Boy, Thanksgiving's right around the corner, isn't it? That's going to be a crazy week.
OK, here's what I'm hoping to do before the Turkey Day insanity:
1. Input the proofreader's corrections to the e-books.
2. Set up a giveaway on Library Thing.
3. Input the corrections to the paper book; deal with the layout questions. With luck, I can upload the new files to CreateSpace before all hell breaks loose.
4. (This one's a bonus.) Get more adept with ePub.
Whew!
This is a neat article in the New York Times about a fellow named John Paton who is trying to save newspapers by removing the whole "paper" end of the business.
Newspapers have this fabulous infrastructure--they can print up a solid ton of papers and distribute them all over a city in no time flat. It's pretty amazing, but nowadays there's an even faster method to distribute information that doesn't use paper at all: the Internet. That remarkable infrastructure newspapers have that lets them move a solid ton of paper also happens to be really, really expensive, and to support it, newspapers have to make another solid ton of money.
Web sites and the like make less than a solid ton of money. The article notes, "Mr. Paton has heard all about how choosing digital revenue over print revenue is like choosing dimes over dollars. He points out that the print dollars have dropped by more than half in the last five years and perhaps it is time to start 'stacking the dimes.'"
In other words, newspapers don't have the revenue to support this paper-moving infrastructure anymore. If they want to stay in business, they'll have to shed the expensive infrastructure (not an easy thing to do because they usually own printing presses and delivery fleets and all that). If they manage to do that, they have a shot of remaining profitable even if their revenues are lower.
If they become newspapers in name only, they will have the reporters and the editors and the news--but they won't have the paper. Instead, they will function just like a Web news site, adding features like reader blogs that they never had before.
Along those lines, Dean Wesley Smith notes that Penguin has a new agreement with a print-on-demand publisher to provide POD services for all of Penguin's imprints. In the past, POD was expensive, but it's become cheaper at the same time that ordinary printing runs are getting smaller and more expensive. So, voila, here's a traditional publisher suddenly looking a lot more like an upstart small press or self-publisher--eliminating expensive infrastructure and bringing down costs so that they can profit even as revenues shrink.
I think another aspect of the business that is going to be drastically altered is acquisitions. I've said this before, but I just don't see why you would bother trying to guess which books are going to be best-sellers when you can just look at the Amazon rankings and see who is already a best-seller.
I'm not the only one thinking this way: If you read the comments on Hodges' scary agency contract story, you'll see that the agent basically mass-solicited indie authors with good sales records. This kind of mass-solicitation isn't inherently unethical, and we'll probably see more of it (hopefully with better deals for authors) because it is so efficient.
So, I think just as newspapers will become news sites, traditional publishers will become much more like the POD/e-book-reliant indies. Just as newspapers will incorporate things like reader blogs, traditional publishers will figure out how to incorporate and monetize self-publishing. And just as the newspapers that don't do these things will vanish, never to be heard from again...yeah.
Oh, and now Penguin is offering self-publishing services. Wow.
And between Dean Wesley Smith and Joe Konrath, I'm feeling guilty because you might assume that I recommended Penguin's self-publishing initiative, which--you know I didn't, right? When I recommend something, I actually say stuff like "I do recommend him." I'm a simple person that way--my observation about Penguin was simply that, an observation, noting that trad pub is looking a lot more like indie pub these (craaaazzzy) days....
Trang came back from the proofreader today--oh my God. If you're wondering what the difference is between a good proofreader and a bad proofreader or just a normal reader: My sister, who is intelligent, educated, and literate, but not in any way a publishing professional, read over Trang and noted any typos she found. In the entire book, she found five. This fellow found way more than five--way more than five in each chapter. And I do mean outright errors, not debatable questions of style.
The thing that people often don't appreciate about proofreading is that it's rarely about catching misspelled words--those are relatively easy for readers to catch, but spell-checking software does a good job of catching them, too. I left in a lot of things like "he said replied." Each of those words is spelled correctly, so the eye tends to skip over the problem, but one of them needs to go!
The proofreader also had some good suggestions for the layout--I think I'll input the changes to the e-books first (and do a giveaway on Library Thing) and then tackle modifying the print layout. One thing he suggested was removing the "***" I have to mark breaks within the chapters. I think it makes sense to take them out of the print book, but I wonder if I should leave them in the e-books. Maybe they're not necessary, but I'm a little paranoid about formatting, and the "***" makes it absolutely clear that the breaks are supposed to be there and aren't the hard returns magically multiplying. Then again, maybe it looks amateurish. Hm.
