Covers and positioning

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I contacted one of those Etsy artists about using some of his paintings as book covers. He may say yes, he may say no, he may do that typical visual artist thing where he doesn't get back to me for a year and then is really upset that I hired someone else. But his paintings are pretty, so go look at them.

You'll notice that they aren't wacky people and wacky aliens, despite my repeated assertions that I must have both on my covers. That's because I've recently started rethinking the wisdom of positioning Trang as a straight-up adventure/comedy book. I filled out a little interview form about the book for a review blog that asked a lot of questions about what inspired the book, and what inspired a lot of it was the aftermath of the September 11th attacks (I was living in NYC at the time)--the xenophobia, the anti-French bullshit, dealing with the stress and guilt, all that. So, you know, while I think of it as light and funny, there are things like repeated brutal scenes of Inquisition-style torture, so perhaps it's not as fluffy as all that.

The other thing that got me thinking is that I got a review on Amazon by someone who did not like the book AT ALL, and the main complaint was that "not much happens." This is a really common complaint made by readers of plot-driven commercial fiction when they read something that is more character-driven or more literary. Much like "Where's the Cher?" it's a complaint that's easy to make fun of*, but actually should be paid attention to, at least from the standpoint of positioning your book. The fact of the matter is that, at least in Trang, I care a lot more about the main character's post-traumatic stress disorder than I do about the wacky aliens.

So I think maybe I should go with a more "serious" cover. I mean, Trang's a mutt, but I like mutts--I like Buffy and Muriel's Wedding and The Atrocity Archives and other works that swing crazily from funny to tragic to terrifying to absurd. So a funny description and a serious cover may be the way to convey that.


*We can make some fun though, right? In Publish This Book Markley quotes from reader reviews of a couple of literary classics. They include a review of Native Son that reads in part, "This book was one of the most boring book that I have ever read. There are one or two scenes in the book that are interesting, but overall the book is boring. BORING. BORING. BORING." and one of To Kill a Mockingbird that reads in part, "This book is so boring! Nothing is going on.... [Y]ou have to go through pages and pages about Atticus's childrens' lives.... Does anyone have any idea why this book even won a Pulitzer?!?!"

Did I read that right?

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As I was looking through review blogs, I saw a--I'm not sure what to call it. An unreview? An anti-review? A statement noting that the blog author would never review books from James Frey's Full Fathom Five publishing house because Frey treats the writers so poorly.

And I was like, huh? People are willing to work for James Frey?

Let's review what we know about Frey: He lies. A lot. He lied to make money. He also has a history of substance abuse.

*Deep sigh.*

Dear young writers,

Did you know that not everyone can write? It's true--I worked for an educational publisher, and we hired respected academics to write our books, and most of them, despite their brilliance in their subject matter, could not put two words together to save their lives!

Not everyone can write. Being able to write is a skill that is worth something.

You need to recognize the value of your skill, and not work for any old compulsive liar who comes along. Do you know that I've been freelancing, off and on, for over a decade? Guess how many times I've had to threaten to sue people to get paid, or go to court to collect a paycheck, or just been stiffed?

Zero times. Zero. The most I ever had to do was a quick e-mail to an editor saying, "Have you seen my check? It hasn't arrived yet."

This is not the norm in the industry!

How did I accomplish it? I was careful who I worked for. The minute complaints started wafting through the air that so-and-so was stiffing writers (and nowadays, they'd waft through the Internet, making them easy to find no matter where you are), I put them on my own personal Do Not Call list. If I was thinking of working for someplace, I'd ask around--have you worked for these guys? what are they like? If the answer was anything but "Great!"--Do Not Call. I did not work for dodgy start-ups. I did not work for people who promised glory but no cash.

And I was able to make a living at it. When I say "make a living," I mean a decent apartment, decent food, decent clothes, no calls from bill collectors, stellar credit. I was not a bohemian. I did not squat and go without heat like the characters in Rent.

I have worked for a cokehead--a regular 9-to-5 job that ended when he destroyed his own company. Never again. I never ever worked for anyone who I knew for sure, because it's a matter of public record, was a dishonest person. Because I am not stupid, and you should not be either: The man willing to lie repeatedly on Oprah will not think twice about misleading and deceiving you.

Best of luck!
--Mary

Or, maybe it belonged to chaos

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Insomnia, rain gutters, and a power outage that lasted most of the afternoon (!) flat out derailed Trust. Better luck next time, I guess.

