Month: August 2011

The write, promote cycle

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 Digital publishing has made the publishing process much easier for an author to publish on their own. If you’re an author, you can now focus your attention on your writing without worrying about what you’ll do with your work afterward. However, for people to find and read your story, you will have to do some promoting to let them know about it. Promotion is really what traditional publishing companies do. They’re successful because they have processes in place that they have fine-tuned for many years.

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And that’s the secret to promoting well, having a process for it. To do it yourself, it should be a part of everything else you do. Here are some ideas of ways to integrate some promotion during the writing and publishing process:

  1. Write – As you do research or get ideas for your story, explore concepts you come across by talking to people about it, either via online forums or by attending related events. Why not make the whole process a journey and start a blog about it.
  2. Talk about it – Before your story is finished, give a sneak peak with a summary of what it’s about and post it to your site or online profiles. Or find blogs and user forums that might be interested in your idea.
  3. Publish – Once you have your story ready, send review copies to zines or blogs that would be interested in your kind of story and would post a review about it. Make sure it’s easy to point people to buy it; the Indie Aisle marketplace can help with that.
  4. Interact – Setup events either in-person or online on forums or via a live chat to interact with people who want to talk about your story; hold contests; find niche websites that might be interested in your genre and would want to interview you.
  5. Repeat

While there are many ways you can promote, you ultimately figure out what works and doesn’t along the way. As you continue to do it, you improve and figure out your own process. And by using tools on the web, you’re on the same playing field as publishing companies. Here are some ways to get started online:

  • Start using social media networks
  • Keep links of relevant websites you can submit to
  • Regularly check and participate on blogs and discussion forums
  • Keep track of contacts you make that can help you later on
  • Experiment with techniques and keep notes of outcomes

You enjoy writing because it’s a creative process, so use the same formula for promoting: be creative and have fun with it!

 

The Race To The Bottom

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This post, by J.A. Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 8/30/11.

I’ve had a few people forward me the article written by Ewan Morrison for the Guardian, Are Books Dead, And Can Authors Survive?

I mostly agree with Morrison’s prediction for the end of paper (something I’ve been predicting for a while now–print will become a niche market) and the end of publishers (which I’ve also been blogging about for years.)
But then Morrison takes a giant leap and says that authors will also go extinct. He ends it with:

But ultimately, any strategy conceived now is just playing for time as the slide towards a totally free digital culture accelerates. How long have we got? A generation. After that, writers, like musicians, filmmakers, critics, porn stars, journalists and photographers, will have to find other ways of making a living in a short-term world that will not pay them for their labour.
And then:
I ask you to vote that the end of "the book" as written by professional writers, is imminent.
Well, you can go ahead and ask. But you’re wrong, Ewan.
One of Morrison’s problems is being unable to differentiate between the organizations that support artists, and the artists themselves. He uses a lot of examples, and on the surface his arguments seem solid, but they topple easily once counter-examples and some basic logic is applied.
So go read the article, then come back here and I’ll attack it, point by point. I’ll put his points in italics.
Most notable writers in the history of books were paid a living wage.
 
That’s because publishers, who controlled distribution, decided who would be published and who wouldn’t, and paid those writers advances. Though "living wage" is incorrect, as the majority of professional writers also need day jobs, now and throughout history.
But the end of paper books and publishers does not presume writers will no longer be paid. The model is changing, but writers will still be paid in the new model. More of them than ever before.
The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart.

Wrong. There can be many different types of economic frameworks that support writers. Publishers, the state, ereader manufacturers, and ultimately the readers themselves. I can take away publishers, and even heavyweights like Amazon, and still get paid.
But Amazon isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Without advances from publishers, authors depend upon future sales; they sink themselves into debt on the chance of a future hit.


Read the rest of the post on J.A. Konrath‘s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

Keep Your Characters In The Driver's Seat

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Have you ever been watching a movie or reading a book in which a character does or says something that doesn’t fit with who that character has been set up to be, and you’re left annoyed, wondering why the character behaved or spoke as such? And then the plot continues cranking right along, and if the story’s very funny or involving, or there are lots of explosions and cool special effects, you keep watching or reading, but with lower expectations. This is what happens when plot drives character, instead of the other way around.

 

A common example of this problem is the story that would never get off the starting blocks at all, were it not for some illogical action on the protagonist’s part. Otherwise level-headed and pragmatic CPA Polly suddenly decides to ditch the security and status she’s come to love in her career, move to the other side of the country and open a cupcake shop—not because she’s always yearned to be more of a free spirit, dreamed of being a professional baker, has always wanted to move far away, or any other good reason based in logic or her life cicumstances, but because doing these things will open the door to a series of madcap adventures and romance with a cute industrial restaurant supply sales rep who lives in the new city.

