Becka's Writing Blog

This Saturday’s Guest Post is by Karen Wehrstein, a traditionally published author who is now very active in the weblit community. See the end of the post for a brief bio and a linbk to her site.

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Dead-tree to weblit in 15 seconds or less

A traditionally-published author turns to the Internet to forge her own path

By Karen Wehrstein

Asked to write about migrating to weblit from the traditional publishing world, in which I published two solo novels, one collaboration and several short stories, and continue to work as a freelance journalist, I realized the difference boils down to one basic thing that can be expressed in simple diagrams.

Writer ———————————–> Reader

Fig. 1: Weblit

HOWLING ABYSS OF GEOGRAPHY

VALE OF TEARS

Writer —————> ARBITRARY GATEKEEPING ——————> Reader

OTHER PEOPLE’S DECISIONS

GLACIAL TIMEFRAME

Fig. 2: Traditional Publishing

Okay, maybe that’s a bit simplistic. Maybe Fig. 1 should look more like this:

HTML HELL

WEB DESIGN NIGHTMARES

Writer —————> CEASELESS E-SELF-PROMOTION ——————> Reader

SNOTTY WOULD-BE GATEKEEPERS

DEADBEAT READERS

But the difference, in terms of the width of the gulf between writer and reader, is still enormous, and the implications of that touch every aspect of the writing/transmission/reader relations experience.

When I first had writing ambitions, which was about the same time that the Internet was an obscure dot-matrix-delivered quirk of geeky computer science students, I learned about how traditional publishing goes. I learned about the double gatekeeper system (first you have to find an agent, then a publisher), the stacks of rejection slips (everyone has them), the endless waiting (since publishers want to be given two or three months each to reject your manuscript) and the fact that the vast majority of writers never get published. I was sure that there were people who would like my writing out there, but the gulf that I saw yawning between them and me I seriously doubted I could cross.

Once I did get a publishing contract, I learned that I still had not entirely crossed that gulf. There were still the matters of editing, packaging and marketing, none of which the writer controls. Other people tell you how your writing needs to be changed, design the cover, determine the branding, and decide how it’s going to be marketed, all based on their ideas of what will attract readers. You have no guarantee that these ideas are correct in your case, or that irreversible mistakes won’t be made.

Now my publishing experiences might have been unusually bad, due to a basic personality incompatibility between my publisher and me. I remain grateful since it allows me to bill myself as a published novelist for the rest of my life.

But, due to the publisher’s editing/packaging/marketing decisions, I had to cut the book length by a third, change the title to something I thought was somewhat deceptive and eliminate one gay relationship. These were all things that I would have been willing to do, if given the choice, to get published (though the gay relationship thing really stuck in my craw). I had heard horror stories of much worse. Cover art with all the details wrong is pretty much par for the course, so I didn’t much worry about it.

But one thing happened that I considered, and still consider, a disaster for my writing career: the editor wrote a line on the back-cover blurb for my first novel that created the false impression that the setting for my story had actually been created by someone else. It was a selling point, as it referenced an already-successful work, but it also cued reviewers to not take me seriously as a first novelist, ensured that most of them would ignore my work, and probably didn’t much impress readers either.

I didn’t get to approve or even see that blurb before it was written and 40,000 copies printed. It was a mistake that could not be undone. To this day, people who pick up my first book in used bookstores get the impression that I was not enough of a writer to create my own world. This happened nearly 20 years ago, and it still hurts. One reason why I got into weblit was to give that work another kick at the can without that taint. In traditional publishing, you have no guarantee that something like that won’t happen.

In weblit, other people do have some power over the fate of a work; the review sites spring to mind, and the benefits they provide can be outweighed by the costs in cases of ill-written reviews. However, there is simply nothing in weblit that allows an impact even comparable to the above. No review site or directory is the single pathway of your work from author to reader. And if something in your marketing gives the wrong impression, you can instantly rearrange, or ask someone else to rearrange, the pixels. On paper, it’s etched in stone.

Other little dangers in dead-tree publishing that writers often don’t foresee include publication dates being delayed indefinitely or payment problems due to the publisher having financial troubles (because you’ve signed a contract you can’t shop the manuscript elsewhere), a publisher going bankrupt just before they print your book and launch the splashy ad campaign, and the fact that if your book sells well, your publisher will pressure you to write the same kind of thing for the rest of your writing days. Then there’s the D&A factor that haunts any and all businesses and fields: among the people you work with will be a certain number of dicks and assholes. That is true in weblit, too, but it’s much easier to choose whom you associate with.

