Publetariat

Show Your Setting through the POV Character’s Eyes

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This post, by Jodie Renner, originally appeared on The Blood-Red Pencil on 4/18/12.

Fiction writers—one of the fastest ways to bring your story world and characters to life is to portray the setting through the senses, feelings, reactions, and attitude of your protagonist.

Enhancing your fiction by filtering the description of the setting through your viewpoint character’s senses is a concept I instinctively embraced when I first started editing fiction about six years ago. I was editing a contemporary middle-school novel, whose two main characters, a boy and a girl, were both eleven years old (details slightly changed). The author had them describing rooms they entered as if they were interior decorators, complete with words like “exquisite,” “stylish,” “coordinated,” “ornate,” and “delightful.” Then, when they were in the park or the woods playing and exploring with friends, each tree, shrub and flower was accurately named and described in details that were way beyond the average preteen’s knowledge base or interests.

Besides the obvious problem of too much description for this age group (or for any popular novel these days), this authorial, “grownup” way of describing their environment would not only turn off young readers, but also create a distance between any reader and these two modern-day kids. As a reader and editor, I didn’t feel like I was getting to know these kids at all, as I wasn’t seeing their world through their eyes, but directly from the author, who obviously knew her interior design terms and flora and fauna! Through this unchildlike, out-of-character description of their environment, the author puts a barrier between us and the two kids. If we don’t get into their heads and hearts, seeing their world as they see it, how will we get to know them and bond with them, and why will we care what happens to them?

I advise my author clients to not only show us directly what the characters are seeing around them, in their words, but to bring the characters and story to life on the page by evoking all the senses. Tell us what they’re hearing and smelling, too. And touching/feeling – the textures of things, and whether they’re feeling warm or cold, wet or dry. Even the odd taste. And don’t forget mood—how does that setting make them feel? Emotionally uplifted? Fearful? Warm and cozy? Include telling details specific to that place, and have the characters react to their environment, whether it’s shivering from the cold, in awe of a gorgeous sunset, or afraid of the dark. Bring that scene to life through your characters’ reactions.

As Donald Maass says…

 

Read the rest of the post on The Blood-Red Pencil.

E-Ink Devices – The Fastest Invention In History To Become Old-Fashioned

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I’ve been noticing that more and more people are reading e-books from tablets and fewer people are buying e-ink devices like the original Kindle. When I straw-polled this perception on Twitter, it seemed that I was right. While we are seeing more Kindles and Kobos than ever, the number of iPads and other tablet devices seem to far outstrip the e-ink growth.

Further chatting and some links supplied by friendly tweeters backed this up. When I tweeted: “I predict that e-ink devices could be the fastest invention in history to become old-fashioned”, futurist Mark Pesce replied:

@mpesce: They’re already charmingly quaint.

From a shiny new technology to obsolete and replaced in very short order. Already, the Kindle is “charmingly quaint”, like a gramophone player or a phone with a cord and dial. I’m a bit disappointed about this, because I love my Kindle. The thing I like most, apart from the very easy on the eyes e-ink screen, is that it’s a dedicated reading device. No distractions. It holds books and other documents that I need to read and that’s all. There are enough interruptions everywhere else – I don’t need them in a book too. Plus, the battery lasts literally weeks.

But I do have a slight issue in that I love my comics. I’ve read comic books forever and still buy several titles a month. I’d be happy to move to reading those digitally, but for the colour and graphic delivery I’d need a tablet like an iPad. I’ve yet to be able to justify the expense of an iPad purely for reading comics. But if it was for all my e-reading… And that doesn’t even begin to address the multi-media reading experience, with linked footnotes, video content and so much more that tablets make so easy.

But here’s where another problem presents itself. Reading novels (or other straight, unadorned text) from a tablet is problematic at the moment. It’s hard to see outside in the sunshine. The tablet has a terrible battery life, compared to the weeks and weeks I get from my Kindle. The backlit display is more tiring for the eyes. And herein lies the reason tablets are taking over – all those things are being addressed and improved at a furious rate. The tablet is starting to achieve all the positives of a dedicated e-ink reader, along with all the other things it does, making the strengths of e-ink irrelevant.

It’ll be a while before the tablet screen, ink, battery life and so on are as good as, say, a Kindle, but not that long a while. It will happen.

