On E-Books, Self-Publishing, and the “Tech Guru”: A Conversation with Matt Bell

Matt Bell, author of the well-regarded story collection How They Were Found (Keyhole, 2010) and editor of Dzanc’s annual Best of the Web series, has self-released e-book editions of two of his previously uncollected short stories—“A Long Walk, with Only Chalk to Mark the Way,” and “A Tree or a Person or a Wall.” They are available through the Kindle store and, directly, from Bell’s website. This interview was conducted over the last week, by e-mail.

I. “MY MOM’S HAD ONE FOR YEARS ALREADY.”

THE FASTER TIMES: Why did you decide to release these two stories as standalone e-books?

MATT BELL: I’ve been teaching myself e-book design off and on over the past year or two—the first thing I designed was Monkeybicycle 6, two summers ago—and have recently ramped up my self-training so that I could do the design work for Dzanc. Obviously, as I was doing that I spent a lot of time looking at e-book platforms, thinking about how they work, and also how writers might best use then.

Obviously, these are still things I’m thinking about. They’re complicated, and there aren’t easy answers to any of the various questions the ease of self-publishing raises, nor the ones that the permanence of e-books raise: if you give someone e-book rights to your book, you better be happy to have them have them forever, because your book is never, ever going to be out of print, which in the print world was always the way of eventually getting your rights back.

As for why these two particular stories: both stories were previously published last year, in great journals—Redivider and The Lifted Brow—but aren’t part of How They Were Found, or any short story collection manuscript. I very specifically waited until both of these magazines had at least one new issue out as well: I truly appreciate these editors taking my work, and I’d never want to cannibalize their sales or seem less than grateful for their great work on behalf.

Beyond that, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to give short stories a little longer life than the literary magazine is able to, which eventually moves on to a new issue, and a new crop of authors to promote and share. If an author is planning on waiting a while before doing another short story collection, as I am, then what’s the best way to keep those stories out and available? I’ve got a novella coming out next year, and a novel-in-progress, and at least right now I have no interest in doing another collection until both of those are out. And maybe not even then: I don’t want to do another collection that is just the next set of stories, especially if they’re not that different from what I’ve already done in book form. Ideally, I want to wait until I have something new in that realm, until I have a manuscript that has something different to say with the form than what How They Were Found does. In the meantime, I’ve got a number of stories waiting around, post-magazine-publication but pre-manuscript-inclusion, and I want them to have some kind of life in-between.

For this, the short-story-as-e-book seemed kind of ideal: it’s extraordinarily low-risk, especially since it hasn’t forced me to give up any more traditional publishing opportunity—as mentioned, these have already been in magazines, which is all they could be so far—and the work necessary to prepare them in this format was pretty minimal. The best-case scenario is that they sell really well, and I make a couple bucks to help me spend more of my time writing. The worst case is that not much happens, but even then I’m not really out anything except a couple of hours spent laying them out and designing covers and so on.

The most likely outcome is that something in the middle will happen: they’ll sell some copies (and already have sold a good number), and that’ll get my stories out to people who wouldn’t have otherwise read them. That can only be good for me and my books, and as long as there’s no reason not to, it’s something I expect to do in the future.

TFT: What specific technological know-how does a writer need in order to make a releasable e-book and put it up in the existing e-book marketplaces?

BELL: There isn’t anything particularly difficult about e-book formatting: it’s basically modified HTML. Especially when you don’t have the organizational needs that a full book has, it’s mostly just a matter of making the text look good, and understanding what’s different about an e-book, compared to a printed version of the book. Really, it’s very, very easy, once you get the hang of it. The last short story collection I laid out took about a single workday to get right (working from the final print interior file), and these two stories took much, much less time.

I designed the books beginning to finish in Textmate, a text editor for the Mac, then converted them using a combination of Kindle tools and Calibre. The cover was done in Photoshop. I tested everything on an iPad, a Kindle, and an iPhone, and used e-junkie as a platform for selling them from my own site, in addition to the Kindle store. Nothing too complicated, and several of the tools are free or almost free.

II. “I DON’T THINK THERE’S ANY DEFAULT POSITION ANYMORE.”

TFT: Do you have a marketing plan, other than word of mouth?

BELL: I don’t really have a marketing plan, but that’s partly because I’m not sure how hard I want to try to push them: mostly they’re there as another way of getting my work out, rather than a business all their own. I do have some future opportunities in the e-book world as well as ideas about how to proceed with them, so this is mostly just dipping my toes in, rather than a full immersion. Assuming things continue as I think they might, the next phase will probably be a bit more aggressive.

