Business Diary: 5/14/21

by • Business Diary

Let’s try something. Yesterday, I sat down and wrote my goals for the day.

Let’s see how I did:

* Write the cast list for the 1929 silent “Die Abenteurer G.m.b.H.” (Adventuress Inc.) which we’ll watch tonight as part of the “Murder, She Watched” book.
Accomplished! We try to watch two movies a week. Teresa writes the review / commentary, I provide the cast list (with notes on other parts they’ve played) and find the art to go into the book. I also gather art I can use elsewhere, such as buildings, bodies, and clips from the show.

* Send the newsletter

Done! I didn’t realize until I went into MailerLite that I have sign-ups from Career Indie Author, so they got the main newsletter as well. I have to put on the list how to structure it so CIA signups get a CIA newsletter. There are also other details I haven’t gotten into, such as creating the Reader Magnet (done but not uploaded) and setting up a schedule to write it.

* Edit the Ellen Crosby interview and send it to Mechanicsburg Mystery.

Fail. I need to do that today.

* Edit “Yellow Peril” essay for “Blue Ploermell.”

Fail. This has been hanging fire for weeks. This will certainly come up in my year-end evaluation.

* Write 10 footnotes for “Brown Suit.”

Another failure, and it’ll hamper getting it done by the deadline of late June.

* Post something to Instagram/Facebook (2 hours!)

And here’s why the rest of the day went off the rails. Learning how to use the Creator Studio, putting together a post for them, then publishing them took more time than I expected. Part of it was due to writing up the workflow to make later iterations faster. Once that’s down, this will go much faster.

So all in all a mixed day.

jennie nash novel revision course

Jennie Nash’s Novel Revision Course with Early-Bird Discount

by • Revision

Recently, I got a chance to preview a new novel revision course from Mark Dawson’s Self-Publishing Formula website that I think is worth recommending.

(Note: I’ve been a longtime member of his Facebook group, and that’s the limit. Dawson doesn’t know me, and I earn nothing by recommending him or his courses.)

That out of the way, I think that one of the biggest obstacles indie writers face is learning how to revise their novels. There are plenty of how-to books out there, and plenty of advice, but apart from “Self-Editing for Fiction Writers,” I’ve found them lacking.

The advice I’ve seen have all been of a piece: look at the characters, look at the scenes, look at the background, look at this, look at that. They didn’t speak to the way I think.

In Career Indie Author, I recommended Holly Lisle’s One-Pass Revision Method. I used it to revise my two (unreleased) novellas and found it enormously useful.

Recently, Dawson opened the doors to this revision course by editor Jennie Nash. It follows the same method as Holly’s, but with some interesting twists. I’m only a third of the way into the course — I had to stop to take on a project with a hard deadline (ironically, it was a developmental edit) but I’m looking forward to getting back into it.

Nash’s novel revision course is not long, about three to four hours long, but it is detailed in its methodology and easy to follow.

The first part takes you to the 50,000-foot view by asking you to summarize your book into a few pages. She wants you to back away from the details of the work to the narrative arc, from beginning to end. Get the info into your head, then as you break it down in the next section, you’ll compare and contrast and see where the narrative might be going off the rails.

One neat metaphor she uses the stop light to categorize the weak spots in the manuscript:

* Red light issues will cause the read to fling the book into the corner. These are gaping plot holes, structural problems, subplot issues, etc.

If you want a comforting thought, she says that in a typical manuscript, she sees four to seven red-light issues.

* Yellow light issues are smaller than red-light issues. They may not stop the reader, but they damage their attention span. These can be dialog issues, too much infodump, pointless chapters, and moderate word cuts.

* Green light issues — admitted a weak spot in the metaphor because green means “go,” doesn’t it? — involve grammar, spelling, and finding better words than the ones you wrote. These are the ones inexperienced authors head for first, because they’re easy to see.

Nash, however, won’t have any of that behavior. She wants you to work on the red-light issues first. And she does that by having you do what she calls an Inside Outline. This is a chapter-by-chapter breakdown, and she not only describes the process, she gives you examples of Inside Outlines by other authors, including SPF’s own James Blatch.

Once you’ve done that, she leads you into the prioritizing process, and how to execute the fixes and polish your story. I admit that I haven’t gotten that far yet. I want to use the course on one of my works, but I’m enormously impressed with what I’ve seen so far.

