Month: February 2013

350 Words

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I’m always trying to tweak my process to become more productive. On the one hand, I don’t like to work on edits and rough draft of something else at the same time on the same day because it feels like multi-tasking. Why not finish the most close-to-being-ready thing and then move on to the next thing to take your full focus?

At the same time, when I do that, what tends to happen is I will get out of the “writing groove”. So while it can take a lot of time and energy to switch between tasks as one does with multi-tasking, it can sometimes take longer to get into a new groove after it’s gone, particularly with writing.

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

Chuck Wendig wrote a post that I found inspiring toward this end: How To Push Past The Bullshit And Write that Goddamn Novel: A Very Simple No-Fuckery Writing Plan To Get Shit Done

From the very beginning I knew that this was going to be great because anybody who says No-Fuckery is someone I feel I ought to listen to just on principle.

I had previously tried a 250 words a day writing goal. The idea was to JUST START and even if you JUST do the 250, you’ve got some word count down and you started and if you write more awesome, and it adds up over time. It’s like stealing your novel through fifteen minutes here or there. And while it can take that long to even get into a groove, period, if you do it every day, the time it takes to get into the groove is much shorter.

So, I figure… even while I’m editing, there is a burnout point. There is a point at which I’m not going to edit any more that day. I’m going to do a certain amount generally and then the rest of my time for that day is my time. So, in THAT OTHER TIME, the non-editing time… I can’t carve out 15 minutes to work on my WIP? REALLY???

One of my excuses is that I have to outline/plan a book and that’s hard to do while also editing a book. But I have a WIP in progress right now that I can chip away at. Yes, in the long run it’s going to need to percolate some because I’m a little burnt out on that pen name and I need to get back to Zoe and write Hadrian and Angeline’s book but still… chipping away at it while I work on edits for the other book and then planning for Hadrian and Angeline is forward momentum. And that’s what I need. Forward momentum.

So 350 words a day. Anybody can do that.

 

This is a reprint from Zoe Winters’ weblog.

Second-Class Contracts? Deal Terms at Random House's Hydra Imprint

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This post, by Victoria Strauss, originally appeared on Writer Beware on 2/28/13.

Over the past few years, more and more trade publishers have created digital-only imprints. Another new one just popped up in my newsfeed today: Little, Brown UK’s Blackfriars will be launching its first list this coming June.

Last November, there was some excitement over three brand new digital imprints from Random House: Hydra for SF/fantasy, Alibi for mysteries and thrillers, and Flirt for the is-it-or-isn’t-it category of New Adult. I was interested by the fact that these new lines were pitched in language reminiscent of self-publishing services:

Under this program, authors will have a complete and unique publishing package. Every book will be assigned to an accomplished Random House editor and a dedicated publicist. They will also have the invaluable support of Random House’s experienced marketing and digital sales teams, who know how to reach out to and expand each book’s dedicated readership. Not only will authors benefit from working with the finest cover designers to ensure irresistibly eye-catching books, but they will also be offered the unique advantage of social media tools and training that will allow them to connect directly with their readers. To reach the widest possible readership, every title will be available for purchase at major e-retailers and will be compatible with all reading devices.

I wasn’t alone in this impression–much of the news coverage of the new imprints speculated that Random House was attempting to snag self-publishers, what with the imprints’ focus on short content, their willingness to accept previously-published books, and their literary-agent-optional submission procedure.

Authors who are accepted by Hydra and the others will have access to professional editors and designers, and will benefit from Random House’s publicity team–just as with conventional imprints. If they desire the prestige of being able to say they’re published by Random House, they’ll have that too.

Even so, I can’t help feeling that, with digital-only or digital-mostly imprints, print-based publishers are offering a kind of second-class publication.

Read the rest of the post on Writer Beware.

The Slippery Slope of E-Originals, Part 1

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This post, by Richard Curtis, originally appeared on Digital Book World on 10/14/12.

In the last year a number of major publishers have begun offering authors contracts for “e-originals” – books released originally – and exclusively – in e-book format. Though this is a logical step in the evolution of traditional publishing houses from tangible to virtual formats, the deflationary nature of its business model poses a serious threat to author earning power. Less obvious but ultimately more dangerous is the implosive effect the shift may have on the publishing companies themselves and the people who work for them.

What’s Wrong with Paperback Originals?

The first and obvious question is, what’s wrong with paperbacks books, that publishers are abandoning them in favor of digital originals? The fact is that in the past fifteen or twenty years, mass market paperback books have transformed from a breeding ground for fresh talent to an exclusive club for bestselling authors.

