Month: May 2011

10 Actions You Can Take To Improve Your Proofreading

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This guest post, by Randall Davidson, originally appeared on Nick Daws’ Writing Blog on 5/19/11.

Today I’m pleased to bring you another guest post from writer, proofreader and entrepreneur Randall Davidson. 

Randall has ten top tips for writers on how they can improve their proofreading skills to create better, more professional-looking documents.

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Correct and efficient proofreading is one of the most crucial elements in producing quality advertisements, business documents and academic papers. Misspellings, poor grammar and/or improper word usage can create a negative impression that may overshadow your desired message. Additionally, these mistakes can reflect poorly on the individual or company responsible for the errors. Here are ten proofreading tips that can produce more professional results.

  1. Divide and conquer. By looking at the document in sections, proofreaders can often catch mistakes that might otherwise go unnoticed when reading a longer paper. Smaller sections can reduce fatigue and allow the proofreader to process the material more effectively while minimizing the chance that an error will be overlooked.
     
  2. Slow down. Many proofreading errors occur due to haste during the process. No list of proofreading tips would be complete without a recommendation to slow down and read carefully as you proofread.
     
  3. Sound it out. Reading the document out loud is one of the most beneficial proofreading tips and can help to identify mistakes in word usage and grammar that may not be apparent in the printed form. Additionally, any repeated or missing words are easily identified when the document is read aloud.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes seven more proofreading tips, on Nick Daws’ Writing Blog.

10 Grammar Rules You Can And Should Ignore

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This post, by Tracy O’Connor, originally appeared on Ghostwriter Dad on 1/7/11.

Some people are pedantic twits when it comes to the squishy rules of grammar.

Truth is, grammar is a powerful tool that lends clear meaning to quality copy, but it’s also far more flexible than most people realize. And a lot of what people claim as hard, fast rules can be completely ignored.

It is important to ensure your writing is easy to understand and that you set the proper tone for your audience. Outside of that, the page is your canvas to paint. Despite conventional wisdom, here are some rules you can safely ignore:

1. Never end a sentence with a preposition. Bow down to this rule without question and you’ll end up with unnatural sentences that are more difficult to understand. If the meaning of your sentence is clear and it sounds natural, go ahead and end it with a preposition.

Consider “What are you waiting for?” versus “For what are you waiting?”

Both are correct, but the second sounds like part of an 18th Century soliloquy.

2. Don’t start a sentence with “and,” “but” or other conjunctions. Starting too many sentences with “and” or “but” will make your writing sound like a second grader’s. But use it in moderation and you will have the voice of the everyman.

This can be particularly useful when you are trying to add emphasis or give your writing a conversational tone.

3. Don’t use double negatives. While you’ll probably want to avoid sentences like “I don’t got none,” there is a place for double negatives, particularly if you enjoy being snarky. “Twilight is a not unpopular series of books,” or “I’m not unfamiliar with your blog.”

Be sure to use it sparingly unless you want your readers to become not unwilling to kick you in places you’d rather be licked.

 

Read the rest of the post for seven more grammar rules you can sometimes ignore on Ghostwriter Dad.

Looking for Logic? Not in Book Sales

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Watching your digital book sales climb is exhilarating. Seeing them decline  is heartbreaking and confusing. “What changed?” you ask yourself, feeling panicked. Did I slack off too much on blogging? Or forget to post in the forums? Did I take this success for granted for 24 hours? Frantically, you try to recreate the right combination of effort and luck that made it happen. Then you realize you don’t really know why the run-up occurred.

Sometimes, changes in books sales are obvious and logical. During weeks when I have three guest blogs posted and I’m active in the forums, the numbers go up a little and it makes sense. Other times, the sales shoot up for no reason. This month, they dropped for no reason.

I tried not to panic, telling myself it was temporary. But still, I kicked into high gear, posting in the forums, writing blogs, and sending out press releases. None of it seemed to make a difference. I even bought some ads, something I rarely do because it’s so hard to measure their effectiveness. But self-publishing is a small business, so reinvesting a little profit into advertising seems logical.

I crave logic, and these inexplicable fluctuations can make an author crazy. Particularly people like me: control freaks who want things to make sense. I want to know the cause and effect of everything. I want to depend on my efforts to produce predictable results. (Are you laughing?) So for months, I checked my Amazon sales daily. Because if I did something that worked, I wanted to know. How else do you learn and improve?

