Doing a large-print edition

There was a comment by ABE in response to my last post asking for more information about doing a large-print edition. I was just going to reply, but then I realized that, if people are curious, I might as well make a new post that has basically everything I know about doing them in it.

So, ABE asked:

Just out of curiosity - as you should have it quite clear right now - how many pages did your regular edition have, and how much of a multiplier is it to go to the large print edition? You got close to the edge, so that helps pin it down.

The problem is that the multiplier changed because I changed fonts. Trang was set in 10-pt Palatino Linotype, it is a 373-page book, and it made a 794-page large-print edition (set in 18-pt Arial with 22-pt line spacing). Trust is 375 pages (oh, so it's not actually shorter, duh), but it's set in 10-pt Book Antiqua, so it makes an 846-page large-print edition--too long for CreateSpace, which limits you to 820 pages.

What I should have done--and what I did with Trang--was to stick all the text into a file, set the page size, font, margins, and line spacing, and have a quick look at how many pages resulted. That gave me a fairly accurate idea of what the page count was going to be--and that's why my line spacing is a half-point more narrow than it's supposed to be.

Also, I wouldn't necessarily have thought of putting out the large print edition - and that's another good idea.

I haven't actually sold any of my large-print editions. This is sort of a quixotic thing for me that I do when I'm not hugging trees and weaving clothing out of organic hemp. A large-print edition is a lot easier than a regular layout because the ragged right means that you don't have to worry about tight or loose lines, and you don't break words, so you don't have to worry about bad breaks. Buuuuut it does take some time and effort (or money, if you don't do your own layouts), and the payoff may never come, because people with serious visual disabilities these days probably get e-readers and set the font to something they find readable.* For me, it's easy enough and I'm fanatical enough about accessibility (can people read e-ink as easily as paper? I dunno) that it's worth it, but I could definitely see someone going the other way.

Lastly, has it ever occurred to you to sell your templates? After all this work on your part to get them right - maybe that would have some extra value.

I don't know that templates would actually be helpful to other people, because I'm already cheating slightly on the American Printing House for the Blind standards (which, in my defense, are by far the most stringent), and I'm going to have to cheat more. With the regular layout, since I use Word, I do a lot of odd hacks to make it work that you can't put in a template.

 

*ETA: I've read about authors wanting to fiddle with their e-books so that readers can't modify the fonts. Please, please, please, PLEASE, PLEASE do NOT do this. You may think that san-serif fonts are ugly, but for some people, they are the only fonts they can read.

Aigh!

Ugh, I'm on chapter 27, and the large-print edition of Trust is over the page-count limit at CreateSpace! Damn it! I didn't think this would be a problem because the regular edition of Trust is shorter than the regular edition of Trang, but I used a different font for Trust and that must have made a difference. Should have checked before I started laying it out, no?

Hm...the question is, how to get more text on a page without impairing readability. I'm already a little small on the spacing between lines, so I think I'll squeeze the margins a tad.

I just wish I hadn't wasted all that toner printing each chapter out! Ah, c'est la vie, this round of production has been going so smoothly, it's about time a wrench was thrown into the works....

Who's driving the bus?

One belief I keep hearing from newer writers is that they don't have to bother with all the "technical" stuff (like proofreading or formatting or grammar or actually having a plot) because they hope that the reader will be "swept away" by their marvelous story.

Let's put aside the fact that I think that's much more likely to happen if you have the "technical" stuff down. I actually have an issue with the "swept away" imagery itself.

I mean, of course I've been swept up in a story--I got a lot of exercise when I read the His Dark Materials series because I kept missing my bus stops. (Like, seriously, every day--it got really annoying.)

But when people talk about being "swept away" in real life, it's usually when they're talking about some horrible mistake that they made. People who get "swept away" a lot tend have multiple divorces, children who won't talk to them, criminal records, and no money.

