Month: February 2014

Common Ground in the Debate of Self v. Traditional Publishing

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This post by Jack W. Perry originally appeared on Digital Book World on 2/21/14.

A storm was created last week in response to Hugh Howey’s Author Earnings post. It was widely criticized by many but also praised. It started a lot of discussion.

Having read most of the back and forth, I did notice a few commonalities.

Some issues all sides generally agree upon:

1) Digital has demolished the distribution barriers to entry for self-publishing. Before digital a self-published author would have to pay to print and distribute books. That was an outlay of cash and inefficient. The author then went to indie bookstores to get distribution one book at a time. Hoping to eventually break through and signed a major deal. Today an author can upload their book and get instant distribution to the entire country. Sales can happen immediately. The goal may be to remain independent or to gain negotiating leverage with traditional publishers.

2) The data is incomplete and there is a definite need for more transparency. Amazon, B&N, Apple and Google don’t publically release sales data. There is no “Bookscan for ebooks” although Nielsen is working on it with PubTrack Digital. Self-published and the Amazon proprietary titles are generally felt to be under-reported if at all. This feeds into the debate of the size of self-published ebooks. By withholding the Kindle data, Amazon has created a massive hole in any analysis. Perhaps a company like App Annie could fill that void and be a resource of data and analytics.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes four additional points of discussion, on Digital Book World.

 

Impatient Readers Lead to Rapid-fire Series Release

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This post by Sadie Mason-Smith originally appeared on the Melville House blog on 2/12/14.

On-demand services have not only changed the way we watch television shows, they’ve affected our expectations of all media. Instant gratification and binge-watching have affected the consumer model, and the publishing world is taking notice. Julie Bosman reports in The New York Times on a new trend in the industry: publishing release dates for series are getting shorter. Editors like Farrar, Strauss & Giroux’s Sean McDonald are catering to the ravening hordes of but-I-want-it-now readers by shrinking the release dates between installments from a year to a few short months.

According to McDonald, these readers are more than just Veruca Salt imitators—they’re scared. “You can end up with angry and perplexed fans,” he said. “I think people are more aware of series storytelling, and there is this sense of impatience, or maybe a fear of frustration. We wanted to make sure people knew that there were answers to these questions.”

That sound you hear in the distance is George R. R. Martin laughing diabolically. Probably while killing a beloved character. Fans of serials have long been subject to the perfectionist whims of their favorite authors. Who can forget J. K. Rowling’s extra months of work as each successive Harry Potter book took an incrementally longer time before release? Who, even now, is on the edge of their at-this-point-worn-down seat for the last installment in Robert Caro’s Lyndon B. Johnson biographies, a five-book project that has been in-progress since 1982?

 

Click here to read the full post on the Melville House blog.

 

Guide to AWP for People Who Don't Know What an AWP Is

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This post by Peter Mountford originally appeared on The Stranger on 2/26/14. Note that it contains strong language.

It Stands for Association of Writers & Writing Programs— Just Say “Book Nerd Fest”—and It’s in Seattle This Weekend

If you notice a slight uptick in the number of verbose, bedraggled, and socially inept people in downtown and Capitol Hill this week, it’s because about 13,000 aspiring and no-longer-aspiring writers are collecting at the convention center for the 2014 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference (February 26–March 1). As someone with an MFA degree (Master of Fuck All), and an attendee of most of the last decade’s AWPs, I’m here to tell you that this should be fun if you like reading and writing. Actually, even if you don’t care about reading and writing, it should be at least amusing.

 

INSIDER TIPS

So where’s the action?

The hotel bars closest to the conference center will be a constant seething humid throng of acne-afflicted nerds with low-grade alcoholism. These bars are the main attraction for most.

Off-site events are listed on the AWP website and The Stranger’s readings calendar, and there are scores of these. At their best, off-site events are fucked-up, inspiring, and brilliant (see page 17 for prospects). At their worst, you walk out with only minor injuries to your opinion of the human animal. Either way, they’re free. Sometimes it might feel like the Mardi Gras of literary nerds, which is annoying, but you’re less likely to have a jock vomit into your hair than at the actual Mardi Gras.

