Is Professional Editing Worth It In Self-Publishing? A Case Study

Cover for Gideon Marcus's book Kitra via Goodreads

Last week, I argued that professional editors were not necessary for self-publishing authors. I feel that the fate of the story has largely been decided before it would ever get to an editor. To produce a commercially viable book these days, it must be targeted at a commercially viable readership, delivering the tropes, the story beats, the cover, and the blurb that those readers expect. No amount of editing will sell a story by someone who doesn’t know how to write, nor a well written story, if the writer has not done their research and/or lacks the resources and/or know-how to market their book.

This week I’m going to use Marcus Gideon’s YA science fiction book Kitra as an example of my premise. As I said last week, he drew the short straw because I recently read his forceful advocate of professional editing, has published a book, and has shared some sales results that will allow us to examine the proposition.

So to start, here is Marcus’ “get an editor” pitch:

“I’ve written thousands and thousands of pieces in my life. I compose almost as effortlessly as breathing.

I always have an editor go over my work. Sometimes several editors. You should too.

Here’s why:

When you have an audience of one, you know exactly where your characters are, their motivations, their traits. You’ve got a clear idea of the universe. You know what you’re trying to say. Until someone else reviews what you’ve written, you don’t know if “someone else” knows what you’re trying to say.

So for anything you want to publish, and especially stuff you expect to get paid for, you need an editor. And not just any editor. You need, at the very least, an experienced writer to bounce your ideas off of. Otherwise, the best you’ll get out of them is a vague, “I liked it!” or a “It needs something, but I don’t know what.”

It may be tough finding the editor that works for you, someone who 1) you can work with, 2) offers good advice, and 3) is affordable. I’m still reeling from the loss of one of my favorite editors, who is coping with a chronic illness. But when you find the right editor, your work will ascend to the next level.

Finding the experienced editor (or several) is the first hurdle. The second is your ego.

No one likes to be told that their magnum opus doesn’t work. No one likes to spend months pouring themselves onto a page only to have to rewrite the whole damned thing.

Let me tell you something: when starting out, you will spend more of your life in editing than writing. If that bugs you, you’re in the wrong business.

Sure, eventually you’ll get good enough that you can work out a lot of your bugs prior to the editing process, but that first book? It’ll go through the wringer.

Kitra, for example, essentially went through four drafts until it was good enough for the public. It’s doing pretty well. Folks like it. If I’d released any of the earlier drafts?

Three sales on Amazon.”

He offers some valid points. Every writer would likely benefit from some sort of feedback on their story. It should be proofread. But does it need a "developmental editor" to go through and fine tune the story similar to the process in traditional publishing? And is it worth the money?

Marcus Gideon is a professionally published writer. He is the proprietor of the website Galactic Journey, and the small publishing house, Journey Press. The quote comes from a blog entry entitled “Time in Service” on the Journey Press blog section. You can find the complete blog post here: Journey Press Blog

Strictly speaking, Marcus is not a self-publishing author, but the founder of a small press that published the works of others, besides himself. His SF anthology Rediscovery features stories by women SF writers from the 1950’s & 60’s. Marcus is well known in SF circles, and the subject matter of this book generated a lot of free publicity upon its release in SF circles. Much more than any self-published author, no matter how popular on Amazon, could expect with any new release of their own. In addition to publishing Kitre, he has also reissued a 1964 B-side ACE double story by Tom Purdom, I Want the Stars. For some reason. He has spent the last year or more building up a network of some 500 independent bookstores that offer his books. And owning a website that is visited thousands of times a month which he uses to promote his books, I think it is safe say that he’s pretty solid on both the distribution channel and publicity side of selling books. So with those very important ducks in order, you would think that the sky’s the limit for his professionally edited debut novel. But, ah… not so much.

As it turns out, the YA non-dystopian, non-post apocalyptic science fiction market is not a vibrant market, according to Alexa Donne, who should know. She has had two YA non-dystopian, non-post apocalyptic science fiction novels traditionally published, and knows the YA market backwards and forwards. She offers weekly videos on that market on Youtube which you can find here: Alexa Donne Videos In several of them she has talked about her experiences as a YA non-dystopian, non-post apocalyptic science fiction writer. From what I could gather, a runaway best seller in that market would be a disappointing release for a YA fantasy book. Fantasy sells, while non-dystopian, non-post apocalyptic science fiction books are lucky to sell a couple thousand copies. Whether this is because there is no interest in them in the YA audience, or because traditional publishers don’t know how to promote them she feels is an open question. But the fact is that the ceiling is low for the type of SF story that Kitra represents. And Marcus seems to have been aware of this, since he writes; “Let’s face it — YA is often associated with dystopia, grim stories where the evil Queen or the fascist government is the big bad. Kitra is a hopeful story, one in which teamwork and perseverance see the characters through. There’s a hunger for these kinds of stories now.” That last line strikes me more as wishful thinking that market research. In any event, his sales so far fail to justify that optimism.

Kitra was release in April 2020, at the start of the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, he reports that his company was selling around 200 books a month – which would be the Rediscovery title with its significant free publicity. During the pandemic, sales have dropped to around 70 copies a month, split between the three titles. Much of that decline, can certainly be blamed on the pandemic. Still...

Both versions of Kitra are offered on Amazon. The ebook version on Amazon’s bestseller list is ranked in the 1.5 millions when I looked it up for this post. That translates to a copy every month or so. Trust me, I know that from experience. The paperback version is in the 2 millions, so it has sold a non-zero number of copies on Amazon. These are in line with the results you could expect from a debut novel without an Amazon focused advertising budget.

