Karen Sandler

Tag: self-publishing

  • If #WeNeedDiverseBooks, Why Not Just Self-Publish?

    diverse-logo-sA while back, I wrote this post. I ranted about how during the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign, some white folks jumped on the hashtag to flog their own books (which may or may not have been truly diverse). I got into a mostly polite back and forth with an anonymous commenter who among other things suggested that if diverse authors can’t sell their diverse books traditionally, they should just self-publish.

    On the surface, this sounds like a splendid idea. Self-publishing has become a much more acceptable route to publishing, and there have been some mega-successes (Hugh Howey and Barbara Freethy come to mind).

    But how many self-published authors have actually made a go of it? According to Bowker, in 2012 alone (the most recent statistics I could find), nearly 400,000 books were self-published. So that’s a lot of people striking it rich, right?

    Not so much. According to this study by Digital Book World and Writer’s Digest, the bulk of self-published authors (about 82%) make less than $5000 per year. The chart they included with the study shows that 19% of the 82% segment make nothing. Zero, nada, zilch. And the chart also indicates that the percent of self-published authors dwindles even more in the higher income brackets.

    So right out the gate, if a diverse author went the self-published route, they, like all self-published authors, have a lesser chance of being compensated for their work. Therefore, by being channeled into self-publishing instead of into traditional, diverse authors are almost certainly placed in a lesser position financially.

    So a diverse author self-publishing is very likely going to make less money. How about if we move to the other end of the financial issue–what it costs an author to self-publish. I can speak with some authority on this since I have a dozen or so indie-published books up for sale. Here’s what you have to pay for if you’re not publishing traditionally:

    • Editing — If you hope to have any credibility as an author, you need a clean, professionally edited book. Traditional publishers do this in-house, but self-published authors have to pay someone for this service. Costs can be $1000 and up per book
    • Cover art — You think you can do this yourself? Maybe some can, but most authors are masters of the written word, not the visual arts. Even using royalty-free clipart, authors usually don’t have an eye for composition, nor do they own the pricey programs need to put the elements together. An unappealing, amateurish cover can lose you sales, so you’ll want to hire someone experienced to do it for you. Expect to pay $100 and up for cover art per book. It will be even more if you’re going to print rather than just ebook since there’s more work involved in a full cover.
    • Formatting/Uploading — If you’re a technical whiz, you can probably handle the tedious work of getting your book properly formatted and uploaded onto the myriad of sites that sell ebooks. But as someone who has an MS in computer science, I can tell you that this process has been a trial even for me. The worst thing for any author would be to put up a book that’s riddled with errors. Believe me, readers notice and will warn off other readers. So you may need to go the route I did–hire a virtual assistant to do the work. Depending on what their hourly rate is and the formatting problems the VA encounters, I’d say it could be $50 and up per book.
    • Marketing — There are a lot of free avenues for marketing/promoting your book–Twitter, Facebook, e-newsletters. In my opinion, it’s pretty obnoxious to see a million tweets or FB posts urging people to buy your book. But it’s free…and it’s also rarely effective. A lot of people barely register those “Buy me, buy me” tweets, or ignore them entirely. So you might need to go with promotion that costs money, many of which start at $50 or so and go up into the stratosphere cost-wise.

    So before a diverse author can get their book up on the virtual shelves of online bookstores, they’ve had to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars. Money that the statistics show they are unlikely to recoup. But there are many out there (like my anonymous commenter) who think that self-publishing is a viable way for diverse books by diverse authors to get into the hands of readers.

    Expecting diverse authors, but not white authors, to go the indie route is a ghettoization of publishing. Let’s say two authors, one white, one diverse, both have a well-written, publishable book. We’re saying to the white author, “Step right up to this line, the traditional publishing line. We’ll pay for everything, and give you an advance to boot.” Then we’re telling the diverse author, “You have to go to the self-publishing line over there. You’ll have to take all the risk of getting your book published.”

    Just as white shouldn’t be the default for characters in books, self-publishing should not be the default path for diverse authors.

