Think

Opinion pieces offering commentary on various aspects of book culture, publishing and self-publishing.

Dealing With Characters In A Series Of Novels

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I’m preparing to write the 6th mystery in my Enos Hobson Leavenworth Mysteries Series; therefore, some of that which I will share with you is fresh in my mind. As a professional storyteller, I have always believed that the best stories are based around their characters. If we don’t consider characters, there is no basis for plot.

When I wrote my first book in my series, I considered who I would need to tell my story. I named them, assigned them roles, defined their appearances, defined their interactions, and considered their back stories to explain who they were and why. I developed a computer data base to keep all that straight, which became my Bible or ready character reference. That data base has become rather extensive now. I needed a system to determine how my characters should change or stay the same. The following is a method that seems to work well for me:

Character Development Spreadsheet

You can use a spread sheet or a table in a word processor to do this. Create three columns, 1 for the character’s name. 1 for the good things, & 1 for the bad things. This is not a Bible but a simple set of statements of where each character is at the start of the story and in what directions should he or she go in this story. It looks something like this:

Character:
Good  –   Negatives

Tommy (protagonist):
Proud of HS graduation.  –  Doesn’t know where money for college will come from.

Lucy (Girlfriend):
Happy she & Tommy graduated.   –    Going away to college. Needs to break up with Tommy.

Bill (Tommy’s Brother):
Looking forward to being star of football team.  –   Will become paralyzed by a car wreck soon.

Dad:
Plays favorites w/ Tommy.  –   Bill’s injury causes Dad to begin drinking heavily again, losing job.

Jimbo (Hoodlum):
Has been gone to reform school.  –   Gets out, gets drunk, crashes into Bill’s car to cause the injury.

Now, this is way too simplistic of an example, but it helps to develop character motivations and directions in the story. You can see the possibilities for conflict already. Is Tommy going to possibly be placed in a position of either ignoring the family problems, forget about college to help the family with Bill since Dad is no longer capable of doing so? Should he acquiesce to the breakup or try to go to Lucy’s school? What will happen to Jimbo. Should he become a major character who reforms and takes on responsibility to help Bill throughout the story? Or, should he be sent to jail for the rest of the story?

A lot depends on what has happened in previous stories and deciding if the characters should stay the same or should they grow and develop in different directions?  Once all this is decided, you can decide how they fit within the context of a set of plot points. In other words, where have they been, where are they right now, and where will they be going.

Outline

Now it’s time to list the chapter numbers and consider what happens in the story along the way to the end by considering the good and negative aspects of the characters. I write a few sentences about what should happen in each chapter right under the chapter number. Those stay in as a reference until I write each chapter, after which I delete them. This insures the characters go in the directions I felt they should be going. Now I realize this process may sound too much like a strait jacket to you seat-of-your-pants writers, but there is plenty of room in this structure for your muse to run wild. None of this has to be locked in concrete. There are times when I have changed the descriptive sentences under a chapter number to accommodate a creative idea I got that would change everything. The methodology is meant as a means to energize creativity while keeping the story on track with good reasons for all the characters doing what they do.

Blending Techniques

I do the spread sheets and then I use Contour software (designed for screenplays, but I’ve found it works for novels as well) which asks pertinent questions that cause one to create a meaningful story framework. Once I’m done with that, I combine the considerations of both approaches to create the chapter outlines.

 

This is a reprint from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

I Didn't Plan This Post

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I didn’t think that much about this post at first. When the title came to me it was after a few minutes of sitting here, realizing that I really didn’t have a plan for this week’s post. I had this vague notion that I wanted to write something here before the work week was over, but I really didn’t have a specific idea I wanted to develop into an article. Then I realized that the subject of planning itself – especially in the context of writing – was a worthy subject. It’s one that I do address from time to time, but I will admit that I’m not the best planner.

You see, I’m not a planner by nature at all. I struggle daily with the concepts of planning, scheduling, and setting goals. What articles I write about it only serve to heighten my awareness of this need to have a plan. Clearly, I am not alone in this. You know very well what it’s like, those of you who also don’t find that planning is a natural tendency. You struggle with meshing your chaotic thoughts into coherent sentences just as much as I do.

The Plan Itself

Plans are a tool of structure and order. They also have the added bonus of helping you get things done more efficiently and with fewer problems in the long-run. For the writer, the plan can sometimes get mixed up with certain attitudes about outlining, but I’m sure most of you long ago read in one of those many writer’s guides that we don’t necessary need to follow some stringent outline structure like we used when we were high school. I wouldn’t dare suggest that for any of you. I certainly have not desire to codify my thoughts about how a piece of writing is put together using letters, Roman numerals, and the like.  Plans are pretty flexible things when you think about it. They can be conceived in an endless variety forms and are used to accomplish all manner of things in our lives – every single day.

When a plan is conceived and brought to fruition you have to smile at the pleasure the one who pulled it off must be feeling.  Think about it this way. Say if you’re working on a book and you spend some time at the beginning to jot down some notes about what you want to happen; it doesn’t have to be static. You’re merely giving yourself some rough guides going forward. Now, picture the finish line folks. You’ve used that plan to finish your story in a more sensible manner. You no longer have to wait for so-call inspiration to cast you headlong into a story with no sense of the purpose or the goal of the narrative. That little plan is your insider’s guide. You know where it’s all headed. 

 

As For Me

The point where the rubber meets to road for me is actually learning what is involved in conceiving a good plan. Depending on the subject or project you have before you, the plan may be rather small – a few points jotted down on paper to tell you what needs to be done in order complete the task. That is really enough sometimes. Now, the more complex your gig is, the more you’ll have to think about it. Nobody wants to get bogged down in ill-conceived ideas. (I know I don’t.) That sort of cinches it for me, really. I need a plan going forward. In fact, there is a need for more than one plan. I have lots of things going on at once so I need a cohesive strategy to make it all fit.

In the end, all I have to say is, "I love when a plan comes together."

 

This is a reprint from Shaun C. Kilgore‘s blog.

Painful DRMs and Ebook Pricing

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I am not an early adopter. I love gadgets, but I like to wait until most of the bugs have been worked out. Then I wait a little longer until I’m sure it’s a tool I’m really going to use and not a toy I’ll toss aside in a couple of months. So I was really excited about finally buying an eReader last month.

Alas, my excitement was short lived upon discovering my new gadget couldn’t read several of my previously downloaded books. No problem, I thought. I’d just convert them with this nifty software I’d read about.

Wrong! Until that moment I had little understanding just how DRMs affected me personally. Suddenly I’m faced with undesirable choices: a) pay for yet another eBook version, b) read it on my laptop only, c) learn to strip the DRMs from my eBooks, d) forget the whole thing. While b and d are the simplest solutions, I am actually hovering between paying what I considerate an exorbitant amount for an eBook and learning how to “pirate” my own books for my own personal use, which brings me to my topic: eBook pricing.

Traditional publishers have missed the boat when it comes to eBook pricing. In fact, many aren’t even on the loading dock. As JA Konrath points out in his post “Ebook Pricing,” customers want to pay less for eBooks than they would for a hard copy. It’s always made sense to me as a customer, but as a business person/Independent Author I wondered if it was wise to price an eBook low. If Konrath’s numbers are to be believed, however, the lower the price, the better the sales, the more money you can pocket.

With so many eBook avenues opening up to Independent Authors from Amazon’s Digital Text Platform for Kindle to Barnes and Noble’s new PubIt! pricing for high sale volume seems the better choice on The Road to Writing.

Author generated links:
April Hamilton’s post “Avast Ye Lubbers and Hear Ye Me Pirates” on eBook piracy tells of an honest woman pushed into piracy.

 

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

J.A. Konrath: eBooks And The Ease Of Self-Publishing

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This article, by J.A. Konrath, originally appeared on The Huffington Post on 10/16/10.

October 19th is the release date for "Draculas," a horror novel that I wrote with Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson. How four guys were able to collaborate on a single narrative is an interesting story, but not as interesting as the way "Draculas" is being released.

Though together we have over sixty years of experience in the print industry and have worked with dozens of publishers, we’ve decided to make "Draculas" a Kindle exclusive. Not only that, but we’re publishing it ourselves.

The choice to circumvent Big New York Publishing was easy. We all have print deals, and probably could have sold this project to a major publishing house, but the reasons to go the indie route instead of the traditional one were numerous.

