Month: May 2011

Strip Mining the Authors

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This post, by Passive Guy, originally appeared on his The Passive Voice blog and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written another important essay on the changing face of publishing. I’ll intersperse some excerpts with my comments, but this is one you’ll want to read in its entirety. There is, as always, a link at the bottom.

As will be abundantly clear from Kris’ examples, traditional publishers and the new agents-turned-publishers are making a brazen grab for as many rights from authors as possible while reducing the amount of money they will pay authors for their books. This is the new strip mining model for publishing.

Why are they doing this?

When the ship is sinking, some of the passengers start fighting over the lifeboats.

With each passing week, the handwriting on the wall becomes more and more distinct. What does the writing say?

Big Publishing, the agents who rely upon it and the traditional bookstores that provide its lifeblood are sinking. Just like the Titanic, they’re not disappearing in an instant. The band is still playing and fashionable people are doing business on the upper decks. The good ship Big Publishing will be bobbing in the waves for some time to come, but Amazon, ebooks and indie publishing have punched big holes in the hull. Those holes cannot be patched and the ship is going down.

Does this mean the end of publishing ships? No, but it means the demise of the grand ocean liners. The S.S. Amazon is an entirely different design, crafted for speed and efficiency and it doesn’t need many sailors schooled in the old ways.

While the band is playing and champagne flows, people make brave speeches about the timelessness of their trade. But, make no mistake, a battle is underway below-decks for spots on the lifeboats. If it’s necessary to toss authors over the side to make room, well, that’s just the nature of the business these days.

From Kris:

[A bestselling] writer, more than any other writer, is in danger of losing money and copyrights, of in fact going from making a lot of money to making little or no money at all. How can she lose money when she will probably maintain her bestseller status, her sales will probably go up, and her work will go into more markets than ever before?

Simple. Her contract terms will change and she might not even notice.

At some time hidden in the mists of time, an ancient rule of contracts was formulated: When a business partner is in financial trouble and wants a change in a long-standing agreement, watch your wallet. The more “routine” the change, the more dangerous it probably is.

Kris talks about e-rights:

Another clause to beware of in the e-rights clause of your new contract is this one:

“The Author hereby grants to the Publisher…the exclusive license to produce, publish, sell, distribute and further license any Electronic Version of the Work…. ‘Electronic Version’ means versions that include the Work…in a complete, condensed, adapted, or abridged version and in compilations for performance and display in any manner whether sequentially or non-sequentially and together with accompanying sounds and images, if any, transmissible by any electronic means, method or device (including but not limited to electronic and machine-readable media and online or satellite-based transmission or any other device or medium for electronic reproduction or transmission whether now or hereafter known or developed…)” [Emphasis mine.]

Yikes! Ick! No. Never, ever, ever, ever sign this clause. Think about this: movies are digitized—they are performance, and they are often distributed online. Not only does that clause allow someone to monkey with your work, abridging it, taking it out of order, adding things to it, making it into a performance piece, adding sound effects, but it also is a backwards way of granting television rights, video display rights, and any other performance right, so long as that performance can be distributed electronically.

And don’t believe that someone in your publishing house won’t use that clause down the road. The editor you trust may leave, the publishing company might change hands, and a clause that was designed for one thing will be used for something completely different.

Gold has been discovered in ebooks. Smart people are prospecting for more gold with enhanced ebooks. Video in ebooks is a definite possibility.

While a few people sprinkled in publishers’ management positions high and low may have seen a vision of what books could become and the effect that might have on publishers’ profits in their traditional lines a few years ago, nobody bothered to tell the gnomes who tended the standard-form contracts.

Kris has seen far more publishing contracts during her career than Passive Guy has, but the ones he’s examined that are more than a couple of years old are tight where paperbacks and hardcovers are concerned and they leak like a sieve everywhere else.

Back to Kris:

Watch out for your option clause. Try to avoid signing one at all. In the past, option clauses were like job security, but no longer. Option clauses have now become a way to tie a writer to a publishing house and to prevent her from working for anyone else. So strike your option clause if possible.

. . . .

Watch your warranty clause.  Now, many publishers are reverting to an old practice. They want writers to warrant that the writer will not write anything until this particular book under this particular contract is published.

This used to be a separate clause, and very easy to find.  It existed in a lot of contracts 20 years ago, then faded away.  Now it’s back with a vengeance.  It used to be that the writer guaranteed that the book she had just contracted for would be her next book and no other book would compete against it.

Now she’s guaranteeing that she will not write another book until this one is published.  And in many cases, the publisher enjoins her from writing anything.

This clause, which has been in every new book contract I have seen from traditional New York publishers in the past six months, is buried in the warranties.  Which are the boilerplate part of the contract, the part that includes bankruptcies and acts of God.  A lot of established writers stopped reading the legal gobbledygook in the boilerplate years ago, and have been snared by this clause.

Sometimes people fighting for lifeboats don’t act in rational ways. During the fight, the lifeboat may be damaged, supplies lost and passengers capable of providing valuable assistance to the survivors prevented from boarding.

When he read Kris’ description of these provisions, Passive Guy was reminded about one of the fundamental rules of making contracts with important long-term partners: Don’t screw your partner in the contract even if you have an opportunity to do so. When your partner realizes you screwed her as she inevitably will, she’ll spend all her time and energy working on ways to get out of the contract instead of doing whatever it was that you wanted her to do when you signed the contract.

What about the clause that hog-tied the author to the publisher? PG’s already thought of a half-dozen likely ways to evade the clause. He can’t help it, that’s just the way his mind works. However, he’ll keep those under his hat for the moment because he hasn’t seen the language in the contract.

Something else also came to mind, however. As described, the hog-tying clause potentially precludes a professional author from earning a living by writing for a competing publisher. When you think of it that way, it sounds a lot like a non-compete clause.

Non-compete agreements are common in the tech world. When you go to work for a tech company or become a contractor for a tech company, you’ll be required to sign a non-compete agreement that prevents you from taking everything you learned while you worked on the Apple ebook project and taking it with you when you’re hired for the Microsoft ebook project.

