How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017
zhubert.com
zhubert.com
Show your piece to a number of people—ten, let us say. Listen carefully to what they tell you. Smile and nod a lot. Then review what was said very carefully. If your critics are all telling you the same thing about some facet of your story—a plot twist that doesn’t work, a character who rings false, stilted narrative, or half a dozen other possibles—change that facet.
It doesn’t matter if you really liked that twist of that character; if a lot of people are telling you something is wrong with your piece, it is. If seven or eight of them are hitting on that same thing, I’d still suggest changing it. But if everyone—or even most everyone—is criticizing something different, you can safely disregard what all of them say.
In the same piece, King advises “if it’s bad, kill it.” (“When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.”)
1. http://www.jerryjenkins.com/guest-blog-from-stephen-king/
A development editor would be fantastic as well, I honestly just didn't know where to find one!
Ie - did you wait for your first completed draft before showing them the whole thing, or did you show them chapter/scene works-in-progress as you wrote them?
The consistent feedback I received from those readers weighed heavily on the major edit which followed. I had made some mistakes, no doubt about it. The work is now better for it.
I then gave the "finished" book to a much smaller group of beta readers and repeated the process. Then I went through the book a few times myself to improve the flow. Finally, it went to the copyeditor.
What is Lean Media? It’s an approach to creating media content that emphasizes low-cost production, careful observation/measurement of audience feedback, and fast iteration. Properly incubated and carefully scaled, Lean Media projects can attract loyal audiences and grow into successful works and brands.
(more information via http://leanmedia.org)
Would you be interested in being profiled on the blog about your approach to using beta readers? If so please email me at ian -at- leanmedia.org ... I think what you are doing would provide a great example!
Obviously, you can take responding to feedback too far, but the idea of the artist-in-a-tower-birthing-a-fully-grown-work-whole is an inaccurate idea at best, and a damaging assumption at worst.
Like King says, ignore the outliers. But if no one understands a plot twist, or everyone dislikes something you really like, maybe take another swing at it. Iterate a little more. Creative output is the art of refinement as much as anything else.
(Good editors can also often help substitute for peer feedback)
On the other hand, in general I almost exclusively read books and blogs because I'm interested in what the author has to say, rather than what I'd like to hear. Cal Newport discusses the idea of craftsmanship in a way I really like. When you're building a table or a bass guitar, there are better and worse woods for the application at hand that have little to do with how the craftsman feels about them. They are, to an extent, impersonal and external to him. A song or a poem, by contrast, have everything to do with the author and little in the way of objectivity about them.
Of course, all of this is a case of finding an optimum balance.
I assume you read mostly nonfiction, then?
When a fiction writer comes up with a plot, or even a turn of phrase that blows my mind, that's one of the best things about reading. Like "how did he think up all this?!"
Typically the answer is: hard work and iteration, and many times not by himself. I think you're partially falling for the fallacy of the singular author completing a perfect work with unflinching vision. IMO this is incredibly rare.
Take, for example, Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird. It's an amazing book. It's a novel that might at once feel effortless and also an unaltered vision of the author. But it's actually the result of years of editing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_Lee):
> Ms. Hohoff was impressed. "[T]he spark of the true writer flashed in every line", she would later recount in a corporate history of Lippincott.[16] But as Ms. Hohoff saw it, the manuscript was by no means fit for publication. It was, as she described it, "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel".[16] During the next couple of years, she led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled To Kill a Mockingbird.
Everything from the narrative structure to the title to characterization is refined, over and over again.
The goal with feedback and subsequent editing isn't the dilution of an author's vision, it's the opposite. It concentrates and clarifies the vision with each successive pass.
Novels are clearly a medium for writing to an audience. Artists, esp amateur ones, think they can write for themselves and still create a novel. They should stick to their journals.
Both approaches to writing are okay, but I think there's something wrong when an author says "oh, I'd like you to read this story, but I don't care about what you think".
One place to get feedback is in writer's groups/clubs. They may not reflect your intended audience as much, but they're also writers and would be better at separating their subjective biases (like not liking sci-fi) from a more objective analysis of the work, looking at things that are common to all writing, esp. fiction (is the writing overly wordy, does the plot make sense, are the characters believable, etc.).
If your goal is to make a lot of money selling, then "Of course!"
