Self Publishing News

An important story for self publishers of all kinds, books, websites, news, etc.

This article is from the Norwalk (Connecticut) Hour, a local newspaper.

With decades of experience as an investigative reporter, Chapman started NancyonNorwalk.com in 2010 together with her now-deceased husband and fellow journalist, Mark Chapman. The website, funded by local donors, is a nonprofit, self-published news site for and about the town of Norwalk, where Chapman resides.

For the past eight years, Chapman has covered issues important to the local community. In early 2018, for example, she broke the story that Norwalk’s finance department inadvertently transferred nearly $1 million to scammers. So, when Marc D’Amelio, a prominent local Republican, entered the race for the 25th District’s state Senate seat, Chapman was on the case.

Remembering D’Amelio from his 2017 run for Norwalk Board of Education, Chapman thought back to a story she read in the online Daily Voice about D’Amelio’s 2014 arrest record. According to the report, D’Amelio was driving under the influence (DUI), handing out casino winnings while his 9-year-old daughter (and three random men he picked up at a bodega) were also in the car.

Chapman considered D’Amelio’s DUI arrest newsworthy during his 2018 state Senate race, but noticed the Daily Voice article was no longer online. Like any good reporter, she then chased down a redacted copy of D’Amelio’s arrest record from the Norwalk Police Department.

Before publishing a story about the arrest, Chapman reached out to then-candidate D’Amelio for comment, and his response was to threaten litigation. D’Amelio said that because his arrest record was expunged, Chapman would be liable for defamation if she ran the story. She then conferred with counsel and went ahead with publishing an article about D’Amelio’s DUI arrest. She included his comments, as well as the fact that records of his arrest and conviction were expunged.

After losing the election this past November, D’Amelio sued, accusing Chapman of false light invasion of privacy and inflicting emotional distress.

The sheer cost of defending the case threatened to put Chapman, a local journalist running a nonprofit news site on a shoestring budget, out of business. Fortunately, a friend pointed her to Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access (MFIA) Clinic for help.

Until recently, if you were a writer who had a novel or other work, there was essentially a single path to follow: you tried to find an agent who liked your writing, and who would be able to sell it to a publisher. The process could take months or years — assuming you were able to get on that merry-go-round at all.

David Gaughran, author of Let’s Get Digital and other books about self-publishing, tried that route when he wrote his first novel about 11 years ago. It was an exasperating experience.

“I spent about 18 months querying every agent that I could find in the English-language world and didn’t really get anywhere,” Gaughran says. He was frustrated enough that he thought about giving up. “But then I started looking at self-publishing.”

Since then, self-publishing has become far more than a last-ditch alternative to traditional publishing — it’s a choice that many authors are making from the starting line. But while it’s not all that hard to put out an ebook these days, finding an audience takes a lot more than simply uploading your manuscript and clicking publish: it means going through the entire publishing process on your own, from editing to artwork to marketing, putting your book’s success entirely in your own hands.

This round-up of self-published books is sponsored by the Read Harder Journal.

Created by Book Riot, this smartly designed reading log consists of entry pages to record stats, impressions, and reviews of each book you read. Evenly interspersed among these entry pages are 12 challenges inspired by Book Riot’s annual Read Harder initiative, which began in 2015 to encourage readers to pick up passed-over books, try out new genres, and choose titles from a wider range of voices and perspectives. Indulge your inner book nerd and read a book about books, get a new perspective on current events by reading a book written by an immigrant, find a hidden gem by reading a book published by an independent press, and so much more. Each challenge includes an inspiring quotation, an explanation of why the challenge will prove to be rewarding, and five book recommendations that fulfill the challenge.

Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Back in January, Lana Del Rey revealed her plans to release a book of poetry titled Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass. Today, she gave fans an update via an Instagram post, saying that she plans on self-publishing the collection and distribute it to mom & pop bookstores across California in a few months. To a fan asking how much the book would cost, Lana responded "$1... because my thoughts are priceless."

She also has shared a variety of poems that will presumably appear in the collection, the likes of which can be found below. There's still no official release date set for Lana's upcoming fifth studio album Norman Fucking Rockwell. Its most recent single, "hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but i have it," arrived in January.

From Forbes.com

I spent most of my career working as a psychotherapist. I saw patients in my office five days per week. And while it was good income, I felt stuck on a hamster wheel. I only earned money for the hours that I worked.

