Of basements and books …

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve started work on "Basement of the Universe". It’s going rather slowly at the moment but hopefully will gather momentum as I get deeper into the book. The title actually is older than the current story 🙂 We first gave that title to a story that we plotted out for a story that Laurie wanted to write. It was set in my universe but was about characters that Laurie had come up with. We plotted out the entire story and Laurie wrote the first draft in about three weeks.

After we had plotted out the story, I took certain elements from there and inserted them into "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" since I liked what I’d created. (In fact, I did the same thing with another story we plotted for Laurie but I’m not going to talk about that one yet :p) Anyway, the element that I added to "Honest" became such a big part of the story that when I started thinking about how things were going to proceed post-"Honest", I decided that it would work pretty well to incorporate the original "Basement" novel that Laurie wrote into the series of stories stemming from "Honest" 🙂 We discussed the possibility and I even started a rewrite of the story that Laurie had done so that it could be integrated into my story line better. However, somewhere along the way, we decided that it would be better to leave Laurie’s story alone and write a new "Basement of the Universe" for my series. So, Laurie’s novel was renamed to "Gatekeeper of the Worlds" and my new novel was titled "Basement of the Universe".

Of course, this resulted in a whole slew of changes – one of which was that Laurie ended up with a couple of prequels to the new "Gatekeeper of the Worlds" which in turn is going to be a prequel to "Basement" 🙂 Basically, the basement is a sub-universe in my main story universe and Laurie will be writing the stories which set up the sub-universe. So far, we have planned about 4 – 5 novels in that series for Laurie’s books and that’s not counting the 2 – 3 I have set in the basement for my "Honest" series. It’s going to get rather complicated pretty soon, I tell you :p

Directions

As I’ve indicated here previously, I’m trying to get my first novel "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" published. I’ve been trying agents but after querying about 60-70 agents, only 3 even responded with something like "let’s see your work". All the others either said that they weren’t interested without seeing one word of the novel itself or didn’t respond at all 🙂

I was thinking of the self-publishing route but then realized that I’d be spending a lot of money without actually knowing if my book was any good. (A few people have pointed out that it doesn’t cost much to publish through Lulu or Diggory but the fact is, to do things the way I want, it would cost at least $150 or more and while that is not a lot of money in the US, here, that’s Rs. 15,000 and some people don’t even earn that much in a month here!) Since Laurie was about the only person who’d read it all the way through, I decided to ask a few other people what they thought of the novel first, to figure out if it was even worth publishing.

My friend Nige, after reading it, responded that it was good but that it needed work and suggested that I get an editor. I looked around for editors and found that the good ones cost $850 upwards. That’s more than five times the cost I’d estimated for just publishing the book via PoD! So looks as if an editor is out of the question for the moment :p There are a few other people I’m waiting on to see what they say since so far, all I’ve gotten have been opinions of people who know me. I want the opinions of people who don’t know me 🙂 But while waiting for that, I decided to sit down and take stock of things and decide how I wanted to proceed.

I’ve often said that I don’t want to start on the next novel without first putting this one to bed. But then again, that’s mostly because I’m that kind of person :p I am very impatient and can’t sit still for something to happen – instead, I have to be up and doing stuff and making things happen and when I don’t see something happen, I get even more impatient. However, I also realize that the world doesn’t move at my pace or my whims (I don’t know why it doesn’t though, it should darn it! :p)

As I mentioned yesterday, I am looking into submitting to Baen Books and since their electronic submission process apparently takes about a year or more, if I were to sit around waiting for something to happen, I’d probably kill myself just for the sake of having something to do :p So, I decided to sit down and re-assess things and come up with a new plan of attack. Getting an editor was out of the question for the moment and while Nige gave me enough to do another edit, I didn’t want to start another edit till I’d gotten more feedback. However, I did want to go ahead with submitting to Baen books soon since it would take about a year for the process to complete. So, it seemed about the only thing I could do was to submit to Baen, wait for comments from the people who are critting the book at the moment and integrate their suggestions into the next edit but at the same time, start working on the next novel to stop myself from driving me crazy :p So, I started work on my next novel, "Basement of the Universe" last night … but more about that tomorrow since this post is getting way too long and I need to go do some writing 🙂

Mosey on up to the bar

Since I was considering self-publishing and I still had no clear idea how good the story was, I decided to get the opinions of some people who enjoyed the type of story I wanted to tell. So, a couple of days ago, I went over the alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup and posted there asking if there were any volunteers to read the first few chapters of my story 🙂 Of course, this is something that I should have done a long time ago. It’s just that I’ve never had much luck getting most of my friends to read a word and so I decided not to bother and go straight to submitting to agents. I had hoped that they’d tell me if the story was no good but that was before I learnt the sad truth – most agents rejected my novel without even reading it :p The few who did read it (three) said nothing bad about the novel itself but rather that they weren’t the right person to represent it.

