Here is what I hope will be a growing list of people and organizations to contact about getting a review for your small press book. Feel free to post or send me your ideas — I’ll be happy to add them to the list!
Well, VT has a functional website again. It’s still a little buggy, and we’re still missing a ton of content, but at least we don’t have a static “under construction” message for a website anymore.
Some of our book pages don’t show all the formats available… and lots of our 2010 releases are missing totally. I’ve managed to repost all of our press releases, and I’ve posted two author bios, but none of the events are showing, and I have dozens of author appearances and news to repost. Our newsletter program needs to be set up from scratch, and oh yeah, I’m about 3 books behind in our publication schedule.
This is starting out to be one heckuva year. At least the Mariners are looking good… Read more »
OMG.
That’s all I can think right now. OMG.
Our website is dead. Finito. End of life. Sigh.
It appears that someone with too much time on his hands hacked the website and deleted our database. But that’s okay, because we had a backup system installed, and we have a fairly current backup of the database. Whew!
The only problem is, the backup is corrupt. Read more »
Let a woman in your life,
And patience hasn’t got a chance,
She will beg you for advice,
Your reply will be concise,
She will listen very nicely
and then go out and do precisely
What she wants — Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady
I was reminded today of the Writer’s Workshop I did for Orycon. One of the authors had written a fairly interesting fantasy piece, and aside from the usual “show don’t tell” advice, I mentioned that I thought he might want to revisit the beginning, because it was a little slow. In fact, it didn’t start to get interesting until page 11 for me, and if I hadn’t promised to read through the whole thing and mark it up for the workshop, I would have put it down after about page 2.
The other two commentators in the workshop expressed the same opinion (and I was not the first to go, so they were by no means following my lead). So, here we have an unpublished author who pays a fee to get his “manuscript in progress” professionally critiqued, and all three reviewers comment that he should probably rewrite the beginning to make it more engaging.
Naturally, you would expect that since he paid for this session, he would be taking notes, asking questions, gathering as much feedback as possible so that he could incorporate the suggestions into his manuscript and get it ready for submission. Instead, he told us all, very politely, that he had already tried it that way and it didn’t work out, so he really needed to leave it exactly like it was, thank you very much.
So he paid the critique fee… to basically ignore the critque? Read more »
I got an email back from my college friend who writes fantasy novels for one of the “the majors.” I asked her why there seemed to be so much controversy about eBooks vs. print from established authors. Here’s what she told me:
I think publishing is threatened by far more than a new format. I think fear of piracy followed by fear of not getting paid are the two biggest reasons many writers react as you saw. Although a print book can be pirated (as anyone who has dealt with Russia or China knows), it’s hard. Breaking the code on an e-reader is much, much easier (and people hack calculators for fun, without profit).
As for paid… Contracts usually base pay on a percentage of the cover price. If a $25.00 book is sold for $5, even if there is a huge raise in percentage, well… You can do the math.
Basically, I think you ran into a lot of fear over what may be a dying industry. Fewer readers, more competition from writers past whose estates are delighted to sell for a pittance, more spin-offs. And electronic books have added to that in a big way. I’ve read numerous columns that basically boil down to, “why read a new book that will cost you, when you can get a free classic on Google?” I don’t know if I’ll be making a living in a few years…
That’s an interesting bit of commentary from the trenches — especially in regards to the last part. The part about “free.” What is our obsession with “free”? I see this more and more, and it baffles me. Read more »
Today’s panel at Orycon was a bit more civil, but that doesn’t mean the controversy over eBooks vs. print books was any less pronounced. The panel was titled Paper’s Place in the Future—Physical Books vs. eBooks. My co-panelists were Michael Briggs (husband of Patricia Briggs, the author GoH), author James F. David, Orycon webmaster Rick Lindsley and author Paul Guinan.
In the end, we all agreed that print books and eBooks each had their place and audience… but much is still undefined. Rick noted that for those of a certain generation, who grew up reading books only in print, there is a certain comfort level and familiarity with the format that leads to a marked preference for print books. However, most of the kids growing up today are accustomed to doing everything electronically, and they want to read books on their cell phones and eReader devices.
