All right, I've put a new cover up--I get the feeling I'm not doing it right, because I'm telling Amazon to "publish" again every time I change the cover art, and I think I could just upload the cover art and be done with it. But I'm not sure, so I've probably cost them an additional fraction of a cent with all this. Sorry, guys.
Anyway, the concept here is lightning, because (spoiler alert!) poor Trang gets blasted at one point, plus lightning is fun and dangerous! But I felt like that on the original cover, you couldn't really see the lightning, so it was just a plain black cover with yellow lettering. What with the choice of font and the yellow color, the lettering reminded me of a Hardy Boys book from the 1970s, plus the thing was boring and far too sparse.
So I used some bigger lightning, I changed the fonts, and I made the title and my name different colors. I put a banner across the top, too--marketing always amuses me, because the goal with journalism and educational/reference publishing is to be precisely accurate, with as little room for misinterpretation as possible. Marketing's a whole 'nuther story, so I put "#1 in the exciting Trang series!" up on the banner so that people will see that "#1" and go, Gee, this book must be number one in something! It's silly, but rest assured that Trust's banner will say "The second book," not "#2"!
Anyway, now the cover looks kind of like a textbook, although maybe that's just the dimensions of the thing.
ETA: It's up on Amazon now. It still looks like a textbook to me, but at least you can read the title in that tiny 1" x 1" format you see when you put in a search. That's kind of an issue, I think--there are a lot of very beautiful covers that are just illegible when they're shrunk down so much.
Uncategorized
Business models, or the McQuestion question (I'm sure that joke never gets old for her)
I mentioned earlier that Karen McQuestion has sold 36,000 copies of her books in 11 months as Amazon e-books. That raises some interesting questions about the future of book publishing, so I wanted to look at it a little closer. (Yes, once a business reporter, always a business reporter--get used to it. In fact, delving into this strange little world is probably going to be a significant sideline to this blog.)
Selling 36,000 copies of a book is not bad in traditional publishing--but it's not great, either. McQuestion would definitely be considered a midlist writer, not a bestselling author, but she would probably get a contract for a second book.
Assuming, that is, that those 36,000 copies sold were all of her first book. But that's not the case: She has six books up on Amazon. Selling 6,000 copies or 10,000 copies of a particular title--that's just not enough if you're at a commercial house, and you won't get another contract. You're off to the small presses.
But...McQuestion sold those books on Amazon, as e-books. Now, Amazon didn't start its 70% royalty program until last June, but let's pretend that for the sake of simplicity that over the past year McQuestion sold 36,000 copies of her books at $3 a copy. We'll round that royalty, too, and say that she got $2 for every book sold, and Amazon got $1.
In that scenario, in a year, Amazon makes $36,000 (minus production costs, which are reportedly quite low, plus whatever they make selling Kindles, which is the real reason they're publishing e-books in the first place). McQuestion makes $72,000! For a writer, $72,000 in a year is pretty darned good--most writers make far less (impressionable youngsters reading this should know that they'll make their parents much happier if they go to law school). Plus she got a movie deal out of it, so there's more money there.
In other words, McQuestion's sales are of zero interest to a large, commercial publishing house. But because of the way Amazon is set up, she's still doing fine!
Le puff, le pant, le puff, le pant....
So, I have formatted Trang so that it complies with the Nook quirks instead of the Kindle quirks, and it should be up for sale in 24-72 hours. Also the Nook site made me feel all weird about not having cover art, so I mocked up a simple little cover. It looks very much like an amateur cobbled it together on the free photo-editing software that came with her computer, but I guess it's better than nothing. (You know, I think what it's missing is more text. I'm going to put a series teaser on there....)
Ya learn something new every day
One of my friends was like, Hey, I have a Nook--why are you excluding me? And I was like, Hmmm, when I looked on the Barnes & Noble Web site, they didn't seem to support self-publishing. But I looked again, and yes, if you go past their main page and to their Nook store, they have a very similar program to Amazon. So, Nookites (Nookies? Nookers?), never fear, I shall e-publish there as well. Tomorrow.
