Resources: Publishing Part 1: Traditional Publishing

Chances are that if you write--and especially if you've come to this blog by way of search engines or Twitter--you want to be read and that means being published. If you're anything like I was eight months ago, your understanding of the publishing industry goes something like "write, submit to publisher, profit." There are a lot more question marks than that.

Traditional publishing, it can be argued, offers the best quality control and the highest prestige. Whenever I think about traditional publishing, I think about the Big Six, big box bookstores, and well-known periodicals. I think about agents, editors, lawyers, public relations managers, bestsellers, movie options, and merchandising rights.

When I started doing research into the possibility of self-publishing, I first did all the research I could on traditional publishing. That meant reading up on the largest publishing houses, on agents, on query letters, on copyright laws, on everything I could think of. I read blogs, I read Writer's Market, I read through publishers' websites.

If you're thinking about (or ready to start thinking about) publishing, the following list of links is for you. It's not complete, not by any means, but for me, the links were good places to start.

The Life of a Book

• Irene Harrison's Guide to Book Collecting: The Life Cycle of a Book
• Publishing Trendsetter: Life Cycle of a Book
• How a Book Gets Published

The Industry

• Kristine Kathryn Rusch: The Business Rusch
• Publishers.org
• Publishing Trends
• Writers and Editors: So, You Want to Write a Book!
• Louisa Barton: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Publishing Biz But Were Afraid to Ask
• Pens With Cojones: The Online Guide to the Publishing Industry

The Big Six

• Hachette Book Group
• HarperCollins
• MacMillan Publishers Ltd.
• Penguin Group
• Random House
• Simon & Schuster

Agents

• Neil Gaiman: Everything You Wanted to Know About Literary Agents
• WritersNet: Agents
• SFWA: Literary Agents
• Novel Publicity & Co.: Which Literary Agents to Follow Online Plus Some Basic Rules of Etiquette
• Pub Rants

Query Letters

• AgentQuery: How to Write a Query
• Charlotte Dillon: Writing a Query Letter
• SFWA: The Complete Nobody's Guide to Query Letters

Self-Publishing: Research, Research, Research

Recently, I talked about things to do before you self-publish. I mentioned that one should do a lot of research before making the decision to self-publish and I wanted to expand on that. Publishing is more than just "write, submit, profit." I think that anyone who wants to publish should be as well-informed as possible. There is definitely a learning curve--in self-publishing and, I'm sure, in traditional publishing--but by researching the hell out of your industry and your genre, you can decrease the slope of that curve.

The Big Six.
"The Big Six" is a phrase commonly used to denote the six largest New York publishing houses, the most powerful traditional publishing houses in the industry. Each house has a number of smaller imprints. If you submit a manuscript to a publisher, you are most likely submitting to one of these six publishers. Read up on them. Especially if you want to go the traditional route, learn everything you can. Start with their official websites (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Group, Random House, Simon & Schuster) then drill down until you know everything you can about the people who will be touching your manuscript. Learn what they want, how they want it, and who they want it from. Examine the bestsellers in the same genre as your manuscript. Have you got what it takes? If you don't, can you develop what it takes?

Small presses and publishers.
An alternative to the big six, small print presses and publishing houses are more likely to take on untested authors and publish manuscripts that may not necessarily be surefire bestsellers, especially in the current economic climate. Poets & Writers has a database of small publishers. Again, do your research. Make sure that the company is still operating and do your best to find out if it's doing well (in this business, small publishers disappear all the time). Read what other writers have to say about the publisher's practices. Learn what they want, how they want it, who you'll be dealing with. Check out the books they put out. How well are they doing? What kind of marketing are they doing for their books? What kind of treatment can you expect?

Self-Publishing: Print on demand.
Sites like Lulu and CreateSpace (there are others, many others) offer print-on-demand publishing. Your book isn't printed until an order is placed, eliminating warehousing costs. Startup can be expensive, and you'll usually have to pay for your proofs unless you catch a great sale, but if you want to see your physical book in hand, POD can give you that. Shop around. Think about what you want to accomplish from POD and choose a company accordingly. Do you just want a few books for posterity? To give as gifts? Are you hoping to get your book into local bookstores, or sell through your website?

Self-Publishing: Ebooks.
With the Kindle, Nook, Sony e-reader, and iPad, more and more people are reading books on electronic devices. Amazon offers direct publishing for self-publishers. Smashwords offers direct publishing, ISBNs, multiple formats, and distribution. Self-publishing electronic books is probably the most popular way to self-publish right now. It's easy, it's fast, and it can be entirely free. It's so popular that there is currently a flood of self-published work on the market right now. It is not fast money. Smashwords may pay out as soon as you reach the threshold, but reaching that threshold requires sales, which probably requires marketing. Amazon doesn't pay out until 60 days after the close of the month in which you make sales and they only pay once you reach their threshold, too. If quick money is your goal, get out now. Start hooking or selling drugs or something. Do you want to reach a wide market? Do you want to make your books easy to find and easy to read? Are you comfortable with electronic reading technology?