     

  • Adventures in the e-Trade – Part 2

    I decided to start my foray into self-publishing with my two Berkley Jove Haunting Hearts books, Unforgettable and Night Whispers. These were the only two books for which I did not have an electronic file. There were my original files, but I wanted to start with the final edited book. That I had only in printed form.

    So I sacrificed one author copy of each book, sending them off to Blue Leaf Book Scanning. Since I was willing to let them cut the books up to make scanning easier, the cost for scanning two 300+ page books was quite reasonable.

    They did a decent job, but it still took a good long time to correct the errors. Besides misinterpreting letters (a cl might become a d), paragraphs throughout were often chopped in two mid-sentence or even mid-word. Sometimes italics became plain text, so I had to flip through the physical book to make sure text that I wanted italicized was indeed italicized.

    I made several passes to correct scanning errors, then at least one editing pass. My cover artist was busy with the covers for the first two books (the final for THE IN-BETWEEN, formerly UNFORGETTABLE, is above), so when the manuscript was ready, so was the cover.

    But nailing down the typos and polishing the prose was only the first step. Next I had to make sure the manuscript was in a format that would easily and correctly convert to Kindle (I’m mainly selling my books through Amazon). I had to make sure that where I wanted blank lines, I had to use the before/after spacing option in Word rather than just hit enter. I had to make sure I was using indents for each paragraph rather than tabs. Without these two crucial fixes, the converter would ignore all my paragraph indents and blank lines. I of course had to do manual page breaks where I wanted a new chapter to begin.

    I then had to wrestle with the converter program I’d decided to use, Mobipocket Creator. In my opinion, the interface is a little goofy and klugy. It asks for information (pricing, for instance) that you will then have to enter again when you put the book up on Amazon. It is not at all clear how to, say, change the cover art or substitute in a new book file without deleting everything and starting all over. I am a very experienced computer user, but many aspects of Mobipocket Creator baffled me.

    I did finally get the book into Kindle format (which I could check out using my PC Kindle reader). I discovered with subsequent books (I’ve done seven so far and intend to do two more) that the best time to check for those final little issues is using your PC Kindle reader. It’s far easier to navigate through the book there than later when you’ve uploaded it on Amazon’s website.

    Once the converted file was ready, I filled in the forms on Amazon, uploaded my cover image and .prc file and waited the couple days for that book to be published. In the case of the first two books, I went ahead and also submitted them to Smashwords as well. That necessitated me inserting certain language on the copyright page, so I had to have a separate version of the book just for Smashwords. Assuming you meet the qualifications, Smashwords will put up your book on Koby, Nook (Barnes & Noble), Sony, and the iStore unless you opt out of any of those venues. It’s been a little trickier getting them taken down (which I’m trying to do, to make these first two books exclusive on Amazon as the rest are), but I think I have it nailed now. Their customer service is not as responsive as I might like, but they have a lot of authors to take care of.

    Side note: Why am I going exclusive with Amazon? Because in their KDP select program you get a couple of bennies: free days (up to 5 where you can offer your book free) and inclusion in their Amazon Prime library. Also, I found it tedious working with Smashwords, and after selling a whopping 3 books there, it didn’t seem worth the effort. I confess to a certain amount of apprehension contributing to the unvanquishableness that is Amazon, but I’m doing well there sales-wise and making some decent money. Hard to pass that up.

    Going back to The In-Between (formerly Unforgettable) and Dark Whispers (formerly Night Whispers), it was a whole rigamarole figuring out I wanted to change the titles and author names after I’d published them. The cover art change wasn’t a problem, since my artist is so easy to work with. And it was simple enough changing the book title and author on Amazon. But I couldn’t make heads nor tails of how to accomplish the same task on Smashwords. Apparently there’s a way, but I never figured it out. I ended up abandoning one account and adding a second one, which led to no end of confusion when I decided to unpublish my books from there.

    So, be sure of your title and author name before you request your cover art and start the publishing process. Otherwise you’ll be chasing your tail trying to fix things when you really just want your book up for sale so you can start building an audience.

    One last note regarding self-publishing. As I mentioned in a previous post, all the books I’ve put up on Amazon are books I’d already made money on, that had already been edited. They’d proven themselves by having been either traditionally or small press published.

