Improvisations on Reality

Today is interesting, so far. It finally got a little colder, my new eyeglasses are ready (because LivingSocial is awesome and six years of contact lens wear does tend to spoil the love a little), and it is also seventeen years since my blood family and I, myself being only nine years old at the time, touched down in a Tower Air jet into JFK Airport.

Now, it’s 17 years later, and while the flight is a highly blurred memory of time long past, this is usually when I think back on the year and look forward to the champagne toast to kick off the next one.

This year, I:

- Went to CA for the first time.

- Got my business registered and opened

- Got my photography on

- Published Book 3

- Right about quadrupled my readership…I kid you not; all the relentless Marketing 101 I’ve been teaching myself has been paying off big-time…and thank you all for sticking with this ramble-fest!

So, what’s on my agenda next year? Mind you this: I don’t exactly make resolutions. I just do. I keep a list, and cross it off. Call it an annual version of a bucket list, if you will.

My agenda iiiissss….

1. Get back into dance class. My teacher is back the first week of January. Hello there, hip scarf, I missed thee.

2. Get my SmugMug on. People have asked me about prints before, and I think this will be an awesome way to have a formal portfolio.

3. Get my Lens Collection on. The Sigma telephoto is not enough, ladies and gents. Lady wants a Nikkor 18-200mm, which is about $800. Lady also requires a 12-24mm wide-angle. And lady is definitely lusting after the 800mm super-telephoto lenses, but the lottery will have to preempt that purchase…

4. Release Book 4 and engage in a heavy marketing push. Self-explanatory. I want the books to work for me, after I spent the time working on them.

5. Contract more. Once again, despite Tax Season looming, I’m open to commissions for design. Book covers? Ad campaigns? Coaching on Marketing 101? Photo shoot? Bring it on!

And most importantly…

6. Enjoy everything around me just a little bit more. :)

But you guys know that.

Much love, and a happy New Year to all, in advance.

K.G.

This is another of those posts that we all knew was coming.

I’ve already addressed the differences between the two methods of publication. They both have their drawbacks and benefits. They’re pretty similar in terms of the steps that a manuscript needs to go through before it hits the market, but vastly different insofar as who does the work.

I’ve waxed analytical on this in this post right here. In short, big difference between trad and self is that in self, the author does the work. Sometimes it costs, sometimes it doesn’t.

It’s no secret that I’ve gone self-pub. I’ve tried the traditional route. A year of querying got me nowhere fast, and the free proof copy code from CreateSpace was sitting there, beckoning me to make a book happen on my own. And I promised myself that, if by my 24th birthday I wasn’t going to land an agent, I would use that code. Being a woman of my word, that’s what ended up happening. What also ended up happening was a whole lot of learning,and one of the lessons I had to learn the hard way was that self-publication carried certain stigmas that, while they are being slowly overridden, are as pervasive as ever.

Let’s start debunking them one by one, shall we?

1. A self-published book isn’t a “real book”. 

Well, you guys know me, I had to dive right in there.

First of all, what makes a book a “real book”? Having the publisher’s logo on the jacket? Or, if you have to go for the fact that a bulk of self-pubs are e-book only, would a “real” book qualify as being on paper as opposed to an e-reader?

Let’s start with a dictionary definition of a novel, per the gods of Merriam-Webster: an invented prose narrative that is usually long and complex and deals especially with human experience through a usually connected sequence of events. If you have to get slightly technical, we’re talking about a work of fiction that is anywhere from 50,000 to 125,000 words in length, per most literary guidelines. Word count differences are, occasionally, determined by the genre of the book.

Note that nowhere in this explanation did I note method of publication, book jacket, or reading medium.

And also, let’s state the keen and obvious: most of the so-called “qualifications” for a real book are bunk. That’s right, bunk. Crap. A load of hokum. A real book only requires being written. The publication medium, especially in today’s world, had never mattered less.

Think about it in terms of logic, and logic alone. Would you consider an audiobook real? Yes? Then why not an e-book? And if you don’t consider an audiobook real, tell me please: is it any less a real text if someone reads it aloud or if it’s not presented as a stack of dead tree? Not to get environmentalist on you, but with all the going green hoopla out there, have you considered the trees that can be saved if someone would just get an e-reader?

And as far as publishing houses, let me get into…

2. Self-published books can’t possibly be good enough if they couldn’t get to a major publisher.

Let’s consider that some of the best fiction out there had been thrown out of publishing houses for not being X enough or Y enough. Harry Potter had been rejected by multiple agents, and again by multiple publishers before it finally got picked up and made into a global franchise. And right now, some of the best fantasy and science fiction is all but guaranteed to be self-published – why? Because publishers don’t take risks. They get books going less for the reasons of quality, finding an audience, etc. and much more for sales. This makes for a double whammy: writers with a great plot concept and a pitch for multiple books in a series get nowhere, while writers who stick to the same formulas that have brought success to their predecessors would get picked up, regardless of their quality.

If I really have to go there, think about Twilight. Yes, I’m going there. It is a franchise by now, a brand name, if you will. It got picked up because there was a market – teenage girls – and it was presented to the market in such a proficient way that it got snatched up like hotcakes. But the writing itself is not good. It’s 80% purple prose, the main character is a complete Mary Sue who doesn’t grow or progress with the series, and if you analyze the messages presented to teenage girls in this book, it is just downright unhealthy.

But it was marketed well, and it sold. Which is why Little, Brown and Company is very happy.

Also to note: about 85% of currently self-published authors have, at some point or another, queried agents and publishers, and had gotten rejected each and every time, for the above reason. This is part of the publishing routine in trad-pub: you keep asking until someone doesn’t slam the door in your face.

As you can imagine, this gets exhausting fast. And if you’re going to sit there and say, “Well, that’s what you have to do!”, then I’ll scoff in your face. Self-publishing is a legitimate, and even lucrative, alternative to traditional publishing.

Let me elaborate for a minute.

We all know the saying: money talks. So let me clarify the point a little by saying that royalties talk. Or, rather, royalty rates.

