Once I sent my manuscript off and was waiting for proofs, I started thinking about how I was going to let people know what I'd done. I asked myself, how I would discover my book, if I were the reader. I’d bought privately published local histories in Borders in Michigan. If it wasn’t in the local history section of a book store, then I might find it in that section in a library.
When I was reading detective fiction, I tried finding new authors by reading annotated catalogs from specialty bookstores and looking for fan magazines that discussed new authors. As I remember, it was tough to find anything useful
The problem for readers and writers alike is how to get bookstores, libraries and fanzines to take notice.
Reviews are the obvious, most desirable way to promote books with an aura of legitimacy. My publisher offers five bound reviewer’s galleys for $299, but doesn’t offer to send them to the right people, or even suggest who they might be. Five finished paperbacks, at the author discount, is a third that price. Other publishers are more generous with free review copies in their packages.
Critics reside everywhere from the New York Times and Publisher’s Weekly to an author lurking behind an alias puffing his or her own book on Amazon. One publisher even offers favorable reviews by Ellen Tanner Marsh for $399, and another sends books to Kirkus Discoveries, a paid review service, for $360.
I thought about various publications that might influence me, but wondered how many would actually consider a book from an essentially anonymous source. I narrowed my list to those that might be read by people I thought would buy my book and were most likely to publish something favorable. I saw no point in donating copies to the snobbish or potentially hostile. There’s a lag time of at least six months before you see any results.
The alternative is advertising. Unless you want to treat marketing as an expensive hobby, you may want to apply some sort of cost-benefit analysis. Mine was simple: I divided the price of a service by the average royalty I might receive. I then pondered the likelihood of selling more than 25 books for every $100 of outlay.
Almost every on demand publisher offers mass distribution programs, either through faxed press releases, internet links or email campaigns. Pat Holt asked Xlibris for details on their program, and could find the only benefit was a professional wrote the press releases. They did no follow-up, offered no way to distinguish their releases from the hundreds of others arriving daily at every media outlet in the country.
A number of publishers offer postcards with your cover on the front, and ordering information on part of the reverse. Apparently, these are designed to exploit the lower rates offered by the post office.
This leaves two problems. How often have you paid attention to a postcard that resembled an ad, and who are you going to mail them to?
I don’t think I’ve ever even gotten an announcement through the mail for a novel or literary work. However, I used to get them about non-fiction when I was teaching and actually did read some of them.
I asked the post office about bulk mailing, and my postmaster told me I couldn’t afford it, because I wasn’t going to send enough to specific zip codes to justify the $150 start-up cost. He suggested I find a private company to do the stamping under its permit. For them to keep their prices down, they barcode items for automatic sorting.
My purpose in sending anything by mail would be to fool someone long enough that he or she started to read about the book before realizing it was a promo. It wouldn’t do me any good to send something cheaper if it was more likely to be thrown away unread.
I thought an envelope would be more effective than a postcard or folded cardstock, if I could find something that looked classy. Really good envelopes were not available in quantity in the big-box stores that replaced stationers in my area. Decent ones averaged a little over 1 ½ cents. I rounded to 2 cents to cover the cost of addressing ink.
I designed a two-sided flyer using those graphic skills I developed that weekend I was trying to answer the publisher’s contract questions about the cover, then called some printers for general cost information. One was basically a photocopy operation that would reproduce what I brought it. Another did offset work and would take my digitized pictures and mockup and recreate it with more professional software.
When it came time to do the work, I called again, and prices were higher. I tried printing them on my own machine, and found I could produce about 75 two-sided copies with a single cartridge. The cost of ink and paper came to 22 cents each. One company wanted 14 cents, the other 30.
Both wanted me to send them the pictures and text and pay them a setup fee to recreate my flyer. The alternative was to create a PDF file. When I tried saving my file with Adobe on a friend’s computer, the software changed the page breaks and distorted the borders on pictures. I became less concerned with the cost of setup, than with potential battles with another designer.
When I considered including copies of the cover proof with some letters, it was obvious it was cheaper to pay someone 50 cents a page than try to make copies with large blocks of solid color. My printer sucked up ink and left damp paper.
