Asymmetrical Goings On No. 2
Joshua Fields MillburnA shedload has happened since our last Goings On update, a veritable whirlwind of publishing-related activities…
Asymmetrical People
Since moving our HQ to Zootown back in February, we’ve brought on board nearly 40 interns, all of whom have diverse backgrounds and different skill sets: editors, translators, PR people, social media managers, community managers, podcasters, designers, developers, an author manager, a retail strategist, and even a “sonic brander” who’s doing all the cool music/sounds for everything audio-wise at Asym.
Discover more about these folks (photos, bios, links) on our Asymmetrical People page.
We’re currently looking for talented book-cover designers, videographers, and developers (let us know if that sounds like you).
Three-Legged Table
We didn’t get into the publishing business to be a traditional publisher. That’s not our thing. Rather, we want to share our expertise with the world and, ultimately, show you that you too can successfully publish a high-quality indie book that’s indistinguishable from the Big Six publishers.
As the publishing industry evolves, so must publishers. Thus, our business model looks something like a three-legged table:
- Community: The Asym Community gives you a voice, as well as access to shared resources that’ll help you on your publishing journey. (If you haven’t been there in a while, check it out. Plenty of people are sharing valuable insights and participating in meaningful discussions.)
- Press: Asymmetrical Press is the publishing wing of our business, where we publish our own work and occasionally seek out guinea pigs (other authors from our Community) to help us refine (and redefine) our ever-changing publishing process. For this reason, we don’t take submissions—we don’t actively look for new talent. Instead, when someone or something catches our eye—something we love—we ask the artist if they’d like to work with us to publish their project. Our learnings from each publication allows us to reshape and share our template with everyone.
- Studio: See “How to Publish a Book, a Soup-to-Nuts Approach” below.
The overarching objective is simple: we want to improve the overall quality of indie publishing—to raise the tide, because a rising tide lifts all boats. No longer should self-publishing carry a negative connotation. Like indie music and indie films, we want to make indie publishing cool, better, desirable.
Ergo, we’re hard at work on a free, in-depth, six-part series that’ll help everyone who’s interested in publishing their own high-quality book…
How to Publish a Book, a Soup-to-Nuts Approach
Over the course of six essays and six podcasts, Colin Wright and I will show you, based on our own experience as successful Independent Authors, how to publish an Indie Book (hence the title). This series will include six parts:
- Introduction & How to Write a Book
- How to Edit and Proofread Your Book
- How to Create a Book Cover, Author Bio, and Synopsis for Your Book
- How to Format Your Book for Print, Ebook, and Audiobook
- How to Distribute Your Book via Various Sales Channels
- How to Successfully Promote Your Book to an Audience
Each essay will also contain a half-hour podcast in which Colin and I will expound on the contents of the essay, using our own personal experience and opinions as a beacon to guide the conversation.
Concurrent to this six-piece guide, Ryan Nicodemus is putting together a host of “studio” services and additional resources that will be available through Asymmetrical. Ultimately, we know that you can successfully publish your book entirely on your own—we have the empirical first-hand experience to prove it—but if you want help in certain areas like editing, cover design, formatting, and promotion, then Ryan and the Asymmetrical team will be there to help with the Asymmetrical Studio. More details coming soon.
Classes
How to Write Better, my springtime online writing class, alongside Colin’s design class, sold out rather quickly. The feedback for both was overwhelmingly positive, and so we’re offering summer classes for both.
Learn more: How to Write Better and Intro to Design for Publishing
As part of our studio services, we have a whole suite of publishing-related classes from various experts slated for the future. We’ll keep you posted as things develop.
Upcoming Books: Act Accordingly and Others
In late March I received a phone call from Colin Wright, sometime during his three-week stint in Iceland. He said, “I wrote a book today.”
After staring at the phone a moment, I pressed the receiver back to my face and said, “I’m sorry—it almost sounded like you said that you wrote a book…today.”
“Yes, I wrote a book.”
“Today?”
“Yes.”
“Wrote it today?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, you mean you finished writing a book today?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. Well, yes. I guess I did finish writing it today. But I also started writing it today, too.”
“…”
“Hello?”
“You’re an asshole.”
Obviously, I was projecting. After all, it took me four years to write As a Decade Fades and the thought of writing a book in a day wasn’t even on my radar’s radar.
Truth be told, I think Colin is a talented writer, one of the best online, but I didn’t expect the book to be any good. I mean who the hell writes a book in a day?
But of course it was good, although good doesn’t do it justice. I received the first draft that night; it’s title: Act Accordingly. I read the manuscript in a single sitting, cover to cover. As far as first drafts go, it was brilliant—chock-full of wise, timeless advice that didn’t in any way come off as preachy or didactic or pretentious, a philosophical framework of how to get the most out of life.
Even though he wrote the book in a day, it obviously took Colin 28 years of cerebration to gain the knowledge and insight the book delivers, which it does, time and again, like a one-two punch to the gut and brain. Act Accordingly is a sort of modern-day Tao Te Ching: brief yet significant, concise yet abundant, black/white yet full-color. If Lao Tzu were alive today, I’m certain he’d write a blurb for the cover.
The book is in the final stages of our long editing process, after which Colin will record the audiobook, and then we’ll publish and promote the book, ahem, accordingly. It’s a fine piece of literature, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with the world.
We are also in various stages of publishing other books: Chase Night’s novel, Chicken; Colin Wright’s short-story collection, 7 or 8 Ways to End the World; Shawn Mihalik’s novel, Brand-Changing Day; Robyn Devine’s nonfiction book, She Makes Hats; and Ryan’s and my memoirish book, Everything That Remains. Stay tuned.
Act Accordingly‘s book cover:
Our Retail Distribution Strategy
The future of publishing involves two methods of distribution: the Internet and bookstores. That doesn’t seem different from publishing today, and in many ways it’s not. The distinction, though, is that as sales move more and more toward the online world, the bookstores that survive—and even thrive—in the future will be nimble, indie stores who focus on the customer experience, rather than aggregating eyeballs to the “best-seller” endcaps.
Through Asymmetrical’s existing distribution channels, we can already get our books into Barnes & Noble and virtually any bookstore (and so can you). But that doesn’t matter if they sit on a shelf and collect dust. Accordingly, we’ve hired Nicholas Milewski to lead Asymmetrical’s retail distribution efforts.
Instead of focus on quantity (i.e., we don’t want a huge, expensive pile of our books collecting dust at B&N), we’re focused on quality by developing strong relationships with 100 amazing indie bookstores throughout the US & Canada (int’l in the future), honing in on one Asym-exclusive flagship store in each city. This strategy will allow us to foster long-term, on-going relationships with key partners in each city, growing on the ground as we continue to grow in the Cloud.
Feel free to get in contact with Nick — nick@asymmetrical.co — if you know of any great indie stores near you that we should partner with.
Flowery Bullshit
Colin designed a few new shirts for our shirts-for-the-indie-at-heart store, including the above-pictured “Indie Author” shirt, as well as a shirt containing a bit of sound writing advice, “Chill out on the flowery bullshit” (quote inspired by Chase Night and Robert I. Brown).
As always, it should be clear that you don’t need to buy anything from us. But if you need a new shirt, we’ve got a few well-designed writing/reading-related options for you. We make a few bucks on each sale, but we don’t expect this to be a massive moneymaker—it’s just something fun for us, and hopefully for you, too.
(Top photo by Megan Jae Riggs. That’s me in the background on cajón pretending to stay on beat; Ryan on guitar; Colin on seductive stare.)