 We're very excited to present this first self-publishing workshop here at Bear Pond Books. I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Samantha. I'm the new Events Marketing Coordinator here at Bear Pond Books. It's nice to see some familiar faces, some new faces as well. Thanks for coming. We're doing this event tonight in collaboration with IngramSpark, IPNE, and Galaxy Bookshop in Cardwick. We decided to pair up and bring these professionals to the communities here in Montpelier and in Hardwick because we have such a great writing community here and we can see by our crowd tonight we're at a sold out crowd that everybody's enthusiastic. We host many events here at Bear Pond Books throughout the year, usually there on Tuesday evenings. We have events ranging from author readings and book signings to discussions and workshops and even film screenings. Our next event will be on Saturday. It's April 8th and it's a girl rising film discussion and book discussion with author Tanya Lee Stone. She wrote a companion book to the documentary Girl Rising and we're offering special ticket prices for that for caregivers and parents with their teens or tweens. But you don't have to be a teen or tween to enjoy the documentary and the book. And that'll be April 8th. We're showing it at the Savoy. You can get tickets here at Bear Pond or online at bearpondbooks.com. We also have a full lineup of poetry events happening in April. April is National Poetry Month and we're fortunate to have Poem City. So look for events in their program, look for it online, follow us on Facebook and Twitter at Bear Pond Books and you'll see those events. Let me tell you a little bit about the format for tonight's event. We have our five panelists here. They will each speak for about five minutes and they'll introduce themselves and they'll speak about their services or their experiences and how they can help you have the best success in self-publishing. After the panelists speak, we will open it up for questions from you. So I ask that you hold all your questions until that time after they're all finished with their speaking. Let me point out our bathroom if you need to use it. The back of the store, which is to my right and to the right of that corner. The back door will be our exit tonight. That's the door that remains open. Our front door is closed for the evening. I'd like to remind you to turn off or mute your cell phones and I'd also like to point out that we have refreshments, juice and cookies at that table to my right. I'd really like to thank Orca Media. They're here filming tonight. Let me rewind. I'd like to remind you. It was a good time to happen. I'd also like to thank our panelists for being here tonight. We have Charlotte Pierce. She's joining us from Boston where she runs Pierce Press and she, quote, helps authors' dreams come true. So we look for big things from Charlotte today. We also have Stacey Williams. She's our New England rep from Ingram Publishing Services and Ingram is a company that's been helping publishers with distribution for over 50 years. We have Roberta Harreld. She's our local success story and author of two self-published books, Heron Island and Murdered Sleep. They're both available here tonight to purchase at the front counter here at Bear Pond Books. And I'd like to point out that Murdered Sleep was the 2015 winner of genre fiction for IP&E's annual book award. We have Susannah Noelle. She is a Montpelier-based copy editor who works with independent authors and the Big Five publishers. Who are the Big Five publishers? Two of them are my clients. Penguin Random House and McMellan. So they merge and then it's hard to keep up. It's really just one. Anyway, two of them are my clients. And we have Mark Estrin. He's here from Burlington, Vermont tonight. He is the co-founding editor of Fomite Press, a post-capitalist operation that prides itself on publishing high-level literary work. We're extremely pleased to present this panel of experts here for the first self-publishing workshop. And with that, I'd like to begin and we will start with Charlotte. Oh, okay. Well, I'm Charlotte Pierce and I started my company Pierce Press after moving to Boston from New York in the 2000s. 1989. And I did a lot of freelance work until recently and I've gotten more into book publishing. So we do a more of a collaborative type of publishing. So we work with the authors and is more of a business partner. So we share expenses and revenues. And that's on the upswing. I've been acquiring books like Matt and I've been trying to keep on top of everything. Mostly use subcontractors. Like I hire editors and designers and I don't do all that stuff myself. We'll talk a little bit more about that. And then I've been involved with IP&E or IPNI, as we call it, for about 10 years. It started in 2007. I volunteered at the Mass Library Association Conference. And that's kind of what I was going to focus on tonight. I mean, you can feel free to ask me anything else. But I would highly recommend joining IPNI or another organization like it. There are a lot of state organizations. There's a lot of writer's groups. You probably all, who's in a writer's group? Yeah, those are great. We focus on the process of publishing, the business of publishing. And our motto is make better books and sell more of them. And to do that, we have regional groups. We have online, like our community media. We have Ask the Experts show. We have Face the Book TV. And these are online streaming shows where you can go YouTube and look it up and get a lot of information. We have really good people like Stacy and people from Ingram and the Independent Book Publishers Association, which used to be Publishers Marketing Association. But now it's our, we're a regional affiliate of them. And they're kind of like IPNI on a national scale. And their CEO speaks at our conference. We have an annual conference. And I think, you know, it just empowers independent authors who try not to call ourselves self-publishers because with the opening of the gates of people being able to self-publish or publish their own books, a lot of crap has come out along with that. And you, there's a stigma. If you walk into a bookstore, don't say I'm a self-published author. You know, say I'm independently published. Or get a business name. You know, get a business name. Get a Pierce Press, you know, whatever. Bear Pond Books, you know, be a business. One of our, one of my favorite speakers at our conference is David Godin, who's a fine publisher. And you probably have some of his books here, maybe. Just really great art, artistic and literary books. And he says, if you don't take the time to, if you don't take the, you focus on being business-like about and the quality of your books, improve the quality of your books, then you're privishing, you're not publishing. So I thought, that stuck with me, you know. Sure, you know, write your own stuff, print it on your dot matrix printer or whatever. But if you're going to get it out to the world and publish it to make it public, then get a professional editor, a proofreader who should be a different person, and a designer, a cover designer. Publicity, you can sometimes do yourself, but not everybody is good at it. So these are the things that make a book that will be on those shelves. So how am I doing for time? Formant. Formant? Formant is more? One minute left. No. So with, with Tiffany, you have access to people who are small and medium-sized publishers. We have publishers