Progress report

I finished the noise removal on chapter 1 of Trang--huzzah, I think it's now officially finished, although I still have to convert it into an MP3.

I was out of town for Thanksgiving and got back yesterday--I suppose I should be happy that I have this lovely beta task to do when I'm groggy as hell (I didn't get much sleep, and not because I was busy doing fun things), but I'm kind of frustrated to be looking at these progress reports and realize that I haven't written anything for two weeks. (Good thing I don't do NaNoWriMo, huh?) It also became painfully obvious during Thanksgiving that this coming spring is just going to be very hard on my productivity--I have to help an elderly relative who is a chronically disorganized hoarder get a house in shape to sell. No, this person does not live in the same state I do--that would be just too easy.

The frustrating thing is that my nice new computer (that I got specifically so that I could produce books more easily) with the enormous screen (that I got specifically so that I could do layouts more easily) is not even remotely designed to travel. Since the person will be moved out by the time I get there (a good thing, trust me--otherwise nothing would get thrown away, ever), there will be no computer and perhaps no Internet access--God, this is sounding very much like I have to get a laptop, isn't it? Uuuuugh.

Random thoughts before the holidays

Just getting these in while I can:

Joss Whedon's Top 10 Writing Tips (via Pam Stucky). Both Whedon and Jane Espenson offer surprisingly good advice for writers of all stripes, even though they are specifically talking about screenwriting. Screenwriters have to be very focused on efficiency, so they talk a lot about plot, engaging the viewer/reader, and pacing, which are sometimes (VERY WRONGLY) considered a little beneath literary writers.

I would like to highlight two particular pieces of advice (although I'm also a big fan of #3--HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY):

1. FINISH IT

Actually finishing it is what I’m gonna put in as step one. You may laugh at this, but it’s true. I have so many friends who have written two-thirds of a screenplay, and then re-written it for about three years. Finishing a screenplay is first of all truly difficult, and secondly really liberating. Even if it’s not perfect, even if you know you’re gonna have to go back into it, type to the end. You have to have a little closure....

7. TRACK THE AUDIENCE MOOD

You have one goal : to connect with your audience. Therefore, you must track what your audience is feeling at all times. One of the biggest problems I face when watching other people’s movies is I’ll say, ‘This part confuses me’, or whatever, and they’ll say, ‘What I’m intending to say is this’, and they’ll go on about their intentions. None of this has anything to do with my experience as an audience member.

Explaining what you meant is a real trap, because if you're in a critique group and someone says, "I don't understand X" and you explain it, then they'll be satisfied. And you may get tricked into thinking that the thing works. It doesn't, unless you plan on standing next to every single person who picks up you book and saying, "What I meant by that was--" every time they hit page 23.

How To Guarantee Failure. OK, this is actually titled "Why I Unpublished My Self-Published Novel," but come on. Removing your book from the market completely--not revising and then republishing it, not changing the name to a pen name, not making it exclusive somewhere, but making it so that nobody can buy it ever--is NOT going to help 1. sales, 2. your career, 3. your finances.

I don't understand the perception that if an e-book isn't performing to expectations, then it should be removed completely. Sure, that works in other businesses, but that's because, say, Chevrolet has only so much room on its sales lots, so if a particular model isn't selling well, it makes sense to stop making it and make room for another model. But that doesn't apply to e-books--the self space is infinite, and there is absolutely no cost in time or money or effort to keeping your book on the shelf. You can decide not to spend any more promoting that book, but it takes more effort to take a book down than to leave it be, and the potential upside to leaving it be (it might catch on eventually) is much greater. Just let the book ride and move on with your life.

Speaking of change

News Corp. is on the rebound and has expressed interest in buying Simon & Schuster, which it would merge with its HarperCollins Publishers unit. (Via PV.)

The merger supposedly would help fight off competition from self-publishers (how?) and give the new company more negotiating heft with Amazon.

And further down in the article it mentions another reason to spin off HarperCollins and merge it with another company.

