How to Sell Your Book without Selling Your Soul

Right away I need to tell you something personal. Not the TMI-kind-of-personal, but personal in the sense that this won’t be the typical “how-to” blog post about book marketing. Why? Because sales and marketing turns me off completely and causes my skin to itch. 

 

 

I’m fiscally skeptical to my core, the kind of girl who skips commercials and doesn’t care who designed my shoes. This shouldn’t come as a surprise—I write cyberpunk, so a certain level of anti-establishment goes with the territory.

Perhaps this makes me a poor example. After all, experts say if you want to sell your book, view it as a product, and view the readers as customers. Your job as a published author is to move that product, grow your customer base, and write that next book so there’s more product to sell. The more you write, the more you have to sell, the more customers you’ll get, and the more money you’ll make.

Good advice, right? Yes, of course. But personally, I can’t do it that way. Not without selling my soul in the process.

 

Now here’s something else you need to know about me: despite this deep, dark issue with marketing, I sell books all the time as an associate editor at Henery Press. Even when I’m on break, even on weekends, even after hours...I do it without violating my conscience, and I enjoy it. How? Because I believe in the authors and their books. I think anyone who has the guts to write a novel is pretty darn amazing, and I want to support them.

So here’s my secret to selling books without selling your soul: **BELIEVE IN YOUR IDEAS**



Mr. Robot is a fantastic example of idea-based marketing.

To make it work, you’ll need to separate your identity from the book itself, without breaking away from the ideas behind the book.

Let’s say you write about zombie insects. For whatever reason, creepy-crawly zombies really float your boat. So go forth and find other people who like zombie insects, either in person or online, and strike up a conversation. Just geek out for a while with all those other awesome zombie-insect lovers—people who aren’t going to judge the fact that you think zombie ladybugs are the bomb—your kind of people.

 

If you view your book as a product, you'll feel like a salesperson every time you talk about it. But with idea-based marketing, talking about your book will come naturally as you engage with others about the ideas that inspired your writing in the first place.

The cool thing about idea-based marketing is that you can do it anytime, in any place, across any platform. In-person signings could become lively discussions about topics you enjoy. Tweets could entertain and inspire. Facebook posts could inform and even raise awareness about important events or causes. 

 

You don’t have to have an active product, just an active idea. My sci-fi thriller OPEN SOURCE doesn’t come out until January, but in a sense, I’ve already started marketing and building my audience around its core concepts. The best part is that most of the time it doesn’t feel like marketing, because these are things that really do matter to me. I fully believe in my ideas, and I want to talk with other people about those ideas. It’s a natural outflow of my interests.

One last note: idea-based marketing only works if you MAKE IT EASY TO BUY YOUR BOOK. I won’t go into strategies here, but all your social media profiles should clearly identify your author name, your book title, and provide a buy link (when available). If you make it easy to buy your book, you can spend more time talking with people about the ideas that inspired your book, and less time telling them to go buy it.

 

Maybe book sales will follow, maybe not. But you’ll still have your soul, and that’s a good thing.

Celebrate Earth Day with Print-On-Demand

Today is Earth Day, which is a perfect time to talk about  print-on-demand (POD) services. Aside from being a sustainable alternative to traditional offset printing, for an indie publisher with a small staff and limited resources, it makes sense. Much of my book production experience has been with Reputation Books. We chose IngramSparks because of its relationship to Lightning Source, which only works with publishers. The cost to produce a book is more than CreateSpace, but as a publisher, we want to get our books in front of booksellers, and booksellers are more likely to order books if they are available through Ingram’s catalog than through CreateSpace’s distribution channels.

As an indie author, however, CreateSpace is a very viable alternative. The options for POD are growing, but rather than comparing them all, I’ll share my thoughts on CreateSpace, which provides the most cost effective option to producing a book.  And since it is owned the world’s largest online retailer, CreateSpace offers the fastest and easiest way to get a POD book on Amazon’s marketplace.

Traditional publishing can appear to take quite a long time. It can take up to two years with some publishers, depending on their processes. With Reputation Books, we formally schedule the time it takes for our editorial, design, production, marketing and post-production processes. Each book takes us a year to produce, so I can see why some authors would choose to self-publish rather than go the traditional route. For indie authors, they are in the driver’s seat with these processes, so it can take considerably less time to self-publish their books.

Both IngramSpark and CreateSpace allow you to set up your account for free, and purchase your books at their production cost. The difference in costs are in their upfront fees. While CreateSpace does not charge to upload your book files, no matter how many changes you make, IngramSparks charges an initial $49 fee for book’s cover and interior file, plus an annual $12 “market access fee.” Any changes to a “completed title,” which happens when the official book proof is okayed for printing and/or distribution, IngramSpark charges $25 for a revised cover and $25 for a revised interior, so it's especially important to carefully and completely inspect the proof before approving it.  However, with CreateSpark, you can make changes to your book files at no additional cost, regardless if you have okayed the book proof for publishing. I also like that I can order a physical copy of the book before I actually release the book for publication.

I’d like to say that both IngramSpark’s and CreateSpace’s POD processes are equal, but I actually find IngramSpark’s easier to understand. That said, both require a bit of trial and error for the DIY author. Thankfully, there are some good tutorials on the internet that can help you get through the process.  But I found the most valuable resources were the PDFs of IngramSpark’s and CreateSpace’s submission guidelines. CreateSpace does a better job at explaining design and publishing terminology for creating submission files, which is important if you are designing the book or providing instructions for the book’s design. 

Both also provide cover templates to use, which I highly recommend. IngramSpark creates the cover mechanical template with your book’s bar code, while CreateSpace adds the bar code after you have uploaded your book files, so you don’t have the option of moving the bar code to another area on the cover.

