Some truths about publishing your own book

 Self-publishing for Dummies. That's what you might call this short spiel. I've experience on both sides of the fence. I've self-published several books and, at present, I'm reading a self-published book. Here are some of the realities.

Not every book can find a traditional publisher. Not everyone who writes writes material that falls within the commercial needs of a traditional publisher. This is where self-publishing comes in.

There are people out there who have ideas -- messages -- they want to share with others through a book and have taken the trouble to put it all down on paper and just need someone, some company, to turn it into a book for them, and then some company or agency to give it some distribution and publicity. These are services that can be purchased, if you have money and are willing to pay.

The problem is that, for all of what you have done, and that now you have a published book, chances are nobody will buy and read it. This is what the traditional publishers are trying to tell you when agents refused to champion your work. If they can't see a way to get people to buy and read it -- "they" being the book industry with all its skills, resources, and experience -- odds that anyone will read your book are ... poor.

My own foray into self-publishing has been mildly rewarding, but I've gone at it with several advantages.

First, I had a following for the material I was writing (which happened to be about perfume making technology for people who wanted to make and sell their own perfume.)

Second, I had experience in desktop publishing -- taking the bare text and turning it into a formatted book: cover, table of contents, page numbers, illustrations. (After years with Quark XPress I've turned to Affinity Publisher which, while it has as many quirks as Quark, is affordable and, at the end of the day, can put out a good job.)

Third, I turned to Amazon KDP for printing and distribution. It costs nothing and royalties are distributed regularly.

Finally, to get sales I aimed my website visitors, email recipients, and blogviewers toward the specific Amazon pages that featured my books. The money earned wasn't enough to make a living but books were sold and money continues to come in monthly. But, as mentioned, I had these advantages.

For those who do not have my advantages, the self-publishing process will involve finding a company that will put your book together for you. There are quite a few out there that offer this service. Just be aware of the realities.

First, just getting a book between covers and having it "out there" doesn't guarantee anyone will buy it. Sales is a whole different game than production and your sales could amount to ... zero.

Second, not every company that offers to put your book out there will do a good job of producing the book. I don't mean the actual printing. Any decent printer can print and bind a book. The problem I've come across is in the graphic design of the book. I've come across a self-published book where, on certain pages, the font changes for no reason other than carelessness on the part of the designer. On the book I'm currently reading (which will remain unnamed) there are neither page numbers nor page headings which would show the title and author's name. Nor is there a table of contents, nor an inside title page -- sure signs that the author bought publishing services from a sloppy book maker.

There are self-publishing success stories, just as their are stories of people who have won a large lottery payout. The companies selling self-publishing services use these examples as proof that it can happen, just as the diet pill hawkers give examples of users who have experienced gratifying weight loss. But these results are not typical.

The "rule" for the writer who settles on self-publishing is "be prepared to market the book yourself." The only way it will sell and the only way people will buy and read it is if you go out and promote it ... vigorously! There are plenty of resources available online to help you with this but, for all the available resources, the only way it will happen is if you put the time and energy into it. Lots of time. Lots of energy.

Good luck.

Another gem from Frenchys

Among my original seven books from Frenchys this summer was The Problem With The Other Side, by Kwame Ivery. Reading the first dozen pages convinced me that it was a good, very good writer who had written this book and, today, as I finished it, I found myself stunned. Out of breath. I never had that experience from a book before, not even the greatest of the classics.

So again, credit to the book bin at Frenchys. My only regret is that the sales of books in the book bin at Frenchys don't earn royalties for the author, regardless how much the author may deserve them. But read it yourself. It's here on Amazon.

Oh yes, I read other stuff too

 I've written a bit about my summer (2025) reading list and why my reading doesn't provide comps for agent queries. Yesterday I got caught having to admit I was reading something more in line with current popular tastes.

I was sending a query to an agent who, I'll admit, seemed like a pretty hopeless choice for what I'm trying to sell but after a while, after you've sent out dozens of queries, you sense you're beginning to run out of possibilities -- so you grasp at straws.

The agent I was querying used Query Manager for submissions and I had all my materials ready to pop into the appropriate boxes -- bio, word count, genre, query letter, pages -- but then, this particular agent had added to the Query Manager form, a question of her own: "What book are you reading?"

It wasn't "what books have you read lately?" or "what books are your favorites?" or "what books do you want to read?" but "what book are you reading?" Of course I was reading a book but not one I would have liked to get caught reading. I was reading The Perfect Marriage, by Jeneva Rose and I had a history with this book.

A year or two ago I had set out to get a taste of what was currently popular in fiction. I was browsing through the fiction section of our local Barnes & Noble. The staff had tagged certain books which they had particularly enjoyed. I bought two of them. At home I found both unreadable.

I set them both aside and turned to some other books which I had wanted to read. I didn't quite forget them and I did think that "someday" (like Justin Bieber's perfume) I might get around to them, but I was in no rush. Then, as we were making plans to go to Canada, my wife spotted my copy of The Perfect Marriage and told me her book club had chosen it for their next book. I offered it to her and it came along with us. I still hadn't read it. My wife however dug into it.

Then she began to urge me to read it. If I wanted to be a "contemporary writer" (which I didn't!) I had to read this book. I continued to resist, plowing through the titles I had picked up at Frenchys. But she persisted and, without giving anyway anything, finally got me to promise to read it. Finally I did and, I'll admit, once I got into it -- it did take a while -- I wanted to keep reading ... until I had finished it.

So this was the book I had to name when, in that query, I was asked, "what book are you reading?" It wasn't a title anything close to what the agent was looking for. It was probably as far out of her specified preferences as it was out of mine. But, like it or not, I had to tell the truth regardless of how embarrassing it was.