News Corp. is in the process of splitting into two listed companies, one containing its entertainment assets, such as the 20th Century Fox film studio and Fox News cable channel, and the other housing publishing assets, including Dow Jones and HarperCollins....

One motivation for the split is the flexibility to pursue the purchase of old-media companies that may have turned off current News Corp. investors, according to a person familiar with the company's strategy.

Oh, yes--investor relations. People who want to use their money to make money are not looking to invest in traditional publishing.

Crazy change

This (via PV) is a great meditation on how quickly publishing is changing nowadays.

[N]obody alive has twenty years of experience doing what you want to learn how to do. It’s like somebody telling people shopping for trucks in 1911 that they should listen to them because they’ve been a teamster for 30 years....

The very kinds of things that author/publishers are concerned with and trying to learn more about and evaluate every day–is Kindle Nation a better ROI than BookBud? How best to layer promos and ads around Select free days?–are completely beyond the understanding of people who spent decades in the old models–and see no need to unlearn and relearn because they are experts and already know it....

[P]ublishing is changing daily. Writers are re-examining what they learned earlier this year.

I love this because it doesn't apply only to the writers who made their bones decades ago, but to self-published writers today, including myself. One reason why successful self-published writers give such contradictory advice is that they broke out at different times, and methods that might have worked very well then may work less well now.

I worry about my DIY Publishing thingy, because I last updated it--OMG, twelve months ago! Some of the stuff won't go bad, but some of it I'm sure has already. Between the length of time it's going to take me to finish Trials and the fact that I've switched operating systems and will be using completely different software, I'll effectively be a newbie myself the next time I go through the production process!

It's difficult because with the Meetup group I organize, I have normal roundtable Meetups for the more-experienced people, but the newbies attend a seminar-like Meetup where I just tell them about self-publishing. I tell them, Wow, stuff is changing fast, and I try not to be too specific, but sure enough, every time someone comes up with something that I didn't know about, because I put Trust out a whopping six months ago. (Here's a useful thing: Amazon actually put out something helpful about book formatting.) Plus, since I'm going to put Trang on KDP Select, I've been ignoring the newer retail outlets like Kobo (I'll go on them once I'm done with KDP Select, never fear), so I don't know much about them.

Of course, it's silly of me to pressure myself to be an up-to-date expert on every facet of self-publishing--I'm a writer, that needs to be my focus. But the rate of change is phenomenal, that's for sure.

Book Bastage

A year or or two ago, I met a writer who had done a book with Book Baby and been happy with them. Obviously I'm a such a DIY-er that I'd never use a service like that, but I thought companies like Book Baby or Lucky Bat Books were potentially useful for people who wanted someone else to take care of things like formatting and uploading books but didn't want to give up ownership or control over their books.

And the other day I met someone who seemed to fit that profile, so I dropped the first person a line and asked, Are you still happy with Book Baby?

Well, you know the whole bit I just mentioned about not giving up control over the books? Book Baby will not allow this person to enroll their books into KDP Select because its exclusivity requirement is not particularly convenient for Book Baby.

Wow.

B&N's market share

This was on the Passive Voice yesterday--the original article is here, and it's a survey of e-book buyers by Bowker Market Research to find out what kind of device they use.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook devices had a 14% share in the second quarter [of 2012], a figure that has held steady since the fourth quarter of 2011, but was down from a peak of 22% in the third quarter of 2010

Now this is a different number from either number that appears here: This survey includes devices like desktop computers, smart phones, and iPhones. But 14% is a long way from 27%--a number that is supposed to also indicate the percentage of the e-book market controlled by Barnes & Noble, even though nobody knows how big that market actually is.

If the recent presidential election taught us anything, it's that my jokes have a strange way of coming true--I mean, it's that decisions made about what to measure can drastically affect results. So, deciding that a smart phone or a desktop computer is or is not an e-reading device, or deciding that e-books sold by Amazon don't count--how one chooses to define the "e-reading market" or the "e-book market," in other words--can drastically affect perceptions of how a company is doing. And just like there are various pollsters who make money telling presidential candidates exactly what they want to hear, companies that report data are serving a market that rarely consists of disinterested observers.