First was an issue of time. We wanted "Draculas" to launch before Halloween, but we’d only finished writing and editing the novel in September. There was no possible way a major publisher could go from first draft to live within three weeks. But we did.

With Amazon’s assistance, we were able to put up a pre-order page and a free teaser last month, though we’d only written the first few chapters by that point. Like a traditionally published book, this allowed us to build buzz and accrue some advance sales.

Based on some of my experiments on Kindle, we’re pricing "Draculas" at $2.99–something no Big Publisher has done for a new release (except for AmazonEncore, who is releasing my thriller novel "Shaken" next week at that price point.) We’re also releasing it without DRM (digital rights management), which is another thing no publisher will allow (except for AmazonEncore.)

 

Read the rest of the article on The Huffington Post.

Self Publishing Success: A New Author Shares Her Journey In New Era Book Publishing

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This article, from Israel Vasquetelle, originally appeared on AwarenessMogul on 9/13/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with the author’s permission.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing author M. Louisa Locke. Her first novel, a Victorian era mystery, has managed to reach an audience despite not benefiting from the resources of a traditional book publisher. She’s not a household name, at least not yet, however, in the era of new media and the technology that makes it these channels possible, it’s not necessary to have a huge audience to find success.

Locke is part of a growing contingency of authors that have chosen to bypass the lottery-like odds that require the need to gain the limited attention of traditional publishers. Instead of chasing a middleman, she reaches a potential audience by utilizing the democratizing services of digital distributors and print on demand services that helped her to make her title a reality.

Traditionally, authors with aspirations of making it alongside bestsellers on bookshelves would need to convince gatekeepers of their potential to sell huge quantities. Obviously, only a tiny percentage of those considered ever garner a book deal. Once getting through that level of immense scrutiny, typically, for a new author, that means a small advance and a ticket on a waiting list that could last many months or years. Furthermore, for better or worse, the author’s words are subject to a barrage of changes and revisions by editors. If, and when the book finally hits the market, it will only receive the promotional resources of its publisher for a very short window of time. 

In many instances, the author also finds themselves investing their own funds and efforts to further promote the title. If an author is to realize income from the sale of the book, the revenue realized by the publisher first must offset expenses associated with the printing, packing, shipping, and marketing of that title. The publisher first has to recoup a bulk of their investment– including advance monies paid to the author– before the book’s creator ever has a shot at realizing further revenue. Even then, the potential of revenue in most cases is miniscule. This is because the author’s share is derived from a small percentage of sales. Because of this fairly standard model, only a small percentage of authors actually reap financial rewards from the sale of their product- beyond an initial modest advance. Without an impressive amount of sales, it may take quite a while for their next book to reach a bookshelf, if ever. Many authors understand these issues, however, continue to choose this route as a shot at reaching an audience and for the potential prestige associated with being a published author.

Due to changes in distribution and how people consume books, the publishing paradigm continues to change rapidly. Not too long ago Amazon announced that over 50% of its book sales are now coming from digital sales. This is great news for many authors that would never have a shot of having their books on the shelves of a Borders or Barnes & Noble nationally. Today, these authors can have their books sold right alongside the biggest-sellers on places like Amazon and B&N. And, its not just digital versions that are on these virtual shelves, physical books are now printed as orders come in. Technology makes it possible to forgo the need to incur the overhead of advance printing and then the shipping and storing for a book that may take months, if not longer, to sell. Even with these advances, sales aren’t going to happen effortlessly. Just making the content available doesn’t guarantee its consumption. Ultimately, the product has to be good and new authors must also be savvy marketers willing to participate in a variety of activities online to connect with audiences. For authors like Locke that fit that criteria, the opportunity for success is more of a reality than ever before.

Unlike the stories that we’re used to reading about the million-selling success of blockbusters, new stories will continue to emerge of a new type of media success that doesn’t involve immense budgets and multinational conglomerates. These individuals don’t have to recoup millions, hundreds of thousands, or in some cases not even thousands of dollars to be in the black. Many just have to reach hundreds or maybe thousands of interested readers. So, what is success in this new space? Everyone has a different definition, for many authors it’s simply making their work easily accessible by an audience and being fairly compensated for that consumption. Locke is realizing this achievement. In this interview, Locke shares her journey of publishing, technology, new media, and reaching an audience.

Can you discuss the premise of your book?

My book, The Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery, is the first in a planned series of historical mysteries set in 1879 San Francisco and featuring Annie Fuller, a young widow who runs a boarding house. Annie supplements her income as the clairvoyant, Madam Sibyl, who gives business and domestic advice. When one of Madam Sibyl’s clients dies, Annie, with the help of a local lawyer, Nate Dawson, investigates his death.

From the beginning it was my intention to use the historical mystery genre to illuminate the late Victorian world of women and work. Maids of Misfortune focuses on domestic service, the most prevalent paid female occupation of the period, while Uneasy Spirits, the sequel I am currently working on, examines nineteenth century spiritualism and female trance mediums. Subsequent books in the series will concentrate on teaching, clerical work, and other common forms of paid work for women. These books will also investigate the Victorian gender system through the developing attraction between Annie and Nate. Of course, despite these historical themes, my primary purpose is to tell entertaining stories, with tension, romance, and humor.

As a college history professor, you obviously have a passion for the subject. Can you discuss what finally convinced you to write your book after being inspired so many years ago?

I actually had the idea for the book thirty years ago while working on my dissertation for a doctorate in history. I was reading a diary of a domestic servant who was complaining about being locked out of the house, and it gave me the idea for a locked room mystery. Ten years later, when I thought I would be stuck in the underpaid career of adjunct teaching, I wrote a first draft of the mystery. Then I was offered a full time job teaching at a local community college. This twenty-year career as a history professor was an extremely satisfying one, but it kept me so busy that I didn’t have the time to devote to writing and trying to sell the book.

However, I never gave up my determination to become a published author. I remained active in a writer’s critique group, I worked on rewriting sections of the book, and I kept up on trends in publishing. When I cut back on my teaching (instead of teaching 5 classes a semester, I only teach one), I knew I had to give my writing career one more chance.

I felt that Maids of Misfortune was a book that deserved to be read, and what I had learned about the new opportunities provided by self-publishing, ebooks, and print on demand technology convinced me that I didn’t have to depend on the traditional publishing route to make that happen. That was very liberating, and I have been pleased with my experience as an indie author.

There is a level of responsibility and control when you self-publish that is both terrifying and gratifying. I knew that I had to get my manuscript to the same level of professional writing as a traditionally published book–that was the terrifying part. At the same time, I had complete control over the text, cover and interior design, and marketing, and when the final product was finished and began to sell–that was very gratifying.

Your book falls into a unique niche due to it being a romance novel focusing on a Victorian era female sleuth. Can you discuss how your audience has managed to find you and your book?

At this point, I haven’t really positioned the book in the romance genre, although I do believe that fans of this kind of fiction would enjoy the book. This is simply because the romance in the book, while a strong part of the story, is subordinate to the mystery. In addition, there isn’t the explicit sex that readers of romances often expect.

Instead, I have concentrated on marketing Maids of Misfortune as part of the historical mystery sub-genre. To that end I contacted those websites that specialize in historical mysteries. For example, there is a site called Crime Thru Time and another called Historical Mystery Fiction that list mysteries by era. This is one way to make sure people who read this sort of fiction will find my book.

Amazon’s browsing capabilities may be the best way that fans of the historical mystery genre have of finding me. I specifically put the words "Victorian" and "Mystery" into my book title, and as a result, if you put in the words "Victorian mystery" into an Amazon book search, Maids of Misfortune consistently shows up on the first page, even when I hadn’t yet sold many books. In addition, Amazon’s "Customers Who Bought This Item, Also Bought…" programming very quickly began to list my book when people bought other better-known Victorian mysteries.

Perhaps most importantly, Amazon permits people to browse in its Kindle and print bookstores, and one specific sub-category is historical mysteries. At first, because of a computer glitch, my book didn’t show up under that path, but when this error was corrected, Maids of Misfortune started showing up as one of the top three bestsellers in this category on Kindle, and one of the top 100 in Amazon’s book store. Therefore, anyone looking for an historical mystery of any type is going to find mine, is going to see the 4 1/2 stars, the positive reviews, and the free sample. According to Amazon’s data, consistently 80% of the customers who click onto the product page for the print book go on to purchase it, and over 90% of the Kindle customers who click onto the book product page go on to buy the book. I think this is probably the main way I sell the book.

