And here is the bootleg recording of “Story Turns”, my second presentation at this year’s LTUE. You can also downlad the PDF of the presenation.
A big thanks goes to Aaron Allred who recorded the audio and Michael Barker who mashed it up with the presentation.
Last week I went and saw Salt. Wow. The movie started with a bang and was off to the races with lots of great action. Unlike many action films where the characters perform stunts which are simply too hokey for me to buy into, I found myself believing in all but two of Salt’s. So I was wowed most of the time instead of thinking about whether they were using wires or what or that it was all so wrong and geeze don’t these guys have consultants? They weren’t as stunning as the opening of Casino Royale, but what is?
But it wasn’t just action. The premise and acting were all great as well (yes, I recant, I slammed Jolie a while back as an actress cast only for her face value; and while you know that’s one of the reasons why she was here, she still was convincing in her role). Furthermore, the story had a lot of great reversals and reveals. But this was also its ultimate downfall.
When I got to the ending, I did not feel a climax release. No catharsis. No afterglow. It just ended and left me feeling empty. It’s an awful feeling. Totally unsatisfactory. Such a maddening cut off.
But why? It was all so good up to that point.
*** SPOILERS ***
As I was talking it over with Nellie I believe I indentified the answer: in their effort to be surprising, the director and writers removed everything that would have built suspense. So instead of getting a Sixth Sense ending where the surprise adds to the climax and gives it a wonderful texture, we got a slap of surpise and then nothing.
For me to feel relief, triumph, and the desire to stand up and cheer–all those great climax emotions–I have to be worried about a character. Stressed, thinking they’re going to fail. They need to fight courageously against insurmountable odds and actually come to a point where it appears all is lost. Where I groan inside. All this creates massive pent up worry and anxiety for them. And at that point, the character snatches victory from the jaws of defeat.
Boom! The climax floods me and it’s delight, relief, cheer, joy.
It’s just like a football game where we bite our nails until the very end. Where our non-ranked team is playing the #3 team in the nation. Maybe we jump ahead in the second quarter, but in the third we fall behind. We make some great plays but can’t catch up. And when we do put points on the board, the other team immediately responds. There are three seconds left. We’ve stalled at the twenty yard line. We have one more play. From the moment it starts it appears to be broken, our QB is going down, and then . . . he passes to a running back who has made some space. Who is standing open in the end zone! Yeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhhh!
In order to feel a release a climax, something has to build up. The thing that builds is worry, fret, desperate hope. This is what we mean when we talk about suspense. We know the team’s goal, see their predicament, see the overwhelming odds. See them about to lose it all. The dread of defeat and what will be lost rises.
But in Salt the director and writers went for the effect of surprise instead of suspense and triumph. The moment Salt starts in on the Russian president I thought she was the bad guy. Yes, there was the bit about the spider that had me wondering. Yes, I knew she felt anguish about her husband being killed (that smart little reveal in her expression). I knew all of that. But the movie kept me busy thinking she was the bad guy up until almost the very end. Everything in the film lead me to believe this. Not because I didn’t get it. I got it precisely. It’s exactly what the director wanted. It was the setup for the big surprise/reversal at the end.
But when they went for surprise by not letting the audience know what Salt was really up to, the immediately removed the possibility of suspense. So I didn’t feel any suspense at her infiltrating the old group of spies. No relief at her killing them–that was just her revenge. No suspsense when she went to the White House. Nothing when she chased the president down the elevator shaft. The whole time I was thinking, crap, they really did indoctrinate her. She’s bad.
More importantly, there was no rooting, no worry building to release proportions.
Not until the very end do we realize what she’s been trying to do. Oh, the role reversal with her and Ted Winter (btw, like Liev Schreiber who plays the part) was all a big surprise, as it was designed to be. But the surprise faded and there was . . . nothing to replace it. That’s how surprise works. It’s a relatively short effect.
