Timothy's Thoughts

   Pencil Drawing  P ublishing a coloring book seems like it might be a fun thing to do. I saw an article on eHow [1] in which Lesley Barker gave a process for doing it, starting with purchasing ISBNs from Bowker. From there, the article pretty much gave the general self-publishing process, with the exception of number two, which said to scan your artwork into the computer and save it as a jpeg. Lesley Barker’s article falls well short of a complete description of what must be done to publish a coloring book. Obtaining an ISBN and selecting a publishing company (a choice that will determine whether you even need to purchase an ISBN or not) are the least of your worries if you plan to publish a coloring book.  Ink Tracing of Pencil Drawing  The heart of a coloring book are the pictures. Creating a coloring book isn’t as simple as grabbing some of the free coloring sheets you find online and binding them in a book. Not only would it be illegal for you to copy ...

T here’s an innocence that exists before you publish a book. I’ll tell you right now that the first and second books I published were written with the intention of self-publishing them. To be quite honest, self-publishing intrigued me (still does) and I needed some material to feed through the process. But one of the things I’ve noticed is that people working on their first book have no clue when it comes to publishing. Almost universally, they have this idea that all they have to do is to write their book, send it off to the publisher and it’ll be in the stores before long. And though their hopes are dashed quickly after they finish their book, I keep encountering people who say, “I’m almost finished with my book and I’m going to look into a publisher soon.” I don’t think we have much opportunity to educate these people. I suppose some of us novelists could write stories about authors seeking publication, but I’m not sure that even that would reach all of these people. But there’s so...

M y research on the subject is by no means scientific, but my observations indicate that most authors aren’t interested in learning how to write, just in getting whatever they’ve written published. I base that statement on the fact that I get far more traffic and comments from people looking for information about getting published than the people who are looking for ways to improve their own writing. I have naïvely hoped that by posting about writing I would be able to spur some discussion about writing. I thought maybe someone would disagree with me on a few things and it would get interesting, but that has not been the case. What I have found, however, is that people are very interested in posts I’ve written about the details of getting published. Let’s face it folks, getting published is easy and cheap. With a little knowhow, you can get anything you want published in book form and available for sale around the world within a few days. But convincing other people that they want to ...

I recently saw a discussion about whether book two is easier to get published than book one. From my point of view, I think it is pretty obvious that it is. Just look at it in terms of years. If it takes ten years for an author to get the first book published and the contract for book two is in place even before book one reaches the shelves then it is obvious that the author didn’t have as much trouble getting the second published. But let’s look at why this is. The first reason is that the author already has an agent. Agents don’t really like signing new clients. What they really want is for their existing clients to make them tons of money. Life would be much easier for agents if they had seven clients who were making enough to live on rather than having twenty clients who are scraping by. If the agent has a client that a publisher liked in the past, the agent is going to push for publishers to publish that client again. An author with a traditionally published book is more likely t...

W e looked at what it costs for a publisher to publish a book, which turns out to be about $50,000, but what does it cost for the author to publish a book? Let’s not make this a comparison between traditional publishing and self-publishing. Let’s instead focus our attention on publishing via the traditional route. Going this route, the saying is that money should always flow toward the author and what I would like to look at is how much money should be flowing toward the author. Let’s say it takes the author four weeks to write the book and the author makes a wage of 22.5 dollars an hour. I realize that many people take longer than that, but Agatha Christie said a month was plenty of time to write a book and we don’t want to get greedy. That puts the labor cost of writing the novel at $3,600. You’re going to need an agent and we are told that to get an agent you will need to attend some conferences. Let’s send you off to a conference like ACFW. By the time you account for conference fe...

E arlier I reviewed Thomas Nelson’s WestBow Press . My primary focus was on the quality of book an author using that service would get. I didn’t review either of the books for content and I don’t intend to, unless I read one of them and decide I like it. In which case, I’ll be happy to give the author a plug. Today, I want to do the same thing I did before, but I want to focus my attention on a couple of books published by Harlequin’s DellArte Press. I also want to identify differences between DellArte Press and WestBow Press. The books I purchased are Dargan’s Desire by Wendy Young and Half-Breed by Phylly Smith. You can’t tell by the picture, but these books are smaller than there WestBow Press brethren. The WestBow Press books are 6x9 and these are 5x8, but in this case I think the smaller size is a good thing. Half-Breed is only 107 pages and had 35 lines per page, with about 400 words per page. With about 42,000 words, it doesn’t even qualify as a novel. (And let me just say one...

P lans change. When I was in college, I had a vision for the future. I would graduate, get a job in St. Louis, start attending a big church, fall in love, get married and live happily ever after in a big house. It didn’t quite turn out that way. I did graduate, but I didn’t move to St. Louis. I didn’t start attending a big church, though it seemed big to me at first. I did fall in love, eventually, but we didn’t get married and I haven’t a clue where she is now. I don’t live in a big house, but its big enough for me. A man’s heart deviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps. Proverbs 16:9 My dad studied botany. His plans were to work for the US Forest Service after he got out of college. But God called him to preach and he ended up pastoring a church and working in fire protection at a diaper factory. I don’t know much about the US Forest Service, but I’m pretty sure it would be difficult to work for them and pastor a church at the same time. When I was younger, I hoped God wou...

