Tag Archives: self-publication

My precious!

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I’ve done a lot of blogging about my new character, Camaro Espinoza, over the past month or so. You may have read a few of these entries. And you may also be aware that starting on June 21, 2013 and every month for three months following, I will release onto Kindle a novella featuring Camaro. I hate to cut out you people who either: 1) don’t read ebooks, or 2) don’t do business with Amazon, but I have my reasons and this is how it’s going to be. If you want to read this work, and for $1.99 you’re not going to find much of a better bargain, you need to join the growing number of people who read ebooks in addition to, or to the exclusion of, print books. This is the way the book business is going and you will make the transition sooner or later. Why not make it sooner?

To recap for those who haven’t been following along: Camaro is a former Army combat medic with a combined four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now out of the military after twelve years of post-9/11 service, she finds herself without a place to call home, and without the traditional supports of family and friends. At the beginning of the novella, Camaro Run, which kicks off a series of four interlocking stories, she’s on her way from California to the east, when a one-night stand in Las Vegas turns into something deadly serious. That’s when people learn the hard way that Camaro is not someone to be trifled with.

As I say, the following three novellas are close sequels, working their way through the first leg of Camaro’s overall story. The last novella, called Sisters in Arms, is a complete work unto itself, but sets the stage for the first full-length Camaro novel, called One-Night Charter. This novel is meant to be both a continuation of the story thus far, but also a stepping-on point for new readers. Ideally they’d go back and read those earlier stories, but I didn’t want to make that assumption.

Now I’m self-publishing the novellas, but I have (slightly) different plans for One-Night Charter. I want to offer it to traditional publishers as the start of a series, at least at first. I’m willing to give the market six to nine months to pick up the book before I take it to readers directly. However, I’m not going to take the usual deal traditional publishers offer. I have, if not demands, then requests about how the book and especially the character are treated.

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One step at a time

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When I was working my way through the production of Juárez Dance in preparation for its release in January, I told everyone that I would try to keep them abreast of what I was doing and how everything all fit together. Ideally an ebook should not be something you cobbled together in the course of an afternoon, and there are lots of steps to putting out quality product.

Given that I’m just about ready to unleash Camaro Espinoza on an unsuspecting world, I thought it would be worthwhile to review all the parts of ebook production so you, too, can do the same thing one of these days. We’ll use Camaro Run as our example. It may not be a novel, but it’s beefier than a short story and is treated as a novel during the process.

The first and most important thing you need to do is… write something good. This might seem like the stupidest piece of advice you’ve ever read in your life, but you’d be surprised to learn just how many people skip this part entirely. Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised, as even a cursory examination of a random selection of free ebooks on Amazon will show you how bad some of this truly gets. For some, the mere act of creation is license enough to put it out there for pay, regardless of its merits or lack thereof. Do the world a favor: don’t be like that.

How can you know if your writing is solid enough to be market-ready? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: let people read it. And don’t stop at your wife or husband. Get a good friend to read. Get a not-so-good friend to read. Give it to your agent if you have one (but don’t tell him/her that they’re not going to get a cut!). Get as much feedback as possible and then incorporate that feedback into your work. Don’t seek out or expect pats on the head, but demand that you get critical readings from everyone. Tell them to be merciless. Your writing will be better for it.

Sure, some of the feedback you’re given is going to be essentially useless, but part of being an effective writer is knowing how to sort meaningful suggestions from personal quibbles.

I hope you have money, because the next step is to hire someone for professional editing duties. This includes, but is not limited to, proofreading. Don’t go cheap on this! I went cheap with Juárez Dance and ended up with a manuscript riddled with errors. This is an embarrassment to you and can affect sales. Suck it up and pay the money. About twenty-five dollars an hour is what you can expect, and if your book is of average length (80,000-100,000 words), that’s 30-40 billable hours.

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And now the fun part.

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On Monday I talked about a couple of writers wrestling with different issues pertaining to the craft and publication. I’d like to get back to that for a minute before going on to discuss something different, but related.

This has more to do with the second of the two writers, the one who’s landed his white whale of a novel and is raring to see it in print. Right now he’s thinking he wants to go the traditional route, for which I laud him, but I cautioned him against wanting to see things move too quickly, because the submission and publication process can take years under the best of circumstances. Factor in the fact that he has no agent and it becomes an almost impossible task.

Bearing all that in mind, I mentioned to him that he might want to try self-publishing. If it’s a quick fix he’s looking for, and if he’s confident that his work has the merit to stand out in a (very) crowded marketplace, there’s no reason why not to do it save the expense required to prepare and release such a thing. But I know that money is as tight for him as it is for me, so that’s an issue. More to the point, promotion is an even bigger problem, and that brings me to today’s topic.

I’ve explained/complained before that traditional publishers don’t do promotion anymore and that’s more or less completely true. Sure, there might be some token effort to get things reviewed by circulating reader copies here and there, hoping that a newspaper or a magazine will take the time, but for the most part books are left to die on a figurative ice floe. Maybe someone will come along and save it from obscurity, but there are a lot of ice floes out there and a lot of stranded books and the boat can only hold so many.

Some books do get heavy pushes. These are the prestige releases from authors deemed worthy of such attention, and these are also the hoped-for big commercial successes. A decision is made early on in the process to get behind a particular release and all stops are pulled out. What little money publishers have set aside for promotion is funneled into these “sure thing” bets and occasionally they pay off. Certainly the odds are better for a book like that than they are for Joe Average’s release, which got a three-line reader review on Amazon (but four stars!).

Now these are traditional releases from publishers that have dedicated personnel whose only job is to promote that publisher’s books. Imagine now a situation where those publicity people don’t exist and there’s not one single person in the entire world who knows you have a book out. That’s how it is with the self-published author.

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It doesn’t get better.

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On Sunday I had occasion to hear from two people I know who also write and they provided a couple of different takes on what it feels like to be accomplished in the craft.

The first fellow reported that he felt like he was failing at writing. He has not published, is struggling with his one and only manuscript and has almost overwhelming feelings of self-doubt. He knows the mountain he has to climb and he’s feeling discouraged. What he was surprised to learn, from me and from another published author of similar success, is that for some that feeling never goes away. With every project and every working day there comes the sense that it’s all futile, and that whatever good things that happen to have happened will be the last good things to come along.

I’m sure there are some writers who don’t think this way. They have their hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars and they know they have it made. James Patterson makes $96 million a year and he doesn’t even write his own books. That’s not the sort of guy who worries about tomorrow. For the rest of us, though, there’s the reality of swimming in a body of water fraught with whirlpools and other hazards, and just staying motivated can be a real challenge.

So this other writer and I tried to give the guy some sympathy because we’ve been there. We are there. I don’t know if we succeeded in cheering him up at all, but at least he had the comfort of knowing he’s not the only one feeling those feelings.

The second fellow I heard from was one who is likewise unpublished and had managed through sheer force of will to pare down a 130,000-word novel to 65,000 words in the course of a single, herculean editing session. He was feeling totally supercharged and spent hours afterward looking for places where he could send his newly lean piece of work. He told us all he expected the book to appear very soon. He was all confidence. Then I came along.

I don’t like rain on anyone’s parade. I really don’t. At the same time, I feel it’s incumbent upon me to tell everyone how it is. I congratulated this writer on his amazing feat, which was definitely deserving of praise, but I gently reminded him that even if he were to sell his book tomorrow, and the book required no editing, it would be at least a year before it ever saw the light of day. That’s no one’s definition of very soon.

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