Ebooks

Articles specific to writing and publishing ebooks.

DOJ, Authors Guild, BEA, and Hypocritical Authors Backing Up Words With Action

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This post, by Bob Mayer, originally appeared on Write It Forward on 6/7/12.

I recently read the email where the Authors Guild is asking members to send to the DOJ to stop the legal action regarding the Agency Model.  I found it quite strange.  It felt as if the Authors Guild was defending bookstores, publishers, agents and others in the mistaken belief that in doing so they were helping authors.  I can’t ever remember the Authors Guild taking such strong action defending authors against bookstores, publishers and agents.  Demanding higher eBook royalty rates.

And even in the letter, the Guild admits publishers made a “mistake” in allowing Amazon to dominate the eBook market.  I’m not sure it was a mistake as much as it was arrogance.  I keep going back to one fact:  Amazon didn’t exist except in Bezos’ mind in 1994.  How much has publishing changed since then?

And then there are the authors.  Scott Turow and Richard Russo and Malcolm Gladwell key among them.  I love Richard Russo’s books, but I find his business stance quite hypocritical.  Ditto with Turow and Gladwell.  If Amazon is the evil empire as they quite clearly say, then why are their books still for sale on Amazon?  Hey guys, if you hate it so much, immediately demand your publishers pull your books from Amazon.  NOW!  You don’t get to have your sales and sneer at them too.  I’m sick of the top 5% of authors who get coddled by publishers defend[ing] a business that treats its other 95% of authors as replaceable parts that they can easily toss on the garbage pile and replace.  You show me a traditional author defending legacy publishing whose contract doesn’t get renewed, and I’ll show you an author whose tune changes very fast.

Publishers, agents, editors, bookstores, here’s something you basically need to wrap your brain around:  the physical book you hold so dear is NOT the product you are selling.  The story that writers create is the product.  That story can be bought by the consumer in the physical form of a book, but it can also be bought digitally to be read or listened to.  And the latter is going to become dominant sooner, rather than later.

I spent a day this week at BEA.  I did my first BEA about 10 years ago.  This one wasn’t much different.  I was walking the aisles with my business partner at Cool Gus, Jen Talty, and I told her:  “Half these people are going to be looking for jobs in three years.”  I’m not being mean, I’m being realistic.  It’s pretty much business as usual, like the band playing on the Titanic and the passengers swapping deck chairs to listen to them.  The ship is still going down people.  I saw nary a computer screen at any of the booths displaying digital books.  I saw not a single publisher giving away digital arcs (and wouldn’t it be so much cheaper and environmentally friendly to do so?).

 

Read the rest of the post on Write It Forward.

Self-Publishing Mistakes, Screw-ups and Disasters

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Over time, from talking to a lot of authors, I came to realize something really important about publishing your own books: a lot of people are afraid.

No, wait, I mean it. There are several kinds of fear you run into over and over again when asking authors about their publishing plans, and whether they will take the leap into self-publishing.

It might be

  • fear of doing it wrong, or
  • fear of looking like an idiot, or
  • fear of the negative opinions of others, like book reviewers, or
  • fear of appearing illegitimate to other, traditionally-published authors, or
  • fear that money, time and effort will be wasted, or
  • fear of being ripped off, scammed, or otherwise taken advantage of.

You get the picture, and I could go on.

These are all legitimate concerns, and in our best moments we understand that these fears can actually help us to produce a better book. They make us vigilante about mistakes, and about doing our homework as best we can before we hand our precious manuscripts over to someone else we hardly know.

But sometimes these fears get the better of us, don’t they? Then, we get stuck.

We’re afraid to move forward, while all the time realizing we can’t possibly move backward. So there we stay, stuck.

This is particularly unfortunate when it comes to authors. Writers have something to contribute to our larger society, a piece, however small, to add to the cultural mosaic.

When you get stuck, you don’t contribute your piece.

Self-publishing isn’t brain surgery or rocket science. Any intelligent, attentive writer can do it, and they can do it well if they prepare themselves with education and training. With attention to good practices and an understanding of the dynamics of how books are produced, marketed and sold, a writer has nothing to fear from the process.

And it’s pretty forgiving. You can overcome almost any calamity, if you know how.

In the second video in the free series of training videos from the Self-Publishing Roadmap, I take these fears on head-first. I also run through some common mistakes that new self-publishers make, and how you can avoid them. It will be posted early this week.

Understanding our own hesitations, fears, worries and concerns is really important to making progress, getting those books out.

That’s why I think your mindset is one of the most important assets you can possess when you get involved in self-publishing.

When that second video is ready to go, I’ll let you know here on the blog. Or you can sign up for the Self-Publishing Roadmap Early Notification List to make sure you don’t miss it.

Do you have those fears? How do you deal with them, or have you found a way to keep going, despite the nagging worries?

 

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

How To Self-Publish An Ebook

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This post, by David Carnoy, originally appeared on CNET on 6/1/12.

A while back I wrote a column titled "Self-publishing: 25 things you need to know," which was mostly about how to create and sell your own paper book. After folks asked me to do something similar for e-books, I created this article, which has now been updated a few times.

I begin with one caveat: The whole e-book market is rapidly evolving, and a lot of self-publishing companies are offering e-book deals bundled into their print book publishing packages, which makes them harder to break out and evaluate. It’s all quite complicated, and in an effort to sort through the confusion, I’ve decided to offer a few basic tips and present what I think are some of the best options out there for creating an e-book quickly and easily. As things change — and they will — I’ll do my best to keep this column up to date.

 

Tips

:

 

  • It’s gotta be good: The same rule applies to self-published e-books as it does to print books. You have to start with a good product if you have any hope of selling it.

  • Create an arresting cover: When it comes to e-books, everything starts with the cover image. Creating an eye-catching, professional-looking cover that also looks good small (it has to stand out as a thumbnail image, since it’s being sold online) is easier said than done, but it can really make a difference in terms of sales. Ideally, you should hire a graphic designer who has some experience creating book covers. From a production standpoint, an e-book cover is easier to create than a cover for a print book (you just need a JPEG with decent resolution), but it shouldn’t look out of place among traditionally published e-books. I can’t tell you how many bad self-published covers are out there.

  • Price your e-book cheaply: You should sell your e-book for $5.99 or less. According to research done by Smashwords, an online e-book publishing and distribution platform for authors, publishers, agents, and readers, $2.99 to $5.99 yields the most profit for self-published authors, and although 99 cents will get you more downloads, it’s a poor price point for earning income (see Smashwords’ presentation on pricing here). On the other hand, Lulu, one of the bigger online self-publishing operations, says that authors who price their e-books in the 99-cent to $2.99 range "sell more units and earn more revenue than those in any other price range."

    It’s important to note that Amazon’s 70 percent royalty for authors only applies to Kindle books priced between $2.99 and $9.99; otherwise, the rate kicks down to 35 percent). As for going free, well, Smashword data indicates that free e-books get about 100 times more downloads than priced e-books.

 

Read the rest of the post on CNET.

What I Love About Being An Indie Author: I Can Shift Course On A Dime!

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Despite the gloom and doom of some of the blog pundits, and despite the relatively weak effect of my last KDP Select promotion at the end of March, which came in the midst of Amazon’s shifting algorithms, I decided to put the two books in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, up for another round of free promotions this month. While my goals have remained the same, my strategy changed in response to the changing algorithms, and, as a result, my outcomes this time around improved.

Goals:

As usual, the primary goal for my promotions was to push both of my novels up on the historical mystery bestseller list and to get them as high as possible on the historical mystery popularity list. I have written numerous times about my conviction that keeping my books visible on these lists is a significant factor in my success. (Maids of Misfortune has been on these lists continuously since July of 2010, and Uneasy Spirits has been on them since it was published in October 2011.)

If my books fell off the top of these lists I would be dependent on driving potential readers to Amazon to look for the book. As a relatively unknown author with only a modest social media presence this is a difficult proposition. Instead, when my books are near the top of the historical mystery lists then people who are browsing these lists get the chance to judge my books by their covers, excerpts, product descriptions, “also bought” lists and reviews). Conversely, I have heard how dramatically sales decrease for books by other authors when these books fall off the bestseller lists.

As an aside, I don’t understand why some authors still argue that using free promotions devalues books. For example, the buyer can see a book’s fixed price (in my case my books are now $3.99––becaue like other indie authors I am feeling more confident about pushing my prices up from $2.99), so they know it is only temporarily free. I see the use of free promotions as the same as any promotion––for example, when traditional publishers pay (cut into their revenue) to get their print books onto the front tables of bookstores. I don’t recall anyone concluding “that they must not be very good books if their publishers don’t feel the books can sell themselves on their own!”

