Business End

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

Interview With Indie Author Alan Baxter

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Alan Baxter is the author of the supernatural thrillers RealmShift and MageSign, and also a regular contributor to Publetariat.

Why have you elected to go indie with your books?

My first book was almost published traditionally but fell over at the eleventh hour. Rather than go through the whole submission process again I decided to self-publish it and see what happened while I got on with the next book. I therefore discovered the joys of indie publishing and haven’t looked back.

You’re very active in terms of author platform; which strategies do you feel have paid off, and which have not?

By far the most important thing is to have a website that acts as a hub of all my online and promotional activity. My website is both a blog and a place where people can read all kinds of examples of my writing – I have short stories, flash fiction and a serial novella there, as well as the first three chapters of both novels, RealmShift and MageSign. That gives people something to do there, and I regularly update the fiction pages. When I get anything published in magazines or online I post links and reprint the stories on my site when the publishing rights expire. I blog as often as possible about all things writing and publishing related, not just my own writing. All these things give people a reason to come back and learn more.

That website then becomes the central station of my online presence and all the other things like Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads and so on are linked to it. That’s what works for me.

Many indie authors view corporate giant Amazon with a mixture of suspicion and contempt, but you’ve been a very outspoken supporter. Why?

Amazon gives indie authors something they’ve never had before – the chance to put their books in the same place as every other book from every other publisher. That’s unprecedented exposure. Amazon certainly have their quirks and there’s a lot about them that I’d change given the chance, but there’s simply no denying that the opportunities that Amazon presents to indies far outweigh any niggles in their professional practices.

Having published both in print and ebook editions, do you find your ebooks selling more, less, or in about the same numbers as your print editions?

Currently my books are selling better on Kindle than any other format, but it fluctuates. I think ebooks are certainly going to become mainstream very soon (if they aren’t already!) and will probably begin to account for the bulk of indie author sales. But there will always be people that love the physical book and POD means that the physical book will always be available. I’ve already had readers that have told me that they originally read my books as ebooks, but then went and bought trade paperbacks to have them on the shelves at home. One format holds up the other it seems.

You’re an Englishman who’s now settled in Australia; are the two cultures very different in terms of writing and writer communities?

English and Australian culture is very similar. If anything, Australia is more influenced by American culture than Britain is, but otherwise they’re pretty interchangeable. The same applies to writers and writing communities. Sadly, Australia suffers from one of the things that makes it so great. There are only around 20 million people in Australia, which is why we have so much space and so much natural beauty, but it also makes us a bit of a backwater when it comes to publishing and sales. Compared to somewhere like the US with around 300 million people, no one is really interested in building up their presence in Australia – we don’t even have an Amazon.com.au for example. As an indie author, that causes problems, but time is slowly seeing some changes and I’m optimistic for the future. And I also love our wide open land, so I’m not in a hurry to see us have a population like the US or Europe!

In a nutshell, what are your books, RealmShift and MageSign, about?

RealmShift follows the trials of a powerful immortal by the name of Isiah. Isiah is tasked with trying to keep some level of balance between all the gods and beliefs of people. In this instance he has to track down a murdering blood mage by the name of Samuel Harrigan. Isiah needs Samuel to complete a task he began – if Samuel fails to fulfill his destiny it will have ramifications on a global scale. The trouble is, Sam has reneged on a deal with Devil and has gone into hiding, so Isiah has to keep the Devil at bay while he tracks down Samuel and convinces him to finish what he started.

MageSign is the sequel to RealmShift and sees Isiah trying to find and bring down Samuel Harrigan’s mentor, a man known only as the Sorcerer. Isiah is keen to make sure that no new prodigies like Samuel are moulded, but his investigations lead him to discover that the Sorcerer has far more followers than he ever expected and an audacious plan that will change the world if Isiah can’t stop it.

Both books are rollicking dark fantasy thrillers with lots of magic and action, demons, gods, monsters and all that good stuff. You can learn a lot more about them, as well as read reviews and excerpts on my website.

The covers for the books are very attractive. Did you design them yourself, or hire a cover artist?

I’m lucky that I have some ability with Photoshop and a decent eye for design, so I did them myself. I heartily recommend hiring a cover artist if you don’t have the skills though – people really do judge a book by its cover. I’m glad you think my covers are good!

Do you have plans to continue the series? Why or why not?

I originally wrote RealmShift as a standalone novel. During the writing I came up with the idea for MageSign and it was something that I really wanted to explore, so I wrote that too. It turned out to be better than RealmShift in many ways and I’m very proud of both books. I don’t really have any plans to continue with another Isiah book, but a lot of people have asked me if I am. In fact, several people have insisted that I do! I’ll only write another one if a really good idea comes to me – I won’t just churn out another for the sake of it. In the meantime I’m working on a new novel, completely unrelated to RealmShift or MageSign. There may be an occasional cameo or two though.

You’re also a Kung Fu instructor. How does the discipline instilled by this martial art inform your work, or work habits, as an author?

Well, I write good fight scenes! I’ve often been complimented on the fight scenes in my writing and have been invited to present a workshop on writing and the martial arts at Conflux this year (Australia’s biggest speculative fiction convention) which is very exciting. Otherwise, I suppose that I see the path of martial arts and the path of writing as very similar in one particular way – when you study martial arts for a long time (nearly 30 years in my case) you realise that the more you learn, the more you have to learn. No matter how good you get, you’ll never stop learning or improving. The same can be said of writing – the more I write, the more I realise how much better a writer I can become. And just like martial arts, where you have to practice every day to maintain and improve your skills, a writer has to write every day for the same reasons.