The reasons for this metamorphosis are complex (you can read about them in The Rise and Fall of the Mass Market Paperback: Part 1, Part 2), but in essence the ruthless math of an industry based on the returnability of books has made it almost impossible for fresh talent to develop over time in the nursery of original paperbacks. Though many promising genre authors, especially romance writers, continue to be introduced in mass market paperback, the sales thresholds they must achieve in order to make a profit for their publishers have risen to almost unattainable heights.

Cue e-book originals.

At first blush, e-originals appear to be the perfect way for publishers to pull authors out of this death spiral, for many of the costs of manufacturing and distribution are lower or negligible. You would think that the savings would be passed along to authors in the form of higher advances and royalties. So far, that has proven far from true. Why?

Read the rest of the post on Digital Book World, and also see Part 2.

Sagging Scenes: How to Know When You Are Killing Your Scenes

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This post, by Jean Oram, originally appeared on her The Helpful Writer blog.

Do your scenes suffer from TMI? Are they sagging? Boring? Repeating themselves? In other words, are they slower than molasses in January?

Last week I talked about coming in late and leaving early (scene writing tips & how to write a killer scene) in order to keep your reader hooked and turning those pages from one chapter or scene to the next. But what happens when you have scenes with sagging, drooping middles? How can you identify them and how can you fix them?

How to Know When Your Scene is Sagging

This is tough. As writers we sometimes feel as though every word counts. But often it doesn’t. Often we can pare 100 words out of 1000 without the reader noticing–other than it reading much better. :)

But how can you tell if things are dragging for the reader and your scenes are sagging?

Check for these things in every one of your scenes:

1. Repetition.

You have already said it before. Readers have fairly decent memories. If you’ve explained why your character feels hope whenever she is in a hospital, you don’t need to explain it again. One or two words to remind the reader is sufficient, they will pick up the rest.

2. Description.

This is the easiest way to bog down a scene. For example, say you want to describe a room for your reader and you want them to feel how awful it is. The room feels as though a hoarder lives there and it reeks.

Do you need five paragraphs? No.

Do you need two? I’m going to go with no, again.

One paragraph–no more than 4-5 sentences–should be more than sufficient. You want to highlight the biggest, most impacting aspects of the room to give the reader enough big things that they can fill in the spaces. Why? Because when they fill in the blanks they become invested in the story. It begins to feel as though it belongs to them. They are putting a piece of themselves into it and identifying with it. If you describe every detail, it doesn’t leave them room to go: OMG, that smell–I know that smell! That’s Uncle Eddy–and boom! Suddenly they’ve made that room Uncle Eddy and associate all these memories, and feelings associated with Uncle Eddy into that room. It’s theirs.

3. You’ve already made the point.

Sometimes we really, really, really want to hammer a point home. We want to jab our point right into the reader and then some. Problem is… once the reader has it, the rest becomes something that is only taking away from the story.

In other words, if you have sufficiently shown that the character is angry through their actions, words, and/or narrative… stop. Don’t continue on. Delete the rest. Believe in the power of your words.

Pare it down for the biggest impact. Allow the point to be made on several different levels and with a subtly that will truly resonate with the reader.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes four more signs of sagging and tips for dealing with all of these problems, on Jean Oram’s The Helpful Writer.

What's the Best Way for Authors to Use Twitter?

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Twitter can be a great networking tool, but many authors wonder about the most effective ways to use it. Here are some common questions:

How often should I tweet?

It’s best to post several tweets a day, but it is hard to say what is the optimum frequency. Personally, I would like to post 5 to 10 times a day. Some people post several times an hour and repeat the same posts frequently, but that takes a lot of time and it may annoy your followers. And it’s not a good idea to post unless you have something interesting to say.

As each new tweet appears at the top of people’s home page, it pushes the earlier ones down a notch. Most people probably don’t read beyond the first page when they log onto Twitter. If you make several posts at once, they will all be bunched together on your follower’s screen. But if that person doesn’t happen to be on Twitter at that time, they might not see any of your tweets if they have already been pushed beyond the first page. If you make several posts spaced out during the day, it’s more likely that one or more of them will be seen.

You can save time by using a scheduling service such as HootSuite (the service I use) or SocialOomph (formerly TweetLater) to pre-schedule your posts on Twitter and other social networks. HootSuite is free but you can pay a modest monthly fee to be able to upload pre-scheduled tweets in a spreadsheet.

What can authors tweet about?