Altogether the cost of a single flyer mailed first class in an envelope was 63 cents. A personalized letter added a penny. A copy of the cover another 50 cents, for a total of $1.14 per item. That’s less than my publisher wanted for a press release, unless I sent out 500 at $499, but still meant I needed to sell one book for every four of the more expensive package.
To do any mass mailing, I needed a list of people to contact. Last spring, I started to compile addresses of local history societies, then remembered professional groups sell their mailing lists. That was tantalizing, until I saw their prices. Fanzines and small bookstores may be less rapacious, if they make their databases available.
I returned to the internet to compile my own list and discovered many had email addresses. That seemed the affordable option, and I could send my flier as an attachment. Unfortunately, the increase in spam means it’s even harder to get people’s attention on their computers, than it is in their mailboxes. Also, unsolicited email tends to make people angrier than junk mail.
Amazon offers another way to use the internet. You create a list of books or other products you think are similar to yours. When anyone brings up one of the itemized books, your list appears. Of course, you place your book first, with a brief description. It’s more effective if Amazon has an image of your cover to display.
The device is called Listmania. You first need to set up an Amazon account. When you do the first list, it asks you to set up a "real name" and starts making noises about confidential information. Go down to where you can use a "pen name" instead. This is a free service because you market their books for them. Amazon tracks how many times your list is viewed.
If you decide the ideal reader for your novel is already reading Stephen King or Tony Hillerman, your list may not appear on Amazon because the screen only displays three. However, I discovered some of mine appear with other booksellers when I do subject matter searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN. So, even if a popular book gets you no exposure with Amazon, it may still publicize your book where it matters.
One final thing to remember when you’re sending out information - most people have never heard of print-on-demand or self-publishing, but probably have negative views of vanity presses. Don’t try to educate them. Let them think your book is like every other book they’ve ever bought.
If you used iUniverse, say it’s an affiliate of Barnes and Noble; if you used Xlibris, say it’s a strategic partner of Random House Ventures. They used the corporate association to build credibility with you; you can use their carefully crafted legal language to market to others. It may be the only unadvertised benefit of the package you purchased.
Sources:
Goldstein, Bonnie. "Raves For Sale," 19 January 2007 at Slate.com.
Holt, Pat. "Outsourcing at Xlibris," 22 September 2004, at Holt Uncensored #389.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Self Publishing - Part 4 - Infrastructure
Every on-demand publisher offers you the world - the world of e-commerce and internet sales.
What they deliver is less than you expect, although technically what they advertise. Most use Ingram’s Lightning Source to print and distribute books. Ingram, in turn, feeds book information to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders and receives orders from them. The problem is the flow of information is slow and often needs prodding.
Six weeks after my book officially was released, Borders had a complete listing on its website, Barnes and Noble listed the book but said it was not available, and Amazon had nothing. When I wrote to ask if there were problems, my publisher answered it took 60 to 90 days to get books fully listed. I was also warned the listing could be variable when it first appeared while a retailer’s software stabilized.
No publisher mentions that lead time when it touts the speed to self-publish, and mine certainly didn’t advise me to wait three months before I started promoting my book.
Two weeks after my complaint, which may have led to some expediting with Ingram, Barnes and Noble had the book fully listed and available, and it was beginning to appear in Amazon. It took another week before both the hardcover and paperback were available, but there was no image of the cover.
My publisher prefers people buy books through its agencies, and offers price and royalty incentives to customers and authors. The reason is obvious. It needn’t split profits with a bookseller or wholesaler. It expends its efforts on creating book and author web pages, and leaves the other outlets to Ingram and the author.
However, even when it is in the publisher’s interest to have useful internet pages, I discovered more gaps between expectations and deliverables. When my book was officially released, my customer rep sent me an email telling me my web addresses, along with instructions for maintaining my pages.
The book site, which is used for ordering, was functional. Only, no one had bothered to enter a book description. That was my task. The rationale was that I could change it quickly, perhaps post a review when I received it. That’s certainly a valid reason for giving me control, especially when its web designers charge $65 an hour to maintain pages, with a $16.25 minimum charge.
