From The Book Designer:

To self-publish or not, that is the big question facing many of today’s authors. Today, Steven Booth, a publisher, offers his thoughts on what should be factors in this decision making process.

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Many authors are confused about when it is best to publish through traditional (including small press) publishers, and when to self-publish their work. I see this question every day on Facebook, and I hear it often in the writers and publishers groups I am associated with.

As an author who has self-published (without an imprint) as well as publishing my work through my small press company (I’ll get to that in a moment), I can understand the confusion about the pros and cons of publishing.

Here’s what I tell every author who will stand still long enough:

1. If the work isn’t good enough for a publisher, it probably isn’t good enough to be self-published.
2. If the work is good enough that a publisher wants to publish it, then seriously consider self-publishing before you sign the contract.

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But publishing is a business, and a good publisher will have a marketing niche that they can be successful in. Going outside of that niche is not cost-effective. But if you self-publish then your marketing niche is exactly what you have in your hands, and you will probably do a better job at marketing your own book than any publisher can—especially if it is a tough genre to label.

The caveat to self-publishing if you are offered a contract is that you have to remember that self-publishing is a business, and should be treated like one.

A self-publisher, when they do it correctly, is a small press with one author… you. For example, are you prepared to get:

• a fictitious business name
• a business license from your municipality
• start and maintain a website
• engage in and maintain a social media presence
• have a bank account for your small press that is separate from your personal account
• work on marketing your book at least once a day for the lifetime of your book

If not, then perhaps you would want to seriously consider traditional publishing?

Link to the rest at The Book Designer and thanks to Ant for the tip.

From book designer Joel Friedlander:

People often ask me, “How can you tell if a book has been designed by an amateur? I mean, it’s just a book, right?”

This reminds me of the author whose book I was designing a few years ago, who asked me, “Book design? What’s there to design? You just put the page numbers on, right?”

Well… no, actually.

. . . .

I’ve gathered together what seem to me to be the 5 most common layout mistakes that authors make when they start to design their own books.

These are the screw-ups that I see most often in self-published books. Just be eliminating these errors, your book will start to stand out from the tidal wave of indie books being published every day.

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2. Rampant running heads

Unfortunately all too common, it looks like the author couldn’t figure out how to have running heads on some pages and not others. Or, they thought every page should have one, but display pages, like this chapter opening page, don’t need and shouldn’t have, a running head.

Link to the rest at The Book Designer

From book designer Joel Friedlander:

Laura Rahme submitted The Ming Storytellers designed by Caryn Gillespie. “It is with pleasure that I submit the cover of The Ming Storytellers for your consideration in this competition. The Ming Storytellers was released on Amazon Kindle in July 2012. Its cover is the work of designer, Caryn Gillespie. The artwork is intended to evoke the dark, mysterious and oriental themes of the novel. The female representation is sensual and introspective in a manner that recalls the beautiful and strong female protagonist. There is an emphasis on the ocean which evokes far away journeys -the main male character being the famous Chinese admiral, Zheng He- along with the idea of a spiritual journey. The dark blue color scheme and the burning buildings in the background aim to convey the depth and intense journey that is The Ming Storytellers.”

JF: Just love this cover and the evocative illustration. Even though the illustration is complex it maintains our focus, drawing us into the story. And although I would like to “bump up” the author’s name a bit, the dimensionality added by having the woman’s figure arising from a dark sea adds even more drama. Fantastic job.

Link to the rest at The Book Designer

From book designer Joel Friedlander:

Here’s what we received:
98 covers in the Fiction category
24 covers in the Nonfiction category

. . . .

Once again the talented Damonza, a previous winner for nonfiction, shows how to combine all the elements of a cover into a cohesive and striking whole. We get intimations of the story, atmospherics, a good deal of menace and some customized typography that helps to bring the whole thing together.

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Man oh man, when it all comes together it really works. Here the talented illustrator and designer Kyle T. Webster hits it out of the park by really capturing the fun and excitement and hypnotic attachment we have with our smartphones. Powerful graphics and a constant focus on the task of the book cover clearly set this one apart.

Link to the rest with lots more covers and commentary from Joel at The Book Designer

From book designer Joel Friedlander:

Do you feel like you’d like to get more involved in social media to market your books? Are you hearing a lot of people tell you that it’s a great way for authors to find readers and build community?

Do you wonder whether you should set up house on a Facebook fan page? Concentrate on Twitter? Don’t you have to be on there for hours?

It’s all pretty confusing when you’re new.

I know, I remember getting started on Twitter myself. I just sat and watched what other people were doing for months. I wanted to be sure I “got it” before diving in.

Eventually I got over my hesitation and learned to enjoy social media, but there’s a reason for that—I discovered a great way to make the whole thing manageable: this simple “hub-and-outpost” method to organize my social media marketing.

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Set Up Your Hub

This method of organizing your social media activity requires that you set up a Hub that will be your “home base.” It could be a blog or a website.

