Writers on Writing: Ray Bradbury RIP

To start a series of instructive and inspirational posts about writers on writing I decided to begin with the pugilistic titan that was Ray Bradbury who passed away in the last couple of weeks. He was a massive personal inspiration and will be much missed by generations of readers. His classic Fahrenheit 451 still resonanates today as society shifts its focus from printed forms of learning and culture, to electronic mobile technologies. Enjoy this terrific video.

Coming Soon: Writers on Writing: Amanda Hocking and Marketing Advice for Self-Publishers

How to Self-Publish: Quality Matters!

Just found a blog by Dionne Lister, a self-publishing fantasy writer in Australia. The particular post that caught my eye (here) started by relating the (positive) real world experience of selling her own book to a Sydney independent bookshop. And it worked! Some chutzpah to add to her writing skills! But her real point was the need for quality in self-publishers because the shop owner was automatically dismissive of the poor quality of many self-published books.

And of course, we know that's true in many cases. The benefit of self-publishing is also the problem: anyone can do it! But I have a sense that the message is getting through. There is so much advice online, in blogs, forums, on Twitter, Facebook etc, that it's hard to write without bumping in to a blizzard of specific advice, all of which says it loud and clear: make sure your book is edited by someone who is not your affectionate mother/auntie/cousin.

I happen to be writing as fiction book. I won't bore you with the details because I'm not ready to market it yet, but it's 162,000 words long and I'm on the fifth and final edit (I've already cut back 10,000 words and deleted most of those nasty adverbs). It's been read by two literate friends/heavy readers and I've gone about as far as I can. Now I have to find an appropriate editor and suffer the humiliation of allowing an objective professional correct my grammar, sense and (probably) spelling. I have a degree in English Literature, I've worked in publishing for 28 years, I've written nearly 40 non-fiction books under various nom-de-plumes, so you'd think I would know what I'm doing! Well I do, that's why I'll find a decent editor to pull my text apart where necessary and improve it! By the time the book makes it to market it'll be as well edited as any traditionally published title. And yes, I am going to self-publish, either through KDP or Smashwords because the author experience through these thoroughly modern, quick-thinking, author-curating facilitators (ie not publishers), is excellent.

As a final mention for Smashwords, their style guide is fantastically helpful for all writers, especially those looking at ebook publication for the first time.

Coming Soon: How to Survive a Book Launch and Finding a Good Editor
Image courtesy of ima/Shutterstock.com

How to Self-Publish: Madison McGraw

Have just come back from Bookexpo in New York and am writing a blogpost about how slick and swift Amazon Kindle Publishing is, just after a post about greedy publishers. Well, here's Madison McGraw, a voice from today's world, please take a few moments to listen. It made me laugh at the pomposity of my own industry!

Coming Soon: How to Publish: Amazon KDP and How to Publish on the Nook

How to Self-Publish: Greedy Publishers?!

Have consumed a large amount of bile and invective over the holiday period (mainly at the BookExpo in New York)! Actually, have been looking at the blogs and web sites of successful self-publishers to see what they do, how they do it, why, how and what advice they have to pass on to others. Almost all of them are generous to a fault, but quite a few are also voraciously anti-publisher. If you check the sites of successful self-publishers (such as the mighty J A Konrath and the industrious Kristine Katherine Rusch) you’ll find they really do hate the bricks and mortar publishers, regarding them as greedy, self-serving, crooked and above all, anti-author.

I’ve worked in the industry as a writer, publisher and marketeer for a long time and I think there needs to be a clearer understanding about what’s going on.

It’s true that publishers do not give enough to the authors, it’s also true that authors can now go direct to market in a way that was impossible even five years ago. But that doesn’t mean that publishers are instrinsically bad, but they are slow, out-of date, stuck in their ways and too reliant on the ‘old boy’ network! That makes them an easy target for those who can now break free from the old thinking.

What’s really going on here, is the creation of a fairer system, because there are genuine choices to be made, informed choices for both readers and writers, a new system and quickly evolving system.

The key word here is informed.

A traditional publisher is basically a business that has made its own choice to create or distribute products which happen to be books. Some people within publishing love what they do, others perform straightforward business functions such as administration, accounting, sales, marketing or straightforward management tasks. That’s a long list of job functions: the bigger the publisher, the larger its infrastructure. It has to make money from its activites to pay this long list of staff. It also has to satisfy investors, owners and bankers. It has to make a profit to do this. Within this structure the author plays as important, but not necessarily defining part. Of course, without the author the traditional trade publisher would not exist, but up to a few years ago, an author could not be successfully published, without a publisher. For over two hundred years an ecosystem of publishers and literary agents has developed both to feed itself and its authors, a sympathetic parasitic structure which has achieved an uneasy truce within itself for the sake of long term self-interest.