Anyway, I don't know if the guy wants me to put his name here, and he doesn't have a Web site to link to, but I do recommend him. If you e-mail me (use the Contact Me form to the left there), I'll give you his contact info. He charges $25 an hour, and it took him 14 hours to proof Trang, which is 108,000 words. As always when you use a proofreader, you want to give them your final copy--there's no point in having someone proofread something if you're going to, say, completely change the ending. Clean copy will be proofed more quickly and less expensively, so have your friends and writing buddies look it over first before you send it to a pro.
And, as a former freelancer myself, I must say, PAY ON TIME. You get the manuscript back, you look it over to make sure the job's been done, and you immediately write a check and put it in the mail. Nothing says "Thank you!" like timely payment.
(The kids are here today; no work shall be done.....)
My sister and I were discussing vampire romances the other day: Namely, the Twilight/Stackhouse convention that nothing is more erotic, sensual, sexy, and exciting than making love to a cold, hard, stone statue.
I'm just going to get inappropriate for a moment and say: Bullshit. Take a stone phallus, stick it in your freezer for a day or so, and then jam it into your orifice of choice. Having fun yet?
Anyway, the point I made to her is that for some people, the simple presence of vampires is enough. They love themselves some vampires, so a book with vampires in it is a winner for them, no matter what. Likewise there are quite a number of people who seriously object to sci-fi that has no aliens in it. Aliens = quality, period.
I'm not that way, and I get the feeling this is part of my problem with horror. Right now, I'm 184 pages into Dan Simmons' 766-page horror novel The Terror. Now, I LOVED the Hyperion books, so I have hope that Simmons is going to do something interesting. But at the moment, I've got two problems.
Problem #1:
The book is based on Franklin's lost expedition, an arctic expedition that was lost back in the 1840s. It is believed that every person on the expedition died as a result of:
1. Inadequate supplies
2. Disease
3. Inadequate planning
4. Severe cold
5. Exhaustion
6. Poor command decisions
In The Terror, the men are facing:
1. Inadequate supplies
2. Disease
3. Inadequate planning
4. Severe cold
5. Exhaustion
6. Poor command decisions
7. A HORRIBLE MONSTER
See, here's where the fact that I'm not the kind of reader who is just delighted by the mere presence of a HORRIBLE MONSTER works against me. To my way of thinking, that HORRIBLE MONSTER just isn't bringing anything to the party: Factors 1-6 killed off everyone perfectly well all by themselves. The HORRIBLE MONSTER is just superfluous.
And he is really HORRIBLE, which brings me to....
Problem #2:
OK, you're a HORRIBLE MONSTER in the arctic. You are 12-feet tall, massively strong, with claws as big as Bowie knives. In addition, you can materialize and de-materialize into the ice, and bullets don't hurt you. Oh, and you can control the weather.
You come across two ships stuck in the ice, filled with delicious humanity you want to kill for some obscure reason.
Would it take you months and months, because you insist on picking them off one or two at a time?
I'm serious, HORRIBLE ARCTIC MONSTER, let's talk about your time-management skills. They are stuck inside their ships. They are sitting ducks. With a little effort, you could be inside their ships, slaughtering away. I know this has occurred to you, because you tried to break in through a ship's hull. Helpful hint from your bear friends: Don't try to break the windshield, break the back window. In ship terms that means: There are doors on the deck leading down--go in that way, instead of trying the fortified hull of an ice-breaker.
And if you were in a situation where a HORRIBLE MONSTER kills the lookouts on deck, but never goes into the ship, would you ever go on deck? I know characters in scary movies are constantly leaving places of safety to get killed, but it always annoys me. (I liked 28 Day Later in no small part because when the guy roamed off in an apparently stupid manner, it turned out that he had some really interesting reasons, and they resonated thematically with the rest of the film. That thrills me so much more than the presence of zombies.)
Yeah, I woke up late today, and everything has just been a mess since then--I don't think I'll manage any writing today, and this weekend looks bad, too. We shall see--the dank and crappy weather we're having may actually open my schedule more, because no one wants to go out in it.
One thing I did realize was that I needed to update that DIY Publishing thing. I mention in it that I wrote it last spring and that the portion on e-books will probably be out of date by November, and guess what? Actually, part of it went out of date in September, but still more should be out of date next year, so I put little Out of Date Alert!s in it.
The upside of all this out-of-dateness is that it seems like people are actually trying to make the process easier for authors, which is good. The downside is that it seems like ePub is going to rule, and ePub is actually the format I'm least adept at. So, I'll have to edjumacate myself a little more....
