• Curiously Twisted Tales by P.S. Gifford
• First Communion: A Collection of Modern Irish Stories by Jack Scoltock
• Revenge by Gabrielle Faust and Solomon Schneider
• In the Autumn of the Unfortunates by Christopher Treagus
• River Bottom Blues by Ricky Bush
• Of Machines & Magics by Adele Abbot

We incorporated on September 19th, 2011 as a non-profit publisher, and looking at that small (but growing!) list on Amazon.com is very satisfying for a host of reasons, but most importantly, they represent promises kept to both myself and to others.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Barking Rain Press is starting to find its stride. Tomorrow we will close down our first ever open submission period, and I am hopeful we will find at least one gem in the batch. I am really pleased with the high number of submissions we received. As we close January 2012, our sixth book was just released. We began accepting submissions on January 4th when we only had two books out, so it was a leap of faith on the part of many authors to send us more than two dozen manuscripts for review. I’m looking forward to the review process!

It has been hard these past few months, but I haven’t been alone through all of this and I am ever so grateful for the kind support I received from so many. I am a little tired right now, but feeling very blessed and grateful as I look forward to the next half-dozen books.

Still, there were many things that I enjoyed about all the work I did for VT. I’m going to miss all the people — the authors, editors and artists I was privileged to work with all these years. I enjoyed my layout work, too. Making the books was sometimes frustrating, but always fun. And I absolutely loved seeing the finished product, knowing that it was something that I helped create.

And the wonderful feeling I got, knowing VT was helping so many talented people get exposure. I often say that getting published is like trying to get a waitressing job. When I was in high school, I went from restaurant to restaurant, looking for that first job so I could save up for college. They always asked if I had experience, and as soon as I said “no,” that was the end of it.

Eventually I lied and got my first job working for a diner. It was hard work, but I waited tables throughout college and beyond, so it served me well. The point is, how are you supposed to get “experience” if no one will give you that first shot?

And that’s what being a newbie author is like. And VT was founded to give new authors with a really good story that shot at getting published. We were generous with our contracts — we gave authors 50% of the royalties, which is much higher than the 10% or 20% or 30% our competition was offering.

So what closed us down? Collective burnout, and a wickedly unfunny April Fool’s Day. Everything just came to a head, and by the next day, half of us were leaving, and the other half was trying to talk us out of it.

Which brings us to today. The day we took the website down. The day we made it official.

“There’s a new exhibit in Seattle showcasing props from the Harry Potter series. As I make my way through it, I see children holding magic wands in their little fingers, pretending to cast spells.

If only writers had a book of spells we could use to make things happen!

It turns out we do. It’s called a dictionary. It has all the magical words we need (though some assembly is required). We can use these words to convince (from Latin vincere: to overcome), to motivate (from movere: to move), to inspire (from inspirare: to breathe [life] into), and more.”

AWAD will introduce you to spells new and old, with a single word each day. It’s a free and easy way to build your writing vocabulary.

I highly recommend it.

A Romance Review — Reviews only Romances (print & eBook); online reviews only.

Midwest Book Review — The Midwest Book Review gives priority consideration to small publishers, self-published authors, academic presses, and specialty publishers. Online reviews only.

Rambles — Reviews Spec Fiction (Fantasy, SciFi, Horror), Mysteries, YA, Historical, Humor, Children’s & Anthologies. Online reviews only.

Sacramento Book Review — An independent book review publication (print & online) that covers every genre of book.  Also offers expedited (i.e., paid) reviews; gives preference to local authors. Sister company of the San Francisco & San Antonio Book Review.

San Antonio Book Review — An independent book review publication (print & online) that covers every genre of book.  Also offers expedited (i.e., paid) reviews; gives preference to local authors. Sister company of the Sacramento & San Francisco Book Review.

San Francisco Book Review — An independent book review publication (print & online) that covers every genre of book.  Also offers expedited (i.e., paid) reviews; gives preference to local authors. Sister company of the Sacramento & San Antonio Book Review.

SciFiGuy.ca — Currently only interested in reviewing urban fantasies. Online reviews only.

SFFWorld.com — Reviews Spec Fiction (Fantasy, SciFi, Horror) only. Online reviews only.

SFReader.com — Reviews Spec Fiction (Fantasy, SciFi, Horror) only. Online reviews only.

SFSite.com — Reviews SciFi & Fantasy genres only. Online reviews only.

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… better than I’ve seen ‘em in a couple of years. Even my Yankee-holic brother sent me an email with a gruding comment that the M’s just might be the team to beat. Spring training is just around the corner. I’m really looking forward to being able to sit back and watch some baseball. It’s how I relax… when I’m not swearing at a bad call or a bungled play or smacking my husband because he’s making another Ichiro crack. God, I miss baseball!

