The first is Michael J Dowling’s White Paper on Publishing Options, in which he very clearly spells out the advantages and disadvantages of today’s publishing options. Check it out at: http://www.michaeljdowling.com/pdf/Michael-J-Dowling_Publishing-Options-White-Paper.pdf.

The second is my discussion with JW Najarian about ghostwriters and ghostwriting on his quite fascinating “Cause and Effect” site. Look for it at: http://jwnajarian.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/claudia-suzanne-professional-ghost-writer-on-learning-how-to-find-one-or-be-one/

What a great time to be in the book business!

On the List. I use that phrase so often that my newly reorganized company is replacing our long-standing imprint, WCPublishing, with On the List Publishing. OTLP joins Iridescent Orange Press and Bad Walnut Media, two completely new imprints, under a new division: Read As Written Publishing Group.

About that newly reorganized company: we’re still Wambtac Communications. In January, we’ll become Wambtac Communications LLC. Besides a seriously expanded publishing enterprise, we’re also expanding our educational pursuits. Ghostwriter Certification Training is splitting into two semesters and will be joined this fall by The Story in Your Head, a fiction workshop co-taught by JD Moore; Before Copy Editing, fiction and nonfiction; and, if the storm don’t come and the creek don’t rise, What You Know, a nonfiction/memoir workshop.

We’e also adding other new teachers to our roster besides JD (are they all GCT grads? Well, I’ll be damned–most of them are!) and a Ghostwriter Guild.

Pretty ambitious, eh? But I’m not doing it alone! We’ve got a new President, a new COO, new CFO, new strategic alliances with designers and printers and advisors and PR people …

It’s all coming soon. Watch this space. It’s all on the list.

When we last left our reluctant storyteller—that would be me—she had wrestled her intruder, a.k.a. multiple sclerosis,  to a virtual standstill. The symptoms were chronic but not progressing, and nothing new had darkened the horizon for quite awhile, health-wise.

Lest you think I did this all myself, let me assure you I had more help than Houston has during a shuttle launch. My parents supported me emotionally, physically, and monetarily, stalwartly and uncomplainingly, throughout the entire nasty affair. My daughter, Lona (short for Ilona in case you hadn’t figured that out), gave up wide stretches of her childhood, youth, and young adulthood to drive for me, fetch for me, remember for me, do for me, worry for me, and sometimes even think for me. Bera researched, suggested, denounced, prodded, guided, and did everything but slap me upside the head with a 2 x 4 to help me.  Ron, bless his wacky, wonderful heart, just kept sending those Chelation tablets. My friends all deserve a Presidential medal just for hanging with me all this time because I was never —trust me on this—stoic or silent. My mother-in-law, Doris, gave me the kind of support one might expect from a BFF without ever once making me feel I was too needy or intrusive. And Tom …

And Tom.

Tom had a psychological break in October, 2006, just about 18 months after his mom died. It was as predictable and expected as Phoenix heat in July or wind down Michigan Avenue in the winter, but remember the old musician story about the guy who knows that in five years, he’s going to turn a corner and somebody’s going to punch him in the nose? As much as I could have clocked Tom’s crash with an egg timer, it was still a punch in the nose.

This was right in the middle of us “acquiring” the three young adults we took into our home (and hearts) and sent to community college. Tom balked at every single new person that came along until the point when he said, “Go get her!” about Tyger (a.k.a. Kathy) after Lona described Tyger’s living conditions down in Texas; “Go get the cat!” about Nyxie (a.k.a. she doesn’t like her real name so I won’t use it) when he heard no one was actively caring for Taru at her parents’ house while she slept on our floor to avoid the 45-minute drive to and from work every day; and “Get your ass in here!” about Kata (a.k.a. Eric) when he was sleeping on our back porch because he’d gotten himself into trouble and had no place else to go and the weather had turned cold and rainy.

My husband was a very strict, hard-nosed guy with a soft, marshmallow center. Or, as one friend wrote on his death: “He was a gentle soul with a bombastic spirit.”

I have to believe our expanded family gave him something and someone else to worry about over the next three and a half years. I know he grew to love and cherish them. And rely on them; he definitely came to rely on every one of them, almost as much as he relied on Lona.

Of course, he relied on me most of all.