You might wonder why the author doesn’t just start the tale in the new location, with Polly getting settled in and looking for a good retail bakery space. The author thinks, in beginning with Polly’s ‘old’ life, he’s setting up the necessary background to create a "fish out of water" story and demonstrate an arc of character growth. But in reality, unless there’s some very compelling reason for Polly to uproot herself in this way, her behavior and choices read more like authorial convenience than growth.

Perhaps even more annoying is the character who’s been well-established, whom you’ve come to like and root for, right up to the point he does something that makes no sense whatsoever. Suddenly, this fully-realized, three-dimensional person becomes a puppet on a string, being forced to go through certain motions to get the reader or viewer to the next major plot point.

In a thriller, the sweet, kind, but mousy library clerk who’s normally scared to walk to the parking lot alone at night nevertheless ventures into the dark basement alone when he hears a strange noise from the top of the stairs. In a sci fi novel, the by-the-book researcher who finds his lab has been breached doesn’t report it to the proper authorities, but decides to launch his own, private investigation instead. In a romance, the strong-willed, self-sufficient, feminist heroine melts into a needy puddle of damp lace doilies at the sight of her beloved. In a mystery, the clever and resourceful hero could resolve a case of mistaken identity with a single phone call to one person, yet somehow the idea never occurs to him. I could go on, but do you really want me to?

The reason why this is so irritating to the reader or viewer is that our estimation of a story’s believability is based on how well it jibes with our own, real-life experiences and knowledge. Even in a fantasy or sci fi story, we want the behavior of human and humanoid characters to match up with what we know of real-life people. And in real life, character ALWAYS drives plot.  


Every choice that every real person makes every day is a product of who that person is. His motivations, goals, fears, desires, etc. are all rooted in his background and lifetime of experiences to date, and it’s his motivations, goals, fears, desires, etc. that dictate his actions.

 

The cure for the author-as-puppeteer syndrome is to begin with well-drawn characters, and then keep asking yourself, "Given who she is, what would this character do when confronted with these circumstances?" as opposed to, "What does this character need to do or say to get the story to the next major plot point?" Even in an intricately-plotted novel, characters should never act…well, out of character.

I tend to start with a character and a set of challenging or unusual circumstances, and let character dictate plot. Whatever I believe the character would do next is exactly what happens. If you’re going to begin with plot, then you probably need to work backward: rather than creating the character and then asking yourself what she needs to do or say to get to the next plot point, start with an assumption that the character is going to do or say whatever is necessary for the sake of plot, then ask yourself what kind of character would do or say that thing. In so doing, you create the illusion that character is driving plot.
 

April L. Hamilton is the founder and Editor in Chief of Publetariat, and the author of The Indie Author Guide. This is a reprint from her Indie Author Blog.

When The Ideas Come

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There are times in every writer’s life when ideas will come flooding in — but not for the story you’re working on.  You don’t want to forget those little gems because they would be great in another story, yet they’re useless for what you’re doing right now.  So what do you do?

Something I learned a long time ago was to keep an idea file.  Ideas come in many forms from quotes we’ve read to pictures we’ve seen to that fabulous new movie we just saw (if you have the time ;) ).  Whatever the form, it’s best to capture the idea as soon as possible.

For certain items, such as magazine articles, it’s easy enough to rip them out and file them away.  For others we have to get a bit more creative.  An example would be a wonderful painting from a museum.  It’s considered a crime to grab the painting and run (and I’m pretty sure trying to explain it away as “needing it for my idea file” wouldn’t get you very far).  Thus we must get creative.  You may be able to photograph it or, barring that, perhaps sketch it.  If you’re art skills don’t go beyond stick men, then maybe you could write a description of it.

One nifty little tool I’ve discovered is Evernote. If you’ve got a smart phone, this application can be very useful. Snap a picture of whatever sparked your story idea, then share it to your Evernote with notes, tags, whatever. Your ideas are readily available to you via the web on any smartphone (with the downloaded app) or computer.

Regardless of how you get the inspirational item into your idea file, remember to write down the idea that was inspired and attach it.  Sticky notes work great for hard copies (though the sticky does eventually wear off so be aware that your ideas may go wandering in your file).

Writing takes ideas.  Being an Independent Author means being creative in every area of your career.  And so, that’s why it’s important to collect the little gems that inspire you along.

What other creative solutions have you found to capturing story ideas?

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s blog.

Social Media Roundup

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Now that so many authors are getting savvy to the ways of the web and the need to utilize social media effectively, it seems hardly a day goes by that we here at Publetariat don’t come across some commentary or how-to article on the matter. Here are some we’ve decided are worth a closer look.

The New York Times Technology department reports that Half of America Is Using Social Networks, which should convince you that making social media an integral part of your author platform strategy is definitely worth the effort.

