[Link] The Writers Collective Life

by Gary Phillips

If you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.

— Stephen King

Writing is not always that dangerous, though for journalists in various parts of the world it is, but it is a lonely business. Writing is counter-intuitive to the idea of the cooperative process. Even if you were copywriter in a busy office, envisioning yourself as a modern day Don Draper, mesmerizing the potential client with your ability at word pictures, selling them on how you’ll sell their doo-dad over martinis at lunch. But eventually you have to bang out the copy, then pass it around to others to get their notes, their edits, their rewrites, picked over, beat up, then handed back to you.

But we all still write alone. We are still the first and final judge on what we compose.

In the old days you stole time from your job and family to write at night or on the weekends to produce the Great American Novel or at least your version of that ideal. If you were a genre writer, maybe you were influenced by the likes of Mr. King who was once so broke that he was living in his car; yet still churning out his stories. Maybe devoted family man, Orrie Hitt, struck a chord as he cranked out his sleaze paperback titles like Naked Flesh and Man-Hungry Female sitting at his kitchen table 12-14 hours a day. Or you might have been inspired by the likes of Ray Bradbury, who wrote Fahrenheit 451 ––his classic sci-fi novel about censorship –– while renting the use of a typewriter in the basement of UCLA’s Powell Library for a dime each half hour. Total reported expense: $9.80.

All this before the internet, before Amazon, before the marriage between digital printing and a bindery machine. Before it all changed.

Read the full article: https://drpop.org/the-writers-collective-life/

[Link] How Indie Genre Fiction Ebooks Are Thriving Online

by Adam Rowe

In the indie ebook world, the genre is king.

According to a 2017 Author Earnings report,  over 70% of all genre fiction consumer purchases — the "overwhelming majority" — are now in ebook format. Of these ebooks, most independently published ones have a larger market share than traditionally published ones when broken down into genres: Self-published romance, mystery, horror, science fiction and fantasy all sell better from indie authors or Kindle imprints than they do from traditional publishers.

According to the numbers, genre fiction has taken over in the self-publishing community. Mark Coker, founder and CEO of ebook distributor Smashwords, has some insight as to why.

"The bestselling indie titles are genre fiction," Coker says. "Genre fiction is ideally suited to screen reading because it's straight narrative and easily reflowable." By his reckoning, a first wave of commercial success for independent books can be pegged to the "reverted-rights out-of-print romance titles" that debuted as ebooks in 2009 or 2010 and proved the model could succeed. "In addition to romance, we had several authors who broke out in those early days with fantasy and sci-fi as well," he adds.

Read the full article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamrowe1/2018/01/13/how-indie-genre-fiction-ebooks-are-thriving-online/#704b186411fa

Publish, Self-Publish or Perish

by C. Hofsetz

 
 

 In academia there’s a saying: publish or perish. If you don’t publish often enough, you won’t be successful, you won’t achieve recognition or tenure and before you know you are writing a paper about booty calls.

Professors are measured by where they publish, how often and the number of citations, and not just the quality of the work. That creates a publishing industry that feeds on the despair of people trying to stay relevant and, as a result, quantity trumps quality. Sounds familiar?

I’ve been a software engineer and out of academia for a decade, and although I did have fun teaching and doing research, I’m glad I don’t have that pressure to publish anymore.

But then I wrote a book. Goddamn it!

Writing the first draft of a novel isn’t easy, but it’s only the first step of many. Publishing is a big funnel ahead of you with dead ends everywhere. Finishing a novel is a herculean task, but Hercules had twelve labors, and you just completed the first one.

You’ll publish my book or else!

My Strategy

But I’m a special snowflake and not at all like the other wannabe writers out there. Also, I have a plan! And since I’m generous, I’m sharing it with you:

• Keep editing book.
• Query agents.
• Go to 1 until you give up.
• Self-publish it.

Awesome, right? I’ll wait for you to pick your jaw up from the floor before continuing. You can thank me later. I accept all major credit cards and money orders.

Well, guess what? Everyone else has the exact same idea. The publishing funnel is the same one regardless where you start, although there are few shortcuts (e.g. you’re a celebrity, rich or you steal a couple of boats and airplanes*).

The actual timeline is a little more complicated than that:

After you finish and iterate your first drafts, you start sending queries (A) until you hit the jackpot, find an agent and become the next J.K. Rowling (B)–all published writers are rich, right? Most of us, though, don’t get anything close to an offer and we eventually panic and start submitting directly to publishers (C – I’m still not there, but close). Finally, we eventually give up and self-publish (F) or we let our novel, our dreams and our self-esteem die in a puff of nothingness (G).

Note: if you do want to be the next J. K. Rowling, there’s a how-to guide for that. Really, what are you waiting for?