Those years were very tough. He rallied now and then, but mostly he wanted to die. He had no plan; he wasn’t actively suicidal. He was just done. The live-music business was dying (it’s beginning to revive again now—also predictable—in a haunting example of too little, too late). He had finally finished his beloved History B.A. the previous semester and was calf-deep in a master’s program but, “To what end?” we bantered endlessly. No one was going to give  a 50+ year old life-long freelance musician a straight job, no matter how many letters of recommendation he produced or how many applications he painstakingly filled out. His position playing the piano at Knott’s Berry Farm had become bone-achingly dreary, and his need for constant connection with me drainingly obsessive.

So we talked, which is to say, he talked. I listened. (Ironically [or not] I had written a  song for him called “I’ll Still Listen” back at the beginning of our marriage; he wrote one for me called “Just For Laughs”—an unwitting foreshadowing of our lives together.) He despaired; I encouraged. He grew nasty as he got more despondent. I grew angry as I got more impatient.

And the MS gave way, just a little bit.

We both put on weight, which gave him more cause to lose hope. I hated the way I looked, but could not help noticing that for all my extra weight, I physically felt better.

Was my miserable parasite invading his psyche?

In November, 2009, I took him to the ER (whoa—talk about your turnabouts). Doubled over with pain, he “knew” he had another kidney stone, that’s how bad it hurt, and demanded Toridol, if that’s the right spelling, for the pain. The damn ER doctor ignored his belligerent request and ran some tests.

It wasn’t a kidney stone. It was pancreatis. Very painful. He spent three days in the hospital, hallucinating from continual doses of heavy pain medications and telling me to, “Get the hell out of here.” I got the hell out.

I also jumped through a couple dozen hoops to get him on a county medical plan so he could continue to get medical attention when he came home from the hospital.

Instead, he continued to look for a straight job during the day and went out nights to figure out how to break into the dueling-piano world. He was a natural. But he was tired.

Tired was something I understood. My tiredness—not fatigue at this point, just tiredness—came from ghosting for my clients, creating the final edition of the definitive textbook (one reviewer called it the “seminal text”) on ghostwriting, teaching my expanded training program, handling the house, dealing with the kids and their school issues, and providing his almost nonstop psychological support. We tried going to a few actual therapists, but they did not give him what he wanted or needed, which became ever obviously more and more of me.

I didn’t voice it at the time, but in retrospect, the more of my time and energy he demanded, the less the MS did.

Huh.

On April 14, Tom turned 58 playing what would be his last gig, at the Villa Nova in Newport Beach. We’d sent word out that he was subbing for Rick Sherman that night, and friends and fellow musicians filled the room. The kids and I left after a few hours; I had to work in the morning and they had classes.

The next day, I took him to the Emergency Room in pain again. They sent him home with a few prescriptions. We didn’t have time to fill them, because the day after that, he returned via ambulance, spitting up blood.

I’m going to cut to the chase here. Between April 16 and May 29, 2010, we went in and out of the hospital. Tom received first one, then six, then another six units of blood for what was first a bleeding, then an obstructive duodenal ulcer. His demands for pain medication alienated every nurse and hospitalist (yeah, that’s what they’re called) who interacted with him, to the point that one gastroenterologist called me in the middle of a Saturday and said he didn’t want to have anything to do with Tom anymore.

On May 29, after that same gastroenterologist had run some tests and sent Tom to UCI to have a procedure done so he could eat again, we learned Tom had stage 4 cancer that had metastasized to his liver. “He has 6 to 12 months. There’s nothing we can do. You can leave (the outpatient bed) whenever you’re ready. I’m sorry.”

Okay, life changed.

Not going to go through that next month step by step. Use your imagination. Or don’t. Wish my Intermittent Amnesia would kick in for some this. But it won’t.

He died June 28 at 10:35 AM. I was by then functioning with a single brain cell. Did what I had to do, with enormous, above-and-beyond help from my parents, my kids, my brother and sister-in-law, Tom’s brother-by-love Leon Natker, and my own beloved rabbi, Bernie King, alev ha sholem.

The MS did not make a single peep. Not the slightest whimper. Sure, I slept a lot, but that was grief. My hair fell out—textbook grief.

