Publishing your own books comes with a lot of extra baggage in terms of learning. You do your own cover. You do your own marketing. You do your own blurb. You do your own formatting and copy editing. You do your own marketing. You choose whether you will use Amazon or Ingram for your publisher/delivery mechanism. Are you going wide or being exclusive to Amazon? You do your own marketing in either case.
Although Amazon and Ingram are the biggies in Print on Demand, Apple Book has a new arrangement where they will make an audio version of some books for you, using AI. (Obviously your book has to be available on Apple Books so now you’ve chosen to go wide.) What’s cool about someone else doing the audio is that otherwise, you do it. But this is true for all of the above; you have choices. You can do these tasks or you can find help, either free or paid, in all these areas. Or they don’t get done.
The task I’m currently working on is figuring out what my book is. This is part of trying to find readers for the book. (Also known as marketing…) People do go on book sites, and look for books about everything you can think of. Dante and homeschooling, murders in knitting shops. Historic fiction about Charleston or Savannah and plucky women opening tea shops. They look for sweet and clean romance that involves second chances in super vacation spots around the world, or alternatively in the absolute back of beyond. They look for stories about Small Towns and Rural Life. (Aha. That’s actually a category, and I fit.)
A book on Amazon has key words associated with it, as well as a genre, in order to help people find the very particular books they are looking for. To a large extent this is the choice of the author. I’ve heard of books being moved around by Amazon for odd reasons, but the authors usually go back and fix this. Anyway, my book has no murder. I kind of meant it too, but that’s not what happened as I wrote. It has a bit of a mystery, but not one that is complex to solve. It’s just about a person changing her life. She’s a Catholic so the book is Catholic, but one thing I am certain of is, the genre of this book is NOT “Catholic fiction.” If I list it that way I will never reach the people who might like to read it. Because…
Catholic fiction per se is Flannery O’Connor, who is described as Southern grotesque. I don’t know if this is fair or not, having only read one of her short stories. I liked it, but can’t remember the title. Walker Percy is also mentioned. I’m not like him. A bunch of others who I am also not like, include Alice McDermott, who specializes in problematic Irish. Nope. Not what I’m writing.
I have spent a fair amount of time on Amazon using the Look Inside feature on books that have been identified elsewhere as Catholic. I also read a book of Catholic short stories, an anthology from the 1980’s. I thought looking up those authors might help identify what Catholic writing was. This would spill over, either into my writing, or into understanding how to find an audience for my book. Unfortunately, I hated the anthology so much that I’m not going to give its title or editor, especially since I didn’t find any new authors in it to think about. I’ll just say beware of any anthology you find from the 1980’s!
I discovered a lot of other things I am not doing. I’m not writing parodies of TV shows, with some Catholic ideas involved. I am not writing Romance as Amazon describes it. Romance as a category has to have very specific qualities. Otherwise, the book might be romantic, but it will annoy people who want the longing looks and soulful conversations, or the much more ‘detailed’ stuff.
I am not writing angsty Catholicism. I had better not be.
Later I found a publisher who specializes in work that he thinks Catholics should like. I’m not ready to agree with him. Two quotes from reviews of two of the books on his booklist …
1) Through the veil of fiction [the author] meditates on the nature of self-sacrifice and the possibility of believable miracles in a disenchanted world.
It sounds okay, but as a purely personal matter I wouldn’t probably choose this particular book, because I feel as if I’ve already read this general book more than once. Even Harry Potter could be described this way.
2) [The author] handles a number of erotic encounters with an unlikely but effective combination of Aristophanic humor and restrained delicacy, using the sex scenes to shed light on his hero’s foray into (as one of the chapters is titled) “godless territory.”
And this book I’m not interested in at all. Not even to find out why it qualifies as a book serious Catholics might want to read.
I did find this thought embedded in an article about Catholic fiction. It seems to set some reasonable goals.
“All good novels aim at the same end, no matter the setting: speaking to the interior realities of human life through an engaging narrative and dialogue.” From an article by Jared Staudt where he is discussing the novel, Quo Vadis.
Update: I moved three paragraphs this morning! I should never put up articles at 11:00 p.m. the night before.
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