Business End

Articles about the business aspects of publishing and self-publishing.

Getting Ready For NaNoWriMo

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This article, by Steve Shepard, Storyist developer and avid NaNoWriMo participant, originally appeared in the How To section of Storyist. NaNoWriMo is a scant month and a half away, so if you’re planning on participating, it’s time to start planning.

"What are you writing this year?"

It’s the question on everyone’s lips at the regional NaNoWriMo kickoff parties. The answer, even among seasoned NaNoWriMo veterans, is often "I don’t know."

So if you don’t know either, relax—you’re in good company. Heck, even Chris Baty, the NaNoWriMo program director and cheerleader in chief, claims he doesn’t know what he’s writing yet.

If you’re looking for ideas, there are pleny of resources available to you: The NaNoWriMo forums, and Chris’s book No Plot? No Problem! are two of the best.

As this is my fourth year participating in NaNoWriMo, I thought I’d add to the mix by writing a quick how-to on the techniques that have worked for me.

Play "What If?"

So what should you write?

Conventional wisdom says that you should write what you know. If you’re a teacher, write about a teacher facing one of the many struggles teachers face. If you’re an accountant, write about an accountant facing accountant stuff.

Or not.

I disagree with this "conventional" wisdom. For many writers, part of the joy of writing is in learning about something new, and in living in a world of your making. The trick is finding a story idea that captures your imagination.

One of the more effective ways to do this is to play a game of "What If?" Look around you and ask what would happen if something you cared deeply about changed in a significant way. For example:

  • "What if I finally found my true love only to discover that she was in love with someone else?"
  • "What if my daughter were kidnapped?"
  • "What if my high-school-age self ran for class president and didn’t get a single vote?"

If you are uncomfortable putting yourself at the center of your story, look around you. Family, friends, and co-workers are great sources for "What Ifs."

  • "What if my mom discovered my that dad was cheating on her?"
  • "What if my kid brother finally decided to retaliate against that bully Jimmy Porter?"
  • "What if my boss were a zombie?"

     

Be forewarned though; friends and family can be very prickly if you put them in your novel. And while you could use this to your advantage, you’re probably better off disguising their situations so they won’t know it’s them.

If that doesn’t work for you, you can always turn to the Web. Current news stories make great starting points.

  • "What if Obama was secretly planning to kill my grandmother?"
  • "What if Dave Letterman was sleeping with my girlfriend?"
  • "What if Glen Beck developed amnesia?"

Take fifteen minutes or so and write down as many "What Ifs" as you can. Try to fill a couple of pages.

Tip: Play with a friend. This exercise can be uproariously funny if you give it half a chance.

Tip 2: Be as specific as possible. Use "my boss" instead of "management," and "Obama" instead of "the government." Even a vast conspiracy needs a point person through whom the reader can experience the evil.

Then, sift through the list and find the "What If" that grabs you. If you can’t pick one, take some time to cull the top three, and flip a three-sided coin to identify the winner.

Identify the Story Line

 

Read the rest of the article on Storyist.

Questioning The Brave New World

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A lot of people say it’s a brave new world with publishing. I’ve said similar things before myself, but I’m not so sure about it anymore. Unlike some, I don’t believe that most traditionally published authors with big publishers are somehow “set” and indie authors are screwed. I kind of think for the most part that we’re all screwed.

While I’m against the gatekeeping system on principle… do you have any idea how many books out there were being shut out by that system… books that were good? Why is this a bad thing? Because it makes it harder for everyone. This industry has always been insanely competitive and hard to make a living at. The problem is that there has always been way more supply than demand. Writing isn’t exactly the smartest career move for people who want to make money. But it’s the only thing I can do. My other options are some kind of internet business, which is just as competitive these days.

I gotta say, I’m starting to wonder why I’m so rah rah indie. On some level it’s totally selfish. I know people are going to talk about going indie and they’re going to help other people go indie. Whether I help or not… SOMEONE will. And if I help, then you know my name and MAYBE you will help me when I need it. i.e. tell people about my books.

So no, I’m not all that magnanimously altruistic and have never claimed to be. I’ve never laid out all my motivations, nor have I ever said I help people JUST because I like helping people. I do it because if I don’t someone else will anyway. So I might as well rack up some decent karma and hope to God it comes back to me when I need it.

I think it’s going to be harder for EVERYONE to sell books now. Not just indie authors, but trad authors. There are already too many books. Too many good books.

I always wonder why people worry about the crap. Forget the crap. The crap is no threat to you. It’s not your competition. Few people will ever even see it. Worry about the good stuff. Worry about not only the good traditionally published stuff, where at least with bookstores and such there was a funnel and most of the reading public only ever saw what came through that funnel, worry about the good indie stuff. Worry about every single good book out there… because all this whining about the crap seems to me to be a cover for the real thing we should fear…

Too many good books, not enough readers, and not enough time among those readers to devote to your book.

I believe most authors trad or indie in the next ten years will be negatively affected by not an overload of crap but an overload of books, period. More books will see the light of day and be read and that’s great, and more authors will get a piece of the pie. But those pie pieces will be increasingly smaller.

I feel like it’s already starting to happen. And I feel the pressure and the squeeze, and the fear that if I don’t get where I want to go, very soon, I’ll never get there because there will just be too much competition to gain the kind of visibility I need to really succeed.

That’s another reason I’m trying to withdraw some from all of this… because every second I spend arguing with a tard over something pointless on the internet, is a second I lose of what I feel could be my only shot to get what I want… which is to make a living writing fiction.

 

This is a reprint from the Weblog of Zoe Winters.

Self Publishing or Indie – What's in a name

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 The playing field of publishing has tilted, but it hasn’t leveled by any means. The vast majority of books sold still involve the cutting down of a tree and the passing through of some very tiny gates. But it is has tilted, and if you step back, and make a little director’s square with your hands, you’ll see that it is skewed in favor of those who understand the digital world.

There is no doubt that some of the Big Six (BS) will alter course to swing their mammoth tankers towards the unchartered waters of the social consumer. Others will order the champagne to flow and tell the orchestra on the poop deck to play louder. What shape the industry will take is anybody’s guess, but if you’re looking for direction, Mike Shatzkin’s blog is a good place to go. He has a very good piece with Random House CEO, on transitioning from B2B to B2C.

But this post isn’t about the calamity,or not, that BS are facing. Rather it hopes to delve into something of a different nature. An insecure, abused orphan, lacking in confidence, and reaching its adolescent years suffering from an identity crisis; Self Publishing.

