OMFG

I was planning to spend the evening reading one of the new books on the subject of the historical biography I plan to write. I was a little worried, because there's always a possibility that I will sit down and read the exact book I want to write. And then I will have no choice but to throw up the project altogether--which is what happened to the very first novel I wrote after I read Of Human Bondage.

This book didn't look very threatening--in fact, it looked self-published (but it wasn't, which is just sad). But you never know: Look in any academic library, and you'll find many really crappy-looking but perfectly respectable print-on-demand books that happen to be on obscure topics. So, I sat down, opened it up, and--

it's a novelization!

WTF? Nowhere on the cover does it say that this is fiction. "Inspired by a true story?" No. "Based on real events?" No. Obviously geared to children? No.

You open it up, and it's nonexistent dialog, handy tertiary characters, imagined drama...sold as nonfiction.

This, this, this crap, this inexcusable! unethical! crap! is why I want to write a book on this subject. We're not talking about George Washington here. There aren't a thousand well-researched, yet entertaining and accessible, books about this person to balance out this fictionalized piece o' shite. There are 1. obscure academic works, and 2. cheap hack jobs like this one. And believe me, this historical person is the most interesting person ever! His life deals with momentous social change! I have yet to explain who he is to someone and have the person respond with anything other than, "Wow! That sounds like a great book! I want to read that!" The editors who rejected it want to read it! And THIS is what's out there--fucking fake fictionalized fairy tales. God help me.

Uf

Today was a day spend messing around with passwords, fiddling with files, uploading files, checking files, etc., etc., etc. A pain with this stupid sinus infection, but it's all good news: Smashwords should put Trang in Apple's iBookstore fairly soon and the Sony Reader store shortly after that, and in a little while you should be able to read a tantalizing chunk of Trang on Amazon (as well as searching inside to, I dunno, count how many times the word "dogfucker" is used or something), and they've got the descriptions up, too.

Wise beyond her years

I'm reading Amanda Hocking's blog--she's a successful self-published writer, and all of 26 years old. She makes a good point here about something that I think people worry about unnecessarily: There's no reason to worry that you'll alienate traditional publishers if you sell a lot of copies self-publishing. On the contrary, if you are successsful, you'll have more appeal because you will have established a track record for yourself as a writer who sells a lot of books.

This has always been true. Heard of Bridges of Madison County or What Color Is Your Parachute? Self-published, sold a lot copies, picked up by a publishing house. Terry McMillan? A self-published author who sold a lot of books and got a contract with a major house. The so-called stigma of self-publishing didn't apply, because there was money to be made. The real stigma with self-publishing was that self-published books tended not to sell well. That could be because of quality issues, or it could be because the book's topic was esoteric, or it could be because the book's author lacked access to a major distributor and wasn't willing to hand-sell out of the back of their car the way McMillan did.

I think people who worry about "stigma" are once again forgetting that publishing is an industry that needs to sell a lot of books, not some sort of quality-control board for an academic literary salon.

(For the record, J.A. Konrath thinks you shouldn't worry about alienating traditional publishers anyway, because nowadays you can make more money self-publishing.)

The hard copies are up!

Whoo-hoo! Trang is up on Amazon, as is the large-print edition! Whoo! Look at that page with all of them on it!

Yay!!! Boy, I'm glad that's all taken care of!

I don't know why when you look up one edition, it doesn't automatically link you to the others, though. I'll see if that fixes itself, or if I need to e-mail somebody over there about it.

I was going to experiment with sponsored results, but it seems that Amazon doesn't run that program any more (that article is actually quite old). I have signed on as an author on Amazon, though, and I'm going to enable their "Search Inside the Book" feature as soon as everything goes through.

I'm still sick. I didn't even get any reading done. (ETA: After posting this, I did get some reading done. I am ever unpredictable.) Today my big accomplishment was that I got groceries, and frankly, even that was a bit much. But I'm happy the books are up!

I am not alone!

Oh, go read this guest post by Jon Merz on Joe Konrath's blog. He got told "the world needs Jon F. Merz's voice" in the course of a rejection. See? It's not just me!

