Jeebus!

in

The large-print proof arrived--good Lord, that thing's a mother! It looks like the phone book! And it's not APH-compliant for weight--I don't know how you could produce an 18-point book that weighs under two pounds, unless you printed it on tissue paper. As luck would have it, CreateSpace does not offer a tissue-paper option, so mine weighs almost four pounds.

And while the cover was easy to resize and generally looks good (the art is teeny, which helps), you can tell that the author photo on the back has been distorted--makes sense, the eye is particularly sensitive to the shape of faces. But I think my vanity can handle it....

Counting the costs

in

The new layout of Trang has been accepted, and I have ordered the proof. Barring any major problems, both editions of Trang should be available for sale soon!

I feel like a big reason to have this blog (other than the fact that if I don't report to somewhere, I tend to stop working) is to present my experience to people who are thinking of self-publishing so that they have a realistic idea of what it involves.

Obviously, a major barrier to getting anything published is cost. Not because you should be paying fake agents or sleazy editing services, but because when you are writing for publication, you're not earning a paycheck. For a first-time novelist, you need to have the novel done and ready for publication before you can get an advance (which isn't really an advance at all by that point); for a nonfiction writer, you need to have a very detailed proposal with sample chapters. Both take a lot of time, and putting that stuff together while earning enough money to not starve to death is a major challenge.

And then there are the specific costs involved in actually getting a book out. Not that my finances are anyone's business but my own, but I was a business reporter after all, and I thought it would be helpful to actually inventory what I've spent so far--the start-up costs, as it were.

Of course, LJ doesn't make it easy to format columns. I had to do it backwards, and it's still not quite right.

So: What did I have already? A computer, Internet access, and Microsoft Word. (I don't try to figure out the cost of paper and ink, because I'll use the same toner cartridge or paper ream for several different projects.)

Spent on creating marysisson.com:
$67.50 for 5 yrs....Cost of domain name
$226.79 for 2 yrs.....Cost of Web host*
$294.29.....TOTAL

Spent on creating e-books:
$0

Spent on creating hard copies:
$355.00.....Purchase Adobe Acrobat
$17.86.....Purchase initial Trang proof
$9.91.....Purchase revised Trang proof
$16.24.....Purchase large-print proof
$78.00....Fee for improved price/distribution (both books)
$477.01.....TOTAL

GRAND TOTAL: $771.30

Which, you know, ain't exactly peanuts. Obviously it's cheaper to just produce e-books. That said, I only had to purchase Acrobat once, and it's going to be five and two years before I have to pay to keep up the domain name and Web site, respectively. There will be a reoccurring cost of $10 per year to maintain the improved price and distribution for both hard-copy editions of the book. (You can see from the difference in price between the initial and revised proofs the kind of hunk that fee takes out of the cost of the book both to me and to readers.)

How does that compare with the cost of trying to get published traditionally? Well, from 2005 until 2008, I spent $427.56 on postage alone--and I know that's not all I spent, because I was sending out Trang in 2004. (This is why crap like "Send me your stuff so that I can reject it and feel important!" pisses me off.) And you know, at least now I actually have a book, which is more than I had before.

* Edited March 30, 2012, to reflect rate change.

Whew!

in

I finalized and uploaded the new layout and cover, so assuming they don't find any weird errors, I should be able to order the proof soon.

Oh, and I realized that that magical $39 you pay to make things cheaper and get extended distribution? It's per title, not per account like I thought. That's what you get for not reading the fine print. But that's still pretty cheap--Jeremy Robinson paid $150 for an equivalent service for one title. Plus, thanks to the size of the large-print edition, it's already going to cost $5 more than the regular edition, so I'm not really interested in padding that price even more. I guess if I really want to save myself the $39, I could have it available only on the CreateSpace store, which is the cheapest distribution channel, but honestly I don't know if I'm comfortable doing that--what good is an accessible edition that no one can find?

Yeah! Yeah!

in

I finished the layout! Whoo! And it's 374 pages, so that's good, too. I am going to print it out and give it one last go-over before I send it to the printer, but as I've said, the layout is so much easier with narrow margins, I doubt I'll have to fix much. With the wider margins I had to print it out and go over it twice, with fairly substantial changes made both times--and of course the new changes would screw up the old, which was lots of fun.