I know you have a blog, can you discuss a bit about how you connect with your audience there and on any other online platforms or social networks?

My blog, The Front Parlor, is the main place where I have chronicled my path as an indie author. I wrote a series of three long posts on "Why I decided to self-publish," and later addressed how I handled the lack of a professional editor in a series of posts entitled, "How to be your own best editor." These topics doesn’t necessarily translate into potential sales of my book, since people interested in this subject may not be interested in buying historical mysteries.

However, when I entered a contest on Publetariat, a site devoted to self-publishing, and won, this began to expose me to a much larger national audience. Once I became a regular contributor to this site and Maids of Misfortune began to be advertised on the site (as a consequence of winning the contest), I noticed an uptick in sales.

When I first published my book, I made an announcement on Facebook, and much to my pleasure a good number of old high school friends and acquaintances ordered the book. On the other hand, as of yet I don’t have an enormous number of Facebook "friends" so the impact of this has been rather limited (except I continue to hear about other people learning about the book through "word of mouth" from these first buyers).

I do use twitter, although again, like Facebook, my contacts are limited. I find twitter a great way to keep up on publishing trends, and I try to follow people who have shown interest in historical mysteries, which may have garnered me sales. I admire writers who make good use of twitter, but so far I haven’t figured out a way to use either twitter or Facebook efficiently or effectively. There are lots of "how to" advice articles on using social media to promote your books, but most of the suggestions seem to require a good deal of time (which takes me away from writing), or a kind of direct promotion with which I feel uncomfortable.

Can you discuss other ways that you build awareness for your book?

There are a good number of sites where readers hang out and chat about books, and I have just begun the process of joining and participating on these sites. Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari are the most famous. Each of these sites has smaller groups or forums that concentrate on different kinds of genre fiction–including historical mysteries. There are also specialized sites like the delightful romance fiction site, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and Historical Fiction Online, and KindleBoards. Every time I join in on a conversation on one of those sites, I am essentially introducing myself to new readers, who if they like what I have to say might check out my profile, see that I have published a book, and might eventually buy that book.

It is important to actually participate on these sites in an honest fashion rather than just joining to promote your book (readers are very touchy about this). I am a life-long reader and fan of mysteries and historical fiction (and devoted Kindle fan), so this really isn’t much of a hardship, but it does take time.

Have you reached out to press or new media outlets for coverage?

Standard print media outlets generally do not review self-published books or ebooks (or genre fiction for that matter). If my first book continues to do as well as it has, when I am ready to publish my next book I will probably contact my local paper, because at that point I will have an established track record, and they might be more likely to take me seriously.

In contrast, Internet reviewers seem more comfortable with the new trends in publishing, and there are an expanding number of bloggers who specialize in reviewing genre fiction. I queried 14 reviewers, got requests for review copies of the book from six, and eventually received four reviews, all positive. Traditional book publishers send hundreds of review copies of books out to reviewers, but I don’t know what kind of return they get on this effort in terms of reviews if the book isn’t by an established, best-selling author.

I did submit Maids of Misfortune to two contests for self published books as a way to garner press. I was a finalist in the historical fiction category in the 2010 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and this meant that my book was part of this organization’s promotional activities, including the distribution of their catalog at Book Expo America in New York. (The second contest won’t announce winners until October.)

Can you describe any promotional activities? I believe that I read that you offer a free ebook. How has that worked out in regards to building your audience and garnering sales?

I haven’t pursued the use of contests (with free giveaways), which is one promotional method that some authors are using, although one of the on-line reviewers gave away my book in one of her promotional contests.

What I did was write a short story, Dandy Detects, based on characters from my novel, and I offer that free on Smashwords (which because of its affiliations, means it is also free in the Barnes and Noble estore and Ibooks on the IPad.) Over 400 copies of this short story have been downloaded on Smashwords, which means 400 potential buyers of Maids of Misfortune. A number of people who have independently reviewed Maids of Misfortune on Amazon, Shelfari, etc., mentioned reading Dandy Detects first.

Unfortunately, as a self-published author on Kindle, I couldn’t offer the story for free, but have to charge 99 cents. Even so, I have sold over 250 Dandy Detects on Kindle. But, I got a chance to see the effectiveness of offering free material when Steven Windwalker on Kindle Nation Daily featured Dandy Detects as part of his "Free Kindle Shorts" at the beginning of July. Within two days I sold 187 copies of Maids of Misfortune, I hit the top of "movers and shakers" on Amazon, and this is when I started showing up in the top of the bestselling list of historical mysteries.

Are you involved with any offline activities such as book readings or signings? Have you sold books directly to your audience at such outings? If you haven’t, why not, and would you consider? 

Book tours and books signings are the traditional methods of promotion for most authors (with the mailing of book marks, post cards, and newsletters as a way to tap into an existing fan base–a base that I am just now creating). I haven’t pursued any of these activities as of yet. I am not convinced from what I have read, and from the experiences of my friends who have published traditionally that these methods are cost effective.

In addition, it is very difficult to get self-published books into traditional bookstores (who would be then willing to host a book signing). This is the main marketing advantage traditionally published print books have over independently published (or electronic) books. Their sales departments sell to bookstores, and then an author can book a signing with stores (who benefit because it brings traffic into the store).

Self-published authors can sometimes convince bookstores to carry their books on consignment (particularly if it is a local author with a certain local fan base). The local mystery bookstore in San Diego, Mysterious Galaxy, has agreed to do this for me. I will probably arrange a book signing with them when I launch my next book. I am also planning on writing to local bookstores in San Francisco (since my book is set in that city), and I hope that some of them will also be willing to carry Maids of Misfortune on consignment. If I am successful, I would try to arrange some book signings in that city.

For authors who publish ebooks, or print on demand books, (Maids of Misfortune is both), it is estores like Amazon.com, Smashwords, and Ibooks, not brick and mortar stores, that are important. And the data is quite clear-it is in estores where a steadily increasing percentage of books are now being bought. Therefore the marketing strategies that drive buyers to those sites and help them find my book when they shop in those ebook stores (Internet reviewers, social networking, fan sites, key words, etc.) make the most sense for me as a self-published author.

I do think I would consider doing a virtual blog tour, probably for the launch of the next book. Here you arrange to guest blog on a variety of blogs, which then helps promote those sites (since you advertise this on your own websites), but it also garners you potential sales from their readerships.

Can you discuss the publishing process? Can you describe your experience with the services that you used? Did you hire an editor?

The first step to self-publishing a book has to start with getting your manuscript in perfect condition. This means you want the reader to have no clue that it didn’t go through the whole traditional editing process-which doesn’t just mean no typos or grammatical errors, it means a high standard of writing, well plotted, and characters you care about. The most gratifying aspect of publishing Maids of Misfortune has been the frequent comment by readers that they didn’t want it to end, and they can’t wait until the next book. This is how I feel about my favorite books, and to have this said to me about my book is an immeasurable pleasure.

I didn’t hire an editor-although I think that most new self-published authors should, and I very well might hire one for future books. I had been working on this book literally for 20 years, I had gotten feedback from agents, editors, and my book critique group, I had rewritten it several times, and I had 30 years of correcting other peoples writing under my belt. In addition, I spent about four more months rewriting, with extensive cutting, polishing, and proofreading, and then I gave it to readers, and after their comments, I went through it one more time.

The next task was to get a cover designed-which was the one thing I paid someone else to do. I knew that I needed a cover that would show up well as a thumbnail-which is the main way most people will see it, but it was also important that it look completely professional for those people who bought the print book. I hired a local designer, Michelle Huffaker, who has subsequently become a good friend, and she did a terrific job.

I had chosen to publish Maids of Misfortune as an ebook with Smashwords and Kindle, and to produce my print book through Amazon’s print on demand division, CreateSpace. The main task to do this is to format the manuscript according to the requirements for each one.

Some people pay other people to do the formatting. I did it myself. I am not particularly tech savvy (my husband was my tech support) and it did require an attention to detail, but was not all that difficult. There are guides, how-to-books, and community forums to turn to for advice, but I depended on April Hamilton’s Indie Author Guide on Kindle, and a new print edition is coming out in this winter-I highly recommend it. For Smashwords you primarily had to produce a word document with all the formatting stripped from it so that their formatting program could work. For Kindle you need to create an html document. There was more to do to plan the interior design for the CreateSpace print edition (headers, chapter breaks, margins and gutters, etc), and it required a pdf document. However, once the files were created in each format, uploading the files and covers literally took minutes. Once I proofed each version and clicked "publish" the books were ready to be purchased in less than a week. Talk about instant gratification!

