Andalusian Horses by Doreen Haggard
http://www.amazon.com/History-P-R-Andalusian-Horse/dp/1453814396/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi1
Andalusian Horses by Doreen Haggard
Month: December 2010
Happy New Year!
2010 was a watershed year for indie authorship, and 2011 looks to be even better. Indie authors and small imprints, your hard work, dedication and patience are finally paying off. The stigma attached to self-publishing is all but gone, and it’s largely due to your commitment to excellence. Congratulations on countless jobs well done. To those who have yet to publish: fear not, for the trails have been blazed, the tools and resources are at your disposal, and the world is your oyster!
Publetariat staff will be off Friday 12/31/10 through Sunday 1/2/11 in observance of the New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day holidays. No new content will be posted to the front page of the site until the evening of Monday 1/3/11 at 6pm PST, but site members can still post to their blogs and use the Publetariat Forum in the meantime. We wish you a safe and happy holiday weekend, and will see you next year! No need to click through – this is the end of the post.
How Will You Promote Your Books In 2011? A Savvy Book Marketer Survey
Authors and publishers, what online and traditional book promotion tactics do you plan to use to promote your books in the new year?
Please take a few minutes to complete this short book promotion survey to share your thoughts and get a chance to win the Savvy Book Marketing Guide of your choice!
In last year’s survey, an overwhelming 94 percent of the respondents said that they planned to promote their books with social networking and other social media.
What will be the top promotion tactics for 2011? What new skills do you need to carry out your book promotional plans? Watch for the survey results in mid-January, and thanks for participating!
This is a cross-posting from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer. Please help Dana out with some input – the results will be informative for all of us!
Independent Authors And The Bookware Biz
In a recent post I rejected the idea that self-published authors always need to own their own ISBN’s. My rationale was primarily financial, but it was also influenced by my belief that independent authors should not try to mimic the publishing industry’s traditional business model:
Still, as a self-publishing author I think it’s important to remember that what I’m doing is not what most people in the greater publishing industry are doing.
I may be looking to use the same sales channels that everybody else is using, and I may be packaging my content in the same delivery vehicle (a book), but in terms of scale there are significant difference that shouldn’t be ignored.
It’s understandable that independent authors would look to the book industry for a template upon which to base their own self-publishing efforts. It’s understandable, but it’s also a mistake. To see why, imagine for a moment that you’re a potter. Your goal is to make your own pottery in your own studio, and to sell that pottery in a small shop. Would it make sense to base your manufacturing and sales decisions on the business models used by Corningware or Dansk? Or might you find more practical utility in mimicking the business models of other local artisans, even if they produced paintings and jewelry?
Scale Confusion
The problem with appealing to the publishing industry for a road map is that doing so confuses multiple roles. In traditional publishing the author is almost always distinct from all other functions including manufacturing, marketing, distribution and sales. In that sense — where the author’s role is limited to that of content provider — there is a similarity between publisher-dependent authors and independent authors, even if there are disparities in scale.
In every other respect, however, the differences are beyond stark. Publisher-dependent authors don’t have to meet any of the responsibilities (or make most of the choices) that self-publishing authors have to face. I’m not saying that’s good or bad: what I am saying is that it makes all the difference in how self-published authors should approach the business of publishing.
Like the potter, the self-publishing author is responsible for making a lot of things happen that simply will not scale without an infusion of millions of dollars. Again, there’s no comparison between the self-publishing author and the industrial-grade publisher in every respect other than content. The two are not different-sized apples, but rather home-grown apples versus oranges from a corporate grove the size of Dade County.
The Morphing Publishing Model
Confusing the issue even more is the degree to which industrial-grade publishers and publisher-dependent authors have begun to morph away from their own traditional business model. Because of the internet, mainstream publishers recognize that the model they have relied on for decades (if not hundreds of years) is dead. What sense, then, can it possibly make for independent authors to appeal to mainstream publishing for answers? Obviously, none.
Mainstream publishers and self-publishing authors may indeed produce the same retail products, but that’s as useful as noting that the potter and the dinnerware manufacturer both make bowls. Complicating matters further is the fact that publishers and independent authors can now create virtual products that have no analog in the bowl business. Again, as far as I can tell, independent authors gain little or nothing by looking at how book publishers large and small conduct their business.
