Cobwebs

Gosh, it's dark in here, innit? Dust floating around, making you sneeze and tickling your throat. And... Oh no... I think I just walked into a cobweb.

It has been a long time, huh!

You'd hope I would have done lots by now. Not really anything new to report. I sent my book to a couple of agents but it got turned down. A couple isn't much, mind you, so I ought to try some more.

Unfortunately life took over once more and I had no head space or energy for writing, not even cover letters. I was starting to understand the litteral meaning of 'exhausted'.

Well, that was before the holidays. I'm hoping I might have some time soon-ish to get back to writing. I have a good detailed plan for book 2 and I want to start writing, but my head in swimming in non-novel related things at the moment, so I don't know when soon-ish will be.

But soon-ish, I promise!

Until then, better do some spring-cleaning around here.

To self-publish or not to self-publish - Part II

I peppered my last post with words of warning that self-publishing wasn’t as rosy as I was making it seem. This is my rebuttal, what part of my brain says when I swing back from my self-publishing high.

This is…

Part II - Not to self-publish 

i.e. publish traditionally. By this I mean the normal route of:

•         finding an agent
•         the agent finding you a publisher (big or small)
•         you getting an advance
•          the publisher producing your book and selling it (hopefully)

1/ You get a stamp of quality

As much as I hate it, there is still some stigma associated with self-publishing. And even though the barriers are coming down, it’s still hugely important for many people to get that recognition. Agents are sometimes called ‘gatekeepers’, because they stop all the crap from getting to the publishers. They’re the ones who have to sort the gems from the slushpile they receive.

Nobody stops anyone from publishing crap on Amazon.

Now you may say that many crap books are published by traditional publishers, but what you mean really is that many books you think are crap are published by traditional publishers. Other people like the very same books you think are a total disgrace. But you won’t find books that have loads of typos, are ridden with grammatical mistakes or just make no sense.

Now in all honesty, I doubt those terrible Amazon books made their author very successful or have swamped the market. They’re part of the data, sure, but they’re just there, doing not very much. (There must be some very interesting articles on this data somewhere – if you know any, do send them my way!)

Yet people still attribute this enormous importance to ‘being published’. To having someone else say: ‘Hey, this is good. We should sell it.’ Which brings me to point 2.

2/ It takes a hell of a lot of guts to promote a self-published book

You have to be pretty damn confident to go around and ask people to give you money and invest their time in something that no one but you (and your mum, or so I hear) think is brilliant. Relentlessly ask people for money and time. As part of the jobs you take on, you have to be the main marketing guy in your one-person company. Now of course you care passionately about your book, which makes you well qualified to rave about it, but it’s your baby. You’re too close to it. You might also be incredibly a) sensitive, b) doubt-ridden, c) overprotective or d) all of the above (D, please). You have to stomach bad reviews all on your own, and have nothing but your own self-belief to keep you going. That’s haaaard.

3/ A one-person company can be lonely

I mentioned in a previous post I’d fallen in love. It wasn’t so much love as that feeling you get when you’re single and you see a loved-up couple. You might well be very happily single, dancing and singing à la Natasha Bedingfield and Beyonce, (*all the single ladies, all the single ladies, lalala*), but then you see that couple touching and kissing and looking so lovely together you get that warm fuzzy feeling and you think, ‘Gosh, I wish I had that.’ It’s not so much envy as hope. You see all that love and you think, ‘That could be me.' That's why we watch romcoms, right?

Right, so this is what happened to me with an agent. Not as romantic, I know. But the way she talked about her author was so passionate (yes, I know it’s her job!) it made me want someone to talk about my book like that. Someone who would be on my side and love it and fight for it with me.

I know there are many indie author networks and circles. But being part of the traditional publishing process, you’re also part of a team, and that team is working for your book because they believe in it. Not because you’re paying them. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

4/ You get an advance

Now of course you’re not in writing for the money, otherwise you’d be an investment banker (or insert other stereotypically well-paid job). But it’s like with my other actual job (the one with the little people): you don’t do it for the money, but you still need the paycheck at the end of the month to pay the bills. If nothing else, getting an advance might mean this: giving up the day job for a few months to write book 2 and do some promo. And this little bit of time might make all the difference to your career as an author.

5/ It takes a lot of time to self-publish

(Have you noticed how nicely my paragraphs flow into each other? I hope you’re impressed.)

I mentioned earlier that as a self-published author you take on all the jobs of a normal publisher. Now even if you outsource some of it, it’s still a huge responsibility. It means learning a huge range of skills and doing a lot of reading. It means coordinating and proofing a lot of work. It takes time.

