I made a thing.
Self-publishing
Tea with Lord and Lady Gamford
“How kind of you to invite us, Your Grace,” said the Marchioness of Gamford, with a graceful curtsey. She was a tall woman, but the husband bowing beside her was even taller. So this was a godson she had not seen since his uncle sent him overseas more than seven years ago, in part to separate him from his bride.
They’d been wed as children. Eleanor would have prevented such an early marriage, had she any sway with the father of either bride or groom. But those two best friends had made up their mind, and would listen to no one. Not their wives. Not their brothers. And certainly not the children themselves.
The friends’ deaths a few days later, in an ill-fated curricle race, had allowed the families to keep the newly weds apart. Somehow, they had survived their separation with their marriage intact, and in love, unless Eleanor was very much mistaken. Which she was not. Not even a fool could miss how Lord Gamford hovered over his wife, seating her as if she were made of delicate porcelain, and Lady Gamford, in turn, looked up at him as if he had hung the moon and stars, all for her delight.
“It is very kind of you to come, my dears,” Eleanor replied. “I do hope you will call me Aunt Eleanor, for I am godmother to Hal, here, and hope to be friend to you both.”
“Please call me Willa,” the marchioness requested, lowering her lashes, shyly.
She served them each with their preference of tea, and before long, they were chattering like old friends, and Eleanor was delighted to have her curiosity about their courtship satisfied without any vulgar questions.
***
To find out about Hal’s meeting with the grown up Willa, read “The Marquis Returns” in Chasing the Tale. This collection of elevenshort stories is currently USD 99c, but will go up to $2.99 shortly.
Disastrous error!
Go on. Ask me. Which part of ‘never do stuff while you’re tired and distracted’ didn’t I follow?
I’ve just accidentally cancelled the pre-order of Unkept Promises on Amazon. I knew straight away that my fingers had just betrayed me, but it was too late. No ‘are you sure’. Just gone. Locked. Can’t get in. And the ominous message in my email inbox:
Dear KDP author,
The pre-order for your book Unkept Promises has been canceled. Customers have been notified that it was canceled because you have decided not to publish your book. Also, you have lost pre-order access for one year.
For more details about Pre-orders, check out this page.
Best Regards,
Kindle Direct Publishing Team
I’ve sent a tearful begging message to Kindle Direct Publishing. Can I recover from this disaster? Meanwhile, the ads are going out, and the book isn’t.
And my preorders! All the people who expect the book in less than 36 hours! And the reviewers who are waiting to jump in. I feel sick. I might just go and crawl into a hole and pull a blanket over my head.
UPDATE: I’ve talked to Amazon, and they can’t reinstate. I’ve just republished. It’s in the queue to be reviewed. I’ll put up new links as soon as I have them. Meanwhile, you can still buy from Kobo, Apple, Nook or Smashwords — links here https://books2read.com/Unkept-Promises
Or at my bookstore, where it is 99c and available now. https://judeknight.selz.com/item/unkept-promises
UPDATED UPDATE: Fixed, and a new Books2Read link made with the new Amazon information.
Here, There Be Dragons
Synchronicity, much? On Friday, I was part of a government-run workshop on the reform of New Zealand’s copyright laws. On Sunday, I discovered my House of Thorns on two ‘free book’ websites. Both seem to be run out of the same country, but the perpetrator’s name is only on one of them.
He’s a man who is part of a political movement to get rid of all intellectual property protections. He claims that books are ‘loaded by readers with the permission of authors’, but his own site says, ‘we assume in good faith that those who load books have permission to do so.’ He replies to authors who ask for their stolen material to be removed from his site with some version of: ‘I will obey the current law which says I have to take this down, but I’m doing you a favour finding you readers, and if you can’t make money without interfering with my business, you need a new business model.’
I heard some of the same arguments at the workshop: pirate sites help authors by exposing them to readers who can’t afford to buy their books; copyright law currently stifles creativity and economic growth by limiting access to works; people should be able to use work created by others in order to create something new.
So let’s take those points one by one.
Pirate sites do not help authors
The thieves who take our books like to refer to Neil Gaiman, who famously responded to the widespread theft of his books by making American Gods free for three months, and seeing his sales go up. He compared pirate sites to libraries, or borrowing a book from a friend, and those comments been quoted ever since. This was the best-selling and rightfully admired Neil Gaiman, right? With the 10th anniversary expanded edition of a book that was best-selling and multi-award winning on its original release. With all due respect to a magnificent writer, his test doesn’t tell us a lot about the impact of piracy.
