Tag Archives: self-publishing

August 21, 2014 · 9:53 am

Don’t Let Rejection Weigh You Down

This New York Times article is…weirdly composed. It’s a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster (what do odd resume’s and rejection lists have in common?), but I’m glad it brought the rejection list to my attention.

Basically, author Monica Byrne has kept track of every single rejection she has ever gotten. There are more than 500 now on her list, compiled over 6 years. Which just has to be brutal. But I found her comments about it inspiring:

“Of all the things I’d ever submitted to or applied for,” she writes at The Washington Post, “I’d gotten only 3 percent of them. That’s a 97 percent rejection rate. That means I got 32 rejections for every acceptance.”

But she DOES have acceptances, including a book deal and a sold-out play. I also liked this quote:

“The anti-résumé remains my deceptively simple answer to the question, ‘How do you do it?’: that I persisted during all those years of rejection for no other reason than that I loved writing so much I wanted to spend all my time doing it. Writing must be its own reward, even for the most talented and hardworking writers, or they’re going to have a tough time.”

I’ve not had much success with courting agents. I’ve gotten some nice comments, a few requests for manuscripts, but nothing has really gelled. And it’s been frustrating. Sometimes I think back on my rejection list and wonder if maybe I’m “doing it wrong”–“it” in this case being “everything.” But Byrne reminds me that this is sort of just how it is. Just keep going for it.

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August 19, 2014 · 9:40 am

Real Costs of Self-Publishing

I found this excellent peek behind-the-scenes of self-publishing from Writer.ly’s CEO Abigail Carter.** It’s the kind of information that is just hard to come by, and I found it really useful.

She describes not just the costs she has put into the book pre-launch, but also the struggle to get recognition via reviews. It’s a good reminder that self-publishing means you have to take on a lot more than you would if you were picked up by an agent and publisher (though the difference in your royalties may be worth it to you).

Before launch, Carter spent $2,570 to get the book ready (yeah, that number rocked me back a bit, too, but it’s so great to have actual hard numbers). In a week, she made… $75.41.

She followed up recently with another post, detailing more of her expenses, in particular her hard work to get those vital Amazon reviews. She got 102 reviews and more sales, and her expenses went up to $3,183. With sales at only $441.94. Yikes, that’s a big cost. Hopefully it will pan out for her.

If you’ve self-published, have you “broken even” yet? What did it take to get those early reviews?

**Full disclosure: I work with Abby sometimes through Writer.ly, because I find it to be an excellent resource for writers, editors, and illustrators. She’s a nice person. No one paid me to write about this, however.

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August 14, 2014 · 9:12 am

Amazon vs. Publisher Kerfuffle Continues

Though I don’t yet have a dog in the race, I’ve been following the Amazon vs. Hatchette/authors battle. Looks like there’s been another volley, and it’s just a bit silly. Amazon apparently emailed a bunch of “their” authors (those who have used the KDP) requesting that they email Hatchette and cc Amazon’s PR folks on it…to prove it, I guess?

Basically, they wanted to use the authors are human battering rams against their rival corporation. The funny thing about writers, though: they like to write things. So I saw a cascade of folks offering up their opinions.

Here are some good ones to read:

  • Neil Gaiman:  “It’s like Godzilla battling Gamera, and we’re looking up from the sidewalks of New York rather worried that a skyscraper might topple on us.” And he points out some independent bookstores people might populate instead.
  • Chuck Wendig: Who wrote a long, detailed and really great post about the whole thing. “It’s a cheapy tactic meant to drum up support from a group of people who don’t really have a huge dog in this fight — this is a fight with traditional publishing about traditional publishing. “
  • John Scalzi: The following quote is only tangentially related to the controversy, but it hit home for me.

“Look, here’s the thing: You can construct in your mind a world where there are the tough and scrappy self-published authors on one side of a battle and the posh and pampered traditionally published authors on the other, and pretend to set them against one another, like flabby, middle-aged Pokemon. But I think that’s kind of stupid and I’m not obliged to live in that particular fantasy world. Nor do I believe that the successes of other writers take away from my own. It’s not actually a zero-sum game where only one publishing model (and the authors who use it) will survive and the rest are eaten by weasels, or whatever. The world is large enough to have authors publishing one way, or another, or by some combination of various methods.”

