Jane Friedman's Blog: Jane Friedman, page 153

Imitation Is Part of Being a Writer

Zeynep Ozakat

I recently read an essay by Theo Nestor, describing how you need a nut graf in a personal essay. She offers a wonderful example of how this can be done, then advises writers to copy the format: “It is perfectly okay … The content will be very much your own.”

Similarly, in a recent essay for Glimmer Train, Zeynep Ozakat says:

Imitation is part of being a writer. Just like babies who learn to smile by imitating adults, we must have the humility to learn from the greats through mimicry.

She closes by quoting Picasso, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” Read her entire essay.

For more insight from the latest Glimmer Train bulletin:

Writing What You Don’t Know by Patrick Hicks
Just Add Cowboy by Sean Bernard
The Monster Scale by Daniel Torday

The post Imitation Is Part of Being a Writer appeared first on Jane Friedman and was written by Jane Friedman.

Could You Benefit From a Website Redesign?

by Aurélien Bellanger

Today’s interview is by contributing writer Chris Jane (@chrismjane), who does every-other-Wednesday interviews for the 5 On series.

Anyone who pays any attention to my Facebook feed knows that I’m more than a little happy with my newly revised website.

I didn’t understand why, at first.

After all, the previous (and free) template I’d been using did what it was supposed to do: it provided pages and a menu. It was clean and it was simple. What more could it need?

As I discovered, it needed a feeling.

What I hadn’t thought about when creating my own, earlier, sites was the range of reactions I’d typically have when visiting other people’s websites, whether it was an immediate need to click away from the chaos—or an urge to stay a while, admire the professional organization and sharp colors.

When the latest iteration of my website was finished, I said to its designer, Richard Kelsey of Absolute.click, “It’s like wearing a nice suit.”

Not a unique or even very creative observation, but that was how it felt (and feels).

An important question, though: Who but me cares how I feel about my website?

Sure, it gives me more confidence to approach people who might visit it—and that’s a great value—but what really matters is the impression they get from it. Isn’t it?

I wanted to know more about the importance of having a good website—whether “good” translates as flashy functions, easy navigation, or a perfectly appropriate theme—so I asked Richard a few questions.

(“But, he’s a biased website designer,” you say. This is probably true. However, my experience with him has also shown him to be honest and straightforward. I’d have no interest in interviewing him, otherwise.)

I wanted to interview you because you recently redesigned my website, and one of the elements you added was the A-ha, yes! that in one move, with one page, eliminated endless links and redirection and—well, clutter in general.

I’ve had websites in one form or another since 2007, and I’ve never been so satisfied with appearance, organization, and navigability. How did you do that?

Well, essentially, you always want to take a less-is-more approach. Clients sometimes tend to want everything they can possibly think of, right there and now, without a real concept. It smacks you in the face.

Most of the time visitors barely witness half of what is going on, simply because they don’t take the time, let alone want to. Something has to grab their immediate attention, or has to represent at least a sign of something they expected to find.

Most design elements and functions that have come out lately have been clearly developed to meet, match, and improve user experience and behavior—which, interestingly enough, also results in and is beneficial to better search results with Google & Co. What’s easier for users is also usually easier for “spiders” (search engines) to crawl.

In Your Homepage Is Not As Important As You Think , Dan Blank writes that visitors to websites rarely see the website’s home page after being referred to the site via links, social media, search engines, etc. Therefore, every interior page, he argues, “needs to tell your story … reiterate who you are, and provide context at every opportunity.”

In your experience designing websites, you must have seen some existing sites that could be considered a nightmare, either because they were confusing to navigate or because they failed to serve the identity or purpose of the website owner.

What are a couple typical reasons websites fail?

That’s funny about the home page. Our (and my personal) experience has been that it is quite the opposite. When visitors land on any page other than the home page, panic starts to strike (in the worst case). Most people look for the “Home” button.

There might be many reasons for that, the most popular being that people need a sense of starting from the beginning. It’s like the cover of a book. A “Did I miss something?” sort of moment.

I always like to go to the actual URL (the home) to get a “feeling” for the site. What is it that the site wants to do or say? Indeed, if the home doesn’t entrance me, why should the other pages?

So, a home button has to be easy to find. Poor navigation is a fail. Design and colors I think are just as important, even if it really has nothing to do with content. People like eye-candy. Smooth and simple.

In terms of incoming links and needing to tell your story, I agree with Dan. But the home page is what it is: the roof, the door, the window to it all.

But does a website’s appearance and ease-of-use really make that much of a difference to the average visitor?

It is the Alpha and Omega.

Kidding aside, you can just put text up on the white screen and maybe a picture and be done with it. Why would you do that, though, if you can do so much more and make it more enticing?

Now and then I’ll Google an author or other kind of writer and discover they don’t have a website. When I wrote for the newspaper and was sometimes tasked with writing about local bands or musicians appearing in upcoming events, I found that many of them also didn’t have websites. Facebook pages, yes, but not official websites.

You’re a longtime musician . Isn’t it fair to say that if the writing or music or other art is good enough, a website isn’t necessary because audiences will find the work, the artist, in other ways?

But I have to admit that when as a feature writer I didn’t find websites, I was immediately less inclined to contact the artists for articles. I don’t know whether that’s typical or whether I was being uniquely judgmental.

This kind of ties in with the home page topic. Social media can be overrated. … You [should always] have your website to fall back on. Your home, so to speak. It also creates credibility and trust and, in the case of a music artist, shows how serious and passionate you are about your craft and art.

As much as Facebook and Twitter make it possible for new artists to have a following as big as that of known acts, anyone can create a fan page and be done with it. You may run into the danger of not being discovered there at all. A good website with a good search result in Google might be your better ally.

The website is the home, and everything else needs to be linked to it. Like a web. The combo makes it a “full meal.”

I know Absolute.click offers website design rates on a sliding scale, but why should a person pay anything for a website when there are quite a few decent templates available for free?

Well, the web design business, as any business these days I imagine, has witnessed dumping prices. There are many factors. The global community and competition, the over-saturation of really good web design agencies and professionals, the amount of educated individuals who, yearly, come out of the schools hungry for work, and all these do-it-yourself kits and platforms—some good, some not that good.

It’s up to you, really. How much time you want to invest, what you want your results to be, how professional it is supposed to look. Even WordPress, with which we work almost exclusively, can be used by any novice. At the same time, WordPress has spun an industry that pays thousands of people worldwide daily, and has produced hundreds of companies that dedicate their time to WordPress alone. What does that tell us?

Clients in any area of service can sometimes have unrealistic demands. What should people be aware of before they contact a website designer, in terms of managing expectations?

Believe it or not, when someone comes up to me and says, “I want (or need) a website,” my first questions are, “What for?” and “Are you really sure?”

This may be dangerous in my business, but essentially what I am asking is, what is the purpose of the site? And usually I hope it has a sole purpose, and not a million different things at once. If the website is for a business that already exists, for example, then it is obvious that a website is a necessity for today’s market. If it’s for a new business idea, I would say do your research first to make sure you have a niche market for it.

Actually, the most critical expectation we have found goes beyond the completion of the website: once it’s done and in the world wide web, most believe that’s that, and all is good. But that’s when their real work begins.

Thank you, Richard.

The post Could You Benefit From a Website Redesign? appeared first on Jane Friedman and was written by Chris Jane.

Book Marketing Must Center (Mostly) on the Author: Q&A with Scott Berkun

Today I’m delighted to feature an interview with full-time author and speaker Scott Berkun (@berkun). I first met Scott at the 2014 World Domination Summit, where he was a featured speaker. He’s dynamic, insightful, and—in the eyes of many writers—living the dream.

I asked Scott if he would answer a few questions about his experiences with book marketing and promotion, because over his career, he’s worked with a few traditional publishers and self-published his work. Some of the biggest questions in the author community right now focus on the author’s responsibility to market and promote, and what value or support the publisher provides. This is the first in a series of author interviews I’ll be featuring on this theme in 2015.

Side note: Ask Scott your own questions during his live Q&A next week. Sign up for free.

The first and most impressive thing I want to point out is that you earn a living from book royalties and speaking fees—and you’ve transparently outlined how that works at your blog. How important are book advances to sustaining this kind of lifestyle, if at all?

My early books continue to sell and speaking requests are steady, so advances aren’t as central as they were. But it does help when working on a book to know where a major source of income will be coming from, and that someone has put a big stake in something you haven’t finished yet. Practically it means I can do fewer side projects and focus more on writing a great book. I’ve pushed hard for big advances as the belief is bigger advances means you’ll get better attention from the publisher (some editors debate this, but some admit it).

To back up for a moment: You’ve had an impressive career in the tech industry, working at Microsoft and WordPress, before striking out on your own. That’s quite a platform to start with. How much of a role do you think that’s played in your current freedom and lifestyle?

Any network, professional or personal, is essential for authors. It means people know your name, hopefully in a good way, and will respond when you reach out. Many books sell primarily on the network and visibility the author has. Writers are sad to hear this, but a famous person can write an awful book and have it sell well, while an unknown can write an amazing book and barely sell a dozen copies. The book business doesn’t depend on good writing as much as everyone wants it to.

