Don't blame Smashwords or Paypal: The frontier moved for indie authors, it's time to move with it

As this post and many others currently mushrooming on the web are commentating, indie ebook distributor Smashwords has asked authors of certain kinds of erotica to remove their content in order to satisfy an ultimatum from Paypal that such content be removed or the payment processing facility be withdrawn.

Now argument is raging on all kinds of fronts. Some have to do with US consitution, on which I'm not going to offer comment. Thankfully, very little debate has focussed on the type of material under discussion - that doesn't seem, to me, to be the point.

The two points that seem to me to be most pertinent (others will have different opinions) are these:
- what do we think of Paypal makin this request?

- what kind of organisation does Smashwords want to be?

To take the latter first, Mark Coker, an inveterate champion of indie publishing, has regularly portrayed Smashwords as a champion of all things indie. It is this that I think has so many authors angry. I won't harp on too much about this, but much confusion comes from what we mean by "indie", as I'm always saying. The more the indie book world looks like the regular book world (and as more people self-publish the more it *does*) the more we should expect indie champions to behave like people in the mainstream. Erotica authors were amonst the earliest adopters of epublishing - they were indie frontierspeople, and I think they still share a pioneering view of what indie means (as I tend to), hence they feel sold down the river first and foremost because what they thought of as a safe haven for boundary pushers has been colonised by the "safe" making it no longer safe for them. As it were.

I'm not saying Mark Coker *should* be one thing or the other, but this decision has a "needs of the many..." feel to it. It is a move mainstream, so those who enjoyed the pioneeringness of smashwords will move out, and will do so feeling regret that things have changed. Though I hope they won't feel it for long - regret at change is a very conservative tendency and I would expect them to wipe the tears and not find but create something new. The problem comes with the commercial aspect. And that's where I think we're seeing a fundamental crisi of identity for the frontiers-type indie - is what you do about the art, integrity, and pushing boundaries, or is it about the bottom line? I have no problem with people who make either choice, but I think authors have hitherto had the possibility of prevaricating. Now they don't. That's uncomfortable, but maybe it's also a good mind focusser.

To get to Paypal. I think their decision is heinous. But bon this point the discussion has been less balanced. And I can't help feeling a lot of people are finding themselves in a liberal conundrum. I see a lot of people saying that as just "processors" or "bankers" Paypal shouldn't be interested in content.

To those people, I would like to say - rewind a moment. One of the great consumer movements of recent years has driven the rise of "ethical" or "green" banking. Whether it's planet-raping gas companies, those whose accounts are tainted by blood diamonds, or those charging interest on sweat-shop produced profit, banks are being forced to offer commercial products that steer clear. Now it's true that I have no interest in a bank that steers clear of xyz erotica. But I am very happy to see an account that won't place my savings (or wouldn't if I had any) anywhere near sweat shops or blood diamonds. And I don't see that I can have one without allowing the other. So, like out of town supermarkets and organic produce, I would urge those who really care to vote with their feet and with their voices, but not to argue that Paypal shouldn't do what it's doing without accepting the consequences.

In short, this is a wake-up call to indie authors that things have changed and maybe we can't choose to have a foot in the mainstream and the pioneering camps any more and it's time to face those difficult choices. And then get on and do - because that's what we're good at - actio. Not reaction, but creating something new.

Hold a Self-Publisher to Account: Month 3

Stats:

Downloads
smashwords: 222

Scribd: 6

total: 228 (forecast 200)

Sales
Lulu direct: 2

Bookshop: 2

Me direct:

My copies from Lulu

Total: 4 (forecast 5)

Events
It was a very quiet month as I predicted - not much publicity for my own book because I was concentrating so much on Free-e-day and the new Year Zero books. Significant events were:

4th November - Nylon Mag list Year Zero as their site of the day (a spike of around 300 extra hits to the Year Zero site on the day, that sustained over a substantial period)