Alan Baxter is the author of the dark fantasy thrillers RealmShift and MageSign. Both books are available from indie publisher Blade Red Press through Amazon.com (print & Kindle editions), Amazon.co.uk (print editions), and Smashwords.com (multiple ebook formats). Learn more about the author, read Alan’s blog and read lots of free short fiction, a novella and the first three chapters of both RealmShift and MageSign at Alan’s website.

Beware The Writing Masterclass

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This article, from AL Kennedy, originally appeared on the Guardian UK Books Blog on 7/7/09.

Workshops are a delicate business, and calling them masterclasses is unlikely to improve them.

Workshops – I’ve mentioned them briefly in this blog before, but they are currently much on my mind. Increasingly such things are being called Masterclasses, which sound much more impressive and buzzy and vaguely as if they’ll involve an opportunity to be in an airless hotel function suite with a minor deity. I’ve been giving workshops – and now Masterclasses – in prose fiction for a period of time I will not mention for fear of feeling wrinkled and reflecting that I had a bloody cheek to try telling anyone anything for at least the first decade. Then again, giving workshops to people who can’t yet write while you can’t yet write either, is a traditional way for nascent writers to earn their crusts. And it means we can meet people we didn’t make up, and learn, and consider overviews, and be near the process in others and see how lovely it is and how a person can light up when all goes well and a penny drops and so forth …

Of course, having no time of my own and not being the sociable type, I rarely do anything that involves a bunch of strangers and a flipchart, unless I’m the one inhaling the delicious marker pen fumes. But, only last night, I was reflecting with a chum on a masterclass I attended which did absolutely make me reassess how I run my workshops.

First, let us think of the horrible temptations within the workshop scenario. There you are, alone with a largely or wholly compliant roomful of people who offer themselves up to your help, perhaps harbouring a curiosity about the writing life (such as that which fuels this very blog) and perhaps also a touching belief that there is a Golden Key that will make all well and effect immediate change in their putative vocation.

The workshop leader’s power can be huge, given that writing is so intimate. Although the scale is tiny, the possibilities for wrongness and corruption can be appallingly extensive: ideas can be mocked, weaklings can be bullied, tired or apprehensive participants can actively encourage the tutor to blather on about his or her self at revolting length and offer all the worst sorts of admiration. The nervous and self-critical (many good writers are both) may not express needs which therefore go unfulfilled, or problems which therefore continue to fester unexamined. Participants may have no idea what to expect and could be fobbed off with any old nonsense.

With the best will in the world it’s difficult to describe a mental process to someone usefully without requiring at least a tiny bit that they think like you – when they should ideally think like themselves, only more so – and that’s without mentioning the possibilities of technical failures, the restraints of time pressure and the intrusion of acts of God (I once ran a workshop during which a shrew ran up a participant’s leg. Things ended badly for the shrew, much to everyone’s dismay, including the owner of the leg).

Read the rest of the article on the Guardian UK Books Blog.

Finding Promotional Hooks for Novels

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This is a cross-posting of an entry that originally appeared on the Book Marketing Maven blog on 7/10/09.

In many ways, fiction is more challenging to market than nonfiction. Novelists must think creatively to apply the marketing tactics commonly used for nonfiction books.

Fiction authors need to find promotional "hooks" within their books. It might be the profession or hobby of the main character in a novel, or the town or historical era where the story is set, or some aspect of  the book that relates to current news or events.

The key is to market to "like-minded people" or people who have an interest in some specific aspect of the story.

If one of the main characters is a horse trainer, then horse lovers are a natural target market. A story involving corporate scandal could be tied to today’s headlines. Southerners identify with novels set in the South. If the story line involves a particular health condition or ethnic group, that could be a hook. A book that’s set during the civil rights movement will appeal to people who are interested in that topic or era.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller has done an excellent job of marketing her Vietnam-era novel, Mrs. Lieutenant, to military audiences. Can you think of other examples of promotional hooks for fiction?

Dana Lynn Smith, The Savvy Book Marketer, specializes in developing book marketing plans for nonfiction books and helping authors learn to promote their books online. She is the author of the Savvy Book Marketer Guides. Dana has a degree in marketing and 15 years of publishing experience. Read her complete bio here.

Why Do Pynchon, Ballard And Wallace Provoke Such Online Loyalty?

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This article, from Louis Goddard, originally appeared on The Times Online UK site on 7/11/09.

Louis Goddard wonders what turns some writers into internet cults.

Out in the farthest reaches of the internet, mediated only by e-mail and a rudimentary code of interpretive etiquette, five men are discussing the first page of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. Not the uncharacteristically straightforward first sentence (“Later than usual one summer morning . . .”), nor even the title page, but the dedication and publishing information —the dates, addresses and typographical notes that most readers skip on their way to the fictional meat. “There’s no dedication in V or The Crying of Lot 49,” one reader remarks. Gravity’s Rainbow is dedicated to Richard Farina and Against the Day is dedicated to the light in the darkness and Thelonious Sphere Monk.” This is the beginning of a Pynchon-L “group read”, and a beginning in every sense of the word.

Pynchon-L, the Thomas Pynchon discussion forum, was set up more than 15 years ago and still runs on the same basic system. As Jules Siegel puts it in Lineland, his bizarre account of this literary fringe group: “You join a list by subscribing to it. Members send their thoughts by e-mail to a central computer and all those messages go out to everyone subscribed to the list. To get off the list, you unsubscribe.” It’s a simple arrangement, but one that has survived the social networking revolution and the ultra-plurality of the blogosphere.

In fact, it feels strangely appropriate in the case of an author such as Pynchon who, in a 1984 piece for The New York Times, set out the case for a particular sort of enlightened Luddism. While his sprawling novels are sometimes said to have anticipated the speed and hyperconnectivity of the internet, it’s a lot easier to imagine the infamous recluse sending a few anonymous e-mails than, say, updating his Twitter feed.