Yes, she kills Winter. Yes, he was a threat at the end with his scissors, but I didn’t care that much. I hadn’t been whipped into a fever pitch. Not like I was in Gladiator with the emperor and the lead in the coliseum. There was no pressurized worry ready to burst. There wasn’t any because we hadn’t had any time for it to build and because by that time nothing for Salt was really at stake. The one meaningful thing she stood to loose–her relationship with her husband–was taken away from us in an earlier scene when he was shot dead. So what was at stake? A big old nuclear war. Well, who cares about that? Nobody. It’s too generalized. We cared about Salt and her husband.
The result was that the director and writers traded climax for surprise. Alas.
So here’s my conclusion. Surprise is a relatively easy effect to create. You simply have something unexpected but logical occur. Relief, triumph, climax needs something much different. And surprise can be a part of it. But in our effort to build surprise we must not remove the conditions necessary for please-dear-mother suspense. Suspense requires we root for and worry about a character for a significant period, our unease growing until it’s drawn taut, straining. All the time something significant has to be at stake. Something we can sympathize with. Something personal to the person we care about. Only then can we feel the climactic release. Only then will we stand up and cheer in holy-crap-no-way relief and delight.
You can read the transcript of my remarks at the American Librarian Association (ALA) conference in Chicago on July 11 below as well as the supporting information.
I am so happy to be here. And I’m happy share some good news. David McCollough, the Pulitzer prize winning historian shared this fact in his commencement speech at the University of Utah this spring. “There are yet “more public libraries in America than there are McDonalds.” [Cheering]
We have not yet been assimilated!
Of course, this is due in a large part to you, the librarians who care for the collections and take care of the patrons. Which is why I think you deserve a big round of applause. Give yourselves a hand. [Applause]
I want to start my remarks with two quotes.
Ray Bradbury was recently interviewed in a NY Times article He said, “I don’t believe in colleges and universities.” This is what he said, “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries.” He said this because when he graduated from High School he didn’t have enough money to go to college. So he went to the library three days a week for ten years.
The next quote is from the great poet Dylan Thomas–“Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light”–that guy. He said, “My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.”
If you look at Bradbury and Thomas, they read, not because there was some grade involved, not because someone went after them with a stick—they read from hunger. From thirst. They read with wild abandon because they found in reading something they couldn’t find elsewhere.
I want to suggest one thing they found was a drug. [Laughter] I’m not speaking in metaphor. I’m talking about real physical response. As real and physical as the response you get when you or I take aspirin, brandy, or crack. Well, I hope we’re not taking crack. [Laughter]
When we think about drugs we think about pills, smoke, injections. But those are simply one set of delivery mechanisms for chemicals that trigger a physical response. There are other delivery mechanisms. Other triggers. One of them is fiction.
Now I don’t have time today to detail how this works. But I will write it up on my website for those who are interested. The key thing to remember is that fiction, the kind of fiction we love, the kind that keeps us up at night sitting on the edge of the tub or locked in a closet with a light, the kind of fiction goes beyond cognition, beyond data and facts. We find it so pleasurable precisely because it triggers and guides a physical response.
So how does all of this apply to science fiction and fantasy? Here’s the deal. And here’s where we come to our topic. Science fiction and fantasy is, for our youth, one of the most powerful gateways drugs into the fictive experience. Of course, there are ideas in science fiction and fantasy that ripple out to the society. But even if there weren’t, the happy side-effect of an addiction to this drug is improved literacy. And we all know how much that impacts.
Now I know those of you who work with young adult circulation have seen this. But I thought it might be interesting to get some actual numbers so we can start to gauge the scope of the science fiction and fantasy effect.
My interest in this began when I saw the results of the latest NEA survey. They have this graph showing reading rates in all age groups dropping horribly since 1982. By 2002 the graph is taking a nose dive. Then in 2008 everything turns around. And among the young adults (18-24), we see the biggest increase—9%.
I saw they had a genre preference question in this survey. Of course, I wondered about science fiction and fantasy. So I contacted the NEA and dug into the details. It appears that 34% of the 18-24 group say they like to read science fiction and fantasy. That’s a big number. That’s 1 in 3.
Of course, I wanted another data pont, so I went to BookScan and asked for data on book sales. Because the wonderful people there love librarians and Tor Books, they said of course. We looked at juvenile fiction sales from 2004-2008. What we saw was that science fiction and fantasy grew 144% during that period. All the other genres only grew 23%. We also saw that science fiction and fantasy currently make up almost 30% of the juvenile fiction market. So about 1/3.
