Mary Sisson's Blog, page 114

Guys, you might want to market that a little better

So, as I was noodling around with my (now delayed) Goodreads giveaway, I realized that...they sell e-books.

Like, they've been selling e-books for a year now--really explains the problems with Amazon, no?

I Googled it, because I was wondering if this was new. No. It's not. It's been around since before I joined Goodreads. I've been listing and rating the books I read there, and I had no idea they sold anything.

Most of the articles Googled turned up were people saying, "Did you know that Goodreads sells e-books? I had no idea!"

Brain no worky so good

Yeah, I didn't sleep well at all last night. I managed to lay out a couple of chapters, but...yeesh. I'm exhausted, I keep forgetting stuff, and I'm afraid if I keep at it I'm just going to have to redo it all later. I should be able to get everything done before I leave anyway, so I'm kicking it down the road to tomorrow.

I'll put together the large-print cover at least.

Hey, indie bookstores have options!

And since he's always a helpful fellow, Passive Guy also has a link to this neat article about indie bookstores actually (gasp!) working with self-published authors, instead of boycotting their books!

And by golly, it turns out that carrying books by local authors regardless of publisher helps distinguish the store from places like Amazon! The writers' friends and families love you, and you can get a lot of free publicity and even win awards.

Even better, according to Heather Lyon, who owns Lyon Books in Chico, California, "For self-published books, there isn’t the pressure to compete on price, so Amazon isn’t much of an issue."

Lyon goes on to say:

I’m on a soapbox about this, because I know a lot of bookstore owners and managers don’t like to work with self-published authors. I think they’re missing out on the big picture ... and profits. Once you embrace it, it’s really not difficult.

Where do the profits come in? Most of the time these books are sold on consignment, so there's no cost to the bookstore other than staff time. In addition, some of these bookstores are basically selling promotional services to authors--you pay to have an event at the store, or you pay to be included in a large newspaper ad.

There's just so many better ways of dealing with the changes in publishing than trying to slavishly copy Amazon or being some boycotting reactionary.

CreateSpace in Europe!

Passive Guy is being his usual helpful self today: He discovered that CreateSpace is now offering POD books for sale in Europe. This is a free service, not the Expanded Distribution you have to pay $25 for. You check a box and your paperbacks become available on Amazon's UK, German, French, Italian, and Spanish Web sites. Nice!

I did it for both editions of Trang--you can either set the price in pounds and euros or have CreateSpace calculate it from your price in dollars. You do have to price slightly higher in the European market, so with Trang I raised the price in dollars, calculated the pound/euro price from that, and while I was at it I put it back on Expanded Distribution--why not, dropping the price hasn't done anything for it. The large-print edition is already pretty expensive, though, and I would have had to price it above $20 to break even on a pound/euro basis. So with that one I just set the prices independent of each other.

My guest post on cussing is up!

Here it is!

Where's that line?

Naturally the Passive Voice blog has been keeping up on the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit (PG is a lawyer). There's been some new stuff coming out, and it's been interesting to me to see all that is being revealed about Barnes & Noble and its very tight relationship with the larger publishers.

Obviously, they've gotten into trouble for that before. They haven't been named as a defendant this time, but...very tight relationship.

For example, according to the new state lawsuit--PV has the whole document here; there's a summary here--during the whole Macmillan/Amazon kerfuffle, the CEO of B&N told Macmillan he would "go to the mat" for them and moved Macmillan books up in the search result on B&N.com. (Because, you know, people typically buy based on publisher.)

And then when Random House wouldn't join in the little price-fixing conspiracy, B&N played enforcer! Yeah, the complaint states that the Penguin CEO went to B&N and asked them to stop featuring Random House books in their advertisements, and B&N eventually complied, thereby forcing Random House to get with the program!

While you could claim that B&N had to go along to keep publishers happy, apparently it's a two-way street. According to the judge's denial of the defendants' request that the class-action lawsuit be dismissed:

Prior to December 2009, the Publisher Defendants’ standard practice was to release eBook and hardcover versions of titles at the same time.  After a key meeting with an important industry executive, however, this practice changed abruptly.  In late November 2009, representatives from a number of publishing companies met with the Chairman of Barnes & Noble, a major chain of brick-and-mortar retail bookstores.  During the meeting, the Chairman of Barnes & Noble complained about the potential for Amazon’s low prices to hurt hardcover sales.   This meeting spurred a sudden and dramatic change in the business practices of most of the Publisher Defendants. 

Wow.

This is the thing for me: Given how laughably public these guys were with their price-fixing, an activity that is pretty much guaranteed to get you in trouble, I have suspected that there's been a hell of a lot of...shall we say...cooperation going on in the publishing business. You don't cross a line in public unless you've been flirting with it for a long, long time. You see this when shock-jocks like Don Imus finally step in it and genuinely, truly, really, sincerely, deep-down-in-their-hearts do not understand why people are so upset. So Imus insulted African Americans! He does that all the time! He does that and people love it! What's so different about this time? It's baffling!

And again, there's this notion that everybody who deals with books is in the same business. Not the same industry--the same business. Agents are authors and authors are publishing houses and publishing houses are, apparently, retailers. B&N complains about a rival retailer, and publishers jump to fix it! They don't say, Hey, you are in trouble--how can I benefit from that?

I'm guessing that Microsoft is going to bring a very different perspective.

And I'm guessing that there is a lesson here for indie writers. You are not anybody else in this business. Your interests may coincide with, say, Amazon, but they are not identical. Don't make someone else's problems your problems. In fact, if you're really smart, you'll figure out how to make their problems your opportunities.

