As some of you may know, most of you probably as Google
stats tells me that vitually all of you come to this blog via my sailing blog,
I’ve recently had ‘a bit of a shock’ on the pension front. To be precise, my
pension payments have been slashed by 66%. Not TO 66% but BY 66%. Clearly,
clear to me at any rate, my cruising days (cruising in my boat for those of you
who haven’t visited via the sailing blog) are numbered. What to do?
At this point let’s review the arguments against
self-publishing. So JK, you’ve written the definitive novel of the twenty-first
century (or not, are you the best judge of that?) and now you’ve decided to
self-publish. Have you carefully proof read your work? Well you might have
done, but as you wrote it in the first place you probably won’t spot that many
errors, so you need a proof reader. A couple or three choices spring to mind.
Friends, hire a proof reader or join a writers group and hope somebody will do
the job for you. That translates into somebody who might or might not spot more
typos than you, spending money or having a complete stranger whose background
you know precious little of check your work and wanting something in return.
Having jumped through that hoop, you might consider editing
your work. Now you’ve probably already chopped bits and pieces out of it, but
can you view it with an unbiased eye? Can you hell, it’s your baby, your pride
and joy. Somebody else needs to cast a critical eye over it. What should an
editor be looking at? How about inconsistencies in the plot, shallow
characters, a bad ending, a bad beginning and is the story in fact worth
telling at all, for a few of ideas off the top of my head? Friends and writers
groups might be able to answer a couple of these questions, but can they look
past what they like and consider a genre that they might have no
interest/experience in or liking for? Back to hiring an editor, but which one?
Lucky dip in Yellow Pages, recommendations from other authors or do you
respond to adverts that pop up from
time to time on your browser or email program. Of course, you might decide to
skip both these steps and trust your judgement, I’m sure a lot of
self-published authors do. I’m also sure that many if not most self-published
authors sell a few books to family and friends and that’s it. Remember that
pension which is now 33% of what it was? A bit of a conundrum then, do you
invest in yourself or do you exercise iron will and a self-critical eye? I have
no idea what a proof reader and editor would cost, the two are totally different
functions of course so you really are looking at hiring two different people.
And now a digression. ‘They’ are watching you, you know.
Have you ever noticed that when you send an email or even make a blog entry,
you receive a bunch of ads/pop ups based on what you wrote? I have and as an
ardent aardvark fancier who thinks
it would be fun to have an ardvark
as a companion on a cross country bus
trip in Latvia, travelling in a
vintage double-decker Routemaster London
bus whilst in fancy dress, say a
little leather cocktail dress, I
shall view my ads over the next couple of days with interest.
Be that as it may, back to self-publishing (or even Self-Publishing. Nah, get enough of
those already!) and having crossed the financial hurdle of having your work
checked, or not as the case may be, you have to decide are you going to publish
your masterpiece as an ebook, a paperback or both? Let’s assume that you’re
going to publish as an ebook only, which platform do you use, Amazon,
Smashwords or something else? Using Amazon limits you to the Kindle format, but
of course, they probably are the biggest provider of ebooks. Sorted then? Well
not quite, first you have to upload your work, then you have to check the
formatting. Having done so, quite possibly several times, you’re ready to
epublish right? Not quite, how about the cover artwork, is it important for an
ebook? Well when you do a bit of searching on the Internet you find that most
of those who provide artwork for a price say it’s vital (now there’s a surprise),
a couple of honest souls say it’s important but if it’s a good story it might
not be quite so important and of course here’s plenty of people who say it’s
unimportant. Personally when I’ve brought ebooks I haven’t really noticed the
covers unless they’re exceptional, but then I haven’t really been browsing,
I’ve been after a specfic book. That leads me onto another point, but in a
moment.
