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Articles about craft.

Your Brand Is NOT A Community

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This post, by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, originally appeared on his loudpoet blog on 9/7/2010.

Back in January, Shiv Singh gave a great keynote presentation, Engaging Readers in the Digital Age, at the inaugural Digital Book World Conference that, in retrospect, set the tone for what was to come in 2010.

“Build consumer brands,” Singh exhorted, “because your current value chain is breaking.”

Since then, we’ve seen the introduction of the iPad, the Agency Model, and ugly public standoffs between Amazon and several publishers over ebook pricing; notable authors like J.A. Konrath and Seth Godin have made a fuss about eschewing “traditional” publishing channels; and uber-agent Andrew Wylie challenged Random House to a stare-down over ebook royalties, launching his own ill-fated ebook imprint, Odyssey Editions.

Underscoring all of these dust-ups is one recurring theme: publishers’ lack of a direct relationship with readers leaves them vulnerable to disruption and disintermediation.

While Singh and others, myself included, have noted the need for publishers to move from a business-to-business model to a business-to-consumer model, some arguments have mistaken “brand” for “community”, using them interchangeably.

Geoff Livingston, author of Now Is Gone – A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs, illuminated the difference by contrasting two well-known consumer brands: Madonna and Lady Gaga.

Madonna is an unmatched branding genius. She is able to transform and reinvent herself decade after decade and stay relevant. Her 2008 album Hard Candy was a #1 bestseller, the seventh of her 27 year career.

Yet Madonna is not a huge social media success. The branding doesn’t translate. Why? I think you need go no further than her community page, which reads: “Please note that posting Madonna unreleased material (including photos, audio and video) to your profile is not allowed. Doing so could result in the immediate termination of your membership with Icon.”

Madonna is in control, Madonna is messaging at you. And her image is complete, her content quality secure. And no one really wants to talk about her in conversational media forms, and given how she has controlled her community, is it any wonder?

–“From Branded Content Publishing to Networks (Madonna vs. Lady Gaga)”

Livingston contrasts Madonna’s approach to community vs. the artist most often compared to her, Lady Gaga, noting the latter “has transcended 20th century marketing to become the ultimate brand of the 21st century.” Her 15.3 million digital download sales in 2009 made her the best-selling artist, even beating Michael Jackson, whose death led to backlist sales skyrocketing.

“Gaga is dedicated to her fans,” notes Jackie Huba, co-author of Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message, “and clearly knows the elements of cultivating a community of evangelistic fans.”
 

Read the rest of the post on loudpoet.

How To Read A Book Contract: Paragraph 7 Giveth And Paragraph 22 Taketh Away

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This post, by Passive Guy, originally appeared on his The Passive Voice on 10/9/11.

I’m starting a series of blog posts that discuss how to read a book contract. To be completely accurate, the principles I’ll lay out are important for reading any contract, but generally I’ll use illustrations from publishers’ and agents’ contracts with authors.

Given the tenor of the times with publishers and agents, I’m going to place an emphasis on how a skilled lawyer can hide a gotcha in plain sight and how you might find that gotcha.

As a background for today’s discussion, you need to understand that the entire contract is important. Just because it’s first, Paragraph 1 is not necessarily more important than Paragraph 35. Paragraph 1 can give you a nice big lollipop and Paragraph 35 can take it away or rub enough mud on your lollipop that you would never want to lick it.

Good contract drafting style includes grouping like items together in an organized manner and most well-drafted contracts put the important provisions up front and use the later paragraphs for routine boilerplate. However, there is no law that requires an attorney to follow good drafting rules and those later paragraphs can be wonderful places to hide King Gotcha.

Someone reading the whole contract makes lots of notes and changes in the early paragraphs, but once they hit the part about what addresses will be used to send official notices to each party, they’re kind of sleepy and tend to see what they expect to see instead of what’s actually written on the page.

An excellent example of this occurred in a multi-million dollar contract between the company I worked for a few years ago and one of the largest internet companies in the world. Giant Company delivered a proposed contract about 50 pages in length, organized the way I expected, obligations and dollars set forth upfront. The proposed contract left about a half-dozen meaningful issues to negotiate.
 

Read the rest of the post, as well as Part 2 and the related post, Don’t Sign Dumb Contracts, on Passive Voice.

The Ditchwalk Self-Publishing Scale

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Independent authors believe every self-publisher is a revolutionary. Gatekeepers in traditional publishing think self-publishers are losers, at least until those same losers use their self-publishing success to humbly petition for a book deal. Vanity publishers insist all self-publishers are overlooked geniuses, and happily back up that assertion with high-priced services and promises they never intend to keep.

All of these definitions are unhelpful at best, self-serving at worst. In order to talk about self-publishing with any legitimacy we need a way to differentiate among self-publishers that is meaningful and objective. For that reason I created the Ditchwalk Self-Publishing Scale, which uses rising levels of production complexity to categorize self-published authors.  

Patrice Writes A Book
To see the Ditchwalk Scale in action, we’ll follow a writer named Patrice as she transitions from category to category, cutting a self-publishing swath deep into the heart of the publishing industry.

  • D0 – aka the Nobody, the Starving Artist, the Purist

    Patrice writes a book. She tries writing query letters and submitting chapters to agents and editors, but tires of the condescension and interminable delays. Patrice looks at the available self-publishing options, checks her bank account, and decides she has no choice but to do everything herself if she wants to make her work available to readers.

    While preparing her book Patrice gets cover-design software help from a friend of a friend. She also has several friends read the book for typos and usage errors, and gets e-book and print-on-demand (POD) formatting help from online forums.

    Because she does not pay anyone to help create her self-published work, Patrice is a D0 self-publisher on the Ditchwalk Scale.

  • D1 – aka the Aspirant, the Indy Author, the Realist

    Patrice’s self-published book does well. It doesn’t bring in enough money to pay the rent, but it’s enough to encourage her to write a second book, which she does.

    When she’s ready to publish her second title Patrice decides she wants professional help. She learned a lot publishing her first work herself, but with her second title she wants a more professional look and feel. Patrice hires a cover designer, and a professional proofreader to check her text before she locks it down.

    Patrice is now a D1 self-publisher because she paid people to help her prepare her book for manufacturing.

  • D2 — aka the Communicator, the Serious Writer, the Professional

    Patrice’s second book gets buzz but also draws criticism. She is recognized as a good writer, but there’s general agreement that the pace of the book might have benefited from tightening.

    Patrice takes the criticism to heart. She realizes she needs trained eyes not only on her cover but on her content as well. When she finishes the first draft of her third title Patrice hires a freelance editor to help overcome blindness to her own work.