Time you’re not spending writing your next book.

6/ Self-publishing costs money

As indie author, you are your own investor. You can do a kickstarter (or similar) to raise some money, but unless you already have a following, you’re looking at your friends and family giving you a hand. If you are successful, you should be able to recuperate the costs, and hopefully even make some money (to take time off to write book 2, as with the traditional route).

But let’s look at numbers. From what I’ve seen, a book published to a professional standard will cost around £3000 (maybe more). If you get about £2 back for every book, you’d still need to sell 1,500 books just to cover your costs. For an indie author, that’s already quite a lot. So there’s also high risk that you’d lose money on the book. But at the end of the day, if you’re self-publishing, it’s because you are willing to take on that risk. So then you have to decide… Is it worth it?

As for me, well… At the moment I’m in the ‘finding an agent’ phase of my mood swings. Tomorrow, who knows?

To self-publish or not to self-publish - Part I

Foreword:

Today I finished my new round of changes to Book 1 (The girl from Otherworld).

Now what?

Well, apart from writing Book 2 (how’s that synopsis going, you ask?), there’s publishing. And with it comes the important question: to self-publish or not to self-publish?

A few years ago, this might not even have been a concern. You just tried for an agent first. But now self-publishing is becoming more respectable, it is a real dilemma: should I even try for the traditional route, or just embrace self-publishing?

There’s a French saying that goes, ‘Between the two my heart swings,’ and it really is how I feel about publishing. One morning I’m rearing to self-publish, the next I’m back to wanting a publishing deal.

In the next couple of posts I’m going to try to explain why, for me at least, it’s not a clear-cut answer, and what the advantages and disadvantages are for both. Needless to say that this is NOT a guide for anybody else to make a decision on whether to publish or not, but my own internal comings and goings.

I am therefore pleased to present …

Part I - To self-publish

1/ My book doesn’t follow the rules.

My book is YA high fantasy, a combination that’s not exactly hot at the moment, while YA is also said to be saturated. My story has characters with quite different ages (14, 16 and 25ish), and a main character who is scared of her own shadow (not the usual ‘moving the action forward’ kind of character) and might well get on some people’s nerves.

It also has three different points of view. When I tell people in the trade about this, I always get that sucking in noise people make when they want to say: ‘Oooh, that’s bad!’ The ‘eeeesh’ kind of noise. Then I get told I need to make sure each character has a really distinct voice for it to work, and I hope I have achieved that, but they may well disagree. I also don’t think it’s as big a problem as they say (in my completely unqualified opinion). Game of Thrones has more points of view characters than I can name, Alone in Berlin changes points of view mid-thought (not that this is a good example to follow) and authors have been using omniscient points of view for ever. So what’s the big deal?

The problem is that it’s unusual in the kind of book I have written, and therefore there is a risk attached to it. A lot of risk.

I have heard great and terrible stories about publishing, but on the whole what I understand about it is this: most agents and editors care deeply about the books they sell, but they are also in this business to make money. In order to find books that sell, they look at what books have sold. Now everyone knows this is a poor predictor of what is going to sell, but everybody is famously rubbish at predicting what the next big thing is going to be. Both Tunnels and The Night Circus were predicted to be as big as Harry Potter, and well... Have you even heard of them? Publishing a book costs money, and publishers gamble when they take on a debut author. And that is why they don’t want to take any extra risks. Now I’m sure people can argue at length about the disastrous consequences this might have on the quality and diversity of literature, but it’s not their money being put on the line.

I, on the other hand, would be willing to risk it, because (most days) I believe I have written something solid. And that is where self-publishing comes in.

2/ It is now easier than ever

If you wanted to make your book available on Amazon, all you’d need to do would be to convert it to the right format and upload it. That’s it.

Now it might well be that it’s unedited and badly formatted, but the distribution on Amazon is that easy.

I have read a number of tutorials, and the reality is of course a lot more complicated. There are different platforms and formats to consider, there is proofreading of conversions to be done, there are tax concerns to deal with. And there are many, many companies out there who want your money and will try to screw you over.

However, the fact is that all the services available to publishers – line editing, copyediting, proofreading, formatting, illustration, cover design, typesetting, printing, even marketing and distribution to real bookshops – are all now available to independent authors. Some services are offered by large companies, others are by individuals who can be contacted on platforms such as Reedsy.

As I see it, as an independent author you become your own publisher, which means you do all that a publisher would do. You either pay for it (as an investment) or you learn to do it at a professional standard. There is a plethora of articles and self-help books, as well as forums and writers’ groups, so if you are committed and do your research, the information is out there and (mostly) free.

