Publetariat

I did some research into the top five providers of email newsletter/contact services and decided to share the information. They all offer design and list management tools, a sign-up function for your website, and usually a free trial. The pricing doesn’t vary much, but there are important differences in services. Three offer a pay-as-you-go option for people like me with small lists who plan to use the service infrequently, and only two offer RSS services. Here’s a brief guide:

Vertical Response

• monthly plan or pay as you go
• PAYG: .015 per email for lists under 1000 ($7.50 for 500)
• monthly: $10 per month for 500 or less
• discounts on monthly plans if you buy 6 or 12 months at a time
• free trial (first 100 emails free)
• tracking, segmentation, and ROI reporting
• free customer support
• offers surveys and direct-mail postcards

Constant Contact

• monthly plan only, no pay as you go
• monthly plan: $15 for 500 or fewer
• free 60-day trial
• lots of customer support/phone, e-mail, library, videos
• reporting details (who opened, what links clicked)
• direct download from Microsoft outlook

iContact

• $9.95 month for 500 or fewer
• 15-day free trial
• RSS features for blogs
• offers survey services/features
• offers lots of e-mail marketing information

Vista Print

• $14.99 a month for 500 or fewer
• also offers per-mail options (.03 per-email for 500 or fewer)
• one-month free trial
• reporting tools
• set-up limited to Internet Explorer or FireFox browsers
• can be integrated with Vista Print website (if you have one)

Mail Chimp

• monthly plan or pay as you go
• monthly plan: $10 for 500 or fewer
• PAYG: .03 per email for small batches (uses a prepaid credit system)
• RSS to email list
• no call center phone support
• offers Mail Chimp Expert, service that will do all the work for you
• lots of marketing tools: segmentation, analytics (many of which I don’t understand)

I decided to go with Vertical Response because I need a pay-as-you-go option for infrequent mailings. Vista Print offers that option, but it’s more expensive, and Mail Chimp (will little customer support) is not for beginners like me. If you know what you’re doing and need RSS feeds, then Mail Chimp is probably a great option. Vertical Response also had direct-mail post cards, which I might use someday, and also has a good reputation in the writing community.

What service do you use? Are you happy with it?

L.J. Sellers is the author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mystery/suspense series: The Sex Club, Secrets to Die For, Thrilled to Death, and Passions of the Dead. For more information, visit: http://ljsellers.com

This post, by Bill Walker, originally appeared on his site on 12/3/10.

I posted these once before and thought now would be a good time to re-post them. I don’t who the original author of these commandments is so if you do please let me know so I can give the author appropriate credit.

As you set your writing goals for the new year, stop and think about this list of commandments for writers.  Which one(s) do you need to work on?

1. Thou shalt think like a professional, starting now.

2. Thou shalt begin and keep going till you’re through.
    
3. Thou shalt take your efforts and desires seriously.
    
4. Thou shalt call it work.
    
5. Thou shalt write for yourself, not the market.

6. Thou shalt not wait for visits from the muse.
    
7. Thou shalt not ask whether you are good enough.

Read the rest of the post, which includes ten more writer commandments, on Bill Walker‘s site.

This post, by Kelly James-Enger, originally appeared on her Dollars and Deadlines blog on 11/15/10.

Since I segued into writing books (my first, Ready, Aim, Specialize was published in 2003), I’ve been a traditional girl. Meaning, I’ve only worked with traditional publishers (think Random House) which pay an advance against royalties to acquire the rights to publish a book. To my mind, no money up front=no deal.

Of course I’d heard of POD, or print-on-demand, publishing but knew little about it. It sounded like the “lesser-than” option to me. I’d seen a lot of POD (often called self-published) books that frankly looked terrible. I didn’t like the idea of being wholly responsible for selling a book (even though that’s the case for pretty much any midlist author today). And I couldn’t justify devoting my limited, precious work time to a book that I would have to pay to get in print (as opposed to being paid by a publisher to get it in print). Not for me, I thought.

