To The Author In Search Of A Publisher

I distinctly remember listening to E. G. Marshall trying to reboot radio drama. I would be driving home or back to grad school after a date with the delightful girl I eventually married, and the car radio helped keep me awake. Late night radio often has unsold air time and a certain class of vendors gravitate to this cut-rate advertising. 

One of which had a rather stuffy sounding guy talking about "the author in search of a publisher."

He was trolling for suckers for the vanity press. For a few thousand 1979-dollars you could have your manuscript turned into a real book and get it printed. Yay. 

Then what? You'd have a garage full of boxes of books. Then it was up to you to find a way to sell them. Good luck with that. Most of the time, this was not a wise investment of one's savings.

Time passes and technology advances. It is now completely feasible to realize camera-ready typeset pages using just your home computer and a laser printer. It's trivial to produce good looking book designs using just Microsoft Word or any number of other cheap or free tools. Good. We can now produce "galley proofs" at home.

And if you want to fill your garage with boxes of books, any medium-sized town will have several print shops who can obliged you.

The last two paragraphs enable any non-idiot to completely disintermediate the vanity press guys. The dirty little secret is that writers in search of a publisher could have disintermediated them back in the '70s, too.

But even if you did, and you saved thousands of 1979-dollars it was a sucker bet. How are you going to get those boxes of books out of your garage and into bookstores?

Then an amazing thing happened: Amazon.com. Now, all you had to do was hook up with Amazon to get those boxes of books out of your garage. The amazing thing got amazinger. Amazon came out with the Kindle. And they had the good sense to buy a print-on-demand publisher. Now, anyone could click a web site and your book in bits or printed-on-demand would be shipped to their door.

This made me think that self-publishing a non-sucker bet. (And I hope you'll vindicate my opinion by buying either The Aristotelian or Finding Time.) I think self-publishing is a viable route for any writer who doesn't have a book deal. But you gotta be smart about it.

I think the vanity press companies are still a sucker bet. I don't understand how they can still exist when they are so trivially bypassed.

What's truly amazing is the tangled network of ownership. The biggest vanity publisher is now owned by a traditional publisher. You can get the details here.

Why would a traditional publisher own a vanity publisher? In the former case, the publisher pays the author an advance and royalties. In the latter case, the author pays the publisher. Heh. If I were the publisher I'd quit with the advances and royalties. So, there are some conflicts of interest here.

I don't quite know what will come of these changes in book publishing. It looks to me like we aren't seeing the old sucker-bets going away. Instead I think we'll see a whole raft of new and improved sucker-bets to beware of. Let me know if you come across any.

Create Marketing Pieces

(This is step #15 of my How To Publish An eBook thang)

What's the number one thing you can do that will sell your ebooks?

You could get an interview on Oprah Winfrey's show, but that's hard since I think that show is off the air. And all the other forms of mass marketing and merchandising can also drive sales. If you can get Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh to read your book and talk about it on the air, you'll sell a boat load of books to their listeners. Same goes for not just right wing radio commentators, but for anyone who has a big broadcast voice. If you can do this, God bless you. And you're buying lunch next time, OK?

Before I got distracted by that last paragraph I had in mind the simple process of one-on-one selling. You've done a great thing writing a book and you should be proud of it.

If you were raised right, you learned it's not nice to toot your own horn. Let another person sing your praises and all that. Yet there is a time and a season for putting your best foot forward and you've got to be ready where it concerns that ebook you've published.

The big advantage of going with a traditional publisher is marketing and distribution. Amazon has done a good job of empowering you where distribution is concerned, but you still have to proactively engage the demands of marketing.

Even if you are as bad at marketing as I am, someone is going to ask you what your book is about. You will need to have your elevator pitch ready: cast your work in its best light in the span of 30 seconds to 2 minutes. This elevator pitch cannot be composed too early in the writing process. You may run into an editor or publisher with a suitcase full of money to induce you to NOT self-publish your work after you wow them with a boffo elevator pitch.

If that goes well, the person you are talking to may not be able to buy your work immediately.

You want to put something in hand that serves as a reminder so s/he can go back later and buy your work.