Speaking of the bar code, both POD services require an ISBN for each book.  As a publisher, we purchase our ISBNs in bulk through Bowker Identifier Services, but  for the indie author who is self-publishing, purchasing an ISBN one at a time is fairly expensive. If you don’t want to spend $125 for an ISBN, CreateSpace has options for purchasing your ISBN through them from free to $99.

The one issue I have with CreateSpace is in connecting with an actual human being to get answers that weren't available on their website. With IngramSpark, I can call their customer service, while CreateSpace requires you to fill out their online form to get either an email or return call. When I’m in the middle of production and hit a snag, I like the quickness and ease of picking up the phone to get help.

For small publishers, IngramSpark still makes better sense than CreateSpace whether it is because of their distribution channels, customer service, or personal preference. For self-publishing authors who don’t mind a little DIY elbow grease, CreateSpace may be a better choice, because it offers authors more control, minimal up front costs and ease of use. 

Whether it’s IngramSpark, CreateSpace or another POD service, print-on-demand provides not only an economical alternative to indie authors and indie publishers, it offers a sustainable alternative to traditional offset printing. So on Earth Day, go green with POD. 

A Career In Books?

An editor in New York recently said to me, "This is one of the last true apprenticeship fields." Although she meant it as just an interesting aside, the more I thought about it, the more I realized this is both a problem and an unfortunate truth in writing and publishing.

If you're like me, as many in our field are, you spent your childhood with your nose in a book. Late nights under the covers with a flashlight, sitting on the sidewalk while others did sports, and hours at the local library are the bright, shiny, happy spots in your memory.

Books, books, books. Must read all the books.

Sadly for me, as I got older, reading became less an obsession and more of a hobby. My English class in high school was uninspiring, and few of my peers read like I did. I was from a small town and a child of poverty, so although I had dabbled in writing here and there, there was no concept of being a writer for a living. I was privileged enough to go to college, but there was no way I would waste that opportunity on an English major. I didn't know taking a literature class was an option, let alone having a career in books. (This belief prevails. Check out this Slate article: Major Exodus: How do post-recession English departments attract students to a field losing popularity?) Thus I got my B.S. and reading was further pushed into the "something I only do for fun," area of my life.

What am I doing with my life?

Ironically, it was my career in biology that reunited me with my love of books. As a field biologist I got to witness many of the amazing creatures nature has to offer. That being said, I was also twiddling my thumbs, a lot. You do quite a bit of "observing" in the field, which means waiting and watching for something to happen. That's when the ideas for a novel started crowding my brain. I spent my nights tapping away at the computer, and it rekindled the love and obsession I had as a child. One year later, ta-da! My first complete novel.

Ta da! I will be a famous novelist!

I was going to make a living as a writer! This was what I should have being doing all along! Of course as anyone in the publishing world will tell you, it wasn't ready. But I didn't know that. It took 100+ rejections, a MFA in Creative Writing, self-publishing my next novel, and a 2-year unpaid internship at a literary agency for me to understand, six years later, what "ready" meant.

What makes you think your book is special?

All of that experience was my apprenticeship, and it opened my eyes to the world of publishing as a potential career. If you love books, despite what people tell you, teaching English or starving writer are not the only career options. The book industry world needs managing editors, literary agents, book-marketing gurus, book buyers, bookstores, designers, proofreaders, copy editors, ghost writers, book reviewers, writing conference leaders, distributors, publishers, the list goes on.

I only wish someone had pointed this out to the little girl with her nose in a book. I would have started earlier, done the unpaid internship in college, taken the courses in writing/literature, begun my career path sooner, so that the struggle would have been at the age it should have been. The MFA programs are equally as guilty, many of them focus on writing as art, scorning the "commercial" world, which is where most people in the book business make a living.

You write commercial fiction?

Many others who work in the book industry have a similar story to mine. They fell into it later in life, and realized they were in love, but it took some time to get to a moderately successful career and there were many financial sacrifices along the way. And still others don't make it that far. The path to publishing is littered with ex-editors who couldn't survive on such low salaries, ex-literary agents who didn't have financial support in those first few penniless years, ex-interns who had to get a paying job and more.

Why can't being an author and working within the book industry be a viable career path for everyone? Why can't more universities offer programs like Columbia's Publishing Course? Why are we expected to toil away at un-paid/low-wage apprenticeships just to get our foot in the door? Why is it that there is not a career path for novelists the way there are for so many other jobs? Why is there so little money in such an important field? And why is most of it concentrated in NYC, one of the most expensive cities to live in the world?

I don't have to put up with this, do I?

It was luck and privilege that I was able to follow my dream career at an older age, which included a partner willing and able to support me and an educated mother who taught me to love to read. People say that publishing/writing is a career for trust-fund kids and retirees. This is not true, but it is definitely an uphill battle if you don't have those advantages. One of the biggest reasons for this is a lack of information/opportunity available to those with less means. There are not many options for the not-so-privileged, the need-to-work-for-a-living, and the few paths to work in books that are viable for us are buried under negative stereotypes of post-English-major lifestyles.

Hey there. I work with books!

Books are considered a luxury commodity, even though reading and writing have proven again and again to be a crucial aspect of human nature. See the Guardian's Reading Fiction "Improves" Empathy Study Finds, or the New York Times's Writing Your Way to Happiness or NPR's How Orwell's 'Animal Farm' Led a Radical Muslim to Moderation.

Yes, you can work with books.
(And maybe the next doctor will be a POC. Maybe.)

The world needs more (and diverse) people working in books, but how will that happen with the current lack of support in the education system and society in general?