It seems like it should go together doesn’t it?  Self-publishing (“Indie Publishing” I reckon isn’t quite the same) on Teh Interwebs is eezie squeezie, and getting your book up and on Amazon or B&N is something that many a soccermom turned romance novelist is doing.

But that seems to be where many end up e-stopping, when in fact they should be hitting the e-gas.  I’m getting more and more active on the Kindle Boards, where I read almost exclusively the “Writer’s Cafe” forum, and about the average of what I’m seeing is folks having a blogspot.com account.

Which is fine, really, if you have no idea what you’re e-doing and are afraid of getting screwed by unscrupulous web people (of which there are a few).

And while I tend to use these two as my benchmarks, they are, so it bothers me that Joe Konrath and Amanda Hocking are both using theirname.blogspot.com accounts to blog and promote their books when there is SO MUCH opportunity out there for either of them.

Let’s take one of them as an example…

Amanda Hocking’s main site is her blogspot blog, with what I assume is a semi-standard template and a lot of widgety-goodness buzzing around on the edges.  I don’t know her personally, but I would reckon it does little to convey either the feel of the author or her work through its design.

Amandahocking.com however, just has this:

YUCK.  Yuckety-yuck. Poweryuck, with yuck-burning boosters.

Girlfriend, you’ve quickly ascended to celebrity status among self-publishing authors and have almost single-handedly lit the fire under the asses of tens of thousands.  You’ve finally got a big book deal and you’ve optioned the rights to a bloody movie for the sake of Pete.

GET A WEBSITE UP ON THAT DOMAIN.

If somebody else owns it, pay what they want.  The earlier you do that, the cheaper it’ll be.  If they won’t sell, then take ’em to court and prove your own copyright now that you are undoubtedly a corporate entity, but get a site up there, because that’s craptastic crapburgers with poosauce on ’em.

Your books should have their own websites too.

Amanda has a slew of books and also a trilogy aptly named “Trylle Trilogy”, with books priced $0.99, $2.99 and $2.99 respectively.  She’s got these books available on her website with a neat moving banner thingo that I think Amazon provides, but that’s about the only place she’s plugging these books.  A quick Google Search for “trylle” shows only sites that are talking about her movie deal in the Top 10 and any website that’s actually about those books nowhere near the Top 30.

I actually emailed her about 3 months ago when I got started down this whole Self-Publishing E-book route, and at that time I informed her that www.trylletrilogy.com was available (which it was) and she should go and get it.  I’ve just checked and it’s since been registered by “charlies sheen” under a private account.  Hmmm.  There’s no active website up for that domain either.

Missing out.

So right there, you’ve got two prime opportunities for self-promotion.  You’re an author, you need a website that’s YOURS with your domain name.  Heck, my new mate has www.justinscro.com that he just got through WordPress, and he knows sweet f*ck all about websites and such.  Amanda Hocking should have a website that has all the trappings for linking to her fan pages on Facebook, Twitter, sending her an email, and info about her books.  She can turn the homepage into a listing of her latest blog posts and then link to the blog separately too.

Hell, if done right, she can even export all of her old blog posts and import them onto a new site with little hassle.

She should have registered www.mybloodapproves.com (which fukkinell is AVAILABLE, oh my goodness, I should make that one an example) as well as www.trylletrilogy.com and put info up about both books (not just “Buy!  Buy!  Buy!” but other stuff) as well as set up a couple of forums for people to get on there and debate their favourite characters, discuss their favourite books from the series, what’s happening with a movie deal, etc.

Hell, all she’d have to do is blog that she’s looking for some forum moderators to help look after these websites, and she’d have 30 pasty-white and doughy hands in the air faster than you can say “secretly thinks they’re a vampire”.

ALL of this can be done with little hassle, you just need to know what you’re doing.

The best part about all of this too, most of it is free.  FREE.

Get a decent web host, like my mate Pete at www.ihswebsolutions.com and you can have a website with all the trappings for about $3.95 a month.  That’s peanuts, trust me.

A domain name will run you about $9/year through Pete as well, and once you’ve got all this set up, you can log into the CPanel (control panel software through the backend) and set up WordPress on your website, a PHPBB forum and an email address or five, for NOTHING EXTRA.

Go to templatemonster.com or another similar site, grab a template for $70 and install it on your website.  Get a webnerd to spend an hour swapping out the huge alligator from the top banner and the stock photos of that blonde girl with the headset on (that’s on EVERY site, I swear) and you’ve got a semi-customised, fairly unique, website all your own.

