I have been putting pen to paper since the age of thirteen with various levels of success. Apart from my regular job, I took to freelance writing in 2005. This entailed various odd content related stuff like website content, marketing collateral, brochures etc. In 2005 I decided to seriously write a book. In fact, I have had always wanted to write a novel but it never materialized. Some got abandoned after the title selection and some after a few pages. It took me close to 4 years to write Have a Pleasant Journey, my first book. I started writing Have a Pleasant Journey in 2005 and had to fight distractions like affairs, jobs and marriage (not in that order) to complete it in the latter half of 2009.
Publishing experience:
Now that I look back, the easiest part of the entire exercise was writing the book. Getting it published was a different ballgame altogether.
I had completed the first draft in Oct 2009. I was so tired of getting it finished that I wanted to get it out of my system. I wanted to get this done and move on. But before I could send the manuscript to the publishers, I wanted to check whether this story was worth reading. The easiest way was to give a printed copy each to my wife and a friend for reading it. I told them not to pay attention to grammar and/or typos. I wish I had not given them that brief. After I got their feedback, I started off with the editing. There was a problem with this though. I was so acclimatized with what I had written over the years that I was overlooking all the mistakes.
I should have edited, re-written, re-edited and re-written some more before I submitted the manuscript to publishers and literary agencies. Not that my chances of getting published were affected by the substandard language (I had read bad books in terms of language and grammar making their presence felt in bookstores), I just wanted to deliver a book which was in proper English. How difficult could that be, you ask?
Well, quite difficult if you ask me.
I found out that it is very difficult to write a book without making any mistakes and even more difficult to find those out alone. The typos that creep in during the writing process are always very difficult to find by the author. My suggestion would be to take help from people who know their English. In the 8 rounds of editing that my book went through, I managed to find hundreds of mistakes. This continued till the time it finally went into print.
I was so excited at having completed the manuscript that I sent it out to all publishing houses after a couple of rounds of cursory editing. I later realized that the manuscript had huge holes in the plot interspersed with in-your-face grammatical and typographical errors. It was no surprise that the manuscript was rejected by many. If I read the book again after a year or so, I am sure to find a few hundred more mistakes. That’s the power of editing and re-editing.
After giving up on finding mistakes, I chose to go for professional help. Just as I was about to send out the manuscript to a professional copy editor, a publishing house showed interest and I dropped the editing idea. Bad choice, I’d say.
The publishing contract never materialized and I was left with my mistake-ridden manuscript. I went back to the MS Word document and read it word by word till I was convinced that I had pulled up every single word, sentence and punctuation mark that was guilty of making the book a badly-written one. I was happy with the result but alas it was too late. I had already sent out the “badly-written” book to the publishers.
Pursuing traditional publishers and literary agencies was quite interesting though. I started off by creating 4 documents:
- A proposal or covering letter
- A sample chapter document (1/3/5 chapter/s sample, based on specific publisher’s requirements)
- A synopsis of the story
- Author bio
After the book proposal along with the sample chapters and synopsis are sent, you wait. Yes, wait till you lose patience. It normally takes around 4-6 weeks for the publishers to get back with a response: positive or negative. If it is a direct rejection, you move on but if they show interest, don’t be too excited. You are not there yet.
If the publisher likes your synopsis and sample chapters, they might ask for the entire manuscript. The manuscript evaluation might take between 6 weeks to 6 months since a publishing house receives hundreds of proposals every day.
I started sending out the above documents to publishing houses and literary agencies. All this happened a month after I had completed the manuscript and 2 rounds of editing. I waited with bated breath for a response from any one of them.
The very first response came from a renowned Indian literary agency. The lady mentioned in her email that they had a first reading and appraisal fee depending on the word count of my manuscript which would give me a detailed feedback by the team of within eight weeks. She further mentioned that paying didn’t ensure the team accepting my work for representation. The reading fee came to 10K.
Nice start, I said to myself.
Then a call came from a publishing house. He said that they were willing to publish my book at a flat fee of 35K which included 20 free copies. I asked him whether those 20 copies would be the only ones in circulation. He said something profound that involved dreams, 20 copies and 35K in a single sentence. I still haven’t understood what he said. I never heard from him again.
