Colin Taber's Blog, page 2

Changing Times in Publishing

How many of you out there are writers or aspire to the trade?

Are you aware of how much the industry is changing and of how much you should be taking that into account in your own writing activities?

We are only a few short years away from the first authors who will be published by majors, but who will never actually 'see print'. Their work will only be available in digital formats, not as mass market paper books. Those authors, if they see print at all, will only be for individual orders as POD (print on demand).

I've spoken to authors in the past few weeks who have told me they sell hundreds of 'books' a day, but never with a page printed. On launching one title, one such author quoted a single day's tally of sales as being over seven thousand units. That's just one title, for just one day! I've also read the thoughts of established authors who are wildly angry about what they see as the destruction of 'quality' publishing or the 'traditional' publishing industry. Such a charge sounds serious, but instead is laughable as its loudest proponent in the past week writes pulp fiction, which last time I checked has never been associated with quality.

What the publishing industry was five years ago is different to what it is today. The way things are going, you won't be able recognise it in five more years.

With the music industry's implosion still fresh in mind, traditional publishers have no excuse to not heed that lesson and adapt. I hope they do, and in the process open up and change. They need to take advantage of the cost savings the digital age offers, and to use them to not just profit themselves, but also their authors and to broaden their range.

Are you planning for that day?

What Do You Really Want To Know?

I find blogging an odd thing. Odd that people want to read such regular musings, odder that they want to read such musings from me. I often struggle for topics to write about, as I'm torn between two simple truths: One is that I'm actually a private person, the other is that I know anyone who is interested enough to read my blogs actually wants to read more about me than just my latest book and writing news. For me that contradiction presents quite a quandary.

So, what do I talk about?

What I'm prepared to say about myself seems awfully droll to me. In truth, I've done lots of things over the years; I've travelled a bit and have lots of interests, so I should be able to find plenty to talk about, plenty that's interesting.

Yet I struggle.

Increasingly, emails or comments on the Facebook fan page help generate ideas for blog posts, but if I'm to blog more – and more regularly – then I need to keep coming up with ideas. Over the coming months I'm going to try a lot harder talking about a variety of stuff (me, my background and writing), I'll also do more opinion pieces. In return I want feedback from people: Post questions, ask for more of what you're interested in. Simply, help give me direction with my blogging.

So, what do you want to hear about?

Tales of an Amazon.com Launch: Ossard Book 2

Well, it's out there, and that's great to see. Strange to watch it go live online, to be able to monitor the sales as they come in via real time reporting, and then to have that all rounded out with comments, emails and Facebook posts from readers who'd just bought it. Strange, but also exciting.

Afterwards, I had some messages from readers who weren't in the US and didn't want to buy it from Amazon.com (because of the shipping charges), which means they'll just have to wait a few more weeks for other online retailers to pick the book up. Likewise, I also had messages from people wanting the ebook (the Kindle format is only weeks away) and then there were the messages from my Australian readers asking where they could get it from locally. Sorry cobbers and cobettes, the Australian retail release is still a few months away (in September). Hang in there, please.

My readership is split almost evenly (at the moment) between Australia and the rest of the reading world, though the ebook editions will change that, and probably fairly quickly. For the record, we'll be trying for a more closely co-ordinated release of book 3. That's right, we'll be aiming for something global – or as global as our small outfit can manage.

So, back to the matter at hand; I guess you want to know how book 2 went?

Well, the answer is pretty good.

Books sold. Quite a few of them, in fact. Not that Ossard's Hope will be gracing the bestseller lists for May on Amazon.com, but for a couple of days there it climbed the ladder, and for a couple of hours or more it sold enough to even make the top 10 of the Epic Fantasy bestseller list. To make such a list for such a length of time sounds better than it is. In truth, we're talking about a sub-list of the fantasy list, which is a sub-list of the bestseller list. As you can see, while it might sound impressive on the surface, it's not a wild and huge achievement, but it's still something. And that's okay by me.

I'm pleased to have the book out there and now looking forward to the Australian release and what signings and appearances can be arranged for that. The face to face stuff is the best part of a new release. Meeting readers, chatting to people and seeing your book so blatantly displayed is energising.

Oh, glory to the gods of good merchandising!