That’s $9 for the domain name, $47.40 for hosting, $70 for a template (or FREE off of WordPress.com’s website), and a signed copy of your book for the dungeonmaster comicbookguy that’s never kissed a girl but can tell you the birthdate of every female that’s ever been one of The Avengers.

$126.40 isn’t much when you consider the potential book sales, not to mention the overall publicity that your name and your books will garner.

Seems a damn shame that it’s that simple and more aren’t doing it.  I mean really people, if you’re not out there cornering the market on YOU, someone else will eventually.

Or worse, no one will at all.

The Passive Voice usually has some great stuff, and it almost always tends to inspire me, but this morning I’ve got a cuppa, ALL of the older kids are off to school and it’s exactly one week until our baby is here.

This may actually be my last chance for peace like this… so I shall write.

Passive Guy wrote about how self-publishing and traditional publishing are both really just on a bell curve.  The Amanda Hockings and the Joe Konraths of the Yay Self-Publishing World are on that high bit of the curve.  There’s a few others up there, sure, but for the most part, the rest of us are towards the lower ends.

The market is changing, and changing quickly.  The entire publishing world is going through an enormous shift, and the World has never quite looked like this for writers.  It’s pretty exciting.

So, the little guys see their shot, they read the blogs and the media articles and the hooplah about the chubby girl from southern Minnesota that’s making millions doing this and they think, “HEY!  I can do that TOO!”

I know, because I am one of them.

The action is on, big things are happening, and as is our human nature, we want to get in on the action and do the big things too.

But we don’t look before we leap.  We just hop in and start running, forgetting one thing:

This race is a marathon, not a sprint.

Konrath and Hocking haven’t just been writing 9 hours a day for the past few months, they’ve been doing it for years.  And they haven’t just been writing book after book in an effort to push their product out to the masses.  They’ve written what they know and love…

And then polished the ever-loving shit out of it.

Editing folks.  Fix up.  Fix up and get it as close to perfect as you can before you put it out there.  More than one downloaded sample has been blasted from my Kindle (app) into oblivion because of typos and infodumps.

The typos can usually be forgiven, to a point (I’m not the Grammar Nazi that Wifeage is) but I can usually apply the Cockroach Theory: For every one you can see, there’s ten in the wall.

If the author couldn’t be f*cked to fix a very obvious typo within the first few pages, then they probably couldn’t be bothered writing a very good book either.  They probably just wanted to write a book, tell that story that’s been burning inside of their little writerheads, and then sit back and cash in.

And they’ve probably sold some books, especially if they’re good (or lucky) at self-promotion.  But if it ain’t a very good book, that won’t last very long.

Infodumps are a trickier one, because they’re probably more along the lines of personal preference more than the black/white of typos, but they’re still a No Fly Zone for me.

Frequently billed as “backstory”, infodumps are the authors way of catching you up on every little thing that’s happened so that you don’t feel like you’re missing anything.  The Passive Voice also linked to a brilliant article on
How To Include Backstory Without Killing Your Novel, which essentially says “Pay close attention to your first bits, they’re really important”.

Of course, I’ll never get tired of telling folks how Les Edgerton’s “Hooked” changed my entire life.  Or rather, gave me the right tools to get right into writing, and writing something well.

So, in our haste to simply start cashing in on the excitement, we crank out the novel that’s been brewing on the backburners of our li’l creative consciousness and we forget to make it very good.

We just wanted it out there.

The window isn’t closing, and for the good writers, it probably never will.  Mark Coker said it best with Point Number One in his post: The Seven Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success

Write a great book.

And if you needed Tyler Durden to make it clear for you, Coker’s Point Number Two is:

Write another great book.

You getting this yet?  Awesome.

Take your time.  Pace yourself.  I have no doubt that you’ve got one helluva story in there, and that you’re pretty good with words, but if you really want to make this work…

Get it right the first time.

Good luck!

The book world, that is.

The one where people write books and buy books and try to sell their books and talk about their books and talk about other people’s books.  That one, it’s interesting.

While I spent almost the entire morning reading various websites about all of the previously mentioned I was happily having my own opinions on things, commenting on a blog here and there when that opinion bubbled over, when it came time to write in my OWN blog about these opinions, I’m doubting myself.

Not my opinion, oh no, I have a deathgrip on those.  No, I’m doubting whether or not the World needs yet another blog waffling on about writing and publishing and e-books and all that other shit.

Welp, at the end of the day, it IS my blog, so I’m just going to fart around as I do, and see what comes of it.

Publishing – By the Big Kids

It’s a commonly held notion that someone who’s “published” is to be held in some esteem.  Even those who aren’t aspiring novelists know that it’s wickedbloodyhard to not only write something good, but to have someone else think it’s so good that they’re going to spend time and money on printing, promoting and distributing it.

