Am glad to see this forum started, since it is like pulling teeth to get anything published.
For example, I have recently translated a book (J2E) and am now in the process of self-publishing because the publishers who looked at it were not interested. (Yes, this could be because it is a terrible book or a terrible translation or something else on this side, but the most common response was that it is not structured the way they think a book should be structured.)
And for another example, a friend has translated Rosemary Clooney’s Girl Singer and could not find a publisher for it. So he is also going to self-publish.
So we have two examples right here. One in each language direction.
But there lots of things getting published by publishers big and small. So what’s the trick?
Hi, Fred.
As Kurodahan Press I’ve no doubt run into most of these problems, and managed to solve, oh, maybe two-thirds of them. Part of the reason for starting Kurodahan in the first place was to publish my own translations… which most US publishers weren’t interested in. Of course, that was 20-25 years ago, before POD, but even so.
POD has opened up a lot of doors and made self-publishing possible.
POD is print on demand, and basically prints books one at a time on a big color copier/printer (well, a little better than that, but not much). The advantage is that there are very low start-up costs and you can control most things. The disadvantages are that the quality is not very impressive, and the cost per book is quite high.
There are basically two types of POD, POD printing and POD publishing. In POD printing, a printing firm prints your book for you. They may provide fulfillment (mailing the book) and other things for you, too, but basically you are responsible for selling the book. In POD publishing, the firm has its own online bookstore and sells it for you (this is basically the modern form of vanity press). There are lots of variations.
A number of swet members have self-published—I assume with hundreds of copies taking up living-room space until they could be sold. But I do not have the space for that. Nor, more honestly, do I want to be reminded how badly to book is selling to want to have to take care of fulfillment (collecting money and sending off stuff). So I will go with a POD company that also does fulfillment.
That said, I wonder if a website or even a blog would not be the way to go if you wanted to publish less-than-book-length things. You could, I think to myself, put part of it up and ask people to pay a little bit for the whole thing if they liked the sample. Or you could just give the stuff away and ask people to support the effort (which would probably be a bad idea for anyone who actually wanted some income). I know this strays a bit from the classic definition of publishing, but ...
You could, I think to myself, put part of it up and ask people to pay a little bit for the whole thing if they liked the sample….
Anyone have experience with this?
Didn’t Stephen King start working on a project like this during the initial hype surrounding e-books? Something about an insidious vine destroying a publishing company, if I remember correctly. As I recall, the project was fairly successful—up until the point when King called it off (being Stephen King, after all, means not having to settle for “fairly successful” when “wildly successful” is the usual benchmark).
:coolsmile:
That said, I wonder if a website or even a blog would not be the way to go if you wanted to publish less-than-book-length things.
A writer named John Scalzi got a book published this way. He began by posting his stuff on his website, got some demand for continued installments, and managed to get a publisher to pick that material up for printing.
His blog is worth looking through for the odd bit of writing-related advice. I believe he’s got some more books in the pipeline now that are collections of his old blog entries, actually . . .
Stephen King was quite happy with the results. My understanding is that he didn’t quit because he wanted more money, but for entirely other reasons. Getting run over by a truck no doubt helped.
A websearch would no doubt produce a zillion hits.
People interested in Internet distribution would do well to read this http://www.baen.com/press.htm#Library
and wander around the Baen Books website in general.
The sad truth about getting published is that there is no magic wand. If your work is good enough it will be published.
Publishers know what they want. Readers know what they want. Publishers are a business and have to sell books. If you can write a good story, and write it well, then you can sell it be it SF, Romance, Historical, Mainstream or Contemporary.
The biggest problem for Publishers is that they are inundated with manuscripts that are totally unsuitable for publishing. 90% of what many publishers receive is badly written rubbish. IT seems we are all taught to read and school and therefore we are all writers.
Self publishing is excellent for some forms of non-fiction, local guide or history books, very specialist tech books or helpful books for special groups like parents with children with MS or suchlike. It is not good for fiction. The reason being you have to sell those books and it will take all your writing time.
Self published books are not easy to sell as many book shops won’t stock them and the lucky few, very very few who do self publish and are then taken up by a publisher are simply that, lucky.
There are no short cuts to publishing, especially fiction. But if you present the right publisher with a perfectly written and submitted manuscript it will be published.