who are, have 40, 60, 80 books on their list. We have a lot of vendors, which we call vendor members are editors, designers, and people who are not publishers or authors, but do the work that you'll need to have done to get your book in a professional-looking condition. And we have a lot of independent authors, probably maybe 60%, but through the, through the in-person events that we have and our online resources and live streaming shows, you can get to know a lot of people. And our philosophy is very much collaboration and if you call me and say, I don't know where to find a designer, help me. I'll find you one. I'll find you 10. And they'll be good. They'll be proven good people. So my business card is up here. Please call me anytime. And you also get a half-priced membership by coming tonight. So how's that? Thank you. Hi. I'm starting my time worse. My name's Stacy. I was a bookseller for about 10 years before I stepped into the publishing world. A large bookstore in Milwaukee where I handled a lot of author events. Everyone from random houses sent somebody who's won a bunch of awards and there's 600 people in the audience and also our local authors who would come in and say, I love you guys. Will you please carry my book? I have a book now. And so managing those different relationships, especially the ones where you know the person who's walked in your door and you really want to help them and you want to encourage them. But they've just printed the books themselves and it's really hard for you to be able to get it on your shelf and you're trying to explain to them what consignment means and what kind of limited space you have and you want to help them very much. But the system isn't really set up for that. And so now that I work for a company that offers not just sales and distribution but an actual platform to help authors like those people I knew when I was a bookseller and wanted to help, I get really excited about the existence of something like this because IngramSpark is essentially a print on demand platform that allows you to not only find stock for yourself in your basement and your friends and family and to sell on your website, but it also allows you to show up at Bear Pond and say, hey, you know how you guys know that I've been working on this book for five years? Well, I've published it now and I would love it if you guys could carry it. And rather than have you show up with 10 copies of your book and have to sign a contract at agreement of who gets how much, you can give them the information. They can contact us and then order it for their shelves and then every time they run out order more without having to actually bother you with your busyness that you are spending all of your time trying to talk to other bookstores or selling your book online or talking to friends and family or trying to set up your own events or doing the business of being an author. And so it takes a little bit of effort off of your plate in terms of actually getting your books into people's hands. You know, you still have to do perhaps your own work in terms of your publicity and marketing and outreach, but the availability suddenly becomes much more broad. For example, a friend of mine has a mutual friend of his who worked on a cruise ship for many years and he recently wrote a memoir. He's been working on this for 10 years. He wrote this memoir about what it means to work for the cruise industry. And he chose a specific print-on-demand platform. He printed up copies of the books and he has a bunch of them in his basement. And now he wants to know how his friends in Australia and how the cruise ships that have gift shops can possibly carry the book. And they can't because he has to try to find a way to ship them copies of his book and how to create a business relationship with each individual organization, each individual, you know, bookstore or gift store. And, you know, try to sell your book in a store in Australia where somebody actually wants to buy it and carry it. And it's kind of difficult to do. So IngramSpark is a really, really simple platform that allows you to upload your already finished book. Perhaps you've partnered with IPNE, you've been in your Writers Group, you've got it proofread, you've, you know, solicited the help of an editor, you've solicited the help of a friend who's a really great designer and you have your book ready to go, you just need to be able to create it and get it out into the world. So IngramSpark allows you to actually upload all of that information for a small fee and then create your book in a way that exists in the digital world and you only have to print the copies you need or want. But what this does is this immediately sets the book into a distribution stream that allows anybody with an Ingram account and we're talking, you know, 35,000, I think, partners around the world and those are, we're talking independent individual businesses, you're talking about Amazon, Barnes & Noble, you're talking about the gift shop at a museum who happens to specialize in the area that you wrote your memoir about and it makes, it makes it possible for them to have your book and then you only have to worry about dealing with one company in terms of getting your profits. You can also order copies for yourself. The nice thing is, is that the books aren't created until they're needed. So you don't have to worry about excess stock which is really important. You can also simultaneously do an e-book as well as your print book and that's a really huge benefit to being able to get a broader reach. When you combine multiple types of platforms and multiple approaches to getting your book out there you'll have a far greater chance at success in accomplishing what it is you want to do with getting your story into the world. So we offer just one of those ways to help you saturate that reach. But that's my five minutes. So this is your very, very short version but we have lots and lots of further information. You can ask questions. We have brochures. You have a book et cetera but passing it on to your next sort of piece of the puzzle. Okay. Thank you. Stacey, could I get you to set that timer for me too? So I can. Nice to see some familiar faces here too and some folks I know have been dedicated to the writing thing a long time. Let me ask a quick question and get a feel for what kind of books you all are working on. Who's working on fiction? Genre fiction, literary fiction? Literary. Literary? Yep. Poetry? Nonfiction? Memoir? How to type? Okay. There's children's books. Children's books? I forgot to ask about that one. I don't have kids and I tend to be very spacy about that sort of thing. And one thing I wanted to mention is that so much depends on what your goals are for publication. I think of them being in three different categories. One that was big for me was getting the book out from inside me into the world. I do a lot of community theater, as David Klein does as well. And part of what makes it magic is when you close the loop. The rehearsals are great fun in themselves. The process is great. There's a great deal about it. But the magic happens when you close that loop and connect with the audience. And just getting that loop closed is a reason enough to publish a book. Another one is if you're thinking in terms of third-party publishing or what do they call it? Traditional publishing sometimes a very well put together indie published book can be an entree into the publishing world or certainly give you credibility with the