Well, I was wrong. This year, I published my first POD book, Goodbye Byline, Hello Big Bucks: The Writer’s Guide to Making Money Ghostwriting and Coauthoring Books. But this wasn’t a random act. Rather, it was a calculated decision which included weeks of research and thought to ensure that POD was the right choice. I had five compelling reasons to make the leap:

1. There was no competition for my book. When I looked for books on ghostwriting, there were only a couple—and they weren’t particularly helpful. The authors claimed to be making good money ghostwriting, but didn’t say how much. I hate that. I want specifics! I want details! The authors told you to make sure you had a written contract, but didn’t give any examples. They didn’t discuss how to negotiate fees, how to successfully market yourself to different kinds of clients, or how to address common problems that arise. I knew my book would include all that, and be the only one that gave readers everything they needed to know to break into this lucrative field.

2. The book fit into my platform. While I cover health, fitness, nutrition and wellness, I also have developed a "successful-freelancing-expert" platform over the past 14 years. I’m a contributing editor at The Writer magazine. I’ve written more than 80 features and columns about writing for markets ranging from Writer’s Digest to Writing for Dollars and published two books on successful freelancing. Six-Figure Freelancing continues to sell well, even on a crowded bookshelf. (Seems like every writer wants to author a book about writing and I’m competing against names like Stephen King and Anne Lamott, so this is significant.)
 

Read the rest of the post, which includes three more reasons to go POD, on Dollars and Deadlines.

Hi Everyone,

I work in high tech marketing, but started seriously writing fiction about ten years ago.

My short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen Mystery magazines. This summer I made the decision to go Indie and will be release my first novel, The Demise of the Soccer Moms in January 2011.

Since my fiction doesn’t fit neatly into a single genre, I’ve adopted the term Suburban Noir.

I’m looking forward to meeting other Indie Authors at Publetariat.

Publetariat staff will be off duty from now through Sunday, 11/28 in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday. Members can still post to their blogs and use the Publetariat Forum, but no new content will be posted to the site during this time and emails won’t be answered until Monday, 11/29. No need to click through – this is the end of the post.

This article, by Rachel Deahl, originally appeared on Publisher’s Weekly on 11/8/10.

The midlist is dying. That sentiment has been a mantra in publishing circles for years as agents, authors, and editors have decried that corporate publishing will no longer support the kind of author that was once an industry staple—the moderate success who was a consistent seller, if not a bestseller. With the "big six" demanding bigger sales numbers from all their authors, indie presses, which have long been the province of riskier, harder-to-market literary fiction, are finding that more commercial writers are showing up at their doors, as well as writers with serious accolades and lengthier track records.

One shift is that the definition of  the midlist author has changed. A number of agents and publishers interviewed said when editors at the big houses look at the sales performance of an author’s last book in considering acquiring that author’s new book, the number they need to see is bigger than it used to be. While it’s been rumored that a publisher at one of the major houses told his staff they couldn’t acquire authors whose last book sold fewer than 50,000 copies, most sources said they thought the so-called "magic number" was closer to 25,000 or 30,000. One agent, noting that there’s far more variation at the paperback imprints of the big six, said most hardcover publishers today "would settle for 20,000."

Munro Magruder, publisher of New World Library, believes presses like his have become the beneficiary of this trend. In the past few years, Magruder said he’s seen an influx of midlist authors who had spent years at the big houses. He cited two books NWL published in October—Alice Walker’s poetry collection Hard Times Require Furious Dancing and Michael Krasny’s Spiritual Envy—as books he thought he might not have gotten years back. (Walker wrote the megaseller The Color Purple, and Krasny is the host of KQED’s Forum out of San Francisco.) NWL considers both books to have been successes—Krasny’s title has already sold out its first printing of 8,500 copies, and Walker’s collection sold out its 7,500-copy first run.

While authors often find that they and their books are paid more attention when they move from big house to indie press, there is the sting of losing the bigger advance. Most of the smaller publishers PW spoke to cited $5,000 as a high advance, and others acknowledged paying as little as $1,500, and that can be a tough pill for agents, and authors, to swallow.

