Following on from last week where we disputed Ros Barber’s out-of-date notions for not self-publishing, here are more reasons for self-publishing according to an article written by Hazel Butler for the Huffington Post.

It is possible to self-publish on a small budget, Butler says, but producing a quality book and effectively marketing it does take a lot of time and expense so this is something to bear in mind.

But Butler’s top five reasons for self-publishing are:

Control – when you self-publish you have complete control over every aspect of your project, from the cover to the marketing, to the editing. Traditional publishing houses will expect you to re-write copy and make changes. This may well improve your book, but can often be simply for commercial reasons.

Being True to Your Book – the changes that publishing houses often ask for, Butler states in her article, might require compromises you are not willing to make, such as drastic cuts to the word count or changing whole elements which aren’t viewed as suitable for main stream publishing. Such changes can change the very nature of the book.

Royalties – self-publishing allows for greater royalties, everything left after the costs of the production of the book. Of course, traditional publishing houses (and especially the large ones) are in more of a position to facilitate higher sales – but that’s not guaranteed.

Profile – if you self-publish a book, you boost the profile of your business, whether that’s being an author, a writer, a blogger or just a professional in any capacity who publishes a book relating to their industry.

Time – traditional publishing takes an age. It can be a long, long time until your book hits the shelves. Smart self-publishers often build on the momentum created by a first or second book, knowing that voracious readers will devour books if they find a writer that they like. A book shouldn’t be rushed, but there is a lot to be said for setting your own timescale.

Adorn your thinking caps - it's Friday and we are looking for entries for our Friday Flash fiction.

It's not a competition (well, we do prefer well-written stories obviously and they must be original) - just a space where you can hone your writing and editing skills by composing a story in 100 words or less.

Stuck for inspiration? Try the news, look around you, come up with some satire or take off on a complete flight of fancy involving space travel, other planets, dragons and Tao-ist cats. (All of the latter-mentioned have created some very entertaining threads on our Friday Flash Fiction discussion group on LinkedIn.)

Submit your entries here. 

This week’s roundup of self-publishing news included an article in the Guardian by writer Ros Barber, in which she listed the reasons why self-publishing was not for her.

Opinions are fair enough and each writer’s path to publication is different. The reaction to Ms Barber’s column was somewhat predictable – there were many comments, mainly from those who self-publish, disputing in detail every single one of Ms Barber’s reasons for not self-publishing.

Nick Spalding, one of self-publishing huge success stories, joined in with a comment, saying that obviously such a feature required a companion piece by a self-published author relating why he or she* would not go down the route of traditional publishing route.

[Please write it Mr Spalding – we look forward to what we are sure will be an informed and witty piece.]

While Comely Bank Publishing is always open to different opinions and not all of the (extremely articulate) arguments for self-publishing that were put forward by the commentators convinced, the article did seem rather out of date, generalist and inaccurate in places.

Here are some of Ms Barber’s arguments and our counter-arguments:

You have to forget writing for a living – Ms Barber claims as a self-published writer, you are going to be marketing for your living, not writing putting that figure at 10/90 percent split. We’d be interested to know where she got this precise figure from. Applications for agents (and presumably that elusive publication deal) often ask prospective authors what marketing activities they can do and what their social media following is.

Gatekeepers are saving you from your own ego. With a rather peculiar cabinet-maker metaphor, Ms Barber claims that modern-day publishers (the gatekeepers) will not sell your cabinet if it’s rubbish and doesn’t work properly. Seriously? As many of the commentators on the piece pointed out – the ultimate gatekeeper is the buying public and if they buy your book in sufficient numbers.

Talent, quality and craftsmanship (womanship) is no indicator of what will sell, nor does it indicate that your book will be published by one of the big publishing houses.

Here at Comely Bank Publishing, we are a publishing co-operative. We work with each other, reading and critiquing each others’ books, and making suggestions for improvements. We insist on professional proof-reading (some of us have been lucky enough to find exceptional proof-readers among our friends and family) and professional type-setting and covers. Then we award the CBP stamp.

You can forget Hay Festival and the Booker. “Self-published books are not eligible for major prizes like the Baileys, the Costa and the Man Booker”. Oops, Ms Barber – this year’s Bailey’s longlist did include a self-published book. The tide’s turning.

