What They Didn’t Tell Me First

STEVE LISKOW won the 2009 Black Orchid Novella Award for “Stranglehold,” which appeared in the summer issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Who Wrote The Book of Death? is his first published novel. Currently, he is trying to sell a PI series featuring the characters in “Stranglehold.” His Web mistress daughter is Captain of the Queen City Cherry Bombs, so he is also writing a mystery that involves Roller Derby.  Visit Steve at http://www.steveliskow.com/

My first novel, Who Wrote The Book of Death?, was published in May, six months to the day from when I signed my contract. That contract required that I have a Web site and cut at least 6000 words from the MS as it stood. I’d been telling myself I needed a Web site for months anyway, so that just forced me to get busy. But writing without an agent and signing a one-shot deal with a new and very small publisher has taught me a few other things that I want to pass on to you so you have more time to enjoy the ride when you sell your first book.

Start your Web site NOW, whether you’re published or not. Pick your colors, shapes, and mood to show viewers what you write. Mine is shades of gray and grayish-blue, with vertical rectangles and three columns. Cold colors and no feminine curves because while I don’t write hard-boiled a la James Crumley, nobody will call my work “cozy,” either. I have lots of biographical information because it affects my style and subject matter. There are pictures of me with various guitars, and a few excerpts and blog entries. If you check the Web site, you know what to expect when you pick up one of my books.

Mainly Murder Press asked me to do my own promotion, too. That meant revising; calling on libraries; getting in touch with friends from Facebook, SinC, and the Guppies for guest blogging; finding potential reviewers; soliciting blurbs, suggesting a cover design, and writing the cover copy and logline. Six months sounds like a lot of time until you try to juggle all of this along with creating content for the Web site and having a life away from the keyboard. Because of the hassle, I’m drafting blurbs and log lines for all the WIP’s on my hard drive now. I’ve also changed one working title to something that evokes a more striking cover design. It may help later.

My accountant told me to track all my mileage to and from bookstores and libraries as soon as I started pitching the book to them, so now that’s an Excel spread sheet.

Another spread sheet lists all my expenses on the book so far: the copies of the publicity release, the payment to my web designers, the books I bought to sell at signings. It also includes the fee for registering the copyright. You can register your book on-line, and the Feds have a PowerPoint tutorial to walk you through the process. Registering on-line saves you ten dollars plus the postage on mailing your hard copy.

I can buy copies of my book at a reduced author’s rate, but before I can sell them—at ANY price—my accountant (Precious man!) helped me register with the state as an independent retailer. Living in Connecticut, I have to pay 6% sales tax on every book I sell. The registration fee is a one-time $100, but the tax bill is due quarterly. My publisher didn’t tell me any of this.

Now I’m visiting libraries and signing books. Better still, for the first time in six months, I actually have time to think about writing. I’ve interviewed people and written character bios and drafted a rough outline. This is what I “really” do, and I’ve been away from it for far too long. Now that a lot of the machinery is in place for the next book, it shouldn’t happen again.

But it certainly would have been nice to know a lot of this before.