I first met Tony James Slater at a conference almost exactly two years ago. Given that it was quite a, cough, liquid affair, neither of us remember much about the encounter, other than we were both in a similar position: we had a finished book with which were desperately trying (and failing) to elicit interest.

And we were both getting knocked back for the same reason: the “experts” said there was no market for it. I was told that nobody wanted to read a historical novel set in South America, and Tony was universally informed that his foul-mouthed memoir of a time spent working in an Ecuadorean animal refuge could only have very limited appeal, especially considering he was an unknown quantity.

Okay, so Tony definitely wins the “niche” game. But Tony’s (eventual) success proves that even  the most narrowly defined niche is going to be well populated in a world with millions and millions of e-reader owners, most of whom can be reached through one retailer.

The challenge (as ever) was finding those readers. And while KDP Select was the key to him finally getting enough eyeballs on his work for his sales to take off, I’m convinced Tony would have got there one way or another, for one important reason: he was never, ever going to give up. If Tony had been that guy in 127 Hours, he would have got his head trapped instead of his arm, and still have managed to hack it off, slide out from under that rock, sew it back on, and crawl to safety.

Tony was willing to try a bit of everything, including dressing his poor mother up in a bear suit, his sister in a giant pair of cardboard underpants, and forcing them both to hand out fliers in front of Waterstones. For his e-book.

While success like this always involves a strike of lightning, Tony climbed to the top of a steeple on a stormy night, then covered himself in tinfoil.

But that’s enough from me. Here’s Tony:

Why Giving Away Thousands Of Free Books Is A Good Thing

For anyone that didn’t get the memo, my crazy travel comedy That Bear Ate My Pants! went free last week, as part of an Amazon KDP Select promotion.

When Amazon first announced KDP Select in December, I came out strongly against it. How dare they try to dictate blah, blah, exclusivity, blah – yeah, you’ve heard all that already. I also had a sneakier reason though; cold hard cash! Specifically the piles of it I would make selling on other platforms whilst every Indie author worth their salt had sold their souls to Amazon.

I’d figured out I could publish direct with Kobo, who looked set to claim a decent chunk of the UK market – the Kobo device had just started being stocked in WH Smiths and ASDA, two of UK’s omnipresent store chains. They were bound to sell like crazy over Christmas – much like the Kindle, only to folk who did their shopping in ‘real’ shops instead of online. This is a BIG chunk of the population in England, where we still make widespread use of donkey-powered treadmills to heat our homes.

With an ISBN in hand, all I needed was a slight re-formatting of my book, which I did, and a scanned copy of my signature… which I never got around to doing. Why? It was the easiest stage of the process by far, but… I was reluctant.

By this point I was hearing good things about Select, about the advantages it had given people, about free promotions driving sales ranks through the roof. Christmas came and went as I told myself I’d get around to dealing with Kobo as soon as I’d… [insert unnecessary activity here]. Well, I did emigrate to Australia around this time (as they are kinder to donkeys there, on account of not needing to heat their homes).

I realized what was happening; I wasn’t deciding. I was sitting on the fence, which is never a good idea because fence posts have pointy tops and my ass is soft and squishy. I was being indecisive, because there was fame and fortune at stake, and just possibly the ability to pay my rent next month.

Then I read David’s blog, as I generally do, and he was featuring stories on people who HAD done well out of Select. I’d read some before but they all seemed halfway to being superstars already, with friends in high places and mailing lists for gawd’s sake.  Somehow, reading it here made it seem more plausible. It was exciting to realise there were people like me, selling two dozen copies a month at best, that had hitched their wagon to the Select train and been carried off to mega-stardom! Or at least, to selling three dozen copies a month.

So I though ‘bollocks to it,’ and pulled my finger out (of where, I shan’t be saying) – and clicked the ‘enrol’ button on my Kindle Dashboard. Just like that, it was done. (But because I’m me I went back and unclicked it, then panicked and re-clicked it, then stomped around stressing for an hour when it wouldn’t re-click and finally tried it again and it worked. Sometimes I wonder how I get through the day.)

I figured since I’d thrown my dice I might as well bet the farm, so I scheduled two of my free days directly after Valentines Day (despite being told that anyone who bought their significant other a Kindle as a Valentines gift was well on the way to becoming single again).

I set about finding and contacting all the places that feature free books, making a list as I went (and mentioning the list frequently, in the hope it would make the owners of these sites more likely to feature me.) For anyone interested, most of that list is on my blog here.

I got in touch with all the biggies (POI, KND, ENT, etc.), several of whom I’d had adverts with in the past, so I could email them directly. Then I found smaller sites and newsletters, and newer Facebook groups, and contacted them. It took a while as I hate writing ‘form’ letters. I’m sure people can see through them straight away, so I typed every email and contact form individually, despite saying mostly the same thing in all of them. I set up a Facebook Event and invited all my friends, then wrote a message to them all asking them to invite all of theirs! I can only persuade myself to be this cheeky when I’m giving something away for free.

I also prepared sample Tweets to send, for me and for any helpers I acquired, a blog post telling followers how to help out, a couple of guest posts and joined a few Re-Tweet schemes (the ones at World Literary Café and the Book Junkies are great). During this time I wrote well over a hundred emails – I would say I spent up to eighteen hours a day doing this, for the three days before the promotion was due to begin.

And then it all kicked off, and I didn’t sleep for quite some time.

Due in no small part to the freebie newsletters I was featured on, ‘That Bear Ate My Pants!’ rolled up the charts over the course of the first free day. Sometime that night I cracked the Top 100 in the US; by next morning I was #9 overall on Amazon.com’s free list. I spent a whole day at #1 overall on Amazon.co.uk, but the download figures reflected how much easier this was to achieve than the US result.

In total there were 22,701 copies downloaded. Sixteen thousand of these were from the US, whereas a measly 6,000 downloads were enough to hog the top spot in the UK. It was an amazing result, catapulting my book to centre stage and achieving a visibility I had only dreamed of.

Tweets were flying around like mad, the book was being featured and listed by all kinds of aggregators and I had my first new review before the second day had ended. Since then they have been rolling in, three of four a day scattered between the two sites, each one giving me cause to leap around the bedroom shouting “YEESSS, get IN!” while my wife looks on in confusion. And yes, I am still struggling to explain to her how giving away twenty-two thousand books is a good thing…

The aftermath was terrifying. I’d heard on the Kindle Forums how books tended to plummet once they came off a free promotion, only rising slowly back to their former level. I was determined not to worry about it, but it brought a tightness to my chest when That Bear first showed up with a ranking over 100,000.

Then it began to climb, and contrary to all I’d been told it took less than a day to reach – then exceed – my pre-promo ranking of 30k. It shot up, gaining momentum, still being tweeted about and getting picked up by newsletters that thought it was still free. By that evening I broke into the Top 100 paid on Amazon.co.uk and made 327 in the States. I’ve slipped a bit since, but not too much – which presumably means someone is still buying it  :0)

Amazon is currently having a few issues with the reporting of royalties, and at any rate I won’t know the full story until the end of the week, but in the first few days after the promo ended I seem to have sold almost 800 books and made around £1,000.

Which co-incidentally is almost exactly the amount of money it’s cost me to repair my car after the wife had a little prang in it yesterday. This is an example of what I call ‘Karma with a C’ – the universal Law that, no matter how much money you come into, there will always be a car bill of equal or greater value on the horizon…

Easy come, easy go  :0)

If I had to, I would do it all over again. Hell, I’d love to do it all again! It was like the best theme-park ride I can imagine. And it was free. I gained readers, reviews, ranking and came very close to making some money – but then, we all know it: Karma, however you spell it, is a bitch.

Epilogue: It’s funny how, when I was ranked around 30,000 I was constantly worried about slipping below this; now my book has stabilised around the 150 mark in the UK and the 1,000 in the US, I’m even more scared of it dropping! At this level, if it holds steady, I’ll be making a minimum wage – small, but liveable. That in itself is hard to believe – until the cheques arrive anyway – but it hasn’t given me the confidence to leave it alone.

I’m going to work harder at expanding my online presence to include Goodreads, MobileRead Forums, LibraryThing, Pintrest and LinkedIn. I’ve even started a mailing list! (It has six names on it.) I’m looking out for new sponsorship opportunities and sending out more review copies than ever. If anything it’s made me see that the potential to sell well is out there – I just have to work harder for it, use every tool available, and pull out all the stops if I want to cling on this close to the top. And then I’m going to buy some climbing shoes and head back up there…

A screenshot of me in the Amazon.com Top Ten Paid is the new Everest Summit photo! Watch this space  :0)

* * *

If you want to read more of Tony’s adventures, his blog is here, his website is here, and you can follow him on Twitter here.

I’ve read Tony’s book, and it’s bloody hilarious – the funniest thing I’ve read in a very long time. If you have any interest in books set in exotic locations, if you want to laugh more than you have done in ages, if you want to hear Tony curse like a sailor as he subjects himself to all manner of self-harm, then do yourself a favor and pick up That Bear Ate My Pants for $2.99 on Amazon US or £2.68 on Amazon UK.

You might think I’m biased, Tony’s a friend after all. But you don’t have to take my word for it. He has 23 five star reviews in the US, and 21 more in the UK.

Enjoy your weekend!

Let’s Get Physical

As you might have guessed by the above pic, my first print edition has been foisted onto the world. If any of you are interested in purchasing A Storm Hits Valparaiso in paperback, North American readers can get it from Amazon (those in the US can also purchase from Barnes & Noble), and international readers are advised to buy from The Book Depository (who are excellent), where they can avail of free worldwide shipping.

Should you do print editions of your books? Dean Wesley Smith has a great post, explaining in some detail why you must. For the click-lazy, I’ll break it down. Eighty percent of readers haven’t switch to e-books yet, and it’s foolish to ignore that market when you can produce print editions very, very cheaply.

I used Createspace, which is free. They also provide you with a free ISBN, and don’t charge for the pro plan anymore (an old program where you paid a small yearly fee and were eligible for much higher royalties).

Your only costs will be a small charge for a proof copy (which you need to check before the book goes on sale), an optional $25 for expanded distribution (highly recommended, and will get you into stores like Barnes & Noble, The Book Depository, and Amazon’s new Indian store Junglee.com), a little extra to convert your cover to the wrap-around version needed for a print edition, and a small charge for a print formatter – if you don’t want to attempt it yourself.

