Month: February 2015

It's OK To Send A Message

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This post by Karen Harper originally appeared on Shelf Pleasure on 1/8/15.

I’m fully aware that over the years, fiction writers have been warned by that old Sam Goldwyn quote, “If you’ve got a message, send a telegram.” I know, I know, in mass market fiction, we’re writing primarily to entertain with great stories, memorable characters, adventure or thrills and gripping emotions rather than share a message.

Yet the longer I have written novels (over 30 years now,) I find I can’t quite follow that advice. Maybe it’s because I taught high school or college (Ohio State University) for 17 years. The teacher/instructor in me just won’t quit. Or maybe it’s because, even reading fiction, I like to learn something new and not only read a good story. Really, aren’t we learning something even if we read a fairy tale? Discovery is old as storytelling itself: Aesop’s fables are fiction and yet pack a punch.

So in my writing, although I usually begin with a setting I love—one with instant conflict embedded in it—and then progress to plot and character. I’m sorry, old Sam Goldwyn, but I think I do send a message, or at least try to inform my readers about something they might not know. Of course, I realize I can’t bog down the action. Interesting information has to be worked in, maybe through the heroine’s career or something huge (and evil?) she’s up against.

 

Read the full post on Shelf Pleasure.

 

January 2015 Author Earnings Report

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This post originally appeared on the Author Earnings site on 1/28/15.

Executive Summary
AuthorEarnings reports analyze detailed title-level data on 33% of all daily ebook sales in the U.S.

30% of the ebooks being purchased in the U.S. do not use ISBN numbers and are invisible to the industry’s official market surveys and reports; all the ISBN-based estimates of market share reported by Bowker, AAP, BISG, and Nielsen are wildly wrong.

33% of all paid ebook unit sales on Amazon.com are indie self-published ebooks.

20% of all consumer dollars spent on ebooks on Amazon.com are being spent on indie self-published ebooks.

40% of all dollars earned by authors from ebooks on Amazon.com are earned by indie self-published ebooks.

In mid-year 2014, indie-published authors as a cohort began taking home the lion’s share (40%) of all ebook author earnings generated on Amazon.com while authors published by all of the Big Five publishers combined slipped into second place at 35%.

 

Full Report
U.S. ebook sales have plateaued — or are even declining, relative to print — declare some widely-cited industry statistics. Publishing pundits opine that readers’ Kindles are all “full” now, and talk about the “glut” of ebooks. News articles imply that consumers are abandoning ebooks and are returning to print books, and then those articles speculate about whether ebooks were “just a fad.” Other pundits assert that indie authors will no longer be able to compete with the Big Five traditional publishers, now that those publishers have begun to price some of their ebooks lower.

Lots of speculation. Lots of flawed studies based on 2008 methodologies. Lots of inaccurate statistics. And very few facts.

As always, we turn to the data for real answers.

 

Read the full post, which includes numerous charts and graphs with accompanying analysis, on Author Earnings.

 

Let Us Now Praise Authors, Artists, Dilettantes, and Drunks

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This essay by John Yargo originally appeared on The Millions on 2/10/15.

1.
During summer break, sophomore year, my father and I took a short trip from our house on Sugarbush Drive (memorable streetname, unmemorable neighborhood) to visit the Jack Kerouac House. It was a 20 minute drive down I-4 to the small quaint house that is now situated a few blocks from a sprawling commercial development. Orlando was an agreeable town when Kerouac’s mother moved there, and while Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums there. A few years later, the arrival of the Walt Disney Corporation would radically alter the landscape, physically and culturally.

We walked around the House and knocked on the door. Answering the door was an early-career MFA graduate, the House’s resident writing fellow. The three-month fellowship ostensibly afforded him the time to work on a play about a New Orleans jazz musician. A pair of sunglasses slid down his nose, exposing his puffy eyes: he was just then emerging from a hangover. Work, he explained, was going slowly.