Most of your tweets should be about sharing and interacting with others, but it’s fine to make occasional promotional posts. Here are 7 ideas for tweeting:

1. Link to helpful or entertaining books, articles, websites, and blog posts. Add your own comments or ask for feedback.
2. Re-tweet good posts by other people, but don’t go overboard—most of your tweets should be original. Include “RT” and the original tweeter’s name in your post to indicate that you’re re-tweeting someone else’s post.
3. Invite people to subscribe to your ezine or blog, and offer an incentive.
4. Announce your live and virtual events, such as book tours and teleseminars.5. Ask for advice or ask questions that encourage responses.6. Introduce other authors or experts in your field who are also on Twitter.

7. Post an inspirational quote or message.

For more information on using Twitter most effectively for book promotion, see Twitter Guide for Authors.

Your turn: What do you tweet about? What is the most effective ways for authors to use Twitter? Please share in the comments section [on the original post].
 

This is a reprint from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

Story Writing 101

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This post, by Ali Hale, originally appeared on the Daily Writing Tips site.

Since prehistoric times, when tales were told around fires and painted on cave walls, stories have been an essential part of our human experience. But what exactly is a story – and how can you write a great one?

A story is simply a tale of events that are linked by cause and effect. It can be true or it can be a work of fiction. We expect stories to have a beginning, middle and end; they involve at least two characters, and some events take place.

In this article, I’ll take you through three major contemporary types of written story:
• The short story
• The novel
• The life story (biography or autobiography)

For each, I’ll explain what it is, and how to write it successfully. I’ll end with tips about story writing which will help you improve your writing, whether you’re a beginner or a published author.

Three Types of Story

1. Short Stories

A short story is a piece of fiction under 20,000 words. More typically, a short story will be 1,000 – 5,000 words. (Pieces under 1,000 words are “short short stories” or “flash fiction”, over 20,000 and they’re novellas.)

Short stories are published in magazines, newspapers and book anthologies. Short stories need:
• A small cast of characters, with one main character
• A compact time frame, with the story taking place over the course of a few days or weeks
• A single plot without subplots, though longer short stories may have a subplot

The majority of writing competitions are for complete short stories, rather than novels or novel excerpts. If you do enter competitions, don’t be put off writing if you don’t win – judges have different likes and dislikes.

How to Write a Great Short Story

Like any story, your short story needs to have a beginning, middle and end:

  • The beginning is where we’re introduced to the characters, especially the main character and his/her problem
  • The middle is where the action and plot develops. The main character will face difficulties such as opposition from other people or a challenging environment.
  • The end is where the main character triumphs over his/her biggest challenge (or fails, in the case of a tragedy). The resolution should be satisfying and conclusive for the reader.

Even in literary and experimental short stories, it’s important that something should happen. Much of the action might take place inside the characters’ heads, but there should be a real change as a result.

By the end of your short story, your main character should have experienced an internal change.

 

Read the rest of the post, which also offers definitions and tips for writing novels and life stories, on Daily Writing Tips.

Ann Voss Peterson's Big Regret

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This post originally appeared on J.A. Konrath’s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

Joe sez: And now a word from my frequent collaborator and good friend, Ann Voss Peterson…

Ann: Last May I wrote a guest blog here about my decision to stop writing for my publisher (Harlequin) and self-publish my new thriller instead of submitting it to traditional publishers. In the piece, I shared terms of my publishing contracts and showed how those terms translated into money, using one of my books as an example. I did this not as a complaint, but to give other authors–some who might be thinking of writing for Harlequin–a look at how the numbers stack up.

Plenty of people weighed in on this blog and others, both in support of my decision and criticizing it (some of whom didn’t even bother to read the post).

So the question is, after nine months, do I regret my decision?

Let me share some numbers:

Last May 8 through 12 using KDP Select, I gave away 75,420 copies of Pushed Too Far.

In May and June, I sold 11,564 copies, netting me $22,316.30.

I also had 874 borrows during this time for another $1902.30.

So in a bit over six weeks, Pushed Too Far earned $24,218.60 and was downloaded onto 87,858 e-readers. My highest earning Harlequin Intrigue earned me $21,942.16 in the last twelve years.

Verdict: In less than two months, Pushed Too Far became my highest earning book. EVER.

As Joe has said many times, sales ebb and flow, and PTF has been no different. But for May through December of 2012, this one book (Pushed Too Far) has had a grand total of 15,257 (paid) sales and borrows, netting me around $31,179.03.

Of course there’s no guarantee. I’ve known authors who have done better. I’ve known authors who’ve done worse. But the question is, do I regret my decision to self-publish?

Are you kidding?

