jacket & tie

I'm all for the notion of self-publishing.
     It drives a project that might otherwise be abandoned through to completion. And the need for a formal, polished version of a work, whatever its destiny, makes for an improved manuscript.
     But if you're going to take the self-publishing route, please hire a real graphic designer for the cover; don't try to do it yourself. You need the objective eye of a professional.
     Every glance at your book jacket is a job interview. Make sure you look your best.
— Michael Hale

The Good...

From: Huffington Post

the Bad...

From: Good Show Sir

and the Ugly...

From: Lousy Book Covers

"I can’t get no respect.” Chapter II

"In 2001 when my first novel, 'Slab Rat,' was published and I was important for about eight weeks, I was asked to write three very short stories for a literary magazine….

     As best as I can remember [my third novel, 'Pocket Kings'], did not receive one negative review. There were some flat-out raves, too. The Washington Post loved it and it was an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times Book Review. This was the first time that the Times had liked a book of mine. They cold-bloodedly butchered the first and fatally wounded the second.
     'Pocket Kings' got positive reviews, but the problem is it just didn’t get too many of them. As far as I know, only one newspaper west of the Pecos (the Dallas Morning News), reviewed it. Newspapers don’t cover books anymore, of course. And then there’s the lack of a readership on my part, I’m just not that prominent, etc. But why wouldn’t newspapers or magazines in Las Vegas cover a novel about poker....
     'Pocket Kings' took so long to actually get published that before it finally hit the stores and Amazon, I’d already written another novel, called West of Babylon,' and was ready to shop it around. My agent and I had decided, however, to wait and send out the newer book in the wake of 'Pocket Kings.' Our hope was that “Pocket Kings” would get positive reviews and that publishers would then chomp at the bit for 'West of Babylon.'

   ...we decided I should self-publish the book in electronic book format only. I would be publisher, editor, publicist, regional sales manager, mail room guy and everything else. (My wife designed the cover in return for a $50 gift card to the Gap.)
     I can tell you that self-publishing is not fun.
     After a few weeks of this 9-to-5 masochism, [as P.R. agent] you lose your sense of shame. I’m no longer so hesitant about sending emails because, I figure, nobody is going to read the damn thing anyway. The worst thing they can do is turn you down or ignore you, and by now I am used to that. I sent an email to the book section editor of a newspaper I thought would find 'West of Babylon' to its liking and, through an intermediary, was able to discover that the editor had never gotten the email. I have to assume that this is just one of the reasons for the great silence: I’m sending queries to people and my email is probably going straight into spam folders, right along with the ads for Viagra and Cialis. I have no idea what’s worse: writing books that don’t ever get published, or writing books that get published but don’t ever get read, or writing emails that don’t ever get read to people about books that don’t ever get published and won’t ever get read."
— Ted Heller, Salon
Read the full, unfragmented article here…

Buy all of Ted Heller's "analogue" books here…

And get his latest book 'West of Babylon' here…

Dross vs. Dreck

From: Bad Book Covers

"[…] For one thing, most contemporary literary fiction is terrible: mannered, conservative and obvious. Most of the stories in the annual best-of anthologies are mediocre, as are the stories that populate most magazines. It’s inevitable that this should be so; fiction writing is ludicrously popular, too many people are doing it, and most of them are bound to be bad at it. MFA programs, while of great benefit to talented writers, have had the effect of rendering a lot of lousy writers borderline-competent, and many of these competent writers get stories and books published. (This is not an anti-MFA rant: I loved the program I studied in, and love the one I teach in, and enjoy helping students do their best, even when it doesn’t end up being very good.)

     As a result, the dialogue literary fiction writers are having with themselves is, by and large, uninteresting. It isn’t that there aren’t smart people writing and conversing, it’s just that the lit-fic world is so enormous that the noise tends to overwhelm the signal."
— J. Robert Lennon, Salon
Read more…

"With the massive swell in self-publishing on the Kindle platform, these lists are getting very swollen indeed – and with the tiny price tags attached to the work of no-name authors, the temptation to play supermarket sweep when browsing can become irresistible.
     I am an avid reader of science fiction, and I have recently developed a guilty pleasure whenever I run out of reading material: performing late-night trawls of the genre’s bestseller list on the Kindle store, and picking up six or seven extremely cheap books that seem to be being read and enjoyed by the masses, all by authors I have never heard of.
     Most are mediocre – either bloated short stories that appear to have been proofread by drunks, or cliché-ridden hatchet jobs written in an attempt to jump on the rusty and creaking post-apocalyptic fiction bandwagon. But at 70p or £1.50 a pop, one can hardly feel cheated."
— Fred Crawley, The New Statesman
Read more…

For more about Garry Killworth, go here...