The sun kept coming up every single day. Tom stayed dead long after the joke stopped being funny. He sent me a song the day he died through Bera. I remember the fact and the feel of it, nothing more. Had a few stasis incidents, utterly vanquished by Rescue Remedy. In November, I’d come to the end of my emotional rope and took off with Lona in my new, reliable vehicle (to replace that 1978 van that, yeah, Tom was still driving and Greg Vail now uses “temporarily” until…he doesn’t).

We were only going to be gone for a day or two, so, throwing caution to the wind, and not really caring one way or the other, I took no supplements with me.

We were gone for six days. I was fine until my body reminded me that MS or no MS, I was still a girl with a four-generation gastric dysfunction. Otherwise—no ill effects.

In  January, I got sick as a dog. With the flu.

For decades, I never got sick. No cold, no flu, no bug could get very far in my body, which was in active search-and-destroy mode, killing off my nerve connectors and brain cells and—wait, is that something new? Let’s kill it!—whatever else that had the audacity to penetrate my system. Now, I was on my back, coughing, wheezing, hacking, sneezing, whimpering sick. For well over a week.

The MS was definitely gone.

It took me another few months of paying close attention to accept it as a reality, but yeah—the enemy had been vanquished. Banished.  Expelled, ejected, cast out.

Like those memory lapses, it was gone, gone, gone.

Did Tom take it with him? Did my physical dreck leech into him and die along with his poor, cancer-ridden body? Did his soul, knowing he was about to shed his corporeal mass, suck it from mine?

Okay, so this isn’t the last blog in this series.  I guess I have one more to write. But not now. It’s Sunday, the only time I have to visit my parents. Back anon.

Ghostwriting is booming. Ghostwriting is recession proof. Ghostwriting is just about the only way for a freelance writer to earn $20,000, $35,000, $50,000 or more per project–honest to God. I’m just finishing a $40,000 memoir. One ghost I know charges $65,000 per CEO “expert” book—and does 3-4 every year. A former student told me she signed four new clients in January alone! A book packager in the Midwest can’t keep enough ghosts in his stable to cover all the work flowing in.

Ghostwriters are in demand.

Granted, ghostwriting is  not for the faint-hearted or the uninitiated, but if you’ve got the skills, the raw talent, and the ambition, ghostwriting could be for you.

So how do you break into this exploding field without getting burned? Ghostwriter Certification Training.

Ghostwriter Certification Training is the pinnacle of writer skill training. You’ll learn techniques not available in any other course of study–skills that can not only open the door to padding your wallet but will forever change the way you look at the written word plus improve your own writing.

Ghostwriter Certification Training covers everything you need to

• Understand the job
• Do the job
• Find the job
• Troubleshoot the job.

And this is no “here are the ideas,  have a good life!” info dump. Class size is limited to no more than 3 people per class with no more than 2 classes per semester. You’ll get plenty of practice doing in-class work and skill-building homework.

Please don’t consider signing up if you don’t have the time to do significant homework every week.

I know it’s tough to think of yourself as anything other than “The Author” or “The Writer,” but weigh those aspects against the current state of your bank account and do yourself a favor: think about ghostwriting.

Details and online registration are available by clicking Ghostwriter Certification Training on the left panel.

Questions can be answered and payment plans worked out by calling me directly at 1-800-641-3936.

I look forward to speaking and working with you anon!

Claudia Suzanne

“It can’t make you much money,” she said. “Not for the amount of time and work you put in over the three months.”

She’s right; it doesn’t. I spend three hours a week teaching each class–in the fall, that’s going to go up to four hours/week. My students tell me they put in between 6 and 10 hours on their homework every week–homework that I then have to go over, comment on, discuss, and correct. If I add up everyone’s tuition and divide by the number of hours I put in, I’m making …

Damn little.

So why do I teach GCT? Not sure. Let me muse as I write.

If we go back to the beginning, I started teaching the basics of the book business and a little bit about ghostwriting back in 1993, I think. Maybe 1996. Don’t remember. My motive then was to pass on some information and sell my book, This Business of Books: A Complete Overview of the Industry from Concept through Sales, then in its 3rd Edition.

