Elegant New World

Computers begat The Internet begat eBooks begat Internet Distribution begat eReaders...and they had sons and daughters. Small Publishers, Independent Contractors

I put a count-up widget at the bottom reading how long I’ve been doing this, so you know exactly how much salt to ladle out on my experience. But let's round it down to One Year, and an active listening one at that. I’m just muddling-through, and if I suck, it’s not for lack of trying.

This is the story of H2NH ePub’s tentative quest for some damn cover art, and I want to use it to highlight a really cool promotion strategy, and thus the true elegance, by my view, of this New World of Publishing. But first...

Tangent! I’ve heard people call it a Brave New World, but that’s different. I’m just waiting for the first blog salvo from the Self vs.Trad ‘debate’ where the term “Savage” is deployed. When that happens, I want to set a timer to the first answering volley of “soma”. Of course, I won’t be reading that blog post, being too busy doing Work. Think of me as Mustapha Mond. I am above your pointless arguments, but I’m not on an Island. That’s for quitters. /Tangent!

I was searching for a cover artist via all the reliable sources--which translates to ‘asking anybody who had cool cover art whence it came and seeing if the website so linked had a clear pricelist’--when The Passive Voice (who you should be following) posted a link “A Sale on eBook Covers”.

I followed it, because why not? And what did I find? Elegance.

Let’s unpack the layers:

Level 1: Designer, JT Lindroos, had some great cover art that didn’t find a home, so he set up a “Garage Sale” to shift it.

Level 2: Small Publisher, Blasted Heath, had a promotion going that lowers the price of their eBooks from $2.99 to $0.99.

Level 3: Blasted Heath hosted the Garage Sale and made all cover art purchases contingent on buying at least one of their eBooks. Essentially, a one buck fee, but you get an eBook. So, that's OK.

Level 4: H2NH ePub, a small publisher, is looking for cover art. By chance, one of the Garage Sale covers fits the image in David Barron’s writer brain perfectly. How convenient.

Level 5: David Barron buys ‘Phase Four’ by Gary Carson, then works with the designer to modify his chosen cover. While he’s waiting, he reads the eBook, enjoys it.

So, everybody wins:
Designer JT Lindroos gets some money and exposure and almost certainly some repeat business.
Author Gary Carson sells a book to a satisfied customer.
Blasted Heath sells some eBooks, shows off the rest.
H2NH ePub gets to try out a cover designer for very little risk.
David Barron gets a new eBook to read.
...and a sweet cover for his upcoming book:

Around and 'round the mulberry bush,
The monkeys chased the future,
The monkeys thought 'twas all in fun...

Pop Goes The Future

A Novel of the Apocalypse

That’s awesome.

Two other cool things:

First - The Blasted Heath check-out system is really, really well-designed. Seriously, it’s one of the most hassle-free online shopping experiences I’ve ever had. Check it out, it’s slick! If you’re about to start up a webstore, ask them what they did. I know I will, once H2NH ePub rolls out its pro-site. It’s nice to see competence.

Second - ‘Phase Four’ was a good book, and a steal at a buck. (It’s underpriced at $2.99, too, so pick it up before they realize.) A fast-paced, psychedelic story of terrorism, chemical weapons and conspiracy. I’d call it Mundane SF Horror. (Mundane as in ‘near-future, on the Earth’, not ‘boring’.)

H2NH ePub has now pretty much tried everything ‘ePub’: distribution, formatting, pro cover art, ARCs. I’m feeling pretty confident...and excited. Now I just need to bring out at least ten books and a series, then I can roll into print and earn the name H2NH Publishing.

And that’s an Elegant New World.
-daB
feel free to comment

Indie Ploy

I’ve been doing this Indie thing about a year now, so it’s time to look back and see exactly what it is that I’ve been doing, and see what I’d do differently...just in case some of that 5% of writers who will do self-publishing are reading. Note that you shouldn’t really take any of my advice ex nihilo until I’ve been doing this thing at least five years, but add it to your body of anecdotes, and consider this a summary, then, of pretty much all the Lessons Learned on the Business side of this blog.

First off, let’s sidestep a dumb argument: I don’t really care if you’re a "House Slave" (ah, jeez...) or a Sh*t-Pubber...or whatever the latest negative terms, respectively, for rabid traditionally published or aggressively dim self-published writers are at the moment. On this blog, I take a balanced approach. If the contract’s good, I’ll take your money, but if the book’s good, I’m willing to take a chance on myself, too. Fair’s fair, so long as I pay my bills. You gots to do what’s best for you, and also I don’t care. I’ll follow your career trajectory and take lessons from it...but if you don’t have a career trajectory? Well, I’m not really going to listen to what you have to say about my career (& vice versa, OK?)