Irish author Catherine Ryan Howard has an excellent guide on formatting your own print editions on her very helpful blog. Even if you are going to pay someone to do it for you, I recommend reading this anyway, so you can figure out things like trim size, and what you want to have as your front- and back-matter.

I opted to pay someone to do it for me. Heather Adkins at Cyberwitch Press charges only $50/$60 depending on length. I think she should be charging more for the excellent work she does (and I’ve told her that), so I would advise you to book her services before she sees sense and raises her prices.

Print veterans may swear by Lightning Source, and there are advantages, but the learning curve is much steeper. Beginners would be better off learning the ropes on Createspace (and you can use both actually, and have two different editions taking advantage of what both companies offer).

Mailing Lists

The paperback has been out for over a week. As usual, the lucky subscribers to my new release mailing list heard about it first. If you want to sign up, and join the crew who always hear about new releases first, click here.

I’ve been meaning to post about mailing lists for some time. In short, they are an extremely powerful tool, and if you don’t have a mailing list set up, you should create one immediately. (Note: this is different to blog subscriptions. This is a separate email subscriber list who have signed up to be notified every time I release a book.)

I have the sign-up link in a prominent position on my blog, and it’s the first thing readers see when the finish any of my books. The numbers on the list are growing all the time (with no further effort from me), and provide a healthy number of sales with each new release.

I use Mailchimp. It’s free, provides handy tracking tools, and, with a bit of tinkering, produces very professional emails like this one.

There are limits to the free service – I think it’s about 2000 subscribers before you pay a monthly fee – but I won’t be hitting that number for quite a while.

January Sales Report Redux

I don’t have time to do the usual detailed sales report, so here it is in brief. I sold over 300 books and made over $800 in January – my second best month to date. UK sales were very strong, almost reaching US sales. And I gave away over 20,000 copies of my two short stories and had the #1 free short on Amazon US for four days.

However, sales came to a dramatic halt on the 31st (after ten of my best days to date), and remained very poor until yesterday. In fact, Transfection – usually the runt of the litter – is my top-seller this month. That has just come off a free run (the old way), which shows that still has some juice. My other short is clogged up in the system, but should return to paid in the next day or so.

I hear a lot of self-publishers saying sales are down this month. There were widespread reporting delays on Amazon for at least the first few days of the month. Some self-publishers saw a flurry of catch-up sales after that, but I didn’t.

Are sales down in general? Will I see a bump in the monthly report from sales that haven’t been reported yet? It’s hard to say right now, but I’m not taking any chances, and I’m running a sale this week to coincide with a marketing push.

To distract me from dismal sales, I’ve been writing like a demon – well over 30,000 words this month. It’s quite the tonic. Also, one of my books has gone a little viral on Wattpad, which may lead to great things in the future. More on that later in the month.

The Aforementioned Sale!

Let’s Get Digital has been reduced to $2.99 on Amazon US, and the catchy sounding £1.53 on Amazon UK (with similar discounts on the European sites). I don’t want Kindle owners to have all the fun, though, so here’s a coupon for Smashwords: SN82G.

On a similar note, A Storm Hits Valparaiso is also reduced to $2.99 on Amazon US, and £1.99 on Amazon UK. And here’s the Smashwords coupon: GH45L.

But the bargains don’t stop there! Oh, no. This is probably your last day to pick up If You Go Into The Woods for free on Amazon US and Amazon UK. And because I’m feeling particularly kind-hearted today, Smashwords peeps, have at it: CZ58B.

Sales like this are great, can really boost your numbers, and gain you extra visibility in genre bestseller lists and the like. It’s also a fun way of testing other price points. They are simple to set up. Simply drop the price the night before in KDP, and in the morning, go into Author Central and add a note to the blurb announcing the sale (you can click on my Amazon links to see what it looks like). Then, blog about it, and send out a tweet or two.

If you’re really lucky, the price drop might even get picked up by one of the reader sites, like is happening for me later today with the fine folks at Pixel of Ink.

Ad Spots

I knew in advance that Pixel of Ink would be featuring my sale today, so I decided to capitalize on any sales momentum by running a few ads this week. I’ve got one in EreaderIQ on Wednesday, and another on Kindle Fire Department on Thursday.

I’ll let you know how those ads go, and what they do for sales. For me, though, Pixel of Ink is still the top dog. I’ve tried a few different sites now, and nothing came close to the boost I got there. Others swear by Ereader News Today, but they are booked up now for all of 2012 and aren’t taking any more bookings, so I won’t get to test them out.

Should you run ads? Should I be even running ads? I’ll break it all down afterwards, but there are a few criteria I use when evaluating these sites: price, what you get for the price, whether they have a Facebook page (and how active it is and how many “likes” they have, which is becoming very important), how many email subscribers they have, and what results others have achieved.

For example, some say Kindle Nation Daily has lost its mojo, but others have (still) seen stellar results there. For all sites, and especially with all the options on KND, it’s good to keep track of what results people get in places like Kindle Boards Writers’ Cafe, where there appears to be huge variance depending on where you advertise, the genre of your book, and the promotion you opt for.

There are no simple, quick answers here. Do your research. (And don’t forget that there is little point advertising unless you have the basics in place.)

Donations

I fund all of my ads through the PayPal donations I receive from the free PDF version of Let’s Get Digital. This allows me to avoid the (often hefty) charges of pulling that money down to my bank account, and the exchange fees from converting those dollars into Euros.

A (blog) reader contacted me the other day asking why I don’t have a similar PayPal donation button under my blog posts, like some other bloggers do.

I’ve no issue with other bloggers doing it, but I don’t feel comfortable with it. For the same reason, I’ve turned down a couple of advertising opportunities I’ve been approached with. I had 35,000 views last month (the only metric I get on the free WordPress set-up), so I could make a little money from ads, but I’m never keen on it when I see it on other blogs.

Besides, the prime spots are advertising my books.

As for the idea of a PayPal donation button, I would feel like I’m passing a hat around, which I don’t want to do. My blog readers – you guys – support me in lots of other ways: buying my books, getting the word out about a new release or a sale, or just helping me spread my ideas through sharing my posts. And you are my sounding board, giving me advice on covers and blurbs and pricing, and helping me hash out the issues of the day.

Most of my blog posts spring from the great discussions we have in the comments, and I think if I started passing the hat around, it would might seem like I don’t value all the above. So, in short, no PayPal donation button here (or ads).

Happy Monday!

Barry Eisler dealt with this fear, rather conclusively, back in October in a guest post on Joe Konrath’s blog.

But lately, the hysteria has been ratcheted up a notch by Mike Shatzkin’s sensible prediction that Amazon will soon be responsible for 50% of most publisher’s sales (I can’t link to Mike’s original piece at the moment, there seems to be a problem with his site, but Passive Guy quotes the main points).

The Author’s Guild now has Amazon firmly in their sights. An article at the end of January entitled Publishing’s Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory was followed by another yesterday: Amazon, Innovation, and the Rewards of the Free Market. The anti-Amazon views contained therein are hardly surprising, given that the President of the Author’s Guild, Scott Turow, considers Amazon the “Darth Vader” of the publishing industry.

It appears that those labeling Amazon a monopoly (or on the road to becoming one) have failed to take account of the following:

(a) The definition of the word “monopoly” (the OED describes it thus: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service). I would like to see anyone attempt to make the argument that Amazon has either ”the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in” print books or e-books, or that Amazon is on the way to doing so.

(b) The fact that a retail monopolies never occur without the assistance of legislation outlawing competition (such as the Swedish prohibition on the sale of hard liquor outside of government-run stores).

(c) The inconvenient truth that Amazon’s share of the e-book market has dropped from a high of around 90% two years ago to around 65% today, largely thanks to the entrance of fresh competition in the form of Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google, and Apple.

When a company’s competition contains names like Apple and Google – two of the biggest corporations in the world – and virtually anyone can hang out their shingle and open an e-bookstore, you can’t make the monopoly argument and expect to be taken seriously.

I don’t see Amazon as a threat to competition. Quite the opposite, in fact. Amazon has done more to foster competition than any other player in the industry.

As Mike Shatzkin points out, five years ago the overwhelming majority of all books were sold in bricks-and-mortar stores (he estimates it at 80%). As any self-publisher or author published by a small press will know, large publishers essentially have a lock on those spots, and were only really competing among themselves.

The world has changed dramatically in the last five years. The convergence of four key trends – rise in online bookselling, the widespread adoption of e-readers, the rapidly increasing popularity of e-books, and the ease of digital publishing – have introduced a new level of competition in the industry.

One company has been more responsible for that than anyone: Amazon. Instead of large publishers monopolizing all the spots where most books were sold (stores), Amazon has blown it wide open so that anybody can compete with the large publishers (including self-publishers, Amazon’s own imprints, literary agents, and small publishers).

Out of the all the players, Amazon has had far more influence over the rise in online bookselling, the adoption of e-readers, the popularity of e-books, and the ease of digital publishing. Large publishers had a lock on distribution, but now Amazon has blown it wide open so that anybody can compete with those large publishers

And they certainly are competing. Amazon’s imprints regularly propel books to the top of charts. Self-publishers and small publishers are taking over the bestseller lists. Anybody can upload their book to Amazon (and Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble, and Apple, and Diesel, and AllRomance, and DriveThruFiction, and Xinxii, and Waterstones, and Tesco, and Kobo, and Sony) and sell their work to readers across the globe.

Writers have more choices than ever before. No longer do they have to accept crummy advances, restrictive terms, and laughable royalty rates in the vain hope that their piece of publishing spaghetti will be the one that sticks to the wall.

They can sign with a progressive small publisher, on much more favorable terms, confident that they can’t be excluded from the online or digital marketplace the way they are from most bricks-and-mortar stores.

Or they can self-publish, knowing that simply by uploading to a few websites, they can match the digital distributive reach of the largest publishers, earn over four times the royalty rates, and have someone passionate in charge of the every little detail of how their book is presented to the reading public, someone that is truly invested in its success, someone that knows that book better than anyone: themselves.

And the greatly increased viability of both of those paths is largely down to one company. Amazon are doing more to change the status quo than anyone, and this makes a lot of people mad, because a lot of people have a vested interest in nothing changing.

Large publishers would prefer to have a lock on distribution and to be the sole arbiters of what gets published and what doesn’t. Literary agents would like to remain the gatekeepers who decide which writers can submit work to large publishers. Barnes & Noble is pissed because when they put an indie bookstore out of business, they don’t get to scoop up all their customers anymore; many move online and into the arms of Amazon.