    Because she hired someone to help shape the content of her work, Patrice is a D2 self-publisher on the Ditchwalk Scale.

  • D3 — aka the Multitasker, the Player, the Gig

    Patrice’s third title receives solid critical response. Even better, it prompts renewed sales of her first two titles, generating a fair amount of income for several months.

    While contemplating her fourth book Patrice realizes she can tie it in with an upcoming cultural event. When Patrice outlines the book and works up a schedule, however, she discovers she won’t be able to finish the book in time to take advantage of the opportunity.

    In a moment of inspiration Patrice decides to hire another writer to help her. The subcontracted writer will do research and write several first-draft sections of the time-sensitive title while Patrice works on the rest of the book. Patrice will then revise the entire work in her own voice and rush it into production using the team that helped produce her previous titles.

    Paying someone to write original content for a book she is authoring makes Patrice a D3 self-publisher.

  • D4 — aka the Luncher, the Writer Lover, the Editor

    Patrice’s time-sensitive title brings in considerable cash. Patrice acknowledges the contracted writer’s contribution both in the book and in interviews.

    Excited by the possibility of replicating this success Patrice lays out a book series that takes similar advantage of predictable cultural moments. While she recognizes that there’s a risk in launching a series, she knows she can subcontract other writers to write part or all of each first draft, leaving her free to provide overarching editorial control while also working on her own book.

    After weighing the pros and cons Patrice decides to go a step further. She starts a small press and hires writers to write first drafts in the series using stepped contracts, with the intent of keeping them on as the credited writer if they do a good job or she runs short of time to finish the books herself.

    Hiring other writers to write books under her editorial control makes Patrice a D4 self-publisher on the Ditchwalk Scale.

  • D5 — aka the Visionary, the Baby Mogul, the Publisher

    Some of Patrice’s sub-contracted titles pan out, others flop. Patrice learns from the experience and finds herself contemplating even more ideas for books. She maps out several possible schedules for the coming year, but no matter how she juggles titles and writers she comes up short of time to write, edit and release those books. Patrice realizes she needs to start a dedicated business with in-house editors overseeing aspects of projects that don’t need her direct supervision.

    For those titles that Patrice and her staff originate and maintain editorial control over, Patrice is a D5 self-publisher.

  • D6 — aka Random & Schuster, Harper House, SimonCollins

    Patrice takes her company public and retires from day-to-day control while still maintaining a financial interest. The board of directors hires a new CEO and expands aggressively. Some projects come from agent submissions, some are collaborations with bankable industry names, but a fair portion of the books her company publishes are developed in-house, in keeping with Patrice’s established practices.

    Because she maintains a financial interest in her publishing company, Patrice is a D6 self-publisher for those titles developed in-house.

Reality Check
Here are the main points of the Ditchwalk Scale condensed into a handy table:

To see why the Ditchwalk Self-Publishing Scale reflects reality — and did so even before self-publishing came to the masses — consider what it means to be published. If you write a book and Knopf publishes it to critical acclaim, you’re published, not self-published. If Boris from Russia opens a publishing company with profits from his murder-for-hire business, and publishes your book at a massive loss because it allows him to launder his blood money, you’re published, not self-published. If you have a rich aunt with social connections in the publishing industry, and you whine long enough to get yourself a small book deal for a work that must be ghostwritten in order to protect the professional reputations of all those involved, you’re published, not self-published.

No matter how you approach the question of what it means to be published, the only thing that actually matters is that the publisher — the actual legal entity that produces the book — is separate from you. If you write a book and somebody else produces/manufactures that book (without charging you up-front money, which would make them a vanity/subsidy press) then you’re a published author, not a self-published author. On the other hand, if you create the contents and you make the book, then you’re self-published, no matter how complex ‘you’ as a legal or business entity may be.

The Assumption of Authorship
Implicit in the idea of publishing and self-publishing is the question of authorship. Because a writer is usually credited on the cover of a book, authorship is often assumed even when it’s not an accurate description of the writer’s role on a project. When you see “Ernest Hemingway” on the cover of “The Old Man and the Sea”, you can reasonably assume that Hemingway was the author of that title. But when you see “Suzy Silly” on the cover of “The Cretin’s Guide to Calico”, it’s not necessarily the case that Suzy is the author of the book, even if she wrote most of the contents.

Why? Because authorship is defined by the creation and ownership of a work. If you’re the writer of a work but you don’t own that work then the question of authorship becomes murky. Conversely, a writer who self-publishes an original work is unambiguously the author because that writer both created and owns that work.

The common assumption about traditional publishing is that a writer writes a book which is then submitted to various publishers for consideration. If a publisher likes the work a financial deal is struck in which the original writer retains all rights of authorship because they originated and executed the idea.

Anyone who has a passing familiarity with the publishing industry knows there are many projects which do not meet this test of independent authorship. For example, who is the author of A Shore Thing? Is it Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi? Is it ghostwriter/collaborator Valerie Frankel? Is it the agent, editor and/or publisher who pitched and brokered the deal? Who had final editorial control over the book? Who owns the contents? Any of the above? Does it even make sense to talk of authorship in cases like this?

To be clear: if you write a book and someone agrees to publish it on the condition that you make specific changes, you’re still the author when that book comes out. Why? Because you signed off on those changes, even if you sold your soul in doing so. (You could have refused to make the changes, rejected the contract and still retained ownership of the work.)

On the other hand, if you’re hired to write a book, and you can be told to make changes, and you can be fired if you refuse or fail, then I don’t think you’re the author of that book. Your name may be on the book as the writer, and you may claim authorship in your bio, and you may be able to defend that claim because nobody else wrote the words in the book, but relative to someone who creates and executes an original idea themselves, I think it’s clear that your contribution is less. Throw in the test of ownership and I think the issue is decided.

In-House Self-Publishing
If you’ve spent any time observing the publishing industry you’ve inevitably heard a project described as in-house — meaning it was initiated by an editor or someone in management at the publishing company that produced the work. No matter who the publisher hires to write the words for an in-house title, is not the admission that something was developed in-house proof that such works are literally self-published?

To see what I mean, here are the three possible publishing relationships that can exist between writer and publisher:

  1. Writer creates work, writer publishes work. (Self-publishing)
  2. Writer creates work, publisher publishes work. (Traditional publishing)
  3. Publisher creates work, publisher publishes work. (Self-publishing.)

If a writer can self-publish a book even after hiring a cover designer, proofreader, designer, editor, marketer, publicist, accountant, tax lawyer, estate lawyer and chauffeur, how does merely hiring a writer (or ghostwriter) shelter a publisher from the charge of self-publishing if the publisher controls and owns all aspects of the resulting work? Isn’t that the very definition of self-publishing — albeit abstracted in both a business context and as a collaborative process?

