SinC into Great Writing, #3 (final)

Ellen Hart spoke next, giving a practical outline of what is involved in putting a book online, steps she had to figure out when she decided to convert her backlist titles of the Jane Lawless series into ebooks.

• First, you need to be sure you have the publication rights or work to get rights reverted from the original publisher. This can take some time. She found that dealing directly with the publisher was the most efficient way.
• You need to get the printed book scanned (she had hers done by a company that does this using a device that looks like “a tiny tanning bed for books”) – or you can work from a digital file. Make sure any editorial changes that were made are reflected in the digital file. If you use a company to do this step, you’ll want to get the scanned files back in mobi, ePub, and pdf formats. Mobi is the format Amazon uses; most other ebook vendors use ePub. Among such companies are 52novels, BookBaby, and Booknook. (Ellen was very happy with Kimberly Hitchens at Booknook.)
• Cover design  is important. Ellen said that words have to be relatively HUGE and graphic has to be simple and sharp in order to stand out when only postage-stamp size. She recommends The Book Designer as an interesting blog on the topic of cover art.
• She recommends giving each book an ISBN, which can be purchased at www.isbn.org. This is expensive, so buy in blocks if you plan to do more than one book. Because an ISBN is so commonly used to identify books, it’s extremely important for distribution. (NB: This is the key to why Amazon started selling books. There was no other widely-used consumer product with a standard inventory control system. I forget where I read that. Maybe it was just something I dreamed.) You can’t use the ISBN of a book already published, because it’s specific to the edition.
• Metadata will help people discover your books. Make a list of all the words that people might be searching for – setting, subject matter, genre, etc.  Before you get ready to upload, also be sure to have review quotes and blurbs on hand, because these will be entered as you upload and will help readers make up their mind about your book.
• DRM (digital rights management) is optional. It makes copying difficult and is designed to discourage people from sharing your book. Unfortunately it can frustrate users and is easily cracked, so Ellen prefers to go without it. This will be a choice you’ll be asked to make as you upload your book.
• Pricing is complicated. It’s easy to lower a price, but hard to go up—because customers get irate. Amazon’s royalty structure encourages prices at $2.99 and up. Low prices may be harmful for the business in the long run (and your percentage is much lower). Good job, Ellen!

Marcia Talley followed , giving detailed step-by-step instructions on how to clean  up and upload a document to Amazon and other ebook platforms. She had a lot of examples; here are some random notes (I was getting tired):

• Need to have a Word document – scanning may be best if you have been edited; otherwise you need to work every edit into your original manuscript. Even so, you need to proofread scanned text, because the OCR (optical character recognition) can go wrong. She showed some amusingly garbled phrases to illustrate this point.
• In Word, use the “show” icon to tidy up the invisible problems of  extra spaces or tabs or hard returns where they don’t belong. (Do you still put two spaces after a period, just like you were taught in typing class. Don’t do that!! Your typing teacher lied. You’ll have to delete that extra space.) Take out all of the contents of headers and footers, including page numbers.
• Ctrl+A and make sure the format is consistent throughout – with properly indented paragraphs, etc. Use standard fonts and avoid any fussy special fonts; they won’t work in ebooks. (A short editorial comment here: the absolute lack of design is one of the things I despise about ebooks.) Use find/replace to take out double spaces – need to be one space between sentences only. Yeah, that typing teacher was a sadist. Set your manuscript to have curly, not straight, quotes. Use page breaks rather than section breaks.
• Have your bank account info ready – it will be needed to set up your account – not to spend money, but to earn it.
• Make sure the cover art is 72 dpi – if the upload doesn’t work, it won’t tell you why it didn’t work, but chances are your cover wasn’t 72 dpi.

There was a lot more detail in her presentation slides.

The dinner speaker was Meg Gardiner. Her talk was followed by a panel on marketing and consisted of a self-published author, an agent, and a staffer from Open Road Media. I didn’t take notes for this, but the message was “use technology to build personal relationships with readers” and the tools are twitter and interactive websites that tie into the story.

