self-publishing

Harlequin: Ur doin it rong

Moriah

Harlequin, I see you’ve set up a, um, POD?/vanity?/subsidy?/self-pub? (no definitely not self-pub) arm of your company.

Congratulations. I think that’s brilliant.

However, you have negated that brilliance by the simple fact that you have obviously not gone about researching the industry any more than anybody you hope to make a customer.

What I do not think is brilliant is the following:

1. Partnering with AuthorSolutions, Inc.

Consider:

  • Do you know that they use Lightning Source to print their books? Do you know you could get your own account with Lightning Source and do the same thing, only cheaper for you?
  • Do you know you could’ve set up your own in-house programs and packages? You should’ve; you have the resources right at your fingertips.
  • Do you know that the rates you’re quoting are outrageous if one went piecemeal to freelancers for those services? And if you do (which I don’t think you do), you would’ve gotten a bigger cut of it had you not partnered with AuthorSolutions Inc. You already have editors and artists and such. Use them. Hire a couple more if you don’t have enough.
  • Do you know that AuthorSolutions Inc. doesn’t have the best reputation on the planet even amongst subsidy publishers?
  • Do you realize that the 50% “royalty” you take from your customers could have been at a much higher dollar amount if you had set up your own shop?

Bad, bad business decision, just from a P&L standpoint. Geez, you’re cutting off your margins to spite your bottom line.

2. Attaching your brand.

I shouldn’t even have to explain this.

UPDATE: As of 11/19/2009 4:12 PM, Harlequin has decided to rename its vanity press division something other than Harlequin whatever. Pub Rants got the scoop.

3. Thinking/branding it as self-publishing.

Self-publishing involves setting up shop as a business and outsourcing the tasks you can’t do yourself. What you’re doing is a service company promoting way overpriced service packages.

4. Your website really does kinda suck.

Oh, sure. You’ll get a lot of customers, and that’s okay. I see nothing wrong with it. I just think you coulda gone about it a different way.

And this is what surprises me. Harlequin, you’re brilliant. You’ve made nothing but all the right steps in all these decades of publishing. You flourish where others founder. You took a great (welcome) leap with Carina, but this? This displays the business sense of a kindergartner.

It makes me think your parent company is setting all this up and making you (and by extension, Malle Vallik) take the fall.

The unmentionable alternative

Moriah

I am constantly struck by the idea that writers “give up.” What does that mean, exactly? They stop writing? They stop submitting? Or they stop writing because they’re so disheartened by the submitting? My bet’s on that.

Keep on submitting and you will get published.

By “writer,” I mean good, unpublished novelists who don’t, for whatever reason, catch an agent and/or editor’s eye. I’m not talking about the people who don’t hang out on agent and editor blogs, learning every query trick in the book (some of which are flat wrong to some agents and golden to others). These are the writers who assume that the problem is with them, not with the odds.

Write a better book next time.

Oh, fuck that. It’s odds, folks, whether you want to believe it or not—and the odds get worse every week. And that write a better book bullshit? How do you know the one you just wrote is bad?

You don’t.

And then some of you will crack under the discouragement and say, “I write crap.” And you’ll stop submitting. You may even stop writing.

I did that.

I didn’t write crap, per se. I wrote slightly off-tick that didn’t hit the romance formula bullseye exactly right. Yeah, I said it. There’s a formula. I couldn’t hit it, and the misses were near enough that it was sickening.

willworkforfood243x301This is not an anti-traditional-publishing rant. This is about writers, about you and your work and how much faith you have in it.

Why are you basing your goals on decisions someone else has to make? And, by extension, why are you waiting for validation based on odds that aren’t in your favor? And why are you acting like a job applicant?

You’re not powerless.

But somehow the idea of taking control of your work and presenting it to the public/the readers/the (gasp) curators is “giving up.”

Because “money always flows to the author.” Fuck that, too.

Yeah, you’ll have to assume some risk. Deal with it.

It pains me to see good writers on agent blogs talking about “when I’m published someday,” because “it will happen if I submit enough and don’t give up” and “I just have to write a better book next time.”

Stop thinking that way and start believing in your product.

Stop thinking you have no power.

Stop thinking like an employee and start thinking like an entrepreneur.

Go make your own damned job.

Update: To clarify, I’m using the term “curators” to describe the self-appointed task of the people who consume the work, like it, and recommend it to others, i.e., the readers/fans, the people who make being The Lone Artist all worth it. I’m not using the term as it has been tossed around the internet for the last year.

Everything is still biased against the lone artist.

Moriah

I didn’t say it. Someone who shall remain nameless said that to me, and it started me thinking about The Lone Artist.

I’ve been to New Orleans, Paris, Venice Beach, New York, London, Amsterdam, and other places where The Lone Artist sets about attempting to earn a living or at least approbation from a crowd of strangers walking by.