If you have never used Twitter and have no idea what it’s all about, this YouTube video, Twitter in Plain English, is for you.

If you’re even further behind the curve and have no idea what social media are all about, Social Networking in Plain English provides an excellent, easy-to-understand introduction.

But maybe you’re more of a Facebook fan. In that case, you’ll want to check out Mashable’s Facebook Guide Book.

Over on Slate, Farhad Manjoo and Emily Yoffe debate the question: Is it OK to tweet your own horn?

Along those same lines, kikolani.com offers tips on how to self-promote through social media without turning off your online friends and followers in a post entitled Self-Promotion Through Social Media – Don’t Be A Narcissist.

Back on Slate, Kevin Gold addresses the "leaky" nature of internet privacy on social media sites like Facebook. As it turns out, people can learn plenty of your personal details just from your contacts’ profiles and links.

Now get out there and get social!

Putting Pictures On Posts In WordPress

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This post, by Christine M. Grote, originally appeared on her Random Thoughts From Midlife blog on 8/24/11.

I’m going to share a few tips with you I’ve learned about putting pictures on the web, and about WordPress in particular. If you use Blogger or some other software, I don’t know how much of this will apply, but you might pick up a tip or two.

Sometimes I find inserting and formatting images into posts the most frustrating challenge of blogging. You may already know all of this, and more. Feel free to move on, or stay and enlighten us with a comment about a tip or two you may know. Don’t miss the Eiffel Tower photos at the end.

Let me start by saying I am far from being an expert. What I know I’ve learned largely from trial and error.

Here’s what the WordPress “Add New Post” screen looks like. I got this photo from taking a screen shot on my Mac by holding down the keys: command-shift-3. The computer saves a png file of the image on my screen to my desktop. I can open the saved file with my photo editing software, in this case photoshop, and crop it to whatever I want. PCs come with a “print screen” button that saves the image to your clipboard where you can paste it into a new file in your image editing software like photoshop or elements. I learned this about the PC this morning from this website where I also learned a few more tips about saving a screen shot on a mac. I’ll go back and look at it in more detail later.

Beside the circled Upload/Insert Image button, are the other buttons for uploading and inserting video, audio, media, poll, and custom form. I might have uploaded a video before, but otherwise I haven’t tried out any of these other buttons. When you click the insert image this is the next screen you get:

 

Read the rest of the post on Christine M. Grote‘s Random Thoughts From Midlife blog.

25 Famous Authors With Learning Disabilities

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This post originally appeared on the Bachelors Degree Online site.

Learning disabilities, including dyslexia, ADD, ADHD, and autism can be life changing and debilitating. Many students struggle in school or drop out altogether. But for others, a learning disability may be a gift, requiring them to work harder and achieve more, or have a special focus or talent. It is for this reason that so many high achieving people have learning disabilities, including Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo Da Vinci. Although those with learning disabilities typically have trouble with communication, many writers are also in the high achieving, learning disabled club. We’ve highlighted 25 of them here: famous authors and writers who suffer, or thrive from, a learning disability.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is the best-selling author of all time, with about four billion copies sold and translations into at least 103 languages. She is best known for her detective novels and short story collections. But at the same time, she couldn’t even balance her own checkbook due to her learning disability, believed to be dysgraphia. She had a hard time spelling correctly, as a self proclaimed "extraordinarily bad speller" and was not good about remembering numbers, but her learning disability did not hold her back.
 

Stephen J. Cannell

Stephen J. Cannell was an American writer and novelist, as well as TV producer and sometime actor. His most celebrated work was crime drama scripts, with writing credits including The A-Team, 21 Jump Street, The Rockford Files, and The Greatest American Hero. He suffered from dyslexia and struggled in school, but he graduated from the University of Oregon. Cannell used his fame to speak out about dyslexia, and discussed his experiences in the documentary Dislecksia: The Movie.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

As one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his novel, The Great Gatsby, as well as many short stories. But F. Scott Fitzgerald is believed to have had a learning disability, mostly likely dyslexia. It’s reported that he was kicked out of school at the age of 12 for not focusing or finishing his work, and he had a very hard time spelling, but he succeeded as a writer despite his disability.

 

Scott Adams

The man behind the comic strip Dilbert self-diagnosed his dyslexia. He was working as a bank teller and noticed that his totals didn’t balance at the end of the day. But dyslexia does not seem to have hindered his success, as Dilbert is well loved, in addition to his books, restaurant ownership, and appearances on TV shows. Adams also suffers from focal dystonia, a condition that causes involuntary muscular contraction, as well as spasmodic dysphonia, but he is able to work around all of his conditions.
 

JF Lawton

JF Lawton is a prolific screenwriter, with screen credits including Pretty Woman, Under Siege, and DOA: Dead or Alive. But before he became a popular screenwriter, he suffered from severe dyslexia. The disability made school life difficult, and Lawton had to work hard to overcome this obstacle to become a writer. He credits his father, author Harry Lawton, with the support he needed to succeed– something that families of dyslexics should keep in mind.
 

