Community Publishing Newsletter - Issue 7
Exciting News, and an extract from our DIY Publishing Toolkit!
Greetings from the Community Publishing in Regional Australia research team,
In this newsletter, we’re excited to share with you a sneak peek of the DIY Publishing Toolkit that we will be launching in late June at the Winton Outback Writers Festival.
The DIY Publishing Toolkit is a major output of our research project and will be available in both paperback and online form. It distils all of the information from the workshops we ran in Mparntwe / Alice Springs; Willyama / Broken Hill; Winton, on the lands of the Koa people; and Ayr, on Bindal country. It also includes pull quotes sharing the real publishing experiences of the people we interviewed. We hope that it will be a useful guide for anyone who is going through the publishing process.
We will definitely be in touch once it’s published so you can get your hands on the finished version. For now enjoy this early-look at our draft sections – and do feel free to send us any feedback that might improve the final version.
Our interviews and research with the AustLit database are also featured in a new article published on the Australian Society of Authors website: Short story writing in regional Australia by project research assistant Roseleigh Priest.
With best wishes, the CPRA team
--- excerpt from the DIY Publishing Toolkit ---
Get ready to be entrepreneurial
In traditional publishing, you send your manuscript to a publisher, they agree to publish it, and that’s pretty much your job done. While the publisher’s editorial process might require you to do some re-writes, the publishing house will then drive publication.
For DIY publishing, you need to be both a writer and an entrepreneur who manages and directs everything to do with your book. It’s like setting up as a small business or sole trader. So while a lot of writers might feel like publishing begins once there’s a manuscript ready, if you’re DIY Publishing it’s never too early to be thinking about the practical aspects of your project.
DIY publishing involves a lot of different activities beyond writing: you’re also responsible for budgeting, design, printing, storing and distributing the copies. This calls for skills from wrangling documents and online portals to business administration. Think of it as project managing your own book. It is extra effort, but you get creative control over the finished product, and you get to keep any potential profit from sales of the book.
Being the project manager doesn’t mean you have to do absolutely everything yourself. You might ask friends or hire people or services to do some of the work for you. If you decide to work with freelancers for some or all tasks (such as cover design or copy editing), you pay a fee and keep copyright, creative control, and all potential profit from sales. You might decide to work with an author services company that packages together a number of services; if so, do make sure that you’re working with a reputable company that has competitive and transparent pricing (read more in section X).
‘I think I prefer to contribute to the marketing. I’ve been more than happy to go and do all the talks and all that, but I don’t want to have that responsibility where I have to run a whole show.’ – Annette Herd, author of We Live, We Die
‘So the reason I published myself: originally, I wasn't going to, I was going to send it to everybody, and then I thought, why should I? I did everything. I mean, I wrote it. I found an editor, I found a book cover designer. I had it formatted. I did all of that on my own. Nobody was there making me coffee and patting me on the back and propping me up. So why then should I give half of my money to other people?’ Kathleen Ryder, author of A Fling with the Flying Doctor
‘I found a crowd called IngramSpark. Fabulous site, fabulous how-to guides, fabulous all the way through but you really have to put in the hours to learn how to do it. Whereas if you go to a publisher you just go, here it is, take it away, you do it. You do the page layout. I don’t care; it’s all going to happen. When you do Indie publishing you’ve actually got to be aware of all these things yourself: the amount of white space, the chapter layout….You can pay somebody else to do it and I certainly did with the cover’ – Rose Siva, author of Dinocroc: A Hunt for Ancient Crocodiles
Reflection point: Do you like the idea of being an entrepreneur/project manager? What are your strengths and interests? What are the things that you might need help with, or would just rather not do? Try the decision tree below to clarify your preferred approach
Decision tree: what kind of publishing is best for you?
--- end excerpt from the DIY Publishing Toolkit ---