Writers in the Storm

Kathryn Craft

Turning Whine Into Gold

As writers, we are used to making choices on behalf of our characters. As characters in our own life stories, though, we also make choices. We set a goal, pursue it until we come to a fork in the road, and then deal with the changes and challenges this new direction brings to our lives.

Hands down, the goal that inspires the most rabid pursuit among writers is to see their work through to publication. Note “rabid.” Since rabies is an infectious disease that creates unquenchable thirst and madness, and the treatment is painful, it behooves us to look at our choices in a healthy way.

First, let’s be clear: despite the rancor often found on the front between the indie vs traditional camps, this is publishing, not war. No one is holding a gun to your head. You have entered this publication story’s plot of your own accord and can leave at any time.

You always have a choice.

In fact, the number of publishing choices for authors nowadays is unprecedented, a fact that in itself is anxiety producing! People bank on the fact that each choice will lead to “King”-sized income and best-sellerdom. It could—I’m not trying to take that dream away from anyone. Heck, I have that dream too! But let’s look at the cold, hard math:

(Assuming: same # of readers consuming same # of books)

divided by

(unprecedented # of authors getting published in an unprecedented # of ways)

= fewer readers per author.

No amount of wishful thinking can change that math.

Oh, but we want to blame someone for it, don’t we? This is where disease sets in.

But there’s an antidote for the soul-rot caused by blame. I covered the first steps to take beyond emotional reaction last month, so we could deal with our anger before spewing it all over social media. But when met with an unexpected plot twist we aren’t just going to sit in the road adapting while any old truck comes down the pike to hit us, are we? Heck no—this is our career we’re talking about.

When change provides new information, we must choose again.

How quickly we disempower ourselves by saying we “had” to go in a certain direction! If you are one who is “defaulting” to self-publishing, what you are doing is deciding to put yourself out of the misery of waiting, and choosing to take on the misery of an outcome that was less than your goal. Think of the word “de-fault”: it sounds like there’s blame hiding in there, doesn’t it?

After owning a few small businesses, I know that disempowerment is not the foundation you want to build on. You are the brand, and people want to believe in you. Being an author requires an entrepreneurial spirit, self-published or not, and to think otherwise is to live in another century.

Incontrovertible truth: You will never be able to drive forward while looking back!

There is no reason to park your creativity at the door when it comes to your publishing choices. After all, even a fork in the road has many tines, right? A choice isn’t always either/or. The language of “choice” will empower you. Here’s an example, using the self-pub default example:

I can’t get an agent/I’m too old to wait for an agent. I’ll have to self-publish.

• You could choose to stand firm and continue to submit the same, always-improving project to agents in other geographic areas.

• You could choose to start a new project and resubmit to see if agents deem it more marketable (once an offer comes through, multiple completed projects are a huge bonus—and in the time it takes to write the new novel, a new spate of hungry young agents will have arrived on-scene).

• You could choose to up your game by learning more about writing and storytelling and publishing. Knowledge breeds confidence!

• You could choose to submit to one of the many small and micro publishers that you can access without an agent.

• You could choose to begin an education in the many aspects of book production and marketing and see if the self-publishing option beckons to you. If it doesn’t, you will be that much more knowledgeable about publishing when the offer comes. If it does, you have an exciting new career option!

“Exciting new career option” sounds a lot better than “default,” right? I know people who have taken each of these paths and called it a win—because after considering many options, they owned and fully embraced the choice they made.

It is my opinion that fiction writing makes authors more empathetic people. We deal daily in human failings, deep motivations, emotional scars, and irrevocable change. Why not extend some of that empathy to ourselves? Make the choice, today, to let the protagonist in the story of your life own his or her own path. After all, you chose it.

To what aspects of your life do you feel enslaved? Do you “have” to work a day job, or care for an elderly parent? How could choice language help you honor the part of yourself that holds to this agreement?

 About Kathryn:

Kathryn Craft is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks: The Art of Falling, and The Far End of Happy, due May 2015.

Her work as a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com, specializing in storytelling structure and writing craft, follows a nineteen-year career as a dance critic. Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, she now serves as book club liaison for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. She hosts lakeside writing retreats for women in northern New York State, leads workshops, and speaks often about writing.

Kathryn lives with her husband in Bucks County, PA. Although a member of The Liars Club, she swears that everything in this bio is true.

Website: http://www.kathryncraft.com/

Elizabeth S. Craig

When writers offer other authors’ advice about generating more income, the advice inevitably is, “Write a lot of good books.”

Although it’s true that volume is key to visibility in an increasingly crowded book market, there’s another way to gain visibility—offering our content, our books, in a variety of marketplaces.

While working to release more books, there are smart things we can do to make our already-written content work harder for us through diversification.

If we diversify our distribution, offering our work on a variety of different channels and platforms (beyond just the usual suspect, Amazon’s Kindle), we can develop multiple revenue streams from a single product.

Here are some examples of different places that we can sell our work…and one place where we can give it away for free.