Yet sales often fluctuate for no rhyme or reason, so watching the daily numbers is a good way to give yourself an anxiety disorder—and not get much written on a new novel. But you have to keep writing new stories, because releasing a new book is the best thing you can do for sales of all your books. Proven!

So what’s an author to do? I’ve given up looking at daily sales. I still check my rankings on Amazon’s police procedural list every once in a while to see where my books are. If my titles are slipping off the first page, I ramp up my efforts for a while or maybe buy a small online ad.

But I’m trying not to obsess and to accept that I have little control over sales. I remind myself that making a living as a novelist was and is my dream, and that so as long as the bills get paid, I’m happy.

P.S. They’re climbing again, but who knows why?

Authors: What are your experiences with digital sales? Can you shed some light on the ups and downs?

L.J. Sellers is the author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mysteries and standalone thrillers.

My Reasons For Self-Publishing (Again)

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This post, by Melissa Conway, originally appeared on her Whimsilly blog on 5/15/11.

Back in 1999, after a decade of starts and stops, I finished my first novel, Uncommon Sense. To say I was naïve about what came next, about the way the publishing industry worked, would be a vast, echoing understatement. I began searching for information, and was appalled when I learned how long the process took. Months waiting on agent query responses, partial responses, full responses. Assuming you snag an agent, you wait several more months on editor submissions. Assuming the book is eventually accepted, you then wait up to two years for the publisher to release it. Yikes! I wasn’t getting any younger. How long was I willing to languish in pre-publication purgatory before I saw the fruits (recognition, if not outright acclaim) of my labor?

My search yielded an alternative: self-publishing. Because I was clueless to any repercussions, the concept appealed to me. I had no one to advise me against it. As a working mom, I didn’t have time to attend writer’s group meetings, and back then, if online groups existed, I didn’t know about them. The information I’d gotten on traditional publishing was highly discouraging. The odds alone gave me serious pause; there are millions of writers out there competing for a select few spots on the bookstore shelves. Getting published is akin to winning multiple lotteries—first you win an agent, then you win a publisher, then you win fans…or not.

So I hope it’s not too hard for you to understand how I was swayed by the promises of my first self-publisher, iUniverse. They had a (paid) program where one of their reviewers would read my manuscript and if it was good enough, it would get a ‘special’ designation as an Editor’s Choice novel. When Uncommon Sense passed muster, I was over the moon. They like me! They really like me! The reviewer had wonderful things to say about the novel.

It felt like a tremendous victory, but I realize now the thing that made me happiest was that someone other than my family and friends read it and approved. I gratefully bought a ticket and boarded the iUniverse train, despite the fact that I had to accept whatever lame cover their amateurish artists threw together. In no time my baby was in print – with a $12.95 cover price, a cost much higher than the average paperback. Marketing, as a basic concept, never occurred to me.

It was before ebooks hit the scene, so of course sales were less than dismal. I can only fall back on the excuse that I really do suffer from a pervasive naivete. This explains why I chose to self-publish my next two novels, The Dragon Diary and Dessert Island. I simply hadn’t learned my lesson. The truth is that I was still caught in the gravity pull of planet Instant Gratification. The gratification in my case had more to do with putting my manuscripts in motion, launching them as it were, rather than jumping through agent submission hoops before inevitably abandoning my books to languish on my hard drive. Certainly I wasn’t gratified by my royalties!

My rude awakening occurred at the first writer’s conference I attended. At the Southern California Writer’s Conference in San Diego in the early 2000’s, I went to lectures and workshops and generally enjoyed myself…until a small-press editor got behind the pulpit and smashed my confidence to smithereens. She had palpable contempt for those who self-published and even went so far as to say that anyone who did would ruin their chances of getting accepted by a “real” publisher because their debut status would be forever gone.

I slunk away, ashamed of myself and my three books. It didn’t take long for me to come up with a plan: I would start over using my married name and hope that no one discovered what I had done.

Thank goodness the stigma of self-publishing is fading!
 

Read the rest of the post on Melissa Conway‘s Whimsilly.