Also, you'll note the arbitrary way his first publisher treated him--business considerations mattered less than the fact that the agent he fired was all palsy-walsy with his editor. That doesn't surprise me--publishing is a VERY small world, and people in that little club can have far more influence than you might expect. My first agent dropped my historical biography because an assistant of his had taken a class and become enamored with a crackpot theory on the topic. So the only way to write the book was to focus it on this crackpot theory, despite the fact that, hello, there is very little evidence to support it and a great deal of evidence to the contrary. I actually do take journalism quite seriously, and I'm not going to write a book that I think is a lie, period, and I'm especially not going to do it to make some boneheaded assistant happy. Need I add that the agent, who initially LOVED the proposal, had decades of experience in the industry, while his assistant had very little and was, in fact, leaving publishing? But it didn't matter that she was credulous and ignorant and inexperienced--she was in the club, so her opinion mattered most of all. (Oh, and when I finally got an agent who was willing submit the proposal to editors, guess how many decided to pass on the book because it didn't focus on the crackpot theory? None. Not a one. Thank you.)

Sinus infections are the mother of invention

All right, I am officially Too Sick To Write. That's annoying to me, because I'm finally really and truly done with Trang and ready to start on Trust, so it's the perfect time to get so sick it took me a solid two minutes to put the cap back on my pen.

But I don't want to just sit around, coughing and fouling handkerchiefs, so I think I'm going to update my proposal for the historical biography. I know I'm all, "Yay self-publishing!" these days, but the thing is about my historical biography is that it's a Serious Book. Like, a really, truly, Serious, Important-Type Book. It's not like Trang, which aspires only to be entertainment. If Trang appears to have been written by a crackpot (which you know it was), who cares? It's about aliens and space Marines, and anyone who thinks that they are actually an expert on those two topics is by definition insane. But a Serious Book about a Serious Topic I think deserves a Serious Publisher, if only so that people don't assume it's the rantings of a crackpot (which in that case, it isn't, because I'm actually quite careful to keep my nonfiction, you know, not fictional).

Since that Serious Publisher won't be a commercial house, that means an academic press. So, I need to do two things: 1. read through anything new that's been published on the topic since I gave that proposal to that agent two years ago, and 2. revise the proposal. The proposal especially needs to be revised because in it, I disparage the books produced by academic presses on this topic as totally dull and lacking appeal to most readers (which they are, but I obviously need to rephrase that sentiment so that it's less insulting to people who work for such presses). That's good order to move in as I (hopefully) recover from this stupid illness--first I read, which is not so taxing, and after a few days of that, presumably I'll feel well enough to revise.

I've had this in my head ever since I drew up the schedule on my Web site and realized that my due date on this is 2015. Given that it apparently takes two years for people to reject things these days, they'll bounce it back to me with a letter saying that it's totally awesome, they loved it to pieces, they're looking forward to reading it, and they can't publish it in early 2014, which will give me plenty of time to make that deadline publishing it on my own. In fact, I should probably quote the rejection letters on the back cover, except that I don't remember who wrote what.

A whole new world

So, Joe Konrath's most recent blog post is about his experiment with dropping the price on one of his books to 99 cents. It's fascinating.

OK, it's fascinating to me, the ex-business-reporter weenie. What's really fascinating is that Konrath is dealing with a buying public whose behavior he can't predict--that's why he has to conduct these experiments. Will e-book buyers act like regular book buyers? No one knows!

One thing is obvious: Book publishing is in the midst of enormous change. Thanks to new technology, e-books and even print-on-demand books are really cheap to produce. This is hurting traditional booksellers (which shouldn't shock me: I used to work in the encyclopedia industry, which was basically eliminated by first CDs and then the Internet). Writers, however, can make money--Konrath reports that he is making $187 a day off his 99-cent book, which is on Amazon, which isn't exactly going under selling 99-cent books, either.

Which is why stuff like this is so off the mark--this person, who no big surprise, sells services to self-published writers, thinks that to be "competitive" you have to cough up more than $40,000 to produce a book.

Let's turn our heads away from the fact that, duuuude, if you want people to buy stuff from you, you're opening line should not be, "Wanna go bankrupt?" Let's ignore the fact that you can spend all the money you want on a review package, and the major media outlets still won't review a self-published book. And let's not focus on the fact that people like Konrath and Karen McQuestion have done very well for themselves spending waaaaaaay less than $40K.

Isn't that $40K in start-up and promotion costs exactly what is wrong with traditional publishing?

I mean, let's say it's really vital to me that I break even on Trang (it's not). Given my start-up costs and that ad I bought, I need to sell, what, 450 copies of Trang to make back that money? Compared to 20,000 copies if I were "competitive"? With that kind of spending, it's no wonder a writer at a major house will not get a new contract if their sales are south of 30,000 copies.