In other words, I feel like saying, "I want the reader to get swept away" is somewhat akin to saying, "I want to take advantage of the reader" or "I want the reader to make a really bad choice by reading my book." It suggests to me that you aren't actually interested in pleasing the reader in any kind of meaningful way. You're being a little sleazy.

I'd rather go with the imagery of taking the reader someplace...on your bus. You are the bus driver, and you want to take the reader on a wonderful tour, where they'll see all kinds of marvelous things and love it and recommend you to their friends and take all the other bus tours you have on offer.

(Yes, I ride the bus a lot. You can read on the bus; if you read while you drive everybody gets all upset.)

Now, in order for your passengers to relax and enjoy the trip, they need to believe that their bus driver can drive a bus.

I cannot express how important this is. This is Step #1, without which no other steps can follow. No one is going to relax and enjoy the ride when they are doubting the bus driver's ability to, you know, drive.

I've ridden a few buses where the drivers were having fairly spectacular mental breakdowns. I responded one of two ways.

Way #1: White knuckle it through the ride, and then call the bus company and report the driver. The reader equivalent is me death-marching my way through The Fountainhead and then telling everyone what an awful, awful book it is.

Way #2: Get off the bus as soon as I can and take one with a different driver. This is probably what most readers do--they bail. Fast. You know the saying, "You never get a second chance to make a first impression"? That's very true with books because when people hit something that makes them question the ability of the writer, they just stop reading. You never get any sort of second chance. It's all over.

Obviously, I try not to have mistakes in my work. I also try not to have things that look like mistakes. I try to avoid the appearance of error, as well as actual error.

It's especially tricky for me because in the Trang series, there are characters who do not know or use proper English grammar, and all the aliens' speech is run through these translation devices that hatchet up everything. So I have to make very sure that people realize that I am doing this on purpose--I'm not doing it because I'm ignorant or because I can't write well. I'm doing it because it serves the story. I can drive a bus.

If you must go with the "swept away" concept, please bear in mind that successful seducers are very detail oriented. They put a ton of effort into the trappings of romance, hoping to distract you from the lack of any actual love. Indeed, 90% of the time it works because the seducee thinks, Gee, if they're doing this much work, they must really care! (No, they don't--at least not about you.) Successful seducers aren't sloppy and they don't leave things to chance--getting someone to the point of being "swept away" takes a lot of planning.

Ownership

Right now, there's a fairly amusing thing going on at Passive Voice: This agent posted a (dumb) critique of this post, and then claimed, "No, it wasn't a critique of that post! It was some other Harlequin author writing on some other self-publishing blog!" and then took down the post, and then took down another post because people were leaving criticism there, etc.

Forget Bad Agent Sydney. This is the guy you want to hire.

Aside from the general hilarity (he says you can make a living writing for Harlequin! That's news to Harlequin!) the post demonstrates Mayer's point that there's this mentality in traditional publishing that writers don't create content, agents/publishers/bookstores do.

But there's a twist: According to this guy, the publisher is responsible for a writer's successes. The writer alone is responsible for their failures. (The business model itself of course has nothing to do with how much money an author makes. Just put that thought out of your silly little head.)

Here it is:

When an author is not making money, it is NOT always the fault of the publisher. Maybe their writing has gone flat. Maybe they aren’t promoting enough. Maybe it is simply a matter of bad timing for when the book comes out. The point is, be careful blaming others for your lack of success in the business.

I for one am a firm believer in Harlequin. The editors work AMAZINGLY hard with the authors out there dedicated to their craft. The promotion departments do an amazing amount of work to get those books out to their readers. I would also add that all of the editors work amazingly well with me personally when I want to negotiate contracts. They are in it for the long haul with their writers and they don’t want to lose a great thing when they see it.

Interesting, no? If your writing "goes flat" (whatever that means), the editor had nothing to do with it. If your writing doesn't go flat, it's because the editor worked "AMAZINGLY hard." The promotion departments are also "amazing," but of course if the promotions don't come off it's because the writer isn't promoting enough.

