But don’t think I’m done with Unstressed Syllables. In fact, we’ve got grand plans for the site that we intend to roll out this fall. We’re hoping Unstressed Syllables will become the go-to site for writing and publishing advice.

In the meantime, I’m hard at work helping develop the new go-to site for self-publishing. I’m the Director of User Experience for Draft2Digital, a new ebook publishing platform, and among other things I’m contributing to their promotional copy.

So today, I’d like to share my most recently finished copy, and get your take as interested parties. I beg of you your feedback.

Why Choose Draft2Digital?

The last few years have seen an ebook revolution that massively changed the publishing industry. Thanks to digital distribution, it is easier than ever to bring your book to an audience that’s always hungry for more.

“Easier than ever” doesn’t necessarily mean “easy enough.” To get the most out of this opportunity, you need to convert a manuscript (usually a Microsoft Word document) into an ebook format like epub, set up user accounts at multiple sales channels, learn the quirks of each platform, and then duplicate the book’s sales information across all those outlets. Every time you make a change to your book, you’ll have to make those changes everywhere your book is listed.

Many authors have learned to use the self-publishing tools available at sites like Kindle Direct Publishing, Barnes & Noble’s PubIt!, and Kobo’s Writing Life. While some publishers love that level of control, we know there are some authors out there who want to participate in this new market but who don’t have the technical skills to format an ebook or the time to manage all those different accounts.

That’s why we created Draft2Digital. This site provides a single, simple process to turn your story into a professionally-formatted ebook and release it through all the industry’s most powerful sales channels. We’ll give you one place to publish your projects, to manage any changes, and to track your performance across all vendors.

And the market is still growing! As new sales channels appear, we’ll be at the front of the pack, learning to manage each new platform so you won’t have to. If that sounds like a useful service, try us out today. You can publish a book at no cost and no commitment and see how convenient Draft2Digital really is.

What works? What’s missing? Does it sound like a service you would like to use? (If it does,  you can sign up for an email notification when the service goes live.)

But that suggestion inevitably elicits the same response:

How?

It’s a fair question. Readers aren’t necessarily writers, and maybe you haven’t tried to do something like this since that book report you wrote in fifth grade.

The goods news is, it’s really not hard to write a helpful review. It’s not even as hard as a fifth-grade book report.

A customer review doesn’t need to be an essay. It doesn’t need to be pages long or strongly argued. All it needs to do is communicate your experience with the product.

The Critique

From the author’s perspective, there are two ways to write a “helpful” review: You can provide a critique, telling the author what he did wrong to help him improve his craft; or you can provide a recommendation, encouraging other readers to buy the book (and telling them why).

Now…I’m a writer and a businessman. My family’s financial situation depends entirely on the number of books I sell. That does bias my opinion here, but there’s an easier way to keep the conversation in perspective.

I’m not trying to describe the perfect book review technique. I’m focusing specifically on ways you can support a writer (in this case, with a book review).

So! With that established, I hope you’ll allow me to say that a public critique is far less useful than a recommendation. I’m unlikely to make significant changes to a book that’s already published, though, even if you provide a detailed and compelling list of plot problems in the customer comments. (And if Idid make those changes, your published critique would become out-of-date and confusing.)

So publishing a critique can’t help the book you’re commenting on. It can only hurt sales. That’s not so say you should keep all your meany-pants opinions to yourself!

I’m also a writing coach and student, and I always want to see writers improving their craft. But these days, it’s remarkably easy to get in touch with writers directly. If you want to provide literary critique of my style, I would love a comment at my author website or a message through my contact form.

As an author, I take all critiques seriously (even the offhand comments in a 4- or 5-star review). In fact, it’s often the critiques buried in recommendations that impact me most.

And as a final caveat (in case I haven’t been clear enough), I’m not claiming negative reviews are useless. If you post saying everything that’s wrong with a book, you should be doing that to help other readers (buyers) avoid making a purchase they’ll regret.

That’s a legitimate service. But it doesn’t help the writer at all. It only hurts his paycheck.

Recommendations

I’ve spent more time on that topic than I wanted to, but maybe it’s for the best. This is what you’re here for–how to write a positive review–and the main thing I want to convey on this topic is that it’s easy.

Here’s the whole guide:

1. Tell the world what you enjoyed about reading this book.

That’s all. That’s how to write a helpful review.

