Last night, I spoke at Ignite Ann Arbor 7. As always, the Ignite talks covered quite a range of topics and the speakers gave us a great time!
My own talk was one about self-publishing, which is something I’ve had some experience with this year. Back in 2006, I co-wrote a technical book (Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears) for Prentice Hall. That year, I also self-published a DVD (the TurboGears Ultimate DVD). But, my focus in this talk was my experience this year self-publishing the first three books in my 11 Quests children’s fantasy series.
<!– more –>Publishing companies have their place, and I’m not actually against using their services. My view is that we, as authors, should recognize how much more powerful self-publishing is today than it was even a few years ago. The Internet and modern technology and services are making life increasingly difficult for middlemen of all sorts.
After that bit of background, I dove into things that I found useful in my publishing adventure. First, I started with the writing. I wrote the first 11 Quests stories during National Novel Writing Month 2011 (NaNoWriMo, as it’s more succinctly called). I did all of my writing in Scrivener, which is a fantastic program that is available for Mac and Windows. Scrivener helps organize your writing. And, as an added bonus, Scrivener did a good job of producing my ebooks and the interiors of my print books!
MacHeist, which has been extended for 3 days (through Monday, October 29, I’m assuming), currently offers Scrivener along with a bunch of other apps for just $29. It’s a really, really good deal. And, with NaNoWriMo starting up again on Thursday, the timing is wonderful.
Next, I got into cover design. 99Designs, CrowdSpring, and DesignCrowd all allow you to post a price you’re willing to pay for a design and have a bunch of different designers produce artwork from which you pick the winner. These sites are controversial because only one designer gets chosen, but a bunch of designers are doing the work to try to get selected. Only you can decide how you feel about that issue.
Less controversial would be to find a local artist or someone at a site like DeviantArt or Elance. It’s a much more traditional relationship where you agree upon a price and the work gets done.
The approach I took to cover design was “do-it-yourselfish”. I started with DAZ3D which is free 3D software (Mac and Windows). I’ve also used Poser a bit, but I settled into DAZ Studio for my work. What makes these programs great is that you can buy, for not a lot of money, 3D models and then pose them and otherwise customize them to get the image you’re looking for. These programs have a learning curve, and there’s a lot of work required just finding the right models to match what you’ve written. But, I was happy with the results that I got.
I also used some stock images from stock.xchng.
After talking about cover design, I moved into distribution. I gave a full 40 seconds of my talk to Leanpub which is a truly terrific service. They help you get your book out to readers, possibly even before you’re done! Then, you can make changes and readers can update their copies of the book. At Leanpub, you start off with simple Markdown-formatted files and they will make ebooks that work well on computers, Kindles, iPads, Nooks and whatever other electronic gizmo you might have.
You can use Gumroad to sell any file from your site.
Of course, letting potential readers find your books wherever they might be searching for books is important. The four I’ve targeted are Amazon, Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes & Noble and Kobo. Services like Smashwords can help you get your book into a bunch of stores in one go. I’ve actually done it manually for my books so far. Note that Apple requires an ISBN for your book, which requires a cash outlay and a bit of hassle (which I believe Smashwords removes as a barrier). I bought a block of 10 ISBNs directly from Bowker, which is the official agency in the US. Canadians apparently don’t have to spend anything to get an ISBN.
For some books, it’s really important to offer print books. I’m using CreateSpace. They do print on demand (they only print when someone orders a book). From the shopping around I’ve done, their prices are reasonable, I’ve been happy with the output, and they’re owned by Amazon. That means that Amazon Prime members can get my books in two days with free shipping. CreateSpace also gives you your own “eStore” pages so that you can sell your print books from your site with a bigger profit margin.
Possibly the biggest print on demand company is Lulu (though I really have no idea about the relative sizes of these organizations). Lulu offers more print options and can help get your book into the online bookstores.
I spoke a bit about marketing. My main point with marketing is that it’s going to vary for each book. Good luck.
For marketing inspiration, though, I enjoy reading much of what Seth Godin has written. His book Tribes is especially relevant to self-publishing because building up a tribe that is interested in what you write is clearly a good way to have people interested in your books.
Last, but not least, I spoke about Joe Konrath. He’s a thriller author who has worked within the big publisher system and spent the past several years learning the ropes of modern day self-publishing. He’s a big fan of publishing ebooks for the Kindle and is super transparent with how he does things and what the results are. Those results, as he recently reported, come in at $37,000 a month on average over the past two years.
I summarized my talk by saying that these tools I’ve discussed (which just scratch the surface of what’s out there) didn’t exist a few years ago. The ebook market wasn’t there a few years ago. Whatever interests you undoubtedly interests others and there’s no reason today that you can’t get your words out there.