The easy answer: go to a lawyer.

No, really. I’ll tell you a bit about what I did (as I understand it), but ultimately, get thee to a lawyer. I’m not advising you to do anything (besides go to a lawyer). I’ve heard of people doing it online, clicking a button and paying $99, but I wouldn’t recommend it, mainly because a website can’t listen to your goals, understand your needs, and advise you accordingly. It’s obviously cheaper than going to a lawyer, but, well, as with so many other things, you get what you pay for.

I made up Exciting Books just before I published my self-titled collection while I was at USC. I’d long envisioned an entity called Exciting Entertainment–a sort of production company. By then I had a background in both broadcast production and publishing, so I knew a little about production and distribution. I’d just moved to LA and thought I might ultimately like to become involved in feature film production, and that was how I figured to do so. I’d have a production company. But I was also very interested in publishing, and I thought maybe I’d do that, too. Back then, I hoped I’d get a corporate bookdeal I could use to ultimately take on my own imprint as part of a bigger company–I very much wanted to be a creative director at a small imprint of Random House or Grand Central.

I published my collection with the Exciting Books designation on it.

When I published Meets Girl a few years later, I did the same thing.

I had not yet spoken to a lawyer or formulated a business. I was still studying business and marketing. I did not yet know about the idea of separating one’s assets. I knew very little.

Just after Meets Girl was published, I did a collection called Sparks with a guy named Simon Smithson. Simon had the great ideas and came to me with it, and my role was to basically produce the thing, while he had a vision for marketing it and building its buzz. It was small and did okay and in the end we split the revenue and called it a day–the revenue being roughly equivalent to what I imagine the two of us would have left as a tip after a couple of steaks together.

A few months after that, though, I reviewed Nick Earls’ Perfect Skin as I was completing my MBA, and tweeted at Nick that I had posted it, as well as expressed some disappointment it wasn’t out for Kindle. I told him if there was any way I could help him, I’d be happy to. Fast forward a couple of days and we were talking about digital distribution and strategy and publishing, and fast forward a couple more days and I woke to find an email from his agent in my inbox. They were interested in going forward, in signing agreements, in publishing with me, and that was when I knew it was time to make things official.

I was already in Pittsburgh, and I drew on my network to make the connections I needed. I contacted a law firm, set up an appointment, and drove over with my then-fiance (now wife), who had already edited everything I’d ever published and whose guidance I knew I needed in going forward.

The lawyer was great, and we sat down for more than an hour while I told him what I wanted to do and he explained my options.

I’d already known I wanted to do business via limited-term licenses, rather than by purchasing rights to publish. In fact, before I went into that meeting I developed our business model so that I knew exactly what we wanted to do and how. Given that there’s no such thing as out-of-print anymore, just as there’s really no such thing as shelf life, I knew that I wanted to offer authors I worked with something different. I didn’t want to tie up their rights. I didn’t want to print their books, even. I just wanted to take what they’d written and make it digital and facilitate sales on digital platforms.

Which was already changing things such that my old ideas no longer made sense. “Exciting” always has, for me–because I aspire to it in the sense of science, where to “excite” an electron means to increase its energy to a new, higher, measurable level. I wanted to literally “excite” publishing, bringing it to a new level, and because of that, “Books” no longer made sense to me–I thought of books as paper and novels, and I needed more flexibility. I thought back to the ideas that had revolutionized publishing–the technology, the movable type, the printing press on which books had been made on paper.

And I realized that was what I wanted to do. Just as the printing press produced paper books, so did I want to produce digital stories–novels and poetry and essays all. No bindings. No limits. I wanted to be a press, and thus was born Exciting Press.

In discussing my ideas with the lawyer, the ideas of sole proprietorships and corporations and etc. came up. I decided on a limited liability company–I wanted to own Exciting Press myself, and I wasn’t going to open it to shareholders and such, so I didn’t figure on the whole “corporate” route. This is also why I’m creative director of Exciting Press, and not CEO–LLCs, for the most part, don’t have CEOs, more like a manager. I can probably call myself whatever I want (I think a lot of people online tend to), but I didn’t want to; I’m a writer and publisher, and thus precision in word means a great deal to me (this is also why I don’t use terms like “traditional” or “self-publishing.” I think they’re imprecise and inaccurate.

There were a couple of other things to consider, as well. First was that I’d never envisioned only books–what about production? What about Exciting Entertainment? But by then I’d also begun teaching, and I’d also started to offer some publishing services, taking on a few clients to help them make books, so what I was doing wasn’t just Entertainment anymore.

I decided on Exciting Endeavors LLC.

When creating an LLC, though, one requirement is that one always use the LLC designation whenever mentioned. I thought that might become cumbersome quickly, though, and the solution was simple: fictitious names. Fictitious names are simply, basically, what an imprint at a publishing company or a subsidiary of a corporation are. They’re part of the greater entity, but they’re the brand by which that entity goes to market. They’re also called DBAs, or doing business as, which I liked because that was what I wanted.

So after settling on Exciting Endeavors LLC, I created four disparate fictitious names. Obviously, one is Exciting Press, for publishing. In case I found myself in the position to offer services (and wasn’t going to publish a book as Exciting Press), I created Exciting Consulting (I’m not really using that. Mainly because there are too many corporate publishers now offering publishing services via scammy operations like AuthorSolutions and etc., and I want to differentiate myself from them. I’ve been approached many times to lay-out an ebook or to design someone’s cover, but in the end right now I’ve found myself focusing more on Exciting Press and the authors I’ve signed to work with, and I’m sure we’re all happier that way).

[Sidenote: don't pay AuthorSolutions any money. There are better freelancers out there who can provide everything they do better and cheaper. Don't pay an agent to push a button for you, and then give him or her 15% of your revenue. Times are changing fast, yes, but there are a lot of people taking advantage of those changes in some ways that may not be outright wrong or illegal but are certainly questionable.]

The other two fictitious names created were Exciting Media, for what didn’t fall under publishing (games, apps, whatever), and then Exciting Endeavors, so I didn’t have to use LLC every time and further because who knows what I’m going to do down the line?

*

I’m not saying those decisions are right for you. I don’t know. That was why I developed a model for what I wanted to do, and how, and then took that model to a lawyer to figure out what I needed to file to make it happen.

How do you do those things? Start with the model. What do you want to do, and how? Even if you don’t want to ultimately work with other authors, I think you still need to approach publishing as a professional, and more so than getting paid that means completing the necessary requirements to do so. Registering an LLC (or corporation, or sole proprietorship, or whathaveyou). I think it’s a really good idea to keep personal assets separate from professional assets, mainly because intellectual property and digital rights are so new and ever changing and it’s just a damned good idea to cover your ass.

After you’ve developed your model, and have a plan, take it to a lawyer. Who may well tell you, “Eh, don’t worry about what the internet guy said. The chances of that are slim. Just become a Corp-S.” Who knows? I don’t. I just know that I went and talked to mine and he listened carefully and helped me make decisions for which I’d have otherwise had no context whatsoever.

There’s also the issue of taxation. In writing, Danny mentioned California’s tax “for the pleasure of doing business in the state,” which basically means that the moment you legally register you need to pay those taxes. Which may not be economically feasible if one isn’t making enough–and let’s be candid that most don’t. Most business lose money at first, and really the only reason Exciting Endeavors isn’t actively hemmorhaging capital is because digital publishing requires literally no investment up front, so we have no operating costs that I hadn’t already personally incurred. I don’t know anything about taxes, either–I have an accountant who handles that. I just give her the documents, and she makes sure the right things happen. She’s also the one who advised me to take just a partial amount of refund in case revenue started to increase and I had to pay taxes more often.

Or something. I’m not sure. That’s why I go to them.