Maybe I was looking for referrals. Maybe I just wanted to share. I honestly cannot remember. But I found I enjoyed teaching. It was fun. It was stimulating. It was educational for me. And people paid me a little bit of money. A win/win.

Over the years, the class ebbed and flowed. I taught sometimes, didn’t the rest. Tried to put together Professional Book Writing School, but life got in my way. Remember, I spent over two decades struggling with serious health problems, which I have now, Baruch Ha’Shem, completely overcome. But during most of the past two decades, I was inconsistent and intermittent with my work habits, my clients, and my teaching.

Looking back, it’s amazing to me how much I managed to get done by just bulldozing through. When faced with allegedly insurmountable odds, some people take it easy, some people rely on the medical community, and some people give up. I just put my head down and worked. Not fast, not always well, but through the best and the worst of it, I worked.

And then I was facing the end.

It was 2000 and I had one of those “life-changing” episodes during a downward health spiral that told me I was coming to the end of my days. But I had a client! How could I transition to the next world and leave my client up in the air?  So I handed the client over to one of my interns and started pricing funerals.

I won’t keep you in suspense–I didn’t die. In fact, with the help of my beautiful sister-by-love, Bera Dordoni, N.D. (Bastis Foundation), I began the long journey back to perfect and total health. But it was an eye-opening experience and I realized I had to write a book. And so I did.

And I rewrote it.

And rewrote it.

And so and so forth and scooby dooby do.

The final edition of said book, Secrets of a Ghostwriter: World’s First Step-by-Step Guide to the Theory, Skills, and Politics of Ghostwriting, is at long last complete and exhaustively emended by five wonderful, nit-picky editors. And Ghostwriter Certification Training has evolved from a 5-week to a 7-week to a 14-week and soon to be 16-week program that details exactly what the job is, how to do the job, how to find aspiring authors to do the job for, and how to convert those authors into contracted clients.

Which may be the actual reason why I continue to teach GCT. After putting in all this time and effort to develop what Cora Foerstner called “the seminal text” on the subject and honing the program to the point that I’m confident it’s turning out skilled, competent ghostwriters, how can I stop?

But I warn you now: in fall, the price is going up. Because yeah–I don’t make enough money at this right now!

Don’t you deserve better?

As a book ghostwriter, I always get paid, I set my own fees, and I can work as many big-ticket projects at the same time as I want. Business ghostwriter Michael Levin says that three $35,000 projects per year is not unusual for him; truth is, it’s not unusual for any trained or experienced ghostwriter.

Ghostwriter Certification Training is the wave of today. Join the  growing ranks of certified ghostwriters who are landing hi-ticket projects that are fun and fulfilling. The next GCT session starts the first week of June with day classes, teleclasses, and evening classes. Click on Ghostwriter Certification Training in the left column or go to http://claudiasuzanne.com/gct to learn how to improve your writing, increase your income, and get paid to live the writer’s life.

I look forward to seeing you in class next month!

Steve Jobs thrilled some people and infuriated others when he announced that Apple’s new eBook app will use the agency model for pricing.

Translation: publishers can set the price of their eBooks, and Apple will take a standard 35% discount, or commission.

Amazon was up in arms, because it believes eBooks should be a low-cost alternative to paper books.

Translation: keeping all Kindle prices under $9.95 would help push Amazon’s Kindle—which requires a unique format unusable on any other eBook reader—into the top spot in the eBook-reader market.

In Amazon’s business model, Amazon sets all eBook prices and pays publishers a commission—negotiable for larger publishers, non-negotiable for smaller and independent houses. Traditional publishers have been grousing about this policy for some time. When Amazon grudgingly agreed to accept agency-model pricing —with the stated emphasis on “grudgingly”—they managed to get into such a fracas with Macmillan that they killed the “Buy” buttons on most Macmillan titles. While this situation lasted hours, not months or weeks, it received damn-near minute-by-minute press thanks to the flurry of IMs, text messages, twitters, blog postings, and comments scurrying around the web.

Once consumers found out about the Apple/Amazon/Macmillion/agency model/Random House situation (a good 7.32 seconds after the industry found out) …

Translation: Random House took their sweet time making a deal with Apple and so were not included in the otherwise all-encompassing list of publishers who had signed up to play with Apple and thus caused a minor ripple about preferential treatment that didn’t even have a chance to spread very far before it was squashed with another announcement.

