As many of you know I went to the Oregon Coast to take a workshop with Dean Wesley Smith and Scott William Carter with Special Guest Appearance by Kris Rusch ;), on the whats and hows of epublishing, and – more importantly – whys.
I’ve taken other workshops with Kris and Dean in the past, and this one was both similar to those (starting with the very first master class which I attended) and completely different.
It was similar in that Kris and Dean give value for their workshops. I’ve said this before. They don’t have the lengthy breakfasts, the laid back chats… No, every minute of the workshop – and often of the working lunches, when they have to let us eat before we faint (grin) – is dedicated to learning. This makes it very exhausting even if you already know some of the material they’re teaching and, probably, near-lethal if you’re learning and thinking it all for the first time.
This is in no way a complaint. If you’re going across the country for a workshop; if you’re a writer who is perpetually semi-broke; if you have a family you’re leaving on their own while going, you WANT the workshop to be intensive. The last thing you need is to spend time out there doing nothing, while you know you could be working at home.
It was very different from past workshops, though, in that Dean was sharing things he learned just recently and often saying “this might change” or “this might be different for you.”
It was similar because, as with many of their workshops, a lot of what they said I have to struggle to accept – even when I logically should know it’s true.
It was different because the market portion of it was more tentative. See, the market portion used to be on how to submit to editors. It now is on how to submit to… readers. Editors were a small group, living in NYC, attending the same parties, talking about the same topics, practically inhabiting each other’s pockets. You could psyche their preoccupations and their hot buttons one way or another. Apparently my subconscious has a long – LONG – list of “do not write this, no one will buy it” topics, and by “no one” I mean NYC editors. OTOH, ebooks are marketed to a for all intents and purposes infinite market, which does not live in each other’s pockets. Who knows what will find a niche audience of, say, a million people or so, and take off like a rocket?
It was similar because the emphasis was on writing, telling good stories, writing fast and well. Okay, it wasn’t a writing workshop, but 99% of the attendees were traditionally published authors, and Dean kept emphasizing if you stop writing to do tech, you will fail. The writing is what drives all the rest, and the tech is designed to give you freedom to create what you want to, beyond the limits of the traditional market.
The funny thing is that they didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t know. I mean, at the back of my mind, I’d already arrived to similar conclusions. I know this, because as they presented their conclusions, the reaction wasn’t (usually. There’s one exception) Oh, Heavens. I Never Thought Of That! It was more like Oh, Well, DUH. However, they were things I knew but would never have put together, if that makes sense. As is, some of them, though I know intellectually, will take me months to adjust my mind to.
So, without further ado, let me give you some things I learned at the Think Like A Publisher workshop.
1- The market is infinite for all practical purposes.
Qualifications – of course it isn’t infinite. There is a limited number of readers in the world. Also, for now ebooks only reach into about four countries (easily and from the US, that is) and are way behind the US in most of those countries. BUT in terms of “there will be enough people in that group that like any given thing that you could not just make a living but become a millionaire” the market is infinite.
1.a – This is an answer to the “tsunami of sh*t” complaint about how indies will ruin publishing. You see, with that vast a market, what you have to remember is that there are a lot of people in the group you can now access who LIKE sh*t. (This reminds me of the quip in Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment “I just said it was horse p*ss. I didn’t say I didn’t like it.)
1.b. – by the law of statistics this creates a curious “flattening” of the market. Yeah, some things will sell better than others, but not that insanely better. Look, the thing about our “names” in publishing (by which I mean bestsellers. For the benefit of the audience, no, I’m not a name. I’m barely a name in my OWN household.) is that lately there have been so many of them they’ve become “niche names.” Unless you’re talking of J. K. Rowling – and even then you might have to add “Harry Potter, you know?” – chances are any of your non-writing friends will give you a blank stare at the mention of any bestseller. Heck, I’ve had people in the business give me a blank stare at t he mention of a bestseller in UF. Part of what causes this is that there are so many books/authors out. Now multiply that by a bazillion (yes, this is an exact figure! Shut up.) And throw in every writer who ever lived and whose work can be scanned in. Compared to Rowling, I have a name in my own household. Compared to, oh, Kipling, I’m “who is she?” even to my own kids. But the thing is this is NOT a problem. Why not? Because some night people might not want to read Potter or poems, and they might type in keywords that kick up my books – like Shifter. Or Dark Ships. And given an almost infinite market, there will always be a baseline of those enough to keep me in roof and meals and possibly even assistant. Also, with luck and a little care on my part, they’ll come back because I give value. And I’ll have an expanding audience that does not rely on gimmicks or publisher push.