One part of this uneasy truce was the author contract. 

It may not be obvious now, but the hit rate of published books is very low. When I first entered publishing (an embarrassingly long time ago) I worked for a while at a large conglomerate. Only one in twenty books made its advance back. The imperfect process of commissioning new books, picking the "gems from the dirt", was an art at best, guesswork for much of the time. So while many books were left in the slushpile, even those that did make it onto the Publisher's list rarely made any money for publisher or author.

In such circumstances the author contract was designed to give the publisher all rights in case something could be made from a book: TV, book club, electronic, audiovisual, serial rights all would be considered if not tried, but again, only a small percentage would be successful. Part of the problem was the volume of books published each year by each publisher.

But along came Amazon, then ebook formats, then the iPad and a revolution fuelled by smartphones and tablets. The old model really is, suddenly, out of date and turned on its head. And the entire structure of the traditional publishers is being forced into a complete rethink. Technology has overwhelmed the book industry, it's a Great Deluge and just as potent.

So, the traditional publishers are engaging in a massive landgrab. As businesses, they are complicated systems of vested interests and will try everything they can to survive, including the aggressive chase of electronic rights in old contracts. At their best, the publishers are also trying to assert their historical skills in editing and marketing (although spread very thinly, more on this in forthcoming post), to allow an author to focus on what traditionally they are good at, writing. But you’ll notice that the most successful authors are also very good at marketing. J K Rowling, James Patterson, George R R Martin – these people know their market, they keep in touch with the different facets of it, they engage in many different ways, through videos, films, magazine articles. The top authors are top marketeers, whoever publishers them.

But now, back to the choice. 

A self-publisher too must be good at marketing, in fact you must be a good business(wo)man. The big difference between you and a traditional publisher is that you only have yourself to feed (perhaps a family, or two!), but a publisher still maintains its structure of staff and buildings. It's an unequal battle which is begining to make the publishers seem more like the dinosaurs wiped out by the comets that struck the earth 65 million years ago. The insects and the mammals survived because they were more adapable. Publishers are beginning to walk the Dinosaur Road.

Self-publishers need to understand that the traditional publishers are trying to find their place in this new world, and that in order to survive, keep employing people and buildings they make different choices than motivated individuals. Understanding this doesn't make it acceptable for you, but it does help make a credible choice because now you can self-publish, do the marketing yourself and reap the full rewards of your hard work.

Coming soon: New Markets for Short Stories and Take Your Time.
image courtesy of imageegami/Shutterstock

How to Self-Publish: Review Other Writers!

In the modern world, with social media networks, online retailers, ereader devices, smartphones and tablets the job of a writer, any writer, is more rewarding than ever before. Your work can be published more quickly, you can engage directly with readers and the community of writers is vocal and supportive.

In the last week or so I’ve been taking a good look at online reviews, particularly those of writers on writers (take a look at this site by Jade Varden (author of the Deck of Lies series), for instance which has both a terrific post on this subject and a range of useful comments from many different writers). 

With the explosion of self-publishing the competition between authors to gain those rare places in lists of the traditional trade houses is greatly reduced, because anyone can, and many are, doing it for themselves! The number of indie publishing houses, author co-operatives and self-publishing blogs has blossomed into a huge eco-system. The liberating effect of the internet and the obvious need for all writers to seek advice has created a supportive framework that celebrates the fact that the community of writers is part of the greater community of readers, participating and engaging with each other –  helping, commenting, critiquing.

This is considerably more healthy that the competing network of professional reviewers whose views we all seek for the kudos and authenticity, but whose job it is to entertain, often by taking a negative or deliberately contrary view. 

On the whole, writers are cultured people, with considered (often wildly differing) views, who work hard and juggle their daily lives with the joy and pain of writing. Anyone who writes often or regularly, understands the efforts of another writer. We might dislike the subject, the story, the angle or the characters, but we take a fundamentally empathetic view of the effort. And that leads to a degree of compassion that can turn constructive criticism into a powerful force of good.

So, if you read a book and have something to say about it, go to Amazon or your blog, or the author’s blog, and say it. It doesn’t have to be long, but make it constructive, useful, think about how you would respond to a comment, how you might use it to make your next book better. Dictatorial comments are not required, but genuine responses are very helpful to an honest writer and the mirrorball of comment in the form of multiple reviews can be the most helpful teacher for all of us.