Johnny Temple, at Akashic Books, said it’s unfortunate that the big houses can’t afford to publish books on a smaller scale, but it’s a reality of today’s industry and one that not all agents and authors have fully accepted: "These big companies, every book they do they’re trying to knock it out of the park, and they don’t have the flexibility to publish books at different levels. The flip side, though, is authors and agents like to have big advances and don’t like to think about what the fiscal reality of that is." Since the big publishers were overpaying for books for years, Temple added, he thinks "some agents and authors got a little soft, and too comfy, being overpaid."

Read the rest of the article on Publisher’s Weekly.

This post originally appeared on Blogthority on 11/15/10.

This article will compare the book costs and overall costs (including distribution) for three of the biggest self-publishing companies – Amazon CreateSpace, Lulu and Lightning Source.

Ok, so you wrote a great book and were rejected by every publishing company in North America.  Or maybe you would rather self-publish your book and do your own promotion and maintain more control over the book.

The question now becomes:

Which self-publishing company do I use?

Lulu and Amazon CreateSpace are probably the best known self-publishing companies, but there are many to choose from.  Lightning Source is another option, but it is not a publisher – in fact it is a printer and you have to set up a publishing company (easy) in order to get an account there.

Most of the self-publishing companies you will encounter (such as Lulu) use Lightning Source as the printer for your book.  Needless to say, having an intermediary company involved will cost you money, but it should also be a bit easier to get your book into print.

How self-published compensation is calculated

In order to analyze the self-publishing options properly, we need to understand the costs involved with self-publishing – printing and distribution.  Note that the distribution costs are only applied to books sold through a distributor such as Amazon.com.  If you buy the books directly from your publisher and sell them yourself – then you are the distributor.

To calculate the book profit, you simply subtract the printing cost and the distribution cost from the retail price (set by the author).

Example:  An author has a book with a retail price of $10, the distribution fee is set to 40% and the printing costs are $3.50.

The profit  = Retail price – distribution fee – printing cost = $10 – $4 (40% of $10) – $3.50 = $2.50 per book.

Using a Third party publisher

Read the rest of the post on Blogthority.

I’m a big believer in reaching for the stars. If you only ever have mediocre dreams, you’ll probably only ever have medicore results. I firmly believe in working your arse off and holding onto those dreams of great success in whatever it is you want to do. If you don’t have faith in your ability to achieve great things, why should anyone else?

Work hard, dream big, don’t be a tit. That’s my philosophy lesson for today.

With that in mind, Joanna Penn pointed this out to me and I thought it was hugely entertaining. So I’m using it to dream big. Click on the pics for a bigger version. Go and try it yourself.

(I’m not sure if I’m expecting my books to one day be Broadway musicals, but that would be kinda mad.)

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

This post, by Ruth Ann Nordin, originally appeared on Self-Published Authors Lounge on 9/24/10.

I could insert “self-published” into that title, but as an “intelligent” person suggested on one of those “lovely” forums, “Indie means you go with a small publisher.  Self-published means you did it yourself…without the help of an editor, blah, blah, blah.”

There are people who are out there who don’t understand the nature of publishing and the distinct difference between a commercially/traditionally published small press author, a self-published (via vanity press) author, and a true indie author.  Now you know why I have to use the term “self-published” all the time.  A lot of people just don’t get the distinction so to save myself the headache of having to spell it out for them, I opt to make it simple.

Now, how many small press authors consider themselves “indie authors”?  Anyone want to raise your hand on that one? 

Okay.  So this is why I should not go on those stupid forums on a certain website.  I should probably avoid all forums since there’s usually a group of people without a clue.  They don’t do the research, and then they spout their opinions as if they know something when those who know the facts sit back and shake their heads at the person’s lack of knowledge on the subject.

So what prompts this particular rant? 

I’m glad you asked. 