Self-publishing can make you look like a fool. Ms Barber complains about those self-published writers who spend their lives promoting their own or other self-published books. A lot of them do this, but a lot of them don’t – and a lot of traditionally published authors do this (and a lot of them don’t). Choose your Twitter followers wisely.

One can’t help feeling that Ms Barber has also indulged in the very behaviour she complains about. The why I wouldn’t self-publish column is certainly attracting plenty of publicity. Unashamedly blatant marketing behaviour? Almost certainly.

You risk looking like an amateur. Ms Barber extols the benefits of traditional publishing where one is aided by editors, proof-readers, professional cover designers, marketers and more. Again, this seems a rather out-of-date argument. See above for our point about what authors published through Comely Bank Publishing do in order to achieve professional books.

You can pay for those services and many self-published authors do, seeing it an investment and part of the learning curve. And then they pay the fees – fees that they regard as the equivalent of what traditionally-published authors pay their agents and publishing houses. Except they are going to get greater royalties.
  
*Despite the general consensus that ‘they’ is now de rigeur for the singular, CBP can’t yet get behind it.

Good e-reader published an article this week stating that nearly two-thirds of children will always want to read print books, even though there are ebooks available.

Research conducted by BookTrust, in association with the Open University, revealed that 76 percent of surveyed parents found their children prefer print books for reading for pleasure and 69 percent prefer print books for educational reading.

For interactive e-books, only 30 percent of parents said that their child prefers using them for reading for pleasure, and 34 percent for educational reading. Some 15 percent of parents said that children prefer using simple e-books for reading for pleasure and educational reading.

In the Good ereader article, literacy advocate and teacher Donna Rasmussen thinks children prefer print books because “we are tactile creatures” and that people do creative things with books that they can’t with e-books.

The Book Trust study found that reasons for preferring print books over e-books were that children enjoyed turning the book’s pages, owning their own book and choosing the books from the library.

Missing your fix of Our Best Attention? Author Jane Tulloch has turned her talents to another short story - marking Easter.

In Jock's Instant Sunshine you'll find the good characters of Murrays Department Store (a department store of distinction in Edinburgh) you remember be-moaning a spring that so far isn't proving to be terribly inspiring. What on earth will cheer them up?

You don't need to have read Our Best Attention to enjoy the story, however - and if you do like the short story remember that you can buy Our Best Attention straight from our bookstore. (If you go through Amazon, unfortunately we lose out on a substantial part of the costs for books, despite the fact that we store and send out all of our books). 

Our Best Attention tells the story of Murrays shop and is set during the 1970s. It brings together a diverse cast of young and old characters working their way through all kinds of situations, some funny and some tragic. The book has been something of a best-seller so far and is proving very popular with its readers. 

Author Jane Tulloch is currently working on her sequel to the first book. Stay tuned to keep up to date with our publications schedules for this and other Comely Bank Publishing books.

Download the free pdf Jock's Instant Sunshine to find out more about Murrays..

Self-publishing is THE smart business decision, according to a recent article in Tampa Bay’s Creative Loafing news site.

The piece, written by author and oil worker Jonathan Kile, highlights the death of the narrative, “you can’t find and publisher then you self-publish”. He quotes successful self-publisher Hugh Howey, whose opinion is that self-publishing is simply a more viable path to earning a living and reaching readers than sending out query letters to agents.

Self-published authors need to take pride in the route they have taken, Kile says. You should tell your smirking cocktail party friends that self-publishing has a better ROI should they smirk when you tell them you self-published.
The most successful self-published books are romance and science fiction (Kile reckons that people read romance “like crazy” and there is a direct relationship between the number of cats romance readers have and the number of books they buy in a week.)

[Editor’s note: Er… guilty as charged.]

Kile finishes off his piece by saying that you can’t write something good. You start by writing something that isn’t very good because the first draft is going to sound “like it was written by Rick Scott’s speech writer” or it’s like the first coat of paint in a room, but nothing happens until you get that first coat done.

​He also advocates writing the ending first so that it gives you something to write to and makes it harder to get lost along the way.

See the full article here. Picture thanks to the PD Pics website. 
 

A self-published author has been long listed for the Bailey’s women’s prize for fiction.

