Dean Wesley Smith

Editing and Proofing – Traditional Publishing vs. Indie Publishing

10 July 2012

From Dean Wesley Smith:

Just for fun and giggles and to help kill a few myths, I figured I would take a few areas of publishing and compare them across, from indie to traditional. The differences, the beliefs, how things are actually done.

. . . .

One of the great new myths is that traditionally-published books are cleaner and better proofed than indie-published books. Traditional publishers use this myth as a selling point to keep writers mailing them books.

. . . .

[A] lot of us old traditional writers are indie publishing our backlist now. And that’s leading to some really eye-opening discoveries. We are finding tons and tons of problems in traditionally published books that were not in our original manuscripts. Problems introduced by the editing and proofreader of a traditional publishing house.

. . . .

Traditional Publishing

Step One:

Your manuscript gets read by an editor. (Please do not say anything about agents in this. That topic is too ugly to handle here.)

Often this editor is young, just out of college, and filled with the myths of how there is a perfect book. (Again, read Kris’s post about perfection.) If you are lucky your manuscript finds a more experienced editor and the editor goes through trying to make your book a better book for what you wrote. Editors do find mistakes, but most of them are not good copyeditors.

Sometimes in this stage you get an editor who thinks they are a writer and tells you how to rewrite your book into something they think will sell better, or is more to how they would have written it if they had enough courage to be a writer. (There are tricks to getting around this type of editor. You learn them after getting stuck with a few of them.)

How are we discovering this? Simple, actually. We give our hired proofreader a copy of the original, traditionally-published book and an original electronic file. Then we tell the new proofreader to compare the electronic file to the published work and try to get the electronic manuscript as clean as possible.

Our proofreader is finding mistakes that got missed and mistakes that were added in. Thus our books being done indie are now far cleaner than the ones originally done traditional.

. . . .

No matter what your book is or how well-written or perfect, there will always be a rewrite that you must address in one fashion or another. Why? Contracts, that’s why. They give you money on signing and money on acceptance. They have to divide those payments apart for cash flow reasons. You know… business. So the editor MUST find something for you to do, even if she loves the book. In over 100 books I had less than five of them not go through a minor to completely-stupid rewrite.

Sometimes the editor found good stuff that needed fixing, sometimes the editor was just marking time until she could put in for the next check for her writer. Those marking-time rewrites cause more damage than good when the writer is too new to stand up to the editor.

. . . .

When all that is done, your manuscript goes off to a proofreader for a copyedit. If your advance is low, chances are they are testing out a new proofreader that is cheap. If your advance is high, you might get a more experienced one.

. . . .

If your advance is low, you are rolling the dice on getting a decent copyeditor or not. If you get a copyeditor who wants to be a writer and has no respect for your writing, you will find yourself in a hell you can’t even begin to imagine.

If you get a good one, they will find all kinds of stuff and mistakes you swear you never knew were in there.

You must always spend the time, sometimes days, to check through the copyedited manuscript sent to you by the publisher.

. . . .

So what is the process for indie publishing?

Step One:

You have a manuscript. Give it to a couple good first readers. Friends that you also read their work, or just friends that don’t write but love to read. Listen to them on the mistakes and then only fix what you want.

This step is how indie writers go around the editor part of traditional publishing. An editor is only a good reader. Two of your friends are often, combined, a great reader as well.

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith

The New World of Publishing: Insulting Your Writer Friends

21 June 2012

From Dean Wesley Smith:

This week my wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, talked in her blog about a topic that has been bothering me for some time. And a problem I saw coming years ago. And one that makes me sad that the problem has finally arrived.

That problem, put simply, is writers angry at other writers. The reason?  A writer’s choice on how to publish a book.

— Some indie writer on some blog or comment starts going on about how all traditional books these days are bad and I want to raise my hand and say, “Uh, excuse me, over one hundred traditionally published novels here, and not all of them are bad.”

— And then at the same time, on some other blog or comment, some traditionally published writer starts going on about how all indie books are bad and I want to raise my hand and say, “Uh, I’ve put up over 250 indie books and not all of them are bad.”

I am simply making choices for my own fiction, and people are insulting me.