4th November - Penny Goring's "Temporary Passport" is discovered on the Year Zero site and will be made into a film

6th review of Songs on Sulci Collective blog

7th - interview with a local journalist

8th flyers for Songs on display at a college alumni event celebrating 20th anniversary of fall of Berlin Wall

9th Berlin wall anniversary. I tweet five or six times, and there is a spike of 200 extra views on smashwords

20th Songs wins the Litchat #litpitch comp on twitter

28th my article on social media appears in issue one of literary ezine Words with Jam

29th SKIN BOOK featured on the Writer's Muse site

Analysis
The downloads were up on expectation - analysis of the daily chart shows this is entirely down to the Berlin Wall anniversary. Other than that I note with interest not a single sale or a download blip as a result of the flyers (although, of course, the 9th November blip may be a result of this and not twitter, but the volume of retweets suggests otherwise). This is significant as it emphasises the importance of a personal presence at these events and selling on the spot rather than through flyer.

In the build up to Free-e-day there was a surge of interest in the Year Zero site and the Free-e-day site, but these did not convert to personal downloads - the results of Free-e-day itself will go in December.

Forecast
I anticipate a busier month but a disappointing one for sales. My personal attention will be focused on the new Year Zero anthology and forthcoming tour for it as well as selling chapbooks of SKIN BOOK. Sales of Songs will depend on whether family buy copies for Christmas. Forecast: 5 - through bookshops as I start to do more instore in preparation for getting the new Year Zero books into shops. I may be able to do further live readings before Christmas enabling on site sales.

I anticipate downloads to be back to 300 after Free-e-day and because I will be focusing on marketing the Year Zero books as a package before Christmas, sending press releases and focusing on magazine forums. Songs will also feature on the Writers' Muse website. There will be a mention of Year Zero in Writers' Forum.

I anticipate a significant upturn in sales in late January as I get Amazon listed - I will finally this week get a Lulu ISBN, a decision not taken lightly but financially necessitated.

NOTES: SMASHWORDS will not guarantee delivery of timely figures for Barnes & Noble downloads. Mark Coker is aware of this column and the fact that I am calling them out over this (and apologising to my readers for any resultatnt confusion), and has, helpfully, agreed to ensure 1. I get figures eventually and 2. that smashwords will work to inmprove delivery of figures. I am as ever grateful to Mark. He is also aware I will call smashwords ut ina big way if they fail to deliver on this. AMAZON figures will not necessarily be timely. I will also call them out when necessity dictates. Unlike Smashwords I doubt they will care

Into Print

OK, this post is basically a plug. BUY MY BOOK, Songs From the Other Side of the Wall.

The day the Berlin Wall came down, Jennifer returned to England, leaving her week-old daughter, Szandi, to grow up on a Hungarian vineyard with 300 years of history. Now 18, Szandi is part of Budapest’s cosmopolitan art scene, sharing a flat and a bohemian lifestyle with her lover and fellow sculptress, Yang. She has finally found her place in the world. Then a letter arrives that threatens everything, and forces her to choose once and for all: between the past and the present; between East and West; between her family and her lover.

Songs from the Other Side of the Wall is a coming of age story that inhabits anti-capitalist chatrooms and ancient wine cellars, seedy bars and dreaming spires; and takes us on a remarkable journey across Europe and cyberspace in the company of rock stars and dropouts, diaries that appear from nowhere, a telepathic fashion mogul, and the talking statue of a bull.

There, that's the pluggy bit. Now I'll try and make the rest of the post as helpful as I can for a plug asking you to BUY MY BOOK.

So I’m going to offer a little bit of an insight about what I did to get Songs From the Other Side of the Wall to print (in the widest possible sense. You can also download it to you Kindergarten or Eyeball or any other kind of device you may have). It’s strictly technical stuff as practical advice. I’m always talking about marketing and abstract stuff, so this is a pure hands on of what I did, where I went, and what I thought of it.

