Progress report

A teeny-tiny bit of progress to report: I revised the promo/jacket copy for Trust. Unfortunately my time and attention right now is mainly being taken up by some tax-related idiocy, which was really, really NOT what I was hoping for....

Different flavors of creativity

Oh my God! A non-rant! This is a very cool article about creativity (you have it, you can cultivate it) in the Wall Street Journal. Helpfully, it distinguishes between the situations that require insight--where you should relax and distract yourself and let your subconscious do its thing--and those that quite you to just keep plugging away.

This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When we don't feel that we're getting closer to the answer—we've hit the wall, so to speak—we probably need an insight. If there is no feeling of knowing, the most productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we're getting close, we need to keep on struggling.

What is not going to happen if agency pricing ends

Because publishers used a system called agency pricing to raise e-book prices, there are now several people speculating that if agency pricing comes to an end, traditionally published e-books will drop precipitously in price, destroying the price advantage that indie e-books have.

To which I say: Not so fast.

Agency pricing just means that the publisher sets the retail price of the book, and the retailer takes a cut. That's all. Large publishers can and do offer e-books for 99 cents. They just don't do it very often, because they can't afford to.

Why not? High costs. How high? Well, let's take as gospel this back-of-the-envelope calculation by the Wall Street Journal and say that, in order to cover their costs and make an acceptable profit margin, a large publisher must make at least $9 ($9.09, but we'll round) on an e-book.

In the traditional book retailing model, the retailer pays a wholesale price to the publisher, and then the retailer can set the sale price however they like.

The publisher still sets a price--but it's the wholesale price, not the retail price. If the publisher needs to make at least $9 on each e-book sold, then the wholesale price is going to be at least $9.

That puts a floor under the price--the retailer can price the book below $9, but they're going to lose money.

They might do it anyway: Agency pricing was forced down Amazon's throat because they were buying e-books from publishers for $13 and selling them to the public for $9.99. They took a $3 loss on e-books because they wanted to spur the sales of a weird new gadget called the Kindle.

That was a couple of years ago, which is an eternity in e-book land. The Kindle is no longer weird and new--it is one of Amazon's best-selling items.

So, I'm going to guess that nowadays, Amazon is a lot less likely to be willing to take a bath on e-books. Indeed, Amazon now sells Kindles at a loss to drive the sales of e-books, so if they start selling e-books at a loss, too, they're going to get into big trouble--they need to make a profit somewhere.

Amazon may well retail a hot new best-seller for a few bucks cheaper than the competition (as they do with paper books), but I don't see them taking a book they paid $9 or $13 or whatever wholesale price publishers want to charge ($20? $25? $40?) and marking it down to $3 or 99 cents. Taking a $6-$12 loss on each copy of a book that sells millions of copies is going to be tough even for Amazon to keep up.

The cost structures of indie and traditional publishing are just so different that it creates a huge gulf in the prices they can charge--and those cost structures won't change in a hurry. Look at that number that caused so much drama: $9.99. Amazon was selling e-books for $9.99, and publishers panicked. Meanwhile, over in indie publishing land, $5.99 is seen as quite expensive, and people are afraid to sell stories for 99 cents.

Which makes it less likely that Amazon will drastically cut prices on traditionally-published e-books: They have this huge library of indie books now that, for the most part, sell for less than $4.99. And they make money on those cheap books! They don't need to take a $10 loss on some traditionally-published book in order to convince people that it's worth it to invest in a Kindle. They can offer a ton of $3 books instead--and make a profit!

Scott Turow has never heard of Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber

Scott Turow, who is president of the Authors' Guild, posted this astonishing bit bewailing the Department of Justice's likely upcoming lawsuit against some large publishers and Apple as a result of their collusion to fix prices in order to slow down the adoption of e-books.

Where to begin? Well, of course, I began over here with:

Amazon’s predatory pricing would shield it from e-book competitors that lacked Amazon’s deep pockets.

Like Apple. THERE’S a cash-poor company. [I'll add that he also mentions Google, which is of course desperately poor.]

Bookstores were well along the path to becoming as rare as record stores.

Which is why the number of indie bookstores are up: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/independent-bookstores-add-a-new-chapter/2011/08/12/gIQAfMh9LJ_story.html

Like rock bands from the pre-Napster era, established authors can still draw a crowd, if not to a stadium, at least to a virtual shopping cart.

Whereas poor Lady Gaga is forced to sit at home, all alone, with no fans and no money.

