Self-Publishing Horror Stories

We are getting ready for Day 2 of the Miami Book Fair International today. 

If there was one theme we encountered on the first day of this multi-block street fair in downtown Miami, it was: self-publishing author beware.

We met a lot of wonderful authors at our Stories To Tell booth. They were enthusiastic about the books they wanted to create. But, too many of them were smarting from their experiences with subsidy publishers with their previous books. They had purchased publishing packages from companies including Author House, XLibris, iUniverse, Outskirts Press, and Publish America. 

Their complaints covered a range of issues.

Two women, one a professional editor, who co-wrote an award-winning book, complained about the great difficulty they had communicating with the editor assigned to their book. The company had clearly outsourced the project overseas. The editor spoke with a heavy accent and was difficult to understand. The authors requested another editor, but the request went nowhere.

Another woman described months of complaints about the interior design of her book. The company said her book was ready, but the text fonts, bold and italics were not what she had written in her manuscript. She had to reject the design and demand that it be corrected several times. Each time the company was resistant.

Several authors we spoke with felt they had been misled when they paid for marketing packages. All agreed that the services provided were inadequate. Indeed the authors found that  all they got were Amazon listings they could had arranged for themselves at no cost. Each author reported that the publisher's marketing was inadequate and they had to do their own marketing to succeed. 

Another author told us about the way her publishing company had set the cover price of her book at a level which was too high for her to make a profit. She had requested a change in the price, but was unsuccessful. Now, two years later, she could buy out her contract with the company and republish it herself. To add insult to injury, the company charged her an additional $100 for the use of the cover design which she had already paid for.

Other authors told us that they could not get the rights to their books back from the companies. They had simply resigned themselves to moving on to a second book.

It’s a shame! A quick web search for self-publishing will return listings for all of these large corporations. Authors, seeing no alternative, sign up for a publishing package which often includes services they don’t need at inflated prices, and it all turns out badly.

These sadder, but wiser authors are all enthusiastic about their next books because they intend to truly self-publish. They will maintain all the rights to their book by managing the process themselves, hiring professional editors and book designers to create the book. They expect to take responsibility for their own marketing but they can set the price of the book, and keep all the profits! That's how self publishing should work. 

We are getting ready for Day 2 of the Miami Book Fair International today. If there was one theme we encountered on the first day of this multi-block street fair in downtown Miami, it was: self-publishing author beware.We met a lot of wonderful authors at our Stories To Tell booth. They were enthusiastic about the books they wanted to create. But, too many of them were smarting from their experiences with subsidy publishers with their previous books. They had purchased publishing packages from companies including Author House, XLibris, iUniverse, Outskirts Press, and Publish America. Their complaints covered a range of issues.Two women, one a professional editor, who co-wrote an award-winning book, complained about the great difficulty they had communicating with the editor assigned to their book. The company had clearly outsourced the project overseas. The editor spoke with a heavy accent and was difficult to understand. The authors requested another editor, but the request went nowhere.Another woman described months of complaints about the interior design of her book. The company said her book was ready, but the text fonts, bold and italics were not what she had written in her manuscript. She had to reject the design and demand that it be corrected several times. Each time the company was resistant.Several authors we spoke with felt they had been misled when they paid for marketing packages. All agreed that the services provided were inadequate. Indeed the authors found that  all they got were Amazon listings they could had arranged for themselves at no cost. Each author reported that the publisher's marketing was inadequate and they had to do their own marketing to succeed. Another author told us about the way her publishing company had set the cover price of her book at a level which was too high for her to make a profit. She had requested a change in the price, but was unsuccessful. Now, two years later, she could buy out her contract with the company and republish it herself. To add insult to injury, the company charged her an additional $100 for the use of the cover design which she had already paid for.Other authors told us that they could not get the rights to their books back from the companies. They had simply resigned themselves to moving on to a second book.It’s a shame! A quick web search for self-publishing will return listings for all of these large corporations. Authors, seeing no alternative, sign up for a publishing package which often includes services they don’t need at inflated prices, and it all turns out badly.These sadder, but wiser authors are all enthusiastic about their next books because they intend to truly self-publish. They will maintain all the rights to their book by managing the process themselves, hiring professional editors and book designers to create the book. They expect to take responsibility for their own marketing but they can set the price of the book, and keep all the profits! That's how self publishing should work. 

Writing To Win

I struck up an interesting conversation with a woman named Robbie at the Hollywood Book Festival the other day. She writes -and exclusively reads - nonfiction, mostly essays. Like many unpublished authors, she has been writing for a long time, in between the more pressing responsibilities of life. Like many writers, she has procrastinated about getting her work into shape for publishing.

Recently, after all this time, Ronnie actually finished writing her book. In a sprint-toward-the-deadline-like burst of frenzied writing, she completed the book at the end of August. What motivated her to finally get it done? She was submitting the book to the Graywolf Press. Each year they hold a contest for new authors and award their Nonfiction Prize to the winner. Their website promises "A $12,000 advance and publication by Graywolf will be awarded to the most promising and innovative literary nonfiction project by a writer not yet established in the genre."