However, I submit to you that King is not a massive success because he targets the average. He is a success because he writes well. His plots and stories are not that great - even his fans agree. But his ability to suck you into a story is quite strong. As he said in his book:
"The job of a storyteller is to get out of the way!"
This means no fancy literary devices that let the reader appreciate the choice of words - that alerts the reader to your presence, and distracts from the story. It also means strong settings and descriptions.
> This means no fancy literary devices that let the reader appreciate the choice of words - that alerts the reader to your presence, and distracts from the story. It also means strong settings and descriptions.
This is subjective, though. I, for example, love authors who alert me to their presence. This can powerfully reinforce or enhance the story. Vonnegut was a shining example of this.
One person then brought up a point: "If you only created art for it's own sake, rather than for people," she said, "you'd be in the fine arts. And if that is what you want to do then awesome. But what we do - making art that people will use, because that's what we value - is different."
And I think that is the point here. If the goal is to make a novel that people will want to read and share and enjoy, that necessarily means foregoing your own idea of what the writing ought to be. And that is a completely okay motivation to create art!
In my case, I thought I had told a different story than the alphas perceived, so, in truth, I hadn't told the story I set out to. Making changes was a natural part of the process to correct issues "lost in translation" as it were.
PS: rooftop conversations sound awesome, by the way.
For example: I got criticism for character names, too much romance, too little romance, not painting settings enough, too much description in certain places, etc
If your goal is to write something just for yourself -- maybe to practice a technical element of the craft or just to have total artistic freedom -- then go for it! That's actually a fine goal. I work on many creative projects that are Just For Me.
If you're interested in other people enjoying your work, though, it behooves you to get feedback on what you're creating. If nothing else, I think it's good for an artist to learn to intuit his or her audience's reactions. A band or a stand-up comic gets on stage every night and gets feedback, but for a writer it can be tough.
Like, damn, do you also argue that proper grammar and sentence structure is just "an average of what the masses like to read"? Because yes, that's what English is, its an average of what the masses communicate ideas with, within the mass of people who speak English.
You aren't taking all suggestions, just the ones that 9 or 10 out of 10 agreed was bad. 6-8 complain? consider changing it. Not that you have to or anything.
With these categories, it is more likely that you didn't write something clearly enough for others to have your understanding of the subject. Maybe it doesn't make sense or whatever. Either way, edits are needed.
And this holds true even if you are writing non-fiction about a somewhat niche subject. If your intended audience doesn't get it, you won't sell to the tiny group you are aiming at.
He says ignore the gradient
I know this isn't very DIY, but it's probably worth knowing it's an option: I simply hired someone who works at a book publishing company to edit and typeset the book for me on the side. The person I hired does it for a living and is incredibly good at it. Let's just say it's not the most lucrative career choice, so I had the entire book (198 pages) edited and typeset by a professional for about $400.
This also had the added benefit of letting me write and get feedback from early readers using google docs, which was incredibly important.
I ended up paying her a pretty big bonus on top of that (as we pre-sold $110,000 worth and since publishing a couple days ago have brought in another $2,000 - all straight profit since we're ebook only so far and not on Amazon) but for my time and sanity it was very, very worth it.
We ended up changing the marketing messaging to "the ultimate growth hacking guide" from "a step-by-step guide to user acquisition" because that performed 200% better in our A/B tests, and I'm still a little bitter about that, but the money soothes my bitterness. So that was important.
Our biggest winners tactics-wise were sharing the first couple chapters on Medium and cheating a little bit, doing the same on Reddit, with a link that said "if you want more like this pre-order the book," and we worked Twitter pretty well and did a few guest speaking engagements, but no silver bullets, just a lot of lead ones.
Link to a chapter on Medium: https://medium.com/startup-grind/seo-is-not-hard-a-step-by-s...
(Link to pre-sales page, for reference: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-ultimate-growth-hacki...)
FWIW, we sell it direct-only to not deal with fees at https://secretsaucenow.com
Any insight on "piracy" rates? I recently published something print-only, and was considering offering a PDF (layout matters). It's a completely different "vertical," so the rest of your experience isn't too relevant.
I also once saw an author online who had a similar sentiment and offered a "did you download this book somewhere" button where you could donate a freely chosen amount of money to "ease your mind" and support future releases that worked rather well (to his own surprise). Trying to think of the name but can't I'll edit if it pops into my head.
