Audiobooks

By Dale T Phillips

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Since audiobooks are currently in the fastest growing book format right now, getting your novel out for sale as an audiobook is vital for success. If your book isn’t, you’re losing a lot, and leaving money on the table, as the expression goes. My audiobooks have sold hundreds and hundreds, and I love the continual income stream. Sadly, many writers from traditional publishers don’t have their backlists up as audios, so they’re missing out.

Reasons why you should have audio as part of your overall writing business strategy:

• Discoverability: Get a bigger audience and make it easier to find your work. Many potential fans like audio for a number of reasons, some just enjoying a good listen while walking, driving, running, or biking. You want all the fans you can get! These days, people have less time for reading print books, so audiobooks can be a saving grace. While To Be Read (TBR) piles are so big, chances are many readers won’t get to your print book for a long, long time, if ever, but if you’re on audio, they have a better chance of finding your work. If they like that one, they’ll come back for more. Having your book listed in audio format also gets more hits in internet searches, and is listed in more places, increasing your internet presence and the chances of someone finding your work. With over ten million books in print and electronic format, your book is a drop in the ocean. There are far fewer audiobooks: smaller ocean, bigger chance to make a splash! And it’ll get you into some extra markets. I was speaking with a person from a State Library about my books, and the first question was “Any of your books out on audio? Because we’re investing in those right now.” 

• Sales: As well as finding new fans and watching your sales numbers increase, you can make money. Once the book is produced, all you have to do is promote it whenever you want. But each title is another product in your writer store, and even little trickles of money add up to an income stream. It’s nice to have hundreds of sales in another venue.

• Reviews: While many print book reviewers are overwhelmed, there are many sites doing audio that can still accommodate a review. You have more chances of getting good notice for your work. It all adds up. Listeners can also post reviews and ratings, which help.

• It’ll make you a better writer: When someone else reads your words, it makes the clunky ones stand out, and the good ones sound better. Your ear will develop, especially for dialog.

• Freebies: With some audiobook production, you get free giveaway codes. You can gift these to reviewers, as contest prizes, or simply as rewards to readers. When someone buys a print book in person from me, I’ll offer them the free audiobook as a nice extra.

Audiobook Options

Historically, audiobooks were done by professional companies and were expensive to produce, costing thousands of dollars. So only better-selling books made it. Now there are options.

• Someone ELSE does all the work- (and takes most of the money). While it’s nice to have someone do all the work for you, as with traditional publishing, there’s a danger. They might stick you with a hideous cover, a bad version, a product priced wrong for the market, or take a long time to get it out- or never, while they hold the rights captive. In any case, it may not sell, and you’re stuck. And when someone does the work, they also take most of the profit. 

While you assume that a big publisher would do a professional version, there may be other factors. I got one from a BIG audiobook producer, but the narrator couldn’t pronounce ANY place name in Maine correctly- even easy ones like Bangor and Augusta! Letting someone else do it all means the quality control may not be there, and there’s little you can do about it. And you might tick off some fans. (I know I was!)

And that’s assuming you can get a publisher to produce it. Professional narrators run upwards of $100 an hour, and it takes hours to produce a book. Plus other production costs, and packaging, and distributing, they’re investing a few thousand dollars, at least. Since they expect a good return, they have to estimate the sales will exceed the output. So if you’re a typical mid-lister, with less than ten thousand print/ebook sales per book, they may not even do your book for audio. But they’ll likely still retain the rights, in case you hit it big. Then they can always do one later. But what happens is that you can go for years (or forever) without an audio version. 

So- check your contract to see what provisions there are for audio. Even if you signed them away, and they’re not doing anything with them, maybe you can re-negotiate. They may not give the rights back for free, but maybe you can offer them something for it that will make it worthwhile. 

• Do it all yourself, keep all the money. 

Two factors- Production and Distribution

It’s true you don’t need a studio anymore, so it’s become cost-effective. You can produce high-quality audio files in different formats with free software and inexpensive equipment. I recommend Audacity software for recording, because it’s free and simple to learn and use. 

Are you a professional narrator? If you’re charging money for the book, you want quality. Unless you’re famous, the listeners may not be forgiving of less-than-awesome narrating. Before you start this path, do some voice work (maybe some podcasts), and get comfortable with a microphone and sound editing.

Drawbacks- while this can be done, the main cost is time to record and edit. Most of us don’t have enough hours in a day now. And it may take hours of editing to get the sound to a professional level.

Distribution. Even if you do it yourself, how are you going to package, list, and sell the finished product? Tough to arrange this on your own. 

• Work with a Service, and split the money

While there are other services, my current favorite production option right now is ACX.com, which feeds into Audible.com, an Amazon company. They make it easy and profitable for independents to get their books produced, listed, and sold. Better yet, the finished product is on the Audible site, AND on your Amazon book listing, right beside the print and kindle versions. Huge showcase! And they can tie it into Whispersync, which lets you switch between devices and formats.

How to Produce Audiobooks

For ACX, you’ll need an account on the site (includes telling them where to send the money!). 

1. Check your publishing contract first, and beware of issues with anthologies, or other writers listed on your book as authors. 

2. READ YOUR CONTRACT TERMS! Audible gets an exclusive right for years, so make sure you’re comfortable with the terms.

3. Log in to ACX and search for your book, then claim it as yours, with the right to produce an audio.

Various ways to produce your book:

• Do all the narration yourself. ACX distributes the book for you, and you make 40% of the list price. 

• Pay a narrator up front for doing your book. Narrators are expensive. While you can still retain your 40%, consider the cost, and how long it might take to recoup that. You post your project with the offer to pay, and get bids. Decide on who you want. 

• Offer a royalty split, for no up-front money- This is my favorite way. You are hoping that narrators will do all the work on spec, in hopes of making money when the audio sells. You each get 20% of the sale price in this part. They’re putting in time, which to them equals hundreds, or even thousands of dollars, and you have no risk! But of course, you wrote the book, so your time is already invested. 

When you’ve claimed your book, and decided if you want a narrator, you post it up as a project, with a description and notes on what the ideal narrator should sound like- male or female, age, accents, humorous, serious, scary, etc. You post an audition piece, a short segment that will give a good indication if the narrator is right for the work (dialogue with different voices is a good indicator). Add any helpful hints on what the passage should sound like.

This posts the project up for people to audition for, and you wait for replies. You can also search on available narrators, and sample their voices to see if any fit, then send them a message to see if they’re interested in your project.

When auditions come in, listen if they’re right for your work. When you’ve found someone who has the right voice for the job, you then set a schedule and make an official Offer. There’s a date for a 15-minute milestone, which is a guide to see if they’re on the right track, and a date for the project completion. You may need some back-and-forth on pronunciation and tone, and you send messages via ACX. When they’re ready, they send ACX the files, and you give a listen. You can request changes if there’s something amiss, so you have complete quality control. 

