Want to E-Publish? A Guide for Everyone:
How to be Your Own Publisher, Marketing Director, Layout Designer, Publicist, etc., And Still Make Money Without Going Crazy
Malissa M. Kent
Published by La Licorne Press at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Malissa M. Kent
All Rights Reserved
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Table of Contents
1.4. Publication Channels: What’s Right for You?
2.1. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing
3.3. Smashwords’s Sales Tracker
4. Beyond Publishing: Marketing and Publicity
4.1. Creating a Marketing Plan
4.4. Forums and Other Networking Sites
Appendix 3: Social Media Marketing
This e-book was envisioned as a documentation of the research I did when I decided to e-publish, and of my experiences with e-publishing as an author who had no social media or web presence and is moderately tech-savvy. I’ve quoted many sources that informed my e-publishing decisions and marketing strategies. There are so many excellent resources on formatting and marketing (many of them free) that I didn’t even try to reproduce them here; instead I’ve created a synthesis of everything I read, presenting the most interesting and salient passages. If you find these helpful or interesting, you can find all the sources in my Works Cited.
I’ll be updating this e-book on a monthly basis with the newest information from the publishing world and breaking developments (along the lines of Amazon’s KDP Select). I hope you find the information I present here useful in your e-publishing endeavors!
I like to think that I was “there” for the e-publishing revolution. At the Denver Publishing Institute (DPI) in 2009, everyone in attendance from the publishing industry agreed that e-publishing was a bad thing for an author’s career, on par with vanity publishing. Paying someone else to publish you, rather than being paid when you’re published? Perish the thought! When I came back from DPI, I interned with a literary agent near Seattle, who told me to reject any author who mentioned in their query letter that they had either self-published or e-published. Six weeks after DPI, I was hired as a contractor at Amazon.com to edit e-books. That position changed into vetting covers of e-books, and then morphed into reviewing copyright of e-books.
I’ve been a writer for as long as I can remember. I have an epic Fantasy novel that’s the first in a series that I’m sending around to agents. I’ve won some awards and been published in some literary journals. My day job working with e-books more or less forced me to take the medium more seriously. After two years of astronomical e-book sales growth and the arrival of multiple e-readers, e-publishing platforms, formats, and e-bookstores, e-publishing is no longer the scarlet letter ‘E’ that will get you rejected by agents immediately.
In fact, Wendy Strothman, a literary agent who visited my Creative Writing MFA program, Stonecoast, in July 2011, said that she believes an author who has e-published shows “wherewithal” (of course, also proving that you have a solid audience certainly wouldn’t hurt). Brandon Sanderson, a best-selling author of Fantasy novels, suggested that new authors self-publish short works while shopping their longer, novel-length works with agents and publishers. A self-published author on Amazon, John Locke, sold over 1 million e-books, joining the ranks of Charlaine Harris and James Patterson, and made news by signing a print distribution deal with Simon & Schuster (in other words, print publishing is far from dead…even a Kindle ‘millionaire’ wants the cachet of a print publisher). It seems that e-publishing is becoming a legitimate way to make money and spread your works without a traditional publisher; and rightly so, according to Mark Coker, who explains that “Ebook* sales have been increasing over 100 percent per year the last few years, according to the latest industry research, while traditional print book sales have stagnated or declined” (loc. 156)**.
It’s one thing to think about e-publishing, but quite another to actually do it. I approached my e-publishing ventures as an experiment, something that I can share with my fellow MFA students as part of my graduation presentation. I started out with a few questions that--on the surface--seemed relatively simple: How easy is it to e-publish, exactly? What do successful self-published e-book authors have that others don’t? If it’s so easy to self-e-publish, why isn’t everyone doing it--and making money? And how can I do it and make money?
A major part of the response to each of these questions is that self-publishing requires authors to be their own publisher. It’s not just putting your work out there and waiting for it to sell. It’s doing all the work of a normal publishing house--all the work that many new authors take for granted. How many new authors even realize that there’s a whole department at publishing houses dedicated to cover art? Or to layout and design every aspect of the book? I’ve heard many authors say that their publishers sell their books; what does that mean for a self-published author? Many established authors have also told me that they no longer have to promote because of their fan base, and they’d have no idea how to promote if they were to start over today. To tell the truth, before I started thinking about this project, I barely thought about promotion beyond book signings--which are, of course, irrelevant with e-books.