What the Ditchwalk Scale shows is that when the owner of a title hires others to write all or part of the contents under contract, and that same owner also manufactures the resulting work, that person does not get to claim that the work was published by that business. Rather, the work was, by definition, self-published.

Self-Publishing for All
What publishers have been saying as long as publishers have been in existence is that creating and self-publishing books is okay for them, but not okay for you. Yet hiring others to do work on a title doesn’t determine whether a work is published or self-published. The only thing that matters is whether publication is bankrolled by the content owner or by a separate business.

By that definition, many of the books published around the world are self-published by publishers in exactly the same way that independent authors are now self-publishing their own work. The only difference is a difference in scale.

 

This is a reprint from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

Theme And Meaning In The Pretverse

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I took a series-writing course to help me get my ducks in a row. The type of series I’m writing is a series in which each story technically stands on it’s own, but they are all linked. I write them in a particular order and number them merely because there are some things happening in the background that cause everything to make more sense. But you could enjoy the front story of each book all by itself, or in any order you choose (And some people may prefer it that way to have sort of a ‘puzzle-piece’ experience).

[Editor’s note: strong language after the jump]



In the series-writing course, it is suggested that I should come up with the “worst possible outcome” for the series, and then come up with “any” solution, no matter how stupid, because it will help me figure out a way to “wrap it up” when the time comes.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my series doesn’t work that way. And it helped me to come up with the underlying theme of what I’m writing, what’s most important to me to convey.

While I have all these different romances and species, everybody is at odds: human (the ones that know), magic users (really humans, but a little upgraded), demon, angel, gods, vampires, therians, guardians.

There are so many different conflicts and there really is no one “group” that we are all supposed to root for. We’re just supposed to “understand where they are coming from and what motivates them.”

In most books/series we have an idealized reality that doesn’t help us understand humanity any better. Even villains we can “understand”, we still understand they are “the bad guy”. And the heroes we understand are the “good guy”. It’s very polarizing, because it doesn’t help us get any closer to understanding our own humanity.

In the Pretverse, if one character we like “wins”, it can mean greater conflict and challenges for another character we like. I’m not sure the point is for us to “save the world” here. I think the point of this series, the theme I want to express is:

There is no utopia. There is always struggle. But in the midst of that there is love, hope, and pockets of happiness to be found and enjoyed.

Somehow I doubt that the afterlife is a boat ride of pure eternal bliss, and if it was, it might be as sterile and boring as the heaven in the Pretverse. When we’re in high school many of us can’t wait to get out. But when we get out in the adult world, we come to find, much to our chagrin, that it’s just like high school again. All the shit we hated about high school, we hate about the “grown up world”. Well, what if Heaven (or whatever afterlife scenario one envisions) is still high school? What if dying doesn’t make problems go away and we still have to grow and change and fix things and deal with set-backs and disappointments. If that’s true, then what does it mean?

I think maybe some people haven’t really thought out the whole: “perfect happiness forever and ever” issue. And it’s something I want to explore with the Pretverse.

So… toward that end, I don’t WANT some giant awful thing everything in the series is building toward, then they overcome it for peace and puppies at the end of the series. The background conflicts aren’t there to be “resolved forevermore”. They are there because that’s the point. Love and happiness in life happen in spite of the background drama. The world will never be perfect and everything will never be wrapped up neat in a tidy bow, but despite that, each couple finds their happiness. And the hope is, that you will also find yours.

 

This is a reprint from the Weblog of Zoe Winters.

10 Tips To Improve Your Writing

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Nice to have you visit again.

I am in the middle of wrestling my manuscript to the ground and find I learn something new every day. With that in mind, I thought I might offer all my writer friends some general writing tips on how to improve your writing. Outside of the first tip, these aren’t offered in any specific order other than what came to mind at the time.

Let’s begin with what I think is the secret to success as a writer: persistence. As a father, the mantra I imposed upon my poor daughters was, “Practice, practice, practice.” (Though grown, they still make fun of me about that one.) In any case, as with every profession, the more you do it the better you become.

2. Invade your readers’ senses. This means when writing you find opportunities to have your characters use their five, or as some say, twelve, senses. When your characters smell the honeysuckle, so do your readers.

3. Diamonds are not a girl’s best friend. Well, I think it was Marilyn Monroe who informed all men that diamonds are indeed a girl’s best friend, but for women writers, (and their male counterparts), it’s verbs. The strength and exactness of the verbs you choose is the most powerful tool you possess to elevate your writing. The best verbs bring emotions or pictures to your readers’ minds.

4. Create interactive settings. That is, write in such a way as to have your setting come alive. The first time I took my writing to my critique group, every person mentioned a visual I had in my story. They commented on a scene where a boy reached up to grab his father’s shotgun from over the mantel and I wrote about the glow from the fire as it warmed the boy’s legs. It is those inconsequential images that paint those all important and powerful word pictures that immerse readers into your story.

5. Backstory belongs in the back. When I learned how to write backstory into my novel, I had to rewrite large chunks of what I already had on paper. Those long-winded paragraphs about what happened before my character came into my story became short, concise inserts within the story.

6. Bodies have language, too. Think of a person who has received astonishing news. What might they do at that time? Inhale? Shriek? Curl a lip? So might your characters. And best of all, readers love characters’ body language.

7. Conflict is king. Conflict is much like a drug drip in a hospital. That happy little bottle always hangs around and you get to dial it up whenever you want to. Conflict, not action mind you, but conflict is the power behind your novel.

8. If conflict is king, characterization is queen. Every novel rises and falls on the backs of those people who populate your novels. Effective characterization is a difficult skill to master but when you do, even you’ll fall for your books.

9. Knowledge is power. By this I mean, your writing has more strength if you give your readers the knowledge they require. It’s more interesting if your characters know the bomb is about to explode as this creates tension in your reader’s mind. As Alfred Hitchcock said, "There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it."

10. Give ‘em what they want. Your readers read for a reason and as a writer you should know that reason and cater to it. The lesson here is to learn your market. Write to satisfy your readers’ needs and not your own.

What tips might you like to share?

As always, know I wish for you only best-sellers.
 

Listen to a PODCAST of this article. 

This is a reprint from C. Patrick Shulze’s Author of Born to Be Brothers blog.

The Website Platform Advantage

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While writing my Platform Evolution post I gave some thought to commenting on an excellent Infographic about content farms. No sooner did I decide against it than I ran across this excellent post on Publishing Trends about content farms. Then, a day later, a good friend sent me an unbidden and timely link to a post on Making Light, which, among other things, talks about — wait for it! — content farms.