When it’s done properly, you Approve the work, which then goes through ACX for their approval, and then gets posted to Audible for sale. You’ll need a cover image modified to their specs, a squared-off version of your book cover. Then it goes up on Amazon as well, linked with your print and Kindle versions. They will set the price of the finished book, based on length.

But there’s more! ACX sends you codes for free downloads of the work. You can use these for reviewers, friends, giveaways, and rewards for your fans- it’s an awesome way of promoting your work- for free! You send instructions and a download code, and someone gets the audio for free.

And the bonus program- if your work is the first someone selects when signing up for Audible, you get a bonus payment- it’s split with your narrator, but is a nice addition.

This Crazy Writing Life: Okay, Let’s Talk About The 800-Pound Gorilla: Marketing

By Steven Womack

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Bold statement time. Ready? Here it comes…

I’d rather write five novels than market one.

I think that probably goes against the grain for most people. After all, writing’s hard. A novel is long, a grinding marathon of page after empty page that goes on months, sometimes years, before you reach the finish line.

And yet I’d rather run five of those marathons than try and sell one.

When I say that, I think there must be something wrong with me. For some reason or other, I’m uncomfortable blowing my own horn, hawking my own work. For some people, it comes easily, like drawing a breath. For me, it’s always seemed…

Well, unseemly.

When I was young, one of my best buddies got us both a summer job selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. We got about two days of training (I still remember the spiel: The Bison, the world’s most complete home maintenance system. Guaranteed to protect your home and furniture, conserve your time and health…) and we were then turned loose on an unsuspecting neighborhood.

I think I lasted three days.

A couple of decades later, when I finally sold (there’s that word again) my first novel, I assumed the publisher would take care of all the marketing. They’d set up book signings for me, take out ads, arrange for reviews. All I had to do was cash the checks and write my next book.

Ah, what a naïve little grasshoppah I was.

Truth is, long before the genteel gentlemanly world of 19th century publishing morphed into the Darwinian dog-eat-dog cutthroat business it’s become in the 21st century, writers had to bite the bullet and learn to sell their own stuff. Now, in the age where the number of indie-pubbed writers has long surpassed the number of traditionally published authors, it’s more important than ever that writers grasp the fundamentals of marketing. When every writer is essentially a small shopkeeper slinging pages out of a tiny storefront, unless you’re willing to promote your own work, you’re never even going to get noticed, let alone make a living.

Last September, I found myself in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida at the annual Novelists Inc. conference. I’ve written about Novelists Inc. before in This Crazy Writing Life. The beauty of the Novelists Inc. conference is it’s all business. You don’t get many seminars on developing character or finding your voice with these folks. But you will get in-depth seminars on indie audiobook production and negotiating foreign translation rights contracts.

At this conference, one of the best marketing seminars I ever attended was put on by Ricardo Fayet, who’s one of the four founders of Reedsy, a company that provides support and guidance for indie-pubbed authors, as well as being a gateway connecting freelancers with writers. If you don’t know these guys, just Google them and go to their website. It’s worth the trip.

Ricardo’s written two books on marketing for indie authors: How To Market A Book and Amazon Ads For Authors. I’ve got them both and they’re well worth the price.

Ricardo’s seminar at the conference did a deep dive into the underlying psychology of marketing and a few basic principles that indie authors need to learn and deploy. It’ll make the hell of marketing a little less hellish. Let’s take a brief look at what Ricardo described.

Principle #1: It’s cheaper to retain an existing reader than acquire a new one.

It costs five time as much to attract a new reader—in money and effort—than it does to keep an old one. That’s why series are so powerful in today’s marketplace. Whether you’re Jack Konrath writing 27 installments of his Jack Daniels series books, John D. MacDonald’s 21 Travis McGee novels or J.T. Ellison’s nine novels in her Lt. Taylor Jackson series, a series quite literally builds a brand that attracts readers and keeps them. Fayet even cited one series that’s run to 112 books.

What if you’re not into series? Then develop a style and voice that becomes as identifiable and as reliable as a series. Dick Francis wrote mostly standalones (outside of his four-book Sid Halley series), but his style and voice was so distinctive that when you pick up a Dick Francis book, it’s instantly identifiable as a Dick Francis book.

Principle #2: Product trumps marketing every time.

This principle embodies the notion that, over the long run, no amount of brilliant marketing will sell a bad book. You’ve got to write an amazing book to even have a chance of competing in the literary marketplace. Fayet cited the statistic that only seven percent of traditionally published books sell over 10,000 copies.

“You can’t sell a book if it isn’t good,” he noted.

Principle #3: Decay is inevitable.

“What’s working now isn’t guaranteed to work forever,” Fayet said. “In fact, it’s almost guaranteed to peter out at some point.” All marketing and promotion efforts and strategies eventually begin to lose their effectiveness. This principle doesn’t apply only to books. All products, sooner or later, need a marketing refresh. Interest wanes, attention moves on to other things.

And a sidebar to this notion is the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of your results will come from twenty percent of your efforts. And you must constantly look ahead. If you focus solely on today’s marketing efforts and campaigns, then you won’t be prepared for when it all stops working.

Principle #4: Steady versus Explosive Marketing.

Steady, consistent marketing efforts will get you to a certain level of sales. But you may find you’ve hit a ceiling and you’re just not breaking through to the next level.

Explosive marketing, however, requires a different approach. It requires careful planning and execution, along with good timing. If spaced out properly, explosive marketing avoids fatigue and wearing out your audience. Finally, Fayet noted, it works best for highly targeted campaigns, and for many authors, that means being enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.

Principle #5: Volume x ROI.

This is kind of a big one, folks. Start by imagining the global audience of readers: millions.

Now imagine your audience: a tiny subset of millions.

So how do you reach and then grow your tiny subset. The best strategy is to start small and cheap. Maybe that’s Amazon ASIN ads or Facebook ads. This is a highly targeted strategy, where you aim to reach the people who already read your kind of book. This may not be a huge number of readers, but your Return On Investment (ROI) is potentially going to be pretty good.

Then you aim a little higher: BookBub Featured Deals, Meta A+ ads, then maybe on to digitally targeted ads, TV, even billboards and print ads.

But remember, with each step up the marketing ladder, you’re going to reach more people. But your conversion rate’s going to go down, along with your ROI. So if you want to broaden your reach, remember that with each new and larger strategy, it becomes harder to make your money back.

Principle #6: 10% of 1000=1% of 10,000…or why you don’t need to be chasing trends.

One of the most baffling questions for many writers is the question of writing to the market or chasing trends. Of course, we all want to tap into the popular zeitgeist. If there’s a demand for something in the marketplace, we all want to meet that demand. But especially in traditional publishing, the timeline for bringing a book to market may be so far out that the trend will have passed before your book can get out there.

Just remember, Cabbage Patch dolls, Beanie Babies, and Pet Rocks were once all the rage.

