If You Want Something Done Right...

I promised myself I wouldn't blog on this topic but I can't ignore it anymore. There are just too many vaguaries around self-publishing and I am torn about it myself. So I want to layout the facts, list the pros and cons, and assess the results. I'd also like your input. If you've got anything to say on this subject I'd like to hear it.

Definitions
Let me start by saying that by self-publishing, I mean Print on Demand (POD) using a service like lulu.com, CreateSpace, iUniverse, or similar service. I am not talking about a vanity press where you pay all kinds of money to get your work published. Print on Demand is better because the reader pays to have the book printed when he or she orders it. Your cost should be very low to set this up. However, if you go to a convention or trade show or even a flea market and order 50 copies to sell there, you'll need to pay for them up front.

Benefits
It seems to me that the benefits of self-publishing are clear:

• You retain all rights.
• You control all aspects of the project so it gets done your way.
• There are plenty of good services you can use. As I mentioned before, Lulu, CreateSpace, and others let you create a really nice, professional-looking book.
• There are plenty of distribution channels you can use to promote your work. Smashwords, Amazon, Apple's iBook store, and others let you post electronic version of your book. Lulu also lets you set up a web site to help you sell your book. You will have to convert your book to Kindle and iBook format but that's probably worth the effort to get the book in wider distribution.
• No rejections; yet least no explicit rejections. The reader may still reject your work and not purchase it.

Drawbacks
The drawbacks seem pretty clear too:

• You control all aspects of the project so if you don't have an eye for detail, quality can suffer. This can manifest itself in the form of poor editing, poor cover art, and poor production value if you go with a service that yields a low quality book.
• You assume all the risk for the project; if it does not sell you can lose a lot of money. Even using a POD service, you'll probably have to pay for artwork and maybe editing or proofreading and then any copies you order to sell. If the book does not sell, this could cost you thousands of dollars.
• You miss out on having the experience and expertise that a publishing house can bring to your project. This is a huge one for me. I don't assume I know all the ins and outs of publishing or selling books. Being able to work with folks who know this stuff would be a tremendous asset for me personally and the overall success of the book, it seems to me. I'm sure I could learn much from working with such folks.
• There is a bias against self-published works; after all if the work was really good wouldn't some publishing house/small press have picked it up? There really a false argument, I know. So let me rephrase that. For many readers, a self-published book is a big risk. What are the risks? That the story meets some general minimum standard of fiction in the genre, that the book has been edited and proofread by professionals. Without these, who knows what you will get?

Non-issues
Let me also dispel a few myths. The following items are not relevant to the discussion because you have to deal with them regardless of how you publish:

• Promotion, regardless of how you publish, you need to promote your work youself.
• Reviews, regardless of how you publish, it will not affect your reviews; chances are you will need to give to someone to review.

So what does that leave me? Well, the first two drawbacks I can mitigate. Using Facebook, I found a really cool artist for the art cover and someone to proofread my work. I'm pretty good at editing and proofreading too so these are not issues. 

As for the last bullet point, there's really not anything to be done about it. I can't control what the reader thinks. What I can do, it get some reviews and use the best ones to promote the book. That will show someone else read it and liked it. 

But I can't get passed the third point. I want to work with publishing professional as my first books go to press. I want to learn from them. I think that's the main reason for me not to self-publish. That may be silly and given the way life works, I may have to self-publish so that someone sees how good my novels are. But for now, I think I'm on the path of submitting to small presses and hoping I can sell my work.

Anticipating the Future

Like most major cities, Boston's residential areas are divided into neighbors. As a boy, I grew up in Mattapan, at the southern end of the city. I was happy there for eleven years living in a two-family house. My grandparents upstairs and my father, mother, and brothers downstairs.

The summer before I entered junior high school we moved to a suburb south of the city. There I discovered my ability to weave tales and focusing on writing. It is amazing that I did this because we were not welcome by the town we had moved to. That fall, my two older brothers and myself were harassed mostly for differences in our religious beliefs, but partly also because we were outsiders and the neighbor was quite xenophobic. That Halloween our house was egged and overall we were made to feel very unwelcome.

I remember dreading going to school each day, fearing the harassment I would have to endure. But most of my fears never materialized. One of the curses of having a good imagination is I can always envision something far more awful than reality actual produces. I suppose that's one reason I write fiction; my reality is by far more uneventful than my stories. But I digress.

The moral of that experience I realized many years later: anticipating the future is pointless. Worrying about the future is equally useless because mostly of our fears never come to pass. Life has a way of throwing curves and when you least expect it. These are little tests of character. I usually failure at them but I don't worry about them. I learn from each experience so that the next test is easier to deal with.

I also try to stay focus and deal with the present. If I'm lucky I plan a little for the future too. I don't plan too far ahead because often, when I do, it is for naught. Something happens to make those plans impossible. For example, I plan in October my vacation the following spring. My wife and I decide to go to Atlantic City. But that winter a bad storm damages part of the house and the money that would've gone to vacation must now go to repair the damage.

