Self Publication or Commercial Publication - Is There a Difference Anymore?

Editor's Note: We have a guest blog by best selling author Jeremy Robinson, who I refer to as the author's author. I followed Jeremy's career when he started as a self-published author, watched him create ingeniously unique marketing events for his books and finally land a lucrative three-book contract with a traditional publisher, Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press. He is an inspiration to all aspiring and just-published authors.- Anthony


By Jeremy Robinson

So what is the difference between being a self-published author and an author with a commercial publisher. Being a self-publisher for three years, this was a question I often wondered about. NY publishers and authors are very quiet about the inner workings of publishing and in some ways it felt like this secret society that you had to become a part of to learn the truth. In a way, that's true, because I didn't really know until I was in the club, so to speak.

I should mention that this is MY experience. I am a professional interior and cover designer and have hired editors for my books. Because I tried to treat the process of self-publishing as much like a publisher as I could (going so far as to start a small press), you will not find those typical self-publishing/big gun publishing differences in my perspective.

But I'm happy to talk about it and let YOU in on the secret. First, I'll start with the differences, because there aren't that many and, honestly, they're not nearly as important as the similarities.

1. You get paid an advance. Most of the time. Which is nice. It says, "Hey, we think your book is going to sell X amount of copies and we're so sure of it, we're going to pay you in advance for those copies". Wow! What a shot in the arm. But its not as grand as it sounds. Odds are, as a first time author your advance will be far less than you need to live on for a year, so don't quit your day job. And then there is the pressure to actually sell what was expected of you...which can be a lot harder than you think.

2. This is the big one, distribution. Your books, if the publisher is doing their job, will not only be available to brick and mortar stores, it will also be on the shelf without you having to lift a finger. Deep breath, smile, and sigh. Ahhhh.

3. Royalties. As a self-publisher I was accustomed to making $4.00 per book sold. That's now at $2.50 for hard covers and something like $.65 for mass markets. So to make the same amount of money, I need to sell roughly double the amount of books, which is, again, harder than you think.

And that's about it. There are other obvious differences, like working with an editor that's been in the business for a while, and a team of artists at a publishing house, but that experience is totally different from person to person, and for me, hasn't been too different than what I'm used to in my own self-imposed system of publishing.

As for what has not changed (despite how much I wish it would) is this: marketing. When I got the catalog from the publisher with PULSE in it, I looked at the list of marketing that was going to be done for the book...and you know what I saw? Everything I have always done for my books. Meaning, I would still be doing them...and that was it. There would be no marketing beyond what I could manage on my own.

If you're an author, you might be aghast right now. But you shouldn't be. This is life for most newbie authors. Many choose to do nothing and let the book sell from the shelf on its own, but I wouldn't suggest this.

You must act like you're still trying to prove yourself as an author, because you are! Getting a big publisher is just the first step in having a career as an author. What happens after that, once again, largely depends on the author's action or inaction. So, what hasn't changed is that I am still spending insane amounts of hours marketing. I created my video trailer. I hired a narrator to podcast my previous novel, Kronos, an inserted ads for PULSE. I'm active on my blog, website, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube and Goodreads. I had multiple contests. Wrote and released press releases. Booked radio shows. Scheduled signings. And a slew of other things I have mentally blocked.

In fact, I would suggest you not think about what is different between self-publishing and commercial publishing. If you get a publishing deal, great, but don't think you've "made it." You're still a long way from that. I'm still a long way from that. So stay focused on what remains the same. Keep your desperation. Your drive. And maybe you'll get a second book deal when the first is done.

For more on me and the novels, please visit www.jeremyrobinsononline.com - Sign up for the newsletter while you're there!

PULSE is now available.

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"Jeremy Robinson's latest novel, PULSE, ratchets his writing to the next level.  Rocket-boosted action, brilliant speculation, and the recreation of a horror out of the mythologic past, all seamlessly blend into a rollercoaster ride of suspense and adventure.  Who knew chess could be this much fun!"
-- James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of THE LAST ORACLE

What Makes a Good Memoir?

By Paula Margulies

As a publicist, I'm sent books of all genres by authors interested in my services, but lately I seem to be on the receiving end of a lot of memoirs. I've also spoken to a higher-than-usual number of memoir writers, who either telephone or approach me with questions at writer's conferences. The bulk of these conversations have to do with why their memoirs aren’t selling and what the authors can do to make them better.

My first suggestion for all memoir writers is to take a look at their market and identify the different types of people who would want to read their book. This is tricky, for while many memoir writers have done a good job of detailing certain aspects of their personal history, a number of them have not thought about who might be interested in reading what they've written.

