Publetariat staff are off today, 12/31 and the day of 1/1 in honor of the New Year’s Day holiday. No new content will be posted until 6pm PST on 1/1/14.
Here’s wishing our readership a safe and happy New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, and that all your writing and publishing dreams for 2014 come true!
This post, by Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton, originally appeared on her Indie Author Blog on 12/30/13.
I originally posted this open letter to Stephen King on my Facebook page, but it generated such a lively and sometimes heated discussion that I’ve decided to share it here. Let me preface what you’re about to read by saying I’ve been a big fan of Stephen King going all the way back to Carrie. Granted, I was only 8 years old when that first book was published, but I started in on King at the age of 13 or so and happily devoured everything he had to offer well into my 20’s. Whenever I wanted a good, old-fashioned scare from the type of book I didn’t dare read alone at night, King was my go-to source.
In 1999 King was hit by a car and needed an extended period of convalescence. He even spoke publicly about the possibility of retiring. It didn’t last, he came back in 2006 with Cell, and he’s continued to release new novels, essays and other works since. And I haven’t liked a single one of the novels he’s written since his return. Book after book, year after year, he continues to disappoint me and make me regret having given him the benefit of the doubt (and my time and money) yet again.
With that said, here’s my open letter.
– – – – –
Dear Stephen King:
It was a lovely reader-author relationship while it lasted, but it’s been over for at least a decade and it’s time for me to move on. I think it’s really wonderful that you’ve found faith and feel that it, and sobriety, have turned your life around. I just don’t enjoy the fact that those two things have become the central themes of virtually every piece of fiction you’ve written since you discovered them.
I came to you looking for truly frightening, taut, dark and edgy supernatural horror that explored the limits of human strength and character in the face of pure, inexplicable evil. But you haven’t been writing that kind of material for a very, very long time and what you have been writing has been so self-indulgent, maudlin and overwrought that’s it’s difficult for me to believe you even have an editor anymore.
I held out hope that with Dr. Sleep, your long-awaited sequel to The Shining, you would return to form at last. I was wrong. It’s less a supernatural horror thriller than an overlong, overwritten examination of sad-sack, grown-up, recovering alcoholic Danny filling in as your usual Christ figure as he takes on your recently-typical cadre of banal baddies.
Click here to read the rest of the post on the Indie Author Blog.
This post, by Dan Holloway, originally appeared on his blog on 12/27/13.
Happy festivities. In this season of round-ups and forward-looks, when Janus stalks the blogosphere, writers everywhere are musing and reflecting. And whilst I am happy to grinch along with the best of them, it seems churlish not to join in the speculation.
But first the important bit. Here is a present. Click the image below to download an exclusive pdf of SKIN BOOK, beautifully illustrated with 8 pictures from Veronika von Volkova’s stunning Grime Angels series.
It’s been a fascinating year for self-publishers. At the start of the year I had just begun work on the Alliance of Independent Authors’ Open Up to Indies guidebook. At time of writing, that guidebook’s release is imminent. But the backdrop against which it will see the light of day has changed – if not beyond all recognition then at least significantly. This autumn, Crimefest announced that it will be welcoming self-published authors next year. The Author Lounge at this year’s London Book Fair included self-publishing luminaries like Mel Sherratt. The Folio Prize, launched as the serious literary alternative to Booker, opened its doors to self-publishers, self-publishing conferences started talking about writing as well as marketing. And the Guardian has been running a self-publishing showcase giving blog time to indies for several months now. We’ve even seen a major serious writing award for the originally self-published A Naked Singularity.
The door feels ajar.
Whether or not it is, now that’s another matter. For me personally, it’s been a year of as much frustration as liberation. I still feel like the amusing pet as often as I feel like the welcome family member. It is getting easier to write about self-publishing. But as a literary writer and poet it remains as hard as ever to get the things I self-publish actually written about. I get to talk about self-publishing more than ever. But about my self-published writing as little as ever. There is still much work to be done to get people talking about self-published books rather than about self-publishing: the phenomenon.