If the story was exciting, say it was exciting. If you got lost in the narrative and missed out on a night’s sleep (or a day’s productivity at work), say so. If you loved getting to know the characters and you kinda miss spending time with them now that the book’s over, mention it!

You don’t have to summarize the plot. You don’t have to break down the elements of story or convince an English teacher you really understood the symbolism and themes. Just say what you liked, and you’ll be helping other readers judge whether this book features the things that are important to them.

Was the story fast-paced and short, so you could finish it and move on to another book? Was it immersive and deeply developed, so you felt like you spent years of your life in this place?

Either comment can be far more useful than “It was pretty long,” or “It was kinda short,” and either comment can be seen as a pro or a con depending on the buyer. If you focus on saying what you liked about the experience, you’ll automatically provide the most useful information within the most useful context.

And in the process you can let your favorite writers know what you want to see more of. That might end up helping you out, too.

Near the top of the list (and repeated more than once before the list was done) is the simple act of recommending the book to other readers. That might seem like a painfully obvious suggestion, but authors (and publishers, large or small) live or die by readers’ word-of-mouth.

The humble book review represents one of the most powerful promotional tools available to a writer, and it’s one that’s (almost) entirely out of the writer’s hands. We depend upon our readers.

Professional Reviews

Back in the good old days of legacy publishing, those reviews came from gatekeepers nearly as powerful as the publishers themselves: professional reviewers for national and industry newspapers. It used to take a positive mention in the New York Times or Kirkus to land a book on the bestseller list or get it into libraries and book clubs.

Professional reviewers knew they had that power, so they could afford to be selective. In fact, they were in such high demand that they had to be selective, so most books published never graced the columns of a major paper.

That hasn’t changed. It’s a lot easier to break into writing these days, but until you sign a deal with one of the big New York publishing houses, you won’t have a shot at those reviewers. But the good news is, those elite professional reviewers matter less with every passing day.

Customer Comments

The last few decades have seen a radical shift not only in our technology, but in our attitude toward authority. As a society, we show less and less respect for the opinions of an enlightened few; we prefer to get our data from our peers.

And technology supports that. You can see it in action at Wikipedia, and you can see it even more clearly at the Internet’s favorite place to shop: Amazon.com. Amazon built its empire on two utterly interdependent things:

1. An overwhelmingly large selection of consumer goods and
2. Convenient tools for finding what you want within the sea of stuff

Recommendations and “Also Bought”s are cornerstones of that process, but the most popular feature among buyers is the customer comment list. You can read what other shoppers found when they took a chance on a new product, or see what they might recommend as an alternative to the brand you know and loathe.

Customer comments at sites like Amazon are powerful tools for selling books. A single customer review, good or bad, might mean an immediate  30% shift in sales. I’ve seen that firsthand with Taming Fire.

So if you like a book, please tell the world. It’s as good as putting money in the author’s pocket.

Reviews across the Web

Of course, there is a middle ground between professional reviews and customer comments. There is a rising class of serious reviewers on the web.

Many of them have their own sites dedicated to their book reviews, but others simply post at Amazon or Barnes and Noble, at Goodreads or Shelfari. The best post everywhere.

These hybrids, these book review blogs, are rising now to the prestigious role the major papers used to fill. And the reviewers are discovering the benefits that come to those who can reliably write good reviews. It’s not just the thrill of sharing your opinion with the world.

Anyone who makes a habit of recommending books in public will soon find books pouring in for free. And not just free, but often early! Advance Reading Copies might show up weeks or months before the book becomes available to the public.

Publishers are making deals with book review bloggers (even my tiny indie publishing house, Consortium Books), and savvy authors are submitting their own books to get some buzz.

That’s all happening because we understand how much we need the fans. A finished book is only half a work of art. Without an audience, it’s just a bunch of letters.

So spread the word. Get the message out wherever you have a voice. Recommend the books you love, and the world will be a better place. That’s what happens whenever you make art.

That self-publishing success has allowed me to quit my day job, found a publishing company, and offer advice and insight to the indie writer community.

I’ve accomplished all that without spending a dime on any kind of advertising. I’ve done it without much in the way of a social media presence. I’ve done it with a good story, some good sales copy…and good friends. Now I’d like to share a brief overview of the many ways my fans have contributed to my success.

A Marketing Team

I have to give credit where it’s due. I have the assistance of a fellow writer with professional experience in PR and marketing who helps with sales text on every book I release. He is my official Marketing Team.