Oh, I found some more good Web sites for...this is the hip term...indie authors. Yes, that is what we are calling ourselves nowadays--look at me all down with the lingo. Now get off my lawn, you damned kids! (No, seriously--get off it. I only got a lawn a few years ago, and you would be amazed at the crap (sometimes literal) people leave there--one guy used to park his truck on it until I left him a note, and then he parked it on the neighbors' lawns instead.)

Anyway--I mentioned I didn't get much sleep last night?--back on topic! The Web sites are this guide to e-book review blogs and this blog that alerts subscribers to e-book sales. I'm going to contact them about the Norwescon sale.

Another reason not to procrastinate

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You know what happens once you announce your intentions to get right to work? Something comes out of left field and EATS YOUR TIME AND ENERGY.

Today somebody reviewed Trang on Amazon and mentioned that there were formatting problems. Ugh. Some things I don't get, like why this person wants a table of contents. There's no table of contents in the hard copy, because hello, it's a novel--novels written for adults usually don't have tables of contents. I'm wondering if it's a Kindle thing. If it is, I may have to figure out how to format one, but I hear it's a huge pain in the ass. (ETA: OK, I just talked to a friend of mine who owns a Kindle, and she was as baffled by the request for a table of contents as I was.) (EATA: I talked to a couple of more e-reader owners, and apparently not everyone has the hang of the bookmark feature, and they do find it easier to have a TOC because flipping lots of pages can be a hassle. So I'll look into doing that.)

The person also wanted to be able to download the front jacket. Seriously? Obviously s/he hasn't taken too close a look at it, which is fine by me. Maybe once the cover is fixed I'll figure that one out. (ETA: My friend the Kindle Oracle doesn't get this one, either--still, if there's a way, once I get a decent cover, I'll try to do it.)

But the complaint I was willing and able to fix was the lack of paragraph indents, because (I've heard this elsewhere) double-hard-returns in Word turn into triple- or quadruple-hard-returns on an e-book reader. It became obvious when I tried to fix this that having Amazon convert a Word file into a Kindle file just causes all sorts of weird and VERY unpredictable formatting errors, so what I did was have Amazon convert the file into HTML, download the HTML, edit it in Word (which you can do, apparently--I had no idea), and then upload the edited HTML. That seemed to work OK.

After that I tried loading the same file to Barnes & Noble, only to discover once again that the Nook has its own quirks. I quirkified the HTML file for Nook and uploaded it, but then when I tried to do the same for Smashwords, it turns out that they want a Word file. So I'm hoping the conversion from HTML to Word went smoothly--I especially wanted to update the Smashwords file because I know the version there has some typos.

The overpowering urge to procrastinate

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The thing about being a writer is, you have to write. And it's always VERY tempting to do something else. For example, I had an idea last night (after a day spent SHAMELESSLY procrastinating) that might let me work up an acceptable cover for Trang myself, despite my utter lack of drawing talent. Also, there are all those new potential sources for reviews. And you know something? I haven't cleaned the rain gutters in months and months, and I should get some cooking done, and I need to plant those herb starts, and the moss needs to be cleaned off the roof of the shed, and I need to finish painting the guest bathroom, and, and, and, and, and, AND, AND, AND, AND, AND, AND, AND!!!

Yeah, the list is potentially endless. It's especially tempting when it's stuff you "need" to do. (Steam the rug! That's really urgent!) Typically, too, the more I procrastinate the more anxious I feel, and then that makes me feel like the unimportant chores I should get done one of these days are REALLY SUPER IMPORTANT AND URGENT--but the funny thing is, if I were to dedicate the next week or so to doing them all, my anxiety would never lessen, because of course I'm ignoring the One Big Thing I'm supposed to be doing.

There's a number of metaphors about this in literature, not surprisingly. The Terrible Trivum from The Phantom Tollbooth was an early favorite of mine--I remember reading "we have pencils to sharpen, holes to dig, nails to straighten, stamps to lick, and ever so much more" when I was about 10 and just being thunderstruck at how true those words were. More recently, I took a part-time job in what turned out to be a fantastically dysfunctional workplace that sucked up a tremendous amount of my energy and time until I resigned (in protest, because they thought sexual harassment was totally OK--I should mention that this was a workplace that served children). My sister asked me how things were going at one point, and I was like, You know, it's such a meaningless soap opera for me, and even when things are going well, it's just lotus-eating.

