Ending the Stigma of Self-Publishing

This is a fairly interesting blog post from over on Free Kindle. The author asks the question "What is a book?" He has a valid point. If the book is the physical thing, then an e-book isn't really a book at all. Neither is an audio book, a podcast or anything else.

This is the way I approach it, too. I see myself as a storyteller more than a writer, which is why I'm as happy directing as writing. Films, books, it's all just about a story at heart.

Here's another free kindle post about what readers judge a book by. Publisher isn't in the top 5, interestingly enough. One reader comments that he (or she?) only reads books that are like books by authors he (she?) likes. This reader doesn't know how to search out other books.  I keep getting the feeling that there should be a way Indie Authors can come together, because only collectively can Indie Authors outshine the NY Publishing Houses.

Until there is a way for Indie Authors to work together, there will be limited individual successes (yes, okay, like Zoe. Zoe who?) and a huge amount of people falling into obscurity. Yes, there is crap produced, but there are some real gems out there. I feel there needs to be a way to get readers to more easily find Indie Authors.

I read a lot of Indie Author blogs. You'll find them down the side of my blog, all except Zoe who (lol, again) for some reason I can't link to from down there. I'm always finding more Indie Author blogs without even looking thanks to the gem that is Google Alerts. I have various alerts set up but the important one just now is "Indie Author" including the quotation marks.

A lot of these author blogs I read are geared at other authors. Very few make a conscious effort to blog for readers. I don't either, but I don't have a book out yet so I doubt readers are interested in me.

This isn't an Indie Author thing. Of all the blogs I have read by authors, only 2 have been strictly for readers. Neil Gaiman posts a "this is what I did, this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm going to be doing" style blog here. For a blog that's fun, interesting, and all about the readers, try this one: Patrick Rothfuss. The reason I think this works so well is because he wrote a magazine in college. His blog posts are college-magazine like.

So what can Indie Authors do? I don't really like offering advice because my book isn't out yet. I am kind of side-lined, but it is getting unbearably close to being ready. Like standing at the tip of the diving board, staring into the water below, people behind getting impatient. I did that, once. Was terrifying all the way up the ladders, and just before I jumped I lost all fear. It was about 30 ft above the water and I was doing a life-jacket test.

Indie Authors all seem to see themselves as being alone. But that won't work. When a NY published book comes out it comes out without the stigma attached to self-publishing. It comes out with the backing of literary gatekeepers. Yes, as Zoe Who episode 2 points out, that gatekeeper might be a 19 year old fashion school drop out, but it's still a gatekeeper.

Right now is the best time to be an Indie Author. Right now the publishers are killing themselves, they are literally in their death throes. I really do think they will re-invent themselves, be reincarnated in a new form. But right now they are dying. They are collapsing where they stand. And there are so many reasons for this, way beyond the obvious reasons. You want to know one of the major reasons the publishers are dying? J A Konrath is murdering publishers, or at least he has the potential too.

He is showing that mid-list authors with backlists and fans can do a lot better on their on, without publishers. When this news gets about, as it will, more will follow. When they do, publishers will be left with noobies and big guns. With only debut authors and giants and nothing in between, and every few years the noobies reaching the point where they are better off on their own, the publishers will die.

That's not the only reason. This is another one, and the agency pricing model another, and the obsession with dead tree books another. Now is the best time to be Indie, but to truly get passed the self-publishing stigma, I think that Indie Authors need to work together. There needs to be a grassroots community of Indie authors that readers find easy to navigate. There has to be a way of finding other books readers will like.

It has to be aimed at readers. It has to be directed at the people we are directing our work at. It has to be honest. If we recommend something shit, it damages our reputation. By finding a way to highlight the gold we can widen other indies readerships even as they widen ours. Books are read faster than they are written. By bringing Indie Authors together and sharing fans everyone's readership will grow, and we will lose some of that stigma that self-publishing has.

If a reader picks up an Indie book they might think "Wow, I thought all self-pubbed books were shit. Guess this is the exception." If they Stumbleon the grassroots community of Indie Authors where every book is quality, then their whole opinion must be revised. A self-publishing author isn't news. A grassroots, word-of-mouth community of authors that have turned their backs on Publishing because someone left a wardful of idiots in charge might be news.

For the benefit of all of us, Indie Authors need to come together. I'd love to hear other people's views on this. Leave a comment below.

Size Matters (But Not in the Way You Think)

Picture from I can has force.


Size Matters in the Indie world, but here I think smaller is better.  Blog posts are short, Twitter is short, Facebook updates are short.

On the net, everything is bitesize. 


