ePUBLISHING
ePublishing. Internet publishing. Online publishing. They all mean the same thing -- the opportunity for your eBook to be in cyberspace for all the world to see. Getting published online is a viable option for so many writers.
Whether you have that Great American Unpublished Novel, poetry, an obscure biography, a how-to or self-help manuscript or even stage and screen plays, chances are it's publishable online. Of course it's up to you to look over each publisher carefully. READ THE CONTRACT! Yes, it's written in legal jargon but it could mean the difference between being paid and winding up on "Judge Judy" or some other courtroom drama. The best way to find out if the company is for you is to contact some of the authors. Oftentimes their website address will be provided. If not, go to a major search engine and enter the writer's name. When you locate the writer, ask them how happy they are. How much promotion is being done? Do they get paid? Would they recommend the publisher?
Another thing to consider is the fact that you are completely responsible for making sure your manuscript is edited. Not only should it be free of typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors; it's imperative that the story must flow, and if the book is non-fiction, the facts must be accurate. I've happened upon some online book summaries written by careless writers that have made me cringe. BE PROFESSIONAL!
Think long and hard about paying to have your book published in the POD [Print
on Demand] format as it requires a lot of money upfront. It's difficult to
sell books online, and unless you have a huge network of family and friends,
you'll sometimes have to sell hundreds of copies just to break even! Of course,
everyone has different reasons for writing and e-publishing books, but if
you're serious about getting your work out there on the WWW and want to be
perceived as an author, you should avoid any form of vanity publishing. Real
writers pay for two things:
1. Postage
2. Photocopying fees
Online writers must also pay for their U.S. copyright which currently costs
$35.
Finally, if you're going to be an ePublished author, you should have an online presence other than e-mail. You can get free websites, or even an e-group or community. Want to promote on a smaller scale? Try putting up a webpage. It's up to you to let people know about you and your book[s]. Good luck & write every day!
Click on the link for Internet Publishing to read what noted author Piers Anthony has to write about it!
“The
‘e’ in ePublishing Stands for…?”
By
Lisa Maliga
©
2004
All Rights Reserved
To reprint this article on your website, please contact
Lisa Maliga and include this byline:
Read and learn at Lisa's Library of Writing. Discover the diverse writings ranging from free soap and bath & body recipes to fiction, figure skating, herbal hints, and helpful publishing advice. Explore an extensive array of links. This is the literary home of Lisa Maliga, owner of EverythingShea.com. Link to: http://www.lisamaliga.com
‘e’
is for Electronic
How many electronically published writers do you know? In the world online,
there are countless authors; some of them willing to write for pennies a word,
or mouse click, others earning a bit more. And there are authors who do it
for nothing, just the vanity of seeing their name in ‘print.’
Back in August 2000 I began writing articles for a company named Write for Cash, which bought nonfiction on any topic imaginable and paid a one-time fee ranging from ten to twenty bucks. The articles were then input into the major search engines. The author’s name was the only byline. In December the company posted a ‘closed’ sign on their site. I scrambled quickly to find a new writing opportunity.
Themestream’s web site was brought to my attention when doing research. Noticing the 1700 categories, I realized that many of my rewritten articles and several unpublished works could be placed on that site. The paltry two cents per click was bargain basement, but maybe if I tried posting a few, I’d earn something. I didn’t expect to be buying a Ferrari, but the possibility of getting my work noticed occurred to me.
Aromatherapy was a popular topic I happened to have written about and as the hits grew I thought that the upcoming Christmas season could be mined by offering some gift-making recipes for bath and body products. And, unlike Write for Cash, I was able to post my short stories and essays. I never lost track of one important factor: I was involved in vanity publishing. This was made even more obvious when I did finally sell a story to a paying [online] magazine and the editor suggested some revisions. Was I grateful? Yes! On Themestream I rarely received constructive criticism. I’d find ;) and thank you notes in the comments box. My ego was routinely massaged with kind words and trite phrases. That was done so I’d go to the commentator’s articles and rack up some money for them along with kind remarks. I was frustrated due to the fact that even if an article was lauded, the hits weren’t very high in number. Other authors had dozens of comments and hits numbering in the hundreds or thousands. Those artificially inflated numbers were often due to the ‘writers’ clicking onto their articles repeatedly by signing up on those ‘click through’ programs.