On Amazon, Kitra has garnered six reviews from actual purchasers of the book, four 5 star, two 4 star reviews in eight month. It has a total of 22 rating/reviews, but the other reviews likely come from free copies of the story given in exchange for reviews. This technique is common in the trade to spur sales with lots of reviews upon release. However, there are too many incentives for all parties in the system to favor good reviews, so I don’t consider them completely valid. It also has 31 ratings on Goodreads, with 26 reviews for an average of 4.06 stars, again with at least half the reviews coming from free copies, plus Marcus Gideon’s own 5 star rating.

So the book is well received. I’ll leave credit for how that is divided up between the author and editor to them. However, even with good reviews, I think it would be hard to make the case that its professional editing has done much for sales. Certainly not enough to overcome the handicap of writing a book for a small, low demand market.

All of this is not to say that Kitra is a failure. It is a modest success to date, and has many years to earn out its cost. And, with future sequels, it may do… Okay. Sequels can stir interest in the previous volumes, but they inevitably sell less with each sequel.

However, if you’re in the business of writing and publishing stories to make folding money, I think it is fair to judge a book as a product and a product by the money it earns. As a product, Kitra, with all its editing, does not seem like a product with much promise by that metric. Not because it is poorly written or edited, but because there’s relatively little demand for this type of story. The publishing business, self-publishing or otherwise, is a very competitive business, and I don’t think anyone is going to succeed at making money in it, if one doesn’t shot for the stars. And that means identify and mastering a potentially lucrative market, and writing to it.

So I say, first know your audience, and then trust your talent. Critique partners, and beta readers can offer much of the feedback an editor would provide. If you have money to spend, spend it on a good, proofreader and a cover artist. 

Are Professional Editors Useless in Self Publishing? (Part 1)

People are always telling self-publishing authors who dream of making money writing, that that they need to hire professional editors to lift their stories up to a professional level. In most cases this is pure BS. I understand that the big publishers are laying off editors right and left, and that editors need jobs, but well, life is hard. The last thing a self-published author needs to do is to spend money on a professional editor. That money is more wisely spent elsewhere. Like in advertising.

Why? You ask. You did ask, didn’t you? Well, the simple reason is that it comes too late in the game to save the day, if the day needs saving. Editors in traditional publishing have hundreds of manuscripts to choose from. They, and the marketing department, can select from these hundreds, the ones with the greatest potential to sell a lot of copies. However, when a self-publishing author hires an editor, they must work with what that author has written, and by that time, the story's fate is already sealed. So, short of rewriting it, an editor isn’t likely going to make enough of a difference to change this fate.

To understand why this is, you have to go to the head of the production line. If an author is going to be commercially successful, they need to identify a market that has the potential to provide a profitable business for the writer. It doesn’t have to be the largest, but it needs to have a large enough pool of avid book buying readers to provide the potential for selling thousands of copies.

Having identified such a market, an author needs to study what exactly this audience expects in the books they buy. What are the tropes and story beats that all the best sellers in the genre serve up? What is the formula? This is discovered by reading, and studying the bestsellers with an eye to their similarities and structure. Once they have deciphered the formula, they then need to write to that formula, giving it their own distinctive variations, while making sure that readers get what they expect to get.

If an author has done their homework and understands their potential readers – and written a story that meets their expectations for both the story and the basic quality of writing – they shouldn’t need an editor to polish it further. The fact is that if one is writing for avid readers, the literary bar isn’t all that high. Potboilers sell, and always have. Avid readers are not discerning readers. They don’t have the time for being fussy.

I should mention here that we're talking about editing, not proofreading, which is something different. Some sort of proofreading to eliminate typos is a necessity. Polishing prose isn't, if the story meets the expected standard of the genre. Which, if the homework is done, it should.

Plus there are more pressing issues that need a self-publisher's money. The main one is getting readers to notice their books. What good does it do you if you have the perfect book but no one can find it? The money spent on editing is likely better spent on advertising and promotions, which are sad necessities in self-publishing world these days. Without advertising of some sort, one's chances of making more than pizza money in the trade is close to nil. So, in that respect, money spent on an editor is actually counter productive.

Don’t believe me?

Well next week I’m am going to use a concrete example of a professionally edited book that targeted at a relatively small market, namely, YA non-dystopian, non-post apocalyptic science fiction. It’s a market that even big traditional publishers have a hard time selling more than several thousand copies – at best. The book I’ll use is Kitra, by Marcus Gideon. Marcus draws the short straw because he is the most recent advocate of professional editing that I’ve come across. And he happened to provide some ballpark sales figures for his professionally edited book which we can use to get some insight into how much, or how little, professional editing drove sales of his book.

Perfection(ish)

 

I can’t spell. Never could. Still, my attitude is that the only way someone knows that I misspelled a word is that they know the correct spelling and thus the misspelled word did it’s job. It may’ve taken a split second to translate it on the part of the reader, but it still conveyed the meaning of the correctly spelled word. Which is all you can ask of a word. I may’ve used a crowbar to hammer a nail down instead of a hammer but it got job. You gota work with what you got.

I’m not a person who learns by rote and memorization, and there is no way to learn spelling, or indeed the ins and outs of the English language except by rote memorization. And to put it bluntly, the English language is a hopeless clusterfuck. There is no logic in its spelling, and for every so-called rule, there are exceptions, so there are no real rules. No real guides. Perhaps the most annoying thing about the English language is that some people think its unalterably sacred. I find it hard to believe that the gods of the English language handed down the word “nevertheless” to us. (I Googled it to save your the trouble. It likely comes from the Middle English word neverthelater and means notwithstanding.) Nevertheless, I have to believe that at some point some Middle English people just started stringing the phrase “never the later” altogether, whether the high priests of the English language objected or not. And then someone, some time later, just slipped nevertheless into its place. Who knows if the high priest of English objected or not. If they did so, they failed to put a stake through its heart. 

