Why grammar and spelling matter

(Thanks to circumstances beyond my control, I'm not editing today.)

I've noticed a tendency among writers who haven't worked in publishing to be kind of dismissive of stuff like grammar and spelling. This is in strong contrast with those who have worked in publishing: That's a field where the term "functionally illiterate" (say it with contempt!) is applied to those who make these types of errors, no matter how many PhDs or billions of dollars they may have. It is also a field where cover letters containing errors are marked up with red pencil and hung on the wall in the break room for the amusement of staff.

Outside that world of hedgehogs, less-experienced writers sometimes regard grammar and spelling as mere details (because when it comes to writing, details don't matter). I have even heard proofreading disparaged as "technical editing," with the implication that grammar and spelling are mere technicalities that a true artist can dispose of. You know, the way Michelangelo disposed with learning how to paint. (In addition to being bad in concept, that is also a misuse of the term: Technical writing and editing is what you do when you produce technical documents--user's manuals and the like.)

The fact of the matter is, errors interfere with the reader's enjoyment of the story. Trying to read a story that is riddled with errors is like trying to carry on a meaningful conversation in the middle of an artillery range. You're reading along, hoping to get into the story, when BANG!

"Jane looked at Mark, and then at Fred. Suddenly, he hit her."

Wait, what? Who hit her? Was it Mark or Fred? What's going on?

"I really hope it's leg isn't hurt."

I really hope it is...leg...what? Oh, they mean "its leg." Got it. Now where was I?

"At this rate, he'll probably catch a venial disease."

A...what? Oh, ha-ha, they mean venereal disease. Someone didn't get much sex ed.

You get yanked out of the narrative. (If you notice an error in this post and go, "A-ha! She's so high and mighty, but she screws up, too!" you've just made my point for me, thank you.) The more exciting things are--it's an action scene, blood's flying everywhere--the worse it is, like hitting a speed bump when you're going 70 miles per hour. Not to mention that if the errors are bad enough, you literally cannot understand what the person is trying to say.

It's a problem once you publish, obviously. But I also think it's important that your work be at least somewhat polished if you're giving someone a draft to look over. I feel like it's a real waste of everyone's time if you give me something in hopes of getting meaningful feedback, and the only feedback I can give you is, "Please fix the grammar and spelling, and then I can actually focus on your story and tell you something of value."

Thinking about the future

So, if you haven't figured this out yet, I definitely think the LibraryThing giveaway was well worth doing. There are not only some fab reviews on LibraryThing itself, but more are trickling out onto Amazon and Goodreads, and of course I now have enough reviews to have a reviews page (plus the psychological boost of knowing that some people actually liked the book). In addition, once the early LibraryThing reviews were posted, a number of other people put the book on their "to-read" list, plus several e-mailed me to get the book. And I think I finally got a second Book Rooster review. I assume that the fact that the early reviews were so positive encouraged people who might not necessarily read a book available for free (because who wants to spend their time reading something that sucks?) to pick it up and read it. And, you know, the LibraryThing giveaway didn't cost a cent.

That, plus the content of the reviews--even the people who thought it was just OK want to read the next book--makes me very comfortable with the idea of Trang as a loss leader. It's something that I assumed I would do once I had more books out (like, two more books out--Trust and Trials--not just Trust).

But now there's that new program with Amazon, where you list your book exclusively with them for three months. If you do that, people who pay for Prime membership can borrow your book for free, and you can offer your book to everyone for free for five days.

That's like sticking a toe in the free pool, as opposed to jumping all the way in. So I may give that a try once Trust is out.

Love this

From an interview with Elmore Leonard.

 

You're 86 and still writing every day. What keeps you working when you could easily retire?

I still like to write. I might as well do it. I can't just sit here and look out the window. There's a lot of snow out there right now.

Luck and self-publishing

So, Joe Konrath is on track to make a gazillion dollars this year, and (as he often does) he's citing luck as a factor in his success (via PV).

I think it's important to acknowledge that luck is a factor in life, as opposed to thinking that you're one of God's little favorites or something. Live in a country where indoor plumbing is the norm? Luck. Parents sent you to school instead of putting you to work the minute you grew big enough to fetch and carry? Luck.

Konrath's success? Errr, I'll grant that he didn't get spectacularly unlucky, but I think the major luck portion was his decision one day to throw some books up on Amazon. Of course, he was someone who constantly tried different things to distribute and market his work, so...that was really him making his own luck there. You're a lot more likely to find a gold mine if you're willing to dig holes.