 

Should I pay for a pass?

I might anger the AWP gods by saying this, but no, probably not. Most of the fun happens outside the conference itself (see above), and at $285 for the tote bag and a lanyard that grants you access to the conference proper, you have to REALLY want to spend a few days walking the book fair, and also you need to REALLY want to see some of the official events/panels/readings.

Also, if you’re a writer, AWP is just not a great place to advance your writing career. It’s a big boozy gossip with smart people, but for some reason, very little business takes place. The conference was originally just for people interested in the pedagogy and administrivia of universities’ creative-writing departments. It’s not exclusively for academics now, but at the end of the day, the community in question is still decidedly not-for-profit (very few literary agents, almost none of the major New York publishers or magazines will be there, etc.). On the upside, almost everyone is there because of a shared love for reading and writing, rather than for love of filthy lucre.

 

I want to bag a writer, any advice?

No problem!

Recite Matthew Dickman’s poem “Slow Dance” into the ear of a poet, and you will end up with a hickey on your neck (even before you get to the chandelier part!). Also: Be kind to poets, they’ve made peculiar life decisions, and bear in mind that these people are inexplicably excellent in bed.

 

Click here to read the full article on The Stranger.

 

A Guide To Finding One's Voice As A Writer

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This post by Kimberly Lo originally appeared on The Elephant on 2/24/14.

It probably goes without saying, but I love to write.

Indeed, it’s one my favorite things to do. Many years ago, when I was starting out and I decided that I would like to take a serious stab at writing, I asked several former and current professional writers for tips.

Each of them said the same thing: Find your voice as a writer.

Needless to say, that can be easier said than done (some may even be reading this and wondering what exactly that means). Simply put, it means tapping into that unique voice that all of us possess, whether we write professionally or not.

While the tips below may not guarantee that we find that voice right away, they may make the process easier. I certainly wish I had known or done the following when I was starting out:

1. Find writers whose work you like and make a list of what you like about them.

Some of the writers that I have enjoyed and have inspired me over the years include Elizabeth Wurtzel, UK-based columnist Julie Burchill, and the late Caroline Knapp.

Interestingly, at least in the case of the first two writers, I didn’t always share the same points of view, but I nonetheless enjoyed their writing styles.

 

Click here to read the full article, which includes three more specific tips, on The Elephant.

 

Does What You Paid For A Book Affect How You’d Rate It?

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This post by Jane Litte originally appeared on Dear Author on 2/23/14.

When I first started buying my own books some twenty plus years ago, I had very little money. My favorite authors were starting to come out in hardcover (Julie Garwood, for example) and unless I wanted to wait to be the 80th person at the library to read the book, I had to fork over $22.00 or more which, at the time, was a lot of money for me. It basically meant I wasn’t going to be able to buy another book or maybe even eat anything but ramen and macaroni for the month.

Most of the time, however, I bought my books used at the Half Price Bookstore or some other used bookstore that sold romances for $0.10 or $0.25. And when I bought the hardcover, I knew that I was sacrificing at least four other reads for that one book.

As I got older, I was able to buy more books but my reading habit got to be really pricey so I instituted a book budget of no more than X amount of dollars to be spent a month. Because I read three to five books a week, I was only able to purchase about eight titles a month new and the rest would have to be library lends or used book store purchases. During the heydey of chick lit, I was really struggling!

Price has always been a big thing for me when it comes to books and from what I’ve heard from industry professionals, mass market purchasers are very price sensitive. Most romance readers are mass market purchasers although the new readers coming in to the market after Fifty Shades are probably not.

There’s an interesting concept called anchoring. Anchoring is the tendency of humans to rely on the first piece of information offered. In economic terms, anchoring means that the first price a consumer encounters for widget A is likely the price that the consumer believes she should always pay for widget A. (Widget is an official economic term. No lie.)

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on Dear Author.

 

20 Lessons I’ve Learned on My Way to Selling 500,000 Books

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This post by Christy Heady originally appeared on her site on 1/9/14.

