by admin | Apr 19, 2018 | cover, ebook, promotion, Publishing, readers, self-publishing, Uncategorized
I had an interesting exchange recently with an indie publisher who’s been in the trade for many years and seen it all. This is what he said on the issue of eBook prices. “Things are tough for every indie publisher – readers seem to have
decided that the price point for eBooks is 0.99 or free and as you know there are very small margins involved at that level”. Oh yes, the margins are very small indeed.
Self-publishing writers like me are attracted to eBooks for all sorts of reasons. The upfront costs are minimal compared with publishing ‘real’ books; you don’t have to decide how many to produce, balancing unit costs and the risk of coping with unsold stock; and there are no issues around storage. Cheap and easy, or so it appears.
But, if you want to produce an ebook to an acceptable standard, you may want help with editing, and proofreading, and the cover. All those need to be paid for, and the costs will far outweigh the cost of conversion to eBook format. And if you want people to buy your book, in whatever format, you will need to publicise and promote it. Any potential reader first needs to know that your book exists, and believe that they want to spend some money on it. Promotion takes effort and energy and can be frustrating, as you realise that ‘professional’ reviews are unachievable, the market is saturated, local media don’t care that much, and advertising is expensive.
The promotional strategy that takes least effort is simply to lower the price, and here’s where the problem starts that all of us are currently facing. If a sufficient proportion authors are prepared to sell their work for £1 or $1, or even give it away to manipulate the ‘best-seller’ lists, how can we then persuade readers to pay a proper price, for a product that represents many many hours or work? It makes no sense to under-price, and thereby under-value, a book. It cheapens the writing process, and makes me – for one – feel like a mug.
If selling for these ludicrous prices were a rarity, and a temporary way to attract buyers, fair enough. But the ‘bargain’ price has now become the ‘standard’ price and the value of our work as writers appears to be permanently 
debased.
I would love to increase my ebook sales, but right now I’m simply not prepared to reduce the price to less than a cup of tea. Am I being foolish? Maybe, but I value my self-respect.
by admin | Mar 3, 2018 | A Good Liar, character, dialogue, drafting, opening paragraph, plotting, readers, setting, Uncategorized, writing
Almost at the end of the writing and editing process on the new book now, and the last thing on the list of issues to deal with is the opening paragraph. The current version has been written and rewritten countless times over the past few months and before I’m done it’ll be started all over again. Not many lines, maybe half a dozen sentences, but I want to get it as good as I can.
It’s always a challenge. In a short space you have to give the reader a sense of place, time, character and the impending story, and every word counts, like poetry. It’ll be the first thing the curious potential reader will look at, and probably the first thing I read aloud when I’m presenting the book. I’ve read the first paragraph of ‘A Good Liar’ many times over the years since it was published and I’m still pleased with it, and I want to feel the same about the first paragraph of this book too. It’s almost there, but it’s still too clumsy. I’ve tinkered with it until the words start to blur. Now’s the time to start it all over again.
The other crucial section of course is the ending, the final few sentences. All the major plot points are sorted out by then, no more twists, just a ‘human interest’ scene and a shred of dialogue to leave the reader interested in what might come next. I think I’ve got that. So the first paragraph will keep calling to me until the deadline for sending it to the designer is upon me, or I just can’t bear to look at it any more. In either case, by the end of next week it’ll be done. Thank heaven.
by admin | Feb 3, 2018 | crime fiction, pace, plotting, readers, self-publishing, structure, Uncategorized, word count
Last week’s issue was the business of ‘murdering darlings’. This week I’m looking at the carnage and wondering – to use yet another metaphor – whether I’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
The main victim of last week’s murderous rampage through the third draft was the opening of the new story, where I took four chapters to get to the first real tension, although I thought the discerning reader would see the story’s inexorable decline into noir and be prepared to wait. There was merit in some of those early scenes, but in the end they just weren’t justifiable and out they went.
There’s no doubt that the 4th draft now gets going faster and rattles along, but when I sliced away at the rather turgid middle section as well I noticed that the final word count had shrunk by an astonishing 15,000 words, from 99,000 down to 83,000, and I began to wonder whether I’d been too enthusiastic.
I checked around. How long is too short for a thriller/crime story? My previous two had been over 100,000 words, which is probably why this one felt a little thin. But other opinions were reassuring : anything between 70,000 to 100,000, said someone whose experience I respect.
What I need to do now is step away from the text for a day or two and go back to it with fresher eyes. Have I thrown the baby away? Which fragments of the erstwhile opening chapters need to be included, to add depth without length? Sometimes all it takes is a remark or a look or a thought to enrich the reader’s view of the scene, and that will be my task for the next re-write. I also need to look out for anywhere further on in the story where reference are made to passages that are now lying on the ‘cutting room floor’.