Fortunately, in 2013, I realized I could start earning even more money by sharing my knowledge in other ways. And soon, I was able to earn money in my sleep. I created several different revenue streams by sharing the same advice I was giving to clients in my therapy office in new ways.

You don't have to be a therapist to get paid to share your knowledge. Whether you're a plumber, accountant or entrepreneur, you have knowledge and expertise that other people want.

You might start by creating a small side hustle that allows you to earn extra income. After a while, however, you might find you can earn more money with these extra income sources than in your day job (I certainly did).

Here are seven ways to earn a living from the knowledge you already have:

1) Provide coaching/consultation.

Coaching doesn’t always have to be about your exact area of expertise. For example, if you’re an author who writes about happiness, you might not coach people how to be happy.

Instead, you might coach other authors about how to write, launch, and sell books. Or, if you’ve launched a successful home-based side hustle, you might find there are plenty of other people out there who want to learn how to do the same.

Think about what questions people ask you. That will help you see what information people are eager to learn and you can begin to provide coaching services.

2) Write articles.

While some bloggers earn a decent income, most never do. Blogging is a good way to drive traffic to your other products, but you’re not likely to earn much from sponsors or ad revenue.

You can, however, earn money writing articles for magazines and high-end websites. Some pay by the page view while others offer a flat fee.

3) Create courses.

Online courses are a lucrative source of passive income. You can create a course that you host on your own website or put it up on a website, like Udemy.

From Forbes.com

It's becoming increasingly difficult to make it as a professional writer in America today. A recent survey from the Authors Guild found that U.S. authors have suffered a drastic decline in earnings in recent years. The drop appears to be impacting nearly all categories of authorship and writers of literary fiction have been hardest hit, suffering a 43% fall in earnings since 2013. There was one exception and that was self-published authors who saw their book-related income almost double since 2013, though it remains 58% lower than for traditionally published authors. Across the board, median income for all categories of U.S. authors stood at $12,850 in 2007 and that has fallen steadily ever since, sinking to a historic low of $6,080 by 2017.

The guild said the trend raises serious concerns about the future of American literature and its president, James Gleick, said that "when you impoverish a nation's authors, you impoverish its readers". There are many factors contributing to the growing financial pressure on U.S. authors and Amazon's dominance of the marketplace stands out among them. While Amazon can prove positive for some authors, particularly those seeking to self-publish, it forces publishers to accept narrower margins and those losses get passed onto authors through lower advances and royalties.

Increasing competition from Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program is having an impact while pressure is also coming from Amazon resellers who sell new books far cheaper than the publisher's copies. When it comes to self-publishing, Amazon controls 85% of the market and that means that authors in that category must accept the company's terms to get their work published. Another reason cited by the Guild includes the rise of electronic classroom course packs that are made on a royalty-free basis due to arguments about fair use. In order to improve the situation, the Guild recommends that publishers and self-published authors should be able to negotiate collectively with content distributors while royalties should be paid by resellers for sales of new books. The U.S. should also help authors benefit from public use of their books while publishers should pay higher royalties on ebooks and deeply discounted books.

From an article published in Forbes.com.

Audiobooks have been a popular sector of the publishing industry for years now thanks to the ubiquity of the smartphone, but 2018 was the year that distribution channels caught up: Google, Walmart, and Instaread all started selling audiobooks within the last year, and Kobo wasn't too far ahead of them. Intermediaries are making audiobook distribution easier too, like Findaway Voices, which ushers self-published authors' audiobooks onto the Apple Books marketplace and its 45% royalties. With even more audiobook accessibility, 2019 is poised to keep the audio train rolling, and no publisher wants to be left behind.

Ian Small, general manager of digital audiobook service Audiobooks.com, has been tracking the ins and outs of the audiobook industry for over 14 years. He predicts more growth and more evolution than ever in 2019: "I predict more competition and entries into the market, and more creativity as retailers try new things and battle for consumer attention," he tells me. "With that, we’ll see outside industries trying to align with positioned retailers to participate in the growing market, and different industries partnering together to create synergies and increase growth potential. I expect to see surprising collaborations, and new service models for the consumer, as well as experimentation with content and delivery."