I am sick and tired of this attitude running amok the forums where if a person so much as dares to praise an “indie” book, that author is automatically accused of gathering her friends into a circle so they can suggest a book.  And you know why this author gets accused of this?  Because this is an author who’s been “self-published” instead of “indie published with a small publisher”.  (Hey, their words, not mine.) 

Read the rest of the post on Self-Published Authors Lounge.

This post, by Kristen Tsetsi, originally appeared on her From a little office in a little house blog on 10/16/10.

R. J. Keller, author of Waiting for Spring and the forthcoming The Wendy House, my partner in the PaperRats writers’ relief YouTube series Inside the Writers’ Studio, Backword Books member,  and obsessive Star Wars fan, has recently had her independently released novel, Waiting for Spring, picked up by Amazon’s Encore imprint. Here, she answers some questions about going to the dark side.

Congratulations on Waiting for Spring‘s move to Amazon’s Encore imprint! What kind of day were you having when you heard from them, and what was the rest of your day like after that?

Thank you! The truth is I was having a rather shitty day (pardon my Bulgarian). The rural convenience store where I work, in the very rural town where I live, had recently burned down and I was transferred to a location in the city of Bangor (“city” is a relative term in Maine). My first shift was fairly hideous. The store is busy beyond belief and patronized by a rather rough crowd. Customers without proper IDs were refused alcohol and tobacco. Obnoxious kids spilled sticky Slush Puppy beverages on the counter, then burst into hysterical laughter. Insults and objects were hurled (not at the kids, although they deserved it). After ten hours of chaos, I was physically and emotionally drained, but by the time I got home – at shortly after midnight – I was too wound up to sleep. I checked my email and found a letter from AmazonEncore acquisitions editor, Terry Goodman, in which he offered to take on Waiting For Spring.

My first reaction was shock. It was one of those moments you hear about when you literally can’t believe what you’re reading. Then, of course, I “squeeeed!” a little. Or maybe it was a lot. Then I got nervous. I was afraid it might be a scam and I didn’t want to be taken in like an idiot. I’d heard of AmazonEncore, of course, but as I sat there in my Slush-Puppy-stained convenience store uniform, it seemed a little unreal that this email could actually be from them to me. Finally, I sent a copy of it to Craig Lancaster, whose novel The Summer Son had recently been acquired by Encore, with a note that asked, in part, “Is this the real AmazonEncore?” His response was, “This is the real deal! Congratulations!” After that, the Slush Puppy and obnoxious customers faded from memory.

For a while it seemed you were pretty committed to retaining control of your projects. Was it difficult to make a decision about whether to allow a publisher to assume control? And what is it that made you say yes?

Read the rest of the post on Kristen Tsetsi’s From a little office in a little house blog.

For just a few days, I imagined a well thought out plan for what I was going to do to promote my Civil War book at the Athena Club meeting in Belle Plaine, Iowa last night. That all changed last Tuesday with a sizable dent in my car’s driver door. My door won’t open until the repair work is done so I’m stuck with driving the car like it is. Until that happy moment when I can get in and out of my car like any other driver, I’m getting in on the passenger side and squeezing between the gear shift lever and arm rest one leg at a time. There went the idea of wearing my full skirted, floor length homesteader dress. It’s hard enough to double up and maneuver myself into and out of the driver’s seat in slacks. Not that this little inconvenience dimmed my enthusiasm for talking about my books. I slipped on my pioneer bonnet and told the audience I wore it to get in the mood. That got me a chuckle from everyone which put them in a good mood as well I hope.

But I didn’t go to the meeting with just a bonnet and my book. I took the Vernon County Missouri 1887 history book that tells about the Mayfield family Bushwhackers, pictures of Bushwhackers, tombstones I’ve taken and death certificates. Also, I have a picture of my Great Grandfather Charles Wesley Bullock, a Union soldier, sitting beside a former bushwhacker, a picture of my Great Grandfather’s drug store and information that tells that my Great Grandfather was probably in Sherman’s March To Atlanta and a copy of his discharge paper. I tied Vernon County’s connection to Iowa together with the fact that Iowa Calvary was sent to Ft. Scott, Kansas to catch all lawbreakers which included Jayhawkers as well as Bushwhackers. I had a 1903 plat map that showed the sections around Montevallo and a terrain map that gave the audience an idea about the rugged timber, caves, rolling hills and creeks that made it easy for the Bushwhackers to hide from the soldiers.

