POD Publishing: Talking about CreateSpace

Not so much a "Q and A" session today, because although a couple of readers have asked more or less the same questions, it's less a question than a plea: "Will you please talk about your experiences with CreateSpace" ...?

Apparently, there's a bit of a brewhaha out here, and some folks have definitely picked up the impression that CreateSpace (and/or Amazon itself) is (or are) a scam. Since we've been messing about with both of these since last September, and we have multiple titles "up there," and we're actually selling copies, we count as the experts or veterans -- meaning, we know a fair bit more than someone who's coming in for the first time, or someone who has one book which has yet to sell any copies.

The disclaimer first: I wouldn't call us experts or veterans! We've gone through the process a number of times, but we've only been with CreateSpace for a short time. I'm sure there are problems we haven't seen yet ... only time will tell. Also, we've only worked with them in the field of books ... we can't comment on their service regarding CDs, DVDs and so forth. We have 14 books with CreateSpace; the 7th is in the process of making its long, slow, laborious way to Amazon. So...

I was sent a forward of this, and asked to comment:
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/400/RipOff0400767.htm

This is a post (or report) on a site called Ripoff Report. It's interesting, but the person posting is making little sense. Here's his (or her) case, in a nutshell (load the page for the full version, obviously). In so many words, "I put my books on Amazon via CreateSpace, but few copies are selling, and I'm not getting paid. I only just noticed that one must earn $20 minimum before being paid -- I'm so angry, I'm deleting my books from CS/Amazon. I want the money earned from selling 3 copies, total; they're not paying; this whole thing is a scam."

Ouch.

Okay, let's take that apart. First, you publish at your own risk, and you market your books yourself. If you can't sell copies, that's the risk you took. (This same poster quotes Lulu.com as a "another money-wasting proposition," probably for the same reason ... s/he has yet to fathom that just putting your books on Lulu -- or Amazon -- doesn't make them sell. You have to make them sell.)

Second, if you read the deal, you'll see, up-front, that you get paid when you've earned $20+, and not before. If you've set the list price low and earn $2 from every copy sold, you'll have to sell 10 before you get paid ... you must grasp this at the outset. Apparently, our angry poster was also looking to get paid immediately for copies sold -- s/he had also missed the part of the deal where the "delay 30" is explained. This means you get paid for January's sales at the end of February. The time-lag is necessary to allow for stop-payments, bouncing checks, credit card fraud, problems in shipping, and a hundred more woes that could easily come up.

In other words, "the devil is in the details" as they say. You must read the fine print, figure out what the deal is, what the rules are -- and then play by them. The information is all there, up front and obvious, but no one is going to stand over you and make you read it.



In this context, the only possible "ripoff" that one could perceive would be in the area of CreateSpace's "free setup." I would have to say, "free" is a relative term. There are two fees to pay. One is the US$39 upgrade to the "pro" status for each book. If you pay this when launching the book, you get to keep a lot more of the list price. There is also the absolute insistence that you order and review a physical proof copy before the book will be released to Amazon. If you live in the US or Canada, this will be cheap, about $10 or $12 at most. If you're in Australia, it's US$30 -- so you're up to US$69 now, which is over A$100 set-up costs per book. If you need several proofs to get it right (this is your fault, not Create Space's! Make sure the darned thing is right before you upload it!) then you can add US$30 for each additional proof.

(Fact: you could easily get up to A$200 per book; 10 books on Amazon will have set you back a couple of grand, Aussie -- but most of this was the result of your own errors, not CS's shortcomings.)

In other words, the set-up is not actually "free" as such ... but they don't charge money for registration of a title, setting up your account, "cover deposit," chromalin (color) proofs, file conversions, upload fees, download fees, editorial services, marketing packages, press releases, and myriads of other fees that other POD printshops charge, if you're not careful. CS will hit you up for a hardcopy of the project ... and they hit you for an upgrade to "pro" status -- what's this for??

Well they GIVE you the ISBN. In fact, a single ISBN costs A$35, and a 10x block of ISBNs costs A$70. Writers who are serious about publishing will have more than one project, and will be out there marketing the heck out of them. So -- in my estimation, the upgrade fee is actually a hedge against all the free ISBNs they're going to be shouting you. You can also earn back the upgrade fee in the first ten sales or so of the title -- so long as you set a decent list price. If you "undercut yourself," you might have to sell 40 copies to earn back the upgrade fee. So...

The next question has to be, what are your chances of selling copies?

As with all things ... it depends on the book, and on your own efforts. You're not just the writer, you're the editor, the publisher, the marketing consultant, the publicist, the lot. Nobody is going to do any part of the job for you. If you don't publicize and push your work, no one out there will know it exists; and if readers don't know you're there, how can they buy?

In the scope of a single post, the best I can do is give you some groundrules. I've been asked to talk at much greater length about this, and I'll probably do the usual ebook project, which is what people seem to do these days when they have a heck of lot to say. For now, here are a few of the Great Cosmic Truths I've learned in my travels:

• Nonfiction generally sells better than fiction.
• Niche fiction is a safer bet that literary fiction.
• If you have an established name, you'll sell better.
• If you're totally unknown, you're climbing Mt. Everest.
• It is never easy to market any kind of books.
• Marketing fiction, especially, is a bear.
• Amazon is a great place to sell ... not to publicize.
• Putting up a website does not automatically generate traffic!
• Writing a blog does not automatically attract readers!
• Great websites go unnoticed unless they're publicized.
• Great blogs can go unnoticed, just the same.
• You can annoy Google and vanish out of the search results!
• It's far easier and cheaper to blog than do major websites.
• People need to be dazzled by websites: DIY simple ones fall flat.
• A great site or blog gives you something to market...
• The sites and blogs do not market themselves...
• YOU sell the site and the blog --
• The site and the blog help to sell your book(s).
• The bigger your investment, the bigger your risk.
• POD decreases your investment and your risk.
• There are good POD printshops everywhere...
• Lulu.com is the easiest to work with, but...
• CreateSpace is the easiest doorway to Amazon.
• Amazon is your marketplace, not your salesman!!
• CreateSpace can get expensive over multiple books.
• The process of getting to Amazon is s-l-o-w.
• It will take at least a month to get listed there.
• CreateSpace's product quality is high --
• But they have their problems: be alert.
• Their website is s-l-o-w: be patient.
• Their website is still a little buggy: be persistent.
• They're working to improve things: be appreciative.
• Their Customer Service team sucks: be fatalistic.
• Understand that CS is a printer, not a salesteam!
• CreateSpace does make mistakes: cope with them.
• The system WILL jack you around: deal with it.
• Market your books with all the energy you have.
• Publicize yourself with all your ingenuity.
• Offer good customer service to your readers --
• Be available via your blog and/or website.
• LEARN about marketing and pro blogging...
• Train yourself to be your own salesman.
• CreateSpace works on the "delay-30": grasp this!
• They have a $20 minimum payout: grasp this too!
• This is a very difficult mountain to climb; but...
• Don't let it beat you: keep trying.

