Jason Joins the Establishment!
Plus: The Great Indie Debate—Small Press vs. Self-Publishing; and the latest book reviews and Reddit ESL questions
Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on September 9, 2022, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.
Big news! I’ve just joined my first-ever trade organization on the subject of editing! Specifically, I’ve joined the American Copy Editors Society (or ACES), which first came together in the 1990s after a series of discussions among members of the American Society of News Editors. As a result, it’s still mostly headed by full-time newspaper editors, and the group is dedicated to more traditional and academically rigorous copy editing, the kinds of perfect jobs that need to be done for things like doctoral theses or the few print magazines that are left in the world.
I thought this would be a good one for me in particular to join, since I’m almost entirely self-taught as an editor, and in many ways I edit intuitively and only afterwards learn of the rules that govern those actions. That’s been working fine so far, three years now into my attempts to freelance full-time as a career, and I’m at a point where I charge 1 cent per word to self-publishing authors for things like genre novels and am making pretty good money. If I want to jump up to a higher pay rate, though, sometimes even up to 4 or 5 cents per word, I have to learn all the rules and learn them inside out, because it’s only places like magazines and universities where you find that amount of money available to spend on this, but the editing in those environments have to be scientifically exacting.
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That’s one of the things I like about ACES, is that they co-sponsor a training program and eventual certification in both basic and advanced editing in these issues, jointly run with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida, which is priced half-off if you become an ACES member; plus, as a member you have access to a plethora of other educational material as well, not just online but through the chance to attend their yearly national convention (in Columbus, Ohio in 2023). They also have a members-only online space where you can list your CV and learn of interesting new job opportunities in the field; and they offer discounts for the AP, APA and CMOS stylebooks, as well as software like PerfectIt and WordRake.
This gives me the chance to list these certifications at places like my Upwork profile, to prove that I’ve gotten an expert’s level of training on these subjects; and that way I can not only continue to offer my fiction-editing services to self-publishing authors, but more and more pick up jobs for much higher pay rates with academics, journalists, NGOs and corporations. This is combined with other things I’m doing this year to kick my career into a new level; for example, I’m finally getting a standalone website open for my freelancing services, where you’ll be able to book me directly in an online calendar instead of having to go through third-party services. You’ll also be able to use an Ethereum cryptocurrency “smart contract” to hold the payment in safe escrow, much like how a place like Upwork currently does it manually in exchange for a big fee.
That’s all coming up in the future, so I’ll keep you apprised of the latest. For now, if you’re an author and are ready to get started on a round of editing, simply drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com so we can begin discussing rates and schedules. Don’t forget that if you subscribe to this newsletter when booking the job, you get 25 percent cut from the total bill—all jobs, all bills—so do make sure to mention that when you initially reach out.
Small Press vs. Self-Publishing: The Great Indie Debate
80 to 90 percent of the authors I work with as a freelancer have one of two fates awaiting their manuscript: either they've decided to pitch it to editors at small presses (or perhaps already have a deal with one), or they've decided to self-publish it. (The remaining 10 to 20 percent plan on pitching their manuscript to literary agents, in the hopes of getting it published somewhere big like Random House and the like, but we'll talk about that whole subject in detail in another issue.) Therefore it's a common question I'm asked as a freelance editor, and a subject I think about a lot, the relative merits versus demerits of either option.
I thought this would be a good subject to explore here at the newsletter, but with a bunch of caveats attached: that my numbers here are only approximate, and that you can find both smaller and bigger exceptions out in the real world; that some people disagree with just these steps in the first place, both the total number and their definitions; and that I'm undoubtedly getting a few of the details wrong, so you shouldn't take this as gospel or a blueprint but just general advice. I also wanted to give a summary of what this lengthy section says, which I'm starting with below.
TLDR: If you can afford to loan yourself $5,000 to $10,000 of your own money slowly over the course of two years and not need it back until year 3, and are enthusiastic about not only all the steps of publishing but all the steps of marketing and promoting, you're better off self-publishing. If you don't have this money to spend, or if you don't want to be involved in every step of the publishing process, you're better off signing a contract with a small press.
