Publetariat

In The Truth About CreateSpace’s Free ISBNs, it was stated that if an author who has accepted a free ISBN from CreateSpace subsequently removes his book from CreateSpace, CreateSpace might reassign the ISBN that was assigned to his book (aka, "recycle" the ISBN). This is not true. 

According to Amanda Wilson, CreateSpace’s Public Relations Manager, CreateSpace does not, and never has, reassigned its ISBNs. If an author accepts the free ISBN and subsequently removes her book from CreateSpace, the ISBN assigned to her book will go out of circulation.

This post, by Jeff Gomez, originally appeared on his Print is Dead Blog on 5/30/07. Hard as it may be to believe, book review sections were already beginning to shrink and disappear even then—two years ago.

Last week, Art Winslow had an essay on the Huffington Post site’s Eat the Press section; entitled “The New Book Burning,” the essay revolved around the recent reduction of book review sections in a handful of major American newspapers.

Writes Winslow: “In the new book burning we don’t burn books, we burn discussion of them instead. I am referring to the ongoing collapse of book review sections at American newspapers, which has accelerated in recent months, an intellectual brownout in progress that is beginning to look like a rolling blackout instead.”

First of all, I think Winslow is being more than slightly hysterical when he tries to portray the disappearance of book review sections as being “the new book burning.” That’s not only a ridiculous suggestion, but a dangerous one.

Burning books is about the totalitarian eradication of what the ideas in books represent, whereas book review sections being slimmed down or phased out is about simple economics and the fact that, in our Internet age, things are rapidly changing and book reviews are no longer needed. But Winslow prefers to take a darker view, rhetorically asking, “How did we arrive at what seems to be a cultural sinkhole?” Instead of answering that, I’d like to ask Winslow a question: “Where have you been for the past ten years?”

But what I find most interesting about Winslow’s essay is that he’s a “former literary editor and executive editor of The Nation magazine and a regular contributor to Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Bookforum and other publications.” So it seems that Winslow, and many critics and writers like him, are really just clamoring to keep their jobs. In the end, they don’t want things to change because they don’t want to give up the power they currently have.

In the past, Winslow and the other book reviewers out there acted as the arbiters of literary taste: when they would write a good review of a book, their review had the power to propel that book into the national spotlight (and vice versa; a bad review could ruin a book, and sometimes an entire career). So while the importance of movie critics has lessened over the years (gore-fests like Hostel and Saw, which are routinely ravaged by reviewers, go on to make millions at the box office despite what any critic says), in the book world, reviewers have — until fairly recently — retained their clout. (As New Order put it in a song, “We’re not like all those stupid people/who can’t decide what book to read/unless a paper sows the seed”).

But with the Internet, blogs, the rise of “citizen journalism” and user-generated content, book reviewers are seeing their little corner of the world erode and fall into the sea, and they don’t like it.

Read the rest of the post on the Print is Dead Blog.

This article, by Damien G. Walter, originally appeared on The Guardian UK Books Blog on 9/24/08.

The future can be worrying to consider at the best of times. But with a global economic crisis looming, a war on terrorism and the continuing threat of climate change to ponder, the future looks bleak indeed. It’s at times like these that people seek escape in the pages of popular fiction. But anyone looking for a better future in science fiction is in for a shock.

Back in the golden age of science fiction, the future was a much brighter place. Pulp magazines gave readers amazing stories of flying cars, towering skyscrapers and the utopian metropolis. Legendary writers like Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov predicted a future where science took mankind to the stars and beyond. And all this in the face of the Great Depression, two world wars and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. There was no lack of reason for people then to be very gloomy indeed about the future, but maybe because the times were dark, readers flocked to the visions of a brighter future offered by science fiction.

But for all its sense of wonder, golden age science fiction was guilty of a peculiar naivety in its depiction of the future. In its wake the character of the genre changed radically. The new wave movement, lead by writers like J G Ballard, Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, reacted against the pulp roots of the genre, writing science fiction that drew heavily on literary technique and values.