Considering that Amazon has widened its fights to include a drag-out fight with the monolith that is Disney, I can’t see this slowing down anytime soon. However, I must say it has given me pause regarding whether I’ll publish with Amazon. I mean, I probably will–they’re the biggest fish in the pond in the ebook space, and it’s sort of crazy to ignore that–but it does make me hesitate.

Anyone else keeping tabs on this? Thoughts?

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July 26, 2014 · 11:48 am

Self-Published Authors Make a “Living” From Sales

This isn’t a great article–it doesn’t give much new information–but I thought I’d share it to show how the changing publishing marketplace is making headlines even outside of writers’ circles.

Five years ago, printing your own book was stigmatized and was seen as a mark of failure.

“But now,” says Dana Beth Weinberg, a sociologist at Queens College who is studying the industry, “the self-published authors walk into the room, and they say, oh, well, ‘I made a quarter million dollars last year, or $100,000, or made $10,000.’ And it is still more than what some of these authors are making with their very prestigious contracts.”

Weinberg says there is still a strong financial case to be made for publishing books the old-fashioned way, but there are now many well-known independent authors who have made a fortune self-publishing online.

You can read the whole article here.

I’m not sure what to believe, and it looks like there isn’t really clear data either way. (Here’s what I know about writers’ rates by type of publication, though.)  It’s still such a smoke-and-mirrors, get-lucky business. What do y’all think?

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July 8, 2014 · 9:02 am

What is Editing?

At its most basic, editing is making changes to a written text. Simple enough, right? And yet, not, because folks have different understandings of when it is okay to make those changes.

Case in point: I once knew a writer-turned-editor who felt “editing” meant she always needed to make a change to the original text, sort of as a way to prove that it had, in fact, been edited. This led to a lot of ridiculous edits, such as the substitution of a word with its synonym: ex. “Clifford the big red dog liked to play” would become “Clifford the enormous red dog enjoyed playing.”

The original meaning of the sentence wasn’t changed or improved at all by those kinds of edits; many of the writers she worked with felt like she was just wasting everyone’s time and was only interested in her own self-aggrandizement.

On the small scale, this kind of substitution editing can be harmless to mildly annoying. On the large scale, it meant the editor was taking a lot of her time completely rewriting copy, without a good reason for it. (When asked, she said, “I thought it sounded better.” That… isn’t a reason to make edits.) Her editing ethos was: “The editor knows best.”

Basically, she was the Loki of editors:

Is there a better way?

I think so. My editing philosophy is: “First, do no harm. Second, make it better without impeding the author’s voice and meaning.”

In other words, it is never my job to make a change just for the sake of making a change. If I were hired to copy edit a piece and I couldn’t find a single mistake, I’d congratulate the author for doing an excellent job (I’d also want to shake their hand, because that’s a feat!).

An editor is really second fiddle to the author. Particularly in the changing publishing marketplace, an editor acts as adviser and clean-up crew–but the author is the boss. When I make edits as a freelancer, I always provide complete transparency, using Word’s Track Changes feature to literally show each and every change. If a change is subjective, I leave a comment explaining my actions. Then it is up to the author to decide which changes to keep and which to disregard.

Editors are powerful, it’s true, but at the end of the day, they–like our pal Loki–are small gods.

Author Hulk here is expressing his feelings toward his overly intrusive editor, Loki.

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May 15, 2014 · 10:31 am

The Burning Jealousy of the Not-Quite-There-Author

Let’s talk about jealousy. I have it.