But I’ve got an unofficial team, too. That’s my friends and family. It’s my fans. It’s everyone who took a chance on this indie writer, decided they liked my style, and recommended me to the world.

Today, I want to talk to the fans out there. Not just my fans; any fans. I want to tell you how you can support the writers you love.

Every writer will benefit from these things, but none more than the indie writers still trying to break in.

A Checklist: How to Support Your Favorite Writers…

All these things could benefit from additional explanation, and I’ll get to that in time. Many of these things require some initial work by the author or publisher. Trust me, I’m advising all the writers to get that going, too.

But for now, in brief, here are the things you can do to support your favorite writers:

1. With Your Appreciation

• Recommend their books to your friends. (This is the easiest, most obvious, and by far the most powerful thing you can do.)
• Write reviews of the stories you’ve read. (This is probably the second most powerful, thanks to the internet.) You can share your reviews:
  • On your blog
  • At Amazon.com
  • At Barnes & Noble
  • At Goodreads
• Write fanmail! Tell your favorite writers that they’re your favorite writers, and I guarantee you’ll make their day.
• Request Advance Reading Copies! I’ve just completed a limited offer of ARCs of The Dragonprince’s Heir at my author page, but if you’re willing to promise a public review, many writers will be happy to provide an ARC just for asking.

2. With Your Internet Presence

• Follow them on Twitter.
• Like or subscribe to their author/book pages on Facebook.
• Visit their websites frequently or, if you have a preferred method, subscribe to the RSS feed or email updates.
• Comment on their blog posts.
• Link to their website from yours.
• Share their best posts to your friends on Facebook or Twitter.
• Share their broadcast announcements (new releases, contests, events, etc.).

3. With Your Talents

• If you find you enjoy writing reviews, start a book review blog. Make a hobby of it.
• Create and share fan art. If you really want to support a writer, you might even let him use your fan art for promotional purposes.
• Share promotional text. Writers always have a hard time coming up with good sales copy for their own work. If you’ve got the knack, write sales pitches for the books you like best. Again, if you’re feeling extra generous, you might even let the writer use your sales pitch on the book’s product page.

4. With Your Money

• Buy the books. Buy the short stories. Download free editions. Every sale counts, both in royalties and in visibility.
• Gift the books. Print books have always been a popular gift items, but most e-book stores also make it easy to send a gift copy with just an email address. These count as sales and recommendations!
• Buy the swag, if it’s available. Bumper stickers and t-shirts and high-rez, poster-sized maps of the story worlds are yours for the asking!
• Leave a tip! Some writers have donation links on their websites. It’s a good way to keep them writing.
• If your favorite writer runs any kind of charity drive or donation campaign, get involved.
• Support the publisher. Many indie writers work within small publishing groups, and you can really help your favorite author by buying other books from within that group. (You might find some great new writers, too.)
• In the same sense, support the books your favorite writer recommends.

5. With Your Time

• Add their books to lists (Best Indie Writers, Books that Make You Go, “Wow!”, Most Interesting Magic System, etc). Some popular sites that feature these kinds of lists:
  • Goodreads
  • Kindle Boards
  • Listmania! Lists on Amazon (not as scary as they sound)
  • Really, anywhere books are discussed
• Tag their books at Amazon with relevant search terms.

If you’re not sure how to do some of these things, focus on the ones you already know. If you don’t have time to do it all, do the things you’re best at or the ones that sound most fun–or just focus on the quickest and easiest. Every item on that list is worthwhile and supportive.

And to all the authors reading this: If your fans can’t do some of these things, help them out! Make it as easy as possible, and they’ll make you a bestselling author.

What Did I Miss?

I know that’s not a complete list. I’m hoping to find time to expand on these topics in dedicated posts soon, but if you help me expand them first, those posts will be even more valuable.

Share your favorite grassroots marketing techniques in the comments below. I’d love to get them all in one place.

I received one such question this morning on Facebook, and I answered him on the spot. If you want to get started writing, here’s the easiest way to do it:

1. Start with a hero (your protagonist), then figure out something your hero really desperately wants. Make it absolutely clear to the reader that the hero would do anything to get this thing, then keep him from getting it until the end of the story.
2. Give yourself a villain. It’s like giving yourself a Christmas present. Storytelling is so much easier with a definite antagonist. Put someone in the story who desperately wants to make sure the hero doesn’t get the goal you described in item 1. Introduce the antagonist often, and keep him in the story throughout.
3. Write in simple past tense. Write in third-person, and stick close to a single character’s point of view for the whole story (third-person limited). Tell the story in order from start to finish, and tell each scene in order from start to finish.