Dav Pilkey

Dav Pilkey, author and illustrator of the Captain Underpants book series, was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia at an early age. His disabilities caused him to act out in class, and he spent lots of time banished to a desk in the school hallway. It was at this desk where he created Captain Underpants, the character that made him famous as an author and illustrator of children’s literature. For Dav Pilkey, dyslexia and ADHD helped launch a career.

 

George Bernard Shaw

The famous Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote more than 60 plays and is the only person to be awarded an Oscar as well as a Nobel Prize for Literature for the same film, Pygmalion. It’s believed that Shaw suffered from ADD (attention deficit disorder). Although he was a co-founder of the London School of Economics, he did not like formal education, noting that "Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents."
 

Jeanne Betancourt

Award winning author Jeanne Betancourt is beloved for her Pony Pals book series. Two of the characters in her books, Brian in My Name is Brain Brian and Anna in the Pony Pals, are both dyslexic. She has publicly spoken out about her dyslexia, sharing that she believes being dyslexic helped her as a writer, and explaining that, "Since learning to read and write was difficult for me growing up, I paid more attention to the world around me. I watched and listened carefully to people for clues to what people were thinking and feeling." As a dyslexic, she better developed her skills as a storyteller.

 

Richard Ford

Richard Ford is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author and a dyslexic. He’s famous for The Sportswriter and its sequels, as well as his short story collection Rock Springs. He has mild dyslexia, but he did not let his disability keep him from developing a love of literature. In fact, he believes that dyslexia actually helped him become a better reader as the disability made him slow down and be thoughtful about the books, sharing that "being slow made me pore over sentences and to be receptive to those qualities in sentences that were not just the cognitive aspect of sentences but were in fact the "poetical" aspects of language…those qualities in language are as likely to carry weight and hold meaning and give pleasure as the purely cognitive, though of course we can’t fundamentally separate those things, although the information age does its best."
 

Jules Verne

Jules Verne pioneered the science fiction genre and inspired steampunk. He is most famous for his novels, including A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days. As a student, he was more interested in writing than working in other subjects. He didn’t do well in school, and often complained of having a hard time focusing. Although undiagnosed, it’s believed that Verne may have had a form of ADD or ADHD. 

 

Read the rest of the post, featuring 15 more authors with learning disabilities, on the Bachelors Degree Online site.

Writing Full Time: What Does It Look Like To You?

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I haven’t written a post in some time, because I was working furiously to finish the first draft of Uneasy Spirits, the sequel to Maids of Misfortune, my historical mystery set in 1879 San Francisco. The manuscript is now out to my first set of beta readers, I have just finished a week of family visits and entertaining my grandchildren, and, to keep from obsessing over whether my beta readers will like the new novel, I thought I would try to take stock of my writing process. I was particularly interested in looking at my own speed after the lively discussion on blogs this past month over this topic prompted by Dean Wesley Smith’s post on writing four novels a year.

Last fall I made the decision to retire completely from teaching (see this post) and start to work on my writing full-time, as the number of sales I was making of Maids of Misfortune began to increase enough to compensate for that loss of income. In December 2010, after my last set of finals were graded and turned in, I went off to visit my daughter and family for Christmas, and when I got back I took out the outline I had written over for Uneasy Spirits and started to write, January 3, 2011. I finished the first draft, June 28, 2011, almost exactly 6 months later.

During this six-month period I kept a log where I recorded the number of words I accomplished for each day that I worked on the novel. I was very surprised when I added up the number of days I wrote and discovered that over that period (181 days) I only wrote on 90 of them (50%). Suddenly my full-time writing looked part-time. So where did all the days go?

First of all, I wasn’t always in town, because I am definitely part of that generation who is sandwiched between family responsibilities. With a father with worsening Alzheimer’s, and a daughter who had a second baby in sixteen months, I was away from home on four visits that totaled 23 days. So, I really had 168 possible days to write. This got me up to working 55 % of the available days.

Then, there is the question of weekends, because the 181 days figure included all the days of the week. Now, while I have found myself working seven days a week on some aspect of my writing and publishing, to be fair to myself, subtracting the days I was out of town, and the weekends of the days I was in town, left me with 127 writing days in that six month period. Given that figure, I wrote on 71% of the days available for writing.

