Month: November 2009

Grisham Spills The Beans…

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I just got up after watching a short segment of the Today Show.  Usually there’s not much of interest for me anymore on NBC mornings, but this morning, Matt Lauer, interviewing John Grisham about his newest book, a collection of short stories, turned from the standard book tour interview to a hard question.  It dealt with a recent Court case involving writers who are fed up with the retail sales tactics of  a few giants and box stores.  In John Girsham’s case, his hard cover new book, with a list price of $24.00 is being sold at Walmart and Amazon, among others, for …$9.95.

Matt Lauer wanted to know what Grisham thought of the case, which uses the language "predatory sales tactics".  Grisham admitted that it wouldn’t affect him much in the short term, but when he considered the long-term effects, the interview got interesting.  Mr. Grisham, openly pronounced that for new or future writers, this practice will make it very hard to impossible for them to be published.  There is nothing made when a book that costs the publisher a certain amount to produce is sold for way less than what its cost.  To paraphrase, he indiacted that in his opinion, this kind of tactic will shake the industry to it’s knees, eventually. Even when the sales quantities are considerable, the margin has disappeared.  The margin is what fuels publishing’s ability to test new authors work.  It gives them the room to provide publishing homes for new voices, and without it, there will be little attention given to emerging writers. 

It turns out, according to Mr. Grisham’s comments, that the business of selling books has a great deal more impact on whether your book will be published than many of us believed. 

Massive discount tactics have already destroyed the once-great American Department Store Retail culture.  There are no more merchants out there at all, just perpetual motion operations that desperately must keep the goods moving or perish — similar to the old notion of how sharks swim forward all the time to stay alive.  It’s about time that a respected author turn some of his attention to some of the ills that are in the process of destroying publishing as we know it.  He also spoke of the pending collapse of many publishers and established book sellers who wil be unable to compete with the box stores and online merchants.  This is already happening in spades.

He closed, by saying, that his book, "is worth $24." 

Readers should be willing to pay someone for their creative work, and if it means paying the author directly, that day may well come.  That bodes well for Indie Authors who can produce a high-quality product at a reasonable price…and can hang in a bit longer, until the dust settles.

 

What The Hell Does "Well Written" Mean?

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This post originally appeared on the Mysterious Matters blog on 10/9/09; the author wishes to remain anonymous.

So, everyone says that for a book to get agented and published, it has to be "well written."  I’m not sure that is 100% true – we can all think of people who have made the best-seller lists whose books are competently, or borderline-competently written, but not WELL written.

However, I think it’s fairly safe to say that if you are an unknown (i.e., non-celebrity, non-politician, non-sportstype, non-CEO), your manuscript has to be well written.  This is one of those terms, I realize, that is bandied about without ever being quite defined.  I suppose we could say it’s like pornography – we know it when we see it – but I thought I’d try to come up with a more specific definition.

So, in my opinion, well written means the following:

1.  Properly spelled, grammatically correct, with punctuation in the right place.  This is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for good writing.  I think a lot of us can put up with an occasional typo in a manuscript.  Everyone’s human, and God knows that after looking at the same manuscript every day for a year, a writer can be forgiven for a misspelling or a missing comma.  I do think most of us see beyond that.  But multiple errors in the first few pages signal a generally low level of competence and cause us to tune out.  (Case in point, so that I can get down off my high horse – in Meredith Phillips’ guest blog from last week, I had several typos in my introduction and conclusion that Meredith herself pointed out to me!  Slightly embarrassing, to say the least.)

2. Good variety in sentence and paragraph structure.  I sometimes see manuscripts that are 300 pages of simple declarative sentences.  That might be OK for children’s or YA adult books (though I doubt it), but it won’t fly in an adult novel.  Please give me some dependent clauses, some participial phrases, some gerunds or infinitive phrases.  Ask a rhetorical question or two.  Vary sentence style and paragraph length (especially paragraph length!  300 pages of 3-sentence paragraphs makes your book look like it suffers from ADD.  300 pages of multi-page paragraphs makes it look as though you’ve channeled James Joyce, most likely not on his best day.)

3. Simple, effective description.  I always feel that the best writers evoke a scene, a character, or a characteristic in a minimum of space.  I like a sentence or two of description–and then get on with it.  For more complicated locations or items that are intrinsic to plot, longer description is fine.  I like to see similes, etc., in descriptions–something other than telling me how big the thing is, and what color.  I also feel that, from a reader’s viewpoint, a simple sketch lets readers fill in the details and makes the book more absorbing.