Who the fuck am I supposed to be "competitive" with here? And what am I competing for? If the competition is to avoid Chapter 11, I'd say I'm already ahead. If the competition is to, I dunno, outsell J.K. Rowlings or something--with my non-commercial science-fiction book that lacks an alpha-male hero and features lots of bad language--then what I really need to do with that $40K is to plow it into therapy in hopes that one day I will become less delusional. Or maybe I pile it up in my back yard and set it on fire--that would work about as well, and I'd get more enjoyment out of it.

Anyway, yes, I need to stop reading provocative blog posts and get to work on Trust. That "something" I was coming down with is apparently a sinus infection, though, so we'll see how productive I am....

Whoot!

The proof of Trang arrived and looks good, so I have approved it! Both editions should be up on Amazon pretty soon. I also signed on to Google Books--I realized that instead of creating a massive, unmanageable Web page by putting the first half of Trang on marysisson.com, I could just put a note on there with a link to Google Books explaining that you can read even more for free there. (I could also link to Smashwords, but I worry that it would piss off Amazon and Barnes & Noble.) Anyway, that should be up shortly as well.

Ugh, I'm so tired--a long day of real-life crap, plus I think I'm coming down with something. But I have hot water now, yay!

Some interesting blogs

So, I still don't love Twitter, and yet I am finding it extremely useful. I'm following the Twitter feeds of some people who are interested in self-publishing. Not shockingly, it turns out that most people who are interested in self-publishing are interested in making money from it, and not necessarily by writing self-published works--they want to sell services to writers who want to self-publish, which obviously doesn't automatically make them dodgy, but it pays not to be too trusting.

Nonetheless, they are, indeed, following trends and stories and offering advice and whatnot, and through them I have found this really interesting blog by Joe Konrath, who is a traditionally-published-turned-self-published writer. He's also an evangelist for self-publishing (especially e-publishing), but what's nice about him is that he's willing to talk numbers and even conduct experiments in pricing with his own books to see what happens. His openness has allowed another blogger interested in e-books named Dave Slusher to write this analysis of how Konrath's can optimally price his books to maximize revenues. So that's all pretty cool, and very informative and useful to authors considering self-publishing in this day and age.

Barnes & Noble also struggling

Their problems aren't as bad as Borders', but Barnes & Noble just suspended its dividends. If you don't know what a dividend is, when you buy a share of stock, you can make money one of two ways: The stock can go up, and you sell at a profit; and/or you get a dividend, which is a share of the company's profits paid out every quarter. Not all stocks pay dividends, but most investors like them because it's a regular income, meaning that if you have enough stock, you can actually live off dividends and don't have to work; and because with dividends you're less dependent on the crazy ups and downs of the stock market to make money--you could actually sell a share of stock for less than you paid for it and still come out ahead, because all the while you were holding that stock you received dividend payments.

So eliminating a dividend means that a fair number of your investors will immediately sell your stock and not buy it again until you reinstate it. It's a big move made by companies that are in a lot of trouble--which is why B&N was actually borrowing money to pay dividends before now (also not a good sign). They say that they are suspending their dividend to have more money to plow into the Nook and e-books. In other words, even if this gamble pays off, it will pay off because B&N will no longer be as reliant on bookstore sales. And even B&N executives are not trying to spin the Borders bankruptcy as a positive for their company. None of this bodes well for traditional bookstores....

Thoughts on marketing

So, you know how I was joking about procrastinating by working on the house? Well, apparently my hot-water heater is not to be trifled with, because it was sufficiently enraged by that joke and by my working on other parts of the house that it shorted out. It's dead, and judging from the scorch marks, it did its level best to burn the rest of the house down with it. Lovely.