In that spirit, I think I’m going to invent a word myself. A useful word – atleast. Atleast is atleast as useful a word as nevertheless, if not more so. The gauntlet is down. And I don’t care if there’s a red line under it. There’s a red line under “neverthelater” as well. And that’s a good Middle English word.

Given my attitude, one has to wonder how it is that I’m a writer. Or perhaps, how good a writer I am.

I’m okay at it. It’s a journey not a destination, but we’re on the road. As for my lack of qualifications in the English language, well I’ve got a crutch. A computer to do the spelling for me. I hate writing by hand these days. But on a more general note, my attitude is that I am not an automobile mechanic and yet I can drive a car. All the illogical messiness of the English language can stay under the hood, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t need to know it. Sherlock Holmes didn’t want to clutter his head with useless knowledge, like the earth circling the sun, for fear of filling it up with useless knowledge at the expense of useful knowledge. That’s my attitude as well. In the place of rules and diagrams of sentences, I have read maybe two thousand books in the past half century. And  from that experience I have distilled what I think is good writing and storytelling looks like. And I try to apply what I think is good to what I write.

Attitude is one thing. But it takes one only so far. You gotta respect your audience as well.

In 2015 I self-published the three novels I’d been working on during the previous five years, starting with A Summer in Amber. In doing so, I decided to lay my strengths and weakness as a writer out there for anyone to see. It wasn’t a decision that I took lightly. However, I realized that there was no great risk in doing so. If I did made a fool of myself, I’d only be a fool in the eyes of a few, maybe a hundred, strangers. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

In doing so, I learned a lot. One of my major lesson was I discovering just how blind I am to typos. I read, like most people, what I expect to read. Just as long as the shape of the words more or less match expectations, I'm good to go. And because they were my words, I hardly had to read them at all. As a result, I would give my wife what I considered a clean manuscript to proofread and she’d find five or six hundred or more mistakes. And still not catch them all. And I didn’t help my cause by making revisions after the manuscript had been proofread. So there were a fair number of typos in my first books, though, as I said, many hundreds less that if left to my own devices. This sad fact was mentioned in the early reviews, which was fair enough. However, what was encouraging is that they were, for the most part, still good reviews, so I knew that I’d done the most important thing right. I just had to do other things a lot better.

In the five years since I first published these works, I’ve made many revisions to correct those problems. I had a year’s worth of Microsoft Word that had a more robust grammar checker than the LibreOffice program I use to write. I went through the books I'd written at that time using Word to find mistakes we’d missed. It helped, but the real solution came when some of my readers stepped up and volunteered to send me lists of the mistakes they found when reading my books. And some of them have stayed on to be volunteer beta read for all of my subsequent books as well.

The process is rather eye opening.

My wife, a retired high school teacher who knows a lot more about English than I do, is my first proofreader. And as I said, she finds the first five, six, seven hundred or more mistakes I make. After making corrections, I send the manuscript off to my four or five beta readers. They find an additional 50 to 100 mistakes. They all get the same copy, and yet, there is remarkably little overlap in the mistakes each of them find. It seems that everyone reads a little differently, and each get tripped up by different words. The process, however, delivers a pretty clean copy, and I am ever so grateful for their efforts. I don’t get complaints about all the typos these days, thanks to them.

However, I want to give my readers the best possible experience (within my budget) and I noticed that while typing emails in gmail, it would highlight awkward grammatical phrases, and such. I wondered if Google Docs would do the same thing. So I uploaded my latest book to Google Docs, and sure enough, it worked the same way, finding double words, missing words, and those correctly spelled wrong words that slip in, the its and it’s, where and were, discrete and discreet – my usual suspects.

As a result of this experiment, I’ve spent the past week running all of my works through Google Docs and making corrections that this process found – when appropriate.

I found many things to fix in my earliest works, though almost no misspellings. But in those early works, I wrote in a rather telegraphic style. I wrote them how I heard my characters speaking, and I often skipped little words like “a” or “the” that were almost understood without speaking in speech. And I would think that they’d not be missed, when in the flow. However, this time I put them in.

I found a few other interesting points going through my work. Google prefers that my characters look “at” each other, while I prefer that they look “to” each other, i.e. “I looked at her” vs “I looked to her.” I also found that Google prefers that when a character did something, did another thing, and then says something, it prefers it written as, “I looked down, jumped back, and exclaimed, “Hey, that’s a snake!” Whereas I prefer prefer to choreograph the action, i.e. “I looked down, and jumping back, exclaimed, “Hey, that’s a snake!’ I kept my way in both cases.

These revised versions of my books are now available in all the bookstores. My Google books now have the 2020 covers as well. If you’ve already read them, it’s water over the dam. But if you have some sitting around yet to be read, swap them out for the new editions, if you can. I’m confident that they are now perfect(ish). At least as perfect as they’re ever going to be – though I will, of course, make any corrections readers send to me.

Bottom line; no looking back now. They are what they are. And I think they’re good enough for me to sleep well at night.

All But Keiree are FREE on Amazon

 

Them algorithms. For some reason Amazon has decided to price match all my books, save Keiree, and have reduced the ebook versions to FREE. I can't say how long this will last, but if any Kindle readers have been hesitating to sample my books, now is the time. The cool thing is that most of my most recent books, Sailing to Redoubt, The Prisoner of Cimlye, and now The Secret of the Tzarista Moon are all FREE for once.