I think that’s important. It seems like a lot of writers outsource tasks like marketing. A lot of authors claim “they just want to write.” So they get agents, and corporate publishers, and hey, that’s fine if it’s what they want. But I’ve also seen a lot of authors mention the day they spent with their taxes and a calculator, and I wonder if the 15% they’re paying their agents and the who-knows-how-much-the-corporations-take wouldn’t be better spent outsourcing the important stuff like legal contracts and taxation. And I know legal contracts technically fall under agents’ purview, but sometimes I wonder whether it actually should (mainly because I see very, very few agents with JDs. Or MBAs, for that matter). I’ve seen the kinds of contracts corporations use for book contracts, and honestly, when I created Exciting Press’ license agreement, those contracts were very much on my mind. Corporate contracts are huge and long and restrictive and tend to try to make sure that the corporation gets as much as it can; Exciting Press’ license agreement is two pages long and designed to be read and easily understood by authors (though we always recommend they seek some sort of advice about those contracts, or any contracts, really, before signing).

Which is why, last night, when Bibliocrunch’s Miral Sattar highlighted last evening’s Twitter #indiechat with Bowker to me, I intended to avoid it. Miral and Porter Anderson both highlighted Bowker’s product manager, LJN Dawson, as well as touted Bowker’s new “self-publishing services.” I saw some of it–I was on Twitter, decompressing–but didn’t figure to participate until a tweet from the Bibliocrunch account pulled me in. No one had yet mentioned that authors no longer need ISBNs. No one had mentioned how incomplete Bowker’s tracking data actually now is.

So I thought I would. Long and short: as an independent author publishing digitally, you’ll do better ignoring any of Bowker’s offerings–including its “self-publishing services” and investing instead in founding your own small press as an LLC and legal entity.

ISBNs

First: if you want your print book on shelves in either bookstores or libraries, you’ll need an ISBN.

For this reason, corporate publishers–big publishers–definitely need an ISBN. Publishers who print books and ship them using the returns system need ISBNs. It’s how stock and sales are tracked (though to what end is unclear. The only bestsellers lists based on sales are those on the Kindle store and iBookstore). When you see any industry report noting anything regarding revenue, sales, or profits (like, for example, that ebook sales are plateauing), they are basing those reports on tracking ISBNs.

So, big question: are you a corporate publisher? Do you want your book on bookstore shelves or in libraries?

The answer to the former is likely no. You may want your book in bookstores or libraries, but know this: private, mom-and-pop bookstores tend to eschew independent authors (or “self-published,” as they’re likely to call them). One big reason is that most independent authors don’t (and perhaps can’t) offer returns, which is how bookstores do business.

(There are a lot of horror stories from mom-and-pop bookstores wherein independent authors have behaved badly to them, badgering them or berating them or just in general being awful. Don’t do that. If a private bookstore doesn’t want to host your reading/stock your book/etc., just go elsewhere. For the most part, arguing is just going to make you look bad, and they’ll unfortunately extend your behavior to all authors.)

If you want your book in bookstores or libraries, you probably need to seek publication through the corporate system. Query agents. Maybe you’ll get one, and maybe he or she will sell your book for a nice (though nowadays probably not “very nice”) advance, and you’ll get great marketing support and etc. It’s entirely possible.

These days you don’t need to have print books in actual bookstores to ensure that readers will find your stories. These days you can go to the major digital retailers to sell your book. The big five ebook retailers are Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Sony–to lesser extents there are a few other places like Diesel and such, but I think those big five cover it. Now, bonus question: guess how many of those retailers require you have an ISBN.

If you said “none,” congratulations. You’ve done your homework and research and you’re on your way. I’m proud of you. Well done.

It’s probably poetic justice that the big five corporate publishers in the print space are being supplanted by another big five, but there’s a big difference: if you want to sell your book on Kindle, you don’t have to find an agent, or attract a New York publisher, or anything. You can simply upload your book to any of those five places.

(And my recommendation is to do so directly. I think you’ll need an Apple product to upload to the iBookstore [I think iBooks Author is available for iPad, and you can create within its confines], but I think that’s about the only requirement among them. You can do so indirectly through a place like Smashwords, but the site will accuse you of vanity if you want to list yourself as the publisher, and your book will have to say Smashwords Edition, and a few other things–but honestly, I think it’s better to deal directly with the sites through whom you’re selling. So if you want to sell on Nook, just go directly to Nook. They all let you do so nowadays.)

Tracking

One of the big claims Bowker makes is that ISBNs are good for tracking.

Now, here’s a deficit in my knowledge of the system. I’ve only used ISBNs twice–for the print versions of The Prodigal Hour and Meets Girl. I picked up each one for ten dollars (I think) through CreateSpace. I don’t necessarily want the books in bookstores or libraries, but I did want readers to be able to buy a print version on Amazon, and for the extra ten bucks, I figured why the hell not?

I don’t know what information Bowker tracks about either book. I don’t know if it sees how people found the Amazon page, or if it can tell people who bought Meets Girl because it is listed as meta-fiction also bought other novels tagged as such. I don’t know if Bowker can see that both books have combined to sell, like, a half dozen copies tops in the two years they’ve been available (interrobang because ZOMG has it really been two years?!).

I don’t know if Bowker sees any of those things, but I know Amazon does. Through Author Central, I can see a lot of great data. About who’s bought those books, and from where, and track things like my author rank and et cetera. Amazon provides me lots of graphs with data collected from BookScan (in conjunction with or powered by Bowker, I believe), but I’ll be honest I rarely use them.

What I do use is Kindle. Through the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) site, I can see near-realtime sales data for all Exciting Press titles. How real time? I’d wager there’s maybe a five minute lag, tops. I know that, when I offer free promotions, I can literally refresh the page every second and watch the number of downloads increase by five or ten at a shot. It’s happened like that a couple of times.

Apple’s iTunes Connect allows for the same thing. I can see realtime data in a nice chart Apple graphs for me. Free and paid downloads on the iBookstore.

What’s interesting, and very important here, is that I can see those figures, but Bowker cannot.

None of the digital Exciting Press books have ISBNs. That means Bowker can’t see that we sold more than 5,000 copies last year, nor that nearly 50,000 readers downloaded our books. Not huge numbers, but I can’t imagine we were the only ones. Consider Hugh Howey and Wool. Hugely popular, phenomenally bestselling–and none of the Kindle versions serially published appear to have ISBNs. Enough of those sold that Howey climbed the top seller lists and struck a deal with Simon & Schuster. It appears not even the Omnibus collected edition has an ISBN–its page lists a Page Numbers Source ISBN, but that refers, as far as I know, to the ISBN of the source Amazon draws its Kindle Real Page Numbers function from (both Meets Girl and The Prodigal Hour list Page Numbers Source ISBNs for their ebooks, presumably because those pages are drawn from the pages in the CreateSpace print versions).

Amazon reported last year that something like a quarter of its top selling titles had been independent. I just looked, and as I write this, seven of the top 10 bestselling Kindle books on Amazon don’t have ISBN numbers.*

Bowker can’t see any of them. That means Bowker can right now see only 65% of the Kindle top 20. I’d go farther along the list to explore, but I think that’s damning enough. Even if giving Bowker the benefit of the doubt, all those stats and all that data about ebook sales plateauing and et cetera misses probably 30% of the market.

That’s a huge percentage that’s just totally not visible to them.

They’ll blame it on the authors and the company. “Well, if they’d use ISBNs, we’d be able to!” And I’m not saying that shouldn’t matter, but I see no compelling reason to get an ISBN.

They claim search visibility: books on Amazon show up just fine in Google and others.

Their website (I’m not linking) is just egregious about it. On their FAQ page:

Do I Need An ISBN To Publish My Book?

If you wish to sell your book, most vendors require an ISBN.

I guess they mean “most vendors besides Kindle, iBookstore, Nook Press, and Kobo,” but I also guess if they said that, people might notice that, no, one doesn’t need an ISBN to publish a book.

Founding Your Press & LLC

So you’re looking at Bowker’s prices. $250 for a block of 10 ISBNs. You can get 100 for $575, or best yet, 1000 for $1000.