That creativity he mentioned is a natural outcropping of a relatively young and thriving medium like podcasting, which is cross-pollinating with the decades-older audiobook industry in a variety of interesting ways. A few recent examples include Mac Rogers' Steal the Stars, an audio-first production from Macmillan subsidiary Tor that was later turned into a novel, and Marvel Entertainment's first scripted podcast, Wolverine: The Long Night, which brought the long-running eponymous surly comic book character to listeners' ears. Small foresees plenty more experiments in 2019.

"Publishers are getting more experimental with what they produce in audio," he says, "and how they release it – audio exclusives, short-form series, full-cast productions – and I think we’ll see more of that in 2019. Following the last few years’ trends, we can anticipate an even greater volume of content published from over the prior year; however, I especially anticipate a boom in non-English language content. This is the natural response to the medium’s increasing proliferation around the world, and with it, retailers’ greater global reach." Audiobooks.com is launching Audiolibros.com, an entirely Spanish-language service tailored to the growing market.

The demographic of audio's expanding audience is pushing younger as well as more multi-lingual, Small predicts. "Alongside global customer growth," he says, "I also anticipate a continued shift to a younger listening demographic that is even more gender balanced than what we’ve previously seen. As integrated technology in people’s homes continues to grow and CarPlay and Android Auto become standard features in new vehicles, a younger, tech-savvy crowd will turn to audiobooks and spoken word entertainment. In turn, they’ll have an influence on the content produced and the pricing and purchase pathways available."

From TheFrisky.com

So, you had a great creative idea or simply wanted to write a historical book based on facts. And after all the hours and all the energy spent in front of the computer, it is finally done. You feel all the satisfaction, but there is still something that has you didn’t do, and that is publishing the book and receiving money for your effort. Now, there are many websites out there that are good for self-publishers, and among them probably best is Amazon’s Kindle, and that for a few reasons. It is pretty to use, you have an awesome team of experts and qualified people that are there to support and correct you, and a provision that Kindle takes is not big (you get off the money when your book is sold).

Still, publishing on Kindle demands that your book is in an adequate type of format, and no writer enjoys that. It is time demanding and can be even pretty stressful. But, don’t worry, formatting for Kindle isn’t nearly as hard as you might think. There are a few ways, some being free and some at a price. Let’s take a look!

How To Format Your e-Book Without Paying A Dollar

First of all, it is important to say that there is a software that offers to format for free. Among the most used tools is the Kindle Create, which is free to download. You put your already written e-Book in the software and convert it into Kindle format without any hustle. Along with this one other writing services and software like Calibro or Convertio that you can use to write your e-Book in and automatically fit in into the right format. Still, though easy and free, mistakes using this software are not rare so from time to time it is even better to take everything in your hands. Formatting for Kindle using only MS Word is actually pretty simple, once you have enough patience and have done some research...

By Barbara Fister in Inside Higher Ed.

The abuse of what is known as “platform capitalism” is a huge issue for us.

So, a for-profit "Christian" “university” founded by an evangelical pastor that is being investigated for fraud is connected to some 140 LLCs that, among other things, run Amazon storefronts selling cheap goods at high prices as well as a publishing empire (also being investigated for fraud) that purchased Newsweek magazine at a bargain-bin price (firing Newsweek journalists who began to investigate their owners) and, incidentally, also runs storefronts including a bookstore that isn’t exactly running like a bookstore (you want to buy a book? Are you sure?)  . . . it’s a wild story. Art history professor and sometime-journalist Jenny Odell has pulled all the threads and ended up with a big ball of “what the heck is going on here?” for which she has no answer. It’s as if someone created an artificial intelligence bot and trained it on a mix of Amazon shopping habits, money laundering practices, and prosperity gospel evangelism before setting it loose to whir and spin off fraudulent businesses, a web of simulated reality that somehow is profitable.

This kind of unanticipated use of platform capitalism isn’t entirely new. Remember when, just after Amazon launched its self-publishing platform, weird books started showing up for sale that were random compilations of Wikipedia articles? Perfectly legal, because Wikipedia articles are in the public domain, but the packaging was designed to defraud people, and it often worked. I suppose we could go back to the early days of printing and the ways printers jumbled together stuff and sold it before the concept of copyright vested power in authors to control their work so it couldn’t scamper away and reproduce in unexpected places. Or we could contemplate machine-generated academic papers (so much more efficient than writing them!)* and automated essay graders (so much more efficient than reading them or, you know, teaching students anything).

