Novelists E-Publish and Flourish

Where can a novelist publish a love story with a subplot about pesticide exportation that’s written entirely in e-mail messages?

On the Web, of course.

In 1994, when Leslie Guttman pitched her manuscript to a dozen New York literary agents, she didn’t get a single bite. So she took matters into her own hands and published it herself--online.

“If agents don’t immediately know which shelf your book will sit on at Borders,” Guttman says, “they’ll think there’s no market for it and won’t take a chance.”

In June, Guttman, a San Francisco Chronicle editor, created her own Web site, enticing readers with a few free chapters of her book, “Message Pending,” and selling the rest for $6.95 as a downloadable file, or e-book.

Guttman is just one of a growing number of independent and first-time authors eschewing traditional publishing venues by putting their works directly online, selling them in electronic or printed form or both.

Melisse Shapiro used the Net to market her novel, “Lip Service,” an erotic romance she wrote under the pen name M.J. Rose.

Rather than hiring a vanity press to publish her manuscript, Rose created an online publishing house, Lady Chatterley’s Library. She spent $20,000--money she raised by selling jewelry her ex-husband had given her--to hire a Web site designer and a graphic designer and to pay for the printing of 2,000 copies.

Shapiro then loaded the books into the trunk of her car and made the rounds at every independent bookstore in her hometown of Greenwich, Conn., without success.

“They didn’t want to give me any shelf space because it meant taking away space for books with advertising,” Shapiro says.

Rejected, Shapiro brought “Lip Service” to Amazon.com. The online bookseller, which encourages first-time authors through a program called Advantage, added her self-published book to the 4.5 million printed titles it already offers. In exchange for accepting her book for sale, Amazon’s only stipulation was that Shapiro produce enough printed and bound copies to keep up with sales.

But expecting online book buyers to happen upon an independently produced title, or to find their way to that book’s Web site, was unrealistic. So Shapiro, who has 17 years of advertising experience, used an “inverted pyramid” marketing approach to generate a buzz. She sent printed copies of her book to Web sites she thought would be interested in the content of her novel and asked that they review the book. Every time she got a positive review, she included a copy with the next round of pitch letters.

In two months, mainstream publishers came calling. And eight months after putting up her site, Shapiro sold the rights to Pocketbooks, a division of Simon & Schuster.

“If you can find your readership online, you can convince publishers that there’s a market for your work,” says Shapiro, who sold 1,500 copies of “Lip Service” on her own before selling the rights to Pocketbooks.

Today, the book-buying public is just as likely to be found online as in an actual bookstore. In the last two years, a handful of small online publishers, known as e-publishers, has emerged, hoping to sell electronic versions of printed books to be read on hand-held electronic gadgetry called e-books. Although some e-publishers sell titles put out by the New York publishing pantheon, others, such as Hard Shell Word Factory, in Wisconsin, take chances on independent authors by selling their works in electronic form only.

“We create a market for authors whose novels don’t fit into the marketing guidelines of traditional publishing companies,” says Hard Shell owner Mary Z. Wolf.

These include such genres as time travel, futurism and the paranormal (e.g. vampires, ghosts and reincarnation stories)--categories New York publishers can be wary of but that Wolf says have scores of loyal and computer-savvy readers.

Guttman showed her novel to several e-publishers, including Peanut Press, formed less than a year ago in Springfield, Mass. Peanut Press sells e-books downloadable onto Palm Pilots.

“We’re really not in the business of working with independent authors,” says Mark Reichelt, co-founder and chief executive of Peanut Press. “But this market is so new, no one knows which direction it will end up going.”

Shapiro, for one, hopes it will go in a direction that favors independent authors. “There’s a glamour associated with independent musicians and filmmakers,” says Shapiro, who will run Lady Chatterley’s Library to market independently published novels. “But the independent author is treated like the dregs of society. It’s time we got our due.”