The Blizzard finished in third place in the 2010 San Diego Book Awards. The ceremony for the 17th annual competition was held last Saturday night, June 11th. Across the many categories, they had a record 230 entries.
In the Young Adult division, Return to Treasure Island by John O’Melveny Wood and Dark Water by Laura McNeal tied for first place. Congratulations to both of them!
In a previous post, I told how I came to my decision to self-publish. After having my manuscript professionally edited by one self-publisher, I learned of and moved to Createspace for everything else. For the most part, I was very satisfied with their service.
Services Offered and Negotiations
When I started my on-line research, Createspace had a six-column matrix of all the services they offered in the book department. These, in turn, were divided into Standard Value Solutions (where I shopped) and Total Design Freedom Solutions. (On a recent short visit there, it looks like they now have the Interor and Cover options split into two matrices.)
Aligned down the left column were eight general categories that, as you might expect, became more complex as you moved right into the more expensive columns. The general categories were: Price, Interior Images, Cover Design, Interior Formatting, Promotional Text Creation, Kirkus Discoveries Review, Editing Services, LCCN Assignment, and Press Release with Distribution.
Deciding what services you wish to buy is sort of like ordering from a Chinese menu: this-and-that from Column A but only such-and-such from Column B.
By the way, the prices may have changed since 2009 when I first printed out my matrix, but back then they started at $299 and went up to $4346.
If you choose to go with Createspace, you will need to contact them and they will assign a Publishing Consultant to your project. One nice thing is you don’t get bounced around to a lot of different people. I got Lynn Eang and she is still my consultant. (She just worked with me to get by book ready for Kindle.) The thing I really liked about Lynn and the Createspace set-up is they are willing to work with you and do it without any high pressure sale pitches. Because my book had already been edited, I didn’t need that service which was part of a package I wanted to buy. I explained this to Lynn, and instead asked her to give, instead, me something else I needed from a different row. No problem.
Next, you will need to sign a straight forward, plain English contract. Remember, whatever self-publisher you go with, you are only hiring them to prepare and print your books and, in the case of Createspace, which is part of Amazon, agreeing to a distribution arrangement in which they will help sell your books for a cut of the profit. You are retaining ALL other rights, e.g., foreign editions, movies rights, the ability to move to a different print-on-demand company, etc.
After that, you open a Createspace account on-line, you get an account number, and a design team will be assigned to work on your book. In my case, the cover, the interior, and promotional text creation. The whole idea of self-publishing and print-on-demand is computerization. Everything you send to them and they to you will be done electronically.
Next time I will explain about working with the design teams.
The Blizzard is now available from Amazon for addition to readers’ Kindles.
The book was submitted some time ago for the Barnes & Noble Nook but reporterdly they are trying to get caught up on a large backlog of submissions. I’ll send out an alert when it goes up.
The U.S. Constitution grants the government the power to grant copyrights. A copyright provides certain legal rights to a creative work, in our case, a book. The copyright will last for seventy years after your death. You can get more information from the U.S. Copyright Office website.
So, what exactly does the mean? Does having a copyright mean no one can steal or plagiarize your work? No! The world is full of cheaters and crooks who might try that. A friend of mine authored a textbook that has been the bible of his industry for over 25 years and someone recently published a similar book containing obvious material lifted from his work. A copyright only gives you a sword to use if you decide to spend the money to protect your book (or other creative work) in court.
Nevertheless, you still want to have your book copyrighted. It might deter some plagiarists and, more importantly, it makes your book look more “real” and authentic. After all, you want publishers and other authors to take you seriously, right? But having a copyright is more than just putting the date and a “c” inside a circle at the front-piece of your book (although you want to be sure to do that, too!), you have to register it.
If you register your book electronically (you will still mail them a hard copy of your book), your application will be processed more quickly and will cost $35, a $15 savings then if you use the slower, paper registration. The multi-page electronic process is a bit complicated and once you advance from certain pages, you can’t go back. The only option is to “trash” it and start over. I recommend going through the eCO PowerPoint tutorial offered by the Library of Congress once, so at least you’ll know what the pages will look like and what you’re supposed to do.
When you’ve finished the electronic registration process, don’t forget to print out the form that needs to be sent in with your book to the Copyright Office.
