How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017 • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#121

Post by Arizhel » Mon, Feb 27, 2017, 9:24 PM UTC

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…

I think another factor here is carefully picking your audience. If you're writing a sci-fi book, you probably won't get very good feedback and criticism from a bunch of elderly people who like to read craft magazines, for example.

One place to get feedback is in writer's groups/clubs. They may not reflect your intended audience as much, but they're also writers and would be better at separating their subjective biases (like not liking sci-fi) from a more objective analysis of the work, looking at things that are common to all writing, esp. fiction (is the writing overly wordy, does the plot make sense, are the characters believable, etc.).

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#122

Post by scandox » Mon, Feb 27, 2017, 9:30 PM UTC

mkaziz wrote: post #79

scandox wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I don't want to oversell my wisdom here. I have a specific outlook on all this and commercial success is low down on the list of priorities I think about. That said: The trouble with getting stuff in front of a critical audience is that you don't get many chances. If you run after friends and family with a manuscript, you may also find your circle of acquaintance rapidly shrinking. So, I don't think you can trea…

Your last paragraph there speaks volumes about my own writing ability. Any advice on how to overcome the handicap of being too rational? (In my writing, it manifests as all my characters being unnaturally reasonable)

Missed this...It's a hard problem and I struggle with it a lot. There's a few choices:

1. Identify the problems and just work on eliminating them.

2. Write about characters in a milieu in which everyone does behave in a highly rational way - to be honest I don't know of such an environment - but kinda sounds interesting.

3. Abandon conventional narrative techniques. However this doesn't work if you want to write genre fiction, or anything that will be widely read - i.e. you're in the experimental zone!

4. One writer I know uses Myers–Briggs personality types to determine each character's behaviour and lets their actions in each situation flow from that. In fact he's a good writer and the technique (however he uses it) really works, though I would have been a sceptic if someone told me that is what they do.

The thing that fascinates me is how some writers can create tension in the smallest things. Some writers can generate drama out of a missing cat, or the fleas on a dog. It's all about tapping into extreme subjective reactions, while showing the rational justification the character supports it with...

Good luck.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#123

Post by chipotle_coyote » Mon, Feb 27, 2017, 9:37 PM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #111

Quote: "TL;DR: Scrivener, Vellum, KDP, Createspace" Scrivener is US$40, Vellum is Mac-only and US$200, the other two are unnecessary/replaceable and IMHO should be a list of equivalent options -- once you have a manuscript, which can be created using any number of free tools. Someone who imagines writing the Great American Novel, but who also expects to have to pay a premium for each step along the way, may not grasp…

To be fair, he's describing the tools that worked for him. Scrivener is for taking stories from notes through first draft; it's not a word processor in the same way Word and LibreOffice are, and there's no direct free software equivalent. You could use free tools for the same tasks, but you'll do those tasks differently--and that might be preferable to you, depending on how you work. Scrivener is very powerful, very flexible, and very idiosyncratic.

Vellum is similar, but there are direct free software equivalents, most notably Sigil, a GUI ePub creation tool. Alternatively, you could use Pandoc to assemble an ePub from Markdown (or any of the seemingly several thousand other markup dialects Pandoc knows). I ended up using Vellum for my book because it was incredibly smart about taking a DOCX file exported from Scrivener and turning it into a properly sectioned and tagged ePub, and adding new sections, artwork, metadata and overall book styling is trivially simple. Sigil and Pandoc are great, but they're also lower-level tools by comparison, with both the advantages and disadvantages that implies. For me personally, it was worth spending $30.

Self-publishing is also free or should be.

Well, it's as free as you want it to be. In my experience, YMMV and all other appropriate disclaimers, producing an ebook which seriously competes with ones from traditional publishers requires skill not just in writing but in editing, graphic design, typesetting (or ebook production), and (depending on the cover) illustration. If you have access to all those skills without spending any money, awesome, but it's kind of a tall order.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#124

Post by crpatino » Mon, Feb 27, 2017, 9:55 PM UTC

More or less off-topic question. How to not get sued by overzealous copyrights holders?

I have an idea for an informal Chemistry 101 notebook. I might end up making comparissons between cartoon characters and periodic table elements: Hydrogen ~= Tinkerbell, Hellium ~= Master Yoda, Lithium ~= Philoctetes (from Hercules movie), etc.

It is not reassuring that most references in that list are owned by Disney Co.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#125

Post by gkya » Mon, Feb 27, 2017, 9:55 PM UTC

Literature doesn't work this way... It's hard to get your first book published because you are unknown in the literary circles. One has to start with introducing themselves in literary journals (or even blogs), publishing short stories, reviews, essays, etc. Probably none of the acclaimed authors started out with a big novel. Then, publishing with a known editor is easier, and has many positives: their name alone helps increase the amount of potential readers.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#126

Post by teach » Mon, Feb 27, 2017, 10:25 PM UTC

thewhitetulip wrote: post #89

teach wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Stripe is quite a bit cheaper: 2.9% + $0.30 per successful card charge.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#127

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 27, 2017, 10:25 PM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #111

Quote: "TL;DR: Scrivener, Vellum, KDP, Createspace" Scrivener is US$40, Vellum is Mac-only and US$200, the other two are unnecessary/replaceable and IMHO should be a list of equivalent options -- once you have a manuscript, which can be created using any number of free tools. Someone who imagines writing the Great American Novel, but who also expects to have to pay a premium for each step along the way, may not grasp…

[deleted]

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#128

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Feb 27, 2017, 10:39 PM UTC

alimw wrote: post #101

dredmorbius wrote: post #87

If you're not of the "I'm writing because I can't not" personality, you might also want to consider self publishing book statistics. http://www.bowker.com/documents/self-publishing-report-in-un...

Not sure what point you'd like to make with those statistics. That a lot of books are written? Probably more interesting to a prospective author would be statistics on how many of them are read.

Approaching 1 million annually.

That's 1 per 317 Americans.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#129

Post by nkrisc » Mon, Feb 27, 2017, 10:49 PM UTC

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.

This approach works because sometimes exactly what you wanted to say just isn't that good.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#130

Post by rev_bird » Mon, Feb 27, 2017, 10:58 PM UTC

crpatino wrote: post #124

More or less off-topic question. How to not get sued by overzealous copyrights holders? I have an idea for an informal Chemistry 101 notebook. I might end up making comparissons between cartoon characters and periodic table elements: Hydrogen ~= Tinkerbell, Hellium ~= Master Yoda, Lithium ~= Philoctetes (from Hercules movie), etc. It is not reassuring that most references in that list are owned by Disney Co.

>How to not get sued by overzealous copyrights holders?

I might be misunderstanding, but why is it unreasonable for the holder of a copyright to object to an author using their work without licensing it? This in particular seems like a pretty clear-cut example of actual infringement.