I always advise authors I work with that the following are the basic minimum steps that come with publishing a good book, one that has a realistic chance of garnering positive reviews and turning a profit:
Developmental edit. Done after your final private draft, and often the first time someone outside your family sees the manuscript. A developmental editor gives you big-picture advice on things like characters, plot, length, pace, style, etc. This often involves large changes (such as moving entire chapters or combining two characters into one), so most often this step is done to completion before beginning the next.
Copy edit. Done with either your developmental editor or with a brand-new editor. This time they are looking only for technical issues with what the editing community calls GUPS (grammar, usage, punctuation and spelling). This editor has assumed you've been through a developmental edit and have made all your final decisions over big-picture issues, so will only bring them up in an emergency if they see something glaringly wrong. This step is your very last chance to make changes to the manuscript, at which point it is "locked off."
Interior design (ebook and/or paper book). The final layout of your manuscript into the book itself, for all elements except the cover.
Cover design. The final layout of the cover and nothing else. This is often done by a different designer than the one doing the interior, which is why book covers so often have different design schemes and typefaces than their insides.
Post-Production Proofread. One more look through the entire book by a trained editor, but this time searching only for legitimate and unambiguous last problems (typos, missing punctuation, etc.) and nothing else. This editor also proofreads all the formatting, to make sure the page numbers are in the right order, that there are no typos in the headers, etc.
Book Set-Up Online. The uploading of all these pieces once they're complete to Amazon Direct Publishing (for ebooks and paperbacks in the mail) and Ingram Spark (for paper books only, in brick-and-mortar bookstores only). This is also where you complete the book's "metadata," such as its synopsis (known in a previous life as its "dust jacket copy"), ISBN and ASIN codes, BISAC categories, and Amazon "keyword" phrases.
Marketing and Promoting. Everything that happens after the book's publication date in order to convince as many people as possible to read it.
To get down to brass tacks very quickly, the main difference between a small press and self-publishing is that a press provides all of these steps themselves, in return for keeping a bigger percentage of each sale. When you self-publish, you keep much more of each sale, but you're in sole charge of making sure all of these steps get done (and they do all have to get done in one way or another, although there are cheap and smart ways to do each of them, as we'll see). So let's say we're self-publishing, like is my own background before I started publishing other people back in the early 2000s. Based on the numbers I see from my clients on what they're spending, here are some very general numbers we can expect to see these days (autumn 2022)...
Developmental edit: 0.5 cents per word up to 5 cents per word or even more. I myself charge 1 cent per word; the upper rates are for specialty edits, like of academic papers or traditional journalism. Assuming in our hypothetical case that our book is 100,000 words, the size of a good airport thriller or hefty YA novel, that would make this $1,000.
Copy edit: Same rates, so another $1,000.
Interior design: $500 to $1,500. If someone's offering less, they're probably trying to hide that they're a beginner and perhaps not that good.
Cover design: $200 to $2,000. This one is all over the board, since it's only a single image that needs to be delivered. You can spend on the high side to get the same exact cover artist who also freelances for the mainstream presses; or you might luck out and find a friend's kid who's a college student and studying this subject, willing to do it for a few hundred dollars and class credit.
Post-Production Proofread: Typically half of what you paid for the copy edit. Here, $500.
Book Set-Up: Free if you do it yourself; there are a plethora of simple online guides that can teach you. Or maybe 20 bucks an hour to hire someone to set it up for you, for perhaps $100 total.
Marketing and Promoting: I currently recommend that clients set aside "$12,000" for this step, that number deliberately in quotes because it only constitutes $6,000 of actual money. The other $6,000 is volunteer labor you put in, also known as “sweat equity;” if you "pay yourself" $20 an hour for this effort, that's 300 hours of labor spread across 365 days, the first year of the book’s existence. This is also a big enough subject that we'll tackle it on its own in a future issue, but that basically breaks down to $2,000 in targeted ads at Amazon and Audible, $2,000 for a book giveaway promotional campaign at Goodreads, and $2,000 to attend literary conventions; then the 300 hours of labor mostly breaks down into pitching your book to reviewers, sitting in with physical and virtual book clubs to discuss your book they just read, and attending the literary conventions you put aside money to afford.
So all in all, roughly $4,000 to publish the book and another $6,000 to properly promote it thoroughly enough to break even, but with a chance for this to be as low as $2,000 to publish it if you luck out a bit, do a lot of homework, and are smart with your decisions, and $3,000 in marketing if you only care about breaking even and having fun. But you probably won't get to enough sales for break-even until a full year into the book actually existing and being promoted, which already followed a year of editing, revising, designing, uploading and printing, which is why I say that you need to be sure you don't need that money again until year 3 of this process.