On the other hand, we all want to write for a growing market. But what if you occupy a bigger place in a smaller market? Fayet noted that 10% of 1000 readers is the same number of readers as 1% of a 10,000 reader market.

This is among the most complicated and convoluted decisions a writer must make. Sometimes it’s better to stay in your lane. Should we just ignore trends?

Fayet’s answer is “Of course not!” Trends signal a growing market, but you need to weigh your decision against several factors:

Can I expect to make more money in a new genre or a new kind of book? Would I be better off just delivering what I know my current readers want?

Can I expect my existing fans to follow me?

Can I keep my sanity and have a little fun by taking a new path?

Do I know the new genre well enough to dip my toe into it? Do I have the skill set?

Can I reasonably get in on the trend in time?

This is all complicated stuff… Marketing and promotion for writers can make writing look easy. But if you keep in mind Ricardo Fayet’s six principles every writer should let guide their careers, then this mine field might not be quite so treacherous.

In next month’s episode of This Crazy Writing Life, we’ll start taking deeper dives into specific marketing strategies.

I don’t know when this installment will be published in KN Magazine. I’m writing it before Christmas, so if it comes out before the holidays, have a great one. If it’s 2025 when you’re reading this, I hope this year’s your best one ever.

And thanks for coming along for the ride.

Audiobooks

By Dale T. Phillips

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Since audiobooks are currently in the fastest growing book format right now, getting your novel out for sale as an audiobook is vital for success. If your book isn’t, you’re losing a lot, and leaving money on the table, as the expression goes. My audiobooks have sold hundreds and hundreds, and I love the continual income stream. Sadly, many writers from traditional publishers don’t have their backlists up as audios, so they’re missing out.

Reasons why you should have audio as part of your overall writing business strategy:

• Discoverability: Get a bigger audience and make it easier to find your work. Many potential fans like audio for a number of reasons. Some just enjoying a good listen while walking, driving, running, or biking. You want all the fans you can get! These days, people have less time for reading print books, so audiobooks can be a saving grace. While To Be Read (TBR) piles are so big, chances are many readers won’t get to your print book for a long, long time, if ever, but if you’re on audio, they have a better chance of finding your work. If they like that one, they’ll come back for more. Having your book listed in audio format also gets more hits in Internet searches, and is listed in more places, increasing your Internet presence, and the chances of someone finding your work. With over 10 million books in print and electronic format, your book is a drop in the ocean. There are far fewer audiobooks: smaller ocean, bigger chance to make a splash! And it’ll get you into some extra markets. I was speaking with a person from a State Library about my books, and the first question was “Any of your books out on audio? Because we’re investing in those right now.” 

• Sales: As well as finding new fans and watching your sales numbers increase, you can make money. Once the book is produced, all you have to do is promote it whenever you want. But each title is another product in your writer store, and even little trickles of money add up to an income stream. It’s nice to have hundreds of sales in another venue.

• Reviews: While many print book reviewers are overwhelmed, there are many sites doing audio that can still accommodate a review. So you have more chances of getting good notice for your work. It all adds up. And listeners can also post reviews and ratings, which help.

• It’ll make you a better writer: When someone else reads your words, it makes the clunky ones stand out, and the good ones sound better. Your ear will develop, especially for dialog.

• Freebies: With some audiobook production, you get free giveaway codes. You can gift these to reviewers, as contest prizes, or simply as rewards to readers. When someone buys a print book in person from me, I’ll offer them the free audiobook as a nice extra.

Audiobook Options

Historically, audiobooks were done by professional companies and were expensive to produce, costing thousands of dollars. So only better-selling books made it. Now there are options.

• Someone ELSE does all the work- (and takes most of the money). While it’s nice to have someone do all the work for you, as with traditional publishing, there’s a danger. They might stick you with a hideous cover, a bad version, or a product priced wrong for the market, or take a long time to get it out- or never, while they hold the rights captive. In any case, it may not sell, and you’re stuck. And when someone does the work, they also take most of the profit. 

While you assume that a big publisher would do a professional version, there may be other factors. I got one from a BIG audiobook producer, but the narrator couldn’t pronounce ANY place name in Maine correctly- even easy ones like Bangor and Augusta! So letting someone else do it all means the quality control may not be there, and there’s little you can do about it. And you might tick off some fans. (I know I was!)

And that’s assuming you can get a publisher to produce it. Professional narrators run upwards of $100 an hour, and it takes hours to produce a book. Plus other production costs, and packaging, and distributing, they’re investing a few thousand dollars, at least. Since they expect a good return, they have to estimate the sales will exceed the output. So if you’re a typical mid-lister, with less than ten thousand print/ebook sales per book, they may not even do your book for audio. But they’ll likely still retain the rights, in case you hit it big. Then they can always do one later. But what happens is that you can go for years (or forever) without an audio version. 

So- check your contract to see what provisions there are for audio. Even if you signed them away, and they’re not doing anything with them, maybe you can re-negotiate. They may not give the rights back for free, but maybe you can offer them something for it that will make it worthwhile. 

• Do it all yourself, keep all the money. 

Two factors- Production and Distribution

It’s true you don’t need a studio anymore, so it’s become cost-effective. You can produce high-quality audio files in different formats with free software and inexpensive equipment. I recommend Audacity software for recording, because it’s free and simple to learn and use. 

Are you a professional narrator? If you’re charging money for the book, you want quality. Unless you’re famous, the listeners may not be forgiving of less-than-awesome narrating. Before you start this path, do some voice work (maybe some podcasts), and get comfortable with a microphone and sound editing.

Drawbacks- while this can be done, the main cost is time to record and edit. Most of us don’t have enough hours in a day now. And it may take hours of editing to get the sound to a professional level.

Distribution. Even if you do it yourself, how are you going to package, list, and sell the finished product? Tough to arrange this on your own. 

• Work with a Service, and split the money

While there are other services, my current favorite production option right now is ACX.com, which feeds into Audible.com, an Amazon company. They make it easy and profitable for independents to get their books produced, listed, and sold. Better yet, the finished product is on the Audible site, AND on your Amazon book listing, right beside the print and kindle versions. Huge showcase! And they can tie it into Whispersync, which lets you switch between devices and formats.

How to Produce Audiobooks

For ACX, you’ll need an account on the site (includes telling them where to send the money!). 

1. Check your publishing contract first, and beware of issues with anthologies, or other writers listed on your book as authors. 

2. READ YOUR CONTRACT TERMS! Audible gets an exclusive right for years, so make sure you’re comfortable with the terms.

3. Log in to ACX and search for your book, then claim it as yours, with the right to produce an audio.

Various ways to produce your book:

• Do all the narration yourself. ACX distributes the book for you, and you make 40% of the list price. 