Another factor that I think is really important to his success is the fact that he puts out a lot of titles (a strategy that also works for Dean Wesley Smith). As the Washington Post described in its profile of Nyree Bellevue, "the right recipe [is] a small but devout core audience; a readily available backlist for new readers to discover; a knack for writing fast; and an inherent appeal to a fan base that read[s] voraciously."

Is this something that is easy to replicate? Oh, hell no--a 200-title or even "just" a 40-title backlist? Are you crazy? That's, like, decades of work!

And it took him decades--like Monty Hall, Konrath is an overnight success who took 20 years. The reason he looks like a lucky-duck overnight success is that he's only getting his payday now. It took him years to establish that core audience, and it took him years of practicing writing to get to the point where that 40-title backlist wasn't just a load of unreadable crap.

Writing is work. Publishing (even self-publishing) is work. Konrath is successful because he worked very hard for a very long time. He was lucky in that he didn't get run over by a car and killed when he was 10 years old or something, but everything else--work.

And I leave you with a quote from a recent blog post by Kristine Kathyrn Rusch that I think is germane: "I have no idea why people want to hang onto the stories of failure, the impossibility of doing well without cheating or 'getting lucky,' but they do. They want it all now and they don’t want to work for it. And when you tell them they must work for it, they get mad."

ETA: And now I've got Malcolm Reynolds' "You rely on luck, you wind up on the drift" speech stuck in my head. Great.

Progress report, Twain, Fellini

Today I edited up to chapter 8, so a good day there. It was a part with fewer problems, though, and I've got a chapter coming up that the beta reader really did not like.

The thing that's nice about good readers is that they're very focused on the main storylines and the characters, so they notice right away when a character starts doing something off, or when all the characters magically forget about the many problems that were causing them so much consternation five minutes before.

It's easy for the writer to lose track of that kind of continuity (I'm guessing because it takes a lot longer to write something than to read it, and you don't always write page 1 first). For example, with this problem chapter coming up, a long time ago I read Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and there's a hilarious bit in there about wearing armor. I'd always remembered that bit, so I thought I'd write a similarly hilarious bit about Philippe Trang and his suit.

The problem is that there's an awful lot of really serious stuff going on, and then all of a sudden it's all "Ha-ha! His pants are falling off!" and the beta reader felt that was inappropriate. And you know something? The beta reader was right. 

Last night I also watched Federico Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits. I've always liked Fellini, and by "always" I mean since I was about 10 or 11, and my sister and I very randomly came across La Dolce Vita flipping around television channels one afternoon. We watched the entire rest of the movie, and I vividly remember it, as does my sister. We both really enjoyed it, and not just because it was obviously about "adult stuff" we weren't supposed to be watching.

The reason I enjoyed Fellini as a kid is no different than the reason I enjoyed it last night: Despite all the surreal aspects of his films, they are very straightforward. Fellini was someone who was very sure about what he wanted to say, and everything in the film--no matter how random-seeming--actually serves the larger purpose. You don't get the feeling that a bunch of crap was thrown in there to make it arty. His movies are deeply logical.

So, I guess my point is that it's worth it to pursue that kind of continuity. No matter what's going on, it needs to at least make emotional sense.

Progress report

I edited the first chapter and part of the second chapter. There's a number of changes to be made there because my beta reader who hadn't read Trang was confused or overwhelmed with information at various points. Then I finished and uploaded the large-print edition of Trang, so that's done with, yay!

There was some weirdness, though. I found a tiny, tiny error in the large-print edition--really insignificant, and definitely not worth revising the paper book over. But I figured, let's do the e-books.

So I took the html version, edited it, and tried to switch it to ePub...and when I opened the file in Adobe Digital Editions, there was no text! I tried it again, and...no text! I downloaded the old file from B&N, and I can read the text just fine, so it's not a problem with Digital Editions.

Screw it--like I said, it's a super-duper minor error, and it's not worth the trouble.

More ballparking on costs

This is an interview at Joe Konrath's blog with an editor he has used and liked in the past. She's offering services ranging from basic proofreaching to a full edit, with prices ranging from $25 to $40 an hour. The proofreader I used, who I recommend heartily, charges $25 an hour. So, again, if you want to hire someone, that's your ballpark figure. Anyone quoting far higher prices needs to be treated with extreme caution.