This is pretty much what I've learned, defined in the broadest possible terms. After this, you get into the million-odd details, and a single blog post is not the place to tackle them!

In my experience, CreateSpace is slow, but they get there in the end. Their customer service team is too small and too overworked ... they send out form-style responses to save time, which is frequently the wrong thing to do; they often (but not invariably) misread your description of the problem (which will get you mad ... but calm down; start again).

Their website is slowly improving, but it is still buggy and can behave unpredictably. They're working on it, and by the end of 2009 it should be much better. Their physical product is extremely good -- better than the product churned out by Lulu's Australian digital affiliate, though the quality of the product from Lulu's American printshop is 100%.

CreateSpace does make booboos: I've heard of the wrong book being inserted into the wrong jacket! This has probably only happened once in the history of humankind, and of course it was reported on the web. Can you imagine if a very adult, steamy novel were to be jacketed inside the cover of children's book, and shipped to the customer who ordered Fluffy Bunny's Birthday Tea Party? Mom or Dad opens up the book and there's all these people doing things to one another which may or may not even be anatomically possible!

For a discussion on the pros and cons of CreateSpace which by now spans years, try this:
http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2007/09/26/anyone_have_an_opinion_on_createspace.php

On that page, over two years' worth of comments have accumulated. You can track CS's progress from being buggy as an antfarm to being "almost there."

We were lucky: we're recent members at CS. I guess 85% of the problems were fixed before we signed up -- and we still hit our fair share. For example, a "jammed" java shopping cart that wouldn't check out, wouldn't let you empty it, wouldn't do nuthin', in fact ... and due to the deficiencies in customer service, it took 14 days to fix this situation. This delay shoved THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE into 2009 -- and we are still waiting for the proof copy as we roll into mid-January.

The process is slow as a tired snail, but you do get to Amazon eventually, for the cost of a proof and a $39 upgrade fee. They give you the ISBN, which puts you $35 ahead right there, and a proof is indispensable anyway. If you've done your job right, one proof is all you'll need. Botch it up and go to 2, 3, 4 proofs ... that's not CreateSpace's fault.

Selling copies is another question -- the ball is in your court. Grab it, run with it. Market the hell out of yourself, and be optimistic. Understand how the system works -- the $20 minimum payout, the "delay-30," and so on. Teach yourself marketing and pro blogging, as well as editing, proofreading and desktop publishing.

Above all, try to enjoy the process. Remember the wise old saying: "If it stops being fun, stop doing it."

I'll write more about this, but we'll make an ebook of it, in due course. Right now, this post is running longer than Ben Hur, and you wouldn't believe how hot it is in this room. There's no a/c, and it's going to be 107 F in the shade, in the backyard, in about an hour. So --

Ciao for now!
MK

See also:
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2009/01/pod-publishing-ramps-up-for-smash-and.html
and
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/09/publishing-series-read-it-in-order.html

Marketing gay books online ... the challenge!

I was asked just recently if there's any real difference between marketing gay books online and any other kind of book. In fact, there's quite a gulf of difference, and you have to take that extra bit of care which writers of most other works don't.

If you've written the most crash-hot book on building garden sheds that has ever been produced in any language, including Ancient Greek, you'll have a comparatively easy time marketing it. Which isn't to say that it's dead easy to market any book, anywhere, at any time! But your book falls into an absolutely clear-cut category, and there shouldn't be one word in it which could be misconstrued by anyone, from any corner of the demograph. Your book shouldn't have the potential to offend anyone, anywhere.

Likewise, Elizabeth's Big Book of Brilliant Sweater Patterns; Tom's Top Tips on Classic Car Collecting, My First Treasury of Cheesecake Recipes, Auntie Aggie's All-American Anthology of Aggravating Armadillos ... and so on.

Fiction is different. Any kind of fiction. Fiction is about people doing ... stuff. And as soon as anyone does anything, someone else is going to have a complaint to make about it.

Jack's eating a cheese burger with extra bacon, fries and a Coke. Jill's a vegetarian, and grossed out. Bob's a health food aficionado, and grossed out. Ahmed is grossed out by the bacon strips, because of something the Koran says. Roger is grossed out by the beef content, because he's protesting the inhumane conditions endured by domestic cattle in the US. Joyce is grossed out by the dairy content, for the same reason. Sam is grossed out because he's lactose intolerant and basically, any mention of dairy makes him puke. Maria is grossed out by the Coke, because she's a diabetic, and any mention of sugar-water makes her come over dizzy and nauseated.

All Jack did was eat a burger. It was a dead boring scene in the book.

Supposing the plot got halfway interesting: he's having an extra-marital affair with the next-door neighbor, who's a single mum working nights at Hooters to pay the bills. Christians are going to be grossed out by the adultery. Muslims will be grossed out by both the adultery and the lady's lascivious profession. Welfare workers will be grossed out because her kids have a stripper for a mom. Feminists will be grossed out because Jack's two-timing his wife for the pneumatic Barbie doll next door.

Now, suppose Jack was gay, as well as eating the burger and having a clandestine affair with the gorgeous dude next door.

Suddenly, you have a book which is absolutely guaranteed to rub some people the wrong way, and do it biiiig big time. The fact is, as soon as the writer introduces "mature content" or themes to a work of fiction, it has to be marketed differently. Add in a gay element, and you give yourself a challenge...

When you're registering your book at Amazon, you have to choose your categories, and you're in a bind. You obviously choose Literature/fiction as a place to start; then, they offer you a very wide list of thematic material ... unless your book is gay.

If there's a gay element, you're automatically shoehorned into the Gay/lesbian pigeonhole. You're not science fiction, you're not historical, you're not romance or western or anything else. Well, yes you are, but your main content is of absolutely secondary importance to the gay element.

And there's an excellent reason for this. Many gay books (most of them, perhaps) are "gay enough" that there is absolutely no question of what they're about. But there are also books like my own, and they're tougher to categorize.

Sure, they're gay. Every one of them has at least two gay or bi central characters, and some of them have a whole group. There will always be gay issues discussed and lived through. There'll also be scenes of gay sensuality at the heart of the gay romance that drives most of my plots ...

But a lot of these books are also hard science fiction. Half a dozen are historicals. Two are vampire historicals. Several are fantasies. Some of the SF tales also qualify as hardboiled detective stories. Several are massive adventure romps. And all of them would qualify as romances.

The tendency, at least for me, is to wax poetic about the broad, technicolor canvas on which I "paint" these stories; to talk about the locations (which might be the Caribbean, Australia, Europe, Alaska...) or the ships or aircraft, whatever. As a writer and a reader both, the "gay aspect" of the story is, to me, only one facet of the story ... and, in fact, it's the part of the book that's probably the easiest to craft.

