Month: January 2010

How To Kill A Writing Career

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This post, from Jason Sanford, originally appeared on his site on 1/10/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

This afternoon while slaving away on the novel which will rocket me to the heights of literary superstardom — maybe even to the level of Paris Hilton superstardom — insight struck. I realized I was working way too hard at this writing gig. Instead of trying to succeed through hard work, talent, and dedication, there was a much better way to reach my fictional goals.

I simply needed to thin the writing herd.

Think about it. There are thousands of fiction writers and wanna-be authors in the world. As we all know, when one species overpopulates an ecosystem all creatures are at risk of starvation until the population stabilizes. So why not knock off the competition? This way the survivors — and their fiction — will naturally float to the top of an empty literary world.

With that in mind, here are some suggestions on how to destroy a writing career. Simply retitle these suggestions as positive advice — such as "What every successful writer knows!" — and send them to both budding writers and established pros. Budding writers won’t realize the success you refer to is your own until AFTER their buds have been nipped, a la Barney Fife, while established pros are so cocky they won’t recognize what’s happening until they’re knocking on heaven’s remainder bin.

So do your part, and dump a little weed killer in the garden of literary delights by passing this "advice" to other fiction writers.

How to kill a writing career
Remember: Before sending this to a writer, retitle it in a positive way, such as "10 sure-fire ways to publishing success" or "What publishing insiders don’t want you to know."

  1. Heed the immortal writing advice of Allen Ginsberg: ”First thought, best thought." Revisions and rewriting should be left to those without the talent to be writers in the first place.
     
  2. Proper spelling and grammar are traps to keep authors down. Dare to reach greatness by following your own linguistic path.
     
  3. Only writers lacking vision worship coherent plots. So every time you sit down to write, mutter this simple chant: "James Joyce’s Ulysses is a great novel. James Joyce’s Ulysses is a great novel."
     
  4. Write only what is popular and trendy. After all, if drunk and horny vampire biker chicks are the hot thing this year, imagine how much hotter they’ll be when your book comes out three years from now.
     
  5. Embrace adjectives. If one adjective is descriptive, why not five or six in a row?
     
  6. Waste the readers’ time. After all, if readers want to drink from the fountain of your literary greatness, it’s up to them to pucker up and suck.
     
  7. Write only when the muse moves you. Only bad writers force themselves to write every day. You answer only to your muse. And don’t forget — the muse loves to drink! Lots and lots of drink!
     
  8. Guidelines are for writers afraid to push the boundaries. Not only defy every guideline you encounter, when submitting tell the editors you don’t accept their limited ideas on what fiction they should publish. Be sure to also address submissions to "Dear Editor" to show these little people their proper place in the literary supernova that is you.
     
  9. Continually act neurotic, paranoid, angry, annoyed, psychotic, or better yet, all of those at once. And remember, you can’t be a great writer unless you are addicted to something obscure and weird. (Like wow man, that dried gnat excrement is nature’s only truly righteous high!")
     
  10. Flame wars are your friend. If you don’t post a nasty repartee somewhere on the web at least once a day, how will you succeed as a writer? And be sure to engage in flame wars with other writers, editors, and literary agents. Nothing says you’ve arrived on the literary scene like a flame war!

 

 

 

Jason Sanford co-founded the literary journal storySouth, through which he runs the annual Million Writers Award for best online fiction. He won the 2008 Interzone Readers’ Poll for one of his stories, and has also been published in Year’s Best SF 14, Interzone, Analog, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, The Mississippi Review, Diagram, Pindeldyboz, and other places. He’s published critical essays and book reviews in places like The New York Review of Science Fiction, The Pedestal Magazine, and The Fix Short Fiction Review.

How To Sign An Ebook

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This post, from Ami Greko, originally appeared on The New Sleekness on 1/18/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

Like the oft-lamented “smell of books,” I’ve found that there there are some concepts that people consistently get hung up on when discussing ebooks. I used to try to puzzle out answers to these, but in this new, Zen-like approach I’m experimenting with in 2010, I’ve decided to try to actually evaluate the meanings behind the questions. Get your Desktop Rock Garden ready: we’re going behind the scenes on three of them this week.

Question 1: “How will people get their ebooks signed?”

As far as I can tell, the logic behind this question seems to go like this: authors have always signed books, and readers have always come to events to get their books signed, therefore not being able to do that = huge problem.

Here’s the logic I’d love to see people using: instead of wondering how we can adapt an older model to suit new technology, maybe we should think about what getting a book signed represents to a consumer, and see if there’s a way an ereader could make it better.

I’m not big on signed books, so it’s possible I’m missing something here, but it seems to me that they tap into a few different things: the impulse to memorialize an event, the collecting jones, and also the desire to have a unique experience directly with the author. Why else stand in line for an hour with your name spelled out on a post-it note waiting for Salman Rushdie to scrawl his signature and your name in Shalimar the Clown? (←An actual unfulfilling personal experience I’d prefer to not relive.)

We can make this a different encounter. It’s a paradigm shift. Instead of forcing people to wait in line hoping to get some small face time with an author, maybe everyone who attends the reading gets a recording of the event immediately following. Maybe the author is excited enough about being sent on tour that he writes an additional story with the book’s characters, available exclusively to those who show up at his appearances. Maybe a risk-taker even releases the first chapter of her upcoming work-in-progress and an email address where comments can be sent.

