Schizophrenia Awareness Week
This week is Schizophrenia Awareness Week, and in the interest of raising awareness, I’m making Scar available for FREE download. Click the link, and use coupon code JD65M at the checkout. Tell everyone you know; offer ends next Sunday!
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/97573
Createspace works in mysterious ways
I logged into Createspace today, which is no longer a daily activity for me, the way it was when I first published Scar. Sometimes I’ll go a couple of weeks without checking in.
But today I logged in and found the dashboard looks a little different. It now displays royalties earned in dollars, British pounds and Euros. I clicked around a little more, and found that there’s a whole new sales channel Scar wasn’t enrolled in: Amazon Europe.
When I got started with Creatpace, I paid extra – $35 or something like that – to have my book placed in their Extended Distribution Channel (EDC). This would help my book get listed in non-US Amazon sites, such as Amazon.co.uk, .de, .fr and so on. A while ago, they did away with this system and started including EDC for everyone.
Now they’ve changed the system again, and it’s actually a good thing. It seems they’ve finally realised the whole point of print-on-demand, and started printing books in the country they are ordered in. This means faster shipping times for customers and, thanks to lower production costs, (slightly) higher royalties for authors. Honestly, it’s ridiculous that it’s taken them this long to figure it out. It’s not as though Europe doesn’t have printing facilities, after all. Why print a book in America and ship it across the world when you can just send a computer file?
It’s all good news for those of us who sell books overseas. I just wish Createspace had let us know when the changes were made; an email would have been nice.
Thought Catalog, I Love You
Another article I wrote got published on Thought Catalog. I was overwhelmed by the response to the last one, but this one has been treated even more generously. I could get used to this….
http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/do-you-have-to-be-miserable-to-be-an-artist/
The Blogger’s Return
It’s pretty disgraceful that I’ve neglected this blog for three solid months. It’s not because I’ve given up, or because I had nothing to write about; quite the opposite.
I’ve moved from the ‘getting the book published’ part of Scar’s little life into the ‘getting people to actually read it’ part. I thought the publishing was difficult and time consuming, but this marketing game is something else. I’m still pretty early into it, with no major successes of which to speak, so I’m not really in a position yet to tell you what works (though I could tell you a few things that don’t).
But for now, I thought I’d share an article I wrote on the realities of being an artist in the modern age. It was picked up by Thought Catalogue, and I’m told was pretty well-received, judging by comments on twitter. I’ve never really understood twitter myself, so I’ll have to take other people’s word for that.
Anyway, you can read it here: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/being-an-artist-in-the-21st-century/
And while we’re at it, let’s make that my first marketing tip. Write an article. You’re a writer, aren’t you? So write something you can give away for free, and find someone who’ll publish it. Like Thought Catalogue. The internet is a ravenous beast, scouring the earth for fresh content to disseminate, every minute of every day. There are lots of sites like this that will let people write for them. And if people like your article, they’ll repost or retweet or whatever it is people do with articles these days, and suddenly people who have never heard of you, have now heard of you.
Creating a book cover: The Dostoevsky/Kardashian Method
It occurred to me recently that I’ve neglected to mention one very important aspect of publishing Scar: the cover. Part of what got me thinking about this was going through the self-published books on Smashwords, goodreads.com and other sites, and seeing some truly awful covers.
Forget the old cliche about not judging a book by its cover; that’s what the cover is there for. How do you make your book stand out when it’s surrounded by thousands of others, whether on a physical bookstore shelf or online? Your cover is your first chance to get people interested in your book, and if it doesn’t do that, it doesn’t matter if you wrote the best novel in human history; no one will ever know, because no one will ever get past that boring/hideous/offensive cover.
For the self-publisher, the cover of your book needs to do three things:
1) Grab the (potential) reader’s attention and make them want to know more.
2) Convey in an instant what kind of book this is, so that you know you’re engaging with the right kind of reader, ie. people who actually read the type of book you’ve written.
3) Make your book look as professional and high quality as any other book out there.
The first two points are just as important for a major publisher as they are for anyone else, and big publishers will spend thousands on getting the covers of their books right. You don’t need to do that, but you do need to be aware of the tricks and techniques the big guys use, so you can steal borrow them.
Step 1: Grab the reader’s attention
Which of these looks more interesting?
I’ll admit that “Database Issues…” isn’t helped by its subject matter, but the cover for “The Sisters Brothers” draws your eye towards it. It has bright, bold, primary colours; red, in particular, always attracts attention. It has interesting fonts. It has both human figures and what looks like a face, two things we are evolutionarily conditioned to notice and look for, as anyone who doubts Jesus’ appearance in a piece of toast will tell you. One of these books makes you interested to know more, and the other doesn’t, unless you’re really curious about geographic information systems.
