Lessons from a Self Publishing Author's Experience

“[I spent] six years sailing around the world. Three years writing about it,” says Larry Jacobson.

The result was a book, The Boy Behind the Gate, which Jacobson recently self published. He discussed his experiences in a recent post on The Book Designer Blog titled 8 Keys to Self Publishing Success. Jacobson’s book was intended for commercial distribution, but his observations are interesting for authors planning both commercial distribution and limited non-commercial distribution to family and friends.

The first, and in some respects most daunting, challenge he faced was planning and organizing the project. “Fortunately for me, I had been and continued keeping my ship’s logs and personal logs. I also had hundreds of emails back and forth with friends and family,” said Jacobson. “All of this documentation left with me nearly 2,000 pages to work from, and I was truly overwhelmed.” Developing a sound outline involved making decisions about the book’s intended audience, goals, illustrations, and format.

Once he had a draft of his manuscript, Jacobson had to make some critical decisions about how much help he would need to bring it to publication. The first regarded editing the draft. Jacobson said, “I have always enjoyed writing but knew I had limitations. Be smart enough to know what you don’t know. I hired a professional editor and we worked together for almost two years on three very intense edits/revises/re-writes.”

With a fully edited manuscript in hand Jacobson again decided he needed help, this time from a book designer. “I know how to use Word on the computer and I have iPhoto, so why couldn’t I just do the design and layout myself? (Laugh Out Loud),” he said. “Not a chance-I tried a couple of pages-and knew I needed a professional.”

Finally Jacobson explored his publishing options and decided on self publishing. “While I do know that publishers supposedly have the distribution down, in a world where distribution of books is no longer set in its ways,” he reasoned, “I decided to go alone and start my own publishing company. I didn’t have the time or patience to deal with a publishing house…even if they were interested.”

The lessons from Jacobson’s experience for anyone considering self publishing are clear. First, take the time to develop a clear plan for the book which will allow you to write a good draft. Second, decide where you need professional help in preparing the manuscript for publication. Finally, consider the options concerning the publisher or printer who can best meet your goals for the book.

Click here to read Larry Jacobson’s post.

Every Author Needs an Editor

I am always interested when someone chooses to write about book editing, so it’s no surprise that I was happy to find Alex Clark’s article “The Lost Art of Editing” in The Guardian’s online edition.

Clark laments changes in the publishing world where the bottom line of the conglomerate has become more important than the quality of the books sold. Says Clark, “For some years now – almost as long as people have been predicting the death of the book – there have been murmurs throughout publishing that books are simply not edited in the way they once were, either on the kind of grand scale that might see the reworking of plot, character or tone, or at the more detailed level that ensures the accuracy of, for example, minute historical or geographical facts.”

He recalls one particularly amusing incident: “One evening at the end of last September I found myself all set to interview Jonathan Franzen about his new novel, Freedom, on the stage of the Southbank Centre in London. I had anxiously worked and reworked my list of questions, but while my preparation was not in vain, it was swiftly put into perspective by an unexpected turn of events. It transpired that Franzen had that very afternoon, during the filming of a BBC television programme, discovered that the UK edition of his novel contained a number of errors – errors that he thought had been corrected during previous stages of production. In other words, the copies of the novel stacked high in the foyer, not to mention the tens of thousands on their way to bookshops, were not as Franzen, or indeed his publisher, intended.”

At first glance, none of this may seem like it pertains to a memoirist or family historian considering limited distribution or self publishing. But on second thought, Clark demonstrates that even our greatest writers need a diligent, skilled editor. Experienced, thoughtful editors help authors shape the content of their books to make sure their stories are well told. They also help authors to make sure that they are correct on the sentence level.

With the decline of editing in publishing houses and the rise of self publishing an increasing number of authors are turning to independent editors to help them make sure that their books are the best that they can be.

Unfortunately a fair number of self publishing authors skip the editing step or gloss over it. Having a sympathetic friend or writing group review a manuscript is not the same as what an author gets from a skilled editor. The result can be a book with a story less sharply drawn than it could have been and a series of errors that could have been avoided.