When I quit the software world to try to be a writer in 2003, I tried to publish a creative nonfiction book, but was rejected by over a dozen publishers. I switched to a book on management, where my resume helped make the project credible to publishers, and that was my first published book, Making Things Happen. By shifting to a genre I’d worked in (management/tech), it was easier to find organizations to speak for free to promote the book, as well as experts to endorse it, and bloggers to review it. Each of my other books has taken on broader, bigger subjects, chasing a wider audience, but that initial network, and matching it with a book it would have natural interest in, was a wise move.

Your most recent book is a memoir, The Ghost of My Father, which you funded through a Kickstarter. I wonder if you more or less had to self-publish this because it doesn’t fit in with the type of nonfiction you’ve been producing up until this point? Or if you decided it would be a crowdfunded project from the start?

I was pretty sure I’d use Kickstarter from the beginning. The advantages of a publisher for creative works like memoirs and novels is harder to measure than for nonfiction and business books. So much of what drives sales of a memoir or a novel is going to start with the author, their reputation and their following. (Most memoirs by major houses don’t sell well nor garner many Amazon reviews.)

I also wanted to donate profits from the book to a charity that would help families, as the book centers on the life of a thoughtful, intelligent adult man (me!) sorting out the story of his broken family, and a publisher would balk at that. I’m giving the royalties that would go to a publisher to Big Brothers & Big Sisters instead. Everyone wins.

Knowledge of self publishing guarantees I always have the option to publish any book I want to, in the way I want to. That is tremendous creative freedom. I’m sure I will work with major publishers again, but I also know if they’re not interested, that won’t stop me from writing a book that I believe in. That’s the power of knowing how to do things yourself.

A lot of authors now say that it’s the same amount of work to market and promote a book regardless of whether it’s traditionally published or self-published. Since you’ve done both within the last few years, what’s been your experience?

The biggest difference is with a publisher you get some support automatically. Their PR team will focus on you when your book comes out, and they may put in money to chase media attention. If you self-publish, nothing is automatic. You can replicate much of what publishers do, but you’ll have to plan for, pay, or do it it yourself.

Some authors I know, including prestigious ones, are arrogant, and naïve, about marketing. They think it’s beneath them. But no matter how much a publisher does, most of the marketing must center on the author. The author is the star, the only name on the cover. If the publisher gets you on The Daily Show, guess what? You have to fly there to be on the show. A magazine interview? Same thing. Authors are always central to marketing. Every movie star is central to the promotion of every movie they’re in and they do a ton of it.

If you don’t want to do marketing, be a ghostwriter.

What was the best or most important thing your publishers have been able to do for you that wouldn’t seem possible on your own?

Early on it was what I learned about publishing. My first three books are with O’Reilly Media and I learned much from them. My editor there, Mary Tressler, was a fantastic partner. They put money into marketing my books I could never, at the time, have put in myself (or known how to do). Generally publishers force important conversations authors need to have, and bring ideas and connections to the table few authors have on their own.

The best thing by far at a publisher is the editor. The relationship between an author and the editor is everything. Great editors give advice and input on dozens of decisions that help the book that an author wouldn’t likely get otherwise. Editors set authors up to succeed, use their industry connections to help the book, without taking over the book.

I tell people to pick their editor more than they pick their publisher. A great editor at a mediocre house is better than a mediocre editor at a great house.

What have you been able to do as a self-publisher that you might not be able to do as effectively with your traditionally published books?

Take risks. Do experiments. Publishers are conservative by nature. They have their way of doing things and they will strongly prefer to do everything that way. Often they’re right, but sometimes they’re behind the times, or afraid to try something new. To Wiley/Josey-Bass’s credit, the were totally on board with the bright red underwear cover for The Year Without Pants, a bold choice most publishers would have been too scared to try.

So many authors ask me what the right “balance” is between marketing and promoting your existing work versus producing new work. For instance, there’s a group of authors who say there’s no better marketing and promotion than putting out a new book—and I more agree than disagree, assuming the quality is there.

I know that your blog is a very important component of your visibility, and I consider blogging to be a mix of producing new content and marketing and promotion (if it’s working right—and it is for you).

In any case, back to this question of “balance.” Do you give it much thought, or do you have any strategy or principle that you follow?

I ask readers to help me. Each week I blog about the topic readers vote for.  I’ve done this for a few months now and it’s working. Many of the questions are about older work, but some of the questions are about newer work, or things I haven’t written about before. Blogging regularly is a great way to balance as I can throttle how many posts about past work versus new work. 50/50? 30/70? You can adjust this at any time.

People spend all day filtering email, social media, and the web. If some of your posts or promotions are about old work, and a reader isn’t interested, they’ll just filter it out. As long as you don’t go too far, they’ll stick around until they like the new work too. At least that’s my hope as I’m still learning how to do this. The Ghost of My Father, as a memoir, is a big departure from my previous books, but I know I want to write novels and more creative projects. I have to learn how to do this and there’s no way to learn other than by doing. So here we go!

I’m very grateful to Scott for his time in answering my questions. Don’t forget you can ask your own questions about memoir writing (or writing in general) at his live Q&A next week.

You can browse all of Scott’s books here on Amazon.

The post Book Marketing Must Center (Mostly) on the Author: Q&A with Scott Berkun appeared first on Jane Friedman and was written by Jane Friedman.

5On: Kathleen M. Rodgers

In this 5On interview, author Kathleen M. Rodgers discusses her approach to writing and reading, her self-promotion philosophy, and why she won’t self-publish. She also shares a personal writing and publishing history that might serve as powerful encouragement to others to never give up.

Kathleen M. Rodgers is a former frequent contributor to Family Circle Magazine and Military Times. Her work has also appeared in anthologies published by McGraw-Hill, University of Nebraska Press/Potomac Books, Health Communications, Inc., AMG Publishers, and Press 53. She is the author of the award-winning novel, The Final Salute, featured in USA Today, The Associated Press, and Military Times. Deer Hawk Publications reissued the novel in e-book and paperback in September of 2014. Her second novel, Johnnie Come Lately, released from Camel Press February 1, 2015. In 2014, she was named a Distinguished Alumna from Tarrant County College/NE Campus. The mother of two grown sons, she lives in a suburb of North Texas with her husband, a retired fighter pilot/commercial airline pilot, and their dog, Denton. She is working on a new novel titled Seven Wings to Glory and is represented by Loiacono Literary Agency.

5 Questions on Writing

CHRIS JANE: What book or story (or author) had an early and lasting impact on you as a writer, and in what way?

KATHLEEN M. RODGERS: Although I was born and raised in New Mexico, I’ve always been drawn to southern writers. Mark Childress’ novel, Crazy in Alabama, had a huge impact on me the first time I read it in the mid nineties. Mark taught me that a novel about a serious subject (in this case, civil rights) could leave a reader laughing and crying at the same time. Portions of his story are told in a lighthearted style through his character Aunt Lucille, who dreams of going to Hollywood and becoming a big star. Meanwhile, back home in Alabama, her young nephew, Peejoe, is learning a cruel lesson about racial injustice in the south during the sixties.

Mark’s writing style gave me the courage I needed to put my first novel through multiple revisions. In The Final Salute, set against the backdrop of a fictitious Air Force base in the South, I wrote about how fighter pilots too often die in peacetime training missions while the brass are busy covering up sex scandals.

What do you read when you want pure entertainment, and what do you read when you want to think?

It’s impossible for me to read for pure entertainment. I read to learn, to feel, to grow as a writer and as a person. And sometimes I read other authors’ books so I can help promote their work through endorsements and reviews. My favorite books are contemporary novels, the occasional biography or memoir, or books about the writing life.

You write in your website bio that you’ve encountered roadblocks and detours as a writer. What roadblock or detour stands out, and did you ever consider quitting (if so, what did that feel like and what was the turnaround moment)?

My first novel, The Final Salute, was a sixteen-year effort of more than one hundred revisions, that many rejections, and my bullheaded determination to find a traditional publisher. Finding that publisher proved as daunting as revising the novel. I started the novel in 1992, and by 1995 I’d signed with a literary agent who got my manuscript to a major publishing house in NYC. Three weeks later came the rejection, along with advice from an editor telling me what I needed to do to fix the novel. I took her advice and started over from scratch.

In the end, my former agent dropped all of his fiction writers and I never found another agent to take on the project. So I spent years revising and believing that one day I would find someone who believed in my story as much as I did. I kept hearing, “All it takes is one person to say YES.”

But that one person seemed to elude me.

A few weeks before September 11, 2001, and after too many years of rejection, I got fed up and quit. By then, I’d also grown tired of freelancing for magazines and newspapers, and I desperately needed a change. So I went back to college, earned a degree, got a dog, worked as a nanny, and tried to walk away from the writing life. But it was there, lurking over my shoulder. It called to me. And I listened.

In early 2007, I enrolled in novel writing classes at Southern Methodist University. One night a week, I’d leave my nanny job and head to writing class. On the second floor of Dallas Hall, in the most imposing building on campus, I started my second novel, Johnnie Come Lately.

Finally, in May 2008, sixteen years after I started writing The Final Salute, I signed with a small traditional press and my novel came out that October on my 50th birthday.

What wouldn’t you write about in a novel, and why?

I will never write about rape and murder if it somehow glorifies or entertains. My stepsister was brutally raped and murdered in 1982. The brutality left me shaken. If I ever do approach the subject, I will write straight into the fear.

When you want to create a character who is true to life, convincing, what details do you think about/apply?