Suddenly I don’t feel like such a slouch, particularly when you figure in the amount of time I spend as an indie author in the other aspects of the business of publishing, and that as an officially retired senior, I could be just living a life of leisure. (Smile)

No longer feeling like such a slacker, I considered the issue of actual writing speed. Smith says he can write 750-1000 words an hour. This of course has caused a great deal of discussion among the author community, and, I can only say, more power to him. Personally, I find my writing speed is much slower. I always start a writing day rereading what I have written the day before and making at least minor corrections. This gets me back into the story, but it certainly eats into my average words per hour. Writing a historical novel means that I often spend a great deal of time looking things up, often on the internet. For example, I frequently check to make sure a word I have used was in common usage in 1879, or the correct name for the architectural detail of San Francisco houses of the period, the name for a piece of women’s clothing. Former president Grant was in and out of San Francisco during the time period my novel was set, so I had to keep checking to see if he was in town on particular day to weave that into the narrative. While I sometimes make a note to look something up later, I have found that most of the time if I don’t do the research right then, I have trouble moving on.

As a professional historian, this part of the writing is a lot of fun, and I don’t want to deny myself that fun for the sake of speed.

As a result, given those detours, figuring out the number of words per hour didn’t make sense (I started out trying to keep a record of this and gave up very quickly.) So the most I could come up with was average words a day. In the six months, I wrote around 140,000 words (yea, I know, that’s a long novel, but my first book was 117,000 words and nobody complained, and I expect I will be cutting when I get into the revision period of this one.) This turns out to be an average of approximately 1500 words a day. The least number of words I wrote in one day was 360, the greatest number of words was 3376. I was really on fire that day!

What does this mean? Well, I figure that it will take at least two months to get feedback and rewrite. During that time I will be getting the cover designed, reworking my website, planning my launch, and putting out a new edition of my first book Maids of Misfortune, with a preview of the sequel, and probably a 99 cent price for promotional period. Then there is the formatting and uploading of Uneasy Spirits which I don’t anticipate taking more than about a month, including time to ship the POD proofs. Then during the following two months, I expect to spend time marketing, including writing and publishing some more short stories, and I will begin to outline the next novel. In short, six months to write the first draft, six months to get that draft rewritten and the book well launched. If all goes as planned, I will be starting all over again next January on the third book in my series.

Turns out, instead of being a four book a year writer, as Smith proposes, I am a one book a year writer. Yet if I was thirty years younger, and needed less than eight hours sleep, and wasn’t taking a trip to visit family every fifty days, and was willing to write shorter books, I could certainly produce at least two a year. And, if in addition, I was at the start of my life as a writer and could reasonably expect that at the end of four years I could have six to eight books out there producing, potentially forever, as ebooks, this would be a very economically sustainable career.

I’m not any of those things, but nevertheless, one book a year makes for a very satisfying retirement career. That is, if my beta readers don’t hate the new manuscript!

So, what does writing full-time look like for those of you out there fortunate enough to have made writing your day job?

 

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s site.

Why I Read And Write Crime Fiction

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After spending months writing about a bleak future, I found myself feeling depressed and negative. I even considered giving up writing gritty crime novels—if that’s what it took to stay positive. Then while working on a nonfiction book, I came across my notes for a talk I gave at the library called Why I Read and Write Crime Fiction. It reminded me of the genre’s value and why I should continue to write it and why it’s good for readers too, including the president. Here’s a shortened version of my talk.

Crime fiction confronts the realities of life across various cultures more often and more honestly than mainstream/literary fiction does. Crime novels are suited to exploring provocative social issues and showing how those hot-button subjects affect various people’s lives, often from diverse perspectives.

Crime fiction can be surprisingly poignant and analytical about problems such as illegal immigration, human trafficking, and drug use. These novels highlight deep-rooted cultural ills such as racism, sexism, bigotry, and the dangers of stereotypes. Sometimes a mystery will show a stereotype in all its glory, reminding us of why stereotypes exist and how we all fit into one … at least a little bit. The crime genre often forces us to see the world from perspectives that make us think outside our comfort zone.

As crime writers and readers, we get to make sense of things that would otherwise haunt us. We learn why the family next door disappeared one day or what’s really going on in the creepy warehouse across the street. Sometimes that knowledge helps us sleep better and sometimes it doesn’t, but at least we learn one version of the truth.

Police procedurals and thrillers give us a medium through which we can experience the triumph of good over evil. For short while with each story, we get to be the good guy, the hero who rescues the kidnapped child or saves the president’s life. We get to drag the bad guys off to jail or shoot them dead if “they need killing”— fantasies we can’t act out in our everyday lives. The real-world events around us can be unjust and inexplicable. It’s important to our collective mental health to experience justice, order, and revelation through fiction.

Novels with well-written protagonists and antagonists bring us to terms with the duality within ourselves. Humans are all deeply flawed, with the capacity for great goodness as well as for deceit, jealousy, schadenfreude, addiction, selfishness, and often worse. When crime fiction heroes—detectives, FBI agents, and prosecutors—possess such flaws, we not only relate to those characters, we forgive ourselves for the same shortcomings. When a killer calls his mother or pets a stray dog, we hate him a little less and remember to look for good qualities in everyone.