These days it's fashionable to talk about the death of the bookshop or the ebook revolution. While both topics are built around healthy seeds of truth, I still very much enjoy the 'traditional' end of publishing - and hope to for a few more trilogies. For me, the best part of a new book's launch is the opportunity to go to bookshops and do signings.

For those who helped make this online launch a success, I thank you for your support. For those still waiting, whether it's for the book to list on a rival online retailer, or to become available as an ebook, or to see it on the shelves of an Australian bookshop, I thank you for your patience.

As for me; I'll now be dealing with the promotional side of the second Ossard release for a while, but also gearing up for book 3. In the coming months, as the Australian release comes and goes, I'm also hoping to have some announcements about other releases. If all goes well 2012 will be a big year.

Good reading!

Sad News On The Web - Borders Australia

I don't know quite what the official position is, but from what I'm seeing online from friends who work there, it seems that Borders Australia is approaching the end of its journey into administration. Unfortunately, the last stop is not looking good. The official media release talks of the need for an urgent sale, the timeframe mentioned is only one month. Beyond that looms nothing but liquidation.

I worked at Borders for five years and enjoyed most of my time there. I worked with great people and spent many hours surrounded by some of the best and most fascinating books I'll ever see. To say I put tens of thousands of hours into the business is not an exaggeration, not all of them paid, both at the Bondi store where I started in Sydney, and later in the Perth store on the west coast.

Personally, I'm sad to hear of the demise of Borders in Australia for many reasons, the most prominent being because of the people who work there, who, I'm sure, could do without the turmoil that they're being served up right now. Of course, on another level, I'm also saddened by what's coming because I was a customer, and having such a big bookshop to get lost in will be sorely missed.

The book trade will live on, so will bookshops, though they may become much fewer and far between.

Borders Australia, if no white knight arrives in the next 30 days, know that you'll be missed.

Ossard's Hope: Release Dates...

Just a quick entry to clarify points that are bound to be confused over the coming weeks (and months):

* Ossard's Hope will appear on Amazon.com for sale within days (possibly hours), that's the trade paperback release. By the end of May, as promised.

* That same paperback edition will appear in 6 to 8 weeks time on other online retailing sites (the Amazon outposts, such as .co.uk etc. and their competition, the Book Depository.

Buy it from where you want, but if you're interested in my opinion, I'd prefer you got it from Amazon.com at its imminent release. The sales going through one site will help push the numbers, plus, in truth, I make hardly anything from the the other outlets (about fifty cents per book).

* The Australian book trade release of the paperback will be in late September, as it will be a separate print run from the online international stock (as was the case with the Fall of Ossard).

* A Kindle version of Ossard's Hope should be available by mid to late June.

Some time around the Australian retail release, I'm intending to both announce the title of the third Ossard book and its release date. That date, hopefully, will be the same for my thousands of readers around the globe.

Thanks to all of you for coming on this journey with me.

I think, for now, that about covers it.

368

Small press brings flexibility, but also means being a jack of all trades while sporting a fairly lean petty cash tin.

To be successful, a company needs to have a product range that will sell, know how to sell it, and also watch every dollar/pound/euro it spends.

One major expense is printing.

Every extra page in a book costs money, just as printing too many units results in cash being tied up in stagnant stock. The smart thing to do is to print books that only have the page count required, meaning not too many 'white space' pages to pad things out, and also not to have too few pages so as to see things squashed up making a book look too busy (that'll harm sales). Simply, there is a middle ground.

A good page count versus cost is around 368, which is actually the target we work to here. If the count goes above 450, it's no longer possible to have the book distributed through most third party channels (without raising the cover price). Having said that, if a book is published with 420 pages, that's also of questionable value as there are other expenses that have to be covered, and that margin is probably just not going to do it. Again, simply, it needs to be balanced so a product (and therefore the business) is viable.

On that note, The Fall of Ossard listed with 368 pages, while Ossard's Hope will launch with 384 (we targeted 368). The base retail price in the US will be $14.99 for the trade paperback, just as it is for The Fall of Ossard. At launch it is quite possible (and we hope) that some retailers will also discount it.

While Ossard's Hope will launch with 384 pages, the original printed proof copy from back in July 2010 (was it that long ago?) held 452 pages, so had to be reduced. While a good 40 pages have been saved with more rounds of editing, other space has been saved by carefully managing the white space throughout the tome.

