Archive for the ‘Publishing’ Category
A Writer’s Secret Weapon: Honest Feedback
When I wrote a short story for a contest a few months ago I gave it to my wife and to a friend for feedback. They both love to read, but I hadn’t anticipated the results.
My wife felt comfortable telling me that it was terrible. My friend just said it was alright.
I thought they would both say something similar, but my wife ended up giving me the feedback I needed in order to rework my story. She was right. The original one didn’t work.
Paying $15 to enter a lousy story into a contest is not my goal.
Just about every article that passes the “wife test” is accepted by an editor or at least receives praise. One story, that passed the wife test, even received an honorable mention in a Glimmer Train contest.
I’m lucky to have such a talented reader in my home that I can trust implicitly to provide honest feedback. She is my secret weapon who has saved me a lot of disappointment and frustration in the long run.
I have read similar stories from writers who rely heavily upon one trusted reader who is sometimes a spouse and other times a member of a critique group. Keep in mind that a spouse is not always the best choice for feedback.
What to look for in a reader:
- Interest in the same subject matter.
- Attention to the details in your genre (eg. what makes for a good plot in a novel).
- Trust and comfort to tell you the truth.
No writer can catch all of his/her mistakes. If there’s a hole in an argument, a weak point in the plot, or an explanation that falls flat, oftentimes an attentive and critical reader is one of the safest bets in finding them. If you’re waiting for an editor to catch your mistakes, chances are you’ll just receive a form letter saying, “Your work does not meet our current needs.”
That could be a clue that you really need better feedback before you submit your work.
How to Know if Your Book Idea Works: Is It Unique?
I’m guessing you can count on one hand the books you’re read more than once. We typically read for information or in order to be entertained by a particular story, and then we return the book or stick it on a shelf. If we really enjoy it we’ll recommend it to our friends.
If you read a book explaining the significance of the beaver trade in colonial America or telling the story of a young woman who finds out that she’s really the princess of a small country, I’m guessing you wouldn’t be tempted by another book that explains the animal-centered commerce of colonial America or how a country found it’s unsuspecting princess in a mall department store.
In other words, if you’re just rehashing what’s already out there, chances are you’ll have a hard time finding readers. That isn’t to say you need to have a completely fresh and unique idea that no one has ever done before. There are fresh angles to explore in topics that are already addressed in books and new spins we can add to old stories.
However, you need to watch out for the “been there, read that,” response from readers. It would be terrible to invest a year or two of your life into a book project that fails to sell because it’s been done.
I know that the spirits of aspiring authors are crushed every time a new vampire book is released, but even if there are plenty of repeats out there, publishers and the general public are looking for unique books with something new to say. For every vampire spin-off, there are plenty of innovative and unique books released each year. For example, I encourage you to read something by Susanna Clark, Jasper Fforde, or Neil Gaiman for examples of authors breaking new ground by tinkering with older forms.
Can you add a new angle to a topic that has been covered extensively? Can you draw in your readers without tossing in a character with a gun (such as secret agent Michael Scarn?)?
If someone has already nailed your book topic, I encourage you to buy that book, read it, and consider what else needs to be addressed in your own book. In fact, reading your competition is essential by way of not only selling your book, but making sure you write with an awareness of your genre and field.
If you claim to present a ground-breaking, fresh, new, riveting book that only rehashing what five others have already done, then you’ve just spent a lot of time working on the project that’s going no where fast.
Perhaps you could begin by asking yourself this question: What can I write that no one else can?
How to Know if Your Book Idea Works
I have had publishing hopefuls ask me whether their book ideas were good, and I have to admit it’s a tough question to answer. There are many factors to consider when setting out to publish a book.
It’s most important in my experience to summarize the book succinctly, to have a solid title in mind, and to know exactly what you need to say in order to evaluate its merit. The details of each chapter may be fuzzy, but at least the main idea, controlling metaphors, and outline should be pretty clear before evaluating whether or not a book could work.
Some sample chapters will help you sort through how substantive your ideas are and if you can carry on for an entire book. Many good book ideas work better as magazine articles.
There are several factors you’ll need to consider when evaluating whether your book idea works. I’ll give you a hint right now, it won’t be enough for the idea to be good. I’ve seen my own good ideas and the good ideas of others fail the editor test.