I imagine that I am each person living inside the story, and I become each character as I write. Physical attributes, body language, and gestures are all important to bring a character to life. But it’s what’s on the inside that makes my characters feel alive to me. What are their secrets? What are they hiding? What are they afraid of? Who is getting in their way? Do they believe in God? Do they have phobias or anxiety attacks? How do they feel about visiting a cemetery after midnight? Are they haunted by past mistakes? Do they hold grudges or are they able to forgive?

Flawed everyday characters charm me more than bigger than life super heroes or heroines. What may look like odd behavior to one character may seem perfectly normal to another. For example, in my latest novel, Johnnie Come Lately, my protagonist, Johnnie Kitchen, is curious about why her mysterious new neighbor, a portly airline pilot, is digging a hole in his front yard in the middle of a rain shower. Once the reader finds out Mr. Marvel’s story and the motivation behind his odd actions, it all makes perfect sense.

The bottom-line: I go for emotional impact. I want my readers to laugh and cry with my characters. I want fiction and reality to blend into a seamless dimension where my characters know they are real people and my readers think they are my characters.

5 Questions On Publishing

What about self-promotion comes naturally or easily to you, and what part do you dislike or feel least comfortable with?

I am a people person, and I enjoy engaging with others. When my writing carries a message that could benefit others, I want the word to get out. I want to be a helper, a person who spreads HOPE.

Every time I promote myself, I go out of my way to promote others. If I post something about my writing career, I then turn around and shine the spotlight on someone else. By doing this, it helps soften the glare of “self-promotion” and shows that I care about others. At least that’s my goal. There are two kinds of writers in this world: the givers and the takers. I try to focus on the givers in our profession because the takers can rob us of any joy we experience along the journey. I have a saying that goes like this: “When we elevate others, we elevate ourselves. Let’s all go be elevators.”

The part I hate the most about self-promotion is when the media ignores me regardless of my credentials. Despite the fact that I am traditionally published and I have an amazing agent who helps me with publicity, my work gets overlooked for writers with big marketing teams from major New York houses. It’s frustrating, but I keep going.

What critical lesson did you learn in your search for an agent and then publisher?

Patience and persistence…and I’m still learning.

After I finished Johnnie Come Lately in spring of 2013, I mailed the manuscript to a trusted copy-editor. No sooner had Joyce Gilmour and I finished polishing the manuscript when my dog and my dad died five days apart.

A week after we returned from Dad’s funeral, and still numb from two deaths back to back, I busied myself by sending out batches of queries to agents all across the country. Despite my thirty-five plus years in the business, I don’t handle rejection with grace. Usually I get angry, maybe even curse a bit, and then I sit down and fire off more queries. One night, after a handful of rejections, I stood in the kitchen and yelled, “My dog died. My dad died. And I can’t get a *#@*ing agent.” I’m glad my husband was the only one there to witness my outrage. Gulping down a glass of ice water, I marched back into the office and fired off another round of queries.

As the rejections continued to trickle in, along with several agents requesting a full or partial, I pressed on with faith that my new novel would find a good home. I believed in my story about a woman named Johnnie Kitchen, a character who came to me years ago while I was working on my first novel. Looking back over my long writing career, I reminded myself that each acceptance came with a slew of rejection.

In mid September of 2013, four months after I sent that first query, I received an offer of representation from Jeanie Loiacono, President and CEO of Loiacono Literary Agency. After our initial meeting, Jeanie went to work pitching Johnnie Come Lately to numerous editors at various publishing houses around the country. Two months later, we received an offer from Camel Press, an imprint of Coffeetown Enterprises, a traditional publisher based in Seattle, WA.

A little over a year after we signed the contract with Camel Press, Johnnie Come Lately released February 1. As my novel is finding a home in the hearts of readers, I am busy working on the sequel, Seven Wings to Glory. And I am learning once again that I have to juggle two jobs: the shameless act of self-promoting and the hard work of bringing a story to life on the page.

Should something like what happened with The Final Salute happen again, would you consider self-publishing?

I’m old-school when it comes to self-publishing. I grew up in the era when self-publishing meant paying a vanity press thousands of dollars to get a book out. I heard horror stories of authors pedaling their books around in their car trunks and their garages stacked with boxes of books. From the time I was fifteen and writing for my high school newspaper, I have longed for the approval of others in the business. I want that pat on the back from an editor who is helping me hone my craft. As much as I enjoy working on my own, I also enjoy being part of a team that is working toward the same goal.

I guess it comes down to confidence or lack of it. If one other person in the industry tells me my work is good enough to publish, then I take that attagirl and run with it. That one yes gives me the boost of confidence I need to push my book into the world. To be honest, I want someone else investing their money in me. Not the other way around. Many of my friends are self-published and some of them have written award-winning books that go on to become bestsellers. Regardless of the route we take to get our work into the hands of our readers, we writers must keep chasing after our dreams.

At this point in my career, I hope to continue on a traditional route. I have worked so hard to get where I am. My agent and I have formed a bond based on mutual trust and a belief in each other’s abilities. We are hoping to work together for a long time.

How are the pressures you experience creatively now that you have a publisher different from the creative pressures you experienced pre-publisher?

It doesn’t change anything. I still write what speaks to my heart. Camel Press has first refusal rights on the sequel to Johnnie or on a second novel. I’m staying hopeful they will say YES.

You respond to many Amazon reader reviews of your books. When did you first decide to do that, and how do you decide when and when not to comment on a review?

At some point along my author journey, I remember being told to “never engage with a reviewer.” But that seems silly to me if a reader has written something positive about your book. After all, readers invest their time and emotion into a book. And if they leave a nice comment, I feel a responsibility as the author to leave a thank you note. Once in a while, I hear back from the reviewer. There have been a few cases where we end up connecting on Facebook and become friends. Isn’t that why we write? To connect with others?

I don’t respond to negative reviews. They sting, but I try to remember what my oldest son, a working artist, told me recently: “Mom, the more you get your work out there, the more critics you will encounter.”

I am grateful for my readers. When they spend time with my novels, my characters get to live.

Thank you, Kathleen.

Note: If you enjoyed this interview, you may also be interested in an earlier Q&A with Is This Tomorrow author Caroline Leavitt, who discusses, among other things, her worst rejection and how she handles competitiveness in the writing world.

The post 5On: Kathleen M. Rodgers appeared first on Jane Friedman and was written by Chris Jane.

How to Create Picture Ebooks for Kids

Jennifer LaGarde via Flickr

Today’s guest post is by Laura Backes of Children’s Book Insider and Picture eBook Mastery.

Until recently, creating ebook versions of children’s picture books was something publishers reserved for their best-selling authors and illustrators. If you wanted to self-publish a picture ebook, you either needed to be a whiz at writing code, or you paid an ebook creation service to do it for you. (That said, it was possible to find a few services targeted toward publishing books for kids on Apple devices, such as Book Creator.)

Last September, Amazon released KDP Kids’ Book Creator, which allows the average Joe to create illustrated children’s books for the Kindle and upload them directly to Amazon. These books can be designed in the landscape format (to mimic the layout of print picture books) and can include text pop-ups that enlarge the text with a tap or a click, making it easier to read.

Side note: Using the KDP Kids’ Book Creator means you’re publishing through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program. You can choose from several royalty structures within that program, and also choose whether or not to be included in KDP Select, which gives Amazon exclusive distribution of your ebook for a certain time period in exchange for marketing perks.

While the KDP Kids’ Book Creator still has a few rough spots (which Amazon is presumably ironing out in response to user feedback), it’s a good start. Those of us who have worked in children’s publishing for years recognized this move for what it was: a game changer.

Just how much has Amazon’s new free software changed the game?

With the release of the Kid’s Book Creator, as well as the Kindle Fire HD Kids Edition tablet, Amazon is investing in illustrated ebooks. And they need content.

So now comes the big question. Are you ready to ride this wave?

Not every self-published picture ebook will make it. Many will slip into oblivion as soon as they’re released.

Does Your Book Have a Fighting Chance?

Here are some positive signs.

You have a book that appeals to a niche market. Often publishers reject a manuscript simply because there isn’t a big enough audience to justify their expense to bring it to fruition. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the book shouldn’t exist. You’ll just have to make an effort to directly reach the consumers searching for the specific topic in your book.

If your story features a child with certain food allergies and how he must navigate snack time in preschool, you can write guest posts for parenting blogs that focus on these issues, or even blogs about nutrition and cooking. Many mommy bloggers welcome guest posts about all aspects of child care, and you can mention your book in your bio.

You already have a good online following. Jessica Shyba’s popular blog Momma’s Gone City, featuring photographs of her toddler and puppy at naptime, prompted publisher Jean Feiwel to offer her a two-book deal. Naptime with Theo & Beau was published by Feiwel and Friends in February, with a huge social media campaign using the hashtag #theoandbeau.

Could Shyba have chosen to self-publish the book and do the same thing? Sure. These days, authors and illustrators reach readers directly via their blogs, Twitter feeds and YouTube channels. Even if your blog is attracting the kind of people who would buy your picture book, you still have a potential customer base.

You want to begin establishing yourself as a professional author or illustrator. Waiting for an agent or editor to say yes can take months or years of submissions. Getting two or three picture ebooks out now means you’re working on creating a name for yourself and building a platform. If you do these books well, and market them smartly, you can build a reputation that can lead to more opportunities and possibly traditional book deals.

You have taken the time to study your craft. The quality of your work will be compared to those authors and illustrators who appear on the bestseller lists, so it must stand up to the scrutiny. Take classes in picture book writing and design, attend workshops, join a critique group, hire a professional editor. You want, and need, for your book to garner five-star reviews on Amazon, and not just from your mother. 