traditional publishers. And then there's the of course commercial success, the best seller list, all that kind of stuff. And every now and then it happens. Fifty Shades of Grey is a perfect example. I couldn't read past page two because I thought the writing was still abysmal, but for me I started out with the goal of having my book traditionally published. And I'd gotten the impression from some folks I talked to that murder mysteries were particularly marketable in that respect. So I thought, well, you know, and we'll go from there. So wrote the book, took it through seven drafts, really was very careful with the plot and everything. It came in at 137,000 words which is far too big. I ended up meeting an agent at an event called The Muse in the Marketplace. I want to recommend this to you along with the organization that sponsors that. There's an outfit based in Boston called Brub Street. I'm sure you're familiar with them. They offer a lot of great classes both in craft of writing and in marketing and other aspects of getting your book published or making money at it or whatever. Muse in the Marketplace is an event where you, if you're ready to look for a way of selling your book through a third party, not necessarily self-publishing, but I think they cover that now as well. It's a great opportunity to network and so on. And somewhere during a writer friend that I knew introduced me to a lady who ultimately became my agent and I thought, great. So off I go to my book group with a bottle of champagne and I say, I've got an agent. I'm going to get published. Well, that was then. Unfortunately, my historical mystery which is this one went out into the world roughly coincident with the great slump of 2008 and into a period when historical mysteries were not doing as well as they were doing. And the long story short is that eventually she said to me, you know, it's just not happening. In the meantime, though, she had gotten an expression of strong interest from an editor in New York City who said, oh, I totally love this. You know, I'd love to put it out. Where's the sequel? Sequel. Oh my God. And I had started working on a sequel but I hadn't gotten very far. I rushed one into production. And I had to tear it off the face of the earth. And this is a fairly common story. So after a while she said to me, look, you know, I'm really sorry this hadn't happened. I really think your book deserves an audience. Perhaps you ought to try putting it out as an e-book. She referred me to an outfit called Smashwords which turned out to be an excellent choice. Smashwords was great. It required a great deal of careful formatting but they were able to get my book into e-book form and Smashwords is it does not unlike a traditional publisher it's not selective at all. Anybody can put a book up on Smashwords. So you have titles in there like Breaking Your Addiction to Lesbianism through Jesus things of that sort and Frightening Vampires and Werewolves for my liking anyway. But it got the book out there but then friends would say, oh you got a book that's great but I don't do e-books. Why don't you get a print version. It's subsidiary. Am I running? Oh my God. I'm running out of time and I got it out that way into print and there is nothing like opening that first box of books and picking it up in your hand and saying I did this. Long story short the next phase went more professional and I found a wonderful woman who's down in Watesfield named Kitty Werner who runs an outfit called RSV Press sounds very much like some of the work that Charlotte does she helps you turn it into a book in the reality in my second book and get it uploaded with Ingram. Ingram I cannot say enough good stuff about Lightning Source which is the Ingram subsidiary that I worked with. Spark came along a little later after my books came out but I would use it now if I were going to. They really make it happen for you and Lightning Source is not a misnomer they really came through in terms of print on demand I could order a book on Friday you know 80 copies of it and I'd have it on Tuesday that's kind of good to do that so that that has proved to be a great lifeline for me and the other thing that Kitty did was to take the first generation version of this book that I did with Word Clay and help me upgrade it to a more professional look I think a key thing to do as somebody said is create a business that you know has a name different from your own I chose Station Road Press because Station Road was a road that I had lived on in Scotland when I was a little kid and also I had a sense of forward motion to it and to get these ISBN numbers which enable bookstores to stock it and sell it fairly readily those are two pretty key things in terms of getting the book out and about that you have to do since I am out of time I'm going to leave it at that I have two little handouts for you here one is a piece I did for the Mount Philly Bridge which along with Fair Pond was incredibly supportive when I put my book out I'm so grateful to them for everything they've done to help my books see the light of day and this was just a little bit about the saga the story of how this happened for me so if you want to pass those around and the other things since there's no time right now to talk about marketing to any great extent is just this website referral that I found today in which a guy talks about all the platforms that he's used to get his books out into the world so hopefully that would be of some help to you all and with that I'll just make sure to get the fact that this is great having you keeping us honest so my name is my name is Susanna Noelle and I run a company called Noelle Editorial it's me and my brother and we are based in Montpelier and we do structural editing copy editing and proof reading and I work with a couple of the big five publishers random Penguin Random House and McMillan Press and they have a bunch of vintage books and St. Martin's Press and Picador there's a bunch of imprints under them so I've been freelancing for them since the mid 90s and trade fiction and nonfiction and but I also work with self published authors independently published authors and so does my brother and so I wanted to kind of give people a sense of the difference between copy editing and proof reading and structural editing because I think through the process it can be a little confusing so so knowing that I'm on a time or maybe I won't start with the process through the traditional publisher so let's just talk about what it's like when you're probably going to publish independently so the first thing that you want to do is sort of get the book down and and feel like your decisions have been made in terms of storytelling so that's I think one thing that is a little tricky when you send it off to be edited maybe with a structural editor who does the deeper kind of the deeper edit and suddenly you're changing POV you're changing the plot you're changing the timeline you want to sort of feel like you're pretty set with all those things before you send it to an editor or you just will spend thousands and thousands of dollars having it edited again and again so that's why Rob Street taking classes maybe getting your MFA a lot of people finish their novel while they're working on their MFA and that might take a few years as Robby said she had seven versions before she really got to the part where she was looking for an agent so that's kind of the first stage then the second stage is do the hard work of revising with