They need to be better than good, and that’s what I’ll discuss in my next post.
What You Need to Know About Self-Publishing: Solving the Distribution Problem
One of the greatest obstacles that self-published authors will face is finding people to actually buy their books.
Think about it. No one will visit a book store and stumble upon your book. No one will find it on a publisher’s web site. No one will read about it in a catalogue. No one will want to stock in a book store because it’s self-published.
Oh, of course you can sell it online, but how will readers find it?
That is the trick. Can you assemble a realistic marketing plan that will sufficiently take into account all of the setbacks that self-publishing brings, while still connecting with readers on a scale that will ensure you sell enough copies to at least break even?
Ah, distribution is a huge problem for self-published authors. Heck, when self-publishing A Path to Publishing, I still didn’t quite grasp the amount of work ahead of me or the sheer quantity of potentials readers I needed to connect with in my niche.
Where should you start if you’re self-publishing?
For starters, check out my free online marketing guide. That gives both traditional and new ways to market your work.
However, the most important principle in selling books is to make a real connection with a potential reader and to communicate clearly why he or she may want to buy your book. Someone else may be able to do that for you by way of an endorsement or a review, but kicking it all off depends on you and you alone.
I began this series saying that “self” is the key word when it comes to “self-publishing”. If you have any hopes of selling your book, make sure you have more than Plan A and B for distributing your book. You’ll probably need to have plans that range from A to Z.
Your job is to find the communities, blogs, forums, Twitter users, Facebook users, groups, societies, and any other group of potential readers in your content niche. That is the publishing sales game in a nutshell, and it’s a tough one on your own!
Lessons in Self-Publishing: Format It Correctly or Else…
While no one will dispute the importance of writing a great book and making sure you connect with readers, the design of a book can be just as important, if not more so to a certain degree. “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” aside potential readers WILL judge your book by its cover and its formatting.
In fact, if your font, lay out, and spacing look sloppy or are unreadable, they won’t take you or your book seriously. There are simple things you can do to correctly format a self-published book, ensuring that readers will be drawn in and take it seriously once you’ve successfully marketed it to them:\
Keep Your Lay Out Simple
Don’t make your book’s lay out too flashy if you don’t know what you’re doing. Instead, use the templates that are available at sites such as www.lulu.com. Your primary job is to write a great book, and therefore a book template will save you a lot of time and pay off in the long run.
Research Your Design Options
Beyond the options offered by book templates, many of your most important design decisions (cover design, font choice, font size, and line spacing) can be figured out by researching your options and reading what others have found to be true in online forums. Some test-printings on your home printer will also give you a good idea of how your fonts will show up for readers.
Compare your design choices to the books you enjoy most, what experts recommend, and what others have found in their own publishing experiences. Readability is a major concern for self-publishing authors and deserves a lot of consideration.
Invest Where It Counts
There are some things that you cannot do well on your own no matter how hard you try. One of these things, for most of us at least, is designing a great book cover. Of course most self-publishing services provide a cover creator as part of their packages, but if money isn’t too much of an issue, I think it’s well worth paying a professional or even novice designer to at least create a cover.
Even designing a simple cover requires choosing the appropriate font to match your material and then choosing the size, spacing, color, and location that works best. This can be quite difficult to do.
A catchy, professional cover will not necessarily sell more books, but it will be an important part of the whole package. You don’t want an unappealing cover to give customers a reason to ignore your book!
What You Need to Know About Self-Publishing: Seek Opinions
In conjunction with the release of my self-published book A Path to Publishing: What I Learned by Publishing a 
Nonfiction Book, I’m offering this series of posts on what you need to know about self-publishing.
When working on a self-published book you may have put together a passable first draft, and even managed to spruce up a pretty decent second draft. However, chances are your argument or story will have some significant holes in it, to say nothing of some sections that readers will find confusing.
While working on my third draft of A Path to Publishing I couldn’t think of any significant changes to make, so I sent it off to several friends and colleagues to read it. Sure enough, one reader found the same glaring flaw in two of the book’s chapters.
She very gently suggested that those two sections needed significant revision. She was absolutely right. I had a few doubts at first about those sections, but I had decided they worked fine. Thankfully she pointed out some other reasons why needed to be not only rewritten but largely deleted.
