The way we were – self-publishing 2005 and now

Look what we found in the attic.

It’s a self-publishing supplement from the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain in New Year 2005.

When this was circulated, I was ghostwriting for Big Six publishers (when they were a Big Six) and hoping to get an agent for my own novel. My writer friends were on the same trajectory.

A book deal was the way – the only way – to get your work into the world. For posterity, for a career.

Self-publishing was a mysterious parallel universe. A few authors had used it to start good careers, but mainly because they got lucky. Maybe with influential reviewers. Maybe an agent bought a copy, as if they didn’t already have enough to read. If you didn’t get that luck, what happened? We never knew.

I think I had an early glimpse of a self-published book that didn’t get lucky. Our local second-hand bookshop had multiple copies of a mysterious grey novel that looked like no novel I’d ever seen before. It had a blank cover with only a title, which was curly, heavily shadowed and unreadable. I now realise it must have been an indie book that someone was desperate to get rid of, but at the time I was intrigued by its oddness. What was it trying to be? There were at least 20 copies and somehow this quantity, and the austere appearance, made the novel look like it knew something I didn’t. I believed that treasure came in odd disguises and I tried reading the first page. Oh dear, the prose was a droning info-dump and impossible to understand. But every time I went into the shop, those copies were still there, grey slabs of print that commanded a look because they were so wrong. Several times, I opened a copy and tried to like it. I wanted it to be a work of wonder and meaning. It wasn’t.

That seemed a shame. And the book seemed to embody so many of the things that could – and still can – go wrong with self-publishing. The general message at the time was: don’t do it.

Don’t do it. No, do

So when I found this self-publishing guide from 2005, I was curious. How did they make the case?

In the introduction, Tom Green notes how the publishing landscape has changed. It sounds familiar: ‘More people are chasing less space on the lists of traditional publishers and agents. Even established writers find themselves dropped without warning if they are not the flavour of the month and don’t have the required celebrity status to get coverage in the media.’

That could be today. But the reasons to self-publish in 2005 weren’t all negative. Tom also points out two clear advantages – control over the product, and control over other rights. Today, those are massive cornerstones of independent publishing – we decide how the book will be, we get maximum value out of other forms such as audiobooks, translations etc.

And with those freedoms came a warning. Again, a familiar one – the great potential to make mistakes. Not just mistakes of quality, like our friend with the unedited, mispresented grey doorstop, but financial mistakes. Then, as now, writers had to avoid overpriced services of dubious value, and contracts that strip you of your rights.

If only they knew

As I read, I thought how they couldn’t have known how much easier their path was about to become. Just a few years later, much of the expense and difficulty of self-publishing was swept away by two developments – ebooks and the miracle of the online world.

First, ebooks. All self-publishing in 2005 was print. It wasn’t that ebooks hadn’t been invented – Project Gutenberg made the first one in 1971 – but we hadn’t yet got devices for reading them comfortably. Who wants to read a book on a desktop or laptop?

And second, our online infrastructure – we hadn’t yet got the internet plumbing that allows us to sell books worldwide, via huge online stores that might be on a different landmass from the country we write in. That same internet plumbing also brought massive opportunities to share our learning so we can self-publish well.

So in 2005, books were paper chunks. Moreover, you had to guess how many to make (in the hundreds), then store and ship them or pay someone for that. Print on demand (POD) did exist, but not in the sense we know it. Although it was possible to produce one copy at a time, POD was more normally used by trade publishers for short runs of backlist titles.

Let us give hearty thanks for our highly evolved POD and ebook sales systems. Whenever I teach a course in self-publishing (yes, I do that), it’s the first thing I explain.

One interesting attitude in 2005 is that self-publishing was seen as a stepping stone. Joanna Anthony, who at the time was marketing director of hybrid publisher Pen Press, writes: ‘I believe there will be a time when all unknown authors self-publish to test the market and mainstream publishers will pick them up once they have proved they have a market’. Although that does happen now, many self-publishers are happy to stay indie.

