Month: August 2009

6 Reasons Why Every New Writer Needs To Be On Twitter

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This article, from Caroline Smailes, originally appeared on her website on 8/12/09.

It seems that everywhere you turn writers are being told that they need to build an online platform. They need a blog, a website, a Facebook page and, perhaps most importantly, a twitter account.

Here are six reasons  I (@Caroline_S) have found twitter to be essential for new writers:

It is big and it is clever: The explosion in twitter users has made twitter the thing all the cool (mainly over 25s) ‘kids’ are doing. It’s new (ish) and to be honest its reputation as the best social media tool out there is well deserved. The simple fact that twitter is the latest trend is reason enough to get involved. The fact that is gives writers the chance to entice hundreds of new readers makes it, well…irresistible.

Conversation is King: Twitter’s biggest advantage is that it makes millions of people so damn accessible. Once a member of twitter, you can follow and interact with anyone else on the system. Now (for me) this isn’t about famous people, it’s about normal people and people that you can connect with and who you’re interested in. As a writer it allows you to make friends and build a following. However, it also allows you to interact with people that can help solve problems. For me, twittering isn’t about trying to get someone to buy my books, it’s about connecting and having a laugh. Need a bit of advice about grammar, or which publisher to approach or even the best type of dog food – twitter can help.

You might just bag yourself a book deal: A growing number of publishers and agents are using twitter. Most are open and ready to interact. This means that, for the first time, writers have the chance to skip the slush pile and go straight to the people that count. Build a relationship with the correct agent or publisher and you never know there might be a book deal in it for you.

Read the rest of the article on Caroline Smailes’ website.

Revelatory Sequencing

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This article, from editor Alicia Rasley, originally appeared on Edittorrent on 7/27/09. In it, she explains how pacing and your choice of what to reveal, and when, can strengthen or weaken your fiction writing.

I’m reading a mystery where the victim is widely disliked, so there are lots of suspects. (I’m summarizing and paraphrasing here, but you’ll get the point.)

So the detective has just arrived at the scene and has said he’ll go tell the new widow that her husband is dead. He thinks that her reaction could tell him something.

The woman sees that he’s a policeman and stands up and says in exasperation, "I hope you’re not here to tell me my son has been arrested."
He says, "I have some bad news. Your husband has been murdered."

Next line:

She reacted with shock but not sorrow, and Yanif saw clearly that she didn’t love her husband. Could she have murdered him? He didn’t know. He just knew she wasn’t mourning his death.

—
Okay. We know she has a husband, the victim.
We know now that she has a son.

Now this is a big moment in the plot. The detective tells the widow, and she reacts in a way that puts her right at the top of the suspect list.

But I think the scene could have been made more emotional, more fun, with a bit of a diversion here. Let’s say the woman rises and says with exasperation, "I hope you’re not here to tell me my son has been arrested."
The detective — craft the dialogue carefully here, because my point is… draw it out. Take your time. Take it slow.
The detective replied, "No. But I have some bad news–"
And then he pauses.

Maybe you want him to draw a breath here. Maybe he’s pausing so that he can see her reaction to the news. But when he pauses, instead of waiting, the widow rushes in.

"No! Not my son! He’s not–"
And the detective says hastily, "No, no, not your son. It’s your husband. He’s been murdered."

So she drops into her chair, hand on her throat, and whispers, "Oh, thank God. I thought you were going to tell me– but he’s all right. Philip. My son. He’s all right, you say?"

And the detective then has to say again, "Yes, ma’am. This isn’t about your son. This is about your husband. He has been–"

"Murdered, yes, you said. But Philip is all right– Thank you."
"But your husband–"
She took a deep breath. "Yes. Walter. Murdered. Yes. Please tell me where, and when."

—

What’s the difference? Well, first, we learn something about this woman. She loves her son. She doesn’t love her husband, but that’s not because she’s incapable of loving. She’s no sociopath.
 

Read the rest of the article on Edittorrent.

Cloud-publishing; or, Why "Self-publishing" Is Meaningless

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I don’t like the term "self-publishing."

Cloud-Publishing

In the emerging world of "cloud-publishing," it’s meaningless, and does not reflect what’s coming, what we’re already seeing signs of. Cloud-publishing — what we’re doing at Book Oven — is providing a toolset, on the web, to publish books; a publishing model native to the web, with all the benefits:

  • instantaneous global distribution
  • simple, web-based collaboration (editing, proofreading, design)
  • networks of creators and collaborators (new and existing)
    • networks of readers (new and existing)

How book creation gets organized in such a model will vary greatly, from the lonely writer, to a small press wishing to focus on content & not technology, to collections of colleagues and friends, to professional associations, collections of strangers aligned by topical interest, or financial interest, or just aligned in the interest of making books.

The key here is: cloud-publishing (and Book Oven) will provide the tools to allow groups of people to easily coalesce around the production, distribution and sale of a particular book or books. How those groups organize themselves will look different from book to book. But Book Oven’s tools will mean that book makers can focus on the important thing, the content, and not worry about the technical hurdles of making, printing & distributing books.

