Self-publishing? Don't do this. And this. And this...

Readers start early. 

They know a good book when they see one.

Let’s call him Joe. 

Joe writes a novel about a father-son fishing trip gone horribly awry when his son Josh disappears at dusk. Dad gets impossibly lost searching the back country for Josh. Wouldn’t you know, Josh resurfaces a week later, having taken refuge in another fisherman’s cabin that had been stocked with a few cans of beans and tuna. Why he stays a whole week is a mystery. On top of that, no one can find Dad.

And Joe can’t find an agent. He emails his book to a slew of agents, unsolicited, before giving up and going straight to the publishers. The publishers reply to Joe’s “Cabin Fever” query with a standard ‘thank you but no thank you.’

Joe believes in his mystery-thriller and decides to publish on his own.

Here’s where the real drama begins.

Jillian Keenan is doing a great job getting the word out 

about her new memoir, "Sex With Shakespeare." 

She knows how to connect with people. 

Even her editor showed up to support her at her 

recent reading at Half King in NYC. 

Joe, kudos to you for believing in your work and investing your hard-earned money in self-publishing your book. Please. Don’t make the following mistakes. Mistakes like the ones I’m about to list will almost certainly guarantee that no one other than your mother will read your book or take it seriously.

• Don’t copyedit and proofread the book yourself. Even professional editors and writers know they must hire professionals to scour their book not once but several times before committing it to print. I’ve received numerous review copies of self-published books with hard-to-ignore typos. Once, I got a phone call from an author asking me to toss the book into the trash and wait for a new printed version because there was a typo on the back cover.
• Don’t format the book yourself. You need a professional graphic designer who specializes in book production to create a readable format. 
• Don’t design the cover yourself just because you own a copy of Publisher. Covers sell print books and ebooks. Invest in a professional graphic designer with cover design experience. 
• Don’t do anything until you have a solid marketing plan you’ve run by some savvy authors and marketers. If you make a book you want to sell it, right? 
• Don’t query book reviewers with incomplete sentences, misspelled words or a recommendation from your pastor.
• Don’t create a website that fails to have an “about this book” page. In fact, the book should be front and center. If you’re going to nab a reader, you won’t do it on the merits of your bio. It’s going to be because they are interested in the book. And don’t create a website that has not been copyedited. And don’t launch an unsightly or clunky website. Hire a professional or use Squarespace or some other program that makes ugly close to impossible.
• Don’t use a photograph of yourself taken at your bachelor party, Joe. That’s just wrong. 
• Don’t expect your local independent bookstore to carry your book. Shelf space is a gift, not a given. Chances are, and this is sad, no bookstore will carry your book. Even authors with traditional publishers can’t get their books in bookstores for more than a couple of weeks, at best. Thousands of books are published every month. “Cabin Fever” has a short shelf life, no matter what. That’s why you need a marketing plan with a reliance on alternative methods of sale including Internet sales.
• Don’t fail to express gratitude every time someone reaches out a helping hand. That includes book store proprietors, librarians and your ever-loving mother. Kudos to Mom. There’s almost no such thing as an entitled author, just unschooled wannabes who don’t understand how the game works.

If you don't have a winning personality or you tend 

to bully librarians and bookstore proprietors, 

consider playing with kittens.

In conclusion, self-publishing holds a valuable place in the making of books. But at this time, these books can still look and feel self-published. If so, “Cabin Fever” is doomed. If you want your book to have a fighting chance, it must look professional, handsome and hard-to-resist.

Self-published authors can be at a disadvantage unless they come from a publishing background because they don’t understand what it takes to put out a quality work. Agents and editors provide a much-needed reality check on all things publishing, from editing to marketing to behavior in bookstores. If you don’t have an agent at your side helping you find your way, you owe it to your work and your investment to find out what a professional author needs to do to get the book noticed and sold.

Joe, if you want people to find “Cabin Fever,” please do everything in your power to make sure the book doesn’t wind up in a landfill, a mess of typos. And Joe, you are your book’s key emissary. Be tactical, yes, but be gracious as you go. Otherwise, forget it.

Why I review books every week for free…and usually pay for them myself

The Happy Hooker and friends at a reading
to sell books at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan.
Many books are sold outside of bookstores.

We want to believe that good books rise to the surface, that good books will find the readership they deserve. Yet I know that’s asking a lot of books these days.