In addition to writing, I was also a promoter. The Lisa Maliga Advertising & Publicity Agency was unofficially launched as I surfed message boards, posted free classifieds, contacted friends and relatives, submitted each article to search engines, and used my new web site as a linking system to my articles. One of my recipes was continually racking up the numbers and I promoted that one further by using link exchanges with fellow crafters.
Reading what the regular Themestream Writers/Promoters had to say, I increased the number of articles, sometimes posting as many as three per day. Two months later I had almost 80. Not all of them were bath and body recipes; although those continued to receive the most reads and were the simplest to write. I never received my paycheck. I contacted the accounting department, only to be sent the occasional form e-mail. My doubts about the legitimacy of the company located in Silicon Valley intensified as I began noticing that after midnight the clicks were minimal or nonexistent. As people in such diverse locations as Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain and South Africa had contacted me, all places where at midnight Pacific Standard Time it was daytime for them, my nocturnal observations turned to suspicion.
I heard from disgruntled Themestream writers about The Vines Network, which paid up to three cents a click. As the labyrinthine site required lots of mouse movement to read an article, let alone publish one, the various ad banners that popped up informed the viewer/writer that someone was making money. I posted about 20 of my articles, as I owned full rights. I knew I was “posting” not “publishing.” After a few days I ventured into my ‘info’ section to check my revenue. The number of page views was impressive – 997! The earnings were less than stellar – fifty cents! I decided that no more articles would be posted on vanity sites. Like the article I had sold to a real e-magazine that paid me before it was published, I knew that writing for pennies didn’t mean navigating streams of themes or big bucks advertising vines of confusion – it meant writing for legitimate online and print publications.
I was able to relate to the late Jim Thompson, author of “The Getaway” and “After Dark, My Sweet” who wrote in his autobiography [“Rough Neck”] “I have many sharp memories of that winter in Oklahoma City. Of writing two novels and selling neither. Of selling 300,00 words of trade-journal material and collecting on less than a tenth of it. Of distributing circulars at ten cents an hour, and digging ditches at nothing per.” That was written during the Depression. Were things really that different for writers?
Traditionally, the route to publication was to submit a query, synopsis or manuscript to a publisher. Chances of it being returned, or just ignored, were magnificent. If it was sent back, it was either in very poor condition due to enduring book rate mail, or the manuscript had clearly not been read. Book publishers gave small advances, paid tiny royalties [average 10%] and the wait from acceptance to publication was often years. Even when the book was released if the unknown author didn’t assist with promotion, the book was soon on its way to obscurity. “Some years ago I sold a book to a Wm.Collins conventional publisher in the UK. One of their executives subsequently admitted that they ‘lose’ money on nine out of 10 books and that the tenth one pays for the flops. He said, ‘Normally we spend next to nothing on promotion. If a book floats we promote it and if it sinks we let it drown.’” John J. O’Callaghan, Entrepreneur’s Network, Inc.
For over a decade I peddled my two novels to the biggies in New York, along with medium and small sized ones across the United States and Canada. I had an associate editor at Random House express interest by sending me a two-page long rejection letter which described possible changes in which I could refine my novel. And it also proved that my manuscript had been read. I saw that as confirmation that I possessed some talent as a writer and in less than two months I was able to revise the book, incorporating many of her helpful suggestions. A year later my manuscript was returned along with a brief note apologizing for the delay.