And if the book fails because of "bad timing," which the writer has absolutely no control over and is completely the responsibility of the publisher? Hey, clearly also not the fault of the publisher. The publisher is "in it for the long haul" and "don't want to lose a great thing." They don't screw up, ever. If your book fails because of bad timing, it must be your fault somehow--you're cursed or something.

I understand the impulse to take ownership of a writer's successful work. I went to college with Joel Derfner, who wrote the excellent Swish. We've reconnected via Facebook, and a few months ago he was working on an essay that was giving him a hard time, so he asked for feedback. Being a former editor, I sharped my trusty axe (oh, who are we kidding? I sharpen it every night before I take it to bed with me; I call it Vera) and took a few whacks at it.

He published a really marvelous essay, and I was so proud--of myself.

And then I got a grip. I mean, he'd written several drafts well before I got to it, and it's not like the draft I saw sucked or anything. It's also not like I would have ever, in a million years, written that essay--it's Joel's life experience, and more important, Joel's talent that takes that experience and converts it so delightfully into written words.

Fine-tuning is important. Fine-tuning helps. I am all in favor of fine-tuning.

But fine-tuning is also roughly a gazillion times easier than creating something good from scratch.

As John F. Kennedy once said, "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan." In the course of my career, I've had editor after editor take credit for "teaching" me how to write--of course the worse the editor, the more likely it was that those words came out of their mouth. Don't believe it when other people lay claim to your talent--if they were so damned talented, they'd be writing themselves.

A damning defense of agents

You  know what's always interesting? To read someone defend behavior you think is largely indefensible. Sometimes you come out of it with a fresh understanding of why a decent person would act that way.

Other times you don't.

PV linked to Dean Wesley Smith's post on that letter by the Association of Large Publishers' and Chain Bookstores'--oops! I mean Authors'--Representatives.

And someone critical of Smith's attitude responded, "Since when was an agent a trade union official?"

WOW. Wow wow wow wow wow.

Let's break that down, because that's a very insightful way to look at agents.

Say you were in a trade union. When would you go to a trade union official?

1. When you're not getting paid.

2. When your work conditions are not acceptable for some other reason.

3. When the company you're working for is not living up to the terms of its contract.

Now, for most people, that's more or less what they want their agent to do. Not getting paid? Onerous work conditions? Publisher not honoring your contract? The thought is, you go to your agent.

The thought is, the agent is in your corner.

NOT TRUE. Someone who is defending agents thinks it's totally stupid to think that's true. Someone who is defending agents thinks that is a silly and pathetic expectation.

Why go to an agent? The person continues, "one reason only – because it was the best way to get the attention of a senior editor at a publishing house and get our work seriously considered."

This person is completely in agreement with Smith, whether they like it or not. Both think agents do not--even remotely--represent authors in any kind of meaningful way.

It's just that Smith thinks they ought to. Stupid, stupid Smith.

And stupid, stupid you if you have the same expectation.

Remember, just because you pay them doesn't mean they work for you.

When traditional publishers act like self-publishers, guess who gets the shaft?

The New York Times has a story about how traditional publishers now want their authors to crank out a ton of titles, title after title, including short fiction and novellas that the traditional publisher can sell as 99-cent e-books.

Isn't that swell? That's exactly the business strategy many self-published writers use, and it works great! Once again, it turns out that all the Very Special Services a large publisher provides don't work nearly as well as offering a lot of titles at a low price!

Fantastic! Traditional publishers are saved!!!

There's just one problem: How much are the writers making in this scenario? You know, those writers who are now being forced to crank out title after title, regardless of whether or not this is something that helps the quality of their output?

Oh, yes--almost nothing!

Let me quote me again, because I can never get enough of that:

OK, so on a 99-cent book, [traditionally-published author George Pelecanos is] making 17 cents--which is half of what he'd make putting that sucker onto Amazon himself at that price, but that's not the scary bit.

The scary bit is that he gets $2.27 on a $13 e-book! !! !!!! !!!!! He could get that kind of money for a book he self-published on Amazon and priced at...wait for it...$3.25.