I can’t imagine how girls in the thirties had any freedom to be adventuresome, wearing dresses. My mother-in-law was a teenager in Arkansas at the time. Mom assures me I’m wrong. Women wore dresses no matter what they did on the farm. They didn’t know any different. In fact, when the first two women in the area dared to put on slacks, they were considered sinners. However soon after that the fad caught on and northern Arkansas had many sinners wearing slacks.

In the middle of my struggle to get from one seat of my car to the other, it reminds me of sitting on a horse’s saddle while I sit on the hump with the gear shift lever in front of me. I asked Mom if she ever rode a horse in a dress. Turns out at fourteen, she was riding one of her father’s work horses bareback with a bit and reins. She is only 4 feet eleven inches tall but could grab the horse’s mane, give a leap and straddle that large animal. I asked, "How did your dress work out for you then?" She said it wasn’t a problem. Dresses were longer in those days. Was she adventuresome? Oh yes! She met up with a group of boys from school at a little used country road and together they raced to the other end. Now I know this lady likes to be the best she can at anything she does so I asked if she ever won the races. She smiled cagily when she told me it wasn’t that kind of race. They just ran the horses for the fun of it. Sounds like a smart woman to me. At fourteen years old, she had figured out to let the boys win the race.

Last night at the meeting, I talked about another woman with a competitive nature. During the Civil War, Ella Mayfield, lady Bushwhacker, was determined to fight to the end for her cause. Not only was she a crack shot, she rode her horse better than most men. While hiding from Union Soldiers in the Ozark timbers of Vernon County, Missouri, a messenger found Ella to deliver a message from a friend that lived near Ft. Scott, Kansas. The doctor needed to see Ella right away. It was a matter of life and death. This was 3 in the afternoon. Ella raced west and arrived at the friend’s house at dusk. She found out the problem was the doctor had sent her mother a picture of a Union soldier that killed Ella’s two brothers. One brother’s widow had put a bounty on that soldier’s head. Now the rough men in Kansas wanted that picture so they would know who to shoot for the bounty. If the doctor didn’t give them the picture in 24 hours, they were going to kill him. Ella rested an hour, got back on her horse and headed back to Montevallo, Mo. She arrived at her mother’s cabin, explained the doctor’s dilemma, secured the picture and raced back to the doctor’s house. She made it in the 24 hour time limit and had rode at break neck speed for 125 miles with only two hours break. As well as Ella knew the land, traveling at night had to be dangerous for many reasons. What if her horse stumbled in a gully or stream? What if the Union patrols, camped all over the area, were alerted by their horses knickering at Ella’s mount? Her only warning when she came near a camp was smelling smoke or seeing the flicker of a campfire. If Ella came too close to a cabin in the dark, she could have gotten shot by a homesteader that thought she was a murderous Jayhawker. Wild animals were plentiful such as wolves, bobcats and mountain lions. Those night predators could have easily pounced on Ella. Not only was she in good shape physically, but her horse must had very good stamina. However once Ella rejoined her Bushwhacker band in the timber camp, I can imagine she and her horse took a well deserved rest. Oh yeah, and she did all that in men’s trousers.

That’s just one of the stories I told last night about Ella’s brave deeds from the book Ella Mayfield’s Pawpaw Militia – A Civil War Saga In Vernon Co. Mo. It was a fun meeting with a very interested audience. I enjoyed myself, and I hoped the Athena Club did, too.

Now I have to get back to my November writing contest story. I’m doing all right so far with word count, but the month is young.

