Money, writing, and realism

This is something that I know is going to make me sound like a real ass, BUT: Writing fiction is not a short-term solution to your serious financial problems.

OK?

I know people look at the overnight successes and say, That could be me! But what they're ignoring is that there is no such thing as an overnight success. Amanda Hocking? NINETEEN NOVELS UP. Joe Konrath? FORTY. Smith & Rusch? TWO HUNDRED. Again, they just look like overnight successes because their many, many years--or decades--of work paid off all in one go.

But what about the people who do make one book work? Well, generally speaking, they've spend years building up an audience in some other way, or they have a background in marketing and don't mind doing that all the time. And I do mean all the time--I wish I could find the link, but I remember reading a story about one guy (who had, like, decades of experience as a writer, but anyway) who made one self-published novel work for him, and on an ordinary day, he spent five hours marketing that sucker. Those were not his "marketing days"--he spent more time than that marketing on the days when he was actually making a push.

And it's not just time they spend--they spend money. They buy ads, pay for reviews in places like Publishers Weekly or Kirkus Reviews (unethical, guys!), pay to enter writing contests (gee, I won my stuff for free)--OK, clearly I have a lot of issues with all this, but apparently the return-on-investment is sometimes there. (Sometimes. You're just paying for PW to consider reviewing your stuff. And be aware that they and Kirkus have gone over to the Dark Side of reviewing with this--they just have.)

What I'm trying to say here (in between rants) is that, if you have no money to pay for marketing, and you have no time because you need to work for a living, the MARKET! MARKET! MARKET! approach to overnight success is not going to work for you. You can't buy overnight success if you have no money to buy it with.

So overnight success is off the table. What should you do? Should you start looking for a traditional publishing contract?

Oh, fuck no. Seriously. Going for a traditional publishing contract because you "can't afford" self-publishing is like relying on payday loans and check cashing services because you "can't afford" to go down to your local credit union and open a no-fee checking account. It's bullshit. The financial benefits are an illusion. Assuming you actually get anywhere (which you probably won't), you'll pay up-front money to find a publisher (including maybe paying to self-publish your book! Isn't that awesome!), you'll pay up-front money once you get a publisher, and you'll pay a lot more money in the long run.

What should you do?

You treat writing like a hobby.

What!?! you shriek. I am not a hobby writer! I am a serious professional!

Notice how people like to join together the words "serious" and "professional"? I hate to break this to you, but there are many, many writing professionals out there who aren't the least bit serious. Why do you think the word "hack" exists? All "professional" really means is that you get paid.

I am not suggesting that you don't take writing seriously. Take it seriously. Be open to criticism. Do your best to make your story something you would want to read if it were written by somebody else. Be disciplined in your work habits.

If you are serious about making money writing--which is different from being serious about writing itself--you need to think long and hard about the kind of writing you're doing. Don't be like me and write science fiction: Pick a more-popular genre, ideally one where expensive cover art is not the norm. Focus on speed and quantity of output. Write shorter pieces you can sell more than one way.

But from a financial standpoint? Treat your creative writing like a hobby!

Or better yet, treat it like a small business! Control your costs! Start with the cheap and easy stuff! Expect to make no money for a good long time!

But wait! you shriek (again--you know that's no good for your throat). You always rip into people who say writers shouldn't make money!

Ah--I rip into the people who make money off those writers. If you're writing for me, and I sell your work, and then I screw you over, and then I say, "What? You're not supposed to be in it for the money!" guess what that makes me? A confidence artist! (And an asshole!)

If I say, "You are more likely to become rich overnight by buying lottery tickets than by writing books," then I am telling you the truth. I'm sorry.

Self-publishing is a better business model than traditional publishing. You are more likely to be able to make a living by self-publishing--eventually. It is more predictable than traditional publishing.

It is not perfectly predictable. You don't know when you'll start making decent money, and you don't know for sure that you will ever start making money. It is certainly not a sure-fire way to make money, especially not in the short term.

I know that's not something that anyone wants to hear. But it's the truth. Self-publishing is better than traditional publishing, but that doesn't mean that self-publishing is easy. It just means that traditional publishing is truly horrible.

Some things are hard to write about

I know I haven't written anything about Ray Bradbury's passing. That's been kind of a hard one for me, like when Kurt Vonnegut died--it's surprising how much it can affect you when a writer dies. Even if you never met the person (and I never met Bradbury, although he did give a free talk to a massive arena full of schoolchildren when I was 11 or so that I attended, and he was entertaining in the extreme), if their work really influenced you, it's a bit like losing a family member. 