Real life sucks! On to marketing! That's an issue with self-published books, because a major marketing tool for books is reviews, and most reviewers won't touch books that don't come from a publishing house. I have found three Web sites that review SF and that apparently do accept self-published books for review, although they're pretty up-front that your chances of actually getting reviewed are not high. (That's true any place--that journal I interned at did reviews, and they probably received 20 books for each one they reviewed. Of course, some of the books were laughably inappropriate: If you have a book on Marilyn Monroe's "murder" that was written by a team of psychics, it's probably not going to be reviewed by a hoity-toity journal, OK?) That's fine--I'm willing to pony up to buy and mail out three copies of Trang for a chance at a review, because if I get one I can excerpt it at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The other traditional marketing thing that I have done is buy an ad. Yes, I've bought an ad--I feel like such an entrepreneur. We shall see how this works, because ad buys can get very expensive very quickly. I started small, with an ad in the program of Norwescon, because it 1. is a large con, 2. is a more-literary con, 3. had pricing information on its Web site, and 4. wasn't that expensive ($100). The con takes place April 21-24, so I'll see then if there's a bump in Web traffic and sales. If it gets reasonably close to paying for itself, I'll try other con programs, plus I'm thinking of doing an on-line ad at Locus magazine's Web site. (If I'm just dying to spend more money, I could buy sponsored results on Amazon, although it doesn't sound that promising for a novel. OTOH, that guy did go for very general search terms: "communism"? "Reagan"? How many people searching those terms are looking for a vampire novel? "Brian Lumley" worked better--I'd probably do "Vorkosigan" and "Bujold," since I think those books are closest in spirit to Trang.) (ETA: It turns out you can't do this anymore anyway.)

Obviously I am hoping that sites like Amazon will basically market Trang for me. That approach has the considerable advantage of being free, although I do wonder how much "you get what you pay for" applies. Smashwords has a really annoying marketing guide (it should be titled, Promote Smashwords!), but the site does recommend something that I at first thought was crazy but now think is a good idea for a novel: Make the first 50% of your book available as a free sample. That's pretty savvy (although I don't think I'd do it for nonfiction, where people are more likely to just look up what they want and then go on their way), because someone who makes it halfway through a narrative story is probably really hooked. In fact, I may add more chapters to the Trang excerpt on my Web site, although that page is pretty damned unwieldy as it is.

Anyway, after I approve the hard copy I think I'm going to sign on to Google Books. That's something I've kind of gone back and forth on: I thought that signing up for that would put you on the Espresso Book Machine, but it won't, and it turns out that there just aren't that many of those machines, so I probably shouldn't worry about it anyway. There are some issues with Google Books: They don't list what your royalty rate will be if you sell e-books on their site, which isn't promising, and if you want to link to a site where people can buy the book, you can't link to a site like Amazon--you have to be selling your book on your site, which I don't. But I don't actually have to sell through them or link to a sale site: Just partnering with them will likely boost your Google page ranking (nice and incestuous, that), and you can offer free sample chapters of your book...say, the first 50% of it? Hopefully anyone who reads all the way through the first half of Trang is someone who likes it enough to actually look up where to buy it. Either that, or they are someone who seriously needs to work on their time-management skills.

The last freebie-marketing thing I was thinking about doing was going on Twitter. Twitter has never had any real appeal for me, and I'm not crazy about the 140-character limit. But I could essentially Twitter-fy this blog--in fact, right off the bat I could just tweet a bunch of links to specific blog entries and hash-tag them as #self-publishing or something. (ETA: OK, I'm on there as mary_sisson--that didn't take long. I think I'll tweet an old entry a day for a bit.)

So, am I ever going to get off my ass and start working on Trust? Honestly, probably not until later this week, at which point I hopefully will have hot water and be able to wash my (increasingly gross) hair. Fingers crossed....

What you can learn from porn

This is a funny video called, "So You Want To Be a Novelist," but I think it's a little naive. I agree that it's great fun to laugh at people who think of writing as a way to make lots of money, but the person who wrote it clearly thinks Quality Literature = Bestselling Status, and it will not shock you to hear that I disagree.

One specific check to the would-be bestselling author's ambitions is that "your characters are as one-dimensional as the ones in a pornographic movie." You know what sells well? Porn. And when has having one-dimensional characters ever hurt sales of non-porn? I have just finished reading Twilight, a monster bestseller that has been roundly criticized for featuring not just one, but two lead characters who lack anything approaching multiple dimensions.

That criticism is certainly valid: Bella is clumsy. Edward is perfect. Bella loves Edward because he is perfect. Edward loves Bella because she is clumsy. This has led to some angry ranting about the book's gender roles, which will presumably result in a generation of women who think that falling down and nearly getting killed all the time is a sure-fire way to meet Mr. Right. But I used to write jacket copy for paperback romances, and 99% of them have this setup. The woman has zero self-esteem, and the guy is perfect: Rich without being spoiled, good-looking without being vain, brave without being cruel, compassionate without being wimpy, and more than willing to perform unreciprocated oral sex on this woman who enthralls him for no discernible reason.

