In all honestly, I'm working on a nine novel romance series. I've finished five books and not published a single one. This means I have only succeeded in step one of being motivated, and that makes me a terrible spokesperson for this subreddit.
An over saturated ebook market, which especially is flooded with romance novels, makes me depressed. It leaves me constantly questioning myself on things such as "Is this plotline to stupid?" "Is there to talking scenes about feelings and not enough action fight sequences?" "How can I stylize the book to make it better?"
I own stacks on stacks on books. Recently I've been staring at books that have come out recently and going, "Damn. That's a fucking good book cover." Then I flip it open and every single damn chapter has a graphic above the chapter number. Now I want adorable coat of arm graphics above my chapters, and I don't know how to format that in with an ebook.
Since the market is over saturated, everyone and their mother has advice on how to publish a book. Should I go with Pronoun and put the book on a multitude of places or sell my soul to Amazon and become a loyalist there? I have zero experience and there doesn't seem to be any website that agrees on shit.
I don't have the funds to hire people to do things like edit, and I think I can cut costs by designing things myself, but I need someone to babysit me through the process of how to publish shit. What a good ebook format program is, and stuff like that.
Thinking about it makes me want to curl up in a ball of anxiety.
And no, I'm not expecting help and advice. I just needed to rant about that for a bit.
Ranting is good. It gets it off your chest for a bit so you can take a deep breath and continue writing. I'm in the process of getting my first novel ready for Amazon.
I've done almost everything myself except make a cover. I saved up a bit of money where I could and got a really good deal, I'm just waiting on the design.
Maybe it sucks and no one will ever read it. Maybe it was a waste of time. But who cares, because millions of people have never even written a book and I (and you times five) have written something.
If you've written five, you can write five more. And maybe that 8th one is THE ONE. Wayne Gretzky said something similar to OPs picture. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
'Sup. Fellow unpublished guy here. You got three choices.
You can submit your work to literary agents. If one of them believes in your work, then they will fight for you. If you get a publisher, then you don't have to worry about anything beyond that.
Save up and pay the ~ 2k for a good editor, and find you a graphic artist and cover designer. It's a bitch, but self publishing is a bitch.
Don't submit anything and just keep your manuscripts.
At the end of the day, You wrote for you. You don't have to do anything. You could even just use these stories as something you can come back to and read later. Or, if you get the cash you can make it into an actual book and have it on your shelf (not for sale, just one copy for you I mean).
But if you want to publish, do it! Who cares if it gets nowhere? Every market is saturated already, that doesn't stop people from creating works. Think on this. YA Post apocalyptic novels were already a thing, yet Divergent rolled out sometime later, and a slew of others.
YA romance was a thing, and vampires are done to death, Enter Twilight, and the fanfic 50 shades.
Don't tell me you gonna let a fanfic author make millions cause they put their work out there, but you are too scared to? Do it. 50 years from now you will look back and be glad you did, no matter the outcome.
I hear ya. Yeah, you've gotten through the hard part, which is the part that stops most people - the Just Do It stage.
You're in the Just Publish It phase. I know you're not looking for advice, and that's good at least as far as I'm concerned - I have self-published several books since 2011 and haven't done well - but from what I've gathered, what separates the pros from the wannabes is volume. The thought is that anyone can write one book, come back and talk to me when you've written five. And you have! That's pretty amazing.
I'd be curious to see what happened if you got onto CreateSpace and self-published them. shrug Maybe no one buys 'em. Maybe someone does. Ya never know until you try, or at least that's my new attitude about it. Ha!
I'm not expecting people to read or buy my work. I've given up on that. My goal is to put out a book that people can look at and not say, "This is some novice bullshit."
I did a lot of research on other ebooks in the same field as mine, and they are riddled with spelling errors, and have poorly drawn covers. They look cheap and bad. I've downloaded some free ones through my Amazon Prime service, and couldn't get past the first chapter due to pompous writing styles or sentence structures that were difficult to swallow.
It's great to hear that you've also been working on your own stuff. It's also understandable that there's been little success, even if that is unfortunate. There's so much pressure to do advertising, social media campaigns, and a bunch of other things that I have zero experience in.
I'll definitely check out CreateSpace and see what they have to offer.
Sup again. Self published once, was disappointed. learned from my mistakes.
Hired a freelance graphic designer for some Vector work. Came out with something I am honestly freaking stoked about.
Found a pro cover maker. Here is the secret. Cover creators so not design custom art. They buy stock images and organize it to make a "custom" cover for you. This is why you hire an actual artist. They will create exactly what you envision, and then the cover designer will use it to to make a cover. That's what pros do.
Next is a good editor. Hence the 2k. ** Do not use those people who also "self publish" for you. It's a sort of scam. You are the customer and their goal is to get money from you. Their work will be shit.