Is My Book Ready?

In case you just finished your first draft the answer is a resounding ‘no.’ Ernest Hemingway allegedly said that the first draft of anything is shit.

Based on my tiny experience in writing, it’s my belief that a collection of pages becomes a book only after several revisions. The first draft is only the scaffold. This is true even for blogs, but we don’t have much time to iterate on those. Sorry about that!

I see discarded drafts everywhere!

 
For instance, the big twist at the end of Sixth Sense wasn’t part of the first script. In fact, the movie was supposed to be about a kid who saw the victims of a serial killer. M. Night Shyamalan rewrote the script from scratch ten times, and only in the fifth revision he wrote the big twist (I’m trying not to spoil it here).

But what if you already did several rewrites, and you’ve been working on your book for more than a year? Is your novel finally ready?

Well, the answer here is simple: have you published it already? If not, you’re not ready.

*Based on Shit Rough Drafts Does “The Great Gatsby”

You’re going to be editing it until the printers are spitting out your novel, and probably even after that.

Traditional Publishing

It’s hard to get in traditional publishing, and even having thousands of followers on twitter or other social media platform (not my case yet), it doesn’t mean you’ll get an agent. Your book has to be as good as it can be, and you have to be lucky. According to querytracker.nethttps://querytracker.net/ less than 10% of the queries result in requests, and requests are not offers of representation.

Source: querytracker.net. Data as of 1/22/2017

But wait, there’s more! Or, actually, less. Yes, it’s a numbers game, but the numbers are not that large. The genre of my current unagented novel is Science Fiction. Using querytracker.net as a source, we find 1517 agents (as of 1/22/2017). 1193 of those are in the United States, 907 are open to queries and only 146 (about 10%) are accepting Science Fiction submissions:

Worse, some places have more than one agent looking for Science Fiction, and in most cases if one already rejected yours, you won’t be able to submit it to another one in the same agency: some share the same input query, others explicitly tell you that one ‘no’ means ‘no’ for everyone there (some say to submit to the other agents anyway, arguing that the other agent won’t even remember it, and the worst that can happen is some strangers are mad at you. I wouldn’t do it, though. My skin is not that thick.)

No wonder so many books fall through the cracks.

Self-Publishing

I’m not going to talk about the several skills you need to self-publish. It’s another set of herculean tasks that’ll take you away from writing, and it’s well documented on the internet. The question here is *if* you should self-publish.

Recently, I had a chat at AbsoluteWrite.com that started as an innocuous question about publishing my first chapters online, but soon it became a soul-searching thread if I should be a blogger, self-publish my novel or query agents. I’ve been at this for about a year now, and some people took almost a decade to get an agent. I met someone at a PNWA writing conference that was trying to publish for 30 years.

 

Clearly there are marketable books that are shunned by agents, either because of the sheer number of submissions–so they can focus on the best ones out there–or because the book is considered bad by traditional standards. Take The Martian, for example. It uses both 1st and 3rd person, past and present tense and it’s riddled with expletives. It was rejected by agents several times, and he decided to publish it first as a web serial, and later as a free e-book on his website.

Also, consider B.V. Larson. He has more than 63 self-published books, many of which are considered brain candy. Some even say that Steel World is a wannabe Starship Troopers. But readers love his books, and most of his work is also available in audio format.

I’m not saying that my (or your) novel is a diamond in the rough, or that it in any way compares to best sellers. The point is that even books which would eventually be successful are often rejected.

And it’s not the agents’ fault; in their places, we would do the same thing. Many of them go through more than a hundred queries per day, and a well-written query does not necessarily mean the novel is any good–and vice-versa.

Moreover, self-publishing (also called indie publishing) is skyrocketing in the last years, while traditional publishing is losing ground. The chart below illustrates how Amazon Published and Indie Published is taking over. The stigma of self-publishing (sometimes called vanity press in a derogatory way) is slowly vanishing.

Source: AuthorEarnings.com

The downside of self-publishing is that readers never know if a book is decent, or if it was even edited, and this can scare people off from reading them. Some say it’s a mass of mediocrity. So if you take this path do your homework, edit your book and make your story be the best that it can be. Don’t take shortcuts.

The Secret to Publishing

Everyone wants to know the secret to publishing, preferable through an agent.

Do you want to know what is it? Well, me too. I have no idea. As of this blog post, my book is unagented, and I’m at least a year away from self-publishing if it comes to that. Thanks for reading this and please don’t go away!

People say that if you write a good book it’ll be published, and maybe that’s true. But we’ve read so many bad books that are published, and our novels are hopefully somewhere in between To Kill A Mockingbird and the worst-ranked books on Amazon. How did they do it?