The upside to traditional publishing, however, is this:

PROFESSIONAL EDITING

PROFESSIONAL DESIGN

Writer —————> PROFESSIONAL MARKETING ——————> Reader

BROAD DISTRIBUTION

MONEY UP FRONT

Publishers hire good, sometimes excellent, people who specialize in editing, packaging and marketing, people who, chances are, can do these things way better than you can. They have established distribution networks through which your work is channeled. When you are in weblit, you have to do or arrange all this yourself, except for the money up front, about which you can forget. Woe betide you if you aren’t good at them or find them distasteful.

I have noticed that the people who are most successful in weblit are not just good and prolific writers. They also have good marketing instincts and a willingness to use them. They tend to be risk-takers, too. Alexandra Erin quit her day job; MeiLin Miranda sank money into her ad campaign; MCM undertook feats of endurance writing and ceaseless experimentation. You have to be willing to be out there and blow your own horn. It’s not for the faint of heart. That’s a challenge for me. I can write well, and lots, and lots well, but getting myself out there is a constant fight against deep and pervasive fear.

If you are the kind of writer—and many are—who is introverted, shy and afraid of rejection, and want to just sit in your little garret, concentrate purely on cranking out writing that others will champion for you, you’re better off in dead-tree publishing.

So there are pros, and there are cons: but there is one way in which the weblit medium wins hands-down, because you can do certain things that your dead-tree colleagues can’t even dream of. That is: speed of transmission, and the fact that the readers can just as instantly transmit right back.

In dead-tree publishing, your book is published months or even a year or more after you turn in the completed manuscript. By the time you get fan letters, you’ve galloped on to the next project, and you kind of don’t care about what they’re praising any more. With weblit, you can get feedback in seconds.

When I first decided to do this, I emailed Alexandra Erin to pick her brain. She told me that she thought the biggest adjustment for me, switching from traditional to online publishing, would be dealing with immediate feedback in comments, and that it might be tough. My feeling was—are you kidding? That would be like nirvana! I did have a little trepidation—the net abounds with trolls, for one thing—but mostly felt I’d enjoy getting immediate comments.

This has proven absolutely true. I can’t say how much I love and appreciate reader reactions. You become friends with your fans; you learn what kind of people they are; you feel their support day in and day out; you learn all kinds of things they offer from their expertise; they become a community. You can make instant use of their feedback, whether it’s line-editing-type corrections, in-depth critique, the results of surveys, or simply site statistics that tell you you’d better switch gears. You can use their negative comments for guidance towards improvement, and their positive comments as testimonials in publicity for a work you are still selling.

In fact, weblit writers are using the instant interactivity of the net to take reader participation to new heights. They take live requests for character emphasis, offer choice by vote on story topics and plot developments, integrate reader ideas instantly into ongoing stories, and are making writing into a performance art. MCM now bills himself as a livewriter; Shirley Meier and I do live chats in which our readers get to chat with our characters, challenge our readers to solve problems in the story and incorporate their ideas into it, and even engage very select readers in creating scenes by role-playing with us. These sorts of things, along with various forms of non-linear story-telling only possible on the net, add a whole other dimension to the experience of shared imagining between writer and reader. They are simply not possible in paper publishing.

At this point, I’ve barely made pin-money doing this, but I would not go back on my own initiative to the dead-tree fiction publishing world. I’ve learned to love the challenge of the midnight deadline, a forced daily discipline you don’t get in traditional publishing, that is excellent for developing writing speed and skill. I love being able to write explicit sex scenes (remember that gay relationship that didn’t happen in the paper version? Have a big fan trained on yourself when you read the weblit version). I relish the direct relationship with my readers: the 3 a.m. comments, the emails, the votes, the chats. I like being able to design my own packaging, with my own art—details correct, and blurbs that give credit where credit is due—so as to find my true readership, those who resonate with my work. I like knowing by a few clicks of the mouse that I am finding them.

And I guess… well, I am suddenly in tears as I write this, to my surprise. I didn’t totally quit writing after that back-cover-blurb disaster happened. But I was so demoralized, I quit seriously trying to put my writing out there. Now, doing it as weblit, and getting the reader responses I’m getting as I write, is healing that old wound and making me believe in myself as a writer as I never did before. As I look back, I realize that growing my readership gradually while developing a comfort level with having one is something I needed to do, and would have been better off doing back then, if it had been possible. But you can’t do that in traditional publishing. You go from zero to tens of thousands of copies of your book being on shelves, and if you can’t handle it you’ll flip out or do self-sabotaging things.