The author web site was another matter. My biographical information had been dumped with no formatting. I was expected to enter HTML tags to restore basic paragraphing. While I was there, I tested the email link. Other writers said they had problems with that with their publishers.
You have a choice - bite the bullet and learn some HTML, or find a teenager who works for video games. Since all you really need do is identify paragraph breaks and bold or italicize words, you can do it yourself. You add codes before and after the words to be emphasized, and enclose the codes in angle brackets <>. The code for bold is "b" and for italics is "i". In addition, at the end, you include a slash / between the opening bracket and the code letter.
Paragraphs may be more complicated. For scientific style like this column, you only need the code "p" with brackets and not all websites expect the end code. For indented paragraphs, you type an ampersand (&) and "nbsp;" as many times as you want spaces, with no brackets.
Once you have professionalized your publisher’s websites and have complete listings in the commercial sites, you can let your friends know where to find your book. Be aware, however, that internet outlets are separate corporate entities from the physical stores, and the appearance of a book on a company’s website does not mean a store will order it. Your friends will have to enter the twenty-first century,.
Also be aware that your entries on rival outlets contain only the minimum necessary information to order. If you want to reach strangers you probably want the same kind of promotional materials found on your publisher’s site. For non-fiction, the most important are the book description and author biography. For fiction, the excerpt is your most powerful tool.
For non-fiction, you want to keep the entry short. Remember the person you are trying to attract is probably not going to read more than a paragraph. You want to let them know why they should buy the book, and provide evidence that you are the expert they should listen to.
Fiction readers may be more leisurely and are going to want to read your style. You should provide an excerpt short enough to read, but long enough to leave them wanting more. Your biography may not help, since many will be more interested in your characters than in you.
Each of the major on-line retailers has unpublicized tools to accept this information. However, you will have to add the HTML codes if you have more than one paragraph in your excerpt. Amazon provides a short list of key words that are essentially what you learned to improve your publisher’s website. Whenever asked, list yourself as the publisher’s contact.
I wrote each section in Word and added the codes, so I could cut-and-paste text that had been verified by my spell checker. I entered the information into an Amazon on-line form on Sunday. On Tuesday, the missing cover image suddenly showed up. Thursday, my text appeared. They warned it could take a week, and it took less.
Borders and Barnes and Noble use email. Include the same identifying information you use for Amazon, your ISBN number, the author’s name and complete title, then identify the text you want added like "excerpt" or "author bio."
I sent them messages the same Sunday I entered data into Amazon. When I checked the following weekend, Barnes and Noble had used the excerpt and table of contents, while Borders had used the description from my publisher’s website. Unfortunately, it ran it all into a single paragraph, so it read poorly and looks worse.
Professional websites are not enough. Potential readers must discover your web page. The webmaster I wrote to at my publisher said it does not do anything to make it’s site available to the major search engines; it simply waits for them to be found, which can take months.
I’m told you can register your sites yourself. Yahoo requires you first set up an account. I entered my information in Google, but three month’s later the publishers’ websites do not appear when I search on my name. I sent nothing to Yahoo or MSN. and my websites do show up on the first page of results. Unfortunately, more shoppers use Google.
Some of what you do to build the infrastructure to market your book is fun, and a lot of it is tedious. However, if you’ve gotten this far, have actually completed a book and managed it through the publishing process, you know you can do anything. And everything I’ve mentioned is free because it benefits the corporations as much as it does you - or that hungry teenager you’re bribing.
Websites where your book is offered
* Amazon.com
* Barnesandnoble.com
* Bordersstores.com
Addresses to post additional information
* Amazon on-line form at http://www.amazon.com/publishers
* Barnes and Noble, email to titles@bn.com
* Borders, email to Corrections@Borders.com
Addresses to register your websites
* Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html
* Yahoo at http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
* AltaVista at http://www.altavista,com/sites.search/addurl/
Useful introductions to the mechanics of on-line listings
Brown, Rebecca. "How to Get Your Book up on Amazon.com" at RebeccaReads.com.
