Printing is expensive, especially in small quantities. Despite not having cut-throat pricing, some printing companies are quite competitive in other aspects of their business. My advice is to shop around and to go with what works best for you (sage advice that should be applied to every aspect of life!).
I've learned all sorts of print jargon, such as 'bleed' (making sure your pictures, including your cover, are actually bigger than the page size so if the alignment isn't quite right there won't be a small white line around the edge), 'stock' is another word for paper (no surprise to my scrapbooking friends) and paper is quantified by gsm (grams per square metre).
I've learned how to format a book in Microsoft Word. This took me a long time, but when one company offered to charge me $3 per page for the privilege of doing it (which adds up quite quickly for a 300+ page book!) I decided it would be a better investment of my time and money to learn how to do it myself.
I've learned that B-format is not a standard measure of the size of a book and you need to specify the height and width in millimetres.
As far as distribution goes, rather than marketing to bookshops, I've been focusing on getting my books into libraries. With over 1500 public library branches in Australia and over 7000 primary school libraries (which is great news if you're a children's author), there's a good chance your first print run will more than sell out to this customer base alone!
Regarding bookshops, I've only contacted a couple of the big chains, but neither of them have deigned to call me back. I'll pursue this at a later date. In the meantime, the Brisbane children's specialist bookshop, Where the Wild Things Are, was kind enough to host my book launch yesterday. I read a few passages from my book, and the audience laughed at the appropriate bits (phew!), then I gave them a couple of exercises to do, so they could experience what it's like to be a trainee PEP Squad agent.
If this sounds like fun, then come along again on September 29 as I'll be doing a few more secret code activities at a day camp, and at selected Brisbane City Council libraries during the summer holidays.
PEP Squad, a book about a secret boarding school for teenage spies, hit the shelves in 2014. As far as I knew, things were going okay. The publisher wrote to tell me the book was included in the 2014 edition of New Writing from Ireland, the annual rights catalogue published by Ireland Literature Exchange. All good. So a few months later I offered the publisher the manuscript for the second book in the trilogy. A few months further along, after taking into account sales figures and the fact that the Irish Arts Council wouldn't be funding the company's children's books in the coming year, the publisher declined my offer.
So, for two years I concentrated on writing other stuff, even though I had book 2 ready to go, and friends who had read the first book were asking about the second. Then I decided to do something I never thought I would: self-publish PEP Squad Freshman Year as an eBook.
In order to do this, I needed a cover, and I have to say that the people at Mercier Press, PEP Squad's original publisher, were super helpful. They sent me the original files of the cover so that I could then send them on to my graphic designer to modify. And voila, PEP Squad Freshman Year was available on Kindle.
When I told my reading community about it, some immediately downloaded the Kindle edition, but others asked for a print book. After thinking about it for a day, I realised I wanted a print edition too, so I started looking into how to go about this. Though I'm still investigating printing options, I have found out that before a book goes to print there are a lot of steps a (self)publisher must take. In addition to structural edits (does the story make sense?) and copy edits (is all the grammar and spelling correct?) there is formatting, which includes the title page, publishing page and formatting the text itself. And, even though we shouldn't judge books by them, the cover! Once all this is completed you need to get a separate ISBN (International Standard Book Number) for each format of the book (print, Kindle, etc). A print edition also needs a bar code which makes it easy for bookshops to scan the book at the checkout. Once the book is printed you must lodge a copy with the National Library of Australia (having ordered a CiP number in advance of this), and depending on what state you live in, you may also need to lodge a copy at your State and/or Parliamentary Library.
The most exciting part for me (heck, it's ALL exciting!) was creating a logo for my publishing company. When applying for the ISBN you need to include the name of the publisher. If you look at most companies – not just publishing companies – they have logos. These often appear on the spine of a book and on the title page, so of course I wanted a cool logo. Being more of a words person than a picture person, I was going to outsource my logo creation, but then I had a cool idea. The company is called Omitch Press, so I wanted to make a logo out of a stylised "O" and "M". I thought the sun setting behind mountains would be cool, using the letter "O" as the sun, and the "M" as the mountains. Then I added some sunbeams. Then, when my son pointed out that the white space under the logo looked like an open book, I knew the logo was perfect.
Once the book is printed, you need to decide how you are going to sell it and how much you are going to sell it for. Options include online vendors (including your own website!), bricks and mortar bookshops and markets. You also need to decide the best way to get your book to retailers and customers. This is called distribution. Some printing companies will also distribute your books for you. It is the print and distribution part of the process, the part I cannot do myself, that I am stuck on at the moment.
So it turns out I'm not that great at world building. A mere 5 months ago (a measly trifle in publishing timeframes) I resubmitted what I thought was my magnum opus. I'd addressed all the issues the readers had brought up the first time, paying more attention to the world building, and I thought my manuscript was ready.
I got a very detailed and friendly rejection email.
Thus I turned my hand to building other things.
On the same day I got the rejection email, the producer of some locative fiction pieces I'd worked on in 2015 had the great news that the company who'd originally paid us for the work was finally planning to make them available! She also asked if I had any ideas for illos (publishing lingo for illustrations or art work). My artistic talents are limited to the written word – and due to aforementioned rejection, severely limited – but I had a think and came up with what I thought were fun ideas: playdough characters, balled paper mosaics and pop art. If kindy kids can do it, then I can too, right?