Quitting your day job.
The big question: Can you afford to? In my specific case, my husband was transferred overseas and we were ready to have a child. I was going to be staying home, anyway, and while that was mostly to raise said child until she started school, it was partly to see if I could get a writing career off the ground. If you work to pay the bills--and who doesn't these days--sit down with your budget and see what can be done. Do you want to quit your job? Change your hours? Telecommute? Do what you need to do in order to free up time to write, to network, to market. As I mentioned in the other post, set reasonable expectations. I started writing in April and self-published my first short-story anthology in August. I won't see a significant royalty payment until February. That's ten months from start to money I can do anything with. Read what other authors, self-published and traditional, have to say about income, their day jobs, and when they could quit to write full-time.

Sizing up the audience.
What do you write? What do you want to write? Who do you expect will be reading your work? Research that. If you write romance, start with the romance bestseller lists, romance reader blogs, romance writer blogs. Check out forums, message boards, and other online communities. If you write how-to guides, or gardening books, or design knitting patterns, it doesn't matter: the Internet can tell you what you want to know. What does your potential audience like? What do they hate? Which writers are the most popular? Why? Which are the least popular? Why? What kind of money are the readers willing to spend? I am not saying write to a specific audience just because you can cash in, but if you've decided to publish, they're going to be judging you. They're going to determine your success. It's a good idea to know as much about them as possible.

Sizing up the "competition."
I use that word loosely. I guess, technically, because publishing is business that writers are in competition with each other, but I don't know a single writer who actually thinks like that. Sure, with the economy in the bad place it is now, people have less money to spend on books, so we want readers to buy our books. I guess. What I mean by sizing up the competition is see what others are doing. What works for them, what doesn't, and why. Get ideas about how to write, when and where to publish, how to market and promote. Figure out who you'll best fit in with and figure out how to target their audience. The competition can teach you a lot. Learn from them.

Humans Are Social Animals. Yes, Even Writers.

Writing may be a solitary activity, but you can't write in a vacuum anymore than nature likes one. Writers need social interaction. We need it for life experience so we can accurately craft our work, we need it for support, and we need it to give our work life and keep our work alive.

There are probably people sitting in coffee houses to write because they're douchebags who want people to see that they're writing; if you're one of those douchebags, please stop. Nobody is impressed. Being a writer is like being an archaeologist or a history major or a business analyst: most people, upon finding out that you're "a writer," are just going to discover how quickly their eyes can glaze over. Unless you're, like, Stephen King or something. Which you aren't, otherwise you wouldn't be reading a blog on writing.

I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, though, and I tend to assume that writers in coffee houses are there to get away from the distraction of their homes/offices, or that they write better in crowded public spaces, or--and this is where the subject of my post comes in--they like the social aspect that they get in the coffee house. (You can sub "bar" for "coffee house" if you have to.) Public spaces are a great place to spy on human interaction. You can eavesdrop ("If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college.") and you can people-watch. I know that when I meet up with friends I haven't seen in a while, we head over to Starbucks; I imagine the case is the same for most people. While eavesdropping and people-watching, you can learn tips and tricks on characterization. You can catch snippets of conversation that could turn into story ideas. You can see how people dress, how they walk, how they treat the servers. People in coffee houses are usually casual and off their guard.

This goes for most public spaces. People behave differently in different public spaces, though. As a writer, I think one of the best things I can do for myself is to always be aware of others. I never know when some random passing stranger is going to have the look, the gait, the aura I'm going to need to inspire a new character.

Another aspect of community that is immensely useful is the writers' group. I strongly believe "new" writers (writers who have just picked up a pen or have set fingers to keyboard or writers who have never shared their recreational writing with anyone) should join these groups. Critique groups, writers' clubs, whatever you want to call them, they're good ideas. At the absolute least, they should find a few like-minded people and communicate regularly about writing. These groups are safe places to share your new piece or your WIP and to see others' work, safe places to give and receive critique. If you join a group, or make a group, where you know the people and respect (even like) them and trust their judgment, it's much easier to hear that something in your writing just isn't working. Writers' groups are also a good way to expose yourself firsthand to the differences in personal opinion. They're an excellent way to build that thick skin you absolutely must have. I think writer's groups are important for established writers, too. It never hurts to get safe fresh perspective on your writing.

Right now, I'm looking for a good young adult or paranormal group. I'm currently a member of the ERWA, a list I have found immeasurably helpful. Everyone on the list seems to be intelligent and articulate and willing to share their opinions and expertise. I'd love to find a group of writers who focus on vampires, werewolves, and the like for the 16 - early-twenties crowd, since that's what my current WIP is.

Just keep it small. I favor five to fifteen people. The ERWA is a bit larger than that, but it's not my main source of group support, so that's okay.

Readers are people. I know! Shocking, right? People like to talk. There's a reason Goodreads is such a popular site. All the promotion you do isn't going to do you any good if you can't interest people and connect in some way with community. And all of your promotion can very easily come undone if people read your work and tell their friends, "Don't read this. It's awful." As an author, the bulk of promotional duties fall to you--even if you're traditionally published by one of the Big Six, you're still going to have to do a lot of work on your own. That's where sites like Twitter and Facebook come in. If you're self-published or published through a small, independent house, you should join the site-specific forums, like the Kindle Direct Publishing forums. I also joined the MobileRead forum, which has a lot of authors but seems to have just as many readers.

You have to go where the readers are. Don't spam them, don't piss them off, but find them, find out what they want and what they have to say. Not necessarily because you want to write at them (you should always always write what the story demands and write what you like, then worry about the audience), but so you know. Information is always a good thing to have.

So now you know. Go forth! Be social! You might even make new friends and reach a new audience. At the very least, you'll probably learn something.