DON'T Buy into the Hype that Self-Published Authors Are Not REAL Authors

DON'T Buy into the Hype that Self-Published Authors Are Not REAL Authors

I just read on another "writing coach's" Facebook page that "Self-Publishing Will Kill Your Reputation as a Quality Author." She's trying to make a clear distinction between self-published authors who use vanity presses and true independently published authors, but all she does is conjure up the same old "self-publishing has a stigma" line from years ago.

“Self-publishing.” A term often confused, skewed by greedy vanity publishing companies, and a stigma to the entire publishing industry. What do you think when you hear, “I am self-published?”

• That author wasn’t good enough to get a ‘real’ publisher.
• Their book probably wasn’t edited.
• Their cover design is horrible.
• They just wanted a quick fix, an easy road to get their book out.

This is only a smidgen of the stigma true independent publishers have to fight from those in the “self-publishing” industry. The fact is, any company you pay to publish your book, who pays you royalties, or who puts their logo on the back of your book – any company that handles the distribution of your book for you that is not a real book distributor – is not a self-publishing company. They are vanity, plain and simple.

The fact is, the publishing business is changing, and many "BIG NAME" authors are now choosing the self-publishing route.

Just to make sure I wasn't crazy — and that the many articles I've been reading over the last six months to a year support this position, I did a quick Google search for "perspectives on self publishing." The FIRST article that comes up is about Alissa Valdes-Rodriguez, who walked away from St. Martin’s Press to self-publish. That's the term they use, "self-publish" — not "independently publish." Her comments are telling:

Self-publishing, you see, gives me control. And if I’m not in control, God only knows what will happen. My work might end up shelved under “foreign” in my own country again, or the press release might once more call it “spicy” and me “a hot tamale.” I might, again, get booked to read at a store in Arizona, only to have the manager ask me if I speak English — my native and only tongue. Shudder. 

And I recently posted an on my Facebook fan page a link to a conversation between authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath about this very subject ... the primary focus of which is that Eisler walked away from a 6-figure agreement in favor of "self-publishing."
 
Here's the thing: this other coach is not wrong about vanity presses. They're low-budget, and working with them can give you a black eye in the literary world. But she does all of her readers a grave disservice by dismissing the facts that:
 
(a) The publishing industry is changing — anyone recall a little chain called Borders recently going under?
 
(b) Self-publishing (aka indpendent publishing) does not carry nearly the stigma today that it did 10 or 15 years ago.
 
(c) As many OR MORE opportunities exist for savvy self-publishing authors than for those tied to traditional publishing houses today.
 
(d) High-quality self-published books are being released every day.
 
This "coach" would have done her readers/clients much more good by discussing the things one needs to do to make sure their self-published book is well received, such as:

• Hire the best editor you can afford.
• Hire a professional book designer to create your cover and interior layout.
• Have your book professionally typeset.
• Make sure your book has a table of contents and index, if appropriate.
• Get an ISBN and LCCN.
• Register your book with the US Copyright office.
• Make sure you create a "publishing company" that does not have the author's name/initials in it.
• Create a logo for said publishing company, and include it on the spine, the back, and the copyright page of the book.

A whole bevvy of new self-publishing authors would likely skip one or more of those steps, and thus run the risk of being decried "not good enough to get a ‘real’ publisher." Those are the clients I love to work with. In fact, I recently helped two self-published (aka indpendently published) authors complete their books. Can you tell, by looking at the covers?

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If you'd like help to get your book project off the ground, please message me on Facebook, send me an e-mail, or call me at 602.518.5376. And whatever you do, ignore the shouts that "self-publishing will kill your reputation as a quality author."

NOTE: Bill Greaves at Concept West did the covers for both Find Fulfill Flourish and Gabriel's Angels.

Top 10 Ways to Celebrate Library Lovers' Month

Top 10 Ways to Celebrate Library Lovers' Month

February is Library Lovers' Month, a month-long celebration of school, public, and private libraries of all types. This is a time for everyone, especially library support groups, to recognize the value of libraries and to work to assure that the nation's libraries will continue to serve.

