/lit/ - Literature

I refuse to read anything self published.

Unless I'm looking for a cheap laugh.

I hope you'll be able to stay fulfilled writing genre fiction and YA for the rest of your life.

>>4088375
>mfw I was the guy who did the Daring Do books.

>>4088378
Actually I write military sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal romance under a pen name, and a few other things. I've never touched YA due to too much swearing and genre fiction is boring.

>>4088388
> I write military sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal romance
Are you retarded? Those are all genre fiction. Link me to a serious literary novel that you wrote and that sold even 100 copies.

>>4088392
For some reason, even though I read genre fiction, my brain read chick lit.

Well, here's my first novel. It's kind of old now, but it's sold a fair few (and is currently free). It's in the top ten of three categories on Amazon. That doesn't mean it's good but it is what it is.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006RZNR3Y/?tag=wwwlacunavers-20

My new release is fantasy.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EZ4CEO2/?tag=wwwlacunavers-20

Nobody else out there has self-pubbed anything?

>>4088354
Traditional Publishing:
>"We'd like to publish it, do nothing to promote it, and watch it disappear from the shelves in less than a month."

Self Publishing
>"We'd like to publish it, do nothing to promote it, and it will never be on shelves, ever. Also, when I say "we" I mean "nobody." There is nobody here who wants to publish your stuff, we just accept everything we get."

>>4088416
What about people like Hugh Howey, though? Or Amanda Hocking? Self-published authors who do well. Not guys like me who only make minimum wage with their books, but Hocking who make a million a month not so long ago.

I've never submitted anything I'd ever written to a publisher, ever. I'd rather it start selling right away.

>>4088421
They're still writing trashy genre fiction for people who have never read a book before in their lives. If they have any shred of self-awareness they probably contemplate suicide daily.

>>4088354
I've written a few satire pulp novels, and I have considered self publishing them on amazon. Is there any advice on doing so?
Are the books in PDF/Kindle format?
Does amazon print physical copies of the books?
What prices do you start your books off?
Any notable success in your books?
Have you contacted or been contacted by an actual publisher to republish your work, or new work?

I've been curious about this, but /lit/ tends to hate bash self-publishing. Most of it turns out to be shit, so I understand why.

>>4088427
Actually, I met Hugh Howey in real life and hung out with him a lot, he's a really awesome, down to earth, smart guy and he's very well read. His books are probably going to be classics someday rather than my easily forgotten slop.

He's a total bro, too. He really pushed for Wool to be included in the Kindle Worlds fanfiction thing, and I wrote some stuff for that too. Pretty happy with how that turned out.

>>4088438
>science fiction schlock
>classic

Only if civilization degrades to a point where it no longer deserves that name.

You desperate, greasy little faggots who come here to market your kindle store hackwork should be shot.

>>4088443
He said, furiously stroking his Infinite Jest, oh stroking, scratches on the surface from pentip and fingernail and resting surfaces all known to him, he stroked faster, faster, he knew he wasn't alone, he knew he would see David again, and the climax so white and the tissues all wasted.

>>4088443
Ha ha, typical /lit/

Hey OP, have you ever considered sending your books to a real publisher?

>>4088434
Yeah man, you can totally do it.

>format
The books, when delivered by Amazon, are in a format called .mobi. Mobi files can be read by Kindles (obv.), by Kindle for PC/Mac/iPhone/Android, and by 3rd party conversion software like Calibre (open source).

How you upload them, though, is up to you. I use Scrivener to compile directly to Mobi, it helps because I can see exactly what the reader gets, but you can upload Word docs as well. I think you can upload PDFs too, if they are text enabled and not images, but that's dodgy as it involves a lot of conversion and it usually turns out bad. I've seen some Word docs that get mangled, too, but that's a lot rarer and authors like David Dalglish (who's making a cool $250,000 a year by the way) upload them as Word docs and manage to somehow not fuck it up.

>print copies
Amazon do not, but their fully-owned company Createspace does. You can make print copies of your books there, they look pretty good (pic related). Also, they just launched a new initiative called Bookmatch, which means if you buy a print version off Amazon you get the ebook version for at least 50% off (up to free), for books that opt-in. I opted in with all my books for $0.99c.

>prices
I usually make the first thing of everything free. Novels are $5, short stories are 99c, novellas $2.99, print versions of novels are $12. I try to avoid 99c if I can as it only gets 35% royalty, as opposed to 70% for $2.99 or over, so I usually just end up making them free and hoping they sell more novels.

>success
I dunno. Not as much as some, but more than most. I make enough to write full time, and I publish a novel about once every six months. In that time I usually publish 3-5 shorts or novellas too. It's my living and it's pretty good, even if I am a shit writer, readers seem to like it.

>contacted by publishers

LOLno. Not once. Amazon courted me for my Wool fanfic, because it sells pretty good, but apart from that no.

>>4088443
I'm just curious, are you a reader or a writer too? I know there's a lot of vitrol towards self-publishers from trade published authors, but we don't really hate you back.

It seems like, certainly on /lit/, that there's a lot of hate towards self-published authors, I'm just curious if it's hate from readers or other authors.

>>4088449
I have considered approaching 47 North, Amazon's publishing company, with my new novel since I'm super happy about how it turned out, but I haven't really no. Why would I? I doubt they'd take one look at me, and I'm already making enough to live off the royalties. I'm not sure what they can offer me, and they're not going to throw me a god-tier contract when I approached them.

Hugh Howey rejected publisher after publisher when he got big, because their terms would make him ultimately lose money, in both the short and long term. Aside from the bragging rights, I'm not sure what signing to a publisher gives me, and I can't eat bragging rights nor do I really care about bullshit titles and the like. I'd rather just write.

>>4088452
/lit/ hates everything except Ruggles.

I find it likelier those who hate self-publishing are either working on their MFAs or are aiming at the publishing business, and thus in both cases have a vested interest in the prestige difference between traditional and self-publishing.

>>4088450
>forgot pic

>>4088455
>Aside from the bragging rights, I'm not sure what signing to a publisher gives me
A free editor. And those are worth their weight in gold.

I can't wait to publish the hard-core porn novella I'm writing staring Judith Butler, hezbollah hottie co-eds, volvos, and ivey league parking lots, turgid language and obfuscation in dollops.

1)will this sell well?
2)what do i title it to make it sell well?

>>4088456
A part of me is inclined to agree, but at the same time, I don't know. Maybe. There IS a lot of bad self-published stuff out there.

But serious question though, what prestige? Publishing contracts tend to be totally awful, especially for first time authors. Why would I want that?

How much advertising must you do, how much time and money does it take? I see you shell out for good covers, what more? And how important do you think it is?

>>4088461
P-pynchon?

>>4088460
Oh, I love my editors to bits. I couldn't function without them. But you can get freelance editors too; it cost me $1,100 to get Ren of Atikala edited, proofed, formatted, etc. You can do it without publishers, and some of their editors make terrible decisions (and you can't do jack about it either). At least this way I control everything.

>>4088462
Prestige, not money. That's an intangible and I think pretty much impossible to deny - it IS more prestigious to be properly published than to put up a kindle book.

>>4088466
>self-published
>actually goes out of his way to get an editor
Respect for that, man.

>>4088464
no sorry haha : (
might make it kinda like oedipal and lot49 doe. cept not as good of course

>>4088463
I used to do a lot of advertising and it got me some sales, but with Amazon gutting Select and generally making it harder to get noticed, I stopped. Now I just make the first of any series free and that does my advertising for me, by and large. Don't have to really do anything.

I usually do a Bookbub promotion (and other promotions) around Christmas time, because yeah. Last year I was making $500-$1,000 a day between Christmas and New Year, trickling off in January and February. You really wanna be on the top of the lists at that time.

>>4088473
What length is your best-selling work?

>>4088467
I can't eat prestige, and I'm not a prideful person. Titles mean very little to me and I'd rather live off my writing and do what I want than have to work a full time job, all because of some lofty, intangible "prestige".

I'd take a publishing contract if they could show me that doing so would make me more money, otherwise I would probably turn it down, unless there were other, more tangible reasons like promises of large advances for future work, favouritism in the Amazon rankings and being a Kindle Daily Deal (if it was Amazon) etc.

Even then...

>>4088468
Yeah. I used Cheryl from Inkslinger, and she is brutal. I've never seen an editor who cut so much out of a manuscript. A friend of mine gave her a manuscript and she basically rubbished it, said it was worthless and stopped after a little while because it wasn't good.

