Who's in Charge?

The more I read about traditional publishing and royalty statements, the more it firms my resolve to be in charge of my own career as a writer.

A traditional publisher currently still holds the prestige of having someone choose your work to be published. I say currently because there have been so many changes lately, it's hard to know what it will look like tomorrow or next week or next year.

Let's imagine that we treat the book business like we treat the music business or the movie business. The editor is someone we follow like a producer or director. (Great link, sadly not my idea.) We have household names like Steven Spielberg and Christopher Columbus.  How many people can name a single editor if you're not in the book business or know one personally? But an editor as a brand gives us something to follow to say, hey, I might like this book, too.

Even agents could leave a trail of different books to read. Someone has to have similar tastes. Yet it's all on the author's name and effort. It leaves all the writers struggling to be individually known.

No wonder they're starving artists. The royalty statements (from the first link above) can be as messed up as you please, and if each writer goes against them individually they can only go so far. Some publishers will do what they can to fix things. Others will try to screw everyone over in the hope that no one will call them on it.

Self publishing might be the only way. And that's why I'm sitting at my computer in the late evenings, editing. I want to get it the best I can manage before I send it to a professional editor. Cover design and formatting the book will cost me, too, but at least then I know what I owe and when I break even.

When did things get so crazy? Are there other options?

Crowdfunding to Self Publish

I want to be read. That's the reason I write things. I want people to read them, to share them, to think about them. That's what being an author is to me.

So when I talk about the impermanence of short stories, how they get their place on a site for a short time and then get put away, it makes me glad they were out there. I provide the link to friends who might be interested and I love getting their reactions. But then the stories are gone.

Publishing keeps changing in so many ways. So what I want to do is put out a couple short story collections. They would be self published, but that is not the stigma it used to be. They would be professionally edited and formatted. The covers would be done by a good artist. [I already found at least one who can work with me.]

The best part is that anyone could read these stories.

The worst part is that I can't afford it by myself at this time.

However, there are ways around my funding issues. I'm looking into crowdfunding: Kickstarter, Kapipal, IndieGoGo, Go Get Funding, and others. I'm limited in that I write erotica and I plan to give erotica away as incentives. I don't think it's a big deal, but anybody who wants to go through PayPal needs to be careful because they won't allow pornography in their incentives (along with alcohol and a bunch of other things). I probably could make the distinction that this is erotica, there are no pornographic pictures or videos, but I just want to play that part safe.

There are two ways to do crowdfunding. One puts out a goal of a monetary sort and says, "If I make this goal, the investors get their incentives and I get the cash. But if I don't, nobody gets anything." The other way allows investors to get the incentives and me to get the funds even if we don't make our goal. Some of the sites take a larger percentage if you don't make the goal, but it means I'd still have to provide the incentives if I only got a percentage and I'd get at least partial funding for this project.

Partial funding might be enough. I have options on ways to go, but I don't think I can take on the whole project without help. So I'm working on incentives and deciding which crowdfunding company will suit me the best.

Thoughts?