It’s a well-known fact that the label, self publishing, carries with it a stigma. The stigma that once you’ve self-published you’re finished as a writer. A stigma born of the past,  and carefully nurtured by those with a vested interest in the present. The BIG argument from the BS train is that the slush pile is being put on-line. For a near hysterical diatribe from an extremely arrogant and myopic viewpoint, from a lady who’s clearly suffering her own identity crisis ("I’m the man") go here, feel free to flame comment. Guess what, they’re right. The slush pile is being put on-line. So what. I can reject something just as quick as you can, however unlike you, I don’t think that I am the sole arbiter of taste, nor do I believe that I am unique.

We’re reliably informed by many Agent blogs that the vast majority of "real books" by "real authors" (i.e. pure BS), never earn out their advances and end up being returned. OK, so an agent chose those books and BS editors squabbled over them, the marketers marketed and the sales people sold; and then the public didn’t buy them. I can do that :-).

There is a lot of crap out there from both Trad and Indie publishing. Both parties are aware of this and neither has a solution. BS say the slush is going on-line, Self Publishers (SP) are saying we need to change our name from SP to Indie Publishers (IP) to help distinguish between good Indie and bad Indie. Why? Because self publishing has that stigma and it isn’t bleeding palms. How do you change the perception that something published by an individual is at least the equal of something published by a corporation. For a quick and sad (in my opinion) look at how decisions are made about books have a read over here.

You don’t. The market will decide. What has changed is that the market is now a lot bigger and this is a good thing.

The good stuff will float to the top. Amazon‘s way of doing this is via reviews – user driven reviews. Goodreads and LibraryThing are two other sites where readers write reviews on books. And it works. Yes there are the "release reviews" which are impossible to avoid or to police, (hey publishers print "his latest bestseller" on the front of books which haven’t been released yet), but if the author hasn’t done their work in marketing then that’s all the reviews that author is going to get.

If the author has done their work and spread the message that their new book is available, then some people will sample, some will buy, and the reviews will add up. Some will be mean-spirited, I haven’t had my coffee yet, 1 star for you type reviews, with the reviewer not even having read the book (hey, that happens at agencies too); other reviews will be well thought out by passionate readers who have read past work by the author and didn’t like or liked the work for reasons which they point out in the review.

There are two broad assumptions in the BS world. One – Self publishing is OK for niche non-fiction (thanks for that, I’ll rush to print with my in-depth study of the impact of pet rocks upon the modern American Psyche); and Two; that self publishers are a lazy lot who have no idea about editing, cover design, and (here’s the cruncher) what sells. I’ve read enough blogs and seen enough evidence to know that the first assumption is simply BS, and the second is just plain rude.

Excluding my time (in my day job I’m charged out at US$3,000 a day), I’ve spent about USD6,000 on getting my book, TAG, to where it is. The cover and copy editing remain to be finished, and when they’re done I’ll have spent a total of about USD8,000 on the book. Then I’ll put it up for sale on Amazon and Smashwords. I consider every penny that I’ve invested to be money well spent. The vast proportion went on developmental editing; which for me was a crash course in writing. I don’t have the time to take an MFA, and whilst books about how to write, help, there is nothing like having a professional critique of your own work to advance.

My publishing goal is simple: put out a great product. That means an attractive cover, no typo’s, and a well written, hopefully, entertaining story. How hard is that? Dam hard, but it can be done. Will the market like the book? Who knows? But if they don’t, it won’t be because of errors in the text or a crappy cover, ergo laziness. Maybe the writing isn’t ready for prime-time, but I can get feedback on that from an audience. As opposed to trying to decipher months of silence interspersed with snippets of "I didn’t fall in love with it."

What happens if it doesn’t sell? I’ll write another one. I’ve already started, quite some time ago, about a month after the first one. If that doesn’t sell? OK, I’ll write another one. My writing goal is to have what I write read by people, lots of them, and I’d like those people to pay what I write. That is verification. Each time I write I get better. Each time I publish I’ll get better. Each time I read reviews and see feedback I’ll get better. The difference is that I’ll use the market to tell me what they like and what they don’t.

From my perspective the business model offered by BS, and the model offered by IP (note: the acronym for Indie Publishing is also commonly used for Intellectual Property; whereas the acronym of Big Six… well I’m sure you get it) boils down to one significant difference and one thing only. No, it isn’t money, (if it does sell) you stand to make much more with IP.

The only reason that you should consider going with BS is because, for now, they still have the reach. They can put your book on a shelf. All the rest you can do as well, if not better, than Trad. Why? Because BS is firing a whole bunch of talented people and those people are going to want to eat. The shingles will be hung and in some instances they’ll say, I know you can’t afford me so I’ll take a cut, let’s say 20% of that 70% you get from Amazon – deal? Deal.

People don’t buy books from publishers. They buy them from authors. In the past this meant that you had to get on a bookshelf and the bookshelf was a monopoly. Now a portion of that bookshelf is electronic. Your average, serious, Indie author knows their customers better than any of the BS. How many of the BS actually know who is behind the Bookscan numbers. How many email addresses, blogs and facebook pages are tucked away in their CRM databases? I suspect, given that one CEO of a BS recently claimed that the high cost of ebooks was justified due to the high cost of digital warehousing (I’m not making this up), that the answer is, "More champagne Harper, and do get the orchestra to play a Waltz."

 

The Promise of Fall: How to Achieve a Balanced Writing Life

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Labor Day has come and gone, marking the end of a summer that went by so fast it gave me whiplash and the beginning of fall, which has always been my favorite season, even here in Southern California where September is often the hottest month of the year.

I was one of those odd kids who loved the return of school days, as the nights grew cooler in my Pennsylvania home town, my blood ran faster, washing away the sluggish dreaminess that a summer spent reading had produced. Adulthood, and a teaching career that mimicked the rhythms of my youth, meant fall continued to represent a time of increased activity.

This summer I was supposed to make serious progress on my second historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits. I was supposed to make so much progress that when fall came, and I went back to teaching (albeit a reduced load since I am now semi-retired), I would not falter, but continue to write with the goal of finishing a first draft by winter break. But this did not happen.

I did get 8,000 words written, at the very beginning of the summer, but then nothing. I can blame the two trips out of town and the two weeks on jury duty, which ate away over nearly half of the summer, then there were my husband’s two business trips and the increased responsibilities that this created, but none of these life distractions can explain why I didn’t write at least an hour every day.

So what did happen?