• Pay a narrator up front for doing your book. Narrators are expensive. While you can still retain your 40%, consider the cost, and how long it might take to recoup that. You post your project with the offer to pay, and get bids. Decide on who you want. 

• Offer a royalty split, for no up-front money- This is my favorite way. You are hoping that narrators will do all the work on spec, in hopes of making money when the audio sells. You each get 20% of the sale price in this part. They’re putting in time, which to them equals hundreds, or even thousands of dollars, and you have no risk! But of course, you wrote the book, so your time is already invested. 

When you’ve claimed your book, and decided if you want a narrator, you post it up as a project, with a description and notes on what the ideal narrator should sound like- male or female, age, accents, humorous, serious, scary, etc. You post an audition piece, a short segment that will give a good indication if the narrator is right for the work (dialogue with different voices is a good indicator). Add any helpful hints on what the passage should sound like.

This posts the project up for people to audition for, and you wait for replies. You can also search on available narrators, and sample their voices to see if any fit, then send them a message to see if they’re interested in your project.

When auditions come in, listen if they’re right for your work. When you’ve found someone who has the right voice for the job, you then set a schedule and make an official Offer. There’s a date for a 15-minute milestone, which is a guide to see if they’re on the right track, and a date for the project completion. You may need some back-and-forth on pronunciation and tone, and you send messages via ACX. When they’re ready, they send ACX the files, and you give a listen. You can request changes if there’s something amiss, so you have complete quality control. 

When it’s done properly, you Approve the work, which then goes through ACX for their approval, and then gets posted to Audible for sale. You’ll need a cover image modified to their specs, a squared-off version of your book cover. Then it goes up on Amazon as well, linked with your print and Kindle versions. They will set the price of the finished book, based on length.

But there’s more! ACX sends you codes for free downloads of the work. You can use these for reviewers, friends, giveaways, and rewards for your fans- it’s an awesome way of promoting your work- for free! You send instructions and a download code, and someone gets the audio for free.

And the bonus program- if your work is the first someone selects when signing up for Audible, you get a bonus payment- it’s split with your narrator, but is a nice addition.

This Crazy Writing Life: On Defining a Book By Its Cover

By Steven Womack

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We left off last month’s column with an exploration of the technical aspects (and challenges) of formatting the interior of print books. This month, let’s talk about the exterior of the book—the cover.

Before we get started, though, one quick sidebar. In late September, I drove back from St. Petersburg Beach, Florida (just about 48 hours ahead of Hurricane Helene) after attending the annual conference of Novelists, Inc. Novelists, Inc. may not be as well known as some of the other major writers professional associations like the Mystery Writers of America, Romance Writers of America, or SFWA—Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America—but since it was started in late 1980s by a group of disgruntled romance writers, it’s emerged as one of the most powerful trade associations out there. It’s the only writers’ organization I know of outside of the Writers Guild of America that requires you to actually be a professional writer to join. To gain admittance to NINC, you have to have published at least two novels in popular genres like romance or mystery, and you have to have earned a minimum amount of money from those two books (the exact requirements are outlined on the website at www.ninc.com).

Readers and fans, editors and agents are not eligible to join NINC. The founders of the organization decided that NINC would never offer prizes or awards (like the MWA and RWA) because this fostered a sense of competition that was contrary to the organization’s purpose of encouraging and lifting up all writers in the struggle to survive in this crazy business. And business is the focus of the conference as well as the organization; you’ll rarely see a NINC panel on how to write sparkling dialogue. But you will see panels on understanding the intricacies of subrights licenses and contracts or the technical aspects of independent audiobook production.

Sponsors pay big bucks to have a presence at the NINC conference (in the spirit of complete transparency, I’m a former president of the organization and a current Board member). The reason I bring this up is that as a result, some of the most cutting-edge aspects of indie publishing show up at this conference. Every time I go, I learn something new. Last year, the big topic of discussion was the use of A.I. generated voices in audiobook narration. This year, there seems to be a big movement toward indie authors selling books directly from their websites. The One Big Thing I learned is that taking a simple, static author website and turning it into a true e-commerce platform is something I’m just not quite ready for.

In future columns, I’ll share some of the things I’ve learned from these conferences. As independent publishing continues to grow from an isolated few stubborn writers trying to survive into a cultural and business movement that has totally remade publishing, dozens of other companies have sprouted up as well to serve this market.

As I’ve said more than once lately, it’s a whole new world out there.

***

I was curious as to where the phrase/cliché Don’t judge a book by its cover came from, so I Googled it. Turns out George Eliot first coined that turn-of-phrase in her 1860 novel, The Mill on the Floss.

Gotta confess, I missed that one.

But I’ve heard the adage all my life, which is a metaphorical phrase telling us that outward appearances can be deceiving, that we should never judge anyone or anything by its external looks.

Sounds good on the surface; only problem is it’s hogwash. 

We judge everything by its external appearance. A car may be the most dependable, rugged, efficient vehicle ever made, but if it makes you look like a complete yutz driving it, you’re not going to buy one (are you listening, Walter White, cruising along in your Pontiac Aztec?)

You may meet someone at a party who would be the kindest, most loving, passionate and dependable life partner you could ever wish for, but if their hair is greasy and dirty, they smell bad, snot’s running out of their nose, and they have huge pit stains, you’re probably gonna take a pass.

It’s the same with book covers. The indie pubbing world is full of stories of books that didn’t sell for squat, so the authors yanked the books down, changed the cover, put the book back up without changing a word and now it sells like crazy. You may have written a classic, a prize-winner, a book that will last through the ages, but if your cover turns everyone off, then the book’s going to be a loser.

I’m speaking for myself now, but I’ll bet a lot of you are in the same boat. I’m not a graphic artist, and when it comes to good cover design, I wouldn’t know it if it ran up behind me and bit me on the butt. Truth is, I’m not even qualified to write about book covers from an artist’s point-of-view. I have absolutely no talent as a graphic designer. So, I’m writing this from the perspective of an indie-pubber who has to deal with the fact that he’s not even capable of telling good design from bad.

Maybe I’m being a little hard on myself here. Truth is, I’ve been around book covers my whole life, and while I have no talent as a designer, I am a sophisticated and experienced consumer of books. I know when a book cover design doesn’t work for me. And when I run across a brilliant book cover, it moves me on a visceral level.

I’m not overstating here: your book cover is the first and one of the most important marketing tools you have.

So how do you deploy this tool to make your book as marketable as possible?

First, it’s got to convey a certain amount of information. The title of the book—and subtitle, if it’s got one—and the author’s name should be prominent, along with any other information that will help sell the book (as in “New York Times Bestselling Author”). I have actually seen book covers where the author’s name was hard to read. When that happens, someone needs an intervention.

