Crime: Truth and Fiction
Fans of crime fiction and true crime: I’d like to draw your attention to two award-winning authors who’ve recently published two exciting new books.
Duke Southard is a First Place winner of the 85th Annual (2016) “Writer’s Digest” Writing Competition, a finalist of the 2016 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards, and a finalist of the 2015 Indie Publisher Next Generation Book Awards, to list just some of his accolades.
Southard’s new book Cracks in the Wall (Wheatmark, 2016) is a suspense novel in the Parker Havenot Police Detective Series. The plot centers on the murder of a young mother of three in a quiet suburban town in what appears be an open-and-shut case. Detective Havenot, however, is not so sure, suspecting that the key to the murder lies somewhere in the victim’s past. This book is a fantastic fast-paced read from the first page to the surprising ending.
Gregory A. Fournier is a Finalist Award winner of the 2011 USA Best Books contest, and an Honorable Mention winner of the 2011-2012 Los Angeles Book Festival, in both cases for Zug Island: A Detroit Riot Novel (Wheatmark, 2011).
Fournier’s new book Terror in Ypsilanti: John Norman Collins Unmasked (Wheatmark, 2016) is a true crime book about the infamous 1967–69 Michigan Murders in which serial killer John Norman Collins brutally murdered a series of young women on, or near, the campuses of Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan, until his capture and conviction for the murder of Karen Sue Beineman. The other murders attributed to Collins never went to trial, with one exception, and became cold cases. Fournier tells the stories of these other victims, recreates the infamous trial that took Collins off the streets, and details Collins’s time spent in prison. Fournier’s carefully researched book is based on hundreds of vintage newspaper articles, thousands of police reports, and countless interviews. Not to be missed.
Both authors are also active bloggers who blog about true crime, writing, and other topics. Their blogs can be found at dukesouthard.com and fornology.com. Here’s hoping both authors keep writing great books, blogging, and winning awards!
New Year, New Digs!
Nothing spells the new year and a bright outlook than a move into newly remodeled offices in the city center. We recently bid farewell to our old corporate center by Tucson’s Rillito River on River Road near Campbell Avenue. While it was a great and easily accessible location for many of our local authors, many of you had found it difficult at first to find our exact suite in a myriad of similar-looking buildings and suites!
Well, we’re in a corporate jungle no longer!
Our publishing company, now in its 17th year, just moved a couple of miles south to Speedway Boulevard near Campbell Avenue by the Aloft Hotel near the University of Arizona.
Our new address is 2030 East Speedway Boulevard, Suite 106, Tucson, Arizona 85719, located in the Sun Building. You will no longer get lost looking for our suite, I can guarantee that!
If you’re local or are visiting Tucson, we look forward to showing you around. Here are some pictures for you in the meantime!
From all of us at Wheatmark, we want to wish you and your family Happy Holidays, a Merry Christmas, and a prosperous 2017!
What Is Hybrid Publishing?
There’s a lot of buzz about hybrid publishing in the writing and publishing communities, coupled with an equal amount of misunderstanding and confusion. Not surprising. As the name suggests, hybrid publishing is a cross between traditional and indie publishing, incorporating some features of each. There are a wide variety of hybrid publishing business models, depending on which features are incorporated. Here are some of the features to watch for when evaluating a hybrid publisher:
Curation
The best hybrid publishers do the high-level editorial work that traditional publishers do: Screening submissions and accepting only those of merit with a reasonably large potential market, and working closely with authors on design and editing to create the best books possible.
Financing
Nearly all hybrid publishers require the author to finance all or part of the publishing, editorial, and marketing costs, usually through the payment of upfront fees.
Rights
Some hybrid publishers want an exclusive license to sell your book, and all subsidiary rights. Others allow only want a nonexclusive license, and allow you to retain all of your subsidiary rights.
Distribution and Sales
All published books, traditional, hybrid, or indie, have access to major online retailers like Amazon.com. But, some hybrid publishers offer distribution to the trade (brick-and-mortar bookstores, gift shops, special markets, etc.) through distributors like Ingram Publisher Services (IPS), a subsidiary of Ingram Book Group. A distributor usually has curated catalogs of books and a sales force that calls on accounts. Still other hybrid publishers have their own catalogs and salespeople.
Marketing
Many hybrid publishers provide publicity and platform building services for their authors. Often these services are provided for every book they publish as part of an overall suite of publishing services.
To my mind, curation is the most important thing to look for in a hybrid publisher, as it provides the branding that distinguishes your book from the sea of indie published books on CreateSpace or iUniverse.
I talk more about these exciting new publishing models in a recently released Authors Academy webinar. In it you’ll discover whether hybrid publishing is right for your project, the different varieties of hybrid publishers, and how to work with hybrid publishers.
