Small Publisher Organization

I was recently reviewing my 2011 writing output so that I could reformat it to reflect what I’ve learned, and I discovered that I’m an unorganized idiot. I also realize that my fellow small publishers, while not idiots, may also be ridiculously unorganized. Not to mention the aspiring small publishers who, theoretically at least, follow this blog. (There’s a lot of traffic, and I’m pretty sure it’s not all pornography.) So, now that I’ve done the muddle-through, I’ve systemized for your benefit the organization I (under the auspices of H2NH ePub et al) am and have been using in 2012.

GRAPHIC!

Presumably, you’ve already done all the Business of Publishing stuff, so make a folder titled “Example ePub”, then set up all these folders. I hope it’s not too complicated, but here’s a guide:

Top

Ads

Banner ads, book trailers and catalogues.

ARC PDF

Convenient access to all your prepared ARCs, for immediate e-mailing upon request.

Templates

Word and HTML templates, for the busy publisher.

Workflow

Checklists, macros, and miscellaneous time-savers.

Imprint

Your sexy publishing logo, in small and large size.

Author Name

Each pen name, or the names of fellow authors you’re assisting. You can do everything yourself, but what with all the labor-saving templates and macros I’ve made, I’d be happy to format your story up for Amazon, Smashwords and B&N (e.g. MOBI, DOC, and EPUB) for a cool fifty bucks, if you provide me with cover art (or don’t mind me using a generic text-heavy cover), and have already made a publisher account. Books and collections extra because I hate Smashwords formatting. Oh, and you’re not allowed to complain too much, as it’s only $50. (See blog footer for other suggested cover art and formatting services.)

000Current Project

This is the only part of the folder that’s allowed to be disorganized. Toss in all the chapter TXT, draft DOC, versions of documents in editing, up-to-current EPUBs you like - even some preliminary cover art/illustrations. Once the book is done, it’ll all go into a neat little folder and you won’t have to hunt for it. If the book doesn’t get finished and you want a new current project, you get to make an official ‘in-progress’ DOC or RTF file and put it in a Book folder for when you get back to it. Don’t let those pile up, though, or you’ll forget the characters.

Stories

This is where organization really pays off. You’ll probably write a thousand short stories (5,000,000 words!) in your career, so you’d better get organized, or your estate will curse you forever. You can’t expect filial piety if you didn’t do the basic ground-work.

You should probably subdivide your stories by year written, unless you’re writing more than 999 stories a year, in which case you should be making enough to hire a secretary and a minimal staff to organize all that, and you shouldn’t listen to me because I want to learn from you (I’m sure it’s possible, I just want to observe your technique!)

Title

001, 002, 003, 004, 005…c’mon.

Packs, Bundles and Collections

You should be collecting your stories. That’s just basic. There’s two kinds of short story customers: one sees a great short story blurb and says “Wow, that’s pretty neat!” and buys it. The other sees a great short story blurb and clicks on the author name to buy a collection. Cater to both. I use a simple system of “Packs and Bundles” to do the initial collecting, then I get fancy with Collections.

Five Pack

It doesn’t have to be five stories, but it should be at least 15,000 words.

Ten Bundle

Again, exactly ten stories is optional, but it should be at least two five packs, or 30,000 words.

Collection

Get fancy, choose a theme, select the stories for it, and get some great cover art. This is your short story showpiece, and will stand for all time as testament to your greatness. Anywhere from fifteen to thirty stories will do you, but I’d personally shoot for 60,000 words, here.

Price List.txt collects all the word counts and prices of the stories, so you don’t have to check.

Book

Individual books in here, bulking up each folder to The 13 Files. Do not, under any circumstances, add anything else into these. You’ll just get confused, and feel dumb. If the inspiration takes you, clear out Current Project and use that as your brain-dump until you’re ready to organize each book.

Series

Put all the books in the series in here, then put the cover art all in one place for your own convenience. Otherwise, each individual folder is the same as an individual book.

The 13 Files

Every single title folder shall have these (and only these) files, non-negotiable. Of course, if you use Photoshop, replace the GIMP file below with that. I just use GIMP because I'm on a 12" netbook and wouldn't be able to take advantage of Photoshop's many features.

See H2NH ePub Workflow for details.

A FocusWriter

01 “Title.txt” (plain text)

02 “Title.rtf” (edited copy, with italics)

B GIMP 

03 “Title.xcf” (raw)

04 “Title(cover).jpg” (final eBook cover)

C Microsoft Word 2007

05 “Title.doc” (Master, with styles)

06 “TitleDOC.doc” (Meatgrinder-ready)

(Smashwords to Kobo, Diesel, Apple, Sony et al)

07 “TitlePDF.doc” (PDF backup)

08 “Title – Author.pdf” (PDF)

(DriveThruFiction; ARC)

09 “TitleHTML.doc” (with )

D jEdit

10 “Title” (for entities)

11 “Title.html” (clean HTML)

E calibre

12 “Title – Author.epub” (checked EPUB)

(B&N et al)

13 “Title – Author.mobi” (checked MOBI)

(Amazon)

Backup

.zip the folder up, once a week, and store it in four places:

1. In the ‘Example ePub Backup’ folder on your computer’s second hard drive.

2. On an external hard drive.

3. On a thumb drive in a drawer in your house.

4. Somewhere else secure, but that is not your house.

Write more

If all these folders are empty at the end of a year, you’ll feel like a twit.

Good to go, but talk to me later, when I’ve done some Print-on-Demand.

daB

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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