Getting Started In Indie Pubbing — Part Two – The First Few Choices
By Steven Womack
So you’ve decided to take the leap. You’re sick of agents taking six months-to-never to get back to you. The rare legitimate publisher who is willing to read unagented submissions is so inundated with manuscripts that by the time they get around to reading your book, you’ll be deep into your dotage and will have long forgotten you wrote it.
So you’re going to self publish.
Oh, wait… If you read the first installment in this series of columns I’m calling This Crazy Writing Life, you’ll know I despise the term self-publishing. If you need a memory refresher, go back through the Killer Nashville Magazine archives and find that first column.
Then do a reset. You’re not self-publishing.
You’re independently publishing.
And the first step in independently publishing your book is to make a series of choices. The first and in many ways most important choice is what are you going to publish. You’re not only a writer, but you’re a book lover as well. So having a physical book that you can fondle and sniff and gaze at on a shelf is the most important thing to you.
Okay, that leads to some choices. What form will your book take? Every writer fantasizes seeing their book as a hardcover, a classy old-school hardcover with a dust cover and maybe even an embossed cover with gold foil. That speaks real class.
But it also speaks big bucks. Times are hard, and readers are reluctant to shell out north of thirty bucks for a hardcover, especially a hardcover by an author they may not have even heard of. Yo’ momma and Crazy Aunt Agnes may love you that much, but that ain’t exactly a target-rich environment.
So you punt and decide to go with a paperback. But that forces a series of choices. Do you want a mass market paperback to minimize costs and make it possible for your book to fit on those wire racks in stores of the grocery and drug kind? You can go that way if you want, but historically speaking, the days when mass market paperbacks ruled the retail book space were over about two decades ago. And the chances of an indie pubbed book getting picked up by a major distributor and winding up in a Kroger, Walmart or Costco are about as good as winning the Powerball.
Okay, you reason, let’s go with the trade paperback. But again, that incites a series of choices. What trim size do want for your trade paperback? What kind of paper do you want? In the early days of indie-pubbed books, your only option was the white paper that was similar to what came out of a Xerox machine. This kind of paper, combined with the early binding and production quality of a print-on-demand book screamed self-published. So you want to go with something a little classier than that. But you also want to hit that sweet spot between size and production costs, the number of pages and your word count. You also have to consider the genre. Science fiction fans and romance readers have different expectations. You might have to go to a bunch of bookstores with a measuring tape and start researching this.
Then you go on from there. Let’s consider eBooks. I realize that this may be opening up a real can o’ worms for some folks. Some people hate eBooks. I know people whose intelligence I admire and respect that absolutely cannot abide eBooks.
But let me interject a little bit of reality here.
The idea of a digital or electronic presentation of a book actually dates back to the 1930s. But it was in 2007, when Amazon launched the Kindle eBook reader, that eBooks came into their own.
And let me state this as bluntly as I can. The invention and launch of the Kindle was the most significant, game-changing, revolutionary event to hit book publishing since that fellow Gutenberg invented the first usable system of moveable type almost 500 years ago. This is not an overstatement. The eBook has made modern independent publishing both profitable and possible. It has created a whole new industry. It has enabled thousands (and on its way to being millions) of authors to bring their work to the public. And like throwing a rock into a still pond, the ripple effect keeps widening every day. There are multiple distribution channels for eBooks, up to and including you can now borrow eBooks from libraries just like physical books. And there are more being invented and created every day.
Millions of readers now gobble up eBooks by the gigabyte. For certain genres—especially popular ones like romances, mysteries, thrillers—eBooks are rapidly becoming one of the chief ways readers read.
So here’s the bottom line: if you’re going to independently publish your own work, then you’ll bypass eBooks at your own peril. There are extremely successful independently published authors out there who only publish eBook versions of their work, either that or they publish print versions solely as vanity or corollary editions.
Because eBooks are so much cheaper to produce and distribute than print books, you can price them lower and make more money (sometimes much more money) than you can with print. EBooks are also much easier and faster to produce. Next month, I’ll introduce you to an app that will have you formatting your first eBook in a matter of hours.
So that’s where we’ll go next month. We’ll explore how you format and produce eBooks and how you decide where and how to distribute eBooks. It’s a whole new world out there.
Jump in and hold on.
