From self to shelf

I have just signed a traditional publishing contract with Urbane Publications Ltd for my next book.
The Ghost Tree, the sequel to The Sleeping Warrior, is due off stone in October.
I put a lot of thought and effort into self-publishing The Sleeping Warrior but it's taken me a year to realise that I have neither the marketing skills, the time, the budget nor the experience in the publishing world to get my book out into the public domain with any great success.
Irrespective of gathering thousands of online friends on the big social media sites, it is notoriously difficult for the majority of new writers to get noticed as an individual inside Amazon's crowded halls. Even more impossible is the opportunity of securing a traditional publishing contract, even for good writers with excellent stories to tell. Despite some very successful self-published authors commandeering the top spots on Amazon's best-seller list, there is still a fair amount of snobbery and stigma attached to self-publishing that is not going away any time soon.
I feel very fortunate by managing to catch the eye of a few publishers for The Ghost Tree but decided to go with Urbane.
I met the publishing director, Matthew Smith, on Twitter. He kindly agreed to run an interview about his publishing house for my Ivy Moon Press blog and I was immediately struck by his passionate and professional approach to publishing.
Unless you sell millions of books for them, publishing houses do have a reputation for putting sales before the author. Urbane conducts its business the other way round and that's what I like about them.
Matthew's worked in the industry for a long time and uses this experience to sell his authors. He's also very active on social media, knows the market and all its quirks and and, more importantly, gets Urbane titles on the shelves.
I hope that this will be a very long and productive relationship between us.

SEEING STARS

I spoke to Lucy Catten, one of the many well-respected, committed and talented book reviewers on Goodreads, recently who told me: "I'm drawn far more to books with a mix of really high and really low ratings than those with hundreds of mediocre ones. Far better that a story sparks strong feelings! I don't give scores in my reviews either - I think they're pretty pointless." 

If that is the case, why are we authors fixated on equating the quality of our work with a quantity of stars?

I suppose it's because authors put so much time and effort into producing their very best that they expect to be rewarded with a mark of excellence. It's like being at school: with five gold stars, you're at the top of the class.

With product feedback dominating the decisions in consumer choice, public opinion has usurped the long reign of the professional literary critic. Feedback for a book comes in the form of the reviewer, which is anyone and everyone, and the majority of readers aren't interested in whether that semi-colon is in the wrong place; how many adjectives there are to a sentence; or whether the reflexive pronoun has been lexicologically murdered, they simply mark a book according to the personal experience it has given them.

There is solace for those amongst us who have received some terrible reviews of their precious works. Even the world's greatest writers have had one-star ratings for a range of reasons, from not liking the story personally to not receiving the book on time. After a quick trawl through Amazon, the following is, from least favourite to favourite, my Top 30 list of the best (or worst) one-star reviews: 

30 Emily Brontë,Wuthering Heights: “I am repelled by the absurd peregrinations of Brontë's spiteful, petty-spirited, self-absorbed characters” 
29 Paulo Coelho,The Alchemist: “Allegorical nonsense”
28 Joseph Heller,Catch-22: “... one of the most tedious, poorly-written books I've ever read.” 
27 Yann Martel, Life of Pi: “... dull pseudo-intellectual garbage.” 
26 Helen Fielding,Bridget Jones’s Diary: “For anyone concerned about the ‘dumbing-down’ of humanity, here it is in all its glory.” 
25 Irvine Welsh,Trainspotting: “I have no idea if this is a good story because I became bored and frustrated trying to translate the cockney crap.” 
24 Ralph Steadman, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream: “Nothing more than a drug-induced binge.” 
23 John Steinbeck, East of Eden: “This book was yellow and old. I did not want to touch it and threw it away.” 
22 Hubert Selby Jnr, Requiem for a Dream: “This entire book is written in ghetto/white trash dialect spelled phonetically, with minimal punctuation.” 
21 Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho: “A juvenile attempt at grossing the audience out.” 
20 Markus Zusak, The Book Thief: “What's with all the color descriptions? I felt like I was working through a box of crayons.” 
19 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: “Really boring. It's about steamboats and the ivory trade.” 
18 Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls: “You spent more time wondering what the gypsies are saying than the actual story.” 
17 George RR Martin, Game of Thrones: “There is no point to this soap opera. Everyone dies.” 
16 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude: “... tedious, pointless, and unpleasant and all the characters are creeps.”
15 Scott Donaldson, On the Road: “Three hundred pages of whining, grousing and getting loaded.” 
14 Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring: “Aside from a memorable metaphor on page one, this book is bland as a pauper's meal of yesterday's potatoes.” 
13 Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: “... if you were interested in crazy people this is the book for you.” 
12 Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast for Champions: “I'd say it was a book purposely written stupidly to appear clever.” 
11 Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: “She talks of her lady parts and its SERIOUSLY GROSS.” 
10 Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities: “Many words used are obsolete.” 
9 John Milton, Paradise Lost: “It was so far beyond me that I embarrassed myself.” 
8 Orson Scott Card, Enders Game: “... an awful lot of all male shower scenes for an author who doesn't like gay people.” 
7 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: “The creature went from hideous dumb clod to hideous Collin Firth in a matter of months via eavesdropping on some peasants.” 
6 Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange: “The made-up slang words ruined the book for me.” 

