Part of the lure of independent publishing is that it feels like a free lottery ticket. Punch a few buttons, publish a book, become the next J.K. Rowling! It’s built on one of the most popular and seductive of our fallacies: that the singular, crazy one-time anecdote of success is not only duplicate-able, but it can happen to you, too.
It CAN. You CAN also win $10,000,000 the next time you drop a quarter in a slot machine. Really, though? You won’t.
People get that for the most part about Las Vegas, but they don’t seem to get it when it comes to the creative endeavors I dwell in. All this silly “acting” I’m doing – why waste my time studying and auditioning when all I need to do is “get discovered?” Same thing with aspiring screenwriters, aspiring web series creators, aspiring aspiring aspiring. All it takes is one example of success to blind people to the intermediary steps, because the stories of the ordinary go untold. Hearing that it’s hard work with no guarantee of success, in fact with failure being a near-certainty, is so much less fun.
And the truth is, the ordinary result is the same one as that slot machine – nothing. You drop your quarter, watch the wheels spin, and they just stop, and you’re there in silence.
Bringing it back to indie authorship, it’s important to articulate your goals and own them. If you’re just proud to create a book and give it to 20 friends, you can do that with absolute ease, very little investment, and very low standards. If, however, you want to create a professional product that can stand deservedly by the professional products on the shelves at book stores, if you actually want to carry yourself like a professional author in the hopes that the marketplace will confirm this, then there is more involved.
Please do not bring up E.L. James at this point. See above.
I know I’m invested in being an author. I’m spending money and time to make Stages of Sleep a handsome book because I don’t intend to stop publishing books.
But how much money? How much time? People just starting out wonder that a lot. I can’t tell you how it goes for everyone, but I can tell you how it’s going for me – the choices I’ve made, the luck I’ve taken advantage of, the risks I’m taking, and the true negative cost of self-publishing.
You Are a Publisher
The way to remove the stigma from the word “self-publishing” is to take the “publishing” part seriously. You have to take responsibility for the fact that your job isn’t over when you write the book, you have to see to its preparation for the marketplace. That means executing all the tasks previously handled by the professional publishing house you have replaced with your own self – the editing, the artwork, the layout, the publishing information, the promotion, the pricing and distribution channels.
If all you think about is out-of-pocket money, then it is technically possible to do all this for free. But to do it well? What you’re really going to end up with is a hybrid investment of your money and your time; and you decide how much of each to invest. You have to be interested in learning skills (which will pay off if you have the serious intention of publishing more books.) And you have to put time into vetting the services and partners you use, just like a boss (which you are now) hiring vendors and employees.
There are plenty of services offering vaguely-worded “publishing packages” that will happily vacuum money out of the pockets of aspiring writers. Some of them may even deliver what they say. Others will do the easiest and bare minimum necessary, and count on you being too thrilled by the book in your hand with your name on it (trust me, it’s THRILLING) to pay too close attention. Some that call themselves “full service” won’t even offer everything I described above. So you need to spend your time (there’s that investment idea again) figuring out just what you are buying in these packages, rather than just paying the first Google Search result. I mean, that is assuming you care. Please care.
Here are the choices, for better or worse, that I have made along the way for publishing Stages of Sleep:
Editing
You need an editor. If you find yourself saying something like “but oh, I ran Spellcheck and I have good grammar and…”, shut up. YOU NEED AN EDITOR. Now you’re saying “okay, well I’ve got a friend who’s a writer and they’ll look it over for free and,” shut up again. YOU NEED AN EDITOR.
What do I mean? You need a disinterested party with training, up-to-date style knowledge, and experience logging corrections in manuscripts so you can choose to implement them or apply the rare “meant to do that” exception. In this case, an editor who is not your actual friend is your friend.
There are several layers of editing. The highest, “manuscript evaluation”, is where an editor tries to identify and challenge the core goals and themes of your work, perhaps recommending re-writing and reshaping before they have even marked a single comma splice. To use a recent example, a publisher looked at Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman long ago and suggested “what if you focused on the childhood stuff instead?” That turned out to be useful advice.
A professional quality manuscript evaluation from someone with major publishing house experience can cost thousands. I am taking a major gamble by skipping this step – my hope is that my experience as a professional reader and a former development executive have given me sufficient training in answering some of these fundamental questions about what I am trying to do creatively with this book. I would love to be able to afford this step in the future, but I simply cannot right now.
