We were going along as always, making plans, sniping and hugging, irritated and proud of each other and just like that, he left.

And suddenly, I’m single.

A widow.

A woman without a best friend. Without  someone to fight and make up with. Without the single pair of arms that made  me feel safe.

It wasn’t suppose to be this way.

“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.

And may God bless us all.

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.

Yup, here we are again at the end of another tough year. But since it wasn’t as tough as 2008, making that list of things I did right is going to be a lot easier, right?

Of course. Because, as I wrote last year, it’s far too easy to look back and come up with everything you did wrong over the past twelve months–besides, where does that get you? Maudlin on NYE, and making a lot of ridiculous promises to not do this and absolutely do that to compensate for everything you messed up or didn’t do in the past.  Forget it.

I’d rather focus on the things I did right. That way I can start the new year feeling good about myself, and let any resolutions reinforce that forward motion. I’ve been doing this for years–about seventeen, come to think of it! I just wish I’d remember to make the list as I go through the months. But I never do, so memory must serve…

First and above all else, I hung in with my husband as he bounced from good to bad to worse and finally, to getting his life under real, permanent control thanks to a tiny little pill and a highly intuitive doctor. Thank you, and you’re welcome. (And a thank you to him for hanging in with me.)

I supported my daughter’s decision to leave school again while the others kept going. She’s waiting for them to catch up to her, credits-wise, and trying to figure out her life. I can’t really help, but I can get out of her way. Which I did. And that’s a good thing.

I nailed the structure and requisites for Ghostwriter Certification Training, and got eight people through the entire course while editing and tweaking the textbook’s contents. I think that counts as two good things. Maybe three. Whatever, I’ve helped change people’s lives for the better, and that counts for the list.

I helped a fellow writer figure out how to get her book into colleges. A BIG good thing.

I helped a wonderful new writer strengthen her novel and her skills. Yes, I know that’s my job, but she was a special case, and it took a degree of sacrifice to get  through the entire book. Both were definitely worth it. A good, good thing.

I accepted help. A lot of help. I even accepted the bizarre notion that I’m not Wonder Woman and can’t do it all myself. Very tough; very, very tough. But I did it. I even asked for it. I’m counting that as two, because the level of difficulty should affect the degree of goodness.

My list, my rules. Make your own list if you don’t like it.

What else? I gave away a lot of vital information to a lot of people. Not sold; gave away. The business people in my life don’t think that’s such a good thing, but I do. Oh, wait! I also charged for some advice! Asked upfront, “Will this would be Mastercard or Visa?” just like I’m suppose to do. So I’m counting that as two.

Yeah, I take it both ways.

What else, what else…? Ah ha! I started reading my “quirky/difficult” novel at my critique group. They’d asked me to bring something in, so I finally did. Most are sorry they asked, but a couple people are enjoying it. This book has been a touchstone in my life for a long time. No matter what else I write, my soul is wrapped up in HIRED BODIES. After two agents couldn’t sell it, I’d decided to put it in a drawer. Now that I’ve taken it back out, I find I still love it, and have even begun looking for another agent to try, try again. Absolutely, that’s a good thing.

Which leads to a bad thing linked to a good: I left my old agent and signed with a new one to sell SECRETS OF A GHOSTWRITER. Why was such a sad parting a good thing? I needed to infuse my author career with some energy. My old agent and I had gotten too complacent with each other. Another tough, painful step, but I did it. Doing tough stuff I’ve put off facing for years is absolutely a painfully good thing.

Where am I so far? Ten or thirteen, depending on how you count. My criteria; agree to thirteen.

Hmmm… anything else? Marilyn! I accepted Marilyn Jenett’s friendship and guidance into my life, which doesn’t sound like a good thing to have done, just a good thing to have happened. But since I am so resistant to close to new people, and since it took a conscious act, not to mention a leap of faith, I’m counting it as doing a good thing. No, make that a GREAT thing, because Marilyn has made a remarkable difference in my life, and I cannot recommend her FEEL FREE TO PROSPER  program enough. And no, I don’t get paid to say that. So that’s fourteen.

Oh, I bought Marilyn’s program for my sweet, wonderful, life-in-tandem sister -by-love. Definitely a good, good number fifteen.

I listened to my daughter’s ideas about how to commercialize SECRETS OF A  GHOSTWRITER. No, we haven’t made it happen yet, but the concept is wonderful and I listened instead of simply saying no. Absolutely, that was a good thing. Sixteen.

I reconnected with a friend without making undue demands on her. Another toughie. I’m counting it. Seventeen.

Finally, I made a major financial mistake this year. Major. Not bright. Easily avoided. Felt like an idiot for doing what I did. What a dumb thing to have done. But I’m going to flip it around, like a poorly constructed piece of writing, and see the good in it: I will never do anything like that ever again. I promise me. And if learning from an expensive lesson isn’t a good thing, I don’t know what is.

I think that’s it. Looking back, it’s been a remarkably healthy, growing year. I anticipate 2010 will be even more so, and I close the year with this blessing:

May you enjoy health, prosperity, rich friendships, and abundant good fortune through the coming year, and may you find yourself writing out a twenty item “Good Things I Did” list twelve months from today.

Happy New Year!

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

Please.

Signing up with a self-publishing service doth not make thee a self-publisher.

Actual self-publishers get LCCNs and P-CIPs so their books can be sold to libraries.

Actual self-publishers do, indeed, have imprints and business addresses and business licenses and resale licenses and their own block of ISBNs purchased directly from www.bowker.com.

Actual self-publishers are members of Amazon’s Advantage program and Independent Book Publishers Association and Small Presses of North America  and have book-rep and wholesaler and distributor agreements; they use traditional book manufacturers or industry-connected printers  and go to great lengths to ensure editorial accountability, find credible internal and cover designers, and pay for warehouse and fulfillment facilities.

Actual self-publishers only use POD (Print, not Publish, on Demand–it’s a type of printing, not a type of publishing) to send out advance galleys for reviews, because short-run POD printing tells the book industry you only intend to sell a few dozen copies.

Self-publishing is a full-time business that requires editorial accountability, industry registrations, and multiple-avenue distribution supported by marketing and promotion. Whether you’re releasing your own titles or someone else’s, the enterprise requires business formalities, serious time, and significant financial investment.

I’m sorry–and I know I’m fighting a losing battle along with all the other people in the traditional-publishing world–but “self-publishing” through a “service” is just another euphemism for subsidy publishing, pure and simple.