I've written a whole blog post on why I sell my books for FREE when I can. The short story is that I don't spend more than $50 out of pocket on any book -- for paper copies to my beta readers -- and my incidental sales cover much, if not most of that expense. So I can afford to sell books for FREE and not end up in the poor farm.

While writing a book takes a lot of effort, it's not work. It's fun. I don't need to be paid to have fun.

My attitude towards books is that if I want a book, I'll by the paper version. But if I want to just read a book, the library is my first choice. So, for me, reading a book is a free experience. This makes my free price on ebooks seem natural to me, since I think ebooks are reads -- not books in the physical sense.

Amazon decides when and for how long they will price match books. I don't know how long the free prices on any of these books will last. So get'em while you can.

My Library -- House Plan & Architectural Books

 

Some thirty years ago now, we managed to scrape together a down payment for a house. After looking at several houses in town, and realizing that we’d likely have to not only make do with one feature or another that we weren't completely happy with, but would also need to put money into these older houses on an ongoing basis to fix this or that, we decided to build a modest new house. One that would not need modernization for several decades. And since we were going to build a house, we might as well design it to suit ourselves. Which we did, having a professional designer draw up the actual plans and blueprints. All of this sparked an interest in house designs and I began to acquire books with house plans to see how things could be done.

Dover Books offered – and still offers – a ton of books with old house plans from the turn of the last century to the Twenties and Thirties. Dover Home Plan Books Many of these books are reprints of house plan catalogs offered by architectural companies and building associations. I believe that people would order the blueprints and material lists that their builders would use to build the house. Some of the catalogs offered mail order kit houses, like the ones sold by Sears. In that case, all the material for the house would arrive on a rail car to be erected on the prepared foundation by local tradesmen.

Even after we had built our house, I found it interesting to go through these old catalogs to see all the variations in houses and floor plans – as well as the common patterns. Some of them also included sections about the appliances, furnaces, and plumbing that was modern in the 1920’s. All very interesting.

To these catalog reprints I added some architectural books devoted to certain types of residences – shingle style, prairie style, Victorian, and a lot of books on my favorite style – bungalows. I have number of books on bungalows down through the ages. Including the classics of Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman style homes and missionary style furnishings. Plus a book on Charles & Henry Greene’s famous California bungalows dating from the turn of the last century. One of their most famous bungalows was used in the Back to the Future film. I even have several years worth of American Bungalow magazine.

While the plans are interesting, I also enjoyed many of the books for the drawings and art that the architects used to showcase their house designs. I’ve included a few samples above, but there were many more that evoke a bygone age.

I often wondered what it would be like to live in houses like these, but wondering is as far as I'm ever going to get. Oh well.

The bottom picture on the above page is a large open room on the second floor that I thought would be really cool, especially if it was on a lake... And my little steam yacht was docked, down, beyond the terrace.

The book on the far left is called A Pattern Language, Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, et al. It deserves a blog post of its own. If you're ever going to design a house, it is a book that you should look through. What they did was have people go all around the world and note the characteristics that made them feel comfortable, starting with what makes a city livable and working down to houses. From this study they proposed 253 "patterns." For houses these patterns range from #181 "There is no substitute for fire (i.e. fireplaces) #180 Window seats -- who doesn't like curling up with a book in a cozy seat next to a window. #196 Doors in the corners of rooms  so that the traffic pattern does not run through the center of the room and conversational area. #203 Child caves .All kids like small places -- closets and such to hang out in. And all sorts of other observations. As I said, it's a blog post in itself. But it makes one think, and so often it made me say, "Yes, exactly. That's what I find attractive." 

Anyway, that's my shelf of house plan books. One of those little passions of mine from my own bygone age. Though I have to admit it was fun paging through them again. I'll have to bring them out more often.

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon is FREE on Amazon

 

I'm happy to announce that Amazon has made my newest book, The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon, FREE on Amazon.com. Recent experience with Amazon and their price matching policy suggests that this will FREE price will not last long. So Kindle readers, here's your chance to discover why a certain pirate prince wanted to sell the Tzaritsa Moon to its insurance company...

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon

 “I signed aboard the Tzaritsa Moon as her second engineer. I ended up a toaster repairman. I was very lucky.” – Rafe d’Mere, from The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon marks the long awaited return to the Nine Star Nebula of the Bright Black Sea. This story takes place in the Alantzia star system, the most remote of the eight solar systems. The Alantzia system is known for its many little worlds, moons, and rocks that are reputed to be more like the “lawless” drift worlds than the staid worlds of the Unity.

Old spaceers convinced Rafe d’Mere that to fully appreciate the exotic romance of the Alantzian experience, he needed to ship out on one of the small planet traders which call on the eccentric little worlds of the system. So he did, signing aboard the Tzaritsa Moon, under the name Rye Rylr, as her second engineer.

On the passage to Fairwaine, Rafe’s swift response to a critical engine failure saved the Tzaritsa Moon. And his life. However, the failure was deliberate, part of a pirate prince’s plan to keep the Tzaritsa Moon from arriving in Fairwaine orbit. And when it did, thanks to Rafe, the pirate prince was not happy. At best, Rafe might expect his memory of the incident to be erased. Erasing Rafe would, however, work just as well.

So Rafe needed to get clear of the Tzaritsa Moon and get very lost on Fairwaine until things cooled down. However, while doing so, he crossed orbits with a thief. A girl with a pretty face, who may, or may not, have been a covert agent of the Patrol. She was rather evasive on that point. But she was determined to discover why the pirate prince wanted the Tzaritsa Moon destroyed. And Rafe found that he couldn’t resist helping her. She had a pretty face.