    I won’t tell anyone not to self-publish a book they’ve either not been able to sell traditionally, or are choosing not to go the traditional route at the outset. But I beg you not to toss any old bowl of spaghetti against the publishing wall (i.e., to see what sticks). Get the book vetted first by writer friends you trust, or beta readers, or pay an editor if you can afford it. I’ve discovered some dreadful books using Kindle’s sample feature and more often than not, they’re (a) self-published and (b) the only book the author’s written. Pul-leeze, learn your craft first.

    Any questions? Ask ’em in the comments.

  • Adventures in the e-Trade – Part 1

    Kensington Books published my first two romance novels, Just My Imagination and Table for Two, back in 1998 for their Precious Gems program. Not long afterward, I sold two to Berkley Jove’s Haunting Hearts line, Unforgettable and Night Whispers, which were released in 1999. (side note: when my Night Whispers came out, there were two other books available with the same title, one by Judith McNaught).

    Within that same time period, I sold my first e-book, Eternity, a science fiction romance, to Hard Shell Word Factory, which was strictly an e-publisher at that time. I later ended up selling them one other original romance, The Right Mr. Wrong, and an original middle-grade book, Time in a Bottle. In 2000, when rights to my two Kensington books reverted to me, I sold those to Hard Shell too. One other romance, Chocolate Magic, which originally came out in hardcover and then trade paperback from Thorndike Press, eventually became a Hard Shell e-book as well.

    But I didn’t stop with selling rights to those early books only to Hard Shell. I discovered the large print market and was able to sell all  of my first six romances as hardcover large print. That meant that for Just My Imagination and Table for Two, I sold various rights to three publishers within five years.

    This is all prologue to what I’m up to now. Rights for all of the above-mentioned books reverted to me August 2011. Since then, I’ve been republishing the books one by one as Kindle e-books.

    It’s been a steep learning curve. First, the cover. I am not a visual artist. I just don’t have the patience to search through online clip art, nor the talent to put images together into a cover. No clue at all as to what would look good.

    I was lucky enough to find a cover artist who’s quick and reasonably priced. She uses royalty-free clip art to keep costs down, and has a good eye as to what elements work for a given story. I’m astute enough to look at what she’s done and suggest changes as needed, but I don’t have to create the cover myself.

    My second problem was the author name issue. In the last couple years, I’ve switched from romance to the children’s market (young adult). It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want my YA readers to figure out that I’d written romances as Karen Sandler (Harlequin is still selling all the romances I wrote for them under that name). It was more a marketing issue. I didn’t want to tweet about my romances using my @karensandlerya identity on Twitter, for instance. I didn’t want to advertise my romance novels on my karensandler.net website. Which meant I needed a new identity.

    I’ve always wanted to use my mom’s maiden name, Russo, as part of a pen name. With that as my surname, I only needed a first name. I had the perfect choice right at my fingertips, so to speak–Kayla, the name of my main character in my YA book, Tankborn. So my romance identity became Kayla Russo.

    I also started thinking that maybe I ought to be retitling my books. For the most part, I was going for something a little less generic. I also wanted a fresh start on the books. It’s not that I wanted to fool anyone into thinking these are brand-new books. There’s a note inside each one identifying the original title and publisher which a reader can find by downloading a sample. But I wanted to catch the eye of those who might not have heard of me before with (hopefully) more clever titles.

    Unfortunately, I didn’t make the decision to change my name or the titles until I’d not only had the covers created, but had also put up the first two books for sale. Having my cover artist make the name/title change was the easy part. Getting the books updated on the venues I’d submitted them to was a whole other story. I’ll get into that in part 2.

     

  • LTUE – First Day

    The nighttime view from my hotel room.

    I should confess up front that I got to far fewer workshops than I’d planned today because I spent so much time talking to some really great people. I’d slept in a little so it was 10am before I traversed the obstacle course of road construction to the UVU campus. This involved dashing across streets, serpentining around the roundabout, and bobbing and weaving amidst crazy drivers.