somebody else besides your readers your beta readers your spouse your parents your writing group people but this is like experts professionals so this is where I would say send it to a structural editor sometimes what people do is the senate they get a manuscript critique so that's kind of like structural edit light so you have someone who knows what they're doing to read through it and say I feel like you're really strong with characterization but I didn't believe a word of that twist that happened on page 210 didn't make it at all so that's where you get like a great kind of overview of what the manuscript editor thinks and then you can finish it from there or you can work with a structural editor who will help you go through that process and make some of those changes for you and it's tough because sometimes you have to change stuff again and you feel like I've already done this like why do I have to do this again but it's an important copy at it and a lot of times people think that the copy at it they think that once they've gotten there they think oh I'm done all I need is a final read through and so they'll say I just need proofread but really what you need at that point is a copy at it and that's what I do and I also proofread and so this is what I sort of think of as making it feel like a book so the structural editor isn't always I mean you want to rely on your structural edit for that because they're really focused on deep stuff and you want to let them do that job so the copy editor is going to take care of all of that stuff for you then the copy editor in terms of fiction I'm sure the same can be said of nonfiction but it's more important in fiction there's things that it's amazing how they can go arise so characters names sometimes change in the middle of the book timelines can go on some sort of quest and they just never could start and they never can there was one book where the woman said she was trying to get her dog to stop drinking from the toilet bowl standing on the ground drinking from the toilet bowl the dog is Chihuahua so I was like sorry so there's lots of little things like that and then the copy editor will also work with like this word just sounds wrong or this character would never say that so there is that that you'd be amazed how much of this stuff comes up even though it's been through a thousand and one revisions already so then it goes back to the author goes back to you you make those changes and then it's only when you feel like it's 100% ready to go out into the world that you get it proofread so this is where you say okay I'm completely done with it I just want to make sure there's no final errors and you find oh my gosh I did misspell that word and you know there were actually more changes to be made than I thought and then you upload it you send it to Ingram Spark or you upload it to Cray Space or at that point you send it to an agent although you've done a lot of the work that the editorial process would do if you went with a publisher you've already done it and paid for it so sometimes I would recommend instead so anyway that is my time so I'm done I'm Mark Estrin and I'm going to talk to you today through two very specific lenses which is my experience and one is publishing with a traditional publisher I have 14 novels out there from five different publishers and plus a memoir which also and the other is a recent activity of my wife and myself we've made a literary publishing company and in the last five years we now have 117 titles very very high level many award winners of literature of novels short stories and poetry so those that's all I know I don't know what it's like to write a mystery I don't know what it's like to write you know nonfiction or to deal with it that being said I want to fanatically recommend that you pursue self-publishing and the reason for that there are many reasons for it but when she said you know post capitalist press is that a lot of publishing is captured by the need to maximize profits and you know in classical Marxist terms self-publishing is a revolution you own the means of production you know and that's really astounding possibilities in that which are only beginning here the reason is to do it you don't have to write query letters and send them out and query letters are excruciatingly important but you hear back from 1 out of 99 that was my experience so there is no black hole in the process like you've been accepted you send the manuscript in and then you wait and you wait and what's going on blah blah blah you know and you never hear from people and you get pretty jittery because you're always in control and you always know where your manuscript is there's no editorial struggle and I want to talk about having an editor as positive but there's also no struggle an editor for instance I had an editor I sent him a fictive biography and he said I don't want a biography I want a novel and he did some spectacular changes and some very high level editing and it was a novel instead of what I wrote and so there's also no waiting this aside from a black hole is this goes as fast as you want to make it you're in control you get to design the entire package you get to design what how big the book is you get to choose the type phases you get to choose whether there are headers and footages where the page number is going and what's the front matter and the back matter it's all your decision and you're not being forced by market decisions you get to set the price if you're selling through Amazon there are certain lower limits but if you don't want to put a price on the cover then that's your choice you can come to something like this and with ten books and sell them for a dollar each if you want it's as hard with relationship with indie book sellers which we should talk about you get high royalties in other words you get everything you don't have to if you're not getting Amazon takes 30% off the top but aside from that you don't get any percentage you get 100% of what comes in so if that matters to you or at least making back the money that you've spent on the editing of what previously you've done then in getting high royalties you can make free e-books easily easily it's a 15 minute process to take a finished manuscript and turn it into a beautiful e-book we do it all the time you get to design your own marketing strategies you don't have to get pushed around by publishing companies I mean I've had I was sent out to Seattle to read it to Barnes & Noble and nobody came you know so I'm sitting there in Seattle for whatever you know it's just there you get to know to choose what you think is appropriate for you and your book will never go out of print it's always there it will not be poked you know I think a very high percentage of books end up being poked which in this world of ecological crisis it's not a great idea so for all of those reasons we my wife and I our company which I'm not going to mention for reasons that I'll tell you are very very hot on this revolution of challenging the traditional publishers with an alternative stream and that doesn't mean a secondary screen that means very very high quality as high as you want to make it stream of literary production here are the disadvantages somebody mentioned the vanity press thing well there was that it's lingering slightly but if ever you start feeling guilty about it I will tell you that Ulysses would self-publish Proust would self-publish there's stuff that just is not an interest at the time of publishing