C h a z z W r i t e s . c o m

See all my books at AllThatChazz.com.

12/31/2011 • 1:54 PM 5

Self-pub Highlights: The Best and Worst of the First and How to Succeed by Failing

Please click here to pick up Parting Shots.

When you can’t get out of the bathtub on your birthday, something’s gone wrong in your life. And by your life, of course, I mean mine. The other night I tore a rotator cuff muscle boxing. It hurts when you throw a hook and miss. I ripped it up pretty well. I’d had shoulder pain off and on for weeks due to to my incredibly sedentary lifestyle and the computer mouse. I sit very still to write. I can’t write and walk around at the same time. I’m chained to a desk by an intravenous tube that carries coffee. When the shoulder pain hit, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. The pain is enormous. I almost called my wife to help me out of the bathtub. On my birthday. Not one of my best birthdays, I have to say. In fact, it might have been the worst.

Long-term?

Pain is good.

I will use this.

I did manage to get myself out of the tub. Getting my shirt on? That was five minutes of hell and wishing the Advil would kick in faster. It didn’t. I’ve had shoulder pain this bad before (on the other shoulder.) When it hurts to laugh, you know it’s bad. When you have to devise new strategies to do mundane tasks, it’s makes you mad. When it happens on your birthday, it makes you sad.

However, I won’t let all this sadness and badness and madness go to waste. At some point, I’m sure I’ll have a hero try to fight the bad guy in a climactic scene and the hero’s shoulder will be all messed up. That’s the easy take away from this experience.

Let’s go deeper.

Staying home to write books full-time? This is awesome. This is the fulfilment of a dream. I am so lucky to be able to devote myself to this enterprise all day. However, if I don’t take better care of my physical body, I will lose this opportunity. When every movement reminds you of pain, it’s hard to concentrate on work. Pain saps productivity, whisks away opportunities and manufactures misery far from the site of origin.

But let’s go deeper.

The pain in my shoulder is not simply a rotator cuff tear. It’s a symptom. I have not been to the gym for quite some time. I have not been taking care of myself. Why is that?

My excuse…no…my dumb reason is that I have been swimming in the launch of my books. I have no excuse. I let myself forget that success is not a single facet. To get my shit together, I have to take time to take care of all aspects of my life: family, fitness and work. I am not of one dimension. I was so busy with work, it gave me the excuse to be lazy in other areas of my life.

Translation:

I have books to publish! I have no time for the gym! Publishing is so exciting I don’t even have to feel bad about not going to the gym because I’m being productive!

Yeah, right. But for low long, Spock? How long?!

Concentrating so much on marketing made the disappointment at the initial outcome darker. My sales aren’t anywhere near where they need to be (yet, goddamnit! Yet!) The reviews haven’t been rolling in (yet, goddamnit! Yet!) But I’ve started up businesses before. I know how this works…or doesn’t work. These things take time. Readers will get around to writing reviews. Word will spread. It doesn’t happen on a schedule. You may as well try predicting cloud formations as plot book sales. But I do have a strategy. While figuring out how to manage our time in the new year, I told She Who Must Be Obeyed that I think I’m through The Worst of the First.

The Worst of the First is the downside of that incredibly creative, energetic time when you start up a new enterprise. You have to get a business license and take care of paperwork that is not directly related to your success. You order business cards or figure out technical aspects that feel removed from the core of your enterprise. The Worst of the First is about trying to do everything at once, just to get things rolling forward. The Worst of the First is about the trivia that no reader ever sees. It’s the behind-the-scenes stuff no one cares about, including me, but it has to get done. It’s part of building inertia, too.

Then there is The Best of the First. Here are the highlights of my first couple of months as founder, president, author and Chief Dude in Charge of Wastebasket Emptying at Ex Parte Press: Three ebooks up on Amazon and just about everywhere else by November 1. Recorded a podcast, Self-help for Stoners, to help market my book of the same name. Tried and failed to get my first podcast published. Dave Jackson of the School of Podcasting helped me to get the podcast up and out there. He helped me get control of my author website, too (allthatchazz.com). Got the paperback formatted with Jeff Bennington’s help. Got new art for the paperback done with my graphic designer, Kit Foster. Published Self-help for Stoners through CreateSpace. Published three short stories in the last week (Parting Shots, Asia Unbound and Vengeance is #1) on Smashwords.com. Maintained my Scoopit! Page, three blogs, three Twitter accounts and published six podcasts. Now the podcast is also available on the Stitcher app as well as iTunes, so it’s everywhere.

