To a new author

I recently had a friend talk to me about her husband’s self-published book, a relative made the cover (she has a degree in art), and he used a publisher who specializes in helping new authors self-publish. I can’t get it out of my mind, and so today I wrote up the following. Now I’m worried about showing it to him, my husband thinks I’m being a bit brutal, and that’s AFTER I did my best not to be…

Dear _____________,

Your wife mentioned your novel that you’ve published, and that it wasn’t selling. I took a look at it on Amazon, and I have some thoughts.

First, please know how much I admire you for finishing and publishing your first book! That puts you ahead of 90% of other writers who want to be published, yet never get that far. It is really awesome, and scary, to put yourself out there.

Here are my concerns. Your publisher, _____ Publishing, has a reputation as a “vanity press”. Some publishers earned that reputation by publishing at a high cost to the author, with no regard to whether the product is marketable. They go to some lengths to get away from that image, but based on the reviews online that I found, they are charging more than $3000 for their full package. Given that you supplied your own cover, I’m guessing you paid a lot less than that, yet I think you were probably overcharged for the services you received. Most successful independent authors that I know pay less than $500 per book for everything they contract out, and they use freelance providers for what they can’t do as well for themselves.

1. What kind of editing did they provide? There are several different kinds of editing available, all are widely available from really good editors working freelance. The most basic kind is a line edit, which only looks at grammar and punctuation. Every writer no matter how experienced needs this kind of editing. The next level up involves looking at continuity – i.e. if your character has brown hair on page 2, there better be a reason he’s blond on page 40. Also, things like if he left the office on one page, why is he still there on the next page. The highest level of editing is a content and structure edit. This looks at plot structure, character arcs, writing style etc., and is often needed by inexperienced authors. This is where the majority of the money is spent in self-publishing.
2. Cover art. You have a nice cover, but it has a number of issues. The purpose of a book cover is solely for selling the book. To that end, it has to accomplish a few goals. The first and most important is to indicate what genre of book it is. On first impression, your cover doesn’t say SciFi. When I showed it to ______, his first thought was young adult or middle-grade fantasy. I agree. Partly this is due to the style of the art, which is a drawing, instead of photo-realistic, or computer generated. Most SciFi covers fall into the latter categories. The next part is that at thumbnail size, it has to grab the reader’s attention with clearly readable type for the title and author. MAIN TITLE is clear. All the other words are much too small, and especially the subtitle. If they can’t read it, they won’t click through to read the blurb. If you decide to change the cover, which is a common fix, there are a number of sources for good covers under $100. It’s a good idea to look at the top selling books in your genre, and find a cover that is similar in feel.
3. The blurb is the best part. It could use a little tweaking, but it does sound like a very interesting concept. What needs some tweaking is it’s a little too expository, too much of a plot reveal, and not enough of question raiser that a buyer will be intrigued by, and have to buy the book to find out.

Unfortunately, they didn’t take advantage of the next most important bit of sales pitch available on Amazon, which is the Look Inside feature. This lets a potential reader look at a few pages of the text to see if they like your writing.

4. The price point of 9.99 is much too high for an unknown author, especially given the issues above. This is the next most sticky part that keeps readers from checking out your book, versus some other book by a better known author. 2.99 and up gets you 70% royalty. Most self-published authors are in the 2.99 to 5.99 price point, with many at .99. At .99, you get 35%, and it’s a great idea to promote every so often at that point. A good thing to note is that of the top 100 selling SciFi books on Amazon, a huge percentage are self-published. One last problem is that the two different editions are not connected in Amazon.
5. The last part is that you have no reviews. This is a deal killer, even if a potential reader thought it might be an interesting concept. There are a lot of strategies to getting a few reviews, as an author, you can even give away a copy or 10 with a request to review.
6. Parts 2 through 5 above are the marketing end of this equation, and where they fell down the most in providing services to you, without reading the book to see what the editing is like, and the formatting. My fear is that their business model is based on selling services to authors, and not on selling books to readers. If they’ve already made their money on the front end, they don’t have to sell any books to still be profitable.

I don’t know what your contract is like. I would try to get out of it if it were me, and walk away, chalking it up to a learning experience. The big questions are, do you still own your own copyright? Did they license it, or buy it outright from you? What is the term that you are tied to? Is there a built in way to sever the relationship? What control do you still have over cover, pricing, etc.?

I am still at the beginning stages of my author journey, and actually you are farther ahead than me, in that you have your first book out there. I don’t claim personal expertise, but I have read many books on every aspect of writing, marketing, and publishing. I’ve been to writing conferences for almost 10 years, and am active in a number of author groups on Facebook in every aspect of publishing. I follow Kristine Katherine Rusch (www.kriswrites.com), who puts out a lot of excellent advice on writing and publishing. Another local source that I’ve begun attending is the local chapter of the League of Utah Writers, which is actually SciFi and fantasy focused (meets at the local community center once a month, classes and critiques of manuscripts). All of the above is based on the education I have received from these various sources. I hope some part of it may be helpful to you. I also have books you can borrow from me on writing, marketing and publishing.