Nassise, Joseph M. "How to Add Your Book to Online Bookstores" (2001) at authorsden.com.
Sipos, Thomas M. "Marketing through Amazon" (2001) at GreenTentacles.com.
What they deliver is less than you expect, although technically what they advertise. Most use Ingram’s Lightning Source to print and distribute books. Ingram, in turn, feeds book information to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders and receives orders from them. The problem is the flow of information is slow and often needs prodding.
Six weeks after my book officially was released, Borders had a complete listing on its website, Barnes and Noble listed the book but said it was not available, and Amazon had nothing. When I wrote to ask if there were problems, my publisher answered it took 60 to 90 days to get books fully listed. I was also warned the listing could be variable when it first appeared while a retailer’s software stabilized.
No publisher mentions that lead time when it touts the speed to self-publish, and mine certainly didn’t advise me to wait three months before I started promoting my book.
Two weeks after my complaint, which may have led to some expediting with Ingram, Barnes and Noble had the book fully listed and available, and it was beginning to appear in Amazon. It took another week before both the hardcover and paperback were available, but there was no image of the cover.
My publisher prefers people buy books through its agencies, and offers price and royalty incentives to customers and authors. The reason is obvious. It needn’t split profits with a bookseller or wholesaler. It expends its efforts on creating book and author web pages, and leaves the other outlets to Ingram and the author.
However, even when it is in the publisher’s interest to have useful internet pages, I discovered more gaps between expectations and deliverables. When my book was officially released, my customer rep sent me an email telling me my web addresses, along with instructions for maintaining my pages.
The book site, which is used for ordering, was functional. Only, no one had bothered to enter a book description. That was my task. The rationale was that I could change it quickly, perhaps post a review when I received it. That’s certainly a valid reason for giving me control, especially when its web designers charge $65 an hour to maintain pages, with a $16.25 minimum charge.
The author web site was another matter. My biographical information had been dumped with no formatting. I was expected to enter HTML tags to restore basic paragraphing. While I was there, I tested the email link. Other writers said they had problems with that with their publishers.
You have a choice - bite the bullet and learn some HTML, or find a teenager who works for video games. Since all you really need do is identify paragraph breaks and bold or italicize words, you can do it yourself. You add codes before and after the words to be emphasized, and enclose the codes in angle brackets <>. The code for bold is "b" and for italics is "i". In addition, at the end, you include a slash / between the opening bracket and the code letter.
Paragraphs may be more complicated. For scientific style like this column, you only need the code "p" with brackets and not all websites expect the end code. For indented paragraphs, you type an ampersand (&) and "nbsp;" as many times as you want spaces, with no brackets.
Once you have professionalized your publisher’s websites and have complete listings in the commercial sites, you can let your friends know where to find your book. Be aware, however, that internet outlets are separate corporate entities from the physical stores, and the appearance of a book on a company’s website does not mean a store will order it. Your friends will have to enter the twenty-first century,.
Also be aware that your entries on rival outlets contain only the minimum necessary information to order. If you want to reach strangers you probably want the same kind of promotional materials found on your publisher’s site. For non-fiction, the most important are the book description and author biography. For fiction, the excerpt is your most powerful tool.
For non-fiction, you want to keep the entry short. Remember the person you are trying to attract is probably not going to read more than a paragraph. You want to let them know why they should buy the book, and provide evidence that you are the expert they should listen to.
Fiction readers may be more leisurely and are going to want to read your style. You should provide an excerpt short enough to read, but long enough to leave them wanting more. Your biography may not help, since many will be more interested in your characters than in you.
Each of the major on-line retailers has unpublicized tools to accept this information. However, you will have to add the HTML codes if you have more than one paragraph in your excerpt. Amazon provides a short list of key words that are essentially what you learned to improve your publisher’s website. Whenever asked, list yourself as the publisher’s contact.
I wrote each section in Word and added the codes, so I could cut-and-paste text that had been verified by my spell checker. I entered the information into an Amazon on-line form on Sunday. On Tuesday, the missing cover image suddenly showed up. Thursday, my text appeared. They warned it could take a week, and it took less.
