Guest Blog Post: Steampunk Author Tee Morris

As part of the ongoing Write by the Rails blog tour, we’re welcoming author Tee Morris (The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, Morevi). Tee and his lovely wife, Pip Ballantine, write amazing stories of steampunk, magic, and more. They’ve been published several times, and Tee shares his experience on the options available for a writer seeking to be published.

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Getting Published: You Have Options, Just Know the Options

I’ve lost count how often I have been asked on publishing advice. When I say “publishing advice” I’m taking about the “I want to get it published” advice. The people who approach me at this stage of the game have a manuscript in their hands, or maybe a non-fiction memoir, or perhaps the rough draft of a self-help or instruction manual they want to start pitching to agents and editors. The variation on this theme still includes the manuscript, but the agents have been contacted and the rejection letters have been received.

Whatever the writer in question, the question is still the same: What are my options at this point?

Let’s address the 800-pound gorilla in the room: the New York Publishing Houses. The “Big Six”— or seven, if you count Amazon — are all under a lot of pressure to remain in business. I’ve lost count on how many “doom and gloom” articles I’ve read on the “dinosaurs” of publishing, but here’s the truth of it: The Big Six still matter. Pip and I were doing “well” having some big surges with Dragon Moon Press, our indie publisher based in Calgary, Alberta; but we never saw the numbers that signing with Ace and Harper Voyager have shown us. The consistent between those NY houses: Distribution. If you land a publisher that will get your books in bookstores big and small, airports, and even shopping markets, you get into the eyes of potential buyers. Some of the SPNR (Self-Publishing Nazi Regime) will claim “He speaks of the old ways…” or use terms like “House Slave” in my praise of the Big Six, but what I rarely hear the SPNRs rarely address is the impulse buy. Here are statistics from Publishers Weekly in 2011 concerning placement in locations beyond the bookstore, locations usually reserved for the major players out of New York. The truck stop, the airport, and even a Target are all good places to be, especially if your books is facing “cover out” as opposed to “spine out” because a cover is designed (most of the time) to be eye-catching. You catch the eye, you make someone pause, you get someone to look over your book…and to get that kind of traffic you have to be in the bookstore. To do that, like it or not, you need to be with the Big Six. Are there exceptions to this rule? Sure, but getting indie books in markets that lend to the impulse buy are far harder than if coming from the Big Six.

Along with distribution handled, you have people taking care of you — editors to make sure you have a clean, sharp book; artists and designers putting together for you a great looking book with an eye-catching cover, and even legal teams who will issue out cease-and-decist order to people trying to pirate your books. (And yes, they will.) Your job will be, when you are at a Big Six, to write and assist you in marketing your book.

So things are “easier” when you are at a Big Six publisher and easier still in getting your name out there. Landing a contract with the Big Six, however, is a true challenge because you need to have an agent who believes in your work, knows how to get it before editors, and make the sale. To do that, you need to win over the agent. So if heading to the Big Six is where you want to go, get a list of agents, find out who on said list is accepting manuscripts, and submit. Find conferences that offer you a chance to pitch to agents or even evaluate your pitch, and attend. (The James River Writers’ Conference in Richmond is a great event for this.)

You keep working and working the agent angle until you land an agent, and then you and your agent should work together to have the best book you can pitch to people.

If however, you aren’t interested in pursuing the Big Six, you’ve got self-publishing. Once upon a time, self-publishing was considered amateur hour. Now, it is big business. You hear the pioneers and the runaway bestsellers all rave about side-stepping the gatekeepers and finding success, and there’s no denying it — there are true financial and artistic triumphs in self-publishing. Perhaps the greatest advantage of being self-published is full control over the direction of your work. Self-publishing gives you final approval of your voice, of your look, and of your connection with the audience; and now, in only just a few months after Amazon agreed to assist the self-publisher, the process is easy and cost-effective. Depending on how much you invest in editing, in layout, and in your cover art, you can make a slick looking digital and print book. Distribution, once the greatest of obstacles for self-published authors to clear, is now instantly granted from coast-to-coast and around the world through Amazon, Smashwords, and other online eBook vendors.

Another great advantage over the Big Six and their imprints is the ability to get new work to readers. In a day you can have your latest book online and ready to purchase. Just like that. And the profits from these books go to you. No longer do you have to wait for the publisher to pay the agent, have the agent take their cut, and then have the remains reach you. No longer do you have to wait for the assigned pay dates from the publishers. Now you collect within a month of publishing, the profits from each sale higher.

It all sounds appealing, but here is the trade-off — in self-publishing, all the work falls on you. Editing. Layout (if you decide to do print). Cover art. Marketing. (Again, more on that later.) Creative direction. Accounting. Analytics. And when someone pirates your book (and yes, they will), you have to handle it. Asking someone to not pirate your book without a legal team behind you is about as intimidating as it sounds. All these responsibilities take time, time when you could be writing.

But let’s say your time management is impeccable and you’ve got this covered. Great. Now let’s return to the book. Your work, whatever genre you work in, will truly be whatever you put into it. Give it a beautiful cover, sure. After paying for a hot cover, though, how much do you have left in your budget for editing? You want to self-edit? No, you don’t. You need fresh, objective eyes to look at it, and you need an objective opinion to ask tough questions about your work. What’s right about it? What’s wrong with it? Where does it need the most improvement? Can some sections be cut? Just because you have a good story doesn’t necessarily mean you have a good book.

So you put money into editing…but what about the cover? Are you doing stock photography or are you having something original made? Who’s laying out the cover? Even keeping it simple, you’ll have other expenses to concern yourself with such as purchasing ISBNs, paying for extended distribution, and even digital protections. All these costs rack up. All these details matter in the impression the book makes.

What both methods share in common — Marketing. That always falls back on the author, and that is a good topic for another blogpost.

But what is it you want to accomplish? Are you looking to go full time with writing? Are you looking to publish for a very niche market? What is your definition of success? One approach may be a labor worth the windfall while another can happen with a mouse click.

You have options. Find the one that works best for you.