Business End

Articles about the business aspects of publishing and self-publishing.

Screenplay Writing Interview I

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Because Shannon made such an informative comment on my last post, I asked her to please allow me to interview her. The result was so filled with great info, that I am going to split it into 2 or 3 posts. Shannon can be reached at http://www.shannonlarrant.com/ .

Should a writer convert a novel they’ve written into a screenplay?
That really depends on the novel and the writer. A novel written in the first person where much of the plot is explored inside the main character’s mind might not translate well to the screen without some serious rewrites.

Also, if you’re the type of writer who cannot look at your work objectively and rip it to pieces, then you’re probably not the best choice to write the screenplay for it. Being an author myself, I know that a little piece of my heart and soul gets put into everything I write. It can be difficult to look past that but you have to when you’re writing a screenplay. You have a very limited amount of time to convey your entire novel in. If you’re not prepared to cut out chunks of it, you’re not prepared to turn it into a screenplay.

What is the absolute first thing a writer should do when converting a novel into a screenplay?
Make sure you have the film rights for it. This is an absolute must. No legitimate production company will even think about looking at your screenplay without them.

Even if you’re converting one of your own novels, don’t automatically assume you have the rights. If you’ve published your story through a publishing company instead of going the self-publishing route, odds are you no longer have the right to film it without their permission.

 

There are thousands of novels out there where their copyrights have expired and they are now in the public domain. Anything in the public domain can be turned into a movie without written consent.

How would a screenwriter go about securing the rights to a novel?
There’s a couple different ways you can do this. Which one you choose is really dependent on your personal preference and budget. They both begin with contacting whoever presently holds the rights to the novel in question. If it’s a print novel you can buy off the shelves of a major bookstore, odds are the publisher listed on the inside front cover holds the rights. If it’s a self-published print or eBook, generally the author still has all of the rights to it.

 
There are two ways you can contact them; yourself or with the help of a lawyer. Personally, I think it’s more professional if you use a lawyer. Getting a lawyer might be a bit of an investment but you’ll show that you’re serious as a screenwriter and should be taken seriously in return.
Once you contact the rights’ holder of the novel, the next step is to see if they’re even willing to let you write a screenplay based upon it. If they’re interested, you then get to hammer out the details of the contract: how much the film rights will cost, how much say the original author has in the screenplay, how long you have the film rights for, etc …
If you haven’t consulted a lawyer before now, I highly recommend that you do so for this step. While you can create any sort of contract you want with the rights’ holder, a lawyer will be able to help you plan for any potential complications you might encounter down the road and ultimately protect you and your screenplay in the process.
There is nothing worse than pouring your heart and soul into converting a novel into a screenplay that you can’t use because you didn’t take the time to properly secure the film rights first.
 
Where can a screenwriter find works that are in the public domain?
Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) has thousands of books written before 1933 whose copyrights have expired in the United States. Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org) also has a search feature that will allow you to find works you might be able to use, depending on the Creative Commons license assigned to the novel by the author.
Please note, this information is good for residents of the United States only. Laws vary in other countries. If you live outside of the US, be sure to check with the proper authorities in your country before using any work you find in the public domain to write your screenplay.
 
How would you go about converting a novel into a screenplay?
The first place I would start is by reading the novel. It should go without saying that a screenwriter would read the novel first but it’s amazing how many don’t. Even if it’s one I’ve written, I would take the time to read it from start to finish. I would try to get it read with as few interruptions as possible. You don’t want to rush through it but you don’t want to take weeks to get it finished, either.
 
 
After finishing the novel, I would set it aside for a few days. During that time, I would try not to think too much about it or the screenplay I plan on writing.
 
Once several days have passed, then I would sit down and think over what I read; jotting down any scenes, plot points, and characters that immediately come to mind. Odds are good if it’s something I remembered several days after I finished reading the novel, it’s something that’s integral to the overall plot and should be included in the finished screenplay.
 
With that list in hand, I would go back to the novel to fine tune the scenes, plots, and characters that need to be in the screenplay and flesh out anything else I had forgotten about but feel should be included.
 
What are some things writers need to keep in mind when writing a screenplay? Why are these important?
 
The average feature length screenplay is anywhere from 90 to 120 pages long. With one page of a screenplay equating to roughly one minute of film time, that means the average feature length film is anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours long. It’s very important to keep this information in mind while writing your screenplay because most production companies and screenwriting competitions will not accept screenplays that fall outside of the 90 to 120 page range.
 
Some will make exceptions if you are a few pages under or over but that’s it.
Even though your script most likely hasn’t been picked up for production yet, it’s still a good idea to write with some sort of budget in mind. Basically, you want to try to keep the budget small. It’s easier to spend more money if you have any leftover than it is to cut costs later. A smaller budget also means you can pitch your script to more production companies.
 
The absolute cheapest script to shoot is one that can be filmed with one camera, in one location, with a minimal amount of actors, costumes, and special effects. Obviously, these restrictions aren’t always practical for the screenplay you’re writing but it does help explain why adult films and B-horror movies tend to be the biggest money makers in the movie industry.
 
Generally, action sequences are quicker to shoot than dramatic ones, but can be expensive depending on the props and special effects involved. Unless you know the cast ahead of time, dramatic scenes can be a total crapshoot. You can get a shot done in one take or take all day just getting one good take of one shot. There are so many variables that come into play that can make dramatic scenes deceptively expensive and time consuming.
 
The best course of action is to be flexible and to try to keep a good balance between the two. If you have to write drama, keep the number of actors and locations to a minimum. If you need to go the action route, start small with fist fights and foot chases with dreams of going bigger if the budget allows for it later.
 
There will be much more to follow [in this series].

 

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

The Truth About Typos

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They always win.

Always.

Yes, you can catch most of them if you try. If you’re the sporting sort you can hunt them down like the dogs they are and wipe them out with glee.