I n my day job, I work in an engineering environment. Surrounding me on a daily basis is a bunch of really bright guys. There are some women, but mostly guys. A lot of the time, an engineer will be working on a project, just trying to get it done, but keep in mind that these are bright guys. Someone will come up with an idea. It may be something that can be implemented right away, or it may be something that requires some research. Inspiration strikes and someone decides that he would like to go investigate something, rather than doing what he is doing. Well, the company sets aside some money for that, but that money is limited. While it’s good to pursue fresh ideas, there are too many of them to let everyone do whatever he wants, no matter how good his intentions. There are similarities between this and the publishing industry. For an engineering company, there is usually some group of people who decide which ideas are worth pursuing and which aren’t. Those that show the most promise ...

I n case you haven't noticed, book titles are not unique. I generally track search results for the titles of my books. Anytime someone says something about one of my books, I want to know about it. The other day, search results showed up for <i>For the Love of a Devil</i>, but the author wasn’t me. For <i>And Thy House</i>, there’s no hope for uniqueness and I didn’t expect there to be, but what really got me thinking was when I saw two authors talking about <i>Thicker Than Blood</i>. One was new and one was old. One is a first book and one is the second book in a series. But it made me wonder if the publisher of the newer book gave it much thought when they  used the title. There are some advantages and disadvantages to using a previously used title. If there is a popular book with the same name, then your book may sell more copies, just because it happens to show up in the search results when someone types in the name. On the other hand, by...

P eople in the publishing industry are a bunch of liars. I was reading a literary agent’s blog the other day and she made a comment about a perfectly good book that she didn’t feel she could represent because perfectly good books don’t sell, only great books sell. Anyone who has ever picked up a book, read some number of pages and finally decided to put it down because it was just too boring, knows that isn’t the case and would be glad to have some perfectly good books out there on the market to replace some of those not so great books. The problem is one of terminology. Imagine you are a literary agent and you have a book you are trying to sell. You can’t go to a publisher and say, “This is an okay book that I think you should consider. It probably won’t make you much money, but I don’t figure you’ll lose money on it either.” Instead, you have to go to the publisher and say, “This is a great book! This book is going to help you make up the money you lost on those other books you’...

A nyone who has read this blog very long knows that page numbering is a pet peeve of mine. Admittedly, I almost numbered a book wrong the other day, so I understand that mistakes can be made. My real issue is with people who number a book incorrectly with no intention of trying to do it correctly. There are several publishers out there who make no distinction between the front matter and the text other than that they may leave off the numbers for the front matter or use lowercase roman numerals, but the result is that the text of the book could end up beginning on page 7 or 11 or some strange number that seems out of place. I found one publisher, NESFA Press, that even says in their style guide that they do not start renumbering with the first page of the text. Their actual statement says, “We do not re-start numbering with the first story page. (If it really bothers the editor not to use Roman numerals on the front matter, OK, but the pages are still numbered consecutively in one s...

F irst, let me say that I’ve got nothing against Thomas Nelson. I have several of their books in my library and if they were to offer me a publishing contract, I would certainly consider it, but recently there has been some discussion about big name publishers like Thomas Nelson and Harlequin venturing off into the self-publishing business because that appears to be the wave of the future. The question came up about what the world would be like if we didn’t have publishers like Thomas Nelson and all authors self-published. It’s a very good question, so as of today, I’m announcing that Thomas Nelson is closed. I’m locking the doors and all of its employees have been laid off, permanently. All of you authors who have manuscripts ready to submit—don’t bother. The age of self-publishing has begun. In this new age of self-publishing, everybody gets published. No more rejection letters and you can do it for as little as $0. No, that’s not a misprint. You may have to get some sof...

Q uick! What's the purpose of an editor? There are many different functions involved in the making of a book. You have the author, the agent, the printer and many others, including the editor . Actually, there may be several editors, but for our purposes, let’s lump them all into one category. We think we know what this guy does. He edits the book, right? No, this isn’t a trick question; that’s what he does. Well, unless he’s an acquisitions editor, in which case he may not actually edit the book, but that’s a different issue. The editor we want to consider today is the guy who edits the book. On another blog I saw a comment from an author saying, in essence, that it is the job of the writer to craft a story, but it isn’t really the job of the writer to revise the story. That, the commenter, claimed is the job of the editor, who is supposed to take whatever the author puts out there and turn it into a bestseller. That got me thinking. That is how we think of editors, at times. The ...