At its essence, writing weblit is this:

Writer <============================> Reader

Insofar as communication is what we writers are all about, it’s the perfect world.

Hey, readers! There’s nothing between me and you anymore.

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About the author: Karen Wehrstein published two solo fantasy novels, Lion’s Heart and Lion’s Soul, and a collaborative novel with Shirley Meier and S.M. Stirling, Shadow’s Son, with Baen Books in the early 90s. She has published several short stories in the horror and science fiction genres and innumerable news stories and features, has edited and published several small publications in the alternative health field, and is a practicing homeopath. Her weblit works, The Philosopher in Arms and asa kraiya : beyond the sword, can be found at www.chevenga.com.

It’s Saturday and that means a guest post! Today it’s an old friend  of mine Indie Author Stacey Cochran.

I’ve been reading Stacey’s work since 2005 or thereabouts and the fact that Claws 2 is Kindle only is the only reason I’ve finally downloaded Kindle for PC. Which probably tells you something.

I’ll be reviewing Claws 2 sometime in the next couple of weeks, and I’ll also upload the reviews I’ve done of his previous works to the new blog.

Today Stacey is going to talk about his experiences as a self-publisher, what he’s learnt from it and why he’s committed to ebooks.

Claws 2 is only available at the Kindle Store

And now over to Stacey.

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Hi, Becky, thanks so much for having me at your place today. As you know, I am on a two-month Blog Tour campaign to spread the word about my new thriller CLAWS 2. I think it is safe to say that you were one of the first readers to “discover” me way back in like 2005, and so my blog post here today holds a special place in my heart.

I thought it might be helpful to reflect on some of what I’ve learned regarding how to DIY market self-pubbed novels. What has worked and what hasn’t worked, and where can newbies get started… that sort’a thing.

I self-published my first novel in 2004 as a print-on-demand trade paperback. I had no idea whatsoever how to market the novel, and I may have even believed that just having a novel published would mean that people would start to buy it and it would become a hit. I think I’ve sold about two dozen copies of that first novel to date.

Lesson #1: Just having a novel published does not mean people will buy it. Somehow, you’ve got to spread the word and make people aware of your book.

So some of my earliest efforts at marketing were as simple as e-mailing people I knew and asking them to buy the book. I exhausted this well of people after about two days, and then rather painfully began asking total strangers to buy my novel. I mostly did this by reading Amazon reviews and then contacting the reviewers to ask them if they’d consider buying my book and writing a review, which leads me to Lesson #2.

Lesson #2: Do not directly contact total strangers and ask them to buy your book. This is the marketing equivalent of throwing paint at someone’s house in order to sell them on your paint brand. They won’t like it, and they’re very likely going to get online and spread the word about what a jerk you are for direct-selling to them.

That said, you’ve got to start somewhere, and no one’s first steps are going to easy or painless. In my case, after I got burned by direct-marketing to total strangers like this, I started trolling writer discussion boards like NaNoWriMo. I would often talk up my books to fellow writers, and while this did not meet with as painful a result as my earlier efforts, it was far from smooth. I managed to sell a few dozen copies of my short story collection The Kiribati Test using this method, but mostly I irritated a lot of people. This would’ve been around late 2004, early 2005.

Lesson #3: Don’t let the fear of people not liking you or even attacking you, prevent you from trying to sell your book and your brand.

By summer 2005, I had learned that direct marketing online was painful at best and could backfire at worst, and so when I released my novel Amber Page and the Legend of the Coral Stone in October of ’05, I began trying to use my imagination to market and sell the book. I visited area bookstores and tried to set up author signings. I visited area libraries, coffee shops. I printed up flyers and posted them all around town. I asked at the library if I could stand on the sidewalk out front and hand out flyers to patrons coming in. I drove to other towns and walked the streets with hundreds of flyers literally handing them out to passersby and anyone who didn’t look threatening. I managed to land my first two or three bookstore events working like this. I did a coffee shop gig that sold a few dozen books. A library gig that sold a few. I tried to get libraries to buy the book for their shelves.