It’s not without precedent. But there is something disturbing about the complexity and sheer weirdness of this scheme, as if it pulled some bits of modern life together into a shell company game where they began to replicate feverishly – website after website, company upon company, a simulation of contemporary commerce, all of it . . . melted into air, thin air. It’s fitting that one connecting thread Odell found among all of these businesses and websites is the word “dream.” This web of enterprises is made of such stuff as entrepreneurial dreams are made of. Great globalization shall dissolve, their cloud capped towers and gorgeous palaces made of baseless fabric, an insubstantial pageant.

I’m reminded of James Bridle’s creepy discovery of a wormhole in YouTube that sucks in small children whose parents unwittingly hand them a phone playing a kids' show hoping for an hour of peace. An entire industry has sprung up to warp children’s programming. Yes, some of it is deliberately twisted by trolls who want to turn popular cartoon characters into mass murderers for a laugh, but much of it is algorithmically remixed and reproduced with bits rearranged in ways that make the videos not only deeply weird but often violent because the algorithm works that way – dragging us deeper and deeper into the muck. It’s why it’s so easy to deny facts – you can manufacture alternatives and web them together into an alternative reality and, for a variety of reasons, people will gravitate to that web and become stuck there.

I’m not sure what to conclude about all this other than that we must insist on designing humanistic values into our artificial systems, that we must compel systems that are designed to reward grotesque simulations and mindless faulty reproductions to change their rewards systems, that we must simultaneously oppose censorship and promote truth against invented falsehoods. The odd thing is I think we can do it, if we really want to. We found ways to take out the garbage in the past. It was clear the internet would be broken if we didn’t. There’s more garbage now, and much more money involved, but we depend too much on networked information to let the entire system become corrupted by fraud and chicanery. When the internet became an engine of commerce with attention as a currency, we neglected to build in the brakes. It’s not too late, or so must hope.    

*Though the example I linked is satirical, there is an actual product on the market. So much more efficient than hiring someone to write your paper for you.

From Swiss Info. Beautiful books!

A Zurich art publishing fair is proving the printed book isn’t dead. The “Volumesexternal link” event is more popular than ever, attracting publishers from the world over.

Switzerland has a long tradition in independent publishing. In the early modern age, many scholars and artists, such as Erasmus von Rotterdam and Albrecht Dürer, would come to Basel to print their works, considered offensive by the Catholic Church. With the Reformation, after the 1520s, protestants, anabaptists and other anti-clerical authors also sought refuge in the Swiss city attracted also by its printing presses. They were eventually followed by anarchists, socialists and revolutionaries from further afield.

Today's independent publishing market has very little to do with politics or religion. Rather, it is a niche increasingly explored by visual artists, with or without renown, as well as for designers who work this medium as an art form in its own right.

“Independent publishing is not just about self-publishing,” remarks Anne-Laure Franchette, who runs Volumes together with Patrizia Mazzei, an arts educator, and the editor Gloria Wismer. “At Volumes we welcome zines and artists’ books, but also small publishers, indie magazines, poetry collectives and performance artists who deal with publishing,” she says.

The fair's international scope is also expanding, but cautiously. Bookstalls are not organised by country, nor are all continents represented. That said, most of Europe is represented, including Turkey and a couple of Japanese publishers. This year the spotlight is on Chile, with Chileans from the book fair Impresionanteexternal link, whose presentation comes under the motto "Sin ninguna vergüenza" (without any shame).

Anne-Laure Franchette (left) and Patrizia Mazzei (Carlo Pisani)

From Forbes.com, continuing to provide valuable information and ideas to authors.

Mystery author Kellye Garrett found out that her publisher, Midnight Ink, an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide, would be closing to new author submissions next year on the same day the news was announced publicly in October, when she received an email from the publisher.

Garrett has two current titles in her Midnight Ink Detective by Day series for sale: Hollywood Homicide, published in August 2017, and Hollywood Ending, published in August 2018, with a third, Hollywood Hack, scheduled for an August 2019 release. Hollywood Homicide was widely lauded in the mystery community, winning the coveted 2017 Agatha Award for Best First Novel and 2018 Anthony Award for Best First Novel, among others.

Garrett told Forbes.com that she and other Midnight Ink authors “were as shocked as everyone else. There are so many things you stress about when you have a book coming out—reviews, sales, publicity—that it never occurred to me that I would have to deal with my publisher closing.”