Comic books. I’ve been known to read one on occasion. I even enjoy them, especially the newer ones like Yak’s Pub. And yet I never gave any thought to the indie spirit behind the comic book phenomenon. At least not until reading Jaebi’s post “What Can Self-Publishers Learn from Comics?“

It seems that many comic book artists began as independent authors of a sort, pouring themselves into creating a quality product and then selling it directly to their readers. Today that same go-getter attitude is still active in the world of graphic novels as market savvy entrepreneurs like Questionable Content‘s creator J. Jacques move into online comics with numerous hard-line products such as t-shirts. For authors this would be similar to serializing a story on a blog and offering books and other products on the side. Not such a bad marketing technique in my opinion.

So what can independent authors learn from these quirky people telling their stories with pictures? A solid product, hard work, and some creative marketing can pay off on The Road to Writing.

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road to Writing.

This post, by Pete Morin, originally appeared on his blog on 10/26/10. It invites comparison between the "fat" in a piece of writing to the excess material goods sometimes accumulated in life.

Over the past week, I have been distracted by the excruciating task of emptying our parents’ house in Florida and preparing it for sale. I’d been on a pretty good writing jag for several days before, but came to a screeching halt the minute I got off the plane in West Palm Beach.

My parents were exuberant consumers of … stuff. When my father went out for something, he came back with three. He once went out to purchase a new pants presser and bought four – and sent one each to his sons. I used mine at most a half-dozen times. He took me hunting on the Eastern Shore of Maryland once years ago. On the Annapolis side of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, we stopped at a sporting goods store to pick up hunting licenses and ammunition. We walked out with that, plus two shotguns worth about $1200 apiece. Several years after my mother had her stroke, he thought it would be nice for her to get around, so he bought one of those JAZZY electric wheelchairs. On her first test spin, she ran into the butcher’s block and took a chunk out of the door frame. Ol’ Jazzy sat in the corner of the guest room for the next four years.

In light of this, you can imagine what a daunting task it was for me and my brothers to start opening cabinets and drawers. Four flashlights. Countless “extra” batteries. Owner manuals for appliances long since discarded. Cuisinarts, blenders, knife sharpeners, juicers, salad bowls, Woks. It was like the domestic version of clowns in a Volkswagen.

Read the rest of the post on Pete Morin‘s blog.

This article, by Henry Wallop, originally appeared on the Telegraph UK site on 11/3/10.

Read the rest of the article on the Telegraph UK site.

This article, by Marc Johnson, originally appeared on the Longshot Publishing blog on 10/20/2010.

Unfortunately, a lot of indy authors don’t pay for editing. I think the primary reason for this is most people don’t know how much it costs. I’m here to help people with that and tell you how much my experience cost. I believe you should edit your manuscript before you publish, but before you decide you should know what you’re getting into. At some point, I’ll talk about choosing a good editor and my experience in working with her.

On a thread on one of the forums I frequent, the prices people thought editing was varied greatly. For your standard 300 page manuscript, people thought it was as little as $100. Others thought it was as much as $50,000. Most people thought the price of editing as at least $10,000. To be fair, the $100 quote was someone who thought that was just basic copyediting, but most of the people either grossly overestimated or underestimated how much editing was.

The type of editing I was looking for my 90,000 word manuscript was a developmental edit. That type of edit dealt mainly with the structure of the story. There was also some light copyediting involved. I emailed about a dozen editors to get their quotes. To the eight or so editors that could take me on, their prices were as low as $1500 to as high as $6000. The average ranged from $2000 to $3000. The editor I chose cost me $2000. You don’t have to pay all at once. You put a deposit down, about a third of the price, then pay the rest when she’s finished.

The one thing I’m not sure about is if prices are different based not only on the type of editing you want and how long it would take, but also on the genre of your work. I’m working on a fantasy series. Would that be harder to work on because it’s based in a made up world than working on mystery series set in today’s world? In any case, I emailed editors that worked in my genre.

Read the rest of the article on the Longshot Publishing blog.