Fiction Scribe

Children’s book author Mayra Calvani joins us today as part of her virtual tour during the month of June. Leave a comment to show your support.

On the Author/Illustrator Relationship…
By Mayra Calvani

For most authors, working with an illustrator for a picture book can be a thrilling yet stressful experience. Having created the imaginary world in their stories, authors often wonder whether or not the artist will be able to grasp the essence of the setting and characters—not only physically, but tone-wise as well. After all, it is up to the artist to bring the story visually to life. Sometimes the artist may have a different idea for the artwork than the author, and this can create problems.

When working with the big publishing houses, authors hardly have any saying as far as the artwork goes. The art department assigns the illustrator who they think will be better suitable for the book, and that’s that. With small presses, the author has more influence in the matter and often authors and illustrators work side by side.

This, by the way, doesn’t necessarily lead to a better book. It’s okay for the author to indicate her vision for the book, but it’s also important to allow the artist to be creative and do her part. Likewise, an illustrator should keep in mind the author’s vision for the illustrations. Mutual respect and communication are essential in any relationship, and for authors and illustrators working together this is no exception.

Of course, an author has the most control over the artwork when she hires an artist for a self publishing project. This is how I found Amy Moreno. Initially I was planning to self publish my children’s picture book, The Doll Violinist. I had sent it out to dozens of agents and publishers, without success. I got some good comments on it, but apparently the editors and agents found the story’s tone too ‘quiet’. Nevertheless, I had faith in my project and set out to find the right illustrator for it. My plan was to keep submitting while the artwork was being done, and in the event that I didn’t have a publisher by the time it was finished, then I would publish it myself.

But to go back to Amy … I spent about three months searching online, studying illustrator’s styles and querying the ones whose work I liked to learn about their fees and work schedules. (more…)

Author Peter Bowerman, Mr. Well Fed Writer, is joining us for three days here on Fiction Scribe. He’ll be talking about his writing, his book, and self-publishing today. Today is his last day here, so be sure to stop by and say hello.

While “self-publishing�? has had a bad name, I’m living proof that there’s a new definition out there, one with rising profits as well as rising industry respect. And as it gets progressively harder to land a deal with a conventional publisher, more and more of those writers and aspiring writers with books inside them are starting to (cautiously) glance in this direction.

Not sure which publishing path to take? As I see it, if you’re writing non-fiction, non-fiction how-to (my genre), or even niche fiction (i.e., romance, mystery, horror, sci-fi, etc) to a certain extent, the only reason NOT to self-publish is you simply don’t have the money and/or the time to devote to your self-publishing adventure.

If you don’t have the money, but DO have the time, then conventional publishing will at least provide you with the funding, but remember: the marketing support you get from a publisher will typically be jaw-droppingly negligible. Most of it still falls to you. If you’re okay with the reality of busting your tail for “pocket-change�? royalties, go for it (no, I’m not biased towards self-publishing…

If you have neither time nor money, then consider POD (print-on-demand). But be realistic. POD makes sense mainly for those who simply want to be able to call themselves “authors�? and make their book available to friends and family. Forget about making much money as a POD author – in the overwhelming bulk of cases, it just ain’t gonna happen. True fact: The average POD author sells 100-150 books, and guess who’s buying two-thirds of them? The author!

General rule of thumb in publishing? Your potential return is directly proportional to the level of your investment – both in money and time. True for a lot of things, I suppose.

Some advice? Make excellence your motto. Sounds cliché (“yeah, yeah, I know that…�?) but creating a book that stands out in the marketplace and indeed delivers the potential of a full-time living requires excellence on many levels: excellence in the quality of your manuscript (i.e., write a damn good book; shoot for, at the very least, conventional wisdom that says it’s “one of the best books in the genre�?); in the production quality of the book itself; in the quality of the marketing materials you create; in the comprehensiveness and quality of your book web site; in your customer service; in the effort you bring to talks, speeches, and book signings, etc.

Let me tell you this: there are few feelings to compare with creating a really good book, making it the best it can be, bringing it to market and creating a full-time (or even part-time) income stream from it. That’s big stuff. I wish that for you.

Author Peter Bowerman, Mr. Well Fed Writer, is joining us for three days here on Fiction Scribe. He’ll be talking about his writing, his book, and self-publishing today.

Even those authors who manage to gain entry to The Publishing Kingdom quickly discover that the emperor truly has no clothes: paltry royalties, up to two years to publication, the loss of creative control and relinquished book rights. And the most unpleasant realization of all? Even after all those concessions, authors are still expected to shoulder the lion’s share of the book promotion burden themselves! All to earn – in most cases – far less than a buck a book.

Self-publishing offers the opportunity to take the reins of your own book journey. You keep control of the process, the timetable, the rights, and most of the money. Given that have to do most of the marketing yourself even in a conventional publishing scenario, why not reap most of the rewards? Yes, you have to foot the bill for your publishing efforts, but if done right, whatever you invest can quite realistically come back many times over.