A Proper Publishing Parallel
I understand the romance of publishing, and the importance of the book as a cultural object. But those attributes are part of the fantasy and mystique of book publishing, not the cold-hearted reality. The only thing that really matters is whether you can survive economically, and that’s true whether you’re a writer or potter of any size.
Just as the independent potter can probably learn the most from other local artisans selling art, the independent author should look at how other independent content creators sell their products. And here I do not equate content with books, but rather with any text, sound or images that a single person can create and sell, either online or as physical product.
Having worked in the software industry, I’ve watched game development evolve along lines similar to publishing, albeit at a vastly accelerated pace. Commercial PC gaming began with small-scale development in the early days, including one-person designers who turned out hand-craft projects. Only a few decades later the computer-game and video-game markets were dominated by large-scale producers and multi-million-dollar titles. While broadband was eagerly anticipated by established producers as a cheaper distribution pipeline, it also unleashed a new cycle of small-team and single-developer titles in the casual-gaming, social-gaming and games-as-apps markets.
Software as a product embodies all of the aspects of content listed above: text, sound and image. If you include non-gaming apps and e-books-as-apps, the overlap between what independent authors are trying to do and what independent software developers are doing is complete. (Even demand for physical books can be likened to customers choosing to boxed or CD/DVD version of a program rather than a download. And if you’re thinking software is different from a book because software runs on a machine, I disagree. All books deliver code written for the human CPU.)
Books and software are also both published. From the consumer’s perspective, independent software development has a long-established history of acceptance, if not also respect. Independent software developers face the same pricing pressures and economic hurdles that independent authors face, and the same obstacles in trying to get products placed on store shelves or accepted by mainstream publishers.
In every respect I can think of, software publishing is either a similar or better business parallel to independent authorship than traditional book publishing. And software publishing has the emotional advantage of being unencumbered by the romance, traditions, expectations and paternalism of the book publishing world.
Software as Solution
In the post about ISBN’s referenced above I openly questioned the value of ISBN’s for independent authors. Among other observations, I noted:
The ISBN system was created in the pre-internet days. It solves a problem related to tracking and inventory, not a problem related to marketing and sales. The modern internet search engine, primed with a few keywords, can now connect 99.99% of the people who want to find my title with a point of sale. What else do I need?
As far as I know, independent software developers don’t register their work with a monopolistic service like R.R. Bowker. They don’t pay fees to be listed in databases that were created to facilitate the business practices of large corporations across international borders. Rather, they use the internet, their own web sites, and various online markets in order to sell their wares. It’s a tough, competitive business, and for every economic success story there are thousands if not tens of thousands of economic failures. But it’s also a business (or hobby) that allows and invites complete creative freedom.
Like a potter studying how a local painter has managed to carve out a niche in the marketplace, independent authors should take a hard look at how software is sold to consumers through search engines, online recommendations, social networks and word of mouth. Nobody hawking blog templates or cell-phone apps or shareware is asking a clearing house for permission to do so. Nobody with a killer app for sale is trying to mate their business model to the practices of Microsoft or Oracle or Apple or IBM. And nobody selling software is asking an agent or editor for permission to make a sale.
Editions and Versions
To the extent that an ISBN or anything else eliminates confusion in the mind of the consumer that’s obviously a good thing. But software manufacturers generally do a good job of eliminating confusion without slaving themselves to an industry-wide registration system. Rather, each software manufacturer keeps track of their own version history, even though they may offer several versions at different price points for different levels of functionality, or in order to meet differing technical requirements for proprietary devices or operating systems.
Not only do software developers keep track of all this, consumers don’t seem to have a problem with that. By the same token, I see no reason why an independent author should not use the same approach when listing the various editions or versions of a work — whether those exist within or outside the ISBN registration system. In fact, going forward I think this kind of autocuration will become a necessity.
Why? Because over time e-books will to run into the same legacy and version issues that bedevil all software. Files that were formatted for the original Kindle or Nook will be replaced by new standards, yet some customers will continue to use those older devices. Like DOS games that can no longer be played on modern computers, electronic books face obsolescence in a way that books themselves never have.
What the independent author wants is what the independent software developer wants: to meet the needs of the customer. To the extent that an ISBN or any other industry identifier makes that possible, either by helping the customer find what they’re looking for or by opening third-party markets, it might be a good thing. But the idea that an independent author needs to provide ISBN’s for all versions of all editions is beyond absurd because it flies in the face of the software industry’s own successful practice.
