Selp Publishing For A Cause

I'm going to blatantly blow my horn (heh) for this lovely book put out by a fabulous and talented self-pubber, Alessia Brio.

I didn't self-publish this one, but it was released through her kick-ass Coming Together series.

So, this would be one of those self publishers working together for the greater good dealios. Working together is rarely a bad thing and in this case it was a great thing. An I wash her back, she washes mine kind of thing. Or vice versa. Either way, close the door on your way out while we finish washing um...each other...or see the below shameless self promotion.

Coming Together: With Sommer

Went live today :) Book benefits LLS. The foreword was written by the amazing William Patrick Tandy, editor extraordinaire (of Smile, Hon fame) and the whole book was made possible by the unstoppable Alessia Brio.

If you go to the book's ARe page, you can read the author's note and see just what this book means to me. Now that's steamy sexy paranormal for a good cause! :)

XOXO
Sommer

A Short, Sharp Dose of Reality

Last week I got my first real quarterly royalties cheque. At the princely sum of $84 I think the appropriate comment is “ouch!”

Oh well, we can’t all be Joe Konrath or Amanda Hocking.

If I take the perspective of wanting to be a full-time writer, it's fairly terrible. There's no way I'd ever be able to live off that.

Thankfully, I don't have to take to take that perspective. I'm fortunate enough to already have a full-time job, one I enjoy and is relatively well paid. I can take the other perspective. I'm doing something I like (writing stories) and receiving money for it.

$84 is still $84. That's the second half of the kindle I already bought with money from a Literotica contest plus some books to load it up with. It's more than I ever picked up trying to slog through the old fashioned route of submitting to horror/sci fi magazines and certainly $84 more than the manuscript would have got languishing forgotten on a slush pile somewhere.

It's not all. My first book is still out there, still picking up the same trickle of sales. That means in another three months I'm going to get another $84 or so. Actually, there's two months of the second book's sales on top of that, so it's probably going to be more than eighty bucks. And then later in the year I have a third book coming out. It's easy to see how it can start to mount up. I can't live off it, but on top of my regular salary it's a nice extra to put towards a vacation, or a new TV.

One of the points I've seen raised is the current explosion of self publishing and 'race to the bottom' in terms of pricing will kill writing as a viable profession for all but the already wealthy. I don't really see this. A lot of authors had to start off juggling other jobs with their writing until they made enough to leave the day job behind. An advance can help with this sure, but it can backfire horribly if the first book tanks and they aren't picked up for a second. This is even assuming they make it through the gatekeepers. The vast majority don't and won't ever see a single dime for the manuscript they spent a year or two lovingly putting together.

With self publishing a writer can start to see a return as soon as the book is finished and use this to tailor their life accordingly. I go into work every morning and I write on my spare time. I won't need to think about changing this unless my income from book sales starts to outweigh my regular salary, or my spare time suddenly becomes a lot less spare. And of course, even being comparatively unsuccessful in the meantime still generates a bit of extra cash for a few luxuries.

I enjoy writing and it makes me a bit of extra money. Can't really complain about that.

And I even got my post in on the 17th this time.

M.E. Hydra

#6 Do You Play Well with Others?

Is something you might want to decide when you are self-publishing. I’ve had a few people mention poor sales for anthologies, and I have so say—I don’t see it. The anthologies I’ve put out for December Ink don’t seem to sell any worse (or better for that matter) than anything else. But I digress! The point is, do you want to do an anthology or a “bundle” or a collaboration Do you want to work with other writers? Can you get along?

For the longest time I said no, no, no! I often say no to things that make me nervous. For about two years I said no to writing paranormal, now it is damn near my bread and butter—so go figure. The point is, don’t listen to your fear when it talks. Listen to what you want to try out and be brave enough to do it.

On a whim one day I put out a short call—it started on twitter. What resulted was not one—because I had too many for one—but two short anthologies (Dirtyville: 13 Tales of Small-Town Dirty and Kinkyville: 13 More Tales of Small-Town Dirty). Dirtyville has hung out a great deal on the Kindle Gay/Lesbian Erotica Anthology list. It was just there this week. Almost a year later both are still selling and I still get to pay out writers (though small bits because it’s a 26 way split!). I also still get to see us pop up on random lists here and there. We were even a top seller on All Romance ebooks in the beginning.

Doesn’t that sound exciting?

Now here’s just a few of the things you need to consider when working with others. I learned these along the way and am still putting out fires from time to time.

