Indie Book Club discussion

Some people start out indie publishing with an eye toward traditional one day. I've been through all the various routes....self...small press....and now big-six. I actually think it is easier to self-publish, gain a following, then get picked up then to participate for months or years on the query-go-round.

In any case since I've been through the process, and I think I can count how it came out as a win so if anyone has any questions or wants some advice I'd be happy to aanswer them.

Keep going back and forth on that myself. Used to work with a publishing company, but soured of the politics. When I started writing again, I decided not to fight the submission game with this book. Every so often though, I debate going to back and trying with them, especially if I put out more than the one book.

I guess a good question then would be...is it worth it? :) Aside from exposure, what benefits are there to fighting that uphill battle with the publishers?

Michael wrote: "Some people start out indie publishing with an eye toward traditional one day. I've been through all the various routes....self...small press....and now big-six. I actually think it is easier to s..."

Personally, that's just the route I hope to set out on, Michael. Releasing my first novel in just under two weeks now; want to see how well I can "go it on my own," as it were, before hitting the publishers.

The standing hope I think a lot have in going with that approach is that we can then point to ye olde success (hopefully) when appealing to the "big wigs" of the publishing world later and say, "See what I could do without help? Imagine what I could bring with just that little extra nudge..." Certainly at least appears to give us more ground to stand on than otherwise. Proof of marketing potential - no use saying we're anything less than numbers to their side of the business, after all.

Of course, given the scowls and fists the big companies continue to raise toward the whole "self-published" movement these days, one must always wonder how much it helps...

But I digress. If the process has worked for you, I'm certainly interested in hearing a bit more on how exactly you went about pitching matters, and company reactions in general.

Michael wrote: "Some people start out indie publishing with an eye toward traditional one day. I've been through all the various routes....self...small press....and now big-six. I actually think it is easier to s..."

It's nice to hear your take on it. :) I have to admit I have met a lot of self-published authors who really look down on me because I am still writing works that I intend to traditionally publish, and because I only self-published my current novel after two years of trying to sell it to a larger publisher. It gets frustrating to put up with it. I want to turn writing into a sustainable career, and the predictable incomes are in traditional publishing...along with the budgets to do effective promotion! I spend so much of my writing time promoting now, and it's terribly frustrating. I'd rather be writing!

I do think the industry is growing much more welcoming of self-publishing, providing you can show that readers are eager for your work. Sites like this one really help because a potential publisher can take a look at entire strings of conversations about your book(s) and see how real readers are reacting to it. I know one self-published author whose self-published book is actually being considered by two agents right now, even though he went indie with it initially. The time when publishers were only interested in first rights may be slowly fading. Slowly.

Jim wrote: "I guess a good question then would be...is it worth it? :) Aside from exposure, what benefits are there to fighting that uphill battle with the publishers? "

From my point of view...they do all (or much) of the really difficult work for you. Cover design, proofing (which you help in, of course), professional editing, formatting, marketing, distribution...all the stuff that eats up so much time for us. I do a passable job at all that, but I'm good at writing and that's what I WANT to do. I'd rather use my time writing so I've got more material to offer to readers! :)

Jim wrote: I guess a good question then would be...is it worth it? :) Aside from exposure, what benefits are there to fighting that uphill battle with the publishers?

Jim, I think it really depends on the publisher and whether they see the book as something thing are going to throw a lot of their weight behind or not.

I've seen a tremendous amount of effort on my series' behalf from Orbit. They've given out a ton of copies to bloggers, book reviewers, librarians, bookstores. The gave me a full page ad in Locus (a popular Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine), are runnig ads on Facebook and here on Goodreads (Look for the "flash ad for theft of Swords". Created a really sophisticated facebook page which unlocks chapters as we reach various "like levels" and I could go on and on.

The thing I don't know is if I'm getting "better" treatment than other authors...I just don't have anything to compare it to. But for me - it was definitely well worth it.