As with everything else, however, non-compete agreements were abused by some employers and today a dense combination of state laws and court decisions have placed substantial limits on how much a company can restrict the post-employment work of a former employee.

One of the fundamental limitations on non-compete agreements is a public policy that people should be free to work and support themselves in their chosen profession and should also be free to move from job to job. Limitations on that freedom included in non-compete agreements must be narrowly-tailored with time limitations to protect the vital interests of the company, not punish ex-employees or former contractors for quitting.

Back to the bigger picture for a moment, hiding material limitations on an author’s freedom in obscure warranty clauses as Kris describes is an unethical business practice.

Depending upon how it’s done and what extra-contractual representations are made to the author, we may be moving into fraud territory.

This practice exploits the great mismatch in resources and negotiating power between a large publisher and an individual author. Passive Guy has no problems with bare-knuckles contract drafting and negotiations when both sides have access to good-quality legal advice, but this is over the line. It demonstrates disrespect for an author and an intention to fleece the author for the financial advantage of the publisher.

This is antithetical to a relationship of mutual respect between professional colleagues. This is destructive exploitation – strip mining – of an author’s life work.

Such behavior by a publisher gives rise to an additional inevitable question. If the publisher is willing to engage in borderline fraudulent practices in its contract with an author, what additional types of fraudulent practices may it engage in? Even hidden clauses in a contract are far easier to discover than under-reporting of sales and underpayment of royalties.

So, how do we deal with hidden gotchas in a publishing contract?

Next week, Passive Guy will unveil yet another lovely contract provision for authors. Check back to learn about the Smoke ‘Em Out Clause.

And most definitely read the entire post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. This one can make or save you some big money.

 

Principles of Contracts: Everyone Knows Peggy Lee (Or Should)

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This post, by JD Sawyer, originally appeared on his Literary Abominations site on 5/26/11.

Preface: I mentioned this in the first post in this series, but because I’m going to be talking about some specific points of law in this post, I need to reiterate: I am not a lawyer, am not qualified to dispense legal advice, and none of what follows should be considered as legal advice. All of what follows is opinion based on experience and on layperson’s research, and you should always consult a lawyer of an appropriate specialty when negotiating an IP-related contract (especially when dealing with a company that can afford bigger lawyers than you can).

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Previous chapter: Market Awareness
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If God had a lounge singer in the 40s, 50s, or 60s, I’d lay you even odds that it would have been Peggy Lee. Along with Etta James, Billie Holiday, and Rosemary Clooney, she had a glorious, smoky, rich alto that wrapped naturally around horns and clarinets to make sounds that were the aural equivalent of chocolate.

Peggy Lee had a good friend named Walter, and Walter need a singer/songwriter for his new project. Walter did good work, and he was a good friend, so Peggy gave him a good rate, and in 1955 the result of that project hit the country like Christmas. It was a little movie called Lady and the Tramp.

It was a great collaboration, and they had a good contract for the time (Peggy and her cowriter retained rights to “transcriptions” such as record albums and sheet music–a smart move). Everything might have been peachy for life, if Sony hadn’t screwed up the world with home video.

Videotapes have been around pretty much since the Big Bang (or at least since 1951) in broadcast, but nobody really expected that it would wind up being something people used at home any more than the early computer manufacturers thought that your phone would contain twice the computing power that sent men to the moon (which some of them now do). Even if it were technically possible, why would anyone want home video when they had, you know, lives? And television? A professional toy like video tape wouldn’t appeal to a mass market–or such was the thinking. Sony, by the 1970s the world leader in miniaturization, disagreed. In 1975 they introduced Betamax, the first home video format.

It took a few years for it to catch on, but (thanks largely to the porn industry) by the 1980s home video was THE thing (and in the years since, this trend has only deepened with more formats being released). Studios started making their bread-and-butter money from video rentals and sales, rather than from theatrical exhibition. The only people who had a problem with this were the artists who weren’t getting paid for the work they’d done for theatrical exhibition–but most of them just grumbled. Not Peggy Lee. Peggy Lee pulled out her lawyers and said “Sic ‘em.”

Disney argued that the original license left them with an implicit right to sell the movie in any format, and that “transcriptions” didn’t cover home video because it was just another video format, like film and television. Peggy Lee argued that it was a transcription, and that she couldn’t have sold home video rights, because home video didn’t exist at the time that Lady and the Tramp was produced.

It took a long time for the lawsuits, contrafilings, and court case to run its course. At the end of it, in 1992, Peggy Lee won two important victories. First, she got a few million dollars for her troubles, which helped with her retirement even after her lawyers got their cut. Second, she got a precedent, known in entertainment circles as “The Peggy Lee Decision.” According to this decision, rendered in the California Supreme Court, an artist can’t sign over rights that do not yet exist.

Let me say that again. An artist can NOT license rights that do not yet exist. All those old movie contracts suddenly got complicated, as studio lawyers had to scramble to make sure their creatives (such as composers, songwriters, etc.) signed addendum allowing the use of their work in home video. At the time, Internet streaming didn’t exist except in experimental theory, so very few studios listed that in their addendum–that came later (this is, btw, one of the reasons that certain episodes of TV shows, and certain films, are not available on DVD and/or for streaming–studios would not meet artist’s asking prices for their music and other creative contributions in the new formats).
 

Read the rest of the post, which goes on to address how the ‘rights that do not yet exist’ situation applies to—and can seriuosly injure—authors, on JD Sawyer’s Literary Abominations.

Hidden Gems And Little Darlings

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What makes you uncomfortable with or defensive about your story is worth looking at closely for two reasons: 1) it could be a hidden gem, or 2) it could be a little darling.

Hidden Gems

Sometimes as we write our subconscious seeds our stories with hidden gems, like how or where your protagonist will find the answer to his surface problem*.

In Bob Mayer’s book, Novel Writer’s Toolkit, he talks about a writer getting stuck with a particular problem in the story (the main character needs to discover some vital information in order to solve the mystery) and not knowing how to resolve it. It only took a quick look back through what was already written to find the answer in a short bit of description (several journals the character had seen on a shelf in another character’s office).

