#book publishing

[reasonsforhope]

Book Publishing Resources

Well, since a few people said they were interested and/or that posting about it on here occasionally was a decent idea, here we go!

I'm MC Calvi, a freelance editor specializing in self-help, psychology, spirituality, paganism, workbooks, and LGBTQ books.

You can find out more about me at my website, where I also offer free twenty-minute book/publishing consultations, in addition to regular editing services.

I am also now offering some pay-what-you-can resources on my website and on Gumroad. I'm committed to offering pay-what-you-can resources because the odds are already so stacked against marginalized authors, and publishing shouldn't be pay to win.

I have two new booklets I'm actually super happy with! They both draw on my eight years of experience in the publishing industry to give authors a leg up.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming as I hit "publish" on another good news post!

[thebibliosphere]

My apologies if you have talked about this recently, but, as an aspiring author-if-i-ever-manage-to-finish-something-haha-can-you-imagine, I have a question! I discovered Draft2Digital thanks to one of your old posts and it caught my attention very fast because it looked very promising, but lately (as much as I've been able to consult with Tumblr's search, magnificent and very functional as it famously is) you've been mentioning IngramSpark more, so if I may ask! Is D2D still an acceptable platform nowadays, or is it better to go look for other alternatives? Thanks!

Oh, Ingram Spark used to be one of the only options for paperbacks other than Amazon in the US and I am moving AWAY from them because they’re such assholes.

They’re responsible for the price hike in my books and I’m 99.9% certain they’re skimming profit off my retailer discount. They also put the ability to call customer service behind a paywall ($25 per 30 minutes). You can still email them but good luck ever getting a reply. Which is an issue when they send you a box of hardback books covered in binding glue with pages falling out that they still maintain are in sellable condition and won’t issue a refund for 🙃 (yes to anyone who has been paying attention it’s been 2+ years and I’m still fighting with them over that)

Yeah, no. I’ll be a d2d author going forward. They’ve got the same global market reach as Ingram, as well as recently merged with Gardners in the UK (a big distributor)

Plus it means I can do my ebook, paperback and audio all from one place. (Findaway is partnered with d2d)

I’ll still keep Amazon separate, but that's because Amazon pays better royalties for direct uploads. Everything else I’m using d2d.

Fuck Ingram. They’re never getting another direct penny from me 😅

[jamesfitzjamesdotcom]

Future publication

One of the things I want to publish is Fitzjames' 1833-34 Midshipman journal, which was donated to the National Maritime Museum Greenwich. I had my book concept printed to see what it looks like in print, and I love it! 🥰

The cover is a picture of the actual journal, so that you feel like you're holding the real thing! When I've finished writing the biography I'm finally going to approach publishers.

[JOD/86, National Maritime Museum Greenwich. See the original journal here.]

[norapotwora]

Hello folks!

Last year I had an amazing opportunity to unleash creativity and came out of my comfrot zone by creating the character design tutorial for "Inspired by Nature".

The book, published by @3dtotal, just had it's premiere not so long ago, and is now available in the 3dtotal store!

It was a huge fun, and I hope you like how the Periwinkle came out!

[thetransfemininereview]

Guess what day it is? We're back at it with a broad overview of trans-forward indie presses, looking both at some of the better known ones (Topside, Metonymy, LittlePuss) as well as a few lesser known ones (Reluctant, Doppler, Instar). We ❤️ our indie presses!

[maream2636]

2024.29.7

Yesterday I went out to the beach with my family and it was really fun although I fell on my knees and hurt myself but I still walked! Today I found myself lost so I sat down and wrote down all the important and silly tasks that came to mind and things I wanted to do and more and more are still floating around and I won't be able to finish them all in one day but I want to focus on the more important things so I will finish the simple now

So :

1.Looking for a suitable sports schedule for me

2.I agree with my sister to prepare healthy meals for me in exchange for money (I know how to cook but I hate it)

3.Search for a psychological improvement course (I had it but I don't know where I lost it!)