Next came the rejections. They were short, sweet and invariably ended with wishes for my book finding another home. I was okay with rejections as they gave me a feeling of closure unlike some publishers who just wanted me to hang onto the edge. These were the ones who made me wait a week at a time till I lost all hope and patience.
My POD Journey
I have a flaw. I don’t have patience. If you want to get your book published by a traditional publisher, learn to have patience. Since I had already waited 7 months for the book to be accepted, I was not too keen to wait anymore. After researching on the subject, I zeroed in on Print on Demand or POD.
Print on demand (POD) as the name suggests is a service wherein a book is not printed until an order has been received and paid for. So, if there is a specific demand, the book would be printed. This ensures that there is no inventory or unsold stock. This also means a fixed cost per copy which is higher than offset printing. In offset printing, the setup cost (i.e. making the print plates) is higher but as the print runs are high, the overall cost comes cheaper than POD.
POD is not without its share of risks, the main being content quality. Anyone with a manuscript, irrespective of its content quality can go for POD and get a book published. If you will, POD is a form of self-publishing minus all the hassles.
In India ISBN (unique book identification number) is given out free. In my case, I could either have got myself an ISBN for my book and published it under my own name or taken help of POD experts. I opted for the latter as it was easier and simpler.
The following are the 2 most reliable POD service providers in India:
· Pothi
· CinnamonTeal
For authors who are outside India or who want to market their book outside India, here are a few options:
· Lulu
· TheBookPatch
· Xlibris
· Amazon’s CreateSpace
bloggers note too >>> www.essence-publishing.com
After some discussions with CinnamonTeal, I decided that this Goa based POD service provider was the one I would tie up with. This was in June 2010. My journey of becoming a published author had just started.
The entire process comprised of the following phases:
- Signing a standard author contract with the publisher
- Getting an ISBN allotted to the book
- Getting the cover page designed
- Laying out the manuscript for it to be print ready
- Printing
Just like traditional publishing, POD service providers ask you to submit your manuscript. You can either edit and proofread your manuscript yourself or engage the POD’s services to do the same. The book cover design comes next and finally the listing. Most POD service providers have their own online bookstore. The listing is free but it comes for a price (more on that later). Once the book gets listed, all one has to do is shop for it online. After the payment is confirmed, the publisher would go ahead and print a copy and ship it.
In my case, the above 5 took less than a month as I had already formatted my manuscript for a 5″x8″ book.
Show me the money:
The basic services of a POD provider are free. These include, ISBN allotment (in India at least it is) and book submission. Most of the POD service providers do not screen submissions but some do for language and the content. If you want to go beyond the basics (ISBN, printing, binding etc), and add proofreading, editing, formatting, cover design, marketing services, and the like, you will have to purchase these services separately. Now comes the second most trickiest and complicated part of getting a book published (I’ll talk about the No. 1 trickiest part later): Pricing the book.
Let’s discuss the cost price of the book first. I’ll discuss this with an example. Let’s suppose that the book is of 195 pages. At a rate of 60paise per page, the printing cost would come to Rs 117. Now you add the printing cost of the colored cover page and perfect binding, which is Rs 60. He is the lowdown, point wise:
- Cost of printing the book: Rs 117
- Cost of printing the cover page and binding: Rs 60
- Total cost price: Rs 177
So Rs 177 is the cost of 1 copy. Now comes the “author’s cut” or royalty. As an author who thinks that you have delivered your magnum opus, you would obviously want some of the book sales proceeds to come into your pocket. Fair enough! Now here’s the deal. It’s a trade off between low royalty (and higher volumes in terms of sale) or high royalty (which might result in low sales volume). I’ll leave it to you to decide how much is too much.
Now comes the price for listing and the commission. Yes you heard me correctly. The online book retailer takes his/her own commission for listing and selling the book. There are 3 options when it comes to retailing your book: the POD service provider’s online bookstore, 3rd party retailers (e.g. Indiaplaza, Flipkart etc.) and brick and mortar bookstores. Here’s how the pricing would work for the 3 options:
1. If you get your book listed on the POD service provider’s online bookstore, you will have to pay a commission of 20%. After the 20% is deducted you will have to pay for the printing cost of your book. After the printing cost is met, whatever remains will be your (authors) revenue.