Me? I began as an unknown author with one book, NO big publisher, NO publicist, NO big marketing budget and NO publishing experience whatsoever. I was in the black in 90 days, and subsequently turned that book into a full-time living for five-plus years (more like seven-plus now with two more books under my belt).

Of course, I often hear, “I don’t know anything about marketing and book promotion.�? Well, I firmly assert that commercial success as a self-publishing author is far more about a process than an aptitude – far more about a lot of things you have to do than some way you have to be. None of those things are particularly difficult – they just have to get done.

Because I realize most people don’t come from a marketing background, I devoted an entire chapter of TWFSP to developing a “marketing mindset�? – minus the angst and stress. NOT book promotion – that’s most of the book – but rather grasping the fundamentals of sales and marketing to better understand book promotion. Chapter title? “Learning to Love S&M… (Sales & Marketing).�? It just feels like the other sometimes…

Of course, my focus isn’t simply self-publishing. It’s profitable self-publishing. Self-publishing by itself, as a process, is obviously feasible. People do it all the time. And in most cases, they do it like clumsy, sloppy clueless amateurs. And as a result, they go nowhere, reach virtually no one, and make no money. Which is why “self-publishing�? gets a bad rap – and in the overwhelming percentage of cases, that rap is well deserved.

But your self-publishing story doesn’t have to end that way. Success isn’t easy or cheap, but it’s do-able. I’ve done it and countless others have done it as well. It all starts with a plan, and that’s the whole point of TWFSP – a detailed blueprint authors can follow to write their own self-publishing success story.

Author Peter Bowerman, Mr. Well Fed Writer, is joining us for three days here on Fiction Scribe. He’ll be talking about his writing, his book, and self-publishing today.

“Writing is a career path of dubious financial prospects.�?

I’ve earned a handsome living making a lie of that conventional wisdom. And I’ve done it in two writing arenas: “commercial�? freelancing (writing for businesses, large and small, and for rates of $50-125+ an hour) as well as self-publishing.

My name is Peter Bowerman and I’m a commercial freelancer, speaker, business coach, and self-publishing author. In 1994, I started out as a commercial freelancer with NO writing background, experience or training; I’d never written anything for money. I was paying all my bills in less than four months, and I spent the next seven years collecting the all the how-to detail about my field.

I self-published the 2000 award-winning Book-of-the-Month Club selection, The Well-Fed Writer, and its 2005 companion volume, TWFW: Back For Seconds (both self-published; www.wellfedwriter.com). Those two books have become how-to “standards�? on starting a lucrative commercial freelancing business. I then chronicled my self-publishing success (52,000 copies of my first two books in print and a full-time living for over five years) in my third book – and the focus of these blog posts – the award-winning 2007 release, The Well-Fed Self-Publisher: How to Turn One Book into a Full-Time Living. www.wellfedsp.com.

Why did I write The Well-Fed Self-Publisher? Well, visit virtually any writer’s web site or read any writing publication, and chances are, you’ll see one or more articles relating to the challenges of getting published – along with tips, strategies, tricks, etc. So many authors chase it, but so few manage to get it.

I felt that for most authors, self-publishing was truly viable, and given the time and energy they’d have to invest even in a conventional publishing scenario to be successful – and all for a lousy return – didn’t it make more sense to do it yourself and keep control of the process, the timetable, the rights, and most of the money?

Given my success at creating a full-time income for five years off ONE book, I felt my story was one worth sharing. Oh, and yes, I thought I could make money! Because my formula had worked twice, it could work again (and has). Yes, that success benefits me, but it also reaffirms the fundamental validity of the book’s premises.

Some people ask me how I made the transition from writing fiction to writing non-fiction and here’s how I did it. In hindsight it just seems to have evolved nicely.

I began writing financial fiction thrillers about ten years ago when I saw a space in the market. I had seen an explosion in the genre mostly in the USA with authors such as Paul Erdman and Stephen Frey, but I was aware that there was no one in the UK or Europe writing the same type of books. I had been doing a very time consuming and demanding job in the City of London but later I returned to live and work in Dublin.

Soon afterwards I heard of a London author who received a large advance for a financial thriller so I set about my first book with an added greedy impetus. Nick Leeson and the timely collapse of Barings Bank helped us both I think! My first four financial thrillers; Square Mile, The Dealer, The Frontrunner and The Headhunter, were published by Hodder Headline in London and also in the Netherlands. At the time it seemed I could go on ‘churning’ out financial thrillers at my ease but that wasn’t the case.

I hit some initial problems with Hodder Headline since they were bought by a French company, my editor left, a new editor arrived and they bought less books. Hodder Headline declined my fifth book, which in hindsight was a great thing for my writing. I was less enthused by finance and in any event world stock markets had collapsed! I didn’t write anything for a year as I toyed around with the fifth thriller. It is called The Missing and so it is to this day!