What’s Wrong with the Status Quo?

Others of course, will prefer the current model, and that is wonderful and excellent and good. I love publishers, and books, and book stores, and libraries, and they have brought me great joy over the years.

But the web offers new, parallel ways to make books, not necessarily better, but more flexible, more easily global, more connected.

That’s the larger movement afoot. And if all goes well, Book Oven will be a big part of this movement.

Self-Publishing Doesn’t Cut It

So "self-publishing" doesn’t cut it as a description of what we’re building at Book Oven. It’s too limiting, and doesn’t get anywhere near the vision we have of a new, parallel, model for publishing as a whole.

As the availability of web-based tools for making books grows, the distinction will be between what you might call "corporate publishing" — blockbuster, and top-end publishing; commercial textbook production, etc. — and the rest of us. The rest of us are "independent": the smaller presses, groupings of people who put craft and time into making something with various motivations, and yes, individual writers. That doesn’t mean there won’t be money on the independent side, but the structures around the businesses will be very different than on the blockbuster side.

We’re All Indie Now, or None of Us Is

Though as Richard Nash suggests, we’re all indie now (except the big guys), so even the term indie doesn’t mean much:

So now the phase of indie is over, now that the monopoly on the production and distribution of knowledge, culture and opinion has been broken, what next, a new phase, a drive to, perhaps, create, maintain, defend a New Authenticity arises?—Ah, am I opening myself up for derision with that…? Never mind, I toss it up there, a wounded duck. Power will try to hide behind the people, let’s use a new authenticity to stop them. [more…]

Bloggers Suck, Right? And Amateur Talkers?

But back to "self-publishing": once upon a time, it conjured in some people’s minds a negative slew of adjectives: Bad. Sub-par. Not selected.

Deserved or not, that’s how many react to the term.

They said the same thing about blogging in the old days, and yet I can (and do) now find 10 times as much wonderful, thoughtful, well-written content from blogs than I do from professional outlets. Every time I hear people claim that blogging is "bad" (amazingly, you still hear that), I roll my eyes. As I said to Henry Baum: you might as well complain about bad "talkers." Some talkers are wonderful. Others insufferable. Some of the worst "talkers" are paid lots of money to talk; some of the best are friends of mine and they do it for free. So you would never consider complaining about "talking" as a method of communicating, just because lots of people talk nonsense. You assume that is the case, and seek out the good talkers. So on the web with bloggers, and music, and indeed, books.

Talking is just a means of transmission of words and ideas.

But for whatever reason, it’s hard for people to think of distributing text in the same way that they think of distributing verbal words. While talking might be free, distributing text, audio, video has only recently become (effectively) free. And just as the world is getting used to blogging, and maybe podcasting, along comes this idea that books can be distributed essentially for free. Think about what happened with blogging: suddenly, the means of transmission of text – to a global audience – became free. When the cost restrictions on producing written text disappeared, so did the power of the established system to decide what was worth printing and what wasn’t. And people did what they are wont to do when systems blocking them disappear: they started publishing text like crazy on the web. That made people very uncomfortable. It meant lots of "bad" writers were publishing their text for global consumption. But more importantly, it meant that we saw a beautiful flourishing of great writing that no one had bothered printing before – the topic was too narrow, the audience too dispersed, the return on investment too low. It turns out that the calculations about what’s "worth" publishing is very different when the cost of publishing approaches zero. And that means that now, if you have an internet connection, you can read just about anything produced anywhere in the world. Lutes and Violins? Bespoke tailoring? Goats? You got it.

In the end though, blogging is just a means of transmission of words. And it turns out that there were millions of people willing to write excellent stuff that for whatever reason the traditional media set up did not, or could not publish.

We expect to see something similar with cloud-publishing.

[We’ve had easy access to the tools of publishing for a while, see for instance Lulu. But the most important shift we’re about to see, I think, is the network of readers and writers and book makers. I’ll write more about this later].

Good Books vs. Bad Books

Now, I can guarantee something. As the ability to publish books gets easier, we’ll have more "bad" books than you can shake a stick at. (In fact, we probably already do, published, unpublished, self-published…).

But the lines of distinction will not be, as they were previously, between traditional publishing and self-publishing, but rather just between good books and bad books (with caveats about eyes of beholders etc).

We’ll have corporate publishers making good books, and independents making more good books. And everyone will make lots of bad books too. But how independents organize themselves will change greatly too.

Publishers and the Web

Fact 1: many corporate publishers are having a hard time coming to terms with the web. It’s going to get harder for them – they already are having trouble sustaining their cost structures, and have off-loaded much of the work around the web to their authors.

Fact 2: The web has a wonderful ability to allow people to sort through huge piles of information, and seek, rank and share gems.

Opinion 1: People will find more new writing on the web; so "book publishers" must start to be native to the web, and see the web as integral to their task of connecting readers and writers; they cannot continue to see the web as some kind of add-on to their marketing departments.