My book is neither tech nor mass-market, and I've heard from another author in the area that "piracy" doesn't seem to be a major factor. It's also a large enough file to be a pain to email or put on a free blog, and unlikely to turn into a reliable torrent, so accidental or casual mass distribution is unlikely. Hm...
If you're really concerned you can use gumroad, which will allow you to stamp each .pdf with the user's email when they bought
1. To write the best book you possibly can
2. To print, market and sell that book
Far and away the most important thing is No. 1, because No. 2 cannot happen effectively without that. And the bar is high - very high. So in many ways the battle is lost or won by the time you've put down your pen. Yes marketing and distribution are incredibly important. Design too. But none of it is going to do much good unless the book really works. And making a book work is not hit and miss. It's the product of a very exact type of knowledge and skill - this is especially true of genre work. Of course, there have been a few tremendous exceptions - but you'll know if you're one of those.
So with self-publishing, as with ordinary publishing: first write a great book.
For that the tools you need are:
1. Someone who can give you tough feedback and who knows what they're talking about
2. A writing group for softer, more regular feedback
3. Long practice in writing shorter work
4. Long practice in critical reading of other people's work, especially unpublished work. You'll never make a mistake once you see that mistake and understand it in someone else's work.
Proof that "none of it is going to do much good unless the book really works" is not reliably true, by counter-example: https://www.google.com/#q=bad+books+bestsellers
Random technical example (fast NTFS filesystem metadata search) I almost lost because I forgot to bookmark it after reading the only HN comment I've ever seen mention it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13738309 And further, I just found the child comment sharing another utility!
Edit: Focusing more on preventing misinterpretation.
I accept that some bad books succeed, but this really is vanishingly rare. Subjectively even many so-called bad books have really excellent qualities - especially in narrative structure.
So there are Bad Books and then there are BADly written books.
I agree also with your point: build it and they will come doesn't work. Marketing is essential. But ask people to swallow an unreadable book - which is most books people write - and all the marketing in the world won't save you.
In the writing groups I've participated in, there seem to be a number of authors that are scared off by the process of getting their work out there. I'm hopeful that this post will help them overcome the technical hurdles in doing so.
I invite you to check out my novel's Amazon page and read some of the reviews. Even the negative reviews praise the story itself, while slamming my writing style :)
Something about getting the product in front of a critical audience ASAP to prevent wasting time creating something that even marketing can't save?
The trouble with getting stuff in front of a critical audience is that you don't get many chances. If you run after friends and family with a manuscript, you may also find your circle of acquaintance rapidly shrinking.
So, I don't think you can treat it exactly like an MVP :). However, to talk in "HN" terms the equivalent of an MVP in the literary scene is probably a short story. If you can write one good short story, the chances are you've cracked a great number of the problems of writing a novel. So I always strongly advise people to write short work and share it. And that is less intimidating to your potential audience. Also it's likely you can get feedback from magazines and so on. With a novel - it's very hard to get feedback in a timely fashion, or with any detail.
Now, of course, novels have significant other challenges, but at least you've addressed style/voice and basic story-telling.
What I find about technical people (even mildly technical people such as myself) is that we have a big disadvantage: rationality. The thing is that being reasonable often makes for bad story telling. You need to have a little bit of cruelty and unreasonableness to generate an emotionally convincing world. I find writers with a technical background portray rational actors and lack a sense of drama (I do anyway). To give an example, they resolve conflicts too early. They find using "miscommunication" to be a kind of cheat. They don't like information hiding (ironically!)...And these are all staples of provocative fiction.
Anyway, sorry I haven't really clarified much there.
1. Identify the problems and just work on eliminating them.
2. Write about characters in a milieu in which everyone does behave in a highly rational way - to be honest I don't know of such an environment - but kinda sounds interesting.
3. Abandon conventional narrative techniques. However this doesn't work if you want to write genre fiction, or anything that will be widely read - i.e. you're in the experimental zone!
4. One writer I know uses Myers–Briggs personality types to determine each character's behaviour and lets their actions in each situation flow from that. In fact he's a good writer and the technique (however he uses it) really works, though I would have been a sceptic if someone told me that is what they do.
The thing that fascinates me is how some writers can create tension in the smallest things. Some writers can generate drama out of a missing cat, or the fleas on a dog. It's all about tapping into extreme subjective reactions, while showing the rational justification the character supports it with...
Good luck.