Publishers Be Crazy…Or Desperate

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I just read this article about Bookish.com, a new joint venture being launched later this summer by Hachette Book Group, Penguin USA and Simon & Schuster. Per the article:

The site intends to provide information for all things literary: suggestions on what books to buy, reviews of books, excerpts from books and news about authors. Visitors will also be able to buy books directly from the site or from other retailers and write recommendations and reviews for other readers.

The publishers — Simon & Schuster, Penguin Group USA and Hachette Book Group — hope the site will become a catch-all destination for readers in the way that music lovers visit Pitchfork.com for reviews and information.  

A couple of sentences further down, you’ll read:

“There’s a frustration with book consumers that there’s no one-stop shopping when it comes to information about books and authors,” said Carolyn Reidy, the president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “We need to try to recreate the discovery of new books that currently happens in the physical environment, but which we don’t believe is currently happening online.”

There are three problems with Ms. Reidy’s statements.

First, there is NOT "a frustration with book consumers that there’s no one-stop shopping when it comes to information about books and authors," because in fact, there are several sites that offer one-stop shopping for author/book information. Perhaps Ms. Reidy just hasn’t heard of such obscure, underground sites as Amazon.com, Goodreads.com, Shelfari.com, and LibraryThing.com.

Second, nobody needs to "recreate the discovery of new books that currently happens in the physical environment," because for the average consumer, discovery of new books NO LONGER HAPPENS IN THE PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT. Once again, it’s Amazon, Goodreads, Shelfari and LibraryThing to the rescue here, not to mention genre-specific online communities like Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and format- and device- specific online communities like Kindle Nation Daily.

Third, Ms. Reidy and her compatriots don’t "believe [this is] currently happening online." Why not?! How is it possible that publishers are THAT FAR out of touch with book buyers? I’ll tell you how: traditionally, publishers have viewed booksellers as their customers, and book-buyers as the customers of booksellers. They have little to no idea what’s bouncing around in the head and life of the typical consumer, because they haven’t had to know those things to run their business at any time in the past—past being the operative word there.

So these three major publishers are sinking massive amounts of time, effort and money into a huge new initiative that I think just about any typical book-buying consumer on the street could tell you today is destined to fail. And how do you suppose they’ll be financing this new initiative? Certainly not by reducing the prices of their books, or signing more new, unproven authors, or keeping books on physical shelves longer to give them a better chance of catching on, or giving individual authors more marketing money.

I’m sure the publishers would say this initiative is all about supporting their authors and marketing books in a cost-effective way, so kudos to them for good intentions. But while they may know book and author marketing today is all about author platform, they clearly don’t understand that author platform is all about community, and community is about making personal connections and feeling like you’re part of a movement. Which do you think a fan of Stephen King would rather visit: Stephen King’s personal site and online community of fans, or the obviously corporate umbrella site, Bookish.com?

Bookish.com content will necessarily be vetted and vanilla, so as not to hurt the corporate images and reputations of its backers and to avoid offending any site visitors. Anyone who wants the raw, unfiltered version of musings from their favorite authors and opinions of others in those authors’ communities won’t bother with Bookish.com when they can get the straight scoop right from the horses’ mouths elsewhere.

I hate to sound so negative and dump all over publishers like this, because it’s a good thing that they’re finally willing to try something new. But at this point, they face the same problem Microsoft did with its Zune MP3 player: Apple got there first with the iPod, and they did it very well. If you’re going to enter the marketplace with a new product for which the demand has already been fulfilled by someone else (or several someone elses), then your product has to be so incredibly, amazingly compelling that consumers will feel they’re missing out by not switching to it. Microsoft tried it with the Zune; I think by now we can all agree they failed to capture enough of the MP3 player market to even make Apple break a sweat. And Microsoft has decades of experience with technology and marketing direct to consumers.

So Bookish.com gets an A for effort, but a goose egg for vision and sustainability.

Publishers: maybe you’re looking at this all wrong. Maybe instead of trying to supplant the Amazons, Goodreads and Shelfaris of the world, you should be looking for ways to leverage what those sites and communities are already doing, and doing very well: crowdsourcing.