Self-publishing has its problems, and most of those problems are quite well-known to those of us who have worked as freelancers for years. You have to do everything yourself, basically.
There are, fortunately, a number of very good references on what to do and how to do it. I have found the overall best to be “The Self-Publishing Manual” by Dan Poynter, Para Publishing, ISBN 1-56860-073-9
Amy Chaves visited us a few weeks ago and we talked about this. She has more than 3000 subscribers and seems to be doing well with this kind of blogging and selling over the Inet. But it also takes much time for maintaining it.
That site appears to be muchly to do with eBooks, which are dandy and easy to make.
Adobe’s DRM system has been poorly received, however, and eBooks in general are stil a very flexible, very new field. It may be a good way to distribute, but many publishers also fear it as an excellent way to transfer your books to the public domain.
Recent copyright protection developments in computer software (P2P, for example) and audio/movie software (protection schemes for new films on DVD, and DRM-downloadable MP3s…) will probably spill over into publishing as well, especially now that GooglePrint has goaded all the other publishers into moving into eBooks. Still lots of things to happen there, is my feeling.
Fred, you said: it is not structured the way they think a book should be structured.
Did you follow the publisher’s guidelines?
Judging from my own experience, I suspect he means the book itself is not written as Americans (or whatever) expect books to be structured. Many Japanese books lack the “correct” problem-development-climax-resolution sequence, and may lack other useful things like action, characters and plot, as well.
Ah, thank you. I have noticed that many Japanese novels are not structured according to Aristotle! It doesn’t stop them being published in translation though.
Apologies for the lateness of this. I have been off doing other things and did not check back here as often as I should.
Patrika asked if I followed the publisher’s guidelines in structuring the book—this in relation to my comment that it is not structured the way they think a book should be structured.
As Ed speculated, I meant that this is a translation and so I did not really have that much say on how it is structured. Nor, going beyond that, did I do it for any particular publisher or set of publisher’s guidelines. Rather, I translated it because I thought it deserved translation and then I shopped it around looking for a publisher. But because it is a non-fiction anthology of several dozen people’s views, each person with a few pages each, it does not have a single author, it does not have a unified point of view, and it does not have a logical development sequence. Rather, it is a political book which, like democracy itself, is a confusing mosaic in the hope the reader will be prompted to think about the central issue being discussed by these authors. (Another problem may well be that, like democracy, it is not particularly compelling from a non-Japanese perspective in that few of the names of the people included are familiar names to overseas observers. So it does not have the pull that, say, even a self-congratulatory autobiography by Abe Shinzou would have. These are “just people”—albeit people with impressive credentials if you are into Japanese politics and recognize the credentials’ worth. So this is another structural problem. Who are these people?)
I fear I have gone on too long, but I hope this explains my comment and answers Patrika’s kind question.
Thank you, Fred, it’s a difficult problem. I write fiction and have to very carefully match my work to publishers’ requirements. I often hear editors moan about writers who don’t bother to read the guidelines or check what they publish before submitting something completely unsuitable and in the wrong format.
Niall Murtagh talked at the JAT meeting today (Feb 12) about mixing writing and translating. He is someone who has published a book about what it is like to be a blue-eyed “salaryman” at a big Japanese company, but now he is working as a translator because—unless your book is very successful—translation pays money and writing doesn’t. In fact, he said, it is very difficult to even get published unless you have an unusual story to tell. There are so many people out there who want to be writers that it is almost impossible to get noticed.
So I asked him if having a blog might be a way to get noticed and even have samples of your writing style available for potential publishers to look at. Yes, he said—assuming your blog gets noticed. But again, there are soooo many of them out there that it is a real uphill struggle to get noticed.
True, a lot of the blogs I read are by people who are already established—e.g., Juan Cole and Kevin Drum—but there are some such as Suburban Guerrilla that are by people who do not seem to have much established presence outside of their blogs. So the question remains: how do you get noticed? I suspect the answer is to specialize—to just try to appeal to a narrow interest group—but that is just a first step and is no guarantee you’ll get noticed even by this select group.
Anyway, I pass along the information that Niall did not seem to think a blog was much of a shortcut to publishing fame and fortune.