International Standard Book Number
Just like the name says, your ISBN is the number that your book can be tracked in any library or bookstore in the world. You need a different ISBN for every format in which your book will be published. For example, you’ll need one for the printed copy and another one for the e-book (well, at least for Amazon’s Kindle; right now it is not required for Barnes & Noble’s Nook). If you intend to have an audio version at some point, it will need its own ISBN.
If you are fortunate enough to have been picked up by a major publisher, they will provide your ISBN. If you are self-publishing like I did, you can either get your own ISBNs or purchase them as part of the package from the company that is compiling and printing your book. If you buy your own, you get them from Bowker, the official ISBN agency for the United States, which is exclusively responsible for the assignment of the ISBN prefix to those publishers with a residence or office in the U.S. (Don’t forget, if you’re self-publishing, you are not just the author, you’re also the publisher!)
Like most things, Bowker gives a volume discount. The more you buy, the lower the unit price is for each number.
A Warning
If you decide to go with Createspace for your design and printing work, buy your ISBN from them. Why? Because you hope your book will be carried in brick and mortar bookstores at some point and Createspace won’t let bookstores order from them if the book doesn’t have an ISBN purchased through them. This was probably my biggest disappointment with my otherwise good experience with Createspace. They let me slap my own ISBN on my book and never said a word, like, “Oh, by the way, Marty, did you know bookstores won’t be able to order your book from us if you do that.”
Next time, I will “talk” more about my experience with Createspace.
If you read my Bio on the website, you already know I went through almost a year of researching agents and then sending them my manuscript. This was preceded by many months of reading books and websites about how to get an agent to look at your book.
When it came time to contact agents, I mostly tried the ones listed with the Association of Authors’ Representatives, because my research showed they subscribe to a serious ethical code. The nice thing about the AAR website is you can search for agents who represent authors in your particular genre. You can also look for agents in the Writer’s Market (available at most libraries).
Regardless of how you find agents to contact, be sure to know their submission requirements. I was surprised how many agents no longer want “hard” copies of synopses or manuscripts, but request electronic submissions instead. Most agents do NOT want an unsolicited synopsis, or manuscripts (know their requirements!). You first send them a query letter to spark their interest and if they think it’s something worth looking at, they invite you to send the manuscript. There’s plenty of books and Internet articles (here’s one) about the art of writing a query letter and preparing a catchy synopsis, which I’m not going to spend time on here.
I did adopt one hint I learned from an agent’s blog. For the agents who only wanted an electronic submission, my query letter was in the body of the e-mail but I automatically sent the synopsis as an attachment. If the agent wanted to read it, it was right there and s/he didn’t have to waste time emailing back to request it.
All the time I was sending out queries (and waiting for responses), I continued to research things on the Internet. One thing I learned is that agents will often only pick up authors who are writing what publishers want at a particular time. That could change and the agent who rejected you one year might be interested the next year.
Another thing I discovered is that some publishers, through their editors, will also accept query letters and possibly invite a synopsis, by-passing any agents. I started trying the route, too. Then I heard more and more about self-publishing and had to find out what that was all about.
I’ve known since high school what the “vanity press” is, where an author pays some printer x amount of dollars to print his or her book and then goes around trying to sell them. I swore I’d never go that route. In this Internet-age, by self-publishing (also known as print-on-demand, or POD), the author doesn’t have to carry any inventory at all. S/he can just let sales take place through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and any other electronic bookseller.
But, as I will explain in a future post, you keep a larger percentage of the cover price if you also sell books on your own. And, because there is no agent or actual publisher (remember, with “self” publishing, YOU are the publisher!), you retain all the rights to your book for paperback editions, foreign markets, movies, etc. Be sure to read your contract and make sure some POD outfit doesn’t ask you to surrender any of those to print and market your book.
One day, I went on the website of a radio talk show and saw an ad inviting authors who were interested in getting their book published. I copied down the name and went on line to check them out. I didn’t find any bad comments about them but I did learn of another POD publisher who I eventually started with. All the reasons listed in the previous paragraph, plus the months lost trolling for agents, convinced me to self-publish. I hired them to do the literary editing.