Consider the following (culled this morning from the Web):

o About 300,000 books are published each year in the United States. Approximately half this number includes textbooks and other non-consumer books.

o Publishers Weekly, a go-to publication in the industry that reviews books about 3 months before they come out, reviews about 7,000 titles a year or less than .04% of new consumer books.

o A handful of large publishing companies account for nearly 80% of all U.S. book sales. A successful fiction book sells 5,000 copies; nonfiction 7,500 copies. The “average” book sells 500 copies.

o About half of the books meant for retail sales are sold in bookstores. Less than a quarter of new books are sold online, though this number does not include e-books.

o A typical Barnes and Noble store stocks about 150,000–200,000. Only half (or fewer) books aimed at consumers get into bookstores. And even if the bookstore carries a new book, it probably won’t stay on the shelf for long.

Note: I didn’t fact check though I used figures I found cited in a number of sources. I also noted that Web users quote from each other. One number, reported authoritatively, can wind up in untold number of documents. Further, I looked at postings from 2008 on. As you know, what’s listed above is changing as we speak. I’ve read this week that Amazon/Kindle claims great strides in e-book sales and further declines in “real” book sales. On the other hand, some in the industry claim that Amazon’s figures are misleading. FYI: Re. paid books available at Amazon: For every 10 books Amazon sells, it sells 6 Kindle editions.

Yet I point to these numbers for the statement they make, generally, about getting a new book into readers’ hands.

What the numbers suggest is that most books get very little attention from “traditional” print media sources — magazines and newspapers. And a large number of new books never make it into bookstores. Despite the realities, most authors are sorely disappointed when they realize no one is going to review their book and they can’t even find their book listed on Amazon, much less sitting smartly on a B&N bookshelf.

Authors need help getting the word out. Even the local papers, as desperate as they are for readers, refuse to publish book reviews. This lack of advocacy for the written word perplexes me. Shouldn’t newspapers and magazines be in the business of celebrating books and writers? Isn’t a book reader more likely to be newspaper reader?

I once interviewed a bookstore proprietor in New England. In the course of our discussion, I mentioned that a new book by a writer just down the street from her store had just been published. She had no idea.

True, the author could have stopped by but this conversation made an enormous impact on me. Publishing a book is way too much like that proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it.

An author spends years of his/her life writing a book. An editor takes it over and spends a good many months on the review and editing process. Other experts — marketers and booksellers and graphic artists — are called in to further the publication process. Trees are cut down, ink is poured into press reservoirs and books are printed, packaged, shipped and …. sold??? A book is perhaps one of the most undervalued products in our degraded economy.

Why are newspapers and magazines important to authors? There are plenty of arguments that say social media is the way to get the word out these days. Yes, it probably helps, especially if you’re savvy in these ways and more so if your audience is tweeting and posting to Facebook regularly.

But printed book reviews are still very important because many book readers still read newspapers and magazines. Did you know that as many as 80% of families did not buy a book this year? The pool from which authors draw readers is already ridiculously shallow. Authors need a hand from the obvious places, places where readers already turn.

Since that discussion with the independent bookstore owner, I’ve made it my mission to review books by local and regional authors. For years I received a stipend for my weekly reviews but that has since changed. I work for a different, larger newspaper chain now and I no longer ask for compensation for my reviews because I am afraid my weekly column will no longer appear if the newspaper editor is expected to pay for it from her dwindling budget. Further, because of cost cutting at book publishers everywhere, getting review copies is much more difficult. I end up buying most of the books I review for free!

Next time

I’d like to write my next column about what goes into producing these weekly gratis book reviews. I’ll do so if I’m not distracted by something else that requires blogging.

If you have something to say about book reviews, by all means, please post a comment. I’d love to hear from you.

Tips for Better Literary Readings

• • • • •
Author and audience members
at a recent reading
at Half King in Chelsea
• • • • •

Sitting through a literary reading when you can’t hear and the author isn’t really into it, as I did the other night at Half King in Chelsea, is more punishment than pleasure. I’m a bit of a literary event junkie. Readings are often free of charge and since I’m a book reviewer with a weekly deadline, it’s fun to scope out for myself what’s new and interesting. This accessibility to new books and authors is a genuine perk for those living in NYC.

