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On Self-Publishing: What to Start With

I’ve been talking lately about the publishing revolution. Last time, I drew it up in pretty dramatic terms and finished with a heartfelt call to action.

If you can be satisfied with the promise of an income and an audience, you should be self-publishing.

But there’s a big difference between deciding to self-publish and actually doing it. Self-publishing is a lot of work. It’s not necessarily more work than all the research and querying of the legacy model, but it’s definitely work.

And the most obvious thing you lose with self-publishing is the curation. The gatekeeping. That’s the whole foundation of the legacy model. As soon as you decide to go this route, you take on the new responsibility of choosing what you will publish.

Anything That’s Ready

Last time, I made you wait until the very end to answer the question I’d raised in the title, but this this week I’ll put it right up front. What should you self-publish? Anything that’s ready.

Admittedly, that’s a nuanced answer. And it works in several different contexts. The most important (and most angst-ridden is the story itself. Is the story ready for the public eye? Is it finished?

That’s not the same as asking, “Is it perfect?” Nothing’s ever perfect, and the best artists never stop improving. If you wait until a story is perfect, you’ll spend the rest of your like tinkering.

As a writer, I find this issue to be one of the biggest rewards of being published. Once a book is published, it’s done. It’s finished. You can go on tweaking it, but if you’re doing anything more than minor editorial changes, you’re really doing an injustice to everyone who already bought the book.

More than that, you’re doing an injustice to yourself by robbing yourself of the immense relief of being finished.

But that relief can also conceal a missed opportunity. After all, if you realize years after publishing your book how to make that two-dimensional, contrived love interest into a robust, compelling character who will be remembered through the ages…well, too bad. This book will always be the one you published first.

So the answer to the question–is it ready?–lies at the cross-section of perfectionism and regret. There’s certainly no way to reduce that to a quantitative assessment. It’s entirely inside your head.

Does the story as written accomplish everything you want it to accomplish? If yes, it’s ready (warts and all). If no, it’s not ready. Easy as that.

And that reveals the grand flaw in the gatekeeping model. The real test of a book’s readiness rests entirely in the heart of the writer. Now, acquisitions editors have never pretended to fill that role (their job is to guess which books readers will pay money for), but too many authors have imagined editors into that role.

A Ready Market

The question of a book’s readiness is certainly the most dramatic, but another significant consideration is the readiness of the book’s target market. Huge at is it, the self-publishing revolution is really in its early days.

In a lot of ways, the “self-publishing revolution” I’ve been talking about is synonymous with “the rise of the e-Book” or “digital publishing” (or “Kindle publishing” as I often call it). Exactly why is a whole conversation in itself, but this explosion of new opportunities for writers is driven almost entirely by the inherent characteristics of digital distribution.

And since that’s the foundation, it’s often pretty simple to see which markets are ready to support self-published books. All you have to do is evaluate how compatible that market is with digital distribution.

That’s why fiction does better than non-fiction. Fiction tends to consist almost entirely of free-flowing text, whereas non-fiction often depends on the extra formatting of page layouts for things like charts and tables.

And so within the non-fiction category there’s a big exception for narrative materials–memoirs and true crime, anthologies and essays. Anything that is primarily narrative text can do well; anything that needs visual or physical formatting is a bigger challenge.

And, yes, that includes children’s fiction. They don’t (yet) lend themselves to self-publishing. There’s certainly a market for them (and graphic-heavy nonfiction), but all the extra work necessary to make them attractive on e-readers means the legacy publishers still have the upper hand.

Another problem market is juvenile or young-adult fiction, because the price of e-readers still puts them out of reach of most of the target audience. Kids don’t have e-readers (yet), and parents aren’t necessarily willing to share theirs (yet).

I keep saying “yet” because everything is changing. The prices of e-readers are dropping, the selection is expanding, and the formatting tools are getting easier to use. The question isn’t, “Is there a market for this book?” It’s just “Is the market ready yet?”

And while I’ve been talking about old markets making the switch, there are also new markets emerging (or dead markets reviving). There’s a ready market for short-form serial fiction like the old pulp novels. Short stories and novellas are perfect for Kindle publishing, and there’s a Renaissance of collaborative fiction going on.

You can publish anything that’s ready, and that means new opportunities with every new day.

On Self-Publishing: Who Should Start

I started a brief series back in March on the topic of self-publishing. Those first two posts weren’t really planned, but they did fall neatly into the beginnings of a pattern:

That asks for the obvious journalist’s progression — who, what, when, where, why, and how — and the more I think about it, the more I wish I’d gone in that order from the start. But now I will.

Spectators at the Revolution

There’s a lot of talk about the changing marketplace for books. I know. I contribute my share to it.

