Road trip series postponed: want to know why?

To all of you who were waiting with bated breath for the next installment of our road trip to Spain "On to Toledo", I apologize for not posting it yet; the reason is that a more important and interesting subject has come up: money!

Yes, the root of all evil, that which makes the dog dance, the thing that "makes the World go 'round" according to the song from the musical "Cabaret",

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8P80A8vy9I

has come to usurp the fun part of life. As some of you already know, I have started a "crowd funding" campaign in order to gather the necessary funds to professionally edit and publish or self-publish a novel, "Mrinalika, a Third World romance". Hence, I thought I should use my blog to give my loyal half-dozen readers a "behind the scenes" look at the campaign.

Firstly, I'd like to explain how all of this started: as we all know, the Internet, and its evil/good children, social media, have come to change many things. One of the most important is the Publishing World.

Publishing has been around practically as long as Humanity has been around. Paintings on the wall and scratches on rock surfaces were Humanity's first editions. It took us thousands of years to go from cave walls and rock to clay tablets, parchment, and eventually paper. And it took just a few hundred years to go from paper to electronic bits displayed on screens.

After the printing press was invented, publishing was pretty straight forward: an author wrote something, took it to a printer, got it printed, and then took the copies of his work to a book seller. An author paid the printer either a fee from his own pocket or, more frequently, from the pocket of a patron or sponsor, or he shared the profits from selling his stuff with the printer and book seller. Even Shakespeare and Proust did this.

In the early Twentieth Century, another actor appeared on the scene: the agent. Since there were now hundreds, if not thousands, of magazines and book publishers in the world, it was hard for an author to manage, negotiate, or even approach the right magazine and/or publisher for his work. So, a specialized entity, an agent, offered to do that for a fee: usually 10-15% of the author's profits.

That situation went on for decades: authors wrote, agents found and negotiated with the proper magazine or publisher, editors of the magazine or publisher cleaned up the manuscript and argued with the author about changes, and finally the publisher published and distributed the work.

But then came the disruptive element: the Internet.

In the old author-agent-publisher system, the publisher took care of most everything: editing, creating a book cover, distribution, promotion, getting the book reviewed, etc. With the event of the Internet, all of those pieces flew apart and became independent. The motivation for this was, and is, MONEY! Or better put, PROFIT and COSTS.

As the old system of author-agent-publisher found that the profits of the publisher were diminishing and the cost increasing, it became harder and harder for first time, or unknown authors to get their manuscripts printed or even looked at. Agents found they could interest publishers only in sure-fire best sellers, and publishers only wanted that kind of stuff. It was easier to sell of piece of trash like "Fifty Shades of Gray" (pornography always sells) than to publish a serious novel, such as Penelope Fitzgerald's "Offshore."

In an interesting experiment, an author took a book that had sold millions in the fifties and sixties "Old Yeller" and which had been a very popular Walt Disney movie, put it into typed manuscript form, changed the title and sent it to agents and publishers. NO ONE WOULD TOUCH IT.

Agents complained that there was no market for "dog stories" and publishers asked why there were no "sex scenes" in it.

Which brings us to the present problems an author faces when trying to publish a book. Firstly is convincing an agent to "take on" your manuscript. Time after time you are told NOT to send out your manuscript unless it is PERFECT. By that they mean that is it professionally proofread and edited. "Any typos," they will tell you, "misuse of grammar, or badly structured sentences will guarantee that a publisher will not even bother to send you a rejection slip." Professional independent editors charge between $1,500-$2,500 dollars to line edit a 100,000 word novel. Ebook publishers and electronic magazines will ask you to do your own cover or graphic designs. They tell you that a book cover that will "work" in both electronic and paper publishing has to have certain graphic elements and that a graphic designer asks for $400-$600 US dollars for a cover design. Advertising, distribution, and promotional campaigns cost between $1,000 and $2,000 US Dollars. Internet publishing does not call for thousands of copies that are distributed to bookstores; it is done "on demand", that is, the book is printed only when a person orders it online. The printing costs goes against the profits of the author. And so on, and so on.

Yes, you can use something like Amazon's Kindle Publishing to self-publish a book. That is, you can write your manuscript in Word, create a book cover in your favorite paint program, and upload it to Amazon's CreateSpace or Kindle Directo Publishing but you are on your own to write, design, promote, distribute, etc. etc. Of course, you can then buy all those services, but it that case, you are back to square one: see the costs mentioned above.

You can say, "To Hell with that: I'll just put it up on Amazon and wait to see what happens." Well, so do thousands of people and what happens is that an ebook without promotion rarely sells more than a couple of hundred copies. Amazon doesn't care because if a million authors give them 2 dollars profit for selling just one book each, that's two million dollars for them and 1 dollar for each author, if the selling price is $2.99. Many times, it is even less. However, it is zero cost for Amazon, it is just pure profit.

This now brings us neatly to my efforts at crowd funding. Please go look at the campaign web page:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mrinalika-a-third-world-romance-novel/x/8737005

Notice the target? $3,500 dollars. Well, if you add up the costs above mentioned, you will see where that figure comes from. BUT, consider that even if the TARGET IS NOT REACHED, any and all funding is useful. I do believe in PROFESSIONAL EDITING AND CONTENT REVIEW. It is very important whether I can get an agent to manage the novel or if I decide to SELF-PUBLISH the novel.

Another thing to mention: it is important to know that NOT ONLY THE AMOUNT CONTRIBUTED IS IMPORTANT, SO IS THE AMOUT OF CONTRIBUTORS! The INDIEGOGO web sites promotes and features a campaign according to the AMOUNT OF CONTRIBUTORS NOT THE AMOUNT OF MONEY. That is why even contributions of one dollar make a difference.

OK, now you know why I started this thing. The campaign will last two months. I will keep all six of you posted on any further and interesting developments.

Please post your comments on both this blog and on the campaign website:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mrinalika-a-third-world-romance-novel/x/8737005

Regards,
Rodolfo