The last couple of weeks have been like a sabbatical, still doing creative stuff, but branching out into a slightly different field. I have learned (or rather confirmed) that working in the visual arts is messy, time consuming, requires several drafts and a lot more talent than I have. But happily, there are some pieces I'm not too embarrassed by.
The pop art is still in draft phase, but as soon as it's done I'll pop up a few favourites.
As we all know, keeping busy makes the time pass faster, and the way I've been keeping busy is by working on two new novels.
One is set in the Australian bush, which is quite straightforward to describe and easy to research. Going for a bushwalk and looking, listening, smelling and feeling the atmosphere/texture of plants/different surfaces beneath my feet should give me enough material to draw on when I design the backdrop of my novel. This is known as world building. Even if a story is set in the present day in a familiar setting (which this one is), there are other things to consider when building your world. The mood of a character affects the way they perceive the world. The time of day changes the appearance, sound and activity levels of wildlife. Some regions of the world experience larger daily temperature variations in summer, whereas in Brisbane, where I live, this happens in winter. If you're writing about real places, it's important to get this right. If you don't, the locals will know and they won't appreciate it. They may even stop reading your book and vow never to read anything you write again!
The other story I'm working on, like many recent and popular young adult novels, is set in a dystopian future. (Dystopia is "an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.") While I enjoy reading these novels, I get the feeling if they'd been sent to my commissioning editor, they may have been sent back to the author with a request for better world building. Not all of them are clear about what immediately preceded and caused the unpleasant state of things, and although some do make mention of "the war", details about the nature of the conflict and the catalyst for it are completely lacking. I'm determined not to make the same mistake in my novel, so I'm doing a lot of research on climate science and human causes of global warming. It's very interesting, and makes me not want to drive anywhere or eat fruit that I haven't grown in my own backyard (which would mean I would go very, very hungry). It's a serious issue, and I hope that the finished product will not only be entertaining but thought-provoking.
So if you'll excuse me, I've got a world to build.
I have been a bit quiet of late, blogwise, as my writing time has been spent working on the manuscript I sent into my publisher on Friday (woohoo!) 13 and a half years after I had the original idea.
This is the story of that story.
My latest book-to-be is called "The Operative". It's a coming of age novel, so it's written for a slightly older audience than my other books.
I got the idea during a conversation with my brother's former flatmate's father. He was a very interesting man from Derry in Ireland. During "the Troubles" he worked as a surgeon at Derry hospital, and had some very interesting things to say about his life during that period. Being half Irish myself and growing up in the 70s and 80s when the news reports were full of terrorism in Northern Ireland, I found this man's first-hand experiences fascinating. The thing that really sparked the idea for a story was when he talked about things that disappeared from the hospital: hospital equipment, medical supplies, patient records and, in some cases, the patients themselves! My writer's mind took that one step further and thought, what about the staff? I imagined a story revolving around a doctor who is kidnapped at gunpoint by a man in a balaclava and forced to operate on a wounded terrorist. Or two.
For a long time (it has been 13 years after all!) my imagination didn't stray far from there. The story was grounded in Northern Ireland, so I threw myself into researching as much as I could about the Troubles. But the problem was, the more I read, the more I realised I didn't know, and it became obvious to me that I would never be able to write an authentic-sounding story set in 1980s Northern Ireland.
I was still fascinated by the plight of the main character, so I took the key elements of the story and transplanted them to an imaginary country a century or two in the future. I called this country "Queensland", stuck a heap of tropical plants and gun-toting terrorists in it and built a fence between it and the rest of Australia.
That's where the real hard work began. So far I had a scenario and a main character, but I had to get to know her, her past, and the world she is living in (which is called world building), dream up other characters for her to interact with, and think of a good ending.
It turns out I'm not that good at world building and the publisher I sent the story to said no. But she also gave me a heap of constructive criticism (ie, get your world building right!) "should I decide to revisit the manuscript at any stage." So I read the comments and let my subconscious mull it over for a few months while I wrote a completely new story – also set in Queensland with a medical bent. Then I reworked my kidnap story, let it mull, and reworked it again.
Now version 2 is back in the publisher's hands (or rather, in her inbox), and I have time for writing other things, including a brand new story with brand new characters while I wait for the verdict. I'll keep you posted!
I got a lovely surprise in the mail today – actually a few days ago now, but I've been busy!
I can see into the letter box from my kitchen window and noticed there was a package in there. Usually packages mean my husband has ordered some sort of computer accessory on the internet, but this time the package was for me, all the way from my Irish publisher in Cork ("Corcaigh" in Irish). I opened it and was confused to find a random selection of my Penny books in Turkish: Penny the Pencil (translated as 'The Adventures of Crazy Pencil Penna Against the Evil"), Penny in Space (The Space Adventure) and Penny on Safari (Safari).
When I looked closer, and read the accompanying letter from the publisher, I noticed little white rectangles on the covers with "5.baski" and "3.baski" written on them. These mean 5th edition and 3rd edition, which means they've sold out of 4 print runs of the first book and gone to a fifth, and 2 print runs of the others. Normally you only find this information on the publishing page, which is often page 2 of a book. But subsequent editions are such a big deal in Turkey they print it on the front cover!
Time to go celebrate with a slice of baklava!