The suggestions above aren’t meant to be definitive, and more importantly, they aren’t meant to be changes that need to happen overnight. I mean for them to be examples of the ways in which we can reconsider the signing experience wholesale, instead of merely adapting old practices.

What ways would you be excited to see the signing experience change?

 

Part II in this series, Kindles For All!, can be read on The New Sleekness.

Ami Greko is the director of business development for AdaptiveBlue, working primarily with their add-on Glue. She has previously worked as a publicist at Viking Penguin and FSG, marketing director at Folio Literary Management, and digital marketing manager at Macmillan.

Publication of Written In BLOOD is Pushed Back

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Even with the holiday season I had to move it back owing to the scope and size of the book and its plotline. I am working as hard as I can to finish it, but it does entail some serious research and organization, and I am also creating illustrations for the new video to accompany it. We hope to have the print book published and released by the end of February, with a simultaneous release of the digital ebooks in a variety of formats. In the meantime, some of the other books planned for the season have also been rescheduled. Antellus will announce their debuts as soon as they are ready to be released. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. The 2nd edition of PRINCIPLES OF SELF-PUBLISHING, including new material on digital publishing, is the next book and to follow Written In BlOOD, and may be ready to release sometime in the spring.

Different Types of Merchant Accounts

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After cash, credit cards are the most widely accepted means of payment in the world. No matter what business you are running, or what product you are selling. Chances are that you will require a credit card processing system. From American Express to Visa, the brand may vary, and since there is no such thing as an individual payment gateway for each individual company. Every company may have a payment system that is unique to them, but the payment gateway is what is the essential link. But before we go into the technicalities, lets get some of the basics out of the way. Especially some of the terms just used.

Any credit card transaction on the planet acts in a predefined manner, first the customer will offer his credit card details, the credit card details are then processed through a payment gateway, and finally the credit card payment is received in a merchant account. The way in which the credit card payment is accepted is different, you could be using the credit on a EPOS (electronic point of sale terminal), or you could have a successful online store that is accepting payments. The important thing to remember is that the mode in which you are accepting the payment is not as important as having a payment gateway and a good merchant account.

Okay so the next thing to discuss here is what is a payment gateway? well a payment gateway is usually a third party system that processes the credit card transaction it could be the server an EPOS dials out to, an e-commerce system, however the term payment gateway usually refers to the latter, and once the checks are done the funds are then transferred into a merchant account. The essential component is the merchant account, the merchant account is offered by companies and based on the volume of transaction and certain other criteria; the charges and upkeep is different. No merchant account is free as the company is offering you services. Merchant accounts in general are of various categories and depending on the type of business you are running, different monthly charges, and percentage charges are applicable.

Important merchant account types

a) Regular merchant accounts – Although in business there is no such thing as a typical business, however a majority of businesses are usually treated as regular merchant accounts, they have low maintenance fees and lower rates than other merchant accounts.

b) High risk merchant accounts – This category is usually reserved for high risk credit card processing accounts, for example accounts that handle a large volume of transaction that may or may not offer a 100% authorisation rate. An example will be an outbound call centre, that attempts hundreds of credit card transactions to verify the credibility of the credit cards. There are also additional complications like currency conversion involved. Hence the term high risk merchant account.

c) Specialized merchant accounts – There are some businesses that require specialized credit card processing, or might require a specialized merchant account that caters to requirements such as offshore processing, etc. Such merchant accounts are usually referred to as specialized merchant accounts.

With Kindle Royalties About To Be Set At 70%, Is It Time To Revisit Bestselling Novelist Anne Rice's Post: "Should Major Authors Think About Making Kindle (If Possible) Their Primary Publisher?"

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Many Kindle owners may care very little about issues such as author and publisher royalties, digital rights management, the finer points of Kindle book pricing, or whether Kindle authors need traditional publishers like a fish needs a bicycle. But some of these issues ultimately will have a powerful effect on the selection of books that are available to us as Kindle owners.

 
As of yesterday, the prospect of Apple unleashing a popular tablet device and negotiating great deals that would lure authors and publishers away from the Kindle was looking like the first real threat to the growing dominance of the Kindle in the field of ebook reading devices and content. 
 
Today, not so much.
 
Any fears that authors and publishers were about to begin jumping ship in droves from Amazon’s Kindle catalog were vaporized this morning when the company announced a suite of dramatic changes in its relationship with authors and publishers. The headlines will be all about the fact that Amazon is promising to begin, on June 30, paying a 70 per cent royalty on qualifying Kindle books, but there is much more to ponder in the requirements that Amazon will use to qualify authors and publishers for that 70 per cent royalty, and in the overall impact that these moves will have on the book business. Amazon never seems to be short on arrows in its quiver, and in this case its tactical moves are bound to have a chilling effect on Apple’s apparent efforts to lure authors and publishers away from the Kindle platform.
 
"Today, authors often receive royalties in the range of 7 to 15 percent of the list price that publishers set for their physical books, or 25 percent of the net that publishers receive from retailers for their digital books," said Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president of Kindle Content, in today’s news release. "We’re excited that the new 70 percent royalty option for the Kindle Digital Text Platform will help us pay authors higher royalties when readers choose their books."
 
