Month: June 2012

Suw Charman-Anderson Offers Three Articles of Interest to Indie Authors on Forbes

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Suw Charman-Anderson is an author and contributor to Forbes whose articles there are about self-publishing and crowdfunding.

She’s written three excellent and informative pieces this month: Valuable Lessons From Self-Publishing Survey, Book Promotion For Self-Publishers: A Waste of Time? and Self-Publishing and Ebook Sharing: The Industry’s New Bellwethers.

In Valuable Lessons From Self-Publishing Survey, she lists five inportant findings from the recent Taleist survey of self-publishers. Among them:

1. Get help

The first lesson for self-publishers is that if you get help with things like cover design, story editing and proofreading, you will likely earn more. The report found that getting help, paid or unpaid, with editing, copy editing and proofreading provided a 13 per cent bump in earnings. Those who added cover design to that list saw a 34 per cent increase over the average. Interestingly, ebook formatting help added only an extra 1 per cent.

— and —

3. It is possible to earn a living

It’s not without reason that much of the coverage of Taleist’s survey has focused on respondents’ income. The average income from self-published books was just over US$10,000, plus a bit less than half of that from traditionally published books. But, as is so common in creative fields, a minority of authors were responsible for the majority of income.

 

The median income, a more useful figure denoting the point at which half the respondents earn more and half earn less, was $500. This is typical of a power curve distribution and is exactly what we’d expect.

Read the full Valuable Lessons From Self-Publishing Survey article.

In Book Promotion For Self-Publishers: A Waste of Time?, Charman-Anderson writes:

Rusch has a very strong point that one of the best things that an author can do is carry on writing and get more books finished and put up for sale. Authors cannot put all their eggs in one book-shaped basket. Having a selection of books available gives the reader choice, and readers who like one book may well go on to buy a second and third, naturally bumping sales. 

She is also right, as she says in a comment, that it can be impossible to predict how a book will sell, when it will take off, and in which territories. There is undoubtedly an element of chance involved. Maybe your book starts to get passed around a community of readers all interested in similar things, or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the subject matter hits the zeitgeist, or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe another author writing similar stuff to you has a massive hit and that exposes your book, via the ‘Customers who bought X also bought Y’ recommendation, to a much larger volume of people, or maybe they don’t. There is simply no telling.

Read the full Book Promotion For Self-Publishers: A Waste of Time? article.

In Self-Publishing And Ebook Sharing: The Industry’s New Bellwethers, Charman-Anderson notes:

Most of those sharing ebooks are women, says Marwick. This may reflect the fact that women have less disposable income than men. They may find current prices prohibitive, particularly if they are having to choose between buying a book and buying their children new shoes.

Does this then point to a large, under-served corner of the romance market? And is there an opportunity to craft an offering that meets those needs with more affordable books? Clearly it would have to be a volume sales proposition, but equally clearly the demand is already there.

— and —

The tempting reaction for publishers is to gnash their teeth, search for stronger DRM and bewail the evil grasping nature of those who would dare crack it. But that would be to quite spectacularly miss the point. There’s clearly a market for erotical written by women for women, but this market is, as per romance, not wealthy and potentially under-served.

Read the full Self-Publishing And Ebook Sharing: The Industry’s New Bellwethers article.

 

The Curious Case of Ebook Sharing Sites

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This article, by Alice Marwick, originally appeared on the Social Media Collective Research Blog on 6/5/12.

The popularity of ebooks has skyrocketed in the last few years. The Association of American Publishers reports that eBook sales by US publishers were up 300% in 2011:

Total eBook net sales revenue for 2011 was $21.5 million, a gain of 332.6% over 2010; this represents 3.4 million eBook units sold in 2011, up 303.3 %. As comparison, print formats (Hardcover, Paperback and Mass Market Paperback) increased 2.3% to $335.9 million in 2011. (Source)

With this increase has come the usual hand-wringing over the end of print, the effects on book stores, access to books for people who can’t afford e-readers, the problems caused by DRM and the demise of the First-sale Doctrine (which says you can sell second-hand books, DVDs, videos, etc.), and so forth.

These are all worth investigation, but I’ve become interested in two specific effects of this shift.

First, the enormous rise in erotica sales and the ability of unknown authors without agents or publishers to publish ebooks cheaply and easily.

Second, the ebook sharing underground: a loose network of sites that let people swap ebooks without DRM. Because the files are so small, they’re much easier to disseminate than movies or television shows. They can be easily emailed, DropBoxed, or placed on a DDL (direct download) file-sharing server like 4Shared or Rapidshare. (There are also ebooks on BitTorrent, but it seems that most ebook sharers bypass the torrent infrastructure entirely, probably due to usability concerns or lack of comfort with the protocol.) The popular freeware program Calibre allows ebook users to convert any format (pdf, epub, mobi) to any other format; there’s a popular Calibre plugin that cracks DRM. Most ebook sharing sites contain a tutorial or two on using Calibre.

While all sorts of books are shared online, many of the ebook sharing sites I’ve come across are largely comprised of romance novels. Romance novels are an enormous industry, comprising 13% of the US market and generating more revenue than any other category:

Romance fiction: $1.358 billion in estimated revenue for 2010
Religion/inspirational: $759 million
Mystery: $682 million
Science fiction/fantasy: $559 million
Classic literary fiction: $455 million
[Source: Romance Writers of America]

From my highly unscientific perusing of ebook sharing websites, the majority of participants are women, and most of them are voracious consumers of particular subgenres, such as paranormal or Western. They’re aware of release dates — romances are published on a strict schedule– and so there’s a constant stream of new content being made available. Romances have become so popular on ebook sharing sites that one disgruntled participant wrote:

 

Read the rest of the post on the Social Media Collective Research Blog.