Second, the design/artwork should stand out visually. Whether on a jam-packed bookstore shelf or a crowded Amazon web page, there should be something that grabs your eye as you scan from Point A to Point B. I realize that’s a nebulous, unfocused notion. If I could actually define in solid terms what “stand out visually” means, then I’d be a famous well-paid cover artist and not the word-shoveling literary coal miner that I am. The best I can do is echo Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who—in attempting to define obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio—famously wrote I know it when I see it.

Third, your cover design must reflect and communicate the book’s genre and tone. If you’ve written a light-hearted cozy mystery where the protagonist’s cute but feisty cat solves the murder based on a plot point that’s a recipe for cream cheese blintzes, then a dark, brooding, heavily shadowed cover with a pair of threatening, glowing eyes coming out of the mist is not going to help you. Conversely, you’re not going to sell a graphic, disturbing serial killer suspense novel with a bright, cheery cover of pinks and blues, cartoon characters and fonts with extra curlicues and other cutesy elements.

This requires you to learn and study the conventions of your genre, to research what works and what doesn’t work, and to learn the expectations of your audience.

Stuff you should already be doing anyway…

One of the best examples of dynamite book covers out there today are the books published by Hard Case Crime. Hard Case Crime publishes crime fiction that echoes back to the paperback pulp fiction era of the 1940s through the late 1060s, when writers like Mickey Spillane, Cornell Woolrich, and Robert Bloch were flourishing. They’re bringing back and revitalizing the old hard-boiled school with contemporary writers like Stephen King, Lawrence Block, and Max Allan Collins, as well as republishing long-dead writers like Donald Westlake and Woolrich. And their books all feature covers that are homages to those great mass-market paperback pulp fiction covers.

While I admittedly am not a designer myself, I do find that there are certain things I react positively to and others that turn me off. I subscribe to a lot of book promotions websites: BookBub, Free Booksy, Robinreads, etc. So I get way too many push emails every day, and most of them are for indie-pubbed books. I’ve noticed in the last couple of years that more and more book covers depend on stock photos for their visuals, especially in genres like romance. I get that original art costs a fortune, but there’s something about a generic stock photo on a book cover that screams self-published, and I find that a turn-off. You can start with stock photography if you want, but with programs like Canva and Book Brush out there, in my view one should at least put a little effort into manipulating and adapting the image to make it more unique.

The bottom line for most writers—myself included—is that the best way to land that beautiful book cover is to find a cover artist you trust and whose work you admire. Only problem is, they can be hard to find and kind of expensive. It’s a challenge to find that sweet spot between “I love your stuff” and “oh, I can afford that.” I worked with a designer for several years when I repubbed the out-of-print novels in my Music City Murders series. Dawn Charles did a fabulous job for me, was great to work with, with very reasonable fees. Unfortunately, she passed away a few years ago. But go to my Amazon page and you’ll see what I’m talking about; it’s an object lesson in how to create a brand.

And I mentioned earlier, companies are popping up everywhere to help indie pubbers get the help they need. One that’s been around over a decade is Reedsy, which is a company that’s an online employment agency for publishing freelancers of all types; editors, designers, formatters, etc. They’re great to work with and a good place to start.

We’ll continue this discussion next month. Thanks again for hanging with This Crazy Writing Life.

Set to Sell: How to Effectively Market Your Finished Manuscript to Agents and Publishers

By Aimee Hardy

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So, you’ve written your story. You’ve gotten feedback and edited draft after draft. Finally, your manuscript shines. You’ve been sending it out to agents and publishers (and may have gotten a few requests), but you still haven’t found success. You start to wonder if your story is any good or if your writing isn’t good enough, but all of your feedback has told you that your story works. What could be happening? 

As an editor, the majority of manuscripts I receive are well-written and interesting, but their pitches often don’t do their stories justice. To move your work from the slush pile to the must-read pile, there are a few small things you can do in your pitch that will pay off exponentially. 

Important Details

When you pitch your work to agents, be sure to give them important details about your novel, including genre, word count, and comp titles. Acceptable word counts vary by genre, but a common sweet spot is between 80,000 and 100,000 words for general fiction. Look up specifics for your genre to make sure your manuscript fits with the standard conventions. 

Comp titles are also helpful for the publisher or agent to clearly understand the concept of your work. You can use popular books, movies, or even TV series, just make sure your comps are current and reflect today’s reader. For example, if you’ve written a dark coming of age thriller set after the apocalypse, you could describe your work as the Gillian Flynn version of The Last of Us meets Stranger Things. The agent or publisher will understand common themes (such as coming of age, power, friendship, and courage) but can expect a darker twist. 

Give or take a little more 

Once you’ve finished your manuscript, you’ll want to create a 1–2 sentence logline for your pitch. Your logline gives all the information needed for your book so the agent or publisher can identify the main character, the conflict, and the stakes. Who is your character, what is their big problem or conflict, and what happens if they don’t succeed? 

Some writers fear that they will give away too much plot or that the agent or publisher won’t read it if they know all the details at once, but the reality is, you need to have a clear understanding of your work to be able to sell it later (more on that in the next point). Here are some quick examples of short but effective taglines: 

• A young FBI cadet must confide in a manipulative convicted killer to receive his help on catching another serial killer who skins his victims. (Silence of the Lambs)

• A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where a sinister presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from both past and future. (The Shining)

Try writing a few for your work and see which one works the best. 

Place it on the shelf

Along with knowing comp titles, understanding the market for your genre is often one of the best ways to sell your work. Agents and publishers want to know that you understand the market, the conventions of your specific genre, and the clear vision you have for your work. 

Not only does it show that you’ve done your homework, it shows that you can sell your work within the current market, which is a much-needed skill when it comes to publication. Although writing a novel is hard, a lot more work goes into book promotion. Once a book is accepted for publication, it will typically have a release date that’s 1–2 years away. Publishers need time to plan marketing, distribution, awards, etc. that might work best for your book, so comp titles and market knowledge are essential for planning a successful launch. If you already have a vision for your work, publishers are often able to use similar campaigns or networking strategies to your comp titles. 

Pinpoint your readers 

Another effective way to sell your story is to have a good understanding of your readers. You should know why your story is important and why readers would buy your book. Look at the demographics of your comp titles, including age, sex, occupation, interests/hobbies, etc. If you have a strong selling point with an eager audience, it helps agents and publishers see the incentive of releasing your book. 

Identifying your audience also helps publishers see how they can effectively market your book. They might consider partnerships or nonprofit campaigns that will connect you with your ideal reader. The more concise you are about your audience and how to reach them, the more likely a publisher will be to release your work. 

Leverage your communities

We’ve all heard that it takes a village, but networking is essential to your book’s success. You might need to include the organizations and networks that you’re a part of so you can leverage existing relationships. This also gives your publisher to see any connections that you may have missed when it comes to marketing your book. 

Although writers often don’t want to consider social media as important to their work, it can be an important part of getting your work to a wider audience. Focus on genuine connections with friends and followers and don’t be afraid to partner up with other writers and creatives to make meaningful relationships in the larger community. 