As an author who decides to self-publish e-books, you must be able to promote yourself or be lost in the crush. There are probably near half a million individual e-books on the Kindle store (disregarding public domain and ‘spam’ works), not to mention those found on other e-book retailers. How do you stand out from that crowd? And maybe even more importantly, how do you do so while holding down a day job and a social life? Based on my research and experimentation with e-publishing two short stories, “Mind Melding” and “The Match Makers,” it’s possible for a new author to become an e-publisher without going crazy, even if you (like me) are just moderately tech-savvy and have no social media platform or web presence to speak of--provided that you embrace a self-publishing lifestyle of creating quality works to publish and promoting them heavily on social media and e-reading communities on a regular basis.
The reason that we have a publishing industry, as anyone on the street can tell you, is that some books are simply too terrible to be put forth into the world. This doesn’t mean that only good books are published--I’d argue against that any day--but it does mean that one can expect a certain standard when picking up a physical book. You can expect that most of the typos have been corrected, that the pages are correctly numbered, and that chapter 3 follows chapter 2 and not chapter 17. You know that somewhere, a group of people believed that this was a good enough story to put in all the work necessary to publish it.
As a self-publisher, it can be easy to feel alone; and yet this first step in the process is the one where you’ll need the most feedback. Whether it’s figuring out which of your works are fitting to be published or designing a cover and laying out the format of your e-book, you’ll want to consult with others as much as possible; even when choosing your publication channels, you’ll want to do some research into other people’s experiences before settling on any choices.
When you’re self-publishing, you don’t have an agent sifting through your work and deciding what’s fit to publish. This can be both liberating and constraining; there are no nay-sayers to hold you down, but there are also no devotees ready to defend your work to every editor in New York until one of them breaks down enough to read the entire 800 page manuscript. Few authors--especially those who are just starting out--can honestly evaluate their own work. Some, like my best friend, hate every word they put on the page and need lots and lots of positive reinforcement to see any good thing in it; writers like this are unlikely to self-publish unless convinced to do so by someone else. Other writers, like James Patrick Kelly, are of the opposite mindset. Kelly says in the introduction to his e-zine, Strangeways 2, that “If I am not thoroughly convinced that the story I’m working on is not only my very best but the greatest story ever written ever in all the multiverses, I couldn’t proceed. Alas, once I finish and start to come down off my narrative high, I begin to get some perspective” (loc. 27). Thanks to this perspective, Kelly knows that not all of his work is great--but some authors simply never get that perspective. Kelly’s perspective came years after publishing short stories that “I would not ask anyone who is a fan of my stuff to suffer through…” (loc. 19-27).
So how do you decide which work is worth putting online? Kelly uses baselines like editor and reviewer reactions (loc. 27), which almost certainly won’t be available to new authors. Yet that second opinion is essential, especially if you want to build up a supportive readership. I used the second opinions gleaned from workshops and the short stories that Kelly critiqued during my second semester at Stonecoast; writing programs like Stonecoast are the perfect testing grounds for how well something will be received by a wider audience, after all. Writer’s groups are a great solution, as well, though it can take a bit of time to find one that’s as serious about writing as you are.
So step one is knowing what to publish, though “your book doesn’t have to be a great book, just a good, solid book, with a good plot and an interesting story line. Oh, and a good edit” (Mathias 3).
Those last five words are step two: “oh, and a good edit.” As a reader, typos and outright errors drive me crazy. I triple-check all my works with a red pen, searching out hidden mistakes for hours at a time. Between my own compulsive editing and the checks I received in workshops and critiques, I considered my work well-edited. But authors who aren’t lucky enough to be coming fresh out of workshops or great writing groups, or who know that they’re not grammatically inclined, need to do more than just run Microsoft Word’s spell check (I hope that no one ever uses its grammar check. Ever.). There are plenty of freelance editors who will give you various levels of edit for your work at varying rates. It may be hard to part with money just to have someone make sure your commas are in the right places, but it will pay off in the end. Do you want readers giving your e-book a 1-star review because of your grammar or spelling mistakes? I didn’t think so. Remember, this is what editors in publishing houses are paid to do, and a published print book will likely go through at least two full edits, a copyedit, and a proofread.