I’ve got such a bad case of “woulda, shoulda, coulda” right now, because I feel like I’m letting people down. We just released THE EPSILON ERIDANI ALTERNATIVE in December, and all the promo is missing from the website. And the author of THE FIGUREHEAD (May 2010 release) just started promoting his book, and none of the links he’s posted work. And of course, we were supposed to release LEGION and I WILL in January… but that’s going to have to wait until next month.

I know that in some respects, it’s been for the best. We really needed to upgrade to Joomla 1.5, and we knew that. The new website has a lot of cool features, and we’ve installed some extra security programs and an automated daily backup system. And eventually, all of the old content will be back up again. Who knows? I might even be able to get caught up with the original new release schedule by the summer. Yeah.

I still can’t help thinking about what a different place I would be in the website hadn’t been hacked… or if we’d been able to find a current backup that wasn’t corrupt.

Funny thing is, it’s like that with Marketing sometimes, too. I can run a really good campaign, execute it flawlessly, get really good results… and then, as I analyze those results, I think about what I should do to make it better the next time, and suddenly, I find myself feeling dissatisfied with the last campaign.

Poof! Just like that, I’ve gone from happy to deflated in less than 60 seconds.

In reality, marketing is a building process. One action springs out of a previous action, and each new activity builds upon the last. It’s supposed to keep growing and improving, and therein lies the joy. My next post is going to focus on one seed I planted last fall that is really starting to pay off — and it’s something that every author should be doing. Best of all, once it’s set up, you don’t have to do anything except open your email. The information you need to have this marketing tool start really paying off will simply come to you automatically… with very little effort required.

Sheri

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.

I guess it’s not enough to keep one backup these days. You need to have a month’s worth of daily backups at all times, because you’ll never know how good any of them are until you need them.

It’s heartbreaking right now. Just when I was feeling that VT was finally getting into a groove and churning books out with predictable regularity, we have to drop everything and rebuild the website from scratch. Right at the start of tax season, too. Aagh!

We knew we would have to do it eventually. Joomla 1.0 reached end of life two years ago, and some of our modules had stopped functioning. But the upgrade to Joomla 1.5 requires a lot of work. We’d need a new template, for starters, and that’s a lot of artwork customization. Virtuemart would need to be upgraded, too. And the data integration is manual, not automatic, so it would be a painstaking process.

That’s why we kept putting it off… and now, we have no choice. Joomla 1.5 it is!

I found a good template, and we’ve got it installed. My partners are champs, pure and simple. Some of them are combing through the Google caches, looking for pieces of our content to screen-scrape for text so we can restore our history. I’m working on the artwork sizing and my other partner is customizing Virtuemart. I’ll start tackling the menu structure this afternoon, after I pickup our annual box of Cushman Honeybells from the Post Office.

Considering the freezing weather in Florida (and my luck in general lately), I’m curious about the quality of the oranges. Still, I am hopeful. In years past, they have been outstanding. There is simply nothing like a sweet Florida orange. Maybe it’s because I grew up as an East Coast girl, but California oranges are nothing to Florida’s.

So, with a plate of Honeybells and a large pot of Harney’s tea at my desk, I will plug ahead and see if we can restore our website presense this weekend. Because the first rule in Marketing 101 says ”Get a website,” and right now, it looks like we’re out of business, even though we’re not.

Sheri

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?

Now I completely understand why an an author would choose to stick to his or her guns over something, but if that is the case, why would you pay for a critique? Why waste your time and money (not to mention the time of the poor critiquers who had to read your schlock instead of doing something more productive and are now sitting at a table with you, listening to you completely ignore their critique) if you’ve already decided that your manuscript is perfect as is?

I guess I have a problem understanding that, because in my line of work, nothing ever ends up the way it starts. Take a magazine ad, for example. I start off by making up 2-3 concepts, then it gets routed around. The text is tweaked, the images are tweaked, none of them work so we start from scratch. Nothing that I do — a press release, a newsletter, the layout for a manuscript — is EVER so perfect that not a single change is made before it is finalized. And I’ve been doing this for 25 years.

Not only do I expect that every single thing I do can be improved, I actively seek out opinions and work comments and advice into the next round. That doesn’t mean I give all comments received the same weight, but I do listen to the feedback and incorporate what I can into the next version. After all, what’s the point of asking for feedback if you’re going to disregard it all, anyway?

Contrast that with the other author in the workshop. She took notes. Asked questions. Laughed about some of our comments, solicited more feedback. She thanked us all for our time and for our candor. She will go home, review her notes, make some of the changes, disregard others, and will otherwise polish her manuscript feeling like she got some bang for her buck because she’s now one step ahead in the submissions process. She’s already heard what the editors reading her submission are going to think, and she’s going to think about those concerns in advance.

In so many ways, attititude is everything. It can really make the difference. And marketing is no exception.