I regret I didn’t do it sooner.
 

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

Are You Making This HUGE Book Marketing Mistake?

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I *hate* greeting card shopping.

Recently, I popped into my local CVS to grab a Valentine’s Day card for my niece.

It started out as a positive experience. I approached the sparkling red and white display of Valentine’s cards with a smile on my face, imagining how excited my niece would be when she received a special note from her (favorite) aunt in the mail.

I picked up the first card that caught my eye because it had a cute puppy on it.

Then I checked out another with sparkly hearts.

I picked up one with flowers and one with a cute poem. I grabbed another with a Charlie Brown cartoon and opened another one with a teddy bear. I checked out one with Minnie Mouse and one with a rainbow and at least three others with more sparkly hearts.

Pretty soon, I’d gone through every card in the kids’ Valentine section — at least 30 cards in all.

I didn’t hate any of them and I didn’t love any of them, but I was overwhelmed by all of them.

Too many choices!

Frustrated that I couldn’t decide on a card, I stomped out of the store in a huff.

Whether it’s greeting cards or shampoo (Which one will really make my hair all shiny and flouncy like the girl in the commercial?) or cereal or car insurance, having lots of choices does not always make us happy customers.

So why do we do it to our readers?

I’m talking about a very specific mistake I’ve seen a lot of authors make (and truth be told, I used to make it myself).

You give your readers too many choices for buying your book.

Here’s how it happens:

You publish your book and pay for the additional distribution package (as you should). Now your title is available all over the web — at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, etc.

And that’s just the paperback.

Add in your eBook options (the aforementioned three plus Smashwords, iTunes, Kobo, etc.) and suddenly you’ve given your readers 9 – 10 choices to make before they can purchase your book.

What’s wrong with choices?

We’ve been conditioned to think that more is always better — especially when it comes to options, right?

A few years ago, a social psychology graduate student conducted an experiment at her local market that proved exactly the opposite.

She set up a sample stand of jams and alternated between offering customers 6 and 24 varieties of jam. She discovered that even though the 24 choices attracted more attention, only 3% of people who stopped made a purchase, but when she displayed only 6 choices, customers bought jam 30% of the time. [Read more about the study here]

I’m pretty terrible at math, but even I can tell you there’s a significant difference between 3% and 30%.

How does that translate to book sales?

If your website lists 9 – 10 options for readers to pick where they should buy your book, you are losing sales.

I guarantee it.

You’re forcing readers to not only make the decision to buy your book, but then to weigh the pros and cons of each retailer before deciding where to make their purchase. As they analyze their choices, readers often find themselves in “analysis paralysis.”

They become overwhelmed and they make the easiest decision of them all — they choose not to buy anything.

So how do you fix analysis paralysis?

You should have one paperback choice and two eBook options. That’s it.

And I’ll tell you something else — your paperback choice should be Amazon. Not only is it the most popular online bookseller, it has the best shipping options, which is an important factor in the cost of your book.

For eBooks, I would strongly suggest Amazon and Smashwords (Obviously if you’re doing KDP Select you will only have one option!).

The reason we can offer two options in the eBook category is because we don’t have one universal format for eBooks just yet, so you can cover your bases with the most popular option (Amazon) and offer the rest of the available formats via Smashwords.

STOP! Really important point coming in 3…2…1…

Please note: I am *not* saying you shouldn’t have your books distributed to other retailers.

I’m saying you should limit the purchase options you give readers on your website and your social media networks.

It’s fine to have your books available on Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Kobo and the rest. You never know when someone might be searching through titles on any of those sites and come across yours.

But where your marketing plan is concerned, you should avoid overwhelming your readers with too many options.

As an added bonus, driving your readers to three specific places will save you time when choosing links to share on Twitter, Facebook, in your Media Kit, etc.

What do you think?

  • Do you get overwhelmed when you have to make too many decisions for a purchase?
  • How many purchase options do you offer readers?
  • Have you recently reduced your purchase options and noticed a difference in sales?

 

This is a reprint from the Duolit blog.

The Free Kindle Book Ride May Be Over

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

Many authors have been taking advantage of the Amazon KDP Free Book promo option ever since KDP Select was rolled out, and many a bookish website and blog has sprung up specifically around promotion of free Kindle books.

