Catherine Ryan Howard is rather famous for her non-fiction books, Mousetrapped, Backpacked and Self-Printed, and after really enjoying the former two, I was pleased Catherine was going to make her foray into the fiction world! Results Not Typical was the result and it was brilliant. After enjoying the book, I arranged an interview with Catherine and I hope you enjoy it (I know I did!).

1. Can you describe Results Not Typical for us in 5 words?

Um, no… Can I do six? The Devil Wears Prada meets WeightWatchers. Sort of.

(Okay, so that’s eight. Flummoxed by the first question!)

2. Results Not Typical isn’t your typical Chick Lit novel, but is that where you would categorise it if you had to? Are you OK for people to say it’s Chick Lit?

It definitely isn’t your typical chick-lit, but that’s part of the reason why I wrote it. There’s numerous books out there that ridicule or exaggerate corporate life (Company by Max Barry being my favourite) but they all seemed to be aimed at men and about men, for the most part. I wanted to read a book like that about women, for women, and when it came to an industry ripe for ridicule, there was no better candidate than a dieting and weight loss company.

I would – and do – call it chick-lit, because to me “chick-lit” means commercial fiction for women, and that’s what Results is. I think the problem as highlighted of late is that the genre is expected to encapsulate so many different kinds of books – everything from the likes of My Sister’s Keeper to the Shopaholic series – that some authors are bound to get offended and some readers confused. And there’s definitely a double standard, with One Day being a shining example – if that had had a woman’s name on the cover, it would’ve been labelled chick-lit without a doubt. But it didn’t, and so it wasn’t. It’s the double standard that annoys me, not the “chick-lit” label itself.

3. Where did the idea come from for Results Not Typical? It isn’t your average boy-meets-girl affair, and and I’d love to know the inspiration behind the book!

The inspiration came from, fortunately or unfortunately, personal experience! In the latest instalment of my decade-long career in yo-yo dieting, I joined a crazy behaviour modification clinic who forced me onto a diet of not-completely-dissolved protein flakes and profoundly messed with my head for one hour a week in person and about seven hours a week via hypnosis CDs, which never hypnotised me because I was too busy giggling at them. When I’d tell my friends what had happened at my latest clinic visit, they’d fall about the place laughing – and they couldn’t believe that that sort of thing was even allowed to go on. Eventually two wires connected in my brain – the hilarity of the clinic’s practices and the fact that I wanted to write a book like Company, but for and about women – and the idea for Results Not Typical was born. Something had to actually happen in the book, so I had the only existing stock of their soon-to-be-released revolutionary weight-loss pill, Lipid Loser, stolen from their corporate headquarters in the opening.

4. You’ve spoken vocally on your blog about how you’ve tried to be published “traditionally”, does it annoy you somewhat that your book is rejected because it isn’t “typical” Chick Lit? Shouldn’t that not matter? Shouldn’t we be embracing books that are a bit different to the norm? [Ed note: For the record, I think we should be be embracing different books; it's refreshing to read something different, something not typical.]

I think as a reader it’s easy to get all romantic and idealistic about what books should or shouldn’t be on the shelves, but publishing is a business above all else. For every five celebrity novels, there’s one The Help (which I heard was rejected 50 times before getting an offer!), which is a shame, yes, but the sales of the celebrity novels enable publishers to release books like The Help, because even if the “risk” book doesn’t do well, the “safe bet” books will still pay the wages. This lets them take a chance on something new, something unusual, but they can’t take a chance on all the somethings new and unusual, because their business would implode. So when I was told that Results wasn’t mainstream enough or enough like what was doing well at the moment, no, I wasn’t annoyed really. I was just happy they had some positive feedback to go with the rejection.

I did get one rejection that annoyed me, and it was an editor who said, “I like it, but it would only appeal to women who’ve been on diets.” I don’t think that’s true but even if it was, isn’t that an awful lot of women? I felt like saying, um, YEAH?! That’s the point!

5. Why did you eventually decide to self-publish it? Did you just reach the point where you figured that since self-publishing is doing brilliantly at the moment, you might as well get your book out there rather than carry on being rejected?