For The Aristotelian I had a local print shop make up a bunch of  postcards. That was OK, but I found that most times when I was having a conversation about it were times when I did not have any of those postcards on my person. Thus, when it came time to make up something like that for Finding Time, I decided to have business-cards made up instead.

You'll want to put your cover art on the front, and you'll want to put some kind of contact info on the back. I was going through a QR code kick a year or so back and I decided to have the hyperlinks in the last two paragraphs encoded as QR codes and fit my name and email beside it. Next time I'll probably quit the QR code business. It's cool, but nobody uses it.

It's very easy to keep a dozen of your work's business cards in a holder you keep in your coat pocket so that after you deliver your elevator pitch, you can give out your card.

Someday, you may find yourself manning a table at a book fair, trade show, or convention. You might want to get bookmarks printed up. I haven't done that, but some of my friends have. Other writers I know have had pens, calendars, and key rings made. You'll want to have these little bits of swag for you to hand out. It's also a good idea for you to have a few book-on-demand printed paper copies of your book for sale. If you're really ambitious, you can have those huge six-foot-high by two-and-a-half-foot-wide banners made to hang up behind your table. Or maybe set up a big-screen TV with your book trailer running on continuous loop.

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Vanity of Vanities

(This is step #12 of my How To Publish An eBook thang)

When I was a kid I'd hear radio ads that pitched "for the author in search of a publisher.' And those ads were for vanity publishers. You gave them money, and they'd print your books. You'd get several large boxes filled with copies of your book and they'd sit in your garage until the heat-death of the universe.

Those books would stay in your garage because you are not a distributor nor do you have a business relationship with a distributor like traditional publishers enjoy.

Amazon changed all that when they combined the functions of bookseller and distributor along with book-on-demand printing. And they have a company called CreateSpace.com. If you want to publish a paper edition of your book, you want to research CreateSpace.

You also want to do a reality check, but I'll come back to that.

They work just a little differently from Kindle Direct Publishing because they're not sending your bits to Kindles, they are printing and shipping paper editions. Your ebook doesn't have a back cover or a dust jacket. (If you want a hardback edition, you'll have to think about that binding, and that dust jacket. You'll have to talk to a printer and bookbinder about hardback editions.) CreateSpace just prints trade paperback editions.

CreateSpace charges a nominal setup fee and they require you design a wrap-around cover that combines your front cover design, a spine, and a back cover design. The back cover nominally has a blurb as well as a few testimonials and or editorial squibs from reviewers.

If you want to put a physical copy of your book under your nephew's Christmas tree, you can use CreateSpace to make it. And if you have other customers who don't use Kindles or Nooks, you can service that market using CreateSpace.com to print-on-demand books that Amazon.com will sell and ship to your customers. But that's time and effort. And your paperback edition will use a different ISBN number than your ebook.

Maybe you'd better take a look at how well your ebook is selling first.

I've heard the rule of thumb that several tiny publishing houses uses is: Only do a paper edition of the work after you sell 100+ ebook editions of a work. That makes a lot of sense.

Let's suppose you start selling books hand-over-fist. You'll want to get as many books in as many hands as possible through as many channels as you can manage. But what if your stunning work is not appreciated by the reading public. Or your stunning work is universally loved, but nobody in your target market finds out about it. At some point you have to take a sober look at how well your work is selling and decide whether there are less-dead horses to flog.

You have to listen to your market and learn from it. I was surprised that Finding Time does not out-sell The Aristotelian, because I know there's much more value there. Nevertheless, I was shocked to learn that promotions for Finding Time tended to drive more sales of The Aristotelian! I'm by no means an expert or even mildly competent in this marketing business, but I do know that the sales numbers tell me.

If you have a book that is not selling fast enough as an ebook, it's only going to sell more slowly if you bring out a paper edition.

Conversely, if you can reach a good-sized market that wants your ebook, the numbers may justify multiple editions: trade paperback, hardback, signed-and-numbered collector's edition. Each of these editions will be an opportunity to wring more sales out of your market. Personally, I think every bookshelf and coffee table would look a lot better with a leather-bound, glossy paper, signed-and-numbered boxed copy of Finding Time.

