Yet another self-publishing diary.

Being a compilation of notes and particulars as to the publication of City of Roses Vol. 1: "Wake up..."

Some context, methods, & software.

The overall work is intended to consist of 22 episodes of roughly 14,000 words each, as self-contained as any given episode of a strong, arc-driven television program. 15 chapters have been completed to date, and the full contents are available for free online in HTML form. But enough people (two? three?) had expressed an interest in reading it on a Kindle or iPad or smartphone, or had expressed a dislike of reading it on the web, that I decided to bite the bullet and prep an ebook. I've resisted for a while, disliking the hodge-podge of formats and the utter crapshoot that is the final product in all the places it might well end up; finally, working with a reasonably recent build of Sigil, I was able to generate files I could live with. I decided to rather crudely break the overall story exactly in half, so that volume 1 would consist of 11 episodes, or roughly 150,000 words; even though it breaks on a nasty cliffhanger, that felt better than breaking the story into halves of 9 and 13 episodes, or 12 and 10. —The text is composed in Scrivener; Tex-Edit and Dean Allen's HTML markup scripts are used to prepare the text for web publishing (a very old step from previous workflows; I should really take the time to teach myself how best to export straight from Scrivener to HTML, since that's one of its strengths); the text is then typeset in InDesign for the paper chapbook versions of each installment. (So the final text is live in three places: Scrivener archives, the website, and the InDesign files. Makes late edits fun!)

To generate the EPUB, I took the HTML from the website versions and flowed that into Sigil, then tinkered with the results until I had something workable. (I've tried InDesign's EPUB generation tools and was not impressed at all. I haven't yet tried Scrivener's export to EPUB function.) I then used Calibre to convert the EPUB to a MOBI for the (blasted) Kindle, and later in the process ended up with a "pretty" PDF; all three are hosted as separate Google docs, and purchasers through the website receive an email with the relevant links to download any or all versions for a single price.

Pricing and sales channels.

I decided to price the ebook of 11 chapters at $3.00, following the logic of Nick Mamatas: the price of a used book, which is about the clearest signal we can get as to the pricing of the contents of a book minus all the physical accoutrements, should be used to suggest the price of an ebook.

I then took the initial EPUB and ran it through Barnes and Noble's PubIt and Lulu's ebook publishing mills, got it validated at both locations, and priced it identically. (Lulu has since indicated that the EPUB isn't valid for its premium listings; since there's nothing wrong with the EPUB itself, I can only assume it has something to do with the listing, or something, but I only just discovered that today, and haven't had time to poke. —When I say "indicated," I don't mean "sent an automated email," I mean stuck a graphic next to the title on a report generated at the website which if noticed and clicked would then take you to a page which merely told you it was invalid, not why. Not big on communication, these folks.)

Then it was time for Smashwords. My lovely, rigorous EPUB wouldn't do there; I had to take the text of all 11 chapters, strip out all formatting, flow it into a plain Word doc, and then put all the italics and chapter headings back in by hand, and build the ugly table of contents Smashwords needs to generate navigational links for its more abstruse variants. So that took a while, and it took a while longer for the resulting ebook to be validated for the premium sales channels (iTunes, Scrollmotion, Kobo, etc.); Smashwords finally went live in July.

While I was waiting, I figured out that Smashwords' pending integration with Amazon was perpetually pending. I'd resisted publishing to the Kindle directly myself, because the MOBI format just annoys the hell out of me, but I wanted to have an ebook listed on Amazon, so decided to take the MOBI I'd built earlier and publish that through Kindle Direct, which went live in July as well.

And finally, having done all this, I decided I wanted a paper book as well. Dammit. I started trying Lulu, but despite claiming to offer a mass-market paperback trim size (they even offer a Word template for it), that size was utterly unavailable when it came time to try and build the book itself, so I went with CreateSpace instead. They didn't offer a mass-market size, but the 5x8 trim size they had did exist, so I went with that. I took the InDesign files from the paper chapbooks and flowed them into a new InDesign document, then printed a PDF from that. Hey presto.



So! That was how I spent my summer: most of May, June, and half of July. Ebooks and a POD option available through a shotgun blast of sales channels. The results?

Results (to date).



Yeah, so. Fame and fortune, just around the corner. Right?

A conclusion?

Well, actually, first there's an enormous piece missing, the magic bullet, to wit: marketing.

So then: press releases and review copies to local and genre media outlets; modified press releases, review copies, requests for review, etc. to book bloggers on a rolling basis as I find them; author pages on LibraryThing, Goodreads, Shelfari, and Amazon; a LibraryThing giveaway of 10 copies for review; a minuscule amount spent on ad campaigns through Project Wonderful (~$70, 1.3 million ad views, 465 click-throughs); the generous allotment of a month's worth of advertising here, for which many thanks, and to which at least one of the website sales of an ebook can be directly attributed (you know, I presume, who you are); and tabling at the Portland Zine Symposium, where I sold the three in-person copies of the physical book (all to friends or acquaintances), and, not incidentally, made almost half the $34 in profit noted above. —As well as that, of course, the history and name I've built over the years publishing in the webfiction community.

