Self-Pub Authors: Do us ALL a favor! (Note: I'm one of you)

To my fellow Self-Pub authors out there, do all of us a favor and take your craft seriously. There are many of us who spend years honing our skills, finding our voice, creating our story worlds and imagining great characters. We invest time and money into writing classes, workshops, and editors. It's our dream to be successful writers, to have people love our books, and maybe even be financially independent along the way. All of that is hindered by the stigma that follows us for having self-published.

Things are shifting in the publishing world, that's obviously. While traditional publishing isn't dead, the advent of digital publishing, and now the proliferation of avenues for self-publishing, are pushing the market. A couple of the Big Five publishing conglomerates have purchased companies that had been avenues for self-pubs. Those authors who build followings and catalogues of work sometimes find the big publishers knocking on their doors with offers. Wouldn't that be nice? It might not happen often, but it does happen.

So what's my point? It's all about quality. There seem to be watermarks that separate the different levels of authors from those who are truly successful, with regular contracts, bestsellers to their name, and a good sized catalogue, to those who think about characters or plots and jot a few words down. It all depends on how seriously you take it. Just like any career path, it's hard work, takes time and skill, and even having great talent only gets you so far. And most people don't have great talent. A lot of writers build their skill at the craft. They learn the hard way how to put together stories, refine characters, and polish dialogue. There are great writers who had talent, but who were never wunderkinds and mastered their craft. There are great writers who are talented and do the same.

Our problem among self-published authors are the number of people who simply use their word processing program's spellcheck and think that's enough. Or that they would do a revision or two and think it's ready. Any time you say or think the phrase "good enough" in regards to your work then it's #FAIL! "Good enough" is the mantra of the never-weres and also-rans. For those of us who seek to nor be in that category, the aching worry is that it will never be ready. This is a good point at which I'll interject that working with an editor helps a LOT with that. Having someone who's a trained professional, knows the business, and has a lot of experience to look at a piece gives you both an outside perspective to let you know when something's ready and the kind of constructive criticism and attention to detail you need in order to get it there. A lot of people don't take this route, to varying degrees of success. There isn't one road to take, I tried a writers' workshop but didn't find it was getting me where I wanted to go. I needed someone who would go through my manuscript with a red pen and scribble all over it with notes and corrections, not just general comments or only a few specifics.

So...back to my point...If you want to take your writing seriously, to respect yourself and the craft, take time to work through your piece. Show it to people who know what they're looking for and ask questions. Polish it. Find someone who can do a good cover for the cover art, and not just a do-it-yourself digital mess. If you want to be treated like the authors who get their books on the shelves of the local bookstore, with their glossy covers and all, then that is the standard by which you must hold yourself. For those who aren't interested in putting in all this work, there are plenty of places to post your writing for free, whether it be fanfic or original. Audiences can tell almost right away whether they like a story, and a lot of that has to do with the quality of the writing. They see spelling or grammatical errors or awkward dialogue in the first page and a half and they tune out.

All I'm saying is, do yourself and all the rest of us a favor and take it seriously.

Balance and Creativity

It's been a month since I posted last. That's a no no in marketing life. It seems the secret to self-promotion is consistency and frequency. Unfortunately I have a firm deadline of when class starts this fall, so have been going a bit crazy to get the novel, which my professors see as peripheral, a side-gig that should take a back seat to their assigned work if I want to be serious in the career path, and mayhaps they're right. But I can't just do one thing. Like most of the writers I've met, for me it's somewhat cathartic, something of an obsession, and something they can't stop doing. Being successful in anything often requires single-minded focus bordering on obsession. My problem is having more than one passion. I mean many people don't even have one, and I have at least two, three if you split the music into performing and studying history.

Yeah. So, I have a definite deadline. And I already didn't get as much done this summer as I wanted to, spending more time working on the novel than I'd originally scheduled. My therapist says it's because I took on too much. He can see where he kind of has point. I mean, as is I suppose I pulled off a small miracle between learning Italian, studying 20th century classical music history, gathering research on a 40 page academic research paper I meant to write, and revising and polishing a novel that in manuscript format is 347 pages, about 92K words. Isn't that enough? No. But I can't put out a piece of work that is mediocre. It has to be the very best it can be. I even managed to have a little fun along the way this summer, going on a few dates, meeting new friends, and going away for a weekend in Chicago for Market Days.

So...at what point do I have the mental energy to blog?

Authors are having to do a lot of their own promotion these days, I see even major names doing a fair amount of it on social media. The nature of that promoting changes when you become huge, like Jim Butcher or Neil Gaiman. They promote their novels via interviews and guest posts on blogs. They have people at their major label publishing companies to do the tweeting and posting on social media or crafting attractive ads and getting people to review their work. These people seem to be the exception, however, not the rule. For me, I have to maintain a regular presence on Goodreads, which, by the way, has a giveaway for my short story collection Three By Moonlight during the rest of the month of August. I'm also on Twitter (@jnelsonaviance), and on le Facebook.

For the last week or so, however, I've been going through the manuscript and first entering the corrections my editor suggestion with the ever-subtle red pen, then, and this is something I've only been doing more recently, reading the text out loud. This helped a lot in catching things I had otherwise overlooked. It especially helped realize where I had used words too often In too short a time. Power, for instance, comes to mind as it is necessary in a number of different contexts. And there were a few pages where every character reacted by jerking their head in the direction of a new speaker, or seemed to nod like a bunch of bobble heads.

This takes time, though. On average, and this is the same when I'm reading an academic paper during a presentation, I take about two and a half minutes to read a double-spaced page. The editing process means that with my manuscript I probably only managed three or four minutes per page. Needless to say I finished last night close to four, so am  running on about five hours sleep right now.

I'm hoping that I'll find a greater balance, since even the editing process often doesn't feel that creative, which is a lot of the fun and catharsis of writing stories in the first place. But even that is more creative than trying to strategize about effective uses of Twitter, or tracking sales, or hunting down places to submit for reviews. Those things have their own appeal, but they aren't the free flow of ideas that makes my left-brain sizzle.