I grew up reading Bradbury.  My dad was a big fan. That in itself was interesting because by the time I was old enough to start reading adult fiction, my dad had stopped reading it--the rigidity and the extremely fragile sense of identity that would eventually kill him had already led him to stop reading anything that wasn't purely functional. But he was very pleased that I was reading Bradbury--Bradbury was, in his words, "a dandy writer" who specialized in the short story, a form that was for my father a guilty and even shameful pleasure.

In Bradbury's obituaries, it's noted that he married literature and pulp sci-fi, which was an extremely novel mixture at the time. But of course, if you grow up reading someone like Bradbury, the idea that science fiction is some kind of lesser genre that can't be used to talk about complex ideas, adult experiences, philosophy/spiritualism, or social issues is the novel one. I was well into adulthood before I noticed that sci-fi has its particular lowest-common-denominator (horny teenage boys) that the less-ambitious writers feel obligated to cater to.

That expectation that science fiction should not be dumb--that it should be challenging and well-written and non-formulaic and not all about wish fulfillment--was part of the reason it was so frustrating to me to realize that traditional publishing had become so rigid and narrow that if someone like Ray Bradbury--Ray Freakin' Bradbury--was just starting out today, his work would not get published. Because it was different. Because it was creative. Because it was unlike anything anyone else wrote.

At that is why people love it.

I am very much of the "Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!" school of thought--I like that there are no gatekeepers with self-publishing. I'm happy that people can publish stuff that's really freaking weird. Because without the weirdness--without the people who don't obey the rules--you get no Ray Bradburys. No Kurt Vonneguts. No Robert Silverbergs. No Philip K. Dicks. You just get the sexy girlie aliens in glittery spandex and the big alpha males with their enormous guns. You just get the kid stuff.

Progress report

I finished tweaking the large-print layout! Huzzah! It's printed out, and I will read it (probably Monday, tomorrow's busy), make any fixes I have to make, and then I won't have to lay out anything else until I finish writing Trials! Joy! And by that point, I'll probably have a better computer! Happy dance!

How I would think of traditional publishing

This post about (yet) a(nother) bestselling author who is making more money self-publishing went up on Passive Voice last week. The thing that really piqued my interest was a comment by Edmond saying:

You have to wonder whether the career path of a writer will become.
Self publish => Get attention => sign publishing contract => build following => return to self publishing taking readership with you.

That was interesting to me in light of Amanda Hocking's experience--she's definitely building a new audience, as she had hoped, while at the same time keeping a substantial number of self-published titles available. Instead of following Edmond's cycle, however, she's multitasking--since she has so many titles out, she never had to cycle out of self-publishing. She can advance on all fronts.

It doesn't change my very, very strong opinion that if you are a new writer and you want to get published, you should self-publish. (Like, OMG, you should self-publish. Don't be a fool.) Traditional publishing seems to work best for people who basically don't depend on it--they've got self-published titles to fall back on if things go to hell, and they've got self-published titles poised to gain sales if things go really well. (This necessarily means that they don't sign traditional publishing contracts that restrict their ability to write and publish other books.)

I think the best way to think of traditional publishing is as something akin to a Next Step, like doing an audiobook or creating a store on your Web site. You don't start out by seeking a traditional publishing contract; you start out by self-publishing an e-book. Traditional publishers could help you reach people who you might not be able to reach on your own, like those who insist on buying hardcover books at the airport instead of downloading a Kindle app onto their phone, just like an audiobook could help you to reach a previously-inaccessible niche.

But it's an expansion of your distribution model; it's not your only distribution model. It's not even your first or fundamental distribution model. It's something you bolt on, not something you use as your foundation. And for God's sake, don't put all your eggs into it--the future does not look bright for those people.

Random businessy stuff

The Passive Voice has been having some really good posts lately on the businessy end of publishing.

Today he let the comments run the show by asking people there's any predictable correlation between a book's ranking on Amazon and the number of books actually sold/money the author earns, and he asks about sales patterns. The answer about rankings seems to be a general "not really" (your ranking depends on your genre, and at the lower rankings you can jump way up by selling one book); as for sales pattern, not shockingly, the more books you have out.... Also people link to other sites where people have tried tracking data. I try not to worry about this stuff, because 1. I don't have to, and 2. nonetheless I can easily get really focused on that rather than, you know, focusing on writing books, an activity I actually enjoy. But if you're interested, there it is.