What happened was I sank into my life-long summer pattern-I slowed down. I read, I chatted with friends, I read some more, I upped my rate of exercise, I read, and in between I worked on marketing the book, Maids of Misfortune, which I published last December. I spent hours reading through the various blogs I now subscribed to, reading the threads of comments, writing comments when I thought I had something to add. Off and on during the day I wandered through the chat sites and forums I now belonged to, looking for places to put in my 2 cents. I worked on my own blog, updated my author web-page, and obsessively checked to see how many books I had sold each day. And by August I was now selling, on average, 10.8 books a day.

I had created a nice, healthy, balanced life–and my marketing strategies seemed to be working, but writing–the main point of all this activity–just wasn’t happening.

So, it is fall again. I can feel myself speeding up. And I have decided to experiment with cutting back on the time I spend marketing my first book in order to spend more time writing my second.

This is my promise to myself. I will not work on marketing after 7:30 am or before 6 pm.  The only exception is that I can spend up to 4 hours on Sundays working on a blog post and/or my next marketing initiative, which is to reach out to San Francisco books stores in preparation to my attendance at the mystery convention, Bouchercon, in October.
I will be curious to see if these limitations will harm my sales numbers, and I certainly hope they will help me progress on the second book.

I am also curious, what do you all do to ensure your marketing doesn’t interfere your writing? I would love to know.
 

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s The Front Parlor.

7 Reasons You Need A Facebook Fan Page

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Facebook Pages (also known as Fan Pages) look similar to personal Profiles, but they are designed for business use and they are a terrific way to promote yourself and your business. You can create a Page for your business, book, or even a character in a book. People join your Page by clicking the "like" button at the top of the page. (That button used to say "become a fan.")

Facebook Pages have several advantages over personal Profiles:

1.  You’re limited to 5,000 friends on your Profile, but there’s no limit on the number of people who can "like" your Page.

2.  Pages are designed for business use, so it’s more acceptable to be promotional on a Page than on a Profile.

3.  You can create multiple Pages to promote different products or businesses.

4.  You can send a message to everyone who has joined your page. Your message will show up in the Update section of each fan’s Inbox.

5.  You can create customized "tabs" or screens on your Page. For example, you can create a tab to promote your book and include your cover image, book video trailer and other content on that tab.

6.  After people join your Page, they will be directed to the Wall tab each time they visit the Page. But you can create a customized welcome screen for new visitors to land on. And each of the "tabs" or screens on your Page has its own URL that you can link to directly from outside of Facebook.
 

7.  You can use your Page to increase your email subscriber list, by adding an opt-in form and free bonus to one of the tabs. In the screenshot below you can see the Free Ebook tab that I added to my own Page.

FreeEbook

Learn how to create custom content like this on your own Facebook page in the August issue of The Savvy Book Marketer Newsletter. If you’re not already a subscriber, sign up now and you’ll receive exclusive access to the newsletter archives, including my tutorial, How to Create Custom Content on Your Facebook Page. You’ll also get a free copy of my ebook, Top Book Marketing Tips.

To learn more about how to use Facebook to promote yourself and your book, read Facebook Guide for Authors or The Savvy Book Marketer’s Guide to Successful Social Marketing.

Have you already created a Facebook Page? Please share the link using the comment section below.
 

 

 

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

For Most Book Lovers, The Future Is Here

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Every morning I check one of my favorite book business newsletters, Shelf Awareness, and one of my favorite features there is a "quotation of the day" that is often provocative. This morning’s quotation is an interesting one from William Gibson, whose latest novel, Zero History, was released yesterday:

"My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they’re able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home. Book making machines exist and they’re remarkably sophisticated. You’d eliminate the waste and you’d get your book–and it would be a real book. You might even have the option of buying a deluxe edition. You could have it printed with an extra nice binding, low acid paper."    
–William Gibson

I love the idea too, and I am certainly a fan of the imaginative energy behind various print-on-demand technologies including the Espresso Book Machine, which is popping up in a growing number of well-capitalized bookstores but remains a pretty expensive technology for many others.     

But here’s what’s a little funny about the quotation: it’s not a "futuristic dream scenario" at all. Amazon has been doing this with tens of thousands of "real books" for over three years. I know they are real books because they have sold thousands of copies of my books. The print quality and production values are better than copies that I used to have printed at a reputable printing company an hour from where I live, and the production costs are lower, and the price for customers is as low as on any comparable trade paperbacks.

It’s true that I can’t "go into" Amazon’s "bookshop," which means that I have the convenience of buying such books in seconds and waiting 24 to 48 hours for their delivery. It is also true that I can’t get a deluxe hardcover edition, which of course eliminates less than 1/10th of 1 percent of all book transactions.

If I don’t want to wait 24 to 48 hours, of course, I can download many of these books instantly and directly to my Kindle, BlackBerry, iPad, iPod Touch, Android, PC, or Mac.

Either way, I think that the future is probably here for most of us, Mr. Gibson. And I am liking it.

I love bookstores, too. And I loved the grand old publishing companies of the mid-20th century. And my collection of great 45 RPM records and LPs. And horses, too.

Related post: William Gibson’s Futuristic ‘Dream Scenario’: Enhanced POD


This is a reprint from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily.

Book Marketing: Use Your Email Signature Effectively

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You have probably heard this advice before, but have you done anything about it? What does your email signature say right now?

I get emails every day from people commenting on the blog, asking questions or telling me about their books which I love to receive and happily reply to. However, over 50% of those emails do not have any links in their email signature, and many have no email signature at all. Some have an image of a business card with no clickable links to their website or book for sale which is not very useful either.

How many emails do you send a day? To friends, your accountant, business colleagues, potential clients, potential readers and more. If your email signature is set up, you are constantly sending people your information and doing ‘passive’ marketing, spreading the word about you, your brand and your books. Use your email signature wisely and those people might click through and read more about your book/join your email list or contact you for business.

So, today’s book marketing advice is to sort out your email signature right now!

What information should an email signature contain?

To make sure people know who you are and can buy your books, you should include some of the following aspects:

  • Your full name, your business name and tagline if you have one, or an explanation of what you do. Don’t assume people know what you are about.
     
  • Your website and blog URL prefixed by http:// which makes it directly clickable (you should always use that prefix on the web for clickable links)
     
  • Your book titles and where people can buy them or find out more information e.g. Amazon.com links or specific pages of your website
     
  • A hook or offer for the reader that catches their eye if it is a topic they are interested in e.g. I mention my Author 2.0 Blueprint
     
  • Social media links including Twitter, Facebook and any other main site that is relevant (you don’t have to use them all!)
     