Cheryl will beat the shit out of you and you will love her for it, because at the end of the day the book becomes heaps better. I think that's why so many self-pubs operate without editors, they can't handle the criticism.

>>4088475
Probably Lacuna, it's 80k words-ish. Most of my novels are around that length (Lacuna, The Sands of Karathi, The Spectre of Oblivion, Ren of Atikala).

Ashes of Humanity will probably be around the same. It's a good length. With 5"x8" formatting, it equates to being about 320 pages.

>>4088477
Well, not everyone writes for money - if you write literary fiction, you're most probably going to have to live on tenure, not royalties or advances.

>>4088458
Do you focus on self-promotion? Such as a website, or interviews with independent book clubs?
How did you go about getting the covers for your novels? Did you have to hire an artist or something?

>>4088466
The cool thing about traditional publishing is you don't have to pay the editors anything.

They pay you.

>>4088461
Probably not, but you never know. Some of the stuff that does the best is the strangest.

I'd title it Park It In My Lot. If you make the protagonist a vampire too, and there's vampire spanking, you will fucking drown in money.

>>4088483
Sure, and if people want to write for the sake of writing and not worry about economic concerns, then by all means. But if you're doing that, why would you worry about getting it traditionally published, and not just put it on your own personal website?

I just don't see that there's any monetary reason to go with a publisher before you're already famous and making shitloads, and if you are, I'm not sure why you need them.

>>4088485
I used to do heaps of self promotion, now I rarely do. Mostly around Christmas time. I sometimes do an interview, mainly because I'm trying to help out someone starting a blog or something. I don't have that much interesting stuff to say otherwise.

To get my covers I use various artists, my favourite being Raymond Tan. He's a really skilled, creative guy and he brought all my stupid bullshit to life. He did Ren, the Lacuna series novels (I did the shorts/novellas), New Fleece on Life the Wool fanfiction, and some other stuff I'm probably forgetting.

I found him on DeviantArt, just browsing for artists who were available for commission, and asked him. He charges a flat rate for the pic and is pretty permissive about what I do with it.

>>4088492
>I'm not sure why you need them.
To get into B&N. That's pretty much it I guess.

How much time do you put on your writing per day?

>>4088487
Well, they really don't.

The publishing company gives you an advance. That's not money for free, that's an advanced payment on your royalties. Like an interest free loan.

Then they take the lions share of your royalties, or at least a good chunk of it, depending on your contract. They also have total control over your books. They choose your cover, they can have your editor make changes you disapprove of (redheads are in this season, your protagonist is now a redhead), and your book is now under their control. If it doesn't sell, they pull it from production and no more royalties for you.

In exchange, there's the vague promise of more promotion. Sure, I guess. You'll get the cool feeling in your chest of seeing your physical books on physical shelves... right up the back of a bookshelf half the country away from you... but they'll be there. And gone in a month.

I'm not sure that's worth the cost of a free editor.

>>4088500
To get into their storefronts that are closing all over the country, and most people order their books online these days, especially people who read sci-fi, and my print books are already there alongside every other publishers. Sure, I suppose that's a good benefit.

I'd love to say I'm a writing machine who never stops, but I spend way too much fucking time on 4chan for that. I usually put in about 1,000 words worth of stuff on an average day, up to 10,000 if I've had a lot of red bull and am really hitting my stride.

About half of my day is "other stuff". Checking sales, maintaining product pages, editing work, outlining, spending time on Kboards.com, etc. After a big release, though, I usually give myself some time off, so that's another thing.

All in all the main thing is to be consistent, write a little bit every single fucking day if you can, and pretty soon a whole novel appears.

>>4088510
do you do the outlines first? do you build characters? or maybe you first just write whatever comes out and then see what's usable to start the process?

>>4088510
How long did it take for you to notice you were gaining a profit? Was it trial and error, or did the readers eventually come?

>>4088515
Depends on the book length. For short stories I can usually just write them and go. For novellas, some planning is needed, but not much. For novels, I tend to plan a lot; I break it down into three acts, work out how many chapters each act is, then plan the twists and stuff accordingly.

I don't do character sheets, but for some of my longer running series I'm considering building them. Four Lacuna novels is a lot of canon to take care of, and some of that shit I wrote two years ago. I can barely remember what I ate for breakfast.

However... no matter how much planning I do, I'm never a slave to that. If I get a really good idea, and it works, I'll run with it and fuck the outline. Sometimes that means I have to cut stuff; I cut the whole original first act of Ren of Atikala, after the whole thing was written, and while that hurt like fuck it was necessary because it was boring and shit.

I cut it because while I was writing it I kept saying to myself "It's okay, just gotta get through this part and we'll get to the REALLY exciting bits!" ... and then I realised that if even *I* thought it was boring, it should go.

So I plan a lot, sometimes, but I also have off-the-cuff moments that sometimes turn out horribly wrong, and sometimes turn out to be the best shit I've ever written. It's learning to recognise what's bad and cutting it that's the important skill.

>>4088517
Well, I had the advantage of launching my novel series back when Select actually worked. This made a big boost in my initial launch sales. After a while, things fell off. The worst month I had was February 2012, in which I made about $70. Pretty neato.

It just took time, and more novels, to reach a point where I was selling decently. Making the first novel permanently free (with three other novels and five shorts in the same universe) really helped. That's when things took off.

>>4088526
>Select
?

Brandan Sanderson did a lecture about the pros and cons of self publishing. I encourage all of you to watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8YydnShI45iAap336K9GmBiEflxwuyBk

>wanting to make money off your books

Sure is YA shitty fiction in here.

>>4088532
Yeah, authors should starve and die.

>>4088532
>not understanding the pleasure derived from recieving money out of what you enjoy doing
sure is autism here

>>4088505
>Then they take the lions share of your royalties, or at least a good chunk of it, depending on your contract. They also have total control over your books. They choose your cover, they can have your editor make changes you disapprove of (redheads are in this season, your protagonist is now a redhead), and your book is now under their control. If it doesn't sell, they pull it from production and no more royalties for you.

Sounds to me like you've bought into the horror stories of traditional publishing that vanity presses tell everyone.

Publishers take the lion's share of the royalties because they already gave you an advance and bought your FNASR, and once they make back their initial investment in you then you'll start reaping in the royalties yourself.

As for having no control over your cover or changes to the book, that's just silly. Stuff like this is stipulated in contracts, and as the author your have the ability to change the contract before you sign it.

And editors aren't mustache-twirling villains who want to ruin your book. If they're willing to give you an actual book deal it's because they like your book, not because they want you to change everything about it.

But then again, you wouldn't know any of this, because you've never submitted anything to a real publisher before.

>>4088535
You should have a proper job to put food on your table and not rely on appealing to audience and writing shitty stuff in order to get money. If writing is your job you're not gonna go very far.

Unless if by "far" you mean the next hunger games. It that's what you're aiming for, go right ahead.

>>4088526
I'd like to hear about your revision process. Do you ever print out a copy of your manuscript? Do you edit and revise digitally? Any special software? Or is a basic word program good for you?

>>4088535
>doesn't realize that almost all great authors in history have lived through starvation, poverty, and privation

You probably like Jonathan Franzen.

>>4088538
>writing bad literature
>deriving pleasure from it

As I said, go right ahead.

>>4088544
I only read third world literature by people who had to kill babies to survive, like a real patrician.

>>4088528
Amazon have a program called KDP Select. If you make your book exclusive to Amazon in electronic form (they don't care about print), for 90 days, they grant you:

- A tiny boost in ranking.
- The ability to set your book for free, for up to 5 nonconsecutive or consecutive days, during your enrollment.
- The ability for Amazon Prime readers to "borrow" your book for free. In exchange, you get a cut of $1 million, where your cut is equal to the pool of money, divided by number of books borrowed total, times by number of borrows you got.

The thing was, after setting your book for free, Amazon initially treated all free sales as paid sales. So if you gave away 10,000 copies, your book could be in the top #100 for Amazon for a day, something that would make you thousands of bucks, and hundreds later as it drifted down the rankings, and a lot of exposure. Then they made it 1 paid per 10. Then they made the boost spread out over 30 days, instead of immediate, so you had to give away 10,000+ in order to even get any kind of post-free sales boost. It got to the stage, at least for me, that I would have to pay more in advertising to give away free product than I would recover from the post-free sales.