Let them tell you what the readers want to see in print and ebook forms. Listen to consumer complaints about ebook release windows and pricing, and respond accordingly. Switch to POD book production so you can offer a much wider variety of titles at a much lower cost; grousing about the lack of variety and fresh, new voices from mainstream pub is so common as to be a pastime in reader communities. Stop chasing after blockbusters and start tuning into the pre-existing discovery network to locate your new literary stars. Keep your ears to the ground for breakout indie authors, and sign them, knowing they’re already proven commodities. Get and keep a bead on technologies consumers are excited about (color ebooks, interactive book apps, etc.) and invest in those technologies.

Your role as arbiters of taste and gatekeepers is a thing of the past, and the position of Reader Community Leader has already been filled. Own it. Restructure your businesses and legacy thought patterns to embrace this new reality. Now, your role is to find out what consumers want in print books, ebooks and emerging media technologies, and give it to them. Period.
 

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.

My Self-Publishing Journey

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This post, by Erin Kern, originally appeared on her blog on 5/16/11.

My first release, Looking for Trouble, is currently #70 in the Kindle store. It’s #2 on the Kindle bargain books list, #5 on the kindle store contemporary romance list and #6 on the general fiction contemporary romance list. I’m selling an average of 300 books a day. If I can stay on that pace I’ll be shy of 10,000 copies sold for the month of May.

A year ago, I was reading one form rejection letter after another from every agent and publishing house in the country. So how did I go from being rejected to being a Kindle top seller? I’m so glad you asked. Let me tell you about it…

It started last summer when I’d been having a dialogue with an editor at a smaller publishing house. She’d requested the first five chapters, loved them and loved my writing style. However, she did have a few things she thought needed to be changed with the book. In addition to that, she informed me she wasn’t in a position to take on any new clients, then she wished me luck. So did I throw my book on Kindle the next day? No. I shut down my computer and sulked for a week. I cried, I was depressed and seriously thought about giving up writing (at that point I’d received close to 40 rejections from agents and publishers). Needless to say, I was feeling pretty kicked in the gut.

After a big, "you need to get your shit together" pep talk from my husband, I pulled up the word doc on my computer and started reworking the book again. I rewrote the first four chapters three different times. I deleted scenes because the book was way too long and reworked the ending. Then I did some more research on more publishing houses. I’d completely given up on agents. At least the editors took time to give me feedback/suggestions. Most agents didn’t even bother responding to me.

I still hadn’t considered self-publishing. I wanted a book deal. I wanted to see my book in print. I wanted to be able to smell the ink and flip the pages back and forth. I was unwilling to accept anything less than that.

Then after a few uneventful weeks, I started hearing whispers about authors who were self-publishing their rejected books onto the Kindle. So did I throw my book out there the next day? Not yet.

Shortly after that, Amazon announced it’s 70% royalty program. If you price your book at $2.99 or higher they give you 70% of the sales. I thought, okay even if I only sell 20 copies a month, that’s $40. Not bad considering it costs nothing to upload to Kindle. Even after that little incentive I was still a bit hesitant. I’d have to come up with my own cover, write my own blurb and do all my own marketing (which is a TON of work). That didn’t really sound appealing. But, then again, reading a rejection letter 6 months after the initial query isn’t that great either.

After a lot of pondering, research, praying and weighing the pros and cons, I took the leap of faith. I got my cover designed by a friend of mine, so not cost there. I had a ton of help with my blurb so that was pretty easy too. I priced the book at $2.99 because I wanted the 70% royalty and uploaded it to Kindle last October. I also uploaded the book to Barnes & Noble and Smashwords.

Read the rest of the post on Erin Kern‘s blog to learn how she got her sales into the thousands.

100 Stories For Queensland: Please Buy It [To Aid The Relief Effort]

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When something drops out of the news cycle it’s easy to forget about it. But just because the purveyors of sensationalised pictures have got bored with an event, it doesn’t mean people aren’t still suffering. The devastating floods in Queensland might seem like a long time ago to most of us, but they’re still very real to lots of people. People that have lost everything and are suffering. eMergent Publishing put the call out to collect 100 stories, donated from writers around the world, and publish them in an anthology to raise money to directly help those people. Jodi Cleghorn, editor and owner of eMergent, has done an incredible job with her team getting this book together and I’m really proud to be one of the 100 authors included. Now it’s time to buy the book.