Big publishing houses have a game they like to play though and just like any game that you want to be really good at while no one else is, they move the goalposts around a lot.  For a while nobody wanted kids going to magician’s school or vampires that fall in love and glitter, but then that changed, and our world changed with it.

For a writer, the game entails some vital steps:

1. First, working your ass right off to write a good book.
2. Then work your ass off to get an agent to give it some love.  Many won’t.  The vast majority won’t.  In fact, the majority will probably do the worst thing for it, and ignore you.
3. Then work with your agent (who’s working their ass right off) to get a publisher to give you some love.

Step 1 is hard enough.  Damn hard.  Crazynuggethard.  SO crazynuggethard in fact, that many don’t make it past this one.

Step 2 is hard too.  Farting-in-Church-without-giggling hard.  Many, the vast majority, won’t make it past here either.

Step 3 is something I know so little about, I feel guilty even putting it on here.  I’m going to guess that it’s hard, but at that point it’s just wackystupidhard for your agent and not you, so shoosh, no complainin’.

Whew.

Dog Forbid, you’ve made it, you’ve gotten that book deal and the only thing hard in your life is your nipples… and then you have to wait.  And edit.  And tweak.  And wait.  And write a bit.  A lot.  And still hold down that job because writing ain’t payin’ the bills yet.  Then wait some more.  You start to regret what I said about your nipples…

YOINKS.  If you’re lucky, Leprechaun’s asshair lucky, then in a couple years you’ll have a book on the shelves of a bookstore, you’ve bought five copies for your mother, and they gave you enough coin to pay off some of those debts and maybe put a down payment on your own place.

If you’re lucky.

You probably won’t be.

Publishing – By Your Own Stupid Self

Yep, stupid.

Let’s face it, you didn’t just wake up one morning and decide that you were going to write a book and publish it yourself because you want to be the one in control.  Or because it feels cleanest, or because you’re a stinkindirtyhippie and don’t like how Bantam don’t use the right kind of recycled owl in their books.

Nup, you probably chose to self-publish because everybody else in the known Universe turned you down.  You probably didn’t take that to mean that your book was a clown turd or that you should just work on another project, get it published, and then pitch your first novel after you’ve gotten some traction.

Oh no.  You probably sat there, with your unpublished self, and thought that everyone else was a big poopyhead.

Even if you didn’t think that, it’s highly likely that you scraped together enough coin to publish your own book because you just didn’t want to wait any longer and you reckoned that book was a winner.

Hell, it even might be.

But to do that, to go through all that, with all the risks involved and all the time you’re wasting, getting rid of your combivan AND bass guitar… well I reckon you’re a bit stupid.

Publishing – “E” styles

Sorry, what?

“E” publishing?  Is that like “E” mailing my book to get it published?

I hadn’t really heard of it either until about 9 months ago.  Hell, I was in The States last July and heard my mother talking about reading books on her “Kindle”.  First thing I thought of was that she’d gotten confused about which light was the lamp and which was the fireplace.

So I’m late to the game as well.  I only finished my first novel last December and I’ve only just heard of Indie Authors and E-Books in the last few months too.

And I’m hellaciously curious as to how that’s all going to pan out.

See, now you can write a book, just like in Step 1 up there, and then you can just skip all that other crap.

I KNOW!

Just skip past finding an agent, or rather getting rejected by hundreds of them, and don’t even bother thinking about any publishing houses or their opinions of your book.

Don’t even sell your wife’s Volvo and cash in little Timmy’s College Fund either, for you’re not going to split your own pocket doing this kind of publishing.  For the most part, it’s free.

FREE.  You heard me, this big bad bitch of a publishing method is FREE.

Holy Hidden Agendas Batman, what’s the catch?

To be honest, I haven’t found one yet.  I think the catch might actually be: you have to actually be a good writer, but I’m not sure yet.

So, am I still stupid?

Maybe, but I can’t see your underwear from here and therefore have no immediate indication of your intelligence level.

What I can say, is that with the E-Self-Nonhugeguys-Publishing Method, you’ve got a much better chance to sell some books.

Getting people to read your stuff really is what it’s all about, and if you:

• Write a good book.
• Edit it like it’s your mother-in-law’s obituary.
• Go to Smashwords, or Goodreads, or someplace like that.  Follow their guidelines and dot and cross things.
• Promote it.  To people that aren’t in your Stuffed Lion Collecting Club.  Promote it to everybody.
• Keep writing.
• And writing.

Then you just might make a success of yourself.