Truth, folks. Sometimes I go indie, sometimes I go traditional, and I love the ability to pick and choose. And I advise writers on both sides. And I teach choice.

But it seems other writers don’t want me to have that choice, and clearly don’t want that choice for themselves.

I am finding this stunning, but not surprising, actually.

What I find really stunning is that writers now have options, and it seems that MOST WRITERS HATE HAVING OPTIONS. It makes them angry.

The hatred on this topic comes from everywhere.

Go read my last post explaining how it is possible for writers who work really hard and take a long-term approach to their writing might make a living with short fiction. And notice that to make a living, I used BOTH TRADITIONAL AND INDIE publishing?

That made one poor blogger so angry, he said I was running a “scam.”  All I could do was laugh, since I guess my suggesting a writer must work hard over a lot of years to make a living is a scam. (Kris heard about it and laughed and wanted to know what I was doing with all the money from the scam. Yeah, I was wondering the same thing.)

So even a post suggesting balance gets people really, really angry.

When you hear yourself making some firm and angry statement about another writer who is doing something (either traditional or indie) you don’t either understand or like, take a deep breath. And ask yourself the following questions:

— Do I really understand that writer’s situation and life and writing methods?

— Would I do the same thing in his position?

— Why does his choice make me so angry?

—- And why am I so afraid of other writers having choices?

And that’s really where this all comes down.

Another writer’s choice does not impact you in any way. Stay out of their business, make your own choices, encourage and learn from other writers.

If you don’t want to add a choice of publication into your world, that’s fine. Don’t. It’s your career. Your choice.

But please stop insulting other writers. You may not like another writer’s choice, but honor them for their choice and try to understand why they are making that choice.

Link to the rest at The New World of Publishing.

Guest post by Bridget McKenna

The Secret Myth of Traditional Publishing

16 June 2012

From Dean Wesley Smith:

I keep laughing when writer after writer goes on about how much better traditional publishing is than indie publishing. Now, granted, I am still a traditionally published writer with a couple books under contract, but the myths involved with traditional publishing are just head-shaking to someone like me, an old-timer.

. . . .

– You get more respect if you sell your book to a traditional publisher.  Well, maybe in your own head, but real readers never care if Bantam or Bongo Books published the book they love. If it looks professional and is clean and easy to read, they will never notice the publisher. This one is only a concern to insecure writers who need professional help. Or authors who care nothing of writing, but only want to be published to brag and sit on panels at conferences or join writer’s organizations. They are not writers, they are authors.

– Traditional publishing is a better way to launch a career.  Well, if you have years to wait around while editors and agents and production departments get their fingers out of their noses and actually do something with your book. But most writers starting out would rather have a few readers on their books a little sooner than four or five years. It might only be a few, but that number will grow if you keep writing. If a traditional publisher buys two or three books and your first one bites it, they will drop the other two and you will repay the tiny advance.

. . . .

The myth that no one mentions.

You write a book, you spend the years and the energy to sell it to a traditional publisher. They pay you part of the advance. You think the book will then come out. Right? Well, not so fast.

That’s right, fair myth believers. Selling a book to a traditional publisher is not a guarantee it will ever see the light of day.

. . . .

At a rough count, going quickly back over records and sadly-functioning memory, I have sold and been paid for, and sometimes written, at least seventeen novels that never got published.

Yes, 17 novels. I said that, I really did. Thirteen of them are fully written, the rest are partially written with outlines. That is not counting novels that didn’t sell but I wrote or partially wrote with outlines. There are a bunch more of those.

That’s right, I’ve written, sold, and been paid for more novels that never saw print than most writers have written in their entire careers.

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith

Think Like A Publisher: Production and Scheduling

24 May 2012

From Dean Wesley Smith:

If I had to summarize those first three chapters, I would say this: “Be prepared, set up correctly, keep your costs down, and understand the possible cash flow.”

So the next logical step is the question: “How Do I Get My Books Out To Readers?” In other words, how do I produce and distribute my book? You can’t have distribution without production, so I am starting with production right now.

The first major steps in production are inventory and scheduling.

. . . .

As an indie publisher, you also need to set up a publishing schedule and then, as best as possible, stick to it. And always remember one major thing:

Publishing is an industry driven by deadlines.