I have to admit I was prepped for this New World of Publishing by four factors: (1) I’m an American who lives outside the U.S., and, once I got over the initial hurdles of Suck and Awe—oh, man, that’s a great blog title...—(2) I’m a Fast Writer (as defined as “>4 books a year”), (3) Because of my Real Job, I hate paperwork with an abiding passion and (4) I am a roiling ball of insanity and bravado. Put all that together and give me some time, and I’ll have more books than you can shake a stick at, and there’s this thing called International Shipping. It’s ridiculous, in this Internet age, to send a paper manuscript anywhere and then wait a year to get no response. So, that was my intro—if I were a fancier writer, I’d here say ‘impetus’, but I’ll spare you—to start researching: “What’s my alternative?”

One, there’s small publishers who are ‘clever’ enough to take electronic submissions. Sweet. I sent (and still send) some of my books that fit the call for submissions to small publishers that don’t suck. It’s fun! I want that experience, because I like working with other professionals. We’ll see how that goes.

Two, though, is self-publishing, and that’s where I did some research heavy-lifting, assisted in Theory by Dean Wesley Smith, in Practice by Kristin Kathryn Rusch (cf: The Freelancer’s Survival Guide) and in general encouragement by seeing Kevin J. Anderson & Michael A. Stackpole, many of whose books I’ve read, were also ‘in on it’. (I had also read and enjoyed Kristin Kathryn Rusch’s Star Wars tie-in novel “The New Rebellion”.) Since I’m not trying to persuade you, I don’t need to re-hash all their arguments, but I can boil it down:

Freedom [to make money]

I can get on board with that! Self-publishing train, leaving the station. Man, that’s a lame metaphor, and I apologize. BALLOON OF INDIE, Activate!

(balloon of indie picture cancelled due to budget constraints)

So you’re still with me through that, and you have no major disagreements on the Theory. I’m assuming this will be about 5% of you. What’s the Practice? I’m going to tell you what I think you should do, that is: what I should have done, along with what I did (if different/interesting). These are suggestions. I’m not even going to justify them. Agree or disagree, try something. Or not.

The daB Indie Starter Guide

for people like me!

Step One: Confidence. 
I can’t help you with this one. You’re just going to have to read enough, then write enough so that one day you wake up and say to yourself: “I don’t Suck.” Oh, and you have to believe it AT LEAST 80% of the time. As previously indicated, I’m a roiling ball of insanity and bravado, but I came by that by other means. I had to dial it back a bit while I was writing the First Million (read: Sucky) Words.
(cf: Jeff Ambrose's The Successful Fiction Writer. He's been doing this almost as long as I have.)

NOTE: The first million sucky words is not the same thing as the first sucky STORIES. You can salvage the stories later, you just need to learn how to put words together in a not-sucky way to form stories. Mostly it involves characters. (That’s all I got. Ask me again in five years.)

Step Two: Choose a genre 
You’ve got confidence, so which area of plot are you most confident in? Time to focus, for a while. You can branch out later. (I chose Science Fiction.)

Step Three: Write ten short stories, submit. 
Consult Duotropes Digest, and send each story to five pro-paying markets in your chosen genre.

Step Four: While you’re waiting, write a book!
While you’re letting those ten stories circulate, write a book in your chosen genre. At least 60,000 words. Do it. If it turns out to be a series, great. For bonus points, do it during Nanowrimo.

Step Five: You’ve been rejected 50 times.
Still feeling confident?
If not, start over at Step Three.
If so, proceed into the magical world of Small Publishing.

Step Six: Create a Small Publisher
Come up with a sexy publisher name. (Mine is ‘H2NH ePub’)

Get a bank account and an e-mail address and attach a Paypal account to both. Do whatever you need to do wherever you are to register a ‘doing business as’ DBA business. (In Florida it cost $30) Make an Amazon KDP account. Make a Smashwords publisher account and author account. Set up the payments.

Write all this sh*t down at some point. (I did all this ass-backwards and it’s very annoying to retrofit.)
(cf: Dean Wesley Smith’s "Think Like a Publisher" series)

Step Seven: Titles
You’ve got ten short stories and one book. So you’ve got fourteen titles:
1 Book
1 Ten-Story Collection
2 Five-Story Collections
10 Individual Short Stories

Split up your short stories by some sort of theme, come up with titles and write introductions for the collections. After that, write some sales blurbs. Those will go on Smashwords and Amazon.

Step Eight: Cover Art
I made a guide to making some cover art. It’s out of date, but you can see the basic idea: Take a good picture, add a title/author name. Some people buy stock images for a couple bucks and make their cover.
Whatever. Make it work. You’ll learn a lot, which you’ll use LATER when you’re looking for cover artists.
Remember: You can change the cover of an eBook. It’s not hard.
(A few of my early covers sucked. I admit that. But not all of them, and those ones got the job done.)