Out Front

From: The Museum of Bad Covers

Book cover design causes much heated debate. We all know what works and what doesn't but getting the desired result is something of an inexact science. […]

     One thing's for sure, bad design is something that's as obvious as the proverbial donkey's dangly bits. And in this day and age of indie and self-publishing just because you can create your own, doesn't mean you should.

PUSHER: We all know a good cover when we see one, and a bad one, before we talk about what makes a good one - what makes a bad one for you?

JIM DIVINE [veteran book-cover designer]: A bad cover to me is something that simply does not do the material inside justice. if it's a bad book then in my opinion, it deserves a bad cover. Generally bad covers are produced because the designers producing them either don't get what the book's about or don't care."
— Tony Black's Pulp Pusher
Read more…

Find out more about Bron Fane, author of Rodent Mutation, here...

DIY or die...

Linotype "hot-press" metal cast printer (from: Brian Azevedo)

"The story of self-publishing is Jan Strnad, a 62-year-old educator hoping to retire in four years. To do so is going to require supplemental income, which he is currently earning from his self-published novels. In 2012, Jan made $11,406.31 from his work. That’s more than double what he made from the same book in the six months it was available from Kensington, a major publisher. He has since released a second work and now makes around $2,000 a month, even though you’ve never heard of him.

     Rachel Schurig has sold 100,000 e-books and made six figures last year. She is the story of self-publishing. Rick Gualtieri cleared over $25,000 in 2012 from his writing. He says it’s like getting a Christmas bonus every month. Amanda Brice is an intellectual property attorney for the federal government. In her spare time, she writes teen mysteries and adult romantic comedies. She averages $750 a month with her work.
     […] Of course, you’ll see articles lamenting the paucity of sales most self-published books enjoy, but there’s a problem with comparing average self-published sales with traditionally published books. In self-publishing, the slush pile is made available to readers. These comparisons between the two paths take the tip of one iceberg (the books that made it through the gauntlet and into bookstores) with an entire iceberg (all self-published books). It’s not a fair comparison."
— Hugh Howey, Salon
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"Self-publishing is the literary world’s version of masturbation, except the results are quite often less thrilling, and you usually end up with a mess. However, despite its reputation for producing amateur dreck or your crazy uncle’s genealogical findings, self-publishing has a long history that includes such luminaries as Marcel Proust and Lewis Carroll. As of late, the practice has been supercharged thanks to the Internet, which enables the production and promotion of a book by almost anyone. Since 2006, the number of self-published books, print and electronic, is up 287 percent – that’s more than 235,000 titles, according to Bowker, the company that handles ISBN numbers. In 2011 alone, nearly 150,000 print books were self-published."
— John Winters, Salon
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Shameless

"Most difficult was enduring the stigma. Traditional publishers wrote the rules; no one--publishing houses, agents or mainstream media--would touch self-published authors, largely denigrated as hacks who couldn't cut it in the traditional world. Even superstar John Locke, who'd sold millions of e-books, had few fans offline. When Locke struck a sweetheart distribution deal with Simon and Schuster, his books appeared in bookstores, but few owners and shoppers knew who he was; as a result, his books languished in the lower rent area on shelves at the back of stores.
     Happily, the world has changed. In December 2011, Amazon stunned the industry when they introduced their KDP Select program, giving Amazon Prime members free access to thousands of books (now 180,000) in their Kindle Lending Library and offering authors an exciting new marketing opportunity and a brand new revenue stream. To participate, authors are required to distribute exclusively through Amazon, sparking outrage in the publishing world and--surprisingly--opening new avenues and presenting new opportunity for self-published authors."

