I attended a birthday party for my aunt last night. When I announced that I had quit my job and was a full-time writer, she mentioned that her husband, my uncle, had written a book and she wondered if I could help him get it published.

I told her that self-publishing is the route to go these days and said I’d send her an email with some info for him to review.

After I finished writing the epic email, I realized that might be useful for other folks, so here it is as a post.

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While it once held a stigma of being the refuge of the terrible writer who couldn’t get traditionally published, self-publishing is now a respected and viable method for a writer to directly connect with their readers and retain full control over their work.

I follow the blog of Joe Konrath. He’s traditionally published (six thriller novels) but has also self-published quite a few and now only recommends that writers self-publish instead of going to a traditional publisher. He wishes he had the rights to his traditionally published novels back as he says he’s losing money every day that the publisher has them.

The Numbers Game – crunching the profit numbers between a traditional publishing contract and self-publishing

Time is Money – about how going the slow traditional route will cost you

Time Investment – Joe compares the effort he spent promoting his print books to the time investment on his self-published books

Self-publishing now is easy. You need just a few things:

1. A good story – professionally edited and proofed. That doesn’t mean you have to pay a professional editor, but the final product needs to be as good as it can possibly be – professional standards.

2. A great cover image that looks good as a thumbnail- self-published writers have to come up with their own cover art. Two options – find a graphic designer with experience in book covers and have them design something. Will cost $.

Or do it yourself, if you’re handy with a graphics program. The key here is to make the cover look professional, as if it could grace a bookstore shelf. Best idea is to review book covers in the same genre and mimic their font, text placement, picture style, etc.

3. A great book description – this is a paragraph or two that entices the reader to buy the book. Think of it as the back cover blurb.

4. A low price – for a brand new writer, .99 is the magic price that will get readers to take a chance on an unknown. A common tactic now is to price the first book at .99 and subsequent books at 2.99. You don’t make a lot of money at .99, but the idea is to get readers first and make profit later.

To start self-publishing, you go to Amazon. With the Kindle, they have the largest catalog of electronic books and that is where much of the world shops.

Self-publishing with them is a matter of creating an account (if you don’t have one already), uploading a properly-formatted file (good series here on how to format from Guido Henkel – you can also pay someone a one-time fee to format it for you), uploading your cover art .jpg file, adding your book description, and setting a price. Amazon will list it in their catalog within a few days and you’re done. (Except for promoting it.)

With self-publishing, you can change anything about the book at any time. If your cover art isn’t drawing people in, you can change it. Book description doesn’t pop enough? Tweak it. Price is too high (or too low)? Change it. Discovered typos in your book? Upload a corrected file.

Easy and the writer has full control over the work.

I’m currently working on a fantasy romance novella (follow my progress here) that I plan to release on the Kindle as soon as it’s ready. Working for some time in March, April at the latest.

Writers can now reach readers directly with minimal effort (beyond writing the actual book). They can control every part of the work and the process. They can actually make money being a writer.

It’s a GREAT time to be a writer!

What’s your experience with self-publishing? Are you considering it or have you taken the plunge? Link to your site or your books in the comments!

Print publishing is still a long shot for many writers. So many factors have to come together at the same time to get a publishing contract.

• Writer must write a good story.
• Writer or agent must connect with the right publisher for the book.
• Publisher must like the book.
• Publisher must think the book will sell.
• Publisher must have an open slot for the book.
• Publisher must not have just published a similar book or have one scheduled for release.
• Editor, art department, marketing and the executives must all agree on and support the book.
• Schedules for art, galleys, printing and shipping must all align.
• Mercury must be in retrograde with Jupiter.
• Seven fireflies must fly in three concentric circles in Central Park.

Okay, so maybe the last two don’t have to happen, but sometimes the entire publishing process can seem to be a mystical ordeal that depends on butterflies in Kansas lighting on a specific flower to see a book published.

There are things you can do though to stack the deck in your favor and encourage a publisher to take a chance on your book.

You can bring your own audience to the table with the book.

Okay, I can hear the groans from here. Yes, that means doing your own promotion. But it’s becoming more important for writers to do their own promotion if they want to continue selling books to Big Publishing and actually have a writing career.