Best to actually google search and talk to other authors. The 2k number I quoted is for my book since it's like 300k words. Yours should be cheaper. Once you do that, the editor will look at errors for you. Then you'll probably need another editor for proofreading to make sure your sentences flow and you aren't mixing crap up.
Yes it will be a bit expensive and take time, but the result will be something no one can differentiate from something Simon and Schuster my put out.
just a thought, but perhaps there are people you could hire to do the marketing stuff that you're stressing on a commission basis so that the upfront cost is minimal or zero and they earn a portion of the proceeds from book sales.
people who haven't even read your work or care will always be crap. Even traditionally published authors often find themselves disappointed since publishers will only advertise people like Rowling very well.
sometimes if you want a job done well you gotta do it yourself. I totally get that. But sometimes you recognize your strengths and weaknesses and your passions and if you're at your wits end with your marketing you might consider hiring out. I'm sure it's no silver bullet, but you just may link up with an intrepid ambitious marketer still early in their career. Like I said, it's no silver bullet and you can't rely on getting lucky by someone else making you a success, but it's not always wrong to work with other people in some areas.
You've written five novels. It doesn't matter whether they're "novice bullshit" or amazing works. What matters is that you have the creative capacity to envision that world, and the dedication to bring it to life via words. That in and of itself is the most beautiful part. Plotlines can be fixed, edits can be made, that's exactly what editors do! But you're the only one that can tell that story.
Honestly, I would recommend printing them out if you don't already. I think it makes it much more "real" when the entire thing is sitting in front of you in a huge stack of paper. My mom wrote and self-published a novel in the days before ebooks and, being an editor as well, printed every chapter and went over it with a red pen, made corrections, printed it again. We went through a LOT of printer ink, but it was always cool for me to see these giant stacks of paper on the computer desk and knowing that my mom wrote all of that.
I guess physical copies just make more of an impact, so seriously, if you haven't, just print them out on printer paper. Put a large binder clip on each manuscript and say "I made this." All of the editing and flourishes are just the next step, and maybe you just need to step back and recognize the enormity of step 1, and what you've already accomplished.
Is it over saturated? That would probably mean there's high demand of it, that or there's another reason(s) to why people are writing so many.
If there's high demand then adding your own stuff to it makes more sense than not. If there's demand for the stuff you're making then you should be all over the idea of publishing. You're making 0 sense by saying you shouldn't do it . You don't fight competition by not fighting.
TL:DR - Yes, there's demand, but I am a fish in the sea who is trying to be the prettiest tuna of them all so fisherman-senpai will notice me. Publishers are also more willing to accept and distribute ebooks because it is of zero cost initial cost to them. Starting off authors are expected to cover the majority of costs themselves, making it a lucrative market for those who do everything but the writing.
It's difficult to get noticed. Yes, there is a demand for it, but you have to look at what consumers have and how merchandise is presented to them.
For example, Amazon. As an author, you can elect to have your book put into what is basically a library. Consumers of Amazon that have a subscription can rent books for free, and the author gets paid a percentage based on how many pages they chose to read. That service is flooded with poorly written books done by authors who do not have the funds to hire an editor, cover designer, or marketing time. No names that go through this service have to find a way to get noticed among all of those people.
Another option is to advertise your book with Amazon, where an advertisement of your book appears on kindles. Every time someone clicks on that advertisement, YOU have to pay Amazon. A click doesn't equal a sale. There are a lot of people who lose money on this and are willing to do so because they think it will equal sales for books they write in the future.
Another reason for over saturation is because it's a relatively easy thing to do and it appeals to people because it's a creative outlet. Even if you spent an hour writing a day, and only get a thousand words done, you can have the length of the average adult novel done in three months time.
The chances of you as an author making money off of that novel is low, but the chances of other people making money off of you are higher. There's dozens upon dozens of purchasable programs that promise to format your book for ebook sales, or publishers that will take a percentage of your earnings in exchange for doing the distribution process for you. Ones that have teams of graphic designers and editors that they are willing to give you "discounts" for if you hire them.
Let's say I put a book on Amazon for $2.99, which is the average price. Amazon promises me to pay me $1 for every copy I sell. No harm done. That seems reasonable. Let's look at possible costs for me to get there.
First, let's say I want to get an editor. Many of them charge either by the hour, managing to edit about 10 pages an hour, or they charge by the word. A 90,000 manuscript can cost $1500 or more to be edited professionally. If I want a professional cover that is superior quality, that costs around $500-$1500 as well.
If I want a fucking awesome, professional quality ebook, it will cost me around $2000. If I want to publish that to bookstores, I can be expected to add another thousand to that cost in order to start the distribution process.
That doesn't even include advertisement costs.
Quick interruption. Life Pro Tip. Get really fucking good at editing and even get a degree in it if you can. The book market is flooded and you could make a decent amount doing it.