There's a major theory that our attention spans are getting shorter.  We are not paying attention to the world around us.  We only read blogs with pictures (like the nice one of the lady with the strawberry ------------>) or short blog posts. 

Readers like things short.

There is also lots of things on the net that are free. 

With so many free things abounding, how do we make our readers buy our books?  Well, the books have to be good.  The free sample has to hook them in.  Make them desire our books. 

And give them content that's bitesize.

NY may have turned its back on novellas, but they are alive and well amongst the indies.  Cheap enough that the freebie loving internet generation doesn't immediately discount them, short enough that an author could write several a year (writing full-time, at the speed I write, I reckon I could turn out 3  novels a year - so a lot more novellas, then) and short enough that the internet generation with its goldfish attention span doesn't mind reading them.

I don't know if my attention span is as short as a goldfish, but I do know that, unlike some people who have recently experienced a complete about-face with regards to e-books, I'm not likely to get a Kindle anytime soon (they're not worth it in the UK yet) and as a result I'm much more likely to download and read a novella, especially an inexpensive one.





So let NY continue with its a year and a half to produce an over-priced and under marketed novel.  After The Guns of Pleasure and Death comes out, I'll be moving onto novellas for a while.  

How about you?  Do you fancy lots of short, good reads, or something more substantial.

Hallelujah I Broke My Head - Part 2

Off the cuff, can I say how much I love google analytics?  I'm bad (real bad) at geography, but the way I see it, if it's not in Scotland, why should I care?  

So, anyway, google analytics just told me where Malaysia is.  And it told me where Petaling Jaya is.  I did a google image search and the city is lovely.  I don't know who visited my blog from there, but thank you.  Now I know something new.

I love knowing new things. 

My broken head, part 2 carries on from My Broken Head Part 1 (the post immediately beneath this one.)

I was all for adding my Tome of Infinite Greatness to the assembled crap of the slush pile, seen on the left here.  With a title like The Guns of Pleasure and Death and a kick-ass septigenarian and a rampaging evil God it was so incredibly awesome it would stand ten miles out from the crowd.  It would blow them all away.

I am nothing if not confident.  (It would only count as arrogance if I thought I was better than I am.  But despite the fact that I am number one on this list, ((I am, go, check, look right back to number one... okay you got me, I'm not, but I should be)) I'm actually modest).

But then I started to think things through.  And I realised I didn't want to do that.  And I blogged all about my recalcitrance elsewhere.  Because I know how much you love reading about me, it's here.

And then I decided to go indie.

And that's when things got interesting.  Or difficult.  Depends on your point of view, really.






I mean, the cat probably finds this interesting.  The mouse, I'd say he's more angled towards difficult.



Interesting or Difficult: problems with POV

Weirdly I discovered my head had been subliminally altered by years of consumerism.  I thought the way I had been taught to think.  I bought the things I had been told to buy.  I was a good little Mass Media consumer junkie.  I was a 21st Century Zombie (that would make an awesome title).

I thought the way I was taught to think.  I thought e-books were wrong, evil, dirty, not real books at all.  I thought books should have a minimum of 80,000 words.  I thought novellas were wrong, evil, dirty, not real books at all.  I thought success could be measured in sales and money.  I thought Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon (the flag moves in the wind, for goodness sake).


I, who consciously rebel against conformity for no reason other than the fact that I like rebellions; I, who am in mind if not in body of a punkest mindset (I be a punk, right-o, yo ma bitch); I, who - yeah, you get the point.  I'm always that guy, the one not doing what he's supposed to be doing.  The one, you know him.  


I have problems with authority.  If I was a girl, I'd get pregnant just so I could piss in a policeman's hat.  What?  Are you saying you wouldn't?


And now my head has betrayed me.  It's a conformist.  Damn it, my head is a sheep, and it isn't a cool ass sheep like this one. 

 I love that sheep.


No, it's a lame duck type of sheep.  I'm not posting a picture because my blog is already nearly overrun with wool and animals.  Y'all might start thinking I'm Jodi Meadows' secret identity or something.  Incidentally, if you have never read her blog, you should.  It's good.  Nearly as good as mine.  It is here.

My head betrayed me, and so I broke it.  And now I'm free.  Now I see what I couldn't see before.   

 Oh, this one has gotten long, too.


Well, I shall post the third and final part of My Broken Head soon. 
 

The Value of Editing

I recently received an email containing one of my beta's comments on my manuscript.  A lot of the comments I felt didn't really apply, for instance when the comment was that only one character seemed to be introduced (there is only one main character introduced in the first two chapters)  whilst other comments were essentially lost in translation (I will continue to spell artefact with an e; sorry, but I know I'm right and spell checker agrees with me.  So does the Oxford English dictionary.  :p   )

And some comments blew me away.