Why Your Book Might Not Make It

Your book has been rejected 25 times and you’re tired of submitting. Self-publishing won’t fix the flaws in a manuscript that had received nothing but form rejections from editors. Nor will it camouflage an ill-conceived story or writing that doesn’t appeal to the intended audience. You first need to figure out why the manuscript was rejected, and fix the problem.

You don’t have a solid marketing strategy. Complain all you want, but there is no way around it—if you want to sell books, you’ve got to market. And this goes for authors who are traditionally published as well. Don’t expect to post a link to your book on all your friends’ Facebook pages and call it a day.

You lack quality illustrations. This is crucial if you want your picture ebook to attract an audience. Remember that your first sales tool is your cover, and your second sales tool will be the first two pages of your book if you have Amazon’s Look Inside feature. If your illustrations look amateurish, the overall impression you’re giving potential customers is that this is not a professional product.

If you’re not an illustrator yourself, get the best illustrations you can afford. Start by checking the rates of some experienced illustrators. You can search the Illustrator Gallery of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators, or find freelance illustrators at sites like elance.com.

If you decide to design your own illustrations, it’s wise to take a graphic design class so you learn the basics of font choices, image placement, and how things fit together best on a small screen. And speaking of the smaller screen, remember that the images should be clear and without too many tiny details so they can be easily viewed on a Kindle or iPad.

At the very least, the biggest hurdle toward successfully self-publishing picture ebooks doesn’t need to be the technology. Trust me, the KDP Kids’ Book Creator software is easy to use. Hundreds of authors and illustrators have already taken advantage of this opportunity, and are selling their books on Amazon—and they’re not all young upstarts who could use an app before they were potty trained!

The post How to Create Picture Ebooks for Kids appeared first on Jane Friedman and was written by Laura Backes.

Start Here: How to Self-Publish Your Book

The following post is an introductory guide to the major self-publishing options available to authors today, and how to choose the right service and approach for you.

First, A Little History

For most of publishing’s history, if an author wanted to self-publish, they had to invest thousands of dollars with a so-called “vanity” press. That all changed in the late 1990s, with the advent of print-on-demand (POD) technology, which allows books to be printed one at a time. As a result, many POD publishing services arose that focused on providing low-cost self-publishing packages. They could be low cost because—without print runs, inventory, and warehousing—the only expense left was in creating the product itself: the book. Outfits like iUniverse, Xlibris, and AuthorHouse (which have merged and been consolidated under AuthorSolutions) offered a range of packages to help authors get their books in print, though most books never sat on a bookstore shelf and sold a few dozen copies at best.

What’s Changed Since 2007

Just as traditional publishing has transformed due to the rise of e-books, today’s self-publishing market has transformed as well. E-books comprise 30-35% of all US book sales, and 60% or more of all book sales in the US happen through an online retailer (primarily Amazon). That means the full-service POD publishers that used to make a killing are now largely irrelevant to most self-publishing success, and make little or no sense if you’re focused on publishing and marketing your e-book. However, because of self-publishing’s history, you may still think they offer something you need. For most authors, they do not.

Today, you can get access to the same level of online retail distribution as a traditional publisher, through services such as Amazon KDP, Nook Press, Kobo, Smashwords, and BookBaby. One could say that distribution through these channels is free. You don’t pay until your books start to sell. Every time a copy of your book is sold, the retailer takes a cut, and if you use a distributor, they’ll take a cut, too.

First, I’ll address how the e-book side of self-publishing works. Then we’ll return to the question of print.

Before You Digitally Publish

Even though e-books are skyrocketing in adoption, ask these questions before you begin:

Do your readers prefer print or digital?
If you don’t know what your readers prefer, is it common for authors in your genre to release e-books only? If digital-only publishers exist in your genre, that’s a good sign.
Is your book highly illustrated? Does it require color? If so, you may find there are significant challenges to creating and distributing your e-book across multiple platforms.
Do you know how to reach your readers online? People who buy e-books will probably find out about your work online.

An author who is primed to succeed at self-publishing has an entrepreneurial spirit and is comfortable being online. Ideally, you should already have an online presence and an established website. You also need to be in it for the long haul; sales snowball over time, rather than occurring within the first months of release.

How E-Publishing Services Work

The first and most important thing to understand about e-publishing retailers and distributors is that they are not publishers. That means they take no responsibility for the quality of your work, but neither do they take any rights to your work. Here are the characteristics of major services:

Free to play. You rarely pay an upfront fee. When you do, usually in the case of a distributor (such as BookBaby), you earn 100% net. If you don’t pay an upfront fee, then expect a percentage of your sales to be kept.
At-will and nonexclusive. With all e-book retailers, you can upload your work at any time and make it available for sale; you can also take it down at any time. You can upload new versions; change the price, cover and description; and you can sell your work through multiple services or through your own site.
Little technical expertise required. Major services offer automated tools for converting your files, uploading files, and listing your work for sale, as well as free guides and tutorials to help ensure your files are formatted appropriately.

Again, it’s important to emphasize: By using these services, you do not forfeit any of your rights to the work. If a traditional publisher or agent were to approach you after your e-book has gone on sale, you are free to sell rights without any obligation to the services you’ve used.

I should also acknowledge here that some of these retailers/distributors may have services they try to sell you—for editing, design, and marketing. When possible, I recommend authors retain their own freelancers rather than hiring through a middleman. You want to know exactly who’s doing work on your book and have them be accountable to you, not the middleman service.

Two Key Categories of E-Publishing Services

Most e-publishing services fall into one of these two categories:

Single-channel distribution. These services—which are retailers—distribute and sell your work through only one channel or device. Examples: Kindle Direct Publishing and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Press. Single-channel distributors do not offer any assistance in preparing your e-book files, although they may accept a wide range of file types for upload.
Multiple-channel distribution. These services primarily act as middlemen and push your work out to multiple retailers and distributors. This helps reduce the amount of work an author must do; instead of dealing with many different single channel services, you deal with only one service. The most well-known distributors are Smashwords and BookBaby.

Multiple-channel options are multiplying, and each works on a slightly different model. Some act as full-service publishing operations, requiring no effort from you, the author. However, in exchange for the services of a multi-channel distributor, you typically have to pay an upfront fee and/or give up a percentage of your sales.

One popular approach for independent authors is to start by distributing through Amazon KDP, and to then add multi-channel distributor Smashwords, which has no upfront fee and distributes to all major devices and retailers except Amazon.

A note about ISBNs: While an ISBN is not required for basic e-book distribution through most retailers, some distributors and services require one. Therefore, to maximize distribution, you’ll need an ISBN for your e-book. Some self-publishing services will provide you with an ISBN as part of the fee for their services, or you can buy your own ISBN through ISBN.org.

Converting and Formatting Your Work

Nearly every service asks you to upload a completed book file that is appropriately formatted. Services vary widely in the types of files they accept. Because standards are still developing in the e-book world, you may find yourself converting and formatting your book multiple times to satisfy the requirements of different services.

Here are the most commonly used formats for e-books:

EPUB. This is considered a global standard format for e-books and works seamlessly on most devices. While you cannot directly create an EPUB file from a Word document, you can save your Word document as a text (.txt) file, then convert and format it using special software.
MOBI. This is the format that’s ideal for Amazon Kindle, although you can also upload an EPUB file.
PDF. PDFs can be difficult to convert to standard e-book formats, and do not display well on grayscale reading devices.

Many e-publishing services accept a Word document and automatically convert it to the appropriate format, but you still must go through an “unformatting” process for best results. All major services offer step-by-step guidelines for formatting your Word documents before you upload them for conversion.

Important to note: There is a difference between formatting and converting your book files. Conversion refers to an automated process of converting files from one format into another, without editing or styling. It’s often easy to convert files, but the resulting file may look unprofessional—or even appear unreadable—if not formatted appropriately.

Useful tools for formatting and converting e-books include:

Calibre : Free software that converts and helps you format e-book files from more than a dozen different file types.
Sigil : Free WYSIWYG editing and formatting software for e-books in the EPUB format; you can start with plain text files saved from Word.
I’ve listed more tools here.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed at the idea of converting and formatting your own e-book files, then you may want to use an e-publishing service that takes care of formatting and conversion tasks on your behalf, such as BookBaby. This is especially necessary if your e-book has special layout requirements, heavy illustration, or multimedia components.

But if your book is mostly straight text—such as novels and narrative works—then you’ll probably be able to handle the conversion and formatting process without much difficulty if you’re starting with a Word document or text file.

Designing an E-Book Cover

There are a number of special considerations for e-book covers, not least of which is how little control you have over how the cover displays. People may see your cover in black and white, grayscale, color, high-resolution, low-resolution, thumbnail size, or full size. It needs to be readable at all sizes and look good on low-quality or mobile devices. For these reasons (and many more), it’s best to hire a professional to create an e-book cover for you. One designer I frequently recommend is Damon Za.