1. If you don't have a library card, GET ONE! They're free!!
2. Send a Valentine to your favorite librarian or take him/her to lunch. If you don't have a favorite librarian, buy or send a bouquet of flowers for the whole library staff. You will be guaranteed to make their day!
3. Host a book club meeting to celebrate your favorite genre (mystery, sci-fi, romance, NY Times or NPR-suggested, etc.). Who knows - maybe you'll want to make it a regular thing.
4. Take your child (or a child you know) to story time. There's no better way to connect with books than to hear them read aloud - and the children's enthusiasm is infectious.
5. Rent a movie that features a character who is a librarian. There are far more of these than you would think!
6. Make an official proclamation to celebrte Library Lovers' Month in your school, town, or community. Download a template here.
7. Give bookmarks instead of Valentine's cards. Or Valententine's cards that double as bookmarks!
8. Post a Library Lovers' Month image on your blog, Web site, or Facebook page.
9. If your library has one, join the Friends Group - a support group of volunteers who provide fundraising and other assistance for many libraries. As a member, you will be kept informed of library funding issues. If your  lirary has no Friends group, start one!
10. Start a book collection drive. Ask your friends, neighbors, and coworkers to clean out their bookshelves and give their old books to your favorite library.

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Visit Write | Market | Design today to download your free copy of the eBook: The First-Time Author's Guide to Hiring the Right Editor for YOU!

Top 10 Lessons Authors Can Learn from the Super Bowl

Top 10 Lessons Authors Can Learn from the Super Bowl

Yup, it's that time of year again. Interestlingly, many literary types tend not to be sports types. Nevertheless, there are lots of things authors can learn from watching Super Bowl teams in action. Here are my Top 10.

1. It takes guts and conditioning to make it to the top. Elite athletes don't get to the top of their games by accident. They train, practice, and commit themselves to success. How committed are YOU to succeeding at your craft?
2. The best team doesn't always make it. Sometimes, a lesser team has a good game, and the team you think should win doesn't win. This is true of books, too. Wonder why a bad writer becomes popular? (A) Right place at the right time. (B) It's who they know. (C) A little luck goes a long way. (D) All of the above. Leverage everything you can to give yourself the best advantage.
3. Good coaching matters. Almost without exception, good teams have good coaches. As a writer, you can do the same. Gather around yourself a writing coach, editor, designer, and others who will help you lift your work to become the best it can be.
4. Getting on the field and making it to the endzone ... two entirely different things. An author understandably heaves a giant sigh of relief on finishing that manuscript, especially if it's been years in the making. However, finishing the writing is only the FIRST step in the publishing process. Make it to the end zone of strong sales with a good plan for editing, design, and - most importantly - marketing!
5. Sometimes you have to take a risk. On the field, that could mean a Hail Mary pass or running instead of punting on the one-yard line. As a writer, it could mean taking a controversial stand, approaching someone famous for a blurb, or spending a lot on a marketing pitch. Be strategic, but remember that it's often the case that the bigger the risk, the bigger the payoff.
6. When you fall down, get up quickly. Things don't always go according to plan. Sometimes you hire a bad editor, the designer quits before they've finished your cover, no one reads your blog, or the book itself is a flop in spite of your best efforts. Are you going to sit and contemplate the challenge awhile, or get up and get back in the game ASAP?
7. Having rabid fans helps enormously. Whether you're a Cheesehead or a member of Steeler Nation, you're ready to root on your favorite team. Successful authors appreciate the fact that the energy of the fans has an incredible effect on the players. If you don't have a screaming fan base yet, this is the time to start building it!
8. Be creative with your advertising. So many people watch the Big Game for the ads that they've begun an odds bracket so we can call our favorites. As an author, pay special attention to the Super Bowl ads this year. What about them is captivating? And where can you mimic their success, if even in a small way?
9. Throw a big party! When you're ready to launch your book, don't let it come quietly into existence - THROW A BIG PARTY and invite everyone you know! Send written invitations. Send media releases. Print flyers and postcards. Have food at a place where you'll be welcome to spread out and sign lots of books.
10. The whole world is watching you. OK, maybe not the whole world. But parts of the world. With a book launch, you're going public. So be ready to meet the public by speaking fluidly and intelligently about your book, having good people out there promoting it for you, and being ready to make as big a splash as you can.

