December 19, 2011

Here's the long awaited Christmas Edition of this blog (at least, I waited a long time to write it). As promised last time, I will have more to say about dealing with Lightning Source this time and my own experiences. Before I get to that, however, I need to bring my readers up to date with news from Moonshine Cove Publishing, LLC. And there is news, big news. Moonshine Cove has published its second book, No Time to Cry, an exciting romantic suspense novel set in a small southern town back in the era of tail fins and rock and roll. For more details, go to this site: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=G+Dedrick+Robinson&x=10&y=20.
It's somewhat of an understatement to say the story is set in the 1950s. Rose Campion is actually the pen name of a writer from that era. It was actually written in 1957 making it an important period piece. More than that, it's an exciting read with memorable characters. Here's what some current writers of romance novels say about it:
"NO TIME TO CRY may be set in 1957 Kentucky , but it's definitely not Richie Cunningham's 'Happy Days.' Sue Munroe, a small-town gold-digging Lolita, mistress of the con, wants two things--riches and her own Prince Charming--and she'll go to extremes to get them. Filled with intrigue, scandal, romance, betrayal and murder, this romantic suspense novel is a sizzling guilty pleasure read."--Carole Bellacera, award-winning author of Tango's Edge and the upcoming Lily of the Springs
"Rose Campion's fresh and engaging voice comes through loud and clear on every page of No Time to Cry. With its vivid descriptions and fascinating characters, this book grabs you from the start and won't let go."--Heather Huffman, author of Ties That Bind and Suddenly A Spy
Sorry to go on so much about this new book, but I guess you can tell that as the publisher, I'm proud of it.
Now, let's get on with some more more information about Lightning Source International, LSI from here on. First, how can you as an individual, author or not, deal with this company? The short answer is you can't. LSI does not sign contracts with individuals, only with publishing companies. So that has to be your first step if you want to work with LSI—form your own publishing company. How many hoops you have to jump through to do so depends on what state you live in. As I've already described in a previous installment, for South Carolina, it wasn't bad, just filling out an application and paying $125.00.
Once your company exists, there's one more preliminary step that must be completed before you apply for an account with LSI. You need to own a set of ISBNs, International Standard Book Numbers. Look on the back of any book and you will see the ISBN, 13 numbers usually printed on a bar code in the lower right corner on the back of the book. The ISBN identifies the book and publishing company anywhere in the world. Where and how do you get an ISBN for your book? They are provided free in many parts of the world, but in the United States you have to buy them from R.R. Bowker, a private company. You can buy them one at a time, but it's a money saver to buy them in bulk. The price for one ISBN is $125.00 but 10 will cost you just $250. A hundred is $575 or just $5.75 each, a lot better price structure than $125 each. I decided to buy a hundred. In addition to the savings, another big advantage of buying in the bulk is that the six-number sequence of numbers identifying your publishing company remains constant. All books your company publishes will have this same six-number sequence whereas if you buy ISBNs one-at-a-time, the numbers will differ.
After your publishing company legally exists and your ISBNs are in hand, you're ready to start filling out the LSI application form. The purpose of the application is to establish a wholesale business relationship between your company and LSI. You can request that LSI mail the application to you if you want, but doing it on line is a lot quicker and easier, although the LSI website is far from the easiest to navigate. Correctly completing it can be tricky because some of the things asked are not entirely clear, or at least they weren't to me. I found Aaron Shepard's guide to completing the LSI application in his book POD for Profit to be a great help and I recommend it. It's important that you avoid incorrectly answering some of the questions because if you don't, your company might be turned down.
After submitting the completed application, what typically happens next is that you will be emailed a set of additional questions. Answering these correctly is just as important as the first set, but the end result should be that you have a contract with LSI for the U.S. You will be asked if you also are interested in contracts with the UK, the European Union and Australia. If so, there are contracts to complete for each of these. It's a lot to fill out, but worth it because the end result is that the books from your publishing company will be available all over the world through Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon Australia, etc as well as Barnes & Nobel and many other sources. Any book store should be able to order your book.
Although not a direct requirement, it's worth mentioning that in reality you need one more thing to work with LSI, technical proficiency. In other words, you need to feel comfortable working with computers. LSI hints at this with one of their questions: “Will you need assistance with editing, book design or cover layout?” What they're really asking is whether you will need help from LSI. If you say you will need help, your application will mostly likely be turned down because they do not offer such help, so just answer, “no.” If you think you might need help, you'll have to get it somewhere else. If you are a person who has to ask others for help with your computer fairly often, then you most likely won't be able to work successfully with LSI. On the other hand, if people ask you for help, you should have no problem.
After a week or a few weeks, if your contract is accepted by LSI, you will receive a welcoming email from the Account Liaison Representative. This is an important email because it will introduce you to your assigned Client Service Representative with her phone number and email address. From here on, you will work exclusively with your assigned Client Service Representative. If things go smoothly, you will have no need to contact her. It's when problems develop that you have to work with her, but it's up to you to contact her, not the other way around. If your cover or you book interior is rejected for some reason, you'll receive an automated email informing you of that fact, but not why. After you contact your CSR, which sometime can take days, your CSR will serve as your liaison with the technician. She will tell you why your book cover or interior was rejected, but not how to correct it. That's up to you to figure out.
Maintaining a good working relationship with your CSI is important, not just to get your book out in a timely manner, but for the bottom line. LSI charges your company $75 to submit the cover and interior. If you have to resubmit either, you will be charged again. Your CSR can waive this charge. Be nice to your CSR. Realize that the CSRs at Lightning Source are greatly overworked with each CSR having to handle maybe 300 clients. That's a lot to keep up with, so don't be impatient if she doesn't answer your email immediately. Try to remain calm and understanding.
Enough for this installment. Next time, I'll get down to some specifics about how to set up your book interior and how you can go about getting a good cover for your book. Merry Christmas Happy New Year and good publishing!