2 – The supply is infinite for all practical purposes. There’s every author who ever lived out there. If you read a new author every day of your life, you’d never run out. It’s reader’s paradise. It’s also writer’s paradise.
2.a This creates the next answer to the tsunami of fecal matter thing – in the enormous pool of the market, no matter how much er… waste splashes in, it will be negligible. Think of the difference between peeing in your bathtub and peeing in the ocean. (This is not, btw, an encouragement to put out randomly generated stories, based on an algorithm that scrambles sentences and creates the equivalent of Atlanta Nights. Peeing in the ocean is still bad manners and if people pay you for it, they’ll get upset. At you, personally.)
2.b. The doors have been thrown wide open. You want to write about people who have a fetish for hydrogen peroxide? There are probably enough of them out there to make you a very rich writer.
3- Chinese Math applies. Sort of.
(Chinese Math states that if you sell something for a dollar to every Chinese person, you’ll still be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.)
3. a But Sarah, you say, you are unlikely to produce something that EVERYONE out there wants to read. [Stop. Just stop. You’re giving me the shakes. I’m visualizing billions of dollars flowing in. (Moans. Clears throat. Sits up straighter.)] Right. So, I am. But I don’t need to. Even if any given piece of my work appeals to say 1000 people on any given month, I’m making a living. And if it appeals to 10000 people, I’ll be making a GOOD living.
3.b. It has a multiplier effect. If one piece of my writing appeals to a thousand people a month (these numbers seem to be unrealistic, btw, unless you’re very good or very lucky. Or both – hi Ric! If a story is doing well it will sell maybe a few hundred a month) then why don’t I have ten pieces out? Or twenty? What am I, stupid? At the level of criminal stupidity? Agatha Christie used to say she sat down and said “I think I’ll write myself a house.” Midlisters, in a way can now do that.
3.c. It REALLY has a multiplier effect, because readers are creatures of habit. What in heck do I mean by that? Well, once we find a writer we like we will keep reading him/her. Sudden, for us, that author has stood up and is beyond the random selection thing I talked about. Oh, it’s unlikely he/she will be an author “everyone is talking about” – look at that near infinite supply thing – BUT he/she will have a growing share of the market and enough to be very rich indeed. So, have books out there under the same name/in the same style, etc, enough to make a living.
4. Book launches are irrelevant. So is most other publicity.
4.a. All they do is speed up the process of finding an audience. Okay, so perhaps not totally irrelevant, particularly very early on, when you want to start seeing some money for a proof of concept on your indie efforts. But ultimately, say two years in the future, you’d be in the same place. This means, if you can wait, you don’t need to publicize. Your book is not going to age or fall off the shelf.
4. b. Yes, this means that books don’t “age” – that relates to shelf space, etc. If anything, since the best publicity in the new market is word of mouth, older books have an advantage. Stop thinking of your books as bananas that will spot and spoil. Now.
4.c. If you’re the sort of writer who wants to sit down and write furiously, your time has arrived. (Thank G-d almighty, free at last.) Oh, okay, you might need to learn some basic coding, but I’m now where I can see how to do it, sort of. And if I can do it, ANYONE can do it. Including people who’ve never seen a computer before and for whom chipped flint is the height of technological innovation. (Yes, that’s how techy I am.)
4.d. There is no such thing as a “big book.” Oh, sure, some of your work will sell better than other work. But the difference won’t be enough for you to think in “big book” terms. What I mean is for most of us, the editors have got in the back of our head and made us think things like “Oh, this next book is going to be huge.” Now you don’t need to let that happen. Just make each book the best it can be, and enjoy the process.
