Authors Open for Business

 

 

So, you want to be an author. Are you prepared to also become a public relations wiz, marketing guru, entrepreneur, and international sales rep?

I was at a workshop recently, and the take away message from a panel discussion seemed to be that as authors we must treat our passion as a business.

It all starts when we sit down and write that first word. Think of it as owning our own manufacturing company. Our novel is a time-consuming, rewarding labour of love, and with any manufacturing process, our job is to create a compelling, dazzling product to shake up the market place. But our investment isn’t finished when that manuscript rolls off the production line. Whether we traditional publish, or self-publish, we have to generate sales. What business can survive without healthy revenue and income streams?

With shiny new book in hand, we must understand our market niche and promote to that target audience. We have to knock on doors, cold call, hand out postcards, business cards, and bookmarks. We must find creative ways to engage potential readers on social media, hosting launch parties and giveaways, joining groups and forums, and commenting on blogs. Gone are the days of just writing a book and waiting for readers to find you.

I listened to fantastic ideas outlining opportunities to promote yourself, all of which involved understanding your core market first—after all if you don’t know who wants to buy a book like yours, how are you going to go about promoting it to them?  I took notes and admired the creative ways proposed to engage with readers, for example, if your book is about dogs, meet your local pet store owner and see if they would be willing to carry your book. The presenters spoke about business plans, clear objectives, and a narrow focus—know your audience and focus your efforts there. There were lots of suggestions on how to get your book or cover in front of readers e.g. ads of Facebook, Google, Goodreads, Twitter.

But a business? To me, that label took the creativity, spontaneity, and fun out of the process and turned it into something sterile and cold.

Here’s a couple articles on highly successful people: 

http://www.inc.com/lolly-daskal/the-10-most-important-attributes-of-highly-successful-people.html

http://www.businessinsider.com/8-traits-the-worlds-most-successful-people-share-2015-7

The traits that struck me most were passion, integrity, persistence, communication, and drive. We can embody all of that without looking at our chosen path as a stuffy, starched collar, stiff tie entrepreneurial business. We need to show up and do the work, I appreciate that. We need to write like the wind, devote a certain amount of time to understanding the needs, desires, and values of our readers, and we should all be looking to engage, delight, and inform. We can promote and sell as needed, but do we have to do it from the confining space of a business mentality?

I realized a few things in this workshop, but specifically to this train of thought: just as there are plotters and pantsers when it comes to one’s approach to writing, there are plotters and pantsers when it comes time to deal with the other myriad aspects of being an author.

I know a lot of people who approach their writing career as a job. They wake up, section their day into the ‘business’ side of their affairs and the ‘writing’ side of their job. They plot, plan, make spreadsheets, and graphs. I also know other people who take their passion just as seriously, but their approach is more organic. They might try something new every day—a new way to engage with readers, a new promotional idea, a new outlet or avenue never explored before—but they are not trapped by expectations or measuring conversions.

I can also tell you, neither group appears to be more ‘successful’ (such an interesting term and very subjective when it comes to defining what it means personally to be successful) than the other.

I’m curious. What do you think? What’s your approach to writing and letting the world know you’re out there?

In gratitude,

Marissa xo

Self-Publishing Journey Part II

The last time I was here, in early August, I talked about deciding between traditional publishing (including Big-5 houses and mid- and smaller-sized houses) and self-publishing.

I talked a lot about what you need to consider if you choose to self-publish, like acquiring a good editor, finding reliable beta readers, marketing, marketing, marketing.

You may remember that I mentioned my co-author, Merissa, and I had decided to self-publish book one of our MMA-based romance series. Here we are in October, and we're well on our way to realizing that goal.

In the meantime, though, I also decided I wanted to write a series of novellas and self-publish those. It started as kind of a frustrated tantrum that some tropes seem to sell better than others, so I wanted to experiment and see if I could do well with a series if I followed tropes.

Hence, the Caine Brothers series was born. It's a series of erotic romance novellas about six alpha brothers (a billionaire, a biker, a SEAL, a fighter, a rocker, and a shifter...and one of them will have a stepbrother/stepsister romance). Yes, it may seem cliche, but I'm putting my own twist on all the stories, and really, it's an experiment in self-publishing. Can I create something that will sell by chasing the trends?

So between the two projects, I've been hard at work learning the ropes of self-publishing. Thankfully, I'm involved in several Facebook author groups where some of the authors are also self-published, and many of them have been very generous about schooling the newbie.