In order to raise awareness about the book’s existence, therefore sell more copies and therefore get more money to the people in need, the paperback edition is being promoted with a Chart Rush. What is a chart rush? Readers are invited to purchase a book on Amazon, in a nominated 24-hour period, with the intent to capitalise on the volume of sales to move the book up the Amazon best seller list. The higher up the chart it is (we’re aiming for a spot in the top 100) the more visible it becomes to other readers who may go on to purchase it. It’s all about exposure and the more people who come across 100 Stories for Queensland, the more books we sell and the more money we raise. If you can’t buy on the day, you can add it to your wishlist. Every little bit counts.

100 Stories for Queensland is listed at Amazon and Amazon UK.

You can join the Amazon Chart Rush Facebook event or official fan page for updates on our progress up the charts. Also tweets at @100stories4qld and 100 Stories for Queensland is listed at Goodreads.

This is a fantastic book, full of stories from some great authors, that will directly help the survivors of the floods, with all proceeds going to the Queensland Premier’s Flood Appeal. Please buy the book tomorrow, Tuesday 17th May (but late if you’re in Australia to stay tight to the 24 hour window), and do your bit to help. You’ll get a sweet book out of it.

 

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

Ebooks And What Matters

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This essay, from Charles Tan, originally appeared on his Bibliophile Stalker site on 5/15/11.

Context is very important. Last week, I came across two seemingly-contradictory articles, at least if we only read the headlines and the first few paragraphs: E-Readers Fail At Education and iPad Study Released by Oklahoma State University. To sum up both articles: one showcases how ineffective eBook readers are, while the other praises the iPad.

Over the past few months, I’ve migrated from reading eBooks on a computer to an iPod Touch to a cheap eBook reader to an iPad. While my conclusions is based on personal experience, I think it gives me leeway to extrapolate on the subject.

The Reader Matters

Whenever there is a discussion, I think it’s important to nail down who the reader is. It’s not simply about the demographic, classified by age or profession or degree, but who they are as individuals. Are they open to reading on a computer screen? LCD or e-Paper? How tech-savvy are they? Any medical handicaps that may impede (or in some cases, benefit) from using an eBook reader? (I also want to point out how these questions are framed from the assumption that paper is the default and theoretically best method.)

That’s not to say these details are easy to consolidate and present in a report, especially as a statistic, but when it comes to individual choices of whether to use an eBook reader or not, I think these are essential questions which can’t be covered by a generic recommendation.

The Book Matters

I’ve been in a reading slump as of late but there have usually been two motivators for me when it comes to reading books on an electronic device–and this element isn’t stated often.

The first is how badly do I want to read this book? I’m a genre reader from the Philippines so book scarcity–whether it’s a supply problem (not available here) or a finances problem (it’s available but it’s not within my budget)–is a genuine problem. If eBooks can overcome those problems, my desire to read a particular book can possibly overcome any anti-eBook bias I might have. I don’t think this is constant rule, but just as we make exceptions to various standard responses, I think a book that’s compelling enough to the reader might make us "put up" with eBook readers, no matter how sub-optimal it might be.

Read the rest of the essay, which includes three more things that matter about ebooks, on Charles Tan‘s Bibliophile Stalker.

Because You’re Not Worth It (Or, Why Friends Don’t Ask Friends To Work For Free)

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This post, by Kian Kaul, originally appeared on his Stockholm site on 5/10/11.

I used to find this quote inspirational, but now it just seems puzzling…

“One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.”
– Stanley Kubrick

[Editor’s Note: strong language after the jump]

Not to pick an undebatable point with one of the greatest creative minds in recent history, but having produced a novel (yes, produced – more on that later) it’s fairly clear that all the author traditionally does is put the words together pretty.  Write the manuscript.  What usually follows in the process is turning it over to proofers and editors, lawyers who vet the prose for lawsuits-in-waiting, marketers whose job it is to judge to whom and how to hock the story, which in turn informs the graphic designers who mock up the jacket cover and possibly any accompanying advertising materials (if handled in-house), all overseen by the publisher whose vision greatly supersedes the person who slapped the words together pretty in the first place.  Not to mention the ENG crew who may be hired to shoot crisply-lit interviews with the author to be used in the press kit (produced by yet another company entirely) for media outlets who may want to cover the product (yes, product).

