Folks, I wanted to turn you on to Tom Gillespie, who is a freelance proofreader and editor. You can find out more about his work here. His motto? “Write tight.” Could not agree more!

And then there’s Chapter by Chapter, which is quite innovative. ChapterByChapter is a juried web site that publishes original novels. Visitors can read approximately the first one-tenth of a novel for free. If they like what they’re read, they can buy additional segments for 99 cents each. No charge to authors; pays 30% royalty. Manuscripts must be publication-ready. All adult and young adult genres.

A conversation via email with Cliff Thompson! Conducted in the after-dinner hour, before our kids made us shut down the lights at nine o’clock in observation of Earth Day.

Let’s start with a little bit about “Signifying Nothing” - what led you to write it?

I started writing the novel in late 2003. It was only sometime in 2004, when I’d written 100 pages or so, that I realized that the center of the action — Lester, a 19-year-old, mute and retarded male — had been inspired, unlikely as it sounds, by my grandmother. My grandmother, whom I grew up with and loved dearly, was like Lester in that the family had to operate around her because of what she couldn’t do. She was very old and couldn’t hear, so she couldn’t be left alone for very long. So the novel concerns what a family goes through in caring for/making adjustments for a “special” member.

And what led to the decision to self-publish?

The long and short of it is, I had written what I considered a good novel and couldn’t do a thing with it the traditional way. I contacted 50 literary agents and nearly 30 publishers, some of whom told me that Signifying Nothing was “obviously a quality manuscript” (to quote one agent) but that they couldn’t see trying to sell it in today’s market. As for the criticism I got, half of it contradicted the other half. One editor told me, for example, that the novel was too plot-driven, while an agent wrote that the book’s plot didn’t come into focus soon enough. It seemed to me that I had three choices: forget about the book; go on submitting it until I was too old to walk; or put it out there myself. I chose “c.”

So, now that you’ve got the book in your hands, what’s happening on the marketing side?

The first thing I did when the book went “live” was to try to contact everyone I’d ever met. I emailed everyone in my address book and sent postcards to people without email (or whose email addresses I didn’t have). I joined Facebook and am still in the process of adding friends to it, the better to spread the word about the novel. With the journals I sometimes write for — Threepenny Review, Cineaste — I make sure to mention the book in the author’s note.
And I started a blog. Tellcliff.com is devoted to getting and giving commentary on three things I love — films, books, and jazz; but it also functions, or is intended to, as an ad for my book. It has links to the book on amazon.com.
I am pursuing readings and seeking out literary blogs, and I’ve already sent a blurb to the Class Notes section of my college’s alumni magazine.

What are your thoughts on e-books? Are you going to release your book that way?

There’s something I have yet to explore, but I will.

What’s next for you, now that “Signifying Nothing” is out in the marketplace?

Trying to work on new stuff: writing essays, polishing up a second novel.

What’s your advice to those looking at self-publishing as an option? Both practical and philosophical/therapeutic….

Practical: Take your time in preparing the thing you want to publish. Once it’s out there, it’s out there. Seeing even the page proofs of my book, their look of permanence, almost sent a chill up my spine. So, take some time away from your book. Come back to it with fresh eyes. If something doesn’t work, change it. Once that’s done, get an outside proofreader — he or she is BOUND to catch things you don’t. Read it again yourself. Make sure it’s the best book you can make it.

Philosophical/therapeutic: Believe in what you’re doing, because not everyone you tell about your self-published book will shower you with congratulations. You WILL sometimes get the pity-laced smile that makes you want to say, “Maybe you misheard me. I don’t have bone cancer, I’m publishing my BOOK.” But if you believe in what you’ve written, then you must also believe it’s worth putting out there, however you can do it.

Any final observations before we have to turn the lights out for Earth Day?

In the end, a book’s commercial success or failure isn’t really up to you. Try your hardest to get it out there, but then . . . focus on the next thing you’re going to write. That’s what it’s really about.

One of my very good friends is now a self-published author. His book, Signifying Nothing, is now available from Amazon. You can read an excerpt at his blog, Tell Cliff.

According to Seth Weintraub, the fastest-growing iPhone app category is ebooks! This includes the Kindle app for the iPhone. Weintraub notes:

Using a Book publishing engine like Iceberg from Scrollmotion, just about anyone can publish a book online.  Scrollmotion is putting many already published books from major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Random House and Penguin into application form for the iPhone.