Moral 2: We need patience. As writers we need a lot of patience because we wait a lot of the time. We wait for stories to be accepted. We wait for them to be printed. We wait for reviews. We wait for our careers to take off. The anticipation can be as crushing as fear or doubt, two of my best friends and two of my worse enemies.

This is another reason why I deal with the present because if I get too far ahead of myself, I waste time planning for things that never happen. However, I must admit I'm terrible at waiting. I really hate waiting  and my only trick to get through it all is not to think about it. That's not hard; usually there are lots of other things that need my attention.

Most of us have a thick skin since we deal with reviews and critiques regularly. We also know how to focus on our work or we'd never gotten anything out the door in the first place. Using those skills, you should be able to cultivate a new one: the ability to ignore the irrelevant. By 'irrelevant' I mean things beyond our control or things we cannot change. For example, once the story is out of my hands and published I am forced to accept the comments of others good or bad. I am forced to accept the publication schedule of the publishing house that I submitted my work to. So there's nothing for me to do but stay focused and keep writing, promote the book, show up for blog tours, or a book signing, or whatever else I plan to do to sell my work.

We need this ability because without it we are likely to stress over things that are out of our hands. And, speaking strictly in medical terms, stress is far worse than fear or doubt. Stress can kill if you do not control it. Stress can keep up at night when you should sleep and stress can eliminate all coping mechanisms you have turning you into a non-functioning mess. Consequently, if you don't have this ability yet, I recommend trying to cultivate it through regular practice.

So stay focused and keep writing. The future will take care of itself.

Embrace the Dark Side -- Gently

As a writer, I try to encourage and enjoy a person's more positive qualities: their creativity, their ability to reason, to problem-solve, and appreciate the contribution that these qualities they make our culture and society. These qualities allow us to maintain and develop our civilization. Conversely, I'm not a big fan of the darker side of human nature, the side that seeks to destroy and tear down things. It likes strife, and hatred, and war, and violence, and anger.

And yet, in one of those supreme twists of irony, without strife and conflict, my career path of choice -- writing fiction -- is not possible. I need people to have a dark side or I have nothing to write about. It reminds me of -- of all things -- a Star Trek episode, where Captain Kirk is split in two and learns that without his dark half he cannot command his starship. And to that point, I, as a writer, need my positive qualities and my darker side to create fiction, hone it, and temper it like a blacksmith making a fine sword.

That doesn't mean I'm a big fan of humanity's darker nature, just that I've learned to accept it and work with it. This was no always so. I spent many years hating my darker side or denying its existence. Doing so was pointless and self-inhibiting; I realize that now. But at the time I thought it was possible for people to rise above their more base and debauched nature. Silly me. If that were possible we'd have done it already.

Then I thought it serves no purpose in stories and wrote adolescent tripe about characters with lots of internal conflicts but not much plot or action. Very juvenile. Once I matured I realized just how bad those drafts were and never looked at them again.

About the same time I realized that good stories need conflict, they need a hero, and they need a villain. And if I was going to write good fiction I'd need to embrace humanity's darker side, my darker side. The problem I had with that was, as I've said, I really didn't care for the darker side of human nature. In a story, it's one thing; it helps more the story along, and if I'm lucky helps to reveal a hidden truth about people. But in the real world it means someone is suffering for whatever reason, whether through circumstance or not. 'Life is pain' says the Man in Black to Princess Buttercup. He's right, of course, and that's a sad thought.

Of course that's the way the world works. Someone is always suffering and my pragmatic side stepped in at that point and reminded me that unless I was God (which I'm not) someone in the world will probably be always be suffering. I can try to help and contribute and entertain folks with my stories but I can't end the suffering. I don't think any one person can.

Many publishers will accept some level of violence too but, according to the submission guidelines I've read, don't want it to be excessive or glorified. Enough for the story but not so much as to sicken the reader. I agree with that. But that raises the question how much is too much? When do you cross the line? More importantly will all my readers, especially the younger ones, the teen set, be able to distinguish between the violence I include in a story (or work of art) and the violence they see in the world around them? I've certainly read reports of psychological studies that point out children having difficulties distinguishing between real world violence (from the nightly news, let's say) and violence from a cartoon or movie.

This is where the ratings for movies and TV comes in and is partially the reason publisher want violence used more like a spice to the dish and not make it the whole entree. So I needn't describe the gruesome details of how the villain dies went his own magic dagger is turned against him and his withers away as his soul is eaten by said dagger. I envision it much the way the Nazi turn to dust at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. But rather than give that much detail, which I think is excessive, I merely say, he aged quickly and turned to dust. I leave the rest for the imagination.

And I think that's the point. We, as writers, need to write with a bit of vagueness, I think, particularly when it comes to violence. Being a little vague or implicit is a spice and it leaves the reader room to use his or her imagination in a way that being explicit destroys.

So embrace your dark side but do it carefully, responsibly, and respectfully. Do it to become a better person and a better writer, not to go off half crazed and become the next mass-murderer or manipulative cult leader. Do it to lift up our culture and our society. That is our role as writers and artists. Any thing else is a disservice to our readers and, more importantly, ourselves.