Anything and everything. But mostly it was done in real-time, real-world locations (i.e., not online). On the internet, I used my website to do free T-shirt giveaways, fridge magnets, signed copies of the book. I started making videos and posting them online (literally before YouTube was available to the public). And then when YouTube became available in early 2006, I started using my channel to market and promote my books and brand.

I started attending writers’ conferences and tried getting on the programs so that I could speak to audiences.

All of this amounted to a couple hundred copies of Amber Page being sold.

Despite all this hard work, the price of the book was too high. The base cost of print-on-demand books was cost-prohibitive, and many readers wouldn’t take a chance on an unknown writer.

Still I was beginning to gain confidence. I was raising eyebrows, and I was selling books.

Lesson #4: Persistence is everything in this business. If something doesn’t work, revise it and make it work better the next time around. But keep trying. Year after year.

In 2006, I moved from Arizona back to my home state of North Carolina. I had learned some valuable lessons out West and good, bad, or indifferent, I had learned how to publish my own novels.

Once back in North Carolina, things started to take off. I visited area bookstores and libraries and joined writers’ groups. I helped organize the Raleigh Write to Publish Group, which has subsequently grown to include Charlotte, Wilmington, and Washington DC Write to Publish Groups. I was offered contract work with Lulu, which sent me on my first national book tour to Borders Bookstores in Michigan, Arizona, and California.

In summer 2007, I launched The Colorado Sequence as a print-on-demand trade paperback. Despite being my best novel to that point, it was a big book, and the base cost was way too high. Regardless, I had made friends with some key people at Lulu, and they helped to print up hundreds of copies for me as I was spreading the Lulu brand around the country and around the state of North Carolina. I probably sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 300-400 copies of the book, and most of these sales were 100% revenue because Lulu had paid for the printing as I was a contract employee for them.

In addition to bookstore and library events, I teamed with other writers and sat in on booths at street fairs and book festivals. Sometimes I’d sell copies for 5 or 10 dollars. I learned something that should be obvious to everyone. The lower the cost of your book, the more often people will buy it.

Still there was a serious problem that I simply could not see a way to overcome, and Lulu was completely reorganized at the corporate level in 2008. Most of my contacts were forced to resign, and I was back at square one.

The base price of the books was too high to lead to impulse buys.

Lesson #5: In any industry, the price point you set must seem reasonable and fair to consumers. If consumers perceive they’re “getting a deal” then you’ve priced your product well.

So how to overcome the high price of POD books? I struggled with this one for almost two years before I released CLAWS in summer 2009.

With CLAWS, my initial goal was to release a trade paperback and sell at least 200 copies. By poring over the booking phase of the project and searching exhaustively online and at writers’ conferences around the country, I managed to arrive at a base cost of about four bucks for the book (U.S.).

I think it’s safe to say that this was a Priority #1 Goal with the release of CLAWS. To get the cost down as low as I could.

And then Amazon Kindle came along.

In 2008, Amazon began beta-testing their Digital Text Platform for Kindle by e-mailing established authors and asking them to upload their books. By early 2009, Amazon ended the beta-testing and opened the DTP to anyone who had a book and the technical skill to upload it.

Sometimes stars align in life, and this was exactly the case for me. I priced CLAWS on the Kindle eReading device for 99 cents in mid-May 2009. The book became a bestseller in days.

Then I brought out The Colorado Sequence at 99 cents, and the book shot to #111 overall in the Kindle store (out of 300,000 titles at the time).

For the next six months, I sold a lot of books.

Then, in December with the help of a friend, I listed my short story collection The Kiribati Test in the Kindle store for free. I had 30,000 costumers download my book to their devices in six weeks. Suddenly, I started getting e-mails from movie studios and had literary agents contacting me. It was a wild ride.

Which brings us to summer 2010 and the release of CLAWS 2. For the past year, I’ve been hosting an online interview show Book Chatter using ustream.tv. I’ve mostly concentrated on Kindle authors and bloggers, and so have made some important friends in this community. With their help, I launched a Blog Tour to market and promote the novel.

With CLAWS 2, I actually increased the price to $2.99… the first time in six years I’ve moved in that direction with pricing. As a result I’ve started earning a 70% royalty rate on each sale, and in the past week combined sales of CLAWS 2 and CLAWS have been good. It’s too early for me to assess its overall performance, but it seems to be working well. And most importantly, I’m having fun.

If you can get to a point as an author where customers are happy, you’re happy, and you’re selling books entirely on your own initiative, then you are in a good place.