The course also includes admittance to a private Facebook group where you can ask questions about the method.

The course’s retail price is $300, but because this is new, they’ve discounted it to $197, or 12 monthly payments of $21. Like all of the SPF courses, once you’ve bought it, you can return to it anytime you like. You can also download the classes and the handouts, so you can keep the material handy.

I would say that the only downside to the course is that you have to put in the work, but you know that already, don’t you my droogs? And I speak as someone who thought that buying how-to books was the same as using them.

I still recommend Holly Lisle’s method (and she offers classes as well), but I think this is worthwhile, too.

glengarry glen ross brass balls

What’s Your Brand Alignment?

by • Branding

No, this is not a Dungeons & Dragons joke, although it does involve a fantasy author.

I’ll not identify him, because this is not really about him, but he recently released a video on his YouTube channel announcing that he was going to stop making videos for awhile.

In this era of DIY, no one cancels you when your videos get low ratings. You have to do that yourself.

In his case, it was a good idea. Although he was having fun making them, the videos were sucking up the time he needed to do more important things.

Like write. He was doing very little writing. Not just because of the videos. He had other things going on in his life as well, and taken together, he couldn’t afford to spend 20 percent of his time making videos.

Hence, the self-cancellation.

Which was a good idea, like I said.

The problem with his lack of success, I think, came down to a clash of alignments.

Not neutral good or chaotic evil alignment, but his brand’s alignment.

He is a fantasy writer, but his videos were all about him. His writing. His opinions. Not about the fantasy genre. Not about his books in the fantasy genre. Not about the genre at all.

He was making videos for a small audience, one that might not be interested in his books.

He had made this mistake before. He had made videos on a very popular subject. He got a lot of views and a lot of subscribers willing to engage with him on the subject.

The only problem was, not many of those fans read fantasy novels.

What’s the Takeaway?

What we have here is a lesson in brand misalignment.

Maybe it’ll help if I explain that marketing can be like being a carnival barker. Anything that you post — social media, YouTube ads, blog posts — are the barkers. Their job is to get the customer interested in your books.

And that means following the path of AIDA.

glengarry glen ross AIDA
That’s an acronym popularized in Glengarry Glen Ross. It means whatever you put up, you need to create a path that leads the customer from it to your goal, whether it’s to buy your book, signup for your newsletter, or read another interesting post.

Here’s an example of an AIDA path:

Attention: Someone searches for a post on something and find yours.

Interest: They read the post, and your software makes suggestions for more posts on the subject.

Decision: They see references to a book on the same subject and decides to buy it.

Action: They follow the book link and buy the book.

In the case of our fantasy writer, here’s one possible path:

Attention: He decides to write a short story and film himself narrating the book. The story can be broken up into three video segments, each one ending on a cliffhanger.

Interest: They’re posted, and he includes a link in the show notes to his website so they can sign up for his newsletter. (Plus, judging by the number of views for each video, he can get an idea if his story is engaging them. Remember, this is a short story, not a novella.)

Decision: They see the link and decide to visit the website.

Action: They follow the link and sign up.

That’s it. A simple funnel. I use it at the end of this post to get you to the “Career Indie Author” book page. If you like what you see, you’ll click on the link to where you can buy the book.

That’s AIDA in real life.

There are other possible paths, depending on the type of books you write.

If you’re writing relationship self-help, you can be giving advice to readers, like Amy Alkon. If you’re a journalist who writes deep dives into the intersection of commerce, culture, creativity, and the sciences like Malcolm Gladwell, you do a series of podcasts on the same subject.

Many indie authors add a consulting sideline to their fiction work, and build a good part of their business around that. David Gaughran, Mark Dawson, and Joanna Penn are working hard in that area.

In fiction, deciding how to lure the punters into your tent is a lot harder. Jonathan Maberry, before he became a best-selling author, conducted interviews on his website with other authors in his thriller genre. His reasoning was their fans would come over, read the interviews, and check out his books.

I don’t know if it helped, but the logic is sound, and there are never enough thrillers to suit readers, so why wouldn’t they?

Building AIDA paths also have another benefit: It helps you focus your efforts that could bring meaningful results.

If you’re wondering what to advertise, or if, or where, think about the path. Build the path from whatever you do to an endpoint that you can see. If it’s newsletter signups, then you can tell if it worked by the number of people who join.

