Maria Savva's Blog - Posts Tagged "publishing"

I'm participating in Adopt an Indie, this November. My book The Dream is among over 100 books being featured in this event.







You can 'adopt' an indie author by choosing his or her book to read and review, from the list, request the book using the 'Book Request Form' on the site. If your request is successful, you'll receive a free ebook version of the book to read and review!

It's a great way for readers and bloggers to find out more about independent authors.

Here's a link to the site: Adopt an Indie

My guest blog post, which will appear on the site on 1st November, is entitled Why "I'm self published" is not the same as "My novel wasn't good enough to be published traditionally"

I will be posting a link here when it's been posted. I hope you'll all stop by and have a look at the books that are available on the site, and if you have time please participate, either by spreading the word about the event, reading and reviewing some of the books, reading the guest posts, commenting on the blog posts.

Here's a bit more information about 'Adopt an Indie' month that I've taken from the website:

* Readers will be able to talk to published authors and learn about their experiences
* Authors will be able to find out what really matters to readers and if they really care about the ‘indie/SP/small press’ labels
* Bloggers can share their take – do they see traditional books as higher quality? Does the publisher even matter?

In addition, as part of the ‘Adopt an Indie’ theme, readers will be able to read and review one book from a selection available in order to see first hand the quality that is on offer. In effect, they will ‘adopt’ that indie and be able to ask more detailed questions about their work and get more of an insight into the indie world.

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I hope you'll get involved in this event in some way! If you do, please let me know by posting a comment below! Happy reading :)

I'm continuing my series with a few more self-publishing and writing tips that I hope you'll find handy.



N:

Names

One thing that is very common for writers when they first start out, is the need to use capital letters for everything. I've done it, and I've read lots of books by debut novelists that have the same issue.

You only need to use a capital letter at the start of a proper name, place name, or the brand name for something, or for a title. Obviously you use capital letters for days of the week, months of the year etc., but I find the most common errors are to do with misuse with words like mum and dad, aunt and uncle -- with these types of words you only need a capital letter where it's being used as a name. A few examples to hopefully make this clearer:

Where you don't need a capital letter:

Rachel's mum was doing the ironing.

Greg's dad was watching television.

My uncle came to visit.

The queen was in the parlour.

The king was in his counting house.

I went to university with him.

I have an appointment with the doctor.

Where a capital letter is needed:

"Are you doing the ironing, Mum?" asked Rachel. (Notice the word 'mum' is being used as a name.)

"What's on TV, Dad?"

"Thanks for visiting, Uncle Bob."

The ruler of the land was Queen Elizabeth.

For fifty years, King Henry had ruled.

I went to Middlesex University.

My appointment is with Doctor Green."

Another one is God. You always use capital G for God because it is a name, assuming you are using it for the one and only God. If you are talking of multiple gods, you don't need a capital letter. Again, when you're talking of the one and only God, you would also use capital letters when referring to Him, and use He and His, when you are talking about Him.

Hopefully, I haven't thoroughly confused you now.


NaNoWriMo

I have never actually taken part in this, but have been told by fellow writers that it's an excellent way to kickstart a new project, especially if you tend to procrastinate.

It means: National Novel Writing Month, and the idea is to write a complete novel in a month. Some people (amazingly) do manage to do this. Others don't, but those that don't finish often say that they are pleased they took part as they now have the beginning of a novel and can continue to work on it. I am not an expert of NaNoWriMo, so I can't really add any more to this, except, here's a link to the website where you can find out more about it. It takes place every November:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Networking

One of the most important things you can do as a self-published writer is network with fellow writers, readers, and people involved in the book-publishing industry in some way.

I have mentioned the forum, Bestsellerbound.com, where I am lucky enough to have met many supportive and talented independent writers. The great thing about having a support network is that you can get help when you need it, and two heads are better than one when it comes to finding ways to promote.

Find a writers group that you are happy with, and stay connected.

Twitter is also a great place to meet other writers, I have found (writers tend to follow fellow writers). I've also signed up to the World Literary Cafe Twitter Follows, here: http://www.worldlitcafe.com/, where you follow other Twitter users and they follow back. A good way to build a following, and network with other writers.


O:

Okay and OK

Many writers seem to be very confused about this word. I find variations, including ok, Ok, Okay... they are all wrong (except the last one if it's at the beginning of a sentence and needs the capital O.)

The only two correct ways of writing OK are:

OK and okay

OK????


P:


Podcasts

Increasingly, authors are using podcast interviews as a way to promote their work.

Two internet podcasts that I have appeared on are Tweep Nation, and Blue Bonnets, Bagpipes & Books.