Chris wrote:
If the process has worked for you, I'm certainly interested in hearing a bit more on how exactly you went about pitching matters, and company reactions in general.

To be honest I don't have the full details...it was handled by my agent. Here is what I know for sure.

She put together a "package" (which I think was primarily ranking data and sales numbers) and sent to 17 publishers giving them each 3 weeks to respond with an indication if they had an interest or not.

Seven (or was it eight I can't recall) came back immediately saying yes they were interested and they were taking it through the various departments (these days publishers need buy in from sales, marketing, etc before making an offer.

A few "dropped out" (presumably because they couldn't get across the board support). A few others said they were goint to put together an offer. One came back before the 3-weeks with a pre-emptive offer. Basically saying...sign with us right now for x $'s. Pre-emptive offers are usually made to beat the competition and avoid a bidding war. We had a meeting with the people who made that offer and they were doing some other things that we (my wife and I) really liked to hear and they were at the top of our lists as far as choices to begin with. So we took the pre-emptive offer...our theory being even if someone else came in with more money the likely 10% - 20% additional would not have been enough to take us off a preferred choice.

Hope that helps.

Lavender wrote: "It's nice to hear your take on it. :) I have to admit I have met a lot of self-published authors who really look down on me because I am still writing works that I intend to traditionally publish, and because I only self-published my current novel after two years of trying to sell it to a larger publisher. It gets frustrating to put up with it.

Yeah there is animosity on both sides (self-pub people thinking traditional is a waste of time, and traditional published people thinking all self-published is trash). It's too bad as they both have positive and neative reasons for doing them.

Lavender wrote:
I want to turn writing into a sustainable career, and the predictable incomes are in traditional publishing...along with the budgets to do effective promotion! I spend so much of my writing time promoting now, and it's terribly frustrating. I'd rather be writing!

I wouldn't say that - I know a lot of self-published authors that make more than traditional. The "midlist" is poorly compensated (both in advance and marketing budget) at traditonal publishers so if your book is "midlist" material than I think a better income can be had from self-publishing.

Now if you have a "bigger hit" then yes traditional will give you more marketing $'s and the advances are such that you can live nicely off them even if you you don't earn out. It really depends on the book and the deal being offered.

As for wantint to write rather than market - well I think regardless of which way you go you need to do this - so that is pretty much a "wash".

I think my next question would be "where does one find a good agent?" This seems to be a largest hang-up I'm finding with authors who should be or would be published by traditional means. Submitting on your own directly to publishers gets you a big slap down, but finding an agent who can pull their weight is tricky and feels like a crap-shoot.

Jim

@Michael -- true, you'll need to promote regardless of whether you self-publish or go traditional; but I have a hard time imagining I'd be spending as MUCH time promoting if I had a publisher's backing, and with the guidance of a PR department I'd likely be able to focus my promotional efforts on avenues that will yield more return on my (time) investment. When you have to figure everything out from the ground up it's so frustrating and time-consuming!

Anyway -- I suppose I am doing something right because in one month's time I've seen nine ratings of my book come in, and that's more ratings than many self-published books get after a year or more! (Yikes!) So the book is finding its way to readers, and that is encouraging. I feel that I am off on a good foot; perhaps not such a good foot that I can call it the "right" foot, but a good one. ;)

But yes, I agree with you that it's a shame about the needless animosity between the two factions of publishing. Phooey on that.

For the reference of other curious parties in the thread, my experience with my agent and submissions to editors was the same as Michael's, except that over the course of almost two years we never ended up having any editors buy the book, despite many, many editors saying they really loved it. Publishing: so fickle sometimes! :)

Jim wrote: "I think my next question would be "where does one find a good agent?" This seems to be a largest hang-up I'm finding with authors who should be or would be published by traditional means."

That's really not as hard as you might think...First off look in the acknowledgements of other books in your genre. Or do a google search on a favorite author and the word "agent" on the same search. By doing so you'll find out who has worked with who.

You can subscribe to Publishers Weekly deals newsletter. In it they list deals that are made and it will say what book is sold by what agent to which publsihers.