Royalty rates for self-published authors are, hands down, much better than the ones offered by traditional publishing houses. If a self-pub author goes through specific (mostly free-to-use channels), then the author enjoys a nice 70% on e-sales, and 45% on print sales. The traditional publishing alternative would be somewhere up to 16% on e-sales, and about half of that for print.

To make it clear, self-publishing is a more profitable alternative for the author if you crunch the numbers. And yes, that does make it very much a preferable alternative to going through the well-known gamut of trying to land an agent and spending months, if not years, waiting for a response other than a form rejection.

That’s right: people actually choose to self-publish because it’s more profitable.

Does that make their books less “real”? I personally don’t think so, if only on the account that those things on my shelf are hardly zombies, and same goes for the e-books that are populating my Kindle. They seem to be taking up space, they contain text that’s broken into chapters, and in a huge majority of the cases, I paid for them.

3. If it hadn’t sold millions, it’s not a book worth reading.

See above about Twilight.

Now, repeat after me, with feeling: a best-seller only sells well; it doesn’t make a good book.

Really. Little, Brown and Company made a killing on Twilight as a franchise, as well as a book. That doesn’t mean that the books are good. I lost a bet and had to read those books, and believe you me, I wish I had never made that bet. But it sold in the millions of copies, in multiple languages. Does that mean that it has to be great fiction if it had done so well in the market?

Absolutely not. And there are eggs like that every genre under the sun: they sell spectacularly, but the writing and storyline are very, very lousy.

Some of the best stories are mid-listed or dropped by publishers altogether because they hadn’t met sales-quota expectations. Why? Because of this very mentality, which people are very keen on buying into. If it must have sold well, then it must be great, right? Wrong. Again, Twilight. Also, half of what was written by Judith McNaught…seriously, if you want historical romance, read Philippa Gregory. I’m no romantic, but Gregory has a very rich, flowing style to her writing.

4. Self-published authors are lazy and not willing to put in the work that it takes to get published traditionally.

See #2, especially the part where I talk about money.

Now, let me give you a this-or-that scenario. Suppose you’re an author, looking to get your work published. You spent a year on rewrites, and another year of letting it sit and then rewriting it again. You have a choice. Do you:

a. send hundreds, if not thousands, on query letters and hope you hit jackpot somewhere, spending months of hopes and prayers for a five-figure advance sum but trade it off on low royalty percentages,

or

b. do a little bit of extra legwork, get your book on the market fast, not get an advance, but collect your royalties right away at a higher rate than most trad-pubs?

If you’re willing to wait and think that you would see a payoff in terms of volume sales at the lower royalty rate – okay, then you can go trad-pub. But also consider the tradeoff of publication rights. The publishing house isn’t just printing, marketing, and releasing your book: it’s also acquiring first publication rights, copyright, and distribution rights to your work, and depending on your contract, this can go into a ten-year stretch. So if your book is mid-listed, doesn’t sell well, and is otherwise not meeting the publisher’s expectations, then you will have a fun time wrestling your rights back under your purview. You will not be able to re-publish as a self if it doesn’t do as well.

With legitimate self-publishers, you do not give away your rights. Which, in turn, brings me to rehash something.

5. Self-publishing is paying to publish, and it can’t possibly be good enough if the author had to pay for printing/releasing it.

Call to your memory: first post about Book Country, second, and third. And fourth, about an Aussie vanity press.

If you’re not willing to click to read back through my last repeated ramblings on the difference between a self-publisher and a vanity press, I will reiterate: self-publishers never ask you for money up front for use of services. They may offer certain services for a fee, but none of them are required.

As a bonus, they let you keep the rights to your work. So you’re free to shop your work around after release, if you so feel like.

Vanity presses do charge you money up front, and their contracts and terms of use are sometimes so vague that you don’t notice that you’re signing away your distribution rights, copyright, and first-publication rights. Moreover, there are precious few vanity presses that actually deliver on their promises. iUniverse is probably one of the best ones, because it focuses on developing the author’s brand and business name.

If you don’t know what PublishAmerica is, then this subforum in AbsoluteWrite will give you a nice picture of what authors go through to get away from them. They pose as a legitimate publishing house, then proceed to fleece authors at every turn, even for their own book copies. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a vanity press and a scam.

Also, to clarify, a scam doesn’t necessarily have to be against the law. It’s just making money by dishonest means. And fleecing authors is dishonest.

However, back to my point. You don’t pay to self-publish. In fact, you keep more of your royalties because you’re covering only distribution and raw materials (if you choose to print). However, does CreateSpace charge a “set-up fee”? Not once in my three and a half years of use have I encountered it. It comes with default Amazon distribution, at no charge, and offers a one-time fee for expanded distribution. Is it required? No. But if $40 is all it takes for CreateSpace to list my books on the site of its parent company’s (Amazon) biggest competitor, that being Barnes & Noble, then you know what, it’s a good deal, as opposed to forking over $99 to upload and do everything myself (see Book Country posts). Is it required? No. But I like having expanded channels.

6. Self-published authors don’t work as hard as traditionally published authors.

Bull. Sorry to be blunt, but that’s just plain old-fashioned bull.

I’ve yet to meet a single self-published author who didn’t put in years – yes, years – of blood, sweat, tears, and sleepless nights into their work. Because a self-published author is, quite essentially, going through the publication process on his/her own, then the workload quadruples. There’s no in-house editing team to fillet the manuscript and make sure that the plot flows, the spelling’s proper, the grammar is cohesive. There’s no graphic design team to draw or photograph and create the perfect cover for your book. There’s no layout and printing expert to ensure that the PDF file that goes to the printers will meet their expectations precisely. There is no help. So the author is doing everything.

Daunting? Yes. But that’s what self-pubs do. They may hire outside help, or they may take a couple of months to learn all of that on their own. There has been many a self-pub author who had gone to class to learn Photoshop just for the sake of that perfect cover, and there will be plenty more, at that.

So, really, don’t give me the line about self-pubs not working as hard. Traditional publishers hold the author’s hand when it comes to the pre-release gamut. Self-publishers have no one but themselves and whoever is willing to lend a helping hand.