You have two gorgeous guys. Could be four: THE SWORDSMAN has two couples -- Jack and Seb, plus Janos and Luc; HELLGATE has Travers and Curtis, also Dario and Tor ... also Richard and that little prick, Tonio; and Mick Vidal. The relationships of all these people interweave, get complicated, sort themselves out again. They get together, they have differences, they argue, make up, and so forth. That's life -- and it's the simplest part of any book to write, because every human shares these experiences. We're all on the same page.

So, from my own perspective, I tend to focus on the areas of the work where I put in the most hard labor, either in research or invention. Worldbuilding. Researching a place on this globe where I've never been and have no chance of going (Myanmar, for one). Or, looking ahead to a time when the comet or asteroid him the planet, tearing the climate to shreds and rebuilding a livable environment (WINDRAGE; AQUAMARINE).

If I were marketing the books single-handedly, I might have blundered into strife by now, because I'd be enthusing about the locations, the adventure aspect, the ships, the high-tech, what have you, and there's the faint but real possibility that someone might buy one of these books in error.

Let's say you have a 16 year old surfer reading all this fantastic stuff on the website about the NARC high-tech and outrageous adventure on the high frontier. Cool. But in fact these books are not supposed to land in the hands of underage readers, because they're also gay books, and they can be explicit in their language, thematic devices and (!) sensuality.

Marketing has to be pellucidly clear, to make sure old Aunt Maud doesn't get hold of something that's so blisteringly hot, it ought to be handled with fire gloves. Straight or gay -- doesn't matter. Auntie M. will be off to the nearest emergency room with a coronary. (Incidentally, times change appearances. The book cover at left does NOT indicate lesbian content. "Gay" also means joyous, and this cover from 1936 is about young heterosexual females who ... just wanna have fun.)

And Marketing has to be extremely clear about gay content, because certain readers can either enjoy or turn the page to get past sensual hetero material, but the instant the material tends toward the gay ... the same readers are not just disinterested, they're actually offended.

Now, a number of my books are certainly in the "no underage readers, thank you very much!" bracket. I'd put the NARC series there, plus ICE, WIND AND FIRE, and also WHITE ROSE OF NIGHT; possibly WINDRAGE and BREAKHEART.

But there's also a slough more which I'd rate "okay for mature older teens who're gay, bi or gay-friendly." THE SWORDSMAN, THE DECEIVERS, TIGER, TIGER, and such like.

But these decisions are not mine to make. There's a big, gray area where folks of all ages are muddling around together ... the younger reader who's desperately hunting for porn because s/he's already addicted to sleaze, and the 40 year olds who've been so sheltered, profanity and nudity make them faint.

Until you're 18 (or maybe even 21, depending on your region ) what you can read is the decision of your parents, your preachers, your teachers. Over that age, you're pretty much on your own. You must make your own decisions about what gets put into your brain, but --

It's up to the folks responsible for marketing the books to give you clear indications of what's in said books, so the decision ... to buy or not to buy? ... can be made in all good conscience.

To some people, the mere mention of the word "gay" or "queer" in a piece of work will immediately rate the book R. (Like this blog, believe it or not. Keegan is rated R, for speaking candidly about reality, though there is no nudity or profanity anywhere in these posts. Go figure.)

In fact, a hint of gayness in a book aimed at children will make a lot of adults go ballistic. It's actually quite amusing. Mom and Dad are running around like a couple of headless chickens, having heart attacks about what's in the little book, and the kids are saying, "Mom, Dad, they're gay, get over it."

We have a long, long way to go before a book like, say, DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT will be classified as a historical, simply with an asterisk that offers, "Be aware of same-gender content, characters and romance." Right now, DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT, FORTUNES OF WAR, THE DECEIVERS ... they're gay books with an asterisk offering, "be aware of historical setting and themes." Spin the treatment though 180 degrees and you glimpse the absurdity.

So, yes, it's very different marketing gay books than "any other kind" of books. You really do become aware of being hammered into a category ... politically marginalized. Gayness was never an issue when plotting, writing, jacketing and publishing, but the instant marketing starts -- yup, it's a challenge. You have to sit down and figure out how to get these books in front of people who enjoy 1) a good gay read irrespective of whether it's historical, SF or fantasy; and/or 2) a good book in a specific genre, irrespective of the fact it has gay characters or themes.

Take the NARC books as an example. Many readers are gay guys. Many are straight women who enjoy a good story about gay guys. Some are lesbians who enjoy the stories for their own sake and the gender freedoms I describe. And a few are straight guys who get a huge kick out of the powerful science fiction futures I describe, and at the same time are liberal-minded enough not to get all bent out of shape by the gay aspect.

The trick is in making every aspect of the books pellucidly clear, so that readers can make up their own minds about what they're buying. Marketing on the Internet is not as easy by a long shot as putting books into a store and leaving readers to browse and thumb-through, and choose. But it can be done.

A good place to start is with the cover: you can usually give some clear clues about what the book's going to contain ... and when a book is going to be sold via Amazon (where a tiny fragment of textual description is given, and the front cover only), the jacketing becomes critical. Errors could be made via the Amazon marketplace -- and I imagine they sometimes are.

This is something we'd like to avoid at all costs, sooo...

DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT, WHITE ROSE OF NIGHT, WINDRAGE and a couple of others will have to be rejacketed into a new edition specifically for this reason, before they "go up" to Amazon. It's a little extra work which will surely pay dividends in the end.

It'll also keep us busy for a while!
Ciao for now,
MK

Writing, Publishing, and odd ways to spend your life

A couple of readers' questions today ... meaning, the piece I'd wanted to write will have to wait till tomorrow -- because I can't locate its images. They're here somewhere, on SOME computer (there are five, and just as many floating hard drives), but after an hour of searching, damned if I can find them. And the person who would know where they are won't get here till after three in the PM.

So my reminiscences of a Northern Hemisphere kid-hood in the week that contained Halloween, my birthday and Bonfire Night, will have to wait, which gives me time and space to answer some questions which have been waiting for a few days.

First question: I write so much about the sea, I must really love it; what's my experience of working in it, on it, and under it?

Do I love the sea? Well, yes and no. In my entire life, I've never lived more than five miles away from it, so there's a fundamental "marine awareness" in the back of my mind. When you grow up with ships, you're not necessarily going to be a mariner, though the thought has occurred to me a few times. My parents were both associated with the Navy in one way or another; I have one uncle who captained a passenger ship and another who served aboard a battleship. My partner grew up on and around sailboats, and his brother is a 20-year USN veteran, and my brother is one of those bods who strap tanks to their backs and sink into the deeps. I can tell you hair-raising stories of scuba tanks in the trunk on days when its 160 degrees in the Sun, bouncing over speed bumps and holding my breath, waiting for the kaboom!! to happen.