I felt like since I was getting pretty much the same rejection everywhere I went, I was only ever going to get rejected with this book. Getting traditionally published is my real goal, and more than one publisher said they’d like to see something else, so I wanted to turn my attention to doing that, to thinking about what that something else might be. But here I had this novel, finished and ready to go, that several editors had said great things about and which I really believed could have an audience, and I already had an audience – my blog readers, Twitter followers and the people who’d read my previous self-published non-fiction books. Since my financial investment is much, much smaller than a publishing house’s would be, Results Not Typical wasn’t such a big risk for me. If it sold well that would mean more money for coffee, and more coffee would mean that I might actually manage to write the Something Else – not to mention the fact that being able to say, “I’ve sold 10k copies of my self-published novel” might get me over the finish line with an editor when the Something Else is finished and ready to go. Of course whether or not I’ll be able to say that remains to be seen.

6. For anyone wanting to self-publish their book, what would your recommendations be? (Apart from reading your book Self-Printed, of course!) Do you recommend having it professionally edited and having a professional cover designed? Did you have it edited properly and designed properly?

There is absolutely no justification for self-publishing without having your book at least proofread, preferably copyedited and proofread and ideally structurally edited, copyedited and proofread. But if after all that you don’t get a professional cover design, you might as well just tear up your polished manuscript and chuck it down a toilet, because you are doing yourself such a disservice. And yes, I did all that to Results – I wouldn’t dare say that if I hadn’t!

As for my recommendations, I think too many would-be self-publishers start off their self-publishing journey by studying other self-publishers. I think this is a mistake. You know the phrase, “Shoot for the moon – even if you fail, you’ll land among the stars”? Well, if you shoot for the stars and fail, you’ll end up in the treetops. My point is you’re far better off studying the world’s bestselling authors, who are all traditionally published and have professional marketing teams, etc. and try to emulate or even improve on what they do, rather than trying to emulate the success of your fellow self-publishers. Go to self-publishers for the nuts and bolts (like how, specifically, to produce a self-published book) but go to the world’s biggest selling authors for inspiration on how to sell them.

Oh, and buy Self-Printed of course!

7. How do you make yourself stand out when anybody can go onto Amazon, upload their book and make up a cover and stick on a cheap price? How do you let people know that your book isn’t just some cheap novel filled with errors that’s there to make money and quickly, and that it’s worth people picking up? Is it just trial and error?

I’m still trying to figure all that out, to be honest. I think there are certainly things you can do to make yourself stand out from the masses of cheap and perhaps not very good books, self-published or otherwise. Your cover sends a slew of messages about the quality of your book in an instant, which is why it’s so important to have the best one you can. Then there’s having a good product description on Amazon – a blurb that reads like it was written by a professional, and endorsements that aren’t from your mum. (Self-publishers showcasing inappropriate and/or irrelevant endorsements is a pet peeve of mine – the point is not what the person said about your book, people, it’s all about the person who said it!!!) Finally, getting good but honest reviews, both from Amazon customers and book review sites – like yourselves! – is a great way to set your book apart. Once you get all that sorted, all you can really do is find a comfortable seat and settle in to wait for some luck.

8. Do you still hope to be published traditionally some day, or are you happy to stick with the self-publishing revolution and stay on the dark side?

I want to be traditionally published. That’s my “real” writing dream. It’s not about money or validation or being accepted or being told I’m good enough or gaining access to “the club” or any of the other ridiculous reasons the Self-Publishing Evangelists (i.e. the ones who insist on calling all agents and publishers “gatekeepers”) try to persuade me it’s “really” about. Getting published is my dream, it’s always been my dream and self-publishing, no matter how successful it is, will never be enough to replace achieving that dream. That’s what it’s about. What’s changed is that I used to think self-publishing was just a little adventure on the side, whereas now I see it as a parallel. Or at least, I hope it’ll get to be a parallel. I’m just waiting for my Fairy Editor-Mother to arrive with a dotted line and a pen…

9. Are you currently working on a second novel? Or, rather, will you be self-publishing a second novel?

The novel I’m working on now is the one I’m going to submit to publishers so hopefully I won’t ever self-publish it. (Cross your fingers for me!) But if Results sells well and people like it, I do have two more novels in a similar vein planned, which I will self-publish. I’m not one of these crank ‘em out self-publishers though, especially not with novels – you’ll have to wait a while for them. And if anything happens with the Please Publish Me Novel (!), that would be my priority, of course.