Small world

So self-publishers of the 2020s can reach readers more easily, and with good-looking books – but that freedom has come at a price. The books world of 2005 was much, much smaller. Thousands of titles were published in the UK each month (about 8,000 a month according to the wholesaler Gardners), and that might sound like a lot, but they went out of print. Now, nothing goes out of print, and there are more new releases than ever because it’s easy. Soon we’ll have more books than there are atoms in the sea. Authors have powerful tools to market and promote their books, but it’s competitive and expensive – for some of us, prohibitively so.   

In the simpler days of 2005, marketing was still a big issue, and authors were advised they needed to take it as seriously as the writing.  

But they were also reminded that it could be an extension of their natural talents. Dick Sharples had a lot of cheeky fun with his book, A Year In Muswell Hill. It was a spoof of Peter Mayle’s A Year In Provence, penned under the name Pierre LaPoste. As Dick built awareness for the book, he says, ‘angry letters by apprehensive local residents began appearing in the local press demanding that the book be banned, especially as LaPoste had promised his book would “do for Muswell Hill what Peter Mayle did for Provence”, in other words, bugger it up.’ The national papers got wind of the story (nice one, Dick), and turned up in Muswell Hill, hoping to interview LaPoste. Dick pretended LaPoste had fled to Provence and the book sold out several print runs.  

As I read the guide’s advice on marketing and other services, I reflected how lucky we are now. Authors of the 2020s can get advice and protection from several high-profile organisations – the Alliance of Independent Authors and Victoria Strauss’s site Writer Beware.

I turned the page and there was Victoria Strauss herself, sharing her knowledge and experience, helping writers avoid bad choices, already a strong voice to make the indie world a better place.

There were many surprises in this little publication, but that was the nicest.

There’s a lot more about writing in my Nail Your Novel books – find them here. If you’re curious about my own work, find novels here and my travel memoir here. And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, here’s my latest newsletter. You can subscribe to future updates here.

Kind ways to deal with damaged POD books – guest post at Alliance of Independent Authors

Any kind of merchant has to deal with damaged stock from time to time, but authors are usually shielded from this inevitable part of bookish life. Unless you self-publish, in which case you might be faced with this.

No, that wasn’t how the books arrived. They came to me slightly damaged, but in order to claim replacements, I … (deep breath) …. had to rip the covers off!

I confessed my distress on Facebook, and soon a crowd of authors were offering commiserations and creative uses for the dead books, so Debbie Young of the Alliance of Independent Authors asked me to write a proper post on the subject. Do come over, but be warned, it’s not for persons of a sensitive disposition. For instance, my English teacher from school, who would hyperventilate if she saw a crease in a book’s spine.

Print options and free books: two of my own rules I’m breaking this year…

In my last post I talked about publishing options in a changing world. Well, this year I’m reversing a couple of my own fervently held policies. So today I confess. (I’m an indie. I reserve the right to change my mind.)

Change #1 Putting print editions on IngramSpark

If you’re self-publishing, one of the main debates is which print on demand company to use. CreateSpace is free and has the most seamless interface with Amazon, which is where you’ll get the bulk of your sales because most of your marketing is online. But Ingram Spark has better distribution links with other outlets. And bookshops balk at ordering CreateSpace titles because the delivery time is slow and returns aren’t possible. So current wisdom is to buy ISBNs, print for Amazon only on CreateSpace, and print for other needs on Ingram Spark. (A lot more about this here. )

Why I didn’t put my books on IngramSpark

The Ingram Spark route isn’t free. You have to buy ISBNs (if you haven’t already). You also pay a fee for each book you set up. Revisions cost you more again. (However, if you’re a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors you get a discount and the revisions fee is waived. ) You’ll also have to modify the book’s print files. (The paper is thinner than CS, so your cover’s spine will be narrower. You might also need to tweak the title page with a new ISBN. None of this is difficult, but you might need expert intervention.)

The cost in itself isn’t that offputting – and it’s certainly not much compared with the cost of the book’s production. But it’s dumb to spend any time or £££s unless you’ll see a return – and that’s what made me dubious.

