More advice on self-publishing

Jan Burke, who is a very well-known American mystery writer, has some excellent posts on her blog about getting an agent and self-publishing. I would urge anyone who is self-publishing or considering self-publishing to read them.

http://janburke.com/blog.html

Look for:

Saturday, March 31, 2007 - The Business Side of Writing: the Agent Hunt

Monday, April 02, 2007 - A Few Things to Think About If You Are Thinking About Self-Publishing

Wednesday, April 04, 2007 - Is there a time for everything, including self-publishing

Thursday, April 05, 2007 - The Economics

I will make the caveat that we have some different problems in Canada. I’ll try and address them here later this week.

Judging books by the cover

You’ve heard the statement, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Well, maybe we shouldn’t, but the reality is we do! All the time!

Because of my work with writers, I see a lot of covers. And I have to say that while some of them are good, far too many of them are not. In fact, one of the two biggest problems I see with self-published books is that they look self-published. By that, I mean that if you put a self-published book on a shelf beside a book published by a large royalty-paying publisher, chances are very high that the self-published book will look duller, less interesting, less exciting, and well, less professional.

Very simply, some of the common problems with covers.

• Not having a professional graphic artist design it
• Not paying for the top quality, full-colour, glossy printing
  
• Not paying someone to write top-notch cover copy
• Not studying the genre you are publishing in well enough to know how to make the book look as though it fits.
• Cutting corners so the costs aren’t too high

How can you get around these problems?

• Spend a day in a bookstore or get catalogues from publishers and study the latest books - especially those in the genre you’re writing in - romance books look a lot different from mysteries; memoirs look very different from self-help books.
• Don’t get a friend to design the artwork unless that friend is a professional who does this all the time (even someone who does graphics but not books will likely not have the expertise you need).
• Hire someone who understands marketing and promotion to help with the words that go on the cover (especially the back cover). Titles need a blog of their own!
  
• If you insist on going to a vanity publisher (place you pay to publish your book) take control of every aspect and bring in your own design, etc. if you need to. One vanity publisher I know has only done a few covers I consider excellent, and in every case the author brought in their own cover design.

Without an attractive cover that fits in with the other covers on the shelves, no store except maybe the one in your home town will want to carry your book. Why should they? They know their customers are going to judge the book by the cover.

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”.

On business plans and self-publishing books

I’ve been thinking some more about business plans and writers.

You know, I really think most writers (and maybe this is also true of other artistic people) hope that if we have something important to say, that’s really all that matters.

And for writers whose overall desire is to help others rather than to get rich and famous, we assume God will take our good intentions and see that it all comes out right.

I wish that was true. But it rarely is.

One prime example is in the area of publishing books. Over the years, I’ve talked to lot of people who have written and self-published a book without any idea of how the publishing business works. And many of them are offended when you ask them if they’ve studied the business of writing and been published elsewhere and so forth. Some of them have told me they didn’t even want to have an editor touch their words because the words are precious - either it’s their story and can’t be changed, or the words/thoughts came from God and should not be altered.

The problem is, this attitude is both unrealistic and self-defeating.

There are three problems with 90% of the books I’ve seen from these authors.

1. Although the work may be okay in the sense of having few spelling or grammatical errors, the writing is usually of poor quality, often lacking in direction.
2. The product itself is not usually comparable to what is on bookstore shelves. In other words, it “looks” self-published to the objective eye.
3. Usually, there is no marketing plan, and little work has been done towards actually selling the book before it is in print.

What’s that saying, “Three strikes and you’re out?”

I do understand. In their minds, what really matters is the idea they are trying to pass on to others.

I wish it was easier to get that idea across.

But the reality is that most people will never read past the first few pages.

The packaging has to be there. Every day, people judge books by their cover and by the words on the first page.

From my experience, those writers who succeed are generally the ones who are able to balance the art, craft, business, and ministry of their work and not get bogged down too heavily into any one of the areas.