Trust me, if you don’t have deadlines, things will just slip by and books won’t get done or published.

. . . .

A publishing business is a business of selling product. I know, as a writer, your story is your baby, your work-of-art. But once you move it into the publishing business it is a widget, something to be sold to readers to enjoy. You are in the sales part of the entertainment industry.

So as you start your business, you first need to know what inventory is available to you, what will be available, and what can be created.

So do an inventory. Count all your finished short stories and novels. Then count all the short stories and novels that have been published but might revert to you soon, or count stories mostly finished that would be easy to finish. Then look at your writing schedule and figure out over the next year how many stories or novels you can write.

. . . .

So now you have an inventory and a rough idea how long each project will take to complete and get published.

So take into account the amount of time you want or can afford to spend on this kind of publishing business, then just do a publishing schedule.

Set the date for publishing each title.

. . . .

Writers in general hit deadlines, but there are always a few writers who think it is all right to miss a deadline by a year and still expect their book to be published. And then they get upset when the publisher kills their contracts and asks for their money back. This is a business, a deadline-driven business, so act like a publisher and treat your deadlines like that as well.

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith

I did bash stupid writers

12 May 2012

From Dean Wesley Smith:

When I was down in Las Vegas last week being a guest speaker at the SuperStars writing Seminar, they put me on a panel about agents. They expected me to bash agents, as it seems is my reputation. I didn’t. As I have said many times, in the old days of publishing, when agents were actually needed, I had three top agents and I liked them and they did as I asked them to do. (I repeated that on the panel as well.)

Mainly, I didn’t bash agents because it’s not an agent’s fault that writers hire them in this new world. It’s not an agent’s fault that writers give them all their money and all their paperwork and then wonder why they got ripped off. It’s not an agent’s fault that a writer signs an agency agreement giving the agent part of the copyright in a work. It’s not an agent’s fault that a writer lets a non-lawyer agent negotiate a contract with fifty lawyers on the other side.

And it’s not the agent’s fault that a writer didn’t notice the agent stopped working for writers and started working for publishers years ago.

. . . .

So I didn’t bash agents on the panel last week. But I did bash stupid writers.

And I have been doing that here for years now.

I guess that makes me anti-agent, but I am not. I am anti-bad-business. And anti-stupid-writer.

So now comes this week’s events and one more point in the proof how bad agents in general are for smart writers in this new world.  Just this week (yet again) the agents themselves gave us even more proof that they work for publishers, the very people they are supposed to represent writers against.

The AAR (a group of agents joining together to pretend to have more power when they have none) just put out a letter asking that all agents and writers and other publishing professionals write the Department of Justice and say that we all don’t like the suit filed against the major publishers on the agency agreement.

. . . .

And their organization did this with not one thought on how such a position will help or hurt their writers (at least the midlist writers and indie writers).

. . . .

Yup, one day the agents and all publishers sort of “got together” and decided electronic couldn’t be 50% of cover anymore (as it was in all contracts before this magical agreement), but had to be 25% of net. It was “better for the business” that way.

Just as setting agency pricing “was better for the business” as the publisher’s said, and now the agents want us to support those publishers.

. . . .

Last week at the SuperStars writing seminar, all seven of us instructors (all bestsellers and long-term writers) were asked where publishing was going. There was a long, long, long moment of silence, then finally someone said, “As soon as we figure it out, we’ll let you know.”

That’s right, from a panel of “old” professional writers, most with over thirty years of experience and hundreds of books each. We don’t know.

But I do know one thing. Smart writers are running in droves from agents. And many young writers are not even going after agents at the moment, but instead going directly to editors and using IP lawyers to help with the contracts. Or indie publishing and letting the dust settle.

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith

When to Mail Short Fiction To Traditional Publishers

10 April 2012

From Dean Wesley Smith:

But let me say this clearly right up front. I believe that selling short fiction to magazines and collections is the only major aspect of traditional publishing still worth the time and effort. (Translation and overseas sales are a distant second.)

Up until two years ago, the advice I gave over and over was to finish a story and get it in the mail to top markets and keep it in the mail until it sold somewhere. I had thirty-six rejections on one short story that finally sold for 10 cents per word to a gambling magazine.

. . . .

— Both mailing and indie publishing of a story have about the same actual out-of-pocket costs.

