Getting Started In Indie Pubbing (or Good God, what have I gotten myself into?)

By Steven Womack

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Maybe you’ve written your first novel (or second or tenth, whatever) and you’ve taken three years to query every agent on the planet and haven’t gotten even a nibble.

Or maybe you’ve been in this business a couple of decades and published two dozen novels, all of them with modest midlist advances and now out-of-print and not making you a penny. And you’re getting older, and all those years writing novels were years you weren’t piling money into a 401(k) or a company pension, and now you’re scared as hell you’re going to be eating cat food in your dotage.

Or maybe you’ve had some success, made some pretty good money from time to time, but you feel like you’ve been thoroughly abused and taken advantage of by publishers (don’t laugh; it happens). And you’re tired of arguing with editors and having covers you hate shoved down your throat, not to mention the complete lack of marketing, promotion and support (unless you’re a best-seller, in which case you don’t need it).

 So you listen to a few podcasts and read a few blogs and there all these stories of writers taking control of their careers, writing what they want, with covers they love, and succeeding beyond their wildest dreams. You’ve heard of this guy Mark Dawson, who sells a huge, sprawling extensive bunch of courses under his “Self Publishing Formula” brand. And you’ve heard about that fellow in northern Wisconsin who blogged that he made a hundred grand in three weeks selling his self-pubbed titles on Kindle.

And you hit the “Yeah, I’ll take your cookies” button on a few websites you visited and now your Inbox is flooded with emails every day offering to sell you courses on how to be a successful self-publisher or even offering to do it all for you—for a price.

It’s too much. Overload, fuses blown…

Time to take a deep breath and relax.

Like everything in life that’s overwhelming (and the older you get, the more of life that encompasses), sometimes it works to stop staring slack-jawed at the big picture and just break off a little chunk of it and see if you can handle that.

So if you’re trying to build a career as a writer, what’s the best chunk to start with?

The first step goes without saying: you’ve got to write a good book. I won’t spend much time discussing that, but remember—without a story that works, characters that are compelling, writing that leaves you wanting to turn to the next page even if it’s past your bedtime, everything else in the process is for naught.

So given that you’ve done everything you can to meet that first requirement, what next?

You also have to realized that writing, editing, marketing, book design, cover design—all the components of the process—are completely separate skill sets. Just because you’ve written a book doesn’t mean you can edit it or design a good cover for it. Indie pubbing your own work means, first of all, making a series of choices as to which skill sets you’re willing to learn and which ones your going to pay someone else to do.

So one consideration becomes: how much money do I have to put into this?

If money’s not an issue (is that even possible???), then you can write your book and pay somebody else to complete the process. There are perfectly legitimate companies out there who will do a good job for you (BookBaby being one of the more prominent), but plenty of others who are just blatant rip-offs. Do your due diligence.

Say, though, you don’t have unlimited resources and your biggest asset is the sweat equity you’re willing to put into this. Each person’s professional and life experience is different. For instance, I spent a decade working in publishing art departments, mainly as a typesetter and running an in-house art department. I’ve either actually typeset or supervised the typesetting of hundreds of books, so I’m pretty comfortable with interior book design and formatting.

Would I touch a book cover, though? Not a chance. I wouldn’t know good graphic design if it ran up behind me and bit me on the keister. A good cover designer is worth every penny you pay them, and more.

Editing? In my life, I’ve written literally millions of words. Do I trust myself to edit them? Hell, no. In the last Music City Murders novel I published, my biggest single expense was paying an editor to make sure the manuscript was in the best shape possible. I’m even glad someone’s going to be looking over this column before you see it.

That’s enough for now. I hope this has given you something to think about as you ponder your own indie pubbing journey. Next month, we’ll do a deeper dive into the steps of this process. Stay tuned…

Why Book Signings Aren’t What They Used To Be

By Steven Womack

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Buckle up, Buttercup: it’s story time!

Today, I’m putting on my Professor Peabody hat and inviting you to join me in The Wayback Machine, where we’ll journey back thirty years or so, to a time when being a working novelist was a whole different gig that it is now.