Despite the list’s sizeable academic membership, it remains open to anyone with an e-mail address and maintains an eclectic standard of discussion — topics range from rigorous, line-by-line exegesis to vaguely relevant news stories.

The jewels in the electronic crown are the list’s “group reads”. Situated somewhere between the common or garden book group meeting and the academic symposium, these readings often take months to complete — sections of the book in question, usually about 50 pages long, are assigned to volunteers, each of whom then takes his or her turn to make a virtual presentation and to lead the discussion as the group rolls along. As a method of collaborative criticism the group read is innovative and exciting, and it works. Having organised painstakingly meticulous expeditions through the best part of Pynchon’s oeuvre, the list has built up a considerable body of interpretive knowledge, much of which has been translated into the pages of the Pynchon Wiki project, a Wikipedia-esque attempt to create open and hyperlinked guides to all six of the author’s major works.

Pynchon isn’t the only author to have been graced by such digital scrutiny — since 1996 waste.org has also played host to Wallace-L, a discussion group dedicated to the work of the late David Foster Wallace. When Wallace died in September last year Wallace-L was one of the first places to know, and the following few days received a flood of personal remembrances from fans, friends and former students, all more true and moving than any of the newspaper obituaries. This is not to say that these obituaries weren’t taken into account — on the contrary, list members spent weeks collecting every scrap of media coverage, fragments shored against Wallace’s already formidable reputation. And as everyone else looked over at the brick on their bookshelves and thought “I really must read that some time”, the members of Wallace-L began their third in-depth group read of Infinite Jest.

Read the rest of the article on The Times Online UK.

Antellus to Drop Kindle Ebooks From Its Fall Line-Up

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Antellus – Science Fantasy Adventure and Nonfiction Books
http://www.antellus.com

Antellus to Drop Kindle Ebooks From Its Fall Line-Up

Antellus, an independent publisher and seller of science fantasy adventure and nonfiction books on related subjects, has opted to avoid using Amazon as a retailer of its ebooks.

In the wake of several deeply disturbing announcements regarding the sale and redaction of various Kindle e-books, in which Amazon finally revealed its service agreement which states that the e-books bought are actually leased, and that it can yank the cord at any time without notice; we are no longer going to publish Kindle e-books for the future. The full expectation of our customers that the books they place on their Kindle library are theirs to read and enjoy as long as they own a Kindle has been violated, and in some cases grossly mistated and misrepresented. Amazon’s arbitrary removal of titles without cause and without the permission of Kindle owners will permanently damage any future relationship they hold with Amazon. Antellus will continue to offer e-books directly for sale and through its partner sellers.

"Due to recent complaints on the part of both consumers and suppliers to Amazon, we are concerned with the way Amazon does its business," author and CEO Theresa M. Moore said. "In many cases, the complaints illustrate that a great deal of fraud and waste occurs in the company’s daily transactions, and Amazon’s relaxed attitude and sometimes refusal to resolve consumer complaints makes us question whether they really are a solid marketplace to rely on. We value quality as well as good customer access, and Amazon appears either unable or unwilling to meet our standards in terms of customer service."

For more information about Antellus and the author, visit our web site: http://www.antellus.com.

CJ Allan and Matt the Cat, new members

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Hello Fellow Writers, 

I’m CJ Allan.  I just joined you over the weekend, having been invited by April to come take a look. 

I was introduced to April by Ed Patterson’s book, “Are You Still Submitting Your Work To A Traditional Publisher?”. 

(I wrote an Amazon review of Ed’s book, with the header:”Should be required reading for any who want to self-publish at Amazon”.) 

I’m from Dallas, Texas, and am currently traveling around Texas and Oklahoma. 

As I told April, I’ve always made my living as a writer… of articles, user manuals, and business publications, but do not yet call myself an “author”. 

I came close a few times in the past, but each time I sat down to discuss a contract with a conventional publisher (“you don’t need a lawyer, you can use ours”… did anyone else ever hear that?)… I would, on reading the fine print, back out. 

“I’d be making minimum wage”, I’d say.

 “But I’m the one taking the risk”, they’d say.

[SIGH]

 Do you suppose they wonder why Indie Publishing has taken off the way it has?

Since retiring from the business world, I’ve been traveling in my motorhome, writing travel-related articles.

My signature line carries the likeness of Matt the Cat, who rides shotgun with me.  He will be the spokesman in some photo-articles I am planning for the Kindle.

 Looking forward to learning from you all,

CJ

Evolution Of An E-book Author To Publisher

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This post, from Rob Walker, originally appeared on the ACME AUTHORS LINK blog on 7/9/09.

Sure every author wishes to be discovered by Random House or another of the biggies of NYC but since my first publication in 1979 the pinnacle of publication has gotten thinner, higher, spikier, snarkier, and harder and harder to manage.

In fact, since the early eighties, getting a novel published has only become more difficult to the point of its being like making the NBA or NASA or winning an Oscar™ or the Lottery. It has gotten further and further out of reach and every author is nowadays faced with brick walls, even a well published author—and often he or she is finding it harder than the new kid on the block.

As a result, over the past several years, I – like so many others who must write – have turned to smaller press venues. First with Echelon Press with PSI Blue a number of years ago. More recently, I have signed with Five Star for DEAD ON coming out this month. Between these two publications, I published three books with HarperCollins, my Inspector Alastair Ransom series. So I have a unique view on what it is like to be publishing with large and small presses. Recently, too, I have submitted a book, Cuba Blue, to yet another small press.

I don’t have to enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of going large or going small, but I do feel a lot more Zen with the smaller presses; with them it is far more about the work and far less about the sales figures, although everyone wants to see good, healthy sales. I have published titles with Dorchester, Zebra, St. Martins, Pinnacle, Berkley, and a few imprints no longer in business along with my early YA publisher Oak Tree Publications, as well as HarperCollins, and family, friends, fans who read me can simply not fathom why I am not far, far more successful in this business, and why my work has not landed on the major bestseller lists.

