Writing a book is an artSelf-publishing a book is a business.
I know you’re business savvy enough to do this on your own and earn quite a bit of money doing it. The big questions for me would be:
- A strong e-mail list with a good open rate (25%+)
- Well-established social media network that can help spread word of mouth
- The right contacts to help place guest articles/posts on the right sites/blogs that target the book’s target audience
- An existing website that can be quickly adjusted on the fly to focus on the re-release
- A nice backlog of content connected to the book—or re-purposed from the book—that can be excerpted across sites/blogs interested in your work
- Resources to hire a good publicist for the first 3 months of relaunch
- Resources to hire a good cover designer
- Do you have the time & energy to spend on it?
- Do you have the resources to hire help as needed?
US independent publisher Perseus Books Group has launched a distribution and marketing service for authors wanting to self-publish their own e-books, offering a 70% royalty rate to the author.
Called Argo Navis Author Services, it will be offered to authors represented by agencies that have signed an agreement with Perseus, with Janklow & Nesbit Associates the first to have done so.
"... Send us 3 pithy, information-packed sentences about yourself, along with your CV (cut and paste, no attachments), 3-5 links to your best published work, and at least 2 links to your social profiles
(Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon etc.) "
"The agent is now less an advocate than a buffer between the publisher and the writer's unrealistic expectations... Mergers, takeovers, and the disappearance of companies have become commonplace."
"Writer John Locke claims the #1 spot on this week’s list with his novel Saving Vegas. Here’s more from the site: “Three of the books on the List were written by the same author, John Locke. Locke’s book, Saving Rachel, was the first Indie book in history to hit #1 on Amazon/Kindle. In total, he has sold more than 875,000 downloads since January.”
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| Guest Post by Online Colleges |
"It's as if we've torn down the walls of the library, and now the
reading room is full of street people."
I picture the area around the New York Public Library suddenly becoming the basis for all the chatter and cross-talk taking the place of lovely books. On my first visit to that venerable institution, I enjoyed the beauty of the reading room, years before technology overtook quiet. Not finding a single book available for browsing, I asked the desk attendant, and was told "If you want a book, fill out this slip to ask for it and wait while someone brings it to you." Growing up in Chicago where I could browse the library from the age of 5, and take home as many books as I wished, the New York experience left a mark on me. I've been collecting books for my personal library ever since.
A virtual shelf, like Amazon or Smashwords, carries all my titles, all the time. And I don't have to compete with a NYT bestseller who has 400 copies of their latest hit on the shelf, while I only have one copy of mine. We each take up one virtual space per title. … Virtual shelf life is forever. In a bookstore, you have anywhere form a few weeks to a few months to sell your title, and then it gets returned. This is a big waste of money, and no incentive at all for the bookseller to move the book.
The minute you decide to take on a nom de plume, be prepared to stick to that name in your correspondence and at writers’ conferences and book signings. You want people to associate that name with you, not give them a slew of different names to remember.Thanks to Ronnie at Writer's Relief.
Hint: If you do choose to go with a pen name, choose a name that’s not too generic or linked to someone else. Try an online search of your prospective name to see what comes up.
"Balancing precariously between history and literature, memoir writers have finally found their place on the bookshelf. But increased notoriety brings intense scrutiny: memoirists are expected to create a narrative worthy of fiction while also staying true to the facts. Historians, too, handle tricky issues of writing from "real life," when imagination must fill gaps in the historical record.More here: http://patriciahampl.com/test/tellme.html
Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May have gathered fourteen original essays from award-winning memoirists and historians. Whether the record emerges from archival sources or from personal memory, these writers show how to make the leap to telling a good story, while also telling us true.
Contributors: Andre Aciman, Matt Becker, June Cross, Carlos Eire, Helen Epstein, Samuel G Freedman, Patricia Hampl, Fenton Johnson, Alice Kaplan, Annette Kobak, Michael MacDonald, Elaine Tyler May, Cheri Register, D. J. Waldie."
Along with searching for more manuscripts from our inkpop community, we’re also working on developing more outlets where readers and writers can just get their ideas in front of editors here. We realize that writing a full novel is difficult and not something that every teen can do every day. We also realize that they are full of great ideas and we want to empower our members to share those ideas with us, so that instead of editors in a room creating books that they think teens will like, teens will really be helping to create the books they want to read.
Did you know T.S. Eliot practically welcomed a cold? He found that writing while so afflicted greatly helped him concoct unique, gruff voices either for different characters or in the creation of harsher scenes.
That's less harmful than Honore De Balzac's writing motivation: "To keep writing, he drank from 50 to 300 cups of coffee per day. Balzac infamously died of health problems related to caffeine poisoning... Turkish and Parisian blends particularly piqued his fancy, providing him with enough fuel to keep him writing throughout the evening and on into the night."
"Philip Roth — much like Vladimir Nabokov — prefers this physical calibration when writing. In addition to this healthy habit, he also pushes himself to walk half a mile for every page he completes. Despite age starting to plague his body, Roth continues this ritual to benefit both body and mind. As with Haruki Murakami, he believes that clarity and creativity come when all facets of a person operate in peak condition.
Toni Morrison rose before dawn to write her way into the day, and Gertrude Stein used her car as her personal space to invoke creativity for writing poetry. 