So instead, I left Select. Those was some painful months there. No promos, no free, just nothing. Still did okay, but not great. When I was out, I put all the books up for sale everywhere, and Amazon price-matched the first book in all my various series to free. Since then I've spent $0 on promotion and done even better.

>tldr Select used to rule, now it sucks.

>>4088545
well if you enjoy doing it and people enjoy reading it...
as I said, autism

>>4088413
>?tag=wwwlacunavers-20
Really grabbing for that $0.20/copy, huh?

>>4088539
>because you've never submitted anything to a real publisher before.

Have you?

>>4088530
I'll have to check that out.

>>4088532
I don't write YA. I don't really know how.

But authors should be paid for their work. That makes sense. I like Game of Thrones, I think Martin should be paid for it. I don't think he's *owed* any particular income just because he wrote a book, but if he writes a good book and I like it, he should get paid. Makes sense to me.

Like I wrote earlier, you can't eat prestige.

>>4088546
>third-world
>reading books written by low-IQ subhumans

pleb

>>4088554
>not reading books by the nearly braindead
lol

>>4088553
>if he writes a good book and I like it, he should get paid. Makes sense to me.
Sure, I never said selling books is bad. Just that having that as your main objective is not respectable, mostly because you usually have to resort to bad formulas that are popular and will get you money.

It's a much better way to ensure that your stuff will remain how you meant it to if you don't need it to sell in order to eat and pay your rent. If you can both write without having to appeal to the bad stuff AND make enough money to survive on only that, I guess that's impressive and I congratulate you. I just don't think that's very likely.

>>4088550
First of all, I only said Rainbow Man never submitted to a real publisher because of he said so here:
>>4088421

Secondly. Yes, I have.

>>4088539
Except that no publishing company is going to turn over full control over book covers to an unknown. Sure, to J.K. Rowling they will, but not to me.

And the advances usually are quite pitiful and the percentage share that goes to the author equally so.

No, of course I no nothing about it, I've only worked in the industry for two years as my primary source of income, hanging out with hundreds of authors (self published, and traditional) and had to make knowing this kind of thing the difference between eating and starving.

Things like this:

http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/kristine-kathryn-rusch-spins-a-traditional-publishing-horror-story/

>authors wants her character to be a black male
"No. Women can't write from the perspective of black men."

>goes on book tour
"We want to hire a black actress to play you on your book tour."

Or authors having to sue their publisher because they used shit editors (think nepotism) who put out typo ridden books and they couldn't do anything about it.

http://www.thepassivevoice.com/08/2013/author-sues-publisher-over-poor-book-quality/

That's not even counting the mountain of books that get rejected by publishers every day. My sci-fi series would almost certainly get rejected because the main character is Chinese and America has a very, very minimal role at all (the protagonists are Chinese, Iranian, Israeli and Australian).

And yes, sometimes publishers choose God-awful covers for books and there's nothing the author can do about it, because no first time author can choose what's on their cover.

>>4088560
How did it go?

>>4088540
> you won't get very far writing
> I've been self employed for a year living off my writing

I'm not sure what you mean?

I don't write shitty stuff. I write exactly what I want. My latest novel is about a kobold from the D&D/Pathfinder mythos (available for use because open gaming content). No publisher, except possibly Paizo, would ever take that and not even they would, because:

- They're bombarded daily with offers for people to write Pathfinder Tales while they have more than enough of their own in-house people to do it.
- Ren isn't a Pathfinder and I don't want her to be one, so even if they did accept it I would have to change the story so much it wouldn't be recognisable as the same story.

And Ren doesn't fit into the Forgotten Realms, which is where Wizards of the Coast would want it, and they have Paizo's problem of being bombarded by offers except times that by a million. Plus they have a blanket ban on "monsters as heroes" novels because Drizzt.

>>4088544
Just because they did doesn't mean they should, or that I should choose to. Plenty of authors were poor and starved but their books are forgotten now.

This really isn't a compelling case.

>>4088549
>linking to free books
>6% of nothing is nothing

>>4088550
I never have, no. As I said there's really not much point as far as I can see, nothing I write would fit their market. Lacuna has Chinese protagonists so that's right out, Ren is about a kobold which causes most publishers to go "what is that?", and the rest is just short stories or novellas.

>>4088565
Maybe (probably) I'm just clueless as to how easy it is to get money off self publishing then? I always assumed that anything that wasn't cookie-cutter, easy to understand, emotional and filled with quotes ready to be posted on a teenage girl's fb wall got no money unless you hit a soft spot of someone influential and got some readers that way...

Maybe I'll give it a try, then, I have a couple of stuff of my own that are sitting on my computer catching dust.

>>4088559
I dunno. If people want to fly, they can work a job and fly on weekends sure, but if people love it can't they become airline pilots? Is that wrong?

I write whatever I want, and part of the reason why I don't submit my stuff to publishers is that it doesn't fit their mold. It's the other way around, in fact. In my mind, publishers just want to preserve the status quo and dislike anything that's too strange and different.

They're like Hollywood in that regard. Notice how every rom-com has the same plot, the same beats?

>>4088563
I'm guessing they weren't accepted.

That's okay. I wouldn't be either. But instead of sitting around with this manuscript in a drawer, not earning me anything (and in fact, costing me money to have printed, bound and shipped), mine's out making money.

>>4088578
I really recommend you do. You have nothing to lose -- you can always pull them from sale if you really want, and it costs nothing to put your work up. You can still shop them around to publishers while they're for sale on the various ebook sites.

I'd suggest getting a freelance editor though, and getting a good cover artist. If you hang out on Kindleboards, you'll find plenty of editors and artists. I recommend Cheryl from Inkslinger as an editor, she's brilliant.

>>4088580
Yeah, as I said earlier, I guess I'm just uninformed. Thanks for the enlightenment. Not being sarcastic, by the way.

I think I also got a bit butt hurt because I write mostly out of random inspiration that bursts sometimes, and seeing someone who can simply organize how many chapters, characters, etc will be in their stuff made me a tad jealous.

>>4088562
>St. Martin's Press
>subgroup of Macmillan
Welp, no surprises here.

>Eternal Press
>Sleezy erotica publisher

All I can say about those horror stories are: the author or the author's agent picked a shitty publisher. Picking the right publisher is about as important as writing the novel itself.

>>4088578
That's true for regular publishing too.

You don't really need someone influential, you need word of mouth. There was this thing, for instance:
http://www.themillions.com/2012/06/outside-the-ring-a-profile-of-sergio-de-la-pava.html
I dunno how much he made while it was self-published before he was picked up though, probably not that much. But that's true for all literary fiction anyway.

There's a lot of people making decent living from self-publishing nowadays. But I imagine most of that is indeed cookie-cutter thrillers, YA and romance.

>>4088578
Regarding how easy it is to get money, well... if you have a good cover, good blurb, good first 20% of the novel and then a good rest of the novel (in that order), you'll probably do okay. Getting noticed is harder these days, but if you write a series, set the first one free, and do an occasional promo you'll probably be just fine.

I write the "Rakshasa" series under a pen name, it's a paranormal romance serial, each episode is 10,000 words released whenever the hell I feel like it, each is $2.99. In January this year Rakshasa was 1/3 of my income, but it fell off since then since I wanted to focus on writing novels.

The ebook market is a lot more tolerant of different book lengths, styles, POV. You can basically do what you want and as long as you write a good story, you'll sell.

>>4088587
>but if you write a series, set the first one free
What if you don't have a series?

I guess a serial could work, Dickens-style.

>>4088584
Man, I know that feel. Sometimes I have way too many ideas and just not enough time to tell them in. The only way I deal with that is to write myself notes, and then take a whole lot of caffeine and get the book out there.

Many people compare this kind of thing to driving a car at night. You can use a GPS to guide you, or you can just follow the signs in your headlights. They'll both get you there. The second one is faster, but sometimes you get horrifically lost. No matter what, though, sometimes a deer leaps out in front of you and wrecks your shit. That's unavoidable.

Pick whichever approach works for you and own it, I say. They're both equally valid.

>>4088585
Sure, but how many good publishers are there out there? 5? 10?

What do you do when they all reject you? Just throw your manuscript away?

>>4088586
I joke about vampires spanking to make a million bucks, but it's kind of true.

The same thing happens in traditional publishing. Harry Potter becomes a thing, stories about children and magic take off. That's something that's normal for both sides.