Don't Just Sit There -- Network!

Over the course of my life, my father, while he was alive, tried to give me advice about certain things. Most of it made no sense to me; however, one thing he told me about looking for work that has stuck with me was, "You've got to sell yourself."

At the time I had an immediate reaction of "Blah! That sounds awful." I didn't say that to him but I thought it and spent many years giving very bad interviews because I ignored that advice.

In the world of writing and publishing this advice is even more true. You've got to sell yourself and your work or you go nowhere. There are many ways to do that, but one of the most effective is to network with other writers and the people who can publish your work.

These days networking is easier than at any time in the past. Social sites, such as Facebook, make it easy to connect to thousands of people. You, as a writer, should get in the habit of connecting to some number of people in a given week. How many is enough? Hard to say and, since some sites put up blocks if you try to connect with too many people too quickly to guard against sexual predators and others with less than honorable intentions, you probably want to start small and connect with two to three new people a week. Look at their online profiles, see what they post. Respond to the post, get to know them.

To some this will seem like an invasion of privacy to the person you are connecting to. But they can reject the connection so it isn't really. Others may say, 'I'm prepared to network once I have something to sell.' Let me suggest that a good network is as important (or in some ways more important) than the stories you are writing. 

If that thought strikes you as odd, think about it for a minute. What is the function of your network? Answer: it is there to support you, just as you support the people in your network. The support comes in several ways. For example, it may come when you hit an issue in your writing or it may give you some leads for new markets that open. Often it will spark interesting discussion points about writing. But primarily if they are there to support you when you sell something, they will buy your book, or electronic magazine with your story in it, just as you should to the same when they sell something.

I'm sure some people don't like that idea because it means the only reason I am connecting with people is so I can sell them something. That's not entirely true. As I said, you want to get to know them personally. You want to get to know the people you connect with and support them in lots of ways that don't involve selling anything to anyone. You want to make them friends. Once you've done that, then the rest should happen naturally. I fully expect that whenever my books go on sale that my friends, my real friends, will go out and buy a copy. Some may read it, some may not. But they will buy a copy and that's the important part. Will I ask my network to buy my books? Sure, of course, I'd be stupid not to, but I will ask only once and then as politely as possible because I know what an enormous favor they are doing for me.

Of course, that's the theory of how it should work. Some people won't want to make friends with you; they just want to connect to you so they can sell to you. So be it. That's their choice. Others will try to get whatever they can from you and ignore your selling efforts to them. That's their choice too. But I think these people forget about human nature. I'm far more likely to help and support people who help and support me. It's like the song says: 'Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could'. 

That may sound hard and cruel but in my opinion, that's the way it is. So if you've been content to sit and write and let the world go by, get up and get out there. Network!

Preparing to Sell Your Work

It seems I've reached stage two of the journey toward publication. Stage one is the initial part all about writing. You know this part, where you have an idea for a novel or story and you write it. You work hard for weeks or months to complete your writing project, polishing it so that it is ready to go out into the world.

Stage two is all about selling your work. The selling process changes a few things. For example, during the writing phasing I kept the draft of my book in a single file.  Now, however, I need to give out pieces to editors and publishers so that approach isn't the best. What I need is a way to write individual chapters so I can send them out when needed and still create a single complete copy for anyone who want to see the whole thing.

I also need to single-source the novel so I don't have multiple copies of the novel floating around. Microsoft Word won't do for this, which is unfortunate because the distribution format still needs to be .doc or .rtf since that's what most places want.

InDesign would good except it doesn't export to .doc or .rtf. I need something else.

Enter Scrivener. On a whim I decided to check out this software. It meets all my requirements beautifully. The only problem it is not cross-platform. It is only available for Mac OS X. (Now there's a switch). For me, that's not an issue. My Macintosh box is my primary writing machine. For others, it will be. However, Windows users can use FrameMaker which can support this same workflow once you add an extension to export to RTF. One caution: FrameMaker requires a lot of time to learn to use it properly so if you can't do that, look for another authoring tool. FrameMaker is also pricy. Scrivener is only $40.

Another change, as least for me, is patience. I hate waiting and it seems to me that in the submission process that's all I do. I suppose, that gives me more time for other things since simultaneous submissions is generally frowned on. 

And then of course there's the promotion aspect. I need to promote what I have, my blog, my ideas, my skills and experience. That means surfing the web looking for places and ways to sound the trumpet and let people know I'm here. That's a huge time-sink. Guess, I know what I'm doing between sending out submissions.

However, before I do that I need to get all my house in order. The blog just got a small makeover. I added a menu bar at the top, and added some images to a few older posts.

Next, I need write about my fantasy world to show it's depth and breath. I started a web site for this information last year but abandoned it in favor of completing the first book in my fantasy series. Now I think I need to reverse that a little and give it some attention while I complete book 2.

What else do I need to do to prepare for selling my work? I don't know,  but I'm sure I'll think of other things. For now this is enough. After all, I still working in stage one too creating new stories and working on new ideas and I don't won't to overload myself.