What this boils down to is actually something bigger. The device itself is becoming irrelevant. The beauty of the tablet is that it is a convergent device. You carry one thing and it does everything you need – reading, writing, web surfing, social networking, etc. This leads to a paradigm shift in content creation and delivery. As Eoin Purcell said on Twitter during last night’s conversation:

Things will be sold, but selling will take different forms. Subscriptions, memberships, ads, events, readings etc.

His point being that the content will be in the cloud, the creators and publishers will earn through the things he mentions in the quote above and that content will be consumed on a variety of devices. The device itself becomes irrelevant – all it needs is access to the cloud and a comfortable reading experience. That’s the tablet with the battery life, screen resolution and daylight clarity I talked about above. The implication here is that not only does the device itself become irrelevant – as long as you have one, any one will do – but the concept of an ebook is also irrelevant. You don’t buy a book. You subscribe to a publisher and access their content, whenever, wherever. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this…

So the dedicated e-reader, like the Kindle or Kobo, is already dead. It just hasn’t stopped kicking yet. Amazon know this, so they’ve released the Fire, which is a tablet device. Others are following suit. For those of us who prefer a dedicated e-ink device, we should make the most of it now. Before long we’ll be the hipsters of the digital reading world, congregating like those people in record stores who still buy vinyl and talk about what stylus they prefer. I wonder if half the people reading this even know what a stylus is.

(For further reading, I’d recommend this article on the subject by Eoin Purcell. Interestingly, this article is already more than two years old.)

 

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter’s The Word.

Monthly Mash-up: 10 Writing Craft Books And Blog Posts

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There are so many great writing craft books and blog posts out there I just had to do my first monthly mash-up focusing on those. The following are some of my favorite books, in no particular order:

Writing craft books:

  1. If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland — Brenda shows us that no writing is absolute crap. In fact, she challenges us to write the worst piece possible, then goes on to show how in even the worst there will be a few gems. She tells us cherish the quiet moments because that is when our stories are percolating.
  2. Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell — James walks us through the four act set-up, character arc, various plotting methods and a myriad of other techniques that make writing more efficient (if you’re a plotter, that is). Pantsers can find great information in this book, as well, with questions to ponder either before or after the first draft and different methods of revising once the draft is complete.
  3. Story Engineering by Larry Brooks — Larry explains the six core competencies of concept, character, theme, story structure (plot), scene construction and writing voice, showing us why each of these are important to writing a great story. He also breaks structure down into easily understandable points and gives an idea of how to judge the length of a potential story.
  4. The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes — Ralph helps writers understand that we are not alone in our fears. He gives anecdotes of how famous authors coped with that fear, even encouraging each of us to develop rituals that help get us through the fear of setting words on the page (or screen).
  5. Failing Forward by John C. Maxwell — From redefining failure and success to learning how to embrace failures, John shows us that making both small and monumental mistakes is something to strive for rather than try to avoid. If you’re worrying about falling on your face as a writer, especially as an indie, this is a great book for learning how to accept failing as part of becoming successful.

Writing craft books aren’t the only place to get great information. There are hundreds, perhaps millions, of great blog posts with exceptional advice on how to be the best writer you can be. Here are just a few:

Writing Blog Posts:

  1. Do You Judge A Book By Its Cover by Diana Murdock — Diana gives us a peak into how she chose the cover of her book, Souled.
  2. Tips for Writing Back Cover Copy a guest post by Roz Morris on Jamie Gold’s blog — Having trouble condensing your entire book into a couple of paragraphs? Roz has some tips on what do to and what not to do to capture your story and make readers want to snuggle up with your book.
  3. Saying ‘No’ — A Successful Writer’s Must by August McLaughlin — If you’re struggling to get any writing accomplished because others think you can drop everything to help them, the August has some great ideas on how to set boundaries.
  4. Ask the Editor: How can I cut back on the abundance of pronouns in my writing? by Kira McFadden on Novel Publicity — Having problems with an abundance of he/she/it? Kira shows us how to rewrite passages to limit the number of pronouns used.
  5. 7 Setting Basics That Can Bring a Story to Life by Jody Hedlund — Setting can really bring a scene alive and move the plot forward if we use it properly. Jody gives us 7 ways to make setting almost a character in itself.

These are 10 of my favorite writing craft books and blog posts. I have hundreds more because I’m a craft junkie, as Jillian Kent said in her guest post on Rachelle Gardner’s blog. (Psst… That’s #11. :D ) I’m always looking for more blogs to read and books to buy on the craft of writing, so, if you have one you love, please share it in the comments. Happy writing!

