My Self Publishing Journey Part 1

 

In the US Bronze is on a countdown promotion starting Sunday 14th September at $0.99 for the eBook, rising to $1.99 on the 17th September before reverting to the full price of $2.99 on the 20th September.  All promotions commence at 8:00 am PDT on the stated days.

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I've been self publishing since 2011 and was absolutely self-taught.  I'm sure I Googled a lot back then, used the how-to guides provided by Amazon and Smashwords but I don't know if there were any YouTube guides back then, almost certainly are now, but if I used them I've forgotten entirely.

I do remember it being a steep learning curve, probably helped by my having three novels - one a  relative behemoth at 115k words - sitting on my hard drive, so once I'd worked out what to do for one I was able to apply that learning and reinforce it on the following two.

I even blogged about the process (links below).  A quick perusal of that content fourteen years later shows it was more about the general process I'd learnt and less about what button to press and when in which piece of software.  Probably useful for someone starting out and almost certainly outdated in parts now.

How to self publish Part 1

How to self publish part 2

How to self publish part 3

How to self publish part 4

How to self publish part 5

The bit that might stick out like a sore thumb if you're reading those blog posts today is that there's no mention of print editions.  I think Amazon were spreading rumours about print on demand coming and if memory serves it was the US market that got POD first, but it just wasn't an option at that point.  Today most authors would want a print option for their readers, even though the profit margin is generally lower.  Actually that isn't accurate, you can price your eBooks and print books at any price you want within certain constraints, but most authors will be trying to make the print version as affordable as possible, and that usually means the lower priced eBook returns more in royalties.

Now all ten of my books are available in eBook and print versions.  The last couple are available in both paperback and hardback versions although I doubt I'll ever sell any hardback ones.  I created them because the only extra cost is my time and if I (or someone else) really wanted to provide a special gift of one of my books, then the hardback version would be a nice upgrade.

In addition to the ten books listed at the bottom of this blog I also was heavily involved in the production of the four (to date) Newsbiscuit compilations that exist to supplement our meagre income.  They were created by a small team of editors including myself and I was the person who did all the preparation, formatting and setting up in our NewsBiscuit KDP login for eBook and print versions.  Again, there are both paperback and hardback versions available.  We've actually sold 23 hardback copies, which at around £20 a book isn't bad.

  

The challenge for these books was similar to all the other books - setting up the prelim pages, setting the page and section breaks so the prelim section used roman numerals (apart from the leading pages that had none) and the main section had Arabic.  Like all print books I had to be aware of orphans and widows - chapters ending on the first couple of lines on a new page, for example.  Usually solved by careful selection of font and font size, but also by very fine editing if the story supports it.  One advantage of these books is that on any given page there are usually between two and four short stories and shuffling them around the chapter often resulted in a more efficient use of page space.  That technique generally doesn't work in a long-form novel!

Other challenges with print that you don't have concern yourself with for the eBook version is page size, page colour and margin sizes.  I initially used the default 9 x 6 format Amazon suggests.  Apparently it's a popular book format in the US but looks large for a piece of UK fiction.  Fine for textbooks and I set a large page size for the Newsbiscuit anthologies, however for my more recent print books in my range I've gone for a more traditional UK 8 x 5.  Obviously smaller pages mean more pages and with POD every page raises the unit cost, but equally smaller page sizes reduces the individual page cost.  I knew that maths degree would come in useful one day.

So these fourteen books have given me a grounding in preparing books for publication in eBook and print format, skills that have been acquired through hard work and more than  a little perspiration. I'm sure I will be setting up an eleventh Ray Sullivan novel at some point in the near future and we're way overdue a fifth NewsBiscuit anthology, but it turns out I've had the opportunity to use my skills to help other authors produce their books.  I'll be discussing who I've helped and in what ways in the next part of this story.

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In the US Bronze is on a countdown promotion starting Sunday 14th September at $0.99 for the eBook, rising to $1.99 on the 17th September before reverting to the full price of $2.99 on the 20th September.  All promotions commence at 8:00 am PDT on the stated days.

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Follow me on Twitter: @RayASullivan

email me at raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com

Check out my comedic ramblings as Throngsman on www.newsbiscuit.com

     

   

 

Writing for NewsBiscuit

 

I mentioned in a post the other day that I was talking to the Wrexham Writers' group about writing for NewsBiscuit. I did write about NewsBiscuit some years ago but a lot of water has run under the bridge since then so now's a good time to catch up.  The pitch I made was an attempt to see if I could persuade one or more of the writers in the room to have a bash at writing for NewsBiscuit.

We've got a healthy amount of writers at the moment - last year we had just under one hundred contributors published, most if not all are submitting this year as well.  There was probably a small number of other writers who submitted but didn't get their work selected, but in my experience a little tenacity helps here - writing comedy and satire takes a little practise and each attempt gets you closer.  We do see a small number of writers who post once or twice and then disappear, which is a shame as we really like to help writers develop.

