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Month: January 2016

Readers seek great books, not big publishers: Bibliocrunch CEO Miral Sattar

Published by Adam on January 21, 2016

Indie authors can’t do it alone. Believe me, I’ve tried. What I’ve learned over the course of writing, self-publishing and marketing three novels is that it pays to get help.

Over the last year, I’ve featured several tech companies and indie book promotion websites that aim to put indie authors on a level playing field with the traditionally published. These include Reedsy, The Fussy Librarian, NoiseTrade and Story Cartel.

miral-sattar_headshot
Miral Sattar, Bibliocrunch CEO

Today I’d like to feature Bibliocrunch, a company that’s actually been in the indie publishing game since 2011. The service connects authors to freelancers for editing, marketing, graphic design and much more. The site also hosts book giveaways and provides useful advice about indie publishing. Check out my profile on Bibliocrunch as an example.

I spoke with founder and CEO Miral Sattar about what Bibliocrunch hopes to accomplish and where she sees the publishing industry headed. Miral leads a team of seven based in New York City.

Adam: What problem is Bibliocrunch trying to solve?

Miral: Giving authors access to tools resources to publish the best book possible. We have a vetted marketplace that connects authors and publishers with vetted publishing professionals. But we also have our LearnSelfPublishingFast.com series which is growing very popular.

Adam: Today’s authors can self-publish a book all by themselves if they want to. Why is it important that authors pay for freelance help, and how big of an investment does that need to be?

Miral: If someone is paying for your book, then you need to make sure that it is in the best state possible. You need an eye-catching cover, a well-edited book that’s error-free, and readable on all devices and formats.

The investment varies. You can publish a quality book on a budget or pay what a typical publisher would pay for one of their authors. I have written articles on both. It’s different for each book.

Read Miral's articles on this subject!
How to Self-Publish Your Book on a Budget
The Real Costs of Self-Publishing a Book

Adam: The publishing industry is in a state of flux right now. Where do you think it’s going, and how well will self-published authors fare against industry published authors?

Miral: I don’t think this is a relevant question. I think it’s more important that traditional publishers start offering more to their authors. Right now, 40% of the books on Amazon’s best-seller list are self-published. People usually don’t care whether a book is self-published. They want a great read. If they love the book, they will recommend it to their friends.

Adam: What was your background before starting this company, and what led you from there to here?

Miral: I’m an engineer and writer by background. I went to both graduate (NYU) and undergrad (Columbia) in the city. I had been working at TIME Magazine for several years, leading a lot of the editorial product development. I was also finishing up my Masters at NYU at the same time.

In 2011, I noticed that people were publishing books based on breaking news events and selling tons of books. The people who were publishing were not professionals, and they were doing it through Amazon. So I went back to the higher-ups at TIME and pitched my project: publish books based on breaking news events. We had the best writers from all over the world between TIME, Fortune, People, etc. But like any big corporation, they were slow to approve and execute.

I ended up leaving and starting my own company, Bibliocrunch, several months later. We launched as a tools platforms where authors and publishers could write and convert their books in the cloud. However, we kept getting requests from authors asking if our platform could convert PDF files into eBooks, or design covers. We referred so many people that we made a marketplace out of it.

Adam: How many customers do you have?

Miral: We have about 20,000 authors and 1,500 vetted freelancers who provide services to authors and publishers.

Adam: What is the most popular service authors seek freelance help with?

Miral: I’d say editing and then cover design.

Bibliocrunch offers a variety of paid VIP services to authors.
Bibliocrunch offers a variety of paid VIP services to authors.

Adam:  Do you typically get authors who are looking to self-publish, or are they polishing things up with the intention of querying a big publisher?

Miral: We get all types of authors, though the majority of our authors are self-published. We also have publishers who have hired freelancers because they don’t have the budgets to keep qualified folks in-house. Each author is different, so we tell them the first thing they should do is define their goals.

Adam: Do you have minimum qualifications for the freelancers? Must they have professional experience in the publishing industry?

Miral: Absolutely. We check to see if they already are a member of a pre-existing organization, their LinkedIn profiles, their testimonials,  works samples, and website.