These are the things I’d like to see for self-publishing in 2014.
1. Slow writing and the death of the algorithm
The best marketing for your book is other books. Write more. Be prolific. The tipping point to success comes when you’ve written x number of books. More books breed more discoverability. These have become more than mantras of self-publishing, givens that every writer has to take on board.
And these truisms are poison. Roz Morris wrote a brilliant post earlier this year about the slow novel, about the fact that some genres such as literary fiction spill their words more slowly than others. And yes, I absolutely accept that some genres are more sales friendly than others. But sales are not the be all and end all, and should not be the guide for whether or not a book receives coverage or acclaim.
Click here to read the rest of the post on Dan Holloway’s blog.
This post, by AJ, originally appeared on Apology To John Keats on 3/24/13.
I’ve become just as suspect as anyone about the legitimacy of reviews. With authors paying for reviews, begging for five stars and dressing up as consumers to write inflated reviews of their own books it’s hard to trust all five of those shiny stars. But what happens when those seeming “authors behaving badly” are actually reviewers doing it themselves? Can a gushy, happy, joy-joy 5-star review actually be more detrimental to an author than a 2-star one?
From some personal experience, some fellow author’s experiences and a little observation, here are some pitfalls authors may encounter even in honestly obtained reviews.
1. The Facebook Comment As Review
“Omg, my cousin totally wrote this book and it’s amazing! I don’t read at all, but I think everyone should buy this book because my cousin spent a lot of time and money on this and it’s so cool that I’m related an author! 5 stars for Brooke and her awesome accomplishment!”
Ok, fine, if you want to put something like this on your Facebook page, knock yourself out but for the love of literary kittens do not post it on a distributor like Amazon or B&N or a review site like goodreads. It makes the author look like they have been soliciting reviews. I have no doubt the author (poor made up Brooke in this case) did NOT ask for an overzealous cousin to post this, but sadly some excited friends and family members do. Unless you have read the book and have more of an opinion as to why it’s good besides knowing the author personally, keep things like this on Facebook, not on review sites.
2. The Skimmer Writes a Review
“This is a great time-travel piece. The characters find a magical creek and drink the water and are transported to the Civil War where they free slaves from an auction. I loved the narrator and her brother was so funny. 5 stars.”
Well, that’s great, but in the book, they go to the creek AFTER they get tossed back in time because it is the only natural landmark they have to go by. Then they find out they are in 1855 (the Pre-Civil War era) and a vigilante group of abolitionists plots to steal slaves from an auction. And the narrator doesn’t have a brother, that guy is just her friend, though the narrator does lie that he’s her brother so it doesn’t seem so improper they are traveling together for the time period.
See the difference? I’ve had authors mention people recounting events in their books that never happened or are so skewed they make the story seem, well, stupid. Especially in fantasy, horror, or sci-fi when oversimplification can make even great books sound lame, it is pretty darn important for reviewers to know what they read. I’ve seen many readers at the library claim to “love” books they’ve only skimmed. It happens. But don’t write an incomplete review. It makes the author look like they don’t know how to tell a story and consumers will think the 5-star rating is unjustified.
3. The Stalker
Click here to read the rest of the post on Apology To John Keats.
This article, by Carol Clark-Emory, originally appeared on Futurity.org on 12/23/13.
After reading a novel, actual changes linger in the brain, at least for a few days, report researchers.
Their findings, that reading a novel may cause changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain that persist, appear in the journal Brain Connectivity.
“Stories shape our lives and in some cases help define a person,” says neuroscientist Gregory Berns, lead author of the study and the director of Emory University’s Center for Neuropolicy. “We want to understand how stories get into your brain, and what they do to it.”
Neurobiological research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has begun to identify brain networks associated with reading stories. Most previous studies have focused on the cognitive processes involved in short stories, while subjects are actually reading them as they are in the fMRI scanner.