Are there other services that you considered using, but didn’t?

I might eventually publish an ebook with Scrib’d, but the benefit of Smashwords is that it produces a book that can be read on a variety of ereaders, including the Nook and IPad. Kindle is not only the largest market for ebooks, but through KindleAps, makes my book available on smart phones, the IPad, etc. In addition Smashwords provides the author 85% royalty rate, and now Kindle gives me 70% royalty rate-which is fantastic.

The other print on demand service I considered was LuLu, which provides a pretty comparable service and production cost to CreateSpace, but using CreateSpace gave me access to Amazon’s free shipping option for buyers, and the CreateSpace and Kindle support staffs-since they are both divisions of Amazon–were crucial to helping me solve the browsing path error I discussed previously.

What has the ratio of physical to ebooks sold via your selected online sellers?

At the end of the first four months, 54% of the books I had sold were ebooks, but the next four months 79% of the books I sold were ebooks. Since my ebooks are priced at $2.99 and my print books are $12.75, I am pleased that I am doing as well as I am selling print copies!

You generously revealed information about your first quarter sales. In a recent article in Publetariat.com, you shared that you’ve cracked the 1,000 sales mark. Can you discuss what activities you feel have provided the best results?

I believe a series of activities, cumulatively, have helped increase my sales.

In April 2009 three things happened. I became a regular contributor to Publetariat, I published my short story, Dandy Detects, and I changed my ebook price on Maids of Misfortune from $4 to $2.99. My total sales in March were 28; my total sales in April were 46. There are a number of people who have discussed how $2.99 seems like an important price point-that readers feel comfortable with taking a chance on a book at this price. I also noticed that occasionally for some reason Amazon discounts this to $2.39 and my numbers go up even more.

Then in May I began to get my first reviews on websites and got the book award, and my total sales in May were 80!

The trend continued upward, so that in June I sold 156 books. At the end of June I got the browsing path on Amazon fixed, and a week later the short story was featured on Kindle Nation Daily. In July I sold 490 books (three times what I sold the month before!). If you take away that 2-day bump, I still did well with 302 books sold. In August I have sold 330 books, averaging slightly more than 10 books a day, 75% of them ebooks. I figure that if I keep active on my blog, keep participating on other blogs and on the fan sites, I should at least be able to maintain that average. And with each new reader, there is the incalculable word of mouth factor to potentially increase my sales.

Would you have done anything differently?

The best way to answer this is to discuss 1) what I still hope do to continue market Maids of Misfortune and 2) what I plan to do differently for the next book.

1) As I mentioned earlier, I really haven’t pursued the traditional markets or marketing strategies. So I am committed to reaching out to more local San Diego books stores, as well as to San Francisco bookstores. I will be giving a talk at my college on my experiences with self-publishing, and I will talk to the college newspaper and other publications about doing interviews.

My intention was always to use my blog to talk about more than self-publishing, and I would like to begin to do a series of posts about writing historical fiction, and I think that will also make my blog more interesting to people who have read or might be interested in reading my book.

My author website is very practical-it is an effective place to find out about my book and short story and how to purchase them. But I would like to make the site a place where people who have gotten involved in the world of Maids of Misfortune would come to learn more about the characters, the time period, and the places that were featured in the book.

2) What I will do differently when I am ready to publish my sequel, Uneasy Spirits, is concentrate on truly "launching" the book with a lot more pre-publication activity. I will get reviews ahead of time. I will reach out to any stores who have shown interest in the first book and schedule launch parties and book signings. I will schedule a blog tour. I will encourage people who have bought the book to review it immediately and put those reviews on Amazon and Smashwords-something I didn’t do with Maids of Misfortune.

What’s your biggest lesson that you’ve learned from this experience?

I have learned if you have a good "product," in my case a well-written historical mystery, and you make the effort to use the new opportunities available on the Internet so that potential buyers will come across the book, look at the reviews, and sample the first chapter, that you can be successful.

Am I making a lot of money yet? No-although I am making $2 a book on my ebooks, and $2.77 on my print books-so the reader can do the math. . Could I make a living at this? Yes, in time if I produced 3 or 4 more books like Maids of Misfortune, and the ebook market continues to expand, as everyone predicts it will.

Without the option of self-publishing and ebooks, and these new ways of marketing, I am not at all convinced I would have gotten this book published, or if I did, that I would have been successful in getting enough books sold in bookstores before the dreaded return policy of stores kicked in. As a result, I probably, at my age (60) wouldn’t have had the motivation to continue to market the book, or write the sequel. And Annie Fuller and Nate Dawson and their world would not have been heard from, and that would be a shame.

 

 

E-Texts For All (Even Lucy)

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This article, by Char Booth, originally appeared on the Library Journal site on 8/5/10. If you’re publishing for the Kindle and haven’t enabled text-to-speech, this article just might change your mind.

If digital literacy is exploding, the visually disabled are taking the shrapnel. I would wager that most librarians consider ourselves committed to accessibility and make individual and organizational efforts to comply with (and often exceed) the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in our buildings and the Rehabilitation Act Section 508 standards on our websites. We may not, however, have had the sobering experience of trying to access an ebook or e-journal using screen-reading software or other assistive technology. Despite our best intentions, this limited insight can lead us unwittingly to collection development and web design decisions that make digital literacy far more difficult for the print disabled.

Over the past year, I’ve been working closely with Lucy Greco, a colleague and disability advocate at the University of California-Berkeley (UC-B). Lucy, who has been blind from birth, has transformed my understanding of the word ­access. Not only do librarians need to understand the accessibility front of the ebook wars, we have the responsibility to embrace our advocacy role in shaping its outcome. As one of the few public sector agencies charged with recognizing the access rights of all, libraries must collectively examine how we can steer the e-text trajectory-from ebooks to e-journals to any other format-in a more universally usable direction.

Ebooks and DRM
Lucy is partial to a few sayings that have helped me understand the e-text accessibility paradox. The first is that "ebooks were created by the blind, then made inaccessible by the sighted."

Online text formats like DAISY and EPUB were pioneered in part by the accessibility movement as an alternative to expensive and cumbersome Braille texts. As ebooks have gained popularity, however, digital text became inexorably less accessible as for-profit readers like the Kindle and Sony Reader muscled onto the scene. A patina of digital rights management (DRM) has been added in order to protect the intellectual property of vendors, contrary to the open and accessible orientation libraries have long held toward literacy and learning.

Device- and interface-specific ebooks are often "locked down" to other readers, meaning that by default they block attempts to be read by JAWS and other screen-reading software. The Kindle—still the dominant hardware ereader—has text-to-speech capability, but its speech menus remain inaccessible despite a 2009 promise from Amazon. [The Kindle 3, announced last week, has addressed this particular flaw.—Ed.] Hence the recent Department of Justice letter to college presidents warning against inaccessible emerging technology use and a suit brought by the National Federation for the Blind against Arizona State University’s Kindle DX pilot.

Dollars = leverage
 

 

Read the rest of the article on Library Journal.

No It's Not Writer's Block, It's….

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It seems I keep circling around this topic every time I think about what I want to say here. Writer’s block is nothing new if you happen to be a writer by trade. It’s been covered so many times in so many contexts that I really don’t think it is worth the time to address anew here. Okay, you might be wondering why I’m writing this post then. I want to answer that by saying that I’m beginning to think differently about the whole concept of writer’s block.

I’ve heard my share of those who believe writer’s block and those who patently refuse to acknowledge it as a reality. I sort of exist in this middle ground where I acknowledge there is something happening. I myself have endured the disruptive experience where nothing is moving through my creative centers. I can’t get one word to form on the page. I can’t say with honesty that writer’s block is a myth or an excuse – although it has been used as one. Other times, it may merely be matter of calling it a block when there is something else happening below the surface.

When I think about writer’s block, most of the time the main thought takes the form of a question. "Am I sure this is writer’s block?" Then the next question becomes, "What is it then?"

Other Options

There is reason to believe that there are other reasons you can’t write. I want to at least mention them briefly so you might rethink how you explain problems with writing.

