Hey Folks,

I’m pleased to announce a new website and expanded writer services.

Over the next week or so, the professional services I’ve offered on HarveyStanbrough.com will migrate to my new website, WTW Solutions. In the meantime, this site, HarveyStanbrough.com, will transition into becoming more of my personal website, showcasing my own books and other writings.

At WTW Solutions you’ll see a few familiar features:

WTW Editing

WTW EFormatting & Cover Design

WTW Events

WTW Seminar Descriptions

I’ve changed and greatly improved one valuable solution. If you need a website, swing by and check out all the features in The Writer at WTW Web Design.

I’ve also added what I hope will be a useful new feature for those of you considering epublishing:
EPublishing FAQs. If a question occurs to you that I haven’t answered there, please consider emailing me at Harvey@wtwsolutions.com.

Finally, I’ve added a brand new venture that I hope you will find exciting:
StoneThread Publishing.

StoneThread Publishing provides writers with one more publishing avenue. For complete information, including submission guidelines, rights information, and royalty divisions, visit StoneThread Publishing.

Just to pique your interest, here’s the nutshell version:

1. StoneThread Publishing is neither a subsidy nor vanity publisher. There is never any cost to you.

2. We invite submissions of short fiction and nonfiction; long fiction, memoir and nonfiction; and collections of short fiction, short nonfiction and poetry. No dedicated romance or erotica. In nonfiction, no politics or religion. (See the full guidelines for details.)

3. If we accept your work, we do all formatting, cover design and publishing. Within a month of publication, your work will be featured in approximately 30 markets worldwide.

4. The writer earns 75% of the net royalty (what we receive from the distributor or sales venue). WTW Publishing earns 25%. (There are sales and royalty examples on the website.)

I encourage everyone to stop by WTW Solutions, and I welcome your feedback. You can email me directly at Harvey@wtwsolutions.com.

That’s it for this time, folks! Thanks for your support!
Harvey

Hi Folks,

This seems pretty much a no-brainer, and I guess for most of us it is, but a former friend used this bit of sage advice to sling a little mud at ebooks and those of us who publish primarily in that vein. The implication was that we who publish electronically tend to be purveyors of the soup sandwich, whereas those whose works have been anointed by a traditional print publisher are perfection personified. After all, if we publish a book that’s filled of misspellings, wrong word usages, typos and more, we can simply “unpublish” it, upload a new document (this one probably as rife with errors as the first), and go on our merry way. Right? Actually, wrong.

It’s true that you can upload a revised version of your ebook if you find the need to do so, and it’s equally true that traditional publishers can pull a book and reprint if they find a grievous-enough error. (Usually, of course, they just pretend the book is fine.) But publishing an ebook isn’t a snapped-fingers, magical kind of sleight of hand either. If your ebook already has been submitted to Smashwords, for example, and it’s been vetted and found clean, it’s already been added to the Smashwords Premium Catalogue and distributed to Amazon, B&N, Apple, Kobo, Sony, Diesel and Baker & Taylor (yes, seven vendors, each with multiple sales venues that literally span the globe), a process that takes two weeks to a month. If you then decide to revise your book and upload a new version… well, let’s just say you’ve opened a can of particularly grumpy worms.

Once you’ve uploaded your revised ebook, Smashwords will set about the tedious process of pulling your ebooks back from those seven vendors, each of whom will have to delete the book from all of their sales venues. That process will take from two weeks to a month or longer, but that’s all right. We have time because Smashwords also has to completely re-vet the newly uploaded version of your ebook, which of course also takes two weeks to a month or longer. Then, once it’s been re-vetted and passed inspection again (if there were no glitches), it takes another week or two to go out into the distribution channels again to the vendors, each of whom receive it and then send it out to their sales venues.

If you’re self-publishing in both paper (CreateSpace is wonderful!) and digitally (I’ll continue to sing the praises of Smashwords and Amazon), it’s actually less disruptive to pull the print version and submit a revision than it is to do so with the digital edition. Well, unless you’ve already ordered a thousand copies and have them stashed in your garage. Then you’ll have to decide whether that scene where Uncle Elmo puts his arm around Aunt Zippy’s shoulder as she peers wistfully out through the kitchen widow (not window) is all that important.

Yes, of course, a book should never be published before it’s ready, and yes, it’s more painful to stop the presses when a traditional publisher has ordered a 20,000 copy print run, but the size of the run and the avenue of publication has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the work.

What annoyed me most about the guy’s implication is that even back when we were friends, I couldn’t recommend his books. I can’t say for sure whether they were poorly written, poorly edited or both, but I can say they were published before they were ready. People in glass houses and all that….

‘Til next time,

Happy Writing!