Before the switch is thrown on this assembly line, it’s debatable whether the manuscript is really a book or just a pile of papers.  Or perhaps it was best argued on an especially subtext-heavy episode of Seinfeld , “It’s a pizza as soon as you put your fists in the dough!” “No, it’s not a pizza until you take it out of the oven!”

But, all the above is pure fantasy if you’re an indie author (the recent rebrand of the dreaded “self-published”).  Unless you’re versed in some or all of these skills, or just wealthy (in that case, read no further, you’ve got life on a string!) you’re probably planning to pull in favors, find other skilled creatives who “need to build their portfolios” and enlist friends who will be brimming with enthusiasm to drop whatever they’re working on to help you.  But the truth is, you’re not worth it.

The math is pretty simple; if you’re not in the position to hire for pay, none of the following highly-coveted descriptive terms apply to you: wealthy, famous, influential, incredibly charismatic, double-jointed.  Because, let’s be brutally honest, if you were two or more of those things you wouldn’t be an “indie author”.

The term “indie” seems to be a more sanitized form of “punk” or “underground”, with the aesthetic implications of photocopied demo tape jackets and monochrome fliers, circa 1980-199something (pre-Photoshop, post-Guttenberg).  And that’s essentially what we’re doing, sticking up our own demo albums on the local giveaway shelves until either someone offers us money to do it on their terms or we make enough to pay ourselves a living wage and continue to produce (while screaming “fuck the man” and pretending that we haven’t become exactly that).
 

Read the rest of the post on Kian Kaul‘s Stockholm.

Rewind, restart…

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 I am a boutique publisher of two years standing who has learnt the hard way about what does and does not work. 

Now things are different. My business partner and I are starting over. We are taking a different position. Making baby steps this time without the giant leaps which we could not support. Concentrating on building our own readership with our work before we take on any others.

The Secret Ingredient To A Strong Author Platform

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This post, by Justine Musk, originally appeared on her Tribal Writer site on 12/9/10.

I have come to believe that an author platform is its own cool thing. It isn’t something you can just slap on top of your novel – a coat of promotion, a sprinkle of marketing – but a living, growing entity in its own right.

It needs to reach into many different places. You can’t just sit on your blog like a spider in its web and wait for the pretty flies to come. You need to find your readers across the different platforms – and you need to re-imagine and re-purpose your content to fit those platforms.

This requires work and time. An editor at a webinar advised her listeners to take half of your writing time and dedicate it to platform. Gone are the days when marketing your novel was something that happened after the fact. Now it has to be baked into the process.

Now it requires big meaning.

And by this I mean a big idea, a theme, an obsession, a vision, a mission statement, a full-fledged manifesto/a. Call it what you will. I like the phrase ‘big meaning’ because meaning is what we seek and make out of our lives, fleshed out through our creative work.

A sense of meaning is intrinsic to happiness. We need to love and work in meaningful ways. When we’re depressed, we say our lives have no meaning.

If an author platform is to be truly powerful, it has to mean something to you and to others.

Read the rest of the post on Justine Musk‘s Tribal Writer.

Online Retailer Amazon Accused Of Trying To ‘Wreck The Publishing Trade’

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This article originally appeared on the Daily Mail U.K.’s Mail Online site on 5/15/11.

Amazon has been accused of trying to ‘wreck’ the book trade by turning itself into one of the world’s leading publishers.

Critics claim the online retailer’s plans to produce its own titles will give it a stranglehold on the industry and drive traditional publishing houses and book shops out of business.

 

One literary agent who asked not to be named said: ‘It is a crazy and ridiculous idea which will end up wrecking the publishing industry.’
 

Amazon has already come under fire for ‘ruthlessly’ undercutting traditional retailers on the price of books.

It has launched four publishing businesses: Amazon Encore, specialising in first-time writers; Amazon Crossing, which sells English language translations of foreign books; Montlake Romance; and non-fiction range Domino.

The move is part of a campaign to further boost demand for the company’s Kindle electronic reader, which is the biggest- selling product of its kind in the world. The ebooks published by Amazon will be available only through this device.

The strategy is already proving a success and several of the 65 titles the firm has published have made it on to best-seller lists.

But critics say the strategy will further undermine demand for traditional print books and will put increased pressure on small and independent publishers which are struggling to survive.

Read the rest of the article on Mail Online.