to people who are into making money if you're publishing one book and you want it in bookstores or in libraries you will have a very costly ISBN number one ISBN number costs $125 we buy 500 at a time and we buy 100 at a time and that costs $5 so it's that kind of stuff you don't have to find a publisher you don't have to find an editor you don't have to get rejected it's your book and you have confidence in it and it's out there searching for a house a publishing house or an editor or an agent these days is absolutely nuts it should come with a knife you don't have to put up you will have to put up possibly with intrusive editing you will not have an editor accept yourself and you will not have a copy editor you will not have a structural editor you need help we can talk about that later because your eyes stop seeing what's on the page you will have to accept publishers' plans for your book in terms of how much they're going to put out in terms of pushing marketing your book you will not have deep pockets to do that although one of my books was published in Penguin and they chose not to spend a lot of money on it so that's a choice that's all so those are the pros and cons but we're really hot on self-publishing as a way of life and a challenge to the system really good advice I was doing a little bit of live tweeting but I just thought it was indispensable the difference between copy editing and proof reading and the structural editing I have shown that before I'd love to open it up for questions and if you wouldn't mind you can address the whole panel you can address a specific person and panelists if you wouldn't mind repeating the question whoever's going to answer it so that the microphones pick it up for the camera that'd be great would anyone like to start? everyone has just absorbed so much information yes I'm not only doing the writing but I'm also illustrating children's books I've been a teacher for 47 years and taught in public and Walder and we taught through the oral tradition so I have all these stories that I told orally now I'm just putting them down and writing but my question is with the pictures should I seek out a different type of editor in the art world I don't know I just have a question for that because I'm doing both I'm doing the story the stories are already written now I'm working on illustrations so is anyone... go ahead you're there so her question was is it any different if you also have art essentially with your manuscript I would if somebody came to me with that book I would I would try to get them to find someone who with a specialty in picture books because there it is we're just talking about dinner picture books are very much their own thing and they can be very tricky to do so I would just Google copy editor or structural editor picture book and I bet you'll find somebody who can kind of give you some not only do the copy but give you some idea of marketability or how it might be revised but it is kind of its own animal so I would try to find someone who knows are you doing the illustrations yourself or are you doing them for yourself yeah I just acquired a children's book that came with illustrations which I love fortunately but I would recommend getting some feedback from like we were talking from these bookstore sales point of sales just to see what it doesn't have to change how they turn out but just to see what how they might be received by your audience and another thing I wanted to emphasize is go do your research no matter what kind of book you have there are probably a thousand books in that in that genre and you want to kind of know it can be it doesn't have to be any different than you intended but it helps to know what your competition is what people you know who show up at the store with twenty bucks what they're going to spend it on the children's book that was a good example of exactly that of researching what already exists not in order to mimic or recreate because especially in children's picture books the range is incredibly broad there is no one way to do a children's picture book it's not you know this book has words on the page and you can decide on formatting but it's still just text on the page and you're working within that space you are working in a with a format that's well and that's it is that you spend so much time in kids books so I know where we're coming from in that regard I just wanted the question I had was who do I contact to talk about the pictures we don't do children's books but we have experience with mixtures of text and graphics we have a category called odd birds eluding the net of classification many of the odd birds are odd birds because they're you know they've got a lot of graphics and then we do it we're doing with our fifth book with Peter Schumann from Bread and Puppet he draws all his books that guy so I can tell you a few things about publishing POD publishing which you probably would be doing and graphics the first thing is you are very restricted in sizes if it's going to be in bookstores there's some standard sizes so some of the other children's books you need to check into whether whichever service you have will do that and also get it into England or have bookstores etc otherwise it's you're out of that particular loop right the other thing is that the quality of the graphics is improving quickly but it's still largely subpar compared to impress printing color printing from a regular from a regular printer photographs are pretty poor okay the photographs are grayed out a lot sounds like you have we have done a few color books large years experiments and they're okay they're not art books they're not Abrams art books on shiny paper so I would I would label them at a B level of graphic quality but in the case of these books B level is fine so well although there are now a level especially for children's picture books I mean Ingram's lightning source the Ingram spark and lightning source both they do children's picture books they print children's picture books not just for small publishers yours right but also for there are several online platforms where a grandparent can order up a general storybook and have their grandchild's name put into it and then have a fully jacket it I mean I've seen the people you start to look at different costs of course with quality of paper and the format but the quality of the graphics a lot of that it's not necessarily on the printing side anymore that's the issue it's when you upload the material yourself and that is going to be the key part for which leads into also like covers if you have any you know your cover design your graphics your you know your artwork actually and making sure that everything is absolutely at the highest resolution possible is going to be key for quality these days and don't do like I did design for a 9 by 11 book and try and upload it to lightning source because they don't have that size so definitely check what you do or lightning source look at what's out there and then work within they have a wonderful template generator you know so you can input the size and they'll it just won't be available if you put it in because I've been making mock books I get bare books and then I put the text and the pictures in so that I can read it and see how it feels that's fantastic but I will definitely do that that's the right size cover quality has always been very high they use a different press than we do to print the text and so even when the quality of internal imagery was okay the cover was