Fans

Brandon Sanderson created quite a stir with his recent announcement of extra novels he wrote during the pandemic. He had the extra time because he wasn’t doing his normal speaking engagements and fan meetings. He was able to produce five novels beyond his normal output. So he and his team put together a Kickstarter drive to publish four of them and raised over twenty million dollars in the first three days. Now he’s nearing thirty-five million dollars (with time left to go).

Thirty-five million.

Wow.

I also wrote obsessively during the pandemic. I wrote a time travel novel in March through July of 2020, followed by a pandemic romance in November of that year. I also wrote a sequel to my time travel novel in July and August of 2021, then three more books in the same series from November 2021 through February 2022. Six novels in two years. I have no plans to use Kickstarter to raise money for their editing and publication. You must have fans for that.

Got few fans.

Bummer.

So, since 2021 was the year I finally published something (Under Shōko’s Bed), 2022 is going to be the year I finally get some fans. They’ve got some good stories coming.

Editing: Neyuki II

My editor, Fran Lebowitz, got the manuscript of Neyuki back to me a few weeks ago. It was a long time coming, but she gave me great feedback, including her overarching reaction: “I really loved the book.” I can satisfy most of her comments with simple revisions, but there are a couple of things that are more challenging to fix.

Fran would like to see the characters before the catastrophe that makes their lives spiral out of control. I had originally started with the momentous event, thinking that would be an effective hook. Based on her comment, I’m trying to write a whole new opening chapter. I am woefully dissatisfied, though, with the new beginning. Bucolic life in rural Japan does not capture the imagination and refuse to let go. It doesn’t turn pages. So day after day I peck away at ideas that may show the protagonist’s pleasant life in a way that can also hint at the coming conflict and keep readers going.

The longer term challenge for the novel is that it deals with sexual deviance and violence. Those are not the story’s principal themes, and the book condemns the characters who do those things, but they are integral to the plot. I know I risk triggering terrible thoughts, emotions, and memories for some, particularly survivors of sexual abuse. Some will say we should avoid such topics, that whatever worth the writing may have, it’s not important enough to overcome its degrading nature. Some worry about copycats. Those fears are not lost on me. But I know such deviance exists, I feel it’s good to denounce it, and I think Neyuki is a story worth telling. Yet I suspect no North American publisher will touch it. I could try to find a publisher in another country (the UK, for example), or I could publish it myself. Over time, though, the topic may become even less tolerable and the novel might forever stain me in some readers’ eyes. Even so, I’d like to find readers who will be moved by the story.

Whatever I decide, I hope to have a revised version of the novel completed this summer. It would be wonderful to publish it before the winter snows hit Japan.

Finding comparable titles

If your novel can get a publisher’s attention, they will likely expect a list of comparable titles. I have been searching on my own and asking others who have read Under Shōko’s Bed for suggestions. I have yet to find any that are directly comparable in many respects, although there are some that are like Under Shōko’s Bed in one way or another. It is good for the novel to be unique. It may be harder to sell, though, when it cannot be pigeonholed, making its readership and profitability less predictable.

Spoiler alert! If you read the next paragraph, you may learn too much about the novel to most fully enjoy reading it.

Under Shōko’s Bed is a story of love and loss, and has strong elements of psychological pain. David suffers from depression and Shōko from post-traumatic stress disorder, and their healing influence on each other is a key part of their cross-cultural love story. Another important element of their recovery is Shōko leading David back to his true vocation, painting, something they shared when they loved each other many years before, but which David drifted away from in his life with his wife, Kelly. Unbeknownst to David and Shōko, however, they are part of a love triangle, as Kelly has not abandoned him as he thinks, but has only gone home to America. David, who has been too sick to leave the refuge of Shōko’s bedroom, has told no one where he is, and soon the police begin searching for him, and Kelly, now lost in worry, returns to Japan. It all comes to a head when Shōko’s parents suddenly discover David. He now has to make the impossible choice between the love he thought he had lost and the love he has just rekindled. Shōko must decide whether to fight for the man she loves or do her duty and step aside. Kelly too is faced with the awful choice of how to deal with David’s newfound love.

Under Shōko’s Bed is cross-cultural contemporary psychological literary fiction with mature characters set in Japan. Is that a category on Amazon?

The feedback I have gotten so far on Under Shōko’s Bed has led me to The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman as one of the most comparable titles, since it has much the same sense of impending heartache. Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami, a tranquil Japanese love story in a confined setting, is another. Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and Nicolas Sparks’s The Notebook, stories of rekindling lost love, are two more. When We Collided by Emery Lord has broadly similar psychological themes, although it is about teens. I also feel some kinship with authors such as Barry Lancet, Micheal Pronko, and David Peace who have lived for an extended period in Japan and used Japan as a setting for novels (although they write in completely different genres from Under Shōko’s Bed).

Still, I have found no novel comparable to Under Shōko’s Bed in more than one or two aspects. My search continues.

The decision to self-publish

The decision to self-publish was not an easy one.  The difficulty, though, was not the choice of self-publishing versus traditional publishing.  That decision requires an author to have a publishing company that is expressing interest.  My decision was the much more common problem of what level of resources to sink into the self-publishing venture.  On a shoestring budget, I could do all my own editing, create my own cover art, and post the ebook for sale on Amazon.  I could sell it to family and friends and maybe cover the cost of the software used to make the ebook (Scrivener, blog post), which is not very expensive ($38.25 academic price, since I work at a university). 

