Tag Archives: Self Publishing

A Forward– at the End

14 Wednesday Jan 2015

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Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

     The Kindle version of our first novel, Across the Doubtful Sea , has just appeared, and the paper version will be available, we believe, in just a couple of days.

     The whole experience, from beginning work in early June to now has been a wonderful one. Neither of us had ever collaborated on such a project before and it was a learning experience every day of our work together. We thought that, in this blog, we would discuss what appear to be the biggest areas of our project: creating together, research, cover design, expenses, making the actual (or virtual) book, and facing the reality that, at least at first, all of this was going to be, in the immortal words of MGM, Ars Gratia Artis. (Cue the lion.)

     First, we had to figure out how we were going to write together. There were models, of course—you could think immediately of people from the musical theatre tradition, from Gilbert and Sullivan to Rodgers and Hammerstein, for example. Or, in terms of novels, you might look to older authors from Erckmann-Chatrian to Nordhoff/Hall, or to all of those fantasy/science fiction couplings you can find on the shelves of your local bookstores.

     In our case, however, we didn’t model ourselves on anyone. Instead, as the plot progressed, one of us might do more of the actual writing, but every line was, ultimately, the work of both: ideas, editing, changes, inspiration—there was nothing the two of us didn’t do at some time and in some way together.

     This changed, however, when it came to the actual self-publishing. One of us, it turns out, has a wonderful (and newly- discovered) talent for the technical side—creating covers, the complex process of formatting the text—and has produced what we feel to be a beautiful and absolutely professional outside for our first book. (Perhaps books can be judged by their covers?) For this later stage of the process, that one of us was completely in charge—and the other looked on, admiringly.

     Research was an important element in our work and one of us kept busy figuring out just what we needed to know and acquiring it, from books on naval warfare to work on Inuit and Polynesian languages and cultures. We’ve discussed some of this in earlier blog postings, but there was much more and it created its own puzzle: this was to be a series of fantasy/adventure novels, after all, so how much would we actually depend upon actual history and how much would we create? As well, we wanted to avoid magic per se, which has always struck us as an easy out—and can look very much like an easy out, too! (JRRT was so right to allow Gandalf to show off his real powers so infrequently.)

     Once we were into a good working routine, we began to consider what our cover should look like. In our research, we had discovered the work of William Hodges, who was the main artist for Captain Cook’s second expedition (1772-1775). Considering elements in the plot (if you read Across, you’ll know at once what we mean), Hodges’ painting, commonly called “The Waterspout”, but actually entitled “A View of Cape Stephens in Cook’s Straits (New Zealand) with Waterspout”, fit perfectly.

 HMS 'Resolution' off Cape Stephens with waterspout, May 1773

     A quick internet search showed us that this painting was not in the public domain, but was the property of the National Maritime Museum, in London. This meant that we had to request permission to use it. We e-mailed the NMM, and with the friendly help of the Image Librarian there, Emma Lefley, we obtained permission.

     There was a contract, however, and a fee, which we gladly paid, but this brings up another step in the process: expenses. As new to all of this as we were, we hadn’t expected that publishing our first book would be free, but it was another step in our education to watch how the expenses could mount. Our internet research cost us nothing, of course. A certain number of the books—mostly on naval warfare—were already in one of our personal libraries, and we could have gradually acquired more through academic and public libraries, although some of the titles we used would have required ILL searching, but we decided to buy some, as we knew that we would need them for the entire series. (And we like building up our libraries anyhow.) The Hodges’ image was our first big expense, however.

     When we began to think about how we might encourage interest in our work, we decided upon a blog and a Facebook page, for starters. The Facebook page was free, but we needed a domain name (that’s “dot.com” )for our blog and there was another expense. (There are lots of other potential expenses with a blog—but we’ll save those for another post.)

     Our last big expense came when we had finished the book and we planning its on-line publication. To sell it effectively, it was necessary to have an ISBN—in fact, we needed two: one for the paper book and a second for the Kindle version. An ISBN is not cheap, but two obviously have been double if Bowker (the chief supplier of ISBNs) wasn’t running a deal: buy a ten-pack and the price for the individual ISBN goes down significantly. So we bought the pack—and have used two already.