If you’re a member of the Authors Academy, just log in and find the webinar “What Is Hybrid Publishing?”
If you’re not yet a member, visit authorsacademy.com/authors to join now!
‘Tis the Season . . . for Author Ordering
It is hard to believe that another year is already winding down, which means that the holiday season is right around the corner. As the hustle and bustle of life begins to ramp up the closer we approach Thanksgiving and Christmas, it is normal to try and get ahead on our holiday shopping. The quest to find the perfect gifts for the ones we love is often an annual tradition of fighting traffic, battling unending lines and searching for the best deals, while never feeling completely satisfied with your final choice.
For our authors who want to avoid the shopping chaos, what could be better than giving someone the gift of reading? While I may be biased, I believe books can be some of the most cherished presents, particularly when the giver is the writer. Some of the most precious gifts I have received have been personally created or designed by the people that I care the most about. They leave lasting memories for years to come, especially when I see them displayed in my home.
If you are considering purchasing your books for family and friends this holiday season, there is some important information to be aware of as you move forward. Due to high seasonal demands placed on shipping carriers and production facilities, the normal production time for orders will be around three weeks or more. As a result, it is suggested that all book orders be placed before the following dates in order to allow the best possibility for your books to be delivered by Christmas:
Hardcover: November 29
Paperback: December 4
Additionally, rush and express order options will no longer be available after these dates:
Rush Orders: November 6
Express Orders: November 13
This information is not meant to discourage any future orders for the Christmas season, but to give you ample time to get a head start on your holiday shopping for any family and friends that are on your list. As always, if you have any additional questions or would like to purchase books, feel free to contact me by phone or email and I will be more than happy to help make this holiday season as painless and joy filled as possible.
The year is almost over, but the time for giving has just begun! I wish each and every one of you a magnificent (early) start to the most wonderful time of the year.
Mindy Burnett
520.798.0888 Ext. 100
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one blog post
I have a friend who is deeply passionate about a certain subject. My friend’s spent years reading every book and article written on, and watching every documentary made about, the subject. He’s studied and thought about it deeply. He feels that he now has something to contribute to the global conversation. But, my friend doesn’t have any academic credentials in the subject. He’s not a member of any online (or offline) interest groups. And, he hasn’t yet written any books or articles on the subject. His study has been done mostly in isolation.
He recently asked me if I thought anyone would read books or articles by him on the subject. I had to answer, “I don’t know.” The question was impossible to answer with a definitive yes or no without some knowledge of his potential readers and without having read his yet unwritten writing.
I did have a recommendation, however, as to how he should go about getting the answer to his question. He could carefully and extensively study the market for his content, or he could write and publish a book. But before undertaking those monumental tasks, I recommended that he start his own blog. A blog as a starting point has several advantages:
- It provides direct and immediate feedback from a writer’s audience
- It allows a writer to write and build their audience simultaneously
- It is a quickly acquired credential—it takes much longer to write an entire book or get a degree
- It provides a hub for all audience building activities. A writer can refer anyone who shows any interest in their ideas, online or offline, to the blog
- If the blog has an email capture feature, a writer can build a list of readers to market their writing directly to
Of course, there are usually very few visitors to a new blog by an unknown writer. That’s why it’ll be important for my friend to visit other popular blogs and comment on others’ posts, to join any online (or offline) interest groups and communities, and to network in any other way he can.
There is no foolproof method of building an audience for your writing, and there’s no guarantee of success, but blogging is an excellent way to start.
Yes, you can become an author!
Writing is simply a number of sentences strung together. Remember the paper chains that you made as a child? One slip of paper rolled and wrapped around another until a chain was formed that stretched from one end of the room to the other. That’s how you write your book.
Create small, manageable writing goals. Start by just writing a single paragraph. That’s all. Just one simple paragraph. You can do that, right? If so, your first goal has just been accomplished!
As a writer, it’s easy to get swamped by the mountain of things to do before your book gets finished. Add to that the burden authors today must carry of promoting and marketing their books, and it is so easy to get discouraged.
There is a solution, however! It’s simply this: Create small goals that can be easily accomplished. A friend once shared with me her story on her experience of learning HTML coding for websites. She said in the beginning it seemed impossible. She looked at the code and it made as much sense as if it had been written by a Martian. How could she ever expect to write the code for a website?
But she was fascinated by the possibility and decided to try. She started learning back in the old days when computer code was basically written sentence by sentence on a black-and-white screen. The first code she wrote began from a tutorial from HTML Goodies. This was a site that broke down the impossible into the doable. Lesson one began by writing a single sentence and publishing it on the screen. The magic happened, she said, when “Hello, my name is . . .” appeared on the screen. She had done it: her first line of code! The barrier had been broken. If she could write one line of code, she could write two and then three. Eventually she designed a website with hundreds of pages that was awarded a USA TODAY badge and won national recognition by being published on the USA Today site.