1. Maybe you haven’t planned your writing enough. Now, this option doesn’t fly far with those writers who disdain the idea of outlining, but I want to at least mention it. Still, it matters to many us who struggle with a piece writing simply because we didn’t think to jot down some notes or outline the possible structure of an article or an essay. Do you see what I’m getting at? A little forethought can go a long way to keep you working when a bout of block would have been the result in the past.

2. Perhaps, you need a break. Now, this can be revolutionary for the workaholic writers among us. You may think that spilling words on the page a breakneck speed is the only way to work – that is until you trip over a monster-sized block. You may also be pushing yourself closer to a true burnout. Either way, the idea of stopping and taking a breather may do more good than you think. By taking time away from keyboard to spend time with friends or family, or may catch a movie or something, you may begin to recharge your creative batteries so you can come back ready to write .

3. Turn your attention to another project. It may really be as simple as shifting your focus from project that’s got you gridlocked. If you have one article you’re trying to draft, but have another that’s already written, why not spend time editing that piece until you feel ready to write the other one. This is just one idea. Think about this one. Maybe you can come up with some ideas for yourself.

In Closing….

Obviously, there may be other reasons why you find yourself affected by writer’s block of one type or another. I would suggest that the writers among my readers reconsider what’s happening. Don’t use block as an excuse not to do something. There may be better options that keep you productive. At least you can think about it. See you next time.

 

This is a reprint from Shaun C. Kilgore‘s site.

Saturday Chit-Chat: A Plotting Workshop

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This article, by Julie Leto, originally appeared on the Plotmonkeys site on 4/28/07.

Couple of weeks ago, I asked if it would be okay with the Plotmonkey readers if we devoted a little time to the writers who join us here on the blog. Since everyone seemed amenable, I’m going to hijack the Saturday Chit-Chat for the next few weeks to present my notes from a workshop I recently did for my TARA chapter called “Plotting With Your Pants On.” Ask questions, comments, request examples and clarifications…hopefully the other monkeys will jump in too with their commentary. (Except Leslie, who is off at a conference this weekend.)

Here it is…I’ll be presenting in parts.

Part One

Plotting with Your Pants On

In recent years, two schools of thought have emerged in terms of how writers plot their books. If you’ve been in RWA long enough, you’ve heard the term “plotter” and “pantster.” The plotter being the writer who carefully and meticulously plans out every key point in the scenes, chapters and “acts” (under screenwriting’s three or four act systems, which I’ll discuss next week), does character interviews, exhaustively researches and for all intents and purposes, comes off as anal and left brained.

The pantster, on the other hand, is so named because this writer works from the seat of their pants, rather than from any definitive plan. The original term for this was “misters,” a term coined, I believe, by Jo Beverly when she gave an RWA keynote address and wrote several articles on “Flying Into the Mist,” which basically outlined her process of sitting at the computer and typing away, letting the story tell itself organically without any definitive plot to guide her. This is all very creative, very right-brained, very…literary.

Over the past few years, there has emerged a sort of factioning that disturbs me as a writer. Assumptions are made about the creativity level of one author over the other…and frankly, about the talent.

I believe very strongly that these arguments are ridiculous. But it’s easy for me because I’m a switch-hitter. I “do it both ways” as it were.

Read the rest of the article on Plotmonkeys, and also see Part II. 

What An Indie Hip Hop Act (Or Any Artist) Can Learn From This Self-Published Victorian Era Mystery Author

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This article, by Israel Vasquetelle, originally appeared on Insomniac Magazine on 9/19/10 and features M. Louisa Locke, one of our own Publetariat contributors.

Too many times, artists of all genres look only to their own immediate world for both creative and business inspiration. The problem is that those same ideas are recycled over and over again by many within that space. I remember when 50 Cent (and obviously artists before him) approached mixtapes as the ultimate way to saturate the market – one locality at a time. That was a phenomenal way for 50 and other artists to break in and make substantial names for themselves. The problem today is that nearly every rapper on the planet now has a mixtape.

Sure, this form of promotion and distribution can still prove to be a means to reach an audience, however, for the most part it’s noise. Today, mixtapes are a dime a dozen. Sometimes taking a step out of your immediate world, what every that may be, and looking at other forms of media can provide the most valuable insight. This is one of the reasons that for years I have continued to cover a variety artists and industry professionals’ stories of success within Insomniac. This has been done in hopes that their experiences will motivate others to find their own path to whatever they’re striving to achieve.

Maids of MisfortuneM. Louisa Locke recently published her first novel, a Victorian era mystery, and has managed to reach an audience despite not benefiting from the resources of a traditional book publisher. She’s not a household name, at least not yet, however, in the era of new media and the technology that makes it these channels possible, it’s not necessary to have a huge audience to find success.

Locke is part of a growing contingency of authors that have chosen to bypass the lottery-like odds that require the need to gain the limited attention of traditional publishers. Instead of chasing a middleman, she reaches a potential audience by utilizing the democratizing services of digital distributors and print on demand services that helped her to make her title a reality.

Artists seeking to get signed by labels should take a page out of this author’s playbook. With a little entrepreneurial spirit and the use of today’s technology, artists can reach their audience and maintain control of that connection. Until, this is something that was nearly impossible to achieve without a significant resources in the form of capital and a barrage of middlemen.Today, it takes talent, hard work and a bit of marketing savviness.

Traditionally, authors with aspirations of making it alongside bestsellers on bookshelves would need to convince gatekeepers of their potential to sell huge quantities. Obviously, only a tiny percentage of those considered ever garner a book deal. Once getting through that level of immense scrutiny, typically, for a new author, that means a small advance and a ticket on a waiting list that could last many months or years. Furthermore, for better or worse, the author’s words are subject to a barrage of changes and revisions by editors. If, and when the book finally hits the market, it will only receive the promotional resources of its publisher for a very short window of time.
 

Read the rest of the article on Insomniac Magazine.

Peeling Away The Layers Of Confusion

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When I first started researching the area of Self Publishing about three years ago, I was struck by the multitude of terms used both writers and publishers to define their own business. We can easily review many self publishing companies and rattle off terms like Vanity Publishing, Subsidy Publishing, POD (Print-on-demand) Publishing, Partnership Publishing and Independent Publishing. I’m sure many readers of Selfpublishingreview can list off a few others.

 
In the development of Self Publishing over many years, the above terms have not only merged, but indeed, the waters of distinction have become pretty muddied. I also have been guilty of interchanging the terms. It just seems that many Self Publishing companies (if I might call any publisher who offers one or more author services at a cost) are often all too eager to add to the confusion—combining romantic notions on the art of the writer with extravagant promises of notoriety and success—simply to promote a form of publishing were money flows to them and not the writer. Let me throw my two cents in on the above terms.
 
Vanity Publishers
 
These are the old timers of the business. Vanity in publishing has become like the ‘C’ word. To me, Vanity Publishers operate on the ‘bait and snare’ model of business. Get the customer interested enough; laud their work to high heaven; demonize traditional publishers; throw a veil of complexity on the publishing process; and like used car salesmen, don’t point out the scratches or the cracked chassis or the full costs until the customer asks how much to make the cheque out for and then hit them over the head with a baseball bat.
 
Sound pretty loathesome? Well, the reality is that many still operate this form of publishing business, and some of them have the highest turnover of self published titles every year. Brazen enough to even advertise four to five digit author fees! Vanity, to me, isn’t Aunt Maple wanting her life story published, nor is it some spotty college teenager thinking he has written ‘The Great American Novel.’ It is a publishing business set up to prey upon Aunt Maple’s and our teenager’s naivete, not their vanity. The vanity lies with the publisher smug and disingenuous enough to keep doing it.
 
Subsidy Publishers
 
Much of my attention two years ago was focussed on Subsidy Publishers in the USA. In the past year, I’ve started looking at UK and Irish Subsidy Publishers. What sets these Subsidy Publishers apart from Vanity Publishers is that, for the most part, they are upfront from the start about what they are offering, in effect—an author service, usually from submission through to design, production, print, final proof and the proverbial 25,000 online available booksellers and anything more is an additional paid add-on. The add-on’s are what is also known as the up sell. You will be emailed about ‘must have services’ which will help your book sell. Their contracts, rights, costs, editing, quality of production, promotion and marketing, if any, and other author services vary widely.
 