It's funny because of course I found typos, so I fixed them, but you know, the large-print edition has already been printed, and nothing that I've found so far has been serious enough to warrant trashing that proof and doing another one. So both versions will be slightly different from each other. Likewise, the people who bought an e-book early on have slightly different versions of the book, and the Kindle and Nook versions are going to differ from the Smashwords version, because it's harder to update Smashwords.

I do think now that it's worth it to hold back on releasing e-versions until the layout is done. But the large-print and regular layout are probably always going to differ slightly from each other, because I have to make corrections in Word and then convert it into a PDF file to go to the printer, and Word is just not stable--when you close and open Word, it will shift lines around from page to page, and that's a real pain in the ass when you're trying to lay out a book. So, I just have to be relaxed about it.

Whew!

in

Between the cover and the large-print edition getting bounced back (they accepted it this time, and the proof is on its way) and general life stuff taking up time, I haven't worked on the layout in a while. Which made me get a little nervous about it, so I decided I'd better check and see if it was going to fall below the magical 400-page limit. And if the layout continues as it has, it will be roughly 380 pages long, so that's good.

I also read something about the Sony Reader device, and I was like, Gee, I should see if I can make the Trang e-book is available for that, too. Apparently you can do it through a service called Smashwords that is free, so barring the discovery of some odd reason not to, I'm going to upload Trang to them as well.

After I get cracking on this layout. You know, when something's really hard to do, I'm usually pretty good about setting aside time and putting my shoulder to the wheel, but when it's easier, well, then, there's no big rush, right...?

Shoulder to the wheel, girl! (*cracks whip*)

Borders

in

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Borders bookstore chain will probably file for bankruptcy early next week. I get very tired of posting to articles that you can't read unless you have a (not inexpensive) subscription, so here's the HuffPo version. On the other hand, the reason I pay for a WSJ subscription is because the original article contains analysis like:

 

Online shopping, and the advent of e-readers, with their promise of any book, any time, anywhere, and cheaper pricing, have shoppers abandoning Borders and Barnes & Nobles bookstores as they did music stores a decade ago.

"I think that there will be a 50% reduction in bricks-and-mortar shelf space for books within five years, and 90% within 10 years," says Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of Idea Logical Co., a New York consulting firm. "Book stores are going away."

 

Not that you should always trust what consultants say--they tend to say whatever is most likely to get people to hire consultants--but fundamentally I agree that many book stores are going to go away, in particular non-niche stores. (That has long been true of non-niche independent bookstores, which pretty much got wiped off the map by the rise of chains like Borders.) I live near a Barnes & Noble, and whenever I go there, either I can't find what I'm looking for, or when I find it, it costs more than on Amazon and the buying process is somehow much more annoying (there's a long line, and the only other clerk would rather answer the phone than run the cash register; or, the only copy of the book has been beaten within an inch of its life by some inconsiderate slob, and then reshelved as though there was nothing wrong with it).

So, yes, I'm betting pretty heavily on Amazon. Another reason that I'm optimistic about their prospects is that they've figured out how to make money selling books--in particular, e-books--cheaply while paying waaaay-better-than-industry-standard royalties to writers. That's led to some high-profile author defections from traditional publishing. Publishing is both a business and an industry, and in business, anyone who can figure out how to reduce the cost of production without sacrificing quality is going to own the industry. It's that simple.

ETA: And Monday brings another really good WSJ article you probably can't read about how the closing of Borders stores is going to affect publishing. Basically they're predicting that it's going to further restrict distribution (ominously, when Borders shut down in the UK in 2009, it didn't help sales at the other chains), and they say that traditional publishers are getting more cautious about new writers because there's not that network of book stores to promote them any more. E-book are going to become more important (obviously), as is word-of-mouth and customer reviews--which might actually level the playing field for small presses and independent authors. (That's it! That's what I'll call myself! "An independent author." Sounds good, no? Like I actually know what I'm doing or something.)

In other words: Go review Trang!

Help from hither, help from yon

in

I lent the proof of the old layout to my sister, explaining to her why I was changing it. She opened the book and immediately said, "Oh, yeah." And of course it was something I hadn't really thought too hard about, which is that, unless it's oriented to children, a book with really big margins doesn't really look like a book--publishers also want to save paper, staff time, and therefore money by keeping the margins narrow, so readers unconsciously expect that.