3/ You can reach the same audience as a traditionally published author

Well, yes and no, but of course here I’m going to argue yes.

The ebook audience has long been the domain of self-published authors. Platforms such as Smashwords reach a number of ebook stores, except Amazon (but as we’ve seen, that’s dead easy) and the internet (blog reviews, Wattpad, Goodreads, etc.) allows indie authors to reach out to complete strangers. Sure, putting a book on Amazon and reaching an audience are two different things, but it's been done. A few self-published author successes (the authors of Switched and Wool for instance) have shown that complete nobodies could become bestselling author.

(If you are wanting to throttle your computer as you scream ‘Yes, but!’, bear with me – I know it’s not all black and white).

But for a really long time, that was it. Bookshops, libraries, schools – no one wanted to hear from a self-pub author. They had enough books to choose from and in my experience were the most likely to suffer from prejudice against self-published authors. Why wouldn’t you get traditionally published if your book was good enough? #stiffupperlip

From speaking to a few hopeful writers, it is still an issue. To find a distributor, you need to be a publisher. To get to bookshops, you need a distributor. Some people established their own publishing companies (employees: 1), but this can be viewed as cheating (i.e. pretend you’ve been "properly" published when you’re just another reject of the traditional route).

That being said, I think things are changing. The attitude of the public and the industry towards self-published books is not as negative as it used to. With companies like Matador* offering distribution to bookshops, indie authors now have a shot at street retailing as well, which is great news.

*I know I bang on about them – I swear I don’t receive any percentage of their profits. I haven’t even tried them myself – they just sounded pretty impressive and I haven’t found any negative articles about them.

4/ Authors have to do all their promo themselves anyway

Twitter presence, blog tours, writing blogs… Whether they are traditionally or independently published, nowadays authors are expected to be actively promoting their books. And it’s not just author talks and interviews. I have been told that authors should also be approaching bookshops directly to offer to sign stock or do events. So if authors are going to be doing all their promo anyway, they might as well keep the profit.

5/ You've got the power!

I've got the power!

As a self-published author, you get to decide EVERYTHING! You can choose the cover you want and what it’s all going to look like. You have total control over everything (except, of course, whether people buy it or not).

It’s terribly exciting, and it also means that there are no nasty surprises. Nobody can make you change things you feel deep down are wrong for your book and your career. You don’t find yourself in the horrible situation where the heart of your baby (your book, that is) is being torn to pieces by the people in the marketing department who clearly don’t understand your work of genius. Or that ugly cover design over which you have no say.

The problem with traditionally publishing is that you are only the writer. Oh, yes, you’re supposed to help with promoting the book, but the publishing bit is not your job. This has its advantages  (see next post), but it also means that if your publishers completely screw up your vision for your book (or even your vision of you as an author), you have no leverage. You have signed a bit of paper that has handed that over to somebody else and you are legally bound. This, more than anything, is what scares the crap out of me.

Of course you might also make all the wrong decisions as an indie, but hey, at least they were your choices, and not something imposed on you by a third party. Not great if you don’t like making decisions, though… *whistles*

Alternative

I hate my sister.

This really wasn't what I was planning my next post to be. But then, a lot of things are going off plan recently.

What happened was this: I was having a nice chat about visiting her and her work and life in general when we started talking about my book.

And what do you know, two hours (and a few held-back tears) later, and our conversation has made me decide to make some major edits to Book 1. I'm trying to think of it as an 'alternative' version, rather than the 23400th edit, but it's still demoralising to be back to that. I was done with Book 1, damn it! I think I've found a new title for it, too: The Book That Is Never Finished (the Neverending Story was already taken).

It all started because of a comment my sister made about Lacie, so really it's all her fault.

Number crunching

Today I decided to change the age of some of my characters (yet again). Partly it's because I've decided to make June a POV character for book 2 (Are you excited?!! I know I am!!) and therefore I need her to be a bit older, and partly it's because I'm thinking I need to narrow down the age group of my audience a bit more, and it's likely to lean more towards the older teens.

So at the start of the book June is now 10, Theo 13, Lacie 15 and Izzie and Rowan 16. It doesn't really change anything for any of them since I'm not changing the way they act (which I think is appropriate for their new age as much as it was for the old one), just their age on paper. So you might ask: why all the fuss?

Well, the exact age of my characters matters a great deal because it impacts on how much time has elasped since events in the past occurred. And this matters greatly because in my book because, as Esther says, 'Time doesn't pass the same in your world than in ours. That is to say it passes much, much more slowly.'
It passes 8 times more slowly, to be precise. And I have a whole spreadsheet of when certain things happen so that I don't get confused (which I do. All the time.)