And if you are a bestselling author who shifts huge amounts of print books through those channels (which your publisher has a lock on), you’re probably scared of things changing too. But for the rest of us writers, we’ve never had it better.

A final point. As Joe Konrath pointed out earlier this week, Amazon is winning because they are better than the competition. And sometimes it seems that those they are competing with aren’t even trying.

There is nothing stopping large publishers from raising royalty rates and removing ridiculously restrictive terms. Barnes & Noble excludes international self-publishers and purchases from anyone outside the US, for no good reason. Apple has a horrible e-bookstore. Kobo doesn’t let (most) authors upload directly. Most bricks-and-mortar stores aren’t even attempting to sell e-books (despite the availability of a free platform from Google).

If you’re not even going to try, you will get little sympathy when you lose.

UPDATE: There is a superb post from Passive Guy filleting the latest anti-Amazon screed from the Author’s Guild. Really, really worth reading.

Note: Blogging has been intermittent this month. I’m in the middle of a writing challenge – attempting to churn out 60,000 words in February – and everything else has been shoved to one side. Normal service will resume next month. Please continue your great discussions in the comments. I haven’t had time to reply to all of your comments in the last couple of weeks, but they all get read. (And I have about 26k down, in case you are wondering.)

Any “hard” numbers we have about self-publishing are either hopelessly out of date, or use (very) imperfect measures, such as the number of ISBNs registered in a given year, and then number of print editions bearing those ISBNs sold in outlets captured by Neilsen Bookscan.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. The most glaring is that a self-publisher could sell thousands and thousands of books without every getting an ISBN or creating a print edition (and many do just that).

Traditional publishers have all sorts of metrics. One that I like quoting here are the monthly AAP figures, which give us a rough idea of what percentage of the market that e-books have captured – an important number for all sorts of reasons.

However, as regular readers will know, the AAP numbers only tend to measure the larger publishers, and take no account of self-publishers whatsoever.

Steven Lewis (the brains behind the Taleist blog) has put together a comprehensive survey to seek to redress this statistical imbalance, and I asked him along to explain the thinking behind it.

Am I a failure as a self-publishing author?

I’ve been a professional writer for 15 years now but I didn’t start self-publishing until August 2010. I was lucky enough to find the blogs of Amanda Hocking and JA Konrath to help me but the sales figures they generously shared made me feel like a minnow swimming with whales. Amanda is now a member of the Kindle Million Club and Joe recently made $100,000 in three weeks. It took me months to earn the $100 I needed for Amazon to cut me my first royalty cheque. Everybody starts somewhere, though. Karen McQuestion told me she earned $30 in her first month on the Kindle and look at her now, just a couple of years later.

Today I get a royalty cheque every month, each one so far bigger than the one before. But I’m still a long way from induction into the Million Club even if I am frequently in the top 10 in my categories.

All these big numbers from the self-publishing lions got me thinking: How are the rest of us doing? The majority? The “ordinary” writers? Where’s the benchmark against which I can measure myself?

Those answers aren’t out there at the moment. Celebrity self-publishers like Joe, Amanda and Karen are inspirations because they’re outliers. What’s missing is information about the middle and the other end of the spectrum.

To fill the gap I’ve partnered with Dave Cornford to create the Taleist 2012 Self-Publishing Survey. Dave’s not just a fellow self-publisher, he’s an experienced consumer researcher so this is much more than just an online poll. It’s a professional snapshot of the state of the self-publishing “industry” in 2012.

Together — with help from a panel that includes my host today, Mr Gaughran — we’ve put together 61 questions. The questions look at the who and the how of self-publishing; and they ask how authors are doing and what’s working for them. From the answers we’ll be able to see whether, for instance, there are things that the most “successful” self-publishers have in common.

We appreciate it’ll take a little time to answer such a comprehensive questionnaire but the more information we have, the more interesting the observations we can make. We’ve also set ourselves the somewhat ambitious target of 1,000 respondents to get a meaningful sample.

To make this possible, we need your help and that of the rest of the self-publishing community to take the survey and share links to it with their networks on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and wherever writers gather.

We look forward to being able to share with you a picture of us all!

Steven Lewis runs the Taleist self-publishing blog and the Taleist 2012 Self-Publishing Survey is now open.

***

Steven has put in a lot of time and effort on this survey. It’s quite comprehensive, and the results will give us a picture of self-publishing for the first time – but only if enough people participate.

I just did the survey. It takes around ten minutes. As with any survey, if the answer you want to give isn’t listed, try and pick the answer which is closest.

Everything is anonymous – you aren’t asked for your name or the titles of your books – so you don’t have to worry about any private information being made public.

Please answer the questions as honestly as you can, and please participate even if you feel your sales are too low or too high and might skew things. The survey will only accurately reflect the community if everyone participates – both those doing better than expected, and those who feel they have room to improve, as well as those who have been doing this for a few years, and those who have just started.

I would be grateful if you could share this post – or the link to the survey – as widely as possible. That way we have the best chance of getting as many responses as we can – and the more responses we get, the more accurate picture of self-publishing will result.

Niklas had some success on the traditional path, but that was in Sweden (and writing in Swedish). This time he was writing in English, and that publication credit wasn’t going to open too many doors in Manhattan.

Fast forward one year, and Niklas has self-published his first book in English. As you will see from the interview below, his situation is quite unique.

I spoke with Niklas over a few days in Google Docs, and I think you will find this very interesting.

***

Hi Niklas. I know you quite well, but why don’t you introduce yourself to the readers and tell them a little about yourself.

I’m a 40 year old writer living in Stockholm, Sweden. I work as a free-lance editor and I also do some teaching, mainly History to underprivileged kids.

In 2009, I published my first novel – the traditional way – with the Swedish publisher Normal Förlag. It’s called På knä i Köpenhamn and follows the adventures of a young, gay man called Robin, trying to find love and success in business in Copenhagen.

I wrote it with my brother, who is a gay activist. Our goal was to try to write a Harlequin-style novel, using almost only gay characters.

We had two objectives: normalizing gay experiences and at the same time stressing how – when it comes to romantic fiction at least – there’s nothing more “queer” than heterosexual love.

You have just released a book, The Sonsov Bitches. What’s it about?

Again, it’s gay fiction. The Sonsov Bitches is about another young, gay man. Simon de Beauvoir works selling snacks on a train between Paris and Angers, in France. When he gets the chance to be the frontman of a band, he feels that it’s his only chance in life. The problems start when someone tries to kill the band members off, one after the other. It’s my attempt at writing gay chick lit, with a thriller twist.

I guess you might call it a Dick Lit Thriller.

Heh. I like that. Your first book was traditionally published, and written in Swedish. But this book, your first in English has been self-published. Talk us through some of the thinking there.

Like most people here in Sweden I was unaware of the massive changes that are taking place in publishing. That’s coming from someone that works in the business, mind you. Then I read your excellent book Let’s Get Digital and started to understand this brave new world of books. It’s nothing short of a revolution. That, teamed up with the feeling of not wanting to send out queries and my novel to tons of people who might not even get back to me made the choice easy.

The whole indie writer scene feels very interesting right now. Even though I self-published The Sonsov Bitches, I’m not in it for the vanity. I’m in it because I want people to read and enjoy my books. Deciding to self-publish put a very big, stupid, happy smile on my face already the day of the launch, when I sold my first copy of the novel on the German Amazon site. The fact that someone in Germany is reading The Sonsov Bitches blows me away. That person made all those years writing it worthwhile, with a click on the buy button on Amazon.de.

That’s really cool. I don’t leave my writing cave much, except to haul home bottles of grog. Is there much of a self-publishing “scene” here in Sweden? I don’t see too many (or any, to be honest) Kindles around, but plenty of iPads and iPhones. Are people reading e-books here? Has the whole digital revolution had any impact on publishers?

Sweden is way behind, both on the publishing and reading sides. It is starting to change, but will probably take at least another couple of years. There are a few self-publishing sites up and running, but their impact is limited so far. Vulkan.se is the most serious attempt. The publishers are trying to limit libraries’ lending of e-books, and they’re pricing and marketing e-books more or less exactly like DTBs, which feels like they’re trying to reverse into the future. All the big players understand that they’ll have to change, but seem fairly clueless.

I see the same pattern all across Europe. European publishers have had extra time to prepare for the digital revolution, but most of them haven’t used it wisely, and instead doubled down on the mistakes their American cousins have made: not releasing e-book versions the same time as hardbacks, pricing them too high to protect print sales, paying authors too little despite the reduced costs in a digital world, and wasting time and money in a pointless battle against piracy.

But I want to ask you about something else. Most Swedish people seem to have a high level of English – and that’s true across all of Scandinavia. I read something recently about Denmark where they said that English language versions of books from the UK and the US often outsell the local translations because of problems with the translation, the delay in the translated version hitting the shelves, and the simple desire to read the writer’s original words. While we haven’t seen a big appetite for English language work in Germany, France, Spain, or Italy, do you think there is opportunity in Scandinavia for self-publishers writing in English?

I would like to be the first in a long line of writers giving it a shot. The Swedish market is too small to be able to make a living from it, unless you really make it big, i.e. DTBs. I face the same problem as everyone else, though: how to reach readers.

Anyone reading The Sonsov Bitches might naturally assume that you are gay. But you’re not (unless you have something to tell me), you’re happily married with two children. Where did the impetus come from to write from this perspective?

I’ve been involved in the fight for gay rights for a very long time, through my brother. For me, one of the biggest mysteries in life is why so many people accept the lack of civil rights for gay people, without stepping out of their comfort zones to show solidarity. My brother was gay-bashed so badly that he developed epilepsy, yet people seem to be more interested in who he marries than how to stop the next person from getting gay-bashed.

I am absolutely convinced that future historians will look at our time (and, yes, that means 2012) in horror when it comes to civil rights for LGBT people. The Sonsov Bitches is my attempt, through entertainment, to try to be a part of change for the better.

Was the book hard to write?

Not really. I believe that human life can be filtered through almost anyone. It did certainly help, however, that my gay brother gave me invaluable feedback when it came to the sex scenes. I soon realized that I was clueless in that department, hence the wife and two kids.

Speaking of your wife, you took her name when you married.

Yes. I also waited to get married until my brother was allowed to get married according to Swedish law. I firmly believe in not following tradition, if tradition is wrong. In my Utopia love is universal, yet private. Until we’re there, we have to fight.

I’ve read The Sonsov Bitches and it was great. It’s set (mostly) in Paris, and I spent a summer there about 10 years ago. Reading all the names of the streets brought back a lot of memories. Have you spent much time there?