I started my first novel when I was eighteen, which was entirely too young for anyone to think they had anything to say about anything. Still, the combination of youth and arrogance knows no bounds, so I pressed on, determined to be the great writer I knew I was somewhere inside. Now if I could only convince the rest of the world…

Then life took over. And in one of the great ironies of my life (and the older I get, the more convinced I am that irony is one of life’s more primordial forces), after starting my first novel at the age of eighteen, it would take me precisely eighteen more years to sell one.

Even after the sale, it took a couple of years to get the book out. Then, as now, the wheels of traditional publishing grind very slowly.

So in 1990, I became a published novelist. Not only that, my first novel was a hardback published by one of the great publishing houses of New York, St. Martin’s Press. And like all newly published novelists, my first concern was when can I start doing book signings!

I loved going to book signings, loved meeting authors who’d written real books. Bookstores were my happy place and now my dream of getting to go to my happy place from the other side of the signing table was coming true. My hometown, Nashville, was a wonderful book town then. There were lots of independent bookstores around, as well as the big chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble.

One of the local independent chains was Mills Bookstores (chain? well, there were three of them), so I reached out to them, and they very kindly offered me a signing at their flagship store in Hillsboro Village. I met a fellow there—Michael Sims—who had moved to Nashville a few years earlier and would later go on to a spectacular writing career himself. He and I have been friends ever since.

Even then, publishers didn’t put a whole lot of marketing or promotion into most debut novels. So I took it upon myself to publicize and promote my first book signing. I worked up a database of a couple hundred of my closest friends and family, then merged the database with a Word document and sent out personalized letters inviting them to my very first book signing, which took place on a warm Sunday afternoon.

And it was astonishingly successful. In an incredible leap of faith, Mills had ordered around 130 copies of a book no one had ever heard of, by a writer no one had ever heard of. The store was packed, the event went on for—if memory serves me—at least three hours. I spoke for a bit, read an excerpt from the book, then signed literally every copy in the store. By the end of the afternoon, Michael was pulling display copies out of the front window to sell.

At the end of the day, I thought I got this…

Now, over thirty years later, I still haven’t had a book signing that successful. Most of my book signings have been like one I did with Sharyn McCrumb at a Little Professor Bookstore in Birmingham, where someone walked up to our signing table (and right up to it, since there was no line) and asked if I knew what the lunch special was today.

Book signings were events back then. They still are for some writers, if you’re a star. Stephen King can draw a crowd wherever he goes. If you’re a genre writer and have developed a huge following in your field, then you’re good to go. Celebrity book signings still work, and locally famous true crime books or other spectacle-type gigs still work.

But if you’re just a working stiff writer, on a self-financed book tour in a town where nobody knows you (yep, I’ve done plenty of those), book signings aren’t worth what they used to be. There aren’t as many bookstores today, so your options are more limited. The two great independent chains that were in Nashville back in the day—Mills Bookstores and Davis-Kidd Booksellers—are long gone. As a result, writers sometimes have to compete for limited signing slots at the few bookstores left. One bookstore I know has an application on their website you fill out if you want to sign at their store, and I know a number of writers they’ve turned down. And some independent bookstores, when they schedule a signing for a well-known author, actually charge admission to people who want to go hear their favorite writer drone on.

If you’re an indie-pubbed writer, then it’s even more disheartening. Bookstores, like everyone else, still have some old-school, ingrained prejudices against “self-published” writers (see last months column).

Even David Gaughran, an Irish writer who’s been a pioneer and an expert in the indie pubbing movement, wrote in his latest blog that getting out there to press the flesh—book readings and book fairs—are “F Tier” marketing strategies for authors today.

“F Tier” means a waste of money and time.

The days when books were primarily hand-sold, person-to-person in brick-and-mortar bookstores are long gone. You might sell a few books here and there, but it’s not going to move the needle on your actual numbers or your Amazon Sales Rank—and sad to say, that’s what counts these days.

So if you want to do a book signing, then do it for the right reasons: you want to hang with friends, family, fans and fellow book lovers for a pleasant afternoon or evening. Have a good time, boost your ego, have a glass of wine.

Then get up the next morning and go back to work. That paper’s not gonna sling itself.