Another friend shared about learning to play the piano as an adult. What seemed something that only “other” people could do, she found that by starting simply and practicing an hour every day she could learn to play as well. It took time. Perhaps the learning was harder as an adult but she started with playing a few notes, adding a few more and a few more until at the end she could play a whole song. One simple song became two and, before long, she was playing for others to enjoy.
So it is with writing. You may not believe that you can actually write an 80,000-word novel, but you can. If you can write one sentence you can write two. And if you add another sentence to that you can, if you keep at it, write enough sentences and chapters to create that book that you always dreamed about.
The biggest advice I can give to you as a new author is to create a game plan for writing. Set small, daily goals that may seem ridiculously small but which are doable. Keep it simple and the difficult becomes easy. Each sentence you write will become a link to the next one.
Finally, keep learning. Read books, study the writing of authors you enjoy. Become your own professor of “Authorology.” Take classes if you can, attend workshops online and offline. Read, study, and write your way to success.
Convergence
For years I’ve given a talk called “Three Ways to Publish,” in which I describe the three main paths to publication: selling your book to a rights-buying “traditional” publisher, hiring a publishing services firm like Wheatmark to publish your book, or starting a publishing company of your own (self-publishing). Over the past few years the lines between these paths have become increasingly blurred:
- The largest retailer of books in the world, Amazon, carries nearly every traditionally and self-published book equally
- Authors with successful self-published books are often picked up by traditional publishing houses
- Successful authors often dump their traditional publishing houses in favor of going “indie”
- Publicists, editors, agents, and book marketing professionals who used to work exclusively for traditional publishers now routinely offer their services to publishing services firms and indie authors
Another way the lines are blurring is that savvy indie authors and publishing services firms are adopting the best editorial, design, and marketing practices of traditional publishers. At Wheatmark, we work to incorporate these best practices into the publishing process we offer our clients. I recently ran across one such best practice.
At a panel discussion I attended at the Tucson Festival of Books in March, a well-known author advised an aspiring author to go through the exercise of crafting a traditional query letter even if the author planned to self-publish. The panelist argued that writing a query letter required the author to perfect their pitch and bio, both of which need to be perfected before finalizing the marketing plan, editing, and book design. (Also, the pitch and the bio will be needed later for the book’s cover.) The panelist also thought it might be a good idea for the author to send the query letter to a few literary agents. What could it hurt? If the author received no response, the pitch might need more work. If the author received a response, it might provide valuable feedback or even an offer to work with the agent. Oddly enough, later that day, at another festival panel presentation a prominent literary agent gave virtually the same advice to another aspiring author. We will definitely be exploring this as a “best practice” to be incorporated in the Wheatmark publishing process.
Maybe I should replace my talk “The Three Ways to Publish” with a talk about “The Best Way to Publish.”
The Perfect Is the Enemy of the First Draft
Many writing coaches recommend writing the first draft of a blog post, chapter, or scene as quickly as possible without stopping to rewrite or edit. The idea is once you’ve got that first draft down, however imperfect, you’ll have broken through your writer’s block and procrastination, and accelerated the entire writing process. That’s not how I do it. I rewrite each sentence several times before moving on to the next. I pause to fact check, to look in the thesaurus for the exact right word, to get more coffee, to watch of few minutes of “Better Call Saul”…
Though I knew it would be difficult for me, I decided to try the technique to create the first draft of this article. I started my timer and set about getting four hundred words down in the shortest time possible, without rewriting or editing. My subject: The First Draft. It took me thirteen minutes! But, the result was horrifying! Here’s a sample:
I’ve been reading a lot on how to make progress on your writing, rather how to get your writing done without procrastination. The key recommendations, a theme, if you will, in my reading is that you should spend a fair amount of time researching what you are going to write about, and then think about your topic, but when the time comes to write, just start writing as rapidly as you can, with a word count goal per minute. Or just a word count goal. I’m sure that that is wrong. This is a painful exercise. I am so used to rewriting every sentence, immediately after I have written it as well as checking the punctuation and spelling and correcting it immediately after I’ve written it. Slow down, Sam, you are making mistakes. In any case, the process is research/think, write rapidly, self-edit, self-edit again, self-edit again, then send it to a professional editor. What did Abraham Lincoln say: “I’d spend 90% of the time sharpening the saw, and 10% cutting down the tree.”