Although my book would be more easily available, how would it get seen? Just putting it in a catalogue won’t get it noticed by bookshop buyers. That’s like a tree falling over in a wood with no one to hear it. Shops don’t know about a book unless reps visit or the press makes hoopla. The bookshops I’ve been successful in are the ones I visit personally. All the rest of my marketing is online, and the sales funnel to Amazon. So, while I acknowledge that Ingram Spark offers better infrastructure, it’s for a market where I’m invisible.

What changed my mind

At the end of last year, I read this piece in The Bookseller. Ingram have acquired a network called Aer.io, which allows users to build storefronts and add ‘buy’ buttons for books in the Ingram catalogue.

Over the past few years, I’ve seen a lot of online bookselling portals, but usually you have to upload your book details yourself (or a publisher does it). Then, within a year, the venture goes the way of most start-ups, and vanishes. But Aer.io has a catalogue already – all the books already on Ingram, including IngramSpark. So every time anyone builds a bookstore with Aer.io, a reader could amble in from the internet and they could order my books. (BTW, I was directed to the Aer.io piece by the Hot Sheet, a publishing industry newsletter for authors from Jane Friedman and Porter Anderson.) Holy distribution, Batman! I’m making my Ingram editions as we speak.

Change #2 – a free book!

As you know, I have strong opinions about free books. Here they are.

Why I didn’t

See above. I didn’t think a free book would do much for me. My catalogue isn’t big enough to give a book away – although I have five titles, they’re for two distinct audiences. I can’t dash off a new one quickly – either the Nail Your Novels or a piece of fiction.

What changed my mind

It started with an email. Just before Christmas I was contacted by Goodriter, a daily deals site for everything authorly – books, courses, services for self-publishing, book marketing, copywriting, blogging, tutoring etc. It’s like Bookbub, but exclusively for writers (give or take a ‘w’). Goodriter invited me to contribute to a bundle of writer freebies.

I could see it was a great way to meet more readers, but did I want to give away a ‘proper’ book? Then I suddenly realised I could make an ebook shortie about characters as an introduction to my Nail Your Novels, which would be useful in its own right and an aide-memoir if you’ve read the big book. Anyway .. voila.

Once I’d sent the freebie to the giveaway, I had coffee with another author friend, who pointed out something I’d never realised about free books. They’re now such an established part of reading life that they find their way into retailers’ recommendation algorithms all by themselves, and get you visibility on lists where you wouldn’t otherwise be seen. ‘Put that book on Amazon, Smashwords et al,’ she said. As I was already half-way there, I did.

I admit I still have misgivings. I deplore the trend that pressures authors to give away their work. But the acid test is whether it pays me back in sales. That won’t become apparent for many months and I shall report. Watch this space.

And grab that free book before I change my mind.

Thanks for the U-turn photo Martin Howard

Over to you. Are you breaking any of your own rules this year? We are among friends. Come and tell me.

Before you spend money on publishing services, read this

As indies get ever more professional, an entire service industry is springing up to offer us services for every occasion. At this year’s London Book Fair, the Authors’ Lounge was heaving with suppliers, and no shortage of willing customers. While it’s great to have access to these, authors are ripe for rip-off.

This week David Gaughran highlighted unscrupulous companies that charge exorbitant prices, or hoodwink authors into paying for services that could be obtained for very little or no cost.

So this post is a self-publishing 101; a catch-up for those who are wondering what they need to spend money on. In some cases, knowledge is the answer; all books, authors and genres are different, and one supplier does not fit all.

It’s virtually impossible to publish a book without any expenditure, but we can make sure we use our budgets wisely – and stop writers filling the pockets of unscrupulous suppliers who are getting rich on our dreams.

Publisher accounts

Some authors don’t know they can create their own user accounts on Smashwords, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kobo and CreateSpace. Or how simple it is – basically, no more difficult than entering your details in a mail-order website.

Some companies offer to upload your books through their account, but this is unnecessary. Even if you don’t make the files yourself, you can still upload them. If your service company went out of business, what would happen to your book listings? Moreover, if a third party controls your access to these publishing platforms, it’s harder to adjust your book’s appearance and description – which as you’ll see is essential to successful self-publishing.