Of course I have it for the biggies, the JK Rowlings and the Stephen Kings and the Shakespeares and the Jane Austens of the world. That’s a given, but that kind of jealousy is motivational: those are the success stories everybody looks up to.
To a lesser degree, I’ve got that for the Hugh Howeys and the Suzanne Collins’, our most modern wave of authors who, one way or another, adapted to the changing face of publishing and owned it.  But even so, that’s not the kind of jealousy that seeps in under your skin and makes your heart clench up.
No, that kind of jealousy is more intimate… reserved for the people who you (or, at least, I) think I’m at least on par with, maybe in terms of skill, or concept, or–mostly–in terms of starting point. The other newbies; the ones who get just ahead of me.
The shoulda-been-me’s.
I feel spasms of jealousy periodically on twitter, when someone I don’t even actually know announces a book deal or landing an agent or winning a contest. But lately, I am struggling with a big weighty ball of jealousy brought on by a real-life connection.
See, someone I have known pretty much my whole life has just self-published. She wrote the book in less than a year. Months ago, she asked me for the basics on advice for how to get published, and I gave her the Cliff Notes version: you can do the long slog or you can self-publish. She said self-publishing sounded more like her speed, and I pointed her to some resources and offered my editing services at a “friends” price. She turned me down, and I didn’t hear much about it, until she asked me to be a beta reader on short notice. I’m a little overbooked right now, so I declined and wished her well.
Two weeks later, BOOM, there’s her book out on Amazon, and she’s promoting it like crazy. She’s doing interviews, working her contacts, shilling that book everywhere on Facebook–you know, the stuff you do when you’ve just published a book on Amazon and you’re trying to get the numbers up.
But, oh, does it burn me.
I’ve been to the conferences, I’ve read the books, I’ve built a blog and joined Twitter like I was told. I’ve gone the traditional route because of promises of greater potential. I’ve entered the big open submissions opportunities. I’ve written the succession of query letters and dutifully waited while working on something else.
In other words, I followed “the rules.”
It feels like a sharp and painful contrast to this woman, who right out of the gate “broke” the rules: she compares her book to a game-changing classic; she didn’t have any internet or social presence before publishing; she never did a contest; she’s never written before at all!; she didn’t get a professional editor to work on it; and, of course, she self-published.
But people in our circle are talking about her. She gets glowing praise on her Facebook page. She can call herself “an author” and not be questioned.
It burns me right up.
But I realize this kind of jealousy isn’t helpful. This is my problem, and her being different doesn’t mean I’m illegitimate.
(However, I will say that much of the claptrap super-small authors or aspiring authors pump out about “there’s room for everyone” and “your time will come” and “celebrate everyone!” feels like a lie right now. I have a hard time believing “anyone” can be an author…)
So I need to get over this. I may have to start by buying her book.
How do you cope with author jealousy?

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January 31, 2014 · 10:00 am

The Secret to an Awesome Novel? Science Knows. Kinda.

Rest assured, plebeian writers of Earth: science can now solve all your problems!
That’s right: Science has cracked the code to a best-selling novel! And the answer is…
Wait, this can’t be right. The answer is…” heavy use of conjunctions such as “and” and “but” and large numbers of nouns and adjectives.”
The Telegraph reported on this story, which says that Stony Brook University in New York used science to analyze the best-selling novels (and even poetry!) to analyze what factors led to one book becoming successful over another. They found their analysis could predict with an 84 percent accuracy whether or not a book was successful.
But it’s pretty hard to take this and figure out what, exactly, made one book successful (perhaps–dare I say?–authoring is more art than science?).
The article says the secret to success was “range of factors determine whether or not a book will enjoy success, including “interestingness”, novelty, style of writing, and how engaging the storyline is, but admit that external factors such as luck can also play a role.”
So is there anything useful to authors here, in terms of boiling down the magic to success? Well, maybe.
First, it’s probably not a good idea to write Jaws except with a whale, but it still eats people and the boat is still too small. Being completely original (or “novel”) is certainly a challenge, but it pays off.
There’s no note on how “style of writing” or which style of writing leads to success, but that can be seen as another way of saying “develop your own voice.” Chuck Wendig’s writing “sounds” very different from Joe Hill’s. The only real way to do that is by writing.
“Engaging” and “interestingness” might be ways of saying “keep things moving.” That can be a struggle in some stories, but as you edit, be sure to ask yourself “does this move the story along, or is this scene filler”? I’ve been playing through the “LEGO Lord of the Rings” game and it has made me realize how, while the background story is very basic, Tolkien really kept throwing new perils at the little Hobbits (oh, you managed to survive that horde of orcs? Great. How about an Oliphant?!)
Regarding the “heavy use of conjunctions”: that sounds like “complex writing” to me. It means using advanced writing forms, rather than a series of simple sentences. That takes skill and, again, practice. You could take a class in this (or hire a good editor to help connect the dots), but the best thing you can do is just keep doing it. And read the good stuff; you’ll pick up on the rhythms subconsciously.
It’s great that they acknowledge luck. I’m very grateful for that, because too often a lot of “how to write” books make it sound like you really can boil down some sort of methodology and it comes across as a get-rich-quick scam. It’s not. Just keep chugging.
I am not particularly worried that an agent, editor or publisher is going to start running manuscripts through the SuccessCalculator5000 anytime soon, so this study gives me a rudimentary baseline: Do good work, and keep doing it.

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December 31, 2013 · 9:18 am

2013 Unresolved

I am one of those people who makes resolutions.

