Soon I shall be an author!

At long, long last, I believe I shall shortly be "an author". I signed off on the between-the-covers content last week, and made what I hope is the last tweak to the covers today. Provided the changes to the cover come through ok, I will shortly be publishing my book.

Looking back, there's some interesting stuff in there: A year is a long time. Probably 40% of that year was spent with the ball in my court. Maybe more. It's certainly possible to self-publish in a lot less time than a year, and if I were to publish another book, I'd ballpark it in the 120-to-240 day range.  On a third go, probably 90-180 days.

As a first-time author, I was really surprised at several aspects of the process.

1. My skills in writing, my vocabulary, and my collegiate-level knowledge of punctuation and technical organization pale in comparison to those of a professional literary editor. I scored 99th percentile in the WEST test in college, yet I am no more than dust.
   
   Oh ye who condemns the greengrocer's apostrophe and hates "scare" quotes, ye who stands agog at the misuse of literally and infer, ye for whom a split infinitive is the beginning of a splitting headache: prepare to be humbled by the flaws and inconsistencies in your own writing. It hurt much more than I expected to see my writing critiqued.
2. As an engineer, I was completely surprised by just how much font choice and page layout impact the readability of a book. When you're reading a 2, 8, or even 40 page technical document printed in black ink on bright white 8.5x11 inch printer paper, courier mono spaced 10-point is just fine. When you're dealing with a paperback book using dark grey ink on beige 5x8 inch paper, the font suddenly matters a lot. So do margins, and leading whitespace.
   Don't even try to approve an electronic galley without actually printing it out in the format you're actually going to print with. On a white screen with black text and no left-right pagination, you're just not going to have a clue. This is a (trust me on this) financially expensive mistake. Don't make it.
3. By the time you've researched and written a non-fiction book, you actually are a minor expert on the subject. We all accumulate organic knowledge from our day-to-day lives. Independently researched information is different. Few adults ever take the time to put an academic quarter's worth of open-minded open-ended learning behind anything they do. If you have, trust me- you're at least a minor expert.
   
4. Like starting a small business, marketing is everything. If you want even moderate financial return on your book, plan to spend most of your time, effort, blood, and treasure marketing your book. If you used crayon and wrote your book in pig-latin, the editors will fix it. If you don't market your book well, you will sell no books.

That's all I've got right now.

Merry Christmas,
-Jeff

Back in gear

Today I am writing a little bit out of frustration. SO much has gone well, and I've really enjoyed the process of writing and publishing a book. Not only that, I've learned a bunch about an industry I didn't know anything about.

My book is finally through editing passes, and I'm getting a hardcover and a softcover sent to me so I can check them one last time before we start the presses. Like the editing folks, the printing folks at iUniverse are great to work with. I even have ISBNs now!

Personally I've set a celebration goal of 500 copies sold through channels as my "I'm a real author" benchmark, but the ISBNs do make me feel pretty professional.

More on the frustration parts after I cool off a bit. No sense writing a post I'll only delete in the morning. :)

Cover art: less fun than making sausage

The esthetic parts of book publishing, like cover art, were some that I had most hoped to slough off to my self-publishing company. I'm a software engineer, and art is not one of our strengths.

Unfortunately, the first cut iUniverse offered on cover art was so bad that even I, with my engineer's eye, could tell it was awful. On the off chance I was being too picky, I sent it around to a couple of my more artistically inclined associates. They were universal in their disdain for the covers. I was seriously discouraged, because this was an area that I had really intended to get my money's worth. I sent it back, with comments, and their response was pretty much "Well, this is the cover we promised to make for you. If you don't like it, make one of your own". After talking a bit more with my Publishing Services contact, it became more of a "Why don't you show us what you were thinking about and we'll take another swing at it". Fair enough.

Happily, thinkstock is a really neat outfit, and they have an enormous and fairly well indexed collection of stock photography and art that you can use to gen something up. I took an afternoon and with my rudimentary GIMP skills cut & pasted my way to a selection of three alternate covers. I'd post them here, but unfortunately I haven't paid ThinkStock for the source images yet, so it'd be infringement.

Yesterday I sent them on to iUniverse. We shall see what happens next.

I'm really hoping they come through. This is an area which I really need the expertise of a practiced professional.

Aside from that, we're essentially ready to publish. Whee!

I fail to make Rising Star status

I am left wondering what it must take to get this award. I had promotional quotes from experts, links to bookstores, book fairs, and libraries established, a website up, and an open invitation to write an article on the subject in a major online publication serving my target audience.

Apparently you must offer a truely awesome gantt chart and established interview/speaking schedule to get this.

iUniverse has explained that in order to remain independent the Rising Star Board does not communicate specifics with iUniverse, so there is no way to know in what way my submission fell short.

For the record, below is a summary of the marketing info I sent to them. (Their headers, my lightly-excised info)

---

AUDIENCE/MARKET:

Non-self-employed high school or college grads with 2+ years of work experience after graduation

SELLING POINTS:

Other titles in this area are completely impractical. They're more entertainment than information. Some are huge encyclopedias of interesting / weird / high-paying jobs, but they devote only a few words to each one, give no real information, and in many cases the job is singular: Curator for the National Arboretum. That's no use to anyone.

An actual survey of practical jobs that a regular person could expect to do for themselves? That book doesn't seem to exist - yet.

MARKETING & PROMOTION POINTS:

I have

1. created a personal website
2. two alumni organizations (X and Y) which will publish notices of my publication
3. a local library with a local author program which will allow me to do a Q&A of my book, and/or at least announce the publication of my book
4. contacted two non-iUniverse marketing organizations that specialize in promoting books
5. begun working with Z at iUniverse to produce marketing and publicity materials

PUBLICITY:

I plan to hire a professional for a 3 phase approach

Phase I is 2-3 months: This is a sanity check to see if anyone wants to BUY it.

Phase II is 3-12 months: Minimum profitable run time, according to my sources.

Phase III is 13+ months: Until the book stops selling...

ADVANCE PRAISE/ENDORSEMENTS:

"Earning without being employed" provides the reader with a "Gee, I can do that" idea that these professions are within their reach. Military veterans come with a great work ethic and self-starter attitude, and would find this book of great value to capitalize on their skills and experiences they learned and achieved during their service." --EndorsementPersonOne

"If the only thing standing between you and successful self-employment is What or How, you can toss those obstacles away by reading this nifty book filled with how-to information. Quite simply, Jeff Evarts has rounded up a goldmine of entrepreneurial options and he shares them in this easy-to-read collection. Start digging." --EndorsementPersonTwo

TIMELINE/APPEARANCES:

None

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED TITLES

None (technical papers, but not “book titles” per se)