If you’re not familiar with content farms you can get a quick overview here. As a writer, what concerns me most about content farms is that they are to writing and publishing what Ebola is to the human body. If I was an astrophysicist I would also add that content farms are to information and knowledge what solar storms are to communications. And if I was a logician I would say that content farms are to accuracy and reliability what tsunamis are to fishing villages.

Which is to say that everything about content farms is bad, but not equally bad. The worst aspect of content farms is not that they’re the new frontier for spammers and swindlers, it’s that producing so much crap at such an incredible rate renders every single aggregating and filtering mechanism useless.

Google as a search engine for retail products and reviews has been beyond broken for years. (Try searching for “best _____”, where the blank is any product you’re interested in.) Amazon is currently the default search for products, but it’s starting to fall apart as well. (Am I looking at the latest version of the CD/DVD/book I want to order? Is it new or used? Does it ship free or for a fee? Is it shipping from Amazon or some fly-by-night third-party reseller?) And of course the idea that all that ballyhooed user-generated social-media content is pretty much crap is also nothing new.

What content farms do that’s new is automate the production of internet crap by exploiting free labor and making liberal use of other people’s content in a plausibly deniable way. For independent writers trying to attract attention, fighting through the noise pollution generated by content farms may seem impossible, and all the more so as content farms begin to pollute e-book retailers like Amazon. The antidote to this virulent hemorrhage of obfuscating web text may seem to be a gated social networking community, but I think the opposite is true.  

The Best Offense
When you own your own website you establish a perimeter you can actively defend. Whatever else might be happening on the wild and wooly web — whatever newfangled social-networking site or app might be setting the masses atwitter, and whatever predatory forces are conspiring to mute your voice — you can control the integrity of your brand and web presence from behind your server firewall.

As the web disintegrates and segregates more and more, and as sites like Facebook and Amazon fight to lock you in to their communities, denying portability to the relationships you establish on those sites, your isolated, solitary website will remain unsullied. As such it will help you accomplish what fewer and fewer netizens are able to do these day: authenticate yourself. Nobody will be confused about who you are because on your own site you control the message and the medium.

Rather than having to fight through other sites or networks, an independent website also allows readers to find you using almost any basic search engine. Yes, people will need to know something about you — your name, the title of your book(s), etc. — but that will be true no matter how you attempt to integrate your platform into the web.

Content farms, by their very nature, and designed to obscure and deceive through sheer volume. Should content farms progress to the level of writing useless articles about every name in the phone book, then yes, that could pose problems for independent authors. But those problems will still be significantly less if you have your own dedicated site.

Why? Because most search engines take the quality of posts into account. In less than a year and a half I’ve managed to turn the keywords ‘mark, barrett, writer‘ into multiple first-page search hits that allow people to find me. If readers learn or remember the word Ditchwalk they can find me even more quickly, either by typing in that word as a URL or searching for it.

In an age when more and more individuals and businesses are determined to exploit and corrupt information, the ability to validate and authenticate your own presence on the web carries a premium. As an independent author you are and must be your own brand, and I believe it’s less important in a platform context to distribute that brand than it is to make yourself easily identifiable and accessible. (You don’t have to join Facebook or Twitter or anything else in order to find and access Ditchwalk.)

The Best Defense
The biggest fear most writers have about not being on Facebook or Twitter — apart from missing out on the markets themselves — is that somebody will poach their name or brand. The fear of brandjacking is actually stoked by social networking site because it drives a considerable amount of registrations: sign up now or someone will steal your identity! (Some websites make this threat part of their business plan, driving registrations by implicit extortion.)

Back in the day it was possible for a sole-proprietor to maintain a presence on one or two social networking sites to make sure nobody was poaching. Anyone visiting those pages could be redirected in some fashion to the brand’s home page. Today that’s not only not realistic, but social networking sites have gotten better at making it hard for people to leave the compound. Trying to integrate with every site that has a market/community — let alone maximize those relationships — could easily leave the independent author with no time to work.

From your perspective as an author, establishing the prominence of your own name probably seems critical, but it’s not. There are a lot of Mark Barretts in the world, but because of my investment in Ditchwalk I don’t have to compete with any of them. Merely by writing a few blog posts using words central to my work I’ve been able to differentiate myself from others who are fortunate enough to have the same great name.

In the same way that I’m not going to play defense in order to protect myself against brandjacking, I’m not going to play defense against namejacking. Even if I thought parents were naming their kids “Mark Barrett” in order to dilute my brand, I wouldn’t bow to that kind of extortion because it’s too easy to get around the problem. (I might consider suing them for trademark infringement however. Or blasphemy. Or something.)

There’s a bit of equity in all this, too. If you’ve got a really common name it’s going to be a little harder to differentiate yourself from everyone else, but you’ll benefit because most people will be able to guess the spelling. If your name is less common it may be harder to spell, but it will be much easier for you to differentiate yourself.

It’s possible that someone somewhere may at some point put up a fan page using your name. It’s also possible some weasel might try to steal your identity by brandjacking. It’s useful to do web searches from time to time to see when and where your name appears, and in what context, but I don’t think there’s any reason to be paranoid. If you do find somebody ripping you off you can probably get the offending account or web page taken down by contacting the relevant admins.

The Signal-to-Noise Test
If you’ve been using the web for a decade or more you’ve experienced the decay. Searching for even simple things has become a chore, in part because of the nefarious practices of a dedicated and growing subculture of spammers and exploiters, but also in part because of a social-networking mindset that says the open web is a threat.

When you’re building your own platform and considering how different applications or sites might benefit you, consider the signal-to-noise ratio. I stopped using Twitter because the ratio of signal to noise kept getting worse no matter what I did. I stopped using Facebook because Facebook constantly abused and confused its own users, while at the same time encouraging a nearly endless stream of meaningless updates and postings.

When you base your platform on your own website, the signal to noise ratio is under your control. Nothing and nobody can get in the way of your message because there is no noise unless you allow it. As a result, the clarity of your site stands apart from the muck spewed forth by content farms and networking sites. And there will only be more muck.

 

This is a reprint from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

Invitation To The Madhouse ~ Report On Self-Publishing

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This post, by Alexander M. Zoltai, originally appeared on his Notes From An Alien blog on 2/24/11.

{This post is almost a rant and purposefully written in a voice I rarely use…}

A madhouse is where insane persons are confined or a place exhibiting stereotypical characteristics of such a place.

This, to me, right now, is what self-publishing is.

Let me define my terms a bit more precisely:

“Sanity” has roots indicating “healthy condition” or “soundness of mind”. If I temporarily constrict my argument to the term “publishing”, most people who are trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in this arena of human experience would, I feel, tend to agree that publishing is not in a healthy condition or showing soundness of mind.