always a-okay I don't mean to hog the thing I have another question but I'll wait anybody else? I have a question and thank you Bear Pond this is such a great place and I love they have these kind of events I'm kind of a crossroads I've independently or self published three books now one of which is a novel that's done extremely well nationally and I'm writing the sequel to that I'm a couple of drafts into the sequel I have two other books that are out there more regional and have done pretty well I've done them all three through create space and I'm really trying to move away from Amazon for social reasons for I'm a huge supporter of independent bookstores though Amazon of course has made it so easy to get your books out there it's really I'm struggling to kind of get out of Amazon into something else and as I look towards probably doing the same thing publishing the sequel with a fairly good audience anxious for it I'm really interested in what some of you are doing I've worked with a freelance editor out in Fresno, California for 20 years now who has just been a fabulous editor she's more a content structural editor and I'm getting older and I want to spend more time frankly writing so I'm really interested in kind of trying to find where my cord could plug in away from Amazon you know into Spark I was told to do lightning source or Ingram first and then Amazon because you get the non-Amazon market and then you it doesn't matter you can upload to Amazon anyway well yeah so his question for those of you I don't know if is that when you have for example an already existing audience for your book and it's already doing well nationally and now you're working on a second to move beyond just a single platform sort of an existence beyond just the idea of the creation of the book itself one of the options to consider there are some interesting models out there similar to what Mark is doing in terms of people what they're investing in and pulling work in and then getting it out into the world for you and there are two different types of things to think about one is entrepreneurial publishing which is kind of a hybrid model of a publisher and a publishing company that is doing editing and design and marketing and printing and they're even doing some of the publicity and sales work for you but you are paying for that she writes is a good example of one that does that yeah right right a little bit of a hybrid and she writes is actually a very interesting example because they have an editor who also does acquisitions editing of the work that is given to she writes but another model that's newer is one called and ink shares is when I say crowdfunded publishing it doesn't sound as professional as it actually is what they need by crowdfunded publishing is this is a professional publishing company meaning that they do full service you know they will edit your book and help you with design and marketing and then they work with the sales and distribution team to then get your book in front of a bookstore small and large and wherever but what they need by crowdfunded essentially work with you to set a goal on pre-orders and when you reach that pre-order goal then they will accept your book and work with you on it and the turnaround time is really fast because most of the people who are participating in this model already have a completed book they've worked with writers groups and editors and a designer or they already have an existing audience and they just need they just need that extra push because they want to spend more time writing like you do and so close to the best of an experience as independent publishing can offer them with that kind of level of control and closeness to the material but also being able to relinquish some of the larger structural systems of it so that's another type of model to kind of consider when you're looking whether or not to explore just another physical print you know platform where you're still in charge of dealing with sales or whether or not you step into one of these other upstarts for publishing good work I certainly would second your labeling of Amazon as being the devil in terms of corporations they're closing down lots of stores lots of bookstores lots of other kinds of village stores popstores and all of that and Bezos is not anybody you would want to hang out with and we flagellate ourselves every day for using create space but after a lot of research we have found that from for our authors to have the fastest turnaround the least expensive correction stuff that create space we've looked at all of the services and create space does the job from our author's point of view better than any of them and we hate it and that's exactly I basically raise money through my books for cherries and by far I can raise way more money through create space than any other platform I've looked at though I kind of hate it and I'm connected with independent bookstores and we'll have our own flagellating devices maybe I could borrow yours but I really am serious about wanting to try to move off that partly because a lot of my friends who work in and own independent bookstores particularly all over the northeast don't want to carry Amazon books anymore so you're kind of in this vice of what you just said you know in terms of trying to make money either for yourself or the Doni they're by far the best but you know I love independent bookstores you know so it's kind of heartbreaking to have you know bookstores that you've done really good business with you know writes you a Dear John or Dear Steve or just a little tip if you have you know what a rat card is it's like a four by nine card you can don't don't put Amazon on that I know they know that you're going to be an Amazon or a bear pond but for instance a book in Crow books carries all of it and maybe bear pond does the same thing and as that spreads this will no longer be an issue it won't be in the face of the bookstores the other thing is if you go with light and source which I am or Ingram Spark they automatically upload to Amazon the print book is immediately available it's Spark is the same way think of it as a digital data feed once you make your book available in a digital form that is printable which is essentially what you're doing then anybody who has data feeds from Ingram which is basically everybody who's large and most of who is small they then have the information so that a person can choose where and how they're for purchase maybe we ought to ask people like thereupon in that situation if you're not carrying Amazon even if you go through them do you guys carry those independent books? absolutely yes we do independent books through Ingram and that group definitely even if they're Amazon linked but all books are just don't what is this that when you have your website or you go in and say if you're able to say you can order my book on Ingram from Ingram regardless of how it got to Ingram if you're able to say my book is orderable via Ingram that is key to a Berkson mortar space keeping in your book without having to work with you on consigned basis say your distributor is Ingram don't say it's Amazon or yourself distributor you're familiar with rather than the Berkson mortar stores will not use Amazon as a distributor correct not the same as an individual customer will go there and order books but Ingram is a reputable distributor that Berkson mortar stores are familiar with so they will order I mean all my books go through Ingram or Baker and Taylor but I've had several