And in the world of legal stuff....

HarperCollins is suing Open Road over e-book rights. (That link is worth clicking on if only to see the graphic representing e-book sales over the past three years. Wow. Unfortunately, it's the Wall Street Journal, so it may be that you can't see it.*) Now, I clearly have no love for Open Road, but HarperCollins is basically claiming that it obtained rights to e-books in the early 1970s, waaaaay back before e-books actually existed.

Passive Guy is, of course, all over this (he's even quoted in the WSJ article), with a great post about the legal motion here. It's not necessarily a slam-dunk, but it's fairly well established that you can't license copyright to a technology that doesn't exist.

Of course, legal precedent doesn't necessarily stop large corporations from filing frivolous suits in order to intimidate people into doing what they want. But just be aware that these types of lawsuits fall into that official category known by journalists as "Mostly Bullshit."

 

* OK, I couldn't find a graphic, but the data they used was from BookStats, and it looks like this, "e-books have grown from 0.6% of the total Trade market share in 2008 to 6.4% in 2010. While that represents a small amount in the total market for formats, it translates to 1274.1% in publisher net sales revenue year-over-year with total net revenue for 2010 at $878 Million." So imagine a bar graph showing 1,274.1% annual growth in revenues, with most of that growth happening between 2009 and 2010.

Progress report

Today was one of those days when I opened up Trust, looked at it, and said NFW. It's a little like jumping off the high dive--some days, you just aren't up to it.

So instead I went over the layout of the large-print edition of Trang, caught a few minor errors, and input them. I've got the kid tomorrow, so I probably won't do much, but if she naps a lot I may give the PDFs the final once-over or work on the cover.

Oh, I also read a short novel that began as a fairly entertaining tale and devolved into an utterly pointless travelogue. I realize that if you include the details of your vacation in your book, you can write at least some of the cost off your taxes, but if it doesn't forward your story, please please please leave it out. Please.

Progress report

I basically did a rough edit of Trust today--going through and marking the places that are going to need more in-depth work while also making the quick changes.

While I was doing that, I printed out the large-print Trang layout. I always fall into the trap of thinking I can "just" print one thing while working on another--I guess that would work if printers didn't require constant babysitting. This time was especially bad because I decided to use the handy-dandy Draft Mode, which is supposed to save you time and toner. Well, I hereby rename it Jam Mode, and speculate that you use at least as much toner and even more time because so many pages get jammed up in there and have to be fished out and reprinted.

News flash: One size still not fitting all!

I've been reading some things that are very dogmatic about how you MUST go about self-publishing and how you're an IDIOT if you do it some other way. And hey, I also get frustrated when I see writers who I don't think are valuing their work properly.

But the fact of the matter is, we are all individuals with different goals, who are motivated by different things.

If you look at the advice I gave Crabby McSlacker, for example, you'll notice that there's a lot of "Well, I did this, but you may want to do that" in there. Is that because I think I made a bunch of horrible mistakes? No, it's because, being a fan of Cranky Fitness, I know that Crabby is very different from me. I just want to write books--that's it, from here on out, that's what I'm doing. Crabby has another career, plus a very strong interest in health and fitness that she's built into at least a half-career at this point. So the math around things like, "Should I hire someone to lay this out, or should I do it myself?" is going to be different for her. It would be really silly of me to go foaming at the mouth because she hired someone to do something that I did myself (as long as she's not getting totally ripped off, of course), or because she put her book up only on Amazon because she didn't want to figure out Smashwords, or because she decided to give her book away for free, or whatever. Her life is not my life, and she's going to make different decisions.

People have different goals and are motivated by very, VERY different things. I don't think it's appropriate to judge those goals and motivations by any standard other than, "Are they mine?" I don't think it's sensible to heap scorn on people who differ from you, nor do I think it's sensible to slavishly copy the career moves of someone whose goals may be completely unlike your own. John Locke is quite happy to make 35 cents per book sold--he knows that he could easily make more money, and he doesn't care. If that keeps him motivated as a writer without causing him serious money problems, I say more power to him. But someone who is relying on book sales to pay the rent or is simply more motivated by money should probably investigate other pricing strategies.

I learned pretty early on not to be too judgmental about what motivates people. This happened because in my first publishing job, I wound up ghosting for a Notable Academic. Said Notable Academic was (to my mind) an utter sell-out: We never met, and he didn't even know who was ghosting for him--he thanked someone else for their "help" in the introduction to "his" book (to my knowledge, he actually did write the introduction).

