Traditional Publishing Editor/Self-Published Author – An Interview with Cheryl Klein

Today, I’m excited to bring you an interview with Cheryl Klein, author of Second Sight: An Editor’s Talks on Writing, Revising, & Publishing Books for Children and Young Adults, as well an editor at Arthur A. Levine books (for whom, in full disclosure, I’m writing a novel… though Cheryl is not my editor).

Cheryl self-published Second Sight and used social media to make it happen. I’ve heard Cheryl speak and read many of her speeches online, so I can vouch for her expertise on the content side. Still,  I was interested in why she made the choices she did and how it all worked on the publishing side. Luckily, she was gracious enough to answer my many questions.

OK, seriously now… you work for a traditional publisher, so what led you down the path to self-publish?

There were a couple of different factors that influenced my decision. Probably the most important one is that I felt like I could publish it successfully:  I had the knowledge and contacts to produce a quality and attractive book; I have a strong platform; I know who my audience is; and I have ways of reaching that audience directly. And Kickstarter allowed me to confirm that there was an audience for it, and to raise money for my first printing, which was immensely useful in building both my confidence and my ability to actually do the book.

Another factor was the nature of the book itself. Because it’s compiled from various blog posts and speeches I made, it’s very conversational and informal, and about half the material appeared on the Internet at one point or another, and some of the talks borrow points from other talks. . . . It felt more like a sort of friendly, quirky personal project than a formally structured, absolutely cohesive Book on Writing, which is what I’d want it to be if it were coming out from a traditional publisher.

Lastly, I thought it sounded really interesting and fun to put a whole book together myself and learn about all the different parts of the process usually handled by other people in my company. And it has been, altogether.

I wrote earlier about how you used Kickstarter to raise the money to produce the book. Your years of blogging and being active on and offline had given you a nice platform to help spread the word. Yet I’m guessing that when you started online, you had no idea you’d be heading this way. Did you find that you got good support from the folks you were connected with?

I got terrific support! I hoped to raise $2000 in the course of two months in order to print 500 books, and I ended up reaching that amount in just nine days. And I received more than $3200 altogether, which allowed me to quadruple the size of my first printing.

Did you find that social media was effective in helping get attention for your book?

The blog was absolutely essential:  I announced the project there, and most of my Kickstarter support came from there. During the fundraising process, I used Facebook and Twitter mostly to draw attention to my blog posts on the topic, but now that the book is in production, I’ve used it to communicate my progress — now we’re in first pass on the manuscript, now the cover is done, now I’m seeing proofs. And Facebook has also been very useful to let people in my non-book lives (my college and high school friends, church community, etc. — people who don’t follow the blog, mostly) know about the project.

This winter I’ve been Twittering all 25 of the revision techniques I discuss in one talk (the creatively titled “Twenty-Five Revision Techniques”), and I think that’s led more writers to start following me on Twitter, which hopefully should pay off in increased attention for the book itself.

I’m a big fan of Kickstarter’s system of letting the project creator offer incentives for those who are early supporters – offering different add-ons at different funding levels. Did you find any keys in terms of what you offered… and did you learn anything else about this type of fundraising?

I offered $5 off the eventual cost of the book if someone supported me at the $5 level, $10 off at the $10 level, and interestingly, only one person bought in at the $5 level, while 30-something people came in at the $10 level.

I think the difference happened because the cost of support was so closely pegged to the actual cost of the product:  I said upfront that the book was going to be somewhere between $10 and $18, so I’m guessing people felt comfortable saying “Ah, I’m eventually going to spend at least $10 on this anyway, might as well buy in now.”

Do you think you’d've gone the same path with a novel? Would you have had to rejigger your incentives? Is it as possible to offer “value” (like you mailing out additional pages later) with fiction?

No, I definitely wouldn’t have gone the same path with a novel. On a novel, I’d want someone to reflect their emotional experience of the book back to me and to help me shape that experience accordingly — a real editor, in other words.

I would feel much less sure about who the audience was and about my ability to reach them, because my blog audience is mostly writers, not so much the kid, YA, and gatekeeper readers for children’s fiction (assuming that’s what I’d write). And finally, because the audience for fiction is so much less defined, I’d want a novel to be available in bookstores (which SECOND SIGHT will not be) to make up for that lack of definition by casting a wider net . . . and getting quality bookstore distribution is a LOT of work for self-publishers.

The incentives question for a novel is really interesting, because with a novel, you’re selling not your knowledge, things people can use, but your imagination — things they’ll be moved or entertained by. In other words, by supporting you, they’re sort of buying into your ability to draw out an emotional reaction; so I’m not sure readers would be interested in book-related incentives (deleted scenes, etc.) until you’d actually proven your ability to create that emotional reaction, and until they’d come to care about the characters and story of the book itself.

Self-publishing must be quite a different process for someone like you – who puts together books (with a team) for a living – than it would be for many others. Any lessons learned about the process of putting together the book itself?

The book-making process was more or less identical to the process I go through in-house:  Write, give to the designer, get the designed pages back from the designer, rewrite/proofread, repeat until you’re done. The book-selling process — or rather, the process of setting up the book to be sold through a fulfillment services company — has been very enlightening about how little tiny things like shipping options and Web browsers can make a big difference in how customers experience the ordering of your book.

Would you do this whole process again?

Yes, for a similar project. I had a great time putting the book together and I’m excited to get it out into the world.

Second Sight is available for order now.  And my thanks to Cheryl for taking the time to answer these questions so thoughtfully.