Paris, France --- A Street artist draws the face of the Mona Lisa on a sidewalk in front of the Louvre to try to earn money. --- Image by © Owen Franken/CORBIS
In Paris, it was the Ecole des Beaux-Arts students drawing Mona Lisa in pastels on the sidewalk, their hats out for coins.

 

new orleans
In New Orleans, it was a pair of pre-teen boys tap dancing on a street corner, under the watchful eye of their mother, a trumpet player on a corner down the street, and an artist setting up shop in the middle of the St. Louis Cathedral courtyard, right under Jackson’s shadow.

 

amsterdam
In Amsterdam, it was the scantily-clad prostitutes in the plate-glass windows along the canal. (Okay, as “artist” and “lone,” that one’s questionable, but it’s vivid, ain’t it?)

 

london
In London, it was the—what is this guy? Is this classified as pantomime? Definitely performance art. (Shut up. I like mimes.)

 

newyork
In New York, it was the oddball music played by street musicians.

 

venice
In Venice Beach, it was a dude who charged $5 to create origami magic with one strand from one palm frond. I knew it was a living sculpture that would die in an hour, but I bought it anyway because it was so different and . . . unexpected. I admired that he could do it in seconds right in front of my eyes, I admired the work itself, and I kept it for the hour it lasted, then threw it away. That $5 was very well spent.

In a lot of ways, I like being a lone artist. When I go to authors’ websites and read about the difficulties they have working with a publisher, I’m glad. When I go to readers’ websites and read about how sad they are when a favorite author gets cut off mid-series, I’m glad. When I sit down to write and realize that I can do anything I want without having to account to a sales staff, I’m glad. When I know that the readership I’m gathering one by one, to whom I am ever so grateful, now has enough faith in me to go where I take them, I’m glad.

There is one respect I really don’t like it. I don’t like the near absence of distribution. But . . . that’s about the only way I can think of that I don’t like it.  After all, a street performer can only play to the audience that walks by.

It’s not easy. Some days it’s damned depressing. I count on the readers to talk to me and remind me that there is something of worth in what I do, and believe me, I remember it. I count up those emails and screen shots and snippets of conversation here and there, and I keep them, put them in my hard drive bank like coins in my hat.

So when bedtime comes (if it comes) and I fall in bed exhausted from everything I have to do to be a lone artist, it’s the good kind of exhaustion.

Howard Roark laughed.

Evolution of a cover, part 1

Moriah

Originally published at Publishing Renaissance January 6, 2009.

 


If you’ll all indulge me, I though it’d be fun to do a little series on the evolution of a cover by a non-cover artist/designer. It took me almost a year and hundreds of hours of Photoshopping to come to the cover I did, which I affectionately call The Bewbies™. Originally, The Proviso was one book and it was enormous. I originally titled it Barefoot Through Fire. Then I figured I’d probably do better to split it out into 3 parts, 1 part per romance. This is where the cover journey begins.
Read more →

It’s work time.

Moriah

I have nothing to say and too much to do. I meant to get my edits on Stay finished this weekend, but the widespread WordPress attack hit The Proviso‘s site and I spent my weekend, instead, cleaning up after that mess. And I still have a bunch to do before I’m satisfied with my sites.

The blog I just linked made the assertion that we should’ve upgraded. I made a deliberate decision not to because the last time I auto-upgraded, it broke my shopping cart and photo gallery plugins. I had to rebuild Peculiar Page‘s shopping cart twice (which still doesn’t work and redirects to B10 Mediaworx), and B10 Mediaworx’s once, which, thankfully, works. To me, it was a no-win situation and in hindsight, I see that I would’ve had to waste all that time anyway.

There was one thing that kept me from being hit on all my other sites, and that was the fact that I didn’t have “Anyone can register” checked. Only on The Proviso‘s site did I have that, and sure enough, that was the one that went down.

I made a Zazzle store for products with quotable quotes from or inspired by The Proviso and Stay. Culled them from fans, and I’m nowhere close to finished, but I’m trying to be more like the musicians who can merchandise the hell out of their music. Now, if I could figure out a way to go on tour…

In other news, Mrs. Giggles says she’s bored with romance bloggerland. So’m I, for all the reasons she listed. And you know, as much as I hate feeling like every time I post somewhere or tweet, it’s self-promotion (because it is, except most of my Twitterstream is me being completely silly stoopid or whining about something), at least I don’t have 90 days or fewer to make certain my sales numbers are enough to sell another book. That’s not a brag. It’s a statement of gratitude. I’m bored of most of all the rest of my regular blogs, too.

I also won’t be reading much of anything for pleasure.

Anyhoo, I’m making my blog vacation official since, you know, I haven’t actually said anything in a week or so because I tend to not speak when I have nothing new to say. Check my archives. Whatever it is, I’ve said it already. Twice.

I have much to do before Thanksgiving and I intend to get it all done.