Ebook formatting

This week, as you may have gathered, I published the follow-up to Nail Your Novel. I was rusty with the e-platforms, but it didn’t take long to get reacquainted.

Basic ebook formatting is dead simple if you can use Word on an everyday average level. You don’t need to be a wizard, but you do have to be meticulous. The best instructions are at the Smashwords Style Guide, a free book with diagrams and reassuringly clear instructions. There are a couple of other useful links in this post I wrote 2 years ago when I first ventured onto Kindle. I reread them when I uploaded my new book last week and it all went smoothly.

Indeed, if you have Scrivener, it will format ebooks for you.

Print book interiors

Print books are more tricky than ebooks, and amateur ones can look dreadful. But there are various tools to help beginners do a good job for very little money.

I recommend you read Catherine Ryan Howard’s book Self-Printed, which I used the first time I ventured onto CreateSpace and I still keep to hand to remind myself how to set up a book. She also has a ton of other useful guidance on book formatting.

How do you make the interior? CreateSpace provides Word templates, if you need help (although I make my books in a design program and upload a PDF).  CS templates are pretty plain, and Word isn’t ideal for interior formatting, but it’s fine for novels, which require hardly any design. In any case, a neat finish isn’t created by fancy typesetting, it’s from consistency and readability – and you can find a post I wrote on that here.

If you want a slicker look for little money, try Joel Friedlander’s book design templates for use in Word.   Joel has created interiors that you graft your text into – which is exactly what happens when books are designed in mainstream publishers (although they don’t use Word).

Which print-on-demand company should you use? There are two main options: Lightning Source and CreateSpace. LS isn’t suitable for beginners. It costs to start a book project and proofs are expensive. CS, though, is free to set up and holds your hand. Here’s a post I wrote comparing the two for novice publishers.

Covers

A great cover is money well spent. But you need to take creative control because you could end up with something unsuitable, horrible, or even illegal if the designer downloaded images from Google instead of sourcing them legitimately. This happens.

When you hire a cover designer, you need to know how to choose them and how to know when the job has been done properly. Identify your genre, familiarise yourself with its most successful covers, then you’ll know how to judge which designer is right for your book. Here’s a post I wrote recently on getting a cover designed.

Marketing

At LBF I talked to a publicity company to find out how they’d publicise a literary novel. They hadn’t tackled literary fiction before, and seemed unwilling to admit it until I pressed them hard. If I’d been a newbie, they’d have been selling me expensive packages that were unsuitable for my book. (I wasn’t looking to buy anyway; I was asking out of curiosity.)

With marketing, learn as much as you can before you hire publicists or buy advertising. I’ve learned a lot from Joanna Penn’s blog, and this is where I’d send you too.

Not all marketing has to cost money. Book descriptions, price point, tagging, titling and categorisation will all affect whether your book can be found by its ideal readers and you can experiment and tweak ad infinitum. (Remember I said you don’t want to have to ask a third party whenever you adjust your book’s back end? This is a good reason why.)  You might find you know more about marketing than you realise, as I did when I was asked to write this guest post.

Two more books I’m going to recommend:

• Choosing a Self-Publishing Service by the Alliance of Independent Authors
•  and Let’s Get Digital by David Gaughran

psst… Editorial services

First, of course, you need a book that’s fit to be published. In a publisher, there would be a team of people handling different editing stages:

• developmental (the big picture: book structure, characters, narrative voice, plot etc)
• copyediting (niggly details like plot consistency, names, timelines)
• proofing (looking for typos and other mistakes)

It’s worth hiring expertise to help you with these and it’s unlikely that you can do it cheap. But you can choose wisely: here’s my post on issues to be aware of.

Thanks for the pic Horia Varlan

What other warnings and tips would you add to my self-publishing 101?