And that brings us to the challenge of editing your own book. You always need perspectives other than your own to make sure your book flows and makes sense. No matter how talented you may be as a writer or an editor, you can’t catch all of your own mistakes.
Depending on your relationship with your friends and family, you may ask them for help. However, remember that a good editor will not worry about hurting your feelings. A good editor needs to feel comfortable pointing out all of your book’s flaws. Will your friends and family be able to do that?
My friends through social media and blogging have been a tremendous help in reading drafts of my books, while several key friends and family members have helped at times as well. However, I think it’s important to choose your readers carefully and to give them deadlines that can be flexible if need be.
In addition, keep in mind that these friends may publish their own books some day. Guess who they’re going to e-mail before anyone else for help…
What You Need to Know About Self-Publishing: Get Known First
In conjunction with the release of my self-published book A Path to Publishing: What I Learned by Publishing a Nonfiction Book, I’m offering this series of posts on what you need to know about self-publishing.
When you’re self-publishing all of the work falls on you, the author. No matter how much published authors complain about the lack of marketing support provided by their publishers, which can be spotty at times, the worst publicist will do more than upload a file to a web site, which is all you’re doing when self-publishing.
The Basic Ways Publishers Market
Publishers have established lists of contacts who receive their catalogues, e-mail newsletters, and browse their web sites. They represent authors at book stores and can send releases out to major press services—something that can be quite costly to do on your own.
The staff at publishers generally have social media accounts and blogs, and they may even generate some buzz for your book through these tools. At the very least these publishing professionals will tell potential readers about your book. You’ll at least have a few warm bodies with a measure of interest in selling your book.
Any way you slice it, the least that a publisher provides still puts their authors way ahead of the self-published ones.
What Self-Published Authors Need to Do
While it’s important to seek out some reputable endorsers and reviewers who have a large group of readers, I don’t think self-published authors realize the number of readers they need to pull off a self-published book that sells more than 25-50 copies. Simply put, self-published authors need a massive number of connections with potential readers.
The “potential reader” part of this is crucial. Authors may have lots of “connections” through social media, their blogs, or more traditional means, but many of these connections may not view their books as something they’ll want to purchase.
I’ve done quite a bit of networking, but I have been reading Crush It! by social media expert and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, and he’s been blowing my mind. I usually drop by some blogs to leave comments and contribute to writing forums, but he advocates a scale of networking that few would ever consider.
I sure didn’t!
I could try to describe it to you, but to be honest, I’d be doing you a disservice because I can’t do his methods justice. Crush It! is available at a pretty low price as a Video Book, which I highly recommend, though it’s also available in print. You may not do everything Vaynerchuk suggests, but I think he’ll give self-published authors the reality check they need about how involved the marketing process will be for their books.
An author who is new to the publishing process will underestimate the amount of work necessary for marketing. Count on it. As a published author I still underestimate the amount of work I need to do. Before you invest heavily into a book, begin marketing yourself and making connections today. It’s a worthwhile investment you won’t regret.
Next Steps
- Check out the free online marketing guide at www.pathtopublishing.com.
- Pick up Get Known Before the Deal, a must-read for authors new to marketing their work.
- View a sample of Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk at vook.com.
What You Need to Know about Self-Publishing: Know the Publishing Business
In celebration of my latest book, A Path to Publishing: What I Learned by Publishing a Nonfiction Book, I will be posting a series on what you need to know about self-publishing. I chose to self-publish A Path to Publishing and discovered an enormous amount of material online, but some of it was dated. Over the coming weeks I will provide an updated guide to self-publishing today based on my latest experiences.
What Self-Publishing Involves
The most important word in self-publishing is “self,” not publishing. The publishing part is fun. The self part is not.
Of course self-published authors boast higher royalties, greater control, and many other benefits. These are all true to a certain extent, but consider what you’ll need to organize by yourself:
- Researching the market and audience for your book.
- Outlining, writing, and editing.
- Researching a publisher and comparing the various packages.
- Paying for and organizing the editing, design, printing, and distribution (which of course will vary).
- Putting together a marketing plan.
- Creating a publicity kit
- Contacting bloggers, radio producers, newspaper editors, and other media outlets about your book’s release.
- Contacting independent and chain book stores to set up book events. Many of them will not call you back because you are self-published.