When so much positive stuff was happening at once, I was riding high. But I wasn’t leaving my desk. I’ve been married to my Mac, which makes She Who Must Be Obeyed jealous. I’m through the imbalanced part now. My shoulder reminds me with every move that I have to concentrate on the core. That means publishing three novels in the next year, yes. That also means taking better care of me so I can accomplish those goals. It means eating right and getting to the gym. That’s also part of the writing process. It clears the brain and keeps my body ready for writing marathons. Sitting still for too long is too hard on the body. We’re made to move and if we don’t, we die.

On my birthday, I checked my book sales and found the accounting had finally come through. It wasn’t good, but the beginning is rarely good. I’ve been here before. I know the terrain. I know the pain hammering me in the shoulder is a reminder of what a low point feels like. The sinking feeling as I looked at my first sales numbers—on my birthday!—made me think for a moment that all my marketing efforts had been wasted. But no. It’s just a normal part of The Worst of the First. My readership hasn’t found me yet. You have to market your books when you think you should be using all your time to write. In weak moments I do think, All I should do is just write and revise and do nothing else. But then I remember this is not 1987. Seclusion is a luxury for old media authors. I’m a new media author. I must not hide from the world if anyone is to ever hear me.

The fattest kid at Fat Camp has the most potential. When you reach critical mass and are feeling low, you can look up. There is so much to learn and so much to conquer. I am grateful to have so much fun and trial ahead of me. When we succumb to the idea that the best times of our lives are behind us, we truly begin to die. This is just the beginning and there is so much to look forward to! Writing this post, holding tight to this pain and this disappointment? That’s going to make the triumph all that much sweeter, don’t you think? I’m going to appreciate the win more when it comes. And I’m through the gauntlet and into the glove already! I made it through the Worst of the First. Yes, there will be frustrating times ahead, but I got through the first couple of months of the enterprise. I got to the starting line. A lot of people dream of the starting line but never get there. They never get the chance, or take the chance, to run. Now I’m running and I’ve got some inertia behind me. I have you behind me. (I know because you’ve read this far.)

My resolutions for 2012?

I will use this. Failure is fuel.

Failure is only failure if you let it keep you stuck in the tub. 

Happy new year.

If it isn’t happy,

MAKE IT SO.

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Filed under: DIY, ebooks, getting it done, publishing, self-publishing, short stories, What about Chazz?, What about you?, Writers, writing tips, , , , , , , , , ,

10/27/2011 • 11:58 AM 5

Self-publishing: The gold rush is not over. Believe.

Logo of LIFE magazine.

Image via Wikipedia

A couple of indie publishers have expressed concerns about the whole self-publishing venture lately.“Concerns” is too weak a word. They’re talking like the self-publishing revolution is over and already lost, an infant succumbed to Crib Death. It was, they say, a gold rush and only those who got in early with paranormal romance and lame thrillers made it big (or at all.) As I embark on a new career in self-publishing, it’s pretty scary to hear people you respect talk like they might fold their cards and curl up like cute little hedgehogs poked with a stick.

Writing a great book is always the main problem. If you don’t have that, there really is no hope. Then there’s the problem of obscurity. How will people find your great book? The easiest way to be a bestseller is to already be a bestseller, so that’s no use to most of us. What to do? Nobody knows how to make anything “go viral” unless it involves a basket of kittens in danger of being crushed by an anvil. (You wince at that image, but you’d click that link on YouTube, if only to express your outrage.)

Self-publishers must believe in themselves and their work, especially when it is unreasonable to do so. To be heard, to go viral, to get any attention at all, we must engage with others, often individually. Such promotional activity eats up a lot of time, but I don’t know any other solid way to do it. (Actually, I do have some other ideas I’m acting upon, TBA soon.)

If your self-publishing strategy isn’t working, you’re going to have change your strategy. Evaluate what you’re publishing and then evaluate again. Do your covers suck? Are you publishing to your taste without regard to your audience? Do you have an identifiable audience you can reach out to? What do you have to do differently to make this crazy Scooby Gang scheme work? (Hint: It’s not what you have been doing, more and louder.)

If you don’t find that hope you once had, what will you do? Take up selling real estate and self-loathing? No. We write because we must write. It wasn’t really a choice. Giving up and doing something else is a choice, but if you’re here, the writing bug sank its fangs in early and that burning venom never leaves the body.