So why did I try to recruit new writers?  Why am I using this blog to hopefully interest writers from a wider net, potentially an international net given the stats I'm seeing for this blog?  Because we post satirical and comedic posts every day of the year, all 365 days.  Last year we published over one thousand short stories generally between 200 and 400 words long, over 1200 headlines (one-line gags) and over 700 cartoons for those who prefer visual gags.  In that year I was personally responsible for writing just under sixty of those posts (and exactly one headline).  I'm probably on the higher side of the productivity scale but not at the top by a long chalk.  We have a small number of very good, very prolific writers while many of the writers are less prolific - most are in full time jobs, living real lives after all.

Plus, and this can't be understated, new blood brings fresh ideas, novel approaches.  That can't be bad.

So, what's it like writing for NewsBiscuit?  Well, for one, it keeps your tax affairs simple.  We don't pay writers (including me), editors (also including me) and the directors of the parent company can whistle (you guessed, including me).  Our mission is to provide a space for aspiring and established writers to hone their comedic writing skills.  Most do it just for the fun, for the rush to be published on an internationally read comedy website.  Others have aspirations to break into satirical writing - writing for NewsBiscuit will help them to build up their CV (resume over the pond). If you have any aspirations for writing for radio or TV, or to write for the satirical websites that do pay, building a portfolio of published work with us isn't a bad play.

I made the point in the Writers' Group the other day that there's generally three excuses people give for not writing for us.  

The first excuse is 'I'm not funny, I can't tell jokes'.  Most of us aren't stand-up material, but put us in a small group and in a few minutes we start riffing and joking.  Trust me, we're all funny, the trick is to hone our comedic writing skills.

Second reason is 'I'm not political'.  Get that, but a good percentage of our output isn't political, it's observational humour.  To us a joke is a joke is a joke.  But taking the 'I'm not political' bit - yes you are, almost certainly.  Most sensible people (and comedy writers can also be sensible) don't start talking politics with strangers or, often, friends and family.  I would suggest that the majority of writers on NewsBiscuit are centre left but we do have some who are more left wing and a couple who are right of centre.  As long as writers punch up rather than down we're happy to play.  For the record, I like to mangle an oft quoted art world saying - I don't know much about politics, but I know what I don't like.  I don't like lies, grift and hypocrisy, so I've got plenty of material to work with.

Finally the third reason given is 'I can't write'.  Judging from some of the social media posts I see, there might be some truth in that.  Not all of our writers are word perfect with pristine punctuation, but as long as the gist is funny, we can work with it.  With practise all writing skills will improve.

If you have visited the public site you may have noticed that unlike the vast majority of news websites (both fake and apparently not fake varieties) we don't have any pop up adverts nor any clickbait Google Ads getting in your way.  That is a deliberate choice.  We're also free to access, no log in, no subscription.  If you're interested in writing look for the 'Writers' Room' button at the top, click on it and it will prompt you to log in or register (also free).  Registration is simple, you will need an email address, choose a password and decide on your NewsBiscuit handle.  Mine is Throngsman, by the way.  You don't have to choose an opaque user name, many writers choose their given names, many don't.  It's your choice.  By the way, we don't share email addresses (or any data, such as we hold) and the only purpose your email has, apart from forming part of your login is to send you an automated email if and when you have a post published.  There are some Google ads on the Writers' site, it's a deal we have with ProBoards to host this site for free and they're not intrusive.

Once registered there is a chat room - it's generally very civilised - a Writers' Room for short stories, a Headlines Room and a Cartoons Room.  Take a look around, compare what is submitted to what is published to get a feel for what works and what doesn't.  Contribute to the chat room, have a go at posting something, don't get disheartened if it doesn't get picked up straight away. If you think something has been overlooked then by all means bump it, sometimes editors miss good posts.

Most importantly, enjoy.  Writing should be fun, writing comedy should be really fun.  You can submit from your PC or your phone.  If you do sign up, DM me and say hi.  

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In the US Bronze is on a countdown promotion starting Sunday 14th September at $0.99 for the eBook, rising to $1.99 on the 17th September before reverting to the full price of $2.99 on the 20th September.  All promotions commence at 8:00 am PDT on the stated days.

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Follow me on Twitter: @RayASullivan

email me at raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com

Check out my comedic ramblings as Throngsman on www.newsbiscuit.com

     

   

 

15 Years of Typos - an internet lifetime?

 It's been a while since I published anything on this blog, but I haven't been idle.  Some of you may recall I mentioned a (long) while back that I write for the UK satirical website NewsBiscuit.  NewsBiscuit was founded over fourteen years ago by British TV comedic scriptwriter and author John O'Farrell, who was one of the main scriptwriters on the original Spitting Image TV series a lifetime ago.