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Visit Write | Market | Design today to download your free copy of the eBook: The First-Time Author's Guide to Hiring the Right Editor for YOU! 

Silencing the Watcher so that the Writer can WRITE

Silencing the Watcher so that the Writer can WRITE

You may be familiar with this routine:

You write a line. You read it. You change a word. You read it. You change another word. You add a comma. You delete the comma. You add the comma.

You write a line. You read it. You change a word. You change it back. You visit thesaurus.com and find a different word. You read it. You change another word.

You write a line. You read it. You change a word...

This is known as the most painful possible way to write. Unfortunately, it's the only way a lot of beginner - and some veteran - writers seem to be able to do it.

As Geoff Williams says on the Songwriting & Beyond blog, "The worse 'creativity killer' is the analytical part of your mind. This is the part that judges everything you do. If you try and judge something AS you are creating it, the creative part of your mind 'shuts down.'"

I think I was a junior in high school when I first learned of this phenomenon. My English teacher recommended a book about the "Watcher" and the "Writer" - the dual roles we play whenever we sit down to string letters into words into writing that makes sense. If you've become accustomed to letting the Watcher have free reign while you write, it may take some reconditioning to break that habit and silence the buttinsky until it's time for them to do their work - during the editing process.

As a recent post on Copyblogger states, you've got to put the writing first:

So sit down and write. That’s the key. Don’t go back and edit. Don’t sit there and contemplate what you’ll say next. The more you can just write or type your thoughts out as they come to you, the easier the whole project will be. Don’t allow yourself to rethink what you wrote at this point. Don’t stop to go back and make changes yet. Just write it until it’s finished.

My biggest personal challenge is the struggle for precisely the right word. Having lost more than one train of thought on this red herring, however, I've learned to write the closest imperfect word and circle it, highlight it, change the font, or just leave a blank (________) so that I can keep on writing. I can always come back later and find the proper word ... but I can't always call back the creative thoughts that flew out the window while I was needlessly exercising MS Word's thesaurus function.

The thing to remember is that you're changing a habit, so this new behavior is probably going to take some time to develop. And as with developing most new behaviors, the first step toward success is noticing when you're doing the thing you want to change. Although our goal may be effortless, relaxed writing, for the next little while, you'll want to watch for your Watcher and catch him/her in the act. As soon as you notice yourself editing, STOP. Make a note if you need to. And go back to writing.

It may not be easy, but soon this new writing process will become the norm for you, and you'll wonder how you ever let the Watcher have so much control. Only when you've finished with the writing part (blog post, article, chapter, poem) is it the Watcher's time to shine.

Fluency is when self-editing happens so quickly that we can’t see it. ~Copyblogger

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Visit Write | Market | Design today to download your free copy of the eBook: First-Time Author's Guide to Hiring the Right Editor for YOU!

A NEW Idea for Garnering Book Reviews

A NEW Idea for Garnering Book Reviews

Every author dreams of writing a book that garners dazzling reviews. They also dream of conquering Amazon. Here's a great idea for a way to do both: reach out to Amazon users who write prolific reviews on the site!

According to a very informative article on the Amazon site, here are a couple of tips:

Identifying and contacting 100 to 300 potential online reviewers and sending a copy of your book to each respondent who expresses willingness to look at it and perhaps post an honest critique.

If you spend two or three days contacting about 300 potential Amazon reviewers, you can expect to receive about 40 to 50 responses, and wind up with perhaps 35 reviews, a quite satisfactory result.