Now there are some problems with the BookScan data. Yes, it only cover 60-70% of the market. It’s not in Wal-mart, grocery stories, and a few other places. But what’s more problematic for this issue is that they don’t break up the juvenile sales by age. It includes everything for folks one month old to age eighteen. So I’ve got books like Go Dog, Go in the dataset along with Twilight and Go Dog, Go isn’t categorized as fantasy. [Laughter] My suspicion is that if we narrow it down to the middle grade and YA group, we’ll see more science fiction and fantasy.
So I needed someone who did break it up by age. Well, who does that? You do. Libraries do. Besides, a lot of youth don’t have the $ to buy lots of books. So I went to some libraries in Utah and Ohio and got their YA fiction circulation stats. Here’s what I found: 60-80% of the YA fiction circulation is science fiction and fantasy. This does not include graphic novels or magna. It’s text fiction.
Folks, this is a big drug. I don’t know what part science fiction and fantasy played in the rise in reading rates, that would require a larger and more rigorous study. But I can tell you this: We want to see the impact of science fiction and fantasy on our society? We’re seeing it right now.
This large effect makes sense because science fiction and fantasy deliver experiences that are intersting to and matter to youth. It’s chock full of and encounter with the strange, weird, and wonderful; adventure and danger; doing something meaningful; being someone special, someone desireable, someone wanted in the group. All that coming of age stuff. So no wonder it’s a huge gateway drug.
I know that it was in my case. I wasn’t a reader. I don’t think I read more than twenty or twenty-four book from kindergater to sixth grade. I look at the little fellows in my local school today and they read that many titles in the first six months of the first grade. But I didn’t. I wasn’t a reader. I do remember loving the look and feel of these small chubby books. [Laughter]
I would take them them up to the librarian to check them out. She’d look down at me. “Are you going to read all that?” she’d ask. “Yes,” I’d say. Of course, it was lie. [Laughter] It was a huge lie because I would take them home and put them up on my dresser and just look at them. Just loving the look and feel. And then when it was time to check them in, I’d take them back and give them to the librarian. “Did you read all that?”
“Yes,” I’d say. And that’s how I became an author–lying to librarians. [Laughter]
Now in sixth grade my sister, we were in the car, I had four sisters and we had one TV, and so you had to reserve the time for your programs. So my sister says, “I have to watch The Hobbit for school.” Now I don’t know anything about The Hobbit. It sounded like a romance. [Laughter] I protested. No, way–we’re not going to watch some dumb kissing thing.
“No,” she said. “It’s got dragons.”
“You’re lying,” I said.
I was convinced I was doomed. But it didn’t matter. We watched it. It had dragons. And I loved the experience so much I wanted another hit. Shortly thereafter my mother and father went on a business trip. I went over to my buddy’s house. So the first day we come up out of the basement to go to school and I said, “Oh, I’m feeling sick.” So my buddy went off to school and I went back down into the basement and played hookie for two days and read The Hobbit.
It was amazing. More amazing than the movie. I had to have that experience again. And so I read Ursula LeGuin, Patricia McKillip, Donaldson, Terry Brooks. I kept reading because it delivered a cognitive-physical experience I loved. Of course, I didn’t put it that way back then. It was more along the lines of, duuuude. [Laughter]
Now I got a BA in English and a Masters in Accounting. Those degress required a lot of reading. But I didn’t develop the requisite literacy skills in school. I developed them in science fiction and fantasy.
And so when I started to write I was naturally drawn to fantasy. Having experienced this wonderful thing, I wanted to produce that and share it with others. So this novel that’s coming out has the gosh-wow I still love. It’s set in a world were humans are ranched by beings of immense power. There’s a young man and young woman in terrible trouble. So it has monsters, magic, and mayhem. But I also found fantasy big enough to let me explore other things that have become more important to me as I’ve aged. Like family, sacrifice, and redemption. And I hope people enjoy all that. But ultimately, I hope this book does for someone else what The Hobbit did for me and opens a door to a wonderful addiction. And, of course, as a powerful side-effect, improves the literacy of some rascal or rascaless. [Laughter]
I want to end where we began with that Thomas quote.