7. The self-published books aren’t worth their price, therefore a reader shouldn’t have to pay for them.

Now this right here, which is something I’ve encountered more and more in recent time, is utterly infuriating.

A writer is not just writing for the sake of telling a story. This is an intrinsic enough part of the process for a writer that it shouldn’t even need to be said, or spoken of. However, a written work – just like a painting, a meal in a restaurant, a cup of coffee – is a product. And last time I checked, in the world of commerce and retail, customers are required to pay for the product they are receiving.

I will repeat the prior point: self-publishers work very hard to produce their product. They work harder than most trad-pubs. The money that you’re paying for the book is what enables them to pay for the web access bills, for the electric bills, and the roof over their heads so that they can continue to produce their product. Same as where the money goes for a traditional publisher.

At risk of being blunt, I will ask you point blank: what makes you think that you are entitled to someone’s work for free?

Seriously. What, pray tell, makes you or anyone else so special that you think you don’t have to pay for your books? You don’t expect a coffee shop to give you a free cappuccino. Don’t expect an author, regardless of publishing avenue, to give you a freebie either.

I give away free copies from time to time, but there is always a tradeoff involved. It may be a review, or it may be traffic, it may be recommendation, but there is a tradeoff. But to give away a free copy just because someone thinks that being self-published means that I just have to give it away? No way in hell.

8. Self-published authors are greedy and don’t want to share their wealth with others.

At risk of, again, being blunt, why should they share? I call it fair trade. If a traditional publisher is going to help the author at every turn with turning a manuscript into a book, then the 85% of royalties that they withhold from the book price are fair for keeping the production team paid. The editor, the cover artist, the marketing specialist, the book signing coordinator – all of them need a paycheck at the end of the day. Where does that come from? The royalties.

So why, exactly, should a self-pub share any more than they share already? Every time they publish a book and price it below cost to stimulate sales, they’re paying for it by taking a financial loss. Every time they give away a copy, they take a loss. The distributor takes a small cut of the royalty too. And considering that they didn’t have the editor, the cover artist, the marketing specialist, etc., why exactly should they share?

9. People self-publish because there’s no traditional option for their brand of writing.

Now that one actually holds some truth to it. That or, again, the big publisher will not take a risk with that particular genre because it doesn’t think that the book would sell well, even if there is a genre for it enough to, at the very least, mid-list the book.

Niche genres, and niche subgenres at that, are notoriously difficult to make a success, because the audience is limited. Most people reading mainstream books do not know what steampunk is. A lot wouldn’t understand the term urban fantasy.  However, both of those subgenres have a very dedicated and surprisingly large following. Do the publishing houses consider that? Rarely. Which, again, is why an author in a genre like urban-fantasy, steampunk, or even poetry – which is notoriously difficult to publish traditionally – would consider self-publication.

Self-publishing doesn’t differentiate by genre; it’s simply there. It does, however, put the onus on the author as a businessperson and marketer, and necessitates the correct outreach and brand-building, both for the book and the author alike. Building a brand from the books and the author alike is that ends up selling the self-pub. Yes, it’s infinitely more work, but it’s more work with a solid, long-lasting fan base. Which, in turn, produces sales.

—-

The unfortunate truth to the above is, while I can refute and dissect the preconceptions, until the public at large will get with the program and acknowledge self-published authors as individuals who have made an informed decision about their writing future, these stigmas will continue.

I won’t lie: it takes a long time for a self-published author to generate some steam. This is why cross-marketing, as so very well put in this post here (by Candace Mountain, awesomely), is crucial. Authors supporting authors goes a long way, and it pays off in the long run by generating readership.

While at times overcoming these stigmas may seem like a Sisyphean battle, with potential readers and reviewers turning up their nose with a sneering response that your work, which you have sweated leaden ingots over, is somehow now good enough because it’s lacking a Big 6 copyright clause, it is worth it to keep going. Whether or not it seems like it when you’re surrounded by the people who believe that your self-pub book is somehow less real, you do have an audience and you do have a following to reach. It just requires a lot more elbow grease than what people may give credit for.

Special thanks to the members of the FB groups WriMore International and SelfPubEBooks for the feedback on the stigmas.

Onward and upward, my fellow self-pubs.

K.G.

Notabene: My books are still 99c for ebook. After mid-January, back up they go to $2.99 each. Yep, I have paperback too. Click here.

And another vanity press, this one from Australia, makes its way into the Writers Beware spotlight.

Dymocks definitely presents a bad deal. If I thought Book Country was bad, Dymocks’s D-Publishing has you forking over $997 (Aussie dollars) for what Book Country would charge $549 – setting up your cover, formatting your files, uploading and release.

It’s a damn rip-off, of course, and its contract is effectively unbreachable unless the press fails to publish (which I’m sure it will not), but the press can terminate it at any time. It’s also exclusive, which means that they effectively reserve your first publication copyright, which is an author’s primary asset.

Once again, let me reiterate a known fact: set-up of cover, format of file, and the upload thereof are one-time processes. Not for nothing, but I’m about to contract a client for a fraction of the above cost to do the exact same thing, save the upload. Guess what: my client keeps his copyright. He keeps his royalties. I do my part only in the form of document formatting, and I see absolutely no reason that a one-time set-up charge is worth that much. Being an independent contractor/designer, I could do that, but guess what keeps me from it: this little thing called business ethics.

Victoria Strauss says, “The pricing isn’t horrible, by middleman self-pub standards.”

I beg to differ. If you’re really keen on paying someone to do the formatting and cover set-up, Lulu is cheaper. So is a third-party contractor, and turning a file into e-book is not that difficult. There are, once again, alternatives. Heck, if you’re willing to go that route, again, iUniverse gives you a lot more bang for your buck in terms of developing the author’s branding, and I’m pretty confident that they would be able to do international.

But the one thing that I like about this article is that Ms. Strauss thoroughly fillets the contract. It is a bad deal, top to bottom. I cannot think of a good reason to sign anything with those people, especially if you consider that there are, once again, alternatives that would allow you to keep your rights to the work.