When we asked for details about the House and Kerouac, the playwright politely pointed us to a neighbor, a retiree who was walking across the street. The pensioner claimed to have known Kerouac’s mother, who had actually owned the house, as well as Kerouac. She kept “a nice lawn” and “was a sweet woman,” but he was “a drunk” and a “druggy.” Whether or not it was true was beside the point. My father and I agreed the Orlando Tourism Board couldn’t have dreamed up a better touch of embellished authenticity than a curmudgeonly, fist-waving, stay-off-my-lawn Floridian to America’s Own Free-Love Dionysus. Granted, a residence of a 20th-century American novelist probably never earned much notice in the Tragic Kingdom.

 

Read the full essay on The Millions.

 

So What Do I Do Now?

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This post by Wendy Lawton originally appeared on Books&Such on 2/10/15.

How often do writers encounter a wrinkle of one sort or another and wonder, “So what do I do now?”

When I was writing my very first middle grade book on an obscure figure from history I was shocked to find my character featured in another middle grade book by a well-known children’s writer. I was devastated. I figured my story was already done. My big question was, “So what do I do now?” Happily I stepped back and realized that the story treatment was very different from mine and that my concept offered a series that was a unique presentation. I kept plowing forward and not only finished the book but found a publisher for the series.

We come across many a situation where we ask the question. Let me describe a couple. . .

Wrinkle: Say you are a writer who has been slaving away on a steampunk novel only to read that steampunk is dead in the water.

So what do I do now?

 

Read the full post on Books&Such.

 

Indie & Trad Publishing & Flying Monkeys On The Yellow Brick Road!

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This post by Bob Mayer originally appeared on his Write On The River site on 2/12/15.

As you negotiate your journey through the wonderful world of publishing, be careful of those flying monkeys as you gaze in the crystal ball of your career path.

Don’t take anyone else’s monkey as your own! We all are on our unique yellow brick roads to Oz, whatever Oz might be for each of us.

Lately I’ve run into some new writers at conferences who eventually whisper to me they’ve signed a traditional deal, but they’re afraid to mention it to anyone because they get castigated. The attitude seems to be that if the book is good enough to get a book deal, then self-publishing makes more sense.

What a change in just a few years when people would break open a bottle of champagne upon getting a book deal. Now one almost dares not mention it for fear of being ridiculed for not taking the indie route. There are some indie authors saying they will never go back to traditional publishing; the key phrase is “go back”. It’s curious that a lot of us who have been successful as indies actually started in traditional publishing, giving us a distinct leg up; along with a thing called backlist.

 

Read the full post on Write On The River.

 

Can You Successfully Use Word Templates to Create eBooks?

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This post by Kimberly Hitchens originally appeared on BookNook.biz on 10/5/14.

Once upon a time, (okay, about a month ago or so)  in a fit of curiosity, I decided to buy one of those advertised templates—you know the ones—make your ebook from WORD!  Why?  Because we get a lot of inquiries here.  In fact, we receive about 300 emails a day, believe it or not.  We get people asking why our services are “better” or different than what they can do themselves. A lot of what we do is invisible to the human eye.  This makes it hard to answer those types of questions without sounding self-serving.

As in, “well, gosh, we export and clean up the HTML, so that all the bad code that you can’t see with the naked eye doesn’t make your book go wonky when it’s opened on a Kindle.” This is a difficult sell, to be honest.  It’s the same difficult sell that I run into when I try to explain that Smashwords does not do the same thing that we do.  But, when you look at a sausage, do you know what’s inside it? Can you tell that one sausage-maker lovingly crafted his sausage from the BEST stuff, while the other used what remained on the floor after the first guy finished?  No, you can’t.  Not unless you already do this for a living, and if you did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation–would we?

An eBook-making Test:  Show, Not Tell.

In that vein, I decided to test what we do against those “DIY Word” templates that you can buy all over the Internet.  After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, right?  Perhaps, I thought, if I simply used one of those commercial templates, I could show–not tell–people the difference.  I made sure that I bought a well-written template, from one of the most reputable and best-known websites on the topic of bookmaking.  For both ebooks and print books.

 

Read the full post, which includes numerous images for comparison, on BookNook.biz.

 

Going Cold: Writing Emotion, the Earley Scale, and the Brilliance of Edwidge Danticat

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This essay by Dylan Landis originally appeared on Brevity on 2/7/15.