Most self-published stuff is just bad, but it's far from all bad. I mean, I fucking hate chick lit with a fiery passion, but The Milestone Tapes is one of the best books I've ever read. Holy shit. Made me fucking cry like a bitch.

The conclusion I guess I'm pushing is... most of everything is garbage, but at least with self-publishing, your readers get to judge that, not the publisher.

>>4088591
Then it's harder, but not impossible. Lots of authors don't write series (like Dalya Moon/Mimi Strong) and still manage to do just fine. And if by do just fine, I mean have $20,000 months.

You just have to find some way to bring people back to reading your other books. It's easy with a series, but it's harder with standalone works. Not impossible though. Amazon's algorithms help as they tend to clump together books by the same author.

Serials are popular at the moment, but they're hard work too.

>>4088587
>The ebook market is a lot more tolerant of different book lengths, styles, POV
Woah. That sounds amazing from the point of view of a reader, as well, since most of what's being done nowadays seems kinda stale. I never paid much attention to such market both because I don't own a kindle (I own a kobo) and... because, well, I never knew it existed.

Quick question, though: is it at all noticeable that english is not my first language? Most of my stuff is written in english but even though it feels more comfortable and natural (especially because most of what I read is in english so my vocabulary is bigger in english than in my native language) I'm always afraid I'm writing clumsily.

Sorry for kinda hijacking the thread, by the way.

>>4088562
>Or authors having to sue their publisher because they used shit editors who put out typo ridden books and they couldn't do anything about it.
That sounds like a fucking nightmare.

>>4088601
>Quick question, though: is it at all noticeable that english is not my first language
I couldn't tell, and an editor should iron out all irregularities in a longer text.

Good luck anon :3

>>4088601
Not at all noticeable. You have better English than most native speakers. You'll do well. Good luck. :D

>>4088604
>an editor should iron out all irregularities in a longer text.
Do they ask you and talk about these? Or you just send it to them and they send it back to you and that's it?

And thanks!

If Rimbaud self-published so can you.

>>4088613
But anon, I'm not as talented as Rimbaud.

>>4088594
There are thousands of small presses and independent publishers out there. How many are good? I don't know. But it's not hard to find them. It's not hard to buy the books they publish. It's not hard to see if they're right for you.

But I know that the big five are the ones that operate like Hollywood. You seem to think every publisher is like them for some reason.

>>4088562
>No, of course I no nothing about it
>I no nothing about it
>I no nothing
Self-publisher

>>4088612
For trade publishers I don't think they consult with you. For self-pubs, generally the process goes like this:

- Write book.
- Self editing pass.
- Have friends/other authors read it over, provide feedback.
- Fix that shit.
- Submit to editor.
- Editor does a Substantive Analysis; they basically read the whole thing and then send you a 3-10 page document with their thoughts, suggested changes, etc. That's usually big things like "Act I is bad" or "charname dies in chapter 14, but is alive in chapter 22", plot holes, conflicts, common errors (I fucking confuse 'bought' and 'brought' all the time due to being a dumbfuck).
- Do all those fixes. Resubmit.
- Get a redline done. This is a line by line edit, removing, changing or adding individual lines, using the Word track-changes feature, with comments. You can accept, reject, change them as you will.
- Resubmit. Now it's a copy edit. Making sure all your grammar is correct, that sentences end with a full stop, no missing words, etc. Again, you get a track changes enabled doc back.
- Fix it all.
- At this point, I print of a bound copy at a professional printers and then read through the whole thing myself with a red pen, catching any last changes.
- Resubmit. Usually there are two or three proofs. I opt for more if I have the option and can afford them, so repeat as necessary.
- Then the book is formatted and generally made into the right formatting and style, both for ebooks and print, then you do one final copy edit to make sure that it's right.
- Authors usually do a "sanity check" before publishing, which is another read through themselves, just to make sure everything got caught.
- Publish book.

>>4088627
Some of them are really good. Julie from Kboards has one, as does Lynn from Red Adept Publishing. Small presses are a pretty sweet deal, often, because they tend to take less royalties than big publishers and put less restrictions on authors (they know that self-publishing is an option for their clients so they go an extra mile).

I've had Lynn and Red Adept personally edit books I self-published and I had a really good experience with them.

>>4088629
>no full stop

>>4088609
Ah, good to know, thanks. ;_;

>>4088631
>"charname dies in chapter 14, but is alive in chapter 22"
Made me lol.
And, hey, that's great, actually. Thanks for the details. This sure as hell sounds a lot nicer than trying to get published by... a... publisher. I'm not sure I'd have enough stomach to reread something I wrote so many times, though.

Don't you have that big anxiety and belief that what you wrote sucks and feel like never looking at it again?
And when you do look, you feel ashamed for some unknown reason? I've only seen an author speak of this feeling once.

>>4088642
>Don't you have that big anxiety and belief that what you wrote sucks and feel like never looking at it again?

Almost all authors have that, no matter their success. I konw I can't look at what I wrote a year ago without self-disgust.

>>4088642
Oh yeah, it's not easy. It's one thing a lot of people don't get about self-publishing. It's hard work, at least if you want to do it right.

Eventually you can't take it. Nobody can. Amanda Hocking made a great post about this when she signed to a publisher and everyone was freaking out about this grand indie betrayal. The thing is, when you're making that much money and getting hundreds of fan letters a day, plus forums to follow, sales and marketing to do, other authors who want their stuff cover quoted and reviewed and looked over, and you've gotta organise getting paid, getting published, product pages, sort out covers, editing, proofing, outlying, manage everything and have some kind of life on top of it too... it gets too much. I totally understand why she did, even if it cost her royalties, because nobody has that much time.

>>4088643
Depends. Sometimes I look at stuff I wrote years ago and I'm like oh god. Oh god oh god. This is awful.

Other times, it's kind of like... ... hey, this is actually really fucking good, I'll never write anything this good again so I should just go kill myself.

>>4088354
No other questions? I'm about to head to bed.

>>4088778
good night broseph

>>4088646
I feel this too, but, unfortunately, I think it only indicates that I haven't really improved.

The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.
-Earbite Brownskin

>>4088796
I dunno. Even factoring in the fact that I wrote both of them, my first novel is way more shit than my most recent. Ren of Atikala is a head and shoulders above Lacuna. That's just the nature of it. I doubt you could do anything for two years and not improve.

>>4088448

Yes.

It is often that I've found myself at dinner with the fam , the droopy father sitting kitty corner to the perky, pent-up mother, who'd rush to my side, intent on giving my person 'huggles'. The attempt is deflected with a gimp oblong shrug, coupled with my shrieking howls, in flawless Shakespearean pentameter:

'DO NOT TOUCH ME YOU FILTHY FUCKING CA'

She pauses, horrified.

'SUAL! '

At this juncture, I'm generally given to retreating darkly to my basement, where shelved in a hue and pattern of an offset Serpinski triangle is my perpetually festering collection of dust-gathering hardbacks. I gaze at the collection; meta and non-metaphysically patrician in form and content. As I do so, I begin to feel the trouser snake emerge.

In heat, I unbury my Martin Heidegger Real Doll™ and wrap his continental lips around my throbbing member, cooing gently as his bushy liptuft tickles my pubis. Pumping furiously, I read from my perpetually open copies of Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest with my left and right eyes, respectively. I stroke my braille copy of Ulysses with my right hand, guiding Heidi™ up and down with my left. I come furiously down his ravenous, hungry throat and pull out, looking deep into those soulful German eyes as we share a cigarette in post-coital bliss.

I tuck Heidi™ away and stare at my books, thinking maybe I should read one of them.

My mother shuffles into the room and pats me on the head, singing

'Hahaha, time for 4chan.

This thread has actually been pretty interesting to read through. It's given me the motivation to actually finish the shit I'm working on.

>>4089000
You should, man.

The biggest hurdle towards publication and success is finishing stuff. So many people -- I mean so many -- start writing a book and never finish it. I write one every six months, and assorted shorts and novellas. I don't finish everything I start, but I make a damn effort to get as close as I can.

Finish your work! An unfinished manuscript is worth nothing.

>>4088461
Title it "A Hardcore Porn Novella Starring Judith Butler, Hezbollah Hottie Co-eds, Volvos, Ivy League Parking Lots, Turgid Language, and Obfuscation in Dollops"

I'm not joking when I say it'd grab my attention. Ridiculous titles can work quite well.

>>4089064
Yeah. I published something called "Boldly Going: A Practical Guide To First Contact With Alien Species, And How To Have Hot Kinky Sex With Them As Quickly And Safely As Possible".