Fortunately, it never did ... or I wouldn't be writing this. I grew up in a place where there was so much iron ore in the hills, compasses didn't work properly and incoming freighters used to routinely plow up on the beach. One of my most vivid kid-era memories is of being about four and building sand castles in the shade of a huge, beached, rust-rotten hulk of a freighter ... alas, if you put your spade in the sand, under 2" of pale yellow sand, it turned black with oil. So many ships had wrecked there, the coastline was as oily as Prince William Sound ... and the tragic thing is, in those days (looooong ago), nobody cared, although I will say, at least they did notice.

Since landing in Australia (37 years ago), I suppose I could say I've lived in, on and sometimes under salt water, on a more or less permanent basis. The sea isn't something you think about; it's just there. Which is to say, I'd miss it, big time, if we moved to a landlocked area; but having said that ... I'm more of a woodland person. I like boats. A lot. I also like cabins in the woods. A whole lot.

Second question, from a gent in the Pacific Northwest (which, to Alaskans is of course the Pacific Southeast ... though the denizens of the Olympic Peninsula don't like hearing it): "How do I find a publisher? Do they prefer folks who've gone to school for this, or at least taken a course? Can I make enough money out of writing in the short term to save my house?"

That's actually a bunch of questions, not one ... and they're tough to answer concisely enough to make them a fair topic for a single blog post. In fact, I've blogged on this topic several times, and rather than saying it all again, can I give you a couple of links -- one on-site here, and one off.

Take a look at this:
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/09/publishing-series-read-it-in-order.html

This is the index to a series of articles I posted back in September. It's six inter-linked pieces which, slapped together, make a decent-sized book ... a lot of reading, at any rate, which addresses most of the questions raised by the gent in the Seattle area. I began with a look at the New York publishing industry, which is ailing, and went on from there to look at many aspects of writing and publishing -- including (but by no means limited to) the field of POD and do-it-yourself publishing. I also went into the whys and wherefores of how Keegan wound up in POD after signing more professional contracts than you can shake a stick at!

To this I'd just like to add ... sorry, it would take magic, or an act of the gods, for a beginner to make enough from writing to save his/her house. It takes YEARS to get a start in writing, and your first paychecks will probably be so small, you'll be stunned. First pay check I saw, for writing, was A$2000 in 1989 -- not an advance, a one-off sum, for the total sell-thru of a full-length novel. Given inflation, you'd probably get $3000 - $4000 today, but this won't pay your mortgage for longer than a few months, especially since (rats!) it's taxable, too. And when I got that first check, how many years had I been trying to find a publisher?! A lot. A BIG lot.

(Don't let this stop you trying ... but don't make your universe revolve around the necessity of being published and selling big, inside the next year ... it's a one in a million shot.)

There's also a very, very good free download ebook you should read:
http://hollylisle.com/downloads.html#mugging

Mugging the Muse is a collection of articles and features by fantasy novelist Holly Lisle. Doesn't matter if you're not a fantasy writer: Ms. Lisle talks about the business of writing and selling books in the completely generic sense. This isn't advice specifically for fantasy writers, or any particular kind of writer; it's sound advice for any writer who wants to take a serious crack at finding an editor, an agent, a publisher, and paying their way through life by writing. Highly recommended.

In the opening piece of Mugging the Muse, Ms. Lisle tells the horror story of how many (most?) writers are almost certainly going to land in the wonderful world of POD (like Keegan). I'm going to give you a quick outtake about the chain store practise of "ordering to the net", in the hopes you'll be inspired to go get Ms. Lisle's book:

Every author you read, every author you like, is struggling to sell his work against an increasingly hostile computer ordering system that routinely decreases the size of book orders until it has decreased the author right off of the shelves. This system, called ordering to the net, is wiping out the midlist faster than you can blink, and with it, thousands of writers whose work you have read and loved for years. If you make it into print with a professional publisher, you too will be fighting against this pervasive evil.

It works like this. The chains put in an order for 10 books per store. (That’s pretty high, incidentally, but I’m ever the optimist.) Of those, seven sell, one is read to death in-store and has to be scrapped, and two are still sitting on the shelves. This is a 70% sell-through, which will have your agent and you and your editor and your publisher dancing in the aisles. Nobody ever sells through at a hundred percent. 50% is considered acceptable, a 70% sell-through is considered terrific, 80% or better and you might as well be walking on water where you publisher and editor are concerned.

I’ve had a number of books sell through at 70% or better . . . a couple way better. The sounds of jubilation are spectacular. While they last.

Because then the chains reorder. Logically, if you have a book that sells through at 70%, you will order twice or even three times as many of that author’s next book, because sell-through remains constant. If you sell 70% of ten books, you will sell 70% of twenty books. Independent booksellers know this, and follow it. Chain stores do not. Chain stores order to the net – that is, they let the computer automatically reorder only the number of books that sold before. Therefore, they will not order twenty copies of your next book. They will not even order ten. They will order . . . seven. Why? Because they sold seven. And because sell-through remains constant, they will sell roughly five copies of your next book. (70% of seven is four-point-nine, or about five.) And because they only sell five copies of your second title, they ill order . . . you guessed it . . . five of your third title.

And because sell-through remains constant, the chains will sell three-and-a half copies of your third book, and will also show a three-book pattern of dwindling sales. The fact that they and their computerized ordering system caused this pattern will not be brought out in your favor. The fact that your books are still selling through in great percentages will not be brought out in your favor. Only the fact that the computer has been ordering less and less of your books will ever be considered within the chains. So after three books, all things being equal, you are probably doomed. The chains won’t order your titles. Your publisher won’t be selling enough of your books to make it worth his while to publish you. And you can go forth to write under a new name, or you can go back to work as whatever you were before.
http://hollylisle.com/downloads.html#mugging (Reproduced without permission, in the "fair trading" spirit of review, quotation, and advertisement. Now, go visit http://hollylisle.com/!!)

It's a sad end to an industry that was the pinnacle of achievement for the arts and magicks of the writer. However, POD, the Internet, computers, globalization, are also coming to the rescue. Writers like myself who have a large backlist can pick up our own reprints and market the hell out of them. Books can stay in print on a more or less permanent basis.

For example, FORTUNES OF WAR will be on Amazon, in its new edition, in a few weeks -- the first edition is 15 years old, and rather than a reader having to pay silly prices for an original "collector's edition," s/he can have the new edition for about $20. You gotta like that.

And speaking of silly prices at Amazon, there's some copies of the first book of my HELLGATE series changing hands for OVER US$200!!!! People, please! The new edition of The Rabelais Alliance is readily available, there's no shortage of copies:

Just go here: http://www.dream-craft.com/melkeegan/catalog.htm ... and click on HELLGATE from the menu on your left! This one click takes you to this screen:



...doesn't this look better than US$235 for one book?! Damnit, you could get the whole NARC series and the whole HELLGATE series for US$235.

Calm down, Keegan. Take a deep breath. Breathe. Frequently.

