I know there are some authors on here. I have seen their posts and bought a few books.
I have never written before, know of no one of my friends, family or acquaintances that has and I am clueless. Since I retired, I started just, well, writing some stuff and it kept growing and growing until I have a novel-length fiction (but realistic fiction) that I think maybe has some merit…but what do I know!? I am not someone that I thought would do this. I never was interested in writing before and worked as a statistician. This is not someone who usually does these things.
Where do I go from here? SHOULD I go from here? This ‘book’ could be complete trash for all I know. The few people I let read it seemed to like it but, again, they aren’t in the field and could very well just be being ‘nice’. Is there any service that falls short of an editor that just looks at it and would say “Just stop. This is trash”. I would gladly accept this if true. It would allow me to set it aside.
Again, I am completely clueless on this and would like any advice anyone on here would like to give me.
There are people who do this for a living, evaluate and give feedback on fiction. Some are more competent than others, of course, and you’re always risking giving your book (and your money) to one of the more incompetent (or just inappropriate) people who do this for a fee. Do you want recommendations of competent readers? I have a few friends who know what they’re doing, mostly university professors of creative writing, who pick up a little cash this way, and I’m sure you can find some other names, either by recommendations here or by looking in the classified ads of magazines for writers. I’m just guessing at the current rates but if I were doing this (I’m not) I’d probably charge something like a buck per page, give or take. Is this worth your money?
It sounds as if maybe you could get an evaluation of your first few chapters, so we might not be talking about a very large investment on your part.
The answer, I think, is if I knew it wasn’t just complete trash then I think I might. However, dropping 2-3 thousand for an editor and another 1 or so for cover art when it could be garbage makes me hesitant.
not really how this works. You definitely don’t spend a cent for “cover art” (that’s the publisher’s job, way down the line) and if you spend more than a few hundred for some freelance editor’s opinion, you’re getting rooked.
If you get enough positive feedback on your novel to decide to take a next step, these days it’s simple and free to self-publish on Kindle. Though how you market it, I have no idea. Good luck!
I just put mine up on Amazon, via their CreateSpace thing (or whatever they’re calling their print-on-demand service nowadays). They have basically no standards, aside from little formatting things. This was enough for me, since I basically just wanted physical copies for myself. Suffice to say my books haven’t been promoted or advertised or anything, and I’ve only had a handful of sales over the course of years. So it really depends on what you want to get out of the whole thing.
Begbert, I think they call it ‘vanity publishing’ and I don’t really have any vanity in this. This all started because I was reading some writing stuff and someone challenged to write a short bit as a character very different from yourself. I did it. Then went back to it. Left it but it would crop up in my head about ‘how about this happens’…go back to it repeat repeat for about 2 years. The book is essentially done and now my mind has almost completely fleshed out a sequel and it has swallowed up some time that could be used for other things. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed doing it and don’t regret the time spent but I don’t want to keep sinking significant time into something that isn’t going to have value/enjoyment to other people. Is it worth keeping on or not is where I am at. I do have other activities I could devote more time to and that I also enjoy…like voluntary work helping poorer people deal with their state medical insurance issues and so forth…though I haven’t really neglected that either…I have time. I guess I just want to know so I can make a wise decision involving time/effort.
Traditionally speaking vanity publishing is where you end up with three thousand copies of your book stacked up in your garage, less the four copies that you managed to convince people to take off your hands for free. I feel that Createspace blurs the line between that and real publishing…because the effect of it is exactly the same as real publishing. Just with the world’s least picky publisher, since it costs them essentially nothing to do it.
As for whether writing a book is a waste of time, if you’re enjoying doing it it’s no more a waste of time than watching movies or reading books other people wrote. And as for getting large numbers of people to read it, I gather that promoting a book is a lot of work. If you can convince a publisher that you’re the next JK Rowling and get them to pay you for the privilege of marketing the book, more power to you, but I gather that’s not something most people manage, even if they do get it professionally published. (Er, more professional than by Amazon I mean.)
I may be a bit confused here, but Createspace is Amazon. It’s their print-on-demand/self-publishing system. (Which also will create equivalent books, if you let it.) It’s my understanding that if you do become the next JK Rowling then bookstores and libraries can order books from them like an ordinary publisher, but I don’t recall the specifics (or whether I imagined that up) since it super doesn’t apply to me.
What Createspace doesn’t do is any semblance of marketing for you, at least not for free. So it’s a little like renting a venue to throw a party in - you have to get people to take an interest all by your lonesome.
Speaking of clueless, I meant to type “will also create equivalent ebooks”. If you let it. I personally didn’t let it, since I didn’t like what it did for the formatting; I’m picky like that.
I do not think you need to worry at all about making sure your book is on Kindle/Amazon or as an e-book: whatever marketing entity is spamming and flogging your book will take care of it. (Theoretically, that could be you, if you knew exactly what you ought to do. Maybe it’s better to get people to read your book excerpt first and recommend you, and to find the right agent.)
It’s mostly called self-publishing, not vanity publishing now. There are moderately exclusive places where they will do stuff for you, but you still pay, or you can buy the cover and an editor and put it on Amazon - where you still pay. Traditional publishing pays you, but that doesn’t sound like the direction you’re interested in.
Look for a writers’ group near you. (There are branches of the California Writers Club all over the state.) You can find a critique group who will give feedback on your book. Cheaper than a beta reader (but slower) and it is easy to quit if it is not good for you. At least some of the comments will be helpful.
Having Amazon publish it for you is actually free, in the sense that there’s no cost to you. They take a cut of the sale, but so would any other publisher, and you can adjust the price up or down from the minimum they set to balance profit-to-you and affordability for the buyer. This is presuming you provide your own cover art, of course - I haven’t looked into what it would cost to get that done, since I just made my own.
There’s a site called smashwords.com.
A hundred thousand amateur authors offering their books, in a hundred different categories–mostly for free, some for 2 or 3 dollars.
(is it worth my money).