15 Grammatical Errors That Make You Look Silly

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The following infographic, by BlueGlass, originally appeared on Copyblogger. The introductory text is by Brian Clark, and the infographic is shared here with Copyblogger’s permission.

We’re big advocates of conversational writing that’s engaging, persuasive, and fun. So that means it’s perfectly fine to fracture the occasional stuffy grammatical rule (and many times it’s preferable).

On the other hand, making some grammatical errors just makes you look bad, and hurts your effectiveness. Sometimes we even misuse words simply because we hear others use them incorrectly.

 

So, we’ve assembled the 15 most egregious grammar goofs into one helpful infographic. With this handy reference, you’ll never look silly again.

Thanks once again to our friends at BlueGlass for the infographic design that makes my silly little words look cool. Enjoy!

15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look Silly
Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.

How To Become A Full Time Indie Author

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This post, by Karen Woodward, originally appeared on her blog on 6/25/12.

I can’t believe I’ve never heard of Lindsay Buroker before. Even now I don’t know much about her, but I do know three things:

1) She’s an indie author
2) She sells enough books as an indie that she’s able to write full time
3) She gives awesome advice about how to become a full time indie author

I’d go so far as to say that anyone who follows the advice Lindsay has given is guaranteed to sell more books. Of course, milage will vary. You might not be able to quit your day-job, but her advice to indie authors is along the lines of, "look both ways before you cross the street". You could ignore it, but I wouldn’t advise it.

Here is Lindsay’s advice:

1. Don’t just write novel length stories, write shorter ones too
This allows you to publish more in the same amount of time, and the more you get your name out in front of readers, the better. Especially in the beginning. Lindsay writes:

… I’ve never been in the Amazon Top 100 (or in the Top 1000 for more than a couple of days), and I’m not particularly visible even in my sub-categories (epic fantasy/historical fantasy) in the Kindle Store. You don’t have to be an uber seller to make a living, though you have to, of course, have characters and/or plots that capture people’s imaginations and turn them into fans (not everyone has to like your books but enough people do so that you get good reviews and you word-of-mouth “advertising” from readers). If you have ten books priced at $4.99, and they sell 200 copies a month, you’re earning over $6,000 a month.

I don’t mean to make it sound like it’s easy to write ten books or sell 200 copies a month of a title (I would have rolled my eyes at such a comment 16 months ago), but, right now, the numbers tell us that making a living as an indie author is a lot more doable than making a living as a traditionally published author (where the per-book cut is a lot smaller). If you’re mid-list as an indie, and you have a stable of books that are doing moderately well, you’ve got it made in the short-term. If… you’re building your tribe along the way, you ought to have it made in the long-term too (more on that below).

 2. Use the power of free to promote your books

Lindsay writes:

I’ve tried a lot when it comes to online promotion, everything from guest posts to book blog tours to contests to paid advertising, and nothing compares with having a free ebook in the major stores. Not only will people simply find it on their own, but it’s so much easier to promote something that’s free. If you do buy advertising (and I do from time to time), it’ll be the difference between selling 25 copies and getting 5,000 downloads (i.e. 5,000 new people exposed to your work), because people live in hope that they’ll find something good amongst the free offerings.

 

Read the rest of the post on Karen Woodward’s blog.

Hello

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 I’m never sure what I should be doing or not doing. What I don’t want to do is post a link, so I’m not. I’m Author Madison Johns. I have published a short story collections of the horror genre on Amazon entitled Coffin Tales Season of Death. It contains two short stories that I’d say would appeal more to the YA audience, but hey they are creepy.

In May 2012 I published my first novel Armed and Outrageous, which is a cozy mystery featuring a senior citizen sleuth Agnes Barton. Well I must admit writing about characters this age is challenging. It’s laugh out loud funny and with enough realism to make most people identify with one or more of the situations they get themselves into.

I’m happy to be here and look forward to interacting here. I’m also active on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Goodreads. 

Hello

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 I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself. 

Bio

 

As a child, Madison Johns preferred to distance herself from other children her age, and had been described as a dreamer. Even as a small child, she remembers staying awake many a night fighting dragons, whisked away to foreign lands, or meeting the man of her dreams.

At the age of 44, Madison pounded out a book a year for the next three years and published her first novel May 1, 2012.

 

Books

Horror

Coffin Tales Season of Death published November 2011 on Amazon. It’s a collection of two short stories Jack-o’-lantern and Hell Crow. 

Mystery

Armed and Outrageous published May 2012 and currently available on Amazon in both ebook and print editions, also available on Barnes and Noble.

 

What was San Francisco like in 1880? The Economy

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Publetariat Editor’s Note: in this post, historical fiction author M. Louisa Locke shares some of the wealth of information she found while doing research for her novels. It’s worth a close read for anyone working in the historical fiction genre, as it reveals the levels of depth and detail required when doing this type of research.

This is the first in a multi-part series describing San Francisco in 1880. For those of you who have read either Maids of Misfortune or Uneasy Spirits, or my short stories, this will provide you with some deeper understanding of the city where my main characters, Annie Fuller and Nate Dawson, lived as children in the 1860s and returned to as adults in the 1870s. If you are not familiar with my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, I hope these historical pieces will pique your interest––although I promise my fiction is much livelier reading. All the material quoted below is from my thesis, “Like a Machine or an Animal: Working Women of the Far West in the Late Nineteenth Century,” University of California: San Diego dissertation, 1982 pp. 60-69.”  I must say, it is much more entertaining to convey historical information through fiction than heavily footnoted fact!