Owning your Own History
Go to any site that sells software and you’ll find a page that lists the available versions. You might even find legacy versions tucked away somewhere, if not also an exhaustive version history leading back to the program’s origins. If you want something really old you might even be able to find it curated elsewhere.
I believe independent authors should be responsible for their own version and edition histories in the same way, and I don’t think that involves a lot of work. I also think customers will expect authors to provide version and edition information on their sites. But I don’t see this as inevitably leading to confusion, even if independent authors choose to avoid the costs and obligations of the ISBN system.
Why? Because two things are probably never going to change about anything you write: the name of the author and the title of the work. You might create various editions and versions, but the search-engine-friendly identifier of author or title will always remain constant. If customers searching for your work are linked to a page that provides all of the various editions or versions — possibly even bypassing middle-men and middle-markets — how is that bad?
Authors are already (or should be) including links to their home page or book page when they make work available on third-party sties. If a customer can’t find what they’re looking for they can follow that link and see if you have what they need. (Admittedly there are two assumptions here. First, that you’ll always make the most-requested versions/editions readily available. Second, that customers will, over time, get used to looking for bookware in the same way they search for software.)
Minimizing Confusion
If there’s an inherent potential for confusion in anything I’ve proposed I think it springs from the meaning of the words edition and version. In some ways they both mean the same thing: different iterations of whatever the original content was. But I think there are also differences and expectations in the mind of the consumer when these words are used.
The most obvious point to make is that versions usually describe software and editions usually describe physical books. Were these retail galaxies not already blurring together, such distinctions might remain useful. Unfortunately, the line between what is and isn’t a book or an application is getting fuzzier by the day.
Classically, a software version describes two important characteristics. First, the number (or name) of a program tells you if it’s the most recent iteration of the code, which is usually also the most advanced in terms of functionality. Second, versions speak to compatibility. Modern consumers understand that they need to select a version compatible with the hardware they own.
A book’s edition also describes two characteristics. First, there’s the print run of a title — first edition, second edition, etc. This is often most important to collectors, as well as college professors who make teeny-tiny changes to their course texts in order to compel a new round of sales each year. Second, editions are important to customers who may be looking for large print, unabridged original content, or a particular foreword or introduction.
While these two words currently tend to be used for different products, versions and editions speak both to changes in content as well as technological variations. It is this commonality that presents the potential for considerable confusion, but also opens the door for seamlessly merging the self-published book with the consumer’s experience of software.
The practical solution, it seems to me, is to emphasize changes in content through use of the word edition, while using the word version to emphasize device dependence. If the title of your bookware (e-book or physical book) is Blood Lust, editions might include large-print, unabridged, etc. Some or all of those editions might also be offered in various versions that could be read by different devices.
In this context a physical hardcover or softcover book would be a version, not an edition. A large-print edition of Blood Lust might be made available in hardcover, softcover, e-book and audio-book versions. To the extent that this might fly in the face of current publishing convention, I think it’s a change most consumers will find easy to embrace.
The Bookware Business
Whatever the book business is going to become in the future — however it’s going to sustain itself economically — the economics of being an independent author demand that you take action now. Treating your content — both physical books and e-books — as bookware, rather than as something visionary or revered, solves a number of problems. Patterning your bookware business after independent developers who make and sell their own software provides a roadmap while the book industry continues to flail and wander. (Publishers have the capital and cash flow to wait for solutions: you don’t.)
As fickle and treacherous as the software business is, the independent creation of small applications that are sold directly to consumers correlates much more closely to what independent authors are trying to do than anything else I can think of. So the next time you add an app to your smartphone, or a widget to WordPress, take a look at what the people who made that program are doing to attract and keep (and, if applicable, monetize) your interest. You might learn something
This is a reprint from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.
Read > Write > Publish > Repeat = A Wonderfully Strange Life
I’ll start explaining the title’s formula with the word "strange". Its history shows it meaning, "from elsewhere, foreign, unknown, unfamiliar".
A Strange Life…
So does reading then writing then publishing then repeating the process create a life that’s unfamiliar, unknown, foreign, and from elsewhere?
Ask any serious writer 🙂
The reason I started this little explanatory formula with reading is because I’m in agreement with the folks who say the best training for writing (besides writing itself) is lots of reading. Of course, reading might also be the research that writers often do–even the kind of "reading" they do in their own minds when they invent characters and worlds.
