Self Publishing 101

For several years, I’ve taught part-time through a local adult and community education program. I focus on teaching blogging and self-publishing, with the goal of helping new authors navigate through the process of digital and print-on-demand book production and distribution.

Here are some highlights -

It is better to take your time and be sure of what you are doing, than rush into a job without all the details correct, and produce something that looks amateurish or sloppy. Remember that you have the advantage of working at your own schedule, not the schedule of a publisher.

Ultimately, however, you are going to have to come to a point where you decide your project is “good enough”. Remember that there isn’t such a thing as “perfect” here - there is no perfect cover, or perfect font, or perfect editing. There is only what is good enough to suit your time, money, purpose, and audience.
One of the best ways to achieve “good enough” is to keep things simple. A simple but clean and competent-looking cover is better than one that tries to be fancy and fails. A simple layout is better than something that tries to be too complex and never quite comes out correctly. Remember - a carpenter first learns to build a box before attempting to build a rocking chair.
Always have a copy of your current draft, and a copy of all your original materials. Even if you just email a copy to yourself, or save it to another computer, or back it up in some other way (even a printout), never do anything without having your work saved in another location.
Do not be afraid to reach out to people and ask for help, but remember that people shouldn’t feel obligated to help you for free. Everyone’s time and effort is worth something, and you should always offer some form of payment. Exposure, or getting one’s name mentioned in the book is not a form of payment!
All the information you need to know is out there on the internet, you just need to look for it. YouTube is a great place to find information, because it will often have tutorials on how to do things, especially technical things like formatting text or other computer-related projects.
When it comes to images, print-quality digital images should be 300 DPI (dots per inch). This means a picture for a 6” by 9” book cover would have a resolution of 1800 by 2700 DPI. The “dots” refer to the individual pixels, and the more pixels, the bigger and sharper the image.
When it comes to text, Microsoft Word or OpenOffice “.doc” files are best. Amazon can convert these directly into ebooks. CreateSpace and other printers will want a PDF file of the book instead. You will want to learn about both file types and how to make them (hint: you can look these up on Google).
Speaking of which, you will need to become proficient in “Googling” a lot of things. It is okay to make your search in the form of a question. For example, you could type “What is a PDF file” into Google and get an answer! There is more than enough information out there to help you complete your project - you just need to know where to look.
Be sure you do not invest more of your time, money, and energy into this project than you can spare. As much as we would all love our projects to succeed, it is possible they will not sell, and you will not make your money back. Self-publishing is a gamble, and a smart gambler knows how much they can afford to lose.
With that last point in mind, always get a second quote from another source. Never immediately do business with the first company you find, because there may be another that does it differently, but more cheaply. There are a lot of businesses out there right now that are perfectly legitimate and want to help you succeed, but there are just as many who want to take as much money as you can give them, and don’t really care what happens after that. WRITER BEWARE!

Historical Fiction 101

In the winter of 2018, I was invited by the Salem Athenaeum to give an afternoon seminar on writing historical fiction. It was a good discussion, although lightly attended, and preparing for it helped me frame a lot of thoughts about historical fiction writing that had been floating around in my head for a while, but never put to paper. I’m sharing those thoughts here for anyone who is interested in starting a hist-fic story of their own.

“History” and “Fiction” are antithetical concepts. History is a line of fixed, immutable events. Fiction is the creation of events that never occured. Yet, all fiction that isn’t Science Fiction or Fantasy is, in some fashion, Historical Fiction.

Even contemporary fiction is, in a sense, historical fiction because it has to reconcile itself with real-world events, places, and people. The bigger and more wide-ranging the events of your story, the more you are diverging from the historical “real”.
In effect, Historical Fiction is Alternate History, because there are always going to be gaps in the historical documents that don’t cover what really happened at that time and place, and if you are weaving in your own characters, or deviating at all from the stories of historical characters, you are now creating a world that never happened.
When deciding on a Historical Fiction project, you essentially have three degrees of historical verisimilitude:
- 1. A fictionalized retelling of a historical event, where all (or almost all) of the characters are real-life historical figures, and the author is trying to present Historical events in a compelling narrative that sticks to documented fact as closely as possible. Most historical biopics fall into this kind of story, or a fictional retelling of a major historical event. (PATTON, THE KILLER ANGELS, LINCOLN)
- 2. A story involving all fictitious characters, or some real and some fictitious, which is itself a fiction, but written in such a way that it could have happened, outside of the known historical canon. You might consider this a “forgotten tale”. (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, LAST OF THE MOHICANS, THE THREE MUSKETEERS).
- 3. A story involving all fictitious characters, or some real and some fictitious, which is so blatantly false, that it is essentially an alternate history - or - is simply using a historical setting to tell a tale, the purpose of which is something else entirely other than its historical value (INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?).
By far, the first of these forms is the most difficult to get right, and the easiest for others to criticize and tear apart. Not only is there a strong historical record you are emulating, all your main characters are real historical figures, whose motivations, manners, and actions are well documented. Any deviation from the historical record will be problematic, and even if you try your best to be accurate, those who take issue with the sources you used will still be critical of your work. This can be the worst of both worlds - all the work of a historical non-fiction book, yet all the plotting, character development, and dialogue pitfalls of a novel. If you can avoid this kind of project, I do recommend it. (OPERATION ARCHERY)
THE THREE MUSKETEERS serves as a great example of the second kind of Historical Fiction novel. Dumas wove a fictional story out of the lives of various historical figures as well as fictional characters, and even his historical characters, such as D’Artagnan, are highly fictionalized, as are many of the events that take place, even though they are set in a historical backdrop.
The third kind of story, where history takes a distant back seat to the fiction, can be very murky waters. All too often elements of the fantastic are woven into a story like this, either in the form of horror (FRANKENSTEIN), or mythology (TROY), or science fiction (Almost any time travel story), or comedy (Monty Python films, etc.). While these are often free of the restraints of serious Historical Fiction, they fall into an ambiguous twilight zone of muddled fiction genres where leaning too much in one direction or the other may hurt more than it helps.
Know your goal. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you writing from a love of history, or are you trying to write something that sells well? Have you read similar works by other authors, nothing what they did well, and what they seemed to lack - aka, a weakness or market you can exploit for your own promotion?
What kind of story are you trying to tell? Is this really a historical fiction project, or are you just writing a poor man’s history book?
Is this a lazy attempt at writing a fantasy novel you just want to set in the real world?
How much does historical accuracy matter to your audience? Remember that for some readers, getting the details of history correct might be more important in maintaining suspension of disbelief than the events in your story. This is one of the most common pitfalls of rookie Historical Fiction writers - putting an inaccuracy or anachronism in a story that immediately takes a savvy reader out of the story.
Know your audience and what they like to read. Does the action / romance / adventure / intrigue / mystery count for more than the setting and all its attendant details? Than make sure that’s how you write it, because if you spend more time showing off the research you did than entertaining your readers, you are going to pay for it with bad reviews.
You have to know if it is better to avoid, make up, or strive for particular details. You would be surprised at the things which can be very hard to find out about, especially if you don’t have a certain degree of time, money, and/or resources. How do you handle these obstacles? How are your readers going to react to the way you handled them?
Unlike past generations of readers, today’s reader has, at their fingertips, almost any historical detail you can imagine. Coupled with this is the reader’s ability to reach out and make evident any error, or suspected error, in your writing. Every reader is a potential armchair historian ready, willing, and able to publicly condemn you via Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and the reviews section of your book’s Amazon product page.

Post Modern Pulp Revisited

These entries originally appeared on my Post Modern Pulp Blog

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