Nail Your Novel: Writing Characters Who’ll Keep Readers Captivated

Alive and sparking now on all ebook formats

How to prepare your Kindle text for a print edition – Part 2: chapter head styles and cleaning up the text

Yesterday I discussed how to choose the size of your book and the typeface. Today, we finish your book’s interior  

Fancy stuff like chapter heads

You can leave the chapter title in the same font as your body copy, or you might want something eye catching to draw the reader to the first line – maybe a motif or a drop capital. (Designing this deserves whole posts by itself; there are trillions of ways to do it, but the short answer is to find a book you like the look of in a similar genre and copy that). You might want a different font (not too fancy, please). I used Copperplate Goth BT.

Unless you have a fantastically good artistic reason, don’t use more than one heading font besides your body copy. Books look better if typefaces are inconspicuous and style is uniform. A little contrast is allowable in chapter headings, but if you have more than two typefaces it looks like it was made by someone under a responsible age.

Chapter titles don’t usually begin at the very top of the page. You’ll want to add line spaces, both above the chapter heading and afterwards, before the actual text starts. Experiment until you find an arrangement you like. Then write down exactly what it is – eg 3 carriage returns above and 2 below. You need to do it exactly the same in all the chapters. Properly typeset books are consistent about everything.

Similarly between sections that aren’t chapter breaks you’ll need a gap. How many lines do you want them to be? Do you want a little motif in the middle to delineate them? What about the paragraphs? Do you want them full out after a section break? Full out (ie not indented) is the usual option but I have seen indents work nicely as well. Make your decision, write it down – and do the same thing every time.

Then go through the manuscript and put them in.

If you formatted for Kindle you probably put page breaks in for chapter endings. If you formatted for other strains of epub you probably didn’t use page breaks. Go and put page breaks in for chapter endings now. If you try to split the book with carriage returns instead of page breaks, the next stage will do your head in. And make you resort to far more flabbergasted language.

Blank pages and front matter

Use page breaks to make blank pages too. And strip off the folio on blank pages if your program allows, or change the text colour to white so it doesn’t print.

Where do you want blank pages? Certain parts of your book must begin on right-hand pages, so you might have to put blanks in to achieve this – especially at the front.

Before you get to the text proper you need a few bits of set-up copy, known as front matter. Look in any published book and you’ll see. Usually these are:

• half title (right-hand page) – where you can put biographical info too
• copyright notice and ISBN etc (left-hand page)
• full title (right-hand)
• either blank or acknowledgements (left-hand page)
• start of book (right-hand page) or part 1/section 1 title page (right-hand page, then blank, then text proper on right-hand page)

Widows, orphans – the mysterious faffing I was leaving until last

Now you have the biggest, dreariest task of all. You have to look for bad breaks at the tops of pages – widows, orphans and stumps.

Widows and orphans are short lines in places you don’t want them – at the very bottom of a page or the very top. Stumps are words broken by a hyphen so that the first half of the word is on one page and the second half is on the next. All these can look ugly, although sometimes you can get away with one if there’s enough text on the rest of the page – it’s very much a matter of personal taste what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

Get this line back or make it longer…

… but this is okay

All on their own… take these lines back or push a few more over…

… like this

You also have to look for section breaks in awkward places. If you have a section break, you want more than one line below it or it looks weird. And you don’t want a page with just 1 or 2 lines hanging in mid air and then the chapter end.

NB – most word processing programs have auto settings to get rid of these pesky widows and orphans. Turn it off. It results in short pages, which in a text-heavy book like a novel looks dreadful. Yes, you have to do this bit by hand.

How?

NOT by squeezing the fonts together – that looks awful. NOT by sneakily changing the point size or the leading – it shows. You have to alter the text itself.

Remember when I said this isn’t about the text any more, it’s about how it looks? That’s what I mean.

Close up paragraphs, make new ones, cut out extraneous words to pull a line back, add a few to push one over. If you have sub-headings (weird in novels but de rigeur in non-fiction) put one in or take one out. If there’s no scope to edit on the page you’re on, go back a page and see if you can do it there. Sometimes you may have to go back a few. And keep checking the results.

