Month: January 2011

2010: The Year Self-Publishing Lost Its Stigma

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This article, by Carla King, originally appeared on the PBS Mediashift blog on 12/29/10.

For over a decade I’ve been speaking at conferences about self-publishing to audiences of dejected, rejected authors. There was always a stigma associated with self-publishing, with many people considering it lower quality vanity press.

But this year, new faces appeared in the crowd: agents, editors, and publishers eager to understand self-publishing. Why? Self-publishing books has finally reached the mainstream, with enough success stories to make it a legitimate part of the publishing world.

Here’s more about this and other trends in 2010, plus some crystal-ball gazing into what’s coming in 2011.

  1. Self-publishing lost its stigma
    In today’s tight traditional publishing market, agents, editors, and publishers are now encouraging authors to test market their book by self-publishing. Yay! Self-publishing has finally lost its stigma. So if you’ve been dissed by agents in the past, 2011 might be your year to try again. Alan Rinzler is a longtime acquiring and developmental editor at major publishing houses and an independent editor with private clients. "Literary agents have been the missing link for self-published writers trying to break through into mainstream publishing," he states in Literary agents open the door to self-published writers. "But new attitudes are taking hold, especially among younger up-and-coming literary agents."
     
  2. Ease of tech attracts traditionally published authors to go indie
    Technology companies have been wholly responsible for providing tools that let authors easily publish in print and on e-reading devices. "Many of our indie e-book authors are outselling, outmarketing and outpublishing the traditional publishers," says Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, who in 2010 helped indie authors publish and distribute over 20,000 e-books. "Self-published authors are finally gaining much-deserved respect, not only from the industry, but from readers as well." Coker adds that the 60-80% earnings from the retail price of their books "has caused many traditionally published authors to go indie." I like a core group of proven e-book creation and distribution solutions, but keep looking to technology companies and partnerships. Just a few to note are Issuu, BookBrewer, and Monocle with its associated Bookish reader.

Read the rest of the article, which includes 8 more bullet points, on Mediashift.

What’s The Writer’s Job? ~ Recording Or Creating?

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I’m venturing into dangerous territory with the title of this post…

Let me clarify the exact bit of territory I want to defend.

First, when I ask if the writer’s job is recording or creating, certain easy and obvious answers come up:

* Journalists mostly record, though they can do it creatively.
* Essayists and article writers can slide back and forth between recording and creating.
* Fiction writers create, though there may be a bit of recording in some of their work.

In this post, I’m only going to talk about fiction writers and the specific territory I want to defend is this:

Even if a fiction writer uses real life settings, or even, at times, real life people in their work, they should always have the creation dial set at max and the recording dial turned way down.

Some of you might consider that last sentence as being too obvious to need any discussion.

Some of you might want to start an argument with me.

I’ll address my defense to the people who want to argue. The rest of you might wonder what the heck there is to argue about. Fiction is creation, and that’s that. Well…

Some fiction writers feel that their job is to record life; maybe do it with some creativity, but capturing what exists and rendering it is their prime function. I, almost violently, disagree.

I’ll include a link here to an article on Naturalistic Literature but not as any sort of proof of what I want to say. It’s merely to give you an example of the worst type of fiction writer–not necessarily worst as far as how they use words (they may be quite literary) but worst because of what their writing says about humanity.

Naturalistic literature gives what some folks might say is a true picture of the human condition, an almost scientific recording of the plight of certain people. Well, even a highly creative fiction writer might include a rather reportorial rendition of someone in their work; but, if they are true creators, they’ll find a way to infuse what may be sordid or terrifying conditions with a sense of underlying hope or faith. Let me try a short, and simplistic, example:

Take a character who’s a day laborer, beats his wife and children, and discovers he has terminal cancer.

The naturalist would merely record the conditions and have the character die off. The reader would receive no more value than if they actually knew such a person and stood by and watched the man come home every day, beat his wife and kids, then die of cancer.

The creative writer could take the same character and use their circumstances to show any number of human principles that could raise the man’s actions and death to a level that could inspire the reader–possibly to help abused women and children, or investigate the relationship between anger and cancer, or at least serve as moral food for thought.