Indeed. There’s plenty for authors, publishers, and literary agents to chew on here:
  • Amazon is prepared to compensate authors and publishers more generously than they will be compensated anywhere else.
     
  • For authors who deal directly with Amazon rather than through the mediation of a publisher, royalty compensation could be astonishingly high.
     
  • Despite all the buzz about "Kindle Killers," the Kindle Store is the only real game in town if it is true, as some have claimed, that the Kindle Store currently accounts for over 90% of all ebook sales.
     
  • Even at the current 35 percent Kindle royalty, popular authors like Anne Rice are already thinking about making Kindle "their primary publisher." At 70 per cent, there may be no stopping them.
Back on December 13, Rice went on an Amazon customer forum and asked:

What do you think? If regular publishing is having a very hard time marketing and distributing books effectively, should major authors think about making Kindle (if possible) their primary publisher? Kindle would then be the one to introduce and advertise the book, and Kindle could license limited hard cover editions for those addicted to the "real book." Would this be good for authors? Would it be good for readers? Would Kindle do it?

Of course, it’s not like Amazon’s sole purpose here is to do better by authors. Like nearly every major occurrence in the economic marketplace, today’s announcement is driven a complex web of market forces, of which the key factors here are Amazon’s desire 
  • to maintain the dominance of the Kindle catalog, 
     
  • to outflank Apple in that potential ebook newcomer’s effort to negotiate with book publishers, 
     
  • to organize Kindle Store pricing into a logical $2.99 to $9.99 range (at least 20 percent below competing hardcopy prices but higher than the zero-to-99 cent range that has been growing in the Kindle Store and threatening the overall Kindle pricing structure),
     
  • to strengthen participation by authors and publishers in the Kindle text-to-speech feature and other coming Kindle features, and
     
  • to persuade publishers to play nice with the Kindle ecosystem, in part by making them aware how easily they could end up losing authors who might opt for the direct relationship whose possibility Rice raised in her aforementioned post.
Nobody but Amazon and the publishers really knows what deals, percentages, and subsidies may have informed Amazon’s previous dealings with corporate publishers of Kindle content over the past 26 months, but one thing that seems likely today is that, with the royalties and qualifying requirements noted in this 70 percent royalty option, Amazon may be pushing more and more of its corporate publishing partners in the direction of the Digital Text Platform that has been seen heretofore as a publishing platform for smaller indie publishers and self-published authors. After all, for example, participation in the text-to-speech program has never been optional for DTP publishers, so the inclusion of it as a qualifying requirement for the new royalty program suggests that publishers who have accessed the Kindle via corporate publishing channels in the past may be pushed now directly into the DTP. And, like the major music labels that participate in Amazon’s "self publisher" print-on-demand subsidiary, CreateSpace, in order to market their previously out-of-print backlist music titles, the smartest of the major book publishing houses are going to go where the best terms are. 
 
If they lag behind, they run the risk of arriving there only to find that some of their authors are already there.

 

 

This is a cross-posting from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily blog.

Congratulations: You Get To Be The Bigger Person Now

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If you’re working your author platform effectively, you’re very active online. You’re doing any or all of the following: posting to your blog, possibly posting to others’ blogs, tweeting, posting updates on Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn, participating in online discussion groups and comment threads, posting or commenting on YouTube book trailers, and maybe even podcasting. Your goal is to open a dialogue with readers and your peers, and the better your author platform, the more feedback and discussion you will generate. Much of the feedback and discussion will be enjoyable and thought-provoking, a kind of online ‘salon’. The rest of it, not so much.

An awful lot of people will have strongly held opinions with which you disagree, or which are ill-informed, or which are obviously being shared only for the sake of getting a rise out of you or casting aspersions on you or your work. But however much you may want to angrily tear into this latter group anytime they darken your virtual doorstep, however tempting it may be to respond with a biting and clever remark, you must never do it. Answering the uncouth and trollish in kind requires you to become uncouth and trollish, which can quickly escalate beyond your control and undermine all the goodwill you’ve built up to date with your community of readers and peers, and quickly turn off any newcomers to your tribe.
 
As an author, you’ll find there are two primary arenas in which you may feel it’s necessary to rain invective down upon a perceived adversary: following a bad review, or following an ill-informed or insulting post to, or about, you. First, let’s look at what happens when authors respond to negative reviews…negatively.
 
Consider this case of commercially- and critically-successful novelist Alice Hoffman, who was so outraged by a negative review (some have called it merely lukewarm) from author Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe that Hoffman ended up flaming Silman all over Twitter. Hoffman eventually went so far as to provide Silman’s phone number to her fans and request that they call Silman to defend Hoffman. It wasn’t long before the mainstream press was all over this, and not much longer before an embarrassed Hoffman began making public apologies.
Then there’s author Alain de Botton, who responded to a negative review on Caleb Crain’s blog with a number of posts that eventually escalated to the point where Botton was saying things like, “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.” There’s a terrific post about the incident on Ed Rants in which de Botton responds to questions about the incident and provides an essay as part of his response as well.
 