Part One: The San Francisco Economy

“In 1880 San Francisco, with a population of 233,959 residents, was the ninth largest city in the United States. Located at the end of the peninsula that separates the Bay of San Francisco from the Pacific Ocean, this city of hills, sand dunes, fogs, and mild temperatures had been only a small village called Yerba Buena less than forty years earlier.  This small village was one of the chief beneficiaries of the incredible influx of people into the region after the discovery of gold to the north in the winter of 1847-48.”

[For those of you who have read Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits––Annie Fuller, her parents, her Aunt and Uncle, and her housekeeper, Beatrice O’Rourke, were among those who traveled west and settled in San Francisco in those first years.]

“Commerce dominated San Francisco’s economic structure through out the nineteenth century. Its fine natural harbor and its location near both ocean shipping lanes and interior river routes stimulated much of the city’s early economic growth. The city served as the port of entry for the massive flow of people and goods into the region during the Gold Rush, and once agriculture developed in the interior in the 1860′s San Francisco also became the major port to handle goods shipped out of the region. The disruption in trade resulting from the Civil War further promoted the development of agriculture in the Far West, and San Francisco merchants worked hard in the 1850s and 1860s to ensure that all goods entering or leaving the region passed through their hands. By and large they were successful, and their control of the region’s trade remained firm until the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. As late as 1875, San Francisco still handled at least ninety percent of all the goods leaving the state and a major share of the trade leaving the Northwest.”

“As a commercial port city, San Francisco first developed manufacturing that centered around supplying shipping needs and processing the raw materials that constituted the bulk of the city’s trade. By the late 1850s a few firms also began to manufacture a significant amount of the heavy equipment used in hydraulic mining.  In the 1860s…the Civil War and the completion of the transcontinental railroad fostered the development of a new kind of industry within San Francisco––the manufacturing of light consumer items for regional markets. The dislocation of Eastern trade during the Civil War not only aided the development of agricultural lands in the Far West but also encouraged San Francisco’s manufacturing sector by diverting capital investment from the cities of the East to the Far west and by forcing the latter region to look to San Francisco to supply its consumer needs.”

“The high shipping rates of the Central Pacific Railroad acted as a protective tariff for the city, and the railroad gave San Francisco easier access to raw materials and to regional markets for its manufactured goods. The construction of the railroad also attracted great numbers of Chinese and European immigrants who flocked to San Francisco once their job with the railroad ended. This new abundance of labor, in turn, drove down wages in the city and encouraged the creation of the first large-scale manufacturing establishments in the city. As a result, by 1880 San Francisco had a mature, broadly based manufacturing sector that completely dominated the Far West. San Francisco ranked ninth among cities in the nation in value of products…most important industries in 1880 were meat packing and processing, sugar refining, boot and shoe making, heavy metal and machine making, men’s clothing, and tobacco and cigar making. San Francisco’s continued vitality as a commercial center and its growing manufacturing capabilities also insured that the city acted as the financial capital of the region. The headquarters of almost all of the California banking institutions were located in San Francisco, and banks in other cities were often dependent on San Francisco capital.”

“Despite this relatively favorable working climate, San Francisco was not in any way protected from the economic cycles that affected the rest of the nation, nor were the laboring classes immune form exploitation by their employers. In fact, the high wages of the 1850s and 1860s and the popular myth that fortunes were easily made in the Far West promoted unrealistic expectations that were dealt a particularly harsh blow when hard times hit the city in the 1870s. With the completion of the railroad in 1869, the chronic labor shortage that had kept wages high vanished, and for the first time there was severe unemployment throughout the state. The national depression sparked by the Panic of 1873 reinforced the local downturn in business, and in 1875 the collapse of the Bank of California and the decline in the output of the Comstock Lode (in which much of the city’s capital had been invested) added to the city’s difficulties.”

“Even though a visitor to the city in 1880′…was much struck by the depressed air of the tradesmen,’ and a Norwegian pastor implored his countrymen living in the Midwest not to come to San Francisco expecting to find jobs easily, by 1880 San Francisco’s economy shared in the recovery that was sweeping the nation. The development of manufacturing in the city, which had in part been fostered by the very economic difficulties of the 1870s (because it lowered wages), meant that the city entered the new decade with an economy that was more diverse and stronger than ever.”

[It was the Panic of 1873 and the subsequent national depression that had played a key role in Annie Fuller’s late husband’s financial ruin back east and it is the improvement in San Francisco’s economy that Annie takes advantage of as the clairvoyant, Madam Sibyl, when she offers business advice to local businessmen like Mr. Matthew Voss in Maids of Misfortune.]

 

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

Pain and Stress Inform the Work, But Not Always Right Away, and Only If You Survive

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It may not seem like it at first, but this post is about coping with the tremendous, unprecedented pressure to produce and sell that all but the most established authors face these days. Specifically, it’s about coping with those pressures on top of other, even larger pressures, particularly when you’re an indie author in the early stages of your publishing career. So please bear with me: I’ll circle back around to this, I promise.