Opinion 2: Big corporate publishers will have trouble with Opinion 1; so new publishing models need to emerge.

Nothing Is New Under the Sun

We’ve seen this in music and blogs/newspapers and encyclopedia, where the web, and cheap tools of production have spawned an explosion of creative activity, excellence, choice, and a toiling mass of music and writing of all shapes and sizes (along with lots of dreck, but that’s a side effect of all the great stuff).

We think the same is going to happen for books. With a global audience hungry for content, and cheap easy tools for creation and distribution, and a growing network of creators and readers connected on the web and an explosion of devices that allow people to be reading at times and in places they never did before, the distinctions about where or how books were made will fall away.

Do I Want to Read It?

All that will matter are these two questions:

1. is it any good?

and

2. do I want to read it?

And so "self-publishing" is a term that should be retired.

[Cross-posted at the Book Oven Blog and elsewhere …]

Manifesto (Why Do We Write?)

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This post, from Paul Anderson, originally appeared on the Write Anything blog on 7/19/09.

Than you to everyone for your suggestions at the end of last week’s petulant whine appeal for ideas. I’ve got an idea for a few different articles based on suggestions, but I thought the first one to address should be something that Rob asked, as it seems to be one of the first things to address – why do we write?

Well, I can’t really speak for anyone else, I can only say why I write, and give thoughts on what I perceive to be the general urge to write.

All life is story and myth. We tell stories about ourselves every day, in gossip, in conversation, in blogs and emails and telephone calls. “You’ll never guess who I met”, “did you hear about Sandy”, “I’m so excited I just have to tell you….”

Our popular entertainment consists almost exclusively of stories. Drama, comedy, horror, fantasy, science fiction, romance on television, DVD, the movies, radio, online (even books!).

Even current affairs and news is a form of storytelling, depending on the point of view you want to put across from supposedly objective events (or in some cases events cut from whole cloth). The news is myth in the making, before passing into the realms of history, myths that are generally accepted.

Religion too comes down to storytelling, an esoteric myth to history’s exoteric myths.

Stories impart essential information, warnings about dangers, and explanations for how things are. Humans are curious, curious about everything, and stories are how we explain things. From reminiscing about our greatest hunts and warnings of the dangers lurking in the dark, to how we came to set foot on the moon, our existence is told and retold through stories.

Read the rest of the post on the Write Anything blog.

Secrets Of The Amazon Bestseller List

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This article, from Marion Maneker, originally appeared on Slate’s The Big Money site on 8/5/09.

It’s almost a philosophical riddle: Do sales drive the best-seller list, or do best-sellers get all the sales because buyers see them on the list? As much as we’d like to believe that the crowd picks the best books, a strong presence in retail locations—front-of-store positioning and tempting discounts—still counts a great deal in determining how well a title sells. Nonetheless, authors are in it for the glory, and the visibility and bragging rights of being a "best-seller" retains the glamour of years past.

In the old days, the New York Times best-seller list meant everything. But it doesn’t come out until weeks after the sales take place, and it only updates on Sunday. Today’s author needs a better, faster sounding board. And she’s found it in Amazon‘s (AMZN) unblinking sales rank, the 24-hour barometer of book sales. Indeed, it’s a rare author with self-control who, as soon as the book is published, doesn’t obsessively check the list these days, which is updated every hour.

Yet for all that, few people understand how the Amazon list works or its relative importance in the publishing industry. Amazon’s method of ranking books remains something of a black box with the fancy word algorithm used to describe it.

Let’s look at an extreme version of what a writer can be today. The best writers take an active, entrepreneurial role in their book sales. Publishing is filled with success stories that began as self-publishing miracles. Many of those are novels, but let me introduce you to a friend of mine, Andy Kessler, who did it in nonfiction.

Andy’s a bit of an annoying guy. He’s got that gene that just won’t let him take anything at face value. So when he’s presented with a challenge like publishing a book, he just keeps picking it apart until he feels he can do it better.

That worked to his advantage in the 1990s when he moved to the Bay Area and opened a hedge fund that invested in early stage technology companies: real engineering-geek stuff like chipsets and drivers. Andy did well as an investor. He did so well during the tech boom from 1998 to 2000 that he found himself with plenty of free time for writing afterward. In 2002, when Wall Street was getting pilloried in the press, he realized he had worked with some of the most notorious names from the dot-com bubble, like Mary Meeker, Frank Quattrone, Henry Blodget, and Jack Grubman (remember him?).

So Andy sat down and wrote up his experiences in a book called Wall Street Meat. He published it himself because traditional publishers were too slow and kept him too far from the action. His experience outlines just about everything we know about the Amazon list.

1) Authors’ obsession. Like dozens of other writers, the Amazon sales rank became his daily, even hourly thermometer of success.

