Today's blog is directed to those aspiring writers who wish to see their works published. I'm going to chronicle my experience in making the Verdan Chronicles available. I could also have titled this "How Not to Publish Your Work", but I don't think that's 100% true. I'm going to start by providing a summary of my advice.
1. Go outside of your comfort zone, but focus on those things that don't make you miserable.
2. Spending money helps, but spend it wisely and don't jeopardize you or famiy's well-being in the process.
3. Have patience. Success can happen overnight, but generally it takes a while. Don't give up.
4. Set realistic expectations. Dare to dream, but at the end of the day acknowledge that the world may not be quite ready for what you're offering.
5. Be your own cheerleader. Cherish those who offer support and encouragement, but realize that even friends have their own lives and are not intentionally ignoring you.
Ok, that's enough for now. Other attempted words of wisdom will pop up along the way. Feel free to take them or leave them. So how did I go about publishing the Verdan Chronicles? Much of this I've documented in the past, but it bears repeating. I did not start this story with the intent of publishing it, let alone dream that one day others might be interested in reading it. I created a world. And I populated that world with characters that I found interesting. My intent was to create an immersive world with NPCs for my friends to visit as part of our Dungeons and Dragons adventuring. After several months of getting things organized, one friend decided it was time to move on and he decided he no longer wanted to play. Another friend decided it was a good time to quit and so just like that, our D&D adventures stopped.
This was over 35 years ago. I don't recall being sad or upset at the time. College graduation was coming up and quitting did make sense. But I just found those characters I created so damn interesting that they just wouldn't go away. And so I started chronicling their adventures. In a way, I was going to play out the adventures on paper; by myself. After about 200 pages of writing (handwritten and then later typed...on a typewriter), life took over. I got married, I graduated and then I got a full time job. The job became a career.
For the next 25+ years I would revisit the world from time to time, write a chapter here or there, but sometimes go several years without picking it up. I liked my career. I still do, but Verdan became this itch that every once in a while had to be scratched.
And then I hit 50 years old. It was a time of reflection. I hoped to still live quite a while, but was forced to admit that most of my life was probably over. Did I have any regrets? I was still married to a loving wife. I had two awesome kids who were doing ok. I was living a typical middle-class life. But Verdan was still calling out to me. I hadn't finished the story. In fact, I hadn't finished the first book. At that moment I became determined to tell the story.
About the time I finished The Fourth Age, people at work were talking about what they did outside of work for fun. A few talked about wanting to write. I opened up and admitted I was writing and recently finished a draft of my first book. A few coworkers became excited and said they wanted to read it. As you may know, the books are 500 pages. I offered to share the Word file, but generally people said they still liked the feel of the printed page when reading. And so I printed out a copy and it burned through more than one ink cartridge, let alone a ream of paper. It was bulky and still not formatted in the easiest style to read. And don't get me started on the typos. Spell check aborted after so many words. And with all the crazy names and places I was creating, just about everything was getting underlined. It was a mess.
Enter my son. He suggested I consider self-publishing and told me about a site he heard about...Lulu. I checked it out. They had a lot to offer and seemed like they already helped people publish a lot of books. I decided that I just wanted to publish in a paperback format. If you format the book yourself, it costs nothing to publish. What did I have to lose? My son agreed to format my file. He scanned through some stock images and suggested a cover. I approved and a few months later the first book was published.
Now, just because you publish doesn't mean you can start collecting royalties. There are over a million choices out there (literally). Without marketing your sales are very likely to be low. Mine were non-existent...zero. Well, that's not entirely true as I purchased six to eight books on my own and started giving it away to coworkers, friends and relatives who expressed interest. Those first two coworkers who encouraged me not only read it, but said they loved it. One even said it was as good as anything he's ever read in the genre and he reads a lot. Ok, I acknowledge that friends are prone to give positive feedback. But at this point I did start to wonder. Are my books any good? Would people actually be interested in reading them?
I have to tell you that every time I found a person who read my book I was overjoyed. Not all praise was as glowing as the first two, some comments were more on the neutral side, but noone said it sucked, so I took that as affirmation to move forward. But was it all good news? No. Some people who expressed interest took a copy of the book and then never gave any feedback. The few I asked just said they hadn't found time to read it yet. That was several years ago. Sigh.