Even after a good editor has helped polish your manuscript, realize that the final responsibility rests with you, the writer. Diana Athill, who as an editor worked with literary greats like Phillip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Updike and Simone de Beauvoir, and after retirement wrote Somewhere Near the End, a memoir which won the Costa Prize for Biography, observed “The answer I found for myself is that I take much more trouble than I used to in the line-by-line editing of my own manuscript, and I think authors should now take that responsibility on themselves if they don't want to be annoyed by minor details.”

Click here to read Alex Clarke’s article “The Lost Art of Editing”



Finding an Editor For Your Memoir or Family History

For the first time writer, working with an editor can be a daunting task. The Northwest Independent Editors Guild offers a good list of Tips on Working with an Editor.  

When you begin seeking an editor, contact potential candidates well in advance. Editors can be booked for several weeks out. (Having just helped a number of clients who were rushing to get books completed for Christmas, I can sympathize.) Recognize that many editors have projects they will need to wrap up before they get to yours.

When you contact potential editors you should be prepared to discuss the following topics:

• The subject matter and length of your book. (Some editors talk about the number of double spaced pages. We prefer to use the word count which eliminates variables like font size, margins, etc.)

• The date by which you would like to have your project completed.

• The level of editing you are seeking: developmental or content editing, substantive editing, line editing, copy editing, or proofreading. The Guild recommends reviewing A Guide to Common Rates for Editorial Services created by the Editorial Freelancers Association as you are considering the type of editing to seek.

• Do you want the editor to mark up a hard copy or provide the feedback in digital form, as with MS Word "track changes"?

• What are your style preferences? Chicago Style manual, AP Stylebook, MLA Style or the editor's in-house style

When discussing the amount of editing you seek, you will want to consider:

• Are you seeking light, moderate or heavy editing?

• Do you want true editing or are you querying the editor about substantive problems with inconsistency of tone or character?

• Do you want the editor to fact check questionable items or simply flag them for you to check?

• Will you need help preparing the manuscript for publication?

• Are there any specific problems you want the editor to watch for?

  The editor may ask to see a segment of your manuscript o help make decisions about some of the questions above. You in turn may want to see a sample of how the editor edits a segment of your manuscript. (This is one of the reasons we offer a low cost manuscript evaluation service.) You may also want to ask the editors you talk to for references, clients who can provide feedback on their experiences with the editor.

When you have decided upon an editor you want to work with, he should provide you with a specific quote for the services you seek. If the quote is satisfactory, the editor should ask you to sign a specific agreement or contact covering the entire project.

Click here to read the full post by the Northwest Independent Editors Guild

Click here to read the Editorial Freelancers Association Guide to Common Rates for Editorial Services

Why You Need a Professional Editor

When a self publishing author completes a draft of a manuscript their first question is often, “What’s next?”

Susan Daffron of the website Self Pub U, advises, “As someone who has worked in publishing for a lot of years, I believe that I can safely say that everyone -- and I mean everyone -- needs an editor.”

Not every author agrees. They believe that they have carefully revised their manuscript and checked it for correctness. They don’t need an editor.

There’s something that first time writers don’t understand.

“Every writer has blind spots to his or her own writing,” says Ricky Pittman of Writers Weekly.  “You see, you know the story so well that your eye will play tricks on you while you read and you WILL miss what others will see. This is why you need readers and editors.”

Some authors ask friends, colleagues or their high school English teacher to edit their manuscript. But, as Jerry Simmons of the Readers and Writers Blog cautions, “Though it may be tempting to save money and do it yourself, self-editing is not a good substitute for professional editing. Having an objective, experienced eye to evaluate and edit your work is worth its weight in gold. A good editor won’t just fix your grammar and usage oversights, but will let you know what sections in your book need to be expanded, clarified, or removed…an editor will also make sure your story stays consistent, not just in tone, but in plot and “voice” as well. Your editor will let you know about all the problems you (or your friend the high-school English teacher) weren’t aware of.”

Once an author decides that hiring a professional editor is the best thing for her book, there is one more pitfall to avoid. Nancy Peske calls it the #1 myth about hiring an editor. “Any editor can help you with any type of book you’d like to publish.” In reality, says Peske, “Excellent editors may work in several genres, but for the most part, editors specialize. They can’t be experts on everything, and an editor with integrity will tell you flat out if he’s not the right person to help you with your book.”