Agent Query is a free online service where you can do a genre search. On it they list most recent aquisitions so again you can see who has sold what where.

Also a number of agents now have their own blogs and tweet and facebook - so you can find them that way then dig a bit deeper.

There are also forums like on Absolute Write where you can ask other authors what their experience is (or what they have heard) about various agents. The Internet is a great resource tool - you can find just about anything you want from it.

Jim wrote: "I think my next question would be "where does one find a good agent?" This seems to be a largest hang-up I'm finding with authors who should be or would be published by traditional means. Submittin..."

I can answer this one, Jim -- you first need to write a really good query letter. Two sources to teach you how to do that: 1) QueryShark.com and 2) AbsoluteWrite.com forums, where there is an entire forum devoted to learning how to write queries.

After you have a really good query, which takes some time to develop, you begin carefully researching agents. You want to weed them out until you've narrowed your list to just agents who are interested in books that are similar to yours (not only in genre, but also in atmosphere, theme, etc.) AND agents who have a good, recent sales record OR new agents who are working for highly respected agencies. AgentQuery.com is a good place to begin building your list of agents you should approach, but you'll need to research each one you consider for your list individually by checking their web sites, Googling for interviews and sales records, and looking up their sales on Publisher's Marketplace.

Once you've got a well-edited list of agents built up, you begin querying them according to their preferred style -- email or snail mail -- and following their individual guidelines to the letter (for example, some want to see sample writing, some don't.)

It's a bit of a long process to do the research and development of the query necessary to land an agent, but it's well worth it. Remember, nothing in publishing moves fast! :)

AbsoluteWrite's forums is a really, really great place to get help with all this -- the community there is very knowledgeable and very helpful. You can go sign up there and search for threads on finding agents...there are tons of them...and reading through them will give you some great ideas.

Once I finished writing
The Sekhmet Bed, I spent about a month of hardcore work developing my query and putting together my agent list; it took me querying 52 agents and about two months to actually sign a contract with my first agent. So that's about three months of work and lots of rejections...you have to hang in there and remember that agents are readers like the rest of us, and some books just aren't to their personal tastes...rejections are nothing personal, so you can't let it get you down! :)

Oh, let me add this: with fiction, you should NOT begin querying agents until your book is completed and is as good as you can possibly make it -- no rough drafts! Agents are not typically interested in representing unfinished work, especially not from authors who are not established in the industry.

And it is usually futile to query a finished work that you've already self-published. Agents are interested in selling first publication rights, and if you've self-published you've already used up those. However, if you have another book in the works and your self-published book did pretty well (for self-pub), it would be worth mentioning in your query letter that you had a successful self-published novel, and it sold X number of copies. But again, only query once your new work is finished and polished!

Lavender wrote: "@Michael -- true, you'll need to promote regardless of whether you self-publish or go traditional; but I have a hard time imagining I'd be spending as MUCH time promoting if I had a publisher's backing."

It depends on the book and the publisher. Some do little more than put the books in their catalog that go to book buyers as libraries and big retailers. In this case you need to do "just as much" because they don't have any one-on-one, direct-to-reader promotion.

Even if you do get some additional marketing/PR you have to remember that your book will be one of many that they are releasing at once and their time will be divided (and do so propotionally to the ones they think have the best chance of selling well). Only you will be 100% dedicated to JUST your work.

Congrats on the success you're having with your self-published works - it does indeed sound like you are getting off on a good foot. Trust your instincts...I'm sure the things you are doing are not much different than the publisher would suggest.

I hope you're right! (about doing things well.) Time will tell, I suppose. At least it's fun to see reviews start to come in. I'm so glad people are finally reading this book, after years of trying to sell it!

Good points on the traditional publishing perspective, too.

Lavender said: And it is usually futile to query a finished work that you've already self-published. Agents are interested in selling first publication rights, and if you've self-published you've already used up those. However, if you have another book in the works and your self-published book did pretty well (for self-pub), it would be worth mentioning in your query letter that you had a successful self-published novel, and it sold X number of copies. But again, only query once your new work is finished and polished!