big bookstores including Vermont because Create Space is the platform even though it's available through Ingram they won't it's a political front yeah and I and there's certainly justice on the side of people saying get out of this you know because you're closing down indie bookstores it's the last thing that we want to do but we're trying to push on making these things compatible let me ask Charlotte you've got some members in third party publishers right they're not primarily what we call self publishers they're people who publish other people's books small scale I don't publish my own books I started out that way but I don't like to write I shouldn't be allowed to so those are some vehicles that people yeah IP&E members can possible IP&E and you get engaged like we were talking at dinner you know you get more out of it then you put into it but engagement with the group because it's volunteer run and you will get to know people who are publishers who are looking for books I mean I'm looking for alternative education books anybody got one you know I do I can write one I can write one I haven't done it all it started with this Pyrogadji handbook it's Pyrogadji is like self self learning learning environments and that is a that's a creative commons it's public domain and so I wanted to get more books in that in that I'll get busy I've been in the music business for 32 years and have several small independent labels and everyone here I'm sure knows how the music business is going in terms of CDs even Sony is throwing out hundreds of thousands of CDs that just aren't selling and in the process of doing a lot of the CDs and DVDs I've published books some of them are accompanied some of them are belong in high schools and colleges and libraries and I always use lightning source for those books and always have just been blown away by how quickly and when high quality the books that you know I get say if I need five books I have a 21 DVD collection of of the Wayne and Cooley music from Indonesia and there are four books this that if I sell two or three a year of this collection and I need three of those books you know three or four days I've got them it's just incredible and their customer service is fabulous yeah we'll get a response that day if not and I as a result of my winding down the physical part of my business I'm doing only digital download music now I have against the wishes of my entire family and everyone of my friends who looks at me for us I started a publishing company a publishing company and I have used to create space because it was the only thing I could find that was quick and easy I've been incredibly impressed by their customer service getting in touch with people is really quick and easy they answer all your questions any problems they deal it's just it's amazing at the same time my heart hurts every time I go that route because I wish there was something else I wish somebody who had a different model could come up I guess that's what that's what Ingram Spark is is that model so Ingram Spark that's exactly what Ingram Spark is you take that book that you've already you're done with and you you upload it basically and the other thing about the create space conversation though is not just about accessibility and how you order it but it's about terms we're talking about terms discounts and returnability I see and so part of the problem is that create space has a non-returnable situation so a bookstore that can order your book that was printed via you know upload and printed via create space but is available through a distributor and you're asking them to order it into the store to carry because it's not returnable that means that they are accepting your book no matter what which sounds lovely when you're like I know I know you can sell two of these books in a year but you know create space and all that so with Spark your discounting and returnability makes you more accessible to retailers my model is she writes they're just I you know I've read there all of their materials backwards and forwards actually this woman here next to me is the one who introduced me and my wife to her she writes and their understanding of this for instance you can't go out there and say oh no returns I'm sorry the same thing is true of record stores what's left of them you have to be able to return the product of your dead in the water you have the option of doing not non-returns what's that you have the option yes you do have that option you can make that choice but I think it's not recommended it's an almost fatal one if you do in terms of what people are talking about I mean if you only print the books that have already sold that's P.O.D yep they have no return yep so what's the I don't get the issue of like well if a bookstore orders 10 and they they sell 8 and they return 2 and they return as many as they have already sold somebody walks into a bookstore says I would like a copy of this book you know and it's it's already on the database they order a copy it'll be here Tuesday going Tuesday it's there and there are no returns well that's only in the case of somebody walking in and saying I know I want to buy this book and as a bookseller as a bookseller you say to the customer if you come in and want to order a book from a bookstore and we look it up and we see that we can order it but it's but it's not returnable then we will tell you you're committing you're asking a customer to commit to purchasing that book but I think what we're really referring to is you know a local author you know you coming in to Bear Pond and saying you know I'd love it if you would carry my book which is different than someone coming in specifically ordering it and so for a store to say yes we can take a chance and have five copies on a shelf face out with your name under it saying featured local author so even if they don't sell as many as you would like which gives you a better chance of being noticed and spotted and picked up by somebody who doesn't know to look for your order but they're more likely to order those five if they are returnable right so that's what the terms that's where the terms matter I get it but this raises another issue which is if you're not going if it's POV and it's not going to be on the shelf and it's not going to be faced out and it's not going to be on the front table for people to book to pick up and look at then the burden is on your design to have the book sell from the thumbnail and from if it's on Amazon to look inside features what you place in your initial pages if you have blurbs the cover design is crucially mind-blowing it cannot be too complex it has to say the same thing as death and Mr. Pickworth there and there it is it has to be obvious or the graphic has to be very, very captured right so that's your responsibility with Ingram whether they're returnable or not you give bookstores that the usual 40% because the other thing you run into with B-spaces it's 25% right so what do you yes it is a high I mean you still as the author and you are still a business you still set the terms you still set the price but Ingram has a calculator so all you have to do and you don't even actually you don't have to have an account you don't have to register you don't have to pay the fee to upload your book you can go to the website and randomly you can choose a format you can choose a paper quality you know hard cover paperback paper overboard children's paperback picture book choose your quality choose your pages set the price and it