Pastime With Books: Michael J. Bowler – What makes a good book cover? @BradleyWallaceM

Self-publishing vs. traditional publishing

by Michael J Bowler

Self-publishing or traditional publisher – which is better for you? That’s a question I’ve been asked and have asked myself, and since I’ve done both I thought I’d share my experiences. My first two books, A Boy and His Dragon and A Matter of Time, were self-published, but by different companies. My latest book, Children of the Knight, was picked up and released by a “real” publisher, Harmony Ink Press.

With A Boy and His Dragon, which I had initially written years ago and which failed to interest a “real” publisher, I decided to go with Amazon’s Createspace to finally release it in 2011. Createspace is relatively inexpensive to use, especially if, like me, you can create your own cover art. That in itself can run you some money unless you take all the photos yourself, but if you do and own those photos, programs like Photoshop make creating the cover fun and easy. If not, there are tons of stock photos sites you can go to for images. Createspace will give you the template for your cover that will fit your eventual book size (if you want a paperback release.) Obviously, eBooks are much simpler to format. Again, Createspace makes that process rather painless.

My main problem with formatting Dragon was Microsoft Word, which always seems to have a mind of its own (and the mind of a psychopath, at that. Ha!) Createspace gave me a template to download for my book size that would double-side the pages, etc, and all I had to do was cut and paste my Word document into that template. Except, it didn’t work. Word would change fonts and font sizes all through the entire book and I eventually had to copy-paste the manuscript one chapter at a time and check over each chapter for Word changes that I didn’t want. Very annoying and time consuming. However, once I had it right the finished product looked beautiful and very professional. Being an Amazon company, the book was made available in Kindle format, but not Nook (if that is of concern to anyone.) The paperback version is available on the Barnes and Noble website, however.

I decided for A Matter of Time (which I wanted released by April of 2012 to coincide with the 100^th anniversary of Titanic’s sinking) to go with a “package deal” from Outskirts press, which I’d read about and which seemed good for a number of reasons. As I was working a lot and didn’t have as much available free time, this option fit my schedule because they pretty much did everything for me. I designed my own cover and uploaded it, but they formatted the book and got everything set and converted it to epub and mobi formats and prepared the paperback from the bottom up.

I didn’t notice at the time that, I suppose as a way to compress the number of pages, they removed all my transitions and ran those paragraphs together, which some readers complained about because it made the flow of the story confusing, especially if the scene shifted from one time period to another. I recommend to every writer, no matter how you publish, to put several non-letters or numeric characters (like ***) in between important transitions – don’t just leave extra space. Otherwise, you might find yours all run together, too. Overall, however, the finished product looked good. What wasn’t good were their marketing services (which cost extra, of course.) I wouldn’t recommend any of these because you’d likely get more results doing all the marketing yourself and you can save money in the process.

My newest book, Children of the Knight, was released by a real YA publisher, Harmony Ink Press, and it’s been an amazingly positive and joyful experience. These people have been fantastic and creative and incredibly helpful all along the way, from the executive director to the art department to the cover artist to the editors and I can’t say enough good things about the company or the people. I happened to find them through another writer on Goodreads. I read his book and thought it outstanding. I reviewed the book and then he and I got to chatting on Goodreads about his experience with Harmony Ink. He said they were amazing to work with so I checked out their requirements for YA submissions and my manuscript seemed to fit those requirements, so I submitted it. The rest is, as they say, history.

You can make more money self-publishing because all the royalties come back to you since there is no “publisher” that needs to make its money back. In that regard, Createspace is the cheapest way to go for you as an author as you lay out the least amount of money up front. The value of a real publisher, at least in the case of Harmony Ink, is not only did I not spend any of my own money but they actually paid me an advance! Sure, I get no royalties until the amount of the advance has been exceeded, but it’s still cool to know that someone thinks your work is good enough to pay you money (which means they have confidence it will earn them money.) Again, the people at Harmony Ink were so amazing and affirming I may be spoiled to find other publishers aren’t like them. Still, there are some smaller publishing houses like this one that will read books not submitted by an agent, so I recommend checking them out.

So here’s the bottom line, even with Harmony Ink: most of the promotion is up to you. A real publisher like Harmony Ink generally has more access to media outlets and can have your name on a list of “new books,” but I’ve found that unless your book is noted for being controversial or otherwise worthy of notice, it’s just another title. As the author, on all of these books it’s been me generating most of the reviews and pushing the books on Facebook, Twitter, by email and on Goodreads. Goodreads, which put me onto Harmony Ink, is a great place to interact with other authors and most of us are willing to let our brains be picked for insights or experience. There are also many subgroups for virtually every genre and subgenre out there, and you can promote your work there. I haven’t seen tangible results yet from Goodreads, but time will tell. It appears a lot of people may add your book too their “wants to read” shelf, but never actually buy it. Offering free copies in exchange for reviews is a good way for people to review your book and share those reviews with potential readers.

Well, that’s it. My publishing journey so far. If you’d prefer a “real” publisher and don’t mind smaller royalties, see if your specific book meets the submission requirements for small publishing houses that don’t expect you to pay anything. If you want complete control and all the returns, I’d say go with Createspace and avoid the vanity publishers – they may cost you more than you’ll ever get back.