Branding confusion

Dean Wesley Smith once did a post on pen names where he made up a list of reason to use one.

On the list was:

-Your Real Name Is Stephen King

Let me think… Oh, yeah, write under a pen name. That name is taken.

If your real name is Stephen King, Smith's advice may strike you as unfair. Stephen King is YOUR name, after all, and maybe you're like me and Stephen has been a traditional name in your family for centuries--centuries!--and who is this dopey little horror writer to come along and make it so you can't even use your own damned name!!!

But none of that matters, because if you write under the name of Stephen King, you will quickly discover that there are only two kinds of people willing to talk about your book. The first kind are the people who bought your books expecting a Stephen King horror novel, who are going to be very upset that your book is not that. The second kind are the people who figure out before they buy your book that you are not the Stephen King they were expecting, and they will assume that you are some kind of horrible scam artist who is trying to take advantage of fans of the horror writer.

The same thing applies to titles. I recently saw a book--well, let's pretend that the book was a murder mystery set in the fashion world, and the title of the book was Murder in Vogue.

Why would you do this to yourself? If you're really unlucky, Vogue is going to sic their lawyers on you. If you are slightly less unlucky, you are going to find that there are a lot of readers who either, 1. buy your book thinking it has something to do with Vogue magazine and get really pissed off when they realize it doesn't, or 2. realize by looking at your non-Richard-Avedon cover that your book has nothing to do with Vogue magazine, and take a pass on it because they think you're sleazy.

(Yes, I realize Madonna released a song called "Vogue" and did just fine, but at the time she was one of the most popular singers on the planet. She had her own brand, which was extremely strong, strong enough to basically eclipse the Vogue brand. She wasn't some unknown.)

Instead, you could have brainstormed a little more and given your book another, equally snappy title, like, say, Dead Is the New Black. You could have titled the series the Fashion Avenue Mysteries, and behold, you are building an independent brand with a life of its own! (And yes, there's another Dead Is the New Black out there, but it hasn't been around for over a century the way Vogue magazine has.)

I realize there's this desire to piggyback onto something--hence the many [Random Number] Shades of [Random Color] titles--but nobody takes that kind of book seriously. It's like Shaving Ryan's Privates: It indicates to readers that your book is not meant to be anything lasting or significant.

Or it might indicate to readers that, like Nora A. Roberts, you're a scumball who is seriously trying to mislead them. That sort of thing can really hurt your career--you can change a pen name, but as people have noticed, having your account blackballed by retailers like Amazon is indeed a serious handicap.

Progress report

Pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving (NO, this was NOT my idea, but I'm cooking for it somehow anyway) took up most of my time today, but I did manage to do some noise removal on the Chap 1 file, followed by some compression, which does make the talking easier to hear. Unfortunately it also makes the breath sounds easier to hear (I had no idea I breathed so loud!), so I'm going to do another round of noise removal later. You know, maybe after post-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving. (That's a joke. I hope.)

Progress report

Things were pretty quiet today, so I recorded chapter one of Trang and edited it. Editing is actually pretty easy--it's not like I'm doing anything that complicated, so it was pretty straightforward cutting and pasting. (I'm using Audacity for software, BTW.)

Gurus

The other day I was talking about an article about Hugh Howey, and Jim Self mentioned how nice Howey's humility was. And it was nice, because Howey freely cops to not really having anything to do with Wool taking off--it just did, so he did his best to encourage it. It actually kind of annoys him because he put much more effort into promoting his other books, and the one novella he didn't promote got all the love.

The reason that was so nice to read is that there's a lot of advice out there, and sometimes you wind up dealing with people who feel their success means that they know what's best for everybody. And many writers really want that--they want someone with all the answers, who can look at their book and give them some simple plan that will magically guarantee bestsellerdom.

With someone like John Locke, it goes even further, and you get sold a book with a simple plan that will magically guarantee bestsellerdom (although he left out some bits). Or maybe the person wants to sell you some services to enact this simple plan that will magically guarantee bestsellerdom. Or maybe they want you to buy those services from their cousin (who is certainly not kicking back a piece of the action).