It’s not an insignificant price.

Me, I think you’re better off taking the $1000 you’d buy for a block of 1000 (keep in mind Bowker maintains not only that all formats, like hard cover, paperback, and ebook, require their own ISBNs, but also that each digital format might, as well, so maybe one ISBN for your PDF and one for your ePub. So best case is that you need at least two ISBNs, one for a paperback and another for your ebook, and maybe a third for Kindle, and you’re going to want to publish more than one book, right? It adds up fast)

and going directly to a business lawyer who can help you complete the paperwork and filings necessary to become a limited liability company (LLC).

An LLC is a business entity. It keeps one’s private assets (like the house or car you own, or whathaveyou) separate from (business assets). It affects how you file taxes (and what the IRS looks for and at when you do).

Why would you want to do that? A couple reasons. If somebody sues you as a publisher, they can’t get your private assets. I don’t know why they’d sue you, but it’s a just-in-case scenario. You know, kind of like “Just in case a bookstore decides to overlook the fact that you’re an independent author and order a few copies of your book for its shelves.”

*

The most important advice I would give you as an independent author is to approach it as a business, and as a professional. Not “like a business,” but actually as one. Not “with professionalism” but as a professional. As such, things like legality are necessary considerations. I would recommend that, as a business professional, you do your research in advance, come up with a plan, and execute it strategically. That means carefully weighing all options. Me, I recommend saving costs when you can. I recommend not investing in areas where investment isn’t actually necessary.

That’s why I recommend against ISBNs. I recommend–if you’re going to publish independently–you use Mobipocket Creator to make your ebook and upload it to the KDP platform. If you want to upload to iBookstore, Nook, and Kobo, use Calibre to make that PRC into an ePub and upload it in those places. Between those four, congratulations: you’ve covered something like 95% of the ebook market.

I’d try to be more accurate there, but nobody knows how big the ebook market really is yet. Least of all Bowker.

—

*Based on a comment from Miral Sattar below, I went to seek out citation here.

I will note, however, that I think this is digression. My main claim is that you don’t need an ISBN to publish your book on any of the major digital retailers. Regardless of sales statistics and bestseller lists, that’s not going to change.

I think, sometimes, that such authors focus so much on being positive about the experience that others feel they have to highlight the disadvantages of not having corporate support for one’s book, and that’s fine. But sometimes I think that goes overboard, or maybe doesn’t consider the entire situation, and I think it’s important to.

Earlier this week, Tobias Buckell wrote about “survivorship bias” with regard to publishing, and specifically some data published by Smashwords. It’s here. He helpfully subtitles it “Why 90% of Writing Advice is Bullshit Right Now,” which makes me wonder if he considers the post advice and where he thinks it might fit in that statistic. The post specifically links to this article on survivorship bias, which is basically a warning against “advice from the successful.” Buckell’s argument seems to be that successful independent authors are the “survivovrs,” so we should be wary of thinking too much about their success or basing too much of our own strategies on theirs, because . . . I don’t know, to be honest. Their success isn’t yours. They’re outliers. Maybe. Something like that? He quotes:

Survivorship bias pulls you toward bestselling diet gurus, celebrity CEOs, and superstar athletes. It’s an unavoidable tick, the desire to deconstruct success like a thieving magpie and pull away the shimmering bits. You look to the successful for clues about the hidden, about how to better live your life, about how you too can survive similar forces against which you too struggle. Colleges and conferences prefer speakers who shine as examples of making it through adversity, of struggling against the odds and winning.

Which seems to me to be ironic, because “hybrid” authors are basically the “bestselling diet gurus, celebrity CEOS, and superstar athletes” of publishing.

Provided, I’m not sure they see themselves that way. But maybe that’s another aspect of bias.

A subsequent interview with Buckell throws the term “cult” at “self-publishing” (though, nicely, Buckell isn’t the one who uses it, which is somewhat of a relief).

Talk about your biases.

Buckell notes in a subsequent post “If reporters want to talk to the real interesting folk, it’s hybrids. I’m finding more and more wisdom in their moderate, hard-working voices.”

“Hybrid” authors tend to claim that “hybrid” publishing is the best way to go. “Try lots of different things,” they say. Here’s Chuck Wendig promoting the idea that “the hybrid author checks many, even all the boxes. The hybrid author refuses to walk one path, instead leaping gaily from path to path, gamboling about like some kind of jester-imp.”

Here’s the thing: check the “traditional publishing” box.

Go on. Check “get an agent, who finds you a corporate publisher, who offers you a small advance against (small) royalties while promising marketing support, albeit in nebulous ways.”

Check that box. I’ll wait.

You can’t.

Here’s the problem: it’s not about choice.

I’ve never seen any indie author claim that going indie is the “one true way” as so many “hybrid” authors argue it’s not (they’re right. It’s not. There’s no one true way. There are as many ways as there are authors, but that doesn’t get headlines, does it?).

Have indie authors claimed it’s the best way to begin a writing career? I’m not sure. I might have read Hugh Howey say something to that effect. I think a lot of independent authors might recommend doing so to others–though the admonition to do so only after proper research and preparation may too often be implicit, rather than explicit (and again, that doesn’t get headlines).

Being an author who moves fluidly among different options is, obviously, ideal. So is making a living from writing (most authors don’t) and selling more than 1000 copies (most books don’t).

If we lived in an ideal world, all the authors who wanted to be “hybrid” could be. If we lived in an ideal world, libraries would receive more funding than they’d know what to do with. If we lived in an ideal world, every copy of every print run of every book would sell completely out to such an extent that no bookseller would ever have anything to either remainder or return, and people would line up at bookstores’ doors before every Tuesday and load up their bags with all the new releases they could manage.

We don’t live in an ideal world.

And because we don’t live in an ideal world, considering options for what they are is important.

Except calling something an option implies a choice, and as we just mentioned, getting an agent, who finds a good editor at a big publisher with deep pockets for both an advance and marketing, is not something one can choose, only pursue.

I’m not saying an author shouldn’t choose to pursue that route. I mean, me, personally, I wouldn’t, but I’m not saying no one should. I know some authors want validation or big advances. I know some authors believe deeply in the idea of “just writing” and outsourcing marketing. Or whatever the motivation. Maybe the first adult novel they ever read was published by Random House and that’s just always been their dream. Who knows, and who am I to tell people what their motivations should be? Regardless of the motivation, if writers want to pursue that gleaming corporate contract, hey, cool beans.

Here’s my hypothesis: indie authors recommend independence so often because it is the choice writers can make. It’s not easy. It’s likely not lucrative (but what writing is?). The only “success stories” you really hear are the authors who sold eleventy billion books on Kindle and went straight to Simon & Schuster or Random House the moment either came knocking.

I’ve seen an agent claim that being independent is best for “control freaks,” but I think that belies that it’s good for authors who want to be active, and do things, rather than simply hope that people will enable or allow them to do things.

It’s not something to undertake lightly. It’s not something to try without first finding a good freelance editor, and doing a lot of research on how to do it. It requires a lot of work and effort, and a certain perspicacity. I don’t recommend doing it without those things.

But I do recommend it.

It’s not a “cult.” It’s not the “one true way” (there isn’t one). It’s simply a good option at a time when various factors have limited authors’ access to many more options. Maybe there are many paths, but let’s not pretend some of those paths haven’t been bricked up and blocked off. Let’s not pretend that authors can simply walk down any path they choose. Some of those paths have gates, and let’s not pretend that any author who chooses to knock on one of those gates will be granted entrance to the path beyond.

Let’s be honest, instead: maybe there is one true way in publishing, and it’s whatever way you take.

I find poetry is one of the most difficult types of writing to do well because it’s so concise and requires such restraint. The poems I find most effective are the ones that make you feel a beating, thrumming heart below a tightly controlled surface of beautiful words and rhythmic phrases–and that’s very nearly impossible to get right. Unlike so many other art forms, poetry doesn’t really come with formal rules–indeed, many will tell you that poetry has no rules, that it’s all about the feeling, you know, all about the phrases and the images and the way it feels in your mouth and your body and your heart and your spirit and . . .