Laurie says that agents are going to be honest with you and so will not try to be considerate about your feelings or about dashing your hopes and dreams :p So, I was kind of thinking that perhaps my writing wasn’t utterly awful but I still had no idea if it would sell. Now, I’m not out to make a million bucks (wouldn’t say if I did mind you :p) but I do want to have enough people interested in the novel if I’m going to write a second one. Otherwise, why bother? The story is in my head already and I could do infinite variations on it for ever enjoying how it all unfolds :p But I digress ..

I posted to alt.fan.pratchett (AFP) and the people over there were very kind 🙂 Some wanted to read the novel and some pointed out that perhaps I should be trying publishers instead of agents. I had not tried publishers mostly because I didn’t think anybody wanted submissions via e-mail. Sending out three chapters (which comes to about 50 pages in my case) via the post comes to a pretty hefty fee over here and I didn’t actually want to go to all that expense on mere speculation :p But kind person in AFP told me that I should submit to Baen Books and pointed me in the direction of their website. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that not only did Baen Books accept electronics submissions, they actually encouraged it! Then I discovered Baen’s Bar and my happiness was complete 🙂 Here was a web forum where a lot of my favourite authors appeared to hang out and they also had a nice and friendly atmosphere where you could discuss books, what more could you want? So, looks as if I’ll be hanging out at the bar a bit and if you are of a mind, you should come on over too – it’s a friendly place and they don’t bite .. except for the bears at the bar :p

But what next?

Now that I’ve done all of the research into Print on Demand (PoD), I’m been wondering if I should take it a step further. I have found another PoD publisher who is even a bit more cheaper than Diggory Press. I am not quite certain of the facts and figures since I am still waiting on their customer support to provide us with exact figures but on the printing side itself, they appear to be a bit cheaper than Diggory. However, if you include all the setup costs, they are much more expensive for one book.

The keyword there is *one* book. If you publish multiple books, the cost will begin to come down. This has led me to thinking about the possibility of becoming a publisher :p Yes, don’t bust out laughing just yet … Listen to the whole idea first :p You see, there seems to be a slight gap in the whole publishing hierarchy at the moment. You have your regular publishers who will only accept works that they think are commercially viable and then you have the PoD publishers where you can print whatever you want as long as you pay them. How about the area in between? What if you were to offer selective publishing for authors/books that have potential, via PoD?

Yes, I hear you saying, "Hey, if they were that good, they would have been picked up by a regular publisher!" You’re probably correct. But then again, what about the authors who cater to a niche market? What about really good authors who might not be willing to take the plunge into regular publishing because they aren’t sure about themselves? What if I (or rather we, since Laurie wants to come in on this one :p) could help somebody be published? I know I want to be published, not so much for the money as for the satisfaction of achieving something that I’ve wanted to do since I was able to read 🙂 What if I could help somebody feel the same joy?

We’ve been discussing this quite a lot and at the moment, my biggest concern is the cost involved. We would have to go to some expense to set everything up and if nobody is interested in such a service, I don’t really want to spend all that money for nothing. At the moment, what I’m thinking of is to publish my novel through Diggory and if that makes enough money to set up this venture, and we get enough expressions of interest in such a service, we’d go ahead and set it up. But we’ll see … Of course, if you’re interested in something like that, do let us know 🙂

The aunt/uncle factor – Part Trois

Yes, I know. Who is the mystery Print on Demand (PoD) company that I was talking about yesterday? :p Should I keep you in suspense? Should I drag this all out till the end of the entry? Nah, guess not :p They are Diggory Press Publishers and so far, they are the cheapest that I know of for certain, overall, to do a PoD book. Their prices actually let you have a reasonable cover price which is close to standard mass market retail prices and still make a profit.

I’ve been doing some digging on Diggory Press since I wrote my entry yesterday. There isn’t much online about Diggory Press but whatever I could find was always positive. There were a couple of people on a writing forum that I visit who were Diggory Press authors and they couldn’t praise Diggory enough – they say that they are first, efficient and do a very good job at printing. Of course, this is all hearsay. However, I did have the opportunity to experience their customer service/support firsthand when I sent in a query about cover sizes. My initial query went out on Sunday and on Monday morning, I had a response. I had a few further questions and I sent those out on Monday morning and again by business hours in the UK, I got a response and further inquiries were followed up within minutes or at least within the hour. They were very courteous and helpful and were willing to help me save money.