As I said, I don’t have the answers. I wish! What I can say, though, is to be patient. Sure, you can self-publish and even have misleading reviews on your back cover. That’s easier to achieve.

No, you should not have misleading reviews on your back cover!

But as anything in life, you need the following to succeed:

1. Hard work
2. Perseverance
3. A bit of luck

Damn. That’s cheesy and cliché. But it is what it is. The truth is most of us will never be famous authors, but if at least a handful of people read and like our work, it’s already awesome.

Anyway, I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.  Please kill me if I say anything like you miss 100% of the queries you don’t send.

Barf!

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Thanks for my lovely daughter for the stick figures!

*Yes, I’m aware that he technically didn’t write the books. But he’s planning to write his own version of events!

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C. Hofsetz accidentally wrote a book before he even learned how to write. The novel is awesome (according to him), but the book itself was awful. Now he’s slowly fixing it as he learns the tools of the craft. Check out his blog here. Originally from Brazil, where he was a professor of Computer Science, he has been a software engineer for Microsoft Office since 2007, and tracking changes of his first work-in-progress novel in Microsoft Word since the end of 2015.

[Link] Top Ten Trends in Publishing Every Author Needs to Know in 2017

by Chloe

What does 2017 have in store for authors? If you haven’t had a chance to read forecasts and predictions for the coming year, fear not. We have read all of the top articles written by industry professionals and top indie authors so you don’t have to. We also reached out to some of our industry friends to see what their thoughts are. Below we have compiled a list of the top 10 trends in publishing that will impact indie authors the most, with specific takeaways on how you can best navigate them.

1. The Majority of Fiction Sales will Come from eBooks

Data Guy notes in his DBW White Paper that 70% of adult fiction sales were digital last year. It is likely that ebook readership will continue to grow in 2017. More eBook readers means more eBook sales. This means that if you’re writing fiction, promoting your eBooks is a good place to focus in the coming year.

What this means for you: If you are a first-time fiction author, publishing your work as an ebook is an affordable and easy way to enter the market. If you are a published or self-published fiction author, continue to focus your time, resources and budget on driving ebook sales.

Read the full article.

[Link] How many books equals success?

Last night, I was shown this blog post by Claude Forthomme. The link was shared with me by a fellow indie who was surprised by Forthomme’s headline, “Only 40 Self Published Authors are a Success, says Amazon.”

Only forty? That seems pretty low. Especially because the definition of success is extremely subjective.

One author may define success as winning awards. Another might define it by the size of their mailing list. Still another may say they aren’t successful unless they become a New York Times and/or USA Today best-selling author. For another, it might just be consistently hitting the top ten best-sellers in their genre on Amazon. Or earning a full-time income. Maybe attracting a movie deal.

Some feel successful just having published a book.

Read the full article: http://www.percivalconstantine.com/how-many-books-equals-success/

[Link] The Shocking Truth About What Writing Fiction Pays (a personal comparison)

by Lucy Blue

Earlier this week, I got my royalty statement for Little Red Hen Romance for September 2015 from Amazon and went into a full-blown fidget. In spite of the fact that we had outsold our previous best-selling month, June 2015, by more than two to one, moving more than twice as many books to paying customers (excluding promotional freebies from both months’ sales figure, of course), we made less than one-quarter as much money. How the fuck does THAT happen? I shrieked, racing figuratively around the internet squawking for most of the afternoon.

The villain who had stolen from me, I soon determined, was that damned Jeff Bezos with his double-damned Kindle Unlimited – specifically, the new rules for Kindle Unlimited that went into effect July 1, 2015 (you know, the day after our big month). Under the new system, publishers and self-pubbed writers get paid by the page read instead of by the copy downloaded. In June, the Hens were paid $1.25 per KU download, quite a trick since our books average about 25 standard pages and only cost 99 cents each. We were, to be perfectly bald-faced frank about the thing, one of the short works publishers who were unintentionally scamming the KU payment system, collecting as much payment on our short stories as novelists at comparable sales rank were getting for full-length books. Even in mid-squawk, I had to admit that wasn’t fair and that some sort of correction had been required. But I still felt screwed by the steepness of the sudden drop.

Read the full article: https://lucybluecastle.wordpress.com/2015/10/17/the-shocking-truth-about-what-writing-fiction-pays-a-personal-comparison/

[Link] This Is How You Use Facebook to Sell Books

by Mark Dawson

I read the recent DBW piece “Why Facebook Cannot Help You Sell Books” with surprise, and I respectfully disagree with its contentions.

