Tagged: self-publishing

How To Avoid The Self-Published Look

I just read a very useful article with lots of practical tips: ‘How To Avoid The Self-Published Look’.

To that I add:

* If you are printing a book the traditional way, choose good, quality paper. Don’t go for bright, whiter-than-white photocopier paper, else your book will look as if it’s just come off a photocopier. Ask for paper samples, or even show your printer or paper supplier the sort of paper you like from a book whose production you admire. Better paper might be more expensive, but it will look more professional, for sure; maybe you’ll just have to charge a little more for it, or print a few less? But it’s probably better than having lots of brighter-than-white copies lurking unsold in boxes in your garage. Make your book something that people want to possess.

* A good cover. A very good cover. Outsource it, if need be. Make your book beautiful, desirable. (Some publishers could pay heed to that too. Make your book look something more than a full-page advertisement in a magazine sold at the checkout in the supermarket.)

* Understand the differences between structural editing, copyediting, and proofreading, and introduce these as separate editorial stages in your production process.

* At some point, make sure that other sets of eyes read the book. You’ll never catch everything yourself.

And oops, I see that I go against the grain on this site in at times ‘improperly’ capitalising the first letter of every word in titles, including articles, conjunctions, and shorter prepositions. I follow that style in print, but for some reason I’ve found myself using initial caps online; it just looks tidier? Not least given that in email and other online contexts we don’t always italicise titles. Well, that’s my logic/excuse. Someday, maybe I’ll go all OCD on this site and change that, perhaps. Or maybe not. Ow, one of those editor dilemmas to keep us awake at night.

Round-up, 25 October 2012: Murderous Self-Publishers, DRM, Supply and Demand, Handwriting, Serials

A lot of noise this week (quite rightly in my view) on how Amazon controls your Kindle content, and can shut it down at its own whim, it seems. More on this another time, perhaps, but here is the original blog that kicked up the fuss, and some other links with perhaps some of the most useful commentary:

Outlawed By Amazon (original blog)

Amazon Inspires Wave of Anti-DRM Sentiment Following Customer Kindle Shutdown (links from Booktrade.info)

I increasingly favour the DRM-free approach to publishing, at least for many aspects of content. What you give away comes back to you some way or other, I feel (but then I am a generous kinda guy, I hope). Here is an article from Publishing Perspectives describing a succesful DRM-free venture: Top SF Authors Raise $1m With Pick-Your-Price, DRM-Free E-Titles. May their success ever increase (and I love how its the genre writers who’re pioneering this).

From IndieReader, some provocative views on whether self-publishing is killing the publishing industry (basically, self-publishers need to get a bit more professional):

If indie authors are going to make their mark, they’ll need to band together, put out reputable works, and stop looking for get-sales-quick gimmicks.

And from the Globe and Mail, a pertinent discussion on the creative writing industry and whether we’re creating more writers than can or will be read, with Canadian examples: Writers: graduating by the bushel, but can they find readers? Given the laws of supply and demand, I’m inclined to think that Mexican critic Gabriel Zaid is right when he (only half?) jokes that perhaps writers need to slip a five-dollar bill into their books in order to pay their readers …

And from earlier in the week a lovely blog on the lost art of letter-writing in the Guardian. Do follow some of the links therein, and also back to the extract from Philip Hensher’s book on handwriting: Why Handwriting Matters.

And finally: I am a big fan of the idea of serial fiction, and I am enjoying the reports on Naomi Alderman and Margaret Atwood’s serialised novel The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home. I can see (see above too) I am going to have to look into Wattpad some more.