Next, take a gander at the controversy more recently sparked by author Candace Sams on Amazon. When reader-reviewer LB Taylor posted a one-star review of Sam’s novel Electra Galaxy’s Mr Interstellar Feller, Sams responded with a series of angry responses, initially under an alias but eventually under her own name as well. When the dust had settled and the press and blogs were finished with her Sams went back and deleted all of her posts in the Amazon thread, but it was too late by then because plenty of sites and blogs (such as Babbling About Books) had already copied and re-published the worst and most disturbing of them online.
 
Prior to the Sams dustup, perhaps the best-known author outburst came from Anne Rice in 2004, also on Amazon, in response to multiple negative reviews of her novel, Blood Canticle. In a 1200-word diatribe, among other things, Rice responded to reader-critics by saying, “Your stupid, arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander…You have used the site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies." Her entire response is reprinted on the encyclopedia dramatica site, where the term “rice out” is defined as, “To make a spectacle of oneself in response to literary criticism by insisting that one’s creative work is superior in all aspects.”
 
Now, compare these authorial meltdowns to the actions of Carla Cassidy, who posted a wry and clever rebuttal to a negative review on the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books site. SBTB’s review featured a sarcastic, snarky list of 26 reasons why Cassidy’s novel Pregnesia is the best book in the history of pregnant amnesiac romance books. Cassidy responded with her own list of 10 reasons why she loves the SBTB review, as detailed on the Saturday Writers site. According to Saturday Writers, “Carla responded with grace and humor that exactly matched the tone of the review. I don’t think I could respond so well to a negative review. I’m in awe of her.”
If you can’t craft a humorous and/or graceful response to a negative review—and the many examples of non-humorous, non-graceful responses from seasoned authors given in this post are proof enough that you can’t trust your own judgment on this—, then it’s best just to keep your mouth (and keyboard) shut entirely on such matters. As Neil Gaiman has said on his blog, “some things are better written in anger and deleted in the morning.”
 
As for coping with stuff and nonsense from respondents to articles or blog posts you’ve written, or from people who are more or less just out to make you look bad, you should simply ignore such commentary when it’s clearly labeled as opinion but it may sometimes be necessary to correct inaccurate factual information posted about you or your work. If you choose to do so you must tread with the utmost care, lest a new idiom for author freak-outs turns up in common usage with your name attached to it. I don’t think I’ve yet seen a more shining example of calm, professional, classy damage control than that of Harlequin Digital Director Malle Valik in response to the firestorm of controversy that followed Harlequin’s announcement of its partnership with Author Solutions, Inc.
 
First, Malle responded personally to the many charges leveled against the partnership on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (scroll down through the comments thread to Malle’s first comment, posted on 11/18/09 at 6:48am). Next, she graciously answered some specific questions about the deal on Dear Author, then came back to respond to some very pointed and angry remarks in the comments thread following that interview. In the face of a plethora of insults and accusations, Malle kept her cool, kept a positive attitude, and remained professional. She kept the discussion on-point, and never allowed herself to stoop to the mud-slinging tone employed by many of the attackers.
 
Malle Valik is to be commended for her exemplary performance in this matter, and to be emulated by every one of us anytime we find ourselves in the unenviable shoes she was wearing last November. To do so, you must first acknowledge that as a writer, you are in the free speech business. It is your duty (and should be your honor) to defend the right of anyone to voice any opinion on any subject, however much you may disagree with that opinion or even find it offensive. While I freely acknowledge that very often, the people who put you in a mind to take the low road are not honestly attempting to engage you in a fair debate, it will do you no good to respond to them in kind. Correct factual errors if you must, but only if you’re certain you’re capable of Valikian conduct in the matter. Take action on libelous statements about you or your work if you feel they have the potential to do significant damage to your earnings or reputation, but do so in private, offline. Otherwise, your safest bet is to ignore the noise; it’s not truly worthy of your attention, anyway.

This is a cross-posting from April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author blog.

Shipping Warning! The USPS Strikes Again!

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Like many small businesses including indie authors and publishers, we rely upon the USPS’ online shipping services to print labels for our shipments. I’ve been especially pleased with using Priority Mail to send books out when time is important.  Well, no longer.

On Friday, I printed three mailing labels Priority Mail, for mailing after the long weekend.  The Post Office was closed on Monday, so I shipped them out Tuesday, from our POst Office counter. All three were returned to me today, labelled Return to Sender: Bad Meter Date.  When I explained to my regular clerk that they were closed Monday, he said it didn’t matter, they could no longer pass through a package with a printed label except on the actual date shown on the label.

What The ????

I called Washington DC — an amazing excercise in  futility.  It seems that despite my packages being run through for years, no matter the date on the label, the Postmaster General, John Potter has determined — within the last coiup0le of weeks was the date I got, that they will no longer accept packages for Priority Mail shipping unless the label is printed the actual day the item is presented.  He is concerned about the Post Office’s reputation.

What The ????

It seems that some people unfairly ask for refunds of postage when the label date indicates an earlier shipping date than the actual shipping date. My mention of the fact the office was closed Monday did no good, nor my mention of the fact that each package is scanned into the system and the scan date is the date that the package is entered into the system, not the printed label date. No matter, my pre-paid postage is dead.

