Series v. Serial and Why I’m Weary

This post by Lisa Torcasso Downing originally appeared on her site on 6/25/13.

Over the last few days I consumed David Farland’s engaging Nightingale, a YA tale of the SFF persuasion. When it comes to leisure reading, I’m much more likely to pick up SFF if it’s a YA novel because I like to read what my kids like to read. To be completely forthcoming, I probably wouldn’t have purchased my Kindle copy of Nightingale were it not for the recent Facebook campaign to promote the book. I knew I’d enjoy Dave’s book because he’s a wonderful storyteller, even if weird stuff happens in his books. Like suction cups appearing on the fingtertips of the protagonist. Most of the time, I just can’t make the leap SFF writers hope I can make, but every Farland (or Wolverton) SFF novel that I’ve read has made me a believer. Heck, when I hit the 70% mark in my read-thru of Nightingale, I texted a friend who loves SFF and told her not to miss this one.  I was completely taken in.

And then the ending hit. Or rather, the non-ending. Okay, I admit I didn’t love the wind-up of his historical fiction, In the Company of Angels, but for an entirely different reason. I simply didn’t agree with where he chose to end that one. The “problem” I have with Nightingale’s ending  isn’t so much a problem with the ending as with the trend it successfully follows. The truth is, Dave ended Nightingale with the skill and craftsmanship a great writer should. I just don’t like the trend toward serials that has taken over YA fiction. My complaint, then, is not about Nightingale, which achieves its aims with great success, but with the current love affair YA publishers are having with serial fiction.

 

Click here to read the full post on Lisa Torcasso Downing’s site.

 

Authors — Using Business Cards to Build Sales

This post by Robert Bidinotto originally appeared on his blog on 5/24/14.

A common lament of authors is: How do I promote my books? I’ve tried to present a host of time-tested ideas in this blog.

Author business cards constitute one of the cheapest, easiest methods to build a readership and increase sales. I know that I’ve sold hundreds of books through the use of my HUNTER business card.

Before I begin, let me first give a tip of the hat to Robin Sullivan — wife and business partner of bestselling fantasy author Michael J. Sullivan — for providing 90% of the ideas and information in this post.

Robin used to maintain an invaluable website/blog, “Write To Publish,” which, sadly, has been defunct for some years. One of her most useful posts for me was “Author’s Business Cards…Get Them…Use Them.” Precisely because her information is so valuable, it deserves a new lease on life. So here I am, snitching it shamelessly yet publicly, giving full credit to Robin. If you read her article, then you won’t have to read this one.

Here, though, I want to indicate how I’ve adapted her methods for my own use.

In terms of bang-for-the-buck, I can’t think of many methods of advertising your books that generate a better return than business cards. For about an hour of time, plus the price of a restaurant meal, you can produce an advertising product that can generate thousands of dollars in sales and a host of fans.

First, like Robin, let me recommend as a source for inexpensive business cards GotPrint.com. Just today I designed and ordered 1,000 new cards for the forthcoming release of BAD DEEDS. These one thousand cards — two-sided, full-color, UV coated, on thick glossy stock — cost only $19.00. You read that correctly. I splurged for “rush” production, and spent $26.35. You have a variety of shipping options. Mine cost me an additional $14.63.  Grand total: $40.98. And the quality is fabulous.

 

Click here to read the full post on Robert Bidinotto’s blog.

 

Announcement Hachette/Amazon Business Interruption

This post from the Amazon Books Team was posted on the Amazon site on 5/27/14.

We are currently buying less (print) inventory and “safety stock” on titles from the publisher, Hachette, than we ordinarily do, and are no longer taking pre-orders on titles whose publication dates are in the future. Instead, customers can order new titles when their publication date arrives. For titles with no stock on hand, customers can still place an order at which time we order the inventory from Hachette — availability on those titles is dependent on how long it takes Hachette to fill the orders we place. Once the inventory arrives, we ship it to the customer promptly. These changes are related to the contract and terms between Hachette and Amazon.