Borders and Barnes and Noble use email. Include the same identifying information you use for Amazon, your ISBN number, the author’s name and complete title, then identify the text you want added like "excerpt" or "author bio."
I sent them messages the same Sunday I entered data into Amazon. When I checked the following weekend, Barnes and Noble had used the excerpt and table of contents, while Borders had used the description from my publisher’s website. Unfortunately, it ran it all into a single paragraph, so it read poorly and looks worse.
Professional websites are not enough. Potential readers must discover your web page. The webmaster I wrote to at my publisher said it does not do anything to make it’s site available to the major search engines; it simply waits for them to be found, which can take months.
I’m told you can register your sites yourself. Yahoo requires you first set up an account. I entered my information in Google, but three month’s later the publishers’ websites do not appear when I search on my name. I sent nothing to Yahoo or MSN. and my websites do show up on the first page of results. Unfortunately, more shoppers use Google.
Some of what you do to build the infrastructure to market your book is fun, and a lot of it is tedious. However, if you’ve gotten this far, have actually completed a book and managed it through the publishing process, you know you can do anything. And everything I’ve mentioned is free because it benefits the corporations as much as it does you - or that hungry teenager you’re bribing.
Websites where your book is offered
* Amazon.com
* Barnesandnoble.com
* Bordersstores.com
Addresses to post additional information
* Amazon on-line form at http://www.amazon.com/publishers
* Barnes and Noble, email to titles@bn.com
* Borders, email to Corrections@Borders.com
Addresses to register your websites
* Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html
* Yahoo at http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
* AltaVista at http://www.altavista,com/sites.search/addurl/
Useful introductions to the mechanics of on-line listings
Brown, Rebecca. "How to Get Your Book up on Amazon.com" at RebeccaReads.com.
Nassise, Joseph M. "How to Add Your Book to Online Bookstores" (2001) at authorsden.com.
Sipos, Thomas M. "Marketing through Amazon" (2001) at GreenTentacles.com.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Self Publishing - Part 3 - The Cover
I’m a writer, not an artist. I have some aesthetic sense, but no manual skills.
The cover turned out to be the most difficult part of the original submission for me. I hadn’t thought much about it, and felt suddenly asked to provide art, cover copy, and aesthetic decisions about color and font. I had no image of the book, and knew no artists to help. I also couldn’t find examples of the various fonts, and no publisher provided recognizable examples.
I was writing local history, so went through photographs I had available to find something I thought might work that had no problems with permissions or privacy. I didn’t know the legal guidelines, but I limited myself to photographs taken by me or my father. I’ve since heard some commercial publishers require signed waivers from anyone whose face appears on a cover. Most on demand publishers don’t provide this legal information. Instead, they put a number of clauses in their contracts that protect them from your ignorance.
Next I found someone in the yellow pages who could digitize 50-year-old slides. I told him what I was using the pictures for, but had not yet received the specification that defined the file type and minimum pixel density. He was a professional and gave me what I needed (TIF files). I later learned it was the wrong color convention, but could be converted. I don’t remember that being in any specification.
I don’t have professional photography layout software, but I did mockups for my high school newspaper. I found my best method for refining the cover text was to insert a book-sized box in a WordPerfect document, then allot space for pictures, a company logo and bar-code. You may have been on the yearbook staff and might get similar results by cutting blocks of paper.
I typed my cover text in a font size I thought would work, and discovered it didn’t fit, even though it was less than the prescribed number of words. Because physical appearance was more important than content, the rewrite became an exercise in poetry. Working with the graphic representation stimulated a different part of my imagination.
Publishers offer to write the back cover text for a price, but I was skeptical anyone was going to think about my book in the same way I discovered I could. At best, it would be worth it if they would start from my concept and polish it. Thinking anyone is going to understand your work as well as you is as naive as thinking any of them are going to pluck your manuscript from the mire and promote it into a best seller. Even writers published by major commercial publishers complain about the transformations that occur when designers only follow the conventions of the market.