In other words, it's fantasy. It's fantasy the exact same way porn is fantasy: In romance novels, conventionally-attractive men delight in giving homely women exactly what they want; in porn (at least straight porn), conventionally-attractive women delight in doing the same to equally homely men. The idea is that you, Joe or Jane Average, can appeal to a real winner despite (and this is key) not putting forth effort. You don't have to work at anything--you don't have to tend to your looks, you don't have to be likeable, you don't even have to work up the nerve to ask the person out. You don't have to be Angelina Jolie or George Clooney. You just deliver the pizza or show up to school, and Sexy Perfection Fabulousa will throw him or herself at you. You won't be able to keep him or her away!

There are other fantasies, but most monster bestsellers that I've read hit the wish-fulfillment buttons pretty damned hard. (Some of the funniest bits in How I Became a Famous Novelist are when he's cynically trying to figure out how to hit those buttons.) In most cases, the result is a book that's predictable and forgettable (and maybe a little pathetic).

But not always. The whole Fair Unknown motif, where a seeming Joe Average nobody turns out to be both of noble birth and awesome, has had an entirely respectable and popular run in literature, most recently with the Harry Potter books. Other children's books like the Chronicles of Narnia or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler are big on fantasies of autonomy: The kids are separated from their parents, but they survive without any problem and wind up doing totally awesome stuff. Right now, I'm reading Dorothy Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey books: While what hooked me in Whose Body? was the unexpected departure from the fabulously-wealthy-playboy fantasy, the fact remains that Wimsey thinks nothing of dropping a gazillion dollars on antique books and fine sherry, or running off to Venice on a whim, and that has a certain lifestyle-porn appeal.

So it's possible to have your cake and eat it, too. But don't ignore the mass appeal of porn--we have an Internet today because of it.

ETA: There is, by the way, an economic argument for writing good-quality literature: If it's good, people will continue to buy it, and if it's really good, it will wind up in course curricula, and you will have a captive group of students who are literally required to buy your book every year whether or not they want to, without you spending a dime on marketing. But that's different from producing some big bestseller, and it's a market with its own restrictions (such as a bias toward Serious Literature).

I know nothing about this

Oh my, I'd NEVER procrastinate like this.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to make sure everything in my house and garden is perfect before I start work on Trust.

Jeebus!

The large-print proof arrived--good Lord, that thing's a mother! It looks like the phone book! And it's not APH-compliant for weight--I don't know how you could produce an 18-point book that weighs under two pounds, unless you printed it on tissue paper. As luck would have it, CreateSpace does not offer a tissue-paper option, so mine weighs almost four pounds.

And while the cover was easy to resize and generally looks good (the art is teeny, which helps), you can tell that the author photo on the back has been distorted--makes sense, the eye is particularly sensitive to the shape of faces. But I think my vanity can handle it....

Counting the costs

The new layout of Trang has been accepted, and I have ordered the proof. Barring any major problems, both editions of Trang should be available for sale soon!

I feel like a big reason to have this blog (other than the fact that if I don't report to somewhere, I tend to stop working) is to present my experience to people who are thinking of self-publishing so that they have a realistic idea of what it involves.

Obviously, a major barrier to getting anything published is cost. Not because you should be paying fake agents or sleazy editing services, but because when you are writing for publication, you're not earning a paycheck. For a first-time novelist, you need to have the novel done and ready for publication before you can get an advance (which isn't really an advance at all by that point); for a nonfiction writer, you need to have a very detailed proposal with sample chapters. Both take a lot of time, and putting that stuff together while earning enough money to not starve to death is a major challenge.

And then there are the specific costs involved in actually getting a book out. Not that my finances are anyone's business but my own, but I was a business reporter after all, and I thought it would be helpful to actually inventory what I've spent so far--the start-up costs, as it were.

Of course, LJ doesn't make it easy to format columns. I had to do it backwards, and it's still not quite right.

So: What did I have already? A computer, Internet access, and Microsoft Word. (I don't try to figure out the cost of paper and ink, because I'll use the same toner cartridge or paper ream for several different projects.)

