LETHAL JOURNEY
Historical Fiction

Noir 1892 Thriller

Article: (Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

Scams,Inc.     Claims     Refuted     DIY     Points     Hiring Pros     Biz     Sell!    

   Scams, Inc. Only yesterday, I received a spam e-mail from a 'company' with an impressive looking logo and one of those made-for-patent, ungrammatical but suggestive titles. I won't give them coverage here, so I'll just refer to them by a made-up name as The Scam Group (Scams, Inc.). Note: I cannot comment on any specific company—this is intended as a generic commentary on the many scam artists who prey on trusting, starry-eyed authors, as such people have for many generations. Scams Inc.'s spam mail states: "We want to do all we can to get your manuscript published." They offer a 'special package' (don't they all?) for *only* $650, claiming that "Comparable packages elsewhere cost thousands." We all know that many of these bottom feeders offer 'packages' for thousands of dollars. But, assuming you bite, what do you get for spending your hard-earned money in a terrible economy? If they are 'helping' you to 'get published,' then who actually publishes your book? It's very likely that the scam artist offering this particular 'deal' knows very little about publishing, and can't be pinned down on fine points. The approach usually is to treat their starry-eyed victims condescendingly, with the attitude "Don't worry; let me handle everything." That's when you really *should* start worrying and hang up in mid-sentence. Take no more calls from Scams, Inc. Why pay middlemen who deliver, in effect, nothing? Look at the claims this company makes as to what you get:

   Typical Offers

1. Mechanical Editing
2. Interior Formatting
3. Custom Cover Creation
4. Print Publishing Account Set Up
5. Print ISBN
6. Proof Copy
7. Global distribution to Amazon.com, BN.com, etc.

   Taking these points one by one: They offer other 'benefits' you can do yourself, like keeping charts of where you have 'submitted' your manuscript, etc. Obviously, the perpetrator of this scam has not yet figured out that you want to publish your book--not to 'get published.' If you want to 'get published,' submit your raw manuscript to the usual agents and print venues in New York and don't hire anyone to do anything for you. The premise of 'traditional publishing' was that they did everything for you, if you were lucky enough to be accepted, in return for stealing your entire bundle of rights 'in all formats, now known or yet to be invented, for all eternity.' Yes, those rights—intellectual property, copyright. This form of larceny (theft) was the industry standard in the New York monopoly (Big Six), because they were the only game in town and nobody, not even the courts, could stand up to them. If you want to publish your own work in the opportunities now offered in the digital world, you can do so for very cheap, assuming you first do a little homework. You should assess what your interests and skills are, and how they honestly translate into selling books. All of us can stand some learning to improve our product, so it's common sense to stop and think before blindly writing checks to scam artists. Some of them are outright thieves, and others all too frequently only deliver a mediocre or 'nice' book that won't sell. Selling books is extremely competitive, and you need to learn the industry for yourself if you want to achieve any sort of success.

1. Okay, I must confess, I have no idea what mechanical editing is. Maybe they run a spell check? You can do that yourself. It's 'mechanical.' There is, in fact, no substitute for careful human line editing.
2. We will learn interior formatting in these articles, starting today. We'll talk about MS Word, styles, and other issues.
3. Soon, we'll take a poke at cover creation. Note that 'custom' implies they must make a cover personalized for your book. This may be technically true, but usually these companies have some cookie cutter covers, on which they merely insert your name and your title, or something to that effect. If the cover does not sell books, it is as good as worthless. Covers (or marketing images, as their digital offshoot is called) are supremely important, and they require a carefully considered approach so they are *effective* (in the sense of selling books).
4. A print publishing account set up? Whether you use Smashwords (recommended; digital only; all formats), or sign up with Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, either for print or digital, or both, it's free and it's easy. You should not pay anyone for this. Sellers are eager to bring you on board. No middlemen needed.
5. About ISBNs. Typically, reputable retailers or platforms will either give you an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for free, or a small fee (about $10 at Smashwords last time I looked). You do not need to pay a fortune for this. Sellers are eager to sell digital and print books for you, and they won't let the ISBN be a roadblock. The ISBN is a universal way to identify not only your book, but specific editions of it, so you should have different ISBNs for your print and digital editions. Often, retailers make up their own internal numbers in addition, which is transparent to you.
6. Whether you use LightningSource (LSI), Amazon CreateSpace (both of these recommended), or any other service, you will be asked to order a galley proof (proof copy) as a way of ensuring that you have seen the product, and approve of the manufacturer's result. Cost ranges from about $10 at CreateSpace to a flat $35 (last time I looked) at LSI. No middlemen needed. Save your money.
7. Distribution is automatic, obviously, since the bookseller wants to sell your book. You do not need to pay a fortune to middlemen for something that happens automatically. If you go with LSI, they are a wholly owned subsidiary of Ingram, the largest book wholesaler for the old print industry. A hidden benefit of using LSI is that you gain access to the standard, key wholesale distribution chain. A major drawback is that your book goes out to everywhere on earth, and if you ever put out a corrected edition, you will forever be saddled with copie sof the old out there. My experience has been that LSI customer service generally stinks, rather obviously because they are minions of the old print industry, where self-publishers are still vermin and heretics to be laughed at. So you'll be told 'we can't do anything about it.' Whether it's true or not, it's infuriating. The best protection is to make sure you get the best edition out there the first time, which requires complete and proper line editing. NOW NOTICE: Scams Inc. makes no offer of editorial services. The old vanity presses used to typically offer such services, and offer from nothing to spotty to okay line editing for your money. By the way, most of these scam services take your book directly to LSI under their own 'publishing' imprint. Your book will be 'published' for a fortune by Scams, Inc., or you can actually *publish* your book yourself and save most of that money.

