Publishing Ebooks

For over a year I've been blogging about my intention to publish ebooks and record my own audio books. Now I've finally published a novel on Smashwords, and I thought I'd better write a bit about what I expected and what actually happened. Some things that I thought would be easy turned out to be fairly difficult, but some aspects of the process have surpassed my expectations.

First, let me make it clear that I do not expect to get rich by selling ebooks. I didn't get rich by selling hard copies through conventional publishers, either. Nothing squelches your high expectations like a royalty statement. But I had some new novels I wanted to publish, and this time around I wanted to be in charge. So I made some rational decisions.

First, I knew I needed a good editor, so I contacted Elinor Mavor, who edited AMAZING STORIES magazine for a few years back in the 80s. She went over my manuscripts with a fine-tooth comb and pointed out the problems. Using her feedback I rewrote, fine-tuned, tweaked, and read the manuscripts aloud until I felt confident that they were well-polished and up to professional standards.

Ellie is a wonderful artist and graphic designer too, so the second thing I did was contract with her to do my covers. Some writers might be really good at designing their own covers, but I'm not – though I recognize a good one when I see it. I love what Ellie came up with. Now I have attractive images connected with my new titles – I can splash them around the web and attract some attention.

I felt I was ready – I figured the next step was to log onto Smashwords and amazon and publish my first title, The Night Shifters. And that's when I ran into the wall. It was like that dream I had about Godzilla (ending with a resounding SPLAT). I found out that a manuscript formatted for printing does not work on an ebook reader. You end up with text in odd places, no indents, no centering, page numbers that no longer relate to reality, one-word pages, and all kinds of other baffling and ugly complications. And fixing it isn't just a matter of going in and dragging stuff back where it belongs. I thought I was going to have to learn HTML and become an expert on Word, just for starters. I could see weeks of hard work stretching ahead of me. I would have cried if my eyeballs hadn't already been so fried.

Then I noticed something in Mark Coker's How To Publish guide on Smashwords: he has a list of formatting professionals he'll email you if you'd rather not struggle with it yourself. He sent me his list, and I contracted with Elizabeth Beeton of B10 Mediaworx (who also writes as Moriah Jovan). She was affordable, and she did a marvelous job formatting the two files I sent her. She is now my go-to gal for all my formatting needs.

So I had all my ducks in a row. I published my first ebook, The Night Shifters, with Smashwords. Very soon I'll be publishing my second ebook with them too: Spirits Of Glory. They have an attractive site, and they have a feature called meatgrinder that renders an ebook into other formats for distribution on major sites like Kobo, Sony, Diesel, Barnes & Noble, and (coming soon!) amazon. This means a book published through Smashwords can be purchased and read in several different formats, on lots of different gizmos (like the Kindle, the Nook, and your iphone, ipad or itouch). One-stop shopping is one click away.

Now it's my job to market my books. I have offered coupons for free copies to my friends on facebook (begging for reviews in return), blogged about my new books, and looked for my name in google-search and contacted sites that mentioned me. I also bought an ad on facebook (and will be doing so again once my ebook makes it onto amazon). It will take time to build an online audience, but I'm nothing if not patient.

I mentioned audiobooks too. My first attempt at recording one on my Garage Band program was a success – except when I tried to turn it into an MP3 file. Then I found out my files were too big. So I get to do it over again in smaller chunks. But I'm not too upset about it – making my own production improved my self-confidence. I haven't learned enough about the process to offer advice about it yet, so I'll stick to what I DO know.

Hire a professional editor to go over your manuscript ($200 to $500, depending on the length of the book). Don't be afraid to contact artists and ask them how much they would charge to do a cover (price varies, but I paid around $500 – and please understand that you're not buying all the rights to that image, just the right to use it for that edition of your book). Once you've got a book and a cover you can be proud of, get it properly formatted ($40 to $75 if you don't have a lot of images, tables, graphs, etc. in the book – anything really complicated may be up to $200, and I have no idea what a graphic novel might be).

Once you've published, understand that there's a fine line between promotion and pestering. Think about the commercials on TV that you always want to mute or speed past. Don't be one of those commercials! Don't make your facebook friends wince every time they see your name in their email.

Even when all publishing was done the old, conventional way, the people who had successful writing careers were not always the people who were the most talented. They were the people who persisted. So in a nutshell: Learn your craft. Contract with Professionals.

Persist!

The Autobiography of an Idea

Previously I blogged about ideas, specifically where writers get them. I mentioned that writers don’t have a problem thinking up stories, we’ve got the opposite problem. We’ve got too many damned ideas, so many that we can feel overwhelmed by them. But that doesn’t really answer the basic question readers are asking when they wonder where those ideas come from, so I thought I’d take another stab at it. Let me tell you where I got the idea for my Lee Hogan novel, Belarus.