 — Terri Giuliano Long, Huffington Post
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Writing's on the Wall

From: Calendars.com

"This is a story about the end of the gatekeeper. About the movement spreading throughout media, from which book publishing is hardly exempt, as readers of Harry Potter, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey have made all too clear.
     It’s about the reading public – the great unwashed, the hoi polloi – no longer letting tastemakers decide what’s worth reading. It’s about the masses seizing the means of publication.
     Publishing is an injured beast, but it was mortally wounded before Amazon attacked. And the injuries themselves are partly self-inflicted.
     The proof? The vast majority of top-heavy legacy publishers’ books – agented, edited, sales-managed, otherwise massaged, and only then published – tank, sinking with nary a trace. Conversely, some books, refused by dozens of publishers, go on to achieve rock stardom when some kindly soul finally deigns to bring them to market.
     Which means only one thing: Despite their vast education, experience and good taste, publishers have only about a quarter of a clue what the public really wants. For publishers, it’s 'the end of the world as they know it.'"
— Beverly Akerman, The Globe and Mail
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Hard, Soft and Unbound

From: The Upcoming

For better or worse, digital technology has permanently blurred the boundaries between the professional and the amateur. Whether it be in the gilded (and guilded) domains of accounting, law, design, or even medicine (you can now buy a cheep machine to analyze your own DNA); so why not publishing? — Michael Hale

"Attendance figures for the 2012 London Book Fair won’t be released for weeks, until the numbers are audited, but judging from the fairly strong traffic in the main hall (along with a large China contingent), it seems likely this year’s attendance will top the 24,802 who came to last year’s event. But one new exhibitor stood out at this year’s fair: Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing.
     With a booth nicely situated near the Digital Zone theatre, Amazon saw steady traffic, answering questions for potential authors, and making some of their most successful self-published authors available to talk about their experiences. 'It’s been great,' Atif Rafiq, general manager of Amazon’s KDP unit, told PW, noting steady traffic at the booth, good attendance at a one-hour session on Monday afternoon, and overflow attendance at two short presentations in the Digital Zone Theatre. It was Amazon KDP's first time at the fair, and Rafiq said Amazon KDP would also exhibit at the upcoming BookExpo America in New York in June.
     Amazon’s presence was part of a noticeable increase in the amount of programming geared toward self-publishing at this year’s fair. At the Author Lounge in Earls Court 2, roughly half of the programs focused on self-publishing, with titles like: Why Self-Publishing Is Not Only the Future but the Present; Serious Self-Publishing from Manuscript to Market; and E-Books for the Self-Published Author. Authors have always come to the London Book Fair, although not in large numbers—just 1,039 attendees of the nearly 25,000 who came to London in 2011 identified as authors. But as technology makes publication easier, and marketing more effective, that number appears poised to grow, whether to learn best practices or new skills, to potentially meet an agent, or, to find an alternate route to market, whether Amazon, or Lulu.com."
— Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly
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"Penny Dreadfuls" Revisited

From: Wikipedia

"Self-publishing: it's exploding in popularity, we all know that, with self-published authors selling millions via Amazon's Kindle, pushing traditionally published authors out of the top spots on new ebook charts, etc etc. But did you know that self-publishing websites are attracting more than 40% of all China's internet users every month? I didn't, and I am reeling, a little, from the statistic.
     These aren't Authonomy-esque, publish-and-be-encouraged-by-fellow-writers sorts of sites, though, or even collections of self-published novels. The websites host what is being dubbed 'freemium' publishing. Publishing Perspectives has more details: a growing number of self-publishing websites host thousands of free-to-read web serials – anything from historical epics to sci-fi – posted by their authors. As a serial gathers critical mass, the author is invited to become a 'VIP', and readers have to pay for the new instalments – only a few yuan, but these micropayments from readers can number in the millions: China Daily reports that one author, the 26-year-old Huang Wei, makes more than more than Y1m a year (£100,000).
     'It's pure entertainment, written, downloaded, read and deleted all at top speed,' says Beijing-based literary translator and publishing consultant Eric Abrahamsen, who also writes for the Chinese publishing industry newsletter Paper Republic. 'Basically all of this writing is genre fiction. It is produced by young writers and aimed at young readers.' " — Alison Flood, Guardian
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