Someone—dare I say a fan?—asked me today when Irene Deep in Texas Trouble would be published, and I gave my standard answer: I hope in April, but I can’t be sure. It occurred to me some readers of this blog, not in the publishing world, might be interested in a little lesson publishing.
In my long career—my first
book was published in 1978 by Wm. Morrow and Co—I have been published by major
New York publishers, university presses, small, independent publishers, and now
I am self-published or was we prefer today indie published. Until not so many
years ago, paying to publish your own book was the kiss of death in the
publishing world. It meant your work was not good enough to interest a
legitimate, commercial publisher. There were—and still are, I think—companies devoted
to this trade. They would publish your book for a hefty fee, print say a thousand
copies, store them in their warehouse, and sell you the copies you’d already
paid to produce. It was called vanity publishing, for a reason.
Early in my mystery career,
which only began some twelve years ago, I was published by a small press, and I
was pretty happy with them. But as small publishers too often do, they went belly
up, although I will say they did it with grace: they returned the rights to the
five or six books I’d published with them and gave me rights to the covers they’d
designed and which I liked a lot.
But after that, the next eleven
or so books (I could figure out the exact number but won’t take the time) were
indie published. That means after I finish the manuscript, I pay out of pocket
for an editor, a designer, and a formatter. Could I do it without those
professionals? Of course, but it would look amateurish, which is another kiss
of death. I am fortunate that the same woman who designs my covers also formats
the manuscripts for publication on Amazon, which is free—they get their cut out
of books sold. Amazon is author-friendly, in that you can format and publish
your own work, but the times I’ve done it, I’ve gotten it all wrong. So I use a
woman I work with on other ongoing projects, and it’s a good working
relationship.
If say, Penguin Books has your
book under contract, they know exactly when they will publish it—usually at
least a year, more often two after the contract is signed. They give you a
deadline and you meet it. And six or so months before the pub date, they begin
marketing.
As an indie publisher, nothing
is that easy. I cannot predict exactly when a work will publish because I am
dependent on other people’s schedules. When I have a manuscript as polished as
I think I can make it, without overworking it, I send it to an editor. At the
same time, I may send the designer enough ideas for her to work on a cover. How
fast the editor works depends on her schedule and the workload on her desk. I
guarantee no editor says, “Oh, here’s Judy’s manuscript. I’ll drop everything
and get right to it.” When I get the mss. back from the editor, I have to go
through each of her suggestions—that may take two days or two weeks—and re-submit
it. Second edits are more easily dealt with, but you can hear the clock
ticking.
When the editing process is
done, I send it to the designer. There again, the time frame depends on her
workload and schedule. Only when I get it back in final form and have proofread
it for the umpteenth time, can we move ahead. For various reasons, I publish
almost exclusively on Amazon these days, and I ask my designer to send it to
them because she is better at it than I am. I am never sure how to submit it
and specify an advanced date—in fact, I think if you publish an ebook, you can’t
do that. So when you finally send it to Amazon is when you get your pub date—usually
two or three days away. See why specifying a date is hard? And so is advanced
marketing.
So you may ask why I don’t
have an agent and a commercial publisher. The answer in large part has to do
with age—interesting a reliable agent (remember, the relationship is almost
like getting married) takes a long time, sometimes ten years. In my seventies,
when I would have been looking for an agent, I didn’t feel I had that time. I had
books to write, stories to tell, and I didn’t want to twiddle my thumbs while
agent after agent worked through slush piles. (I’d played that game earlier in
my career with little success.) Same is true of finding a publisher, even if
you have an agent marketing your manuscript.
Then there’s the pressure of publishing
with a big house. When I submitted my first mystery mss to an editor at
Kensington, who happened to be an old friend, he wanted to scrap the first book
and start with the second. I declined, because it was my book, and I had my own
vision of how it should be. Beyond that, big houses have certain requirements—if
your sales drop too low, they drop you;
they require a book a year or whatever. There are pressures, and in my retirement,
I didn’t need that.
So here I am, happily indie publishing,
not making a lot of money but finding readers who really like my books (my Amazon
ratings are good even if my sales statistics are not), and I’m doing what I
want. It’s a good life.
And this blog go way too long.
No comments:
Post a Comment