What Attracts You To a Book?

What are you reading right now and why? 

As a group of writers, we here at Fiction Flurry are always interested in what attracts readers to books.  If you read a book that's outside your favorite genre, what makes you select that book?  How do you go about picking your next read from the genre you like best?

For me, I'm first drawn to new works of authors whom I've already read.  I just purchased a hardcover, full priced Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks because she's one of my favorite authors.  I have a Nook e-reader and could have purchased the e-book for half the price, but since Brooks is tops on my list, I splurged.

 

Next in my hierarchy of book-purchasing selection criteria is genre:  historical fiction, literary fiction, mainstream fiction.  If I'm not familiar with the author, the cover better draw me in.  When I purchase an e-book, I've usually seen it in the bookstore first.  Otherwise, a recommendation from a friend who has similar taste in books usually is a good way to go.  When I'm in the mood to buy a book, I go to Good Reads to see what my friends recommend.

I would like to purchase more books by self published authors on my Nook.  What's the best way that you've found to search for titles by self published authors?  What kind of luck have you had with the quality of self published books that you've purchased? 

We'd love to hear from you about your book selection process.  What websites to you use to help search for the next perfect book?  What attracts you to a book?

Self-Publishing Your Novel as an Ebook

During our most recent writers' group meeting, the topic of ebook publishing made for quite lively discussion.  Landing an agent and publishing with a traditional house is no guarantee of financial success.  Authors who travel the traditional route to publication often find themselves with the sole burden of marketing only to take home just a sliver of royalties. Why not do all the marketing you know you're going to have to do anyway and keep most of the royalties for yourself.

Whooosh.  Do you hear that?  It's the  mass exodus of writers from traditional publishing.

Okay, maybe I exaggerate...a little.

As a reader, I know that a hard copy book I purchase from the bookstore has been through the vetting process by layers of agents and editors.  I can expect a traditionally published book to be nearly free of grammatical and typographical errors.  A risk I take, as a reader, in purchasing a self published ebook is that the quality might be poor.  What's the trade-off?  The price might be as low as 99 cents, so I haven't lost much if the ebook is the cherry on the dung heap of literary crap.

There was an interseting article last month by Carolyn McCray on Digital Book World.  If you really want to post some good numbers for your e-book sales, it takes planning and foresight to make it happen.  Some pointers are obvious, like the use of social media to publicize your book.  Others, as McCray points out, have to do with knowing how to work Amazon to your advantage. 

Ask your friends and family to post a few "seed" book reviews of your book to grease the sales wheel.  Make sure a potential buyer knows the genre of the book.  Ask friends to buy your book on Amazon and then purchase one or two other books so that the Amazon "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" gadget will populate.  When reading McCray's article, make sure to scroll through the comments.  She graciously offered feedback on commenters' Amazon pages.

One of the things we do at our Fiction Flurry group meetings is to discuss our progress with finding agents or publishers who have accepted our work.  It's terribly frustrating.  We see in each other's work beauty and potential, but getting a busy agent to see the same qualities sometimes feels like it might take an act of God.  It's plain to see why self publishing, and better yet self e-publishing is becoming such a draw for so many writers.  But e-publishing should not be considered the easy way out.  There's platform building to be done, Facebook and Twitter marketing, cover design, Amazon strategies, and personal appearances to be scheduled.  Of course, all this only comes after your novel is in pristine condition.  Hiring a professional editor before self publishing is SO worth the money.  Your reward?  Larger royalty percentages and control over the process.

Some of us at Fiction Flurry are giving self e-publishing serious consideration.  We'd love to hear your experiences with the process.  What are the drawbacks that you've come across?  Better yet, we'd love to hear about your successes! 

Here are a few books that may help you in the process:

Self Publishing: A First-Hand Account

We have a new member in our writers group!  John Kershaw joined us a few weeks ago, and he's decided to write a post about his experience with self-publishing his book, The Farm at Novestroka.  It's a novel inspired by John's time in the Ukraine as an English teacher. 

John's not set up yet on Fiction Flurry as a contributor, so he e-mailed his post to me and I'm posting on his behalf.  Here it is:

A generation ago, self publishing was much more expensive then it is today. Method of printing required that thousands of copies be printed in order that the price of a single copy could be low enough for the average reader. The usual vanity publishing company required the author to come up with the thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars needed to produce thousands of books. Most vanity publishers had little or no method for selling books so the author received at best a pickup load of books and a sudden need to become a book seller.


Electronic means of printing has eliminated the need to stock large quantities of books. Print on demand publishers can, in fact, print and sell a single copy at acceptable price. Today an author can self publish a book for less than a thousand dollars. There are some “Print on Demand” (POD) publishers that will publish books at no charge. Many of these are “not for profit” publishers organized for the purpose of encouraging local authors. Their only income is from the sale of the books they publish. A high percentage of these sales are to the authors.

In the year 2002, I decided to publish a book with the self publishing company, XLIBRIS. XLIBRIS mailed me a catalog that described two levels of service, BASIC ($500) and PROFESSIONAL ($800). I selected PROFESSIONAL because it allowed greater freedom with cover design, and it included Library of Congress and Copyright registration for which BASIC required additional charge.

I mailed them a check and a diskette containing the 85,000 word manuscript. Within a few weeks I received an email instructing me on how to obtain an Adobe Acrobat reader at no charge. Shortly thereafter the proof copy arrived in a PDF file. I was to examine it and make any needed changes. For changes correcting my goofs, there was a charge. I forget the amount, but it didn’t seem excessive at the time. For changes correcting their goofs there was no charge. While gathering information for the story I encountered two different spellings for the capitol of Ukraine , “Kyiv” or “ Kiev ”. I used both, thinking I would at some point decide which was the most common and use that spelling. The newspapers in that city used “Kyiv” so I decided to make it that, but I forgot to make the change before sending the manuscript. It cost me.

Xlibris used en dashes at every place the manuscript called for a hyphen. There were so many that I asked them to change them the modern way by using the word processor command “search and change.” They changed one of them. The others are still in the book.
For various reasons, I used a fictitious name for the village, “Novestroka.” While in Ukraine I searched for a village that was nearly like the one I described in the book. I found one that I could photograph from the top of a cliff.
A significant portion of the story involves a desperate effort to harvest a large field of winter wheat in spite of the fact that the Germans had destroyed all the modern harvesting equipment. The POV characters went to their junk yard and hauled out the old reaper-binders eventually producing fields full of sheaves. To get a picture of a field full of sheaves, I waited for the right time and went to Amish country and there they were. The subtitle in Ukrainian gave the designers more grief than anything else about the cover, but all told I am happy with the job they did.
I sent Xlibris the manuscript on February 15, 2002. Their memo congratulating me on completion of the book is dated August 9, 2002. It took less than six months and part of that was time I took examining the proofs.

The soft cover copies I received seemed as good as any found in book stores. I am particularly proud of my hard copy version. However, I discovered that XLIBRIS does not involve itself in the production of large orders of books. It contracts to other printing houses. On my order for 100 copies, the books came from a printer in Winchester , VA. Had this printer shipped me books of defective quality, as XLIBRIS put it, they would stand by my side in negotiations with the printer.
Now comes the key element needed for the financial success of the book, the means for selling it. Sad to say, the self publishing company of today is no better equipped than the self publishing company of a generation ago. Xlibris has slowly been developing the services for selling books, but they are at the author’s expense, and there is no guarantee of success.