[Link] Red Flags for Indie Authors

by Raven Belasco

Many of us authors set out into the world of independent publishing full of frustration with traditional publishing’s very real limitations. We also have a belief in ourselves as artists, a desire to oversee our own fates, and a willingness to roll up our sleeves and do what it takes to “make it.”

At some point, many indie authors hit a period of panic. After pouring sweat, blood, and tears into our passion career, we see disastrously low sales numbers. This is the moment when indie authors learn that it’s not just about hard work: it’s also about luck and having deep pockets. There are indeed ways to boost yourself—but they are going to cost you.

That’s what unscrupulous companies are waiting for. These companies have one vital thing in common: they are trying to make money off your desperation. Authors who are panicking about keeping their businesses from failing are authors who will forget that “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” For authors who are having trouble spotting the red flags, here are scams to watch out for.

The first you probably already know, but this article would be remiss without mentioning it: the vanity press (also termed a subsidy press) offers publishing services for a fee—which can grow to thousands of dollars as services are tacked on.

For an author concerned about how much work independent publishing is, vanity presses seem like a possible solution: they do the work you don’t know how to do yet, and you just pay them for doing that work, right?

Not right at all. You’d be paying an outrageous fee for minimal (and often low-quality) effort on their part. For this dubious privilege, you assume all the risk while giving up the rights to your work. Their first communication may promise you literary glory and a deal for a Netflix series, but, after they have hooked you, the costs will just keep mounting and the results will not.

Read the full article: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/pw-select/article/97625-red-flags-for-indie-authors.html

[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/

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.

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