The $1.99 Author

By E. A. Barker

 

Are you planning to write and publish a book?

Do you have a completed manuscript?

Have you self-published a book or even a few books?

Would you like to write books for additional income or a living?

Were you traditionally published by a small-press and have found yourself faced with book marketing?

 

There are more myths and legends in the book publishing game than can be found in ancient Greek literature. Believing the greedy and corrupt ended them. . . It's kind of like that for book writers.

 

The $1.99 Author offers a pragmatic look at today's book publishing options for both budding and previously published authors. Almost every conceivable publishing path is touched upon with the pros and cons of each laid bare. E. A. Barker is a journeyman writer with a knack for drilling to the bottom of the truth well while managing to serve up even the most disturbing of discoveries with a dash of humour. This should help to make his insider's view of a truly bizarre industry a little more palatable. When E. A. was asked what he thought this book may be categorized under, he quipped: "Humorous Tragedy".

 

This book is free of sugar-coated empty promises of success.

 

Instead, readers will be made to understand there is a slippery ladder awaiting them, and The 1.99 Author shows us how to climb it safely without: getting ripped off, getting sued, going broke, being laughed at. . . in addition to mitigating some of the gut-wrenching experiences like piracy and plagiarism which most published authors have likely encountered. Best of all, once you understand the game, you will be given a map of the minefield that is today's book publishing industry so you can avoid the time-consuming low-yield traps－allowing you to concentrate your efforts on what really matters . . . writing more and better books.

 

Are you the next one-in-a-million author with a hit book?

 

If you think you might be, picture The $1.99 Author as being a glass-bottomed boat from which you can view the shark-infested waters of the publishing industry before choosing where to dive in. For every one author, there are hundreds of people lined up to fleece them. Whether you simply want to publish your memoir; publish as a hobby; or think you have what it takes to climb the publishing ladder into "The Big Five". . . The $1.99 Author will save you a great deal of time, money, and heartache in your publishing journey.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: E. A. Barker
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201367411

Book preview

Preface

Caveat Emptor

[1]

The book publishing industry is full of smart people. . . and by smart, I mean they know how to fleece excited unsuspecting marks who have completed a manuscript, and even authors who have been published many times.

Fortunately, I am not the trusting sort, and the few risks I have taken in my publishing journeys were not without exhaustive research ahead of time. Did I make the right call on every cheque I wrote? Most definitely not. Did I make the best decision I could with the information I had? I’d like to think so. Did I cut big cheques because I was in a hurry to see my book in print and was not interested in learning new skills? You bet. Was it worth it? Yes, for quality reasons, and no, in terms of a return on investment.

The sentence you just read is the reason I wrote this book. There must be ways to break even or make some money as a book author until you write the book which has agents, Hollywood producers, and the Big Five publishers throwing around six or seven figure sums when talking about you.

The odds of your first book garnering this type of attention are infinitesimally small so forget about it. Instead, be proud of the fact you wrote a book. Less than 1% of all the people on Earth will. Your accomplishment has already made you special because you finished something which required tremendous persistence. Your willingness to gift it to the world, allowing total － often unqualified － strangers to judge it, shows you are far more brave than the vast majority of those who will be passing sentence on your work.

If this is your first effort, welcome to our very exclusive club. If you’ve published ten books or more, I admire your staying power. Now, let’s see which paths are best for our book(s) while examining what pieces of the puzzle we may have overlooked or become bogged down in.

The $1.99 Author is about playing in and staying in the publishing game without going broke while working our way up an old wooden ladder － ladened with greasy cracked rungs － that no one told you existed. Sounds a little scary, right? I hope you enjoy the climb, and you can do it once you are properly equipped with safety gear and some instruction.

Introduction

Artists are makers surrounded by takers.

The sad truth of humanity － past and present － is talent is almost always treated as a commodity to be bought and sold based on what the market will bear or the fickleness of a patron. Traditionally, talent is something to be exploited. Yes, there are examples of apparent altruism where the artist is commissioned to create a work for a benefactor, but it is the benefactor who ends up owning the work while the artist moves on to the next project － hopefully with enough money in their pocket to pay the rent and perhaps indulge in their preferred brand of self-destructive behaviour.

It is exceedingly rare for any type of artist to be in such high demand where they earn enough to be able to produce their art how they want while maintaining the sole rights to their works. In fact, I could not find any examples prior to 1968 when the Beatles opened Apple Records. Elvis never did. Diana Ross never did, and Michael Jackson could only manage 50% ownership in Sony Music. These heavy hitters, as with top earning authors, would have a great deal of input with some say and perhaps approval before their works were released, but they were/are, at best, in bed with the companies they are signed to. It should be noted the Beatles on Apple Records relied on three other bigger companies to distribute their albums, so even they were reliant on others for the success of failure of each release.

