What I would do differently

Recently, a fellow blogger asked me to write a blog entry about my experiences as a new author and what I would do differently. The idea intrigued me. As I considered what to write, memories came back to me as I revisited some of the mistakes I made with the release of my first novel.

If I had my way, I would go back in time and have a heart-to-heart talk with myself to discuss how essential promotion and publicity are to a new author. Authors should be visible, inviting and welcoming to their reading audience. They should not be afraid to tell people about their craft and what they write. I would use all the avenues available for promotion and try to find new ones.

Foolishly, I waited for my publisher to offer some direction or guidance, but that didn't happen. They are way to busy to guide new authors through the process. It was up to me to make things happen and honestly I did not know how.

African-American romance author Kimberley White explained it best. "When you become an author, you are now an independent business owner." It is up to an author to push their own product. We sell a completed, hopefully entertaining story that readers will pass along to other readers. Word-of-mouth good press is and always will be the best advertising you can receive. Cultivate and use good industry and reader reviews to your advantage.

Book signings provide one avenue to make readers aware of your book. Many new, exciting and talented self-published authors use different techniques to advertise their manuscripts. As authors we have to make ourselves available to every outlet that generates an opportunity for our names or titles to be seen or heard. The Internet provides a wonderful, inexpensive way to reach your core audience, take advantage of this resource.

What are your thoughts on the subject? Do you know of different ways to attract readers? I'd love to hear from you. E-mail me at karenwowens@gmail.com.

Remember, don't be a stranger.

What are you thankful for?

The Thanksgiving holiday has just past. It is a time for giving thanks for all the blessings of life. Of course, living most my life on St. Kitts, Thanksgiving was something I was never exposed to until I moved to the US over a decade and a half ago. Even then we celebrate it in typical Caribbean fashion: with a giant party.

The entire extended family: mother, sisters, brothers, nephews, nieces, cousins, friends and acquaintances would meet at my oldest sister's house. Sometimes the number of guests exceeded forty. The only thing traditional at the meal is generally the turkey; everything else is Caribbean ranging from curried goat to sorrel. Instead of the often portrayed scene of everyone sitting around a table with a turkey in the center making polite conversations, folks sit on whatever surface is available: around various tables, on couches, even in the stairwell, often occupying different rooms. Multiple loud conversations occur simultaneously in accents so deep that the first time I invited my college roommate to our Thanksgiving dinner, she asked if we spoke a foreign language. Odd considering our only language is English. Sometimes, there's even music. And of course at the end of it all is the usual boisterous games of piggy and taboo. If all this sounds familiar, it is a scene I described in both "A Marriage of Convenience" and "From SKB with Love" in Holiday Brides.

Somewhere amid all the partying and good time around this Thanksgiving holiday, the true meaning of the holiday is often lost. But this year for me was different. A few weeks ago I posted a blog about my experience with coming home with a newborn to a house of folks suffering the swine flu. Most of my household including myself and my eighteen month old recovered from it without complications. I am thankful for that. The newborn did not get it and I am thankful for that.

We managed with the help of a few earthly angels. My next door neighbors watched the newborn for a few days while I was recovering. My youngest sister took a few days vacation and drove a several hundred miles to help out. Reflecting on those acts of kindness and the encouraging words and prayers of friends and family that helped us through a very rough time I realized just how much I had to be thankful for, especially this year.

I am thankful that God gave us good health.

I am thankful for the blessings of family and friends.

I am thankful that I got both a novel and a novella published in print this year.

I am thankful that in these though economic times both my husband and I still have jobs.

The list of things I'm thankful for goes on and on.

So what are you thankful for?

Why you should buy publisher-local

The last time I was here at Novel Spaces, I mentioned that my book, Guarding His Body, had made it to print. Among the many congratulations that brought a skerrick of warmth to the frozen cockles of my heart, was a comment from Jewel that really got me thinking. She said: "I'm assuming it's available on amazon.com".

Here's what you should know about sites like Amazon and Fictionwise. You have to pay to play. It's fairly well known in the industry that a 50% discount to such sites is not unknown if your publisher wants to add your title to their catalogue. What do I mean? Let's make it simple and say you have a book out that costs $10.00. Also to make it simple, let's say your epub royalty is 40% of net and your print royalty is 10% of net.