Author Mollie Cox Bryan, whose Classic Star Biography mysteries series will debut with The Jean Harlow Bombshell in May 2019, heard the news from her literary agent. This will be her first—and last—novel for Midnight Ink. Like Garrett, she didn’t have any inkling that the publisher planned to stop publishing. “I was shocked and saddened by the news for myself, but also for the mystery community,” Bryan said.

Midnight Ink publisher Bill Krause told Forbes.com that the 25 forthcoming Midnight Ink titles will still be published and promoted as planned, with the last being released in September 2019. “Midnight Ink will continue to produce, publish, market, support and sell forthcoming titles as well as the 250-title strong backlist into the foreseeable future,” Krause commented via email. Of those 25 forthcoming titles, Krause said, “Several are new authors to Midnight Ink with stand-alone projects, while others are series books that have had their slots from previous years.” The imprint’s mystery series are generally released via one new book in the series per year, released during the same month. Among their longest running series is Kathleen Ernst’s Chloe Ellefson series; the tenth volume, Fiddling with Fate, will be published by Midnight Ink in September 2019..

Publishers Weekly stated that the imprint, founded in 2005, would be closing, while Midnight Ink is adamant that they aren’t closing, merely not taking any new submissions and not publishing new titles beyond September 2019. But for authors with books pending, both descriptions leave the ultimate fate of their books and series similarly unclear.

From Forbes.com, an article that should be of interest to self publishing authors and others as well.

I’ve been to a number of C-level events over the past couple of years and it amazes me the number of marketers who have or are publishing books. It has become quite commonplace. Yet, when I ask them how they have marketed their book to drive awareness and interest, most indicate that it has been extremely difficult.

I recently came in contact with Dan Smith, the Founder and CEO of Smith Publicity, a book publicity agency who can help authors of any size. As an expert on generating awareness and interest for authors across different book categories, his insight on what authors can do to more effectively market their book is valuable.

Kimberly Whitler: Can you provide a little background on what you do?

Dan Smith: My company works with individual authors to help market their books, and we do this by securing media interest. We use the media as a conduit to spread awareness of an author and book to general or niche audiences. About 60 percent of our authors publish the traditional way (using a publishing house) and about 40 percent are self-published. We are able to coordinate and collaborate with publishing houses to augment marketing activity. In today’s publishing landscape, many publishing houses aren’t investing a lot in marketing, which is why authors need to work even harder to market the book themselves. While self-publishing has made it easier than ever for authors to publish, it has also become more challenging than ever to generate sales.

Whitler: What is the process that you use to market a book/author?

Smith: Ideally, the author connects with us at the beginning of their project. We look at the book’s potential from a publicity perspective and examine the author’s credentials. If we think the book and author can be marketed effectively, we then prepare a proposal for the author. The author would then agree to work with us (or not) and we implement a structured marketing campaign to drive awareness and interest.

Article by Harry Bingham in Publishers Weekly online.

In America and Britain, fiction is said to be in decline. PW recently called attention to the 16% (or $830 million) decline in the sales of adult fiction reported by the Association of American Publishers during the 2013–2017 period. In Britain, the Publishers Association reports a slightly larger drop over a similar period. These are figures you’d associate with a product in long-term decline: landlines in a mobile age, horses in the age of Ford.

Of course, there’s a problem with the data here: Where are the self-publishers? Where are Amazon’s own imprints? But more broadly, and speaking as a novelist, I can’t help feeling that these AAP numbers simply don’t reflect what’s happening with readers. (And, as an author with extensive experience with both self-publishing and traditional publishing, I’m able to speak from both sides of the curtain.)

The fact is that nothing at all in my interactions with readers makes me feel like I’m selling horses to car owners. Indeed, if my email inbox is anything to go by, I’m selling horses to people who really, really like horses. The appetite for good, absorbing, well-written fiction feels to me as intense now as it ever did.

Nor do most of those “fiction in decline” theories make sense to me. For sure, Netflix has upended the business model of traditional TV companies over the past few years, but a cop show is still a cop show. Who cares about business models? There may, admittedly, be a generational shift in play, but a generational shift would play out over 20 years, not five.

For me, there are other factors at work—and the common thread is that corporate publishing is asked to simultaneously ride two trains running on ever-diverging tracks.

The first issue is that the bricks-and-mortar industry is simply not as supportive of old-school brand building as it once was. Its long-serving captain, Barnes & Noble, is too enfeebled; the independents are too scattered; the supermarkets just don’t care. Huge standalone bestseller successes are still possible, but building a brand has never been harder.

from Quartz.

