Finding Your NOOK: Self Publishing on PubIt

As we continue on in the self publishing series, I'd be remiss if I didn't spend a bit of time on NOOK.

Granted, Kindle is currently dominating the ereader market, but NOOK is still a sizable aspect, and since publishing with PubIt is so easy, there's no reason to overlook NOOK.

PubIt's front page lists publishing as a 1-2-3 process.  And while it's not literally that easy, it's awfully close. 

At this point I've noticed something of a trend.  Places that publish ebooks expect the author to have a finished project ready to go.  Neither Amazon or Smashword offered cover art, editing, marketing, ect... for their ebook publishing platforms, nor does PubIt.

So, before heading over to PubIt, make sure you've got all your files ready to go.  NOOKs read mostly epub files.  (Just like Kindles read .mobi.)  If you don't already have an epub version of your book, no sweat, PubIt will convert your Word, HTML, RTF, or TXT files into an epub. 

I used my Smashwords .doc version of the story.  I knew it was a clean copy, and it went through the epub conversion swimmingly.  From what I've seen this is always the rocky bit of any ebook publication process.  And like with any other platform, the cleaner your base document, the easier this whole process will be.   

Next up, cover file.  Get your .jpg, hit the button, and off you go.

Once you've got that done, it's time to pick your categories and write your description.  Fill out your rights management documentation and tax information and you're done.  In twoish days, you'll have a book up for sale on Barnes and Noble for the NOOK. 

So, yeah, not quite as easy as walking and chewing gum, but not much harder. 
 

Ye Gods! You Want How Much? Self Publishing with Outskirt Press

So, as a concientious blogger, I decided investigating the sites that advertise on my blog is a good idea.  The first on the list of self publishers I decided to check out was Outskirts Press (outskirtspress.com).  They often have a nice, large ad at the bottom of my posts.

Here's my first impression:  Run Away!  Run away fast.  Do not look back.

You know how in horror movies you get a hint that something bad is going to happen as a way to build tension, like the flash of light off the menacing blade or the creepy soundtrack ramps up?  Well, because of the contract with Google, I can't click on the ads on my on blog.  So I googled Outskirts Press.  As I was typing the letters in, Google showed me the second most popular search, Outskirts Press Complaints.  (For comparison purposes Smashwords doesn't turn up anything bad, Lulu.com Scam is the second term, and CreateSpace Scam is the fourth search term on Google.)

I checked the complaints out.  Alas, I really couldn't tell if they were just authors who didn't read the instructions carefully enough and were unhappy about a mess they got themselves into or were genuinely bilked.  Until I got to the Outskirts Press page, I was leaning in the 'author didn't read the fine print' direction.  Because, honestly, a lot of complaints tend to be people who are upset at a company that did exactly what they said they were going to do, in the fine print.

Then I actually visited Outskirts Press.  Maybe it was serendipity.  Maybe God was guiding my hands in an effort to show me the light.  Either way, the first thing I clicked on was the Marketing Solutions tab.  And what is at the top of that?  Amazon Extreme Marketing at the bargain price of $299.  Wow, let's see what you get for that $299.  Look Inside (where Amazon lets viewers see the inside of your book), a Kindle edition of your book, and ten tags.  Okay folks, we've been over this, you can do all of this for free, for yourself, in less than ten minutes.  This service would have been overpriced at $29.00 and probably just about right at about $15.00.  But, hey, if you just want a Kindle edition of your book or just want the Look Inside feature, they'll be happy to charge you $135 (each) to set that up as well.  Here, let me make any of you who find this idea even remotely tempting an offer: send me a note and I'll do it for half that price. 

Okay, so as my eyes bled with disgust at the exorbitant price gouging on Amazon, I headed over to see about their paper books.

At the top of that list is the ability to call and talk live to one of their sales people, er..."publishing consultants" about which publishing option would suit you best, for $35.  Now, I've noticed that other services also charge to talk with publishing consultants, about formatting, and book design, and getting your manuscript set up to turn into an ebook.  They don't charge you money to talk to the person who sells you the service in the first place!