All of that may be about to change, thanks to an Amazon Associates agreement revision that’s set to take effect March 1 of this year:


March 1, 2013 version
The following is added at the end of the sub-section:

“In addition, notwithstanding the advertising fee rates described on this page or anything to the contrary contained in this Operating Agreement, if we determine you are primarily promoting free Kindle eBooks (i.e., eBooks for which the customer purchase price is $0.00), YOU WILL NOT BE ELIGIBLE TO EARN ANY ADVERTISING FEES DURING ANY MONTH IN WHICH YOU MEET THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS:
(a) 20,000 or more free Kindle eBooks are ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links; and
(b) At least 80% of all Kindle eBooks ordered and downloaded during Sessions attributed to your Special Links are free Kindle eBooks.”

A Little Background On Amazon’s Associates Program

Amazon Associates program participants can provide a link to virtually any page or product on Amazon (including links to free Kindle books) with their Associate ID attached to it, and that ID piggybacks on most purchases the customer makes on the Amazon site during the same shopping session. So Associates have historically had an incentive to share ANY Amazon link, including links to free Kindle books.

If anything, links to free Kindle books have been very desirable for Associates program participants to use because shoppers’ resistance to clicking through on such links is low: the product in question is free, after all. But very often, once on the Amazon site, the customer will start browsing or will think of some other item they’ve been meaning to buy, and commissions for those purchases are paid to the Associate whose ID first brought the customer to Amazon.

Possible Chilling Effects of the Associates Policy Change

There are two factors to consider when trying to forecast possible outcomes of this change:

1. This new policy puts ALL of a given Associate account holder’s commissions at risk in any month where “sales” of free Kindle books from that Associate’s links are high.

2. With this new policy, authors and Associate link / promo providers who used to have the common goal of maximizing click-throughs on free Kindle books are set in opposition to one another. The author still wants to maximize downloads during the free promo period, but the more free downloads are generated, the greater the risk that the Associate link provider will lose all of his commissions for the month.

In my opinion, this will be a pretty effective discouragement for many Associates to promote free Kindle books. Even if the bar for commission loss is set pretty high (both of the above-quoted conditions must be met for a given month’s commissions to be forfeited), the mere possibility of commission loss may steer many Associates away from continuing to promote free Kindle books.

What’s Amazon Up To?

This policy revision speaks to some business changes on Amazon’s end.

Amazon is surely aware that the free Kindle promo option has been a major driver in getting authors to sign up for their KDP Select program, but recent changes to Amazon’s book sales rank algorithm have drastically reduced the formerly positive effects of large numbers of free downloads. While a given book’s sales rank isn’t exactly penalized for free downloads, free downloads are no longer driving the kinds of sales rank leaps and bounds that drew authors to take advantage of free book promo periods in the first place.

Now add the disincentive for Associates to promote free books, and it definitely starts looking like Amazon is moving to discourage publishers and authors from offering their Kindle books for free.

Has Amazon Finally Turned On Indies, As So Many Predicted Would Happen?

Since the great majority of authors and publishers who have been willing to offer their Kindle books for free are indies, some may conclude this is some kind of long-planned attack from Amazon on indies in general, but I doubt it.

Sales rank algorithm changes levelled the sales rank playing field again to a great extent, but maybe sales rank integrity wasn’t all that was troubling Amazon. Maybe Amazon never anticipated how popular and widespread free book promotions would become, and how large a percentage of their monthly Kindle book “sales” in any given month would eventually come to consist of free downloads. Every free Kindle download represents a loss to Amazon, since Amazon is absorbing overhead costs to host and sell the book but isn’t earning any profit on it.

Given that Amazon only earns money on downloads of Kindle books people are actually paying for, I think the most obvious and simple answer is the correct one:

Amazon is tired of losing money on free book downloads.

But once the genie was out of the bottle and indies everywhere had made free downloads an entrenched part of best practices for any new Kindle book launch or promotion, nobody outside of Amazon or mainstream publishing was motivated to stop the runaway freight train of free Kindle books.

Even indie authors and publishers who don’t want to offer free promo periods have felt pressured to do so, since others who did offer their books for free have sometimes seen such great results.

You May Have To Start Making Money On Every Kindle Book Download, Whether You Like It Or Not

I can only speculate about the long-term impacts of this most recent policy change, but after thinking it over I’ve concluded that in the end, it’s probably a good thing. The change gives indies a good, solid business reason to move away from offering their Kindle books for free; what’s that old expression, about how a rising tide lifts all boats?

When the majority of us are selling our books at a price instead of giving them away, the majority of us will be making money on every download.