Whoo! The e-book is up!
Trang is now available as an e-book on Amazon! Go here, cough up $2.99, and if you like it, please leave a review!
I'll have a cover image up when I finish the cover for the print-on-demand version, which may take some time.
Why I ask you to review my books
If you've bought one of my books, then thank you very much, you've done PLENTY. But if you liked it and want to go the extra mile, pleasepleaseplease post a review on the site where you bought it.
Why? Well, one advantage of self-publishing on sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble is that they are actually quite good at marketing titles to people, and I of course have no marketing department. Let's say that you (like me) are a fan of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. (How big a fan am I? I spelled all that right on the first try! And I can't spell!) And let's say you've bought her books on Amazon, and then you leave a favorable review for Trang there. The next time someone goes to buy a Vorkosigan book, Amazon will recommend to them that they take a look at Trang as well.
How effective is that? It can work pretty darned well! According to this article in The Wall Street Journal (which you probably need a subscription to access, argh), Karen McQuestion, who has never been published by a traditional house, has sold 36,000 copies of her books in less than a year this way!
Why self-publish? or The Letters
If you're looking at my previous post and are prone to doing a little mental arithmetic, you're thinking: Graduated from college 1992, probably entered the work force immediately (yes), it's 2011 now--that's like, 20 years of writing for a living! Why couldn't you find a publisher?
Well, the answer to that is threefold. Part of it is the work itself, part of it is my just getting tired of the process, and part of it is the nature of the business.
I started out trying to publish Trang. Now, if you are a publishing neophyte (as, despite my writing experience, I was when I began this process--I was pretty much always either on staff or a regular freelancer, so I didn't have to go through all this before), you should know that there are basically two paths toward publication. Path 1 is, you find an agent, and the agent signs you up with a big commercial house. This has two advantages: It's quick, because the agent can submit to several houses simultaneously, and you get paid more.
The primary disadvantage is that the work needs to be very, very commercial indeed. Big publishing houses want stuff that will sell a LOT of copies.
Does that mean they only want really high-quality stuff? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh my God HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA no. Is Mad Men not on network TV because it's just not that good a show? Seriously, please don't be naive. They want stuff that will sell a lot of copies. Quality is basically irrelevant. This is why Paris Hilton is the "author" of two books despite the fact that, if ever she could read and write, she's probably coked away those abilities by now.
As a result, there's a tremendous focus on genre: Romance sells, books about food sell. Science fiction does not sell--not in the quantities a commercial house wants. At this point, for a science fiction book by a new author to be picked up by a commercial house, it has to fit a very narrow set of criteria: The lead character needs to be a super-alpha male, you have to kill someone off in the first 10 pages, that sort of thing.
Now I know if you read sci-fi you're going, But what about THIS book or THAT book by, oh, I dunno, Issac Asimov or Ray Bradbury or someone? And the sad truth is that science fiction has become less popular in the past few years (fantasy has kind of eaten the genre), so a book that could have been published by a big house in 1970 or 1980 or 1990 would not be published by one today. And the other sad truth is that new authors are the opposite of Paris Hilton: She is a known brand (as are far more worthy writers like Asimov and Bradbury--remember that quality is irrelevant here), while a new author is an unknown quantity. The only thing publishers know about a new author is that no one has ever heard of them before, so it's going to be a bitch to market them. Why put your time and trouble into that when you can just repackage Asimov and/or Bradbury and/or Paris Hilton, make more money, and go home early?
There are, however, a lot of small publishers that deal with science fiction; that's Path 2 to publication. The issue with small presses is that it takes forever--you're supposed to submit to only one at a time--distribution is typically pretty limited, and you're probably not going to make any money off them anyway.