Step 2: Attracting the right kind of reader
A good cover should convey the essence of the book in the time it takes to glance at it. Sounds difficult, but fortunately, we humans are visual creatures, and we’ve been conveying information visually for a very long time now. Not only that, but publishers have developed a visual language of book covers that enables customers to make snap-second decisions on books they know nothing about.
Look at these two:
Both attract attention, but whose attention? One is an intense, harrowing exploration of morality and suffering; the other is by Dostoevsky (Ba-boom! Thank you, I’ll be here all week.) ‘The Idiot’ promises sophistication, abstraction, intensity; ‘Kardashian Konfidential’ offers glamour, celebrity and gossip. Both of these books might catch my eye in a bookstore, but I’d only consider buying one of them. The publishers are marketing to two very different demographics, and when they designed the cover on the Kardashian’s book, they weren’t thinking of me.
Look at books similar to yours; does your cover look like theirs? If you’ve written a story about a single girl in the city trying to choose between her sexy but caddish boss and her endearingly nerdy childhood sweetheart, a hot pink cover with a pair of shoes on the front is perfectly appropriate, but it might not work as well for a dystopian steampunk fantasy.
Step 3: Looking the part
If you take the time to learn the language of book covers, you’re already halfway to not looking like an amateur, because you’ll quickly learn how to target the right audience with your cover. But there are other pitfalls to avoid. One that self-published writers often make is having covers that are far too ‘busy’. Just because your book has scenes set in Paris, Australia and outer space doesn’t mean you have to have the Eiffel Tower, Ayers rock and the moon on the cover. Don’t try and tell the story in an image; that’s not what the cover is for. You want to give a sense of the overall tone of the book, but that’s all. Is it a fun summer read? A rumination on the transience of all things? A political pot-boiler? A murder mystery? These are things a good cover makes clear.
Another common error by self-published writers is having too much writing on the cover. You know those taglines that movies have, like ‘Alien’s memorable “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream?” Leave those to the movies. Big publishing houses don’t put taglines on the front of their books, and neither should you. If you really want a tagline, you can put it on the back cover, where the blurb goes; not on the front.
The front cover of a novel really only needs two pieces of text; the author’s name and the title. Sometimes a pull-quote from a favourable review might find its way there too, but be sparing. Also, if the book is in a series, it’s fine to mention that on the front. Murder mysteries seem particularly prone to this, often listing the main recurring character by name: “A Sluethy McSolve Mystery”. (Sluethy McSolve is the hard-boiled private detective/concert pianist I just invented, in case you were wondering.) This falls under the category of conveying to the reader what kind of book this is.
Simplicity is key; less here is definitely more. Consider the fact that the world’s biggest bookseller has no physical stores, only a website which will shrink your cover down to the resolution of a three-year-old’s drawing and display it as a 1 inch jpeg. The simpler a cover is, the better it will look in those conditions. (Up to a point, of course. The simplest cover is no cover at all, but that won’t sell many books.)
Scar: The story behind the cover
Throughout the process of publishing Scar, I’ve had quite a few people comment favourably on the cover. Not just friends of mine, either; even the folks at Createspace complimented me on it.
I wanted to keep it simple and stark. The tree comes from the mythological themes of the book; the tree has always been an archetypal image in mythologies throughout the world. Also, Scar is a book about family and the past; I felt the tree with its spreading roots was a good representation of that. The red was my girlfriend’s idea; it makes the cover much more striking, and also hints at the theme of blood, of family. The roots in the black soil also hint at the underworld, a major theme in the book being the psychological/mythological descent into the underworld of one’s psyche. That the upper branches of the tree suggest the human brain was a happy coincidence lost on me until my brother pointed it out.
I can’t draw worth a damn. But happily for me, and unhappily for them, artists are abundant, and cheap. There are as many people trying to break out into art as there are trying to write books, and in the meantime, many of them are happy to take on small jobs. I put an ad on craigslist looking for an artist, and got dozens of replies. You can also explore deviantart.com to find someone whose style suits your book.
My cover was drawn by a Seattle artist named Michael Yakutis; he also drew comics of a few scenes from Scar for my website and advertising material. He’s talented, a real pleasure to work with and ridiculously reasonable; you can see more of his work at http://www.artifolio.com/artist/michaelyakutis888/.
There’s a lot about Scar that I’m proud of, and the cover is definitely one of those things. Every time I look at it, I feel a small swell of pride; that’s what a good cover can do.