Maximizing Your Sales

With print books, your success is typically driven by the quality of your book, your visibility or reach to your readership, and your cover. With digital books, the same factors are in play, plus the following:

If you check the e-book bestseller lists, you’ll see that independent novelists charge very little for their work, usually between 99 cents and $2.99. Some argue this devalues the work, while others say that it’s appropriate for an e-book from an unknown author. Whatever your perspective, just understand that, if you’re an unknown author, your competition will probably be priced at $2.99 or less to encourage readers to take a chance. Typically, the more well known or trusted you are, the more you can charge. Note: Nonfiction authors should price according to the competition and what the market can bear. Sometimes prices are just as high for digital editions as print editions in nonfiction categories.
As of this writing, Amazon Kindle accounted for at least 60–70% of e-book sales in the United States. Your Amazon page (especially as displayed on a Kindle) may be the first and only page a reader looks at when deciding whether to purchase your book. Reviews become critical in assuring readers of quality, plus the Kindle bestseller list is watched closely by just about everyone in the business and can be a key driver of visibility and sales.
Price + Amazon. Amazon is well known for paying 70% of list to authors who price their e-books between $2.99 and $9.99. The percentage plummets to 35% for any price outside this range, which is why you find authors periodically switching their price between 99 cents and $2.99. They maximize volume and visibility at the low-price point (and attempt to get on bestseller lists), then switch to $2.99 to maximize profits.

This is but a scratch on the surface of the many strategies and tactics used to sell and market self-published work. Read these guides for in-depth coverage.

What About Agents Who Offer E-Publishing Services?

Increasingly, agents are starting to help existing clients as well as new ones digitally publish their work. Help might consist of fee-based services, royalty-based services, and hybrid models.

Such practices are controversial because agents’ traditional role is to serve as an advocate for their clients’ interests and negotiate the best possible deals. When agents start publishing their clients’ work and taking their 15% cut of sales, a conflict of interest develops.

In their defense, agents are changing their roles in response to industry change, as well as client demand. Regardless of how you proceed, look for flexibility in any agreements you sign. Given the pace of change in the market, it’s not a good idea to enter into an exclusive, long-term contract that locks you into a low royalty rate or into a distribution deal that may fall behind in best practices.

How to Produce a Print Edition

There are two primary ways to make print editions available for sale:

Print on demand (POD)
Traditional offset printing 

As described earlier, print-on-demand technology allows for books to be printed one at a time. This is by far the most popular way to produce print copies of your book. If you’ve investigated services like AuthorHouse, iUniverse, or any of the many subsidiaries of Author Solutions, then you were looking at services that primarily offer POD publishing packages. Traditional publishers also use POD to keep older titles in stock without committing to warehousing and inventory costs.

Pros of print-on-demand

Little or no upfront costs (if you avoid full-service packages)
Your book can be available for sale as a print edition in all the usual online retail outlets (Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com, etc), as well as distributed through Ingram, the largest U.S. book wholesaler.
Most readers cannot tell the difference between a POD book and an offset printed book.

Cons of print-on-demand

The unit cost is much higher, which may lead to a higher retail price.
You may have very few print copies on hand—or it will be expensive to keep ordering print copies to have around!

Most books printed by U.S. traditional publishers are produced through offset printing. To use a traditional printer, you usually need to commit to 1,000 copies minimum.

Pros of offset printing

Lower unit cost
Higher quality production values, especially for full-color books
You’ll have plenty of print copies around.

Cons of offset printing

Considerable upfront investment; $2,000 is the likely minimum, which includes the printing and shipping costs.
Increased risk—what if the books don’t sell or you want to put out a new edition before the old one is sold out?
You’ll have plenty of print copies around—which means you have books to warehouse and fulfill unless you hire a third party to handle it for you, which then incurs additional costs. 

Important: While it can be fairly straightforward and inexpensive to get a print book in your hands via print-on-demand services, virtually no one can get your book physically ordered or stocked in bookstores. Services may claim to distribute your book to stores or make your book available to stores. But this is very different from actually selling your book into bookstores. Bookstores almost never accept or stock titles from any self-publishing service or POD company, although they can special order for customers when asked, assuming the book appears in their system.

Also, think through the paradox: Print-on-demand services or technology should be used for books that are printed only when there’s demand. Your book is not going to be nationally distributed and sitting on store shelves unless or until a real order is placed.

Should I Invest in a Print Run?

The 3 key factors are:

How and where you plan to sell the book. If you frequently speak and have opportunities to sell your books at events, then it makes sense to invest in a print run. Also consider if you’ll want significant quantities to distribute or sell to business partners or organizations, stock in local/regional retail outlets or businesses, give to clients, etc. I do not recommend investing in a print run because you think bookstores or retail outlets will stock your book. If such an opportunity should arise, then you can always invest in a print run after you have a sales order or firm commitment.
Where you’re driving sales. If you’re driving your customers/readers primarily to online retailers, you can fulfill print orders with less hassle and investment by using POD. Ultimately, you do have to use POD regardless if you want to be distributed by the largest U.S. wholesaler, Ingram. (More info below.)
What your budget is like. Not everyone is comfortable investing in a print run.

You also need to anticipate your appetite for handling the warehousing, fulfillment, and shipping of 1,000+ books, unless a third party is handling it for you, which will reduce your profit. When the truck pulls up to your house with several pallets piled high with 30-pound boxes, it will be a significant reality check if you haven’t thought through your decision.

The majority of independent authors report selling about 100 e-books for every print book. Much depends on the genre, but in the U.S. e-books represent 30-35% of all books sold. So also keep this in mind as you decide how many print copies you need.

Print-on-Demand Recommendations

If you choose print-on-demand, then I recommend the following:

Use Ingram Spark to produce a POD edition for all markets except Amazon. By doing so, your book will be listed and available for order through the largest and most preferred U.S. wholesaler, Ingram.
Using CreateSpace (a division of Amazon) to produce a POD edition for Amazon sales. For many authors, the majority of sales will be through Amazon.

I recommend using both Ingram Spark and CreateSpace to maximize your profits and ensure that no one is discouraged from ordering or stocking the print edition of your book. As you might imagine, independent bookstores aren’t crazy about ordering books provided by CreateSpace/Amazon, their key competitor. However, if you use Ingram Spark to fulfill orders through Amazon, you will reduce your profits because Amazon offers more favorable terms when selling books generated through CreateSpace. So it’s much more advantageous financially to use CreateSpace—but limit the scope of that agreement to just Amazon orders.

As soon as your printer-ready files are uploaded, POD books are generally available for order at Amazon within 48 hours. With Ingram Spark, it generally takes 2 weeks for the book to be available through all their channels.

Wait, How Do I Get Printer-Ready Files?

As with e-book retailers/distributors, Ingram Spark and CreateSpace may offer you fee-based services related to editing, design, and marketing. These package services may work OK for your needs, but try to hire your own freelancers if you need someone to produce printer-ready files.

Alternatively, you can take a look at Joel Friedlander’s book template system, which offers a way for total beginners to prepare a printer-ready PDF file. There’s also PressBooks.

I Still Have Questions

I would expect so! This is just the tip of the iceberg. You can read more on this topic at the following posts:

How to Publish an E-Book: Resources for Authors
The Basics of Self-Publishing by David Gaughran
10 Questions to Ask Before Committing to Any E-Publishing Service
4 Key Book Publishing Paths
Mick Rooney’s Independent Publishing Magazine offers in-depth reviews of just about every publishing service out there. Read his review before using any service. You can also hire him for a consultation if you need expert guidance.

I Want to Pay Someone to Self-Publish My Book

Here are two full-service providers who are high quality.

Girl Friday Productions
Winning Edits

The post Start Here: How to Self-Publish Your Book appeared first on Jane Friedman and was written by Jane Friedman.

5 On: James C. Moore

In this 5 On interview, James C. Moore (@moorethink) discusses journalistic vs. creative writing, finding time to write when time is hard to come by, and what being a New York Times best-selling author doesn’t mean.

James C. Moore is an Emmy-winning former television news correspondent and the co-author of the bestselling Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. His second book, Bush’s War for Reelection, included his groundbreaking ten year investigation into the president’s National Guard record. He has been writing and reporting from Texas for the past 25 years on the rise of Rove and Bush and has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976. He is also the author of The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power. His political columns and insights have been published in leading newspapers and periodicals around the globe. Moore is also an award winning documentary film producer. His current book project, When Horses Could Fly: A Memoir of the American Dream, is a narrative examining the hopes and dreams of southerners in the aftermath of World War II.

5 Questions on Writing

CHRIS JANE: With a background in journalism, you were—and are—writing a lot of nonfiction, but you’ve also written two novels: The Rembrandt Bomb and In the Time of Man. What skills did you have to turn on or off when shifting into writing fiction?

JAMES C. MOORE: I don’t think you have to turn on or off any particular skills. Journalists and novelists are not different creatures; we are both observers of the human condition. The fun of writing fiction is to take a thought you’ve heard in non-fiction or daily life and turn it into a great quote or a piece of dialogue. But fiction enables greater freedom. As a reporter, I could not imagine the scene on the other side of the mountain. I had to cross the divide and go see what was taking place. A novelist can simply imagine and create what they hope is transpiring in that lovely valley with wildflowers growing in the meadow and trout rising in the stream. I actually prefer fiction to journalism.

I like Hemingway’s notion that good fiction is truer than the truth. I think he was right. Basic journalism doesn’t allow much for conjecture while that is the entire purpose of literature. I enjoy imagining what the world might be instead of being constrained to writing about what actually is. In fact, that can even be debilitating to a writer. Gertrude Stein told Hemingway to quit journalism because he was wasting his energies and life force on something that was not as important as his fiction. He took her advice. But his experiences as a reporter were essential to his great works like For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms. I suppose that means there is great value to both types of writing.