For my use case (self-publishing a digital-only book):
I wrote "Learn Java the Hard Way" using Leanpub and I was pleased with the experience, but their build tools are closed-source and sort-of creaky and the tweak-compile-preview cycle is WAY too slow for my workflow.
I intend to use Softcover for my next one.
Recently I switched to Gumroad for fulfillment and I have been incredibly happy with them. Highly recommended.
Happy to update the post with alternatives.
Not the person you asked, and haven't tried the feature out myself, but saw this a while ago:
How We’re Handling VAT at Gumroad: http://blog.gumroad.com/post/110080508463/vat
Here is an excerpt from that page:
[ We’ve talked a lot in the past about how we approach building Gumroad: We ask ourselves what creators are spending time on that isn’t making things, and then we figure out how to do those things for them.
We are tackling VAT in the same way. Going forward, this is what creators on Gumroad need to do to properly handle VAT for their digital products:
Go back to making awesome stuff.
In other words, we’re on it. Gumroad will collect VAT as required and remit it to the EU. You won’t need to fill out any forms, register for anything, or send anything out. Your (EU-based) customers, will see (and pay) the added VAT on their purchases. ]
:)
I'd change a thing, press build, wait 9 minutes and check to see if that fixed it. In particular, woe is me if I wanted to use a mathematical formula.
I like that with Softcover I can use a local build system and can fall back to LaTeX (well, PolyTeX) to give me much better control.
I just used them to get a nice-looking PDF and sold it myself from my website using Stripe to accept credit cards.
- 99% of all drafts sent to literary agents are objectively non-publishable. Simple lack of quality, lack of maturity, or other quantifiable factors. One or two drafts is not enough, even for experienced established novelists. Sadly, you can often tell within the first 5 pages, and even within the first paragraph.
- Out of the 1% that have the potential to be publishable, at least 4 drafts, and often much more, are required to reach the quality desired to actually be publishable.
- Good novels that are simply not what the agent/publisher is looking for at that time is also a factor, but a very distant one relative to just quality of work.
- In fact, if your novel is "good" but the agent/publisher is not inclined to pick it up, they are more inclined to ask for a full draft, to give great editorial notes, or to give referrals to other agents/publishers.
- If an agent thinks that they cannot take a specific "Good" book to market, they will frequently give pertinent feedback and often suggest specific revisions in order to make such a book marketable.
- At PNWA and other literary conferences vast majority of attendees bring single or maybe two-draft.
I should note that "number of drafts" is not an absolute requirement. Different folks write differently, and having a high number of iterations on your novel is not an indication of quality, rather than indication of prerequisite work required to produce a good product.
So while the publishing world is far from perfect, and both publishers and agents tend to gravitate towards what's fashionable, the reality is that the vast majority of aspiring work is simply far from finished, despite the authors' claims (this doesn't preclude garbage like "50 shades" from seeing the light of day, mind you).
Self-publishing gives those 99% a window to self-publish with only marginal quality controls. This in a way has the potential to overwhelm the system, and the objectively higher quality works can get drowned out in the noise.
Not to mention that, once self-published, a book is highly unlikely to be re-published by a traditional publisher, especially for a first-time author.
I'll close this tirade on a positive message. If you're a writer, you've already succeeded. The inner battles fought every single day for months and years on end alone make you a winner.
cough Elmore Leonard cough
cough Robert Heinlein cough
> Not to mention that, once self-published, a book is highly unlikely to be re-published by a traditional publisher, especially for a first-time author.
That's a good thing. I think more writers should be in a "fire an forget" mode, i.e write a book, self-publish it, have readers or not, and move on to the next story. Rinse and repeat until you are able to write good stories. I think it's much better for self-esteem to be able to think "I already wrote 5 novels. Most are shit but, hey, it's getting better and better every time" than "argh, I have to write that first novel from scratch, for the fifth time. I'm fed up with it. I've been working on it for 10 years. I feel like I won't ever finish it. Maybe this writing thing is not for me".
However, if you're an aspiring novelist, and you are frustrated that agents are not responding to your query letters with 5 pages of manuscript, and you've only done one or two drafts, there's a good chance that your book just isn't ready.
The other point I make is that the self-publishing industry allows for books that are objectively "not ready to enter the market" to enter the market, and at a ratio that overwhelms books that ARE objectively ready. This skews the market.
So, it kinda works. People who know you will be able to download your awful book, while innocent anonymous amazon customers will never find it by accident.