That's almost a TEN DOLLAR DIFFERENCE to the buyer! And a ZERO DOLLAR DIFFERENCE in profits to the author!

This is why you read all this hand-wringing about how low book prices are going to bankrupt authors. They certainly will--if authors stay with their publishers. As traditional publishers act more and more like self-publishers, authors will in all likelihood get less and less money.

But the problem there is not the cheap books. The problem is the fact that you're working for someone who wants you to produce more and more product while paying you less and less for it.

I mean, I guess you can become the literary equivalent of a sweatshop worker if you want, but I personally object to that sort of thing and don't see the point of doing it unless the alternative is subsistence farming. Which it isn't. The alternative is keeping 35% to 70% of the revenues generated by your titles, and deciding yourself when you want to produce them.

Or, as Passive Guy put it, "Just wait until authors under contract learn indie authors are making serious money from $0.99 or $1.99 short fiction. That only works if you don’t give the publisher 75% of net revenues* from ebooks."

 

*An accounting aside: What is meant by "net revenues"? Well, the problem is that typically this term isn't very well-defined in contracts, which is bad, because "net revenues" can be whatever your publisher says it is.

If we took a common-sense approach, "net revenues" for an e-book would mean "revenues after the retailer has taken their cut." It's something to look out for, because sometimes publishers say things like, "You get to keep 50% of net revenues" and it sounds really good, because if you self-publish you're keeping 70% of total revenues, and isn't it worth a small discount to have the publisher take care of everything for you?

Buuut...the best-case scenario is that they mean 50% after Amazon has taken its 30%. So it's really 35% of total revenues, which is a much more significant chop to your income.

Progress report

I'm taking the regular layout and turning into a large-print layout--this is very different from the way I did things last time, which was basically to take the text, format e-books, and then start laying stuff out. The problem with doing things that way is that you catch a lot of mistakes when you're making layouts--reading something printed out in a completely different font seems to refresh the eye--so I had to revise the e-books over and over and over again. (Indeed, I caught a couple of minor things today.)

APH-style large-print layouts aren't justified--you use a ragged right, so you don't break words at the end of the line. You also don't indent paragraphs, instead using two lines of white space. That means that a lot of the hyphens come out, as does all of the kerning and all of the tab characters, which is also what you want if you're going to format something into an e-book.

You do, however, have to throw in extra line spaces between paragraphs and to get those bottom lines to even up. So what I did was I stripped down the text and saved that. If I don't find mistakes in the printout, I'll just use that clean text--if I do, I'll have to clean it again, but it should be less complex.

I stripped out the entire book, and I threw it all into templates. Only one chapter is truly and properly laid out, with everything lined up the way it should be, but they're all in the rough-and-ready stage--correct font, correct paragraph style, correct headers and chapter numbers, etc.

I'm not going to have a hell of a lot of time to work this weekend, but hopefully this won't take too long and I can get it done and off to CreateSpace before I leave town.

Thinky thoughts on marketing

Remember how I was going to do a giveaway on Goodreads, but then I saw that the book had to come out within the past six months, so I didn't? Well, Lindsay Buroker did a post on Goodreads giveaways, and it turns out that they don't actually care about that. Definitely go read through the comments on Buroker's post--a lot of good advice for maximizing those giveaways.

It's a little annoying (sometimes I'm overly fond of rules), but I guess it's good that I could coordinate a Trang giveaway with the release of Trust. (And hey! I already have the books!) The only problem for me is that I'm going to be out of town for a week in May (yeah, right in the middle of my big push to get Trust out, life is very convenient sometimes), so I'll have to schedule around that.

The other thing that I'm thinking hard about is advertising. You have to be really thoughtful with it, in my opinion. The people I reach on Twitter and with this blog (and I do reach more now, the ho'ing has paid off) are other writers. Which is great, and definitely something I want to do, but of course I don't expect them to be big fans of my kind of book (that would be incredibly hypocritical of me).