Now…I’m not trying to provide the absolute definition of a “good story.” There are brilliant stories told in first-person present tense with reverse chronology, where the protagonist’s goal shifts from scene to scene, and the antagonist is a wide array of interchangeable villains but, deep down, the real antagonist is the hero himself. And, y’know, I made my fortune on a first-person narrative.

So these rules aren’t meant to reveal the right way to write a story. This is the easy way. Once you’re a master storyteller, you can experiment with variations, but following these rules lets you focus on the story. (Otherwise, you’ll get distracted with the telling.)

But if you commit to following these rules, then writing gets a lot easier. From a completely blank page, you dive right into describing the things in item 1 (introduce your protagonist, and introduce his goal), and as soon as possible you threaten him with the introduction of the antagonist. After that, the story should just roll from conflict to conflict until the protagonist finally gets what he wants.

Then you write “The End” on a line by itself, and you’re done. Voila! You’re a storyteller.

Is this the first time I’ve mentioned the KickStarter campaign around here? Well, hang on to something, because I’m about to blow your mind.

You might remember that last December I ran a campaign asking fans to contribute to the production costs of releasing The Dragonswarm, but this time I’m far more ambitious. This time I’m asking supporters to help the Consortium acquire all rights to the final book in the trilogy, so we can release it into the public domain from day one. I’m trying to demonstrate the noble consequences of patronage in action.

We’re putting everything we’ve got into that KickStarter campaign. We drafted a press release and sent it out to hundreds of local and internet media sites. I’m sending emails to everyone I know and talking about it constantly on Twitter and Facebook. Today I even rebuilt all my published fantasy stories with a little promo in the back exhorting readers to check out the KickStarter site.

And last Friday we got our first hit on the press releases. Passive Voice Blog, one of my favorite sources for indie publishing news, ran an excerpt early Friday morning under the headline, “Digital Revolution Renders Copyright Obsolete.”

Saying that to a crowd of writers really ruffled some feathers. I spent all day Friday fielding comments and ended up responding a couple more times over the weekend. All told, the post remained one of the most popular posts at Passive Voice Blog all weekend (and is even now), and it drew nearly 100 comments.

I didn’t find a friendly crowd there, but I did find a phenomenal opportunity to refine my message. I probably heard every objection I’m likely to hear from an artist-type (over and over again, and expressed with surprising vehemence at times), and it was encouraging that every objection they brought was something I’d considered. Nothing any of them said really rattled me.

It was an exciting debate. Several people have told me that it made for some entertaining and enlightening reading, so if you’re at all interested in the role of copyright and the arts, go check it out.

Digital Revolution Renders Copyright Obsolete

Oh! And swing by my KickStarter campaign, too. Donate a buck or two, and spread the word to everyone you know. This is all about the message.

If you can be satisfied with the promise of an income and an audience, you should be self-publishing.

But there’s a big difference between deciding to self-publish and actually doing it. Self-publishing is a lot of work. It’s not necessarily more work than all the research and querying of the legacy model, but it’s definitely work.

And the most obvious thing you lose with self-publishing is the curation. The gatekeeping. That’s the whole foundation of the legacy model. As soon as you decide to go this route, you take on the new responsibility of choosing what you will publish.

Anything That’s Ready

Last time, I made you wait until the very end to answer the question I’d raised in the title, but this this week I’ll put it right up front. What should you self-publish? Anything that’s ready.

Admittedly, that’s a nuanced answer. And it works in several different contexts. The most important (and most angst-ridden is the story itself. Is the story ready for the public eye? Is it finished?

That’s not the same as asking, “Is it perfect?” Nothing’s ever perfect, and the best artists never stop improving. If you wait until a story is perfect, you’ll spend the rest of your like tinkering.

As a writer, I find this issue to be one of the biggest rewards of being published. Once a book is published, it’s done. It’s finished. You can go on tweaking it, but if you’re doing anything more than minor editorial changes, you’re really doing an injustice to everyone who already bought the book.

More than that, you’re doing an injustice to yourself by robbing yourself of the immense relief of being finished.