Demonstrating that you already have people who like your writing and are potential buyers for your books is strong proof that your book sales may be better than the average author’s. That’s a big plus for a publisher who’s always looking for better sales and a sure thing. You’re doing some of the hard work for the publisher and they may look on your novel a bit more favorably because of that.

Bringing the Audience

There are lots of options for bringing an audience to the table when you’re submitting and in book negotiations. Some are more favorable than others. I’ve listed some of them here in descending order of importance.

Previous Sales

If you’ve self-published your own print or electronic book and have sold 10,000 copies, that’s a huge amount of social proof that readers already like your writing and are willing to spend money on it. And yes, self-pubbed authors sometimes get picked up by publishers.

Remember Christopher Paolini? He’s the teenager that wrote a fantasy novel, printed copies and then sold them from the trunk of his parents’ car at libraries and schools. Carl Hiaasen’s stepson read a copy of the self-published book and Carl brought Eragon to the attention of his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. The publisher made an offer to publish the first book, Eragon, and the rest of the Inheritance Cycle series. To date, the series has sold 20 million copies. Eragon was also adapted into a film by the same name.

And then there’s Boyd Morrison. He released three books on the Kindle last March and within three months, had sold 7500 copies of them. By the fourth month he was selling 4000 books a month. His agent, who had previously tried to sell his novels and had them turned down, took his electronic sales numbers to Touchstone, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. The publisher offered him a contract.

If you can demonstrate sales numbers like these, either print or electronic, you have a much better shot of getting a publisher to look at your novel.

Start a Newsletter

If you can write in your query letter that you have 5000 subscribers to your monthly newsletter, what do you think a prospective agent or editor is going to think? You have a built-in audience of people who have opted in to hear from you on a regular basis. Odds are much better that those people are already disposed to buying any novel you write.

Social Media Numbers

This metric includes Facebook friends or fans, Twitter followers, MySpace friends, etc. A similar caveat applies here as to the website visitors. Having a lot of friends or followers is terrific. But what matters most about your social media numbers is not how many people follow or friend you, but how many of them you can mobilize into action–say to buy your book. A Twitter follower may be following you because they like what you say, or simply because they had auto-follow turned on. If you’ve been engaging with your friends and followers and they actually respond to you, then your numbers are a lot more valuable as an indicator of potential book sales.

RSS Subscribers

RSS subscribers use a feed reader to have your blog posts delivered to them, rather than having to visit your website each time you post something new. This is great for your readers, but not so great for you. It’s easy to skim and skip posts in a feed reader, so a subscriber may not be reading everything you post, like your announcement about your latest book release. But it is a higher level of engagement than just a website visitor, so the numbers do count for something.

Website Visitors

This is probably the least compelling number, but it can still be useful. In this case, visitors to your site might read your writing and be interested in it, but they might also visit once and never return. For them to count more heavily in your favor, they need to sign up to hear more from you on a regular basis, like joining your newsletter or subscribing to your RSS feed. However, if you can truthfully report that you get 10,000 visitors to your website each month, that’s a lot better than a site that gets 10 visitors a month. Again, there’s sales potential there.

Ultimately, you want to focus on raising the numbers in all of these categories, but you don’t have to tackle them all at the same time. If you’ve just started your website, start writing the most interesting posts you can and focus on getting visitors to your website. If your website is established, try to increase your RSS subscribers or start a newsletter. Start working on your social media outreach and set up an account on a site you haven’t tried before.

Everything you can do to increase the numbers of people who are aware of you and your writing is another way to stack the deck in your favor in the publishing world.

Once Upon a Time

Jacob A. Writer decided to write a book. He wrote his book, finished it and then researched how to get it published. He discovered there were two options for getting published.

1. Try to get a publishing company interested enough in his story to publish it.

2. Publish it himself.

Self-publishing was by far the easiest route to take, he found out, but it was cursed with a stigma. Only failed writers who couldn’t make it in traditional publishing went the self-publishing route. Or so many people thought.

Jacob didn’t want to wear the label of Failed Writer, so he decided on the traditional publishing path.

He spent much time polishing his queries, refining his elevator pitches (in case he was ever in an elevator with an agent or editor), and began submitting to editors and agents in the hopes that his story would be deemed worthy of publication.