But when it comes to advertising, I want to reach readers, not writers (and science-fiction readers, who are rare birds indeed). That's part of the thinking with marketing at sci-fi cons, and I need to do something similar with on-line advertising. It's about finding the audience: Lawrence Block mentioned a self-published book that sold well at feed stores, and there's a guy who did very well marketing his self-published book on gun forums--in both cases these were books that came out before self-publishing really took off, which gives you an idea of how effective that tactic can be. I think Amazon's marketing power makes people get a little lazy sometimes--they just focus on that system and ignore everything else--but especially with a niche market like science fiction, you have to reach out.

So, who are you representing, again?

The other thing that's happening is that the Association of Authors’ Representatives has sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking them to please let publishers break the law whenever they feel like it. This follows an earlier, similar letter by a board member of the AAR who also heads the agency Writer's House.

(Anyone else remember when Writer's House was a really prestigious agency? I would have given my left arm to be repped by them back in the day. On the other hand, I got screwed by people who were every bit as prestigious, so I guess it all worked out. This just goes to show that the line between respectable agency and dirtbag agency has basically become nonexistent.)

Of course my first thought was, Hey, these guys are Authors' Representatives the same way Scott Turow is president of the Author's Guild! But then Joe Konrath made that point many times, and it's very entertaining, so you should go read all that. And you should re-read how one agency dealt with problems reporting e-book revenues, just to hammer home who these people are actually working for.

And then you should read Bob Mayer's takedown (via PV). Mayer is both a writer and a publisher, and he makes a good (if painfully obvious to those outside the industry) point:

For too long some agents and many publishers mistakenly believed they actually created the PRODUCT that readers consumed:  i.e. the book.  Even with print, that’s not true.  The PRODUCT is the story, the words.  The printed book was the medium by which those words reached the reader.  Thus agents and publishers and bookstores were, and still are, facilitators.  Not creators.

I think this mentality that agents/publishers/bookstores create the product is at the core of why writers get treated so badly by traditional publishing. I mean, it makes sense for you to get 90% of the money if you create the product, right? If you're just a facilitator, taking such a big cut would suggest that you are somehow abusing your position, but if you created it--if Stephanie Meyer wouldn't be anything if it weren't for you!--then all's right with the world. So, yeah, the agents are lining up to back price-fixing publishers and Barnes & Noble rather than writers, because writers bring nothing to the party other than a whole lot of whining.

The main thing to understand is that agents are fighting to defend a system. Traditional publishing is a system that they understand, it's the system that allowed them to profit, and perhaps most important, it's a system in which they were important. They created books. They created literary culture.

If things change, they'll be just another service provider. What do agents do if they're not gatekeepers anymore? They help negotiate contracts. That's it.

And once you put things in those terms--once agents are off that gatekeeper pedestal and people are no longer forced to use them--people are going to look at what agents are providing and start asking questions. Pesky questions. Demeaning questions. Questions like, is this service worth paying for? Is this the best person to hire? Are they offering a good value?

That's going to be a considerable step down. That's going to be the end of the days of telling writers what kind of paper they should use for their queries.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt files for bankruptcy

It's a busy day out there in Webland! For starters, the New York Times reports that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is filing for bankruptcy--the Chapter 11 kind, not the "Th-th-th-that's all folks!" kind, so course the CEO is saying it's "positive news" and that employees certainly shouldn't start mailing out their resumes RIGHT NOW.

Everything's fine! It's just bankruptcy! I'm sure when the private-equity firm took on an unbelievable ton of debt, employees were told that that was nothing to worry about! And when Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt were combined, employees were told that consolidation is certainly NOT the mark of a shrinking industry, and that it was nothing to worry about! And when Houghton Mifflin Harcourt stopped taking on new books--nothing to worry about! At all! Everything's going great! The future is ours!