Works pretty good.

>>4088354
>forth

/lit being trolled

>>4089103
Haha I'd love to say that's deliberate.

>>4088540
You're pretty retarded. Jack London wrote his best books while earning a wage writing adventure/sci-fi stories for newspapers and magazines.

>>4088413
Congratulations on getting 5-stars from all your advance readers for your newest book. You'd think that at least one of them might have a problem with SOMETHING but it looks like all six of them loved it to death. In fact it looks like they all loved EVERYTHING they've ever reviewed, most of them don't even have a single review below 5-stars! An odd coincidence i'll admit but again, well done!

>>4089399
Actually, at least one of them mentioned something that they disliked (one said the start was slow and confusing, another said that she had a few questions for me since other stuff didn't make sense), and all but one of them have at least one other review for something that's not mine.

I didn't check their other reviews but at least one had a 1 star for an elephant, so yeah.

Honestly it's the best book I've written and I'm super stoked about how it turned out, if you look at the rest of my stuff some of it is ranked low some is ranked high, it's difficult to stuff rankings these days because Amazon are cracking down on it; you can't review products if you don't have any purchases on your account, so you have to buy something anyway, and if your credit card's been used somewhere else you get a TOS violation.

The effort it takes to proxy up, buy pre-paid credit cards with cash, and create six fake reviews for myself... along with writing the reviews, trying to make each writing style different, then writing all the other fake reviews for all the other products so that the fake reviews on my own stuff fits in... there's just no way that that's an economical use of my time. I've got, like, nearly 20 books of varying lengths out, and my main novel (Lacuna) has 65 reviews, ranging from 1-5 star, favouring 4 (which I feel is generous).

Why would I go to all that effort and risk my reputation just for a couple of good reviews, when I have access to a big pool of ARC readers who'll give me an honest review?

>>4088378

>I hope you'll be able to stay fulfilled writing genre fiction and YA for the rest of your life.

Good luck finding a publisher who will publish anything other than genre fiction.

A publisher doesn't give a shit about how many awards something wins if it doesn't sell like hotcakes.

>>4089410
I don't think anyone was accusing you of fraud, just that those reviewers were prone to hyperbole.

>>4089427
Yah, I guess. It's weird. Normally at least SOMEONE doesn't like the book that I sent out, but this time it seems to have done well. It's weird and a bit fucked to be honest. I'm glad they liked it though.

I sent a copy to David Dalglish but I think he's too busy to read it.

>>4089421
That's kind of true you know. Publishers are in it for the money, which is why I wrote way earlier that there's no shame in wanting to be paid for what you do. Everyone else does.

>>4088452

I'm going to let you in on a little secret;

If you enjoy any kind of creative process and take part in it for fun or profit or some combination thereof, a lot of people are going to hate it and you. Not because you or your work deserves that hate, but because you're doing something and they're doing nothing.

These are people who could ignore your work, or simply state they don't like it and give reasons why if asked for an opinion or tasked with critique. Instead they will opt to launch into a verbose and petulant tirade in an attempt to make you feel as shitty about your apparent lack of talent as they do about theirs. It doesn't take a psychologist to speculate on why such types feel the need to do that.

>>4089437
>implying I have talent when my only real special mutant power is being too stupid to quit

But yeah, no, I get that point. I am curious though if it's coming mainly from authors or readers, either from bad experiences with self-pubs, jealousy, pity, what.

>>4089410
not that anon, by the way
Have you ever written something (or know someone who has) that goes against the flow of consumerism in writing? Instead of writing something the reader expects in genre fiction, have you gotten so far as to insult current trends and get away with it?

I've been putting around this novel for ages loosely based around the cyberpunk genre, in which can be described as my frustration-filled memoir of all the things I find terrible in culture, society, and the idiosyncrasies of the economy with obsessive amounts of gore in the action sequences. I've had this idea that genre fiction has been getting grittier as of recent, with animations such as Xenogears, Gundam and NGE being references on the visual landscape of my work, but would it require credentials first to have the audience be insulted with R/NC-17 rated work?

Ultimately it does not matter if this gets sold or not, since this is for my own personal sanity before I die, I'm just curious how far I can push going against cultural values and still have the hope of becoming somewhat popular, at the very least a cult classic.

>>4089505
I guess I have. My main series is Lacuna; the protagonists are People's Republic of China. That's rare in a world where sci-fi is predominantly "And Then America Carries Us To The Stars". I don't know if that counts or not.

Then there's my latest novel, where an important character dies at the end and there's an explicit bit in the world where the dead can't come back to life, and no I have no plans of subverting that.

With books you can really push the envelope ratings wise. Think of Game of Thrones; tits and rape and brutal murder everywhere. Grittiness does work. Ren of Atikala has s-bombs and a couple of f-bombs, some sex (vaguely described but witnessed), killing, etc. If it was a movie it'd be MA-15+, but as a novel it can be shown to teens with no worries.

It sounds like a good book though. Just be careful of anime inspired writing; it can be quite terrible. There's a nameless series out there, quite a huge series really, and the author regularly posts on KBoards complaining about why it's not a success. Many people have pointed out that his novel is full of random Japanese-isms ("Blahblah-Kun!", katanas everywhere, etc), and it's clear that he's just an /a/ escapee who decided to get onto the self-publishing game because they wanted to be famous, but in reality his brain has been warped by watching so much anime to the total exclusion of all other forms of media that he doesn't even realise what he's doing.

>>4089505
But for "strange" works, books that a publisher would go "what the hell is it, pass", then yeah, self publishing is a good choice. Books never go out of print, and yeah, if you accept it's not really marketable then any sales you make are just gravy. In any event, it'll be there for decades to come, so you're getting your name out there. You could even ask not to be paid, with your will stating that all sales revenue is to be paid to your estate. That would be a cool inheritance to pass down.

>>4088858
I don't think you can hold that style of writing for anything longer than what you just blurted.

Well this thread as kicked me past one barrier preventing me from getting started writing, my fear of self-publishing meaning I'll never get read, but it's made me slam into another one; I'm terrified of working for weeks and months on something I've been meaning to write for years now and an editor turning around and saying "Yeah, this entire thing is shit. You should probably just scrap it".

I mean, I honestly think my idea is only comic-book tier writing at best, but writing is the only thing I'm even half decent at and like hell can I afford anyone to draw for me.

I mean hell, I'm already relegating myself to a YA novel this way, but should I be afraid? Or is it only when not only the plot but the writing itself is outrageously bad that an editor tells you to fuck off?

>>4089517
>Think of Game of Thrones; tits and rape and brutal murder everywhere.
Technically ASOIAF is much less grim of a story than it seems like. It's a world of misery and darkness with a distant memory of a time of heroes and gallantry, dragons and such, and wishing for it, not realizing it's returning before their eyes.

By the end I bet Jaime will either be dead or some heroic knightly figure.

If you're writing pulp, go for it. If you're writing something more literary, you're probably going to fail miserably as a self-publisher, because people who read literary fiction will assume it's shit if it's self-published while people who read for fun will be more likely to think, "Hmm, could be fun" and not care so much.

I like both kinds of book, by the way.

>>4089572
Going to be brutally honest, if unconditional praise is what you're looking for, writing is not the game for you.

I've hung out on Kindleboards for nearly two years now, and a commonly occurring thread is "I got one starred!". Pops up all the time, and it's ugly. Women cry. Men cry. People go crazy; they post huge, rambling rebuttals, they threaten, they emotionally blackmail, they search out any scrap of evidence that the reviewer was the cousin of a friend of a friend's second wife's sister's aunt's third best friend from college who went to school with a guy who went to school with another guy who once met an author who wrote a book in a "competing" genre, therefore IT'S SABOTAGE.

You have to have a skin like iron to take that shit. People will leave 1 star reviews saying stuff like, "Well, I got it for free, and you get what you pay for!", they'll say it was the worst book you've ever read and accuse anyone who liked it of being your sockpuppet, they'll call it garbage and trash and tell you not to quit your day job even though you did a year ago and things are going just great.

But here's a little secret.

Fuck those guys.

Seriously, who gives a fuck. Just do what you want. You can't please anyone, and the first cut's the deepest, but you'll get 5 stars too and those feel pretty good.

Regarding your writing skills, there are lots of things you can do to improve yourself, but by far the best one is to write, then have a good, skilled editor tear you down. It happened to me. Cheryl destroyed Magnet: Special Mission, which I love and loved, and I couldn't finish it for months just because of how terrible she thought it was.