Like any serious purchase in life (and I believe a first book is as important as a first car or mortgage) research, shop around, ask a lot of questions, know the depth of service you are getting, talk to other authors who have used their services, and most importantly, be sure this is the right path to publishing for your book. Ignore the ‘Joyce, Whitman, Poe etc., self published’ spiel on the publisher’s web pages, as most of these tales have been debunked and are, at best, true, but this was a time when the common man and woman couldn’t read and hadn’t an arse in their skirts or trousers, and, at worst, blatantly false and misleading. Ignore their ‘listen to what our published authors said about us’ pages on their website.
 
Contact an author on their bookstore page through the web. They usually have web pages set up about their published books and will be far more candid about their experiences with the Subsidy Publisher. A good guide to a reputable Subsidy Publisher is one that actually advertises books on their publisher homepage. Remember, the vast majority of income for a Subsidy Publisher is made from author fees, not selling books!
 
Any author engaging with a Subsidy publisher who has not at first attempted the traditional route of agent/traditional publisher for their book is being very foolish. This has always been my first line of advice to an author. There is a vast wealth of knowledge to learn by pursuing this avenue at first call, pain and disappointment though it may bring.
 
Partnership Publishers
 
Again, this is any publisher who is upfront about a financial input from the author, but with the single significant difference from the Subsidy Publisher; a Partnership Publisher is also financially backing the author for one or more books, essentially, prepared to invest in the author and not just a book. It can also be referred to as ‘shared publishing,’ where there is a contract stipulating little or no advance, but a much larger percentage of royalties, sometimes up to 50%, far beyond the 6 – 12% royalties available from a traditional publisher’s contract.
 
You may be surprised to learn that in the past few years some larger publishers are creating imprints just for this kind of publishing. HarperCollins run HarperStudios, Troubador/Matador and also the London Press run a similar model in the UK, and I believe over the coming year, we are going to see an explosion of this kind of publishing from large traditional publishers caught in the trappings of economic recession, who, in spite of less well-informed observers and critics of traditional publishers, actually do believe in a philosophy of nurturing and investing in first-time raw talent. In the coming months, keep an eye on publishers like Macmillan, Faber & Faber and other such publishers who have strong online presence and are always testing the boundaries of what the publishing model is.
 
POD Publishers
 
I’ve been guilty of using this misnomer. All publishers can be POD Publishers if they are using digital and offset to define the method of printing. POD is a form of digital print technology first used in banking to print out customer statements. Someone saw the potential and introduced it to book printing. It allows publishers to print a single copy or short print run of a title in their catalogue without the need to use an offset print press. Offset printing has been the most common method used for the printing of books with a 2000+ print run. Like any product, the more produced in one run reduced the overall unit price. For the moderate self published books, the average is a few hundred copies, and offset is simply too prohibitive on unit price and storage for this amount. Many traditional publishers use POD (print on demand) to re-issue old back catalogue titles which would not warrant a sizeable print run to make them economical using offset printing.
 
You can bet over the next year that many large publishers will be using POD to print a lot of titles from their back catalogues as commissioning editors, and in particular acquisition editors, all stare with distain at their budgets and cut back on titles and quantities published and printed this year. Again, POD Publisher has become one of those terms which has arisen since the advent of publishers offering author publishing services. It is the tried and trusted method of digitally printing self published, low print-run books, and in fact 80% of Subsidy Publishers use exactly the same printer, Lightning Source, with huge printing facilities in the USA and UK. The remainder use other smaller digital printers, or have invested in their own machines.
 
Infinity Press is one of the few Subsidy Publishers who print in-house with their own equipment. With the advent of the Espresso Book Machine (EBM-a digital print machine, small enough to fit in a retail store), more and more Subsidy Publishers will probably have their own machines, or the buying customer will simply have their books purchased and printer in their bookstore.
 
Independent Publishers
 
All publishers who are not owned by a parent company are ‘Independent’ and make their own business decisions. This has nothing to do with the means an author chooses to achieve publication. If we were to draw a ‘family tree’ and list off all the publishers we can think of—you would probably find it a little disturbing to find out that many ‘publishers’ are often owned by the same large media conglomerate. This was very much an occurrence during the 1980’s and 1990’s, and even today, in the self publishing world, as companies like Author Solutions own Createspace, AuthorHouse, Wordclay and iUniverse.

(This article first appeared in selfpublishingreview.com)

 

This is a reprint from Mick Rooney‘s POD, Self Publishing and Independent Publishing.

Questioning The Brave New World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This is a reprint from the Weblog of Zoe Winters.

Me and My Best Friend: When Publishing Goes Bad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 UK Mirror article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author

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

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


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

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

She’s trying hard….

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


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

Wow,

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

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

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

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

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

What books does jk rowling like?

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

What Writers Can Learn From Flamenco

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Creativity through dance is fascinating when writing is our main form of expression. Here are some lessons learned for writers from Spanish flamenco dancing.

  • Know the tradition that lies behind and within you. Flamenco is native to Andalusia in Spain with Gypsy, Sephardic Jew, Moorish and Byzantine influences. It is beautiful to see old people dance it as well as the women in their prime and the young girls who learn the skills. There is a vast tradition behind the movements of flamenco as well as the songs that are sung with it. For writers, we have a great tradition behind us that we need to be aware of. We need to know the rules and the past in order to bring our words to life on the page.
  • Extemporize from that tradition to find your personal expression. For dancers, this is your style of flamenco, for authors, this is your voice and writing style. Once you know the tradition, you can express yourself within it and use creativity in your own way. Flamenco dancers seem to go with the music, almost as a jazz band improvises as the music moves. Each time they perform it would be a little different. As writers, we need to know where we are coming from and the rules of our genre, and then we can go out from there to a place of originality.
  • Use your passion and your personal power. Flamenco is incredibly empowering to watch and to dance. It exudes pride and power, a separation of the artist from those who watch. The expression is usually serious and the movements compelling with authority. This is a dancer that knows their worth. As writers, we definitely use our passion to write but sometimes that power can be missing. We need to reclaim that, to be unapologetic in the ability to express and create. No one can take that from you, whatever their judgement.
  • Have a varied repertoire. Flamenco is best known for the stamping of feet, the fast tapping and grand movements but there are also slow dances, almost mournful in their experience. The songs and flamenco guitar are spine tingling in emotion. For writers, we must also have this full range of skill both in writing, and also in all the other areas of a writer’s life these days, like marketing and promotion.
  • Celebrate each other with Ole! When watching flamenco, it is part of the experience for the audience and other participants to shout ‘Ole!’ and other encouragements, and clap during the performance. It is an interjection like applause and acts as a spur to the dancer to move faster. As writers, we don’t have much applause in our daily writing lives so we can learn from this to try to encourage each other further, to spur each other on to greater things.

It is important to get out there and live a life that is worth writing about. Watching or even dancing flamenco is an experience that will challenge most people and spark new ideas. Have you found inspiration in a dance or other physical form of creativity?

 

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

Publish With Lightning Source

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This story, by Muriel Lede, originally appeared on her site on 8/15/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

Chances are you’ve at least heard of Lightning Source Inc., also known as LSI. If so, you must have been told that they’re the best deal around (indeed), but also that acceptance is selective (not quite), while the submission process is complicated and unforgiving (very true!). If you’ve searched the Web for them, you’ve most certainly noticed that the information about them is scarce and contradictory (often outdated and inaccurate as well). You’ve seen many of their self-publishing customers, some of them quite experienced, curse at them out of frustration—while paradoxically lauding their service!

You indeed consider doing business with the best Print On Demand service around? Then read this comprehensive guide to get a clear idea of the process ahead and avoid making costly mistakes.

Why should you sign up with Lightning Source? Because they have the most options for your books. Because they have the best quality offering. Because their sales representatives are very supportive at every stage of the submission process. Because you want to submit straight to the printer instead of suffering the delays and hazards of intermediates. Because you want the best profit margins (who doesn’t?) and the widest distribution channel. Because you consider yourself a publisher running a business, not merely an author with a manuscript. And you want to gloat about it.

Why should you avoid Lightning Source? Because you’re not tech-savvy. Because you balk at making an initial investment of time and money, or at learning the intricacies of the publishing process. Because you turn green at the prospect of filing paperwork or reading hundred of pages of documentation. Because you don’t care about the minutiae of the end product anyway. Because a free author service suits better your needs, or on the contrary you’d rather pay four times the actual costs to offload it all to someone else. Because you consider yourself an author first and foremost, and would rather avoid every task downstream if at all possible.

This is what they mean with their registration disclaimer. Really, if you recognize yourself in the latter description, they don’t want your business. They want serious publishers that know what they’re getting into, preferably ready to submit.