Ah, yes, it brings back memories.... The first publisher I worked for stopped contracting new books, too. I started looking for another job. (Doesn't that make me sound like I am immune to denial? I didn't actually realize what was going on until after I had a conversation with someone I was encouraging to move elsewhere. That person was not convinced to jump ship, but I sure was!) I found one, turned in my letter of resignation, and got REAMED OUT for my treachery and stupidity. Why was I leaving? I was so dumb! NOTHING WAS WRONG!!! Ten days after I left, they shuttered the New York office. (I don't resent the person who reamed me out--it was just another example of denial at work.)

What am I trying to say? If you work in traditional publishing, no matter what soft soap your boss is selling you, you need to get ready. Actually, you should already be ready--publishing has never been anything but a volatile industry--but you need to start thinking about a world without a traditional publishing industry in it. No matter what they tell you, publishers are NOT optimistic--they would not have attempted price-fixing if they were.

Will publishing services still be needed? Oh, yes. It's just that the way you do your work--who hires you, how you find work--is going to change immensely.

Learning and self-publishing

M. Louisa Locke has another one of her rare-but-excellent posts up, in which she talks about why she's doing what she's doing. I feel like I've been fairly risk-adverse with my career as well. But you reach a certain age, and it starts to feel like it's now or never, right? (OK, fine, I've actually reached that age more than once.)

She writes:

When I experiment with a new price point or a free promotion and then analyze the outcome, I am engaged in an intellectual exercise that, to a degree, counteracts even a negative sales result. In my mind, my book hasn’t failed and I haven’t failed; the experiment has failed and I have learned something from it.

And it's interesting to me, because I'm rather obviously not a natural at marketing. And yet, here I am with a marketing plan (yes, marketing AND planning! Together! Me! It's shocking), and I'm not freaked out, because it's going to be an opportunity to learn.

I've already learned a lot: Last year was a big one for learning about production. I learned about positioning a book correctly for its audience. And this year I've learned that marketing strategies that don't make me want to hang myself do, in fact, exist.

Like they say, education is the one thing they can never take from you (unless they hit you on the head really, really hard). And lucky me, I enjoy learning. Which is good, because I still have a lot to find out!

Something to think about when it comes to contracts

Passive Guy wrote a nice little post today in response to a question about an earlier link to a post by Ann Voss Peterson over at Joe Konrath's blog about Harlequin's horrible, horrible contracts. Definitely the initial post is worth reading--the terms she describes are so bad that someone asked PG (who is a lawyer) if there's any kind of protection for authors when they sign contracts.

The answer? NO. If you sign a contract with a publisher (or an agent, for that matter), "the laws governing business contracts assume that each party to such contracts will watch out for themselves."

Got that? You are business partners. That means that 1. whether you like it or not, you are a businessperson, running a business, and 2. you and your publisher are on equal footing, even if your publisher has an enormous legal department and you'd be hard-pressed to afford the type of lawyer who advertises on bus benches. There's nothing in there about how you can ignore all that business stuff because it is too complicated and you are too artsy. Even if you're signing with a publisher to avoid learning about all that business-y crap--the law does not care. 

PG goes on:

When you sign up for a new Mastercard with your bank, you are wearing your consumer hat and can assume you have some protections against unfair and deceptive contract practices. When you sign a publishing or agency agreement, you have no consumer hat on and you should not assume a “standard” contract will be fair or equitable for you. You should also not assume you will be able to easily get out of that contract if you later find it to be unfair. 

Note that the publisher has no special legal obligation to take care of you. They are under no obligation to make sure you get a fair share or to be sure you can earn enough to make a living from your books.

In fact, Donna Fasano commented:

While attending an RWA conference, a friend of mine stood up and asked a panel of HQ editors and other ‘suits’ how they expected their authors to live on the paltry wages they paid. Their blunt answer, “We don’t.” They said they warn authors not to quit their day jobs; they tell them not to expect to earn a living as a writer. They stress that this is a hobby, not a career.

Isn't that sweet? Once again, writers aren't supposed to make money. The people who publish their writing are--you don't see any of those suits forgoing their paychecks, do you?