Sooner or later, however, one of them will survive long enough to make a fool of you.

 

I was reminded of this yesterday, shortly after I found a typo in an Agatha Christie mystery that was first published in 1926. It’s not clear (at least to me) from the copyright page when that particular paperback edition was produced, but in any case it was by no means a newly-minted story.

Here’s the offending sentence:

Normally she regards them as places where you
you get your feet damp, and where all kinds of un-
pleasant things may drop on your head.

 

Agatha Christie ~ The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

That kind of typo can be particularly hard to catch, although modern word processors are good at pointing out such redundancies. (Here’s a famous example of the same thing.)

Now, what caused me to remember that typos always win was not the Christie quote itself. No. Finding the Christie quote actually prompted me to feel cocky about my own ability to find such mistakes. An entire authorial empire exists around the Christie name, and yet the powers that be couldn’t catch that brazen error?

Pshaw….

No, what reminded me that typos always win was a tweet I re-posted shortly after finding the Christie typo. Because there was a typo in that tweet. In a written work limited to 140 characters.

Here’s the gaffe in all its glory:

A Fiction Workshop Primer: http://bit.ly/aGZ8AN Including a caution about workshops the require authors to read their stories aloud.

Yes, that’s right. I not only finger-fumbled my way through that short bit of copy, but I posted and re-posted the same mistake twice. That I happened to spot the error at all was due only to chance.

Maybe I was tired. Maybe I was worn out from writing other stuff — and I have been writing a fair amount of other stuff. Maybe something distracted me. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

It doesn’t matter what the reason was. I missed it. And the reason it doesn’t matter is that at some point the whole typo-identifying process becomes a statistical question. How much time and effort do you have to throw at any text in order to be certain there are no mistakes? Yes, I should have caught the blindingly obvious brain cramp in my tweet. But that tweet belongs to a day in which I produced at least 5,000 brand-new words aimed at various disparate objectives.

The real agony of the typo is not that it exists, but that it is a self-inflicted wound. It is the bloody blade in your finger at the cutting board. It is the liberated digit at your circular saw. It is the crumpled bumper of the car in front of you as you fiddle with your cell.

When a typo survives you have only yourself to blame. And yet you cannot win, no matter how many sanctimonious onlookers beg to differ. The best you can hope to do is limit the number of mistakes.

Looking back, I’m not sure I even re-read my tweet before posting. So that’s the first lesson. Re-read everything at least once.

If I did re-read it, I clearly did so in a distracted manner. So that’s the second lesson. Find a proofreading gear in your head and consciously drop into it for that specific task. Don’t allow your mind to wander or your eyes to speed over your words. Slow down.

If I did re-read it, and I did so in a focused manner, the only remaining explanation — short of a medical emergency — is that I was too tired to concentrate. And that’s the third lesson. If you’re tired, give serious, serious consideration to holding off on publication until you’re rested — even if what you’re writing is a single sentence.

Do your best. Just know that it will never be perfect. You may manage to put out a clean novel, or short story, or tweet, but sooner or later a typo will survive.

Make peace with that now.

And by the way. If you run across a typo in another writer’s content, feel free to drop them a line. I’ve done it plenty, and no one has had anything to say in reply but thanks.

 

This is a reprint from Mark Barrett‘s Ditchwalk.

Wylie Agency Circumvent Publishers on e-Books with Odyssey Editions (Updated)

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The Wylie Agency has launched an e-book imprint, Odyssey Editions, which will initially publish twenty titles of literature’s most influential authors exclusively through Amazon’s Kindle Store. This is potentially one of the most significant pieces of news this year in the publishing world, and perhaps for some time to come if Wylie continues to expand and utilize the availability of their authors’ e-book rights.

Andrew Wylie pulled no punches last month when he was interviewed by Harvard Magazine. In the interview he said that the time had come to circumvent publishers and monetize unassigned digital book rights.


 

 
 
 
“We will take our 700 clients, see what rights are not allocated to publishers, and establish a company on their behalf to license those e-book rights directly to someone like Google, Amazon.com, or Apple.”

Today’s announcement by the Wylie Agency and Amazon delivers on that threat to publishers with the launch of Odyssey Editions for the Kindle. (see update from PW on Random House suggestion that the move by Wylie may be illegal)

From some of the press release:
 
 
Amazon.com, Inc. today announced that The Wylie Agency is publishing 20 books from some of literature’s most influential authors through its new Odyssey Editions imprint (http://www.odysseyeditions.com/) and making them available for sale exclusively in the Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore). This is the first time any of the titles–which include Norman Mailer’s "The Naked and the Dead," Philip Roth’s "Portnoy’s Complaint" and Ralph Ellison’s "Invisible Man"–have been available electronically, and all of the books are exclusive to the Kindle Store for two years. Starting today, customers can download these books for $9.99 from the Kindle Store and read them everywhere–on their Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry, PC, Mac, iPad and Android devices.

"Our goal with Kindle is to make every book, ever published, in print or out of print, available in less than 60 seconds," said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content. "Having these prominent and important books available through The Wylie Agency’s Odyssey Editions is another great step toward this goal. We’re excited to let our customers read books like ‘Rabbit Run’ for the first time ever electronically."

"As the market for e-books grows, it will be important for readers to have access in e-book format to the best contemporary literature the world has to offer," said Andrew Wylie, President of Odyssey Editions. "This publishing program is designed to address that need, and to help e-book readers build a digital library of classic contemporary literature."

The Wylie Agency operates internationally from offices in New York and London. In business for more than 30 years, it has built a reputation for consistently high standards. The writers and estates it represents include many of the greatest names in 20th and 21st century literature. Odyssey Editions is the first digitally native literary imprint launch of its kind.