And publishers won’t risk capital where there’s no reasonable prospect for reward. They will necessarily focus their capital on what works in an online environment: familiar works by familiar authors.

Which is why Amanda Hocking labors in obscurity as well.

Jesus, does he even read what he writes?

 

Aaaand I'm going to continue here with:

We have no way of knowing whether publishers colluded in adopting the agency model for e-book pricing.

Given that Steve Jobs bragged about it, I think it's pretty much public knowledge.

We do know that collusion wasn’t necessary: given the chance, any rational publisher would have leapt at Apple’s offer and clung to it like a life raft.

Gosh, did you know that collusion is a perfectly rational response to competition? Just like fraud is a perfectly rational response to the need to raise money! Of course, it doesn't make either activity any less illegal, because what is in the short-term interests of an individual company isn't always in the long-term interests of society at large.

In addition, Turow seems to think that colluding with Apple to fix prices somehow isn't collusion. I'm sorry, but when Apple invites you to do something illegal, it doesn't magically become legal because the offer came from the Wizard of Cupertino.

 

In addition to venting about Turow's chop-logic, I really wanted to talk about an analogy that Turow draws that I feel is very apt: He compares authors to musicians.

If you didn't know, once upon a time, a musician needed the support of a record label to become well-known. Record labels unquestionably abused their power, but they were the only real option, so musicians sucked it up and signed crappy contracts and took whatever they were given.

Then digital came along. Record labels did horribly, record stores shut down, and that was that.

What happened to the musicians? Well, artists like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber looked at something called YouTube and said, "I can make that work." And it wasn't just them: Ke$ha and Katy Perry and Adele and many others have found large audiences and certainly aren't hurting for money. They didn't just rely on a label, of course, they had to hustle and get creative: OK Go and Cee Lo Green have been very open about how they make money in this new world.

But according to Scott Turow, these commercially-successful artists just don't exist--Napster wiped out the music industry back in 1999, and no musician has made money ever since.

In Turow's mind, the fact that technological change was hard on record labels means that it necessarily hard on musicians. But they're not the same thing, and what hurts one doesn't have to hurt the other

Likewise, authors are not the same thing as publishers, or for that matter, bookstores. Since he seems to be unclear on this fact, I'll point out again that Turow is president of the Authors' Guild. Authors write books, and then they need to sell them.

Now, if he were a little more reality-oriented, Turow might throw himself into helping authors navigate the changes that are happening to publishers and bookstores, so that authors can still sell the books they write. Nowadays authors have to hustle and get creative and not expect everything to stay still, but they can indeed sell books and make a good living.

Think of Madonna: She's not still waiting around for Sire Records to recover; she's moved on.

Turow, on the other hand, is still with Farrar Strauss & Giroux, which published his first novel in 1987. I'm sure at this point that if anything bad happened to FSG, Turow would feel like a member of his family had just died. And unfortunately, he can't understand that not everyone is served by their publisher the way he has been served by his. He can't understand that what is in a publisher's interest isn't necessarily what is in an author's interest--in fact, screwing authors is a good short-term strategy for publishers to make money.

Worse yet, Turow doesn't even realize that publishers are capable of doing wrong. Yes, publishers might be worried about Amazon and unhappy with their bottom lines, and the executives involved may be desperate to save their jobs. They might have received a very tempting offer from that beguiling devil, Steve Jobs. That doesn't make what they did ethical or legal. They could have tried competing or adapting; instead they tried price fixing. When faced with adversity, they chose to break the law. That was their choice, freely made, and I will shed no tears when they pay for it.

You asked for it, you got it--a lawsuit!

So, if somehow you couldn't hear my insane cackling, the U.S. Department of Justice is totally going to sue the tar out of five major publishers and Apple for fixing the prices of e-books. (If you can't read the Wall Street Journal, the Passive Voice has excerpts, but you're missing some funny bits.)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Oh, I'm sorry. But: HA. I mean, they collude on prices. Steve Jobs makes a public statement about how publishers colluded on prices. [ETA: And there was a whole story in the New Yorker about how they colluded, and how they knew they could get into trouble for it--amazing!] And somehow--this is a very mysterious process indeed--they got into trouble for price fixing!

Life is so unfair!

Now, if you've been reading the propaganda generated by traditional publishing, you're going, Wait a minute, isn't Amazon the one that exercises evil monopoly powers that would draw the ire of the DOJ?

Well, no, it is not. And indie bookstores are actually doing fine.

