HOSTAGE preview release--Why We Chose to Self Publish Book Two
This riff goes into why Rachel Manija Brown and I have decided to self-publish Hostage, the sequel to Stranger, which came out from Viking in November.
If you’re expecting a rant about the evils of big six publishing, put away the popcorn or head on over to your favorite internet rantiseum, because that’s not what this is about.
The Change series has always been an experiment-we wanted to put together a story that did not feature straight white males as main protagonists. We initially developed it as a TV show that was also going to be a book. When the Hollywood deal miraged, as often happens, well, we still had our book! We’d set out not to novelize the screenplay, but to make a complete novel.
Novelizations describe what you see on screen, which is meant to fill about two hours of watching. That means world-building is sketchy, relying on visuals and music and editing to suggest instead of describe. There is no time for detail. Same with scenes-the actors use their arts to convey emotions that in a book get developed further.
We thought we did a good job of developing the world, culture, and characters, sent the ms. around, and the diversity aspect of our experiment led to Yes to Gay YA. But that was a risk we were willing to take. We believe that we need diverse books.
We finally found an agent, Eddie Gamarra, who was enthusiastic about the book, and from there we were lucky enough to get an offer from Viking, working with editor Sharyn November.
There are three things that writers expect from publishers: the expertise of the editor, the skills of the production department, and the vast resources of the publisher to handle publicity and marketing.
We got the expert editing-Sharyn November spotted what in retrospect I realized were the last bits of ‘novelization’ and when we rewrote it to her suggestions, we got what we believed was a significantly stronger book. And then we had the benefit of her skillful line-editing.
But, as publishing often does these days, that process took three years from the time she expressed interest in the project (September 2011) to publication (November 2014). From Viking's end, it was 2.5 years, i.e. from the time we signed their contract, in March 2012. But from the writer's perspective? That wonderful "I'm interested" call came after the long period of submission, and then was followed by half a year of contract negotiation.
What the next step looks like from the writer’s end is that, once the offer is made, the writer gets notes that take a few weeks to rewrite or polish or proofread the manuscript before turning it back in to the publisher. Then they wait, and wait, and wait, until the next stage, and then wait again. From what we have been hearing from other writers is that the gaps between getting editorial feedback at each stage of the process may be anywhere from a few months to nine months to over a year-or longer. In those cases, the book’s release may be delayed, then delayed again.
Why the delays? My understanding is that publishing houses have changed a lot in the past forty years, partly because they’ve been scooped up by mega-corporations who regard books as product units, meant to gain instant profit or be dropped. And at minimal cost at their end, which means no more editorial staffs: editors are doing what used to be three and sometimes four people’s full time jobs, which means reading actual manuscripts on their own time. Rather like teachers, who correct and lesson plan on their own time. As I know from my own experience, they are paid for their classroom time, but they put in at least as much unpaid time behind the scenes.
As a result, manuscripts languish unread, or bought but unedited, for years, because one human being can only do so much in a day.
We only sold Stranger to Viking. They did not offer for the series, but wanted to see how book one did before venturing on book two. That is again becoming a standard practice. But given the long publication process, it meant that book two, Hostage, would not see publication until a minimum of two years after Stranger was released . . . even though we finished writing Hostage over a year before Stranger came out.
If that was to be the pattern for the series, it would mean that the fourth book might come out ten years after the first. Will I even be alive? I hope to be, but having suffered a stroke last year, I am very aware of the ticking clock, and have little interest in a posthumous career if I can help it.
But aside from writerly ego, I see the evidence every day on the Net that readers do not like waiting years and years between books in a series. I don’t think I have to post links to howls about GRR Martin and Robert Jordan, though in their cases the delays were at the writing end. But whether it’s the writer or the publisher at fault, increasing numbers of readers, according to what I see on Goodreads and other places where books are talked about, won’t even start a series until they have a good chance of getting most of the books. If they even come out, which has been another problem: series cancelled midway. And there was no guarantee whatsoever that that wasn’t going to happen to us.
Self-publishing thrives on rapid releases. This can have its own set of problems, if books are rushed into release without proper editing. But we wanted to strike a balance between giving a manuscript time to be edited and polished, and releasing books without lengthy delays.
Stranger trundled its way through the second part of the publication process, getting skilled production.
Sharyn saw to it that we got cover input, and the result is a cover that we think is terrific. Viking put lots of love and care into making it look fabulous.
It was now time for its publication.