   Creating the Package—Yourself. First of all, what does it cost? If you do it all yourself, you can go to LightningSource LSI's website, create a free account, and upload your finished book. Honestly, all of this has its learning curve, but if you tackle it with the idea that (1) I want to be truly independent, master the business myself, and take charge of each step along the way; (2) it's fun; (3) I'm not going to let fear and frustration defeat me. Your worst fear will be "If I do something 'wrong' will I be banished from the world?" No such thing. The worst mistake you can do is create an amateurish cover, or sell text that's full of typos. As a DIY publisher, you will certainly be able to find real experts (not ripoffs) who can help you. The difference is that you're not blindly trusting in some stranger who is angling for hundreds or thouands of dollars of your money. You're an entrepreneur, running your own business. Haven't you always wanted to have a business of your own? Now you do—it's called Purple Potato Press, or whatever you want to call it, and you stand an equal chance alongside the New York Big Six. Every day, new digital authors publishing their own work are proving the Big Six and their acolytes wrong. And in this magazine (PIN), every week we trot out yet another major success story dating back over the centuries. So again, what does it cost? If you take the LSI route, based on my last experience with them about two years ago, it costs you about $80 to upload both the cover image and the interior text of your book. That's it. If you use Amazon's Createspace, everything is free except the galley you are required to order (about ten bucks).

   Points to Ponder. If you are at the point where you are sick and tired of the print industry (which is going away, anyway, as the monopoly we have grown up with), and you are publishing your own book ('self-publishing'), then you are going to do one of three things. (1) You will pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to these scam artists, and get nothing in return but some books in your garage or your bookshelf; prove me wrong; the odds are, the book at best will not sell any better than if you saved your money, overcame your fears, learned the ropes, and became an entrepreneurial (eyes open) publisher; (2) you can try to do it all yourself, which is the first thing you should consider; this path only works for a small number of people who have some graphics skills and, more importantly, marketing savvy to create an effective Package; (3) you can be that same open-eyed entrepreneur, understanding the business (which is not hard), but know your limits, and hire specific experts to perform specific (not vague) tasks for a specified, industry-standard amount of money. On matters of money, if you hire someone to do an effective cover, or effectively edit your text, don't over-pay but at the same time don't try to nickel-and-dime someone who makes a living at a profession (as I have, all my life, in editing and writing). Learning the ropes means understanding how the business works, what the various specialists do, and how to meaningfully employ someone. Nothing should require vast outlays of money, but I have known many people who were taken for a lot of money before they realized they were broke, their sales were abysmal, and they had been taken. So that's the point of this paragraph. One of your underlying instincts is correct: "I don't know how to do a cover, or to work with styles in formatting text." The real question is, can you learn what you need to learn to create an effective package, or is it time to reach out beyond yourself—not to Scams, Inc., but to professionals.

   Hiring Professionals. This could be a very long article, and I may yet write it. Think of it this way. How do you go about hiring someone to paint your house, or to install a sprinkler system, or to design your kitchen? Most of the time, you'll ask for references. You'll consult library and online resources. There is a magazine in print for every purpose known to mankind, from breast feeding to badminton to racing cars to decorating houses. There are a number of magazines that advise writers and publishers; in these, it has always paid to avoid those who advertise in them, just as you avoid scams online. Just because it's an ad in your favorite magazine doesn't mean they will deliver what you need: not just a nice package, but an Effective Package (one that sells books). The difference between nice and effective is like being alive or not—there is no inbetween. You are either selling books or you're not. Is it your text (story, article)? Is it the title, the cover, the blurbs? Maybe it's time to consult a pro. But let's revisit the basics just once more first.