Once you get past that there are different tiers of publishing services.  For a basic novel, the most expensive version, "the Diamond Plan," at $999 gets you a soft cover book with either your own cover or one of their "customizable" pre-designed ones.  (You can pick from 21 designs and then customize.)  You get an ISBN and a bar code.   They do the inside formatting for you.  You get an author's webpage.  A manuscript review (basically is the book salable) is part of the deal.  Your book is available to be sold (if you can track down someone at the book store and get them to put copies of your book on his shelves) at many bookstores.  You get an ebook edition (Their ebook.  You've got to pay them more money to get on the Kindle store).  You can list your book with Books In Print (though you have to do it yourself.)  And you get ten free copies of your book.

And I gave up.  This is total crap.  $999.00 for ten books.  Because you're paying that $999 before you sell a single book.  Then after you've paid your $999, you can set your book up as POD, and when someone orders it, they print a copy and send it off.  You set the price and the royalty, so they apply however much to your account.  How nice of them.

Once again here's a comparison:  For ten books I paid CreateSpace $117 and change (the costs of my books, their Pro Plan, and the cost of shipping the books to me).  Now that didn't get me a free copy of How To Sell Your Book on Amazon, or a manuscript evaluation, or my very own marketing package (No they don't do the marketing for you, you get a list of helpful instructions to do the marketing yourself.), or weekly marketing email (all part of the Diamond Package).  And CreateSpace just covered the print version of my book, I did have to take an extra step to get my ebook set up.  But I also didn't have to spend close to a thousand dollars to do it.  Ten books on Lulu.com would have cost me about double that amount, and once again, I wouldn't have had the marketing stuff, and I would have had to pay extra for the ebook, but the total would have been closer to $500 than $1000. 

Hey, Outskirts Press will get your book on Barnes and Noble!  CreateSpace doesn't do that!  That's true.  They do seem to get the book on the Barnes and Noble website.  Now, you can do that with your ebook for yourself for free.  And I haven't yet figured out how to do it for a paper back book.  So, that's one thing Outskirts can get you.  Is it worth $1000?  Lulu.com will do it for you, too, and they'll charge a whole lot less for it.

But that's the super-duper deluxe package.  How about the low end one?  At their low end, you pay them $199, and they print you up a book.  That's it.  You get one "free" copy.  And it's just a book, no barcode, no ISBN.  You can't even upload your own cover.  You have to use one of the two options they offer you. You can get that at Lulu and CreateSpace for just the cost of the book (and neither of those options would think of charging you extra to upload your own cover!)

Please, by all that is good and holy, stay away from Outskirts.  They are charging vastly more for their services than anyone ever should.  For $999 you can go over to CreateSpace.com and get a custom (as in designed specifically for you) cover or possibly some editing, plus almost everything offered by the "Diamond Package."  Go to Lulu.com, lay down $999 and you'll get vastly more for your money as well.  

As for me, as the next thing on my list is to figure out how to block Outskirts Press as an advertiser on my blog.

Self Pulbishing with Lulu.com: Options As Far As the Eye Can See

Do you want maximum options for how your book will look?  Do you want marketing tools out the wazoo?  Is endless possible customization your idea of a very good thing?  Then Lulu.com may be the perfect self publisher for you.

If you are looking to do something beyond a standard novel, Lulu is probably the best option as well.  They have templates set up and ready to go for picture books (like a photo album, but the photos are printed directly on the pages), cook books, yearbooks, and calenders.

But, if you are like most of the people reading this blog, you are publishing a novel.  And there's only one thing I'd recommend Lulu.com for in that case, your hardback copy.

Why?  Because there's almost nothing Lulu offers except a hard bound book that you can't get for less with CreateSpace.com.