"The Amazon rankings are a blessing for authors because you can really figure out how your marketing is working," Andy says. "Just do Fox News? No change. Maybe that wasn’t a good use of my time. A positive Wall Street Journal review? Wow, look at it spike. I went up 150 today. Woohoo!

"Radio interviews feel like echo chambers, ‘Hello Cleveland.’ " he recalls. "I wonder if anyone is even listening to WZIP—they sure haven’t budged the rankings."

2) Smart authors try to goose the list. "After countless hours watching the timing and delivery of PR for my books—radio, NPR, cable TV, broadcast TV, newspapers, magazines, blogs, newsletters—I have picked up on the rhythm of Amazon rankings," Kessler says. "I’ve done the best after a week or two of decent PR followed by an e-mail newsletter (from a third party with a big, big following) with a link to click. The former sets up a base, and the latter spikes the sales within a few short hours or over the course of the day."

"My best?" Andy asks rhetorically. "I once hit No. 4 and stayed there almost all day. It was a Sunday. An e-mail newsletter had dropped on Friday night with a direct link, and I could almost hear mouses clicking all weekend. By Monday morning, I was back in the 20s and 30s; by Wednesday I was back to around 100. It was exhilarating."

 

Read the rest of the post on Slate’s The Big Money.

27 Ways To Breathe Life Into Your Blog's "About" Page

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This article, from social media expert John Haydon, originally appeared on his site on 8/11/09. The tips here are not aimed at authors and publishers specifically, but will be very useful to anyone with a site or blog.

Every three or four months, I take a look at my About page and ask myself two questions:

  1. What are my business goals for this page? In my case, I do strategy consulting and build what I call “social web systems” for small businesses and non-profits. I want this page to help visitors imagine getting results by working with me.
     
  2. Is this page a true reflection of myself? This is a hard one because, like you, I am constantly evolving – and evolutions resist being bound by words.
     

The answers help me to start breathing new life into my About page. Below are a few things I’ve picked up along the way, either from other About pages and/or through trial and error. ;-)

The obvious

  1. It’s not about you. It’s about the visitor. Speak to them – as if they’re sitting across from you at a coffee shop.
     
  2. Answer questions. This person sitting across from you – what questions will they have about who you are and what you do?
     
  3. Open your door. Put links to your about page in a few places. I have mine in my footer, my nav bar and sprinkled throughout posts.
     
  4. Testimonials. Still the quickest way to establish confidence with potential clients.
     
  5. Have a photo. The quickest (and oldest) way of reading someone is through their face. And for God’s sake, smile!
     
  6. Keep it simple. Depending upon your strategy, less can be much more. Danny Brown teases visitors with an outline of services and provides a link to contact form at the bottom of the page. Beth keeps things short and sweet too. 

    Beth Kanter About

     

  7. Make it interactive. If you have a lot of information that people need to know, break it up into sub-pages, like Epic Change did.

    Epic change about

     

  8. Page Directory. Lots of info still? Try putting a table of contents at the top, just like Alltop does.
     
  9. Have a phone number. I can count on one hand the number of times new clients have introduced themselves with a paypal payment. Most of the time, we talk a few times -through email and on the phone.

    [Publetariat Editor’s Note: This is a good tip if you do consulting or other for-hire work, but you’ll probably want to keep your phone number, address and other personal information private otherwise.]
       

Read the rest of the article, including tips #10-27, on John Haydon’s site.

The Little But Really Useful Guide To Creativity

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This post, from Leo Babauta, originally appeared on his zenhabits site on 8/5/09.

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” – Albert Einstein

It’s easier than ever to be creative, to create, to imagine and make what’s imagined become reality.

It’s also tougher than ever, with distractions surrounding us in ways never before imagined.

No matter what kind of creative type you are — writer, painter, musician, marketer, blogger, photographer, designer, parent, business owner — you are likely always looking for inspirations, for ways to let loose your creative genius.

And while there are millions of creativity tips on the Internet, I thought I’d share the ones I’ve found most useful — the ones that I’ve tried and tested and found to be right.

Here they are, in no order at all:

 

  • Play.
     
  • Don’t consume and create at the same time — separate the processes.
     
  • Shut out the outside world.
     
  • Reflect on your life and work daily.
     
  • Look for inspiration all around you, in the smallest places.
     
  • Start small.
     
  • Just get it out, no matter how crappy that first draft.
     
  • Don’t try for perfect. Just get it out there, asap, and get feedback.
     

Read the rest of the post, including 23 more tips to keep the creativity fires burning, on zenhabits.

The Happiness Project: 13 Tips For Actually Getting Some Writing Done

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This article, from Gretchen Rubin, originally appeared on her The Happiness Project site on 5/27/09.

Every Wednesday is Tip Day. This Wednesday: 13 tips for actually getting some writing accomplished.

One of the challenges of writing is…writing. Here are some tips that I’ve found most useful for myself, for actually getting words onto the page:

1. Write something every work-day, and preferably, every day; don’t wait for inspiration to strike. Staying inside a project keeps you engaged, keeps your mind working, and keeps ideas flowing. Also, perhaps surprisingly, it’s often easier to do something almost every day than to do it three times a week. (This may be related to the abstainer/moderator split.)