Books available in the Kindle Store through Odyssey Editions include modern classics such as Hunter S. Thompson’s "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," Salman Rushdie’s "Midnight’s Children," Oliver Sacks’ "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," Vladimir Nabokov’s "Lolita," John Cheever’s "The Stories of John Cheever" and four novels from John Updike’s Rabbit series.

The 20 e-books published by Odyssey Editions carry an elegant and unified new look designed in collaboration with Enhanced Editions (http://www.enhanced-editions.com/). Features include:

• Newly-designed jackets

• Interior typography adhering to best conventions of book design and reading on Kindle

• Colophon, book covers and series design optimized for the Kindle screen

The 20 books being published by Odyssey Editions and made available exclusively on Kindle are:

• "London Fields" by Martin Amis

• "The Adventures of Augie March" by Saul Bellow
 
• "Ficciones" (Spanish Edition) by Jorge Luis Borges
 
• "Junky" by William Burroughs
 
• "The Stories of John Cheever" by John Cheever
 
• "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison
 
• "Love Medicine" by Louise Erdrich
 
• "The Naked and the Dead" by Norman Mailer
 
• "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov
 
• "The Enigma of Arrival" by V.S. Naipaul
 
• "The White Castle" by Orhan Pamuk
 
• "Portnoy’s Complaint" by Philip Roth
 
• "Midnight’s Children" by Salman Rushdie
 
• "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by Oliver Sacks
 
• "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thompson
 
• "Rabbit Run" by John Updike
 
• "Rabbit Redux" by John Updike
 
• "Rabbit is Rich" by John Updike
 
• "Rabbit at Rest" by John Updike
 
• "Brideshead Revisited" by Evelyn Waugh

The Kindle editions of these books are now available for sale exclusively in the Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore). Kindle offers the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read. The U.S. Kindle Store now has more than 630,000 books, including New Releases and 106 of 110 New York TimesBestsellers. Over 510,000 of these books are $9.99 or less, including 75 New York Times Bestsellers. Over 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available to read on Kindle.

For more information about these books, visit www.amazon.com/odyssey or http://www.odysseyeditions.com/. Eleven of these books will be available globally. Kindle is in stock and available for immediate shipment today at www.amazon.com/kindle.

 

This is a cross-posting from Mick Rooney‘s POD, Self-Publishing and Independent Publishing.

Top 10 Worst Self-Publishing Mistakes—Explained!

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I learn a lot from the comments readers leave on the blog. People have pointed out errors, shown me resources I hadn’t heard of, and made connections that had never occurred to me. It’s a big web out there, and one of the things I enjoy most is this sharing of knowledge, resources and experiences.

Two weeks ago I published Top 10 List of the Worst Self-Publishing Mistakes, a semi-serious look at normal mistakes newcomers to self-publishing might make. But a couple of people asked if there was going to be a follow-up article. They wanted to know the reasons why these were the so-called “worst mistakes” so they could avoid making them.

So here is the follow-up, the explanation for why you wouldn’t want to do any of these things when it comes time to publish your book. I’ve copied the questions from the earlier article and given an explanation for each.

Top 10 Worst Self-Publishing Mistakes—Explained!

“10. You thought you could re-use that ISBN you paid so much for since the novel you put it on last year isn’t selling anyway.”

Explained: You never want to re-use an ISBN, or even use it for another edition of the same book. The ISBN is known as a unique identifier. It’s intended to be assigned to one edition of one book. You book’s information has been entered in book databases everywhere, and you will only create tremendous confusion between the two works, hurting sales for both, if you attempt to re-use an ISBN. Just don’t do it.

“9. Everybody knows the words to the song, so it’s okay to quote lyrics from it throughout your novel, right?”

Explained: Check out this blog post about using bits of songs in your writing. The author here found, after using only snippets of 60s songs in a party scene, that he had a liability of over $6,000. Just like paintings, poems, or any creative expression, people’s lyrics and music are protected by copyright law, and violations of this law can be expensive and very damaging. If you want to use it, get permission first.

“8. The photos looked fine on your screen, and that means they will look fine when they’re printed, it just makes sense.”

Explained: Graphics on screens are all displayed at a resolution of 72 dots per inch (dpi) in Reg-Green-Blue (RGB) colorspace. That’s just the way computers display graphics. However, when you go to print your book, your color photos will need to be 300 dpi in the Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black (CMYK) colorspace. So no, the image you see on your screen, no matter how gorgeous, may not have enough resolution to print well.

“7. I picked Arial for my book because the name reminded me of my middle school girlfriend.”

Explained: Many people don’t notice typefaces, typography, design, serifs, ligatures, and the other elements book designers take for granted, and why should they? But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter what typeface you use. The classic book typefaces, when used correctly, will produce a book that’s beautiful, readable, and reader-friendly. That’s why they’re classics.

“6. I know they’re charging me $6,000 to publish my book, but I get 10 copies, absolutely free!”

Explained: Well, $6,000 divided by 10 is . . . The point here is that if you want to publish your own book you may be better off using a plain author services company like CreateSpace or Lulu than a subsidy publisher. Why? The subsidy publisher makes its money from sales to authors–that’s you. If you use a service like CreateSpace you are the publisher and you use them as a printer. You pay only for the services you decide you need, and then you make your money from book sales.

“5. I thought it would sound more impressive if I wrote my memoir in the third person. All my sports heroes talk that way.”

Explained: By far the best way for most authors to present their information in nonfiction books is with a clear, active, straightforward style. Attempts to create unusual styles, strange viewpoints, exotic points of view almost always fail since they are incredibly difficult to carry off well. Both you and your readers will be well served by a natural conversational style that follows a normal and expected narrative. This will make your valuable information stand out, not an eccentric of saying it.

“4. I really got the unit price down, but I had to print 10,000 copies. You have any room in your garage?”