From here on out, when I say "I" I mean both I and we. I did all the work on the novella, but Merissa and I have worked together on the novel.

Because I'm an English teacher with a masters in writing, I felt relatively qualified to edit my own work. This was an advantage because it saved me time and money by not having to pay for a professional editor.  Once the drafts (of the first novella and the MMA book) were done, I edited them then sent them out to beta readers.

Having reliable beta readers who are also authors, or long-time readers with some advanced skill in understanding story structure and/or mechanics, is extremely important because they can help you find holes in your plot or characters, which you can then go back and fix.

Once I was sure the manuscripts were clean and ready to go, I had to attack the hard work of figuring out what came next.


It turns out, you can't do anything else until you have a cover, so cover art was the next step. For the co-authored novel, we chose to have an artist do the cover. We love the artist and the results, but it wasn't cheap. You pay for quality, which we were willing to do. For the novella, I felt reasonably capable of creating my own cover, which I did. However, I know my own limits, so I kept it simple and clean.  



With covers completed, the next step was formatting. I found a formatter in one of the Facebook book groups, called her and chatted. I'd read some of the books she'd worked on, and after talking to her and interacting with her online, I liked her so I chose to use her. She did a fabulous job on the novella, so we'll be using her for the novel as well.

The next thing I needed to figure out was how to get the book uploaded to the different digital media sites. I talked to other self-published authors and learned about KDP and Draft2Digital. The novella will only be digital, and although the novel will also be in print form, I haven't done the work/research on print yet. That's another step.

Since the novella will release October 19, I'm currently deep into figuring out how to let readers know it's there for them. I'll be hosting a Facebook release party, I've been posting in every book group I can find, and found a lot of reviewers in response to some of those posts. Some of those reviewers were excited enough about the book that they wanted to join a fan group, which I set up on Facebook, also.

I'm not going to pay for a publicity company to do a formal blog tour or other marketing for the novella, but we will do that for the novel. We're still shopping/researching on that front.

So far, everything seems to be moving along nicely. Of course, I won't be able to draw any conclusions until either of the books release and we see how they do.

What have I learned so far?

Self-publishing is a lot of work. There's a lot to learn. I haven't written any new words for a while since I've been so busy learning. However, the learning should be a curve with a steep incline at the beginning and a smoother plateau (or at least a very reduced incline) from there. Once I know what I need to know, I won't have to spend that time learning it again.

My hunch is that the hardest part of the whole deal will be hawking the books--finding readers, establishing a fan base, getting the word out. Once I/we crack that nut, hopefully things will be easier.


The next time I'm back, I'll be able to report on releasing a self-published book and what I've learned about marketing. I might feel completely differently on the other side of that effort, so stay tuned to see what happens!

~Margaret

Be A Tease!

Everyone loves a tease. That tiny morsel of goodness to whet your appetite and leave you begging for more. The build up of anticipation for something, whether it's food, books, movies, a hot date...it's what keeps your attention and focus, leaving you aching for more.

Teasers are an important part of book marketing. Done right, you can grab a brand new reader's attention in less than a minute. Done wrong, you can turn a potential reader away for life.

Here's a teaser for my new book out today, ELUDING ILLUSIONS

Sometimes teasers can be done using a tagline or a "hook" for your book. Here's another using a tagline for my book, VEXED.

Sometimes teasers can be lines or quotes from your book.

You'll notice in the teaser above I put my copyright info and gave credit for the picture to the owner of it. NEVER use pics of celebrities or steal pics from the interwebs to use in teasers. You can get in serious legal trouble without express written permission from the rights holder of the image. There are many stock photo sites you can buy images from to use in your teasers. 

And if you don't want to buy images, some photographers will allow you to use an image if you credit them in the photo, as I did above. But you must have their permission to do so. Or you can use plain backgrounds and make your own using images from your book cover art files as I did in the first two teasers. Ask your cover artist for help if you want banners made up or blank teasers you can manipulate using your cover art files.

A teaser can even be as simple as just an image and your release date to start getting your cover in front of your potential reader audience, like the one I did above.

Also, please remember when making teasers to keep the fonts legible.

While those are cool fonts and it makes it eye catching, it's somewhat hard to read. Teasers should entice a future reader, not make them work for it or get frustrated because they can read only every other word because of font, or colors blending in over background images. 

Try can keep them as crisp and eye catching as possible.

Remember to change up the teasers. 