There are financial analysts and business professors watching with professional interest. There are antitrust lawyers and consumer interest groups watching to see what dangers it might pose. There are readers wondering how much garbage they’re going to have to pay for (and how much they’ll have to pay).

No matter how much they care or how well informed they stay, these people are all spectators in the revolution. Right now, I’m far more interested in the participants.

Stakeholders

There are editors and agents watching with heartfelt terror (or snide disdain). Even these people are already mostly decided. Mostly they have a vested interest in the legacy model and that’s going to color every discussion for them. The same is largely true for established writers, which is sad because they’re the ones with the most to gain.

These people are all stakeholders in the revolution, but mostly they’re still sitting on the sidelines. It astonishes me every day that the legacy publishers don’t start diving in.

(It shouldn’t. There’s a whole book describing why dominant companies inevitably ride their obsolete business models all the way into the ground.)

But that’s at the corporate level. On the individual level, we certainly have agents and editors and authors dipping their toes in the new publishing model.

These are the voices worth listening to–not because self-publishing is inherently right, but because it’s so different from existing models that it can’t be fairly judged from the outside. And many of the clamoring voices are speaking out of that ignorance.

The New Guard

Then there are those like me, who never had a seat at the old table. I’ve met several of them through my years in the Professional Writing program at OU, and know a lot more through Twitter. None of them has yet found the success I’ve found, but they’re all filled with the same excited optimism, and that’s a little miracle in itself.

Back in 2009, I was still proclaiming loudly to new writers that self-publishing was a terrible idea. Back in 2010, I was coming around to the idea, but it still felt like a kind of failure. Like giving up.

Sure, I held my book in my hands. I reached readers who had never heard of me before. I was a published writer…. But in a sense, it was fake.

That’s because I’d spent more than a decade chasing a very focused vision of success. I had always dreamed of making it big, of proving myself, of being chosen and getting published. I’d deeply internalized the (false) connection between accomplishment and…well, an industrial production process.

That’s what legacy publishing really is: an industrial production process. But I didn’t always have the clarity or confidence to recognize it.

I spent my first year as a published author ashamed to mention it. I had to sell tens of thousands of books before I was ready to give myself the credit I would have accepted instantly from any publisher willing to offer me a couple thousand bucks and a 6% royalty.

But today I’m meeting serious, dedicated writers whose dream is to achieve self-publishing success. That’s a huge social shift in a surprisingly short time.

Serious, Dedicated Writers

And that’s the foundation of my answer to this article’s core question. Who should get started in self-publishing? Serious, dedicated writers who can be happy with self-publishing success.

“Self-publishing success” means making money and finding readers. How much depends entirely on your personal ambition, but the promise of self-publishing is an income and an audience.

It’s not pretty covers and a brilliant editor (you’ll have to find those yourself). It’s not a name-brand imprint and prestigious book awards (not yet, anyway). All self-publishing has to offer is an income and an audience.

If you can be satisfied with those, you should get started in self-publishing. Easy as that. Give me a couple weeks, and I’ll tell you what to publish and when to publish it, but if you pass that little test, this revolution is for you.

Join us. It’s fun.

On Self-Publishing: How to Start

Last week I started a series on self-publishing with a little bit of advice on where to start. It was primarily a list of links to the major digital distributors.

I also promised to follow up with a post on how to start. The inspiration for that one came from an email my sister sent me. I’ve decided to include her questions with my answers, so you can see how other writers are feeling as they approach this strange new world.

Where to Start

So, how should I start if I decide to self-publish?  I’ve read absolutely everything you’ve posted on the topic, followed all your links and read other blogs and articles you referenced, even convinced Graham to read most of it.  It was convincing!  Compelling, even!  So, where do I start?

I dedicated last week’s whole post to answering this question, because where you start is…complicated. Here’s a severely truncated version:

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing is where all our money comes from. You’ll have to find a way to get your book into a format KDP will accept.

We use a custom software tool for that, so I’ve never bothered learning all the other options available. But the good news is that the custom software tool should be available to the general public in August, and for limited invitation-only trial in June.

So if you do decide to self-publish, and you can make yourself wait until the summer, I’d strongly recommend Draft2Digital.com (built on BookMaker technology) for all your digital publishing needs.

Hiring an Editor

I found an editor who seems reputable, qualified and somewhat affordable.  How do I know what to ask for?  How do I know what I need?

This one’s a tricky question, because it could either mean what services to ask for or what price to ask for.

Price is usually in the 3-7 cents per word range. Quality will cost more, but if it were me, I would try to shop around and find quality for 5 cents. If it’s a friend or family, you can get it considerably cheaper, but if you’re wanting to pay anything like fair market value, I’d offer at least 3 cents per word.