Adam: Have you had any major success stories so far?

Miral: We’ve had a few authors hit the top 10 on Amazon. Most recently, Howard Kaplan, author of The Damascus Cover, bumped James Paterson and Patricia Cornwell one week.

publishingboxset
Bibliocrunch offers a free 4-book box set of books to help indie authors. Click the image for more details.

Adam: What do you believe is your competitive advantage to other companies offering similar services?

Miral: I think we’ll see the rise of marketplaces in 2016. Almost everyone has one now which is great! Blurb, Publishers Weekly, Publishers Lunch, just to name a few.

We have a VIP Service that guides authors through the self-publishing process with a real person on the phone. We also have our LearnSelfPublishingFast.com author training courses, which come with tools, templates, blog posts and guides. Our most popular course is our marketing intensive.

Adam: What’s coming next for Bibliocrunch? What can you tell me about any plans to further expand or enhance your services?

Miral: We’re expanding our LearnSelfPublishingFast.com series to include children’s books and also launching a few children’s book initiatives later this year.

Adam: Besides Bibliocrunch, what other innovative companies helping indie authors do you like?

Miral: I love Wattpad and BookBub and recommend both to all our authors. Wattpad is great if you’re good at social media and have a fantasy type novel. BookBub is a great way to kickstart sales if you get accepted.

Thanks so much to Miral Sattar for the Interview! Miral also contributed a new year’s prediction for my article on indie publishing in 2016! For more on innovative indie publishing companies, check out my interviews with Reedsy, Story Cartel, NoiseTrade and The Fussy Librarian.

Want to be featured or suggest an innovative indie publishing company? Contact me.

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Indie author’s guide to adapting your novel into a screenplayFilm for a movie

Indie author’s guide to adapting your novel into a screenplay

Published by Adam on January 14, 2016

I love films. I write novels. So I’ve always wanted to give screenwriting a go.

I began by reading some great books, including Save The Cat by Blake Snyder and The Screenwriter’s Bible by David Trottier. I soon plan to continue the learning process at the end of February through a free online course via Futurelearn and the University of East Anglia.

There’s nothing like hands-on experience, though, so while learning I figured I’d dive right in. I purchased Final Draft, which is the screenwriting software used by most of the pros.

As an author, I guess I have a small advantage jumping right into screenwriting. I’ve often been told that my writing style in novels and short stories is cinematic. I think this is because I tend to keep scenery descriptions short — just long enough to evoke an image — and then jump into action and dialog.

However, screenwriting is still a different language to writing a novel, with its own syntax, vocabulary and even indentation styles! I knew going in that the hardest part would be learning the actual style and formatting for screenplay.

Screenwriting software like Final Draft helps, of course, since it automatically keeps indentations correct and guesses when you’re writing dialog or a scene heading. But there’s still a lot it won’t automatically do for you, from things as basic as capitalizing a character’s name the first time he appears, to more complex questions like the proper style for a quick series of flashbacks. If you couldn’t spell, you wouldn’t rely on auto-correct, right? It’s much the same here — you still need to have some knowledge to be sure the software is doing the right thing.

So that I could focus on getting the format right, I decided not to spend a lot of time creating a new story from scratch for my first screenwriting effort. Instead, I chose to adapt my first novel, We, The Watched.

Cover for We, The Watched by Adam Bender
READ IT TODAY!

We, The Watched follows an amnesiac who wakes up in a dystopia. Told from a first-person present perspective, the story places the reader in the shoes of Seven as he struggles to go unnoticed in a surveillance society and discover his true identity.

It seemed like an easy one to turn into a screenplay. The way I figured it, I could basically just move the book over scene by scene. I imagined fuzzy shots through the lenses of surveillance cameras and exciting gun fights between the Underground rebels and the government police force known as the Guard.

However, when I started thinking about the movie in a traditional three-act structure, I immediately found pacing problems in my story. They were scenes that I maybe got away with in the novel, but now seemed extraneous when I was trying to cram the book into a two-hour film. In a screenplay, each page represents about one minute of screen time. So while novels can be anywhere from 200 to 1000 pages, a spec screenplay has got to be about 100 to 120. And you’re not writing with paragraphs that fill the page with text. Thanks to all the indents, loose line spacing and Courier New 12-point, there’s actually quite a bit of white space on each page!