If he was lucky, if the story was good, if the story fit the publisher’s catalog, if there wasn’t already a similar story in the pipeline, if the story was thought to have mass appeal, if the story made it through all of the editorial hoops, then just maybe… Jacob might see it on the shelf at his local bookstore one day. It would take months, maybe even years, but eventually, it would be there. Readers would see it and buy it and Jacob would make a small amount of money for his labor.

This was the acceptable and traditional way for a writer to share his stories with the world. And for a serious writer like Jacob, this was the path he walked.

Then One Day

Along came the Internet and print-on-demand vendors and blogs and PDFs and smart phones and eReaders.

Writers now had multiple paths they could follow.

They could start a blog and share their daily thoughts with the world. They could write on any subject they chose and publish their own words to the world.

They could write stories and release them as PDFs, available as downloads on their website.

They could work with a distributor to release their out of print titles in electronic formats that the readers could download to their smart phones or eReaders.

They could even release novellas and collections of short stories and rejected novels that the traditional publishers didn’t want through their website or the distributors.

And the writers found that the readers were hungry for good stories, regardless of the format.

Some writers began selling their books to the masses using distributors instead of publishers. And the readers bought the books, in great numbers if the books were reasonably priced. And for the first time, writers had a solid chance at making a living from their writing without having to trudge the long path of traditional publishing.

Now they could finish a story, polish it and release it the next day, directly into a reader’s hands.

And a question arose among writers, now that there was more than one acceptable way to publish a story.

“Why do I write?”

Jacob went to his friends and asked them why they wrote.

Traditional Recognition

Jane said that she wrote because she wanted to see her book on a bookshelf. She craved that traditional form of recognition that acknowledged her story had passed the strict publishing tests and been deemed worthy of becoming a printed book stamped with the publisher’s mark. Seeing her name on the cover of a book on the bookstore bookshelf gave her the validation that she wanted. Jane decided that she would continue to submit to traditional publishing. When her first book was released, she proudly sent copies to her friends, including Jacob, and her family.

To Be Heard

Phil said that he just wanted to tell his story. He wanted his words to find an audience, no matter how small. Phil chose to start his own blog, where he posts his thoughts daily. He has also considered publishing a memoir. He hasn’t decided yet if it will be via PDF, a print-on-demand vendor or through a distributor. His blog readership is growing and each post brings a few comments. He couldn’t be happier.

To Make Money

Tammy said that she wanted to make a living by telling stories. She decided to release her stories via the electronic distributors. By telling a good story and keeping the price of her ebook low, Tammy found out that she was able to make more money in a shorter time-frame than she could via traditional publishing with its long publishing schedule. Getting paid good money to tell stories is the best job she’s ever had, she told Jacob.

To Gain Fans

Gary said that what he most wanted was to have his own fan base for his stories. He loved the idea of people reading his stories and living in the world he created. He chose to release PDFs on his website and also released ebooks through the distributors at a very low price to gain more readers. After he builds a good following he plans to pursue traditional publishing as a means to a wider distribution.

Happily Ever After

Jacob thought about how each of his friends identified what they wanted out of their writing and choose a method of publication that gave them what they wanted. Some even decided on using multiple methods.

Jacob himself had a thriller idea he had been tossing around. It was outside his normal Western genre and his publisher didn’t want it. So he decided to release it as an ebook to see how his sales went. He’s excited about the future for writers as technology makes it easier for writers to reach readers directly.

Your Turn

Why do you write? What do you want to get out of it? Is it time to change the publishing path you’re on to better meet your goals?

Ebooks are big news these days, even though they still comprise only a small portion of total book sales. Amazon reported that Kindle downloads surpassed print book sales in December 2009. Apple just released the iPad which can function as an eReader and download ebooks from the iStore.

Writers are cashing in on the popularity of ebooks. By uploading their own books to the big distributors like Amazon, Apple, B&N and Sony and bypassing the Big Publishers, they’re able to directly reach the reader and get a larger slice of the royalty pie. And the slice is getting larger. Amazon is changing its royalty rate in June from 35% to 70% (for ebooks priced 2.99 or greater) which is a huge boon for authors.

Technology has made it easy for writers to sell their stories directly to readers and reap the majority of the benefits. If you can follow some formatting guidelines, you can upload your story within minutes and be selling.

And notice that self-publishing is quickly losing its stigma of being the last refuge for the writer who couldn’t make it in Real Publishing.

