Francis Hamit on Electronic Publishing
Friday, March 14, 2008
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Francis Hamit is a writer and colleague who has done considerable work in self publishing in electronic formats. I persuaded him to share his thoughts with readers.
I thought this important enough to warrant its own page.
This is the latest in a series that included many letters. I will try to go find some of the previous essays that were published in mail, and put them into this page. Meanwhile, here is his latest. This is mostly on POD publishing; previous essays were on electronic publishing. You may find them by searching through Mail (until I find the references).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/>
by Francis Hamit <http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3VR9FYMR9ZEX5/ref=cm_dly_apdp> at 1:46 PM PST, December 29, 2007
At this point, it looks like I will become my own publisher for the print editions of "The Shenandoah Spy". Why, you ask?
These days you cannot even present your work to a mainstream publisher without an agent. The days of "over the transom" are long gone. Agents always say that they are looking for new talent, but what they are looking for is the next easy sale, and, to be fair, if I were them, having sold everything from Christmas cards to real estate in my time, I would do the same. They're in business and meeting the "nut" is a constant worry. They can drown in amateur submissions. It's a great way to go broke. So I understand, really I do. I don't much like it, but I do understand. Nothing personal, just business.
And so is the decision of the publishers to abdicate their role as the custodians of the future of American and English literature, which is predicated on the bottom line, as is the death grip that marketing departments can acquire over the the works of even those who do grab the brass ring of mainstream publishing.
Self publishing is decried because it is a real threat to people who view the glass as either half full or half empty. I am far from alone in my quest to reach an audience by the most direct means. Amazon Shorts is one way to do that, but it is a Debbie Fields sampling medium rather than a place where great sales occur. It has its fans and the quality of the work is top rate.
In my search for a print publisher, I found over a dozen little companies that seemed likely, until I realized that their catalog consisted of between one and four authors (who are also owners). I found others who use Print On Demand (POD) to publish books by people who just need to see their name on a book, and who pay royalties, but no advances. (Not for nothing are these outfits called "vanity presses".) However, the dearth of new fiction from the big mainstream publishers has created a situation where new authors with such publishing arrangements do get reviewed. Favorably, if the work has merit.
Electronic publishing is a niche market and probably always will be, unless the new Amazon Kindle device takes off better than all those book readers that preceded it. We have high hopes, but my experience tells me that while the comfortable and familiar may lack the excitement of the new and novel, it sells. And selling books is what this is all about. Writers are just like anyone else in one respect. They want to make a living at what they do.
Print On Demand seems to be the answer here, something which obviously Amazon.com has taken note of since they offer POD service both through CreateSpace and Booksurge. CreateSpace will even give you a free ISBN. You need that to get distributed in all the channels used by publishers.
So what is involved in going to a POD version? Well, we began with a new cover, hiring David Martin to do a full color image of Belle Boyd that reflects the danger and excitement of the novel. The portrait on the Amazon Shorts portions is a real picture of Belle from the U.S. archives and it works fine for that, but a print book cover requires a new design.
Yes, this costs. It all costs. The type has to be re-edited and re-set and the text will be changed as certain repetitions dictated by the serial form are taken out and some new material, based upon my continuing research, is added. The changes will be barely noticeable to most readers, but I believe in the principle of "Kaizan" or continuous improvement.
Historical fiction has traps for the unwary writer. The first is making up things which not only did not happen but could not have happened. Screaming anachronisms. The flip side of that is becoming a prisoner of your own research, and providing such detail that the reader bogs down and despairs of ever discovering the story within. I hope to avoid that and hired a new reader to cast fresh eyes upon it before we reset the type.
If you want to see this process for yourself you have only to buy all the Amazon Shorts sections now and then compare them with the POD book when that is available next year.
The other disadvantage of mainstream publishing is that you end up giving up portions of your other rights in the work, and while that may be a non-issue for most novels, this one has "legs" and I do have a film and television agent.
Once you master the POD process, you may well not go back. Jerry Pournelle suggested I do a book about that, but we are not quite there yet. Jerry's motto for his computer user columns is "we make stupid mistakes so you don't have to". Yeah, what he said. We're not there yet. As time and experience permits.