Now, for the one thing that is still hard for me to accept: It is still very early days on this. Dean said it over and over again. And I couldn’t believe it. I mean, intellectually I know it’s true. The very cumbersomeness of the software proves it. You have to spit and duct tape things. When it becomes more main stream, it will become easier, and eventually there will be a push-button solution.
But that’s INTELLECTUALLY. Emotionally, it seems like everyone got there before me. I have to tell myself this is not true and to calm down.
Anyway – these are the general impressions from the workshop. Of course I can’t tell you everything they said over three days. Even if I could, I’d miss little points, which would mean something for you that they don’t mean for me. This is all filtered through my mind, of course, and I might have drawn conclusions the presenters never intended. However to me, it is what I’ve seen.
I went to the revolution and took some snap shots. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to write me a house.
According To Hoyt 
Thank you.
LikeLike
Very exciting and inspiring stuff, Sarah. Indeed, as Drak said, Thank You!
LikeLike
Thanks, Sarah, for sharing the workshop with us. I’ve been following Dean’s blog for some time now, but it’s good to get the information from a slightly different perspective, especially when that person is nearer to where I am in the process than Dean. Good luck with the house; me, I want a sports car. Or two.
LikeLike
My wife and I did the “Chinese” Math several months back when she started to encourage me to turn my hobby into a profession.
A book doesn’t have to sell millions. Heck, it doesn’t even need to sell hundreds of thousands. Just 100,000 dedicated readers and you have a career, and a very comfortable one at that.
Thanks for the post. Nice to see that others are confirming my speculations.
We could begin to see very specialized niche markets indeed.
LikeLike
Oh, and I also need to emphasize that the hurdles for acceptable book design are also rather low.
I kept obsessing about the font and spacing when I was hard coding my book, and in the end, no one cared. All my readers care about is that its decent-enough not to be distracting.
The internet has sort of flattened expectations for high end typography.
LikeLike
I recall in a couple of my hardback books, there is a notice in the back of the book stating what font the book was published in. Honestly I couldn’t tell that it was anything unusual, (looked normal to me) so my first thought on reading the notice was, who cares? My second thought was that anybody who read the notice had already finished the book, so they really didn’t want any negative feedback, because if the font was bad enough to cause people to quit reading the book they weren’t ever going to get to the notice anyways, and if the book was good enough that they struggled through a font they hated to finish the book, they probably weren’t flipping through the empty pages in the back, just to see if there was another couple sentences of small importance to read in a font they hated.
LikeLike
I’ve about come to Travis Lee’s conclusion. Whereas book design used to include typography and page layout and all that goes with, for the moment at least, it basically consists of an attractive cover. Pour your RTF into Calibre; pick .mobi for output; wail.
M
LikeLike
Wail or wait?
LikeLike
Both.
If you really want the extra punch from good book design, cool fonts, Initial capitals to start off chapters, illustrations, etc. you really only have one choice.
You can use InDesign and use the kindle plug ins, but even then you have to use certain workarounds, like turning chapter headings into rasterized graphics, etc. but the more I play with mine, the more I’m convinced it’s not worth it.
Kindle doesn’t support full page illustrations really well, let alone cool and fun things like text wrapping and most people have been trained by mobile devices to accept barebones formatting.
Make sure the page breaks work, and that the links in the TOC work. Other than that, move on and focus on the cover like Mark says.
LikeLike
Wail. GIT-tar. Feeback. Windmill like Pete Townshend.
M
LikeLike
Generation too early for me. I would have said Eddie Van Halen or Satriani. LOL.
LikeLike
Thanks so much. It’s all huge and scary and exciting. Good luck with your house. ^_^
LikeLike
Eddie. You know that thing he does running his pick edgewise down the windings of his E string? Saw a video the other day of the Ventures and Bob Bogle did a riff that had me almost shouting, “THAT’s where he got it — even though I’d known it all along.
As Picasso put it All artists borrow; great artists STEAL.
M
LikeLike
I’ve been looking at those workshops and wondering if they’d be worth it. Thing is, I’ve never been traditionally published (I do have one book at Amazon and Smashwords, which is doing okay for something by a complete unknown), so I wonder if I’d be in over my head.