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s blog.

Springtime For Amazon

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This post, by Jane Friedman, originally appeared on her site on 4/26/12.

As the market evolves, Amazon is becoming a home for readers.

Say what? “A home for readers?” The Evil Amazon? Did the jungle drums just miss a beat?

There is so much for readers to do on Amazon – so much book-related content for them to peruse before buying.

There it was again. I could swear I just heard a friendly word for Seattle.

We have to ask ourselves, with the collapse of physical retail for books, which company will book suppliers want to deal with most? Just as iTunes supplanted record stores, Amazon is supplanting bookstores. Of all the bookselling options out there, only the remaining indie bookstores and B&N are more “bookish.” Should they eventually collapse (or transform or get sold), Amazon will be the most bookish place for readers to go to buy books.

You’re not hearing from some Prime-drunk refugee of the Borders wars here. These are the thoughts of Laura Dawson, Firebrand’s reigning Queen of Metadata, one of our best-regarded publishing specialists, and she’s packing knitting needles, don’t cross her.

@ And as you say, Barnes & Noble started adding bookish things & services that made people feel better about it. So will Amazon.

April 26, 2012 11:40 am via YoruFukurouReplyRetweetFavorite

@tcarmody

Tim Carmody

 
 
 

 

In Why Amazon Will Be the Good Guy, Dawson is echoing a jazzy new counterpoint to the shrill call of the poison-dart frog we’ve heard so relentlessly in deepest, darkest Amazonia.

A new slant on the aggressive retailer is beginning to be felt. And this angle doesn’t always turn up along the same lines of debate, which indicates that a subtle but broad-based reconsideration may be underway. Dawson’s not dropping a stitch:

In the late 1990s, the American Booksellers Association sued Barnes & Noble and Borders over what they felt were unfair trade practices… B&N was the king of the discount. And for “bookish” folks, this was a source of friction – the cheapening of books made them seem commoditized, and our beloved independent bookstores were going out of business.

Hunker with me here. This is an argument many can’t see yet.

Amazon has been regarded as less than entirely “bookish” since its inception, when Bezos made it clear that books were just the beginning (and only because books were the easiest products to build a store around).

@ The premise of "bookishness" made me a little nervous, but it is undeniably a Thing.

April 25, 2012 10:30 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@ljndawson

ljndawson

 

 

 

Read the rest of the post on Jane Friedman’s site.

All Changed, Changed Utterly…

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This post, by Lawrence Block, originally appeared on his site on 4/22/12.

All these things happened in the space of a week or so:

1. My friend Pat reported that the POD paperback of the book he’d co-authored with my friend Dick had gone on sale quietly at Amazon, with a score of copies sold in the first several days. (The eBook has already been selling for a month or so.)

The book is Bitter Medicine: What I’ve Learned and Teach about Malpractice Lawsuits (And How to Avoid Them), and I’ve been peripherally involved with it since Dick showed me some chapters he’d written several years ago. Dick is Richard Kessler, a retired surgeon and professor of medicine, with extensive service as an expert witness in malpractice lawsuits. Pat is Patrick Trese, also retired after a distinguished career as an Emmy-winning writer and producer at NBC News; in the course of it he’d also written and published a couple of books. I’ve known them both for thirty years or so, and they’ve known each other for about as long, and the partnership turned out to be a good fit. They put in a lot of hours over a couple of years, and wound up with a solid professional manuscript that told important stories in an accessible manner.

But nobody was interested. A couple of agents agreed to look at the manuscript, kept it forever, and then returned it. A publisher, in an uncharacteristic moment of candor, said essentially that every retired doctor wants to write a book, and many of them do, and nobody cares.

And then Pat had a revelation. Neither of the book’s authors was in it for wealth or glory. Dick had had a very important and useful tale to tell, and Pat had found a way to tell it clearly and forcefully, and what they both wanted was for it to be read. And Pat knew a couple of people who’d embraced the revolution of eBooks and self-publishing, and figured why not?

Pat’s work on Bitter Medicine is done, but he’s keeping busy. His first book, Penguins Have Square Eyes, grew out of his experiences as a TV reporter in Antarctica; it came out in 1962, and now fifty years later he’s tweaking it for self-publication. And he’s hard at work on the revision of a big thriller he’s had in the works for as long as I’ve known him. Some agents have seen versions of it over the years, and encouraged him, but this this time he plans to publish it himself.

