Write by Wednesday- Self and Vanity Publishing

Following my recent series on self publishing, I was extremely interested to see the recent Huffington Post article on self publishing. It says a lot of the things many of us on the blogosphere have been saying about self-publishing, but one quote that really jumped out to me:

"Self-publishing has not only democratized publishing, it has opened up the opportunity for authors to publish at low or no cost, own all the rights, control the pricing and timetable for publishing and get their books listed for sale and distribution on major outlets and platforms..."

The "democratizing" function of self-publishing instantly grabbed me-- the MBA in me immediately hears this as "a true free market economy." That's right, we've created a true economy based on supply and demand. As readers, we can absolutely own the direction of the market in self-publishing.

You should check out the whole article: http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-New-Vanity-Publishing-by-Bernard-Starr-120824-731.html

Write by Wednesday-- Book Marketing

I am on a roll with my self-publishing series (see Supply and Demand and Quality posts), and so I want to continue with a topic that is near and dear to my heart: Being a respectful and effective marketer of your own product.

Ironically, despite working as a marketer, and having an MBA with a marketing focus, and loving my profession, I find the act of marketing my own work... well... icky and uncomfortable. I've learned a lot since I started this blog and started using social media to create some awareness online, and thought I might share some.

Since blogging is the venue most of us use, I thought I might start with some book blogging "dont's." But let's make it easy, let us use a metaphor: You've just published your book. You're very proud. You go to a party, which is an excellent opportunity to meet new people and maybe get a couple of them interested in buying your book.

Don't be the guy who stands in the corner and talks to the wall! Sound obsurd? Well, this is in effect what just plosting blog post after blog post without reading other blogs is like. Blogging is a conversation. I made this mistake like woah when I first started, arrogantly thinking "I wrote a book... people will come." But many of us bloggers have written books, and there are so many awesome and engaging blogs available (by authors and not-authors). Be part of the conversation! You'll learn stuff, make friends, and won't be talking to the wall.

Don't be the high-pressure Girl Scout cookie Mom. Most Mom's: "Hey, Sue is selling cookies. Let me know if you want some." This Mom "Sally is selling cookies. Here is the order form. I will take a check. Why are you only ordering 5 boxes. Do you hate children?" Most authors "Hey, great blog post, I really like XYZ. Hope you check out my blog" (unsaid: and while there notice I read a book that maybe you will read). High pressure author "Hello. I wrote a book. I am going to ignore everything you spent so much time writing on your blog and simply tell you to go read my book." Guess what usually WON'T happen in this case? Trust me, Thin Mints sell themselves more than your novel does.

Don't be the "Want to See Pictures of my Cat" guy. This sort of goes with the above, but the social media world has many of the same rules as a party. There is a conversational arc. People are talking about stuff. So if you're at a post talking about someone's kids, don't start a comment thread that talks about writing. It's not subtle. "I love kids... they remind me of how, when I am writing... because you know, I am a writer..." Even though you aren't hard selling, this is akin to the guy at a party that can turn every conversation into a diatribe on his cats. No one wants to talk to that guy.

Don't be that woman that wears white to another woman's wedding. If someone has a blog post up annoucning the launch of their new title, acknowledge that they likely spent years of their lives and poured their heart and soul into it. Adding on a shout out to your own work, subtle or no, is like trying to steal thunder. Let people have their thunder.

Any others? I know we're all out here a lot and I am wondering what good, bad, or ugly book marketing tactics we all see...

Write by Wednesday-- Self Publishing and Quality

I feel the need to make this disclaimer, and to make it very, very, very prominently: I do not consider myself anywhere near the model for the type of quality I call for below! But it is what I aspire for in the future.

My friend, fellow writer, and former Gopher Elly Zupko and I seem to be in sync on our blog topics.
Look here to see her blog on what she sees as irony that many book bloggers will not review self-published books. I agree with many of her points, but the comments brought this full circle to a conversation I started here a few weeks ago on the pricing models of self-published books. Several book bloggers (some of whom took issue with Elly's points) responded and talked about an aversion to self published books because of quality.