The study focused on the lingering neural effects of reading a narrative. Twenty-one Emory undergraduates participated in the experiment, which was conducted over 19 consecutive days.
All of the study subjects read the same novel, Pompeii, a 2003 thriller by Robert Harris that is based on the real-life eruption of Mount Vesuvius in ancient Italy.
“The story follows a protagonist, who is outside the city of Pompeii and notices steam and strange things happening around the volcano,” Berns says. “He tries to get back to Pompeii in time to save the woman he loves. Meanwhile, the volcano continues to bubble and nobody in the city recognizes the signs.”
The researchers chose the book due to its page-turning plot. “It depicts true events in a fictional and dramatic way,” Berns says. “It was important to us that the book had a strong narrative line.”
Click here to read the rest of the article on Futurity.org.
Click here to view the original Emory University study.
This post, by Avril Sabine, originally appeared as a guest post on J.A. Konrath’s A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing blog on 12/21/13.
When I was a little kid, people loved to ask, “So what are you going to be when you grow up?” Some kids answered fireman, astronaut, ballerina or superman. I said writer. Now maybe they were trying to be helpful, but around 90% of people told me, “You’ll never make money from that.” “It’s not a real job.” “Don’t you know most writers are starving?”
This confused me. It’s not like I wanted to be superman. Why did the kids who said they wanted to be superman get a fond smile, a pat on the head, and “How nice.” It didn’t make sense. I knew he wasn’t real.
But writers obviously were. I’d read their books, visited their worlds, had my imagination filled with wondrous events and magical happenings. So how could that be impossible when no one ever said becoming superman was?
But I learned to play their game and say ‘teacher’ whenever anyone asked. And they’d nod and smile and the conversation would be over without the lecture. To me being a teacher was second choice. Nothing like being a writer. A writer’s who I am, not what I do. And I kept writing. And reading. And telling stories.
When my sister couldn’t sleep at night, she’d crawl into my bed and I’d make up stories for her until she fell sleep. In every spare moment I read and discovered how writers formed sentences, created worlds and drew the reader in so they couldn’t put the book down. I also read in the not so spare moments, learning to walk and read at the same time, to do my chores while I read.
And I wrote. During class. When I was supposed to being doing homework, and when I was supposed to be asleep. Mum wouldn’t let me keep my light on really late at night when everyone else was in bed, so I saved my pocket money and bought a torch. And under the blankets, late at night, I read and wrote rather than lay awake half the night creating worlds and characters in my mind.
Click here to read the rest of the post on A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing.
This post, by Rich Adin, originally appeared on An American Editor on 12/23/13.
On another forum it was asked whether authors should “push the grammar envelope” and embrace the singular plural. I think the wrong question is being asked when you ask whether authors should push the grammar envelope for two reasons: First, because it ignores the purpose of grammar, which is to ensure that there is communication between author and reader. Second, because to push the grammar envelope assumes that there are firm rules to be pushed. The first reason far outweighs the second, but neither is ignorable.
Regarding the singular plural, it is neither pushing the envelope to use it nor a violation of a firm rule nor a distraction from communication (in most cases; there are cases in which it is clearly wrong because its use is confusing). In other words, I think that editors, writers, grammarians, usage gurus, etc., make the proverbial mountain out of the molehill when they oppose the singular plural.
Consider what makes a great editor. A great editor is someone who ensures that a reader understands the editor’s author; that is, ensures that the reader does not leave the book thinking the author is in favor of, for example, genocide, when the author intends the contrary. An average editor can cite chapter and verse of why x is not to be done, but cannot explain why doing x makes the author’s point unintelligible. The amateur editor either blindly accepts the singular plural or remembers having been taught that the singular plural is incorrect and thus blindly changes it.
However, if the singular plural is incorrect, it is incorrect because it makes the author’s point unintelligible, not because a group of self-appointed grammarians have written that it is wrong.