The same business model appears in the art world where painters, sculptors, photographers. . . have a showing in a gallery. The artist is likely to see only half of the sale price － a price set by the gallery, possibly with some input from the artist if their works have a sales history. It is also not unheard of for the gallery to take their pick of one of the works shown in lieu of payment for costs incurred on the event.

UGLY Truth #1:

Rarely is there a free lunch for artists. . . we are always giving up something in return for exposure.

The single most important question we must ask ourselves is: What are we willing to sacrifice to make it as an artist?

There are alternatives to becoming just another cog in one of the hundreds of wheels in the the machine, but rarely are they as good as we might think.

Indie bands can record at home, or in small studios, playing at being engineers and producers which, for anyone with ears, means the listener must try to ignore the glaring non-mastered production issues which hurt the listening experience.

The artistic types can try to sell their art out of their home or pay out monthly for a small space in an co-op gallery.

For those of us who write there is: self-publishing, vanity publishing, and indie publishing where we can maintain complete creative control over our work － maintaining our voice － for better and for worse － unless we sign with the bandits who move the levers in the machine.

UGLY Truth #2:

Writers are rarely: good editors, talented cover designers, great blurb writers. . . nor are they likely to be adept at formatting book interiors, book marketing, or effectively managing the day-to-day operations of a book publishing company.

Something will give under such a strain and their weaknesses will be exposed inevitably affecting both the quality and the sales of their book. Like trying and failing at formatting e-books to look more like physical books, for one.

Fortunately, an entire industry, with less discerning amateur book critics, sprang up after desktop publishing began in 1979. By the early 1990’s, print-on-demand (POD) books became a reality, followed up by the first e-book reader in 1997. We would be seven years into the 21st century before the world would go bat-crap crazy for e-book readers and cheap books to load into them. An opportunity was created and seized by the early indie e-book authors due to the high asking price of e-books from the mainstream publishing houses. A market for crap had been created － whether inadvertently or intentionally is up for debate － but there were millions of wannabes with rejected manuscripts who would embrace this chance to fill the void and don their published author crown with free or 99¢ offerings.

Perhaps the most important question you need to ask as a writer is: Am I an indie artist, or do I want to be a rock star who is willing to let the record company decide how I will sound and which songs get released?

UGLY Truth #3:

Only two of the first million indie-authors would go on to become household names. They remain the only two as of this book’s publishing date more than a decade later.

Are you sure you wouldn’t rather take up photography?

Chapter One

Who Are You?

Are you a writer, an author, or a book author? Every author is a writer, but not every writer or author of a paper, article, or short story is or wants to be a book author, and for good reasons.

Wearing the book author badge means being committed to producing a book and following through to see it is read, ideally by influencers. It is a burdensome commitment which should not be taken lightly. Success in the book-selling trade will have little to do with how good a writer you may be, and a great deal to do with what you are willing to learn and do in order to sell your book, whether on behalf of your publisher or as a self-published indie book author.

There is some question about what constitutes a book these days as the newer attention-span-challenged generations seem to be gravitating to shorter and shorter reads.

For the sake of argument － and you can start some doozies in the writing community with this question － we will look at what tends to make a book appear legitimate rather than its length for the purposes of this book.

✓  Did the author or publisher bother to officially copyright the work?

✓  Is there an ISBN?

✓  Is the cover professionally done with credits and/or licensing information?

✓  Is there a copyright page?

✓  Is there front and back matter?

This little list is not too much to ask, and it does separate out the writers who choose to open-publish on a free reading platform, networking site, or blog. So what about these new pay-for-content platforms springing up everywhere? If they don’t meet the above criteria, I say call those content creators professional writers. I’ve already caved to the short story e-book sellers calling themselves book authors, and I said nothing about writing quality, presentation, or editing. Further, someone querying their first book should be called a book writer － not a book author － until their book is published and distributed. This means the book is available to and searchable by ISBN in bookstores around the globe at a minimum, if not libraries. This is my line in the sand.

UGLY TRUTH 4:

Until you’ve experienced the pain of being a book author, you should not get to call yourself one.

An art class and fifty bucks worth of brushes, paints, and canvases is looking pretty good all of a sudden, isn’t it?

Chapter Two

Why did you write your book?

Psychological egoism tells us we have selfish motives for most things we do including, and perhaps especially, things we do for others.

In my first book, a memoir-esque nonfiction work, I stated, ‘I wanted to save the world.’, albeit somewhat sarcastically, but the truth of the matter, if I am to be completely honest with myself and readers, is I wanted to show people how interesting, smart, funny, and cool I am so this image of me might live on after I am gone. Authors leave their mark on the world, and it is preserved by librarians for future generations to experience and/or learn from. It is about legacy and legacy is about ego or so psychologism would circle.