That’s $1,500 for a NaNoWriMo 50,000-word novel. A penny per word would still run you $500 for a short novel (and $1,100 for something like Taming Fire).

So what do you get for all that money? That’s the other half of the answer: editing services. There’s a whole range of editing services, but most new writers would be best served by the two extremes: structure editing and copyediting.

Structure editing (sometimes called story editing, concept editing, or developmental editing) reviews the structure of acts/scenes/plot points and analyzes how well they fit together to create a cohesive and satisfying narrative arc. That’s what I’m best at. It’s big-picture stuff.

A good editor will tell you exactly what’s wrong with the structure. A great editor will point out specific ways to fix it.

Copyediting is the low-level stuff, crawling through every single sentence and finding and fixing typos. A good writer should eventually be able to master structure, and to some extent it should come naturally to a good reader, but an independent copyeditor will always be necessary.

ISBNs and Bar Codes

Do I need to buy an ISBN number when I self-publish?  Is that not included somehow?  The info on that is confusing.  Once you buy it, then how does it get attached to your book?  Barcodes, too?  Wait.  They’re separate?  Help!

You do not need to buy an ISBN for your book. We bought a whole bunch for the Consortium, and haven’t bothered to use them for the last ten titles we published.

It depends a little bit on which vendor you’re trying to publish with. If you go direct to iTunes (which is stupidly difficult to do), they’ll require you to supply an ISBN for your ebook (which is stupidly prohibitive of them).

If you go with another printing company for your paperbacks, you may or may not need to provide ISBNs or bar codes, but we use CreateSpace and they provide a free ISBN that gives us access to more distribution outlets. That’s why we’re not even using the ISBNs we have.

So, yeah, you can get into a situation where you’d have to buy an ISBN or a bar code, but for the most part, no.

Cover Art

What’s the trick to cover art?  Do you get to adjust the image when you upload it to make sure it fits correctly?  Do you have to add all the other details, too, like the obnoxious items in that last question?  If so, does that need to be attached to the image before upload or is it added on later somehow?

For cover art, each vendor has its own requirements. I searched through all the different vendors we used (Kindle Direct Publishing, PubIt!, and Smashwords at the time), and discovered that a 600×800-pixel JPEG satisfied all of them (and happened to exactly fit the resolution of the Kindle available at the time). So that’s what we use for all our ebooks.

Paperbacks are more complicated. They need to be much higher resolution, they may or may not get cut in exactly the same place every time so they need a special marginal area called a “bleed,” and the exact width necessary changes based on the number of pages in your book (as the spine gets wider, the image has to, too).

Luckily, CreateSpace provides templates that factor in all that, so we just tell them what size paperback we’re printing and how many pages, download the template, and then design our cover image (in Photoshop) on top of that template. When we’re done, we save it to PDF and upload it back to CreateSpace, and it just works.

And one aspect of the template is a big black stamp in the corner of the back cover where CreateSpace puts your ISBN bar code. Whether you buy the ISBN from them or supply your own, they generate the bar code and overlay it on top of your cover (that’s why the template makes you leave that corner blank).

So that part, at least, is easy.

Other Questions

Heather had another question in there that I’ve decided to save for a whole post of its own, but what about you?

Do you have any questions about self-publishing? Ask me in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer.

Unstressed Syllables and AaronPogue.com

I’ve been talking a lot about my self-publishing success lately. The story of my experience is (I hope) interesting to all my readers.

But one thing I’ve talked about often here is audience analysis. Every good writer needs to know to whom he’s talking, and thanks to my recent success, my audience is starting to split.

Teaching the Revolution

I have long-time readers here who want writing advice. I have friends and fans who want updates on my writing projects. And I have new visitors who’ve heard about my success and want to learn about the self-publishing industry and the opportunities it presents.

I keep meeting other writers who need information about the new market. I keep meeting new readers who want to know when book 3 is coming out. Until now, I’ve been sending them all here.

Fans and Friends

Every day now I have more and more of both kinds of visitors, and they’re looking for very different things. Someone who just read The Dragonswarm and comes here looking for a short story to read while he waits for The Dragonprince’s Heir is going to have to slog through an awful lot of writing advice to find a useful link.

So I’ve started a new site for my fans and friends. Check out AaronPogue.com. I’ll keep it updated with work-in-progress updates, information about new releases, and occasional stories about my life as a writer.

Unstressed Syllables

That’s not replacing Unstressed Syllables. In fact, that’s probably breathing new life into Unstressed Syllables.

As I said, this site can be a huge resource for people interested in the craft and business of writing. Over the last couple years, I’ve put myself at the center of a whole web of experts on that topic.