CreateSpace bounced back the large-print edition. It's interesting because apparently they do do some proofing, and their concerns are twofold. The first is that, although I describe the project as "Trang (large print edition)" the title page just says "Trang." My initial reaction was, Well, doesn't the fact that it says "Trang" in very large letters give you a clue? but then I realized that they're just trying to make sure I didn't accidentally submit the wrong interior, so now the words "large print edition" appear both on the cover and the title page.

The second concern was that there was a problem with pagination. I doubled-checked the chapter files, and the page numbers are correct, so at first I was thinking that I had just screwed up and bundled the chapter files in the wrong order. But then, looking through the layout, I found another problem (and if this was their concern, it was a very good catch indeed, and I commend them for it): Unlike in the e-book, where I actually call the first chapter "Chapter 1" and the second chapter "Chapter 2," in the hard copy I just use chapter numbers. These numbers appear in the upper right-hand corner of the page, fairly close to where the odd page numbers appear (there are no page numbers on the first pages of the chapters).

In the regular edition, the chapter numbers are a different font, and they are MUCH bigger than the page numbers, so there's really no possibility for confusion. But in the large-print edition, everything's the same sans-serif font, and the page numbers are very big. Also, both page and chapter numbers have been bolded, because you're supposed to do something like that to things that are not part of the main text to help distinguish them visually from that text.

Although I did enlarge the chapter numbers, I didn't enlarge them enough, the end result is that the chapter numbers look an awful lot like the page numbers--which is obviously a problem you can't ignore in an edition that is supposed to be easier to read. Lucky me, it looks like I can alter the chapter numbers without screwing up the rest of the layout. So that's what I'm doing right now!

ETA: OK, I finished this and uploaded it again. I'm hoping the numbers are different enough--I used Arial Black for the chapter numbers (everything else is regular Arial). I thought about switching to a different sans-serif font for the chapter numbers, but it seems like the other fonts I have don't actually have sans-serif numbers. If CreateSpace kicks it back again, I'll just go with Copperplate Gothic (the font used on the front cover) and hope that the enormous font size makes up for the presence of serifs.

I did freak out a little bit

in

Just before I had to head out for a family obligation, I was suddenly struck by how amateurish and God-awful the art on the cover of Trang looked, so after obsessing on it all evening, I got back and tweaked it a little and made it smaller. I'm calmer about it now, although I have no illusions about my artistic talents.

It's hard because sometimes those kinds of freak-outs happen for no good reason, and other times they happen for VERY good reason, and good luck telling one from the other. When I applied to graduate school I was convinced that the essay I wrote was the deadest thing in the whole entire world, it just lay limply on the paper like a week-old fish, and it so impressed the person who read it that he immediately picked up the phone and offered me a very generous fellowship. So, you never know--although I write a lot better than I draw, that's for sure.

(And you know how people try to be supportive by saying stuff that's obvious bullshit, like "You'll be an artist someday!" That kind of stuff is really not helpful.)

All righty!

in

Since I've got the large-print interior done, and it's a pretty simple business to modify the cover to fit the large-print edition, I uploaded all of that to CreateSpace. I also coughed up the magical $39 that makes everything cheaper--since I liked the quality of their work and intend to use them, it made sense to do that before I had to buy another proof.

Oh, and do you know what a marketing dummy I am? Back when I asked 11th Hour to do the cover, she said, You know, you should really post about this on the Firefly board. And I was like, Really? I haven't posted there in years, it seems kinda low to show back up the minute I need something. And she was like, Don't be a dummy, they'll enjoy hearing about it!

And whaddya know, they are buying it, and to all appearances anyway, enjoying it. Which makes perfect sense from a marketing perspective: I really liked Firefly, they really like Firefly, we probably have some tastes in common, duh.... I always hate the idea of networking and am reluctant to do it because it seems like using, but the reality of it is that often you do have something to offer people.

That's not too hideous, is it?

in

So, I finished the drawing for the cover (and yes, if primitivism ever comes back, I'll have a career as an artist). It's certainly not fine art, but it's aliens and violence and weirdness, plus it's small, and I think I've got the rest of the cover looking more fun--almost cartoonish, really, which is fine.