10. How has blogging helped your author profile? Do you feel you sell more books because you blog?

I think I only sell books because I blog, at least when you trace it all back to the beginning. What I’ve come to believe is that books – or my books, anyway – sell mainly because people find them on the Amazon Kindle store. They find them because Amazon churns them up in things like recommendations and “Customers Also Bought…” To get into these things, you have to have some initial sales that came from elsewhere, and for me those initial sales come from the people who read my blog, follow my tweets, etc. I wouldn’t be where I am today, career-wise, if it wasn’t for blogging. I personally think starting a good blog is the single best thing you can to jump-start your career as writer – besides writing a sure fire bestseller, of course.

11. Your blog is pretty much a one-stop-shop for anyone who needs help trying to self-publish, did you have the same help when it came to self-publishing your first self-published book Mousetrapped or is it because you didn’t have that knowledge that you’re helping others by telling us all about the trial and error (and, ultimately, reward) or self-publishing?

I really had no help. Google is what got me through self-publishing, and since I felt I couldn’t trust most of the information out there (which seemed to be written exclusively by people who wanted to march into publishing houses with pitch forks and torches – bitter, much?) I had to figure out a lot of it just by doing, and course-correcting if I made a mistake. That’s why I started blogging about self-publishing in the first place – because it was so hard to find non-crazy information on the subject. Lots of people are doing it now but it was still a bit of a novelty back then.

12. Without getting into details – I know you’ve posted money stats on your blog, but that’s not what I want – do you make enough from your four self-published books to make a living? Is that your aim if you don’t currently, to make enough each month, each year?

Let’s put it this way: right now, I write full-time but I live with my very understanding parents. (I’m 29!) If sales of my newest books follow the same trajectory as Mousetrapped did/does though, in a few months’ time I’ll be making more from this than I did working a 9-5. But that’ll be after nearly two years of spending about ten hours a day doing something to do with self-publishing. It’s taken a lot of time and work to get to this point.

13. As well as self-publishing your debut novel, you’ve also self-published three non-fiction books, Mousetrapped, Backpacked and Self-Printed, can you tell is a bit about each of them and why we should read them? [Ed note: Or rather why everyone else should read them, since I've read both Mousetrapped and Backpacked - I highly recommend them, too!]

Mousetrapped is about the year and a half I spent living in Orlando, Florida and working in a hotel in Walt Disney World, but it’s really about the place where adolescent dreams meet grown-up reality, and what happens when the two clash a few thousand miles from home. Backpacked is about the backpacking trip through Central America I took immediately after leaving Florida, even though I hate roughing it in hostels, cockroaches, activities, spending all my time with other people and basically everything backpacking is about. You should read them because I always need more coffee.

Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing is everything you need to know to self-publish an e-book and a print-on-demand paperback without ever saying “gatekeepers” or thinking that all bookshops in the world will be closed by the end of next week. You should buy that because it’s useful and funny (occasionally), and because it also helps with the coffee cause.

14. Finally, if there was one piece of advice you wish you had when you first self-published Mousetrapped, what piece of advice would that be that you would give to anyone wanting to self-publish?

I would say: pick a side of the fence and then stay on it. What I mean by that is if you’re self-publishing e-books and POD paperbacks which are sold on sites like Amazon.com, then don’t bother having a bookstore launch or getting newspaper coverage, which is useless unless your book is actually for sale in stores. If you want that, then don’t self-publish e-books and POD paperbacks. And also, go for it! Done right, it can be fun, it can be profitable and it can bring your published writer dreams just a little bit closer.

Thanks so much, Catherine!