Chris Limb Interview : From Self-Publishing to Crowd-Funding

Chris Limb is an independently published author who has written both fiction and factual books. His first self-published book documented the effects of the singer, Toyah, on his life from the 1980s onwards. He latest fiction book Comeback will soon be published by the crowd-funding publisher, Unbound. Here Chris tells me about his experiences in self-publishing and crowd-funded publishing.

Can you tell me a bit about your publishing history? What was the first book you published?

The first book I published was "I Was  Teenage Toyah Fan". I'd been blogging regularly for a while, always finding different subjects to write about. I started writing blog entries about my experiences as a Toyah fan in the early 1980s and quickly discovered that these were proving very popular - and that there was probably enough to say about the subject to fill a book rather than a blog.

Why did you decide to self-publish? Had you tried to publish with a ‘conventional’ publisher or did you know from the outset that you wanted to go it alone?

I did ask around about agents and publishers when I first came up with the idea of expanding these blog entries but it was very difficult to get anyone to even respond or acknowledge my approaches. However, this was at the time when publishing - and in particular Print On Demand - was beginning to take off. So I decided to go down that route.

What has been the best thing about self-publishing?

I think the main advantage is the speed - if you dedicate yourself to a project you can get it out there incredibly quickly rather than having to wait for the sometimes glacial wheels of the publishing industry to turn. Furthermore as I have experience in graphic design for print (one of my main skills when freelancing) so I have been able to design covers and typeset internal layouts to professional standards.

And the worst?

I think the main issues are:

• Getting people to take it seriously (thankfully this is less of an issue now that it is more widespread)
• Getting your books noticed - as self-publishing is an "anybody can do it" medium  now that it is more widespread there's a lot of competition and it's harder to reach an audience.

You recently took a different route to publication. I think that involved some kind of crowd-funding, didn’t it? Why did you decide to do that?

The crowd-funding model wasn't initially my decision. With my fiction I was trying to go down a more traditional route, and so was submitting short stories to anthologies and (online) magazines. I think it's because that way there is some kind of quality control - in order to be published you do need to be read by an editor or the person compiling the anthology. I was quite lucky in that respect;  I had my first short story published in 2013 and a number over the next few years (which I did then collect in a self-published collection "The Demon Face").  I learned a lot from my interaction with editors and I think my writing improved as a result.

With respect to novels, I continually submitted to agents and traditional publishers - a slow process as many specify that you can't submit simultaneously. This meant several years were eaten up waiting to hear back from publishers' open submission periods for instance.

Unbound were one of the publishers I pitched to - and unlike the others they said yes! They have a unique business model - when they accept a manuscript for publication (and I understand that acceptance isn't a foregone conclusion) they then run a crowd-fund to raise the money for their production costs. People can pre-order the book at various "pledge" levels (which means they get certain additional rewards).

What is your business relationship with Unbound? Do they take care of all the marketing and so on? Do you work on a royalties basis? Why is this a more attractive option than just publishing direct (via Amazon KDP or Lulu)?

I suppose basically they are my publisher. If you set the crowd-funding aspect aside (which is them covering their costs of production) they do pretty much everything a regular publishing house would do for me from both structural and copy editing (which I have just completed) to typesetting, cover design, printing, marketing and distribution, and they do work on a royalties basis.

Of course these days all authors need to do a lot of marketing themselves whether trad or self-published; so aside from the production I think it's the distribution that Unbound take care of which is a big plus for me.

I had been trying to get my fiction published in a more traditional way anyway - as I mentioned I preferred it because it meant an editor / compiler would be passing an unbiased eye over my manuscript - so anything which was accepted meant that at least one other person thought it was worth reading! The novel was submitted to a number of publishing houses during their open submission periods. Another advantage Unbound has over other trad publishers is that they don't require you to submit through an agent.

How has this worked out so far? Better or worse than just releasing a print-on-demand book?

Well it worked out in the end as I hit my pledge target in August 2019 after two years. It’s much better than print-on-demand as now that the book is in production it will be distributed the traditional way and appear in bookshops such as Waterstones or WH Smith. I suppose the main disadvantage is that it can take a long time to hit the target whereas with print-on-demand you can go as soon as you are ready.

Also there is still a degree of confusion with regard to the crowd-funding process - there are a couple of questions several people have asked me - "What do you need all that money for?" and "Why not just get a bank loan?" - as I think the concept of the publisher raising production costs beforehand is still quite a new one to people, and they don't realise that the money isn't being raised for me...

Do you do any advertising or marketing? If so, what?