AND FOR MY VERY FAVOURITE TOP FIVE: 

5 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World: “a bit too scientific for me.” 
4 Herman Melville, Moby Dick: “Too nautical for me.”
3 Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire: “Being a vampire myself I can assure you that this is nothing at all like it really is. Anne Rice knows nothing of the world of darkness!” 
2 Stephen King, The Shining: “got ruined for me when that Friends episode told me how it ended.”
1 George Orwell, 1984: “He doesn't know a thing about the '80s. Not ONCE did he mention Def Leppard or Karma Chameleon.”

You can't win 'em all!

THIRD WAY HOUSE

Is there a middle option between conventional and self-publishing?
There's no doubt that a good book deserves a professional service but most new authors - many with works of potential excellence - will know that their precious title is littering the floors of traditional publishing houses and will never see the light of day.
More and more often, with staff and cost cuts in the publishing industry, typos and errors are creeping into professionally-published manuscripts and many companies are reluctant to fork-out a percentage of their ever-decreasing marketing budget on their authors. Some of the smaller organisations have no marketing budget at all. The burden of promotion and proofing are therefore left almost exclusively to the author.
DIY publishing has been made easy and cost-free by the likes of Amazon and Smashwords but, with so much choice on the market, books are judged by their cover. A bad cover design can let an author down as can a poorly edited manuscript.
Then there's the marketing and publicity of a book to get it seen. This, to most authors I have spoken to (conventionally and self-published), is where the real work begins. Months of endless networking, press releases and author interviews doesn't necessarily equate to sales, unless you're an established author with a strong fan base. I've also heard a lot of traditionally published authors complain that they have been forced to take responsibility for the promotion of their own works as publishing houses invest time and expense on other services and their better-established authors.
So, if a book's worth publishing and an author is prepared to put in vast amounts of time and effort, why do we shudder at the thought of paying out cash for professional services?

I know a good few traditionally published authors who are finding the DIY publishing model far more lucrative. I don't know any of them who do not pay for a professional editing service. Similarly, most of them fork out for a good cover designer. They do this to maintain the standard of excellent quality that readers expect from them and will continue to buy into. Some of those authors pay for the services of a publicist to professionally market their product.

Unscrupulous vanity publishers (and that's not a syllogistic statement) have ruined perceptions on paying for publishing. The stigma attached to vanity and the warnings against them are a good reason to stay well clear. Jonathon Clifford, on his excellent site Vanity Publishing: A Campaign for Truth and Honesty makes it very clear what a good vanity publisher will NOT do: http://vanitypublishing.info/agoodvpwillnot.htm

So what's the alternative? Is there a middle road to publishing between conventional and DIY?

I've been speaking to Matthew Smith (pictured right), director of Urbane Publications, a Kent-based company that calls itself a 'collaborative' publishing house: an organisation of professional book people who share the costs of publishing a book with the author in a mutually beneficial contract. He calls it The Third Way.

I'm not advocating their services but am curious as to the effectiveness of their delivery. Are they a brand new business model for the industry or just another vanity publisher under a different guise? If they are what they say on the tin, then this is indeed an exciting time for publishing.

Matthew Smith certainly puts up a compelling argument that his Third Way approach is the way forward. He says: '[There is a Third Way] that combines all the benefits of traditional publishing (an engaged editor, script development, knowledge, design, route to market, promotion etc) but gives the author creative and commercial engagement during every part of the process. Every aspect of the project is a shared experience with shared goals, a genuine partnership. And that includes the sharing of the revenue, because every author deserves a fair return on their words.'

If you're interested in learning more, pop over to my Ivy Moon Press site and decide for yourself.