But that relief can also conceal a missed opportunity. After all, if you realize years after publishing your book how to make that two-dimensional, contrived love interest into a robust, compelling character who will be remembered through the ages…well, too bad. This book will always be the one you published first.

So the answer to the question–is it ready?–lies at the cross-section of perfectionism and regret. There’s certainly no way to reduce that to a quantitative assessment. It’s entirely inside your head.

Does the story as written accomplish everything you want it to accomplish? If yes, it’s ready (warts and all). If no, it’s not ready. Easy as that.

And that reveals the grand flaw in the gatekeeping model. The real test of a book’s readiness rests entirely in the heart of the writer. Now, acquisitions editors have never pretended to fill that role (their job is to guess which books readers will pay money for), but too many authors have imagined editors into that role.

A Ready Market

The question of a book’s readiness is certainly the most dramatic, but another significant consideration is the readiness of the book’s target market. Huge at is it, the self-publishing revolution is really in its early days.

In a lot of ways, the “self-publishing revolution” I’ve been talking about is synonymous with “the rise of the e-Book” or “digital publishing” (or “Kindle publishing” as I often call it). Exactly why is a whole conversation in itself, but this explosion of new opportunities for writers is driven almost entirely by the inherent characteristics of digital distribution.

And since that’s the foundation, it’s often pretty simple to see which markets are ready to support self-published books. All you have to do is evaluate how compatible that market is with digital distribution.

That’s why fiction does better than non-fiction. Fiction tends to consist almost entirely of free-flowing text, whereas non-fiction often depends on the extra formatting of page layouts for things like charts and tables.

And so within the non-fiction category there’s a big exception for narrative materials–memoirs and true crime, anthologies and essays. Anything that is primarily narrative text can do well; anything that needs visual or physical formatting is a bigger challenge.

And, yes, that includes children’s fiction. They don’t (yet) lend themselves to self-publishing. There’s certainly a market for them (and graphic-heavy nonfiction), but all the extra work necessary to make them attractive on e-readers means the legacy publishers still have the upper hand.

Another problem market is juvenile or young-adult fiction, because the price of e-readers still puts them out of reach of most of the target audience. Kids don’t have e-readers (yet), and parents aren’t necessarily willing to share theirs (yet).

I keep saying “yet” because everything is changing. The prices of e-readers are dropping, the selection is expanding, and the formatting tools are getting easier to use. The question isn’t, “Is there a market for this book?” It’s just “Is the market ready yet?”

And while I’ve been talking about old markets making the switch, there are also new markets emerging (or dead markets reviving). There’s a ready market for short-form serial fiction like the old pulp novels. Short stories and novellas are perfect for Kindle publishing, and there’s a Renaissance of collaborative fiction going on.

You can publish anything that’s ready, and that means new opportunities with every new day.

• Where to Get Started in Self-Publishing
• How to Get Started in Self-Publishing

That asks for the obvious journalist’s progression — who, what, when, where, why, and how — and the more I think about it, the more I wish I’d gone in that order from the start. But now I will.

Spectators at the Revolution

There’s a lot of talk about the changing marketplace for books. I know. I contribute my share to it.

There are financial analysts and business professors watching with professional interest. There are antitrust lawyers and consumer interest groups watching to see what dangers it might pose. There are readers wondering how much garbage they’re going to have to pay for (and how much they’ll have to pay).

No matter how much they care or how well informed they stay, these people are all spectators in the revolution. Right now, I’m far more interested in the participants.

Stakeholders

There are editors and agents watching with heartfelt terror (or snide disdain). Even these people are already mostly decided. Mostly they have a vested interest in the legacy model and that’s going to color every discussion for them. The same is largely true for established writers, which is sad because they’re the ones with the most to gain.

These people are all stakeholders in the revolution, but mostly they’re still sitting on the sidelines. It astonishes me every day that the legacy publishers don’t start diving in.

(It shouldn’t. There’s a whole book describing why dominant companies inevitably ride their obsolete business models all the way into the ground.)

But that’s at the corporate level. On the individual level, we certainly have agents and editors and authors dipping their toes in the new publishing model.

These are the voices worth listening to–not because self-publishing is inherently right, but because it’s so different from existing models that it can’t be fairly judged from the outside. And many of the clamoring voices are speaking out of that ignorance.