4.Clean the room

[chroniclesofnadia111]

🙏🏾Publishing my first book at this time in life has been a deeply sentimental and spiritual experience. Thank you to all who have supported. I truly believe these poems and musings will deeply resonate in the hands of whoever it comes in contact with. Words are Life and Art is eternal. 🌹

If anyone wants a real insight into my mind, you can find that in Hopeful Nets. It’s me at my most transparent and vulnerable.

Available now on Amazon at the link below.💫✨👇🏾 📖 Blessings.

[novlr]

How to create a Copyright for my fiction novel?

For example:

All right reserved. This is a work of fiction...

(I forgot all of it)

In August we wrote a beginners guide to copyright, in which we talk about whether you need it, how to get it if you do, and what information you should include in a copyright page. We've even given you a downloadable template that you can customise to your needs for both fiction, and non-fiction books! Click the link below.

[thesobsister]

"Judy-Lynn Del Rey - The Woman Behind Del Rey Books," from PBS's American Masters imprint and its Renegades series, is a short documentary that looks at one of the most influential people in science fiction publishing in the 20th century.

[tiffanytoms]

GUYS!!!

I decided to get one of my stories printed into a book, AND IT ARRIVED TODAY 🥹

Look at it! Look at ittttt! 😍

Ah! Anyway, I wanted to thank @scriibble-fics for recommending the printing place (lulu) and a big thank you to @athenasparrow @cscs01 @chiechie97 lighteningmischief & oldenough2knowbetter for their awesome reviews I totally added to the back cover❣️

Anywho, I highly recommend doing this. Such a cool feeling!

[tinkerbitch69]

Just saw a headline about Boris Johnson’s memoir being a commercial flop and like this is so funny to me because one of my uni lecturers was just talking about few weeks ago about how she works for the publisher that produced it. She claimed that ‘most people’ there didn’t actually want to publish it buuuuuuuuuuut it would make a lot of money so they published to “fund the books they actually want to publish”

LOL

LMAO, even.

This is what you get for compromising your political and moral principles for capital. Stay losing, liberals! We love to see it. 😊

[reasonsforhope]

"At HarperCollins, a lot of attention and thought is given to deciding exactly what combinations of margin measurements, font, and layout feel most appropriate for the genre, and writing style.

But in a case of do-your-part environmentalism, designers at the publishing house have now standardized a series of subtle and imperceptible alterations to normal font style, layouts, and ink that have so far removed the need for 245 million book pages, totaling 5,618 trees.

Telling the story in Fast Company, representatives from HarperCollins, one of the four largest publishing houses in the world, explained that the idea first arose in Zondervan Bibles, HarperCollins’ Christian publishing division. Being that the Bible is 2,500 pages or sometimes more, saving ink and pages was not just an environmental consideration, but one of production costs.

A new typeface called NIV Comfort Print allowed Zondervan to shave 350 pages off of every Bible, which by 2017 had amounted to 100 million pages, and which, as Fast Company points out, would be four times higher than the Empire State Building if stacked.

The production and design teams then wondered how much they could save if they applied the same concepts to other genres like romance and fiction. Aside from the invention of the eBook, publishing hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years, and the challenge was a totally novel one for the teams—to alter all their preconceived ideas and try and find a font and typeface that resulted in fewer pages without being harder to read.

They eventually standardized 14 different combinations their tests determined were the most environmentally friendly, and which delivered an unchanged reading experience.

But the challenge didn’t stop there. Printed books, one might not know, are printed in large sheets which are then folded into sections of sixteen pages, meaning that Leah Carlson-Stanisic, associate director of design at HarperCollins, has to calculate the savings of space, words, and ultimately pages with the help of her team to fall in multiples of sixteen.

Nevertheless, they have been successful with it so far, and in the recent print run of one popular book, 1 million pages (or a number near 1 million that coincides with the 16 times tables) were saved.

“We want to make sure our big titles, by prominent authors, are using these eco-fonts,” Carlson-Stanisic said. “It adds up a little bit at a time, saving more and more trees.”"

