Writing Archives

May 5, 2019 by Laura Resnick

Nink Knowledge: Converting Your Books into Comics/Graphic Novels — A One-Page Experiment

This article, written by Jennifer Stevenson and illustrated by Elizabeth Person, is from the May 2019 edition of Nink, the monthly newsletter of Novelists, Inc. (NINC). Nink, which is packed each month with informative articles for career novelists, is a benefit of NINC membership.

With graphic novels and comics all the rage, I worked with Elizabeth Person, an illustrator, animator, and comic book writer-artist on a three-panel experiment. This will show you how author and artist collaborate, a different exercise from drawing one’s own.

Original 250-word story

At three in the morning of March first, 1893, the moon rode high in London’s sky over the old mansion in Grosvenor Square. All was still: no hansom cabs rumbled over the cobblestones, no policeman’s whistle sounded, and even the gas lamps burned with a fainter hiss, around which bats flitted noiselessly. No house thronged with a private party, no orchestra was heard behind the tall, darkened windows. The only sign of a disturbance was a window ajar on the ground floor at number 12, its curtain blowing outward.

Inside the darkened drawing room, Miss Emmeline Moriarty stood behind the curtain, her pistol raised, listening for telltale sounds of the householder’s return. It had been simplicity to enter. She knew Lord Jowles to be at his club that night, celebrating the success of his plan to seize her father’s criminal empire. The servants would be in their attic rooms. The square was silent. She hadn’t even had to break the glass.

Lord Jowles was still drunk; he had walked all the way home from his club and the unseasonably warm night air had nearly put him to sleep. He never noticed the curtain blowing out of his own drawing-room window. He had spent the evening drinking whatever friends bought for him, eating roast duck and oysters and pudding and everything his medical advisors had forbidden him, accepting congratulations from his cronies until they had tottered home one by one, the slackers. Unsteadily, he now paused on his own doorstep and scrabbled at the keyhole with his wayward key.

Let’s turn it into a script in three panels. In my directions to the artist, I sent the following:

Establishing shot: London city scene, full moon in a starry sky, and below, small, a house lit in front by a street lamp. On the first (ground, if you’re British) floor front, a casement window (door-style, not opening up-and-down) is a little open, and the tail of a light curtain is hanging out and fluttering slightly in a breeze.
Interior closeup shot: Mostly dark. Half of a young woman’s face illuminated by moonlight from the window. She is standing behind the curtain inside that room, but all we see is half her stern, lovely young face, perhaps a curl beside her fiercely narrowed eye, her small hand raised, holding an enormous service revolver circa 1893, pointing up, and perhaps a bit of the street, sidewalk, streetlamp below. If you can’t fit all that in, just give us a bit of her face, the hand holding the revolver, the curtain, and maybe the moon beyond it.
Interior closeup shot: A bit lighter. All we see is Lord Jowles’s plump bare hand trying to thrust his key into the keyhole. The key is attached to a fancy key chain with a fob and a couple of other keys dangling on it. Lord Jowles wears a gaudy man’s jeweled ring. Small speech bubble comes down into the picture: “Damned keyhole moves around on a feller.”

I also told Elizabeth “There’s no room for her clothes as you’re showing how tiny a keyhole image an artist can work with to create the mood, illustrate character, set the time of day and setting. You’ll notice the backstory doesn’t mention whether she’s working for her father’s criminal empire or working against it, so the artist is at liberty to make her look villainous or virtuous, as well as pretty and young and well-bred and determined.”

Elizabeth then sent me some draft images.

Feedback

At this step, as the author, I provided the following feedback: “This is lovely! Street and house are the right kind of architecture. Emmeline looks ladylike, resolute and fierce. The revolver is terrific—huge in her hand, and clunky like army revolvers of the period. The doorknob & keys are excellent. Also, Lord Jowles’s hand is nicely masculine without looking ‘stevedore.’”