I think what you write depends very much on your interests and I have always loved travel and flights and trips to new places. I had read some travel books by the usual suspects such as Bill Bryson, Tim Moore, Charlie Connelly, Tony Hawks and Pete McCarthy and I enjoyed them all. I had a vague idea that the glamorous countries like Spain, Italy and France had been done to death but Germany was a blank canvas. I took trips to Germany and wrote some but it didn’t work for me. I hit a dead end.

Then salvation came. Being abandoned in Malaga airport for 10 hours waiting for a €300 flight home on an alleged Irish low-fares airline called Ryanair can be a fruitless experience for many, but not for me. Whilst spending the time reading all known English language newspapers and the text on my boarding card, I plotted revenge and I decided to see 15 European countries for the same price as my holiday fare, thus extracting my retribution. Ruinair was born in a departures lounge and it was fantastic.

I knew immediately that I had a non fiction topic that I was greatly interested in, that was topical and news worthy, that was ‘Irish’ and that was more commercial and mass market than my financial fiction. Ruinair is a travel book with a difference. It’s not like some other travel books about the weather forecast at sea, towing a fridge, playing Moldavians at tennis, visiting surname bars, driving over fruit or converting a rustic farmhouse. It’s about getting there.

So here is my key to changing from writing fiction to non fiction - if you have a deep genuine passion to write a book, you can write anything, be it fiction or non fiction.

***This post is part of the Fiction Scribe 100 Comments Contest. Click on the link to find out how you can win.***

My marketing and promotional plan is unusual to say the least. I have never really done things the normal way; instead, I take what I have learned from others and put my distinctive spin on it. To be honest it’s hard to describe what I do, because I never really stop. When I go out into the world, I am nearly always on and ready to promote.

One of the most effect ways I use is just talk about my books. I carry bookmarkers with me and give them out to remind people about my work. At book signings, I also gave away pens, notepads, coffee mugs and CDs with excerpts of both my novels even if they didn’t buy a book at the time. Giving away promotional items not only gives them a reminder of my novels, but how we met. A simple bookmarker not only keeps the place within a book, but it also anchors a memory.

Cold contacting bookstores is also an excellent way to get attention for you books in print. With most telephone plans now having unlimited long distance, it is no longer a hardship to reach out and touch someone. Originally, I called and talked to the owner or manager; however, this past year I relied more on fax and email.

Faxing, especially, gives them a hard copy of the information for the owner to use later for ordering; however, not every store has the capability of receiving them. Some people send flyers or postcards to the stores, but snail mail postage adds up quick and the cards are easily lost in the mail. The downside of emailing is that if the subject line isn’t written effectively the email could get lost in the spam box and be deleted without being read.

Online, I have an active blog, which has been gaining in popularity. Blogs are only effective if they are maintained and properly formatted with SEO keywords. You can have the most interesting blog in the world, but unless readers can find it, it won’t do you any good.

I do my best to post at least five separate entries a week. Not only does it keep your readers coming back, but it also helps the blog gain ratings with the search engines. Even if I don’t have anything to say, I will post a YouTube video that like just to show that it was updated. In addition, listing the individual articles with http://www.digg.com will add to the traffic. By using a tag generator, such as http://www.evilgeni usmarketing.com/ice/tag-generator.cfm., each posting catches the attention of internet services such as:

Technorati
Digg
Del.icio.us
Yahoo
BlinkList
Spurl
Reddit
Furl

Keyword sites such as:
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html

help generate the SEO keywords that will help the key generator attracted the search engines and target your niche market. Not only do this sites show the popularity of a keyword, but they also give alternative keywords that the author might have thought of.

Using SEO keywords and tags on my website has also increased the traffic. It is very important for site to be easily found not only by your readers but also by the search engines. The domain name should be logical. Mine is simple–www.theresachaze.com.

Using a nickname or one of your books, unless you intend to by more than one domain name, is simply making it more difficult for you to be found. It’s counter productive. My site and domain name are through Yahoo Geocities; it’s simple and cost effective. Although, I bought the domain name, viewers are redirected to a free site, which isn’t really free because I pay to have the ads removed. It’s a pet peeve of mine to visit a site and have to fight the pop ups. It looks unprofessional and really annoys people.

I placed ads in four national magazines, which targeted my niche market. When you are working with print, there is always a delayed benefits. In addition, if the ad isn’t a good quality, it will do more harm than good.

The first ad I placed didn’t get me much traction because the text neglected to mention where my books could be bought. I rewrote it for the last and it should get more attention. Ads should be simple and direct. Unless you are doing buy a half page or more, graphics should be limited. The smaller the ad, the less likely the graphic will retain its quality.

From Blank Page to Book Shelves–How to Successfully Create and Market Your Book explains not only more about marketing and promotion, but also has tips about writing and publishing. Currently, my ebook is available as an Amazon Kindle or on my website, www.theresachaze.com for $7.00. Copies bought on the author’s site are accompanied by a 345 page listing of over 2000 independent bookstores.