Which came first: a desire to go into journalism, or a desire to write fiction?

I’ve never thought of being anything other than a novelist. I don’t remember a time in my life when I was not a story teller. Old friends of mine, who have heard a few of my yarns too many times, have taken to numbering my narratives. “Oh yeah, Jim, tell us number 48. That one’s excellent.” It’s actually not quite that bad. But I am like most fiction writers because I like the idea of conceiving a narrative and then executing. There isn’t much that is more fulfilling than dreaming up characters, giving them life, making them believable, and putting them in situations to see what they will do. A nicely plotted narrative is an exciting thing, not just to the reader but also to the author.

Journalism was a way to make a living until I could earn money writing fiction. I’ve never really gotten to that point. I do many things to earn a living. But to be successful as a writer a person has to be completely devoted to their art. Look at the lives of V.S. Naipaul and Jim Harrison or any other writer who has succeeded. They went without or found a benefactor or spouse to support them until they made it.

Describe the process of taking ten years of investigative reporting and turning it into a book. Were you surrounded by notepads you had to somehow find a way to organize, or were you able to rely on memory while writing much of Bush’s War for Reelection?

This was the book that brought about George Bush’s troubles over the National Guard. I was a TV correspondent when he was running against Ann Richards and I was a panelist on their only live TV debate. I asked Bush how he got into the Guard during the Vietnam era. I had tried in my home town and was told it was a three year wait. Bush just walked up and was able to sign up for a pilot’s commission. We all know that was nonsense. Houston at that time was full of pilots home from Vietnam who wanted to keep their certificates current yet taxpayers were spending a million dollars to train Bush to fly.

My reporting process was always to keep files. It’s how I wrote Bush’s Brain, as well. I knew when I met Karl Rove in the late ’70s that he was likely to be a player in Texas politics and I just started collecting string on him. When I was traveling on the Bush press plane in 2000 and reporters were talking about how they were going to get a publishing contract on a Bush book, I knew he was the least compelling character in that campaign. I’d built a huge file on Rove and his shenanigans and went back to it and put together a proposal that led to that book, which was a New York Times best seller. I’ve always thought it was a bit odd that I went from notes and useless documents and clippings to a book that was on that list.

But to finally answer your question: I organize my research documents and files and then outline a book with a certain structure, which is also how I produced my documentaries and TV news reports. I look through all of that material for most important points and then start interviewing anyone relevant to the topic or the narrative. When I have enough interviews, I begin writing the first part of the book because I have made a point of doing those interviews first. As I write, I continue the interviews for the next parts of the book. I think this approach enables a writer to produce a book in shorter timelines. I’ve done non-fiction political books that included up to 100 interviews and finished a draft of 100,000 words in six months.

You spend a lot of time on your motorcycle, you’re a TV commentator, you write articles for several different websites— including your own—and you have a tech start-up company. Somehow, you’re also writing When Horses Could Fly. When and how do you squeeze in the time?

Writing is as much of a need as anything else in my life. Cormac McCarthy once was asked about the process of writing and the struggle. His only advice about writing was, “If you don’t have to, don’t.” I think some of us have to. I used to be a serious marathoner and I considered that sport to be the same kind of discipline as writing. When I was training 100 miles a week for a race, I would remove the decision-making process from my running. Every day, I decided, always included certain things: work, eating, sleeping, reading, friends, family. I had to include my running because if I left it to a decision of time, it was easy to decide against it, no matter how much I loved to run.

The same approach is essential to writing. It is a discipline. Do it every day. Make it a thing like eating, sleeping, and all of your other daily functions. When I have a book contract, I get up early and write before people start bothering me with my other work. For my columns and blogs, I tend to get ideas randomly while spending hours on my bicycle in the hill country or riding the motorcycle. Alone time and endorphins are essential for me.

What inspired When Horses Could Fly?

I think there is this unproved notion that America is a perfect mechanism for success. That’s why I am writing When Horses Could Fly. I want to explore that idea, and do it through the lens of my parents’ experience. We are pretty much indoctrinated in this country that all you have to do is work really hard and you can achieve anything you want. As much as we all want to believe that X amount of effort will always yield Y amount of results, it just isn’t true. People fail no matter who hard they try, or how long they try. And we tend, as Americans, to blame them and not our economy or our culture. Can’t be America’s fault, can it?

Of course it can, and it often is. I grew up in the ’50s and came of age in the ’60s and was fortunate that I was living in our country at a time when there was a progressive attitude toward helping the less fortunate. My father was a laborer and my mother was a waitress in a burger joint and there were six kids in an 800 square foot house. There was no money for health care or college, and barely sufficient money for food. Ma brought us home leftovers from the restaurant on a daily basis, where she was paid 55 cents an hour plus nickel and dime tips.

But fortunately, I lived in a country where there had been a political and cultural decision that my future mattered because it was connected to the country’s future. We ended up with government food and health care and I got government grants to get a college education. In an odd way, my country valued my future as much as it did that of George W. Bush, and 40 years later I would find myself sitting on a jet plane bound for New Hampshire and questioning him about why he thought he should be president of the United States. I think that’s how America is supposed to work.

But we are now at a place where we are against each other, too few people have too much money, and failure is a disgrace that we want to turn our heads away from rather than learn from. Our big decision as a society is whom do we help and how much. We never used to ask that question. We just helped. We are all going down the same road together but some of us end up in the ditch. We have to decide whether we are going to offer a hand up to those who are in the ditch in spite of their efforts or if we are simply going to turn away and leave them behind. I think the latter course of action is patently wrong for any culture. The great tragedy of America is that we always find the money we need for weapons with almost no debate but we have to argue about food and health care for poor children. We are doomed as a nation if we cannot get past this.

So, I’m taking my book back to the ’50s, to look at my parents’ struggle. My dad came home from the war to Mississippi with his immigrant bride and tried to make a go of things as a sharecropper because he loved the south and the land and growing things. All my Ma knew about America was what she saw in the movie Gone with the Wind, and when my dad showed up in a uniform looking like Clark Gable, she thought she was going to America to sip mint juleps on a porch at a big plantation. Instead, she ended up in a sharecropper’s shack with no electricity or running water, an outdoor toilet, and sheets hung for privacy between beds. They held on for almost five years trying to make a living until they gave up and went north to work in the car factories. Like a lot of southern families that made that move (which is still the greatest transmigration in U.S. history), the rest of their lives were a struggle of constant work and very little happiness.

I want to understand that in the context of who we are as Americans, and I also want to honor their efforts.

5 on Publishing

People who dream of having “NYT best-selling author” in front of their names have certain ideas about what that would mean or feel like. Many probably expect it would mean a lot of money (at least enough to quit the day job) and having no trouble finding a publisher for future work. How do expectations and reality match up?

This is the most hilarious part of having a book that is viewed as successful. Being a NYT bestselling author does not mean a lot of money or an end to the day job, unless you’ve come up with a character like Jack Reacher. Remember, the rankings are based upon the number of books sold in one week. If the most popular book in America only sold 100 copies and you sold 75, you could be the second most popular book in the nation. But I like to tell people Karl Rove paid for my daughter’s college. With out of state tuition for Michigan State University, however, that’s not quite true.

But Brain led to the National Guard book and that led to The Architect and that teed me up for Adios Mofo, the Rick Perry book. The advances kept getting bigger after Brain, but fell off the table for the Perry political book. But things happen as a result of books. I got hired by MSNBC to be a political commentator and did some paid speaking gigs, and the initial book tour was wonderful for Brain, everything from the Today Show to National Public Radio and newspaper features. And in the latest twist, Dan Rather’s producer Mary Mapes, who followed my work on the National Guard reporting, wrote a book about Rather getting blown out of CBS when he reported the Guard story. Her book is being turned into a movie, which is filming in Australia starring Robert Redford and Cate Blanchette. There is also a Jim Moore character in the film and an Australian character is playing me. It’s called Truth and will be out late this year. And no, I am not making any money on any of that.

Was self-publishing your fiction a first choice or a last resort?

I thought that by being marginally successful as a non-fiction author I might have an edge with publishers and agents to try my hand at fiction. I was wrong. Since Bush’s Brain made it onto the NYT bestseller lists for several weeks, when I wrote agents about my fiction I was able to put “Query from NYT Bestselling Author” in the subject line, and that tends to guarantee your email will get read. But doesn’t get you published.

Fiction is judged differently, and involves more risk for the publisher. With non-fiction, they get from the author an outline, a marketing analysis, sample chapters, author’s qualifications, and they can make an educated judgment on the book’s prospects because they have a lot of data points. Fiction is more subjective as to whether it will find readers. It’s almost impossible to know who will like a story, or how much it will be liked. The best fiction editors have far more misses than hits.

So, I got my science fiction novel read but not bought. The feedback was that it was a very compelling story line but weak character development. If I accepted that, then it was certainly not the case in my thriller novel, The Rembrandt Bomb. There are two very strong and developed characters in the male and female protagonists. But that changed nothing, even though the plot, I felt, is far better than the sci-fi. No publisher was interested. In fact, I never even got anyone to read the thriller.

Self-publishing was the only option, though I only did eBook. I haven’t messed with print on demand. Self-publishing is pretty easy but relatively tedious and I don’t like spending my time on such things since I have to make a living outside of my writing.

My novels haven’t sold very well at all. Of course, I’m lazy on the self-promotion. And there’s always the chance they just aren’t that good.