I then gave her more specific feedback on what I had envisioned:

Panel 1: I had imagined looking down on the house from up above, but this works fine! When you polish, might add a tiny bit of light from the streetlights, and a sliver of a moon above, to help signal “nighttime.”
Panel 2: I imagined this closer up. Perhaps show us maybe less than half her face, and the revolver in her hand or even just part of the revolver (barrel & cartridge-cylinder), the rest of her face partly concealed by the edge of a closed curtain. Because you’ve made her hair, face, collar, hand, and revolver perfectly signal all the things I wanted, if you zoom in, you will still give us everything we want, nice and large, without wasting extra space on the room décor or much of the street view. Also, Emmeline should be behind a curtain. Probably not behind the one that is blowing open. Although it adds continuity to have her standing beside the open window we saw in panel 1, it isn’t logical. The implication being, she is waiting for Jowles to enter the room, and she expects to ambush him when he is inside it.
Panel 3: The third panel, another extreme closeup, brings the promise of the waiting menace of the revolver-holding woman closer to a moment of actual conflict. Lord Jowles’s hand is just right. How about you take out his thumbnail and add a seam on his thumb and a button at his wrist, to indicate a white glove (surely a sign of the upper class!) and add his ring.

Elizabeth responded that she could see what I meant in the wider shot feeling less intimate and dramatic. She then offered her thoughts and sent a cropped copy of the second panel that approximated what she had in mind for my feedback.

At this part in the process, I found what she had done interesting, and let her know that the shorter, wider frame looked better. I also noted that perhaps we needed to consider putting the door on her right so doesn’t have her back to the door and that the view through the window of the buildings across the street confused me. Logically, I knew that the houses across the street very likely look like that, but my immediate assumption is that she’s in a window across the street from the house with our blowing-curtain-open-window. This is because I am a lazy reader. Since there’s no action or dialogue, I think we should expect lazy reading.

I then proposed some solutions, giving her three possible solutions. She chose the third, which was to use the short, wide panel-view she’d sent, and changing it to put her behind the curtain and shift the camera angle toward sky.

After a bit more back and forth emails, Elizabeth sent me the cleaner versions of panels 1 and 3, and three compositions for panel 2:

Panel 1:

Panel 2, three versions:

Top: The same as before but with the door right next to the window on the right. Architecturally, this might seem weird, but visually it read well.
Middle: The view from a lower camera angle with the door closer the reader. The light draws reader eyes to her immediately before seeing the door, so it works narratively.
Bottom: A lower camera angle, but parallel to the wall. It’s dramatic but the door is a bit hard to read.

Panel 3:

The minute I saw panels 1 and 3, I knew we were good there. I also thought the second of the three options for #2 was most effective, because she takes the eye! But I thought that she should have the pistol should be bigger, and she should give the reader a stern eyeball.

I also noticed what seems to be a pole in the room, because the view is of being in the room looking out. As we discussed this, Elizabeth realized the lamp post didn’t have a grounding point in the image, which made it look odd. We decided adding the moon might give a better idea of the camera angle without mistaking the lamp post for some kind of indoor pillar.

Here is the final shot for panel 2:

The final series of images comes out like this, then:

A few takeaways from the process

Your story shifts shape on its way out of your head and onto a page. First, you imagine a series of images and words. Then you convert those images and words into fiction. Then you revisit the fiction to convert it into a comic book script. So your story moves a lot between right brain and left brain, and you may find that what you imagined when you originally wrote the story is not on the page, perhaps has never been on the page.
Don’t be afraid to try drawing your comic book yourself first, using stick figures, to block out the story you want to tell. “Thumbnailing” your script like this will help you learn about communicating with the artist…and learn about your story as well!
Listen to the artist. You have your expertise and they have theirs.

________________________

Jennifer Stevenson is the author of five series, nineteen novels and twenty short stories. Her story "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" appeared in Jam! Tales from the World of Roller Derby, a graphic anthology. Her paranormal women's fiction series Coed Demon Sluts was nominated for the James Tiptree Award and featured on John Scalzi's "The Big Idea" blog. She lives in Chicago with two cats and a stagehand.

Elizabeth Person is a freelance illustrator and graphic designer. She graduated from Allegheny College in 2017 in fine arts & computer science. She has been illustrating covers, maps, and characters for writers since 2011.

April 5, 2019 by Laura Resnick

Nink Knowledge: C.H.A.N.G.E. and Every Writer

This article by Melanie Stiles is from the April 2019 edition of Nink, the monthly newsletter of Novelists, Inc. (NINC). Nink, which is packed each month with informative articles for career novelists, is a benefit of NINC membership.

Ask any number of your writer friends if there is something they could change about the mechanics of their writing career and most (if not all) will respond with a yes. So, as writers, why don’t we take action, instead of merely thinking about it? The answer tends to be as varied as the tasks. In the end, many writers are more than tempted to give up and remain in the status quo.