But of course, that's what traditional publishers have been claiming in the talking points they create for their dupes. (ETA: And oh my God, speaking of dupes.) And the really hilarious part is--that's what they claimed in their arguments to the Department of Justice! Note that, once again, large publishers and Barnes & Noble are working in...oh, what's the word...it starts with a c....

The publishers have denied acting jointly to raise prices. [Too bad Steve Jobs said they acted in collusion with Apple, huh? ETA: Not to mention that story in the friggin' New Yorker--how dumb are you people?] They have told investigators that the shift to agency pricing enhanced competition in the industry by allowing more electronic booksellers to thrive.

William Lynch, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, gave a deposition to the Justice Department in which he testified that abandoning the agency pricing model would effectively result in a single player gaining even more market share than it has today, according to people familiar with the testimony. A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble declined to comment.

Prior to agency pricing, Amazon often sold best-selling digital books for less than it paid for them, a marketing stance that some publishers worried would make the emerging digital-books marketplace less appealing for other potential retailers.

The punch line? "The publishers' argument that agency pricing increased competition hasn't persuaded the Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said. Government lawyers have questioned how competition could have increased when prices went up." [Emphasis added, because it's hilarious.]

I bet they have!

I also bet that when the DOJ lawyers talk about competition, they mean competition with publishers--you know, like if there was competition with publishers, they couldn't fix prices. But when publishers talk about competition, they mean competition with Amazon. They want to see a lot more of that, because they think it will make things easier on them.

But honestly, while I think there will be a lot more competition with Amazon to sell e-books, I don't think it's going to help publishers at all, because I don't think the competition will focus on books that come from traditional publishers. Why deal with their up-front costs?

So, yeah, it's all looking bad for publishers. For the record, it's looking much worse for publishers than it is for Apple. Apple has a ton of cash floating around--that's cash that could have been paid out as dividends to shareholders, but c'est la vie! More important, Apple entered into this pricing scheme to help out its iBookstore, but the iBookstore flopped anyway, and that still hasn't affected Apple's bottom line in any kind of serious way--they're a device company, and as long as people snap up iPhones and iPads, they're fine.

For publishers, well, their pockets are not as deep as Apple's (nobody's pockets are as deep as Apple's). And the pricing scheme was more important to them, because it pumped up margins on e-books, which have become a major product.

In addition: Hello, they pissed off Amazon! And what did Amazon do? Oh, it found a whole new slew of suppliers! It turns out that products from these suppliers sell like crazy! And--this is key--Amazon almost always makes money off these suppliers, even when they sell stuff for 99 cents! Oh, and look! Now the suppliers increasingly don't want to deal with traditional publishers!

The irony is delicious, is it not?

Funny and true

This is a hilarious article instructing bosses "How To Completely, Utterly Destroy an Employee's Work Life."

What we discovered is that the key factor you can use to make employees miserable on the job is to simply keep them from making progress in meaningful work.

People want to make a valuable contribution, and feel great when they make progress toward doing so. Knowing this progress principle is the first step to knowing how to destroy an employee’s work life.

The thing is, if you're wondering why so many authors seem really angry at traditional publishing, well, that's it. That's what's been happening to them.

Whoo!

OK, the Trust layout is corrected and on its way to the copy editor! Whoo!

Nice to know I'm not going to have to deal with that thing again for at least another two weeks! In the meantime I'm going to relax a little, read Proust (the problem with a harder writer like Proust is that you can't read it at the end of a long day working--it takes too much energy), work on some house stuff...and do book stuff. Since I have a page count now (375 pages), I can finish the cover, plus I really want to noodle with the description some more. I feel the description is kind of a conundrum, because of course Trust is about what happens after the climactic events in Trang, but right now the description is, "In the first book THIS HUGE SPOILER HAPPENED. HAVEN'T READ THE FIRST BOOK YET? OH WELL--SUCKS TO BE YOU" so I want to see if it's possible to finesse that a bit.

Progress report

Corrected the layout up to page 335--it's all proofread, so things are looking good for actually getting this done and in the mail tomorrow.

I have to say, pushing through like this really makes me think about hiring out the layout. But 1. I don't have to do this very often, 2. if I didn't have to make this big push, I'd be enjoying it more, and 3. I just don't know how that would work as far as making corrections is concerned. I also like having a copy editor proof the layout, because it's a twofer--you get typos and layout errors caught. Definitely, though, if you are new to self-publishing, be aware that laying out a paper book is easily the most time-consuming part of production.

How to not sell indie books

Yeah, yeah, I'm going to go blind, but God help me, the Passive Voice had a post today that got me all riled up. Somebody at Ebook Friendly felt obligated to post tips on how to find self-published books at Barnes & Noble.