     Then, when we felt that we were ready, we went to Create Space and began the process of turning hundreds of pages of manuscript of what we had decided was the final draft into a self-published book—and in two forms. One of us has already written an informative post on our Facebook page (The Doubtful Sea Series) about the challenges in doing this (a euphemism—but that collaborator was very patient—to say the least!—about the various problems which arose), so, perhaps it’s best just to say here to our readers: be prepared for snags!

     And there came at last the moment of truth: how much should we charge for this? And how much would we get in return? (That really was a secondary concern—honest!—but no novelist, at least since Nash turned out The Unfortunate Traveler, has written in the belief that there was no profit motive, at all, no, truly! in the process.) We were torn, of course: a lower price might mean more buyers; a higher price might bring higher profits. Then we hit those buttons at Create Space and received an education in expenses and royalties and realized that we were fortunate to be doing this as an experiment, and not as a new career. This is worth its own post, but, trust us for now when we say that, even if we sell 10,000 copies of Across the Doubtful Sea and even more of its sequels, we will not be banking in the Cayman Islands and thinking about that summer home in New Hampshire. (And now we understand why some of our favorite fantasy/sf novelists are so prolific: volume and more volume is the only way to make enough money to feel that you’re really earning something.)

     We said that every moment was a learning experience, however, and, truly, it has been—and every moment has been beyond price. Like people who teach themselves to repair their own cars, we’ve climbed into the engine of writing and publishing a book and have so much more appreciation not only for the creative process and the editing/publishing process, but for all the talent and heart which each of us has shown the other in producing the first in what we hope to be a long line of novels full of fantasy and adventure.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

It’s Out! On Kindle!

09 Friday Jan 2015

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Dear Readers,

For us, a very short post.  Our first novel, Across the Doubtful Sea, has just appeared on Kindle.  As of early next week, the book form will be available on Amazon.com.  We hope you’ll be interested!  As of next week, we’ll have one of our regular essays here, but we just wanted our readers to know that, after all of this time giving you information about the book, the book will actually be available.

Now–on to the second in the series–Empire of the Isles!

As ever, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

It’s All About Formatting

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

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Dear Readers,

 

In our previous posting, we spoke about delaying—but not belaying—publishing our final manuscript of Across the Doubtful Sea. We have certainly put a considerable amount of work into our writing, as it was, in part, a learning experience: what works in a collaboration, the topic of 18th century south seas exploration, and, for one of us, it was her first novel. As we are nearing the final publication of Across, we’ve reached yet another important step in the process: formatting.

 

Our project is an entirely self-published book, meaning that we are not only the authors, editors, and publicists, but designers and formatters of our own book, as well. If we had decided to publish our book traditionally, the formatting would have been done for us by a professional working for the publishing company. Of course, we could have paid a professional anyway, as there are several publishing services for authors who’d rather “keep their sanity”—and we’re glad that they’re there—but, in our case, we were up for the challenge, and prefer completing the entire book ourselves.

 

An advantage of being authors in this decade is the availability of information through the internet—we are already making use of this by publishing online, and reaching you, our readers, and sharing our research and behind-the-scenes work through our blog, Facebook page, and twitter. As this has been a learning experience for us, the first thing we thought to look to for formatting was how-to book formatting guides. CreateSpace.com, the self-publishing site of Amazon that we will be using to publish Across the Doubtful Sea, has an easy to understand formatting guide for those using their site.

 

This guide has been incredibly helpful in building a structure for our book—in fact, as important as the research, creating the story, and writing the words. Why? The design and formatting of our book are, in a sense, the equivalent of giving a body to a soul. A book such as ours should have a proper format—a proper physical appearance to match what we believe to be a beautiful story. We read a number of articles on book formatting—some seemed to challenge first-time formatters, with titles such as “The Problem with Amateur Book Interiors,” but all gave solid advice as to how to avoid the common less-than-professional look of an independently published book.