Crime novels explore relationships in a way that few other genres can. What better mechanism to test a bond between husband and wife, parent and child, or lifelong friends than to embroil the relationship in a crime, either as victims, suspects, or perpetrators. Similar to natural disasters, the aftermath of a crime can bring out the best—or worst—in humans.

The genre is also rich with possibilities for exploring the complexity of the human condition. Victims become predators; predators become victims. A person is guilty, but not in the way we’ve been led to believe. Most of all, crime fiction is full of surprises, and we readers love the unexpected. When was the last time a reviewer used the word twist when discussing a literary novel?

Why do you read and/or write crime fiction? Does it ever get you down?
 

This post, by L.J. Sellers, originally appeared on Crime Fiction Collective.

Enhanced Ebook — Audio in Chapters

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This is a post from my blog, http://roofmanthespy.wordpress.com/ . The excerpt is from my ebook, ROOFMAN: A True Story of Cold War Espionage. It illustrates how audio can be integrated into actual narrative:

 

This post shows a major conflict between me and my FBI case officer, Mike Berns, in particular and, by extension, the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Bureau wants a list I have in my possession, but I don’t want to give it to them. Mike uses all the power of his agency to try to "convince" — read that "intimidate" — me  turning over to the FBI a list of innocent Americans.

Chapter 11: A House of Sand and Fog

On Friday, April 4th, I attended a conference sponsored by The Library Association of the City University of New York (LACUNY). The theme of the conference was the free flow of information across national boundaries — something I had more than a passing interest in.

The conference supplied all those who attended with a list of names and affiliations of other attendees. One of the names on the list, Anatoly Sidorenko of the United Nations library, drew my special attention.

On Monday, April 14th, I called Mike Berns, my FBI case officer, and told him about the LACUNY conference. He asked me to send him a copy that list. Ego spoke for me: "Sure."

Two days later, I smartened up when Conscience reminded me: "You’ll be turning over a list of innocents to the American intelligence community. That’s not how it works in this country, asshole!"

Go to the following website and click on “11-3” to listen to the phone conversation associated with this post:
http://roofmanpansini.com/

Please remember this content is © 2011

 

10,000 Books Sold: Sales Figures For Pentecost, A Thriller Novel

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I’m not (yet) a Kindle millionaire but sales of Pentecost have now gone over the 10,000 mark which for me is significant, so I am sharing the figures and also what they mean for the next in the series, Prophecy. Hopefully you will find this interesting as it changes my personal publishing strategy considerably.

  • I did the figures on 19 August 2011 and total ebook and print sales through Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk = 10,025
  • I sold so few through other ebook platforms that I am not even counting the sales. Because I am not a US citizen I cannot use PubIt for the Nook so everything is through Smashwords. I have just realized that the price was set to $2.99 though, so I have now changed this to 99 cents. Perhaps it will make a difference to the next batch of sales but I have sold very few through other channels.
  • Some people will ask about the money – you can work it out from the 99c price point, but as I have written before, this book is about getting readers involved with my series, not about income. Read about my 99c price point decision here.
  • Over 98% of these sales were ebook sales on the Kindle. This is huge for me because there is more cost and hassle to a print book than an ebook. I also priced the print books as low as possible to maximize those sales so I made more money on the ebooks. These sales figures make print books a vanity option for me i.e. I would only do a print book again if I wanted to have something to give my Mum or as a keepsake. I love print books but buy 99% on my Kindle now so I am also happy to target those kind of readers. I found the print book option difficult because it’s harder to fix typos and problems which I fixed on the Kindle immediately. In conclusion, I will move to Kindle only for the next book, and potentially look at print books much later on.
  • This experience also makes me more interested in a print book deal. I enjoy every part of the process except the print side which I would gladly give to someone else. But I would like to keep the digital rights – and I’m not sure that would happen in this current publishing market! I have also been told that 10,000 sales is a good point to approach publishers as it demonstrates there is a market, but I’m not ready for that yet. I need one or two more books in the series and then I might consider other options.
  • 87% of sales were from Amazon.com which is predominantly a US market (with some from other countries) but the sales on .co.uk are growing. I think this is based on the fact that the UK is still a print market, where there is no VAT on print books but there is on ebooks, and ebooks are about 18 months behind the US. I discuss the differences for ebooks between countries here. But the sales in the UK have been growing every month so I see that as a source of more sales in the future.
  • Sales were low during launch month. This is fascinating to me as so much focus is put on the launch itself but actually those sales are pretty small. The sales grew over time which must be related to the number of reviews and the Amazon algorithms kicking in. I am currently putting together a mini-course on How to Launch Your Book Online which will include everything to do with the launch but also the longer term things that have an effect like reviews and your Amazon sales page. I’ll let you know when it’s available.
  • Sales are bigger than my ‘platform’. I have spent years growing my online platform and brand but I absolutely realize that many of the readers of this blog are not interested in my fiction. That is the nature of having a writer’s blog. We don’t like to read the same books, which is absolutely fine. We can still talk about the aspects of writing, publishing and book marketing that are common to us all, but we just don’t like the same books. In light of this, and also what I have learned from John Locke, I am starting a new blog for me as a fiction author that will hopefully appeal to my readers. Again, I’ll let you know when that launches.
  • It is possible to make a full-time living as an indie author. I drank the Kool-Aid a while back but this is the first time I can actually see a future reality for my own writing life. Locke, Konrath, Hocking et al inspire us with stories of success, but I can now see that having multiple books selling thousands per month does add up. So I will be stepping up the book writing and production process. I’m still aiming to have Prophecy out by Christmas and there are currently 7 books planned in the ARKANE series. I also have an idea for a stand-alone novel that will not leave me alone so I will have to start writing that too. As we know, it’s not about the ideas which are two a penny, it’s about the execution… and that starts now!