Amazon is the Voldemort of book events—”our friends in Seattle,” the ominous euphemism goes. The Seattle-based company is famous and feared for its dual qualities of relentlessness and opacity. But what’s more important is how those qualities work in dangerous concert with a third pillar: Amazon’s data collection.

Amazon’s power in books extends way beyond its ability to sell them super cheap and super fast. This year, a little over 40% of the print books sold in the US moved through the site, according to estimates from Bookstat, which tracks US online book retail. (NPD, which tracks 85% of US trade print sales, declined to provide data broken out by retailer.) In the US, Amazon dominates ebook sales and hosts hundreds of thousands of self-published ebooks on its platforms, many exclusively. It looms over the audiobook scene, in retail as well as production, and is one of the biggest marketplaces for used books in the US. Amazon also makes its own books—more than 1,500 last year.

All that power comes with great data, which Amazon’s publishing arm is well positioned to exploit in the interest of making books tailored exactly to what people want—down to which page characters should meet on or how many lines of dialogue they should exchange. Though Amazon declined to comment specifically on whether it uses data to shape or determine the content of its own books, the company acknowledged that authors are recruited for their past sales (as is common in traditional publishing).

“Amazon Publishing titles are thoughtfully acquired by our team—made up of publishing-industry veterans and long-time Amazonians—with many factors taken into consideration,” says Amazon Publishing publisher Mikyla Bruder, “including the acquiring editor’s enthusiasm, the strength of the story, quality of the writing, editorial fit for our list, and author backlist/comparable titles’ sales track.”

A slightly different take on self publishing, but this is a powerful and inspiring story. From ThinkProgress.com.

A couple of weeks ago, members of the Women’s Cross Country team at Rowan University were running grueling 5:30 mile repeats on the track, when the coach of the football team approached their coach and told them that they needed to cover up.

You see, some of the women on the team were practicing in sports bras, and apparently, that was distracting to the football players.

This did not sit well with the runners at all. On the ensuing Friday, there was a closed-door meeting at the Athletics Department to discuss the matter. The cross-country runners stood silently outside, as a way to show support for their coach, speaking on their behalf.

The Athletics Department’s verdict just heaped further insult on the team.

Not only would the women not be allowed to practice solely in sports bras anymore, they were going to have to move their practices to the high-school track across the street so that their presence wouldn’t upset the delicate balance of football practice, which takes place on the football field inside the track.

By Monday, when everyone returned to campus, word had spread among the 15 women on the team. They were all outraged. Gina Capone, a junior who ran on the Cross Country team in 2017 and remains close with the current crop of runners, knew she had to do something.

“I wanted to speak on behalf of them, because a lot of them were afraid,” Capone told ThinkProgress. “And nobody should be afraid to speak out for what they believe in.”

So last Thursday, after securing the permission of her former teammates — including sophomore Brianna De la Cruz and senior Hannah Vendetta — Capone penned a fiery article on The Odyssey, a self-publishing platform targeted at college students.

Capone did not mince words.

If you’re running in a sports bra, then you must be asking for it, right? Well, according to a football player at Rowan University, this is true.

I’ll have you know the real reason women run in sports bras, and it’s not to show off our hard-earned abs. Women, whether they have a six-pack or not, run in sports bras because, quite frankly, it’s hot outside. We run in sports bras because our workouts are demanding, challenging, and vigorous.

Capone certainly hoped the article would draw attention to what she views as outright discrimination. But she never in her wildest dreams imagined quite how much attention.

In just four days, Capone’s article has nearly 200,000 views, and the story has been covered everywhere from the New York Times to Sports Illustrated. It has been, in one word, “overwhelming.”

By Kris Gilbertson in The Zebra.

Harber started writing as a child, “very, very long stories, mysteries and thrillers” she says, “that were really novels.” She continued writing through high school, gave fiction a rest at the University of Louisville (KY), but after graduating in 2003, she took a job in grassroots politics and picked up her pen, or keyboard, again.

When campaign colleagues retired to the hotel bar, Cristin says, she went to her room and wrote stories. This went on until, in 2007, she realized that “these are good stories.” She wanted to publish.

Harber took the established budding-author route, pitching her books to New York publishers, and quickly realized how much she had to learn. She started taking craft classes and workshops, and attending conferences where she could speak with publishers. She queried agents steadily. It was a roller coaster experience, with moments of euphoria when all seemed to be coming together, followed by rejection.