At Amazon, we do business with more than 70,000 suppliers, including thousands of publishers. One of our important suppliers is Hachette, which is part of a $10 billion media conglomerate. Unfortunately, despite much work from both sides, we have been unable to reach mutually-acceptable agreement on terms. Hachette has operated in good faith and we admire the company and its executives. Nevertheless, the two companies have so far failed to find a solution. Even more unfortunate, though we remain hopeful and are working hard to come to a resolution as soon as possible, we are not optimistic that this will be resolved soon.

Negotiating with suppliers for equitable terms and making stocking and assortment decisions based on those terms is one of a bookseller’s, or any retailer’s, most important jobs. Suppliers get to decide the terms under which they are willing to sell to a retailer. It’s reciprocally the right of a retailer to determine whether the terms on offer are acceptable and to stock items accordingly. A retailer can feature a supplier’s items in its advertising and promotional circulars, “stack it high” in the front of the store, keep small quantities on hand in the back aisle, or not carry the item at all, and bookstores and other retailers do these every day. When we negotiate with suppliers, we are doing so on behalf of customers. Negotiating for acceptable terms is an essential business practice that is critical to keeping service and value high for customers in the medium and long term.

A word about proportion: this business interruption affects a small percentage of Amazon’s demand-weighted units. If you order 1,000 items from Amazon, 989 will be unaffected by this interruption. If you do need one of the affected titles quickly, we regret the inconvenience and encourage you to purchase a new or used version from one of our third-party sellers or from one of our competitors.

We also take seriously the impact it has when, however infrequently, such a business interruption affects authors. We’ve offered to Hachette to fund 50% of an author pool – to be allocated by Hachette – to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%. We did this with the publisher Macmillan some years ago. We hope Hachette takes us up on it.

This topic has generated a variety of coverage, presumably in part because the negotiation is with a book publisher instead of a supplier of a different type of product. Some of the coverage has expressed a relatively narrow point of view. Here is one post that offers a wider perspective.

http://www.thecockeyedpessimist.blogspot.com/2014/05/whos-afraid-of-amazoncom.html

Thank you.
 

10 Words That You've Probably Been Misusing

This post by Tyler Vendetti originally appeared on Hello Giggles on 7/21/13.

There are so many words in the English language that it’s not surprising that the definitions for some of them have gotten mixed up over the years. It’s possible that you’ve gone your entire life without realizing your mistakes. I’m sure people have noticed. One day, you were probably walking down the street, casually chatting with an old friend, and one of these words slipped out of your mouth. Before you can move on to your story about how Mufasa would actually make a very attractive human, your friend stops to correct your error, and suddenly, your whole life starts to feel like one giant lie. How long have you been using that word incorrectly, you wonder? How many angry Facebook rants have you ruined with your improper grammar? While I can’t give you an answer to those questions, I can at least provide you with a list of other tricky words so that you may never have to suffer from this embarrassment ever again:

 

1) Travesty

What you may think it means: a tragedy, an unfortunate event

What it actually means: a mockery; a parody

This one, I’ll admit, is my own personal error. For the longest time, I equated travesty with tragedy, mostly because in passing, they sound like the same word. It’s stupid, I know, but if you knew how many times I confused fetal position with beetle position, you wouldn’t be laughing. It’s a serious problem.

 

Click here to read the full post on Hello Giggles.

 

Series Readers—What They Really Want To See In Our Books

This post by Elizabeth Spann Craig originally appeared on her blog on 5/21/14.

I’ve just finished the latest Southern quilting mystery—book five in that series, due to release in late 2015.  So that means, right now, I’m no longer under a contract until Penguin decides if they’d like to acquire more books for the series (likely something they would determine after seeing sales figures for book four, coming out in August).

For the first time…ever, really…the only project I have to work on is my self-published Myrtle Clover series. I started book seven at my usual full throttle, and then slowed my writing pace down a bit and decided to take a more thoughtful approach.

I have a completed outline for the book.  The mystery looks pretty sound. Readers told me they especially wanted more humor and the book’s outline has plenty included.

But then I remembered some of the other emails I’ve gotten.  Readers have been writing me and mentioning things they’d like to see in my Myrtle stories. Others wrote that they were “so glad to hear more about____”. I remember reading these emails and being baffled because the elements the readers liked and wanted to hear more about seemed very incidental to the story.