I’m pretty much the definition of a midlist author: I write full-time, I’ve hit a few Amazon best-seller lists over the last couple years, and readers seem to enjoy my books. I was making a very good income with the usual forms of advertising throughout 2014—BookBub and the other advertisers, permafree first in series, etc.—but when I turned on my first Facebook ads I immediately saw a massive spike in business.

I now use Facebook as a fundamental part of my marketing system and I know firsthand that the platform can be used to sell. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Facebook advertising is the single most powerful marketing and promotional tool that is available to authors, be they traditionally or self-published.

Between August 27th and September 2nd, I spent $3,029.17 on Facebook advertising. It sounds like a lot—and it is a lot—until you factor in the fact that I made $3,928.62 across the platforms where the book was available. I’ve spent more than $60,000 since the start of the year. That includes $13,278 on a single ad, but that ad has generated revenue of nearly $30,000, a return of 125 percent. The box set that I am selling has hit as high as 450 in the paid Kindle store and camps out at the top of its genre best-seller lists most of the time. That leads to significant additional discovery through better visibility, and that means more sales.

The problem with the arguments in the previous article is that the author’s tactics are out of date. The suggestions that it is a fallacy to spend time and money to grow your author page and that Facebook has slashed the organic reach of posts are true, and if the article had been titled “How Getting Facebook Likes Won’t Sell Books,” I would have agreed with it.

But getting Likes should not be the focus of a Facebook ads campaign today. Instead, authors should be using ads to meet two objectives: (1) building a mailing list by advertising a free book in return for a subscription and (2) advertising for paid sales.

Read the full article: http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2015/this-is-how-you-use-facebook-to-sell-books/

[Link] Why Have Digital Books Stopped Evolving?

by Craig Mod

From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. You could call my four years of devout screen‑reading an experiment. I felt a duty – not to anyone or anything specifically, but more vaguely to the idea of ‘books’. I wanted to understand how their boundaries were changing and being affected by technology. Committing myself to the screen felt like the best way to do it.

2009, it was impossible to ignore the Kindle. Released in 2007, its first version was a curiosity. It was unwieldy, with a split keyboard and an asymmetrical layout that favoured only the right hand. It was a strange and strangely compelling object. Its ad-hoc angles and bland beige colour conjured a 1960s sci-fi futurism. It looked exactly like its patent drawing. (Patent drawings are often abstractions of the final product.) It felt like it had arrived both by time machine and worm hole; not of our era but composed of our technology.

And it felt that way for good reason: you could trace elements of that first Kindle – its shape, design, philosophy – back 70 years. It evoked the Memex machine that the American inventor Vannevar Bush wrote about in ‘As We May Think’ (1945), a path-breaking essay for The Atlantic. It went some way toward vindicating Marshall McLuhan’s prediction that ‘all the books in the world can be put on a single desktop.’ It was a near‑direct copy of a device called the Dynabook that the early computer pioneer Alan Kay sketched and cardboard‑prototyped in 1968. It was a cultural descendant of the infinitely paged Book of Sand from a short story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges published in 1975. And it was something of a free-standing version of the ideas of intertwingularity and hypertext that Ted Nelson first posited in 1974 and Tim Berners-Lee championed in the 1990s.

The Kindle was all of that and more. Neatly bundled up. I was in love.

Read the full article: http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/why-have-digital-books-stopped-evolving/

[Link] No, e-book sales are not falling, despite what publishers say

by  Mathew Ingram
A recent piece in the New York Times about a decline in e-book sales had more than a whiff of anti-digital Schadenfreude about it. The story, which was based on sales figures from the Association of American Publishers, implied that much of the hype around e-books had evaporated — with sales falling by 10% in the first half of this year — while good old printed books were doing better than everyone expected.

This was celebrated by many as evidence that e-books aren’t all they are cracked up to be, and that consumers are swinging back to printed books. But is that an accurate reflection of what’s actually taking place in the book-publishing or book-buying market? Not really, as it turns out.

When I first saw the story, I thought it raised two important questions, neither of which was really answered conclusively in the piece (although the second was hinted at). Namely: 1) Are e-book sales as a whole dropping, or just the sales of the publishers who are members of the AAP? And 2) Isn’t a drop in sales just a natural outcome of the publishers’ move to keep e-book prices high?

Read the full article: http://fortune.com/2015/09/24/ebook-sales/

[Link] The Rise of Phone Reading

By Jennifer Maloney

Last fall, Andrew Vestal found himself rocking his baby daughter, Ada, back to sleep every morning between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. Cradling Ada in the crook of his arm, he discovered he could read his dimly-lit phone with one hand. That’s how he read David Mitchell’s 624-page science-fiction saga “The Bone Clocks.”

Mr. Vestal’s iPhone has offered him a way to squeeze in time for reading that he otherwise might have given up. He reads on lunch breaks. He even reads between meetings as he walks across Microsoft’s Seattle campus, where he works as a program manager.