(Author's note: Recently Amazon seems to be restricting communications between authors and readers, and not all Amazon Friends invitations have been going through. Whether this is a policy change by Amazon or simply a glitch isn't known.) 4/13/2009

Look for potential reviewers on Amazon’s Top Reviewers list - and target the people who regularly post reviews of books similar to yours.

Getting your book in front of traditional publications like The New York Times and Booklist would still be a great goal - but why not take your book to the masses, right where they're looking for it anyway?

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Visit Write | Market | Design today to download your free copy of the eBook: First-Time Author's Guide to Hiring the Right Editor for YOU!

Are Christmas cards dead?

Are Christmas cards dead?

For many, many years, I took great pride - and an enormous amount of time - in making my own Christmas cards. In fact, I don't think I've bought pre-printed cards in nearly 25 years.

Over the last few years, though, I've taken to making my cards digitally - and sending them that way, too. Interestingly, the images here are samples of the physical cards I've made over the years ... the digital ones seem to have become lost in cyberspace.

In her December 20 post for Slate, Kate Julian asks, "Did Facebook kill the Christmas card?" I would say no - and yes. For me, running a business killed the Christmas card. The wanton unnecessary sacrifice of trees aside, I agree with Kate, in that I absolutely love printed cards. Time, though, is precious. And since I just can't bring myself to buy store cards anymore - not with the nice ones going for upwards of $5 EACH - making my own is the only way I can go. And making individual cards for 50+ people no longer fits in my time budget.

So digital it is. I re-upped my Blue Mountain subscription this year, along with subscribing to a couple other e-card services. The good news is that since they're digital, I make the effort to send them to a lot more people ... more than likely because it's so much easier than buying/making a card, putting a stamp on it, addressing it, and crossing that last hurdle of finding a mailbox into which to deposit it!

I'm with you, Kate - I miss the Christmas cards, too. I hope you're wrong about 2010 being the year they died - maybe if I put it on my calendar now, I'll remember to make my 2011 Christmas cards during the summer lull. In the meantime, here's this year's digital card. Happy Christmas to all!

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Visit Write | Market | Design today to download your free copy of the eBook: First-Time Author's Guide to Hiring the Right Editor for YOU!

Rewriting the Classics: Audacity or Common Sense?

Rewriting the Classics: Audacity or Common Sense?

Jesse Kornbluth has a lot of nerve. He had the chutzpah to rewrite one of the most beloved Christmas stories of all time: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The editor of HeadButler.com has what he considers a valid reason: he wants his nearly 8-year-old daughter to experience the story, but she was so bored with it she refused to listen. So he changed it up.

In his HuffPost piece, Kornbluth makes a fair point:

Books change over time, and over 170 years, "A Christmas Carol" has changed more than most. We like a punchy opening; "A Christmas Carol" is a slow starter. By our standards, the language is clotted and the piece is seriously overwritten - as I was reading it, I was scanning ahead to see what I could paraphrase or cut.

I'm not parenting, and I'm not sure how I would feel if my son were to have dumped my all-time favorite, The Grapes of Wrath, after giving it a go for less than a chapter ... so I appreciate Kornbluth's desire to share this literary holiday gift with his daughter. Yet the purist in me recoils a bit at the thought that we should have to change literature to soup it up or dumb it down or somehow improve it for the newer generations.

After all, classic, by its very definition, means something that withstands the test of time. As the author of Paisley and Plaid writes, "A classic portrays life as complex and depicts negative and positive aspects of human nature and the trying of values and character." This is precisely Dickens' gift.

Perhaps the question to be asked is whether or not this gift is lost in translation.

Given the choices Kornbluth faced - (1) allowing his daughter to walk away and miss out on the classic, (2) forcing her to sit through it against her will, and (3) rewriting it so it would be more appealing, I suppose his solution is the best of the three. Maybe. My face is scrunched up as I write that ... liking it not at all, but allowing it, because I have long believed that reading something is almost always better than not reading at all.

But it's Dickens! We don't REwrite Dickens! Unless, of course, we do.

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Visit Write | Market | Design today to download your free copy of the eBook: First-Time Author's Guide to Hiring the Right Editor for YOU!