Self-Publication – my experience In the not so distant past the standard route to having a piece of writing published was to do the work, edit, re-write, agonise over the final draft, then begin the marathon thankless task of approaching as publisher.
Literary agent? All well and good if you had one, and that would make life a little easier, but then there was the cut out of your eventual earnings. Please don’t take offence if that is your profession, I am sure that as in the case of dentists, you are absolutely essential to some.
Rejection, rejection, that bane of the author!
You really did need a thick skin to survive the constant stream of rejection slips.
Or in some cases, not so constant – one novel I wrote was with a particular publisher for twelve months, and they had it read twice. Hope springing eternal, I clung on, but sure enough one bright Spring day the parcel was returned with the inevitable comments, which amounted to thanks but no thanks.
Enter the Internet age – I had dabbled in an amateur way with websites in order to keep up with the bright young things who ran the day job.
I was able to convert the novel’s Word document to html pages, added some relevant pictures, and even some sound effects. Thanks to a bit of stolen Java code I even got a graphic interface which emulated pages turning over and the whole magnificent creation was burned on to a self-starting cd-rom.
All well and good – with a bit of home-made promotion the ‘interactive cd-rom’ version of my masterpiece sold about fifty copies through a webpage courtesy of a buy now Paypal button.
At this point one of my relatives in America spotted the work and recommended it to Publish America of Baltimore. They liked it and in 2004 my novel Letter from Poitou appeared in the bookstores as a ‘real’ book. It did not, and will not, make me rich but the biggest thrill I had was seeing a copy on the shelves of the local library.
So I got lucky and my first novel was published. The cd-rom version had served its purpose.
Blogging
Blog sites are now ten a penny. For the uninitiated (if there are any!) a ‘blog’ is trendy short lazy speak for ‘web log’. They started life literally as online diaries, and then got discovered by big business.
How’s that? Why would captains of industry be interested in your Aunt Mabel’s cookie recipe, or what you and your pals got up to at the junior prom, or even a review of your favourite local curry house?
The answer is advertising.
Users generate page views and page views are manna fro heaven to the likes of Google Adsense, Bidvertiser, et al. Even if it’s just your fifty friends and relatives who read it, that’s fifty extra page views you have generated for them.
Companies can use blogs for ‘advertorial’ publications, letting you know the latest development in their field, and along the way pitching to be the best supplier of whatever widget they’re selling.
In both scenarios, personal and business, the holy grail of getting a viewer to click on the advert. More recently there are audio ads, which play whether you want them to or not but that’s a whole separate subject!
Adverts are cleverly targeted according to the text and keywords buried in your site or blog so if you write about a much-enjoyed vacation in Florida, lo and behold you’ll get airlines and travel agents’ ads popping up.
What all this means is that blog sites will offer you ‘FREE’ facilities to publish your experiences, rants, or opinions in the hope you will generate the all-important page views for them.
Some sites like Yuwie and Qassia are breaking the mould by offering to share the advertising revenue one way or another and they are pulling in large numbers of savvy subscribers.
Blogging is a great way to keep the writing muscles exercised, if like the author your time for bigger and more ambitious projects is limited.
Lulu.com
What can you say about lulu.com? For those not familiar with the concept, it seems at first glance to be the to every rejected author’s frustrations.
In principle, you can create you masterpiece on any word processor, and as long as you or someone you know is computer literate enough to save the file as a pdf (portable document format) you can publish and be damned!
The pdf is uploaded from your pc to lulu’s server and it sits there till someone orders one copy or one thousand. The financial arrangement? It’s then printed a t a pre-determined price, say $15, and you sell it by fair means or foul for $20. Simple!
No one takes a risk, least of all a publisher who would normally have gambled on the expense of typesetting, editing, printing, promoting, and distributing several thousand copies to an uncertain audience.
Downside? The author is solely responsible for promoting, marketing, advertising, and publicising: pointing potential readers at the lulu site to order and pay for the masterpiece.
It’s really no skin off lulu’s nose if you only sell six copies to your maiden aunts – you pdf file is merely occupying a tiny space on their vast servers.
Naturally they’d be as pleased as you would be if they had to print and sell thousands but they won’t cry in their beer or give you a hard time if they don’t.
Check it out al www.lulu.com and see if it’s for you. It really suits those with the aptitude and flair for self-promotion. This can be through word of mouth, websites, blogs, forums, postcards – there are many possibilities and many are low tech and inexpensive.
What this means is hat the writer now has choice, and is not at the mercy of a publisher’s jaded opinion. It has been truly said that there is a book in everyone, and God help us, thanks to the likes of lulu.com, they can now come out!
It doesn’t matter how truly dreadful the work may be, democracy has come to publishing!
Equally, an aspiring writer can make sure their work reaches the audience they feel it deserves.
Michael J Eardley is a novelist, ghost writer, and blogger who shares his ideas at www.audleypublications.co.uk