In a scene that is central to Edwidge Danticat’s novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, eighteen-year-old Sophie Caco’s mother guides her gently to her bedroom and “tests” her for virginity—with a finger, just as Sophie’s grandmother tested the mother and her sister every week.

It’s an invasion that shatters Sophie’s sense of boundaries and will make her loathe her body and sex, much as she loves the man she marries. But Danticat makes an interesting choice: She never describes the test itself, only the mother telling a mythical story to distract her daughter.

And during the test Sophie says nothing of her emotions. Afterward, she pulls up the sheet and thinks that now she grasps why her Tante Atie used to scream when she was tested.

Why would Danticat leave out those charged words that get right to the point, words like terrified, invaded, enraged? Early drafts (at least mine) and student writing are often marked by descriptions of strong feeling. Characters gaze at each other with overt love. They feel proud, ashamed, joyous and heartbroken, and the writers come out and say so.

What could be wrong with that?

Chekhov, in two letters he wrote in 1892, critiqued a story for a writer named Lydia Avilova, and told her exactly what was wrong with that: “When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder—that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold.”

 

Read the full post on Brevity.

 

An Incredibly Brief Introduction to New Media Lit

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This post by Matthew Burnside originally appeared on Ploughshares on 2/5/15.

Let us consider a form mired in its indefinability: new media lit. I’ve found that nothing – not even poetry – can alienate a reader more quickly than encountering it. Normally I would resist trying to encapsulate an entire genre into one shell of a definition, but because we don’t have a lot of time here and my purpose is simply to expose you to the very distant edge of what the genre has to offer (whether you choose to step further is up to you), let’s stick with a radically basic, extremely flawed definition: New media lit is any “literature” that appears online, utilizing the myriad tools of technology and often allowing a greater degree of reader interaction than does offline literature.

This stuff has been around for a while—since Michael Joyce first doled out a floppy disk to his peers bearing the first (arguably) hypertext story entitled “Afternoon, a Story” in the late ’80s—but only on the fringes of literature, existing more as a novelty than as a respectable form. Robert Coover hailed its potential more than anyone, seeing it as perhaps the natural evolution of literature—the product of emerging media and our increased connectedness to technology. At a certain point in the 1990s, for some, new media lit seemed to be the inevitable future.

It was a future that never came to pass. But today, as digital literacy and the capacity for multimodal thought processing increases light years with each new generation beyond the previous one, I think it’s worth dipping into the digital waters again, if only to challenge our notion of what literature is and consider what else it can, and might, one day be.

 

Read the full post, which includes links to some online New Media Lit, on Ploughshares.

 

After Harper Lee Novel Surfaces, Plots Arise

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This article by Alexandra Alter and Serge F. Kovaleski originally appeared on The New York Times on 2/8/15.

MONROEVILLE, Ala. — One morning late last summer, Tonja B. Carter was doing some legal work for her prized client, Harper Lee, when she found herself thumbing through an old manuscript of what she assumed was “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The characters were familiar, as they would be to millions of readers — the crusading lawyer, Atticus Finch, and his feisty daughter, Scout. But the passages were different. Atticus was much older. Scout was grown up. The story unfolded in Alabama during the racial turmoil of the 1950s, not the Depression of the 1930s.

Confused, Ms. Carter scanned the text, trying to figure out what she was holding. It was a novel titled “Go Set a Watchman.” It may be one of the most monumental discoveries in contemporary American literature.

“I was so stunned. At the time, I didn’t know if it was finished,” Ms. Carter recalled in an interview on Saturday, her first extensive comments about the discovery. She went to see Ms. Lee and asked her if the novel was complete. “She said: ‘Complete? I guess so. It was the parent of “Mockingbird.” ’ ”

The recovered manuscript has ignited fierce debate — much of it speculative — about why Ms. Lee waited so long to publish again, whether the book will stand up to her beloved first novel, and whether the author, who has long shied away from public attention, might have been pressured or manipulated into publishing it.

And as word of the new book spread in her hometown, the fog that long shrouded the enigmatic, publicity-shy author — known to most as Nelle — has only deepened.