That brings us to the money itself. How much does it cost? I had done a costing for a 190 page 6" x 9" book with Lulu and it came to $8.34 for just the production cost. With Diggory the production cost for a 190 page 6" x 9" page came to $5.88 and I was actually able to prune down the number of pages by about 10 pages due to the way Diggory asks for books to be formatted/laid out for publishing as opposed to the way Lulu wants it done.

However, there are a few catches with Diggory, if you are a Lulu aficionado :p The first is that with Diggory you have to pay $50 up front as a setup fee. You also have to purchase your first proof copy at $20 (you have to tack on about $7 more if you are not in the US or UK for international postage). You can get an ISBN from them for about $80 and they throw in listings with online bookstores and some of the major wholesalers for that price and add the ISBN to your cover as well. You can of course, go with your own ISBN if you have one but you won’t get the free listings then. (The difference here is that if you use Diggory’s ISBN, they become the publisher for your book but if you use your own, you are the publisher). If you do decide to go with the ISBN option be aware that Diggory has to send out 6 copies of your book (at your cost, including postage) to the British libraries. This apparently is the law and not something that Diggory has control over.

The overwhelming advantage that I see with Diggory is that if you go through them and use them as your distributor/fulfilment agent, you can provide as low a discount as 25% to Amazon.com and you can list your books with them. At that price, I can still afford to have a cover price of $10 and hope to make a small profit … if anybody buys my book that is (and that’s a completely different story :p)

The uncle and aunt factor – Part Deux

Everything, as I said yesterday, is relative :p I had investigated a few Print on Demand (PoD) publishers a week or two ago and had settled on Lulu as the best of the lot. My decision was based on the cost per book since I wanted to set a reasonable cover price for the book and not be priced out of the market even before I began putting my books up for sale. Of all the PoD companies that I looked at, Lulu appeared to be the only one who could produce my book at a reasonable cost so that I could set a cover price of around $10 and be still able to make some sort of profit. But that was before I looked closer at Lulu’s Global Distribution Service.

If you publish with Lulu the normal way, your books are simply listed on Lulu’s own website or you can get a bunch of copies printed out and then take them around to booksellers yourself. However, your book will not be listed with any online booksellers or with the major book wholesalers and that’s where I expect most sales (if any would come in). After all, most of the people visiting Lulu are trying to sell their own books – would they actually want to buy more books?

In order to list your books with an online bookseller or the wholesalers, you need an ISBN number. You can get an ISBN from Lulu for $45 but it doesn’t get you much beyond that. If you go with Lulu’s Global Distribution Service for $150, then you get listed with the major wholesalers and with the major online bookstores as well as having Lulu act as your book distributor. I was all set to to with the Global Distribution Service before I read their FAQ and realized that if I used their Globabl Distribution Service (GDS), my cover price would have to change. According to Lulu, there are two prices when you go into their GDS channel – retail price and wholesale price. The wholesale price would be the one I originally had in mind for the book, the new retail price would be twice that! So suddenly, my book would jump from an affordable $10 to a rather high $20! Of course, according to Lulu, Amazon for instance would list the $20 retail price but also give a secondary discounted price which would be a few dollars lower but according to a friend, this doesn’t always happen and besides, even at $18 – $15 it would still be pretty expensive.

This was when I began looking around for other alternatives to Lulu and I did find one that I think is the best PoD publisher that I’ve discovered so far – they do charge an up-front fee unlike Lulu but their overall costs are reasonable and they do produce books for even less than Lulu’s production cost. Besides, they will place your books with Amazon (and other online booksellers) as well as with a lot more wholesalers than Lulu and they will act as your distributor but you would (or at least I would) still end up with a cover price around $10! So who is this mystery publisher? I will reveal all tomorrow in the third part in the It’s All Relative series after I’ve done some more investigation of this particular publisher to make certain that they are as good as they seem :p

The aunt and uncle factor …

Everything is relative :p As those reading these pages would know, I’ve been toying with the idea of publishing my book through Lulu or some other PoD (Print on Demand) outfit. After debating on this for weeks with myself, I finally decided to move on to the next step with Lulu – the one after creating a free account (and sitting on it for weeks :p) I decided to actually upload my book to Lulu and get moving on the publishing process.

