Should You Publish Directly To Kindle?

I would have said no before but now I have to qualify it. The world is moving away from books and of course that means they are downloading crazily. I am thinking about publishing a mystery called Jackpine directly to Kindle. Why? Well. The people already reading Tobacco Sticks and Mica Highways which are Southern mysteries set in time will pick up on another one in the same genre. And I am backed up with traditional releases through Fall 2014.

And I really want to get this book out there. I had spent years writing it and then put it aside for other books but the Kindle environment is perfect for a book like this. It is a genre driven title and once people start to find you then you can feed them one book after another. What about reviews? Well every one of my books has been heavily reviewed and by now people know what they can expect. What about a physical copy?  I am not that concerned with that right now.

The change in publishing is ongoing. And the author has to morph along with it. There is good and bad and little we can do to change that. But the opportunity is there. I will say this. If your book is not ready to be published don't do it. The ebook audience massacres books that are poorly written. You have to know your craft or you will pay for it with poor sales and a massive blow to your ego. So. I would say try traditional first and then if you are ready.

Go Kindle.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
 

The Schizophrenic Author

Used to be if you had five books out you thought you were prolific. But the digital age changed that like everything else. Production times have dropped and literally you can put out a book every season. If you self publish then you can put an ebook out every week if not every few days. Sounds crazy but this is what a lot of people are doing. I ran into a woman who said she had "just fourteen books out." Just fourteen. Another person published one hundred books in a year.

So where do you go with all that? You can say that is not my world and I will take my time and truly this is the way to look at it. But there is that ebook world out there that must be fed. I have two of three books going right now and I am waiting to see which way the wind blows to complete them. Maybe it is wrong to do it that way but dropping years on a book now seems a little foolish if not antiquated.

Each of my books took years and years and yes I am faster but I will never hit the hyper speed  of a book a week. Not that I would want too but you do sit there in amazement as Amazon logic favors the many published author over the few. So there are a lot of starts and stops now. Three chapters of this or three chapters of that. It is the digital age and attention spans are shrinking. Even authors can make up their mind.

Between promotion and writing it is amazing more authors just don't lose it completely. I am sure a lot have already.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

The King of Crap

There is a new paradigm in publishing now. Who will be the King of Crap.  Crap being what games the algorithms on Amazon. The publishing world is changing so fast it takes your breath away and then makes you want to hold it for the stench it is producing. I am talking about the crap that is moving into the cyber vacuum and it is crap. It is whatever is put behind an ecover and flung into the blogosphere. The King of Crap doesn't care. Because the computers kick up the title for a  nice bump and a list appears.

#45 on Ants/literature/walnuts/books about toilet paper. And this then is taken as gospel. Bestsellerdom. Throw some free giveaways into the mix and you have The King of Crap crowing from the rooftops #1 on Toilet paper books about wiping! This then is the new modality. The new fame of the self published author who is not about literary quality. In fact the KOC makes no bones. "Whats the point of being good at something if you cant sell?" An actual quote. Commodification at it's lowest point.

And so KOC publishes. And publishes mightily. One hundred titles a year is a stated goal. You heard right and take it from me producing one hundred titles of self published Crap is not hard. You just sit and write one and three days later upload with your cover. And the computer will treat you as a darling. This is what aspirants to the crown know. Algorithms dictate sales. New books get pushed up front. So you repeat and repeat and repeat until the crown is yours.

The newly crowned and admired King of Crap. Welcome to the publishing world of the early twenty first century. We can only go down from here.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

The Hucksterism of Self Publishing

You get it all the time now. The stories of someone who self published something and it became that something that made a million dollars. The stories fly at us from every corner, from every person who wants to sell us the formula to make that something to make that something make a cool million. The first twenty or so of these stories you read with interest. They are bait and switch stories. Do this and this will happen to you. We see this in mortgages and the lottery. One ticket baby and you are set. I will give you this low low low 1.5%.  Now it has happened to the new industry of instant self publishing and business is booming.

But like the low low mortgage you will never get and the lottery you will never win you are being suckered by the oldest con in the book. This is the snake oil of the literary world now. You can make a million dollars by publishing a book. All you have to do is buy my method, my database, my editing, my publishing, my site, my ad, my email blast. These all use the same come-on that is tried and true. I will be the one who beats the odds and make a million dollars too! Only you wont.

I wont bore you with stats. We have heard them before. But I will bore you with facts. Fact. You want somebody to pay you to publish your book. Why? Because they have skin in the game then. You at least have a silent partner. Fact. Even with a traditional publisher selling books is a ball busting game. You have to work and work and work and then you have to work some more. And then nothing happens. Fact. If you go the route of self publishing with nothing more than the desire to make a million dollars you will fail.