2. My agent told me about a new client he’d just signed, a romance writer. She’d published several books with a commercial publisher, and then they dropped her. So she started publishing herself in eBooks, and in a little over a year she was making eight or ten times what she’d been earning in the past. She’d tried handling her own foreign rights, but it took too much time and she didn’t really know what she was doing, so she needed someone to represent her overseas, and negotiate other sub rights.

Now that she was doing so well, she said, publishers had come around, telling her how much they could do for her. “I tell them I already know what they can do for me,” she said. “They already did it.”

 

Read the rest of the post on Lawrence Block’s site.

Self-Publishing As Meaningful Work

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This post, by Matthew Iden, originally appeared on his site on 4/25/12.

There is a passage in Malcolm Gladwell’s amazing book Outliers that, at its heart, speaks volumes about why writers should self-publish.

[T]hree things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our works fulfills us. …Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful.

Over and over again on websites and in personal correspondence, I hear writers who have chosen to self-publish talk about how energized (or re-energized) they are. While there’s the inevitable grousing about low-sales numbers or promotions gone haywire, rarely are there complaints about the work itself. I know I find myself ready to write every day, eager to get to the page and get my latest words down.

That’s because, according to Gladwell’s definition, self-publishing is meaningful work.

 

Autonomy

The vast majority of would-be writers get up in the morning and write for a faceless agent at an unknown agency. They write so they can add their manuscript to a growing pile of manuscripts so large that at some agencies the interns can sit on them like chairs. That manuscript may be rejected for any number of reasons that, in most cases, will never be communicated to the author, leaving no opportunity for improvement.

The self-published author writes for himself or herself and sets the standard for quality, content, and length. There are no bosses—or, they are the best kind to have: readers and fans. Writing for yourself means there are no barriers or go-betweens. The relationship consists of you and your audience, and that’s it.

Complexity

 

Read the rest of the post on Matthew Iden’s site.

E-Book Prices Must Come Down

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This post, by Richard Curtis, originally appeared on Digital Book World on 4/29/12.

If you seek cogency on digital publishing subjects you’ll always find it in Laura Hazard Owen’s postings. A good example is a recent one on the implications for consumers of the settlement agreements with the Department of Justice in its conspiracy lawsuit against five major publishers and Apple.

What does the settlement mean for customers? Here’s a summary:

1. Let the Discounting Begin.

“Readers are likely to see lower prices on e-books published by HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster — at least at Amazon, which expressed its glee over the settlement. But you won’t see those lower e-book prices until at least June…I wouldn’t be surprised to see some shockingly cheap bestsellers from those publishers — think massive summer promotions where big titles by authors like James Patterson, Jodi Picoult and Nicholas Sparks are $1.99.”

2. Amazon rivals will discount too.

“Other e-book retailers, like Barnes & Noble and Kobo, are likely to want to enter into new contracts quickly as well so that they are on a more even playing field with Amazon.”

Owen points out that Amazon competitors “may not be able to afford to discount a wide range of e-books as deeply as Amazon can.” But that has not prevented Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and even the struggling Sony from maintaining a healthy market share of the e-book retail business.

3. Bundling of e-books, and e-book/p-book combo packages

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes two more bullet points and a link to some further analysis on the DoJ lawsuit, on Digital Book World.

Are the E-Reader’s Days Numbered?

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This article, by Quentin Fottrell, originally appeared on SmartMoney.

By pumping $300 million into the Nook, Microsoft may actually be betting against Barnes and Noble’s e-reader.

The software giant plans to include the Nook app in its new Windows 8 operating system, which experts say suggests the two companies think the future of digital books is on computers, cellphones, and tablets – not just traditional e-readers. “Barnes & Noble will likely become more device agnostic,” says Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.com, one of the world’s largest distributor of self-published e-books. “Consumers will be able to read Barnes & Noble e-books on a wide range of devices.”

 

As it is, only 41% of people read e-books on the Nook or Kindle, according to a study released this month by Pew Research. Some 29% read them on cell phones, 23% on tablets and 42% on computers. Since most people have their phone with them at all times, it’s not surprising that phones and work computers would be used for reading in addition separate e-readers, analysts say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read the rest of the article on SmartMoney.