If you were me, would you go to one of their workshops? And if you did, which one would you choose? (I’m one of the few for whom they’re a few hours drive away, so the main cost would be lodging and the workshop itself)
LikeLike
Megaera
The thing is they select the people to attend, and I wouldn’t pre-reject. As for whether it’s worth it? Absolutely. Now, workshops are made of humans and if you are going to attend one of those that depend on group mechanics (heavy critique going on, say) then it might or might not work as well as others. However, as far as Kris and Dean do it, they try to give as good value as possible. Well, given the new age of publishing, I decided to take Think Like A Publisher (where, btw, the spouse or partner of the writer is free under the same fee. Mostly because these are family affairs, but also because it helps if you’re both on same page.) I might take the publicity one next February, money and time permitting. I WOULD have taken the blurb writing one, if I’d been focused enough (instead of being focused on A Few Good Men (the novel in progress) to realize it was happening.
LikeLike
On point 1: Lake Superior is not infinite. Here’s a straw: drink it.
I was going to use the ocean analogy but, you know: salt water and drinking = not good.
The Crap Tsunami is the wrong analogy; think instead of finding a tree in a forest. There will be a lot of trees that don’t answer your needs but you will soon learn to find the ones that do without some publishers’ clear-cutting.
LikeLike
RES — both ends are FOR OUR PURPOSES infinite. No, of course, they’re not REALLY infinite, but they are when you factor in a human life time and the fact it keeps getting replenished. As for finding what you want to read, well…Amazon has really good algorithms. Let me just say I’ve discovered more new authors there than anywhere else — with very little recommendation, just by using certain words in searches. The other thing I want to say is is that word of mouth does work, which is the other reason for not putting up cr^p even you know it’s fecal matter, just because you can. Word of mouth is a powerful multiplier. It just takes time.
LikeLike
Sarah,
If you want, I can email you copies of my non-fiction books on copyright so that you can see the difference between Kindle and EPub format. You don’t need a tablet, download Calibre and install it on your PC, doesn’t matter whether it runs Linux, Mac OS X, or that hunk of junk Windows, there are versions of Calibre for all of them.
The Kindle format has limits. It doesn’t do color images. But it still works.
I don’t know if Dean covered this. I do know that at one point one his blog it was discussed, but the new model totally changes books sizes. There is this little article called Digital Books and Book Length which is really interesting. Me being me, I started tossing numbers at the wall, and came up with this post which I dropped on a writer’s group on Facebook:
How exactly she is going to break this magnum opus down is becoming very important to me. It looks like for want of anyone more sensible, I’ve become her publisher. And it looks like I have another three or four writers who want to do the mechanical work for them, EVEN THOUGH THEY KNOW THEY COULD LEARN IT THEMSELVES. Hell, I’ve offered to teach them how to do it for free, and they still want me to do it.
So now I’m in the uncomfortable position of trying to decide what to do. Do I say yes, and try and come up with some sort of pricing schedule? Or do I say now, and leave them floundering with publishers that they absolutely hate, and that I know are robbing them blind.
Somehow I feel this is a no-win scenario.
Wayne
LikeLike
Wayne, I’m going to not exactly take issue with you, but will point out that relying on the Calibre viewers can cause problems. They don’t always give an accurate representation of how the e-book will look in the native program on different e-readers. This is a lesson we’ve learned at NRP the hard way. Same thing goes with the viewers online at Amazon, B&N, etc. The only sure way to know how something will look is to actually look at them in a native program. No, you don’t have to have a tablet, but having one does give you an idea of how your e-book will look to a large part of the buying public. Same thing goes for previewing it on a cell phone or iPod touch.
As for what length is a novel, a novella, or whatever, that’s something no one really knows yet. Frankly, it’s going to be something the buying public has a big say in. I spend part of each day looking at what readers are saying on a number of different e-book related fora and, honestly, a lot of them are looking for — and expecting — novels to be longer than they have been under the legacy publishers. Why? Because there isn’t the limitation of size and resources. That goat-gagger that came in at over 1,000 pages and cost a small fortune and caused back aches for anyone carrying it no longer presents those obstacles. Honestly, it’s probably going to fall into short (under 10 or 15k words), medium (up to 70k) and large (whatever you think your reader will keep reading).