If you want your book to be available on Amazon, your book may still sell at around the $10-mark but it would only cost Amazon $5.00 per unit using their usual requirement of a 50% discount. So, say Amazon sells at full marked price, the breakdown is as follows for each ebook sold:

Amazon gets $5.00 (that 50% discount thing I mentioned earlier)
Your publisher gets $3.00 (60% of the remainder)
You as author get $2.00 (40% of remainder)

I'm simplifying a whole lot here, so bear with me. If a print book of yours sells on Amazon, the breakdown is:

Amazon gets $5.00
Your publisher gets $4.50 (90% of net)
You as author get 50 cents (10% of net)

Now, say you don't go via Amazon (or Fictionwise). E-publishers and a lot of small presses also sell directly from their website. So, assuming the same sale price of $10, this is the breakdown for ebooks:

Your publisher gets $6.00 (60% of net)
You as author get $4.00 (40% of net)

With print books, it's:

Your publisher gets $9.00 (90% of net)
You as author get $1.00 (10% of net)

I'm putting all this maths down for a reason. It's convenient to go to Amazon, for example. You have a huge range of books available and you can just shop till you drop and have everything delivered to your door with very little fuss. On the other hand, it's INconvenient to have to hunt down every small press your favourite author is published through, and buy through a multitude of shopfronts, each of which demands that you re-enter your personal and financial data.

HOWEVER.... As you can see from my quick and dirty calculations, you are actually supporting an author more by going direct rather than by going through one of the convenient book portals. It's completely up to you, of course, and I'm not going to stand here and lecture you. (I buy a lot of my print books through The Book Depository, for example, and I'm sure they have a similar model to Amazon's.) But for small presses, I do go the extra kilometre and try to buy direct from the press. In this way, I know the author is getting just a little more than they probably expected, and I know that it will be very much appreciated come royalty statement time.

ADDITIONAL: If the maths above hasn't deterred you, and before you go thinking that publishers are also making money hand over fist, please have a look at a related post from literary agent, Nathan Bransford. It also makes for very interesting reading.

POSTSCRIPT: And a Happy Hari Raya Haji to all!

Naches

I discovered the Yiddish word naches in a novel years ago. One character, a brilliant self-made businessman, was always on the go, flying white-knuckled from deal to deal, taking big risks for the sake of even bigger returns. The guy was hugely obese, and one day, in the middle of a major deal, he dropped down dead of a heart attack. He left behind his devoted stay-at-home wife and some five or six young children. When a friend asked the wife how she would cope without the larger-than-life presence of her husband, she smiled sadly and explained that she got lots of naches from her children.

Naches means joy. To shep naches means to derive pleasure. Jewish children are expected to provide their parents with naches in the form of achievement, but the wife was referring to all the unique joys that children bring: their innocence, love, trust, and perceptiveness, watching them sleep, watching them grow. As a parent myself, I understood what she meant.

I've been thinking of late about the special naches that writers experience. Most of us make little or no money from this racket, but there are some special joys - the naches - that make the writer's journey so very worth it:

— Connecting with other writers and feeling a sense of community, a bond with others who actually get the whole writing thing, and who understand the business is not all about Oprah and six figure deals.

— Stumbling upon a great review. When I do I literally clutch my chest because my heart pounds so hard. I discovered one on the Silhouette forum, of all places. (I'm published by Dorchester.) Another was by a Goodreads librarian who even took the trouble to place her review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Shelfari. Ah, naches!

— Discovering that some unknown reader has put you on her list of favorite authors, or recommended your book on a blog you'd never heard of before Google dropped an alert in your inbox.

— Connecting with an author whose book you enjoyed some time in the past. I reviewed one such book, then saw the author on a buddy's blog, and the author and I are now good friends. She's from the UK but we've discovered so many commonalities it's almost bizarre. She even lived for awhile on Grenada, an island where I worked as a newspaper editor for a short time. Naches!

Emilija and Dejan with their hard-won copy of Café Au Lait

Then there's this kind of totally serendipitous happenstance. Emilija, an engineer/architect from Macedonia who works in Montenegro (yes, I had to pull up a map to reacquaint myself with my hazy geography) contacted me on Facebook and asked how she could get my book, since ordering it on the Internet was not an option for her. I told her that some bookstores would order it even if they didn't carry the title. She wrote again saying that the stores she tried couldn't help but her boyfriend, who's from Slovenia (!) checked bookstores there and was able to place the order. When the book arrived in Slovenia she let me know, happy that it was only "860km far away from my hands". And when her boyfriend, Dejan, arrived bearing gifts, she sent me the photo above. As my son would say, how cool is that? :)

When the writing won't flow, when the wait for agents/editors/publishers to respond becomes tedious, when a review stinks, when the rejections flow in, the advances are insulting, and doom and gloom pollute the publishing news, when we're besieged by self-doubt or self-disgust, when life happens and s**t happens, and we feel that all-too-familiar despair creeping in... there are the naches, arriving out of the blue to set the world - the writer's world - to rights again.

—Liane Spicer

Living the Life You're Living

I've been having an interesting year.

My first novel came out, my mother passed away after two years of slow decline due to Alzheimer's, my sisters are all living in other states or countries, and my home was recently repaired when a contractor was able to fit us into his schedule. It has been a whirlwind of good, bad and indifferent, along with all the day to day things I need to do just to eat and have clean clothes.