There. I feel much better now.

With luck, this will answer the questions readers have been asking, and tomorrow (also with luck) I'll find those images and be writing nostalgically of a time and a place which literally, are no more.

Join me for a Halloween amble down a memory lane smelling of woodsmoke, fireworks and sizzling sausages!

Cheers,
MK

Gay stories and ebooks ... big possibilities for both

As we launch the advertising for the Keegan list which I spoke about yesterday, we're looking at the the whole landscape of indie publishing with fresh eyes -- or at least old eyes aimed in new angles, seeing new things.

Gay books are a fascinating niche in so many ways. Any other genre you can think of is restrictive -- SF will always be SF, historical will always be historical, and so on. But "gay stories" as a genre ...? Let your imagination off the leash.

Adventure? Sure. Talking heads? Fine. Fantasy? Great. "Hard" SF? Terrific. Historical? You bet. Mystery? Mmm. Crime story? Oh, yeah. Thriller? Ancient Greece? Cops and robbers? Martian colony? World War I, or Vietnam? Boy Band luv story? Drugs'n'sex'n'rock'n'roll? 1930s Berlin? Russian Mafia? Doctors and Nurses? Cowboys? Towtruck war? Courtroom battle?

In fact, "Gay stories" is the only genre I can think of that is not really a genre. ANY plot can be shoved into this one niche if it satisfies the basic criteria: does it have some gay characters? Do they do and say gay things? Does the story tackle gay issues or themes in a positive way?

Given three "yes" answers, the writer is let off the leash, and a good time should be had by all. Now, publishing the material is another question entirely, but opportunities galore are springing up these days, for writers and publishers alike.

With retail under the economic kosh worldwide (poor sales figures, no matter what you're selling, apparently; it could be cars, cameras or carrots, and people everywhere are bemoaning the state of the retail environment), ebooks might be the answer to a prayer.

I've had a love-hate relationship with this beast, the life form known as the ebook, for yonks. The major problem I had with them was the price of the readers: $1,000, here in Australia, for a hand-held gadget that puts reading in your hands, the same as a 10c photocopy (yes, yes, I hear the arguments, I know them all). But, seriously, a thousand bucks for an ebook reader?!!

However, things are changing, and they're changing fast.

On a whim, I took a look around the other day, and ended up on eBay.

These guys, by HP, are changing hands for a couple of hundred ... which makes a difference. A couple of hundred is doable, while you'd have to put a thousand dollar item so firmly on the back burner, it'd probably stay there.

For a couple of hundred bucks, all you'd get at an Aussie bookstore would be about right normal-size pocket-edition paperbacks, or six, maybe seven trade size paperbacks, or five, maybe four hardcovers. Otherwise, get thee to a used book store and hope they have what you want in stock.

At a good ebook store, though, you could get anything up to 20 or even 25 novels by writers like Bear, Sheffield, Silverberg and Gerrold ... not to mention a grab-bag of new writers who deserve to be given a go, but are never going to get one if it's left up to the bookstores who subsist on bestsellers.

Hmmm. I fid myself looking at these gadgets much, much more seriously now.

Which means that I (like rapidly growing numbers of other readers, not to mention writers) are looking at ebooks with a lot less skepticism. Till recently, I really haven't had a use for ebooks. I like to curl up with a BOOK -- and I suspect I always will.

However, if I can get a Greg Bear or an Arthur C. Clarke for $6 apiece, I can always curl up with a doohickie. In other words, the doohickie is starting to look attractive ... and I'm looking at PDFs with more interest.

Speaking of PDFs, for the publishers (or wannabe entrepreneurs) among you, it's well worth taking a look at this:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/adsforpdf

Thanks to "The Blue Suit Team" for commenting on one of my posts a few days ago, where I spoke of POD as "megatrend," something I really do see happening.

Indie publishers and writers, imagine this: you've zipped your material into PDF form; it's going out there as an ezine or anthology, in which you might even have sold some ad space already. How's about keyword-contextual ads by Yahoo, popping up when a reader clicks on an ad in your PDF? "Ads for PDF" is a free program, and as I said, well worth a look.

It's probably not the kind of thing you'd want to option if you were publishing a single work (a novel or novella) where ads could quickly become intrusive ... the again, this potential for intrusion never stopped magazines like Analog, F&SF and Azimov's from shoving commercials into fairly short story. But if you were publishing a magazine-style anthology, why not? One is so accustomed to ads these days, readers certainly wouldn't object, and revenues earned by online ads might easily keep the price of ebooks down ... could even make the little fellows free, if readers understood why the damned ads are there. They're not there for fun, nor for the sheer beauty of them.

And now ... work is calling. THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE are waiting, with an end-October publication date looming rapidly closer. Good gods, it is the third already? My blog posts might become a little more brief in these next weeks, as the galleys occupy my time and attention: bear with me ... and trust me, the book will be worth the wait!

Cheers,
MK

New York Publishing: worms in the big apple

First, let me apologize profusely for the Christian propaganda appearing in the Google ads on this page. Not my design, guys! The engine is just zeroing in on the discussion of Sarah Palin and her end-of-days aspirations. (Apparently, Jesus has his tickets booked, and as soon as her fundamental group have eliminated the unbelievers from the entire world ... he'll be back.)

If the Google ads get any more bloody evangelical, I'll be dropping them, because they're getting borderline ... non-Christian visitors (from the GLBTI community or not) to this blog to NOT need to be visually hammered with "experience Life in Jesus Christ," and "how should Christians respond to homosexuality within the family?" (Personally, I admit to being fascinated by the one that keeps showing up, "Was Jesus a Lunatic?" The only problem is, the landing page seems to be down. One might hope that they got so bombed with traffic after the ad started to circulate, they crashed a server. That would be solid reason for the landing page being unreachable.)

But --

This is a gay books blog, damnit! I've only made a handful of political posts, because I was so motivated by the news which found its way to my desk in the last few days, and which I covered in two or three journal entries --

Everything that can be said by me on that subject has been said! If you're here looking for the slime on Palin and McCain, I'll give you the links right here ... and then I'm going to talk about PUBLISHING for the remainder of this post!!

For the update on the impeding Apocalypse, go here:

http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/09/president-sarah-palin-commander-in.html - "President Sarah Palin: commander-in-chief at the end of days"

http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/09/not-gay-think-youre-safe-wrong-jewish.html -
"Not gay? Think you're safe? Wrong. Jewish, Pagan ... Sarah Palin is hunting for your hide."

http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/09/palin-and-mccain-advocating-new-aids.html -
"Palin and McCain: advocating a new AIDS epidemic."

and for my commentary on the Californian gay marriage rights issue:

http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/09/gay-wedding-bells-can-be-expensive.html -
"Gay wedding bells can be expensive."

http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/09/see-what-youre-up-against.html -
"See what you're up against?"

and for gay rights seen as a sub-set of the wider field of human rights:

http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/09/here-comes-damocles-with-his-chainsaw.html -
"Here comes Damocles with his chainsaw"

http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/09/in-landscape-of-spring.html -
"In the landscape of spring."