Others have had very different experiences. Maggie Stiefvater, a best-selling fantasy author, saw a huge drop in sales when her books were pirated, which led her publisher to cut the number of book copies for the next in series. So she also did a test, creating a book that had the first four chapters, over and over, plus a message about book piracy. Read the linked article to find out what happened.
The pirate sites aren’t doing this for love. They make money from ads and other digital products associated with the site. The pirate that stole House of Thorns commented in an interview I found that he is running a successful business (his pirate site) that pays him well.
Every book people download from his site is a loss to the author, and even a couple of hundred downloads might be enough to change an author’s career, sending the signal ‘no one wants to buy this book’. I have friends who have changed genres or stopped writing altogether because they’ve poured their heart and soul into a book for the hundreds of hours needed to bring it from conception to birth, put in more grueling hours marketing it, and had little or no interest. Good books. Well-researched, well-written, well-edited books. The books they might have written are now lost to readers.
It is professionally hindering advancement of people who would follow the footsteps of great authors who have significantly contributed to the creative narratives that societies need regardless of geographical boundaries and situations.
No one will be encouraged to be authors or to dream big of having their works published because they are not compensated or recognized. The monetary side of publishing a book, for instance, is a manifestation of a person’s recognition of another person’s ability and creativity. By trivializing the act of downloading a material without properly compensating the author or publisher, you are, in effect, putting a big stop to the wheel of what we know as a creative process. [Independent Publishing Magazine]
Most readers who download from pirate sites can afford to buy them
Readers who can’t afford books don’t, by any means, make up the bulk of those who download from pirate sites. The Guardian article notes research showing that most such thieves belong to the higher socio-economic groups and are better educated than average. Even if they don’t want to shell out for a book, thus helping to support creativity and innovation, they have alternatives.
Cash-strapped readers are able to belong to libraries, borrow from friends, buy second-hand. Each of those instances depends on an original sale, and — in the case of libraries — potentially an on-going payment based on the number of copies in libraries (at least, that’s the case in New Zealand).
I read voraciously. I buy books and I borrow from my library, because I expect my author accounts to fund my reading and I just don’t earn enough to pay for all the books I read. But I well know that every pirated book that is downloaded is a lost sale. I won’t do that to another author.
The pirates argue that I’m getting my books to people who otherwise wouldn’t read them. That wasn’t Maggie Stiefvater’s experience, but let it pass. Where did the idea come from that people are doing me a favour by reading my books? Don’t get me wrong. I love my readers, and I’m glad they enjoy my stories. I reckon we’re in a partnership, where I provide the words and you provide the images. But if you don’t think I’m worth the pittance I charge for each book, then do yourself a favour and read someone else.
By the way, I always enable the loan function when I load a book on Amazon, so if you want to lend a book of mine you’ve enjoyed to someone else, you can do it. Amazon has instructions for how that works. I also have a special price set for libraries in the book aggregator I use to reach the places where libraries buy books, so if you’d like your local library to carry my stories as ebooks, tell them that all the novellas are free to libraries, and the novels are 99c (US dollars). I’ve been poor, and I love libraries.
Copyright law protects creativity so people can get on with writing books
If you’ve been around on this journey with me for a while, you know that my goal is to make enough from writing so I can leave my day job. I’m not blaming pirates for my failure to get there so far. It’s a very complicated market, and well oversubscribed with books, including those ladled onto Amazon by people who are gaming that giant’s algorithms. But it bears repeating, every book of mine downloaded ‘free’ from a pirate site is a lost sale — a few cents that would have taken me closer to my goal.
I figure I can at least double my output if fiction was my full-time job. If you think that it’d be a good thing for your favourite authors to write more, then not downloading stolen books, and reporting digital piracy when you see it, is one thing you can do to help.
People should get permission before remixing the creative works of others
The workshop on Friday included creators of content from the gaming industry, musicians, photographers, and artists. I was the only author in the three table-sessions I attended, though others might have been in the room. The other creative types all agreed that their industry had benefited from remixes — games that used characters from popular games, clips of music put together into a new work, images that provided a base from which an artist created something original. I guess the fictional equivalent would be fan fiction.
Under New Zealand’s current copyright law, getting permission to do this kind of work is tortuous and often (when the creator died forty years ago or is unknown) next thing to impossible. I can buy changing the law to make it easier for orphan works to be used in this way, but I still think that some kind of regime that requires best efforts to get permission gives the original creator the protection that encourages creativity.