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon is a cozy SF mystery adventure. It features Rafe d’Mere, ex-Patrol contraband suppression and repair tech, now a spaceer engineer, and Vaun Di Ai, who seems to be a Patrol Lieutenant JG, Intelligence Analyst 2, who had, somehow, escaped her desk job to be an acting covert agent. The story is set mostly on the moon of Fairwaine, and in one of its old fashioned, nonconforming societies. One that uses toasters to make toast.

C. Litka writes old fashioned stories with modern sensibilities, humor, and romance. He spins tales of adventure, mystery, and travel set in richly imagined worlds, with casts of colorful, fully realized characters. If you seek to escape your everyday life, you will not find better company, nor more wonderful worlds to travel and explore, than in the stories of C. Litka.

A Million Flowers

 

Summer Field, Claude Monet

Make that millions of flowers. Flowers of creation. Flowers of a revolution. Computers, the internet, and self-publishing platforms like Wattpad, fanfic sites, Smashwords, Amazon, Kobo, Apple, and other self-publishing book sites have given millions of people around the world the opportunity, and the incentive, to be creative. To tell a story of their own. Technology has made it possible for people in all walks of life to write and share their stories with readers around the world. And in many cases, form communities of storytellers and readers who celebrate, share, and help each other as writers. Anyone, and everyone, can tell their stories, regardless of their level of accomplishment. And by doing so, they can grow in their craft by both by writing, and with the help of other readers and storytellers.

This tech revolution has also allowed many people the opportunity to publish and share with the world, their expertise on a million different subjects in articles, blogs and books. It has given people with special, obscure, and niche interests the chance to not only share their interests with the world, but to establish links with others who share their interests, people they would never have met without these technologies.

In short, it’s a wonderful world.

Since I’m a writer of fiction, I’m going to focus on the storytellers of this revolution.

I need, however, to first address the issue of accomplishment. There are many who dismiss the world of self-published books as a cesspool of bad books. And there are writers who feel that the presence of these millions of non-traditionally written books are suppressing the ability of their presumably superior products to shine. And by shining, they mean making a boat load of money from their books. Essentially they are saying that someone else is to blame for their lack of commercial success. But hey, that’s the nature of the market. One needs a business model to address it, or one will deserve to fail.

However, that’s commerce, not art. In my view, creating a story is art. There are many levels off accomplishment in any art. And often it takes decades of practice to become very accomplished in one’s field. But you have to start somewhere. And while the traditional advice for someone seeking to write commercially is to keep one’s early, less accomplished work, in a drawer, I have to ask why? The answer, I suspect, has more to do with the commercial aspects of traditional publishing than with art – the publishing houses want to limit the height of their slush piles, and authors want to limit the supply of potential competitors. Now, I believe that writing is an art. Art, however, becomes a product when it is offered for sale, which is something that needs to be judged differently than a work of art. And that is beyond the scope of this essay. 

Still, I'll admit that most of the books in that field of flowers, or the cesspool, were probably written to be products rather than art. However, given the long odds of any of them ever being viable products, I think that the vast majority of them can be viewed simply as an expression of art. I will also readily admit that many of them, in my opinion, are not very accomplished works of art. But then, I’m a rather harsh critic, and find that there are a lot of traditionally published books that I don't think are all that accomplished works of art -- even if they are good products.

The thing with self-published books, however, is that if viewed as art, they are the real deal. They haven’t been selected by the marketing department of a publishing house to appeal to a certain market. And they haven’t been manipulated in the editing process to conform to that target market. Self-published books are the authentic, unadulterated creation of their writers. And while they may have been written with a target audience in mind, they still reflect how the individual writer envisions the product for the market they are aiming for.

I’m not going to pretend that I’ve read a lot of self-published books. Given my narrow tastes, there’s no way I’d read most of the ones I've sampled all the way through. However, what I do find interesting is that even the free samples of the story offers a window into the mind and imagination of the author. There’s a Jim Morrison’s tune, “People are Strange.” No truer lyrics have ever been written. We’re all strange. And the thing about writing is that it is often a window into the strangeness that lies within all of us. This alone makes even the least accomplished written story interesting, even if one can only stand to read a few pages of it. I read a couple of pages – or a chapter or two, and then sit back and wonder… What?

I’ve sampled a writer where even the blurb is hard to follow – a rush of breathless words and a tumbling cascade of ideas. And the stories read like an outline of ideas and events rather than the story. One wonders if this writer has ever compared what they write to what they’ve read. And yet, this writer has produced a dozen or more books, because the writer as so many ideas, so many stories. Neat.

I’ve sample the story of a fellow who hoped to make a ton of money on his book. The sample I read seemed to eerily parallel what little I could gather of his life, but it painted him becoming the super intelligent hero of the story. He put it on Amazon for twice the usual price of a self-published first novel, and the last time I looked, had never sold a single copy there. And he never lowered the price. I’m petty sure he has assigned blame for his failure to something other than himself. Sad.

I’ve sampled a few of the young writers on Wattpad which often offer interesting glimpses into the minds, dreams, and culture of the youth. Plus a feel for other cultures, with unfamiliar norms. Fresh.

And of course, because I read speculative fiction – well, mostly space opera stuff – I find lots of strange, and not so strange worlds. Sometimes the stories immediately bring to mind movies or TV shows. In these, I get to see just what aspects impressed the writers. A number of them have scenes with ship captains sitting a chair on the bridge barking commands to the crew at their stations all around them…Star Trek. Or some sort of fearful master dressed in a mask and a cape who strangles subordinates at will for minor mistakes because they’re evil. Star Wars. Or loading a down-and-out tramp ship loading a few crates of cargo and mysterious people up the ramp. Firefly. Fanfic in a mask.