But I know by now that anything readers like, even if it seems incidental to me, is simply a sign that I’m not getting it.

 

Click here to read the full post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s blog.

 

While You Are Out…

This post by John E. McIntyre originally appeared on The Baltimore Sun on 5/23/14.

The holiday weekend has started, and many of you are undoubtedly trapped in slow-moving traffic on your way to the beach or the mountains. And because it’s a holiday weekend, those of you who are not trapped on the road won’t be reading anyhow, but enjoying summery drinks on the verandah.

That makes it more the pity that you will be missing these links to some choice pieces of writing about language by my friends and colleagues. Check them out when you get back.

Item: So you think you know something about grammar? Prove it by taking the Stroppy Editor’s grammar quiz.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes links to four more items of interest on the topic of language, on The Baltimore Sun.

 

Amazon vs. Hachette: What It’s About And Why I’m Rooting For Amazon

This post by Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton originally appeared on her Digital Media Mom site on 5/24/14.

As you may have heard, or read, or discovered while browsing Kindle books on the Amazon site, Amazon is currently in the middle of a battle with “Big 5″ publisher Hachette. The beef is over reseller wholesale contract terms (the publisher’s ‘cut’ on every ebook of theirs sold by Amazon), and Amazon has been using some strongarm tactics to remind Hachette that Amazon doesn’t HAVE to sell Hachette books at all if the parties can’t come to an agreement.

 

First, a little background is needed.

Back when the Kindle was new and ebooks were just starting to become a thing, say 2008 or so, Amazon established wholesale terms with publishers on ebooks based on the “fixed price” (usually known as a “suggested retail price” in other industries, for other products) which was set by the publishers. Amazon could discount the actual sales price of ebooks to whatever they wanted, or even offer them for free, so long as they paid the publisher the wholesale rate that was based on the publisher’s fixed price.

For example, if the publisher’s fixed price was $15 (seriously, that’s the average of the fixed prices the Big 5 publishers were setting; on some ebooks they wanted to go as high as $18) and the publisher’s wholesale cut was 40%, Amazon would have to pay the publisher $5.60 for every copy sold or given away on Amazon. Whether the ebook ultimately sold for $10, $6, or was given away for free, Amazon owed the publisher $5.60 for every copy distributed to Amazon customers. As a result, Amazon was (and still is) actually LOSING money on many ebook sales, but they were willing to take the hit to establish their Kindle line as dominant among ereaders.

 

A couple years down the road, publishers started to get nervous.

In 2010 publishers decided they didn’t want Amazon to have the right to set its own prices on their ebooks anymore, even though Amazon’s retail pricing didn’t affect their wholesale cut AT ALL. They feared that if Amazon were allowed to establish $9.99 in the minds of consumers as a standard price point for frontlist ebooks (new release ebooks the publisher expects to sell well), they would never succeed in rolling out their own, much higher fixed prices. And they were probably right about that, but only because the fixed prices they had in mind for frontlist ebooks were ridiculously high to begin with.

 

Click here to read the full post on Digital Media Mom.

 

Three Reasons Why I Do Not Give a Fig Who Steals My Books

This post by Patricia V. Davis originally appeared on the Women’s National Book Association San Francisco Chapter site on 3/18/13.

A few years back, I was in the audience listening to a speaker at a prestigious writers’ conference as he warned us about book piracy and how many potential sales authors stood to lose as a result.

“I know for a fact that people are pirating my work and even selling my books illegally online, he said, clearly not happy about that.

He went on to inform a roomful of mostly new writers that he’d even caught some reviewers ─ legitimate ones ─ selling their review copy of his book on eBay after they’d reviewed it. “When giving out review copies of your books, be sure to write ‘review copy’ in it, to help prevent that from happening,” he cautioned. He continued in the same vein about illegal copies being obtained for his ebooks, as well, and I observed several audience members taking notes diligently on his piracy prevention suggestions.

The problem is, I’d personally never heard of him before that conference, and if you ask me even now, I couldn’t tell you the title of even one of his books.

What does this mean? I’m getting to that.