It looks like this:

*** Spoiler note: I've hidden what all the dates and times actually mean, so this should be relatively spoiler free. ***

This means that every time I change when something happens, or how old someone is, I have to change the whole blooming spreadsheet. And if I'm honest, it takes me a long time to remember what my calculations mean, let alone fix them.

So there. This is what I did this morning. And that, kids, is why you should listen to your Maths teacher. You never know when it might come in useful.

The Masterplan

So, world, long time no see. It's been so long in fact that my URL bar autofill had forgotten blogspot and *shock horror* I had to type it in myself.

But now I am on holiday and I have at least 10 days before going anywhere, which means writing is back on the agenda! Hurray!

I had promised about a thousand years ago that I would reveal my masterplan for my book. That was when there was a masterplan, which was in 3 stages:

Stage 1: become part of the community
- get my book out on Wattpad so my friends/ family and even hopefully random strangers can see what I've written. In other words, build an audience. I'm happy to report I have 8 followers, 12 comments, 24 favourites and 216 views. Which is really pathetic in Wattpad stats, by the way, but makes my gratitude for those 8 followers all the more heartfelt.
- be active on Twitter (which has happened, like, twice).
- connect with online reviewers by reading their reviews and the books they recommend (note to self: add to to-do list).

Stage 2: crowdfund to self-publish
I've always thought a crowdfunding campaign would be really fun. Also really embarrassing to beg people for money, since I am aware that most people who know me and read my blog are not actually that interested in reading high fantasy adventures for teens. Still, it would have involved making videos and promotional material and thinking of perks (the stuff you give to people who donate), all of which sounded exciting. My idea was to raise enough money to get an editor, a cover design, making the book (typesetting, printing, etc.) and promotion. Possibly pay for some of that myself (goodbye exotic holidays!), depending on the success of the crowdfunding.

Stage 3: self-publish
This would have meant going through all the steps mentioned before, which as I understand it involves the following:

- line editing: making it sound better, fixing dodgy sentences or unclear paragraphs, etc. It might sound like something you can do yourself or ask a friend to do for you, but this is the one thing that everybody says you should not skimp on.

- copyediting: fixing typos, grammatical mistakes, etc. I have become totally blind to my typos, so I definitely see the need for a copyeditor.

- typesetting: getting the file ready with the correct font, spaces, etc. so it can be printed.

- formatting for ebook or print format

- cover design and formatting. One of the tips I received at the London Book Fair is that a book has to be a beautiful object for booksellers to want it. I particularly like the ones with foil blocking.

I love foil blocking! (That's the gold stuff on here.) This is not my book, obviously, but I love this cover I had to ask some guys to move so I could take a picture of it on the tube.

- printing: does what it says on the tin. Printing can be 'on demand', which is more expensive per copy but is the only option for very small print runs, or it can be for a particular print run, usually over 200 copies, which is then cheaper per copy.

- distribution: for ebooks, there's a variety of platforms from which to distribute the book, all of which seemed achievable as an indie author without paying anyone for it. However to reach the printed book market (and how cool would that be!) you need to go through a distributor. Distributors and bookships don't usually accept indie books if you contact them directly so I thought that was the end of the story, but there are some publishers which, for a fee, will place your book with distributors, and tehrefore bookshops. I know that you have to be very careful, though, with vanity presses, and I have heard of many a horror story of people paying through their nose for services they never received and gave up their copyright for their work in the process. I think, though, that with the rise in self-publishing, a few The one I was the most impressed with at the London Book Fair was Matador, which is a self-published imprint of Troubador (and from my little research, doesn't seem to be fleecing writers in exchange for hot air). They were upfront about the costs, had some legit endorsements and very helpful advice booklets. And because they are part of an actual publishing house, it didn't seem like a fraud (though that's not always a guarantee). Anyway, as you can see they did a good job of convincing me they were the best in town for my purposes, because I had my heart set on them.

The reason this needs to be paid for is that a publisher would pay for it. And if you want your book to look professional, it needs to be done by professionals.

Some self-published authors also pay for marketing, but I was mostly keen on doing that myself: blog tours (blogs publish a piece about you or your book on different days within a week/ month - like a tour, but online), twitter presence, entering competitions, doing giveaways on Goodreads...

From this point on, my path was set for glory, right?

But like I said, this WAS the masterplan. And now... well I have fallen in love, and it's changed everything.

I am not dead

I swear.

Only trying to keep up with life. I will post soon, I promise!