 

Read the full article on The New York Times.

 

Are You In Style?

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This post by Kate Siegel Bandos originally appeared on San Francisco Book Review on 2/5/15.

Fashion and other popular magazines, TV shows, and numerous websites tell us how we should be dressing, doing our hair, and decorating our homes so that we are always IN STYLE. What about publishers? Are you paying attention to being up-to-date with writing styles?

If you are working with a seasoned editor, hopefully they know the latest style rules for writing. Of course, there is more than one “style” book that details the dos and don’ts of writing. However, you will always be safe—especially when writing materials for journalists, if you follow the AP (Associated Press) style guidelines.

How writers and journalists feel about commas is almost as divisive as the views of Democrats and Republicans. The Oxford comma (also known as the “serial comma” or “Harvard comma”) is the name given to the optional final comma in a series. In the phrase “ham, egg, and chips,” it’s the comma between “egg” and “and.” While the AP Stylebook advises against it, others insist on it because it makes the meaning clearer. Like everything that is optional, it has its adherents and its detractors. But make a decision and be consistent.

For the 2014 edition of AP Stylebook, there were five key changes that you should be aware of for both your book(s) and all media materials:

 

Read the full post on San Francisco Book Review.

 

A Humdinger Ending

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This post by Janie Bill originally appeared on Savvy Authors on 1/8/15.

Endings can make or break an entire story. We’ve all heard about the protagonist’s motivation dictating his actions. His motivation shapes the plot and determines the big finale of the story. Whether you’re a plotter with an outline, or a panster with a completed first draft, once you’ve decided the resolution, revise with a mind to bolster the ending. Set up the elements before you reach the final chapter.

 

1. Say It Like You Mean It

Gossip, gossip, gossip. We’ve all been victims. We’ve done our share of spreading seedy details about others too. It catapults a person’s reputation from dreary housewife into conniving diva. The neighbor who wears high heels with a pajama top to walk down the driveway and pick up the morning paper becomes headline news.

Embellishing the facts is delicious. Tension skyrockets every time a character expresses a strong opinion about the antagonist.

“He’d kill a kitten in a playground.”

“That woman cheated on her husband and then took his entire savings while he was away in the war.”

 

2. Spread the Dirty Laundry

Readers love to hate and they love to find a reason to hate. A great excuse to disapprove of a person comes from casting judgment on him.

Exposing the dark secrets of the antagonist’s past does wonders for turning the readers against him. Character traits we as a society can’t forgive include, harming our neighbors, abusing pets and children, and showing a lack of respect toward the environment. The antagonist loses supporters when he only thinks of himself. The reader yearns to find fault where the antagonist deserves his upcommance.

The anatomist beats his dog. He refuses to share his cookies with his mother. He chews out a cashier at the grocery store.

 

Read the full post, which includes eight additional bullet points with further explanation, on Savvy Authors.

 

5 Self-publishing Truths Few Authors Talk About

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This post by Dylan Hearn originally appeared on his Suffolk Scribblings site on 1/5/15.

One of the hardest thing to watch on social media is an author, usually a debut author, getting excited about their upcoming book launch and knowing they are about to get hit around the head with a hard dose of reality.

They’ve done the right things, built up a twitter or Facebook following, blogged about the book, sent copies out for review, told all their friends about the upcoming launch, pulled together a promo video and graphic, maybe taken out some adverts. The first few days after launch are filled with excited tweets, mentions of early positive reviews and chart rankings. Then, after a few days, maybe a few weeks, the positive tweets stop and an air of desperation sets in as the reality of life as an indie author hits home.

Part of the problem is that the authors most vocal on social media are those that have already seen self-publishing success. They got in early, made names for themselves through talent, hard-work and persistence, and are happy to spread the gospel of the new self-publishing utopia. They are telling the truth, from their perspective, but for the vast majority of authors the picture is very different. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find success with your debut novel, just that it’s rare – and with changes in the market, becoming ever more so.

In order to provide some balance, below are 5 truths I, and many other self-published authors, have experienced. This hasn’t put me off from a writing career, and shouldn’t put you off either, but at least you will be going in with your eyes open.