> However, if you're an aspiring novelist, and you are frustrated that agents are not responding to your query letters with 5 pages of manuscript, and you've only done one or two drafts, there's a good chance that your book just isn't ready.
Yes, but the question is : is it worth keeping working on that book or is it better to forget and start working on a new one ? There is no definitive answer, but abandoning forever the first novel I ever wrote was the best decision in my writer life. YMMV.
My favorite recent malapropism, seen more and more often and in increasingly exalted locales, is "reign it in". "Reign" is what a monarch does to a kingdom, "rein" is what a cowboy does to a horse.
While my press paid for the cover art, printing, ISBN, and other stuff, and they've done some advertising, a lot of the promotional work is left up to me...and in a lot of ways I think marketing is a much harder problem to solve. My novel came out of an intensive workshop led by a Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy Award winner (Kij Johnson), has a blurb from a recent Nebula novel nominee (Lawrence Schoen, author of BARSK), was available for pre-order, and I've done what I could to promote it...and it turns out all those people saying it's tough to get your book noticed are, surprise, absolutely right.
tl;dr: while I'm interested in how Mr. Hubert produced his book, I'm more interested in how he finds an audience for it. (Beyond writing an article about it that gets linked on the front page of Hacker News!)
Most of my grad buddies (in experimental physics!!) had endless challenges with it.
Surmountable, of course, but I wanted to aim for an easier skill set.
Here's the LS pricing guide: https://myaccount.lightningsource.com/documents/LSI/files/pr... and here's the CS pricing: https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/Royalties.jsp
For example, I sell a very short book via LS. The MSRP is $2.99, I set a 20% Ingram discount, and the print charge is only $1.56 (though the pricing guide now says $1.72; I think it's increasing soon). So I make $0.84 per book. With CreateSpace the lowest possible print charge is $2.15 per book, and given their fixed 40%/60% sales channel fees, it wouldn't be possible to sell the book for as low as $2.99.
LS isn't always cheaper though; you should do the calculation for your particular book size and page count.
Working with LS does make things a bit harder. You have to buy your own ISBNs, spend time waiting for certain manual processes (like for them to review your account application or a new book), and deal with their clunky website. But for me, it's worth the effort to be able to publish short books much more cheaply.
Time for my annual rant on KDP and Amazon not caring about writers in non-English.
The list of supported languages is incredibly limited: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119
Finnish is allowed but Estonian is not... it is ridiculous. Latvian and Lithuanian is not allowed, Russian is not allowed etc etc.
It took a shaming campaign by the British press to get Welsch added.
This restriction is so silly when the book comes out perfectly on Createspace paper version.
It looks fine doing my own conversion for the Kindle but Amazon will not let me publish the books in unsupported languages.
I do editing and typesetting for a non-profit as a hobby/volunteer effort and end up publishing the paper books on Createspace but ebooks have to go through Kobo and other non Amazon venues.
For those who have never written a novel, writer is being sarcastic here. The equivalent in terms of reference more familiar to the regulars on HN might well be: "Step 2: study for a CS degree, then decide which industry you intend to disrupt, learn how it works, and come up with a strategy. Oh, and write the killer app."
This is just the framework for the business plan: it's helpful, but it's insufficient on its own.
Writing Singular was probably the most emotionally trying and, at the same time, rewarding challenge I've tackled. It even feels weird to describe it that way, it's simply been a part of me for the last two years.
I'm curious how that changes from the first book to the twenty-first?
For your answer, compare "The Right Stuff" (1979) to "I am Charlotte Simmons" (2004), both by Tom Wolfe. The second book, apart from being unreadable, seems not to have been written by the same person.
;-)
If you just want to release an ebook or even in paper, you can do that easily. If you want to release an ebook and have it be a success, that's really hard. It's hard even for traditional publishers, and it's certainly not any easier for self-published authors.
Anecdote: I helped my grandmother release her first book (here: http://carolynnslaughter.com/book/). The technical aspects are frankly not that hard. For anyone with halfway reasonable technical skills, launching a book is simply a matter of following various instructions online.
How much did we sell? Pretty close to rounding error of zero. Honestly, we were never expecting much success, because the book is fairly academic.