I’m afraid that this style of lackluster presentation by authors is more common than you’d expect. A literary reading may be one of the last places where nose-thumbing at the all-mighty dollar is in full view. The anti-sell attitude, if you will, looks and sounds like this:

“I don’t need to notify friends and family of this reading. I don’t need to tuck in my shirt. I don’t need to think about what I am going to say. I don’t need to bookmark what I plan to read nor do I need to know what I will read. And I certainly don’t need to speak up or look up. Frankly I don’t need you people. I’m a published author, after all.”

That last sentence is, admittedly, mean-spirited supposition. I don’t actually know what compels authors to come to their own readings so unprepared and uninspired.

I’ve grown quite a bit as a reader, thanks in part to the honest feedback and help of friends. I’ve reversed my focus from putting my stage fright first to making it secondary to caring about my audience and wanting to entertain them. Luckily this effort was possible and my own way of managing is to dramatize the text as I wrote it and want it to be read by my readers.

On April 9 of this year I read briefly at my book launch in Rockport. It was — ta da — my first “Free Fall” reading. I barely looked up and I didn’t put energy into the reading. I heard about it afterward from friends. The basic message was: Try a whole lot harder.

A blogger who commented on the Half King reading Monday night (the performing author shall go unnamed here) interpreted the man’s demeanor as sincerely humble. How two people sitting in the same room could read a man so differently amazes, intrigues and delights me. This is proof that there is no truth, that there are a million stories for every second in time, that my well shall never go dry.

Some additional thoughts on reading out loud:

1. I need to get this off my chest. The Half King is a great venue for literary readings with one enormous caveat. They almost never invite women to read. Should I return? Should I give them my money for food and drink? Should I continue to review Sebastian Junger’s (one of the owners) books, as I have since he began publishing books? For me, this male orientation is serious bad business.

2. Now for the tips. Author: Look up. Take note of your audience. See who’s there and stay connected. Is someone getting antsy? Does someone dare look away from your scintillating story for even one second? Retrieve him! Read to him! Entertain that wandering mind till you have him safely back in the fold.

3. Apply due diligence to summoning the crowd. Consider filling the room your responsibility. Send out postcards, e-newsletters, news releases, emails, postings on Twitter and Facebook. Make fliers. The work is hard and you can never do too much.

4. Smile the minute you walk in the room and keep smiling. You can stop when you get to the passage about the baby seal being gutted by the great white shark. But when you turn the page, smile again. Let people know you’re happy to be there and happier still that they are there with you.

5. Do you tend toward unkempt appearance or physical ennui personified by slouching or a failure to shave? Take a hint from Lee Child, who has a furious reading schedule every year in the late spring. Buy one good shirt and one well-fitting pair of pants. Consider this your road show outfit and reprise it when called upon to address the public. It becomes something of a talisman that signals “Performance!”

6. Do you tend, as a jaded author, to wear a pall of ennui? Do you save your passion for the page or the sack? Give it up. Get lively for your tribe.

7. Use your finger, if necessary, to mark your place in the text so that you can LOOK UP. You need to know who’s listening and who’s not. You need to make genuine connections.

8. Read favorite passages that work. Read the same passage at other venues. Dramatize. People really enjoy being read to and entertained.

9. Don’t read for more than 10 or 15 minutes because people’s limbs start to fall asleep and their butts hurt. Also: Remember to start off by very briefly introducing your excerpt and explaining the characters and the setting.

10. There’s an odd whole-room pause the second you finish reading. If you want to take a few questions, wait for the applause and then wait a little longer. People need time to collect their thoughts and formulate their questions. I often try to help out by saying something like: One of the most often-asked questions I get is…. That always gets the questions coming.

11. Know in advance how you will inscribe the book. I now write: Enjoy the free fall. (It’s a line straight out of the book.)

12. Never forget that people have traveled to see you. Leave your humility at home and work for them.

13. If you are a man, and you happen to score a reading at Half King, here’s an extra tip: Authors must compete with a thunderously loud drinking crowd on the other side of the wall. And the sound system is not very good. Practice projection and articulation. Make good use of your manly voice.

14. Follow up with thank you notes to the bookstore or library, the person responsible for choosing to book you, and anyone who helped you make the event a success. Sometimes I even bring some wine and cheese when I know I’m going to have a crowd that’s made up of primarily friends and colleagues.

15. Finally, the reality is that you are one of the key hand-sellers of your book. Even seasoned, best-selling writers call up their regional libraries and ask for readings. You do this not just for the book, not just for your readers but for your long-term platform as an author worthy of consideration.