What I dislike, however, is the utter lack of differentiating between a self-publisher and a vanity press.

Again, see above quote. Middleman self-pub standards? Self-publishing has been created for the purpose of cutting the middleman out. As in, to NOT pay someone for something that the author could take care of on his or her own. So why is there any reference to a middleman here? Publishing medium is a more accurate way to put it, if I have to get persnickety.

Vanity presses take money up front. That’s the only litmus test for self-pub vs. vanity press. You’re not “paying someone to publish” with self-pub, you’re just doing the work on your own. Reimbursement of raw materials is doing business, but after the initial proof copy, a proper way to cover costs is, like the traditional publisher, to have those costs taken out of royalties. A vanity press, like D Publishing, and like Book Country, is charging you for use of services, and on top of that, D Pub is keeping your rights, to boot. And for how long is that, precisely?

Additionally, in comments, Victoria Strauss is asking why the people aren’t as angry or taking her to task like with the last time. Simple answer: this particular press is in Australia. An enormous percentage of the authors who had lambasted Book Country before are American. This affects them directly. And most authors know to beware of foreign presses bearing contracts, so if it will not affect them directly, they would not stir up as much of a furor as what had happened with Book Country. Book Country was set forward by a seemingly reputable publishing house, but upon careful review, it is nothing more than a money grab at the author’s expense.

Let’s call a spade a spade here: a vanity press is a vanity press. Self-publishing and vanity presses are not the same thing. Kindle Direct Publishing, being free to use up front, is not a vanity press. CreateSpace, with the only real set-up cost being the cost of raw materials in proof printing, which can be avoided by an issued code, and is comparably minuscule as opposed to almost a thousand Aussie dollars in this case, is not a vanity press either. Book Country is a vanity press, and so is Dymocks’s “self-pub” option.

And, while it’s not illegal to run a vanity press, I find the practice disgusting. Basically, it’s counting on the author to not do the research and hand over money and their rights. And while a lot of authors will do their research and select an option that’s suitable for their needs, whether this requires money or not, there will be some who will fall for it, and that is how a vanity press profits.

Again, if you want to argue the “paying to publish” angle, what’s worse: handing over 30% to Amazon, or handing over 85% to a publishing house? Even if you do end up getting picked up by a publishing house, there’s no telling that the book will ever make it off the mid-list. At the very least, if your book doesn’t do well and you’re a self-pub, you don’t have to wrestle your rights away to try another avenue in publication.

K.G.

You guys know what I mean.

If you don’t, then I’ll say it point blank: I love jazz. I love contemporary jazz, specifically. I chase it, I photograph it, and I travel with it.

I’ll be honest, this year had gotten more than a little bit madcap as far as traveling was concerned. I had gone to California, Philly, Texas, of course the Caribbean – and the destinations change year to year. And all of this had been in the name of my music.

I can’t really think of the best moments of 2011 and pick just the one that stands out the most. Especially now, in my hotel room in Connecticut, preparing for another show tomorrow night, I’m raking my mind over the moments of 2011 in the key of jazz.

1. Newport Beach Jazz Fest - my first time attending, my first time meeting my friends from across the country, and my first time seeing the sheer, unbridled enthusiasm with which California embraces its contemp jazz.

2. Dave Brubeck, without a mic, at the Note - let’s put aside for a moment that this was Dave Brubeck, the legend of jazz. This was the first time, in my three years of coming to the Note, that I have ever heard the entire club go silent when Dave was about to speak. There was reverence in the room that night.

3. Boney James at BB King’s - how long has it been since James had been in NYC? Answer: too damn long.

4. Joey Sommerville, Oli Silk, and Matt Marshak at the Houndstooth - I think the Houndstooth Jazz series had become the smaller, NYC version of a jazz festival (an ongoing one, at that), but this show in particular was a party, start to finish. Joey turned out the swag, the funk, and the salsa.

5. Acoustic Alchemy at the Iridium - another great contemporary jazz sound that hadn’t been around NYC for a long while, and if there is ever a piece of auditory magic, it’s The Beautiful Game. Fred White takes the signature Acoustic Alchemy sound and makes a hypnotic tapestry out of it in live show.

Not to mention, Steve Cole came back to Houndstooth, and Peter White did the Elvis at BB King’s – and I have photos to prove it!!!)… Just so many great moments, most of them spent with the people that I am delighted to call my friends.

I look forward to 2012. A lot.

I’ll leave you with a photo that I’ve snapped of Mindi Abair at BB King’s last week. I took it during Silent Night, and it surprised me. I did not retouch the photo in any way, and although I could up the contrast a bit…no. I like it exactly the way it is.

A very merry Christmas to those who celebrate it, and a great winter season and New Year’s to those who do not.

K.G.

Copyright (c) KG Creative Enterprises

I have a confession to make.

I like Kenny G’s holiday music.

Yep, you heard correctly: I am complimenting Kenneth Gorelick.

No, really. It’s a funny thing; while I will not listen to his originals for a moment, I find that his Christmas stuff is amazing. I didn’t pay much attention to him until The Millennium Mix version of Auld Lang Syne, which made me drop everything and just listen. To pepper a well-known classic with snippets of history is an excellent approach, and especially for history buffs like myself. Also, since I’ve grown up with the impression of New Year’s Eve being a time to reflect and make improvements on the year ahead, it puts reminiscence into a whole new perspective when a song for that time opens with Thomas Edison’s voice.

But his non-Christmas stuff…I hold by what I said many a time to many a person. Sap Meter alert. The needle is permanently stuck at 10, in the red zone of the meter, for Mr. G. Until he brings some funk to the stage, that will not rescind itself, and is compounded by the Tomato Test. As in, if I want to throw a tomato at someone’s head, ask a twofold question: what did that person do to earn it, and how fresh is the tomato.

(The Sap Meter is a bit of an inside joke. Will write about it later)

K.G.

You knew this was going to happen, one way or the next. The essay of self versus traditional publishing.