1. You don’t need an agent, but having the right one is absolutely the best investment you can make.

2. Co-authoring a book is a great idea.

3. No matter what the publishing house offers in terms of publicity, you are your own publicity machine.

4. That means you must need to know personal PR and have a game plan.

5. Speaking in soundbytes is imperative. Too much dribble means no more interviews.

6. Create a competitive analysis spreadsheet that shows you where the bullet holes are among your competition.

 

Click here to read the full post on Christy Heady’s site.

 

A Victory Against Author Solutions

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This post by David Gaughran originally appeared on his Let’s Get Visible site on 2/14/14.

It should be clear to everyone now that Penguin Random House has no intention of cleaning up Author Solutions.

The only development since Penguin purchased the company for $116m back in July 2012 is that Author Solutions has aggressively expanded operations (see here, here, here, here and here).

I’ve been covering the Author Solutions story for a while now – particularly since the Penguin purchase, which was met with disbelief in the author community. It’s a frustrating beat, especially when faced with a wall of silence from the many companies and organizations in traditional publishing who have links to Author Solutions and its subsidiaries.

Documenting the links between Author Solutions and the rest of the publishing world is depressing work. The list reads like a Who’s Who of traditional publishing. Getting them to discuss their links to Author Solutions has been near-impossible, let alone taking any action with regard to those links.

One exception has been The Bookseller.

Click here to read the full post on Let’s Get Visible.

 

The Terribleminds Holy Mother Of God Lordy Lordy Hallelujah Guide To Creating Super Ultra Awesomepants Supporting Characters

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds blog on 2/17/14. Note that it contains strong language.

Oh, the poor supporting character.

The best friend. The lab assistant. The cab driver. The sex gimp.

How shitty they must feel, you know? “Hey, we’re all blocks of flesh in the storytelling pyramid, meant to uphold the protagonist. Hey, pass me another bucket of plot, willya? I’m getting dry. What’s that? The antagonist stole the bucket of plot and pissed in it? We don’t have to… wait, we have to drink it? We have to drink it. … Goddamnit.”

Somewhere in here I’m envisioning a human centipede thing, except in pyramid shape and…

No. Nope. Hunh-hunh. Not going there.

You might think, hey, that’s the ideal usage for a support character. To support the characters, the plot, and the story. Maybe to uphold theme, too, or contribute to mood. And all of that is technically reasonable and not entirely untrue, but looking at it that way runs the risk of coloring your view of all characters as being no more than mere pulleys, gears and flywheels whose only purpose is to mechanize the plot you’ve created. (You ever see the ingredient mechanically-separated meat? It’s something like that, where you envision all the characters as avatars of plot diced up and separated out.)

Characters aren’t architecture, though.

Characters are architects.

Your protagonist and antagonist tend to be grand architects — they’re the ones making the big plans. They’re building — or demolishing — whole buildings. They are the demigods of this place. Creators. Destroyers. Sometimes each a bit of both.

But supporting characters are architects, too. They’re just architects of lesser scale. They work on individual floor designs. They’re hanging art. Moving light switches. Picking paint colors.

 

Click here to read the full post on terribleminds.

 

Dr. Katherine Ramsland: Confessions of a Female Serial Killer

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This post by Dr. Katherine Ramsland originally appeared on The Graveyard Shift blog on 2/19/14. As a forensic psychologist, Dr. Ramsland can offer informed insights to the breaking “Craigslist Killer” case. This post will be of particular interest to crime thriller and true crime genre authors.

With sudden dramatic confessors, it’s best to verify before you buy

I wrote about Miranda Barbour last week, here, concerning the murder that she and her new husband, Elytte, had committed together last November. For kicks, they’d lured a man to his death with a Craigslist ad. I used their case to describe how two (or more) people can develop a sixth sense about each other for violence. They have a “mur-dar” radar.

Troy LeFerrara, 42, responded to the ad. They picked him up and Elytte used a cord to incapacitate him while Miranda repeatedly stabbed him. They dumped him, cleaned the van and went to a strip club to celebrate Elytte’s birthday. Their phone call to the victim led police to them, and they’ve been awaiting trial.