 

What Goes Into a Book: Case Study: The Catalyst

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I was talking to a reader on my Facebook page and had mentioned a small part of the process for The Catalyst. Her reply was:

I knew that releasing a book was a complicated process, but ‘Wow’. As a reader it’s interesting to learn everything involved in order to get a book out, so that we can enjoy it. If more people understood everything that it takes to get a book out into the world, there would be alot less bitching about having to spend anything over 99 cents for one.

Since I think this understanding is so important, rather than JUST reply directly to her, I decided to make a blog post about it to take you through what goes into a typical Zoe Winters series book:

 

It’s not just writing a book and throwing it out there. In an indie situation all time and money costs are the author’s. There are promotional costs as well as the costs of putting out a truly professional product that can compete with mainstream published work on quality. On the one hand people expect indie books to be “cheap” but on the other, they complain about lower quality. In order to GET higher quality it takes a level of work (and often monetary costs) that require it to not be “cheap”. For example… if I charged 99 cents (making only 35 cents per copy sold), I would feel highly resentful, given what all goes into this both time and money wise.

Here’s what goes into the standard Zoe series book:

Rough Draft (usually I try to get this done in a month or less. Most people can’t do more than 2-3 hours of actual writing in a day because it’s pretty draining. Creative work is not digging ditches, but it can still be exhausting.)

Then I do a read through and edit and send it to the beta readers. (while it’s with the betas I’ll generally work on something else. That’s also when I start getting stuff together for the book trailer and the cover art and start the process for that. I consult on cover art but I’m more involved with the book trailer. I pick music, video clips, images, and write the text and give a basic storyboard idea of how I want it to go. But generally I’m also working on another phase of another project while my book is with betas or with the copyeditor. Like when Catalyst goes to the copyeditor I’ll be writing Lifecycle.)

When it gets back from the betas, I do another round of edits, based on feedback. Then I send it to the copyeditor. (while it’s with the copyeditor, I’m doing other things on other projects, or getting the book tour/promo set up and ready to go, or whatever.)

When it gets back from the copyeditor, I input the copyedits, do a final proofread, format for ebook, register copyright, then publish and run my promo and send review copies out to reviewers.

Then I format for print, send it to LSI and wait for my proof copy. When I get my proof copy, I proofread the print, then approve it for distribution. During all this I get things set up with my narrator and audio production people for the audio book. I consult back and forth on things such as the particular voices each main character will have and answer any questions on word pronunciations that aren’t clear.

As recording comes back for the book, I listen to it and note any audio errors that the editor might not have caught. A mispronunciation here… a part that’s hard to understand… etc. I send notes back and re-listen to the fixed parts, then approve for distribution.

As print and audiobook become available, I promote those with a newsletter, blog post, twitter, and facebook.

Things I spend money on… like for the Catalyst:

Cover art, including audiobook cover.
Copyediting
Book Tour (Blog tour)
Book Trailer and elements for the trailer (music, video clips, images)
Kindle Nation Daily ad
Audio narration
Free signed copies as part of previous promos.

Total costs involved for this book come to about $5,000 (a big chunk of that of course is audiobook narration and production, but I think the costs are worth it to be in audio.)

In the end analysis, writing, editing, promoting, and releasing a book takes me hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars of my own personal money. This is why I charge $4.95 for full-length books in the digital format. Digital is my main bread and butter. Audio and print are small sidestreams of income, though Audio will likely grow over time because the market itself is growing.

 

This is a reprint from The Weblog of Zoe Winters.

Tolkien’s 10 Tips for Writers

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This post, by Roger Colby, originally appeared on his writingishardwork site on 4/29/12.

I have long been a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien.  Every year, when school dismisses for summer break, I read The Lord of the Rings.  This year I will read it to my children and do all the voices for them.  Tolkien was a brilliant writer, but what if we could sit down with him and ask him any question we wanted?  What if he could give writers advice about their own writing from his years of experience as an incredible storyteller?

