Maintain Control of Your Manuscript by Publishing it Yourself

by Toni Seger
(Lovell, Maine)

The Telefax Box, Volume I of The Telefax Trilogy

I've been a writer a long time and have collected many horror stories associated with publishers, agents and editors. Over the last 30 years, media has grown increasingly consolidated and increasingly corporate. Publishers were once 'ma and pa' operations with personal knowledge and association with their writers. Today, most sizable publishers are tiny items on giant flow charts. When publishing is controlled by media giants who regard books as commodities, the sole concern is size and rate of book sales. Content must have mass market appeal. I’ve gotten many rejections that praised my writing, but insisted my books wouldn’t sell. I had to “lighten up”, “be more entertaining”, “less realistic” or “despite other merits”, I was just “not what sells today”. I don’t consider a cost/benefit analysis to be literary criticism, so I don’t feel connected to messages like these. If this perspective doesn’t work for your creative expression either, I’d encourage you to consider self publishing..

Self Publishing allows you to maintain control of your manuscript and, for me, that’s most important. I also had an especially negative experience with publishing that made me determined to control my own books. In the mid-90's, I was the Communications Director for an export management firm doing business in 23 countries. The internet was very new and global trade for small business was a exciting story. I had an idea for a book about global trade which my business partner thought was great. My larger reason for writing this book was to develop connections for the literature I wanted to see published.

Unfortunately, while I spent two years laboring on researching and writing a book my partner dominated our agent and the eventual publisher. Outside my hearing, he promoted himself as the author and me as the ‘wannabe’ writer, ‘girl in the office’ who typed the manuscript. My title and cover design were never considered. A young editor with no background in the subject reworked the entire manuscript until it was barely recognizable while I was barred from the project. I wasn’t included in the marketing process, so I couldn’t get any exposure and when credit was handed out, I wasn’t included. After that experience, I was determined to publish and promote my own books.

For a long time, my largest barrier to self publishing was money. I refused to stop saying I was the real author of the book my ex-partner was taking all the credit for and he had enough reach to black list me as a writer with all the connections I made while working with him. He nearly destroyed my ability to get communications work, so my income collapsed. My husband had a heart attack and we had no insurance, so there were a lot of bills to pay. Self publishing took money and we didn’t have any. It took years to begin to recover financially and there was never anything extra.

Instead, I used other methods to get attention for our literary work. I produced, directed and acted in productions of original plays for stage and public access television where I also learned to run cameras and edit film at no cost. I began making films focused on my husband’s poetry and circulating them through the access system, first in my state and then outside it. Two years ago, my husband and I started working with an actor on professional readings for use in films and CD’s. We have enough raw material now for CD’s of prose and poetry readings as well as short films that are on a half-dozen web sites. A year and a half ago, I started selling one of my full length films on the internet and will soon be selling another. Still, self publishing our books on the internet remained a goal.

Early this year, I learned about CreateSpace.com; a free online service for producing books, CD’s and DVD’s for sale online. At CreateSpace.com, writers can prepare documents for online publishing themselves, eliminating the cost of cover design, document formatting and setup fees. You also don’t pay for inventory because books are only printed on-demand. Understanding what is involved is a bit of a learning curve, but if you take it one step at a time, it isn’t bad. I’m a designer so I knew I could design book covers. The wrinkle here is that covers must be designed within certain templates and are provided for use in PhotoShop. PhotoShop is not a design program, so it’s a little awkward to work in it, especially when manipulating text. To add an excerpt from my book to the back cover, I created an image file in a desktop publishing program, exported it as an EPS file which I imported into PhotoShop. Then, I cut out just the box with my excerpt, converted it to a printable, high resolution .tif, then placed it on the back cover.

Another tricky part was figuring out the correct margins to format in Word Processing to fit the size paperback book I chose. Consult your own paperback library for examples and compare the pages you are creating with the size you choose to make. Because it’s a paperback, text is smaller than a manuscript and closer together. Using the correct font is very important for readability, so you need to experiment with different fonts. Eventually, covers and content are saved as .pdf files and uploaded to the CreateSpace site where the writer orders proof copies.

Just as audio and video benefit from close editing, all written work benefits in the same way. Though I endorse the value of close editing, I haven’t experienced much value in editors. I’ve been hacked up many times by copy and page editors working for periodicals. After editors remove all logic from a paragraph, it’s the writer's byline that receives the criticism for work that doesn’t make sense. Because I had an entire book carved up by an editor, I would never turn a book of mine over to someone else, at least not willingly. I also don’t agree with the wide spread notion that writers can’t edit themselves. I believe writers should have enough of a grip on their work to be capable of refining their own expression. Who could possible know what you’re trying to convey better than you do? When you make the effort to view your work objectively, inconsistencies arise, poorly formed sentences reveal themselves and so forth, but you have to make the commitment to review your work until you can’t find anything left to change. Granted, this takes time. Time works against meeting tight deadlines for freelance articles, but when it comes to literature that publishers aren’t interested in, a serious writer has time to get it right.

It’s the same thing with proofreading. Mistakes are going to happen. You have to anticipate that and you won’t necessarily catch them all the first time. I recommend two or three proof readings to proof something thoroughly. It’s amazing how you can keep finding errors if you look closely enough. Though fresh eyes can be valuable for this, consider whether a stranger might overlook errors because they don’t know how they’re supposed to look. In the case of the book I wanted to publish at CreateSpace.com, “The Telefax Box”, there were numerous details I couldn’t expect a proof reader to get right. My book is a satire depicting an entirely fictitious world where I invented numerous words, phrases and their meanings. A stranger wouldn’t be able to tell what was right or wrong, so I really had to do it myself.

I know that choosing the right genre to represent a work of literature is all important to connecting with your target audience, but the question isn’t always straight forward. When I originally sent “The Telefax Box” to publishers, they refused to read it because a quick glance at the first page interpreted the book as science fiction and I was told to send the book to science fiction publishers. However, when I sent the book to science fiction publishers, they actually read it and liked it, but felt it belonged with a main stream publisher and was not science fiction as they defined it all of which left me in never-never land.

From my perspective, “The Telefax Box” is social and political satire that uses a science fiction mode to illustrate the book’s social commentary. Unfortunately, genre categories rarely include satire or social commentary, so I select science fiction though I can’t be sure if calling it science fiction is helpful or not.

Recently, I purchased a new computer with enhanced capability. I plan on learning web building to construct a web site for my husband and I. My new computer allows me to edit audio at home and I plan on making CD's from the professional readings we taped and sell them on the web along with films, novels and plays. My long range plan is, once I have enough finished products on our site to justify it, I’ll advertise the site in literary publications.

There has never been a better time to self publish and market your work than now. Sites like this one didn’t exist that long ago and new options keep opening up.

Visit Toni at CreateSpace.