Let's say that you averaged somewhere around $8 net profit of each retail sale once all forms of sales—print, ebook, Audible, Kindle Unlimited, public libraries, etc.—were added together (again, a complicated enough subject to warrant its own future issue); that means you would need as a self-publisher to sell somewhere around 600 to 1,200 copies to recoup your losses, and then for every thousand copies you sell after that, you make a quite great $8,000, adding up fast if you have a breakout hit that sells in the tens of thousands or more. Of course, selling less than 600 to 1,200 copies would result in a loss, and that's a gamble you take when you self-publish; but the basic marketing plan outlined above is so foolproof that it's almost guaranteed to sell a thousand copies in the first year if you follow it closely.
On the other hand, if you sign to a small press, they provide all of these steps for you,* then simply pay you a percentage of whatever profit is left over. This is typically expressed as a percentage of each retail sale, known as a "royalty." As a new author, you would typically receive a royalty of around 10 percent, but then with the press paying you a certain amount of those royalties in advance, before the book is even out. This, surprisingly enough, is known as an "advance," and for a small press might realistically be somewhere between $500 and $2,500. If your royalty worked out to, say, $2 per book, that means the publisher is paying you in advance for the first 250 to 1,250 sales, whether or not you actually sell that many. So if you don't, you still keep that money no matter what, which is another big difference between traditional publishing and self-publishing. After those sales, though, you're only making $2,000 of take-home pay for every additional thousand copies sold, which is why I say that if you're energetic and a natural project manager, likely to sell in the 5,000-10,000 range of your book, you're much better off going the self-publishing route, especially if you're a genre author doing a series and building up a bigger and bigger following with each new title (exactly why so many self-publishers are genre authors).
*That said, don't expect a marketing budget of $6,000 from a small press; most of this money will simply have to come from you, like $5,000 of it or more. On the other hand, presses may have "publicity machinery" in place that you can't access as a lone operator, such as opportunities to get interviewed or reviewed at certain publications, or maybe a free pass to a genre convention so that you don't have to buy one yourself, maybe even a slot during the day to sign books at the publisher's table while you're there, and an invite to an exclusive insider-only party that night.
Of course, another aspect of a small press providing all these steps for you is that they provide their own people for them as well, and you typically have little to no say over who these people are and what kind of alterations they do to your manuscript. I was reminded of all this, unfortunately, through a recent chat with a client over frustrations they're having with a press they signed with not long ago; and so this is also a perfectly legitimate reason why people sometimes self-publish, so that they're in total and complete control over every step of the publishing process, from the final edit to the final cover, the synopsis, the author photo and everything else. Plus, of course, if you want to publish with a small press, you have to actually convince a small press to publish you; so that's another difference as well, that anyone on the planet with the right minimum resources can self-publish, no outside permission needed from anyone at all.
Coming from a self-publishing background as I do, it's not exactly a spoiler alert to divulge that I often swing to that side of the debate, and am always delighted to see the authors I work with who have decided to take on that responsibility in exchange for the big rewards that come with something they strongly believe in. But I also know that not everyone has this opportunity, nor this energy level or bank account amount, so it's perfectly valid to go the traditional publishing route as well, and exchange some of your rights and money in return for a smoother, cheaper and easier process.
That said, as I've hopefully made clear, in the 21st century the marketing and promoting of a book largely now falls on the author, whether self-publishing or going the traditional route, and that's what we'll talk about in detail in the next issue. One of the big pluses that's come with freelancing is getting to peek in on the marketing plans of authors all over the world, so that I can gather a lot of real-time data over what's working and what isn't. By synthesizing all these stories I've been hearing, I'm coming up with more and more of a basic plan everyone can use no matter what their situation, so we'll examine the detailed steps of that next time.
