For my first large sci-fi/fantasy
convention, I travelled across the country to Perth — another
first, for me. SwanCon is Australia's longest running speculative
fiction convention. In this, its 42nd year, the background
theme was honouring the work of Douglas Adams. They had wonderful
guests of honour (Michael Troughton, Joyce Chng, Traci Harding, Sean
Williams, Alan Baxter, Davina Watson, and Wesley Chu via Skype). The
SwanCon committee had organised a huge range of panels and activities
— generally about four talks on at the same time across each day
from 10am to 11pm or later; along with four or more activities
running in parallel — from board games, to live action
role-playing, to console gaming to children's and family
activities.
(Michael Troughton and Sean Williams holding up the SwanCon costume party sign)
SwanCon 42 was held at the Metro
Hotel, Perth, which did a heroic job to support the convention (and
feed a large crowd several times a day). The hotel strained at the
seams, but in my view can be proud of the job they did.
I was also impressed by the dedication
of the organising committee, and their ability to fix things and cope
when things went unexpectedly wrong.
This is just a short piece to record
and share some notes I made as homework for one of the two planned
panels I was on. It's a companion piece to a related panel
focussed on writing your story (and hence, is over on All About Leeth).
(I just intended to type up my notes, but thought they'd be a bit
too cryptic if I had done literally just that.)
The topic of the panel discussion
(organised by Michael Cogan,
I think), was "Publishing: Where to Begin".
"Do you have a really awesome story
and need a way to get it out to the masses? Come and hear from some
who have been there and done it before."
My most excellent fellow panellists
were Amanda Bridgeman, Satima
Flavell, and Glenda Larke.
I think we collectively provided good
information, and there were excellent questions and comments from the
very engaged audience. Please understand this is not a
record of what we all said, but merely some notes I made beforehand
as a memory jogger. Some of these points were made by other
panellists independently, in their own words. Because we had only an
hour and there was a lot of ground to cover, only some of my
notes were covered in the talk.
The
following applies after you've written your story.
Before
publishing, you need to have put in the effort to make it the best
you can. This is critical
for your first published work, since the biggest problem for new
authors is being discovered and tried by readers. If you make a bad
first impression, there are so many new stories coming out all the
time that readers may not come back and try you again.
So it
pays to invest in your first story. By all means get friends or
family to read your story. Note though that you're putting them in
a difficult position, especially if you take
criticism personally:
criticism of what you've written is not a criticism of you. And if
your story is
not the sort of story your
reader would normally read,
don't ask expect
anything other than finding typos and bad grammar.
You're
much more likely to get insightful criticism from other writers, and
from avid readers in your genre. Having portions reviewed by other
writers will be especially valuable to you, as will feedback from
beta readers.
Neil
Gaiman said "When
more than one person tells you
something you've written is wrong or doesn't
work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you
exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost
always wrong. You are the creator: only you can
know how to fix it."
Most
valuable of all will
be a paid-for critique by a good professional
editor who understands the story you are trying to write. And if you
only spend money on one thing to help publish and sell your book,
spend it on that, even if you have to save up for it.
You
learn writing by doing. When you think your work is good enough,
invest some money in getting a good professional editor to critique
it.
It's an
investment in yourself. And
unlike other such
professional
development courses,
the "practical
exercise" from this "training course"
directly
contributes to making your story the best it can be.
But
you need to do the homework to get to a stage where the editor will
be helping you make it
the best it can be, rather than spending
your money having them teach
you how to write! (A
good editor would not agree to take on work that's not up to that
standard, IMO.)
And
you need to find an editor who ‘gets' your work and is willing to
explain why they've advised what they have, and will listen to you
when you explain why you did what you did. You need to be able to
discuss and things when your opinion differs. Usually, then, you'll
reach some agreement — often, some blending of both points of view,
or some other wording or approach or scene that you can
both agree on. I
highly recommend ThEditors.com. They even offer a free assessment of
the 1st
3k words of your work.
Regarding
editing, I've blogged about it here.
And this article I
stumbled over looking for that Neil Gaiman quote is
pithy and wise.
So,
let's
go:
Traditional
Publishing (including
Indie-publishing)
and self-publishing have
a lot in common. If you are
being published by a company,
you'll also need to write a "pitch letter" and/or an outline
and/or
a synopsis. These are all different kinds of writing, and require
time and practice to learn how to do well. They each
serve a different purpose,
related
to making
the publisher's (or agent's) job easier. Those
people have hard jobs, so
these communications have evolved to tell them exactly what they need
to know, as clearly and succinctly as possible. There are books on
the topic and web-sites, including examples of Things To Do, and
Things Which Will Instantly Get Your Story Rejected If You Do Them. A
key thing to know is that the people who will be reading your words
have very little time and are under a lot of pressure. Try to put
yourself in their shoes, and think about things
from their point of view, so you can tell them what
they need to know.