Another thing that has led to several posts is a lot of news about companies expanding in e-book retailing and self-publishing. Kobo is going to allow self-publishing and is trying to be author-friendly. A new social e-book app has been announced. Wattpad (where you give away stories for free) got a bunch of money. And Forbes did a profile on Mark Coker of Smashwords, which includes exciting (at least to me) tidbits like Smashwords recently expanded from three employees to fourteen, and that it expects $12 million in revenue in 2012. (And $1 million in something called "pretax profit." OK, guys, that's bullshit--I know private companies can say whatever, but why even report that number? Unless Coker plans on counting his money while sitting in jail for tax evasion, it's not a profit until after he pays his taxes.)

And Coker financed the company by borrowing $200,000 from his mother. Gotta love those entrepreneurs!

Progress report

Another day saved by the timer--I got up to chapter 20 done.

But I found mistakes! Argh! It was something I thought I had been really careful about--a couple of chapters are told from the point of view of an alien who is supposed to refer to the humans as "it" throughout, but I found a "he" and worse yet, two "her"s, which is truly a marvel considering that that alien comes from a species that has only one gender! Ugh. I had noticed I was slipping back into using "he" later on, so I went over that part really carefully, but of course I managed to throw in a couple very early. After I read over this layout one last time I'll input those fixes.

OTOH--as I was futzing around and procrastinating and fiddling with stuff around the house, I actually came up with some very good ideas for Trials. Sometimes busy work helps with the thinky work...

Abstraction in art and literature

This is an interesting article on abstraction in art, including literature. It concludes:

You can also see the mark of abstraction on a fair amount of 20th-century literature—and not just the avowedly experimental writings of James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, either. Countless modern writers have been influenced by Anton Chekhov's short stories and plays, which renounce plot-based structure, concentrating instead on the quasiabstract sketching of character and mood. This approach long ago became the basis for the vast majority of short stories published in the New Yorker. Somerset Maugham, a staunch traditionalist who believed in the iron necessity of plot, liked to tease younger writers who embraced the magazine's famously ambiguous house style: "Ah, yes, those wonderful New Yorker stories which always end when the hero goes away, but he doesn't really go away, does he?"

But Maugham's sly quip also reminds us that nonvisual "abstraction," for all its historical significance, has never become truly popular with mass audiences—and neither, for that matter, has visual abstraction. Though it has no shortage of devotees, most people are still more comfortable looking at paintings with a subject, just as they prefer novels and plays with complicated plots and four-movement symphonies with familiar harmonies, and my guess is that they probably always will.

Yet despite what seems to be an innate preference for more or less literal representation of the visible world, the abstract idea remains to this day both seductive and perennially relevant. Why? Because the best abstract art has the power to cut through the rigid conventions of direct representation and externalize interior essences—to show us things not as they look, but as they are.Balanchine may have understood this better than anybody. "We choreographers get our fingertips on that world everyone else is afraid of, where there are no words for things," he told Jerome Robbins. He knew that a wordless glance across a near-empty stage, or a splash of color in the right place on a canvas, can sometimes say more than…well, a thousand words.

I feel like abstraction can be done well, in which case it's VERY interesting, or done poorly, in which case it's predictable, derivative, self-important, and dull. You know, like pretty much everything else when it's done poorly.

But I do like plot. And I think sometimes people get too wrapped up in the abstraction in a really admirable piece of writing and forget about the fact that there's a good story in there, too. Even a book as dense and experimental as James Joyce's Ulysses has some great storylines--the whole saga of the marriage of the Blooms was just heart-rendering, and the reveals were handled masterfully. I totally thought I knew where F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night was going, and I was totally wrong. I like Michael Chabon's books because he usually has a rip-roaring story going on along with the excellent writing (and The Yiddish Policemen's Union is my least-favorite because the plot is really predictable, especially if you've read his other stuff).

Progress report

Yes, I actually made progress today! I blew off yesterday (saw Cabin in the Woods--hee!) and was tempted to blow off today, but instead I was very good and set a timer instead. (This is what I do when I really can't settle down--I set a timer for 90 minutes and tell myself that I can quit when the 90 minutes are up. By that point I'm typically more into the groove and keep working.)

Anyway, I am 10 chapters down (out of 28) on the large-print edition--I lost a page, so basically I have to lay it out yet again, because all the spreads have moved over one. But I'm much fresher than I was, and there are relatively few art mistakes left by now, so that's actually going fine.