Wait! Don't run away just yet; you've already missed the deadline. But Ronnie didn't, and she now has a shot at winning. Good luck to you, Ronnie. We will be waiting for the announcement.

For some people, this type of external motivator is just the thing to make them face that blank page. A contest gets the competitive juices flowing. And if you are really inspired by fear, you can imagine an audience of hypercritical contest judges rejecting your work. That may be just the thing to cause you to choose your words even more carefully.

Naturally, the odds are long. But contest winners do get attention, and the resulting publicity can help an author’s career. Interested? New contests abound online. You’ll find them discussed around the virtual water cooler over at Absolute Write. (If you haven’t come across the site yet, it’s a good resource for writers.) http://absolutewrite.com/forums/

Before you jump in, be sure to check the terms of a writer’s contest. There are some that are scams, meant to profit the organization, not authors, with steep submission fees. Some hapless authors pay these fees agin and again in hopes of being discovered, and that’s not a route I can recommend.

Here is a link to learn more about the Graywolf. Prize. http://www.graywolfpress.org/Company_Info/Submission_Guidelines/Graywolf_Press_Nonfiction_Prize/127/

If you are writing in another genre, type it (example: mystery) and “contest” into your search engine and explore!

Your Memoir - Where to Begin

 Dickens opened his biographical novel, David Copperfield, with the line, “I am born.” That worked in the 19th century, but it’s not the way to get started with a memoir today.

The opening lines of your book must interest and engage your readers or they are likely to put your book down never to pick it up again. A dramatic scene to hook the reader works effectively. It’s a technique you often see in fiction. Think of the mystery genre. The book opens with a murder. The hero – cop, private eye, whatever – comes on the scene with a pressing problem to solve, a killer to catch, and the story is off and running. The reader is immediately engaged and goes along for the ride.

Your memoir probably won’t start off with a murder, but there are plenty of less grisly dramatic moments. Place yourself at a turning point. Let the reader see why it’s a critical, life-changing moment. I am currently working with an author who begins her memoir with the moment when she is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and told she has two years to live. She can choose to accept the diagnosis and prepare to die or seek a more aggressive way of treating the cancer than she had been offered. She chooses the latter, finds a successful treatment and has, for the past fifteen years, been a  vocal advocate for people in situations similar to her own.

Sometimes It's Better Not to Write

Here's another excellent question from an author with a book in progress.

April H. wrote: I've been working on a chapter here and there as much as time allows, but in the process of selling my home, a lot of my research materials were minimally packed. I am trying to find a way to make a writing schedule even if it's short. Any thoughts?

April, I know you're not the only one with this problem! Real life has a way of intruding on less-urgent projects. it can make you lose your momentum. It's rare for authors to have the luxury of writing often, whenever they want, without interruption.

Here is the thing about writing in short segments: it may not produce your best work. You can't expect to just jump in and be creative, or to achieve a consistent tone in your prose after being away for too long.

So the best things to do in small chunks are the more mechanical ones that you really can't mess up, like sorting and scanning photos, or putting your research into order. That's all logical work. In the same way, small research projects, meant for filling in an unknown piece of the book, can be tackled when you're not really into the book as a whole.

If you brainstorm and make yourself a list of these pesky short-term tasks on one day, then each time you get a chance to do a short session, you don't have to figure out what to do, and you can cross one more thing off the list.

Ideally, if you are going to do the actual writing, the original creation part of the book, try to do it in longer sessions, say for 2 hours or more. Before you write, read over material you have written before. That way, your tone and style will carry from one session to the next, and the book won't seem choppy.

In my own experience, I have tried it both ways - long term, drawn out writing in short segments, and longer, intense, focused sessions of writing. Focused wins, each time, and not just because I get faster at composing sentences. It's because I start having fun with the project, and the ideas start flowing.

As a consequence, I have found that ultimately it's much easier, despite my busy schedule, to find the time to write in longer sessions, and to get lost in the work. I hope you get a chance to experience that pleasure, sometime soon!

Fonts Are For Fun

This one's just for fun - geeky fun. As you know, part of book design is having an eye for fonts. How do we learn about fonts? If you're of an academic mind, the best book on the subject, ever, is The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. You can learn about the history of type, structural forms, shaping the page, and much, much more. Bringhurst writes with such passion that you find yourself deeply engaged with the rules of acronyms and ellipses, ligatures and page proportions.

No? OK, then, how about playing a goofy game online instead? Check out www.typeconnection.com, a wonderfully designed site that lets you think about type in a whole new way. It's set up like The Dating Game, the old TV show. 

You pick your font and try to find a good connection for it. You need to choose a strategy for finding a good match - by (font) family, by (visual) similarities, or by dissimilarities, since "opposites attract",  or by shared history and influences - perhaps the same period or font foundry.

Next comes the part where you might actually learn a thing or two. Like the dating game, you skim the bios of the fonts competing for a match. Pick one, and you go on a date. You can see how the two fonts pair up. Incidentally, you'll learn about ascenders and descenders, serifs and strokes and curls. Mostly you'll just enjoy this website's interactivity and the creative way they make fonts the subject of a game. Check it out!