And I think the moral rights of a creator not to have their work used a way that offends their belief system is pretty important, too.
I write my own stuff; don’t steal it
So those are my random thoughts this sunny morning in a New Zealand autumn. I write my own stuff, and I’m going to continue doing so, despite the sea monsters, dragons, and pirates that infest the wild corners of the indie publishing digital world. I can’t stop the thieves. I barely have time to notice when people steal my stuff and put it up online for other people to pinch. But don’t expect me to be grateful. If you load a book onto a pirate site, you’re stealing. If you run a pirate site, you’re stealing. If you download from a pirate site, you’re stealing. The justifications such sites use are a pack of lies. Don’t be a thief.
Time to go to the day job.
For more on this, see:
Suzan Tisdale on Book Thieves Suck
Maggie Stiefvater on her experiences
The Guardian article, which includes what other authors said
In praise of editors
I got the edits on House of Thorns back from Scarsdale Publishing a couple of days ago. This is the first time I’ve worked with a publisher, and so far I’m enjoying the experience. My draft looks, as one of my friends said about hers, as if Casey cut open a vein and bled all over it, but it’s going to be a much better book for her input.
It’s not the first time I’ve worked with an editor, of course. For a start, I am an editor. In my day job editing commercial and government documents into plain language I work with a whole team of editors. Nothing goes out of our office without being peer reviewed, so I’m edited all the time. From that experience, I came to fiction writing knowing the value of an educated eye. We get too close to our own work to be able to see its flaws — or, for that matter, its strengths. So I’ve employed editors since I started indie publishing, either paying for them or swapping manuscripts.
Good books are a collaborative process.
The author tells the story, perhaps entirely alone but more likely hashing out difficult plot points with a trusted friend, ringing or emailing specialists for a bit of expert knowledge, checking facts through research using information collected by other people. For my books set in places I’ve never been, I watch YouTube videos, read books (guide books, historians’ studies of the place and time, contemporary letters and diaries), study maps, go through local newspapers from the time period, and in many other ways draw on the work of others.
In my process, I then give it an edit and send it to beta readers; a group of early readers who will look at the half-cooked story and give me their reactions.
Another edit from me and it’s ready for the developmental editor to cut open a vein and bleed red ink everywhere.
My turn again. Time to make it better. I’ll often at this stage trial rewritten sections with the editor, or anyone else who will sit still long enough, until I’m sure I’ve got them right.
Next is a copy edit, and finally a proofread.
I say finally, but of course lots more has to happen. While the book has been off being rebuilt, tuned, and polished, we’ve been making the cover. And the production process involves adding the hair I tear out to the editor’s blood. Producing the stories you read is a very messy business. I’m looking forward to leaving that side of it to Scarsdale.
But that’s in the future for House of Thorns. Just for now I’m going to be grateful for editors.
Spotlight on Rejoice and Resist
Today at last I can give you pre-sale links to the third of the three anthologies I’m in this coming holiday season. Rejoice and Resist is a box set of nine stories set in different times and written in different genres, but all using the Final Draft Tavern. And it has been sitting at the top of the Amazon bestseller list for Shortstories and Anthologies since it went to pre-release on Monday.
Come share a drink in the Back Room of the Final Draft Tavern, where for nearly a millennium, the Marchand family and their cat, Whiskey, have led travelers through time and space: rebels and dissenters, heroes and villains, artists and lovers. These seven (longish) short stories feature characters united through the ages by resistance to tyranny, and celebrating the right to speak truth to power. Rejoice and Resist will amuse and entertain, but also inspire you to call out oppression, demand human rights, question the status quo, and stand up to be counted.
Travel backward and forward through time with multiple authors and fiction genres: drama, horror, women’s fiction, historical fiction, time travel, historical or contemporary romance, and paranormal. Shoot through the lens of a photographer or the pistol of a highway brigand; meet death with a ghost-writer, or a president and his cabinet with a deck of cards; brave life in a new country, or just in a new era of civil rights; or conceal yourself in time with an orphan of the apocalypse.
Whatever role you take in the struggle toward justice, step through a secret passageway and pull up a barstool, let the closest Marchand pour you a libation, and celebrate the holiday season with the Speakeasy Scribes.
Here’s the Amazon US buy link. I’ll add others over the day.