Small presses have commercial considerations as well, which brings me to The Letters. People have expressed great interest in The Letters, which is too bad because I threw most of them away when I received them, and the rest I trashed when I decided to self-publish. But I remember some and others I quoted in cranky notes to friends. I started to receive The Letters when I sent Trang around to agents, and since I knew very little about the industry at that point, they were extremely confusing to me--in fact, I once had a dream that agents were sending me envelopes filled with little dolls that I had to join together to form a coded message, which I then had to interpret.
I had been prepared for letters that said, I can't take this, it needs improvement, here's what to fix. But The Letters basically said, This is a great book! I can't represent it! I can't really tell you why! I remember one agent ended a long, vague, "not suitable to our needs"-type letter with something like, "I sure enjoyed it, though." Eventually I found an agent who was honest to the point of bluntness (his letter began, "This is a good book, and you are a good writer"), and he explained that sci-fi was no longer commercial (he told me that ten years ago, he could have sold it, but not today) and that I should probably look into another genre.
I had covered health care as a business reporter, and one of the interesting dynamics about that field is that, although a hospital has to make money to survive, just about everyone who works in health care is VERY uncomfortable with the fact that it is an industry and a business. You're not supposed to want to make money when you work in health care; you're supposed to save lives. I realized that the same thing is true in the field of publishing: You have to make money, but you're not supposed to want to make money--you're supposed to be contributing to the world of letters. That's why so few agents were willing to say, Sorry sister, there's no money here! But it's confusing because the message to writers is, to say the least, mixed. And at times the agent is just being a selfish asshole: I went to a sci-fi convention where a well-established agent told us that, out of the past 2,000 submissions to her, she had accepted ONE new writer as a client (there was no word as to whether or not she actually found a publisher for said client). When I said, OK, so we new writers here shouldn't waste our time and money mailing submissions to you, who should we send them to? she was like, Oh, no! Send them to me! I need to feel all arty and boho!
Anyway, thanks to the more honest agent I at least knew what to do: I sent Trang along to a small press. Remember how I said that takes forever? It doesn't take so long if they don't like your book--it'll get booted back to you right away. As it was, it took two years for me to get...The Letter! I kept a quote from this one: Trang is "very entertaining and easy to read, with some interesting technology...and intriguing alien species." The reader strongly recommended it. And so they're not going to publish it. I mean, I'm not leaving out some deeply critical element to The Letter here--they don't want me to make it better. They like it fine. They just don't want to publish it.
I also I went to work on a proposal for what I hoped would be a more-commercial nonfiction book. This book found an agent, who submitted it to some large houses, who sent back The Letter. I have to say, when editors talk to agents, they are much more open about the bottom line than agents are when they talk to writers. So These Letters are at least honest about why they didn't want the book (if you haven't heard, there's a recession on), but they were also flattering to the point of delusion about the book's future, given that they were choosing not to publish it: "I look forward to reading this as a published book.... It will be a welcome addition to the literature on slavery." "[Mary is] clearly a smart and talented writer and she's on to a particularly rich slice of history here.... [S]he does a marvelous job of historical detective-work in plotting out a narrative of the life and the period (and a terrific portrait of the England in which he lived).... It looks to be a serious and absorbing book."
At this point, my options are 1. to continue sending the sci-fi novel and nonfiction proposal around to small/academic publishers and sit quietly as the years pass by and The Letters pile up, or 2. to self-publish. And these days, self-publishing on Amazon? Easy, free, and thanks to that 70% royalty, potentially as lucrative as anything a small press is going to give. So here I am!
So, who am I?
I've worked as a writer, editor, or reporter my entire adult life--not that any of that means my books are written well, you'll just have to judge that for yourself.
Still, I do have some familiarity with publishing--indeed, when I graduated from college, the first place I worked was at a small-yet-hoity-toity journal, where I was a summer intern. The journal, which appeared once a month, published one fiction story in each issue. Half the fiction slots were reserved for name authors--people the magazine would contract with--and the other half were reserved for stories submitted by whoever.
In other words, in a year, the journal would publish a total of six stories by unknown authors. Part of my job as an intern was to screen the mounds and mounds of short stories that were submitted. I'm a pretty fast reader, and the losers were readily identifiable (no, no journal will publish your Star Trek fanfic, they don't have the rights to those characters), so I would say that on the average day, I would find one or two stories that I thought were really good and totally worthy of publication.
