What do getting published and childbirth have in common? Chemistry in their conception…? The creation of something completely unique…? Or haemorrhoids and a hell of a lot of pain? Read this article to get the low down on the best publishing options available to authors at the moment and where there may be light at the end of the tunnel.
I like to think there is a bit of magic (or at the very least, chemistry!), involved in the conception of both books and babies. And I don’t believe the similarities end there. Writers, like expectant mothers , nurture their creations, developing them into something fully formed and unique. Of course, it’s not all easy. They too have to deal with the sleepless nights, the worry about whether anyone will want to look at it when it comes out, the haemorrhoids. Well, maybe not the haemorrhoids (although writing does involve a lot of sitting down).
This is where the extended metaphor ends. You’d think. There is nothing like breaking of waters, dilating and pelvis-breaking contractions when it comes to getting your book out into the world. Perhaps, you might say, if you are the latest politician to be dishing the dirt in your memoirs, then you can expect there to be a good amount of shouting and swearing as it comes out, but that should be it. However, many new authors will tell you that getting a first, or even second book out into the arms of the smiling reader can be a real slog, a really painful experience…and there won’t be anyone offering you drugs to take the edge off. Of course if you are successful it’s worth it in the end, but the chances of success are not as high as some might think.
Let’s take a look at why it’s so difficult. Essentially you have two choices – try and convince a publisher to take you on (the traditional route) or take the plunge and self –publish. The traditional route is the one recognised as ‘legitimate’ by the industry. On the other hand, Anne Brooke, a successful self-published author, likened admitting to self-publishing to confessing that you’re an alcoholic: “Not done in polite circles”.
The difficulty with the traditional publisher/literary agent route is that they have to see you and your book as ‘marketable’. A publisher branding your book as ‘unmarketable’ isn’t necessarily synonomous with ‘unsellable’. It may be that your book is something a bit outside the safety zone of what publishers know for sure will sell. Eventually, you might find a small publisher who is willing to take a chance, but you may face the risk of a ball-breaking deal, where you only get a tiny fraction of the royalties and that can take a lot of the fun out of it. It’s a bit like having to convince the midwife that little sproglet is destined to be a dotcom billioniaire before she’ll even consider delivery.
So maybe you decide that you will be better off going it alone (I should probably clarify, this is not something I’d recommend with childbirth). If we ignore the stigma attached, writers see the main problems with self-publishing as the following: it’s expensive, you don’t get the same kind of independent feedback to improve on your book and even when it’s printed you still need to promote your book.
Expense?
Well, developments in print-on-demand technology means that at least the first of those problems can be easily addressed. Now, you don’t have to fork out hundreds of pounds up front to produce something respectable. At the moment your best bet is a service like Lulu which allows you to upload your book and sell printed copies of it online. Lulu take a 25% commission from any profit you make from the book but if you sell it through Lulu marketplace then you will be able to make a bit of money, whilst still selling it for a low-ish price i.e. if you sell it for £5.99, you will make £2.21.
Feedback?
You can visit a number of websites and upload your work for free feedback e.g. Youwriteon, Authonomy, Writers Net. Unfortunately, though the premise is good and some of the feedback invaluable, I’m pretty sure these websites weren’t designed by anyone at the cutting edge of the web scene. They are not easy to navigate and are quite limited in functionality, relying mainly on forums and comments with no scope for anything particularly detailed.
Promotion?
Now we run into the third problem. However fantastic your book is, it’s not going to sell itself. Lulu offers you a shop front, but how is anyone going to pick out your little treasure amongst all the others? Writer feedback sites are only generally visited by other writers so you are going to have to promote further afield to find other readers.
At the moment, if you want to generate interest I would advise trawling round all of the book-community websites (Goodreads, Shelfari, LibraryThing) discreetly plugging your book. You can also publish previews of your work on sites such as Goodreads. You may, of course already have a blog too. Brilliant. But how does anyone find that? Again – you will need to visit lots of different websites and other blogs to tell people about it.
Delivering results
I think there are plenty of tools out there that can help you, but they are all limited to one area of functionality. As yet we are still waiting for something which provides the following, all rolled into one:
- easy to use website
- Cheap, self-publishing solutions (both online and as a real book)
- Independent feedback on your work from other writers & readers
- Effective promotional tools
- Easily accessible target audience
So far, this combination still seems to elude me. Although I have heard about a new service called CompletelyNovel.com which looks promising but is not out until later this year. If they can offer all of the above then they are really on to something and writers everywhere will have cause to celebrate. And when you are being interviewed by the Times on the amazing success of your debut book, you can allow yourself a small, self-satisfied smile, safe in the knowledge that you will never have to pay for it to go to University.