Explained: Having a plan on how you intend to market, publicize and sell your book before entering into book production is highly recommended. The unit cost of your book is meaningless if you never sell any. Many self-publishers are using digital printing through print-on-demand distribution to minimize this type of risk. However, you have to plan your book, its retail price, and your method of distribution before going to press.

“3. Sure, I included an invoice with all the books I sent to book reviewers. Hey, they don’t care, it’s just a big company paying the bill.”

Explained: Although reviewers do usually work for larger companies, sending an invoice with a review copy will ensure that while you won’t get paid for the book, you won’t get a review either. The convention is that you are asking for valuable editorial time and space in a publication, and certainly the least you can expect is to provide a book to anyone gracious enough to go to the trouble of reviewing your book.

“2. It was cheaper to print my novel as an 8-1/2″ x 11″ book because I got so many words on each page.”

Explained: Although it’s true that you can save money in digital printing by creating a book with fewer pages, a novel printed full page on letter-size paper with small margins and tight lines to “get so many words” on a page is likely to be read by no one. Making your book difficult to read is a quick way to eliminate many readers. There is no economy in printing books that no one wants to read.

“1. What do you mean, I need a cover designer? Don’t books come with covers?”

Explained: Most author-services companies are only too happy to put a cover on your book for a fee, or to turn you loose on their cover creation programs. But it’s pretty easy to tell most of the books that have been “designed” this way, and it isn’t a pretty picture. If your book is worth publishing, and you want people to buy it, and you understand the cover is the primary way that people will identify the book wherever it appears, don’t you think it might be worthwhile to get a cover designer you can afford to create a cover for you?

Well, there you have it. If there was any doubt, you now know some good things to avoid when it comes time to publish a book.

 

This is a cross-posting from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

Does Social Networking Really Sell Books?

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In my recent "Social Networking Success for Authors" teleseminar, someone asked if social networking really sells books.

It can be hard to track the sale of books directly to social networking (especially if your books are sold through retailers) but I strongly believe that social networking, if done effectively, develops relationships that lead to book sales and other opportunities.

Let’s say that one of your Twitter followers re-tweets one of your messages. One of their followers sees the message and starts following you. After enjoying several of your posts on Twitter, they hook up with you on Facebook.  In looking at your Facebook profile or page, this person sees a link to your blog and clicks through to check it out. Then they sign up for your opt-in mailing list and later buy one of your books. Now you have made a sale to someone that you might not have reached in any other way.

Here’s a real-life example. Several days ago I received an order for one of my books and I noticed this comment in the "where did you hear about this book" field on the order form:
 

"Found Dana on Twitter, joined her Facebook, then saw her Facebook links and the rest is history. Job well done, Dana."

Obviously, not everyone that you meet online is going to buy your book – in reality only a small percentage will buy. But the more contacts you make and the more frequently those folks see and hear from you, the more books you are likely to sell.

And don’t forget that social networking opens the door to many other opportunities that can lead to book sales. The folks you meet online may end up reviewing your book, exchanging guest blog posts with you, becoming an affiliate or joint venture partner, hosting your virtual book tour, or inviting you to speak to their group or be on their radio show. In fact, I have personally experienced all of these opportunities with people that I met through social networks. And of course it’s always valuable to make friends with others in the publishing business.

Yes, social networking really does sell books – so make sure that you are doing it effectively.  If you missed the Social Networking Success for Authors teleseminar, the recording of the call is now available as a downloadable audio program. You’ll also get a learning guide with screen shots and resources, and a copy of the special report, 10 Steps to Online Networking Success. 

Also, check out my Facebook Guide for Authors and Twitter Guide for Authors, as well as The Savvy Book Marketer’s Guide to Successful Social Marketing (which includes the Facebook and Twitter guides).
 

 

This is a cross-posting from Dana Lynn Smith‘s The Savvy Book Marketer.

Upcoming E-publishing Revolution, Part 2

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Publetariat is pleased to present Part 2 of Upcoming E-publishing revolution, entitled "E-Magination: What’s Now and What’s Next in Ebooks", a podcast, webcast and transcript from Copyright Clearance Center’s Beyond The Book site.

The podcast and transcript originated from a panel discussion for the Independent Book Publishers Association at their annual “Publishing University” program. More information about Part 1, along with links to the Part 1 podcast and transcript, can be found here.

In this episode, featured guests Mark Coker of Smashwords, Jack Sallay of Vook and O Magazine Books Editor Sara Nelson explain the ongoing e-publishing revolution.

The podcast, webcast and transcript (in pdf format) are available now.

Editor’s Note: the webcast link is not available as a permalink, and therefore the webcast to which it points may not be available indefinitely.

Working Amazon: Some Strategies For Selling in E-retail Stores

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Lesson #8 of the Publetariat Vault University’s Platform/Promotion Curriculum, by Zoe Winters, is called “Working Amazon.” I know it is skipping ahead, but I recently spent a good deal of time looking into what had “worked” and what hadn’t in selling my book in the large internet retailers like Amazon, and I would like to tell people what I learned in the hope that others who are embarking on this wonderful journey of self-publishing will benefit from my experience.

Until recently, when an author’s book was traditionally published (or independently published in the traditional way), there were three essential steps a publisher and author took to get the book sold. The first major step was to get the book on the shelves of bookstores. The second step was to find ways to inform people about the book and convince them to come to a bookstore to buy it. A third step was to try and ensure that people would come across the book while browsing in the bookstore in the hope they would spontaneously decide to buy it.
 
With the emergence of large electronic retailers like Amazon, these steps still exist, but as you will see, they play out in a slightly different fashion.
 
