10 Things Writers Should Know about the business side of writing.

Chuck Wendig's blog is always good for shaking the proverbial writing tree and seeing what hits the ground. This week's entry by the talented Kameron Hurley reminds us that all publishers, epub or traditional, are seeing the biz differently than you. They see it literally as a business and your book, and you by extension, as a  product and a method of marketing.

If they don't see you that way, they won't be a publisher for long.

With that in mind, I've got some quick rules of thumb for you about publishers and your writing career. There are always exceptions to these, some of which prove the rule.

1. A Writer's Vision is for marketing copy only: If you talk about your vision -- as in how a publisher doesn't get your "vision" or your genius -- it's a clue that you don't get   that a novel is a collaborative project. A good editor and publisher can be a godsend on cutting the chaff to make your book a leaner, meaner storytelling machine.
2. Copy Editors edit, Editors advocate :  When you meet an editor at conference or con, you'll meet your story's champion. They will try to do their best for the story, not you, your story. So while that means they might go to bat for the story against the publisher, they'll also go to bat for the story against you if you insist on keeping things that distract from the focus of the story.
3. Self-Publish? Congrats you're a publisher: Back in my early days, it was hard enough to wrap my head around the idea that proofreading wasn't done by editors -- they've got enough to handle (advocating, profit/loss statements, finding more quality stories). They hire copy editors to handle the proofing. And you should too. If you can't afford one, find a volunteer. Same goes for covers and probably marketing as well.
4. Volunteers take their sweet time: There's that old adage that you can have two out of three things when working on a project, either fast, cheap or good. If you're getting a volunteer to help  (especially  people you shanghai in with promises of "exposure.") then prepare for them to take their time. They have lives and are doing you a favor.
5. Consider yourself on a 10 year plan: If you look up any "New" Writer's award, you'll find a good decade of practice and exposure behind them. Some wrote in fanfic, or advertising or in other fields like RPGs or non-fiction. You are in for the long haul buddy.
6. Writing may always be your part-time gig: There's more and more scuttlebutt that the days of a full-time novel writer maybe coming to a close, or that it's reaching a long nadir of sorts. I say this not to discourage, but to help brace you for the long slog ahead.
7. Paid writing is paid writing -- if that's what you want: You may find that if you really want that writing lifestyle, you'll have branch out in ways that keep you at the keyboard, but not necessarily doing what you dreamed of. Fiction novel writing is one of the toughest gigs to get and there's more luck involved than most people are willling to admit. Non-fiction, advertising, how-tos, pretty much everything pays better with more frequency than a novel. 
8. Business 101 is not Ethics 101: And Ethics 101 is that doing something legal is not the same as doing something that's ethical. As Ms. Kameron Hurley can attest, read your contracts and assume that publisher's know you're going to fight that boilerplate contract that tries to have you sell all of your rights in perpetuity for $500. Or that if you're an artists that negotiates doing your own book cover, then get paid for it as a separate item, otherwise you just did work for free.
9. Don't write for the market, but that is the harder road: You're going to write your next novel for a minimum of two years, maybe more. You have to love what you're doing or you're lose steam. Sometimes what you think is cool isn't a slam dunk for the marketeers, and that's all right, but know you've got an uphill battle (Says the guys who is trying to pitch a Weird Western.)
10. Live more, read more, write more: Seeing how real people live and interact, seeing how other writers tackle the same stories as you do and seeing yourself improve will help you inch closer to perfecting your craft.
11. Bonus Round! Read and write out of your comfort zone: Creativity is like a body that needs food and exercise. And just as eating and excising the same every day short changes a body, the same goes for your writing. Try new things and stretching yourself, you may discover unexpected inspiration and new tricks.

Now go fourth, my writing comrades and write!

Three bags of hurry up and wait

Well, that took a bit longer than I thought it would.

The prize aspect of a writer is discipline. You got to keep your butt in the chair and keep plugging away. Even when you’re staring at a screen that says “Uploading your ebook now.” That’s not so great for my ADHD.