Don't worry, Ossard's Hope is not printed in 8 point type!

The two books, compared by word count, measure as 125, 000 (FoO) vs 150,000 (OH).

While it won't look it, Ossard's Hope will be 20% bigger.

Some of you may be thinking that there are plenty of other books out there with 600 pages, and even some that hit the shelves at 1000 pages. Yes, that's true. Large publishers selling bestselling authors can spread the cost of printing through economies of scale. I don't know what the print run was for either Rothfuss' A Wise Man's Fear or what it will be for Martin's A Dance of Dragons, but I do know that both prints will easily and obviously dwarf the print runs for the Ossard books. Those titles would count their units shipped in the 100,000's, while The Ossard Trilogy is yet to break 10,000. Maybe that helps clarify things. Maybe it doesn't.

The end result will be a book, Ossard's Hope, that adds solidly to what came before for our readers and will also be viable not just for this business, but for those who choose to carry, support and sell it.

That's the middle ground we were aiming for.

Inspiration & Interviews

As some of you know, a while ago we were running an online interview at the Facebook fan page. Some interesting questions came up, including where I get my inspiration from. Now, I answered that question as briefly and as best I could, but it did remind me of a story that I thought I'd share in a less space-restricted venue.

The first Unae trilogy is The Ossard Trilogy, and it will be followed by what is tentatively called the Blood Prince Trilogy. Both are already largely written, but originally, the first to be plotted was actually the Blood Prince.

While Ossard was originally conceived as a series of one page pieces of colour text over several magazine issues in the hallowed pages of Australian Realms Magazine, the beginnings of the Blood Prince Trilogy actually came to me like, well, like a bolt out of the blue.

Or more truthfully, like a CD flying through the air at a nightclub to crack me on the forehead.

Let me explain:

One night I was out listening to some music and relaxing amidst Perth's clubland, taking in its lights and thumping beats. Later, after a bit of onstage entertainment, the MC came on stage and threw some promotional material out into the audience. One of these items, a new release CD single, quite literally hit me in the head.

It was an amusing moment, if somewhat surprising.

Luckily I had a pocket big enough to stow away my heaven sent gift. So, despite having never heard of the song or artist, I stuffed it in my pocket and took it home.

Later, when back at my apartment, I dug it out and put it on. It was surprising, not some piece of light weight clubland fluff, but a gritty vocal over a moving orchestral soundtrack.

To this day it still puts a shiver down my spine.

The track was Furious Angels by Rob Dougan, and it immediately made a mark on me. Listening to the words and the power of the music, I immediately envisioned a terrible and heart breaking scene.

I saw a young lady cut down with her lifeblood bleeding away as she lay on her back, clutching at a stomach wound. Her murderer was storming off to leave her to her fate, him an angry and spurned suitor.

Alone, with her dying breaths, she called out with her own fury to summon her angelic (and recently deceased) lover to her side, the one she'd been forced apart from by her current suitor's deceit. She called him because she wanted him to meet her to help in her passing – and to avenge her.

A furious angel.

Inspiration can come in a lot of ways. It might paint a broad picture or just be built of emotion wound up in a brief moment or image. Either way, it's a seed that should be allowed to bloom.

On a CD single I found a trilogy.

What might I find somewhere else?

What about you?

Building An Audience

When you start out as an author, particularly when you enter that home straight in the race to the finish line for your first book's publication, you get lots of advice. Possibly, too much. Not surprisingly, a lot of it has to do with promoting yourself and getting yourself 'out there'. Many suggestions will be made, one of them will be to blog.

Clearly, I've not had the best form in that regard.

Most blogging authors, after they work through the short list of topics they *did* want to talk about, fall back on a mix of personal musings and publishing news. A good portion also lean heavily on book reviews. Such reviews are often also plastered across the internet, from Amazon to GoodReads.

The thinking behind churning out such reviews is that you'll build an audience who likes that product, might grow to like you, and who will then be interested in your own book when it finally sees the light of day. For myself, I'm happy enough to give sound-bites on some of the reads I've had. I'm an author, not a reviewer.

Successful blogging is about what you have to say and how you say it, not much else. No one wants to read a blog about nothing. Simply, it won't build you an audience.