P.S. What's the upper limit of self-publishing? Well, check out this recent profile in the New York Times of fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, who broke Kickstarter's all-time record and raised $15.4 million in a single 24 hours ($41 million altogether) for a self-published book; and all this before the book actually goes on sale to the general public, at which point it will make millions more. But note, as it says in the article, what he has in place that he's paying for out of his own pocket to make these numbers a reality: 100 days every single year on the road, an entire company with 30 employees, an entire physical warehouse in Utah (where he lives) for his various products. That's why I always advise that rule #1 in devising a marketing plan is to immediately start thinking in terms of percentages: "If I want to make X amount of money, can I do it spending Y amount of money beforehand? What if I want to make Z amount of money instead?" But again, we'll talk about this in a lot more detail in the next issue.
The latest reviews: Sexy Vampire Edition
As always, more new book reviews over at Goodreads to report…and this time most of them are urban fantasy!
We start with Jim Butcher’s 2001 “Dresden Files” story Fool Moon, whose underwhelming nature reminded me that I actually created a 50-title “Urban Fantasy Canon Reading Challenge” list several years ago, and that it’s probably finally time to start it.
Then we move to the random first title of the challenge, Benedict Jacka’s 2012 “Alex Verus” story Fated, which unfortunately instead of expanding the genre in new directions gave me a virtual copycat of the Dresden mythos and prose quality.
And then we move on to the random second title, Kim Harrison’s 2004 “Rachel Morgan” story Dead Witch Walking, which itself was also a virtual copycat of both the Dresden story and the Verus story. A troubling trend or merely a strange coincidence?
Oh yes, and I finally finished up my Summer of Moshfegh, by reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s fourth and newest book, the recently released black-as-Hades horror tale Lapvona. It was right up my dark, twisted little alley.
And of course let’s not forget those fascinating questions I’m always answering from English as a Second Language (ESL) students around the world at Reddit, especially at subreddits like r/WhatsTheWord and r/EnglishLearning. Some of the most thought-provoking ones recently include:
What’s a common term for someone who flips between two extremes of a spectrum?
Is there a narrower term besides just “media” for media specifically that tells a three-act story?
Want me to review a book? Have a strange question about English or grammar to pose? Send them to me at ilikejason@gmail.com, and I’ll try my hardest to answer them!
This is not my city you’re seeing above. It’s simply an example of how cool and detailed you can build within Cities: Skylines.
Oh yes, and I’ve also started my latest strange online avant-garde storytelling project
Oh yes, and did I mention that I have a new literary project to announce? Behold: “Tales from Winnemac,” an attempt to build out complex and highly detailed metropolitan environments in the video game Cities: Skylines (CS), then write stories and shoot narrative videos that are all set in these complex fictional environments. The big conceit here, however, is that they’re all located in the same fictional US Midwestern state that revered author Sinclair Lewis invented in the 1920s to set many of his most famous novels, including Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth and more.
I’ve actually been doing experimental storytelling projects online way back since the mid-1990s and the birth of the World Wide Web; called “hyperfiction” back in those heady cyberpunk times, they were essentially clunky “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories done through webpages and hyperlinks, which with a lot of work and finessing you could get to run interactively on pioneering mobile devices like Palm Pilots by the late ‘90s. The intriguing thing about CS, though, is that it’s an actual simulator of a city, a sophisticated one where you just tell it what kind of neighborhood you want to build and it will start implanting zone-specific homes and offices, factories and police stations, schools and hospitals. In effect you’re doing joint storytelling with a “partially intelligent” AI bot, where you’re filling in some of the details, the bot is filling in other details, and you in the end write stories based on what the two of you came up with.
It's essentially like the old ‘80s game SimCity, but with all the sophistication you get from modern thousand-dollar gaming computers; but unfortunately that means you have to own a thousand-dollar gaming computer to run it, which is why it took two years of YouTube obsession with the game before I could finally afford to own a copy. I’m just starting my first project now, but in the meanwhile I’ve written an overview of what will be coming, what I hope to accomplish by this, and what inspired it all, over at my personal journal at the indie hosting service Write.as (write.as/jasonpettus, get it?). Consider this an official invitation to all you writers to pen stories within these fictional spaces once they’re up and running; I’m going to be releasing the entire thing under a Creative Commons license, after all, so it’ll be perfectly legal for you to do so. The game files will also be available for fellow CS players to shoot their own animatic videos, so in all cases please just write to me at ilikejason@gmail.com to let me know of your interest.
Have a project you’ve just released? Let me know about that as well, and I’ll share the news in a future issue! Until then, goodbye for now!