I think most people “become” a resolution person for at least 2 hours around New Years’ Day, and stop being a resolution person, definitely, but January 3.

But I make resolutions and actually try to do them; at least, I have for the past few years. I contemplate the year ahead, write out some goals, and stick them on the door to my closet, where I’ll be forced to look at them every stinkin’ day. For the most part, this keeps me on track and I feel like I’m accomplishing something, so I like it.

Last year, I made a swath of resolutions, but three are particularly pertinent.

  • Build a website.
  • Send out queries for my most recent book.
  • Devote 4 hours a week to personal writing or editing.

The first one,  you’ll note, went pretty well. I launched this blog on February 12, 2013, and I have more or less stuck to a schedule of publishing at least two posts a week since then. WordPress tells me I’ve written 138 posts this year. Not too shabby, and I’m still proud of my little self-made blog. Not too bad at all.

(As a corollary, I launched my official Twitter presence at about the same time, and I’m up to 629 followers, utilizing my “don’t follow any particular strategy” strategy. However, this factoid is depressing when I realize that literal spambots have more followers than me, by the thousands. At that point, I start to hate humanity, give up on counting followers and go eat some chocolate or something.)

For the second goal, I … I was doing pretty well until May, then it came to a screeching halt. But I swear that is for a good reason. In May, that book I was sending query letters out for received two full manuscript requests. Courtesy says you are expected to stop trying to solicit other agents when this happens, so I stopped, completely. Which…maybe I shouldn’t have been courteous, because one agent declined the manuscript because she was switching agencies and the other, even now, hasn’t responded to me. Ah well. Perhaps next year.

However, I did learn that all the massive failures of my query to attract attention was, most likely, not because my book sucked, but because my query did. I had gotten a little overeager and tried something “different” in my query, which seemed brilliant at the time, but I found, at DFW Con, that it was getting me insta-rejected. So have heart! It may not be your book that’s the problem; just your query.

Finally, the writing goal. I was inspired by Stephen King and his dedicated blocks of writing time every week. Four hours a week was pretty ambitious for me, but I “allowed” myself to count blog-writing time as that personal writing time. At first, I was doing pretty well. In fact, here’s the chart I used to keep track:

2013goals

Each little X after the first two columns (used to track a different goal) represents 30 minutes of writing time. Each row is a calendar week. So from my helpful fridge chart, we can see that I did a damned decent job of writing or editing for myself for… half a year.

And then it’s blank.

I got some bad and stressful news in June, and basically lost the willpower to keep up with this fairly difficult goal. But I didn’t entirely quit writing (after all, blog posts continued to flow!). I lost the gumption to keep track of my writing, and to motivate myself to try more personal work, more flash fiction, or working on my novel. If I had to guess what the remaining six months would have looked like, had I bothered to keep track, I’d guess there would be a few blank weeks, but most of the weeks would be at least partially filled in. (Especially November. I wrote like a demon in November in order to win NaNoWriMo).

Even though I did an impressive pratfall on my writing resolution for the year, I found it to be a very helpful goal. It was too hard for me, regardless of what Stephen King manages to do, and I’ll have to recalibrate for next year, but having that little chart to remind me was a good way to get that “butt in chair” part of the equation going. I’m still figuring out what I want to focus on for my already-busy 2014, but I know that should be in there somewhere.

What are your writing/publishing goals for the coming year? How will you keep yourself on task?

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December 17, 2013 · 10:02 am

They’re Just Not That Into You: Ego vs. Humility

I was reading a publishing forum the other day and was appalled by one commenter. She had just gotten her rejection notice after months of waiting, and was (obviously) disappointed. But rather than just expressing her disappointment, she went sassy, saying she wasn’t going to bother to thank anybody because they didn’t give her a real chance anyway, and she was going to self-publish this one and all the rest. You could just hear the “so there” implied in her rant!

It’s one thing to be disappointed. That’s completely normal! Expected, even.

It even is perfectly understandable to think all of those things: nanny-nanny-boo-boo, I can get published without you!

But it was just nasty and mean-spirited to do so in a public forum, and, really, all I think she achieved was making people not WANT to work with her (I wouldn’t want to). And that’s really the opposite of the message you want to be sending with your internet transactions; the next time a publisher or an agent comes along, they might Google you, and the way you act online might — fairly or not — influence their decision to take you on.

