Wambtac’s summer schedule is out with  something for everyone: Level II workshops for Ghostwriter Certification Training grads, a quickie peek into how ghosts do fiction for novelists, even a clue-in for high school and community college students on how to write better papers. Details and registration are available at http://wambtac.com/left-coast-institute/summer-courses-2012/ .

Also, have gotten some interesting feedback on my upcoming title release, Buh Bye, M.S.!  It’s the sweet, heartwarming story of how I went mano-a-mano with multiple sclerosis for 42 years until I  finally kicked its miserable, capricious, maggot-ridden butt out of my system for good.

We’re raising money for the initial print run, but you can order in advance (and help that fund-raising effort) by going to http://wambtac.com/wc-publishing/buh-bye-ms/ .

Strong language and irreverent descriptions. May be unsuitable for the fainthearted and politically correct. Spiritual guidance advised.

Finally, we’re getting ready to launch a new service: Book Plans. Every book needs its own strategy to get ready for market, get into the market, and get sold at market. Watch this space for news on this upcoming new, exciting, and effective individualized action plan.

In January, I stopped being a freelance ghostwriter and became the Founder/Creative Director of Wambtac Communications LLC, a one-stop literary shop. We ghostwrite, we educate, we publish. Sounds succinct, doesn’t it? It’s actually a bit more elaborate than that.

We–meaning myself, my partner (aka daughter) Lona Nicholle, our teachers Liv Haugland and JD Moore, and our current intern Teri Stevens–ghostwrite books for people who have wonderful ideas. We are implementing a rather elaborate (read “time consuming and costly”) marketing/advertising campaign to let literary agents, publishers, CEOs, and one-percenters know that we have a growing cadre of professional Certified Ghostwriters who will do an excellent job on their or their clients’ books. Our intention is to spread those clients among the members of the Ghostwriter Guild, which is still in development but will be comprise our graduates from Ghostwriter Certification Training.

We’re  expanding GCT to a three-semester program: Nonfiction, Fiction, and Business, which includes the politics we cover in the class now plus a strong grounding in the book industry itself. Until then, we’re offering Level II classes in Line Editing, A&Rs, Book Proposals, and The Industry.

The idea of taking GCT into Cal State U Long Beach Extension Education is still being bantered around between the parties (them and us), but has  not yet come to fruition. Obviously, eh?

Our consumer-ed classes (The Story in Your Head, What You Know, Writing Your Life, Before Copy Editing, etc.) are also in development. Discussions are ongoing with ed2go.com for some of those, but most are going to come from us at Wanbtac.com.

The publishing part is semi-new. We’ve always been the ones to put out the four editions of This Business of Books  (5th edition in the works) and Secrets of a Ghostwriter.  Now we’re expanding to also publish other titles for writers, editors, and educators via On The List Publishing and general trade titles via Iridescent Orange Press. Our ebooks and multi-media products, such as MS Word for Writers, will be produced by Bad Walnut Media.

Sounds kinda ambitious, doesn’t i? It’s a great work-in-progress with a three-way mission: to help raise the literacy bar of the industry, one author at a time; to train/retrain displaced writers for lucrative ghostwriting careers; and to publish the good works they create if those authors cannot land a traditional New York publisher. We’ve got a fantastic operations director, Kata Schuyler, a great bookkeeper, Nyx Goldstone, a wonderful go-to assistant, Ben Picker, a good publicist, Devon Blaine, and an in-the-wings marketing guy who’s waiting for us to get our act (read $$) together. Which brings me to the logical wrap-up of this piece.

Every pitch session I’ve gone to lately insists one should always end on what one needs, so I’m sharing that, too. We’re a small, literacy-oriented organization, so of course we could use some seed money to launch these programs and products a bit faster. We’re also looking for a location so we can hold workshops and classes, and we could use a few extra pairs of volunteer’s hands around the office for our marketing campaigns.

Should I be putting all this in a blog post? Let’s be real: if I was the kind of person who worried about what I should and shouldn’t do, I wouldn’t be the kind of person of thought up such an elaborate scheme, brought three strangers into my house and made them family and now staff, or taught more than thirty people how to make a living ghostwriting for the absurd cost of approximately $8/hour for my time!

If you want that title to sell, be it ebook or paperback, here are some things to consider before you sit back and wait for the orders to roll in:

• Does your book have editorial accountability?
• Into what categories does your title fall?
• Have you developed your list of keywords?
• What is your marketing strategy?
• What is your promotional action plan?
• Do you have a one-pager about the book? A fact sheet? A one-paragraph bio? A list of suggested questions for interviewers?
• Do you have endorsement blurbs?
• Do you know what “thought leader” or corporation to go to for sponsorship and have a plan for approaching them?

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!

In the past few days, I’ve encountered two completely diverse situations that speak to the lack of commonality of this enormous, diverse community and how we perceive ourselves within that loose fellowship.

The first came up during my talk with a wonderful novelist. She sold  her first book to an online/POD publisher and subsequently joined its author community via blogging and blog commenting. Problem is, she feels isolated within this group, which she specifically joined to enjoy that wonderful sense of connection we all seek with our fellow writers and authors. Their writing goals and process seem so  different from hers.  The only common ground she can find is their mutual affection for the publisher and desire to get their stories down in writing.