Becky Chambers’ debut novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (the story is about a ship of wormhole builders who travel the galaxy making holes in space) was funded through Kickstarter. Chambers asked crowdfunders to help her finish writing her novel and secured the $2,500 (£1,750) she needed to do so. She has since landed a deal with Hodder & Stoughton.

Some 20 novels have been longlisted for the prize - £300,000. Past winners include Zadie Smith and Lionel Shriver. This year’s longlist has also attracted a large number of debut novels (11 in total) – the highest number since 2000. Included on the long list is Jackie Copleton’s A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding.
​
Judge and novelist Elif Shafak said the longlist had a mix of debut writers and well-established names (Kate Atkinson’s book, A God In Ruins is one of them) – and it showed that you didn’t have to set out with a big publishing company.

Customers who order our books through Amazon might be dismayed to know that surprisingly little of what you pay actually goes to us, or to the author. (Remember that every penny paid to Comely Bank Publishing is passed on to the author.)

I was checking our accounts tonight and discovered that Amazon now take around 40% of the purchase price of your book – sometimes slightly more, sometimes slightly less. For that, they... well, they don't do a lot, really. There's no nice bookshop where you can see the book you're buying first. Bookshops also have to stock our nice books until you have the pleasure of finding them. All Amazon do is tell us to send the book to you then take a hefty share.

That share seems to have got a lot heftier recently, too. I think they'll claim this is something to do with tax in Luxemburg (ironic given Amazon's tax-paying records) but whatever the reason, you, and we, are being ripped off. So much so that it looks like we can no longer afford to give customers the big discounts that we offer at the moment. What we do is to reduce the price by the postage cost, but once Amazon removes its 40%, we're left with almost nothing to cover our costs. And so, from 1st March 2016, we're going to have to ask customers to pay the postage charges for some books if you order through Amazon. We'll continue to supply bookstores as before.

On the other hand, if you buy direct from us, we'll continue to offer the prices post-free. And watch out for special offers, and book groups in particular should buy from us – we really will try to give them a good deal. In fact, buying direct from us seems quite a good idea genrally, all things considered. You know where we are...

​Want to get your mum a present she'll really love this Mother's Day? Why not bag a book bargain from Comely Bank Publishing!

Choose from Four Old Geezers and a Valkyrie by Gordon Lawrie, The Man from Outremer by TD Burke, Katie and the Deelans by Emma Baird or Our Best Attention by Jane Tulloch. You can buy any of the four titles here. 

Other books we rate here at Comely Bank Publishing and which would also make excellent choices this Mother's Day are:

A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding by Jackie Copleton. When Amaterasu Takahashi opens the door of her Philadelphia home to a badly scarred man claiming to be her grandson, she doesn’t believe him. Her grandson and her daughter, Yuko, perished nearly forty years ago during the bombing of Nagasaki.

But the man carries with him a collection of sealed private letters that open a Pandora’s Box of family secrets Ama had sworn to leave behind when she fled Japan. She is forced to confront her memories of the years before the war: of the daughter she tried too hard to protect and the love affair that would drive them apart, and even further back, to the long, sake-pouring nights at a hostess bar where Ama first learned that a soft heart was a dangerous thing.

Will Ama allow herself to believe in a miracle?

A God In Ruins by Kate Atkinson. A God in Ruins relates the life of Teddy Todd – would-be poet, heroic World War II bomber pilot, husband, father, and grandfather – as he navigates the perils and progress of the 20th century. 

For all Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge will be to face living in a future he never expected to have.

​After You by Jo Jo Moyes - the much anticipated sequel to Me Before You and a very worthy sequel it is too.

Perseverance and not being afraid of failure are two of the tips offered by a self-published success story in an online article this week.

Publishers Weekly features an interview with Andres Quintero, the author of Hairy Harold & His Extraordinary Trip to New York, a book that was billed as an “impressive debut” by the publication.

The book was crowdfunded, although the author admits that if he’d known how difficult it was at the time he wouldn’t have done it this way.

His advice to other self-published authors is to:

• Get feedback from the audience – share your story with as many people as you can and make sure to ask them for their honest feedback – however painful this might be.
• First spread the word about your book and then start crowdfunding. You should only crowdfund through Face book if you have 600 or more friends – and be prepared not to crowdfund again for at least another couple of years.
• Persevere and don’t be afraid of failure. You’re never going to get things right the first time, he says.