Nerdology 101: Big Dreams

Hey loves! Welcome back to Nerdology 101. The blog where I, Maria Levato, Nerdiest Overlord of Hel, guide you to a greater understanding of the Nerd Culture. Mwuah-haha-haha!

Anyway, this week I’m going to expand on a concept I’ve mentioned quite a few times in recent blog posts: Wanting to get an agent and move toward traditional publishing with my new series because my vision for it is not compatible with my position as an indie author. So, let’s get into some Nerdology!

What the statement actually means?

What does it mean for a series not to be compatible with my position as an indie author? Simple: What I want isn’t something I can accomplish by myself or with the help of the people I currently work with. It has nothing to do with how good my team is and it doesn’t mean I’m doing poorly; it just means that if I had a publisher, I wouldn’t have to pay the thousands of dollars I spend to produce a book and I could focus my own funds on realizing other aspects of my vision. Using totally made up numbers here, if one party invests 10,000 into a book and another party invests 10,000 more, there’s more money than if only one party invested 10,000 and that’s all they could do. And yes, trad publishing is free to the author, but that doesn’t mean the author spends no money. It means they spend no money on the creation of the book. Plenty of authors still invest in the book in other ways and it can be the difference between the book flunking and getting launched into the stratosphere. Would it be nice if I landed a deal that came with all the marketing money I could dream of and I never spent a dime? Sure. But I’m not putting all my chips in that basket because that’s rarely the case. If I get lucky, wonderful, but if not, I’m perfectly content to have a strong publishing partner who can just take the required production investment off the table so I could focus on bank rolling the extra stuff.

So, what is it you want to do that’ll cost so much?

EVERYTHINGGGGGGGGG! I have so many ideas here. Realistically, most of them won’t work out even with a publisher, or will take a while to become doable, but some it will be perfectly attainable if I’m not spending money on 1000 non-negotiables.

1. I don’t just want one special edition; I want FOUR for each book in the series. Why? Because this is very much a series where readers are going to want to pick their team. Pretty much, in each book, four gods from various pantheons will be competing to represent their pantheon in the FMC’s harem. To me, every character has colors and vibes that represent them. I want to design special editions based on each of the competitors so readers can choose based on their favorites. I’m talking different covers, edges, and internal art for based on their favorite. Maybe even different playlists. While it’s not an affordable idea, it’s a fun one and I think it’ll be worth doing.

2. I want character sheets/guides. Obviously, because competitors for each book will be from the same pantheon, they often have established relationships, various titles and powers, etc. I’d love to include character sheets with pretty artwork and a basic breakdown of who each character is.

3. Book tour. Loves, I do events as an indie. I do them in as many places as I can because I want to reach my audience. The travel costs me big time though. If I had some loose change, I could come to a lot more of my audience and do it a lot more frequently than I can without help. I know you’re going to want all those custom special editions signed and I want to be able to come to you so you can get them signed.

4. Spin-offs and side stories. Obviously, not everyone’s favorite will be chosen by the FMC. I’d love to be able to do spin-offs to follow up on some of the crowd favorites. The base series will be five books though. Just in ISBNs for a regular paperback and ebook, not even counting spin-offs or special editions, that’s over $200. To do the special editions and the spin-offs, that’d be over $1000 in just ISBNs.

5. Merch. To put it simply, this one isn’t about money as much as it is negotiating power. Agents and publishers are in a far better position to find partners for merchandising than I am. If I did it, it would be about money because I’d have to pay for it. If they did it, it’d be about liscencing and likely wouldn’t cost me anything.

6. Reach. Obviously, all of this hinges on the book doing well from the gate. I’ve been busting my ass off for years and my Instagram has had 3k views in the last 30 days. That’s growth compared to where I started, or even where I was a few months ago, but once you factor in the view-to-sales conversion rate and whatnot, you realize that it’s still a far cry from the kind of reach that would finance something this huge. Publishers can help with that. Even a publisher that doesn’t help with it would be freeing up money so I could pay for more help with that (I will have slightly more starting in Nov because I was able to offer a bit more to my PA so she’d have more hours, but even that I can only do for a couple of months before we return to our norm).

There’s still more I could say here about what I want to be able to deliver to my audience and how trad publishing this series would help me accomplish that, but I think you get the gist. Ultimately, the things I want to give you all just require me to have a bit more help. So, stick with me and know that I’m considering all of this in every decision I make for this series. It's for you, dear reader. It’s always because I want to be able to give you more. Well, and the fact that I just find it so fun to do, but that’s besides the point. LMAO.

That’s about it for this week’s segment of Nerdology 101. Stop in next Friday for more. Also, keep in mind that Nerdology 101 will be having it’s 1 year blogaversary at the end of October and that I’m hoping to do something kind of special for it. Anyway, until next time, have a nerdy week!