Rather than freak out about all this, however, I looked at the project as a fun puzzle … and an opportunity! We, The Watched was my first novel, and while I am proud of it, there are things about writing stories now that I did not know then. So it was actually great fun to analyze each scene and pull out only the most essential details and dialog.

I ended cutting a few scenes and even a few minor characters (sorry, Eric). I also massaged the logic of a few bits, like how the hero meets the Underground for the first time. It wasn’t all cuts and edits. I added a few bits between characters to add more tension and amplify character emotions.

Another challenge was that I didn’t want to use voice-over narration, even though the novel is told in first-person present tense. I had to think of ways to convey the hero’s emotions through his expressions, actions and dialog. While inner monologue can totally work in a book, it can come off as a bit lazy in such a visual medium as film. This proved not to be an impossible task; I just had to be creative — which is the whole point, right?

While I ended up having quite a bit of fun every time I sat down to write, I must admit that I had trouble keeping on track. For most of this time, I was simultaneously writing a novel (also coming soon!) and working full-time as a journalist. I’d given myself a loose “finish by end of 2015” deadline, but I discovered this wasn’t great motivation for most of 2015.

What ended up really helping was finding a competition in which to enter the script. It was December when I learned about a “first ten pages” contest. The script was mostly done, but I hadn’t spent much time reading through it to work out the kinks. When I heard about the competition, I thought to myself, “Hey, I can definitely spend time polishing up the first ten pages of my script!”

Lo and behold, just focusing on tidying up the beginning motivated me to get the rest of the screenplay in order, too. You know what? I have no idea how well I’ll do in this competition, but it doesn’t really matter. Having a formal deadline gave me the encouragement I needed to finish.

Well, anyway, thanks for reading my ramblings! Happy to answer any questions in the comments below, and I hope to share the screenplay (and hopefully one day a movie!) with you soon!

 Get We, The Watched (e-book) for free!

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Book publishing to be ‘more mainstream than ever’ in 2016?

Published by Adam on January 9, 2016
Indie publishing gurus gaze into their crystal balls.

Happy new year, everyone! As the proud indie author of two self-published books, I thought it’d be fun to see what people closely involved in supporting and promoting indie publishing predict for book publishing industry in 2016.

Here’s what they had to say!

Emmanual Nataf, co-founder of Reedsy

Photo of Reedsy co-founder Emmanuel Nataf
Credit: about.me/emmanuelnataf

“Most forms of publishing have dramatically changed in the past few years: it’s become incredibly easy to publish photos (Instagram), song tracks (Soundcloud), videos (YouTube), blog posts (WordPress), etc. In 2016, it’s book publishing that will become more mainstream than ever. Through books, more people will express who they are and communicate their vision of the world with others. With 2016 set to break all records with hundreds of thousands of titles pushed to the market, authors need to have a clear idea of what they can expect from publishing a book. In most cases, it will be a gratifying and enriching experience; but only those willing to work hard will find it lucrative.”

Jeffrey Bruner, founder of The Fussy LibrarianJeffrey Bruner, founder of The Fussy Librarian

“I predict that Barnes & Noble’s eBook division will either be sold or auctioned off through bankruptcy proceedings and acquired by a tech startup that will reinvigorate B&N’s website and database and create a little more competition for Amazon.”

Miral Sattar, CEO of Bibliocrunch

miral-sattar_headshot“Now that there are more and more quality books being published a day, largely due to self-publishing, you’ll see a rise of companies that provide marketing tools or services to help the best ones reach the top and get discovered.”

 

Meanwhile, Smashwords founder Mark Coker wrote an excellent post on his own 2016 predictions. I’ve quoted a few of his predictions below, but definitely read the full article!

Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords

Photo of Mark Coker, Smashwords

  1. “Indie eBook authors will gain market share at expense of large publishers”
  2. “The overall market for ebooks will shrink in dollar terms, but unit volume will increase”
  3. “Kindle Unlimited will gut single-copy sales and drive greater eBook commoditization”
  4. “Print will remain steady, though those sales are the sole domain for authors of traditional publishers”
  5. “Wattpad will be acquired“

What are your predictions for 2016? Sound off in the comments below!

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Review: Tarantino shows defter touch in ‘The Hateful Eight’

Published by Adam on January 5, 2016

https://youtu.be/6_UI1GzaWv0

[wp-review]

The Hateful Eight, like its predecessor Django Unchained, is a western with taller-than-life characters filmed at epic scale. However, director Quentin Tarantino shows a nimbler hand in his eighth film.

When so much of the press has centered around Tarantino’s use of 70mm film for a super-wide screen presentation, you could easily be fooled into thinking that The Hateful Eight is a movie full of massive set pieces. On the contrary, most of the action takes place in Minnie’s Haberdashery, a cozy rest stop for bounty hunters and other wanderers of the wild west.

Boy, do you get to know that rest stop. It’s essentially one big room, and by the second half of the film I felt like I knew every corner of it. Point me in any direction and I could tell you which way to the bar, coffee pot, piano or Sweet Dave’s chair.

Like a good theatre production, the economy of the set puts the spotlight on the actors. Luckily, this is a talented cast with major presence. Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russell shine the brightest, making it look easy to portray an uneasy friendship. Jennifer Jason Leigh is positively despicable, while Bruce Dern delivers half his excellent performance just by the expression on his face.

And look, eight killers trapped in a room together during a blizzard might sound like an obvious premise, but it’s also a very effective one. It’s impressive how much tension can be created by the presence of a mere coffee pot in a snake pit like this. Also, while every person in this “Hateful Eight” may be a bastard, they all — in typical Tarantino fashion — deliver immensely enjoyable dialogue that drips with secrets and hidden meanings.

Of course, this is still a Tarantino movie, and he brings along the stylized gore and indulgent distaste he’s known for. On occasion, the conductor sends his picture off the rails.

Actually, the first scene where this happened wasn’t even violent. At the start of Chapter Four, or immediately following the intermission, Tarantino actually starts narrating. For me this broke the fourth wall. Up to that point, I felt like I was stuck inside with the Hateful Eight — a sort of “Objective Ninth,” if you will. Tarantino’s narrative reminded me it’s a movie. I’m glad he’s proud of what he wrote, but I’d rather hear why he thinks a given scene is clever on the Blu-ray.

This particular scene is, of course, almost immediately followed by the first real gross-out blood scene in the film. To be fair, for a Tarantino movie, the gore in this film is pretty restrained. It’s also used more often to comedic effect, as in Kill Bill or an episode of South Park. It is rarely hard to watch, like the dogs or wrestling slaves scenes in Django Unchained.

Speaking of Django, slavery and racism continues to be a theme for Tarantino in The Hateful Eight. However, I appreciated this movie’s approach in conveying that through the characters’ histories and personalities rather than making it the focus of the plot itself. For example, we know that Major Marquis Warren (Jackson) fought in the Civil War and carries a letter from President Abraham Lincoln. This builds the world and adds to the tension with other characters, especially the former Confederate General Sandy Smithers (Dern). It is not, however, the main plot. It’s a more subtle approach to addressing slavery than Tarantino took in Django Unchained, but works just as well.

I’ve always preferred Tarantino when he seems like he’s having fun — Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction are my personal favorites. While critically acclaimed, Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained left me a little cold with their more realistic and hard-to-watch violence.

The Hateful Eight marks a return to the lighter, character-driven approach of Tarantino’s early days, but his characters’ discussion of race issues show more maturity than those first films’ chats about Burger King and how much to tip the waiter.

It’s engaging and also a whole lot of fun to watch. Pass the popcorn.

Note: I saw the “Special Roadshow Engagement” version of the film, which is a slightly longer cut presented in 70mm that includes a musical overture and intermission. This presentation was great fun and highlights Tarantino’s nostalgia for cinema. It’s definitely recommended if you have the option.

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