Step One: Get book onto Amazon’s bookstore shelves
 
In the fall of 2009 when I decided to self-publish my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery, I made the decision to concentrate on getting my book into the electronic retail markets, rather than into brick and mortar bookstores. No need for sales representatives, sales catalogs, or schmoozing with booksellers at conventions. I didn’t have to convince Amazon’s Kindle store or Amazon’s bookstore to carry my book, all I had to do was upload my formatted files for the ebook through Amazon’s Digital Text Platform and the files for my print on demand version through Amazon’s CreateSpace. Step One took me less than a day to do, and within a week both the ebook and the paperback were for sale. This aspect of working Amazon was really quite easy.
 
Step Two: Get people to go to Amazon’s bookstores to buy the book
 
The next six months I concentrated my efforts on this step—and it will be an ongoing process. I set up my author website, got the word out about Maids of Misfortune on Facebook, sent my books out to be reviewed, got my book listed on websites that specialize on my genre like CrimeThruTime, entered the book into book award contests, set up a blog, and wrote Dandy Detects, a short story featuring the same characters from Maids of Misfortune, to help promote the full length novel. This step is the one that deviates the least from traditional publishing.
 
Convincing people to go to Amazon’s bookstores to look for my book isn’t really any different than convincing them to go to a physical bookstore—except it is easier. With a click of link on my author website, a blog review, or a list of historical mysteries, a customer is not just at my product page on Amazon (where my Kindle edition and print edition both show up), but they are looking at my book—and if they are buying it as an ebook, all it takes is another click of the buy button and they can be reading it.
 
In addition, as the author and publisher I also get almost instant sales data to see how I am doing, because each night I can check to see how many books I sold on Amazon and Kindle. I can also tell what percentage of the people who checked out my book actually bought it, and see what other kinds of books they bought. This tells me a lot about how well my advertising is working. I can even see in some cases when something I am doing has a direct effect on sales. For example, when I became a regular contributor to Publetariate, then again when I dropped my price from $4 to $2.99, my sales jumped.
 
Step Three: Get people who are browsing the Amazon bookstores to find and buy the book
 
Traditionally, publishers and authors focus on making sure the cover of the book they are selling is eye-catching and that the back cover has a good description and blurbs that will entice a buyer. In addition to ensuring that the book is shelved in the appropriate categories in the store, they will try to get the book placed in the store window, or featured on tables at the front as a new release, or bestseller, or one of the staff’s recommended books. All of this is designed to get someone who is browsing to pick up the book, check it out, and decide to buy it.
 
This step is only slightly different when dealing with an e-store like Amazon.
 
The important role of a cover remains the same—only now you need to make sure that the cover shows up well as a thumbnail (see my post on Establishing a Brand.) There is no back cover in an e-retailer, but there is the equivalent in the product description and the customer reviews. Of course, you don’t get the option of picking and choosing your reviews; I would hope that several in depth positive reviews might be at least as effective as the short one-line reviews that grace back covers.
 
Amazon and other e-retailers also try to duplicate the experience of browsing in a bookstore by offering “sneak peeks” or free excerpts from the book. I think I “worked” Amazon effectively in these respects as well. My cover is eye-catching as a thumbnail, my product description snappy, and I have collected a few stars and strong reviews. In turn, my use of the words Victorian and Mystery in my title and Amazon’s nifty formula that tells a customer who bought another Victorian era mystery that they might like Maids of Misfortune had meant I did have the equivalent of a staff recommendation.
 
What I hadn’t done very well was to make to sure that my book showed up in the right shelves of the bookstore and I really hadn’t done anything in particular to make sure it showed up on one of the equivalent of the best-seller tables. I think I simply assumed as an indie author with a first time novel that the best-selling category was completely out of my reach. Turns out that I was wrong.
 
How I “worked” Amazon and achieved “best seller status”
 
I first reviewed where a browser might find my book if they weren’t coming to store specifically to buy the book. When you get on Amazon and click under either Kindle Books or Books there is a side bar on the right side that give you browsing categories. Skipping the various best-seller, editor’s picks, and movers and shakers categories (which I knew I wasn’t in) I looked for the categories I had chosen when I uploaded my Kindle and print editions.
 
When you upload a file into the DTP program for Kindle, or into CreateSpace, you get to pick five categories using the Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) subject headings for listing your book and you also are given the option to list any tags (key words) you want to help customer’s find your book. I chose my categories and my tags, but I hadn’t followed through to see how that affected the chance a customer who was browsing either in the Kindle Book Store, or the Amazon Book Store would run across my book. When I looked into this, I was in for a few surprises.
 
First of all I noticed that the browsing categories were not identical to the BISAC categories I had chosen. For example, I had chosen Fiction-Mystery & Detective-Women Sleuths for the BISAC subject heading, but the browsing path on Amazon (for both Kindle and Books) was Fiction-Mystery & Thrillers-Mystery-Women Sleuths. Well that seemed sort of strange, but no big deal since they were pretty closely matched. Then I saw that there were 4,500 books under that category in the Kindle Bookstore. Another category I had chosen, Romance-Historicals, was even worse-there were 5400 listed.
 
Amazon does list on the product page for a book its ranking by category, but only if the book is in the top 100 books under that category, but at the time I couldn’t imagine that I would have a lot of chance competing with the likes of Sue Grafton, Janet Evanovich, and Charlene Harris in the Women Sleuths category to get into that top 100. (And this was the Kindle Store-in the book store on Amazon, there were nearly 9000 books listed under Mystery-Women Sleuths, and over 22,000 books under romance-historicals!)
 
One bright note, I noticed that on my product page I was consistently showing us a one of the top 20 books under one of the other categories I had chosen- History (ie non-fiction section)-US-State&Local-West. Why? Well, where there were less than 400 books in that category!
 
I was a bit puzzled, because the category I had checked on launching the book on Kindle had been fiction-history-US-etc, but the books under this browsing category were clearly non-fiction. There my historical mystery sits, next to books on the founding of Texas and Kevin Starr’s history of California. But hey, if someone wanders into that category, I figure they might enjoy a pleasant interlude of fiction. And anyway, after seven years working away to get a doctorate in history, writing 400 some pages of a dissertation about working women in the west, I am pretty darn proud of the historical accuracy of Maids of Misfortune. But, I didn’t think that the people browsing in this section would be my main target audience.
 