English is difficult enough without making it impossible. Editors constantly twist and turn to apply “rules” of grammar in the mistaken belief that there are rules of grammar. What are too often called rules are really current conventions.
Click here to read the rest of the post on An American Editor.
This post, by Jodie Renner, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog on 12/8/13.
With so many authors self-publishing these days, the best independent editors are in high demand, so if you’re looking for a knowledgeable, experienced professional editor to help you make your fiction manuscript the best it can be – and improve your overall writing skills in the process – be sure to take some care with how you seek out and approach them.
Due to the high volume of requests, sought-after freelance editors turn down many more writer clients than they can accept, so it’s important to make a good first impression.
First, make sure your manuscript isn’t still in rough draft. Try to find time to hone your craft (see my to-the-point editor’s guides to writing compelling fiction), then go over the manuscript a few times to spark up the characters, raise the stakes, add conflict, tension, and intrigue, pick up the pace, and tighten the writing.
Next, do your research and look for editors with good credentials and reviews, who edit mainly fiction and read and edit your specific genre. Google “freelance editors, mysteries” or whatever, or go through an editors’ association like EFA or EAC.
Then read through the editors’ websites to find out about their services, process and requirements. What kinds of problems/issues do they look for? If it’s only grammar and spelling, you can get an English teacher friend to do the same, for a lot less money or even free. To make the most of working with a professional, choose someone who first looks for other, more important possible issues, such as a shaky premise, a boring plot, cardboard characters, confusing viewpoints, stilted dialogue, insufficient tension, inconsistencies, slow pacing, plot holes, info dumps, showing instead of telling, and convoluted or too-formal phrasing.
You need an editor who can ferret out big-picture issues and help you with all the various techniques that, when ignored or botched, can sink a novel, and when flagged and addressed, can turn a mediocre or good novel into a real page-turner that sells and garners great reviews.
Once you’ve determined that the editor is up on current fiction techniques and industry expectations, be sure to read and follow their submission instructions. On my website, for example, I specifically request the following from potential clients: the genre, total word count, first 15-20 pages, 10 pages from somewhere in the middle, a brief synopsis (a few paragraphs to half a page), and a brief description of each of the main characters.
Without this information, I have no idea whether we’d be a good fit and I’d be the best editor for you. I can’t assess the level of work required to bring your manuscript up to industry standards or whether your story would fire my passions so I can give it the zeal and commitment it deserves. Nor can I provide you with an estimate of my fees without doing a sample edit or reading several pages to see what’s involved. The quality of writing and the storytelling skills vary hugely from one manuscript to another, so of course the amount of work (time and effort) – therefore, cost of editing – will also vary hugely.
Here are 10 tips for attracting a top-notch, in-demand editor for your fiction and getting the best possible edit or critique for your manuscript:
Click here to read the rest of the post on the Crime Fiction Collective blog.
This post, by M. Louisa Locke, originally appeared on her blog on 12/16/13.
Introduction:
Two years ago, I wrote a blog piece about the importance of using categories, keywords, and tags (which no longer exist) to make your books visible in the Kindle Store. A year later I wrote an update that expanded on this and discussed how having your book in the right categories could make free and discount promotions more effective. The basic argument I made hasn’t changed––that an author needs to understand how categories work in order to use them to improve the chance their books will be found by readers who are browsing in the Kindle store.
If you aren’t convinced of the importance of categories in improving discoverability—you might want to go back and skim through those two posts or just Google “discoverability and categories” to see the multiple posts on this topic. However, for most of you, it isn’t the importance of categories but how to get your books into the right categories that you are most interested in––and there have been a number of significant changes warranting a new update on this topic.
First, the number and kinds of categories and sub-categories in the Kindle Store have increased dramatically in the last year.
Second, the methods of getting a book into the correct categories and sub-categories have expanded, with keywords becoming particularly important.
Third, these changes have made the process even more confusing to authors.