This reading of one’s own mind isn’t all that hard. It is strange, though, because it usually doesn’t involve words. It’s the heart reading what the mind is saying from its depths.
So, then comes the writing. If you aspire to create a wonderfully strange life, I suggest you not read a bunch of books about writing before you actually do a whole bunch of writing. In fact, the formula should have a little feedback loop between reading and writing: read>write>read>write, etc.
Then, publish. This doesn’t have to be normal publishing. Since the word means, "to make public" and public means, "open to the community", the community you publish to could be as small as a group of friends.
Then comes repeat. If you want a truly wonderful life that constantly surprises you with the unfamiliar, that leads you to the unknown, that introduces the foreign, and entertains experience from elsewhere, you have to get a cycle of read/write/publish going.
Think of a coffee house. Imagine the person who reads books, then shares their experience in their own words. Every time you visit, they have a new story. Pretty soon, they’re telling their own stories. By the way, one of the original meanings for the word "write" was "paint".
So, there they sit reading their own minds with their hearts and painting verbal pictures that inspire the little coffee house community.
The first people who led a wonderfully strange life may not have had coffee, but they had their community. They spoke heart-felt words that captivated their friends.
They were our human family’s first authors…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Follow the co-author of Notes from An Alien, Sena Quaren:
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First Google Books Sales #s In
This post originally appeared on Munsey’s Technosnarl on 12/27/10.
Hokay, Google’s bookstore, launched Dec. 8th or so, is now giving sales stats. Results are promising, at least v. B&N or Kobo, less per title than Apple, but still a good start. Some portions, like the “sold through retailers” thing, aren’t looking as hot, but Google did manage to sell 4 copies via third parties, which is about 4 more than I expected.
Here’s why Google, and not B&N/Kobo/Sony/Apple/Agency/whatev, is the biggest ebook story of the year: They take away Amazon’s most powerful weapon against publishers. You can’t bury us in search anymore, Jeff.
I’d been putting titles into Google, by pointing their uploader to a directory w/ all the .pdfs I created for LSI/CSpace, and then taking Dusty for a long walk past the swimming pool while it processed. Through this arduous process, I’ve got 699 books live, another 150 pending, and can double that amount in short order, maybe after the uploader better supports .epub format (I’ve got a thousand such titles that I’d already prepared for Kobo… whenever the uploader supports .epub. Google does say that’ll happen soon, though it has been a while.)
The reason for going Google isn’t that I was so flush from ad revenue from Google Book Search; it’s that a book in Google’s search engine can, in many circumstances, be found, where it cannot be on Amazon.
Read the rest of the post on Munsey’s Technosnarl.
The Streets of San Francisco: Detoured, Diverted, and Derailed by Historical Research
Several weeks ago I had carved out a few days for uninterrupted writing, and I was firmly committed to making significant progress on my new book. I already had the first five chapters written (about 10,000 words) of Uneasy Spirits, the sequel to my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, and my goal was to get another 4-5 chapters done. I started out well, briefly reviewing my outline, and then I began writing the chapter where my protagonist, Annie Fuller, was to travel from the O’Farrell Street boarding house she owned to the residence of Simon and Arabella Frampton, spiritualists she is investigating. This would require her to take a horse car from her neighborhood north of Market Street to the Rincon Hill neighborhood, south of Market, where the Framptons were renting a house. I started on the first paragraph, and two days later, I only had about 600 words written.
You see, I got lost in the streets of San Francisco, doing research.
The first detour away from writing started innocently enough. I wanted to find the name of the horse car company Annie would have been riding in 1879. First I did a google search, looking for sites on early San Francisco transportation. I eventually found out that there were two routes that went near her house and would take her within a few blocks of her destination, the Central Railroad Company (horse cars ran on rails), and the South Park and North Beach Company. Of course I also read about the history of horse cars in general, learned about when horse cars began to replace omnibuses in San Francisco, located a lovely picture of a horse car from the South Park Company, and read about the history of Rincon Hill/South Park district. One morning of writing gone.