The idiocy of snobs

I have to vent: When you've got no leg to stand on, you can always just be a big fat snob about things. You put other people down to make yourself feel better. Why? Because that is the only way you can feel good about yourself.

Snobbery is pathetic. Snobbery is a mark of desperation. Happy, confident people are not snobs--they just don't need it.

Guess who does?

Apparently certain members of the Author's Guild, who recently spent a pleasant evening making fun of people who are not like them, like the woman who wrote 50 Shades of Grey!

The really convenient thing about snobbery is that it lets you abandon all pretense of logic. (Why do you have to buy Frette sheets? Because they're Frette sheets! What do you mean, they feel like burlap? They're Frette sheets!!!) You can sneer at someone who isn't traditionally published because they write mommy porn. But of course traditional publishers produce a ton of mommy porn--that's pretty much the large majority of romance books, which are the industry's biggest-selling genre. Take away the mommy porn, the quack diets, and the celebutard books, and traditional publishing collapses overnight.

Ah, well--I'm sure E.L. James is crying all the way to the bank. I bet she could buy and sell David Rakoff and Sarah Jones a hundred times over at this point. And if that makes Rakoff or Jones uncomfortable, maybe they should look at the financial terms that were offered them by their precious, precious traditional publisher--who, it should be noted, would cut them both loose and blacklist them both in a second if they could sign James by so doing.

Oh, is it mean to point that out? Is it mean to point out that traditional publishing is a business, not a literary salon? Is it mean to point out that your financial interests and those of your publisher don't always coincide?

In half a second.

And then there is Steve Wasserman's article in The Nation (via PV and Rusch's excellent post on the industry overall): 

Readers of e-books are especially drawn to escapist and overtly commercial genres (romance, mysteries and thrillers, science fiction), and in these categories e-book sales have bulked up to as large as 60 percent.

OK, where to begin?

With a quiz!

Q. Readers of e-books are "especially drawn" to romance and mystery/thriller because....

A) They are stupid stupid stupidheads who are stupid with their stupid e-readers and their stupid iPhones and their stupid gadgets and stupid kids these days and their stupid stupid stupidness!

B) Uh, aren't those pretty much the most popular genres in any format?

Wasserman's a book editor--isn't that pathetic? Of course, he's at Yale University Press, so he's somewhat protected from having to know his own industry.

Which is why he does things like lump together genres like romance, mystery/thriller, and science fiction.

From a commercial perspective, these genres are nothing alike--science fiction is not a big seller. Which is why traditional publishers largely abandoned it. Which is why indie titles dominate the e-book bestseller lists.

It's harder for indie authors to produce and (especially) to distribute paper books--you have to lay the book out and reach out to indie bookstores (forget the chains). Science fiction is big in e-books because it's simply not as available in paper. I wanted to read Wool (I haven't yet! No spoilers!) so I downloaded it--what choice did I have? My local library doesn't have it, and I seriously doubt The World's Worst Barnes & Noble does.

Oh, but I forget! Wasserman has the Power of Snobbery, which handily defeats the Power of Logic, or the Power of Actually Knowing What the Hell You Are Talking About!

All these genres the same, because they are...escapist!

You know, like the science-fiction novel The Hunger Games, which is about a teenage girl living on the brink of starvation who is forced by an oppressive government to fight other teenagers to the death. That book was many things--violent, brutal, and stressful to read--but escapist? No, escapist it was not. I just finished another science-fiction novel, The Windup Girl. Again, a very good book, but again--escapist? What the hell are you trying to escape from? Having enough food to eat? Good health? Being able to walk the streets in safety?

And thrillers? Honestly, there are many books in the thriller genre I don't read because I just can't handle all the violence and gore and sadism and death and...escapism.

Anyway, if Wasserman wasn't so busy being a snob and a gloom-and-doomer (big time! That article's kind of a Nation special--everything's just awful, although you're not sure exactly why), he might have noticed something really pretty exciting about e-books and self-publishing: Books are becoming bestsellers that, not long ago, never would have been made widely available. Books are being published that, not long ago, never would have seen the light of day.

Why not? Because they were not considered commercial enough.

He writes that with traditional publishing:

We...feared bloated overheads would hold editors hostage to an unsustainable commercial imperative. (We were right.)

Now these bloated overheads are gone. Now no one is a hostage. Call me crazy, but I like that.

Gleaning information from giveaways

Hmm, no one is signing up for a free copy of Trang on Library Thing!