You know something? When the civic-minded feel an obligation to post pointers to help people find things in your store, your store is badly organized. Honest to Pete, you think B&N could hide the books on its Web site any better?

And HOW can you find self-published books? By looking in the section for books published via PubIt or Smashwords, of course! (Quoth Bridget McKenna: "Wow! Our very own ghetto! I’m so proud…")

Seriously? Yeah, people don't search for books by genre or anything silly like that, they search for books that have been published a certain way, that's totally how they do it. It just amazes me how poorly B&N understands its own customers--you're not selling to school districts, who really do care who the publisher is, you're selling to the general public. Don't they even talk to the floor staff in their own stores? How many people come in looking for a book that was published a certain way versus people looking for a mystery or a book by a particular author or a book like those written by a particular author?

You know, people were snarking on the B&N CEO because he doesn't have much of a background in bookselling, and I thought that was kind of silly. But I may have been totally wrong....

Trust the process, not the publisher

Yeah, my eyes are about to permanently cross, but I have to spend some more time in front of the computer because I keep seeing people express the opinion that if one of the Amazon publishing imprints wants to sign you, well--whoo-hoo! You're in Fat City! Just sign right on--you'd be CRAZY not to!!!

Think back to two years ago, and people would have been responding that way to an offer by a big publisher or an agency. Think of what a mistake that would have been.

I say this as someone who has been screwed over by some of the finest names in the industry: Do not assume that a place with a good reputation and a fancy name is going to serve you well. They may. They may not. You don't know.

You have to develop a process you can trust to help you make a good decision, and then you trust that process. Do not trust names. Trust processes.

This is part of thinking like a businessperson. If I am thinking about investing money into a company, I need to know whether this company makes money or not. How do I know? I look at their books. How do I know their books are any good? Well, there are standard bookkeeping processes, and I would look for evidence that those processes have been followed.

If those processes have not been followed, I cannot trust the books. It doesn't matter if, on a personal level, I think the people who run that company are very honest. They can be perfectly honest and still have been making horrible mistakes!

People are fallible--they get sick, they get distracted, they discover cocaine. You can't depend on someone being a rock forever, because people are not made of stone. People also move on: Right now, the person in charge of Amazon's publishing contracts may be Bob Cratchit--kind, generous, honest, always looking out for the other guy. But Tiny Tim got sick, so Bob has to take some time off. Now Ebenezer Scrooge is in charge. Uh-oh!

You also have to be realistic about who you are. If Joe Konrath gets a great contract with an Amazon imprint, that's terrific--for him. It also has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the contract you get offered will be any good. Remember, Joe Konrath makes $100,000 a month these days, so he's getting treated very well--even a small percentage of his income is some serious coin.

Instead of assuming that Amazon or whoever is going to take care of you, you need to get some processes into place that will make sure they do. I would argue that you probably should have a qualified lawyer go over any contract. You also probably should take some time to figure out what you want from your career and how you think a publisher could help you achieve that. Try at least to form an opinion of what a good contract for you would look like. Decide now what you're not willing to give up to anyone, for any amount of money.

I find it almost frightening how quickly some people have moved from assuming that Big Daddy Traditional Publishing will take care of them to assuming that Big Daddy Amazon will take care of them. It reminds me of how some people skip from relationship to relationship to relationship without ever creating a better quality of relationship. Those people always assume that this time it's going to be different, but it never is, because they're always doing the same damned thing.

Read an e-book week!

Things are a little frantic here--I told the copy editor I'd get the layout to her March 9th, and I'm realizing once again just how long it takes to input corrections into a layout. It's not like a manuscript--every little change changes everything else.

But enough about my problems! It's Read an E-Book Week over at Smashwords, which means it's time to get Trang for free! Here's the link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/42407, the coupon code is RE100, and it will be on sale from March 4-10! Go get 'em!

Progress report, the finding-a-copy-editor edition

So I forgot to post a progress report yesterday, but I actually did make progress, proofreading the Trust layout. I proofed more today and will either proof still more after I write this or input the corrections, I'm not sure.

Another thing I did yesterday was line up a new proofreader! Yeah, the very good one I used before vanished. I don't know what's up with that (hopefully he's just swamped with work and it's nothing bad), but that's the drawback of using freelancers, they're not always available. (Aaaaand every editor I ever said no to just experienced a quiver of schadenfreude.)