Change almost never takes place instantly. Real change is usually accomplished through a series of gradual, purposeful actions. The beautiful thing about change is that even one small adjustment contains the possibility for a myriad of beneficial outcomes. So whether you view change with a fair amount of chagrin, or embrace change as eagerly as a leaf is carried on the autumn wind, by engaging with a few minor examinations that require minimum effort, you can move forward into the C.H.A.N.G.E. you need today.

C = Community
When it comes to our money, most of us look for competitive interest rates on credit cards. We want to pay the lowest cost for the greatest amount of insurance, and we want the best sale price on major purchases. But when it comes to our communities, we tend not to give them a second thought. If we have fully incorporated a person into our writing life, they are apt to be there for the duration. If we accumulate enough folks, we simply don’t have room for more. People are definitely not as interchangeable as credit cards, but writers can do themselves a great disservice if they do not periodically take stock of their own community. We tend to travel in genre herds, aligning ourselves with those who speak our lingo. That’s great for critiquing particular projects or for shoring up our comfort zones, but it’s not always conducive to expanding our writing horizons. Branching out can offer new opportunities. Writing communities should support several basic areas; it’s rare that one group does it all. For example, if you haven’t already, consider adding the following:

A Social Media Partner – When it comes to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all of the other outlets on the web, it hardly matters whether the writer you connect with writes in the same genre. If a writer likes to post more than you do, he/she is a community treasure trove for you! A simple weekly telephone appointment can change the nature of your own social media presence as you trade information or navigate mutual chores.
A Marketing Partner – Marketing partners do not necessarily have to be other writers. Successful sales people make great connections, as they are innovative and often gregarious about thinking outside of the proverbial box. As writers, we can always use a fresh approach that differs from what we already know about.

Adding and subtracting community, when done deliberately, can push us to the next career level.

H = Habits
We generally recognize when someone else practices habits that are different from ours. This can create a silent message that winds its way through our brain saying, “I wouldn’t do it like that.” Interestingly, most of us never consider a secondary message, the one that says, “But, is his/her way better?” Consider performing a short, three-question survey. Ask questions, of other writers, that relate to areas in which you deem yourself most entrenched. Examples might include:

How do you maintain a consistent word count?
What does your social media management look like?
What is your most successful marketing tactic?

These simple inquiries can often encourage us to make small habit changes that can lead to greater productivity.

A = Attitude
Winston Churchill said, “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.” It seems to be true for an army of writers such as J.K. Rowling, Dr. Seuss, John Grisham and Madeleine L’Engle, who never let multiple rejections stop them. To make mental adjustments in our attitudes, it’s often necessary to redefine or reframe our challenges. We have to believe and accept that there are no dead ends, only redirections that move us one step closer to our goals. In the end, attitudes are always a choice. Contemplate writers who have traveled before you and what their lives could have been like if they had quit.

N = New routines
Let’s face it. The evolution of new apps, software, computers and most everything related to writing and publishing, is traveling at exponential speeds. By organizing our learning endeavors so that they are both purposeful and scheduled, we can increase our skillsets gradually and successfully. We already have a lot on our plates, so pacing is primary. Try attending seminars or participating in online classes with a partner. Having a study buddy automatically increases consistency. There will always be something new on the horizon, so why not make our educational experiences as pleasurable as we can?

G = Goal centered activities
The average American now spends a little over five hours a day watching television (www.bls.gov) and a little less than one-half hour thinking. In order to ascertain whether or not an activity truly supports our goals, we will have to exceed this sad, thinking statistic. Taking the time to simply ponder or daydream about the end result of a project carves out an imaginary path to its completion. By mentally plotting our way, we can easily see what fits and what is irrelevant to its success.

E = Extending the vision
No writing career is complete if it doesn’t include the acknowledgment of the people in our surroundings. We must extend our knowledge, time, and pens to include helping those who are new to the writing journey. It is our way of repaying those who were there for us.

By tweaking the things that we already do right, we can effectively hone our lifestyles to increase our maximum productivity. As we apply the components of the C.H.A.N.G.E. acronym at least twice a year, we can create a lifestyle overview that quickly ascertains what is missing, what we need to let go of and what is going well.

________________________

Melanie Stiles is an award-winning author and life coach who has accumulated hundreds of bylines in various publications. She has authored three books specifically for writers and frequently speaks at conferences. She offers writing-related services including editing, ghostwriting, coaching and more.

March 5, 2019 by Laura Resnick

Nink Knowledge | Tactical Crowdfunding: Using Kickstarter for Quick Capital

This article by M.C.A. Hogarth is from the March 2019 edition of Nink, the monthly newsletter of Novelists, Inc. (NINC). Nink, which is packed each month with informative articles for career novelists, is a benefit of NINC membership.