The New Guard

Then there are those like me, who never had a seat at the old table. I’ve met several of them through my years in the Professional Writing program at OU, and know a lot more through Twitter. None of them has yet found the success I’ve found, but they’re all filled with the same excited optimism, and that’s a little miracle in itself.

Back in 2009, I was still proclaiming loudly to new writers that self-publishing was a terrible idea. Back in 2010, I was coming around to the idea, but it still felt like a kind of failure. Like giving up.

Sure, I held my book in my hands. I reached readers who had never heard of me before. I was a published writer…. But in a sense, it was fake.

That’s because I’d spent more than a decade chasing a very focused vision of success. I had always dreamed of making it big, of proving myself, of being chosen and getting published. I’d deeply internalized the (false) connection between accomplishment and…well, an industrial production process.

That’s what legacy publishing really is: an industrial production process. But I didn’t always have the clarity or confidence to recognize it.

I spent my first year as a published author ashamed to mention it. I had to sell tens of thousands of books before I was ready to give myself the credit I would have accepted instantly from any publisher willing to offer me a couple thousand bucks and a 6% royalty.

But today I’m meeting serious, dedicated writers whose dream is to achieve self-publishing success. That’s a huge social shift in a surprisingly short time.

Serious, Dedicated Writers

And that’s the foundation of my answer to this article’s core question. Who should get started in self-publishing? Serious, dedicated writers who can be happy with self-publishing success.

“Self-publishing success” means making money and finding readers. How much depends entirely on your personal ambition, but the promise of self-publishing is an income and an audience.

It’s not pretty covers and a brilliant editor (you’ll have to find those yourself). It’s not a name-brand imprint and prestigious book awards (not yet, anyway). All self-publishing has to offer is an income and an audience.

If you can be satisfied with those, you should get started in self-publishing. Easy as that. Give me a couple weeks, and I’ll tell you what to publish and when to publish it, but if you pass that little test, this revolution is for you.

Join us. It’s fun.

Last week I started a series on self-publishing with a little bit of advice on where to start. It was primarily a list of links to the major digital distributors.

I also promised to follow up with a post on how to start. The inspiration for that one came from an email my sister sent me. I’ve decided to include her questions with my answers, so you can see how other writers are feeling as they approach this strange new world.

Where to Start

So, how should I start if I decide to self-publish?  I’ve read absolutely everything you’ve posted on the topic, followed all your links and read other blogs and articles you referenced, even convinced Graham to read most of it.  It was convincing!  Compelling, even!  So, where do I start?

I dedicated last week’s whole post to answering this question, because where you start is…complicated. Here’s a severely truncated version:

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing is where all our money comes from. You’ll have to find a way to get your book into a format KDP will accept.

We use a custom software tool for that, so I’ve never bothered learning all the other options available. But the good news is that the custom software tool should be available to the general public in August, and for limited invitation-only trial in June.

So if you do decide to self-publish, and you can make yourself wait until the summer, I’d strongly recommend Draft2Digital.com (built on BookMaker technology) for all your digital publishing needs.

Hiring an Editor

I found an editor who seems reputable, qualified and somewhat affordable.  How do I know what to ask for?  How do I know what I need?

This one’s a tricky question, because it could either mean what services to ask for or what price to ask for.

Price is usually in the 3-7 cents per word range. Quality will cost more, but if it were me, I would try to shop around and find quality for 5 cents. If it’s a friend or family, you can get it considerably cheaper, but if you’re wanting to pay anything like fair market value, I’d offer at least 3 cents per word.

That’s $1,500 for a NaNoWriMo 50,000-word novel. A penny per word would still run you $500 for a short novel (and $1,100 for something like Taming Fire).

So what do you get for all that money? That’s the other half of the answer: editing services. There’s a whole range of editing services, but most new writers would be best served by the two extremes: structure editing and copyediting.

Structure editing (sometimes called story editing, concept editing, or developmental editing) reviews the structure of acts/scenes/plot points and analyzes how well they fit together to create a cohesive and satisfying narrative arc. That’s what I’m best at. It’s big-picture stuff.

A good editor will tell you exactly what’s wrong with the structure. A great editor will point out specific ways to fix it.

Copyediting is the low-level stuff, crawling through every single sentence and finding and fixing typos. A good writer should eventually be able to master structure, and to some extent it should come naturally to a good reader, but an independent copyeditor will always be necessary.