Here's the oranges to oranges comparison: with CreateSpace you decide on the Pro or Regular plan, the Pro plan costs $39.00 regular is free.  If you go pro your per page cost is .012 and regular is .02.  With Lulu.com you pick the kind of paper you want Publisher Grade (.015) or Standard (starting at .02 and going up from there).  Publisher grade gives you two size options, and you can't get an ISBN number.  Standard comes in pretty much any size you can imagine, and you can get an ISBN.  If you're actually planning on selling your book, you're already spending way more per book than you will with CreateSpace.

Why am I comparing Lulu to the Pro Plan prices instead of the Regular plan prices?  Because when you buy the Pro Plan with CreateSpace you also get the distribution tools you want if you actually intend to sell a physical book.  (I'm assuming this is where the term Pro Plan comes in.)  With Lulu, if you really want to sell a book you have to pick the paper option that costs more and then pay more for a distribution channel on top of it. 

So, for Sylvianna my CreateSpace author's copy costs $5.96.  My Lulu author's copy costs $14.00.  That was the moment I decided, unless I want a hardback copy of Sylvianna, Lulu was not going to get my publishing business.

Okay, so how do they do on ebooks? 

I'll admit I didn't get very far in this process.  I uploaded my file, and then they asked me what size I wanted my ebook to be.  I found myself thinking, "Pick a size for ebook?  Ummm what?"  See, here's the thing with ebooks, they come in whatever size the reader's screen happens to be.  So, my Kindle for PC screen is a lot bigger than my iPhone and my husband's Kindle is sort of in between.  So it doesn't make a lot of sense to pick a size for your ebook.  But, what do I know?  I'm new to this whole thing, so I open the list of sizes.  They're all standard book sizes.  I pick 5x8, and it resizes my document for 5x8 pages, and it looks bad.

Now maybe if I hadn't already used Smashwords.com, and come out with a product that looks good on any sized screen, I wouldn't have been so picky about this.  But I did go through the Smashwords conversion process and got an electronic book that looks good everywhere.  So, seeing the 5x8 pages, and knowing I already had a distribution channel set up for basically any ebook format I could want, I gave up on Lulu's ebookery. 

Lulu offers marketing tools, they offer promotional stuff, they'll build your cover for you, they'll edit for you, they provide pretty much every service you could possibly want, the only thing is: it costs a lot of money.  CreateSpace offers almost all the same marketing, promotional, editing, and cover work, and they charge less.  Smashwords actually understands how to build an ebook so that anyone can read it.

So, unless you are looking for your hardbound masterpiece, it's time to go looking for a different publishing house.

Next up in the Self Publishing series: Outskirt Press.  I see their ads below my posts, so it's about time I go and see what they can offer!  Also in the not too distant future, a review of Whom God Would Destroy.

The Electronic Revolution: Self Publishing for Kindle.

Last week we explored how to use Amazon.com to turn your manuscript into a physical book.  This week it's time to check out Amazon's Digital Text Platform and how you can self publish for Kindle.

First and foremost, if you don't already own one or have it on your computer, go get a Kindle.  Kindle for PC is a free download, and it's worth the few minutes of time to have one.  Then as soon as you have one, download  Publish on Amazon Kindle with the Digital Text Platform.  It's free and has step by step instructions on how to go from logging in the first time to getting your book online. 

While the CreateSpace page is rather romantic, seducing you with images of your book dancing in your head, the DTP is rather utilitarian.  There's nothing to buy here, no spiffy packages, no offers of editing or illustration or publicity.  Just a simple service that lets you put your book online.  First things first they want you to sign in and provide tax documentation.

Once you've logged in and taken care of your tax information your next step is to prepare your text.  Unshockingly enough the way to get your text to look like it does in your book is to get it into HTML format and make sure it looks right.  Now, they will reformat if you start off in .doc or .docx (word), .pdf (doesn't transfer all that well), .mobi (works very well), and plain text.  If you're already working in word (like I am) save your document as a "webpage" and that will rewrite it into HTML.  You can then fiddle from there.  But, if you don't turn it into HTML first, then you have no guarantees that the spiffy format you set up will transfer from your original document into your Kindle book.