A secondary goal of doing another free promotion was to make the books visible on other categories besides historical mysteries, even if they didn’t stay there once the books went back to paid. The historical mystery category is a relatively small category (2,182 books), and I don’t usually sell enough books daily to show up in the top 100 of the larger categories like mystery–women sleuths (6,420 books), or historical romance (12,163 books), except during free promotions. In addition, I switched Uneasy Spirits from romantic suspense to historical fiction for its second category after the last promotion, and I hoped that this round of promotion would get it exposure for the first time in this fairly large category (22,000+ books). In short, this promotion would be another chance to expand my market beyond the historical mystery category.

Pre-promotion status: 

By the middle of May, before the promotions began, Maids of Misfortune had slipped into the 7,000′s overall and 40′s on the historical mystery bestseller list. Uneasy Spirits was in the 9,000s overall and 70s on the bestseller list. Uneasy Spirits was dangerously close to dropping off the top 100, and was averaging 11 book sales a day, versus 25 a day in April and 42 a day in March (all these figures are for the US Kindle store). I understand that for many authors, 11 books a day would be nothing to sneeze at, but, again, if I want to sustain visibility I didn’t want to let that daily average slip any lower.

Amazon changes:

In case you haven’t been keeping in touch, Amazon apparently started testing new algorithms for its popularity lists in the middle of March (see this post by David Gaughran.) While these algorithms are secret it was very clear that a free download was no longer counting as a full sale. The effect of these changes was a drastic decrease in the post promotion sales bump most authors had been experiencing and fair amount of consternation among indie authors.

I confess I was relatively sanguine about these changes. Even though my own promotion at the end of March was seriously disappointing in terms of over-all sales, it did prop up my books’ rankings for a brief time and then slowed their decline. In addition, what I was witnessing was a very similar pattern to my post holiday sales from the year before––when KDP Select didn’t exist. Last year and this year my sales in April were 27-28% less than they had been at their peak in the 3 months after Christmas. The difference was that due to KDP Select the peak this year was ever so much higher than the previous year.

While Amazon’s introduction of KDP Select and its free days had given many of us a great gift in increased sales this past holiday, it was creating very volatile popularity and bestseller lists, and traditionally published books were being pushed further and further down those lists. It made sense to me that, given the DofJ settlement, Amazon would have a vested interest in proving that it could still provide a competitive market for those traditional books. Frankly it never had seemed right to me that some of my favorite historical mystery authors were doing so much worse than I was––it wasn’t their fault their publishers kept making so many bad decisions (high prices, bad formatting, refusal to participate in the Kindle Lending Library, ect.)

Then in the beginning of May the popularity list settled down––for now, and there has been general agreement that for the last few weeks the popularity lists reflect a new ratio where free downloads are only counted for about 10% (some say 5%) of sales for the purposes of ranking (ie 1000 free downloads =100 sales). There is evidence that the list is also weighted more heavily by a book’s sales (maybe even its total revenue) over the previous 30 days––rather than in the immediate promotion days. As a result, the effect of the already diminished download count is further flattened by the previous 30 days of sales averages.  Edward Robertson has done a good job of summarizing the effects of these changes.

Changing Strategies:

When I read the posts about the changes in the algorithm I decided to deviate from my previous strategy for free promotions. I had been putting Maids of Misfortune up with Uneasy Spirits at the same time for one day, then continuing Uneasy for a second day. My logic had been that Maids was my most persistent seller (and usually got its largest downloads the first day) and that people would see the two up together and a percentage would decide to go ahead and get both of them, boosting Uneasy’s downloads. The one time I had put up Uneasy by itself it hadn’t done well (and this was before the algorithm changes), and I assumed that people might be giving it a pass because it was a sequel. So each time I have promoted I kept Uneasy up for a second day, thinking that it needed the extra day to achieve a significant number of downloads and that people might have started Maids of Misfortune and enjoyed it enough to go back and get Uneasy the second day.

But, with the new information about the greater importance of the sales of a book during the 30 days before the promotion, I decided that I needed to rethink this strategy.

I wasn’t too worried about Maids of Misfortune. It hadn’t slipped down the rankings as far as Uneasy Spirits, and, because it was uploaded in 2009 when you could choose 5 categories it has a better chance of attracting free downloads. It also had 98 reviews, and I knew that this would help. I did decide, however, to leave Maids free for two days this time since it was going to take more downloads to achieve any sort of bump in sales with the new ratio.

More importantly, I also decided to put up Maids of Misfortune for free a week before I put up Uneasy Spirits (something I had never tried before). My thought was that if the free promotion of Maids increased the sales of Uneasy at all (and the ripple effect of free on sequels has been well-documented), then this would mean that at least 7 days of that 30 day average would have the increased sales to figure into Uneasy’s rankings­­––improving the chances that it would experience some sort of sales bump after it came off its free promotion.

So far it appears that this new strategy is working.

Post Promotion:

Maids of Misfortune was free May 19-20, a Friday and Saturday. At the end of the two days the book had 3206 free downloads in the US Kindle store. If the rumors about the new algorithm were right, this would translate into approximately 320 sales over those two days. The previous 30 days my average sales for this book had been 20 books a day, so not surprisingly these 2 days, at about 150 a day, did push up the book’s popularity rankings, which in turn increased the books sales and ranking on the bestseller list. The fourth day after the promotion Maids of Misfortune was in the mid 3000′s on the paid list, versus the 7000s where it had been before, and #12 on the historical mystery bestseller list, versus in the 40s.

And, during the free promotion for Maids, the sales of Uneasy Spirits doubled. The bump didn’t last past the promotion, but it does mean that Uneasy was in a slightly better position going into its own promotion, and that it has a slightly better 30 day average to help it sustain the bump it got from that promotion.

Uneasy Spirits was free May 25-25 (Saturday and Sunday) and did much better than Maids in terms of giveaways. While Maids only made it to 109 in the free store the first day and lost ground the second, Uneasy made it to #33 in the Free list and remained in the top 100 for the second day. (I suspect the fact that this was the beginning of the memorial day weekend might have caused Uneasy’ greater success). This meant it had much more exposure and achieved over 3 times the number of free downloads as Maids of Misfortune did (10,142 in the US Kindle store).

This of course meant an even bigger bump upwards for Uneasy Spirits when it went back on the paid lists since these downloads would translate into 1000 sales for the two days.

In fact, doing the promotions sequentially has benefited the sales and rankings of both books because Maids of Misfortune averaged 98 book sales over the 2 days that Uneasy Spirits was free, nicely adding to its 30 day average and pushing it up the popularity rankings as a result.

To date, 5 days after Uneasy Spirits joined Maids of Misfortune back on the paid lists, my average sales for both books is double what they were before the promotions began. Maids of Misfortune is now ranked 2945 over all, and it is #11 in the historical mystery bestseller list and #10 in the historical mystery popularity list. Uneasy Spirits is currently ranked 5138 over all and #22 in the historical mystery bestseller list (although 3 days after the promotion it did hit the 3000′s and was #18 on the bestseller list), However, perhaps more importantly for its long run sales, Uneasy Spirits is currently #8 on the historical mystery popularity list.

If Edward Robertson is correct in his analysis of the new algorithm, as the older, poorer sales for both books at the start of May drop off, and the newer higher sales during and since the promotions begin to dominate the 30 day average, both books should continue to do well in the historical mystery popularity list, which in turn should continue to boost sales and help maintain these books’ position on the bestseller list. In short, they may not have risen as high in the rankings as after previous promotions, but neither will they drop as quickly. If this turns out to be true, Amazon will have achieved its greater stability in the lists, but KDP Select will still permit indie books to be competitive as well.

My final point is that I learned about the new 30-day aspect of the Amazon algorithms on May 7th when I read about Edward Robertson’s blog discussion of the changes that had been made, and I was able to immediately respond (in the words of the title––change course quickly.)  Four days after reading this blog post I had made my decision to give the free promotions another try, but this time sequentially, and I went onto my dashboard and scheduled both free promotions and began to make the arrangements to feature those free promotions on such sites as Kindle Nation Daily and Pixel of Ink. A week later the first of the promotions began.