They’re not wrong. There are some forms of poetry–sonnets, for example, or villanelles–that do come with requirements of their form. Some demand a specific placement of words or a certain number of lines.

Many more, however, do not, and I think that’s where the difficulty comes in. There are no formal requirements for free verse, and perhaps my experience of contemporary poetry is limited but pretty much all I see is free verse. Poetry slams. Readings that verge on performance art.

Some of it is great. Some of those performances are spectacular.

A lot more of it, and them, however, are not.

It’s a danger that comes when there are no rules and requirements. I think a lot of writers seek out rules because restrictions make it easier–they tell you what to do (or not) and provide a sort of checklist with easy tick boxes. “Don’t open your novel with the weather.” Check. “Make sure your query letter is personalized.” Check.

Etc.

When there are no rules, things become more difficult. I think that’s why poetry is so difficult for me; I’m one of those writers for whom being able to check something makes the process easier. It’s one of the reasons writing in three-act structure is so easy for me; plot point one? Check. Plot point two? Check. Inciting incident? Got it.

I think there’s only one poem in Bite Your Lip & other poems that has a form–a sonnet about Doctor Who. There’s another called “Soliloquies” that plays with several of Shakespeare’s plays, including “The Tragedie of Macbeth,” but it plays with them loosely, and while Shakespeare wrote–mainly–in iambic pentameter, my additions are more loose with that requirement.

I find most contemporary poetry is more loose with such formality. I know several people who devote their exploration of the form almost exclusively to sonnets, but they’re an exception to a general rule of people who are just digging it and writing it, you know? I see many more poets who wouldn’t know a double dactyl if it bit them on the ass and likely confuse it with a pterodactyl anyway.

Which is actually fine. Because really, not only is that knowledge not necessary to write a good poem, but the challenge of poetry is writing a good poem without form, without rules, and without guides. It’s more simple and straightforward to write with some competence when you can tick checkboxes; it’s far more difficult to do so when there aren’t any boxes to check, and I think it’s because those boxes introduce some restriction. They limit what you can and cannot do. Without those limits–however arbitrary they may be–the capacity to make bigger mistakes looms larger, but then, so too does the capacity to write something extraordinary.

I’ve written a lot of terrible poems. I’ve given terrible poetry to girls, and submitted terrible poetry to literary magazines. I’ve encountered “found poetry,” which is allegedly when a poet takes some amount of prose and introduces arbitrary line breaks for no real reason other than that poetry requires the breaking of lines.

I’ve seen a lot of great poetry, too. I’ve seen writers perform poetry that has made my jaw drop.

I like to think that none of the poems in “Bite Your Lip” fall into the ‘terrible’ category, while I simultaneously hope that they achieve the latter. Mostly, I’m sure, they tend to fall somewhere in between.

Which I think is the challenge of poetry. Without rules, without formality, both failure and success become more difficult, and honestly, quite a lot of what one is left with is mediocrity–not bad but neither great work that might not necessarily be flawed but neither quite achieves what it might.

Exciting Press is, for me, a deeply personal investment and enterprise. After a solid decade spent chasing the golden publishing ring of agent representation and ginormous bookdeals but generally finding nothing but (then-deserved) rejection, I became rather bitter. Now, candidly, it was then-deserved; a lot of the time I spent querying I focused on a novel that might be fun in its way but isn’t very good, and looking back I’m relieved it never saw the light of day. I’m relieved no paperback version of that story exists with my name on its spine. But for a long time I didn’t feel that way. For a long time all I felt was frustration and resentment.

This became particularly bad immediately after I earned a master’s degree in fiction and screenwriting from USC, at least partly because I knew, very deeply, that I’d gone to USC and become a better writer. I had a degree conferred by one of the top schools in the world. And I knew, looking at my prose, it wasn’t just competent; I’m a lot more confident in my style. It’s not to everyone’s liking–what is?–but I knew what I was producing was good.

And yet I was still getting rejections. The rejections were different, then; there were fewer forms, and more notes that my writing was good but there was uncertainty in the market. The market that supported Snooki and Twilight.

This isn’t about those.

This is about the moment I got a Kindle 3G, the one with the keyboard. This is about the moment I opened that simple cardboard box and held that new gadget in my hands and understood, at a visceral level, that suddenly everything I’d ever wanted was completely different than I’d ever realized. It was a moment when I realized I was studying business and marketing for a reason I hadn’t previously understood. I remember standing in my Jersey City apartment–so many of my life epiphanies regarding writing seem to have occurred in Jersey City apartments–and I started up my new Kindle, and I admired it, and then I went to my then-roommate–a girl who was then also my editrix and is now both my wife and Exciting Press’ executive editor–and I said, “I think–I think I can do this. I think I can make an ebook and sell it.”

And she said seven simple words: “Not before I read it you’re not.”

*

By then I’d already published a collection of short fiction, but it was more an experimental thing. The market for short fiction is crap; most of the time, short fiction is more about getting publication credits in some literary journal or other than about getting stories to readers. I never cared about publication credits, which was why, back in 2007, there wasn’t much risk involved in my publishing my self-titled debut collection on Lulu. It was a collection of short stories, fiction, and poetry; it was not work I was hoping to get representation for or sell. It was more of a calling card than anything.

Meets Girl was not. Meets Girl was a risk. It was a novel, and publishing it meant that I burned through first-publication rights. There was a time most agents and publishing professionals held that no publishers would touch a book after that. They’ve since been demonstrated completely wrong, but that wasn’t the case then.

Then, there was a risk, but it was a calculated risk and I was willing to take it. I could only have one debut novel, even if I’d already had a debut book, but then I realized I wasn’t interested in the debut idea. I’d always wanted a career, and I decided that publishing Meets Girl on Kindle would be a good next step.

This isn’t your usual success story. I published Meets Girl in November 2010.

Pretty much nothing happened.

I sold out of a limited-edition print pre-sale, but it was very, very limited. I serialized it here on this site and then published it on the Kindle store just after Thanksgiving.

It sold several hands full of copies.

I admit, there is a part of me that wishes here my story were different. Here is where my story could have gone all Locke-ian or Hocking-esque. I published a novel that did exceedingly well and made thousands of dollars straightaway.

My success story isn’t like that. But I’m realizing more and more that it is one nonetheless.

*

Meets Girl didn’t sell spectacularly well at first, but it did sell. It started out with some great support for which I’m grateful.

For a lot of authors, the big indie-to-corporate success story begins a few months after their work was published on Kindle; some agent or editor sees it high atop the lists, asks for a copy, sells it to Simon & Schuster.

A few months after I published Meets Girl, mine diverged when I published a review of Nick Earls’ Perfect Skin on my website. I included a mention to bring it to his attention when I tweeted the link.

And Nick and I got to chatting. Nick’s been one of my favorite authors since I read Perfect Skin in 2001. His work is funny and warm and real, and I read everything I could find. This was back before the days of Kindle; I perused ABE and other sites, searching for old paperbacks and editions published only in foreign lands. Some I still couldn’t find. I’d noticed Nick’s work wasn’t on Kindle, and I told him I might be able to help with that. I’d published a few things on Kindle already, and I was comfortable enough with the process I thought I could be of service.

A few days later, I was talking to Nick’s agent, the wonderful Pippa Masson at Curtis Brown Australia.

It was surreal to be talking to an agent about publishing an author’s work. I’d always been the author in question. And I still was an author, but I’d started publishing and could help her client, and we made arrangements for me to do exactly that. It took some legal legwork, lots of filing of paperwork, and then suddenly I had a company, Exciting Endeavors LLC, of which Exciting Press was a subsidiary, and I collaborated with an intellectual property lawyer on a license agreement that completely changed the publishing paradigm, and I brought that agreement to Nick and Pippa, and they suggested a few changes, and I suggested a few possibilities, and together we revised it and signed it and digitally shook hands and suddenly I was Nick Earls’ digital publisher in every region except Australia and New Zealand, where he already had a close relationship with a publisher.