Then there is “proofreading”, for all that pesky spelling and grammar that no one is perfect with, even with Spellcheck. You want someone who is going to be slow and meticulous in the way that you won’t. I did engage the proofreader who handled Seeing by Moonlight for my co-author and I. She teaches at a University and does this for side income, so we got a very competitive rate for professional-level skills. I initially chose her from hundreds of submissions of a Craigslist post and I’ll keep working with her until there’s a reason not to.
Artwork
Look at this website. This is why you need good artwork and your “friend who draws” or your own Photoshop skills are not enough. Hopefully you are convinced.
Artwork was a long process. I first took it to my close friend Heather McMillen, who is a professional painter and illustrator I’ve known for years. She struggled to come up with a defining cover image but was inspired to create the three excellent illustrations that introduce each of the three sections of the book.
The cover art was eventually cracked by Kevin Necessary, who makes his primary income as an editorial cartoonist but does commercial graphic and illustration work on the side. This is another stroke of luck in that he truly is a professional artist, but doesn’t make his living with book covers, which means I get professional quality delivered at a bargain. He’s created art for several of my Earbud Theater episodes and is wonderfully versatile. I won’t tell you the price I got, but our Seeing by Moonlight cover cost about $500, which is a bit more normal. You can get cheaper if you’re lucky like I was, but if you find yourself compromising on quality to save $50, go back to that website and remember the horror.
Those three checks I have written so far – for proofreading and two artists – total $800 out of my pocket. For the level of work I’m getting that’s a hell of a deal.
Layout
This is another big risk – I am doing all my own layout, both for the eBook and print versions of Stages of Sleep. This has meant reading several formatting guides (don’t spend money, plenty of perfectly good free ones for what you need) and applying a lot of my past experience doing layout for the old student newspaper, as well as some Matrix-level Microsoft Word manipulations. Not to mention researching margin standards, learning about the readability of serif fonts for printed text and sans-serif for headings and chapter titles and eText. It meant learning about the difference between a freely-licensed font and a font you don’t actually have permission to use in your book – font makers gotta eat too, people! Some great free ones are here though, including the eventual winner for the print version, 13-pt. Tallys.
This was many hours, but since, as I keep saying, I’m going to publish more books, the skills are continually applicable. I’m very proud of how my book looks, inside, outside, and virtualside, and I hope it makes a difference in how consumers view it.
Publishing Information
Do you know what an ISBN is? It may cost you money. Briefly, it’s the universally-recognized tracking number for editions of books, and you purchase them from Bowker, the official issuing agency for the United States.
If you only ever intend to sell your book on-line, you may get an identifying number direct from Amazon and not even need this. But if you hope a real bookstore might put your real book in it someday, you will need an ISBN since that’s how they find and order and organize your book.
I already have, as far as the publishing world sees, two editions of Stages of Sleep, the Kindle version and the Smashwords version that will distribute to all other eBook outlets. More on why I did this below. But a print version of the book is yet another version, and is tracked as such. A single ISBN would cost me $125. But since I plan to publish more, I can purchase a pack of ten for $295.
While that sort of means only $29.50 of that investment applies to Stages of Sleep, I’m still out the whole $295 right now, so for those keeping track, I’ve now spent $1,095 so far bringing this book to market, and that’s with a great deal of luck in my friends and a few major structural risks. There’s also the matter of creating a barcode for the print version – you’re responsible for that and Bowker as well as others will be happy to charge you money. I’m going to take a swing at this tool, which purports to be working and free (since really, making a barcode shouldn’t cost $20-$30 in the 21st century.)
Promotions
My co-author hired a PR firm on Seeing by Moonlight, and that resulted in some sales and some new Twitter followers, which was all well and good. But I just don’t see a lot of authors of short story collections becoming household names these days, so I think there’s a cost/benefit ceiling to PR for this particular book. And again, I’m broke. I do have time and stubbornness, though, and that can be useful.
I spent dozens of hours compiling a list of book bloggers who review indie authors. I vetted them by how many books they review, how many followers they have, and how approachable they seemed like they would be for what I’m offering. This involved a lot of websurfing, note taking, and query letter writing. But if I can have at least ten reviews on Amazon and Goodreads when the book launches, that makes an incredible difference in the book’s visibility in search results.
