At the weekend I delivered a presentation at the Kingston University Publishing Conference. This year their title was: ‘Self-publishing: Last resort or heralding a new era of author participation?’
I also stayed on to listen to other speakers covering marketing, the way the publishing industry is adapting to the new market and digital publishing. There were lots of questions from a very enthusiastic audience, who were extremely keen to figure out the best option for them. I also really enjoyed talking with the writers and other speakers during the breaks – an opportunity to hear more about the huge range of people who are interested in self-publishing.
I was asked to give a talk on publishing services available to writers. I tried to avoid doing a sales pitch for CompletelyNovel as I wanted to try and ensure that the delegates got a decent overview of the options available to them. I’ve embedded my slideshow below so please feel free to take a look. The conference was also filmed, so hopefully the video will be up soon! As I usually keep my slides pretty minimal they don’t make too much sense on their own. So, below the slideshow is the transcript (well, this is what I intended to say, but as I don’t like to look at my notes, it may have varied considerably on the day!)
I also offered some thoughts on why I thought self-publishing was a good idea. Perhaps the subtitle to my presentation should have been “Don’t wait for Jim to fix it…fix it for yourself” as that was one of the points that seemed to strike a chord!
SLIDE 2
Why self-publish?: Be Entrepreneurial
I think self-publishing offers you a great chance to be entrepreneurial – you are effectively starting your own business, and that is really exciting. It’s scary but it can be very rewarding. You are taking your future, in terms of your writing, into your own hands and you stand to learn lots of new skills by doing this.
SLIDE 3
Why self-publish?: Be a Rock Star
Self-publishing and going for a traditional publishing contract don’t have to be mutually exclusive options. Doing both helps to prove that your product has a market.
You don’t have to start throwing TVs out the window (unless they distract you from writing) but I’d say that you should be more like a rock star – when they are trying to get record deals, they will be playing gigs, selling albums that they have recorded in their mate’s studio etc. They are getting their work out there and this is a great way to get better, find fans, get feedback and potentially get noticed by someone on the lookout for talent.
SLIDE 4
Why self-publish?: Make it fun
The whole experience of publishing your book should be fun. Writing letters to people, never hearing back or getting rejected is not fun.
I wrote to Jim’ll Fix it thirteen times when I was younger and he never replied, and it took me a long while to come to terms with the fact that I would never get to appear as one of Kylie Minogue’s backing singers.
However, maybe if I had spent more time learning to sing, and less time writing to Jim, that dream could still be alive.
I think there are serious flaws in the way that the traditional publishing process works, and that means that even if you have written a great book, it could easily be overlooked.
Don’t wait for Jim to fix it…it might not happen.
SLIDE 5
How to self publish
Broadly speaking, there are three paths you can take when it comes to self-publishing – and by splitting it up I realise I am going to make some broad generalisations but I think it helps.
I find thinking about food tends to focus the mind. So, I’m going to make a brief analogy with how different people might go about preparing a meal; it really depends on you.
1. When some people make a meal, they like to make everything from scratch. Bake the bread, make the pastry, grind the coffee, grow the herbs, brew their own beer – very time consuming but basically, they will have full control over every element of the meal. These people are generally designed to make everyone else feel inadequate.
2. Other people will decide to use some pre-made ingredients to help them save time on the preparation and cooking – ready to roll pastry which, by the way, Jamie Oliver himself has officially sanctioned, a jar of shop bought pesto, curry paste, pre-cooked chicken … and then add some of their own ingredients too. The work they need to do involves putting everything together.
3. Then your third group of people might decide that actually, they would rather get some caterers in to do the job for them. They pay someone else to deal with the hassle, leave it up to them. Less time, more money.
SLIDE 6
How to self publish: Doing it from scratch
So, the way this maps on to self-publishing is that you have the first route of doing everything yourself – essentially setting up your own publishing company.
You negotiate with multiple printers to find the one that can produce a book to the exact spec that you want (after you have learned about paper and printing), you buy and learn to use complex software such as Adobe InDesign to design your cover and your manuscript. You can learn about how to format a PDF (and never underestimate how complex they are – PDF, for anyone who doesn’t know, stands for Pretty Darn Fiddly), buy a set of ISBNs, set-up an account with Neilsen. Basically, lots of stages that a publisher would do.
You will have a lot of choice, but it will be very time consuming and involves learning a lot of new specialist skills. Brilliant if you want to be a publisher, maybe uneccesary if you want to be a writer. It can also end up being quite expensive because of the investments that you have to make in buying software, buying more ISBNs than you need etc. So this approach is not for the faint hearted.
SLIDE 7
How to self publish: Getting help with the tricky bits
The second self publishing route means that you get other people to do the complicated bits for you. It makes lots of the elements less expensive or even free because those publishing services can achieve economies of scale. For example, we work with a couple of print on demand printers. If you were to go to them directly, you would have to pay a set-up fee for your book. But because we have built a system which allows us to automate the way the digital file reaches the printers, we enable people to make their books available as printed copies with no set-up fee.
So, the essentials that they can help you with include creating a print-ready manuscript, creating a cover that is the right size and ready to be printed, making into an eBook, setting you up with an ISBN, help with distribution.
