RomanceEverAfter

The Writing Craft:
Business Issues for Writers

Award-winning Author and screenwriter T.A. (Todd) Stone has made his mark on the print and e-book worlds. Todd was kind enough to share his expertise in the world of e-publishing in his article, "Are You A Candidate for e-Publishing?"

Also, you can check out his interview at T.A. Stone where he discusses writing cliffhangers, the writing process, dealing with writer's block and the three mistakes novice writers make.

Topics Discussed by T.A. Stone

What is e-publishing?
E-book formats
Manuscript submission process
Publishers, agents, e-publishers
Rejection
Traditional & Non-traditional subgenres
Advances
The Timetable of a published book

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Are You A Candidate for e-Publishing?

You may be a candidate for e-publishing. How do you know? Start here.

Whether you have yet to publish your first book-length work or have a long backlist of novels now "out of print," whether your completed manuscript is cross-genre speculative fiction or an insightful analysis of an historic event, and whether you revel in learning new technology or know only enough to open your e-mail, you may be a candidate for e-publishing.

As authors, we hear in seminar after seminar and article after article (and often in rejection after rejection) "it’s not about you, it’s about the work."

This article is different. This article is not about your work; it’s about you.

Plan for Success

You may be a candidate for e-publishing. I say "may" because e-publishing might be a good choice to help you execute your writing career plan, or other forms of publishing might better serve your goals.

Plan? Goals? If you don’t plan farther ahead than the next chapter and have goals no more concrete than "writing a book and getting some people to read it," perhaps you’d best start there first. But don’t pretend you’re writing and spend your time "planning" instead. For a good number of us, we crank out parts of a novel, a complete work, even two, and then realize that we’re trying to get somewhere. Then and only then do we take a time out to figure out where we want to go and how we want to get there. So finish that chapter, make notes on the next scene, and then take some time to map out your writing path.

Assume You Have Goals & A Plan

Let’s assume, though, that you do have goals and a plan that sound something like "I want to publish a series of works of fiction about (your character, subject, etc) in the next "x" years, to be read by those with an interest in the subject, and receive income and eventually make a profit from those works. My plan is to compose, publish, and promote my first book this year, my second year after next, my third in "x" years…" and so on. While my friends who conduct goal-setting workshops would have us refine those goals and that plan to be as specific, measurable, and achievable as possible, something like the above isn’t a bad place to start.

Having some kind of plan puts getting published in perspective: publishing is no longer an end in itself; it’s a means to a larger goal. This is a perspective that can come in handy when you’ve just received your umpty-third rejection scrawled at the bottom of your query letter and stuffed sideways into your SASE.

So you’ve written your novel and would like to see it published soon. Or over the next five years, you want to write, publish, and promote the three books you have in you. Or in the next two years you want your backlisted and out-of-print series of five books to generate some income for you, because those boxes of your books that you saved from the remainder tables and that have been sitting in your basement just aren’t selling.

With a plan or goals such as those, are you a candidate for e-publishing? Could be.

What is E-publishing?

E-publishing is something of a misnomer, as it implies "electronic only" publishing. This isn’t true. Advances in print technology, most notably print-on-demand technology that makes high production value trade-paper size paperbacks available to even small presses, means that almost all e-publishers market paper books.

For our purposes, though we’ll define e-publishing as making your work available through a royalty-paying publisher who neither requires nor solicits financial contributions from the author, and who presents themselves as a company that distributes books primarily in electronic format (e-books) for sales to relevant market(s) of readers. 

This eliminates self-publishing, cooperative publishing, and publishing that is intended only for family, friends, and so on. It also eliminates most traditional publishers (read: New York houses and many smaller presses). In other words, we’re talking about small publishers who primarily market e-books, who pay royalties on copies sold, and who don’t charge the author for the value-added services publishers (or printers) traditionally provide.

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