Finally, not everyone can learn how to convert their books, at least not well. All you have to do is look at some of the dreck that is up on Smashwords or Amazon or B&N. There really are some folks that just don’t get it and can’t. There’s also the group who simply don’t want to take the time to do it themselves. They feel their time is better spent writing or editing or promoting their work. Or they feel they can get a better service for a reasonable cut of the sales price by going to someone — contractor or e-publisher — who will do it for them.
LikeLike
Agreed, Calibre isn’t perfect, but it will usually give you a decent feel for what the major platforms (Kindle, Kobo/EPub) will look like. When I’ve compared my own stuff with the copies that Amazon and Smashwords have put through their “conversion” systems, the look has been pretty close.
And that was my main issue, getting a feel for what it would look like before I started. Now I have a decent feel for what I’m doing, I’m not so worried any more.
And I agree. The customer makes the choice. Our problem is we don’t yet know what the customer wants. Oh, we are making sales, but do we really know? I don’t think that the readers know yet. It is still too early, and the market is changing too quickly.
But we now have a huge number of options, and it doesn’t cost us a lot to experiment. What if we took took the same series and broke it the starting novel down into:
1) 50K novel for $0.99
2) 75K novel for $1.99
3) 100K novel for $2.99
Maybe you choose item 1, and it feedback was it was too short, so you dropped the price to free, and made the follow up novels 75K or longer.
Or maybe you did something else. The options are endless.
As to your third paragraph, I agree. The problem is, what do I charge? I don’t have a clue.
Wayne
LikeLike
According to Dean your prices are WAY too low, Wayne. And I concur as some people NOW won’t pick up a 99c novel. The sweet spot for 50k words has moved up to 2.99. Adjust accordingly. All of this, needless to say, subject to change without notice as the market finds a new balance.
LikeLike
Sarah,
Those weren’t my prices, those were Joe Konrath’s prices. Dean was going by the prices I had entered in the EBook Sales Calculator Spreadsheet, and I took them from a post of Joe’s.
You have copies of the latest version of the spreadsheet, check your Facebook inbox. Feel free to post both copies here (OpenOffice/Microsoft Office), my website is down right now, and my geek has gone missing in action.
Wayne
LikeLike
Prices for e-books are completely arbitrary. A 300k book is much more expensive than a 100k book to produce in print. In e-publishing, it’s no extra cost at all, and download times are negligible.
So your price should be whatever your fans and the market will allow.
For first time authors, that might be nothing. And everyone should consider giving away a novel for free, just as a publicity stunt. For established authors, it might be the same as a print edition.
It’s more psychology than anything else. Go low, and people might think “What the heck? Why not?” Go too low and they might not think it’s worth it.
It’s spaghetti against the wall time. Throw it and see what sticks.
LikeLike
well, a 300k book takes much longer to write and I have to pay more to edit. So, as an indie, there is an added cost.
LikeLike
Yeah, but you know what my answer is to that…but I don’t want to start the “crowd-sourced editing” flamewar over again. lol.
LikeLike
Just two days ago, in a used-book store, I picked up — I think Book 2 of Tad Williams’ To Green Angel Tower (which, in its two pieces, is the third in a trilogy…), that was at least two inches thick. I waved it around and said, “This is the kind of book I imprinted on!”
So as a reader of Lovely Fat Books, I’d say, break books down according to two rules:
1: Most importantly, how does it break naturally? Cliffhanger is fine, if it’s a natural and inevitable cliffhanger. (See also the second book in Mira Grant’s Feed trilogy.)
2: What price-points are reasonable? Say you’re thinking 2.99 for a 100K novel (a reasonable loss-leader for a “new” ebook author). 17.99 for a 600K book, though a bargain by print standards, may be a lot by ebook standards if the author isn’t already equipped with a fanbase to rave about the flawless editing, lack of typos, un-bloated chapters, and excellent story. (If one does try a higher price-point, I suggest calling it a “series, all in one file,” or some-such, to call attention to the “hey, juicy big story here!” aspects. Also make sure to note “Sample the first X% free!” — where X% is equal to whatever percent of the book the given distributor includes in a sample.)