What’s important here is that you own it. You own the domain name; it doesn’t belong to another entity the way that blogs on blogspot.com or wordpress.com are part of a larger company. You need a place over which you exert ownership, which you can control without worrying about other people’s “terms of service.”

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Explore to Find Outposts

Outposts depend on your own subject matter and preferences for working, but they have to be places where people interested in your subject congregate.

You might find effective outposts in:

• Facebook fan page
• Twitter accounts
• Forums that deal with your topic
• Photo sharing sites like your stream on Flickr.com
• Video sites like your channel on YouTube.com
• Bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon.com
• Networking sites like LinkedIn.com
• Specialized niche sites like those run on Ning.com

. . . .

At your outposts you post links to content you’ve published at your hub. But you’ll also contribute content to the outpost sites, too.

Link to the rest at The Book Designer

Joel will be doing a webinar on hub and outpost marketing for the Independent Book Publishers Association. Click here for more information.

From book designer Joel Friedlander:

 

Author Henning Mankell, writing in the New York Times last year related how he came to live much of the time in Mozambique. Listening to old men sitting on a bench talk, he speculates:

It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer nomination (name) for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo narrans, the storytelling person. What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people’s dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats–and they in turn can listen to ours.

Now, Homo spaiens means loosely “knowing person.” Homo narrans would be “storytelling person.”

. . . .

No matter what realm we operate within, no matter what discipline we’ve learned or invented, storytelling has a central place.

For instance, it’s how we transmit the news of our discoveries, how we describe who we are and where we want to go, how we account for what we’ve become. In each case a personal narrative in involved. A collection of stories that taken together create a personal history all our own.

Link to the rest at The Book Designer

You just have a couple of day to submit your ebook covers to Joel Friedlander’s Cover Design Awards for May.

Here’s the link.

Editor Linda Jay Geldens speaks to indie authors:

You’ve spent months (or possibly years) writing the manuscript that will one day be your book. You’ve distilled all those handwritten notes from pages or scraps of paper, those often-incoherent e-mails to yourself, and those ideas racing around in your brain, and typed every one of them into the computer, in some loosely organized format that vaguely resembles a book. Then one day… hooray… it occurs to you that… you’re done!

Now you can’t wait to get your little gem “OUT THERE” for all the world to marvel at. You are indeed a writer (which nobody can deny, which nobody can deny)!

Oh, yes, you’ve given a sneak peek at your masterpiece to a few people whose opinion you trust—relatives, longtime friends, business colleagues. And, sure, they may have spotted a few misspellings, or a weird sentence construction here or there, but what the hey—everybody makes mistakes.

. . . .

But if you submit (interesting, the ramifications of that word “submission” when it refers to sending in a manuscript, isn’t it?) your pages to the hyper-scrutiny of a nitpicky copyeditor, won’t your authentic voice be changed or deleted or mangled beyond recognition?

The answer is… no, not if you properly vet the copyeditor to make sure you can work together well, and if the copyeditor stipulates that one of his or her goals is to make your manuscript publisher-ready… but not change your unique voice.

. . . .

A good copyeditor brings so much to the party. He or she can:

1. go over grammar, punctuation, spelling, and sentence structure with a fine-tooth comb;
2. check for consistency of verb tense, tone, and mood;
3. find instances where sentences or paragraphs could be moved to make more logical sense;
4. ask questions about clarity of idea, or accuracy of fact;
5. call attention to parts of the text that could be tightened, expanded, livened up or deleted;
6. make suggestions — synonyms for overused words, deletions of redundant words or phrases

Link to the rest at The Book Designer

From Nina Amir via book designer Joel Friedlander:

If you are like most bloggers, you may not realize your blog represent a gold mine filled with content that can be published beyond the blogososphere. Stop looking forward to the next new post you will write, and realize “There’s gold in them ‘thar posts.” You can find nuggets of content that can be refined into a variety of manuscripts. In other words, you can find publishable gold in your blog. You just have to do a bit of prospecting.

Indeed, every blog post you write, have ever written or will write in the future has the potential of becoming part of a book. If you stop thinking like a blogger and begin thinking like a writer—or, even better, like an aspiring author—you’ll find your blog holds more publishable content than you know what to do with. Additionally, your blog can turn into a way for you to produce books quickly and easily.

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It’s a good idea to know what angle you might want to take with your book, what content you want in your book, etc. I suggest creating a content plan prior to repurposing your blog posts, or “booking a blog,” a term the author of this particular blog, Joel Friedlander, coined. You can then search out posts to fit into that plan, or outline.

You can do a search though your tags (in WordPress) or labels (in Blogger) to find posts on the topics you need to flesh out your content plan—assuming you labeled them well using such keywords. You can also search for posts in your categories, again assuming you have “filed” your posts by subject matter.

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The last way to mine your blog for gold involves purposely setting out to create these valuable nuggets. Rather than booking your blog, blog a book. In other words, create a content plan for a series of posts that will fill a book. Then write the book in post sized bits, and publish these on your blog.

Link to the rest at The Book Designer