  • Address and phone details if they are relevant to how you run your business
     
  • Logo or picture of you or your books if you want to include them. This is not mandatory, but if you do include them, make sure you also include plain text links as well.

My basic email signature is shown above. It is an image here but as an email signature all the links are clickable.

I don’t use any fancy formatting or images right now but there are plugins and code you can use to make it look prettier. That is great but just get something basic up for starters and worry about formatting later. If people want to know more about you, they want the information right in front of them. They don’t want to search for it.

If you’re having problems with your email, try Gmail

Some people have problems with their email accounts and providers. It seems some of them make it very difficult to set up email signatures. If you’re struggling with email, I highly recommend using http://www.gmail.com which is Google’s own free online email service. You can set up a signature through the Settings page, and then the General area. There are also a host more benefits including easily searchable text, contacts and tasks integration and much more.

What do you include on your email signature now? Do you have any favorite tools for making it attractive?

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

What About Book Reviews?

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You may find this post to be a little controversial because I’m going to gore a sacred cow, book reviews.

Book Reviews of the Past

There was a time that new books lived or died as the result of their reviews. If one could garner an excellent review from a major reviewer/review journal, your success was almost guaranteed. Even a bad review wasn’t all bad because it would guarantee sales to curiosity seekers. Not many folks were in the reviewing business.

They got paid for their work by newspapers and journals who sold subscriptions and advertising to pay for their content. One large review operation that uses between 80-100 volunteers has been funded by grants. In other words, there was a variety of structures that allowed for a paid professional/semiprofessional reviewer corps. Getting the blessings of one of these was considered a real coup and almost essential to obtain bestseller status.

The Modern Review Scene

The old, established scene is still here, but it has been greatly degraded by journals and newspapers going out of business. Still, there are far more reviewers today than ever before because of two things–the internet and online retailers such as Amazon who encourage people to write about what they read. The numbers of the traditional professional reviewers are less, but there are many more who have come to prominance  via blogs. The business side of book reviewing has been changing as well. As I mentioned, professional reviewers got paid by who they worked for. These organizations never charged for their reviews and the idea of having to pay for a review was abhorrent to many. That has definitely changed. Such reviewing giants as Kirkus, Bowkers, and Foreword Magazine now have pay-for-review programs for self-publishers and small presses.

After reading and writing reviews on over 2,000 books for free, without any compensation for my time and talents, I decided to charge $247 for normal books and $47 for children’s picture books’ reviews. I still use sets of rubrics or evaluation guidelines to base my scores, which make my reviews far more objective than many in the industry. That has surprised and upset a few clients, even though my website at http://www.heartlandreviews.com is very clear as to my approach. They thought that by paying, they would be given a fluff review. Sorry, but I just don’t do that. I’m an honest, straight from the shoulder type of guy. My scoring system provides details on a number of different areas which helps writers/publishers understand what may need improvement.

What Do You Do With Reviews

Although reviews in the major journals can be helpful with the library and major chain bookstore markets, there are other ways that any reviews can be useful. They are an important tool for marketing. I have seen excerpts of my reviews on book jackets and covers, inside books, websites, and in display ads in many newspapers and journals, to include the New York Times. They can be used in your current books and in future books, advertising flyers, brochures, and even on brochures. Instead of leaving blank pages at the end of a book to load up a signature, fill them with reviews and marketing information.

The day of the review is not over, although the rules have been changing. You are limited in how you use them only by your imagination.

 

This is a cross-posting from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

Ebook Revolution Well Underway

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Exactly a year ago, I wrote about how ebooks are the future. Today I read that the Oxford English Dictionary, the mighty volumes that record our very language itself, will only be available online. You can read a bit about that here.

Now, I’m a speculative fiction writer. I love science fiction. I’ve said this before – my iPhone does way more than Captain Kirk’s communicator could ever do. The iPad is suspiciously like Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s PADD (Personal Access Display Device). Incidentally, check out the gibberish on the PADD screen in the picture below. Are we really surprised that things like a multi-volume behemoth are crumbling under the weight of online use? We can’t have the future and the past together. That’d be some weird time twister where everyone’s confused.

As a writer, I often use a dictionary to check words. You know which one I use most? www.dictionary.com. I have a beautiful printed dictionary, in fact I have a few, but I rarely use them. If I’m not at my computer, I use the dictionary.com app on my iPhone. It’s easy and it’s good for the planet. You can hear the trees breathing a sigh of relief.

But you may also remember me gushing about how much I love Angela Slatter’s new book. Not just because it’s awesome storytelling, but because the physical book is just a beautiful thing to hold and behold. It was limited to 300 copies. Here’s a relevant quote from my previous post a year ago, that I linked at the start of this one:

But here’s my prediction – 99% of the books of the future will be either electronic or Print-On-Demand. Within twenty years or so traditional off-set print runs will be used exclusively for high-end collectors edition books.

I know – quoting myself. What a wanker. But you get my point. We have to accept that these things are happening and we have to accept that it’s not a bad development. I heard a statistic on the radio today that by the end of next year, one in ten books bought will be ebooks. Ten per cent of market share. That’s a lot for a new technology. It’s already around the three to five per cent mark. But literacy rates are expected to go up as well, as more people will have access to more reading options more often.

That 20 year estimate in my quote above could be grossly inaccurate. It might all happen far quicker than that. It’s the future people. Embrace it. Real books aren’t going anywhere, because too many of us love them. But the face of reading is changing just like the nature of book buying and book publishing is changing. Don’t be scared – it’s all really quite exciting.

EDIT – There’s been a fair amount of chatter about this post on Twitter and other places and one of the things that keeps getting mentioned again and again is, more or less, “I just hate reading from a screen, simple as that.”

Well, it’s worth noting that ebook readers are evolving rapidly too. Already the Kindle and other e-ink devices are replicating the printed page very well. Screens will soon be so advanced that they’re just like a printed page. And isn’t that deliciously ironic. Accept it – we already live in a digital future. The Schwarzschild radius has long since passed.

 

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

CIP: What It Means, How to Read It, Who Should Get It

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There is one place in printed books were we look for all kinds of editorial, bibliographic, legal, promotional and production information: the copyright page. But among all this information, data, legal notices and marketing and contact information, there’s one piece of content on the copyright page that is obscure to most people who pick up the book: the CIP data block, issued by the Library of Congress’ Cataloging in Publication program.

According to the Library of Congress, the CIP program allows catalogers to

complete the descriptive cataloging …, assign subject headings …, and assign full Library of Congress and Dewey decimal classification numbers. … A machine-readable version of the record is distributed to large libraries, bibliographic utilities, and book vendors around the world.