Services

LSI offers two POD services. Print to Order is for wholesale distribution. That means their online retail partners (most prominently Amazon and Barnes & Noble) order copies straight from them, usually sold to customers beforehand. Print to Publisher, on the other hand, is for short runs (which can be as small as one copy but are meant typically for fifty copies and above), and ships to the publisher instead (or whichever address you specify). Note that the latter option is slightly more expensive per copy.

You can also submit electronic titles for distribution with Ingram Digital, through which you can sell ebooks in DRMed formats such as PDF and ePub. For these two formats, the provided platform is Adobe Digital Editions. In that respect they’re definitely not the best deal around (Digital Editions sucks bad, especially for ePub, while the list of retail partners is more modest than for POD), but the service is free, while you already need a PDF file for the print book interior, so why not…

Requirements

Before you even register for an account, you will need a few things:

You can also provide a GST number if you’ve registered your business with the Canada Revenue Agency.

Last, but not least, you need money; Lightning Source isn’t free. Here’s how it costs for a typical blunder-free submission:

Book cover submission: $37.50
Book interior submission: $37.50
Proof: $30.00
Ingram catalog listing: $12.00
Total: $117.00

Ordering a proof is mandatory for an initial submission. The Ingram catalog fee, charged yearly, is to make the title available to retailers, otherwise your title would only be available for Print to Publisher short runs. Keep in mind that the costs could rise; revisions cost $40 per resubmitted file. May I recommend you don’t make mistakes? They also charge for whatever technical assistance you will require, so don’t ask them for help if you can avoid it.

Administrative concerns aside, I strongly suggest you prepare your submission in advance. You will need Adobe Photoshop, and probably Adobe Acrobat Distiller (which LSI strongly recommends, although sometimes you can do without it). The rest of this guide shall describe the challenges ahead; take a look at their File Creation Guide for an overview.

Cover price and wholesale discount

At this stage, you need to settle your pricing and discounting strategy. By discounting I refer to the wholesale discount, that is, the discount you grant retailers like Amazon. Typically, online retailers in turn grant half of that discount to their customers. You must also consider the price of printing the actual copy in the equation, which is:

Profit per copy = (100% – wholesale discount) × cover price – printing cost per copy

The printing cost depends on the format of your book, its cover type, and its number of pages.

You should decide which format your title shall be, if you haven’t already; whichever you choose, they probably offer it. Only then can you compute the final printing costs per copy, which you need to settle your cover price. It consists of a base cost per copy plus a cost per page, both depending on the format. See the POD publisher operating manual (only available once you’ve signed up) for details.

In regard to the above, there are only two sensible strategies to pursue. If you wish to see your book on the shelves of brick and mortar bookstores, you must offer a trade discount of 55%, flag your book as returnable, and also sign up to be listed in the Ingram Advance monthly catalog ($60 fee per listing). Be careful before choosing that option! First, such a high discount means either you settle for razor-thin margins or you try your luck with prices significantly above the competition. Second, if your book is returnable, that means bookstores will return their surplus after a few months, and you will have to assume the cost of the unsold copies! I recommend against that avenue for most self-publishers, and even small electronic/POD publishers; read about Ellora’s Cave’s woes with Borders for an example of things going awry.

That leaves us with the better and only viable strategy for self-publishers, which is to opt the for the minimum short discount of 20%, not returnable, and to hell with the Ingram Advance catalog! That means an online-only strategy, as brick and mortar bookstores will not carry your titles unless they take the lion’s share of the profits while having you assume all of the risks (if you ask me, it’s a racket). But that also means much more money per copy in your pocket and a safe business plan. Don’t be afraid to offer the minimum discount; some will tell you it’s risky because retailers might snub your title, but that’s just an urban legend.

Then the price you should expect to be listed is calculated as follows:

Expected listed price = (100% – wholesale discount / 2) × cover price

More simply, online retailers further discount the title to their customers by half the discount you granted them; if the wholesale discount is 20%, their discount shall be 10%. Take note that, with Amazon at least, this customer discount might not be offered immediately (I’ve noticed a delay of one month), while the decision to discount any given title is entirely up to them, subject to change without notice, and is not officially documented but has been deduced empirically.

Warning: Make sure your price and discount are final; price revisions take up to 45 days to propagate across resellers. What’s more, if you’ve put the price on the cover, you’ll need to issue a cover revision!

Book interior submission

Before you proceed any further, do yourself a favor and read this official FAQ. Much of what follows is already illustrated in that document.

The book interior must be submitted as a PDF file (Postscript, InDesign or QuarkXPress also accepted), preferably as PDF/X-1a:2001 but this requirement isn’t that stringent. In practice, what matters most is that fonts be embedded to your document. If you open your PDF file with Adobe Reader and inspect its properties, you’ll see a list of fonts (with cryptic names) that the document uses. Every entry must read as either fully embedded (meaning the whole font has been embedded into the file) or embedded subset (meaning that only necessary glyphs have been imported). If it says anything else then it isn’t embedded. This is important because printers do not provide any fonts, however common, which is the only way to ensure the document will print exactly as it displays on your computer.

So how do you embed fonts? You don’t, but merely configure whatever software you’re using to produce your PDF file to do so, the safest way being to look for a PDF/X or High Quality setting. It is also recommended to stay clear of Type 3 fonts (bitmap fonts).

There are other important requirements, one being that illustrations be sampled at either 300 dpi (pictures) or 600 dpi (line art). Another is that those illustrations be encoded as either grayscale or CMYK—no RGB. See next section for a discussion of CMYK.

Last, but not least, make sure your file is titled properly: the syntax is either isbn_text.pdf or isbntext.pdf. I’ve heard of rejected submissions for misnamed files.

Once you’ve frozen your interior file, use the Weight and Spine Width Calculator to complete your book cover; indeed you cannot complete your cover spine without the spine width, hence without the final page count.

Book cover submission

This is the difficult part, where you get to experience the joys of CMYK conversion. There is no avoiding getting technical at this point; just do your best to follow.

Your color book cover file on your computer is most likely encoded as RGB (Red-Green-Blue), which is the additive spectrum that computer monitors use to display images. A printer, on the other hand, requires a subtractive spectrum to print on white paper, and this is CMYK (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-blacK). Simply put, you have to convert your file so that instead of defining color components for light, it does so for inks instead. This is no caprice, but physics.

In theory this should be trivial. Every RGB color has an equivalent in CMY; black wouldn’t even be required, as it can be obtained with 100% of each of the three primary colors. In practice it doesn’t work that way. For example, the black just described doesn’t produce black on paper, but some dark gray instead. Besides, given how prevalent black is (to say nothing of dark colors in general), it would be a waste of ink and quite a mess to mix three colors just to obtain it, which is part of why black ink was added. But conversely, black ink alone (called pure black) isn’t quite black either, at least not enough for many purposes; we need to mix it with some amounts of the other colors to obtain what is called rich black (LSI recommends 60% cyan, 40% magenta, 40% yellow, 100% black).

Then there are gamut issues, as some colors fall outside of gamut depending on context. This phenomenon isn’t exclusive to CMYK; televisions and computer monitors, for example, cannot render pure black but a dark shade of grey, due to their very nature of being light-emitting devices. Only this is far worse for printing, many more colors being unavailable; deep blue, for instance, is notorious for rendering purplish. This can be worsened by the type of press used, the type of paper, the coating, and so on.

As if it weren’t enough, printers set a total ink limit for every individual dot (obtained by adding together the percentages of each component), which can be as high as 300% (comfortably high) but which LSI sets as 240% (quite low). That means many more colors fall outside of gamut, as there is no way to obtain them with so low a ceiling.

And then, the glossy coating LSI applies onto the cover darkens the image somewhat! With so many variables to consider, it’s nearly impossible to predict what the end result is going to be, which means you can only guestimate what the necessary adjustments should be, order a proof, and cross your fingers.