Progressless report

Well, at least I have the corrected layout all printed, but I didn't sleep last night--sometimes this happens. I tried to caffeinate up, but when I looked at the first page of Trust I just couldn't process it. So I decided to read someone else's book, but that's not going so well, either. I think I'm just going to watch TV and go to bed early....

"Yer first book is gonna suuuuuuuck!"

You know, I keep reading variations of the above sentiment. Your first book is going to suck. New writers don't know a damned thing. Write your first novel, sweat blood over it, and then throw it away! For God's sake, don't expose anyone to your first book--think of the children! It's radioactive! The first novel ALWAYS SUCKS!!!

Le sigh.

This is one of those pieces of advice where I can totally see why the people giving it think they are being helpful. The problem with it is that it's not true and is basically meaningless to boot.

Now, you might look at me and say, Why would you think this? I mean, I wrote professionally for the better part of two decades before publishing Trang. I even ditched my first novel: I wrote the first draft in the summer of 1999, went back to it a few years later (I had to finish my degree and earn a living), tried to polish it up, read Of Human Bondage, and promptly trashed it. I mean, trashed it--I have no idea if I have a copy of it anywhere any more, and given that I've had two computers crash in the meantime, I probably don't. And I don't care: There was absolutely nothing I had to say in my novel that Of Human Bondage hadn't already said.

The problem is, I wrote a story in high school about a young lady who accidentally "falls" into a fairy dimension and has to, among other things, fight off a vampire, because it turns out that vampires are really a kind of fairy--all while dressed in only her underwear. It won a prestigious national award.

So...did that story suck?

Before I ever even attempted to finish that novel that was merely drafted in 1999, I wrote a Firefly fanfic novel. Now if you ask me, I think that story could have been made much better--I knew I was never going to get paid for it, so it's just a first draft, and my first drafts are never as good as my final drafts.

But because we Browncoats wanted to know if there were going to be official Firefly novels (and because a friend of mine was really nagging me about getting serious about this novel-writing thing--she is thanked in Trang), I submitted it to the publisher of the Buffy novels. I got back a truly lovely rejection letter praising my novel very generously but noting that, at that time, they hadn't gotten the right to the Firefly novels. (Later on they did, but no Firefly novels were forthcoming--what's up with that, Joss?) You know, come to think of it, that first letter set the tone for every rejection I ever got.

So...did that story suck?

Toss in the fact that many writers clearly degenerate over time. They get bored with their own books or they get sufficiently "prestigious" that no one is allowed to fix their horrible, horrible writing or they get super-lazy because they'll get paid no matter how awful their stuff is.

And even the most talented authors write stuff that sucks. Let's put it this way: The Bad Hemingway awards exist because, while there is nothing quite as good as good Hemingway, there is also nothing quite as bad as bad Hemingway. (I know this is true, because I've read it. Apparently Hemingway asked someone to be sure to destroy his bad, never-published crap after he died, but when that happened, the "friend" decided to publish it all instead. The moral of the story? Burn it yourself, or use computers that crash.) If it didn't bother William Faulkner to publish Sanctuary, I don't know why on Earth publishing something that might suck should bother you. Authors tend to be judged by their highs, not their lows.

We're not even getting into the question of, What sucks? I thought the Twilight series sucked (not just the first book, but because it really wimps out at the end, the whole series), but there's at least $160 million saying that I'm wrong. You shouldn't even get me started again on Ayn Rand or John Updike, but both are considered classics in some circles (you know, like RAPIST circles).

The "Your first novel SUCKS!!! Burn it NOW!!!!!" is not that different from the advice, "Put a poem in a drawer for 10 years before looking at it again" (which is cited on Rusch's blog as advice that shouldn't be taken literally, but you shouldn't attempt to access that blog right now): It's an attempt to force a writer to attain a goal that can be reached by other means.

What is that goal? You need to apply the same standards to your own writing that you would apply to someone else's.

In other words, your novel--be it the first or the hundredth--needs to be something you wouldn't mind reading if someone else wrote it. That's really all that matters.