Before he tried it, he wondered whether reading in snippets might be dissatisfying. But to his surprise, he found he could quickly re-immerse himself in the book he was reading. “I want reading to be part of my life,” said Mr. Vestal, age 35. “If I waited for the kind of time I used to have—sitting down for five hours—I wouldn’t read at all.”

Continue reading: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-of-phone-reading-1439398395

Still Swimming Like a Shark ( or "I Wish I'd Known This Before I Started")

By Percival Constantine

Ever since the age of 10, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Every aspiring writer has a medium they aspire to—for me, it was comic books. But getting published was a different story. Since 10, I continued to write just about every single day. Before my family got a computer, it would be stories scribbled in notebooks and then later typed up on an old typewriter. Throughout high school and college, I would devote most of my energy to writing comic book fan fiction and also comic scripts for my own original ideas.

While in college, I first heard about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). And under the advice of my friend Derrick Ferguson, I decided to try my hand at writing a novel. The first attempt went nowhere. As did the second. The third time I actually managed to meet the 50,000-word goal with a few days to spare.

The next step was trying to see if I could get it published. I revised the manuscript and then handed it over to a friend for editing before doing further revisions. And then I began querying agents, following their submission guidelines to the letter. Of the fifty or so agents I queried, I received about twenty responses. Of those twenty responses, around three were more than form letter rejections. And those three all basically said the same thing—a good start, but I’m not sure how I’d sell this in today’s market.

This was in late 2006, so it was long before the self-publishing revolution Amazon kick-started with the advent of the KDP platform. Ebooks were very much in their infancy at this point—there was no Kindle and an ebook was essentially a PDF you read on your computer or PDA (anyone remember those?). Self-publishing did exist, but it was virtually indistinguishable from vanity publishing.

Derrick had published his first book, Dillon and the Voice of Odin, through iUniverse (now a subsidiary of the very shady Author Solutions) a few years before this. So I consulted him for advice. He told me about his experiences with iUniverse and I looked them up. And I have never been so happy to be a broke college student, because the prices were so far out of my range that there was no way I could have afforded their services. I almost got suckered by the PublishAmerica scam, but fortunately I had done my research and found out what a predatory company they were.

Derrick recommended I speak to Joel Jenkins, who told me about Lulu. Unlike many of the other services out there, Lulu’s print on demand service didn’t charge any upfront fees. You had to purchase a proof copy of your book and there was a fee for expanded distribution to get an ISBN and have your book available for purchase on websites like Amazon (and it could be requested at bookstores), but altogether, that brought the total cost to less than $50, definitely within my range.

Of course, Lulu offered other services for book layout and cover design, but these were optional, not mandatory. I had some knowledge of Photoshop and InDesign, so I made the cover and formatted the book myself in those programs (which required a massive learning curve). After approving the proof, my first novel, Fallen, was available.

My marketing consisted of telling friends. I started a Facebook group called “Help make my book a bestseller” and included the link to Amazon and how people could find the book. Despite virtually everyone on my friends list joining the group, only a small fraction of them bought the book. I published in March of 2007 and in that first year, I sold a grand total of 28 copies.

When I talk about my first publishing experience, I actually consider the first seven years of my writing career to be my first publishing experience, because I really didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t discover the ebook revolution until around 2011 or 2012 and my efforts at that point consisted of relying solely on Smashwords. Up until that point, I was only doing paperbacks. I didn’t know anything about the Kindle. I didn’t know about the self-publishing success stories like Hugh Howey or Amanda Hocking. I completely missed the Kindle gold rush and the glory days when KDP Select actually helped you sell books. I didn’t know a thing about mailing lists or series branding or anything like that.

By the time I did learn about all these things, I had a much steeper climb, one that I’ve only started to make. It’s been said that a shark has to keep swimming or else it dies and the same is true of authors.

I’d advise everyone to learn from the mistake I made and do your research on the market. Even if you think you know everything, keep researching. And learn about marketing because there are so many titles out there that you have to figure out a way to get the word out that isn’t spammy or just asking your friends. The world of publishing is in such a state of flux these days that things are changing every day. The current market is very different from the market in 2007 or even the market just a year ago.

Percival Constantine is a pulp action author responsible for several series, including The Myth Hunter, Vanguard, and Luther Cross. Visit PercivalConstantine.com for more information on him and to find out how to get free books and stories.