So. If I understad this properly, the USPS Postmaster General John Potter has, in the interest of maintaining the repuytation of the POstral Service, determined that without so much as an online warning, they willo make shipping for their regular business customers, as inconvenient as possible, thereby improving their glowing reputation.  Sounds just like Washington DC, doesn’t it?

The USPS has put a loty of money — taxpayer money I might add — over the past few years into marketing their services for business shippers.  They stressed the convenience of what they offer in all their TV advertising.  Yet, this decision.

To put my own troub les into perspective, my local Postmaster told me to watch where he went, as he slid to the back, behind their counter.  He called out — "we’ve got a lot of regular busi8ness shippers now," and motioned towards a huge laundry dolly. Wheeled canvas, about four feet on a side and filled two feet above the top with Postal Priority Packages. 

"These are from one shipper," he explained,"They were all returned because he printed the lables on Friday, and presented them after the Holiday on Tuesday.  I’m sure he’s not going to be happy."

I’m sure.  So remember, if you can’t take the time to go to the post office to deliver your package today, don’t print the label, or it will come bouncing back.  Even if it’s a PO Holiday. Call them, instead, for a pick-up.  This will help their bottom line about as much as the PR nightmare this new ruling will create among the business customers the Postal Service has been working to attract for so long.

Oh, by the way, if you think this is a hare-brained new regulation — you can always write John Potter:

US Postmaster General

US Postal Service

475 Lenfant Plaza SW

Washington, DC 20260

Alien Languages: How Foreign Would They Really Be?

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This post, from Juliette Wade, originally appeared on her TalkToYoUniverse blog on 1/10/10.

This post was requested by CWJ, my friend from the forum over at Analog – thanks so much for the question, CWJ! It also strikes me that this may be a timely topic for people who are considering the Na’vi language that was used in Avatar.

CWJ asked: 

Juliette, I’d like to hear more about (constructing) non-human languages. In particular, if Chomsky’s idea of universal innate grammars is correct, does that mean there are only certain avenues down which humans can go, which might be different from aliens? That is, maybe there are some concepts or constructs that would be difficult for humans to truly conceptualize. Or the other way around. In short, I am interested in the possibility that communication may be very difficult.

This is a complex question, so I’ll take it a bit at a time.

First, the Chomsky question. Chomsky proposed the idea that there was some basic sense of grammar universal to all humans, that was passed on as an instinct.

Now, human languages are very diverse. The most thorough article I’ve seen on this topic was recently published in the Economist, and you can check it out here.

In fact, it’s hard to say how much of human language is innate and how much is learned. Humans are oriented towards language from birth or even earlier; this is well known, as newborn infants prefer to listen to language sounds over non-language sounds, and their mother’s native language over other languages (studies measured strength of sucking response!). They also go through a number of language development stages, like early babbling, even if they don’t have any auditory language input (say, with non-hearing babies). Non-hearing babies are also known to babble with their fingers. People have also looked at pidgin languages, which tend to take on grammatical structure – and very similar grammar structure – when they’re passed on to the second generation, and used this as evidence for a more extensive innate language faculty.
 


Read the rest of the post on Juliette Wade‘s TalkToYoUniverse blog.

Simple Math: Fewer Editors = More Mistakes

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This post, from Craig Lancaster, originally appeared on his blog on 1/19/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

Here’s an interesting story from the Washington Post. It seems that more and more simple errors are sneaking into print, and readers are noticing. It’s not hard to figure out why. The story notes that the newspaper’s stable of copy editors has been whittled from 75 to 43 in the past few years, even as the duties beyond pure copy-editing have increased.

In my day (er, night) job — you know, the one that pays the preponderance of my bills — I work as a newspaper copy editor. I’ve long considered it a sound policy not to discuss one’s employer on a personal blog, and I’m not about to abandon that wise course now. Instead, I’d like to discuss editing in the big picture, across all forms of publishing. I guarantee you, what’s happening at the Washington Post is not an isolated case.

When I originally self-published my first novel nearly a year ago, I was — outside of my wife — the only person who had laid eyes on the words, and I’m afraid that deficiency was easy to spot. When the first book landed in my hands, I immediately spotted dozens of errors — dropped words, backward quote marks, dangling modifiers, etc. Because the book was print-on-demand, I was able to upload a new interior file and fix those. Then came the new book and a new round of errors. I must have done this five or six times.

By the time I turned the manuscript over to Riverbend Publishing for the book’s re-emergence as 600 Hours of Edward, I had read it innumerable times and rooted out every possible error, or so I thought. But the publisher found a few, and then I found a few more in the proofing stage, and finally we had a completed book.

The first time I opened it, I found another error.

Do you see what I’m getting at? It’s damned hard to come up with a pristine manuscript. Harder still when editors are removed from the equation.

Unfortunately, that’s what is happening across a broad swath of the publishing world. Houses, even the biggest ones, have cut deeply into their editing ranks, for reasons of expedience and expense. Maxwell Perkins, were he alive today, would probably be an acquisition editor, focused chiefly on getting the books into the publishing house and not so much on honing them into word-perfect shape. Many of the traditional editing chores now fall to literary agents, and while they’re often fully capable of doing that work, they already other vital and time-consuming chores, such as persuading the acquisition editors to bring the work aboard. So, then, the onus falls to the writer to get it right in the first place, and while there are many ways in which we can improve our craft and our self-editing, we can’t possibly give ourselves the same benefit we would get from an intensive edit by a professional.