My favorite mantra for coping with pain, stress and the general asshattery and douchebaggery of others when it occurs is, "It informs the work. It informs the work. It informs the work." Sometimes I have to say it through gritted teeth, but it’s true: the most painful and troubling experiences of a writer’s life combine to fill a well of personal truth from which the writer can draw to lend authenticity and heft to his fiction. But like a fine wine or artisnal cheese, those experiences usually need to age before they’re ready for public consumption.

It’s only through the passage of time, and accumulation of new experiences and outcomes, that the writer gains distance, perspective, and a degree of objectivity that enables her to take something deeply personal and channel it into stories and characters that speak to others in a relatable way. And I’m not just talking about fictionalized memoirs here, I’m talking about dealing with the broad themes of loss, pain, denial, longing, failure and all the other negatives that challenge us as human beings, in fiction.

Writers are a sensitive lot by nature, and many of us are living through dire times. Some of you who are reading this post have recently suffered a job loss; some have been out of work for a year or longer. Some are losing—or have already lost—their homes to foreclosure. Some are coping with the loss of a loved one, divorce, a health crisis…or maybe even two or more of these major life traumas simultaneously. Some are just barely keeping the bill collectors at bay while living on a steady diet of ramen noodles and peanut butter. One day, the survivors will look back on these dark times and see them for the growth experiences they were. But not today, and not if they don’t survive.

Sometimes people ask me why I’m not producing one or two novels a year, as so many indie authors are advised to do if they wish to build up the kind of back catalog that’s necessary to truly make a living as an indie author. Some ask why I’m no longer a familiar face at writer conferences and events. Some wonder why they’re seeing more images and updates of my craft projects on Facebook than of my writing projects, and why I just generally don’t seem to be "working it" as an indie author, and haven’t been for some time. Well, I’ll tell you.

I came out of the chute like gangbusters back in 2007, when "self-publish" was still a dirty word. I got my books and myself out there, I launched and nurtured Publetariat.com, I became active with social media, I networked, I got involved with online writer and reader communities, I spoke at writer conferences, I taught workshops, and more. I’d built up quite a head of steam and forward momentum when…

…the bottom fell out of my life.

In early 2010 I learned I had a breast tumor [I’m fine now, thanks for your concern =’) ]. Two days later my husband of 18+ years announced he was leaving me. This meant I’d also soon be unemployed since my job at the time was as Office Manager for a business my then-husband and I ran together. I’d left a career in Software Engineering some six years previous to help establish and run that business, so hopping right back into my former professional field wouldn’t be possible. Divorce also meant I might soon be losing the only home I’d ever owned, and had recently remodeled, and loved, since I most likely couldn’t afford the mortgage payment by myself.
 
It’s been over two years since the bombs dropped on me, and I’ve come a long way toward full recovery. But I’m not there yet. While the initial shock and emotional devastation are behind me, the fallout from these problems is still poking me with a stick on a daily basis, preventing me from establishing comfortable, secure new routines. In many ways, I’m still in survival mode. Surely all of these experiences will imbue my work with more depth and meaning than it’s ever had before. But not today. And not if I don’t survive.

Survival is job one, for all of us. If you don’t survive, you won’t be there to tell your stories when the crisis is over. If the pressures of your daily life are already pushing you to your limits as a human being, before you add the pressures of authorship, you need to step back. Give yourself permission to delay, though not abandon, your dreams. If you don’t, drive will turn into despair. Hope will turn into bitterness. The urge to create will turn into an urge to destroy.

For someone in survival mode, every bit of effort, time and money spent is a high-stakes investment, because there’s so little of those commodities available to such a person. Where entering a contest, submitting a manuscript, or publishing a new book would’ve been an event of nervous, but hopeful anticipation in the past, when you’re in survival mode these things become acts of desperate need. Rejections that would’ve been difficult, but manageable, before are crushing to someone in survival mode. Not only is it impossible to create your best work, you lack the emotional wherewithal to understand and accept it when others don’t respond well to your sub-par efforts. It becomes a downward spiral of fear, rejection and increasing desperation, all of which serves to further delay your eventual recovery and ability to come at authorship from a place of renewed strength and perspective.

Building a career as an author is a marathon, not a sprint. If you’re exhausted as you stand on the blocks, before the starting gun has even sounded, there’s no way you can hope to win that race. Do what you need to do to survive, so that someday, you can once again thrive.


This is a cross-posting from Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.

5 Mistakes of New Fiction Writers

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However many books on writing we read, and however many novels we have consumed in our genre, there are still things that we get wrong as new novelists.

I know I fall into these traps. I also reviewed a friend’s manuscript the other day and found myself telling him exactly the same things.

So I thought you might like to add your thoughts as well since we can all learn from each other. Please do leave a comment [on the original post] with your top mistakes of new fiction writers.

This is not an exhaustive list, but just some obvious things that, if fixed, may transform your manuscript. Aspects may also vary by genre.

(1) Show, don’t tell.

Now I know why editors and publishers say this over and over again. It really stands out in a manuscript when you read with a fresh eye. If the Nazis are marching into a French village, don’t report the event in third person. Instead, relate the event from the point of view of a character in the crowd. Make it personal and show their reaction to the event by their behavior. Deep, interior monologues can be replaced with characters doing something or saying something.

(2) Consistent Point of View (POV)

I don’t think I really ‘got’ point of view until I paid for my first professional edit. I jumped into the heads of the different characters within one scene which can be confusing for readers. Yes, some writers do it but it’s best to get POV sorted before you start playing around.