will tell you you know you can vary the terms and see what the result is for yourself in terms of money in your pocket per sale so you can but with increased space you can't tell the bookstores what percentage discount they get that's really what I'm asking so Ingram spark or lightning source give the bookstores 40% off retail I think I can choose 20, 40 or 55 okay so yeah it's very important because in fairness the bookstores they kind of need to really I usually go with 55 I mean I don't know if it's affected sales or not but 55% discount yeah wholesale discount wow I mean think about it this way the material is not sitting anywhere you're not paying for it to sit in a warehouse you're not paying for it to you're not paying to ship it in advance so while the discounting may sound like you know it's it's a little bit terrifying when you're first stepping in and saying oh my god that's money out of my pocket I haven't spent any money because these are basically sales that you know as were mentioned you know these are sales that exist when they're made you know you're not and you can go into a bookstore and say my books are available on Ingram for 55% wholesale discount and they're they're probably gonna you know perk up I mean it's better than 40 or 20 right that is definitely a perk yeah we have time for about one more question hi I'm coming from a very different perspective and I like decisions as a first time independent author and I came tonight with the specific deciding whether to be very independent or to go with Ingram spark I've been writing for very many years I've been represented by two agents I've seen my dream come this close and had some very bad luck so this is a huge step my new website was just about ready to launch when I saw this workshop where I'm just yet and trying to make the decision of what exactly can Ingram spark offer that for me is getting lost in the discussion I understand that the benefit potentially is accessibility that all of these thousands of bookstores are accessible in a way that my website we were gonna launch with just independent sales of e-books and print on demand so the question if we were to go with Ingram spark however there's the potential obviously to reach reach far more readers how exactly does that happen though I mean what do you do for a self published author in terms of readers I mean there's it is purely sales and just I mean it's purely distribution stream is what it is it's making we when I was a bookseller and I would talk to if you came in if you were one of my customers and we were having this conversation about what you should do I would say to use every possible platform you actually can I mean really you want to diversify as much as possible because if you do only use create space you're looking at this percentage of sales if you use only digital if you use only one type of e-book you know if you use only one type of printer or distribution stream you want to use every single one that you possibly can make available to everybody whether it is via direct sales on your website which you can do with IngramSpark as well whether you're selling them yourself or whether a retailer is selling them you you want the broadest reach possible for your work Amazon e-book someone in Australia the bookstore here through your website and being able to offer that is one of the things that I again as a bookseller you know on this side I can see in the benefit of this platform because it does allow you to do that and it doesn't it doesn't rule out all the other possible platforms either so what exactly happens if I went with IngramSpark you would my book be listed in a catalog I can show you exactly what it looks like it's not a catalog per se so it's not that so I am actually a sales rep on a normal basis she writes as one of my it's one of the publishing companies where we sit down and we talk about the books coming out and I tell them about you know the books are being published by she writes and the Vermont author who has a memoir coming out and so I am pitching the book to a bookstore to have them carry it on the author's behalf IngramSpark is a POD platform for you to utilize that happens to also allow you another way to get marketing there's no you don't have a sales rep who is going out and pitching your book because there are 13 million titles in the Ingram database nobody can sell that so it is it is on you still to sell your book but when you have your website ready and your book ready and all you're doing is printing it and then just linking to yourself for ordering it's a pretty simple platform and I actually some of them are actually from when IngramSpark first started a few years ago and some are more recent and what I like about them is that they they really do break down the pros and cons of each platform cost-wise distribution-wise ease of use how easy is it to do customer service how easy is it to get your information up there to sell books on your own versus getting them into retail selling just to add to that Ifney and IVPA both have discounts with Ingram so when you order short run-up books 50 100 or something like that we have a you just say you're an Ifney member and there's a code that we use to order so you can order for your local bookstore or you know fulfills that or whatever your own website sales and I will talk to your author here she's been introduced I was going to say yeah if there's one thing I would do differently if I were doing it all over again from scratch it would be to set up to hire someone to do publicity work to be a publicist Jennifer McMahon some of you may know and admire as I do who writes a lot of suspense thriller really interesting stuff mentioned when she launched her first book even though it was a traditionally published book that she hired a publicist of her own independent of the publisher to help her get the word out about her book through all the various ways there are libraries one of the self e for example is something you can get into via library journal which promotes self published books if they accept if you're at a quality of it I've been on selfie for ages and I've never done anything with it there's always that conflict between getting you know keeping on writing if that's what you want to do if you only got one book you can spend all the rest of your life marketing it if you want to get into all the all the venues that you could get into and use all the tools that are at your command to publicize your book so that's that's the thing I would do differently because at this point I'm busy writing book three which is not part of the series and I've really pretty much neglected marketing my first two books and we have a number of publicists in our membership too I'll have to check them out that's really good to keep in mind and I'd like to point out that I'm a independent publishing and I'm hoping they see some of the questions that Oh, absolutely I remember had will be addressed in this so look over this when you get home and hopefully you will all be published on this the next time you see that Absolutely and we know we'll see you here You can do it I do have one little publicity item here if anybody would like one which is bookmarks if anybody wants one on one time with you to come up Stacey, you said you had something to show possibly I've got some sample books and I've got brochures and I can answer more specific questions and if anybody wants to sign up there's a discount code or we can do it online and use it later Thank you