Progress report

I laid out 14 of the 28 chapters today, as well as making the changes (like resetting the margins) that had to happen in all the chapters. It went well--I'm halfway through and the book is 16 pages shorter than it was, which bodes well for getting the large-print edition in under 820 pages.

I've noticed that if a change needs to happen in every chapter, it's easier and more reliable if I open them all up and make all the changes at once. In the past I've tried making a list for myself and then checking it off before I lay each chapter out, but if you skip something (and I have), then all your laying out is for naught and you have to do it again.

Ugh

You know how sometimes you know that something needs to be fixed, but you figure it doesn't matter, so you don't fix it--and then OOPS you should have fixed it back when you noticed it?

Goodreads has this cover for the paperback edition (and only the paperback edition) of Trang. I'd noticed that before, and thought about doing something about it, and hadn't. Of course I realized this after I set up the giveaway. Ghastly!

I've delayed the giveaway for a couple of days and am trying to get that fixed. If you were hoping for a paperback copy, it actually has this cover--the one without the art on the back and spine. A little more boring than the current cover, but you know, potentially a collector's item!

Plus, I'm signing them. You'll just have to take my word for that, because my handwriting is completely illegible.

Informative and annoying links about money

The informative:

Courtney Milan did a great post comparing the costs to her of self-publishing vs. being traditionally published (via PV, and she provided more financial detail in the comments).

So, what's the bottom line?

But for those who are looking for information, the bottom line is this: As an author, I spent 50% more on a traditionally-published novella. And I made half as much in twice the time.

That is something that people who are worried about the out-of-pocket costs of self-publishing need to think about. In theory there are no costs to you (other than that pesky lost revenue) when you publish traditionally, but in reality, if you want the book to succeed and you want publishers to think of you as someone who is willing to support your own work (i.e. someone it's worth signing a second contract with), you have to pony up.

And of course, that's after you get published. Remember, I spent more than $400 in postage alone trying to get published.

The annoying:

One of the things that really irritated me about yesterday's dumb agent post was that he said:

Needless to say, she is off to run and “self-publish” her books and be able to now essentially retire with the amount of money she will make on her own.

And then Konrath found another agent who decided to piss all over Ann Voss Peterson because she wants to be able to afford braces for her kid. This agent says:

Multiple clients sent me Peterson’s “Harlequin Fail” article and wanted my opinion. My first thought is that this was the typical “a publisher is ripping me off” fodder.

The sneering--that is what gets up my nose. A writer wants to be able to retire! Writers get upset when their publisher rips them off! What silly expectations they have!

I'm curious--does Scott Eagan hope to retire one day? (Actually, the way things are going he may have to do that a lot sooner than he thinks.) What kind of retirement does he hope to have? The kind where he eats dog food because he can't afford anything else?

Is Steve Laube OK with it when his mechanic rips him off? Does he enjoy it when the bank that owns his house pulls a fast one that costs him a bunch of money? Does it make him feel all warm and fuzzy inside when someone takes advantage of his ignorance and desperation to screw him to the wall?

I'm curious--how long did it take? Most agents at least pretend that they started agenting for a living because they wanted to help writers. How long did it take before these guys became completely desensitized to the fact that these writers are being ruined? At what point in their careers did they decide that it was OK for writers to be miserably poor and constantly taken advantage of? How do you get to the point where the biggest problem with all the thieving is that writers whine about it?

Doing a large-print edition

There was a comment by ABE in response to my last post asking for more information about doing a large-print edition. I was just going to reply, but then I realized that, if people are curious, I might as well make a new post that has basically everything I know about doing them in it.

So, ABE asked:

Just out of curiosity - as you should have it quite clear right now - how many pages did your regular edition have, and how much of a multiplier is it to go to the large print edition? You got close to the edge, so that helps pin it down.

The problem is that the multiplier changed because I changed fonts. Trang was set in 10-pt Palatino Linotype, it is a 373-page book, and it made a 794-page large-print edition (set in 18-pt Arial with 22-pt line spacing). Trust is 375 pages (oh, so it's not actually shorter, duh), but it's set in 10-pt Book Antiqua, so it makes an 846-page large-print edition--too long for CreateSpace, which limits you to 820 pages.

What I should have done--and what I did with Trang--was to stick all the text into a file, set the page size, font, margins, and line spacing, and have a quick look at how many pages resulted. That gave me a fairly accurate idea of what the page count was going to be--and that's why my line spacing is a half-point more narrow than it's supposed to be.

Also, I wouldn't necessarily have thought of putting out the large print edition - and that's another good idea.

I haven't actually sold any of my large-print editions. This is sort of a quixotic thing for me that I do when I'm not hugging trees and weaving clothing out of organic hemp. A large-print edition is a lot easier than a regular layout because the ragged right means that you don't have to worry about tight or loose lines, and you don't break words, so you don't have to worry about bad breaks. Buuuuut it does take some time and effort (or money, if you don't do your own layouts), and the payoff may never come, because people with serious visual disabilities these days probably get e-readers and set the font to something they find readable.* For me, it's easy enough and I'm fanatical enough about accessibility (can people read e-ink as easily as paper? I dunno) that it's worth it, but I could definitely see someone going the other way.

Lastly, has it ever occurred to you to sell your templates? After all this work on your part to get them right - maybe that would have some extra value.

I don't know that templates would actually be helpful to other people, because I'm already cheating slightly on the American Printing House for the Blind standards (which, in my defense, are by far the most stringent), and I'm going to have to cheat more. With the regular layout, since I use Word, I do a lot of odd hacks to make it work that you can't put in a template.

 

*ETA: I've read about authors wanting to fiddle with their e-books so that readers can't modify the fonts. Please, please, please, PLEASE, PLEASE do NOT do this. You may think that san-serif fonts are ugly, but for some people, they are the only fonts they can read.