I didn’t have to consult with anyone (like an agent or editor) or get the permission of a marketing committee to make this decision, the scheduling of the promotions took seconds, and the pre-promotional work I did took about an hour. As a result, I was able to move quickly to reverse the downward spiral of sales before my books dropped off the historical mystery lists and became invisible. I know that this is not how things would have happened in the world of traditional publishing where people keep using the analogy of how difficult it is to turn a big ship around to explain how slow the Big 6 have been to respond to the ebook revolution. And for that I once again give thanks for the power I have as an indie author to exert some control over the fate of my books, even when the winds of changing algorithms threaten to blow them off course.

 

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke’s blog.

A Dozen Do's and Don'ts on Prepping Your Novel for ePublishing

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This post, by K.A. Hitchens, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog on 5/29/12 and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

Well, as you all know, I originally promised to blog, two weeks ago, about the ISBN monopoly controlled by initially the ISBN.org and then, here in the US, Bowker.  However, that post was delayed by an unforeseen “cat-astophe,” when The Amazing Zep (“Zeppelin,” properly known as Suncoon Tucson), a 7-month old Maine Coon kitten, decided he could fly off the top of our 7’ cat condo.  Obviously, I’ve allowed him to watch entirely too many Marvel Comics movies. 

He leapt from the top of the Condo, aiming at a nearby artwork niche, and the results were, shall we say, not good; he nearly came to be known as Hindenburg.  Half a house-payment and 5 exhausting days later of caring for him 24/7, he’s fine, the little monster, but I apologize for missing the blog.  His nefarious face is shown here, so all will know the miscreant.  (And, yes, because most people look at kitten pics and go, “awwwwwwwwwwwwww…;” I’m shamelessly exploiting your weakness for kittens.)

But yesterday, Editor Extraordinaire Jodie Renner dropped me a line, and asked me if I happened to have a list, or a link to a list, of tips for preparing your Word document for e-publishing, whether you’re going to use an eBookformatting company like mine, or DIY.  She suggested it would make a good blog post—and I’d do anything to oblige her.  So today’s topic is What NOT to do in your Word document, either to keep costs down, or to make it easier for yourself/your formatter, to create your book in a gorgeous style.

 

1.  Everybody already knows #1; use Word’s built-in styles whenever possible.  Use them to automatically indent your paragraphs; don’t use the tab key or the space-bar (5 times or however many).  Now, an experienced formatting won’t have difficulty with this.  But if you’re using someone new, or doing it yourself, this will cause you problems.  Moreover, if you use Word’s built-in styles for all your regular narrative paragraphs, you shan’t have a problem, when you upload to the  KDP, with inconsistent paragraph styling—which you will have if you “style” every paragraph differently, not deliberately, but through misadventure, by not knowing and understanding Word’s styles. 

If you don’t have a basic understanding of how these work (and how to see how they are working), take a few minutes and watch this video (not from my company, but we think it’s nice and clear enough that we host it in our Knowledgebase) on our Knowledgebase (you can enlarge it to full-screen for easy of viewing): http://booknookbiz.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/182863-video-on-word-styles . Our Tutorials section also has a video on the TOC and how to use headings (just click the “Tutorials and Videos” breadcrumb to take you to that section, or click “Home” above the article header to rummage around to your heart’s content.

 

2.  Speaking of…Header styles.  Very few people seem to know about or use what used to be called the “Document Map” in word.  If you use “Header Styles” to create your chapter headers, you’ll be able to easily navigate through your document by simply enabling the “Navigation Pane” on the left-hand side  (In Word 2007-2010, “View—> Click “Navigation Pane”).  If you’ve used header styles for every chapter head—lo!  Right there in the Navigation Pane, you’ll be able to see (and jump to instantly) the beginning of every single chapter.  An even bigger “freebie” side effect of doing this—you can auto-generate your Table of Contents. 

This is incredibly handy for those of you determined to “DIY.”  For the video on how to do this, please see our second Knowledgebase video: http://booknookbiz.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/182864-video-on-headings-and-toc-in-word . If you don’t like the LOOK of the header styles that are available to you, you can change that with a simple click—but that’s generally covered in the first video, so by the time you get to the second video, you should already know how to fix that.  This can also save you some ducats at the formatters, depending upon how their pricing lists are structured.

 

3.  Lists.  Ironically, for either price-savings or saving yourself DIY brain-damage, don’t use numbered or bulleted lists, IF they are indented.  If you must have a bulleted or numbered list (yes—like the one I’m using here, hence the irony), and you’re going to publish to Amazon, it’s a giant pain.  If you can live with the bulleted or numbered list at the left-margin, it will work fine.  However, if you are attempting to indent them, what will happen is that the wrap-indents will NOT align perfectly. This is due to the ability of the Kindle e-reader (of all kinds, excluding the Fire, which can do this quite nicely) to rescale fonts. 

The “wrap,” inside the secret-sauce code of a kindle book, is set in (either) a percentage (of the available screensize) or “ems” which are relative to the font, unlike text measurements—which are absolute.  What this means is that your text wrap will, on an indented, bulleted or numbered item, look perfect at one font size—but  will creep, ever so slightly, left-or right, as the font-size changes, relative to the selected font-size, if that makes any sense.  To wit:  if you increase the fontsize, you increase the amount of the second-line “indent” in the wrap.  However, the first line remains as it was set up (don’t ask), so your second line creeps left or right.  If this doesn’t faze you, then rock on.  If you have bulleted lists, and want them to align as perfectly as possible—well, you know where to find us.  ;-).  Making them perfect can’t be done in Word.

 

4. Return-itis.  This one may seem obvious, but, I kid thee not, we get at least one manuscript a week in that is actually typed with a “return” keyed at the end of each LINE.  Not paragraph, but LINE.  Seriously; we have authors who don’t understand that Word wraps automatically, nor how to set line-spacing, so in order to make their manuscript “submission-ready,” they type to the right margin, and hit “enter” twice.  Please:  for your sanity and mine, don’t do that.

 

5. Don’t create a dedicated STYLE to italicize or bold your text.  Simply highlight the text you want to italicize, and use the “I” button at the top of the ribbon/menu.  Same for Bold.  If you create styles, but also use the buttons, you can create inconsistencies in your work, and if you’re not a Styles-Genius, it can get confusing.

 

6. Fonts!  If you ever read what I write here, you know that you have to license any copyrighted fonts you use.  That’s the first thing; the second thing, however, is equally important.  If you use fonts in your book, to set apart various types of content—for example, the interior FP thoughts of your killer—be aware of the following:  the Kindle e-ink devices, as well as the majority of all e-ink devices, like the Nook e-ink readers and the Kobos—do not support more than a single font.  In the Kindle legacy devices—still the most widely-used of all reading devices, of any brand—they have a single font, called “Caecilia,” which is a Times New Roman clone. 

Therefore, although you can license and embed fonts that will work spiffily in ePUB readers and in the Kindle Fire, be aware that firstly, that second font, despite your wishes, won’t show up on the Kindle legacy devices and second, if you’re trying to do this from Word on a DIY basis, it won’t work.  Despite your best efforts, as far as I know, if you endeavor to upload a Word file with multiple fonts in it, you will not obtain the desired result; font embedding has to be done from within HTML or XHTML (HTML you used to be married to) to work correctly.  On a Kindle you can use a second font—a Courier monospaced font—if absolutely necessary, but it doesn’t reflow like the TNR font, and it’s not very attractive.  You should, if you are going to DIY, consider using a fleuron or some other graphic device, to set that “other font” or inner thoughts, or whatever it is, apart from the rest of your regular narrative flow.

 

7. Poetry, song lyrics, and other miscellaneous material that is indented and somewhat “columnar.”  For ease of formatting, both for yourself and any formatting company, don’t use “enter” at the end of the line; use a line break, which is SHIFT+ENTER, as opposed to the usual “enter.”  Don’t use this coding pair to create a new paragraph, but if you intend to display poetry or song lyrics, this is the combo to use at the end of each “line.”  At the end of each STANZA, however, you would use the usual “enter” key, twice, as you would for a scene break.  (Yes—there are better ways to do this, using Word’s built-in Styles, but this will work “okay” for both DIY and for any formatter worth his/her salt.)

 

8. Spelling.  Yes, I know—how obvious is this? But you would be shocked at the huge number of manuscripts we get in here that are chock-full of spelling mistakes.  I think that authors invent character names and places, which Word, naturally highlights with the ubiquitous red line; and they get so accustomed to seeing that, they ignore the REAL errors.  If you have invented names, places, etc., in your ms, tell your spellcheck to “Ignore” those, so that you stop being “spellcheck blind.”  Correcting spelling errors that your readers find, post-production, is embarrassing for you; and if you’ve used a formatter, it’s expensive, as editing in HTML isn’t like editing in Word.