Next up, fill in the information for your book.  Title, author name, description, etc...  If it would be on the cover of your physical book, you'll fill it in here.  This is followed by the rights section, where you select what geographic region you've got the rights to publish in.  If you are the author, and you haven't sold any rights to the book, you maintain the rights to publish everywhere, so you can hit the world wide option.   

You'll pick your categories, up to five of them.  This is probably an area you want to spend as much time thinking about as your cover text.  What category is your book?  With five to choose from you've got lots of opportunity to get readers who may not usually look in your direction interested.  Granted, do not put your fictional tale of life in a kitchen in cookbooks unless it has recipes, but in addition to lit fic and food writing, you might aim for romance if there's an underlying tale of that, or possibly organic farming if you spend a lot of time talking about organic sustainable agriculture.  Still, of the five you have, make sure three are really close matches to your work, and if you can come up with two more close matches, get them, too.  Head out on a limb when you're out of close matches.

Next up keywords:  You get five to seven of them.  Obviously your name and the book title are good matches, but what next?  Here's the thing with keywords, you have two options: You can aim for words that will help to locate your book for people who already know something about it (character names, places, things in the book, etc...).  Or, you can aim for people who know nothing about your book with general terms.  I'd say how you do this will have a lot to do with how the rest of your marketing plan works.  If you expect a lot of people to know something about your book, ("I don't remember the title, but there were horcruxes, wands, and a school called Hogwarts.") then by all means use those sorts of keywords.  Most of the rest of us will need a combination of keywords, some very specific to get people who already know something about our book to it, and some very general to attract those who have never heard of us. 

Then up goes your novel and the cover image.  Make sure the cover image is a .tiff or .jpeg.  Once again the text should be .html.  Upload each and away you go.

Now comes the fun part:  Money!

How you get paid: you have two options, a paper check can be mailed to you, or the money can be deposited directly in your bank account.  Now, unless you are somehow allergic to technology, (And if you are, how are you reading this blog?) you want the second option.  Here's why: each month you accrue a certain amount of sales.  Those sales result in royalties.  If you chose the electronic deposit option, each month that goes by with more than ten dollars of royalties in your account results in a payment to you. (A payment sixty days post accrual.)  If you go for the paper option, not only do you have to wait for 100 dollars to accrue (on top of the sixty days for the check) but they will also charge you an eight dollar processing fee for each check they send out.

As for those royalties, you also have two options.  You can get a seventy percent royalty or a thirty-five percent royalty.  I assume most of you are thinking, why pick the thirty-five option?

Here's why:  The thirty-five percent royalty is good everywhere.  There is no "delivery fee" attached to the thirty-five percent royalty.  You can't charge less for your work elsewhere, but you can get the price down to $0.99 or set it as high $200.00.  So here's the calculation:  List price*.35 = royalty.

On the seventy percent royalty it works something like this.  You still cannot sell your book for less anywhere else.  If it goes for less elsewhere, Amazon will match the price and pay your royalties accordingly.  The seventy percent is only good in the US and the UK (No, this doesn't mean you can't sell elsewhere, it just means that you'll get the thirty-five percent royalty from your Canadian, Aussie, and French readers.)  You have to set a price between $2.99 and $9.99 and no more than the cost of the physical book minus twenty percent.  (If the physical book is $14.00, you can not set the price of the kindle book at more than $11.20.)  And your royalty is calculated by the price you set, minus the delivery fee.