Step Nine: Formatting!
Buy Paul Salvette’s Guide to eBook Formatting. It’s three bucks. I really, really wish I had had this when I was fumbling around. Don’t worry, it’s super-easy. Just don’t let yourself be intimidated. You’re confident, right? If not, return to Step Three.

Follow that workflow and you’ll have 14 eBooks formatted in DOC for Smashwords and MOBI for Amazon. Make EPUB and PDF versions too. EPUB because it’s cooler, and PDF for Review Copies.

Step Ten: Upload
This is comically easy. Just put them on Amazon KDP and Smashwords, and they’ll show up eventually.
Make sure to select distribution by Smashwords to everywhere except Amazon (since you’re already going there direct). That will put you on Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Sony, Apple, &c.

Side Note: Pricing
Book: $4.99
Ten-Story Collection: $4.99
Five-Story Collection: $2.99
Individual Short Story: $0.99
...just do it.

Step Eleven: Write Some More
Do not check your sales numbers! They will almost certainly suck for the first quarter. Calm down. Really, once everything is approved and working, you shouldn’t even go to the sites. Pretend you have no access to data (what, exactly, would you do if you did?), write that next book, get it up there, write the next next book, write lots of short stories and send them around the markets. Format, upload, repeat: make it happen.

Have fun! Just Write!

The Future:
You can get fancy. H2NH has got a little fancy in this, its fourth quarter of existence. But ask me for Lessons Learned in five years.

-daB

feel free to comment

Short Stories Challenge Practical

This was going to be a quick addendum to my Business: Short Stories article, but it snowballed. Think of that article as the ‘Theory’ and this one as the ‘Practical’. Apply it to your life, if you dare. 

Will this happen? Probably.

To summarize the previous article, I laid out why I wasn’t going to sell individual short stories anymore, based on the Amazon 35% Royalty on $0.99 vs. the 70% Royalty on $2.99. That point still stands so far as I’m concerned, but I left out a few nuances, craft and business.

Craft: I Like Finishing Things

Short stories get the creative juices flowing. Using scientific tracking methods, I’ve found that my word count per day on books increases if I’ve written and completed a short story in the near past. And I’ve also got a new short story to sell for everybody to admire, which is nothing to be sneezed at. I suspect I just like finishing things, and so when I do it gets the adrenaline up, but there’s also the Middle of books to be considered. That’s the most dangerous part, creatively (that is, where I tend to get bored and try to start a new book unless I chain myself to the text document)...and taking a little break to write and finish a short story reenergizes the mind. 

Business: Smashwords

My standard complaint about Smashwords is it makes my books look ugly, but it’s still a good place to sell short stories. There’s not that much formatting in a short story to mess up or for Meatgrinder to mangle, and Smashwords sends them all over the place and pays somewhere around 50% royalty. I’ve had especially good success selling short stories on Kobo via Smashwords, so I think it’s a good idea to use it as my ‘short story distributer’. This meshes well with the Theory article, because Smashwords makes it incredibly easy to make a story Free, whether via price control or via coupon. As we speak, Smashwords’ sales tracking is improving, and I suspect at some point soon they’ll work out the deal with Amazon. If I can just upload a short story DOC made from a template and watch the cash flow in from five to ten markets every quarter...well, I’d say Smashwords has earned its 10%. 

Short Stories Challenge

For business and craft reasons it’s desirable that I write and finish a short story on a regular basis. Well and good. Dean Wesley Smith declared a fancy challenge with a One Year time limit and everything, but it’s already October, and I’m too lazy to wait until January to officially challenge myself. I’ll just ask how often is the optimal regular basis? Science Says: every weekend. 

So, every weekend I’ll write a short story. Start on Saturday, finish by Sunday. Stick it up on Smashwords for free until the next story goes live, after which it’ll be a buck everywhere fine eBooks are sold (once it’s gone through the Meatgrinder). I’ll even do a little blog post about it, whynot? I’ll do this for five years, give or take. Probably. 

I’ll write books on weekdays.

Story Covers

I’d rather make my own cover than buy some ‘generic art’, but because this is a short story challenge, not a crappy-slappy cover art challenge, I made a template for my short story cover art. Remember, I’m lazy.

So lazy...

That should do it. Big author name, big title, an inconspicuous number, a logo, and clearly labelled “Short Story” so nobody can possibly be confused. As noted in the previous article, I’ll spend the big bucks on the collection covers, but whatsay for a popular short story? If it comes down to it, I’ve one idea that may or may not be reasonable.

Sketch Covers

I provide a two-sentence cover description, give an artist $50 to sketch it, add the title and author name and save it as a 600x800 jpg. I’d expect the total working time to be about an hour, so I wouldn’t expect it to be fine art or done to a deadline. Just a quick art project between big jobs, wham-bam-done: fifty bucks later, I’ve got a short story cover. Fair? Sounds fair.