With the self-published books I generally do all my marketing via social media which has varying success. With the Toyah book I was very lucky as there was an audience for it already. It was more difficult with my short story collection as that was an unknown quantity to many people - plus you have to be careful not to bore them with constant tweets! For the eBooks I found having it available free for a short period did boost sales afterwards as it raised the books' profile.

Do you write fiction in a specific genre? Do you think it is easier to find an audience if they are already looking for a “specific types” of novel?

Yes indeed, I think in general it is easier for genre books to find an audience as genre readers can be enthusiastic readers and are often on the lookout for something new to get stuck into. Once upon a time that would have been by looking on particular shelves in bookshops or libraries - now that can also be done by subscribing to book bloggers and reviewers.

I do write in particular genres - (urban) fantasy, horror and science fiction, although there is a bleed between the three and one or two of my ostensibly "horror" tales - including the first short story I had published - have no supernatural elements whatsoever so could actually happen in real life. My forthcoming novel Comeback is Urban Fantasy.

As a writer it is easier to find a home for short stories when writing in genre - calls for anthologies or magazine submissions are usually themed. I would imagine that it is easier to target audiences for novels too although I haven't had to do that yet aside from when submitting my novel to publishers' open submission periods - it did have to be publishers who specialised in SFF!

When self-publishing I think the way to go with genre fiction novels is to send copies to book bloggers and / or reviewers who specialise in certain genres and already have an audience who will be by definition on the lookout for that kind of novel. Plus organisations such as the British Fantasy Society do review independent or self-published books sent to them (and despite the name do cover SF and Horror as well as fantasy). A good review from them is always a plus.

Do you work with any other ‘freelancers’ – say editors, proof-readers or cover designers?

Not when self-publishing, yet. I can see the advantage in doing so though - in particular,  no matter how much you might think you are concentrating, typos will always slip through when you are so familiar with the text. And following on from my comments above I think editors are very important so even though I haven't self-published fiction (aside from my collection of short stories which had all been through the editing process prior to being published elsewhere) I would definitely consider doing so.

What would you do differently if you were publishing your first book all over again today?

Following on from the previous question I might indeed hire an editor and proof-reader to give the text a going over to make it better. Also I think I would have started earlier and fleshed the book out a little as it is quite a slim volume!

What have you got planned next?

The main thing will be plugging my novel "Comeback" when it comes out with Unbound in April 2020 and then seeing if they are interested in the (already written) sequel. If they are, that will mean another crowd-fund, but hopefully not as long a one!

Chris’s Books

I was a Teenage Toyah Fan: http://j.mp/TTFkazUK
The Demon Face: http://j.mp/TheDemonFace 
Comeback (page at Unbound): https://unbound.com/books/comeback/
Goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5347555.Chris_Limb

More On Chris

http://chrislimb.com/
http://www.catmachine.com
Twitter: @catmachine | @catmachinedes

Writers and Publishers, Let’s Get Together!

It’s been a while since I last updated this blog. An awful lot has changed in my writing and publishing business lately. The main thing that’s changed is that a business is now what it is. I used to think of myself as a writer. A writer publishes one book, maybe two or three or more and then sits back and looks at the total lack of sales.

A publisher, on the other hand, sells books: markets them, advertises them, publishers not just one or two individual books but one, two, three (or more) series of books. Publishing is not a ‘calling' or a ‘talent’, it’s a business. And to make a success as an independent writer you also need to be an independent publisher.

I’ve been a publisher once before – a magazine publisher in the conventional (that, is old-fashioned) way. I commissioned articles, had the magazine designed, got tens of thousands of copies printed, had them distributed to shops. And then waited to find out how much money I’d lost!

That was back in the 1990s. The idea that you could publish without paying huge sums of money to get all the salable copies printed in advance was not one that had even occurred to me. On-demand publishing didn’t exist back then. Nor did Kindle and iPad devices. Heck, Amazon didn’t even exist back then! Fortunately, the world has changed, and my approach to publishing has changed with it.

Anyway, it’s early days for me but this year I launched my publishing business (Dark Neon Books) with five programming books under the imprint (or ‘brand name’), Bitwise Books. There will be one more programming book published before the year is out. And I also redesigned and republished three novels via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). They were previously published via Lulu.

Along the way, I’ve had to do all kinds of other stuff such as buy ISBNs so that they are shown to be published by my company (a free Amazon ISBN shows them to be ‘Independently Published’ which is not what I wanted) and I’ve had to start to learn the whole confusing, complicated business of advertising and marketing. To be frank, I am still in the early stages of this and I’m planning to become more professional about marketing during 2020.

If you are an independent publisher, a small publishing company or a self-published writer and you would be interested in sharing your experience, please get in touch. Maybe I can do a short interview (by e-mail is fine). From now on, I want this blog to be by writers and for writers. So let’s share our experiences to help one another!