   The Business. Discard all the nonsense first. Books are not made in heaven, or blessed by savants in the industry, or legitimized by Professor Flutesnoot in the Literature Department. Rather, as the many self-pubs I bio in this magazine prove through doing rather than saying, it's a matter of bringing a product to a potential buyer. Often, the middlemen (acquisition editors, agents, etc.) do not have the vision or often even the brains to understand your mission. Time and again, great authors have become famous and successful in spite of the establishment, not because of it or through it. Whether it's shoes, cheese, or poems, you create something you want others to enjoy (and pay you). You dolly up your product so it's an Effective Package, in this case a book with a gripping (effective) title, an intriguing (effective) cover, and engaging (effective) marketing words appearing on the retail websites. There is nothing mysterious at all about any of this. The digital printing mechanics are actually simpler than those of the Print on Demand (POD) method whereby self-publishers nowadays usually reach their audience. Think of it like a flea market. You make 30 widgets, whether it's wooden flower boxes hammered together from boards and painted, or garden windmills. On Friday, when the flea market starts, you load everything on your truck (or a rented truck) including your cash box, your ledger, your pencils, your business cards, plenty of water, and your receipt book. You drive to the flea market or the swap meet, set up a table, put up an umbrella for shade, sip your water, and watch the people walk by. When someone stops to ask about your product, engage them in conversation, with the idea of leading them toward buying one. The idea has to come from them, not from you, or seem that way. And Bingo, you are an entrepreneur. Publishing your book is exactly like that. The print industry and its sacerdotal acolytes have made the process into a huge stink that only 'experts' (scam artists) can lead you through. Don't be fooled. If you are smart enough to write a book, you are smart enough to master selling windmills, flower boxes, or your book. With windmills or flower boxes, if they don't look jazzy, nobody will buy them. By jazzy, I mean effective because people buy them. It's the same thing with your book.

   Sell Books. Forgetting the slightly more complex (but not impossible to understand) distribution process of the old print industry, let's look at the simple steps that I will highlight in this DIY series of articles. (1) write a book, story, or artice, give it an effective title, and figure out who your audience is; that's who you'll market to; we'll collectively here refer to these works as books; (2) get a line edit (that's the publishing industry term for proof readers, copy editors as in the news and advertising business); a willing and detail oriented English teacher will often love to moonlight for extra money; consult the annual Writer's Market (book) and other resources for industry standard fees, being careful to avoid scammers who advertise in most industry-related magazines; (3) do an effective cover, or have someone do it; (4) Write some effective blurbs; we'll talk about all these steps in our series of how-to articles; (5) go online and get a free account for your choice of retailers or platforms (I would go for LSI or Create Space for POD, and Smashwords for digital at this writing); (6) upload your cover image or marketing image, and your formatted interior text; (7) start marketing, which consists of telling the world about your book, whether it's online on social networking, getting an article into your local media, or other networking. That's pretty much the whole process. If you wish, sit down with a pad and pencil. List all these steps in a column. Create a second column parallel to this, and list the steps you would take in bringing some other product from creation to finished product to sales and marketing. Both columns should be quite similar. It's easy. It's not frightening or mysterious, as the middlemen and bottom feeders would have you think.

Sator Enigma: Ancient Roman Mystery Solved

The so-called Sator Square (also Sator Rebus, Puzzle) refers to a mysterious ancient text found on walls throughout ruins of the Roman Empire. Archeologists have found exemplars in such diverse ancient Roman locations as a government hall (aula) in Cirencester, Britannia; twice in Pompeii, pre-dating the city's volcanic destruction by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE; and in the distant frontier fortress of Dura Europos on Rome's Mesopotamian border with Parthia. Something about this strange, cryptic writing must have been so important that the Romans would post it in their government halls, public squares, and top military headquarters.

It is one of the most perfect palindromes ever created. A simple palindrome is a text that reads the same, backwards or forwards; e.g., "Madam I'm Adam" and ".madA m'I madaM". The Sator Square is a perfect four-way palindrome that reads the same left-right, right-left, up-down, and down-up. Nobody had a clue how to translate it, despite thousands of hours of research, hundreds of learned books and articles, and at least one Ph.D. thesis in Classics at Yale University.

John T. Cullen solved the puzzle in the summer of 2007, almost coincidentally, while continuing eight years of scholarly research for his nonfiction/Ancient History virtual tour guide A Walk in Ancient Rome, Revised 2nd Edition (Clocktower Books, Summer 2011). He had been aware of this baffling cryptogram from long ago, which has since become an object of superstitious reverence in certain Christian and Neo-Pagan settings. Suddenly, while taking a break from his Rome research, he looked at the Sator Square in a new way—and was able, within a few weeks, to both translate it and plausibly explain it.

Ironically, at the annual convention of International Thriller Writers, of which he is an Active Member, in New York City in July 2009, he was the only author present who had actually deciphered and explained a cryptic, ancient epigram of world importance—and lived to tell about it.