Writing Young Adult Fiction For Dummies

by Deborah Halverson

  Ordering ISBNs: An ISBN identifies both the publisher and the book. With rare exception, you can’t sell your books through retailers without one. Publishers buy their ISBNs in bulk from R. R. Bowker, the official ISBN agency of the United States. Because each ISBN is coded to identify the publisher who purchased the number, ISBNs cannot be resold or reassigned. An ISBN purchased through an author services company remains assigned to that company; it does not transfer to the self-publishing author. Therefore, the author services company remains the publisher of record for that book. Self-publishers can buy their own ISBNs (singly or in bulk) directly from Bowker at www.myidentifiers.com. Because every edition of a book (paperback, hardcover, large print) needs its own ISBN, consider buying blocks of ISBNS. For more information, check out R. R. Bowker’s question-and-answer section for self-publishers at www.bowker.com, or go to www.isbn.org.

  Filling out an Advance Book Information (ABI) form: When a book has an ISBN, it can be registered with Bowker’s Books in Print (the industry’s largest bibliographic database) via www.bowkerlink.com. Filling out the Advance Book Information form is part of listing your title in the directory. If you’re using an author services company, that company can take care of this step for you.

  Ordering bar codes: The bar code encodes your ISBN in black bars for retailers to scan, with your numerical ISBN running along the bottom of the bars. Bar codes are obtained from Bowker Bar Code Service after you have an ISBN. You position your bar code on the back cover of a paperback book or on the front flap of a hardcover jacket.

  Determining categories: Publishers use the Book Industry Study Group’s (BISG) industry-standard categories to tell booksellers where to shelve books and to tell readers what they have in their hands. Ever seen something like JUVENILE FICTION/Fantasy & Magic on the back cover of a book? That’s the Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) classification. The BISG website explains it all (www.bisg.org). Search for “subject headings list, juvenile fiction” or go directly to the BISAC juvenile fiction listings at www.bisg.org/what-we-do-0-108-bisac-subject-headings-list-juvenile-fiction.php.

  Applying for control numbers: If you want to sell your book to libraries, you first need to get it cataloged by the Library of Congress (LOC). Normally your publisher takes care of this step, although your publisher gets something called a CIP (Cataloging-in-Publication) instead of a Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN). Publishers with an established history of producing books that are widely acquired by libraries apply for CIP data through the LOC before the book is published and then print the CIP data on the book’s copyright page. The publisher eventually sends a copy of the final bound book to the Library of Congress, which adds the book to its collection and uploads the CIP into its database for all libraries to access. But self-publishers don’t qualify for the CIP program because of the unlikelihood of wide library pickup. This doesn’t lock you out of libraries, though. Individual libraries that decide to carry your book can catalog it locally, or you can apply for a Preassigned Control Number (PCN) at http://pcn.loc.gov before your book pubs. The PCN program assigns your book an LCCN, which you print on your book’s copyright page to facilitate cataloging in libraries.

  Registering copyright: In traditional publishing, your publisher registers the copyright for your bound book with the United States Copyright Office (www.copy right.gov). In self-publishing, you do it yourself.

  Author services companies

  Author services companies provide publishing services to authors for a fee. Essentially, they’re printers that offer extra services such as design and distribution. You may use these companies to print POD (print-on-demand) bound books or to create e-books. Big-name players include Lulu (www.lulu.com) and Amazon’s CreateSpace (www.createspace.com).

  The distinction between vanity publishing and using an author service company is a blurry one. I talk about vanity publishing in Chapter 1, calling it a dangerous no-no. The big evil is that vanity publishers are subsidy printers that offer themselves up as full-scale publishers even though they provide author services for a fee. That is, after they make you pay for manufacturing the book and for their marketing efforts, they take a cut of your profits as if they were a traditional publisher with an actual stake in your book. Not good. Vanity presses may require you to assign your rights to them (instead of just acting as your hired company for manufacturing your book), and they own your book’s ISBN (the 13-digit International Standard Book Number that uniquely identifies each book), so they’re technically the publisher of record.

  When you hire a true author services company, you pay for the services you want and keep all your profits. That sounds simple enough, but the water gets murky when you consider that many author services companies own the ISBNs and may require some claim to digital or e-publishing rights. (Note: ISBNs are coded in a way that identifies the purchasing company and cannot be reassigned if even an ISBN is resold.) In effect, most of the issues that have made vanity publishing unsafe for writers also exist in author services business practices. See? A blurry line — and one that inspires heated debate in self-publishing circles.

  Education is the key to going the self-publishing route to publication. Ask for recommendations from your writers’ group, research the companies, and explore other writers’ experiences through online self-publishing forums. Understand the fees involved from the beginning, know who you’re dealing with, and set realistic goals for the final product and sales.

  Publisher services companies

  Publisher services companies use print-on-demand technology to print and distribute small runs of books for traditional publishers. Think of these companies as small-scale printers. They don’t edit, design, or in any way prep the product for printing; they just print the book and ship it out. Because small-batch POD printing is not as economical as printing large batches of books, publishers still rely on traditional offset-press printing companies to print most of their books. Interestingly, many author services companies (see the preceding section) use publisher services companies for their printing and distribution needs, as do some major wholesalers.