But I did it. I kept writing and writing, working and re-editing, and finally we were both happy. Then I gave her Ren, and she loved it.

You'll improve, but you need feedback to do so. You can't just write and magically get better. You have to see what you're doing wrong and use that to improve, but it's painful.

TL;DR: The praise keeps you going, the criticism keeps you growing.

Good luck mate, I know you can do it.

Good thread.

>>4088413
>She is given command of one of three great warships built to fight the "demons"
>No, Chinese Naval Captain Melissa Liao
>you are the demons

>>4089623
And then Chinese Naval Captain Melissa Liao was a zombie.

>>4089623
Wow it's like you've read book 4 already.

>>4089632
Holy shit the 4chan hackers on steroids are into my computer and stealing my manuscripts halp halp.

>mfw I changed the line "Let's make them fear us" from my novel 4 manuscript WIP to "Let them think we are demons."

>>4088392
>Literary novel

What does that even mean? And how does it compared to 'genre fiction'?

>>4089505
I don't think anyone is going to be insulted or surprised by those ideas considering you were fed it straight out of the television. Do you know what cyberpunk lit is even?

OP are you making your own covers?

>>4089709
see >>4088497
>To get my covers I use various artists, my favourite being Raymond Tan. He's a really skilled, creative guy and he brought all my stupid bullshit to life. He did Ren, the Lacuna series novels (I did the shorts/novellas), New Fleece on Life the Wool fanfiction, and some other stuff I'm probably forgetting.
>I found him on DeviantArt, just browsing for artists who were available for commission, and asked him. He charges a flat rate for the pic and is pretty permissive about what I do with it.

>>4089709
Also, are you writing these with a sense of humor? Like, are you perfectly aware how silly it is to subtitle your prologue "In Medias Res"?

>>4088413
Your reviewers are sock puppets, aren't they? One hasn't reviewed anything but your book, another reviewed 102 books, giving 5 stars to every single one of them. Others gave 5 stars, and not a single reviewer thought your books rated below five stars. Paid and/or sock puppets, all of them, aren't they?

>I joined UFOP: Starbase 118, a Star Trek roleplay-by-emails group, in 2010 and it was there where I learned my craft.
At least keep it a fucking secret, fuck.

do you do any advertising?

>>4088587
How much do you make on average per month?

>>4089590

how or where did you find someone trustworthy and knowledgeable enough to critique you?

>>4089517
Thanks for the response. I may be a fan of Japanese culture, but I do have enough reservation about some aspects of it to not represent it in full weeaboo-esque writing, such as adding honorifics when there shouldn't, etc. Like I said, I'm more inspired by the visuals and general concepts instead of the word-by-word, so if I begin writing in acidic tongues it will be in my own way, and hopefully coherent enough to read.

It's not exactly surreal as Naked Lunch, but it involves a lot of strange/cosmic sciences the further as I go into the series, so the descriptions of the characters verge more on body horror, combined with philisophical musings that reference the likes of Plato and his biggest fan, Nietzche. There will plenty more underappreciated philosophers I hope to catch on my proofreads, such as Machiavellianism and interpretations of Don Quixote.

Anyways, your books seem like a fine old read, I might as well add you to my pool of inspiration.

>>4089704
I may not know it in the literary sense (Neuromancer, Snowcrash) but I've done enough research on visual side (Deus Ex series, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor) to know the genre conventions. I'm hoping to round out visual research with some Serial Experiments Lain, and the books will come naturally as I study writing techniques which I can apply to my novel.

>>4089790
Have you read Tokyo Cyberpunk? It's a study of more contemporary cyberpunk works coming from Japan, covering Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, Akira (the manga), Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Kairo, Avalon (also by Oshii) and Serial Experiments Lain, though it does dip into some Giger and Cronenberg during the Tetsuo section. It's very comprehensive and well researched, but also fairly readable. I'd recommend it if you're looking for a deeper look at the criticism surrounding these works.
I'd also recommend Semiotext[e] USA for an extensive, seminal anthology of the underground cyberpunk literary scene (also including zines, comics, poetry) that was festering in the 80s.

I only asked if you familiar because what you've described might have once been subversive, but now they sound like the conventions one would come to expect in a cyberpunk novel. You'd be more subversive to mount a /defense/ of capitalism and consumerism, and even that, only slightly.

>>4089822
>Tokyo Cyberpunk
Sorry, full title is Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture, by Steven T. Brown. Don't let the awful cover fool you, it really is a valuable study.

>>4089726
oh dear

>>4089790
are you joking
is this a joke

>>4088375
I didn't know Tao Lin liked MLP

>>4089743
I too would like an answer to this?

>>4089678

You really don't understand the difference between genre and literary fiction? Genre fiction is primarily focused on a plot and a stock setting/universe. It includes, fantasy, scifi, romance, western, military, etc. Literary fiction is usually more grounded in the real world and focuses on characters and exploring philosophical, societal, political, etc. themes and questions. That's kind of a bad explanation--it's really more of a "you know it when you see it" kind of thing. Ender's Game is genre, Anna Karenina is literary fiction.

Your shit looks fucking awful, OP, but I'm not a fan of genre fiction. And I tend to be of the opinion that self publishing and ereaders are corroding the literary world, but meh. Guess I'm a stick in the mud.

But still, I'm not hating. You're making a living off of writing so you're still a boss.

do you still use the kindle select thing?

do you use stores other than amazon?

do you have an author website?

do books that have author profiles and photos and stuff sell much better?

what are some concrete things you can do to increase sales? for instance, genres, titles, author names, gender of mc, etc etc

>>4089827
Thanks for the tip, I'll see if any libraries have it.

I may not be reinventing the wheel, so to speak (I only have 3 factions in the main conflict, two of them rebelling the against the main law agent with vastly different policies), but the main viewpoint I want to tell is siding WITH the megacorporation, and analyzing the good and the bad with uniting a law system across all continents. None of these sides are clearly good or evil, and it's most of their power struggles to topple each other over that cause most of the drama in the story, in line of the soldiers (the main characters) that have to clean up this mess.

But the factions are not all static - I'm planning to introduce another faction which plays neutral to all sides, if only because their own goals aren't quite realized yet and are pushed by other factions into a role in society, by the end of the first book. Another theme I want to touch is transhumanism, and the goals obtainable by having a mammal with the durability of a water bear - expect 2 of the factions to cry out, "no true transhumanist".

Even if I offended people this thread, I'm proud that we got a good conversation going.

>>4089709
Hey sorry I went to sleep.

I do some of my own covers. The pictures for Lacuna and its sequel novels, Ren of Atikala and New Fleece on Life were drawn by Raymond Tan. I did the typography, the layout, and for Ren of Atikala, I did the "ripped paper effect".

The rest of the stuff I did myself. I did the Rakshasa covers, Insufficient, the Lacuna short stories, etc.

>>4089718
Oh yeah. I'm a pretty silly, goofy guy so I tend to try to be funny. And, of course, things like that slip in too. Literary people will recognise it, as will Tropers, but for most people it's "funny latin title".

Sometimes I try to be funny and my editor cuts that shit right out, which in hindsight is good.

>>4089726
Nope. I like Starbase 118. Many authors cut their teeth on fanfiction and I'm not ashamed of that at all.

>>4089739
Rarely. I used to do heaps, back when my books were in Select, but I don't anymore. It gets too expensive to work.

The best advertising by far is to write in a series, and then make the first part of that series free. That gives you a steady stream of sales that cost you nothing except potential revenue on the first book.

>>4089743
Depends on the month. Sometimes I make upwards of a grand, sometimes less. I invested some money in property back when I was a software engineer so between that and books I cover my expenses. I live pretty simply and don't need much, just an internet connection and the occasional bit of junk food, so my expenses are few.

>>4089778
Holy shit this is hard.

Basically, I use other authors, and I encourage them to hit me hard. Saying "this is nice" and "that is nice" feels good, but it doesn't improve the story. I'd rather have honest, hard hitting feedback than arsepats.

I also pay editors, and I pay the most vicious, brutal editors I can find. I want them to murder my little pointless darlings, making them as good as possible. That helps a lot.

>>4089790
That sounds really awesome. Let me know how it goes, I'm interested in reading.

You can't go wrong with reading more. It always helps. I don't read as much as I should, which sucks really.

>>4090071
That's okay man, I don't mind that. Sometimes I wonder myself if it is fucking awful.