My firm belief is that fiction’s proper purpose is to help humanity raise its sights, improve its situation, and strengthen its resolve to make life really matter…

I’m not trying to advocate some sort of sterile, moralistic fiction. We still need a damn good read and we don’t need a book telling us how to live our lives. Still… Showing the reader that even the worst conditions can hold some promise for improvement, even if the characters fail miserably to attain that promise, is, to me, a job that fiction writers should always be working to master.

Would you want read a book in which the characters always fail at life?

Would you like to read a story that had a few characters who failed but you still had your feelings affected in a way that helped you, in your own life, to understand or heal or help?

O.K. That’s as far as I can take my foray into this dangerous territory; at least, in this post…

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FlaAuthor Blog: 2010 in Review

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The 2010 Results are In: My First Year of Blogging was Successful!

One nice thing about a WordPress blog is that they give you a report at the end of the year on how your blog did against the competition, on WordPress.  I would like to thank all of my readers for following my bittersweet ramblings, and I promise that 2011 will be more upbeat, and contain more useful information for my readers.  Without further adieu, here are the results for the FlaAuthor.wordpress.com blog.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

 

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,600 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 72 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 60 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 17mb. That’s about 1 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was October 2nd with 70 views. The most popular post that day was Can I Write? – Feedback from My Editor.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, twitter.com, linkedin.com, mail.yahoo.com, and kickstarter.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for views from sandhausen, public isolation, public isolation project, internet world map 2010, and internet structure.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Can I Write? – Feedback from My Editor October 2010

2

About the Authors July 2010

3

Public Isolation Project November 2010
2 comments

4

Views from Sandhausen – Proposed book cover September 2010
3 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

5

Thoughts from an Unemployed Professional November 2010
1 Like on WordPress.com,

These results are very modest, compared to my competition, but have served to introduce Views from Sandhausen: Experiences from a Foreign Service Assignment.  For an author, it is all about building a platform before releasing a book.  Given that half of my income in 2010 was consumed by medical expenditures, and that was WITH great medical coverage, the end of the tunnel is in sight and you can expect more in 2011, afer my finances stabilize.

As I have told you all before, May your year of 2011 be the best ever for all of you (and me)!

Cliff

A New Year's Resolution

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 Well, I’ve caved in to the march of time. For years now I’ve been railing against electronic books and electronic reading devices, such as Amazon’s Kindle and all its imitators. As publishers, Susan and I have been forced (or at least forcibly persuaded) to make some of our titles—the Perseverance Press mysteries, mainly—available as ebooks for our distributor to sell to Kindle and the others. The conversion process costs us more money than we were making on the sales, but we still had to do it to satisfy our authors and the distributor. Well, ebook sales are picking up dramatically, and now we’re making a few cents instead of losing a few dollars. Now as a writer, I am faced with temptation, and I’m giving in.

 

 

 

My closet shelf has a handful of novels I’ve written over the years, for which I’ve been unable to find publishers. I don’t know why I’ve failed. Well, I do know that some of them weren’t very good to begin with, but there are a few—four in particular—that I’m proud of. I have felt sad that the characters I invented and have come to love have had to sit on a dark shelf.

 

So, this year’s New Year’s resolution is to give those stories and those characters a chance to be read. Maybe they won’t be read by many people, but a handful of readers is better than a silent void. So I have already “published” my novel Swimming in the Deep End as a Kindle edition. Early next year, I’ll do the same with Geronimo’s Skull and Elephant Lake. I think I may have found a publisher for my mystery Behind the Redwood Door, but if that’s true the publisher does ebooks as well as print books, so that will be available as an ebook too. (And if that deal doesn’t go through, I’ll publish an ebook edition myself.) I’ll do the same for Hooperman, although that needs another rewrite before I do.

 

Anyway, in time I’ll have a handful of ebooks available to those few friends I have who own and use Kindle machines (or iPads or iPhones or other electronic reading devices). Then comes the frightful job of marketing the works: telling people. I don’t know if I have the stomach for that, but I guess I must try. One tool for that will be my blog. Another will be a couple of websites that I’ve joined, Publeltariat and Speak Without Interruption, where I can post articles about this and that.

 

Meanwhile I continue to write mostly autobiographical essays for Black Lamb, and I’m chipping away at another novel. All of this activity keeps me out of trouble and is good for my mood. I’ve given up grander goals than that.

 

The New Year’s resolution, expanded version: to make some of my novels readable by some people, and to try to increase my readership, and to continue taking the greatest joy from the writing process itself.