Publetariat

I self-published my first novel, RealmShift, at the start of 2006 through Lulu.com. It was an interesting exercise. I learned a great deal about producing a quality book and I learned a lot about the nature of Recommended Retail Price, bookstore discounts, international postage and shipping costs and the stigma that stops people taking self-published work seriously. But the book sold modestly, got a lot of great reviews and generated a bit of buzz. I even had people randomly emailing me with praise and asking for more, which was very flattering. As it happened I was already working on the sequel. Once that was ready to publish I decided to take the whole process more seriously and, rather than use an author service POD company again, I wanted to go directly to source.

I investigated cutting out the middleman and dealing directly with Lightning Source International (LSI), the POD printer used by many author service companies. I discovered that LSI don’t deal directly with authors – they deal only with publishers. Now, the semantics of indie author/publisher aside, this actually gave me an idea. Why not become a boutique version of something like Lulu or iUniverse? Why not become a publisher? I saw an opportunity here to take the indie publishing process a step further. So I slowly put together a plan.

I would create a POD publishing company that would be essentially exactly the same as the big POD author service companies mentioned above but with the following caveats:

Genre Specific – my work is dark fantasy, sometimes classified as horror or urban fantasy. I decided to form a publisher that would specialise only in science fiction, fantasy and horror, with a preference for the darker, more adult works in those genres.

Quality Control – I wouldn’t just let anyone publish anything. While the work would need to be done largely by the author, especially all the marketing and promotion post release, I would firstly only take well written, well edited, quality stories and I would do the typesetting, formatting, layout and cover design myself (in deep consultation with the author) to ensure that the books we produced were both good writing and professionally put together. Small

Catalogue – the publisher would only have a small number of authors on board, keeping to the specifications above.

Cost Neutral – the publisher itself would not be designed to make a profit. The publisher will recover costs from the authors from their sales and subsequent sales profits then all go back to the authors – it’s up to them to market the work, so they should get the proceeds. I’ll have to make my profits from the sale of my own books.

Anthologies – some money can come back to the press by way of anthologies. I would pay for the stories included, buying first print and online rights for one year, and hopefully cover costs with anthology sales and maybe put a bit of money back into the publishing company this way. Any profits made here could be used to market the press as a whole and generate interest in all the work published. This is also an opportunity to give emerging writers another market for their work.

There are two fundamental points to this approach: As this publisher is not out to turn a profit, I could offer my books and those of anyone else I take on at a retail price very close to the cost price from the POD printer; With quality control and a limited catalogue, we could work towards shattering the indie publishing stigma – a stigma that is slowly dissolving, but that can certainly do with an injection of quality work!

Any books put out through this publisher would also have a stable of other work to stand up with. All the books would carry the logo and all would be featured on the publisher’s website. The catalogue of work as a whole could be marketed and any sales from one author would expose the other authors to those readers. This idea is basically taking the technology that we have available today, that is used so successfully and profitably by the author service POD companies, and distilling it back down to something smaller and more targeted.

Being genre specific and having a degree of quality control means that the publisher can be grown as a brand within the indie publishing world and within the greater publishing world as a whole. And so Blade Red Press was born. I started pulling in favours and getting things organised. My “day job” is as a martial arts instructor. One of my students at the time was a graphic designer. He put me onto a friend of his that designed the Blade Red Press logo for me at mate’s rates.

With the help of another friend and his IT skills I put together the Blade Red Press website. I registered the company name and set up a publisher account with LSI and I was ready to go. I started with my own books, re-issuing RealmShift along with the new book, MageSign. With everything I’d learned about cover design, promotion and so on I was able put together two excellent quality books. I had some reviews done in advance and was able to include the review comments on the cover and inside the books. I got another author friend of mine to give me a blurb. The work was all uploaded to LSI and Blade Red Press had its first two titles.

The original cover of RealmShift (left) and the new Blade Red Press edition, along with the sequel (centre and right)

Everything is new and still growing at the moment. We’ve put out one more title, an alternate history of ancient Baghdad, called Maggots Of Heresy, by Michael Fridman. The website still needs some development. But it’s all up and running. I’ll be opening a submission window soon for short stories for our first anthology and also for novel submissions for our next title release. I intend to use the press to release one or two anthologies and one or two novels per year. It will stay small and offer a quality product at a decent price.

POD is always going to face its hardest challenge with pricing. But when I first released RealmShift through Lulu it was US$23.95 at amazon.com. Now, through Blade Red Press, it’s US$15.95, as is the sequel, MageSign. Both books are close to 400 pages. So we’re heading in the right direction.