Because there are advantages to this as well as problems. One advantage is you keep your rights yourself. Publishers, even the tiny ones, want half, even of they give you no money up front for your work.
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The filter on hardbounds for reviewers existed when I was doing all those reviews for the Los Angeles Daily News. (1) We got thousands of books and I personally got hundreds, but no publisher ever sent a trade paperback because that was normally a secondary edition, not a first. It has to be a new book to even be considered for a review because if it's not new, it's not "news" either.
The recent advent of Print on Demand has changed that a little bit, but old habits die hard and every reviewer gets an order of magnitude more of review copies than there is time and space to review. The big dogs have the advantage here; big name author, big publisher....hard to resist because reviewers are only human and want to read the latest best seller too. (2) all the Print on Demand publishers (meaning those with actual plants) provide economical hardbound options and you can roll out multiple editions at different prices for different markets. Especially if you don't figure to make the cut from brick and mortar bookstores. Those houses that provide only trade paperbacks are for folks that don't figure to get many reviews anyway. (3) there are all sorts of instances where the above is wrong.
Finally, the regular paid book review is rapidly disappearing and this has been a subject of much discussion and not a little hand wringing in the journalistic community. Authors are required these days to be their own publicists, which is hard to do and takes you away from the core mission of writing more books. Added to that is the growing number of people who don't read and are proud of it.
Sincerely,
Francis Hamit
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A follow up on review copies which you can add to that last I sent.
The only way to get e-books reviewed is to provide a paper copy that is bound. I did this with "The Shenandoah Spy" and have gotten a few reviews. The logic is unassailable here; if you are a reviewer, which book are you going to review? The one that requires you to download it and squint at a computer screen for hours on end, or has to be printed out, or the one that is printed and bound like any other book? E-book products, in my experience, have not sold well because they require extra effort on the part of consumers that few are willing to make just to satisfy an impulse. Zipf's Principle of Least Effort says that people will buy something they are looking for at the first place they find it. That need has to be measured against the costs of acquisition and the more trouble that is, the more likely the customer is to move on and look elsewhere.
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Dear Jerry:
We are trying the set up a web store page for Brass cannon Books. So far, it has not been a good experience. We tried using Homestead Storefront with templates. Thing is a total kludge; very slow and very limited. When our local tech support guy, who charges $35.00 per hour, couldn't make it work I canceled the account. It looked good going in but is anything but intuitive or easy to use.
Then I tried signing up for Amazon's Webstore. I never got to the design part because it kept sending me back to the start page and there were major problems just getting registered. Also, they did not disclose in the FAQ that you cannot set a link to another outside site such as CafePress.
CafePress is where we have our "affinity merchandise", which is a fancy term for coffee cups, t-shirts,etc. This , too, is Print on demand, and a major part of our marketing strategy, or at least a way to recover my costs for that fancy cover. This is an easy site to set up, although we are replacing the images with new ones that provide a better graphic.
I also fished around for a better deal on larger runs of the book in case I get a deal with a big retailer. Seems that Lightning Source has huge economies of scale and no one can beat their price either for short run or longer runs. I tried to contact Amazon Booksurge, but they never got back to me. That whole company is in bad need of a shakeup. No one knows how to do business and they often , for all their rhetoric to the contrary, forget who the customer is with their "forcing behavior" tactics and "don't call us, we'll call you" e-mail policies. I sold my stock months ago.
I guess I'll have to do a custom web site that will let me link into these other site. Off the rack solutions for e-commerce suffer from too many geek "everyone knows that" assumptions and bad documentation and site design which does not encourage confidence. CafePress has done it right. The rest, not so much.
Sincerely,
Francis Hamit
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Dear Jerry:
An added note; it took me three tries to get out of Amazon Webstore deal. After I unloaded on their tech rep he needed a confirmation web mail. The e-mail I got can not be replied to directly and requires a link be activated and form filled in. Apparently no one reads these because I got another automated reply and when I said, yeah, i really do want to cancel, finally one acknowledging the cancellation but asking me if I wanted to fill out a survey. Your comments about the Iron Law of Bureaucracy came to mind as I recalled that to get anything up on Amazon Shorts, I have to have a third party verify that it indeed my work. My verifier is Leigh, who, of course ,works for me.
I went back to bed.
Sincerely,
Francis Hamit
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