 

9. Hyphenation and Track Changes:  (A Twofer!). First, if you’ve used hyphenation throughout the document, for line endings (optional hyphens), you should do a search and replace, and remove all optional hyphens.  If you don’t, they can show up as regular, non-optional hyphens in the finished eBook product, which you obviously don’t want.  Use Find > Advanced Find > More > Special > Optional Hyphen, and replace with nothing.  As far as Track Changes goes, ensure you’ve “accepted all changes” in your document.  If you do not, the edits that are now invisible to your eyes—all your additions, deletions, etc.– will show up in your ebook, just as if they were typed in the text.  I can’t emphasize enough the importance of these two “pre-flight” items.   

 

10.  Explicitly marking your scene breaks.  If you are going to use a formatting service, ensure that you explicitly mark your scene breaks.  If you haven’t been a religiously neat typist, and occasionally have extra “enters” between paragraphs, a formatter can’t infer when you want a scene break used (a flush left paragraph with vertical whitespace above it) and when you do not.  If, like some authors, you have multiple types of scenebreaks—one that uses a flush-left, and one that doesn’t, due to whether or not it’s simply a passage of time, or a POV shift—then be sure you mark them differently and explicitly. 

EBook formatters don’t read your book and can’t read your mind, so be sure to tell them what you want.  At Booknook, we have our clients use the old convention of *** to indicate any scene break where they desire the visual cue of a flush-left paragraph with vertical whitespace above.  Alternatively, of course, you can use a graphical fleuron—but be aware that using fleurons requires extra coding for use in Kindle, as the e-ink devices will try to grossly enlarge them (that’s the default Kindle behavior.)  If you use a formatter, the cost will be higher; if you try to do it yourself from Word, the results, on the actual e-ink Kindles, may not be what you expect.

 

11.  Broken Paragraphs:  If you’ve used any form of conversion software, (please see Tip #12, below), or perhaps typed the file on different computers, over a long stretch of time, make sure you diligently scan your document for broken pararagraphs.  If you’ve converted it from any other format, or had it scanned & OCR’d, the incidence of broken paragraphs will be quite high.  To find broken paragraphs, turn on your Pilcrow icon (if you don’t know what this is, please see my blogpost here called “Pilcrow A Go Go,” from last October), and scan the right-hand-margin. 

If you see a Pilcrow mark hanging out in the right-hand margin, in the middle of what should be a paragraph, that’s a broken paragraph, and that’s the way it will convert in an eBook—as two separate paragraphs, broken right where the Pilcrow is sitting.  If you see one sitting there, highlight it and delete it, and fix any formatting around it (usually, a space is needed before the ensuing word).  For additional information on the “end of line” pilcrow problem, please see my post on “Pilcrow No-No’s, Part II,” from last November, which addresses this exact problem.

 

12.  Don’t Convert!  Okay.  Here’s a tricky one.  This will sound contrary to everything you’ve read, on the KDP forums, etc.:  but don’t convert from Mystery Format A into Word.  If you have a PDF of the interior of your print book, just find a competent eBook Formatting company and hand it to them.  If you have a Wordstar File from the dawn of time, hand THAT to them.  WordPerfect?  Pretty much the same (although later Wordperfect files convert very nicely, but some don’t, and you end up with a manuscript full of “@” signs where you should see left-hand-quotes, and a host of other glitches). 

We get roughly 2-4 manuscripts a week in from prospective clients that know that we have a higher charge for PDF than for Word (as do all formatters that are serious), and they’re all the result of either using Calibre, or some online “You can convert your PDF file to Word, Easy/Free/Cheap!” website.  Here’s the actual truth:  It does NOT work, not at all.  What comes out looks, on the surface, like a pretty good Word file; but lurking beneath what your eyes can see is a disaster waiting for a place to happen. 

Believe it or not, it’s cheaper, in the long run, if you simply hand a PDF file to a converter, who, quite frankly, will scan it, OCR it, and proof it, just to get the same starting point as  a Word file—because the results from that are 100x better than what you’d get by using Adobe Acrobat X Pro and attempting to export the file as a Word file.  If you have an endless amount of time, and knowledge of HTML, you can use the “auto-convert” method; and spend days or weeks cleaning up the ensuing HTML.  But if you hand a file like that to a converter, like us, they’ll charge you for all those man-hours.  Honestly, the scan option is probably cheaper.

 

And there you go.  An even dozen items for you to use in creating and “pre-flight checking” your book for e-formatting.  We have other frequently asked questions, along with the two videos I already pointed you to, in our Knowledgebase, which you may find by clicking here.  Not many are actually about formatting, but we do have some nice links about marketing, Retailers, and a few hints and tips on Social Media.

(And yes, for those of you who’ve emailed, tweeted, and asked:  yes, it’s true.  We have Jackie Collins in the house; you should expect to see “Chances,” her first Lucky Santangelo novel, in eBookstores around the end of the first week of June!)

– Hitch

 

K. A. Hitchens is the owner of Booknook.biz, an eBook formatting and production company, specializing in producing affordable and professional conversions for every author–from first-timers to NY Times Bestsellers.  You can follow us at Twitter (@BooknookBiz), Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Booknookbiz ), Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/booknookbiz/) or  LinkedIn (just search for us).

 

 

Ten Home Truths About Starting In Self-publishing

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This post, by Patty Jansen, originally appeared on her Must Use Bigger Elephants blog on 1/19/12.

This month marks my one-year anniversary at Smashwords. I started with His Name In Lights, which had been published previously, and now have sixteen items up, ranging from hard SF to non-fiction to fantasy. Short stories, novellas and novels.

Here are a few things I’ve learned in the process shared here for the beginning self-publishing writer.

1. You know Amanda Hocking, and Joe Konrath and them?
Yeah, you are going to forget their names and the fact that they’ve had phenomenal successes right now. They exist in a different universe where possibilities and probabilities have been interchanged and where luck smiles down on everyone. That is the universe you’ll find if you take a right turn at the sign that says winners only. But the way is almost always blocked.

2. Don’t expect anything
That way, you’ll be pleased with modest successes, because modest, they will be. Most of the successful self-publishers have a few things in common: they have already sold well in paper or, they have a large stable of available novels, preferably both. They are also likely to have a fair bit of experience in the literary world. And luck. See point 1.

3. First, make sure you can write
This issue should be an open door, but you only need to visit the Kindleboards briefly to see that some authors rely on their Amazon reviews to tell them what’s wrong with the book. For crying out loud, don’t slap your first finished novel on there without having an inkling of whether it’s actually any good style and technique wise. Join a workshop, a critique group or similar. Do they tell it it’s all fine and dandy? Go and find someone who tells you your writing sucks. Listen to this person’s arguments. Tighten your prose. Fix meandering plots. Learn to write. Sell a few short stories first. I made the pact with myself that I wouldn’t self-publish until I had met the criteria to join SFWA as full member. Make sure you can write. I cannot say this clearly enough.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 7 more tips, on Must Use Bigger Elephants.

My Foray Into Making Audiobooks

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This post, by Michael Hicks, originally appeared on his site on 10/11/12.

I’ve been asked by a number of readers if my books were ever going to be available as audiobooks. The short answer is “yes”. Getting there, though, has been an interesting journey so far!

While my book sales have freed me from my former day job (I hope permanently!), I’m still not at the point where I feel I can afford to pay a pro to do the voiceovers. Maybe someday I’ll be able to hire James Earl Jones, but I suspect that’s not going to be any time real soon!

And, like many things (other than electrical and plumbing stuff, which I never mess with!), I’m sort of a do-it-yourselfer. Partly because I’m cheap, but mainly because doing something myself is always a great learning process. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Do the thing, and you will have the power…as long as it doesn’t involve electricity, plumbing, or power tools.”

Being a gadget addict, I was initially focused on the gear. It’s always about the gear, right? At least until you know better. Anyway, I had a Blue Snowball microphone I’d gotten a while back, and I made a couple of test reads of passages from IN HER NAME: EMPIRE, which I’ll be offering as a free audiobook when it’s done, here in my junk-room-turned-office.

Okay, I’m not an acoustic genius, but I could tell the audio quality in this room sucked. So, I looked around a bit for potential solutions. I didn’t want to build a sound booth, so I settled on the Porta-Booth Pro, which is also something I can take with us when we go out in the RV (actually, the latter is the main reason I got it).

I set the thing up in my closet upstairs, plugged my Snowball into my MacBook Air, brought up EMPIRE in the Kindle app of my iPad (yes, yes, I’m a cheap gadget freak – go figure!), and off we went with a chunk of chapter 1.