Some publishers offer to design your cover for a price; others offer basic templates that have predetermined blocks where their designer inserts the picture and text. The latter changes the design process into something analogous to looking at group picture mats in the hobby store and picking the one that will work best with your family photographs and wall decor.
One publisher specified the pictures you sent had to already be the exact size of the template block. This requires you have the necessary software and experience. If you don’t, then the cost of paying a professional, yours or theirs, is required. Photoshop, the best known of the layout packages, lists at about $600. I used the software that came with my camera; it may have been free, but the camera wasn’t. My biggest problem was the manual had long disappeared and it took hours of trial and error to learn it well enough to use.
I cropped and enlarged the pictures to create objects (JPG files) I could insert into my word processor mockup. I played with WordPerfect’s color wheel, which is available under the "more" option of the highlight button. I tried one color after another for the background in the text box until I found the one that worked with my pictures. I then changed the font colors until I found something that looked OK.
I sent my mockups along with the original TIF files created by the professional and the formulas for the colors with my submission package. The pictures in the mockups weren’t usable because, in my ignorance, I destroyed the reproduction quality of the images, but their intent had always been a means to communicate vision.
My mockups didn’t fit any one template, and the company offered a service upgrade. I realized the cover is another of those potential vanity snares. You need to know how you’re going to distribute your book. If it’s going to be sold at a community booth a simple cover will work. If you’re going to sell it with a seminar you offer you may need more.
I looked at the ads in the New York Review of Books and discovered covers didn’t attract my attention and that most large publishers have fairly simple ones that still look good when they’re shrunk for promotions. Indeed, many don’t use pictures, but sophisticated freeform fonts. The only time a book jacket might be important is if you place it in a bookstore or souvenir shop where you need to catch someone’s eye before you can sell to him or her.
I decided I could live with a template, so long as they reproduced my colors and croppings.
I was surprised at how happy I was when I finally beheld a copy of the finished book, and the flat proof page was changed into three-dimensions with a glossy surface. I discovered I cared very much that the book look like a book and feel like a book.
My satisfaction with the book as an object comes from those choices I made that panicky weekend when I prepared my submission. I realize now it had become a matter of stepping up to the challenges of new software tools, and mine were primitive, or live with the work of others who wouldn’t be able to devote the hours I did to my project. Choosing the options that provided the most control within the skills I could develop was the root of my pleasure.
The cover turned out to be the most difficult part of the original submission for me. I hadn’t thought much about it, and felt suddenly asked to provide art, cover copy, and aesthetic decisions about color and font. I had no image of the book, and knew no artists to help. I also couldn’t find examples of the various fonts, and no publisher provided recognizable examples.
I was writing local history, so went through photographs I had available to find something I thought might work that had no problems with permissions or privacy. I didn’t know the legal guidelines, but I limited myself to photographs taken by me or my father. I’ve since heard some commercial publishers require signed waivers from anyone whose face appears on a cover. Most on demand publishers don’t provide this legal information. Instead, they put a number of clauses in their contracts that protect them from your ignorance.
Next I found someone in the yellow pages who could digitize 50-year-old slides. I told him what I was using the pictures for, but had not yet received the specification that defined the file type and minimum pixel density. He was a professional and gave me what I needed (TIF files). I later learned it was the wrong color convention, but could be converted. I don’t remember that being in any specification.
I don’t have professional photography layout software, but I did mockups for my high school newspaper. I found my best method for refining the cover text was to insert a book-sized box in a WordPerfect document, then allot space for pictures, a company logo and bar-code. You may have been on the yearbook staff and might get similar results by cutting blocks of paper.
I typed my cover text in a font size I thought would work, and discovered it didn’t fit, even though it was less than the prescribed number of words. Because physical appearance was more important than content, the rewrite became an exercise in poetry. Working with the graphic representation stimulated a different part of my imagination.