If you are following this blog, it’s because you are looking for advice on marketing your book. I’m hear to dish it out, and you are free to take it or leave it. There’s more than one way to get things done, and if you are open to new ideas, new technologies, new methods for putting yourself out there, you will come out ahead eventually.

Otherwise, why bother?

Sheri

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.

It costs money to provide services, to build things. Right now, in the Portland metro area, there is a huge controversy over a proposal to expand the main bridge that crosses the Columbia River and joins Washington State with Portland, Oregon. Everyone agrees the bridge is old and can’t handle the current volume of traffic — let alone manage future growth. It needs to be replaced and expanded. But, no one wants to pay for it.

The Federal government will kick in a good chunk of change, as well as Oregon and Washington. But some fundraising is going to be required. And for a bridge, that means tolls or taxes. When they built the other Columbia River bridge in the 70s, they added a temporary toll until the bridge was paid for. But now, if they toll the new bridge, they’re afraid everyone will try to use the other bridge, so they want to toll both bridges until the new bridge is paid off. That has people hopping mad.

Then, there are the people who commute over that bridge, twice a day. The bridge will serve the entire region. It will help move freight and create jobs. It should be paid for by a bond measure, because if tolls are used they will never go away, etc. Everyone wants the bridge… as long as someone else pays for it.

Give me police and fire stations, build the roads and bridges, give me my social security check and  my medicare, but give it to me free, please. I don’t want to pay no &$&#! taxes.

Ridiculous!

Intellectual content takes time for someone to create… and they deserve to be compensated for their efforts. Otherwise, how can they make a living? If everything is supposed to be free, then how do people earn a living? I have to assign some of the blame to the Internet. So much is offered to people for “free.” Why buy a newspaper, because you can read the news for free online. Why buy a book? You can do research for free online.

Right now in the US, goods that are ordered online through Internet-only stores are not taxed. Yet, Barnes & Noble has to charge sales tax for the books it sells online, because they have brick & mortar stores. Joe’s Online Books does not have to charge taxes. How is that fair?

But people will say that they want to use Joe’s, because they don’t see why they should have to pay any taxes. Let Barnes & Noble pay the taxes. Anyone but me. I want it free, and if it can’t be free, I want it for nearly free.

This mentality is great news for China. But’s it bad news elsewhere, because if we all loose the ability to make money from our labors (intellectual or physical), well then, isn’t it great that everything is free?

1 Tim 5:18 — For the scriptures say, “You shall not muzzle the ox that treads out the corn.” And, “The laborer is worthy of his reward.”

Sheri

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).

That’s frustrating, to be sure. But then again, so it was for movies and music. These industries balked at electronic versions initially because of piracy and other issues, but in the end, the consumer wanted electronic movies and music, and ways were found to provide it legally. Think about it — when was the last time you purchased a CD of music? For me, it was a couple of months ago, when I wanted to hear a particular piece of classical music as performed by a specific conductor and orchestra. It was only available on CD, so I ordered it.

I immediately transferred it to my iTunes account, and the CD is in the closet. I may never look at it again… but I will listen to the music it contained over and over again. On my computer. On my iPod. On my cell phone. On my Sony eReader (which stores and plays Mp3 files). In fact, we are getting ready to remodel our family room, and we have decided to donate our stereo system to Goodwill. When we want to play music in the house, we plug our iPod or iPhone into a docking station and turn it on. My very expensive, state-of-the-art (at the time) receiver, equalizer, turntable, double tape deck and 5-CD carousel player that I starved to buy in college hasn’t been used in years, frankly. They take up a lot of space in a large cabinet along the wall next to the fireplace, plus we have tons of cassette tapes and LPs and CDs.

We just don’t play them anymore.

There are conversion services and even conversion devices you can buy now that let you transfer your LPs and cassette tapes into a digital format now, and that’s what we’re going to do. Not only will we be able to make new playlists and port our music to whatever devices we like, we are going to free up a lot of space. Cabinets and shelves that won’t be collecting tons of dust, either.

That being said, books are a world behind. I can’t get most of my favorite books on eBook yet… and there are limitations to the technology. My Sony eReader, for example, is B&W, so it cannot hope to properly display any of my “coffee table” art books — as Paul Guinan pointed out.

But all the heated debate and discussion got me wondering if there isn’t something more — something deeper — that isn’t being discussed. I sent an email to a college chum who is a “NY published” author for enlightenment. I’m curious to hear what she’ll tell me.

Sheri

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.

Consumers are not as dumb as corporations would like to believe they are. They understand that printing a book involves expenses related to paper, ink, binding, glue, cut and trim, packing, storage, transporation, etc. But they know that an eBook does not require these expenditures, and consumers don’t think it’s fair that they should have to pay the same $24.99 for a new eBook title that they do for the hardcover version.

