To Self-Publish or Traditionally Publish is the Question, and Just Where Can I Get it Done? Part I

Traditional Publishing

Now that you’re all edited to perfection, and formatted, it’s time to decide just how you want to publish. There are a couple of options, and within those are even more options. First, though, you need to decide if you prefer to publish traditionally, with a formal publisher, or if you just want to do it yourself.

There are any number of schools of thought on this, and even more opinions. I’ve done it both ways, so I’ll just tell you how to go about each to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, and you can decide which on is right for you.

Traditional publishing refers to having your book published by a publishing house. There are many publishing houses out there, some of them big publishers (generally referred to as “the big six”), some middle ground publishers, and then the small or independent publishing houses. Each offer different things, and each individual publishing house will have its own rules or policies.

Who are the big six?

Hachette Book Group (formerly Warner Books, as in Time Warner). More recognizable are some of their imprints, such as Little, Brown & Company, Grand Central, and Orbit

Harper Collins has many imprints, I think somewhere in the range of thirty-ish, such as Harper Teen, Avon, Walden Pond Press, and William Morrow.

MacMillan Publishers also has many imprints, including Rodale, Templar, and St. Martin’s Press. I believe they have around fifty-ish divisions.

Penguin Group just this year overtook Random House as the largest publisher.  Besides Penguin Books, they imprint Ace Books, DAW Books, Signet Books, Viking Press, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, and Jove among many others.

Random House of course includes Crown Publishing Group and Knopf Doubleday Group, with I don’t know how many imprints. Ballantine, Delacorte, Golden Books, Bantam, Dell, and of course, Doubleday.

Simon & Schuster rounds out the six with Free Press, Gallery Books, Pocket, and Scribner to their name.

I will tell you right now you don’t have a chance to even be looked at by any of these big guns without an agent. Direct inquiries, or worse, direct mailing of your manuscript will land your efforts in the trashcan, and can possible even get you blacklisted if you’re a pain in the butt about it. So if you’re looking to be published by any of these guys or their subsidiaries, get yourself an agent.

How to get an agent? You can either google “agents” and search them out, one by one, or you can subscribe to a service such as WritersDigest or WritersMarket, where they have done the homework for you. However, even if you subscribe to a service such as that to narrow your search, make sure to go to each agent’s website and read their guidelines. If you don’t follow their guidelines strictly, they won’t even glance at your query letter, and you will have wasted your time. Make sure you double check if they require exclusive submissions (meaning don’t send it to anyone else until they’ve given you a yea or nay) or accept simultaneous submissions (meaning you can send to as many as you want at once). If you do have simultaneous submissions out, let them know in your query. It’s the polite thing to do.

Ah, yes, the dreaded query letter. I wish I could give you some magic formula for writing one, but I don’t have it. No one does, because it’s all a matter of you writing the right words to catch the attention of the agent you are querying, and to make your book sound like the best thing written since Grapes of Wrath. You can also google this, and read advice from any number of authors, agents, and editors. The most important thing to remember is that agents are busy, and receive hundreds of queries a week. You must catch their attention immediately, within 10 seconds, or you don’t have a shot. And be professional. Absolutely no spelling or grammatical errors or you’re out. There are some online classes you can take to polish your query, and I highly suggest doing this first.

Also, don’t send a query to an agent you don’t really care to work with. What if they offer to represent you, and then you say, “Uh, no thanks, I’ll wait for someone better.” Agents are a fairly close knit bunch, and they will let the others know about this ungrateful author they dealt with. Guess what will happen to your query at the next agent’s desk? Bottom line: don’t waste their time.

Be prepared for rejection. There may be the rare author out there who was picked up by their first agent. I don’t know who they are, but they could exist, right? Do you know that Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, was rejected 60 times before an agent signed her? Stephenie Meyer was rejected fifteen times. That’s actually a pretty low number of rejections. So be prepared. And be prepared that no matter how prepared you think you are, how tough you think you are, rejection hurts. Don’t expect them to send constructive criticism, either. Remember the line about receiving hundreds of queries a week? You’ll be lucky to receive a form letter rejection.