So when you finish your manuscript give some serious thought to hiring a professional editor who specializes in your genre. If it’s memoir or family history we hope you’ll choose us.

Click here to visit Self-Pub U

Click here to read Ricky Pittman’s full article Why Beginning Writers Need an Editor

Click here to read Jerry Simmons’ article on Interviewing an Editor: The Seven Questions You Need to Ask by Lauren Hidden

Click here to read Nancy Peske’s full article, Seven Common Myths About Hiring a Freelance Editor for Your Book



What Do Readers Want?

Would you like to know how to make your book more appealing to readers? Would it help the revision and editing process if you knew which sections of the book readers found most interesting and which they skipped over?

Tools to answer questions like these may soon be available on Scribd, a social publishing website sometimes called the You Tube for documents. Visitors can browse millions of documents or “upload your PDF, Word, and Power Point docs to share with the world’s largest community of readers.”

Scribd CEO Trip Adler recently announced that the site would offer a free tool, Scribd Stats. The new statistics will provide, he said, “new data on reading that’s never been available before."

Jason Kincaid of Tech Crunch described some of types of data available with the new package including:

• Data on search queries that led people to your document
• Data on what people are searching for within your document
• Graphs that allow you to track your document’s popularity over time
• Data analyzing Scribd’s Read Cast feature which let’s readers share content they’ve just read on Facebook or Twitter

 “Perhaps the most interesting feature of the new Scribd Stats package is the heat maps that will run down the side of each document…,” said E.B. Boyd of Fast Company. [see image above] “The heat map represents the entire document. Red indicates pages that users spent the most amount of time on, blue the least. Clicking on a section of the heat map takes you to that particular page in the document.”

Ann Westpheling, Scribd’s new strategic partnership manager who recently joined the company after 11 years in publishing marketing, said…“If I create an excerpt with material from three romantic novels, I can now see which author drove the most traffic. Experimentation [with different marketing strategies] becomes more meaningful.”

The implications of the new data are potentially enormous.

Boyd said, ”The stats could provide insight into how long people read different kinds of material--leading, perhaps, to new optimal lengths for different genres of books--as well as how reading speeds vary by day of the week or by age of reader--which could also lead to changes in how authors write.”

Click here to read Jason Kincaid’s Tech Crunch article. 

Click here to read E.B. Boyd’s Fast Company article.

Click here to visite the Scribd website. 

A Self-Publishing Case Study

The process of self-publishing a memoir or family history book presents first time authors with many potential journeys into unknown territory. Considerations about who will edit a manuscript and how to design the cover and and interior of the book face the author who is often most concerned with the question, “What will it all cost?” For a person who has never been through the process of self-publishing a book the prospect can seem quite daunting.

A recent post by Joel Friedlander on his blog The Book Designer helps to illuminate the process of creating a book. Friedlander offers a case study of a single self-published book, The Andrew Street Mob, by Andrew Marais which he describes as a “…firsthand account of growing up amid a group of 40 or more kids in Johannesburg, South Africa in the 1950s.”

The book was a non-commercial project. Friedlander describes how he worked with Marais to, “Create a book that can be handled and read, that’s economical to produce, and that minimizes the cost to print as much as possible.”

If you’re considering self-publishing, following Friedlander’s account of the choices that took the project from manuscript to printed book will be illuminating. It will also give you an idea of the sort of collaborative relationship you will want to seek with your editor and/or book designer.

Click here to read Joel Friedlander’s post.

Lessons on Editing Your Family History

Lynn Palermo, who blogs at TheArmchairGenealogist.com, offers some interesting and useful advice to people writing family histories and memoirs in her post Seven Key Lessons to Editing Your Family History.

Here's her list:

Lesson 1 - Never attempt to be writer and editor.

Lesson 2- Prepare from day one for the editing process.

Lesson 3- Do not take corrections personally.

Lesson 4- Regardless of whether you are self-publishing, or using a printer, don’t shy away from paying for a proof or purchasing an advance copy.

Lesson 5 – Resist the temptation for your book to be “a surprise for the family.”

Lesson 6- There will be mistakes.