I console myself with the fact that I'm getting better. Writing and publishing, and doing so consistently, is how you improve. Every one of my novels has been better than the last, and that's something awesome.

>>4090097
I used to use Select, but I don't anymore. It just stopped working. I wrote about why earlier on in the thread.

Yeah, I use B&N, Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, a lot of different places. I do NOT use Google Play except for free shit, because they automatically discount and Amazon price matches, then bad shit happens (like they both start discounting/price matching off each other, or they get jammed and won't un-fuck it even if you remove one of them from sale, etc).

f you're not in Amazon Select, you should always be in as many stores as possible IMO, except Google Play because of the discounting thing.

>>4090097
Oh yeah and my author website is www.lacunaverse.com and my author Facebook page is the "Lacunaverse" (stupid anti spam filter).

Regarding author profiles, I have a photo there. No idea if it helps or not. I'd say it might, especially if you're hot.

Hey, OP, what with you being a published author of fantasy and the like, can you chime in on this question I asked in another thread?

For those who write fantasy, how do you strike a balance between worldbuilding and story? For example, in ASOIAF, the world feels large, full of places that have been there for ages, cities that are growing or shrinking, and so forth. Obviously he spent some time on this. But I also know people who plan to write novels but instead have spent the last ten years painstakingly adding more and more and more and more to their settings, so that they have lots of detail and a fascinating world in which a novel could take place... but no novel.

Any advice on striking a balance so that you have a story, but it also takes place in a setting that doesn't feel like it was just slapped together?

>>4090157
Things you can do to increase sales:

- Get the best book covers you can afford.
- Get the best blurb you can, and spend time making it good. Get as much help and feedback with this as you can, it's the most important couple of paragraphs of your entire work.
- Hire the best, most brutal, heartless editors you can afford and do 85% of what they say. Spring for extra proofreads, your readers will appreciate it (and nothing says unprofessional like reports of typos). That shit will haunt you, believe me, I know.
- Make your title what the story is about. Esoteric titles can work (see Wool), but the purpose of the title/blurb/cover is to SET READER EXPECTATIONS. Whatever your title is, it should do that.
- Gender of MC is largely irrelevant, but you should be aware that the majority of Kindle readers are female, aged between 30-45. How that affects the design of your MC, of course, is up to you. I don't let it affect it at all, really.
- Write a series, make the first part free. If you're not doing that, run giveaways via Select, or somehow increase visibility of your book. There are literally millions of books on the Kindle store, you have to get noticed somehow.
- Set up a fan page and a mailing list. Facebook and Mailchimp are what I use. Put links to both at the back of your books. Your mailing list will be invaluable come the launch of a new book; people sign up, they want to read more of what you write, you send out a mail telling them that your new book is out. They all rush out and buy it at once; this gives you a big boost of sales, which allows you to climb the rankings early, and also sets up the "This Customer Also Bought" section with all your other books, giving your old books a bit of a bump too. Start early because they take a long time to grow.
- Also have links to your other books, somehow, in the back of your book. I usually link to my website, and use that to link to everything else.

That's about all I got off-hand, the main thing is to write good books, get the best editing blurbs and covers you can, build a mailing list. Communicate genre and reader expectations.

Good luck.

>>4090941
I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I can't find the thread you're talking about, so I'll say here: story forever, death to worldbuilding. Worldbuilding - especially in the rigorous, engineered, ultra-realistic, logistic sense the word usually has - is utterly uninteresting to me and it chokes out good writing and its centrality in thought and work is a really bad thing.

>>4090947
I can see where you're coming from, but isn't the point of fantasy in major part that it's escapism? How can you escape to a place that doesn't feel like a place but instead a few poorly made-up names of distant cities and THE BLACK FOREST WHAT THE ELVES TALK ABOUT IN HUSHED TONES?

>>4090941
Really good question, and I had exactly the same problem myself in Ren of Atikala.

Ren of Atikala was originally third person and had a LOT of world building. It was all about the kobold society, their structure, their training, the way they grow and fight and die, etc etc. It was all about this world.

The problem is, it was boring. It was a history lesson in a book. And the more I wrote, the more I was like "Okay, all I have to do is explain this one thing for ten more pages and then I can get back to the story again..."

So I cut it. I cut all the worldbuilding, by and large, and rewrote the story to be first person. Now it focuses entirely on Ren and her personal journey, which I found much more compelling. The world flavour is still there, you can see it in the way people act and talk and in the maps that are included at the front of the book (which show a vast world almost completely untouched by the protagonists), but it's not the focus of the story at all.

It taught me a really valuable lesson, and that's that sometimes too much world building can crush you. World building are the supports a story rests upon. They aren't the story. You can't make a house out of foundations.

Applied sparingly it can make your story interesting. In RoA, for example, the Gods are dead. There's no healing magic, but there once was. This affects how people think and act.

But a pantheon of dead gods, and POV flashbacks to the fall, and all that other shit? Largely irrelevant.

In a way, it's like ASOIAF, if GRRM had cut everything but Danny's story. The other stuff is still HAPPENING, it's just that it's so far away and so unrelated to everything that you could genuinely cut it and the story would be okay, even possibly better because it's not burdened with all this baggage.

>>4090947
Oh yeah, that's very true. Like I said earlier, worldbuilding is nice, but story is king.

>>4090953
Because it's not about escaping to a place, per se, it's about escaping to the people within it. The place can be interesting and engaging, but it's always the people that are the most important factor for any fantasy.

Or any story.

>>4090962
>>4090967
Good points. Thanks. By the way, I bookmarked your site. I have a nook, but I'm going to download your first book to my Kindle app for PC and then use Calibre to convert it to .epub and hope the formatting doesn't get fucked in the process.

Thanks for the advice. It's not every successful author who'd help some random jerkoff on 4chan with silly, basic questions.

>>4090972
You could also get the epub from Smashwords so the formatting's not fucked, but that also works. The book's also available from B&N but I know a lot of Nook users shop at Amazon. There's no DRM so that should work.

No worries man, good luck with your writing.

>>4090953
I don't think those are the two alternatives and I don't think that a lack of rigorous worldbuilding necessarily prevents one from escaping or entering into a world.

I think you can still provide the sense of a complete world without necessarily providing all that rigamarole - or even necessarily a complete world - it's about the aesthetic and rhetorical unity that it presents, which is much more important than the detail. It is about how well you depict the world and how well-told and well thought out the story is. The details like those only need to work out well enough for the service of the story; if the story works out no one will care about the rest of it.

There's an essay by M John Harrison called "What It Might Be Like To Live In Viriconium" that makes this point really well - see if you can track that down.

>>4090982
Yeah, I guess that's a good point, but the Show, Don't Tell rule applies. Show how your world works, don't just talk at the audience. LotR got away with it, but most writers can't.

How much detail do you put into outlines? Do you start at the beginning and hack it all out in order or do you write whatever scene you feel like working on at the moment?

>>4091005
For novels I usually start with three acts, work out how many chapters I need, then put in a paragraph or two of notes for each chapter. I then start writing at the beginning, but I tend to jump around a lot. I often write the end very early, or at least have a good idea about how it's going to go down.

I then work towards that end. If someone dies at the end, I give them plenty of "screen time". If the finale is the reactor going critical needing someone to crawl in and fix it, I foreshadow that a lot. "If that coolant valve goes, the whole thing could explode" etc etc.

Writing scenes out of order is a nice way of writing (you get them out of your head while they're fresh and good), but it slows the process and you have to stitch them together later, which can sometimes be awkward. That said, that's usually how my best scenes are written because they have so much work put into them and multiple passes to make sure they're right.

The main thing is to do what you feel works best for you, to experiment and find the best thing to match your style.

And to finish what you start.

>>4091035
So how do you decide how many chapters you need?

Heck, how much should I be putting into a chapter in the first place? There's got to be a 'proper' way of doing chapters, right?

>>4091061
There's no 'proper' way.

A chapter is as long as it needs to be. For third person work, I tend to favour longer chapters; 6-10k words each, three chapters per act, prologue and epilogue which are usually 2-5k each. I know the modern thing is to avoid prologues, but I try to use them the way GRRM used them; to show something that otherwise really doesn't need its own chapter.

For first person work, I make the chapters smaller. 3k-5k is a good number for a first person POV chapter. They're different because, I think, first person is a bit more tiring on the reader; it's harder to stay focused. Accordingly, I tend to put in six chapters per act in first person POV, along with a prologue and epilogue.