This transmission of data is what makes participation in the program useful for selling books. Being listed in the databases of large libraries and book wholesalers thanks to the Library of Congress program eliminates one of the obstacles to achieving library sales for a book. And for many books, libraries are a critical part of their market.
 

The Problem with the Program

Unfortunately, the CIP program excludes self-publishers from participating, and that applies to authors who have [self-published through a print service company like Lulu or Createspace]. It also excludes publishers who have issued less than 3 books by authors other than themselves. This effectively bars self-publishers from the program, even those whose books would be of great interest to libraries.

The good news is that participation in the Library of Congress’ Preassigned Control Number (PCN) program is open to all publishers who list a U.S. place of publication on the title or copyright page, and who maintain an office inside the U.S. where they can answer questions from the catalogers. And once you have a PCN you can pay for your own CIP to be created.

CIP data blocks created by the Library of Congress are known as LC-CIP. Those created by a publisher, or by a third party on behalf of a publisher, are known as P-CIP. The chief source for P-CIP for many years has been Quality Books, a distributor of small press books to libraries. Their fee for this service is $100.

As with the Library of Congress, you will have to fill out their forms and supply information about your book. A cataloger will analyze your submission and produce a P-CIP data block to be printed in your book. Of course, the downside is that this record will not be distributed to large libraries and wholesalers, the way the Library of Congress’ record is distributed.

This leads to the question of whether it’s worth it for a self-publisher to go through the time and expense of having a P-CIP data block produced for her book. And the answer is actually quite simple: If you anticipate making any appreciable sale to libraries, it’s probably well worthwhile to get P-CIP. Having this cataloging information simply makes librarians’ jobs that much easier, reducing their resistance just a bit to acquiring your book for their collection.

Particularly if you publish reference books, histories, books about local events that would be of interest to libraries in your region, travel books, directories, how-to books on popular topics, or similar books, you could well have a good sized market with the thousands of libraries, both public and private, throughout the country.

What Does it All Mean?

 

Copyright page CIP data block

Click to enlarge

This brings us to the data block itself, and our attempts to decode the arcane notation of the catalogers. Here’s a line by line guide to what’s in the CIP in this illustration (and this is a complete invention, just for illustration).

 

A. Alerts the librarian the CIP was prepared by or for the Publisher

B. The main entry under which the book is cataloged, always the author’s name.

C. The title, followed by a statement of responsibility, in this case assigning authorship to John and Joan Doe.

D. Physical description of the book, almost always blank since the books are usually not yet published.

E. Notes whether an index or other bibliographical entries are in the book.

F. ISBN

G. Subject headings, conforming to Library of Congress usage. Here’s an important note from Lisa Shiel, an experienced CIP cataloger: “The subject headings . . . MUST be authorized Library of Congress subject headings or it isn’t really CIP–and it isn’t properly cataloged. . . . Unless you are experienced with choosing subject headings you may misunderstand the intricacies of cataloging or inadvertently choose a heading that has fallen out of favor.” See the comments to the blog post for Lisa’s complete comments.

H. Indicates other ways the book will be cataloged, here by title as well as by author.

I. Library of Congress classification number.

J. Dewey Decimal classification number.

K. Library of Congress PCN. Note the year the number was issued is in the first four digits.

Note that since this article was published I have incorporated the information generously provided in the comments by Lisa Shiel, an experienced CIP cataloger.

So there you have it. Here are some resources for going further into the CIP area:

  1. Library of Congress PCN program information
     
  2. Quality Books P-CIP Program
     
  3. Adrienne Ehlert Bashista, a freelance Cataloger-At-Large who prepares P-CIP data blocks for publishers
     
  4. Five Rainbows CIP Cataloging service

Takeaway: Although participation in the Library of Congress CIP program is closed to self-publishers, understanding this data block and how it’s used by librarians will tell you whether to go to the time and trouble to acquire your own.

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

ISBNs Don't Matter As Much As You Probably Think They Do, But You Might Want To Start Owning Your Own Anyway

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I was about to post an overlong response in a comment thread on Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer blog, but on reflection, realized what I was about to post wasn’t a response, it was a blog entry in its own right. The article associated with the comment thread is about Library of Congress registration information [Editor’s note: the article is reprinted here on Publetariat today], and the subject of ISBN ownership came up in the discussion going on beneath the article, in the comments. And here’s what I have to say about ISBN ownership:

In the case of an individual author who only self-publishes his own manuscripts (as opposed to someone running an imprint, publishing works by other authors) what does it matter, really, who’s the registered owner of the ISBN on a book? There’s no legal or regulatory tie between ISBN ownership/registration and copyright or intellectual property rights. ISBN registration only designates ownership of the ISBN, not ownership of the content of the book to which the ISBN has been assigned.

I’ve used Createspace’s free ISBNs on all of my self-published books to date, and while this technically makes Createspace the ‘publisher of record’ in the ISBN records, I still retain all rights to the published material and I still own the copyrights. CS’s terms of use state this explicitly, and CS is also very adamant that their company not be listed as Publisher on their clients’ books’ copyright pages.

ISBN ownership can help to establish the legitimacy of a publisher’s claim to profits from a given book in a legal challenge situation, but given that CS has made it abundantly clear it never wants to be named as the publisher of record for any of the books it prints and distributes, the likelihood of CS trying to usurp my royalties seems pretty remote. Also, since copyright is the most meaningful measure of intellectual property ownership in the case of a book, and I own the copyrights on my books, the fact that CS is the registered owner of my books’ ISBNs wouldn’t allow CS to claim my intellectual property rights, either. One caveat: the financial and legal waters would be a bit murkier if I were running an imprint and publishing other authors’ works as well as my own, and in that case I would absolutely want to purchase and register all the ISBNs in the name of my imprint.

While not being the registered ISBN owner prevents me from listing the books with wholesale catalogs myself, since Createspace now offers to create wholesale catalog listings as part of their service, it’s a non-issue for me. My CS books are available on Amazon, Amazon UK, through Barnes and Noble, and through every other bookseller and retailer that stocks its inventory via the Ingram or Baker & Taylor catalogs, and that’s most of them.

Borders is a special case, in that its online and in-store inventory is stocked from an internally-maintained catalog; the only way any publisher, indie or mainstream, gets her books listed with Borders is to get one of Borders’ buyers to add them to Borders’ internal catalog. Since my CS books are listed in the Ingram and Baker & Taylor catalogs, from which Borders draws entries for its internal catalog, I could approach a Borders buyer and inquire about getting my CS books added to Borders’ catalog if I wanted to, but I haven’t bothered.