- Suppose you price the book at Rs. 250, then after deducting the 20% commission the price will be Rs. 200. From this you will have to pay for the printing cost of your book which will be Rs. 200-177. So the author’s cut would be Rs 23.
- If you get your book listed on Indiaplaza and Flipkart, you will have to pay a commission of 45% and 40% respectively.
- If you want distributors to market your book to brick and mortar bookstores, they will distribute a minimum of 100 copies. These 100 books will have to be printed at the cost of the author. The author will have to offer a discount of 50% on the MRP of each book. Books will be on returnable basis. You can receive a count of your books at any time on request from the POD service provider.
Marketing the Book:
Now let me come to the trickiest (discussing this as promised earlier) part of self-publishing or going the POD way. It’s marketing. The downside of self-publishing or using the services of a POD service provider is the absence of marketing backbone. When I mean “absence”, I mean it is not free or at the cost of the publisher. In traditional publishing, the publisher pays for the marketing which includes press releases, book launches and author signing. In self-publishing or POD, it comes for a price and this comes out of the author’s pocket.
If you have the money, you can go a long way in getting publicity for your book and selling it (provided it’s worth reading). If you want free marketing, then you need to be smart. Not that I have sold billion copies and am a pro in this but I’m learning and trying.
So here are my two paisa on generating that buzz for you book that will get it sold and fly off the virtual online bookshelf.
- Get someone of importance to review your book. Good or bad, at least people will know about your book.
- Check and convince a bookstore to stock your book and offer free book reading sessions.
- Offer a monthly newsletter that has information about your books in particular and the publishing world in general.
- Offer sample chapters of your book for free.
- Print personalized business card with your book’s details and offer them to anyone interested.
- Network socially. This could be offline and online. Use the power of Internet to exploit the marketing buzz creating potential of Facebook, Orkut, Linkedin, Twitter etc. Believe me, doing this will result in creating and increasing the buzz at an exponential rate.
- Generate original content on the publishing industry and issues surrounding your book and publish them on your website, blog or ezine sites. You can even write on the aspects of being a published writer similar to this one.
- If everything fails and you have the money, hire a PR/marketing firm to publicize your book.
www.pamperrypr.com
At the end of the day, publicity or no publicity, marketing or no marketing, traditional or self-publishing, it is the quality of your book that will take it far or fall flat on its face. If your book is good, it will find a place in the reader’s bookshelf.
The tools:
We all have only one lifetime to achieve our dreams. If you want to see your book getting published during this lifetime, then you need to manage your time well. With all plot and sub-plot ideas, characters and settings, it is very easy to lose focus on your time lines.
As a first time writer, it is very important to deliberately and systematically measure and keep track of your progress.
There are a number of ways to track your progress. Some may use free tools available online to keep track of your daily word count and some may use spreadsheets. For keeping track of the progress on my first book, I had come up with a spreadsheet which automatically showed whether I was “On Track” or is the project “Delayed”. This spreadsheet might come in handy for any writer. Get in touch with me to get this spreadsheet. The cells have comments which would make user-input fairly easy.
At the end of the day, I’d say, it’s the journey which matters, not the destination. I suggest you never lose touch with the pleasure of writing. Write what you would like to read. Getting published is just a perk but the satisfaction you’d get by writing a book is something that can only be experienced to believe it.
All the best!
Having lived in Orissa, Jharkhand and Maharashtra, Pijush Gupta is currently based in Hyderabad. An MBA from Xavier Institute of Management, Pijush has been in the IT industry for more than 7 years with experience ranging from consulting to product management.
When not working on the computer to write articles, blogs and notes-to-self, he enjoys painting, carpentry, sculpting and many other diversions. Have a Pleasant Journey is his first novel.
Find out more about his work and life by checking his website http://www.pigtale.co.in, where he blogs infrequently.