And you'd be a fool not to pay for that, right? I mean, after all, this person sold a bazillion copies, and who are you? It's a simple plan, and it magically guarantees bestsellerdom--what's not to like?

I would point out two things:

Thing #1: It has, alas, never been uncommon in the world of publishing for people to realize that there are a lot of folks out there who dream of becoming a bestseling writer, and that all those people sure do have a lot of money floating around in their pockets. The fact that a person may have a legitimate and lucrative business (as an agent, a publisher, or yes, even as a bestselling writer) doesn't mean that they're necessarily inclined to let all that lovely money go.

Thing #2: Nobody can ever EVER EVER predict what books will become bestsellers! NOBODY!!! NOBODY can MAKE a book into a bestseller--EVER. The streets of publishing are littered with the corpses of executives who thought that they could. If God himself appeared in the sky in his fiery glory and said to me, "Mary Sisson, I can guarantee that your next book will be a bestseller," I would laugh and laugh, and then feel really bad that so many people believed in this guy for so long. Overpromising is the mark of a scammer.

The "I sold all these books!" card is actually not all that rare these days. It's really wonderful that so many people have been able to make self-publishing work for them, but if you dig down and try to find the "secret" to their success, you will find:

Some think you should offer free books, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should offer 99-cent books, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should advertise, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should use KDP Select, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should have your book available everywhere, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should be open to traditional-publishing deals, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should do giveaways and prizes, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should use social media, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should blog, and some think you shouldn't.

What do they have in common? All those people can point to their copious sales and say, "I'm an expert." It's the story of the blind men and the elephant.

Although it can be hard to remember this, it's actually a very good thing that there are several possible paths to success in self-publishing, instead of just one. It reminds me of the best advice I've ever seen regarding exercise: What is the very best, very healthiest exercise possible, the one that will get you the most fit? The exercise you actually do. If it works on paper and doesn't work for you, it doesn't work.

I mentioned before that I like Lindsay Buroker's approach. But I should also mention that I don't try to be her. Lindsay hires out just about everything. I hire out almost nothing! She likes to focus on her writing, and indeed her success is probably in no small part due to her copious output. I've already spent years experiencing the joys of writing seven fucking days a week, and it makes me happier to finally figure out why none of my mix tapes ever came out right.

With Buroker, 1. if it makes her want to hang herself, she doesn't do it, and 2. she's willing to try different things. I think those two elements are common to the vast majority of writers who have found success self-publishing. The willingness to explore, to find one's own path, to keep experimenting is really crucial.

It's also a lot harder to do than glomming onto someone's simple plan that will magically guarantee bestsellerdom. It's easy to be a child and get led by the hand. It's harder to be an adult.

Progress report, audio geekage edition

I didn't get much sleep last night, and it wasn't raining today (hard rain + metal roof = ambient noise nightmare), so I decided to take a crack at recording with the pop filter. It really does change things, and it took me a couple of readings before I found the best way to handle it.

If, like me, you're totally new to recording audio, it turns out that you have to fiddle a lot with something called input volume. That means the, um, volume of your, er, input--in this case, your microphone.

If you are old and gray like me, you probably made a few mix tapes back in the day. And since people still had a mix of vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs, the music for your mix tape came from a bunch of different sources. As a result, when you'd play your mix tape, some songs would be REALLY LOUD and others would be really quiet.

The problem, as I have discovered decades after being repeatedly baffled by this as a teenager, is one of input volume. If your input volume is too loud, you'll blow the ears out of the poor sod who bought your audiobook or downloaded your podcast. If it's too quiet, that poor sod will have to crank up the volume to hear it, and then they'll get their ears blown out when the next thing on their MP3 player comes on.

This is no way to treat a customer.

So, when you record, you set the input volume at a certain level. Well, duh, you're thinking, that sounds really simple. But it's not! The problem is that certain words will max out the volume of your recording even if everything else is normal, a phenomenon known as clipping.