I suspect that by the the time I’ve added in one or two potentially dramatic and useful scenes and fleshed out the 
opening details just a little more I’ll be up to the 85,000 word mark, exactly midway between the parameters suggested by expert colleague. Let’s hope so. I’m getting to the stage now when I never want to see this manuscript ever again.
Apart from any other considerations, a slightly shorter book will make for faster and thereby cheaper production, especially proof-reading. After the embarrassment of inadequate proof-reading in one of my previous books, I’ll be doing whatever it takes this time to get that the stage of the process properly covered, even it costs a lot.
by admin | Jan 7, 2018 | cover, feedback, genre, planning, Publishing, readers, research, self-publishing, Uncategorized, writing
WARNING People write books about this: one blog post can cover only the bare bones
We can split the process of going from story in your head to books available to readers (in whatever form) into three parts. As a self-published writer, you’re on your own: whatever help you need will need to be found, by you, and paid for if necessary. You can do it all yourself if you wish, and save the money, but the finished product could be an embarrassment, and most of us would want to avoid that, unless – like the current US President – you think you’re a genius and therefore infallible.
Part 1 is about getting the story out in first draft form, and will apply whether you have a publishing deal or not. 
You will need an idea, a setting – time and place – some characters who interest you and a story that hopefully will engage potential readers. Whether you plan in detail or not is your choice, and you also decide when you will write, where, for how long, alone or in collaboration with others. Personally, I do plan – although the plan changes all the time. I write at home, out in the shed if the weather’s good, upstairs if it’s not too cold, and downstairs if I need more warmth. I research and plan for several months before starting the first draft and then I try to write chapters in the order in which they’ll be read. Once I’m writing, the first draft emerges pretty quickly.
Part 2 is about everything that has to happen between the completion of a first draft and the final manuscript being ‘published’ in either paperback or ebook format.
a) story edit. You may feel you don’t need this if you’ve had feedback about the story as you go along. 
This is where the details of the story are checked to see if they hang together. Does the chronology work? Are there inconsistencies of any kind? Does every chapter/scene add to the story? Does the plot develop in a way that keeps the reader going? I like to get feedback from someone who’s not encountered the story before, beyond the initial outline. The person needs to understand how stories work, to be clear in their judgement and able to provide a critique which is helpful without being bossy – it’s your story, after all.
b) next draft, use the notes from a) to improve the quality. Any manuscript will improve with careful editing, but beware of ‘over-writing’ which makes the text feel too elaborate and heavy.
c) back to the editor for ‘line-editing’, with a focus now on the grammatical and other details, to clear up any infelicitous phrasing, poor punctuation etc. Lots of errors will be picked up. Don’t assume that corrections can be made at the proof-reading stage, where you will have very little room for correction. The final edited manuscript must be as good as you can get it.
d) the text has to be laid out in the form that will appear on the page. With or without expert help, you have to decide – depending on whether it’s on the page or the screen -on the font, the page size and layout, chapter headings, placing of page numbers, all sorts of visual details. I never know what to call this stage – probably ‘design’ is the best word to use. A professional book designer can make a book look beautiful – but it’s one more person to be paid.
e) cover design. Here again it depends how much you want to spend, and how visible the cover will actually be. On the Kindle store the dimensions will be small with not much room for detail. The cover of a paperback can be more dense. Either way, the cover is the first indication to the reader (and the bookseller/browser too) of what the book might be about. Different genres have different styles. If you want to get ideas, go to a bookshop or library and look for covers that seem to work, analyse why they do, and use those insights in either designing your own cover or briefing someone else to do it.
f) preparing and checking proofs. This is the very final check before your book is published. Once it’s out there, it’s too late to change anything. 
One of my books slipped through this stage with insufficient attention and I have regretted it ever since – far too many tiny errors that a fast reader wouldn’t even notice but a slow/picky reader did and will. There’s always a kind person out there who will send you the unbearable list of mistakes. The best way to get the proofs properly checked is to have them read by someone with a professional and very picky approach and who has never encountered your story before, at all, ever. Some of the best proof-readers read from back page to front to avoid getting so involved with the story that their reading speed picks up and mistakes are missed. We need proof-readers, even if we might not want to spend the evening with them.
I know this is all pretty basic, but I’m constantly surprised by questions from people who don’t know what self-publishing entails but think it might be right for them.
You’ll recall I said there are three stages. If you think that Stage Three is about sitting back and watching the money roll in you are gravely mistaken. Stage Three is about getting people to pay their money to read your book, and that doesn’t happen unless you do something to make it happen. More on that later.
by admin | Dec 23, 2017 | agents, marketing, Publishing, readers, self-publishing workshops, success, Uncategorized, zen
Arriving on a Caribbean island is an object lesson in slowing down. It didn’t help that four planes arrived at once, but the line for passport and customs checks took nearly two hours. 