Edit: Less anecdotally: "Ninety percent of your book’s success will be determined by the quality of your book. The other ten percent is distribution, marketing and luck." (From Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/145431)
I understand that as HN readers we gravitate towards technical solutions. But the sibling comment by scandox is on the nose here. The hardest problem by far is writing a book that people will be willing to pay money for. The second hardest problem is marketing it, and all these other technical aspects come somewhere after that.
Personally, I wanted to write a story about Lisp machines, Bostrom-inspired Artificial Intelligences, and a journey of discovery/adventure in the vein of my favorite stories (www.zhubert.com/reading). Not everyone gets excited about Lisp machines, so I'm not expecting a mainstream market.
That said, marketing was out of scope of my original article and quite a challenging problem, I agree.
Disclaimer: I used to work for Lulu, but no longer do, and have no financial stake in them. Just wanted to point out the existence of another option.
Scrivener is US$40, Vellum is Mac-only and US$200, the other two are unnecessary/replaceable and IMHO should be a list of equivalent options -- once you have a manuscript, which can be created using any number of free tools.
Someone who imagines writing the Great American Novel, but who also expects to have to pay a premium for each step along the way, may not grasp the essence of novel writing -- how it fits into the big picture.
There are any number of free word processors able to organize a book project into chapters and sections. Self-publishing is also free or should be.
My favorite story about novel creation is that of Andy Weir and The Martian. Weir started the project as a series of blog posts, got very useful feedback from his readers, improved his content on that basis, and the project grew nearly on its own. By the time Weir wanted to talk to publishers, they already wanted to talk to him.
Vellum is similar, but there are direct free software equivalents, most notably Sigil, a GUI ePub creation tool. Alternatively, you could use Pandoc to assemble an ePub from Markdown (or any of the seemingly several thousand other markup dialects Pandoc knows). I ended up using Vellum for my book because it was incredibly smart about taking a DOCX file exported from Scrivener and turning it into a properly sectioned and tagged ePub, and adding new sections, artwork, metadata and overall book styling is trivially simple. Sigil and Pandoc are great, but they're also lower-level tools by comparison, with both the advantages and disadvantages that implies. For me personally, it was worth spending $30.
Self-publishing is also free or should be.
Well, it's as free as you want it to be. In my experience, YMMV and all other appropriate disclaimers, producing an ebook which seriously competes with ones from traditional publishers requires skill not just in writing but in editing, graphic design, typesetting (or ebook production), and (depending on the cover) illustration. If you have access to all those skills without spending any money, awesome, but it's kind of a tall order.
Now, to be fair, I could write the entire thing in Markdown and be happy. I don't need Scrivener. But for what it does and how well it does it, it's worth looking at.
* I used XeTeX plus my editor of choice.
* I sent it to a few friends, listened to what they said, and read and re-read until my eyes bled.
* I avoided Amazon like the plague, instead using a small print-on-demand shop with reasonable prices.
* I sold via pre-sales, my personal website, and consignment at small bookstores.
Also, it might be helful to note tha the likelihood of making a living from writing is dependent on how fast an author can complete each novel.
https://blog.marvindanig.com/2016/03/17/how-to-write-a-super...
Disclosure: I'm the developer/engineer.
http://www.bowker.com/documents/self-publishing-report-in-un...
That's 1 per 317 Americans.
My experience was through Smashwords and I was pleased with the platform. Never even recouped the $10 or so fee to get the ISBN number hah. It's a nice opportunity - self publishing, that is - and I think lots of amateur writers should feel compelled to give it a try. Nothing is quite like the artistic experience of working very hard on a piece, getting it out into the world, and almost nobody paying any attention to it. Except a couple purchases by relatives.
Not everybody gets to be Chuck Tingle, which, while fiscally successful, is the literary equivalent of the contents of a mop bucket at a seedy peep show joint. Ugh.
Actually, after several years of decline, print sales have been bouncing back in the past couple of years:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bo...
https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=AH8RA6CMVRN8Y&ref_=pe_29...
I don't understand why something as ubiquitous as writing necessitates spending $100 on software from Microsoft. A plain text editor works out of the box. If you have a need for more complex formatting you could use LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Pages (comes free with a new Mac/iPad), WPS Office, etc. I get that Word has is the standard and all, I just don't understand why the agreeded upon standard needs to cost upward of $100, especially for something as simple as word processing.
When working with folks outside of tech, something like Word expedites the process as it's their native tongue. While tools like diff and patch are great (I was a Unix admin at Amazon back in the Jurassic period), they'd limit my options for copy editors.