Over the past weekend, Miranda, 19, said that not only was she guilty of the LeFarrara murder but she’d been killing with a satanic group since she was 13. Supposedly, she’s “lost count after 22.” If let out, she would kill again. Needless to say, this confession has created a flurry of media reports about this “female serial killer.”

But let’s keep in mind that, at this time, Barbour has admitted guilt for one murder for which there is evidence. She’s not yet a confirmed serial killer. Given the brutality of it, we can accept that she’s killed before and perhaps her stories will be validated soon, as law enforcement works with whatever she gives them. However, until then, we should remember the lessons from past cases.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Graveyard Shift.

 

Are You Legit?

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This post by Andrew E. Kaufman originally appeared on The Crime Fiction Collective blog on 2/18/14.

So lets say you decide to write a book.

You’ve always been a fan of the things, had a few ideas swimming around in your head, and have wanted to take a stab at it for as long as you could remember. Now, here you are, finally connecting with the courage needed to commit those hungry fingers to keyboard, passion to dream.

After X amount of time, your novel is finished, and then, BAM! Away you go, uploading your book to the KDP platform, ready to take on the world and be the next Nora Roberts or Stephen King or whoever you think is the bomb.

First question: are you an author?

Well, technically speaking, yes, because you’ve:

A. Completed a novel.
B. Published it.
C. Can call yourself whatever the hell you want.

And really, in this era of self-publishing, that’s how a lot of established authors got their start (myself included).

Next question: are you a legitimate author?

 

Click here to read the full post on The Crime Fiction Collective blog.

 

3 Reasons Most Writers GIVE UP & 3 Reasons Why YOU Shouldn't

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This post by Angela Scott originally appeared on her site on 12/20/11.

Between getting our words down on paper and then trying to get someone (agents, publishers, READERS, anyone) to care about those words, we may come to a cross point in which we say, “Is this even worth it? Why in the world am I doing this to myself? I think I’ll take some medicine to numb the voices and just go back to bed. Forget it. I’m done.” *sticks out tongue and blows a raspberry at the world*

I’ve been there myself, many a time. But each day, I put myself back in front of the laptop and write. Even on days when I don’t want to.(I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna). Why? Why do I put myself though this craziness? Well, I’m still trying to understand it myself. And though I don’t have a clear reason why I keep plugging along (I’m a masochist. I’m schizophrenic. Like Lady Ga-Ga, I was born this way), I do know several reasons why some writers give up:

Reason #1: Writing is hard. It is. The writing process, at times, can be incredibly fun and rewarding. When the words flow and nearly write themselves, it’s amazing. It’s almost a high type of feeling. A rush. But there are other times, many times, in which writing just plain sucks–the words do not come; or the words DO come, but they are crap; editing (it’s a pain in the butt, but SO necessary. Do not skip this step. Just saying); promoting and marketing (UUUGGGHHH); and then coming up with another great idea. Oh the pressure! No wonder I feast on lots of migraine pills, chocolate, and caffeine.

 

Click here to read the full post on Angela Scott’s site.

 

2014: The Year Of Reading Women?

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This post by Zeljka Marosevic originally appeared on the Melville House Publishing site on 1/24/14.

Sometime last year, I pinned a sheet of paper above my desk with the title “Women Writers” and began forming a list of names of female writers that I had read whose novels I enjoyed, admired or found important. I did this because I had too often found myself reading literary criticism or having conversations about books in which every author mentioned was male. A communal, easy forgetfulness seemed to spread over the article’s writer and his reader, or over those taking part in the conversation, a coercive amnesia where we forgot that women had ever written books, that they might even be good, and that they could be discussed alongside books by men —and would hold their own— rather than in separate fenced-off conversations.

Last year was a bad year for women in literature. As we covered on MobyLives, figures were revealed that showed how male reviewers and authors vastly outnumbered their female counterparts across UK publications; only 8.7% of books reviewed in the LRB were by women. In the US, the New York Review of Books flaunted a boy’s-only bumper summer issue when, out of twenty seven contributors, only one was a woman (April Bernard reviewed Frank Bernard, and we mustn’t forget an archive piece from Joan Didion).