Delivery Fee?!?  I mean, it's an electronic document.  They aren't boxing anything up or mailing it off.  However, a fee of $0.15 per megabyte will be assessed to you.  If it's a tiny book, then not less than $.01 will be charged.  They determine how many megs your book is, and no I didn't see how they determine this, or if the cover image is part of the calculation.  But here's how it works out, if that fee ends up costing more than half of your cover price, go with the thirty-five percent royalty.  If it costs less then half, you come out ahead with the seventy percent royalty.  Here's the calculation:  .7(list price-delivery fee) = royalty  I want to price my book at $4.99, so as long at it comes in at under 16 megs (and, granted, its long, but not that long!) I come out ahead on the seventy percent option. 
 
And that's pretty much that on the publishing end of the story.  You hit the save and publish button and wait two days for the book to be reviewed.  Once it has, you get an email telling you it's gone live. 

Sit back, relax, check the reporting data to see how many books you've sold, and sooner or later, money shows up in your bank account!

Self Publishing With Amazon CreateSpace

Welcome to the future of publishing.  Self published works produced print on demand or electronic versions for our ereaders.  Write up a book, get it edited, turn it into a snazzy PDF, attach a cover, pick a Print on Demand (POD) service, and off you go.  You are now a published author.

And there are a whole lot of ways to go about doing this.  So, here begins the series on different services available to authors who have a manuscript in hand and are getting ready for the next step.

First off, CreateSpace. This is Amazon's self publishing arm.  It offers pretty much everything you could possibly want, and several things you probably don't, to the self publishing author.  When you first land on the CreateSpace page you have the option of Books, Film, and Music.  Since this is a book writing blog, we're going to ignore Film and Music and go straight over to books.  Once you click on books you have two options, both of which I hope you will use, Book or Amazon Kindle ebook.

Technically CreateSpace is only books.  Ebooks are handled on Amazon's Digital Text Platform.

Once you get into CreateSpace they have a slickly laid out pile of information ready and waiting for you to browse through.  You have the option of doing everything but printing the book for yourself, or paying them a pile of money and having them handle everything, or something in between.

CreateSpace starts you off with one of two options,  Standard Plan or Pro Plan.  The Standard Plan lets you sell books through Amazon and your own website.  The Pro Plan allows you to use the "extended distribution" channel.  This means that you can sell your book to bookstores, libraries, etc...  The Pro Plan costs $39.00 for the first year and $5.00 for each additional year.

Granted, in the last entry I mentioned not being a huge fan of paying for a service to let you sell your books to brick and mortar bookstores, but in this particular case, they've made paying the fee worth your while.  The royalty set up is different for the Standard Plan and the Pro Plan.  In both cases you pay a basic per book fee, a per page fee, and Amazon gets a cut of the final price.  Amazon's cut goes up depending on where you sell your book.

The basic formula for a book on the Standard Plan sold on your own site looks like this:

$1.50 (per book fee)+ $.02 per page + 20% of the price you set.  If you sell on Amazon that percent goes to 40%.

If you have the Pro Plan the formula looks like this:

$0.85 + $ 0.012 per page + 20% of the price you set.  Once more, on Amazon that percent goes to 40%, and for other retailers it goes to 60%.

Those are the formulas for books over 108 pages (they cost less for smaller books) and black and white type.  Basically, a generic novel.

Here's the difference between those formulas.  With the Standard Plan I can price my book at $18.50 and make no money on Amazon sales and $3.70 on my estore sales.   With the Pro Plan I can price it at $11.50 and make $0.29 on Amazon sales and $2.59 on my estore sales.  (Yes, on the Pro Plan I lose money if I price it at $11.50 and sell to bookstores.  I'm not going to sell to bookstores.  At least, not through Create Space.)  So, quick vote, how many of you are going to pay $18.50 for a trade paperback fantasy novel by a writer you've never heard of?  How about $11.50?  I am less than shocked to see more of you raise your hand for the second choice. 

