by Tosh McIntosh

Prior to Amazon’s introduction of the Kindle in November 2007, writers had only two options for publishing their books.

They could fight their way through tollbooths manned by literary agents and onto the interstate highway leading to a contract with the “Big Six” publishers, or make do with the one-lane byroad represented by vanity publishers more than happy to take their money with promises of fame and fortune when achieving the breakout success that was sure to follow.

For any writer who hasn’t spent the intervening years in another universe, the impact of the Kindle has altered the landscape forever by shifting the bedrock of the publishing industry and creating a tsunami of eBooks and advancements in print-on-demand technology. All of the previous impediments to publication placed in our way by agents and publishers have been effectively removed.

This new world has a new name of indie publishing to go along with it, and the objective of trying to separate it from the pejorative mantle of vanity is so obvious as to be ludicrous. All you have to do is read a small sample of the work by unknown authors to realize that the name change means nothing. Indie publishing is the new vanity, and it’s always going to be so.

Another factor that remains constant in the publishing industry is the element of predation.

About the time I began writing with the intention of publishing a novel, a website with the name of Predators and Editors showed up (http://pred-ed.com/). Along with Agent Query (http://www.agentquery.com/), these two sites attracted wannabe-published authors looking for the best way to navigate around the many obstacles to being a legacy-published author.

If you’ve seen the film “Authors Anonymous,” you will probably remember best the role played by Dennis Farina, whose character John K. Butzin resorts to self-publishing and pays a publisher in China to help him duplicate the success of Tom Clancy. There’s a hilarious scene in which Farina opens the first box of his books and finds a poodle on the front cover and the jacket blurb written in Chinese. His publisher-supplied cover designer apparently didn’t know the difference between a poodle and a lion.

Unfortunately, all effective satire is based on reality, and the vast plains of publishing offer a target-rich environment for predators roaming the grasslands. They are out there just like those lions, looking for the most vulnerable among their potential victims.

Writer’s wear their vulnerability like tattoos on their foreheads and attract predators armed with carefully worded promises of being the answer to all our dreams of publishing the breakout novel and hitting the big time.

The reality, of course, is far different. Most writers never recoup any substantial capital investment in their novels. The more you spend up front, the deeper in the red your financial bottom line will probably remain. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that there’s an alternative option of doing some or all of the production yourself. And let’s be very clear that no matter what anyone else says, this decision is not tantamount to offering an amateur product for sale. That contention by the know-it-alls is no different than the legacy-publishing attitude that they know best what the public wants to read, and the assurance of quality requires their filter.

And while most writers won’t choose to do it themselves, let’s be clear that the decision to hand over the tasks to someone else should be made with your eyes wide open by arming yourself with the knowledge necessary to filter out the false promises of the predators and protect yourself from being financially eaten alive.

If you want to start somewhere, spend time reading the blog posts of the four most widely-read proponents of indie publishing: J.A. Konrath, Barry Eisler, Dean Wesley Smith and his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Smith’s Think Like a Publisher is a gold mine of relevant information.

Of all their words of wisdom, the mantra of controlling your own destiny is of paramount importance, and they provide an up-close-and-personal comparison between living within the prison cell of legacy publishing and the freedom of indie.

Smith describes one of the major differences like this (paraphrased): Paying an agent and publisher royalties is like offering the yardman who cuts your lawn a percentage of the profit when you sell your house. All they do for you is day work. Pay only for that, or their hooks will be into you forever. Retain all rights to your books without exception.

So that means all you have to do is ensure the agreement you make with someone to help with your book is based on a fee-for-services structure, right? And maybe you’re offered a shopping list of services you can choose from with the costs clearly identified. What could be simpler?

The answer to that is simple as well. Don’t fall for the hook, and don’t believe in a generic statement like Authors retain all rights to their work. It won’t protect you later, and the reason for that is just as simple.

Let’s say you choose to publish your novel with Amazon, and you want to offer an eBook for the Kindle (using Kindle Direct Publishing or KDP) and a print-on-demand (POD) paperback (with CreateSpace or CS).

You can pay Amazon for some or all of the individual tasks necessary to produce the book. Or you can do it yourself, and these Amazon subsidiaries make it really easy to complete the final stages of book production without paying them anything. (Note: Amazon does take a percentage of each sale, so you are paying a royalty. But it’s a much smaller percentage than legacy demands, it’s calculated on the retail price of the book, not on the net that they determine after taking out their inflated “expenses,” and all rights remain with you.)

But we’re talking about hiring someone else to prepare the book for Amazon to publish and distribute for you. How does that impact the equation?

Here’s a summary of the tasks involved:

1. It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: Write the best book you’re capable of at this point in your journey as a wordsmth. I obviously think that for the vast majority of writers, this is best accomplished by participation in a critique group.
2. Do everything you can to make it work on all three levels of editing: content/developmental, line/copy, and proofreading.
3. Don’t believe any persons who try to present themselves as editors who can perform all three of these functions for any and all genres. That’s overselling in the extreme.
4. Scrub the final .doc or .docx manuscript of all editing artifacts that can cause havoc in an eBook. For anyone interested, I can show you how to do that.
5. This manuscript will need to be converted to filtered .html, which is accomplished with a couple of clicks. That’s the file uploaded to KDP. (Note: I prefer to convert the .html to .mobi and upload that rather than let Amazon do it, but that’s just me.)
6. Upload an eBook cover image. KDP has specific requirements for this .jpg file.
7. KDP then publishes your eBook.
8. For the POD paperback published through CS, the uploaded interior file is a print-ready .pdf. Word can do that conversion, so the source manuscript you’ve used for the eBook can serve for that purpose as well. I prefer to use InDesign because I’ve found that it gives me more control over formatting, and on occasion the Word conversion to .pdf can be a little glitchy. I do that by transferring the same .doc source file for the eBook into the InDesign application, and from there creating the print-ready .pdf.
9. You will need a wraparound cover for the paperback uploaded as a .pdf to CS along with the .pdf of the interior.
10. CS has a very user-friendly system for reviewing the results online, including a 3-D virtual previewer of the cover and the ability to view the interior .pdf online or download a copy for review.

That’s all you have to do to publish your book. =;^)

Seriously, how does the topic of predation fit into this scenario?

Go back and read the task summary again and ask yourself how much work product has to be generated. Let’s take a moment to list some of the individual files.

1. The source .doc or .docx manuscript and its .html version.
2. The .mobi file you upload if you choose to do that rather than let KDP convert it.
3. The eBook cover in .jpg, plus all the original images used to build the cover and the original Photoshop (or other photo editing application) file that was used to create the .jpg.
4. The original .pdf of the POD interior and whatever source document was used to create the .pdf if it’s not the same as the source file for the eBook.
5. All original images used in creating the cover for the eBook and POD editions and the original Photoshop files used to create the .jpg for the eBook and the .pdf for the POD.

To avoid predatory control that provides a deceptive promise of Author retains all rights to the book, here’s the bottom line:

Make absolutely certain you contractually and practically have immediate and final control of all work product generated in your name and paid for by you.

These files belong to you, but without possession of them, where did your rights go? If you decide to do anything with your book on your own, or get someone else to assist, how are you going to do that?

Answer: You can’t, because all the files are controlled by someone else.

Do not let that happen and become prey in the world of indie publishing.