Installment Three

In the previous installment, I emphasized that authors had better be prepared to publicize and promote their books if they expect to sell any. Even authors lucky enough to get published by one of the big companies have to do this, and it is especially true of self-published books. Well, since the previous installment, this is what I've been doing, with the two new books I have out now, one of them published by a different publisher than my first and the other one by Moonshine Cove Publishing, my own publishing company. I've spent a lot of time on a lot of different web sites posting notices, summaries, descriptions, excerpts, cover images and anything else I could think of about the two books. My major emphasis has to be on the Moonshine Cove book, Blood Scourge, since 100% of any profit goes to me rather than 25%, or even worse, the 10% from my first book. The way it's actually worked out is that I've devoted pretty much equal time to them, since while I'm on a particular web site and familiar with the procedure, it doesn't take that much extra time to repeat the process to enter the information for The Last Lion of  Sparta.

I ended last time saying that a new technology, print on demand or POD, and a new company, Lightning Source International, are completely transforming the publishing business. I have more to say about both of them in this edition.

Nowadays, it seems we do everything on a computer, or even a smart phone. POD is the technology that brings computer generated books to the publishing industry. Up until just a few years ago, all books were produced by modern versions of a really old technology, printing. Printing, of course, goes all the way back to Gutenberg and his invention of the printing press around 1440. The first book to be printed this way was the famous Gutenberg Bible. The technology quickly spread and books rapidly became much more affordable. Once all the setup process was completed, which took a lot of time and effort (and expense), a single book could be produced in a few hours or minutes, instead of perhaps a year. That's how long it might take an experience scribe to copy a book. Of course, this varied with the length of the book and how experienced the scribes were as well as how diligently they worked. For a thick book like the Bible, a year would have been about right.

Modern printing technology doesn't bear much resemblance to the Gutenberg press. Books were, and still are, printed on what are called offset presses. They work by transferring an image of the pages being printed to an inked plate. The plate than transfers the image to a roller which actually prints the pages. Presses like this come in various sizes, but the largest one are automated and huge. They cost millions of dollars each, use giant rolls of paper and print sixteen pages of a book at one time. A far car from setting each letter by hand using a piece of moveable type, the earliest form of printing that Gutenberg pioneered.