I noticed the second situation in a LinkedIn group discussion as I read over the various answers to a question about the writing industry and thought about my own perspective on the topic. I admit it: I’m ever the optimist. I look at a problem and, like a Ferengi, I suppose, see opportunities and possibilities, not gloom and doom. Yes, the writing and book worlds have changed, enormously. But they haven’t ceased to exist–they’ve merely become different, and I don’t think the answer to “better pay for better writing” is in legislation, but in our individual selves.

So what is the point of this blog? I guess just to point out that writers come in all flavors. That our vast conglomerate of folk never has been and never will be a one-size-fits-all. Writing is so darn individualistic, it cannot and should never try to be stuffed into round holes. We are the last, great independents in a world hellbent on conformity.

Few will remember Gary Cooper or Alice Cooper in 100 years, but they’ll still know Dickens, Austin, and Rowling. And maybe, just maybe, you and me.

And, with nods to Dr. Who, Agatha Christie.

It starts Tuesday, April 5 at 4:30 Pacific time and runs through Tuesday, May 31. Nine days of fiction-writing concepts and perspectives I can pretty much guarantee you’ve never heard presented this way.

I’ll be team-teaching with J.D. Moore, a Certified Ghostwriter who specializes in fiction. Together, we’re going to show you light-bulb popping ways to look at your manuscript, your approach to writing, and your finished product.

Think you know everything about plot, character, premise, and construction? Ha! Think again — then join us to discover the thought processes of those who actually “fix” novels for a living.

It’s gonna be a fast, fun, informative 9 weeks. Details and registration at http://wambtac.com. Got questions? Write to me directly at claudiasuzanne@gmail. com or call toll-free 1-800-641-3936.

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.

I did not write the 5th Edition of THIS BUSINESS OF BOOKS.

So I’m doing that one now. This January, 2010. Really. I mean it. Absolutely for reals. I may have to buy an interest in Mars Candy Company to recoup my investment in M&Ms to get through it, but I’m doing it. Right now. Seriously.

For six years now—six years?!  What’s the matter with you? Just write the damn thing!—I’ve promised myself to slam-dunk this revision in a matter of ten to fourteen days. A month at the outside. Six, eight weeks, tops. Definitely within a fiscal quarter.

And for six years—six years?!—I’ve found good reason to not even crack the thing open. I had clients’ work to do. I was backed up on my bookkeeping. It was still selling as is. I had other stuff to write. I didn’t want to self-publish again and I didn’t want to create a proposal. I’d gotten two negative reviews (out of about forty-five or fifty, the rest all positive —so sue me, I’m an author, just like you). Other books had taken its place. I didn’t know what I wanted to change.

I didn’t want to do all that work.

But this year—this glorious 2010 year, this tenth year since we stopped saying “nineteen” and started saying “two thousand” and now say “twenty,” this fantabulous year wherein my husband goes forth with his reinvigorated career, my daughter and her fiancée move to Boston, I sell SECRETS OF A GHOSTWRITER and even find a new agent for HIRED BODIES—this year I’m knuckling down and doing the 5th Edition.

In fact, I’ve already started. Mostly by pretty much catching up on everything else so I have no excuse left, but also by making notes in the margins of my desk copy. I’ve created a new file with a new file name that I can fold, spindle, and mutilate. I’ve collected articles and URLs with important albeit already outdated information. I’ve figured out exactly what I want to change and how I’m going to adjust the cover. I’ve determined the best BISAC Subject heading. I’ve even seriously thought about maybe starting a possible book proposal!

Whew! Is it time to take a break yet?

But no—I slog on. Neither rain nor sleet nor beckoning dirty toilets shall stay me from actually rewriting the obsolete stuff, editing the perennial stuff, updating the transient stuff, and throwing out the rest. The revision-needy text and its accompanying diagrams, tables, and sheaf of amendments sits right here before me, slightly right of my monitor, on the very top of the manuscript pile, obvious, relentless, demanding. I shall persevere. I shall overcome. I shall write the 5th edition.

But as Harry Truman would say: don’t quote me, that’s strictly off the record.

(To download PLOT Y OUR NOVEL IN 15 MINUTES OR LESS, just fill in your name and email address under SUBSCRIBE in the right column and hit submit.)

Got another free eBook coming soon: HOW GHOSTS GET THEIR GIGS. This will be a compilation of stories by actual, working ghostwriters. The eBook should be ready around the time the next Ghostwriter Certification Training (GCT) classes start in January, and will be free to all GCT students, past and present (and possibly available for a small fee to you aspiring ghosts…)

Why a HOW GHOSTS GET THEIR GIGS eBook? Because if you don’t take the training but still want to break in to the business, you’re going to need a helping hand. As one recent student said, ghostwriting isn’t  easy. But it is one of the fastest growing and most in-demand freelance-writer opportunities available.

Also–and take heed, shameless self-promotion ahead–check out the new Press page in the left column to see what people (only one is a student) are saying about ghostwriting and GCT. That’s it: shameless self-promotion officially over.