Tag Archives: publishing

From proof sheets to royalty reports: what a self-published book can earn

A client just asked what she could plan on making per copy of her book — she’s trying to put together a budget, which is always an excellent idea. Well, I talked earlier about the costs of preparing a book for publication, but hey! We know your book is going to sell, right? So what should we plan on in the revenue column?

I thought it might be helpful to share my response to her, to give you an idea of what a book might actually bring in (per copy — how many copies sell is entirely up to you).

The numbers I gave her are based on these assumptions:

  • The book is going to be self-published (so the author will the person going to Amazon’s KDP and Createspace subsidiaries, and to Ingram’s Lightning Source or IngramSpark)
  • The book in question is going to run approximately 350 pages (black ink on white paper), will have a trim size of 6″ x 9″, and will be “perfect” bound (the standard paperback binding)

Here’s my response: Continue reading From proof sheets to royalty reports: what a self-published book can earn

New Guest Post: Best Ebook Marketing Tip EVER

I was working on this site recently when I had a bit of a revelation: the people who read a book all of the way to the end are precisely the people most motivated to review, FB-post, Tweet, Pin, etc. about it, thus sharing their experience with their friends, a group of people who may never have heard of your book, but who will take seriously a mention by your reader.

Better than any advertising you could pay for!

And web sites have been taking advantage of this truth for years — which has led to the ubiquitous bars of buttons that make it as easy as possible to share a web page (or product or…) with your nearest and dearest.

My revelation was that, since an ebook is merely a highly specialized web page, I should include a set of just those sorts of links at the end of each book: links to review the book on the bookseller’s site, on Goodreads, or on my own site, or to post something about the book to Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest.

Joel Friedlander posted my article on his wonderful resource for small and self-pubishers, The Book Designer, as Six Things You Should Be Including in Your Ebook (and Probably Aren’t)

Of Ebooks and Audio and Editing

Revising, reworking, removing by mpclemons/flickr.com. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Self-publishing doesn’t mean having to do everything by yourself!

Stillpoint Digital Press is proud to serve not only as a publisher of fine ebook, audiobook, and print editions, but also as a provider of quick, affordable, and professional ebook conversion and design, audiobook production, and editorial services.

We have helped small presses, agencies, and self-publishers to produce the books they want to create, and we’d love to work with you!

Contact us for an estimate today. For more information about our services, read on: Continue reading Of Ebooks and Audio and Editing

Spreadsheets to Galleys: How to Budget Your Self-Published Book

New Year, New Spreadsheets by SaraE

After I wrote recently about why self-publishers need to use professional editors, a number of folks emailed and commented, asking just how much such an endeavor would cost. It was a tough question to answer — I know what I would charge for many services, but it’s difficult to say what the market cost might be, especially for services that I myself don’t regularly provide. Understandably, some correspondents were anxious, wondering if they should jump in, not knowing what the whole process might cost.

This week on PBS.org, Miral Sattar, CEO of the publishing-services marketplace site BiblioCrunch, posted what I found to be a quite thorough rundown of what it might cost to put a self-published book through as professional as possible a publishing process.

She posited a fairly typical book, weighing in at around 70,000 words. She made no further stipulations — fiction vs. non-fiction, for example, or thoroughly workshopped, researched, and rewritten (I was obsessed about the need to rewrite my essay as a student, still remember) vs. hastely pulled together. The style, genre, and initial quality of the prose do make a huge difference in terms of the kind and amount of editorial work that needs to be done, obviously. Ms. Sattar was trying to explore a median case.

She based her standards and pricing on the Editorial Freelancers Association’s posted rate sheet, which is as close to an industry standard as exists.

Here in brief is Sattar’s rundown (each entry has a low and a high end estimate):

(null)

Stillpoint Partners with Sixteen Rivers Press

Sixteen Rivers Press Logo

As National Poetry Month comes to a close, Stillpoint Digital is proud to be able to announce that we are partnering with poetry collective Sixteen Rivers Press. Not only will we create ebooks with them, but Stillpoint will serve as their online store and distributor. 100% of all Sixteen Rivers net sales will be paid to the award-winning collective. It seems appropriate to us, as a company whose name is drawn from a T.S. Eliot poem!
Continue reading Stillpoint Partners with Sixteen Rivers Press

In Which David Is Transported….

Dutch Flag

to Holland, and to Poetry-land, wherever that may be!

First, in a very new experience for me, I found that my article on editing, which went a bit viral on Huffington Post, has been translated into Dutch.

Wow.

Go, internet!

Second, in another first, Uvi Poznansky, who wrote the recently-released Stillpoint audiobook A Favorite Son (and whose audiobook for Apart from Love I’ve just finished editing — woohoo!) wrote a… um… poem about me.