Nevertheless, offset printing still shares something in common with the earliest printing presses, most of the expense and effort goes into the setup process. Once that's done, it's very easy to produce a lot of books. Therefore, it's going to cost a whole lot more per book to print just a few, but much less per book to print many. There are a number of book printing companies on the web that publish their price lists. What is striking is how dramatically their charge per copy goes down with the more books the customer orders. This works well for the big publishers. They can order tens of thousands for a single press run and pay next to nothing per book. But self-publishers are out of luck. The price to print, say ten or fifty books, would probably be as much as the publisher could hope to sell them for. The result? The big publishers corner the market.

POD changes the equation. The publisher prepares the book, both the interior (the words) and the exterior (front cover, spine and back cover) as digital files. Generally pdf files are used (invented by Adobe, pdf stands for portable document format). Their big advantage is that once produced, they stay the same and look the same on any computer, whether pc, mac, ipad or smart phone. The publisher submits the digital files, prepared to the printer's required specifications. The printer stores them on a computer connected to large automated printers. The process of printing a book, whether a single copy or fifty, simply requires a technician to send the digital file to a computer along with the number of copies to be printed. The process is really just an automated industrial version of what ones does at home when printing a letter or some other document using a computer.

So, with POD, it's no longer necessary for a publisher to print up a huge number of books to get the economy of scale. When an order comes into the printer, the book is printed. No warehouses are needed, no problem of having a lot of unsold books and no returned books from bookstores that they can't sell. A small publisher can compete with a big publisher, at least in theory. In practice, it's not so simple (is it ever)?

The problem is that for a publisher to actually sell books, they must be distributed nationally in order to be available to a wide market and that requires a wholesaler. The largest wholesaler in the U.S. is Ingram Book Company. To deal with them, a publisher had to establish a relationship and sign a contract, not a terribly hard thing if you're a large publisher. If you were a self-publisher, forget it. Ingram never had any interest in dealing with you. This is where the new company enters the picture, Lightning Source International (LSI).

There are many POD printing companies today. LSI is one of them, but one with a most important difference. LSI is a division of Ingram Book Company. Because of that, Ingram carries every single book printed by LSI. This automatically gets your book listed on Amazon, the world's biggest book seller, and Barnes and Noble, the second biggest. Any book store can order the book. In short, LSI is a game changer.

More on that next time.

INSTALLMENT #2 – 18 AUGUST 2011

Wow! Three weeks since my first blog entry. I need to do better about keeping this blog up to date. I've been busy during this time, completing a lot of steps necessary toward publishing my novel Blood Scourge through my publishing company, Moonshine Cove Publishing, LLC. A lot of it has been updating my content on various websites to try to get web exposure rather than actual time spent in publishing the book, but I'm running into snags on that too. I have made progress, however. The various ebook versions are published, allowing the book to be for sale at a lot of different sites including Amazon and the Apple store. The snags I'm running into concern the cover of the print version, but I'll save that for another time.

I ended last time making the bold claim that it takes just a few hours time to publish a book and get it into the distribution chain. Even with the snags I'm running into as a newbie publisher, learning the ropes as I go, I stand by that statement. The publisher's time in getting a book out, ready for customers to purchase is so much less than the amount of time it takes to write a novel that it's laughable. Instead of the 90:10 split (or 75:25 as for the other book contract I have) in favor of the publisher, it should be turned around the other way.

If the publisher devoted time and money to promoting and publicizing each author's book, publishing deals would be a lot fairer, but, from what I've been able to tell, they don't. They expect the author to take care of this. That really makes no sense at all. The author has already spent a year, two years or five years writing the book. Now they're supposed to take more time selling the book so the publisher can take the lion's share of any profit. What kind of deal is that? For most writers, a really bad one.