What should have been the perfect category, however, was Mystery & Thrillers-Mystery-Historicals-and on Kindle there were only 72 books listed under that category, and on Amazon’s bookstore less than 800 books were listed. Hallelujah! In that pool I had a real fighting chance of getting noticed. Except, neither Maids of Misfortune or my short story, Dandy Detects, showed up under this category in either list!
 
After correspondence with the dtp and CreateSpace support staffs the error was corrected, and within a day, Maids of Misfortune began to show up in the top 10 books in the Mystery-Historical category in the Kindle store, and the top 100 books in the Mystery-Historical category in the Amazon store. Even better, at the end of that week the number of books I sold was double that of the number I had been selling in the previous weeks. I even began to show up in the Kindle Store on its best seller list for the category.
 
My book was now shelved in the right place, it was showing up on a best-seller table as well, and I could rest assured that for those people looking for an historical mystery, there was a good chance they would find mine. Lesson learned? Be very careful about your choices of categories: try to find categories where your book will stand out and have a chance at competing with traditionally published books and follow through and make sure your book shows up where you think it should.
 
What struck me is how much more difficult it would have been for a traditionally published author to even find out if their book had been mis-shelved, much less correct it. I read a blog post recently (can not remember where-sorry) about an author whose science fiction book kept being shelved with African-American Literature. Problem was, there weren’t any African American characters in this book, and his primary readers weren’t going to find his book under this category. He might get this corrected at a local store—but what if this was a widespread problem throughout the bookstore chains and independent bookstores? Would his publisher even care enough to help him get this error corrected?
 
Once again, I was left with the satisfying knowledge that my success or failure as an indie author was in my own control. It was up to me to “work” Amazon, and I must say Amazon has worked well for me. 

This is a cross-posting from M. Louisa Locke‘s The Front Parlor.

Web Presence Checklist

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This post, from Muriel Lede, originally appeared on her site on 7/14/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with her permission.

 You’ve spent months, perhaps years, writing your book. Did you do so for it to die in obscurity? Why then does its web presence reach no beyond the Lulu Marketplace? Why then doesn’t it even show up upon typing its title on Google? Why then does its Amazon’s sales rank sag below the 4 millionth mark? If that sounds anything like you, keep reading, for I’m about to list all those opportunities to broadcast your title and reach your target audience that you’re missing out on. To the extent that they’re inexpensive, easy, and of course applicable to your book, you have no excuse not to implement them.

Let’s begin with the bleeding obvious—alas so often neglected!—and progress toward the more forgivable omissions:

  • Website

    I mean a real website, with its own domain name and all. These days web space has become inexpensive enough for pretty much any author to afford; I recomment the likes of FatCow and JustHost, that offer unlimited storage and bandwidth, plus a free domain name. But then, even without considering this variable, how many books out there don’t have their own dedicated webpage, paid for or otherwise? How do you expect prospective customers to take you seriously if you don’t even bother to make one?

    Tip: If you pay full price for web hosting, you’re a fool. I suggest you first track down referral links to the provider you’re targeting, which often grant rebates up to 50%. You can do even better than that: start filling out the form until you’ve got an actual quote and reach the payment section, then drop out of it and wait. Chances are, you’ll receive within hours an email offering you an additional discount, no kidding!

    Implementing a webpage is easier than you might think. Anybody can learn basic HTML in a day or two, or ask someone they know to format their contents for them. You don’t know what to say on that webpage? How about putting your title information and book cover, for starters? My own website you can use for inspiration. It’s single-page, with two columns: one for the title information, the other for my sales pitch. A book website doesn’t need to be fancy, nor to have lots of graphics; a minimalistic design might actually work better than a complex website, so forget about Flash and fancy animations that take forever to load. All that matters is that you put your title information, blurb, book cover, and a link to where to buy it. Anything else is unnecessary, and might even be in excess.

  • Blog

    Same as above, except this time it’s totally free, or at least does not incur any additional expense, as you can host it on your own website; I recommend installing WordPress for that purpose, which is both infinitely customizable and very user-friendly. You don’t know what to write on that blog? Let’s start with an announcement for your book, with a link to your website or wherever it can be purchased. Even if you were to abandon your blog after that one post (what I sure hope you won’t do!), that would at the very least help improving your website’s page rank a little. Need more ideas? Think about what makes you or your book interesting, or your target audience’s interests, and write about that. I sure hope your book is interesting, and that you do have a target audience.

    These days, a blog is so pivotal to an author’s marketing strategy that it’s worth spending some time customizing, with links, polls, widgets, and the like; see Facebook, Goodreads, or BookBuzzr for ideas. Don’t hesitate to crowd the sidebar all the way to the bottom. Running out of ideas? Post links to other blogs, and propose that they link back to yours!

  • Author email and signature

    Once again it’s free, while you won’t go very far without one; it’s required to subscribe to pretty much anything. Did you set up your email signature? That’s an opportunity to post a link to your website or blog with every message you send, without additional effort! Keep it subtle and no one will complain. Better still: link to your blog instead of your book’s website, so it doesn’t look like an ad.

  • Announcing on forums and mailing lists

    Did you know that many forums have a section dedicated for authors to spam on? You believe no one reads them? Think again. Besides, even if that held true, it remains another opportunity for increasing your website’s page rank. Arguably the most prominent is AbsoluteWrite’s Announcements, Events, and Self-Promotion forum. You should also search Amazon’s forums for active threads on which to make such an announcement, like these, listed by genre.

    Then there are mailing lists, mostly Yahoo! groups. In my sphere of writing, the largest such list is LoveRomancesCafe, which holds Promo Mondays dedicated for recent releases announcements and excerpts.