Let’s take another scenario:  Me, as a teenager at a neighbor’s garage sale. She had a bin of old paperbacks that she was selling at ten cents each. Obviously we’re going way back here, before the internet even existed, so in essence, her reselling of those paperbacks at ten cents each was that era’s equivalent of today’s online book piracy. I bought a paperback that looked intriguing ─ why not, at that price? ─ and took it home to read. I became so enraptured by the story, that I read it all in one sitting, then raided my babysitting money which I’d saved for something else, walked all the way to the local bookstore and bought another of her books at the full paperback retail price that same day. Over the years, I’ve repeatedly bought her titles, and sometimes, if I’m feeling famished for the quality brain candy novels that she writes, and something new she’s written looks particularly appealing, I won’t even wait for the paperback version ─ I’ll spring for the hardback price of 25 dollars plus tax. (Yes, even this day of eReaders and iPads, I still buy hardback books.) So, the novel that I bought “illegally” hooked me into becoming a lifelong fan of this author.

 

Click here to read the full post on the WNBA San Francisco Chapter site.

 

How to Make Your Reader Cry: Anatomy of a Death Scene

This post by Livia Blackburne originally appeared on her blog on 8/21/11.

Spoiler warning: Major spoilers for Plain Kate in this entry.

I recently fell in love with Plain Kate by Erin Bow. Every sentence is beautiful, and the story is impossible to forget.

Plain Kate is also a very, very sad book. A major character dies at the end, and Bow pulls no punches. I cried when I read it. And being a sucker for punishment, I reread the ending the next day and cried again. Then I started thinking.  People die in my books as well. Why don’t my beta readers cry? So, being the cold, analytical psychologist that I am, I went through Plain Kate’s death scene line by line to tease out the elements that tugged at my heartstrings.

 

From later in the post:

1. Emphasize the good qualities of the dying character.

Taggle tells Kate. “You can survive it . . . And that is all I want. You do not need me.” The narrative then continues. “And Taggle, who was beautiful, who’d never misjudged a jump in his life. . ” For the reader, it’s gut wrenching to be reminded of just how selfless and special Taggle is as he leaps to his death.

 

2. Draw a connection to a previous tragedy.

When Plain Kate’s father died in the beginning of the book, his last words were “Katerina, Star of my Heart.” And this is what Taggle calls Kate in this scene as well.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes the relevant excerpt from Plain Kate and seven more specific points of analysis, on Livia Blackburne’s site.

 

Using SlideShare For Marketing Fiction And Non-Fiction Books

This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn blog on 5/16/14.

I know you don’t want to think about any other sites for marketing!

But in this post, I outline why I think you should consider Slideshare and how I’m using it for both my brands, J.F.Penn thriller author, and Joanna Penn, professional speaker and non-fiction author.

 

Why care about Slideshare?

Slideshare is basically a presentation sharing network.

It’s a form of content marketing, but more visual, and if done well, it can be much more effective than writing a blog post on a topic, especially if you are unknown and your site has no ranking. Visual marketing is very much the big thing now. In an age of text overload, people are clicking more on visual content – whether that’s Instagram, pics on Twitter or Facebook, infographics or SlideShares.

It’s easily shareable and viewable on any social platform as well as on mobile devices. On the right, you can see a tweet that actually embeds the whole SlideShare so it can be read within Twitter. Awesome for twitterholics like me!

Slideshare is one of 120 most visited websites in the world, with 60 million monthly visitors. It ranks highly in Google for keywords, and you can use embedded hyperlinks to direct traffic to your site.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Creative Penn.

 

Smashwords and OverDrive to Bring 200,000+ Indie Ebooks to 20,000+ Public Libraries

This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords blog on 5/20/14.

Imagine if your indie ebook was purchasable by thousands of public libraries around the globe. Now imagine no more.

Smashwords today announced an agreement to supply more than 200,000 titles to OverDrive, the world’s largest library ebook platform.

OverDrive powers the ebook procurement and checkout systems for 20,000 public libraries around the world, including 90% of US public libraries.

This agreement marks a watershed moment for indie authors, libraries and library patrons around the world.

It’s also a big deal for thousands of small independent presses around the globe who now have a convenient onramp into the OverDrive network.

Millions of library patrons will now have access to the amazing diversity and quality of the Smashwords catalog.