JA may have a brilliant hack here: Take the ePub file Smashwords makes (which has a cover and a clickable table of contents), edit out the Smashwords-specific material, and voila--you have an ePub file to upload to B&N! I must give that a spin.
Yup, I started Trials today, and wrote 1,827 words!
I got some bad news about a friend last night, so today I'm just sticking with the lighter tasks, among them sorting out what the heck I'm supposed to do now that I'm on Goodreads, Library Thing, and Shelfari.
You can give away review copies of your book on Goodreads and Library Thing. With Goodreads, it has to be a hard copy, which means I have to buy the copy from CreateSpace and pay for postage to send the copies out. If I do, say, 10 copies, that's going to cost more than BookRooster did, with equally little guarantee that I'll get reviews. However, I do think that's a reasonable expense--it's always the case that a lot of review copies get sent out, and while 90% end up doing nothing for you, the remaining 10% can do an awful lot.
With Library Thing you do e-books, so there's basically no cost to you. As a result, instead of people offering up, say, 5 or 10 copies of their book, they offer up 1,000 or 2,000 copies! I'm suddenly understanding why people would join that site--I guess as an author you just cross your fingers and hope that your entire potential audience isn't already on Library Thing!
Anyway, I think both giveaways are worth doing, although I'd rather wait until the proofreader gets Trang back to me, which should be soon.
I know, again with the Passive Voice, but it's a great blog! And he has a really good post today that features Mike Shatzkin saying, "Hey, most self-pubbed authors won't go the DIY route," and Passive Guy saying, "Oh yes they will."
Given my experience in the encyclopedia industry, I have to agree with PG. We certainly liked to think that what we did was Very Important indeed, but consumers decided that it was not nearly so important as being to access similar information for free.
And I have another example to point to: Amanda Hocking. I finally read My Blood Approves (the library had a hard copy, howzabout that). I thought the book was OK, but bear in mind that romance is really not my thing--that said, her female lead was relatively free of self-loathing.
From a production standpoint, however, the book was bad. I found several errors in there that you simply wouldn't see in a traditionally-published book, even in the sort of really cheap mass-market paperbacks that are notorious for typos. The thing that drove me crazy was that frequently the wrong word appeared--a word that sounded like the word Hocking meant, but wasn't it. That's a terrible mistake for an editor or proofreader to let through, because it makes your author look stupid and ignorant. (I'm not shocked that one of her main reasons for signing with a traditional publisher was to get decent copy editing!)
So, have those kind of below-par production values hurt Hocking's sales? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA-HAHAHA-Aha. Ha. Oh, you know that was joke, right? The same errors that made me want to hunt down the people she hired and punch them in the nose mattered not at all to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who bought her books. For 99 cents, people will sort through slush. For 99 cents, they'll tolerate typos and errors (especially if the $17 books are no better). It's just 99 cents, fer Christ's sake!
I was thinking of yesterday's post, and wondering why it is that articles on 30 Ways To Market Your Novel! or 47 Ways To Maximize Twitter!! or 167 Ways To Annoy People on Goodreads!!! or Are You Sabotaging Your Sales?--Yes, You Are, You Moron!!!! always stress me out so much.
Much of it I can dismiss, because the people ensuring you that you MUST do X or Y and if you think it's not important, it's super-important, you idiot, and you're screwing it up, badly, are usually selling services. That kind of thing reminds me of one time I went in to get a facial, and the facialist walked in, informed me I was hideously ugly (not in so many words, but the import was clear), and then tried to sell me a bunch of expensive services in order to protect small children and other innocents from the horror that was my face. Need I mention that she looked exactly like a frog? Need I mention that I was propositioned by a complete stranger on my way to the salon, so clearly I was doing OK in the looks department beforehand?
But some of it is coming from people who actually love to do this sort of thing, and do a whole bunch of it, and I don't, and it makes me feel stressed and guilty. The irony is that, if I wanted to be commercially successful, I would have written a commercial book. One of the reasons I started writing novels was that I was tired of always having to write to various rigid commercial standards--at some point, you're not so poor anymore, and you weary of having to constantly contort your writing to match the market (which typically wants stuff that's "good enough," but not stuff that's actually good).
On the other hand, I do want Trang to, you know, be appreciated--for it to find an audience. And I think that's why this stuff stresses me out: I believe in the book, and I don't want it to fail because of something I did or didn't do. I think way too many things get compared to having a child, but there is that element of wanting what is best for this thing and feeling obligated to make that happen that is somewhat parental.