You might think that clipping is caused by shouting, but you can make something clip, and clip mightily, without significantly increasing the volume of your delivery. For example, the first page of Trang contains the following passage:

And instead of a vacation, all he had gotten had been variations of the question, What, exactly--? What, exactly, was the Titan station for? What, exactly, could scientists do there that would ever justify its cost? What, exactly, was its purpose?

Now, with those lines, if you make "What, exactly," sharp--not shouting "WHAT, EXACTLY!!!" because that would be silly, but just using the snippy tone that someone would probably use if they were asking that kind of question--it clips like nobody's business. "What, exactly," becomes "WHat, exactly," and even "W[random distortion that is not at all pleasant to listen to]Hat, exactly."

The issue for me is that I have a quiet little voice and a tendency to mumble--people say things to me like, "Oh, I can understand you now that I've gotten the hang of lip-reading." I'm a little better about it at this point in my life, but still--my voice is soft. So I have to crank up the input volume (I'm assuming this is what the mellow-voiced NPR people do, because you can hear them fine), which means a lot more clipping.

The idea of the pop filter is to reduce the clipping, which it does. It also reduces your input volume--oops! So I had to crank it up to the absolute maximum, which meant that when I did clip, I clipped really badly--distortion noises and everything.

But I didn't clip very often, much less than I did without the filter. And I realized that, with the pop filter, it's actually pretty easy to modify the delivery of lines like "What, exactly," so that they don't clip at all.

Once you're dead....

Kris Rusch did a post on having a will and a literary executor, and Passive Guy (who is a lawyer) chimes in as well. (Note that any executor position is a job. People rarely want jobs for which they are not paid.)

My grandfather was also a lawyer and was the vice president in charge of estates and trusts for a bank, so I certainly had the need for things like wills drummed into my head at an early age. (In fact, I first got a will when I was in my early 20s and had no dependents, which amused the hell out of some people.)

But I'm going to point out something that may seem a little contradictory: You can't predict the future.

My grandfather thought he could. He knew all the ins and outs of estate law, and he drew up a monster of a trust designed to virtually eliminate taxes and to ensure that no one in the family would ever be poor again!!!

The problem is, he drew it up in the 1970s. Tax law has changed considerably since then, so strategies that were supposed to save us money no longer do. Instead, they greatly complicate record-keeping and greatly increase the fees we have to pay lawyers and accountants. The institutions that were supposed to look after us no longer exist. Coping with all this crap is extremely time-consuming, and we are planning to petition the court to dissolve this trust as soon as it is practical because we don't want the next generation to have to deal with it.

So, while I do think you should certainly have a will, don't be a control freak about it. If, a century from now, your great-grandkid blows all your hard-earned money on drugs and winds up in the poorhouse, that's on him. There's only so much you can do.

Compare and contrast

Passive Voice has two links up today that were pretty interesting to read in juxtaposition.

The first was titled, "Hugh Howey Doesn't Need a Publisher, Thank You Very Much" (a title that made Howey feel compelled to point out that he does have a publisher for his print editions abroad, a fact that is mentioned in the body of the article). It is very upbeat, noting the Howey has gone from an unknown wanna-be to someone who has sold 300,000 copies of Wool alone, despite the fact that he did very little promotion for the book.

The funny thing was, Howey didn't need a publisher. He was doing just fine on his own. "You do so well self-published, it's hard for publishers to compete with what you can do on your own," he says. "I make 70 percent royalty rates on sales here in the U.S., and if I went with a publisher, that would be cut to almost one-sixth. And so, you know, we sat down with them, and they had some nice offers, but I'm handing them a bestseller with a film contract attached and all of these other things attached and what they're offering is just not as good as what I'm doing currently. I showed them what I'm earning now, and they kind of said, I don't know if we can compete with that."[...]

If Howey had his way, all authors would go the self-publishing route. "My opinion these days is that everyone is better off to start out with self publishing," he says. "It's no longer the career-killer it used to be. ... All publishing success is like winning the lottery, whether you do it along the traditional path or the self-publishing path. You have to get lucky several times over either way. Neither one is a way to make it rich."