I am still quite reluctant to agree to do podcast interviews, because I always get very nervous. However, if you like that sort of thing, I'd recommend the two podcasts listed above. There are many more similar opportunities if you search around the Internet.


Promotion

What are the best ways to promote? That is the million dollar question. I am not sure that there is a way to promote your books to make sure you get sales. The nearest I've got to success was when I did the last KDP Select free promotion of my book Coincidences. There is no doubt that the Amazon KDP Select programme increases the visibility of books on the Amazon website. However, I have found that the only way to be sure of lots of downloads is to promote using the free days. i.e. give your books away. I had about 14,000 downloads in my last free promotion. For about a month after the promotion the book was selling well, but it appears to have died down. I think because there are so many books on Amazon, and so many being given away free each day, in order for your book to be noticed it has to be quite high up in the bestselling lists. The free promotion goes some way to helping this, but after the promotion dies down, sales do too. The benefit of giving away so many free books though, is that when people read your book, if they like it, they will go on to buy more of your books. So, I suppose if you only have one book, I wouldn't recommend the KDP Select free promotion as a great way to advertise, but most writers have more than one book in them.

Even if you don't want to be part of the KDP Select programme, you can get your book listed free on Amazon. Author Darcia Helle has had great success from giving away one of her books free on Amazon, she continues to offer her first novel, Enemies and Playmates, free on Amazon and sales of her other books have taken off because of that. Again, this is only an option for those authors who have one or more books. The way to get your book listed free on Amazon without joining the KDP Select programme, is by listing it free on another site, e.g. Smashwords or Barnes and Noble, and then going to your book's page on Amazon and reporting the free book, by clicking the link that says: 'Tell us about a lower price'. There is no guarantee that Amazon will match the free price, but if you ask some of your readers and fellow authors to help out with reporting the free book to Amazon, there is more of a chance this will happen.

Proofreaders

I think I have already mentioned the importance of good proofreaders when preparing your book for publishing, when I was talking about Editing, in an earlier post in this series.

I will quickly mention it again, as it is so important. I would recommend that you have at least a handful of good proofreaders to check over your work for grammatical and typographical errors. There are things that your spellchecker won't pick up. For instance, where you use a word that sounds like another word e.g. their and there, it's a very common mistake to use the wrong one, not because you don't know the difference, but because the brain is a strange thing... You could accidentally have written "is" instead of "if", for example, or "of" instead of "off", "to" instead of "too". These are some of the most common mistakes I've noticed in writing. Proofreaders can often notice these things. One proofreader wouldn't notice all of them. I have found that when using 6 or 7 proofreaders they tend to find different errors, often completely missing those found by the other proofreaders, so I would never rely on just one person to check through the finished manuscript.

This leads me on to the next point I want to make:

Perfection

Although we must all strive for perfection in our writing, over the years, I have learnt that it is almost impossible to achieve it and you should not be too hard on yourself. Try to make sure that your book is error free; use an editor; proofreaders, and beta readers. Read it through yourself a few times, but realise that even after you've done all of this there will likely be 2 or 3 (if not more) typos. As a reader, I can forgive these, and I'm sure most readers can. What you don't want to produce is a book with a typo on every page, or every other page... that will frustrate your readers.


Pinterest

I'm going to quickly mention Pinterest. I have an account there and I know it's catching on, because there are P signs alongside the Google+ and FB and Twitter signs on many websites, so you can share things that you like to Pinterest.

On Pinterest, the idea is simple, you create 'Boards' containing things that you have found that are of interest on the Internet. For writers, you can use it to list your books, and links to your websites. There are also Boards that you can join where you can add your books, for example, I have joined a board called 'The World of Indie Authors' and there are links to books by many different authors.

I hope you have found some of the above helpful.


To see the other posts in this series, please follow the links below:


A-C: http://nutsandcrisps.wordpress.com/20...
D-F: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
G: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
H-J: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...
K-M: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...

One of the comments at The Literary Consultancy's conference this year, was that 2012/13 has been a 'remarkable year of change' for publishing in general.

A panel of publishing professionals gave us their overview of the changes this year and how they are adapting.

Here are a few significant points that were made:

Gordon Wise, a senior literary agent at Curtis Brown talked a bit about how agents are now getting involved with assisted self-publishing for authors. The Amazon "White Glove" service was talked about. I had never heard of that before. Here's an article that explains a bit more about the idea behind it: http://paidcontent.org/2012/12/04/ama...

At the moment it seems to be geared towards helping authors who already have an agent becoming published with the help of the agency. I think the idea is also to help more well-known authors with maybe uploading their back catalogue of books, that many be out-of-print, onto Amazon.

