I can shed some light on the subject; after all I’ve been in printing and publishing for 35+ years.

1.  Typos are like car accidents – no matter what you do to prevent them they still happen. The first car accident on record happened in Ohio in 1891. Since there probably wasn’t another automobile in sight the driver hit a hitching post (no one knows if alcohol was involved). Even though there weren’t enough cars in existence to have a crash, a crash still occurred. Typos will happen. That doesn’t mean you should ignore them. No. You should make every effort to find and crush them, but to save yourself some grief, just remember, you probably won’t succeed.

I read a blurb in a trade magazine years ago where one of the major dictionary publishers said that they go through  132 proofing steps every time there is a new edition, and they still find errors. That doesn’t mean authors should slough off grammar mistakes and typos, but they shouldn’t beat themselves up over it either. Just be sure to fix it before the next printing.

2.  What you need is a divided personality. Except for a professional athlete perhaps, does anyone have a bigger ego than an author? If we didn’t believe in the value of what we write we wouldn’t write at all. We’ve worked hard to hone our skills and we believe that our book is a jewel just waiting to be discovered. Self-confidence is not a bad thing until it gets in our way. It is hard to see a dangerous pothole in the road when we are blinded by the headlights of our own egos. How many people try out for American Idol believing that they can sing and go away defeated and insulted when faced with the truth. We’ve all picked up books that are so bad we wonder how they ever got published. Before you trick yourself into believing something untrue, seek professional input.

3.  Never, never, never send your book off to print without professional editing. I don’t care how good you are, no one, and I mean no one, should try to edit their own book. As human beings we all have a kind of blindness associated with our writing. Our wonderful, creative minds generate the words we put on the page. This same mind can look at a sentence we’ve written with an error in it and we will mentally correct the mistake so that it passes by totally unseen by us.

A writer who deems himself/herself able to edit his/her own book is like the attorney who represents himself in court. The attorney has a fool for a client and so does the author. I know, it isn’t easy to let someone tamper with your baby. Carefully consider your choice of editors. Select one you respect enough so that if they call your baby ugly, you may not agree, but you’ll be inclined to listen.

4.  What is the editor’s job? That’s a good question and the answer is — it depends. Don’t ask for a light edit or proofreading only unless you have had a heavy edit first. Proofreaders check for punctuation, spelling errors, and standard grammar usage. Heavy Editing or Copy editing involve such things as checking sentence structure, diction, sense (vagueness), mixed metaphors, use of passive voice, and flow.  Ghost Writing and Book Doctoring involve something more intense. This type of editor will analyze the book and make the changes or write the copy if the author isn’t skilled. When should you call in a Book Doctor? If you know your skills are weak call one in at the very beginning, or if during heavy editing it becomes obvious that major structural changes need to take place.

Is that all? Not hardly, there are technical editors, indexers, photo editors, acquisition editors, etc. What an author needs to take into consideration is that publishing a book is a complicated and difficult task. No matter how professional the editorial team is, no one is perfect. Mistakes will be made, but everything is correctable. After all, printing is just ink on paper.

5.  You have only yourself to blame if you don’t carefully select your editors. If you are being traditionally published you don’t have a choice. Self-publishers on the other hand are required to choose unless they go to one of those Internet book mills. You know the places who advertise low prices, speedy production, and quality work? If they can put their services on sale you can bet that their services are bottom of the barrel. Don’t let your precious baby toddle off into the lackadaisical arms of strangers. They may seem very nice, but if your book never gets a chance because it is sub-standard it doesn’t matter how nice the people were, or how low the price was, does it? Don’t cut yourself short.

The God’s-honest-truth is that most self-published books are sub-standard. The Red Hen Association has been formed in part to help and encourage authors improve their quality. If self-publishing is ever going to break into the mainstream we will have to overwhelm it with quality books. Otherwise, we self-publishers will be forever viewed as second rate.

I remember a television interview with John Lennon of The Beatles fame. The question asked was, “Do you know when making an album which songs will be hits?”

John Lennon didn't know

John replied that he never knew, in fact the ones that made it often surprised him. I think that is probably true of books too. Sometimes, not frequently, but sometimes, a book succeeds even when the author wishes it wouldn’t. Take the case of J.D. Salinger who detested the success of The Catcher in the Rye, when asked in an interview, “Did you think it would be such a popular book?”

Salinger’s response was, “It’s been a nightmare.” And that was all he would say on the subject.