This is possible if we read his letters.  I have a musty old book entitled The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter.  I once spent the better part of a month reading it cover to cover and underlining every instance where the master of Middle Earth wrote about his process.  What follows are the best of those notes:

1.  Vanity Is Useless – Tolkien writes in a letter to Sir Stanley Unwin on 31 July 1947 “…I certainly hope to leave behind me the whole thing [LOTR] revised and in final form, for the world to throw into the waste-paper basket.  All books come there in the end, in this world, anyway” (121).  The Lord of the Rings has a worldwide following, has inspired films, video games, animated features, songs, poetry, fan fiction and countless other things, yet its author felt that in reality it may not be that important to the world.  There are several other instances where he writes to people about how humble he feels about the things he writes and that they are not really life changing at all, but simply imaginings “from my head”.  In Tolkien’s opinion, The Hobbit was published out of sheer “accident”, as he had passed it around to a few close friends, one of them being C.S. Lewis.  Finally (and lucky for us) an Oxford graduate, Susan Dagnall, who worked for the London publishing house of Allen & Unwin, encouraged him to submit it for publication.  He did, and there are pages of letters where he struggles with the process of publication.  He was not, in any way, a vain man, especially about his writing.

2.  Keep a Stiff Upper Lip – In another letter to Sir Stanley Unwin dated July 21, 1946, Tolkien lists a mound of personal struggles he was facing: being ill, being overworked and missing his son Christopher who was away in the Royal Navy.  He put many of his struggles aside, though, and went to writing.  He had to balance his day job with his desire to write epic stories set in Middle Earth.  He found time.  He made time.  It took him 7 years to write The Hobbit. (117) The thing that he writes about most in this period is his struggle to get the work finished on his novels and to balance teaching and his many duties at Oxford College.  Apparently he found a way.

3. Listen to Critics – Tolkien writes to his editor about the comments C.S. Lewis made about The Lord of the Rings: “When he would say, ‘You can do better than that.  Better, Tolkien, please!’  I would try.  I’d sit down and write the section over and over.  That happened with the scene I think is the best in the book, the confrontation between Gandalf and his rival wizard, Saruman, in the ravaged city of Isengard.”  He writes that he “cut out some passages of light-hearted hobbit conversation which he [Lewis] found tiresome, thinking that if he did most other readers (if any) would feel the same…to tell the truth he never really like hobbits very much, least of all Merry and Pippin.  But a great number of readers do, and would like more than they have got” (376).  I notice the words in parenthesis “if any”, because there are many passages in the letters where Tolkien seems to be self-deprecating.  He listened carefully to critics and understood that they would hone his writing down to something that would be well received by many.  We must learn to use the advice of critics to help us become better writers.

Probably the most telling letter of the entire collection would be his letter to Christopher Bretherton dated July 16th, 1964.  The following are the highlights of that text:

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes tips 4-10, on writingishardwork.

My Journey As An Indie Author

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This post, by Julie Ortolon, originally appeared on her Julie’s Journal Online site on 4/27/12.

It was a year ago this month that my world changed forever thanks to the ebook revolution. April 2011 was when my sales exploded. I have been reeling – in a good way – ever since.

This journey, however, started long before that. It started in the fall of 2009. Back then, I had one goal: to somehow get back some semblance of a writing career. To me, at the time, that meant land another contract with a traditional print publisher.

Boy has that goal changed! But let’s look at how I got from there to here.

The First Step Down a New Path

In the summer of 2009, I was basically unpublishable in the eyes of New York. I hadn’t had a book out since Unforgettable came out in 2007. I’d gone from rocketing onto the publishing scene by hitting the USA Today list with my first title to sales numbers that were so bad (thanks to the implosion of the publishing industry) it was heartbreaking. I was also so emotional beat up after eight years of the publishing process, I needed a break. I stepped back for two years by going to the mountains of New Mexico to paint aspen trees and contemplate clouds.

That was fabulous for awhile, but after two years my muse started to stir. I wanted back in the game. So, I landed a new agent with a proposal for a new series. One of the first things I realized, though, was that a lot had changed in the two years I’d been away. Suddenly, it wasn’t just the proposal and an author’s sales numbers that publishers looked at before offering a contract, it was the author’s Website and overall Web presence, i.e. their number of Facebook friends and Twitter followers. Yikes! My Website was two years out of date, and I didn’t know a tweet from a twerp.

Fate Intervenes

As karma, chance, the universe would have it, I bumped into an Internet marketing coach at a wine bar one afternoon and I hired her to overhaul my Website. Instead, she overhauled my entire life by opening my eyes. I already knew the publishing industry doesn’t make sense to any rational business person. Yet, in talking to this very savvy businesswoman, trying to explain why I couldn’t implement her marketing strategies because “that’s not how things work in publishing” I started to see just how ridiculous the publishing industry is. Even so, the first time she suggested I ditch New York and self publish, I drew up with indignation and said, “I would never self-publish!”