POV is also easier if you think in terms of writing scenes. Each scene has a setting, something happens to advance the plot or reveal character, and there is a point of view. Who is telling the story? Then be consistent within the scene, or if you change heads, then only do it once. There’s no exact science to this, but there are some conventions that make it easier for the reader.

For more on story engineering, check out Larry Brook’s fantastic tips in this interview.

(3) Deliver on the promise you make the reader.

If there is a murder at the beginning, then we need to know who did it by the end. No matter if it is a massive 7 part series. The story arc in the one book needs to be complete. This is one of the reasons I personally don’t like serial books. I like my story to be encompassed in one book. I want the payoff of a good ending.

There needs to be coherence around theme, character arc, plot as well as delivering to the promise of the genre you advertise the book as. I’m writing action-adventure thriller, so I can’t spend half the book in one room pondering the world as a literary fiction author could. If you’re writing romance, there needs to be a happy ending. (Although apparently, a love story can have an unhappy ending in the vein of Nicholas Sparks!)

(4) Overuse of first names in dialogue

This jumps off the page as the sign of an amateur, and I am absolutely guilty as charged in my first novel. Read your dialogue out loud – with another person. Someone has commented on the blog before about reading it aloud to a recorder and then playing it back again. This is all time-consuming though. I notice this in a lot of indie books.

(5) Overuse of exclamation marks

Yes, this can be fixed by a proof-reader/ copy-editor, but sometimes the text needs to be rewritten as well as the excess punctuation removed. It’s trying too hard to communicate emotion to the reader, without showing it in the action or behavior of the character.

Tips on usage from The Perfect Write.

“Some experts feel that exclamation points are the sign of a lazy writer, or worse–an amateur. Whether the rationale for either opinion is sound or not, there are well-grounded reasons for both.”

Conclusion: we can all improve.

One of the marvelous things about being a writer is how we can keep improving. Every word we write can be a step towards improvement. The editing process is all about improvement, about making the book the best it can be. Get people reading your work and critiquing it. We have to keep learning and this is the only way.

What do you think the tell-tale errors of new fiction writers are? Please do leave a comment [on the original post].

 

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

How To Make Yourself Completely Insane in Three Easy Steps

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Okay so there are no real steps here. That’s just the title. I have a special talent for making myself bug-shagging crazy. I am not good at moderation. (Well, except with alcohol. Seriously 3-4 ounces of wine and I’m done. Thank GOD I have an ability to moderate drinking otherwise I’d be in a rehab center somewhere.)

Anyway… too much of almost anything makes me really depressed and anxious and neurotic. Lately I’ve been driving myself crazy trying to be more productive, largely because I feel this huge pressure to get enough work out there to maintain a living and to have a book “break out” because I have this completely neurotic and overwhelming fear of just “disappearing” and everything drifting so far to the bottom of sales rankings that nobody even finds it anymore. (even though this probably is NOT how it works.)

[Publetariat Editor’s note: strong language after the jump]

I’m not saying it has to make me famous or get me on some kind of “list”, I’d be happy at this point for a book to get into the top 1,000 in the Kindle store and stay there for a few weeks, just enough to bump me up all across the boards enough that I can relax and fucking breathe.

And I know you can’t “plan” for a book to break out. A book either catches fire or it doesn’t. You can’t plan it, you can’t know what will make people sit up and take notice in large enough numbers for it to matter. But the more books you write and the stronger/bigger your backlist, the higher the odds raise just from a pure numbers perspective of something breaking out. The other factor is the learning curve. The more you write, the more you learn either overtly or sort of humming in the background, what works with books and your style and what doesn’t. What you excel at and what you’re not so great at. So each book (hopefully), gets stronger, and while it gets stronger, you’re putting out more books which keep raising your odds. (But when you’re in the trenches, believe me, it does not feel like that. It feels like a treadmill that will never reap the benefits you want.)

I rarely do whine fest posts like this, so bear with me. I put SO much pressure on myself. I’m not sure Olympic hopefuls put this much pressure on themselves. It’s a serious character flaw and it causes me more angst than I want to deal with, but I can’t help pushing. If things aren’t going great sales-wise, I push harder (i.e. work more, write more, publish more). If things are going great… I push harder… to capitalize on it more… because I know from experience that it won’t always be like that.

I’m not sure what magic or luck came together to get Mated so close to the top 100 in the Kindle store when it first came out (105), but at the time it seemed EASY. People were making a big deal about all three of my novellas being in the top three spots repeatedly of the Gothic romance section and high in the top 10 of other related sections and in my head it just wasn’t a big deal. Because it came too easy. It came so easy I didn’t know how hard it was and couldn’t appreciate what I’d accomplished until something happened to put me and my work in a more realistic place.

NOW I know how hard that is. NOW I know why people were going: “Holy crap, look where Zoe’s books all are on that list?” Gee, it would have been nice to be able to have truly appreciated it, THEN. Probably some people thought I was being modest, and certainly I wouldn’t have run around tooting my horn like I was the shit, because that is supremely obnoxious and as hard as it is to make a go of it in such a competitive industry in a crappy economy where people have a billion distractions and too many things to do to crack a book open in the first place… you just don’t gloat when you “get there” wherever “there” is. Because it’s fucking hard, and you can feel the pain of every other writer around you desperately wanting to be even where you are that you just don’t shit on people like that when you’re successful.

Jumping tracks…

I don’t understand how to back the fuck off and take a break, and it’s making me certifiably crazy.