And now I’ve asked them to start contributing here. Courtney’s been sharing storytelling advice for two years with her WILAWriTWe column, but that’s going to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Expert Advice

Remember a few weeks ago when I talked about Konrath’s five rules for success? One of them was “Write a good product description.” When I met fellow Consortium novelist Joshua Unruh and learned he had a degree and professional experience in marketing, I recruited him to help me accomplish that task.

And now I’ve recruited him to share that expertise in a weekly column here. I’m hoping to get the same commitment from my editor and my cover coordinator. And, of course, I want to go on teaching you how to write better with less effort, like I’ve been doing from day one.

My goal is to make Unstressed Syllables a one-stop guide to today’s story market. If you have any advice or requests, let us know through the comments below or the Contact form on the right. If you’re interested in contributing, let me know that, too!

And if you find us helpful, by all means recommend us to your writing group. We really hope to grow.

On Self-Publishing: Where to Start

This post (or series) has been a long time coming. I’ve been talking for a while about the benefits of self-publishing, and I’ve spent the last several months bragging about my successes in the field. As a result, I’ve heard interest from a lot of you in doing it yourselves.

I’ve gone through the same thing at school, where I’ve been working with traditionally-published and aspiring new writers alike, and they’ve all been listening with interest to stories of my success. One professor told me she was interested in the new market and had been considering trying it out for a while, but didn’t really know where to start.

As I told her, there are several options available.

Let Smashwords Do It for You (Not Recommended)

The easiest way is to go with Smashwords, send them a Word doc, and let them do all the book packaging and redistribution for you. They take a cut off the top (it comes to about 10% of list price), but the bigger cost is that they do all the conversion and formatting and you lose control.

I don’t recommend Smashwords. They make production and distribution simple, but their product is mediocre and their web page (including the sales reporting and project management) is miserable.

I’m speaking from experience. I used Smashwords for a few books just to get into iBooks, and I don’t even do that anymore.

I can certainly see the appeal of a one-stop shop that does formatting and redistribution, though! I’m working closely with a new startup, Draft2Digital, to provide a superior solution.They’ve already taken over full production of my books and those of my publishing company.

If everything goes according to plan, they’ll be opening their service to the general public sometime this summer. I’ll certainly keep you posted.

Upload Your Own e-Books

In the meantime, you best move is to upload your own books. Virtually all my sales come through Amazon Kindle, but I’ve heard stories of other self-pub authors who, for no apparent reason, sell thousands of books a month on the B&N Nook and see barely anything on the Kindle. The world’s weird.

But as it happens, we end up making our books into epub files (what Nook uses) as a step along the way to turning them into mobi files (what Kindle uses). So since we already have it, it just makes sense to do the extra little bit of work and upload the epub to Barnes and Noble.

If you’re doing it that way, these are your direct distributors:

At KDP and PubIt!, registering an account is about as complicated as setting up a new webmail account or signing up at Pinterest. Then there’s a one-page form to fill out when you’re ready to publish a book.

When it comes to iTunes, Apple makes you jump through some awfully arcane hoops to publish with them, and I haven’t ever sold enough copies on iBooks (even when Smashwords made them available there), so I haven’t bothered. I did finally register an account, but then they made it even more work to publish through them, so it’s currently sitting empty.

Ultimately, I’m just waiting for Draft2Digital to support it for me. In the meantime, all my fans with iPads can read my books on the Kindle app.

Print-on-Demand Paperbacks

While we’re talking self-publishing, I should probably go ahead and throw in the link for CreateSpace. The most common POD publishers are LightningSource and CreateSpace. Of the two, CreateSpace is the easiest. That probably means LightningSource is better, but so far I haven’t had the energy to find out.

One thing I’ve found impressive about CreateSpace is how cheap it is for them to make a copy. If you just wanted a reading copy of a rough draft manuscript, you could do some quick layout, print it to a PDF, upload it, slap a quick and ugly cover on it, and order a proof copy for about $6-$10, depending how quickly you want it shipped.

Compare that to trying to print a 400-page document at Kinko’s! And you end up with a bound paperback.

Of course, I also use them to make my paperbacks available. Again, compared to my Kindle sales I don’t sell enough paperbacks to really matter, but they’re available on Amazon and CreateSpace does list through Ingram and whoever the other major wholesaler is, so if someone at B&N wanted to stock your book, they could easily do so.

Anyway, here’s where you’d go to get started: Amazon CreateSpace.

Next: How to Start

While this advice was languishing in my email somewhere, I got another request from my sister. She wanted to know how to get started in self-publishing.

That information is coming next. It’s going to have to be a pretty brief overview, of course (followed with a longer series later, maybe), but I’ll tell you what to do with your book (and your career) once you’ve got accounts set up at some of the sites I linked above.

The Big Reveal

Today saw the official release of the fourth book in my sci-fi series Ghost Targets. With that came the big reveal of our new cover design for the whole series. You can see it in the image to the right.