ACX: ACX is the audiobook option for self-publishers in the US and UK. I’ve discovered that audio is a more popular reading platform than I’d realized. What’s more, it cost me nothing to have my work available there since I used the royalty share arrangement with my narrator (my narrator and I split the royalties from the sales). The money I make from ACX is pure profit. More about payment options for narrators from the ACX site.

Print: It’s a sign of how much publishing has changed that I even have to include a reminder to consider putting books into print. CreateSpace and Lightning Source are the two companies that most authors use when pursuing print. With CreateSpace, readers can order print copies of our books through the Amazon site and with Lightning Source, physical booksellers can order our books for their shelves. I have all of my self-published books available through CreateSpace and the only costs I incurred were one-time expenses for print and cover formatting from my design team. With print-on-demand technology, books are printed when they’re purchased—no need to have hundreds of books in our garage.

Digital publishing—beyond Amazon. Although Amazon will (almost certainly) be the primary source of our royalty income, putting all our eggs in one retailer’s basket isn’t the best approach. There are other ebook platforms out there, including Kobo, iBookstore, Nook, Scribd, and Overdrive that readers are using. For most of these retailers, if you have the ability to attach a file to an email, you’ve got the basic skills necessary to upload your book to these platforms. We can also choose to go through a distribution platform like Smashwords, which will upload a single file to all the main retailers in exchange for a 10% commission of the retail price of affiliate retailers (Apple, Nook, etc.)

Foreign sales: Are your books available for sale on Amazon’s international sites? On Apple’s? It only takes a click of a mouse to sell our book to foreign markets. Some writers are also pursuing having their books translated for international readers (particularly the German market) through sites like Babelcube and Proz.

Wattpad: Wattpad is a publishing platform with about 17 million unique international visitors each month (and a strong youthful demographic). To use Wattpad most effectively, authors should upload books a chapter at a time, allowing each chapter to garner votes and comments, which is key to visibility on the site.   The platform is free both to upload to and to read from, so this is about exposure. It almost serves as advertising for our series. For me, it’s about exposing my book to a completely different demographic than I reach with the Amazon algorithms…a younger one. I’ve found the community there supportive and engaged. It’s important to put a call to action at the bottom of each uploaded chapter—a buy link for our other books.

Although we should keep writing new stories, it’s just a smart idea to make our already-published books work harder for us in the meantime. As time goes on, the options for reaching readers will only increase for writers.

Have you diversified the publishing platforms you’re using?

What platforms are you currently using?

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth writes the Southern Quilting mysteries for Penguin/NAL, the Memphis Barbeque mysteries for Penguin/Berkley, and the Myrtle Clover series for Midnight Ink and independently.

She blogs at ElizabethSpannCraig.com/blog , which was named by Writer’s Digest as one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers. @elizabethscraig

I have heard other authors discussing their experience with assistants, and frankly, some of them were horror stories. I wasn't even clear on what an assistant did, much less being able to assess if I needed, or could afford one. When my friend, Susan Squires, raved about a new assistant she hired, Kelly Oakes, I wanted to know more. I thought you'd want to know more. So Susan and Kelly Oakes agreed to allow me to interview them about their experience.

First - the author:

How/why did you come to the decision to use an assistant?

I have known I needed an assistant for some time. There is so much to promoting books these days that it doesn’t leave enough time for writing if you’re not careful. I am fairly organized because I used to manage projects in my day job, but I was struggling to meet the commitments to promotion I made.

How did you find one?

With great difficulty! I first asked around among my writer-friends and got some recommendations. I had three failures before I found Kelly. The biggest problem was over-commitment on the part of the assistant. We would have great conversations about what I wanted to accomplish and how that might work, and then either life interfered, or they had just taken on too much work. After two failures, I took someone very inexperienced, but who had the time. That was okay, but the truth was, I needed a full partner who had perhaps more experience at promoting than I did, not someone I needed to instruct. I had just about given up in despair when I met Kelly at a reader’s conference we both attended. We hit it off immediately, but I waited to engage her until I was about three months out from releasing my next book. I liked the fact that she treated the release like a project, with a schedule, and due dates (for both of us!). She planned to sub out things that were simple and cheap to do, like organizing blog tours. She had a plan!

How do you decide what work to hold onto, and what to delegate?

We discuss it together and agree. She can manage social media in terms of promoting the books, but I write personal posts so my personality can shine through. She organizes the Facebook party, but it’s my job to get other authors to attend. She manages the mailing list and formats the newsletters but I write them. She places the book in promotional opportunities and uses the blurbs, bios, and excerpts that I have written. It isn’t just Kelly who gets assignments. She gives me assignments too.

Who comes up with the marketing ideas?

Kelly is a fount of knowledge, but we do work together. And we’re getting more comfortable with brain-storming sessions together. Then the trick is to prioritize all those good ideas and break them down into steps with assignments, due dates and an understanding of the budget that will be allocated to the idea. Kelly was very blunt about the things we needed to do to get my promotional efforts up to speed. Just what I wanted! That included having my web guy redo my website, getting an Author page up (I know—pretty basic, huh? But I’d been putting it off), new covers for my current series, etc. Now she wants a new author photo. Oh, no!!! She can’t help with my photo, but she put up the Author page, found a dynamite cover designer, and we had a meaningful discussion about branding.