It’s a tricky thing for sure. To write a novel and begin the publishing process, you have to have a bit of an ego. It’s an egotistical thing to think “Oh yeah, I have a novel in me. I should be published instead of all those other people.” That’s a powerful drive, and it takes a lot of time and effort to get published, so that kind of ego can keep feeding that drive, even when things are hard and the wait is long.

But you also have to be humble. As special a snowflake as you may be, the agents and publishers out there are in a blizzard. It’s a competitive market, and it’s only getting more so. It really is a miracle that some people get plucked from obscurity (the slush pile, or the deep dark dregs of the ebook list) and become authors with a decent market. That is downright amazing. But, unlike any jolly red elf miracles, it just doesn’t happen over night. It takes work, and it takes some skill, and it takes a lot of luck.

And try not to embarrass yourself with the gatekeepers too badly. That helps, too.

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December 3, 2013 · 10:00 am

Whatever You Do, Don’t Push ‘Publish’

You’ve finished NaNoWriMo! You’ve completed a whole book in a month! You are seriously hot stuff! Go get a cookie. No wait, get two. You’ve earned it, kiddo.

“But wait,” you’re saying, “I’m busy right now. I was just about to publi–”

STOP RIGHT THERE, YOU! Yes, you.

Don’t push that button.

This post was originally going to be called “Advice to Past-Me,” because I have SO been there — and still step over there when the flights of fancy get a bit giddy — but I realized this feeling probably applies to a lot of people coming down off that writing euphoria.

I know the feeling, believe me I do. You have just written the most amazing piece of writing the world has ever known. You are going to be so famous. Your book is like the lovechild of J K Rowling, Isaac Asimov, and all the best parts of your favorite movies. It’s gonna be so big, you guys.

Coming down off that writing high is exactly like being a 15-year-old who just had a first date and held hands for the first time. OMG! That was, like, the best ever! Your heart is all fluttery and it feels like it must burst if you don’t show the world RIGHT NOW because this is your moment and you owned it and nobody understands.

But I beg you: Don’t publish right away.

You may be right. I hope you are! I hope your book really is the next best thing. But if it is, then it won’t be hurt by what I’m going to recommend, and it might save you from the pain of rejection.

The first thing you should do? Walk away from your work for a month, minimum. Go on, you’ve earned the break! And if you still want to keep writing, go do something else. NOT a sequel or whatever. Just something totally different.

After that month, gently crack open your manuscript again, give it a read. It may not look as shiny as it did when you put it down; that’s ok, just do some edits, put in the work. If it does look amazing, first of all, you are a lucky duck. Second, get another opinion. It can be the opinion of your mom or your husband or your kid or your neighbor down the hall, but do tell them to be honest with you.

They’re not going to be honest with you. They’re going to try to be nice to you. But they might try to gently tell you they didn’t “love love” that one little teensy part. This will feel like ultimate betrayal, but this is what you need. Go work on that part.

Then, share your work with someone else, someone less close to you, if you can. Someone who can more reliably destroy your feelings for the sake of good work. (Warning: these people are often hard to get to actually read the danged thing). Take it to a critique group, if you have one.

This is going to feel like someone is stepping on your heart, crushing it into jello. But that’s okay. Your work will be better for it.

Then get your work edited, by someone who is not you. If you are exceptionally lucky, you know someone who is gifted in this area who will do it for free, but these people are special snowflakes, so don’t be discouraged if you need to pay for it. In fact, I don’t trust any unpaid editors, personally. If your work really is the best thing ever, you want it to shine! Stories with typos do not shine, as a rule. Put your money where your mouth is!

(If you don’t know where to find an editor, start Googling. I like Writer.ly. I also happen to be a copy editor, and editing is one of the things I love to do… )

Now, after you have gotten your manuscript reviewed a few times and it’s edited, now maybe it really is the best work ever.

It’s also probably been at least six months since you finished writing it. Maybe it’s a year. But that’s okay! A novel is not a mayfly, emerging whole overnight. It’s an ant colony; it takes time and coordination and help to build it up into something incredible.

Now… now you can publish. Or you can start the process of contacting agents and trying to be traditionally published.

I know that all might sound mean and/or out of touch, because that initial excitement is SO heady. Don’t lose that excitement, but do try to put it in its correct context. That’s really hard to do, particularly when it’s your first rodeo. Slow your roll, new writer. It is more rewarding then publishing prematurely and facing the barrage of poor reviews.

Don’t do it. Not yet, anyway.

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