After lunch I pulled out my book of historical San Francisco maps, and, with a magnifying glass, began to go through the maps for the 1860s and 1870s. Uneasy Spirits opens in October of 1879, just a few months after the events of Maids of Misfortune, therefore I needed to know what routes existed in that year. Of course there wasn’t an 1879 map, that would be too easy, but two maps did have streetcar routes marked on them. One was from 1864, which actually had the title “The Railroad Map of the City of San Francisco,” the other was dated 1873. What I discovered was that the Central Railroad went right past Annie Fullers’ boarding house and would pass just two blocks from the Frampton house, so the Central Rail it was. Now that I was sure of the route, I pulled out pictures I had taken the month before when I last visited San Francisco to attend the Bouchercon mystery conference. I had walked between Annie’s house and the Frampton’s place, providentially taking the same route that the horse car would take, and I had snapped a number of pictures on my husband’s iPhone so I would have a sense of the terrain.
Unfortunately, I am not a native San Franciscan. While I visit the city as frequently as I can and have read numerous books on the city, I don’t know the streets the way a native would. I don’t have childhood memories of which section of California Street is the steepest, I haven’t had to calculate whether it is closer to go straight down O’Farrell to Market or turn at Taylor, I don’t have a sense of how long it would take me to get from Kearney to the Embarcadero. I have to look up this kind of detail on a map, or research them in person. In addition, reconciling the streets in 2010 with the streets of 1879 (particularly when most of places where people lived and worked in 1879 were destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake and Fire) is not easy. Flipping back and forth between my pictures, the printed historical maps, and google street map, I pictured riding a horse car down Taylor, across Market, down Sixth, and getting off at Folsom.
But then I had to hit the pause button on my imagination. I had taken the photos in the morning, but Annie and Kathleen would be traveling in the late afternoon, so I had to look up to see approximately when the sun would be setting in San Francisco mid October and what the weather was probably like (again thanks to google). I then rewound my imagination and took the trip again with the sun low in the sky. Suddenly my first day of writing was over and I had written only 135 words.
The next day. after actually writing a few paragraphs of dialog between Annie and her maid as they traveled to the Framptons, what diverted me was not the horse car route or the terrain, but the look and feel of Folsom Street in 1879. I did more research on the neighborhoods of Rincon Hill and South Park, whose character as the wealthy part of town had been undermined by a bad municipal decision to cut through Second Street. I had noticed when I walked between Annie’s place and the Framptons that the 700 and 800 blocks of Folsom had seemed so much longer than the block on O’Farrell where Annie lived. I needed to know why, and if this was a modern configuration or one that would have existed in 1879. It took me hours, but I finally found out that difference in length was due to the original city land surveys, which made the blocks south of Market Street 4 times the size of those north of this main thorough fare. However, I also discovered that the city then divided those blocks into 6 lots each, which were then subdivided in a variety of patterns by subsequent real estate speculators. Phifft, there went the second morning.
After lunch, I wrote a few more paragraphs getting Annie and Kathleen down Folsom to the Frampton’s house, but then I was completely derailed as I threw caution to the wind and dove into the research necessary to determine what style this house would look like, given that it would have been built in the mid1850s (which is when this neighborhood flourished). Between a number of books written on the history of San Francisco architecture, a historical picture of a mansion on Folsom, and several sites on the internet, I finally decided on the Italianate style and determined the architectural details and the proper color scheme for the period. Day two of writing was gone, my nice window of writing opportunity had ended, and I had managed to write only 620 words.
So, was all this research necessary, and was it necessary that I do the research right then?
Yes and No.
I certainly could have done the research later, concentrating on the dialog in the scene and filling in any details later about the name of the horse car, the route they took, and so forth. One downside of having learned so much detail about San Francisco transportation is that I might have been tempted to do an information dump, the bête noir of historical fiction. Even more likely, I might never even use this chapter, deciding later that it will speed up the pace of the book to start right out at the Framptons, skipping how Annie got there.
Yet, I would argue that I needed to do that research, and I needed to do it then, even if the whole chapter disappears and much of the detail I learned never makes it on the page. Even if the reader doesn’t need to know that someone who got off at Folsom would be able to see the Twin Peaks if they looked west up that street, or that Italianate houses had sturdy decorative brackets along their roof lines, I needed to know. Because it is details like this that fuel my creative imagination.
When I can picture the horse car Annie would ride or what Folsom Street would look like, then what I write will ring true, even if every detail I end up writing is a complete fabrication. Because ultimately what I write is just that—fiction. I don’t really know what the 800 block of Folsom looked like in 1879, and even if I did (say for example I found a picture), I might describe it differently to make it fit into my plot. And I don’t really know how it feels like to ride on a horse car, and even if I got to ride in one today, I wouldn’t experience it the same way someone of that time period would.