Lesson 7 – Family members are very understanding of the work that goes into writing a family history book and are very generous with their praise, and less worried about mistakes.

Good advice! All of these lessons are important. But a couple of them need some discussion for people new to the process of working with an editor.

In lesson two Palermo recommends developing a system to track your documentation. She suggests a binder titled Primary Sources with a section for each person in the book and copies of all source material about that person. Says Palermo, “This book will later be your editors go to source to ensure all information has been transposed accurately from their primary source.” The term used in publishing for this process is “fact checking.” It is important to understand that fact checking is an additional service that editors may provide, but it is not something an editor routinely does. If you want your facts checked make sure to arrange for that specific service.

A second note regarding editorial services is to distinguish between content or developmental editing and copy editing. Again, each is a separate service. A content or developmental edit focuses on the effectiveness with which your tell the story. It looks at how to improve your manuscript by adding detail to clarify or enrich stories, moving stories from one place to another where they will fit more coherently or deleting sections of the draft that are repetitive, unclear, or don’t logically fit. A content edit is a collaborative process of heightening your effectiveness as a storyteller. A copy edit focuses instead on correctness. Your copy editor will look at your draft for errors in grammar, spelling, word usage, punctuation, etc. to produce an error-free manuscript for publication. Make sure that you arrange for the kind of editing services you want for your manuscript before handing it over to the editor you have chosen.

Finally, it is important to understand that fact checking, content editing and copy editing may be done by the same person or by different people depending upon your desires. Just make sure that you have made clear with whomever you call upon to edit your book exactly what service you want them to provide.

 Click here to read Lynn Palermo’s full post.



Why You Need a Content Editor - A Demo

How important is editing? Anyone who wonders should take a look at a recent review in the Smokey Mountain News of Waynesville, North Carolina.

Gary Carden reviewed a recently published memoir Appalachian Roots written by David Waldrop and Michael Revere. Says Carden, “Appalachian Roots captures the essential facts in two very different (but equally daunting) journeys to adulthood in Appalachia.”

After examining the books strengths, Carden shifts gears with a question, “Does Appalachian Roots have problems? Yes it does…it could have used some serious editing and revision.”

He finds three problems that editing could have avoided.

1. The book needs a preface. “There’s no attempt to define this book’s purpose.”
2. “There’s also a lot of repetition.”
3. On the other hand, the book is sometimes short of descriptive details. It “…does not tell the reader enough about the book’s most provocative episodes…”

A good job of editing could have avoided all three. Unfortunately developmental or content editing is a step often skipped on the path to publication. Self-publishing authors find someone to proof read their manuscript and send it off to the printer. Publishers save money by going straight to copy editing and proof reading. In either case the author never has the opportunity to have a conversation with an editor who can help him improve the way he tells his story. When an author works with a content editor he can expect help on how to make sure his meaning is clear. His editor will advise him as on which repetitions can be cut to improve narrative flow and where more detail is needed to improve the story.

As you prepare your book make sure you get a good edit from a qualified content editor. You will avoid the kinds of problems which marred Appalachian Roots. Your readers will thank you for it.

Click here to read the full review of Appalachian Roots



A Resource Rating Publishers and Publishing Services

Looking for a Publisher? Preditors and Editors which bills itself as “A guide to publishers and publishing services for the serious writers,” is a website that can provide some useful assistance.

 The site offers hundreds of listings of publishers, publishing services, editors and literary agents. Not all services providers are listed in any category. (Stories To Tell doesn’t appear at present.) A link to the provider’s website is provided for each listing. Most entries are accompanied by recommendations or warnings concerning the provider. (There is a thorough explanation of the criteria used in determining ratings.) Entries indicate services provided by each listed publisher, editor or agent. Warnings consist first of general advice on how to spot “scam publishers” or “scam literary agencies.” Both in the general listings and in a special section there are warnings about specific providers. Many of the warnings are reports from writers who have had problems working with a provider. A lot of the content is submitted by readers to the site.

The site’s emphasis is on commercial publication, but it does provide information on some small publishers who may be of interest to self-publishing authors.

Whatever your publishing goals, the site is worth checking out.

Click here to visit Editors and Preditors.