* * *

Most people know about Kickstarter, the website where creators crowdfund their projects to the tune of thousands of dollars, and for the most part we’ve heard about the outrageous successes (and the devastating failures). These stories paint Kickstarter as a “go big or go home” platform, which obscures one of its most useful functions: arranging for small infusions of capital, quickly. Would it be nice for us to swing one of those $100,000 campaigns? Sure, but who has the time to manage several thousand backers’ products? We’re too busy writing. But that doesn’t mean you need to pay for the small-to-medium expenses of your career on your own.

What kind of things am I talking about?

Putting your backlist in print again (or in ebook for the first time).
Getting a new cover designed for some of your backlist works.
Buying audio editions of your work.
Writing that niche novella you can’t justify otherwise.
Getting fun merchandise done for in-person events.

Most of us have some loose ends we’d like to tie up. Why not enlist your fans’ help? You can do it with the right kind of Kickstarter campaign.

Think small

First, ask for the least amount of money you can get away with. The formula is this: Amount I Need to Buy the Thing I’m Raising For + Amount I Need to Fulfill Prizes + 20 percent of that total for fees and taxes + another 20 percent for profit. (You need to pay yourself.)

Your total goal should be under $2,000; if it’s not, you’re out of the ‘quick and dirty’ Kickstarter range and into the ‘I need to take this a lot more seriously’ department. If your goal can’t be achieved in under $2,000, then you have three choices: (1) pick something else that does come in under that goal; (2) run the project intending to fulfill only some of your expenses, and (3) pay the rest out of your pocket; or retool to run a major campaign. (Which I don’t recommend. Write another book instead.)

The best way to keep things small is to limit your prizes and your tiers—that minimizes your mental overhead when it’s time to figure out who gets what. Most of your prizes should be virtual and cheap to deliver: wallpapers, ebooks, emailed cut scenes, cameos, names listed in the backs of the books, etc. Get creative; anything you can do once and reproduce infinitely is good! Are you good at singing? Send an MP3! Like talking to people on camera? Give them a backer-only video. Reserve physical prizes for very high tiers, and limit their numbers. Don’t get trapped into shipping several hundred hardcovers; have one tier for 10 autographed books and charge more for them.

Don’t feel bad about fewer tiers. Tell your backers that you’re streamlining so that everyone gets what they backed for as quickly as possible. So many Kickstarter projects never send their awards that if you do so consistently, you will be lauded for it.

Think quick

Don’t let these campaigns drag on. A well-run campaign needs daily attention, plus you’re going to be burning time fulfilling prizes. One to two weeks is good; generally the more money you’re asking—the longer you need. But there’s a point of diminishing returns: it’s hard to sustain backer excitement over three or four weeks, so don’t try.

The moment you hit your goal (and it might be fast!), start to work on those prizes so you can get them out the door as quickly as possible. You don’t want your responsibility to your campaign to linger any longer than necessary.

Think minimalist

One of Kickstarter’s features is the ability to offer stretch goals: additional prizes that get “unlocked” when the campaign hits a certain goal over and above the one needed for a successful campaign. These stretch goals give backers a reason to keep throwing money at the project. Usually creators promise things like more merchandise, extra gifts, another story—the possibilities are endless. Which is exactly why you shouldn’t declare too many. Stretch goals are a good way to overextend yourself. Pick one or two that won’t take much time or effort and don’t be tempted to add more as your totals go up. You’re not aiming for “most money possible” because that usually entails “most effort possible.” You’re aiming for “most money possible for the least amount of effort, so I can stay focused on my core business. Which is writing. Not fulfilling Kickstarter prizes.”

I usually pick one or two stretch goals, and tie them into something I want to do anyway, and can resell later, like cut scenes or bonus short fiction I can bundle later into a collection for retail.

I didn’t fund!

