Before you self-publish your book…

One of the workshops I teach is “So You Want to Write a Book.” In it, I strongly urge and implore people not to self-publish, especially a novel, at least until they’ve considered all ramifications so they can go into it knowing the facts.

My reasons are as follows.

1. Distribution

Even if you can get a distributor (and that’s very iffy, for very good reasons), most self-publishers can’t afford to pay 60-70% of what they make to a distributor. The smaller the press run, the higher the costs of the books. The more books you print, the more you’ll have sitting in your garage. If your dream is to be in bookstores, it’s very unlikely that you’ll make it. So what will you do?

2. Promotion

Most self-publishers, esp. those who do it through vanity presses, tend to start thinking about selling the books when they are arriving from the publisher. At that point, it’s about six months too late. You need a plan for selling the books before you send the book to the printer. You also need a promotion budget. If you’re a speaker or someone with connections to organizations that are a good fit, or if you’re innovative and have lots of time to put in, you can sell books. But speaking and getting bulk sales work best for non-fiction. Fiction is a much tougher sell.

3. Branding

What a good royalty publisher offers that a vanity publisher usually doesn’t (and most self-publishers can’t get) is the ability to get a new author’s book into stores or on websites or wherever books go. Well-known publishers have spent time and money developing conduits of good will. Part of that is having a good distributor, but just having a distributor is absolutely no guarantee that the book will ever get into a store or be sold on the internet. What really gets the bookstore to carry the book is having a respected publisher’s name on the book. Not yours, at least not in the beginning, but the publisher’s. The bookstore buyer sees RandomHouse or Dundurn on the cover, and says, “Ah, yes, I can trust them.” And eventually the customer buying the book will say the same thing.

When you publish through a vanity press, their name usually goes on the cover, and the bookbuyer goes, “Hmm. Let me think. Oh yes, tried one of their books, but it was bad. Nope.” They have a brand all right, but the brand is “self-published!” Sometimes you don’t even have to look past the cover. It has the self-published look! There are a number of publishers whose books I won’t even bother to open because of the publisher’s reputation. By the way, Mystery Writers of America has a list of publishers whose books they won’t consider for credit as an author, and most are vanity presses. (And while I’m on this subject, have you ever wondered why vanity publishers seem to be everywhere you look? Can it be that they’re all anxious to help struggling writers get their books in print and fulfill their dreams, or might they be the ones making money at this?)

When you publish independently (my term for when you become the publisher and hire a substantive editor and a copy editor and a proof reader and a graphic artist, and then you get your own ISBN and bar code and CIP info and deal with a printer and hire a publicist – all the things a normal publisher does - you’ll have your own publishing name on the book. And then you have the problem of being an unknown quantity. Personally, I’d rather be unknown that recognized as a vanity press. That way I can create my own brand.Given that all publishing houses have to start from scratch, maybe in 10 years of so, you’ll have built up your publishing house so that you have a recognizable and accepted brand of your own. Yes, you can have some vanity presses use your publishing name on them. And if you make sure all the other things are done well, the book can look good, but if you have to do all that, why do it through them in the first place?

My five cents! (I heard they’re planning to retire the penny.

You’ve written a book: now what?

Most of the time when new writers tell me they’ve written a book, what they actually mean is that they’ve completed a first draft of a book. And if you know what you’re doing, you don’t rush off to find a publisher for a first draft.

What you do next is let it sit for a week or so while you work on something totally different, and then sit down to read your book in editor mode. Basically, you try to pretend you’ve never seen it before, and you do an objective critique of it.

If your book is fiction, and you haven’t read Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King; The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes by Jack M Bickham: Revision by David Michael Kaplan; Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern; or most of the books in the Writers Digest Elements of Fiction series, I’d suggest you go to your local store or join Writers’ Digest book club and buy as many as you can afford and read them first.

If your book is non-fiction, look for On Writing Well by William Zinsser, A Writer’s Time by Kenneth Atchity; The 28 Biggest Writing Blunders (And How to Avoid Them) by William Noble, or one of the many books on specific kinds of nonfiction from Writer’s Digest or other publishers. Since each chapter of many non-fiction books may be viewed as a single entity, books on writing articles could also be helpful. Eg. Writing from the Heart by Marjorie Holmes; the Elements of Article Writing Series from Writer’s Digest.

At this time, you also need to refine your target audience so you know exactly who you’re writing the book for.

