Nothing really to do with self-publishing… Heard of “Earth Hour”?

I’m probably coming ‘late to the party’ as the saying goes, but I just became aware of a movement called Earth Hour – which bills itself as…

“…the world’s first global election, between Earth and global warming.

For the first time in history, people of all ages, nationalities, race and background have the opportunity to use their light switch as their vote – Switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, or leaving them on is a vote for global warming. WWF are urging the world to VOTE EARTH and reach the target of 1 billion votes, which will be presented to world leaders at the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009.”

While this really has little to do with self -publishing a book, it certainly appears to be a very interesting idea. We’ll commit to having the lights off in the Dog Ear Publishing office tomorrow evening… though it’s cheating – we aren’t here during that time. But in lieu of lights, I’ll be powering off our servers for that hour – restarting them at 9:30 pm EST.

At the same time the press release for Earth Hour arrived, I also received notification of one of our self published author’s books being reviewed – a book on sustainable business practices, and it seems to be a good spot to mention it… Have you also considered how eco-friendly utilzing print on demand happens to be? I tossed an article over on the Dog Ear site that outlines our environmental policy. We consider the intelligent stewardship of the Earth’s resources to be a priority.

Enjoy some time with candles tomorrow evening!

Clean Up!

While spring is a common time to clean up the house or office, I’m also going to use it to approach a topic that can be challenging within the realm of self-publishing… copyediting. I suggest that authors considering self-publishing approach their spring cleaning as an opportunity to perform a different kind of cleaning: one that involves the proofreading and editing of their manuscripts.

One of the greatest assets of self-publishing is that authors can express themselves freely. The greatest weakness of self-publishing (and its most common criticism) is that the content is all too often sub-standard when it comes to editorial quality. This perception – rightly or wrongly applied in each individual author’s case – is what creates so many market challenges for independently published or self-published books.

Without proper proofreading for grammatical errors, the readability of the work suffers; authors might not express themselves as clearly as they would hope. Beyond grammar, authors can involuntarily produce inconsistencies in theme, plot, and voice. These types of discrepancies can diminish or misconstrue the entire meaning of a book.

Editing gives your self-published content a “professional feel.” Sure, your book will look and feel the same as a traditionally published book when you self-publish it, but will it read like one, too? It’s harder to sell and market a book that is rampant with grammatical errors or is structurally confusing. Don’t be afraid of the editor’s red pen – they aren’t in business to make you feel bad; they exist to make your work better. I had one of our editorial managers write an article on how to ‘emotionally’ approach the prospect of copyediting – you might find it useful (it’s on the Dog Ear Publishing site.)

Luckily for self-publishing authors, there are many editing resources available. Some self-publishing companies provide editing services as part of their publishing packages, which may be worth looking into. Authors can also find a multitude of freelance editing companies online simply by typing in “editing services” into a search engine.

The following are some popular standard editing services:

Literary Critique. Have an editor look over your work and provide constructive criticism on areas that might need improvement. The editor should be able to recommend any further editing your manuscript needs, such as proofreading or copyediting. A Literary Critique should leave you with a sense of what you do well as a writer, as well as what could be improved to make you an even better writer.

Proofread. If all you need is a simple check of your grammar, then hiring a proofreader might be your best option. The proofreader should correct basic errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, and syntax throughout your manuscript.

Copy Edit. Along with providing the services of a proofreader, a Copy Editor examines issues like structure, flow, and consistency. The editor should read through your manuscript 2 or 3 times in order to correct any author inconsistencies in sentence structure, outline, word choice, flow, and tense. This popular editing service improves readability.

Literary Edit. This service includes everything provided in a copy editing service, but also performs a very in-depth analysis of storyline, character development, focus, and overall structure. This attention to overall meaning and depth is why traditional publishers consider this service the most critical to produce an anticipated “bestseller.”

(For descriptions of editing services beyond the standard ones included here, visit here.)

Even if you don’t take advantage of professional editing services, have a close friend read over your work—you’d be surprised what comes out of the woodwork when a fresh pair of eyes looks at your writing!

And remember: every writer needs editing . . . even the pros! Don’t feel embarrassed or too shy to put your work out there for some constructive criticism. There’s no doubt you’ll get some great feedback, and if you aren’t too sure about a few suggestions, that’s fine—YOU are in control of the final product. YOU get the final say in whatever advice you choose to take.

Are you ready to clean up your manuscript and dig into the editing process? Dustin Wax’s “Improve Your Writing with the Editing Tips” is a pretty good place to start.