The immediate alternative, not publishing at all and just writing because I enjoy it, I finally rejected.  That decision came during a seminar I attended in January 2018 by Hackerfarm and Zoot Publishing where I got a very useful introduction to the publishing industry.  I had always wished I could find a traditional publisher, because then I could just write and let the publisher take care of selling the books.  What I learned at the seminar, though, and what many online have also said, is that these days the traditional publishing houses expect authors to do much of their own marketing.  So I thought if the publisher isn’t going to handle all the marketing of my book, then why not just do it myself?  After all, on a shoestring budget, what do I have to lose?

I began to think beyond the thinnest shoestring when I contemplated creating a website.  The two platforms most often recommended are WordPress and Squarespace.  My impression is that a WordPress website can be put together less expensively, but the platform can be more difficult to work with for anything beyond a basic blog.  I do not know whether I will actually sell anything from my website, but I like Squarespace’s e-commerce capabilities.  I also want the ability to do pop-ups, etc.  That requires Squarespace's Business plan, cheaper if you buy it by the year, $216.  I certainly don’t have unlimited friends, but a few dollars of royalties each from those who might actually buy could cover the cost of the website for a year.

Then I began looking at more self-publishing advice on the Internet.  For example, one especially helpful site is The Creative Penn.  This site and many others say how important the cover art is for a book, either physical or digital.  My first novel, Under Shōko’s Bed, is about an artist and I think one of the things sketched in pastels in the novel would be a great starting point for a cover.  Unfortunately, inexpensive covers are based on stock images, and the sketch by my artist protagonist is nothing like a stock image.  That means finding a real illustrator, and that will likely cost much more.  And with that decision, my friends are no longer going to cover my costs.  Either the book has to find other readers, or I have to spend money just for the joy of knowing I made something as well as I could.

If I am going to sell some hundreds of books, though, then what about editing?  That is the other thing that Joanna Penn and others say is well worth the investment.  Writers are always gushing over their editors.  Do I need a professional edit of my novel?  I have a Ph.D. from a great university, but it’s in a business field, not language or literature, so while my editing skills should be above average, I don’t know that I am good enough all by myself for a major novel.  My wife, who has also served as an editor on Under Shōko’s Bed, has a masters degree, but it’s in engineering.  She even works part-time as an editor!  But she does native English edits of papers written by non-native English speakers.  (Honest to goodness, what she does with these manuscripts is nothing short of amazing.  Her ability to understand and fix their broken English, making it concise and clear—it’s like watching a psychic channel the author’s innermost thoughts.)  But that is academic writing, not novels.  And in fiction, I am a rookie author.  I thought the first draft of Under Shōko’s Bed was great.  It wasn’t.  I think the seventh draft, though, is quite good.  But having an editor go through my work, someone with experience editing best-sellers, would be both a wonderful learning experience and could possibly turn my very good novel into one with real literary quality.  But whether it can be raised to that level or not, trying is going to cost between $1000 and $2000 (for a 110,000-word novel, freelance editor found on Reedsy, but I will talk about that more in a future post).  From what I have seen online, that is not at the high end in terms of expense.

On top of that, I would like to create an audio book of the novel.  I would like to do the reading myself, since I have been told I have a voice that would be good for that.  But that’s not the kind of recording you can do for free with GarageBand on your Mac.  It requires much higher quality sound with actual recording studio acoustics.  I don’t know the exact price yet, but with the number of hours required, that’s going to cost hundreds, even with extreme pricing competition between recording studios, since Tokyo has a glut.

An ebook, a physical book for a print-on-demand service, and an audio book will require three separate ISBN codes.  ISBNs are much cheaper if you buy them in bulk.  For example, one costs $125, while 1000 cost only $1000.  I can buy 100 for $5.75 a piece.  Since Under Shōko’s Bed is not my only novel, I might as well save money in the long run and buy 100.  Then there is copyright registration, which looks like it will cost only $55.

I have not even thought seriously enough at this point to guess what marketing costs will be.

Total all of this up, and if I manage to sell a book in one of the three formats (digital, paper, audio) to 100 friends and family, I will lose so much money that it will be akin to giving each of them the book with a $50 bill tucked inside as a bookmark.  I am well on my way to becoming a cautionary tale!

At the same time, though, I will have produced something of which I am proud.  And my second novel will benefit from the learning of my first, and some of the costs are fixed, so that the second novel’s costs might be a wee bit lower (although the biggest costs are editing, cover art, and audio studio time, which are not at all fixed).  I hope that the biggest difference between the unconventional love story Under Shōko’s Bed and the thriller Neyuki, my second novel, is that some of those who read Under Shōko’s Bed will like it enough to buy Neyuki.  If I can keep producing the stories that flow out of my slightly twisted mind, and keep readers entertained with them, I may eventually have a large enough following that my children won’t have to decide whether they are willing to pump money into the website, etc. to keep things going.  Royalties that cover my expenses, that’s my long-term goal.  And if someday years from now I finally break even on all the cumulative expenses, then I can sit back with a smile on my face and know that I still could have done better financially by spending my retirement working at McDonald’s.

In the end, it’s for the writing, not the sales.  It’s for the pride in a story well told, not the profit.

Although a little external validation would feel nice; better than an Egg McMuffin, certainly.