You Don't Think Book Design is Funny? Watch This

If you haven’t yet explored the TED talks (TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading) check them out at http://www.ted.com/talks. You’ll be sure to find something that speaks to your particular interests.

For me, that particular interest is in books – reading them, making them, sharing them. So this talk from Chip Kidd, king among book designers, pleased me to no end. Chip Kidd brought us the distinctive book cover of Jurassic Park, and one of the best-designed, all-around-best  books on my reading shelf right now, Haruki Murakami’s IQ84.

Chip Kidd is clever, he’s funny, and he is right on about books! Check out his performance for a laugh, and maybe it will also inspire an idea for how you’d like your book to look.

A Genre by Any Other Name … Confuses People

It’s easy when your book is a mystery, or a children’s book, or another easily identified genre. People know if they like those type of books. But some writers have an idea they want to write about, and like a square peg in a round hole, they don’t have a nice genre slot to fit it into.

In business, we are all taught to give an “elevator speech”, to describe in just 30 seconds, if need be on a short trip to the upper floor, what exactly it is we do. Why? So people will know if they are interested in us and our business. The same goes for books. They need to be easily slotted into a genre category, for the ease of the casual browser, who will likely make a snap judgment.

Just take a look at your supermarket’s bookshelf. The genre is announced loudly by the book’s cover design, and reinforced by the tile and promotional copy. These westerns and romances and thrillers are easy to recognize and are guaranteed to sell.

Other genres are more troublesome. I’ve been reading In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, a new book out by Margaret Atwood. (If you haven’t read her, I cannot praise loudly enough Atwood’s fascinating novels, essays, and poetry.) Margaret Atwood has been hard to slot in the book-buying world. She terms The Handmaid’s Tale and some of her other novels “speculative fiction”, which has aroused the ire of science fiction fans who would like to claim her as one of their own. Ursula K. LeGuin criticized Atwood’s genre definition, writing in a Guardian article, “This arbitrary restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.”

Atwood tells this story to illustrate a point: calling it science fiction or speculative fiction may seem to be just semantics, until it isn’t. Atwood defines the genres this way: science fiction deals with things that might happen in the future, such as space colonies. But speculative fiction deals with things that might be happing already; it is a more direct commentary on current culture; and it’s not necessarily “scientific”. And fantasy, also often lumped in with SF, is about things that have never happened and could never happen – think unicorns.

Why niggle about this? Because of the book marketing campaigns that follow once a book is slotted into its genre. Or pounded in, like a square peg into a round hole. Atwood describes her horror when her publisher released her books with lurid, sexy covers. Imagine how disappointed those misled buyers would be to read her un-sexy words! She imagines poeple angrily throwing her words into the trash, unread. Ouch.

The publishing industry used to dictate a lot of these genre terms, as they had a pipeline to the bookseller’s shelves, arranged by genre. It was out of the author’s control. Now, in this brave new world of self publishing and online social marketing, we must think about genre, and decide how to present ourselves. Carefully.

Many of our blog readers, and our author clients, fall under the big genre umbrella of biography. This encompasses autobiography, memoir, and family history, and many fascinating topics are also nestled under there too, such as a memoir about a career as a spy or the biography of an avid butterfly collector.

So how do we communicate what exactly our books are? First, unless you’re as good as Atwood, stay under the umbrella and associate yourself with what is already known. Not sure? Find comparable books and see how they have described themselves. Or ask an editor. Next, communicate your identity clearly. Link the genre with the specific subject, such as Suspense Thriller, Cold War or Self Help, Diabetes. Develop a good elevator speech, and try it out on those who have read your draft. Be accurate.

Next, design the book to look like what it really is. Sepia photos on the cover are fine for a memoir, but they are the kiss of death for contemporary chick-lit. (Chick-lit’s neon colors and cartoon illustrations wouldn’t do well for most memoirs, either.)

And last, perhaps most important, find ways to tell the story of your story. Talk about what your book means, specifically, so that people care and appreciate what you’ve written. If you do this part well, you can communicate your unique idea and transcend your genre.

An Author’s Story

Hats off to Terese Davis. Terese is one of those people who overflows with energy and enthusiasm.  She is an inspiration to any author who hopes to self-publish and actually profit from book sales.

The first time I spoke to Terese, I laughed when she raved about Miatas, a sports car I had barely noticed in the past. Now, having read, edited and designed her illustrated, full color book about Miatas, (guess what the pictures are) I love them too, and I spot them everywhere I go!

Terese is a first time author, and a natural entrepreneur.  Read her article about her author’s journey as a case study and as a success story. This article, published last month in an online newsletter, is just one of the ways Terese announced to the world that her book has arrived.

Click here to read the article Terese Davis on Self Publishing.

Since this article appeared last month, she has published her book Just Miatas, and she is selling them like hotcakes. Look for the book on amazon.com when it is available there later this month.  

I hope her article inspires you.  -Nan