As they say: You can't make everybody happy, so you might as well make yourself happy. The problem with the notion that your first novel MUST suck (which has got to be news to the kid who wrote Eragon--you know, I had no idea that book was self-published first. Awesome) is that it feeds into the belief system that you are a tiny, little, worthless, talentless piece of crap who should not dare to attempt to brave the big, bad system of publishing that is filled with people who know SO much more than you do. It feeds the Three Ps, and it encourages you to do: NOTHING.

And there is nothing so risky as doing nothing. Buying lottery tickets is better than doing nothing, and trust me, I have never bought a lottery ticket. Doing nothing, especially as a writer, will unequivocally result in failure--100% of the time.

For want of a button battery, a critic was lost....

I've mentioned that I'm a fan of Joss Whedon's work, so I've been keeping an eye on the reviews for The Avengers, since I'm probably going to break habit and actually go see it in the theater. For the most part, critics seem to like it, but a rather notable exception occurred yesterday in The Wall Street Journal.

That reviewer clearly did not enjoy the movie, and he singles out a slow first act as a problem. But he puts "an asterisk" onto his lack of enjoyment and goes on to note (emphasis added):

Now, about that asterisk. I saw "The Avengers" in 3-D at a screening in Hollywood at the ArcLight, a multiplex known for excellent projection. As soon as the opening credits hit the screen it was obvious that something was wrong; the images were dim and badly out of register. I should have known that the problem was a dead battery in my glasses, since the same thing had happened—in a different theater—during last year's disastrous screening of "Clash of the Titans." Instead, I sat there stewing with frustration, and assuming the projection was to blame, since a couple of friends who'd come with me were having the same problem. One of them went out to complain, but nothing happened. A few minutes later he went out again and returned with replacement glasses for himself, his wife and me. Someone had told him the glasses were the culprit, but those batteries were dead too.

The third try did the trick; he passed out three pairs of glasses that worked. By then, though, I'd been distracted for most of the first act, and felt more empathy than I would have preferred for Bruce Banner's problems with anger management. That's the main reason I'm recounting this here. The technical screw-up was so upsetting that it may have skewed my judgment about the movie as a whole. I think I settled down, but I can't be sure, and I can't omit mention of the problem from my review.

The other reason has to do with the status of theatrical exhibitors as the weakest link in the 3-D process. (Some theaters have already been caught reducing light levels on the screen to extend the life of expensive projector lamps.) What happened to me and others at the ArcLight the other night was the height of absurdity. Here we were watching a production that cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter-billion dollars. Yet our enjoyment was compromised by button batteries that can't cost more than a buck a pop. And we were an invited audience, privileged to see an advance screening, not moviegoers paying hefty premiums for their 3-D experience. I shudder to think what they see.

Your book. Your book is the quarter-billion dollar movie extravaganza--because, let's face it, the time and energy and money required by book production is but a small fraction of the time, energy, and lost revenue required to write the freaking thing in the first place.

The one-dollar button battery? That's your copy editing and your book formatting and layout.

When done well, these things cannot make someone enjoy something they wouldn't enjoy anyway--this critic may have disliked Avengers even more if he had been able to actually see the first act. This makes less-experienced writers believe that these things are trivial and don't matter. The problem is, when these things are done poorly, they can turn a potential fan into someone who goes, "Meh, I didn't really enjoy it."

You want people to get "swept up in the story"? PONY UP FOR GOOD BUTTON BATTERIES, ok?

Yesterday's progress report

Sorry, I forgot to post this yesterday: I finished inputting the copy editor's corrections, yay. Again the lack of big layout errors made the process go much faster. But then I tried to print out the corrected manuscript, and my printer died. Like, it's really, really dead. It's less than a year old and still under warranty, so they're sending me a replacement. Today I'm going to my sister's house to print out the rest of it, although I won't be getting much done because, you know, I'll be at my sister's house. Still, I should be able to get it read one more time pretty quickly, and then I'll send out advance review copies and start laying out the large-print edition.