    My intention was to catch the rest of the panel discussion, What Exactly Does an Editor Do? that included my editor, Stacy Whitman. But before I got there, I crossed paths with an unpublished writer who had just finished a book and wanted to know what happens next. We ended up finding a quiet corner while I explained to her about agents and submissions, pointing out the pitfalls she might encounter. So I didn’t walk into Stacy’s panel discussion until about the last 15 minutes.

    Next stop was Middle Grade Books for Boys which Stacy was moderating. My main focus is on young adult, but I do have one MG book that I’ve considered expanding into a series, so I wanted to get more information for that age group. The panelists were Tyler Whitesides (Janitors) and E.J. Patten (The Hunter Chronicles).

    First, they clarified the basics. The age range for MG is 8 through 12, and the length is 50,000 to 70,000 words. It isn’t just a matter of age or length, though. The themes of an MG book have to be age-appropriate. The stories are more adventure-based and if there is any romance, it’s puppy love.

    They mentioned that some MG series do transition to YA within the series (Harry Potter is a prime example), but in general, there is not as much of a market in YA for boys. Boys tend to go directly from MG to adult fantasy. Boys also love non-fiction.

    A writer should think about what boys like to figure out how to write for that market. Characters should be a year or two older than the target audience because kids read up. Age 13 is probably the top age for MG characters.

    Boys like slapstick and potty humor. Kids in general like familiarity and will read the same books over and over.

    After the MG panel, I got caught up in another conversation or two and so arrived late at the panel discussion on self-publishing. Since I’ve self-pubbed some of my backlist, I was interested in what new information I might glean. I confess (again–I must be channeling my Catholic upbringing), I was a bit put off by some of what was presented in this panel. When asked “what works” in the way of promotion, the answers varied from the “throw whatever you can out there, maybe something will work” to “book bombs so you’ll be on the bestseller list for a day.” A couple suggestions sounded reasonable–put up a free short story to entice readers to check out your book, and also to look for long term success rather than immediate short term results.

    One panelist’s answer to “What do you find frustrating?” was that formatting, editing, and promoting take so much time, it impacts how much time there is left to write. Where I see myself as a writer, these folks have to be publisher/writers and I don’t think the proportion of writing to publishing would satisfy me.

    But here’s what really raised my hackles. At one point during the Q&A, someone in the audience asked “So, should I self-publish first, or go to the traditional route first?” The panel’s answer–self-publish first because a traditional publisher might discover you that way. I wanted to stand up and shout, No! That’s not how it works! Your odds of having a traditional publisher discover your self-pubbed book out of tens of thousands are as bad as hitting the lottery. Self-publish if that’s what you believe in, but don’t do it as a route to traditional publishing. I kept my opinion to myself. Well, until now.

    Next up, a screenwriting related workshop I had arranged ahead of time to jump in on. Michaelbrent Collings and Blake Casselman were kind enough to let me horn in on their already scheduled panel. They had planned for the panel to be entirely Q&A so I fit in pretty well. I like to think that I brought something to the discussion having spent a number of years writing screenplays.

    I headed to lunch (side note: it is apparently possible for a 3 Musketeers candy bar to age to the point of rock-hardness, based on the one I bought at the UVU cafeteria) then retraced my perilous path back to the hotel for a break. After my R&R, I again danced around Orem traffic to return to campus, got lost for a bit in the IT department (thank you, help desk for getting me on the wireless network), then found Stacy again. She introduced me around to a few more people, I got into a few more lengthy conversations, and never did make it back into a workshop. My bad.

    Stacy and I connected again later and she introduced me to the lovely ladies who became my dinner companions (Gwynne Meeks & Audrey Gonzalez). She also gave me an intro to James Dashner (The Maze Runner) with whom Stacy promised she would “hook me up, Utah-style” for dinner Friday night.

    Japanese Pan Noodles at Noodles & Company with Gwynne and Audrey, back to UVU for the tail end of Stacy’s last panel (where I learned about a story featuring an LDS vampire systematically killing her family–cool!), then we added another new friend, Brittany Heiner, and the four of us ventured out for incredibly yummy ice cream at Cold Stone.

    I am full of knowledge and tasty ice cream. It has been a perfect day.