Publishers offer to write the back cover text for a price, but I was skeptical anyone was going to think about my book in the same way I discovered I could. At best, it would be worth it if they would start from my concept and polish it. Thinking anyone is going to understand your work as well as you is as naive as thinking any of them are going to pluck your manuscript from the mire and promote it into a best seller. Even writers published by major commercial publishers complain about the transformations that occur when designers only follow the conventions of the market.
Some publishers offer to design your cover for a price; others offer basic templates that have predetermined blocks where their designer inserts the picture and text. The latter changes the design process into something analogous to looking at group picture mats in the hobby store and picking the one that will work best with your family photographs and wall decor.
One publisher specified the pictures you sent had to already be the exact size of the template block. This requires you have the necessary software and experience. If you don’t, then the cost of paying a professional, yours or theirs, is required. Photoshop, the best known of the layout packages, lists at about $600. I used the software that came with my camera; it may have been free, but the camera wasn’t. My biggest problem was the manual had long disappeared and it took hours of trial and error to learn it well enough to use.
I cropped and enlarged the pictures to create objects (JPG files) I could insert into my word processor mockup. I played with WordPerfect’s color wheel, which is available under the "more" option of the highlight button. I tried one color after another for the background in the text box until I found the one that worked with my pictures. I then changed the font colors until I found something that looked OK.
I sent my mockups along with the original TIF files created by the professional and the formulas for the colors with my submission package. The pictures in the mockups weren’t usable because, in my ignorance, I destroyed the reproduction quality of the images, but their intent had always been a means to communicate vision.
My mockups didn’t fit any one template, and the company offered a service upgrade. I realized the cover is another of those potential vanity snares. You need to know how you’re going to distribute your book. If it’s going to be sold at a community booth a simple cover will work. If you’re going to sell it with a seminar you offer you may need more.
I looked at the ads in the New York Review of Books and discovered covers didn’t attract my attention and that most large publishers have fairly simple ones that still look good when they’re shrunk for promotions. Indeed, many don’t use pictures, but sophisticated freeform fonts. The only time a book jacket might be important is if you place it in a bookstore or souvenir shop where you need to catch someone’s eye before you can sell to him or her.
I decided I could live with a template, so long as they reproduced my colors and croppings.
I was surprised at how happy I was when I finally beheld a copy of the finished book, and the flat proof page was changed into three-dimensions with a glossy surface. I discovered I cared very much that the book look like a book and feel like a book.
My satisfaction with the book as an object comes from those choices I made that panicky weekend when I prepared my submission. I realize now it had become a matter of stepping up to the challenges of new software tools, and mine were primitive, or live with the work of others who wouldn’t be able to devote the hours I did to my project. Choosing the options that provided the most control within the skills I could develop was the root of my pleasure.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Self Publishing - Part 2 - Text
Commercial publishers provide services, at least to their more famous authors, that handle every step from editing to marketing. Some even suspect the writing. They often use outside printers. On demand publishers, essentially, take over the functions of the job shop, and leave the rest to you.
The tasks you assume require some knowledge and some computer software, most likely Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader. Before you dismiss services as so many high-priced automotive accessories, consider what it would cost to do something yourself, and how important it is to be done well. Remember, even your nearest and dearest will resent buying a sloppy product.
The first step is the editorial work. To writers this should be the easiest. I had a manuscript I was comfortable with, so didn’t care about editorial services. Actually, I wouldn’t have minded a skilled editor, but I thought my chances of getting one were slim. I’ve rarely found someone who could do critical reading as well as I needed, but then I’ve worked as a technical editor and taught English composition and can do the basic work myself.
If it’s been years since you worried about grammar and punctuation, the surcharge may be worth it. One thing many don’t advertise is the cost of errors. Many publishers invoice you for every correction they make, once the manuscript is accepted. I discovered my space bar had stuck and my spell checker hadn’t caught problems when words merged with dates. The bill for putting back the spaces was $2.00 a space, plus baseline fees.
Other skills in the editorial process that are not disclosed are the techniques used for revisions. My publisher sent the proof in an Adobe file. For the first galleys, I read 500 pages aloud from my small screen. For the second iteration, I printed it and read the typescript. For the final, I only ready the pages where I expected corrections. It doesn’t take long to learn how to "go to" specific pages in a PDF document, or to print them out.