There are a lot of reasons a Kickstarter might not fund, but most of them boil down to “my goal didn’t match up with my audience.” (It’s a lot like writing a successful novel that way.) But here are the most common problems:

You didn’t tell your fans. They can’t fund your project if they don’t know about it, and you should give them some advance warning so they can plan their budgets. (I usually tell mine a month in advance, and hit up all my major social media/newsletter/chat outlets before and during the campaign.)
You didn’t keep the project alive. You should plan to post an update to your project every day it’s active, and then regularly after closing, especially until you’re done sending out prizes. Don’t just talk about the campaign’s progress; have a list of topics related to your project. If it’s a book, you can talk about how you came up with the characters, or share photographs of the place the book’s set, or discuss forensics—whatever seems relevant. If it’s a side project, like merchandise, you can talk about the process of hiring artists, or what your vision was, or ask fans for suggestions on how to use the results. (Asking your fans things in these posts is a great way to promote engagement.)
You asked for too much money in too little time for the number of fans you have. Keep in mind 95 percent of your money’s going to come from your existing fanbase, not from people “discovering” you on Kickstarter: the amount you can raise is going to be limited by that number. If you have one hundred fans, don’t ask them for $2,000, ask for $250. Likewise, don’t ask people for $2,000 in five days (unless you have several thousand fans). The amount you can raise and the time you can do it in are directly related to how many people you can mobilize, so use that to set your expectations.
Something about your prizes wasn’t compelling. Best way to fix this problem is to ask your fans what they want—and what they find uninteresting. Mine keep telling me they love bookmarks, for instance, and aren’t very interested in patches, so I keep producing bookmarks!

It may take you a few tries to get the formula down. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t figure it out immediately. Use Kickstarter’s search engine to find other (successfully funded) writer projects and see how they handled it. (Here’s my profile if you want to see mine: https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/mcahogarth/created). Take notes. Listen to your fans, too; they’ll tell you what they’re willing to pay for, and how often. They want to help you! So let them!

Do it again

Did it work? Excellent. Do it again. One of the side effects of a good Kickstarter campaign is that it gives your fans something fun to get worked up about. They like helping you accomplish something; they enjoy watching the totals rise and unlocking your one or two stretch goals. Don’t let this tool rust now that you’ve mastered it … any time you’ve got a small project that could use some capital, use Kickstarter for a quick injection. Have fun with it!

________________________

M.C.A. Hogarth is a former vice president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and the author of over 40 novels in the genres of fantasy, science ﬁction, and romance. She is also a professional visual artist, doodles cartoon jaguars for fun, and has written a book about Kickstarter.

January 5, 2019 by Laura Resnick

Nink Knowledge: You Thought You Knew What Being a Hybrid Means?

This article by Patricia Burroughs is from the January 2019 edition of Nink, the monthly newsletter of Novelists, Inc. (NINC). Nink, which is packed each month with informative articles for career novelists, is a benefit of NINC membership.

One of the great benefits of being a NINC member is access to the wealth of knowledge and experience available in the NINCLINK email loop from writers of all different backgrounds. Recently someone presented a confusing question, “What is a hybrid publisher?”

Most of us know what hybrid authors are. But it took some Googling to discover that there actually is such a thing as a hybrid publisher.

It primarily boils down to financial risk, and who is taking it.

Until the 21st Century, most publishing was what we now call traditional publishing. The publishers took all the financial risks from editing, to publishing, to marketing, to shipping. And the author usually got paid an advance up front!

The opposite of traditional publishing was vanity publishing. These publishers fed off a writer’s vanity (or more likely, desperation) and promised the sky—but the author had to pay all the publisher’s expenses, plus more, and then ended up with boxes of books to market and ship. Vanity publishing was rarely a good idea and almost always ended in frustration for the author.

But after the turn of this century, authors gained the power and ability to skip the traditional publishers and publish their own work profitably. Yes, self-publishing.

We all know the term “hybrid author” as a writer who combines both publishing paths in her or his career. Publishing has evolved its own hybrid, not to be confused with “hybrid authors” any more than it should be with “hybrid cars” or pluots, a hybrid of plums and apricots.

A hybrid publisher is a publisher that—in a perfect world—brings a lot of value to the table that the author usually can’t provide. Namely? Marketing and sales through established access and relationships with libraries, schools, and brick-and-mortar stores.

But it’s not that easy.

One reason there are so many definitions and descriptions of hybrid publishers is because they have widely different business models. Also, different companies that range from legitimate to scammers are using the term.

It’s up to writers to know what to look for and what to avoid.

The simplest and most accurate definition of hybrid publishers is that they combine aspects of traditional publishing with aspects of self-publishing.

In general, the author often provides the book and the money to cover editorial and production costs. This is usually far more than the typical self-published author pays for the same services, even if they hire them done. Thus it’s even more important that the publisher can hold up its side of the bargain.

The publisher provides the knowledge and experience to publish and market the book. This can include providing developmental editors with a background that matches the author and book, as well as later editing, professional layout and covers, and of course—selling books.