Next, you write a second draft. How you do that is up to you. Some people just start writing again from scratch. It depends on how much it needs to be changed. What I do is save everything I have as a new file and then start taking it apart and moving things around and rewriting sections, and do forth. I like to think of that first draft as the clay I need to work with in order to create a masterpiece.

I look first for big problems or issues, and ignore most of the little things like spelling and grammar and so forth. Focus on the plot - does it work - and the characters - do they feel real? Or in non-fiction, are the chapters in the right sequence? Does it flow? Have I missed any key areas? What research still needs to be done to make sure everything is accurate?

And when you have that done, you do it all over again and again, as needed. You likely want to get a critique from another writer or two, or a really knowledgeable reader. At some point, you may want to pay for a really good editor to do a substantive edit (more about that next time.)

When you’re satisfied with the plot and the characters in your novel, then you look at the description, the dialogue, the accuracy of the details, and the time sequences.

In your non-fiction, check out the flow of your ideas, make sure all the relevant points are there, look at the illustrations you’ve used, refine your transitions, check that there is something for the reader to take way, and make sure every aspect is good.

Keep refining until you get down to the last bit - the spelling and punctuation, and so forth.

I revised Shaded Light 17 times. True, it’s a very complex book with multiple plot-lines and 14 points of view. My other books have been revised more like 7 or 8 times. Well, Friends Like These took maybe 10 times. My non-fiction books took probably 5 or 6 times.

The bottom-line is that you aren’t just “writing a book” in the sense that once all your thoughts on paper you’re finished. Even if you have done some editing as you wrote (something I don’t encourage), you still need to work with the end product. What you’re actually doing is crafting and molding and shaping it it so it says exactly what you want it to say and so that every single word you leave in has a function.

Yeah, I know. Sounds like work. But, actually, writing a book IS work. As the old saying goes, the idea - the “inspiration” is only a small part of the entire process. The other 90% involves “perspiration”.

The nasty practice of ghost-writing

I just read Linda Hall’ s post at TWGauthors.blogspot.com and dug out this message I’d sent to a listserve I’m on last June. Thought it was relevant.

As a reader, I think work-for-hire or ghosted books or articles that don’t give appropriate credit to the actual writer are morally and ethically wrong. It is lying and when I find out the truth, I feel cheated. I absolutely hate it. As a writer, I feel even more strongly about it.

I’ve mentioned to a few nonwriters that certain well-known people don’t write their own books, and every single one of them has been horrified. They don’t want to know - it really bothers them - as it does me. What would have been the problem in saying “with X”? I just don’t get it.

Ideas are a dime a dozen - everybody has an idea. In one of my writing workshops, I give them all the same idea and they each come up with something totally unique. It’s the writing that matters - that fleshes out the idea and illustrated it and sets the work apart.

I’m not saying it’s wrong for the writer to do it, and I’m certainly hot trying to put down anyone who has done it. And I know how tough the industry is - if you don’t do it someone else will. But just because something has been accepted in the past doesn’t make it right. Or maybe times change.

I think it’s wrong for the publisher to want to take credit away from the worker - and I think it’s wrong for the celebrity to take credit for something he or she didn’t do. I just don’t get it. I won’t lose respect for the well-known person if his book says with so and so. But I will lose respect for him when I find out that someone else wrote the book with his name on the cover. In fact, I have stopped buying a number of people’s books because of this issue.

If they don’t want it on the cover or on the heading, at least put it inside or at the bottom. How hard is it to say “edited by … ” or “with…”?

To me, making it appear that a person wrote something he or she didn’t actually write is simply dishonest. I used to teach high school. I know that having someone else write your essay is not considered a good thing. In fact, it’s quite frowned on. So why is it okay just because you’re an adult and you’ve become famous?

I just wish the Christian publishing industry would take the lead in correcting what I see as an industry problem. I have several books from years ago that say “with John and Elizabeth Sherrill,” and magazines whose bylines say “as told to….” Those work just fine for me. Why can’t they all do it?

I am also saddened by the lack of respect for the newer person who comes eagerly in wanting to use his or her talents to make a difference and is asked to ghost-write. When writing well is no longer the prerequisites for publication, what is left?

Frankly, I think we’ve dug ourselves into a corner and we need to figure a way to tunnel out. I anticipate radical changes in the not-too-distant future, helped by new technology. Words are precious to God. We need to use them with passion, diligence, transparency, and love.