That brings us to that third thing: publicity. For the reader, this is a Golden Age of YA publishing-from the writer's perspective, there is the fear of being lost in the deluge of new releases. Traditional publishers, with their cutbacks, focus their publicity resources-such as handing out ARCS at BEA (Book Expo America) and big conventions like Comicon to generate buzz-on a very few books they have selected to receive the best seller treatment. Like most books, Stranger was not selected to receive that treatment.
Again, this is not uncommon nowadays. Most traditionally published authors are now expected to do their own publicity, just as they would if they self-published. The necessity for doing our own publicity made the prospect of self-publishing seem more reasonable than it otherwise would.
While self-publishing has disadvantages, its big advantage is that the author can control the entire process. For example, the price. Traditional publishing often sets the prices of e-books at rates that many readers feel are too high. They have good reasons for doing so, beginning with the fact that their production costs need to be covered.
Self-publishers tend to set e-book prices much lower, out of the belief that more sales at a lower price are better than fewer sales at a higher price, and that the first book in a series should be priced low to hook readers who otherwise wouldn’t take a chance on a book by an author they’ve never read before. They can do it because they are providing their own labor, or trading labor with other writers to keep costs down.
The price of the first e-book edition of Stranger was set at $10.99. I got a swarm of private emails saying variations on, “Um, Sherwood, I really want to support your book, but I can’t afford eleven bucks for an e-book.”
Could I blame them? No way! I have paid over ten for an e-book exactly once, when Baen issued an e-book preview of Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest in the Miles Vorkosigan series. I paid fifteen dollars for that e-book, full knowing that I would be buying it in hardcover when it came out months and months later, but I am a dedicated Bujold fan and didn’t want to wait months and months to read an eagerly anticipated book.
Our new series does not have dedicated fans-how could it? At most we still had some remnant of curiosity left over from the Yes Gay YA kafuffle three years previous, but not eleven dollars’ worth of curiosity. The price was subsequently lowered to just under ten bucks, but how many check back to find that out? I seldom remember to check back on something too high because there is always a stream of new books coming out.
Would sales have been better to the extent of generating more total profit, not to mention more fans who want to read the rest of the series, if the e-book had been priced at $4.99 or even $7.99, which seems to be a median for many ebooks from traditional publishers? We don’t know. But our experience in self-publishing suggests that they would.
All three of those items, the possible ten years being the tipping point, brought us to our current decision. This is new territory, as our agent Eddie Gamarra said. (He still represents the series as a whole: his help has been phenomenal, and The Gotham Group is a class outfit. Our biggest stroke of luck has been getting to work with them.) But this series has always been experimental.
So if we published it ourselves, what we wouldn’t be getting? Sharyn November’s expert editing. Could our book be bettered through her input? Undoubtedly. But there are other fine editors. We also wouldn’t get the benefit of Viking’s wonderful production team, but we worked through Book View Café, getting editing and copyediting through fellow professionals like Judith Tarr, who have been long in the field, and volunteer help with production from Chris Dolley and Vonda N. McIntyre. And most of all, there would be no relatively cheap hardcover edition, though we are arranging for a trade paperback.
I personally believe this second book is much stronger than the first (in part because it builds on the first, but also because hostage situations are inherently high-tension), though we tried to make it readable separate from Stranger.
But I’m also hoping that readers who do venture into this one first will be made curious about what happened in Stranger and want to try Book One. If they read it after having read Hostage, they will discover at least one big surprise that is not spoiled in the second book.
All this talk of business and money may obscure the reason for it all: we love this series. We are gambling that it will find readers who love it, too.
One thing I’ve become aware of in years of reading literature, about literature, diaries and letters and essays, is that publishing has always been experimental. The e-publishing evolution right now reminds of me of the evolution of print publishing of the 1700s. There were so many models, including subscription-what we now call IndieGogo and Kickstarter.
We decided not to go that route. We relied on the growing skills of BVC for production help, and commissioned a cover from an artist skilled enough to match the mood of the cover of the first.
We’re borrowing that Baen model and releasing the e-book, right now, as a pre-release, at a more modest price. Our e-book price will go up a bit when the print book is released, whether that is by us or someone else.
If you’ve come this far, we ask you to consider buying it through Book View Café. We get a better royalty than at Amazon and other e-publishing venues. But also, it’s an all-volunteer writers' collective that we’d like to support. Who knows? That may be the future of publishing, or one of its futures; I don’t believe traditional publishing is going to vanish like smoke, and we intend to share data with Sharyn November, and work with Viking, as we promote both books.
Hostage is also available at other venues. The cost right now to readers at either BVC or these other venues is just under five bucks: the price of a fancy coffee.