  • Adventures in Self-Publishing

    I’ve finally dipped my toe into the self-publishing waters with a paranormal romance titled UNFORGETTABLE. UNFORGETTABLE was originally published in 1999 by Berkley/Jove for their Haunting Hearts line. Long before paranormal story lines became so mainstream, Berkley’s Haunting Hearts line published books that all featured ghosts of some kind. In the case of UNFORGETTABLE, the ghosts are Laura and Johnny, teen sweethearts who died in (and are haunting) a 1955 Ford Fairlane.

    The most common question I’m asked as a writer is “where do you get your ideas?” so here’s the story behind the story for UNFORGETTABLE. Years ago, our family was on a camping trip in Northern California. We’d taken something away from my older son (a video game, maybe? I don’t remember) and had locked it in the glove box. A determined kid, my son managed to get the glove box open, but he broke the lock in the process. Which meant he had to buy us a new lock.

    A replacement from the car dealer was exorbitantly expensive, more than my son’s modest allowance could afford. So we decided to trek down to the local “pick-and-pull” wrecking yards. We spent a couple hours wandering the lots looking for the part, which we eventually found. Along the way, we passed one totaled car after another. Sometimes we’d look inside and see what had been left behind–fast food wrappers or a ball cap, or even toys. It was a hot July day, but it gave me a chill thinking about who had been the occupants of those cars when the accident happened. Did they survive uninjured? Could someone have possibly been killed?

    That visit to the pick-and-pull planted the seed of an idea in my mind. It sprouted roots and with time, it eventually developed into a full-fledged book. I’d written maybe a third of the book when heard a Berkley editor speak at the San Francisco chapter meeting of Romance Writers of America. That editor suggested to those at the meeting that if you can, it’s best to submit to new editors. She gave us a couple names and soon after, I submitted a partial to one of those new editors at Berkley. Since I’d already published three books at that point, the editor was willing to offer me a contract based on an unfinished book. The rest, as they say, is history.

    As I said, that was back in 1998-1999. I had the rights reverted to me several years ago, sold large print rights sometime later, then the book sat on my hard drive for years. I finally got off my duff recently and sent a copy out to be scanned, then found an artist who could do the cover for a modest price.

    Then I had to get the darn thing properly formatted for Amazon. The problem was, I started off in the wrong direction, using fancy and over-large fonts for my titles and chapter headings. I also encountered contradictory instructions. One guide said don’t use page breaks for a new chapter, but Amazon said yes, use page breaks. The latter turned out to be accurate. Without page breaks, the chapters all run into one another.

    The scan, while good overall, wasn’t perfect. Many, many paragraphs broke to a new paragraph prematurely (like in the middle of the paragraph) and the only way to find the bad breaks was to scroll through slowly enough to visually scan for them. Spell check can fix a multitude of sins, but not those erroneous paragraph breaks unless the break results in a misspelled word. For instance, “running” chopped into “run” and “ning” it will flag. “Backward” split into “back” and “ward” it won’t.

    Then there were the weird characters sprinkled throughout–forward slashes and numeral 7 in place of I, the occasional quote mark interpreted as superscript, and these odd “optional hyphens.” The problem with the optional hyphens was that they were only visible when the “show all” option was turned on. When I finally spotted them, I couldn’t figure out what exactly they were called, which I had to know so I could do a search and replace for them. After much trial and error, I stumbled on “optional character” and was able to delete them all.

    Then there was the spacing issue. Every time I converted the file to Kindle format, all the blank lines would be gone. They were stripped out in the conversion. I finally found a solution online. Where I wanted space, I had to go into the paragraph option and define 12 point or 24 point spacing before and after the paragraph, depending on how much white space I wanted.

    There were other little bumps in the road that I’m not remembering (blocked them out of my mind, maybe). But the book is finally up on Amazon, waiting for hordes of readers to discover it and buy it. Feel free to go take a look. If you own a Kindle, or have the Kindle software on your phone, iPod, or PC, you can check out the free sample and be awestruck by my masterful formatting. Or maybe you’ll find the typos I undoubtedly missed. Feel free to leave a comment to let me know if I’ve blundered. Because with an e-book, I can fix the typos after it’s published. Isn’t that cool?