A lot of memoirs I've seen recently are nothing more than personal recountings of an individual’s experiences – some of which are, indeed, memorable. But I've found that a great number of memoirs contain information that might only be interesting to the author. In this category, I include stories about having a child out of wedlock, rescue missions by health care workers, struggles with family members over an elderly relative’s care, vacations or trips abroad that the author found life-changing, collections of stories that the author told his/her children while they were growing up, or collections of a family member’s letters from World War II. Although engaging and, occasionally, entertaining, books with these topics typically focus on material and/or experiences that a number of us have already encountered in our own lives. And, thus, because we readers are familiar with the situations ourselves, stories like these don’t always make interesting reading.

So, what makes a compelling memoir? I believe that in order to become a bestseller, a memoir must have a strong storyline. That means that there is a beginning, middle, and end to the events that are recounted in the book. Examples of breakout memoirs with clear timelines are Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, where the author, Danish baroness, Karin von Blitzen-Finecke, describes the political and emotional barriers she faced while trying to build a coffee farm in Kenya, and Before Night Falls, by Reinaldo Arenas, the rebellious and flamboyant Cuban poet and playwright, who describes both his early years as a homosexual artist under the Castro regime, including his imprisonments and escapes, and his last days as an exile in the United States.

Successful memoirs also have compelling or distinct characters in them. Just like fiction, a good memoir will introduce the reader to individuals who are memorable and, sometimes, highly unusual. Examples include Augusten Burrough's mother, Deidre, and her unorthodox psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, in Running with Scissors, or the sadistic mother in A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer.

Oftentimes, as in fiction, the individuals in a memoir will be sympathetic, so that readers strongly identify with them. This is particularly true of Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, who begins her book by depicting herself in a heap on the bathroom floor, devastated by a recent divorce, or Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, who lost her husband to a sudden heart attack and shares the aftermath with the reader in a way that is heart-wrenchingly honest.

Another reason for the success of these two memoirs is the fact that they both tell love stories. In Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert begins the memoir with the loss of love (after a failed marriage) and then ends it with the start of a new relationship with the man who will become her next husband. Likewise, Didion recounts the significant moments of her marriage to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, as she describes her attempts to grapple with her grief at his passing. These two books are skillfully written, with clear, strong voices and brave directness, and both authors draw painful moments with great tenderness.

People in successful memoirs often face situations with high stakes consequences and experience an emotional trajectory, or arc, whereby the individuals are changed somehow at the end of the book. Many memoirs have to do with the author or a parental figure teetering on the brink of alcoholism (Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller), destitution (Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt), poverty and spousal abuse (All Over but the Shoutin', by Rick Bragg), drug addiction (A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey), cultural adversity (Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver-Relin), and life-threatening adventure (Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer). What makes these books stand out above the others is that in all of these stories, the authors and/or their loved ones faced extreme circumstances – incarceration, kidnapping, starvation, emotional abandonment, and, sometimes, immanent death – and somehow survived.

In addition to the victim/survival type memoir, there are celebrity memoirs, where the author recounts his own story as a celebrity or his experiences living or working with one (examples include Here's the Story by The Brady Bunch star, Maureen McCormick, or Everything about Me is Fake and I'm Perfect by supermodel Janice Dickenson). There are also tell-all or insider memoirs, where the individual describes events in an environment that most of us would never have a chance to experience. Many of these are political in tone, such as John Dean's Blind Ambition, the anti-Nixon tome published in 1976, or George Stephanopoulos's All Too Human, which described intimate details about the first family during the Clinton administration.

The message here is that unless your memoir is something like the ones I've mentioned in this post, you might have a tough time selling it. That doesn't mean that authors shouldn't write memoirs – on the contrary, writing a memoir can be a wonderfully revealing and cathartic experience for the author and of great significance to family members and friends. But to reach further audiences, memoirs that don't involve a celebrity connection or insider information must have a definable storyline, remarkable characters, high stakes, and a great love story – or some combination, thereof – in order to experience breakout success.
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Paula Margulies is a book publicity and promotions expert in San Diego, California. You can reach her at paula@paulamargulies.com, or visit her website at www.paulamargulies.com.

New Publishing House Announces "What We Look For in Book."

By Anthony S. Policastro

Outer Banks Publishing Group, my newest venture, is one of the few publishing houses to use state-of-the-art digital printing technologies, social networking, virtual marketing, and the Internet to produce, promote, sell, and brand you and your book in the largest market in the world – the Internet.

Outer Banks Publishing Group was created with the same innovative and pioneering spirit displayed by the Wright Brothers who achieved the first flight more than 100 years ago. Hence, the name seems appropriate for what we hope to achieve in the publishing industry.

Image via Wikipedia

Whether your have written nonfiction or fiction, all books in essence are about a story.

In light of more than 400,000 titles published last year and the number increasing daily with the explosion of ebooks and self-publishing, your book has to be exceptional to get noticed and to ultimately be purchased.