I like the new look. I can’t wait to see it in the context of the full series, but my designers put in some remarkable effort just to get this cover done in time for the release. I’ll give them a couple hours before I start asking for the others.

Running behind Schedule

Camouflage nearly slipped through the cracks. As you probably recall, I spent last December way behind schedule and frantically scrambling to get The Dragonswarm out the door before Christmas.

Then I decided to complicate things considerably by inviting Joshua to publish his NaNoWriMo as our January offering, meaning we had about forty days to take it from raw rough draft to publication quality. Thanks to my hard-working and incredibly-talented volunteer staff, we did that.

And then it was February already. I knew a Ghost Targets novel was due out, but when I turned in my resignation letter at work I had to put my nose to the grindstone to finish up a project that I’d been working on for three years. I didn’t leave myself any time at all to do Ghost Targets.

Dusting It Off

Luckily, the book was done. I wrote it two years ago, during NaNoWriMo. Trish had read it and proclaimed it good at the time, and ever since then it’d been gathering dust. I hadn’t even glanced at it.

But when I asked Becca to coordinate with Krysten on the new covers, she took her job more seriously than I was taking mine. She kept reminding me about it until I finally got her a reading copy of Camouflage, and then a couple weeks later she caught me at Consortium Time to tell me it was good. She said it was probably her second-favorite in the series so far.

That relieved a lot of stress I hadn’t even realized I’d been carrying. It also prompted me to get the project finished. It was already mid-February by then, but I shared copies to Jessie and Courtney and asked them to do their editing, then I dove in for a read-through of my own.

Finishing It Up

It needed work, of course. They always need work. I had some recurring awkward sentence structures that Jessie chastised me over, and two major characters with unfortunately similar names, and then a resolution that ground to an agonizing halt ten pages before the end of the story.

I literally had a scene in which three armed agents, alone in the woods with a couple dangerous prisoners, stopped what they were doing to repackage some electronics. I spent a whole page moving pieces from little boxes into bigger boxes to make room in the back of the Jeep. It was awful.

But it’s fixed now! And apart from that, it’s a thrilling, fast-paced story that gives a glimpse at some of the real darkness still in store for our heroes in Ghost Targets. It was fun re-reading it after a two-year break, because I got to enjoy the story with fresh eyes. It goes exciting places.

Launching New Covers

And, as I said at the start, I’m extra excited for the new cover direction. It may lack some of the drama and artistic creativity we got to express in the older scenic covers, but it’s a lot easier to put together this kind of cover than to coordinate the photoshoot and then design good trade dress over the top of it.

More than that, the simpler cover design will probably be a lot more effective at the thumbnail sizes Amazon actually uses to sell books. As much as I loved the way our other covers made real some of the exciting scenes in those books, so much of the detail got lost when the image shrank to 72×100 pixels.

And while all this was going on, I had another cover project going on, too.  I commissioned another comics artist to work on the World of Auric stories, and he started out by reworking the Notes from a Thief cover. I’m thrilled with his work, and can’t wait to see how he treats the rest of the stories I have in that franchise.

I’ll keep you posted on both those projects. But for now, go grab a copy of Camouflage and see what happens with city-girl Katie gets lost in the woods.

Writing Is Work (Guest Post by Ty Johnston)

As a way of promoting his new novel Demon Chains, fantasy author Ty Johnston’s blog tour 2012 is running from February 1 through February 29. His novels include City of Rogues, Bayne’s Climb, and Ghosts of the Asylum, all of which are available for the Kindle, the Nook and online at Smashwords. To learn more about Ty and his writing, follow him at his blog tyjohnston.blogspot.com.

Here at the beginning, I would like to say thanks to Aaron for allowing me to appear on his blog today. This is my second blog tour, and the reason it is my second is because I had so much fun doing the first one last November. I got to meet a lot of new people online, and I discovered a lot of blogs and writers I had not known before. I love blog tours.

Aaron’s is a blog pertaining to advice for writers, and as a fiction writer myself, I think I can pass on a little advice to my fellow writers and to those who are considering a career in fiction writing.

My first piece of advice? Always remember that writing is work.

I run across far too many beginning fiction writers who seem to think they can spend a day or two on a short story, upload it to Amazon for the Kindle, then sit back and wait for the big bucks to come rolling in. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

Admittedly there are success stories, big success stories. For those of you playing the let’s-have-a-drink-every-time-he-mentions-a-famous-indie-author game, I’m sure you’ve heard of John Locke and Amanda Hocking. Just to name a couple.