“My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.”
That kind of wild abandon will happen when the drug takes effect. And for many of our youth, probably at least one in three, that’s going to be when they ingest a few ounces of SF & Fantasy.
Thank you.
[Applause]
Emotion is not a cognition, although cognition plays a part. It’s not just in your brain. It involves a physical response, which means it involves chemicals.
We sometimes forget that our bodies produce a staggering number of chemicals. Sometimes they produce in response to external stimuli—the sun triggers the creation of vitamin D, ingested sugar triggers the production of insulin, the sight of a ravening lion standing not five feet away with nothing between him and me produces, among other things, adrenaline.
Lots of these reactions, we don’t notice. But there’s a whole group of these physical responses that we do. We lump them together and call them emotions.
Jenefer Robinson in her wonderful book Deeper Than Reason, explains, “Emotions are our way of responding to events in the environment (either external or internal)” that matter to us. They are “physiological changes that register the event in a bodily way and get us ready to respond appropriately.” Fight, flight, pursue, woo, investigate. They focus our attention, get us ready to take action, and communicate all this to others.
So while I might not feel the production of vitamin D, I do feel the fear of the lion. Fear is a wonderful thing—it keeps us alive. It raises our heart rate, pumps us full of drugs that prepare us to flee or fight. The emotion writes itself on our faces in order to, among other things, communicate the situation to those around us, warning others and calling for help. It is a physical response. Yes, there are cognitions involved, but there are also chemicals.
The latest research on emotion shows that emotion is a process that involves three things. (1) An affective appraisal of our environment that signals something important to us—a threat or opportunity. (2) This triggers an immediate physical response (chemicals, galvanic skin response, accelerated heart rates, facial expressions, etc.). (3) At this point cognitive (conscious thought) appraisals kick in and help us monitor the situation and moderate the physical response.
For example, I go out to the yard and step on this thing that slithers through the grass. The sensory signals immediately trigger a physical response to get me ready to flee or fight–heart rate, adrenaline, etc. Then I notice the snake is far too long. I look closer. It’s the garden hose. My physical response changes. I laugh, feel relief. Research has shown that when we read text, the same process occurs. We do indeed have the same types of physical responses. In some cases they’re more intense.
Now here’s the thing. This physical response is triggered not just by threats and opportunities we perceive with our senses, things out there. It is also triggered by thought. Thoughts deliver a physical response just as surely as crack does. We have the research to prove it. In fact, sometimes thought delivers a more powerful physical response. Here’s but one example. Did you know that people with a phobia of snakes have a stronger reaction to reading a passage about snakes than they do to the actual critter?
This is where fiction comes in. As I stated in my speech, fiction, the kind of fiction we love, the kind that keeps us up at night sitting on the edge of the tub or locked in a closet with a light, the kind that lingers in the fabric of our clothes and our hair long after we close the book, that kind of fiction goes beyond cognition, beyond data and facts. That kind of fiction triggers a physical response.
It does this, and this is one difference from emotion triggered by our own thoughts or the sensory data we pick up from the world, because fiction, by its very nature, its very structure, is actually guiding our emotional response. Our physical response. This management of the response is in fact one of the things that we find so pleasurable about it.
To find out more, please read:
You may then want to search out texts by Dolf Zillmann, Jennings Bryant, and Peter Vorderer.
Life, the Universe & Everything is coming up in a little over a month on Feb 12-14, 2015. It will be held at the Provo Marriott Hotel & Conference Center. Some reasons to go.
Number one. Toni Weisskopf, the editor and publisher of Baen Books, is the guest of honor.
Number two. LTUE and LDStorymakers are the best two cons in Utah for learning how to write, but LTUE is lots cheaper.
Number three. Lots of local authors will be there. It’s a great forum for hearing their insights and finding out what they’re doing.
I will be giving three presentations.
I hope to see you there.
What great news!!!
Washington, D.C. — For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read.