The Four Firsts
I’ve been on a reading binge, catching up on some of the books in my TBR (to be read) pile. AND I’ve been doing a bit of judging for various contests. Which has set me thinking about first impressions.
Once upon a time, I would finish everything I started reading. Then I realised I was spending valuable reading time on stuff I was not enjoying or learning from, so the stuff with the worst writing or the most unlikeable characters dropped off my list. But I’d still often struggle on with stuff that had some promise, in the hope it would get better.
But I’m 66. I may still have 30 years ahead of me, but beyond a doubt I’m closer to the end of my life than the beginning. I’ve become more demanding.
At this point in my life, I need to have some kind of guarantee of satisfaction. I don’t demand perfection. I can forgive a name that is historically unlikely, or the occasional cliche in a description. If the plot grabs me and I care about the characters, the rest just needs to be good, not flawless.
But I have little time and a TBR pile that keeps growing, which lesson I need to apply to my own writing. I want people to keep reading my books, so I need to pay attention to the four firsts: first sentence, first paragraph, first page, and first chapter. If the four first aren’t right, there’s a real risk my books will never make it onto people’s read list, whether or not they’d really enjoy the rest.
First sentence
The first sentence should hook you into the story, intrigue you, and impel you to keep reading.
“In the great sprawl of London, where would he find her?” (The Marquis and the Midwife, Alina K Fields)
“The man who’d murdered her stepfather was finally in her sights.” (My Fair Princess, Vanessa Kelly)
First paragraph
The first paragraph should reveal a hint of the plot, while keeping you in the moment.
“If women were as easily managed as the affairs of state—or the recalcitrant Ottoman Empire–Richard Hayden, Marquess of Glenaire, would be a happier man. As it was, the creatures made hash of his well-laid plans and bedeviled him on all sides.” (Dangerous Weakness, Caroline Warfield)
First page
The first page is often as far as you’ll read when you’re trying to decide whether to make the purchase. And certainly you will use it to judge whether a book in your TBR pile suits your mood of the moment. It needs good writing, more than a hint about at least one of the characters, something to intrigue you, maybe action.
First chapter
The first chapter might be as far as you get. I need to make it count. Check out my excerpts page to read the first chapters of my published books.
What have you learned from this experience?
The headline is a quote from the man I adore: “What have you learned from this experience?” (Not, incidentally, what you want to hear when you’ve just bumped your toe or broken your heart. But I love you, darling.)
Two years ago this December, I published my first historical romance, a novella. I’ve since published two novels, three novellas, and multiple short stories. I am about to publish another two novellas (in a box set) and another novel.
I am learning all the time, but here are my top five lessons from this first venture into the wild and wonderful world of Indie.
Lesson 1: We do better together than apart
In the past two years, I’ve ‘met’ many wonderful authors. My to-read list has expanded at an alarming rate, but I’ve also been privileged to share their insights, tidbits from their research, and their encouragement as I’ve dipped my toes into the indie publishing water. I’m also part of a collaborative of historical romance writers, the Bluestocking Belles.
Without the retweeting and sharing of my friends, far fewer people would have heard of my books. And I am keen to return the service whenever I can. Readers are not a scarce resource to be hoarded; an enthusiastic reader will devour the books of many authors. When we share, when we support one another, we grow a larger market to benefit us all.
Lesson 2: 20 December is a terrible date to launch a new book
The 1st; maybe the 10th; maybe the 30th. But I launched my first book on the 20th.
The 20th was a really, really, bad idea, and very nearly did me in. So many competing demands. We have a habit of giving the grandchildren a craft day, and the year I published Candle’s Christmas Chair, we did two (one full Saturday for the older children, and one for the younger). I work full-time in commercial publishing, and 30 years of experience should have taught me that clients pile on the deadlines in the three weeks leading up to Christmas and the New Zealand summer holidays. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on Christmas shopping and baking.
I did all my own editing, cover design, formatting, marketing, and so on. The week leading up to 20 December was insane, and the next week, as I publicised the book, even crazier. And that week included Christmas Day.
I’m not planning to do that again, but check with me later this year and I’ll let you know how 13 December worked out for me.
Lesson 3: Don’t leave the cover till the last week
I’ve done a lot of research on covers, and looked at hundreds trying to work out what I like and what I don’t. To make the cover of Candle’s Christmas Chair, I downloaded Pixelmator for the Mac, and my PRH transferred across a heap of fonts from the ancient version of InDesign on our old publishing company’s computer. We experimented with fonts till we found some we liked. But – with final tweaks on the image — the cover I actually used wasn’t completely ready until 12 December, just a couple of days before I uploaded to Smashwords and Amazon.