Nerdology 101: Self vs. Trad Publishing

Hi! Welcome back to Nerdology 101. I’m Maria Levato, your nerdy sensei who writes about kink play—and a bunch of other random stuff no one asked about.

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of discourse around the merits of self vs. trad publishing, so I’m using this week’s post to address that. Let me give you a hint: Both options are perfectly valid.

There are few industries where we judge the legitimacy of a business by who makes the initial investment. I have never heard someone say “Oh, this store is worse than a different store because the owner paid for it themselves instead of getting investors.” Why haven’t I heard that before? Because it would be insane and most people wouldn’t say it. So, why do we do it when it comes to books? Let’s dive into some Nerdology and find out!

Before the Printing Press

Long ago, there was a world without the printing press. A medieval time where books were—Checks notes, then gasps—made by hand!? Oh, the horror. As you may have guessed, they took a lot of time and money to make. The majority of them were made and collected by religious entities and universities. “Getting published”, as we know it today, didn’t really exist. What did exist, though, is the concept of patronage. Wealthy people, like nobles and royals, would find artists and writers they liked and bankroll them. Eventually, after creating some work, some of the artists and writers would start to get commissions from other wealthy people who wanted a work made by that artist or writer. Publishing houses are the post-printing press version of this, so you can call writers who became published this way early trad authors. On the other hand, you could call writers with the wealth to pay to have their writing produced themselves, early self-published authors.

Good Ol’ Gutenberg and the Printing Revolution

In 1454, we see Gutenberg’s printing press get put to commercial use for the first time where he prints a slew of stuff off for the church. Then, suddenly books (or at least those the church approves of) are more widely available. It’s magic. A ton of people were interested in this because it was a quick and easy way to replicate their ideas and distribute them to a wide audience. It was a Printing Revolution, literally, that’s what it was called. It was part of the Renaissance. You can learn a lot about it by viewing this page from Printing R-Evolution that explores it in depth. For our purposes, though, I’m just illustrating how this became the publishing industry. You see, whoever had a printing press could print and distribute anything. So, having one became a powerful way to distribute materials that would make people more likely to agree with your preferred idealogy. That’s a lot of power. It platformed people like Galileo, who was a radical thinker for his time. It also gave us texts that sparked social movements like the rise of Prostestantism, such as bibles written in languages that aren’t Latin, which were considered heresy at the time. Eventually, people realized that printing and distributing books could be lucrative. Enter: The Publishing Industry, entities who printed and distributed books on behalf of the writer.

Literary Agents

Three to four centuries and a lot of books later, literary agents come onto the scene between 1870 and 1930, depending on location. Their job was simple. Connect writers with publishing houses. This is really the start of traditional publishing as we know it today. From there, traditional publishing became more of a standardized process. Query agents (via snail mail, at the time), get an agent, have that agent submit the work to publishers, get published.

The Internet

With the internet came a revitalization of self-publishing. In 2005, Blurb, an online self-publishing platform was founded. In 2009, Amazon started Amazon Publishing. In 2013, IngramSpark came onto the scene. As with anything, some people got mad about it. They started bashing people who took that path because it went against their expectations of what becoming an author should look like. That’s where it started to get stigmatized.

Social Media

With the rise of Booktok/Bookstagram/Booktube/etc. came change. Self-published authors started to gain stronger platforms and their path became less stigmatized. This led us to the debate I’m seeing today about whether self or trad publishing is better. As I said at the start of this blog post, it doesn’t matter. The difference lies in who bears the initial investment, not the quality of the production itself. I’ve read plenty of trad books that I love and plenty that I dislike. The same applies to self-published books. Trad published books sometimes have editing issues, so do self-published books sometimes. Both formats have different pros and cons. Ultimately, the choice on which format is better depends on the writer and the piece they’re publishing. No matter what a writer chooses, they choose it because it is the best route for them and their work. Some writers choose one path at first and a different path later. Some are solidly on one side of the line or the other. So long as everyone respects everyone else’s decisions, there’s nothing wrong with any of it. It’s okay for people to achieve similar goals by different means. To say a trad-published author is a sell out or a self-published author wasn’t good enough to make it is ridiculous. No matter who bears the initial investment, the quality of the writing is what matters at the end of the day. Read books you like, no matter how they were published, and don’t read books you don’t like, no matter how they were published.

Let me know in the comments what your thoughts are! Did you learn something new about the history of publishing?

With that, I bid you all a good weekend. I’ll see you back next Friday at 3P.M. ET for the next segment of Nerdology 101. Until then, have a nerdy week!

Source List (This is a blog, not an academic paper. I’m just dropping the links so people can learn more, not making full citations).

https://guides.library.ubc.ca/historyofthebook/beforeprint

https://independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=1510

https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/mcdonald/incunabula/gutenberg/

https://www.printingrevolution.eu/7

https://www.transatlantic-cultures.org/es/catalog/agents-litteraires