Here are some basic elements that should be in every book:

1. Known as the lead in newspapers, the first sentence or paragraph should effectively communicate something that will entice, interest or emotionally attach the reader to your book so he or she will want to read the rest of the book.
2. Every word, sentence, paragraph and section or chapter should relate in some way to the theme or story in a significant way. Background information on a character, a situation or concept should not be there just to fill pages. It should all relate in some way like the Ying and Yang - each complement each other, each are relevant to each other as parts that create the whole.
3. This may sound obvious, but your book should have a beginning, a middle and an end. In essence, all questions, concerns or conflicts should be resolved by the end of the book. The reader should not be left with any questions whether your book is nonfiction or fiction.

Content is king. No matter what you write about, if the content and the writing engages, inspires, entertains or educates with an emotional attraction, the world will open up to you.

Be Careful What You Wish For

By Paula Margulies

At a lunch meeting a few weeks ago, a client of mine, who is getting ready to release the second edition of her young adult novel, confided to me that she found the business of marketing a book to be a bit daunting. "It’s a full-time job, isn't it?" she stated (a bit ruefully, I might add). I have to agree with her, especially since I do book publicity for a living (it’s definitely a full-time job for me) and since I’ve also been promoting my own first novel, which was published by a small press last April.

Every writer dreams of the day he can hold a printed copy of his book in his hand and, even better, sign copies of that book at bookstores across the country. But a lot of writers don’t realize the costs, both literal and figurative, that come with the realization of that dream. For being a published author brings an incredible crush of new responsibilities with the title. Even if a writer is lucky enough to be published by a large press, in most cases, the burden for promoting a book falls squarely on the shoulders of the author. That means that the majority of writers who end up having a book published (either by someone else or on their own), will have to spend a great deal of time and money to ensure that the book is a success.

How much money? When I speak at writers’ conferences, I advise potential authors to save all of the advance dollars they might be lucky enough to get. And for those who don’t receive advances, I recommend having at least $10,000 set aside for promotion and travel expenses (and that figure doesn’t include what they'll spend on printing, etc., if they decide to self-publish).

I still meet writers who naively believe that once they're published (by a large New York publishing house, of course), their book will quickly become a big hit and the money will roll in. On the contrary, the reality is that for the vast majority of the writers out there, there will be no big publishing house (many will be lucky to find a small press for their books) and little or no advance (the amount publishers give authors against what they hope to recoup in royalties). In addition, there will most likely be a limited number of distributors and book sellers willing to sell their books, and the money the authors make will either be a small fraction of the book's price (the majority shared with their publishers), or will come from their own pockets.

But the biggest revelation for most newly-published writers, especially those who are hoping to do a book tour, is that, in addition to having to spend their own money to publish, purchase, and promote their books, they will oftentimes have to spend hours – and sometimes entire days – traveling to market their work. For most beleaguered authors, who write, hold full-time jobs, and have extended family, kids, and pets to support, the idea of adding time away from home to their already full plates is not something they’ve considered.

So, what should a writer expect when he gets an offer from a publisher? Here’s what I’ve learned: When a book is published, the author will most likely spend long hours negotiating his publishing contract (hopefully with the help of an agent or publishing attorney); writing copy for book jackets and back covers; helping to locate experts, including professionals, and celebrities, for blurbs; proofing the manuscript – sometimes multiple times – before it's printed; writing reader's guides; writing c.v.’s, bios, and bits of copy for press releases; and promoting the upcoming book launch to his friends, family, and niche readers.

Once the book is out, if he’s lucky to have a publisher with a marketing staff, he'll have to commit to a certain amount of travel for book signings and speaking engagements. If his book isn't published by a house with a large staff, he’ll hire a publicist, or make calls on his own to book signings, speaking gigs, and newspaper, television, and radio interviews. He'll send out review copies, pay for booths at book fairs and trade shows, order books for events where the organizers prefer that the author bring copies, have promotional material – posters, bookmarks, post cards, business cards, booth signage – made, and create and place advertisements. He’ll set up his own website, blogsite, social networking pages, and blog tours. He'll pay his own travel costs (unless these are included in his publishing contract) and spend time, sometimes weeks, away from home.

In some cases, especially if he's self-published, he'll have to find his own wholesalers and distributors and may even need to write a marketing plan to have his book considered by these entities.

But the biggest surprise of all to new authors is that their special gift, the ability to write, may have to be put on hold while they squeeze this new job – promoting the book that just sold – into their daily lives.

If all of this sounds daunting, wait – there's more. How much a writer is offered for his next book is going to depend on sales numbers for the first book. So, if the first one has a poor sales record, the likelihood of enthusiasm for the next one will wane considerably. That means less advance money or even rejection by the same agent and publisher the author had before when the second book is ready for publication.

So, still want to publish a book? Most of us do, despite the competitive and economically traumatized publishing environment that exists today. The trick is to learn as much as possible beforehand about the business of book promotion and what publishers are offering writers. Then, if you're lucky enough to have your wish come true, be prepared. Save your shekels (or your advance, if you get one), and plan on spending a good chunk of money and time promoting your newly published book.
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Paula Margulies is a book publicity and promotions expert in San Diego, California. You can reach her at paula@paulamargulies.com, or visit her website at http://www.paulamargulies.com/.