Quality. And by quality, I do not mean the overall strength of your fiction. I am talking the very basic-- formatting, grammar, and spelling.

Amazon, Smashwords, and a plethora of other sites have made it incredibly easy for us writers to put our work out there for sale. And the state of the fiction industry is making it harder and harder for people with manuscripts to find publishers. Work that would have been picked up quickly 10 years ago now sits and sits and sits with no interest because so many publishers are being undercut and out supplied by low-cost, self-published fiction (well, and for about 20,000 other reasons).

What these services/sites have not done is eliminate the need for thorough and thoughtful editing.

Publishers used to provide a very stringent quality standard on much of the world's published fiction. They bought work, cleaned it up, made it presentable, and published it.  With so many of us left with few options other than self-publishing, it seems that for some, this clean up step has been forgotten.

It cannot be forgotten. In my pricing models blog, I talk about setting consumer perception that self-published work is only worth 99 cents. I didn't really take a stand there, but I am now. If you

1. Spend a year or two writing a book
2. Have a bunch of honest fellow writers or bloggers review and vet it
3. Months editing it (or shell out money to have a professional editor do so)
4. Format the heck out of it over and over until it is perfect 
5. Develop a kick a*s cover
6. Self-publish it
7. Every second of your free time marketing it

that is worth more than 99 cents.

Problem is, there are too many (and again, not all, but many) writers out there are going from step 1 to 5.

We've all seen really good examples of self-published fiction (actually, Elly's book is one), and really, really bad examples. The problem is that, as a consumer, the bad sticks with me way longer. When I am looking at a self-published title, I am thinking "OK, its got 14 reviews, but what if they are all from the writer's family and I am buying a mess that I won't be able to understand half of because it is so riddled with errors." Am I going to spend $4 of my hard-earned money on that? Heck no... its too much of a gamble. I am going to shell out a maximum of 99 cents. That way, if I get a writer who didn't think steps 2 through 4 were necessary, I am only out a buck and can move on to the next thing.

We need to take the gamble out of buying self-publishing fiction before any of us writers considering it (or who have done it) can find success here. But steps 2, 3, and 4 are CRUCIAL. This is the best advice I can give anyone thinking of self-publishing.

Get honest opinions on your work (i.e. my boyfriend loves everything I do, so I ask his roommate to read things because I know he will tell me they suck if they do). Have writers or avid readers that aren't related to you read your stuff and give you opinions. Every single piece of my work has been made better by the candid feedback of others. And thought sometimes, rejections from agents and publishers are not a reflection of your work, sometimes they are. Take the feedback with a big grain of salt, but take it, and use it as free advice to improve your work.

I am a HORRIBLE editor of my own work. Seriously, I can read the same passage 400 times and not see 2,000 typos. And dude, homonyms (just had to look that up to make sure it was the right word) kill me. It took me a long time to swallow my pride and realize this, but on my most recent novel (yet to be published), I paid someone to edit. It was expensive, and not something I can do frequently, but many of us could trade this service! I can edit other people's work like there is no tomorrow, and would absolutely do so in exchange for a thorough review of my own.

And please, please, please people, when you are publishing an eBook (or any book), formatting is key. It kills me to be reading an amazing story with no paragraph breaks, or with words that are ridiculously big or small. Preview, preview, and then preview again.

If we want to raise the perceived value of what we do, we have to raise our standards! Some great writers have been very blunt with me about the  issues in my work. At first, every single one of them pissed me off and hurt my feelings. A few even made me cry. But each and every one of them contributed to my decision to hire an editor, which made my book better.

So there is my tirade. Am I totally off base here? Any thoughts?

Write by Wednesday-- Supply and Demand

I am not arrogant enough to believe that I have some kind of hidden insight into what is happening in the world of fiction publishing that has not already been hashed out, mused over, and discussed ad nauseum on the blogosphere. However, some thoughts have been rolling around in my head, and I am curious for feedback.