The method for requesting corrections was another matter. My publisher expected me to enter them into a Word table. It took me a while to figure out how to manipulate the table features, then I had the usual problems with Word converting initial letters into capitals. If I didn’t catch the inadvertent changes then the publisher’s literal minded clerk put unwanted capitals into the manuscript, and I had to pay to have my text restored.
A hard copy option for corrections exists, for a price.
Once you consider the tariff for mistakes, professional help may be a good investment. Mine finally ran to about $300. If you live near a college, there’s always a pool of talented, conscientious people who need money who post their names in the copy shops. Alas, there’s also a pool of the untalented or avaricious. If you discover this is what you’ve got, remember it’s probably easier to break a contract with a local than with your publisher, and you have less to lose in the battle.
The proffered levels of help range from simple proofreading and grammar checking to something more. One offered referrals to ghostwriters, and some will type your manuscript.
The second step is preparing the submission package. Most companies ask for the same things: a manuscript, cover art, and cover text. Essays for a web site are required if that is part of the marketing service they provide, not just for you, but for themselves. I learned the last could be changed later without penalty.
Most companies take your manuscript and prepare it for the text publishing software. That is, they do the aesthetic work - change the fonts, add page numbers and page headers, chapter breaks. However, the fine print for one company required the writer send a print ready manuscript. The usual service was an option for every price level.
What "print ready" appears to mean is that you take your manuscript and convert the paragraph structure to the standard indented first line you see in most novels, not the blank space and flush first line used in scientific writing and this column. Then, I assume you do all those formatting changes that make a page look like a book, and finally save the results in a PDF format.
The current list price for Adobe software that will produce, not just read, a PDF file is $450, about the price you’d pay for the base package from a number of publishers. If you already own the software or have a future need for it, then you can weigh various costs. Otherwise, select a publisher that only requires a Word or text file.
However, beware there are still potential problems. My publisher claimed all I needed to submit was an electronic document and it would do the rest. I had problems when it transformed my scientific style paragraphs and there were block quotations in the paragraphs. The software assumed the sentence following the quotation was a new paragraph and that every quotation ended a paragraph. I could not get my publisher to correct problems when the quotation was, in fact, embedded in a continuing paragraph, and I had to refuse accepting the final proofs until some paragraphs were corrected.
My second problem came with my word processor. I use WordPerfect. I had Word translate the text which introduced more errors than if I had let WordPerfect do the conversion. Special characters were not interpreted correctly, including double and single quotation marks, dashes, cent signs, British pound signs, and some special letters in foreign languages. The usual French and Spanish letters like ç and ñ presented no problems.
During the production process, my publisher allowed me to separate my errors from its, and only pay for the former. What I discovered was that it was much easier to get my errors corrected than its. I was still trying to get some special characters corrected when I refused to accept the final proof. The most egregious were Riga and Kyoto, with a club in the Latvian word and an omega in the Japanese. In the end, Riga appeared without a line over the i, while Kyoto had the proper line over the first o. As happened at several critical stages, I ended up having to accept less than I wanted to get the book out.
Most of my serious problems could have been avoided if my publisher had assumed an author was capable of doing some of the preparation. It needed to provide two levels of customer support, one for people whose computer literacy was limited to email, typing a manuscript and shopping on-line, and another for people like me with some experience with computers.
The best defense is to try to get technical specifications from as many publishers as you can, and assume the rules for one apply to all. Then, reformat the manuscript into the standard paragraph form, making sure you use what are called curly single and double quotation marks. If you have special characters, make a list and include it with the submission as a warning.
Don’t go any farther. Formatting directions are part of the information you send with the manuscript, not embed in it. It’s a good idea to play with the various formats and fonts available with your word processor, but only so you understand the questions asked by your publisher.
Remember, at this point, your only audience is a computer program manipulated by a technician who is not paid to read your book. It is always easier for everyone if you send a simple manuscript with accompanying notes, rather than introduce problems by trying to do formatting that may look beautiful, but is not what the computer expects.
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