Many of those same people would go further and claim that self-publishing is the medicine needed for the sick field of publishing.

Well…

I’ve been involved in self-publishing for about six years now and the last year has seen me working overtime to come to terms with how to best take advantage of the opportunities that self-publishing seems to offer.

I don’t have space in this post to detail the ills of the traditional publishing route but anyone interested can easily find much to ponder.
 

Read the rest of the post on Alexander M. Zoltai‘s Notes From An Alien blog. 

Adopting a Device-Neutral Approach to Electronic Publishing: A Q&A With Springer's Timothy Griswold

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This article, by Janet Spavlik, originally appeared on Book Business on 4/14/11 and is reprinted here in its entirety with the site’s permission.

Digital publishing was, of course, top of mind for many of the attendees at last week’s Publishing Business Conference & Expo, as the event kicked off with a panel of book industry leaders in print-digital integration. Moderated by THA Consulting President Ted Hill , the session, entitled "The Cross-Platform Book Publisher: Reinvent Your Company," featured panelists Timothy Griswold , vice president, sales, trade and special licensing, Springer; Adam Lerner , president/publisher, Lerner Publishing Group; Deborah Forte , president, Scholastic Media; and Mike Rosiak , lead content architect, Wolters Kluwer Health—all of whom shared their experiences and insights into successfully bringing products to market in multiple formats.

Book Business Extra spoke with Griswold after the conference to expand on some of the themes discussed amongst the panel. Here, he advises book publishers on publishing electronically across multiple devices and discusses the next big opportunity Springer is exploring.

Book Business Extra: During the panel, you stressed Springer’s device-neutral approach in regard to publishing content electronically—the company publishes across as many devices as possible. How has Springer adapted to so many different devices and formats, and what advice would you give to other publishers that want to adopt a device-neutral approach?

Timothy Griswold: … There is a learning curve involved. You take a risk, and some of them are good and some of them may not be so good. … When you’re any publisher, whether small, medium or large, during the negotiation with [online retailers, such as] the Apple iBookstore, Amazon Kindle, Blio, etc., you need to really do that trial run-through at the beginning during the contract negotiation [before the contract is signed]. … What we found is that, in some cases, the content and the format [in which] we delivered the content … the actual appearance on the e-reader, the quality was not good. And so, because of that, with the contract already signed, there were conversion costs, and, in some cases, considerable conversion costs that had to be incurred.

There was a discussion back and forth as far as who was responsible for those conversion costs, so that’s probably the most important thing. … I learned that I need to have the people in production that I can rely on and who are knowledgeable regarding the different formats of e-files and delivery and what has to be done, and I need that knowledge while I’m out there negotiating with Blio or whoever it happens to be in order to deliver the content and make it that seamless transition.

Publetariat Editor’s Note: also see this Storify page, on which Heather Fletcher shares tweets from the conference, many of which include links to blog posts in which attendees have recapped various sessions and commented on them.

 

Author Interview: Naderia by Julian Gallo

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 Author Interview – Julian Gallo’s Latest Novel, "Naderia"

written and conducted by Garry Crystal.  

Platform Evolution

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Here’s a graph from my Twitter Quitter post:

A basic premise of independent authorship is that authors should establish their own platform in order to reach out to readers and potential customers. I believe in that premise. What constitutes a platform, however, remains undefined.

Implicit in the idea of an author’s platform is the creation of an online presence. Because the internet has become commonplace it’s easy to forget that an independent platform for individual artists would be impossible without it. (Prior to the internet an artist’s platform was limited by geography. Bands were limited not by their music but by their touring range.) While the advantages and opportunities provided by the internet are astounding relative to the pre-internet age, the internet is still a communications medium devised by human beings, with inherent strengths and weaknesses.

Understanding how the internet works in a business context is an ongoing process. Two days ago the New York Times put up a paywall, attempting for the second time to derive revenue from its own online platform. (The first attempt failed.) That one of the most prominent newspapers in the world is still struggling to monetize content despite almost unparalleled visibility and economic muscle is a reminder to everyone that the platform question has not been answered.

Depending on your perspective, the tendency of the human mind to cherry pick information can be seen as either a bug or a feature. In the context of online platforms, it’s easy to see successes like iTunes as indicative of potential and promise when it’s actually the result of a unique set of circumstances. Finding gold in a stream may spark a gold rush, but only a few people will stake claims that literally pan out. The internet is no different. As I noted in a post about the future of publishing:

In return for making distribution almost effortless and almost free, the internet promises nothing. No revenue. No readers. Nothing.

Possibilities are not promises. Possibilities are chances, which is why I always say that writing for profit is gambling — and gambling against terrible odds. Determining what your online platform should be, and how much time you should devote to that platform, is an important part of nudging the odds in your favor.  

Lowering the Bar
Platform-services consultants, like marketing consultants, will always tell you that you can never do enough. Because the time you can devote to your platform is limited, but the time you should devote is infinite, these people will offer to bridge that gap on your behalf, for a fee. Because the internet is driven by technology, and because anything less than a cutting-edge platform means you’re falling short, platform consultants will also offer to sell you myriad apps and solutions, all of which they will teach you about, maintain and upgrade for a fee. (The New York Times was convinced by these same people to spend $40 million dollars on a paywall that can be easily circumvented.)

Approaching your platform as a vehicle of infinite possibility constrained only by your own feeble lack of determination is a recipe for failure. You do not have an infinite amount of time and resources to devote to your platform. Even if you did, there’s no guarantee that such a commitment would equal success. From part IV of my marketing and sales series:

In the real world, if you really did grab a pick and shovel and head out into your backyard to strike it rich, your friends and family would rightly think you a loon, no matter how deeply felt your convictions were. Why? Because it’s common knowledge that gold isn’t plentiful everywhere. Rather, it’s concentrated in veins of rock or in waterways that hold gold from eroded veins of rock.

If you try to dig in the wrong place it doesn’t matter how much time or money you spend, or how cutting-edge your tools are. You’re not going to get any gold even if you have infinite resources. Because the internet obviates geographical limits it seem to negate all limits, but as the NYT’s second attempt at a paywall makes clear that’s not the case. The internet is not an infinite vein of gold waiting to be exploited if only you’re smart enough to pick the right mix of apps, site functionality and marketing techniques.

(This false premise echoes the happiness industry’s determination to blame everyone for their own failings. If you’re not a happy person it’s your own fault: stop whining and try harder. If your platform isn’t racking up clicks and sales it’s your own fault: stop whining and try harder.)