I know 10,000 sales are nothing to more developed authors, but what have you learned from your own book sales? Have your publishing goals changed?

 

 

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

Promo and Other Tips for New Authors

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This post, by Jenna Anderson, originally appeared on her One Mystake At A Tyme blog on 12/5/10.

Often I hear new authors say, “I had no idea….” or "I’m new to all of this." There are so many facets to this adventure it’s impossible to know them all the first time out the gate. Each of these facets is broken out and discussed at length around the web or water cooler.

Here is a list of topics new authors may want to investigate. They are in no particular order of importance. I suggest you look through this list then do further research. You will find LOTS of information and varying opinions. Even this LIST is long…. Wow.

Note: when I say books I am referring to books and ebooks unless otherwise noted. Second note: when I reread this it sounds pissy and bossy. Sorry, I didn’t mean it to. It’s all just food for thought. Take what you find helpful, ignore the rest. Also – sorry about all the typos and puncutation errors. I love my copy editor and pay him well for my fiction work. My blog stuff… eeek… I’ve got issues.

1. Have you read any self-help books regarding publishing and marketing? There are many choices out there including these by successful indie authors: The Newbies Guide to Publishing by JA Konrath, Jack Kilborn and Barry Eisler, Write Good or Die by Scott Nicholson,  Smart Self-Publishing: Becoming An Indie Author by Zoe Winters, and Are You Still Submitting Your Work to a Traditional Publisher by Edward C. Patterson

I am not going to add any technical tips for formatting, uploading, POD, etc. in this blog post. The books above have information on those topics.

2. If you load your books on Amazon, Smashwords, etc. do not expect many sales the first few months. If this is your first book don’t be surprised to see ten or less sales per month.

3. Consider publishing your book in e format first. Putting your work out there as an ebook will give you the opportunity to get feedback, hear about typos, change the cover, tagline, description, etc… Once you commit to the expense of a print version you are stuck with that run for a while. Making changes is expensive in print. Making changes to an ebook is painless, almost free and very fast.

4. Create tags for your titles posted on Amazon. You can add up to thirteen yourself. Tags will help readers find you. (If you don’t know what this is, go to your Amazon product page and look around. You’ll find it.)

5. Research pricing. Play with your price. There are a lot of discussions on this topic.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 20 more tips for new authors, on One Mystake At A Tyme.

Mining the Literary Middle Ground: Byliner and The Atavist

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This article, by Hernán Iglesias Illa, originally appeared on the Publishing Perspectives site on 8/5/11.

Online start-ups Byliner and The Atavist have established a market for stories too long for magazines and too short for books.

NEW YORK: How long should a book be? For more than a century, publishers and authors have understood that most commercial books, to be profitable and viable, should come in around 250 pages, give or take a hundred or two. With the popularization of e-books, though, the restraints of the paper-based industry no longer apply, but new standards are still evolving. How long should an e-book be?

Two American startups, Byliner and The Atavist, are looking for an answer to this question in the middle ground between 5,000 word magazine articles and 100,000 words books. Earlier this year, both started publishing creative non-fiction titles that are too long to fit into a magazine or too short to fill a book.

They don’t call them “e-books” (Byliner refers to them as “originals”) and they don’t price them like regular e-books, either. While most digital versions of print books retail for around $10 in stores like Amazon or iBooks, Byliner’s ($0.99 to $5.99) and The Atavist’s ($1.99 or $2.99) pieces are much cheaper. And both share the revenue with the authors, who get 50% of what the editors receive.

They also had a promising start. Byliner’s first two articles hit the New York Times’ bestseller list for digital products, and The Atavist’s app for the iPad and the iPhone has been downloaded more than 40,000 times, according to the company.