Sadly, I think I'm the only one who thinks that. And that's why I won't bring out that edition until I've got the sales to justify the expense and trouble.
(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Add A Title To Your KDP Bookshelf

(This is step #10 of my How To Publish An Ebook thang.)

Kindle Direct Publishing isn't particularly difficult to work with.

Let's suppose you have created an eBook and you've formatted it for the Kindle. Suppose further that you've shown this Kindle-formatted file to a dozen or so advanced readers. Suppose even further that the editor you hired and these advanced readers assure you that the eBook is flawless, perfect, and without any typographical errors, grammatical errors, or spelling errors.

You have to make sure the quality of your eBook is perfect, perfect, perfect, because it bears the stigma of being self-published. Self-published works are looked down upon by many readers. Traditional publishers want everyone to believe "self-published books are trash." They want to serve as gatekeepers. They would like you to believe this is to protect the reading public from a flood of low-quality self-published works.

I wish that were the case. They are simply businesses trying to make the most money they can for their shareholders. They aren't really running a conspiracy to bring in the antichrist or to persecute you. If they believed he could make them a lot of money, they'd publish the devil himself.

Truly, traditional publishers produce edited works day in and day out. But traditional publishers also exclude works from publication for other reasons:

• they pursue different markets, 
• they already have similar titles for sale, 
• they don't publish Commies, Whigs, or Delusional Paranoids.

It is the responsibility of the self-published author make a lie of the traditional publisher's aspersions about his work.

A thousand self-published works can be great, but all it takes is for the reader to get one low-quality work to vindicate the traditional publishers' propaganda.

Once you upload your eBook to the KDP Bookshelf, there's a chance you'll create that bad impression about self-published work. So, now is a good time for you to ask yourself for the last time why you are self-publishing and also to ask whether you're deluding yourself about your deathless prose.
(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Create An Account On Kindle Direct Publishing

(This is step #9 in my How To Publish An Ebook thang.)

I'm only telling you what I do. If you prefer to publish on the Nook or through the iBookstore, write a howto for that step, let me know, and I'll link to it. If you prefer to publish on Smashwords, nag me and I'll write that up, too.

Getting an account on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is pretty simple. You will need to know a few things before you start, or be ready to do some scurrying to get the info at the last minute. Since Amazon will be sending money your way, you need to give them a tax ID number. So, have your Social Security Number available. (If Social Security is an entitlement, why is your SSN a Tax ID?) You'll also need to give Amazon a place to send your money. So, have your bank account's routing number.

I didn't say this earlier, but I should have. After you go to the County Clerk to register your business name, make a side-trip to your bank and talk to someone who can create a new account for your ebook money. You'll want a separate account for all your ebook income, and when you get that, you'll want to make sure you confirm the account's routing number.

If you're smarter than I am, you've established a budget for your ebook publishing venture. If you haven't established a budget, stop right now and plan one.

When you create the ebook account, just put that much money into this bank account plus some margin as working capital. If the account has a minimum balance, make that or 15% (whichever's larger) the extra margin amount.

If you're a genius savant with technology, you can probably create your KDP account while you're sitting in the bank and you've got that info at your fingertips. Otherwise, make sure you've got the paperwork at hand to answer the questions KDP will ask.

When you've got everything set up with KDP, you'll be able to publish your ebook. If you've already made your ebook's MOBI file and have put all their metadata in exactly the way you want, you're ready for the next step.

Otherwise, get to work with Sigil, Calibre, etc. and your ebook perfect.

You did proof it and run it past a dozen beta-readers, didn't you?

Here's another thing I didn't warn you about: You have to hire an editor. You need someone who isn't you to scour the ebook looking for typos, grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and stupid stuff. The main thing that makes self-published books suck is the failure to take this step.

Oh, you might say, "I blew my budget on art work and have none left to hire an editor."

In that case, find another impoverished ebook writer, or the most pro-active of your beta-readers, and set up a barter arrangement. "You edit my book, and I'll edit yours... Or paint your bike shed. Or something..."

Just Make Sure Your Book Is As Close To Flawless As You Can Make It.
(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)