So, that’s the story. Here’s the book.
At Kindle | B&N | Kobo | Itunes
Want to try Book One?
If you’re expecting a rant about the evils of big six publishing, put away the popcorn or head on over to your favorite internet rantiseum, because that’s not what this is about.
The Change series has always been an experiment-we wanted to put together a story that did not feature straight white males as main protagonists. We initially developed it as a TV show that was also going to be a book. When the Hollywood deal miraged, as often happens, well, we still had our book! We’d set out not to novelize the screenplay, but to make a complete novel.
Novelizations describe what you see on screen, which is meant to fill about two hours of watching. That means world-building is sketchy, relying on visuals and music and editing to suggest instead of describe. There is no time for detail. Same with scenes-the actors use their arts to convey emotions that in a book get developed further.
We thought we did a good job of developing the world, culture, and characters, sent the ms. around, and the diversity aspect of our experiment led to Yes to Gay YA. But that was a risk we were willing to take. We believe that we need diverse books.
We finally found an agent, Eddie Gamarra, who was enthusiastic about the book, and from there we were lucky enough to get an offer from Viking, working with editor Sharyn November.
There are three things that writers expect from publishers: the expertise of the editor, the skills of the production department, and the vast resources of the publisher to handle publicity and marketing.
We got the expert editing-Sharyn November spotted what in retrospect I realized were the last bits of ‘novelization’ and when we rewrote it to her suggestions, we got what we believed was a significantly stronger book. And then we had the benefit of her skillful line-editing.
But, as publishing often does these days, that process took three years from the time she expressed interest in the project (September 2011) to publication (November 2014). From Viking's end, it was 2.5 years, i.e. from the time we signed their contract, in March 2012. But from the writer's perspective? That wonderful "I'm interested" call came after the long period of submission, and then was followed by half a year of contract negotiation.
What the next step looks like from the writer’s end is that, once the offer is made, the writer gets notes that take a few weeks to rewrite or polish or proofread the manuscript before turning it back in to the publisher. Then they wait, and wait, and wait, until the next stage, and then wait again. From what we have been hearing from other writers is that the gaps between getting editorial feedback at each stage of the process may be anywhere from a few months to nine months to over a year-or longer. In those cases, the book’s release may be delayed, then delayed again.
Why the delays? My understanding is that publishing houses have changed a lot in the past forty years, partly because they’ve been scooped up by mega-corporations who regard books as product units, meant to gain instant profit or be dropped. And at minimal cost at their end, which means no more editorial staffs: editors are doing what used to be three and sometimes four people’s full time jobs, which means reading actual manuscripts on their own time. Rather like teachers, who correct and lesson plan on their own time. As I know from my own experience, they are paid for their classroom time, but they put in at least as much unpaid time behind the scenes.
As a result, manuscripts languish unread, or bought but unedited, for years, because one human being can only do so much in a day.
We only sold Stranger to Viking. They did not offer for the series, but wanted to see how book one did before venturing on book two. That is again becoming a standard practice. But given the long publication process, it meant that book two, Hostage, would not see publication until a minimum of two years after Stranger was released . . . even though we finished writing Hostage over a year before Stranger came out.
If that was to be the pattern for the series, it would mean that the fourth book might come out ten years after the first. Will I even be alive? I hope to be, but having suffered a stroke last year, I am very aware of the ticking clock, and have little interest in a posthumous career if I can help it.
But aside from writerly ego, I see the evidence every day on the Net that readers do not like waiting years and years between books in a series. I don’t think I have to post links to howls about GRR Martin and Robert Jordan, though in their cases the delays were at the writing end. But whether it’s the writer or the publisher at fault, increasing numbers of readers, according to what I see on Goodreads and other places where books are talked about, won’t even start a series until they have a good chance of getting most of the books. If they even come out, which has been another problem: series cancelled midway. And there was no guarantee whatsoever that that wasn’t going to happen to us.
Self-publishing thrives on rapid releases. This can have its own set of problems, if books are rushed into release without proper editing. But we wanted to strike a balance between giving a manuscript time to be edited and polished, and releasing books without lengthy delays.
Stranger trundled its way through the second part of the publication process, getting skilled production.
Sharyn saw to it that we got cover input, and the result is a cover that we think is terrific. Viking put lots of love and care into making it look fabulous.
It was now time for its publication.
That brings us to that third thing: publicity. For the reader, this is a Golden Age of YA publishing-from the writer's perspective, there is the fear of being lost in the deluge of new releases. Traditional publishers, with their cutbacks, focus their publicity resources-such as handing out ARCS at BEA (Book Expo America) and big conventions like Comicon to generate buzz-on a very few books they have selected to receive the best seller treatment. Like most books, Stranger was not selected to receive that treatment.