So how do we bridge the gap? A few ideas:

1. Be damned good in the first place.

2. Failing No. 1, become a better self-editor. Read well-edited material and take note of what it does well (precise word choice, economy, structure, etc.). Take advantage of the myriad (and free) editing tips that can be mined on the Web. Our friends at The Blood-Red Pencil regularly offer excellent editing advice.

3. Join a writing group. Even if your colleagues can’t offer detailed copy editing, they can give you big-picture reactions to your stories and essays.

4. Trade sweat equity with a buddy. He reads and edits your stuff. You read and edit his.

5. If you can afford it and think you’ll benefit from it, engage the services of a professional editor. I’m happy to recommend one: My friend Leon Unruh at Birchbark Press does unfailingly excellent work at a competitive price.

We owe it to readers to give them the best experience we can with our books. That’s our bond: In exchange for their money and their time, we offer the best story we could write, with as few flaws as possible.

 

Craig Lancaster is the author of 600 Hours of Edward.

 

Do You Really Know The Author

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When we buy a book, we think we’re going to like it because the title, synopsis or cover attracts our interest. I’d be the first to admit that I don’t often read a book that makes me stop to wonder about what the author is like. Questions like what does the author look like, where does the author live and did life experiences give the author ideas for the book. An author’s brief biography is in the back of the book and sometimes a picture, but that short paragraph is not nearly enough to get to know the author.

The more famous authors becomes, the more we learn about them, because of the publicity they generate. Lesser known authors just starting out, especially self published ones like me, are strangers and will pretty much stay that way unless the author reaches out to them. I don’t hire publicity, but I do use the internet, my local newspapers and book signing. I have the idea that if I make myself known to my readers, providing they like me and my books, the more books I might sell. So far this reasoning seems to be working.

Some readers get to know about me through my blogs where I tell about my rural upbringing. If I didn’t tell the readers, would they know that westerns were the books of choice in my house. How I grew up is reflected in my writing. Living near a small, Iowa town helps me use characters and stories that are true to life in my mystery series.

The Dark Wind Howls Over Mary – a western – ISBN 1438221576

Amazing Gracie Mystery Series – Neighbor Watchers- Book One – ISBN 148246072

I often talk about my personal experiences that I have turned into books such as being a caregiver for my parents. I volunteer for the Alzheimer’s Association and for eight years was facilitator of an Alzheimer’s support group. Because of that experience, three of my books deal with Alzheimer’s disease. People who are working their way through that dreadful disease need to know that I went through it before I wrote the books. I want the readers to understand I know how they feel so they can identify with me and my family.

Open A Window – ISBN 14382444991

Hello Alzheimers Good Bye Dad – ISBN 1438278276

Floating Feathers Of Yesterdays – a three act play – ISBN 1438250932

For the readers that haven’t found my websites or read my biography, I put my bio and contact information in with the books I sell along with a business card. If they are curious enough to check my information out on my bookstore website, they will learn about me in my bio, blog and book event pictures as well as the titles and prices of my books.

I advertise my bookstore website as much as possible and sell my books on other sites like Amazon. When I sell my books, I send an email to the buyers right after I mail the books to alert them to watch for their books. The mail system has lost some of my books. I do replace them at my expense. Knowing that media mail takes 2 – 9 days, I try to mail a book in a day or two so that the wait doesn’t seem so long for the buyer. I want that speedy delivery to please them. If the book does get lost, I replace it. I have developed a trust with the buyers. They find they can depend on my honesty to replace a lost or damaged book. They need to know I will do the right things to work up my customer base and show them I have an honest business. Maybe the books won’t turn out to be to their liking, but it will be everything it has been advertised to be.

In my email I always say if the buyers have time, I’d liked to hear what they think of the book. Those reviews come in handy to put on sites where I sell books. Giving my email replies a personal touch has made me friends with people from around the United States and lately in other countries. They continued to keep in touch. These buyers wait for word from me that my next book is ready to buy. Some of the anxious ones email several times to ask how long until my next book is finished. I always reply with a response about how the book is coming and reassure them that I’ll let them know as soon as I have the book for sale. Right now, I have a long list of emails to send a notice once I’ve published the book which should be ready this summer. What I have done so far may not have made me a household word yet, but what I’m doing works for me. Maybe some day.

 

 

　

　

　

　

Kindle Store Pricing Trends: Is Amazon Backing Away From Big Deals?

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Kindle Store prices, discounts, and promotions are moving in so many different directions that we should resist concluding that there are many real identifiable trends, but here are a few things I have noticed lately:

 

  • Amazon’s own Big Deals on Kindle page, which tended to go unchanged and stagnant for months at a time after being launched last year, still exists but its link has been removed from the "Special Features" section of the Kindle Store’s left-sidebar Browse link list. This could mean nothing in particular, or it could mean either than Amazon is backing away from the free promotional book offers from mainstream publishers that have tended to populate the page or — and this is the more interesting of these possibilities — that the page is being overhauled and might be rolled out anew with information not only on free promotional books but also on over a million other free books available to Kindle owners, including Amazon’s own listing of nearly 20,000 free public domain titles and other free-content channels via Project Gutenberg, the Project Gutenberg Magic Catalog, the Internet Archive, ManyBooks, Feedbooks, and others.
     