Platform Motivation
I think the right question to ask is how each independent author’s platform can most effectively dovetail with that author’s individual goals. If you’re the kind of writer who wants to write a lot of books, slaving yourself to a complex or time-consuming platform is going to keep you from reaching that goal. (I’ll elaborate on that in a moment.) If your writing goals are more modest or limited — and if the work you’re producing is itself part of a larger goal — then creating a more complex platform might make sense. For example, if you’re a public speaker or have a primary profession, authoring a book might help you further those pursuits even if the work itself never becomes a bestseller.

I think it’s also important to be conscious of the motivations behind the voices championing the idea of a platform. As a writer I think you should have a platform in order to make yourself visible. Making yourself available online allows people to find you and your work, and it allows you to have information or products waiting for them whenever they choose to arrive. Without a presence on the web you are invisible and mute, no matter how many pages you crank out.

Publishers, agents and editors want you to have a platform, but for slightly different reasons. To them your platform provides a metric by which they can measure your popularity in an uncertain marketplace crowded with aspiring writers. The measure of dedication you show to your platform also indicates how interested you might be in doing the things those people would want you to do in order to maximize sales. Given that they only make money if you make money it’s understandable that they would have these interests, but those interests do not put writing first.

In my case, for example, the decision to quit Facebook and Twitter was made after considerable deliberation about what was best for me as a writer, including assessment of the workloads involved. I’m fairly confident most publishers, agents and editors would see my choices as a mistake, if only because I’ve made it harder for them to assess my platform relative to other authors. Staying active on those sites would please them, but it would make my writing life more difficult without any demonstrable payoff. (If I write a runaway hit I can always join those sites again in order to capitalize on that success.)

Platform Criteria
So: how to juggle all of the available platform options? Well, after testing some of the options I’ve changed my own platform weighting as follows:

  • Creating and publishing new work is more important than any platform activity by at least an order of magnitude. If there’s a choice between writing and working on my platform, I’m going to write. Doing so emphasizes the proper ratio of time I should spend on my platform.

    As I said above, writers who crank out books probably need less of a platform relative to other writers. Why? Because after you establish even on an online toehold, your growing body of work becomes the greatest expression of, and attraction to, your platform.

  • Becoming a better writer is more important than bettering my platform by at least an order of magnitude. Because I’m never going to be able to drive sales with my celebrity I need to make sure I can compete with my content. Here’s how I put it in the conclusion to my series on marketing and sales:

    Writing is a qualitative act. It matters whether you suck or not. As such I believe mastery of craft is the most reliable predictor of critical or commercial success for the great majority of writers. There will always be people who succeed despite a lack of authorial gifts and there will always be good writers who are overlooked in the marketplace. But if you’re determined to play the percentages and protect your own authorial vision, nothing pays off like focusing on being the best writer you can be.

  • Both Twitter and Facebook demonstrate the same inescapable truth: if you have celebrity you’ll have more success at exploiting those sites; if you don’t, the road to cultural currency (to say nothing of sales) becomes much, much more difficult. The written word is the root of any storyteller’s celebrity. It is the engine of an author’s success in every way, including platform success. I agree that authors should launch their platforms before they launch their books, but the success of that platform will be defined largely by the success of those books, not the other way around.

  • All platforms are not the same. Some authors focus on issues, some authors focus on readers, some focus on both. (Zoe Winters wrestles with these choices here and here.) I’m at the point where I want to write and self-publish more fiction, and engage more readers. Again, however, my success at doing so will come from spending more time writing things for people to read, not more time working on my platform.

  • After a year and a half I can say with conviction that an author can have no better platform than their own website and blog. If you want to extend that locus through other sites like Facebook and Twitter, that’s fine. But you should have your own home base and you should own it. It doesn’t have to be a complex site, and probably shouldn’t be if you want to protect your writing time. And you should always protect your writing time.

Everything I’ve learned over the past year or two says that an author’s platform should be smaller rather than larger. Everything I’ve learned also says that authors should concentrate on writing rather than augmenting their platform. You do need to have a presence. You don’t need to obsess over it.

The Platform in Context
Launching an online platform is like staking a claim. You hope you pick a good spot but you also know you have to compete with everybody else working the same territory. However much time and money you decide to devote to your platform, some of your competitors will have more money, some will work harder, and some will have trained professionals helping them.

Treating your platform like a competition with others is tempting but it’s a big mistake. I’m convinced that the people who visit my site and read my words are less concerned with how my platforms stacks up against other sites than they are with how well I deliver on my promises to them. I certainly don’t want my site to look amateurish, but beyond that low bar my focus needs to be wholly on my readers.

Because the internet potentially allows an author to connect with everyone on the planet it’s tempting to try to drive readers to your platform. I’ve come to believe that doing so is a waste of time. You should approach your platform and presence as something long-term and make it easy for readers to find you when they’re interested. The best of all possible worlds is one where readers promote you and your work by word of mouth, and apart from celebrity-driven successes I can’t find any examples to the contrary. Bottom line: it takes time, so plan accordingly, including emotionally.

One of the most oft-quoted remarks about the obstacles facing independent artists comes from Tim O’Reilly:

Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.

This idea has also been heavily promoted by anti-DRM advocate Cory Doctorow:

That’s because my biggest threat as an author isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. The majority of ideal readers who fail to buy my book will do so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free electronic copy.

The problem with this claim isn’t that it’s false, it’s that it’s meaningless. Obscurity is also a far greater threat to authors than smallpox, grapefruit and linoleum. If nobody knows who you are, yes, that’s a big problem. But ignoring the costs of piracy doesn’t solve any author’s obscurity problem. In fact, based on my Twitter experience, I don’t think anything can solve the obscurity problem because it’s baked into the online cake.

The internet made information available 24/7. It also made it possible for anyone to distribute digital content. Now, with the advent of Facebook and Twitter, it’s effortlessly easy for people to express every stray thought in their heads. As a result, the wall of noise that any content provider must compete against has grown exponentially. We’re at a point where every single person on the face of the earth is a direct competitor. There is no longer any distinction between the people who make content and the people who consume it.

The fact that everyone seems so deeply invested in expressing their own thoughts means fewer and fewer people are listening. Attention has become a commodity as critical to the lifeblood of a writer as obscurity is daunting:

Many of the filters earlier generations took for granted, the ones imposed by the absence of real-time communications and efficient transmission and storage, have now been eradicated by the advent of internet and digital media.

The only possible solution to the obscurity/attention quandary is not to play. No matter how great your celebrity or big your platform, there are limits. Just ask Roger Ebert. (There are also good reasons to believe that Facebook and Twitter are overvalued financially and culturally. Just ask Warren Buffett and Vincent Eaton.)