But always remember, keep your brand aligned with your AIDA.

If you want to learn more about branding and other aspects of the writing business, check out “Career Indie Author,” the one thing apart from coffee that’ll get your heart started in the morning.

antique store cash register buttons close

The Problem With The True Cost of Self-Publishing

by • Publishing

I came across a recent story that went into great detail what it costs today to publish a book.

This is a good thing to know. Before you publish your first book, you need to understand what it takes and how much to pay.

The writer was very thorough. She was thorough in listing the categories, down to office supplies and postage. She gave precise numbers.

It was also unrealistic and a little misleading. Someone new to the profession could look at the list, total up the numbers, and say, “I don’t have that kind of money.”

For example, she suggested that you could spend on editing anywhere between $600 and $18,000. At the low end, with a manuscript in good shape, it would be for proofreading only. The high-end price was for five levels of editing: manuscript assessment, developmental, line editing, copy editing, and proofreading.

That, in a word, is insane.

But before you write that check, you need to ask yourself some even more important questions:

1. What is my goal? To publish this book or to publish a lot of books.
2. Why am I writing? Is it to give a voice to my imagination or to tell a story? Or do I want to make money at this?
3. Finally, how much do I want to spend? How much am I investing in this project.

The answer to each, taken together, will give you some idea of your victory conditions.

My what?

Right, your victory conditions. It’s a term I picked up from when I played wargames. These games recreated a battle, or a campaign, and it would end after a set number of turns. Unlike chess or Monopoly, the game didn’t end when there’s one person’s pieces still on the board. So, you needed the victory conditions to tell you who won.

The same concept can be applied to self-publishing. If you know when you’ve won, you have a better idea what to do to get there.

For example, if the answer to the first question was “to publish this memoir,” then that determines what services you’ll buy and which ones you can leave alone. If the answer to the second is that you want people to read the memoir, whether you may money or not, then that determines what kind of marketing services you want to buy. You may want to give the book away, or for a low price. And if the answer to #3 is “$10,000,” then you can buy a lot of editing and design services to make the book as attractive as possible.

But if you’re goal is to publish a lot of books, make money at it, and you have only $500, that’ll result in a different answer. You may choose to write to what’s selling now, join a writer’s group and use beta readers to whip it into shape, spend a hundred bucks on a genre-appropriate cover, and learn how to format the book yourself. You may buy a book on using KDP ads or get Kindlepreneur’s free course on AMS ads and use the rest of the money there while you write the next book in the series.

Different goal, different plan.

The problem with answering the question “How much does it cost to self-publish” is that it’s too variable for just one post. So that’s why I’m going to break this down for you over the next month. Once a week, I’ll talk about a different aspect of publishing, what you can do yourself, and what it might (and I stress might) be better to get someone else to do.

By the end of the month, you’ll have a much better idea of the options available to you, and you’ll be able to make a much better informed opinion.

Are Your Fonts Commercial?

by • Book Design

Regarding your trade paperback books published by KDP, the question might come up: Are your fonts commercial?

I learned this during a kerfluffle I had with Amazon regarding one of my books. It took a week to resolve, and diverted me from my other book-writing projects, but since I learned a little something about fonts, I thought I should pass this along.

It happened when I updated the content for the trade paperback version of The Complete, Annotated Mysterious Affair at Styles. It was a simple process, and when they sent me the email that it had been published, I went on with my life.

A few months later, while checking something else on my dashboard, I saw that my book was listed as “On Hold.” In other words, it wasn’t on sale. No reason given.

First lesson: Amazon will not tell you when a book is on hold.

Working through the Contact Me section of the dashboard, I had them call me and I explained the situation. I’ll give them credit, when the operator saw that my book was On Hold, he passed me up to a senior support specialist. Over the next few days, I talked to three of them, because they were passing messages to the tech people about my problem.

The tl;dr edition: Once I understood what their problem was, I solved the problem.

Here’s how.

During the review process, KDP examines the fonts used in the book to see if they’re approved for commercial use. Two of mine weren’t. They told me which ones.

This surprised me. I wasn’t using them for the book.

Then I looked at the interior PDF to see what fonts were embedded in it (to get there, click on File, then Properties, then Fonts).

Turns out I was wrong. There they were.