Schizophrenia in the media
Bit of a departure for a blog about self-publishing here, but I’ve been following the news coverage of Anders Breivik’s diagnosis by forensic psychologists as a paranoid schizophrenic. You remember Breivik; he’s the self-described ‘anti-Muslim militant’ who killed 77 people in and around Oslo in July.
Breivik has been quite clear in describing his motivations for the attack. He targeted the summer gathering of Norway’s Labour party in twisted retaliation for what he saw as their pro-multicultural, pro-immigration policies. Breivik, like many on the far right, felt not only that radical Islam was a very real threat to European societies, but that political entities on the Left were in some way allied with these radical Islamists.
Since his arrest, Breivik has been awaiting trial, with much of his time spent in solitary confinement. Now that he has been found insane, he may, depending on the court’s agreement with the findings, be facing compulsory psychiatric care instead of a prison sentence.
I’ve been reading a lot of comments on this verdict, and there’s two things that trouble me.
One is that this was a politically motivated attack. We don’t consider the mental health of the 9/11 hijackers, or of the Air India bombers. These were people acting in accordance with a very definite political agenda, using violence to achieve their aims. By lumping Breivik in with the likes of Charles Manson and Fred West, the ideology he subscribed to is passing by almost without comment. We know he was involved in one way or another with far-right groups, but when we categorise him as simply insane, all that seems to fall by the wayside. A terrorist act, a Norwegian 9/11, becomes instead a Scandinavian Columbine, a senseless tragedy with no political angle whatsoever. This is missing an important point: that anyone can be capable of unspeakable acts if they believe themselves to be doing the right thing. You can see it in schools, where children are taught that Hitler was an insane lunatic who somehow bewitched an entire nation into committing atrocities, as though he were the only murdering dictator in human history. Nothing is as dangerous as the man who believes beyond a shadow of a doubt that what he is doing is right. We forget this at our peril.
The second troubling aspect is this diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. I’m not in a position to argue with forensic psychologists over the mental state of a man I’ve never met. Breivik may very well be schizophrenic; I wouldn’t know. What I do know is how this informs the societal image of what a schizophrenic is.
Due to having written a novel with a schizophrenic protagonist, I have a Google alert set up to notify me of news stories on schizophrenia. It’s a depressing spectacle, for the most part. Especially today. The Google News page for schizophrenia today leads with Breivik, of course. He’s followed by Anthony Rapoport, a Chicago man who beat his aunt to death with a baseball bat. Scroll just a little down the same page, and we have Nicholas Bendle, the California man who killed a complete stranger with a hatchet.
Scared yet? Apparently, the world is full of murderous schizophrenics who could snap at any moment and kill you for no reason! Even if they think they have a reason, as Breivik did, it’s the madness, not the ideology, that we should blame.
So far, so depressing, but none of this is especially surprising. The mainstream image of schizophrenia has long been that of a rampaging, murderous psychopath – well, that or someone with ‘split personalities’, a completely unrelated condition. We’re thinking of Norman Bates, not John Nash.
The truth is a little different. About 5 per cent of violent crime is committed by people with various psychotic disorders, including but not limited to schizophrenia. When you consider that roughly 1 per cent of the population suffers from schizophrenia, it starts to seem a little less scary.
In 1999, a study by the Royal College of Psychiatrists concluded that people with mental illnesses are far less dangerous than people under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and that dying at the hands of a mentally ill stranger is less likely than winning the lottery. But the media is naturally biased towards the unusual, the shocking, the bizarre. No one wants to hear about the 50 million people who didn’t win the lottery this week; they want to hear about the one who did. No one wants to hear about the schizophrenics who control their symptoms with medication and function highly in society despite their illness; we want the knife, the hockey mask, the Hollywood horror.
The truth is simultaneously more mundane and more horrifying: a supposedly sane person is just as likely to commit horrific acts as a schizophrenic. And whether Breivik is schizophrenic or not, it is his ideology that prompted him to murder innocent strangers – an ideology he shares with hundreds of sane people.
Ebook publishing blues
With Scar out in paperback, I quickly set about getting an ebook version available. Now, personally, I’ve never read an ebook – at least, I hadn’t until I started making one. I don’t have an eReader, and I don’t really want one. You see, it’s not just stories that I love. I really love books; the physical object itself. I like bookstores. I like having books around me at home. While I can see the appeal of being able to carry a library around with you at all times, I can’t quite make the leap, yet.
But I’m not one to make war on the ocean. Ebook sales for January 2010 were up 261% against the previous January, and that statistic is now two years old. Ebooks outsell hardcovers on Amazon, and that’s for established authors. When it comes to self-published authors, the difference is more dramatic. It’s anecdotal, but from talking to authors on forums such as the Createspace forums, ebooks are where it’s at. Check out J.A. Konrath’s blog (http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/) and see what he’s doing with ebooks and self-publishing. This is a man who’s turned his back on traditional publishing to self-publish ebooks, because he can make more money that way.