And let’s be honest, the margins for measuring that are a bit roomier with that last option.

Hell, I reckon I can get my wife, my mom and possibly mother-in-law (who doesn’t read this blog) to buy a copy of my book.  If it’s on Amazon.com at $0.99, then that’s $2.98 I made right there.

And all I had to do was something I absolutely love with every fibre of my being.

I’d call that an overwhelmingly huge success.

Wish me luck.

I think the biggest part of the fun of the creative process is actually being creative, because when you’re open to them, the ideas just flow. It’s wonderful.

Unfortunately, until you’re creating full-time (with that full-time creaty income taking care of things), it’s hard to give time to every new idea.  That said, I still try to capture them in their essence as soon as I can.

Typically this involves waking up from a particularly and repeatedly disturbed night’s sleep and trying to write down the dream I had about raw eggs, raw fish and rocket travel to space with a teenage Keanu Reeves before I get tucked into emails and remember what actually pays the bills around here (barely).

My dreams power a lot of my novel ideas, though in reality they’re probably not ALL novels.  Short stories, I suppose, screenplays even, I have no idea.  I know they’re stories, interesting ones, that I’d like to tell.  The medium in which I do it isn’t as important right now.  And like almost all of my other amazing and wonderful stories that I’d like to tell, I have no idea how it ends because I woke up.

I s’pose that’s another big part of the fun too, going along the journey of writing these stories and watching what unfolds and how they end up.

Right now though, right now I am faced with yet another day where I’ve got responsibilities and shit that needs done, and I probably won’t get a chance to sit and write and explore and create and make stories happen and discover how they end.

This way of life will change though.  Soon probabaly.  I’m not sure how just yet, but I do know that it won’t always be this way, and I’m really looking forward to that.

Wish me luck.

See, the funny thing about writing a novel is that when I wasn’t ready to start revising it straightaway, I wanted to write another one.

I dream a lot.  A LOT.  They’re usually quite vivid and sometimes pretty exciting.  Some nights I have “movie dreams” where I feel like I’ve rented a movie and wake up very entertained.  Unfortunately, I frequently miss out on the ending because I wake up with underwear problems that make me have to stand waaaaaay back from the toilet at pre-6am.

It’s a bummer sure, but it gives me lots of great ideas.

Not long after the New Year started, I had a really cool dream about a future where telepathy was fairly common (on a limited scale) and a World War had ended up driving the surviving society of Australia into the bush, where they lived for years thanks to skills learned from the Indigenous Australians.

Well, waking up with a peeboner or not, I was bound to lay there quite awake formulating the rest of this story after that kind of dream.  A lot came after that, and by the next morning I was sketching the outline in my notebook and prepping myself for another novel.

I did it different this time though, I took my corkboard and pulled all those pesky pictures of children and memorable moments and started putting up thumbnails of characters, locations, timelines… all sorts of planny goodness.

Then I just started bopping through it, outlining sections and making the stories fit together… then I challenged Scotty and the crew again.  A few different takers, but me and Scotty, Abel, and Doc-in-law again, only this time it’s 1,500 a week minimum, and the winner is the one that types “The End”.

And gets a publishing deal.

KIDDING.

But once we kicked it off, we’ve been doing pretty good, and we’re on about Week 5 or 6 even, I’ve lost track.

So, writing and writing on the new book.  What’s happening with the old one?

It’s been resting.

Like a fine wine or some freshly kneaded bread dough, or a tired pregnant woman sitting in front of a fan and watching baby boy thump in her belly.  It’s resting.

I wanted to get crackin’ of course, getting it finished straightaway and getting it published.  But wife suggested I follow some advice from Stephen King.  She even made me look it up.

He finishes a book and puts it in a drawer for at least a month.  3 months usually.

Well, I didn’t think I could make it, but once I got crankin’ on the new novel I almost forgot all about it.

Almost.

Then Scotty got back to me with his feedback, and it was great.  Most of it was stuff I’d thought of, but the rest was ideas that I didn’t have fleshed out nor really had the confidence to slap in there.

So, now I’m hip-deep in the telepath novel and I have this whole other novel, My First Novel, waiting for me to finish it.

Because once I finish it, I hope to “self publish” it, where I make a kickass cover and put it “out there”.

I’ve been following along with these folks, and they’re chock full of good ideas and great ways to do this:

• Amanda Hocking
• Joe Konrath
• The Book Designer
• Steve Umstead
• Smashwords

I’m following The Passive Voice too, that emails me articles every day about all of this fun shit.

I gotta say, this whole process has been a hoot.

Can’t wait to see where I end up.

Wish me luck.