— Selling a 5,000 word story to a top magazine will gain you about $300 in actual money and upwards of $1,000 or more in ad value.

— Selling an indie-published story an average of five times plus collection will gain you $12.50 per month times x 21 months or about $262.50 in actual money and completely unknown ad value.

— Selling traditionally to a major magazine will also get you more readers if they like your story. That’s the huge plus that can’t be calculated with any real cash number.

In other words, IF your story sells to a major magazine in a timely manner, which you always have to assume it will, you are still far better off mailing your work for the advertising advantage. They will pay you to advertise your writing in their magazine. Total win.

. . . .

Sending a story to a traditional publisher has become a real gamble. When, in the “old days” there was nothing else you could do with it, there was no real gamble. You mailed your work to editors and just kept the story in the mail for years.

But now, with even the minimum sales from indie publishing, you are risking $150.00 per year. ($12.50 x 12 months)

. . . .

So Do I Keep it in the Mail Forever?

My answer to that is no. Even with the huge advertising advantage of selling to a major magazine, not counting the career aspects of getting on award ballots and such if you are that inclined, it still would not be a good idea, IN MY OPINION, to spend more than a year or two mailing a short story.

The lost-income costs just start mounting too much after a year or so. And the gamble gets too large. At least for my tastes.

But how to limit the time a story is in the mail?

I think the limitation on this time spent in the mail now boils down to genre. Yes, I know, writers don’t know what they write, but trust your first reader to tell you what you wrote, what genre it rests in. And here are my suggestions, again just my opinion.

— Romance… put it up indie published at once. No worthwhile romance short fiction markets at the moment.

— Western… put it up indie published at once. No worthwhile western short fiction markets at the moment.

— Science Fiction… Keep the story in the mail to the top four or five. Start with Asimov’s, then Analog, then on down. About five and it should take you about a year.

— Fantasy… Keep it in the mail to the top two or three markets. There isn’t much else at the moment. Should take less than a year.

— Horror or major paranormal… There are small press markets, but not worth the loss in my opinion. Put it up indie published directly.

— Mystery or thriller…Keep it in the mail to the top two or three markets. Then consider moving it for a time to top mainstream markets because if you don’t call a mystery a mystery, it can often sell mainstream.

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith

An Estate Full of Books

15 March 2012

Dean Wesley Smith has a long post detailing his travails in settling an estate of a long-time friend and big-time book collector.

Excerpts:

He was a major book collector and hoarder. He carefully protected every book and pulp magazine he got and had a fantastic memory of everything he owned. He also was a huge source of information about books, authors, and collecting. But he also saved every publisher catalog and every piece of paper decade after decade after decade.

His home only had a trail through it and his apartment was the same. But he only collected top quality stuff, so every pile had stunning books, pulps, and art in them. He had one chair in his apartment and no place to sit in his home. Even his garage was stacked to the ceiling with boxes of books and magazines I had managed to help him get on pallets to protect ten years ago.

The picture on the right is looking in the front door of his home. Up until now, Larry Woodside and I were the only people who were in that building in the last ten years.

. . . .

So the day after Bill died, I sat down in his chair and started through the piles of paper beside his chair that he had said the will was in. After two days of searching, I found a will. It only had Larry’s signature on it, but honestly I didn’t think much about that. I figured Bill and Larry had redone it at some point and it was basically the same as I remembered. So I made an appointment with an attorney and showed him the will the next day. He flipped it back to me and said, and I quote. “It’s not valid.”

You see, in Oregon, intent of the dead person does not matter. And a will must have at least two witnesses. And since Bill had no relatives, if his will didn’t hold, the State of Oregon would get everything. And they would auction it all off, the very thing Bill did not want to happen to his collections.

So after a short hour or two of panic, Kris told me she had a firm memory of witnessing a will for Bill and her name was not on the will we showed the attorney. So another will just had to be there in the piles of paper somewhere. So back into the stacks of paper I went and another two days later I had found two more wills. Both with enough signatures, thankfully. Both with the same terms. One just dated about six months after the other.

So I took the most recent will to my attorney here on the coast and he glanced at it and said, and I quote. “It’s not valid.”

The reason? The witness signatures had not been notarized.