2a: Make sure that the price-point falls into the Sweet Spot of royalties from any given distributor. It might be that 70% of 9.99 would be better than 35% of 17.99.
LikeLike
See, as a writer, I NORMALLY don’t think this way. My novels tend to have a natural length around 80k. Going shorter or longer is difficult. BUT there was the 600k word novel that’s part of a — groan — series, and which I suppose I can now — grown — edit and put out. I’d still love to break it up though. And yeah, it took me (I was a fledgeling, remember) three years to write. And I suspect there are shorter ones lurking, too, particularly if I ever venture into romance. (REMEMBER no genre is safe from me!)
LikeLike
The price point can not be determined without looking also at the royalty rate.
Say Amazon, how many 99 cent books have to be sold to make the same money as with one 2.99 sale? About 10 books.
Better have some real reasons for going outside the 70% royalty window. ;)
LikeLike
Ah! And here’s a man who thinks like a (starving) writer!
LikeLike
Years ago, Disney decided to limit all of their animated movies to 90 min, on some specious market research that decided that kids’ attention spans were only capable of lasting that long.
Horse puckey. My kids were enthralled through all of Spirited Away and bored every minute of some of those 90 min affairs.
Page length is the same way. There is no magic length.
It’s the length it has to be to tell the story. My first novel is way longer than a standard first novel is supposed to be. I sent it to my editor and readers and said make it bleed. They cut 50 pages. 50 is inconsequential for a 500+ page book. I was really worried about it, but in the end, I just decided that the pacing is right, it doesn’t drag and it is the length it needed to be.
I find that in these discussions about being indie authors we are still holding on to standards that only made sense in the days when publishers were the gate keepers, who make the same arbitrary decisions that Disney made with animated movies.
Let the books be the length they want to be. Some big books will break through and we’ll change the market.
LikeLike
Two Words – Harry Potter! Everyone said the first Harry Potter movie was far too long, and that kids wouldn’t like it.
You couldn’t have pried my kids out of the theater with a crow bar.
I’m in the middle of editing Mom’s children’s book “The Mice of Middleton Marsh”. Total including Preface is 35,810 words. For a book of bed time stories to be told to 5-10 year olds, I think that’s a good length. I know that two generations of kids in our family have loved the stories.
Yeah, it’s an odd length. It’s what Mom wrote, and it’s what we are publishing.
Wayne
LikeLike
Really good and important post, Sarah. Thank you.
Does anyone know how close InDesign is to a real, workable format solution? (I’ve seen it used. I’m trying to get a copy so I can learn to use it myself. But otherwise, I am quite vague.)
As for the side-conversation with Wayne, I know that putting things into the right program for e-book publishing gives me nightmares. This is something my late husband Michael was really good at; he understood computers, and liked e-books, though the market was different in ’04 and we weren’t thinking of putting anything out in this fashion at that point. But I just have very little ability this way . . . and I see the problems rather than the solutions (part of my mindset).
The upshot of all this means that I’m still looking for a work-around, an expedient, that will work before I try Smashwords with some sort of trial balloon. (I have the ideal one, a story I really like that gets good comments at magazines and the like, but always bounces out in the end. Not always for the same reason. My thought is that this story might do well — and if it doesn’t, I’ve lost nothing. But I still have to learn how the formatting works before I’m going to make the attempt.)
Barb
LikeLike
Barb,
Both Amazon and Smashwords prefer uploads of Microsoft Word files, so unless you are going to set up your own site to sell books, I think that InDesign would be overkill.
I use IWork Pages myself. It has a good Microsoft export function. IWork is a lot cheaper than Microsoft Office, and in my opinion a lot more capable. Of course you have to own a Mac to run it…
Amazon has good information on what to do. Sign up for a vendor account, it costs nothing, and the information is easy to read. Smashwords has a book which you can download. Again, it’s pretty simple.
Think of it as baking a cake – if you can make a cake from a recipe you can do this.
Wayne
LikeLike
I don’t know a thing about Smashwords, but I’ve been playing with Kindle for a while now.