With a pinch of an old picture, a dollop of a nineteenth century newspaper story, mixed in with four years researching and writing a dissertation on women who worked in San Francisco in 1880, added to a very large portion of having lived for sixty years and the important ingredient of an active imagination, I can make the reader believe they are truly experiencing the past. That is the alchemy of creative writing, and doing research as I write, not in some fill-in-the-blank manner later on, is one of the ways I do my job well.
What about you? How do you use research when you write, whether you are writing historical, contemporary, or science fiction? And, how much detail do you as a reader want when reading about a time and place that is not your own?
This is a cross-posting from M. Louisa Locke‘s The Front Parlor.
A Modest Proposal For Book Marketing
This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files blog of the Idea Logical Company on 12/23/10.
It’s a pre-holiday week and a busy one following a busy one last week. So time for blogging is limited and, besides, all you readers have presents to wrap.
But there is one subject to ruminate on just a little bit that came up repeatedly during last week’s business. Constance Sayre of Market Partners and I are doing a joint exploration of ebook royalty rates for a presentation at the Digital Book World conference in January. We created a survey to allow agents to tell us anonymously what kind of deals they were striking and we got about 130 responses.
(Market Partners’ newsletter, Publishing Trends, has a report in their current issue, released today, on what the agents said and the full data will be released for our attendees at Digital Book World on January 26.) We decided to balance our presentation by giving publishers an opportunity to give their side of the story, also anonymously (except, since we interviewed them, we know who they are. The agents, having responded online and in privacy, can’t be tied back to their answers. Connie and I are good at keeping confidences.)
We spoke to seven CEOs last week, a couple of whom were joined by colleagues who actually do the contract negotiating. What they told us about ebook contracts is what we’ll talk about at Digital Book World.
But just about all of them made an ancillary point and that’s our subject today. The point they made is that the main task ahead of them in the next few years is to completely reinvent book marketing. There was clear acknowledgment across the board of something that has concerned us for some time: that inevitably declining retail shelf space means a commensurate decline in critical merchandising capability.
Changes are definitely occurring. The big publishers are undeniably SEO-conscious, investing real effort thinking about what search terms apply to each book they publish. They’re all experimenting with Facebook and Twitter and other social networking sites as well. Various community-building tools, including the very ambitious Copia platform that launched a few weeks ago and the John Ingram-funded start-up Rethink Books and its new Social Book capability, are now being tried out. The established ebook vendors, notably Kobo and Kindle (on my radar screen; I’m sure Nook and Google too), are building social capabilities into their platforms. And the established book discussion networks like Goodreads and LibraryThing are continuing to add participants, books, metadata, and conversation that constitute raw material for marketing the next book from any publisher.
Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.
Independent Bookstore 2010 Christmas Season
Tis the season to be jolly in the book retailing business. This year’s season has been busier than many. Our sales are definitely up; however, they have also been unusual. I will give this my best guesses as to why. I will address:
- Bestsellers
- Mid Lists
- Impact of Ebooks
Bestsellers
Although many industry watchers tend to focus on the NYT’s Bestseller List, they do not tell a representative story and here is why. First, the NYTs is tainted by the way books are reported and manipulated by the big publishers. Sometimes the same books get counted multiple times: when the publisher sells them, when the bookstores buy them, and when the book buying public walks out the door with them. Of course this all greatly skews book buying reality, as does how many of these books are sold. One can go to most large-scale grocery stores and big box discount chains to find these same books discounted 30 to 50%. They’re used as loss leaders. We independent booksellers purchase our books from distributors and publishers for discounts of 38% to 50%. That makes it difficult for us to compete. Most of our bestseller sales are to folks who are loyal to us (bless their hearts) or who find a bestseller book convenient to purchase when buying other, less touted books. For independent booksellers, NYT’s bestsellers are not where we make our important sales.
Mid Lists
What we’re seeing a lot of are sales of series books, adult and young adult, and what I would call the old war horses—books that have been popular for years and new books by the same authors. We’re also seeing a lot of long tail niche books being special ordered. Books this year have represented the awareness and caring for the tastes of friends and family. Our shoppers have expressed their opinion that books are a convenient way to one-stop-shop for the holidays. For that reason, although the number of shoppers is pretty much the same, they are buying a lot more than they usually do.