If you want to make a full-time living as a writer, that is now entirely possible. Even if Big Publishing isn’t interested in your books.

Need some proof?

JA Konrath is selling 180 230 ebooks a day. He has six books in print and thirteen ebooks available on the Kindle (mostly novels that Big Publishing didn’t want). He projects he’ll make $100,000 by the end of the year. Just from his ebooks.

Karen McQuestion has six ebooks available on the Kindle (and not on any other platform and no print books) and has sold 30,000 copies of her ebooks since July 2009. Of the six, one is a children’s book and two are young adult novels. She’s proof that you don’t have to be traditionally published or have a big name to make money on ebooks.

Moira Rogers reported a dramatic upsurge in her ebook sales in December 2009 and January 2010. After months of low sales, her numbers jumped to over 400 sales in January alone on just one of her ebook titles. She says her other backlist titles on Amazon are experiencing the same surge in sales.

Lee Goldberg has been following JA Konrath’s ebook success and has been experimenting with the covers of his backlist books available on the Kindle to see the effect on sales. So far, his sales have increased with the new covers and if his sales continue at their current rate, he’ll earn $1400 in royalties in April.

Ellen Fisher released her first ebook on Amazon in February 2010 and had 27 downloads. She released two more ebooks and ended March with 889 downloads.

There is amazing opportunity for writers with a good book, a good cover, an appealing description and low price to make money on Kindle sales. And this isn’t even counting the other platforms, like the iStore, B&N and Sony.

Your Turn

Do you have any ebooks available on Amazon or on other ebook platforms? How have your sales been?

If you don’t have an ebook on Amazon yet, why not? What do you need to get you started?

If you’ve been following Joe Konrath’s blog, you know he’s been experimenting with ebook sales for a year now. And he’s had tremendous success so far.

In fact, he’s now advocating that writers should not ever sign away their ebook rights to a publisher, because they can make more money by listing the books electronically themselves.

But is his experience typical? To provide another view on ebook sales, Mark Terry has written a guest post on Joe’s blog detailing his experience with selling an ebook.

The overall summary?

Joe is certainly selling more copies of his ebooks than Mark. They both discuss the possible reasons why in the post and in the comments.

I think the main reason is that Joe has done a ton of promotion for his books, both print and electronic. (Sent 7000 letters to libraries, visited 1200 bookstores, did a 100-blog tour in a month, and traveled to 39 states speaking at writing conferences, conventions, and book fairs.)

If you want to have large ebook sales, promotion is a key component. People can’t buy a product they’ve never heard of.

Internet Promotion for Ebooks

If you have an ebook for sale on the Kindle or any other electronic distribution platform, try these suggestions for getting the word out about your ebook.

1. Put links on your website to all of the locations where readers can buy your ebook. Make the links prominent – put them in your sidebar and set up a page on your site with a description of the ebook and links to buy it. Make it easy for readers to find your book and get a copy.

2. Send an announcement about your ebook to your mailing list. If you don’t have a mailing list, start one on your website so you can gather email addresses of fans interested in your stories.

3. Post an announcement about your ebook on your blog.

4. Write a guest post for someone else’s blog and have a sentence about your ebook in your author bio at the end of the post.

5. Cross promote your ebook with another ebook author. Trade first chapters of each novel and place them at the end of the other person’s ebook as a teaser chapter. Be sure to include a link or location where your ebook can be purchased.

6. Give out free copies of your ebook. Yes, that seems counter-productive to making money with your ebook, but the more people that get hooked on your writing, the more future sales of your books, print and ebook. If you’re still leery of giving them away for free, look at Joe’s blog. He lists all of his ebooks as free downloads on his website and he’s still selling loads of them through the Kindle store.

7. Make subtle announcements about your ebook on your social media networks, like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, as well as any genre sites, book tagging or review sites that you belong to.

8. If your ebook is on the Kindle, join the Kindleboards community and interact with Kindle readers. Put a link to your ebook in your forum signature.

9. Join other eReader forums, like MobileRead and Book Summit. Do a search for “Kindle forum”, “iTunes forum”, “Nook forum”, or “ebook forum” to find others to join.

Remember, you aren’t aiming for a hard sell. You just want to make people aware that you have an ebook out there. Ideally, you want to draw them in with a catchy description of the book to entice them into checking it out.