Writers from Ursula K Le Guin to Octavia Butler saw the potential of science fiction for expression, but rejected the overwhelmingly white, male perspective that dominated the genre. Bruce Sterling, William Gibson and other cyberpunk authors imagined futures so dark that even the human soul could be destroyed. Science fiction evolved into a sophisticated literature of ideas, offering dark warnings of the future to come.

Read the rest of the article on The Guardian UK Books Blog.

This piece, by Jim C. Hines, originally appeared on his blog on 4/29/09. In it, Mr. Hines looks at what it takes for a mainstream author’s book to "earn out" its advance—and why big advances aren’t necessarily a good thing for authors.

Publishers and authors tend to keep actual numbers under wraps when it comes to print runs and books sold. As a result, new authors are often clueless as to what’s normal.

I know I was completely lost the first time I saw actual numbers for Goblin Quest. Was my book selling well? Was I going to get dumped if I didn’t sell 100,000 books in the first year? How many books did my publisher actually print?

I don’t actually know what my print runs have been. I have some guesses, but nothing from the publisher. But then I got to thinking…

We know the median first novel advance for a SF/F author is probably around $5000 or so. That’s the boilerplate first offer I got from Baen (which then fell through, but that’s another story). Average is a little higher than the median, but I’m going to stick with $5000 for ease of math.

We also know not all novels earn out their advance, especially first novels. $5000 is a best-guess on the part of the publisher as to how much they should invest in your new book.

Sticking purely with mass market paperbacks for the moment, let’s say you get royalties at 8% (fairly standard but not universal for an original mass market, I believe) and a cover price of $7.99 (also standard U.S. cover price for mass markets). So you’re earning $.64 per book.

Juggle the numbers, and a $5000 advance means you’re going to need to sell roughly 8,000 books (7,812.5) in order to earn out. In my case, I’d guess the publisher probably did a print run between 10,000 and 15,000 books, but that’s a total guess, and hopefully more experienced publishing folks can speak to that piece.

(ETA: ramblin_phyl points out that there’s also a break-even point in the cost-efficiency of first print runs, which might mean the numbers on that run were a little higher.)

Hardcovers and e-books add more variables, as the royalties are different, but I’m trying to keep things as simple as possible for this example.
 

Read the rest of the article on Jim C. Hines’ blog.

This piece, by Janice Hardy, originally appeared on her The Other Side of the Story blog on 4/15/09.

We spend a lot of time focusing on our core conflict, and rightly so since that’s what driving our novels. But what about the subplots? Those pesky side stories that either deepen our novels or side track them to dark alleys and bang them over the head.

With my first novel, the subplots ruled. Every time I got a cool idea for a character, no matter how important they were, I ran with it. That’s probably why I had eleven POVs and couldn’t tell you what the dang book was about.

The next novel, I kept a tight leash on the subplots. The book was pretty flat, because nothing beyond the main story ever happened to shake things up.

Finally, I found a balance that worked for me. Core external conflict, core internal conflict, handful of subplots.

But there’s a catch…

They all have to be connected.

The core conflict is the bulk of my story. Protag needs X, and will do anything to get X. But constantly reading about, oh lets make up something… Bob being chased by zombies … is pretty boring after a while. We all know how stories go. We know that Bob is going to be thwarted by zombies at every turn until the end of the book, where he’ll pull something out of his, um, hat and save the day. (or get eaten if that’s the kind of story you’re writing).

Bob’s core conflict: Zombies are trying to eat him and everyone around him.

His goal: To survive and kill off the zombies.

Yawn.

We need subplots to spice this up so it isn’t as predictable what will happen. I could give Bob another threat to deal with, say crazed renegade bikers taking advantage of the chaos, who are also trying to kill him. But really, two "trying to kill you" threats are basically the same thing. The stakes are still the same, and the story is still going to follow the same path as with the zombies. There’s nothing new to offer the reader in terms of a problem to overcome.