But authors should be paid for their work, no doubt about it. More than anything, though, I believe the problems with the current publishing model (i.e., “traditional” publishing, a.k.a. NY publishers) has as much to do with authors as it does the NY publishers.

The traditional publishing model requires publishers to pay out a large advance to an author (several thousand dollars at least) and assume all of the costs involved in creating, printing, and distributing a book. Most of the marketing responsibilities fall on the author’s shoulders, and in many cases, the author does not make very much (if any) by way of additional royalties because no royalities are paid out unless/until the book generates enough sales to not only cover all the initial expenses (such as ISBNs, editing services, typesetting services, cover artwork services, review copies/ARCs, advertising, etc.) but exceeds the “returns reserve” they have established.

Under this model, the NY publishers are happy if they can sell half of the initial books printed  after returns because then they will cover all their expenses and maybe even make a little money. And the author got their big advance, so at least they got paid for their efforts, even if they don’t do any marketing at all.

As for eBooks, well, when the NY publishers don’t look at it as siphoning away their print profits, they look at it as “gravy,” — extra, unexpected income. They give their authors 20% or less of net eBook revenues, and that has the authors hopping mad. If eBooks are “the future,” and they get less revenue for eBook sales than print sales, and the eBooks cost less, well… I think you see what they’re so upset about.

The way I see it is that publishers need to change their models so that they don’t go into a new book with the expectation that they will destroy 50% of the copies due to returns (which they’ve paid to print), and authors need to be open to lower advances with higher back end royalties. The whole model is totally broken… and that’s why I believe that independent presses like VT have a unique opportunity in publishing right now.

In the first place, most of us use POD (print on demand) technology to avoid the entire accounting screwiness with inventory taxes. We don’t print books until they are ordered, and consequently, less than 10% of our books are returned. We don’t have inventories, so we don’t have to worry about inventory taxes.  Our model has less waste and less initial risk. Because it doesn’t cost us a small fortune to print a new title, we can afford to publish new authors and take a chance on them.

However, while we don’t expend a lot of cash to get a new title out, we do expend a lot of sweat equity. Not just us, but our editors, our cover artists, and the print and eBook layout designers all do our work upfront. We do not pay advances to anyone (even ourselves). So instead of getting a $2,000-$5,000 advance for a book with 6%-10% royalties per copy after all the expenses are recouped, our authors make at least 50% of net royalties for every print and eBook copy sold… which encourages (and rewards) the author for his/her marketing and promotion efforts.

In other words, if a book is selling on Amazon.com for $10, and Amazon takes 40% (or $4) of the cover price, and it cost 20% (or $2) of the cover price to print a POD copy, the author would make a minimum of $2 per copy (50% of net revenues). But, for the eBook, the author actually makes more because there is no “cost to print” on a eBook. Amazon is still going to take 40% of the cover price for their cut, but that means that the other 60% is available as net revenues.

However, keep in mind that we also charge more for print books than for eBooks. The cost to print a book is based on the number of pages. The more pages, the higher the cost (for example, $9.95 for 160 pages, or $12.95 for 220 pages). But for eBooks, we base the price on the number of words (for example, a 40,000 word eBook would retail for $4.95, and a 120,000 word eBook would cost $6.95).

In doing this, we demonstrate good faith with consumers because we know that they understand that paper and ink costs money, and by providing a reasonable gauge for determing the eBook price (word count), the consumer is not feeling like they’re being taken. The different prices charged for both print and eBook is justifiable, and authors are fairly compensated by word count (longer books/eBooks command higher retail pricing).

The most interesting comment I heard came after the panel, when a woman stepped up to talk to me privately. She agreed with my comments that part of the “piracy” problem with eBooks is caused by the fact that there are so many titles that aren’t available for purchase. Many authors are so worried about piracy of their backlist titles that they won’t put them out as eBooks. So an unscrupulous person takes advantage of the desire to have an Anne McCaffrey title as an eBook by pulling a paperback copy of the book apart so they can scan it, do an OCR conversion and then post it illegally for download.

If the books were available as active eBooks, ready to purchase at a justifiable price (i.e., the word-count model), people would buy the titles legally — just as they do for music and movies. And I suspect that authors would be more willing to do this if they could make a greater percentage of the proceeds (i.e., not 20%… especially if they’re not getting a separate eBook advance).

As with software, music and movies, it won’t eliminate all the piracy… but realistically speaking, the people who choose to download a free copy of something instead of buying a legitimate copy were never going to be your customer anyway. By giving your customers the option to buy your book in multiple formats (print, eBook, audio book, etc.) you will maximize your revenue potential and give the customer what they want. Now that’s good marketing practice!

Tomorrow’s panel is also about print vs. eBooks, so I suspect there will be lots more to discuss.

Sheri