No whining or blaming. I’m sympathetic to problems in self-publishing, of course. I was in traditional publishing for years, sold a lot of books for others and eventually got fed up with the hierarchy. Now that I’ve switched to self-publishing, it’s all shiny and new and I’m full of foolish missionary zeal and silly hope and I haven’t been worn down by grim reality yet. I get that. But what are the alternatives to getting fatigued by the Sisyphian task of promoting your books in an environment where most people think your babies are ugly and your promotional efforts are spam?

Start with unreasonable hope. Move on from there to taking a refreshing break (possibly with peers over scotch) and some reevaluation time to figure out how you’ll change your game. Don’t put down the slush of ebooks that obscure your precious work. Rise above it by being just that damn good. If what you’re doing isn’t working, find alternative paths to indie success. Retitle your book to something catchier. Get a power endorsement from someone you might now think is inaccessible. Figure out what successful people are doing and model your strategy on theirs.

I haven’t sold a lot of my books yet. I’m maintaining the delusion that I will until I make these lies I tell myself true. Steve Jobs had a Reality Distortion Field to motivate himself and others to believe they could accomplish big things. We need to energize our own Reality Distortion Fields. That’s what gets this crappy reality bent to the reality you want.

Comfort yourself in knowing that the gold rush isn’t over. It’s barely begun. When I go out in the world with my Kindle, people still slow down and say, “What’s that?” Last Christmas, readers got a big boost. There will be another big boost this Christmas in e-reader sales. Buck up. Believe.

Remember when you started self-publishing and were innocent of the struggle? Find that person in the mirror. You’re going to need him or her to face getting that big rock up that big hill. If it be a failure, make it glorious so you’ll know you really tried. The most powerful words I know are, “Begin again.”

If you’re indie, you are not a cute little hedgehog.

You are a lion.

Click here to get your free sample of Self-help for Stoners, Stuff to Read When You’re High

Filed under: DIY, e-reader, ebooks, getting it done, self-publishing, What about Chazz?, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

10/24/2011 • 9:41 AM 2

Surprising self-publishing delays and how ebooks are not so instant after all

Ebooks aren’t quite as instant as you might expect. They certainly aren’t as instant as I expected. A couple of months ago, my friend Rebecca Senese encouraged me not to announce a publication date for my ebooks. Rebecca was an early adopter in the ebook craze and has formatted a ton of her short stories using Smashwords. She knows whereof she speaks…so naturally I considered her advice seriously before stupidly ignoring it.

I thought I could get the formatting and conversion done and once the ebooks were delivered to the various digital platforms, bang! The books would be up and available for at least a couple of weeks before my official launch date of November 1. I wasn’t rushing to publish. Editorially, the books are ready for the big show. Still, self-publishing guru Joe Konrath’s words were probably lurking somewhere in the back of my mind: “A month’s lost sales is a month you’ll never make up.”

Only a couple of months ago, November 1 seemed so far off. It wasn’t an arbitrary date for me…at least it’s not psychologically. That’s when my career odometer turns over. Next Tuesday I am officially no longer a part-time massage therapist and stay-in-the-home-bunker dad. On that date I’m retired from twenty years of clinical practice in the treatment of sports injuries and broken backs and squeezed brains. I’ll be writing and publishing and podcasting full-time…oh my god! Next week! Jesus! Anyway, Rebecca was right, of course. It doesn’t pay to be inflexible because even though you can deliver the books — fully formatted and converted to specs — they still won’t be available for sale right away.

After delivery, Amazon can have your stuff up for sale within two to four business days. Great, right? However, Sony won’t have my ebooks available on their e-reader for weeks! I really wanted to hit the ground running and have all my books available across all digital platforms by the time I switched careers. I hadn’t considered how slow the word “instant” could really be. I’m not beating myself up about it. This is a learning curve and a huge milestone in my life does not translate to a publishing schedule. That’s an emotional attachment I’m putting on a business situation.

I soon decided I would use the delay as an advantage. I had wanted to say the books were available across all digital platforms, but Kobo still isn’t in my mix (and I’m still evaluating the worth of the Kobo platform to me.) I have The Dangerous Kind available most everywhere through Smashwords. All three ebooks are up on Amazon. Sony is the third most popular platform (behind smartphones and Amazon) so the wait is a bit frustrating. I don’t know why Sony takes so much longer than Amazon. I can only assume they don’t have the same resources for the task. However, the procedural delay will allow me to announce new platform availability over time so I can repeat my message and not feel so spammy about it. I also have some advertising plans to evaluate and pbook ARCs to publish so a little more time will allow me to hone them to a sharper edge. (And the paper books will take a long time, too. For sure!)