Do your research

You may also consider doing a bit of research. Watch interviews and read wish lists for agents and publishers. Reference their preferences to let them know that they are really important to you and aren’t just on an endless list of contacts you’re mindlessly submitting to. Personal connections let the agent or publisher know that you’re a real person who truly cares about your work and the place you're submitting it. 

You may also research market trends, including current events, changes in genre trends, and new reader data. Understanding the market shows that you’re invested in the success of your novel and that you can see an opportunity for your work in the future. This creates a sense of urgency for the agent or publisher and increases the likelihood of getting new eyes on your work. 

Invest in YOU! 

The most important part of pitching your book is the time and effort you give to the success of your book. You’ve worked so hard on your novel that you don’t want to sell yourself short or waste your time with strategies that don’t work. Remember, you are the only one who can write your story, but you are also the only one who can have the vision and the drive to make it a success. 

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Aimee Hardy is a writer in Birmingham, Alabama. Aimee is the author of Pocket Full of Teeth (2024) and has various short stories published with Running Wild Press, Stonecoast Review, and other literary collections. She received a Pushcart nomination in 2019 for her short story "Paper" and is dedicated to telling stories in unique ways. Aimee is married with two kids and loves to get lost in nature or disappear into a good book with a warm cup of tea.

The Indie Pubbing Journey Continues—Part Four: Navigating The Distribution Maze

By Steven Womack

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So you’ve written your book, rewritten your book (any number of times), and like the good little professional you aspire to be, you’ve paid an outside copyeditor to get the book in the best shape it can possibly be. You’ve studied the market, maybe queried a few agents (most of whom never even responded), done your due diligence, and decided that in today’s publishing environment, your best bet is to go the indie route.

You’ve done a deep dive into the freelance market that’s sprung up in the last decade to serve the needs of indie pubbers, and you’ve found a cover designer you absolutely love. You’ve either chosen an app to format your book or you’ve decided to spend the bucks to outsource the technical stuff.

Little by little, piece by piece, your dream is coming together. You can see the finish line—pub date—and you get a shaky, excited feeling deep in our gut that this is finally becoming…

Real.

Hundreds of hours of work, planning, following months or even years of writing your book. You’re excited, but at the same time, exhausted emotionally and maybe even physically. But you’re nearing the end, right? The finish line’s in sight.

Hold your horses, cowpokes. The reality is, you’re just getting started.

You think writing that book was hard? Try getting the book out there, grasshoppah…

This month’s installment of This Crazy Writing Life is going to—as the head of IT at the film school where I used to teach often said—start to start the process of getting your book out there. There are two main avenues by which you’re going to get your book into the hands of readers: eBooks and print books.

We’re going to start by tackling the question of eBooks, since as we established in an earlier edition of this column, that’s how you’re going to reach the largest number of readers and bring in the largest number of bucks. And in the world of eBook distribution, there is only one question to answer which will determine your eBook distribution strategy.

Are you going to go wide or are you not going to go wide?

What does that even mean, in English?

Okay, time for another [brief] history lesson. As the eBook revolution ramped up in earnest in the first decade of the 21st Century, there was a certain wild west feel to it. There was the Kindle e-reader from Amazon, then Sony came out with the Sony Reader in 2006, and Barnes & Noble came out with the Nook in 2009. So there were three different mainstream e-readers out there, each with different specs and technical requirements.

Then a whole slew of eBook distributors came online. There was Amazon (of course), and then Apple got in the game, followed by Rokuten Kobo, which is a Canadian eBook retailer owned by a Japanese company, known primarily as Kobo. Over the years, scads of other companies emerged as eBook retailers, distributors, or publishers—Tolino, Barnes & Noble, Overdrive, Books-A-Million, Hoopla, etc. etc. etc.

It was a complicated landscape. The administrative load alone to distribute through all these channels was overwhelming.

So in 2008, a book marketing guru, publicist and novelist by the name of Mark Coker rolled out a company called Smashwords, which was the first eBook aggregator. Coker’s groundbreaking and innovative approach brought all these varied distribution outlets into one place. Now indie pubbers could sign up with Smashwords, pick the outlets they wanted to distribute to, and then upload one file to one place, rather than one file to fifteen places. Coker also wrote a number of reference guides on formatting eBooks to meet all the technical needs of the various distributors and did all the accounting and setup. They created tools and guides to help indie publishers navigate this complicated landscape. Smashwords uploaded to the outlets you picked, tracked incoming payments, even did tax reporting and bookkeeping, and distributed payments out to the individual authors and independent publishing companies, all for what was actually a reasonable and fair cut of the earnings.

Coker’s idea—and Smashwords—was wildly successful. Within a few years, they were distributing hundreds of thousands of eBooks.

In 2012, three young entrepreneurs—Kris Austin, Aaron Pogue, and Toby Nance—decided it was time for Smashwords to have a little competition. So they opened Draft2Digital (often shortened to D2D), headquartered in Oklahoma City. D2D took a similar approach as Smashwords, but streamlined some of the processes and offered up a competitive set of user-friendly tools to help indie author publish their books with enough time and energy left over to write more of them.

Ten years later, in 2022, Draft2Digital acquired Smashwords in a friendly deal that kept Coker on board as part of the team. Today, D2D is the 800-pound aggregating gorilla in the indie pub space.

So that, in a nutshell, is going wide. Get your book out there in as many different channels as possible and just wait for the tsunami of bucks headed your way.

What’s the alternative? And why would anyone want to consider it?

Enter Amazon, the exciting, attractive, funny, smart, creative person you’ve always wanted to date but found incredibly high-maintenance. In July 2014, Amazon rolled out Kindle Unlimited, a subscription service that for $9.99 a month gave you unlimited access (with a few restrictions) to Amazon’s entire library of books and audiobooks—as long as those books were enrolled in Kindle Select (in typical Amazon fashion, nothing’s ever easy or simple; if you’re an author you have to enroll your books in Kindle Select in order to get them into Kindle Unlimited). Think of it as Netflix or Spotify, only for books.

There isn’t time or space here to go into the convoluted history of the Kindle Unlimited program. If you’d like to do a deeper dive into that, here’s a link to an excellent article:

https://www.hiddengemsbooks.com/history-kindle-unlimited/

The important thing to remember is that the way KU paid authors has evolved over time. The first payment method was rife for scamming and bad behavior. Amazon tackled that and went into a second generation of KU and now they’re in the third. But basically, in laymen’s terms, when you check out a book in KU, there’s a little widget or something inside the file that enables Amazon to count the number of pages you’ve read (well, hello there Big Brother) and authors are paid a fraction of a fraction of a cent for each page.

Five or so years ago, when I decided to dip my toes into indie pubbing, I chose what I thought was the obvious best route. I created a D2D account and listed all my books on every channel possible. Then, not knowing any better, I started buying Amazon ads and BookBub ads (more on that in future installments) and promoting them on social media and my meager newsletter subscriber lists and doing everything I thought would move books.