Some of you might be thinking that the reason for this is because I've been published by small independent presses, not one of the big publishers, the ones who only take submissions only from literary agents. Well, from what I read, maybe it used to be that way at the big publishers, but no more. While it is true that the big publishers have big budgets for promotion and publicity, it's all reserved for the books they think will have the best chance of selling a lot of books. What books would that be? The ones written by folks who have name recognition, the stars and especially the superstars. They get the big splashy book tours where people line up around the block, the appearances on popular TV programs, the expensive ad campaigns, the reviews by important reviewers and the blurbs by famous people about how wonderful their latest book is and how you just can't put it down. These are the books that make most of the money for the big publishers.

If you stop and think about it, this makes good economic sense. Spend your budget on the books that your experience tells you have the best chance of making money, not on some no-name author no one's ever heard of. After all, a publishing company is in business to make money, not promote unknown writers or showcase great literature that few people will bother to read. It's hard to get readers to take a chance on an unknown author being a dud. Even worse than wasting their money on a bad book is the waste of time, time no one can ever get back.

What might happen if a big publisher devoted the sort of promotional budget to a first novel by some unknown author that was spent on, say, Sarah Palin's book? I tend to think they could turn it into a best seller, but even so, it probably wouldn't sell nearly as many books as Palin sold. The publisher stands better odds of making the most money doing exactly what they're doing.

Sarah Palin's book would have done well even without the big promotional budget because she already possessed what the publishing industry calls a Big Platform, an A-List Platform, meaning her name was known to millions of people and that she could get on national TV and radio anytime she wanted. Unknowns, like me, have no platform. Our job number one is to try to build a platform. One way is starting a blog and have your own web site.

Another way is to spend your own money by hiring an agency specializing in author promotion. I've read that it takes a minimum of $100,000 to have an effective national promotional campaign. The key word in that sentence is “minimum.” A hundred thousand is considered the bare minimum to be able to sell enough books that might have some chance of paying for the promotion. A quarter of a million would be a lot better.

What is comes down to is that new authors, whether with a small independent press or one of the big names, had better be prepared to spend a lot of time promoting their own books. If you do that and succeed in selling a fair number of books, the big publisher is more likely to offer you a contract for a second book. Why not? You've made some money for them. Then they'll probably start to spend a little money on you. But if that second books flops, watch out! There won't be a third.

To return to why I made the decision to start my own publishing company, December last I bought three books on self-publishing and began reading them. To say the least, they were eye-opening. I bought some more, now seriously considering the possibility of becoming a publisher, and knowing more the type of books I'd need to guide me through the process. By late January, I found myself checking the law in the state where I live as to what steps I'd have to take in order to start my own LLC publishing company. In other words, how much red tape would I have to struggle through. If you don't already know, LLC stands for Limited Liability Cooperation, which our oldest son, the one who is an attorney, said would be a good course to follow.

As it turned out, it was a simple process, just a short application to fill out along with a check for $125. Within a couple of weeks I received a Certificate of Existence from the Secretary of State certifying that Moonshine Cove Publishing, LLC, duly organized under the laws of the state, exists. With that declaration, I found myself in the publishing business.

I knew I'd really arrived when two weeks later, the first piece of junk mail came in addressed to Moonshine Cove.

Now that I had a company, I had to start seriously planning the steps I'd have to take in order to actually put a print book and an ebook before the buying public. There are lots of steps, lots of things to do the first time through that you won't have to do with the second book. I'll get into some of these steps in later additions to the blog. None of this even matters unless you can get national distribution for your book. Without that, you'll be limited to selling single copies of your book to your family and perhaps on eBay.

National distribution is the thing that the big companies used to have sewn up. Why do you think the small independent presses are small? Because they couldn't sell enough books to be big.

But the publishing industry is now in a great state of turmoil and change. Why? Because of a new technology that started about a dozen or so years ago and the founding of a new company. The technology is POD, print or publish on demand, and the new company is Lightning Source. I'll write about both of these next time.