After all the work and coffee consumption involved in making an idea into a book, there’s nothing instant about the writing and editing process. It’s true for the production process, too, even when we think we’ve taken delays into account. It’s always later than you think!

CLICK HERE TO SEE A SAMPLE FROM

SELF-HELP FOR STONERS, STUFF TO READ WHEN YOU’RE HIGH

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10/15/2011 • 1:27 PM 0

How to tell when criticism is unreasonable

"Do not feed the Trolls" sign. Photo...

Image via Wikipedia

Recently I read a blog post that angered me and broke my heart a little. When we dare to express ourselves, there’s always going to be someone who disagrees, doesn’t like it and thinks you’re stupid. Some people aren’t shy about letting you know how they feel and are pretty blunt about it. Constructive criticism is helpful criticism, administered gently. Awhile back I got a nice note about an edit that needed to be done on my other blog. The guy pointed out the problem and couldn’t have been sweeter about it. As a result, I went out of my way to help him in turn. Then there are those other people.

How to tell when criticism is unreasonable:

1. They focus on you instead of the issue. People who start out by insulting you aren’t helping. They want to feel good about themselves by putting you down. Call them a name in turn: Troll!

2. They go on at length and overstate your grammatical sins. That’s someone who has too much time on their hands. (See #1)

3. They talk about their work and its relative superiority. Some people actually take this tac to ask for business. They want to sell their editing or consulting service and their approach is a frontal assault on why you suck.Don’t encourage bad behavior by rewarding it.

4. They treat finding fault as a moral victory. If they wanted to be helpful, they’d just point out the problem and move on.

5. They’re wrong. An english teacher once tried to convince me that the you effect the affect instead of the other way around. She wasn’t going to be convinced otherwise, either. After all, she was a teacher, not a learner.

6. If this is someone you know, instead if an acquaintance or an anonymous internet troll, have you noticed that person is hypercritical about everything? Consider the source.

7. They quibble over stylistic stuff that could go either way. When I worked at Harlequin, we often got letters from readers applying for jobs. A common tactic was to criticize books for perceived failings in proofing. The approach never worked for two reasons: It was insulting to the staff and the complainer/job applicant was annoyed with all the British spelling in lines that were meant for British markets. (See #5)

8. They tell you publicly what they could have told you privately. Instead of setting out to embarrass you publicly on Facebook, they could have just sent you a kind private message to let you know you screwed up. That tells you where they’re coming from. They’re out to show off how clever they are at your expense. Not a friend.

Writers produce. A lot.

(And yes, I know that’s a sentence fragment. Actually, I’m quite fond of sentence fragments, so there.)

We write so much that, inevitably, problems will emerge.

Typos and missing words and miscellaneous issues will appear. We’re writers, but also human, I’m afraid. Follow anyone around all day with a tape recorder and eventually, they’ll say something dumb. Stuff gets missed and mixed up in speech and in writing. Recently, President Obama got the number of states in the union wrong. Does anybody really believe Obama doesn’t know there are fifty states in the United States?*

Well…some people would believe that. That’s someone else you should ignore.

*There are 50, right? Gee, I hope I got that right! Otherwise, I’ll deserve hot pokers under my eyelids and a solid whipping and I’ll never, ever write anything again and I’ll be ever-so-grateful to the person who saved me from myself and my horrible, horrible mistakes! I’m not worthy! I am worm sweat and trolls are all oh-so-very-smart! How do these demigods bear breathing the same air as the rest of us mere mortals?

Okay. That might have been a bit over-the-top, unreasonable criticism in the form of unnecessary sarcasm.

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Filed under: DIY, getting it done, grammar, publishing, Rejection, reviews, Writers, writing tips,

10/11/2011 • 5:42 PM 7

The downside of cheap ebooks

The_Dangerous_KindEbooks are often so inexpensive that they have become impulse buys available for mere couch change. (That’s how I’m selling my ebooks. Two of them will be up for sale November 1 at $2.99 and one long

Self-help for Stoners

Available Nov. 1

short story goes for 99 cents.) It should be an easy sell for people who can read, like to read and actually do read. The Dangerous Kind, the short story, should lead people to buy the collections (Self-help for Stoners, Stuff to Read When You’re High and Sex, Death & Mind Control.) Well…it’s a good theory.