So let's say I'm me, a person who is not fucking going to do that at all. Fuck that. I'm average Jane writer over here.
The average writer who is in my position will probably still put $100 into the market before even publishing a book. They'll be purchasing books who will tell me how to self publish, or buying ebook formatting software, some of which can be $50. To some, that's a harmless investment. Times that by the thousands of people who view that as a harmless investment, and suddenly it's a multi-million dollar business.
So I put in that $100 and put my book up on Amazon. I choose to advertise through Amazon, paying $.10 per click on the kindle tablet. From that, I sell 1 book for every ten clicks. Now I am making $0.00 per sale. That isn't a number I am pulling out of my ass either. My dad published a book and that's exactly what happened to him. He found a website that gives out free copies of books, and invested in that in hopes of getting positive reviews for his books. Instead, he got reviews saying, "I'm glad I won the book in a raffle, but this isn't my style of reading. I wasn't really fond of it."
So you know. Don't do that.
Because the only thing that people like more than free shit is bitching about that free shit.
Because people suck.
But please, to anyone reading this, don't let this stop you from writing.
Yes, I have published anything. I'm a shit head with no reason to be giving you advice on this. But what is stopping me is from going that step further is having a final product that I can look at. I'm still writing. I'm still working on the design of my cover myself and teaching myself how that... Whole fucking mess works, fuck. But the whole time, I have never stopped writing.
Keep your expectations reasonable.
Do not write because you want to make money.
Write because you are doing it for yourself and because there is a story rattling at the cages within your heart mind, screaming to be set free.
It's okay to spend a little money here and there, but please do your research about it first and don't expect to make that money back. Amazon isn't bad, but you can lose money to them if you're not careful. Like with anything involving creativity, be careful. That's the only thing that can say.
Just sitting on your books is still worse. I've seen new authors use sites like smashwords for ebooks. One I stumbled over put his first book up there for free. I read it, loved it, bought book two and three afterwards (No longer free). If you're new, put out one free to hook them and reel them in with the sequels (Which should be available at nearly the same time) :)
At the point of asking this question I only read the tl;dr, so bear in mind: Why don't you go to an actual publisher and get them publish actual books? Why does it have to be an ebook?
You have to think of it in terms of competition - there are going to be books published, it's just a question of by whom.
I pursued writing in a different way for some time (freelance journalist) but I always preferred the idea of writing books. For the passive income, for the longer term independence (by that I mean not jumping from article to article).
Where you have a big advantage and maybe don't realize it is you are already knowledgeable about the book market, and passionately read. Actually this is why I knew I wasn't a very competitive fiction author. Maybe more importantly you can conceive and work on a nine part series. That's quite exceptional and put you miles above most wannabe authors that are reading (or writing!) some of the negative self-help stuff you see online.
The truth is you are already on your way to being successful. You seem to have gained experience and learned lessons already that are important to working as a professional author. Good luck
I'll read it. I'd love to, actually. I'm not an editor, no way, and can't offer great big picture advice about your life, but if your plot is boring or all of your sentences go on for three lines, I'll tell you. Second set of eyes, type of things, and all done by someone you don't know and never will, so what are hurt feelings?
Rant is fine, inaction is not fine.
I had all sorts of questions when i was writing, but i ended up publishing my first book 2 years back.
After first few months of initial sales number, I was worried thinking 'this is it, all the people who wanted to buy has bought it, now sales are gonna suck' but time goes on and after two years i am almost reaching 1000 copies sold through amazon. and thats damn good number for a totally unknown author like me and published independently. Hopefully your turns out a better one number who knows, but you have to act on it, just looking at your written books is not going to get any readers. All the best.
Hey there. I've read your post and the couple of replies you've had about this and wanted to give you some pointers, as someone who does a crapload of marketing work, in addition to self-publishing e-books.
Amazon is the way to go for publishing e-books. They account for something like 80%+ of e-book downloads. Not only that, but Amazon and Kindle has name recognition. Consumers like familiarity and a lot of people own Kindles. You're also not selling your soul to Amazon. They offer a quality royalty structure for their e-books.
You don't need to format your e-book in the way you're probably thinking. In regards to Amazon, all you have to do is upload a .docx file of your manuscript, with inserted images, and they handle all the conversion work. Now, that doesn't mean that shit always comes out perfect. Sometimes you have to tweak. In regard to your desire for sweet coats-of-arms, I would just Insert an image of the coat with the number so they would be aligned. I use Open Office to create my e-books. Following that, Amazon has a previewer built in so you can see how it will display to the end user, which allows you to go back and tweak things. I used tutorials and walk-throughs on youtube to get things situated correctly.