All of that work, then, on top of most of May and June and half of July and of course the uncounted and God willing uncountable time spent sitting at the desk typing the words into Scrivener in the first place: for which the sum of thirty-four dollars. —If nothing else, seeing it all laid out like that makes one appreciate the ego and sheer bloody-minded fuck-all stubborn-as-a-God-damned-mule mindset necessary to do whatever it is this is.

The upside? At least the publisher isn't going to kill the book just because it isn't selling well. (Cue bleak, obviously canned laugh-track.) —Boiled down to a takeaway, though it comes out something like: it is difficult to sell unless one is known; it is difficult to be known, unless one has sold. Which, I mean, ain't nobody on the planet doesn't have that problem.

I'll be focusing for the next little while on trying to get a review, any review (I think it was Messr. Macdonald who noted the slushpile's moved on to the reviewer? Well here I am, shoveling slush) in the hopes of a mention, any mention, to drive more holy traffic, and of course for the egoboo that comes when one is read, or at the very least noticed. —And also writing; more writing. If I can stay on schedule, Volume 2: The Dazzle of Day will just about be done this time next year, which means I get to do this all over again...

I should have been more clear: a couple of kind souls, the Medievalist most notable among them, have promised reviews in-depth or otherwise, and press has been garnered in such places as Faenation.com. (Thanks, Lisa. I await with bated breath and fingers crossed and wood knocked and loose salt ready to toss over my shoulder.) (—And I should note: those editors and agents who have reviewed the work for less niche-y niches have been unanimous in noting that the work, as-is, is "too episodic." Which, I mean, is, well, is what you get when you set out to write an episodic work I mean am I missing something here? —Probably. But it has nothing to do with the strictly self-publishing end of these proceedings, and so.)

Irysangel: which blurb where had typos? I've had to go hunting through a bunch where at some step along the way from this text box to that distribution outlet an em-dash or a smart-quote had some adventures and turned into ex-unicode gibberish, but that's all I could think of. (Now I'm desperately certain my fly's been down all along.) —Also, the cover's been one of the things some people really perk up at; this might be a variance in mileage.

As for the sig used here at Absolute Write: that's far more to gently promote the work in general, not the ebook. My æsthetic sensibilities prevent me from larding the opening page with ads for the damn thing; a failing, perhaps, on my part.

The title is one of those dreaded portmanteaux: The book itself is titled “Wake up...”, as in, something that is being said (hence the quotes, hence the lack of capitalization, hence the ellipsis); but it's also Volume 1 of the overall work, City of Roses. The full title some might say would then be City of Roses Volume 1: “Wake up...” Outlets will render the title differently in different ways, depending on how you're allowed to enter titles and whether series and volumes are tracked or not; I have tried to be Zen about the whole thing. Much as I had to let go of font control and proper ding placement on the ebooks.

(I'm not sure why the title ended up the way it did? Again, the ebook parcel has been something of an afterthought. Nor am I sure how I feel about the fact that sales might well improve if it's changed from “Wake up...” to, say, Wake Up.)

And there's a whole 'nother discussion about the differing expectations of audiences when it comes to books and television programs and comics, and the nature of serial, episodic fiction, and "waiting for the trade," and what constitutes a "finished" work, and why the novel qua novel is the shape it is, anyway.

None of which is to take away from or disagree at all with any of the all-too-terribly valid points brought up. (Especially the one about the quality of the sample. Thank you! I beam. —That's the important thing, right there; the rest is hawking and window dressing. And I wish sometimes I weren't so put off by the subject. I've tabled at comics cons and zine shows, and there's a palpable difference between putting the book on the table and standing there, waiting, and putting the book on the table and saying hello to people and pitching them and engaging them, and it feels foolish sometimes and it's a lot of work and people will look at you funny, but there it is, and here we are. Chop wood. Carry water. Repeat.)

pangalactic: Old skool zinesterism all the way. Color covers are printed at Kinko's, usually, on plain copier paper; innards are printed wherever and whenever I have access to a decent black and white printer for whatever I can cajole. Binding by hand with the saddle stapler on the floor of the TV room with a movie I've seen before on in the background. They can be as cheap as 65 cents and as expensive as $1.40, not counting time and effort; I sell 'em for $3 a pop, and place them at various zine and comics shops on consignment for 50 - 60 per cent of the cover price.