How did your professional background contribute to the success you had finding publishers for your nonfiction books? Did it help you substantially, or were there surprises?

Authors writing non-fiction need expertise in their subject matter or their odds of getting published are reduced. When I first proposed the Bush and Rove book, I had been traveling on presidential campaigns since Jimmy Carter’s when I was a young radio reporter in 1976, and had attended all of the political conventions during those presidential election years. I think that experience, combined with an Emmy and other significant reporting awards, made it possible for me to get a serious look as a first time author. But you still have to write a great proposal and pitch the story in a manner that excites an acquisition editor.

I didn’t find any real surprises in this process beyond the fact that even publishing is political. One of the publishers that had rejected my proposal suddenly got interested in Rove after Bush led Republican wins during midterm elections, and that editor sent a note to a friend of mine asking if he would be interested in writing a book about Rove and calling it Bush’s Brain. He’d never have known the title had he not read my proposal. My friend turned him down but some other writers wrote a quick clip book about Rove under a different title for that particular publisher and it made it to the market place before Brain.

What were the self-publishing pros and cons you experienced upon releasing your novels?

I think self-publishing is quite exciting. But I’d rather get an advance from a publisher so that they are invested in me and are compelled to promote my books when they are finished so they can earn back their advance. But self-publishing offers opportunities that would not otherwise exist for most writers. However, an author has to be dedicated to daily marketing of their work. We tend, as writers, to hope the world will find our work and be well pleased.

As a friend of mine says, “Everything is a marketing problem.” And he’s right. You have to learn to promote yourself and good writers are not good sales people, though they must acquire that skill, especially if they are intending to self-publish. Use social media regularly, post chapters of your book, send emails to local and national media, write columns that show off your expertise, and become a carnival barker when all you want to do is return to your lonely garret and construct another lovely sentence. That’s just not enough. And if you aren’t willing to do that, you might as well leave it alone. You won’t sell much.

What would you say is the most important lesson you’ve learned about publishing or the publishing industry that might be useful to those just entering?

I think writers entering the publishing world need to understand that they are very likely to simply end up as mid list authors and that the people in the front office are not likely to invest greatly in your work. I learned to be realistic and understand that each book stands on its own merit and if the proposal isn’t sharp and convincing, you won’t get a decent advance or even an offer to publish.

Money cannot be a motivation for writing. Writing is its own motivation. In my years as a competitive distance runner one of the great coaches posed and answered a question about milers. He said, “Why do milers run? To run is reason enough.” I think writers need a similar mindset. Your book may very well be the greatest writing since Donna Tartt and the money will flow, but the odds are greater that you will get a modest advance and earn modest royalties. And if you do, you are one of the luckiest writers in America. And if you don’t, and you don’t find satisfaction in the beauty of our language and the construction of a fine sentence and the rendering of a beautiful idea, you are not a writer in the first instance and ought to spend your life’s energies in another endeavor.

I was once at a party with a few writer friends and one of the people they were talking to said, “I just know I have a book inside of me.” After a pause, one of the authors turned to him and said, “I think you might want to give consideration to the possibility that your book should remain inside of you.” And he walked off. Might not be an original thought but writing is a need for certain people. And if you are interested more in the money than the story, consider software sales instead.

Thank you, Jim.

The post 5 On: James C. Moore appeared first on Jane Friedman and was written by Chris Jane.

Why Authors Walk Away From Good, Big 5 Publishers

Harry Bingham between houses

Today’s guest post is by Harry Bingham (@harryonthebrink), a UK-based author.

I’ve been an author for more than fifteen years. My first book came out with HarperCollins in February 2000 and I’ve been going ever since. (I’m British and the book came out in the UK and elsewhere, though I’m a relative newbie in the US.)

Fifteen years might not sound such a long time, but I’ve already had two literary agents, four publishers, seven editors, and thirteen books—even more if you include things I’ve worked on as editor or ghost. More to the point, I’ve witnessed the publishing industry evolve through at least four different eras.

The first era—I just caught its tail end—was back when price discounting was still modest. Back then, publishers still had marketing cash to spend on actual marketing. HarperCollins spent about £50,000 ($75,000) on launching my very first book, with posters up at rail stations and airports, on the London Underground and elsewhere. I was lucky: those times were already ending.

Before long, retailers started to become more assertive. They slashed prices to lure consumers and sold space in their retail promotions to replace that lost income. The cash that had once been used to attract consumers was now going straight to bookshops to compensate them for the pain of all that discounting. No more posters, no more direct appeals to the consumer.

That was the second era, but it was still pre-Amazon, pre-ebook. And as that third era dawned—the Dawn of Bezos—it turned out that the actual digitization issue was easy. (E-reader technology? Get Amazon and Apple to invent something. Distribution? Leave it to Amazon and iTunes.) The thing that truly gave publishers sleepless nights was the risk that their traditional retail buyers would go extinct.

In both the US and the UK, Borders collapsed. Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, the book retail leaders in either country, were either loss-making or only marginally in profit, a situation which still persists.

Publishers were finding it increasingly hard to sell in print and to sell right across their front lists—but it soon turned out that they didn’t have to, either, or not the way they used to. The huge margins they made on ebooks more than made up for the loss of print revenues. The equally huge margins they made on their backlist ebook titles made up for the struggles of the frontliners.

In a weird, paradoxical way, Amazon provided both the threat (the rise of the ebook) and the solution (those giant margins).

The net result? It turns out that now, at the end of that third era, publishers are making more money than they ever have done before. All those tedious stories about Amazon wanting to swat publishers from existence somehow ignore the fact that Amazon is only marginally profitable, while the publishers are making a fortune. (And, yes, literary agents know how much money publishers are making, but they still haven’t managed to reverse the long decline in author incomes. No sign of that changing.)

But what about the author in all this? What does it mean for you? What has it meant for me?

Well, I don’t know. Anyone who claims to have answers is a fraud: the wheel is still in spin, the ball has yet to settle. But I do have a story that contains the seeds of an answer.

I said I’ve been through a number of different books, different editors. Well, I should really have added that I’ve been through a number of careers too. I started out writing financial thrillers. Those things morphed into historical fiction. Then I jumped over to nonfiction, both specialist and non-specialist. But I could never stay with nonfiction forever. I just liked telling stories too much. So I started writing a series of mystery novels, featuring a young Welsh detective, Fiona Griffiths.

Those books did really nicely, and still are. They sold in the UK, in the US, and to other publishers in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and elsewhere. A production company optioned the rights to the first book and that book has already successfully been televised.

Which is nice. My career has had some ups and downs (more about that here if you’re interested), and it’s wonderful to be writing series fiction that’s performing strongly. It’s like having all the nice bits of being a writer (the writing) without all the worst bits (the massive financial insecurity).

Only there’s a twist in this tale, a twist that caught me totally by surprise.

In the US, my books were bought by Delacorte/Bantam Dell, part of Random House. I enjoyed a superb editor and the firm’s quite excellent production standards. I got some incredible reviews—that first book, Talking to the Dead, had starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus and was a crime book of the year for the Boston Globe and the Seattle Times. What’s more, my ebook sales were strong enough that I’d earned out my author advance before the book had even come out in paperback. That’s good going.

As you can imagine, I was pretty pleased. An author’s turbulent life looked, for once, to be pretty calm. With hindsight, I was like the pretty teenager in the weird, creaky house who decided, “Nope, there’s nothing to worry about here.” The quiet bit before the horror starts.

Because the two books I did with Random sold well as ebooks, they pretty much failed in print. The $27 hardback isn’t an obviously desirable product for today’s crime/mystery reader—certainly not when debuts are concerned—and the book basically flunked. Because retailers couldn’t shift the hardback, they didn’t want to be burned twice, so they ordered the paperback only in very limited numbers. That too sold horribly.

What we had was a paradox—emblematic of that third era in publishing—where a book could have (a) great reviews, (b) a good author-publisher relationship, (c) excellent production quality, (d) strong ebook sales, yet (e) be a print failure. What were we to do?

To me, it was obvious that we needed to establish the series in stages. We’d start with ebooks, priced so as to attract the risk-averse buyer. Then, once we’d built a base, we’d start to issue affordably priced paperbacks. Then, once all that was strong enough, we’d offer the premium priced hardback too. Simple.

Only not. For one thing, Random House wasn’t set up to work like that. There were e-only imprints (Alibi) and there were hardback imprints (Delacorte). There wasn’t, and isn’t, an imprint able simply to publish a title in whatever was most natural to that author and that book.

And then too, if I was going to be published e-only by Random House, I would receive just 25% of net ebook receipts. That’s about 17% of the ebook’s cover price as opposed to more like 70% by simply publishing direct with Amazon. I couldn’t understand why I’d want to do that. I mean, yes, I’d have listened if they’d come to me saying, “Harry, I know giving up 75% of those net receipts sounds like a lot, but we’re going to add a whole ton of value to the publication process. We’re going to do a whole heap of things that you can’t do on your own. And here’s a stack of in-house data which shows that we can boost your sales way past the point you could achieve.”

They didn’t say that. They didn’t actually make any argument at all. When I said no to 25% royalties, that was it. No further conversation.

And I was OK with that. I very happily chose to self-publish the third book in the series—The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths—and will accept whatever outcome the market cares to deliver. 

