Self-Publishing WELCOME TO THE MADHOUSE: A Writer's Odyssey

Self-Publishing Welcome to the Madhouse: Chapter Five: The Cover Ideas

Chapter Five: The Cover Ideas

My Account Manager, Bre Boyce, has been sending me several links to Shutterstock. It is a website of graphic images and there are millions of incredible creations available to download. There are so many fantastic graphics to choose from! The artists who create these images have them copyrighted and may charge you to use them, but they can make a cover image really stand out. You can get lots of ideas, just from browsing through all the images.

. . . Or, like me, you can be overwhelmed and go cross-eyed, from staring at all of the mind-boggling patterns and eye-jiggling optics. There are so many colourful images of every persuasion to choose from, that - you if have no idea what you want for a book cover - you can feel more confused after looking at all of the images, rather than more decided.

Asking help from friends and relatives can really help here!

I decided I liked the graphics of an artist named Garry Killian, but Friesen Press said they would design their own graphics for my book, based on the images I chose from Shutterstock. They have their own graphic designers and book cover designers and Bre has asked them to come up with at least three different cover designs for Welcome to the Madhouse. I hope I have trouble choosing from among them, because they are all awesome. I hope I will be able to post them on this site, to show you all! Perhaps you can help me choose!

One of the designers who will be working on my cover made a suggestion to Bre Boyce about using some very new graphics, launched recently by a company in Australia! They sent the link to me and the graphics were very neat. They were from a trailer for a new TV show coming out in Australia. I was very impressed that the people at Friesen Press, in Canada, are keeping up with what is new and innovative in other countries around the world.

My Account Manager says everyone is very excited to be working on the new cover and can't wait to get started! I really feel that this company is taking my project seriously and enthusiastically. I am beginning to believe that Welcome to the Madhouse will be a beautiful book, when it is done, no matter what else happens. Even if it does not sell well, or just to my friends and family, I believe I will be very proud of what Friesen Press produces. I cannot get over how keen the Account Manager is and the people working under her.

And she has not even read the book! I don't know if she even will!

When my family visited the actual company in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, all of the people there were so friendly and welcoming. It was such a different and refreshing feeling than I have had at science fiction and fantasy conventions, where you can bump into publishers and editors who are selling their books or trying to make deals. Most of them really only want you to buy their books, and if you intimate that you are a new writer, they really are not interested in you. Some of them can be very dismissive or quite rude.

'Move along and go bother someone else', is often the feeling you get. Has anyone else felt that way or is it just me?

The most frustrating thing about going to these conventions is trying to convince anyone to just read your story. There are so many would-be writers at these conventions and just looking at someone, you cannot tell if they are a good writer, or not. Most publishers will not look at you if you have not published a few short stories or you are not already a 'name'. If you are not a master of the short story, and unfortunately I do not fall into this category, this makes life more difficult for you, because publishers generally want you to have proved yourself as a short story writer first - at least, it seems so, for science fiction and fantasy.

I met a writer, at the last convention that I went to, who said she had proudly received her hundredth rejection letter and was thinking she would frame it. She was perhaps in her fifties and I felt so disheartened by what she said. She, however, was still determined to keep writing and submitting, saying that she had had some luck in selling some of her short stories.

Did I really want to spend years working on short stories - when I really do not want to write short stories - just so I could say that I had something published, to be able to impress (or not really impress) some editor of publisher? If I was younger, of course I would do it! That is the traditional route! But, in dog years, I am already dead, so I do not have the time!

I was very fortunate to have made some friends of some very nice authors, while attending these conferences. That is the best thing about attending these conventions - meeting the other writers, many of whom are very nice people! One of the authors said he would be happy to read Welcome to the Madhouse and make a recommendation to a publisher for me . . . if he liked it.

He eventually got back to me and said he really liked Welcome to the Madhouse. He said he was willing to talk to a publisher at Tor for me and he said, if the publisher did not want it, he wanted to publish it.

This author also read my second book, Bud by the Grace of God, and after reading that book, he said he 'wanted to publish anything I write'. I had no idea he was even publishing books!

So why am I not going with that publisher?

The unfortunate thing was that he could not publish my book before 2018 or 2019 and those dates were very 'iffy' according to his office manager.

Could I wait another three to four years? Welcome to the Madhouse had been written in 2012. Would I be alive by 2018 or 2019? Not if I was a dog!

The publisher told me, if I had not published by 2018 or 2019, he would publish Welcome to the Madhouse, or anything else I had written. He said he loved my writing and wanted to publish anything I write. Friends told me, 'You can wait three or four years'.

So why am I self-publishing?

. . . I want to see if I can do it on my own.

. . . I want to see if I can promote my book without giving my rights away. I do not think writers should have to give up all the rights to something they have slaved over and sweated over, perhaps for years, so that some unknown company that may care nothing about you, can do with it, what they will . . . or not. They have no vested interest in the project, except to make money off of you, and they can take up to ninety-five per cent or even more of the book profits, if you are a first time author.

In the past, authors have had to take these deals and live with them, often being cheated out of millions of dollars. For example, the publishing company could get very rich, publishing your book in many different languages, giving you very little in royalties, if you are not careful.

Now, with eBooks and self-publishing companies, authors do not have to live with these poor publishing deals.

If I get my book out there, so it is available to people in paper form - so many of my friends and family say they just do not want to read a book online!! - then the book will hopefully find a fan base.

I have to try, at least once.

And I hope I have no regrets (except for maybe the author picture!)