Adults up 3.5%, young adults (ages 18-24) up by 9%. Full article here. Full report here (with nifty graphs and tables).
They attribute it to reading programs. Perhaps. I’m sure JK Rowling phenomenon had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, it’s good to hear.
Some folks say ebooks will foist a terrible problem upon readers–they’ll soon have to wade through mountains of crap to find a book to read. It will be a terrible chore. J.A. Konrath gives his answer to this lament. Kris Rusch gives hers.
Here’s mine: there will NEVER be a tsunami of crap facing a reader looking to buy ebooks or any other kind of book. Ever.
Why?
REASON 1
Buyers REFUSE to look at seas of choices–crap or otherwise. Shoppers always seek to limit choices (too costly to look at everything) and use a number of methods to immediately narrow those choices down: recommendations, reviews, what’s on the shelf, etc. (For a fascinating look into a few facets of how we make choices, listen to this Radio Lab espisode.)
For example, when shopping for vanilla you don’t go searching through the 500 brands available online and in various stores–Mexican, Vodka, American, Rum, organic, generic, brand, etc. It’s just not worth the time. Something on the shelf is usually GOOD ENOUGH.
Likewise, nobody cares to look at 150,000 titles to find the best. They don’t have the time. In fact, they don’t need to. They can usually find a number of books that are intriguing enough in the “smaller” selection any given vendor sets before them.
In the case of Amazon ebooks, that selection is the best-sellers, the ads, and the this person bought that.
Nobody ever sees the 4 gazillion books. Ever. They don’t want to.
REASON 2
Vendors can’t display a gazillion choices, even if they wanted to, which they don’t (studies have actually shown that providing shoppers too big a selection leads to FEWER sales).
And no, just because Amazon says it have 2 quintillion titles for sale that does not mean they’ve been displayed. You only see a handful of titles at a time.
Even if you scroll through the various lists, you are rarely looking at more than a dozen choices at a time. You’ll probably see less than 200 titles total any given time you go shopping.
Vendors NEVER display a tsunami. EVER.
REASON 3
Readers have MORE THAN ENOUGH leads to fill their capacity for reading. Even if they wanted a sea of options, they wouldn’t wade through them because they don’t have to–it’s too easy to find something to read.
Leads are everywhere. There are recommendations from friends, family, reviewers, celebrites, and Amazon’s this person bought that. There are leads from best-seller lists (another type of tacit recommendation). Leads from browsing.
Readers have leads coming out their ears.
This is important because the number of leads any given reader has far excees that reader’s capacity for reading.
How long does it take you to find one book that looks interesting? From browsing or recommendations or whatever?
Minutes.
Maybe if you’re having a really bad day, it takes an hour. But it takes so much longer to read one story than it does to find one you want to read. That’s why we all have two year’s worth of books to read in our queues.
So. There is no sea of crap. There NEVER was or ever will be one for any given reader.
Buyers avoid selection seas like the plague. Vendors don’t provide such seas anyway. And readers don’t need them–they have more than enough leads which turn out to be exciting enough to fill up all their reading slots and more.
Is The Guardian right?
Does it really cost $6,000 to publish a book independently?
Is that the price to become Hemmingway these days?
Lots of commenters at The Passive Voice said the numbers were rubbish. Far too high. They said this was yet another thinly-veiled bit of flimflam The Guardian cooked up to depress indies and send aspiring authors into the arms of the zombie traditionalists.
I actually thought the piece was good.
Why?
Because I like numbers. I did get a Master’s degree in accounting, after all.
But is it just that numbers are sexy?
It’s true the shape of the number 3 can be glorious. 9 is a stunner as well. But the slopes and curves of these digits is not why I like them. Numbers, even if they’re bad numbers, allow you to start thinking about costs. They allow you to question whether they could be reduced. Or whether you’re getting any bang for your buck in a certain category. Heck, numbers allow you to discover whether you’re allocating way too much in one area and far too little in another.
I thought The Guardian did a great job breaking the costs out into categories and starting an examination. The question is: are the categories and amounts political fictions or real?
One way numbers do all the things I mentioned above is by letting you do comparisons. So I figured I’d compare The Guardian’s numbers with a set of my own. I’ve published four books independently. How do my costs stack up?