This is the drudge. You have to do this for every single page. It’s fiddly. And this is why you want to have established all your other design decisions before you get here. Because you don’t want to have to do it all over again. And this is why you need to separate your chapters with page breaks, so that any change you make is confined to just a few pages. If you use carriage returns instead of page breaks, every change you make will affect the rest of the entire book.

You might wonder how you spot all these things. I do it automatically because I’ve done it for years. I can read the text and see all these things at the same time. (Hell, I scan for them when I’m reading other people’s books.) I can adjust the text so that it’s true to what I want to say and also looks typographically acceptable. In fact, because I knew I’d have to do this, I made my last major edits of My Memories of a Future Life in PagePlus so that the text would be identical to the Kindle version.

If you’re not practised at this it’s best to do several passes through the book, looking for one problem each time, until you get your eye in. And this exhaustive level of nit-picking might be one of the reasons you decide to hand this part of the project over to someone who can do it much faster than you can, and more thoroughly.

Once each of your pages looks typographically beautiful, proof-read it one last time, remembering to check that your chapter breaks are consistent – and your text is ready to go.

If you have a Kindle book you’ll have a front cover but you won’t yet have a back one. And you’ve probably got quite enough to do for now – so I’ll tell you how I designed mine in a future post.

Have you released one of your books in print form? Did you do the production yourself? If you have any tips to add or nightmares to share, I’d love to hear them!

HELP IS AT HAND… If reading all this has given you an intolerable migraine, I can format your book for you! Email me on RozMorrisWriter at gmail dotcom.

My Memories of a Future Life: episodes 1 and 2 available now. Episode 3 on 12th September. Print edition end September. Do you like podcasts? You can listen to or download, free, the first 4 chapters

How to prepare your Kindle text for a print edition – Part 1: book size and typeface

While making an ebook is pretty straightforward, putting it into print is a pain. In traditional publishing houses, it’s an entire department’s job – because there’s a lot of invisible fiddling you need to do. (It used to be my job too, which is why I know.)

But it is possible to do it well, given the right instructions. I’ll walk you through what I did to get the text of My Memories of a Future Life ready for print. Be prepared – this will get pathologically nitpicky. And this stage is not about how the text reads – it’s about how it looks. Yes, to writers that’s the tail wagging the dog. Get over it now.

It’s quite a big job so I’ll split it in two posts. Today: choosing the size of the book and the typeface.

What size do you want the book to be?

Choose this first, because that governs how much you get on a page. Nail Your Novel is a short book at 40,000 words, and the first time I put it out was at 6×9. That made it look flimsy, so when I redesigned the interior I sized it down to 5×8 where the thickness and size feel just right.

My Memories of a Future Life, on the other hand, is a whopping 103,000 words. It would be rather chunky at 5×8 and expensive to produce because of the weight – which means I would have had to charge a lot more and everyone would think I was being greedy. Many literary novels are now being produced in 6×9 size, or even bigger – so it fits nicely with the genre.

If you use CreateSpace you can download a Word template for the interior. It sets up page sizes and margins so that everything looks right and you can do your fiddling in Word. Catherine Ryan Howard’s book Self-Printed has a detailed section on how to do this. There are other POD companies besides CreateSpace, but they’re not as easy to use. I used CreateSpace but with a design program, PagePlus, because it’s what I do my covers in and because my version of Word doesn’t make PDFs. (For CreateSpace and Lulu you submit your book on a PDF.)

PagePlus sets automatic margins as well, but the default ones are too narrow so I customise them. If you’re using anything other than CreateSpace’s template I suggest you check your margins too. They may have been set up for leaflets, not paperback books.

Before you finalise your margins, whack some dummy text onto the page, print it out and put it over an existing book of the same size to check it looks okay.

Important: get your margins right now. If you change them later you’ll have to redo a lot of tedious checking.

Text

When you formatted the Kindle or ebook edition you probably established a style for the book…. didn’t you? You’re consistent about when you use single or double quotes, proper em dashes and so on? You checked you had curly quotes and not ticks, including on the apostrophes? You’ve never thought about it? Go and fix them now. They’ll make your book look a lot more professional.