Would you do it again? How expensive is it?

I would have engaged an assistant a lot earlier if I’d found a good one sooner. I will use Kelly for the foreseeable future. It’s possible our hours may fluctuate a little, but they haven’t so far. As far as expense goes, I think Kelly pays for herself and then some. I think of it as a longer-term investment in building audience. I initially thought the investment of hours was front-loaded as we did lots of work on the basics, but now we have new ideas to implement that go beyond basics, so I don’t see our hours changing all that much. The trick is to set a level of hours invested with your assistant that will meet your needs, and that you can afford. I think it’s only fair to your assistant to keep that as consistent as possible, so she can have reliable income as well. Right now, 20 hours a month seems to be about right for us.

It’s also important for you, as an author, to plan in advance. If you haven’t been using many hours and then suddenly you say to your assistant, “I have a book coming out next week and want more hours from you”—Well, she might have those hours available and she might not. You need several months’ notice anyway to generate reviews, blog tours, cover reveals, release parties, or whatever, so plan ahead. If you don’t plan ahead, you won’t be maximizing the usefulness of your assistant.

At what stage of an author’s career do you think they should consider using an assistant?

This is a hard question and one only each author can answer. Personally, I think an assistant can help you generate income, but unless you have an independent source of money (great day-job, lottery win, inheritance, or a sugar daddy) you may want to wait until you’re sure the book sales you are currently generating will pay for the assistant as well as the promotional activities she plans. But that’s just my take on it.

Any suggestions you have for an author who is interviewing assistants?

Ask how many hours they have available. I think reserving a specific number of hours is much more effective than paying by the individual task. If the hours aren’t used, then they should roll over to the next month. Then ask what tools the assistant uses to keep track of both of your activities. Does she keep a time sheet? I like getting spreadsheets with all my blog dates on them (as well as links), for instance, so it would be good for me to hear that the assistant knows a program that produces spreadsheets. I like to understand how the work will be invoiced. Figure out how you will stay in touch. This is especially important if you live in different time zones. I’m very glad Kelly and I live in the same time zone, but it can be done even if you don’t. You just have to schedule your talks, and set hours in the day when you will both reliably answer emails. Kelly and I meet at the beginning of the month by phone to plan out the month’s activities and periodically during the month but we communicate primarily by email and instant message in the interim.

Next, The Assistant:

Kelly, do you only work for authors? How did you get into this line of work?

Yes, I started this company because of my love of books and wanted to do something that involved them, but at the same time, wouldn’t make me hate books.

It started with a book… No really, I hurt my back nearly 6 years ago and was bored out of my mind while on a 2 week rehabilitation at home. A friend brought by a book from a series she’d been reading… it was my gateway drug. I started blogging about these amazing things called BOOKS!

I’ve now been a blogger for over 5 years and made many author friends from my site or going to book conventions. I loved interacting with the authors and promoting their books.

It wasn’t until a BIG move across the U.S. was scheduled with my husband’s company that I had the idea, or fear, “What the heck am I going to do for work in Florida?” So, one night when at a convention and sitting in a van with Jade Lee outside of a strip club in Vegas, she mentioned she was losing her assistant. I jumped at the chance and said, “I’m starting my own company, I’ll be your assistant!” True story. The move fell through, but the new company and job was born.

What skills do you need to become an author’s assistant?

#1 Survey answer is: Organization! That is your main job, keep your author organized and on task.

But other than that, it’s good to have experience with: Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Goodreads, Instagram, etc.), Blogging, Word, Excel, MAC applications, Photoshop, Communication skills, Google applications, time management and creativity. Having 17 years interior design experience and management skills seem to help a little too! I know that sounds like a lot, but you need to know everything from mailing a box, to creating a blog post or coming up with ideas for teaser images to promote a book.

How do you find authors?

Actually, word-of-mouth and referrals are the main way. Some I’ve met at book events while working for another author.

I do have a website, but only get a couple inquiries from there.

What does your job entail?

Please see answer: “What skills do you need to become an author’s assistant?” and much more! Really, I do anything that an author needs and that I can accommodate. I am however, not a marketing company, nor do I bill myself as a publicist. (disclaimer)

Do you like this job?

I love this job!. I’m currently doing it part-time, and hold a Full-time day job as a Designer, but hope to transition it to full-time VERY soon.

Any suggestions you have for authors that would make your job easier?

Copy me on everything! It’s hard to keep track of things that I don’t know are happening. But my group of authors are very good about keeping me in the loop, most of the time. :)

 What’s the weirdest thing you’ve been asked by an author to do?

Lace up an author’s corset. Although that’s not weird at all, attending conventions we all have dressed in the occasional costume.

Are you looking for clients? If so, how would an author contact you?

Not at the moment, but some of my clients don’t need me at all times and every month. So don’t be afraid to contact me if you need a Facebook party scheduled, book tour or just help with an upcoming book release, I might be able to fit you in.

 So, WITS readers, what do you think? Would an assistant fit your style? Could you see yourself using one?