1. Editor? Yep, that would be you. Unless you go ahead and ‘hire’ someone else. I did the two anthos but once I had done my three million reading run throughs, I sent the pdf’s to the authors and asked them to read their own work. Once in a while you get some really good eagle eyes reading who will send you general errors they spotted in the whole book. And then once you fix all the reported issues—yep, you get to read it again.
2. Paperwork: get their permission in writing to use the author’s work. Even if it is one paragraph that basically says: ______is legally mine to sell, I am the sole author of this work, I agree to let ____________ use it for_____________ amount of time at the pay rate of_________________. And then their signature and date.
3. Pay out with a flat rate out of pocket or pay out a percentage of the work? That is the question. With no one bankrolling you but you, flat rate payouts may be iffy. I go with option number two because it saves me from having to put out money up front and in this instance, I saw the ‘ville books as “our” books. A group effort. So to me, contributors were getting just as much or just as little as me, it seemed only fair.
4. Paperwork is quarterly or however you spell it out in your agreement. I do quarterly because most of the vendors I use (ARe, Smashwords, Bookstrand, 1 Place for Romance…) pay out quarterly. So my antho writers don’t get paid until I do.
5. All the other stuff. Questions, emails, spreadsheets, paypal addresses, juggling. It can be a lot and often I still feel overwhelmed when I sit down to do it. Which is why you see that DI isn’t swimming in multi-author works. However, it is also awesome to share the success of those little books with a group of people and I adore having put something together that included lots of orchestration, time and love.

So what about you? Do you play well with others?

As a final note I’d like to add, take a look at the anthologies in your own possession as models. And follow the direction! Meaning when you put these works up on sites. Smashwords is a prime example of spelling out the copyright page and all that jazz. They put the rules there for a reason, use them. Most of all, have fun!

XOXO
Sommer

Double the fun, double the money

And the 17th sails by yet again.

In my defence, my second book, “A Succubus for Valentine’s Day and other tales of Perilous Pleasures”, came out on the eleventh of February and most of my attentions have been spent on hyping that. Or rather, quietly whispering it’s out there if any kind soul would be so good as to purchase a copy.

Here’s a simple tip. If you want to boost sales of your first book, write a second. January was largely dead for my first book, which was a little unfortunate as this is the time of year most people load up the shiny new kindles they received as Christmas presents. Then my second book came out and the first suddenly started to pick up sales again.

Actually, the first book started to pick up sales even before the second came out. I think this might have been because I spent the two weeks leading up to the second book’s release putting excerpts from the new stories up on my blog. In building up interest for the second book, I also built up interest in the first book for anyone that missed it first time around. This was very encouraging. I’ll do the same for my third book when that comes out later this year.

Also encouraging was to see both books come up in each other’s ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ lists. That means someone liked them enough to go back for the second. Always a good start for anyone hoping to have a lengthy writing career.

Damn, I still have to work harder at the whole making them run away screaming thing.

I’m still in the bits’n’pieces section of Amazon’s rankings. That’s fine. I wasn’t intending on quitting the day job for some time anyway. I’m thinking long term. Maybe it will pan out, maybe it won’t. Doesn’t really matter so long as I still enjoy writing the stories.

M.E. Hydra

Have it the way you want…

I was doing some writing and banging out all these terrible, filthy, sexy words on screen. And the things the characters were doing to each other? Most interesting. As I wrote I thought back to when I started this writing gig. Then, I was subbing only to one publisher. Why? I was dumb and new. I’m still dumb but older. Anyway that publisher had strict rules about what words could be used to describe sex and other stuff. ‘Dick’ was never to be used to describe a penis. And ‘baby’? That wasn’t a term of endearment to them. They considered it somehow pedophilia to have the characters say something like -“Baby, I love you.”

That publisher was very limited in their views. I believe it was because they were the big fish in a small pond and they had power over the e-book erotica market. A lot of writers feared their wrath and were too scared to do anything but follow rules. Of course now the e-book pond has grown and multiple new publishers have arisen changing the market even more and for the better. How so? Competition. It’s a great thing. There are new genres, more open minds about the everyday reality of language and the use of words and bodies. It also means writers don’t have to agree to blindly follow the management of one mob. They can pick and choose who they send their work to and – more importantly – 99% of the time they can write the way they want without their ‘voice’ being changed to fit some publisher diva’s personal belief. Creativity should never be packaged in a box because someone says so.