Happy editing!

Using Amazon Connect as book promotion for the self publishing author

(we are getting this question quite a bit – so I’m posting a reprint of an article on Amazon Connect from the Dog Ear Publishing web site)

What is Amazon Connect

…  and why is it important to a self published author?

AmazonConnect is a highly targeted blog within Amazon.com where authors can do a wide number of tasks related to marketing their book. A book author can post messages directly to their own product detail pages, they can create and post an individual blog page, and a book author can send information / posts directly to the Amazon Daily of the purchasers of their book.

AmazonConnect provides prime placement for author blogs within the Amazon site by doing four things -

1) The AmazonConnect system delivers and showcases your 3 most-recent blog posts on all of your product pages. Your blogs posts via AmazonConnect show up immediately below your books Product Details section.

2) Your blog posts are ‘surfaced’ to the Amazon Daily of the purchasers of your book… I threw a couple terms at you in there – that don’t seem to be defined anywhere – so here’s what they mean (sort-of… these are not official definitions in any way…): surfacing / surfaced – means your content is brought to the ‘top’ of someone’s news / web page; Amazon Daily is the ‘landing page’ that many of us registered Amazon users see when we log in to Amazon.com.

3) Each message you write in your AmazonConnect account gets listed on your AmazonConnect blog… this creates excellent ‘new content’ and brings readers back again and again.

4) You will be listed in the AmazonConnect Directory – along with a link to your profile page. You can find the directory at http://www.amazon.com/amazonconnect

It can be a bit confusing to get started with AmazonConnect. To sign up you will use your (or need to create – it has no cost) Amazon.com account. After you’ve created a profile, the ‘public’ information that is part of your current Amazon account will be displayed in your AmazonConnect profile – this includes your reviews, lists, registries, wish lists, etc. (so be careful…) so… as an author, you might think about creating a new ‘customer account’ that you use with your AmazonConnect profile.

Another amazing feature is that you can ‘surface’ (here’s that word again…) your ‘external’ blog (from WordPress, Blogger, and the others) directly to your Amazon purchasers via your AmazonConnect profile.

Amazon Connect is one of (if not the…) premier ways to promote and market your book to users of Amazon.com

An Interview with F. X. Mathews

F. X. Mathews is a man who has seen it all–at least as far as publishing and self-publishing is concerned.

Recently it came to my attention that Mathews, one of our self-published authors, has also had some success in the traditional publishing world. He is the author of the self-published The Garden of the Whale-Fishes, and is also the author of The Concrete Judasbird and The Frog in the Bottom of the Well, published by Houghton Mifflin.

Given Mathews’ familiarity with both sides of the publishing industry, I felt his story could be helpful and insightful to many authors who are curious about the “ins and outs” of self-publishing and traditional publishing. Like the contributors to the Writers’ Digest article that I wrote about in the last blog, Mathews explicitly says that being self-published is “not validation” for his writing; he must work “to print . . . the best writing [he's] capable of.” However, Mathews experienced the “well [drying] up” in the traditional publishing industry, and found self-publishing to be an opportunity to make his art come to life.

Not all of the questions I asked him were directly related to publishing, but his answers are interesting, so I thought I’d share them. Enjoy!

Please tell us about yourself.

I was born in Stamford, Connecticut in the depths of the Depression, studied at Fairfield University, and went on to graduate study in English at the University of Wisconsin, where I had the good fortune to show the manuscript of a work-in-progress to the visiting Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. She recommended the novel to her publisher, Blanche Knopf, who read it, put three other readers on it, and wrote back to me that though they admired the writing, they all agreed that it was not a novel.


Spurred on by the Knopf rejection, I told the head of the department that I was dropping out of the program and going to San Francisco to write another book. (It was 1958 and the Beats were the city.) She argued me out of that folly, pointing out that since I was unlikely to write an important novel before the age of 30, I might as well get the Ph.D. first. I succumbed to academe and stayed on for the degree. The novel went the way of other juvenilia. I went off to teach at Colby College in Waterville, Maine for five years, until a new chairman there urged me not to lose my mobility.


The next 30 years I spent at the University of Rhode Island, where I taught courses in Shakespeare, Joyce, and creative writing, and published two novels with Houghton Mifflin, The Concrete Judasbird and The Frog in the Bottom of the Well. Now I’m retired. When not writing (which is much of the time) I like to empty my mind by digging up the acre with a ferocious joy that borders on madness and making junk sculptures to populate the gardens. I’ve long thought of the novelist as a dump-picker, hoarding scraps of unlikely stuff in the expectation that someday they will coalesce into meaning. And they do. It’s not the raw material that matters; it’s the transformation.