Impact of Ebooks
Although we’ve had a number of customers who have freely admitted to owning an e-reader of one form or another, they’re still buying regular books for themselves and others. We’re just not seeing much of an impact as compared to the major bookstore chains. I still think we are aways off being hurt by e-books at the independent bookstore level.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all my readers.
This is a cross-posting from Bob Spear’s Book Trends blog.
Happy Holidays, And An Update
Publetariat staff will be taking Wednesday, 12/23 through Sunday, 12/26 off for the Christmas holiday. No new content will be posted to the front page of the site until the evening of Monday, 12/27 at 6pm PST (our usual posting time), but members can still post to their blogs and the Publetariat Forum in the meantime. We here at Publetariat wish all of you a safe and happy holiday weekend.
And Now, The Update…
I’m going to share some fairly personal financial information here, but I think everyone who’s donated deserves to know how the funds are being spent. I’ve already shared enough that we’re pretty much past the point of what’s usually considered polite conversation anyway.
Thanks to the outpouring of support and generosity from Publetariat’s audience, friends of its audience, and friends of friends of its audience, plus some help from my sister, I’ve been able to make a mortgage payment, pay the past due utility bills, make a payment toward my outstanding medical bill from the surgery, and make a payment toward my outstanding attorney fees. I’m still two months in arrears on the mortgage, but the bank tells me they can’t "accelerate" the mortage and move into foreclosure proceedings unless I’m at least three months in arrears.
I still need to get completely current on the loan as soon as possible, being in default is trashing my newly-single credit rating (I became legally single December 17), but at least there’s no fear of losing the house entirely if I can keep making a mortgage payment each month from this point forward. I’m also trying to get a mortgage modification, but it takes a long time—it seems to be a two steps forward, one step back process—and the bank doesn’t stop its collection efforts while processing modification requests. I’m now setting aside incoming funds toward next month’s mortgage payment and utility bills. The wolves are at bay, at least temporarily.
***
I’ve been a writer pretty much my entire life, yet I find myself at a loss for words to express the gratitude I feel. Many times during this past year I’ve felt isolated, hopeless and fearful. I’m an optimist by nature, but I haven’t been myself for a very long time. When the person you’ve loved for 20 years, whom you thought would always love you back and be there for you, abandons you just when you need him most, it tends to make you doubt everything you thought you knew about the world and the people in it.
My belief that people are essentially and generally good is restored, as is my hope for the future, and it’s all thanks to all of you. Whether you’ve donated, offered me freelance work, helped to spread the word about my plight, or just sent a kind note of support, you have pulled me back from the edge and helped me back to the light. You have made what I expected to be the worst holiday season of my life the best, and most meaningful, instead.
THANK YOU, SO MUCH. THANK YOU.
Citizen Author: Determined, Motivated, Fed-Up Authors: Unite
This editorial, by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry, originally appeared on Publishers Weekly on 12/20/10.
Yes, Virginia, we’ve entered a new digital age in publishing. But there’s another major change afoot.
America was founded by a scrappy bunch of determined, motivated, fed-up citizen soldiers who revolted against an unjust system that benefited the few at the expense of the many. Like them, a new 21st-century group of brave outsiders has decided to revolt against the often unfair elitism of modern publishing. We call them Citizen Authors.
Sure, some of these brave new Citizen Authors are Harvard graduates with megaspeaking careers and fancy titles. But most Citizen Authors aren’t college professors, graduates of M.F.A. programs, or even relatives of someone in the publishing industry. Instead, they are veterinarians, entrepreneurs, schoolteachers, bartenders, soccer moms, firefighters, goth teenagers, and foodies determined to write their way to success.
Citizen Authors have two things in common: (1) a dream of having a book published, and published well, and (2) the will to make it happen by whatever means necessary. Some Citizen Authors self-publish, some e-publish, some partner with small, medium, and megapublishers, and some do all of the above. There’s Seth Godin, who uses his creativity to package, market, and publicize his books in unique and savvy ways that embrace a grassroots methodology. There’s Robert St. John, who depends on his local following to successfully publish and produce gorgeous illustrated books that defy all publishing conventions about the coffee-table book market. There are Patricia Konjoian and Gina Gallagher, mothers with a passion to help other mothers despite no "expertise" in their topic.