Little is known about the "White Glove" service, but it's something that we may be hearing more about in the future.

***

Dan Franklin, who works at Random House Digital talked a bit about how the growth in self publishing has affected the larger publishing houses.

He said that e-books make up 23% of the publisher's revenue.

He said that authors demand much more from the publisher now because of the changing environment. They are working more towards author transparency, for example in respect of how royalties are paid. They are running social media tutorials for their authors because that is becoming more important for published authors.
Publishers are now obliged to provide more data to authors than before.
He also talked about how there are going to be mergers between publishing companies.
Interestingly, he believes that the words are more important when it comes to e-books and it seems the major publishers are not too concerned about evolution of the e-reading form.

***

Stefan Tobler, of And Other Stories, a small publisher, gave a bit of insight into the way they have met the challenges presented by the digital revolution.

The volume of e-books they sell is 5% of their total sales. They don't do heavy discounting on e-books. They were lucky that one of their titles Swimming Home was short listed for the Man Booker Prize. Before that, they had a book that was a bestseller, Down the Rabbit Hole.

They charge £10 for an e-book but with Amazon discounts their titles are about £4 in e-book format.

For more popular titles, Amazon will decide to discount to 20p - £1. What the publisher gets, it was stated, is much more than that. Amazon makes the decision to cut the e-book prices, not the publishers, yet Amazon pays the publisher much more than they get from sales.

***

A few other points of interest that came out of that panel discussion were:

1. Children's books are not very popular as e-books. Some people have said that they don't like the idea of children's books as e-books and prefer their children to have the experience of reading real books. One audience member said that she only buys children's books as e-books when travelling because it's easier to have the books on an e-reader rather than carrying lots of actual books.

2. The forecast is that sales of e-books will overtake paperback/hardback books by 2017.

3. One journalist in the audience stated that outside of London, in the UK high street bookstores are "practically dead".

I'll be posting more about this conference soon.

At the recent TLC Conference in London, there was a Digital Masterclass on the 'Five Key Stages of Self-Publishing', in association with SfEP (Society for Editors and Proofreaders) and ALLi (The Alliance of Independent Authors).

I'm going to split this into two separate blog posts because there was a lot of information given.

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Dr Alison Baverstock, Course Leader for MA Publishing at Kingston University, made the following points:

1. Take care

It's very easy to self-publish a manuscript and the sites that you upload to won't check the content, the quality of the product.

She warned that negative responses to books can hurt and be damaging for a writer.

2. Think about the objectives.

There are many different formats you can publish in. Consider the flexibility of formats.

3. Think of an e-book as a scroll.

A digital book is flowing text. A reader can change the font and font size, as well as line spacing.

She went on to say that there is no restriction on the length of an e-book. With e-books, she says there is a much more level playing field between indie and traditionally published books because no one can really tell who published it.

She says it's best to make e-books widely available.

4. You don't have to do it on your own.

There are various supports out there. Guides to formatting.

On Smashwords.com, for example, there is a free style guide.

She mentioned BookFlower a website where you can easily format your books on your own.

There was a demonstration of that website, and it does seem very easy to use to convert a document into an ePub.

Dr Baverstock also recommended the book Let's Get Digital: How To Self-Publish, And Why You Should, by David Gaughran.




She also recommended Jutoh.com

She gave a few tips for effective distribution:

The aim is to drive traffic to your book. Social media is useful. She recommends trying one thing at a time; changing one variable at a time to see what works and keep a record to learn from.

In regard to the question as to how much to charge for an e-book, she stated that we often underestimate how much people are willing to pay. The presentation of the book is important. We should not look at price in isolation. There are other factors that influence the decision to buy a book.

5. Gain vital market information

Whether you're self-published or published by a traditional publishing house, authors need to get involved in media/marketing. Publishers have become more reliant on authors for this.

Wendy Toole, Chair of the SfEP, stressed the importance of editing.

She said that at least 2 of the following should be done before publishing:

1. Get a manuscript assessment/critique

2. Developmental/structural editing

3. Copy edting

4. Proofreading

She said that it's best to use SfEP members, and also recommended TLC's services. She said you could also use someone who has been personally recommended to you by another author whose books are well-edited.

It was also stated that it's best to get your manuscript into the best shape possible before sending to an editor as this will save time and expense.

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In Part II of this part of the series, I will tell you what the speakers said about cover design and font type, and also pass on some tips from an author who switched from traditional to self-publishing.

Part I of this segment of the series can be found here: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...