Self-Publishing Resource Roundup

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Since Publetariat’s launch a bit over three years ago, the site has become a trusted resource and thriving community for indie authors and small imprints. For that, I thank each and every one of you. It’s also become a favorite haunt for writers who are considering going the self-pub route, but don’t feel quite ready to come out of the shadows and stake a claim to a readership independently. To them, I offer this roundup of particularly useful articles and resources for those just starting out.


Choosing A Self-Publishing Service Provider

Mick Rooney’s POD, Self-Publishing and Independent Publishing made its name on its analysis and reviews of various service providers, and continues to post service provider reviews and commentary about them on a regular basis.

Over on their Greene Ink blog, Stephen Wayne Greene and Meredith Greene offer the recent results of a survey they’ve taken among indie authors, asking which service provider the authors preferred and why.

Considering Lightning Source? See this case study over on the Foner Books blog.

Joel Friedlander explains what a subsidy publisher is, and why you shouldn’t work with one, on his The Book  Designer site.

This free, sample lesson I wrote for Publetariat Vault University will help you crunch the numbers when comparing service providers, and I’ve made these worksheets I designed for my book, The Indie Author Guide: Self-Publishing Strategies Anyone Can Use, available online as a free pdf download, too.


Getting Your Book Ready For Print—or Ebook—Publication

Editing – there are LOTS of articles and tips on editing right here on Publetariat. Whether you’re looking for DIY editing tips, guidance on when and how to work with a professional editor, or how to find and hire a freelance editor, you’re sure to find what you’re looking for.

Joel Friedlander offers a kind of crash course in self-publishing on his The Book Designer site, from Getting Ready to Publish, to Planning Your Book, Understanding Fonts & Typography, and Making Print Choices. 

Joel also offers this post on Ebooks &  Ebook Readers, and I’ve made my Indie Author Guide to Kindle Publishing and my Kindle Publishing Workshop (from the Writer’s Digest Business of Getting Published conference, 2010) available as free pdf downloads on this page of the Indie Author Guide companion website. 

Author Platform and Book Promotion

You’ll want to visit Dana Lynn Smith’s The Savvy Book Marketer site for lots of great articles on book and author promotion, with a particular focus on using new media and social media.

Also be sure to check out Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn, where you’ll find excellent how-tos on subjects like podcasting and making your own book trailer, as well as plenty of insight and firsthand accounts from Joanna herself regarding her own experiences as an author and speaker.

Once again, Publetariat has you covered with its own treasure trove of articles on author platform and book promotion.

Indie Audio

So you wanna learn how to turn your manuscript into an audiobook, and maybe release that audiobook in podcast form and make it available online for free? Podiobooks is the place to start. They’ve got a large and helpful community, a mentoring program, and excellent tutorials, all for free.

So you wanna release your indie book on audio and sell it? Audible has just announced its ACX.com service, which will allow you to do just that. Hey, if it’s good enough for authors like Neil Gaiman and MJ Rose, and Random House, it might just work for you, too.

Community, Support, and Motivation

The Association of Independent Authors is there for you, with resources, online discussion forums, and news from around the globe that affects indie authors.

If you just need a good old fashioned kick in the pants to get you motivated and excited about the possibilities of going indie, or need to feel like you’re not all alone out there in the indie wilderness, there’s hardly a better source than Zoe Winter’s Weblog. Whether she’s talking about her own struggles and successes, her writing, publishing and book launch approaches, or commenting on the state of publishing in general, Zoe tells it like it is and pulls no punches.

Mark Barrett’s Ditchwalk is another excellent stop, where you’ll find a mix of commentary and reportage on Mark’s own adventures in the world of indie authorship.

Finally, Publetariat’s got an extensive library of articles on the topics of motivation, writer’s block and the writing life.

 

Now get out there and do it!

 

A Plethora of (Terrible) New Alternatives To Going Indie

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The internet’s fairly bubbling over with news and commentary about sweeping changes in publishing, and most of it is not good for authors and aspiring authors.