When free Kindle books become the exception instead of the rule, book buyers will stop ‘waiting till it’s free’ or even having an expectation that a given book should be free. I was never one of those who backed the ‘devaluation of books and literature’ argument, I’ve always thought that within reason, ethics and the law, any promotional tack that gets an indie author more exposure and sales is worth trying. Even so, I think the prevalence of free Kindle books has shaped—some might say distorted, or even dominated—the ebook market in ways that few predicted, and it has ultimately hurt indies overall more than it has helped most of us.

The former, nearly guaranteed sales rank boost one could expect from a free promo period is all but gone, thanks to algorithm changes. Yet many have continued to cling to the free promo gambit like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood, because it has worked for so many authors in the past.

In the face of the very daunting book launch and promo task, a free book promo was at least something an indie could do pretty easily to get his or her book in front of as many eyeballs as possible, and an easy “in” to book blogs and sites. Like I said before, a free product is an easy “sell”. And if most customers who were taking advantage of those free promo downloads were actually just book hoarders, collecting but never actually reading hundreds of free titles, well, most of us preferred not to think about it.

Amazon may be trying to force authors, publishers and book bloggers alike to stop offering and promoting free Kindle books, but in so doing they’re forcing us in the direction of more profit for everyone. It’s hard for me to see that as anything but a positive development.

An Open Letter To The Shoplifter Caught Stealing My Book

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This piece, by John Birmingham, originally appeared on The Sydney Morning Herald site on 2/21/13.

Hey buddy.

How you doin’? Not so well I guess. I’m sorry to hear you got pinched trying to steal one of my books from Dymocks yesterday.

How’d I know that? The magic of the interwebz of course. A Facebook friend was in the store and saw you get nabbed. Ouch. Said you looked like a nice enough young bloke, well dressed, not hard up, but obviously in need of a read and short of the requisite folding stuff.

Have to say, I feel for you. I am surrounded by things I would like but can’t have. A big arse retina Macbook. A credible and properly funded defence policy. That ridiculously expensive whisky on the ep of Nikita I watched last night. ($12,000 a bottle. Can you believe that?)

I don’t know whether you went into Dymocks looking to steal my book in particular, but I’d like to think so. It’s an odd, left-handed compliment in a way, to have written something you wanted so much you couldn’t wait until you had the money to pay for it. You, me, the Department of Defence, we all know all about that my friend.

Still, you know, you could have gone to your local library. I get a shekel or two for every one of my books borrowed, and I like local libraries. I encourage you to support them. You could have got it second hand. Do you like second hand book stores? I love them.

There is something about a teetering pile of pre-loved literature that brings something weird and extra to the space in which we find it. For all that I love a good book store, I love a secondhand bookstore even more. It’s only partly because I’m a cheap bastard. In the end, books, writing, are the magic by which we share ideas across time and space. When you enter a secondhand bookstore you enter a realm where that shared experience exists not just in its potential form, but where it has already happened. You gotta love that.

I say this as somebody who loses money because cheap bastards like me buy the sort of books written by authors like me in a sort of dingy secondhand bookstores haunted by me.

Read the rest of the piece on The Sydney Morning Herald.

Why "Genre" Is Poison

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This post, by David Bryher, originally appeared on Pornokitsch.

A few years ago, shortly after I had jacked in a low-flying job in magazine publishing to go freelance, a friend asked me what I planned to write. “I have an idea for a novel or two,” I replied.

“Oh, yes? What kind of thing?”

“Fantasy,” I replied, and he frowned.

He wondered why I’d wanted to write in that genre – not because he thought it was bad, simply because it was a genre that didn’t appeal to him. As a genre, fantasy never chimed with him.

Oh, did I mention this friend writes Doctor Who? (Not all of it, just a few choice episodes.) So it might seem odd that he doesn’t like fantasy, yes? Ah, but. What do you think of when I say “fantasy”?

My friend and I didn’t talk much more about that idea. (Although I did mention a second idea, which he liked a lot: a woman falling in love with a man half her age via the medium of an online fantasy roleplaying game.) But I got the sense from what he said that he didn’t like things like elves and dwarves and magic swords – which is certainly what many people probably do think when I say “fantasy”. And (and I say this with the utmost respect to my friend) when many people start to picture elves and dwarves and magic swords, the gates of their mind shut tight and that is that is that. My fantasy idea didn’t have any of those things. Doctor Who doesn’t have any of those things. Ironically, the online gaming story idea was full of elves and dwarves and magic swords – and yet my friend liked that one more because he could see it was about a woman falling for the wrong man.