  Although publisher services companies don’t work with individual self-publishers, some self-publishers form their own publishing companies so that they can work directly with publisher services companies, bypassing author services companies altogether (and thus extra fees). The largest publisher services company is Lightning Source, which is owned by the same parent company as Ingram Book Company, the largest U.S. book wholesaler.

  Distributors

  A distributor is a company that buys books from publishers and then sells them to stores and wholesalers. Distributors warehouse your books, fulfill orders, issue invoices, and collect money. If there are returns, the distributor processes them (charging them back to the publisher). Some distributors have sale reps who visit bookstores. Distributers don’t market the books, though — that’s up to the publishers.

  Most distributors are exclusive, meaning you sign agreements to use them and only them. Because you have to pay distributors for their services, they add to the cost of your book. If you want to get your self-published book into physical stores, you need a distributor. When you use an author services company, it’ll work with distributors on your behalf.

  Wholesalers

  Retailers aren’t interested in buying their books from a gaggle of individual authors. The logistics would be a nightmare. They do buy from established sources: wholesalers. Wholesalers don’t have sales reps; they merely stock your book and fill orders. The largest wholesalers are Ingram (www.ingrambook.com) and Baker & Taylor (www.btol.com).

  Booksellers

  Booksellers are broken down into categories such as online and brick-and-mortar stores (physical buildings such as the bookstore in your local mall). Here are a few types of booksellers you can access directly or through distributers (see the earlier “Distributers”
section):

  Independent bookstores with on-the-spot owners ordering the books; such owners may be open to self-published authors’ approaching them

  Specialized booksellers such as book clubs, private organizations, and museums

  Corporate chain stores (such as Barnes & Noble) with specialized buyers at the national headquarters who deal only with distributors and traditional publishers

  Retail stores with a big interest in books (such as warehouse stores and Walmart), again buying through national headquarters and dealing with distributors and traditional publishers

  Libraries and schools are book buyers, too, although they aren’t big buyers of self-published books. Knowing where you want your books sold helps you decide which self-publishing option, if any, is for you.

  Weighing Self-Publishing for Your YA Fiction

  Self-publishing is a serious business endeavor, with your reputation, your finances, and perhaps even your sanity at stake. Every author should consider the pros and cons, the challenges, and the potential based on his own situation and project. This section offers some scenarios in which self-publishing may be a viable path to publication.

  Self-publishing works best for nonfiction, for established fiction authors who enjoy name recognition and an established reader base, and for genre fiction (such as romance or crime thrillers) for which authors can easily target readers through genre-related publications, organizations, social media subcultures, and events.

  YA self-publishing success stories

  The odds of a self-published young adult novel breaking out may not be great, but it does happen. Here are four success stories where authors had a vision, did the work, caught the eye of the traditional publishing world, and inked a book deal.

  Kara Kingsley, author of Erec Rex: The Dragon’s Eye, middle grade fantasy series, ages 9–12, illustrated by Melvyn Grant: Kara Kingsley’s original plan wasn’t to use self-publishing as a stepping stone to traditional publishing, but that’s how it worked out, and she’s plenty happy with the outcome. When she decided she wanted to publish the first two books in her fantasy series, she set about learning everything she could about self-publishing. Books, online articles — she studied it all. Realizing that time would be a primary challenge for her, she was careful to prioritize her efforts. And then she went for it, using bookstore connections and appearances to sell 30,000 copies of The Dragon’s Eye on her own. The book even earned a turn as a Borders Original Voices pick. Kingsley came to believe that her books could go further with a large publisher, so she contacted an agent and soon signed an eight-book deal with Simon & Schuster. The key to her standout success? According to her S&S editor, her sales record helped, but her solid characters and a well-written story sealed the deal.

  Tim Kehoe, author of The Unusual Mind of Vincent Shadow, middle grade fiction, ages 9–12, illustrated by Mike Wohnoutka: Tim Kehoe took eight months to write the story of 11-year-old aspiring toy inventor Vincent Shadow, a character inspired by Kehoe’s own successful toy inventing. Then Kehoe decided to go the self-publishing route. He hired illustrator Mike Wohnoutka, whose fantastic artwork helped the novel stand out of the self-publishing pack, laid out the book using Adobe’s InDesign software, and printed a few hundred copies. Local bookstores rallied around the book in a big way. Author Vincent Flynn took notice and opened the door of the traditional publishing world to Kehoe. A few weeks after meeting Flynn’s agent, Kehoe had two offers from publishers. Little, Brown and Company now publishes Kehoe’s Vincent Shadow books.