I grew up in a small town in Western Sweden and couldn’t wait to bust out of town. When I graduated from high school I moved to Paris. The contrast was almost too big to handle. It was like a second birth. I lived there for almost a year in 1992 and in some ways I never left. A big piece of my heart still sits in a café somewhere in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I go back as often as I can. To really spread a thick layer of camembert cheese on it, I got engaged and married in Paris as well. My brother, who is a gay priest, married us on a sunny day in May 2006 in Parc des Buttes Chaumont.

Your main character – Simon de Beauvoir – leaps off the page. He’s snarky and bitchy, but a lot of that is hiding the self-doubt that has stalked him for much of his life, and the pain he felt growing up. Is he a purely fictitious creation?

Simon de Beauvoir and I have a lot in common. The only significant difference between us is that he’s gay and I’m straight. One of the strangest things in my life was when I hit my first writer’s block working with the novel, around 2005. Then Simon and The Sonsov Bitches were about to play a show in Bangkok, Thailand. In January 2007, in the middle of my not being able to continue writing, I got the offer to join a band that was going to go on tour in China (I play the guitar and sing back up). On stage, in Beijing, I felt my self-doubt imploding and has felt different about myself ever since. That experience unlocked the writer’s block and of course made its way into the novel.

That’s fascinating. When my creative well is dry, I always try and do something outside of books and writing to unblock myself. That could be something as simple as going for a walk or going to an exhibition, or listening to some music, or just watching a thought-provoking movie (science-fiction always works for some reason). What you did sounds like an extreme version of that process!

Part of the plot, as you mentioned, surrounds Simon joining a band and obviously you have some direct experience there. But do you find your creative pursuits feed into each other in less direct ways? Have you ever thought of recording any of the songs in the book? After all, it’s a small step from being a straight writer releasing gay fiction to being a straight guitar player in a gay boyband!

You’re actually not the first person that suggests that! I feel quite content leaving the songs of The Sonsov Bitches for my readers to compose in their heads. I am equally satisfied that my punk rock band Los Pelados’ biggest hit is a homoerotic song called Johnny’s Girl. It’s about someone that sees the coolest guy in his high school cracking jokes with the local football jocks, only to realize that he wants to be Johnny’s girl.

Do you have any more adventures planned for Simon de Beauvoir and The Sonsov Bitches?

Not right now. I am currently working on a series of shorts, in the Nordic Mystery genre. If my readers want more of Simon I am ready to let him out of his box though.

***

A huge thank you to my friend Niklas for that fascinating interview. If you want to pick up The Sonsov Bitches (and you really should), you can get it on Amazon US here and Amazon UK here (and all the other Amazons too).

It’s a really funny book, and I highly recommend it. I beta read this book, and, honestly, it’s probably quite a bit outside my usual genres. But I’m so glad I did; it’s full of snarky, bitchy, and hilarious characters.

Oh, and the book is on sale – this week only – for the low, low price of 99c. Grab it before it goes back up to $2.99.

Here’s the blurb:

Simon de Beauvoir’s job selling snacks on a high-speed train is dreary. When Simon gets a chance at stardom as the frontman of the gay boyband The Sonsov Bitches, he thinks he has it made. But success always brings envy, this time with deadly consequences. Can Simon save The Sonsov Bitches? Can he still look divine while a crazed killer is targeting him? Will his long-cherished dream of being famous and fabulous be ruined by the lunatic stalking the band?

I’m sure Niklas will be along later if you have any questions yourself. If you want to check out his band, Los Pelados have a MySpace page here. I’m still trying to drag Niklas into the social mediaverse, but in the meantime, you can get in touch with him at cobra [dot] capella [at] gmail [dot] com.

What are you waiting for? Did I mention The Sonsov Bitches was only 99c? Go, scoot!

That sounds pretty impressive until you factor in that two of those shorts were written in 2010, and I had been writing the historical novel over a period of many years – it only had to be rewritten last year. Subtracting both of those, and adding in new text added to the novel, leaves me with maybe 90,000 new words written and published last year.

It could be worse, I suppose, but there is a huge amount of room for improvement – especially when I break it down.

The bulk of those new words written and published were for my short story Transfection and my how-to Let’s Get Digital. I wrote the short in a few days and it only needed a small amount of revision before it was published. Let’s Get Digital took around three weeks. With revising time, back-and-forth with my editor etc., you could probably add another couple of weeks.

I know I can write fast when I put my mind to it. I’ve done 4,000 word days (on very rare occasions). But I lack discipline and focus. I’m a poor planner. I work on whatever I feel like working on. That’s fine, but the obvious corollary is that I will cast something aside when I don’t feel like working on it (as attested by the innumerable half-written shorts, novel outlines, and story ideas on my hard-drive).

A Storm Hits Valparaiso took five-and-a-half years. But a lot of that time I wasn’t working on the book. The first draft took three years and three months. I remember because the first half of the book took me three years, and the second half only three months!

The first half took so long because I was researching as I was writing, I was traveling around the world while working on the book, and I walked away from it at some point in the middle and didn’t write a word for maybe nine months. Plus I was still learning the craft, of course.

But there was another reason why the second half went much quicker: I had a deadline.

It was summer and I was living in the Czech countryside in a small town east of Prague. I was writing full-time and the beer was very, very cheap. But the real world loomed; I was moving back to Dublin in September, and would have to look for (paying) work. I didn’t know when I would get another three-month window like this, so I put the pedal to the metal and got the job done.

Similarly, I started the final rewrite last August. I circled it for a while, working on small parts when I felt like it (which wasn’t that often). Let’s Get Digital was selling like crazy, so it was all too easy to get pulled into guest blogs and interviews (and checking those sales numbers). I went on holidays in September and spent two glorious weeks away from the internet, and did a lot of thinking about the weaknesses in my novel, and how to improve it.

But even on my return, progress was slow – that is, until my crowdfunding initiative and the limited availability of my editor forced a deadline upon me. Again, I pulled my socks up and got the job done.

I can give a million excuses for being a slow writer. I write longhand (i.e. with pen and paper). I write primarily in a genre which requires more research than most (historical fiction). And I’m still pretty inexperienced – I haven’t developed a good sense yet of which ideas are going to last the pace, I still write myself into a lot of dead-ends, and I get stuck lots, for all sorts of reasons.

But, I’m done with excuses.

I know that Zoe Winters used to be a slower writer, but now she is able to pull off 10,000 words a day (sometimes). Now, she writes straight-to-keyboard, and I don’t think it’s any slight to suggest that paranormal romance might require a little less research. However, I know that Courtney Milan can write 4,000 words a day (when the day job allows), and she writes longhand. She also writes historical romance, which probably requires a similar level of research to my stuff.

Purists might claim that quality can’t be written at that speed, but I think that’s a ridiculous notion, and the sales and reviews of the two above writers would argue otherwise. Let me give you some more examples, though.

Sebastian Faulks is not known as a fast writer. However, when he was asked by Ian Fleming’s literary estate to pen a new Bond novel, Faulks decided to copy Fleming’s six-week time-frame, and pulled it off.

However, Fleming and Faulks were not unique. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks. Graham Green spent the same amount of time writing The Confidential Agent in the mornings, while writing The Power And The Glory in the evenings!

Anthony Burgess said A Clockwork Orange was “knocked off for money in three weeks.” Mickey Spillane wrote one of his Mike Hammer novels in nine days (which sold millions of copies). And Steven King dashed off The Running Man in three nights.

So we know it’s theoretically possible, without quality having to suffer. Armed with that knowledge, all I need is some kind of deadline.

I wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo last year, but I was in the middle of the rewrite for A Storm Hits Valparaiso. But on Saturday night, I stumbled across this thread on KindleBoards where Michael Wallace (author of the bestselling Righteous series) was proposing an informal February writing challenge: 60,000 words by the end of the month.

There were a few takers already who have been fiendishly outlining for the last few weeks. I’m a little behind, but I decided to jump aboard.

Immediately, I could think of a million excuses. But, as I said, I’m done with excuses.

I’ve got two days to outline… something. Well, it’s more about deciding which project to work on. Initially, I thought the dystopian novella that has been kicking around in my head for months would be a perfect fit, as very little research would be required.

I spent some time yesterday trying to come up with a very vague outline, but realized it’s still at the “half idea” stage, and needs something else before it’s ready to go.

Instead, I’m going to try and write the first draft of a historical novel. This might seem like a crazy idea – and it is – especially considering that I’ve only done half the research needed. And also because I promised my poor, battered brain that I would work on something else, anything else, before attempting another historical.

Sorry, brain. I published 170,000 words last year and most of that wasn’t new stuff. I wrote around 200,000 words on my blog. There’s something wrong with that picture. Something has to change radically, and I don’t want to stop blogging – I enjoy it too much.

The working title of the book I am going to attempt is Bananas for Christmas. It’s set in New Orleans and Honduras at the beginning of the 20th century and follows the story of a guy called Lee Christmas – a color-blind railroad engineer who fled the US and got mixed up in several Central American revolutions, often at the behest of a certain American fruit company – someone who was quite famous one hundred years ago, but whom most people seem to have forgotten.

I have a bullet point outline of the first half of the book, and a (very) rough blurb:

Lee Christmas falls asleep at the throttle of his locomotive, dead drunk, driving straight into an oncoming train. His life in tatters, he boards a steamer to Honduras, hoping for a fresh start. But when civil war breaks out, he is forced to choose sides.

Bananas for Christmas is the story of America as it moves from The Gilded Age to a new era of Imperialism, of a revolution born in a New Orleans brothel, and the nation’s most famous soldier of fortune, a color-blind railroad engineer who becomes the head of the Honduran Army.

I need to outline the second half – and digest a biography and re-skim a history book (pictured above) – in the next two days.

I don’t expect to have a publishable novel at the end of this. Or even something ready for beta readers (let alone an editor). But I would like to have a good first draft, or at the very least, a good chunk of it done.

This is going to be tough – especially for a slow writer like me, who has never even attempted something like this before. And announcing my participation in the challenge here isn’t particularly smart, considering the overwhelming likelihood of failure.

But I also remember that my father used this same trick. When he was considering whether to run a marathon, he went around and told everyone he met that he was going to do it – which then forced him to run the bloody thing.

And he did it (and in a good time too). In fact, he’s run three of them. He’s in his sixties now – still running half-marathons – and he’s twice as fit as me.