Picturing Your Platform
When I first thought about my own platform I imagined it as a kind of soap box. It was my spot in the public square of ideas. Later, I also came to think of my platform as a retail space. It was my shop and display.

Now, however, I’ve come to see my platform as a launching pad. It’s how I try to put stories and ideas and conversations into virtual orbit. Some of the things I launch may blow up on the pad, some may go to the moon, and the fate of some launches may be unknown for a long time. And nothing I do to my platform will change that.

 

This is a reprint from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

How To Include Backstory Without Killing Your Novel

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I’ve been writing most of my life, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got it down cold. If anything, I’ve learned I have a lot to learn. For example, although my first novel may spend the rest of eternity tucked safely in the darkest corner of the deepest drawer away from anything living it might otherwise harm, I would have to say I did a much better job of delivering back story in it than I’m doing with my current WIP. Of course, that begs the question: why?

Because my first novel was conceived and drafted under the tutelage of a wonderful high school English teacher (Thank You, Ms. Patti Jo Peterson!) who understood the need to plan the entire thing out before jumping in. This one I began as a total pantser. ‘Nuff said.

“So what’s the big deal? I’ve always been a pantser.“

That’s true, but I’m discovering that being a pantser can really cause problems later on. After reading posts like How do you know what to cut? Tune into the rhythm of your story by Roz Morris and 7 Deadly Sins of Prologues–Great Novel Beginnings Part 2 by Kristen Lamb, I’m seeing that what I thought were awesome scenes were really just a cheap way of dumping information. Not a great way to win readers over.

Fortunately there are ways to get that important information to your reader without slowing the story down. Roni Loren suggests 5 ways to include back story in her post How to Dish Out Backstory in Digestible Bites.

  1. Dialogue: Just beware of making this tool a hammer when you really need a screwdriver. It needs to happen naturally and in a way that doesn’t make your characters sound as if they are reciting a history lesson to your reader.


  2. Flashback: Most experienced writers strongly caution against using these. From my own experience I know using flashbacks can be tantalizing, but as Kristen Lamb says, “Flashbacks, used too often, give the reader the feel of being trapped with a sixteen-year-old learning to drive a stick-shift. Just get going forward, then the car (story) dies and rolls backward.“


  3. Memory: I think this one is trickier because you can easily fall into creating a flashback. Roni uses this example — “Ex.) He smiled at her, and for a moment, she was reminded of the boy he used to be, the one she used to love.  (See, that tells us they had a previous relationship and that something changed along the way.  Just enough to whet the reader’s appetite.)“


  4. Thoughts: This is my favorite both in writing and reading. It’s a great way to let readers into the characters internal world and have a glimpse of what their past has made them into. Unfortunately, it’s easy to abuse this one, too. Beware of pages of italicized text. They’re probably hiding an info dump.


  5. Action: Current action in a story can detail past events. Roni uses this example — “i.e.  A news story comes on TV talking about a cold case murder that relates to your MC.“


Roni’s parting suggestion is probably the best piece of advice a writer can tuck away in her toolbox: “The easiest way for me to figure out how to put in backstory is to think like a screenwriter.  They cannot tell you things in a movie, they have to show it all.  So how would I convey this information if it were a movie?“

As I continue to work and re-work my WIP I know I’ll run into the need to include back story, but with all the great resources available, like Kristen Lamb’s blog Warrior Writers, Roz Morris’s Nail Your Novel, and Roni Loren’s Fiction Groupie, finding an answer on how to include that important past information in ways that don’t slow down the story won’t be so difficult.

What about you? How do you include back story without killing your novel’s pace or choking your reader?

 

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

2K Challenge DONE: First Novel Draft is Now Complete

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 That’s right! I’m sitting on 52,360 words and a completed first novel draft.

 

I’d like to thank my husband, my hypothetical cat, and let’s see, who else?

I didn’t keep with the 2k a day, but I also had days where I wrote 4 or 5k instead.  Meaning I was ahead in some respects but at the same time fell severely behind.  Then yesterday I realized I was a lot closer to the end than previously thought.  My original word count goal was NaNoWriMo’s 75k.  Thing is, the story was done, so I ended it.

 

Now that doesn’t mean, by far, that this draft is ready for publication.  Are you kidding? Halfway through I changed the city (and the time era, for that fact).  The main setting was supposed to be Houston, TX (because it’s what I know and can describe).  Thing is, it eventually changed to the remains of Houston in what they call Hughes City.  You don’t see that change until about 2/3 through the draft.  And don’t get me started on names.  Some of the characters flip around a bit, and some just stopped getting mentioned all together.

 

Most of it is adverb-ville, full of telly phrases and cliche dialogue.  Why? Because I’m a fangirl and I think in cliches? Maybe. I think I’ll go with because I’m human and no one can make something beautiful in the first draft. Yes, that sounds much more dignified.

 

Anyway, if there’s anything I learned with this it’s to stop when the story feels done.  Word count, ultimately, shouldn’t define when you end a draft.

I know, I know, I’m awesome. ;P

 

So tell me, how do y’all write your first novel drafts?  When do you know the draft is done? I’d love to hear from y’all.

View the original blog post. 

50 Problem Words And Phrases

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This post, by Mark Nichol, originally appeared on DailyWritingTips on 3/29/11.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to conceive written communication. So many pairs or trios of words and phrases stymie us with their resemblance to each other. Here’s a quick guide to alleviate (or is it ameliorate?) your suffering:

1. a while / awhile: “A while” is a noun phrase; awhile is an adverb.

2. all together / altogether: All together now — “We will refrain from using that two-word phrase to end sentences like this one altogether.”

3. amend / emend: To amend is to change; to emend is to correct.

4. amount / number: Amount refers to a mass (“The amount saved is considerable”); number refers to a quantity (“The number of dollars saved is considerable”).

5. between / among: The distinction is not whether you refer to two people or things or to three or more; it’s whether you refer to one thing and another or to a collective or undefined number — “Walk among the trees,” but “Walk between two trees.”

6. biannual / biennial: Biannual means twice a year; biennial means once every two years.

7. bring / take: If it’s coming toward you, it’s being brought. If it’s headed away from you, it’s being taken.

8. compare to / compare with: “Comparing to” implies similarity alone; “compare with” implies contrast as well.

9. compliment / complement: To compliment is to praise; to complement is to complete.

10. comprise, consist of / compose, constitute: Comprise means “include,” so test by replacement — “is included of” is nonsense, and so is “is comprised of.” The whole comprises the parts or consists of the parts, but the parts compose or constitute the whole.