Here are the costs for the latest.
Cover: $500
Editing: $0
Formatting for POD and ebook: $120
ISBN: $0
Copyright Registration: $55
Print-on-demand fees: $0
Notice what’s NOT up there that was in The Guardian article: reviews and review copies.
Why don’t I include them?
First, I would never pay for a Kirkus review. I wouldn’t because it appears such reviews mean little to readers. They don’t seem to generate much notice or desire to sample. Here’s what readers report matter to them. Such pre-publication reviews DO matter to store and library book buyers. But, as an indie, I’m not focusing on those channels. Those channels are in the hands of the zombie traditionalists.
What about review copies?
You don’t need them to publish. All this review business is marketing. And you don’t need marketing to publish.
So what are my totals? I’ve included The Guardian numbers so you can see the differences.
| Category | My Costs | Guardian Estimates |
| Cover | $500 | $750 |
| Editing and proofing | $0 | $4,000 |
| Ebook and POD Formatting | $100 | ? |
| ISBN | $0 | $125 |
| Copyright Registration | $55 | ? |
| POD setup fees | $0 | ? |
| Reviews | – | $825 |
| Review Copies | – | $300 |
| TOTAL | $655 | $6,000 |
Whoa! The Guardian estimated a cost that’s ten times what it costs me. But I don’t think that’s a sign of some plot. If I’d paid an editor and cover designer and formatter and didn’t mooch my ISBNs, that could have added as much as $1,000-$2,000 to my total. I have friends who have paid more.
Furthermore, that’s just for the ebook and hard copy. Depending on if you publish an audio edition and how you do it, you could spend another $2,000-$3,000.
What does this tell you? It tells me that the reporter made a good start, but needed to do a bit more digging. It also tells me there’s a huge variability in the costs depending on the skills you and your friends possess. It also shows that this is a business. I doesn’t cost a gazillion dollars to publish. It’s not like the $200,000-500,000 you need to start some food franchises, but you’d better be prepared to fork over some cash and/or a lot of hard work.
In fact, when you consider that last point of sweat equity, the $655 is completely misleading because it does not capture the hours I spent, at least 20-60, doing my part of the cover, editing, and formatting. Nor the time spent by my wife or friends. There’s a huge opportunity cost there.
What’s the value of what I could have done with that time?
It’s for dang sure not reflected in the $655.
I didn’t include marketing in those costs above because marketing is its own beast. You can publish and do zero marketing. You can publish and do gobs. And just as with the publishing costs, marketing costs will vary based on what you can do in-house and what your situation is. It costs JK Rowling nothing to get covered in every news outlet in the land. She sneezes, and we get a report about her. You and I are probably going to have to work harder to get noticed.
There are all sorts of marketing costs. Whatever those costs, marketing has a job to do. It’s got to pay for itself. It’s got to help pay for the cost of publishing. And it’s got to help me meet my goal of winning new readers and compensating me for my time.
There are lots of cost categories depending on what you decide to do:
The bottom line is that I think it’s good to separate these costs from publishing so you can measure their effectiveness against sales. Marketing is about revenue generation. These costs really have nothing to do with producing a book.
I’m going to go off an a tangent here for a second. Some folks suggest that indie authors shouldn’t do much marketing. Especially if they only have one or two books out.
I find no evidence to support the idea that just writing the next book is all you need to do for readers to hear about you and beat a path to your door. It’s true you’ve got to write the next book. You must get new product out the door. Hey, I learned that when book 2 from the publisher fell into a black hole. But that doesn’t mean marketing and promotion are inappropriate, wrong-headed, or a waste of time or money.
Let me ask you a question.
Let’s say Juanito is a no-name in the lemonade business. He’s just starting from scratch with dreams of becoming a big time lemonader. Who thinks it’s a good idea for him to open a lemonade stand in his back yard? Or better yet, in a closet in his basement? And when folks suggest that the stand might get more business if he lets the neighbors know about it or puts the stand in a place with a lot of foot traffic, who says, no, that’s a waste of time and money–the key to selling more lemonade is whipping more batches up in the kitchen?