2. Remember that if you have even just fifteen minutes, you can get something done. Don’t mislead yourself, as I did for several years, with thoughts like, “If I don’t have three or four hours clear, there’s no point in starting.”

3. Don’t binge on writing. Staying up all night, not leaving your house for days, abandoning all other priorities in your life — these habits lead to burn-out.

4. If you have trouble re-entering a project, stop working in mid-thought — even mid-sentence — so it’s easy to dive back in later.

5. Don’t get distracted by how much you are or aren’t getting done. I put myself in jail.

6. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that creativity descends on you at random. Creative thinking comes most easily when you’re writing regularly and frequently, when you’re constantly thinking about your project.

Read the rest of the article, including tips #6-13, on The Happiness Project site.

Technological Evolution Stirs A Publishing Revolution

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This article originally appeared on the Knowledge@Wharton site on 8/5/09.

For publishing, 2009 may go down as the year of the machine.

Consider Amazon’s electronic-book reader, Kindle. Though the first version launched in late 2007, a lighter, faster, cheaper version went on sale this spring. And while the online-only retailer doesn’t release sales figures for the reader itself, its cultural impact was clear by late July, when USA Today announced it would include Kindle editions in its popular weekly list of best-selling books.

With slightly less fanfare, 2009 has also seen the emergence of the Espresso book machine, which will make its New York bookstore debut this fall, having already popped up on campuses in several states. Where Kindle offers consumers a chance to buy some 350,000 books at the touch of a finger — and then read them electronically — the Espresso allows them to print a professional-looking paperback book in about the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.

At first glance, the machines are diametrical opposites — physically, economically and philosophically. The smallest Kindle weighs 10.2 ounces. The Espresso weighs in at about 800 pounds. The cheapest Kindle costs $299. The cheapest Espresso, produced by On Demand Books of New York, goes for at least $75,000. The Kindle is all about virtual books and online transactions. The Espresso is about physical objects that consumers buy in person.

Yet Wharton faculty who follow the complicated, emotionally fraught subject of how we buy and sell literature say the two devices share something even more important: A role in upending longstanding customs in the slow-to-change business of publishing.

In an industry where inventory problems and overprinting of books is a perennial money drain, the Espresso’s premise — not paying production costs until a reader buys a copy — is a revolution. And in a business where the cumbersome task of routing books to your local bookstore has been a continuing burden — not to mention a risk, since the book may be sitting on the shelf for years — the idea of cutting out the supply chain represents a major development.

"Inventory waste and/or printing time are very important drivers of profitability — maybe the key drivers," says Wharton marketing professor Eric T. Bradlow. "Now the marginal cost of production is zero and the cost of inventory is zero…. The impact that technology has had in both of these cases, whether it’s a Kindle or some sort of print on demand, is that it has increased the opportunities we have to interface with content."

For consumers, the new ways to buy and read books — and the new price points at which to do so — represent a rare expansion of the playing field. "Both [Kindle and Espresso] are great for bookselling," says Wharton marketing professor Yoram (Jerry) Wind. "They basically expand the range of choices that people have. What we must keep in mind is that markets are heterogeneous. There are many segments, and people’s preferences may vary depending on the situation. What we have here is technology offering more options. Some people, especially younger people, may find Kindle terrific. Print on demand is a great solution for people who would like to have a hard copy. They’re not mutually exclusive."

Different Values

The book business has always been more important for culture than for the economy. All the same, moving beyond five centuries of Gutenberg-style production raises questions about how consumers determine value, what they want to read and even how much shelf-space home-builders should design for the living rooms of tomorrow.

For instance, says Joseph Turow, who studies new media as a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School, many readers are subconsciously affected by knowing that the book they see in a store was produced and shipped at significant expense by a major company — a sign that someone who knows the business saw fit to invest in the author. "A large part of the problem is psychological," says Turow. "The fact that publishers have to pay a lot for making a book is kind of a gate to ensure that it has value…. I think the fact that there’s a physical copy that has to go through hoops is part of how people judge the value of something. And that is going to be with us for a long time."

But just how long a time is open to debate. "There are real generational differences," says Wharton marketing professor Patti Williams, who studies the role of emotions in decision making. The rapid decline of news media brands, for instance, suggests consumers of other forms of media have been able to move beyond long-established hierarchies. "Look at what’s happening to readership of newspapers and magazines," she says. Many of those readers are turning to blogs, and in doing so they are saying that they do not "rely on some third party to validate" everything that they choose to read.

Read the rest of the article on Knowledge@Wharton.

Why Are We So Fascinated With US Literature?

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This post, from British writer Stuart Evers, originally appeared on the Guardian.co.uk Books Blog on 2/11/09.

I have begun to wonder why I have quite so many books by American authors.