 

As with any exterior, we need to have a cover that will both attract attention and provide a small taste of the book. As often as it is said that a book should not be judged by its cover, a good cover makes all the difference in the book’s appearance. For Across the Doubtful Sea, we’ve chosen a somewhat dramatic painting by William Hodges, A View of Cape Stephens in Cook’s Straits New Zealand with Waterspout, 1776, with kind permission of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. The picturesque aesthetics of the painting already set a tone for what the story itself may look and feel like. In a way, the cover for the book is the face, with readable expressions that interpret what is on the inside.

 

Before we began, we took a quick look at formatting styles of books in the 18th century—the time period in which our story takes place—out of curiosity and to see what inspiration could be drawn from there. This also gave us the ability to pay particular attention to how a book is put together, rather than a printed manuscript directly from Microsoft word, as we are used to seeing. There are many styles of formatting, as well—for our book, we chose to include page numbers and the title at the top of each page.

 

Pagination for our book was when we realized how long our book really was, as a finalized, complete novel. Page numbering was the first real step in giving the manuscript physical form, along with the 52 chapters—we foolishly presumed earlier in the process that we might have stopped at 24, then 48, and then… And, as with any book with several chapters, it involves tedious, yet rewarding, work—we’re quite close to completing the project we began during the summer—but 52 chapters can promise that it won’t be a process to be rushed through. Meticulously following advice from the formatting guide, as well as the aforementioned articles about self-publishing, we placed after each chapter, and each chapter title was placed with the desired font and size. Correct margins also had to be set, keeping in mind that the pages would be bound as a book.

 

At this stage—even after reading through and editing the entire manuscript—there was a need for a final check on names and their continuity—after all, we invented or adapted languages for this book. Some things, even at this stage, had either been changed, or still needed to be—which is where we learned an important rule for the future—be careful when changing names! Because of words and terms used by the characters in Across, we’ve included a glossary of terms and names at the beginning. We want to take as much care in making sure that our readers understand words in the languages as we did in creating them.

 

Even now, there is still some work to do—polishing up, working on final font designs, and, then, dear readers, you will have the chance to take a look for yourselves.

 

Thank you, as always, for reading!

 

CD

Delay (not Belay)

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Research, Writing as Collaborators

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Dear Readers,

We had hoped to publish Across the Doubtful Sea at the beginning of December. It didn’t happen. Why?

We had the manuscript . Its 52 chapters had been through two complete drafts and many little subdrafts, along the way, by mid-November.  

If we had been willing to be part of the older book-writing world, we would now have begun the long and painful process of trying to interest a publisher (through an agent, if we could persuade one to take us on, or not, which was much more likely). Because we decided to publish the book ourselves, however, we entered a new and even more complicated universe, in which we were not only authors, but editors, sub-publishers, and publicists, as well. It has provided a wonderful “behind the scenes” education, but it has taken a good deal more time that we had ever imagined.

We were still in the editing stage when we decided to become publicists. That way, we hoped to begin to build an interested audience some months before the appearance of our first book. “So we need a blog,” we said to each other, “and Facebook. And Twitter. To start.”

WordPress provided the basic blog, for free. (Without sounding like we’re receiving a commission, we can also recommend them enthusiastically: very smart, creative people and very easy to deal with.) The basic blog, however, suggested that, if we were serious, and looked upon our work as part of a greater commercial enterprise (our 19th-century author ancestors, like Scott and Dickens, would certainly have said that it should be and that, while art for the sake of art was nice, profits were nice, too), we would need a “domain name”. This would then allow us to list ourselves as http://www.Doubtfulsea.com.   So we bought—or, rather, rented–one, for a year (renewable).

Then, there was the matter of setting up the blog. Fortunately, one of us has electronic art at her highly-talented fingertips and, after a few tries, produced the beautiful site on which you are currently reading us. (Those tries included picking and replacing an appropriate background image, as well as type face—tricky against the image–and formatting.)