But will my work actually be read by anyone even after it’s bought?

Everybody’s to-read pile is so big!

Go to Goodreads and surf a bit and you’ll soon find a bunch of books that catch your eye, each one calling with equal force, “Add me to your to-read list!” I’ve recently become more active on Goodreads. I love the site and, after reading some personal recommendations from my GR friends, I’ve even reconsidered a couple of books I picked up and put back down at the bookstore.

An arresting cover can get surfers to slow down to gawk.

Killer ad copy helps.

Friendly, happy reviews help most.

Sex_Death_&_Mind_ControlBut if people buy it but don’t read it and then recommend it enthusiastically…

Let’s just say I can’t bear to think about that possibility very hard.

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Filed under: DIY, e-reader, ebooks, My fiction, Publicity & Promotion, What about Chazz?, , , , , ,

10/10/2011 • 3:28 PM 2

Bookstores, buying habits, digital rights and the end of the world as we know it

I went cross-border shopping. In all our travels, I saw one bookstore and it was an empty, boarded up Borders. In the huge (and I mean huge) shopping centres we wandered through, there was not one bookstore. Not. One. I am not celebrating the shrinkage of the paper book market. I will miss bookstores and what they were. As their bookshelves shrink to bestsellers-only and mid-list authors find no (non-virtual) place for their books, we have lost shrines to knowledge and literature. When they’re gone (or when I have to travel many miles to get to one) I will feel the same nostalgia I feel now for friendly garbage collectors and milk men who brought their products to my door when I was a child.

How many years will it be before the economics of book production don’t make any sense at all? Economies of scale will, at some point, require that all books go digital unless they are specialty items for very high-end books, hobbyists with very low-end books or novelty items. Paper books are still big, but as the gifts, candles and coffee spaces in bookstores grow and book return times shrink, anyone can see where this train is going.

I still run into people who think a mid-list author should pursue paper book deals within traditional publishing to the exclusion of the electronic marketplace. Unless an author holds his or her e-rights, though, in most cases that math won’t make sense. John Locke held on to his e-rights. Locke stuck to what he was good at and the publisher acknowledged that by making the unprecedented deal. (Joe Konrath wrote convincingly that the deal was an admission of industry failure and was, in effect, a sign of End Times for trad publishing.)

Naysayers object, “Any self-published author would jump at a traditional deal.” Uh. No, that’s not true. A traditional deal will often yield the author about a buck after a book sale. Self-publish digitally, sell for just $2.99, and you’ll get about $2.00 with each sale. For those who would jump at traditional deals, authors may well make that decision for personal, emotional reasons, not as a pure business decision. The math doesn’t change but people are variable and are welcome to their (informed) choices. Video on demand, PVR and satellite replaced Blockbuster, but movies are still getting made.

As bookstores shrink and collapse, consumers are already turning away from the old model, even when it’s available.

For instance, I’ve noticed my buying habits have changed.

Here’s my shopping habit arc:

1. I bought books in bulk. Even though I sold a bunch, my many bookshelves are still groaning under the weight of shelves packed with books in double rows.

2. Then I bought half of my books in bookstores and half on Kindle. (I use my Sony Reader much less because it’s not wireless.)

3. If it’s a reference book, I’d still prefer to read it in paper for ease of use. I picked up a tech manual for my computer last week because I wanted instant answers.

4. If it’s fiction, it’s on my Kindle. I love that I can download so quickly and easily. It’s so easy, in fact, I don’t know when I’ll get to read all of my purchases.

5. I’ve pretty much given up on magazines because of all I can read on the web (on blogs, for instance.) There’s just as much expertise and good deal more depth in many blogs than magazines have space for.

6. Shipping: Paper books at a bookstore are more expensive. If I order them straight from Chapters or Amazon or download to the Kindle, I’m paying for the same products at a discount and the shipping is free, right to my door.

7. The local bookstore is for recon missions to find books I’ll order electronically. When our bookstores can’t afford looky-lou sessions and close, I’ll be doing that research exclusively by going through catalogues, watching for recommendations on book blogs and on sites like Goodreads. And my friends will tell me what they enjoyed. And I’ll say, “I used to get out of the house more.”