Read the rest of the post, which includes points 4-8, on Mysterious Matters.

Roland Denning And, Quite Possibly, The Best Non-Book-Trailer Ever

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You may not have heard of Roland Denning yet, but his hilarious non-book-trailers (On Meeting An Agent, Parts 1-8) are rapidly becoming the stuff of retweet and link-sharing legend. I first learned of the video clips via a tweet from Debbie Ridpath Ohi. Debbie is the artist behind the Will Write For Chocolate and Inkygirl comics. If you use Twitter, I highly recommend following Debbie because she tweets boatloads of great links for writers and publishers. Now, getting back to Roland…

After viewing the clips, I knew I wanted to interview Roland. Not only are his videos entirely relatable for any writer who’s ever queried on a manuscript, they’re very, very funny. The films are book trailers in the sense that they were created in order to promote Roland’s book, The Beach Beneath The Pavement, and there is a brief mention of the book at the end of each film, but the films themselves don’t have anything to do with the content of the book.

Watch On Meeting An Agent yourself (broken up into parts 1-5 and 6-8 in the YouTube videos below), then read my interview with Roland afterward to learn more about the films and their creator.

Why did you decide to create the clips?
I started playing around with the software, then they just seemed to emerge into a series. Then I realised it could be a promotional tool for my book as well as an entertainment.

Did you hire someone to do the animations, or did you create them yourself?
I did it all myself. I am, as it happens, a professional filmmaker. But these were made with some incredibly easy free on-line software (xtranormal.com) which means I could make each one in about 3 to 4 hours from conception to going on line, except the final episode which integrates live action and took a couple of days. (Bugger, I shouldn’t have told you that. You’ll all be doing it now). The problem with the software, brilliant though it is, is that it is very limited. The animations all come out looking very similar. I think I’ve been lucky in that, as far as I know, I’m the first to use it in this context.

How true-to-life are the clips? Did you try to more or less repeat conversations you had with real people verbatim, or did you take some artistic license?
It’s fiction. I made it up! Perhaps it was a mistake to give the robot the same name as me. No, really, the phrases came from real life (‘I didn’t love your book enough’ etc) and real conversations, but I’m not really bitter. The agent I met was extremely nice. I was just a little disappointed. But ‘disappointed’ isn’t funny. ‘Violently bitter’ is. It does reflect some of things I’ve gone through, like you think your book is definitely finished, an agent has a few ‘issues’ with it, you find yourself re-writing the whole damned thing, then you tell yourself that’s what you were going to do anyway.

Don’t you think that’s one of the inevitable factors of being an author, oscillating between total self-belief and self-loathing? Or is that just me?
 
Did you release the clips primarily in order to drive more book sales, to attract mainstream publisher attention, or for some other reason?
Primarily I made them because I enjoyed them. After spending so long writing the book, they came as a light relief. It was only after I started making them I saw the marketing potential.

How did you go about raising awareness of the clips?
I just sent them to a few literary blogs, and sites such as yours and they began to take off.

Have you seen an increase in book sales since releasing the clips?
Too early to say. They’ve only been out a couple of weeks and it takes longer than that for the sales figures to get back to Lulu (who did the POD).

In the clips, there’s some joking about the avalanche of self-published books, and an implication that many of them are of poor quality. What led you to finally choose the indie path, given that you seem to have a somewhat skeptical view of self-publishing?
Well Lulu publishes 1000 new titles A DAY. Clearly, they are not all masterpieces. But the point I was really making was – how the hell can you get noticed when literally thousands of authors are clamouring for attention at the same time? The POD revolution is great, all the mechanisms of the web to promote stuff are great EXCEPT it’s getting exponentially harder for each book to get attention, let alone a sale. I think it’s easy to think that when your name is known around a few writers sites, when you get mentioned on literary blogs, the world knows all about you. But sometimes the internet can be a very small place – or, rather, you can be stuck up a tiny little cul-de-sac and not realise it.

To answer the second part of your question, I’m still sending my chapters out to agents (a revised version, without the problematic second chapter!) as well promoting my self-published version.

Roland Denning was born and lives in North London. He studied philosophy at university but has got over it now.
Most of his life has been spent working on the fringes of the film and television industries and in the arts.
The Beach Beneath The Pavement is his first novel.