At a time when many large publishers are charging libraries high prices for ebooks (front list ebooks from Big 5 publishers can cost libraries $80, and even backlist ebooks can cost libraries $20-40), Smashwords authors and publishers are stepping in to supply thousands of affordably priced, library-friendly ebooks. Faced with the option of purchasing a single James Patterson novel for around $40.00, or ten thrillers from today’s most popular indie authors at $4.00 each, libraries now have exciting new options to build patron-pleasing ebook collections.

To help librarians streamline collection development, in the weeks ahead OverDrive and Smashwords will create curated buy-lists lists libraries can use to purchase the most popular indie authors and titles. Libraries will soon have the option, for example, to purchase the top 100 YA fantasy novels (approximate price: ~$400), or the top 1,000 most popular contemporary romances (~$4,000) or top 200 complete series across multiple categories (~$2,000), or the top 200 thrillers, mysteries, epic fantasies or memoirs. With most of our bestsellers priced priced at or under $4.00, you can do the math to appreciate how incredibly affordable these collections will be. We’re going to have fun slicing and dicing.

Our lists will measure title popularity by aggregating sales data from across the Smashwords distribution network. Indie authors: If you needed yet another reason to fully distribute all your titles to all retailers via the Smashwords distribution network, now you have it. Stand up and have your sales counted because we want to help libraries purchase the greatest diversity of high-quality ebooks across multiple genres and categories.

Here are a couple additional stats to help you appreciate the massive scale of the OverDrive network:

 

Click here to read the full post on the Smashwords blog.

 

Save Our Stacks

This post by Rebecca Schuman originally appeared on Slate on 5/12/14.

It’s not about the books. It’s about the books representing the last place on campus where intellectual contemplation thrives.

If a college library moves 170,000 of its books to storage, to make room for sumptuous new administrative offices—which is happening at Maine’s Colby College—does it still count as a library? Or, as an impassioned open letter from concerned faculty attests, is it no longer “a place for reflection and deep thought, research and scholarship,” but rather merely “a waiting room” sans books and a reference librarian, and surrounded by temples to the new gods of the American university?

The Colby administration argues that the renovations are there to help the students, providing them with more study space. The student newspaper is less convinced, headlining an op-ed “Sorry, Your New Library Still Sucks.”

The Colby case is but one example of a widespread move to re-appropriate library space in the age of digitization. From the University of Nebraska to the University of Edinburgh, from the University of Nevada–Las Vegas to Kent State, knowledge repositories the world over may soon have to change their names, because the liber will be increasingly hard to come by. In fact, the only major library to “resist” this trend—the New York Public Library—did so only reluctantly, and out of capitulation to a passionate, organized, grass-roots campaign.

 

Click here to read the full article on Slate.

 

Literature Still Urgently Needs More Non-White, Non-Male Heroes

This editorial by Monica Byrne originally appeared on The Atlantic on 5/20/14.

If privileged writers keep “writing what they know,” marginalized people groups will continue to feel—and be—marginalized.

One of the most celebrated pieces of advice to writers is “Write what you know.” Unfortunately, it shows.

The demographics of published writers in the West are largely homogeneous, and as a result, our literature is also largely homogeneous. Growing up, for example, my heroes were Atreju, Frodo, and Paul Atreides. All I ever really wanted to do was go on adventures like them. I readily identified with them, and their trials became my scripture: the loss of Artax, the recovery at Lothlórien, the knife fight with Feyd-Rautha.

Despite a liberal upbringing and an education at a women’s college, it didn’t occur to me that my identification with male heroes had damaged me in any way—that is, until I became a writer, and found myself weirdly reluctant to write a woman hero. This wasn’t an accident.

As Vanessa Veselka wrote in The American Reader, there is a profound relative lack of female road narratives in the Western literary tradition. This absence hurt her in much more concrete ways. When recounting her years as a teenage hitchhiker, Veselka writes, “my survival depended on other people’s ability to envision a possible future for me…[but] there was no cultural narrative for [us] beyond rape and death.” Male hitchhikers had Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, and dozens of others. Veselka had bodies in dumpsters on the six o’clock news.

 

Click here to read the full editorial on The Atlantic.