Spanning a period of some three decades, the autobiographical pieces that make up Poe Ballantine‘s Things I Like About America are warm-hearted, witty and tender. Pinballing around the country, Ballantine describes a patchwork quilt of small town Americana, along the way meeting a rich cast of drunks, headcases and deadbeats. He is an engaging and endearing narrator, but it’s his vision of the US – of swap meets and boarding houses, fast food and battered cars – that is the real hero of his book.

I devoured Things I Like About America in one sitting, and, hungry for more, went to my bookshelves for Denis Johnson‘s Angels – a novel that captures that windswept, Hopper-esque America better than any other I know. Looking up and down the shelves, I realised that a good three-quarters of the books I owned were written by Americans. I’d always known that I preferred American writing: I didn’t, however, realise that this had meant the exclusion of writing from everywhere else in the world.

So why so many American books? It can’t just be that Americans are better at fiction than everyone else. After all, writing isn’t swimming or professional basketball, is it?

The reasons, I suppose, are ones of personal taste and individual prejudice. The fact is, I prefer American English: I like the way it sounds; its rhythms and its cadences. Give me a diner over a café, a sidewalk over a pavement, a bar over a pub and definitely a gas station over a petrol forecourt. Take that "gas station", for example. Because of its sibilance, it’s almost as though you can hear someone inflating their tyres. Not only that, but when I read those words, I have a very exact picture in my mind. Compare these two sentences:

Mary fills up at the gas station, then drives her Chevy Impala to Roy’s Diner.

Mary fills up at the petrol station, then drives her Nissan Micra to Roy’s Rolls.

The first could be the beginning of a heartbreaking tale of small-town American disappointment; the second a script instruction from Coronation Street. A petrol station is functional, a place to pick up charcoal briquettes and wilting cellophane-wrapped flowers; a gas station is a place to pick up a packet of smokes and a hitchhiker with a gun in his waistband.

Read the rest of the post on the Guardian.co.uk Books Blog.

The End Of Indie

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This article, from Richard Nash, originally appeared on his website on 8/9/09 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission. In the piece, Richard proposes "indie" has become so mainstream that the term is now meaningless.

I awoke in the middle of the night last night and checked email and Twitter around 4am (they say when you can’t sleep, it’s best to get up, and tire yourself out, before returning to bed). A Twitter follow announcement came in from Kaya Oakes, with whom I had been trying to schedule an interview off and on in 2007 and 2008—I felt a pang of guilt as I checked out her tweets and saw that the book, for which the interview was to be conducted, was done. Finished, published. Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture is more or less what the subtitle says it is.

I’ll spare you the appalling copy from the publisher, which manages to be both glib and patronizing, and give you a little of Publishers Weekly’s description:

“[A] lively and highly literate explication of various American indie scenes and art forms . . . [Oakes’] focus on independent publishing and writing—provides a worthy parallel narrative to Michael Azzerad’s essential indie music history, [Our]Band Could Be Your Life . . . Oakes begins the book with a much appreciated primer on some of the intellectual forebears of her book’s central characters, including the poets Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg and the revolutionary street theater group the Diggers. As an explanation and excavation of the already fading recent past, it is essential reading.”—_Publishers Weekly_

I was momentarily rather bummed that I’d missed out on a chance to discuss the topic with Kaya when it dawned on me that I’d have had nothing very useful to say eighteen months ago. All is changed, changed utterly. Indie doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s dead. Which is OK, because it won. Open source, Twitter. Indie won. Etsy. The irresistible decline of major labels and network TV and corporate publishing. Indie won. We won, but at the cost to many folks personally of suddenly becoming unnecessary. This was most visible in the last few years in the magazines like Punk Planet, Kitchen Sink, Clamor. But it’ll come for us all.

You see, to the extent that indie meant anything, it was as its root word, independent. It was about seizing the means of production. Independently produced. Aesthetics can be imitated, ethics faked, attitudes mimicked, but large bureaucracies could not possibly replicate the indie production process—how could they seize the means of production? They already had it! And now the means of production has devolved yet farther down, past the indie publishers and indie record labels and pirate radio stations of yore.

This is not to say we’ve entered Nirvana. Just because we’d seized the means of production in the 1990’s didn’t mean that poverty had been eradicated, racism ended, and the intellectual property land grab thwarted. We all have to use the tools we’ve been given, find value in, rather than discard, the tools of the past, hold feet to the fire, undermine monopoly, and so on. All things we tried to do with the means of production we seized in the 90’s, we have to continue do with the means of production that technology has handed to us in the 21st century. Moore’s Law* is value-neutral, apolitical, amoral, just like Gutenberg’s press. It’s how we use it.

So now the phase of indie is over, now that the monopoly on the production and distribution of knowledge, culture and opinion has been broken, what next, a new phase, a drive to, perhaps, create, maintain, defend a New Authenticity arises?—Ah, am I opening myself up for derision with that…? Never mind, I toss it up there, a wounded duck. Power will try to hide behind the people, let’s use a new authenticity to stop them.

