Michael Selden's Blog, page 18
June 2, 2014
Publishing That Book
After you have a decent, well formatted book, it’s time to set up the print and e-book distribution. Before we get to that step, you may well have elected to use a multi-service company to get to the formatted stage. There are two main companies (probably more) that help you get there. I-Universe and Create Space. I-Universe is a bundled service—editing, design, and such and Create space is an alla Carte service. I personally don’t use either. I hire people who work in the industry, often they work for the big 5 during the day and for me at night. I only pay for the hours I use.
Changes in Print on Demand (POD) has changed the whole business model for publishing. Today, you can print and mail a single copy of a book for not much more than the per-book cost of printing and mailing thousands—no more need to make big runs. Together with the freelance expertise available the independent publisher can turn out books every bit as good, and often better than the big 5 for less cost. I say better because indies aren’t constrained to only pursue a narrow spectrum of books (the big 5 hate to take chances and will mostly push things that they think are guaranteed to sell) this means that great book that doesn’t have an action sequence and cliff hanger in every chapter may never make it. To Kill a Mockingbird would probably never be published by the big 5 today—but it would by an Indie.
Lightning Source is the #1 POD service, it’s owned by Ingram Books which is the largest distributor in the world. Lightning source only does business with publishers, so you need to be a publisher, with a company and an Employer ID to use it. Alternatively you can go through Create Space OR I-Universe, or Lightning Spark (set up for authors to use with Ingram). Bowker is where you go to buy the ISBN’s needed for every edition of every book. This is a code that ID’s the publisher and the book and the edition. You can buy 1 or 10 or 100 or more to assign to your books and you need to update the Bowker database as you issue them. (This applies to E-Books as well)
E-Book distribution is a big space still, although Amazon has been strong-arming the competition. Ultimately, there is no real material cost, just labor involved.
You set up contracts with each distributor and they take care of the accounting and pay you as books are sold. They also issue W-9′s. As a publisher, you also need to issue w-9′s to people you hire. Its best to start an LLC comapny, with may cost 50 dollars to set up, but you’ll need accounting help as well—again, freelance.
There are still obstacles to overcome for Indies. many reviewers haven’t caught on yet that the days of the big 5 and the dependent publishers are numbered and may refused to review your books. The book publishing industry is following the path that the music industry followed. I doubt that the big 5 will be there ten years from now. They can morph into something else, but you can’t fight the tide of an inferior business model.
Obviously, this is a fairly simplified process diagram and I’ve either glossed over or barely touched many details, but it provides a basic understanding of getting the book out there. Next will come publicizing what you’ve published. I’m still learning this and have learned more of the mistakes I’ve made even as I go on.
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May 30, 2014
Attended the Independent Publisher Book Awards in NY City, May 28.
After some back and forth rumination on the matter, I elected to travel to NYC to attend the IPPY awards gala. The guys did a decent job, conducting the awards presentations. People traveled from as far as Australia and New Zealand to attend.
My trip itself was (of course) exhausting and I’m always reminded of how reasonable life is here at home when I visit Manhattan, where dollars are treated like dimes—probably because so much cash flows through the city’s veins.
Anyway. I picked up my medal and flew home the next day. I wanted to attend the Book Expo America exhibitions, but didn’t want to spend the extra day in Manhattan. Leaving, I tried a more adventurous (for a non-New Yorker) way to reach La Guardia. I took the subway into Queens and hiked the last 3 miles to the airport, wearing my convertible bag as a backpack. Walking is good for me and I had time to kill anyway.
Here is the medal I received, I rapped it over a 30-inch tall poster of the book’s front cover. The book won the Gold Medal for Juvenile fiction in the national category competition.
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May 26, 2014
Publishing and Selling a Book—Part 1, Prepping for Publication
There are basically 3-parts to publishing a book as an independent publisher. These are :
Preparing the book to make it acceptable to publish
The actual publishing process itself
The marketing of the book you’ve published
Each of these three elements are as important as the other, to make sure you’re doing things right. As someone still learning this, I’d thought that I’d offer a little of what I’ve learned so far in three charts with explanations as necessary.