Long story short, part of the strategy this marketing guru proposed to help me land another print contract was for me to start this blog. Julie’s Journal Online was meant to accomplish two things: 1) help me learn social networking by teaching others; and 2) seriously up my overall Web presence. In order to write my blog posts, I had to do a lot of research. That led to me reading things like Konrath’s blog the Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. Which led to me reconsidering epubbing my out-of-print backlist. Lord, what a hair-pulling experience epubbing was back in the early days before we had a sufficient number of cover designers and formatters to hire.

 

 

Read the rest of the post on Julie’s Journal Online.

Price Wars and Book Industry Illegal Activities

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This has been a huge issue lately. To better understand it, let me describe a couple of different pricing models or customs which are at the heart of this controversy.

Wholesale Model: The publisher establishes a book’s recommended price and sells it to the booksellers for a percentage off that price. The bookseller can then sell the book for whatever price (sometimes higher) that he wants to.

Agency Model: The publisher sets a price for the book and then discounts it 30% to the reseller, who must agree to sell the book at the price the publisher establishes and cannot discount. The result has been for the publishers to push up the prices of their books because they can.

Impact on E-books: This has pushed up the price of E-books and has resulted in a major conflict between some of the major publishers and Amazon, who wants to keep the prices low for their Kindle market. In their efforts to control the situation in their favor, the major publishers began allegedly sneaking around in a variety of price-fixing activities. Ooops, they got caught at those and the following cover-up attempts. This brought the Federal Department of Justice into the fray with an anti-trust suit against five publishers and Apple. In the meanwhile, E-book distributor Mark Coker of SmashWords has come on record that he prefers the Agency Model because it allows the authors and the publishers to control the prices. This levels the playing field for smaller book retailers and preventing large retailers from loss-leadering their small competitors to death.

All these recent activities are pushing down E-book prices and tying the hands of the major publishers, which may hasten their demise.

Bottom Line: The forces of greed and control battles point to the obvious solution of self-publishing. Once a pariah in the book industry, self-publishing is becoming acceptable, as long as the author does a professional job of publishing his books. The legal fight has an indirect impact on self-publishers in terms of common price ranges. It all points to a much different business model.

 

 

This is a cross-posting from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

An Idiot-Shaped Box

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This post, by Zoe Spencer, originally appeared on her Colpo Di Fulmine blog on 4/26/12.

Yesterday I came across a small publisher who was looking for writers in the genre I’m currently writing in. I was quite excited until I dug deeper into their website. I’m not going to name names because I’ve no interest in getting into a fight on the internet but the overall tone was arrogant and off-putting.

I have a friend who works as an agent’s assistant in London and she says soft skills are of critical importance because the publishing industry is relationship-based. The tone of this publisher’s web site and specifically their submissions guidelines guarantee I’ll never submit to them.

The killer for me was their bald refusal to consider anyone who didn’t have AT LEAST two hundred followers on each of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. If you don’t have that, they say, you’re not serious about your career and they have no interest in you whatsoever.

Where to start?

I’m very new to the idea of publication – this time last week I’d never submitted a thing and I still consider myself very much a learner – but this attitude suggests they expect their writers to market their books for them. I had this weird idea that was the publisher’s job. If Harper Collins tells me I need to build a web presence, fair enough. But when some relative nobody says my number of followers is more important than the story I have to tell or the quality of my writing, I shake my head and put them in an idiot-shaped box.


Read the rest of the post on Colpo Di Fulmine. Please read through to the end – it’s a kicker!

After The DoJ Action, Where Do We Stand?

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his Shatzkin Files blog on 4/14/12.

This post went up around midnight last night (Saturday, 4/14) in London, or between 6 and 7 NY time. I had been concerned about a part of it that has been edited below. If you read it before 5 pm today (Sunday, 4/15), you’ll not have seen this correction. And you’ll see some comments that obviously pre-date the update.

Well, we certainly have a confused book business on our hands following the announcement of the Department of Justice intervention last week.

According to my (admittedly tentative) understanding:

1. We have three Big Six publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster) that have agreed to a settlement with Justice that obliges them to modify their agency arrangements over the next 60 days in ways that will eliminate their ability to control discounting in the supply chain for the next two years.

2. We have two Big Six publishers (Macmillan and Penguin) that will contest the DoJ position that they acted illegally (in collusion). They can apparently continue to manage their business with agency pricing the way they have, at least until a court rules. And, as we know, that can take a while.