Now, my book is long.  The per page price difference results in an almost $3.00 difference in the base cost of each book.  I'm unlikely to set the price at $11.50.  I'd like to make a tad more than $0.29 per copy sold on Amazon.  If I bump the price up to $12.99, a fairly common price point for a trade paperback the length of the one I'm going to put out, then with the Pro Plan I can take home $1.18 per book, slightly less than double the industry standard royalty for a first time author.  

CreateSpace has a nice little calculator to let you play with prices.  You set the price you want your book to sell for then they tell you how much you'll make.

They also offer another price for you to order your own books at.  Once again the Pro Plan price is substantially lower than the Standard Plan price.  (For example, I intend to buy at least ten copies of my own book to give to buddies.  The Pro Plan discount on that order alone pays for the price of the upgrade.)  You can order as many or as few of your book as you like.  The good thing about this is you can get three books cheep.  The bad thing is there's no bulk discount, so you can't get 10,000 books cheep. 

Once you've finished playing with the royalty calculator, you can take the time to see what else they offer. Which is quite a bit.  Editing?  They've got it.  It costs $175.00 for the first 10,000 words and an additional $0.0175 per additional word for basic copyediting.  If you want all the bells and whistles editing it costs $320.00 for the first 10,000 and $0.032 for each additional word.

Cover design?  Everything from DIY with their goodies for free, to hire their design team and get a $999.00 designed-specifically-for-you to your standards cover, to a 1499.00 illustrated-specifically-for-you to your standards cover.  Or you can use the cover you designed yourself.  If you use their free cover designer that cover can only be used on the Amazon version of your book.  So, if you plan on publishing the book on Amazon, Lulu, and Smashwords, you can't take the cover with you when you leave CreateSpace. 

Publicity?  Sure, they've got it.  You can buy anything from press releases to book reviews to business cards.  (The business cards, at $199.00 for 500, are a tad more expensive than the free ones you can get at Vista Print.  This is one of those areas where it's very likely you can get a better price on your own.)

Want it all together in a nifty little package?  They've got that too!

Need help getting it all figured out?  They've got blogs and community forums filled with advice.  Feel like spending money for the help and you can call them and have someone hold your hand through the publishing process. Want to show off a bit of your work and get some comments from other writers?  They've got that available, too.  Want to introduce your book to the other CreateSpace writers out there?  They've got a place for it.

With CreateSpace you keep the rights to your book.  You have a non-exclusive publishing contract with them, which means you can publish your book elsewhere. You can pull your book off of their service when and as you like.  The only thing Amazon asks is that you don't sell it for less elsewhere. 

Pretty much anything you can imagine wanting to have over the course of getting your story from a manuscript to a book they will happily offer to you.  If you want the help, they'll give it to you, all you have to do is pay.

But what if you don't want a physical book at the end of this process?  Or what if you want a physical book and an ebook?  Tune in next time for Amazon Digital Text Platform!

Self Publishing Scams off the Starboard Bow, Mr. Yog!

You may recall that I have previously mentioned that both agent hunting and editing are areas with great potential for scams...  Well Loves, you haven't seen anything, yet.

Welcome to the glorious world of self publishing, where the scams abound, and hell, in some cases even the scams have scams.

Take Yog's law and hold it close to your heart.  "The money flows towards the writer!"  Keep saying it like a mantra.

So, first and foremost, what are we looking for in a DIY publisher?  Here's what you want: a service that will offer you the ability to turn your manuscript into an electronic and/or physical book, lets you keep all the rights, does not require that you pay anything for these privileges, an ISBN number, and does not require you to buy any copies of your own book.  If any of these conditions are not true, run away as fast as you can.  There are entire websites devoted to writers who got burned by 'self publishers' who ended up requiring the author to buy 50 or more copies of their own book, never sold any books, owned the rights for three years, and didn't pay any royalties.  You don't want to be the author who signed up for that service. 

Who offers legitimate self publishing?  Amazon.com, Lulu.com, Smashwords.com.  I'm sure there are others, but these are the three that I've researched so far.  I will do individual write ups on them in the coming weeks. In addition to write ups on other services as well.  (Full Disclosure: I do have an Amazon Associates Account, and if you do go through my link on the bottom and decide to self publish, I will get a cut.)