Another possible hidden gem your subconscious could work in is a story-worthy problem.

While it is important to give at least a minimum amount of thought to what your protagonist’s underlying issue is, sometimes the real issue develops deep within your own mind and isn’t revealed until you begin writing.

For instance I recently wrote a scene where my main character’s father, an ordinarily soft-spoken and gentle character, speaks condescendingly to his son, my protagonist. It’s a scene I’ve hated reading because it makes me uncomfortable. I’ve considered several times removing it, but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

However, since going back to basics with this story and trying to develop myself into more of a planner and less of a pantser, I’ve realized this scene reveals my main character’s story-worthy problem — the need to believe in himself. Had I taken it out before finishing the entire story I might have missed this very important detail.

Little Darlings

On the other hand, those “special” scenes that we feel the need to defend as “necessary” may not be necessary at all. They could be little darlings, as Stephen King calls them, and need to be eliminated (or at least banished to a folder far far away from the rest of your civilized manuscript).

To know the difference you can ask this very important question: does this move the story along? If it does, great! If it slows things down you may need to cut it. At the very least you’ll have to revise it, which means shortening and tightening.

A lot of my personal little darlings tend to be flashbacks and memories. They’re fun scenes and often moving, but necessary? Probably not. Some of the information needs to remain, but there are certainly better ways to scatter it through the rest of the story.

One example from my WIP is a flashback where my protagonist’s father is teaching him what the term “warming up” means. It’s cute, even endearing, but it really slows down the story. Instead, I’ll be re-writing the flashback into a memory, most likely as a couple of sentences instead of the several paragraphs it currently is. It’ll be painful, but it’s necessary.

Writing a great novel can be tough, but thankfully we’re not alone. There are multitudes of free blogs and inexpensive books we can read to help us learn about craft. Best of all, there are other writers and readers out there we can get in touch with thanks to social media who can become our mentors and beta readers. With all those great resources available, it makes it that much easier to decide if that scene is a hidden gem or a little darling.

How do you make that decision?

*For more information on surface vs. story-worthy problems check out Les Edgerton’s book Hooked.

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road To Writing.

Word Counts

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Writers who do so for a living have been focused on word counts over the years. During the hey days of pulp fiction and pop magazines, writers used to be paid by the word. This sometimes led to excessively wordy books and articles. Today, with the internet’s space and attention constraints, writing tends to be much more tightly structured. This has led to articles for a set fee within certain word-count boundaries.

Today’s book recompense is basically focused around a percentage of a book’s retail or net price, depending on the terms of the publishing contract. Various genres tend to have different standards based upon what the reading public is accustomed to. Generically speaking, if a book is less than 50,000 to 60,000 words, it’s creeping into the novella region. Most publishers (and therefore agents) have submission requirements, which are based on the pragmatic realities of the bottom line.

An unknown, first-time author should try to stay within the 60,000 to 75,000 word range. Why? To keep the publishers’ pre-production and printing costs down. They are taking a major risk on an unknown entity–a gamble that the book will at least break even. I once had an editing client, who at the ripe old age of 20, had written a 3,000 page tour de force military thriller. Mechanically, he was a good client. He learned from his mistakes and caught them in future self-edits. His stories were gripping and accurate. He would never be able to sell such a book until he had established a major reputation and fan platform. The book would be way too huge to  risk its initial costs.

First-time-authored books often become self-fulfilling failures. Since the publishers are unwilling to take on the risks of production and marketing, everything is cut back or eliminated. This results in a low-cost cover that won’t attract anybody’s attention. few will get the word because the ad campaign just isn’t there. The bottom line is, there is no bottom line–no profit. Constraints on the word count also contribute to a dismal prediction.

What To Do

So what can you do word count wise to improve the chances your work will make it through the agent/publisher submission process?

  • Know your genre of interest in regard to writing styles (tight? not so tight?)
  • Know your genre agent/publishers’ submission requirements in regard to word counts
  • Pre-plan your word counts and be flexible about what goes into your story

Let me expand a little on this last point. Sometimes, especially if you don’t have much experience) you will write your story and suddenly discover it’s not long enough. Oh oh, what now? Go back through the story. Look for places where scenes that create more tension or more emotional quandaries might be added without creating a sense of padding. This approach is one of the best ones I know to expand a story while adding to its interest.

Of course, if you can plan for this ahead of time, it will make your life a lot simpler. Let’s say you’ve created scenes, chapters, and acts or sections. You’ve arranged them into a logical outline and you suddenly realize, “Hey, all this ain’t long enough!” I faced this while outlining my new fantasy. I’m accustomed to writing snappy little mysteries of 50,000 to 65,000 words in about 42 short chapters. My new fantasy only had maybe 25 or so chapters, which definitely won’t cut it these days. What could I do to lengthen the work while increasing its tension?

I made two lists. The first was all the dangerous animals my questors might confront and what might happen if they did. I then did the same with a list of all the natural and man-made catastrophes they might encounter while traveling on their quest. I then when through the outline seeking logical places where items such as these might be placed in order to increase tension and make the reader think, “My gosh, what next?” You want to give the reader encouragements to keep on reading, even if it takes all night.All this hails back to when I was a lonely little boy on my grandparents’ farm without playmates. I would tell stories out loud to myself for hours on end. The most common phrase you might have overheard from me was: “..and then…, …and then….”

Another way you can pump up the word count is through the use of additional or expanded subplots and characters. I have used these to good effect in the past. I have found one of the easiest methods of doing this is to add a scene. One way to identify or mark these places is with a break symbol of three asterisks centered or with a new chapter designation

There you have: the importance of word counts and how the plus them up if need be..

 

This is a reprint from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

A Day To Remember The Fallen – Memorial Day

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Publetariat staff are off in observance of Memorial Day here in the United States: the day when we remember all the members of our armed forces who fought and lost their lives throughout history. Whether you’re in the U.S. or not, please take a moment to give thanks for the sacrifices of the fallen soldiers of your nation, as well as their surviving family members and descendants.