With this route, just as with a meal, you can spend more money on the areas that you think are most important or need the most help with. So, perhaps you pay extra to get someone to typeset the book, or pay a professional cover designer. In terms of the quality of what gets produced – it’s up to you to recognise what you are good at and what you need to learn or get help with. And if you choose a service that links you with Print-on-demand printers, then you don’t have to pay for loads of books upfront.
You shouldn’t need to worry about copyright (though it is worth checking) as these companies won’t usually demand exclusive licenses. I’m going to be biased towards this area because this is where my company sits, but I like this approach because it allows you to experiment a bit, without risk.
The way that companies charge you for the different services varies – for example in terms of distribution services some will ask for a large upfront fee, some will ask for a smaller upfront fee, but take more of the royalties of each sale. We ask writers to pay a small monthly fee, which means that they can price their book competitively, but keep 100% of the royalties.
SLIDE 8
How to self publish:How to make the most of the second option
I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but I think it’s worth highlighting the things that you could do which will help you get the best results.
1. Learn to use Microsoft Word (and I mean really use it so you can get really good results). Learn how to change page sizes, change margins, increase line spacing, add page breaks, insert page numbers, use paragraph styles etc.)
2. Look inside a professionally typeset book and, essentially, copy the way that it is done to make your book look professional.
3. Look at existing book covers and try and make your cover fits with theirs – it should be original but not so different that it scares/confuses customers.
4. Be flexible – if you have very firm, fixed ideas about the way that your book should look, then you may end up paying a lot more, or being restricted to one service. It gets easier if you are willing to compromise.
Options in this space:
CompletelyNovel.com, Lulu (US company), CreateSpace (owned by Amazon). And some of the eBook only publishers such as Smashwords.
SLIDE 9
How to self publish: Getting someone else to do it for you
The third route is very straightforward. Just cough up the cash and someone will sort it out for you.
There are quite a lot of companies out there that offer this service:
The main US companies include Authorhouse, Xlibris (owned by Author House parent company Author Solutions), iUniverse (owned by Author Solutions). These are seriously big operations. There are also smaller places in the UK such as Grovesnor House, Matador. These services charge anything between £800 and £12,000.
One thing to be mindful of is that you will probably have very limited control over the package once you pay, so you really need to research what you are getting. You usually have a choice between packages but doing anything outside of those packages can be difficult or costly. Check whether this includes the printing of books. Find out about royalties, if you can set your own price, Sometimes you will have to buy your books at the same price as a retailer would, rather than the cost price, so keep that in mind too, if you plan to sell books through your own channels.
Some people just prefer it all to be out of their hands but you really need to go into this option with your eyes open, and be clear on what you are paying for.
SLIDE 10
How do you choose?
So, choosing the right path for you really depends on how much you have of three things:
- time
- enthusiasm
- money
SLIDE 11
Don’t forget the marketing
So those are the options for getting your book to a point where people can read it, but how do you actually get them to read it? There is a huge aspect that you will always have to do yourself, and that is marketing. This is true even if you get a publishing deal. And this is actually one of the hardest parts. Ultimately you can spend loads of time and/or money getting your book to look exactly as you want it, but if no one knows about it, then it’s difficult for them to buy it.
So, how you are going to market your book is something that you should bear in mind at the stage when you are choosing how to produce your book. This is because there are certain things that can make marketing easier, such as using a publishing service that gives you some kind of web presence that you can control, or links you to readers, so that you immediately have somewhere that can be picked up by search engines and enable people to find your book online.
There are other services out there which are not necessarily specifically publishing services that you should look at. The first is blogging platforms such as Tumblr, Wordpress, and Blogger – they all give you the option to create a and blog really easily and that can be a good way to build up your audience. Emily Benet, who recently won the Author Blog Awards, got a publishing deal as a result of a publisher seeing her blog, and liking her writing style.
Investigate how you can use Facebook and Twitter. Consider using twitter clients such as Tweetdeck. Remember that the best way to communicate is gererally as a normal person rather than constantly someone beating other people over the head with their book . I went to a book launch recently and about half the people there had come because they had talked to the author on Twitter – this was because she had engaged those people in interesting conversations which had made them intrigued to find out more about her book.
SLIDE 12
Digital publishing
It’s worth bearing in mind the growth of digital devices and eBooks sales have gone up by over 200% over the past year. They are now 8% of the market, and that is likely to carry on growing.
One word of caution, however, is don’t believe all of the hype – but think about how that digital growth influences how you reach your audience.
CompletelyNovel is one of the projects that my team is working on and as well as this, we are looking at the future of digital books and how they might evolve – one of the exciting things is the growing number of internet connected devices and the potential for a more immersive experience.
SLIDE 13
Key Points
Think about what is really right for you. I’d definitely urge that you try out a few services before you pay out large amounts of money and see what’s on offer, because you can get pretty good value, and also advice. Bear in mind, if you want to sell your book beyond friends and family, that you need to think about marketing. And above all, don’t rely on Jim to fix it for you… fixing it for yourself is more fun anyway!
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