Still, when I take a step away and get some perspective, I think--is this crap actually going to help? Seriously? I have a hard time believing that Trang will succeed or fail (whatever either of those terms actually mean for me) based on whether or not I write the headers of my blog posts as questions.
And I calm down by thinking of the advice that comes from long-time writers, which boils down to:
1. Be patient.
2. Keep writing.
Ahhhhhh...much better....
As is apparently normal for me when I stop writing and start reading self-publishing blogs, I'm feeling deluged with marketing ideas. And of course they stress me out, and then I tell myself that the BEST way to market is to stop fiddling and reading blogs, and to write the next book! But then I feel like I would say that to myself whether it was true or not.
In any case, I do think it makes sense to prep for the post-holiday e-book shopping season (that we all hope will happen in 2012 like it did in 2011...one year is a pattern, right?), so I've tweaked the descriptions for Trang some more. Back before I got freaked out, I told the proofreader to take his own sweet time with Trang, and now of course I'm wishing I hadn't done that (he says he'll have it done this week). I updated the e-book interiors with little corrections that I and my sister found, as well as changing the interior covers, so even if he turns out to be a major flake, at least they will be slightly more polished. I've joined Goodreads, as I mentioned, and I've also joined Shelfari and Library Thing--you can RSS your blog to Goodreads and Library Thing, plus you can do that to Amazon Author Central (Shelfari is part of Amazon), so that looks like more ways to "build brand" (gag) and take advantage of the Hawthorne Effect (yippee!) without expending a lot of time on it. (Because time spent marketing is time not spent writing. It's not because I'm lazy and don't want to do it--oh, no!)
(But honestly, some of the advice out there--comment on other blogs, not because you like them and want to say something, but because you can leave a link back to your Web site! Do tit-for-tat interviews, "follows," and even book purchases! Seriously, talk about sucking all the joy out formerly pleasant activities.... I mean, honestly, I enjoy Twitter so much more now that I stopped following the vast majority of the self-pub people, who constantly spam your feed to sell you services, and limited myself to following people I either know or find entertaining.)
One thing that has annoyed me is that non-Amazon sites that carry the paperback still feature the hideous cover I drew myself. I'm not sure why that is, but I've pulled the book off that distribution channel in the theory that if I put it back up with a different cover, it will show the proper cover. Obviously pulling a book off the market (or part of the market) is never going to help sales, but I think it hurts the book to have such an amateurish cover show up in searches.
Is any of this going to help sales? Eh, probably not...I do think the best thing to do is get Trust up, and I don't know when that's going to happen. I'll try to do it ASAP, but of course I told the beta readers to take their sweet time because I wanted a break from it, and after those changes are processed, it needs to go to the proofreader, and then get laid out. Production will presumably be more efficient this time around: I've got the front cover and the description already. Last year, I was able to get hard copies up by March 1, which is still in that window of excitement for self-pubbed books (because one year is a pattern, right?)--I guess we'll just have to see what the beta readers come back with, and of course how resistant I am to delving back into it.
I was pondering doing some kind of discount on Trang, but Kris Rusch (who I guess will be my guru on this one, since I didn't really want to futz around with changing prices all the time anyway) makes a good case that it's not worth even offering a title for free if you don't have a bunch of other, closely-related titles to promote.
On Joe Konrath's blog, he posts some hard numbers (scroll down a bit to see this):
Here are my latest royalty statement figures for my six Hyperion titles and my Hachette title, for Jan 1 - June 30, 2011. Paper sales are hardcover and mass market combined.
Whiskey Sour paper sales: $1450.00
Whiskey Sour ebook sales: $5395.00Bloody Mary paper sales: $463.00
Bloody Mary ebook sales: $2591.00Rusty Nail paper sales: $226.00
Rusty Nail ebook sales: $3220.00Dirty Martini paper sales: $415.00
Dirty Martini ebook sales: $3370.00Fuzzy Navel paper sales: $485.00
Fuzzy Navel ebook sales: $3110.00Cherry Bomb paper sales: $224.00
Cherry Bomb ebook sales: $3864.00Afraid paper sales: $1608.00
Afraid ebook sales: $12,158.00
WOW. Well, that pretty much sums up where things are headed, doesn't it?
This is an extremely valuable essay by Kris Rusch on what is obviously a bugaboo of mine: People naively overpaying for self-publishing services.