True, my books aren’t available through European wholesale book catalogs (since only the registered ISBN owner can list books with those catalogs), but since I’m not promoting my books in foreign markets nor releasing them in foreign language editions, I don’t think I’m missing out on many sales there. Amazon UK is the #1 bookseller for English-language books in Europe, and my CS books are already listed on that site.

While not being the registered ISBN owner also prevents me from registering my books with the Library of Congress, I don’t really care about that and I don’t think anyone else does either—with respect to my books, anyway. It would matter if I were trying to get my self-pub books stocked by public and institutional libraries, but let’s face it: self-pub books, novels especially, aren’t likely to be stocked by those libraries anyway.

If I self-publish anything new in the future I’ll most likely purchase my own ISBN/barcode blocks for the new projects, but only because "premium" or "expanded" distribution options offered by print and digital publishing service providers increasingly require that the author/imprint be the registered owner of the ISBN. Since this is already a requirement for Smashwords’ premium ebook catalog, I expect it’s going to become commonplace for ebooks to have ISBNs just like print books and hard media audiobooks.

Even so, I still see the whole thing as little more than an administrative hoop through which I’ll soon be forced to jump and an extra expense I’ll be forced to shoulder to make retailers’ lives easier. Cost of doing business, and all that. I’m still not likely to list my self-published books with European wholesale catalogs, nor Borders’ internal catalog, and I definitely won’t bother registering them with the Library of Congress.

I have always maintained, and still maintain, that ISBNs are merely tracking numbers used by retailers, libraries and government agencies to organize, and retain control over, their inventory of books—nothing more, and nothing less. Some people (and I’m not talking about Joel Friedlander or anyone who’s commented on his article) treat ISBN purchase and ownership like some kind of mark of legitimacy, and others even go so far as to tell self-publishers that if your book’s ISBN isn’t registered in your name, that fact alone makes your book a "vanity" project and you an amateur who doesn’t deserve to wear the name "author".

Horsefeathers. There may be compelling business reasons for this or that indie author to purchase and register his own ISBNs, and there are definitely compelling business reasons for imprints to do so. But that’s all they are: business reasons.

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

Me and My Best Friend: When Publishing Goes Bad

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For me, there has only been one story in publishing over the past few days, and it is this one, about Leo Hunter, six years of age, signing a 23 book deal with a US publisher. I didn’t get the chance to dig deep enough when the story first broke (supposedly) when I posted about it here and on also on Facebook on Friday.

The UK media piece most commentators have focused on was in the Daily Mirror newspaper. The real revelations about this story have been filling the blogosphere for the past few days, but I’ve yet to see one actually link to where this whirlwind first began. If you were only to follow the UK media who covered the story, you could be forgiven for believing ‘Me and My Best Friend’ by J. S. Huntlands had just been published this week. It wasn’t, and this torrid little saga, and the real author behind it, has actually been on the map with this particular book since July 2009, when it was first published by Strategic Book Publishing.

  Firstly, let’s deal with the source of the Daily Mirror story. It’s penned by Rod Chaytor, but like some national news stories, it was ‘lifted’ from a provincial piece written the day before by Paul Whyatt in This is Derbyshire. This is a provincial newspaper in the UK where Jamie Hunter lives. Who is Jamie Hunter? Ah, here’s the rub. She is Leo Hunter’s mother, an author of one book published by AuthorHouse in 2008 called ‘Nick: Twisted Minds’, a self-published and heart-felt story of domestic violence. Who wrote ‘Nick: Twisted Minds’? Well, officially, J. S. Huntlands, but you see, Huntlands is the pseudonym of Jamie Hunter. Where things start to get a little muddled is that the children’s book penned by Leo Hunter, aged 6, is also officially authored by J. S. Huntlands. But that’s ok, because in the Mirror piece Jamie Hunter says: 

"He’s so young that he is not allowed to sign a contract with the publishers. It’s unfortunate because it means his name doesn’t get to go on the book, but we make sure everyone we know realises that he is the author."

Really, Jamie? In the introduction to the book, you say:  

“Thank you to my son for the inspiration to write this series.”

OK, he provided the ‘inspiration’ and chat that led you to write this book, but he is not the author of the book, no more than I am or JK Rowling is. Jamie Hunter also says she sent the book to JK Rowling. Her son is certainly at six years of age seeing the lights of stardom. In the media piece, he is quoted as saying:
 

I like Harry Potter but I like my books even more. I would like to be more famous than JK Rowling and even more famous than Cheryl Cole and Simon Cowell.

Jamie said her son comes up with ideas for a basic plot – for example, a boy who gets lost – and then she helps him make notes that help him write the story.

She said: "He’s very bossy and tells me exactly how he wants the front page to look like and how the illustrations should appear.

 UK Mirror article.

  Here is what the back blurb says on ‘Me and My Friends’:
 

“J. S. Huntlands is the author of Nick Twisted Minds and is currently working on more books in this series as well as 23 more books in the Me and My Best Friends Series.

Huntlands is a full-time writer as well as mom to a wonderful four-year-old boy.”

Take careful note of the age – not six, now it is four years of age.

‘Me and My Best Friends’ was actually first published in July 2009 by vanity publisher, Strategic Book Publishing, now under a lawsuit by Florida’s Attorney General’s Office, and the publishing group it is run by is headed up by Robert M. Fletcher, vanity publisher and literary agent scammer.

Strategic Book Publishing has also goofed up on the book’s product description on Amazon – it is for a completely different book!  

I am trying to be kind here to one of Fletcher’s authors, but she has got sucked into his publishing scam as well as fooling herself into being one of his represented authors in his other literacy agency scams, but she has done herself no favours now – in the past week – or in the past year. This is Jamie posting (spamming) Making Light, a literary blog last year where Fletcher and Strategic Book Publishing were being discussed.
 

#14 ::: JS Huntlands ::: (view all by) ::: September 04, 2009, 08:08 AM:

Set in today’s day and time, Me and My Best Friend is about a young boy, his faithful companion and their exciting adventures.

Henry and Liam are the best of friends and they do everything together. They can run and play all day long. But when Henry the puppy gets tired and tries to take a nap, three-year-old Liam keeps waking him, wanting him to play some more. Will Henry get any rest?

Get your children involved with this beautifully illustrated book. Your child will love to match up words and pictures, and find Liam, who keeps hiding in his bedroom. Perfect for the young reader!