Why. Because it is not set up that way. Self publishing is for the person who has paid his or dues and now wants to bring their voice to the literary community. This is the mission. The goal of making a million dollars is commerce. Even those that comodify selling books move on because there are easier things to sell than books. Another fact. You will publish your book and no store will carry it. Another fact. It will be available on the Internet with a million other books. Fact. You will own your book and a few friends. The rest will be in your garage.

So if you are reading about the guy who turned around and published his book and made a million dollars then know the con. That guy is selling whatever he is selling and dragging a line though the water and many fish will bite. We are an instant world of gratification which makes an instant world of suckers. You want to self publish and bring your vision, your words, your reason for being to the world. Go for it. There is nothing more honorable than that.

You want to make a million bucks. Go buy a lottery ticket. At least you only get conned for a few bucks.

Rocket Man...the American Dream upside down

 

Journey of the Self Published Novel

When I started out writing I started with a  very small press. So small in fact it came down to one man who had never published a book but wanted to try. He brought out my first novel on a big Six Color Heidelberg Press on the South Side of Chicago. I remember watching the first sheets of the novel, Ripples, come off the press. It was exciting. He had no idea what he was doing and neither did I. He had offered to publish the book after his wife read it. The book was well reviewed and that was it.

Come to my second novel, Tobacco Sticks. Again the man with the press and again the good reviews and then, then...the world changed. The big publishers came knocking and an auction was held for the paperback rights. Bantam bid the highest and I ended up with a two book deal. Along comes by next novel, Mica Highways with all the trimmings. There are movie rights and foreign rights and Book of the Month Club rights. They even bought Ripples my first book. Make that a three book deal. And then things quieted down.

And I could not get another book published. Call it the changing times. Call it the plight of the midlist author. But I wrote Rocket Man and ended up self publishing the book. Again the reviewers came calling. Another publisher bought the rights. But he never brought the book out. The book languished. It would seem the rocket never would fire under Rocket Man again. And yet the book would not be quiet. I wrote another novel, The Pitcher.

And this time the book sold quickly. Due out next fall, but there was Rocket Man. The publisher asked me about this book. They read it. And then a two book deal with Koehler Books took shape. Rocket Man and then the Pitcher. Rocket Man is now due out May 1. So what is the lesson here? Publishing is crazy. Yes. You can never tell how a book will end up. Yes. You have to believe in your book. Yes. You have to take a chance when no one else will. Yes.

And finally. Never ever give up. Never. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the story of the upside down generation
 

After You Pass Page Eight Hundred...

You are on your own. Maybe you have something or maybe you have nothing. The book has gotten so big that there are parts you are not sure how they relate to the whole and still it doesn't end. You just keep going with the thought that the book must end somewhere and then what will that end look like? After all these pages will the end justify the commitment. Or will it just dribble out like a fire finally burning down to some coals and then smoting into night.

You don't know.  And in a sense you don't care. You just want to finish that first draft that is plowing along like the Titanic and creating such a wake that everything else is put on hold. After I finish the book. After I finish the book. Then I will deal with the world but of course the world has a nasty habit of pushing into your world anyway. Kids and dogs and schools will do that. So you carve off part of you to get the work done and each day you wonder if there is any gas left in the tank.

Because you have certainly burned through all sorts of reserves to the point you barely have anything left over for blogging or essays or anything. But your secret pride is that you tried it in the first place. That you took a shot and if it is just your great silent catastrophe...that is alright too.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Stigma of Self Publishing

You bet there is a stigma to self publishing. Get over it. If you are a writer then you have a commitment and that is to the work. Publishing may go into deep freeze or they may be burning the house down to bring out your next work. Either way the work is what drives you to get it out there in whatever form you can. Art is never greeted with open arms and neither will your book. There may be a million reasons why reviewers and publishers and agents and everyone else view a self published novel as something less than standard. You cannot worry about that.

Your first responsibility is to write the book. Your second is to get it out there where people can read it. If you only want to see your name in print then that is not going to take you far. If you truly believe in your work then you will do what is necessary. That is why you only want to put out your best work because you will have to stand by it through thick and thin. This is not for the I want to publish a book before I die crowd. This is for the I want to give the world something new crowd.

In Our Time. Hemingway's small chap book of stories was self published by Ezra Pound in Paris on a rotary press. No one would publish the fellow with the strange stories. My first book was brought out by a printer in Chicago who had never published a book before. Hemingway went on as we all know and the very people who turned my book down bought it on auction years later. The point is you are part of the big struggle and you may well be trampled underfoot anyway, but use every tool at your disposal and then make up some along the way.

Being a writer is not for the feint of heart, but who knows, you might just buck the odds. Either way, it is the work that matters. Only the work.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...surviving as a writer