Perhaps this is the great liberation, the great release of the Internet, not just that anyone can publish, but that anyone can comment on anything that’s published. Of course, we have to write well, submit ourselves to editing, to market ourselves and our books well, but ultimately we can now listen to the wide range of comments of our fellow writers and our readers. It's a virtuous circle that benefits us both as readers and as self-publishers.

Coming Soon: Audiobooks for Promotion and Podcasting for Fun!

How to Self-Publish: Basic Styling Rules

The popular Amazon Kindle

Can you guarantee what your ebook will look like on your audience's ereaders? Ebook reading devices come in so many shapes and sizes it can be bewildering but a few simple rules will help you prepare your own text for every eventuality.

After you’ve written your text (spell-checked it, re-read it three times and asked a proof reader to check through it, of course) there are some basic issues to sort out when preparing your text for ebook publication. That’s because the formatting requirements for the Nook, Apple iBookstore, Amazon Kindle, Kobo and the rest, are all be slightly different.

It’s important to bear in mind that an ebook is really a computer file and therefore very different from a physical book. In traditional publishing, apart from the editing and proof-reading, the fonts and line spaces are chosen, the pagination is fixed, the cover designed, and somewhere along the line, an ISBN is assigned so that booksellers worldwide can identify the book. This can take 12 months.

Although the route to epublication is much shorter (two months at most), some of these processes apply to the ebook route too, but the differences lie in the need for text to adapt to a hardware device, that is, any device that can read ebooks: computers, tablets, ereaders, smartphones. For instance, there are variations in the default font choices between similar devices and between operating systems on similar phones. It's worth noting that the ereading software on a device is designed to give consumers the power to consume in a manner that suits them: font sizes can be changed, typefaces can be changed, orientation of the screen can be changed.

So, to give your book the best chance to be readable on all of these devices you need to follow some basic rules:

1. Use the most basic software writing tool you are comfortable with: beware of Ms Word which creates hidden styles.
2. I prefer to type in plain text, underline italics and headers, then, when I'm happy with the writing itself, transfer the text into Ms Word or Apple’s Pages for the final styling.
3. Every space and word must be given a style so choose a basic text style and apply it to the whole text. 
4. Methodically work through your text and exception style headings and italics.
5. Try to keep the number of styles down - a basic indented text style, a paragraph starting non-indent style, plus headers (A, B and C), a bold character style and italic character style will cover most fiction needs. Adding a list or bullet point style is useful for non-fiction.
6. Use a standard typeface, i.e. the one’s you see on every computer, so Times, Times New Roman, Helvetica or Courier New. 
7. Use 12pt for the main body of your text, 16-18pt for the headings. Most ereaders look at the proportional differences in font sizes to work out what do with your text, not the absolute size.
8. Don’t use soft returns 
9. Don’t use page breaks within chapters.
10. Don’t use tables, sidebars.

These are really simple to follow. Once you've mastered them you'll find it's all quite liberating. I spend a great deal of my own time planning and styling books for print publication and it's a great joy to hit a simple manuscript which requires basic ebook styling.

Coming soon: More Editors for eBooks; Software Choices

How to Self Publish: Enjoy it!

Cartoon © David Gifford 2012

There’s one major advantage to self-publishing: anyone can do it. There’s also one major disadvantage: anyone can do it! For two centuries publishers have vetted and controlled the market, with Literary agents mediating between authors and publishers. But now, anyone can write a book, submit an MS word document and through various, inexpensive means, publish their book to the world, online and through print on demand, if they think it’s worth it. Traditional publishers are up in arms because suddenly their slush pile is being self-published, vanity publishers are fast becoming irrelevant and literary agents are finally having to work for their fee.

So, surely this is all good news for the budding self-publisher. Well, yes, but the ease of access means there’s a massive increase in competition. The bigger publishers used to worry about the marketing campaigns of their equally large competitors, but now they have to think about an army of marketing-savvy 17 year olds who have no respect for tradition and live/breathe social media.

So, the advantage of self-publishing is that anyone can do it.

That’s still true. You can write your book, control its look, decide to publish immediately, determine the price and benefit from a greater share of the sale price of the ebook. And competition is good. It makes you think harder, plan more carefully and work harder at making your book a success.

But there’s one more ingredient: enjoy writing the book. Some people love the physical process of writing itself, others revel in the thinking and the planning, some even enjoy the marketing afterwards! Most writers though, use the writing as a form of expression or escape from their daily lives.