Belarus was not actually the novel I intended to write. The novel I dreamed up was titled Shrouded Woman, the book that eventually was published as Enemies. One night Ernie and I went to visit Borders. Back in those days, Borders was a novelty, a gigantic book store where you could actually hang out. I was looking at the new books on the big tables at the front of the store, and one of them captured my attention. It was titled The Autobiography of a Face. The cover featured a close shot of a woman whose face was partially obscured by a veil. But even with all that fabric in the way, you could see her jaw was disfigured.

That author wrote about how cancer had changed her face and her life. Her image on the cover haunted me, I kept coming back to that book and looking at it. I didn’t buy the book, and I never read it either, mostly because the image on the cover had moved into my head and stared evolving into a character. I had no room in there for reality, fantasy had taken over the machinery.

When we got home, we discovered that a bunch of movies had arrived in the mail – we’d had the bad judgement to join one of those mail-order movie clubs, and our freebee-enticement selections picked that fatal moment to show up. We decided to watch Anastacia, starring Yul Brynner and Ingrid Bergman. For those of you who’ve never seen it, the movie is about a woman who may be the last survivor of the Russian royal family, an artifact of a lost world.

I went to bed that night and dreamed. In my dream, the lady with the veiled, disfigured face and the story of Anastacia had merged. By the time I woke up, I knew it was a story I had to write. I sat down at the computer and started to sketch out the basics. I asked myself why the lady at the center of the story was disfigured. Then I puzzled over why the society she lived in would insist she hide her condition behind a veil, and why that society should resemble imperial Russia, especially since it had been transplanted to another world. Why should anyone do that? What did they find when they got to that world? I already knew an alien race lived there – who were they? Why were they there?

I kept asking myself the questions whose answers would explain the lady. That’s how I pieced together her back-story. But I felt I had to explain that back-story to my editor at ROC when I pitched the book (otherwise she might not understand why the shrouded lady should exist), so I wrote a 35-page treatment instead of the usual proposal. I had already written 7 other books for ROC, and the last one, Broken Time, had been nominated for the Philip K. Dick award. I thought I could get away with it. And I was right — sort of. My editor loved the back-story. So she wanted me to write 2 novels instead of 1, and the first would be about Andrei Mironenko, a sketchy-yet-important character, the guy who had founded the planet Belarus.

"Sure!" I said confidently.

Belarus turned out to be the hardest book I’ve ever written. It was a multi-viewpoint, third person narrative full of brilliant, complex characters. I made the mistake (thinking I’d never have to actually write the scenes) of promising 2 wars in the story. And I knew almost nothing about imperial Russia. I hadn’t a dime to hire a researcher and I was holding down 2 jobs at the time. I ended up making a few historical boo-boos that were pounced upon by a couple of reviewers on amazon (I’ll be fixing them in the upcoming electronic edition), but that wasn’t even my major concern at that point. I was busy dreaming up a world.

So remember, we started with a picture of a lady on the cover of a book and a half-digested movie, glommed together. They ended up in the Cuisinart of my dreams, and I asked myself a bunch of questions to explain a few things. Then BOOM, a contract. The fun part was behind me, the pick-and-shovel work took over my life. Time to mail an SASE to that Idea Company and buy some help. Only there IS no Idea Company, there’s just my feverish imagination. And the amazing part? That’s enough.

I started with a sketchy idea. As I wrote each section, characters just showed up. I didn’t plan them, I rarely thought about them. They walked into the room and tapped me on the shoulder. They knew what they were going to do and why. Most of them were a complete surprise to me, and that includes my favorite character from both books: Baba Yaga. She was the easiest one to write, she was the magic that made the whole shebang come together.

But don’t get me wrong, I didn’t sit down every day and channel all these folks. Some of them took a lot longer to arrive than others. I often sat down feeling baffled, and I often got up the same way. Some sessions I only managed a paragraph or two. I had to finally set myself a quota of ½ page per day, because I didn’t think I could accomplish a whole page. Having set myself the challenge of figuring out how a space war might be fought, I had to conclude it was a ridiculous notion. I conferred constantly about the technologies that might be involved with my super-smart husband, Ernie. The whole mess creeped along, one shambling step at a time.

But eventually, the machinery I was constructing began to run on its own, and Belarus took on momentum. Once that happened, I was able to write several pages a day, on one memorable occasion turning out 25 pages in just a few hours.

Ideas come from the subconscious. When you train yourself to retrieve and shape those ideas, they take on a life of their own. It’s sort of like having your own Central Casting, a mob of method actors who are convinced there’s no business like show business. Sometimes they’re brilliant, sometimes they’re corny, but they’re always THERE. You’re stuck with them. They’re stuck with you. Once you’ve written about them, they’ll move into other people’s heads, even if those people don’t remember where they got them.

Ideas think themselves up.

I hope that answers the question. Even if you didn’t ask.