Publetariat members can still post to their blogs and use the Forum, but emails to Publetariat won’t be answered until Tuesday, 5/31, and no new content will be posted to the main site until the evening of Monday, 5/30.

10 Things You Need to Know About Self-Publishing

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This post originally appeared on the Web Design Schools Guide site and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

Today’s authors have started to catch on to the fact that they no longer have to depend on and pay a third-party publisher to do the work that they can do themselves by self-publishing. Self-publishing is no piece of cake, but these books have all the potential to be best sellers and major moneymakers just like their commercially-published counterparts. Whether you’re sold on having endless artistic freedom or complete control over your work, self-publishing is a rewarding task and terrific option for authors who are willing to put in the extra effort. Here are 10 things you need to know about self-publishing:

  1. You Need to Pick a Niche: It’s important to pick a well-defined niche for your book to guide you during the writing process and help determine your target audience. Niche books tend to do best, so it’s generally a good idea to write what about what you know and steer away from personal journals, emotional rants or niche topics that no one has heard of. Also, think about what your audience wants to read and what’s missing from your chosen niche. Once you determine this important information, you can better address the needs of your readers and niche market, as well as make a name for yourself.
     
  2. Study Your Competition: Before you self-publish, it’s important to study, analyze and keep up with your competition. If you haven’t picked a niche for your book yet, but have a couple genres in mind, start your investigation by looking closely at these types of books and authors to compare and contrast. If you do your homework and stay on top of your competitors’ latest works, you’ll be able to bring something fresh and new to the table and hopefully stand out from the others.
     
  3. You Are Your Own Editor: It’s important to remember that self-published authors are on their own for editing, unless you hire a professional editor, which can get expensive, fast. Proofreading and revising your own work is all part of the self-publishing process and is necessary to maintain full creative control of your book. If you’re taking the self-editing challenge, be sure to utilize the numerous editing resources available online, and try to get a second set of eyes to take a look.
     
  4. Make Your Title Memorable: In order to stand out among the rest, you’ve got to make your book title unique and memorable. This is true for any book – self-published or not. A short, clever title is always preferable, but it should still be clear and relevant to your book.
     
  5. Self-Publishing Includes Self-Promotion: If you don’t have a publishing company and literary agent to market your book for you, you’d better be ready to do it yourself. Self-published authors have to put themselves out there and take an aggressive approach to marketing if they actually want to sell their books. This includes promoting the book online, organizing book signings and sending complimentary review copies to newspapers and magazines. Essentially, you should eat, sleep and breathe your book so others will care about it as much as you.
     
  6. Praise and Criticism Should Happen Naturally: As tempting as it is to ask friends and family to write positive reviews for you, whether they’ve read your book or not, authors should overcome this urge and let praise and criticism happen naturally. Fake or forced reviews are easy to spot, and it won’t help your image one bit. So, sit back and let unbiased readers praise your work or rip it to shreds. After all, isn’t criticism better than no attention at all?
     
  7. A Literary Agent Isn’t Necessary: As much help as literary agents can be, they aren’t necessary for selling good books. If you’re dead set on self-publishing and reaping the benefits on your own, you probably don’t have much need or desire for a literary agent who works in mainstream publishing. Having an agent often defeats the purpose and personal benefits of self-publishing because you’ll no longer have 100 percent control over your work.
     
  8. Self-Published Authors Can Still Win Awards: Forget what you’ve heard before – self-published authors can win awards too! Every year, there are several writing contests to enter and awards to be given for superb self-published work, including short stories, fiction, nonfiction, poetry and many other genres. Credibility, a strong readership and strategic marketing will help you achieve your goals and reach the award-winning level.
     
  9. Know Your Audience: An essential part of writing and successful self-publishing is knowing your audience. Since self-published books generally cater to a smaller niche market, you have to consider your audience from the project’s conception, publication and marketing stages. One way of knowing your audience is to study the demographics, interests and needs of readers within your chosen niche. If you’ve self-published work in the past, get in touch with your readers and deeply consider their comments, concerns and questions when writing your new book.
     
  10. Send Out Review Copies: One of the best ways to establish credibility and garner attention for your hard work is to send out review copies to as many people and publications as possible. If your budget allows it, you can snail mail printed complimentary review copies of your book to newspaper, magazine and journal reviewers, as well as publishing companies, bookstores and anyone who sparks an interest in your writing.

 

First Royalty Cheque For Pentecost

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So I have shared the entire journey of Pentecost with the readers of this blog, and I have tried to be transparent along the way. I have shared the triumphs and also the difficult times in the hope that we can learn together. You can read/skim the entire journey here => First Novel.

Yesterday was very exciting because I received my first royalty cheque from Amazon since Pentecost was released on Feb 7th. They have payment terms of 90 days and pay by cheque to people outside the US for Amazon.com sales (which I have had a lot of questions about lately). So to round off the story, I thought I should share it with you in the spirit of honesty. Here it is.

I think there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in the publishing world. People are secretive and keep things behind closed doors which can skew our perception of reality. Joe Konrath shares his numbers and encourages us all, so I’m sharing my (far more modest) sales in order to show you it can be done on a smaller scale. This cheque is a representation of a level of publishing success – very small, but for a new author with a first novel, it’s encouraging to me. I will make my costs back within a couple of months and then we’re into the happy times!

I sold 578 books on Amazon between February 7 – 28 and the total sales = US$1003.06 and GBP33.90. Because of the with-holding tax from the US Kindle store as I’m not a US tax-payer, I received a cheque for $702.14. The GBP royalties aren’t enough to warrant a cheque yet! (They have a threshold of $100 before payouts) No, this is not going to pay a mortgage but it will pay a couple of weeks rent and is not insignificant for a first month [boldface added by Publetariat Editor].

The exciting thing is that Pentecost continues to improve sales and ranking, so although I have lowered my price to 99 cents, the sales numbers are going up (as above).