Aggravation fills my days and nights if I give it much thought and that negative energy can swamp you, so I try to remain positive and have damned the torpedoes and have always written the book that I wanted to write, the one I was most passionate about, and I have never written a book with the direct intent of becoming rich and filthily wealthy but I have hoped to have an income, to have some return on the huge effort or time and energy one puts in but it has not always worked out so.

I do know that I have had the worst representation in the business, and that due to the bottom-line mentality that ties the hands of editors at major houses, editors who love to work with me but can’t, that I am in a sense black-balled. Not overtly so but one look at my last sales numbers and that is all it takes to have an agent or editor run screaming from me. And as this is how the business truly operates, I have turned to other means of getting the work in print, so I thank God for small presses and publishers that have come into being since the early eighties.

Then comes a pale rider called the eBook. I was fascinated with the idea way back when Stephen King experimented with it and found it rather a failure so far as he was concerned, but I kept the faith and have always kept my eye on the evolution of eBooks and the hardware from the hefty Palm Pilot of the early days to the slim, light, lovely state of the art Kindle now set at $299. Keeping close tabs on the Kindle, reading about it in every article I could find, I kept close watch for its success and I predicted it would go large—which it has!

I put up free pdf files on my website and I offered free chapters and whole books on my site, and on chat groups I offered simply to send downloads. I got my toes wet doing this sort of thing. Information kept coming in that the big publishers were experimenting now as well and sure enough HarperCollins asked for an addendum to my contract to place the Ransom Series on Kindle and that was a major spark. After seeing these on kindle at the Kindle Store, I was hooked, and about then Joe Konrath informed me that he had placed a number of books up for Kindle readers and that he was controlling it all from his computer—and making money! A rare thing for most writers! I mean we are expected to give back an honorarium to anyone who allows us to speak about our writing right? We’re expected to give it away, right?
 

Read the rest of the post on ACME AUTHORS LINK.

The Advance v. Royalties Conversation Continues

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This post, from NYT bestselling author John Green, originally appeared on his Sparks Fly Up site on 7/7/09.

Okay, quick background: Last week I wrote a post arguing against outrageously high book advances and in favor of better royalties for authors. I followed this up with a post arguing that the widely held belief that big advances cause big marketing budgets does not really hold up to scrutiny. (Big advances and big marketing budgets are obviously often correlated, but that does not imply any kind of causal relationship.)

Then I promised a mathy post explaining to publishers why this model makes more sense for them, after which I decided that my numbers were perhaps not as lock-solid as I previously believed them to be, so I decided not to publish that post.

For the record:

1. One thing that keeps getting overlooked here is that many big publishers would currently be OUT OF BUSINESS if they were not owned by gigantic media companies that can absorb the losses of their idiotic up-front gambling. It’s not like I’m fretting about some on-the-horizon crisis in publishing; the crisis is here. The model is not working, and it isn’t changing, which historically bodes poorly. (I’m looking at you, record companies.)

2. That said, my radical proposal was wrong enough to be relatively easy to dismiss. But if you lower advances and increase royalty escalations dramatically (at least according to my calculations which might be wrong because I am bad at math), over the last five years EVERY SINGLE PUBLISHER IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE EFFING WORLD would either be more profitable or lose less money except maybe Hachette.* So I just want to make it clear that I am not backing away from that fundamental belief.

3. The comments to these posts have been fascinating and wonderful and I am deeply grateful to all of you for them.

4. I wanted to pull one comment out and respond to it in pieces, because it raises a lot of important questions and also brings forth the obvious but as-yet-unstated fact that I am writing from a particular POV. So okay, from commenter writeon:

"If (like most authors) the only money you’d be making from a book is the advance (since most books don’t earn out their advance or stay on shelves long enough to make royalties) why on earth would an author want to turn down money?"

I want to make it clear that I am not arguing against advances. My beef is not with $30,000 advances for books that might only earn $20,000 back. My beef is with $500,000 advances for books that might only earn $20,000 back.

The reason to take less money upfront and get more in royalties is pretty simple, I think: Your publisher is owned by a company that wants to make money. So long as you make money, you make sense. If you don’t make money, you don’t make sense.**

"Authors don’t have a crystal ball where they can see into the future and say, "Well, in three years I’ll come up with this Book X which will make me money, so, for right now I can sell Book Y and Z for pennies."

Again, I’m not proposing you sell any book for pennies; I’m proposing that you sell a book for a reasonable five-figure advance and the kind of escalating royalty that allows you to share fairly in the profits from the book, if there are any.

"Most authors don’t know if they’ll get the chance to publish another book. They can’t count on publishers doing anymore than putting their book in a catalogue as their ‘marketing.’ You want THAT author to turn down money?"

Probably not, because that author probably hasn’t been offered a huge advance. But I think that author is mistaken if s/he thinks that an antagonistic relationship with publisher will help get the book to its audience.

Read the rest of the post on Sparks Fly Up.

* Twilight.

** But to expand on that a bit: You have to begin with the (reasonable) assumption that your publisher wants to make money and would not have acquired your book if they did not feel that it could be profitable. It may be that they think it can only be profitable if they don’t pay to hand out galleys at ALA, which is disappointing and annoying and etc., but it’s irrational to assume from the outset that your publisher wishes to lose money on your book.

Eight Social Media Tips From Artist Natasha Wescoat

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This post, from Magdalena Georgieva, originally appeared on the HubSpot Inbound Internet Marketing Blog on 7/8/09.

Making a living as an artist is hard. Somewhere between establishing a market and promoting your art, you have to stay inspired.