You might think it's too early to draw conclusions, but the last time I did this a good chunk of the people who wanted a copy jumped on the offer the minute it went up.

So, I think there's one (or both!) of two things going on:

1. The audience is pretty much the same as it was six months ago. I though there might be some churn there and that some people who didn't want the book before would want it now that it has positive reviews, but it doesn't look like it

2. The cover is a generic default cover. Other books also have generic covers (or no covers at all--they're having cover trouble over there); overall those books do seem to have lower levels of sign-on.

What does this mean?

Well, given my suspicions about #2, I should continue to hold off on a Goodreads giveaway until Goodreads decides that it is, indeed, physically possible to correct the cover art.

But #1 means that I need to start branching out instead of trying repeatedly to tap a well that has evidently run dry. And given the lack of interest in a free sci-fi book on Kindleboards, I really need to start looking at sci-fi oriented Web sites.

You know, the nice thing about using giveaways is that you're basically conducting marketing experiments without having to pay for advertising. It's a good way to test the waters.

Anyway, obviously it's going to take time, effort and thought to figure out where to market, and I'm wondering if I want to bother with that before I make Trang free. It seems to me that advertising is just going to work better with a free book (especially if people don't have to go to one specific retailer, register, and enter a coupon code). So for now I'll focus on finishing the large-print edition and writing Trials (not to mention family stuff--I've got a lot of trips/houseguests coming up); marketing-wise I'll just focus on sci-fi cons (I may have some interesting news on that front in a little bit), then enroll Trang in KDP Select, and then make Trang free and worry about ads.

Interesting bit about audience building

Passive Voice linked to an extremely dumb article about how self-publishing is hard. I mean, of course self-publishing is hard, publishing is hard, but the implication is that if you publish traditionally you just lie around eating chocolates all day while hard-working publishing professionals carry you around on a divan and fan you with palm fronds, plus there are some flat-out lies about things you can't do if you self-publish. (Like sell movie and foreign rights. Tell that to Hugh Howey.)

Of course the comments are mostly about how painfully stupid and ignorant the article is, but then (as they often do) they go off on an interesting segue, as two authors discuss how instead of writing a novel and then trying to find an audience (like meeee!), they instead found an audience (via writing fan fiction and political blogging) and then wrote novels that appealed to that niche. Neither author, it should be noted, actually planned to do this; it's just how things worked out.

But it's something to keep in mind if you are already writing a lot on a particular topic. You can't stray too far (like I doooo!), but there are plenty of, say, historians who also enjoy writing historical fiction out there.

Chatting and giving stuff away on Library Thing

So, the author chat is live on Library Thing until June 8th. Feel free to go there and ask me questions about pretty much anything--it can be about self-publishing or what I thought of The Avengers, I don't care.

Also, the Library Thing Trang giveaway is up, if for some reason you'd rather do that than use the Smashwords coupon. It goes until June 18th.

And I just want to say that Jeremy of Library Thing rocks my socks. There were some technical problems with the giveaway (which meant that there was--gasp!--a slight delay between me thinking, "Hmm, maybe I should do a giveaway" and actually having one up), and the cover is wrong, but you know, the attitude is right. Jeremy is like, "There's a problem with the cover, I'm sorry--we'll fix that ASAP," he's not like, "We won't let you use your cover, because we're claiming that it is impossible for us to swap out a JPG file." Very little drama, no rules that aren't actually real, and when things go wrong, people acknowledge that they have gone wrong and should be set right. Really, that's all I ask....

Progress report

Yes, progress marches ever on. I made the small changes to the cover of the paperback (next time I'm just going to do it all in one file so that the layer information doesn't get lost) and did a little work on the large-print edition. I also am starting some serious grunt work on this blog, changing interior links so that they all have the marysisson.com address. That's pretty much the ultimate beta job, no?

I'll probably start up on Trials again later in the week.

Interesting, if not exactly shocking

So, I'm doing a Smashwords coupon for a free copy of Trang (go here, the code is MC96E, expires July 1st). I Tweeted it and whatnot, but I wasn't expecting much of a response that way because I've done free Smashwords coupons before, so my feeling is, if you were interested in getting yourself a copy of Trang, you already did.

But I did do something new, which was to post about it on Kindleboards.

And there's been basically zero response. To a free book.

I'm not shocked, because when Derek Canyon bought an ad on Kindleboards, he sold only one book. Guess what he writes? Science fiction!