So while I know people blame this phenomenon on the Internet or on self-publishing (because traditionally-published writers never have to spend time on ancillary tasks), the truth of the matter is that someone who wants to procrastinate will always find a way. (And the cat stomping all over my computer right this moment doesn't help.) You just have to be strict with yourself.

In other words, Get back to work!

More good blogs, and a quandary

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This blog is relatively new (fewer than 30 posts! I probably post that much in a week), and yet Victorine Lieske offers some really solid advice about marketing and soliciting reviews (with more good advice found in the comments).

At first, I didn't think this blog would be very useful, because the author tends to free associate, but the entries on self-publishing are really good. Like Joe Konrath, Robin O'Neille/Barbara Morgenroth (I think the latter is her pen name, but I'm not sure. ETA: It turns out that the first name is definitely a pen name. The second name may be a pen name as well, but I'm not sure) is a refugee from traditional publishing and has great perspective on the merits of self-publishing, as well as a realistic attitude toward books, audiences, and publishing in general, which I always appreciate. She also is VERY adept with design and does her own book covers as well as those for other people. (ETA: Having read further through this blog, I shall warn you that she really, really does not like transgendered people. I don't know what they ever did to her, but God, she hates them.)

My quandary is that I just don't feel like it's appropriate for me to be Tweeting away about self-publishing given what's going on in Japan. And yet it seems like everyone I follow on Twitter is just continuing business as usual. But of course for most of them it is a business--they'll still have to pay the rent at the end of the month whether the death toll is 1,000 people or 10,000 people. I can afford to be all sensitive, I suppose. I'm nearly out of Tweet-type blog entries anyway, so I think I'll take a break and get back into it later--it just feels really crass and solipsistic to be out self-promoting under the circumstances.

Covers, pricing, covers, pricing,covers,pricingcoverspricingcoverspricing

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Family obligations have been eating all my time lately, but last night before I went to bed I started poking around looking for cover artists. Boy, that was a mistake. It was probably a combination of doing that and watching too much tsunami footage (and today with the nuclear reactors--hang in there, Japan!), but I was having stress dreams about cover art all night. First I tried to look up artist who do sci-fi book covers, and it turns out that there's, like, five of them and two are retired. It seems pretty likely that I can't afford the remaining three, and even if I could, they probably wouldn't be willing to work on an obscure self-published book anyway. Then I tried to look up artists who specialize in self-published or electronic books, and there's a number of companies who do that, but they mainly do what I would call graphic design--putting a bunch of different stripes on your cover and whatnot. That I actually can do--it's the representational art that's kicking my ass.

So I was a little bummed, and then I realized that I'm probably going at it the wrong way: What I really need is just the representational art--I can do the lettering and make it into cover myself. There's going to be a sci-fi convention around here pretty soon, so I think I'll go and have a gander at the art there--maybe I can strike a deal with somebody. (ETA: And I just looked on Etsy and saw some promising things there.)

The other thing I've been thinking of is how to maximize the ad I bought, and I think what I'll do then is have a sale--drop the price of Trang to 99 cents that week (or should I say, THAT WEEK ONLY! ACT NOW! OMFG YOU HAVE TO BUY!--I'll be able to channel Ron Popeil one of these days). Hopefully that will trigger some impulse buys.

Tomorrow--Trust!

Of course, sometimes I'm just naive

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So I updated that proposal for a historical biography, and it's ready to be sent off.

When you do a proposal for a nonfiction book, one thing you do is evaluate the market and competition: Are there readers out there for your book? Are there lots of books on the same topic? So it involves poking around a lot and seeing what else has been published.

And let me tell you, while there aren't a lot of good books out there on the specific topic, there has been a LOT of stuff published in recent years in the general subject area.

Which means that there are a lot of publishers out there who are willing to produce a book like mine.

Which, along with reading someone's comment about a bad agent who behaved exactly as my last agent did, has led me to seriously question my opinion of that agent. He has a sparkling reputation--sort of. I looked on the Absolute Write Water Cooler forum, and sure enough, the more-recent entries about him include numerous complaints about him not communicating with authors.

He did not submit my book many places--at least, if he did, he sure as hell didn't tell me about it. And now I'm thinking that if he had, given the number of similar books published recently, he would have been able to sell it.