I confront my limitations

in

The layout was going so swimmingly, I decided to humble myself by taking a shot at the cover art today. It didn't go as horribly as it could have, although I didn't attempt human figures, and I am relying heavily on the old trick of making a large illustration in hopes that shrinking it down will make it look less rough.

I also basically traced--I took a sharpie and made a rough drawing of, say, a Pincushion on one piece of paper, then put the paper with the illustration on it over it and used the outline as a guide. I think that helped avoid a lot of errors of proportion, plus it precluded the temptation to draw an outline of everything.

The most challenging bit is definitely the human figure, which is the unfortunate Philippe Trang getting the crap knocked out of him. I couldn't get the outline right, so I finally took a picture of myself in the mirror flailing about the way I imagine he might. That helped, but it probably means that Philippe will have a much larger butt than the poor man deserves. Maybe if I could find a picture of, say, Fred Astaire being knocked over....

Covers! On everyone's mind!

in

So, just as I was deciding that I needed to change my cover, I came across two different stories, one new and one, um, new to me about covers and book sales.

The first was this story in the Wall Street Journal about a book called The Madonnas of Echo Park, which is being given a new cover to juice sales. You need a subscription to actually read the story, though, which probably sucks for you. To summarize, the idea behind the old cover was that it would appeal to both men and women. Now, they've come up with a new cover, which is supposed to appeal to women. (Men in general don't buy as many books as women do.)

Maybe I'm saying this just because I'm a woman, but frankly, I think the old cover was pretty ugly. I don't know if it's actually going to help sales, but I think the new cover is much better looking. I also think that it looks more like Serious Literature now, which will probably help.

The other thing was this blog post from Joel Derfner regarding how they repackaged his excellent book Swish when it came out in paperback. This one speaks more to my concern that Trang does not look enough like adventure sci-fi: Swish is not fluff, and making it look like fluff turned out to be a very counterproductive strategy. I even empathize somewhat with the "Where's the Cher?" crowd, because for many months after my father passed away I deliberately consumed a media diet made entirely of saccharine, and I, too, would have been really upset to be getting a dead mother when I was promised hunky guys. (If you want fluff, hunky guys, and maybe Cher, try Joel's Gay Haiku instead.)

Keep your margins narrow

in

I laid out a couple of Trang chapters today using skinnier margins. Wow. It is like a thousand times easier to lay out a book this way. You have far fewer problems with loose lines, and you don't have to break nearly as many words. Seriously, it may be even easier than laying out a large-print book. So, it's easier, it costs less--I'm definitely going to be using minimal margins from now on.

So far I haven't had to push a line down (!), but if I do, I can in fact use invisible text--the test text did not show up in the proof.

ETA: I'm really pleased with how much faster this is going. I think it's because there are more letters per line, so if you're a few letters short, it doesn't look as dramatic. Like, if you have 20-character lines, but you only have 15 characters on a particular line because a word was too long and moved down to the next line, it looks really bad. But if you only have 35 characters on a 40-character line, it's just not as noticeable, and you don't need to move Heaven and Earth to fix it.

Obviously, the new layout is going to be much shorter, and fewer pages mean fewer places where the bottom lines don't line up. So that's also going a lot faster.

Perceptions can be weird

in

You know, when I got the proof, I was immediately struck by the idea that the font looked wrong, somehow--not like a real book font. And then on a whim I opened the book I am currently reading and compared it. And the font is exactly the same. It should be noted that the font in no way struck me as weird or amateurish or not book-like when I started reading that book.

When I'm a little nervous about stuff, I sometimes switch into this hyper-critical mode, where nothing seems right. It's not a very helpful frame of mind....

Heh

in

I'm reading over the proof of Trang, and finding mostly minor things to fix. At one point, Patch is saying something, and I used a comma where I really should have used a semicolon. I was about to replace it, and then I was like, No way in hell does Patch use semicolons. Even when he talks.

Other things are running to schedule, though

in

I finished the large-print layout today, huzzah! I'll have to wait on the new cover, but at least I know that will be easy to do.

And the proof came today! Well ahead of the estimated arrival time. It looks very nice, I'm quite happy with it--and that's a good thing, because it would have been a real pain to have to find another print-on-demand publisher.