That’s when I discovered what’s REALLY important in a story told through audio: HOW it’s told. How you present it to the audience. The first take sucked. I was just reading in a monotone, same cadence throughout. I could’ve been reading the phone book, and it would’ve been just as interesting (or not).


Read the rest of the post on Michael Hicks’ site.

Selling Books With Social Networking: #1, Facebook

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This post, by Michael N. Marcus, originally appeared on Book Making on 5/22/12.

If Facebook was a country instead of a social network, it would be one of the most populous countries on earth. Its population is approaching one billion “members”—including more than 40% of Americans.

With such widespread use and familiarity, it should not be necessary to devote much space to Facebook. But if your main activities on FB have been wishing people “happy birthday,” showing silly photos, complaining about politicians and announcing what you had for lunch, you’re missing a lot. It’s time to think of FB as a venue for selling books by interacting with friends, readers and potential readers.

An FB page can be a very powerful sales tool, and it has several advantages over a website:

·     It’s free.

·     You don’t need any special skills or any software (other than a web browser) to set up a Facebook page.

·     You can modify your page whenever you want, as often as you want, from any computer or computer-like device with Internet access.

·     Many people expect authors to be on Facebook.

If you already have a personal FB “page,” it can also be your author page. If you prefer, you can have multiple pages for you as a person, as an author and as a publisher. You can even have a page for a series of books. or for one book.

Many FB users have hundreds or even thousands of FB “friends” and “fans.” Some are people known since kindergarten, others are neighbors or business associates, and still others are friends of friends, or people met online who share common interests, or even unknown admirers. It should not be difficult to convert some friends into readers.

FB is a great place to tell the word about you and your books. If people “like” your page, or “like” or “share” your postings or comments, you may get additional fans and some of them may buy books. Use FB to let people know what you are working on, when future books will be available, where you will be making public appearances, etc.

The area at the top of your page is officially called the “timeline cover” and can be simple or elaborate. You can build it from scratch with any graphics program, or even with Microsoft Word. There are also templates online. Approximate dimensions for the cover are 850 by 315 pixels.

(above) Bestselling legal-thriller author John Grisham uses his FB page to announce new books and to interact with fans (but someone at publisher Doubleday apparently does most of the FB posting for him). His page is business-only. You won’t find what TV shows he likes or his email address.

(above) Sue Dent’s FB page identifies her as “Author Sue Dent” and it promotes her latest werewolf book. The page tells about Sue’s writing awards, has links to her websites and blogs, and includes personal information such as her birthday, family members, high school and email address.

 

Read the rest of the post on Book Making, and also see parts two, three and four in the series on Selling Books With Social Networking. The articles are all based on Michael N. Marcus’ book, 499 Essential Publishing Tips for a Penny Apiece.

EWF Presentation: On Responding To Reviews And Social Media Etiquette

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This past weekend I had the honour of presenting at the Emerging Writers’ Festival, down in Melbourne. As ever, it was an inspiring and entertaining weekend, and it continues on for the next week. All the details here.

The panel I was involved with was all about Post Publication; what to do and what to expect after you’ve got that elusive first publication. I spoke a bit about how to respond (or not) to criticism of your work and a little bit about social media etiquette. As ever when I present, I strayed a bit from the script. I learned long ago that I’m not much good at sticking to the presentation I write and I tend to get distracted and freestyle my way to the end. But I think I pretty much covered all the stuff I’d planned to talk about.

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

I thought it might be worthwhile to post my presentation here, as a recap for those at the festival and as something hopefully useful for everyone else. Bear in mind that this isn’t an actual article, but more a series of points as reference for verbal delivery, so it’ll be a bit choppy. I’ve tidied it up a bit into a more coherent (I hope) blog post. I hope you find it interesting.

EWF 2012 Presentation

I’m going to talk about making the right noises. Or, more importantly, not making the wrong noises.

So you’re published and you should be very proud of yourself for many reasons, not least of which being that you had the guts to put your work out there in the public eye.

Where it will be judged.

Where you will be judged.

So what are you going to do about that?

Nothing.

That, at least, is your default position.

If you think about saying something in response to someone’s critique of your work, stop and think. Double think. Do you want what you say to be out there forever, and forever gilding your career. Because it will be. Even if you delete it, it’s cached. And people will have shared it.

It’s a given these days that if you’re published in any form, it behoves you and your publisher if you have a social media presence.

Right now, you don’t have to have an online presence, but it benefits you enormously if you do. I would argue that before long a writer will have to have an online presence.

The reason we need that is primarily due to noise.

I’m loathe to use the often-touted term author platform, because I think that carries all kinds of unnecessary connotations, so I’m just going to refer to it from here on as “the presence”.

I’m a horror writer, among other things, so standing up here to talking a room full of people about The Presence amuses me.

There are various social areas of engagement: micro- and macro-arenas, if you like. This here, a room of people, is actually a micro-arena of social engagement.

You could conceivably interact with pretty much every one here over the course of a day or two, in small group conversations, the occasional one on one chat in a queue, perhaps an awkward, strangely polite few words beside each other at urinals or adjoining cubicles. It’s not intimate – well, the urinal thing might be, but overall, this event is not especially intimate, but it is micro.

This is where things have changed. This used to be the macro-arena. An event like this over several days or even weeks, used to be the biggest interaction a person could have. Not any more.

Now we have the internet.

Something like today, this event, has become a micro-arena because the mother of all macro-arenas now exists.

The thing about this relatively new super-macro-arena of social engagement is that it’s hectic. You want The Presence, your presence, to be there, because if you have your work out in the world, you need people to know about it and the internet is brilliant for that..

But getting noticed in that digital maelstrom is like trying to have a civilised chat at a heavy metal gig. And you need to make the right noise. Don’t be noticed for the wrong reasons.

There’s an old Chinese proverb – The empty vessel makes the most noise.

The usual example is a jar of beans. If there are only a few beans in it and you shake it around, it makes a huge racket.

Fill it to the brim with beans, shake it and it’s pretty much silent.

Of course, the point here is that you achieve through quality content – being a full jar – and you get noticed that way, rather than only having a few beans and shaking your jar as loudly as you can.

Sadly, the internet often favours those with few beans and a vigorous shaking arm.

We all have to play in that sandpit. And it can get pretty crappy in there.

While we’re busily filling our jar with beans and trying to make people notice it, all the other people out there will be judging us and our work.

And not everyone will like our stuff and through the unfiltered ease of the internet, they’ll tell us so.

I’m sure you’ve all seen someone immolate their career in a furnace of righteous outrage when they get a bad review, thereby getting noticed by making all the wrong noises. If you haven’t, you will now, because you’ll go looking for it. There’s plenty to choose from. (Edit: There’s a small one right here at The Word.)

And so, when you and your work are judged online:

DO NOTHING!

Here’s a freebie for you. Got a notebook? Write this down. The only response you should ever give to anyone who reviews your work, if you give any response at all, is this:

Thank you very much for taking the time to read and review my work.

That’s it. Nothing else.

If they called you a talentless hack whose work should be used in high school as an example of how not to write, you respond:

Thank you very much for taking the time to read and review my work.

That’s if you respond at all. You don’t have to. You can simply let everyone else do the talking. Of course, if they’re nice to you, you can thank them for that, though again, you don’t have to.

But you must never respond negatively. Never try to defend your work or get drawn into an argument with someone over their review.

It’s their opinion and they’re entitled to it, even if they’re clearly a brain dead slug who wouldn’t recognise quality literature if it rolled them in salt.

Never get caught up in shitfights about opinion.

Engage with social media, use The Presence to draw attention to your stuff, but don’t always and only talk about your work. If you’re constantly on the hard sell, people will quickly tire of your used car salesman persona and ignore you. Talk about all kinds of stuff, engage and interact, but never negatively, and occasionally mention your work among all that.

If you try to present yourself as something you’re not, if you act like a dick, regardless of how good your work might be, people won’t want to work with you or read you.

It’s just like real life. Act online like you would face to face and you’re off to a pretty good start. Unless you actually are a dick, of course. There’s no help for you then.

My philosophy when it comes to social media engagement is four simple points, and I’ll wrap this up with them:

• Be yourself;
• Don’t be a dick;
• Promote the good stuff;
• Ignore the crap and the negative.

Keep working on filling your jar with beans and doing your best to make sure people know about it, without constantly beating them over the cyber-head with it.

Everything else takes care of itself.

 

 

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

Everybody in Hollywood Needs an eBook Strategy

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files blog on 5/14/12.