This past week I decided I was going to write a book in a week. The book had been percolating for awhile, so why not. I’ll tell you why not? Because it’s INSANE. I wrote 30,000 words in 3 days. I don’t recommend it. I don’t think I ever want to do another 10k day. Unless I’m just in such a white hot writing heat and so excited about the book I can’t stop or slow down. But to say: “Okay, this is my quota today” and do these crazy, draining, grueling days. No. Never again.

I have to bring some sanity back into my life. So yeah, it’s cool and awesome that I wrote 10k words 3 days in a row. I’ve never done that before, and unless it’s at gun point, I’m never doing it again. I’m going back to my normal 2,500 word days that don’t feel like they are sucking the life right out of me when I do them. I may write more if I feel like it, but it surely won’t be the quota. Know how many words I’m writing today? 2,500. Unless I just feel wildly inspired. Because otherwise it’s too much stress and pressure. And if I’m not in the right place emotionally, I’m going to write a truckload of shit anyway.

I believe strongly that the muse doesn’t show up unless you do, but at the same time, you can’t just grind out huge huge word counts (unless you’re some kind of prolific writing savant), without there being a strong psychic cost for that.

And speaking of breaking out… (Sort of jumping back onto the first track) Judging from what my betas are saying, Life Cycle has a strong potential to break out… BUT… there’s a hurdle… there are 3 books before it in the series. New people have a giant hurdle of time commitment with me and my books to jump before they get to the magical potentially break out book (and when I say break out, again, I don’t mean riches and fame. I mean a book that really catches on strongly and gets me back into the top 1k again and bringing my backlist with it.)

So Life Cycle HAS to be able to stand alone. Which is what I’ll be working on in edits. The problem with this series is that I have basically done everything I can think of to KEEP it from breaking out. (Not on purpose.) Book 1 (Blood Lust) is a series of 3 novellas which in itself is problematic because it’s confusing to people. People who hate novellas aren’t going to want to read what is basically a novella anthology as the first book to bring them into a series. People who love novellas and hate novels won’t stick around for book 2.

Book 2 (Save My Soul) is problematic in its own way because at times it feels like a totally different series. Things don’t really start coming together for the whole world until book 3. Plus some people may be turned off by some of the Catholicism (even though I am far from promoting traditional religion in my work) that forms part of the backbone of the world. And those who ARE Catholic or Christian might be turned off because again… I’m not promoting it… I’m twisting it in my world (not in a malicious way, but hardcore religious people probably wouldn’t see it like that). Others may feel the title “Save My Soul” implies the book is in first person. Which it’s not.

Book 3 (The Catalyst) is much stronger than the first two books (not that I think the first two are bad… it’s just that writers grow the more they write, generally). But, it doesn’t exactly “stand alone”. I tried, but there’s too much backstory to give it all to you in the book. And it’s too much backstory that’s necessary to the front story.

That brings us to book 4 (Life Cycle). I think it’s a really strong book. The strongest in the series. And I know fans of the series have been WAITING for Cain and Tam. If it can stand alone, I think it’s a strong enough hook to bring in a lot of new readers and hook them back into the first 3 books. But if it’s not, I feel like the series is pretty much dead in the water. I’ll finish it, of course, if for no other reason than *I* love it, but after Life Cycle, I can’t bring myself to keep hoping it will break out in a bigger way.

Which is why it’s very good that I’m going to start a new series. I’ve learned a lot about what to do and what not to do when writing a series, plus my writing has grown stronger. (And lest anybody think I’m an egomaniac here, this is the judgment and commentary of OTHER people… not me sitting around going: “Oh look, I just get more and more awesome each day.”) So the solution is simple, start a new series. I think the concept for the new series is strong, but I have some details left to fill in before I start.

But of course ALL of this stresses me out. As hard as it is, I have to stop caring how well a book does. The one drawback to self-publishing (even though I love what I do, don’t misinterpret this.)… is that it’s extremely hard (unless you have MPD), to be those two TOTALLY different people… the business person who has to care about sales and numbers and promotion. And the writer… the person who CAN’T care too much about that or the work will suffer and they’ll go insane.

You can probably put two and two together at this point and realize why so many writers have substance abuse problems. If writing and publishing fiction won’t drive you to drink… nothing will. At least I win that one consolation prize. I just have to bring the alcohol moderation into the rest of my life and I’ll be golden… at least from a mental health perspective. And maybe from a general career perspective as well, since it’s usually when you stop clinging and fighting so hard that things open up and flow. I should at least try to test that theory. The first step is going back to a reasonable word count and chilling the fuck out.
 

This is a reprint from The Weblog of Zoe Winters.

Is A Self-Publishing Backlash On The Way?

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This post, by Henry Baum, originally appeared on The Self-Publishing Review on 3/2/12.

It’s been a good run.  2011 was the year when self-publishing broke open with the successes of Amanda Hocking, John Locke, and JA Konrath.  The stigma is gone.  No one thinks a self-published book is bad just because it’s been self-published.  But people are creative – there are some out there who actively want to dislike self-publishing, and will look for reasons to criticize.  There are also plenty of people who still want to believe in the validation of a traditional publisher: if an agent and editor like it, I must be good.  So now the stigma is not: self-published books are bad, but self-published books are hard to sell.

This post is so wrong it’s almost not worth linking to, but it’s an interesting sentiment with a provocative title: Self-Publishing is Over –

I’m not saying self-publishing doesn’t work. The fact that I’m spending my days building a 40′ ocean going catamaran is proof that it does, or at least that it did for me.