Friday night traffic jammed the road from the airport, and by the time we had walked to a local restaurant, the meal on the plane – surprisingly good – was a distant memory.
We were a large party and the young man serving us struggled to keep track of orders. He came back twice to check drinks, and three times to check the food order before anything arrived. You could feel people getting more fretful as the time ticked by. When it finally came, the food disappeared fast, but dessert was abandoned as we trudged towards our beds, four hours on from local time and more interested in sheets than sweets.
Today while the rest of the group went sight-seeing I stayed behind to rest my injured leg, and practiced doing everything more slowly. I swam in the pool slowly, did some slow washing, lay languidly on a lounger and drank a bottle of beer one small sip at a time. Delicious. And I also did something I haven’t done for too long – read my copy of ‘The Author’ (quarterly magazine of the Society of Authors) from cover to cover. Normally I skim the headlines and read whatever looks most interesting, but in the spirit of a slow day I started at the beginning and read on to the end. All sorts of unexpectedly good things revealed themselves, most memorably a piece by a Turkish author currently imprisoned about the life of the mind which nourishes him in the bleakest of circumstances. That helped to put things in perspective
More prosaic, but still important, were references in various articles to the choices that minor novelists like myself face. Fundamentally, what are we really trying to do? It’s a question I put right up front when I do workshops on ‘Successful self-publishing’: what constitutes success? Every author will have their own answer, and these days whether you’re self-published or part of the mainstream commercial publishing world, writing just for profit is increasingly problematic. We know that most commercially published fiction actually makes a loss, and even if you keep outgoings to a minimum by self-editing and going for ebook only, the result may not financially justify the hours of time and effort invested in the project.
From my slow reading of various reports of events, the advice to fiction writers seems to be ‘Be true to yourself; enjoy the reactions of readers, regardless of how many there may be; find a community of writers (and agents, publishers etc for those who have them) to engage with and be supported by.’ Nothing new there then. No blinding flash of revelation, just a message of internal efficacy and relatively low expectations. Of course close scrutiny and replication of commercially successful books, and assiduous courting of the ‘blogsphere’ might pay off financially. But who wants to spend their precious time doing that? Not me.
The zen of the art of writing seems, ultimately, to be about doing what pleases and satisfies you, and letting go of the urge to borrow other people’s definitions of ‘success’.
by admin | Dec 16, 2017 | costs, crowd-funding, hardback format, marketing, Pricing, Publishing, readers, reviews, selling, stories, Unbound, Uncategorized, West Cumbria
The papers this weekend are commenting on, and apparently bemoaning, the decline in sales of the ‘literary’ novel over the past two years. Some of the articles suggest that sales of this or that novel might increase when it’s published in paperback, usually a year or so after the hardback.
I read all this with some bemusement. Firstly, I’m struck yet again by the artificiality of genre distinctions that the publishing world seems fixated on. Who decides whether a novel is ‘literary’ or ‘genre’ fiction – I think that’s the main divide, before the ‘genre’ is further sub-divided? I’ve seen it defined that character drives ‘literary fiction’, and plot drives ‘genre fiction’, but surely these are points along a spectrum, not a dichotomy? It might be easy to identify novels at either end of the spectrum, but after that the distinction falters.
The ‘literary’ tag may have to be reconsidered, especially as it now seems to be connected to poor sales, which is increasingly the traditional publishers primary concern. We’ve all heard that a very high proportion of published books lose money, and that the business is rescued from financial disaster only by a few block-busters. Some of these massive sellers can be predicted – the ghastly Dan Brown, for example – whereas others come out of nowhere, as predictable as a win on the lottery. Does any other business trying to make a profit organise itself like this?
And if we’re talking about sacred cows in need to disposal, what is the point of publishing novels in hardback form first and making anyone who doesn’t want a heavy expensive tome wait for a year to get the version they actually want to buy? This is a mystery, and clearly, it’s not working. This time next year, and the year after, will publishers still be fretting about poor sales of the hardback versions and still planning to keep on churning them out? I admit to be baffled about it all.
Many readers like a ‘real’ book – I do myself: the paperback format fulfils this need. Ebooks are also useful in some circumstances. So who wants to read a hardback, besides a tiny number of picky traditionalists who profess to have ‘standards’ and probably insist on esoteric and expensive ways of eating and drinking as well as reading?
My recent and unsuccessful dalliance with ‘Unbound’ crowd-funded publishing came across this issue all the time. Many of my readers, keen to see the new book as soon as it comes out,were puzzled that they would have to pay twice as much as normal for a ‘special edition’ hardback when they would actually prefer a paperback, lighter to carry around and easier hold with one hand in bed, for instance. ‘That’s the way traditional publishing works’ I would lamely explain, and I had no answer to the inevitable next question – ‘Why?’
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