The Writer’s Predicament
Back to the business of writing, and believe me, if you want to write full-time, for a living, it’s a business.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time on this blog bitching about the “traditional” publishing business. Today, I’m not going to bitch. I’m going to give you some free advice. You can take it or leave it.
I’m assuming that at least some of you are contemplating self-publishing a novel. I’m in the process of self-publishing seven of them over a two-month period. And you know what? It’s going pretty good. The reason it’s going pretty good right now is that I’ve been in the writing biz for awhile now. It’ll be six years next month, and during those six years I’ve had a wide range of experiences with writing and publishing. Some have been good, some have been bad, but I’ve paid attention, I’m still at it and I plan to keep at it. For those of you who are relatively new to it, allow me to offer a word of caution. There is a school of sharks out there — a big one — just waiting for newbies like you. They know you’re uncertain, and they will prey on your inexperience. They will lure you with promises, and then they will fleece you. They will gleefully separate you from as much of your money as is possible, and you will be left wondering, “What the hell just happened?”
Do you know how much it should cost you to get a novel up and running on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback versions? About four hundred bucks is what it should cost you. I’ve heard stories about indie authors who have paid as much as twenty thousand dollars to get a book published. That’s on the extreme side. More often, however, I hear about the people who spend two thousand, three thousand, five thousand. That seems to be about the norm. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The first big expense for most newbies is editing. Let’s say Josephine Smith wants to write a book about her childhood — a favorite among indie writers. She spends a couple of hundred hours tapping away at the keyboard, and then one day, she looks at her manuscript and says, “Wow, I think I’m done.” So she starts showing it to her family. They tell her it’s good. She shows it to a few friends. They tell her it’s good, too, but a couple of them suggest that perhaps she might consider hiring a professional editor to take a look and make suggestions. There are some typographical errors, some grammatical errors, maybe the story drags a bit here and there. Now Josephine is a bit uncertain, so she goes to Google and starts looking for a freelance editor. She quickly realizes that there are a bunch of them out there. They all say they can help.
And maybe they can, to a point, but they’re not cheap. Some of them will offer a bare-bones evaluation for a pittance, but if Josephine sends her manuscript, she will quickly learn that in order for this editor to “take the book where it needs to be,” she has a lot of work to do. Josephine will, of course, want her book to be taken “where it needs to be,” so she’ll do what the editor says. She will rewrite and rethink and rewrite some more. She’ll send the manuscript back to the editor and she’ll be told to tweak this and change that and cut this and expand on that. And it will cost her in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars. That’s the average. Some editors charge far more, up to five, six, even ten thousand dollars. These are people who, for the most part, don’t write books themselves. They tell other people how to write books. To me, that’s like a coach who has never set foot in a batter’s box trying to teach a baseball player how to hit.
If you can’t spell, if you don’t know the rules of grammar and when it’s okay to suspend them, if you don’t know anything about story structure or plotting or characterization or the value of conflict, you shouldn’t be publishing books in the first place. Write all you want, but don’t publish. If, however, you do know about all those things, then my suggestion is that you become your own editor. Should you give your manuscript to other people to read and critique? Absolutely. But you don’t have to pay them to do it, and ultimately, the choices you make in your book should be yours. Editing your own work is difficult sometimes. It takes patience, it takes time, and it requires you to be brutally honest with yourself. You sometimes have to suspend creativity and concentrate on simply being meticulous. But you can train yourself to do it, and once you’ve trained yourself to edit, your work will get better and better. It’s also free.
Once you’ve finished the manuscript and you’re ready to publish, you have to choose the formats. I suggest trade paperback (you need to do the book in paper) and Kindle. I also suggest using CreateSpace for your paperback and Kindle Direct Publishing for your electronic version. All you have to do is go to CreateSpace.com and follow the directions. Same with Kindle Direct Publishing. You have to have a formatted content file and a formatted cover file. For the content, I recommend TheFastFingers.com. They’ll format for both CreateSpace and the Kindle for $150. They do an excellent job and they get the book back to you within 10 days. As for your cover, there are dozens of affordable cover designers out there. I don’t use any of them because I have a close friend who is an excellent graphic designer and I know what I want the covers to look like. We bounce ideas back and forth and then we sit down and do it. He won’t let me pay him, which is okay by me. You probably won’t have that luxury, but DO NOT, under any circumstances, pay more than two hundred dollars for a cover design. That includes front cover, back cover, spine, and ebook cover.
Once you get your content formatted for paper and ebook and your cover designed, guess what? You should be done spending money. CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing both allow you to upload your book for free. You write the description, choose the categories and tags, choose the price and submit everything. They’ll review it to make sure your files are compatible and the next thing you know, your book will be up for sale in the biggest and best bookstore in the world. It’s called Amazon, and if you’re an indie beginner, it’s the only place you need to be.
Enroll the title in KDP Select and give it away on the Kindle for 48 hours. Do a giveaway on Goodreads and LibraryThing and Shelfari. (You’ll have to figure those out for yourself.) If the book is good, it’ll start to get some legs under it. Tweak your tags and categories, maybe tweak the description. Wait a couple of weeks. Start another book. Do another 24-hour Kindle giveaway. Then another. Then one more.
So there you have it. Write a good book. Edit it yourself. Format with TheFastFingers. Do a good (but inexpensive) cover. Put it up on Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace. It should cost you a hundred and fifty bucks for TheFastFingers and maybe a couple of hundred for your cover. You’ll have to buy and ship paper books for the Goodreads, LibraryThing and Shelfari giveaways. Give away five on each site. That’ll cost you around a hundred and forty bucks (six dollars per copy for the books and three dollars to ship each of to the winners).
Five hundred dollars, max, for the whole shootin’ match.
If you pay more than that, you’re a… well, I won’t say it. But P.T. Barnum would love you.