Artist Natasha Wescoat has done just fine online with all three. She uses blogging and social media to promote and sell her creative work online. "If I can do it, anyone can," she said in a telephone interview yesterday about her social media usage. Here are eight tips that emerged from our conversation:

Natasha1) Experiment, experiment, experiment Natasha got started with experimentation. In 2005, she began video blogging and saw that people responded to her content. Afterward, she got interested in MySpace and Facebook. With almost 5,000 followers, she has now become an avid Twitter user.

Experimentation helps you keep up with changing industry landscapes. As Ben Rowe commented on Natasha’s Mashable post, "Twitter mightn’t be the silver bullet for all artists. A blog, Flickr or Etsy page might not be either. But the artists who are out there trying these new tools are already miles ahead of the artists who aren’t."

2) Set time for social media Make sure you are not overusing the social networking sites. "I try to set a time everyday to check all my different networks," said Natasha. Twice a day, after waking up and before going to bed, she checks her Twitter replies. That helps her avoid habitually overusing the tool.

3) Patience is a virtue If you are just getting started with social media, be patient. "It takes a lot of patience and research," Natasha said. You won’t see instant results because developing relationships takes time. Natasha suggested that social media rookies focus on "building their networks and relationships because that will be their most powerful tool."

4) Train Your Brain Train your brain to regularly read other people’s blogs and tweets. They provide good examples of the interaction that you are looking for. When she first started using Twitter, Natasha found herself at a loss. "I didn’t have any idea what to say. But I read other people’s discussions, trained my mind and got started on new ideas," she said.
 

Read the rest of the post, including tips #5-8, on the HubSpot Inbound Internet Marketing Blog. (photo credit: Natasha Wescoat)

From The Offer To The Bookstore

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This post, from mainstream-published author Shannon Hale, originally appeared on her Squeetus website.

Before going through the process myself, I was pretty clueless about the route a book takes to get to the shelf. Here are the major phases of traditional book publishing, based on my own experience.

Offer—When an acquiring editor finds a book she’d like to buy, either from an agent or the slush pile, she then calls agent or author to make an offer (huzzah!). The offer details how much money the publisher will pay the author as an advance on royalties (for a first book, generally $2000 – $10,000), the percentage of royalties the author will get (for a children’s author, generally 10 percent on hardcover, 6 percent on paperback), and the rights the publisher wants to buy (i.e. North American rights, World English, or World. Bloomsbury bought World rights from me, meaning if any of my books are sold for translation, Bloomsbury gets 50 percent of those royalties).

The Counter Offer—Often a counter offer is made, wherein the author/agent negotiates a slightly higher advance, percentage, or asks to retain more rights. This can be brief or haggling might go on for weeks. The actual signing of the contract can delay for months, but once the offer has been accepted, business goes forward.

Editing—For me, this phase lasts six to nine months. See Working with an Editor for more details. After several revisions under my editor’s supervision, we decide the book is ready to go. Such a good feeling! Sometime during the process, my editor is also shopping for cover art, running different artists by me, deciding on a feel and design. Bloomsbury is good at consulting with me, but ultimately the decision is theirs. They send me initial sketches of the cover art for input and accuracy. Eventually, I get a jacket proof in the mail and I go over the front, back, spine, and flap text. That’s always very exciting and makes the book feel more real.

Copy Editing—Now the publisher sends your manuscript to the copy editor (inhouse or outsourced). My editor will send me a xerox of the ms with copy edited notes and I often have just a weekend to go over it. I usually find a couple of errors she missed (though those copy editors are incredibly thorough and very good) and find some changes she made that I don’t want made. I also find adverbs I wrote but now hate and other minor changes. When I go over these corrections with my editor on the phone, our call can last three hours. It’s quite an intensive process, but the ms is so much cleaner for it.

Read the rest of the post, including Typesetting & Proofing, ARCs, Printing, The Release, and Now What? on Shannon Hale’s Squeetus website.

Ten Marketing Questions Authors Are Asking

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This post, from literary agent Chip MacGregor, originally appeared on his blog on 6/24/09. While Mr. MacGregor isn’t a supporter of self-publishing, his advice here is equally useful to mainstream and self-published authors.

I’ve received a bunch of marketing questions from authors over the past few months. Let me take a stab at a random sample…

Jennifer wrote to ask, "What is the most important thing I need to know about marketing my book?"

To me, the most important thing for you to grasp as an author is that you are responsible for marketing your book. Not the publicist. Not the marketing manager. Not even the publishing house. YOU. Think of it this way: Who has the most at stake with this book, you or the publisher? (You do.) Who is more passionate about it, you or the publisher? (You are.) Who knows the message best, you or the publisher? (You.) I think an author should work with his or her publisher’s marketing department as much as possible. Make yourself available. Say "yes" to everything they ask. Express appreciation every time they do something that helps market your book. But then go do everything as though it all depended on you, because it does. Whatever the publicist does for you is gravy. YOU are responsible for marketing your own book. Don’t leave it to some young college grad who has 17 other projects to market. 

Clatrice asked this: "If I publish my book with a smaller publisher, will they set up radio and TV interviews for me? And can I expect them to set me up with newspaper interviews or book reviews?"

Here’s my suggestion: When you first begin talking with the marketing department at your publisher, tell them how excited you are to work with them, explain that you’ll do everything they ask of you, then ask this question: "Can you tell me what you’ll be doing to market my book? I’ll be working hard at marketing, and I don’t want to duplicate efforts." Just try to get some sort of explanation about what they’ll do — even if it’s minimal. Some will focus on media, others will send out review copies. Once you find out what they plan to do, you can begin to fill in the gaps with your own efforts. And don’t have huge expectations of your publisher — a smaller house may not have the resources to do a lot of marketing. The fact is, they are expecting the author to help them sell about half the copies of the book that will be sold. Half. No kidding.  