Oh, yeah, me and em-dashes. Oh my. Dashes in general. —Lovely things; when used at the end or beginning of a sentence, they're like semi-colons for paragraphs: joining two thoughts that are separate, but not separate enough for new paragraphs (or to set off dialogue when not using quotation marks, of course)—and when used at the beginning or end of a sentence, a space before or after to separate it appropriately. (One should otherwise of course never put spaces around an em-dash: they already stand out far too much.) —The hilarious thing (for me, at least) is I picked up the habit when I was trying to mimic William Vollmann's achingly po-faced style, with its naïvely arch use of Victorian furniture; I thought of him obsessively setting the em-dashes properly throughout his work, and the mighty battles he must've fought with copy editors to secure their placement, and was warmed. And then I went back to the books sometime later and discovered how haphazard their placement actually was, with—gasp!—spaces placed on both sides and no thought at all to the irruption of the flow on the page. The careful rules and nuances I'd adopted for their use had been mostly, what, a ghost? A figment? A half-remembered game?

—Anyway, I'm stuck with them, in my "essayist" voice. (When used at the beginning of a paragraph like that, they help to signal a more abrupt jump: not quite a section break, but more than a paragraph. At least they do to me? —My, look at the tumbleweeds.) So much so that I don't even balk at using them in something like a book blurb. —This petard, it hoists, you say?

I go on at such length A) because it's something to do instead of a coffee break and B) because, of course, in the lushly spare, gonzo hard-boiled prose I use in City of Roses an em-dash would stick out like an Edwardian dandy with a sore thumb. So I use en-dashes instead, which, of course, require spaces to either side to be seen as the interruptions they are. Far less nuance than an em-dash with the panoply of rules I've (apparently) made up for them, but far sleeker and more modern. Dashing, even.

And so.

(And criticism is always help! To pull us back from the edge of derail. Thanks again!)

Pish and tosh. —It's a stylistic thing, more commonly used on the continent, or so I am told. But what do they know of typesetting? I mean have you seen what the Germans do with quotation marks?

I shall tell my stapler you called its work "crude."

juniper: I was in A&E around about Hallowe'en of 2009 (I'm sure I have a link around here somewhere), with a lovely illustration by Vera Brosgol; was there something more recent that I missed? (And thanks!)

And as far as staples go: I'll allow as how they're brutal, punching hideously sharp bits of metal through yielding paper, rending the fibers asunder, only to slam those bits of metal flat against a plate on the other side; some sort of metaphor for life, no doubt. But they're only crude when the damn things turn or twist on impact or the staples refuse to properly separate from the bundle in the magazine and you have to pry the failure out and try again and inevitably end up punching new holes and everyone's sad. Mostly, I'd proclaim them elegant in their simplicity.

—Muttons and nuts: Dean Allen's always been my lodestar when it comes to typesetting, either on paper or the screen; rather, ideas I got in my head when I read Dean Allen's lovely but defunct blog way back at the turn of the millennium. This old post is still as lovely a general statement on the setting of type as one might hope to read, even if one disagrees with the particulars (British conventions re: dialogue just look wrong to American eyes, and properly so, and we've come a long way with type on screen in the past ten years, such that the best-set blogs happily burst the design limitations one had to keep in mind in those early aughty Dark Ages); still: the principles hold true. —But looking at pretties like that just makes me itch to redesign my blogs. Down! Back! Sit! —The whole point of the narrative voice of City of Roses (if I might be permitted to self-pontificate a moment) is to be flat and affectless, to get out of the way, to show rather than tell, to only provide specific, tangible, objective facts rather than generalities or judgment calls; to be, in a word, clear. (Or rather, to make a show of being those things; I have weird ideas of what it means to be clear, and affectless, and anyway these are all impossible ideals, though there's a fun game to be played in failing to meet them, but we're haring off into another whole post entirely, aren't we.) —Anyway: with that in mind: I wanted the sleek, the stripped-down, the spare, and so I went with the nut rather than the mutton for irruptions and interruptions in that text, much as I only allow emphatic italics or colons semi- or otherwise in dialogue rather than that plain flat affectless narrative voice. —The things you think about to avoid thinking about the things you need to be thinking about; the things you tell yourself so you can keep telling the things you want to tell.

But that's three cups of coffee and the pot's done. Time to make the oatmeal.

If you're filtering for adult content (the default setting on Smashwords searches), you won't see it; there's bad words and naughty bits (or, "language, situations or images inappropriate for children under 18 years of age." While I think any mature 13ish-year-old on up could handle it, one errs on the side of caution in these things). —Google can find it no prob: Smashwords is the third hit for "city of roses" "wake up", and the second for "city of roses" "kip manley".

(So now I'm over here blushing, which is unseemly in a man of my advanced height and startled reputation.)