This really annoys me because I didn't ride this guy because he had such a great rep. It didn't even occur to me that he might have been the problem. And you know something? I know better. The character of Wouter Hoopen exists because I've had so many experiences with meeting people who are famous and fancy and big stars and whatnot, only to discover that they are more often than not self-serving careerists who got lucky one time.

Getting over myself

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I was going to title this entry "Nibbled to death by ducks," because I redid the description for Trang (it's funnier, more detailed, explicitly compares the book to similar books, includes an author bio, and for the e-books, includes a word count), and I uploaded it hither, thither, and yon, and that was kind of a pain. I also realized that the hard copy has been distributed and is available all kinds of places (Barnes & Noble has it on a really good sale right now), which involved me having to add a bunch of links to my Web site, which was also kind of a pain.

So I was going to whine about all that, but then I got something to eat, and I realized that Joe Konrath would be like, "Cry me a river, bitch."

So I will simply make an observation: Time spent marketing is time not spent writing. And frankly, since Trang is the first book of a series, if I want it to be a success, I'd better get off my ass and tend to the rest of that series, no?

But having to noodle around with uploads and links for a couple of hours is nothing compared to having to visit 500 bookstores, so I shouldn't complain.

More self-publishing blogs

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I found another good self-publishing blog through Twitter, this one by author M. Louisa Locke. (The "M" is, I believe, her first initial--I don't think she's Monsieur Louisa Locke, although more power to her if she is.)

This blog is more like Self-Publishing for the Technologically Inclined, which I'm really not. (I'm not a Luddite, but stuff has to get really useful before I can be troubled to learn about it.) The author is Polish, so some entries are not in English (and not just because it's Techspeak), and I would assume that some of the tech he's talking about is to European standards, not U.S. standards. But if you are a techie yourself, you're probably all over that anyway, so go knock yourself out!

You always wonder if you did it right

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About soliciting reviews: It seems like the various review sites and blogs are quite up-front about whether they want you to query first or just send the book, so that's an easy decision to make.

I've read various people say that you absolutely MUST send AT LEAST a cover letter if not a HUGE press packet (which they would be happy to put together for you for a fee) whenever you send out a book. But you know what part of my job was when I interned at that journal that did book reviews? It was to open any package that appeared to contain a book, pull out the book, and throw away the envelope and any letters or packets that were not the actual book (and trust me, I did that without even looking at them--on a good day, I could get the book out of the envelope without even removing those papers). Then I looked over the book to make sure it wasn't about psychics and Marilyn Monroe, and chucked the books that passed that test into a big box, which went to the book reviewer, who decided what to actually review. The letters and (at times quite sizable) press packets never got anywhere near the reviewer.

So, I didn't include cover letters with the books I sent out. It feels weird because they have no way of contacting me, but on the other hand my Web address is on the back jacket, so I suppose they can if they really want to. Plus at least one of the Web sites is set up so that you can track the progress of the various review copies without actually bothering the people who work there.

Ugh

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Well, since I was feeling better I figured I'd better do some real-life crud first--namely, TAXES. Hopefully that's all done with.

I did do a little something for Trang today: I received some copies I ordered to be sent off for reviews, so I packaged those up, plus I contacted some review blogs that are OK with self-published science fiction. So hopefully something will come up there.

Oh, and I also e-mailed Amazon about linking the various editions, and they say that they're on that. Of course, the immediate result was that the search results got all screwed up, but I'm sure that will get fixed.

In which I prognosticate and possibly look like a major ass

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I don't have any particular insider status into publishing, and when I was younger, I used to let that hold me back. I'd be working for a particular publishing house, and I'd be wondering how the hell we were going to stay in business, because I couldn't see how we were going to make money. Then I'd realize that I was just a young lady without much experience who didn't know anything and that the people running the place had much more experience and surely had everything under control.

And then the business would collapse, and I would be out of a job.

Once, when I worked for an encyclopedia, the entire industry collapsed. There we were, selling sets of encyclopedias for $1,000, and Microsoft was throwing in a set of encyclopedias on CDs for free whenever you bought a computer. Those CDs, by the way, were simply lifted off print encyclopedias, so we were like, These are an inferior product! But for free...? Versus $1,000...? Yeah, to save $1,000 you'll deal with Wikipedia's quirks. Plus now that the Internet is so robust, if you know what you're doing, you can find much better information on-line than you ever could in an encyclopedia--I still have the set they gave me when I worked there, but I almost never use it.