3. We have one Big Six publisher, the biggest of all (Random House), which can continue to sell under agency terms without restriction and without a lawsuit to defend. Why? Because they didn’t take simultaneous action with the other five and were, therefore, not implicated in the alleged collusion.

4. Agency terms, including even most favored nation clauses (which never really affected the Big Six anyway), have not been ruled illegal. (Cader said in his post on Friday, blocked by paywalls I think, that, as a result of this set of legal actions “agency itself is demonstrably considered legal.” If that is accurate, and he almost always is, that is certainly an unintended consequence.)

5. The DoJ delivered some convincing evidence, surfaced on the Melville House blog, that despite my conjecture to the contrary, big publishers did discuss agency among each other before they implemented it. That certainly doesn’t look good. But whether or not it was implemented legally does not affect my opinion about the value of agency or the damage from losing it.

Added later. But, aha!!! This is not convincing evidence of a conspiracy. It is most likely that this discussion, assuming the email quotes are all legitimate to begin with, was about Bookish, the book retailing initiative funded by Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin. If that’s true, it would suggest that HarperCollins was an early participant in the conversations about starting it. That makes sense. HarperCollins is a partner with Penguin in the financing of Anobii, an ebook retailing site in the UK. 

And hats off to my great friend and favorite consulting competitor, Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners, who made the penny drop for me in a conversation at the Digital Minds Conference today in London! I was only comforted when I spoke to one of the smartest guys in trans-Atlantic digital publishing who said, “of course” to this when I told him, just as I did when Lorraine told me. Like me, he didn’t get this right off the bat!

 

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

How Do You Survive Criticism?

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This post, by Andrew E. Kaufman, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog on 4/18/12 and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

Being a writer means being vulnerable. I’m talking, rip your shirt open, aim your chest toward the heavens, and let the vultures have at it. I learned long ago that if I wanted to be an author, I’d have to accept this fact. And while, for the most part, people are wonderful, there will always be haters; they’re everywhere. And yes, they do suck.

 
Of course, accepting this philosophy is one thing. Surviving it is another. We, as authors, are human. We’re a sensitive lot. We pour our hearts and souls  onto the pages, and taking criticism, regardless of how much truth there is to it, isn’t easy. But we all have to endure it, whether it’s a nasty review, email, or passing remark. Friends, both readers and writers, often ask how I cope with that. Luckily, it doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I deal with it. I have no choice. I’ve developed a coping strategy. Sometimes it even works:

 

  1.  Accept that this is the nature of the beast. Simply put, if you can’t handle criticism, you’ve chosen the wrong business. This is not brain surgery; this is the arts, and being as such, not only must you accept criticism, you should expect it. 
     
  2. Take what you can use, throw away the rest. Constructive criticism is always welcome. I know I’ll never stop growing as a writer, and growing means listening. Besides, who better to give feedback than the readers? I consider them experts and their input important. If something resonates with me, I take it to heart. If it doesn’t, I respectfully consider it a difference of opinion and move on. I’ve learned a lot from my readers and I hope I never stop. 
     
  3. The exact moment someone gets nasty is the exact moment I realize it’s not about the book. It’s about them. When somebody becomes belligerent or starts calling names, I know there’s something else at work, that their motivation is more than likely coming from a bad place. Constructive criticism is thoughtful. Hate requires none. 
     
  4.  Not everyone is going to like my couch, and that’s okay. I look at it this way: tastes vary widely from person to person. If I bought a new couch—one I found particularly cool and awesome—and showed it to fifty different people, it’s a sure bet I’d get fifty different opinions. Some would love it, some would feel indifferent about it, and yes, some might even hate it. Does that make it a bad couch? Nope (of course, if everyone hated it, then I’d have to do some rethinking about my couch, just as I would with my book). But someone is bound to hate it. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. That’s called life. 
     
  5. Take pride. Anyone who has written a novel knows what a ridiculously difficult job it can be, but it’s also a huge accomplishment. I am by no means perfect, nor would I ever delude myself into thinking I produce perfect work. But I do take great pride in it. I trust my instincts. Even more important, I live for the process, and nobody can take that away from me. Whether I have one reader or thousands, whether people love my books or hate them, I will always write,  always love writing, and will always, every step of the way, enjoy the journey. 

What about you? How do you cope with criticism?