After that, we had to figure just how many posts we could do, balancing them against the rest of our lives. We had read about people who began a blog as a way of talking about a project and eventually found that time for the project was gradually completely consumed by the blog, so we decided that we would do one post per week—but—every week, without fail. So far, we’ve managed to do this from the very beginning: this is post #16 and it will even appear during Christmas week. (Readers who currently struggle to maintain blogs have our permission to roll their eyes and say, “Just wait!” under their breaths, if necessary.)

Then there was Facebook, which came a little later. It was easy to set up, as it was more basic, but it came with the same hunger for posts. The point was exposure, of us and our ideas and thoughts and experiences. This meant, we decided, doing what we were already doing with our blog and so we were committed to two posts per week, one for Doubtfulsea.com and the other for Thedoubtfulseaseries@facebook.com.

So that we didn’t repeat ourselves, we decided that the blog would deal specifically with the Doubtful Sea series (including the other two planned volumes, Empire of the Isles and Beyond the Doubtful Sea) and further books in other series (we already have a complete first draft of one and half of another). We would devote our Facebook page to essays and discussions about reading and writing and creating in general—ours and other authors’.

At the same time, we added Twitter. This was—and is—much trickier. The common wisdom was that you should use it to advertise only 20% of the time and devote the rest to catchy sayings, thoughts, and images from our daily lives. So far, we feel that we haven’t used it enough for anything and, once the book is actually published, we’ve decided to do a lot more research in how to employ it more successfully.

Then we thought the manuscript was ready for the next step.

We are fervent book people, and one of us has even written a scholarly article on a 19th-century Irish poet publishing his first book (a disaster and most copies were eventually recycled for trunk linings), but we had no idea of what we were getting ourselves into.

As modern people, we began with internet research, of course. We typed in “self-publishing”, and quickly discovered that there were multitudes of people eager to help us out there, some for a price, others for free, others for free, but with sales pitches thrown in. We quickly learned, however, that there was a longer process ahead of us than we had ever thought.

First, after surveying the field of self-publishing services, we decided that we would use Amazon, in part because of its access to Kindle, in part because of its liberal profit-sharing policy. (A hint: if you are following our path, be sure to do a little extra research, when you do your googling to pick a publisher, and type in “reviews of ________________________” to try to provide a more balanced view than the self-publishing service is willing to provide.)

Advice from various sites had convinced us that we needed to have an ISBN. Why we—or anyone—might need it would require a separate post, but, in brief, it forever identifies the book as yours, as well as providing potential sellers with a convenient stock number, among other reasons. Only one is needed per book, but, if, as in our case, we wanted to use e-book form, as well, then we needed two—and, if we wanted it available on other media, like phones, we would need more. The main supplier, Bowker, has a deal for a pack of 10, and we decided to use that.

On the actual formatting of the book, we’ll refer you to the upcoming post on our Facebook page, which talks in some detail about everything from proofreading and correcting to number of words on the page to placement of the text on the page. We will say something about the cover, however.

We were doing research on Pacific exploration when we happened upon the work of William Hodges, who was the main artist on Captain Cook’s second Pacific voyage. We quickly realized that one of Hodges’ paintings, often called “The Waterspout”, was absolutely perfect. We traced it to the National Maritime Museum in London, inquired, and found out how to rent the image (dealing with the very kind and helpful Emma Lefley, who is the Image Librarian—what a wonderful job!). It had to be formatted to become the front and back covers, of course—but see our Facebook page for that.

We said, at the beginning of this post, that we had had a “behind the scenes” education. And that it had taken more time and energy than we had ever imagined. It would be more accurate, in fact, to say that we are continuing to have that education. We had known about the back-and-forth aspect of author and publisher and its complications from the experience not only of 19th-century authors, but also from the correspondence of Tolkien and Unwin from 1936 on, but there was so much more. A professional publisher would handle renting the cover image, the actual physical creation of the book, and the advertising, all of which is now in our hands. Sometimes, it has seemed like more work than writing that first novel, but it has, on the whole, been a wonderful experience and we’ll be talking more about it in future blogs.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

CD