Better yet for the publisher, each book is its own “app” that can be linked to individually and can incorporate its own special artwork.  The author and developer get their own stats just like an application developer does.  Amazon’s eBooks give the Author/Publisher much less control.

Every book is an app?  This is also, perhaps somewhat artificially, going to push up Apple’s application tally.   But those are just stats; more importantly, a new realm is opening up for authors.

What does this mean for self-published authors? It means you can “try out” your books online in digital format before committing to print. It means you can add ebooks to your print run as an “extra”. It means you can reach the nearly 30 million iPhone/iPod Touch users with your content.

Diana Mancher and Karen Mender are two former publicists from big houses who are launching the Self-Publishing Book Expo this year in November, in New York City. Details are sparse now - in terms of panel discussions, etc. - but it will be held at 630 Second Avenue, between 34th & 35th Streets, on November 7th from 10-5. General admission is only $15. Stay tuned to their website for more details as the conference evolves!

One of the most important resources I feel we can provide authors is good intellectual property advice. I am not a lawyer, myself, so I’ve reached out and found some great advisors who can help authors (and publishers) who are in copyright and other IP conundrums.

Yuval Marcus, at Gottleib, Rackman and Resiman, is very clued-in about internet issues, Google Book Search, and copyright concerns. GRR’s site itself has many resources of interest, including prison authorship issues, trademark and patent issues, and what to know when entering both the global and US markets.

Ivan Hoffman is a publishing law, copyright, trademark, entertainment and Internet law attorney, practicing for over 36 years.  His web site, http://www.ivanhoffman.com, has won *8* prestigious web site awards.  You may reach him on the Internet at ivan@ivanhoffman.com .  Ivan Hoffman is not affiliated in any way with our company or our web site or otherwise with us.  All of Mr. Hoffman’s articles are based on United States law.

As we know all too well, Google and other search engines only uncover what they’ve been given to uncover. Lawyers have great access to “the hidden web” - all those precedents and cases that are not in public databases. Yuval and Ivan are great resources.

I love my Kindle - it’s lightweight, holds many books, and is great for traveling and commuting. However, it does (occasionally) run out of battery (and there’s nothing more disconcerting than your book running out of battery, let me tell you), and yet I want to keep reading.

Amazon has an app for the iPhone that allows you to do just that. It synchs up with your Kindle books, and you can switch back and forth. In fact, I know folks who’ve not bothered to even get a Kindle because the app on the iPhone is just that good - easy to read, very user-friendly.

Barnes & Noble, which recently bought the ebook provider Fictionwise, has announced an ebook app for the Blackberry and Android phones as well. And today we’re getting all sorts of news that phone companies (Verizon and AT&T) are a little envious of Amazon’s deal with Sprint and want in on the cash flow.

What does this mean for authors?

It means that now there’s a new avenue of distribution for your books! By uploading your title to Amazon for distribution on the Kindle, you now have iPhone distribution as well! And that channel is only going to get bigger and bigger - there’s a tremendous demand for content on all these applications.

Last week, an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal decrying Google Book Search’s settlement with the Authors Guild and AAP. The author, Lynn Chu, is an intellectual property lawyer with Writers Representatives LLC - and someone to be taken seriously.

So why, if I respect what Chu is saying, do I continue to be adamant that GBS is a good tool for authors? Because of this: “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy,” a statement made by Tim O’Reilly many times (and I actually heard him say it once). Whatever there is to say about Google Book Search and the Books Rights Registry, GBS does what no other search engine is doing right now - crawls books and makes those search results available.

GBS does not display the entire book (unless it is in the public domain and there are no rights attached to it). It displays a “snippet” - a little excerpt that gives a reader an idea of what the book’s about. So no one can seriously cobble together a pirated version of a book using GBS - the entire version is never made available, and the “snippets” are generated randomly.

If you’ve written a memoir about raising your autistic child, for example, and someone on the web is Googling “autism”, your book could come up as a resource for that person. She would be directed where to purchase it. And that’s a sale for you.

Small-press and self-published authors have a hard enough time trying to make their voices heard above the clamor of the “big guys”. GBS can level the playing field in many ways for you. It helps make your books discoverable - and discovery is crucial in a world where bookstore space can be purchased and the airwaves are taken up with celebrities hawking their latest cookbooks.