Mind you, this is for info purposes only. I have people reading this blog who know exactly what I’m talking about, and just as many people who go, “Whaaaa? What does that mean?” This is for both, really.

In the wake of the brouhaha that had trailed the past week with the Book Country stuff, my banker, who is an all-around cool dude, handed over the Wall Street Journal to me, with this article on the front page. This is about Darcie Chan’s journey to become a self-published author – and a best-selling one at that.

And you know what, considering that WSJ’s last article was on Book Country, I like this article. It presents a great example of what happens when you 1. get off the beaten path to find your own way and 2. work hard at it.

Especially with the advance of the Kindle, there is an ongoing debate as far as which method of publishing is better: traditional, via the brick-and-mortar publishing houses, or self-publication. Bear in mind that the majority of publishing houses do e-book publication in any case, but that the e-market is still only 15% of all books sold.

Which is still millions on millions of books.

This is the thing: traditional publishing and self-publishing have very little difference, but for one major factor: instead of the publishing house vetting the work and making sure that it’s market-ready, self-publishing puts every bit of work associated with making a book work is on the author.

You may know, either by virtue of common sense, that a book has its stages in the journey from brain to paper:

1. Concept
2. Writing
3. Revision
4. Publication

The first two stages don’t depend on the method of publication. The third one is a pretty standard step, because it is VERY rare that someone will release a book in any form without going over it first. The fourth one varies.

With traditional publication, you have the following as #4:

1. Research
Look, if my past series of posts about Book Country and Gayle’s blog in general don’t teach you, then I will say it again, and will accent with a book to the head until it sinks in: do. your. research. You cannot query an agent if they don’t represent your genre. You need to know which publication will print your short story and pay you, versus one who will not pay you a dime and will print only for the sake of it. You need to know the royalty percentages, what’s normal for which publishing house, and you need to know the language used in publishing contracts  so that you know exactly where your copyright will be going. You are absolutely required to have the knowledge of the business before you go into it. Otherwise, you’re asking to become the victim of a scam. There are many “agencies” looking to profiteer off authors, just like there are vanity presses posing as legit publishing houses (Publish America being the best example). There are websites such as AbsoluteWrite, Preditors and Editors, Writers Beware, to name a few.  Read them egregiously, but also learn and research in your own right so that you know when and if an article by any of those sites is full of it.

2. Query
You don’t just walk into a publishing house and hand in your manuscript. If only it could be so easy; but then there would be a small mob scene outside of the publishing house headquarters in NYC. You query an agent to take your book. In other words, write a letter that, in one paragraph, sums up why the agent should represent your book and shop it around to publishers. If the agent requires you to send a segment of your book – send in a segment of your book. Make sure everything follows guidelines.

Of course, then you cross your fingers, and repeat the prior until someone says yes. Because you will, without a doubt, get rejected.

But, supposing you get an agent, then you also have to wait to get a contract with a publishing house. Supposing get that, then you have to:

3. Edit, Edit, Edit.
Chances are, the publishing house has an entire editing department. Someone will gut through your book for plot and structure, someone else will gut your story for grammar. You edit, and you edit egregiously. This is in addition to whatever editing that you may have done in Step #3. What you may feel is a sufficient story may not be sufficient for the editing department. Is your plot going into a direction they’re not comfortable with? That may also be the case.

I will now proceed to state an unpleasant truth: a book is chosen by an agent or a publishing house not because of how well it’s written, nor because of the genre. Though both of those play into it, the primary reason for you lucking out and being chosen in tradition publication is invariably because of potential of sales. Because the publishing house will take the bulk of your royalty to cover the production costs, and the agent will take a cut as well, the publication relies on volume to survive. The real question in the publishing house is always “how much money can this book make?” first.

Also keep in mind that there is a lot to be said about copyright. The publishers claim the rights to your work for a certain amount of time, usually numbered in the years. This is what lets them sell on your behalf, and claim a cut of royalty for printing and distribution.

4. Go along
The publishing house already has the marketing plan laid out. You have to now go along with it. This means be interviewed, often. Book tours, which are much more work than what you may think. And if they hadn’t established an online presence for you, then it’s on you to do so.

–

That stated, there are three main lists in the publishing house. The first one is the infamous slush pile. Manuscripts end up there, get plucked out once in a while, but mostly, they gather dust. Since there are e-submissions now, the easy way to explain it would be File 13. You guys know what I mean. It is RARE that a manuscript gets plucked out of the slush pile to land on the bookshelves.

The second one is the best-seller list. This is self-explanatory. This is a list of books that had sold exceptionally well. This is a list of books that have sold very well. EVERYONE knows who the author is. David Baldacci makes his living on that list, same for James Patterson (though I much prefer Baldacci; he keeps a nice pacing going). They have made their agents and publishing houses very wealthy. This is the list that everyone craves to be on, but few actually make it.

Then there’s the mid-list. Those are the books that you see, usually, in the shelves at Barnes & Noble. They are selling, but not as well as people have expected. They keep the bills paid, but they don’t do anywhere near as well as the best-sellers. The publisher releases them, hoping that they would do well, but when they do not, the lights are turned off. Those books will probably trudge along, but never meet expectations.

The mid-list is enormous for every publisher. If a book isn’t going to sell out quickly within its first printing, or the second and the third, then you can likely expect that they will be mid-listed. And that is normal. Not everyone can write a best-seller, and just because a story has sold well enough to hit the best-seller list doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. Just like a mid-list story or a slush pile story can be absolutely fantastic, but it was not given a long enough chance to reach its audience or, as in the case of the slush pile, not given a chance at all.

Now, this is not a quick process. You are looking at anywhere from 18 to 30 months – yes, months - from you initial acceptance by an agent to seeing your actual book in stores. However, the trade-off is that the legwork of marketing, printing, distribution, etc. is not on your hands.

Self-publication is a double-edged sword. The good side of that sword is that it takes all the wait, the bulk of the royalty going to the publisher, and the gamut of query-rejection-query cycle, and slices it out of the picture. Generally, a self-pub author also keeps all the rights to their work. The bad news is…all the legwork, and I mean all the legwork, is squarely on the author’s shoulders.