Was the collapse of the encyclopedia industry bad? Well, it sucked for me at the time (although getting laid off for the second time in sixth months inspired me to stop screwing around in editorial and go to journalism school), but as someone who looks stuff up pretty frequently, I freely admit that what replaced it was much better.

I think a similar thing is going to happen in publishing. I look at Trang, and you can buy it for $15, or you can buy the exact same book for $3. I just don't see a bright future for that $15 book. In addition, I make the same amount of money either way, so I have no motivation to try to limit your access to that $3 book--save yourself $12! Please!

Of course, in many cases you're not getting the exact same book--you're getting a self-published book instead of a traditionally-published book. You can talk about how special traditionally-published books are and about how hard editors work sifting through all the dreck on the slush pile, but for a 99-cent book, people will forgo the pleasure of fancy covers and will do their own spadework. Nobody cared about how hard we worked to make those $1,000 encyclopedia sets--they just cared that they cost $1,000, and other means of obtaining similar (albeit not identical) information did not.

Will print books vanish? Not in a hurry. But if print-on-demand publishers can profit (and make authors profit) from those 5,000-copy (or 500-copy, or 50-copy) book runs while traditional publishers cannot, the companies producing those print books will quickly change.

I think there still will be commercial publishing houses, but they will be both smaller and more profitable. That's because everybody will self-publish first. Sell over a certain amount? A publishing house will come to you and say, Wanna be in Target? Wanna be in airport bookstores? It will be a safer business for them, although a much smaller one, because by the time a house identifies a top seller, there's not much left to be done for it. They won't own a huge chunk of the rights, because all they're doing is extending the print reach of the book. And as more people own e-readers, fewer will be picking up books from the drug store, so even that value will shrink.

I predict a lot of blood on the floor for everyone in the publishing industry--in particular, I don't hold out much hope for smaller houses--but I think the people who are good at book editing and design will find new careers: They will sell services to authors who are self-publishing. There will still be a need for high-quality beta reading, line editing, copy editing, cover design, art design, and formatting services. Teaching writing will become an even-more viable profession as writing itself becomes more profitable. The major problem with self-publishing services nowadays is that they attract sleazy people hoping to take advantage of the naive and delusional, so some kind of professional organization with a code of ethics and standards is probably necessary. In addition, certain editors could essentially function as brands, much like certain publishing houses and imprints do today.

And clearly, if I'm churning out long posts like this one, I'm feeling better and need to get back to work!

5,000 units

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Just to expand a bit on yesterday's post: When I first went to work in publishing, my employer kept copies of Publisher's Weekly in the break room. Publisher's Weekly is the industry magazine--emphasis on industry. Interested in writing and literature? Publisher's Weekly is not for you. Interested in how the ever-fluctuating price of paper is affecting profit margins? You've found your read.

Indeed, Publisher's Weekly displayed at times quite a bit of resentment toward writers, who were generally seen as a bunch of whiny prima donnas who would occasionally do horrible things like switch publishers to get a better contract. (Remember: It's OK for publishers to be focused on the bottom line--it's just business. But writers should be above that sort of thing.)

I remember in particular an opinion piece whining about writers who whine about publishers. The guilty writer in question was a poet. He was complaining that publishers don't promote writers enough, and his last book, the woman who wrote the piece pointed out, had sold a mere 5,000 copies. In what other industry, she asked, are you expected to bust your ass marketing a product that sells only 5,000 units?

At the time I was fresh enough out of college, where I had majored in English literature, to be shocked and somewhat angered by the books-are-just-widgets mentality. (I am paraphrasing the piece from memory, but yes, she did refer to poetry as a "product" that in this case sold 5,000 "units.") On the other hand, I had to admit that she had a point--spend too much money on something that inherently has a pretty limited appeal, and you will be out of business very soon. From a business perspective, why would anyone be interested in a book that sold only 5,000 copies?

Fast forward to today. If the poet had sold 5,000 copies of his book as a $3 e-book on Amazon, he'd make $10,000 off it--not a fortune, but definitely a nice addition to the income he gets from his grants and his teaching gig. (And I'm sure $10,000 is quite a lot more than the guy actually made from his book back in the early 1990s.) Amazon would make a mere $5,000, but Amazon is set up to chase the "long tail"--to cheaply market, say, ukulele books to ukulele enthusiasts and poetry books to poetry enthusiasts--so they can make money off books that don't sell tons of copies.