    No really, there are places begging to be spammed—so to speak—and readers will thank you for it.

  • Social networking

    I would classify such networks in two categories, for the purpose of this article. One is generic networks, like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. The above applies to those: even if you were to treat them as mere parking lots, you’re better off occupying them than leaving them vacant. It’s easy, it’s free, it helps driving traffic to your website, and it makes you look professional.

    Tip: Are you a woman? Make sure to flag yourself as single and looking for a relationship. I guarantee that swarms of men will mysteriously stumble upon your profile.

    More interesting is the second category, those meant for readers, like Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari; Goodreads in particular, as you’ll see throughout the rest of this article, is a must. It offers widgets you can put onto your blog to list your most recent reads, apps to crosspost these to your other social networking pages, book preview hosting, giveaways, etc. while its features list keeps expanding. To be fair, LibraryThing isn’t far behind, although free accounts have a cap on the number of books you can list.

    Tip: Spend some time thinking of a good-looking user name (or pen name) and designing eye-catching avatars. You want to draw attention to your posts, or they might drown in a sea of comments, especially on high-volume threads. Can’t produce an eye-catching avatar? Use your book cover then!

    In both cases, social networking is all about making friends, so don’t be shy and make requests. You don’t know whom to friend? How about the people you already get along with on blogs and threads? The larger your list of friends, the better, because it makes you look big to strangers discovering your profile.

  • Author pages

    Some websites allow for authors to post biographies and promotional material. One is Amazon’s Author Central, while another is Goodreads’ Author Program. Even if you post only your picture and a short bio, it already helps convincing readers that you’re not a nobody; they might even have the perception that only successful authors have one! Never mind the fact that they’re free and easy to set up. Also, both pages not only provide authors with a blog, then even allow to synchronize with your existing blog! It amounts to automatically cross-posting on both Amazon and Goodreads.

    You can also become a LibraryThing Author, to unlock a significant portion of the above two’s functionalities on their website, only you have to write them a request by email. It has a feature that sets it apart though, for it provides a Hobnob with Authors page where book sollicitation is encouraged.

    Among websites meant specifically for authors, there is AuthorsDen, the largest of its kind and offering the widest array of features—but also the most expensive featurewise. Red Room also grants author pages, although only to those among self-publishers that already made significant achievements; still, a premium membership grants you the right to advertise your book on their website at will, which could nonetheless make it an interesting platform for promotion.

    Tip: Make sure to write down your bio at the third person, as in the following example. Not only does it look more formal, it suggests you’re important enough for someone else to have written it! It’s all about perception.

  • Title information submission

    That one can make a huge difference, although they’re limited to publishers. When a title surfaces on an online store such as Amazon, it’s pretty much naked. There might be a cover, a one-paragraph blurb, and a Buy button, but that’s about it. Did you know you can customize your title’s page on some of those stores? Amazon has a Books Content Update Form, which you can use to upload a formatted description, a table of contents, reviews, etc., and also the Search Inside The Book Program. Regarding the latter: when is last time you purchased a book you couldn’t browse, whether in a brick-and-mortar store or online? It has the potential to boost sales tremendously. Barnes & Noble also provides means for publishers to submit contents, including scans of interior pages. Then there’s also Google Books, so obvious yet so easily forgotten!

    Tip: Did you rate your own title? A five-stars rating, even if it’s propped up by only one vote, draws far more attention than no rating, or even a lower rating from many votes. Unethical? No more than a candidate for office voting for himself on election day. Also, make sure to tag your title according to its contents.

  • Book reviews

    Nothing boosts sales like book reviews, especially favorable ones—but even caustic ones are better than none; the worst review is no review. How about giving it a try? One easily overlooked avenue is Independent Publisher’s Highlighted Titles, which amounts to a seal of approval from a major publication. Then there are blogs that focus on POD titles, such as POD Book Reviews & More, POD People, Self-Publishing Review, The LL Book Review, and The New Podler Review of Books. Feel more ambitious? If your book could pass for a small electronic publisher’s, you could try your luck with more mainstream blogs. You don’t think you’ll be accepted? The worst thing that can happen is that you receive a polite rejection.

    Warning: Avoid paid review services like the plague! Not only are the likes of Kirkus Discoveries a waste of money, most have such a bad reputation that a “review” from them might turn off potential customers at first glance!

    Tip: Should you get glowing reviews, post snippets of these on your website and blog for all to view! If you don’t brag on your own website upon receiving praise from strangers, where and when will you?

    While we’re at it: there’s nothing to stop you from commenting on any of the above blogs and beyond. If anything, that contributes to spreading your name even further and building your reputation. Plus, many blogs allow for a link to your website with every post you make! Once again this helps improving your website’s page rank, to the point that link spammers track down WordPress blogs and mechanically comment on them for that single purpose. Of course you’re not spamming, as long as you’re contributing to the conversation.

  • Contributed articles

    There are several blogs and websites out there to which you can contribute your own articles. There is no better way to build your reputation than to provide authoritative advice on a popular blog. As a bonus, this constitutes yet another opportunity to post a link to your website. You think this is link spamming in disguise? You’re totally right, and this is precisely the attitude you should be having, never to miss an opportunity to plaster your name and a link to your website wherever you can. As long as you post something pertinent and useful along with it, not only will you get away with it, readers will even thank you for it! Especially if it saves them money and weeks of research.

    Registered Self-Publishing Review and Publetariat users can post blog entries, which may end up promoted to the main page. Some other blogs, such as POD, Self Publishing and Independent Publishing, also are open to article submissions.

    The following articles detail how to post at ezinearticles.com:

     

Then there is the optional, but still worth considering:

  • Contests:

    These are long shots, but could give your book tremendous visibility should it be selected even among the finalists. Two reputable contests immediately come to mind: one is the Independent Publisher Book Awards, better known as IPPY, the other is the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award or ABNA, the latter which I advise to enter as early as possible since each category allows only up to 5000 entries. Yet another would be the Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Book Awards.