I need to do my own writing marathon, and hopefully it will break some of my bad habits (irregular binge writing, general lack of discipline and focus), and teach me some good habits which I can carry through my writing life.

This challenge is 60,000 words in 29 days. Just over 2,000 words a day. Anyone else game?

On Monday, we kicked off the series with a post from UK author and editor Harry Bingham (The Writers’ Workshop), who underlined the importance of editing, and how developing your own self-editing skills can greatly reduce the amount you need to spend on professional help (and lead to a better book). If you missed it, that’s here.

On Wednesday, my editor, Karin Cox, gave some practical tips on how to avoid some of the more common errors she sees in writers’ manuscripts, such as unnecessarily florid verbiage, wandering commas, and modifiers gone mad. That post is here.

If you have digested all that, Karin is back with more to wrap things up:

Self-editing: back to basics, part II

Following on from my last post on Wednesday, I thought I would elaborate on two more issues I regularly see in manuscripts submitted by novice authors.

Of course, there is a lot more to successful self-editing than picking up these errors, but they are at least a good start for new writers looking to finetune their work before they send it out to beta readers or (hopefully) to a professional editor.

Remember, the more you polish your own work, the less a professional editor will have to do, which will save them time and save you money.

Dialogue Dilemmas

Dialogue and action scenes are the make-or-break elements of any story. Writing evocative prose is great, but without action and dialogue to drive the plot forward and make the reader feel invested in your tale (and your characters) all you will have is pretty words on a page. Get dialogue right, and your characters’ voices will ring in your readers’ heads; get it wrong, and your characters will seem flat and, frankly, fictional. All too often new authors get it wrong.

There are a lot of ways to go wrong when it comes to dialogue. The first is to hardly include any at all! Without dialogue you will likely have an awful lot of “telling” and very little “showing.” I often see narrative passages that tell me how the characters have been interacting. For example:

When Joe called Nathan into the conference room and told him that Wordsmith Industries could no longer afford to keep him on, Nathan, understandably upset, called him a bastard. Nathan had worked for Joe for fifteen years and angrily told his boss that the company had taken the best years of his life in exchange for a meagre wage and minimum superannuation contributions. Joe, affronted by his employee’s response, immediately told him to get out. As a final indignity, he gestured to Nathan’s uniform and explained that he would need that back, too: it belonged to the company. Nathan stripped off and tossed the clothes on the floor, then called Joe a bastard again, and a coward. (117 words)

In rare cases, a few brief sentences of this type of exposition can summarise an earlier, “off-screen” conversation (especially if you already have a lot of dialogue, or if it would make for a short, choppy scene). However, it is usually far more interesting to show the reader using dialogue and action, even if it requires more words. E.g.

“Have a seat.” Joe gestured towards the conference table.

Nathan, looking worried, took the seat closest to the door.

“I’m afraid it is bad news,” Joe said, sitting at the opposite end of the table. “As you know, Wordsmith Industries has had some financial difficulties this year.” He cleared his throat and smoothed down his greasy comb-over. “You see, we’re going to have to let you go.”

“You bastard! I’ve given fifteen years to this company—fifteen of my best working years—and all for what? A meagre wage and minimum superannuation contributions?”

Affronted, Joe stood. “I was going to suggest you stay on a week to clear things up. But if that’s how you feel, I think you should just get out. Now!” He pointed a trembling index finger toward the door.

Nathan raked the chair back from the table and leaped to his feet.

“One more thing.” Joe pointed to the uniform Nathan wore. “You’ll need to leave that here: it’s company property.”

Scowling, Nathan dropped his trousers and wrenched off his shirt. A button pinged off the conference table, hitting the wall just below the framed print of a mountain peak with the word “Courage” printed underneath. “You really are a bastard!” Nathan spat. “And a coward.” Then he turned and strode out. (214 words. But note that this actually tells us a lot more about both characters than the original “telling” narrative did).

Expository Dialogue

Another dialogue no-no is expository dialogue. Expository dialogue uses the characters as mouthpieces to relay essential elements of the plot, or information about other characters, which the author wants the reader to know but didn’t want to write as exposition. Let’s use Joe and his wife Gloria as an example.

“Joe, you know that our company Wordsmith Industries is in financial trouble and if we don’t get rid of some employees we’re not going to be able to make the repayment this month and the bank will foreclose on us,” Gloria said as she filled the sink with hot water and squirted in a stream of detergent. “I think you should sack Nathan.”

“Yes, my wife,” Joe answered, “but it’s only because of my gambling problem. If I hadn’t bet that ten grand on that stupid horse named Expository Dialogue we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Exactly!” Gloria pulled on rubber gloves and began scrubbing furiously at a saucepan. “And your brother Tim, who lives in London and has four children, should never have asked you for that loan to add on another bedroom. Now look where it has got us.” She pushed a frizzy curl out of her face and huffed in consternation.

Joe sighed.

“And tell Nathan that he needs to leave his green and white uniform, because we paid for it and had it embroidered with the company slogan “We do it better” in yellow cotton thread last year when we sent it out to Carol Bigby’s seamstress services in Castlemaine.”

Of course, there are other issues with this passage, including wordiness and Gloria’s tendency to divulge inconsequential information. But my point is that there is no need for Gloria to tell Joe things he already knows, such as that their business is in trouble (he would know that), or that his brother lives in London and has four kids (he would know that also). There is no need for her to tell him that the uniform is green and white and embroidered with the company slogan in yellow cotton. There is even no need for Joe to use “my wife” in talking to Gloria, or to tell her about his gambling problem—no doubt poor Gloria already knows about that, too. What is happening here is that the author thinks she is cleverly slipping in description or backstory without passages of exposition. However, this is equally as expository, and it reeks of authorial interference. It also makes the characters seem contrived and the dialogue seem pointless. For more about expository characters, check out this page on TV Tropes, but I warn you in advance that clicking on links can result in you being trapped in this very addictive site for hours on end!

Um, Err, How’s the Weather

Sometimes, writers do their dialogue a disservice by trying to be too realistic. Wait! Did you say “too realistic”? Why wouldn’t we want our dialogue to be realistic? I can imagine some of you thinking. The answer is that you do want a level of realism. But rather than making dialogue slavishly realistic by adding all of the ifs, ums, wells, buts, hellos, how are yous and trivial social pleasantries that pepper real conversation, the aim is to create an illusion of realism.

In real life, we chat about the weather, or work, or how we’re doing, before launching into the nitty gritty of a conversation, but in a book, all of that is filler. Omit filler wherever possible; your readers will thank you for it. They won’t sit there thinking, Gee it was rude that Cassandra didn’t ask Ben how his weekend was first thing on a Monday morning before she blurted out that Sarah was having an affair; at least, they won’t if you “hook” them on your story by writing gripping, authentic dialogue and making your characters credible.

Throw the “Said Book” at Them

We spoke about adverbs in Part I. One of the biggest problems with adverbs is that they can hinder dialogue, especially if used a lot. I’m all for adverbs in moderation, or where they add meaning while keeping writing concise. But try to avoid using adverbs after every dialogue tag. “Said Bookisms” can also make for amateurish dialogue. Some editors and authors insist that writers should only ever use “said” when attributing dialogue; I don’t. However, I do suggest removing extraneous tags and attributions in the first place. If you feel the need to use growled, whispered, screamed, goaded, taunted, muttered, or mumbled on occasion, I say go right ahead, but remember that less is more. If your character is mumbling, muttering, shouting, exclaiming, querying or propounding all of the time, chances are he or she is not distinct or dimensional enough.

When you have just two people involved in a conversation, you can usually get away with just letting them speak, using only their actions to remind the reader which character is speaking. E.g.

“What are you doing?” Cassandra leaned over Ben for a closer look. 

“Deactivating the power source.” Ben flipped the switch on the control panel and slipped the back off the unit.

“Why?”

“Why do you think?” He frowned as he poked a screwdriver into the mass of electrical wires.

“I hope you disconnected it from the grid first.”

“From the grid? Now why would I want to do that?” Ben said sarcastically.

If you have a lot of characters involved in a conversation, I’d recommend using actions or “said” in at least 75% of cases, but using other appropriate tags when—and only when—they add meaning and make sense. Also, do avoid some of the more inane Said Bookisms, e.g.

“What are you doing?” he ejaculated.

“I hope you disconnected it from the grid first,” she snorted.

“Let’s go,” she propositioned.

Name Dropping

There is rarely a need to have your characters use other characters’ names in dialogue, but authors often do this purely to remind the reader who is speaking to whom. In conversation, especially in person, we rarely use each other’s names (although we might in some cases, such as if we are angry, emotional or frustrated). When characters are on the telephone, addressing each other by name, at least to begin with, is standard, but using names constantly in face-to-face dialogue is distracting for the reader and unrealistic.

All of the Above

An example of some flawed dialogue that incorporates all of these no-nos might be:

“What are you doing, Ben?” Cassandra queried curiously, leaning over Ben for a closer look.

“I’m deactivating the power source, Cassandra,” Ben expounded patiently.

“Why, Ben?” Cassandra questioned.

“Why do you think, Cassandra,” Ben grimaced, as he poked a screwdriver into the mass of electrical wires. “If I don’t, it might go off and blow us all to smithereens. But it’s okay. You and I both know I’ve done this before during the Gulf War, although I am colour blind.”

“Ben, I hope you disconnected it from the grid first,” said Cassandra patronisingly.

“From the grid, Cassandra?” Ben ejaculated forcefully. [Yes, I know! Bad, huh?]

See how artificial and stilted this dialogue has become? There is way too much padding around it, which bogs the reader down. If you recognise some of this padding in your dialogue, it is time to revise.

For action sequences or fast-paced sections of your tale, try to streamline your dialogue as much as possible, keeping tags, attributions and actions to a minimum. Writing edgy, minimalist dialogue in small chunks—with brief descriptive or action elements in between to avoid dialogue going on for pages without referencing the setting (which is known as writing “talking heads”)—will pick up the pace and keep your readers invested in the action.

Whoops, wrong word

It is very easy to overlook a homonym used incorrectly or even a word that is similar to another but has a different meaning. Some of the most common mix-ups I encounter are:

Adverse (hostile or unfavourable) Averse (reluctant)

Affect (verb: to influence) Effect (mostly used as a noun, meaning a result or consequence, e.g. a side effect or a special effect. When used as a verb, it means to result in, e.g. to effect an escape.)

A lot (many or often) Alot (no such word!)