And now, on to other topics which are just as aggravating in their own way, but have nothing whatever to do with politics. Don't know about you guys, but I could use a break.


Right. Now:

Publishing.



The word brings to mind images of great newspaper presses, trucks speeding in every direction, carrying shrink-wrapped bundles of brand-new paperbacks ... of agents shmoozing and oiling their way through New York book parties, of writers signing six-figure contracts, and a little while later, signing the actual books, beautiful great hardcover things, while being mobbed at B&N or Borders, and appearing on TV to promote whatever they just wrote.

Well, some of the above images are about publishing, but most are about marketing; and most of those marketing images date from the last two decades (stretch back to 1980 if you have to; but don't go back further), the quarter-century or so of the Age of Corporate Takeovers.

In this era the small publishers, which were the backbone of the industry right back to Caxton and Guttenberg, were inhaled, absorbed, digested, by big publishers. In turn, the big publishers were incorporated into the giant combines ... which were inevitably bought up by multinationals which have nothing much to do with publishing.

The small publisher is almost gone: out-competed by super-predators who can afford to throw zillions of dollars at publicity for a lousy book. Also, books are getting more and more expensive to make. (Yes, the price of gasolene has a lot to do with book prices. Transportation of product. Duh.)

A critical threshold is reached. On one side of it you have a retail price where the publishing house can pay its running costs and keep an editing staff in New York apartments ... on the other side of the line is the price readers can actually afford to pay. Exceed that price, and books stand on the shelves, they don't go through the checkouts.

Somewhere in the middle is the product (books) which have become so expensive, they're going back for pulping by the tons. They find their way onto sale tables, while readers are trawling book exchanges, looking for a decent read at a price they can afford -- or buying "used" on the Internet. Fact: Amazon.com (seen as the boogieman of the publishing world) is the planet's biggest Second Hand Book store. Why pay the $40 shelf price for a hardcover, when you can buy it used, like new, at Amazon, for $6?!

And trampled underfoot are the writers who used to be more or less complacent of their job security. With publishers closing and amalgamating everywhere, paperback royalties at (!) 7.5%, printruns getting smaller as publishers struggle to contain losses ... writers who stand around with their hands in their pockets waiting for a traditional publisher to do it all for them, pay them an advance once can actually live on, and give the nod to their next book -- well, kindly stated, they're an endangered species.

Let's look at "working" writers in the niche end of the market. Run the numbers yourself. Say, a paperback costs US$8 (what *do* they cost in the States these days?), earns you .60c (7.5%), and sells 75% of a 10,000 copy printrun. (They pulped 25%). So, you make $4500. If you're paying a mortgage and buying a car, you need to sell ten or fifteen such books per year ... but your publisher can take a maximum of two. You have a major problem. You're out there looking for a job, and your writing, which used to be your trade, has become your hobby.

Okay .. now look at it from the publisher's perspective. Let's consider a fairly major house, which publishes 60 titles per year, with printruns of 10,000 each. That's 600,000 books, from which you'd expect 25% of the retail price to return to the publisher. That's $2 per copy off the price of a paperback. Maximum income is $1.2 million ... if the whole printrun was sold, and if a lot of those books were not subject to massive discounting in the distribution trade (they are).



The fact is, 25% of all books that are cranked out by the New York publishing industry get pulped, and of those that are sold, tons land on the sale tables, and tons more are pushed through to chain stores that demand heavy discounts. The truth is, this hypothetical publisher will be lucky to see a half million as the business's annual return. Uh ... what's payroll? How many hundred grand a year editors can you support on a half million income? Oh, yeah, and what about paying the writers? Cover artists? Outsourced proofreaders?

Somewhere along the line, something went wrong. Maybe it's the price of printing. Maybe it's the fact that folks who work for big town publishers pay $4000 a month for rent on an apartment, and they need the high wages, if they're not going to starve to death. Maybe it's the distributors who needed a higher and higher cut out of the retail price, as the cost of gasoline and diesel shot skywards after the 1960s?

Whatever went wrong, don't blame it on the ordinary working writer, the loon who beats his/her brains out to produce the very best book possible, editing and proofing for weeks after writing is finished, and then sweating over the galleys ... all to earn a paycheck so small, a lot of people would wonder why they bothered.

Now, some of the rot certainly set in when the bestselling authors started to earn so much money, they themselves began to say they were overpaid. But if their books were selling in the millions, and they were getting 15% royalties off $40 hardcovers, there's nothing outrageous about these numbers. See it this way: one bestseller (like The Da Vinci Code) can prop up a major publisher for years, allowing it to survive multiple failures of other, lesser, books. Fair enough.

Hmm. So you can't lay the blame at the feet of people like Dan Brown and Daniel Steele and Wilbur Smith. They got paid in geometric proportion to the copies going out the door.

But around the same time as all this was happening at the writing and editing levels, the multinational conglomerates got hold of the publishing industry by absorbing it osmotically. Marketing experts don't know a whole hell of a lot about books, or writing. They might know what sells (in other words, they can tell you which megatrend is showing good returns right now, driven by which blockbuster movie that came out just last month). But could they tell a good book from a rotten one?

When's the last time you bought a book and found it badly written? You might not be an editor yourself, but you can spot loads of editorial changes that should have been made ... and the narrative goes off the rails a couple of times ... it didn't end properly ... it contradicted itself in a few places.

Uh huh. You probably just discovered a book that was selected by the Marketing Division. They have a megatrend they're following. Forget the fact this is a rotten book by a first-time writer ... the subject matter is spot-on. The book auction starts to roll and they can wind up paying down millions for this piece of, uh, well, sorry. Krudd.

A certain percentage of the time, they'll be right, and readers don't actually care how bad it is. It's just sufficiently like the latest movie phenomenon to sell a ton of copies. It's the surprise hit of the summer season, everyone gets bankable. But some of the time, the Marketing Division is sorta-kinda wrong. This is why books pile up on the sale tables, and 25% go through the pulping machines and are reincarnated as newspapers.

The waste factor of pulping a huge percentage of your product drives the price up. The marketing bills -- to pump books which have been chosen for their subject matter and apparent marketability, rather than their quality -- are high, and getting higher. Independent bookstores have become increasingly more rare as they're forced out by discount chainstores and on-line bargain bazaars like Amazon. This leaves the chainstores in command of pricing. And in order to offer those whopping in-store discounts, their buyers demand discounts from the publisher. Ouch! Those discounts eat into every dollar, including the writer's royalty.



Today's publishing industry is like a snake devouring its own tail. It's on the last lap -- everyone knows it can't last much longer, but the committee is still out on the question of what comes next.

