Fan Fiction, The Metric Of Success

 

This is an article I wrote for Jacqueline Lichtenberg's blog Alien Romances back in 2015. It was part of her series entitled 'Marketing Fiction In A Changing World' which writers who want their works to be read would do well to study. What has marketing got to do with fan fiction when we can't sell it, I hear you ask? It all depends on how you define the success of your work.

What size should I make my cover? 1 - Paperback

Probably one of the more common questions asked about eBook production is, what size should I make my cover? Like most things, if you ask this of three people, you'll get three different answers! I make no pretense to having a definitive but here are my thoughts on the subject which might help to put things into perspective.

The first thing to consider in any creative endeavor is to ask, what do you want to do, what is your aim, your end result, what are the design considerations? What do you want it for? For me, I want a single graphic (I'm late! I'm late!) that can serve a number of purposes...

1. As a cover that could potentially be printed out for a physical, "dead-tree" "A" format mass market paperback book
2. As a cover for a pdf paperback
3. As a cover for an ebook in ePub and mobi format
4. As promotional artwork, both full-sized and as a thumbnail

Each of these has different design considerations but I have a template that I'm confident can cover all of them! In the next four blogs I'll step you through the design requirements for each of these end products. (NB all dimensions are shown width x height)

THE HARDCOPY

• According to Wikipedia an "A" format mass-market paperback (MMP) is 110mm x 178mm (4.33" x 7.01")
• Allowing "bleed" of 5mm all round, this comes to 120mm x 188mm (4.72" x 7.40") for just a cover page.
• This is only part of the story though! If you want a wrap-around cover for your book, you need to allow for "bleed" on the top, bottom and outside edge *plus* the width of the spine which depends on the number of pages and weight of paper used!
• Take for example Lulu, one of the highest profile Print On Demand (POD) publisher. They don't have a book size that exactly matches the MMP standard size, but their "Pocketbook" perfect bound book at 107.9mm x 174.6mm (4.25" x 6.87") is virtually identical, checkout HERE for the dimensions and HERE for a templates. They advertise that their Pocketbook can go up to 740 pages which, according to their spine calculator would be 35.46mm wide (1.40") using publisher grade paper. Sooo... if you want to make a wrap-around cover for your book, you need to know how many pages it is, what weight paper you are going to have it published on, plug this information into the spine calculator and it will give you the spine width, cover size and even where the spine begins!
• For my purposes a wrap-around cover is not a design consideration for three reasons...
• You'll notice I said that this was for "a cover that could potentially be printed out"? I've given up on the idea of approaching a printer to publish, say, a dozen copies of a fan fiction novel. Realistically, the loss of revenue to a copyright owner from this would be so small as to be incalculable but I still get vents about how it is illegal, immoral and an attack on the very foundations of the western economy. No worries. If you don't want my business it's not my loss, it's just for personal satisfaction anyway.
• Without knowing what paper weight I'd publish on or the number of pages of my potential book, I can't make a realistic estimate of the width of the spine for a specific book, and thus can't say how wide my wrap-around cover should be.
• Since I want to design a template that can be used for all the books I publish, I am currently working on simply generating a front cover only which will have bleed on all four sides. If I were to get it published, I'd create a separate back cover and a spine that bridges between the front & back.

Next: The pdf paperback!

Pdf Publishing: Options! Give me options!

EDIT 2021: The header for this blog post was a Flash "book case" of TrekUnited books in Issuu. Flash is no9 longer supported by modern browsers and so it is now dead. A pity because it was a really intuitive way of promoting and making available pdf publications. This post was updated in 2015 and deserves to be updated again.

Open publication - Free publishing - More fan fiction

Pdf Publishing: so you have a great looking book you want everyone to read, how do you put it online? Most people just have it as a link to a downloadable file. That works - its simple and it gets the job done - but it doesn't let people browse your work before they download it.

This is what we have been using to date, that's an example embedded above, is Issuu, however they are putting a lot more weight behind their paid service and limiting their free features... www.issuu.com/TrekUnited

July 2015: Limited free service but they've added a rather good Facebook app.

Scribd is a long-running social publishing site for sharing original writings and documents in various formats, for private or public viewing, in four Languages along with a commercial store. I note that S&S are using Scribd for advance copy. http://www.scribd.com

July 2015: Scribd is no longer free for readers which creates a problem for fan fiction

DeviantArt, the bastion of amateur art, has a pdf publishing plugin 'scroller' much the same as the one in Scribd. The major value of using DeviantArt is the community, you have a captive, supportive audience here! TrekUnited Publishing has a group here at... http://tu-publishing.deviantart.com/

July 2015: Still a good solid performer

Yumpu is closest in looks to Issuu with flipping documents that they say you can create in only 2 minutes, one click Facebook integration along with Twitter, Linked In, Google+ and Pinterest. German focus but international distribution... http://www.yumpu.com/

July 2015: Still seems good value

SlideShare is the world's largest community for sharing presentations but also also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars. With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million pageviews, it is amongst the most visited 200 websites in the world. Focused more on the real world than fiction! http://www.slideshare.net

July 2015: Still free but of little use for publishing fiction

Joomag sounds like it has a number of features that Issuu doesn't such as Video & Audio (Issuu actually does support audio), a Photo Gallery, Popups and an iPad app. This one bears looking into! http://www.joomag.com

July 2015: the free option seems to be unlimited and ad sponsored 

Zyyne is an online platform that boosts your publications : they are more vivid, easier to disseminate and can be read on any medium. A powerful analysis tool allows you to see who has read them and how. http://www.zyyne.com/site/en/

July 2015: The fact that they offer a thirty day trial suggests this is a commercial platform

MegaZine3, a powerful, userfriendly, open source ActionScript3 based page flip engine. http://www.megazine3.de/

July 2015: They seem to be morphing into a commercial platform