How long have you been writing?

Almost as long as I’ve been reading. My father, who never finished high school, was obsessed with language. (How many fathers go about the house declaiming Blake’s “The Tyger”?) The first item my parents bought after they were married was the complete unabridged Merriam-Webster dictionary on India paper. I remember as a small child being awed by the way my father dispensed words over the dinner table. Other people chattered; he uttered words and crafted them into sentences. I became a writer.

What would you say is the most difficult part of the writing process?

Starting, following through, and finishing. Starting a novel is scary because the world lies all before me, my characters have an infinity of options, and I know it’s going to be a long journey. Somewhere in the middle of a book I experience a crisis of faith and am at risk of becoming preoccupied with leaking gutters and sump pumps. The ending surprises me by coming faster than I expected: the characters have run through most of their options. But “faster” is relative. Because it takes me so long to write a novel, I’m not the same person at the end as the person who initially imagined it. That often results in a confusion of tone. The only way I know out of the dilemma is ruthless revision.

What were your experiences with traditional publishers?

Positive. I sold my first book, without an agent, to Houghton Mifflin, who bought the option on the strength of the first six chapters. When I ran into problems with the completed novel my editor (who was also the editor-in-chief) called me to Boston and we talked about the book. I rewrote the final third, changing it drastically, and the book came out to good reviews and was picked up the next year by Gollancz for an edition in England. My experience with the second novel was similar: a sympathetic editor, good exposure and great reviews in major publications (if less than great sales). What an innocent time that seems like now!


When I went to the well a third time it had dried up—not just at Houghton Mifflin but at all the other major houses the book passed through. The manuscript sits in my closet now, unpublished, and I think, in need of the courage of a serious rewrite.

Why did you decide to self-publish?

Actually, I was an early convert. In 1984 I had finished a book called The Kisses of Joannes Secundus, a modern verse-translation of the erotic poems of a Renaissance Latin poet, and shopped it around to traditional publishers, but let’s get real: what is the audience for a translation of Latin poems, however randy they may be? So I turned myself into The Winecellar Press and learned some of the craft. I designed a cover—front, spine, rear—to the exacting specifications of the photo offset process. I experimented with endless layout sketches (I had no computer), burnishing in each individual letter from transparent letter sheets, an exercise fraught with peril when you make a mistake on the final copy. I blue-pencilled margins on Bristol board and cut and pasted up the text (composed on an IBM Selectric typewriter) with rubber cement, tweezing tiny cut-out letters into place over any typos. I sent it off to a printer and what came back was a beautiful book—Smyth-sewn no less. It was laborious work, but I never regretted it.


My current book—The Garden of the Whale-fishes—is a scrupulously researched novel about the coming of the Black Death to Ireland in 1348. And its a good story; there should be an audience for it. It speaks to the times—both the mediaeval period and it’s set in the anxieties of our own time. But it’s probably not for everyone. I no longer have illusions about a best seller.

Do you have any self-publishing advice for other authors?

There are, of course, no self-published books any more than there are self-written books—only self-publishing authors. OK, that’s a quibble, but the point is that as an author, in a digital age of garbage in garbage out, I have the weighty responsibility of making sure that what I consign to print is the best writing I’m capable of. Publication is not validation; it simply makes the ink permanent.


I began by reading all the contracts I could find online, and decided that Dog Ear’s was the most author-friendly. I particularly liked their position that the digital files belong to [the author] if [he or she] want[s] them. It’s surprising how many houses believe they own the product that you paid them to produce.


Self-publishing is certainly easier now than it was in 1984. This time I was able to work up a cover in Photoshop, though not without some anguished tweaking. Of course you can let the designers handle that. But don’t just put everything on automatic. This should be a collaboration. A lot of things are best done (or at least explored) by the author. Pull the books off your shelf and take a hard look at what physically works and doesn’t work for you, staring with the cover. Measure the pages. Measure the margins. Would you be willing to pay a bit extra for more generous margins? Go to your computer and play with the fonts library; try to settle on a font style and size that best suits your particular material. Read jacket blurbs. For me the most agonizing part was writing the blurb—a trick of perspective, just enough distancing from my own work to describe it, I hoped, with precision yet with passion.