This was where the relative factor came in. I had completed the final manuscript of my book according to publisher’s guidelines – it was formatted with the right margins, had the correct line spacing and had one of the approved fonts and font sizes. So, I had been thinking of my book as being 375 pages (or thereabouts). Then, Lulu says that I need to use their manuscript template to format the book and so I’m like, "OK, fine. Let’s do that!" It takes a while to get everything into the Lulu template (they provide a blank Word document which is formatted the way they want) but once I got everything set, I realize that my book had mysteriously shrunk down to 197 pages :p

I then get started on the actual process of setting everything up for publishing and making sure that the page layout is correct on the new document. One of the first things I did was remove the chapter breaks :p I had originally written the novel as an assortment of scenes and did not want them to be broken up into chapters. However, in converting over from my own editor (Aamanuensis) to Word for easier formatting, the scenes became chapters. I now decided to take the chapter breaks out and simply have scene separators. This ended up in further reducing the number of pages and the actual book now stands at less than 180 pages!

I had done all of my price calculations and comparisons of different PoD companies based on a page count of about 370 and now I find that I have a book which is half that size :p Looks as if I might have to put Lulu on the shelf for a bit and go out and check the PoD company price breakdowns again, factoring in the new page count :p

From the depths of the dungeon …

I finally managed to get a release of WriteTrack out yesterday :p This is the second beta release but except for one area, I feel much happier about this release than I did about the previous one. This one has a real-installer (not a self-extracting executable) and also has some rudimentary documentation and better overall GUI help in the form of tooltips. The one area that I’m not happy about is templates. The template feature itself is working now so that you can create a submission letter or a query letter based on a template and have it either e-mailed or printed out for multiple contacts in your WriteTrack database. What I don’t like is how the templates are created. I hadn’t given enough thought to the template entry screen and so the UI is not as easy to use as it could be. The good news is that that issue will be fixed by the time the next release rolls out 🙂

The next release of WriteTrack will probably be a non-beta and so that will probably mark the end of the development cycle on WriteTrack since I can’t think of any other features that I really want to add :p So, I’m thinking of getting back to work on Blog and finishing off all the little things which has contributed to this extraordinarily long delay in the release of Blog 8.0 … On the other hand, there is another completed app of mine which has never been released – PlotCraft. That one’s for collecting all your plot ideas together in one database. The app was completed a few months back but I still haven’t gotten around to releasing it. I need to write up documentation about it and I’ve kept on putting that off :p I’m also thinking about shifting to some sort of help file format (either HLP or CHM) for the documentation instead of the text files I currently use. The text files are so easy to update for me but aren’t so easy to cross-reference for the end user. Guess I’ll have to look into that …

Inconvenient breakdowns

Technology always breaks down when you least expect it and when it can cause the most inconvenience :p Of course, Murphy said it better with his law but still this fact was brought home to me once again this week.

I had been using Spam Karma 2 for about a month now. It worked well and caught everything thrown its way during that time period. So, with both Spam Karma and Bad Behaviour in place I went off for a couple of days secure in my mind that my blog would be safe. (BTW, I should mention that Bad Behaviour has been doing an excellent job with all that annoying trackback spam. I see a lot of trackback entries – sometimes all I see in my visitor logs is trackback entries – but none of them seem to make it through. Of course, it is possible that Bad Behaviour is blocking some legitimate ones but then again, I’m not absolutely certain this is the case.)

I come back after two days and what do I find? Not one, not two but three spam comments had gotten through everything and were sitting pretty in my blog. I immediately deleted them. I believe I know why they made it through (no, Spam Karma wasn’t malfunctioning :p) but the interesting thing is that this happened while I was away and so couldn’t deal with them immediately. So I’m left wondering as to whether the three comments were just because the first comment got through and the guy kept going or was it just another incident of things going wrong at the most inconvenient time where it could cause the most damage? :p

Back at the helm

We were gone for a couple of days since we went to stay with my parents. It was the Haj festival (the second of the two Muslim festivals but I think mentioned that already in my last post :p) yesterday and we’d been staying with my parents since day-before-yesterday. Since we didn’t take our computers with us and since my parents don’t have any form of high-speed access anyway, we wouldn’t have been online. It was nice to get away from everything and to get back with family. Besides, my sister was there with her kids (we hadn’t seen one of the kids since she’d been born) and since we hardly ever get a chance to see the nieces, it was a double (or triple) pleasure 🙂 Of course, what with all the playing, the carrying around of kids and the general running around, I am sore all over and sorely aware of the fact that I need to exercise more :p

It was good to get away from things as well. We’ll actually be going back to my parents’ place again today since today’s the last of the three days I have off. My parents live only about 15 minutes away and so we could have come back home the last couple of days as well but my parents like us staying with them (I have no idea why :p) and so we figured we might as well do so for at least a day. Of course, tomorrow I have to get back to work on things and I guess figure out what I need to do now.

I did get some feedback about WriteTrack but I haven’t had the chance to do anything since we were away from the computers. I’ll probably finish that up first and then start thinking about what needs to be done with Blog and get back to that next … or something :p