 

1 You need talent to succeed but it’s no guarantee

 

Read the full post on Suffolk Scribblings.

 

The Value Of Making A Book Free

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This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her blog on 2/5/15.

Writing the book, I’ve found – however difficult it might be – is the easy part. Marketing it is way, way harder. There has been a plethora of posts about why it’s so much harder now to keep your author head above the flood of new books being published every day. And there’s Kindle Unlimited and BookBub and blog tours and NetGalley and a million other ways that aspiring hopefuls can jump up and down shouting, “pick me, pick me” – all for a price, of course.

I’m no different to all the other small voices out there. My sales have been declining for months, despite having fourteen titles. One of those is a novella, three are longer short stories and the rest are novels. I could just ignore the sales and carry on doing what I do, but I don’t write for myself. I want other people to enjoy my books – and I know some do. So what to do to increase discoverability. (Don’t you love that word? Makes you sound like an exotic holiday location.)

For a start, I put my two paranormal novels and my space opera novella, each of which sold less than five a month, into Kindle Select. None of those titles were selling anywhere else – Smashwords, Kobo, Apple, B&N or Omnilit – so it didn’t cost me to take them down from those sites. I saw results after a few days, with the number of borrows quickly outstripping sales. Mind you, that simply means I could buy three cups of coffee each month instead of one.

 

Read the full post, which includes an informative graph, on Greta van der Rol’s blog.

 

I Don't Tolerate Poor Grammar

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This essay by Cheryl Connor originally appeared on Forbes on 10/21/12.

And I’m not alone. Even the Wall Street Journal agrees.

Poor grammar and writing is an epidemic in the workplace. While the era of social media and texting has caused many to believe it’s a problem they couldn’t resolve, a number of businesses are finally finding the nerve to crack down. A recent HBR article by Kyle Wiens, I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar, noted wryly that in his company, anyone who thinks an apostrophe was one of the 12 apostles or who tosses commas around with the abandon of a shotgun would be fortunate to find their way to the foyer before he shows them the door.

His article drew 3,013 comments (ironically, many of them taking him to task for ending a sentence with a preposition and referring to “company” in the plural, a convention that while common in American English is apparently still frowned upon overseas.) Which brings up another point – have you ever noticed how much argument a discussion of grammar inspires? It seems the “grammar police” are most vigilant about the 1-2 archaic rules they hold dear, while they blithely break or ignore the dozens of rules they don’t know.

 

Read the full post on Forbes.

 

How Kill Fees Ruin Writers, Hurt Magazines and Destroy Journalism

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This post by Scott Carney originally appeared on his site on 2/3/15.

Just about every journalism contract contains a clause called a “kill fee” that states that if the magazine decides not to run a particular story then it will pay out only a fraction of the agreed upon rate. The writer is then free to sell the story to another publication. The logic behind this policy is that the clause is insurance so that a writer won’t simply accept a contract and then write a half-baked and poorly reported story and then run off with the full payment. Unfortunately the kill fee serves a much more diabolical role in the modern magazine industry. Not only it is bad for writers, it also exposes magazines to potential libel suits and degrades the overall quality of journalism in America.

Last week I had a conversation with a former editor at the New York Times Magazine who told me that they kill between 1/4 and 1/3 all assignments they issued to their on-contract writers. The magazine killed a much higher percentage of stories that they assigned to freelancers who weren’t already on the masthead.

While a kill fee is supposed to be insurance against bad writing, the NYT magazine was using it in a different way. A story can be killed for literally any reason: not only because of poor quality, but because an editor no longer thinks an idea is fresh, or that a character doesn’t “pop” on the page, or the piece was covered in another magazine between the time it was assigned and then scheduled to be published. (Those are three reasons that I’ve had stories killed over the years). Instead publications now routinely use the kill fee system as a way to increase the overall pool of material they can choose from to publish. They intentionally over-assign and account for a certain percentage of killed pieces in advance. Stories that are on the bottom of their list. This policy has nothing to do with the quality of what a writer submits, rather a business model that intentionally transfers risks reporting onto the backs of their authors.

 

Read the full post on Scott Carney’s site.