I have a nom de plum, Jake Jackson. I write practical music books on reading music, guitar and keyboard chords and a Songwriters Rhyming Dictionary. The books have sold many thousand physical copies throughout the world. Now I’m writing a fiction trilogy. I’ve been writing it for three years, just fours hours a week, mainly at weekends, and I’ve loved every single second. My everyday job is as a publisher of illustrated non-fiction, so I know the industry, I know the disappointment that would-be authors succumb to, but even so, I have kept writing because I love the process. If, eventually, 10 people buy the books I’ll celebrate.

Writing is a mission, it’s a vocation. Of course we all want success, but ultimately, we have to enjoy what we do. There’s a great article from the Guardian newspaper, with interviews of a range of interesting writers, from P.D James to Roddy Doyle. In it, Neil Gaiman says: ‘The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like... So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can...’

How true.

Coming soon: Proofreaders or friends? and How to Blog to promote your Book.
For the cartoon at the top of this post, many thanks to Kingston University and David Gifford at inscript design.

Successful eBook Marketing: Pinterest

I love Pinterest. It allows you to express yourself in a completely different way to Facebook (FB), Twitter (TW), Google+ or any of the other social media outlets. But the best thing is it complements rather than competes all of the other forms of social engagement.

So, for writers this is a big benefit. If you self-publish, setting up a virtuous circle of links between Pinterest, FB, TW, your own blog, and the various places where you books is being sold, you can watch your audience grow and engage with your readers. 

Pinterest is almost entirely visual. Its immediate impact is completely different from FB and TW, because it focuses on images. Using the concept of boards (the sort you might have in your writing room/space/study/understairs cupboard) you pin images of your own, or clips from web pages.

At first I was slightly disenchanted with it because the various feeds and boards they highlighted showed so many shiny, perfect photographs that I wasn’t sure that any normal person could match up. However, as the weeks have gone by I’ve realised that its the interface that’s shiny and perfect! Almost everything I’ve put up has looked good. And it’s adaptable to mobile devices so still manages to look good on iPods and Android phones. You can follow and like others, and they can reciprocate.

So how can you use it to promote your writing?

1. Create a mood board with images that represent themes of your book. Obviously if the book’s about Rome, then let’s see some images of Rome, but also, if your book is romantic, you might find some beautiful places around the world that give the reader a sense of how you’re thinking.
2. Created a board for each main character in your book. Using Google searches you can find so many fabulous shots. Your main character might be a knife-toting zombie from New York. Well, find some shots of New York at night time, a spooky cemetery, and some sharp hunting blades. You might write a recipe journal, so you can find some ingredients shots, some victorian kitchen parlours.
3. If you have some cover ideas, sketches, or images you’ve created for the book, put them in here too. If you multiple books, put all the covers on a board.
4. Readers are often fascinated by a writer's inspirations. Give them a board with the places, peoples, buildings, colours or shapes that have influenced you.
5. Each image can be linked to another page, so you can link it to your Amazon  page, or the iTunes link for your book, or your blog.
6. Pin responsibly! The copyright dangers are obvious. Always give a full credit to the source of the image. Always give generous praise to the source. 

One major criticism of ebooks is that we lose the touch and feel of books. Pinterest gives us a new way of extending the look and atmosphere of what we write, so try it out and see what you think.

Some great people to try on Pinterest include Sarah Dessen, Kaitlin Ward both included on a longer list of recommended Young Adult authors on Pinterest on the YA Highway blog. Of course, I have my own which you could look at too!

Coming soon: Using a Facebook Page for your Book and Going Exclusive with Amazon.

Self-Publish Your eBook. Reason #2

Bookshops groaning with Books.

There’s never been a better time to self-publish your own ebook. There are so many ways to promote your books through social media, publish them through major online retailers and make them available to libraries. And it cuts away at the monopoly of the big High Street retailers.

So what’s wrong with the big High Street retailers, Barnes and Noble in the US, or Indigo in Canada, or Waterstones in the UK? 

Well, not much really, except that they are limited by the size of their stores and the flexibility, or otherwise, of their central buying teams. These venerable institutions are in terminal decline because they simply cannot represent the scale of opportunity afforded online to the consumer. And, to make it worse, in an attempt to compete with the internet they are trying to reinvent themselves with non-book items —  fluffy toys, stationery — and so reducing the amount of already limited space available to books. A book store with 40,000-50,000 books used to be a reasonably typical size. This sounds like a large number, but with the publishing industry regularly pumping out over 150,000 new titles and reissues every year, you can see the problem. And Amazon has around 1.8 million books available.