I’ll forfeit the higher price for this first book and the next one in the series, Prophecy, will be back at $2.99 so the cheques will get bigger again after December. As I write this, Pentecost is at #277 overall in the Kindle store, #2 in Religious Fiction and #12 in Action/Adventure.

It’s also exciting to see my future as a pro-writer, blogger and speaker slowly coming more into focus. I fully intend to make it my full-time living in the next few years and move out of the day job. A few more books will mean the cheques will get bigger. I can aim for the success of Konrath, Hocking and Locke – and so can you!

Does this encourage you? What success are you aiming for?

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

Of Readers And Gatekeepers: A Call To Arms

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Are you reading this? Then I’m talking to you. You’re a reader and you have a new responsibility. I’m including myself in this. I’m a writer, but I’m a reader too. Any writer worth his or her salt should be a voracious reader, and we’ve got a new responsibility as well. We’re all the New Gatekeepers. No, not extras in a Doctor Who episode, don’t get over-excited.

There’s so much talk about the changing face of publishing, and justifiably so. It’s an exciting time and writing and publishing is going through a renaissance brought about by new technologies. That means there are options out there for pretty much everyone to get their writing out into the world, and a lot of people are taking up the opportunity. Some people are doing seriously well out of it, like Amanda Hocking. Others are doing rather less well, like the poor woman that immolated her career with one online review – you know who I mean. But one of the net results of this revolution in publishing is that readers have been saddled with a massive new responsibility.

Gatekeeping is important. In the good old days of the late 90s and early 2000s, and since forever before that, the gatekeepers were the publishers. Writers would approach publishers, either directly or through agents, and publishers would decide what was published and what wasn’t. They essentially filtered what everyone got to read. The upside of this was, largely, the stuff that made it into print was generally well written and worth reading. Generally. We all know publishers are quite capable of turning out reams of utter shite too. But on the whole they ensured a general level of quality control. The downside, apart from the afore-mentioned shite, is that they also ensured that anything risky or unusual, something strangely cross-genre, something not immediately saleable, was unlikely to see the light of day. There were self-publishing and small press success stories, where the unlikely became massive, but those hits were very, very rare.

Now, with the advent of Print On Demand and ebook technology, publishers have found those gatekeeping responsibilities ripped away. Writers are still keen to be published by the big guys – there’s a definite advantage to it, both in terms of credibility and distribution, hence readership. But literally millions of people are circumventing the publishers and self-publishing. Millions more are scoring smaller deals with small press. The volume of stuff out there is staggering. And a lot of it is complete shit.

Remember, the publishers themselves have turned out many stinkers over the years, but the strike rate for quality – in editing, formatting, production and so on, as well as writing ability – has generally been kept high even if the stories were rubbish. Not always, but often. Nowadays people think it’s easy to write and be “published” and there’s loads of stuff out there that really shouldn’t see the light of day. Poorly written, poorly edited, poorly formatted – just poor. And that’s where we as readers come in. This is why we are the New Gatekeepers.

Success in writing has always relied on word of mouth. When a big publisher puts the might of the marketing machine behind a new release that word of mouth gets a massive head start, but it’s still the reviews and recommendations of critics and readers that determine whether a book is truly successful or not. That’s still the case, but the mainstream reviewers can’t keep up with the tsunami of words constantly bearing down on them. Along with all the newly published writers, a whole bunch of new reviewers have cropped up, and many book review blogs are developing considerable power. This is a very good thing, as it helps to strim out the crap and let the quality stuff rise to the top.

But you don’t need a review blog to wield power in this new world. You’re a reader – you have enormous power. If only you’d use it. By the Power of Yourskull! Or, more accruately, the brain within it. If you read something you like, tell people all about it. Recommend it to your friends, buy it and gift it to people. You can gift ebooks now as well as print books. There is no better result for a writer than a reader enjoying the book and recommending it. But don’t stop there – there’s so much more you can do, very easily.

You don’t need to be a talented reviewer to review books. Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Goodreads, Smashwords – all these places and more make it very easy for you to leave a review and rate a book. Or just rate it. Your review doesn’t have to be anything lengthy to have an impact. For example, look at this review of my second novel, MageSign, that a reader called Joefredwheels left on Amazon.com (Yes, I’m going to use my own work as reference. Sue me.):

excellent follow up – great story continuing adventure of first book protaganist. hoping for more stories in this world. Baxter is an excellent writer of a fast past exciting plot. THIS IS WORTH THE MONEY. BUY THE BOOK

He also rated it five stars. Brilliant. It’s very short, it’s not worrying about being good writing in itself, it’s simply conveying the person’s enjoyment of the book. Sure, it’s cool when readers take the time to write a few paragraphs of carefully thought out critique when they review, but the review above is just as valuable.

Here’s another example, this time a review of RealmShift, left on Amazon by Cathy Russell “Ganymeder”:

a well thought out tale – I liked that this story had believable characters and explored faith (or lack of), it’s origins, etc. It had a lot of deep themes. The characters were well thought out. The plot was engaging, and I liked the whole idea of a superhuman who could kick the devil’s ass. While reading this, I kept thinking it would make a great action movie or comic book too. I’d recommend this. 4 stars.

That wouldn’t have taken long to write, but in a single paragraph she recommends the book and gives some basic reasons why. Again, brilliant.

I can’t express how grateful I am when people take the time to do this. And it’s something we can all do, for any publication, anywhere on the web.

I tend to review books I enjoy here on my blog, but I’m a regular blogger anyway. I always rate them on Goodreads. I’m also planning to copy my reviews over onto Amazon and Goodreads – I wish I’d done it as I wrote them, as now it’s going to take a while and a concerted effort. But I’ll do it, because I plan to put my reviews where my mouth is.