Now, what do you not want as a self publisher?

One of the things you have to be realistic about as a self published author is what your book is actually going to do.  It is not going to be on the shelves of Barnes and Noble.  They take one iUniverse.com book a year (I don't have numbers for other DIY publishers), so unless you actually wrote a work of breathtaking beauty and staggering genius, it isn't going to be you.  For that matter, even if you did, it still isn't likely to be you.  It may, if you've got good contacts, get onto the shelves of your local indie bookstore and maybe your local library.  If you wrote the right sort of book, there may be a market for it in gift shops, local touristy type places, and things like that.  (Your collection of Thomas Jefferson's greatest sayings coupled with interesting bits of local Virginia history will probably be a good match for the Monticello gift shop, a book shop in Charlottesville and one in Williamsburg.  Beyond that, it's not going very far unless it's online.)  Because of this, the first thing you do not need to pay extra for is anything related to selling your book in a bookstore.  If you want to go the bookstore direction, buy the copies yourself and sell them to the bookstore yourself, skip paying extra for the privilege.  If you do get a bookstore chain interested in more books than you want to be the middleman for, here's another place where owning your rights comes in handy, go find someone who just prints books and have them churn them out for the bookstore.

Writing services.  Do not pay them to read your book and tell you about how well it will sell.  Do not pay them to read your book and then offer suggestions as to how to be a better writer (this is not editing).  Do not pay for writing classes, tutorials, lectures, etc...  Until you've got your book ready to print, don't go visiting the DIY publisher. 

Copyright protection, registration, licensing, etc...  Anything you write is automatically copyrighted for you.  You do not need to spend money getting it registered.  If, like most writers you do everything on your computer, you should have an electronic record of when you wrote your work.  If you want a hard copy, print out your manuscript, stick it in an envelope with the headline and date from that day's newspaper, and then mail it to yourself.  If you're feeling really paranoid get it notarized for what date you put it in that envelope.  When it gets back to you, stick it in your filing cabinet and leave it there.  If you ever need to prove you wrote your work first, there it is, all nicely packaged up, with a US Postal Service date stamp on it. 

Marketing:  This is an area where you will have to spend money, but spend it well.  Most self publishers will offer you options for this and you need to be savy about how much bang you are getting for your buck.  Ask questions, lots of questions, find people who have used these services before and see what they had to say about it.  After all, if the press release service costs $200 and is just a fax saying you wrote a book sent to two dozen papers, well, you can do that for yourself for a lot less than that.  For the most part, unless you know people who have used the service and done well with it, I'd say skip it, you can probably do it for yourself just as well if not better.

Most will also offer packages of things you might or might not need.  Editing: you need it, but do you want to get it from them?  Once again, time to talk to their other authors.  Type setting: you can probably do it for yourself if you take the time to do some research (more on this later).  Cover design: you need it, and this is an area where you really do want a professional who knows what she is doing.  Do you want it from them?  Check out their other covers, maybe you do, maybe not.  Press packages: usually a collection of press releases, post cards, book marks, and a large poster type thing for book signings may be useful but you may also be able to get all of that for less elsewhere.

For any service, any printer, any package out there, Google it before you put your credit card numbers in.  Check it out with other writing communities.  Just because it looks good doesn't mean it is.   Self-publishing is jumping into shark infested water wearing several very fragile blood bags around your neck.  You need to be very careful not to let anything break those bags, otherwise you'll get eaten. 

Finally, read the fine print.  It doesn't matter what the website says in big letters.  It doesn't matter what the correspondent you are emailing with says.  All that matters is that contract you sign.  So read it carefully.  If it doesn't make sense to you, get someone who does understand it to read it.  But make sure it says what you think it says and that it spells out exactly who does what, when, and how. 