How do you get this magic on your team? You pay high publishing expenses up front and then split the royalties with the hybrid publisher, hopefully at least 50/50. Unless your financial investment is low, anything less than 50/50 is not a good deal.

So the author pays huge expenses up front. How is this any different from a vanity press? The publisher should then market and sell the book with a vastly wider reach than the given author could do alone.

This sometimes works.

Let’s just accept that sometimes this actually works out satisfactorily for the author who earns back initial expenses and more. Some hybrid publishers can point to at least a few true successes and connect a prospective client to authors who are willing to recommend said publisher. (If not, it does not bode well to assume that with your book they will suddenly break through and sell thousands or tens of thousands of books when they haven’t before, no matter how flattering it feels to be told your book is special, ‘the one’ they have been waiting for.)

So, again, hybrid publishing can be a good deal. But in all actuality? It’s a long shot.

Beginning with—there is no association or body to monitor or penalize hybrid publishers who are simply vanity presses with a clean, unblemished new term to call themselves.

An author interested in hybrid publishing has a lot of research ahead. Here are some questions to ask and things to investigate.

Are their books editorially curated?

Do they have a gatekeeper and standards a book must meet or do they take anyone who sends them a submission?

Do they provide sound, professional editorial support?

Do they provide developmental editing, copyediting, proofreading, and all the steps expected from a reputable traditional publisher?

Do they produce quality books you’d be proud to have your name on?

How do you know? Read as many free samples on Amazon and elsewhere as you can find. If those pass muster, buy some in digital and print, if the publisher does both. Read complete books to see if they maintain the quality you expect. Hold actual print books in your hands and don’t just read them. Compare them to good traditionally published books.

Do they provide a higher than standard royalty since you are subsidizing production of the book?

Assuming the author investment is significant (as it seems to be in most if not all cases) that should be at least a 50/50 split of net royalties.

What rights does the publisher want to claim?

As publishers, they may want more than you want to give. An important question is, do they exercise all the rights they want to keep? Do they actually create quality audiobooks that are selling and getting good reviews (or at least no bad reviews) on sites like Audible? Do they actually market print books to libraries, schools, stores, etc.? If the answer to these or similar questions is no, it’s incredibly difficult to justify a publisher keeping them, no matter what traditional publishers might do. You have more clout in this situation than you do with a traditional publisher. Carefully consider whether you want to let them sit on your subsidiary rights, hoping someday they’ll be able to use them—or better, that they’ll be worth something because of your later success (which may have little to do with this particular book or anything this publisher did).

Perhaps one of the most important questions is what do they offer in terms of marketing and distribution?

Does the publisher have an actual print catalog of their books? Do their books get reviewed in PW, Library Journal, or specific publications and websites that have an authoritative voice and reach in your book’s genre or niche?

Do they have an actual marketing or sales team that will be actively attempting to sell your book, in the way you would expect a traditional publisher to do? Do they buy ads in places that count or promote their list in other ways? Do they have a marketing and sales strategy for your books? Did they and/or their sales team come from marketing at a reputable publisher in your genre or niche? If not, how are they going to be able to sell more books than you can on your own? Being able to point to books in an Ingram online catalog is not proof of their connections. You can do the same thing yourself. Being in the catalog means your book is available for books, libraries, and bookstores to order. But if the publisher can’t actually stimulate sales, how are they holding up their part?

Remember…

A hybrid publisher should bring a lot of value to the table that the author can’t provide. That means not just producing books but selling them.

A publisher that isn’t every bit as vested in making money from your book as you are is a publisher whose business model is based on getting money from writers.

There is no standard definition of a hybrid publisher, what they offer, or what expenses they expect the author to cover. Do your homework and you may find that special situation that will actually make a positive difference to you. Just remember that in this, like many aspects of publishing (whether traditional or self-pub), the odds aren’t in your favor until you’ve done your due diligence and made smart choices.

The IBPA (International Book Publishers Association) has a helpful and informative webpage with downloads, which states their IBPA Hybrid Publisher Criteria and details the IBPA’s “Industry Standards Checklist for a Professionally Published Book.”

________________________

Patricia Burroughs is a Screenwriting Fellow of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, an award-winning romance writer, and in this phase of her career writes SFF. The last book in her YA Dark Fantasy series, The Fury Triad, will be published in late 2019. Her first cozy mystery, Mourning Chorus, will be published by Sweet Promise Press November 30, 2018.

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