A couple of weeks ago, the dynamic and talented Jessica Bell started a discussion on whether free eBook promotions on Kindle were detrimental to writing. I'm a marketer, so to me, price promotions are just part of the game. What I wonder/worry/ponder about is this new model in which prices on our work are so low that the only way to discount enough to get attention is to go free. Now, before I dive in and make myself seem greedy and very unpopular, please let me be heard on this: I do not write to make money. I don't. I go to work to make money. I write because I love it, and I publish my books because I want people to read my stuff.

That said, I do think there is value in what  we all do. It may be a perspective I have only because I have the unique balance of writer and MBA, but I think that the pervasiveness of the 99 cent pricing model for self-published Kindle eBooks may be devaluing what we do.

Part of the need for and popularity of this price point is all about supply and demand. Now that we can all self-publish so easily, we face a potential (and perhaps already existing) glut of available reading material. And, consumers have the perception that they paid $200 for the device, so the content should cost about as much as the Angry Birds app or one song from iTunes unless it carries a celebrity author's name. And because there are so many of us clamoring for a piece of the pie, we're happy to price our books this way.

And some books should be priced low. My short story collection is $1.49 on Kindle, because it is the equivalent of about 80 pages, can be read in about an hour, and that is really all I think it should cost. But my novels? Those are hundreds of hours of my time and hundreds of pages, and will take a reader several hours to consumer. You know what, though? Time is one of the least important variables-- It is about my heart, which I pour into my books. Is 99 cents all that is worth?

Maybe it is. In some cases, it definitely is, but here is the inherent problem: the pricing model for eBook (particularly self-published eBooks) is being set in consumer's minds right now. I'm not talking about the price on the Amazon product listing, I am talking about percieved value. Consumers are being trained right now to think that they should only have to pay for a novel that they will spent several hours reading (and you spent hundreds of hours writing) what they pay for a song on iTunes that they will listen to for about 4 minutes. Hell, even if they listen to it 50 times, it likely does not constitute the same length of time engaged as a novel does.

To be clear, I am not sure I am saying this is inevitably bad. This is a new paradigm, and who knows, maybe in the future all books will be 99 cents, and we'll have a level playing field to compete for reader attention.

What I am saying is this is happening now. Right now, eBook customers are being taught that they shouldn't pay a lot for self-published work, while writers are being driven to self-publish by an ever shrinking pool of agents and publishers. Are we doing the right thing, here? We live in a world where knocking a price back to 99 cents isn't enough to garner attention-- we have to give our work away to make a blip because everyone else sells theirs so cheaply.

I want to talk about quality next week, because that is also a huge piece of this self-publishing puzzle, but I am interested in what you all think? Am I the evil capitalist for thinking these thoughts? Or is this something the writing community should be talking about?

One More Preview...

I am continuing to shamelessly try and drum up interest in Listening In, my short story collection for Kindle (link on the left if you're interested in reading it), and so, here is my last and final preview of one of the seven short stories included.

I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Silent Reel

The strange thing about the music that awoke her was its silence.  Her ears heard only the ocean as her eyes opened and she stared up at the ceiling, encrusted with grime, but the music was loud and vibrant in her mind.  She reached up and brushed the hair from her eyes, and stretched out slowly.  Almost instantly her hand flew to her stomach as she realized the pain was harsher than before.

   Sile sighed, sitting up and glancing about the room, which was just as dirty and familiar at the ceiling. She looked around now, hoping to find Molly, her rag doll, among the debris on the floor, but then remembered that the doll was perched on her bed at home.  Even the thought of the small, twisted doll brought a smile to her face.  Molly had been her protector when she was little and had spent so many nights here, in her grandmother’s house.

   She moved slightly, with the intent to get out of bed, but noticed that her thighs felt soggy and sticky.  She snaked her hand down below the sheets, dreading the possible realization that it was just more blood.   Instead, she felt only her skin, prickly from a few days growth of hair.  She shuddered and spoke to the empty room.  “Great, and now I’m crazy to boot.  Grandma would have loved that.”