One of the interesting things to me about e-readers is that they’re being adopted first by people who aren’t your traditional indie fiction readers. Take yourself, for example: you were highly resistant to the idea of getting an e-reader, but my mom’s had one for years already. So I’m also hoping that this might also be a way to get my work in front of new readers who might not already be aware of my book and my work in lit mags. It’s a way of accessing a different audience that’s very, very easy to at least set up and have there for anyone who comes looking.

TFT: Do you think this kind of thing might signal a shift to indie music style do-it-yourself-ing?

BELL: I think there might be some of that happening already. Certainly the availability of desktop publishing tools and cheaper digital printing has already given rise to more independent presses and literary magazines. The cost of entry—and the risk of failure—with e-books is even lower, so I imagine more people will experiment with it.

TFT: What kinds of writers might most benefit from giving an e-single a try?

BELL: I doubt anyone would really be hurt by the idea, but it certainly seems like having a pre-existing audience helps get something like this off the ground. That said, unpublished genre-writers are selling 150,000 copies of their novels in e-book format, so I’m not sure there’s anyone that can’t give it a shot.

TFT: What are the potential pitfalls of doing it yourself?

BELL: Having just said anyone could try this, here’s why I think they might not want to, unless the situation is right: the downside of self-publishing anything—even a story that’s already been published—is that you don’t reap the benefits of working with a publisher. Not everyone is going to be capable of serving as editor, designer, marketer, and tech guru for their own books. If you can’t do those things, you probably shouldn’t try.

You also have to be really, really sure of the quality of the work: glutting the market with every story you’ve ever published is obviously a terrible idea. I picked these two stories very carefully, to start with: they’re both stories I’m very proud of, and that I think will be well-received by people who enjoyed How They Were Found, but that also give some hint of where I’m going next with my work in short stories. If I didn’t think they had some of those qualities, I probably wouldn’t do this at all.

TFT: Would you consider doing an entire book this way?

BELL: This is the real question, in some ways, and right now, the answer is probably no, unless there was some reason a print publisher wasn’t appropriate for a work. I think that some of my other goals in life—academic teaching job, etc.—aren’t compatible with large-scale self-publishing. I think that I’m at a point where a blend of approaches to getting my work out there is most appropriate. Sometimes a traditional print publisher makes the most sense, and sometimes it might be the best choice to give them full control over electronic rights and serial rights and everything else. Other times, it might be best to hand over a narrower set of rights—perhaps just the rights to print the book in paperback, and nothing else. Determining what’s right for my goals for each project is something I’m fairly constantly thinking about, and I think there are differences between the potentials of each of the various books I’ve worked on and am still working on. I don’t think there’s any default position anymore, and writers who don’t take the time to consider these issues are going to miss out on opportunities for getting their work read by as many of the right people as possible.

TFT: Does this kind of self-release threaten indie publishers? How do your publishers feel about what you’re doing?

BELL: I think indie publishers are right now well-served by the fact that many of their customers prefer paper books, especially ones that are well-crafted art objects. That’s going to keep their print runs and sales figures the same for a bit longer, but I think they should all be looking at e-books seriously, and figuring out what their strategy is for the fast-approaching day when everyone is completely comfortable with reading e-books on a daily basis. I already am, and it’s changed my approach to the words I take in, how I expect to interact with books, and so on. I think the best way for indie publishers to compete here is to provide other services to writers, to earn their keep above and beyond a mere willingness to put out the book, which (especially in e-book format) writers will be increasingly able to do on their own. That means publishers need to compete by offering superior editorial advice, excellent marketing, great cover designs (which still matter enormously to e-books), and other services. If a standard e-book contract figure is 25-50% of the e-book price, then what would an all-e-book press have to do to earn that percentage? I’m not exactly sure yet what all that needs to be, but publishers better figure it out, or writers are going to stop giving up what could be theirs to keep.

TFT: How many electronic copies do you expect to sell?

BELL: Honestly, this is probably the question I have the least idea about how to answer. I really have no idea. It doesn’t have to be very high for it to be worth doing, since the risk was so low, and in any case I had a lot of fun putting it together. It was a good time doing the layout, putting together the covers, writing the “jacket copy” and so on. Even if no one ever read either of the stories, I still would have enjoyed the time I spent learning the tech and exploring the possibilities. I’ve always been a bit of a tech-geek, and getting to combine that knowledge with my writing is a lot of fun. Either way, I’m happy to have started down the path of learning more about these new techs and opportunities, and to put some of my thinking in action. It’s definitely only a first step: e-books aren’t going away, and they’re something every writer is going to have to figure out for themselves, probably soon. I’m just happy I’ve started doing that figuring now, before someone else does it for me.