But
the other panellists (and some audience members — Alan, Sean, Bec…)
know much more about that than me, since all my attempts to follow
that path went nowhere!
For
self-publishing, you don't need to write those things, though you
will need to write an
excellent blurb, and ideally a tag-line for your book (the
snappy/intriguing teaser line that may appear on the cover), and also
"the elevator pitch".
Be
aware that these things, though very short, are very difficult to do
and you're likely to go through hundreds of iterations before you
get each of them "right". It's because they're like poetry
in a way: you're trying to pack
the maximum impact into few words. You
have to distil everything
down to its essence.
However, for
these far shorter pieces of
writing, you can pester
anyone you know for their
opinion!
The
text of your book must be proofread before publication. This is the
easiest and most straightforward kind of editing there is.
Unfortunately, it's also hard to do yourself since your mind has
stored the words you intended to write, and you'll tend to read
those rather than the words you actually
wrote. This includes punctuation, too. But few errors will throw a
reader out of a story like typographical or grammatical errors.
(Unless it's a glaring
continuity or plausibility
error: they're probably worse!)
Book
cover. Unless
you're a graphic designer, preferably with some background in book
cover design for the genre of your story, pay for a book cover
design. You can get super-cheap cover designs via web sites like
fiverr, or others that will have people bid for your job. There are
sites that offer pre-made book covers across wide ranges of genres,
requiring just the text to be supplied (Title, author, etc.), and who
will sell you exclusive use of a design for a relatively low cost
($100 — $200). You can also look for good book cover designs in
your Twitter feed, and contact the author to ask for their cover
designer's details. (That's how I found my cover designer, the
wonderful Mirella de Santana)
An
audience member asked if we each would recommend trying to go via the
Traditional or Indie route for their first book, or just
self-publish? The other panellists made excellent points, and
observed very correctly that you'll get a lot of
support if you're accepted for publication (especially
with a small, independent publisher):
you'll get an advance, they'll provide the editor, whose services
you won't have to pay for, they'll write or help you write the
blurb, they'll design the cover, and best of all they'll handle
the marketing for the book's launch period. They
all, I think, said "On balance, yes, it's probably a good idea."
I
however think the decision is not so clear-cut. If you self-publish,
you are indeed taking
on all that extra work: that of a whole publishing company — and
you're probably unskilled in most of it! Admittedly, all that work
is just for your story alone.
But
if what you're writing is the first volume in a series, the balance
shifts so that it's probably better in the long run for you to
self-publish, in my opinion.
That's because the first book in a series is a really powerful
tool for marketing. Having
complete control over the cover, the blurb, how and where it's
sold, and most especially, the ebook price (so you can greatly reduce
it, or even make it free for short periods), is enormously helpful in
getting your work found by readers, and generating follow-on reviews
(typically, only something
like 1% of readers will also review your book).
Another
reason to opt for
self-publishing is my belief
that we're currently only
about halfway through a
tectonic shift in the book publishing environment, which in future
will be more like self-publishing. With
self-publishing, the authors
and the readers are in pretty direct contact, via social media,
blogs, review sites, Facebook groups, and mailing lists. This
interaction will be mediated by giants like Amazon (who are in
business to make it easier for authors to sell and publish their
books, and readers to discover and buy books they'll enjoy) and
other ebook publishers and distributors, as well as the social media
companies and purpose-built web sites that help solve the "discovery"
problem.
Even
traditionally-published authors need a social media presence these
days, since companies can only afford to market their work for
roughly the "two week launch period", unless you're one of the
super-star authors.
Of
course, you should produce
an ebook version of your story! It
will be your best marketing tool, and probably also generate you the
most income. And producing and publishing it will cost you nothing
except a day or so of time (including
time spent learning). If you choose to distribute exclusively with
Amazon, you will earn 70% royalties provided you stay within their
recommended (and sensible) price band. If
you choose Amazon exclusively, also sign up for Kindle Unlimited and
allow borrowing. I earn more from my share of Amazon's
subscription-model payments than I do from individual ebook sales. (I
earn least of all from my
print book sales.)
Produce
a print edition, too. If you produce a PDF file, that will be exactly
what you'll get when you print. Though for colour parts (the cover
and back), you'll need to be aware of CMYK colour and how to
produce a PDF/X file with the right profile. I've blogged about
that in too much detail here.
Decide
how you'll publish. If you're accepted by an Indie or large
publisher, they'll tell you. Otherwise, you get to choose.
If
you're self-publishing, I think it's wise to buy some ISBNs. In
Australia, you buy ISBNs from Thorpe-Bowker. One ISBN costs $125;
if you buy ten, that costs
$250. One hundred costs $575. Book distributors' databases tend to
see contiguous ISBN numbers as belonging to a specific publisher (in
this case: you).
It
costs nothing (or next to nothing) to apply for an ABN (Australian
Business Number), too. You just fill out some forms on a government
web site.