The more mentions of your ebook out in the Interwebs, the better the chances of new readers finding your stories.

Your Turn

What promotional methods have you used or seen used for electronic books? Did it work well or not so much?

Joe Konrath has been pioneering new promotion methods since he sold his first book. He’s blogged about his experiences with drive-by book signings, blog tours, and electronic book sales.

His latest post covers his efforts to increase his readership and fanbase by being everywhere, like the southern plant kudzu.

Kudzu, a fast-growing vine that climbs, coils and trails along the ground and over plants, shrubs, trees and buildings. It is prolific in the southern US and is classified as a pest weed due to its persistent and rapid growth.

While you don’t want to be considered a weed as a writer, kudzu is an impressive plant to emulate with your writing career.

Because not every person who reads one of your stories will become a fan, building a fanbase of lots of readers means getting your stories into as many hands as possible. The more stories that you make available in more places, the more chances that readers have to find you and to fall in love with your stories.

How to Be the Kudzu

Submit your stories to traditional publishers whenever possible. This is still the best way to get started in publishing.

When you’ve decided a story is done making the rounds with no takers, look for other ways to get it into the hands of readers.

Step 1 – Prepare Your Stories

Polish all stories up to your current writing standards, especially any under-the-bed novels that you wrote years ago.

Joe rewrote each of his rejected novels to his current writing standards before making them available to the public. By releasing only quality materials, you’ll keep your current fans happy and increase your chances of gaining new fans.

Step Two – Package Your Stories

Gather several short stories into one file to form your own short story collection. Novellas can probably stand alone, depending on length, though you could combine a novella with short stories. Novels can also stand alone.

If you don’t have enough material on your own, get together with writing friends and create your own themed anthology of short stories.

Design a graphic cover for your book, either do it yourself or enlist a friend with graphic design skills. Great cover art is eye-catching, so make it the best you possibly can. Study the cover art of popular books in your genre for ideas on fonts, colors, text placement and common genre elements (i.e. male/female/couple on romance novels; weapons, mystical symbols or animals on urban fantasies; broken things, bloody weapons, chalk body outlines on mysteries or suspense).

Step Three – Publish Your Stories

Save them in PDF format and list them on your website as free downloads.

If you’ve gone together with friends and created an anthology, have each writer upload the file to their own website and provide download links for it.

Go to Smashwords and follow their Style Guide to format your ebook and publish it through them.

For more exposure, also follow the guidelines to get your ebook included in the Smashwords Premium Catalog that goes to mainstream distributors like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Sony and other retailers.

When publishing through a company like Smashwords, set the price of your ebook low – $1.99 or less. You’re asking strangers to take a chance on an unknown author. Make it easy and cheap for them to do so and you’ll get a better response. The intent is to get your work into the hands of a lot of readers. Making a lot of money in the process comes later.

For an anthology, read the Smashwords guidelines carefully and discuss how you’ll handle payment to each writer if you choose to publish through Smashwords and charge for the ebook. (Might be easiest to price it as free to avoid the hassle. Each writer can always release their own expanded version of their story or a different story altogether as a paid version.)

(Yes, you want to post the same books for free on your website and for sale on Amazon, iTunes, etc. Some people feel better about paying for a story – it’s perceived as higher quality than a free one. But free downloads are a great reward for people who go to your site to check you out.)

Step Four – Promote Your Stories

Write a blog post announcing the free downloads available on your site and that the ebooks are also available on Amazon, Sony, B&N, etc.

Send out an email to your newsletter list about the free downloads.

Provide links to the free versions and the paid versions of your ebooks on your site.

Announce the availability of your ebook on your social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.). Remember not to be pushy with the announcements. (“Buy my book, Taming the Kudzu!” is bad. “New story: Taming the Kudzu available for download. (link)” is good.

You don’t have to do all four steps immediately. Your first job is to write some stories or resurrect old ones that can be polished. Then take each one through the steps – Prepare, Package, Publish and Promote.

Your Challenge

Take a high-quality, unpublished short story, novella or novel (that you are not actively submitting and that you don’t plan to submit), save it as a PDF, and make it available on your website as a free download.

Send an email to your newsletter list telling them the story is available for download.

Then leave a comment with your website URL so we can read your story.

Be the kudzu and start spreading your stories everywhere.