Three years later, I published a mini-series of novelettes to see if I was capable of writing fiction. At the time of this writing － only twenty days have passed since the official release － the jury is still out on that one. A handful of advance readers have led me to believe I don’t suck, which was enough for me to gather up all my notes to produce this bad boy. My ego was stroked sufficiently to continue. I once quipped to my oldest online bestie － a well-known Canadian children’s book author － ‘A good number of indie authors on social media are there because of an ego-driven narcissistic Look at me. personality disorder where they care not about book sales but live and die by their follower numbers and flattering comments from any weirdo on the web.’ I remain vigilant where my own self-delusions are concerned; however I won’t pretend I am unaffected by flattery.

I am experimenting constantly － even with genres － to find a niche which might pay for more than the occasional pizza.

I could position myself, as SO many others do, on a pedestal as some godlike being with divine mystical insight into the book publishing world because I worked for decades as a business and marketing executive in a parallel industry. . . but this is not my style. It would be only partially true to say I wrote this book because of all the author horror stories I’ve encountered over the past five years when there is a selfishly motivated career advancement reason as well. This book is intended to add a rung to my book publishing ladder; inching me closer to where an agent might finally have to acknowledge my existence.

It’s not easy to talk of our reasons for writing a book without talking about our expectations for it.

UGLY TRUTH #5:

Kill your expectations dead － now － ahead of time － or this industry will gleefully do it for you.

I had a dream once. . . of what might, could, or even should happen if I wrote a high quality, truly original, entertaining book about life, women, and finding happiness. Who wouldn’t want to read and publish a book like that? It turns out, every agent in New York, every publisher worth a damn in North America, and most every person on Earth.

As I wrote my first book, I thought it was good enough to make an agent drool so bad they would race out to find me a publisher to produce a globally distributed and translated book capable of landing me on several best seller lists － leading to a guest spot on The Daily Show; creating the necessary notoriety, in conjunction with my Nobel Prize in Literature, to have a fellowship and honorary doctorate from a leading university bestowed, which, after some negotiation, would turn into a tenured professor position, and ultimately a television or film deal for my life story.

At 101 words, this is may be the longest sentence I have ever written.

To paraphrase Luke Skywalker[2]: ‘Incredible. . . everything you just said is wrong.’

UGLY TRUTH #6:

Writers have vivid imaginations which make them vulnerable anytime their happily-ever-after appears to be within reach.

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed. - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.

Yeah, I totally got fracked by this. As a new author, I ass-u-me-d I had a slight advantage over many others as I have had hundreds of thousands of my words published in the marketing and communications world over a twenty year span. This was not enough to get me a read from any of the twenty-nine New York agents who presumably read my query letter though. I admit I found this puzzling. The genre was desirable; the book is humorous, reasonably well-written, and very original, although, to be fair, Tolstoy and Shakespeare had nothing to worry about. So why then would they not want to read at least a bit of it? The world craves originality, right?

UGLY TRUTH #7:

The world might crave originality, but THE PUBLISHING WORLD DOES NOT!

I actually believed the book publishing industry was driven by quality, and governed by intellectuals with a love of literature. I was that naive. Outside of a couple of publishing houses truly dedicated to great literature in the U.K., there is a Hollywood business model in play everywhere else. Just as the U.S. film industry prefers to endlessly recycle old ideas as remakes, so too do the main stream book publishing houses who would rather publish a book of doodles from Mr. King than take a chance on a new writer lacking fame and/or credentials. When we choose a nonfiction book to read, we are encouraged to pay attention to the credentials of the author as though only a credentialed person can put forth a valid thought － or so the publishing world, a.k.a. main stream print media and academia would have us believe. They want to keep the riffraff out － the nonconformists － people like me with radical pro-freedom, anti-escapism, anti-racism, and pro-women views who are not afraid to shout them from rooftops. They will however clamour to publish the bizarre twisted philosophies of a drug-addled rock star though. Go figure.

UGLY TRUTH #8:

It’s better to be young and pretty with marginal writing skills than it is to be an average looking incredible writer. It’s clear most of the decision-makers in the publishing industry are afflicted with the Hollywood syndrome to some degree.

They know they can sell more books with a hot author photo on the back cover than they can with good writing alone. Yes, the literary world has sunk to this superficial level, but it does not mean the old bugly-uglies among us should not speak out to try and change it.

Look no further than the dumbing down of the West’s educational systems as the root cause － having the secondary effect of the mass production of starstruck followers who worship celebrity and who don’t read books after graduating. If the digital revolution has accomplished anything, it has given a voice to