[And this is the perfect time to share my favorite marketing story. Years ago, when I was releasing one of my own books, I asked a very brainless marketing manager what she was planning to do on my book. "First, we’re going to give it a great cover and title." I was VERY pleased about that, since I’ve noticed books without titles and covers don’t sell. "Second, we’re going to stick it in our catalog." This is something that only goes to bookstore owners, so that doesn’t make a big difference when it comes to convincing readers to buy my title. "And third, we’re going to give it to our crack sales team." I’m not making this up — those were her three points. My response: "So… you’re not really doing anything?" Which was fine, since I just wanted to know. Again, if you can find out what they’re doing, you’ll better know how to manage your own marketing plan.]

Dave asked, "Since it seems like anyone can get a book published today through self-publishers, how do I make sure my book gets the needed exposure?"

I’m one of those who thinks that most self-published books don’t really count as being "published," Dave. Most people who self-pub lose money because they don’t know how to market and sell their own book. So if you want to really sell some copies, whether you are self-pubbed or published through a regular royalty-paying publisher, you’ve got to understand basic marketing principles. I suggest authors purchase some basic marketing books (such as a textbook from Philip Kotler and Gary Armstrong, or Frances Brassington and Stephen Pettitt), in order to give them a conceptual framework for what marketing is. Maybe take a class at the local community college, or look for online marketing training. Then you can invest in some of the "how to market your book" titles available at Barnes & Noble. But the most important thing is to put together a planned strategy, so that you aren’t just trying to think up stuff on the fly as your book releases.

The key principle for anybody doing marketing of their own book is simple: Figure out where your potential readers are going, then go get in front of them. If you’re doing a book on lowering cholesterol, research to find out what websites people with high cholesterol are visiting, what blogs they’re reading, what magazines and e-zines they’re checking out, what the most popular sites for information sharing are. That’s the first step. The second is to get yourself involved with those venues. 

On a related note, Greg wrote these words: "You have frequently told authors to find out where the potential readers are, then go get in front of them. How can an author find the target audience for his book?"

Research, man. This will take time, but start checking out key words and topics. Find other books and sites that cover similar material and check them out. Start doing reviews on Amazon and TripAdvisor. Get involved with Digg and Flickr. Create del.icio.us bookmarks. Join Facebook and Twitter. Begin researching your topic and you’ll soon discover interesting sites, as well as being steered toward other places people go. This takes time — there’s no hurry-up formula for getting this information. The key is to have multiple venues for finding new friends, and see it as "participation," not just "promotion." 

Read the rest of the post on Chip MacGregor’s blog.

What's A Book Blog Tour?

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This post, from Yen Cheong, originally appeared on her The Book Publicity Blog on 6/11/09.

An interesting discussion emerged on Colleen Mondor’s blog Chasing Ray a couple days ago about the blog book tour and in particular who schedules them and how they are set up.  I caught the tail end of the discussion on Twitter.

Blog tours aren’t new — this New York Times article from a couple years back explores one author’s blog tour experience – and sites like Blog Book Tours or this post at The Dabbling Mum contain some excellent information about what exactly a blog tour is.  But beyond that, I thought it might be useful to look at how blog tours are set up and how they differ from online publicity in general.

First, the basics: for those of you who attended the book blogger panel at BEA, you will have heard the blog tour explained as an author going from blog to blog (rather than from store to store as they would on a traditional book tour) which is a great, quick way to explain it.   Depending on the author and the blog, coverage may consist of any of the following: book review, Q&A (either posted or live) or book giveaway and then I’m sure some bloggers have gotten creative and come up with other ideas.  Blog tours, like traditional bookstore tours, will feature a designated number of “stops” — often 10 to 20 blogs — and can roll out over the course of a week or a month (or whatever other length of time that has been decided upon).

Here’s some more information about blog tours.

How do blog tours get set up?

Blog tours are typically set up either by the publicist of a book or by blog tour companies / coordinators.  Since it takes time (and expertise) to schedule blog tours, publishing companies sometimes feel it is worthwhile to pay a third party — an online marketing company, a freelance publicist, a blog tour company, etc. — to set these up.  (We’ve been doing this for years with the broadcast industry — we hire companies to set up a series of radio or TV interviews, also known as radio or TV “tours.”)

Although typically book publicists ask authors not to contact the media directly, different rules apply to (some) blogs.  For example, Natasha from Maw Books Blog, mentions that authors sometimes contact her directly to schedule a “stop” on a blog tour.   (Other bloggers may prefer to work directly with publishing houses — many bloggers will have information about how to contact them on their sites.)  Sometimes, a group of bloggers may come together on their own and contact the author (or publishing house) to schedule the tour.

Regardless of who sets up the blog tour, the end result is the same.

What’s the benefit of a blog tour?

As with radio and TV tours, blog tours enable a book and author to generate buzz for a book without having to travel.

How is the blog tour different from online publicity?

A blog tour is simply one type of online publicity.  One difference between a blog tour and online publicity in general is timing.  Blog tours start and end on designated dates, the goal being to generate a certain amount of publicity within a certain amount of time.  A general online publicity push, on the other hand, could start months (or weeks) before the publication of a book and could end months (or weeks) after.

Also, while the goal of online outreach is to generate any coverage of a book — from a mention to a full-fledged review or interview — blog tour “stops” will typically skew on the more robust end of coverage, e.g., a post rather than a one-line mention.

Are bloggers paid to participate in the blog tour?

No — paying anyone to cover any books would be unethical.  (Paying for ads is a perfectly ethical practice, of course, but with PR, coverage — good or bad — should come free).   To clarify — since this can get confusing – with blog tours (or with radio or TV tours), publishing houses aren’t paying bloggers (or radio or TV hosts) to cover a book; we’re paying someone to schedule the tour: finding blogs that would be appropriate for the book, arranging dates for the reviews / interviews, reporting back to us about who is running what when, etc.  It’s like we’re paying a party planner to put together a party and the guest list (but we don’t pay guests to actually attend the party).