… more blogs and IMs and twitters and text messages and comments flooded the Ethernet as people expressed their outrage at the cost of eBooks to the reader and the unfairness of DRM.

Translation: Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the technology that lets eBook manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders, and booksellers control the electronic material the consumer buys. Examples of DRM that really push consumers’ buttons include the seller’s ability to yank paid-for material off an eBook reader and the inability to lend or sell eBooks by transferring them from one person’s reader to another.

Part 2

All of which logically leads to the question: just how much does it cost to produce an eBook, anyway?

I’m a ghostwriter, not an accountant, so we’re going to work with round numbers pulled out of the air in an extremely simplified example. Let’s start when a manuscript lands at the publisher’s door. We’ll stipulate that it’s a good book, that the agent called ahead, that the acquisition editor expects it to show up on (arbitrarily) her desk, and that a contract will ensue. We’ll include man-hours and cash outlays and keeping a running balance on the side.

Start the dollar countdown:

Getting the “Requested Material” physically from the mailroom or electronically from the editor’s inbox costs, let’s say, a single man-hour arbitrarily valued at $10 per. Cheap labor is good to find.

$10

The editor has to read the manuscript. Since much of the brouhaha is over fiction, we’ll make it a standard 350-page novel, and we’ll value the editor’s at, oh, $25/hour. Let’s say it takes her ten hours to read and fall in love with the manuscript. That’s pretty fast—I would take longer—but we’re working with round numbers and I have a limited number of fingers, even using both hands.

$260

We’ll dispose of the in-house decision-making meetings, discussions, push-and-shove, etc. in another ten man-hours—that includes all the people with whom the editor has to meet, some of whom make more than her and some of whom make less. Again, probably low, but I don’t want to have to take my shoes off. We’ll average them all out to earning $30/hour.

$560

Not too expensive so far. Now let’s negotiate the contract. No one is really disputing the cost of Jane Doe’s eBook—they’re disputing the cost of Stephen King’s new eBook, or Sue Grafton’s new eBook, or Elmore Leonard’s new eBook—but let’s make ours from an author whose reputation is rising but not yet star-level. We can probably get away with offering $60,000.

$60,560

Nice try, but the agent has other ideas. Another round of meetings, this time between the editor and maybe even the publisher with the marketing and legal departments. We can stick to another ten man-hours (low, low, low), but the average cost is now closer to $60/hour, and the final negotiated deal is $75,000. Agents are worthy of their hire.

$76,160

Huzzah! We own the book! Now things start pricey. The editor is going to spend at least 80-160 hours doing what editors do best (and most): editing. We’ll average it out to 100 man-hours at $25/hour. You’re right—that’s not much, but publishers expect the heavy editorial to be completed by the time they look at the manuscript. Chalk up another $2,500, minimum.

$78,660

Interior design really, really, low-ball: 40 hours @ $20/hour.

$79,460

Cover design: 80 hours @ $35/hour.

$82,260

ISBN, LCCN, CIP paperwork & follow-up: 5 man-hours @ $15/hour.

$82,335

Marketing. The industry rule of thumb is to spend the same amount marketing and advertising a title as it cost to buy the title—in this case, $75,000.

$157,335

We’d be fools to try to recoup over $150,000 on eBooks alone, especially since only about 6% of the population have readers and digital still only account for about 4% of total sales. Ergo, we have to print. If we print 25,000 copies—a gamble—our production cost should run approx. $.75/copy or $18,750

$176,085

We’ve got that $75,000 worth of advertising supporting our sales, so we need to get those books out to our distributors, wholesalers, and booksellers. The average distributor takes a 60% discount; wholesalers take 50. We’ve priced the title at $12.95, so we get $5.18 through our distributors and $6.47 from our wholesalers, for an average of $5.82 per book. If we sell out our initial 25,000 copies at an average return of $5.82/book, we recoup $145,500.

$30,585

We’re still in the red, but we’re getting close to breaking even—not making a profit to boost our budget for buying another book, just barely covering the costs of publishing this one. But hey—what about those eBooks? That cost is minimal at best: say, 10 hours of technical man-hours at, oh, $20/hour. That’s  $200, barely raising our nut.