Of course I had nothing but contempt for this Notable Academic! God, what a money-grubbing creep! Why was he so greedy? And then later on I found out why: Notable Academic has a seriously handicapped child, who will always require very expensive medical care.

Ooohhh....

That was about when I got off my high horse about being someone who simply isn't that motivated by money. And I'm not: I've learned the hard way that if I'm in a miserable situation and have lots of money, I'm still extremely miserable and the money doesn't help at all. Really, as long as I'm housed and fed and have enough shoes, I'm happy. (Not that I don't find money damned interesting to write about, mostly because people have such neuroses about it. Money = survival, and that kicks off all kinds of things in our primal brains.) 

The fact that money doesn't motivate me doesn't mean that I can't be motivated as a writer (indeed, if I was more motivated by money, I never would have started writing--I would have gone to law school). It also doesn't mean that the things that do motivate me (feeling like I'm producing good-quality work, feeling like people appreciate said work) are somehow wrong or bad or stupid. They're just different from the things that might motivate someone else.

Of course it bothers me when I feel like an author is being taken advantage of or is making decisions out of ignorance--I really, really doubt that Michael Chabon carefully investigated the world of e-publishing before deciding to sign away half his profits. (To Open Road. Not to a charity or something.) But I'm a total agnostic when it comes to what motivates you or what your goals are--whatever works, works. As long as you're being realistic, honest with yourself, and mindful of your real goals, then knock yourself out. This world is big enough for all kinds of writers.

Progress report

Today I just carefully read over the feedback I've gotten on Trust--looks good, looks doable, looks worth doing.

If you're saying, "That's IT? Don't you know there are more hours in a day than THAT?" then you just aren't taking nerves into account. I actually had one of those dreams last night where you're taking a class, but you haven't actually been because it's not something you were really interested in doing, and there was an exam on a book, and you don't have the book and never actually did the exam, but the professor has an exam with your name on it, and where did that come from? And you know that to clear things up, you're going to have to explain that you never actually bought or read the book, which was the only on on the syllabus, and probably should have dropped the class long ago.

In other words: This makes me nervous. I just need to ease into it and things will go fine.

Virtual floor placement and retail sales

More evidence that the comments on The Passive Voice are well worth reading: M. Louisa Locke wrote a great analysis of why most indie authors don't have good sales on Barnes & Noble--but some do.

She writes:

First of all, when you first go into the books store [on Barnes & Noble's Web site] and look at the side for the categories (which I see as looking for book shelves) and choose Fiction, you are given 4 choices versus 19 for Amazon’s Fiction listings. Say you are interested in historical fiction–there is nothing for you. So then you look at the stuff in the center of the page–and you get the equivalent of the tables at the front of a bookstore (you know, best sellers, new releases, editors picks)....

[She eventually finds historical fiction, but it takes forever and she's not sure she could do it again.] As the author of an historical mystery, I know that these odd byzantine browsing paths help explain why I sell so few books on Barnes and Noble, while other authors (who are in one of the main 4 categories or instant collections) are selling well. The readers just aren’t finding my books.

 

Floor placement is incredibly important to brick-and-mortar retail. It's why a company like Coca-Cola will pay extra to have their product placed on the eye-level shelves or (even more expensive) stacked up at the end of the aisle of the grocery store. It's why when you go into a department store, the first floor is cosmetics and handbags--those have a higher profit margin than the actual clothing you have to go up three floors to try on. And it's interesting to see that floor placement is every bit as important in a virtual store.

I've seen theories that Barnes & Noble just attracts a different audience than Amazon--and I'm willing to believe that they do to some degree, because different brands typically appeal to different demographics. But clearly one piece of Amazon's success in selling indie authors (and they are very successful at it--a large majority of indie writers make the large majority of their sales on Amazon) is their virtual floor plan. If you highlight only the best sellers, then that's pretty much all you'll sell. If you make it easy to find weird and obscure titles from people no one has ever heard of, then you'll sell those, too.

(And yes, the post she left the comment to is the result of a tip from me, because I knew Passive Guy would be interested in the subject. But her post is actually on another topic, so I don't think we're too far down the rabbit hole here....)

Progress report

After a few days of not being able to work on the layout, I finished it today! Huzzah!