I still think that InDesign is a better option, but the price is a bit prohibitive. It’s EASY to use though, so don’t be intimidated by it. If you have the money, I think it’s worth it, but there are other options.
There are lots of ways to get your MSWord file into Kindle, though, none of them great IMO. MS Word doesn’t format clean unless you use really barebones formatting.
The better option is to export it as a webpage, go back in in HTML, and clean up the notorious bad HTML that MS Word puts into everything, then go to one of the converters, like mobipocket. Kindle Direct Publishing has a huge help page.
LikeLike
Barb,
Here’s a link to the Smashwords Style Guide. The rules for Amazon aren’t quite the same, but they aren’t wildly different. For straight text with minimal pictures (cover, a dozen or so internal illustrations) I can get the same file to work for both.
Really it isn’t all that hard. Just follow the instructions, one step at a time.
Wayne
LikeLike
Thanks, Wayne. I will check it out.
I can follow the steps, usually, but MS Word tends to leave a jumbled, mixed-up mess. There is a way to strip all that formatting out of there and I know that it’s there, but I’m unsure how I, personally, can do it. (I like to use RTF whenever possible, which is better than DOC or, Deity forbid, DOCX.)
I wish I would’ve watched my husband a little more now; he knew all the stuff you and Travis are talking about, as he often exported files into Mobipocket (he had one; it broke soon after his passing and I haven’t the heart to replace it, though one of these days I still might), and he knew how to strip all the extraneous code in M$ anything _out_. (I just know it’s possible to do it, because he did it all the time. I hope that makes sense.)
I tend to think that the coming, overall publishing market is going to be made up of a few mega-pubs (as we see now), a number of smaller e-publishers that publish high-quality fiction and nonfiction (NRP is one of these, though so far it has done exclusively fiction; not sure if they’ll ever foray into non-fic), and a bunch of self-published authors. Quality is the key to keeping any publisher alive at this point; that, and customer service. If the mega-pubs can learn and use the market as it exists now, they’ll survive and do well; if they can’t, then it’ll be a lot of smaller presses plus self-published authors, and maybe one or two bigger places that are savvy about using e-publishing to their advantage.
As for price points, I’m trying to keep an eye on that as well. Ric Locke has done very well with his longer novel at $2.99; I’m glad he has. (The only mystery about all that is why the remaining publishers didn’t give Ric’s excellent novel a chance. I know he submitted it to several publishers. There were novels that were like Ric’s out there — there was, and is, a way to market Ric’s novel and Ric, himself, found it. Why the bigger publishers didn’t give him a chance is beyond me, but I’m glad he persevered and stuck it out. The market has vindicated him.)
LikeLike
InDesign has a plug in for export to Kindle. It’s not perfect, but it is in my opinion the best option, but things like wrapping text around illustrations or graphics is beyond any e-reader at the moment.
You need to use workarounds like turning your chapter headings or things that use unusual fonts into rasterized graphics that preserve the typography you want to use.
I’m just getting into it myself. I have used InDesign before, but never for e-publishing. There are lots of tutorials out there for InDesign, but none for using it for export to Kindle. So, when I have mine all worked out, I’m going to make one.
LikeLike
Barb Caffrey & Travis Lee Clark,
One of the first things I learned was to AVOID Microsoft Word.
OpenOffice
LibreOffice
IWork Pages
StoryMill
Scrivener
Abiword
And several thousand other options are all a better choice that Microsoft Word. You can then convert the output file to a DOC file if you need to, or produce an HTML file.
I don’t know what Microsoft did with Word, but after fighting with it to format a document for the California Air Resources Board for three days, I finally gave up, and installed OpenOffice (IT was quite willing to go along with this, they didn’t understand what was happening either). It took one hour to finish formatting the document. That was when I gave up on using Word.
Wayne
LikeLike
Wayne,
Well I prefer InDesign, but you are ABSOLUTELY right. MS word puts tons of junk in their html files. I don’t know why.
My first kindle experiment involved opening up a MS Word webfile in dreamweaver and doing tons of global finds and replaces just to clean it up.
The problem is SOOO bad, there is even third party software designed to clean up MSWord HTML files! When other companies start making money off of fixing your crap, you have a problem.
LikeLike