Some writers will research their manuscript like crazy, and then they won't spend five minutes on the kind of research needed to keep from getting robbed. Please don't be like that. And please keep in mind that Rusch is both dyslexic and especially dyslexic when it comes to numbers, so however bad at math you believe yourself to be, she is much worse, and yet she is able to comprehend when someone is trying to steal from her. Not everyone is to be trusted, especially not everyone who tells you that they can be trusted.
In short, if a stranger offers you candy, don't get in the van!
I blew off writing Trials today--this is typical for me, I always take a little time to actually start. Instead I finished reading The Passive Voice archives (I told you I was addicted--now, the withdrawal will have to begin).
There were two good entries about blowing off work, so you know, at least it's all thematically connected. The first provides an actual scientific-sounding name for why I have a blog: The Hawthorne Effect. Basically it's the strategy of forcing yourself to tell people that you're slacking off, in the theory that the humiliation will make you slack off less.
Proof that the Hawthorne Effect doesn't always work? A different post about the Internet controversy over George R.R. Martin's work habits. God help me, I find the whole thing hilarious. My feeling about ANY Internet controversy is that 99% of the people flaming away have absolutely no skin in the game and are just doing it for the fun of it. (For the record, I haven't read Martin, either. These kinds of sprawling fantasy epics are so popular that a lot of writers just churn out 600-page books that are 550 pages of boring filler, followed by a 50-page cliffhanger designed to make you buy the next book, so I'm very skeptical of them.)
But to take that impulse to just force a writer to write seriously for a moment: There's actually a real problem with making writers work on a series or book that they don't want to do anymore. And that happens all the time--when a series gets popular, publishers want only books in that series. Had another idea that excites you? Too damned bad! The only thing you can get paid to do is to crank out volume 230 in the Will This DIE Already? series.
That's the reason most series degenerate over time. To use a television example: I'm a huge Joss Whedon fan, and I think season 7 of Buffy should not have happened, because he was clearly done with it before it ended. As it was airing, I was at a party with a bunch of other Buffy fans, and they were all complaining about how awful that season was turning out to be. Yet, they all categorically refused to watch Whedon's new-and-very-good show Firefly, because it was going to be Buffy or it was going to be nothing, and damn that Whedon fellow to hell if he was trying to do something that actually interested him! I was amazed, because they seemed to have no comprehension that there was a person behind all this, and that person might get a little tired of writing the same story for seven freaking years.
But the worst is definitely what happened to P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster books. The early books are great: Bertie Wooster is a young, upper-class British man who, although not unintelligent, always manages to get himself "in the soup" thanks to a certain obtuseness. (For example, he believes that if a woman erroneously believes that you have proposed marriage to her, the gentlemanly thing to do is to marry her, even if you really, really don't want to. Otherwise you might hurt her feelings.) Jeeves saves the day eventually, but it's not easy for him.
The later books are horrible--Wodehouse had clearly come to hate his characters (and I'm sure, his readers) with a fiery passion. Bertie is now simply a moron--barely intelligent enough to breathe. Jeeves disappears for most of the book, only to appear at the end having magically resolved every last little problem. The contempt and resentment are palpable.
I really wish the creative process worked differently. I'm not proud of taking forever to edit Trust: I have a strong work ethic, and it annoys the piss out of me when I can't get going on something. But it's not like making widgets, or even like cranking out X many earnings briefs per day. You just have to respect it, because the results when you don't are never pretty.
(I think I'll start in on Trials tomorrow--I have a couple of left-over production tasks on Trang, but I'm really getting bored with that sort of thing, so it's time to mix it up. In the meantime, I'm going to ramble on about writing and literature!)
I've read books that I've hated, but the character I felt the most violently opposed to, the character I (in all seriousness) wanted to see run over and killed by a garbage truck? That character was Rabbit, from John Updike's Rabbit, Run--the last Updike book I will ever read.
Why did I hate--and I hated this character with a passion--Rabbit so much? Well, part of it was that the book is set in the late 1950s, which was back when it really was a Man's World. Rabbit, being male, has certain prerogatives. For example, he dumps his preganant wife and takes up with a girlfriend. And when he tires of the girlfriend, it's an easy matter for him to get back with his wife, who is expected to be all sweetness and light about everything. Why? Because getting divorced--even when it's not her fault--is going to hurt her far worse than it hurts him, so she'd better toe the line and give him whatever he wants if she knows what's good for her. He knocks up his girlfriend because he refuses to wear a condom--of course she has to go along with that, because the only prospect of respectability she has is to get him to marry her.