If anything, I guess my story is the story of perseverance, of learning from your mistakes, of wanting to grow and get better, and of never giving up.

Thanks, Becky, for having me at your place today, and thank you for all your support, your reviews, and encouragement over the years. If you weren’t the very first, you were certainly one of the first half dozen or so folks to acknowledge my work.

Thank you.

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Stacey Cochran was born in the Carolinas, where his family traces its roots to the mid 1800s. In 1998 he was selected as a finalist in the Dell Magazines undergraduate fiction competition, and he made his first professional short story sale to CutBank in 2001. In 2004, he was selected as a finalist in the St. Martin’s Press/PWA Best First Private Eye Novel Contest. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with his wife Dr. Susan K. Miller-Cochran and their son Sam, and he teaches writing at North Carolina State University. His books include CLAWS, CLAWS 2, The Colorado Sequence, Amber Page, and The Kiribati Test.

My first guest poster on this new blog is Zoe Whitten author of several Indie and Weblit stories. Her latest premium ebook release is “The Sole Survivors’ Club” which is available on Smashwords, Mobipocket and the Amazon Kindle store. I will be posting my full review of the novel later on the blog later this weekend.

The Sole Survivors’ Club is well researched, so I invited her to write a guest post on the subject.

Over to you, Zoe…

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Research is a vital task in fiction, one that should never be overlooked. Writers are constantly reminded to write what they know, and it’s a safe bet that what you know probably isn’t sufficient for many of the writing projects you want to undertake. Research can help bridge the gap and make your stories more realistic.

There are, however, certain limits to research. For instance, you can learn all about shotguns by reading product information, but until you shoot one, the concept of the gun kicking back is an abstract. And how does kickback relate to gauge size? Is it a case of the smaller a gauge, the lower the kick? Or vice versa? Even here, you can fake knowledge by talking to gun enthusiasts to learn how your characters should react to firing a shotgun.

But let’s get even more abstract with a research problem I had last year while writing The Sole Survivor’s Club. I’d decided to write a story about “accident magnets,” people who are cursed to seek out deadly accidents. Bearing witness to death over and over, they had no idea why they kept seeking out such horrid catastrophes. The premise of the story came from a real person Violet Jessop, who served in different roles on board both the Titanic (as a maid) and the Britannic (as a nurse) when they sank. In reading her accounts of both boats sinking, I’d joked, “Man, I’ll bet no one would let her on a boat after that!”

But I started thinking more about the idea of accident magnets as a dark fantasy, and I decided to make a character drawn to multi-car pile-ups. I spent a few months pondering what would be the real cause of this curse before deciding to us the jinn, or genies. I wanted to make the main character one kind of victim, but there would be others, like a train conductor who crashed multiple trains. To add a sense of realism, I researched train wrecks and then suggested that he had been driving or riding a train in every single disaster.

My premise led to an interesting question: How does someone kill a jinn?

Research here was harder, because no matter which stories I searched for, there was no record of a normal human killing a jinn. There have been legends of demigods or magi who had done so with magical weapons or spells, but in this story, I wanted the protagonist to be a normal person who had no idea how to deal with these living spirits.

I went to my favorite forums to pick the brains of other writers, but no one had any ideas for how a normal person could accomplish this task. So I went back to online reading. My studies moved from Persian legends into Islamic texts, but that became even more frustrating because the listed “weaknesses” of the jinn read like assurances of the vast superiority of human beings.

However, this didn’t make my studies useless. I learned how not all jinn were evil, and I learned about the various jinn races; the sila, the ghuls, the ifrit, and the marid. I learned the limits of each race, and all of this would be useful for the story, even if it didn’t tell me how to kill one.

I won’t spoil my own story, but ultimately I came to the conclusion that sometimes, a writer needs to stop researching and fall back on good old fashioned bullshitting. Did it make the story less realistic? Well, not really, considering I’m telling a dark fantasy about genies who kill people with their own technology.

Research couldn’t give me the answer I wanted, but it did give me a wealth of information to pepper throughout the tale and lend it a greater sense of accuracy. Does the research make the story better? It depends on the reader, really. But as the writer, I think it helped give me a stronger idea of who these invisible spirits are, and why they do the things they do.

My roundabout point is, never be afraid to research your stories, no matter how fantastic the setting you plan to use. You might not get what you initially wanted out of your studies, but you will learn a lot of fascinating little details that will make your story stronger. And that can’t be a bad thing, can it?