[Publetariat Editor’s note: also see Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty’s take on comprise vs. compose, here]

11. connote / denote: To connote is to convey (“Air quotes connote skepticism or irony”); to denote is to specify (“A stop sign denotes the requirement to halt”).

12. continual / continuous: Continual events are frequently repeated, or intermittent. Continuous events are uninterrupted, or constant.

13. credible / credulous: To be credible is to be authoritative; to be credulous is to be gullible.

14. deserts / desserts: If you eat only cake, pie, ice cream, and the like, you eat just desserts. If you have it coming to you, you get your just deserts as well. (However, the connotation is negative, so hit the gym.)

15. different from / different than: The former phrase is preferred in formal writing; but “differently than” is always correct usage.


Read the rest of the post on DailyWritingTips.

7 Mindblowing Microsoft Word Tricks Every Writer Should Know

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This post, from The Intern, originally appeared on her The Intern blog on 4/2/11.

The other day, INTERN was flabbergasted to discover the existence of page breaks in Microsoft Word, thanks to this handy article about how to format a manuscript. This led INTERN to ponder the fact that, as writers, we spend so many hours—nay, years—of our lives using a computer program of whose many tricks and features we often remain woefully ignorant.

In order to remedy this sad state of affairs, INTERN spent the past few days unearthing some of the very best Microsoft Word tricks for writers. Here they are!

1. Custom AutoCorrect

Everybody knows that you can set Microsoft Word to autocorrect typos like “teh” for “the”. But did you know that if you’re willing to invest a little bit of time upfront, you can teach Microsoft Word to automatically fill in all the annoying character names, words, and even entire phrases you’re too lazy to write yourself?

Say you’re writing a novel about a spunky chap named Petronius Hermonculus Junior who has a habit of exclaiming "I say, I say, what weather we’ve been having!"

Simply create a custom AutoCorrect command like so:

and another one like so:

Now, when you’re working on your manuscript, all you have to do is dash off "ph exclaimed w" and Word will miraculously transform it into "Petronius Hermonculus Junior exclaimed "I say, I say, what weather we’ve been having!"

You’re welcome.

2. Autocapitalize first letters of sentences.

Listen here: if you have time to manually capitalize the first letters of your sentences, you’re writing too goddamn slow. That’s why Word has an AutoCorrect option that will automatically capitalize them for you. To turn it on, just go to Tools —> AutoCorrect and click the appropriate checkbox. Now never press the shift key ever again.

3. Custom Dictionaries

Anyone who has tried to edit a story or novel involving any amount of slang knows the misery and tedium involved in trying to use spellcheck ("for the last #%@$ time, ‘shizzle’ is not a misspelling of ‘shingle’!") Enter the Custom Dictionary. Before you even get started on your next opus, create a custom dictionary (e.g. ShizzleNizzle Dictionary) and add nonstandard or made-up words as you go along. That way, when you’re ready for the big spellcheck, you won’t get bogged down by unwanted corrections.
 

Read the rest of the post on The Intern blog.

On Leaving Traditional Publishing For EBook Sales Success With LJ Sellers

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It’s exciting to hear about independent authors making a living from their books and today’s interview with L.J. Sellers will inspire you! L.J. actually left her traditional publisher to go the indie route and she explains why in the interview.

 

Podcast: Download (Duration: 34:46 — 20.7MB)

 


In the intro, I talk about how Pentecost went back up the Kindle charts again when I reduced the price to 99 cents for Read an Ebook Week. It seems that a lower price does boost sales and since my aim right now is to get more readers, the 99c price might be the way forward. I explain why the podcast is moving to every two weeks instead of weekly and talk about some of your feedback from my survey. I also talk about my Ebook Publishing mini-course which just launched. It’s a multimedia course behind the scenes on publishing ebooks on the Kindle, iPad, Nook and more.

L.J. Sellers is an award-winning journalist, editor, and mystery/suspense novelist. She has four books in the Detective Jackson series including The Sex Club and two standalone thrillers, all available on Kindle and other online bookstores.

You can watch my video review of The Sex Club here

  • How L.J. started in journalism and editing and then started writing fiction, even though she didn’t think she was creative enough initially. After writing The Sex Club and inventing the character of Detective Jackson, she found a series that readers enjoyed. The latest in the series is Dying for Justice which blends two series characters together.
  • Why L.J. left her publisher and went indie. It was a time of change as she had been laid off. It was either giving up fiction writing or making a commitment to trying to make money with fiction. L.J. had been reading Joe Konrath’s blog and was inspired to do it too. Her publisher owned the Detective Jackson series as well as two books that wouldn’t be published for a while. L.J. asked for the rights back after deciding it was worth it to be independent, despite the stigma of self-publishing in the market. She turned down freelance work for two weeks and hired herself as her own publicist – great idea! Did 10 hours a day, 7 days a week for book promotion which created a spurt in sales for all the books. Within a few months, all 4 books were Top 20 in police procedural Kindle store. By the end of the year, L.J. was a full-time novelist, earning a living with fiction.
  • L.J. invested in her small business, getting cover designs, using editors. Readers liked the stories – it was just about getting the books out there and realizing the profit.
  • Top tips for publishing successfully on the Kindle. Write a great book that will compete well against everything else. It needs to grab attention. The authors with the most success also have quite a few books out there so that is important. It lends credibility that you’re not just a one-time author. A series helps too as people are invested in the characters.
  • Make a commitment to promotion. It needs to be done every day. It’s forum posting, guest posting, commenting, dialog on twitter. Your tagline will contain your book links. It’s indirect but effective as people get to know you. You can pull back on the marketing after you have some books out there. But L.J. believes both marketing and writing are important. We discuss advertising effectiveness for saving time but it costs some money. Kindle Nation is measurable as you can see the sales rise but it’s hard to tell what’s effective.
  • On ebook pricing. It’s a balance and it’s worth following Joe Konrath’s blog as he shares all the math and experiments on pricing. You can play around with the prices. People who are successful have different price points. It’s also about value for the reader and volume does make a difference.
  • On the changing stigma of self-publishing. It’s certainly still around as self-published authors can’t join professional organizations or be on panels at conventions. There are still stratifications. It will be hard for these organizations as same author, same books, same quality of writing but now independent means the author can’t be promoted by these organizations. That will become more complicated as more authors go the indie route. At the end of the day, readers don’t care.
     
  • For new authors coming into the publishing industry, L.J. tries not to advise as some people have a dream of being traditionally published. But for herself, going independent is the best choice.
     
  • On Kindle, the market will decide – either you’re not marketing enough, or the book’s not good enough.

 

You can connect with LJ at her website LJSellers.com as well as on twitter @ljsellers

The Sex Club and other books are available on Amazon and other online booksellers.

 

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