This I think shows how dramatically the publishing business is changing. Selling 5,000 units is no longer something to be scorned--people and certain corporations can make money doing it.

Keeping expectations realistic

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I am feeling better, and I should begin revising the historical biography proposal and/or my description of Trang tomorrow. (Today I bought a new ball and checked out the last new book on the subject of my historical biography--this one was very academic, so now I can continue in good conscience.)

But I'm going to toss out one last cranky, sinus-headache-induced rant about perceptions of self-publishing. It seems that whenever someone posts about the success they've had as a result of the current self-publishing environment, someone else feels obligated to comment: But don't you want to be James Patterson? Don't you want to be J.K. Rowling? Don't you want to be Stephen King? Don't you want to be Danielle Steele?

Don't you wish you were Tinkerbell and could fly and had a magic wand? Doesn't the fact that you're not Tinkerbell and can't fly and don't have a magic wand mean that any success you have had isn't actually worth anything, and you might as well go kill yourself right now?

Honest to Pete, talk about missing the damned point. The exciting aspect of self-publishing these days is that writers can make decent money without having to sell a gazillion bazillion copies--which, for the record, is something not a lot of writers have ever done or are ever going to do. I am less excited by the fact that some self-published authors have had tremendous success than I am about the fact that an author could make a decent living just selling a few thousand copies of each one of their titles. That is new. And that's what should excite people.

Speaking of covers

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This has nothing to do with anything, but I'm reading some of the Philipe K. Dick works in this anthology, and the cover cracks me up. It's Dick, holding a cat, which ought to be cute except that 1. he is holding it with its front paws crossed, which is basically a straitjacket hold, and 2. that cat is PISSED. It is PISSED and it is EYEING HIM like it's thinking, BASTARD! The VERY SECOND you let my paws go, I AM CLAWING YOU TO DEATH!!!

More thoughts on marketing

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So, between Amanda Hocking and Joe Konrath, there's quite a bit of advice on how to market.

1. They both rely a lot on book bloggers. This is another way to get reviews: You give copies of your book to people who post unpaid reviews on their blogs. They also often post the reviews on Amazon or B&N.com as well, which would be helpful.

The downside? I've read that it's considered a little crass to just jump in and say, "Wanna review my book?" Instead you're supposed to insinuate yourself into the community, commenting on this and that, and then pop the question. Considering how hesitant I was to do that to people I actually know, I don't think I'd be comfortable with that. I think what I'll do is search around until I find someone who seems to enjoy adventure sci-fi, and then just ask in an up-front, I-think-you'll-enjoy-this-book sort of way, not so much in a let's-pretend-I'm-your-friend sort of way.

(I should note that I am a little ambivalent about marketing. Both Hocking and Konrath earn a living from their novels; I don't. That said, I do want to give my book a good shot at finding an audience just on general principle. I don't care about becoming a best-seller or anything, but let's face it, if I didn't care about readers at all, I would just be journaling. And I would be a much crappier writer.)

2. Konrath likes to experiment with pricing. Both Hocking and Konrath think it's important to keep e-book prices low--I tend to agree, because all the e-reader owners I know are like, I just spent $100 on this thing, I'm not going to spend $15 apiece on the books for it! Also, given the royalty structure if you self-publish, you're making as much money off a $3 e-book as you would off a $15-$20 hard copy, so it just seems greedy to make the e-book really expensive.

But how low to go? You can go down to 99 cents, which Konrath is playing with. It's a big step because on Amazon, you get a 70% royalty if it's $2.99, but only a 35% royalty below that, so you have to sell a lot more to compensate for the loss in revenue. I think that's an experiment that might be well worth doing when Trust comes out: Drop the price of the first book in the series to 99 cents and use that as a hook into the rest.

3. Both think the cover is super-important! Yeah, again with the cover. I feel like at this point, my cover is not so bad graphically, but of course the actual cover illustration is worthy of Museum of Bad Art. And by shrinking the illustration down to hide the fact that I draw like a six-year-old with a neuromuscular disorder, the cover winds up looking less like its genre peers.

So I think I am going to hire an artist eventually. Not right now, because that's not going to be cheap, and also it might be good to have the same person do both Trang and Trust so that they look consistent. Also, you could argue that for every hot e-book with a really good cover, there's a hot e-book with a really amateurish cover, so maybe the cover doesn't matter. But maybe it does, and it would just be less embarrassing to have a good cover (although if my cover illustration actually gets inducted into MOBA, I'll be very happy indeed). Since a lot of self-published writers credit their artists, I'm reasonably confident I can find someone with an appropriate style, and I have a general notion at this point of what such an artist might charge.