Really.

My novel is about an old warrior who heads out on one last battle, and discovers the only way to win is to die.  In some ways it has been vastly influenced by David Gemmell's Legend.

I love Legend, so no big surprise there.

There's a scene in Legend where Death comes to Druss and warns him that if he goes to war he won't be coming back.  If he stays in the mountains he can have another twenty years.

Druss goes to war.  He's a hero, that's what heroes do.

There's a scene in my book just like that.  It wasn't until it was pointed out to me and I thought about it that I realised it does nothing for the story.  It slipped in out of my love for Legend.  It's coming out.

This is the importance of editing.

I sent the full manuscript out to two beta readers.  They knew nothing about the manuscript before they started reading.  I told them I wasn't fussed about crits, I just wanted people to read it.  At least 1/3rd of my story is flashbacks, an entire second story within the novel.  I didn't tell them this; I needed to know if the flashbacks were confusing to people who had no idea they were coming.

I'm waiting on them coming back in.

When they do I will do a full, intensive revision.  I'll do the fact-checking edit myself.  It's something I feel I can do myself; with every fact I'll check in 3 sources to make sure I have it right.  I'll edit my grammar and spelling again.  This is something else I feel I can do on my own.

At school I was sitting Higher level past papers at standerd grade, and at Higher I never did a single piece of work except assessments and exams, yet I consistently had the highest grades in English in the entire school.  So I know I have talent in that area.

I've managed to get someone to agree to do me a free grammar and editing pass.  She is studying editing and needs the experience, apparently.  So despite the fact that I'm confident in my own abilities, I'm still having someone else look at it.

I'm considering having someone edit the whole thing for story.  I know it will be cost prohibitive (seriously, I have a budget of £0)  but there's no underestimating the importance of a good first impression.  I don't want to turn readers off future books because the first one is a mess.

And I need to make enough money off of this one that the next will be paid for (cover + editing).

The Face of Indie Publishing

Some people are putting J A Konrath forward as the face of Indie Publishing.  I don't really buy that.  Yes, he earns enough from publishing his own stuff to survive at it, but that's all he does.  Yes, he has a blog, but he doesn't crop up all over the place declaring Indie publishing as the future and fighting our corner.  Yes, he sells a lot, but he comes from a NY published background, and brought a platform with him.

I don't really agree that we need a face of Indie Publishing, but if we have to, should it really come down to sales?  That's a very NY way of looking at things.

Surely, the poster boy of Indie fiction should be someone so passionate about it that they can't keep their big mouth shut (in the nicest possible way of course).  Someone who is everywhere on this silly internet thing, speaking up about Indie, pointing out that it's worthwhile, corrupting those who were on the fence to trying our way of thinking.

Surely the poster boy of Indie fiction is already out there, somewhere, being all over cheerleader for the indies.

Everywhere I go, everything I read, a name comes back to me.  I'm yet to find a single Indie resource, anywhere on the web, that doesn't have a certain name attached to it.  Surely that name, that person, has made themself the face of Indie fiction?

Zoe Winters is everywhere across the net, on every site I come to.  I first discovered her on Nathan Bransford's blog, leaving comments about self-publishing.  She is on Indie Reader, and on Publishing Renaissance, and anywhere else I seem to look.  She was one of the first people to join my Guild (link at the top, please join) and she blogs and tweets about Indie all the time.

If someone has to be the face of Indie Publishing, it should be someone like Zoe. 

You can read Zoe's blog here.

The Typography of Book Covers

Here are some book covers by debut authors or unknown authors.

Now okay the thumbnails are small, but the similarities are easy to spot.

First of all, how many of these books have you heard of?  I've heard of the one on the end, that's it.  I'm very intrigued by the first two.  Definitely by the first one.

So, some interesting covers.  Number three is very generic (a fantasy that has people on horseback riding through the mountains.  My Gods, I must buy this at once.  Yeah, not so much...)

But what do they have in common?

Try some more covers, not all fantasies this time.

Do you see what they have in common?

In the first four pictures, the book title is given far more importance than the author's name.  Because the title is the selling point in these cases.  "Oh, Fallow Blade," says the bookshop browser.  "I wonder what that's about."  In the second lot of four we see a shift to "Oh, the next Terry Pratchett/Dan Brown/ whoever book.  I have to buy that."

The Unique Selling Point or USP (seriously, if you want to market your books effectively, you will need to learn marketing.  And that means learning things like USPs and how to do market research and so on) alters in the second batch of books to be about the author.

