Over at Joe Konrath’s blog, the discussion about e-self-publishing goes on and on. Joe is a big proponent of it, and lately he’s had a series of guest blogs (with plenty of his thoughts added) from writers who have successfully ESP-ed. Some of them have a prior print publishing background; some don’t. Monday’s post by Blake Crouch is a good example. As always, the discussion that follows these guest posts is both informative and entertaining. Here are some examples.

by Blake: To be paid monthly to write exactly what you want to write and have absolute control over the presentation is an amazing thing. …to me, the best thing about the ebook revolution isn’t the money. It’s the unlimited creative potential. No more asking permission to write the book you’re dying to write. No more constraints on form.

by Joe: Self-publishing is a guarantee it will find some readers, while pursuing a traditional publishing contract is still a long shot.

by Michael: I can’t emphasize too strongly that this is an age of STAGGERING opportunity for writers. …To be free to write any length you want, in any genre, without some [expletive deleted] editor telling you how to do it, is pleasure enough in itself. But to be able to publish so easily, so quickly, and stand at least some change of making money—hard to believe.

I’ve been trying to think of a metaphor that describes what is happening to the publishing industry as the e-reader/e-book revolution comes storming on. I’ve heard that before an avalanche there is a “cracking” sound, then the snow comes down. Maybe that’s a good analogy. The publishing snow is cracking, the avalanche of e-book sales is about to start, and the traditional publishers are not listening. I read in several books about prisoners of war who escaped from prisoner-of-war camps via tunneling that the sand also does this cracking sound right before a cave in. Perhaps either metaphor applies.

Yet, in those cases there is no falling sand or sliding snow before the deluge. In the publishing industry, e-book sales are 11 percent of total book sales, although this data may be several months old. So there’s something visible and measurable going on. It’s not just a cracking sound. Maybe it’s more like either a flash flood or a gradually rising flood. The water is there, making enough sound that the person not paying attention to what is coming from upstream doesn’t realize a flood is coming. This seems an apt metaphor to the situation.

When Gutenberg invented movable type, the copyist industry fairly quickly went out of business. Now digital devices are slowly driving print out of business. Oh, print books will never disappear completely. e-books won’t even command a majority of market share for some time, maybe a decade. But it’s going to go up from 11 percent. The flood is coming.

The beginning of the work week resulted in my again considering whether I should e-self-publish or not. Over the weekend, I kind of forgot about it. I used the time to finish the Eudora Welty memoir I started in December and to blog about it. I did a little research for the Bible study To Exile and Back, which has turned out to be much more research-intensive than I first thought. I planned out a series of articles for Suite 101, and wrote the first one, which I hope to proof and publish tonight. I set up statistical spreadsheets for 2011. All in all, it was a profitable weekend for my writing career.

Now, back to consideration of e-self-publishing (I think I’ll abbreviate that as eSP from here on out). As I read Joe Konrath’s blog, and other testimonies and advice I find from following links I find on it, it seems I can’t go wrong by choosing to eSP. It will take some time (as in man-hours), but probably less than following the traditional publishing route. Probably? Almost certainly. eSP will burn up less clock than will traditional publishing. You can tell I watched some football this weekend.

All that aside, to make sense to eSP I’ve got to have some completed work to eSP. It seems the people who are making the most success at this have multiple titles out there in the e-book world. The examples on Konrath’s blog are all novelists, so I’d naturally be thinking novels. The only one I have available is Doctor Luke’s Assistant, which is a good candidate. Unfortunately In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People is a long way from being finished, and my other novels are dreams and outlines at this point.

But in terms of non-fiction, I’ve got a couple of things close to being ready. Documenting America, which I first planned as a self-syndicated newspaper column, could easily be adapted to e-book format, probably 30,000 to 45,000 words. In fact, it might be better as an e-book. Some of the columns I wrote were squeezed into newspaper word limits, and I felt they were choppy. The ability to marginally lengthen those would be a good thing. If I dropped other writing projects, I could have one of those volumes ready to go in a month, including proof-reading. I think I could then produce one of those every three months or so, giving me multiple volumes within a year.

I also have a couple of Bible studies reasonably far along. Life on a Yo Yo, The Dynamic Duo, and Sacred Moments are candidates. Each of them could be fleshed out into a small book, say 20,000 to 30,000 words each, in a month or a little more. Is there a market for such as these? Only one way to find out. Related to Bible studies is my small group study guide to C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, which I have tentatively titled, Screwtape’s Good Advice. That one is fully planned, but only about 10 percent written. That would take a couple of months, or maybe three, to do a decent job on.

From what I’ve been able to gather from my study, poetry is difficult to eSP. Because the Kindle platform allows readers to increase or decrease text size, the fixed line breaks of poetry can easily be messed up. It’s not impossible, but poetry will probably have to wait for the next round of e-book reader technology. So Father Daughter Day, fully finished and as polished as I know how to make it, is not a candidate right now. Of course, it’s still not illustrated either.

So the answer to “Do I have anything ready to eSP?” is yes, but not a whole lot. Time to get busy writing, to put dreaming aside, to buckle down and find out what I can produce when under a deadline, even if self-imposed.

I’m edging closer, closer….

Yesterday I closed my post by saying today I would discuss why I’m waiting to e-self-publish my work. The main things I was going to say were:

– Time needed to learn how to self-publish

– Probable upgrade of a computer in order to support the software needed to self-publish

– Cost to self-publish.