Typeface

Choose this next. And make your decision final. Every typeface is a slightly different width, even if it’s the same height.

Don’t use Times, it makes a book page look like a business proposal.

Obviously don’t use any of the fancy curly things that seem to have been supplied to design party invitations.

Get down a few novels in your genre (tastes in typefaces may vary between genres) and choose typefaces that look like them. I used Century Schoolbook BT for My Memories of a Future Life.

Italics: flat feet bad

Check what the font’s italics look like. A lot of computers come with the Roman version of fonts but not the italics, and when you hit the little I icon it slants them. True italics have curled serifs (the little feet), and slanted feet look wrong. If you haven’t got the italic version of your font there are free places to download it – I found my itals here.  Do this now too, for the mysterious tedium-avoidance reason I will explain.

Italics: curly feet good

Typesize and spacing

Most books are set in 12pt, or 11.5pt. Again, compare with other published books in your genre (for instance, literary can afford to go slightly smaller than YA).

If your book is 6×9 the page is quite wide, so you might want a bigger typeface or wider leading (space between the lines) to make it more readable. You can fine-tune this by editing the paragraph style – I set the leading as a percentage of the pointsize. So I had 11.5pt type on a leading that was a niftily precise 14.375pt – or 125% of the point size.

And each typeface has different properties. Some have tall ascenders and descenders (vertical strokes). So if you change from one font at 11.5pt it might look much smaller and less readable than another, so you might need to use it bigger. Before you finalise, print a page out and fold it around a book of the same size to see how it looks in the flesh.

When you’ve decided, run your text in and typeset it.

Part 2 tomorrow: chapter heads… and the really nitpicky stage

Have you released one of your books in print form? Did you do the production yourself? If you have any tips to add for this stage, I’d love to hear them!

HELP IS AT HAND… If reading all this has given you an intolerable migraine, I can format your book for you! Email me on RozMorrisWriter at gmail dotcom.

 My Memories of a Future Life: episodes 1 and 2 available now. Episode 3 on 12th September. Print edition end September. Do you like podcasts? You can listen to or download, free, the first 4 chapters

Self-publish or small publishing house? How to decide

I’ve had two questions recently about small publishers. First, Stacy Green: ‘Do you think self-publishing is a better option for new authors than a small publisher whose focus isn’t solely on the next bestseller?’

Also Tahlia Newland: My agent is waiting for the last 3 big publishers she queried for my book to get back to her. If no one wants it, it’s just small publishers left. I’m thinking I’d rather ebook self-publish than go for a small publisher who hasn’t got a big distribution. I’d be doing most of the publicity anyway, so why not be in a position to keep control and maximise profits? What do you think?

There’s an excellent piece here by Michelle Davidson Argyle on what a publisher should be able to do for you.

What I’ll add to that is my own opinion, from my own experience and that of author friends.

The term ‘small publisher’ can cover anything from the small adventurous imprints started by publishing professionals who have decamped from the major companies – to decidedly less qualified outfits led by people who are chancing their arm at publishing. With varying motives.

Quite clearly, the publishers started by the publishing professionals will have the edge. They have the experience, the expertise and the contacts – and you can weigh up an offer simply by googling them and finding out about their reputation. But some small – and micro-small – publishers may not be as good for you as going it alone.

It all comes down to what they will give you in return for the chunk they take and whether that suits you. And in some cases, you have to be able to assess whether they are properly set up to do the best for your book. Leaving aside the crooks, some of the very tiny publishers do not have enough experience in key areas of the business – but they don’t know how important those are. You’ll see from my horror stories below.

But first, here’s a run-down of the major areas in which a publisher can help you and the self-publishing alternatives.

Editorial help

Editorial help certainly can cost. If you go it alone you can hire a professional to do this, but it’s a hassle to set up and takes time away from your writing.

Art, editing and formatting all come with the package when you sign a publishing deal. Even harder to put a price on is the input of an editor who is in tune with what you want to do. The right editor, who chose your book from their company’s slush pile, has fallen in love with your work – unlike an editor you hire. Any good editor can make you better than you believed possible, but one who had to woo you will probably go the extra mile (provided you agree with their vision). They can guide you to revise and revise, and can reassure you when you’ve done enough. An editor you hire can only carry on as long as your purse can hold out. Having a trusted team around you who are helping you hone your book is terrific and irreplacable.