Now, that’s probably a story we can all sympathise with to some degree. We’ve all read a terrific fantasy or science fiction book that we just know a friend will love – but she won’t go near it because of the spaceship/hooded-man-with-a-dagger on the cover. It will be news to precisely no one that the use of “genre” within the publishing and bookselling world has, over many years, helped readers find the kind of things they love and then rigidly stay within those lines. I’m sure there’s only a small minority of us left that shop for our books exclusively at brick-and-mortar bookshops, but splitting books into genres (and ugly subgenres such as “supernatural romance”) only reinforces these narrow lines of taste and harms “discoverability”. But we’ve heard all these arguments and fears of ghettoisation before.

And we know that it’s not as if people are generally averse to fantasy or science fiction: such stories are a reliable source of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters, and wizards and vampires didn’t put anyone off Harry Potter or Twilight.

This isn’t even an issue of science fiction or fantasy being qualitatively ‘worse’ than other forms of literature. My friend didn’t question the relative quality of my two story ideas, he simply stated his belief in which was more appealing to himself – and by extension, I think, to all potential readers. “Don’t scare the horses.”

Read the rest of the post on Pornokitsch.

The Endangered Fate of Barnes & Noble

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This article, by Peter Osnos, originally appeared on The Atlantic on 2/5/13.

America’s last major book store chain is shuttering locations as it tries to evolve for a digital future. Is this simply a tough transition, or the beginning of the end?

Washington D.C.’s Union Station is a major point of entry for the nation’s capital. Streams of daily commuters from the region, tourists, and business travelers on the Amtrak circuit from Boston and New York can choose from an especially ample array of shopping and dining opportunities. But, as of the end of February, one of the anchor retailers will be gone.

Barnes & Noble is shutting down its bookstore in a main concourse after failing to reach terms with the landlord. Browsing the aisles at Barnes & Noble stores has been a core feature of the chain’s strength in the forty years since Leonard Riggio purchased the assets of what was then a venerable seller mainly of textbooks and turned the enterprise into the country’s most formidable shaper of a superstore culture for book selling.

It is hard to imagine a destination like Union Station without a fully stocked bookstore, even if it is also the case that an increasing percentage of the consumer traffic is carrying a mobile reading device that is loaded with books purchased elsewhere, mainly from Amazon.

The sprawling Barnes & Noble on Georgetown’s M Street is gone, and the company has closed superstores in New York, Dallas, Chicago, and Seattle (among other places) in similarly well-situated locales as part of a broader brick and mortar contraction that suggests–disturbingly–its long-term decline. Barnes & Noble’s post-holiday report for 2012 reflected a drop in same-store sales of 3.1 percent, and despite a substantial push to expand its Nook line of e-readers, product sales for the devices were down 12.6 percent from a year ago.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Mitchell Klipper, chief executive of Barnes & Noble’s retail group, said that, over the next decade, the chain will reduce its outlets by about twenty a year to reach a figure of about 450-to-500 consumer stores, down from a peak of 726 in 2008. A separate chain of 674 college bookstores (which thrive on tchotchkes and their exclusive franchises) is not part of that calculation. Even with so many fewer consumer stores, Klipper said, “It’s a good business model. You have to adjust your overhead and get smart with smart systems. Is it what it used to be when you were opening 80 stores a year and dropping stores everywhere? Probably not. It’s different. But every business evolves.”

Read the rest of the article on The Atlantic.

Killing the “Pay First, Read Later” E-bookselling Model

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em>This post, by Daniel Kalder, originally appeared on the Publishing Perspectives website.

Sometimes you encounter an idea that seems so obvious it’s amazing that nobody has thought of it before. That’s how Yoav Lorch feels about Total Boox, his intriguing new reading platform that is about to be unveiled this March. The idea is simple: instead of paying up front for a book you may never even look at, you download it for free and then only pay according to how much of the book you read.

“The idea came to me gradually. I was thinking about the potential of ebooks, and how to make books more interactive, the different types of books you could produce, but then the idea that you could pay as you read — well, that was far more interesting than everything else. So I did away with interactive books and all that. This seemed genuinely different.”

Lorch initially trained as an economist, but after a few years working in that field switched to become a successful children’s book author in Israel. Along the way he also wrote for TV, the theater and produced translations. In the 1990s, he became interested in new technology and founded two successful startups, PressPoint and Zlango. He is a man interested in ideas, and how to make them work:

“When it comes to ebooks, people talk about the technology a lot but they don’t spend much time looking at business models. And so the old business model of pay first read later — which makes sense when applied to physical books — has been smart and sneaky enough to creep into the world of ebooks. But it doesn’t belong there. It’s a business model which may seem to be part of the essence of books — but it isn’t.”

Advantages of “Pay as You Read”
 
Read the rest of the post on Publishing Perspectives.