  • The number of free promotional titles in the Kindle Store has been trending down lately, and may have become more of an annoyance for Amazon (in terms of customer service and its impact on the Kindle Store bestseller list) than it is a benefit for customers, although total abandonment of the listings might be a risky move in the context of Amazon’s "customer experience" business principle. Although the Kindle Store listings seem to suggest 56 free promotional titles at present, there are actually fewer than 40 after one subtracts free sample chapters and one title that is actually not available for order or pre-order.
     
  • An alarming number of the forthcoming likely bestsellers in the Kindle Store — especially among those slated for Kindle release between March and May 2010 — show Kindle prices in the $14-to-$15 range. Generally (but not always!) such prices are the result of listing issues and tend to sort themselves out (and be lowered to the range of the $9.99 bestseller price point) within a few days of a title’s release in the Kindle Store.

This is a cross-posting from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily blog.

Chapbooks: The Personal Side of Self-Publishing

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 I recently came across a blog by Betty Ming Liu, an award-winning teacher of writing and journalism at NYU, The New School, Media Bistro, and Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute. She recently learned a lot about chapbooks at a panel discussion devoted to the topic. Check her blog post for a great introduction to chapbooks and how to make them.

Chapbooks can be a lot of fun.

My father, Roy Friedlander, was a printer who apprenticed in the Compositor’s union in 1933, and I grew up around books. Later, he would bring home chapbooks like these and other ephemeral printed pieces.

He worked his entire life in commercial printing, business forms printing, briefly at the New York Times and later as a teacher at the New York School of Printing. I think these books, almost exclusively by poets, short story writers and graphic artists, really appealed to him because they were so different than what printing usually meant for him.

(Photo credit: Betty Ming Liu)

Now that the holiday season is here, I started thinking how wonderful a gift a chapbook can be for a writer who wants to share her work with friends and family. It’s a way of bringing publication into your own hands, and of seeing at least some of your work in print. A well-designed chapbook, neatly produced and sewn up, would be valued by whoever received it. 

What Is A Chapbook? 

17th Century Chapbook PeddlerAccording to The Chapbook Review, they are “slim, soft-cover books, usually inexpensively produced and independently published.” In fact, the form of a chapbook is largely undefined. Today, many poets use chapbooks to issue poems, assembling them by hand from pages they’ve printed themselves.

Although small presses may issue chapbooks that have been printed with engravings, lino cuts, or letterpress printing, none of these are required. In its simplest form, a chapbook might be a cover printed on slightly heavier, or colored, paper, with several folded sheets sewn inside the cover. 

This simple and easy to produce “booklet” can easily become a vehicle for your creative prowess. Adding an illustration to the cover will make it more attractive. Look at line drawings, where there are no gray tones, for the best and most traditional match for your content.

What will you put inside your chapbook? The choices are pretty unlimited. I’ve seen lovely chapbooks with poem sequences, a single short story or essay, or a combination of poems, stories, and drawings. Sometimes the chapbooks have limitation statements inside the back cover which add an exclusivity to the production. This is a good place to sign the chapbook, if you want to add another personal touch.

Yes, It’s a Business, But There’s More To It Than That

We are usually very focused on publishing as a business, how to make good decisions about publishing, controlling costs, meeting schedules, and all the other necessities that enter into self-publishing as a business. Sometimes it’s refreshing to remind ourselves of the beauty and power of writing in its most unadorned form; the essence of writing as communication.

I particularly like the artisanal quality of these chapbooks. A writer becomes something of a self-publisher, and also a craftsman, as she chooses her work, arranges the pieces, prints her sheets and assembles the chapbooks. Many parts of her being come together to create these very personal creations, and the results speak of the individual attention that goes into them.

There is no more personal expression of the desire of a writer to self-publish than a chapbook, and no more direct way for the writer to bring their work to a small circle of intimates.

Resources

You can explore the intriguing and personal world of chapbooks, both those from small presses and ones created by individuals, as well as learn some of the history of chapbooks, and see another set of step-by-step instructions. Here are some links:

 

This is a cross-posting from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer site.

Kindle Rush Results

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This post, from Seth Harwood, originally appeared on the Author Bootcamp blog  and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

Click here to Listen to this post as Audio. (Right-click to download.)

As some of you already know, back on December 27th, I released a sample of my first short story collection A Long Way from Disney on Amazon’s Kindle store and used social media strategies to market it. I did this for various reasons, but mainly because, as I said here on OC before, I believe authors need to take on the role of scientists and experiment with what’s possible in today’s publishing world. (If you’re interested in how I publicized this, see my recent posts at AuthorBootCamp.com.)

A Long Way From DisneyFrom a scientific point of view, the experiment was a great success. I learned a great deal, which I’ll discuss below. I sold a lot of books (at $.99 each): around 350 in the first week, and I got my name and stories in front of a lot of new people. I also heard from a number of them who read the book right away and really loved it! For you authors out there, I hope you can relate: Getting positive feedback on your work from total strangers is about the best feedback there is.
[For those of you keeping score at home, those sales put $260 into Amazon’s pockets and $140 into mine. Not too shabby, I don’t think, but also not the split an author might hope for.]