W elcome to Adventures in Novel Writing. Yesterday, I finished my third draft. For the fourth draft, I like to print it out and read through the pages looking for mistakes, as well as getting a feel for how the readers will see the finished work. Rather than correcting as I go, as I have done in the previous drafts, I work with pencil in hand and only correct the pages I’ve marked after I reach the end. With it printed  single sided, double spaced, the manuscript is pretty thick. So I set to work to print it out, knowing that it would take a while.   Twenty pages into the document, I ran into a snag. My printer died with a nasty error. “Wrong Cartridge,” it said, but it hardly matters what the error, my printer couldn’t fix it—not in short order, perhaps not at all. I began to consider my options. I have another printer, but it is designed for portability, not for printing large documents. Twenty sheets of paper is about the limit of its paper feeding ability and the in...

W here should a book begin? I don’t mean the story. I mean the book. One of my pet peeves is that so many books are numbered incorrectly. Pick up a book and look at chapter one. What page is it on? Zondervan begins Frank Peretti’s The Oath on page 3. They begin Terry Blackstock’s Line of Duty on page 11. Kregel begins Miralee Ferrel’s The Other Daughter on page 9 and Maureen Lang’s Pieces of Silver on page 7. Oddly enough, some publishers get it right on one book but not on another. It’s like that don’t care. I will say, however, that some publishers do seem to get it right, allowing for the occasional mistake. I randomly looked at some of the books published by Thomas Nelson and they each began Chapter One on the proper page. Which page is that? Page one, of course. What many publishers are doing is that they numbering from the first page in the book, rather than the first page in the story. This makes the book look sloppy because by they time we include all of the front material,...

I n the summer of 1995, a co-worker told me of an idea he had for a pre-lit Christmas tree. He only told me of the idea after I assured him that I wouldn’t repeat it. His plan was to go invent the thing. True to my word, I kept my silence, but a few years later, practically every artificial tree on the market was pre-lit. To my knowledge, my friend wasn’t responsible for any of them. A few weeks ago, I was looking through some of the novels that are scheduled for release and I saw one that had the same premise as one I had seen earlier. The characters were different, the setting was different, but it was the same story, told by two separate authors. Great minds think alike, or so the old saying claims. We come up with these ideas and then discover that someone else has been thinking along the same lines. Some people find this very upsetting. “That was my idea! He stole my idea!” But it might not be a case of someone stealing at all. It could be that we are all exposed to the same glob...

L ast time, I briefly mentioned the idea of building success rather than having a defining event to catapult us to success. The story is told of a man and his wife entering a hotel on a story night, looking for a room. The night clerk told them that all the rooms were booked, but they could have his room. When the couple departed the next day, the man thanked the clerk, saying he was the kind of person who should be managing a hotel. Months later, the clerk received a letter from the man, inviting him to come manage a hotel the man had built, the Waldorf-Astoria. I tell that story because that is essentially the model for the publishing industry. Writers tell their success stories. “I received fifty [insert whatever number you like] rejection letters and then I received a call from an agent and the rest is history.” Some bristle when someone calls them an overnight success. “But I spent years perfecting my craft.” Every aspiring and wannabe author is looking for an agent or editor to ...

W e call it the advance and it can range from $1 all the way into millions of dollars. Many are in the thousands of dollars range. With all the other changes that are taking place in the publishing industry, publishers are messing around with the advance as well. Not that long ago, Chip MacGregor was complaining about Random House wanting to pay the advance a year after the book releases Previously, I have said I don’t like the concept of the advance because it puts the author in a position of owing the publisher. If the book doesn’t earn out, the author will be unable to repay the debt. That is if you view the advance as something the publisher pays the author in order for the author to live while completing the work. We could also look at the advance more like an earnest payment. By paying an advance , the publisher is promising to publish the book, but if they don’t the author walks away with the earnest money, much like when an offer is made on a house people ...

Product descriptions are a problem for books. As I was working on yesterday’s post, I noticed that many of the product descriptions that the publishers are putting out there aren’t very helpful. With some of them, it took me over a minute to figure out what the book was about. Considering that customers spend about eight seconds looking at the product description, that is a problem. I know I struggle with writing product descriptions, so I thought it might be good to consider how we might improve some of the product descriptions out there. Rather than pick on an author because of a horrendous product description, I have selected the books with the best premise from each of the three publishers I picked on yesterday. One week from tomorrow, at precisely 6:11 in the morning, the rapture or apocalypse or Armageddon or whatever else it is you’d prefer to call it , is going to occur. But only in Goodland, Kansas. The Hendersons are caught in the middle as the town—and the family—divides bet...

Please bear with me, this is a lengthy post, but I hope you will find it helpful. We talk about the plot and characters and all of that, but the publishing industry runs on the idea for the book, more than anything else, as I hope to show with this post. Below you will find short descriptions of various Christian novels that have either been recently released or have yet to be released. In a highly subjective decision process, I have ordered them with the best at the bottom and (shall we say) the others at the top. For all but the first, I summarized the product description, but the first one reads so much like a soap opera that I wasn’t confident that I could accurately glean the central theme from the product description and I copied what the publisher has provided. I wasn’t selective in choosing the books, but gathered them from lists, making this list representative of everything Thomas Nelson, Zondervan and Bethany house are publishing in the way of Fiction. Some of the...