About the Author

J.S. Huntlands is the author of Nick Twisted Minds and is currently working on more books in this series, as well as 23 more books in the Me and My Best Friend series. Huntlands is a full-time writer, as well as a mom to a wonderful four-year-old boy. This book is dedicated to her son in hopes that he never forgets his best friend.

 Resident writer James D. MacDonald reacted to the above posting:


#23 ::: James D. Macdonald ::: (view all by) ::: September 04, 2009, 10:22 AM:

If you Google on "Set in today’s day and time, Me and My Best Friend" you’ll get over 900 hits for this particular comment spam.

She’s trying hard….

What she needs to do now is get in touch with the Florida Attorney General and hope that she can get restitution.


#30 ::: JS Huntlands ::: (view all by) ::: January 25, 2010, 07:23 AM:

Wow,

What can I say? You have strong views. Thank you for the advise.

No I didn’t read this before signing the contract with AEG. I got rid of my website as my 12 months for free ran out and AEG offered a free web site. (good idea at the time)

I don’t have 1000’s of books in my house but, AEG do try to make you have x amount on hand. I own one of each of my books. I have been though a rough time but still no excuse for typo’s (typed for you Joel Polowin,) or not doing my homework. There are 100’s and 1000’s of publisher’s out there. It’s not so easy finding the right one for you. 

On the plus side for me though I did sign a ‘traditional contract’ So publishing cost me nothing. The advertising however can be very costly with nothing in return. Hence I have done it myself. Ie: live radio shows, newspaper reports. The blogging. I thought a great way to get out there. Clearly not such a great idea. Thank you again for your thoughts
 

Interestingly on Answers.com, we also have the following:

What books does jk rowling like?

A: Nick Twisted Minds written by J. S. Huntlands.
Her children like Me and My Best Friend also written by J. S. Huntlands

 

Somehow, I don’t think it was JK who supplied this answer! Ms Hunter has been a very busy girl with her marketing steamroller.

And I don’t think Jamie Hunter learned anything from James’ advice from all accounts in the last week. Somewhere in here should have been the story of a woman experiencing domestic violence and finding hope in the words she wrote in a book, but along the way, it got messed up in a vanity dream, and somehow, a wonderful, bright and creative kid got mixed up in that dream too. He should never have been a part of it, and I’m baffled as to why Jamie Hunter choose to involve her son in her own literary ambitions. 

I have no doubt what he has experienced with mom over the past couple of years could make him the next JK Rowling or Stephen King, but right now he isn’t, and shouldn’t be, and for the UK media or the people who love him to expect that, would be grossly unfair. We must live our lives as adults, and leave our children to dream theirs.

This story is also building up some steam over on AbsoluteWrite.

 

This is a cross-posting from Mick Rooney‘s POD, Self Publishing and Independent Publishing.

New RSS Feed Options At Feedburner

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Recently I wrote a post about why it’s so important to offer RSS feeds on your author blog. Feeds enable your author blog posts to be automatically delivered to your readers’ email inbox or feed reader, so you don’t have to rely on people remembering to visit your blog periodically.

The best way to set up a feed is through FeedBurner. You may be tempted to use one of the feed widgets offered by your blog service provider, but they do not allow you to see statistics on your feed subscribers or customize your feed settings. It’s best to go directly to FeedBurner to set up your feed. 

I recently logged onto FeedBurner to set up a feed for a new website I’m developing (more details on that coming soon!) and I noticed that there were quite a few changes on the FeedBurner site since the last time I was there. It seems that since Google purchased FeedBurner several years ago, they have continued to tweak the service by adding and deleting options that help you promote your blog posts, podcasts, and vcasts (video blogs). 

I was happy to learn that MaAnna Stephenson has just updated her ebook, Just The FAQs: RSS Feeds, to reflect the recent changes at FeedBurner. If you offer your feed via email, you’ll want to check out all of the new customizing options for email format and delivery. There is also a new Password Protector option that helps keep your feed safe from hackers, but could negatively impact the delivery of your email feed. The new Socialize tool has customizing options for pushing your feed to Twitter, but the jury is still out on whether this tool works well for everyone.

Be sure to read the Publicize section to learn about an often overlooked link on FeedBurner that offers even more free ways to publicize your blog and help you rank higher with Google. Podcasters should pay attention to MaAnna’s explanation of the conflict between FeedBurner’s SmartFeed and SmartCast features.

If you aren’t yet offering feeds on your blog, get started today! If you’re already got a feed, it’s a good idea to log onto FeedBurner and check out the new features. From your home page, click on the name of your feed, then go through all of the tabs and check out the various features and settings.

To learn more about how to set up your feed on FeedBurner and take full advantage of all of its features, I highly recommend Just The FAQs: RSS Feeds. This ebook offers step-by-step instructions in plain English, and comes in several versions, designed for installing and configuring feeds on WordPress.com or WordPress.org.

If you use TypePad (like I do), read this article to learn how to find your TypePad RSS feed and connect it to FeedBurner, then order the WordPress.com version of the Just The FAQs: RSS Feeds ebook to learn how to configure your feed.

And be sure to subscribe to my blog so you don’t miss any posts on The Savvy Book Marketer! In the right column of this page, under "Get Blog Updates," just enter your email address in the box to receive blog posts by email or click the "subscribe in a reader" link to have the feed delivered to your favorite feed reader or to the "RSS Feeds" folder in Outlook.

 

This is a cross-posting from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

The Book Industry: What's Next?

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Two driving factors come to mind in discussing book trends:

  1. How many books are written and published
  2. Rapidly advancing technology

How many books are written and published

In the late 1800s, there were between 3,000 to 5,000 new books published a year. During the depression years, there were around 8,000 to 10,000 new books published a year. By the 1940s, the figure was 7,000 to 11,000. In the 50s it was 11,000 to 15,000. Then things really started to explode: 1960s= 15K to 30K; 1970s= 36K to 45K; 1980s= 42K to 53K; 1990s= 47K to 68K. By 2005 the number was in the 172K range, and now between the US and the UK, we may be talking over 600K per year.

The really sobering stat is out of the 172K US number, only 1K sell over 50K copies. In other words, writers, reconsider quitting your day job. Very few authors actually make a living from their book sales. Now, when you consider how difficult and competitive it is to get accepted for publishing, especially by the agented major publisher route, you’ve got to wonder how many books were written every year. The number has to be staggering.

Now, let’s look at the book marketing and retail side. With these numbers, how do you get your new books seen, acknowledged, and desired? Every day more and more outlandish attention-getting techniques are tried. Even if you don’t consider all the previous decade’s new books and just look at one year’s crop, where do the retailers find room to put them? In the big box stores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, they have enough shelf space at best to display 60,000 titles at any one time.