This gets hairy in a hurry.

As you may have seen from my earlier posts, there are multiple avenues for self-publication. Some paid, some unpaid. And there is a massive difference between vanity press and self-publication, contrary to whoever says otherwise.  The key words are up front. A vanity press takes money up front, and you are also likely to hand over your rights, because there may be a hidden clause in the contract about first publication rights. Legitimate self-publishing options do not take your rights, and the paid services are optional.

However, you have to keep in mind that everything needs to be done by the author. And I mean everything.

I’m sure I’ve blogged about it multiple times before, but editing has to be one of the banes of a self-published author’s existence. It’s necessary for any sort of a publishing medium, but the self-published author does not have a team of editors waiting to gut out the book. Either (s)he hires someone to do so – which is an expense out of pocket not for publication itself, to note - or does it on his/her own. This is a painstaking process as it is, made doubly more difficult by the actor-observer bias, and made even more difficult by the fact that there is no advance from the publisher that could at least ease financial matters for the author. The cover design also needs to be done in-house, and unless the author is also handy with the Adobe Creative Suite, then that’s something else to consider.

The thing is, self-publishers illustrate on a very regular basis that they are able to adapt. They edit, re-edit, and if they need to learn Photoshop in order to create the cover that they want, then they step up and get to work. But they’re doing this work, and yes, even set up to pay expenses before it goes to publication, in order to put out a quality product.

Let me pause right there and, again, refer to my prior entries on Book Country and vanity presses. Vanity presses’ up-front charge is for use of its publishing services. Editing is usually not included on that list of services, and although a vanity press may distribute – may, not for a fact – you cannot get out of ponying up the money. In the case of self-publication, expenses do come up. However, those are optional expenses. The author has the option of doing the work in-house; learn the ins and outs of publication, limit marketing only to online, and otherwise avoid paying money. However, because it’s squarely on the author, expenses do crop up – in leading the product towards the publication process.

The self-pub process itself, though, is easy. No, really, it is. It doesn’t take much effort to click Upload. That is not difficult. The formatting guides for Kindle and Nook, even the style guide for Smashwords, are very easy to follow. And all of those are avenues for major distributors; Smashwords pushes out their books to iTunes Books, Kobo, and Sony E-Reader markets. And they are free.

The costs in print self-publications vary because, again, there are vanity presses, and then there are print-on-demand presses. The difference, again, is money up front. Also, the difference is copyright. I cannot tell you how important it is for an author to read their fine print and find out whether their publication method will involve ownership of copyright for X number of years. I can’t tell you how important it is to do research. And know this: typically, a POD press will not hold your copyright. CreateSpace is a typical example of of a good print-on-demand press: all they do is print and distribute. There is only one cost associated as a byway of publication, and that is the proof. However, if you have a free code – which is given out pretty routinely through NaNoWriMo, ABNA, and other contests – then that cost is eliminated.

You may say, “AHA! There is a cost up front!!!” at this, but let me point out that you are not paying the market price for a book in buying the proof. You’re reimbursing CreateSpace for the raw materials used in producing the proof. Ink, paper – all of that costs money. After approval and publication, CreateSpace will take its cut from the sale for the exact same thing.

Oh, and honestly, $5-10 bucks for a proof as opposed to $100+ up front? Seriously, which one would you rather pay? Again, this is not a fee up front just to use the press. It’s the cost of raw materials that are used in production, at production cost.

The services offered by a print-on-demand press outside of the basic printing and distribution services are, in fact, paid. Again, they are optional. The author doesn’t have to have a gut-through by the editing service for $300. Nor does the author have to use their professional cover design service. There are very nice-looking templates in CreateSpace that allow the author to design a professional-caliber cover and use his or her own images. While the $40 – note the number here – is not required, it does list the book at Barnes & Noble, and the Amazon outlets around the world, whereas basic distribution to Amazon.com is free and included in the CreateSpace service.

The contrast as far as press goes would be iUniverse. They do all the work for you, much like a regular publishing house, however – it costs money. You are paying them for work performed on your behalf. They print your book, unload, distribute, and that is both time spent by their professionals in the one-on-one time that they give the author and raw materials in printing your books. However, their cheapest package is in the $600 range, with the best and all-inclusive going into four figures. Bonus is that you may get your books as hardcover as well as paperback.

Let’s once again go back to one simple fact: while the bulk of self-published work out there is e-sales, e-sales are still, at the most, only 20% of the market. The mass-market paperback is not going anywhere anytime soon. People like the feel of the book in their hands, they appreciate work by previously published authors,  or they may go for a particular publishing brand. If there is a good self-pub print, and it develops a following, it will do every bit as well as a trad-pub print, and at a greater benefit to the author.

Okay. I think I’ve rambled enough. Next post on this topic, whenever that would be, is on the stigmas in self-pub, and some myth-busting. Fun stuff!

K.G.

Long story short: It’s the holidays. I’ve seen more sales in Kindle than any other format of my books, including print for all the traditionalists. :)

So!! If you have a Kindle, read Kindle books, or just plain want to help a girl out, all three of my books are now at 99c each! I will keep this sale going through the holidays, and maybe a bit longer.

Link here: http://amzn.to/ogCVcl

Happy shopping!

K.G.

Following up to my prior post, and the post immediately following.

I got a pingback to this page in the morning. Gayle’s response is classified as shrill, and mine was interpreted as a marketing ploy. Oooo-kay.

I was also surprised to see Victoria Strauss reply to my comment on the Writers Beware post (I post as Kat), and completely unsurprised to see her totally miss the point, again and again, about CreateSpace not charging for services up front, therefore not being classified as a vanity press.

I will address her comment first.

Professional packages are offered on CreateSpace, yes, and they’re paid, but, again and with feeling: these services are optional. They are not required to utilize services, and the author, if so willing, can pay an outside contractor to do the legwork for them. I would much rather use an outside contractor and work with that person directly to get the results I want. There is no guarantee that a professional service offered by the printer would turn out a product that the author wants. A one-on-one session with an outside contractor is a much better insurance of getting the bang for your buck.