Sometimes you are left wondering how these writers ever came to write speculative fiction at all, as they seem almost totally unfamiliar with basic science. Was it cartoons, anime or what? Curious.

There are worlds that are very familiar, others that are very bizarre. Worlds that seem small like stage plays, and others that toss galaxies around like bus stops. So many ways to imagine an alternate world. So many ways to think.

Whatever the level of accomplishment – and this is subjective as well as objective – I can appreciate these little glimpses into the minds and dreams of other people.

And what’s more, I can admire them for the effort they put into bringing forth the stories they tell, however they tell it. Writing takes an effort, and finishing a story is an accomplishment, no matter how accomplished one is at the craft of writing. And it takes courage to put one’s creations out for people to view, read, enjoy, or criticize. So however accomplished, or not, the writing is, publishing a story is an accomplishment to be admired. It is the process of creation – the journey as it were – that is the heart of creation, not the end. And I feel that should be celebrated.

So in self-publishing, one has this field of flowers stretching away to the horizons. Millions of them. And yes, they’re mostly wildflowers, with a few escapees from traditional gardens scattered here and there. But each is unique. Each of these flowers blossom as an expression of creativity from deep within the writers’ wells of dreams and imagination.

Let the flowers bloom!

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon is Now Available.

 

My cozy speculative fiction mystery adventure story is now available. Ebooks are either free in most ebook stores, or $.99 on Amazon stores. The trade paperback is priced at $10.00 Links below. I had a lot of  fun writing this story, and I hope it shows. I'm currently working on a sequel with the same characters and locale with a target release date of February-March 2021.

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon

“I signed aboard the Tzaritsa Moon as her second engineer. I ended up a toaster repairman. I was very lucky.” – Rafe d’Mere, from The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon marks the long awaited return to the Nine Star Nebula of the Bright Black Sea. This story takes place in the Alantzia star system, the most remote of the eight solar systems. The Alantzia system is known for its many little worlds, moons, and rocks that are reputed to be more like the “lawless” drift worlds than the staid worlds of the Unity.

Old spaceers convinced Rafe d’Mere that to fully appreciate the exotic romance of the Alantzian experience, he needed to ship out on one of the small planet traders which call on the eccentric little worlds of the system. So he did, signing aboard the Tzaritsa Moon, under the name Rye Rylr, as her second engineer.

On the passage to Fairwaine, Rafe’s swift response to a critical engine failure saved the Tzaritsa Moon. And his life. However, the failure was deliberate, part of a pirate prince’s plan to keep the Tzaritsa Moon from arriving in Fairwaine orbit. And when it did, thanks to Rafe, the pirate prince was not happy. At best, Rafe might expect his memory of the incident to be erased. Erasing Rafe would, however, work just as well.

So Rafe needed to get clear of the Tzaritsa Moon and get very lost on Fairwaine until things cooled down. However, while doing so, he crossed orbits with a thief. A girl with a pretty face, who may, or may not, have been a covert agent of the Patrol. She was rather evasive on that point. But she was determined to discover why the pirate prince wanted the Tzaritsa Moon destroyed. And Rafe found that he couldn’t resist helping her. She had a pretty face.

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon is a cozy SF mystery adventure. It features Rafe d’Mere, ex-Patrol contraband suppression and repair tech, now a spaceer engineer, and Vaun Di Ai, who seems to be a Patrol Lieutenant JG, Intelligence Analyst 2, who had, somehow, escaped her desk job to be an acting covert agent. The story is set mostly on the moon of Fairwaine, and in one of its old fashioned, nonconforming societies. One that uses toasters to make toast.

Amazon($.99)Ebook: Amazon

Amazon Trade Paperback book ($10.00) Amazon

Google(FREE): Google Play Store

Smashwords (FREE):Smashwords

The book should be available on Kobo, B & N, & Apple books shortly

Writing as Art

 

In a Wilderness of Dunes, in my impressionistic style of painting 

I view my stories, like my paintings, as art. I write and paint to bring something new into the world. To create. I also try to make it good, though I am the sole judge of what is good, and what falls short of being good enough. I try to be critical of my work. I don’t expect to succeed all the time, or indeed, most of the time. I expect to always fall short of total success. Masterpieces are masterpieces because they are very rare. However, I don’t get discouraged by falling short of perfection. Falling short is part of the process – especially if you, like me, are exploring an art form on your own rather then by the book or in class. We must expect to learn by trial and by error. And mostly error. We have to be honest with ourselves about our shortcomings. And yet, be happy enough with our little successes to try to fix our shortcomings the next time we set out to create our art. It’s a journey, not a destination.

Big Pine Bend in my watercolor style of painting

For me, the criteria I judge my writing and painting on, are my own tastes. Period. Everyone else is welcome to their opinion, but for me, my opinion is the only one that counts. I will often come across writing advice that says that you need to get other people’s input, which I do. My wife will tell me if something seems wrong. But they also advise one to hire an editor, because you, as the writer, are too close to your work to see its flaws. This advice comes from a particular, and often unsaid mindset – that you are writing to reach a commercially viable audience – or at least you should be. A good editor knows what is selling in the fleeting moment, and will shape a manuscript to conform to the current tastes of the target audience so as to increase the chances of the book selling enough copies to make publishing it turn a profit on it. Which is all fine and dandy. Makes sense. Book publishing is a business, and business have to make money if they are to continue to be one.