As a result of spending my college days at UCLA, I had a handful of contacts in the Hollywood community when I came back East to live in 1969. When I started becoming familiar with New York publishing in the 1970s, I found myself, on occasion, shopping movie or TV tie-in projects. Armed with a script and a release plan, one could make the rounds of editors at the mass-market houses that had been assigned specific responsibility for this kind of acquisition.

At the time I was doing this kind of thing 30 or 35 years ago and more, the book business was growing wary of tie-ins to TV movies. They didn’t have the same promotional life as theatrical releases, even in those days when about one-third of the country was watching any network broadcast. Films that ran in movie theaters were definitely preferred as desirable book properties.

In the decades since then, the link between Hollywood and New York publishing has not exactly been severed, but it certainly hasn’t strengthened. One agent I spoke to told me that interest from Hollywood can definitely help raise the profile of a book project being peddled in New York, but the same agent agreed that the tie-in sale, where a script is novelized to just take advantage of the exposure the title and story will get through the movie, is all but dead.

Another agent, one with strong Hollywood connections through his office, had a slightly different point of view. He says it is still “humbling” to see how much being tied to a movie or TV show (“or even radio”) can “move the needle” on a book sale.

To the extent that the agent who believes in the power of Hollywood exposure to move books is right, the relative reduction in interest by New York publishers only increases the opportunity for Hollywood entities who exploit publishing through ebooks (and judicious and selective use of print) on their own.

(I recall two specific deals from my past relevant to this post. In around 1977 or 1978 I sold the book tie-in rights to a TV movie called “Cotton Candy”, which was produced by Ron Howard. In 1985, I sold the rights to two books to tie into the third “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie: one was a novelization of the first three films and the other a heavily-illustrated “making of…” book. I’d say the “Cotton Candy” deal today couldn’t possibly happen and “Nightmare”, which went to a major publisher, would be a real long shot.)

New York’s interest in Hollywood-originated content was, of course, centered on big properties. Hollywood’s enthusiasm about getting a book deal was often not very great. It didn’t add a ton of revenue (big publishing money for a big movie was small money to the movie producer) and the “promotion” done by publishers was trivial compared to what the movie studios did for the film.

In fact, there were often rights issues that got in the way. Even if the screenwriter had conceded the tie-in rights to sell the script, the studio might still be required to get clearances on the novelization, which would be a nuisance for a book project that often had annoyingly tight deadlines and not much benefit. If the screenwriter had held the tie-in rights and was the one selling to the publisher, it could become a bureaucratic nightmare to get art and logos from the film, which would be controlled by the studio, to promote the book.

New York’s incentives were often too limited to interest Hollywood. Hollywood’s unpredictability on things as basic as release dates, as well as the diminishing likelihood over time that any particular movie property would enjoy enough theatrical success to give real legs to the tie-in book, made systematic efforts unproductive for publishers. There haven’t been dedicated tie-in editors for decades.

But digital publishing changes many things. The relationship between Hollywood and the book business, because of the changes brought on by ebooks, will almost certainly be one of them.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

Traditional Publishing And Self-Publishing Are Not Mutually Exclusive

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I’m getting a little weary of the hype that seems to suggest authors must either choose traditional or self-publishing, and that in no way could the two ever come together.

I also don’t like the polemic that has set authors against each other depending on how they choose to publish. I know this is an emotional topic and people have many different experiences of publishing in its myriad forms, but I wanted to put my thoughts out there and also see what you are thinking on the topic.

The choice of how to publish must be made per book.

I believe in the empowerment of the author to choose what is right for their book, and their business.

I also believe in the empowerment of the publisher to choose what is right for their business.

Some books are commercial enough that a publisher will pick it up because they believe it can make money for them. Some publishers may publish books because of love, not money but the bills still have to be paid.

Of course there are lots of great books that didn’t get picked up by the industry and many authors who feel disempowered by this rejection. Some authors have had bad experiences and have a justified grudge. But some books are just not right for traditional publishers at the time they were queried. The brilliant thing these days is that those books can be independently published by the author and do fantastically well. The author is empowered to publish.

But that doesn’t mean people should stop querying or aiming for a traditional deal if they want to.

I was on a panel on Radio Litopia the other night, discussing the London Book Fair and the launch of the Alliance of Independent Authors. In the chat room, it was suggested that all successful indies just wanted a book deal, and if they took it, they were somehow crossing a line. That they were betraying the indie ideal and proving that the establishment is all anybody wants.

But this clearly isn’t true either. There are successful indies accepting book deals, but they are plenty of authors leaving traditional to go indie, but who are not getting reported on.

So I think authors need to be empowered to consider their choices per book.

Is this book something a traditional publisher might be interested in?
Is this book something I want to relinquish control of?
Is this a project I prefer to have creative direction on?

Because most authors write more than one book.

Let’s face it. There’s so much creativity in all of us, and we have years of creation and publication ahead.

I am currently writing my 3rd novel in the ARKANE series, Exodus, and I have ideas for several stand-alone as well as more in this series. My current fiction is probably commercial enough for the traditional market, so I may decide to query it, although I am very happy with my indie sales so far.

I am also working on a re-release of my non-fiction book, How To Love Your Job…Or Get A New One (out in May). There is no way I would query that. Firstly because it is from my heart and the book I needed to write four years ago to change my life. The rewrite contains everything I have learned since then. Also, it’s not commercial enough for them and so wouldn’t be worth it. I believe in the book but I definitely want it to be published on my terms.

Lots of books written means lots of choice.

There are authors already managing the hybrid model.

Joe Konrath is always talked about as an example. He has books with Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer as well as his own indie books. Barry Eisler is another famous example, but I’d like to call out several other great authors who are rocking the hybrid model.

CJ Lyons has 16 novels and over the years has been with four different publishers for various books but after looking at her options, she decided to publish some books independently including some from her back-list that she had the rights back for. In September 2011 she hit the New York Times bestseller list with an indie book, Blind Faith, which was then sold to Minotaur. However, she continues to publish indie books, including recent success Bloodstained, currently rocking the Kindle charts at #60 overall as I write. [If you want to learn from CJ, check out these courses.]

Michael Wallace signed with Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer imprint in a 5 book deal for his awesome suspense thrillers set in a polygamist enclave. But he also has 8 more books that he has independently published. Michael writes about the importance of persistence in this article.

Recent news has Boyd Morrison dropped by his publisher in the US, but who still has traditional deals in other markets. So he will be in perhaps the unique position of publishing his next book independently in the US, but traditionally everywhere else. Now that is really the hybrid model!

As I was about to post this, uber-author Jackie Collins wrote a blog post about her decision to self-publish. Clearly she has a a lot of books with traditional publishing but in this case she says “you’ve always got to be thinking two steps ahead of the game.” There are a lot of great nuggets for authors in that post. Definitely go read it.

This is actually the model I would like to have. Some books with traditional publishers and others indie published. Isn’t that the best of both worlds?

I am more aware of thriller authors, since this is the genre I read and write in, but perhaps you have other examples of hybrid authors – or perhaps you are one. I’d love to know your thoughts on this, so please do leave a comment.

 

 

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

Are You Trying to Create an “Impossible” Book?

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I don’t know about you, but I hate disappointing people. Authors have something to say, a message to get out, or a story that has to be told. They may have products to sell, too, but it’s no small thing to put your name on a book and send it out into the world.

Publishing promises to fulfill the goals we have for our books. But it’s no fun sitting across from an author and listening to her describe the book she dreams of publishing, only to realize that she’s stumbled into one of the biggest traps for self-publishers.

What’s that trap? Trying to create an “impossible” book.

I know you’re wondering exactly what I mean by an “impossible” book, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

It seems like new technologies really make our imagination light up, often with fantastic ideas of how we can use these technologies to create great books.

But sometimes the ideas we come up with are actual fantasies, and that’s not so good.

These days we can create books lots of ways:

  • Print books at offset book printers
  • Upload book files to print on demand suppliers
  • Create ebooks for different ereaders

When looking at a book, most novice publishers can’t tell how it was produced, or why it was produced that way. That’s understandable; otherwise they wouldn’t be newbies, would they?

But here’s the problem. Sometimes we think we can take the technology of one method and use it to create books that are usually produced by a different method.

This is particularly true now, when books are easier and faster to publish than ever before. However, we haven’t repealed the laws of physics yet, or the laws of economics either.

Examples from Real Life

What’s an “impossible” book? Consider this statement from an author (and maybe you’ve had thoughts like this too):

“I want my book to be just like a regular book but I want a couple of color photos inside because that way the readers will be able to see the [scene/parts of the process/complex diagram/beautiful dress] exactly the way it’s supposed to be seen.”