Everything we do at Authorweb is directed at helping small-press and self-published authors become less obscure. (That said, if one of our clients determines that they don’t want to participate in GBS, we will substitute another service for him or her - we’re not out to railroad anyone.)

Google is the search engine of choice for most of the world (and the default home page of many web browsers). You might not be comfortable with Google’s all-embracing power and its monopolistic tendencies, but to “opt out” is to, instead, opt for not being discoverable. On a collective basis, authors and publishers can bargain with Google through organizations they’ve set up for precisely that sort of legal wrangling; on an individual basis, deciding not to participate in GBS is just another way of saying, “I’d rather not have people find my work.”

And what author wants that?

My friend Cliff Thompson, a writer here in Park Slope, Brooklyn, has just put up a really awesome blog (as of this morning!) that I wanted to share: http://www.tellcliff.com. From a book marketing perspective, here’s why it’s great:

• Simple URL - easy to remember
• Easy navigation
• Excerpt from his upcoming novel
• Previously published work
• Solicitation of feedback and community-building

It is a great example of an author blog - showcasing his talents and his work, while actively involving readers and other writers to share on the site.

“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.” - Tim O’Reilly

I went to college to be a writer. I took all the writing workshops there were, wrote upwards of three hours every single day (it helped that it was an all-women’s college), and moved to New York to Be A Novelist.

In 1987, here was how you Became A Novelist. You wrote short stories and shopped them around to The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and other mags. You treasured your rejection letters, especially the handwritten ones. You got published in literary journals attached to colleges in the midwest, and collected those stories. You shopped that collection around to literary agents. You treasured your rejection letters, especially the handwritten ones. You got some interest from publishing houses that encouraged you to go ahead and write your novel. You slaved away at your novel every day after work. You shopped it around to literary agents, with your pile of short stories. You treasured your rejection letters, especially the handwritten ones. You had babies, got promoted, and eventually….you had a bunch of manuscripts and some lovely rejection letters and a sort of bitter taste in your mouth.

My friends, life is just too short.

And thank God for technology - now we can publish our own work through services like Lulu or iUniverse or Lightning Source. We can have the satisfaction of printed pages bound in covers - without the stack of rejection letters and endless waiting and no resolution.

Here’s the thing, though. Without the big publisher powerhouse behind you, that book is pretty much ALL you’ve got. What you’re still missing is an audience, readers, people connecting with your words and being moved by them. You’ve got a thing, an object. How to get that object out into the hands of people who will want it - they just don’t know it exists yet?

There are lots of independent author marketing services out there - and we’re putting together a directory right now, which we’ll be launching as soon as it reaches critical mass. There are lots of independent author PR reps - and again, they’ll be listed in our directory. These folks do vastly valuable work - they’ll get you on local radio shows, TV, help arrange bookstore readings.

But how do you reach out beyond that?

The web is probably the biggest mass marketing tool there is - and it’s cheap! Google Book Search is one way of making sure that your book comes up in search results whenever anybody’s looking for information on the topic you’ve written about. And it’s free!

Amazon lets you upload your book for distribution on the Kindle - so all those folks out there who’ve bought this cool gadget can download your book! I’ve got a Kindle and I’ve found a lot of interesting, new stuff available that I never would have found anywhere else. Amazon’s also got an iPhone app so even those without Kindles can read Kindle books! (DH does that, and he loves it.)

By making sure your book is registered with Books in Print and has the right identifiers - ISBN, ISTC, DOI - your book will be listed on just about any online bookstore…not just Amazon. Books in Print has recently lowered the price of their identifier services - which is great because it’s absolutely essential to your book getting found on the web!

Of course, with all these tools, there are forms to be filled out, agreements to be negotiated. Most of this is pretty standard stuff, but it gets tedious. (As tedious as collecting rejection letters!) And…most importantly…it cuts into time that’s better spent writing!

So that’s our value here at AuthorWeb. We’ll slog through this for you.

However, if you DO want to know how to do these things yourself, we’ll tell you. Future blog posts will cover the nuts and bolts behind all this. So it’s not like we’re going to make a big secret out of any of this - because none of it is rocket science; it’s just arcane and byzantine and a pain in the butt - it’s just that if you’d rather not go there…we’re here for you.