He adds, "My realization has been that whatever kind of book you have ... you'll earn more and be in a better position if you own the rights. This is true for a book that will hardly sell, for a blockbuster, and for everything in between."

The second article is titled "Book Publishing Crisis: Capitalism Kills Culture." As you might guess, it's more of a downer.

If you work in, say, journalism, or the music business, you’ve seen this kind of thing before: the erosion and then collapse of an industry, often after mergers and acquisitions announced with buzzwords – “synergy”! – or reassurances that new ownership means that nothing significant will change because, after all, we really value the kind of work you people do. Will publishing continue to slide, gradually, or will it fall apart, like newspapers – which have lost approximately a third of their staffs since the recession and seen advertising revenue sink to 1953 levels — and record labels – where annual sales of the top-10 albums have gone from over 60 million to about 20 million in roughly a decade. Members of the creative class have been here, and it hasn’t worked out real well for them. [Actually, David Byrne says it works out fine and gives the numbers to prove it, but what does he know?]

“It’s really painful,” says Ira Silverberg, a veteran editor (Grove/Atlantic, Serpent’s Tail) and agent (Sterling Lord Literistic) now serving as director of literature for the National Endowment for the Arts. ”I’m sure I’ll have tons of former colleagues looking for work, and they won’t find it. Regardless of what [executives] say, it’s going to be a smaller business.”

Obviously, the article views the world through the lens of traditional publishing lens, quoting a former agent and editor, not some scruffy writer. In fact, a major focus of the articles is, how will the changes in publishing affect editors?

But what about the scruffy writers? Oh, pity them, for they shall live without advances!

And while self-publishing has brought some good work out along with a lot of bad, there is little to no money at the front end. (We tend to hear about the rare exception of runaway success, not the hundreds of thousands of self-published books per year that go nowhere or lose their authors money.) For the independently wealthy, those who married well, or businessmen writing valiantly on the secrets of their success, these are real options. As with much of the Internet-driven transformation of the creative class, authors hoping to make a middle-class living with a modest advance will increasingly be out of luck.

This is one of those things where everything said is true, but basically irrelevant. There is no money at the front end in self-publishing--in fact, there are up-front costs. Life is indeed easier for self-published writers (and traditionally-published writers, and all sorts of other people) who already have money. If you want to live from advance to advance, you'll be SOL because there won't be any advances.

What's not mentioned? Oh, what was it Howey said?

I make 70 percent royalty rates on sales here in the U.S., and if I went with a publisher, that would be cut to almost one-sixth.

Ah, yes....

The article's "solution" to all this is--a huge new government program! A ministry of culture, which will obviously provide corporate welfare to traditional publishers and ensure that nothing ever changes again! Because that's totally going to fly in this specific country at this specific time with this specific deficit, just like the Department of Justice was totally willing to exempt the very special industry of publishing from antitrust law. That is one clear-eyed appraisal of the landscape right there!

Anyway, I think when you read the news from one part of an industry, and it's all happiness and we're-in-the-money, and then you read something from another part, and it's all gloom-and-doom and we're-going-down-without-a-huge-bailout, you do need to ask yourself, where am I in all this? If you're a writer, are you set up so that you can get the hell out of the collapsing side of things? If you're an editor or a cover artist or someone else who provides services to writers, are you reaching out to indie writers and learning about their needs, or are you locking yourself in with a single client who may soon vanish?

Focus!

Life has not been letting me focus on writing--I assume this will only get worse as the holidays descend. But I've been reading some less-than-fully-enjoyable things that have caused me to think a lot about focus, or the lack thereof.

One of the things that separates the modern novel from the picaresque novel of yore is simply this matter of focus. In your typical picaresque novel your loveable lower-class outsider goes over here and has an adventure...and then he goes over there and has an adventure...and then he goes over there and has an adventure...and then he goes over there and has an adventure...and then he goes over there and has an adventure...and then he goes home. The end.