Allusion (an indirect reference) Illusion (a false impression or perception of reality)

Altogether (total) All together (many things close together)

Assure (promise) Ensure (make certain) Insure (take out an insurance premium on)

Breath (noun: inhalation or exhalation) Breathe (verb: the act of inhaling or exhaling)

Continual (recurring constantly) Continuous (never-ending or unceasing)

Dam (a manmade body of water) Damn (profanity)

Discrete (separate/distinct) Discreet (tactful or modest)

Every day (every day) Everyday (adjective: occurring every day or mundane, e.g. everyday clothes)

Fewer (refers to individual objects that can be counted) Less (refers to quantities, e.g.  Fewer people will mean less mess)

Imply (to signify, an action performed by a speaker or writer) Infer (to reason or conclude, an action performed by the listener or reader)

Its (pronoun: belonging to it) It’s (contraction of it is)

Lay (to place something somewhere) Lie (to recline or to fib)

Libel (written form of defamation) Liable (obligated)

Literally (100% true) Figuratively (involving a figure of speech such as a metaphor)

Loath (reluctant) Loathe (detest)

Loose (adjective or adverb: not tight) Lose (verb: misplace) I see this one used incorrectly a lot!

Stationary (adjective: not moving, still) Stationery (noun: writing paper)

Their (pronoun: belonging to them) They’re (contraction of they are) There (adverb: location)

On to (e.g. before I move on to the next point) Onto (preposition: we climbed onto the table)

Passed (past tense verb of pass: to have moved) Past (adjective: relating to a former time or place)

Principle (belief) Principal (adjective: most important; noun, authoritative person)

That (for defining clauses, e.g. words that cannot be omitted in a sentence) Which (for non-defining clauses that provide additional information)

Who (subject of a sentence, e.g. The boy who lived) Whom (object of a sentence, e.g. To whom should I direct my enquiry?)

Whose (interrogative pronoun, e.g. Whose book is that?) Who’s (contraction of who is)

For a more complete list, check out Alan Cooper’s list.

As I mentioned in Part I, these are basic errors and are easily fixed. Issues with plot, plausibility, pacing, and characterisation are more time-consuming to correct.

I hope you have found my guest posts useful as a quick introduction to some of the errors to watch out for when you self-edit. Going through your manuscript several times to check each of these things in isolation will help, as will reading your work aloud, using text-to-speech to listen to the computer read it back to you, reading passages backwards, and deconstructing sentences that sound a little “off” to your ear.

For more on self-editing and on identifying and correcting errors in grammar, punctuation, usage and structure, keep an eye on my blog. Thanks for reading and commenting, and many thanks to Dave for hosting me.

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Karin Cox is an Australian editor, poet and author and, like many women, is doing her best to be a modern Wonder Woman (minus the cape and the gold lasso). Trained as a professional editor, and with more than fourteen years in the trade publishing industry under her belt, she edits and writes in her “spare time” while being a fulltime mum to her infant daughter and to a black cat with the improbable name of “Ping Pong.”

***

And a big thank you to Karin for this excellent two-parter. If you are interested in checking out her work, she has self-published two titles. Cage Life is a collection of shorts available from Amazon US, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords, and Growth - a poetry collection – is also available from Amazon US, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. Karin also has a string of trade published titles (too many to list), and you can get more details on those here.

Out of all the things Karin covered – apart from loath/loathe which I can never get to stick, and a worrying tendency towards unintended double entendres which I seem to slip in (oops) to my MS – I think the most common error I make from the above is “talking heads” dialogue.

I’m quite averse to overly descriptive writing, and have quite a spare style, but each successive draft needs a little more setting and detail (as I tend to go too far with it, especially on my first run). I write dialogue much quicker than narrative, and, as I have the whole scene pictured in my head, I rarely notice when I fail to include the necessary minimum of detail/setting to “anchor” the conversation for the reader, and Karin’s red pen gets busy.

What about you? What’s your most common flub?

Karin has a unique perspective: she has considerable experience working for a trade publisher in Australia and is also a freelance editor.

On top of that, her own work (both fiction and non-fiction for children and adults, as well as poetry) has been published the traditional way and has been self-published; she really has seen all sides of the equation.

Karin is also my editor. I have first-hand experience of her impressive pleonasm-hunting skills as well as her uncanny ability to turn my sopa de letras into intelligible prose (no mean feat).

If you missed the first installment in this series from UK author and editor Harry Bingham – on the importance of editing and developing your own self-editing skills - that’s here. For the rest of you, here’s Karin:

Self-editing: back to basics, part I

Let me start off by stating that there is no such thing as self-editing to a publishable level (at least not without a team of skilled beta readers); I would say this even if my livelihood did not depend on editing. I scour my own text for errors before I submit it to my publisher, but I am still always surprised at what my in-house colleagues pick up when they read through my manuscripts. As much as writers attempt to edit their own work, and should for the purposes of enhancing their drafts, I firmly believe they are incapable of doing so as effectively as a professional editor because they lack the necessary objectivity to assess their own writing.

The human brain also employs all kind of tricks to convince writers that what they put down on the page is correct (if not Man Booker Prize material). Taht yuo cna raed tihs at lal is prcaticlaly a mriacle! But such is the power of the human brain. Read a whole paragraph of that and soon you’ll be able to wade through even the most atrocious, unedited drivel and make perfect sense of it. It is little wonder that most authors—even those who are competent self-editors at a draft level—miss a few transposed letters, misspelled words, homonyms, or misplaced modifiers. It’s all thanks to the human brain’s excellent ability to decode and process what the eyes see.

However, knowing that some Indies cannot afford to employ a professional editor, and that any self-editing you undertake will streamline the editorial process and vastly improve your writing, what follows are five of the most common editorial issues I find in manuscripts that cross my desk. Many professional Indies will scoff at this list, declaring it small fry—and much of it is—but you’d be surprised how often authors make these mistakes.

Wonderfully florid, flamboyant, descriptive and wordy verbiage

Some ambitious authors regularly find unnecessary cause to heartily and readily pepper their wordy prose with long-winded, superfluous, and exceedingly boring adjectives and adverbs, continually. See what I did there?

This kind of writing constitutes an adjective and adverb overload. Adjective overload is usually found in descriptive passages, and adverb overload in dialogue. When most of us write, we are relaying a scene we have visualized in our minds. As a result, we sometimes think that providing all of the rich detail we imagine will make the scene more vivid for the reader, who will feel almost as if they are watching a movie. Unfortunately, it rarely turns out that way.

Reading is a different exercise to watching a movie. Providing the reader’s brain with too much visual or sensory information too quickly can actually befuddle it. Rather than getting a clear picture of what is happening in a scene, the reader gets a fuzzy, out-of-focus mess. Because they’re not sure what they will need to recall later, readers will be trying hard to process all of that information, which distracts them from the real task at hand—comprehending. The brain just isn’t able to hold all of that visual detail in there while you get to the “verbs” (action), so it just switches off.

Take for instance:

The girl walked into the long, dim, stone-floored corridor lit only by the softly glowing beams of candles in carved pewter candlestick holders that lined the grey stone walls where richly embroidered tapestries danced in the slight draught. The candlelight flickered off her beautiful emerald-green, floor-length dress made out of Chinese silk flecked through with gold, which left one of her pale shoulders bare, revealing the small scar where she had been nicked by Zhung-ze’s katana as a small girl. At the end of the gloomy hall stood a shadowy assassin wearing an ominous black robe and holding a giant, heavy bronze battle-axe engraved with the curious symbols of the Wey Tu Mutc clan. (116 words)

Phew! There’s a lot going on in this scene, isn’t there? Short answer: not really. The only action is a girl with an interesting scar walking into a candlelit corridor with an assassin at the end—that’s it. There is a lot of good sensory information in there, but it is obscured by all of the padding and setting. It could be more effectively written as:

The girl’s green silk gown swished on the stone floor as she entered the corridor. Flickering light from candelabras lining the walls made her pale skin glisten, illuminating the small scar on her shoulder where Zhung-ze’s Katana had nicked her as a child. At the end of the corridor, the assassin’s black robes billowed in the draught. He lifted his heavy axe in anticipation. On the bronze weapon, the engraved symbols of the Wey Tu Mutc clan shone in the candlelight. (82 words)

Even with thirty-four words pruned off the original, I think you’ll agree that the second version provides a clearer visual image of the scene? Of course, the above passage is far from perfect, but it’s simply to illustrate my point. Ninety per cent of the manuscripts I get sent that are over 130,000 words are rife with adjective and adverb overload.

Some authors (such as Stephen King in On Writing) suggest ditching adverbs entirely and even go as far as insisting there is never any reason to use them. I disagree. Sometimes adverbs can add spice to your writing while allowing you to remain succinct. Take the following example:

“Because I love her,” Dan said dispassionately.

The therapist said nothing. Removing her glasses, she carefully wiped the lenses with a tissue while waiting for him to continue. When he did not, after several seconds she asked, “Really?”

There are three adverbs in this passage (dispassionately, carefully and really). I believe all of them have some role to play. If the author were to remove “dispassionately,” the reader might well assume Dan’s statement were true, which would remove the subtext of this passage. As it is, the adverb provides a clue that Dan’s words and his feelings are not in accordance. The therapist “carefully” wiping her lenses helps flesh out her character. Although this is the most dispensable adverb in this example, it underscores that she is a thorough, analytical person. She is not giving her glasses a cursory swipe with a tissue. [Incidentally, the glasses also provide metonymy here. They represent her clarity of purpose and foresight, her ability to peer more closely into Dan’s thoughts and feelings to see the truth about his life.] The final adverb here (really) demonstrates that she is aware Dan is not being truthful, even if he does not realise it. It could perhaps be replaced with “Do you?” But I think that “Do you?” would be slightly less accusatory. She is calling him on it, so “really” makes that more clear.

There is a way to recast this passage to remove all of these adverbs and still keep some undercurrents in the conversation between Dan and his shrink, but it would require more words. E.g.

“Because I love her,” Dan said, knowing he did not mean it.

The therapist said nothing. Removing her glasses, she wiped the lenses with a tissue, careful to cleanse them of even the smallest smear, while waiting for him to continue. When he did not, after several seconds she asked, “Do you?”

Some writers who have bought into the “Adverbs are bad M’kay” school of writing advice will prefer the second example; others will prefer the first. In defence of adverb haters, in many cases adverbs are used as to prop up weak nouns, especially when it comes to dialogue attribution. It is true they can often be removed to strengthen text. Following are some common culprits:

“Get out!” he said loudly. (Substitute “he shouted” or remove the attribution as the exclamation mark and context make it clear he is shouting.)