Bitwise Books - Our new Programming Imprint

Dark Neon has just launched Bitwise Books, our new programming language imprint! We’ve been working away at this for most of the last year. Our aim is to publish a range of tightly-focused programming books that explain just what you really need to know without any padding.

The series is called The Little Book Of… and our first three titles are:

The Little Book Of C Programming
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk

The Little Book Of Pointers
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk

The Little Book Of Recursion
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk

In addition, we have created a series of free programming guides called A Really Simple Guide To… These include A Really Simple Guide To Object Orientation, C IDEs and Pointers. To can get the guides delivered straight to your inbox (no purchase necessary) from the Bitwise Books site.

We’ll be announcing more Really Simple Guides and Little Books Of (various programming topics) soon.

Interview with Downing College Magazine

I was one of three crime authors interviewed for the magazine of my old college (Downing College, Cambridge) recently. We talked about my life in journalism, 1980s pop music and the three 1980s murder mystery novels that I've published. The magazine will eventually go online (it's not available yet) and I'll post a link when it does.

Using Style Sheets

When you are formatting books for either eBook or printed book publication, you should be sure to set up style sheets. A style sheet contains named font and paragraph formatting options that can be selectively applied to your text. Here I am assuming you are using Microsoft Word for writing your documents but style sheets can also be used with other word processors and Desktop Publishing packages. If you are not familiar with Word style sheets, you may want to follow Microsoft’s tutorial.

If you haven’t already got a style sheet, you need to create one – just load a blank document and save it as a Word template. Then set up styles by right-clicking text with the format you want and, from the mouse menu, select Styles, Save as New Quick Style. Make sure the full styles palette is visible. From Word’s Home ribbon page, click the little arrow-box at the bottom right of the style palette (the thing showing all the character styles) to dock it at the side of your screen.

Now, when you want to modify a style, click the arrow to its right in the docked palette and select Modify.

Make changes in the dialog box and click the Format button to select other categories of style attribute that you may want to change. I don’t plan on explaining all the options here so if you aren’t already familiar with styles, you may want to spend some time experimenting with the possibilities.

Important: when you make a change, be sure that the option ‘New documents based on this template’ is selected. If not, the style changes will not be persisted for use in other documents. You want at least one template for use in multiple documents so this is really important.

Once you’ve got a template, you can apply it to new documents by loading it in this way. Select File, Options. Click Add-ins. In the drop-down list at the bottom-left, pick Templates. Then click Go, click Attach, browse to your template and select it. Make sure ‘automatically update documents styles’ is checked. Click Open. The template will now be applied to your document and the text will be reformatted if the template styles match the existing formatting. If not, you will need to select your text, then select the various style names from the palette to apply them.

For basic Kindle formatting, most style options are ignored so you shouldn’t need to spend too long setting them up. The Kindle Formatting web site also has lots of useful information: http://kindleformatting.com/

For a printed book (for example, via CreateSpace or Lulu), you need to devote a lot more care to formatting. Every formatting change you make will be reproduced exactly on the printed page so don’t skip the details. Just to give you some guidance on how to create your body text, you should either make changes to the Normal style or (which is, I think, better), create a new style based on the Normal style. I use a style called BodyCopy. For most books, a Serif font (a ‘curly’ variety) is the best choice and either Palatino and Garamond are two favourites.

The font I’ve used in my novels is Garamond, full justified, with a line spacing of exactly 14 points and a first-line indent of 0.5 inches (set these options from the Modify Styles dialog – you’ll need to click the Format button and the bottom and choose Paragraph). I’ll discuss this more fully in another article.

Formatting a Kindle Book For Lulu or CreateSpace

So you’ve published your book to Kindle. Now you want to release it as a paperback. The two main ‘print-on-demand’ options you might consider are CreateSpace or Lulu. The main advantage of CreateSpace is that it’s affiliated with Amazon so getting your book listed on Amazon will (presumably) be fairly straightforward. Lulu has the benefit that the company prints books internationally – not just in the USA – so if you want make it available to buyers in other countries (and as a UK author, I certainly do!), Lulu is a better choice. Bear in mind that your Lulu books will be listed on Amazon too as long as you given them an ISBN number (this is available free from Lulu).

Whichever service you choose, the next task you face is getting your book formatted for print. I am assuming here that you have written the book in Microsoft Word. If you have used another word processor or a Desktop Publishing program, the tasks you need to undertake will, of course, be rather different, though the principles are the same.