What I need to do, is give Bob a problem that has totally different stakes than getting eaten. He has to risk something else that matters to him. End of the world stories need a little romance, so let’s give him Jane.

Jane is the love if his life, but he’s been afraid to tell her that. They’re running from zombies together, and he’s working up the courage to profess his love for her. He has something beyond himself at stake now, and bad things could happen to either. Worrying about Jane is an additional worry for Bob. But what might happen to Bob can easily still happen to Jane, so the stakes are only marginally raised. We need a different threat. A personal threat, since the other threats are all impersonal.
 

Read the rest of the article on Janice Hardy’s The Other Side of the Story blog.

This piece, by David B. Coe, originally appeared on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists site on 4/23/09. 

 I’m in the midst of rewrites.  I received a revision letter from my editor the other day and have been wading through his comments, trying to bring fresh thinking to a novel that I finished six months ago, the last book in a series that I was glad to finish. 

Don’t get me wrong; I like the series very much, and I think that the three books taken together represent my best work to date.  But this trilogy followed a five book series set in the same world, and I.  Am.  Ready.  To.  Move.  On.  

And in fact I have moved on.  I’ve completed the first book in a new project that I love.  My mind is there, in that new world.  My head is filled with the stories of a whole new cast of characters.  Wrenching myself out of that world and back into this one is no small feat.

I find myself wishing that just this once my editor had said in his revision letter, “David, this is perfect.  Don’t change a word.”

Okay, I’m back now.  For a while there I was laughing too hard to type….  

I’ve described the revision process in a more methodical way elsewhere and I won’t bother going over it again here.  But I will say that, for me, it may be the most emotionally draining part of writing a novel and preparing it for publication.  I don’t mean this as a complaint.  Truly I don’t.  But going through my own 140,000 word manuscript reading comment after comment about all the things I did wrong isn’t easy.  

This manuscript is actually pretty clean; few problems over all.  Still, there must be 300 comments in there, ranging from subtle changes in wording, to corrections of silly mistakes, to more substantial comments relating to character and plotting.  And though I love my editor, and though I’ve been through this many times before and have developed a fairly thick skin, I have to admit that some of my editor’s remarks raise my hackles.

Read the rest of the article on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Novelists site.

I had a nice interview today on Cowgirl Life radio. It was fun.

Blog talk radio is a great networking too.

Numenon, by Sandy Nathan, is a Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner!

By winning a Nautilus Silver Award with her book, Numenon, author Sandy Nathan joins the ranks of Deepak Chopra, M.D., Barbara Kingsolver, Thich Nnat Hanh, Jean Houston, PhD., Eckhart Tolle, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. All are Nautilus Award winners. “Joining the company of these amazing people moves me to tears,” says Sandy.

As a Silver Award Winner, Numenon will pass to the highest level of judging for the Nautilus Awards, the Gold Award level. If Numenon wins at this level, it will be featured at the Book Expo America and win many other honors.

“As wonderful as it would be to win the Gold Award, what thrills me is what the Nautilus Awards are about,” says Sandy. “My writing and life are directed toward making this planet a better place. I feel like I’ve found a spiritual home with the Nautilus contest and the people behind it.”

The Nautilus Award was established to find and reward distinguished literary contributions to spiritual growth, conscious living, high-level wellness, green values, responsible leadership and positive social change as well as to the worlds of art, creativity and inspirational reading for children, teens and young adults.

The Nautilus Awards are dedicated to “changing the world one book at a time.” Books are judged in a three-tier system using a carefully prepared list of notable characteristics. The judging process is laborious and long, carried out by three teams of highly qualified reviewers. They have successful careers in the book industry as well as the vision to pick out books that offer new options for a better world. Each book is evaluated by at least two judges. Silver winners are selected from each category by the readers in Team #2, and these winning titles are then passed along to the third team where the Gold winners are chosen. Two judges must agree on each Silver winner – and consensus is required for the Gold Winners.

Sandy Nathan, "one happy author!"

“This blog is one way that I connect with my fellow writers and authors, as well as my readers,” says Sandy Nathan. “I have a request. I would appreciate your prayers, blessings, good wishes, positive thoughts, or whatever fits your personal beliefs for Numenon as it winds its way through the Nautilus judging process and the judging of the other contests in which it’s entered. It’s entered in four or five more. I believe in the power of prayer, and I always pray reciprocate. Actually, I just pray for everyone all the time. If you could cast a positive vibe in Numenon’s direction, I’d be very grateful.”

This post, by John Dougherty, originally appeared on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure on 4/1/09.

We had a science teacher at our secondary school who, on this date every year, would send some hapless first year to one of his colleagues with a request for a long stand. Or, occasionally, a big weight.

Even then, I always thought the ‘long stand’ was the better gag (not much better, but that was about as sophisticated as humour got at our school). After all, you wouldn’t normally talk about ‘a big wait’; it would be a long wait, wouldn’t it? But of course if he’d requested a long wait, a child who’d been warned about the ‘long stand’ prank might make the connection.

I’ve been thinking lately about how it’s on this sort of care with words, and this sort of awareness of the meanings of words, that good writing often rests. Probably it’s particularly on my mind at the moment because I’ve been going through the proofs for my next book, Jack Slater and the Whisper of Doom, and one of the things to be aware of – at this stage at least as much as any other – is that sometimes a phrase which carries your meaning perfectly adequately can also carry another meaning.

It’s not enough to think, "Does this say what I want it to?" – there should also be a small part of the writer’s brain asking, "Does this say anything I don’t want it to?"

My son was recently reading a book in which a character – in a environment very familiar to him – is looking for somewhere to hide. There are a lot of short, sharp sentences to emphasise the urgency of the situation – "His enemy was getting closer. He looked round," that sort of thing – and then comes the sentence, "A great oak tree grew in the corner of the field."

Reading on, it’s fairly clear that the writer means that there was a great oak tree in the corner of the field that had been growing there for some years and which was still alive and therefore growing; but when I read the sentence, it caused me to stumble internally, because for a moment I wondered if the writer might mean that as the character watched, a tree began to grow and in a matter of seconds was very large.

Some of you may think I’m just being pedantic – and you wouldn’t be the first – but to my mind, pedantry’s a much underrated pastime; and in my defence, there were a number of factors that made this a not entirely unreasonable supposition:
 

• the story was a fantasy, set in a fantasy land, and magical things were already happening in the scene
   
• the short, sharp sentences were setting me up to expect events – x happened, then y happened, then w happened (surprising everyone who was expecting z next) – rather than description
   
• since the character was in a familiar environment, looking for somewhere to hide, I’d have expected him to know that the tree was there; being told ‘he looked round’ and then ‘a tree grew’, rather than ‘he saw the tree’ threw me a bit

Read the rest of the post on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure.

This article was originally posted at Alan’s blog – The Word.

Rejection is an inevitable part of the writing life. If you’re not good with rejection, you should never even entertain the idea of being a writer. It never ceases to amaze me just how belligerent some people get about rejections. And often, the most vocal are usually the worst writers, refusing to learn from critiques and improve their craft.

No matter how good you think you might be as a writer, you can always improve. My many years learning and teaching martial arts has taught me that there’s never an end to learning any kind of art. Writing, painting, dancing, Kung Fu – no matter how good you are, you can always get better.

And no matter how good you are, you will always get rejections. I’m sure that even Errol Flynn didn’t bed every woman he pursued.

So rejection is a part of the writing life and you need to get used to that. I remember an old Peanuts cartoon, where Snoopy is cold and depressed so Woodstock cheers him up by making a blanket out of Snoopy’s rejection slips. You can’t do that any more, as rejections are usually via email (even if submissions aren’t), but the underlying principle still applies. When you get served lemons, make lemonade. When you get rejections, learn.

Often a rejection will simply say, "Thanks but no thanks." But you will occasionally get a few words giving some kind of reason for the rejection. On rare occasions you’ll get a more detailed critique. I’ve found that the more my writing improves, the better class of rejection I receive. That’s moving in a good direction, right? I’ll often get a rejection saying something along the lines of, "This was so close to being accepted, but we decided against it because…" Frustrating as it is, rejections like that are worth their weight in gold. (Well, they’re worth more than that – the weight of an email in gold does not a rich man make, but you get the idea.)

Never, ever just write rejections like that off. Don’t be a princess and harrumph and say, "Well, they just don’t get it. They don’t recognise my genius." Most likely they recognise a lot more about you than you recognise about yourself. Pay attention to the points they raise, think really hard about any advice they give, try to apply that advice to a new draft of the story. It will make it better, every time.

In my experience, the most painful rejections are the rejections from shortlists. You’ve submitted your work, you’re really pleased with the story, and you sit back to wait. After a few weeks or months, depending on the publication, you get a letter back. It says something like, "We really like this piece and would like to hold onto it for another (x) weeks to see if we can fit it into our publication/anthology/whatever."

This is great news – if it goes no further than this, remember to be pleased that you got shortlisted. But it really does burn when you get another letter several weeks later saying, "Sorry, we’ve decided against it." It burns because you know it was good enough to be bought and published, you know they seriously considered it, but in the end something else they received was better. So short of getting a balaclava and a weapon and hunting down all the authors that are better than you, you have to suck it up and move on. Something about that shortlisted story worked, so your writing is going in the right direction. Fan the flames of that near success and keep plugging on and on.

You will get far more rejections than you ever get acceptances, unless you become as famous as Neil Gaiman. He can write anything and it gets bought. In the meantime, you just have to keep playing the game.

I’ve just yesterday had one of those shortlist rejections, which is what prompted me to write this post. It was for an anthology and I thought I was in, but got rejected in the last round. And yeah, it burns. But at least I know that story is a good one. A little more polish and it’ll go out again to other places and we’ll see if someone else will buy it. I have another story that is currently sitting on a shortlist. Fingers crossed that I might be luckier with that one. I also have two or three other short stories out there with other publications that I’m waiting to hear back on.

Four or five stories in circulation and the odds are that I’ll get four or five rejections. But you have to stay in it. I’ve sold work before and I’ll sell work again. Hopefully I’ll eventually improve my skills to the point where I can sell more and get rejected less. Either way, it’s something I’m compelled to do and I love writing. You have to. No one in their right mind would put themselves through this grinder on a regular basis unless they loved what they did.

"Be not afriad of moving slowly. Fear only standing still." – Old Chinese proverb.

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Alan is an indie author and publisher with two dark fantasy novels in print – RealmShift and MageSign. You can learn all about him at his website.

This piece, by P. Bradley Robb, originally appeared on the Fiction Matters site on 3/23/09.

“Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”
– Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut’s first rule of writing addresses what I like to call the Golden Assumption – “If you write it, they will read.”

Yes, writing a book is an incredibly time consuming task. Days often skip weeks and fly straight into months, piling up with abandon before the first draft is even done. After spending so long writing a novel, as a writer it can be very easy to feel entitled. After all, you worked so hard, it’s easy to feel that at least some people should repay you that time by reading your work.

However, reading is itself an investment. When a reader picks up a book, they are asking to be entertained for the better part of ten hours. In the age when laws are being passed to stop people from multitasking while driving, ten hours of undivided attention is no small sum.

Thus, according to Mr. Vonnegut, we owe it to our readers to not make light of that investment. How? Write a book that offers the reader a reward for reading. Not a monetary reward, mind you, but rather a story that is and of itself rewarding.

For some, this means not pulling out a punch out ending ala St. Elsewhere. For others it means nixing a favorite scene because it just doesn’t work, or cutting out a favorite character, or even changing the narrative point of view. For me? It means I am going through a rather extensive pre-writing process before I get too involved in my book.

How about you, how do you ensure that you’re making the most of your reader’s time?

Go to this post on Fiction Matters and scroll down to related posts to read  analyses of Vonnegut’s Rules #2, #3 and #4. .

This article, by Hirsh Sawhney, originally appeared on The Guardian UK Books Blog on 3/11/09.

While the majors are in terrified thrall to the bottom line, the shoestring passions of the small presses will carry on regardless

It’s not a good time for New York’s books world, or so they tell me. I’ve just returned to this legendary literary capital to earn a living as a hack, and the tales of publishing pessimism are already suffocating me.

Book sales are flagging, to put it mildly; some predict 2009 will be the worst year the industry has seen in decades. As a result, senior editors are being axed, and others have been told to stop acquiring new books and having Martini lunches on the company tab.

More serious still, the books sections of several major newspapers have shut down; reduced coverage of books will likely translate into even fewer sales. Publishers, they say, will have no choice but to sink their resources into safer investments – we should probably look forward to a rash of ghost-written celebrity novels. According to some, the only thing left to read in a few years will be raunchy, simplistic e-books.

Could literary culture really be breathing its last? Should readers and writers be running for cover? Of course not. But what, then, will save literature from economic disaster? Simple: independent publishing. Yes, independents – the ones who struggle to sell enough books to make payroll – will ensure that engaging, challenging books continue to be produced and consumed. It’s they who’ll safeguard literature through the dark economic days ahead.

I’m biased, of course. My own book – yes, here comes some shameless self-promotion – is being published by one of New York’s most exciting small publishers, Akashic. After working closely with this boutique house for more than two years – and hearing rumblings from friends and colleagues who work with bigger houses – I’m convinced that the services small and mid-sized independent publishers provide are truly unique.

First of all, there’s the personal care that a writer receives from an indie house. I send an email with an idea or a doubt; two minutes later, my very busy publisher writes me back. I have an issue with some changes to my manuscript or concerns about a foreign licensing deal; we discuss it over orange juice on a Sunday morning.

But this touchy-feeliness is just the icing on the cake. The real virtue of working with an independent publisher is the artistic experimentation they not only allow, but encourage. Akashic’s proclivity for edginess and iconoclasm was apparent every step of the way while I was editing Delhi Noir, an anthology of urban Indian fiction for them, and this tendency is apparent in most of the titles they put out.

Read the rest of the article on The Guardian UK Books Blog.

My name is Bobby Ozuna, author of the literary fiction novel: PROUD SOULS, public speaker, ghost-writer and host of a new Internet Radio (Talk) Show called "The Soul of Humanity" My show was designed to offer a platform for independent artists–from musicians to authors–and promote their efforts to create success within their passions. I have also begun featuring industry experts, such as a lecture agent, a marketing agent (coming soon) and industry leaders pertinent to the world of indie arts.

"The Soul of Humanity" streams LIVE every Wednesday night @ 7PM CST via the Artist First (World) Radio Network and reaches a world wide listening audience of over 7,000 listeners with an archive feature, so your fans and followers can catch re-broadcasts of your show at any time and any date.

To help indie artists who are not ready for an interview, I offer a "plug" feature where for a simple $10 USD contribution via PayPal, you can have your book or CD title, your name and a brief description of your product plugged LIVE to my listening audience at $10 per show/week.

If you are interested in sponsoring the show or being a guest, or simply having your work plugged LIVE to my world-wide listening audience, please contact me here: bobby@ozunapub.com.

 
…supporting the independent arts…

~Bobby Ozuna  | www.OzunaPub.com  | "Drawing Stories…With Words"