You can also choose to look at some of the smaller publishing houses, sometimes referred to as independent (indie), or vanity publishers. Many times they will accept submissions directly from an author without an agent, and some of them actually won’t take an author who has an agent.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for a big check to come in the mail, either. The face of publishing has changed dramatically. Gone are the days of sending in your manuscript, receiving a fat advance, and then being sent on a whirlwind book signing tour. In some instances, you may receive an advance which is not a “bonus” per se, but rather is the publisher giving you a deposit against future earnings of the book, which means you don’t get paid any more until you’ve made back that amount of money in your earnings for sales.

Should you be so lucky as to find an agent, and then six months to a year later get picked up by a publisher, you’re looking at another six months to a year before actual publication, then six months more until you receive payment for your first month of sales. Conceivably, you could be looking at thirty months or more from signing with the agent until your first paycheck. While this is worst case scenario, best case scenario is being signed by a smaller publisher, who will get your book out within six to nine months, and then pay you six months after that. If you get a check a year after signing a contract, that’s pretty quick.

What happens once you sign a contract? Well, then the work begins. You will be busier than ever pre-marketing your book. Social networking via Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and the invaluable book blogs begins. You have to start becoming visible long before your book comes out. I won’t get into detail about that here since I’ll be detailing that in a later post, but just know that if you do go on a whirlwind book signing tour, you’ll be footing the bill unless your name is Stephenie Meyer, Stephen King, or Danielle Steele (you get the idea). A publisher isn’t going to dump a bunch of money into something like that on an unknown author. They have no guarantee of making any money on your book. Of course they want to sell your book, because they don’t make money if they don’t, but their end game is to make money off your book, not spend money on your book.

What can you expect to get paid? I would guess your average take is going to be around 15% of the total price, and then deduct from that what your agent makes. Not many people get rich off writing books, unless you can sell millions of books. So if you’re writing, do it for the love and passion of it, and plan to make a decent living if you’re good, but don’t plan to get rich unless you’re amazing. Even then, luck plays a lot into your success.

Next post we will take a look at self-publishing, which is a route many authors are choosing. Even some established, formerly trad-published authors are going that way.

As always, happy writing!

On Writing and Publishing: An Author Shares Her Limited Knowledge! Part IV

Formatting: And You Thought Editing was a Nightmare!
Part I: Basic Formatting

As I was writing this section, I realized how long it was getting when I'd hit 6 pages on Word and had only gotten as far as formatting for your paper book. So I decided to divide it into 3 sections to make it an easier read.

I: Basic formatting  II: Formatting for your self-published physical copy  III: Formatting for your ebook

Now that we’ve covered the absolute joy that is editing, we can move on to formatting. Insert big, dramatic sigh here.  Why? Because formatting can be frustrating, and time consuming. However, there are some tricks that will help make this less painful. Unfortunately, those tricks are something you needed to do before you began writing.

Thanks for telling me now, you’re thinking. But I figure you have already completed—or at least mostly completed—you manuscript before you began searching out information about editing, formatting, and publishing. Just to keep everyone happy, though, I’ll go back and add a note to the first of these posts letting future writers know to come here first.

The main thing is to begin by removing most formatting rules before you begin writing. This is because once you’ve finished your manuscript then you go in and remove all formatting it also deletes all of your italics. Then you’ve gotta try to remember where they were, or make a copy of your manuscript before removing formatting, then go back through and add them back in. The other option is to go through and remove each piece of formatting. I personally think both would be just as time consuming as the other.

The reason for using loose formatting when you begin writing is that it’s much easier to go back and add formatting than to try to remove it. I’m going on the assumption that now, or at some point, you will be submitting as an ebook. It requires a very different kind of formatting, so that’s why we begin with the loose formatting.

Let me begin by saying this all refers to Microsoft Word. This is the program I use, am familiar with, and is probably the most used program by writers because it is so accessible. Of course, if you have a Mac, then this section may not help you—other than that most of the rules are probably the same. If you have a PC, and don’t have Word, invest in a copy now! Notepad just isn’t going to do it for you. This is also mainly for those of you who think you may decide to go the self-publishing route.  If you plan to try to find an agent, and then a publisher, then formatting may not be quite as important, other than you’ll want it to look as good as possible when someone does read it. If it’s a mess, it may hit the slush pile before the potential agent/publisher gets to the good part of your story.