Read the rest of the editorial on Publishers Weekly.
Workman published Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry’s The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published: How to Write It, Sell It, and Market It… Successfully last month.
Clogged
I’ve been thinking long and hard why I haven’t been able to write creatively (or editorially) for the past several months. I refuse to use the term “writer’s block;” it is just not a term. For the time that I’m not writing, I can’t call myself a writer, so “writer’s block” doesn’t apply.
[Editor’s note: strong language after the jump]
I keep saying that when I get another job, one that doesn’t suck the life out of me, that I’ll be in a better position to free up that part of my brain that enables me to write creatively. But I don’t know if that is true, so I can’t set my expectations there or else I’m headed for disappointment. And I need that like I need an addiction to crack.
At least for the time being, it’s hard to concentrate on a fictional narrative, given this all-encompassing “holiday spirit” we are all supposed to be engaged in this time of year. Why is it that in a time of giving we are so obsessed with what we don’t have?
What I do have is what will enable me to clear my head and write, because that is what gives me the fulfillment I crave as a writer. I don’t know that the old adage of poor, hungry, alcoholic, tormented artists empirically applies. Good narrative writing requires a lot of things and discontentment isn’t necessarily one of them (or else every depressed person would have an equal shot at being the next great author).
What a good writer does need is confidence and gratification in her writing. We can’t write with the objective of getting external validation, in which all too often we get wrapped up. Independent publishing is more than just doing it on your own — it’s about making all of the details of a writing career your own, answering to no one, and making the right judgments in how to go forward. Or not.
My inspiration for writing fiction comes from having the bandwidth to notice small details and insights in the course of my days–a ladybug crawling up the curtains, the dust on a ceiling fan, a veiled comment. It’s when I don’t have that bandwidth devoted to noticing and cataloging those details that I can’t seem to write. I’m not Agatha Christie so my stories don’t involve complex twists in plots. The stories I am most successful writing involve complex characters with specific traits, involved in compelling yet often mundane situations.
So I need to free up my bandwidth to enable those insights. I am clogged up with resentment (for my boss who lied about my compensation package), commuting details (like leaving at a specific time to allow delays in the downtown 4 Express subway), kid details (oh shit I have to bake cookies for my kid’s school xmas party on Thursday), grownup details (Chase bank is a lying, cheating, manipulative bank that holds my first and second mortgage and if I don’t call them out with a letter to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency they won’t issue a new escrow statement with a cancelled gap flood insurance policy). And more shit like that.
I have to somehow find a better way of dealing with all of those shit details, compartmentalize them, in such a way that I can still write. I’m letting them clog up my life. It’s like what practicing Kundalini Yoga is like, when the instructors teach you to unblock all the blockages, whatever the hell that means.
Somehow I have to do that. Somehow.
3 Signs Your Story's Characters Are Too Perfect
This post, by Suzannah Windsor Freeman, originally appeared on her Write It Sideways site on 12/3/10.
I read a novel from cover to cover yesterday, which I don’t do very often in such a short time span. The premise was really good, and I was interested to see how the plot would evolve.
At nearly one o’clock in the morning, I finally put down the book (actually, I put down the Kindle) and was disappointed—not with the story itself, but with the characters.
What could have been a well-written and thoughtful novel ended up falling short of its potential because some of the characters were one-dimensional. And there was one character in particular (the protagonist’s love-interest) I thought really let the story down.
He was just…well…way too perfect.
Do you recognize any of these three signs that your own novel’s characters might be too perfect?
1. You spend a lot of time describing your characters’ good looks.
Sure, in many cases we expect the protagonist’s love-interest to be beautiful or handsome, but that’s not a license to go on and on describing a character’s perfect looks. And hearing too much about how good the protagonist looks can even make readers feel resentful or like they can’t connect with the character.
On the flip-side, sometimes an author goes to pains to assure us that said character really does have flaws, but we generally remain unconvinced by the quirks or small details that are meant to make them less-than-perfect.
There are ways to show your readers that a love-interest is attractive without going into the gory details. What’s more important than how the character looks is how the protagonist feels when he or she is around that person.
Writer Caro Clarke gives practical advice on how we can describe our characters through their actions, instead of their looks.
2. Your characters’ actions and speech seem inauthentic.
Read the rest of the post on Suzannah Windsor Freeman‘s Write It Sideways.