Definitions:
Because these changes have resulted in a good deal of confusion in terminology—I am going to start here. While KDP has generally improved the experience for authors by introducing a whole plethora of help documents, the terminology used in these help documents and by KDP help staff is not always consistent. I will try and delineate some of these inconsistencies and provide some clarity below.
Click here to read the rest of the post on M. Louisa Locke’s blog.
Publetariat staff are off on December 24 and 25th in observance of the Christmas holiday. The site will remain online and available, but no new content will be posted until we resume our regular posting schedule at 6pm PST the night of the 25th, in order for new content to be in place for the Thursday the 26th.
Here’s wishing our readers a safe, happy, inspiring and fun holiday!
This post, by L.J. Sellers, originally appeared on her site on 8/3/13.
Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg, J.T. Ellison and Catherine Coulter, JA Konrath and each of his writer friends—everywhere you look, authors are teaming up.
The trend seems more prevalent than ever, and I suspect it’s because authors are operating more independently now and because they have to work so hard to reach new readers. Collaborating with another writer brings a whole new readership to each partner, at least for that story or series, and hopefully with spillover to other works.
I never thought I could work that closely with someone. I don’t even have a writing group because it feels too collaborative. Of course, I count on my beta readers (and editor) for feedback, but that’s after I’ve nailed down the main story.
But I was approached recently by a friend about doing a collaboration, and I surprised myself by being receptive to the idea. Now that I have an FBI agent with her own series, a collaboration that brings Agent Dallas together with another established protag seems like a productive idea.
Click here to read the rest of the post on L.J. Sellers’ site.
This post, by Susan Piver, originally appeared on her blog on 12/19/13.
Recently I began working with a master coach to develop my public speaking chops. While watching a video together of a recent talk I gave, he pointed out to me every instance where I gave away my authority, whether through intonation or body language. It was eye-opening to say the least. “See how you’re rocking from foot to foot? That’s what teenagers do when they’re asking to borrow the car.” “Notice how your intonation goes up at the end of most sentences? It appears as if you are questioning yourself which actually causes the audience to question you.” And so on.
It was crazy and also embarrassing. I had never noticed these things about myself.
When planning a talk, I think about what I can offer that is useful and what words I might use to express my ideas. Throughout, I ride a roller coaster of self-doubt. Do I really have the right to teach? There are actual experts on this topic and I know I’m not one of them. What if a real expert is in the audience? What could I possibly add to this topic that hasn’t already been said more effectively by countless people? And so on. The thing is, I thought I was hiding all of this. Come to find out, I was not. The disconnect between verbal and non-verbal communication was palpable.
As he pointed all of this out to me, I realized that this was not the first time I had heard some version of, “Please own your authority.”
I remembered a time I submitted the first draft of a manuscript to a publisher which was sent back to me with the following note: “Susan, please delete all such phrases: ‘it seems this way to me, but it may not to you,’ or ‘this is my opinion; you may disagree,’ and ‘this is what I learned; you may find otherwise.’ Not only is it confusing to the reader, it is irritating.”
Click here to read the rest of the post on Susan Piver’s blog.
This post, by Mike Masnick, originally appeared on Techdirt on 10/8/13.
For years we’ve discussed the ridiculousness of ebook pricing, where some publishers seem to think that sky high prices for ebooks (often higher than physical copies) make sense, despite the lack of printing, packaging, shipping and inventory costs. And, of course, we won’t even get into the question of the price fixing debacle. Art Brodsky recently wrote a fascinating piece over at Wired about how ebook pricing is an “abomination,” because it’s designed to price people out of reading. He points out that we should think more about ebooks like we think about apps, since that’s a much more direct comparison than “books.” And then he gets into a discussion of how publishers are going crazy with their library pricing:
Take the example of J.K. Rowling’s pseudonymous book, Cuckoo’s Calling. For the physical book, libraries would pay $14.40 from book distributor Baker & Taylor — close to the consumer price of $15.49 from Barnes & Noble and of $15.19 from Amazon. But even though the ebook will cost consumers $6.50 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, libraries would pay $78 (through library ebook distributors Overdrive and 3M) for the same thing.