[Link] Why self-publishing is the new punk

by Dylan Hearn

In mid-1970’s Britain, record companies were king. They controlled their industry. Any artist who wanted a career in music had to have a record contract – major artists on relatively good terms but many of the mid-sized to newer entrants on contracts that would have today’s employment lawyers licking their lips. There were a limited number of radio stations, all of whom relied on the record companies to gain access to artists, and in return the record companies’ product dominated the playlists. If you weren’t linked to a record company, you had no chance.

At the same time, the music itself becoming staid, some would say bloated. Established artists were given a free rein, which for many meant bigger, longer and – you will have to excuse me – just a bit up their own backsides. The pop charts, while containing some classics, were full of formulaic songs with high production values performed by the young and beautiful and written by songwriters in the pay of the studios. Yes, there were some artists pushing at the boundaries and trying new things but these were on the fringes. Profit was king and so record companies played it safe, churning out the same thing, over and over, knowing that it was the most cost-efficient and profitable process. I know that there will be some of you reading this and shouting how dare I, what about artists X, Y or Z. My answer is for you to look back at the charts of any week during 1973 – 1975 and tell me how many songs of true quality it contains.

Then, punk happened. Frustrated at the music on offer, the young rebelled. Advances in technology that allowed home recording for the first time and the kids took full advantage. At the same time a few, pioneering DJ’s were willing to promote their work (because mass distribution was still in the control of the few). The musical landscape changed within a matter of months.

Of course, there was uproar. Record companies and many established artists claimed it was just noise. Some bemoaned the sound quality and the lack of  technical skill of the performers. Small, entrepreneurial record labels sprang up to meet the demand. The energy, passion and self-belief created by this opportunity gave rise, not just the big-selling punk artists still known today, but thousands of musicians who continue to make money out of music through small but loyal followings to this day.

Before you accuse me of having the rose-tinted nostalgia of an old punk, I was five years old when all this happened. But it is clear now, looking back, that punk shook the staid music industry to its core.

Read the full article: https://authordylanhearn.wordpress.com/2014/06/13/why-self-publishing-is-the-new-punk/?utm_content=buffer54a79&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

[Link] Authors: end to censored versions of books is 'victory for the world of dirt'

by Alison Flood

Clean Reader app, which changes swear words and so-called offensive terms, removes all titles from online catalogue after writers protest

Chocolat author Joanne Harris is claiming a “small victory for the world of dirt” after an app that blanked out the profanities in books, replacing them with so-called clean alternatives, removed all titles from its online catalogue following a week of angry protests from writers.

The Clean Reader app, launched by a couple in Idaho in the US, has announced that after significant feedback from authors, many of whom did not want their work being sold in connection with the app, it has “taken immediate action to remove all books from our catalogue”.

Clean Reader set out to enable customers to, in its own words, “read books, not profanity”. A filter could be applied to ebooks purchased from its online store, which exchanged words that were judged to be offensive with alternatives.

Read the full article: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/27/clean-reader-books-app-censorship-victory-authors-celebrate

[Link] Quick Book Marketing Tips for Fiction and Nonfiction Authors

by Joel Friedlander

When we talk about book marketing, fiction authors are always asking, “Will this work for me too?

And I don’t blame them. Nonfiction authors may just have it easier, at least at the beginning. On the other hand, nonfiction sales don’t always reach the stratospheric levels of popular novels.

This whole topic came up recently while preparing for a presentation on how to navigate the varied and confusing publishing paths now available for authors.

I thought about the many authors I’ve talked to recently, and what’s happened for them once they finished the publishing process and got their books into the market.

Looking back, it’s often easier to see where you could have done something different, something that might have made a difference. Yes, we all have “20/20 hindsight.”

To “cook down” the advice I put together for these authors, I separated it into separate lists, and here they are.

Read the full article: http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2015/03/quick-book-marketing-tips-for-fiction-and-nonfiction-authors/

[Link] E-book sales are leveling off. Here’s why.

By Neil Irwin

Nicholas Carr parses some new data to show a fascinating trend: Sales of e-books are no longer rising at extraordinary, double-digit rates. In the first quarter of 2013, sales were up only 5 percent from a year earlier, compared with 28 percent in the same period of 2012 and a whopping 252 percent in 2010.

It’s evidence that e-books (whether for Kindle, Nook, tablet computing devices or any other device you might wish to use to read many thousands of words) are starting to become a more mature technology. They seem to be through their explosive growth phase.

It was inevitable, of course. The question was always “at what share of the book market will e-books settle,” not “when will print books cease to exist.” Old technologies never die, they just fade into a smaller, niche offering; television supplanted radio as the dominant mass medium in the middle of the last century, for example, but radio is still a big business.

But the fact that that leveling off is already happening with e-books suggests that the ratio of printed books sold to electronic books is going to stabilize at a higher level than it had seemed likely a year or two ago in the era of extraordinary e-book growth. Carr has a number of good ideas for why; I find his first most compelling.