So I reached out to another friend who works in publishing, and it turns out that she's the queen of copy editors these days, so she had a whole list of people. (And more on the back burner! Apparently they are all pretty busy pushing through the fall list, which I hope is what happened to my first proofreader.) I hooked up with one of them, so I'll mail her the layout in a few days, and if everything goes as planned, she should get it back to me by the end of March. I think she'll be good--she was highly recommended, and she's so hardcore book publishing that I confused her by asking for a proofread instead of a copy edit. Imagine what would have happened if I'd asked her for a technical edit!

I mentioned to my friend how hard it is for indie writers to find decent copy editors, and she was like, Yeah, I've been toying with the idea of starting some sort of cooperative for copy editors geared to indie writers. I hope she does--of course, she works full time, so she may not want the hassle. Still, the thing about copy editors is that there's a HUGE difference between the good ones and the others, and it's not really obvious until you pay one of them to copy edit your work and they either suck or are awesome. (Of course, if you're really new, you may not even realize they suck.) So I really hope she goes through with it--if she does, I will definitely tout it here. (One pointer I can give right now: Oftentimes the really good copy editors have full-time jobs and freelance on the side. So if you find one that works full time as a copy editor for a book publisher, they're probably good.)

I should note that this new copy editor also charges $25 an hour....

Corporate PR

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a nice post today about not getting all wound up by all the corporate news and controversies that either don't actually apply to you or is stuff you could manage if you weren't so busy freaking out. Her prescription, unsurprisingly, is: Get back to work!

Like me, she used to be a business reporter, and she mentions something that I think people sometimes don't understand: When news comes out about a company, it is almost always coming either from that company or from that company's business rivals.

Not always: Sometimes it's stuff like earnings reports, which are required and regulated by the SEC. Other times it's coming from the District Attorney's office or the FBI (those are always the good ones). But companies themselves generate a HUGE quantity of press releases, studies (Miracle Whip causes actual miracles!), surveys, announcements, anniversaries, awards, etc., etc.

Oftentimes this stuff looks or sounds really important and worthwhile, but it's not--it's coming from the company's marketing department (or an "independent institution" that was founded, staffed, and housed by the company's marketing department), and it was developed to generate adventageous coverage for the company. Such coverage could help knock down a rival, or it could help a company sell an asset, or it could just goose sales.

A big part of a business reporter's job is ignoring all that crap. You look up the SEC filings instead of relying on press releases; you don't publish the dodgy studies. But it takes a lot more effort to generate stories from reliable sources than it does to be a shill for corporate America--companies will even send you story outlines to "make your job easier" (because your job is apparently doing their marketing department's work for them). And it's not like nobody falls for the bait: You'll get something like that, you'll toss it, and then you'll see that exact story appear in a respectable paper that should do better (yes, New York Times, I'm looking at you).

Nowadays with the Internet, this stuff is readily available to normal people. You can subscribe to Large Company's press releases, and you can spend your time reading Web sites and blogs that just cut and paste the text from those press releases into another format and call it news. So it's wise to be skeptical, both of the quickie Web news sites and of the respectable papers--if you don't think a story like this wasn't more than half written by a corporate PR department, you are very naive.

Writers bite back!

A bunch of reports on 2011 book sales have come out, and not shockingly, e-books are up and paper books are down.

Also not shockingly, profits are up at places like Penguin and Simon & Schuster. This is due in part to the fact that, yes, e-books are cheaper to manufacture, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar who has absolutely zero respect for your intelligence.

The other major contributing factor? Publishers have been screwing authors over! If you don't have to pay your suppliers for the product you sell, you make a lot more money!

And in the past, authors have been happy to get screwed. As Kristine Kathryn Rusch notes:

Either writers give the traditional publisher 15% of gross or 25% of net [of e-books], or there is no contract. Some publishers are getting even stingier: 15% of net, not gross, and if you don’t like it, writer person, walk away.

So many writers don’t walk. Hell, I have several contracts with those numbers in them, and back when I signed them—ten and five years ago—I too thought e-books would remain a subsidiary right.

In other words, these 2011 profits you're seeing are a result of decisions made in the past. Writers had no choice if they wanted to be published, and they were generally OK with getting the shaft on e-books because those things were never going to make money anyway.

But are authors going to continue to be compliant? Some say yes, because authors are stupid. I say no, because authors need money just like everybody else does.

And making me feel even more secure in my opinion is, of all people, Jackie Collins. Bless her leopard-print soul, but it even sounds like she's self-publishing because she feels hampered by traditional publishers--she wants to write short fiction, and they're telling her no, there's no money in it. (Tell that to Stephen "It took three days, and I've made about $80,000" King.)