In the smaller independent bookstores such as I own, we’re talking maybe 10,000 to 20,000 at most. The book retail business is like trying to force 100 gallons of water through a tiny funnel. For you readers, you have a shopping choice of being overwhelmed by the numbers or hoping for a very knowledgeable book clerk who can make excellent recommendations and do a good job at hand-selling.

Now I haven’t addressed the online experience yet. In addition to Amazon and Barnes&Noble.com, there are a myriad of other electronic catalog experiences out there. Some of them are online-only businesses and some are extensions of bookstores trying to stay in the game with all the venues. The choices are daunting. For example, The Book Barn’s (my store) landing page entitled GRREAT Books uses the book distributor Baker and Taylor’s 2 million book/music/movie data base. Again, the number of choices is daunting. A positive note is that self-publishers and print-on-demand are becoming more respectable if they are done right.

Electronic Media and the Emerging Technologies

So far, I’ve only addressed printed books. Now we add audio books, tape, CD, or downloads and ebooks in all their different formats. Publishers and retailers are flailing in their attempts to keep up with the various technologies. New marketing and distribution channels are developing at the expense of more traditional ones. Many folks are trying to jump on an already speeding train. Some will fall off and hurt themselves. We’re already seeing many alarming stats.

Traditional publishing isn’t finished. There will still be a market for traditional print books, but ebook readers such as Kindle and iPad are very attractive to some, and not just to the very young. Older folks are joining the ranks of fans for these devices for both comfort and flexible convenience. I’m 65. I have arthritis in my fingers and wrists. Reading a 1,000-page printed book becomes a painful process for me. As my vision gets worse, print becomes more difficult to see. The electronic readers are lightweight and will become more so, making them easier, less painful to hold. Their text font sizes and selections allow the reader to use whatever is most convenient to see—the reader chooses for convenience instead of a publisher choosing fonts and sizes for cost effectiveness.

Although I currently don’t have a reader, I see the day rapidly approaching when I will. How will bookstores service that market, or will it be the exclusive domain of the online sources? Will bookstore become a place to come to have your reader refueled with the latest ebooks, which they will download for you? I can see that as a possibility for the aging baby boomers who don’t want to bother doing it themselves, but will they be enough for a store’s survival.

Looking into the future

I’m no prophet, but my military intelligence background trained me to think in contingencies. Here are some trends and timelines I see developing:

  1. Printed books will be around for a couple more decades, but will gradually ease out of the picture.
     
  2. The models for publishing and marketing are already changing to accommodate the changing technologies. The future is here today.
     
  3. People are becoming far more visually (graphics not text) oriented.
     
  4. Technology already in place to allow writers to become speakers as software turns their spoken words into text, bypassing the keyboard barrier. We think and speak much faster than most of us can type.
     
  5. As self-publishing becomes more powerful and accepted, the inevitable explosion of works produced will become massive; however, with the technology to organize and provide conveniently quick searching, it will become easier to find exactly what you’re looking for. This will make Long Tail Marketing king (which has already begun to happen).
     
  6. Expect to see far more multimedia approaches to the providing of information. Already we have book trailers as well as movie trailers.
     
  7. Finally, marketing will become a much more fluid playing field with increasing complexities. Nothing is sacred, only what works well this time and that is guaranteed to change. Marketing will require far more creative thinking and mental flexibility. Reaction times to the market will be shortened greatly by necessity.

There you have it for now. Like anything else these days, all this prognostication is subject to change.

 

This is a cross-posting from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

Late To The Fair: Why I Became An Indie Author

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Last week I caught up to the fact that Chris Kelly was having a blog carnival on Indie Publishing just as the deadline closed. However, after reading the blog posts of those who made it to the fair, and mulling over my reactions, I thought it would still be useful to post on this topic.

I have written previously on my blog about the path that lead me to self-publishing, which echoed other writers (disappointment with the traditional route, issues of control, greater financial opportunities, etc) so in this post I am focusing more narrowly on the most important personal reason I had for deciding to become an indie author.

The traditional publishing route takes just too damn long (and I am too damn old).

I remember a year ago last June coming back from a mystery convention, business cards from an agent and the editor of a small press in hand, and sitting down and looking at those cards. I knew the drill. I and my author friends had been down that road before and I knew that even if I was successful, the minimum time it would take from first query to finished product was 18 months, and as a first time author it would more likely take two years. Even worse, editors at that convention made it clear it would take at least another year after coming out in print before the book was published as an ebook.  (I know that this, like much of publishing, is changing, but in June 2009 most traditional publishers were adamant about not publishing print and ebooks at the same time.)

I had had the idea for Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery 30 years earlier, I had written the first draft 20 years earlier, and I was now approaching sixty, and 2-3 years simply felt too long to wait to get it into readers’ hands and discover if my book was indeed something that readers would enjoy.

Now I know that sixty is supposed to be the new forty, but my mother was dead at the age of 67 and my father’s poetry writing came to a halt when he was in his late 70s and entered the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s, so in actuarial terms, life really was too short.

In addition, while theoretically my sixty years have brought me wisdom, experience and the financial security that would give me an edge over younger authors, what I felt was just old as I read blogs by twenty-somethings who, with the boundless energy of youth, could put in longer days, were more comfortable with new technology, and didn’t have to spend so darn much time keeping the body moving smoothly. Even more distressing were the real forty somethings who not only had widsom and experience, but also had twenty to thirty years of successfully publishing books under their belts, with established contacts and fans, to help them on their way.

I felt like I was late to the Fair, and if I didn’t get a move on, all the rides would be closed. So I put the business cards away and committed myself to taking the self-publishing route. I took the next six months to do the final edit and do what was necessary to be ready to publish (get cover designed, set up author website, set up blog), much of which I would have needed to do prior to even sending out my query to that agent or editor.

Then in a two-week period in December of 2009 I published my book as an ebook on Smashwords and Kindle and used CreateSpace to publish a POD edition.

Two weeks, not two to three years.

And now I am nine months down the road and I am not worrying that my window of opportunity is closing and that bookstores will be sending unbought copies of my book back, and Books Scan is going to label me a failure because my sell-through rate wasn’t high enough, and my publisher is going to drop me (or let my book go out of print) because I didn’t make back my advance.

Instead I am having the time of my life. I have sold over 1150 copies of Maids of Misfortune, over 500 copies of my short story, Dandy Detects, and I am watching my sales improve every day. And I haven’t even turned 61 yet!

 

 

This is a cross-posting from M. Louisa Locke‘s The Front Parlor.