Money, Money, Money Wednesday, Feb 18 2009

When you live in a capitalist society, it’s hard sometimes to appreciate the value of things that don’t come with a price tag.  But if you’re willing to put dollars and cents aside for a moment, here are some things you can do:

Write every day—even though it doesn’t earn you a dime.

Finish the draft of a novel, a screenplay, a poetry collection, an article or essay.

Take you Starbucks money for a week and make five copies of your manuscript to hand out to friends.

Make five more to hand out to strangers. 

Congratulate yourself: you’re now a published author!

Take the feedback you get and revise your draft to make it stronger. 

Write a children’s book, get your artistic neighbor to illustrate it (the one who also understands the value of willing to work for free), call the librarian at your local elementary school, and make an appointment to come in and read your book out loud to the kids.

Congratulations!  You just gave your first reading.

Take your vacation money and instead of going away for a week, stay home and publish your book through a print-on-demand service.  Give copies away to six of your friends.  When they’re done reading it, invite them over for wine and cheese.

Congratulations!  You’ve just hosted your first book party.

Tell your friends to list your book on Goodreads.

Congratulations!  You just got your first reviews.

When the summer comes, pack the kids in the back of the car and drive them to Florida/Arizona/North Dakota to see that aunt/cousin/college roommate you’ve been meaning to get around to visit for years.  While you’re there, ask your aunt/cousin/college roommate to hold a barbecue so that you can meet all of her friends.  While you’re all together eating chicken and ribs, tell them about your book.

Congratulations!  You just gave your first book talk.

Be sure to have a few copies in the trunk of your car to sell. . .just in case. 

Congratulations!  You just made your first sales.

Well, we never said money didn’t matter—just that it shouldn’t stop you from doing the things you want to do.

When you get back home, start on a new book.  Congratulate yourself!  You’re part of a new grassroots movement made up of writers who have decided to take their destiny into their own hands and bring their work to audiences on their own.

There are people out there waiting to read what you have written.  All you have to do is find them.  So put your money where your mouth is.  Get your work out there.  You know that you want to.  What are you waiting for? 

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Double double, toil and trouble Thursday, Feb 12 2009

Double, double toil and trouble;/ Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

First the trouble.

 According to yesterday’s New York Times, HarperCollins has just announced the closing of Collins.  In the last six months of 2008, Harper Collins saw a staggering 75% loss in its income, leading to lay-offs among editors, sales, marketing, and publicity staff–and now the closing of the entire Collins division, despite the fact that it has several blockbusters on its list.  HarperCollins joins a long list of publishing houses that have had lay-offs in recent months, including:

Random House

Simon & Schuster

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

St. Martin’s Press

Meanwhile, bookstores continue to struggle, with sales down in double-digits in recent months, and this past holiday season the worst in memory.  The decline of commercial publishing, which has begun in recent years to look like a train wreck in slow motion, has accelerated in our worsening economy.  Close your eyes.  It’s painful to see.

But all is not lost.

Now for the bubble.

Despite the bad news, there is one sector in the publishing world that has shown growth in recent months: self-publishing.  Author Solutions alone grew by 10% in 2008.  By all accounts, readership is up, but the way readers are getting their books—and the way writers are getting them to them—has changed. 

Here’s how Time Magazine put it in their recent article on “Books Unbound”: “[M]ore books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, [are] circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City’s entrenched publishing culture.” 

The result?  Instead of being handed down to readers by a self-selected priesthood of editors from above, books are bubbling up from below, in a delightful, chaotic stew, everything from the best new literary fiction to fan fiction and Cell Phone novels—which have reached the bestselling lists in Japan.

Hang on to your hats.  The new world is here, and the only question left is: How will you fit into it?

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No Longer a Dirty Word Monday, Feb 2 2009

It’s official.  Self-publishing.  It’s no longer a dirty word.  Don’t believe me?  Read about it in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28selfpub.html?em

The judgment comes from no less a publishing luminary than Louise Burke, publisher of Pocket Books.  Self-publishing, she says, “is no longer a dirty word.”

Now I don’t want to brag that here, at Screw Iowa!, we’ve been ahead of the curve, but let’s just say we’re firmly a part of it.  The world is changing.  Traditional publishing models no longer satisfy readers or writers.  Instead, more and more authors are deciding to go it alone, either by using existing print-on-demand services or by creating entirely new presses. 

Granted, neither route is likely to make you rich or famous.  According to the Times, the average number of copies sold by print-on-demand services is only 150 copies.  If you measure your book against blockbusters that reach millions of readers, 150 copies can seem like a paltry number.  On the other hand, in comparison to the zero readers your book will have if you leave it unpublished, sitting in a box in your garage or under your bed, 150 is huge.

Think about it for a minute.  If you put your book into print, there is every reason to expect that over one hundred people will read it.  Not only that, but since you will be marketing it on your own, the chances are that you will be in contact with most—if not all—of those readers.  You will hear back from a good number of them, as they tell you what they thought of your book and what it meant to them, and you will have the pleasure of watching your audience grow.

What more could a writer ask for?

From where we sit, self-publishing is one grassroots movements that is bound to keep growing, because of its ability to be both personally and socially transformational.  A dirty word?  We never thought so.  It’s nice to see the rest of the world take note.

 

In memory of John Updike.  You set the bar so high, we knew we would never reach it, but we were bound to become better just by trying.  You will be sorely missed.

 

 

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