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How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

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Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#81

Post by joshdance »

amelius wrote: post #19
ilamont wrote: post #5

The author mentions getting a copy editor, but I would also advise hiring a development editor and/or getting feedback from beta readers. Quoting Stephen King (1): Show your piece to a number of people—ten, let us say. Listen carefully to what they tell you. Smile and nod a lot. Then review what was said very carefully. If your critics are all telling you the same thing about some facet of your story—a plot twist tha…

With this approach, your novel becomes an average of what the masses like to read, rather than what you wanted to say. Engineered for the masses, so to speak. Which, of course, could explain why King is so successful.

I know Brandon Sanderson also uses writing groups and feedback heavily. And I wouldn't say his books are engineered for the masses. But it definitely is a balancing act between listening to their feedback, while preserving the core of your story.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#82

Post by gozur88 »

The copy editor is a sore point with me. It's getting more and more common for me to run across jarring errors in novels. I don't mind so much if it's a digital-only 99 cent Kindle book, but if I spend six bucks on a book I don't expect to see duplicate sentences or incorrect word choice. "Tow the line", for example, or "then" when "than" would be correct.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#83

Post by chipotle_coyote »

I'm not sure that figuring out the tooling for indie publishing is too difficult these days. I recently published my first novel, and while it actually isn't self-published--it was accepted by a small press I'd worked with before--in terms of the tooling, it's being approached as a self-published project: I did the typesetting myself, for both ebook and print. (Like Zack Hubert, I used Vellum for the ebook, although I did the print version with LaTeX, which I'll probably write up a short guide to sometime.)

While my press paid for the cover art, printing, ISBN, and other stuff, and they've done some advertising, a lot of the promotional work is left up to me...and in a lot of ways I think marketing is a much harder problem to solve. My novel came out of an intensive workshop led by a Nebula, Hugo and World Fantasy Award winner (Kij Johnson), has a blurb from a recent Nebula novel nominee (Lawrence Schoen, author of BARSK), was available for pre-order, and I've done what I could to promote it...and it turns out all those people saying it's tough to get your book noticed are, surprise, absolutely right.

tl;dr: while I'm interested in how Mr. Hubert produced his book, I'm more interested in how he finds an audience for it. (Beyond writing an article about it that gets linked on the front page of Hacker News!)

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#84

Post by j2kun »

Finnucane wrote: post #68
j2kun wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am using LaTeX, but I'm almost certain it will be a pain when I go to the eBook step, since they all have their own formats and I'm not aware of any tools that can render the math formulas in my book faithfully on all of them.

This is a problem. In epub, you can use MathML, but support on reading systems is spotty. You could embed something like MathJax, but that would also depend on there being scripting support (not all systems have it). On the Kindle, there is none--no Latex, no MathML, no scripting, nothing for math support at all. Your only choice is graphics. SVG or high-res PNG works best. Though on a Kindle, there's no "S" in the S…

What is your opinion on publishing a math-heavy e-book (like, equations on every page, inline and offset)? I don't think I will be able to do better than having a physical book paired with a pay-to-download PDF.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#85

Post by thedz »

exergy wrote: post #63
BeetleB wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the other hand, in general I almost exclusively read books and blogs because I'm interested in what the author has to say, rather than what I'd like to hear. I assume you read mostly nonfiction, then?

I'd say the author's voice shines through even clearer in fiction though. Authors certainly can exercise flair when writing history or something, but even more when they invent a fictional world and develop and atmosphere and characters within it. When a fiction writer comes up with a plot, or even a turn of phrase that blows my mind, that's one of the best things about reading. Like "how did he think up all this?!"

> When a fiction writer comes up with a plot, or even a turn of phrase that blows my mind, that's one of the best things about reading. Like "how did he think up all this?!"

Typically the answer is: hard work and iteration, and many times not by himself. I think you're partially falling for the fallacy of the singular author completing a perfect work with unflinching vision. IMO this is incredibly rare.

Take, for example, Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird. It's an amazing book. It's a novel that might at once feel effortless and also an unaltered vision of the author. But it's actually the result of years of editing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_Lee):

> Ms. Hohoff was impressed. "[T]he spark of the true writer flashed in every line", she would later recount in a corporate history of Lippincott.[16] But as Ms. Hohoff saw it, the manuscript was by no means fit for publication. It was, as she described it, "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel".[16] During the next couple of years, she led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled To Kill a Mockingbird.

Everything from the narrative structure to the title to characterization is refined, over and over again.

The goal with feedback and subsequent editing isn't the dilution of an author's vision, it's the opposite. It concentrates and clarifies the vision with each successive pass.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#86

Post by dredmorbius »

cstross wrote: post #53

NOTE: Step 2: Write the Novel ... You know, the easy part. For those who have never written a novel, writer is being sarcastic here. The equivalent in terms of reference more familiar to the regulars on HN might well be: "Step 2: study for a CS degree, then decide which industry you intend to disrupt, learn how it works, and come up with a strategy. Oh, and write the killer app." This is just the framework for the bu…

Yeah, what would you know down on the farm?

;-)

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#88

Post by eslaught »

I think the author missed the most important point (maybe they haven't gotten this far yet): marketing and especially market-fit.

If you just want to release an ebook or even in paper, you can do that easily. If you want to release an ebook and have it be a success, that's really hard. It's hard even for traditional publishers, and it's certainly not any easier for self-published authors.

Anecdote: I helped my grandmother release her first book (here: http://carolynnslaughter.com/book/). The technical aspects are frankly not that hard. For anyone with halfway reasonable technical skills, launching a book is simply a matter of following various instructions online.

How much did we sell? Pretty close to rounding error of zero. Honestly, we were never expecting much success, because the book is fairly academic.

Edit: Less anecdotally: "Ninety percent of your book’s success will be determined by the quality of your book. The other ten percent is distribution, marketing and luck." (From Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/145431)

I understand that as HN readers we gravitate towards technical solutions. But the sibling comment by scandox is on the nose here. The hardest problem by far is writing a book that people will be willing to pay money for. The second hardest problem is marketing it, and all these other technical aspects come somewhere after that.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#89

Post by thewhitetulip »

teach wrote: post #43
thewhitetulip wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have published two tech books on leanpub, if you like markdown then leanpub is great. Earlier it used to be free, but now they charge 99$ for carrying a book, their rates are awesome, you get something like 90% of tge book sales

For the record I didn't publish on Leanpub. (Well, I did but I didn't send many customers their way.) I just used them to get a nice-looking PDF and sold it myself from my website using Stripe to accept credit cards.

How much does Strip charge you for transactions? Is it cheaper than Leanpub?

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#90

Post by njharman »

thedz wrote: post #28
amelius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With this approach, your novel becomes an average of what the masses like to read, rather than what you wanted to say. Engineered for the masses, so to speak. Which, of course, could explain why King is so successful.

IMO, this is an artistic fallacy that needs to die. Responding and adjusting to feedback doesn't undermine the integrity of a work or weaken its authenticity. Cycles of feedback and iteration are common to all work in every medium. Obviously, you can take responding to feedback too far, but the idea of the artist-in-a-tower-birthing-a-fully-grown-work-whole is an inaccurate idea at best, and a damaging assumption at…

That depends entirely on whether you are writing for the audience or writing for yourself.

Novels are clearly a medium for writing to an audience. Artists, esp amateur ones, think they can write for themselves and still create a novel. They should stick to their journals.

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