Amarinda Jones
Penn Halligan
www.amarindajones.com
www.amarindajones.blogspot.com
Be daring...read an Amarinda book

Reinventing the Publishing House

It’s the 17th. Oh wait, that was a couple of days ago. I will hit my scheduled slot one day!

My first collection of short stories is still ticking up the odd kindle sale here and there. I’ll get the full breakdown when I get my quarterly statement next month. I anticipate I won’t suddenly be catapulted into the echelon of writers making a killing from ebooks. These things take time, patience and a hefty dollop of luck.

And backlists. I’m certainly not sitting still there. I have a second collection of stories coming out next month and I signed a contract for a third collection last weekend. That’ll arrive to shock and arouse at the appropriate time of Halloween. Hopefully they’ll all bump each other.

Contract? Publishing date some way off in the future? That doesn’t sound like the typical self-pubbed story.

That would be because I’m with eXcessica. Selena Kitt started it out as a co-operative venture for her and other writers to get their ebooks up on fictionwise. Since then it’s morphed into something resembling an indie publishing house. Recently, Joe Konrath talked to Ridan Publishing, who’ve done something similar in the fantasy genre. In future, I think we’re going to see a lot more ventures like this.

A frequent gripe levelled at big publishing is that the relationship between house and writer has become purely parasitical. The talent-scouting has shifted to the agents and the marketing and promotion has been shunted onto the writer. Now that the ebook explosion has blown all the gates down, the big beasts have effectively outsourced themselves to eventual extinction. Whether they adapt or collapse to a whinging death is up to them.

That’s not to say publishers are completely superfluous. Yes, a writer can do everything themself, should they so desire, but it’s a damn sight easier to borrow someone else’s expertise for some of the tasks, especially when taking the first baby steps.

I didn’t do the cover for my first book. I didn’t do any of the fiddling to get the ISBN or bash it into any one of the multiple file formats ebooks sell in. I didn’t put it up on all the other bookselling websites that exist alongside Amazon (many of which I hadn’t even heard of before). I didn’t send the book off to a list of cultivated review sites (hopefully, some will recover enough from the trauma to write nice things about it). I have Selena and the good folks at eXcessica to thank for that.

I think we’ll be seeing a few more ventures starting out this way. Someone will know someone who’s good at creating book covers. Someone else will have researched the markets. Someone will know the techy stuff. Then, bang, they’ll all be pumping out books like crazy and laughing all the way to bank.

Some of them may eventually become the new behemoths of the future...

M.E. Hydra

#5 Self-Editing: Do It and Do It Again...

This really isn’t a topic that needs a bunch of explanation. Short and sweet covers it.

Edit yourself.

Read your work. Set it aside. Read and edit again. When you are done that, if you want to go balls to the wall (and you should) read your work out loud. Why, you ask? Because your ear will hear the wrong word used when your eye supplies what it knows you meant. Your brain and your eyes are in cahoots and one will stick up for the other to a fault. Your ears are all rebellious and whatnot.

Your brain will show you, quite often, what you meant to type as opposed to what you wrote.

Case in point:

The other morning I typed an email to the man. I had had about three sips of coffee, there were two children arguing over the size of their bacon and who had more juice and a dog who kept standing between my feet because he thought he might also get some bacon.

This is a typical writing situation for me whether it’s an email or a chapter or a whole damn book. And I bet I’m not the only one! So here is what I meant to type:

We had a power issue last night after you went to bed…

I scanned my email and hit send, happy in my knowledge that I had done a good job explaining.

Two minutes later I got an email that said:

Pour issue?

I reread my message and (sadly) I had actually written:

We had a pour issue last night after you went to bed…

Believe it or not, this happens more often than you think. You mean coffin and you sip your coffee and write coffee. You mean your and type you’re or vice versa. Your brain will often show you what you know you meant. So if you read your work aloud you catch those coffees, yours, and pours. Your eyes might tell you it’s fine but your ears are all: “Say what?”

After you do all that reading, what now? Have someone you trust read it if at all possible. And then when they’re done, you read it again.

That’s really not a hard step in the self publishing effort, but it’s one that’s often skimped on. Trust me, I’ve gotten to this point from being told about typos, mistakes and errors that have been missed. On books I was certain were clean!

And no, you probably will not catch them all. Hell, I have found doozies in books put out by huge publishing houses for huge authors. Books you just know had to filter through a dozen or more people. So doo-doo still happens, folks. But if you are vigilant and careful and thoughtful, there will be less doo-doo to deal with.

Which is always a good thing.

XOXO
Sommer