By a raise of hands how many authors out there would be unhappy if they had his success? I know that I wouldn’t. I’d be jumping up and down and praising the Lord. My dream come true was Salinger’s nightmare.

How can you know if your book will be a bestseller?

How can you know if your book is going to be a hit? You can’t. There are too many factors involved to make anything a sure deal. You can have a beautifully written manuscript, with superior editing, a wonderful design and even though it should sell – it won’t. There just aren’t any guarantees.

Let me give you an example from my own life experience. Twenty-six years ago I was involved in publishing a natural health magazine called The Herbalist. As a service to our advertisers, and a way to monitor ad response, we included a bingo card. For those who don’t know, a bingo card in a magazine has nothing to do with the popular game named Bingo. It is a mail-back card with numbers matching numbers inserted into the advertisements. A reader could circle the number on the ad that interested them. We collected the data and sent computer printouts to the advertisers. Sometimes an advertiser would get pages and pages of response and sometimes they would get very little. What surprised me was the success of a tiny, 1/6th page black and white ad for a book. The ad was poorly designed and the photo used was so bad that it looked like someone dropped it and ground it into the dirt with their heel. It was so ugly we took great pains to place it in inconspicuous places so it wouldn’t ruin the look of our magazine. Month after month this small ugly ad pulled some of the best response. It often out-pulled beautiful, full page, full-color ads.

We tried to come up with an explanation of why this was happening. Someone suggested that the ad looked so cheesy that people assumed it was a bargain. Others thought the subject of the ad was more germane to our readership. We didn’t know what the truth of it was then, and still don’t today. Things work or they don’t.

There is only one guaranteed way to fail

That’s the point with publishing. There is no guaranteed way to succeed and only one guaranteed way to fail. The sure way to fail is to not publish. Maybe J.D. Salinger should have gone this route. It could have saved him a life of seclusion.

Can you improve your chances of success? You bet! There are many roads you can take to promote your book. The good news is, if one road doesn’t work for you another might, and The Red Hen Association of Self-Publishing Authors has been formed to help you succeed by shining a light on the path. We will do our best to help you, but the real magic is to keep trying. Don’t give in to discouragement and keep trying. That’s the best advice anyone can give.

In my last post, I tried to make a distinction between vanity publishing and self-publishing. I also tried, with limited success, to convince the readers that the very word vanity is insulting. What I don’t understand and I hope someone will explain it to me, is why authors, particularly those who paid their dues and know how difficult it is to succeed in publishing, would want to continue labeling other authors with the demeaning term vanity.

Just because an author wants to print and distribute a book to a limited audience doesn’t make them vain.  Family histories, poetry, even cookbooks usually come about as a labor of love. I thought about Love Publishing as a possibility and then decided it would probably be misinterpreted as an euphemism for romance or sex.

Instead I suggest that we re-name this type of publishing as limited. Limited Publishing instead of vanity is kinder, and really more accurate, don’t you agree?

2. Self-Publishing

New authors are vulnerable and there are plenty of people just waiting to fleece them. Whether they are wolves or knaves doesn’t really matter–the point is RUN away from them as fast as you can.

I have nothing but scorn for those publishing businesses that prey on the dreams of new authors to tap their wallets and bleed them dry. There is an abundance of trip-ups and traps in alternative publishing. One tip-off is praise that is too lavish. Once they say the book will only need light editing–watch out.  Stephen King in his Author’s Note at the end of his recent book Dome, wrote “Nan Graham edited the book down from the original dinosaur to a beast of slightly more manageable size; every page of the manuscript was marked with her changes.”  If Stephen King requires heavy editing, what do you suppose a fledgling author might need?

Many claim that they will produce your book and market it through catalogs or other means.  Authors write to me about using these services and discovering, too late, that they are just a number, a notch in the publisher’s belt. After signing on the dotted line and paying their fees they were turned over to employees with questionable skills.  One author told me that when speaking with a graphic designer she was told to peruse clip art and select her own graphic for the cover.

This author sent me a copy of her book. I read it cover-to-cover because I wanted to know for myself if it was a worthy book. It was. It was an excellent book. The cover art, however, violated all of the basic rules of good graphic design. It utilized four different type fonts, and the graphic was a small smiley face. The design fought the intention of the book. The book’s message was serious and the cover was silly. There were other problems with the inside layout too. So the author paid good money to get her book produced and she should have kept it in the bank instead. Remember no one will buy your book if they can’t get past the cover.