  Colleen Houck, author of Tiger’s Curse, YA fiction, ages 12 and up: Colleen Houck was frustrated. She’d just finished reading Twilight: Eclipse but would have to wait months for the next book in the saga. How could she stand waiting? She’d write her own fantasy to fill the time, she decided. And she did. Only, the manuscript didn’t fare so well when she started submitting it to agents. After writing the full trilogy but getting only rejections, she decided to self-publish rather than let her story of 18-year-old Kelsey and a 300-year-old Indian curse gather dust. She published the first two books through Amazon, as bound books and as e-books for Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. She called bookstores, arranged a signing, got her book into local libraries, put up a website, and took out an ad in a local paper. She priced the first e-book at 99 cents, appealing to Kindle bargain hunters, and ended up on several lists for cheap but good reads. Soon Houck was selling 300 books a month and then 300 a day. Customer requests at Costco led the warehouse store to stock her book; China, Thailand, and Korea contacted her about translation rights; a film producer called. Then an agent called, and within weeks Houck had a high-profile book deal with Sterling Publishing.

  Amanda Hocking, author of the Trylle Trilogy, YA paranormal fiction: Amanda Hocking was tired of hearing no. She’d submitted her novels about angels, vampires, and zombies to publishers but hadn’t landed a book contract. So she took matters into her own hands and self-published two of her novels as e-books in April 2010. Within ten months, she had eight novels and one novella on the market and had sold 900,000 copies. Sales rose from there, reaching into the millions before she signed a high-profile, multi-book contract with St. Martin’s Press. Hocking credits her self-pub success to low e-book price points ($2.99 and $.99), aggressive self-marketing through online social media and her own blog, and the enthusiastic support of book bloggers. She also talks plainly about her frustration with the amount of time she had to put into production and marketing tasks when she’d rather be writing, which she cites as the main factor in her decision to sign with a traditional publisher.

  Notice something missing from my list? Yep, young adult fiction. YA self-pubbers are hampered by the difficulty of connecting directly with the general teen population. Doing so is difficult even with a traditional children’s book publisher behind you. Even if your publisher doesn’t send you out on tour, your publisher does give you access to larger promotional efforts and established media outlets, and it can piggyback your title on promotional materials for brand-name authors and create high-quality, high teen-appeal packaging for your book. In self-publishing, these responsibilities fall on the individual author, who must be nimble, market-savvy, information-hungry, and more accepting of smaller sales numbers than a big house is. The average self-pubbed book in any category sells only a few hundred copies; a self-pubbed young adult novel that sells in significant numbers is the exception rather than the rule.

  Of course, you didn’t choose to write young adult fiction because you thought it’d be an easy get-rich-quick scheme. Self-publishing may be a valid choice for your novel if you’re realistic with your goals, wise about your strategy, dedicated in your work ethic, committed to quality, and fanatically obsessed with becoming a self-marketing machine.

  The biggest challenge in self-publishing a young adult novel is letting the world know your book exists. Commit to finding out everything you can about self-marketing. Chapter 15 is dedicated to that very task.

  Common scenarios for self-publishers

  If self-publishing is so darned risky and the breakouts are so rare, why do writers still choose to self-publish their young adult fiction? Here are six scenarios in which you may make the same call — or at least be tempted:

  Publishers haven’t snapped up your manuscript. Your manuscript keeps getting rejected, and you no longer believe that a traditional publishing house will publish the project, so you decide to give it a go yourself. You intend to get behind your book in a big way and sell enough copies to make money on the venture. This is the riskiest self-publishing scenario, with the highest investment of your money, time, and effort and thus the most at stake.

  You’re taking a nontraditional path to traditional publishing. You want to sell enough copies yourself and create buzz about your book so that a traditional house will pick it up. This isn’t a common outcome, but it does happen. You must have sales well into the thousand
s and/or significant bookseller chatter to attract a publisher’s eye, and your book packaging must look professional rather than “self-pubbed.” You assume all the costs and promotional duties until the pickup happens, and there’s no guarantee it will happen. If this is your strategy, don’t wait for publishers to find you. Gather your high sales numbers and bookseller testimonials and seek out an agent or approach publishers directly.

  You’d rather do it your way. You want to retain total creative and financial control and publish without a middleman, and you believe you can sell enough copies to make a profit or at least break even.

  You don’t want to wait. It can take a year or longer for a young adult novel to reach bookstore shelves after contract, depending on how long it takes to edit the book with your editor and where your book is placed in the publisher’s release schedule. And that’s on top of the time the submission phase takes. Self-publishing lets you put the book out on your schedule.

  This isn’t your main gig. Your goal may be to have a self-published novel that supplements your traditionally published books, or you may want to hand-sell your novel as a back-of-the-room (BOTR) offering at your speaking engagements. If you want to hand-sell and don’t mind smaller sales numbers, then self-publishing may be for you.

  You just want a book; sales don’t matter. The New York Times bestseller list isn’t everyone’s be-all, end-all. If your dream is to see your name on a book cover and your goal is to give copies to family, friends, and others in your social circle, then self-publishing is a great choice. It’s easy and low-cost because you’re not concerned with marketing and promotion.

  Balancing your goals, your guts, and your wallet

  With so much at stake and so much work involved, self-publishing entails more than just printing your book at the local printer. Here are points you should consider as you decide whether self-publishing is your path to publication: