Publetariat

This post, by Pete Morin, originally appeared on his site on 9/12/11.

At the risk of repeating myself, I’m going to revisit this whole canard about self-publishing suffering from a “stigma.”

Over at The Forum That Shall Not Be Named, the usual suspects continue their broken record. One of these people purports to be a “professional writer,” but I’m skeptical. “When my novel is done,” she assures us, she will pursue the traditional publishing route, and would never self-publish it, lest she be tainted with the stigma of self-publishing. I got news for you, lady. You’ll never be published.

So now that I am committed to self-publishing Diary of a Small Fish (after all those nasty traditional publishers have ignored it for far too long – **sniff**), these warnings take on a new dimension of absurdity, which I will explain. But first – a commercial message:

Now then. It is indeed so that the digital libraries at Amazon, Smashwords, B&N and Apple are chocked with dreck. There is a clamor of noise out there in digital land, like singers auditioning for American Idol, peeling the paint off of Jennifer Lopez’s eyes, howling like sick cats. Do those singers diminish the quality of Carrie Underwood or Kelly Clarkson? (No wisecracks, please. I’m no pop music lover either, but talent is talent.)

A few more examples are warranted.
 

Read the rest of the post on Pete Morin‘s site.

I’ve gone back and forth for months trying to decide whether to price the e-book version of my new release, The Arranger, at $.99 or $2.99…for the launch phase. The thinking is this: At 99 cents, I’ll sell more copies, the book will go higher on the Amazon charts, and I’ll get more exposure. But I won’t make much money…unless it hits the top of the charts and stays there for a long time. But can I count on that?

Of course not. In July, I conducted an experiment and priced all my Jackson e-books at $.99. They got a little bump in sales, then quickly settled into a slightly higher level than where they’d been at $2.99, for example 25 copies a day for one title compared to 15 at the higher price. The problem is the royalty. Amazon only pays a 35% royalty on books under $2.99, instead of 70%. So dropping from $2.99 to $.99 not only means earning a third of the price, it also means receiving half of the royalty.

Straight up math: I have to sell six times as many books at the lower price to make exactly the same money. And that’s hard to pull off. There are so many authors and publishers now offering their books at $.99 that it’s hard to gain much attention with that price, especially since my books have been on the market a while and already reached thousands of readers. (And thank you to all those readers!)

After only a few weeks, my experiment taught me this: I can’t make a living selling e-books at $.99. Yet, I have to make a living. I’m a full-time novelist now and I don’t want to go back to freelancing. If I were to start editing again to make up the cash difference, I would write less and disappoint my readers who are waiting for the next Jackson book.

So all my e-books are now back to the higher price, and The Arranger will be released at $2.99. It’s still a great bargain for readers, and the plan is to leave my prices set. Readers like consistency, and I’m sure they’re as tired of the price fluctuations as I am. I certainly hope this is my last post on the subject. If you want to read another blog about cheap e-books, written with a lot more passion, check out The 99 Cent Ghetto.

Readers: Are you willing to pay $2.99 for an e-book you want?
Writers: Have you experimented with price and found the optimum?

This is a reprint from L.J. Sellers‘ blog.

Texas, I was upset I wasn’t covering the story more up close

and personal. It was my day off and my phone rang several

James Michael Doughty

4

times, waking me up. I listened to the messages, one of which

was my sister telling me she was praying for me. I turned on

the TV and fell to my knees. I said a quick prayer and went to

work. All those children left without a mother or father—it

was the first time I realized I wasn’t alone as the only kid

who would grow up without a dad.

The Creative Penn has a post about the cost of indie publishing wherein she describes a sliding scale of possible expenditure by the indie author. At the low end, the enterprising and spendthrift indie can publish a book for about five bucks.  At the high end, an enterprising and astoundingly wealthy indie can spend over thirty thousand to achieve basically the same thing.  Note that I said basically, not exactly; the quality and distribution channels that come with a 30K price tag will surpass what you get for five dollars.  However, really great stories remain great, even if they’re written on free napkins with a stolen pen.  The problem there is that any work published that way is not only greatly limited in circulation, but limited in lifespan, too, because napkins have their ways of getting soggy or destroyed.  While I don’t intend to release  jewel-encrusted print editions, I want something a bit more accessible and lasting than a napkin:  I want a paperback and various electronic formats.

I’m more enterprising than I am astoundingly wealthy, so even my highest expenditures must be magnitudes lower than 30K.  But how low can I go? How low should I go?  What expenses can I cut, and still get what I want?  What is the least I can spend to get a version of my book to market?

This is an excerpt from Aniko Carmean‘s blog.

Yesterday, we excerpted from and linked to a piece by Edan Lepucki, in which she talks about letting go of a first novel that didn’t sell. Today, we excerpt from and link to a rebuttal from Kristen Tsetsi.

“Magic 8 Ball,” I asked, “will my first novel be published?”

Yes. Definitely.

Hm.

“Magic 8 Ball, am I a man?”

Yes. Definitely.

Dammit.

___________

Edan Lepucki, in her recent article in The Millions, briefly plays with the idea of a) showing her cleavage in her author photo or b) falsifying her bio to make herself seem exotic (foreign) and male (thought to be more skilled/serious writers) as a means of getting the attention of publishers who haven’t been interested in her novel, which was (less interestingly) written by “an American woman living in an uncool neighborhood in Los Angeles.”

I’ve thought about this, too. And, like Lepucki, I gave it consideration “not entirely seriously, and not entirely in jest.” It’s occurred to me as a woman not-yet-beyond-relative-youth that in this country (and most others), breasts will sell just about anything. A “serious” writer posing topless with her manuscript? Sure, it reduces her to a sex object and reeks of desperation, but all evidence points to It Would Probably Work. As long as the book gets published in the end, isn’t it worth it? And isn’t it the people suddenly giving it attention because of a pair of breasts, and not the author, who should be ashamed?

Like I said, I’ve thought about this.  I’ve also thought about creating a male, and fully Albanian, pseudonym (“Tsetsi” is exotic enough, but “Kristen” doesn’t have that foreign flair).

Because like Lepucki, I’ve been close to publication, and now I’m faced with a dilemma not so different from hers: what to do if a book doesn’t sell.

THEN

Like Lepucki, I’ve had an agent. But way back before finally acquiring that agent, a long line of query rejections had been blissfully interrupted by emails – and a phone call – from fairly big-name agents who said things like, “We love this, but literary fiction is hard to sell, and even harder when it’s coming from an ‘unknown.’”

Read the rest of the post on Kristen Tsetsi‘s blog.

 My new novel, "Be Still and Know That I Am" is now available

This essay, by Edan Lepucki, originally appeared on The Millions on 8/23/11.

In May, after my novel manuscript had been read and rejected by a healthy number of editors, my husband rewrote my author bio. It read as follows:

Edan Lepucki was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1981. He currently lives in East Bushwick.

As an American woman living in an uncool neighborhood in Los Angeles, I thought this hilarious. I also wondered — not entirely seriously, and not entirely in jest — if the revision might help my situation. My situation being that my agent had begun submitting my book nine months prior (not that I was keeping track), and it remained unsold. Admittedly, there had been close calls with two different editors, but, as everyone knows, almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. I was in the same place I’d been back in September. That is, unpublished. The waiting game was starting to char my soul; if you drew a finger across it and put that finger to your tongue, it would taste bitter. Joking with my husband (“Now that I’m nursing, I’ll send them a new author photo, cleavage and all!”) was one of the few coping mechanisms I had left in me.

Now that it’s almost September (“If anyone in publishing actually worked in the summer, I would’ve sold my book by now!”), the jokes aren’t as funny. The truth is, my novel isn’t selling, and it probably won’t. There, I’ve said it. Eventually, a writer must accept rejection, accept the death of her first true darling, and move on. Can I face that sobering reality? Can I put my first book into the drawer, and shut it?

Others have done it before me. There’s a long and rich history of successful writers whose first (second, third…) books didn’t see the light of day. I remember when Myla Goldberg came to speak to the Creative Writing Department at Oberlin. She explained that Bee Season was actually her second novel. “My first,” she told us wide-eyed undergraduates, “you’ll never read.” At twenty, I thought this terribly tragic. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Dan Kois wrote about novelists who abandoned books for one reason or another: Michael Chabon’s infamously unfinished tome, Fountain City, for instance, and the burned pages of Gogol and Waugh. But the differences between these authors and myself are important. Firstly, they all had dazzling careers, failed book or not. I can’t (yet…) say the same for myself. Secondly, these authors decided to kill their books, whereas my darling was murdered.

Read the rest of the essay on The Millions.

Publetariat staff are taking Friday, 9/2 through Monday, 9/5 off in observance of the U.S. Labor Day holiday. No new content will be posted to the site until the evening of Monday the 5th, though Publetariat members can still post to the Publetariat Forum and their own Publetariat blogs in the interim.

And by the way, did you know Labor Day was made a U.S. national holiday in order to quell social unrest following the deaths of some striking workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals in 1894—essentially out of government fear of retaliation from the labor movement? Yeah, neither did we till we looked it up on Wikipedia.

This article, by Sarah Crown, originally appeared on the Guardian UK’s Books Blog on 9/1/11.

A new company, Booktrack, is devising book-length soundtracks for novels and non-fiction. Is it a good idea? Or do we risk losing the serendipitous soundtracks that already accompany our reading?

How’s about this for some brave new world-ery? Very interesting piece in The Atlantic about a company called Booktrack, which "creat[es] synchronized soundtracks for e-books that dramatically boost the reader’s imagination and engagement".

The company was founded by brothers Mark and Paul Cameron, after Mark realised that "as he selected his own music-reading pairings" he was "choosing songs that emotionally corresponded to the words on the page". Inspired, the pair set about devising "movie-like soundtracks for digital books" (it only works for digital books, as the soundtrack needs to be linked to the page you’re reading), combining sound effects and original music. They only have tracks for a handful of books so far, but if you click on the copy of Sherlock Holmes on the top shelf on this page, and watch the trailer, you get a sense of where they’re going with it.

It’s an interesting idea, and I’d quite like to try it out. If done well, I guess it could potentially enhance the reading experience, though I worry – even from watching that brief Sherlock Holmes snippet – that the words and the sound effects would fall out of sync too easily. My only real concern is that I’d be sorry to see the demise of the accidental soundtracks that have punctuated my own reading life.
 

Read the rest of the article, and view a video about Booktrack, on the Guardian UK’s Books Blog.

This post, by J.A. Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 8/30/11.

I’ve had a few people forward me the article written by Ewan Morrison for the Guardian, Are Books Dead, And Can Authors Survive?

Read the rest of the post on J.A. Konrath‘s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

There are times in every writer’s life when ideas will come flooding in — but not for the story you’re working on.  You don’t want to forget those little gems because they would be great in another story, yet they’re useless for what you’re doing right now.  So what do you do?

Something I learned a long time ago was to keep an idea file.  Ideas come in many forms from quotes we’ve read to pictures we’ve seen to that fabulous new movie we just saw (if you have the time ).  Whatever the form, it’s best to capture the idea as soon as possible.

For certain items, such as magazine articles, it’s easy enough to rip them out and file them away.  For others we have to get a bit more creative.  An example would be a wonderful painting from a museum.  It’s considered a crime to grab the painting and run (and I’m pretty sure trying to explain it away as “needing it for my idea file” wouldn’t get you very far).  Thus we must get creative.  You may be able to photograph it or, barring that, perhaps sketch it.  If you’re art skills don’t go beyond stick men, then maybe you could write a description of it.

One nifty little tool I’ve discovered is Evernote. If you’ve got a smart phone, this application can be very useful. Snap a picture of whatever sparked your story idea, then share it to your Evernote with notes, tags, whatever. Your ideas are readily available to you via the web on any smartphone (with the downloaded app) or computer.

Regardless of how you get the inspirational item into your idea file, remember to write down the idea that was inspired and attach it.  Sticky notes work great for hard copies (though the sticky does eventually wear off so be aware that your ideas may go wandering in your file).

Writing takes ideas.  Being an Independent Author means being creative in every area of your career.  And so, that’s why it’s important to collect the little gems that inspire you along.

What other creative solutions have you found to capturing story ideas?

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s blog.

This post, by Christine M. Grote, originally appeared on her Random Thoughts From Midlife blog on 8/24/11.

I’m going to share a few tips with you I’ve learned about putting pictures on the web, and about WordPress in particular. If you use Blogger or some other software, I don’t know how much of this will apply, but you might pick up a tip or two.

Sometimes I find inserting and formatting images into posts the most frustrating challenge of blogging. You may already know all of this, and more. Feel free to move on, or stay and enlighten us with a comment about a tip or two you may know. Don’t miss the Eiffel Tower photos at the end.

Let me start by saying I am far from being an expert. What I know I’ve learned largely from trial and error.

Here’s what the WordPress “Add New Post” screen looks like. I got this photo from taking a screen shot on my Mac by holding down the keys: command-shift-3. The computer saves a png file of the image on my screen to my desktop. I can open the saved file with my photo editing software, in this case photoshop, and crop it to whatever I want. PCs come with a “print screen” button that saves the image to your clipboard where you can paste it into a new file in your image editing software like photoshop or elements. I learned this about the PC this morning from this website where I also learned a few more tips about saving a screen shot on a mac. I’ll go back and look at it in more detail later.

Beside the circled Upload/Insert Image button, are the other buttons for uploading and inserting video, audio, media, poll, and custom form. I might have uploaded a video before, but otherwise I haven’t tried out any of these other buttons. When you click the insert image this is the next screen you get:

Read the rest of the post on Christine M. Grote‘s Random Thoughts From Midlife blog.

This post originally appeared on the Bachelors Degree Online site.

Learning disabilities, including dyslexia, ADD, ADHD, and autism can be life changing and debilitating. Many students struggle in school or drop out altogether. But for others, a learning disability may be a gift, requiring them to work harder and achieve more, or have a special focus or talent. It is for this reason that so many high achieving people have learning disabilities, including Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo Da Vinci. Although those with learning disabilities typically have trouble with communication, many writers are also in the high achieving, learning disabled club. We’ve highlighted 25 of them here: famous authors and writers who suffer, or thrive from, a learning disability.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is the best-selling author of all time, with about four billion copies sold and translations into at least 103 languages. She is best known for her detective novels and short story collections. But at the same time, she couldn’t even balance her own checkbook due to her learning disability, believed to be dysgraphia. She had a hard time spelling correctly, as a self proclaimed "extraordinarily bad speller" and was not good about remembering numbers, but her learning disability did not hold her back.
 

Stephen J. Cannell

Stephen J. Cannell was an American writer and novelist, as well as TV producer and sometime actor. His most celebrated work was crime drama scripts, with writing credits including The A-Team, 21 Jump Street, The Rockford Files, and The Greatest American Hero. He suffered from dyslexia and struggled in school, but he graduated from the University of Oregon. Cannell used his fame to speak out about dyslexia, and discussed his experiences in the documentary Dislecksia: The Movie.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

As one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his novel, The Great Gatsby, as well as many short stories. But F. Scott Fitzgerald is believed to have had a learning disability, mostly likely dyslexia. It’s reported that he was kicked out of school at the age of 12 for not focusing or finishing his work, and he had a very hard time spelling, but he succeeded as a writer despite his disability.

Scott Adams

The man behind the comic strip Dilbert self-diagnosed his dyslexia. He was working as a bank teller and noticed that his totals didn’t balance at the end of the day. But dyslexia does not seem to have hindered his success, as Dilbert is well loved, in addition to his books, restaurant ownership, and appearances on TV shows. Adams also suffers from focal dystonia, a condition that causes involuntary muscular contraction, as well as spasmodic dysphonia, but he is able to work around all of his conditions.
 

JF Lawton

JF Lawton is a prolific screenwriter, with screen credits including Pretty Woman, Under Siege, and DOA: Dead or Alive. But before he became a popular screenwriter, he suffered from severe dyslexia. The disability made school life difficult, and Lawton had to work hard to overcome this obstacle to become a writer. He credits his father, author Harry Lawton, with the support he needed to succeed– something that families of dyslexics should keep in mind.
 

Dav Pilkey

Dav Pilkey, author and illustrator of the Captain Underpants book series, was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia at an early age. His disabilities caused him to act out in class, and he spent lots of time banished to a desk in the school hallway. It was at this desk where he created Captain Underpants, the character that made him famous as an author and illustrator of children’s literature. For Dav Pilkey, dyslexia and ADHD helped launch a career.

George Bernard Shaw

The famous Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote more than 60 plays and is the only person to be awarded an Oscar as well as a Nobel Prize for Literature for the same film, Pygmalion. It’s believed that Shaw suffered from ADD (attention deficit disorder). Although he was a co-founder of the London School of Economics, he did not like formal education, noting that "Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents."
 

Jeanne Betancourt

Award winning author Jeanne Betancourt is beloved for her Pony Pals book series. Two of the characters in her books, Brian in My Name is Brain Brian and Anna in the Pony Pals, are both dyslexic. She has publicly spoken out about her dyslexia, sharing that she believes being dyslexic helped her as a writer, and explaining that, "Since learning to read and write was difficult for me growing up, I paid more attention to the world around me. I watched and listened carefully to people for clues to what people were thinking and feeling." As a dyslexic, she better developed her skills as a storyteller.

Richard Ford

Richard Ford is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author and a dyslexic. He’s famous for The Sportswriter and its sequels, as well as his short story collection Rock Springs. He has mild dyslexia, but he did not let his disability keep him from developing a love of literature. In fact, he believes that dyslexia actually helped him become a better reader as the disability made him slow down and be thoughtful about the books, sharing that "being slow made me pore over sentences and to be receptive to those qualities in sentences that were not just the cognitive aspect of sentences but were in fact the "poetical" aspects of language…those qualities in language are as likely to carry weight and hold meaning and give pleasure as the purely cognitive, though of course we can’t fundamentally separate those things, although the information age does its best."
 

Jules Verne

Jules Verne pioneered the science fiction genre and inspired steampunk. He is most famous for his novels, including A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days. As a student, he was more interested in writing than working in other subjects. He didn’t do well in school, and often complained of having a hard time focusing. Although undiagnosed, it’s believed that Verne may have had a form of ADD or ADHD. 

Read the rest of the post, featuring 15 more authors with learning disabilities, on the Bachelors Degree Online site.

After spending months writing about a bleak future, I found myself feeling depressed and negative. I even considered giving up writing gritty crime novels—if that’s what it took to stay positive. Then while working on a nonfiction book, I came across my notes for a talk I gave at the library called Why I Read and Write Crime Fiction. It reminded me of the genre’s value and why I should continue to write it and why it’s good for readers too, including the president. Here’s a shortened version of my talk.

Crime fiction confronts the realities of life across various cultures more often and more honestly than mainstream/literary fiction does. Crime novels are suited to exploring provocative social issues and showing how those hot-button subjects affect various people’s lives, often from diverse perspectives.

Crime fiction can be surprisingly poignant and analytical about problems such as illegal immigration, human trafficking, and drug use. These novels highlight deep-rooted cultural ills such as racism, sexism, bigotry, and the dangers of stereotypes. Sometimes a mystery will show a stereotype in all its glory, reminding us of why stereotypes exist and how we all fit into one … at least a little bit. The crime genre often forces us to see the world from perspectives that make us think outside our comfort zone.

As crime writers and readers, we get to make sense of things that would otherwise haunt us. We learn why the family next door disappeared one day or what’s really going on in the creepy warehouse across the street. Sometimes that knowledge helps us sleep better and sometimes it doesn’t, but at least we learn one version of the truth.

Police procedurals and thrillers give us a medium through which we can experience the triumph of good over evil. For short while with each story, we get to be the good guy, the hero who rescues the kidnapped child or saves the president’s life. We get to drag the bad guys off to jail or shoot them dead if “they need killing”— fantasies we can’t act out in our everyday lives. The real-world events around us can be unjust and inexplicable. It’s important to our collective mental health to experience justice, order, and revelation through fiction.

Novels with well-written protagonists and antagonists bring us to terms with the duality within ourselves. Humans are all deeply flawed, with the capacity for great goodness as well as for deceit, jealousy, schadenfreude, addiction, selfishness, and often worse. When crime fiction heroes—detectives, FBI agents, and prosecutors—possess such flaws, we not only relate to those characters, we forgive ourselves for the same shortcomings. When a killer calls his mother or pets a stray dog, we hate him a little less and remember to look for good qualities in everyone.

Crime novels explore relationships in a way that few other genres can. What better mechanism to test a bond between husband and wife, parent and child, or lifelong friends than to embroil the relationship in a crime, either as victims, suspects, or perpetrators. Similar to natural disasters, the aftermath of a crime can bring out the best—or worst—in humans.

The genre is also rich with possibilities for exploring the complexity of the human condition. Victims become predators; predators become victims. A person is guilty, but not in the way we’ve been led to believe. Most of all, crime fiction is full of surprises, and we readers love the unexpected. When was the last time a reviewer used the word twist when discussing a literary novel?

Why do you read and/or write crime fiction? Does it ever get you down?
 

This post, by L.J. Sellers, originally appeared on Crime Fiction Collective.

This article, by Hernán Iglesias Illa, originally appeared on the Publishing Perspectives site on 8/5/11.

Online start-ups Byliner and The Atavist have established a market for stories too long for magazines and too short for books.

NEW YORK: How long should a book be? For more than a century, publishers and authors have understood that most commercial books, to be profitable and viable, should come in around 250 pages, give or take a hundred or two. With the popularization of e-books, though, the restraints of the paper-based industry no longer apply, but new standards are still evolving. How long should an e-book be?

Two American startups, Byliner and The Atavist, are looking for an answer to this question in the middle ground between 5,000 word magazine articles and 100,000 words books. Earlier this year, both started publishing creative non-fiction titles that are too long to fit into a magazine or too short to fill a book.

They don’t call them “e-books” (Byliner refers to them as “originals”) and they don’t price them like regular e-books, either. While most digital versions of print books retail for around $10 in stores like Amazon or iBooks, Byliner’s ($0.99 to $5.99) and The Atavist’s ($1.99 or $2.99) pieces are much cheaper. And both share the revenue with the authors, who get 50% of what the editors receive.

They also had a promising start. Byliner’s first two articles hit the New York Times’ bestseller list for digital products, and The Atavist’s app for the iPad and the iPhone has been downloaded more than 40,000 times, according to the company.

John Tayman, CEO and co-founder of Byliner, started thinking about these issues a few years ago, after emerging from the three years he devoted to writing The Colony (Scribner), a book about an infamous leprosy colony in Hawaii. Tayman, who had been a magazine writer and editor for most of his career, found himself realizing that the stories he really wanted to write and read were longer than traditional magazine articles, but shorter than books. “I wanted stories that, as a reader, I could deal with in two or three hours,” says Tayman from his office in San Francisco. “And, as a writer, I wanted stories that I could get off my desk in one month or two, instead of a year or two.”

Read the rest of the article on Publishing Perspectives.