In other words, there's not some larger storyline holding the whole thing together. You could break the picaresque novel up into its component bits, and each bit could stand alone without any trouble.

And it's really less satisfying, at least in my opinion as a modern reader. Nothing builds. There's no larger A plot moving things along and hooking your interest.

I can see the temptation to write a picaresque novel, especially if you've got a bunch of fantastic worlds going on in your head. But just spitting them out onto the page, one right after the other, with very little to connect them--well, it's like after they ran out the Kobol plot in Battlestar Galactica. You're basically asking me to gin up interest and become emotionally invested in an entirely new scenario every 50 pages or so, and that's hard for me to do, especially because your last scenario wound up not really meaning much.

Right now I'm reading a novel that I'm probably going to ditch because it's so unfocused--and I basically never quit novels without finishing them, so that should tell you something. In this case, the lack of focus affects detail.

This book is a blizzard of details. Every thought, every word, every gesture, every object is recorded in loving and extensive detail. The result is a book that is VERY long and not going anywhere. There's no filter and no focus.

You can definitely get deep within a character's point of view and tell me all that they're thinking--but there needs to be a reason behind it. I don't need all the thoughts and feelings of a random person making a minor decision unless there's something really interesting going on with that random person. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulker is a good example of that done well--you are intently within each character's point of view, and they are all desperately screwed up and sometimes quite terrifying people, so it's actually quite interesting.

If you don't have that sort of ambition--you just want to write a plot-driven adventure--then that's great! In that case, don't give me the entire stream-of-consciousness blow-by-blow thought process of someone as they get in a car and get dinner. It's not important.

And don't give backstory by having your characters sit around with nothing to do (a nothingness that is described in, you guessed it, excruciating detail) until boredom drives them to ask each other about their respective backstories. (And then they each discuss their backstory in turn, neatly combining the too-much-detail problem and the picaresque-plot problem.) If your characters are that bored, imagine how the reader must feel.

Signs of the times

MacMillan has decided to stop producing a print dictionary (via PV). Oh, and HarperCollins is getting rid of the last of its warehouses in the United States.

Just tossing that out there as a corrective for all those people out there arguing for one reason or another that this change isn't happening, or has stopped, or doesn't matter, or whatever. You don't stop change by ignoring it; you just set yourself up to get bit on the ass by it.

How Audiobooks Work

Things have been a little chaotic here--hopefully by Wednesday everything will have settled and I'll be able to write. Anyway, I did manage to read David Byrne's How Music Works, which was interesting to me on a lot of levels.

He has an entire chapter on the many different ways to distribute music nowadays (he uses examples from his own career, breaking out expenses and revenues--he's a very open guy). That section was of special interest because while I don't mind giving Trang away as a free podcast, I'd also like to have an audiobook that people can buy if they want, plus if I record the later titles I would want to do them as paid audiobooks and not as free podcasts.

A lot of the places he was talking about just do music, because the only way onto Amazon or iTunes if you are an audiobook is via Audible, and that means going through ACX. The issue with that is that they have pretty specific production requirements--I don't know if they are impossibly specific, though, mainly because I don't know what's involved in mastering. You also have no control over price.

The other option (actually, it looks like you can do both) is Bandcamp, which is a straightforward retail arrangement--no distribution included. They charge a percentage of your sales, but other than that it's free. You can set your price there however you want, which is nice.

Serendipitously, Erin Dolan of Unclutterer, a site I often read, has produced her own audiobook. In her case, she just put an E-Junkie shopping cart onto her Web site--a click on the link takes you right to PayPal.

That looks interesting, doesn't it? For $5 a month I could sell every e-book format plus the audiobooks directly from this Web site. Well, that's going into the Must Investigate in the Future pile.

There's no need to rush

I read two blog posts, one right after the other, by two writers who are both feeling SO overwhelmed by all the stuff they have to do. Just reading those things gave me knots of sympathetic stress.

I've written for a long time, and I think it's important to think hard about how writing is going to fit into your life--after all, if you do it right, writing is something that you can pursue well into old age.