• Have a sexy one if it's a romance novel. 
• Have a more serious and dramatic one that shows the depth of the book as well. 
• Have a tagline hook as we mentioned earlier. 
• A PG level one for general audiences is also a good idea. 
• Have one as well that gives perspective and insight into the personalities of your characters. 

Like the one below for my novel, VEXED, it gives you a sense of the banter between the main characters.

Teasers can also can turn a potential reader into a lost sale. Remember that a variety of people will be seeing your teaser. So, unless you're posting in a specific group of people, please make your teasers for a general audience. If you write BDSM or Erotica, make sure you have a teaser specific to those audiences, but don't post those in a general FB group using graphic sexual references. Have a cleaner version for the masses and put a warning that the book itself will contain language, violence, or graphic sex. 

Also, please, for the love of all humanity, make sure your teasers don't have misspellings or typos. It's a reflection on you as the author. Put your best work forward.

Go forth and tease the world!!

To Self-Pub or not to Self-Pub: The Burning Question

Self publishing--Indie publishing--is all the rage these days, and for good reason.

In its fledgling days, self-publishing amounted to vanity publishing. It consisted primarily of people who had written a book, mostly for themselves, and wanted to see it "published" so they could give copies to their friends and family. For the most part, they weren't serious authors whose goal was a career in writing novels.

For a long time self-publishing was the illegitimate child of the publishing industry. Books were just plain bad: badly edited, badly written, bad characters, bad plot, bad storytelling...just BAD. It gained a horrible reputation that lingered like that uncle nobody wants around.

But self-publishing has shed the stigma and evolved into a serious, reputable, potentially profitable alternative to traditional publishing, so much so that many traditionally published authors are engaging in hybridization of their careers by doing both.

What are the advantages of self-publishing?

 The major advantage to self-publishing is control. As the author, you have control of everything: cover, content, price, marketing, branding.

You have the freedom to do whatever you want with your book.

You also keep all the subrights to your work, and can sell those yourself.

Finally, you keep all the profit. For ebooks, most publishers pay authors between 25% and 50% of royalties on all sales. As a self-published author you keep most of the profit.

Sounds great, right?

What are the disadvantages of self-publishing?  

You're responsible for EVERYTHING. You may envision yourself living the life of an artist, free to make your own choices regarding your work. And that's true. But once you write the book(s), you have to take off the artist hat and put on the businessperson hat and start all the hard work of cover design, formatting, purchasing ISBNs, interacting with vendors, understanding pricing and SEO and markets and readers and genres and niches.

Part of being a self-published author is keeping your name in the readers' mind, so often self-pubbed authors produce more work than traditionally published authors. Romance, especially, is a high production genre where many authors crank out anywhere from two to four manuscripts per year.

And then there's marketing. So much marketing. When you self-publish you're solely responsible for making sure your target audience knows your book exists, so they can buy it. How do you do that? It's like the quest for the holy grail, my friend, the thing all self-pubbed authors are searching for. Basically, marketing is a shitton of work.

Finally, when you self-publish, you bear all the cost of publishing your book. You must purchase the cover art, pay for the ISBNs, pay for copyrighting, pay for marketing, pay for printing, pay for shipping...you pay for everything.

A side note about genre: Not all genres sell well as self-published books. In fact, romance seems to be by far the best genre to self-publish, primarily because romance is the best selling genre overall in all publishing formats at over 50% of the total fiction market. Romance readers are rabid, gobbling up books as fast as authors can write them.

Unfortunately, not all genres do as well self-published, so if you're thinking about publishing your own book do some research to see if self-published books in your genre sell very well.

If self-publishing is so much work, why do so many people do it?  

There's a lot of frustration with traditional publishing. Because the publishing industry is evolving so rapidly and expansively, traditional publishing has changed a lot of its models to meet the changing habits of readers. The days of huge advances are gone, and if you hadn't noticed, the days of huge chain bookstores are waning as well. Digital books have taken a huge bite out of print book sales, which means bookstores can't afford to stay in business.

Because of this, traditional publishers are more cautious about acquiring authors for print deals. They don't pay as much, they don't acquire as many, and there are different expectations of authors. As a result, many traditional publishers have started their own digital lines and acquire authors for those more often than for print. Authors get no or very little advance for digital deals, and usually smaller royalty percentages than smaller digital-only presses, or what they'd make from self-publishing.

Digital-only presses offer higher royalty percentages than traditional publishers, but they often don't do much more than what you could do yourself as an indie-author. They bear most of the costs of publishing the book, but often expect authors to shoulder a large portion of the marketing effort.