“I love you,” she said softly. (Substitute “she whispered”).

“You complete me,” she said honestly. (This adverb is best removed unless there is a specific reason for doubting her honesty in the first place, e.g. she is a compulsive liar.)

She ran swiftly toward him. (She sprinted, she bolted, she pelted, she tore)

He walked slowly. (He ambled, he loped, he strolled)

He smiled happily. (He beamed or he grinned).

Note: Take care not to use “he/she smiled” after dialogue, e.g. “Whatcha doing,” he smiled. No one is capable of “smiling” words. However, you can insert it as an action following dialogue by using a full stop and capital letter in place of a comma, e.g. “Whatcha doing?” He smiled. Persistently using dialogue tags that are impossible is the mark of the amateur.]

“I hate you,” she said spitefully. Now, I know I’m going to cop some flak for this, but in my own writing I would use “she spat” here. But … but … You said you can’t smile words, so how can you spit them? I can hear you flak-throwers thinking. My answer to that is: I’m sure all of us have been spat on accidentally at least once when someone we were chatting with was being over emphatic. Also, language doesn’t have to be literal all of the time. Another option might be: “I hate you,” she said, enunciating each word. Or, if you really want to push boundaries: “I. Hate. You.” She spat out each word.

A worthwhile exercise is to set aside one edit of your draft where you do nothing but go through your manuscript and pinpoint adjectives and adverbs. Assess whether each is necessary and identify the role it plays. If an adverb is not enhancing meaning, aiding characterisation or providing subtext, strike it out. Where an adjective follows a string of other adjectives (especially if you have three or more adjectives in a sentence) delete the weakest one.

Comma Calamities

Not knowing, where to put commas, some authors believe, that the best way to avoid seeming as if they don’t know, is, just to, put them in, entirely randomly. ßDo not do this! I’ve read a lot of comments on forums suggesting that commas are entirely subjective. The rules are: there are no rules. Right? Wrong!

While “rule” is too strong a word, there are conventions regarding comma use. Just thwacking a comma down whenever you pause for breath, or whenever you freeze up momentarily when tapping away at the keyboard, is not going to cut it. Some commas, however, are a matter of personal preference and are called “pausal” commas. Old-school grammarians mostly favour pausal commas; more modern grammarians tend to advocate using as few commas as necessary to achieve clarity. For some good examples of where NOT to put commas, check out my blog post Don’t Put a Comma in your Ear. For some examples of where commas are necessary, click here.

One regular error is the comma splice, which is also known as a run-on sentence. It occurs when a comma is incorrectly used to join two independent clauses in place of a coordinating conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, or so) or in place of an appropriate punctuation mark (such as a semi-colon, colon, or em dash). An example is: He ran to the bus, it was running late.

Because both of these clauses constitute short sentences—that is, they both have a subject (a noun or pronoun, in this case he and it) and a predicate (a verb form, in this case ran and running)—this is incorrect. This sentence could be correctly written as:

He ran to the bus. It was running late.

He ran to the bus; it was running late.

He ran to the bus: it was running late.

He ran to the bus—it was running late.

Or, perhaps best of all:

He ran to the bus, which was running late.

Any one of these is better than the original splice, although the first, second and last are the most standard.

Modifiers Gone Mad

Poor comma usage can also lead to another editorial bugbear: the misplaced modifier. Modifiers are usually adverbial or participial phrases that cause problems when they unintentionally modify something other than what the writer intended. Groucho Marx once quipped, “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.” The problem with Marx’s joke (or at least part of the problem!) is that the modifying phrase (in my pajamas) is positioned close to the object of this sentence (elephant) rather than to the subject (I), which is what it should be modifying. To make it correct, it would require recasting. E.g.

One morning, while/whilst still in my pajamas, I shot an elephant.

[I say while/whilst because it depends on which side of that debate you squat on. Old school is to use whilst; new school would be to go with while, which is now commonly used in both British and American English.]

Participial verb forms regularly create an insidious type of misplaced modifier known as a “dangling participle.” Participle verbs are -ing form verbs, e.g. Running, smiling, dancing, glancing. When a subject does not immediately follow a participle phrase at the start of a sentence, a dangling participle can occur. Take, for instance:

Glancing up at the clock, the photograph on the mantelpiece caught my eye.

The subject in this sentence is unintentionally the photograph, which is accidentally performing both of the actions—glancing and “catching” (in “caught”, the past participle of catch). To make this sentence correct, it would need to be reworded:

As I glanced up at the clock, the photograph on the mantelpiece caught my eye.

Or, Glancing up at the clock, I noticed the photograph on the mantelpiece.

You could also rewrite it as: Glancing up at the clock, my eye was caught by the photograph on the mantelpiece. But that sounds awkward because even though the subject is now “my eye” the photograph is still performing the action of the verb “caught.” You might also try: Glancing up at the clock, my eyes were drawn to the photograph on the mantelpiece. Or even just: I glanced up at the clock, but my eyes were drawn to the photograph on the mantelpiece.

The good thing about misplaced modifiers and dangling participles is that, once you have identified them, there are several easy fixes. Spotting them in the first place is usually the tricky part! For more on misplaced modifiers, visit this page.

Some adverbs also need careful consideration when it comes to their role as modifiers. Mostly, adverbs are freewheeling. They are the only words that can move around a sentence without throwing too much into disarray. Take:

The cat climbed quickly up the wall.

Quickly, the cat climbed up the wall.

The cat climbed up the wall quickly.

The cat quickly climbed up the wall.

We’ve no issues there; they all make perfect sense, although some are slightly more euphonious. But some adverbs “limit” or constrain the words they are close to. An example is the adverb “only,” which should be placed just before the word it modifies. For example:

Go to school only if you are well.

Not: Only go to school if you are well

The latter implies that if you are well, you should do nothing else but go to school.

Those are the first three things I notice in a new manuscript that hint an author is still learning the craft. Of course, there are many more, and Dave has been kind enough to let me waffle on about the other two at length on Friday this week, so tune in then to learn about some basic Dialogue Dilemmas and Wrong Word Whoopsies. In the meantime, keep on scribbling.

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Karin Cox is an Australian editor, poet and author and, like many women, is doing her best to be a modern Wonder Woman (minus the cape and the gold lasso). Trained as a professional editor, and with more than fourteen years in the trade publishing industry under her belt, she edits and writes in her “spare time” while being a fulltime mum to her infant daughter and to a black cat with the improbable name of “Ping Pong.”

***

A huge thanks to Karin for this, and I’m looking forward to the final installment on Friday. For those who can’t wait until then, Karin’s blog is here and you can find more information on her editing services here.

If you are interested in checking out her work, she has self-published two titles. Cage Life is a collection of shorts available from Amazon US, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords, and Growth - a poetry collection – is also available from Amazon US, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Karin also has a string of trade published titles (too many to list here, but you can see some of the covers above), and you can get more details on those here.

Australia, given its far-flung location, is a little ahead of us, but I’m sure Karin will be along to answer questions in the comments, once she has dispensed with the Australia Day tradition of eating Kangaroo Burgers and wrestling the Prime Minister.

Simon thought this would be good day to shine a spotlight on the work of LC Evans (author of We Interrupt This Date, one of Red Adept’s picks for 2010), and has got several of the big indie reviewers to review one of her titles today.

In addition, he invited all the authors he interviewed on IndieView over the last year to participate in a giveaway to benefit Linda’s family (who now have control of her KDP account).

The way it works is like this: if you buy any title by LC Evans today, you get one of our books for free. You will also be entered in a draw to win all 40 participating titles.

Full details on how to enter are here, and you can enter as many times as you like. You get to choose between work in all genres from Barbara Silkstone, Gary Marshall, Guido Henkel, Helen Hanson, JA Clement, Joseph Robert Lewis, Karen Cantwell, Katy Gilbert, LJ Sellers, Lexi Revellian, Maria Savva, SM Jonas, Scott Nicholson, Simon Royle, Steven Lake, Thea Atkinson, Tom North, Valmore Daniels, Vicki Tyley, Wanda Shapiro, Tony Dwiggins, and me.

Linda wrote chick-lit, romantic comedies, and stories about horses. But even if you don’t like any of that stuff, you can always gift a copy to someone who does, and get the title of your choice from the above for free (and get entered into the comp).

The editing/self-editing series will continue tomorrow, but Simon also asked us to post our reminisces of what has happened since he interviewed us, so here it goes:

The Power of Community

A lot has happened since Simon interviewed me on June 2^nd, last year. I had less than a month self-publishing under my belt at that point, but it’s fun to look back at that interview, and see how optimistic I was.

I think I was right to be, things have gone very well for me – better than I could have hoped, in fact – even if things took a slightly different course than I had imagined then.

Back in June, I thought I would have my debut novel out in a couple of months. In fact, I didn’t release A Storm Hits Valparaiso until December 22nd. It had already been “finished” for some time, and I thought I just wanted to give it one last read-through before foisting it on the world. But the final rewrite took several months longer than planned. November and December were completely crazy. Every spare second was spent polishing the final (final) draft of this book to get it out before the end of the year.

There’s nothing like a deadline to focus the mind, but in this case my deadline was completely arbitrary. I had first gotten the idea for this book back in January 2006 (then started writing it six months later), so I was desperate to publish it before the calendar ticked over to six years, and had to cut out all the simple pleasures in life we take for granted: meeting friends, leaving the house, eating, washing, sleeping.

Other things didn’t quite go as planned – but in a good way. Although I’m predominantly a fiction writer, my biggest seller has been my self-publishing guide Let’s Get Digital. The funny thing is, I really fell into that backwards. I remember the day I finally decided to self-publish (after lots of internal debate): April 3rd, 2011. The following day I wrote my first ever blog post, saying I would document the attempts of an unknown, unpublished writer trying to make his way in the self-publishing world. I think maybe ten people read that post, and I already knew nine of them!

Undaunted, I blogged about each step as I was doing it: editing, formatting, covers, marketing, the works. I shared my mistakes, and my failures, as well as my (minor) successes. I think at some point one of my regulars asked if I would throw all the steps together into a PDF at the end, and I thought that was a good idea. Then I thought: hey, I might as well publish it as a proper e-book. That might seem like a strange step for someone to take who had only been self-publishing for a few months – and I suppose it was strange – but at this point, the blog readership was really taking off (for reasons that are still something of a mystery).