Victoria Strauss is missing another major point: publication, in and of itself, is a simple process. This is true in both avenues of publication. Traditional publishing houses take over the story once they decide to take a shot and put it into production. The author confers with the editorial department, the cover art is designed in-house, the marketing personnel devises a plan geared towards the right audience, and the author is left with a minimal workload. Not to say that editing is difficult, but when you have a team working with you, it’s a much lesser workload than doing it solo. But editing, marketing plan, and cover design is all pre-publication prep. And since the traditional publishing house is taking over the entire process, there’s nothing for the author to do to arrange printing, e-book uploads, and royalty allocations. Self-publication is easy as well: just make sure you format the files to the proper specs. Self-publishing is not designed to be difficult, and the uploads are one-time-only, for which, again, Book Country charges $549.

As far as vanity publishing goes? If Victoria Strauss wants to talk about paying to publish, then let’s point out that traditional publishing houses take a whopping 85% of  royalties in order to keep the lights on and pay the team that’s behind your book being published. All of a sudden, that 30% that Amazon takes from direct publication suddenly begins to look appealing, doesn’t it? The mid-list of every publishing house is outrageously long, because not every book is a best-seller, and if a mid-list book won’t sell well enough to make it off the mid-list, chances are the author won’t be offered another contract. Atop that, rights control. If you’re that mid-list author stuck without a second contract, guess what: you’re still locked into the contract that gives the publishing house rights for X number of years. So you can’t take that book to try and work with it yourself on the self-pub market, nor can you give it over to another publishing house.

The basic point that I (and the small legion of self-published authors who had lambasted this already) was trying to make on that post, which Victoria Strauss had ignored blithely, is that Book Country is a bad deal. Not illegal, because it isn’t illegal to charge money for services, but certainly a rip-off. What is it about a formatting job, and a couple of clicks to upload that’s worth $549 when it can be done for free elsewhere, and what else comes with it? The post that she had made should have warned writers to do their research before they settled into an option, whether or not it’s paid. And, considering that iUniverse offers an excellent bang for the buck as a vanity press, I actually recommend them. They offer actual education for the author as a businessperson, making their fee an investment. Are they still a vanity press? Yes. Just a lot better than most.

What amazed me is that Victoria Strauss continued to blatantly ignore those facts. And yes, those are facts: go through CreateSpace, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, PubIt!, Book Country, and iUniverse, and compare what they offer and how much they charge, if they do. And other authors had pointed it out to her, both at the SFWA site and at Blogger, that she’s wrong, only to have her deny this repeatedly. Look, if you know more about the trad pub option, fantastic! – but don’t ignore facts when they’re blatantly in front of you with a little bit of research and a couple of mouse clicks. That’s playing ostrich, and it does not make you look good. SFWA and Writers Beware are both excellent organizations, but this post accusing self-pubs of basically overreacting is contemptuous.

Similarly, the post that I got a pingback from calls Gayle’s reply “shrill”, and is basically saying that I’m using this to plug my services. Both are wrong. Gayle’s outrage is directed equally at Penguin, for starting this operation looking to make money off the authors rather than the readers, which flies right in the face of professional guidelines in the publishing world, and at the authors who don’t do their research. I will agree with her right there: every aspiring author should research their options egregiously before taking any action. But Penguin is basically laughing all the way to the bank, because authors don’t do their research and fall for this. In the end, they still may end up doing all the work themselves, but now they’re out some money.

Far as me – look, I’m a graphic designer. I do, in fact, work on document templating from time to time. Yes, I can do e-book formatting for authors, but that is not my primary avenue of design; that would be printouts. What I said before isn’t a personal plug, it’s a comparison of services between myself and Book Country. Self-publication always leaves the onus on the author to do the legwork, and Book Country has not been clear about what services it includes for the $549. For all I know, all they’ll do is format, upload, and initiate distribution. My contracts bullet-point what I offer, and I have learned enough on the self-pub circuit to feel confident passing it along.

It seems like this entire thing had twanged on some taut nerves and pressed some buttons.

Fantastic.

Seriously, it’s awesome. Feathers need to be ruffled, because sometimes, that’s the only way that works insofar as getting a point across.

The point here is that the options of self-pub need to be researched, and they need to have some transparency, which is sorely lacking in Book Country’s case. Book Country is vague in regard of services offered, with the only thing being clear that unless you’re going to fork over $549, you’re on your own. iUniverse is very clear for what it offers. Kindle Direct and CreateSpace are pretty clear. Smashwords too. Why can’t Book Country be that clear before the money exchanges hands? Inquiring minds want to know.

Not that I’m speaking for self-published authors everywhere, but I am a little tired of the idea that self-publishing is somehow “less than” traditional publishing. Really. This sentiment is in every sentence of the Writers Beware post, and I’ve encountered more than one person, as every other self-pub author undoubtedly did too, that would flat-out refuse to read self-published authors’ books, under the BS guise that if they didn’t go through the traditional publishing avenue, then they can’t possibly be anywhere near as good as the trad-pub. They fail to consider that the trad-pub books have every bit as many flaws as self-pubs, and there has been a lot of crap released by publishing houses as well. They also fail to consider that most self-published authors – note that I’m using most, not all – have attempted, egregiously, to get representation before. It didn’t happen. And I don’t mean send one query letter, get rejected, and get done. No. I mean kept-at-it-for-years-and-nothing-came-of-it sort of didn’t happen. Also, most – again, most, not all - self-pub authors have researched their self-publishing options, saw the benefits of it, and decided to chance it on their own. The method of publication has no reflection on the merit of the work, especially now that there is a very viable e-book market.