In retail, you must get folks to notice your product and then persuade them to try it. Now, maybe you’ve got something going that’s generating all the notice and sampling you can handle. Maybe you lucked out.
What percentage of indies are in that situation? Raise your hands, please.
What? We’re not all inundated with hordes of readers? We’re not all swimming in gold? Imagine that.
The fact is that it’s tough to get notice. It’s tough to get people to try. But there are some things we can do to increase our odds. Selling books is a retail business. Retail lives and dies by visibility. Yeah, you need word of mouth. But you need to be noticed and sampled in large enough amounts to keep that word of mouth going.
What would you rather have? 100,000 people all over the country in many social networks (I’m not talking about Facebook) noticing and sampling and talking about your product, or would you rather have five?
In the brick and mortar world, there are lots of ways to get visibility without doing much TV or internet advertising. Ways to get notice include things as simple as signage and a store’s location. For example, you get a ton of eyeballs just situating your restaurant in the parking lot of a big destination shopping mall. You get eyeballs putting a sign on top of a 100 foot pole next to the freeway exit saying “Gas & Eats.” Online retailers get noticed in other ways.
Without blathering on about that (this was a post on publishing costs), let me just say that until customers begin to line up and start throwing hundred dollar bills at me, it appears I’m going to have to do what every other retail business has done for hundreds of years–get my lemonade stand out of the basement and into the park with lots of thirsty kids and moms.
EDIT 8/30/2014
While a number of folks are assuming the article was written as part of some vast conspiracy to undermine indie authors, David Gaughran posted some criticism in the article’s comment section that actually make sense.
DavidGaughran
The reason I’m so annoyed by the inaccuracies in this article is that this kind of misinformation is creates an information gap which allows shady operators to flourish.
Vanity press operators thrive because inexperienced authors think that self-publishing is either difficult or expensive. It’s neither of those things, and articles like this only serve to reinforce this false notion. That’s why I think this piece is irresponsible as well as inaccurate.
Companies like Author Solutions specifically target the most inexperience authors, the ones who know least about self-publishing and the industry in general, the ones who have fallen under the spell of various myths (like that self-publishing costs $6,000).
As a commenter said below, saying self-publishing costs $6,000 is like saying houses cost $10m. You can spend that much, but you don’t need to.
It costs me less than a third of that to publish a book, and I use a Big 5 cover designer as well as an editor with over ten years experience working for traditional publishers. Anyone can look at my books and immediately see that they are produced to professional standards.
You don’t even have to spend as much as I do to get a quality product. If authors are on a tighter budget, they can purchase a pre-made cover design. There are some wonderful pre-mades out there for as little as $40. You will have to invest a fair bit of time combing through the sites to find something suitable, but if you are on a shoestring budget it’s an option.
Same goes for content editing/developmental editing. All manuscripts will need a thorough copy edit, but you can get by without a specific content edit with successive round of beta readers. Again, this will require a time investment – writers usually trade beta reads of each other’s work. But if you’re on a tighter budget, it’s another way you can save money.
This is why this piece is so off. Even going the “deluxe” route shouldn’t cost more than $2,000. And if you don’t have $2,000, there are plenty of options where you can achieve a quality product, spending far less, if you are willing to put in a little time.
There are ways you can save money in other areas too. It’s a waste of money for an author (especially a new author) to buy a NetGalley membership for themselves. Authors can (and do) form collectives to buy a membership between them – often spending just $20 per person. I got a NetGalley spot for a month, for free, by bartering with another author. (I didn’t think it was quite worth $20, by the way, let alone $400).
If you need reviews, there are much better and cheaper ways. Submitting to book bloggers costs nothing (we usually send e-book copies or PDFs, rather than hard copies). Doing an e-book giveaway on LibraryThing costs nothing. Giving out electronic ARCs in advance of your release costs nothing. And all of these are much more effective than giving any kind of money to Kirkus, let alone $425.
But I guess it doesn’t matter how many experienced self-publishers (and editors who work with same) tell you that your figures are off, or that you don’t need ISBNs to self-publish, you are going to stick to your guns.