During my research, I had learned of Amazon’s publishing arm, called BookSurge, but it was going through a transition and being revamped as CreateSpace. By the time my editing was completed, I decided to move over to CreateSpace. Their prices were competitive and, in some cases, better than the other company plus it came with the guarantee my book would be listed on Amazon.com. What was not to like? In a future post (maybe next time if i feel like it!), I will tell more about my general overall high marks for my CreateSpace experience.
Write in if you have questions, or tell what made you decide to self-publish.
I was up early this morning and found an email from the president of the San Diego Book Award Associations that was sent at 12:53 a.m. that read:
Your book The Blizzard is a finalist in the Seventeenth Annual San Diego Book and Writing Awards. I hope you will join us for the award ceremony on June 11th!
I don’t know how many others made the cut for the finals, but I am proud to be among their company. Now I will root for the gold medal!
As promised, here is some information for several book awards contests around the country. This list is far from comprehensive, so be sure to check with your local library, major booksellers, and your own Internet searches.
If it hadn’t been for our local library, I may not have learned of the San Diego Book Awards Association before the deadline passed. This competition is limited to San Diego residents, but you may have something similar in your area. For this contest, the book had to be published in the 2010 calendar year. That is not true of all competitions. Check the submission guidelines for each!
Another contest in which The Blizzard is entered is sponsored by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Assn. . It is only one of nine regional organizations (see list below), which, I assume, hold their own contests. Check out the one in your area. An interesting note about the current SCIBA competition is that is hasn’t even closed yet. The deadline is July 15th for books published between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011.
•Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association
•Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association
•New England Independent Booksellers Association
•Northern California Independent Booksellers Association
•Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association
•Midwest Booksellers Association
•New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association
•Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance
The IPPYs
A major competition is for the IPPY, the prize presented by the Independent Publishers Book Awards. Its contest is divided into 69 categories and drew over 4,000 entries last year. They also give awards for the Best Regional Fiction and Best Regional Non-Fiction books in eight U.S. and two Canadian regions, plus Australia/New Zealand.
As with any competition, watch your submission deadlines! The IPPYs give you a break on the entry fee for getting your entry(ies) in early. The Blizzard is entered in the national Young Adult Fiction category and also in the Great Lakes Region contest, because the story – in case you didn’t know – takes place in northern Illinois.
ForeWord, a trade journal devoted exclusively to reviewing books from independent houses, sponsors its annual Book of the Year Awards to bring increased attention to the literary and graphic achievements of independent publishers and their authors.
Specialty Awards
The are numerous awards to recognize excellence within a given genre and even for sub-categories within a genre. For example, if you’re a mystery writer, you can compete for the Edgar Allen Poe Award (the “Edgar”) but if your hero is a private eye, then you also qualify for consideration in the Shamus Awards. There are a total of 44 awards for mystery writing.
The Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards are a specialty competition to recognize excellence in children’s and young adult literature. As in many of the book awards competitions, each entry is read by each member of a three judge panel.
Yes, there is a monetary investement in entering these contests, but as I mentioned last time, winning an award can provide big promotion and publicy advantages. If you don’t believe in your book, why should anyone else? But whether you win or not, I think there is a certain “street cred” you get when talking with publishers, agents, or other authors when you mention your book is entered in such-and-such contest. It projects confidence in your ability as well as knowledge of and participation in this industry you’ve chosen to join. Lastly, I admit there is a bit of excitement as you await the announcement of the winners.
One thing I have learned from speaking with published authors, or from their on-line confessions, is this: Unless you are a best selling author with a major publishing company that has budgeted a generous promotion allowance for your book, much of your book’s publicity and promotion must be done by YOU.
A great way to get some traction for your book is to be a winner (or even an Honorable Mention!) in a book award competition. Heck, I’ll probably do a press release if The Blizzard is chosen to be a “finalist” in some contest!
If you should be so good, and lucky, to win, place, or show in a Book Award you can
• attend the award ceremony and receive a neat medal (and maybe a free meal, or least some decent hors d’oeuvres);
• put out that self-serving press release (don’t forget the local newspaper and radio and TV stations!);
• make an announcement on your blog and/or put a blurb on your website;
• get little foil stickers to put on the covers of your books (hopefully impressing managers at brick-and-mortar stores to give you some shelf space); and
• add “Award-Winning” somewhere on the cover of all subsequent printings of your book.