Interestingly, even by book seven, Harry Potter was still considered of far more importance than JK Rowling.  That's the power of branding.

So, for the debut author it seems that you're title should be at the top of the book.  Should it?  Readers are subconsciously targeted by the layout of your cover.  If you give your name all the attention, it might suggest to readers that you are far more well known than you actually are.  And having the readers subconsciously thinking "Hmm, this is a popular author," can't be a bad thing, can it?

Oh, and it's not lying, it's marketing.  Well, it is lying, but marketing IS LYING.  And we are having to compete with companies that have multi-million pound turnovers per annum.  We need whatever help we can get.

What do you think?  Where's the title going on your next book cover?

These book images are all copyrighted.  I don't own the copyright.  I have used them simply for illustrative purposes.  I am not claiming to be the author or publisher of any of these books.  If you are the author or publisher of any of these books and you wish me to remove the image, please email me at Chriskelly82*AT*aol.com, replacing the *AT* with an @.

Thank you.   

 

When did writing become about the money?

When did it become about the Monet?  Sorry, that was awful but I couldn't resist.  Over at Pimp My Novel there's been a self-publishing debate going on, and someone pointed out that as I had a grammatical error I was deluding myself if I thought I'd get fame or fortune from self-publishing.


Okay, ignoring the fact that my blog style is conversational, and as a result I favour clarity and ease of communication over grammar, and this is not the style in which I write but rather the style in which I talk, I've got to ask, when did it become about the money?

Let's be honest.  It's statistically far more likely that you will win the lottery than become the next J K Rowling.








People don't seem to understand this, though.  Writing is seen as an easy thing anyone can do.  It is seen as something you can throw together, and send off, and the publishing world will instantly fall in love with your genius.


Well, sorry, but that's crap.


Nathan Bransford has pointed out there is a growing number of people sending in queries, and for every 1 that is readable there are 2 that stink.  My words, there.


Writing is an artform, but more than any other form of artistic expression, it is becoming about the money.  Incidentally, I don't class Hollywood movies as art; you get artsy movies, but they tend to be made by the Indies.


Painters don't paint with a market in mind.  Poets don't rhyme to industry conventions.  More and more, publisher's don't publish what is good.  Publishing is a business, as we are constantly told.  They publish good writing, we are constantly told.  No, they publish marketable writing.


Writers shouldn't have to mould themselves to a publisher's shape.  The story is the most important thing.  Some readers might read my novel and absolutely hate the fact that my heroine dies at the end.  Some people might question why I constantly point out she's going to die in my blog.  Matilda's death isn't the point of the story, it's the epilogue. 


I don't agree that winning equates surviving.  Sometimes the only way to win is to go down with your ship, so to speak.  Sometimes escaping fate reeks of deus ex machina, and pisses your readers off.  Surviving is necessary in NY styled books because if the book does well the publisher will want a sequel.


I'm sick and tired of buying Lord of the Ring clones and Wheel of Time clones and pissy fantasy books about bland heroes and heroines.  There are only so many singing forest elves and surly dwarves I can keep down, before I start regurgitating bad fantasies over my kitchen floor. 


There are better books out there.  I've found so many online.  I've read stories that rocked my world and changed the way I thought about things.  My favourite author doesn't write books (maybe I should call him a storyteller) mostly because he doesn't edit.


WHAT!!!!!!!?


That's right, he thinks every aspect of his story through, and writes it down.  Then it gets betad for grammar or spelling or clarity, but there are almost never any mistakes.  After that, he might change a word or two.


He writes the best fiction I have ever read, and I read about 200 novels a year, so I've read a lot by this point in my life. 

People assume that self-publishing authors and Indie authors couldn't get "real" publishers, so our work must suck.  Well, no.  Some of us don't want "real" publishers.  Especially not when the former CEO of Random House has pointed out that publishers don't have a clue about how to treat the e-book phenomenon. 

Some of us aren't just writers, some of us are business savvy.  We look at NY publishing, and we see a creaking, groaning buckling industry ready to collapse.  We are not lemmings throwing ourselves off cliffs.  More like climbers finding our own way down.  And some of us might turn into birds and soar to the skies.  And some of us might fall. 

And that's fine.   It will separate the weaker writers from the better ones.  It will make it easier for readers to find writers who are good.  Because ultimately readers don't care who publishes books, they just want well-written interesting stories.  And 80% of the time that's not what comes out of NY. 

I'm not writing for the money.  I know my works not "commercial," but having read the clone-fiction that so often is commercial, I wouldn't want it to be.  And I'm not saying all NY work is clone work, so if you're aiming for that, good luck.