The future of publishing is a monstrous question -- and I've already rattled on so long, today, that I'm out of time! So I'll pick up these threads, tomorrow, right where I'm leaving them to dangle today. In Part II (!) I'll be talking about POD, ebooks, how the hell one markets books without recourse to a bookstore or a publicist (or an advertising budget!), and where Nostrakeeganus sees the industry going in the next five or ten years.

In the meantime, if you want the whole sordid tale, in detail, see this:
http://nymag.com/news/media/50279/ - "The End: The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world. By Boris Kachka Published Sep 14, 2008"

See you tomorrow.

Ciao for now,
MK

Le Tour on a footy field, and what next for gay publishing?

The Red Eyes of July are back ... blame the French for holding their bike race in the middle of the night. Do they have any idea what it's like, trying to stay awake in the bleak, cold, small hours of a winter's morning, to keep up with Le Tour? Last night was the individual time trial, so I was inspired to keep the eyes open. Tonight, we'll probably let the DVD recorder take it, since it's 'just' a flat stage (and I know, you wouldn't say 'just' if you had to ride the goddamned thing), before they get into the mountains the next day. It's sheer, unmittigated sadism. For the viewers, I mean.

In fact, viewers ought to be elligible to win awards, for their particpation in this annual trial by ordeal. The most outstanding of us ought to get colored jerseys and stuffed animals, like the podium-place finishers. It's an endurance event: 23 days in July, when you don't get enough sleep and can't seem to wake up before mid-morning. Not to mention the definite effect all this has on your bum. You KNOW you're going flat, from sitting in front of the tube. You can FEEL the flatness accumulating as the days turn into weeks. You grow accustomed to a certain numbness in the posterior ... you start to worry about deep venous whatever it is ... and as alluring as a veritable swarm of athletic young men in bright spandex might be (and it is), you start to think longingly of a rugby game. You know, the kind of thing which is over, done, FINISHED, in 80 minutes, plus halftime.

(Not that you could hold much of a bike race in 80 minutes, even if you didn't let the boys have halftime. It would be a headlong sprint between morning tea and lunch, with a maximum of maybe five or six TV commercial spots; so it wouldn't raise much money ... and, because it wouldn't be so lucrative, few of the celebrity riders would show up for it. In the end, the TV people and organizers would probably decide to use the time more productively; for instance, hold a rugby game, which can be done inside the time constraint. Not that you'd get much of a rugby game, because bike racers are way too skinny to be much use in a scrum. Good gods, can you imagine Lance Armstrong and Robbie McEwan going up against Tana Umaga and Willy Mason? It would be like a remake of King Kong, with either of those bikers in the Faye Wray part. (By halftime, they'd find Willy Mason on top of one of the lighting towers with Robbie McKewan in his hand. Unless you let Lance and Robbie keep their bikes, in which can Tana and Willy would never actually catch them.)

If none of this is making much sense, blame Le Tour for being on in the middle of the night: I'm suffering from sleep deprivation. It does disgusting things to what few brain cells survived the Kreeping Krudd. Speaking of which:

Head cold report: it's easing off and I'm back at work.

Have been writing for the 'write your novel' site today, as well as looking at a lot of gay publishing websites, trying to figure out if the industry is as slow as it seems to be, or if it's just Keegan who's out of touch. Turns out, it's a bit of both. I am out of touch, but not way out; and the industry has gone fairly flat in the last ten years. Some gay stuff is being published, but the scene is not what it was, and if you're a new, aspiring gay writer these days, things might look a bit lean. It's no wonder young writers are turning to ebooks ... the problem being that, if you give them away (as is happening frequently), you might have droves of loyal fans, but you'll never get to give up the day job.

I have a couple of links which make interesting reading:

Books Guardian Unlimited">Why don't straight people read gay books? (Well, in fact, some do: a number of MK's readers are straight ... a small number, I grant you, but they're out there. Flocking by twos and threes.)

Calling All Gay Writers... (Well, not *all* gay writers. You have to be unpublished ... and there's a geographical prerequisite in there, the intro, the lunches with agents, and what have you. Won't do you a shred of good if you're from Aukland, New Zealand.)

Gay Authors Community (Gay fiction online; register and login to read. Very cool indeed, in fact ... but those day jobs are staying put.)

Gay Ebooks, downunder. (And they're freebies, which speaks volumes. Authors -- no matter their gender or sexual preference! -- don't give their material away and then go clean people's carpets or work supermarket checkouts ... unless they have to. Hmmm.)

Anyway, take a look and you'll see what's on my mind as I begin to contribute to the new 'how to write' site. There's a disturbing, even sad element, here. And the most optimistic bottom line that I can see is that this community has to stand together, stick together, and patronize our own. Kind of 'support your local,' albeit on a global scale, via the WWW. If gay publishing is going to flourish online (as is taking place), and gay- and gay-friendly readers around the world support the trend, we'll do so well, other independent publshing enterprises will wonder how the hell it was done. We'll be able to rell them that we ARE a genre, in and of ourselves: we write, publish and read in our genre, and (here's the business end of it) we support our own group.

You have to wonder if it could be made to work.

Got to get some more work done!

If sneezing were an Olympic event --

The Headless Horseman did appear to call at this address last night, but he missed me (rats: Day III of head cold well underway). He did, however, score a pigeon. Or at least, there was a headless pigeon outside the backdoor this morning ... I have a suspicion the cat might have had something to do with it, mind you.

Very good news from the webmaster's department at DreamCraft: along with the visible work that was done to build the new Keegan OnLine site, massive amounts of invisible work were done. None will ever show, because it's all inside tags buried in key places on the page, and the whole thing is about search engine compliance. And it worked. Traffic is increasing quite rapidly, and we're pleasantly surprised by the number of 'generic searches' we're winning.

(Generic searches are where someone goes to Google or Yahoo and queries on something like 'gay books,' or 'gay thrillers.' We're right there in the middle of the first page, and grinning. The other side of the coin is where someone goes to Google and types in 'Mel Keegan' ... and obviously we've been ranked top of the first page for a long time. But it's great when new readers find you: in bookstore terms, it's like having someone browsing along a shelf and notice your novel, and -- not knowing you from a hole in the ground -- pick it up.)

Work goes slowly. The world seems to be in slo-mo, at least from my perspective, right now. The urgent need to sneeze every 17.4 seconds is coloring my whole concept of Reality. I'm supposed to be editing AQUAMARINE, and what am I doing? Looking at the middle-distance with glazed eyes, wondering if the Headless Horseman would consider calling again tonight, and this time giving the pigeon community a break. Editing the novel is going to take more functional brain cells than I seem to possess right now, so I've put the job on hold and am reading someone else's book.