So, here are the nuts and bolts of how you want to set up word before you begin. We’ll get to re-formatting soon enough.  If you’re doing this on a document which you’ve already started, then place your cursor somewhere in your document, and hit CTRL+A. This selects all of your text, and will apply changes to the whole document.

Before you do one single thing on formatting, turn your formatting marks on, otherwise you may as well be formatting with a blindfold on. Sometimes Word is tricky—what you see is not always what you get. No matter what step in the formatting process, you should always have this on. Of course you won’t want it on when you’re writing—that would be annoying. But you MUST have it one for anything formatting. How do you do that? you ask. Easy peasy. Find the little button at the top of your page that looks like a little paragraph mark. On Word 2010 it’s in the third pane over on the home page. On all you can find it under “options”. On all of them it looks like this: ¶. Keep in mind you need to set everything like this, no matter what size of book you’ll do later. We will go over specific formatting later.

1.       Paragraph (in 2010 this is under Home)

a.       Indents and Spacing: Alignment: Left, Indentation: Left, Special: First Line, by: .25 or .3, Spacing Before and After: 0, Line Spacing: Double

b.      Tabs (bottom corner of dialog box): .25 or .3, Alignment: Left, Leader: 0

c.       Line and Page Breaks: Everything should be unchecked except: Don’t hyphenate

2.       Page Setup (in 2010 this is under page layout)

a.       Margins: 1” all sides, Gutter: 0, Gutter position: Left, Multiple Pages: Normal

b.      Paper: 8.5” x 11”

c.       Layout: Section start: New page, Headers and Footers: everything unchecked, both set at .5”, Vertical alignment: Top

3.       Proofing, or Word Options (in 2010 this is under File>Options)

a.       Proofing: This is something of a personal thing. Whatever auto corrections you want Word to make as you type can be set here.

b.      Save: You can set your Auto-Recovery here. I suggest it be set for no longer than 10 minutes. 10 minutes of work lost is better than 10 hours of work lost.

c.       Advanced: Again, most of this is personal preference. The exception is for Cut, Copy, and Paste. On this, I suggest you change Pasting between documents and Pasting from other programs to: Merge Formatting. That way you don’t have to reformat something you’ve copied & pasted from somewhere else to match your formatting.

d.      This is also where you can customize your ribbon and toolbar.

4.       Specialized formatting: If you have somewhere within your text a letter, or note that you’re showing, you’ll want to italicize it, then highlight the specific paragraph and format it as follows:

a.       Paragraph: Indents and spacing: Indentation: Set Left and Right the same, usually 1” works well

If you have a dream sequence, you should italicize it, but keep the paragraph boundaries the same as the rest of your text.

5.       Extras: Make sure you’ve added all of your extras (which should probably be done when the manuscript is completed and not before):

a.       Facing title page: this is where you can list previous works. If you have no previous works, you can omit this and just begin with the title page

b.      Title page: Full title and author’s name. If you are self-publishing, and have created a “publishing company” you can list that at the bottom of the page. The title should be centered horizontally. No punctuation on this page, unless it’s a specific part of the title, or your name (example: M.D.).

c.       Copyright page: This is an important page! You don’t have to go out and apply for a specific copyright. Books are considered the intellectual copyrighted property of the author and/or publisher without any official copyright. Make sure you use the © symbol, year, and your name. Example ©2011 Cindy C Bennett.  You also put your ISBN on this page. Your ISBN will be different for a paper book and an ebook, so you will want to just put the letters for now, and add the numbers later as your format for each type of book. Any credits for the cover design or cover photos belong here.  Most books will also use this page for “Printed in the United States” or wherever you are having it printed.

d.      Dedication page: This is where you dedicate your book to the nice person who wrote a blog teaching you how to format!  :o)  All right, fine, go ahead and dedicate it to someone you love/admire/are grateful to.

e.      Contents page: This is completely optional, and will depend on whether you want it in your book, or not

f.        Preface or acknowledgements: If you want a preface, it goes here. You would then want to put your (optional) acknowledgments page at the end. If you have no preface, you can choose to put an acknowledgments page here, or at the end. Or nowhere, if you don’t want one.

