The Real Story on Publishing

Apologies to people who have no interest in publishing except reading books, but obviously I am part of the industry. I've thought about writing a blog post on the topic, but it is so complicated and contentious these days... I haven't.

However, author Michael J. Sullivan just cut through a lot of the bull shite on his blog and did it much better than I think that I can. So if you're interested in why so many authors and publishers are in such a lather, I suggest reading his blog post:

Publishing: Let's stop comparing apples and oranges

It's well written and informative. And for those not interested in publishing, I have a post on sword fighting coming up in a few days.

Indie Fiction Challenge

Samantha Warren over at Mariyta's Musings introduced me to a fun challenge. The challenge is to read 24 indie authors this year, each with a last name that starts with a different letter of the alphabet. (The challenge allows you to skip any two letters of the alphbet) Novels read before the first of the year don't count. You can check out the complete rules at ABC Indie Fiction Challenge Sign Up. Here is my list of books I've read since the first of the year that fit on the list. A) B) C) D) Dalglish, David - The Weight of Blood (The Half-Orcs, Book 1) E) F) G) H) Hocking, Amanda - My Blood Approves I) J) K) L) Lieske, Victorine - Not What She Seems M) Martinez, Victoria - An Unusual Journey Through Royal History N) O) P) Patterson, Edward C. - Look Away Silence Q) R) S) Snyder, J. M. - Power Play T) U) V) Vosika, Laura - Blue Bells of Scotland: Book One of the Blue Bells Trilogy W) Woodbury, Sarah - Footsteps in Time: A Time Travel Fantasy (The After Cilmeri Series Book One) X) Y) Z)

I notice I've read books by way too many authors whose names begin with 'S'! I'll update my list as I go along.

If anyone would like to check out my novels, you'll find them here:

Freedom's Sword is available at Amazon and Smashwords. A Kingdom's Cost is also available at Amazon and Smashwords for only $2.99.

What Makes A Good Ebook Cover?

I've been trying to figure out what to say on this subject. I am about as far from an expert as you can get, but they are tremendously important. You have probably at most a few seconds to tempt someone on Amazon, Smashwords or B&N to take a closer look. All that will do this is your title and cover.

What makes a good ebook cover? I think first you have to realize, and this took a while for me, that an ebook cover needs very different elements than a DTB cover at least in large part because people mainly see it in thumbnail size. This means that small details and small or elaborate fonts get lost, often completely. I started out trying to judge my covers by successful DTB covers before I realized what a bad idea that is.

I recently saw someone complaining that no one knew that his mystery was a mystery. He was told that his cover didn't look like a mystery with it's semi-nude woman on the cover. His response was, but it says it is a mystery. The second problem (other than the semi-nude) was that you couldn't read the small font that said mystery.

Remember, in a book store someone may pick up a book and examine the cover not to mention that a mystery is in the mystery section. This doesn't happen that much online. The potential reader may magnify it, but that is highly unlikely if it doesn't catch their attention in the first place.

If you make your cover look like it is from a different genre, then why would someone looking for a mystery bother to look at it? They won't.

My dragon-looking creature on my Wings of Evil cover is a bit of a cliché for fantasy covers, but anyone who looks at it darn well knows it's a fantasy. I hope the interesting artwork (I hope it is) and the bright colors help get past the fact that dragons on covers have been done to the point of cliché-dom. People haven't gotten tired of handsome hunks and beautiful women on the covers of romances yet, so I think I may be right there.

Am I sure of it? To tell you the truth, no, but generally it has received a good reception and positive comments.

Fonts are another problem. You have to be able to read it in thumbnail which means it has to be large for both the title and the author name. Fancy fonts seem to lose most of their detail and even look a bit amateurish in thumbnail size. That doesn't mean you have to stick to TNR. What is too fancy and what is just a touch of flair is open to debate, but at least you need to be sure that it can be read easily when it's small.

That doesn't touch on good design elements. I'm not going to discuss that because it is just plain open to too much debate. What I consider good design and what someone else does may well differ wildly. But it needs in some way to be interesting. Now is that vague, or what?

Please comment. What do you think makes a good ebook cover?

Reviews and the Hard Part

I'll try not to whine here, but getting reviews--or rather not getting them--is killing me. I don't quite know what I'm doing wrong.

What have I done?

Well, I emailed every blogger I could find who reviewed indie-published fantasy with a request to do a review. About 10 of them expressed interest in reviewing, so I sent out review copies. Now, it is too early to see results from that. Most bloggers have a back list of novels to review. I mean, I'd love results within the three weeks since Wings of Evil came out, but that would be pretty much a miracle.

