Example
by Barbara J. Shave
(Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada)
Raven Tricks by Barbara Shave
Publishers prefer to devote their resources to marketing established authors. Movie stars and mass murderers stand a chance with their ghosted stories, but self-publishing is often the only recourse for those of us commoners who seem condemned to forever plead at the door.
Always a common, middle-of-the-night madness writer, I turned into a magazine contributor when an editor requested submissions from me after my retirement from teaching. Soon I had my own regular feature called "Gray Matters." I wrote mostly humour pieces about those twists of fate and fancy which are more likely to govern the course of our lives than our fine plans. I called these raven tricks. The Haida First Nation People of my British Columbia tell of a trickster raven who delights in imposing such ironies as "When we can afford the things we need, we no longer need them!"
To improve my skills, I associated with other writers through membership in the Canadian Authors' Association and the British Columbia Federation of Writers. I attended writer workshops, took classes and submitted my work for contests and for anthologies.
In 2006 I self-published my first collection of creative nonfiction articles under the title Raven Tricks -- It's All Wrong, Yet It's All Right! I sent out a few feelers to publishers while I continued to lay out my own manuscript with MS Word and a step-by-step courtesy guide of a pay-to-publish company. I was impatient to plow on because I was too old to spend years pleading at the door of the book publishing world.
I hired a professional to do a hard edit of my draft manuscript. No one should short cut on good editing, by the way, and the volunteer services of Aunt Betty who used to be a teacher won't do. Even when family and friends are capable, they are usually wary of causing hurt feelings regarding hard truths about composition improvements.
Several months and many edit arguments later, I produced hard copies for the review of three different proofreaders. Multiple proofreaders are another must. We writers simply don't see our mistakes. We know what we intend to write, and that is what we see on the page. We can spot some of these oversights by reading aloud to an audience. However, even after Raven Tricks had gone through multiple proofreaders and 4 editions, stupid typos still occasionally popped off the printed page like nasty little spit-wads.
Because I believe that artists of various disciplines should support each other, I chose the raven imagery of a first nation's artist to grace my book's cover. I acquired a retail barcode from the internet and registered Raven Tricks with the Canadian Archives to obtain the necessary ISBN identification number.
Then I chose a local printer who was affiliated with a nearby binder. He helped to format the fonts and colours on my book cover, and when we were All Systems Go, I backed up the entire manuscript, the front and back cover, the barcode and separate copies of each embedded photo on a memory stick. These were then easily downloaded onto the printer's computer, and he printed a draft for my approval.
Voila! Less than a week later I had my first 100 copies of Raven Tricks. Including professional editing, the art for the cover, and the printing and binding expenses, my total cost was approximately 1/10th of what it would been if I had entrusted the task to a distant print-on-demand company. Furthermore, my process took a fraction of the time from start to finish, and I had total control of the product throughout.
Only after the book was printed did I find time and inclination to begin seriously searching for a publisher. When I discovered that publishers now prefer agency submissions, I searched instead for a literary agent who would peddle my book to those publishers on my behalf. Bingo! An agency immediately seized my book as just about the most promising in the history of their company! It seemed too easy.
I hope you all check out your prospective agency or publisher on www.writerbeware.com. I didn't this time because I had seen this agency's ad in several literary journals so felt no reason to suspect a scam. I was "Flattered, Flummoxed, and Fleeced" and that article title fairly summarizes my experience. While everyone knows no legitimate agency asks for money up front, this one urged me to hire all manner of additional "independent" help through its connections in order to transform my amateur production into Oprah's Book of the Month!
During those months while I soured on the agency route to fame and fortune, I was selling books faster than I could print them. I gave books to a number of newspaper and internet reviewers and their reports attracted buyers. I donated books as prizes to all manner of charitable competitions on the condition that I be allowed to give readings so I invariably sold. I once handed out my books to bored passengers at airline waiting gates. Grateful, most bought those books to read during their flights. I bugged my neighbourhood banks and merchants to display my book on their premises, and a team of neighbourhood realtors now presents Raven Tricks as their gift to new homeowners.
I did readings and signings at book stores which advertised those events, and I consigned books to them -- reluctantly because their commissions cause me to lose on every book they sell. By the way, readings must be performances. A beginner should obtain dramatic coaching to polish elocution skills. Cut off readings after 10 minutes because an audience can't stay focused longer. Keep the presentation lively. Humour pieces or audience participation pieces work best.
With the assistance of the librarian, I drew up a list of local self and professionally published authors. After a few phone calls and presentations to a number of writer groups, a core of these authors and I formed a cooperative to showcase and market our literary output at trade fairs. We peer jury all work for quality and general interest before allowing it in our collection. We chided art galleries to include literary artists, and soon we were exhibiting among visual artists at art fairs.
Meanwhile I was still sending out queries and I interested a couple of Toronto agencies. One took 6 months to get back with a rejection. The second has now been incommunicado for a year. These agencies got free books, I got stonewalled.
I developed a website and I entered Raven Tricks in the Writer's Digest competition for the best self-published book of 2007. Although it didn't win, I received an excellent and very thorough review. My book was "agency material," the reviewer wrote. No thank you.
Who needs an agent? With no outside help whatsoever, I have sold more than 500 copies of Raven Tricks and I have just launched my second book of nonfiction articles, Good Intentions Gone Bad!
While there is much that is positive about self-publishing, there are definitely drawbacks as well:
1) The reading public and the book chains seldom consider self-publishers to be "real authors" because self-published material is so often of inferior quality. If we self-publishers are to achieve public credibility and space on the shelves in major bookstores, we must self-impose strict quality controls.
2) Some print-on-demand publishers do distribute to bookstores (for an additional fee). Those of us who do it ourselves almost never get chosen for long-term shelving in the national bookstores. We self-publishers must therefore think outside the box (and the chain bookstores).
The good news is that despite a system that would keep us as beggers at the door, some self-published authors are beginning to turn establishment heads -- and thinking. Consider Terry Fallis, whose book, The Best Laid Plans, was rejected over many years by nearly every agency and publisher in Canada. Recently he self-entered this book in a prestigious literary competition. It was chosen as the best Canadian humour book of 2008. Terry was presented with the Stephen Leacock Medal and a $10,000 cash prize.
Terry Fallis has proven that even self-publishers can go Write to the Top.
Visit Barbara's website.
(This would be Barbara's book if Barbara's book were listed on Amazon!)