I haven't blogged any where near as much as I would have liked, and there's no one to blame for that but me. I've either been too busy working on a book or separate project, working a full time job (sometimes even looking for one) or trying to grab some sleep or a moment of social time. Amongst my life's *exciting* bustle has also been the feeling that I don't have much to blog about.

Yeah, I know, poor me.

People who know me well, know that I've always got an opinion. The only time I'm quiet is if I'm feeling unwell. Yet, I've often felt that blogging seemed a waste of time (as most new blogging authors do, I suspect). You can't help but wonder why you're investing so much time on something you doubt anyone is reading.

Logical enough, isn't it?

But, over the past few months I've been getting more and more emails, letters and other queries from people who wanted to thank me for past posts (yeah, I know, I didn't believe it either) or to ask me advice (what are they thinking)!

While I've been terribly busy the last few months getting Ossard's Hope ready, I've also been conscious of, for the first time, the fact that there are actually people out there waiting for my next blog post.

Incredible!

They want to know how my publishing adventure is going, how our small press outfit survives, or to get tips on how to get your book out and about and known. I guess, what I'm saying is that I've begun to build an audience, and funnily enough, that audience is starting to *shape* my topic selection.

Feel free to take part by commenting, emailing, or joining up the Facebook fan page or following me on Twitter. If you do that, I'll do my best to post what I can that's relevant, particularly as we come up to the next stage of my publishing adventure; the release of Ossard's Hope.

Small Publishers: Three Laptops & a Mobile

The Fall of Ossard is published by a very small outfit. So small that no one who works for it is on a weekly payroll and the business has no physical footprint. That's right, Thought Stream Creative Services is little more than a mobile phone, three laptops, some official looking papers amongst another couple of contracts and other written agreements. People who work for it get payments based on their work as subcontractors. Most of the arrangements are made by email. For example, half the 'staff' I've never met face to face, and for that matter, half of them don't even live in the same state.

I guess that means there'll be no office Christmas Party this year (again).

What does that mean for me as an author? It means that I have a lot of freedom to do what I want. Perhaps too much.

No editorial committee is going to intervene and tell me that I shouldn't have killed so and so, or that the tone of my book is too sombre, or that the plot is drifiting. That also means (thankfully) no one is going to make me put in a fluffy puppy, soften up such and such a scene, or that my book is just not formula enough for the market.

Hot tip: The market has enough formula books gracing its shelves. Some people out there want something different.

In truth, while all that freedom is liberating, I also long for the editorial support that would come with giving that freedom up. Such support would also, inevitably, speed up the publishing process. Maybe one day I'll make the change. I'm always open to offers. In the meantime, the core of my work's direction comes from my own commonsense and the feedback from fellow subcontractors and test readers.

The publishing industry is changing, just as many others before it have had to adapt. The change is largely brought about by new technology, a digital revolution (and what an overused phrase that is), and changing tastes in the marketplace. There's a lot of noise being made about ebooks these days, or the damage online sales are doing to traditional bookshops. Some of that noise counts for something, much of it doesn't.

Simply, the statistics show people are still reading. People just want something worth reading. That doesn't mean another Twilight, or another Harry Potter, or another Dan Brown rip off, but something worthy of their cash and time.

While recent changes in the industry forced by technology have often been painted as negative in all kinds of media (particularly the industry media), the truth of it is that because of those changes, a previously unknown author (me) was able to burst into the top twenty of a national book chain in mid-October 2009 as a bestseller. Through other facets of those same technologies, I have also been able to offer my tale to readers around the world. Yet other computer wizardry allows me to update hundreds of readers instantly on my thoughts, drinking tastes, or my need for caffeine.

Change is coming - and what a relief!

The times we are living in are revolutionary, the opportunities huge, and if that happens to disrupt a few self interested and self absorbed prehistoric (publishing) corporations or cosy clubs of lit-fiends on the way, I will not shed a tear. This is the future, and people better get used to it.

Colin Taber Borders Perth Q&A

The Question: Will Twilight be all but forgotten – unlike Lord of the Rings & Harry Potter?

The Answer: Eventually, yes.

How's that for a limb to go out on! Now, let's see how strong it is.

Twilight has been a publishing phenomenon – and hot on the heels of the last one, or is it two? Both Harry Potter and Dan Brown have created books sales history, and all in an era when reading and publishing are supposed to be dying. So, what gives?