Okay. Done with your drinks, yet? All right. The truth is, both Locke and Hocking did indeed get lucky, but they also put in a lot of work. Amanda is a fast writer and can pump out a novel faster than I can sneeze, it seems. Locke was a professional entrepreneur before he became an indie author, and he had a detailed business plan in mind before he even sold a single digital novel. Neither of these two famous indie authors woke up one day, spent a few hours typing, then became rich over night.

Success takes work. Yes, some luck is involved, but if one has not set themselves up for success, then the potential for success falls flat.

Look at me, for instance. I consider myself a success, though I have nowhere near the readership (nor the money – drat it!) of Hocking or Locke. As I’m fond of saying, “I’m not getting rich, but the bills are getting paid.” What little success I have did not come to me out of the blue. I have had to work for it, and work is what it takes.

Patience is a key. Beginning writers often have a lot of concerns and fears, and admittedly they do have some things to learn, but experience will provide. Education and professional advice are always a boost, but when it comes down to it, a writer becomes a better writer by writing. When a partial or complete manuscript is ready, take it to a critique group or put together some beta readers who are willing to lend a hand. Spend some time reading slush for a fiction magazine. Read, read, and read some more. Then read again.

In other words, put in the work necessary to make you a better writer. We don’t expect lawyers and doctors to be experts without education and experience, so why should we expect the same from novelists and short story writers?

I am fortunate in that being a former newspaper journalist, early on I gained some of the skills that would help me as a fiction writer. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, the basics. But there is more to writing fiction than being able to construct a sentence, and those skills I had to pick up mostly on my own over the years. Back when I was first beginning to write fiction, there were no websites such as Aaron’s where you could go to get help. At best there were a handful of books each year from the Writer’s Digest company. In other words, the advice was limited, and even if one could travel to conventions and workshops, often the professionals there had little time to work with individuals. So, for the most part, I picked up fiction writing by writing and reading, a lot.

I still don’t consider myself a great writer, but I am, at the least, a competent writer. I can entertain my audience, and perhaps that is all one can ask for. Success is what we make it, but to achieve it in the first place we have to be willing to work for it. Everything else will follow.

Self-Publishing Success

Last week I talked about what a successful self-published author I’ve become. I followed that up with a description of the strange stumbling block I’ve placed in my own path.

I suspect some of you would be a lot more interested in knowing how I found that success in the first place. That’s not so easy for me to spell out–to some unknowable extent, I just got lucky–but I did approach the whole process with a clear strategy, and I can at least share that.

Konrath’s Five Rules

I’ve discussed this before, but the foundation of my strategy was Konrath’s five rules. J. A. Konrath was a mid-list writer who walked away from his publishing contracts to self-publish and marveled at the amount of money he was able to make.

More importantly, he shared that information. Konrath dedicated his blog to informing other writers of the opportunities in self-publishing, and in the process he became the poster boy of the publishing revolution.

And he said the most important rules for self-publishing are:

  • Write a great book
  • Develop a professional cover
  • Prepare a compelling product description
  • Get 5-10 products up for sale (all meeting the requirements of 1-3)
  • Give the process more than a year to gain traction

(If you want to read more about Konrath and his five rules, check out my series, “Should I Self-Publish?“)

Keeping at It

The last rule is really the hardest. I released my first book in October 2010, and my total profits from books in the following year looked like this:

Month Income Expense Running Total
Oct. 2010
$0 -$500  -$500
Nov. 2010  $0 $0  -$500
Dec. 2010 $121 $0  -$379
Jan. 2011  $68 $0  -$312
Feb. 2011  $61 -$500  -$751
Mar. 2011  $16  $0  -$735
Apr. 2011  $82  $0  -$653
May 2011  $43  $0  -$610
June 2011  $36  -$500  -$1,074
July 2011  $26  $0  -$1,048
Aug. 2011  $79  -$500  -$1,469
Sep. 2011  $1,531 $0  $61

Those values in the “expense” column refer to the money I spent on cover art and promotion. Most of that was travel expenses for our out-of-state cover artists (who shot, edited, and supplied the actual artwork for free), and then the cost of the handful of printed books we ordered as proofs and to give away in promotions.

Eleven months in–even getting my covers, editing, and promotions assistance for free–I had invested $2,000 out of my own pocket and earned just over a quarter of that back. I was looking at a loss of $1,469.

Throughout those eleven months I had lots of opportunities to recognize the failure of my self-publishing experiment and give up on it. Instead, I stuck to my schedule, kept investing the cash and the effort to give myself the best shot possible at finding success, and in June I put out Taming Fire.

Then I started seeing sales. The first real check for Taming Fire sales arrived in September, and it was enough to get me positive. Ever since then, things have been improving.