I checked my Word file. It seems that, I created the Styles file by taking the file for another book, cleared out the text, and replaced it with the new book. But when I did that, blank spaces retained the non-commercial fonts. They did not appear in the book, but remember that in Word, blank spaces have a font assigned to them as well.

And it was these blank spaces that tripped the Font sensor at KDP.

I searched for those fonts and replaced them with commercial fonts, and the book went through just fine.

Are You Using Commercial Fonts?

Here’s how to find out. If you’re using Windows, the Fonts folder can be found by going to the C: drive, opening the Windows folder, then the Fonts folder.

Once there, look for the Font Embeddability category. Chances are, it’s not there. You’ll have to turn it on.

Hover the cursor above the subject line (which displays “Name”, “Font style”, “Show/hide”, “Category”, etc.), right-click, and select “Font Embeddability.”

Windows font categories

Here’s what it’ll look like:

Font Embeddability Tag

Every font has a status in this column: blank, Installable, Editable, Print and preview, and Restricted.

If a font is Restricted, it does not have a commercial license. If it says anything else, you’re good to go.

Second lesson: Even if you have a free font, even if it was given to you to use for commercial purposes, it doesn’t matter if the font is Restricted.

I had downloaded the font from a free site. It had no author attached to it, and no way to reach him. He had even commented that the font was free and could be used for any purpose.

But what he had done was create it using professional software that automatically saved the font as Restricted.

It doesn’t matter what I can tell KDP. All they can see is the Restricted flag, and I had no way to remove it.

(Actually, I lie. Back in the 1990s, someone wrote a program that flips the Restricted bit to Installable. A notable typographical firm made him remove it from the Internet, but he left the source code online. It’s a bit hinky, and I wouldn’t use it on a licensable font, but it’s there.)

As you know, I searched the Word document for every appearance of the banned fonts and eliminated them. I made the PDF of the interior and checked it to make sure that the fonts were gone and uploaded the new file.

A day later, KDP emailed me and reported that the book was for sale again! Which was great, but I still lost sales.

Conclusion

Like I said, chances are, this may be a problem you’ll never run into.

On the other hand, now you know how to check your fonts to make sure they’ll pass the test. If you put your fonts to the test, you won’t wake up one day to find your books not selling.

Should Authors Insult Customers

by • Public Persona

File this under the category “The things authors do that make me shake my head in wonder.”

There’s an author who also sells publishing services. Rather than identify him or her, let’s call him RedShirt.

RedShirt puts out a brochure listing his services. It’s an expensive piece, with color pictures of the books he’s worked on, and a detailed description of what he does. He comes across as very positive, very informative, and very supportive.

He also lists things that he won’t do and it boils down to two things. He won’t plagiarize, and he won’t work with Christians.

Not only won’t he work with Christians, RedShirt’s very emphatic about it. He devotes a paragraph to explaining that he thinks Christians are misguided in thinking that they can pray away “poverty, sexuality, race, or gender.”

(Pauses, takes a sip of coffee.)

This disturbs me. Not that RedShirt believes this. It’s a free country. Helping someone publish a book is a creative undertaking, and he shouldn’t work with people whose values he doesn’t share. I wouldn’t cite anti-discrimination laws to force him to accept work from a Christian group, any more than I would force a bakery to design a cake for a same-sex couple’s wedding.

No, RedShirt’s statement bothers me for two reasons. First, he demonstrated an inability to write clearly. The sentence about praying away “poverty, sexuality, race, or gender” is confusing. How do you pray away a race or gender? Why would you?

Second, RedShirt deliberately goes out of his way, in his promotional material, to attack a group of people who might still want to buy his services. Christians write children’s books that don’t mention God. They write memoirs without intending to proselytize.

Does this mean he shouldn’t mention this? Of course not, but he could have phrased it in a way that doesn’t intend to hurt. He could have written, “I’m not comfortable with religious material.” If he knew book packagers who deal in this area, he could offer to give the customer a reference.

It’s all in using the right words.

There’s another reason why this statement – even if it doesn’t apply to me – would make me reluctant to use RedShirt’s services. It’s the vehemence of RedShirt’s objections to religious content. It stands out sharply against the positive tone of the rest of the brochure. How easy will RedShirt be to work with? Would anything I say or do trip RedShirt into objecting?

So I’m not saying you shouldn’t talk about subjects that matter to you. That may be your jam to do so. I’m just saying you should think about the effect your words may have and decide if they’re really worth saying.

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