Of course, there are some books published by major houses that have flagrant errors when they’re printed--and readers are just as eager to point these out as they are on self-published e-books. A spelling, grammar, punctuation, or character consistency error is often enough to pull a reader out of the world of the book; and what could possibly be more frustrating to a reader when they’re engrossed in the story? The best way to keep your readers happy is to make them forget not only that the story isn’t real, but also that there’s an author out there who slaved away to write it. Let them live fully in the world you’ve created.
This is probably as good a place as any to mention titles. Titles are incredibly important, and you’d be surprised how infrequently an author’s choice of title is the one that’s actually used for a published book. Since you’re your own publisher and agent and (potentially) your own editor as well, you’ll have to come up with your own title. I was lucky enough to hit on a good title for “Mind Melding” without too much work, though that wasn’t the story’s first name; in fact, it’s still called “Trading Minds” on my computer.
The title for my second story was much harder. It’s a Rumpelstiltskin retelling, so I called it “Say My Name” in my computer, “Rasp” for workshop, and “The Match Makers” for publication (because the Fairy Godmother provides princes to match with Rumpelstiltskin’s princesses). I wish I had followed Douglas J. Klostermann’s advice in his The E-Book Handbook before choosing either name, though: “Be sure to do a Google and an Amazon search for your book title to make sure the same or similar title is not already being used” (loc. 484). So simple, so genius! It turns out there’s a Star Trek book called Mind Meld, and a number of books with “Match Maker” in the title, including one about tennis. Luckily, Mind Meld is only available on Barnes & Noble’s website, and the “Match Makers” issue is mostly on Amazon.
Let’s put Klostermann’s advice to practical use. “Match Makers” isn’t doing nearly as well as “Mind Melding,” and I think that part of that may be due to the name. I rather like the sound of “Say My Name,” especially when it has to do with Rumpelstiltskin. However, a Google and an Amazon search quickly showed what a bad choice that is. On Google, my poor e-book would have to compete with Destiny Child’s song of the same name (and how could it possibly hope to do that?!). On Amazon, it would have to compete with eight books and e-books of the same (or very similar) name; and the top two are erotica. Certainly not the digital shelves I want my short story classified in! So for now, “Match Makers” remains.
Just as there are many services for editing, there are many services for creating covers. And let’s admit it; we all know that readers really do judge a book by its cover, no matter how much we’d like to think they don’t. Creating a good, professional cover is important because “Part of the job you have just taken on as promoter/publisher of your own book is generating content for posts, such as tweets, and Facebook promotions. Using good cover art generates a lot of profile visits. You can post your cover on Facebook and/or a blog post and ask for input about it” (Mathias 6). In other words, you can use your cover to interact and build connections with your readers, which will hopefully draw them back to buy more of your work.
I created a cover for “Mind Melding” rather quickly, with the intent that it be temporary until my graphic designer friend could design a more professional cover for me. I used a photo I’ve had sitting on my desktop for years--I think it’s really cool, a sort of whirlpool effect I created by manually moving around my camera while focusing on a French forest. I thought it fit “Mind Melding” well, since part of the story is about the disorienting effect a mind meld has on the host. I threw my title and name on it using Paint and considered it good enough as a placeholder cover. It was replaced as soon as my artist friend was able to create a professional cover for me; and sure enough, when I posted the new cover on my Facebook wall and asked for feedback my fans responded quickly and positively.
Besides using your own photos, there are ways to create free covers yourself; you can use clip art, for instance, or any of the many stock photo websites. But Harper cautions, “Try to avoid creating book covers from 3-D e-Book templates you often find free on different websites… They don't match the 2-D covers in the Amazon store, and 3-D covers tend to look like thick books, which might confuse the buyer into thinking they are buying a book and not an article” (loc. 208-210). This is excellent advice for another reason, too: 3-D cover generators are often used by “Master Resale Rights” or “Private Label Rights” publishers. These publishers buy into rights to a book, which they can then sell as their own. They all seem to create terrible, 3-D covers that are pixelated and grainy. A year and a half of working on e-book copyrights trained me to associate such covers with garbage; and considering their proliferation on the Kindle store, it’d be hard to escape that association.
1.4. Publication Channels: What’s Right For You?
Now that you have the best material you can possibly create, you have to decide where to sell it. This section is important because it will influence how you format your e-book (below)--and, even more importantly, what your royalties will be and how you’ll be paid.