My Kickstarter campaign to fund my next novel The Big Aha is coming along well—and many thanks to my backers. With any luck we may pass my targeted goal this week. [Update: We passed the target of $7,000 on June 25, 2013.]
Like a door opening up in the heavens! A glorious tunnel in the sky to Parnassus.
Last year I figured out the mechanics of making a novel into an ebook and a print book and getting it distributed online and even in few bookstores. It’s a more complex process than I realized at first—I put most of what I learned about making ebooks into a series of 4 blog posts, “How To Make Ebooks #1 – #4”. And with some trace of irony, I combined this material and cleaned it up a bit to make an ebook called How To Make An Ebook. And making a print book with InDesign is a whole other story, but I’ll blog about that at some later time.
Anyway, the point that I want to make today is that, once you know how to make and distribute your own ebook and print books, one of the main things you’d still want to have a publisher for is to pay you an advance on the royalties for your expected sales.
But, with any luck, Kickstarter lets you sidestep this need. Given that all of my backers will get an ebook of THE BIG AHA (and in some cases an paper copy as well), I am in effect doing advance sales. So in some ways the process is very similar to getting an advance from a publisher.
My readers are in effect my publisher now—and they’re kindly paying me my advance. With no intermediaries. Even better, they’re offering me more than precise remunerations for the goods offered, they’re open-handedly and generously encouraging me to continue my work by paying extra. So there’s an element of getting a grant here too.
I was discussing some of these issues with the writer Tim Pratt last month and he used a word I like. Disintermediation. As in, “Electronic publication really calls for disintermeditation.” That is, selling your creations as directly as possible to your consumers. With fewer and fewer intermediaries.
Sketch for “A Gub On Her Bed.”
Enough biz for the moment.
I have some creatures called gubs in The Big Aha . They appeared fairly early in my novel—I wrote about them in blog post called “Gubs and Raths” in November, 2012. At that point I just viewed as insignificant pests, on a level with dogs or pet pigs or rabbits.
But now, as I’m moving into the final chapters of my novel, I’m realizing that the gubs are incredibly powerful alien beings—very nearly at the level of gods. And I’m trying to get a clearer mental image of them.
So I made a nice lively sketch as shown above, kind of funny, at least to my eyes, messy, it only took a minute or two, and now I’m trying to translate that into an oil painting.
Draft #1 of Painting for “A Gub On Her Bed.”
What’s going on here is that a spotted gub is sitting on the bed in the apartment where my woman hero Jane lives. And Jane’s husband Zad is visiting, and they’re looking with some dismay at the fairly grubby gub on Jane’s bed. The spotted gub’s name is Duffie. They want him to leave.
This is only the first draft of the painting, and, yes, I know it doesn’t look that great yet. It’ll take maybe three more sessions to finish it. The gub looks funnier in the sketch with the slack neck and kind of looking over his shoulder; I want to put more texture into the wallpaper; give the gub some little paws; Zad and Jane should look livelier; there ought to be some object in the upper right corner like maybe a mobile or possibly a tiny distant gub seen through the window. A gubbess.
“A Gub On Her Bed,” oil on canvas, June, 2013, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the image.
So okay, on June 25, 2013, I got the third, and final, version done. Having two people made too much clutter, so I cut it down to just the woman and the gub. And I put a girl gub out there in the sky, she’s green, her name is Sedusa.
I always like the idea of a painting that seems like an illustration of some unknown proverb or fable. At a metaphorical level, the gub might symbolize some kind of marriage problem.
By the way, you can get paintings of mine as rewards for the higher levels of pledging to my Kickstarter for The Big Aha . If I raise enough money, I plan to make a nice new edition of my art book, Better Worlds. And I want to do some more paintings relating to the novel.
One more shift of gears in today’s post.
An issue which one of my backers raised is the question of whether I would miss having an editor—which is one of the other things that a publisher provides.
With commercial publishing in the underfunded state that it is, an author often gets very little in the way of editorial comments anymore. My sense is that the editors are mostly focused on acquisition and on promotion, and they tend not to have much time for tweaking your book.
This said, on many books, I’ve gotten a few telling remarks that really did make a difference. But over the years, I’ve been getting less advice all the time. Possibly at this point, with the experience I have, I don’t need so much editing advice anymore—maybe having an editor is more important when you’re starting out. This said, I do know there’s a danger of an unedited author letting his or her work bloat and become fatuous.
A simple editing option for indies is to show a draft of the book manuscript to a few trusted personal friends whose judgment you trust, friends who are willing to take the time you read your manuscript. Pretty much any kind of comment can be useful. You don’t have to do everything your friends suggest, but if something confuses them or throws them off, then it’s often pretty easy to fix it. And if you feel too unsure of what you’ve done, you can hire a freelance literary editor, although here you may be getting into dangerous waters, that is, you might pay a lot for advice that’s not necessarily very useful.
Whatever! My big issue right now is to write a few more scenes about Zad, Jane and the gubs!