Don’t, please don’t, place your precious manuscript into the hands of publishing grist mills who hire the incompetent, the unknowledgeable, or inexperienced just to keep their costs down.

A bargain price should be your first tip-off. When they offer you a special deal or are having a sale, run the other way. These companies do not care about you or your book, their only concern is that you give them money and they produce it as cheaply as possible so they can maximize their profits.

If your ultimate goal is to someday sell your self-published book to a traditional publisher, you won’t impress anyone if your book appears to be sub-par. Doesn’t your book deserve the best chance of success you can give it?

What, you don’t believe it? According to my Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary the act of writing is all it takes to become an author. If you wrote something, you are an author.

To become a published author is another thing altogether. For most of us the ultimate goal is to see our books in print and distributed to readers everywhere.  After all, what is a writer without a reader? It’s Yin and Yang. Two halves of the whole. As far as I’m concerned a manuscript in a desk drawer defines you as an author, but something definitely is missing.

There are only two approaches you can take to get published. You can do it yourself (self-publish) or find someone else to publish it for you (traditional publish). How do the two choices compare?

At first blush it appears that the easiest path is to sell your rights and let someone else publish your book. Let’s face it this is what most of us think of when we talk about being published. The biggest hurdle with the traditional publishing model is that  4% or less of manuscripts will ever become a book. And for that 4% there are probably thousands that never even make it to a publisher’s desk. It’s pretty obvious that if your manuscript doesn’t get read, it will not be published. I’ve said it before, if you are unknown, getting a book published through traditional channels is like winning the lottery. The odds are that bad.

Let’s compare the two methods and help you decide which way is best for you:

weigh your decisions carefully

1.  Who accepts the financial risk? If self-publishing you pay for all the costs involved in producing the book including the editors, artists, and printers. In traditional publishing the publisher takes on that burden.

2.   Who has creative control over the look and presentation of the book? If you do it yourself, you retain the rights. If you sell those rights to the publisher they can do whatever they think is best. That doesn’t seem important to you? It will if the publisher changes the meaning of the text through their editing, or comes up with a cover design that would lead readers to a totally opposite idea from what you meant. It happens.  Your only remedy you have is whining.  Selling your rights will give you money, but it may not give you peace of mind. Which is more important to you?

3.  Who arranges for distribution? If self-published, the burden is all yours. No matter how good the book is, please keep in-mind that some channels, like national bookstore chains, may not be available to you. Many booksellers have a policy against accepting self-published books, but If  your book is traditionally published, and your publisher pays for distribution, many of those guarded gates will be opened. It doesn’t seem fair, but that’s the game.

4.  What about marketing? Marketing is doing all of the things needed to promote the book, making fliers, public relations, appearing on TV talk shows, and radio programs. Issuing press releases, teaching seminars, speaking at schools, clubs, and wherever you can find an audience. You’d think that if traditionally published your publisher would handle all of this. Wrong. Most book contracts today require the author’s active involvement in promoting the book. That involvement is much more than showing up for the occasional book signing.  So, whether self-published or traditionally published, you dear author, must by contract, be hawking your book, mostly at your own expense.  If you don’t drum up sales your book won’t move, except from the shelves inside the store into the discount bins outside. If that happens, your chances of ever being traditionally published again are astronomical.

5.  Profits, ah profits, who gets the money? The one who takes the risk takes the money. If you are lucky you’ll earn between $.50 -$1.00 per book in royalties. Sell ten thousand books and you get $5 to $10 thousand dollars. That same book, if self-published, could generate $150 thousand dollars.

The self-publishing model is heaven made for those authors who believe in their product and are sure that they can find a market. It is costly and difficult to self-publish, but if you are right and you can successfully reach your readers, the amount of money you could make is much greater. You can have financial freedom and personal freedom as well.

Which way is best? It all depends on you. Either way, it will take energy, money, and lots of effort. After putting everything you have into it, it may not be enough. If the traditional route is the one you choose, the odds are that you will never be published. If you self-publish and can’t find your audience, your garage full of books will hang like albatross around your neck. But remember, that even though the odds are notoriously poor, someone always hits the lottery eventually. Who knows, maybe this time it might be you.