Misty Morning in Crofthaven, in my impressionist style

However, I am not in the business of publishing books. I’m not in business at all. I’m terrible at business. As I said, I’m an artist. And what I seek to do is to bring my imaginary people and places to life in the imagination of other people through words and paintings. In doing so, I take the same approach to writing as I do to painting. I try to be critical of my work, and release the best book I reasonably can. Reasonably, in the sense that there are a hundred different ways of saying anything in English, and that on any given day, I know that I’ll prefer one way over the other ninety-nine. This means that I can never read more than a few pages of mine without wishing I’d said something better. However, if you are ever going to share a story, at some point you have to say, enough is enough. It is what it is. Release it, and hope to do better the next time.

Cealanda in my watercolor style, though in this I used acrylic paint on canvas

In addition to deciding when I’ve reached the point where I could fiddle with it forever without making it appreciably better, I also make decisions about what I want to tell, and how. Since I am not in the business of writing, I’m not concerned about how to make my stories appeal to the most people. Instead, I tell the stories the way I think my first person narrator would tell them. For example, in A Summer in Amber, I have two chapters devoted to weekend trips – a bicycle tour and an overnight sail. Neither chapter advances the main plot one iota. At best they can be considered world building. However, they remain in my story because I enjoyed writing the character Red Stuart, who is featured in those chapters, and secondly, because my narrator, Sandy Say, is writing essentially a “what I did on my summer vacation” story, would certainly have include those adventures in his story, since they were part of that memorable summer. All of my stories have that same priority – they are told by a character in that story, and told in a manner that character would tell the story. As such, they include things that the character would include in his telling – regardless of what an editor employed to take a creative work and make a product out of it, would think of it.

Crescent Park Study 2 in my impressionist style

And perhaps I should add here, that I write, as I paint, by instinct and, I would like to believe, talent.  I am always amazed when I hear authors talk about their books as engineering projects, with all sorts of standard components placed in standard patterns. Every component of the story is engineered to produce a desired effect. Not that I'm criticizing that approach, I'm just saying that I can't think of a story in that way, at least not in the detail they work with. I take a much more organic approach to a story. 

However, writers, like myself, live in a sort of golden age. Ebooks, the internet, and self publishing has allowed me and millions of other people to tell our stories. Now, many, but by no means, all, of those stories are written as products to sell. And many, if not most of those products, are really bad products. Still, as I said, there are those of us who simply have imaginary stories that we want to bring to a life outside of our imaginations. And judged on that basis, there are no bad stories. What counts is that journey from our imagination into the world, not the number of destinations it arrives at. Being creative is what matters.

Side Note

I've illustrated this post with several of my paintings in my two main styles of painting. I started painting regularly (50 paintings a year or so) using ink and watercolors 1992. They are of an imaginary country, Cealanda, that I, as the painter, rambled around in painting what I saw. I suspect that my paintings in this style are several times (or more) more popular than my impressionist paintings. I turned to oil and acrylic paints when I started selling paintings in 2003, as they command more money than watercolors. I found it hard to paint in thick paints, and at 53, I didn't have time to start over again. Luckily I always like impressionist paintings, so I adopted that style as my own. I think my impressionist works are better than my watercolors. I've painted a thousand of them, even though maybe only one person in a hundred (who appreciate art) really appreciates them. Like in my writing, I get to decide what is good and want isn't. Not the market. And the best of them are good.

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon -- 19 November 2020

 

My latest novel, The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon will be released on 19 November 2020 as a free ebook on Smashwords, Apple, Kobo, B & N, and Google. It will be priced at $.99 on Amazon. Free is my preferred price, but hey, it's worth a buck. It will be up for pre-order on Amazon shortly.

"I signed aboard the Tzaritsa Moon as her second engineer. I ended up a toaster repairman. I was very lucky." -- Rafe d'Mere from The Secret of the Tzarist Moon

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon marks the long awaited return to the Nine Star Nebula of the Bright Black Sea. This story takes place in the Alantzia star system, the most remote of the eight star systems. The Alantzia system is rather infamous for its many little worlds, moons, and rocks that are reputed to be more like the “lawless” drift worlds than the staid worlds of the Unity.

Old spaceers convinced Rafe d’Mere that to fully appreciate the exotic romance of the Alantzian experience, he needed to ship out on one of the small planet traders which call on the eccentric little worlds of the system. So he did, signing aboard the Tzaritsa Moon, under the name Rye Rylr, as her second engineer.

On the passage to Fairwaine, Rafe’s swift response on discovering a dangerous hot spot on the ship’s no. 7 plasma injector tube saved the Tzaritsa Moon. And his life. However, the flaw was deliberate, part of a pirate prince’s plant to keep the Tzaritsa Moon from arriving in Fairwaine orbit. And when it did, thanks to Rafe, the pirate prince was not happy. At best, Rafe might expect his memory of the incident to be erased. Erasing Rafe would, however, work just as well.

So Rafe decided that he needed to get clear of the Tzaritsa Moon and get very lost on Fairwaine until things cooled down. However, in doing so, he crossed orbits with a thief. A girl with a pretty face, who may, or may not, have been a covert agent of the Patrol. She was rather evasive on that point. But she was determined to discover why the pirate prince wanted the Tzaritsa Moon destroyed. And Rafe found that he couldn’t resist helping her to do so. She had a pretty face.

The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon is a cozy SF mystery adventure. It features Rafe d’Mere, ex-Patrol contraband suppression and repair tech, now a spaceer engineer, and Vaun Di Ai, who seems to be a Patrol Lieutenant JG, Intelligence Analyst 2, who had, somehow, escaped her desk job to be an acting covert agent. The story is set mostly on the moon of Fairwaine, and in one of its old fashioned, nonconforming societies. One that uses toasters to make toast.