6.       ¶ You’ve turned this little guy on, right? If not, do it now. You page will suddenly be filled with all kinds of strange marks. This is good; it means you’ve done it right. Now, you need to go through your entire manuscript looking for inconsistencies in your formatting if you’ve already finished the manuscript, or are even just a few pages in.

a.       The beginning of each paragraph should have this exact same mark ¶ (called a pilcrow, if you care). It should never have an arrow. An arrow is caused when you’ve returned/entered, then manually hit tab rather than having your document formatted to automatically tab for you. If there is an arrow, you haven’t set up your formatting correctly. Set up your Indents and Spacing (below) then back space all those arrows out. A note: if you are using numbering or bullets for something, it will show an arrow between the letter/number/symbol and your text. That’s the way it should be for that.

b.      There should be no more than ONE dot between each word. It looks like this:  · sort of a period hanging mid-air. If there is anywhere you have two or more, remove those spaces. Former college student who was taught to put two spaces between sentences?  Change those habits now! It looks bad in a book to have more than one space between words and/or sentences.

c.       The end of each chapter should have no more than 8 hard returns. This will show as 8 of the pilcrow (or paragraph) marks. DO NOT put in page breaks, section breaks, or anything else at this point. If you can’t stand not having the page breaks, that’s fine. Just know you’ll have to go back and undo them all when you are formatting for ebooks, and change them to section breaks when formatting for a paper book.

d.      Keep this feature turned on as you are doing specific formatting as well.

So now you have your basic formatting. And that truly is basic formatting. Save** your document then make a copy of it (you’ll have to go to your documents folder for this step). The basic formatting is going to be the preferred formatting of most agents and publishers. However, if you are going to submit, read their specific formatting requirements first then format your copy accordingly. Once this is complete, you’re ready for specific formatting.

**A note on saving: Give your doc a name at the very beginning, when you first start, and train yourself to hit CTRL+S as often as possible, preferably every 10 minutes. Save yourself the heartache of a crash or shutdown that loses your manuscript!

Have a happy week, and a joyous formatting experience!

On Writing and Publishing: A Writer Shares Her Limited Knowledge! Part II

Writing: Where Ideas Come From

Who has what it takes to be a writer? My answer to this is, well, anyone. Anyone who has a passion for storytelling, reading, imagining scenarios. Anyone who has the patience to sit in front of the computer, typewriter (yes, I know, what is a typewriter?), or a blank sheet of paper with a pen for an extreme extended period of time. This is usually anywhere from 90 days to a couple of years. 90 days would be a super-fast manuscript, and could probably only be done if you have hours per day to spend on your endeavor. Then, once you’ve finished putting your wonderful, fascinating, unbelievable story down, you have to walk away.

What?

Yup, I said walk away. For at least a couple of weeks, minimum. Why? Because what you’ve put down might have sounded fantastic as you were writing it, but when you go back, you might laugh out loud at what you’ve written. Or you might be pleasantly surprised, sometimes even stunned at what you’ve managed to let leak out of your brain. Those are the best times!

So, now you’ve typed and/or written 75,000+ words. You’re a writer, right? Yup, again. Of course you are; you’ve written something. Are you an author, though? Hmm…that’s a matter of perspective, I suppose. I did not consider myself an author until I had published, sold, and had a few solid reviews on my first book before I felt like an author. I’m sure it’s different for every writer, as to when they feel comfortable with the title of “author”. For me, my reluctance was because it was something I had long dreamed about, longed for, desired. But, out of fear, never pursued. Now, I don’t know why I waited so long!

Anyone who’s ever sat before a blank piece of paper, or a blank computer screen, can understand fully the term “writers block”. We know what we want to fill the whiteness with; it’s the actual execution that stymies us. However, once your pens starts moving, or your fingers start typing, a sort of magic happens. Or at least, it should.