I’m preparing a seminar to present at the District 15 Toastmasters conference mid-November. The title is Why Every Speaker Needs a Book. It’s a good subject perfectly designed for the needs of my audience. The problem? My book I am writing for public speakers is far from ready. I have been working on it regularly but it isn’t complete enough to add the final touches, get it to an editor, and print it.

Some of the points I intend to hammer home have to do with speakers using their books as a way to gain credibility, and to generate income through back of the room sales. I wanted to have my book there to demonstrate how it is done. Instead, I’m feeling somewhat hypocritical. Does this hypocrisy diminish the value of the information? I hope not. We’ll see.

Even a Professional Can Fool Himself

In fairness when I announced my intention to have a book ready for the Fall Conference, my wife said that I didn’t have enough time. “I can do it!” I said in the most convincing cartoon super-hero voice I could muster.

Most of us need deadlines or we will procrastinate forever. Setting an unrealistic deadline really doesn’t help, it hurts. Now my dream of walking in with a box of freshly printed books and smiling as the attendees lined up to have me sign their books and tell me how much they enjoyed the seminar has gone poof.

Start Backwards to Go Forward

What is my point? Book production takes time and before you set an unrealistic deadline work backwards on a time line starting with the last step which is shipping. Ha, you thought I was going to say printing, didn’t you? No, in your planning you have to figure in the time to get the books to you. For example, if you are using a local printer same day is realistic. If you are printing overseas, plan on at least three weeks by boat and another week to get through customs. Then no matter what your realistic time line is, add more buffer to each and every step. In book production things rarely go as planned. Below are some points you need to consider to build a realistic time frame:

1. Shipping. allow one day to four weeks or more.
2. Printing. Expect two to five weeks. A soft cover book takes less time than a hard cover. Discuss time frame with the printer.
3. Typesetting and Layout. Should take two to four weeks for this stage. Expect to be actively involved during this step. Authors and editors must check, and recheck to make sure everything is right before going to press. It is cheaper to fix problems during this phase than it is at press. Scrutinize everything.
4. Proof Reading. Some consider proofreading to be part of the editor’s job and it is, but in my experience, you can’t have too many eyes on it. I once read that a new edition of Webster’s Dictionary goes through 132 proofing steps and they still find errors. Find a good proofreader you won’t regret it, but if you go to press with typo’s I guarantee that they will become glaringly obvious the second you crack open the book. Then the mistakes will haunt you. The only thing you will be able think about are the errors. Cut yourself a little slack. We’ve all been there. Remember that you didn’t see the problems after reading, re-reading, and reading your manuscript time and time again, so it is likely that most of your readers won’t see them either.
5. Editing. Check with your editor to determine the amount of time they will need. The type of book and size will make a lot of difference to the time frame. A fictional book will go faster than a technical treatise. With fiction, grammar, sentence structure, and spelling corrections will pretty much do it, but with non-fiction a re-check of the facts and understanding the technical terms takes time. My best guess is that an editor could do the job in three to eight weeks.
6. Cover Design. Here’s a piece of good news. Cover design can begin at the same time your editor starts and probably won’t add more time, with one caveat; you will want the editor to check the copy. Your cover, despite the old saw that says, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is your first impression. If the cover doesn’t draw the reader, it doesn’t matter how good the text is. Time spent on cover design is worth it.
7. Marketing. It isn’t too soon to consult with book marketing professionals. You may hire them to give you general advice or have them work closely with the editor and artists. I recommend them, but you have to consider the price tag. Hourly rates, just like hiring an attorney, can quickly spin out of control. It doesn’t take long to rack up thousands of dollars.
8. Writing and Research. I’ve seen Internet ads saying that a book can be written in 14 days or less and I’m sure that some people could do it, but most can’t. Some manuscripts take six to eight months others can take years. Whatever the amount of time you need to take for writing and research is the time you need. Period. Again, add extra buffer because we all tend to underestimate what we can achieve and when.

I’m not saying that a book couldn’t be done much faster than the time frames I’ve outlined, but in preparing a good book, a book that will make you proud takes time. If you want a book to hit the marketplace in one year from now, it isn’t too early to get started. That’s what I’m saying. Get going, author, get going.

You may not believe this but after you have birthed a book, and getting a book out has much in common with birthing babies, the hard work begins. Finding readers is a difficult task indeed. Check out The Author’s Platform it’s a low cost, easy to use, step-by-step program to teach you everything you need to know about Internet marketing. I personally recommend it.

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