What worries me a lot more is Amazon, Nook and LibraryThing reviews. As soon as the novel went live, I posted offering review copies. I gave away 20 on Amazon, 5 for Nook on Nookboards, and 5 on LibraryThing. After about two weeks, I haven't received a single review. Not one. I would expect them to trickle in. After all, a lot of people do have a TBR list, but not even one review out of 30?

Maybe I'm not realistic in thinking they would start this soon? Maybe 30 review copies isn't enough to get results? I'm really not sure, but the lack of reviews is really tough to get past.

I'm thinking over what to do, and I'm not sure of the solution.

Guest Post by Jennifer Hudock

Today I have my first Guest Post, and it's from my friend from the Kindleboards, Jennifer Hudock, author of The Goblin Market. I'll let Jennifer tell her own story and pop in for comments at the end. Here's Jennifer:

The Control Freak
By Jennifer Hudock

I'm a control freak. There, I said it. I'm sure they have twelve-step programs for freaks like me, but when it comes to my writing, I don't want to compromise. Okay, I guess that's not entirely true. I'll gladly compromise with my editor on elements of my stories that might not gel well with my reading audience, but there are things I will not sacrifice.

I watched a lot of my author friends go through traditional publishing houses, both small scale press and big six, and the process of getting published was more often than not, excruciating. Some houses had very specific rules about character names—including a long list of "DO NOT NAME" they handed out to their authors in the first stages of communication. If one of your characters had a name on that list, there was no compromise…your character got renamed.

Maybe it's all part of being a control freak, but the naming process for my characters if often very personal, and imagining having to rename them because a publisher doesn't like the name I chose kind of makes my skin crawl.

From the outside looking in, it often feels as if publishers don't look at our creative work in terms of story, unless they're looking for ways to make it sell. They often recommend hacking out important plot points and requesting entire manuscript rewrites that turn your novel into something you would never write. Again, I've got the creepy crawlies under my skin just thinking about it.

As an indie author I need to think about how to sell my story, but first and foremost I need to think about my story and my audience. I tell stories because I love them—the characters, their experiences, adventures and defeats…I feel a connection with the elements of those stories that often runs deeper than the connections I feel to the people in my life.

Maybe I'm just unwilling to compromise my characters and their stories, and that can certainly be a bad thing, but it can also be a good thing. My stubbornness pushed me to find and work with my own editors before I published my first full-length fantasy novel, The Goblin Market. Feedback between my editors was often conflicting, which helped me examine the scenes they referred and their suggestions with an even more objective eye. Why? Because the editor only had one person to impress with their feedback: me. There was no publisher breathing down their neck, just little old me.

While I can't stress enough how important it is to publish clean, well-edit work because an editorial eye can help us find plot holes and unnecessary scenes that help us clean up our novel, I operate under the wisdom that one editor's trash is another editor's treasure.

J. R. sez: You really can't argue with success since The Goblin Market is doing very well over on Amazon. Jennifer is right, of course, that a clean work is essential. If there is one thing that hurts indie authors, it is a reputation for not giving that, but the cream rises to the top. Authors like Jennifer who do give a clean work and a good story, as she does, are rising--fast.

Jennifer Hudock is an author, podcaster and freelance editor from Pennsylvania. Her first full-length novel, The Goblin Market, is currently available on Amazon, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords. For more information about Jennifer Hudock, including updates on upcoming fiction, visit her official website: The Inner Bean.

Traditional Publishing and EBook Royalties

There is considerable buzz about Joe Konrath's recent post in which he told the bare truth about what the Big 6 are doing to traditionally published authors on royalties. After repeating a recent conversation with a NYT selling author he commented on the royalties:

The 25% the publisher is offering is actually based on net. So you're getting 17.5% of the list price. (Amazon gets 30%, they get 52.5%--which is obscene)

When your agent gets her cut, you're earning 14.9% of list price on ebooks.

Read the whole blog post. It is a must read for all authors, traditional or not. Joe does some great number crunching for a wordsmith. But let me repeat what I think is the salient bit of that comment.

It Is Obscene.

Let me revisit the thinking behind the DTB royalties. The 15% was originally devised so that after allowing for the substantial costs that publishers had in editing, cover art, promotion, blurb writers, shipping, storing, etc. that the profit would be split about evenly. The publisher got about half. The person who produced the thing--the author--also got about half.

Under the Big 6 eBook set up the big hog at the trough, the publisher, gets almost all and the one who produced it--the author--gets a pittance.

Do we have a serious problem here? Let me answer my opinion on that. Yes.

My question, frankly, is why are so many authors putting up with it?

The times, my friend, they are a-changing. I suggest that we change with them.

