Posted on 11/16/2014 9:21:04 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
By the time John Kennedy Toole won the Pulitzer Prize for his great American novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, he had been dead for 12 years.
Toole reportedly killed himself in part due to years of frustration over unsuccessful attempts to get his outrageously funny book about New Orleans published. It was only after his mother browbeat author Walker Percy into taking up the cause that Louisiana State University Press published the book in 1980. The following year, it won the Pulitzer for fiction. It went from being considered a cult classic to a must-read: More than 1.5 million copies of Toole’s book have been printed, and it has been translated into 18 languages.
“I think if he were alive today, he might not have been so despondent,” says Mitchell Kaplan, president of Books & Books and co-founder of Miami Book Fair International, which this year will feature a discussion panel on the monopoly of publishing. These are exciting and challenging times for authors both emerging and established. Many of them are blazing their own way, creating a brave new world for authors who will not be denied. The old “publish or perish” mantra may eventually have more application to the existing publishing houses than the authors, who are seeking innovative ways to get their books to readers.
Toole or his mother may have found a way to bring his book to press, were he writing today, Kaplan speculates....
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
I worked through Amazon - they had several levels of editing - i paid for it - wasn’t that bad - then used Create Space [ https://www.createspace.com/ ] to bring my book up and start selling on Amazon - it’s self-published and print on demand without fronting a huge cost.
Yes - I fronted my editing - but it needed a proof to make sure all grammar and style was addressed - worth it to me.
Self publishing bump
I've read a number of books just like this in electronic format. The author tells a good story, but desperately needs an editor. One author keeps using "tenant" when he means "tenet"- and even does it in his day to day blog.
While there could be more published authors on FR, your names came to mind as soon as I saw this thread. (I do apologize to any other authors here whom I’ve missed.)
If your first printing does not sell out, you are done, finished, toast, and you will not get a second bite at the apple. The "real" publisher will use creative "Hollywood accounting" to screw you, I could list the ways but it would be a very long list. And after all that, you don't even own the rights to your own book, to reprint it yourself, if they printed too many and some were remaindered. This happens to 90% of first time authors, BTW.
The bad old publishing model was the same as a mother sea turtle: lay 100s of eggs and hope for a few best sellers. The rest die, so what? Tomorrow, another 100 manuscripts will arrive on their desk. 90% of authors who go this route wind up like 90% of the baby sea turtles, and the "real" publishers could not care less.
Amazon freed us from that horrible (for new authors) model.
When a "real" publisher can beat Amazon's 70% royalty, call me.
“If I were serious about getting a book published, I would self-publish and rake in all the profits myself. Publishing houses take all the money and leave the author, the one who does the actual work, with near nothing and you won’t even be able to promote it successfully on your own terms. There are tons of ways to promote a book or any other product and I am certain that publishing houses are worthless anyway.”
AMEN.
“I’ve read two self-published books. Both were virtually unreadable. Grammar, spelling, and a smooth flow from one idea to the next were sorely missing.”
Under the old model (dinosaur legacy publishing) the books were generally well-edited. But the model was just horrible for new authors, see my comment above, especially about baby sea turtles.
Now, thousands of baby sea turtles make it to the ocean, more than ever, and mot of them are so badly written and edited that they will die on their own. The trick is to separate your quality self-pub works from the growing crowd of trash.
Between the old and new model, the new model wins hands-down. It’s a level playing field to get published (especially in e-book format). The hard part is now separating your quality from the trash, but that is a much easier nut to crack than simply getting published under the old model.
Sometimes self published material is good. But way more often its not very good.
Just checked Fiverr site for prices - $5 seems to covers for ebook cover design, and and other fiver for formating. Didn’t go beyond that.
Sentinel sends me good accounting, and I have an agent. I don't expect a publisher to do much by way of advertising---that was in the "old days." My only gripe is that based on expectations of your last book, the publisher can vastly over-print, then you're stuck with a "loser" in their eyes, even if you sell really well.
For ex., my "Seven Events that Made America" sold well over 55,000---a number most publishers would salivate over. But because of the unrealistic phenomenal success of "A Patriot's History of the United States," the publisher printed over 110,000 copies! I made a very nice advance, but it will be a long time before I ever see another royalty on that. An author has zero control over the print run, which to me is the key.
I know of a self-published author who prices her books at $.99 and sells hundreds of thousands. But she works the social media, giveaways, and every other trick constantly. That's her living. It can be done and some people here (Travis McGee) do it much better than others (me).
Bookmark.
Thanks for the list of links.
I agree with Amazon Kindle. You have a large market, and there is nothing but your time invested up front if you go for free - but you can pay to use their marketing services.
I have several books on Amazon both in print and Amazon Kindle.
What was your opinion of Amazon’s marketing services?
I used 48 Hr books....they were nice and had the book format I needed....but using Amazons editors was a huge help...probably sent $800 for editing...which was needed...I wrote the whole book while in Iraq during combat ops....I did not use their marketing...since my book floats around the Intel and SF communities...I had a website...but mostly the publications and other stuff on there...I got tired of dealing with it....I am sure their marketing is good...but I really did not need it...my goal was to vet my book out to those that needed it...sorry I could not offer much in that area.....
The book:
Babylon Covert War....the photo is one I took while touring Babylon in 2006..
Yet, often publishers don’t put stuff that is very good on the market and to me, leaving it up to the buyer is the right thing to do. Publishers can take a personal view of the product, not taking into account that the story might in fact appeal to people. If the publishing company doesn’t put in real effort to publish this, then I am certain that the book won’t do well even if in fact the story is great and just needs a good boost.
Frankly I don’t believe that publishing companies take advantage of real talent and completely rip off the authors. Only paying a dollar per copy sold is a complete cheating of the work that the author does who should be getting the majority of the profits.
thx checked site out
My two professionally published books, “Humanity’s Edge” and “Sirat: Through the Fires of Hell”, were printed through a small press but digitally through Amazon Kindle, since the publisher didn’t want to bother with digital rights.
I make more from the ebooks than I do the print books.
Ping for later
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