Does he feel guilty about occupying such a position of privilege? My stars, why would he? It's a Man's World! Why should he care about what happens to all those silly little gashes around him? It gets worse--there's a silly little gash, his baby daughter, who DIES because Rabbit is such a jackass. How does he feel about that? Guilty? Devastated? Oh, hell no--she's just a girl! Who gives a fuck about some baby gash? He feels...wait for it...sorry for himself. Boo-hoo. Poor Rabbit.
And I cannot emphasize this enough, but there is nothing in the book to suggest that the reader should feel anything but sorry for Rabbit. Poor, poor Rabbit, ruining the lives and KILLING the women around him. I think that, instead of writing more Rabbit novels, Updike should have written the heart-wrenching tale of a poor, poor slave owner whose slaves are always so difficult and give him so much trouble. It's awful, the poor guy sprains his shoulder beating them to death--don't you feel sorry for him? Or maybe a serial killer who kills children--and people act like they can judge him, and the kids are so uncooperative about it all, and life is really difficult for him. Your heart bleeds.
OK, deep breath. (God, I hated that book!) Now, some years later, I read Michael Chabon's The Wonder Boys. The protagonist of that novel is not so different from Rabbit--an annoying and overprivileged male Baby Boomer with a wife who has left him (for good reason) but who might come back, and a pregnant girlfriend, plus a juicy co-ed.
But--and this makes all the difference in the world--the main character knows he's a dick. I cannot tell you what a difference that makes. It's not like he's devoid of self-pity, or that he's above taking advantage of his position (oh my God, yes on both counts). He is, however, vaguely aware of other people--he knows that they exist, that they have rights, and that his actions may have an effect on them that is maybe not so positive. It's a tiny bit of self-awareness and self-criticism, but it's just enough for the reader to feel some sort of sympathy toward this guy.
Letting characters basically take the fall for their personalities is key, I think. No one is flawless--everyone has their limitations, even if they're not necessarily horrible people. If you let them own that--let them know that they always do X in a situation when they should probably do Y--and allow them to feel frustrated or disappointed with themselves, that's something that anyone who doesn't suffer from narcissistic personality disorder can relate to.
It also saves you from scapegoating, which is simply not that interesting to read. To trot out another famously misogynistic writer, Kingsley Amis has a terrible, terrible attitude toward women--they're all crazy and evil, except for the one designated Madonna. And yet, Lucky Jim is enjoyed by many people (including myself) who think the rest of his books are not worth the time (not so much because they are offensive as that they are very, very predictable). That's because the central problem for Jim is not that all women (except the designated Madonna) are horrible people, the problem is that he will not stand up to the horrible people in his life. The problem is within. And that's something I think anyone with a little life experience can relate to--there's no way to completely avoid bad people or bad things, the only thing you can control is your response to them.
I've mentioned my tragic addiction to The Passive Voice blog, and my discovery of The Business Rusch. Passive Guy is a lawyer, and Kris Rusch used to be a reporter, and between the two of them they have complied the most hair-raising accounts of what you find in agency and publishing contracts nowadays! It's bad stuff--and the most disturbing thing is that these aren't the dirtbag "agents" or vanity presses, which you can assume are out to rip you off. It's the respectable people doing it nowadays.
Seriously, read these guys if you are thinking of signing with an agency or a publisher. With Rusch, I would start here at the bottom of the page and work my way up to the more-recent posts. With The Passive Voice, look at the "contracts" section (he's a bit of a tougher read because, you know, lawyer, but soldier on).
They made me pull out and read over my old agency agreement. Yes, I fired them, but with some of these contracts, that doesn't matter. I don't see anything too frightening there--I did read before I signed it, but events have proven that I was too trusting back then, so no harm in double-checking.
I had read that the agent I fired was doing things that I thought were a little sleazy, but I kind of chalked it up to the fact that he clearly was the sort to cruise on reputation, so what would you expect? But apparently that's just par for the course nowadays--the distinction between reputable and disreputable is becoming very thin. It makes me worried for the people I know who are seeking agency representation and hoping to get a contract with a commercial publisher....
Today Passive Voice has a link to this post by author Sibel Hodge detailing an agency contract she was offered. She (assisted by Passive Guy, who she hired) explains very clearly all the bad clauses and why they are bad. It's an easy read, and it touches on a lot of different issues very concisely, so it's the one to read if you absolutely hate legalese or don't want to sort through a ton of posts on the topic.
When someone talks about a persion doing a professional job, typically they mean that 1. the person is experienced, and 2. the person is familiar with and works according to the standards and practices in the industry.