But the real truth is that books fascinate me and teach me and add something to my vision of the world I live in, even books I never expected to be caught reading.

Factory fiction

When a publisher discovers they've got a hot title, they want more of the same. When their competitors discover that they have a hot title, they want similar titles. What you might have thought of as a creative art becomes a creation factory, a fiction factory.

You've got to remember that publishing is a business, a tough business, so the publishers are looking for opportunities to make money. Yes, the top publishers will, occasionally, put out a book that has intrinsic value, something special. But these few books aren't expected to make much money. They might even lose money. But they give the publisher prestige and prestige attracts books that will make money.

As a writer there are plentiful opportunities to get your work published if you can master the requirements -- the template -- of the fiction factory. If you can do it and do it well, your career can thrive and, if your career thrives, you can dare to write an occasional piece outside the fiction factory template and your publisher will humor you by publishing it.

If you want to be a writer you have to think a bit of what kind of writer you want to be. It's always going to be hard work -- your hard work -- but how you approach the industry will, to a large extent, determine your economic success.

Literature trends like real estate

Yesterday I was looking over an email I got from a real estate broker. I'm on his mailing list and, about every week or so, get a missive suggesting what our house would sell for in the current market and reporting sales and offerings in the neighborhood. He also includes a graph showing his suggested price for our house along a progression of dates. The numbers rise, fall, and rise again. Tomorrow? Who knows.

Now all this while, while our house had been rising and falling in value according to this agent, I've been hard at work peddling stories I've written -- novels -- with, thus far, no success. The rejection emails from agents generally say something like "it's not right for my list."

Thanks to Albert "Ricky" Stever, I'm encouraged by the realization that markets aren't fixed; they aren't set forever. Themes agents and publishers are looking for today won't be the same in a future tomorrow. So what I'm writing now might have to wait for a culture shift in readers' interest until they align with what I write and what I want to write.

But I can wait. That's not an option open to every writer. You have to live; you have to somehow make money. (I'd like some too!) But, from watching that real estate curve, the changing numbers, I'm confident that what I write will, at some point, align with what readers are looking for, publishers who want to give it to them, and agents who serve as the go-betweens.

 

Another gem from Frenchys

 Last Sunday after church my wife suggested we go to the farmers market in Shelburne. I wasn't sure there was a farmers market on Sunday afternoon but a check online confirmed that indeed there was, so we went.

After picking up some blueberries, carrots, and beets, we walked back to the Bean Dock for lunch, for me a scallop and bacon wrap. Then, rather than having our usual ice cream desert, we headed for the Shelburne Frenchys.

I was looking for a couple of long sleeve shirts and I found two which I liked. Then I came across a cotton sweater which caught my eye and I added that to my "shopping cart." This, I was thinking, was enough. I hadn't seen a book bin and assumed that there wasn't one. In the past the book bin at the Shelburne Frenchys had always been in the front of the store.

Heading for the restroom -- the "washroom" as they called it, I spotted two things that were different this year. The door to the washroom was unlocked, you didn't have to ask the cashier for the key suspended from a stick too big to put in your pocket, and, in the back of the store near the washroom, was a book bin. Of course I stopped to look.

It being a bit past mid-summer, the bin was nearly empty but, sorting through it, I found two books I decided to buy. One was Tom Clancy's "The Hunt For Red October." The other was a slightly battered but probably unread book by someone with a really weird name. The back cover reported some prize nominations for the author so I thought it could be interesting. I left Frenchys that day with my two shirts, one cotton sweater, two books, and my wife.

I had picked the Clancy book with the idea that breezing through it could give me some relief from the intensity of the books I had just finished. Unfortunately, when I started in on it, I found that the type, in this small, thick, paperback edition was a struggle for my eyes. I turned to the other book by the writer with the weird name.

At first I thought "Yaa Gyasi" was on of those made up names that creative people adopt to conceal their real backgrounds -- like "Elizabeth Arden" who started out in life as Florence Nightingale Graham. But, it turned out, Yaa Gyasi was real, and her writing inspired. "Transcendent Kingdom" was the book I had acquired. Thank you, Frenchys. The book is a gem.

Gyasi's writing is so good it humbled me. Could I ever write as well? But it also was a challenge, to do better with my next project, to work harder, to try to live up to a standard I'd discovered at Frenchys.

It's an amazing world out there.

Three reasons why I can't produce comps for literary agents

I've been busy trying to connect with a literary agent who can market a story I've written -- a novel. The often asked information I'm supposed to supply in my query is "titles of books similar to yours" -- the "comps."

I'm stumped for three reasons. Maybe you understand.

(1) Money

Reading costs nothing but acquiring current literature is expensive. Libraries can help but, underfunded and sometimes trimmed by local censorship, they don't fully solve the problem. Ultimately to get your hands on a trove of current books to sort through to find the matches, you have to spend money. Paperbacks start at about $20. If the book you want isn't in paperback yet, then it's $36.95 and up. And you'll need at least a dozen. That will set you back around $360. I'm not exactly a starving writer but $360 would be a big hit on my budget ... too big.

(2) Time

There are only so many hours in the day. Duh! I spend some of them reading; some of them writing. My reading is not from the (unknown) books that might be good comps for me. My reading is eclectic: books I hear about from some article I've just read, books listed in the back of other books I've just read, and books that I pick up by chance in a book bin. I'm currently backlogged by about eight tittles and my wife keeps making more suggestions from books she owns and has read. These titles are unlikely to provide me with comps.

(3) Theme

When I'm looking for a book to read I'm looking for something special, something that stimulates my own creative juices. I'm not looking for a book that is "like" something I'm writing or want to write. The books I'm picking to read are not comps.

So I strike out on comps.