Welcome to the Self Publishing House of Horrors Matthew D. Heines on Indie Publishing
“What is a continuous page break?”
“Does the Kindle format need page numbers?”
“Why won’t Apple accept my document?”
“How many pixels should my photos have?
“What’s a widget?”
“Where do I get an ISBN?”
“Does Nook accept a doc.x?”
“Why does the book I paid so much to publish, cost so much
to buy?”
“Why wont that &%$# page number stay off the first page
of the chapter?”
“What do you mean I must have a clickable table of
contents?”
If you have, at some time in the recent past, asked yourself
at least three of the preceding questions, you, my friend must somehow have
found yourself wrapped up in the enigmatic world of self publishing. If you
have not, quickly hit a back button or whatever it is you need to do, but run,
run fast, run hard, run silent, run deep. You don’t want any part of the rest
of the harrowing tale that is about to unfold.
Before we begin, I must caution the reader that, although it
may answer some of the above questions, this article is less meant as
informative or instructive, and more an avenue to vent personal frustrations.
The reader is therefore at his or her own risk to continue. The risk which, may
result in a twisted way, in the reader discovering a few things about the world
of self-publishing. However, if you are in desperate need of a specific answer,
such as which font to use for your book about bunnies in post-war Berlin, you
wont find it here. If you want to read about somebody complaining about how
terribly humiliating it is to write a great book, and then discover that it is
necessary to learn a series of software programs, publishing rules, formatting
guidelines, advertising campaigns, record keeping etc. etc. in order to be
successful, go ahead and strap yourself in for the ride called, “Self
Publishing House of Horrors.”
Why did a writer of Matthew Heines’ caliber choose
self-publishing?
Like most of you, self-publishing chose me. For the most
part, most of the people to whom I sent my manuscript My Year in Oman, thought I was misspelling Amman, the capitol of
Jordan. It didn’t speak much to the intellectual level of agents, nor, the
chances of my books ever getting published. When I finally did find an agent,
she told me she loved my book and to be patient-for a year. Finally, when I
called her office in frustration, I was told she didn’t work there anymore.
White Space
If you are going to self-publish, let me tell you a story
about white space. In 2010, I published the first edition of my book,
Deceptions of the Ages: “Mormons” Freemasons and Extraterrestrials through a
self-publishing outfit that rhymes with boo boo. That book was over 700 pages
long when it was presented to me. Being a naïve buffoon, I accepted the number
of pages as inevitable, even suffering the abuse of a writer at a newspaper in
Ogden Utah, who, without even seeing it, called it a “tome.” To get to the point quickly, I will just say,
483 (516 if you add the bibliography). Yes, I was able to take a book that was
passed off to me as a 700-page behemoth and remove over two hundred pages, just
by reformatting the paragraphs myself and reducing the font. If you are going
to pay someone to publish your book, look at a number of other books in your
category that are put out by publishers. With a few exceptions, no publisher is
going to cut into profits with a lot of unnecessary white space. The opposite
is true of people who you are paying to publish your book.
Forget about the
book, it’s all about the cover
My problem actually predated the introduction of Deceptions
in 2010, but that makes such a nice lead-in to the next topic, I had to leave
it until now. In 2005 I published My Year
in Oman: An American Experience in Arabia During the War On Terror. Like
most people, seeing my own work in print, with a cover and a title, was
overwhelming. It was finished. I never opened it, read it or looked at it
again. I went back to teaching full-time right after its publication and I
never felt any reason, or desire to read the book. Why should I? I knew how it
ended.
When I could, I
began work on Another Year in Oman:
Between Iraq and a Hard Place, which was published in 2008, again, through
the same self-publishers. By that time,
along with allowing so much white space in the margins, lines and between
paragraphs, I had committed another classical mistake, which involved both my
own hubris and my lack of imagination. Thinking that my writing, and not the
cover of my books, was going to sell my books, I settled on a picture of
myself, standing in a green pool of water in an oasis in the Sultanate of Oman.
It was a great photograph, since I was in it, but it, along with the pale blue
cover just wasn’t appealing, at least compared to what else was out there.
Although I had a few book sales, the obscurity of the country in the American
psyche did not produce the effect for which I had dreamed.
So, when my
second book came out, hubris and the silly idea that you can’t judge a book by
its cover, literally, led me to settle on a black and white photo of a Canadian
colleague wearing the Omani headscarf. I thought it was funny as only she, my
wife and I would ever know who it really was. I was lucky we weren’t the only
three people who read the book. Once again, Another
Year in Oman was an appropriate sequel; bad cover and obscure topic, which
led to not so many sales, which meant very few would discover my wonderful
writing style.
In my own
defense, I will say that I was so arrogant about my ability to write and be
“discovered” that I was ignorant about anything else involved in the venture.