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith

Here are a few general tips about wills and estates:

  1. Sign your will in your attorney’s office. That way, it will be properly witnessed, notarized, etc.
  2. If you sign a new will, immediately destroy all your old wills so nobody tries to process one that is out of date.
  3. Tell several people where you are keeping your original will.
  4. Send a copy of your will to the person who will be your executor (sometimes called a personal representative) and to the person who you designated as a backup executor if #1 can’t serve. Your attorney will probably also keep a copy of your will. If the original cannot be found, most states have a process whereby a copy can be used.
  5. Specifically provide in your will that if the executor requires assistance in collecting, inventorying, storing, delivering, etc., your property that he/she is authorized to obtain such assistance as he/she deems reasonably necessary and is authorized to pay the reasonable cost of such assistance from the estate and/or be reimbursed for such costs from the estate. This permission can probably be routinely obtained from the probate judge, but a provision in the will can avoid a trip to court.
  6. PG won’t go into the organizational steps you can take to make your executor’s life easier, but authors should make certain copies of all publishing contracts and agency agreements are collected in a place where they can be located.
  7. For self-published authors, the executor will have to send a bunch of court documents to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, etc., to transfer ongoing royalties to an estate bank account while the estate is open, then to whomever is to receive such royalties after the estate is closed. The estate attorney will likely be involved with this.

As you’ll note, Dean says his wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, will be posting estate suggestions in the future.

The usual estate is not as much trouble as the one Dean describes, but acting as an executor will take some time. Last week, PG declined to serve as an executor for an estate of a non-relative because of the time required. You should ask for permission before you name someone as your executor.

Reasons Indie Authors Should Offer a Trade Paperback Edition

20 February 2012

Another excellent post from Dean Wesley Smith:

Is doing a paper book worth the effort?

My flat opinion is yes. So let me explain why I believe that.

. . . .

Early on indie publishers need to start working some of their books into print. Build a list and a backlist in paper as any publisher would do.

. . . .

Fact: WMG Publishing only has eleven books in trade paper at the moment, and all of them were (in one form or another) experiments. We have three novels, two nonfiction books, four short collections, and two short novels. All but the long novels and one big nonfiction book are $7.99 cover. All are part of the extended distribution through CreateSpace.

Fact: WMG Publishing has 240 or so titles in print electronically. Short stories, collections, short novels, and novels.

Fact: WMG Publishing makes about 15% of its income from the eleven trade paperbacks. Without one ounce of promotion or push to bookstores yet.

A Prediction: Since the focus this year for WMG Publishing is getting more and more books into trade paper, WMG Publishing will be making far more money from trade paperbacks by the end of 2012 than from the books published electronically. And that I am sure will happen.

. . . .

We all know that at this point in time, electronic publishing is hovering around 20% of all books sold. Higher in some genres, lower in others, higher in some months, lower in others.

That means in general that 80% of all books sold are paper, through either online bookstores like Amazon or indie bookstores or box stores.

. . . .

I flat hate any kind of publishing that cuts out readers. It really is that simple, so when Kris and I helped start WMG Publishing and they took over all our backlist, the focus was to get our books out to all readers. Of course, the readers may or may not buy them, their choice. But we will have them available in as many forms as possible.

Secondly, I get very, very puzzled (considering the new and very easy technology of POD publishing) that any publisher would only go electronic, especially with the well-researched data of number of paper books sold vs electronic books sold. (You remember…20/80?) No matter how anyone fudges the numbers right now, paper is still way out ahead of electronic books and will be for years.

If you are going to have a publishing business with your own work, think like a publisher. Go after every reader you can find in any country. But the only way to do that is have paper copies of your books available.

Will the paper books sell at first, or even sell many copies in the first year? Not likely unless you get lucky.

You ought to have seen Kris and I celebrate when an extended distribution sale came in for ten copies of a novel. We made about $12.00 on those ten copies, but it was as if we had hit the lottery. Why? Because we knew what it meant. We really had hit the lottery. Bookstores were finding the books and ordering in bulk. Or a warehouse was stocking the book for future orders. And we hadn’t even mentioned anywhere the book was available.