Continue reading: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/08/e-book-sales-are-leveling-off-heres-why/?wpisrc=nl_cuzheads&clsrd

[Link] Valiant signs on to Amazon’s new fan-fic publishing platform

by Kevin Melrose

When Amazon Publishing unveiled Kindle Worlds last month, one of the first questions in comics circles was which publisher would be the first to sign on to the program, which allows fan-fic writers to earn royalties for certain corporate-approved stories. Now we know the answer: Valiant Entertainment.

The recently revived publisher was announced this morning as part of the second wave of licensors, alongside bestselling authors Hugh Howey (Silo Saga), Barry Eisler (John Rain novels), Blake Crouch (Wayward Pines) and Neal Stephenson (Foreworld Saga). Under the agreement, writers will be able to create and sell stories inspired by Bloodshot, X-O Manowar, Archer & Armstrong, Harbinger and Shadowman, with more properties expected to be added later.

In addition, the Kindle Worlds Store will launch later this month with more than 50 commissioned works, including “Valiant-branded” short stories by Jason Starr, Robert Rodi, Stuart Moore and others. The Kindle Worlds self-service submission platform will open at the same time.

Alloy Entertainment, the book-packaging division of Warner Bros. Television, has already licensed Cecily von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl, Sara Shepard’s Pretty Little Liars and L.J. Smith’s The Vampire Diaries for what’s being billed as the first commercial publishing platform for fan fiction.

Amazon Publishing will pay royalties to both authors and rights holders: For works of at least 10,000 words, authors will receive 35 percent of net revenue (based on sales price rather than the standard, but lower, wholesale), paid monthly. There will also be an experimental program for shorter works, between 5,000 and 10,000 words, which will be typically priced under $1; the author will receive a digital royalty of 20 percent.

Licensors will provide content guidelines for each “World,” which must be followed; in addition, Amazon won’t allow pornography, offensive content (including racial slurs and excessive foul language), “poor customer experience” (including poorly formatted stories and misleading titles), excessive use of brand names, or crossovers.

Read the original post: http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2013/06/valiant-signs-on-to-amazons-new-fan-fic-publishing-platform/

[Link] Independent Authors and Genre Fiction Are Changing the Publishing World

by Percival Constantine

Lantern-jawed heroes. Megalomaniac villains. Hard-boiled crime. Spicy romance tales. Settings that stretched from an ancient, barbaric past into far-off worlds in the distant future. Even if your only knowledge of the term “pulp fiction” comes from the 1994 Quentin Tarantino film, you know something about pulp. Tarzan, Doc Savage, The Shadow, John Carter, Conan — all these and more were creations of pulp fiction. And thanks to advancements in technology and the rise of the digital market, pulp fiction is back in a big way.

Today, a new renaissance of pulp is occurring, thanks in large part to the rise of print on demand, technology, and ebooks. No longer limited to traditional publishing houses, many new and even established authors are instead choosing to go through these routes, made possible through services like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace printing, or Ingram’s Lightning Source. These authors are bypassing the traditional gatekeepers and blazing paths for the kind of stories that traditional publishers may find too risky in today’s market.

Continue reading: http://www.policymic.com/articles/47417/independent-authors-and-genre-fiction-are-changing-the-publishing-world

[Link] Do Amazon and Createspace rip off Indie publishers with failure to correctly report sales?

by John. R. Clark, Managing Editor at AgeView Press

When AgeView Press Indie pubbed the book FLYING SOLO in May of 2012, the author, Jeanette Vaughan immediately began tracking sales. She heard from excited friends and family who immediately emailed when ordering their copies. The first sales were off of Createspace’s e-store with the title ID number given to the author. Then, through Amazon, a week later, when the book went live on the site. Finally on Kindle, when the ebook format was completed.

Initially, things appeared kosher. People exclaiming that they had ordered the book, were showing up within a day or two on the electronic royalty reports with a reasaonable accuracy. But by June and July, sales descrepencies were noted by the author from customers claiming that they had purchased the book directly through Amazon, not an Amazon affiliate. Many of these sales were simply not listed.The author contacted Createspace customer support, who gave assurance that all sales were being accurately reported. FLYING SOLO was now also on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select as well as expanded distribution channels, which included Amazon affiliates in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Sales were being reported to the author from readers and bookclubs in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The first note of apparent discrepancy came when a dear friend of the author ordered three copies of the book from Amazon in June. These books were ordered all at the same time, from Amazon.com direct. Yet, that cluster of three sales was never posted as such.  Another instance in early July involved the same issue. Again, a customer ordered three copies, yet no sales were trackable through Amazons channels for three sale purchased on the same day.