Think of it this way: no one’s ever heard of me, or my novel. They don’t know what to expect from me. For all they know, Scar could be the greatest work of fiction ever created, or (and this is far more likely) it could be a poorly written, unedited exercise in dilettante ego-stroking. But if they read the synopsis and it sounds interesting, they might consider taking a chance on my book. If they want a print copy, they’re risking $14.95 plus shipping. The ebook costs $2.99, and they can download and start reading it instantly.
This is basic marketing psychology, and if you want to sell books – if you want to sell anything – you need to get to grips with this. Ebooks can be priced so low that they become an impulse buy. But when you sell ebooks through Amazon, you get a 70% royalty. 70%, when traditionally-published authors who sell in the MILLIONS get 15-20%. If I sell two ebooks, I make almost as much as I do from one print book; that is to say, a $5.98 ebook sale gets me $4.18, and a $14.95 (plus shipping) print sale gets me $4.45.
I knew I had to make Scar an ebook. But I’m a dunce when it comes to computers. I basically have the same attitude to my PC as I do to my car; I can make it go, but I have no real idea how it works. If something goes wrong, I am powerless to fix it.
Enter smashwords.com. Smahwords is a DIY ebook distributor, and what they do is really quite impressive. When you sign up, you get a free ebook by Mark Coker, the founder of smashwords. (The first and so far only ebook I’ve read, incidentally.) This 88 page behemoth may seem daunting, but it’s an incredible tool that will teach you, step by step, how to take you book (assuming it’s in Microsoft Word) and make it into an ebook. Smashwords will then convert it into every conceivable ebook format, and sell it on their website.
Createspace will offer to make your book available on the Kindle for $79 dollars. But if you follow the Smashwords style guide, your Word document will be Kindle-ready for free. You can then go to Kindle Direct Publishing (kdp.amazon.com) and upload your book for free.
Honestly, if you write a conventional novel, you’d be stupid not to do this. It’s all free, it takes a few minutes, and it’s a whole other way to sell your books. Moreover, the ebook market is the big story in publishing right now. Rely only on print sales, and you will be left behind.
BUT….Scar is not like other books, and so transforming it into an electronic version was a quick day trip to an upper circle of hell. Scar has almost 150 footnotes, each of which had to be individually linked in Word to the point to which they’re supposed to refer. Technically, you can’t do footnotes in an ebook, only endnotes; so they all had to be moved to the end of the book. The blacked-out pages had to be reformatted into images, and once that was done, it turned out they were the wrong kind of images. The palimpsests and overwritten text – the very feature that makes Scar, Scar – simply couldn’t be replicated. Believe me, I tried. I spoke to every professional who would answer an email, and they all said the same thing – no way. Can’t be done. It took a week to turn Scar into a functional ebook, and it still wasn’t perfect.
Ultimately, I had to choose between a neutered version of Scar for the ebook, or nothing at all. But I really believe that this is the future of publishing. I love books; but I said the same thing about CDs. I liked the physical object; I liked the record store. I finally bought my first iPod in 2006, and I haven’t bought a CD in at least three years. Ebooks are new – so new that my spell-check won’t recognize the word – and they have very definite limitations. But that’s how technology goes; we laugh at what seemed impossible a year ago. If you’re not part of the future, you’ve consigned yourself to the past.
So Scar is available as an ebook, without the palimpsests (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/97573). The blacked-out pages are in there, but they seem to appear and disappear depending on what reader you use. The fact of the matter is, I think Scar can stand on the story and the quality of the writing. There’s no doubt that it loses something without the palimpsests; but they’re not essential to the story. I’d rather have it available in this form than not at all.
The way I see it is this: there’ll always be a market for printed books. It’s 2011, and albums are still put out on vinyl; what does that tell you? Sometimes, a cultural artefact and distribution technology meld so perfectly that the object itself becomes a thing of beauty. That’s how I see books. The print version of Scar is a beautiful object, at least to me. It’s the ultimate way to tell the story I set out to tell.
But if people want to buy an ebook, for one-tenth of the price of a print copy plus shipping, I’m not going to stand in their way. I’ve been poor too long myself to start getting elitist. They might miss out on some of the effects I fought so hard to create, but the story will still shine through; they’ll still get it. That’s really all I want.
As a compromise, there’s a note at the back of the ebook. It gives readers a link and a password, so they can go to my website and download a pdf of Scar, the way it was meant to look. This way, those who really get the book, who really understand what I was trying to do, can see it the way it was should be. For those who just want to pass a few hours reading a story, that’s fine too.