If you want your reader to be transported by your words, then you need to be as well. It doesn’t happen 100% of the time, of course. Well, okay, maybe for some writers, those who write amazing books that pull a reader in and hold them captive until the last page, whereupon the reader will be moved, touched, provoked…at the minimum, upset that the book has ended, that there are no pages to follow. We all wish we could write those, but alas, there are writers few and far between with that kind of immense talent.

Instead, we sit down with an idea, and hope to translate it into something at least vaguely interesting to a few people willing to read our words. But where do those ideas come from?

I can only speak for myself, of course. I’d love to hear from any of you as to where you’re ideas come from. Some of these ideas you can incorporate, some just come from within the strange depths of my crazy brain.

Dreams: It seems cliché, I know, but I honestly do dream up some of my ideas—literally. I can’t say what causes the dreams, but when I wake, if I can remember it, I have an inkling for a story.

Songs: Have you ever listened to a song and heard just a line, even as little as a phrase, and an idea for a story sprouted from there? Maybe it was even just a bar of notes, without any words, that inspired you? If so, write it down. You may not have the whole thing yet, but if you write it down, let it . . . fester, so to speak, you’ll eventually have an idea . . . or not.

Life: I spend a lot of time paying attention. The world is full of stories. You know the phrase, truth is stranger than fiction? It’s true. It’s also far more interesting. Stories from friends, strangers, relatives, even TV shows are great jumping off places. For example, in Geek Girl, I needed a backstory for Jen. One day I was watching a TV show about teens in prison (which broke my heart, by the way) and a boy was telling his childhood story. With a few minor adjustments, voilà, I had her backstory. I’m sadly addicted to true-stories on TV, which always makes me wonder what happened in a person’s life to get them to that point, and from there, I wonder, what if they’d taken a different path, made different decisions? And many times from those thoughts, I have a story. (You need to be careful here to make sure you’re making the story your own, changing it to be completely fiction, so that you aren’t treading on someone’s toes.)

Fantasy: I’ve always entertained myself by making up stories in my head. This is a great way to pass time, particularly if you’re bored. Even if you’re not—when I’m on my Harley, it’s my favorite activity to do, and that’s in the middle of having the time of my life! Usually fantasies star yourself. That doesn’t mean that you can’t later take the same idea you just had and transform it into a fictional story using fictional characters. Again, it’s just a jumping off point.

What You Know: This comes in handy best when dealing with non-fiction, but also works for fiction. Had an experience at some point that made a deep impression on you? Put it in your story. In Heart on a Chain there’s a small scene where Kate enters middle school, and is shut out by her friends, destroying any last vestiges of self-esteem she had. Guess what? That happened to me. It was very painful, and so it was a good scene to show Kate’s final push over the edge. Of course, my life was nothing like hers, I found new friends. But it made an impression. So I put it in. Anything you know, that you’ve dealt with, places you’ve lived, people you know, difficulties you’ve survived through—those are all worthy of being used in your books.

What If?:  This is The Big One. All stories begin with, “What if . . .” So once you have an inkling of an idea, just decide what the “what if” is that you want to answer, and you’ve got the conflict of your story.

Those are just a few ideas of where to look for a story to tell. Now comes the fun part—the actual writing. And it should be fun. Like I said earlier, if you aren’t enjoying writing it, it’s doubtful anyone will enjoy reading it. But if you have a passion for writing, I strongly encourage you to get out there and share it with the world. Put it down electronically or on paper, however you prefer, and then fine tune it.

Oh, ugh, I just reminded myself: You have to fine tune it! (*groans*) That’s the un-fun part. But that un-fun part leads to the best part: Becoming a Published Author!

I’m getting ahead of myself here. Those are subjects for later posts. So for now, don’t worry about the rest. Just sit down and write. And then write some more. When you’ve hit the magic mark of 75,000 or 100,000 or 150,000 words (or however many you need), and you feel that your story is complete and has come full circle, give yourself a pat on the back, treat yourself to some ice cream, walk away from your manuscript for a couple of weeks, then re-read it. If you feel like it’s still good, then you have a potential book. Yay!

Next blog, we’ll get into the un-fun. In the meantime, I’d like to hear from you: where do you get your ideas from? Please feel free to leave comments about this, or anything else you’d like to comment about.

Have a happy week! :o)