Again, this is not uncommon nowadays. Most traditionally published authors are now expected to do their own publicity, just as they would if they self-published. The necessity for doing our own publicity made the prospect of self-publishing seem more reasonable than it otherwise would.
While self-publishing has disadvantages, its big advantage is that the author can control the entire process. For example, the price. Traditional publishing often sets the prices of e-books at rates that many readers feel are too high. They have good reasons for doing so, beginning with the fact that their production costs need to be covered.
Self-publishers tend to set e-book prices much lower, out of the belief that more sales at a lower price are better than fewer sales at a higher price, and that the first book in a series should be priced low to hook readers who otherwise wouldn’t take a chance on a book by an author they’ve never read before. They can do it because they are providing their own labor, or trading labor with other writers to keep costs down.
The price of the first e-book edition of Stranger was set at $10.99. I got a swarm of private emails saying variations on, “Um, Sherwood, I really want to support your book, but I can’t afford eleven bucks for an e-book.”
Could I blame them? No way! I have paid over ten for an e-book exactly once, when Baen issued an e-book preview of Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest in the Miles Vorkosigan series. I paid fifteen dollars for that e-book, full knowing that I would be buying it in hardcover when it came out months and months later, but I am a dedicated Bujold fan and didn’t want to wait months and months to read an eagerly anticipated book.
Our new series does not have dedicated fans-how could it? At most we still had some remnant of curiosity left over from the Yes Gay YA kafuffle three years previous, but not eleven dollars’ worth of curiosity. The price was subsequently lowered to just under ten bucks, but how many check back to find that out? I seldom remember to check back on something too high because there is always a stream of new books coming out.
Would sales have been better to the extent of generating more total profit, not to mention more fans who want to read the rest of the series, if the e-book had been priced at $4.99 or even $7.99, which seems to be a median for many ebooks from traditional publishers? We don’t know. But our experience in self-publishing suggests that they would.
All three of those items, the possible ten years being the tipping point, brought us to our current decision. This is new territory, as our agent Eddie Gamarra said. (He still represents the series as a whole: his help has been phenomenal, and The Gotham Group is a class outfit. Our biggest stroke of luck has been getting to work with them.) But this series has always been experimental.
So if we published it ourselves, what we wouldn’t be getting? Sharyn November’s expert editing. Could our book be bettered through her input? Undoubtedly. But there are other fine editors. We also wouldn’t get the benefit of Viking’s wonderful production team, but we worked through Book View Café, getting editing and copyediting through fellow professionals like Judith Tarr, who have been long in the field, and volunteer help with production from Chris Dolley and Vonda N. McIntyre. And most of all, there would be no relatively cheap hardcover edition, though we are arranging for a trade paperback.
I personally believe this second book is much stronger than the first (in part because it builds on the first, but also because hostage situations are inherently high-tension), though we tried to make it readable separate from Stranger.
But I’m also hoping that readers who do venture into this one first will be made curious about what happened in Stranger and want to try Book One. If they read it after having read Hostage, they will discover at least one big surprise that is not spoiled in the second book.
All this talk of business and money may obscure the reason for it all: we love this series. We are gambling that it will find readers who love it, too.
One thing I’ve become aware of in years of reading literature, about literature, diaries and letters and essays, is that publishing has always been experimental. The e-publishing evolution right now reminds of me of the evolution of print publishing of the 1700s. There were so many models, including subscription-what we now call IndieGogo and Kickstarter.
We decided not to go that route. We relied on the growing skills of BVC for production help, and commissioned a cover from an artist skilled enough to match the mood of the cover of the first.
We’re borrowing that Baen model and releasing the e-book, right now, as a pre-release, at a more modest price. Our e-book price will go up a bit when the print book is released, whether that is by us or someone else.
If you’ve come this far, we ask you to consider buying it through Book View Café. We get a better royalty than at Amazon and other e-publishing venues. But also, it’s an all-volunteer writers' collective that we’d like to support. Who knows? That may be the future of publishing, or one of its futures; I don’t believe traditional publishing is going to vanish like smoke, and we intend to share data with Sharyn November, and work with Viking, as we promote both books.
Hostage is also available at other venues. The cost right now to readers at either BVC or these other venues is just under five bucks: the price of a fancy coffee.
So, that’s the story. Here’s the book.
At Kindle | B&N | Kobo | Itunes
Want to try Book One?