Read the rest of the post on The Book Publicity Blog.

Advances And Royalties: The Business End Of Writing

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This post, from mainstream-published author Susan Beth Pfeffer, originally appeared on her blog on 6/23/09.

I was wandering around the Yahoo listings for the dead and the gone, when I found its official Houghton Mifflin Harcourt paperback publication information. Publication is indeed Jan. 18, 2010, but what I didn’t know was that its price is anticipated to be $7.99. That’s a dollar more than the paperback of Life As We Knew It, which means that every paperback d&g sells will earn me 6 cents more than a LAWKI paperback.

I figured I’d be safe sharing this information with you, since you’d be unlikely to hit me up for a 6 cent loan.

It occurred to me after I decided to make the 6 cent announcement that there are people who read this blog who may not know how writers get paid (not enough and certainly not often enough, but that’s a whole other entry). So for those of you who are interested, here are the basics of how it works, using LAWKI as the example.

When I wrote LAWKI, I gave my agent the manuscript to sell. That’s called writing a book on spec (short for speculation). Neither my agent nor I knew if any publisher would be interested in buying it (when I wrote the dead and the gone, and This World We Live In, I got a contract before writing the books). My agent gets 15% of every penny I earn from these books, so it’s in her best interest to sell them.

Harcourt agreed to buy LAWKI, and offered me a $20,000 advance. For that money, they were given the right to publish the book in hardcover and paperback, and to make some additional money by selling some of the subsidiary rights, which they did, selling to both the Junior Library Guild and Scholastic some reprint rights (HMH gets half that money; I get the other half, after my agent gets her 15%).

An advance is called an advance because it’s an advance on future royalties. Once the publisher gives you the advance, they can’t get the money back, no matter how hard they beg. So I got the $20,000 minus 15% (that’s $17,000; I can multiply anything by 15%), gave Internal Revenue its share, and kept the rest to pay rent and gas and electricity and groceries, etc. Since the book was already written, Harcourt pretty much paid me the whole amount at once; with d&g and TW, I got half on signing the contract and the other half after Harcourt decided the manuscript was ready for publication (I’m currently waiting for the second half of the advance for TW).

I get a 10% royalty on the LAWKI hardcover. That means I get 10% of what the list price ($17) of the book is: $1.70 for every book sold, after I earned back the original $20,000. Because of the sale to the Junior Library Guild, I knew that meant as soon as the hardcover sold 10,000 copies, I would start earning royalties. That happened almost immediately, so I’ve been earning royalties on LAWKI since shortly after its publication. I have no idea why they’re called royalties, since most writers earn less than the average medieval peasant.

Royalties get paid twice a year. The publisher keeps track of how many copies of the book are sold, multiplies the total by the percentage the writer gets (10% for hardcovers, 6% for paperbacks), sends the total amount to the agent, who takes her 15% and sends the rest to the writer, who’s been going crazy waiting for the check to arrive. It used to be I never knew how much money (if any) to expect, but nowadays I can ask what the sales numbers are, so I have a far better sense of how big (or small) the check will be. This definitely cuts down on the stress.

Read the rest of the post on Susan Beth Pfeffer’s blog.

Stay Ahead of the Shift: What Publishers Can Do to Flourish In A Community-Centric Web World

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This post, from Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his Idealog site, and represents a talk he presented at BookExpo America on 5/28/09.

Michael Friedman and I were having lunch and he said to me, “You know Mike, the word is “evolve”.” And that’s the word. So in fact it’s not going to be about how you flourish, it’s going to be about how you evolve. How publishers who create products can evolve into a world that’s going to be about community.

There are a few fundamental premises that really ground this speech that we want to start with, and the first one is Things Will Change, and I don’t think we’re going to have a lot of disagreement about that. So, we can move on to the fact that It Is necessary to have a view of the future to anticipate change. Think, for example, that people in the future are going to look up publishers on the web, and search those publishers for the books they want. Well then you would do things differently to what I’m going to suggest to you, because I don’t really think that’s what the future is. But you have to have a view of the future in order to know what to do in the present.

Another premise that I believe is true is that the market is going to shift in some ways, from now on, between the time you acquire a book and the time you publish it. Every book that is being published now was acquired before anybody had heard of Twitter. And every book that is being published now depends on something that is in Twitter. So that’s going to be normal. And because that’s normal, you’re going to be constantly trying new things. You’re not going to have any choice but to try new things! Because Twitter is a new thing, and things become new, and you don’t have the chance to sit on the sideline and watch how it works and analyze it.

You have to be opportunistic, you have to see what opportunities are out there and you have to try new things all the time, and you have to do that within some sort of framework, within some sort of understanding of the future because we know that there are so many new things going on. We can barely remember them all from the last two weeks, let alone try them all. So if you don’t have some sort of an idea of where you’re going, and where the world is going, it gets very very hard to distinguish between the opportunities.

A Lot Happens in 20 Years

Now, before I describe what I think will be the world of content and publishing in 20 years, I want to make the point that a lot happens in 20 years, because I’m going to describe a world that is pretty different from the one that we’re in, and that would raise a lot of skepticism. Think about this:

In 1968, there were about three broadcast networks that had about 95% market-share. There was nothing else to do with your TV, and there weren’t a lot of things to do other than watch TV. So, half the country or 60% of the country, could watch The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, that kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore. By 1988, half the homes in America had cable, and half the homes in America had VCRs. There were five broadcast networks, not three. And there were 40, 50 , 60, 70 channels on the cable. And the broadcast networks knew that that day they had, 20 years before, was never coming back.