More pressure than I needed.
You’d think I’d learn, but when the wonderful Mari Christie suggested that my semi-professional baker in Gingerbread Bride needed a better biscuit on the front cover, I spent a fortnight hunting down a member of the Cake Decorator’s Guild, baking her some gingerbread biscuits to ice, and then photographing them; and the cover was ready right at the last minute.
Lesson 4: Distribution takes time – preorder is the way to go
I uploaded the first book on 16 December my time. The book began to be downloaded from Smashwords straight away. Somehow, I’d managed not to take that into my calculations, but hey — a download is a download, right? It took several days to filter through to the resellers from Smashwords. Apple finally started showing the book on 27 December, and didn’t really pick up speed for several days.
Amazon started selling immediately, too, but didn’t really begin to move until I managed to get them to make the book free.
Putting Farewell to Kindness up for preorder five weeks before release definitely lightened my stress load. A Baron for Becky went up nearly three months in advance, and so did Revealed in Mist.
Lesson 5: Ask for what you want; it’s less stressful than waiting
Ask for reviews. Ask for ratings. People can say ‘no’. But you lose nothing by asking for an honest review. One thing I’ve asked for a couple of times was a free listing on Amazon. I was giving away a novella, and am now giving away a book of three shorter stories and a novella, to give people a taste of my writing style, but Amazon insisted on a price of 99c.
I’d been told that Amazon would price match, and that I should ask people to request price matching. So I did. And nothing happened. I read discussions on forums where authors talked about how hard it was to get price matching. But then I thought ‘why not ask’?
So I emailed Amazon, told them that the book I wanted price matched was free at Apple and Barnes & Noble, that my strategy was to give it away free to publicise the next few books, and that — if they price matched — we’d both benefit in the long term. Within 24 hours, it was free on Amazon to US purchasers, and that slowly spread to their other stores.
So ask. People just might say ‘yes’.
So many stories, so little time
I’ve been updating my books, excerpts, and work-in-progress pages.
It’s part of getting ready to publish Revealed in Mist, and it proved to be a bigger job than I intended.
Step 1: update all my covers. I’ve changed my title font, and I’ve come up with a new font for the historical mysteries (of which Revealed in Mist is the first). Of course, once I’d done that, I needed to republish them all on KDP, Smashwords, and Createspace. I’ve done the first two, and am working on the third. Oh. And I’ve mostly done Goodreads. I also redid my banners here and on Facebook, with the new title font. I guess I need to do Twitter, too.
Step 2: rewrite the blurbs I haven’t been happy with for the past two years. That’s taken weeks, and I’m still not finished. I still have to write one for A Raging Madness, Concealed in Mist, and Lord Danwood’s Dilemma. But check out the others on the book page. They’re better, I think. When I’ve done the lot, I need to update them in KDP, Smashwords, Createspace, and Goodreads. And in the back of all my books (which will then need to be uploaded again to — you guessed it — KDP, Smashwords, and Createspace).
Step 3: format and load Revealed in Mist when it comes back from the proofreader.
Just three steps, right?
What’s in a name?
Book titles matter. A rose by any other name, Juliet claimed, would smell as sweet, but would people be as willing to put their noses close if it were called Skunkstink, or Fartflower? And titles bother me.
Sometimes, a title will occur immediately, surfacing from the interior of my brain without any effort on my part. Gingerbread Bride was like that. As soon as we came up with the concept of runaway brides for the Bluestocking Belles 2015 holiday box set, the title and the basic story appeared in my mind.
Sometimes, I’ll come up with a concept for a series, then have to find titles that will fit. All the titles for novels in The Golden Redepennings series are excerpts from quotes. Farewell to Kindness comes from The Count of Monte Cristo.
“And now…farewell to kindness, humanity and gratitude. I have substituted myself for Providence in rewarding the good; may the God of vengeance now yield me His place to punish the wicked.”
The one I’m working on now is called A Raging Madness, which comes from a quote by French philosopher Francois de La Rochefoucauld.
“…envy is a raging madness that cannot bear the wealth or fortune of others.”
The novella is an entirely different matter! Tentatively entitled The Bluestocking and the Barbarian, which at least means what you see is what you get, it is again the first of a series. What to do, what to do?