Self-Publishing in the New World

As a lot of people have pointed out, in the last two years an entire new world has evolved in publishing: Self-publishing authors on Kindle and Nook. So I'm going to take that as a given for the moment. I'm not going to discuss whether it's good or bad. What I do want to do is take a couple of steps back from where I am now and discuss the process that my co-author, C. R. Daems, and I went through to get Wings of Evil ready and on sale.

So what do I think you need to do to have a chance to be successful publishing your own novel? What did we do to try to reach that goal?

The first thing, and I hope this is a given, is pay a lot of attention to advice from people like Joe Konrath, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Dean Wesley Smith. Joe and Kris particularly led the way in this revolution. They have great advice on their blogs. They are in my blog roll to the right side of my blog. I should also give a special word of thanks to Victorine Lieske who has been more than generous with her advice.

But once you've done your research, what then. You have that novel in hand. The first thing to do, (do I need to tell you this?) is edit that sucker until it shines and get some beta readers to give you feedback on it. Pay attention to the feedback. This is no time to be defensive. No, you don't have to take all the advice, but even the advice you don't totally agree with may have kernels of wisdom.

Then you need a good cover and blurb. The problem for writers is that these are really separate skill sets. Few of us have graphics skills and writing blurbs is very different than writing novels. For this, I went to a support system. I'm an active member of both Critique Circle and the Kindleboards. And let me tell you, people there have opinions and they will tell you those opinions. Everyone hated my first try (well, not mine in the case of the cover--I do NOT do graphics) at a cover and blurb. But I learned why. I was told what to look for in a cover. I tweaked. I reposted. I got more feedback.

Did I ever get something that everyone loved? No. But I got something that a lot of people did like or love. I decided that was as good as it was likely to get, so I went with it. One advantage of self-publishing is that after a while if I get negative feedback from readers or if I don't get sales, I can change them.

I would strongly advise something like this for anyone who is going to put their novel up for sale. Don't depend solely on your own opinion, just as you don't with your novel. You need other people's eyes and opinions, or most of us do anyway.

Then there is the whole formatting nightmare. It is IMPORTANT for your novel to be well formatted when people buy it. I didn't do my own formatting. It happens that my co-author, C. R. Daems, is a total guru about things computer. He did it. (He is a wonderful person. I don't discuss him much but I owe him more than I can begin to tell you. He is patience personified)

Then and only then after what probably took months, you can open accounts with Amazon and B&N, where they want everything short of your great-grandmother's maiden name to open an account, and upload your novel, cover and blurb. It took us from 24 to 48 hours to have them go live on Amazon and Barnes & Nobles.

Then--well, getting sales is a whole different post. Maybe a lot of them.

To Pseudonym or Not to Pseudonym

I write in more than one genre.

My historical novels are the ones my agent had been pitching until I parted ways with him recently. I intend to write several more, although they have been postponed while I polish the fantasies we have completed. I have always thought that it would be best to publish the historical novels under a pseudonym or at least under my birth name which is identifiably Scottish. *chuckle* Who would have guessed that?

All of my other novels are fantasies. There is a very real concern when authors switch genres about readers picking up a different genre than they expect and being disappointed. Obviously, this is a bad thing. On the other hand, while the number of people who recognize my name and look for my work is small, it is growing and who wants to give that up?

It is something that I debate a lot. My historical novels are still under consideration at one market. If they don't sell there, I will probably decide to indie publish them. I am still debating whether it will be under this name or another. Having to do promotion under a totally different name is -- daunting.

However, my co-author and I are working on another fantasy. The working title is The Kazak Guardians but I'm not very taken with that title. It has a female protagonist which we frequently do, and this one is an Urban Fantasy. Of course, our last, Wings of Evil, is an epic fantasy. It's probably within the young adult genre because the protagonist is young, but it is a lot grittier than our last.

I hope the new novel will be ready to go online in March, but it has a lot of work yet to be done on it. It's still in rough draft form with no cover designed. There is a lot of work involved in getting from rough draft to something I would let people read!

Well, so much for my last year's resolution to do better. I'm going to try that again.

I've gone through a lot of changes since that last blog post. My agent tried and failed to sell a couple of novels. I wrote one and a half novels. My co-authored novel, Talon of the Raptor Clan, made it to the finals for an Epic Award.

Now I'm unagented again and have decided to try "indie publishing" along with C. R. Daems with our novel, Wings of Evil. It is a young adult fantasy, and I must admit, I think it turned out well. As of today, it's available in Kindle format from Amazon. I will be posting about how the indie author thing comes along.

Publishing has a new face now and I'm anxious to find out what kind of face that is. I'll share my experience with you.

It's nice to be back in the blogosphere.