All three of them, regardless of literary merit have become more than 'books', instead, they've all become part of pop culture, if holding vastly different positions within that fad-filled and tenuous arena.

Now firstly, I'm not going to go into detail about how they got where they did, what I'm going to talk about is will they maintain the heights they've achieved – or will they fade away, not just into memory, but oblivion. In short, I'm focussed on which of them will be stayers. For the record, they got where they are fundamentally through word of mouth. Once they found their markets, it was that positive buzz that set them on their way. It was only then that substantial marketing resources were invested into pushing them as far as they could go.

So, what makes a stayer?

A stayer has the ability to move well beyond its initial niche market. A book doesn't have to come out offering broad appeal, but some achieve it through universal themes, where as some are simply too niche, regardless of how big that niche may seem. For example, Harry Potter crossed relatively quickly from the children's market (and note, it was in both the boys and girls ends of the children's market) into the adult market – and when it did, it wasn't just adult readers of fantasy that were picking it up, but yet again a broad range of people (and again, both male and female). More than anything, Harry Potter created a reading habit in a lot of people – and not all of them children.

What helps cement a stayer is of course backup, whether that be in the form of new books or follow on series, TV or movies, or just the sidelines of T-shirts and other seemingly unrelated product. All of this can add to the 'product experience' some of it though, through overexposure, can also diminish it.

Okay, so what doesn't make a stayer?

A book might be the bomb in its home market, like Twilight was, where it became a must have accessory for millions of teenage girls and young women worldwide, but if it can't climb the walls and spread across other niches (not just one or two), it's just not going to get up and run – and I'm not talking about the niche friendly 100m sprint, but the stayer's marathon.

Lord of the Rings

Tolkien's epic is a stayer because of its quality and depth – and all despite the archaic prose which might have been acceptable to the market when it was first written, but has over time become a barrier to many new readers. With so many other titles backing it up (led by the Hobbit), Lord of the Rings, as a fantasy forerunner, was always going to be at the very least a cult hit. Over the years it's come into fashion and gone out again, but it's consistently named in polls that seek to find the public's favourite books. Simply, it has a huge footprint, and now is reinforced by Peter Jackson's solidly produced movie trilogy. This is a series that will never really fade away, not now, not even 'just' into cult status. Simply, people will still be reading and watching Lord of the Rings in a hundred years.

Harry Potter

This series of books has been handled well, even if not wildly original in concept. Built of competent writing and execution, its real strength is its broad appeal – and that's what makes it a stayer. Simple themes of coming of age and good versus evil lift an accessible story into the mainstream, and do it easily. Backed up with quality movies, this is a series that will also last. The themes are ageless, and the weighting of the story (of its gradual shift into more mature territory of politics and life or death battles) is handled so well that young readers have grown up with them – and will continue to do so. This is a series of quality that is accessible and enjoyable. Not the stayer that Lord of the Rings will be, but nonetheless something I feel is strong enough to well and truly hang around. I also think people will be reading it in a hundred years, and certainly watching it.

Twilight

Twilight has saturated its market, but that's something it can't grow much beyond. There is overflow of course, but nothing as substantial as in its target market. The end result will be, by and large, that the core of Twilight's market will grow out of it. I'd already seen it begin to happen when I was a bookseller. What could have arrested such a thing would have been high quality movies, and a well developed genre populated by many authors staying true to their genre but doing different things. Unfortunately, neither of these are in place. Consequently, and egged on by the crass commercialisation of Twilight through everything from towels, T-shirts to broaches and more, I think the market is far more likely to burn itself out than last. There will be resurgences in coming decades, but in the end, without having a broad base to appeal to, it will not be around in a hundred years, not in any meaningful way. Twilight may seem as quaint then as the fiction genre of yesteryear, the Western. If anyone remembers it.

Obviously, no one can say for sure what will be read in a hundred years, but that doesn't mean that we can't try and make an educated guess (or that I can't simply make a fool of myself). What I have tried to do is use my knowledge of what people read and why, and then apply the above question to these three series. In the end it comes down to whether something has broad appeal, a certain level of quality and back up. But all of this is also subject to the fickleness of human nature, literary fashion and even pop culture.

Good reading.