Spent on creating marysisson.com:
$67.50 for 5 yrs....Cost of domain name
$226.79 for 2 yrs.....Cost of Web host*
$294.29.....TOTAL

Spent on creating e-books:
$0

Spent on creating hard copies:
$355.00.....Purchase Adobe Acrobat
$17.86.....Purchase initial Trang proof
$9.91.....Purchase revised Trang proof
$16.24.....Purchase large-print proof
$78.00....Fee for improved price/distribution (both books)
$477.01.....TOTAL

GRAND TOTAL: $771.30

Which, you know, ain't exactly peanuts. Obviously it's cheaper to just produce e-books. That said, I only had to purchase Acrobat once, and it's going to be five and two years before I have to pay to keep up the domain name and Web site, respectively. There will be a reoccurring cost of $10 per year to maintain the improved price and distribution for both hard-copy editions of the book. (You can see from the difference in price between the initial and revised proofs the kind of hunk that fee takes out of the cost of the book both to me and to readers.)

How does that compare with the cost of trying to get published traditionally? Well, from 2005 until 2008, I spent $427.56 on postage alone--and I know that's not all I spent, because I was sending out Trang in 2004. (This is why crap like "Send me your stuff so that I can reject it and feel important!" pisses me off.) And you know, at least now I actually have a book, which is more than I had before.

* Edited March 30, 2012, to reflect rate change.

Whew!

I finalized and uploaded the new layout and cover, so assuming they don't find any weird errors, I should be able to order the proof soon.

Oh, and I realized that that magical $39 you pay to make things cheaper and get extended distribution? It's per title, not per account like I thought. That's what you get for not reading the fine print. But that's still pretty cheap--Jeremy Robinson paid $150 for an equivalent service for one title. Plus, thanks to the size of the large-print edition, it's already going to cost $5 more than the regular edition, so I'm not really interested in padding that price even more. I guess if I really want to save myself the $39, I could have it available only on the CreateSpace store, which is the cheapest distribution channel, but honestly I don't know if I'm comfortable doing that--what good is an accessible edition that no one can find?

Yeah! Yeah!

I finished the layout! Whoo! And it's 374 pages, so that's good, too. I am going to print it out and give it one last go-over before I send it to the printer, but as I've said, the layout is so much easier with narrow margins, I doubt I'll have to fix much. With the wider margins I had to print it out and go over it twice, with fairly substantial changes made both times--and of course the new changes would screw up the old, which was lots of fun.

It's funny because of course I found typos, so I fixed them, but you know, the large-print edition has already been printed, and nothing that I've found so far has been serious enough to warrant trashing that proof and doing another one. So both versions will be slightly different from each other. Likewise, the people who bought an e-book early on have slightly different versions of the book, and the Kindle and Nook versions are going to differ from the Smashwords version, because it's harder to update Smashwords.

I do think now that it's worth it to hold back on releasing e-versions until the layout is done. But the large-print and regular layout are probably always going to differ slightly from each other, because I have to make corrections in Word and then convert it into a PDF file to go to the printer, and Word is just not stable--when you close and open Word, it will shift lines around from page to page, and that's a real pain in the ass when you're trying to lay out a book. So, I just have to be relaxed about it.

Whew!

Between the cover and the large-print edition getting bounced back (they accepted it this time, and the proof is on its way) and general life stuff taking up time, I haven't worked on the layout in a while. Which made me get a little nervous about it, so I decided I'd better check and see if it was going to fall below the magical 400-page limit. And if the layout continues as it has, it will be roughly 380 pages long, so that's good.

I also read something about the Sony Reader device, and I was like, Gee, I should see if I can make the Trang e-book is available for that, too. Apparently you can do it through a service called Smashwords that is free, so barring the discovery of some odd reason not to, I'm going to upload Trang to them as well.

After I get cracking on this layout. You know, when something's really hard to do, I'm usually pretty good about setting aside time and putting my shoulder to the wheel, but when it's easier, well, then, there's no big rush, right...?

Shoulder to the wheel, girl! (*cracks whip*)

Borders

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Borders bookstore chain will probably file for bankruptcy early next week. I get very tired of posting to articles that you can't read unless you have a (not inexpensive) subscription, so here's the HuffPo version. On the other hand, the reason I pay for a WSJ subscription is because the original article contains analysis like:

Online shopping, and the advent of e-readers, with their promise of any book, any time, anywhere, and cheaper pricing, have shoppers abandoning Borders and Barnes & Nobles bookstores as they did music stores a decade ago.