-via Good News Network, April 4, 2024

--

Note: Great! Waiting to see this on the rest of their books and at the other big publishers!

Actually, though, it's worth noting that this may not come quickly to the other large publishers, because Harper Collins almost certainly owns that font - meaning that other publishers would have to pay HarperCollins in order to use it, on an ongoing basis.

More on publishing shit and more realistic solutions here below the cut!

What I'm hoping for and think is more likely is that this will inspire the development of open source eco-friendly fonts, which would be free for anyone to use. That would make it far more likely other publishers would adopt eco-friendly fonts.

I'm also hoping it would inspire other publishers to create similar eco-friendly fonts of their own.

Ideally, there would be a whole new landscape of (hopefully mostly open source) eco-friendly fonts. And/or to see calculations of the eco-friendliness of popular existing fonts, compared to each other.

If we could have a publicly accessible list of calculations for different fonts, including fonts designed to maximize eco-friendliness, I really do think that it would affect which fonts publishers choose to use. Here's why:

Most people in publishing are on the left (notoriously, actually) and really do care about the environment

People in publishing are plenty aware of these issues re: paper and trees, I promise

Shorter books means smaller production costs - and possibly smaller shipping costs as well, over time! So it would save them money too.

Eco-friendly fonts could also be combined with other measures for greater effect, such as bamboo paper (already in use for a lot of projects where page color/quality is more flexible) and thinner paper (aka paper with a lower weight) that uses less trees.

Don't expect books to all move to just one or two different fonts, though. Publishers and typesetters and font designers will innovate to create more options instead, though it will take longer. This is because different books really do use different fonts for various different reasons - one new font to rule them all isn't really a solution here.

"Every book is in the same font" may sound like a "whatever" deal to a lot of people, but as someone who works in publishing - trust me, it would actually make your reading experience worse, even if you could never quite put your finger on why.

[wishingicouldfly]

How Books are Published - Some Personal Insight

I have a bit of experience with how the publishing industry works, and I thought some of you might be interested in taking a peek behind the curtain. For the record, I don’t know anything about the veracity of Maya Henry’s novel (Looking Forward) or what she drew from her own life experiences, the quality of her writing, or her individual path to publication. The following is based on my personal knowledge of the industry.

Under the cut for more.

When someone (celeb or otherwise) has a manuscript, generally speaking, they are going to look for the best deal. One of the “Big 5” publishers (or their subsidiaries) are going to be able to offer the biggest advance, the best PR support, etc. While there are reputable publishers that aren’t considered “Big 5” – those smaller entities aren’t going to be able to afford a big advance on royalties. Sometimes publishers will engage in bidding wars to win the opportunity to publish a book that has wide commercial appeal. This would be known publicly, and the deal would be announced with a flourish and a press release.

Even a smaller deal without a bidding war would be announced through Publisher’s Weekly with information about the book, author, and who made the deal (agent), not announced via the authors Instagram account with no information about the publisher or a link on how to pre-order. See examples: Anne Twist’s book announcement on Publisher’s Weekly: Betty and the Mysterious Visitor (publishersweekly.com) and Lottie Tomlinson’s press release for her 7-way bidding war: The Bookseller - Rights - Blink Publishing wins Lottie Tomlinson's 'inspirational' memoir in seven-way auction

For me, it’s telling that Henry’s book appears to be published by a small press (MARS Book Publishing (marsbookspublishing.com) with little to no platform. This is not inherently bad. However, as of May 17, 2024, the website has typos, does not have links to its staff or published works, and both the Instagram and TikTok links on the website lead to accounts with no posts. If you’re a writer, this would be very concerning to say the least. Huge red flag. Even a small press should be able to promote your product. My advice to someone looking to publish a book would be to stay away from this press, as it doesn’t look to be reputable.