I am saying that it takes a very particular sort of person to do it, and that person has to be comfortable with the idea that they’re going to spend upwards of 75% of their time and effort doing things they (probably) regard as secondary to the creative act, and that there’s no (longer) special reward for undertaking the effort. The chances of your work being embraced by the market are not higher than going the tradition route; the return on your investment of time and effort (and in the case of movies, money) is not higher than going the traditional route.

And self-distro is certainly not the (much hyped) solution to the chaos and uncertainty that reigns in music or movies or publishing. It’s simply another route that might work, but probably won’t.

Perhaps with all the hype about self-publishing’s successes, people have gotten the impression that self-publishers think it’s easy to make it rich. But most know that self-publishing is hard.  That doesn’t make it “over,” just…hard.  As is releasing any book.  And the argument’s so old but – traditionally published writers need to do a lot of work they didn’t used to do as well: social marketing, arranging book tours, etc.  All publishing has elements of self-publishing.

That post was responding to another in The Atlantic:

One of the illusions most common to writers — an illusion that may make the long slow slog of writing possible, for many people — is that an enormous audience is out there waiting for the wisdom and delight that I alone can provide, and that the Publishing System is a giant obstacle to my reaching those people. Thus the dream that digital publishing technologies will indeed “disintermediate” — will eliminate that obstacle and connect me directly to what Bugs Bunny calls “me Public.” (See “Bully for Bugs”.) And we have heard just enough unexpected success stories to keep that dream alive.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Self-Publishing Review.

Why The Deepest Lessons Take Time To Absorb

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This post, by John Caddell, originally appeared on the 99%: Insights On Making Ideas Happen site. While the article takes business ventures as its subject, the advice in it can be helpful to those dealing with failed books and other creative projects, as well.

As the expression goes, "hindsight is always 20/20." But how long does it take to get that 20/20 perspective? Here’s what Jerome Chazen, the co-founder of fashion house Liz Claiborne, told Knowledge@Wharton about the biggest mistake of his long career at the company:
 
With the benefit of hindsight, I would have worked harder to moderate our growth. I think we allowed the growth potential to overtake the company instead of us being in charge of it. It’s a hard thing to explain. But you know, it was so exciting, for me anyway, to report better and better numbers, especially after we went public. I mean I loved it. I loved those quarterly [numbers] that were up 20% or 40%, whatever. I think, looking back now, that I got carried away, that we should have done things more moderately.

 
Liz Claiborne went public in 1981. Thirty years later, Chazen had learned the lesson that his excitement over making quarterly numbers was not in the long-term best interests of the company.
This kind of time lag in learning from a mistake is not unusual. For the deepest lessons an individual can learn, it’s required. Only with the passing of time can the intense emotions (positive or negative) of an event fall away and allow us to recognize mistakes and our contribution to them.
Not every mistake takes 30 years to absorb. Small oversights, process errors, results of projects or experiments can be evaluated hours, days or weeks after completion. Failures of these types result from lack of knowledge, routine human error, or poor assumptions.

But with another class of mistakes the stakes are much higher – the setbacks and failures that derail your future plans or call into question your self-image. These are the ones that occur because of your deepest weaknesses and flaws. For this reason, we prefer to avoid thinking about these mistakes, or to attribute them to circumstances out of our control.
 

I’ll share a personal example. I started my own consulting business in 2006. I expected that all the people who’d benefited from my expertise in my 20-year career would come calling as soon as I hung out my shingle.
Yet it took me seven months to land my first client. A little while later I got a second, who sustained the business for two more years. When that project ended, I couldn’t replace the lost revenue. I realized I couldn’t make a go of it, and took a corporate job. I spent my first year as a salaried employee in complete denial. Any incoming call or email tempted me to jump right back into consulting. I blamed the failure on any reasonable factor – the poor economy, the structural changes in my industry, a dispute with my former company.
All those factors contributed to the situation, but dwelling on them was beside the point. It wouldn’t change anything going forward. I had to understand what I could have done differently, what I should do differently next time.

 

Read the rest of the article on 99%.

How Can We Get Artists Paid On The Internet? A Chat With David Lowery

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This article, by Maria Bustillos, originally appeared on The Awl on 6/21/12. Note that while it focuses on digital music piracy, the issues in it, of perceived value, piracy, intellectual property rights and the need for artists to earn a living, are equally applicable to ebooks.

Little did I realize, when I popped over to the Urth Cafe on Beverly a few days ago to talk with the musician David Lowery about artist compensation in the music business, that within the week he would be at the center of one of those "Media Firestorms." Founder of the bands Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, Lowery is a big, charming, voluble, bearded ginger who natters as fast as I do; he also has a mathematics and programming background and knows a lot about amateur radio, and is a big dork. We had a marvelous talk about the above-named topics over coffee. I’d become interested in his recent work and activism after reading a post on his blog, Trichordist, "Meet the New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss," about the failed promise of "disintermediation" and Internet distribution in the music business: "I was like all of you. I believed in the promise of the Internet to liberate, empower and even enrich artists. I still do but I’m less sure of it than I once was. I come here because I want to start a dialogue. I feel that what we artists were promised has not really panned out."

Just days after our talk, though, came a blog post by NPR intern Emily White, in which she admitted that, though she has a music library of over 11,000 songs, she has only ever bought like 15 CDs, and Lowery’s incandescent response. So much for my sobersides examination of intellectual property issues! The whole internet is still on fire with this story. When I wrote Lowery to exclaim over the fallout, he responded, "We usually get a few thousand reads a day on our blog. And I mean a few, like 3k is a good day. Sometimes we will get these crazy viral things for a few days, the way ‘New Boss’ did. But this Letter to Emily is totally off the charts. Like half a million reads in 24 hours."