Month Income Expense Running Total
Oct. 2011
$3,973 $0 $4,035
Nov. 2011 $5,790 $0 $9,825
Dec. 2011 $3,865 -$100 $13,590
Jan. 2012 $3,154 $0 $16,744

That’s Konrath’s five rules in a nutshell: sticking to it and putting out more books while the others still look like failures. The magic of that approach is cross-sell. Once Taming Fire turned out to be popular, it started driving readers to the Ghost Targets books. You can see it in my sales history.

So, yes, I invested time and money to publish a lot of flops before I found success. But once I found success, those flops were still sitting there, waiting to sell.

Write Another Great Book

One question my literary agents asked me when we first spoke was, “How did you promote the book, to generate so many sales?” I did almost nothing. I uploaded the book to Amazon and Amazon promoted it for me.

The problem with the fifth rule (“Keep at it!”) is the constant temptation to accelerate success. Konrath said it takes at least a year, but what do you do during that year? Do you take out ads on websites or billboards? Do you print up fancy bookmarks to hand out at conventions? What’s your bus bench situation?

If you look around, you’ll find people suggesting all those things. You’ll find some better suggestions, too:

These are all things worth doing. I prod all our Consortium writers to do every one of them.

But none of them will do as much to promote your book as writing the next book. That should be your top priority. It’s how you accomplish rules 4 and 5 at the same time. It’s how you find success.

Speaking of which…it was the release of the sequel to Taming Fire that allowed me to quit my day job. And I certainly haven’t slowed down since then. The next Ghost Targets book will be coming out next week, and once that’s out, I’ll be busy writing Ghost Targets #5 and The Dragonprince #3 and more short stories and another two standalone novels.

There’s the secret to success: Don’t ever quit. As long as you don’t give up, you’ll eventually get there.

The Sales Pitch

On Tuesday I wasted some of your time bragging about how great I am. Right or wrong, I thought it would make a good foundation.

Now I’ll try to make it worth your while. This is what I really wanted to write about anyway.

Shoulders to Stand On

There’s another foundational point I should make, and it really needs a post of its own, too. For now, I’ll give it a section.

See…all art is built upon other art. That’s true whether we’re talking about Costner’s Robin Hood or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or just Twilight‘s feeble efforts to retell Romeo and Juliet.

All art is built on other art. There are certainly elements of Tolkien and McCaffrey and Zelazny in Taming Fire. There’s some Eragon, too, even though I’ve never read it. There’s some Game of Thrones, even though those books completely bum me out. There’s Robert Jordan and Terry Pratchett and a little bit of Michael Bay.

All art is built on other art. As a writer, I owe everything I create to the creators who have come before me. The better the material I have to work with, the better the product I can create.

The Price

Maybe I hammered that point a little too hard, but it matters to the sales pitch because it’s a big part of the price tag. Every title published by Consortium Books is destined to enter the public domain.

That’s a lot to ask. Most publishers overstep the bounds of fairness and reason when they list all the rights they want an author to give them, but no one asks an author to give up all rights, completely, forever.

How can I justify that? Because the Consortium has no intention of hoarding those rights. The Consortium donates them to other artists. We make it cheap and easy to create new works because we respect those who made it possible for us to create ours.

The Salary

That is a lot to ask of a writer, but we offer to pay for it. Or…we will. There’s not enough money yet, but there will be.

And that money won’t be an advance. It won’t be 6% royalties minus reserves against returns. It’s going to be a fixed salary.

That’s the goal of the Consortium: establishing a new patronage. We want to pay writers to become master writers.

So our salary is meant to be a living wage. It’s meant to represent enough wages to cover the full cost of making the work.

Personally, I look at the salary as my pension. I’ll be paid to write a novel while I’m writing the novel, so I don’t need to be paid for writing it for the rest of my life (and another 70 years after I’m dead).

The Perks

But the salary isn’t the only payment we offer. And the benefits include a lot more than just the warm feeling of making new inspiration for future writers.

We also offer publication. That might sound like a small reward to someone who’s already established, but to someone just starting out that can be a big deal. We provide cover art, story editing, copyediting, layout and production, marketing and promotion, and sales and accounting.

We can help a writer find the way in this strange new digital marketplace, and we’re dedicated to building our authors as brands. Not as our brands, but as their own. A writer might well choose to publish one or two books with us to build a name (and some goodwill from contributing to the public domain), then move on from there to a monumental career in traditional- or self-publishing.

If that makes it seem like we’d only appeal to naive novices, well, it could turn out that way. Wouldn’t be such a bad thing, because one foundational aspect of our program is training.

Developing Success

Unlike the traditional publishers, we’re not searching for the chance to secure a book that’s already guaranteed to make us a couple million bucks. We’re looking to recruit a writer with the potential to write a couple dozen good books.

We want to develop writers and develop individual novels. I recently talked about how we did just that with Joshua’s book.