*link added by Publetariat Editor

Richard Nash ran Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, from 2001 to 2007 and ran the imprint on behalf of Counterpoint until early 2009. Here’s why he left.  He’s now consulting for authors and publishers on how to reach readers and developing a start-up called Cursor, a portfolio of niche social publishing communities, one of which will be called Red Lemonade.

Cross-Genre Writing

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This post, from novelist Karen Chance, originally appeared on Penguin{Blog} usa on 4/4/08.

I suppose my last blog post is a good time to talk about endings: specifically genre crossover endings. A lot of books these days are hybrids of several genres. The Cassie Palmer series, for example, appeals mainly to fantasy, mystery and romance fans, with a sprinkling of horror and thriller readers mixed in there for good measure. The question I get asked most frequently is, does trying to please the readers of so many genres, each of which has its own rules and expectations, cause any problems?

Short answer: Oh, yeah.

Long answer: Since one of the biggest bones of contention is how a story ends, let’s use that as an example. And there are no two genres more disparate in that regard than romance and fantasy. In romance, the genre expectation is still the happily-ever-after ending (which is so common that it even has a widely understood abbreviation: HEA). Not that all romance stories conform to this anymore-romance, like most genres, has become more flexible in recent years-but a great many romances do follow the old formula because a great many romance fans still prefer it. In fantasy, happy endings are also the norm and have been for generations. It’s one of the main things that separates fantasy, even dark fantasy, from horror. The problem is that fans of the two genres often have a very different take on how they define the term "happy."

For romance fans, HEA means a Cinderella ending, in which the heroine gets her man and they go on to have many happy years of wedded (or these days, often unwedded) bliss together. Many times, friends of the main protagonist, vague acquaintances and, well, pretty much everybody except the villain of the piece, also live happily ever after. In fantasy . . . not so much.

Take Lord of the Rings for example. In the end, evil is defeated, good triumphs, and Aragorn becomes king. Seems pretty happy, right? Until you look a little more closely. Because Aragorn wasn’t the main protagonist, Frodo was. And what happened to Frodo? A fantasy fan would tell you, probably quite enthusiastically, "he fulfilled his quest! He grew as a person! He became more than he ever thought he could be, and did things that no one else in the story could have done!" HEA, in other words. But a romance fan, if you could tear them away from sighing over a poster of Viggo/Orlando/ assorted pretty, pretty elves long enough to answer, would likely tell you that Frodo got shafted.

I think I can explain this best by showing you, so look into your palantír and witness the following dialogue between a romance fan and a fantasy fan…

Read the rest of the post on Penguin{Blog} usa.

Why No One Links to Your Best Posts (And What To Do About It)

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This post, from Jonathan Morrow, originally appeared on Copyblogger on 8/15/08.

Does this sound familiar?

You’ve picked a topic that your ideal readers are dying to know more about. You can write about the topic with authority. You’ve even chosen an interesting angle. In short, you’ve got a killer post that should bring your blog thousands of new readers.

You’re also smart enough to realize that you need to tell other people about it. So, you send an email to all of the top bloggers in your niche, pointing them to the post. Then you sit back and wait for the links to come rolling in.

But nothing happens.

You don’t get any links. You don’t even get a reply from any of the bloggers you emailed. You check your stats, and none of them even clicked the link that you sent them.

No, you got ignored. And worse, you now realize that no one is paying attention to you. You wonder, could you really be that much of a nobody, that no one would even read your email?

Yep. You could.

The Oldest Blogging Myth

“Content is king.”

It sounds good in principle. Produce a truly great piece of content, and you’ll get all the links you could ever hope for.

Maybe it worked too, several years ago. The Web used to be a fairly quiet place compared to what it is now, and it was easier for people to notice great blog posts.

But not anymore.

Now great is no longer good enough. The Web is full of so much remarkable content that bloggers don’t have enough time to read it all, much less link to it.

If you want links now, you need to be more than great. You need to be connected.

The Secret to Building a Popular Blog

Remember the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know?”

Well, it’s kind of true. A mediocre writer that’s friends with every member of the Technorati 100 will become a popular blogger faster than a brilliant writer with no friends at all.

Why? Because bloggers link more often to their friends than anyone else. If you write a reasonably good piece of content that interests their audience, they’ll link to you, mainly because they like you.

The secret to building a popular blog isn’t just writing tons of brilliant content. It’s also having tons of well-connected friends.

 

Read the rest of the post, including How To Make Friends With Popular Bloggers, on Copyblogger.

DRM Is Not Evil

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This post, from Michael Bhaskar, originally appeared on Pan Macmillan’s The Digitalist blog on 7/14/09. Agree? Disagree? Add your comments below. 

At Pan Macmillan we are no great fans of DRM. For a while now we have been selling a limited range of titles DRM free from our website; these are titles where the authors have requested that we retail sans DRM.