It really meant that the new system worked, that the traditional publishing stranglehold on print books really was vanishing. It meant that any of us could get in the door simply by paying $25.00 to CreateSpace and getting our book into print.

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith

Dean knows far more about how to be a publisher than PG does, but a few weeks ago PG noticed that a collection of “bookstores” were offering hard copy versions of Mrs. PG’s books on Amazon for a few cents to a dollar less than the Amazon price PG had set on CreateSpace. CreateSpaces is the only source of these printed books.

CreateSpace sales were showing onsies and twosies for Expanded Distribution of these books, so there were no bulk orders for in-store or warehouse stock. PG concluded the bookstores were simply piggy-backing on Mrs. PG’s Amazon listings, using their discounts to undercut Mrs. PG’s prices slightly, and having CreateSpace ship to buyers.

Expanded Distribution sales were, of course, generating much lower per-copy royalties than  direct sales through Amazon.

PG turned off Expanded Distribution and hasn’t seen any reduction in numbers of copies sold, but total CreateSpace royalties have, of course, increased. Since he originally priced the CreateSpace editions to allow some profits on Expanded Distribution sales, PG is considering lowering the CreateSpace prices somewhat to see what impact that might have on sales through Amazon.

Does anyone else have observations on Expanded Distribution issues or successes?

 

The Costs of Indie Publishing

10 February 2012

Another illuminating essay from Dean Wesley Smith:

So this new world of publishing is (in my opinion) book-publishing heaven. Not only is this new world faster by factors of a hundred or more, but the production costs don’t even come close to what was needed in 1990 to put out a book.

For example, from 1989 to 1992 we did a series of books at Pulphouse called “Author’s Choice Monthly.” The series let each author pick five or six stories, around 30,000 words, for a collection. We did one per month, sold them both in limited hardback form and unlimited trade paper form. We used the old warehouse method, meaning we had to guess ahead how many to have printed and bound. We did our own printing, then we had to haul the printed books an hour north to either a perfect bindery or the hardback bindery. Then we had to pick them up when done and bring them back to the office to be unloaded, packed, and shipped to stores and customers.

Let me put it this way as to costs. The price of the gas (for the 60 mile one way drive north to the binderies and back in 1990) for the van we used IS MORE than what WMG Publishing pays right now to put a collection of mine or Kris’s into electronic and trade paper edition.

That’s right, just the gas (in 1990 money) for 240 miles is more than I spend now for everything needed to get a collection into print.

Yes, this is publishing heaven. Trust me, I lived in the other place from 1987 through 1994.

And traditional publishers in New York still do. And that’s where so many of these beliefs come from. People who work the traditional side just can’t believe that a book can be done cheaply and yet professionally.

. . . .

I believe every writer should value their time and put a price on that time for writing. I have done a number of articles about that. But this article is talking about money out-of-pocket. And since I assume you would have your lights on and heat working in your home, there would be very little out-of-pocket money for writing.

However, on your accounting books, the value of your time is your biggest expense. Set yourself an hourly or daily wage and put that against the cost of the book.

So it would look like this:

— Cost of writing time, share of electricity, heat, and so on. (Example: 120 hours for a novel = 120 x $50.00 per hour (plus expenses) =$6,000.00)

— Out of Pocket Expenses for writing: None.

. . . .

Newer writers are focused on words only, on creating beautiful sentences, because that’s what their English teachers had them do. And granted, in the early days of writing, this focus isn’t a bad thing. All writers need to learn the basic writing rules before moving on into telling great stories and often breaking those learned rules to tell a better story.

That said, when a new writer looks at a book from a traditional publisher, they think it’s perfect BECAUSE IT IS IN PRINT. Now, of course, if you have been through numbers of books in the traditional system, you are just laughing now. If you have dealt with a proofreader paid for by your publisher who thought they could rewrite every sentence, you are laughing your ass off right now.

In real terms, sometimes traditional publisher helps a book with their editing and proofing and sometimes they hurt a book. And my gut sense is that it’s about 50/50 and you never know which 50 you are going to end up with on any book. Again, I’ve published over 100 books with traditional publishers. I can’t begin to tell you how many they made worse. And I can’t begin to tell you how many a great editor helped me fix details.

. . . .