How Much Should an e-book Cost?

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This post, by Andrew E. Kaufman, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog on 2/6/13 and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

It seems to be a question that has yet to find an answer, with about as many theories as there are books.

Back in the days of paperbacks and hard covers (remember those?) it seemed the price for a novel was pretty standard—they weren’t all the same, but at least they hovered in the same neighborhood. Since the advent of the e-book, however, it seems anything goes. The scale is frenetic, to say the least, with prices falling on average anywhere between free and about $12.99.

As an author, I find it disconcerting, and as a reader, even more so. While shopping for books, I often shake my head at some of the prices—and I also wonder: what makes one book worth more than another? Amazon tried to level the field by setting a fixed price for e-books, putting them all at a reasonable $9.99, and even taking a loss on profits, but then legacy publishing fell into an uproar and put an end to it.

So now the question remains: what makes one book worth more than another? Should they be based on prior sales? The author’s reputation? If those were the criteria, one might expect each book to be as good as the last, and that’s simply seldom the case. How about the length of a book? More pages no longer equate to more paper, but they still mean more work—should the author and publisher be compensated accordingly?

Of course, I’m just throwing out variables here, and really, I don’t know if there’s a reasonable answer. I suppose the logical theory from an economic standpoint would be that a book is only worth as much as people are willing to pay for it, but these days, even that answer seems a bit vague, because most readers have different standards on what they’re willing to pay. Some base their price cap on how much they can afford, others on how much of a risk they’re willing to take on a new author. Then there are those who set a firm cutoff point and won’t go over a certain price no matter who the author is. Yet another variable (as if there weren’t already enough) is the pricing on indie books vs. traditionally published ones. Some readers are still uncertain about paying a higher price for the former.

But whether independent or mainstream, it seems authors and publishers are just as uncertain on the matter. One might think that finding the magic price point were as complex as charting a quantum theory. I decided to take an informal survey of Amazon’s top 12 bestsellers to illustrate my point. Here’s what I found:

1. Safe Haven (Nicholas Sparks): $6.64
2. American Sniper (Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen, Jim Defelice): $8.99
3. Wait for Me (Elizabeth Naughton) .99
4. Crazy Little Thing ( Tracy Brogan) $3.99
5. Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn) $12.99
6. House of Evidence (Victor Ingolfsson) $4.99
7. Collide (Gail McHugh) $3.99
8. Hopeless (Colleen Hoover) $3.99
9. Beautiful Creatures (Kami Garcia, Margaret Stohl) $5.80
10. The Pain Scale (Tyler Ditts) $1.99
11. Alex Cross, Run (James Patterson) $12.74
12. Rush (Maya Banks) $7.99

See what I mean? All over the map.

I suppose prices will eventually settle once the market does—or at least, I hope so—but in the meantime, what do you think? How much are you willing to pay for an e-book, and how do you arrive at that decision?
 

We Interrupt This Series On Marketing With A Timely Lesson On How NOT To Succeed…

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This post, by Gayla Drummond, originally appeared on her Feral Intensity site on 2/15/13.

A writer dropped into the KDP forum today, linked to her two books, and said, “Take a look and your opinions are welcome!”

She stated one was a “wonderful romance”, and the other was about basic training.

For the most part, we’re a pretty welcoming bunch over there (at the moment). The first response complimented her covers, but also pointed out that there were formatting issues with both books.

Her response?

“Come on people! You’re quick and ready to tear down a bad book, but you have nothing to say about good books?????”

For anyone who hasn’t interacted on public forums, that response is a signal to pop some corn and settle in for a drama llama show. It’s a clear indicator that the poster thinks his/her shit don’t stink.

She didn’t want anyone’s real opinion, she only wanted to be told how awesome she is, and the first responder replied saying as much. Her response?

“oh please…. what makes you an expert?”

Um. [scratches head] Why did she come to the forum and ask for opinions, again?

Another member pointed out that the KDP forum isn’t really the place to ask for criticism. Our fearless writer’s response?

“This is a general forum, is it not???? Many people here offer opinions and thoughts about content. Its not too difficult to read sample pages and enjoy the writing. If there are any Vets on here, [redacted] should be of special interest and well worth the money and time to read.”

Okay, she has confidence in her writing. There’s nothing wrong with having confidence in your work. I and many others have confidence in ours, or we wouldn’t put it out there. :)

However, it becomes clear as the discussion progresses that our first responder nailed it: Our new member doesn’t want to hear any criticism.

 

Read the rest of the post on Feral Intensity.