Music is that way, too: You can enjoy music in all sorts of ways throughout your life, and you can do that without ever becoming a full-time professional musician. You can be a doctor who sings bass in a variety of choirs, as was my father, and no one blinks an eye at it.

There seems to be a resistance to approaching writing that way, I assume because of the myth that getting published is some marker of quality. And since self-publishing has rather suddenly begun to offer the possibility of turning writing into lucrative full-time work, people think that they must exploit that possibility. They feel like they gotta do their damnest to hit the jackpot. They gotta write write write write write write!!! and they gotta promote the hell out of everything all the time! Including when they're writing! You just write with your right hand and tweet with your left--don't be a slacker!!!

And don't do anything else! You have no other interests now--you're a writer! You can't possibly expect to get anywhere if, say, you're a doctor who, instead of singing bass in choirs, writes poetry in your spare time. That's just crazy: You can only be one thing!

There was a time where that kind of insane focus was totally necessary--go back and read some of Joe Konrath's pre-self-publishing posts if you don't believe me. But that time is past, and clearly it was yet another symptom of how dysfunctional publishing had become--it's not like things were going swimmingly for Konrath despite all his work.

The problem with the old paradigm was, you either had to sell like crazy, or you had no career whatsoever--your books would never see the light of day. For Konrath, it was scramble or die. But nowadays, if you're not a bestseller, so what? If your book just trundles along, occasionally selling a copy here and there (or not), it's not going to kill you. No one is going to stop you from publishing your next book because your current one isn't selling--believe me, if that was the case, Trust would never have come out.

The other thing is, in the old days, when a book had only a few months to make it, it made sense to scramble to promote it for that short period of time. But now there are no limits to shelf space, and no time limits on your book. So if you're scrambling, there's no end to it. E-books are forever. You will burn out long before your book ever leaves the store.

Which means you need to think long and hard about what you "have" to do to promote, since you'll be doing it for the foreseeable future. The thing I really like about Lindsay Buroker's approach is that she molds tasks to her own personal preferences--she doesn't spend huge hunks of her time doing unrewarding stuff just because someone else told her she has to. There's stuff she hires out, there's stuff she does in the most-efficient way possible, there's stuff she does in her own way, and there's stuff she just does not do, because she's not comfortable doing it. She always looks at these tasks through that paradigm: Do I want to be doing this?

Even writing tons of books--the go-to approach for people who don't like marketing--is only worth doing if you enjoy writing tons of books. Maybe you don't want to do nothing but write all day. Maybe you only have an idea for one book. Maybe you actually enjoy what other people sneeringly call your "day job." I've always preferred freelancing to regular full-time work, but mine is by no means the only way: Despite his fame, Harvey Pekar never left his dead-end job as a file clerk until he retired. His job didn't interfere with his art, and the structure of it helped keep him sane, so he sensibly held onto it.

We get it drummed into our heads that we have to have ambition, that we need to grab that brass ring, that when opportunity knocks, we'd damned well answer the door. What doesn't get mentioned is that after you get that brass ring and open that door, you still have to live your life. You're still you, and you can still be made miserable if you're not careful. Publishing has gotten a lot more flexible; there's no point in ruining that with your own rigid expectations.

Progress report

Well, I was kind of distracted by my shiny new toy today, and I recorded the first chapter of Trang instead of writing Trials. (Yeah, fine, beta tasks are supposed to be done only when alpha tasks cannot be performed. But it's a shiny new toy!)

Anyway, the recording went fine--my neighborhood is usually pretty quiet, and the cats didn't decide to freak out, so ambient noise wasn't an issue. Adjusting the input volume was easy to do, and I think I'm at a good sound range. When I flubbed a line, I just went back and re-read the paragraph. If I didn't like the way a paragraph sounded when I listened to the chapter, I recorded it again. I think the main issue in my delivery is that there are a number of breath noises.

So, I'll have to figure out how to edit all that together, and take out the breath noises. I get the feeling that's going to be the less-fun part, so maybe that will motivate me to, you know, actually write Trials.