So we, as readers, are the new gatekeepers. It’s our responsibility to help spread the word about the good stuff we read, and the bad. You don’t have to leave negative reviews on anything – just don’t review them. But it’s an act of true benevolence to leave good reviews of stuff you enjoy, or drop by websites and leave a star rating. You can write a single line or single paragraph review and copy that to all the sites you visit or shop at. If you do blog, then reviewing a book on your site is fantastic. But whatever you do, do something. Help spread the word. As writers, nothing is more valuable to us than the recommendations of readers. It’s always been that way, and now it’s more true than ever. Readers can make sure the good stuff out there gets noticed and more writers get themselves a well-earned career. Power to the people!

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter’s The Word.

On "Being Indie": Lorena Bathey

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This post, by Lorena Bathey, originally appeared on TNBBC’s The Next Best Book Blog on 4/13/11.

On "Being Indie" is a new monthly feature that will be hosted …on TNBBC. We will meet a wide variety of independent authors, publishers, and booksellers as they discuss what being indie means to them.

 
 

Meet Lorena Bathey. In 2005, she self-published her first book Happy Beginnings: How I Became My Own Fairy Godmother. Unwilling to buckle under the pressures agented/published authors were having, she went on to develop her own publishing company and calls it Lorena B Books. In celebration of her new novel Beatrice Munson, Lorena shares what being indie means to her.

 
 
 
 
 
 
What is an Indie Author?

 

I = Independent: Is a nice way to say self published or balking the conventional publisher/agent route to do everything yourself. I like the moniker Indie author because it fits the definition more than simply self-published. As an Indie author you must be writer, editor, printer, sales, marketing, publicity, and promoter all rolled into one. A tough but satisfying job.

N= Nervous: Being an Indie author can be nerve wracking. Success is happening for Indie authors, especially with eReaders, but it’s still a gamble. Being an Indie gives you control over the things that make you nervous like publicity and promotion. You then can get more involved with wonder.

D = Dedication: To win in the Indie genre you have to be dedicated. You must know your work, the promotion, and the Indie publishing industry. But mostly you must dedicate yourself to writing. Wearing all the hats means dedicating time for all aspects that aid your success as an Indie author. Stay the course; don’t give up if you don’t make a million dollars with your first book. You need to build a platform of fans.

 

Read the rest of the post on TNBBC’s The Next Best Book Blog.

Books For Charity: Helping A Family In Joplin

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As I watched families pick through the rubble of their homes, looking for shoes for their kids, I felt sickened and helpless. As helpless as they must have felt to see the tornado coming and not be able to do anything but hide and hope for the best. I tried to imagine what it would feel to have lost everything and not have enough money to rent a motel room for the week.

So rather than feel helpless, I decided to do what I could. Together with my blogger partners, we’re raising money to help a family in Joplin, Missouri. Drew and I have pledged 100% our Amazon book royalties (print and digital) for the next four days to this charitable cause, and Judith has pledged 25% of her e-book royalties through Memorial day.

The amount of money we raise will be up to readers. We hope you’ll take advantage of this opportunity to buy some great books and donate to a good cause at the same time. Here’s a list of the participating novels with links to Amazon.

Drew’s bestselling title: While the Savage Sleeps

L.J.’s bestselling Detective Jackson mysteries:
The Sex Club
Secrets to Die For
Thrilled to Death
Passions of the Dead
Dying for Justice
And standalone thrillers:
The Baby Thief
The Suicide Effect

Judith’s guilty pleasure Skeeter Hughes mysteries:
Where’s Billy?
Whose Hand?

Another way to help out is to spread the word. Use Facebook, Twitter, or any of your online accounts to let other readers know about this charitable cause.

 

This is a cross-post from The Crime Fiction Collective.

A New Freedom of the Press: How Does Publishing Underwrite Revolutions?

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This is a guest post from Thomas Doane.

The Arab Spring continues, and this month we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible’s publication. 

The question I’d like to briefly reflect on here is: What do the Reformation and the Arab Spring have in common?
The answer that I’d like to advance is that—among other things— what these two historical epiphenomena have in common is that they were both catalyzed by evolutionary leaps between publishing platforms. 

The fortunes of the parties involved in the conflict in the Arab world sway this way and that. Plucking more or less randomly from meta descriptions below the Google News results this morning we read that “NATO is considering intensifying bombings in Libya… Israel is very nervous about how Palestinians are spinning the Arab Spring…The ICC seeks to prosecute Gaddafi…  Syria denies mass grave allegations…” Etc. etc.  Another headline from the Gulf News this morning, May 18th, 2011: “Social Media played a role in facilitating the Arab Spring.” The first line of this article reads: Whether social media led to the Arab Spring or facilitated it, it played a major role in mobilizing Arab streets as they rose against their ruling regimes, said panelists at an Arab Media Forum session on the role of social media.
This has been a mantra since January, when—after Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself on the streets of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia in December—a cascading domino effect of uprisings started to roll across North Africa and into the Middle East. In a now classic article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell wrote, “The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter, and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.” Obviously, there is a difference between correlation and causation, and much digital ink has been spilled to assign social media’s role in the Arab Spring to one category or another.
Meanwhile, this month Harper’s cover story is the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. While nothing about the KJV seems subversive to most of us today (quite the opposite for most of us), historically it can be seen as one of the literary climaxes of a sequence of revolutions that rocked the geopolitical make-up of the Western world in the 16th and 17th centuries—namely, ‘The Reformation.’ 
About 90 years before the KJV first ‘hit the stands in bookstalls’ all over England, becoming ‘the bestseller of all time’ over the next 400 years, a man named Martin Luther sat down and translated the Bible out of Latin and into German. While this sounds rather innocuous from our 21st century point of view, it could be argued that this act—amplified and disseminated across Europe by means of the recently invented printing press—ignited the 16th century’s version of a World War, completely and permanently transforming the global geopolitical landscape for all succeeding centuries.
What changed is that the ‘information’ contained in scripture—the actual words written in the Bible—became widely accessible to the public for the first time ever. There was a massive explosion of literacy. But a streamlining of the publication and dissemination of the printing press was a pre-condition for creating this kind of change. As the European masses (rather than just the priesthood) got hold of this information for the first time, they developed counter-narratives that diverged from the Church’s reading. The King James evolved out of one of these counter-narratives. 
Arguably, the epic shift from print to digital, and from AP journalism to crowd sourced social media communication is the biggest evolutionary leap between publishing platforms that we’ve seen since the invention of the printing press. And while the Arab Spring may not have been caused by social media, I think most people would argue that the social media revolution was a necessary pre-condition to launching the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle-East at the level of well-documented, contagious efficiency that we’ve seen this spring. And it was almost certainly a pre-condition to keeping the body count as low as it has been. 
So I propose a toast to two strange bedfellows: Johannes Gutenberg & Mark Zuckerberg.
Hail old fellows, well met!