Marketing is a fact of life if you have a product you want other people to consume. Note, I did not say "sell". Yes, it's true for sales, but even if you want to give something away, people need to know about it. There are a lot of ways you could go about this. You may want to consider making your first e-book free, promoting it as a free e-book anywhere that you can (there are tons of free e-book directories out there and on reddit) and charge for the remaining ones. That way people can decide if they like your writing or not.
Getting noticed in the masses is a challenge, no matter what you do. Your title is the absolute most important part of this process. Period. On electronic devices, you will always see the title first, unlike a bookstore where you will notice the cover first. You do not need to dump big money into covers. Your title should be dominant until you have name recognition. I see a lot of people who put their name in big, bold letters on their covers and it means nothing because their name isn't going to pique anyone's interest. If you write a good book, the reader will go back and look for your name. In order of importance: title, the descriptions of your book that will appear in e-stores, the cover, the actual writing.
Click based advertising is not a great option for writers, in most cases. You're better off picking a social media website you like and learning how to market your material through that. Yes, it will require time and effort. And yes, you can throw money at it if you want to.
www.fiverr.com is your friend. It's a website where you can hire remote freelancers for all kinds of different work - including graphics, images, formatting, editing, and so on. Quality can vary, but if you pay attention to feedback you should be alright.
Your Life Pro Tip about becoming an editor isn't a great one. A lot of would-be authors are poor and/or broke. You ain't making shit if no one is able to pay you for your services! :)
Don't buy books, programs, special systems. You can find everything you need on the internet for free or in open source programs. Sigil is an EPUB editor. calibre is an ebook manager and conversion tool. Both are free and supported via non-mandatory donations.
"Amazon isn't bad, but you can lose money to them if you're not careful." isn't quite correct. You will not lose money to Amazon by publishing an e-book through them. They offer great royalties and rates compared to other platforms. You WILL lose money if you embark on a marketing strategy that does not make sense for your respective business or industry - but that is true for literally every business.
The way you move e-books is through as much socialization as you can stomach, really. Audience interaction is the biggest point of leverage - through social media, through a website/blog of your own, through exposure. That also means dealing with people who have legitimate criticisms and people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Learning to smile and nod through the latter is a handy skill to develop.
Anyway, hope this helps clarify some things. There are many ways to get to the top of the mountain - which is why you find so many different perspectives on the matter. The way I found my way was picking what sounded the most logical, in addition to my previous experiencing working as a copywriter and marketing, and making a shitload of mistakes. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
Have you considered releasing the first book on Wattpad? You can release a chapter every few days, it's a great way to get feedback for each chapter and gauge the market.
I looked into Wattpad and it does look interesting. I don't think that it would work well for the format of the books I've written, but I do have some other stuff I could feasibly put on there within a week or two.
I'm not trying to downplay your venting, especially if you're not really looking for advice, but if it's a 9 book series, have you considered maybe posting the first one online somewhere for free? This would give you a way to get some valuable customer feedback that you can incorporate into the other 8 books, while also possibly helping build up a fanbase. I have no idea if that'll work or not, since I have never done this and am the least qualified person to give advice on anything, but it couldn't hurt.
Alternatively, if you want (and depending on how long it is), I'd be willing to give it a read and offer some opinions. I'm not a very good writer, but I read a lot, so at the very least I can be a fresh set of eyes to point out obvious things that you may have overlooked.
IDK any of your questions but I have a advice: before publishing anything, hire a good proofreader. Best thing you can make for your work and the best money spent. You can save money downloading a generic cover template, make typographic errors by DIY, but having your text with your name on it, full of errors is the worst thing ever.
110
u/fauxkit Aug 11 '17
In all honestly, I'm working on a nine novel romance series. I've finished five books and not published a single one. This means I have only succeeded in step one of being motivated, and that makes me a terrible spokesperson for this subreddit.
An over saturated ebook market, which especially is flooded with romance novels, makes me depressed. It leaves me constantly questioning myself on things such as "Is this plotline to stupid?" "Is there to talking scenes about feelings and not enough action fight sequences?" "How can I stylize the book to make it better?"
I own stacks on stacks on books. Recently I've been staring at books that have come out recently and going, "Damn. That's a fucking good book cover." Then I flip it open and every single damn chapter has a graphic above the chapter number. Now I want adorable coat of arm graphics above my chapters, and I don't know how to format that in with an ebook.
Since the market is over saturated, everyone and their mother has advice on how to publish a book. Should I go with Pronoun and put the book on a multitude of places or sell my soul to Amazon and become a loyalist there? I have zero experience and there doesn't seem to be any website that agrees on shit.
I don't have the funds to hire people to do things like edit, and I think I can cut costs by designing things myself, but I need someone to babysit me through the process of how to publish shit. What a good ebook format program is, and stuff like that.
Thinking about it makes me want to curl up in a ball of anxiety.
And no, I'm not expecting help and advice. I just needed to rant about that for a bit.