Doing that math? 1.5 stories a day x 365 days in a year = 547.5 publication-worthy stories received in a year. Of those 547.5 stories, we would publish six. I certainly wouldn't say that the six stories that got in were better than the 541.5 stories that did not, especially since those stories had to go through the publisher, who was far more interested in political content than in literary merit.
The moral I took from this was: FOR GOD'S SAKE, DON'T GO INTO CREATIVE WRITING!
That was a career philosophy that served me well for many, many years. I did just fine as an editor and writer in educational publishing, reference publishing and journalism. However, much like the well-respected family man who throws away career, marriage, children, reputation and security in order to join an S&M circus, the real me would come out. So now I'm writing disreputable adventure sci-fi. But I can still write serious stuff, and I plan to do at least one nonfiction book. I'm going to give the Cliff Notes version of my resume, so no one has to wonder where the hell I came from.
•Graduated magna cum laude in 1992 from Harvard University with a degree in English
•Edited two Black history books for young adults that were listed in the New York Public Library's Books for the Teen Age, one in 1996 and one in 1997
•Received a master's degree in Journalism from NYU in 2000; won the Edwin Diamond Award for outstanding achievement, the department’s highest honor
•As a reporter for the Trenton Times, won second place, Series category, 2000 North Jersey Press Club awards; second place, Health, Science, Technology and Environment category, 2000 Society of Professional Journalists of New Jersey awards; honorable mention, Business Writing: Daily category, 2000 Philadelphia Press Association awards; first place, Business category, 2001 Garden State Association of Black Journalists awards
•As a freelancer, wrote articles for reference books that won 2000 ALA/RUSA Outstanding Reference Source, 2000 NYPL Best of Reference, 2002 Library Journal Best Reference Source, 2003 NYPL Best of Reference, 2003 Booklist Editor’s Choice, 2004 ALA/RUSA Best Reference Source, 2004 ALA/RUSA Outstanding Reference Source, 2004 Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and Booklist’s 2009 Best Bets for Student Researcher
Where we are, where we're going....
Hi! You're at the blog of Mary Sisson--presumably you got here from my Web site, marysisson.com, but if you didn't, go there and check it out!
I'm a writer who is self-publishing a number of books. Right now, there are sample chapters for my science fiction novel Trang up on my Web site. Hopefully later today the Amazon e-book version will be ready, and I will link to it there and (ETA) here.
I also plan to have what my mother would consider a proper book--a print-on-demand physical book. I'm hoping to have that ready by the end of February, but that may be unrealistic. Amazon makes it super-easy to upload to the Kindle store--well, I did have to double-space the paragraph breaks because I couldn't get them to indent, but that's more a testimony to my technical ineptitude than anything else--and it's totally free for the writer. For a physical book, however, the text itself needs to be laid out, and you need a cover. One option is to have them do it, which is fairly expensive and would be a brand-new expense with each book. The other option is to do-it-yourself: I wouldn't necessarily recommend that for everyone, but I did spend many years working in publishing, and although I am really, really not visually adept, all-text books are relatively simple to lay out. So I'm going to pony up for Adobe Acrobat and see where I get--this may turn into The Revenge of the Art Department, but so be it. Given my lack of spelling ability, Trang is probably already The Revenge of the Copy Edit Department, so I might as well let everyone have their satisfaction against us prima donnas in Editorial.
So, that's the short-term schedule for now. Longer term, the second book in the Trang series, Trust, is slowly but surely making its way through my editing and revision process. I wrote a draft of it that I thought didn't really work, got sidetracked for a friggin' year on a large freelance project (that shouldn't be an issue any more), and then gave it a major restructuring, probably trashing a good 30K words and adding another 40K. Now it seems to have good flow, and I'm tweaking it and will probably give it to friends to read over fairly soon. Hopefully that will be out later this year.