After a month of book promotion, I have been trying to settle back into regular daily writing, doing a last minute freelance job that will keep me locked to the computer through the holiday, and struggling to establish something vaguely resembling a routine again. In the midst of it all, I found myself saying again and again, "As soon as I get past this, I can relax and start living the life I want to live..."

In the last week, I realized I am living my life. This is it. I am who I am, I am doing what I want to do, and the things I need to do. What I need to do is stop waiting for some magic moment to come along that makes it all okay. So, no more waiting for enough money in the bank to relax. No more waiting for enough time to dedicate my entire day to writing. Wherever it is I am going, I m there,and just have to live up to the moment.

In the words of Buckaroo Banzai, "No matter where you go, there you are." Be there, whatever it is, and make the most of what you have.

Reasons to Be Thankful

Book publishers focus promotion dollars more and more on a handful of blockbuster authors, leaving new authors to sink or swim by their own efforts. A major publishing house prostitutes itself by adding a vanity press line. Magazine ad sales are down, forcing magazines to slim their issues, and so magazines buy fewer articles. Now may not seem the time for writers to be thankful.

Despite the anxious times, I’m still glad to be a writer.

I believe the business of publishing will survive. The extinction of dinosaurs allowed mammals to take over many niches previously closed to them; nimble small presses are likely to fill the gaps left by lumbering giant publishers that could not adapt quickly enough to changing conditions. Companies will try new business models; some authors will, for lack of other options, send their work to publishers using these new models. Publishing will eventually right itself.

Electronic ink has allowed the emergence of easy-to-read ebooks such as the Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s new Nook. Electronic books cost less to make than paper books because paper and printing are expensive. Soon, the price of ebooks will shrink to the point where most people can own a reader and carry an entire library’s worth of books in a pocket or purse. The ebook revolution should benefit writers: Publishers can publish more books because production costs will be lower, and readers can buy more books because ebooks will cost less.

In the meantime, changes in the publishing world make the writing life harder. But some things remain the same. The joy of writing a beautiful sentence and then polishing it and polishing it until it sparkles remains. So do the satisfactions of tackling a challenge and completing it, of entertaining or educating others, of creating something new the world has never seen before, and of making friends with other writers, people whose imaginations soar like your own.

Not to be forgotten, either: Few jobs allow you to work in fuzzy bunny slippers.

I’m thankful this holiday season to be a writer. How about you?


As always, I’m happy you stopped by. I’ll be blogging again at Novel Spaces on December 9. The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop starts accepting applications in December for the 2010 summer class, and I’ll fill you in on the application process and why you might want to consider applying.

—Shauna Roberts

The Latest Buzz - "Author Solutions"

Bowker reports that in 2008, there were more titles by self-published authors than by traditional publishers. It's obvious, one way or another, many authors are deciding to self-publish. And so, powered by Author Solutions, a leader in self-publishing, Harlequin now wants a piece of the self-publishing pie. Therefore, they've announced the launch of Harlequin Horizons (BTW - I'm reading today the name will change shortly due to certain resource eligibility conflicts, so stay tuned), a division of Harlequin that allows emerging authors to have their professionally published books available to readers, for a price.

With a greater number of publishers reporting losses and issuing layoffs, there are more author submission rejections than when I first started writing in 1999. I'd self-published in 2000, and by 2001 I was offered a deal with HarperCollins. Suddenly, self-published African American authors were being picked up by major houses left and right because of so many hard working AA self-pub authors who were able to sell more books on the streets than the publisher's own authors.

Today, in most genres, partly because of the recession and party because of the reality that a lot of authors just plain old ended up with very low numbers (for reasons ranging from lack of promotion to poor distribution and more), the very same authors who had book deals have found deals hard to come by. Either they're not being offered subsequent deals by their publishers, or they don't like the advances being offered. And so, they decided to submit elsewhere. Most find that the other major houses reject their work because of previous low sales, or the work itself is not accepted. They then seek out small, independent publishers who offer very small advances, if any. A lot of authors have given up on writing all together.

Non-traditional ways of publishing are the norm now. It's had to be that way just to stay published, or for new writers to get that first deal. Some independent publishing companies that are owned by self-published authors are doing so well, they wouldn't think of sharing the wealth with a major. And so, also thinking in a non-traditional way, Harlequin, and also Thomas Nelson, now offer imprints designed as another option for the self-published author to consider. The author pays a fee and gets sales, marketing, publication, and distribution services fulfilled by Author Solutions - published by Harlequin Horizons.

Is this really a viable option for writers who wish to self-pub? Wouldn't it be a benefit? After all, the Harlequin press release states that if the book performs well, there's a possibility they might pick up the title themselves, so it's a good way to get noticed, right? But what about the author making money? Is this a way for the author to get paid for their work? Or is this simply an easy way for commercial publishers to make money? Some say this is nothing more than vanity publishing with a fancy bow on it? What do you say?