Somehow the “e” in ebooks changes the pricing game, and drastically. How else does one explain libraries paying a $0.79 to $1.09 difference for a physical book to paying a difference of $71.50 just because it’s the electronic version? It’s not like being digital makes a difference for when and how they can lend it out.
Click here to read the rest of the post on Techdirt.
This post, by David Farland, originally appeared on his site on 12/18/13.
I was asked recently to write an article about selecting a writing name. Many authors would never consider using a pseudonym. Their identity is intimately tied to their name, and they long to see it in print, even if it’s a name as silly as Ernest Lee Funklemeyer.
For me, a name is a brand. Choosing an author’s name is more like choosing the brand name for your new line of automobiles. Sorry, I don’t really get a thrill about seeing my name in print. Maybe I did twenty-five years ago, but it really wasn’t that important to me.
I use David Farland for my writing name, but I was raised as Dave Wolverton, and wrote my first dozen novels under that name. Why did I switch? There were a couple of reasons: When I wrote my third novel, I got a glowing review which advised people to “make sure to look on the bottom shelf at your bookstore, where Dave Wolverton’s novels are likely to be found. . .” My heart sank.
You see I had read an article a few years earlier, in which marketers for Campbell’s soup had found that 92% of all people would not bend over to pick up their favorite flavor of soup from the bottom shelf at a supermarket. People prefer to buy their goods at eye level. Which meant, of course, that no writer wants to be on the bottom shelf. By using the name Wolverton, I was losing a huge number of potential sales!
Immediately, I began investigating how hard it would be to change my writing name. I was already a bestseller in science fiction, hitting high on the science fiction bestseller lists, so I wasn’t sure that I wanted to change my name back in 1991.
When I began to write fantasy (which was my first love as a reader), I recognized that I had a second problem. Fantasy tends to sell better than science fiction, so I figured that sales would be more robust in the fantasy genre.
Click here to read the rest of the post on David Farland’s site.
This post, by PJ Kaiser, originally appeared on Tuesday Serial on 9/13/12.
When it comes to publishing serial stories, writers have faced a conundrum. There are very few online formats that lend themselves to publishing installments. Smashwards specifically disallows unfinished works, and Amazon and Barnes & Noble force the publisher to package each installment separately unless it’s a completed work. This means each episode / installment has its own price, its own cover, its own description, its own reviews. The reviews make it a particularly sticky issue because if the first installment has glowing reviews, those reviews don’t show up automatically on the seventeenth installment. Readers have to go to some trouble to track it all down.
Roz Morris recently wrote an insightful post about her somewhat frustrating experiencing publishing her novel “My Memories of a Future Life” in installments on Amazon. She recapped her issues and lamented the fact that Amazon and other publishers didn’t easily allow for the publishing of a serial in installments.
Just after she had published her post, however, Amazon made an announcement which has the potential to revolutionize the publishing of serial stories. You’ll see at the bottom of her post, she included an addendum about Amazon’s announcement.
For full details of Amazon’s announcement, you’ll want to check out this press release from the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch. The upshot of this is that Amazon now has a new format specifically for serials which will allow readers to pay one flat fee and receive all installments of the story: past, present and future. It keeps reviews in one place and doesn’t clog up the reader’s kindle with multiple entries for the same story.
At the moment, Kindle Serials do not appear to be a self-publishing platform, although it does appear to bypass the role of the agent. Amazon’s submission guidelines provide no indication of how serials are evaluated, how many might be considered for publishing or any specifics. We hope that over time that will become more clear and of course we also hope that the platform becomes a self-publishing option.
As writers, publishers and everybody else try to figure out how Kindle Serials will work, there’s a lot of buzz about it on social media and the interwebs.
Click here to read the rest of the post on Tuesday Serial.