Book printing technology won’t let you easily drop a couple of color photos into a black and white book. Of course you could do it, but you would end up with either bad color reproduction or an awkward and expensive book that no one would buy.

It’s just the nature of the printing methods we have available right now. The day may come when these books become possible, but it hasn’t arrived yet.

Books with good color reproduction are printed by specialty printers on paper designed for that purpose. These books are more expensive to produce, heavier, and don’t make particularly good reading if most of the book is text.

Here’s another example:

“My book needs to be done with print on demand because I can’t afford a print run, but it’s also important to me that it’s affordable, so I want to keep the price of my 480-page novel under $10.”

Well, I’d like that too, but it just can’t be done. If you wanted to sell this book through online retailers like Amazon, you’ll need to give up a discount that would result in you losing a dollar for each book sold.

When you see books like these in the stores and wonder why you can’t do that too, remember that the publisher may have printed 10,000, 20,000 or more copies in order to get the cost per book low enough to sell at that price. Are you going to do that? I hope not, it usually doesn’t work out well for self-publishers.

Book sales are as much about how your books are distributed as anything else. The distribution methods available to you—a small self-publisher—will mandate how your book is produced and priced, and how much you profit from it.

How about one more?

“My gallery opening isn’t for 2 more months, so I’d like to get my book of [photographs/artwork/children’s drawings/interior designs/fashion] designed and printed and available by then.”

The best choice for most self-publishers to create a full-color books is to print them in Asia. Through a good print broker you’ll be able to get prices you just can’t match here in the United States. But overseas book production, even after the book is completely finished at your end, will take 8 to 10 weeks (with no hiccups).

Even then, you may have to deal with getting your books through customs, transporting them to their final destination and making plans for distribution and fulfillment.

Creating Books That Sell

When you begin to see what’s involved in matching up the realities of production with the vision of self-publishers, you realize that getting all this straight is one of the first things you need to do if you’re considering publishing your own books.

The projects that seem to work best for self-publishers get it right. They:

  • Match up with what their potential readers look for in a book
  • Have distribution that reaches those readers
  • Are priced to get the best production for those readers within that distribution channel

When it all lines up your book can truly fulfill the goals you’ve set for it.

I’ve seen too many authors spend lots of money—I’m talking tens of thousands of dollars—on software, designs, cover images and all the other preparation books take, without realizing that the book they are creating may be unwise, unprofitable, or even “impossible.”

So do your planning wisely. If possible, talk to someone who has produced the kind of books you want to create, and who understands the realities of how books are made. They will give you some guidance early in your process.

You’ll be glad you did.

 

This is a cross-posting from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

Working with an Editor: Got My Edits Back. Now What?

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This post, by Cheri Lasota, originally appeared on her site on 7/15/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

I was about to email this information to one of my editing clients (yes, I edit fiction as well), but realized many writers out there could benefit from these tips. I’ve worked with dozens upon dozens of writers through the years, and I walk each of them through the best way to go about incorporating my comments and edits into their manuscripts ( MS). It can be overwhelming and sometimes even devastating for a writer to receive a manuscript back that looks like the editor dumped a can of red paint on it. I know. I’ve been on the receiving end for my own novel, Artemis Rising.

Here are the steps, in order, of how to go about receiving and revising your manuscript edit from an agent, editor, critique group, or kind friend with time on his or her hands.

Give yourself some peace and quiet.

Carve out a quiet block of time—several hours’ worth—to read through your MS. Try to clear your mind of distractions, upcoming appointments, the fight you had with your significant other. If you don’t have time to browse through slowly, then hold off until you do. The reason? If you’re rushed, you won’t be able to take anything in or think critically about it. The more you can retain in this first pass-​​through the better. In fact, it’s imperative. I’ve initially zoomed through edits from critique groups and failed to catch important points and suggestions. And worse, I’ve misread comments as snarky or unkind, when in truth, they were just specific and honest. When I cooled off and read back through, I would have to adjust my incorrect assumptions, which wasted my time and energy. In general, a critiquer or editor’s goal is to aid you in achieving your dream of publication. They wish to make your manuscript better, albeit through their own subjective viewpoint. But we’re all human, and sometimes editors/​critiquers aren’t as tactful as we could be. This is something, the writer must anticipate and eventually overlook. Why? Because you might miss the valuable advice buried under the snarkiness.

Don’t scan or skip.

Don’t skip ahead and scan through a document looking for how much the editor’s pen has bled onto the page. This is a self-​​defeating exercise from the beginning. Why? Because many of those comments might be praise. I often litter manuscripts with praise and encouragement. I do this because I know how important it is for writers to know when they are hitting the mark on their language, characterization, or plot.

Sit on the manuscript.

Yes, you heard me. Sit on your MS, like a chicken incubating an egg. That’s quite literally—okay, metaphorically—what you are doing. Incubating, concocting, inventing, spawning . . . That last one sounds wrong, doesn’t it? Anyhoo, let that sucker fester for a LONG time. I mean it. Don’t touch it after you’ve read all the edits and comments. I recommend two weeks at least. Perhaps a month. Here’s why: a writer’s natural response to criticism—either positive or negative—is to be defensive. That doesn’t make the writer childish or foolish. It is just a natural response, and waiting to dive into revisions cools off that natural tendency. If you wait for a long time before jumping in, you’ll be shocked at how different your response is to the edits than the first time around. I’m always surprised at the difference, and I’ve been at this for years.

Mull over your options.

During your "vacation" from the MS, start thinking about some of the major issues the editor mentioned. Allow yourself to come up with ideas for how to fix that character’s inconsistent personality or that plot hole in chapter nine. Maybe write some notes down to remember for later or freewrite possible avenues to explore. But again, don’t touch the MS. You’ll thank yourself later, when you’ve had time to let your anger or confusion cool and you begin to see the edits for the first time with clear, objective eyes.

Make a copy.

Whether you’re working with hard copy or electronic edits, you’ll want to start revising in a COPY of the manuscript the editor worked on. You want to preserve those original comments/​edits for future reference as well as keep your original draft intact in case you need to go back to it for any reason. So copy and rename that master file with the current day’s date. And every day you work on your edits, save the previous day’s draft, and start a new file with the current days’ date. This way, you’ll have a log of all edits you’ve ever done and when. Works brilliantly. I learned that trick from the president of a publishing house actually. And don’t worry about drafts filling up your hard drive. Your manuscript file is probably not even a megabyte, which is nothing compared to one music or photo file. Oh, yes . . . one more thing: BACK UP YOUR NOVEL FILES frequently. All of them. Most of us have lost drafts to laziness, stupidity, or busyness. Learn from those previous mistakes. Back up, even if you are just emailing the file to yourself. ‘Nuff said.

Turn your Track Changes ON!

After your "vacation," give yourself a long block of time to begin looking at your MS. Have a notepad by your computer or an open blank document up to write notes. Critical at this stage: turn your Track Changes on (in Microsoft Word). Yes, you heard me right. Any changes you make need to be tracked from here on out. Why? Because you are more likely to introduce errors into your manuscript at this stage than at any other. Yup. This is because despite your best efforts, you’ll start rushing through accepting edits, and you won’t pay attention to the fact that an extra space just slipped into that sentence or the first letter wasn’t capitalized, etc. This happens ALL the time. Trust me. I know.

Choose your direction.

This depends on the type of edit/​critique you’ve received, but usually you can separate your edit into the "easy stuff" and the "hard stuff." The easy stuff is straight copyediting issues: grammar, punctuation, etc. These are relatively quick fixes. I have to say that I heartily recommend this route. It will:

  • ease you into the revision process.
  • eliminate a lot of the editing marks that are riddling your document.
  • ensure that most of your grammatical problems are fixed before you press on to more difficult edits.

Conversely, you could go straight to the more time-​​consuming developmental or substantive edits. Bear in mind that this will save you some time if you end up cutting a lot of scenes from your manuscript. But again, I don’t recommend this route for the reasons I listed above.

Don’t just make changes. Learn!

If you’ve hired a professional editor to work on your manuscript, you’ve invested in that editor’s expertise and knowledge. To get the most from your investment, don’t just go through and blindly make changes. Understand why the editor has made these edits and suggestions. If you notice an editor has repeatedly added in paragraph breaks around blocks of dialogue, find out why. What is the general rule/​guideline? What is the goal? If you notice the editor has re-​​done your comma usage in a particular type of sentence construction, find out what you are doing wrong. Memorize that grammar rule. Look it up in the Chicago Manual of Style (the fiction writer’s style manual). Learn the rule and vow never to make that error again. This will aid you not only as you rewrite your current MS but in subsequent manuscripts as well.