Those of you who follow my blog will know that I have been writing a series of posts about what I learned at the recent "Writing in a Digital Age" conference. The staff at The Literary Consultancy have collated various press reports and write-ups on their website. Check it out here: http://www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk/...

My blog posts are included!

Now on to part 2 of this topic. Today I'll tell you what was said about the importance of book design.

There was a very interesting presentation about how book design (the cover and interior) can be an effective marketing tool for writers.

Lots of market research goes into creating covers that sell books. This is one area that I found quite eye-opening. I've always thought that little or no imagination goes into the book covers created by the big publishers, but there is a method in their madness. They know which covers sell, so why bother spending lots on a cover? They have researched the elements that have to be included on a cover for the book to stand a chance of selling to a target market, and they make sure that their covers have those.

Kristen Harrison, found of The Curved House, said that the covers of commercial books 'speak' to the target market.

An example given was that for chick-lit books, typically marketed at 30-40 year old professional women, the usual key requirements are:

1. The colour pink included somewhere on the cover
2. A font that looks like handwriting
3. A woman's legs from the knee down
4. A pencil skirt

Yes, weird, but true... Some covers were shown at the conference and it really was obvious that most of the chick-lit books had followed this winning formula to some extent using one or more of these elements.

Here are some covers I found that kind of prove the theory:





Lots of pink, and legs, and handwriting font there...

Another important point brought up at the conference was about brand identity and how that can help to attract readers and sell books. We see it with the bestselling authors, where they have many books with similar book covers that identify them as the author. For example, they may always use the same font type for their name, or maybe a similar picture on each cover.

The example given at the conference was Rachel Hore. If you take a look at her website, you can see how similar all her book covers are: http://rachelhore.co.uk/

Many indie authors (myself included) do not set out with a marketing plan when designing a cover; they will just choose a cover they feel suits the story and the book. There is a subjective feel to many indie authors' covers. However, from a marketing point of view this is probably not the best strategy.

Some indie authors are aware of the need for brand identity. A couple of authors that spring to mind are Terry Tyler and Susan Buchanan. If you take a look at their book covers, you'll see what I mean:

Susan's books:





Terry's books:





(click on the book covers to see larger images).

It definitely gives a more professional image when you have these types of 'brand image' covers.

******

It's not only the outside of your book that will influence what readers think of it; you have to think about the inside as well.

The type of font you choose is important.

The standard type fonts used by most independent authors are Times New Roman, Helvetica, Arial. At the conference, we were told that these types of fonts may put readers off as they are associated in their minds with office documents, and the look of the book will be 'home-made'. To elevate your book to a more professional status, it was advised that writers should move away from using the standard fonts available with MS Word.

Suggested fonts for use inside a book are benbo and garamond. But it was also mentioned that sometimes publishers will state which font is used at the start of the book on the book information/copyright page. If you read a book by a large publisher and like the font, you can try looking there to see which font it is. Most professional fonts can be bought. A few websites mentioned where you can buy fonts: 1001fonts.com, dafont.com, fontgrill.com, Google

Apparently, readers like the tried and tested book interiors. For example, it's usual in traditionally published books to start the first few pages by numbering in roman numerals, e.g. i, ii, iii, and then when the actual book starts you go onto normal page numbers.

Chapter drops are usually about one third of the page. It was advised that authors stick to this when publishing. The idea is to make readers feel at home, and to associate your book with traditionally published books.

This design strategy does not stop with your book cover. It was advised that things like the fonts used and the colours used on your covers should become your identity online also, for example on your website or your Facebook Page.

Make your website look interesting, add images and videos.

It was also advised that you should use good quality images on your website and other networking sites.

There are some great websites that provide free photos for book covers under the creative commons licence, i.e. you can use the photo for free and just have to credit the photographer. One example given was Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

I've also found a good site http://www.morguefile.com


Another tip given was that you should complete fully your profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other such sites. Often they are left incomplete. Make sure you add an image to your profile pages and a bio.

Wordpress.com was recommended as a good site for creating a website/blog as it has good quality images.

Something that was mentioned was how big publishers often have different designs for covers depending on where they are selling the book. Different markets around the world respond to books covers in different ways. The point was made, however, that indie authors do not really have the option of designing different covers for different countries because the way we can publish is limited. One book design goes all around the world with independently published books.

There is a website, that I had never heard of before, called Fixabook.com where you can get opinions on book covers, which could prove quite useful: http://www.fixabook.com/


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Well, I think that is quite enough information for you to get your heads around today. I was going to write up this part of the series in two parts, but I will add a Part III. In the next part of this section of the series, I will pass on some tips from an author who switched from traditional to self-publishing.

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