- Finding conferences where you can sell your book—that is, if you pay for the space.
- Setting up book events and eating the cost if they flop.
Granted, many publishers today are quite light on the marketing end of things, especially for nonfiction books where a marketing platform is essential for new authors. That being said, at least having someone who is paid to help you send out press releases and to advise you on ideas can save you a lot of time and frustration. In other words, even the publisher who provides minimal help with marketing a book is still way better than doing everything yourself.
What You Need to Know about the Publishing Business
If all of this is new to you, then I’m guessing you’ve never commercially published a book. While self-publishing is easy to jump into from the standpoint of writing and printing a book, making it into a product that someone will actually deem worthy of $15 is quite another matter.
Here are a few things you need to know about publishing as a business:
- Most books need significant editorial development.
- It takes time to learn how to write for a specific audience.
- A bad cover and sloppy interior design can be fatal for a book.
- Distributing a book effectively will take a lot of e-mails and phone calls.
- Marketing a book is a full time job.
If you want to self-publish and to sell more than 500-1000 books, your work is cut out for you. Thankfully it can be done. In the coming days we’ll discuss the importance of a marketing platform for self-publishing.
Looking for a bit more about publishing right now? Check out A Path to Publishing. It’s available for $10 as an ebook and for $15 as a paperback.
A Path to Publishing is Now Available!
I’m happy to announce that A Path to Publishing is now available as a paperback book through Amazon and most other distributors, as well as an ebook through Lulu.
The price through Amazon is $15, while the ebook price through Lulu is $10.
So far the feedback has been really encouraging, including comments from readers who have found the book both informative and well-organized. One book publisher enthusiastically purchased a copy, and he’s someone who certainly could have taught me a thing or two about publishing! So I’m grateful to see positive responses to the book as it starts out.
If you’re interested in hosting me for an event with your writing group or book store, I offer group discounts and free publishing workshops along with my book events.
Throughout the third and fourth weeks of May a number of bloggers will be posting reviews and interviews. I hope to have the schedule up soon.
In addition, I’ll be posting a series here next week covering what I learned in the self-publishing process. If you subscribe to my e-mail newsletter (in the right column), you can also read about the inside story of self-publishing, the decisions I made throughout the process, and why I followed the course I chose.
There are a lot of decisions to make in the self-publishing process, so believe me, reading about my process will help you a great deal! I learned a ton over the past 6 months.
How to Handle Rejection as a Writer: Reasons for Rejection
When rejection letters come, and they will, you’ll need to figure out why your piece was rejected. Sometimes an editor will tell you point blank. Other times you’ll wait for months and never receive a reply.
Either way, it’s important to evaluate the reasons for a rejected query. If an editor has filled you in on the reasons, then you’re well on your way. If not, you’ll need to review the magazine and its guidelines as you ask some of the following questions:
Do you have the experience necessary?
Perhaps you’re overreaching into a topic or a field in which you need more experience or research before you can submit an effective query.
Have you learned the craft of writing? Are you well-read?
Some writers will need to spend more time reading up on the basic techniques of nonfiction writing, style, and grammar. I took a workshop with the former editor of Vermont Life Magazine and he just about blew my mind with his various diagrams for structuring a magazine story. Books such as On Writing Well and The Elements of Style are bestsellers for a reason!
Do you know your competition?
Did you query an editor regarding an article or book on a topic that has already been addressed by many other writers? Have you failed to address a fresh angle or to offer a unique perspective?
Do you know your audience?
Even if you have a great idea, sufficient experience, and a unique perspective, you may still fall short of writing directly to the magazine or publisher’s audience. I have run into this on many occasions in the field of religion when I took angles that were a bit too liberal, charismatic, or conservative depending on the editor’s taste. In addition, some magazines are more academic or scholarly, while others aim for general readership.
Do you know your potential publishers or agents?
Many magazine editors, publishers, and literary agents who receive queries from writers state their preferences on their web sites, list previous publications, and sometimes even share a theme or genre list. Did you miss any of that crucial information before sending in your query?
Keep Trying
Even if you’ve been rejected or ignored, keep working on your queries, articles, and book ideas. It’s a tough business, but you never know when the right situation will fall into your lap. Unless you’re trying, that will never happen to you.
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