I irecently inherited $35,000 dollars and I'm planning on self publishing my first two mystery thrillers in a series I've been working on for the past 6 years. I had some good responses but ultimately rejections from agents and wish to free myself of the rigid modern rules of publishing in the name of woke shit.
Can anyone tell me if they've ever self published before? What are some suggestions I can do to market it effectively with my budget?
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Hire an editor. I'm a professional and can do it for cheap. Then put it on Amazon after your manuscript is salable. Don't physically print the books until you're absolutely sure everything is right. I've seen people throw entire print runs in the dumpster because they didn't fix a typo on the cover that I literally told them about on the phone multiple times. Also, you can't break into the publishing industry without connections--it's a centrally planned Ponzi scheme
NTA but what do you edit ?
Romance, fantasy, sci-fi, espionage, you name it. Mostly novels, but we've worked on short stories and essays. You can reach us at https://www.fiverr.com/matthewg42
If you mention you're from IQfy, we cut you a discount.
Yes but HOW do you edit? Line/prose editing? Or just spelling and grammar and formatting?
Line editing plus comments and an added essay about which changes the writer should make and why. I have thrown out entire scenes before and replaced them with my own content.
Obviously, I fix any grammatical errors or clumsy sentence structure. The changes are optional; you can accept or reject each one in Word. Regardless, I would never make an alteration unless I really believe it makes the book better
Not that anon, but I'm an editor too. It depends on how much work the piece needs. I've seen some manuscripts that are so bad they need to be entirely rewritten: the tone is bad, the pacing is bad, the word choice is bad, it's full of cliches, the dialog is bad, the focus is bad. When I get something like that I can't mark it up, because I'll mark the entire manuscript, and I'll spend hours doing it, just so the author can get all huffy and ignore everything I said. Hours of time wasted.
If a manuscript isn't that bad what I mostly focus on is how the story is structured. A lot of writers have a bad opening paragraph, but if you go into the story a little bit, sometimes you'll find a great opening. And I say, this is your strongest paragraph, and your most interesting paragraph, put this at the start, take your current opening and put it over here. Or maybe I wanted to get a sense of the setting earlier, just move this paragraph forward a few pages. I try not to delete big sections, but just do a little reorganizing.
So when I edit a manuscript I think: how is this story structured? How can we move things around to improve its structure? What works? What doesn't work? How do we focus more on what's good? What is missing from this manuscript? Broad strokes.
Sometimes you get a manuscript and the plot doesn't match the theme of the story. Recently I had a story that was very much thematically about inner beauty and seeing people for who they are on the inside, but the actual plot was focused on the main character's career goals. I'll point it out and ask do you want to change the theme or do you want to change the plot? Because these two things aren't working together. Sometimes a story has no conflict. It's a big thing to be missing. Recently I read a story and it was like I was just reading the first act, no second act, no third act. I read another story that didn't seem to have a first act and I had no idea what was going on.
There are also lots of little cliche expressions that beginning authors tend to use that I try to get them not to. Things like "manicured lawns" and "gingerly" and "sauntered," or referring to eyes as "orbs." These stand out to me like strobe lights flashing "beginner author" because I come across them in every beginner author's manuscript. Also I try to get rid of wimpy vocabulary, a lot of phrasal verbs that just don't pack any punch. And a lot of beginner authors also have really long dialog tags because they don't use them as dialog tags, they put in action. For example, "Blah, blah, blah," he said, taking back his papers. You don't need both. You can just do, "Blah, blah, blah." He took back his papers. It's stronger this way.
And sometimes, when a person has done a second draft or third draft, there's not much editing that needs to be done. I'll circle things like typos and spelling errors and double spaces but I won't fix them.
Thanks for the input, and to Matthew as well. I wrote a young adult fantasy novel, I've been told it's good in terms of story and action by people in the publishing industry, and the main characters are mostly decent, however there is a 20 page (double spaced) flashback explaining the backstory of the world, but its set in the backdrop of a love story. I'm wondering if this is considered an exposition dump and if I'll be crucified upon publishing the manuscript like this?
Flashbacks are almost never a good idea. You could maybe have a brief flashback in the final third of the story to contextualize the climax, like Neon Genesis Evangelion showcasing Gendo's past with his wife, but the plot still needs to function if your flashback were omitted.
I mean, the movie glass onion has a 45 minute flashback. Deathly Hallows does. But I guess I'll have to spread it out/be sparse with it.
make sure you include a visual motif that indicates whether you're in the past or present, ex. Gendo Ikari's gloves
It depends. I'd have to read it and judge it based on whether or not it grinds the story to a halt or if it's incredibly boring.
Frankenstein is mostly multiple nested flashbacks the entire way through the book, at one point getting 5 layers deep.
So it's OK? I mean as long as it's interesting?
Not trying to be snarky or sth, but if I were to look for an editor like you, how would I know that they know what theyre doing? What qualifies one to be an editor?
Send them an awful sample on purpose and see if they fix it or just massage your ego
>wtf why will nobody publish my shitty amateur detective novels? surely the world doesn't have enough of those already...
>must be those DAMN LIBERALS and their WOKE NONSENSE at it again!
I hope you know I'm liberal, I just hate the woke shit.
My book got very positive feedback but they couldn't represent it due to a matter of "taste", but I know it's because the main characters are all white.
One small publisher who loved it and wanted to publish my first book said I needed to change some characters to different ethnicities to better market to the readers, I declined.
Wow. Do shit really be like this?
Yes. I've lost faith in the traditional publishing world.
As long as you didn't make a point to describe the skin color of every character, what's the problem? Just tell the editor that Mr. Johnson is black and his wife's given name is Xiuying but she prefers to be called Sally.
>i'm liberal
>redditspacing
yep
You talk like a gay and your shits all moronic
>$35,000 dollars
Get an editor, if you want to publish a book you have to follow the big boy rules of grammar and common sense
What's it about?
use that money to take us on a trip to japan i guarantee you three nuts per day