Traditional Kindle books have very simple formatting without fancy layout and named fonts. To make your text look good in print, you need to put some effort into reformatting your text to fit onto a specific page size, use named fonts, apply formatting effects such as indents, page numbering or section numbering and so forth. In this article, I’ll explain the first step – getting your text to fit onto the page.

First, decide on the size of your book. My book is a novel and the standard size (on Lulu anyway) is 6 inches wide by 9 inches tall which is called US Trade. Lulu supplies pre-formatted page ‘templates’ in various sizes and I’d suggest that you begin by downloading one of these from here: http://connect.lulu.com/t5/Cover-Formatting/What-dimensions-should-my-book-cover-images-have/ta-p/33279 The CreateSpace templates are found here: https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/InteriorPDF.jsp

As I am publishing to Lulu, the rest of this article describes what I did using the Lulu template. I would expect the process to be similar for CreateSpace but I have no personal experience of that.

First, bear in mind that, while Lulu and CreateSpace call these documents ‘templates’ they are not what Word calls templates. In Word a template has the extension ‘.dotx’ or (in older versions of Word) ‘.dot’. A Word template is used as a repository for reusable styling information that can be loaded into one or more existing documents. The ‘templates’ supplied by Lulu and CreateSpace are ordinary Word (.doc) documents. If you haven’t yet written your book you could, I suppose, start writing it into one of these empty documents. In my case, my book already existed. I decided to use the downloaded ‘template’ as a reference guide. I examined its page-sizing properties and simply copied these into my existing document (actually I first made a new copy of my novel's document because I didn’t want any changes I made to affect the one that was already formatted for Kindle).

So, without more ado. This is what I did. I loaded Lulu’s US Trade template document and then selected Page Layout, Size, More Paper Sizes.

A dialog appeared showing me the Custom size details. These are the settings that were shown in each of the three tabbed pages.

I made a note of all these settings and just copied them into the same ‘Page Setup’ dialog pages for the document containing my novel. Then I saved it. The end result is that my text was formatted to fit on the pages of a 6” x 9” book. You would, of course, need to copy different settings if you are printing to a different size of book.

That’s just the start, however. I next had to apply a whole range of formatting options to make the text look nice on the printed page. I’ll have more to say about that in another article.

Mobipocket Creator JavaScript Problems

I just uploaded the third novel in my 1980s New Romantic Murder Mysteries series today (it’s called ‘Death Wears Sequins’, by the way, and, by Jove! it’s a damn’ riveting read!).

All was going well when suddenly – eek! – Mobipocket Creator threw a wobbly. I’m using Mobipocket Creator 4.2 installed in the advanced mode rather than the simplified ‘Home’ version. You can download a copy here: http://www.mobipocket.com/.

I was just in the process of adding the ‘guides’ for my Cover image and Table Of Contents as I’ve explained in a previous post when suddenly a dialog box popped up displaying an inscrutable message telling me that an unexpected JavaScript error had occurred. Well, that had me flummoxed. Until, that is, I recalled some comments on this very blog from people who’d come across the same problem.

A quick scan though the comments soon found the answer. The commenter named krakondack wrote: “I've found the solution to my problem, so if anyone else gets the problem, all you need to do is uninstall Internet Explorer 9 in "Installed Updates" section of Control Panel's list of software. There's some kind of conflict there, and uninstalling 9 simply reverts your system to IE 8 which then works fine.”

OK, so I loaded up the Control Panel from the Windows Start menu (this is on Windows 7), opened Programs and Features and searched the list for Internet Explorer. The damn’ thing isn’t there! If I’d read krakondack’s comment more carefully, I might not have been so surprised; but I didn’t and I was. After a bit of creating Googling, I eventually discovered that in order to uninstall Internet Explorer 9 you have to click the View Installed Updates link at the left of the Programs and Features window. Then you scroll down until you find a group called Microsoft Windows and, lurking somewhere in the list there is the Windows Internet Explorer 9 item. Right-click this and select Uninstall. When it’s finished, reboot the PC and Internet Explorer will have changed back to version 8.

Having done this, when I used Mobipocket Creator, all is well. Don’t ask me what it is about version 9 of Internet Explorer (IE9) that cause the problem because I don’t know. And, since I hardly ever use Internet Explorer (these days I generally use Chrome) I don’t much care.

If you do use IE9, you will have problems. Probably the simplest way around them is to use a different Kindle-book generator. Many people like Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) which, like Mobipocket, is free. I’ve tried Calibre and it seems fine but I prefer to use Mobipocket Creator for the simple reason that I’ve already fought my battles with it and now I know how to get myself out of most of the tight corners that initially baffled me. Maybe I’ll try Calibre for my next Kindle book. For now, though, I’m happy with Mobipocket Creator – and Internet Explorer 8!