Adventures of a Self-Publisher

I will be blogging about my experiences starting a publishing company to publish the novels I've written (and perhaps other authors in the future). In this, the first installment, I'll be writing about what finally led me to this step.
After years of struggling I finally achieved that which I sought so long, to have a real publisher, not one you pay but who pays you, offer me a contract to publish my novel, The Seventh Deception. I signed the contract and a few months later the book became available for purchase on Amazon, both as a print book and an ebook. A dream achieved? Not quite, although it seemed so at the time.
A lot of writers out there might be thinking that I am nothing but an ingrate. Having a legitimate, well respected small press publish your manuscript—certainly that's achieving a dream. I should be thanking the publisher every day, not bad-mouthing them.
Well, I have no intention of bad-mouthing my publisher. They have fulfilled their terms of the contract and have produced a respectable product. They have a good reputation in the industry and according to a recent edition of Writer's Market, are selective, receiving a thousand queries in a year and publishing only three. After six years of getting nothing but rejections and thinking my writing must really be lousy, you can bet that made me feel good. I felt even better when other contract offers starting coming in from other small independent publishers. In all, I had about six or seven contract offers to publish my novel about the Nazi atomic bomb project. Yes, I ignored the admonition that quite a few publishers stipulate, no simultaneous submissions. Mostly I think they post that restriction with a wink and a nod knowing that it's not practical, although one publisher did withdraw their contract offer when they learned I'd submitted my manuscript to others.
I'd never received any encouragement at all from publishers before, so this was a surprise, a most pleasant one. In a future issue of the blog, I'll tell about the change I made in order to have this happen, how it all came about, but that's off the subject for this post. If I forget, remind me.
I ended up going with the very first contract offer I'd received. Why? Because they were the only one that I'd been unable to find anything negative about, and they had a lot of their books on Amazon, some with real reviews from legitimate sources. In short, they seemed like the real deal. I thought I was lucky to get them, and I probably was.
Saying all that about my publisher and saying they've lived up to the terms of the contract, than why did I decide to found my own publishing company? The answer is the contract, or actually, the terms of the contract.
A lot of the contract items are pretty standard and no surprise, clauses that say I'm on my own when it comes to any claims of libel or infringement and how I'm expected to help promote the book at my own expense. So if I travel to a book signing, I have to pay for that. But the two that really started me thinking about what a raw deal I got are how much I receive from the net receipts, not cover price or gross receipts, the publisher's net, and how long the publisher owns my book. I'll be paid 10% of the net receipts, and the publisher owns the book for, “the lifetime of the copyright.”
What this means is that the publisher gets 90% of any profit for the lifetime of the copyright. Do you know how long a copyright is in the United States? For a book published after 1977, the copyright is the lifetime of the author plus 70 years.
That means the publisher legally owns my book for as long as I live plus probably as long as our three sons live. But who knows? Our oldest son is an attorney. Maybe someday he might get interested in finding a way to break the contract.
I had to do a lot of research to write this book about the Nazi atomic bomb, a lot of reading, a lot of digging. Then there was the plotting, development of characters, the writing and the numerous rewrites, plus editing, writing long synopses, medium-length synopses, short synopses, query letters, outlines, blurbs, on and on. About three years of work all together, but I only get 10% while the publisher gets 90%. Doesn't sound fair, does it? Or at least that's what a tiny little nagging voice kept telling me.
However, the more rational part of my brain kept saying that it might not seem fair, but actually is because the publisher makes the work available to the reading public and that takes a tremendous amount of work and effort.
Where did that idea come from? Through the many years of rejection, I'd built up a pretty good library of books on writing fiction, editing fiction, writing queries, writing synopses, how to get an agent, giving editors and agents what they want and how to eventually get published. The main message from all these books was to keep writing, never give up, keep reading, keep trying to improve, keep at it. And all of them agreed that yes, the publisher takes the biggest cut, but without doubt, they earn it. They agreed that the same is true of literary agents.
That was my mindset eight months ago. Now I know that I can do in just a few hours all that my publisher had to do in order to publish my book.
More about that in next week's installment.
G Dedrick Robinson; http://www.amazon.com/Seventh-Deception-G-Dedrick-Robinson/dp/160977020X/