First, the electronica. The book has been available as a simple pdf on my website for a little while, and remains so, but this week I made it available for all sorts of e-formats on the Smashwords website . You can download the book as a pdf, as rich text, or in special formats for Kindle, Sony e-reader, and through Stanza, the app used for iPhones. It took me about half an hour to get the Word document ready for this. There’s a Smashwords Style Guide you can download for free that tells you exactly what to do, but it basically involves removing tabs and similar formatting. Then you upload the document, and it takes about an hour for it to become available on the site.

You can set the price at any level. The most commonly downloaded books are, of course, the free ones. I’ve deliberately gone for the “set your own price” option, although I’ll probably experiment with several different variations and see what gets most downloads. The advantage is that if someone wants to pay they can (I want people to read it, and I want price not to be a barrier, but I really WOULD like to be paid :-) so how about downloading it for free, and if you read it and like it, downloading it again and paying?), and you don’t have to give out details of how to get to your Paypal. But no one has to. This disadvantage is that although most people will download your book for free, it doesn’t show up in the free downloads search. Next week I’ll offer it for free for a few days and see how much difference it makes.

The only issue I have with the Smashwords site is the classification of the book. You have to either declare it universally suitable, or over 18 which makes a book like mine (it isn’t young adult, but I imagine a lot of YA books would have the same problem), that deals with adult themes but would suit a teenage readership, awkward to classify.

The paperback is printed through Lulu. If I explained why I chose Lulu I’d be here all day, so I will just outline my experience after I made the choice. Getting your book ready for printing involves two main steps: preparing the inside, and preparing the cover. The inside can be uploaded as a pdf or converted from your own Word document. I could not, whatever I did, get the site to accept my pdf, because of non-embedded fonts (my pdf maker, Primo, doesn’t allow me to embed fonts after production, and seems to unembed those I embed in Word). I had several problems with Word as well, again because of unembedded fonts (the site insisted I’d used Helvetica somewhere, which I know I didn’t – strictly Garamond everywhere except for the name and title headers, which were Verdana. It turned out to be a result of using insert symbol for diacritic marks in Romanian names). But this was eventually remediable by discovering how to embed fonts (through the MS button, and “Word options” at the bottom of the window, clicking “save” and then checking the “embed all fonts” box).

If you do run into problems, there are plenty of onsite forums to help, and Lulu help-bots frequently come along and answer your questions.

The cover was slightly easier because my designer, Sarah E Melville did the hard work. You can either do an all in one cover like mine, or use Lulu’s wizard to do it in three parts, but you need to be very careful that the size of your file (the all-in-one has to be a pdf; the wizard will take jpegs) pic is exactly right (the site does give you very clear instructions on spine size, based on the number of pages in your book). Be warned when using the wizard – the picture you see is NOT what you get – they will crop the file based on its size even though it looks like it’s been shrunk to fit.

Anyway, after one mishap with the cover when I used the wizard, now that I’ve got the all in one, I have to say I’m seriously impressed how accurate the spine printing is, and how good the inside of the book is. I am also very impressed by the speed of service – from uploading the file through two proof copies to being totally happy took two weeks.

You can either leave the book just for sale on Lulu, or buy a package of ISBNs and admin that will get you listed on Amazon et al. I opted for a package called “published by you” which means the book doesn’t come festooned with Lulu logos, which isn’t suitable given that it’s being released through the Year Zero Writers collective. I must say I haven’t been as impressed by this add-on as by the basic service – I was given a maximum time for getting the ISBNs of 14 working days, and it’s now been 16. It will be worth it for the benefits of being on Amazon – the main one of which is getting cross-linked to similar but more famous books.

Finally, the pricing. I was always told self-published books were too expensive for the public. Songs From the Other Side of the Wall is £7.98, a whole penny cheaper than a standard paperback, and I make the same as I would had I been published in the mainstream.

I realise I’ve rambled too much, but I will happily answer any questions in the comments section. Oh, and BUY MY BOOK :-)