Five and One Half Years in Self Publishing

 

Time flies, and so, once again, it’s time to report my May 2020 through October 2020 results.

I release two new stories in the last six months. The first was Lines in the Lawn, an illustrated children’s short story via Smashwords only. It was something I had laying around for a decade and I decided to get it out. The second new release was a novella, Keiree. Currently it is a stand alone story, but I hope to build on it, to eventually roll it into a novel.

Sales Numbers

As usual, almost all of the sales are free ebooks sold through Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, B & N, and Google. My books are also available on Kobo but they do not report free sales to Smashwords, plus some are also listed on other sites that offer free books as well.

Book Title / Release Date	1H 2020 Sales	Total Sale To date
A Summer in Amber 23 April 2015	371	7,589
Some Day Days 9 July 2015	163	4,016
The Bright Black Sea 17 Sept 2015	542	13,036
Castaways of the Lost Star 4 Aug 2016	Withdrawn	2,176
The Lost Star’s Sea 13 July 2017	440	6,423
Beneath the Lanterns 13 Sept 2018	253	2,493
Sailing to Redoubt 15 March 2019	221	1,825
Prisoner of Cimlye 2 April 2020	240	485
Lines in the Lawn* 8 June 2020	55	55
Keiree* 18 Sept 2020	174	174
Total Six Month Sales * New releases.	2,219	38,275

For comparison sake, for the same time period last year I sold 4,590 books, without the last three books on this chart. So last year I sold a little over twice as many books last year as I did this year. Last year, however, was unexpectedly, my best year ever.

For this time period my sales split between Amazon, Google, and Smashwords (including sales on Apple and B & N) works out like this:

Amazon 35%

Smashwords (Apple & B & N) 39%

Google 26%

Last year, 1 Nov 2019 the breakdown was,

Amazon 39%

Smashwords 52%

Google 9%

If we look at sales this past month, October 2020, the split looks like this:

Amazon (15%)

Smashwords (54%)

Google (31%)

The numbers show that my Amazon sales are fading. Smashwords is, more or less holding steady (though half of what it was in 2019), but Google has come through to pick up some of the slack. My goal is to sell at least 300 books a month, as so far I’m clearing that bar, though it takes more books in my catalog to do so.

Back in May, in my 5^th annual report, I wrote that I did not expect 2020 to be a banner year. Indeed, I had not expected 2019 to be a banner year either, but it turned out to be one. However, this time around, it’s looking like I’ll be right. The first half hasn’t been terrible, but it is definitely off last year’s pace.

Headwinds

As I see it, there are two things outside of my control that are weighing on my sales. The first is that it seems that Amazon no longer feels the need to match prices. While my older books are still free, my newer books are not. I’ve made the usual efforts to get them to match the free price of the other ebook stores, but even if successful, that only lasts for a couple of weeks before they’re back to full price.

Now, $.99 is a cheap price, and I do sell some at that price, but free sells much better. Unfortunately, Amazon accounts for something like 70% or more of the ebook market, so this new policy bites into my sales.

The second drag on my sales is the way that the ebook market has evolved. Five years ago, ebook advocates were talking about how ebooks would come to dominate the market for books, making paper books extinct. This is clearly not the case now, nor will it be for the foreseeable future. Ebooks have evolved to dominate some types of genre fiction, like romance, and SFF, which were formally served by pulp magazines, mass market paperbacks, and libraries. And in those categories they cater to to a very special type of reader, the avid reader. These readers want and expect books to reliably deliver what they expect them to deliver, like the fans of Big Macs, which are expected to taste the same no matter where you consume it. Ebooks are, in short, have become the fast food of books.

This is, of course, a legitimate market. And nice work, if you can get it. But it takes more than books to get in it. These days it takes thousands of dollars of advertising, and a large, established readership that an indie-publisher can bet those thousands of dollars of advertising on. Pay to play, as they say. Just as with Etsy, where the local handmade goods market evolved into handmade goods from the sweatshops of China, the author self-publisher has evolved in a similar way. Today, the best selling books are produced by the entrepreneur publisher who either works 16 hours a day to write, manage advertising on a daily basis, hire editors, cover artists, and manage the business in general. Or they may simply be publishers who hire others to do all these tasks, including writing, in order to produce a dependable stream of, good-enough Big Mac type books to feed their customers in the Kindle Unlimited all-you-can-read buffet.

I have no desire to be on that treadmill. Better them than me, is pretty much my attitude. But the downside of this evolution is that unless a writer is producing and spending big money promoting their Big Mac books, the market is for ebooks is deceptively shallow these days. I’m lucky to have gotten into self publishing when I did, as I doubt that I’d be able to give away 38,000 books in five and half years on a zero advertising budget if I was starting today. My initial experiment was to see if I could use free books to build an audience and a presence large enough that I could some day, if I cared to, charge money for my books. I have to say that, given the way the market has evolved, the answer seems to be no. Fortunately for me, it was an academic experiment, so I can’t, and am not complaining.

Looking Ahead

I will be releasing my next novel, a cozy SF mystery/adventure, The Secret of the Tzaritsa Moon, either this month or in early December. I’m planning on starting a second cozy SF mystery/adventure with the same characters this month, with a target release date of late February or early March. I may decide to release Lines in the Lawn on Amazon. And I have another small project of short-short stories and cartoons dealing with robots that I might work on at some point as well in the next six months. I’ve got nothing better to do these days than write, so as long as I have ideas, I’ll be writing, if not selling a ton of books.