8. There will still be bookstores in the future. You’ll have to travel a long way to get to them and most of them will be specialty bookstores. The big inventory will be on the web. Just like now.

The eventual end of the common bookstore is not the end of the world. 

It’s only the end of the world as we know it. 

 

 

 

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10/06/2011 • 10:33 AM 0

Quick links to the most popular posts on Chazz Writes:

All That Chazz     How Editing Works (Plus Editing Symbols)     Five Editing Tricks & Tips      6 Effective Ways to Promote Your Book     First & Third-Person Viewpoint Problems   Ten Lessons Learned from an Evening with Kevin Smith

Sneak Peek at Self-Help for Stoners     TOP TEN: The Divide between the Published and the Self-published    Where does the Darkness Come From?    CreateSpace versus Lightning Source: Pros and Cons Breakdown   What Used to be Cool

 Take me to the Shop Happy Store

Filed under: All That Chazz, DIY, ebooks, Editing, Editors, My fiction, self-publishing, Shop Happy, writing tips

09/30/2011 • 12:37 PM 1

And now for something somewhat different: allthatchazz.com

www.allthatchazz.com

Over a year and a half and 600 plus blog posts, Chazz Writes has been (and will continue to be) free content for writers about the craft and business of writing. Chazz Writes is about grammar, editing, writing advice and the latest self-publishing news. I’ve made a lot of friends and allies and promoted quite a few authors here. It’s a lot of fun. The fun will continue for readers on the companion site. Stop by, subscribe and see what’s cooking.

Someone is already offended because it looks like I’m saying writers aren’t readers. Some people arrive pre-offended, so…can you hear my shrug from there? As a writer, I’m also a power reader: vast library, ten books at a time, two e-readers…the whole smear. But not all readers are writers.  

What will be different? All that Chazz focuses on what readers want: reviews, sneak peeks and more ideas on what to read. On the new site, I write about reading.

Contributors: All That Chazz is open to submissions (just like Chazz Writes). If you’d like to write a guest post about who, what, when, why, where and how you’re reading, please submit your 300-word (max) post and a 25-word bio to me at expartepress@gmail.com.

The Book Review Circle: I haven’t forgotten about Kim Nayyer’s excellent suggestion to establish a book circle. (See the bottom segment for my personal update on what I’ve been doing instead.)

The Review Circle Recap: In the summer, I put out the call for self-published authors who were willing to review a book in exchange for a review of their own book. The reviews, to be published at All that Chazz and promoted on Chazz Writes, can be used by the author and the reviewer for their own blogs and whatever marketing purposes suit them. In the next couple of weeks (as the hither and dither allows) I’ll be contacting all the authors who contacted me to set up the circle.

If you want to participate in the review circle, email me with details of your book, genre and word count at expartepress@gmail.com.

(Don’t wait!)

This looks like a job for me: Wow, have I been busy! My business plan is coming together, though I wish I had a couple of interns and a cappuccino machine to hurry the publishing process along. So much of what I’m working on is new to me (formatting and podcasting, for instance). Some of the learning curve is so steep, I need two Sherpa guides. However, it’s coming together on schedule as long as I continue to try do everything at once. Self-publishing is not, as some claim, the “easy” road to publication. It’s just another path and the terrain is a little different.

I’m enjoying the view from this little goat path. I think I’ll climb higher and see what I can see.

Join me.

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Filed under: All That Chazz, book reviews, DIY, e-reader, ebooks, getting it done, publishing, readers, reviews, self-publishing, What about Chazz?, , , , , , , , ,

09/22/2011 • 12:35 PM 2

Editing tools and typo tips

Book cover (Dust jacket) for the 15th edition ...

Image via Wikipedia

Write_your_book
EDIT YOUR BOOK!

When you’re checking your manuscript, use your word processor’s Spellcheck. Some editors turn up their snobby little noses at Spellcheck, but it can flag problems you might otherwise miss. Nobody’s perfect and problems will always appear once you’ve published your book (yes, in both traditional and self-published books). Don’t take every suggestion; Spellcheck isn’t always right. It’s a tool, not a panacea. You can also use Find and Replace to look for problems Spellcheck misses: its, it’s, there, their and so on. Spellcheck doesn’t replace editors and they don’t replace thinking. But you’ll catch more using it.

To the rude editor I met at the conference who said she never used Spellcheck: Yes, I’m saying that was arrogant and, just like the rest of us, you’re not nearly as smart as you think you are. Or funny. And you need to work on your social skills. (Now I’m worried that I’m projecting.)