Smashwords
will make your ebook available to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iBooks,
and I think all or most of the major players. This will save you the
effort of producing an ebook in each of the formats they all require.
(Though with the exception of Amazon, my guess is that they'd all
accept epub format, or else Word's
.docx format.
Amazon prefers Kindle/.mobi format.)
Producing
the ebook is very easy if you do it the right way. There's some
wonderful free software called Calibre
for managing your ebooks, including producing your own. It's
amazing.
The first time you use it, it'll probably take you some hours to
learn it and set up the couple of options you'll need to alter.
Each
time you add a new book you've written to
Calibre, it'll take you
about an hour to enter in all the book's metadata (Title, Author,
series info, ISBN, keywords,
blurb, cover). You produce
the ebook by
choosing
"convert to ebook" and selecting
the appropriate input — typically Word format — and output: e.g.
.mobi. Click Cobnvert: it
will take about a minute.
Replacing the book with an updated/improved version will take a few
seconds; generating the new ebook version will take a minute, again.
It's really that easy,
thanks to all the hard work by Calibre's creator, Kovid Goyal, who
has also produced heaps of good tutorials for using it (also free).
I've blogged about that,
here.
Then,
basically, you'll upload that output
ebook file, and a separate
cover file, to your
publisher's web site.
If
you've chosen Amazon, or are using Amazon at all, you should
register with them as an author and create your Amazon Central Author
Page. Provide bio details and so on in the online forms they lead you
through. You need to "Add" and link your books explicitly,
manually, to your Author Page.
For
each edition of each
book that you add and link to your Author Page, you
inform Amazon of its
ISBN. If you don't have one, they'll provide you with one. Though
if you choose to publish them elsewhere, you'll need to use a fresh
ISBN, not Amazon's one.
Oh,
and Amazon also make it super-easy to register that you are
overseas and only 5% tax should be subtracted and handed to the US
government (as long as you live in a country like Australia, that has
a reciprocal tax arrangement with the US). You just fill out a form,
and provide your Australian taxation number, and which bank account
they should pay the royalties into.
You
can choose to create a print edition via Amazon, through their
CreateSpace subsidiary.
For
my print editions, I chose a larger publisher/printer than Amazon,
that also uses Print On Demand, called IngramSpark. I think it costs
about $50 to sign up with them (once-off),
and then it costs US$50 each time you upload a new edition/version of
your book. ($25 for the cover, $25 for the contents.) So if you can
get it perfect 1st
time, and don't need to upload a corrected edition, you'll
minimise your cost there. There's also a one-off cost ($80, IIRC)
per book that you can opt-in to, to "advertise" your book. I
think this just pushes your book's metadata out to all the book
distributors' databases, which therefore makes your printed book
available across about 29,000 stores, worldwide. Not bad, eh?
One
trick/note: don't tick the box that says book stores can return
unsold copies. The downside is that almost no book store will stock
your book on its shelves, for fear of not selling them. The up-side
is that you won't lose
potentially large sums of money paying for the shipping back of
unsold copies if a store over-estimates how many they'll sell.
They'll still order your book in, though, if asked. And of course,
online booksellers in each country will happily order and ship your
books to readers. You will need to set your discount to around 40% so
the book store can make a profit. IS provide tables so you can work
out costs and thus
set your price so you make at least a small profit on each copy.
I
chose IS to reduce delivery costs, since the books will be printed in
or near
the country in which they're bought. This
is in contrast to Amazon,
which prints only in the US (and maybe UK)? Also, IS supports a much
wider range of print edition sizes and bindings.
You should inform the National Library
of Australia of each edition of each of your books. It is I think
worthwhile to also apply form and get a Cataloguing in Publication
(CIP) entry for your book. And remember to send off a print copy (and
the ebook) to the NLA after publication.
I think it's also worthwhile joining
the Australian Society of Authors (ASA). They've recently upgraded
their infrastructure. (Remember, Luke, to re-upload all your
author details into the new system.) And the Writers'
Association for your state, too.
Social
media. The big problem for
new authors is being discovered. You need to use some social media to
make your presence known. Be authentic, is my advice. Be yourself,
and offer useful and interesting content. Don't just repeat, in
various forms, "Check out my book". But don't let social media
dominate your time or energy. Limit yourself to at most an hour a
day, is my own rule of thumb.
Use
free give-aways to attract new readers to try your work. The first
book in a series is ideal for this. Never try to
trick/cheat/deceive/coerce a reader. How would you feel if that were
done to you? Good reviews will hugely increase your visibility, so
write the best book you can. And make sure the book description sets
the reader's expectations correctly: most reviewers who don't
enjoy a story will give it a low rating even if they think it was
really well-written. You want the people who will enjoy
your book to be the ones reading
it.
The
best thing you can do to increase your sales is to write more good
books.
Go to
it!