Speaking of crap stories being published, let me bring up something that I read on the forums of AbsoluteWrite. I peruse them from time to time, and I stumbled across the PublishAmerica subforum. There have been thousands of authors taken for a ride by PA, which is a known vanity press with a massive ethics problem posing as a legit royalty-paying publisher. A small group, some years ago, banded together to write a “book” that they purposely crafted as poor writing, to see if PublishAmerica would offer them a contract. This book would not have been offered a contract by anyone…except that PA did. Why? Because PA has a long history of extracting money from authors, with the authors seeing very little for their efforts, and having their copyright held hostage, to boot, as well as any royalties that may have come of it.

So really, don’t give me that line about how self-published authors are somehow less talented, less skilled, and worse than trad-pub. My recent reading experience, which has been comprised of mostly NaNoWriMo authors who have self-pubbed, flies directly in the face of that. You cannot, for instance, read Rachel Cotterill’s The Chronicles of Charanthe series and tell me it’s bad fiction. It’s fantasy, self-published fantasy, and it blows most traditionally published fantasy out of the water. Same for Kevin O. McLaughlin’s By Darkness Revealed; it is excellent fiction, and I didn’t hear about it from a publishing house; I heard of it from McLaughlin on a writers’ forum. And those are just some examples.

Oh, and before anyone says to let it go and let bygones be bygones – sorry, I have no intention of it. Self-publishers are struggling to be taken seriously, and the reasons for it are illogical at best. They don’t spend the countless hours poring over every syllable only to get shot down as “less than” for little reason other than their method of publication. Last time I checked, masochism isn’t the intention behind self-publication. If lambasting a bad option – Book Country, in this case – gets some writers to do some research, then I know I’m doing my job.

K.G.

For those of you who may not know, I have a review exchange happening at the NaNo forums. Yes, I buy people’s books, and people buy mine. Sometimes, I swap via e-mail.

It’s in one of the recent e-mail correspondences that I started thinking about Book 1.

I’ll be honest that the review I got wasn’t the best one, however – and a major however – the author who had reviewed it and had chosen to address it via e-mail had actually gone ahead and asked the very questions that had led many of my other readers to buy Books 2 and 3. She had also made a statement that mine is a style of writing is a bit dated, and doesn’t quite mesh with the current style that readers may like.

This started me thinking about stylistics, and I will be the first to admit that Book 1, which has been my baby for the longest time (I wanted to write a story like that since my early teens, but I knew that I wasn’t ready for it until much, much later), is not my best work.

Gasp, shock! you say. But it’s true. A first book is a first book, and while I knew where the plot was going to go somewhere midway through the rewrite (which was…year 1 of the 3 years of prep-work it had taken before I had it ready to go), I was going forward with publication in August of 2009 with the full knowledge that it wasn’t going to be great. I knew that it was choppy, left the plot holes wide open for filling with later books – and could be a turn-off for some readers – and the conventions were lackluster. I knew it going in, but it had set the stage for a story that stretches into the long-term. That is why I released it: plot-wise, there was nothing more I could do without spoiling the rest of the series.

But my reviewer had brought up a great point as far as the style. Readers like certain things, and authors write a certain way. The two may not necessarily mesh, and I’ve been told before that my style can be a little too old-school for them.

Has anyone read Capt. Thomas Mayne Reid? If you’ve ever read The Headless Horseman in school, you probably have. If you’re not familiar with the Captain, he was a writer in the steamboat-era post-Civil War South, whose specialty was writing “young boys’ stories”: adventure, science-and-nature-infused stories of seeking the unknown, going into the great frontier, etc. I grew up reading his stories, and to this day continue to touch back on them after finding them on Kindle. Strongly recommended reading, but his style is likely not what you are used to.  And I would be lying like a dog if I didn’t say that I picked up my writing style from his books; these stories had actually made me love reading. I was maybe 4 when I had started reading them, and he’s likely the only author whom I cannot get sick of re-reading.

Now, this makes for a curious quandary. I’m writing a modern/futuristic story, science fiction blending lines of fantasy and crime drama, but I’m doing that in a framework of style that hadn’t been used since the 1860s. How does that work?

Something had to evolve there.

My editor will vouch for the fact that Book 2 had turned out better than Book 1. Not just because there was now an editor on board, but because I had taken whatever lessons I had learned with the adventure of writing, prepping, and publishing Book 1, and applied them to the second book, and then the third. By the time I had rewritten the third, I had a good idea of what my readers expected out of the story, and by this time, the storyline had progressed enough to where I was able to satisfy both my style and the readers.

Mind that this process had taken – if I have to track back from the point of publication of the third book, which was this July – 5 years. And with it came a good bit of knowledge about the author/reader relationship.

Now, one of the things that I’ve been suggested is the use of a how-to guide for writing. Personally, I can’t. While I don’t deny that those can be great resources, I’m a major supporter of learning by trial and error, especially for a story spanning more than one volume. It’s hard knocks, and I got more than one negative review on that, but it’s still a learning process. I also learned by working out the kinks that were left in the story by Book 1 in Book 2, and then asking myself just how well I can finish the story in two volumes, or three, or even four. My editor, who had put up with my obstinacy on many an occasion, pointed out exactly what effects the changes would have, and I have incorporated her suggestions into the edits that I’m making now in Book 4, as well as future installments of the series. The best style guide of them all, though, is a little black book by Strunk & White.

The mention of that usually sends a friend of mine cringing, and he knows why.

Nonetheless, it’s an excellent little style guide, and one I’ll recommend over any how-to guide. Put it this way: your story is your story. You know it best. You know how it works best. And it’s up to you, the author, to set it up. So if you get a book of how to write a novel, you may benefit from it, or it may do more harm than good. The Elements Of Style by Strunk and White doesn’t teach how to write a novel. It does, however, teach how to write damn near anything with simple, to-the-point rules. This book is yet to be overturned in practice, because all the rules end up applying sooner rather than later. Storylines progress with practice, feedback, and more practice, but certain constraints of writing them do not change.

It’s a lot of food for thought. And thanks to the reviewer for getting me thinking on these things.

Some time ago, my awesome editor, Gayle F. Moffet, had interviewed me in the anticipation of the release of my third book. This is me returning the favor.

Warning: enough of a wall of text to make a house (her words)

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