Now, my mom’s a poet (and I’ll have more to say on that subject another time), so I’ve shown up in poems before before. Still. None (so far as I know) about me. This was incredibly touching. Here’s the poem, if you’d like to read it:

Ode to the Great Kudler

Seven Deadly Myths and Three Inspired Truths About Book Editing

Reworking, rewriting, removing by mpclemons, used through a Creative Commons license

I originally wrote this as a guest post for Joel Friedlander’s wonderful self-publishing resource site TheBookDesigner.com; it sparked a lot of great conversation and feedback, and it occurred to me that the information might be of interest to a more general readership. If you’ve ever groaned at typos, continuity errors, plot holes or just plain bad writing in a book or blog post, here’s my prescription:

I’ve edited lots of books — children’s books, fantasy, memoirs, self-help, textbooks, and especially books about myths. Myths? I like myths. Heck, I love myths — if we’re talking about myths as “great poems, [that] point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a presence or eternity that is whole and entire in each.”*

If we’re talking about myths in the more negative sense of “untruths,” however, I like them less — especially if they’re myths about my profession and vocation.

Myths and Misinformation about Book Editing

There’s a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about editors and what they do. Here are seven of those myths that I’d like to clear up:

Myth #1: A good writer doesn’t need an editor.

In these days of self-publication and “service” publishers — who take a percentage of sales for letting the author do all of the work — you hear this a lot. “I’ve slaved over this manuscript for years. I checked it through a hundred times. Microsoft Word’s Spelling and Grammar comes up clean. It’s ready for publication.”

Want an example of a professional book from a world-class author who convinced her publishers to put out the book as-is, without a deep developmental edit (see #3 below)? Look at J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Pretty good book, and it’s sold millions of copies, absolutely — but it’s at least a hundred pages longer than it needs to be. There’s needless repetition, uneven pacing, and side-plots that go nowhere. You’ll notice that the previous and subsequent books in the bestselling series were much shorter and much tighter. Rowling worked more closely with her editors.

Here’s the fact: if you want your book to be strong, clean, professional, and appealing, for it to affect the readers as you want it to affect them, you need to have it professionally edited. There’s never been a text written that didn’t need editing. By the time you’ve spent weeks, months, or years on a project, you can’t see the words any more. You can see the ideas — the concepts, arguments, plot, and characters — but not every word that’s on the page, or that isn’t, or where there are gaping holes in logic or jumps in style. An editor will. It’s what they’re paid to do. Continue reading Seven Deadly Myths and Three Inspired Truths About Book Editing

Kids and teens are reading books — but how do they find them?

The Seven Gods of Luck by David KudlerIn a discussion about children’s ebooks on the LinkedIn group Ebooks, Ebook Readers, Digital Books, and Digital Content, two threads emerged that I thought were very interesting: first of all, children’s and young adult books are selling (up 22% in 2012); second of all, someone raised the question of how to encourage kids themselves to review books.

This second point raised a question for me — how do kids find out about books these days? My memory of how it worked back in the pre-digital age was that I’d notice when a friend was carrying a book whose cover I didn’t recognize. So… how do kids find out about/tell each other about books in the twenty-first century? Though paper-and-ink books are still selling well to kids and teens, ebooks are as well, in which case there aren’t any covers to show. (For many readers, this is a positive — no need to show off those embarrassing bodice-ripper or scantily-clad-sword-maiden covers.)

How do the kids you know find out about books? Word of mouth? On-line forums/social networks? Do you know of any good sites where kids exchange opinions on what they’ve read?

I’m posting a poll on the blog page of my site — so you can comment here, post an answer there — or both!

Lend Me Your Ears: Stillpoint Produces Audiobooks

Confessions of a Sex Maniac
and The Seven Gods of Luck
now available as audiobooks
(Visit Stillpoint’s page on Audible.com or see below for details)

When I started Stillpoint Digital Press, my intention was to focus on the growing field of ebook production and distribution.

A funny thing happened on the way to the iBookstore. Actually, several funny things.

Continue reading Lend Me Your Ears: Stillpoint Produces Audiobooks

Seven Gods of Luck Available Now!

The Seven Gods of Luck – Now Available!

Limited-Time Special Offer:
Print, Ebook and Audiobook for $23.95 $9.99!

Stillpoint Releases Classic Folktale

November 1, 2012 – Stillpoint Digital Press announces the release of the fifteenth anniversary edition of the picturebook retelling of the classic Japanese folktale, The Seven Gods of Luck by David Kudler with illustrations by Linda Finch. Set during O-Shogatsu, the Japanese New Year festival, The Seven Gods of Luck is a magical holiday tale of generosity rewarded.
Continue reading Seven Gods of Luck Available Now!