My plan to e-publish was two-fold. The first was to provide several short stories so that potential readers could have more content to choose from. The second was to spread my distribution among the big three -- Amazon, Nook and Smashwords.

But if you have 7 shorts that essentially means you’re uploading 21 stories. I should have thought out that math earlier. So my plan to do a massive upload in one day turned into more like a week. Technically, I could have done it in a day, but I would have gnawed off my arm by the end of it, and learning to type with one hand is a bitch.

At this point, the experience of it all is a bit blurry (having a cold that week didn’t help). But from what I can remember …

For any of the three e-publishers:

·         They will want your tax information: It’s the price (or payment) of doing business. If you haven’t incorporated yet, they will take your social security number in lieu of your tax ID number.

·         If you have the  .doc file and a short story, you’re all set: it’s savvy to learn how to set up your formatting and TOC for your novel in Calibre or Scribe. If you have a .doc (not .docx) file, though, all three publishers have online conversion tools that should work for short stories.

·         Each company has different cover sizes and they change without notice: Do your homework on the covers.

·         For all the talk of how traditional publishers want to straightjacket you into a marketable niche, the genre labels for these companies are mostly either generic or what’s trending. If you happen to have a post-apocalyptical Science Fantasy short in the vein of Vance’s Dying Earth, good luck with that getting lumped into Science Fiction, Apocalyptical, and Adventure. And the Fantasy genres will only touch on Epic, General or Contemporary/Paranormal.  If you’re lucky, you could find Steampunk. Unfortunately, the pull-down menus for these are clunky. I’ll get to tags/labels with each publisher.

·         And no matter the publisher, if you have more than one book online, then you probably aren’t going to be happy on how you have to drill down in the reports to see what’s really going on with the sales numbers. That’s for just 7 stories. I can’t imagine what hoops the writers who have dozens of stories have to jump through to understand their data.

·         A “Same entry as last time” for things like author, publisher and price would make the process much less of a time suck.

·         Have a “cheat sheet” of your blurbs, tags and author bio handy to do a lot of cut and paste

Now for the individual guys:

Amazon:

You sly, sly dogs. I’ve already said that Amazon tries to make themselves a convenient one-stop shop for an author. They allow you to use Styles from Word to set up the formatting for TOC and offer a gallery of customizable book covers. However, then they’ll try to tempt you to go exclusive with them. (But do you really want only one company holding all the cards at the end of the day?)

Amazon only allows 7 tags for your product and offer limited genre choices. The biggest positive is that I saw one or two instant sales -- but then afterwards, nothing.  My cynical side wants to think that Amazon has a slush fund for buying the first copy of a writer’s work. If they can keep you hoping, then you’ll keep putting out content.

Not that I have any proof of such a silly idea. Maybe I should just pat myself on the back that I got lucky day one.

Uploading takes forever and you can’t really go on to the next project as you wait. The whole process happens over several different screens.

The actual publishing of your ebook takes 24 hours.

Nook:

Nook doesn’t offer you a free cover, but they do try to make themselves your browser-based word processor/Scrivener project manager. If you have any bold or italics in your document, you’ll have to go back and add them in via the Nook system.

I seem to remember this one was the most clunky to work with, though they seemed to have the most flexible system for cutting and pasting your tags in.

Again, uploads take forever and it seems that you take chances if you try to skip to the next project. You have to go through several screens related to different silos (price, audience, actual upload).

The upside is, they publish your ebook in a few hours.

Smashwords:

How I hate and love you.

Smashwords had the only single upload screen process, which was great, and the process actually invites you to upload something else as your ebook is translated in any format you need. Neat.

But SW has the most proprietary system for formatting your work (which at the very least means including a copyright that names your submission a “Smashwords Edition.”) For example, Their Word TOC system works off Bookmarks, not Styles and other odd bits.

->TL:DR Read their handbook. It will save you from a lot of grief later.