However, a word of warning. If you choose to do something like this, it will take up a lot of your time! Using the author service companies takes a lot of time and effort as well, producing a quality book and then marketing it. But adding in the extra work of managing your own small company online is something that needs to be seriously considered before you dive in. I’m enjoying the challenge but don’t be fooled into thinking it’s easy. There’s nothing easy about the world of indie publishing, but it certainly is worth it if you’re prepared to take on that challenge.

Alan is an indie author and publisher with two dark fantasy novels in print – RealmShift and MageSign. You can learn all about him at his website.

Writing contests are often great ways to get started for writers. The Society of Southwestern Authors (SSA) runs its Annual Writing Contest from January 01 through May 31 – this year, entries may be postmarked no later than June 1, 2009 as the 31st falls on a Sunday.

Content must be previously unpublished and length varies per category. Four categories are available: Memoir/Personal Essay, Short Story, Poetry, and Short Stories Appropriate for Children Ages 6-12.

Full rules and requirements as well as entry forms are available for download on SSA’s website: http://ssa-az.org/contest.html.

Each category awards a First, Second, Third, and Honorable Mention monetary prize. All winning entries will be published in SSA’s yearly publication, The Storyteller.

What’s different about this contest? Well, it’s only $10 USD per piece entry fee and you will receive comments from the judges. You may also request a more in-depth "appraisal" – aka critique – for $25 per piece.

You do not have to be a member of The Society of Southwestern Authors to enter, nor does your work have to be about or set in the Southwest. You don’t even have to live in the United States. You DO, however, have to use snail mail. NO EMAIL SUBMISSIONS are accepted. Check it out, think about it, give it a go. You might just win!

Once my novels became available on Amazon.com I ramped up the viral marketing on those Amazon pages in the hope of getting them to show up more often in book searches and hopefully sell more copies. If you want people to know your books are out there, you have to work hard to get them noticed. Probably the two most powerful tools on Amazon for making a book stand out are Tags and Listmania lists.

Tags As you probably know, tagging is the practice of adding keywords to a book that then get caught by searches, like metatags on web pages. Book tags on Amazon can be pretty much anything, but the more often a tag is added to a book, the more likely that book is to show near the top of a keyword search. The real rub is that the tags added by Joe Public get more weight than the tags added by the author or publisher. After all, if tagging is supposed to reflect community impressions, there’s no point in letting the writer or publisher try to sway that opinion.

It’s a good idea to start off by adding all the tags you can think of to your own work, then ask family, friends, your blog readers and so on to go in and add their tags. They can repeat the tags you’ve made, raising the chances of your book being shown in a search for those words, or add new tags of their own. By hitting the ‘T’ key twice on your Amazon page, a quick tag box will appear making it easy for people to add their tags to your book. It only takes a few seconds. An example of the tags section of an Amazon page (after double tapping the ‘T’ key)

Try to encourage people to build up the numbers of existing tags rather than just adding loads more. The more times a book is hit with a particular tag, the more relevant it will appear to Amazon searches.

Listmania This is something for those people with a bit more time to devote to you, which is a big ask. Listmania is like a refined search on Amazon where someone has already gone to the trouble of doing a search and listing the top results. Naturally, they’ve searched with their own bias (and in their own minds) and their tastes shine through any given list, but it’s altogether possible that their tastes and yours will be similar.

Hence, if you search Listmania for “urban fantasy” today you get:

1. Urban and new-age fantasy for chicks

2. Upcoming Urban Fantasy 2008 – Part I

3. Hot Urban Fantasy with Vampires, Shapeshifters, Paranormal & More

4. Urban Fantasy Romance Series

5. Private Investigators and Crime Solvers in Urban Fantasy …and so on.

This is a method that puts similar books with each other and helps to raise any given book’s profile by comparing it to others that people may know. For example, there were a couple of Listmania lists for the original edition of RealmShift that included books like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Aside from being very high praise, it gives people the idea that if they enjoyed American Gods, they’ll probably enjoy RealmShift too. It can put your books on a similar standing to something people already know.

If you get your readers to make Listmania lists using this method then your book will crop up in all kinds of searches and be indistinguishable from the other books on that list. If the lists are carefully constructed to appeal to fans of your genre or subject matter, then random sales can occur to people that would never have known your book existed otherwise.

Listmania, like Tags, are far more effective when they’re made by readers rather than by writers or publishers. So try to convince some friends and/or fans to put aside a few minutes and knock up a Listmania or two for your books. They should include your work on a list with a variety of other similar (well known) books. You can learn about Listmania and make a new list by clicking here. These are two very simple tools on Amazon that anyone can use and that can greatly increase the profile of your books.

Alan is an indie author and publisher with two dark fantasy novels in print – RealmShift and MageSign. You can learn all about him at his website.