And to each, thanks for the merry old  messaging platform they did invent!

Self-Publishing: How You Can Reduce Costs

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The price of a book is what really matters to readers. It’s where self-published authors can compete with traditional publishers, as the examples of Amanda Hocking or J.A. Konrath show.

Many Kindle Store writers choose $0.99 price tag. They can afford it, as the cost of publishing an e-book is close to zero. E-bookstores equip the authors with the online tool – the dashboard – where they can publish a book in a few steps, and it usually takes a couple of minutes.

I’ve been testing many e-book platforms and their publishing dashboards. My favorite ones are Amazon (Kindle Direct Publishing), Smashwords, Feedbooks and Narcissus.

At a basic level the only thing you’ll need to prepare is a perfectly edited and formatted text of a book, in a proper file format (mostly required are doc, rtf, txt, html and epub). You don’t even need a cover of the book. Some platforms, like Feedbooks, display a default book cover with a title and author, if the cover file was not uploaded by the author.

Most authors do want book covers, though – and they are perfectly right. But if you can’t afford to hire a professional cover artist, you can always check what technology has to offer. One thing to remember: if you are not planning to print a book, the size of a cover doesn’t have to be high and it will have a screen resolution anyway. It’s where possibilities are.

First, you can download and use Gimp, a free and simple to use image editing program. But what if you’re not very much into design? There are still some solutions. You can, for example, use one of data visualization tools – they can do a design work for you. Some time ago I described how to use Wordle, a tag cloud generator, to prepare a book cover. A good thing about such a cover is that it’s at the same time a tag description of your book (see example, below right).

Another idea for a cover design – use photo applications on your smartphone. You can make a picture and apply one of cool filters, which will bring a tonality and feel you want. Applications I recommend for iPhone and iPod Touch are PictureShow, Camera+, PhotoStudio and Hipstamatic. PictureShow has also an option to insert a text, so you can in fact design a cover completely on your cellphone. 

And here comes the technology again. Formats like epub or mobi allow text to be adjusted by the user of a specific device or application. That means that if you read in a Kindle application on your Android tablet, every book will look the same – according to preferences you selected.

In other words: you don’t need a specific page layout design, unless you really want it.

Next thing, most important one – editing. The most popular way is to ask for help a fellow writer, but there are also very interesting tools, which can help you go through this process for free.

The most known and successful one is Bite-Size Edits. It’s a crowdsourcing platform where other writers can edit the text you submit, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. This service is both fun and useful and what’s even more important – it’s a smart way to connect writers and readers.

Bite-Size Edits

Edit box at Bite-Size Edits

 

This is a reprint from Piotr Kowalczyk‘s Password Incorrect.

Smartphone e-Reader App Reviews: Stanza by Lexcycle

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As e-books become more popular, they are inevitably merging with the largest platform for e-book readers, the smartphone. Google’s Android operating system is now powering more phones than Apple’s iOs, but both continue to surge ahead in terms of market penetration and new users.

All told, the top 5 smartphone manufacturers sold 140 million phones in 2010. That’s a lot more than all the iPads, Kindles, Nooks, Sony Readers and Kobo tablets put together.

It makes sense to think about whether your book are suitable for the smallest screen. Will the story still make sense on those little pages? Will the formatting of your nonfiction book survive the reader’s desire to see the type at the largest available size?

Time to find out.

I decided to take the top e-Book reader apps for smartphones out for a virtual test drive. Although I don’t claim to be encyclopedic in these reviews, I’m looking at them both from the point of view of someone who doesn’t mind reading on the phone, as well as a publisher looking to find readers where they want to be reading. If that’s for a few minutes while standing waiting for the bus, so be it. That’s up to the reader.

StanzaI decided to start with Stanza, a free e-reader originally developed by Lexcycle, a company that was later acquired by Amazon. It’s unclear at this point whether Amazon intends to keep the program alive or not, since the website seems to have gone dormant some months ago.

However, Stanza, which was the most popular e-Reader at one time, and one of the top free apps in Apple’s app store, is such an unusual e-book reader, it’s well worth a look.

For Readers, You Need Books

One of the things that distinguishes Stanza is the sources for its e-books. Unlike Kindle, iBooks, Google and Nook, the app is not linked to one store for its purchases. Instead, Stanza has access to a lot of diverse libraries of e-books. This is both a strength and a weakness, since you may not find the same coverage or quantity in the different collections as you might with the Kindle app, for example.

But Stanza has other tricks up its sleeve. Let’s look at the main components. Compared to most e-book readers, Stanza has a vast control system that allows you to customize your reading experience in ways no other e-reader can match.

Here are the main elements of the app, with some notes.

  • Reading screen—Stanza gives you unparalleled control over the display, far surpassing what other e-book readers allow. Here the reading screen is shown in Georgia with a beige background, and with the type fully justified and hyphenated, something that’s simply impossible on other e-readers.
    Stanza reading screen

    Click to enlarge

Control screen—This is the screen you get when you tap once, and it gives you access to a huge variety of tools to control the app. From here you can navigate using the buttons along the bottom of the screen, to:

 

 

Stanza control screen

Click to enlarge

Stanza settings

Click to enlarge

Note that in the settings screen there’s a sample at the top showing you instantly the effect of the changes you’re making.