That said, if one was going to self-publish, they’d need to have a publisher listed for the business side of things – that’s the way Amazon publishing works. Most self-published authors create a business name for their own published works. Again, this is not inherently bad or wrong, just pulling the curtain back. If you don’t have a book deal with a reputable publisher, then this is the way you can publish your book. From the outside, it appears that there is a publisher attached to the book.

For both traditional and self-published books, authors should have readers prepared with reviews. Currently (as of 5/17/24) there are no reviews on Goodreads, which again, for me, is a flaw if the goal is a longer shelf life and a wider audience.

Ultimately, the quality of the book will be the determining factor. People who read the book will talk about it, recommend it, or not recommend it. Relying on word of mouth, a salacious story, some entertainment magazines interested in a click, and a big-name singer (albeit allegedly fictionalized) attached to the story is certainly helpful to garner interest in a novel. But even on the third day of release (5/17/24) the book isn’t hitting the top marks on Amazon in its selected categories. (Screen shot taken by me on 5/17/24 at 12:06 p.m. ET).

Note: these ratings update and change constantly, this is simply one snapshot in time.

If I were to make an educated guess, the book was shopped around and declined by reputable publishers, leading the author to decide to self-publish. The author created a publishing company name and published via Amazon KDP. In my opinion, it appears to have been done quickly and sloppily, without the amount of professional input it should have had.

Again, I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of this book’s path to publication, so these are educated guesses from personal experience, not personal knowledge of the author’s process.

Not having a deal announced in PW, not having a legitimate publisher website with links to staff and other published works, and not having an author website are all clues to someone wanting to capitalize on something quickly, not someone wanting to take the time to publish with precision.

I don’t have anything against self-publishing, I’ve done it myself. It’s a great way to get a book out if an author doesn't have a book deal and/or the book doesn’t hit traditional niches. However, I think it’s odd for a pseudo-celebrity, with a seemingly compelling story based on life events, to not have a bigger publishing deal with a wider reach.

The reliance on entertainment news outlets for publicity can temporarily raise the interest level; but, not having a book tour, not having books available in bookstores, not having any sort of commercial push for sales will have a detrimental effect on how this book does in the long run, regardless of how many print interviews the author does about her former relationship. Of course, the author could do all of these things at their own expense, so perhaps this is on the horizon.

One last thing to add, a self-published author, with no publishing contract or commitment to a company, has the absolute final decision about everything to do with the book from the content, the packaging, and edits, and the PR.

Self-published books can do quite well in the market, when well written and promoted. I'll be curious to see how this one does.

(For reference, I have professional insight into publishing with Big 5 publishers, smaller independent publishers, educational publishers, and with self-publishing through an independent press).

[jamesfitzjamesdotcom]

Fitzjames' Midshipman journal

The original and my reproduction/full transcription. Another thing to try and get published one day. Just a journal full of tourism, operas, and nautical stuff in the Mediterranean (1833-34).

[Caird Library, National Maritime Museum Greenwich.]

[ahollowyear]

This is my copy of Good Omens. It's ragged and torn and is the first paperback printing, so you know i have loved it deeply since I bought it in 1992. It's always been Terry Pratchett's book to me; his voice spills from every page. I've long thought that Neil Gaiman is a hack who ingratiates himself to much more talented people and then siphons away attention with the delicate artistry of a well evolved parasite, much the same way he is able to camouflage himself as your weird uncle Neil on his Tumblr, and is then your Weird Uncle Neil in your DMs.

I loved Good Omens when I was a traumatized teen, just like so many others, and Gaiman takes advantage of that association to build his cult following so that prey is available to him when opportunity arises.

[elheavenlove]

Unicorn work in progress…

I’m working on updating my portfolio! I love fantasy illustration and mid-century medieval art. I’m trying to create more traditional art because I’ve mainly been doing digital recently.

I’m looking to get into book illustration. I’ve gotten feedback from a few indie authors and a friend of mine who is a publisher. I’m not expecting any work right away especially while I’m still finishing my portfolio. But I would appreciate any advice on how to break into the community!

Would love to connect with any other illustrators and authors!! <3