That book has just come out. It cost me about $2,000 to publish the book. That sum includes cover design, editorial work, manuscript conversion and some marketing activity—primarily an author blog tour and a paid Kirkus review. I know there’s debate in the indie community as to whether it makes sense to pay $425 for a Kirkus review, but the investment has come good for me. Kirkus described the book as “exceptional” and gave me some very quotable quotes. I don’t think you can easily quantify the impact of that review but, for me, I’m much happier marketing a book that has some potent third-party endorsements.

It’s way too soon in the publication process to evaluate whether my experiment has been successful, but my pre-orders were sufficiently good that I’d repaid my upfront investment on the day of publication itself. The advance I’d got from Random House was $30,000 per book, so I’ve a way to go before equalling that, but I don’t rule out succeeding. It’s just too soon to say.

And this, I think, will be the theme of this fourth era that’s now just possibly emerging. It’s a world where authors with plenty of Big 5 sales experience choose to say, “You know what, I’m not playing this game any more.” Where authors make a positive choice to walk away from the terms offered by good, regular publishers.

The much-published Claire Cook has already described on this blog her own journey away from the Big 5. Her story is different from mine, but it’s also the same. There are others too. On my own website, William Kowalski—a critically acclaimed bestselling author—talks about why he made a similar journey. A spatter of refuseniks.

The traffic isn’t only one way. Hugh Howey is the epitome of self-publishing success, but he was (rightly) happy to accept a huge print-only deal from Simon & Schuster. He’s also 100% conventionally published in the UK. There are plenty of other examples of self-pub authors who have decided to take all or part of their business over to the traditional model.

And that’s great. The fourth era isn’t one where Indie Publishers Destroy The Evil Big 5 Oligopoly, or vice versa. This new era of publishing is one where authors have a meaningful choice. What that choice is will depend on the author, the territory, the genre, and multiple other issues which will vary across every different situation.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that publishers will adapt fine: they’ve adapted to everything else. Agents too: they’re going to have to understand that their authors have more options than they did before, and that their agencies can’t necessarily take a cut of everything that moves. (Again, most agents will navigate this shift just fine: my own literary agent has shown immaculate integrity and professionalism.)

But the fact that some major players will be able to adapt doesn’t mean that nothing’s changed. On the contrary, from my own point of view, the ability to say, “Thank you, but no” to a massive publisher is an utterly revolutionary and liberating shift. And the more that authors move from trad-pub to self-pub and back again, the more publishers will be aware that things have changed. If they treat authors poorly—and they do far, far too often—they’ll need to bear in mind that the author in question now has a choice about where to take the next book, far more than was ever previously the case.

Of all the ages of publishing that I’ve lived through, this is the one I’m happiest to be part of. The one that feels most exciting, most aglow with promise.

Long live the revolution! And may you always find readers!

Note from Jane: Harry’s book The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths is available on Amazon and elsewhere. If you want to find more about Harry: visit his author site | Writers Workshop | Agent Hunter.

The post Why Authors Walk Away From Good, Big 5 Publishers appeared first on Jane Friedman and was written by Harry Bingham.

Write the Book That Keeps You Awake at Night Scared

Do you have a project that confuses you, or feels dangerous? In the latest Glimmer Train bulletin, novelist Mark Wisniewski discusses three things he’s learned about writing that he wishes he’d been taught. One of those things? How to search your gut-sense for your “one big story.” He writes:

This is not the story of your life. This is not your version of the best-selling novel everyone’s talking about. This is that one tangle of somewhat imagined, somewhat overheard, somewhat experienced events your spirit relates to with authority. Of all the stories you could tell, it’s the weird one. The one whose emotional terrain can bring you to tears. The one that keeps you awake at night scared that maybe, if it were published under your name, so-and-so might get upset and speak ill of you.

Click here to read his entire essay over at Glimmer Train.

For more insights into the writing life:

The Fog of Creation by Nellie Herman
In Search of Art by Julia Strayer

The post Write the Book That Keeps You Awake at Night Scared appeared first on Jane Friedman and was written by Jane Friedman.

How to Tell If Back Story Is Sabotaging Your Novel

Today’s guest post is by Roz Morris (@Roz_Morris); it is adapted from her newly released book, Writing Plots with Drama, Depth and Heart: Nail Your Novel.

Back story is events that have happened before the narrative starts. Most stories have it—because they rarely start from the beginning of a character’s life. However, writers tend to misuse it or include too much.

There are two fundamental questions with back story. The first is how to present it (e.g., a vivid flashback), and the second is whether those back story events should be used as part of the main plot.

Here are 4 ways that back story might be sabotaging your novel’s effectiveness.

1. Your novel’s most engaging events are buried in a summary of back story.

I often see manuscripts where the writer has invented a detailed and dramatic back story for a character, but the main story events lack impact and substance. There is no meat left for the book’s real-time plot and so the novel seems empty and static. Of course, the story may be precisely that; the character might be coming to terms with past mistakes. The focus might be the finer detail of living with a burden, or leaving behind a golden period that is gone forever. But just as often, this approach is not deliberate and the writer is scrabbling around, trying to find stuff for the characters to do. They don’t realize they’ve already got fantastic ideas, but hidden them in the back story.

Could that back story be used as a fully fleshed flashback so the reader could participate? Or, more radically, could those same ideas be extracted from the past and reworked as a forward-moving plot? Consider whether your back story ideas should be front story.

2. Your novel relies on back story and secret wounds instead of character development.

Writers often try to get us interested in a character by giving them a colorful past. So the heroine was brought up by theatre folk, which the writer hopes will make her intriguing. It does, to a point, but it’s only the start. The real value is in what this history has made of her. Does she crave security and a settled life as a result, or has it left her with itchy feet? Perhaps these twin urges are at odds inside her, sometimes pulling her one way, sometimes the other. 

The back story on its own is not enough to create a character. We must see how it has steered their choices. Also, back story works best if it exerts an active influence on the characters and plot events.

A variation of this back story problem is when a writer uses a past tragedy to get sympathy for their good guys—the secret wound. So a writer describes how a couple had a heartbreaking experience with fertility treatment many years before, or maybe their son was murdered. Although these ordeals are heartrending, and might make us feel for the couple, they don’t in themselves show us the characters’ natures. Back story is a springboard for characterization, not a substitute.

Still worse is the idea (derived from movies, which must streamline their stories) that a character is explained or decoded by a single key event in the past. Characterization in prose doesn’t generally work in one-shot doses or shorthand.

If an unusual origin or past traumatic event is key to how your character behaves now, don’t forget to show us those consequences. 

3. Dramatic issues and secret wounds are never used in the novel.

Many writers give their characters an exciting secret burden, which never features in the story. So they draw attention to their protagonist’s long-lost brother, or mother whose identity was never known, or hidden romantic obsession, or puzzling birthmark—and nothing comes of it.

Such exciting character tidbits are like Chekhov’s gun. If you load a firearm in the first act, the reader assumes it will appear later on. If not, you’ve teased them on false pretenses— which will be noticed. 

If you give your characters these colorful issues, do they have to be resolved? Not necessarily. Chekhov’s gun doesn’t have to be fired. Stories don’t have to mete out rewards and answers in a simplistic way. The characters don’t have to conquer every fear, or heal every injury. But each secret wound adds a tension, a marker that the reader watches for. It must color the story in some way. It shouldn’t be used only to grab interest and then disappear. 

If your characters have secret wounds, make sure you explore them.

4. The back story appears in one major chunk at the beginning.

The beginning of a novel is like starting an immense machine. The reader needs to know what’s going on, who wants what, why it matters, who the characters are, what their relationships are, what they do day by day. It’s easy to overload or confuse—and one of the common mistakes is to tell the back story too soon.

This wasn’t always a problem. In the past, readers weren’t so hungry for immediacy or the personal experience, so would accommodate a long tranche of back story as they settled in. Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan begins with detailed introductions to the setting and his characters before he ever puts them in situations where significant trouble is brewing. This certainly has its own virtues as, knowing the characters intimately, we are riveted when the major events happen. But a slow preamble can fatigue modern readers.

If you look at the opening of a recently published well-edited novel, there is usually very little back story—just the minimum needed to establish context. And it’s always related to the action in the scene.

So how much back story is enough at the start? It helps to relate this problem to real life. Imagine you have a new acquaintance. Certain things draw you together, help you get your bearings with the other person’s personality, values and life. If the time comes to exchange your life histories, it will be after your relationship is established, when you are actively curious.

In the same way, the reader at the start of a novel can coast with a few well-deployed details—just enough to understand what’s going on. The detailed picture might not emerge for a long time.

Reconsider your back story

The reader doesn’t need to know every last note of the characters’ pasts. Often, much of your back story is for you alone; it makes the characters and their dramas solid and helps you write with confidence.

Some writers make a draft that includes all the background—for their eyes only. Then they start a fresh file and fillet out everything that isn’t current, looking for places to reintroduce context if needed. They find there is a lot that stays in the vaults.

Some writers limber up by writing back story up until the story starts, then delete it from the final narrative.

It’s worth doing an editing pass to look for back story. Highlight anything that’s explanation. Consider whether you could save it for later or give it a different use. Or even, if it could be taken out.

A rich back story helps you to write, but the reader may never need to see it.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, then I highly recommend Writing Plots with Drama, Depth and Heart: Nail Your Novel by Roz Morris. You can download the first chapter for free on your Kindle.

The post How to Tell If Back Story Is Sabotaging Your Novel appeared first on Jane Friedman and was written by Roz Morris.