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How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

zhubert.com

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Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#141

Post by abecedarius »

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.

King didn't say to take any of their advice about how to fix the thing they think is wrong. He said that if they all think it's wrong, you need to change it. You still figure out for yourself what kind of change to make. (Maybe I'm making up that last part -- I haven't read his book. But it's how I think about feedback.)

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#142

Post by zhubert »

joshdance wrote: post #81
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.

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.

His YouTube on writing speculative fiction is simply amazing.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#143

Post by zhubert »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #83

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'd love to read about using LaTex. Even though I've read TAOCP (shock!) and been a physics grad student, I'm still semi-scared at the notion of using it for fun.

Most of my grad buddies (in experimental physics!!) had endless challenges with it.

Surmountable, of course, but I wanted to aim for an easier skill set.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#145

Post by douche »

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…

Alternatively, you can take a different page out of King's book, and get ripped on Schlitz and PBR and cocaine and write away in a blackout haze. Most of us probably won't produce some of our greatest work like he did, however [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cujo

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#146

Post by zhubert »

jessaustin wrote: post #137
zhubert wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't the formatting actually. Change tracking of the proposed edits from the copyeditor was greatly expedited through Word's toolset. While I could have copied them all over by hand, I figured I'd likely introduce other errors in the process. Clicking accept/reject was worth the peace of mind.

It's my (possibly false...) impression that those who find Word's "Track Changes" valuable, have never used diff/patch or any of their many descendants (i.e. git etc.) Trying to keep two contributors' work straight with Word's "Track Changes" is a hair-pulling challenge. With more people, forget about it. In large groups, I've found even "change the third sentence in the ninth paragraph" requests via email to be bett…

I can't address the general impression, but as someone who spends nearly every moment of my day in git (and only twenty percent of my day dealing with conflicts, I jest) I think my advice is more towards impedance matching.

When working with folks outside of tech, something like Word expedites the process as it's their native tongue. While tools like diff and patch are great (I was a Unix admin at Amazon back in the Jurassic period), they'd limit my options for copy editors.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#147

Post by SwellJoe »

valine wrote: post #94

> The lingua franca for most writing is Microsoft Word so you’ll have to buy that eventually... I don't understand why something as ubiquitous as writing necessitates spending $100 on software from Microsoft. A plain text editor works out of the box. If you have a need for more complex formatting you could use LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Pages (comes free with a new Mac/iPad), WPS Office, etc. I get that Word has is the…

Technical publishers tend to be much friendlier to alternatives. I delivered my book in OpenOffice format, generated from DocBook XML (translated from DocBook SGML midway through the writing process), to my publisher, and they were comfortable with it and had versions of their templates and such for it, and that was ~14 years ago. I would hope it has improved even more since then.

And, I'm glad to hear Word has gotten cheaper. Didn't you used to need to buy the whole Office suite to get it, and wasn't it like $250? I genuinely don't know. The last version of Office I bought was much more than a decade ago. Oh, nevermind. I checked. It's sold as a subscription. Costs $99.99/year, so it is much more expensive than it used to be, it's just spread over several years. It used to be reasonable to keep the same Office version for 5+ years.

Re: How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017

#148

Post by alexeckermann »

MLR wrote: post #18

I've been toying with the idea of a site for original written works, in the same vein as current fanfiction sites or Deviantart. I imagine it would end up working along the shareware model, x chapters here for free and purchase access to the full story, or something along those lines - though if there is a market for it you could use it as a streamlining process for publishing houses I suppose Is anybody aware of a s…

Im CTO at a startup that is working in that space — https://tablo.io

We currently offer a way to streamline creation, sharing and publishing of work through to the iBooks Store. Going forward we are focusing on being a new home for publishing.

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