 

 

  • Table of Contents, bookmarks and annotations
  • Settings screens with controls for general items, layout, appearance, and app control.
  • Layout tools like Justify, Left, right or center,
  • Hyphenation with dictionaries in many languages
  • Margins, Line spacing, Paragraph spacing and Paragraph indent. These controls use adjustment sliders.
  • Appearance tools like switching to the Night Theme
  • Choice of 42 fonts, and font size selection with sliders
  • Background and text colors
  • Background image and opacity
  • Even more software controls like lock rotation, use page turn effects and more.
     
  • Library screen—Here is where you store your books, and you can sort on Books, Authors, or Groups.
  • Bookstore screen—You can see right away the difference between Stanza and the proprietary apps that only allow you to shop in one store. The app includes access to these retailers:

     

    And these free and sample e-book sources:

    Stanza bookstores

    Click to enlarge

    You’ll notice even more control icons at the bottom of the screen, including an invert button to switch between black on white or white on black, a search tool and access to yet another screen of controls, this one called Actions, which includes

    • Books on Board eBook Shop
    • O’Reilly Ebooks
    • All Romance eBooks
    • SmashWords
    • Fictionwise
    • Feedbooks
    • Project Gutenberg
    • Random House Free Library
    • Try Harlequin
    • Books from Munseys
    • Books from BookGlutton
    • Pan Macmillan Tasters
    • the command to delete a book
    • a dictionary
    • access to your downloads
    • another set of font size controls
    • and a sharing menu for Facebook, Twitter or via email

Just for fun, I changed a lot of the display parameters and loaded a more heavily formatted nonfiction book. Here it is with a white background, no hyphenation or justification, and typeset in American Typewriter:

Stanza

Click to enlarge

Overall, Stanza is easy to use and gives you terrific control of the reading experience in far more detail than any other e-reader. Although the choice of new trade books may not be as wide as other, proprietary apps, the ability of Stanza to also handle PDFs and other formats is even more reason to add this app to your smartphone.

Next up: Apple’s iBooks app.

Stanza in the iTunes App Store
Also available as an app for Macintosh, for iPad and for Windows.

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

Students Write Novels—In 30 Days

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This post, by Art Peterson, originally appeared on The National Writing Project site on 5/12/11.

Summary: The National Novel Writing Month’s Young Writers Program makes writing fun for students because of, not despite, its audacious goal: kids must pen a novel in a month.  

Most teachers assign novels for students to read not write. But many teachers nationwide are not only asking students to read novels but also giving them a month to write them.

Yes, you read that right: one month.

Instead of complaining about being absurdly overworked, students participating in November’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) have been known to ask, "Can we work on our novels today?"

That’s because, above all, NaNoWriMo is meant to be fun. An exercise in "seat-of-your-pants" novel writing, it has almost no rules.

The Office of Letters and Light, the nonprofit behind the event, believes this carefree approach encourages writers to take imaginative risks and truly enjoy their work. Founded in 1999, the adult version of the event requires only that you commit yourself to taking a stab at novel writing—and submitting a novel of 50,000 words, no matter how good or bad they are, by the end of November.

Since 2005, NaNoWriMo has entered many classrooms, including those of National Writing Project teachers, through its Young Writers Program. In addition to curriculum and support, teachers receive a classroom kit featuring a progress chart, stickers to mark word counts, and buttons for writers who cross the finish line.

Approximately 1,800 classrooms and 45,000 kids and teens participated in 2010. The rules for under-18 writers are the same as those for adults, with one important exception: young writers can pick their own "reasonable yet challenging" word length.

If a student elects to write, say, 18,000 words and achieves this goal in a month, he or she is a winner. Awards include a "handsome winner’s certificate," a Web badge, and a promotional code to receive a free bound proof copy of the finished novel.

The Young Writers Program also facilitates Script Frenzy, a similar scriptwriting event that happens each April and challenges participants to write a 100-page script in 30 days.

While young writers work primarily as individuals, teachers are also encouraged to write along with them—an approach at the heart of NWP’s philosophy.

Common Core Curriculum Provided


Read the rest of the post on The National Writing Project site.

Looking For Logic? Not In Book Sales

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Watching your digital book sales climb is exhilarating. Seeing them fall is heartbreaking and confusing. “What changed?” you ask yourself, feeling panicked. Did I slack off too much on blogging? Or forget to post in the forums? Did I take this success for granted for 24 hours? Frantically, you try to recreate the right combination of effort and luck that made it happen. Then you realize you don’t really know why the run-up occurred.

Sometimes, changes in books sales are obvious and logical. During weeks when I have three guest blogs posted and I’m active in the forums, the numbers go up a little and it makes sense. Other times, the sales shoot up for no reason. This month, they dropped for no reason.

I tried not to panic, telling myself it was temporary. But still, I kicked into high gear, posting in the forums, writing blogs, and sending out press releases. None of it seemed to make a difference. I even bought some ads, something I rarely do because it’s so hard to measure their effectiveness. But self-publishing is a small business, so reinvesting a little profit into advertising seems logical.

I crave logic, and these inexplicable fluctuations can make an author crazy. Particularly people like me: control freaks who want things to make sense. I want to know the cause and effect of everything. I want to depend on my efforts to produce predictable results. (Are you laughing?) So for months, I checked my Amazon sales daily. Because if I did something that worked, I wanted to know. How else do you learn and improve?

Yet sales often fluctuate for no rhyme or reason, so watching the daily numbers is a good way to give yourself an anxiety disorder—and not get much written on a new novel. But you have to keep writing new stories, because releasing a new book is the best thing you can do for sales of all your books. Proven!

So what’s an author to do? I’ve given up looking at daily sales. I still check my rankings on Amazon’s police procedural list every once in a while to see where my books are. If my titles are slipping off the first page, I ramp up my efforts for a while or maybe buy a small online ad.

But I’m trying not to obsess and to accept that I have little control over sales. I remind myself that making a living as a novelist was and is my dream, and that so as long as the bills get paid, I’m happy.

P.S. They’re climbing again, but who knows why?

Authors: What are your experiences with digital sales? Can you shed some light on the ups and downs?

 

This is a reprint from LJ Sellers‘ blog.