Perfect Skin was included in those agreements.

I was ecstatic.

*

Exciting Press published half a dozen of Nick’s titles that December of 2011. We’d also published The Prodigal Hour that summer, and I published a handful of stories and essays, as well as an academic piece I wrote in college concerning Arthur Conan Doyle and William Carlos Williams.

That was 2011. We ended that year with Nick signed and a plan to build out a backlist. We had maybe a dozen titles.

By the end of 2012, we had nearly 40, and we’d signed James Brown, Darren Groth, Miya Kressin, Martin Lastrapes, and Kurt Wenzel. I’m talking right now to a fabulous and talented writer about signing her work and need to put together a publishing plan for her, and I’m looking forward to announcing that deal soon. We’ve got a lot of stories, novellas, novels, and essays available, with more to come.

Last year, our books combined for nearly 50,000 downloads and 5000 sales. Our revenue grew by several thousand percent, and I expect it will keep doing so. Of course, if you work that math out, you won’t be incorrect to point out that that averages out to not much more than 125 sales per title, but the caveat is that a lot of titles–e.g., the academic essay I published–sell pretty much no copies at all. Some are the very definition of niche titles and have limited appeal, but let’s be honest; even the business model used by corporations factors in that some books will sell very few copies while some very few others will sell a bunch. People note all the time that the vast success of one or two titles allows a big corporation to support a smaller title that won’t sell in numbers so high, and that’s no different here. A couple of our titles sold several hundred copies each. A couple of our titles were bought only once or twice over the course of the entire year.

We now have Nick’s story “Welcome to Normal” live on both iOS and Kindle for free, always (in most territories). We’re hoping “All Those Ways of Leaving” will soon join it.

By the end of last year, Nick’s Perfect Skin reached the top 100 paid chart, which was huge for us. For an hour at least, Perfect Skin was the number 100 bestselling novel on all of Amazon. It slipped, perhaps, but we can’t underestimate how many new readers are finding the work. We’re already expanding to the iBookstore and will continue to do so.

We’re not putting up numbers like Konrath or Howey, but we are gaining numbers every day. Readers downloaded our books nearly 50,000 times during 2012; it’s only April of 2013 and already we’ve managed half that many. We’re on pace to surpass it. We’re also on pace to surpass both individual and overall sales; we already are, year over year, and I anticipate that growing into the iBooks market will only help that along.

Even more important, however, and one of the reasons I wanted to write this and share this story, is that it’s not all about sales. Exciting Press, even as a whole, doesn’t have numbers like Konrath or Locke, but we don’t write books like that, either. It’s frustrating to see so much of the narrative regarding independent publishing—often called “self-publishing”—revolve solely around sales, because there’s so much more to reading and books than bestsellers. We’re playing a longer game—one that doesn’t consider shelf life or print runs in its strategy but rather overall quality of experience and engagement. Don’t take me wrong that we don’t ultimately hope to reach countless readers, but our priorities here and now are great stories and great writing at great prices.

Along the way, we’ve completely up-ended the business model of publishing. In the old corporate system, authors found agents, who negotiated with big publishers regarding the sale of rights, which publishers purchased by offering an advance against royalties. Meaning that an author who received a $5000 advance (which is fairly common) would not see a dime of royalty until after the novel in question had made that much in royalties—not in revenue, or profit, but actually in royalties. After the $5000 in royalties had been earned, authors might receive something like 10% or 15% of sales, so long as the publisher retained the rights, which publishers generally did until those rights reverted back to the author. Some authors had to pay for that to happen.

Further, in the previous model, publishers sent books to bookstores, who could display books for sale for a certain period of time (say, three months), and then return any unsold copies to publishers without having to pay for them. Those returns counted against income/royalties.

Or something close to. Because honestly, I think it barely makes sense even if you know the system. Publishing contracts are huge long documents, pages after pages of legalese, with publishers doing everything they can to exploit the work as much as they can but pay as little as they can to do so.

And I think it’s crap.

Maybe because I started as an author. Maybe because I became an author mainly so that I could read the books I wanted to read that didn’t exist yet (so I had to write them). Everything I do as an author serves my desires as a reader, and everything I do as a publisher serves what I want as an author.

If I were an author, I’d want to keep my rights. All of them. Advances are nice, but I always said that I wanted to get a huge advance just so I could reinvest the money in publicity, promotions, and marketing, because from everything I’d ever heard—and now everything I ever see—publishers’ marketing strategies could be far more effective. And especially now, when digital and social media are both becoming so important.

And I started to think about what I’d want. I wouldn’t want to give up my rights, but I’d license them. I’d want to focus on digital—after getting a Kindle, I haven’t set foot in a bookstore in years. An advance would be nice, but I’d be happy enough to have higher royalties.

Most of all, as an author, I’d want to participate. I wouldn’t want to just hand in a manuscript and hope for the best. I’d want to be involved in cover design and even developing marketing strategy. I’d want my book in the hands of a good editor—and one who was trained as such, and studied writing and stories and fiction, not simply managed to land a good internship and stick around.

And so that’s what I decided to build.

Exciting Press uses a license agreement; as publisher, Exciting Press licenses as-exclusive-as-I-can get global digital rights from each author signed, and after launch year, that license lasts seven years. In exchange for that seven-year license, we give authors 70% of all net revenue from every sale. We focused on Kindle initially, and what that meant was that for every novel we sold at $4.99, Amazon took 30%, and we took 30% of what was left, and everything else went to the author. In addition, we do all editing, coding, formatting, and designing. And so far as marketing, we do the best we can with what we’ve got. All of the money we’ve taken in so far has gone either right back to the author or to advertising opportunities we’ve found.

You might notice neither advances nor returns factor into that business model. We’re pretty happy about that.

We’re an equal partner, and what we aim to do is sign only those books we believe so deeply in we want to be part of their development and growth out there in the world. So far, the authors we’ve signed have come mainly from either invitation or referral; we’re too focused on our authors to read submissions. And our authors are equal partners; many offer cover suggestions and design tweaks, and all are proactive about getting work out there and engaging with readers.

Because that’s the thing, and why I had to tell this story rather than write another press release. Publishing is a button. Amazon has ensured that getting work out there requires nothing more than a laptop, some software, and an Internet connection. What matters, then, is not getting books published but rather writing great stories and then developing a relationship with readers—which we all are. It’s not just throwing as many titles as one can up onto the platform of one’s choice and hoping readers find them; it’s about knowing authors and listening to them and their readers and enhancing the relationship between the two. We don’t want to be a middle-man; we want to be a facilitator. We want to strengthen and deepen authors’ relationship with their readers, however we can.

So far, we think it’s working. We’re Exciting Press. We’re independent, digital literature, and we want to be your favorite publisher by introducing you to your next favorite author. And we have some stories we’d like you to meet . . .

Sequels are notoriously difficult movies to make–it’s the rare sequel that turns out to be better than its predecessor. And where sequels are difficult, second installments in trilogies are nearly impossible. The few shining examples–The Empire Strikes Back, for example–only highlight how difficult it is to make a proper second installment.

The problem is mainly one of structure, and especially when filmmakers have a lucid vision for an actual trilogy–say what you will about George Lucas, but the Star Wars trilogy had a directed vision behind it, and its story was nearly perfectly executed. The challenge of any trilogy’s second film is the continuity it must provide while at the same time sacrificing the story elements that often make first and third installments so successful. First installments have the advantage of setting up a story and a world, and they most often tell a self-contained story while nodding to the larger thematic elements that will carry all three (as in Star Wars). Third installments have the advantage of climax and resolution. They’re the movie where the previously set-up elements pay off, where growth occurs and change happens.