CHINA MOUNTAIN ZHANG is a damned good book, by anyone's standards. I bought it when it first came out (God, is it really that long?), liked it then and like it now. I'm not sure if there's a current edition in print; I suspect not, but you can probably get it via alibris.com or similar. If you haven't read it -- do. I could have wished there were a lot more novels along the lines of this one, but real gay science fition is in extremely short supply; and a lot of what's on the list, I wrote myself, so there's limited mileage in reading them!

I wrote a feature for the new website on this topic ...

MK talks about Gay Science Fiction

...and rather than rabbit on at length here (due to the aforementioned regrettable paucity of functional cerebral tissue), I'll just zap you the link. I do know that a fair bit of gay SF is coming out in ebook form, and I need to have a look at what's on offer, and from where.

Maybe I can make myself useful, sort some of the wheat from the chaff, review what's hot (and make honorable mention of what's not, but was still a lot of fun if you were looking for pulp, or kitsch, whatever). Stay tuned. I have a suspicion that a lot of what's out there masquerading as 'gay SF' will turn out to be erotica ... not that SF can't be erotic; some of the best is. But the reader has to reach some GPS-point: is it erotic fiction with an SF element? Is it good SF with sexy bits? Is it good gay fic, with an SF twist and sexy bits? And what combination of the above does the individual reader want?

Speaking purely for myself, if I want erotica, I don't want to have to wade through rivers of prose and science backgrounding to get to it. What we used to call 'the essential f**k story' had just enough background and characterization to make it work (be it a western, or a historical, SF, whatever), and then got on and delivered the goods, because as a writer of this type of material, you KNEW what your readers were paying their buck for. Then again, if it happens that I want science fiction, then I'll certainly enjoy the sexy bits, but I don't want to have to wade through 44pp of erotica to get to the plot, because today I'm in the mood for PLOT+credible science, with a modicum of snogging (a snoggicum?) on the side.

Does that make sense to anybody else, or is it just me? (The other side to this issue is, also, how hot are the sexy bits going to be? I've been trying in recent years to tone down the spice from five red chili icons, back to three. The theory was/is that mainstream fiction is becoming more and more tolerant of gay material, gay characters, issues, situations, and a day is rapidly approaching when a series like HELLGATE might easily merge in. I'd love to see it happen.)

I realize this blog is still very new, but I wonder if it's too early to have a poll, and ask readers to vote on what they want (more spice; less spice; leave it as it is; couldn't care less) in a Keegan book. Speaking as a writer with many more stories still to tell, it would help muchly to know what readers really want. Part of the process of writing is to consistently listen to readers, (and occasionally to critics!) and try to meet everyone halfway.

On a parting note: it's bucketing down, albeit in patches. The rains came at last, and will be hanging around for a week or ten days. We had hail in the backyard yesterday ... and discovered we have a leaky window. Thank gods we got the roof fixed last month!

Ciao for now,
Sneez'an Keegan

Balanced on one foot at the crossroads...

Most folks who read my work ten and fifteen years ago must have come to the conclusion Keegan’s given it up and gone into something more lucrative and appealing to the soul ... like selling fish and chips, or vacuuming swimming pools on a professional basis. Not true. Though I admit, there have been times when it crossed my mind that I was swimming upstream against and current and was likely to drown!

It’s been ten years since GMP was taken over by Prowler, and then Prowler was promptly taken over by Millivres, and not-so-suddenly, Keegan was high and dry without a publisher. It’s been eight years since Dave and Jade at DreamCraft suggested POD manufacture, and marketing books on the Internet...

The tricky, sticky words in the previous sentence are ‘marketing books.’ In fact, you can track the sticky content to a single word. Marketing. ‘Books’ are simple enough. You write them, edit them, print and bind them, and then people buy them ... if they know where you are, and what you’re publishing!

That’s where the ‘Marketing’ part comes in, and it’s been a process of trial and error as we explored what worked, what didn’t, and what should have been brilliant, but wasn’t.
Any writer who is in the business of marketing his or her own books knows this, but every one has to go through the process for him- or herself, because all genres are different, and even inside the same genre, two books will perform differently. And yes, you tear our your hair. Sometimes you do ... almost ... quit. Then something great comes along, like a fantastic review on another website, or a letter from someone who deeply appreciates something you wrote. You keep going, and new solutions to the enduring problem do suggest themselves --
Internet marketing. Of books. Of GAY books. Of KEEGAN gay books.

This is where we are right now (mid-2008), and for myself, I’m highly optimistic. A mammoth task has already been accomplished, silently and invisibly: the whole MK OnLine website has been rebuilt from the ground up. It goes ‘up’ in a couple of weeks, accompanied by a ‘campaign’ something like Wellington at Waterloo, and what happens next will decide where DreamCraft and Keegan are headed in the future.

To me, it seems gay publishing is at a crossroads. Specifically ‘gay books’ are certainly a niche, but Keegan novels have always hovered in the vast gray zone, where the characters are gay, and some of the issues ... but the setting, the action, and the ‘bigger issues’ (you know, things like war, death, survival, justice, political reform) belong to the wider field of publishing. I imagine Keegan books have been the kind to give distributors nightmares. They’re difficult to pigeonhole, and if you can’t fit a book into niche, it has marketing problems.

But recently we’ve been seeing an increasing trend, where the publishers that actively solicit submissions (always genre, pulp, and frequently in the ebook market) have been asking specifically for what I’d term ‘genre with a twist.’ It’ll certainly be a romance, but this particular publisher is looking for ONLY romance with a supernatural storyline, and so on.
So, the years when niche marketing made a ‘crossover’ book difficult to sell are passing. And the Keegan books have always been crossovers between gay, and [X], where x = science fiction, historical, sea story, fantasy, thriller, or plain old romantic adventure. In other words, it’s always been a bear marketing Keegan. But the market is starting to swing around, and we’re in an excellent position to plug right into it.

So, where will the future take us? Depends on many factors, but I’ll tell you what the DreamCraft group and ol’ Mel would like. We’re ‘rediscovered’ by the readers who genuinely believe I’ve been selling fish and chips or vacuuming swimming pools since 1999 ... and we’re freshly ‘discovered’ by a lot of new readers to whom the name of ‘Mel Keegan’ doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot. (Something to do with a boozy actor who used to make Aussie movies twenty years ago? Or that soccer player who was the best all-rounder in Europe, even longer ago?)
Five years from now, we’d like to be at the helm of a publishing house that might just be able to give a start to new young writers. Three years from now, we’d like to have the Internet book marketing puzzle so well worked out, we can do a book about THAT, and put smiles on the faces of the armies of writers who are trying to crack this nut. One year from now, we’d like to be well on our way, with three brand-new Keegan titles in print and three more on the way, as we look forward into 2010.

Right now, I’m looking at the new website design, and also the NARC sub-site design (yep, it’s done, the whole show goes online in July), and I’m feeling not merely optimistic, not merely delighted, but also damned proud.

In fact, let me share some screenshots of the new website design with you here. You won’t see it online till July, but I want to show it around...