2014, the Guardian reports, is being declared the “Year of Reading Women”, owing to a few small but important examples of how readers and critics are considering their next read.

 

Click here to read the full post on Melville House Publishing.

 

Hemingway Takes The Hemingway Test

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This article by Ian Crouch originally appeared on The New Yorker on 2/13/14.

Creators of the Hemingway App Explain Their Rules for Writing

This week, in the Times, Charles McGrath wrote about a newly digitized collection of ephemera from Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban estate, Finca Vigía, which confirms that the famously terse writer was, as McGrath says, “a hoarder.” Ticket stubs, telegrams, Christmas cards, diary entries—all of it amassed in the twenty-plus years that Hemingway kept his house there. Amid the collection, McGrath identifies two notes that Hemingway had seemingly written to himself, in pencil. One reads: “You can phrase things clearer and better.” And the other: “You can remove words which are unnecessary and tighten up your prose.”

The above paragraph scored an “O.K.” in Hemingway, an app, created by the brothers Adam and Ben Long, which analyzes text and, as it promises, “makes your writing bold and clear.” The program highlights overly complicated words and suggests alternatives (my “all of it” could have simply been “all”). It also calls out adverbs (“newly,” “famously, “”seemingly”), difficult-to-read sentences (the first being “very” hard to read, while the second was just hard), and instances of the passive voice.

 

Click here to read the full article on The New Yorker.

 

On the Issue of Misogynist Writers and Readers

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This post by Paula D. Ashe originally appeared on Dust and Shadow on 2/18/14. Note that it is intended as satire.

It’s important as a writer (or artist of any kind, really) to celebrate your successes. No matter how large or small. Seriously, the more I write and publish and talk to people about writing and publishing, the more I realize that there are so many people out there who are just livid at those of us who are brave enough to create something and be proud of it.

There’s been a lot of vitriol about Women in Horror Month after some insecure dudes on Facebook and elsewhere attempted to degrade the celebration. They said we women use our sexuality to gain success, that women writers of horror don’t write as well because we’re women, they violated the WiHM logo by including a clinical diagram of a vulva and analogizing the organ to a woman’s mouth, they made sexually violent and objectifying comments about women writers, and many of them said all this by prefacing it with “I love women but…”.

Obviously, those statements about women writers are totally true. For example, if you stare at the texts of my fiction and then slowly push it away from your face after about thirty seconds some titties will materialize on the page like those holographic 5-D posters they used to have in the mall. I do that because otherwise no one will read, let alone buy, my work. Also, as a woman, I’m very concerned about my fiction being too dark because nothing about being a human being, let alone a woman, is rife with existential or concrete horror. In fact, every time I write a death scene I imagine a unicorn emerging triumphantly from the corpse to calm my delicate feminine sensibilities.

 

Click here to read the full post on Dust and Shadow.

Creating Stunning Character Arcs, Pt. 1: Can You Structure Characters?

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This post by K.M. Weiland originally appeared on her Helping Writers Become Authors site on 2/9/14.

What if there were a sure-fire secret to creating stunning character arcs? Would you be interested in discovering it? If you care about connecting with readers, grabbing hold of their emotions, and creating stories that will resonate with them on a level deeper than mere entertainment, then the answer has to be a resounding yes!

But here’s the thing about character arcs: they’re way too easy to take for granted. On the surface, character arcs seem to boil down to nothing more than a simple three-step process:

1. The protagonist starts one way.

2. The protagonist learns some lessons throughout the story.

3. The protagonist ends in a (probably) better place.

That’s character arc in a nutshell. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy. What’s to learn?

Turns out: a lot.

 

The Link Between Character Arcs and Story Structure

Too often, character and plot are viewed as separate entities—to the point that we often pit them against each other, trying to determine which is more important. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Plot and character are integral to one other. Remove either one from the equation, or even just try to approach them as if they were independent of one another, and you risk creating a story that may have awesome parts, but which will not be an awesome whole.

 

Click here to read the full post on Helping Writers Become Authors.

Also see this follow-up post: Creating Stunning Character Arcs, Pt. 2: The Lie Your Character Believes