Even though the actual upload is painless, it take days -- yep days – for a story to go live. It makes me imagine that they have a light-starved gnome locked in a server box, reading every upload by the light of a candle and a Sega Genesis.

I still believe enough in my strategy that I’d do it again. But in the future, I’ll be adding individual stories and remember that I have to multiply my efforts by three.  

’Cause as an ebook author, there’s no such thing as bulk shipping.

Ohhh. Amazon you sly dog ...

There has been a seismic shift in e-publishing in just the last few years.

A. The paperback market has been shrinking, not just on the consumer end, but the distribution end as well. thanks to big box stores who have been very busy in trying to drastically narrow the selection of paperbacks a consumer sees on the shelf at all.  There used to be a top 10 national bestseller list in every genre, mostly because each region had its bestseller's list and that was aggregated into a national list. Now, realistically, there are only three top sellers in each genre because these stores don't want to mess with regional sales. They want one easy list to buy from.

B. The technology has finally caught up to make self-publishing very easy.. I spent a bit of time learning how to work programs like Calibre, only to find out that now I don't really need them. Amazon, Smashwords and the Nook now do the Word Doc converting for you.

C. Who hasn't heard of the woman who has made $30k in one month off of Bigfoot erotica. ... That's not a typo.

That's offered up some good things. With anecdotes like that, several professional writer's organizations are getting ready to approve bylaws that allow ebook authors to join. To see these organizations go from naked skepticism to embracing epublishing in a few short years is amazing. It's like watching a behemoth turn a pirouette on a dime. 

As for probably the worst part, now that's easier to upload your book and there's little shame in doing so, you might as well do it.

Right?

Along with about several other million other writers, aspiring writers and Baby Boomers who decided that they want to be writers during their retirement years. 

Despite all that, Amazon's stayed on top of it all with their bag of tricks. Going beyond the mobi. conversion tool, they've kept switching things up and delivering on promises that  make it worth your while to be exclusive with them, including being their part of their Amazon Prime library. 

There's also Kindle Worlds to entice established authors with the promise of "free money" for letting fan fic writers publish-- and profit share -- their efforts in the world of their favorite author. (Oddly enough, now some fan-fic writers are grumbling that they their hard work -- in someone else IP, shouldn't be "taxed."*)

Update: The Vampire Diaries franchise author, L.J. Smith, who was kicked offer the series is now using Kindle Worlds to get back into the series that she put on the map. 

It makes Amazon really tempting as your one-stop publishing shop, which has been their savvy goal from the beginning. The minor miracle here has been how they've stayed on target for so long. 

Makes me wonder what their next step is.

*So we gone from fan-fic writers being grateful they don't get cease-and-desist letters to some how thinking they should be the sole beneficiary of work they based on someone else's world. A world that took an author, an agent and a publisher, years to develop and grow. Just saying.

Critical Mass is not for Nukes anymore ...

This is one of those "don't do it the way I was doing it" posts, which probably makes it a rarity out there in the blogosphere.

If I'm frank with myself, I've only really done one project at a time. I do a short story, send it out and I TRY to work on something else, but I'm really going back and looking at that same short story, wondering what I could have done better, wondering how lonely that little guy is sitting the huge unloving slush pile.

So my new angle is going to be what I call "critical mass." Instead of writing and sending out one short story at a time, I'm writing four or so right after each other, then submitting them to various pubs en mass. If one gets rejected, then its sister story is sent out the next day. The idea goes beyond just throwing something up against the wall. If editors keep seeing your name, they know that you passionate and trying. That puts you ahead of about 70 percent of the pack.

Even if you're self publishing, this a potential strategy. Think about what you -- and most other people do -- when they find a great new writer. The first thing they do is look for more of their work to buy. They've got an appetite and they want to feed it.

If they can't find anything, they go find something else they can sink their teeth into.

If they find that the next writer had more than one delectable stories, they'll buy more and gorge at the story buffet.

So it's time to get cracking at the keyboard! ... Right after lunch.