The result? Bupkis…

Oh, occasionally I’d sell a book here and a book there, but it’s the understatement of the day to say I was disappointed.

A couple of years or this and I was really burning out. So I reached out to an acquaintance, a fellow Edgar winner who, like me, wrote books set in New Orleans. Julie Smith and I both came into print about the same time, were publishing at about the same level, and encountering the same career struggles. Where our paths diverged was when Julie fully embraced the indie publishing movement in the early days of the eBook revolution and turned her career around.

She began publishing under her own imprint—booksBnimble—and brought back her backlist and later new work. Then she branched out and started publishing other writers. A few years later, she opened up a book marketing division to help indie pubbed authors. I reached out to Julie and after careful thought, signed on with her company.

Julie’s got a marketing plan that won’t work for everyone. Standalone books are a tough sell, as are literary books, nonfiction, and memoirs. But if you’re writing genre novels—romances, mysteries—and you have a series with at least three books, then they’ve got a plan for you.

When she takes you on as a client, you’ve got to get with their program. And the first step is to pull your books down from every distribution channel and enroll them in Kindle Select. This sounds counterintuitive, but truthfully, within a couple of months, I was grossing four figures a month.

I’m running out of space here, but the moral of the story is, don’t discount Kindle Select/Unlimited just because you don’t like Amazon or think you’ll get better results with a shotgun approach. In next month’s issue of This Crazy Writing Life, we’ll take a deeper look into how you make all this work. Thanks again for playing along.

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Decades ago, when I lived in New Orleans and was a newspaper reporter during the first term of the wonderful Edwin Edwards, I learned a great local term: lagniappe. Lagniappe means “just a little something extra; a bonus.”

So here’s your lagniappe for this month’s column. I just read a fantastic book called Love In The Time of Self-Publishing: How Romance Writers Changed The Rules of Writing & Success by Christine M. Larson. It’s simultaneously a history and analysis of how publishing has changed since the 1980s and how romance writers were the first ones to understand these changes, adopt them, and beat the big publishers at their own game. Dr. Larsen is a professor of Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information, but don’t hold that against her. The book’s a bit academic at times, but it reads like a well-written story, one we’re all still right in the middle of. It’s well worth the time to read.

Why I Hate Self-Publishing

By Steven Womack

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Some time ago, I gave a talk at the monthly meeting of the Middle Tennessee Chapter of Sisters-In-Crime. A week or so before that, I’d read an installment of Clay Stafford’s writing blog that put forth the proposition that writers should not give their work away. A writer’s work has meaning, Clay wrote. It has value and to give it away for free sends the wrong message to readers and to the world in general.

I’ve known Clay Stafford a good couple of decades now and have always regarded him as a wise and successful friend. When he speaks, I listen—and usually take notes.

This time, however, I had to disagree.

It’s not that I disagree with his notion that a writer’s work has value. It does, even if sometimes it’s only to the writer him/herself. All writers put an enormous amount of work and heart in to getting those words onto a page. But that doesn’t always automatically translate into value, especially value measured in sales/dollars. When there are roughly 2.2 million new books published every year (according to UNESCO), the competition is pretty rough out there and it’s hard to convince an audience that your book has value; in other words, it’s worth reading.

So I put forth the notion—based on my own experience—that the best way to get attention for your book was to give it away. In February, I had my first BookBub Featured Deal and in a four-day period gave away 24,897 eBook copies of the latest installment in my Music City Murders Harry James Denton series, Fade Up From Black. Through the rest of the month, that resulted in over 200,000 page reads. And since Amazon’s policy is to pay page reads on book giveaways if the book’s enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, I made money giving stuff away.

Enough to pay for the BookBub Featured Deal, anyway.

While I’ve given up predicting the future, I feel confident that at least a few of the people who downloaded those nearly 25,000 copies will like the book well enough to actually go out and buy the other installments.

It’s a whole new world out there, marketing-wise. Marketing in the internet age has a  very long tail, and to riff on my old pal Larry Beinhart, sometimes the tail wags the dog.

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After my talk, Clay wrote me a very complimentary note and asked if I’d be interested in writing a monthly column for Killer Nashville Magazine on self-publishing. I was very flattered, but the first obstacle to overcome was my loathing of the term self-publishing. Loathing? Seems kind of harsh. Why would anyone loathe a term like self-publishing, especially since some of the greatest writers in history published their own work? 

Disgusted with his usual publisher, Mark Twain formed a publishing company to publish The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Charles Dickens’s regular publisher showed little interest in A Christmas Carol, so Dickens hired artists and editors and paid for the printing himself. Beatrix Potter literally couldn’t interest anyone in publishing The Tale of Peter Rabbit, so she borrowed the money to print 250 copies. At latest count, there are some 45 million copies of THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT in print. Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass. The rest, as they say, is history.

In our lifetimes, the stories of self-published books that sold gazillions are apocryphal. Amanda Hocking, Andy Weir, Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, Scott Adams… all have, at some point in their careers, published their own work. And let’s not forget that whole Fifty Shades of Grey thing.

So why such distaste for the term?

I confess here that I’m an old guy. I began seriously writing in 1970, fresh out of boarding school and working on my first novel. There was no Internet then, no such thing as an eBook, and everything was old school; no respectable publisher would consider an unrepresented book, so you queried one agent at a time and if they took six months or a year to get back to you, tough noogies. They were the gatekeepers and they made the rules.

Then, like now, it seemed that every sumbitch who knew how to type thought they could be an arthur (a term coined by the wonderful Molly Ivins, when someone introduced me to her as a mystery writer—Great to meet you, we arthurs gotta stick together…)

Then, as now, there were dozens of predators out there preying on the hopes and dreams of aspiring writers. Self-publishing then was a synonym for vanity publishing, and the vanity presses were raking it in from the naïve rubes. Vantage Press, Pageant Press, and Exposition were three leading vanity presses that were, by the 1950s, “publishing” over 100 titles a year each. 

Even I got roped in myself when I paid $400 to have the legendary Scott Meredith Agency read a novel of mine. Meredith, being one smart cookie, had created a whole separate company to sucker in aspiring writers like moi. I got notes back from some office drone, supposedly signed by Meredith, who needless to say, didn’t take me on as a client.

Not one of those books published by a vanity press had a chance of being reviewed by anybody, let alone a respectable press like the New York Times. No bookstore would carry them.

Writers have always been easy pickings for predators. The most egregious case in history was The Famous Writer’s School, founded in 1961 by Bennett Cerf, a Random House editor and regular panelist on the TV show What’s My Line? There isn’t enough space here to go into that con job, but it made millions by paying writers as diverse as Mignon Eberhart, Rod Serling, Bruce Catton, and Faith Baldwin to join their “faculty.” The suckers thought their stuff was being read and critiqued by Rod Serling, when in reality the work was being done by unknown copy editors. There’s not room enough here to really relate the history of this scam, but Google it. It’s an object lesson for us all.