4. Konrath thinks the book description is super-important. And his examples are really inspiring. One thing it didn't even occur to me to do was to have an "about the author" section in the description. It feels a little weird to me to trot out qualifications when talking about a freaking science fiction book, but on the other hand I think the awards and whatnot will help separate me from the people who don't take writing seriously.

Plus, revising the book description is free. So that's an easy one--I'll do that this week.

Poverty is a barrier

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Since I've been unable to do much real work lately, I've been reading around some more about self-publishing. And there's been this unsurprising-yet-irritating conclusion that, if self-publishing becomes dominant, it will be a bad thing, because it will allow more writers to make a living writing what they want to write.

Horrible fate, no? Writers could pay the rent and buy groceries by happily producing goods that people want to buy. Awful, awful. Bad for writers, bad for readers, bad for America.

The idea basically is that by jumping through all those hoops to get published, writers become better writers, and if they didn't, they wouldn't. Once again there is the underlying assumption that commercial success and quality of work are the same thing, which of course is why The DaVinci Code was described by The New York Times as "Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence." Frankly, I think that you are either someone who thinks it's important to write well, in which case you'll work at it no matter what, or you're not, in which case you won't.

But the other, more pernicious assumption that is that writers aren't supposed to concern themselves with money. Writers starve in garrets, right?

Does starving sound like fun to you? How about starving while living in substandard housing, which is what a garret is? Nonetheless, many young writers start out thinking that they don't need to worry about money, an attitude that typically lasts until they try to move out of their parents' homes. The other people who share that attitude are the unscrupulous bastards (and there are many) who will have you write for them, SELL your writing FOR MONEY (because they're not supposed to starve to death, you are), and then not pay you for it. If you get upset about being stolen from, well then, you obviously aren't very serious about being a writer, are you? Shame on you!

But while that's annoying, the real issue is that most people aren't naive: They know what poverty is, and they have no interest in experiencing it. They want a house. They want children. They want to eat on a regular basis. So they don't become writers. They become lawyers, or write press releases, or work in advertising. If they are particularly hard-core, they do what I did: They become editors or reporters, accepting a substantially lower income in exchange for doing something that is somewhat closer to the writing they actually want to do. But they don't do creative writing.

And who can blame them? It's a pretty harsh exchange: You can either make a living, or you can write fiction. When I decided to focus on creative writing I: 1. Moved away from New York City (it's expensive to live there), 2. arranged my new life so that my housing expenses would be minimal, and 3. went from working full-time to working part-time. That's what it took, and even so I had to do things like take a year off my writing to do paying work.

The other common way to do this is to work full-time and write on the side. It seems to me like a lot of people who do this work "full-time"--they're paid to work a 40-hour week, but the job is so unchallenging, or they do it so half-assedly, that they knock off their work duties by noon and spend their afternoons writing. I honestly don't see the fabulous benefits of that arrangement: I'm sure the writers would rather not have to show up at some office in the first place, and I'm sure the employers would rather have employees who aren't just doing the bare minimum to keep from getting fired.

And to be blunt, most of the people I know who write on the side don't write as well as they could, especially if they have more-challenging jobs. If you're getting up at 4 am to write because the kids wake up at six, and you don't get to bed until 11 pm--well, I salute you if you can be on that schedule and crank out anything that is even remotely coherent, because I couldn't. And I hate to point it out, but "remotely coherent" isn't the same thing as good. It takes time to produce good writing, especially good novel-length writing--time to write, and lots of time to revise. When you write on the side, it usually shows--but of course for most people it's either write on the side, or don't write at all.

If the economic penalties for focusing on creative writing weren't so severe, I honestly think it would improve the writing out there. More people--educated people who have other career options--would be willing to write, because writing wouldn't be the sure-fire path to destitution. More writers would almost assuredly mean more mediocre books, but more writers and more books would also increase the likelihood that some real gems will turn up. People would have more time to work on their writing: Someone who churns out mediocre crap but has literary ambitions could afford to take the time to improve.

In addition, writers could get more experience, because their failures wouldn't be so catastrophic. If a book flops, it wouldn't mean that the writer's publisher drops them and they never write again--they could learn from that experience and move on in their writing careers, just like people do in most other careers.