On 5/4/11 on her The Business Rusch blog, Kristine Kathryn Rusch talked about the history of publishing contracts, and how recently she’s been seeing an increasing incidence of contracts with language that greatly benefits the publisher while greatly penalizing the author. She is particularly concerned about questionable terms being offered by the new agency-publisher hybrid companies springing up:

We used to recommend agents, but we slowly stopped doing that. Some of it was simple: we didn’t want to endorse any one we weren’t intimately familiar with.  But it became more complex than that. Some of our agenting friends had left the business. Others had moved to companies that had rather unseemly business practices, and still others had morphed their agenting business into something unrecognizable.

Rather than walk through the thicket of ethics, friendships, business partnerships, and individual monetary policy, we just stopped recommending any particular agent. Over time, we stopped recommending agents at all.

During that same period of time, we saw a lot of publishing contracts that were…dicey…at best.

In the same post Kristine offers a sort of history of publishing contracts, and it’s not a pretty story. In another post on 5/11/11, she discusses a disturbing new trend she’s seeing in recent contracts from publishers and agency-publisher hybrids: Draconian terms that make it virtually impossible for the author to ever earn a profit on his book.

Kristine also points us to a 5/10/11 post on Dean Westley Smith’s blog that takes a closer, and critical look at these new agency-publisher hybrids. He observes:

Because of sheer stupidity, writers once again are losing a major fight that they don’t even realize they are in…In today’s news there was an announcement of yet another agent setting up a publishing company “for their clients.” These agents, of which there are many around the world now, are settling on certain terms for their new publishing business. The terms from agency to agency are pretty much as stated in this new article today.

Three scary quotes from just today:

“…we are becoming partners with our writers.”

“…will recoup expenses first…”

“…then share net reciepts 50/50.”

In just the last few months many agencies have decided to go this way. Many others have been on this road for a time. One major agency has been doing this for over ten years now. In this new world this path is just about the only way agents can see to stay in business. Also, more head-shaking, a number of major bloggers have been pushing this for some strange reason as if it’s a good thing for writers.

Read the rest of the post to learn why this is most definitely NOT a good thing for writers.

Over on The Passive Voice, Passive Guy tries to help us poor authors out with an examination of the rights reversion clause that’s standard in publishing contracts, but can have far-reaching consequences of which authors should be aware. He warns:

A reversion of rights clause without a definite trigger is nothing but an invitation for an author to go begging to his publisher from time to time.

Then he goes on to share some recommended, more author-friendly language for such provisions.

The lessons to be learned here are many, but the bottom line seems to be this: if you’re considering going semi-indie by partnering with an agency or publisher that’s offering some kind of profit-sharing terms in exchange for handling your book’s production, distribution and/or promotion, watch your back and read the fine print. You may think going that route will save you a lot of time and headaches, but if it ultimately costs you the success of your book or overall career, you’d have been better off going it alone.   

 

Staying Focused As A Self-Published Writer

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This post, by David N. Alderman, originally appeared on Self-Publishing Review on 5/10/11.

“The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking places.” – Author Unknown

Being my own boss, I fall victim to many different things. It’s easy to procrastinate – to put things off that don’t need to be done right away. Sometimes, this causes me to put things off indefinitely. It’s never my intention to do that, it just…well…happens. I also tend to hyper focus on one thing and neglect the others. For example, I’ll get so focused on writing, that I’ll completely ignore my marketing efforts for that day, or vice versa.

I’m not a lazy person by nature. If anything, I am known as a workaholic and I tend to push my own limits sometimes when I try to get projects done in a timely manner. But lately I’ve just been under a spell, not really caring if anything gets done and just feeling fatigued and worn out for who knows what reasons. I think it may just be lack of structure that’s bringing all these things to my daily routine.

See, being a self-published, full-time writer is hard. I know some people think I’m living the dream by making my own hours and getting to do what I love – which is to write – full time. But there’s so much more to this profession than just writing. There’s marketing, there’s cover design, there’s marketing, there’s blogging, there’s marketing, there’s social networking, there’s…you get the point. Add in the fact that this can be a very lonely job, and you have the makings of a challenging career.

I’m sure many other writers, both who are doing this full time and who are doing it aside from a typical 9-5, experience some of these same issues I have been plagued with. And since this is my career, and not just my hobby, I’ve been forced to create a set of remedies to try and counteract some of these vices. I figured I’d share them with my fellow writers who are struggling to stay focused on their daily tasks, and hopefully help them accomplish their short term and long term goals.
 

Read the rest of the post on Self-Publishing Review.