Over the next few years I continued to follow the formula of letting my son select a stock photo or image cover, format the file and publish the book. The first two were published pretty quickly, but then it started taking longer and longer for him get one done. He had lost interest. Dad wasn't exactly making any money at this, and even though I offered to pay him for his services, I could expect maybe one book a year. After a first draft of Volume 6, I gave up. Working with him was going nowhere and I just wasn't interested in taking the time to do my own formatting. A new approach was needed.
Before I get into my new approach, let me review a few other steps I took. After each book was published the first time I went ahead and filed a copyright registration. From what I understand, there's an inherent copyright that authors are entitled to, but if you expect to sue someone for damages should they steal your work, you are much better off being registered. I don't know if it's true, but for the $35 or whatever it costs now, you do get a nice certificate that is sort of proof that you are a published author. It's worth doing for that reason alone.
I started this web-site. My son helped set it up, but I've been pretty much on my own with it for the past several years. Traffic is pretty low. And by low I mean it's probably just me, some random robot hits and a very occasional stray hit from some curious person. That's ok. It's relatively cheap and gives me someplace to do stuff like this blog. Hopefully, it (and I) will be here if anyone is ever interested.
I submitted my first book based on Lulu's marketing efforts to the New York Book Fair. It was one of the supposedly largest held and Lulu had a booth there. I paid a few hundred dollars and sent them two copies of my first book to display. What came from that? Nothing. Literally, nothing. Book sales over the next several months were zero. I intentionally set my expectation to zero, but included my web-site address in the books and hoped I might see a few more curious people check out the web-site. Nope. I can tell that the only traffic over the next couple of months was me. I do not recommend anyone doing this....unless....unless you also plan to be at the fair to help promote your book. I think in that case your odds of getting noticed are better.
Amber Benson is talented actress, director and author, having published a series of books about Death's Daughter. I enjoyed her as Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I watched her movies and I read her books. I met her a couple of times and she was one of the nicest people I ever met. She also blogs once in a while and it so happened that several days before an appearance she was making she blogged about writing and encouraged people to keep writing, even if it was just an online blog. I saw her at the appearance and told her I had self-published a few books, but still had a hard time considering myself an author. I felt I was just more of storyteller. She was very encouraging and suggested that I finish my series, get some good covers and try publishing as a series. Her advice made sense, but my approach has since deviated a bit.
A friend mentioned that they saw an online solicitation from a publisher (name withheld) that was accepting unsolicited manuscripts. I wasn't sure if they would consider my work, since I already self-published, but I sent them an email anyway. They replied that my publishing wasn't ideal, but it was only one factor and didn't exclude me from consideration. Following their guidelines I shelled out another $50+ to get a manuscript printed and mailed to them.
Suffice it to say that I got back a rejection letter. It was not personalized and totally had the feel of a form letter that was probably reviewed several times by lawyers to make sure they didn't say anything that could be misconstrued later. The letter wasn't that long, but in effect it said that they review a lot of manuscripts and can only consider those that are of outstanding quality (Did that mean my book sucked? I wasn't sure.) There were some encouraging words in there to the effect that they don't always make the right decision and other rejected authors later went on to publish their work. (That's nice, I guess). And then they closed by summing up their decision to say that they did not believe they could make money trying to sell my book.
There it is! Publishing is a business. If you want the publisher and the public to take notice, you need a hook. Your book can be the greatest thing ever written, but you need something else to sell it. Is it controversial? Are you famous? It's a little sobering to realize that if you're a serial killer, you can probably write 500 pages of "blah, blah, blah, blah" and thousands will buy it and analyze it for any inconsistencies in blahs or spaces. Don't get me wrong, this is not a complaint. It was just a pull back to the reality we live in. Complaining about it is a waste of time. The noise in the world can be overwhelming and without the right filter, your work is just going to buried in noise.
So what's next? After all the above experience, I made decisions, came up with a plan and I'll share all of that in Part 2.
Wednesday, March 9, 2016 at 7:16PM