When you get the page proofs (and Dog Ear was particularly conscientious about providing them every step of the way) proofread. And proofread. Then, ideally, find an obsessive-compulsive friend to proofread after you. The problem with doing your own is that you tend to anticipate your own words rather than seeing the actual type. I did that, proofread my copy four times, and still had a few mistakes slip through.


When you get the finished book, and it’s exactly the book you envisioned, you pour a glass of pinot noir and stare at this art object for a long long time, thinking I made this! And it’s true in a deeper sense than if you had simply mailed off some typing.

Why do you write?

I am afraid of dying

***

A big thanks goes to F. X. Mathews for sharing his interesting background, as well as lending his perspective on writing and the current state of the book business. If you’d like to learn more about Mathews’ work, click here.

Writer’s Digest – Everything You Need to Know About Self Publishing

This edition of Writer’s Digest (the March / April 2009 edition) has an amazing selection of articles on self-publishing – and actually does an amazing job of covering, literally, just about everything you actually need to know to get started self publishing your book. In the interest of full disclosure, as most of you know I own a self publishing company called Dog Ear Publishing, Dog Ear is represented well in one of the articles on resources for self publishers.

The articles take a very straight forward approach to defining what authors need to know before choosing to self publish their book – no punches are pulled in any way, but conversely very little negative prejudice shows in ANY of the articles. I couldn’t actually find ANY myself, but a few other readers I surveyed felt that some of the writing was ‘too honest’ about the chances of self published works ending up in the traditional market… I tend to believe that reality is uncomfortable for many folks – especially when it’s fairly applied to their dreams and wishes – so I was pretty comfortable that everything I read was pretty much just grounded in the realities of  our market.

Jane Friedman – publisher and editorial director of Writer’s Digest – opens the discussion with an article titled “Straight Expectations.” This is a quick intro to the 5 key items authors should consider… not that any one of the items would dissuade a potential author from self publishing, but each is a critical item for review.

Contributor Andrea Hurst – president of Andrea Hurst Literary Management – is next with “The Stark Reality of Self-Publishing: An Agent’s Perspective” – and tough medicine that authors looking to self publish their book need to take in large doses. Even though self-publishing seems to be a logical first step in getting your book into a traditional house, the chances of success don’t really seem to be much better than if you’d just sent a query letter and sample chapter – and with good reason. The self-published books that fail to find an audience do so not because they are self-published, but because of some other mitigating factor (such as quality of writing; lack of marketing by the author – yes, even as a traditionally published author you’ll be asked to help out to a large degree; or often times – just no market for the book on a broader basis…). Even with all the ‘medicine’ Ms. Hurst’s piece is an amazing perspective from one of the significant gatekeepers of the traditional publishing world.

Joe Wikert – you’ll know him from my comments on his blog Publishing 2020 – he’s one of the gurus I read on a daily basis because his take on technology in our industry is amazing. His article The Changing Landscape of Self-Publishing highlights this in great detail – and highlights how little so many of us really understand about what is going on ‘out there’ – our industry (if you can even call it ‘our industry’ any more…) looks nothing like what any of us expected even a single year ago – let alone 10 or 15 years ago.

More articles follow – even one that discusses Brunonia Barry – along with commentary by readers on self publishing… it’s an amazing issue (can’t tell that I enjoyed it?) – so go out and get your copy today!

Self publishing & the e-book: B&N buys an e-book retailer

I’ll step in to what might be controversy here, but what the heck.

Typically, e-books have not been a large source of revenue for self-published authors. At Dog Ear Publishing, our self published authors have almost never seen sales from an e-book amount to even 1% of their print product.

So, it was with interest that I read the release from Barnes & Noble about their acquisition of Fictionwise.com and eReader.com, (both owned by the e-book retailer Fictionwise Inc.) for $15.7 million in cash.

The Barnes & Noble release states that it “plans to use Fictionwise as part of its overall digital strategy, which includes the launch of an e-bookstore later this year.” No word was mentioned if this is a response to the Amazon Kindle product – from what I could tell, most of the books on the Fictionwise “Bestsellers” list don’t support the Kindle MOBI format…

Could this perhaps initiate some sort of growth in the e-book market? I’m not sure – at least for conventional titles such as fiction – but it is an interesting market strategy for B&N.

A bit of a left-turn in this conversation: Take a look at the Fictionwise “Bestsellers” list- and check out the incredible disparity in price for the e-books… along with the fact that the number one bestseller isn’t from one of the traditionally large houses and they are only charging $7.00 for the e-book. A bunch of the bestsellers are only $1.00. Could these publishers be using the e-book as a book marketing tool?

Is it time to reconsider the e-book?

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