ETA: I should note that I'm happy with what CreateSpace did. But I'm thinking of changing the font. Also, I was considering dropping the size of the font a point for the new layout, but looking at it--no. It's funny because I've printed it out at full size and thought it was mighty big, but looking at it in book form--no, it shouldn't go down another point.

EATA: The actual laying-out process added four pages this time. Last time it added six. I believe I had five pages before I hit CreateSpace's maximum page count if I used 23-point line spacing, so I must concur with my earlier opinion that that was simply cutting things too close.

Production delay

in

So, here I was, about ready to go ahead and put the hard copy of the book up for sale as soon as I saw the proof, but one thing was nagging at me: Wouldn't it make sense to do the new layout first? Especially if I was ultimately able to drop the price--it seems kind of annoying to be like, "Ha-ha! If you had waited a week, you could have paid less! Sucks to be you!"

And then, I was worried about the cover, in two regards. For starters, I'm actually kind of serious about my worries regarding the lack of wacky art. It seems like nowadays, there are two kinds of sci-fi: The fun adventure sort, and then the stuff that takes itself extremely seriously, where the author came up with their own kind of physics or their own theory about the meaning of the Universe, and then wrote a book to explain it all. The covers of these books tend to be sparse: A black background, with maybe a space station on it, or a vortex, or nothing at all.

Trang, a book in which quite literally no one knows how stuff works, and the lead character is completely ignorant of even basic technology, is not that kind of book. So the relatively sparse, dark cover is actually specifically misleading to fans of sci-fi, because the people who like the adventure stuff will be put off, and the people who like the really hard sci-fi will read it and then will be put off.

The other concern about the cover is that the lightning (almost typed "lightening"! bad girl!) is clip art. Like most people, I've generally used clip art with abandon, but then again, I've never sold something that had clip art on it. So I decided that I'd better double-check and make sure I can use it on a book jacket, and the answer is no--if you're going to sell it, you can't put clip art on it (at least not the clip art I have).

So, you know, that's pretty much the third strike right there. This means I'm going to do the new layout before I release the book, and that I'm going to have to--try not to laugh if you know me--create real cover art! Like, the kind where you draw it, and color it in--oh, this is going to be interesting. I'm not sure if I should try to risk human figures or just stick with planets and ships and stuff (human figures would be more suitable to the kind of book it is, though). I know I'm going to rely heavily on the fact that this art won't be very big, and that most of the cover art in this genre isn't exactly Renaissance Master material.

Can I still release it this month? God only knows....

More on rejection letters

in

I bucked up last night and finished Publish This Book! which got a little better, mainly because the guy stopped trying to impress me with how much he drinks and how often he's gotten laid and did you know he occasionally takes drugs? He does! Because he is just that cool and not at all an exact clone of every other insecure 20-something out there, ever.

Anyway, the interesting bit for the purposes of this blog is that he includes his rejection letters for the book in the book. Recently I got my hair cut, and my hairdresser and I were discussing this whole decision to forgo traditional publishing, and she asked a question I often asked myself when I first started getting The Letters: When they say the book is good, entertaining, and enjoyable, are they just bullshitting me?

I don't know how true this is, but I've heard that when actors audition for parts in Hollywood the rule is: If they tell you that you're great, it means you're not getting cast. If they're really super-nice to you, it means you sucked. The more they lay on the praise, the worse you did. (Noncommittal hms are much more likely to lead to callbacks.)

Of course, New York City is culturally very unlike Hollywood--people rarely try to spare your feelings there, especially if they feel that doing so is not going to benefit you in the long run. So there was that general argument against that analogy, and that Very Honest Agent didn't seem to think the positive feedback was bullshit at all. The rejection letters in Publish This Book! offer further confirmation for that perspective. The letters offer very specific reasons for not taking up the book: The editors think the concept is thin (having read the finished product, I would agree), that it's not enough to support an entire book (even the author would agree with that one), and that it won't appeal to an audience other than frustrated writers. They don't praise the book, although there is some interest in other projects by the writer.

So I think it's pretty clear that rejection letters do tend to say what the person writing them thinks. They may be very frustrating, as they were in my case, and they may be couched in terms that require a native to translate, but they are, at the core, honest.