by Nikki Amare | Mar 7, 2019 | Business, Musings
In my last post I talked about how I do my own cover design and formatting.
I’m one of those people who is super critical of my own work and I’m willing to work hard to acquire the skills I need in order to produce a finished product I’m happy with. And for the most part I prefer to do it myself because I know it will be done correctly. And if not I only have myself to blame.
Even if I plan to hire someone else to do a job I still think it’s important, as an author or business owner, to have a good understanding of what goes into building a cover, designing an interior, designing a website, etc. It ensures you’re getting what you pay for, as well as keeps you from having unrealistic expectations.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had a client come back to me after the job is finished and say, “I just need this one little change. It shouldn’t take but a few minutes.” That “little change” then ends up taking me four hours and costing them more money than they want to spend. Why? Because it might seem like a simple thing to them, but in reality it’s not.
A perfect example of this is InDesign. This is the program I use to design interior layouts for print books. This program has a steep learning curve but I honestly believe it’s worth learning if you want to produce high quality print books. This is the same program traditional publishers use to layout their books. Unlike with Word or Pages or Google Docs or whatever writing program you use, when InDesign puts text into a document that text is linked. Every letter, every space, and every punctuation mark is like a single link in a chain. So if you decide you want to delete a paragraph it will effect everything after that point. For most pages it probably won’t matter much. But there are some where it will shift the text to the next page which could mean having to go through the entire document to make sure all the chapters are on the right facing page, reapplying master pages so they are correct, and making sure you haven’t created any orphans or widows. (Orphans and Widows are where you have a few words either at the bottom of one page or the top of the other. This is something you generally try to avoid as it gives the finished product a messy, unprofessional look.) So by making that one “little change” I would have to more or less reformat everything after that point. This is why I stress to clients that it must be a fully edited manuscript and that there will be additional charges for changes after the layout is finished.
It’s those very types of things that make it important for authors to understand what it is they’re paying for. I’m a big advocate of taking control of your career. I hear so many authors who say, “I just want to write.” I understand that, believe me. I would love nothing more than to be able to not have to worry about anything else but writing. I would love to just hand over my life and career to someone else to handle all of the business stuff. But I don’t honestly trust anyone to be as informed or to care as much about my career as I do. So while I hope to be able to get to a point someday where I can hire out certain things, I will never hand over control of my life or my career blindly to someone else. I’ve heard too many horror stories. Seen too many people lose everything because of that mentality. Yes, it’s easier to let someone else do those things you don’t want to do, but how do you know if they’re doing it right or with your best interest in mind?
Educate yourself. After all, knowledge is power, right?
by Nikki Amare | Aug 15, 2018 | Business
As creatives business is often the last thing we want to think about. I hear writers say they just want to write, they don’t want to have to worry about all of that other stuff—that other stuff being the business end of things.
Unfortunately, the moment you decide to publish you become a business whether you want to or not. If you are only going to publish that one book and you don’t really plan to do any advertising or care how many copies you sell, well, then you can call it a hobby, but you still have to keep up with things like taxes and receipts.
Now, I’m not giving business advice. I don’t hold a degree in Business or anything like that. However, I have spent the last several years learning all I can about small businesses and large businesses and what it takes to transition between the two. I’ve learned about copyright and EINs (Employer Identification Number) and DBAs (Doing Business As) and accounting and a ton of other little things that go into running a business. I’ve learned the importances of having your own ISBNs (International Standard Book Number). And yes, I know there are going to be a bunch of self-published authors out there who will say you don’t need ISBNs to publish and technically they would be correct. You can publish without your own ISBNs, but by having one you ensure that YOU are the publisher of record for that book. The legal system hasn’t really caught up with technology yet. None of us know what the future holds as far as things like digital copyright laws. Or copyright laws in general, for that matter. I plan to do everything I can to safeguard my IP (intellectual property) now and in the future. I’m a worse case scenario planner. I always try to think of the absolute worse thing that could happen and then plan for it. That way, if it ever did happen I would already know what to do or how to respond.
I’m also a look to the future kind of planner. While I think about the here and now, I also think about two years from now… five years from now… ten years from now. I think of where I want to be and what it would take to achieve those things.
As much as we would all love to just be able to write and not worry about anything else, that’s just not realistic. Writing is as much a business as it is an art form. Before I did anything else, I sat down and wrote out a business plan. I was honest with what I hope to get out of this career—in the short term and in the longterm. I went into details about certain things and was more vague with others, because I know that those things are more fluid.
I think the most important thing, however, is to be realistic. The odds of my publishing my first book and hitting the NY Times Bestsellers list is slim to none. It does happen, but it’s rare and to my knowledge has never happened to a self-published author. Saying something like, I would like to break even, financially, would be a realistic goal. Of course, depending on how much you put into the cover design, marketing, editing, ISBNs, etc., that might not happen on your first book. Or your second. Or even your fifth. It could take several books before you break even. It could take double that amount before you start making a profit. Or, you could make a profit on your first book in the first month.
One thing I know for sure, there are NO guarantees in publishing. Just like any other business. You have to built a business that can sustain the ups and downs, that can weather the storms. For me, that means being realistic with my goals and never being exclusive to any one platform. While growth may be slower and it might be a bit more work to publishing across platforms, you are building a more sustainable business by doing so. As easy as it is to get caught up in the moment, you should always keep an eye to the future as well.