Meantime, the author was making public appearnances, being featured on blogs and radio, and rounding with booksignings. During the months of June and July, no expanded distribution channel sales were posted on the royalty report, yet customers were emailing the author letting her know how much the book was being enjoyed overseas. More than 15 five star reviews for the novel were posted on Amazon.

What should have shown as a surge of sales, as the book peaked, never appeared on the royalty reports. The author was suspect. She contacted Ingram directly, only to be informed that they were not supposed to reveal information to an author directly. So, the Indie publisher, AgeView Press made the call. Ingram showed 16 copies of the book ordered through their system total since May. Those sales never showed on the June or July royalty report. The author filed formal complaints with Createspace customer service, but received only canned letters in response explaining that indeed there was an issue with reports in Expanded Distribution and it was being investigated. Advice to author? Please be patient.

By August, it was clear there were gross in accuracies. The 30 copies ordered from Barnes and Noble never showed up. Few if any sales were listed for August. Yet the author had confirmation of over 4,000 copies in distribution worldwide. The crowning blow came in September. A plan was devised. A friend, agreed to help with the investigation. She ordered a copy of FLYING SOLO on September 7th, taking screen shots of her order and confirmation of payment directly from Amazon. She printed out here receipt showing date and time of purchase. The book arrived on September 13, to San Jose, California. Photos were taken. The sale was complete. Copies of all screenshots and receipts were scanned and sent to the author. By September 20th, no sales were shown at all on Createspaces report. Phoning Createspace, the author was informed that no sales were showing for Amazon for the month for that title. It was time for outrage!  What had been suspected, had now been proven. Not once, but twice!

Continue reading: http://jeanettevaughan.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/do-amazon-and-createspace-rip-off-indie-publishers-with-failure-to-correctly-report-sales/

[Link] Getting Started With Microsoft Word Styles for Book Layout

by Joel Friedlander

Okay, so you’re sitting at your keyboard pounding away, working on your latest work in progress. You get to the end of a section, hit [Enter] a couple of times and then type the subhead for the next section of text.

You’re an experienced word processor—hey, you’re a writer, right?—so you grab your mouse, select the text of the subhead and start formatting it. Maybe you want your subheads to be Helvetica Bold, 12 point, all caps. (I’m not recommending that, by the way, just using it as an example.)

You quickly select Helvetica from your font menu, change the size, change the alignment from fully justified—which you’re using for the text—to flush left (left-aligned), which is what you’re using for your subheads. Maybe, if you’re nitpicky, you also add a little space above and below the subhead, either by using the [Enter] key or going into the Paragraph formatting palette and setting values in the “Spacing Before/After” boxes.

The Problem with Formatting

That was a lot of work to format a subhead, don’t you think? We walked through about 6 steps to get the formatting right. And you’ll have to repeat these steps every time you come to a subhead in your manuscript.

Some people realize this is a lot of repetitive work and invent shortcuts like copying the last subhead, which copies all the formatting with it, then pasting it where you want the new subhead, and then deleting the old text and replacing it with the new text. That saves time, doesn’t it?

But the fact is that all these methods are bad choices.

Over the course of a long book, can you really be sure you’ve input exactly the same formatting values every time? Did you remember to add that “Space/After” every time? Maybe you should check, since there’s no other way to be certain.

Wait, didn’t you try a couple of subheads in the Verdana font? Did you remember to go back and change those? What about if someone mentions that your 12-point Helvetica bold subheads would look a lot better in 11 point? What are you going to do then?

Continue reading: http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2013/02/getting-started-with-microsoft-word-styles-for-book-layout/

[Link] Why Some People Hate Ebooks; and Why I Love Them

by Jeremy Greenfield

There are some people out there who are frustrated with ebooks. Dylan Love of Business Insider, for one, who published an article yesterday titled “Why I Hate E-Books“.

The ebook revolution is exciting and certainly has been profitable for the book business as a whole, but publishers and booksellers should hear what Love (and others like him) has to say. Here’s why he hates ebooks:

1. “E-books cost too much.” In his piece, he pointed out an example of how an ebook edition of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (Random House) is more expensive than a paperback edition — when you order it with Amazon Prime, which offers free shipping, that is.

This is a gripe that should be familiar to the ebook business. Love isn’t alone. I spoke with a number of consumers in April who were mostly upset about the price of ebooks because the perception was that they cost little to produce and distribute. There have been other media reports that point out similar price discrepancies to what Love pointed out, citing consumer dissatisfaction and confusion.

Love suggests that all ebooks should be under $10. I’m not sure where he came up with that number, but it seems to be the consensus among his set.

Continue reading: http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2012/why-some-people-hate-ebooks-and-why-i-love-them/