Of course, all "professional" really means is, the person got paid.
How are the professionals doing with e-book formatting? Well, according to this (note PDF, non-PDF excerpt here), the answer is pretty badly! The gory details:
In recent days, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs was removed from the iBookstore and replaced with a new version because of formatting errors. One iBookstore reviewer wrote: “I want my money back. The formatting errors in the iBooks version are appalling. At first, a caption is missing or just a word, but it soon becomes illegible. The publisher should be ashamed.”
Similarly, the Amazon Kindle release of Neal Stephenson’s eBook Reamde recently made headlines because line breaks, missing passages, and hyphens preceding words such as “people” and “couple” were scattered throughout the eBook. One Amazon reviewer wrote: “…the reading experience is fatally tainted,” and demanded a full refund of the $16.99 price.
Think about that the next time someone tells you it's worth it to pay them $3,000 to format an e-book, because they are going to take good care of you--you can't even trust the large publishing houses (charging $17 a copy!) to do a decent job.
No matter if you hire someone (and you can do that for much, much less than three grand) or do it yourself, you need to read over the e-book before you publish it. And you can do that pretty easily even if you don't own an e-reader, just download Mobipocket reader to your computer to read a Kindle file, or Adobe Digital Editions to read a Nook file.
I know I've made this analogy before, but it is really just like dealing with a car mechanic or a home contractor: If you have no idea what the person is doing and no intention of checking the work, you will have no way of judging whether the fee charged is fair or if the work was done well. In other words, you will get screwed.
I'm doing a little housekeeping today--getting rid of inches and feet and the like. I ran a word count on Trust--it's about as long as Trang, a little under 110,000 words.
It's funny because with all the reading I've been doing lately, I've noticed that an awful lot of these books come in at, oh, about 30,000 words. Science fiction tends to clock in with six-figure word counts anyway, so I don't worry about mine (I have no idea how you'd keep a sci-fi book to 30,000 words, unless you were writing something like a Star Trek or Star Wars novel where you don't have to bother with all that pesky world-building).
Nonetheless, on a purely practical and commercial level, there's good reason for you to keep your books short, even if I don't: They take a lot less time to write, so you can crank out a lot of titles.
The problem with longer works is that they take an exponentially longer amount of time to write. I used to be a business reporter, so I will give you an example of a short literary form that I am very well acquainted with: The earnings brief.
These clock in at less than 100 words and go something like this:
GinormoMegaCorp reported sharply lower profits on increased revenues yesterday. Profits for the last quarter, ending October 31, were $5 gazillion, down from $6 gazillion the same quarter the previous year. Revenues, in contrast, were $85 bazillion, up from $70 bazillion in the quarter ending October 31, 2010. Company executives attributed the lower earnings to additional expenses stemming from the merger of Ginormo Corp. and Mega Corp. two years before. Shares in GinormoMegaCorp closed at $15.65 on the New York Stock exchange yesterday, a drop of 4 percent.
So, that's 88 words, and it took me four minutes to write. If I was writing an 880-word imaginary feature on GinormoMegaCorp (which is a longish feature, a little more than 20 inches of newsprint), it would take me considerably longer than 40 minutes to write, even if I were to make it all up.
That's because a feature ten times longer than an earning brief is far more complex. With the brief, I can just plug the numbers in and add a one- or two-sentence explanation of why a company is making more or less money. A feature requires an actual story line--I'd need to figure out what I'm going to say about the troubled merger between Ginormo and Mega. Structurally, I'd need a good lede, a paragraph summing up whether people think GinormoMegaCorp is going to succeed or fail, another paragraph noting that it might do the opposite, and then lots and lots of detail (in this case, a lot about what the hopes for the merger were and why it's not happening yet), ending with a nice concluding paragraph that sums up everything beautifully and will be cut for space.
It's the same thing going from a 30,000-word novel to a 100,000-word novel--in all likelihood, it is going to take more than three times as long to produce the latter. You've simply got more to keep track of (and if you feel like you don't, you seriously need to take a hatchet to that mother).
I'm writing blog posts instead of writing or polishing off some production chores--bad I know. But I'm taking a break. Everyone gets all excited about flow, but I'm realizing that I missed some routine-yet-important tasks while I was caught up editing, so I need to reconnect with real life for a little bit.
Anyway, something happened last year that people are assuming is going to happen again this year (remember, self-publishing has been viable for all of two years, so there's not a lot of data to extrapolate from)--there was a big surge in e-book sales after Christmas. The assumption is that many people received e-readers for Christmas and then went looking for e-books to fill them.