This used to be the case - but isn't so anymore in fact many agenets are actually plucking authors from self-publishing. You might be spending too much time on Absolute Write (which is pretty "old school" in their thinking. Checkout the Writer's Cafe on Kindleboards and I think you'll see a bunch of people have either gotten deals on existing works or were signed by agents to represent because of their self-publising. Examples: Myself, H.P. Mallory, D.B. Henson, J Carson Black, I coud go on and on. The times they are a changing - nowadays a proven track record trumps broken first publicaton rights.

Michael wrote: "Checkout the Writer's Cafe on Kindleboards..."

Michael, you'd send her straight into the serpent's nest?!

Na, aside for the fire and brimstone, the Writer's Cafe is cozy. (Just don't mention Digital Rights Management. Ever.) And Michael is correct. The list of folks on that board that have been picked up by agents is quite encouraging. Unfortunately, nowadays it seems like you need a good IT lawyer to pick you up too.

B.

That is nice to hear that more people are getting picked up from self-pub. It seems just a couple of years ago it was an absolutely-not type of situation except in rare cases. It's pretty exciting to see how the industry is changing in response to technology (social networking included under that heading...)

I've never checked out the Kindle boards, but I'll see what they're like. To be honest I don't spend much time on AW at all -- I pop in a couple times a week and see what's shaking in the Novels forum and in AW Roundtable, where all the good industry gossip and news ends up, but that's about the extent of my involvement there. I have found it to be a great resource for answering questions but it's a bit too unweildy for me to spend the majority of my time there.

I've been finding Goodreads to be a lot of fun, though. :)

Lavender wrote: "That is nice to hear that more people are getting picked up from self-pub. It seems just a couple of years ago it was an absolutely-not type of situation except in rare cases."

Yea, you are correct several years ago breaking the furst pubication rights was a big problem - not really an issue these days.

Lavender wrote: "I spend so much of my writing time promoting now, and it's terribly frustrating. I'd rather be writing!"

This has become the mantra of my life...

Jeff

This used to be the case - but isn't so anymore in fact many agenets are actually plucking authors from self-publishing.

I think I may have seen the worst of agents right off the bat. The almost-immediate response I got after mentioning self-published works was...to paraphrase..."too long, didn't read" (after I had talked to them and been told they were interested). Sadly, it's the only agent in my state on the Agent Query listings. :-/

Not the start I was looking for and not encouraging for an indie author to keep looking when the "interested" folks kick sand in your face.

Will check out the other places you suggested, once I convince myself that this was just singularly stupid. "Didn't like it" I can handle..."didn't even look after telling you we wanted to" not as much.

Jim -- you do not need to have an agent located in your state. Even back before the internet, business between a writer and an agent was conducted by phone and mail. Now it's all email. You need to be looking for agents who represent the kind of fiction you write, AND agents who have actually made sales to good imprints, regardless of where they're located.

I strongly encourage you to learn more about how the publishing industry works before you continue pursuing an agent -- otherwise you are likely to end up the victim of a fraudster.

One rejection is nothing. I was turned down by 52 agents before I found my first one. And now I'm on the lookout for agent #3. :)

Lol, fair enough. Just figured it was easier if you could actually stop by the office. :)

B. Justin wrote: "Michael wrote: "Checkout the Writer's Cafe on Kindleboards..."

Michael, you'd send her straight into the serpent's nest?!


The Writer's Cafe on kindleboards is a VERY supportive area for indie publishing. The "serpent's nest is Absolute Write's self-publishing forum which is very pro-traditional and very anti-self. (IMHO)

Jim wrote: "Sadly, it's the only agent in my state on the Agent Query listings. :-/..."

Absolutely no reason for an agent to have to be in your state. In today's world agents can be anywhere although if you were to choose a state it should be NY as they would be in a position to have face-to-face meetings with editors.