Embarrassing, huh? In spite of my horror and embarrassment, I think the experiment was a success. The technique did get me to a finished article in much less time and with much less stress than usual. I’ll be using this technique from now on. Next time I’ll try for twelve minutes.
Price your book to make a profit
There’s plenty of discussion about the retail pricing of independently published books, most of it centered on self-publishing book companies setting list prices too high. I get frustrated when industry experts write that these higher prices are a problem, without offering any evidence that this is the case. In the absence of price sensitivity studies, or of testing book sales at different price points, the “experts” are simply offering a guess based on their experience. I suspect that their experience comes from pricing books for the brick-and-mortar bookstore market. What a company like Barnes & Noble suggests for list prices for their stores isn’t necessarily right for a self-published books that will primarily be sold through online bookstores.
The online book sales market is, in fact, such a new market that it is unclear what pricing strategies are most advantageous to book sales.
In the absence of hard data, how should you price a book? You should price a book for profitability.
For example, if you opened up a specialty clothing boutique next to a Wal-Mart, you wouldn’t try to price your clothes at prices competitive to the box store. You’d go out of business. You don’t have the buying clout of the big boys, so you have to compete in some other way in order to maintain your profitability. You would offer better, more interesting garments at a markup that allowed you to make money!
Independent authors should do the same. Your book is a “boutique” item. It’s a loser’s game for the independent author to try and compete on price with major publishing houses selling through the chains. Even the major publishing houses and the bookstore chains are having trouble making a profit with their current pricing models. You have a specialty product, so price your book for profitability.
Take, for example, one of Wheatmark’s titles, How to Keep Jellyfish in Aquariums by Chad Widmer. Widmer’s book, although written in a way that will engage just about anyone, is not really an “anyone” kind of book. It is a specific book aimed at a specific group of people interested in a specific topic. A niche book does not need to use an unprofitable price to entice buyers. What a niche book needs to be is a quality book that is chock full of information that appeals to these highly motivated buyers (people who are interested in raising jellyfish at home).
Online channels require more intensive and personal marketing. It is harder to wave your book in front of someone, but with quality time spent on them, online marketing campaigns can be hugely successful.
My advice: don’t sell your book short. Price it based on what makes you a decent profit, and then market like crazy directly to your target market. You can always lower the price later if sales don’t materialize. However, I suspect if you’ve implemented a strong marketing campaign and aimed it at the right motivated buyers, lowering the price will not be necessary. Remember, every time you lower the price of your book, you guarantee that you will make less money on each book, but you don’t guarantee more book sales. However, every time you raise the price of your book, you guarantee that you will make more money on each book, but you don’t necessarily get fewer book sales.
Consider Mel Robin, author of A Handbook for Yogasana Teachers. He priced his book just under $100.00 and has sold over 2,000 copies to date! His first book from several years before, A Physiological Handbook for Teachers of Yogasana, has now sold close to 6,000 copies at $49.95!
Are you leaving money on the table by charging the lowest possible price for your book?
In praise of editing
Years ago I was reading the bestselling A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson (on which the 2015 motion picture of the same name, starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte, is based) and found a typo on one of the first pages. The word the was spelled “th”. How could this be? The book was published by Random House, one of the Big Five! How had all of their copyeditors and proofreaders, not to mention spell checkers, missed it? How had the hundreds of advance copy readers failed to report it?
I told one of the editors here at Wheatmark about my discovery. This editor happened to be a voracious reader. She started circling all the misspellings, typos, or instances of bad grammar that she found in any major publisher’s book she read, and flagging the offending pages with Post-It notes. Invariably she’d have twenty or more notes stuck in a book by the time she finished reading it. She’d then show me each book as further proof of how rare, if not impossible, perfection in editing is. She made her point.
Mathematically, of course, it’s obvious. When you put ten, twenty, or thirty thousand words together, all of which have to relate to one another in precise ways, correctly following hundreds of rules of grammar and syntax, the opportunities for error are astronomical. And that’s before taking into account all the tweaking that authors and editors do, and a host of other higher level editing changes.
I continued reading A Walk in the Woods, now actively looking to find more errors. I don’t remember finding any, though there must have been some. I was impressed. My shock at finding the one typo was replaced by respect for what a good editorial process can accomplish. I’ve never lost that respect. Now every time I read a well-edited book, I’m a bit in awe.
The editorial process major publishers like Random House use to achieve editorial excellence usually involves all these types of professional editing: manuscript evaluation, developmental editing, copyediting, and proofreading. While editorial needs vary from book to book, there’s no substitute for a good editorial process.
By the way, the “The” missing an “e” was probably an error introduced during layout. That’s how it could have been missed by so many readers. It should have been caught during proofreading (the post-layout edit), but even proofreaders aren’t perfect. Don’t skip the proofreading!