However, if you’re tied to a publisher you’re tied to their professionals. You may love the words people, but not like their cover artwork at all. And you may not get much clout to refuse cover designs you don’t like.

Moreover, you might be right to distrust those designs. I looked at the list of one small publisher and thought at first they were producing municipal leaflets – all their fiction had ugly covers produced with the one template. Yet they’d managed to get authors to sign up with them.

Distribution

Distribution is where your book is stocked. If you go it alone, you can buy packages for this from the POD companies but if you don’t know what you’re getting how do you know what’s worth paying for? And let’s face it, it’s the least creative part of making books, so who has the patience to become expert in it?

But the grass isn’t necessarily greener in a publishing deal. Especially in companies that were set up solely by editorial or production people. And have never had to handle distribution. And don’t know what they don’t know.

I know of one publisher who produced beautiful copies of an author’s work – superior even to the very good quality that POD can produce – but couldn’t organise how to get the books onto Amazon. Instead they sold them through ebay, where no one buys books, and through an obscure website for that genre. They sent the author to a major fair to showcase his work and couldn’t arrange for copies of the book to be available there so that they could be sold. They got reviews in major magazines and the book still isn’t on Amazon.

Market reach

Another question you have to ask yourself is: what is the publisher’s market reach? Can they market to more readers than you can on your own?

Publishers with rigorous selection procedures will be able to get reviews in places that never touch self-published works – such as the national newspapers. That’s a gate you simply can’t open on your own, no matter what you do.

But a couple of reviews aren’t enough to sell your book. You need other gates opened too – to wider audiences. I know of several small publishers who are well enough connected to be able to get reviews in influential places. But some aren’t at all, regardless of how much they talk about how passionately they love good books. Now that we all build tribes, this aspect of a publishing deal is like royal marriages. Some publishers’ tribes aren’t as big as those of some bloggers!

What rights do they keep?

This is a thorny question indeed and is why it is good to have a reputable agent on your side. I’m not offering legal advice here in any capacity, and every single case is different. So if you are currently studying the fine print of an offer and are worried about it, please get proper help. If you don’t have an agent, a rights lawyer can do it for you – although it will cost you (which is one of the reasons why an agent deserves their percentage).

Traditionally, most books are ‘in print’ for a period and once the run is sold they go ‘out of print’ or are printed again. After a certain period you may get your rights back or your contract may come up for renegotiation. Sometimes you can take the book elsewhere if you want.

Many small publishers launch a book through e-editions and print on demand. Print on demand allows a publisher to print a book only when it is needed, saving on warehousing. If a publisher uses POD, they might have a clause that says they will keep your book in print in perpetuity – and that means you can never take advantage of a better offer from somewhere else with a more prestigious reputation. Of course, to look at it from their point of view, they don’t want you using them as a stepping stone to something better, after they’ve put so much effort in (which they may or may not have, of course). Although any legal agreement can be undone if it’s wrangled enough, that’s messy and expensive.

There might even be clauses governing what you may work on in future and who owns it.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. We mustn’t forget that being published is the most important milestone a writer can imagine. What most of us want to do is write great books and find someone to handle the less interesting jobs and treat us fairly. A publishing offer may indeed do this. More than that, it may give you moral, emotional, practical and technical support that is beyond measure, pulling you out of isolation and into the ‘proper’ world of writing. After all, it’s not just about money; writers have an innate urge to share, communicate and to know our work is cherished.

But any deal you do is also a business deal about your career.  Not all businessmen are nice. Or some may be terribly nice and awfully incompetent.

If you get any offer from a small or micro-publisher, look very carefully at what they will give you for what they will take.

Thank you, Very Urgent Photography, for the picture

Do you have any experience with small and micro-publishers? Share in the comments!

Oh – shameless plug – My Memories of a Future Life launches on August 30!