Okay, without any further delay: Here are the Results (What I’ve learned) from Experiment 1:

1) Timing can be essential. I positioned myself to hit the Kindle store just after Xmas, thinking that with many newly gifted Kindles out there, a lot more Kindle ebooks would be selling and that I could cash in on this rush. I was correct in this prediction (Amazon sold more ebooks than paper copies over Christmas), but what I didn’t predict was how much harder this made it to reach the Top 100 Kindle bestseller list, a goal I had set for myself. I wanted to hit the top 100 because it would give the book additional exposure and stimulate more buying from newbie Kindle owners looking for quick, cheap content.
 

Ultimately, I think choosing this time right after Xmas might have helped me sell a few more books. But by not hitting the top 100 list, I missed a critical chance to attract more attention on the Kindle store. As author Rob Kroese posted on an Amazon Kindle Discussion board, he was able to hit 300 in books on the Kindle bestseller list prior to the holidays by selling 30 copies a day. During the holidays, he sold 60 copies per day and couldn’t crack the top 500. I should mention that the highest ranking I got on Kindle Bestsellers was #250, which in retrospect was a great achievement, even if it came short of my goal.

On that note, I also hit #4 in Short Stories, #16 in Literary Fiction and #40 overall in Fiction.

Would I have been able to reach my goal of the top 100 at another time? I’m not so sure.
 

2) Making the Kindle Top 100 list is actually pretty hard for an independent author. Initially I figured, how many copies of these books can they be selling? Well, I learned that in actuality the answer can be quite high. A lot of the books on the Top 100 list are actually FREE! The Kindle store includes many classics in the public domain—for example, Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, Treasure Island, Little Women, etc. And whenever someone downloads these free texts, Amazon counts it as a sale. It’s hard to compete against FREE. And, for this reason, the bestselling ebooks list can be harder climb than the paper version. (Back in March 08, I made #45 overall in books on Amazon when I tried a similar experiment with a print on demand publisher and my first novel, Jack Wakes Up.)
 

3) Free isn’t for Everyone. So why shouldn’t I set the price of my book at FREE—the web’s new magic price, according to Chris Anderson—as I’ve done with audio podcast versions of all my fiction at my site and on iTunes? Well, because Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (how you put your book up on Kindle) won’t let me. That’s right, as an independent posting content to the Kindle store, the lowest I can go in price is $.99. It’s true. So who’s posting these freebies on the Kindle store? Publishers. Including, you guessed it, "Public Domain Books."

There’s no sour grapes here. I hope no one will misread any of these statements as that. But there are some interesting lessons learned. Would I have made the top 100 if I had put my book up at a less busy book-selling time? Who knows. But if Rob Kroese can hit #300 by selling 30 books in a day, I probably would’ve had a good shot when I sold close to 200 copies on just the first day. I’ll just have to try another experiment at some point to find out.

When I do, I’ll also capitalize on one more thing I learned in this experiment about actual buying on the Kindle platform:
 

4) Non-Kindle-owners need education if you want them to buy. Not too many people have a Kindle out there, but any Kindle book can be purchased on a PC or an Phone/Touch. This means that a great many people can actually buy a Kindle book, but many of them will need to be educated about how they can do this—something that I tried to enable, but could’ve done far better with in retrospect.

So how did I do? As a writer, the biggest success of this experiment was getting my fiction into more people’s hands and hearing strong feedback from them. As for my writing career and how to proceed with publishing experiments going forward, I really learned a great deal. I hope you found it helpful. To talk more about this with me, please comment on either of my writing/publishing websites: sethharwood.com or authorbootcamp.com, or hit me up on Twitter (@sethharwood) or Facebook.

What am I doing next? Going cross-platform with this experiment—taking the Kindle version of A Long Way from Disney and bringing it to Smashwords (Sony reader and others), Mobipocket (Blackberry) and the iTunes store as an App to enable the content to be read on even more devices! I’ll be back to talk about how that all goes soon!

Mentoring – Paying Forward

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This will be a short one but an important one. How many of us were ever positively influenced by an authority figure when we were younger? Perhaps it was a teacher or professor. Maybe it was a cop or an adult big brother or sister volunteer. Maybe it was an established professional in our career field or a higher level executive in our corporation or a higher ranked officer/NCO in a military unit. In any case, did that person take you under his or her wing and provide guidance and help?

Oft times, it’s not possible or convenient to pay back those persons of influence other than to acknowledge their help. Since we can’t pay it back, we have the alternative of paying it forward. Do unto someone else as someone did for you when you were younger. Become a mentor. There are worthy new guys out there who could use a boost up. Look around for talent in the raw. Is there someone who could be helped by your hard-earned knowledge and experience? Consider taking that person on as a work in progress. You can make a huge difference in that person’s life. No, you’ll never be paid back directly by that person, other than perhaps his acknowledgment. But maybe he’ll pass that help forward to someone else who comes after he does. It’s like a chain letter in which everybody wins and no one loses.

Look around. If you’re an experienced person with something to teach, find someone worthy of your help. If you’re someone in need of assistance, look around for a mentor who can provide what you need. Paying forward is a very altruistic concept and has been with mankind forever. Recognize when it’s your turn to either ask for help or to give it.


This is a cross-posting from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends Blog.

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