Worst of all, I was ignorant of my own ignorance. What I was thinking at the
time, was the same thing I was thinking when my first book came out. I just had
to be ready for fortune and fame. At no time did I ever consider that there
could possibly be anything wrong with my books.
By the time I
released Deceptions of the Ages, I had changed my tune somewhat regarding the
topic and the cover of the book, but I still had not figured out the white
space, which is where we came into this story. Deceptions of the Ages cost me $5,000 dollars to publish, I
believe. Since I had been teaching for a year in Saudi Arabia, the money may
did not seem excessively important. After all, it was an investment.
Since I had been
a full-time teacher in Saudi Arabia and written another book, memory is all I
have without actually digging stuff up, which I am too lazy to do. Anyway, five
thousand greenbacks, which included 50 books or 100 books, most of which are
sitting in boxes in my storage unit, unopened, unread and sadly enough, unsold.
Why they are sitting in my storage unit in that condition is the big finale of
the article so I don’t want to give it away, just yet.
With the
publication of Deception of the Ages: “Mormons” Freemasons and
Extraterrestrials, I was sure I had made a breakthrough. The topics, which have
been areas of personal interest, life-long experience and research, seemed so
well-timed with the interest of the public in the Da Vinci code by Dan Brown. I
thought if the public was so interested in a fictional book based on some
loosely strung together facts, how much they would be interested in the real
story-the one Dan Brown or anyone outside (and inside) the LDS Church could not
know, unless they had spent their lives studying history.
But, once again,
even though I had learned a few things, I was still looking at a book that was
over seven hundred pages long. But the clincher was the bottom line. The price
for the paperback was $29.99 and the hardcover was $52.99 I almost cried when I
saw the listing. I knew I would never get any sales at those prices and that
all of my money had been wasted. But still I hadn’t figured out white space.
Fast forward to
August of 2014. In our luxury penthouse suite, somewhere near Seattle, Washington,
I was working furiously to complete my latest book: Killing Time in Saudi Arabia: An American Experience. The remainder
of all of my previous publishing projects was a repository folder on my
computer that contained so many different copies and versions, I had no idea
which was which. I made it a point that before I finished Killing Time, I would organize those files so that I would never
again be afraid to go looking for the most up-to-date copy of my book. When I
started opening the files, and actually examining the content, I began to grow
concerned. After less than twenty minutes, I announced to my poor, overly
understanding and patient wife, “I have to redo these books.”
For almost a
month, with no weekends and twelve to eighteen hour days, I rewrote each and
every book. I took tutorials on every topic, from formatting documents in Word
to submitting in formats like Createspace, Kindle and iBooks. Editing one book that
is over four hundred pages is a monumental task, by the time I had finished editing
four books and my wife had finished editing what I had edited, the words had
begun dancing around on the pages and situating themselves where they wanted to
be. I could tell horror stories of correcting errors and going back the next
day, only to see the same errors again, but let’s move on. I began to find so
many times that I could read a word or a mistake five times and never see it. In
all of that gung-ho cleaning up of the books, I still had not figured out the
most important thing, the thing that was hurting my sales, but I was getting
close.
Although this may
sound silly to most, while watching a tutorial on word, I finally learned that
I could adjust the space between paragraphs. It was, like the books I had
published, something I thought was set in stone. Suddenly, I could get rid of the white space
and make my books competitive. If there were ever a moment similar to the apes
in 2001 a Space Odyssey, that may have been it.
In three weeks, I
re-wrote three books that were close to five hundred pages and Another Year in
Oman, which I reduced from 361 pages to 253. I reduced the cost from $14.99 to
$11.99. In rewriting the books, I only cleaned up the structure, without
changing the meaning of the words, paragraphs and chapters. I also took
extensive tutorials on photoshop and I redesigned all of my covers. In the end,
the products were so different, so much cleaner, and so much cheaper, I decided
it would be best to assign them ISBN’s that I own, which I purchased through
Bowker.
In total, I have
four books that have seen a total of nine editions, covers and three different
publishers. After almost ten years, I have a mild understanding of how to
publish myself. But, that is not the end of it by any means. As a monument to
that ten-year endeavor are dozens of books full of the mistakes of arrogance, impatience
and the fear of wasting an excessively large amount of time.
The question most likely still remains in
the mind of some readers, to publish or not to publish. All I can do is leave
you one last anecdote. In 2002, I was in Sun Valley Idaho, the final dwelling
place of Ernest Hemingway. There is a monument to Mr. Hemingway along the bike
path on the outskirts of town, in the shadow of the surrounding mountains. The
monument itself is a sheltered bench and a bronze bust of one of America’s
greatest writers. As I sat on the bench in silence, I heard a voice say, “Well,
what are you waiting for?”