If you are working on Microsoft Word and bought the Microsoft Office, it has a program included called PowerPoint which turns out is for slides and professional business presentations, but does wonderful covers. Quick, simple, easy to learn, and surprisingly powerful. (It gets a very bad rap from those who have spent years learning PhotoShop.)

No point in hiring someone to do a cover and then try to describe to that person what you want. Just learn how to do it yourself. Scary at first. But wonderfully easy once you pick it up. And you will spend less time doing the cover yourself than dealing with a person you hired.

So your first covers are going to take some extra time to learn things, and you will need to study covers to see what makes your cover look professional, but once you get going and have done a few and learned how to write blurbs and tag lines and such, covers get easy.

And always remember, it can be done again and fixed later very easily.

Besides your time, the art or photo for the cover is where the out-of-pocket cost comes in for each cover.

On any one of a dozen sites, find “royalty free” artwork which is basically the artist selling you use of the art for restricted reasons, which tends to always include book covers. On all the web sites that offer royalty free artwork and photos, read their licensing agreement carefully to make sure you can use what you are buying.

There are some fantastically professional artists on these sites. It’s a new way for artists to make a living by selling uses. Wonderful for them, wonderful for us.

. . . .

Promotion

Why bother? Just move on and write the next book or story. And then the next and the next. Maybe announce it on Facebook once so your family can find it and put a listing on your web site, but that’s it. Any time you spend on this step is wasted writing time. Go write.

And if you spend a penny on this step before you have over fifty or more titles, you need to step back and really look at your marketing and business plan. There are very sound reasons to spend some money on promotion. But not early on.

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith

Pen Names – Everything You Need to Know

1 February 2012

Dean Wesley Smith lays out the ins and outs of using one or more pen names:

I get the “pen name” question more than any other question. Period. And that’s because I am very open about writing under different names and I have varied reasons for doing so. And weirdly enough, I have written under pen names since I started writing.

. . . .

The pulp era of popular fiction brought in thousands and thousands of pen names. There are entire books that have been done trying to track the pen names of the pulp writers, from Max Brand to Kenneth Robison to all the hundreds of pen names of Edward Stratemeyer and his “Syndicate” of writers. (You remember Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and so on.)

Many of today’s major writers wrote under pen names, sometimes many, many pen names over their careers. And almost always for different reasons. I don’t think Robert Silverberg can even count all his pen names.

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In fact, in the high peak of science fiction magazines, there were often only one or two writers per issue, even though the magazine showed six or seven authors.

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Again, there are thousands of reasons to use pen names, each depending on the author’s situation at the moment.  But let me give you a few of the main ones that have lasted over history.

Top Reason: Writer is too “fast” for traditional publishing.

In other words, the writer has a work ethic and has trained himself to sit at a typewriter or computer for more hours per day. And by doing that, the writer will just produce more work than someone who spends two years writing a novel. Just nature of the beast.

In the pulp era, it was fine to write fast and hard and long under one name. The writers had other reasons to switch names back then that I will get to in a moment.

But with the advent of the influence of the university system and editors coming out of that university myth-filled system, the belief started to sink into the traditional publishing offices that writing more than one or two books per year was a bad thing (except in a few genres like romance). And besides, the big machines of modern traditional publishing just couldn’t keep up with a fast writer. In fact, fast writers just scare hell out of them.

So those of us who have a work ethic and can sit at a computer for a regular work day, we flat had to have more outlets. So instead of putting novels into drawers, we came up with pen names and started many writing careers, often with numbers of them going at once.

At one point, Kris and I were joking around at a conference and actually counted the career income streams coming into our home at that moment in time. We had nine writers’ incomes coming into the house. That was more than we had cats at that point.

Today we have about that many, maybe a few more, but some are not making much, at least not enough to live on. Luckily the pen-name writers don’t eat much.

The key is the same with all aspects of the publishing industry: Diversity and a lot of product. If you have three or four writer’s incomes hitting your house, it’s a ton better and safer than only one. And nine or ten incomes just makes things much easier.

The idea of multiple income streams from different names is not something most writers think of until they happen into it by overwhelming their own publisher and deciding to not slow down (meaning spend less time at the computer or playing Angry Birds) as their agent wants them to do.