Publishers, be they the powerhouses of Penguin, HarperCollins and Random or the plethora of indie outfits, all have a tough time selling their books into the limited space on the shelves of the big retailers. And they also sell to supermarkets, garden centres, chain stores etc, and these retailers have even less space for books.

So, as a self-publishing author, using Createspace, or Smashwords, or Lulu, or making and uploading yourself to Amazon, Apple, B&N’s Nook and Kobo, you will control over your own selling space. You can build on it and promote it. You can let it grow at a pace that suits you, you can publish one book every two years or five every other month. It’s your choice, not someone else’s, and, as long as you create something that’s professional and promotable, you will be the prime beneficiary.

And did I mention that you can change the price of your own book? Or alter the cover, or update the book without having to wait for the next print-run? Well, that’s for another post!

Coming Soon: Do You Need an Agent? and How do I Find a Good Proofreader?

Self-Publish Your eBook. Reason #1

Teenage Vampire Fiction

Just a short post to highlight a couple of good blogs/articles elsewhere. One from the Economist called 'The Death of chick lit' in the Prospero blog and a follow-on from Mercy Pilkington at Good eReader. They both focus on the often ignored phenomenon within traditional print publishing which is the attempt to follow fads, flog them to death, then abandon them when sales have slowed. New writers often don't appreciate that book publishers are businesses that have to make money to survive and one of their methods is to find something that sells, or copy something else and ride on the success. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series spawned a mini industry of teen vampire novels (and TV series) that's lasted for three or four years. Now the peak of the wave is over, the market appears to have moved on for some publishers but there is still a good following for authors in this genre. Self-publishing through Barnes and Noble's PubIt, or through Amazon, or into the Apple iBookstore is a perfectly good route for such authors.

More to come on this... In the meantime, I need to embed the number 2UFQWYKWWMPN which a my Technorati claim token and should allow this blog to be published by a wider audience.

Coming soon: Go Local and The Pinterest Challenge.

Editors for eBooks

One of the main purposes of this blog is to encourage the proper use of freelance editors and proofreaders. The problem is, there are plenty of good ones around. If you're just starting to write, and have no connections within the industry, a simple Google search will report thousands of editors, from different continents, all brilliant, all available.

So, to help with this, I've just set up a Facebook group called Editors for eBooks. It will take a while but with some heavy networking it will become a useful resource for those who need to be put in touch with a good editor or proofreader. To join the group you have to become a friend of Nick Wells and then Editors for eBooks. This allows me genuinely to recommend the services of a professional. I'll tie it up to twitter lists too (@flametreetweet), and Linkedin.

Coming soon: Good Reasons to Self-Publish 1; Marketing Lessons from the Music Industry.

Self-Publishing eBooks: Ask Yourself Some Questions.

So why not find a good freelance proof reader, and an editor, perfect your book, then release it as an ebook, straightaway? 

In the last post I looked at some of the issues relating to finding a traditional publisher. While there’s much more to say on that subject, the real purpose of this blog is give people information and inspiration about self-publishing. That’s because there’s so much on the internet about this, it can be difficult to relate it to individual needs.

So, yes, absolutely it is possible to write a text, find a good proof reader and a constructively critical editor, find some simple software and send it off to Amazon, the Apple iBookstore and Google. Self-publishing for the modern world. 

But before you take the plunge you need to ask yourself some questions:

1. Am I passionate about what I’m writing?

2. Will I be able to advocate for it, at every opportunity?

3. Am I interested primarily in the writing itself, the achievement of having done it?

4. Do I want recognition for my achievement?

5. Is the nature of the recognition more important than the sales?

6. Are sales, and a means of earning a living, more important than kudos for its own sake?

7. Am I promoting some other product (seminars, exhibitions, healthcare products)?

If the answer to 3 and 5 is yes then self-publishing may not work for you. That’s because, in the digital community the marketing of what you write is at least as important as the text itself. 

If the answer to any of the other questions is yes, then you’ll need to embrace, if not master, the power of marketing in all it all it’s forms. At the most basic level, engagement with social media is essential, using Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and the rest. It’s about momentum, talking to friends and family, asking them to recommend your publication and help you advocate for it. 

Coming soon: Which software is best to make ePubs? How do I create a Facebook Page for my book?

Easy Steps to eBook Success

Over the next few weeks I'll be looking at the entire process of creating and publishing your own ebook. This will cover several key elements:

1. Writing
2. Editing and proofing
3. Making an ePub
4. Distributing your book through Amazon, Apple, B&N etc
5. Online marketing, including Google Ads
6. Social media, using Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc
7. Traditional marketing, with a special focus on your local media