If not self-publishing, then what?

The world of publishing today bears no resemblance to the publishing world I came of age in, and that’s a good thing. I’m already over my word allotment that Clay gave me for this column, so over the next few months (or however long this little adventure goes on), I’m going to talk about these changes and how my own experience in This Crazy Writing Life have shaped me and my career. To me, it’s not self-publishing. Self-publishing means your stuff’s so bad, you’re the only who’ll touch it.

I prefer the term independent publishing. Going forward, I’m going to talk about how we, as writers, can take control of our work and careers, take back the power from the gatekeepers, and become the kinds of writers we want to be, with the kinds of careers and lives we want to have.

This’ll be a journey we’ll share. After all, as Molly Ivins once said: We arthurs gotta stick together…

Zenith Man

By McCracken Poston Jr.

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Maya Angelou once said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Since the 1999 acquittal of my client Alvin Ridley, an eccentric TV repairman accused of holding his wife captive in a basement for almost three decades before killing her, I knew I had to tell his story.

But there was one element missing—a satisfying ending.

I could easily explain, as I did to the jury, that Virginia Ridley was never held captive by Alvin. I could even show that she was not even murdered. What I could not explain was Alvin, the most difficult and demanding client I ever had as a small-town defense attorney. Why was he so hard to deal with? Before the trial, his entire social circle had consisted of his wife and one close friend, a character who was even odder than Alvin himself. Known as “Salesman Sam,” this pal rode around on his bicycle, pestering people to buy the promotional items he sold from catalogs he carried in his bike basket. He also (annoyingly, to me) often gave Alvin his so-called “expert legal advice,” which often countered and interfered with the legal advice I was giving my client.

After Alvin was acquitted, I continued to help him navigate the world that seemed to thwart him at every turn. We continued to have lunch together every week. Our friendship became important to both of us. But I still couldn’t figure the guy out. Forensic Files, A&E’s American Justice, the front page of the Washington Post, People magazine, NPR’s Snap Judgment, and FujiTV (Japan) all produced the basic outline of Alvin’s story, but none could explain the main character. The quirky TV repairman seemed beyond explanation.

A screenwriter friend wrote our story, and it was acquired by New Line Cinema under my suggested title of “The Zenith Man.” But after five years, it was clear that it was going nowhere. I tried finding co-writers to help write the book of my story, but one by one, each promising effort fell flat. I began to write down episodes from the case, just to preserve the story. I also sharpened the telling of the story in spoken-word, which I usually delivered to small social gatherings where drinking was involved. My friends could tell I was obsessed with it.

Then one day, someone pointed out a book being sold online with the same title that I had shared with New Line Cinema—Zenith Man — about a failed TV repairman accused of locking up his wife for decades. On brief inspection, I could see that it was our story! It changed all our names and location in this short story. What angered me was that it was being touted as original fiction. After my protests, the author of that book later changed her description of it to “inspired by true events.” But I was hurt, feeling like something very personal had been taken away from me. Frustrated at myself, mostly. We were “fair game” —I had been giving the story away!

Around this time, I was working on telling the story again with a podcaster at my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. A juror from our trial, who had moved to Alaska to work as a nurse, mentioned to the podcaster that she thought Alvin might be autistic. A lightbulb turned on in my mind. Within weeks, an expert on adult autism evaluated Alvin in Atlanta. The testing showed that he was very much in the autism spectrum.

The diagnosis gave me a new appreciation for the problems that Alvin had struggled with all his life and that had culminated in his murder trial. It also gave me what I had sought for Decades—an ending to my story. I could at last explain Alvin. That others like him could have similar experiences with the justice system in the future spurred me to action.

I met Bonnie Hearn Hill, an accomplished writer and editor, who read my scribblings and convinced me I could write Alvin’s story. She helped me develop a proposal and shared it with her curated short list of agents. That’s how I met Linda Konner, who agreed to represent me as a client. She sent the proposal to Michaela Hamilton, editor-in-chief of Citadel Press at Kensington Publishing Corp., who signed it up. I cannot stress enough the influence of these three women. If I have any success, it will be because of them.

My book contract called for a manuscript of 90,000 words. The problem was, the first draft weighed in at 177,000 words. Bonnie told me firmly but graciously what was working, what wasn’t working, and what should be cut. It was agonizing. We ended up with a lean and clean book of 98,000 words.

My excitement went through the roof when my book went online for presale on several bookseller sites in late May 2023. There it stood online alongside the “other” short story, which was now being given away for free. Soon they were both joined by yet another book, priced at $4.99, entitled “SUMMARY of Zenith Man by McCracken Poston Jr.” There, in 47 pages of A.I. drivel, a lawyer by the name of Rebecca Mitchell saved her client in a generic courtroom depiction of a trial. I was a woman! I went into action, and by the time I got through, the fake book was gone from all the major sites. Later I was told the project came out of Nigeria, in what seemed to be a scam designed to delude some confused or budget-minded purchasers.

Deciding that selling copies of my book was the best revenge, I signed up for Killer Nashville and had some promotional material printed up. I gave it to (or forced it on) everyone I met at the conference. The next day, I was thrilled to see a bump in Zenith Man’s Amazon Sales Rank. I learned that the ASR could fluctuate wildly, even in response to just a few sales, but it served to motivate me. It provided just enough dopamine to keep me going. I continued to drive the presale campaign at every opportunity.

At this writing, the publication date is a few weeks away.

As I continue my ground-level campaign, asking everyone I meet to support my book, I found an unusual sales aid from an unexpected source. Back in 1998, while I was defending Alvin’s case, I tried to get Salesman Sam on my side by buying some of his useless promotional items — cheap personalized pens inscribed with “McCracken Poston, Lawyer.” A gross of them soon arrived, and I quickly realized they were dried up and useless on arrival. Don’t ask me why I saved them. But it turns out, they now serve a purpose.

When I started talking to people about Zenith Man, I offered to give one of these twenty-five-year-old useless dried-up promotional pens to anyone who sent me or showed me their preorder receipt. To my amazement, people love them. After twenty-five years, the pens are finally of good use to me. You never know what can come in handy when you’re promoting your book.

And speaking of promoting, by the time this article is published, Zenith Man: Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom will be a published book. And the campaign goes on!

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McCracken grew up just across a creek and the state line from Killer Nashville founder Clay Stafford. They frequented the same country store in his hometown of Graysville, Georgia. Poston is a criminal defense lawyer in Georgia and Tennessee. His book, "Zenith Man: Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom" (Citadel, Hardcover, February 20, 2024), is about one of my cases. His client, failed TV repairman Alvin Ridley, was accused of some terrible things, including murder. We all had him wrong.