 

May 2014 Author Earnings Report

This post originally appeared on Author Earnings on 5/19/14.

Three months ago, we released our first full report on Amazon e-book sales and author earnings. Our goal was to look at unit sales and earnings by various publishing paths in order to help authors make informed decisions in this rapidly changing publishing environment. The results were eye-opening, but it was merely our first data point. Our long term goal has been to pull data every quarter to see if we can spot developing trends.

A quick recap on our methodology: Using a custom software spider, we can crawl every Amazon bestseller list and pull info from each book’s product page html. This data goes into a spreadsheet, which gives us the price, ranking, average review, and much more for every ranked e-book on Amazon. Using established ranking-to-sales data from numerous bestselling authors (including our own works), we are able to present author earnings by title and publishing type. As with our past reports, all the data has been anonymized and is available for download at the end of this report. And just like with past reports, any reasonable numbers entered for the power curve of the product rank-to-sales ratio reveals the same overall picture. That is, our conclusions are not dependent on our estimates but are borne out of the freely available data.

The exciting thing about pulling this data is that we have no idea what we’re going to find. Our conclusions since the last report might need rethinking. Our advice on what an author might want to do with a manuscript today could very well change as the publishing industry takes another swerve. My partner and I debated what we expected to see from this second round of data. We both predicted no more than a 2%-3% swing from any one publishing path to the other over such a short period of time. I wagered we’d see a 2% drop in self-publishing titles, offset by an increase in Amazon imprints, as the latter continues to snatch up high performing e-books and put more marketing muscle behind their own authors. My partner thought we’d see a 2% hike in self-publishing at the expense of traditional publishing. We bet a dollar on the outcome.

 

Click here to read the full post on Author Earnings.

 

Don’t Ever Do It For the Money: A Conversation with My Agent

This interview by Edan Lepucki originally appeared on The Millions on 5/19/14.

Whenever my students ask me about getting a literary agent, I say three things: 1. There are a lot of agents out there. 2. The process can take a long time, so be prepared for rejection and waiting, waiting, waiting. 3. If you’re afraid of your agent, he or she is not the right agent for you. That last piece of advice is borne out of my experience working with Erin Hosier, whom I consider not only my advocate and colleague, but my friend. I’m not afraid to email her for advice and I do not fear her reaction to my work. (Other friends of mine seem cowed by their agents, which saddens me: if your agent can’t root for you, then who in the business can?) Erin is honest and smart and funny, and if I am bugging her too much I expect her to tell me so. When she isn’t agenting at Dunow, Carlson and Lerner, she’s writing. Her memoir, D0n’t Let Me Down, is forthcoming from Atria Books. Also: her lipstick is always impeccable.

She answered the following questions via email within 24-hours. If you want to hear more from Erin — and who won’t after reading this? — she’ll be appearing at WWLA: The Conference on Saturday, June 28, 2014. (And, yes, that’s a shameless plug.)

 

The Millions: How did you become a literary agent?

Erin Hosier: I had been interning at a magazine and found it to be a stressful, low-paying job with a lot of responsibility, but I loved the editorial meetings. I loved talking about ideas and strategizing with smart people. It was thrilling to help put together an issue of a magazine, and see the fruits of our labor on display just three months later. The people there were always bummed out, though. They moved so quickly through an idea when I wanted to immerse myself in one. I happened to read a galley of a book called The Forest For The Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, that made book publishing sound much more my speed. Through a mutual acquaintance, I was introduced to the book’s author, Betsy Lerner, who then hired me to be her assistant when she made the switch from Doubleday editor to literary agent at The Gernert Co. The whole thing happened very quickly, in the time it would have taken for another issue of the magazine to come out. I answered phones and worked really hard for a year before I ever sold a book, but once I showed the aptitude, I was given a lot of support and encouragement to move forward in my career. There was nothing corporate about that agency. I didn’t have to compete with anyone or fill a quota. I’ll always be grateful for that experience, but my publishing soulmate will always be Betsy Lerner, who I’ll follow to the ends of the earth.

 

TM: Can you describe, in 2-3 sentences, why a writer needs an agent?

 

Click here to read the full interview on The Millions.