The writer suggested writers look for readers outside the usual genre circles; connect with interesting people and then let them know what you’ve published. Traditional publishing gives you visibility only briefly, when the book is newly released, which doesn’t give it time to build buzz; Open Road does this for authors, continuing marketing campaigns long after the launch. The speaker from Open Road said they don’t see any reason to have book trailers, but they do use video more in a documentary sense – filming short pieces that tie a book into current events or hot issues. The agent sketched out a way for an author to build an interactive website that invites readers into a character’s world, an alternate universe where the site acts like a “wormhole” between the real world and the fictional one, creating a stronger bond of intimacy between the reader and characters. All agreed that authors need to develop an ongoing relationship with readers, which may not take a lot of money but does take time. Although each one described work that could be material for two full-time jobs, they all agreed that writers need to find a balance between market-oriented relationship-building and writing.

All in all, it made for a very interesting day. Eventually there will be some video highlights of the sessions available, so you can see all the bits I left out.

photo courtesy of jm3

SinC into Great Writing, #2

Libby Hellmann was the second speaker at the Sisters in Crime pre-Bouchercon workshop and the catchy title of her talk was “To E or not to E.”

Libby thinks the way publishers are behaving with electronic rights is ignorant and blundering.  But don’t rush out to make your own ebooks until you have considered the pros and cons of traditional and self-publishing.

Advantages of traditional publishing: don’t underestimate their marketing support. Though they may not offer much personal support except for a small number of books they are promoting heavily, they do send out advanced reader copies and their distribution channels are strong and broad. Having physical books on retailers’ shelves helps get the word out in a different way than online chatter can do. Contrary to rumor, publishers still perform editing. Booksellers are valuable for the handselling they do, and traditional publishers get books into those stores. Awards tend to go to traditionally published books, though that is changing. Reviews, which tend to favor traditional publications, also give authors a valuable third party endorsement. It’s much hard to get reviewed by influential reviewers if you’re self-published.

Disadvantages: the percentage of ebook sales offered to authors is too small. Publishers tend to be inflexible. They are slow in reporting sales and royalties and slow in paying them. The marketing they’re good at is very short-lived – no more than six weeks for a new book, after which the next group of newly-published books is given the spotlight and your book is no longer promoted at all.

Advantages of self-publishing ebooks: control is in the hands of the author. This is attractive to a lot of writers. There is no need to go through intermediaries – agents and publishers. Libby recommends paying for critical services: cover art (which is different than traditional cover art because it is small and has to “pop”); editing – either copyediting or copyediting plus a developmental editor who can help shape a book. Conversion is a cost. Amazon is where her books sell most strongly, but they have so much control in the industry that it’s worrying.

Disadvantages: Amazon is bad when it is bad – which is often (meaning frequent technical problems when uploading ebooks and their associated files and metadata). There is little available at the moment in the way of third-party recommendation mechanisms (such as respected and widely-read reviews). Since there are no gatekeepers, every ebook has to distinguish itself while in the company of some awful dreck. It’s very difficult to know what works for marketing and very hard for readers to discover what’s good. Pricing is tricky – it’s a buyer’s market right now and Libby’s experience is that low is the most powerful price point. She pointed out that you can’t easily move up in pricing without sales plummeting. Moving down in price is another matter. However be aware that you pay a steep price for going low; Amazon pays a much larger percentage on books priced at $2.99 and up in order to discourage the 99 cent book price point expectation.

She also spoke a bit about marketing and the changing role of agents, who can’t make the income they did when advances are dropping so low. Incidentally, she’s a good speaker – very relaxed, yet energetic.

Next, there was a conversation between author Cathy Pickens and bookseller/publisher Jim Huang. Cathy made the scandalous announcement that Jim actually has read ebooks. (He’s a well-known defender of printed books.) That, of course, gave him an opportunity to talk about why he loves print, which was a good addition to the mix. Jim then made the point that authors don’t have to choose between agent and Big Six publishers and self-publishing; small houses offer a third way. Small publishers have the same distribution potential as major publishers so long as they are represented in the Ingram distribution system. What you need to know in choosing a small publisher is its “access  to market” – and that means the terms of sale are critical. These conditions for retailers (in this case, booksellers) have to match the industry standard (including discount and returnability) and be advantageous enough for booksellers to carry them; that’s what access to market means for authors. Beware of small publishers that can’t provide retailers the conditions that they need to make selling their books a realistic business proposition; you will lose a major advantage of having someone publish your book. Jim also argued that .99 cent pricing is bad for business, not just because the revenue is low but because it makes it seem all books are fungable – when each is actually unique and each choice should be based on the book, not the price of it.

photo courtesy of BMeunier and  MorBCN

meanwhile, at Bouchercon – SinC into Great Writing, #1

I’m interrupting my participation in the Sisters in Crime 25th Anniversary challenge to post some notes from a workshop held the day before Bouchercon 2011 , which, by the by, was extremely well-organized and fun; got to a lot of excellent panels and enjoyed the roomy and well-stocked book room. Previous SinC workshops had focused on the craft of writing and, according to a member survey, have been well received.