"I think that there will be a 50% reduction in bricks-and-mortar shelf space for books within five years, and 90% within 10 years," says Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of Idea Logical Co., a New York consulting firm. "Book stores are going away."

Not that you should always trust what consultants say--they tend to say whatever is most likely to get people to hire consultants--but fundamentally I agree that many book stores are going to go away, in particular non-niche stores. (That has long been true of non-niche independent bookstores, which pretty much got wiped off the map by the rise of chains like Borders.) I live near a Barnes & Noble, and whenever I go there, either I can't find what I'm looking for, or when I find it, it costs more than on Amazon and the buying process is somehow much more annoying (there's a long line, and the only other clerk would rather answer the phone than run the cash register; or, the only copy of the book has been beaten within an inch of its life by some inconsiderate slob, and then reshelved as though there was nothing wrong with it).

So, yes, I'm betting pretty heavily on Amazon. Another reason that I'm optimistic about their prospects is that they've figured out how to make money selling books--in particular, e-books--cheaply while paying waaaay-better-than-industry-standard royalties to writers. That's led to some high-profile author defections from traditional publishing. Publishing is both a business and an industry, and in business, anyone who can figure out how to reduce the cost of production without sacrificing quality is going to own the industry. It's that simple.

ETA: And Monday brings another really good WSJ article you probably can't read about how the closing of Borders stores is going to affect publishing. Basically they're predicting that it's going to further restrict distribution (ominously, when Borders shut down in the UK in 2009, it didn't help sales at the other chains), and they say that traditional publishers are getting more cautious about new writers because there's not that network of book stores to promote them any more. E-book are going to become more important (obviously), as is word-of-mouth and customer reviews--which might actually level the playing field for small presses and independent authors. (That's it! That's what I'll call myself! "An independent author." Sounds good, no? Like I actually know what I'm doing or something.)

In other words: Go review Trang!

Help from hither, help from yon

I lent the proof of the old layout to my sister, explaining to her why I was changing it. She opened the book and immediately said, "Oh, yeah." And of course it was something I hadn't really thought too hard about, which is that, unless it's oriented to children, a book with really big margins doesn't really look like a book--publishers also want to save paper, staff time, and therefore money by keeping the margins narrow, so readers unconsciously expect that.

CreateSpace bounced back the large-print edition. It's interesting because apparently they do do some proofing, and their concerns are twofold. The first is that, although I describe the project as "Trang (large print edition)" the title page just says "Trang." My initial reaction was, Well, doesn't the fact that it says "Trang" in very large letters give you a clue? but then I realized that they're just trying to make sure I didn't accidentally submit the wrong interior, so now the words "large print edition" appear both on the cover and the title page.

The second concern was that there was a problem with pagination. I doubled-checked the chapter files, and the page numbers are correct, so at first I was thinking that I had just screwed up and bundled the chapter files in the wrong order. But then, looking through the layout, I found another problem (and if this was their concern, it was a very good catch indeed, and I commend them for it): Unlike in the e-book, where I actually call the first chapter "Chapter 1" and the second chapter "Chapter 2," in the hard copy I just use chapter numbers. These numbers appear in the upper right-hand corner of the page, fairly close to where the odd page numbers appear (there are no page numbers on the first pages of the chapters).

In the regular edition, the chapter numbers are a different font, and they are MUCH bigger than the page numbers, so there's really no possibility for confusion. But in the large-print edition, everything's the same sans-serif font, and the page numbers are very big. Also, both page and chapter numbers have been bolded, because you're supposed to do something like that to things that are not part of the main text to help distinguish them visually from that text.

Although I did enlarge the chapter numbers, I didn't enlarge them enough, the end result is that the chapter numbers look an awful lot like the page numbers--which is obviously a problem you can't ignore in an edition that is supposed to be easier to read. Lucky me, it looks like I can alter the chapter numbers without screwing up the rest of the layout. So that's what I'm doing right now!

ETA: OK, I finished this and uploaded it again. I'm hoping the numbers are different enough--I used Arial Black for the chapter numbers (everything else is regular Arial). I thought about switching to a different sans-serif font for the chapter numbers, but it seems like the other fonts I have don't actually have sans-serif numbers. If CreateSpace kicks it back again, I'll just go with Copperplate Gothic (the font used on the front cover) and hope that the enormous font size makes up for the presence of serifs.