Ordinarily I would go ahead and print it out and proof it and then find some really tiny mistakes and then input those corrections into both the layout and the e-books. But, man, those LibraryThing reviews! Even people who had issues with Trang want to read the next book ASAP. So I think I'm bumping Trust up to top priority, with the large-print edition of Trang downgraded to being the project I work on when I haven't had any sleep.

Funny numbers

Not shockingly, there's been a lot of coverage of Barnes & Noble lately.

Whether or not the company is going to go under is pretty much an academic concern for self-published authors. (And here's a more optimistic assessment than mine, although I feel a certain obligation to point out that that position is hedged with such inspirational examples as Research In Motion.) Authors are suppliers, not employees or investors, and the cost of putting a book up on B&N is zero, so, you know, if they get out of the soup, very nice for them, and if they don't, presumably other retailers will pick up the slack. Really the only numbers a self-published author needs to worry about with B&N is his or her own sales figures.

But being a former business reporter, I wanted to note something that Passive Guy first pointed out: No one knows what B&N's share of the e-book market actually is. How could they know that they have 25% or 26% or 27% or 30% of the e-book market, when overall e-book sales aren't reported anywhere? Certain numbers that public companies report are federally regulated--lie about your 2012 profits, and you get in all kinds of trouble. But most numbers (especially those companies like to throw around in press releases) aren't--and guess what category "percentage of the e-book market" falls into?

This is an old, old problem in publishing: Even with print books, the best data available is far from perfect, and it doesn't cover e-books. I don't know that it's possible to gather good data about e-books: Even if you had audited reports from the major retailers, publishers and authors can sell books from their own Web sites, so how are you going to account for that?

So we're left with that old journalistic standby--guesswork! Guesswork and (my favorite) not telling people that it's guesswork!

For example, in The New York Times, you see "the company has made quick work of capturing almost 30 percent of the e-book market in two years." And then you see a bunch of quotes from B&N executives saying that, wow, this is an amazing business to be in--look how much market share they've captured! And so quickly! Certainly it makes lots and lots of sense for someone to come along and buy it!

Of course, there's also this, also from The New York Times, "I.H.S. iSuppli, a research company, estimates that Barnes & Noble has 13 percent of the e-reader market after two years in the business, versus 67 percent for Amazon. The company tracked shipments of display parts to prepare its estimates."

Oh! So B&N controls only 13 percent of the market!  It's not the same market--they could control 13 percent of the e-reader market and almost 30 percent of the e-book market simultaneously. But the Nook is an e-reader, not an e-book. It's not B&N's e-book business. Nor is it B&N.com. It's a device, and they control 13 percent of the market for that specific device, not including tablets or cell phones or other things that people read e-books on.

(ETA: Of course, the 13 percent figure is also guesswork, but at least it honestly identifies itself as guesswork and provides the reader some idea of how it was determined, which helps a reader decide whether it's a good guess or not. That's a lot better than regurgitating data provided by an interested party as though it were sacred writ.)

Again, this is of academic interest, really, but it may help you make more sense of future events. There's a bit of a snow job going on right now--nothing wrong with that, really, it's not like I post the "meh" reviews of Trang here. Just be aware that reporting is usually regarded by companies as a venue for marketing.

B&N not doing so well

Barnes & Noble is looking to sell assets and may spin off the Nook. It looks like they're running out of money. This can happen when you're trying to develop a new business at the same time your old business is collapsing--you just don't have the funds to invest properly in the new line or to get past that initial money-losing period of development.

It will be interesting to see what happens to their Web site and the Nook. (Nobody wants the brick-and-mortar bookstores--not even Barnes & Noble itself.) A new player who isn't encumbered by B&N's financial history could step in and make a big success of one or the other, or both could just go away. B&N itself is obviously going down, and I am not optimistic regarding their prospects of finding a buyer for their more-appealing assets: Their problems are longstanding and well-known, so at this point any potential buyer will probably wait until B&N actually goes into bankruptcy and then snap up those assets on the cheap.

(Oh, and I've been unproductive the past couple of days because of kids and general life crap, but I should get back in the saddle today.)

The review page is up!

It's here! Look at what nice things people say! Aw....

You know, this really does help with the motivation--it's hard to get going if you feel like the end product is something no one cares about or wants. But now, people are all excited about reading the next book! Sounds like I need to get off my ass and finish it, doesn't it?

I find it especially cool that people who don't ordinarily read sci-fi like the book. Sci-fi is worth reading!