This year, the focus was different, partly because there were plans for the Mystery Writers of America to run a session of their MWA University at the same time (though in the end that didn’t happen). But it also seemed like an opportunity to do a program focused on the business of writing in an era when things are changing so fast. The issues tackled in this workshop were where is the publishing industry headed? how does an author decide whether to invest her time in trying to publish the traditional way or self-publish? and what is actually involved in creating self-published e-books (with a particular focus on writers recovering rights to previously-published books and turning them into ebooks) ? It’s shape was a bit of an hourglass, with broad issues, first, becoming narrowly focused on how-to before dinner, and then back out to a broader picture at the end when three speakers tackled marketing.

The first speaker was David Wilk, CEO of Booktrix, who teaches a course at the NYU publishing school on marketing. The last time he taught the course he was surprised that none of the students plan to work in traditional publishing. He cited a survey reported in Publisher’s Lunch that found readers of ebooks don’t know or care where they come from. The author is what matters, not the publisher, when making a choice.  Most publishers don’t have brands other than their authors (who might switch publishers). Small publishers are much better at developing a coherent niche and identity for their lists.

By offering self-publishing tools, Amazon is becoming a publisher; David pointed out that it’s not exactly true that you’re “self” published when another entity has control over making the connection between the customer and the book. He recommended reading MJ Rose’s essay, “The Writer as Willy Loman” about writers as business owners. Writers need to balance the time used up in public contact online with actually producing books.

He said that unlike other products, there is no predictable product line for publishers; each book is unique and has a unique audience – though this explains why series and big names are so well-liked – the marketing for a known entity is much simpler than developing an audience for an unknown quantity.

There’s a shift in the way that consumers see companies; they want to have a relationship with the companies they patronize. It can’t be broadcast, one-way communication. In a crowded market, this makes things more complicated – to be a bestseller you need to sell more, but the old “megaphone marketing” no longer works in most instances. “It’s not about promoting the next book,” he said. “It’s about an evolving relationship with readers.” He warned against relying on massive companies as intermediaries; they are bad for the ecology of books. If we trade dependence on the big six publishers for dependence on the big two—Amazon and Apple—is this truly healthier? (Interesting that Google didn’t make it onto his list – maybe with the settlement faltering it’s seen as less of a player.) He mentioned that booksellers and librarians have always been strong defenders of intellectual freedom, but they are cut out of the picture when the intermediaries control both the content and its access. Think about the long-term consequences of letting businesses control content, access, and the preservation of culture. (Insert my loud cheering and whistling here.)

He feels we’re at a Gladwellian tipping point and the plethora of new platforms and the changing relationship between reader and writer will alter things significantly. “Print publishing is in a lot of trouble,” he said. Economies of scale in printing favor big print runs. Now there are much smaller print runs (which are more expensive in per unit costs) as a cost-savings measure, which is an indication that the major publishers are not doing well. He predicted there we may have a big three in a few years instead of six.

He said that, when it comes to print on demand options, he feels Lightning Source is a better option for authors than other digital short-run publishers because they are owned by Ingram so can  distribute books more efficiently.  (They do have setup costs that other options don’t charge, and they don’t automatically distribute your books; someone has to want them enough to make it worth it.) He believes the thing that has been keeping the hardcover alive is Amazon’s deep discounts. People will buy a harcover if it’s discounted to the price of a trade paperback. The agency pricing dispute, he says, is really about fending off the ebook future for as long as possible – sustaining the current model by keeping prices high.

When planning for a long writing career, a major question is how much a writer wants to do for herself. DIY or purchase services? Publishing is becoming a service industry. The cost of services is in flux: trending downward, but there’s a range of prices, depending on what you want and whether you want to deal with an upfront payment or postpone spending money by sharing a percentage of sales.

That was just the first speaker. More to come – though you may be relieved to know that my note-taking slowed as the day wore on.

photos courtesy of koalazymonkey and jacktwo.