Her muscles ached, the bone-biting kind of ache that warned against movement and yet punished lethargy with stiffness.  She ignored her muscles, pressed her hand to her lower stomach where the pain was just as real and impossible to ignore.  She walked to the window and opened it, listening as the sound of the ocean rushed in and battled the imaginary music for control of her senses.

A small spider crawled from beneath the bed and flirted with her big toe.  Sile glanced down, noticed the filth she stood in.  The floor was brown, covered in the thick coat of loose chunks of drywall, rogue scraps of cloth from the bed and blankets, dirt and sand.  

The whole room knew a similar state of disarray.  She turned from the window and felt, for the first time in the week she had been sleeping in this room, her stomach turn.  Her skin crawled as though a hundred spiders had brought her to this realization, and she suddenly thought that she could not get out of the house quickly enough. 

Her feet hit the bottom of the stairs, and then kept heading for the door.  She grabbed her purse and keys from where they had been sitting for the last week, and walked outside onto the porch.

She opened the trunk of her car, an old blue Chevy, and threw her suitcase in.  As she started the beast it sputtered and coughed a week’s worth of phlegm from its exhaust.  She sat, the wheel staring at her impotently.   Sand had collected on the windshield.  She got out, washed it off, and got back into the car.

She leaned into the door, and stopped short.  On the seat where she had been sitting moments before were three, round, fat drops of blood, slowly soaking into the old upholstery.    She ran her hands across them, felt that they were still warm, shuddered, and got in anyway.  Spotting was usual, or so they told her.

Writing as Work?

So every year, I have the same New Year's Resolution: Get back into the jeans size I wore in college. Thanks to random illness in 2011, I am starting 2012 a bit closer to that goal (about 1.5 sizes away), but since I never quite make it, I thought this year I would add a new resolution, one brought on my the experiences of the last week:

Starting April 1, I am going to start treating writing like work. (April 1 because I am then done with grad school and will actually have time).

Here is why...


Writing has always been my hobby- something I did to calm down, cool off, vacate the writing itch from my brain, etc. But I just had 12 days off work. I did not meet my 25,000 word goal for writing, but I did succeed in being disciplined. Excepting weekends, I got up, showered, and set to work. I wrote (or edited) just about every morning for anywhere from 2 to 6 hours. Then I worked on blogging, self-publishing Listening In, my short story collection on Kindle, promoting Max and Menna, pulling together records of last year's activities for the tax man, etc.

In short, last week, writing was my job.

And it is the best damned job I have ever had (and I say that despite mostly loving my actual job now). And I want it to maybe one day be my only job. And that takes more discipline than I typically have for writing.

So once I am a Master, I will pick up an official part time job-- my writing. In 2012, I hope it will finally and officially transcend hobby.

Another quick short story preview

So Listening In and Other Stories did fairly well during day #2 on Amazon. I'm very new to self-publishing, and likewise new to e-reader formats (got my Kindle Fire for Christmas), and so I am delighted to be learning while sharing my work with the world.

In that vein, another preview of a story from the collection:

Collecting Faces

If want to know, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned. I don’t have any credentials, but if you’re looking to learn about people, I know plenty.


Man has it all wrong. Men spend time trying to answer the hard questions- the meaning of life, world peace, can we save the planet? To me that stuff is meaningless next to ordinary questions. A job application, no matter how menial the job is painful to me.

Name- That’s easy. I go by Sara. Not my real name, but that doesn’t matter.

Date of Birth- I don’t have one. Actually, I’m sure I do, I just don’t know it.

Occupation- there it gets tricky.

What do I do? I collect faces. I might even have yours somewhere. I bet you didn’t even know someone had taken it, did you?

Do you have some questions of your own now, like ‘how does someone collect faces?’ That is the only question I have an easy answer to.