Time indeed passes and I now not only contribute to the website with satirical and comedic offerings but also spend a week every eight or so weeks as duty editor, selecting and preparing articles for publication on NewsBiscuit.  As the website provides new material every day, 365 days of the year, this is sometimes a challenging but rewarding task.

Anyway, back in the start of lockdown one of the senior editors suggested that it might be worth looking at producing an anthology of some of the best articles published over the lifetime of NewsBiscuit.  As one contributor noted recently, internet years are like dog years so to still be around publishing original material for nearly fifteen years is an achievement.  Anyway I threw my hat in the ring and shortly afterwards four other editors came on board.

Over the duration of NewsBiscuit it has published literally tens of thousands of submissions especially when you consider the site publishes one-line tickers as well.  So we had the unenviable task of wading through those, but not before we'd requested permission to use material from contributors.  Unlike other websites of a similar ilk, one of NewsBiscuit's unique selling points is that the writer retains full rights to their material - in essence they loan it to us - so we couldn't use anything that belonged to anyone who didn't reply to our request.

Once we had a list of agreed writers to cull stories and tickers from a bit of crude data mining with our database revealed how many submissions each writer had had published over the years - it wasn't perfect but it gave us a starting point.  Writers were allocated to editors for selecting articles and we worked on a percentage value that differentiated between the prolific big hitters and the infrequent writers, with the prolific group getting a smaller percentage allocation to avoid swamping  the book with prolific authors.

Once editors had selected and trimmed articles they allocated them to genres such as World News, UK News, Science and Technology, Faith and quite a few more.  We sorted and arranged the submissions into what we felt was a logical order, continuing to edit and tidy them up and then the sections were rotated again for sense checking.  More tidying up and the book started to take shape and, because I have previous in this area, I undertook the formatting for the eBook and paperback versions.

Meanwhile a couple of the editors started looking for suitable charities to receive any royalties from the sales.  From the outset we agreed to make this a charity affair and all of the eventual contributors, all 80+ of them, agreed up front to waive any fees despite the fact we hadn't identified a charity at that point.  We approached national and international charities and at best received an out of office message.  Most didn't respond at all despite we were offering to donate all royalties without deductions.  However we did find two very deserving charities that did return our calls - the award-winning mentoring charity and support network Arts Emergency (arts-emergency.org) and English Pen (englishpen.org), one of the world's oldest human rights organisations that champions the freedom to write and read around the world.  

One of the editors is a professional proof-reader so we had him working flat out correcting misspellings and grammatical howlers while the wife of one of the other editors also proof-read the first draft and provided valuable feedback.  I formatted the paperback, ordered proof copies and distributed.  There were still issues that the six of us trapped including my choice of margins and the book was altered.  On December the first it was released.

With over 500 short comedic stories and several hundred one-line gags we have produced a very professional and fun to read anthology.  With the Christmas period looming this might just be the stocking filler you need, or the book you want to buy for yourself.  The book is titled 15 Years of Typos and is currently only available on Amazon (UK link provided - I'm sure Amazon will direct you to the best local version of their website).  

Save yourself a headache - order copies for friends and family.

This News Takes the Biscuit

Regular readers will know that I take the occasional foray into comedic (in my opinion) articles and of course I serialised my two comedic novels on this blog first.  We British have a long history of anarchic humour and like to think we own satire - which of course is universally practised in all countries with English as their first language.

There's an online satirical newspaper that is predominantly written by Brits, but not entirely and I understand it has a bit of an underground following in the US too.  The site is called NewsBiscuit and has been running for several years.  All of the spoof newspaper reports it carries are submitted by members of the public, often under a pseudonym, and tend to be topical and UK orientated (although often deprecating the UK, as it is satire after all).  The best articles make it to the front page (perhaps after a little tender editing) and often are provided with an image to go with it.

Apparently I put my younger brother onto this a few years ago - I probably heard about it in the radio, passed the message and promptly forgot about it.  Until this weekend when my brother contacted me and told me he'd made the front page with three articles - a brilliant result.  So I had to take a look and I guess sibling rivalry being what it is....

Anyway, although most of my submissions to date have gone the way of the majority - there's a lot of material being submitted daily and if you don't make the cut quickly, your baby sinks - I managed to get two on the front page.  Here's a link to one of them, which shows the professionalism of the NewsBiscuit team in improving your efforts.

I'll be submitting more 'articles' in the coming weeks and months, if only because my brother has discovered that he is both prolific and talented.  I can match the prolific part.  Rest assured I can always fall on my 'the book is nearly finished and I haven't got as much time as you' excuse if I lose the quota race.

Take a look at NewsBiscuit, perhaps subscribe to the daily newsletter which features one of the front page articles, and if you have a penchant for writing funny stuff, why not have a go?

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