ISBNs and Bar Codes

Do I need to buy an ISBN number when I self-publish?  Is that not included somehow?  The info on that is confusing.  Once you buy it, then how does it get attached to your book?  Barcodes, too?  Wait.  They’re separate?  Help!

You do not need to buy an ISBN for your book. We bought a whole bunch for the Consortium, and haven’t bothered to use them for the last ten titles we published.

It depends a little bit on which vendor you’re trying to publish with. If you go direct to iTunes (which is stupidly difficult to do), they’ll require you to supply an ISBN for your ebook (which is stupidly prohibitive of them).

If you go with another printing company for your paperbacks, you may or may not need to provide ISBNs or bar codes, but we use CreateSpace and they provide a free ISBN that gives us access to more distribution outlets. That’s why we’re not even using the ISBNs we have.

So, yeah, you can get into a situation where you’d have to buy an ISBN or a bar code, but for the most part, no.

Cover Art

What’s the trick to cover art?  Do you get to adjust the image when you upload it to make sure it fits correctly?  Do you have to add all the other details, too, like the obnoxious items in that last question?  If so, does that need to be attached to the image before upload or is it added on later somehow?

For cover art, each vendor has its own requirements. I searched through all the different vendors we used (Kindle Direct Publishing, PubIt!, and Smashwords at the time), and discovered that a 600×800-pixel JPEG satisfied all of them (and happened to exactly fit the resolution of the Kindle available at the time). So that’s what we use for all our ebooks.

Paperbacks are more complicated. They need to be much higher resolution, they may or may not get cut in exactly the same place every time so they need a special marginal area called a “bleed,” and the exact width necessary changes based on the number of pages in your book (as the spine gets wider, the image has to, too).

Luckily, CreateSpace provides templates that factor in all that, so we just tell them what size paperback we’re printing and how many pages, download the template, and then design our cover image (in Photoshop) on top of that template. When we’re done, we save it to PDF and upload it back to CreateSpace, and it just works.

And one aspect of the template is a big black stamp in the corner of the back cover where CreateSpace puts your ISBN bar code. Whether you buy the ISBN from them or supply your own, they generate the bar code and overlay it on top of your cover (that’s why the template makes you leave that corner blank).

So that part, at least, is easy.

Other Questions

Heather had another question in there that I’ve decided to save for a whole post of its own, but what about you?

Do you have any questions about self-publishing? Ask me in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer.

But one thing I’ve talked about often here is audience analysis. Every good writer needs to know to whom he’s talking, and thanks to my recent success, my audience is starting to split.

Teaching the Revolution

I have long-time readers here who want writing advice. I have friends and fans who want updates on my writing projects. And I have new visitors who’ve heard about my success and want to learn about the self-publishing industry and the opportunities it presents.

I keep meeting other writers who need information about the new market. I keep meeting new readers who want to know when book 3 is coming out. Until now, I’ve been sending them all here.

Fans and Friends

Every day now I have more and more of both kinds of visitors, and they’re looking for very different things. Someone who just read The Dragonswarm and comes here looking for a short story to read while he waits for The Dragonprince’s Heir is going to have to slog through an awful lot of writing advice to find a useful link.

So I’ve started a new site for my fans and friends. Check out AaronPogue.com. I’ll keep it updated with work-in-progress updates, information about new releases, and occasional stories about my life as a writer.

Unstressed Syllables

That’s not replacing Unstressed Syllables. In fact, that’s probably breathing new life into Unstressed Syllables.

As I said, this site can be a huge resource for people interested in the craft and business of writing. Over the last couple years, I’ve put myself at the center of a whole web of experts on that topic.

And now I’ve asked them to start contributing here. Courtney’s been sharing storytelling advice for two years with her WILAWriTWe column, but that’s going to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Expert Advice

Remember a few weeks ago when I talked about Konrath’s five rules for success? One of them was “Write a good product description.” When I met fellow Consortium novelist Joshua Unruh and learned he had a degree and professional experience in marketing, I recruited him to help me accomplish that task.

And now I’ve recruited him to share that expertise in a weekly column here. I’m hoping to get the same commitment from my editor and my cover coordinator. And, of course, I want to go on teaching you how to write better with less effort, like I’ve been doing from day one.

My goal is to make Unstressed Syllables a one-stop guide to today’s story market. If you have any advice or requests, let us know through the comments below or the Contact form on the right. If you’re interested in contributing, let me know that, too!

And if you find us helpful, by all means recommend us to your writing group. We really hope to grow.