And then he and I had a long conversation about this topic — about his sacrificing ownership of this amazing young-adult adventure story to the company. He smiled at me and said, “I didn’t write the book you published. I just wrote the rough draft. It took the whole company to make the book that’s getting so much attention.”

That education is a big part of our mission. That’s the writer’s real reward for the rights given to the company. We have an entire School of Writing that exists to make all our writers better. The cost of admission to that school is participation.

The Big Idea

Please don’t take any that as dismissive of the original act of writing. Remember, I’m a writer. I like writers. I want to pay them lots of money to do it.

But I want to pay them to improve their art, not to exploit fiat monopolies. Copyright is bad for artists. Commoditizing art is bad for artists. What an artist has to offer isn’t an exclusive property, but a public service.

That’s my sales pitch. That’s what’s worth giving up the golden yacht and the movie premieres for. That’s my big idea.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Agents

I’m a hot commodity these days.

No, really. Little ol’ me. You already know my books are selling well, but it gets bigger than that.

Piper

Back in January I received an email out of the blue. It came via the contact form here, and showed up in my Gmail. After some minor pleasantries, it said:

I’m the editorial director of Piper Fantasy, one of the major German fantasy and sf publishers. I wonder whether the German rights on “Taming Fire” are available, and in that case, if you could send me reading material.

The writer’s life can be a schizophrenic one. We work tirelessly to build up name recognition and make ourselves attractive to publishers and agents. And at the same time, we have to live in constant fear of predatory conmen posing in those same roles.

So when I saw an offer by someone who came, unbidden, looking to offer me a very prestigious contract, my first thought was “Spam.” Lucky me, I have access to some incredible resources these days, so I forwarded the message to my much-published professors at OU.

Turns out, Piper is the premier sci-fi and fantasy publisher in Germany (itself a major sci-fi and fantasy market). One of my professors said, “Give him whatever he asks for, get him to make an offer, and take it.”

Subsidiary Rights

Foreign translation rights really are a prestigious kind of contract. Usually you need to have a top-tier agency or publishing company to even get access to international representation, and then your book is just one of dozens they’re pitching to foreign publishers.

It’s a tough pitch, too. Foreign publishers face all the same costs and risks as domestic publishers plus they have to invest the time and money to translate a work on the gamble it’ll thrive in their regional market.

Because of those things, it’s considered a major resume item for a novelist to secure foreign language deals. And here I had a major publisher from a major market come calling to me.

Later in the same month I heard from a big publisher in Poland, too. And an audiobook company looking to make productions of both my series.

Ooh! And last week, an ebook advertising company contacted me to ask for ad space on one of my pages here at Unstressed Syllables. Even this blog is attracting industry attention.

Like I said, I’m a hot  commodity.

Representation

And the same professor who told me to take the Piper deal also put me in touch with his agent. So last week I spent an hour on the phone with New York City, trying to explain to a literary agent how I got so big so fast. It wasn’t easy, because it’s something of a mystery even to me.

Worse than that, I had to try to explain what I can’t do because my hottest books are dedicated to the public domain. Once they’d heard about my sales numbers, these guys were probably ready to start shopping Taming Fire as soon as I said, “Go!” but that commitment to the public domain severely binds their hands.

It’s going to be hard to make any kind of deal with Piper. It certainly wouldn’t be a traditional one. I probably can pursue the audiobook deal, but only because it’s with a company that does non-exclusive contracts (which also means they don’t pay as well).

Sacrifices to the Public Domain

That doesn’t bother me, but it’d have to look like a terrible deal to someone used to wheeling and dealing in the copyright waters. Where these guys specialize in making big money on exclusive contracts, I’m tearing my exclusivity to shreds.

So I won’t be looking at a glossy hardcover of Taming Fire any time soon. They easily could have made that happen. I won’t be buying a gold yacht with the proceeds from lucrative movie options, or taking my wife to the fancy Hollywood premiere.

I’m looking a lot of gift horses in the mouth these days.

In fact, there’s a decent chance I’ll just be too much trouble and this extraordinary opportunity to work with some excellent literary agents will slip through my fingers.

The Sales Pitch

They offered to help me find ways around it, until I admitted that I’m the one who designed the public works contract. I’m not some bright-eyed, naive kid who got duped into signing a restrictive contract. I’m the bright-eyed, naive kid who thinks that contract is a really good idea.

When that became clear, Peter stopped and said, “You know, I’m a writer, too. I have a book I’m about to start shopping. So help me see your perspective. Why should a writer choose to publish this way? What’s your sales pitch?”

It was a good question, and I gave him a lame answer. I’ll give you a better one. Come back Thursday, and I’ll tell you why it’s worth everything I’m giving up to get to work for the Consortium.