$30,785

Let’s say the eBook sells for an average retail price of $9.95, Amazon’s comfort number, that we net 35% of that $9.95, or $6.47, and that 1,000 people—about 4%—buy it. Cool! We’ve made $6,470.

$24,315

We’re still over 10% in the red even without taking myriad other costs into account: bookkeeping, troubleshooting, production overruns, flat covers, and so on and so forth, and scooby-dooby-do. A lower advance won’t make any real difference because we’ll just go with a smaller print run and smaller marketing budget.

If we sell out that initial print run in a week or so, we’ll do another immediately. If we don’t run out for six weeks, we’ll calculate the potential against the cost—after all, we don’t have any more marketing/advertising dollars to spend. If we’ve still got books in the warehouse after six months, we’re not going back to the printer unless the author does something newsworthy to make demand shoot up. As far as eBooks are concerned, any additional sales will be trickles since we’ve already factored in the expected 4%.

Part 3

“But wait!” I hear you cry.

“I’m not going with a traditional publisher. I’m going with a nifty ePublisher whose web site promises to that all I have to do is pay $99 and we’re in business!”

Good for you! Since you have 10,000 Facebook friends and all the time in the world to promote your book because you don’t have a day job, the public will probably flock en masse to buy your eBook.

Approximately 5.8% of the reading public, that is, because that’s about how many people own an eBook reader. Let’s add another 1% percent who will read it on their computer. Oh, heck, let’s make your potential eBook audience an even 10%. The publisher has priced your title at a tempting $4.99 and you only have to recoup $99—hey, you didn’t waste your money paying for their phony extras. Figure you get 50% of that $4.99, or $2.495, so when 10% of your 10,000 Facebook friends buy your eBook—an inflated number, sure, but we’re going for the gold here—you’ll net $2,396, because you don’t count your own man-hours or value. Of course, unless all those people buy at the same time, your income will trickle in at a couple bucks per month, but hey—you’ve got an eBook!

Are these figures accurate?  Nope. I pulled them out of the air, remember? But the concept is solid. As authors, it’s easy to forget that books are business, and business is all about moving units.

Warning! Shameless Self-Promotion Ahead

If you had spent $25,000 to hire a professional to get your manuscript viable in the traditional-publishing world and had captured that $75,000 advance—or even a $40,000 advance—you’d have made at least $15,000, maybe $50,000, all at one time, with the potential to make a lot more since, after all, you have all the time in the world to promote your book. And having that money all at one time would have given you the funds to do a lot of specialty marketing and promotion, so yeah—more people would know about your book and want to buy it.

Just something to think about.

Certification training gives you an edge not only in the marketplace, but in doing the actual job of ghostwriting. It takes you out of the league of “just another writer” and elevates you to top-professional status.

Scads of people call themselves ghostwriters today, but the sad truth is many are not prepared to deal with their clients’ Pride of Authorship or stream-of-consciousness structuring or sequence-of-events plotting. They don’t know how to establish their authority and command $35,000 or more per project. They don’t understand the psychology of doing an A&R or the differences between the author’s process and the ghostwriter’s process.

Certified Ghostwriters know all this and lots, lots more. If you or someone you know is struggling to make a living as a freelance writer, Ghostwriter Certification Training may be the best way to launch a prosperous 2010!

Want more information? Go to http://claudiasuzanne.com/gct

There are only two absolutes in the book industry: 1) all publishers edit according to Chicago Manual of Style (except those that don’t) and 2) all publishers expect authors to use MS Word (except those that don’t).

The Pirates of the Caribbean movies said it best: all those “rules” are really just guidelines. When it comes to writing, editing, submitting, and publishing,  there are really no absolutes, no hard-and-fast rules, no by-the-book regulations. Instead, the business is very firmly based on what this person wants, what that person remembers has sometimes worked in the past, or what some guy in marketing believes will work next quarter. It’s quite hit-or-miss, very trial-and error, extremely whatever works for a particular individual at a given moment on their one, specific project.

So if it works, you did it right. If it doesn’t, you didn’t. If it worked last time, you did. If it doesn’t work now even though it worked last time, you did then but not this time. If it works again next time, you did. If it works for you but not for him, you did, he didn’t.

Have I made myself fairly clear?