During this period, in 2010, a CVS pharmacist took a long time filling a prescription and Cristin picked up a military romance novel. Harber grew up in a house filled with books as her mother was a voracious reader, so she’d never looked for books elsewhere. This chance meeting with military romance introduced her to a new world.

“Military romance,” she says, “like if Jason Bourne falls in love, or Die Hard.” A fan of action movies, she’d always rooted for the protagonists to fall in love, even a little bit. She read that first book cover to cover, then read many more, and started writing the Titan series. 

“When I moved to military romance,” Cristin says. “I found myself writing very strong women who don’t mind the white knight coming in to save the day, but can certainly save the day themselves, and often in my books they do.

“I didn’t realize it was going to become my brand, but I write strong, fearless women and even if you don’t realize it at first, you are that person, it’s in you somewhere.”

Self-Publishing 101

In July 2013, at an Atlanta writing conference, Harber set up a meeting about a traditional contract situation, but she had time to fill. She went to a workshop where three prominent names in romance writing – Barbara Freethy, Bella Andre, and Lilliana Hart – were presenting about self-publishing. It was a new and not fully accepted concept then. Harber stepped in out of curiosity, with no intention of following up, but found herself enthralled.

Since childhood, Cristin had written business plans about her every activity. When she came home from summer camp, she planned how she could start a camp. When she was pregnant, she made ginger snaps that helped with morning sickness and, on bed rest at eight and nine months, she wrote a business plan for mass producing ginger snaps. There was no intention of doing it; she was simply compelled to think of things this way. But now this was different.

“What they said, spoke to me,” she says, “that you can have your manuscripts and use your entrepreneurial side. It was the perfect combination.” Harber promptly removed everything she had submitted in New York from consideration. She would self-publish.

Once again, there was a lot to learn: the mechanics of self-publishing, how to format, and find a designer and a copy editor. Harber had to become the publisher of her own work. And then figure out how to market it.

While working in politics, Cristin learned to discover what people liked. “If somebody rode motorcycles,” she says, “you’d have a candidate speak to a group of motorcyclists. If an environmentalist, same idea….” Reach out to people based on their specific interests.

Harber searched out people on social media who would probably like her books. “I would basically say, I’m new, I would love it if you would take a chance on me,” she says. In September, two months after the Atlanta conference, she set up an author page, started a newsletter, and offered the Titan series. “Here it is,” she told followers, “if you like it, please review it.”

The Titan series novels are stand-alones, but if read in order they create a vivid world. She watched the first one sell, and then people moved to the second and third. Harber offered no freebies; she sold her books from the start.

The next step was to “go wide” by posting on Apple iBooks, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Kobo, which was planned for October 1st, but when everything was ready early, Cristin asked herself “Why am I waiting? Nobody even knows I exist.” She hit publish.

And nothing happened. “Well,” she thought, “I guess I’ll go change a diaper.”

Then it took off.

By Belinda Griffin from Bookworks.com

If you’ve been following my posts, you know how important finding your ideal reader is for book marketing and, more specifically, forming meaningful relationships with your readers. 

But identifying your ideal reader also impacts each of the 7 stages of the publishing process: editing, design, production, distribution, marketing, promotion and licensing publishing rights. Let’s take…

Choosing Your Editor

Knowing your particular reader, it’s wise to hire an editor who is familiar with that genre, especially if you are new to it. For example, are you a literary writer trying to write genre fiction? An editor familiar with genre fiction may notice your sentences are way too long and use too many big words. They can explain to you why you may want to alter your style to appeal more to your readership and will help you do that.

Designing for Your Ideal Reader

What are the genre norms and the reader expectations for your type of book? It’s always good to be original, to stand out, but that doesn't mean throwing out all that is expected or is known to work. If you want to try something different, you need to know the rules before you can break them successfully.

The tropes and standard imagery or typography are used for good reason. They are what help readers find what they are looking for. If you want to do something completely different, you may risk alienating your readers—they won’t recognize that your book is perfect for them.

Editing and design go hand-in-hand when appealing to a particular reader, and they ensure you fit into your chosen genre or style. There is no point in having a cover that shouts thriller if the content is a cozy mystery, or vice versa. Doing this will simply lead to bad reviews because reader expectations will not be met.