(Man, I wish I wrote short fiction!)

Anyway, I realize there's a big debate over whether big publishers will go under or live forever thanks to the largess of their corporate parents. I feel that, like so many debates about publishing, if you are an author, it doesn't matter. Big publishers may well live on as imprint names or as companies that cherry pick bestselling indie writers or as companies that provide services to self-published writers or as companies that specialize in elaborate pop-up books.

In any case, I seriously doubt things are going to stay the way they are. The financial results you'll be seeing for publishers in the future will be the result of decisions authors are making now. And I think publishers who may be celebrating their 2011 results have a serious sustainability problem--authors feel like they've been screwed (because they have been!), and they are making different decisions today than they did just a couple of years ago. Even writers who would rather not change and love their publisher and don't want to learn new things--well, if their advances are getting smaller and smaller, and they can't sell additional rights because they signed them all away for a pittance of an advance, and they have a life set up on the expectation that they will be making X number of dollars a year...they'll change. They won't like it, but they won't have a choice.

Laying out paper books with cheap software

As you may know, I use Word (evil, evil Word) to lay out the paper editions of my books, because proper layout software is really expensive. Today, Passive Voice has a post about using OpenOffice, and he mentions that he also uses Word, and then down in the comments (always read those!) people talk about tricks to use with Word as well as something called LibreOffice, which is like OpenOffice but allegedly better. I use neither OpenOffice nor LibreOffice, so I can't judge the worth of those tips, but they may help you. I also don't know if the Word tips will help me, since my version of Word is a decade old, but I'm definitely going to give them a shot.

One thing that gets mentioned is the value of templates. I have to agree that templates (whatever kind works for you) are awesome. Laying out Trust went so much quicker this time because I essentially had a template (i.e. the Trang layout with a few tweaks), so I just replaced the text and changed chapter and page numbers. In the past I've been a little dumb about it and opened up brand-new files for each chapter, which meant I had to input and format the headers, format the chapter numbers, etc., etc. It cuts the amount of time you spend laying things out probably by at least a third if you just save the last chapter under a new name and use it as a template.

Finishing

Although I am all, "Whoo!" about finishing the layout, coming to the end of a project actually dredges up all kinds of anxiety for me. Part of it is just anxiety over actually putting the book out there To Be Judged. Part of it I think is a relic from my freelancing days--as long as I was working, I knew I was getting paid, but when a project ended, I had no guarantee that another one would come along. Part of it is workaholism--when this is over, whatever will I do with my days? (Hint: Start the next book!)

I know I'm not the only one who sees the end of a project coming and goes, AIIIIIGGGHHH! Matt Groening has a great cartoon on being a graduate student that says in part, "The Simple Way To Avoid the Stomach-Churning Agony of Having To Finish Your Thesis: Read Another Book. Repeat When Necessary." The Perfectionism-Procrastination-Paralysis trifecta rears its ugly head about now. Especially if you're unaware of what's going on, it's really easy to get caught up in getting just one more read from that cool person you met in writers' group...and then just one more read from your old professor...and then just one more read from your Aunt Edna...and then just one more read from that guy behind the counter at the gas station who seems pretty articulate.

You just have to soldier through and GET THE BOOK OUT. It's especially tough when you aren't in a traditional work environment with a boss and explicit deadlines--even (or especially) your friends will enable you by saying things like, "Hey, you sound unsure about this. Do you want me to read it over again? I'm pretty busy, but I'll have some time off next Christmas, so I could read it then." Beat them away with love.

There is no such thing as a perfect (or even just an empirically good) book, so let that go. What traditional publishers do is they have a process. For example, at my first job, the manuscript was proofread three times, and then it was laid out, and then it was proofread two more times. And there were still errors in the final book, but it was pretty darned clean. So I would suggest that if you're having problems with eternal re-reads, you should set some limits--you'll have it read X number of times by X many beta readers, and then it goes to a proofreader. And that's that. You set up a process you can trust, and then you do indeed trust it to get you a not-perfect-but-reasonably-good end result.

Progress report

I'm currently in the midst of laying out the ninth chapter today--yeah, I'm way more productive today than I have been, which is what happens when I actually sleep.

I was going to do more than nine chapters, but I'm going to stop after I finish this one because--you guessed it!--Word has started to go insane. Right now I'm running the maintenance tools; when that's done I'll restart and hopefully I'll be able to finish Chapter 19 without Word taking the entire computer down.