I don’t edit blog posts obsessively, but when I’m working on a book, I have several websites up on my browser: Chicago Manual of Style, Wikipedia, and dictionary.com. I also use Autocrit for more input.

For me, yesterday was single quote day. I wrote parts of my books with Open Office, so I had to go through the manuscript and make all my single quotes curly…and curly in the right direction. I was cross-eyed and HULK ANGRY by 5 pm.

PentecostSelf-publishing guru and author of Pentecost, Joanna Penn, has a great suggestion to deal with typos: Publish your ebook first. Your readers will let you know (politely or not) about your book’s typos. Corrections to the ebook are easier than correcting your printed book. Corrections to print books are called “second editions.” Great tip! For more information from Joanna, check out this very useful interview. I loved this inspiring interview and it helped me calm down after Curly Quote Day. Well…much later, after the photo below.

Me after Curly Quote Day

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09/09/2011 • 8:39 AM 11

Do readers expect too much of ebooks?

I love people who wisely challenge authority and the status quo.

They question the way things are to make them better.

Recently I pointed the way to a post by the insightful Derek Haines over at The Vandal. The discussion evolved from talk about how low, low, low ebook prices don’t match up with many readers’ expectations of perfection. I promoted Mr. Haines’ blog post, but too clumsily since I just mentioned it in a comment reply. Mr. Haine’s thoughts need more attention than I gave them so I’m remedying that today. Derek Haines was one of the first people to  welcome me to Twitter. I often find his blog posts eye-opening (e.g. Free e-books, do they get read? and The Self-publishing Money Trap). His thoughts on ebook pricing, value and quality, What did you expect for 99 cents?, are in need of a good, solid ponder. 

To freshen and deepen the discussion, novelist Reena Jacobs wrote in with something very thoughtful and heartfelt. I didn’t want her contribution lost down in the bottom of the comments. I asked her if I could repost. The first link takes you to the original post by the great Derek Haines and here’s Reena’s comment again as a guest post:

Derek Haines makes an excellent point. It broke my shriveled blackened heart to offer my full-length novel at $0.99, considering all the work I put into it. To think I toiled over the book for months…over a year with no pay, and folks didn’t even want to shell out $0.99…and forget $2.99.

Indie authors aren’t asking much but I think some readers expect perfection when they’re not willing to pay an asking price which is less than fair to the author to begin with. Some seem to forget the money used from sales is not only necessary to earn back the money already spent, but also to invest in future publications.

I don’t go to people’s place of businesses and demand freebies. Or worse, insult them with comments like, this should have been free or I’m glad I didn’t pay for this. If it’s free, folks should be happy they even had an opportunity to try it. Someone took time out of their life to offer readers a gift. It may not be to the readers’ liking or meet their personal set of standards, but it was still a gift. It has value.

Anyway, my wee little heart couldn’t take it anymore. If people want a $0.99 work from me, they’re welcome to my short story. I’d rather hoard all my works and never publish another title again than beg for $0.99 ($0.35 royalty) for a work I put months of my heart and soul into. Every time I read about someone complaining about a $0.99-2.99 work, it makes me want to bump my prices again. It’s gotten to the point I don’t even care if folks buy my books (kinda…’cause let’s be serious, sales matter to all authors) as long as I don’t feel like people are taking advantage of me and implying my work is worth less than it is.

Like Derek said, it doesn’t make sense to invest big money into a product that yields little return. In my opinion, that’s bad business.

I’ve already made a goal not to spend more money on publishing books than I make in sales. If that means no more full-length works, then so be it. Short stories are quick, dirty, and can be edited entirely through a critique group. I can part with one for $0.99 and not feel ripped off.

Reena Jacobs is just your typical writer who loves to see her words in print. As an avid reader, she’s known to hoard books and begs her husband regularly for “just one more purchase.” Her home life is filled with days chasing her preschooler and nights harassing her husband. Between it all, she squeezes in time for writing and growling at the dog. You can find Reena on Ramblings of an Amateur Writer, Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes & Nobles, and Smashwords. 

www.reenajacobs.com

www.reenajacobs.com/blog

http://twitter.com/ReenaJacobs

Alexandria (Alex) Carmichael guards two secrets close to her heart.

One–she’s in love with her best friend, Seth. Two–he’s gay.

 Add I Loved You First to your Goodreads list!

 I Loved You First

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