Sequels don’t have those advantages. They, by definition, don’t generally stand on their own. They tend to be bookended by two stories that may not necessarily be better, exactly, but which in general contain the superficial elements that make them appear better. The challenge is to continue the story and to delve more deeply into the thematic elements it involves while at the same time acknowledging that you aren’t really moving toward resolution–only setting up the actions by which the protagonists will, ultimately, find resolution.

The Empire Strikes Back is a fine example of this. It’s the second in the Star Wars trilogy–and the only one not written and directed by Lucas himself; Leigh Brackett and Irvin Kershner did the honors, respectively. It doesn’t have the advantage of being the set-up for the movie, and it leaves very little in the way of resolution. In fact, its arc is that Luke–Lucas’ hero/protagonist–has a vision to visit Yoda to receive Jedi training, and meanwhile his allies are captured by Darth Vader, who uses them to set a trap for Luke. It’s a darker movie than its trilogy brethren, and ends on a more somber note after the revelation that Vader is Luke’s father (and the loss of Luke’s hand).

And now that I’ve seen The Dark Knight Rises, I think there are a lot of similarities between the two. In fact, I think there are a lot of similarities between the movies Lucas and Nolan made, solely by virtue of the fact that they both seem to be telling incarnations of the hero origin story–the monomyth, as Joseph Campbell calls it. And I think that while The Empire Strikes Back is a better sequel in its own franchise, I actually think that the Dark Knight trilogy might just be the finest committed to film, overall, ever, and with the most amazing antagonist:

Batman.

*

Irvin Kershner taught the first writing for film class I ever attended. While it was mostly a screenwriting class, and indeed we all wrote pages of screenplay to fulfill its requirements, it was about more than simply screenwriting (the screenwriting course came later, and was taught by Syd Field). Kershner took “Writing for Film” to mean exactly that: writing for purposes of imagery, theme, and tone. We often participated in micro-exercises during which we’d choose an image and describe it in as close and precise a detail as was possible–using only objective, descriptive language.

One of my classmates was working on a horror script in which the protagonist had multiple personality disorder and so was the antagonist as well. Kersh never cottoned to the idea–he thought it didn’t work, in terms of cinema and story. The protagonist, he argued, required an outward manifestation of antagonism, because fighting one’s self wasn’t something that could be well conveyed on the silver screen.

That same year, serendipitously, the Star Wars trilogy was released in a limited-edition DVD that included both the original movies that ran in the theaters as well as the new editions Lucas had digitally altered. I purchased all three almost immediately. A few weeks later, after the class had ended (and after I’d ask Kersh to sign my copy of The Empire Strikes Back), I watched The Empire Strikes Back with Kersh’s commentary.

There is a scene during Empire when Luke is tested. He goes into a cave and there meets Darth Vader. After a brief skirmish, Luke lightsabers off Vader’s head. He stands panting for a moment, staring down at that helmet. As an audience, we first see the helmet, but then there’s a flash as the helmet’s mask disappears to reveal Luke’s own face.

Having just taken that class and having heard Kersh’s argument, it was hysterical to hear him explain “Luke is his own worst enemy!”

I think that’s one of the reasons Empire succeeds like it does. Kersh understood that, though Darth Vader and the Emperor are big bads, the whole story is Luke becoming a hero. Struggling with confidence issues, and then arrogance issues, before finally himself becoming a Jedi.

And I think that’s why Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy succeeds in the way it does, on all the levels it does. I think Nolan was trying to tell a similar monomyth. Down to the characters themselves: where Luke has Obi Wan, Bruce Wayne has Alfred and Lucius. Rachel is Bruce’s Leia, in a way: a woman Luke wants to live up to (before Lucas realized/decided they were siblings).

Those aren’t perfect, obviously, but I think there are some analogues. Most of all, though, thinking of Nolan’s trilogy as a consideration of the monomyth of the Hero’s Journey casts new light on the second installment, The Dark Knight.

It took me a long time to warm to The Dark Knight. I didn’t love the movie at first, and I’m still not sure I do though I do find it compulsively watchable whenever it’s on. Ledger is magnetic as the Joker, for sure, but my problem had always been that there was no “there” there in the Joker. Okay, he wanted chaos. Some men just want to watch the world burn. He wanted some people on boats to blow up some other people on boats.

Blah blah blah.

But seeing the full trilogy made me consider not his motivations but his character’s role in the story. One thing about superheroes is that stories involving them typically reverse the protagonist/antagonist dynamic. In stories, the people who want something are protagonists, and antagonists are the people who work against their getting what they want. In most superhero stories, then, superheroes are antagonists to villains’ protagonists. Superheroes hang around being super until there’s a crime for them to prevent. Most don’t actively want to make the world a better place; they simply want to keep it from getting much worse.

Nolan achieves something much more subtle in his trilogy. His Batman is a combination of protagonist and antagonist, mainly because of the way Nolan deftly wove Thomas Wayne’s ambitions into the story and then passed them on, in some ways, to Bruce. Bruce doesn’t have the ambition or drive of his father to make Gotham a better place; in fact, his ambitions and drives are much darker, as evidenced by his alter-ego. He wants people to fear him, and in so doing wants to try to clean up the city by scaring its shadier elements.

To a degree it works.

The problem, though, is that Batman is Bruce’s demons given form. Batman is Bruce’s deepest fears and angers and hatreds made manifest behind a cape and a cowl.

But looking at the hero’s journey structure, looking at the characters and their roles in the story, more dynamics and conflicts reveal themselves. Bruce stops Ra’s al Ghul from destroying Gotham in Batman Begins, but in so doing has to give up being Bruce Wayne to become Batman. It may not be overstating to propose that in the context of Nolan’s story and structure, Batman is Bruce Wayne’s Darth Vader.

And then there’s the Joker.

*

The Joker, in this analogy, becomes Bruce’s Yoda.

Maybe he’s the malevolent version. Maybe he’s Yoda if Yoda had gone Sith instead. But invert the Star Wars story, or at least skew it so it more closely parallels The Dark Knight trilogy: imagine if, after finding Owen and Beru incinerated, Luke had trained extensively to use his Jedi powers to instill fear rather than to fight evil. Imagine if he’d assumed a cape and a cowl . . .

The two trilogies are sort of two sides of the same coin. When the Joker and Batman are in the interrogation room, imagine it as though a more antagonistic Yoda were confronting a Luke who’d harnessed the power of the Sith to fight the Empire. Luke, who thought his power and will were strong enough to use fear and intimidation without himself giving into it, but discovering more and more along the way that that wasn’t the case.

Through the Star Wars trilogy, Luke is constantly tempted to come to the Dark Side. Even in the end, the Emperor is attempting only to anger him, to make him give in to the hatred, to succumb to the Dark Side and use his power to end the Emperor once and for all, and who knows if it might not have actually worked if not for the final moments when, during a moment of redemption, the caped and cowled entity Luke was totally in danger of becoming didn’t save Luke’s life? Bruce Wayne gave in to that anger and hatred and fear.

Which means that the drive of the movie, the arc of the hero and trilogy, is for Bruce to come to terms with his demons and to ultimately reject the identity he himself created. If Bruce begins his journey in fear, searching externally for something, the end of his story must be his finding inner peace and giving up the mantle of the bat.

Which he does. There is both the death and resurrection necessary for the hero’s journey monomyth.

I wonder, too, about the title itself. The title of the final installment is The Dark Knight Rises. The shot that ends it and brings its story into darkness? An image of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character rising on the concealed platform Wayne had built. Gordon-Levitt’s Blake, in fact, seems an anti-parallel to Bruce Wayne: where Bruce Wayne succumbed to darkness and then fought his way to redemption, Blake tried to work within the system until the system failed him, and may now assume the mantle Wayne left behind.

It’s not just a brilliant inversion but also a brilliant treatment of myth.

Well. If it’s true. It may not be. This is all just how I interpreted it, besides as a trio of awesome movies, even if it took me a long time to realize the strength of that notoriously difficult second installment. I think it’s worth noting, though, that understanding the context of the film and its relation to the overall story was what revealed its strengths.