DRM (digital rights management) was a flash point today. James said that as an author, he truly appreciates DRM because it ensure that he will be compensated for each and every copy of his books that are sold. Michael, on the other hand, discussed how he had inadvertently purchased some eBooks using his wife’s Fictionwise account… and when he tried to open them on his own eReader, he was told that his device wasn’t authorized to view the files (because they weren’t purchased using his account Fictionwise notes the serial number of your eReader device and grants DRM access based on that information). Read more »
I just wrapped up my first panel at this year’s Orycon in Portland, Oregon, which was titled Twitter Novels, Kindle, eBooks, Podscast and the Market. I was one of three panelists; the other panelists were Dianna Rodger and Michael Briggs (husband of Patricia Briggs, the author GoH).
I brought my Sony eReader and my iPhone for “show and tell,” so to speak, and we launched into a surprisingly heated discussion. There were a good number of published authors in the audience, and many of them were venting about how the NY publishers are giving them a raw deal on eBook royalties. Many of them seemed quite angry, in fact. I suppose I didn’t help matters by saying that VT does not believe in charging the same price for print and eBook formats, because print requires the additional expense of printing, and eBooks don’t. Therefore, eBooks should cost less than print books.
One very passionate author immediately launched into a salvo about how the editor, the artist and the author deserve to be paid for their work, and it shouldn’t matter what the format is. And while I definitely agree that all the people who work on a title deserve to be paid for their efforts, I was merely pointing out the public perception of value. Read more »
Okay, so my last post was kind of a downer because I talked about “what not to do.” That’s always sobering. Today is the day before Turkey Day in the US, so I wanted to post a few positives going into the long weekend.
I want to talk about what one new author is doing RIGHT… and doing very, very well.
First, I want to mention that this is a brand new, never-before published author. A newbie. The kind of author VT specializes in. So everything I’m saying here is meant to truly inspire you, because she is just amazing. Read more »
I was reviewing my first post and I wanted to clarify something. I stated that I’ve noticed (through my experience with VT) that “some” authors don’t seem to be actively trying to sell their books. What I want to make clear now is that I don’t think it’s because they don’t WANT their books to sell. More than anything, I think it’s that they just don’t know what they should/could be doing.
So this blog isn’t going to be a “blame game.” There’s enough guilt to spread around in all of our lives, each and everyday. This is not about pointing fingers. My intention is for this to be about growth, not guilt. You’ve written a book and it’s been accepted for publication. You’ve gone through the editing process, the galley drafts and now, your book is out there on Amazon.com and a whole lot of other places. You want people to find out about your book and read it… even more importantly, you’d like people to actually BUY it so you can earn some royalties.
But that’s not YOUR job, is it? I mean, you wrote the book. You did all this work to actually write the darn thing, and then you practically rewrote it during the editing process (at least, it felt that way). You’ve done your part… now you get to sit back and watch the money roll in.
The problem is, if you really believe that, the money won’t roll in. Because your book won’t sell unless you are willing to help market it. Read more »
Well, I guess you could say that I’m going into this kicking and screaming. It’s not really what I want to do with the little free time that I have, and yet, it’s to the point where I feel I have to.
You see, I’m the marketing director for Virtual Tales, an independent press based in Vancouver, Washington (part of the Portland, Oregon metro area) in the United States. We are very, very selective about the titles we publish. In fact, I would say that if we review 20 manuscripts a months, only 2-3 authors will be invited to submit their complete manuscript. After that, I would say that only 1 in 5 manuscripts we read complete is offered a contract.
Sometimes, we will ask the author to make certain changes and send it back to us in 6 months for another review. Very few do this, and of those who do… we’ll end up offering a contract on about half of them. We just don’t think that readers are willing to buy crap, to put it bluntly. In order to appeal to readers, we believe that:
I think that Virtual Tales does a fabulous job on the first three requirements; where we seem to come up short is the last one. Marketing. Read more »
Saavy thoughts about marketing books
SHERI GORMLEY is the Director of Marketing & Promotions at Virtual Tales