Many writers are in favour of this, and so we see as it as an important service. Recently we have added the novels of David Hewson to the non DRM stable and they can be found on the website.

Lets face it. DRM can be a nightmare – confusing, fiddly, prohibitively sensitive to basic uses of media. A couple of weeks ago I was setting up a friends Sony Reader and forgot quite how dis-orientating an experience setting up an Adobe ID can be. Ok, so most of us used to the web will not struggle. But what about all those other readers who get by without Twitter and Adobe IDs? No doubt, DRM isn’t perfect and makes life difficult for people legitimately using files they have paid good money for. Worse, it can lead to those files becoming unusable (a situation which is inexcusable).

However the anti-DRM lobby, as vocal as it is appealing, makes DRM sound like some cultural apocalypse. Culture, the argument goes, thrives on being shared and the modern mass media is a recent aberration that cuts against the grain of creativity and the natural flow of cultural production. Advocates like Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig make a case that is compelling, persuasive and important. Yet in the hands of many acolytes this is converted to a simple outright denunciation of any DRM and the assumption that the presence of DRM provides a moral carte blanche for piracy. Google might not be evil, but DRM sure is.

The whole DRM debate is hardly a new one but it’s time someone in publishing said something positive for DRM. Yes, it often sucks, but it’s not evil. Why?

Firstly because paper is a form of DRM. If you buy a book you can lend it out to a few of your friends. Can you send it to all of them? No. You are inherently limited in the spread of that book. We don’t assume that it would ever be possible to distribute that book to everyone we know, only that we can do with it what we want. This is both sensible and sustainable.

Secondly and more significantly because mass culture relies on a mass business model undermined by piracy. An argument against DRM is that the web will engender a liberation and proliferation of culture free from the corporate bonds currently suffocating it; get rid of the suits and we end up in a grass roots web driven artistic utopia. This might be true. However in this scenario there will be no more Hollywood blockbusters, huge epoch defining albums and tours, door stopping bestsellers and all the other accouterments of mass culture that rely on a company infrastructure.

These require scale, a corporate scale, which requires direct and secure revenue which to date has existed in the form of unit sales. Last.fm, Spotify et al are pointing the way to a fantastic new business model, but alone it is not enough. DRM is one of the only tools available to prevent catastrophic loss of revenue.

My argument here is simple: if we want Harry Potter- the books, films, computer games, the whole phenomenon – then DRM has a role. While some of the web elite could happily do without this kind of mass market stuff, and while I believe the web is important in promoting material antithetical to it, I think most of us would not want to see it go away.

Read the rest of the post on Pan Macmillan’s The Digitalist blog.

RaceFail ‘09 – Why Horror Ignores the Elephant

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This post, from Maurice Broaddus, originally appeared on the Apex Blog (of Apex Books) in March 2009.

A few years ago, I was speaking to a fellow black horror writer and she told me that she didn’t write characters of color in her work. She didn’t think it was important, even as a black writer, for her to write black characters (and descriptions of characters with dark hair and brown eyes were enough). It was more important for her to write for her chosen audience, who she perceived as white, and she didn’t want to in anyway alienate them.

This is how badly issues of race have infected and confused some people.

Yes, there is a current brouhaha brewing in speculative fiction that has since been dubbed RaceFail ’09. It started when Elizabeth Bear wrote a piece on writing the other which was then openly disagreed with. Hilarity ensued (catalogued here). I, too, wrote a piece on writing the other (in a response to something Jay Lake had written; mind you, both pieces came out a few YEARS ago) and have stayed out of this round of self-examination except to offer up a play-along cultural appropriation bingo card to go along with the “fantasy/science fiction no racism edition” bingo card. And yet, as Chesya Burke laments, such a discussion has largely not reared its head in the horror community. I don’t expect it to, frankly. Not to be too pointed about a race discussion in horror, but the genre largely amounts to white folks writing about white folks for the consumption of white folks. In other words, horror circumvents the issue of “writing the other” by … not.

With a few exceptions, race isn’t discussed much in the horror genre. Most folks are afraid to discuss it or admit there is a problem. With good cause: the last horror brand RaceFail discussion involved the release of Brandon Massey’s anthology series, Dark Dreams. The bulk of the discussion revolved around the series being the equivalent of reverse discrimination (because, you know, there are no all-white, even more specifically, all-white-male, horror anthology series) or writer affirmative action (because obviously writers like Tananarive Due, L.A. Banks, Wrath James White, Eric Jerome Dickey, Zane, or, I humbly submit, myself, can’t be published elsewhere).

In some ways, I can see why RaceFail has gone on within the science fiction and fantasy genre/communities. By the nature of those genres, they explore (and are allowed to explore) big ideas. Horror too often prides itself on being the “lowest common denominator” genre, not built for rigorous idea exploration. “I’m doing an analysis of man’s inhumanity to man” usually amounts to puerile masturbatory fantasies of rape and torture justified by someone getting their comeuppance in the end.

Read the rest of the post on the Apex Blog.