Because it's more difficult to get a print deal with traditional publishers, and digital-only deals aren't maybe as attractive as they could be, more and more authors are turning to self-publishing.

When is it a good idea for you to self-publish?

First, ask yourself: Why do I want to self-publish? Am I willing to do all the work involved? Do I want a long-term career as a writer? Do I want to publish a book just so I can say I did it? Am I frustrated with traditional publishing and want to try something different?

If you answered yes to any of these questions...it's a good idea to self-publish!

BEFORE YOU SELF-PUBLISH: It's important to keep in mind that once you self publish, you can't take it back. You can't take that same book and query it to agents or traditional publishers. So if you self-publish a book and it tanks big time, you can't say, oh, well, I'll just start querying agents now. They just won't look at it because it's ALREADY PUBLISHED.

With that in mind:

If you can afford a professional editor and decent quality cover (some people can do these things themselves, but not many. Be honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses);

If you're a good storyteller and have had beta readers (other than your mom, other family, and friends) read it and help you polish the story;

If you've researched and know your genre sells well in the indie-published arena;

If you're a savvy businessperson who knows how to market and publicize your work;

You have all the ingredients to be successfully self-published.

What prompted this post about self-publishing?

My writing partner, Merissa McCain, and I have decided we're going to self-publish our contemporary romances, the Tap Zone Series, set in the world of MMA fighting.

We did extensive research, we've made a to-do list and split it so we each have responsibilities, we've put together a long-term plan, and we're proceeding  according to it.

We haven't set a release date yet for book one, but it will be sometime this fall. We'll keep you posted.

In the meantime...everybody keep writing!


~Margaret


 

 

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. 

Is Publishing Slow? Depends on Your Perspective

If you’ve been in the publishing industry for any length of time, you’ve probably heard that publishing is slow. Sometimes we say “publishing is glacial,” or even “publishing moves at a glacial pace.” If you Google any variation of this phrase, you’ll find hundreds of examples where someone used it to explain the mind-boggling amount of time that goes into querying, revising, pitching, editing, and publishing.

 

In full disclosure, you should know that I’ve even said it (scroll down into the comments of this blog post if you want to catch me red-handed).  I’m not sure where I first heard this phrase, but obviously it stuck. I’ve been in the publishing industry for almost two decades as a writer, a self-pubbed author, a freelance editor, and an editorial assistant at a publishing company, and it just flew out of my mouth like the parental “because I said so.”

Fellow publishing professionals, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot with this phrase. We’re hanging on to old-school platitudes that don’t make sense anymore.

Here’s the truth: In this digital age, publishing moves at different speeds for different writers, and the key is finding the best fit for you.

Some publishing paths are slow. If writers won’t settle for anything less than the top agents and the Big Five publishers…well, they might as well grab an icepick and make an igloo, because they’ll be camped out on that glacier a long time. Eventually they’ll sell a lot of books. Maybe.

But some are fast. Self-publishing is by far the fastest option out there. HOWEVER, writer beware: with speed comes error. Across the board, quality control is an issue for self-pubbed authors. At the next level we have new agents and small presses, who can move more quickly than larger institutions. Take it from me, there are many small presses out there in your genre, waiting (and hoping, with fingers crossed!) to read a well-written and compelling manuscript. They might even be able to edit and publish your book within less than a year from your submission date. No lie.

There are shortcuts. Regardless of which publishing method you choose, a savvy writer/editor/agent can maneuver the system. While writing is a form of art, publishing is a business and therefore follows the basic rules of business practice. Networking, negotiation, and commitment go a long way to making your dreams come true.

Anything is possible. At this pivotal time in history, the publishing industry is literally up for grabs. Writers, listen up: WE HAVE OPTIONS. Want to self-publish but afraid of sacrificing quality? There are numerous professional freelance editors and proofreaders out there. Maybe they just got laid off or want to supplement their income. Maybe they’re at home with a baby. But they are trained and ready, and probably charge much less than a proofreading service. Same goes for cover artists and publicists. Think outside the box and use your social media skills.

 

And for the love of all things literary: let’s stop saying that publishing is slow (or glacial, or that it moves at a glacial pace). We’re not doing our troubled industry any favors when we fall back on moldy clichés birthed from the brick-and-mortar era of publishing. Those days are over.

In this digital age, publishing (in whatever form) moves at the pace we choose.