But now I have one to add, provided to me by a writer I corresponded with. In an e-mail she said, “Your best bet is to get a traditional contract before you self publish.” She’s a NY Time bestselling author, so should know a thing or two. She went on to say that the success with e-publishing experienced by Joe Konrath should be considered in knowing he was a multi-published author with a large backlist long before he ever e-self-published; an aggressive marketer/promoter with a fairly large fan base. Yes, he points to successful e-self-published authors who do not have his prior publishing background who have been successful at it.

Still, this author-correspondent in the know seems to think differently. I only know what I read in the blogosphere and elsewhere.

It’s all so confusing.

Maybe I’ll cut my internal debate a little short, or at least the part of it I post to the blog. I’ll think through a few “negatives” often expressed about self-publishing, which can also be applied to the electronic version of it.

Most self-publishers sell only a few copies of the book, to friends and family.
That’s true, but not if the book is a good one and not if the author does some promotion. The chance of doing well with a self-published e-book is perhaps more likely than with a paper version, for the e-book is cheaper. More unknown readers are likely to pay $3.00 or less than are likely to pay $15.00 or so.

Self-publishing only makes sense if the author has a platform—a ready made audience.
Guess what? That’s what the traditional publishers are saying about traditionally published books, and to get published now if you don’t have a platform is, well, very rare.

The self-published author has to be their own marketer and aggressively promote their book(s).
Again guess what? That’s what you hear traditional publishers are interested in with their new, untried authors. There’s really no difference in the amount of promotion needed between the newly author traditionally published and the self-published author.

Only those who can’t get accepted by a traditional publisher self-publish.
Quite a few people have successfully countered this, especially where e-self-publishing is concerned. People with prior publishing background, but who were dissatisfied with that experience, have self-published and done fantastic.

Once you self-publish, the chances of you ever getting a book contract with a traditional publisher drop.
Those who have successfully self-published say, “So what?” Since author earnings are greater per book sold, even at the steep discount that seems to be the norm in e-self-publishing, authors are earning more. And at cheaper prices for e-books they are selling more units than they would have with a traditional publisher. So successful e-self-publishers seem to feel the traditional publisher has nothing to offer them, and so aren’t looking for an offer from them.

The quality of the book, both the words written and (in the case of a printed book) the bound product, are less with a self-published book. Thus readers tend to stay away from them.
That is changing, or has already changed. Many print self-publishing companies have improved the bound product. The quality of the words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters that make up the book is totally within the hands of the author. You don’t have the benefit of the publishers line editors and copy editors. But there are other ways to obtain these services, so the product can be made quite good, as good as something coming from a traditional publisher.

So are there any negatives to self-publishing, especially e-self-publishing? I suppose distribution is one. You are at the mercy of people finding your product on line and ordering on-line, as opposed to seeing it in a physical bookstore. Fewer books are found and ordered on-line than bought in a bookstore. That is changing, however. E-shopping for books and e-books is about the only segment of the book industry that’s growing. Growth hasn’t slowed, and doesn’t look to. Right now few people own a device for reading electronic books, but that is changing. Projected sales of the Kindle and similar platforms suggest incredible growth in e-book sales over the next 6 to 12 months, based on the number of e-book readers alone.

So why am I waiting? I’ll discuss that tomorrow.

Back to my internal debate about whether to self-publish my writing, primarily with e-books, rather than continue the quest for a traditional, royalty paying, print-based publisher via an agent.

Okay, I admit it, when I first came upon the new data about e-books last week I got excited. Really excited. Me, who has eschewed the very idea of self-publishing. The sales numbers reported by those who have released a number of books this way are very exciting for an author.

Then, in the comments to an older post on Joe Konrath’s blog, I read this:

If you’re thinking you have a chance to break through, or start a indie career, or even be able to call yourself a published writer after uploading your manuscript to the kindle, they you’re delusional. The opportunity to break into traditional publishing through the kindle has passed. Youre indie career will be limited to moving a few thousand copies of your manuscript at the most.

Well, nothing like throwing cold water on a hot dream. This is just one person’s opinion, of course, but the study I’m doing has to be realistic, not just take the successes of others while ignoring the true status of the market. But wait, he said a writer who now decides to e-self-publish “will be limited to moving a few thousand copies of your manuscript at the most.”

A few thousand copies? Why, to be able to claim your print novel is a best seller requires sales of only 5,000 copies; 7,500 copies for non-fiction. A few thousand copies? Most self-published books through POD publishers such as LuLu, Publish America, Tate, and others sell less than a hundred copies. So, if the prospect is to sell a only few thousand e-copies, well, that sounds pretty good. Maybe I should keep my growing enthusiasm. Heck, that would be a few thousand copies e-sold, whereas no matter how good my work is the chances of being traditionally published are still next to nil.

But of course, I’m a nobody to the readers of the world, or more specifically, to the e-book buyers of the world. There’s still the issue of writing something so good that people will want to pay $3 to $5 dollars for it in Kindle format. There’s the issue of publicising your work, developing some kind of buzz so that it gets noticed.

At a minimum this means having a good cover (of the quality of a traditional publisher release), because buyers still make buying decisions based on the book cover. Then, once the cover draws them in, you need a great marketing paragraph to hook them. Then, once they download the first chapter as a free sample, that chapter better be so good they say, “I think I’ll spend $2.99 on this one.”

The post today on Konrath’s blog is about how most of those having success with e-self-publishing were in my exact situation, with no prior publishing history and no name recognition. They are having success despite that, so maybe I could too. I still need to curb my enthusiasm for e-self-publishing, at least until I finish the study (still need to know if I’m tech savvy enough to do the uploads, and there’s still the issue of the cover). But all signs seem to be pointing me in that direction.