Reading through the archives of The Passive Voice (which I am now shamelessly addicted to), I found a link to this article charting self-published best-sellers on Amazon for the first half of 2011, which finds that self-pubbed books did really well in February and considerably less well by June. Now, Selena Kitt makes the case over on Joe Konrath's blog that 99-cent e-books aren't going to sell more than higher-priced (by which she means $2.99-$4.99, not $12.99) e-books, because Kindle readers have tried the really cheap books and decided that most of them weren't very good.
Trying to see a pattern here, it seems that the people who receive e-readers go through an initial period of scooping up everything that's really cheap, and then after a little while, become more selective, and start looking only at the pricier titles. Soooo...how should you play that? Put the book on sale in, say, February, and then crank the price back up a month later?
(My own experience is that dropping the price to 99 cents in April didn't do squat for sales, but of course I'm being a prima donna and not really marketing, so you can safely ignore me.)
This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday noting that, yes, different self-published authors have wildly different levels of sales. (This will shock you, but apparently it helps to already have a fan base.)
I'll stop mocking Captain Obvious and will note that I agree that, if you are unknown, your sales are completely unpredictable (this is why agents and traditional publishers generally don't like new writers). You might not sell any books, you might sell a ton, you might sell almost nothing for months or years and then suddenly sell a bunch. Who knows? The world is a crazy place.
That makes life difficult if you hope to turn a profit: You can't control your revenues. This is true for basically all entrepreneurs--you might have a hit, or you might have a flop. Marketing can help, but there are no guarantees that you will be making X amount of dollars.
But there's something you can control: Your expenses. The less money you spend, the less revenue you have to bring in to turn a profit. If you spend an excessive amount, then you've backed yourself into a corner where you absolutely must generate huge revenues--which is bad, because you can't control revenues.
In the article, there is a woman featured who paid $3,000 to a so-called digital publisher. As far as I can tell, that money went to 1. format the e-book and 2. distribute it on Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble. She seems to have done all her own marketing, so they're not doing that.
I'm going to take a deep breath here. I'm going to stay calm. And then I will simply point you to the post where I outlined my book expenses. What number appears under "Spent on creating e-books"? Oh, yes, a zero.
I am the first to admit that formatting e-books is kind of a pain. But seriously, it was two days of work. Do you get $3,000 for two days of work? Would you pay someone $3,000 for two days of work? It's not like they formatted her e-book, put it up, and gave her a pony--she paid $3,000 for what I'm going to guess was more like two hours of work, because these guys presumably weren't doing it for the first time.
I understand that some people are afraid of technology, but there is a lot of help out there, and much of it is free. At the very least please, please, please try to get an idea of what is involved in doing it yourself before you cough up some huge wad of cash. You cannot control revenues: You may never see that money back. You can control costs: If you don't spend it, you'll be that much closer to turning a profit.
Yes, November is upon us again, and everyone's all "Whee! NaNoWriMo! Whee!" And they invite me to do it, and they expect me to do it. At this point NaNoWriMo has been pounded into people's heads so hard that even when I am working on a novel at some totally other time of year, folks will ask me if I am writing it for NaNoWriMo, or they will tell me that I surely must have written it for NaNoWriMo, because it's impossible to write novels except during NaNoWriMo, which is why no novels were ever written before it was invented.
With any luck, I will start writing Trials sometime this month, and I fully expect to be asked if I am doing it as part of NaNoWriMo at least a dozen times. So: NO. I do not participate in NaNoWriMo. I never thought it sounded like a good idea, and the more experience I have with the people who do it, the less I like it. If it has benefited you, that is wonderful, but to my mind something like NaNoWriMo generally leads not only to bad writing, but to bad attitudes about writing. Cranking out 2,000 words a day, day after day, is (to paraphrase Truman Capote) not writing; it's word processing. Honestly I think National Story Outlining Month would be a hell of a lot more useful.
I wrote about this earlier, and I'm going to quote myself, because I am just that egocentric: "Once you've written something, it's easy to get attached to it, especially if you made this huge push and didn't sleep or socialize for the entire month of November in order to meet your 50,000-word quota. No one wants to hear, 'Sorry, dude, back to the drawing board!' after that--it's like going on a huge diet and being very good and losing 80 pounds, and then having the doctor tell you that, no, you did it the wrong way, you need to gain back 70 pounds and then lose it again. But good job on those 10 pounds! The doctor really liked those, and he thinks you show great promise."