Right, the book’s on Amazon UK and Amazon International and
you’ve even filled out a gazillion page form to allow Amazon International to
pay your royalties without deducting US income tax. Relax and wait for the
money to roll in. Er not quite, what about marketing? You’ve already pestered
everybody in your email address book and of course you’ve been writing a blog,
have a facebook page and are a Twit(erer). What else? Damn good question. Still
stalkingthe point I was getting to in the last paragraph. Amazon have a jolly
wheeze up their sleeve. Provided you’ve priced your book at £2.99 or above,
they pay 70% of the cover price as royalties, which of course is good, in fact
about the best deal that you’ll get for ebooks. The jolly wheeze is that as a
marketing ploy you can specify a couple of dates when readers can download your
book free and they will still pay you the royalties at the 70% of the cover
price that you originally set rate. Fantastic eh? Amazon also say that if they
decide to drop the price of your etome they will pay royalties based on the
price that you set. Nirvana (weren’t they a seventies band?)! The sting can be
if you’ve epublished elsewhere, Amazon also reserve the right to match or
better the price of your book on any platform, so if another platform does a
promotion Amazon will notice and will drop their price. In this case, your
royalties will be based on the new price and I’m not clear how quickly Amazon
‘notice’ if the promotion ends on another eplatform. One final little wrinkle
in the fine print. Have you noticed when you buy an ebook on Amazon that you
get a ‘readers who brought this also brought..’ pop-up? Your book, provided
it’s selling, will go up the Amazon sales ladder and eventually at a certain
level of sales your book will feature on the ‘readers also brought…’ pop up
BUT, the sales that come about from the promotion do NOT count towards the
level of sales needed to feature you on Amazon’s ‘readers also brought’ pop up.
Oh, and don’t forget that formatting is different on each different epub
platform. Still with me, or are you wondering what an aardvark in a leather cocktail dress would look like?
So much for ebooks. Wanna be a paperback writer? I believe
that Amazon have a ‘real’ publishing division, but of course the book’s then
only available on Amazon. There are self-publishing companies who will print on
demand (POD) and list the book with Amazon and other retail outlets BUT, the
royalty structure is different i.e. not so generous, and of course you won’t
see your book in WH Smiths, airport departure lounges or a bookstore near you,
unless you pay for a print run. Surely not a good idea as you might have paid
out several hundred pounds on editing, proof reading and artwork already. Never
mind, you’ve pounded the pavements and convinced your local store to stock your
masterpiece. Hell, for a price your POD self-publisher will even organise a
book signing for you. You take the plunge, have a good time and sell a couple
of books. You’ve even persuaded Jimmy Olson from the local rag to attend and
interview you (or paid for him to do so). You’re on your way baby. Weeell, not
so fast JK, ever heard of ‘returns’? They’re the unsold copies that booksellers
return to publishers after they fail to sell them in, oh I don’t know, the
first five or ten minutes after they put them on display at the back of the
bookstore near to the ‘books in Mesopotanian’ section. Naturally they are
returned and disposed of at your expense, not the POD self-publishing company.
You will, I am reliably informed, be billed for this.
So much for self publishing then. What about the
‘traditional’ route? First you have to get signed up by an agent. Yes you can
pitch your book direct to a publishing house but I get the feeling that most
are a bit sniffy about that, although it is changing, slowly. OK, an agent
likes your work and a good one will proof read and may even make editorial
suggestions in order to attract a publisher, free of charge but of course there
are agents’ fees to be paid out of royalties. If your agent asks for money up
front, find a new agent or make sure their ‘cut’ from your royalties is on the
quantum end of the scale rather than the cosmological end. Now the waiting
begins and it can (and has) taken up to three years for an agent to interest a
publisher in a manuscript. But eventually comes the day and you sign a
contract; hurrah!! Problems over right? You get a humungous advance and…..not
so fast. Most advances these days seem to be in the order of three or four
thousand US dollars (or the equivalent) and you might not get that in one fell
swoop either. Before that, the agent will have negotiated your contract,
retaining as many of your rights to your work as he or she can manage and
making sure that you get a different royalty structure for ebooks. In the
interim you’ve lost out on sales (i.e. money) by not self-publishing.
Conventional wisdom says that the advance from the publisher will nullify this,
but assuming you get £1.99 per book from Amazon, if you can manage to sell
fifteen hundred books (based on an advance of three thousand pounds) you’re
ahead by self- publishing. Or are you? Fifteen hundred books is a lot unless
you’re a marketing wizard. If the agent route takes three years to produce an
advance (and frankly these days that isn’t guaranteed) you need to sell five
hundred books a year/forty one a month/ten a week. Tricky JK, tricky.
For all that, my pension has just been cut BY sixty six
percent and to keep cruising (and I wonder what ‘they’ will make of cruising) I need to generate some
income PDQ. I had started on what I fondly imagined was a faintly amusing
police story. Rather than take any of my books away from Emma the Agent, I
think I’ll finish that off and self publish on Amazon, with a cover photo that
is in the public domain (i.e. free). I was about six chapters into it, so I
tell you what. How about I edit/proof read the first chapter and put it on this
blog, would you let me know what you think about it? Watch this space.
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