This is just another reminder to myself that the key here is targeted marketing. With science fiction especially, you have to find people who are willing to read it. Marketing to a broad audience just isn't going to cut it.

Speaking of finding people and free books, I think I'm going to do another Trang giveaway on Library Thing--it's been six months, the book has good reviews there now, and I'm trying to make sure that the people there who liked Trang know that Trust is out.

Decompressing.....

OK, enough of all that. Boy, it's a lot of work getting a book out!

I suppose in theory I should now run around and promote, promote, promote, but I think we all know that's not going to happen.

I will be doing an author chat Monday on LibraryThing--mainly to let the LibraryThing people know that there's a sequel out. And I posted a thing on Kindle Boards, which I'll bump when I'm allowed to bump it. So, you know, if you do either of those things and feel like saying Hi over there, please do.

Mainly, I'm taking a deep breath. And I'm going to see The Avengers tonight! It looks like Cabin in the Woods is still around, too....

There's still stuff I need to do for Trust--there's two very minor art changes I want to make to the paperback cover. We're talking, stuff that's not big at all, but because I now have fancier cover art, it's going to require some attention to fix it properly. Plus of course I have to finish the large-print edition, and make those same changes to its cover.

Buuuut I'm not going to chain myself to the computer for all this. It's more a mind-set thing than anything else. I need some balance back in my home life.

Trust is out!

Whoo-hoo! DONE!

The e-book is at Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords--$2.99 until July 1, when I raise the price to $4.99.

If you haven't read Trang yet, I'm giving it away on Smashwords until July 1--go here and use the coupon code MC96E.

(And, yeah, I'll be giving Trang away a lot, and eventually making it free. Trust is going to be holding pretty steady on price, if only because I am lazy, so....)

The paperback? It's supposed to be on Amazon fairly soon (and everywhere else eventually--I paid the $25 and put it on expanded distribution), but right now it's only on CreateSpace's site. My understanding is that they charge an arm and a leg for shipping, so I would wait if I were you. (Yes, I get a bigger chunk of the money that way, but remember how I'm in the Illuminati? Don't worry about it.)

So many details!

OK, the e-books are really, really finished now. I wanted to have good back matter, but you can't do things like link to where people bought the book with a suggestion that they leave a review if you don't have a Web address for it--the book has to be up before it can really go up. And then I had to upload new versions of Trang that have links to where you can buy Trust, as well as the sample chapters.

And then the Smashwords tech help people had to figure out why Trust wouldn't convert--the short answer is, Word Sucks, the long answer is, Word stuck a bunch of invisible crap in there (in other words, Word Sucks). So I pulled all the crap out of the Smashwords version, and then I took another look at the Amazon and B&N versions, and sure enough, the invisible crap is not so invisible in an e-book format. (I hate you, Word.) So I had to replace those things one more time.

But it's all good now--by tomorrow, which is the official release date (you didn't know that, did you? That's what I told the reviewers, anyway), the aboslute final versions should be the ones you actually get when you pony up for them.

I don't know when the paper book will be up. The Amazon international e-book editions are up already--better go link to them on my home page. Whee!

Trust is uploaded! Mostly!

I formatted the Trust e-books and uploaded them to Barnes & Noble and Amazon...but not Smashwords. For some reason, Smashwords won't take my Word file. At first I thought it was because I tried making my own clickable table of contents (if everything is labeled "Chapter 1," "Chapter 2," etc, Smashwords will automatically generate one, but I have one labeled "Epilogue"). So I trashed that (changing "Epilogue" to "Chapter 28: Epilogue"), but it still wouldn't take it. It's giving me no information whatsoever for why the conversion won't work, and I've done things like clip and paste into a new Word file (which usually helps on the many, many occasions that a Word file goes wonkus) to no avail. So I'm wondering if that's a problem on their end--maybe waiting a couple of days will help there.

And the Amazon file looks a little weird because Amazon took the "Normal" text (which isn't indented in Word) and indented it more than the indented text. It's fine as far as readability is concerned, but I've got a tweaked file ready to go. Also I forgot to include the word count (113,000, if you care) and the language advisory (whoops! Well, hopefully people will see that on the first book) in the descriptions, so I'll have to tweak that, too.

FYI I am indeed running that Early Bird Special--Trust will be $2.99 until July 1, when I will raise the price to $4.99. I also am doing a giveaway of Trang on Smashwords until July 1, despite the fact that they won't let me upload Trust--the coupon code is MC96E, and the book is all by itself over here.