First Year Only
Okay, here’s one important thing you need to know, or remember, about Book Award competitions. In nearly every case, your book has to have been published in the preceding year. Also, that may not be the preceding calendar year. Every contest has different time spans for publishing dates as well as different deadlines, so you have to check out each one and make sure your book is eligible and then gets entered in time.
After receiving a New Author medal from our central library, I was contacted by a book award contest in my own city asking me if I was going to enter my book. Yikes, even though The Blizzard was already entered in other competitions, here was a contest in my hometown that I didn’t even know about! Oh yeah, they also told me the deadline was in two days!! As much as I respect our postal system (I’m not being sarcastic), I wasn’t going to take a chance my book — and check — would get there in time. A tracked down a phone number, called, and found it I could hand-deliver my entry to an organizer’s home. It was the other side of town but worth it.
All of these contests have an entry fee that range from reasonable to expensive, so there may be a limit to how many you are able to enter. Most of them have numerous categories for nearly every type of bound volume (even cookbooks) and some of them also have regional contests in addition to their national competition.
In a future post, I will give you the names and contact info for some major book award contests.
Here are some questions (or maybe snipes) I have received that maybe others have wondered about.
1. Why isn’t Belle (the dog) on the cover?
She is, you just can’t see her because she’s right behind Chet, trudging along in the path he’s breaking through the snow.
2. Where’s Chet’s rifle (on the cover)?
I suppose it could be blamed on artistic license, but the real reason is we forgot about it while doing the photo shoot. On the other hand, its omission might be a good thing as some gun-haters may have avoided reading a good story if it had been on the cover.
3. I thought it was dark out when Chet carried Melanie to the cabin.
(Is that a question?) Yes, it was after sundown in early February, but it is hard to sell books when potential buyers can’t see what’s on the cover. Again, blame it on artistic license.
4. Will there be a sequel?
What’s the sequel about?
When will there be a sequel?
Yes, there will be a sequel and it is in progress. Obviously, it is about Chet and Melanie. It starts four years later during their last year of college and continues for another two years or so. They’re still together but will they end up together? Some new major characters will be introduced. It will be regular adult fiction, not Young Adult genre like The Blizzard, and I hope to have it out by early 2012.
Michael Kardos provided the following in a guest post to Darcy Pattison’s “Book Trailer Manual Newsletter.” He provides three important points worth considering before you attempt doing a trailer.
Book trailers are relatively new, are mainly an internet phenomenon, and, in my experience, often follow the same formula as movie trailers — to disastrous effect. The reasons?
• Budget. Book trailers don’t have anywhere near the budget of movie trailers. Hence, the attempt looks silly.
• Too melodramatic. Big-budget movie trailers, even for good movies, are usually highly melodramatic. So too are book trailers that copy the formula. Maybe because we expect our literature to be less melodramatic than our movies, the result comes across as really melodramatic.
• Usurping reader’s imagination. When we read a book, we create a world in our mind. If the author does his or her job right, that world is as full and real and nuanced as our own. Do we really want that literary world presented to us visually ahead of time?
A more basic way to state the problem is that movie trailers contain clips of movies. And movies are shot to be visually engaging. Books are printed on a page. The image exists only in our imagination.
Well, I don’t think your attempt has to look silly just because you created your own trailer, or had someone else do it, on a limited budget. Doing it on you own, however, does require some sophisticated computer knowledge. If you are going to use stock photos and music, you will also invest plenty of time going through the thousands of samples and then getting set up with the licensing costs (low that they might be).
Regarding Kardos’ last bullet item, I think he makes a very valid point. Have you ever read a book then later seen the movie, and said to yourself, “That movie star didn’t look anything like the hero in the book!”?
When people (me included) read, we create images in our imagination of what the characters look like. Your trailer is going to plant images in the person’s head that may affect how they would have pictured the character if left to their own devices. If you have watched both of the trailers for The Blizzard in my last post, you see there are two totally different-looking boys and girls in them. Neither of them really looks like the hero and heroine I imagined when I wrote the book, but when limited to stock photos, what other option do you have?