John Tayman, CEO and co-founder of Byliner, started thinking about these issues a few years ago, after emerging from the three years he devoted to writing The Colony (Scribner), a book about an infamous leprosy colony in Hawaii. Tayman, who had been a magazine writer and editor for most of his career, found himself realizing that the stories he really wanted to write and read were longer than traditional magazine articles, but shorter than books. “I wanted stories that, as a reader, I could deal with in two or three hours,” says Tayman from his office in San Francisco. “And, as a writer, I wanted stories that I could get off my desk in one month or two, instead of a year or two.”


Read the rest of the article on Publishing Perspectives.

 

Publishing Innovation Awards Gets QED ‘Seal’

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This podcast and accompanying transcript from Beyond The Book, which originally appeared on that site on 8/21/11, are provided in their entirety by the Copyright Clearance Center.

Recognizing innovation, usability, user experience and quality design, the Publishing Innovation Awards identify excellence in 21st century digital publishing including e-books, enhanced e-books, and book apps. For the 2012 PIAs, entrants are eligible to receive the new QED seal. Based on a 13-point inspection checklist, awarding of the QED (for Quality, Excellence, and Design) signals an e-book reader that the title will render well in whatever their preferred reading format.

“We’re at a really interesting stage in e-book development. We have a proliferation of kinds of books, and kinds of devices, and kinds of publishers, and it’s just the Wild West,” Anne Kostick, a PIA advisory council member, tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “The QED is intended to create something of a benchmark for quality in a field that really is still all over the place, still very mysterious for purchasers of books.”

“The mission of Digital Book World has always been for practical, optimistic book publishing, both in digital and in print,” explains Matt Mullin, community relations manager at Digital Book World, the awards’ sponsors. “We are very interested in the new things that are being done to create products that are truly digitally native, but also work for the mission of book publishing in general.”

Category winners for the Publishing Innovation Awards will be announced during the Digital Book World Conference and Expo in New York in January, 2012.

 Publishing Innovation Awards Gets QED Seal [19:25m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download


Here’s the transcript of the podcast.

 

Moonrat's Rundown Of Publishing Options

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This post, by Moonrat, originally appeared on Editorial Ass on 8/4/10. Though it’s over a year old, it’s still pretty on-point.

The other day, I received a sad email from a reader who has decided to go the route of self-publishing. This person wanted to know why I–and others in New York publishing–had so little respect for people who chose to self-publish.

When I got this note, I realized we had some clearing up to do. I haven’t talked about self-publishing much here lately, so perhaps that is the origin of the confusion, but I personally have nothing against people who self-publish, nor against the self-pub industry. In fact–if you can keep a secret–I freelanced for a large self-pub company for a long time, helping authors polish their books, etc. I know a lot about who chooses to self-publish, why, and what advantages and disadvantages they have. I also know the huge amount of work they undertake. But certainly I respect their choice, and respect the people who make that choice.

But publication is a choice–if you’re in the throes of the submission process, this is sometimes hard to remember, but do remember you always, always have a choice whether or not you publish. You also have a choice how you’re going to publish, and what kind of publication to pursue.

So I’ve compiled this list of the pros and cons of each of several publishing options (and trust me, each has pros AND cons). I have worked, as you now know, at big companies, small companies, and self-pub companies, and thusly declare myself a creature without bias (or pretty darn close). Of course, every publication experience is different. These are just generalizations culled from the best and the worst of my observations.

I have, rather snobbishly, lined up these options in the order of what (mostly) everyone starts out hoping for, then what they hope to settle for, etc. But I hope this pro/con list illuminates that all such distinctions are relative.

BIG HOUSE PUBLICATION
pros:
*Huge, powerful sales force. I put this first because it’s perhaps the most important quality of a big house, whether consumers realize it or not. The reason most bestsellers come from big houses is because big houses have the most comprehensive and powerful sales teams, which have the best marketing sponsorship and thereby the biggest laydowns (first printings) and sell-ins (stocking numbers in national chains). So by default, they also have the best track records for numbers of copies sold–book buyers tend to buy what they see in stores. So chicken-egg-chicken etc. If you want your book to be a bestseller, your best bet is the big house route.

*Money, money, money. The big houses are giant corporate cash cows, often with private company or bajillionaire overlords (::cough Rupert Murdoch cough cough::). This means a lot of things:

*The possibility of a substantial advance (although these aren’t universal, so don’t get your hopes too far up).

*More personnel, so more people working on publicity, marketing, production, etc, with all the benefits that come from crack specialist teams.

*These personnel are usually paid more than their indie counterparts, which means (in theory) they may be the top of their game.

*Bigger possibilities for publicity and marketing budgets.

cons:

 

Read the rest of the post on Editorial Ass.