And, I'm glad to hear Word has gotten cheaper. Didn't you used to need to buy the whole Office suite to get it, and wasn't it like $250? I genuinely don't know. The last version of Office I bought was much more than a decade ago. Oh, nevermind. I checked. It's sold as a subscription. Costs $99.99/year, so it is much more expensive than it used to be, it's just spread over several years. It used to be reasonable to keep the same Office version for 5+ years.
I imagine it would end up working along the shareware model, x chapters here for free and purchase access to the full story, or something along those lines - though if there is a market for it you could use it as a streamlining process for publishing houses I suppose
Is anybody aware of a site like that in the wild already?
We currently offer a way to streamline creation, sharing and publishing of work through to the iBooks Store. Going forward we are focusing on being a new home for publishing.
prerequisite: Mac computer
I've recently self-published using Windows / Linux and didn't have these tools available.
I will say that Createspace is an awesome company. I just think its brilliant I can upload a PDF, and in a few days I can buy 100 copies of it on Amazon, and have it shipped same day.
Lately I've been carrying a notebook everywhere I go and I'm starting to write much more.
The major edit was done via 3x5 cards. Each card had a scene, the values it turned on, and the actors in the scene, so I sort of treated it like a screenplay. 3x5 cards are really nice for juggling things around (though Scrivener does has a corkboard view, I liked the paper approach for this step).
I personally haven't been able to make that work with writing stories, although I have found printing drafts and marking them up physically can work.
1. journey to the end of the universe
2. the fate of the universe hands in the balance
3. voyage to the end of time
I put the book back on the shelf.
KDP refers to the entire publishing program.
KU, Kindle Unlimited requires exclusivity but you get paid by page read.
I have an idea for an informal Chemistry 101 notebook. I might end up making comparissons between cartoon characters and periodic table elements: Hydrogen ~= Tinkerbell, Hellium ~= Master Yoda, Lithium ~= Philoctetes (from Hercules movie), etc.
It is not reassuring that most references in that list are owned by Disney Co.
I might be misunderstanding, but why is it unreasonable for the holder of a copyright to object to an author using their work without licensing it? This in particular seems like a pretty clear-cut example of actual infringement.
Of course I could use GenericFairy#274, or MidgetZenMaster (my appologies to any Little People reading this, but I am not going to risk to use the word Dwarf and jump from Disney's frying pan into Tolkien's firestove), but that kind of defies to purpose of using visual imagery the kids already are familiar with.
Call me a sore looser, but I am not particularly happy with Disney having called dibs on the human herritage of the last 3,000 years and claim it was their own purpose. The only original work from old Walt was their horrible looking antropomorphic animals, everything else was taken from the public domain, repackaged, and ear marked as their own.
I'm admittedly not an expert, but there have been many rulings stating that characters themselves can be covered by copyright,[0] and fair use is supposed to allow for commentary and criticism, not just "oh, that's nice, I'll use that." It's not very different from just putting people's photographs in a science book, is it?
It's probably not even an otherwise-infringing activity that would require fair-use analysis. At least if we are talking about copyright; if the character name is also a trademark, that may be a different story.
If you want to do epub/kindle publishing, then you need to be able to output that into the necessary html files those formats are constructed out of. This is a little chore, but a manageable one.
- use proprietary tool №1
- enslave yourself to Amazon
- use proprietary tool №2 from Amazon
See: http://selfpublishingadvice.org/watchdog-ingram-spark-vs-cre...
Try https://bubbl.in for example if you wish to sell your work like a responsive book straight on the web. Zero lock-ins and great sales outside of a garden if you will ;)
Full disclosure: I'm the developer/engineer behind the service.
That homepage also has a 3MB image of the cover on it, bit excessive. Google reckon on saving 2.8MB by image optimisation (or 3.4MB when targetting desktop), https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... .
Each week I release three more chapters on the website (www.singularbook.com), not on Facebook. It was just something to do for fun :)
Yep, the cover image is a bit excessive. My gulpfile didn't have that image in it but I'll get that sorted out.
It is a bit like saying, why go climbing the mount Everest if lots of people have already done so. Indeed, why trying to do stuff nobody else have done before, exclusively? If billions of people have already existed before yourselves, all the good stuff worth doing will have been done over and over again, and the only original stuff left will be JackAss(TM) material.