Hi Folks,

I’ve been in the middle of this topic before, but it bears repeating. I’m still receiving emails from writers almost every day in which they say they’re balking at self-publishing because of the “stigma.” Investing in themselves by paying someone to help them publish their work is “vanity” publishing, they’ve been told, and they believe it.

Think about this. Would it really surprise you to discover that traditional publishing has paid literally millions of dollars to attach a stigma to the notion of publishing your work through anyone other than them? After all, they don’t want you to kill their cash cow. As it stands right now, the publisher takes the lion’s share of the royalties and gives the writer a pittance. Yet the writers still, somehow, amazingly, believe they aren’t paying in order to be published. Of course they are paying. They’re paying through the nose in the form of ridiculously minuscule royalties.

I wrote to a friend this morning that I’m constantly amazed that he and so many other writers still seek validation of their work through a traditional publisher. Many who are absolutely excellent writers refuse to self-publish despite not having been accepted by the traditional houses.

Tell me something: If you believe in yourself enough to invest your own money in publishing your work, why is it called  “vanity” publishing? If you invested your own money in building your own restaurant, would others call it a “vanity” restaurant? If you invested your life savings in building and running a clothing store, would it be a “vanity” clothing store? If you invested your own money in ANY other business, would anyone call it a “vanity” business? Of course not. So think about that. If you invest your own money in your writing, why is it suddenly an act of vanity?

Having had my work published traditionally as well as in other ways, I most strongly recommend self-publishing through CreateSpace and epublishing through Smashwords, who distributes to Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and several other sales venues. Here’s why:

1. Either way, you pay to be published.

• With “traditional” publishers, you pay in the form of ridiculously low royalties (8 – 15%). The publisher et al divide up the other 85 – 92% of the income from your book. And if you have an agent, s/he takes 10-15% of your 8 – 15%.
• With self-publishing, you pay a minor amount up front and the rest is yours:
• With CreateSpace (self-published paper), your prep is under $200 (including the cover) and your cost per book is about $4. If you sell for $8, that’s a 50% royalty.
• With epublishing, your prep is under $200, and your cost per book is zero. Your royalty (depending on how you price your book) is anywhere from 70 – 90%.

(Here’s a real-life example for you: When I sell 100 copies of my traditionally published WRD&FF at $14.95, my 10% royalty pays me $1.49 per book, or $149. When I sell 100 copies of my epublished WRD&FF at only $5.95, my 78% royalty pays me $4.64 per book, or $464.10. I’ve personally sold a LOT more copies of all my ebooks and made a LOT more money and spent a LOT less time and money marketing since January 2011 that all my total sales of paper books since 2003.)

2. If you decide to go with a subsidy publisher, I strongly recommend you go with Booklocker.com. In my opinion, Booklocker is the only one that isn’t a scam, and your total up-front cost is $519, including the cover. You earn a 65% royalty on all sales.

3. Either way, you have to do all your own marketing. With paper books (traditional or self-published), that means road time, gas, hotels, etc. With ebooks, it means about 2 hours per week online.

Think about all this and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. There are a lot of unfounded rumors out there about epublishing and self-publishing, and most of them were started by traditional publishers because they really don’t want to see their cash cow dry up.

Okay, I’ll quit preaching now, at least for awhile. I just hate to see really good writers clinging to the notion that only some stranger in a huge corporation in New York can validate her work, and do so with a publishing contract that siphons off most of the income when the writer did 99% of the work.

Hey, I hope to see everyone on Sunday, May 20, at the SSA Forum. For details, visit my website at HarveyStanbrough.com and click on the Events tab.

Also there are big changes underway, including a few new websites (watch for Writing the World Solutions), a WTW Seminars Membership card and plan (free), and a couple of giveaways in the near future, including a 7″ mini-laptop computer, a Kindle reader, and more. For details, watch my website and this blog, and drop by my Writing the World seminars. The first one is Saturday, May 26 (see details). Drop by and pick up your free WTW Seminars Membership Card.

See you then! ‘Til next time, happy writing!

Harvey

Hi Folks,

Well, from what I can gather, since about 1991 when I graduated from a 21-year civilian-appreciation course and started advising other folks on how to write and how to correct what they’ve written, I’ve made most of my living on “refreshers.” Not bad. Not bad at all.

Granted, a little bit of my income came (and comes) from what was left of my pension after my ex-wife, in collusion with a court in the near-welfare state (and my once-beloved home state) of New Mexico, robbed me of 1/3 of my retirement. That they awarded her that much (or any, really) was considerably ironic, given that had we remained married I couldn’t possibly have continued with my career in the Marine Corps. But I digress.

Another little bit of my income (and considerably more in the past two years) derived from sales of my poetry collections, short stories and short-story collections. I also made a fair chunk of change from speaking at writers’ conferences all over the nation and in Canada, as long as I was very careful not to deduct gas, motel rooms, meals and other expenses. But most of my living came (and comes) from the sale of my nonfiction how-to writing books—those “refreshers” I mentioned at the outset. I make considerably more from my freelance editing business (which, of course, is based on those “refreshers”) and a few other services I provide for my writer colleagues.