I picked 1980 for the record companies because that was just before a huge boom. As a matter of fact it was before two huge booms, because the Walkman 2 was invented in 1980. So between 1980 and 1983, the record companies got to sell me all the records I bought until that time, as cassettes. And then in 1983 or 84, they invented the CD, and they got to sell me all the records they sold me as cassettes again as CDs. And that made the record companies a lot of money. And things looked great for them. And the future was booming. And we know where the record companies were by 2000. 2000 was before the invention of the iPod, but not before the invention of Napster.

Newspapers. Well 1989 was a peak year for newspaper ad revenue. It went down a bit after that, but you know what saved them? In the mid-1990s, classified advertising saved them. But you know what classified advertising is now? Craigs list. It’s not on the newspapers anymore. You know where newspapers are now. They’re threatened. So in 1989 they had a peak year, and in 2009, they’re facing extinction. That happened in 20 years.

Mass-market paperbacks. Now this is something where you have to be as old as I am to remember when book publishers made a lot of money selling mass market paperback rights, and the fact that that was the jackpot. You published that title in hardcover, and then you could sell the mass market rights for a lot of money. I’ve picked 1975 as a starting year there, because the record sale for mass market paperback didn’t occur until 1979. That was Princess Daisy. Remember Princess Daisy? Pretty forgettable book. 3.1 Million dollar sale from Crown to Bantam. That number has never been topped. By 1999, mass market paper backs were where they are now, which is that they are category books. 95% of mass market paperbacks fall into a fiction category. So in 20 years, it went from a business that meant, that mass market books were bookseller, to a business where it doesn’t anymore.

Online Access in 20 years. Well, in 1989, the World Wide Web was in the process of being invented. But you could go online. To Prodigy. Through a dial-up. And now, 20 years later, you carry the internet in your pocket. So, that’s changed a lot in 20 years!

Books. Well, 1989 was before two great booms, sort of like the music business in 1980. Because in 1989 the owners of Borders, and the owners of Barnes & Noble were headed down to Wall St. to get a lot of money, to open up superstores. And all those superstores stocked a lot of backlist. So in the early 90s, publishers were printing a lot of backlist to put into all those superstores. And then Amazon came along. And that, as a matter of fact, got the backlist for the guys who didn’t have enough sales clout to get into the Barnes & Noble and Borders. Their backlist is sold on Amazon. So everybody was moving up. But you know what? The last 10 years, unit sales on books are flat. And bookstore shelf space is now sinking, where it was really expanding. We have gone from a business that was expanding, to a business that is contracting in 20 years.

Read the rest of the post, view the PowerPoint presentation, and watch videos of the BEA talk, on Idealog.

10,000 Ideas And Resources For Writers

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This post, from Kathryn Vercillo, originally appeared on her Real Words From A Real Writer blog on 3/13/08. While the post was originally aimed at freelance writers, most of the resources on this fantastic list will be useful for any writer.  

Every once in a while I come across an article or blog post listing the "Top 100" of something for writers or bloggers. Every time that happens, I’m a little bit impressed. After all, it is common to see "Top 10" lists but it takes a lot more effort to compile a list that includes 100 things. However, it makes more sense to be thinking in terms of hundreds and not tens when it comes to freelance writing.

With thousands of new blogs launching every single day, there is a lot of material online for people to be reading. There’s certainly far more than ten authority sources on any particular topic. So, in an effort to be ambitious as well as to provide others with information about the best writing tips and sites out there, here is my Top 100 collection of “Top 100″ lists that others have put together. That means that you’ve got 10,000 tips/articles/ideas to read here. There are lists about books, lists about blog tools and lists about everything in between. That should keep you busy during your downtime!

  1. Writers Digest 101 Best Websites For Authors (updated to 2009 edition)
  2. The Top 100 Freelancer Blogs @ Bootstrapper
  3. 101 Ways to Monetize Your Website or Blog @ Vandelay
  4. Top 100 Blogs @ Make Money Online
  5. Top 100 Articles on Writing @ Writing Information
  6. 100 Tools Freelancers Can’t Live Without @ Bootstrapper
  7. 100 Writing Tips @ How to Write for the Web
  8. 100 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Blog @ InternetBabel
  9. Make Money Online: 100+ Tools and Resources @ Mashable
  10. 101 Ways to Create A Powerful Web Presence @ Hello, My Name is Blog
  11. 100s of Resources for Finding Blog Content @ Lorelle on WordPress
  12. 101 Reasons Freelancers Do It Better @ HR World
  13. Top 100 Novels Of All Time @ Time Magazine
  14. 101 Ways to Monetize Your Blog without Irritating your Readers @ Inside CRM
  15. 114 Ways to Build Links @ SubHub
  16. 100 Niche Job Boards for Web Workers @ Bootstrapper
  17. Top 100 Essay Sites for Students
  18. 100 Ways to be Better Entrepreneur @ Entrepreneur.com
  19. Top 100 Social Bookmarking and Social Networking Blogs @ Virtual Hosting
  20. 100 Web Apps for Freelancers @ Codswallop
  21. 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies @ SearchEngineWatch
  22. Over 100 Best Firefox Extensions @ LifeHack (many of which are great for improving writing productivity)
  23. 120+ RSS Resources @ Mashable
  24. Top 100,000 Search Keywords @ Aleksika (useful in SEO, when adding keywords to your posts) 
  25. 101 Great Posting Ideas To Make Your Blog Sizzle @ I Help You Blog

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Read the rest of the post, with links for resources #26-100, on Real Words From A Real Writer. While we’ve verified the links provided in this excerpt (and updated them as necessary) , due to the age of the post we can’t guarantee that when you click through to view the full article, all the remaining links in the post will still be valid.