Sometimes the structure breaks down a bit though. Ren of Atikala begins each act with an essay, which are about 500-1000 words, so that affects the word count.

The above's a good guide, but there's no set, hard way and you should never feel like you have to pad out a chapter to make it fit, or cut a chapter because it's too long. If it's too long, make it two chapters. The purpose of a chapter is to give the reader a good place to stop for a break, and for the micro-plot within the section ("How are we going to get out of this pit?") to be resolved. That's all they are. They're very flexible.

>>4088413
I self pubbed my first novel. It's been doing fairly well, I'm quite proud of it.

I'm from Scotland, so you won't see many reviews on the American site I'll link:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Shadow-Statue-ebook/dp/B00C9ETSCQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378455161&sr=8-1&keywords=the+shadow+of+the+statue

>>4091525
675 pages? Man, nicely done.

Suggestions: use keywords to get into any more categories that your book fits into. You could also try setting your USD price to $2.99 since it looks cheaper.

I picked up a sample, I've got some time tonight, I'll see what it's like! Seems pretty cool.

>>4091530
Thanks man, I'll be picking up yours shortly too, they sound great.

First novel was xboxhueg.
I thought I had used keywords already, are you seeing something I've missed?

>>4091559
No, you've got them mostly right, but Amazon bought out a new feature with keywords and the various fantasy sub-categories (such as Sword&Sorcery). If you put the name of the category in your key words, the book is added to that category, assuming you don't already have too many (the max is like 10).

>>4091576
Aw yeah, that was already enabled when I published back in April I think, I put mines as Science Fantasy - Coming of Age.

If you don't mind, I'd like your opinion on a marketing idea.
I'm about to activate my KDP Select 5-day-free thing, and will be printing off a box load of A5 flyers (basically just the cover/blurb with the free days listed and where to download it) and handing them outside book shops and such during those 5 days.

Do you think this will work? I'm not bothered about making money yet - first novel and all that - but more about people reading my stuff and remembering it when I release subsequent novels.

>>4091579
I'd say that this has a low probability of working. You're better off using that money on something much more targeted: there's a lot of stuff you can do to help your KDP Select days work better. I got this question a lot, back in the day, so I created a Google Doc with a huge list of places you can notify who will email people saying your book is free. Seen here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PeMi5a2jcn1cWkJzzz8QXfs4xrh2YlIOwfjOBiBZ21c/edit

It might be a bit out of date, I haven't been in Select for nearly 8 months, but the big players are still around.

When you get some more reviews (I'd recommend 30-40ish, depending on how good they are) I'd do a Bookbub promo. They cost money, but they're well worth it, I found. Again, though, Select has been less powerful this year so I'd be wary of paying for results, even if they're strong results.

Good luck with your promo mate!

>>4091579
Also, if you're seeding the ground for later novels, I strongly recommend creating a Mailchimp mailing list and putting a link in the back of your books. Signup for readers is easy, and you just send out a new mail when you've got a book. Bam, pre-packed reader base!

You can also make a Facebook group, and while many more people will 'Like' it that's less direct and Facebook's putting the squeeze on people to pay in return for views. So be wary of that.

But the mailchimp mailing list is absolute gold.

>>4091591
Well I get a few hundred leaflets for free so it might be worth just doing that anyway for the occasional bit of attention.

I'll divert any actual money towards proper marketting as recommended, thanks!

On the subject of mailing lists, I write a weekly series about superheroes which is more reminiscent of Heroes or Push, quite realistic I mean. It's got about 50 regular readers so mailing list is already covered, and every episode ends with a "if you like this, check out my actual book" kind of deal. So I already have a list in that regard which I'll utilise in future, that was my intent with episodic writing.

I'm wary of facebook because I'd like my audience to expand beyond friends and family which I've been steadily but very slowly breaking into.

Also I'm more interested in my stand alone novels, with a series planned to start later in my potential career - but the series I am writing, the episodic 3k words-a-peice weekly one, could come out in a release every series with some art work by a friend I guess.

Thanks a bunch for all the help man.

>>4091601
If they're free it's not a wasted effort, I guess, it's just that I don't see many downloads coming from it. Still, I mean, if you're determined, give it a shot! My suggestion is to print out the leaflets to be a copy of the cover, with the information and download link on the back.

Cool, the actual mechanism behind having some way to contact your readers is irrelevant as long as you have some way.

I write a serial called Rakshasa (paranormal romance, under the pen name Alica Knight) and each episode is 10k. I charge $2.99 for those, putting every five pieces into a book. You could do the same with your superhero stuff, just be aware that if it's available online in its entirety Amazon will bitch at you (they are cracking down on books you can just get online for free). You could sell your small episodes for 99c, and then put the compilations out (in groups of 5 I'd recommend) for $2.99. Note you actually make more money that way, since $2.99 gives you 70% royalty, whereas 99c gives you 35%.

You can also make the first part of your serials free, which would help a lot too. I get a dozen downloads a day each on various things that are free, sometimes more. One of those is a short story I made permanently free like two years ago.

Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EZ4CEO2/?tag=wwwlacunavers-20

>>4091606
Yeah, I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on the Kingdom series, there's a bit of a boom on superheroes right now. It's small just now, and out of respect for my small readerbase I'd like to keep it free via the mailing list, but what I could do is package it with the artwork done by a close friend who loves the series and sell it as like a premium collection type deal. IE: all the episodes of Series 1, with artwork and some behind-the-scenes stuff.

That way I won't feel like I'm ripping people off.

I also really need to get into createspace and make a paperback of my book tbh.

>>4091638
Makes sense.

Also, yeah. Createspace is pretty easy to navigate; doing covers is harder, but if you're savvy with Photoshop and can work a calculator it's not that difficult.

>>4091668
I'm gonna head off, thanks again for all the advice man. Best of luck with your writing.

>>4091705
No worries mate, good luck to you too.

If anyone else has any questions now's the time, I'll keep the tab open but I'll be heading off now soon too.

How exactly do I go about self publishing? I mean, you obviously don't printo ff and bind the books yourself, but if I go to someone who'll do it for me, isn't that just getting a publisher?

>>4091808
Self-publishing is almost all electronic or print-on-demand. The alternative is usually called 'vanity publishing' because it rarely results in copies sold that aren't to friends or family.

The main platforms for self-publishing are Amazon's Kindle, Apple's iBookstore, B&N's Nook, and lots of other smaller, more specialised players like DriveThruFiction.

You go about self-publishing by uploading your edited (right?) manuscript to these services, and setting a price. Most allow free although some don't. If you're a non-US resident things get tricky, because some stores are US only. Use something like Draft2Digital to get it into all the stores like I do.

That, in a nutshell, is self-publishing. Amazon's the biggest market by far.

>>4088354
Hey OP, I want to thank you for creating this thread. Your answers and responses have inspired me to start self publishing some of my work. I am currently in the final processes of several short stories. All I need is to find myself a cover artist for my short stories. I was thinking of going on Deviantart and searching for someone who could do a commission for crime pulp book covers. I plan to release 4 short stories at first. 2 free and 2 for sale.
(Does $2.99 seem reasonable for a 10,000-12,000 short story?)

Do you have any advice on finding artwork for your work? How was your experience? (If you don't mind answering)

Do I have to pay royalties to the cover artist for every book I sell? Or is it a one payment type deal?

>>4092645

not op, but if you hire someone to do your cover, make sure you also purchase the full rights to the image. a lot of people seem to use fiverr.com for their covers.

>>4092645
Hey, no worries. I'm glad you're on the way to publishing.

Regarding cover artists, that's what I did. Went to Deviantart and found people looking for commissions. I looked at what they'd done recently and asked for prices.

$2.99 is definitely a fair price for work of that length. I sell all the Rakshasa pieces at that length and they do go fine, although there's an occasional review saying they were too short. Just suck them up and move on.

My experience was mixed. Sometimes people's stuff that they posted on their accounts was the "Very best of", so the end result wasn't as good as I'd hoped. Some people priced themselves way out of my price range. The key was finding someone who was good enough, and cheap enough. It's a balance.

Never pay royalties for a cover IMO. It's a shit of a thing to keep track of, you're basically inheriting a chore for the rest of your life. Always pay a flat fee. For a nice cover, an illustrated cover, I usually pay around $200. Since you're doing short stories, I'd recommend getting one done and, if possible, reusing it with minor variations.

Good luck!