Confusing? A demonstration is indeed in order:


Original RGB cover

Cover converted to SWOP, 300% ink limit

Cover converted to SWOP, 240% ink limit

Cover converted to SWOP, 240% ink limit, after adjustments

Cover scan by LSI

And none of the above looks exactly like the actual cover! The closest in terms of hue is the fourth, only even darker than the original. It does not look desaturated like the cover scan. I’d show you a picture, but it falls outside the color space of cheap digital cameras as well! Talk about irony…

Brace yourself for the fact that your cover won’t look exactly as expected. Here’s a few tips to minimize the difference:

  • Avoid dark colors
  • Avoid saturated colors
  • Avoid colors notoriously out of gamut, like deep blue

To make the conversion, you absolutely need Photoshop; I’m not aware of any other application capable of altering the ink limit of an ICC profile, at least not nearly as conveniently. Photoshop is quite expensive a software suite just to make a few CMYK conversions, but then you might not need to actually buy it; it’s often available at the office, for example, or at some multimedia lab at college or university. (No, don’t even think of BitTorrent. Illicit copying is immoral and hurts the industry. Bad children!)

Think that’s the end of your woes? There’s another requirement to factor in before proceeding: trapping (usually 0.25pt). Here we have a chicken and egg dilemma: we can only trap a CMYK image, hence after the conversion, but at the same time we can’t trap after the conversion proper because the overlapping regions’ total ink might then exceed the limit. Don’t worry, there’s a way out of this; how do you think chickens came to be, anyway?

Ready for a crash course in Photoshop CS4 CMYK conversion?

  • Set your working CMYK profile to US Web Coated v2 (SWOP) from Edit > Color Settings.

  • Convert your RGB cover to the US Web Coated v2 (SWOP) profile using Edit > Convert to Profile; leave the ink limit at 300%.

  • Apply trapping, 0.25pt, with Image > Trap.

  • Convert to US Web Coated v2 (SWOP) profile using Edit > Convert to Profile once again, this time setting the ink limit to 240% (select Custom CMYK in the list; a settings dialog will appear). Brace yourself for the shock!

  • In View, make sure your Proof Setup is set to Working CMYK, and that both Proof Colors and Gamut Warning are set. Locations whose color falls outside of gamut shall later display as gray pixels scattered all over the image.

  • Select the Eyedropper tool, and have one of the info dialog’s panels display the Total Ink (the small eyedropper icon is clickable; a dropdown menu will appear). Then you’ll obtain the total ink level for any given pixel on the image.

  • Use Image > Adjustments > Curves (or any other such functionality of your liking) to tweak your image while keeping the ink levels below the 240% limit and avoiding the gamut warnings. Yes, it is as hard as it sounds.

  • Once you’re finished, save as TIFF; uncheck the ICC Profile option. LSI does not like ICC profiles.

Keep in mind that what you see on the screen is only an approximation of the actual cover, so don’t freak out if initial results are disastrous. They will be.

Once you’ve completed the CMYK conversion, all that remains is to apply the barcode onto your cover, and the cover onto the template. Use the cover template generator for that purpose, then follow the instructions. LSI offers to apply the barcode for you, but I strongly advise you do it yourself; that’s the only way to be sure of the result. You don’t need to generate your own barcode, one is provided with the template they sent you. The document says to save as PDF, but you may also submit a TIFF file. Save your final file as either isbn_cov.pdf or isbncov.pdf. Once again make sure your files are named properly; the word around is that they may be rejected for so trivial an issue.

Putting it all together

You’ve got everything ready? Let’s cover then what to expect from the moment you register:

  • A Lightning Source representative contacts you, asking that you fill a short questionnaire. Don’t worry, it’s just to filter out those that don’t know how to read the disclaimer.

  • If you’re accepted, they create your account. You can now log in to their customer section. But when you initially do, it’s only to fill more forms; schedule some time, it’s rather long. Basically, they want to know more about your company, which of their services you mean to opt in for, how they’re to bill you (account or credit card), where to ship the copies that you order or those that get returned by retailers, etc. Then, to proceed any further, you need to print and sign some contracts, which you must send them either by fax or mail. Once they’ve processed these, your account is activated.

  • You may now access the customer section proper and create your first title; go to Setup a New Title for that purpose. There’s a few pages to fill out about the said title, then it is created and moved to the premedia stage.

  • Go to Titles Not Yet Submitted, then upload the cover and interior files using their uploader. Preview your PDF files prior to uploading! Once again, mistakes are costly.

  • Wait until your files have been processed and approved by the technicians. Since this is your first title, they then send you a mandatory proof by mail (overnight delivery). You can opt out of it for revisions, although it is not recommended. LSI then awaits your approval to make the title available.

  • Review the proof, then go to Proof Acceptance. If you approve it, it shall be made available to retailers shortly. If you reject it, the submission remains on hiatus until you send revisions.

  • Don’t forget to pay your invoices when they bill you! While some charges are immediate, others are delayed by a few days or weeks. Upon receiving an invoice by email, log in to your account and go to Pay Open Invoices. Beware, for I’ve noticed they don’t always email an invoice! If you expect one, you should drop by from time to time and check.

 

Smashwords founder Mark Coker talks to Wetmachine About the Future of Publishing

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This interview, by John Sundman, originally appeared in his My Thoughts Exactly on Wetmachine on 8/4/10. 

Smashwords is a service for helping small and self-publishers format ebooks in diverse formats (for example: kindle, epub, PDF, Palm) and distribute them through diverse retail channels (for example Amazon, Apple, BN, Kobo, and Smashwords itself). A few weeks ago I sent Smashwords founder Mark Coker a note asking if I could interview him for Wetmachine & SelfPublishing Review. He said yes; I sent him some questions about the current & future state of book publishing, and he answered. His replies appear below the fold.

I found his answers interesting and direct, and I think you’ll enjoy reading what he had to say.
 

Q: When I told a list I’m on that I was going to be interviewing you and solicited questions, my friend Dirk replied: “Please ask him what the fuck is going on.” I think that’s a pretty good place to start. Can you summarize the important trends you see in publishing right now?

I can sum up this answer with one word: Change.

Now, more words… For the last century, publishers controlled the means of book production and book distribution. If authors wanted to reach readers, they had no choice but to kneel before the publishing oligopolists who had the power to determine who got published, and what readers read. The system worked fantastically well for the publishers, moderately well for readers, but less well for the authors they published, and even less well for the vast majority of authors who could never gain access to the cliquey club of the published. And like most clubs, the dream of the club often exceeds the reality of the club.  Most authors lucky enough to have their books accepted by this old system received little more than fleeting ego gratification and bragging rights.

Change is an exciting, terrifying thing. It represents both a threat and an opportunity to every author and publisher.

The other week I gave a presentation to group of students at NYU, and I just posted about it over at the Smashwords blog. I titled it, “How Indie Ebooks Will Transform the Future of Book Publishing.”  I started the presentation by quoting my favorite Tool song, Rosetta Stoned. It’s a song about a guy abducted by space aliens, and the aliens give him a message he’s supposed to deliver to his fellow humans, “a message of hope for those who will listen, and a warning for those who do not.” This is the message I shared. My message was that authors and publishers face greater opportunities today than ever before to reach readers with books. Yet authors and publishers who fail to adapt to the change, or who respond incorrectly to the change, will go suffer.

Q: You come from a background in “angel” and venture investing in Silicon Valley. You see all kinds of opportunities and could have chosen any one of dozens of technologies to get personally involved in. Why did you choose to form Smashwords and get into electronic publishing for independent authors?

Traditional publishing is a broken business on the precipice of major change. I perceived an opportunity create a business that can help facilitate this change in a constructive way that’s valuable for readers, authors, publishers and booksellers. 

My motivation for creating Smashwords really came down to a crazy desire to change the future of publishing by empowering authors to be their own publishers. I wanted to turn publishing upside down by shifting the power center of this business from publishers to authors and readers.

For the last century, book publishing was built on the backs of undercompensated, underappreciated authors. If you cherish books as much as I do, how can you not honor the authors who create them, or the readers who purchase them?

I’m not saying publishers don’t honor authors. I just think their businesses are not set up to serve them as they deserve to be served.

There’s a huge disconnect in publishing. Publishers publish books for reasons different that writers write. Publishers publish works based on perceived commercial merit. Most authors are shut out and denied any chance to reach readers.  Readers are denied the opportunity to discover the full diversity of great works. I think this commercial filter is not only myopic, it’s also dangerous to the future of books, especially if you believe, as I do, that books and authorship are essential to the future of mankind.

Publishers are unable to take a risk on every author, nor would they want to even if they could. They have businesses to run and Manhattan skyscraper rents to pay.

I created Smashwords so I could take a risk on every author.  I think every author has a right to publish, and I think the vast collective wisdom of readers will help the best works get read by the right readers.

Read the rest of the interview on Wet Machine.