Heck if I know, I’m making this up as I go.

-daB

feel free to comment

The Second Thing

ow that the pretentious first article is out of the way, let's get down to the meat. What do I want to do with my life? Write, make money. What's my six month plan? Write more, make more money. Where do I see myself in five years? Having written, I'm writing and making money. Simple as that.

I know how to write, or I know how to learn how to write better (Practice). I know how to make money, or I know the first thing about how to make money as a writer (Write More). My question for myself is, then, what's the second thing I need to know about making money at writing? Is there a second thing? Surely there must be. Alternatively, my question would be: Does it make sense for me to spend the time doing whatever the second thing is now, instead of focusing on the first?

Let's go through the candidates for second thing.

Like this guy? image

Cover Art
I’m still not satisfied with my cover art, even though I think it gets the job done. Would fancier cover art increase the amount of sales I make? I’m not sure, but it can’t hurt. But does it make sense for me to spend the time improving my cover art now instead of Writing More? I don’t think so, which means Cover Art can’t be the second thing.

Here’s my cover art plan: I’ll write 100 stories, then find some artists whose work I like in the various genres, pass them my cover art spreadsheets with Title, Type, and Concept columns and let them go nuts. Easy, not too expensive. That would also be the point that I’d reorganize the loose short stories into themed series, volumes, and collections anyways, so I might as well have new cover art. At that point I’d also get a couple of sexy imprints done. “H2NH SF” would be a little spaceship.

This seems suspiciously simple...

Advertising
The only active advertising I do is on this site, like so: Alan series I!, and via Twitter where I announce new fiction uploads once for Smashwords, Amazon and B&N, then leave it to do its own thing. From time to time somebody with a review site or podcast will express interest (most recently here!) and I’ll cheerfully send them a review copy, but I’m not going to hunt them down. So that’s not the second thing.

My advertising plan, then, is to first have a lot more stuff to sell and then worry about advertising. The tendrils of the baby octopus that is the David Barron media empire are slowly creeping their way around the Internet, so I’ll just let it develop organically. People know how to search for books, I just have to throw books into search pools and watch them learn how to swim on their own.

So generic!

Promotions
I do precisely one promotion: Free Fiction 1st. That is, a story on this blog on the first of every month. I got great response from the first one, so I’ll just keep doing it. But I’ll be doing nothing else on the promotion front for now, so another swing and a miss for second thing.

Intermission! The Writing of "Sharia & The Gays"
In the midst of writing "An Aesop Amidst The Fairy Dust", I kept hearing strange people talking about Creeping Sharia law and Gay Marriage and I knew there was a story there, but I also knew that there was no way it was going to be political. So, I put that title up on a blank document, finished up Aesop, then in the post-finish glow I sat in front of the blank screen. Abruptly the first exchange of dialogue hit me and in an hour I rolled through the first three-quarters: lightning speed, typing as fast as I can, which is quite fast. Then I got up to get a drink of water and the ending hit me before I sat back down. It's a shorter story, about 1800 words, but it finished in an hour and a half, so I'm fine with that. The only editing I did was to go through and standardize the spelling of all the names, keeping the form with the most y's. After I made the cover art, it went up for sale, and now you can read it here for Free Fiction 1st.

Wait, what? image

Loss Leader
My operating theory of ePub is that every short story I write is essentially a “loss leader” to funnel folk toward my collections. Not much of a loss leader, sure, in that thirty-five cents is thirty-five cents, but I would really rather people buy a collection outright then a bunch of singles. It’s just that having a lot of singles is great way to fill up that search pool. Nobody’s going to dive into an empty pool, is my point.

That’s nice but...second thing?

Things are just getting weird now.

Mindset
I intend to be making a living with my brain, so mental hygiene is the second most important thing about making money as a fiction writer. I’ve got to organize my life such that every time I sit in front of the computer or walk along the side of the road talking into a voice recorder, I’m On. The second most important thing is to support the first thing, Writing More.

My mental hygiene plan is simple: Not much caffeine (head races), not much alcohol (hours blur), avoid sugar entirely (sugar crash), exercise (so I’m not sick), eat light to eat right (so I’m not carb’d into a stupor), keep the girlfriend happy (fun for everybody), talk not type to people (good motivation), don’t spend a lot of money (keep myself busy, not bored), and Write More (it’s recursive!)

Simple, but difficult. Still, healthy feels great, so that’s motivation all in itself, aside from the sweet sweet cash.

This version of Professional Edition will last until April 6, 2012, updating every Friday. Site design subject to change as I learn by doing. Like what you see? Spot something unprofessional? Feel free to comment!