First, writing the first draft of your story is about 5% of the work. I won’t even get into the conceptual phase, because everyone is very different. Just having a good idea, then plotting and writing the story is the smallest part of the effort. Again, as everyone’s creative process is different., I won’t go into how one layers the story; it’s implicit in the revision process.
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May 25, 2014
Smashwords Interview
I published the E-Pub Version of The Boy Who Ran on the site Smashwords.com yesterday
They published an interview, done electronically—where they submit questions and I answer them. Here is the link to that interview:
https://www.smashwords.com/interview/...
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May 24, 2014
The Boy Wo Ran E-Pub Version Published
The E-Pub version of The Boy Who Ran was released May 24, 2014.
I is currently available through Smashwords at
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...
and will soon be available on Kobo.com
I’ll post that link when they put it online
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May 19, 2014
The Boy Who Ran — to come out in e-pub format
My select period is ending at Amazon, so I plan to release the already prepped e-pub version as soon as possible.
It’ll be available by June 1 for Nook and other tablets in e-pub format.
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May 15, 2014
Visited my new old high school today and plan to take classes in my old new school
When I graduated from St. Mary’s High School, just after electricity was discovered, the school occupied a building just adjacent to the St. Mary’s cathedral, downtown. We didn’t really have an athletic field of our own, but there was a narrow gymnasium under rear property of the church—below ground. We used the Colorado College fields as our home turf, since it was just down the road, about a half mile. Our library was microscopic, but we were next door to the Pemrose Public Library, so that became our library. I think there were just under 500 students in that school (about 98 in my graduating class). Today, the school is housed in the burbs, it has a wonderful gym—I didn’t check out the library, but I hear alumni donated land for athletic fields. There are just 310 students now, but the school has a very nice “feel” to it. If I were ready for high school, I’d go there.
My old school building has become the downtown studio of the Pike’s Peak Community College now, and ironically, I plan to take a few classes in that building—I need to go back through the French language before I go to Provence next spring. I plan a three month stay there, maybe in IX. So, in a sense, I’ll be going back to my high school and taking the same first class I remember taking when I moved to Colorado from Miami in the just-past-dark ages . . . French.
The character I’m writing about lived in Rome from 1880 to 1920, but left around the time the fascists too over t live in Provence. I don’t know much about Provence, but it was recommended to me as a good place to have fled at the time. The character stayed there until the war and then migrated to the US.
I spent almost 3 months in Italy—mostly in Rome—over the winter researching the period and trying to brush up on my Italian, which was as rusty as the Tin Man.
Some interesting things I learned when in Rome. The area where the character lived and worked was the Trastevere area, near Isola Tiberina. At beginning of that the time, there were still no walls around the river and it flooded routinely. There was a terrible flood in the 1870′s that killed many and triggered the wall project. The area at the time was a beach, people went there to bathe and it was considered healthy. Tiberina island has always been associated with health and healing, and it contained a spring which was considered healthy to drink. There were a lot of changes to that part of the city around that time and the walls project changed much of the area along river.
When you look at Rome, in general, you need to remember that Rome was not built in the same way that we built things here. Often the foundations and even wall elements from earlier buildings were incorporated into the new buildings, so the way the streets run, the walls angle and so forth are strongly influenced by the ancient buildings—they are still there, often buried below ground by sediment left from the regular alluvial flooding.
Obviously, I learned a lot more that this in my time there, but I already knew or thought I knew) Rome pretty well. I know it much better now and like it even more.
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May 12, 2014
New Press Release in Colorado
This press release came out today. It is circulating in some areas of Colorado.
http://coloradoprlink.com/Woodland-Pa...
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May 6, 2014
The Balance Chapter 4 Posted (May 6, 2014)
I posted the fifth section of The Balance today, Chapter 4: Classes
The Chapters of The Balance can be accessed at my web site by clicking on the following link, which brings up The Balance main page and its links.
http://michaelselden.com/?page_id=7
Of by navigating to
and using the tab menu at the top of the page.
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