Incorporate only what you feel will serve your story.

Remember that you don’t have to incorporate all suggestions. I personally break my edits into two categories:

  • Comment is optional/​recommended.
  • Ignore at your own risk.

My optional comments usually involve issues of language, style, voice, clarity, or sentence structure. I’ll suggest a change in these instances sometimes, but there are always other ways to smooth out structure, rhythm, or language in your own author’s voice. Often, I’ll set off these types of comments with a "consider this" or question mark to make its optional nature clear. For example, I might say: Delete this phrase to tighten the sentence structure here? Or: Consider expanding on your description of the MC to better illustrate her tendency toward self-​​deprecation. Other editors/​critiquers might use different methods, so ask them if you are unsure.

The key is to use both your head and your gut when making these decisions. If you feel a suggestion may compromise the overall plot or the characterization or the theme, etc., then put that comment on the back burner. You can always come back to it later or ignore it completely if you feel it doesn’t serve your story well.

WARNING: There is a big difference between deciding that a change isn’t right for your story and being too lazy to make the change. Confession: This is a problem for me personally as a writer. I’ll often see the merit in a critiquer’s suggestion, but due to lack of time or energy, I’ll put it aside and "conveniently" forget to go back to it. *blushes with shame* This is a bad practice for writers, considering that our ultimate goal is to better our books. And don’t forget that the critiquer took his or her valuable time to make the suggestion in the first place. So, don’t be lazy or use busyness as an excuse. Do the hard work—you won’t regret it.

Overhauling? Then get out of your MS.

If your editor has recommended doing major revisions to whole scenes or chapters, I highly recommend copying and pasting those scenes into a new document. Playing with ideas or major fixes outside of your master MS file accomplishes two things:

  • You eliminate the possibility of losing any valuable original material.
  • You allow yourself the freedom of exploring ideas and possibilities in a "throwaway" document.

Once you’ve rewritten a scene to your satisfaction, you’ll want to re-​​paste it into your master file and save the file again.

Take another vacation.

Once you’ve made (and tracked) all the edits you can bear to make without keeling over from exhaustion, then take another "vacation." Yes, you’ve earned it! But only a couple of days’ worth, because you’ve still got work to do on this draft. Once you’re back at it, go through the MS again and accept your tracked changes one by one. Make sure that you double check those edits before you accept them, to ensure that you aren’t introducing more errors. You’ve spent countless hours on spit-​​polishing your masterpiece; you don’t want to screw anything up at this point, eh?

Get to work!

All right, now that you know all my secrets for a proper revision, you’ve no more excuses. Get to work and get that manuscript out there already!

 

What Will Become of the Book?

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This guest post, by Charles Rosenberg, originally appeared on Two Ends of the Pen on 5/4/12.

In April, I attended both the IBPA "Publishing University" in San Francisco and the 2012 Left Coast Crime mystery fan conference in Sacramento. In both places, I heard many people ask, in one way or another, "What will become of the book?" They were talking about the book as print on paper.

That question contains within it both an assumption and a lament. The assumption is that we have, up until now, all shared a common understanding of what is meant by the word "book." The implied lament in the question is the emotional equivalent of asking: What will become of Grandma now that we’ve left her by the side of the road and driven away?"

In this blog post, I want to explore both the rapidly changing meaning of "book" and the feeling of lament about those changes.

What Is a "Book," Exactly?

In the long-ago year of 2006, before the first Kindle was released, we had, I think, a culture-wide understanding of what the English word "book" meant when applied to a physical object. It meant text or pictures on sheets of paper, the sheets bound together at one end, called the spine (usually stitched or glued, but sometimes bound in other ways), with a protective cover made of thicker paper, cardboard or some other material stronger than the sheets of paper within. There were indeed many subcategories of books — hardback books, paperback books, art books, comic books, graphical books, notebooks, workbooks, etc., etc. — but, one way or another, all *books. So if you said to someone in 2005, "I just read a great book," most people wouldn’t have bothered to ask what physical form the book took.

That was then.

Now, with the advent of the Kindle, the Nook, the iPad, the iPhone, and numerous other smart phones and tablets, the term "e-book" has arisen, which has begun to upend our more than one thousand year-old understanding of what the word "book" means in physical terms. Think about it: e-books are not made of paper and do not contain pages that are physically bound together with stitches or glue. If they have a cover, its function is not to use thicker/better/stronger digits to protect the text on the inside. Its function is more-or-less to announce the book. Kind of like a butler. Indeed, an e-book is not a physical object at all, although it is contained within one. Yet I don’t think many people would think of a Kindle or an iPad as a book.

As a result, the meaning of the word book has begun to change, to mean text and/or images of a certain length and format rather than a physical object. You can figure this out just by listening to people talk. You will not usually hear someone say: "I just read a great e-book." For an increasing number of people, whether a text was read in digital form or on paper has become a matter of indifference, and yet they still refer to having read a "book." Of course, someone listening to the statement may enquire if the book is available as an e-book. But the question may be generated as much by their "platform" reading preference or on their assumption that the e-book will be less expensive as by any desire to know how the reader accessed the book.

Is This Really Anything New?

From what I’ve read, change is nothing new for books.

Starting around 400 A.D., the bound book became dominant, at least in the West, over the scroll, which has receded into mainly ceremonial use (e.g., the Torah). The bound book had large advantages over the scroll: It was less expensive (you could write on both sides of the page), it was more easily stored and transported (try stacking scrolls), it had what we would today call "random access" (you could reach any page without unrolling), and it was harder to damage (covers really do protect). It was also easier to hide. This was apparently important to early Christian groups, who favored the book over the scroll.

 

Read the rest of the post on Two Ends of the Pen.

Is the Free Ride Really Over?

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This post, by Andrew E. Kaufman, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective site and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

I’m hearing a lot of talk lately among authors that the Amazon Select program is losing steam and no longer spurring the kinds of sales it once did. Many are reporting diminished numbers and poor results after their free giveaways. Rumors are spreading from blog to blog that on May 1st, Amazon abruptly changed its algorithms (The “customers also bought” section) so that free books are now given only ten percent weight in the rankings, in effect making ten free downloads really only equal to one sale. Also, borrowed books supposedly no longer count as sales where rankings are concerned.

 
I don’t know if all this is true, but a lot of people seem  pretty upset. Authors are complaining that Amazon wants them to give away their books for free with no benefit to sales. They’re threatening to withdraw their work from KDP Select and upload them to Smashwords.  Others are trying to decide whether to stick it out with a wait-and-see attitude. 
 
Many have benefited greatly from the Select program. I am one of them. My sales are still going strong, and I haven’t seen the diminished numbers others are reporting. I feel fortunate for that, but my suspicion is that while the free promos may have given me a good bump at the outset, what’s happening now is something entirely different. I never stopped promoting once the giveaways ended, and I’ve never relied on the Select program to carry me forever. I’m not saying that others have; I’m simply recounting my own experience.
 
But in the back of my mind, I’ve always wondered just how long the Select Effect would last. When it began, it seemed like a mad free-for-all, literally, and suddenly the market was flooded with free books. It only seemed logical that eventually, consumers might feel overwhelmed by it all, that they would grow tired, and yes, that the value of e-books might become diluted. After all, there are so many books and so little time to read them all. There’s no telling how many free books are sitting on Kindles now—and even worse, how many of them will ever actually be read.
 

I’m not a gloom-and-doom person, and I suspect that even if my sales weren’t doing well, I wouldn’t be one of those complaining right now. I still choose to see the glass as half full. Many authors are forgetting that even if they give away a lot of books and don’t see an immediate boost in sales, those are seeds that have been planted, and they’re getting the benefit of gaining new readers they never had before. I’ve learned that in this business, too fast never lasts, and that slow and steady wins the race. It’s how I’ve built my audience over the years. Besides that, there’s still the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, and at least for me, it’s been like having extra books up for sale—money in my pocket I wouldn’t normally have.

The thing is, I don’t think the Select program was ever intended to carry authors forever; I think it was intended to give them exposure, help get their books into new readers’ hands, and ultimately, help them grow their readerships, and I still think it’s doing that. What happens after is really up to the authors. It’s not Amazon’s job to do all the work so our books can sell—it’s ours—and it’s not much to ask if we meet them half way.

The truth is, the free ride really isn’t over because in fact, one was never offered.