I published my first book, a self-titled debut collection no longer available, in 2007 during my first full year studying writing at USC. Back then, I had a Hewlett-Packard laptop, and I wrote the entire collection and laid it out in Microsoft Word. I used Photoshop for the cover.

I’d already had experience publishing by then; for the three years before, I’d been assistant editor of two nursing journals. I’d used programs like Quark Xpress and Adobe InDesign. Working knowledge of those two programs was not just helpful but integral to making that book back then.

That’s no longer true, because publishing has changed so much. Honestly, I can’t imagine why anyone would want a PDF for digital publishing, which means several of those programs are no longer useful (a PDF is arguably necessary for CreateSpace, which I think is the best POD service available).

So you want to publish. What do you need?

You need a computer. That’s probably the most expensive thing you’ll need and the one you can’t get around, but I’d wager you already have one, because you’re already reading this on it. I’d wager chances are the computer you have can handle just about everything I’m going to recommend throwing at it. Now, admittedly, if you’re on a computer that’s more than a few years old, some of the programs might be slow. Photoshop, for example. But slow doesn’t mean “unable to run.”

You’ll first need word processing, and Microsoft Word is the most popular program by far. Up until just a year or so ago, it’s the only program I used. In fact, Microsoft’s Office Suite was all I used. It came with Excel and Powerpoint, which I used for my MBA. It was useful and nearly universal, and it was reasonably priced. Chances are you won’t find anyone anywhere who can’t open a .doc file (that’s what Microsoft Word saves a document as).

You can get it at Amazon for about $100.

Seems to include Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. It’s not a bad deal.

More than you want to spend?

If you have a Mac, Apple sells its Pages word processor for far less. $30. Of course, you’ll have to buy Numbers and Keynote (Apple’s Excel and Powerpoint, respectively), for the same suite you’d get from Microsoft Office, but let’s be honest: for publishing most things, you’ll never need more than a Word Processor to start with.

The other alternative? Apache’s Open Office suite. It’s free. It includes an open-source suite, and it looks like it works on both PC and Mac. Now, using open-source software, you’re trading in the security of knowing a company like Apple or Microsoft supports it; if you need help with Open Office, chances are you’ll have to ask other, more advanced users.

Still, it’s free.

Interestingly, you don’t need all that. You can simply use a text editor. This Lifehacker post on Text Editors is old but still mostly relevant, I think. Pretty much any plain text editor, nowadays. Used to be word processing was great because it allowed you to apply styles and italics and et cetera to a manuscript, but now we’re not making a manuscript. We’re building an ebook, and when we use italics, we have to code them.

Coding

After you’ve written your novel (or story. Or poem) in whatever word processing program you chose, you’ll want to save it as an html file. That’s usually labeled as “Save as webpage” or something like that. But doing so will give you either an .html file or a folder that includes an .html file, and that’s pretty much all you need.

When I worked on a PC, I used Notepad++ here. It’s free. You open your html file using Notepad++, and then you edit the code itself. You apply html tags to italicize or embolden or whatnot.

Since I’ve switched to a Mac, I tend to use DreamWeaver at this step, for a simple reason; there’s a specific command that makes DreamWeaver take out all the extraneous code Microsoft Word puts in.

Adobe’s DreamWeaver is basically web design software. It’s part of Adobe’s Creative Suite. It’s expensive. Something like two grand, maybe more.

If I weren’t using DreamWeaver, I’d use Text Wrangler. I still sometimes do, even. It’s free. It allows code editing capabilities for Mac.

Cover

After I’ve finished the html file of a book, I set it aside to find a photo.

You can use a site like Fotolia.com. They sell stock art images, and they’re not very expensive.

Me, I go to Flickr. And I go to advanced search, and search only for images licensed under creative commons and labeled for commercial reuse and modification. Basically, that means I can use someone’s picture and alter it in any way I want so long as I credit the photographer in the book. Going to Flickr and using creative commons images is free.

After I’ve found my image (or, sometimes, several), I go to Photoshop. I used to use Photoshop when I was on a PC, too. It’s a terrific, robust program. It’s also expensive. It’s part of that Creative Suite I just mentioned.

A good alternative program, though, is GIMP (that’s Gnu Image Manipulation Program). It’s free and, like Open Office, open-source. The interface isn’t quite as streamlined or intuitive as Photoshop’s, but it’s robust and it’s what I’d be using if I weren’t using Photoshop.

Ebook Building

So I’ve got my html file. And I’ve got my .jpg of my cover.

If you’re on a PC, this part’s easy. You can do no better than MobiPocket Creator. It’s intuitive, easy to use, and it creates a PRC you can upload directly to Amazon. It’s perfect, really. There’s nothing better.

It’s so perfect, in fact, I refuse not to use it, even though there’s no version available for Mac. What I ended up doing was using Parallels, a program that enables one to run Windows programs on a Mac. I run a virtual Windows 7 machine solely to use Mobipocket Creator.

Now you have a PRC. You can also download Calibre, which in addition to being fantastic ebook management software is also a perfect way to convert that PRC you just created into an ePub.

Now you have a PRC and an ePub. You can sign up for a free KDP account to upload your files to Amazon and sell them there, or a free PubIt account to upload your ePub to Barnes & Noble.

*

And that’s it.

So you see, it can cost either a lot or a little. And truth be told, while my current rig is a Macbook Pro with 8gb of RAM that runs a Windows virtual machine and has Adobe CS5 (as well as Final Draft and several other programs), I genuinely believe I could do exactly what I’m doing to exactly the same quality using that old HP I brought with me to Los Angeles and USC. Some of the programs are now a bit more sophisticated, and my skill in using them has certainly developed, but at the same time, that development and sophistication came mainly with time, not money.

So now you see you can do it.

Should you?

Well, that’s a whole other can of worms. I can’t answer that question for you; it’s one you need to address yourself.

Funny thing: I never stop writing. Haven’t stopped now. Been busy. Since April, Exciting Press has published like a dozen titles. Some mine, most not. And that’s on top of the fact that I moved in late July, but spent all of June and July doing so (June was packing, July was preparing the new house to be lived in). My fiancee and I purchased a house we have to reno a bit, so that’s meant new floors and new paints and new fixtures.

It’s been a lot of fun work I’m proud of. Few things are as empowering as installing a new ceiling light fixture.

And when I get busy, blogging’s always the first thing to go. Probably because I hate the word (“blog”? Blech), but also because it feels like it requires way more effort to be way more ephemeral. Even the sites that attract millions of readers every month require new posts every day (if not every hour), which means older stuff falls by the wayside and disappears from immediacy. And given the choice, I’d rather focus on what doesn’t. The Prodigal Hour won’t fall by the wayside. It may languish in obscurity and one day be forgotten, but it’s a novel, whole on its own and always ready to be discovered.

Every time I start to think I want to post something, I lose interest or over-analyze it. I posted a lot about publishing and Amazon and Kindle and marketing, but those things are really only of interest to other authors, not readers. Those things are probably utterly boring to readers.

And I loathe the idea of boring people, and that’s why I stop.

Which I suppose is why I’ve begun to concentrate more on actually getting work out there. I’ve always liked the aphorism that one could be known by one’s work, and honestly, if I could be known for writing and Exciting Press, that’s all I’d want. I could talk more about craft and fiction and writing, but then, do I want to be known as a great writer, or a great teacher of writing?

Of course: why not aim at both?

Maybe I will. Or maybe I’ll ignore it. Again. Because there’s always renovation, and another story to code. Right now we’re fixing up the house while planning our wedding. And then there will come the holidays and the honeymoon. We’ll see.

I updated the look and the feel here, wondering if that’ll help encourage direction forward. And by that I mean help me figure out what I want to do with this site, if anything at all.

Both have taught me a lot about the market for short stories, and why Kindle might just be the best way to target that market.