This means giving away free copies. If you’re worried about giving away free copies when you haven’t sold a book yet; there’s no nicer way to say it, but you’re going to have to get over that. I’m so far only giving away eBook editions, because the print version isn’t ready, and because that’s far more costly to give away; though I may yet do that for a blogger with a large enough audience.
I think I have enough pledged reviews to hit that threshold; but I’ll keep working at it. I may pay $25 for a month of reviews at StoryCartel, since that lead to some reviews of Seeing by Moonlight and is a relatively-small investment. I also have media outlets who previously booked me to talk about Seeing by Moonlight, and I’ll be circling back to them to see if they’ll have me back.
Pricing/Distribution
Where should your book be on-sale? Everywhere? For what price? Stages of Sleep is going to launch for $4.99 as an eBook and $15 as a paperback. I’ll make more money on the $4.99 eBook because that’s how big the difference in margins is between electrons and ink. I chose $4.99, against Amazon’s recommendations, because while I want the eBook to still be in the price range where people can gamble on an impulse buy, I wanted to take a stand that this thing has some value. There may come a time when I drop it to a firesale price to boost sales, but that’s a strategy that’s most effective when you have multiple books for sale, and we’re not there yet. For now, 15 stories for less than a Combo Meal seems more than fair to me. From each of those sales I’ll make about $3.20, from the $15 physical book I’ll likely make around $2.40.
As for distribution, Amazon is the unavoidable 8 million pound gorilla in the marketplace. 90% of the eBook sales on Seeing by Moonlight so far have come through there. This is why I created a separate Kindle edition (with its own, Amazon-exclusive version of an ISBN) even though Smashwords could have distributed to them for me. I’ll make a higher royalty on Kindle sales publishing directly through Kindle, and since that’s where most of the eBook sales will happen, the extra percentage was worth a little extra work to me.
For the print version, I am leaning towards Ingram Spark. I have never used CreateSpace, but their cost structure severely disincentivizes bookstores from stocking their wares, and I have read a few concerning stories about quality control since they farm out their printing to multiple outside services. Ingram Spark appears to have the consistency and universal distribution access which (gambling on my future again) could actually get me into that mythical little indie bookstore if someone there thought I was worthy of shelving – and honestly, for my peculiar little short story collection, that indie bookstore is probably my best possible ally.
This, however, is why I’ll need to buy that ISBN, since unlike other services, they do not supply one. I don’t mind – once an ISBN is registered, whoever registered it goes in the record as the publisher of your book, even if all they did was buy the numbers in bulk and re-sell one to you.
I am still searching up discounts, but their setup costs are $49 plus $12 a year to keep the book on-file for print-on-demand. I’ll be able to buy books from them for about $5.50 each, including shipping, if I want to take a batch of ten to a reading or a consignment store, or even just to sell at my own private discount. But that adds $61 to my out-of-pocket for Year One, bringing us to aforementioned number of $1,181.
So, I’m out-of-pocket $1,181 before I have even ordered a copy for myself, and for each copy I sell I’ll make either $2.40 or $3.20. That tells me that I’ll need to sell between 300 and 400 copies just to break even on direct investment. Would that that make my book “successful?” Hardly! What if I actually tracked the number of hours I spent at all the self-publishing tasks I described? What would I pay myself for that labor? Hell, how long did it take to write the book?
That’s where the transition to being a professional author comes, and it pushes that “success” threshold for sales way back. And I fully admit, right now, I’d be insanely lucky to sell 300 to 400, or even 100; it’s going to take word-of-mouth beyond what I can guarantee to orchestrate. Have a look at this chart; although some of my stories qualify as sci-fi, overall the collection is best labeled as “literary fiction”, and the indie-published slice of the lit. fic. bar in that sales graph is small in a pile of small.
I didn’t write this book to get rich, though. I wrote it because it wanted to be written, and I’m at peace with that because I know I will write more. If you’re playing the long game, you have to see the first couple of books as probable losers, there to build credibility, a library whose prices you can manipulate to get temporary boosts, a public profile that means you’re not starting every project with zero potential buyers.
If I had a theme for this advice, it would be, “Plan to be unlucky.” Plan on NOT being the next J.K. Rowling, because that’s the only way to get out of Vegas alive.
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