For years I’ve been selling and/or giving away my books on writing. At first it was only Punctuation for Writers, which presents a practical approach to punctuation that, when learned, enables the writer literally to dismiss all those “rules” she’s been struggling to remember since her grade-school days. Witness, in the HarBrace College Handbook, there are several pages of comma rules. In PFW, there are only five—comma rules, not pages of comma rules—and two of the five are mirror images of each other. The first comment from any reader was that Punctuation for Writers was “a nice refresher.” A refresher? How can one write a “refresher” of something that’s never been presented before? Okay, breathe Harv. The customer’s always right… well, he should always be allowed to feel he’s right.

About a year later came Writing Realistic Dialogue & Flash Fiction, the first-ever reader-focused how-to book on writing dialogue, and the first-ever nonfiction book on writing flash fiction period. Did you see those two “first-ever” qualifiers? Still, turns out WRD&FF was actually my second “refresher.”

After a hiatus of several years while I was making the conference circuit (sometimes as many as 18 conferences per year) and writing my own fiction and poetry for which I garnered some pretty hefty nominations, I began teaching private seminars on every writing topic about which I could claim expert knowledge. I kept most of them short at 3 – 4 hours, but crammed 6 – 8 hours of knowledge into them, as many of you can attest. Shortly thereafter, wanting to expand my seminar base but not wanting to spend hours traveling or more hours trying to figure out how to present “webinars”—in other words, wanting to remain firmly seated at my own desk—I decided to send my seminars on the road in the form of very short nonfiction how-to writing books. Okay, okay, call them booklets if you wish. Either way, each of my “booklets” contains a great deal more information than many full-length books on the same topic. Like my seminars, they’re jam packed with information and examples. But guess what? Yep. What I somehow managed to do, according to my own readers, was write a series of “refreshers.”

I don’t mind the somewhat deprecating tag, really. In fact, the whole situation strikes me as humorous enough that I was able to squeeze a pretty good blog post out of it. I honestly believe, at this point, I could write a treatise on “How to Stand on Your Head and Spit BBs at an Alarming, Lip-Melting Rate of 22,000 BBs per Minute While Waving Goodbye Without Laughing to a Ferry Boat That’s Rapidly Toting Your Mother-in-Law Toward the Yawning Maw of a Bottomless Waterfall Populated with Those Infamous Piranha-Bass You Might or Might Not Have Heard About Who Are Striving Upstream in an Attempt to Mate Like a Red Salmon” and someone somewhere would say, “Hey, by the way, thanks for the refresher.”

Ya’ll take care now, y’hear?

Yer Uncle Harv

Watch for my new, relatively major “refresher,” coming in the next few months.

Hi Folks,

After this post, I’m gonna repost a lot of oldies but goodies from the past, once every week or two. I believe most writers don’t take the time to look back through blog archives. My blog is for and about writers, and there was a lot of good information in the old archives, so I figure re-posting it couldn’t hurt. That will bring us from past to present, and this particular blog post is all about the future. It’s going to be exciting.

As many of you know, for over 20 years, in addition to writing my own work — with which I’ve garnered nominations for a Frankfurt Book Fair Award, a Pulitzer Prize, an Engraver’s Award and the National Book Award — I’ve also served other writers as a freelance editor and writing instructor. About a year ago, I added formatting and cover design for epublishing to my roster of services. I’ll continue in all of those capacities, and my freelance editing, formatting and cover design services will remain essentially the same.

Membership Site — As a writing instructor, I’ll continue to offer my Writing the World seminars in Tucson, but very soon I’ll also open a membership website. For a small fee, members will have access to the electronic editions of all of my writing reference books, including my own Writing Realistic Dialogue & Flash Fiction, Punctuation for Writers, a huge forthcoming reference book that I’m not ready to reveal just yet, and several online references I’ve found useful as a writer. In addition to having full access to the reference library, members will be able to choose from among different services, including live, interactive chats on a topic of interest, tutoring sessions on a specific work in progress, etc. If you’d like me to offer something on that site that I haven’t mentioned here yet, please email me at h_stanbrough@yahoo.com or use the Contact Form on the Contact Page of this website.

Web Design — Yep, I’m almost ready to begin designing personal or business websites for writers. My fees will be competitive. I won’t charge as much as the other guys, and I guarantee your satisfaction. In a few days, I’ll have the Web Design page completed and the service up and running. If this is something you need or have been thinking about, be sure to check back!

That’s it for this time. If you have friends whom you believe would be interested in my blog for writers or any of the services I provide, please spread the word.

Thanks for listening, and until next time, happy writing!

Harvey