When I first published my self-titled collection in March 2007, one of my reasons for doing so was that I’d written several short stories and essays at USC, all of which I thought were strong and worth sharing. The problem, as I saw it, was that the options for sharing seemed limited; at the time, websites and online literary magazines were either nonexistent or nascent, the app store didn’t yet exist, and the print world seemed a problem, too.

With print, it seemed to me that there were two (three, at most) options: either one submitted to tiny literary magazines only writers who submit to them have ever really heard of and got paid in contributor copies if one got paid at all, or one submitted instead to one of the big glossies, like The New Yorker or The Atlantic, which pay well and reach a wider readership, for sure, but I imagine I don’t need to tell you how difficult it is to get work accepted there. The chances are astronomical, and one reason is because that’s where all the best writers in the world send stories. There are myriad other reasons besides, I’m sure.

The third option split the two, to some degree: smaller literary magazines that paid, perhaps, a couple hundred bucks and probably even made it to the periodicals shelves at Barnes & Noble.

Back then, I thought maybe I could figure out a better way. Five years later, I’m rather convinced I have.

I tend to go back to reasons and motivations. One major reasons (besides maybe some cash, and maybe some validation) writers submit to those aforementioned publications is the credit of having been published there in the first place. Those publication credits make the biographical section of query letters to agents stand out. If your introduction and synopsis caught an agent’s attention, the fact that you’ve been published in one of those magazines makes queries even more attractive. That’s the general belief, anyway.

That seems well and good, but for me personally . . . that’s not where my motivations are. I’m not sure I’ve ever taken a job just because I thought it would look good on my resume at some point. Mostly, I’ve taken jobs because I thought I could do them well, and they seemed interesting and challenging.

So when it came time to figure out how to get short stories out there, publication credits were never really part of my motivation. I don’t tell stories for publication credit. I tell stories hoping they find readers and hopefully entertain/move/inform them in whatever ways they might.

Back in 2007, there was no good way to do it. My collection did well over five years, don’t get me wrong, but I always had the sense it was really close to what I’d wanted to do but not quite there yet.

This has now changed.

Five years after its publication, I took that collection down, broke it apart, and published pretty much everything in it, somehow, in a new way, with new work. For example, there were five pieces of flash fiction in the collection: they became How the World Will End & other flash fiction, a $2 nano-collection with all five stories contained therein. The two stories focused on C. Auguste Dupin and the death of his creator became Jamais Plus: Explorations of the Curious Case of the Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe.

I think this works well for a number of different reasons, the most major of which is diversity. Rather than only having two novels available for purchase, readers who browse my work (what? It could happen) have options. If they’re interested in poetry, they have four different titles. Non-fiction? Three collections of essays and an academic exploration of the history of medical education and its influence on two prominent writers.

That diversity is not limited solely to format and genre, either, and I feel neatly sidesteps a debate a lot of writing and publishing insiders are having with regard to ebook pricing. Basically: theories abound, but it’s all over the place. You have a camp who feels 99c is a great price for an ebook while another fears 99c ebooks devalue authors, stories, and writing. Then you have the camp who feels (rightly) that the cost of an ebook is about more than just the materials in it (mainly because there aren’t any materials in it). And then there’s the DoJ accusing corporate publishers of colluding to raise ebook prices to $9.99 and higher (evidence seems strong to support the DoJ’s argument).

Me, I think ebooks are a lot like mass market paperbacks. They’re cheap to produce and hopefully they’ll sell as well, and I remember back when the cost of a mass market paperback increased from $6.99 to $7.99. I was disappointed. Suddenly I couldn’t buy as many books as I wanted, which meant I didn’t read as much as I wanted. Which is one reason I like the $4.99 price for a novel. I know how much was invested into the book in terms of education, time, and editing, and I feel it’s a fair price.

And for all the people who love 99c ebooks, there’s plenty there. Two short stories. And that’s only my stuff. Exciting Press has half a dozen short stories available for 99c.

And you know what? Not only do they sell well, but their sales have increased every month since we published them, and so have the sales of our other work. That’s why we picked up Martin Lastrapes’ short stories, and Miya Kressin’s trilogy of novellas.

It ties directly into this New York Times article, “Writer’s Cramp: In the E-Reader Era, a Book a Year Is Slacking”. Because one major idea I noticed was missing from that article was that, now, short stories and novellas are books, too. Since signing Nick Earls and publishing half a dozen of his titles in December alone, Exciting Press has grown to include nearly 30 titles already, and my wager is we’ll manage to publish 50 during our first year alone. One other major note: one doesn’t need to write multiple titles every year so much as it’s helpful to have them published and available.

And really, that helps grow careers. Which is why I think Kindle is so great as a new market for short stories. In sheer terms of discoverability, access, and ubiquity, it’s a powerful engine that attracts not just sales but, more importantly, new readers. It’s much more agile, too. Because here’s the thing: you could write a short story, edit it, get it edited by a qualified editor, submit it to magazines, wait, get rejected, revise, submit again, wait again, get rejected again, revise again, submit again, send again . . .

Or you could write that story, edit it, get it edited by a qualified editor, revise it, and then submit it Kindle Direct Publishing and have it up for sale all over the world in two days.

They’re the words that ended my review of Nick Earls’ Perfect Skin, and, in some part, they’re the words that are the reason I can link that title to the page on Amazon where you can purchase Perfect Skin for your Kindle (at the time of this writing, it’s still in process at Barnes & Noble, but you’ll soon be able to purchase it for Nook, too).

I wrote them here, in a review of Perfect Skin I posted on April 8, 2011, a little more than a year ago now. When I tweeted the link to that review, I included an “@” to Nick himself. Mainly because I hoped he might like hearing how deeply his novel had touched someone, and how much it had meant.

(Rereading that review, I’m surprised that the degree to which I enjoyed it seems . . . a bit subdued. I wrote positively of it, and I used words like “poignant,” but I don’t think it comes through how much I loved it.)

That review and tweet got Nick and I talking. A few weeks later, I was talking to his agent. A few weeks after that, I was talking to a lawyer and making Exciting Press a legal entity, a real company that could license Nick’s books for digital distribution in pretty much every region and territory besides Australia and New Zealand. A few weeks after that, agreements were signed, and Exciting Press was publishing Monica Bloom and The Magnificent Amberson and several short stories.

And now, we’ve published Perfect Skin.

And I love it.

I can’t very well review it on Amazon now. I’m no longer just its reader. But I became its publisher because I believe in it so deeply. And I can think of no other way to express how much I love this book than by noting that love hasn’t diminished even though I’ve now published it. Which might sound strange, but I think most writers have moments when, on its way to publication, they become almost tired of a manuscript. They’ve read it front and back and sideways. They’ve read galleys and marked notes, and the everything starts getting hazy and loses the vibrance and sheen of the newly told tale. They’re usually grateful they already moved on to something new before they submitted the book, and if they haven’t they’re ready to.

I mention that because I think I might have read Perfect Skin for at least the dozenth or so time these past few weeks. I’d read it several times in hardcover. It was a book I’d return to once in a while, thrice or so over ten years.

And then we signed some agreements, and I was publishing it, and I suddenly had to read it a lot more closely. I suddenly had to consider altering a few things. Nothing major. I had to consider readers, and how they read dialog. I had to consider the regions, and their needs. I changed “car parks” to “parking lots,” and a shareholders’ card to a discount card, and traded a “z” for an “s” in several spots.

I had to do that half a dozen times. There always seemed to be a quotation mark the eluded me. A hyphen that somehow leapt out of the text even though I was quite certain I’d coded it in.

And despite that closeness, that proximity, I still love it. I should be dying to move on to the next work (actually, I already have. There’s always more to publish), but I’m not. I’m still smiling about Perfect Skin. I’m still talking about it every chance I get. I’m still telling people “And Holy Hell, now I’m publishing one of my favorite novels of all time, and how amazing is that?”

And they all agree it’s pretty amazing. Because it is.