Next up:  self publishing with Amazon Create Space.


Amazon Self Publish

Self Publishing: Are You Insane?

Well, in all likelihood, yes, but you already knew that.  Let's put that aside and talk self publishing.

So, why would anyone want to do this?  I mean, beyond getting to skip the agent hunt part?

To start with it's easier now to self publish than it ever has been, and more and more writers who can actually write are taking this route.  Secondly, if you self publish you maintain complete control over your book.  Thirdly, you maintain complete rights (assuming you do a good job picking your self publishing route) to your work.  Fourthly, the royalties are much, much better.

Sounds great, right?  I mean who doesn't want complete control, complete rights, and better royalties?

So here's the downside:  You have to design the whole book.  You have to hire an editor.  You have to produce your own website, your own cover art, you own marketing plan.  You have to do all the things the publishing company would do for you, without the deep pockets and contacts of a publishing company, and often with the deck stacked against you because most people won't review, let alone stock, books that weren't published by a traditional publisher. 

So, once again, why do it this way?  I don't know what your rationale is, but I can tell you mine.  I'm in this for the long game.  This is book one of many books to come, at least two sequels are planned and being worked on, as well as a fourth unrelated novella.  The average traditionally published book has six weeks to make a splash before it hits the remainder shelf.  (Note for those of you going the traditional route: make sure your agent has your contract set up so that if your book goes out of print the rights go back to you.  You do not want that six weeks to end, have your book go out of print, and be left with nothing.)  I want the time to let my books build an audience.  It'd be lovely if it goes out and catches fire, but it's not likely.  Even with a publishing company behind you, you're looking at an average of 3000 sales.  I think, given enough time, I can do better than that, and I want the time.

Also, I want my rights.  Especially in the fantasy world, the author can come up with something lovely, and then TSR (to name a now defunct example) goes and hires a bunch of other people to write further adventures featuring the same characters. The publisher can do this because they own your characters, you don't.  And, while I will personally be exquisitely pleased if I ever see Sylvianna on the list of books at Fanfiction.net, I do not want to see my publisher decide he can make good money by selling off my characters to other writers.   

Lastly, check out what successful writers actually do.  Most of them are doing a ton of marketing on their own.  They have a blog, a twitter feed, they do readings, signings, conferences, etc...  They are already constantly building their own brand.  I can do a lot of that on my own.  I don't need a publishing house to blog, or twitter, or network.  And, lucky for me, the bits I do need a publishing house for is becoming less and less important.

What I mean by that is that in the next ten to fifteen years paper books are going to continue to make up less and less of the actual book trade.  Eventually there will be a point where paper books located in a physical store will make up a very small percentage of the literary market.  Going to physical book store will be much less about shopping for books, and more about hooking up your Nook while getting a coffee and flirting with the other customers.  The truth of the matter is that the likelihood of you getting your self published book into Barnes and Noble is pretty much zero.  The need to have the book in Barnes and Noble is what is becoming less and less of an issue.

The second issue of the value of a publisher is something I'm personally working on trying to defeat, and I hope more and more of you will join me as well.  People learn about books from book reviewers.  Many book reviewers will not take self published books.  Amazon's ranking system, Goodreads, Facebook, the blogverse, are also making this less important, but for the time being a New York Times review is worth quite a bit more than all of your buddies writing a review for you on Amazon and putting you on their Goodreads list.  However, the time being is not eternal, and I can envision a future where buying books is much less centralized.  I hope to take advantage of it.

But, beyond everything else, you own your rights when you self publish, which means, if at some future point, you decide you want to go the traditional route, you still can.  Trying to do it the other way around is a much messier process.

So, for me self publishing is a no lose proposition.  If my book lingers on Amazon selling seven copies, I can then go and take it off of Amazon, and start on the agent hunt.  If my marketing takes off, and everyone buys copies, then I've got complete control and a better royalty at the end of the day.