I think all the information was already out there, but it was scattered across 100 different blogs and websites, and readers were grateful for me taking the time to parse all the good stuff, and lay it out in a series of simple steps. I think I was able to present the information that a beginner would need in the way they would understand it because I was a beginner!

Once I had gotten my head around the fact that I was releasing a real book with my name on the front (everything I had released up to then were shorts), I knew I had to do it properly. So, I consulted with my editor about the layout, and the information I would have to add to those early blog posts, which bits needed fleshing out, which had to be rewritten and so on. Sometimes I hear from writers who haven’t self-published yet, and one of their concerns is that they wouldn’t have their agent or editor to bounce ideas off. But my editor fulfills that role perfectly.

Anyway, I released the book in late July. Wanting to stay true to the original vision of making it free from my regular blog readers, I made the PDF a free download on my site. I also knew that the biggest criticism of the book was that I was still wet behind the ears, hadn’t really sold that many books yet, so why should anyone listen to me? I made sure everybody could try before they buy, and that nobody was duped: I addressed my inexperience in the opening paragraph. Even still, I remember getting a lot of heat when it was published (mostly from the arch-defenders of the status quo).

None of that mattered, of course, and the book was a huge success, selling far more than I ever thought possible – 1,400 copies in six months. And the reception has been great: it’s the top-rated book in its “genre” with over 50 five star reviews. Looking back, I see two things that were key to its success.

First, that free PDF (which many warned me not to do, saying it would cannibalize my sales) was downloaded so much on release day that it broke WordPress! I think it has been downloaded over 6,000 times now. Judging by the emails I receive, I think most people tried the free PDF first, then bought the Kindle version.

Second, I made a last minute decision to include a bunch of success stories at the back of the book. At the time, all anyone (outside of self-publishing) was talking about was Hocking, Konrath, and Locke, but I knew that “success” ran far deeper and wider than that. I got in touch with a whole load of self-publishers who had achieved some level of success in a variety of different genres. Honestly, I expected maybe 5 to agree to contribute. I had a little panic when I got 33 to agree, then realized that could work quite well. And it did, and for many people, that’s their favorite part of the book: hearing how all these guys started from nothing and built themselves an audience of thousands (and in some cases hundreds of thousands) of readers.

It still amazes me that all these guys took the time to write 800 words for my book – with only the vague promise of some kind of undefined exposure in return. And it’s not like these guys needed it – they were already dominating the charts. One example: I think Bob Mayer was selling 2,000 books a day when I contacted him. I’m sure he was being plagued with requests for media interviews, guest blogs, and so on. Even so, I think he was the first to respond a couple of hours later. And not only did he agree, he attached his contribution, already written!

But all my contributors were great, with many of them helping to promote the book on launch (and still doing so). That really helped the book take off.

That whole experience showed me the power of our little community, and the amazing generosity of spirit that exists among self-publishers. Everybody helps each other. The guys at the top help the little guys just starting out. And it happens every day. I don’t know of another profession where such esprit de corps exists.

I didn’t know Linda very well – our paths had never crossed – although I remember seeing her book We Interrupt This Date and thinking: that’s a very smart title. Even so, when I heard of her tragic passing, I was saddened. We had lost a member of our community. I was heartened to hear that Simon was planning a tribute, and wanted to help whatever way I could. Because that’s what community is about.

One of the more common criticisms self-publishers receive is with regard to editing (or proofing, which is part of the editorial process).

Sometimes the criticisms are misplaced, with readers confusing British English with a typo, or a stylistic choice (like whether to use the Oxford comma) with a rule. But oftentimes,  readers’ comments are on the mark.

Equally often, readers find flaws with the story that could have been addressed with a more rigorous edit. For example, if your readers felt nothing when a character died, perhaps you should have done more to establish an emotional connection. An editor could have pointed this out in advance, and suggested ways to resolve it.

This week, I have a series of guest posts from experienced editors who are accomplished authors themselves. First up is Harry Bingham:

Edit Like A Pro

David likes to quote Seth Godin’s maxim that it’s easier to design marketing into a product than to spend money on advertising a wrongly designed product after launch. Of course he’s right. How could he not be?

For writers, that mostly means that you yourself need to care enough about your book. You need to be a little obsessive, a tad perfectionist. If you haven’t yet managed to annoy your partner with the depth of your absorption in your book, then may I suggest you haven’t yet done enough work? Hemingway once told an interviewer that he had re-written the final page of A Farewell to Arms 39 times before he was satisfied. Oh, said the interviewer, was there some technical problem which caused you difficulty? Yes, said the Great Man, getting the words right. You need to be like that, and for the same reason.

On the other hand, you need to employ the right suite of professionals too. My forthcoming novel, which is being conventionally published, will have had several reads from my literary agent, a 6000 word editorial report from my editor at Orion, some further comments from my editor in the US, a professional copy-edit, my own revision of that copyedit, and then very careful proofreading, probably by two sets of eyes, as well as my own.

That’s a level of attentiveness to the manuscript which you couldn’t buy for less than, I’d guess, £3,000 (around $4,500). Perhaps the last proof-reading could be trimmed. Maybe one or two of those reads by my agent. But mostly, good quality publishing produces good quality books via a kind of obsessive perfectionism of its own.

Any self-publishing author, however, needs to strike a pragmatic balance between excellence and cost. If you’re a genius marketer (think John Locke), you can get away with a so-so product. (Indeed, even Locke doesn’t rate his authorial skills particularly highly.) If you’re a genius author, you can probably get away with so-so editing. But most of us aren’t in either of those categories. We need to be a pretty damn good writer for anyone to want to read our stuff. You’ll need to be a pretty damn good salesperson to get your work noticed in the deluge. But those things just buy you an entry ticket. They get you in the game. They’re not enough to transform your sales prospects.

For almost everyone, then, some kind of paid external editorial work will be essential. The questions is how do you approach that? And how much should you be looking to pay? Before I go on, I should also make it clear that, although I am a mostly full-time author, I do also help run The Writers’ Workshop, a company which offers everything from writing courses to editorial services. So although I have an expertise in these areas, I’m also potentially biased. You need to remember that as you read on.

First, I think any serious self-pub author needs a full editorial critique of their work. Every pro author gets that – indeed, as noted above, my work was looked at in detail by three editorial professionals (two editors and my agent). I don’t think you should need three rounds of assessment. But I do think you need one warts-and-all critique. That needs to be done by a pro – which means any professional novelist or any professional commissioning editor. English teachers don’t count. Academics don’t count. People who have written academic, business or professional texts don’t count. I know this because I’ve seen crits from all sorts, and the only ones which have ever impressed me are by authors or by editors. The rest are often worthless. (If you’re lucky: bad editorial advice will make a book worse, not better.)

Second, you need a copy-edit. That can’t be one and the same thing as the structural editorial critique, because they look at different things and require different skills. More than that, they pull in different directions. The editorial critique is all about pulling the manuscript apart. It’s about finding weaknesses in the manuscript and directing the author to correct them. A good author will do just that. Copyediting is the opposite. It assumes a settled manuscript and its aim is simply to bed the manuscript down even further. To give it its final form.

Depending on the length of your manuscript, the first type of critique will cost you around £400-500 (roughly $600-800). The copyedit about the same.

But what else? At the Writers’ Workshop, we often seen writers take a writing course, then come to us with a first draft manuscript for review, then some time later, they’re back again, then sometimes they come even a third time. The cost of all this can run into thousands of pounds.

Now, I’m not against people spending loads of money with us. Indeed, I rather like it. But does it make sense?

On the whole, I’ve realised that people sometimes use our editorial services as a way to build their own self-editing skills. Now that, in principle, makes sense. The more alive your own self-editing impulse, the better your work will be. The better your work is when you bring it to an external editor, the more value you’ll get from that editor. But if learning that essential editorial skill is what you’re after, then why not get there direct?

We run a fair few writing courses – everything from how to write a novel through to screenwriting – but the course which gives us our most impassioned positive feedback is our self-editing one. We get two author-editors to run this together and they teach writers how to look at their own novels. How to identify plot holes. How to test prose for soundness, characters for lifelikeness, everything for vibrancy. The actual week-to-week topics are almost exactly the same as those on our basic ‘How to Write a Novel’ course, but the approach is different. Because we’re dealing with people who have written a book and are now wrestling it into shape, their approach is different. We’ve had people tell us that the course has been transformative. Literally: that it’s taken them from one kind of writer (a stumbling amateur) to another (an emerging pro).

Now I don’t want to be too salesy about this. There are probably other good self-editing courses out there. You don’t have to buy them from the Writers’ Workshop. Indeed, you can go a long way just by recognising the issue, buying textbooks, reading carefully, and so on.

But the point remains. What do you need to make sure that your product has that Seth Godinish quality baked in from conception? I think you need three things, not two. You need an external editor. You need a good quality copyeditor. And you need a highly attuned self-editing faculty of your own. The more you have of number three, the less critical will be your reliance on numbers one and two.

As Hemingway hinted, the basic challenge is the same for every writer. Always has been, always will be. Getting the words right.

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Harry Bingham is a bestselling author of fiction and non-fiction. He also runs the Writers’ Workshop which offers a range of writing courses including a How to Write a Novel course.

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Thanks to Harry for kicking off the week. I’m sure his post will generate a good discussion.

Personally, I think self-publishers can be stronger than large publishers in a lot of areas: speed-to-market, formatting, marketing to readers, pricing, and covers (I often see books from large publishers with beautiful covers for print that don’t translate well to e-books), as well as creative thinking in terms of innovation and promotion.

However, I think we have some catching up to do on the editorial side. I see some self-publishers boasting that they only paid $200 for editing. They may well have gone through a rigorous editorial process in the hands of a competent, experienced professional for that price, but I seriously doubt it.

We don’t have to replicate the traditional editorial process exactly, and often some of the stages can be folded into each other as many freelance editors are capable of wearing several hats. For example, with my last release, my editor provided developmental (content) advice before the final draft, then after that was written we went through a couple of rounds of copy and line editing before I had it proofed. All of that took place well after I had cycled through several drafts, and several beta readers.

I haven’t used the services of The Writers’ Workshop but I have heard great things from those who have. I attended a conference they organized in 2010, and the workshops (some of which were taught by their editors) were of the highest quality and I learned a huge amount (not least that my novel needed another rewrite).

I think Harry made a very important point: developing your own self-editing skills will cut down on the amount you need to spend on professional help, and improve your writing.

Next up in this series is a two-part post from my own long-suffering editor on the common mistakes that writers make, and how they can learn to avoid them.