However, now with indie publishing, fast writers have far, far more outlets and the idea of being a “fast” writer, meaning spending more hours writing, is once again becoming a good thing. At least outside of traditional publishing. Inside of traditional publishing being fast still scares hell out of people and they will do everything in their power to get you to spend less time being a writer and more time being an author.

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My wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes under some major names. Her name is known as a science fiction and fantasy writer. And her fantasy series, The Fey, is a dark, high fantasy with lots of blood and death. So when she came up with a light, warm, humorous fantasy series set here and now using fairy tales, she didn’t want to confuse her readers and make the readers that liked one kind of fantasy and not the other angry. So Kristine Grayson, the bestselling paranormal romance writer, was born for the funny fantasy books.

Then Kris came up with a dark mystery series set in the late 1960s that dealt with race and politics of the time. Again, not something her normal science fiction readers would enjoy, so multiple-Edgar-nominated Kris Nelscott was born. And now in romance this next year she has a wonderful science fiction romance series starting out of Sourcebooks under the name Kris DeLake. Pure space opera with a romance touch. But again the readers that love Recovering Apollo 8 or the gritty Diving into the Wreck series would not be very happy. Thus the new author is born.

You want a more major example than my wife? How about Evan Hunter, which was a pen name. Evan Hunter wrote a book called The Blackboard Jungle that won some major awards such as the Pulitzer Prize. But he was a writer, and wanted to write other stuff.  He got an offer to write a new series for a paperback house that needed short novels fast. So he created a new name and wrote police procedural novels for decades under the name Ed McBain.  Also, Evan Hunter, to help pay for a girlfriend or some such thing now lost in publishing lore, wrote soft-core erotica quickly, often finishing a book in a day or so, to help pay dating costs. Of course, those books were also under other names.

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Third Major Reason: You Have A Difficult Day Job

This reason is just obvious. You are an MD and you are writing medical thrillers. Really good plan to do that under a pen name to save legal problems with some patient believing you took their personal information and put it in your book, even though you didn’t.

And yes I know about Michael Crichton writing his way through medical school. Under pen names. He wrote under the names John Lange and Jeffrey Hudson and one of the books under one of those names won the Edgar Award for best novel.  He wrote numbers of novels per year all the way through med school, all under pen names, and got his MD the year he wrote three novels. (Yeah, you don’t have enough time to write.) By the way, his real first name was John.

Another example: James Tiptree Jr. was a long-term spy in the Second World War and in the Cold War, a CIA agent, and an experimental psychologist, so she came up with a very hidden pen name to write under. Her real name was Alice Sheldon, but everyone swore Tiptree was a man for a very long time.

Some Other Smaller Reasons to Change Your Writing Name

– Sales Record Goes Bad.

In traditional publishing, your sales record is tracked by your name. You write a book and something goes wrong along the way, often through no fault of your own, and your sales numbers go down and you can’t sell another book under that name.

Smart writers change their name and keep writing. Authors, on the other hand, sit in bars at conventions and complain they can’t sell a book.

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– Future Divorce

Women, caution on using your husband’s name as your writing name. Writing careers often outlast marriages. Just saying…

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Indie writers who are in a great hurry are usually the ones that ask me about pen names.  One of the truths of indie publishing is that if you have more products under one name, readers can find you easier and if they like a story they buy, they will buy more. And thus having more books and stories published leads to more sales. That is one fact most of us agree on about indie publishing.

But….  All those stories and books need to be in the same general area. If you write a vampire novel followed by a romance with rabbit-sex followed by a private detective novel, all under the same name, you are going to lose readers, not find more. So if you are moving across genres like that in your writing, you are going to need to realize that it’s going to take more time to build an audience. Because you are going to be building more than one career. Of course that takes more time. Duh.

That means as a beginning writer you are going to have to do what seems almost impossible to do. You are going to have to take the long view, meaning not just six months, but six years or more. (Please don’t scream at me. I’m being nice suggesting only six years. More than likely it’s ten years or more, just as it was in the old traditional-publishing-only days.)

I have no issue with a writer telling their readers they also write other kinds of novels under other names. I just told you about four of my wife’s names she writes in different genres. And sometimes readers will follow across genre lines. Give them the chance on a main web site under a main name.

Link to the rest at Dean Wesley Smith

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