Dear Media, what a dog’s breakfast you have made of this Firestorm. The dialogue between White and Lowery is not a fight. These alleged adversaries are in agreement with respect to the only significant point at issue—that musicians should be able to make a living, and they can’t in the current circumstances. Let’s extend the conversation from there.

KIDS SAY THE DARNEDEST THINGS

White’s original post opened with a response to an NPR colleague, Bob Boilen, who’d just consigned his music collection to the cloud; 25,000 songs, 200GB of reclaimed space on his hard drive. Big deal, said White; because she didn’t live through the transition between physical and digital music, storing music in the cloud seemed to her like a small step, rather than a large one. Fair enough. Then the surprises began. She wrote:

As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to realize the gravity of what file-sharing means to the musicians I love. I can’t support them with concert tickets and T-shirts alone. But I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience.

What I want is one massive Spotify-like catalog of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices. With this new universal database, everyone would have convenient access to everything that has ever been recorded, and performance royalties would be distributed based on play counts (hopefully with more money going back to the artist than the present model). All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?

Lowery’s response was both exasperated and gentle, teacherly (in fact he is a teacher, in the Music Business program at UGA). He is over twice White’s age and had no compunction about assuming all the authority of maturity and experience. He pointed out that the same kids who pay uncomplainingly through the nose for iPods and bandwidth on which to play music suddenly get all dodgy about paying for the music itself.

The existential questions that your generation gets to answer are these:

Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?

Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?

This is a bit of hyperbole to emphasize the point. But it’s as if:

Networks: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!
Hardware: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!
Artists: 99.9 % lower middle class. Screw you, you greedy bastards!

Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!

I am genuinely stunned by this. Since you appear to love first generation Indie Rock, and as a founding member of a first generation Indie Rock band I am now legally obligated to issue this order: kids, lawn, vacate.

You are doing it wrong.

It is a bit surprising to hear a 20 year old say so blithely what "my peers and I" will or will not pay for, as if they weren’t already obediently paying without objection for what they’ve been told to pay for, which is iPhones. In fact, White’s generation in general has raised more or less zero opposition to their corpocratic bondage. But it’s also quite plain that Emily White has finally figured out (as she’s "grown up," she says) that she wants musicians to make more money. David Lowery wants the same thing!

 

Read the rest of the article on The Awl.

What E-Publishing Means to a Country Boy

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This post, by Stant Litore, originally appeared on New Wave Authors on 6/21/12.

Bea over at Writing Off the Rails asked me a few days ago what digital publishing, indie publishing, e-publishing, etc., means to me. That made me sit back and think a moment, because it means a lot to me. And not just what you’d expect. Here’s the answer I came up with.

It means all bets are off.

For the first time in quite a while, writers have options. A writer with a fantastic story, some marketing chutzpah, and the self-discipline of an old workhorse can take a decent shot at self-publishing, and that’s been good for a number of novelists. It’s a long shot, but thanks to the rapid growth of the e-book market and the ease of connecting writers and readers via the Internet, it’s far more feasible than it has been in the past.

Another thing that’s exciting to me is the new species of publishers emerging. Some of the small presses are not only entrepreneurial but also give their writers a fair deal, which is something that hasn’t really been the norm among large publishing houses since the 1950s.

And there are the Amazon imprints – Montlake, Thomas & Mercer, 47North, and the others. These not only offer a fair deal but a very powerful marketing engine, and they’re run by innovative people who invest in the author-editor relationship. They’re bringing good work out and they put their weight behind it – not just behind one or two titles they’re banking everything on, they put their weight behind all their books. I’m impressed by that. 

All of this means that a good writer has a better shot at making a living than has been the case in quite a few decades.

That’s a good thing.

But what the e-book market and the digital publishing phenomenon really means to me is bigger than that. Much bigger.

 

Read the rest of the post on New Wave Authors.

12 Most Striking Tendencies of Creative People

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This post, by Kim Phillips, originally appeared on the 12most site on 3/13/12.

Ever wonder what makes those wacky, creative types tick? How is it that some people seem to come up with all kinds of interesting, original work while the rest of us trudge along in our daily routines?

Creative people are different because they operate a little differently. They:


1. Are easily bored

A short attention span isn’t always a good thing, but it can indicate that the creative person has grasped one concept and is ready to go on to the next one.

2. Are willing to take risks

Fearlessness is absolutely necessary for creating original work, because of the possibility of rejection. Anything new requires a bit of change, and most of us don’t care for change that much.

3. Don’t like rules

Rules, to the creative person, are indeed made to be broken. They are created for us by other people, generally to control a process; the creative person needs freedom in order to work.

4. Ask “what if…”

Seeing new possibilities is a little risky, because it means that something will change and some sort of action will have to be taken. Curiosity is probably the single most important trait of creative people.

5. Make lots of mistakes

A photographer doesn’t just take one shot, and a composer doesn’t just write down a fully realized symphony. Creation is a long process, involving lots of boo-boos along the way. A lot goes in the trash.

6. Collaborate

The hermit artist, alone in his garret, is a romantic notion but not always an accurate one. Comedians, musicians, painters, chefs all get a little better by sharing with others in their fields.

 

Read the rest of the post on 12most.