Print publishing was fraught with rejection. As I began spending more time on the www, I noticed eBooks were available for sale at online bookstores in formats previously unheard of. PDF, HTML, eBook Readers with various names, and via diskette and CD. It seemed similar to the music industry with the vinyl records giving way to cassettes and then to CDs and DVDs. In the book business, turning pages were being replaced with mouse clicks and styluses. Reading was done online, offline and even on standard 8 ½” x 11” paper. eBook purchasers printed out the e-books so they emerged from their printers looking just like manuscripts! Another statistic caught my attention: the online royalty rate. It ranged from 30% to 70%!
I began to check out the ePublishers’ sites and the authors’ sites. The miniature book covers intrigued me. Since there were no actual bound books, a postage stamp sized photo or drawing represented an entire novel or work of nonfiction. The Internet was capable of condensing a 400 page Magnus opus of some writer into an image. For hours I sat in front of the computer as I learned about e-publishing and e-published authors. Yet the ability to read an e-book struck me as somewhat uncomfortable. I didn’t have an eBook reader other than the free version offered by Adobe Acrobat. It was similar to my word processing program. Scrolling and clicking through a book wasn’t as fun as propping a hardcover open on the kitchen table and enjoying a Big Mac as I read.
‘e’
is for eNovel
My affiliation with eNovel began in June 2000 when I received a letter from
them describing their “Big Plans” and how I could still have my
book published by a traditional print publisher. No money was asked for, only
a copy of my book on disk. Oh yeah, and to sign a Publishing Agreement, which
“…hereby irrevocably grant, assign and transfer to Publisher and
its licensees, successors, and assigns all Electronic Rights in the Work throughout
the universe in perpetuity.” Now that was a large amount of space and
it went on to list all the avenues that comprise the world of electronic media
other than the Internet, including “…other similar technologies
or mediums whether now known or hereinafter discovered.” As a non-student
of legalese, I didn’t at first fathom what all that meant. Nor did I
read it closely. It was a contract, it looked real, and my manuscript was
probably something that wouldn’t be accepted anyway. Two months later
I received a letter with an unusual first word and punctuation mark: “Congratulations!”
That didn’t read like the standard rejection letters I’d grown
accustomed to skimming over the years. It continued: “You have just
become an eNovel.com Author.” Nice. There was some stuff about a signed
Publishing Agreement and how my book would be sold “to customers around
the world.”
I’d included an author’s bio, which I’d written in the appropriate third person, as though an esteemed colleague had composed a homage to my literary endeavors. When my novel was viewable on the web site around Halloween, I noticed that several more names were in eNovel’s authors’ biographies area. I read the excerpts of the other writers along with their personal and literary histories. Many of them were written in first person and I cringed upon learning of happy housewives’ elation at getting a book in print, uh, online. Then I was astounded to view a biography that consisted of misspellings, grammatical errors, and typos within the six lines of information. It ended with a ;) something I’d only seen in my personal e-mails! I couldn’t imagine Mr. Stephen King adding a smiling face to his latest book jacket! Did the folks at eNovel actually READ any of the stuff that was being sent to them?
The ePublisher was brand new. So up-to-the-minute that it had no affiliations with Amazon or Barnes and Noble. The ePublishers employees were only interested in acquiring a long list of titles, not dealing with the authors they currently had. It was doing no advertising. The cover art I’d created apparently wasn’t received. I wrote e-mails and while they were answered, the words “in the future”, “next year” and “we need time” were bandied about. I still didn’t have access to my author’s account to see if anyone had downloaded my novel.
As a last bastion of published author status, I thought I might get the book reviewed. Another quandary…I had no published copy with an ISBN number! [The International Standard Book Number was essential for purposes of booksellers wanting to stock titles]. I’d been told via e-mail that “…he will send you a courtesy copy of your novel when you tell him that you are the author.” Was this “Field of Dreams”? I was deluded into believing that authors actually received free copies [plural] and they were able to use them to send to reviewers, relatives, friends, former employers, etc. One lousy copy of a book I spent years writing…not to be. “We do not give out author's copies,” wrote the president several months later in a cryptic e-mail.
©
2001 - 2004 by Lisa Maliga
All copy and photographs on this entire website are copyrighted by Lisa Maliga
and may not be used without express written permission.
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