    Warning: Star clear of “vanity” contests, like those charging exorbitant entry fees or those that guarantee an award to all entrants. In doubt, consult Writer Beware.

  • Book trailers:

    It’s just as possible for a self-publisher with next to zero budget to produce a decent book trailer than it is for LucasFilm to produce a 112 million dollars lemon. Money has little to do with it, it’s more a matter of skill and creativity. And then, there are two undeniable advantages to making a book trailer: you can post it on Youtube, which millions browse while eating breakfast; while it can ironically make your book look like it’s a big budget title, to the extent that it’s good enough and that viewers believe only big-budget titles have one. Smoke and mirrors? In this business, perception is everything.

    A good starting point: 43 Book Trailer Sites to Inspire, Instruct, and Share. You will probably need iStockphoto, both the best and the cheapest among stock pictures websites; indeed, most others either are outrageously expensive or set unacceptable restrictions on how to use their contents. Once you’re done, you can upload it to your Facebook, Myspace, and Goodreads profiles, to AuthorsDen (requires Gold membership) and Redroom, to Amazon (through Author Central), and also to book trailer websites such as BlazingTrailers, PreviewTheBook, LiveWriters, TrailerSpy, and Metacafe, in addition to regular video sites such as Youtube, Yahoo! Video, Vimeo, and Revver, and also to blogs like Rate My Book Video!. Not only will most of the aforementioned link back to your website, thus improving its—well, you get the picture—but some even enrolled into Amazon Associates and will help you sell your book through their own website! You can also promote it on Goodreads’ Book Trailers ™ & Author Web Sites group.

  • Paid advertisement:

    This one is controversial. You will be told that it’s not worth it, especially for a self-publisher. But then did you sit down and actually calculate how much an ad would cost you versus how much you expect to earn in increased sales? You might decide against it. You might not be able to afford it. But you have no excuse for not considering it. Publishing is a business, and businesses advertize. The successful ones, anyway.

    Among affordable options, there are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Sponsored Search, Facebook Advertising, MySpace MyAds and Goodreads self-serve advertising. All these allow for arbitrarily low budgets, so you can try them simultaneously and see which one works best. Websites like Bookslut, Bookgasm, and Publetariat offer banner advertising that mere mortals can afford, so you might want to try that too.

    Tip: There are plenty of coupons for Adwords and the like floating around, so you can try them with a rebate! See whether your website provider offers any; if so, you’d be a fool not to use them. At the time of this writing, Google even offers a $75 free trial to residents of the United States and Canada!

    Initially, your target should be to break even, not to make a profit; what you’re really after is to get ratings and reviews while improving your sales rank. Little drives potential customers away more than a title with no prior activity, which also keeps it buried at the bottom of search results. This is a vicious circle you must break as soon as possible. Given what is at stake, this is well worth spending a few hundred dollars, especially if you have already poured that much into your project.

    Speaking of reviews and such, the most effective way to obtain them is to organize giveaways. Of course many blogs and mailing lists might be happy to award your copies to their readers, although a more reliable way would be to leave that to the likes of Goodreads and LibraryThing. BookBuzzr Games also provides a program to give away copies as prizes.

  • Merchandise:

    This is an opportunity to expand your visibility both online and offline. Do you have a gorgeous book cover, logo, or palette of graphics? How about plastering these onto T-shirts and coffee mugs? CafePress allows you to do just that. Not only is it free and easy, it even opens a secondary revenue stream!

The possibilities are endless. There always remain inexpensive and efficient tribunes from which to market your book, so keep digging. Are you sure you didn’t miss a blog, forum, mailing list, reader or author organization, fan website, announcement thread, list of featured books, link directory, link reciprocity program, etc.? How about those that keep popping up all the time? How about those regarding connex topics? No search can be exhaustive, let alone a list, so never stop looking for more avenues, and use your imagination to create some where most people would see none.

Converting Novels to Screenplays

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Time and Page Constraints

How many times have we heard the comment, “The book was a lot better?” Well, there are some good reasons for that. Writing for the movie industry takes a different set of writing tools and constraints. The word “constraints” is the primary key.

The rule of thumb for a screenplay is that one page is equal to one minute of movie time. Most movies fall into time lengths of 90 to 250 minutes with 120 minutes being the standard target length. Now, compare that constraint to the length of most novels, which range from 250 to 750 pages and even longer for some. How does one cut the novel length down to the screenplay time constraints and still communicate the essence of the novel? I will answer that question, but first here are some other considerations.

Different Writing Style

Screenplays are written in third person and present tense. If you think you can just change your novel into those style requirements, you will find that is a laborious task at best. I have written two screenplays based on novels. It is a time consuming task. It is so easy to miss changing all the verb forms and tense forms in almost every sentence. It really takes attention to detail. You have a choice of whether to make all those changes to the whole book and then determine what will be cut or remain or vice versa. I feel in the long run it’s safer to make the style changes first and then make the cuts, but you may prefer to do it the other way—whatever works best for you.

Critically Important Considerations

Movies are primarily a visual media. This makes showing rather than telling absolutely essential. Dialog must be kept short—no long expository speeches or explanations. Action is king. There should be no off-camera explanations by a 3rd party narrator. Conditions, settings, and motives must be shown by what the actors do and say. Back story should be kept to a minimum. A very brief visual flashback might be appropriate if it is essential to the story’s development. For example: a novel might explain the reason why a woman develops a hatred for all men with page after page of action discussing sexual abuse by a father or brother. In the movie version, there might be a 20 to 30 second flashback showing an abuse scene to explain the reason why the woman hates men. Showing is hyper-critical. Telling takes too long and is boring.

Cutting Down the Novel

The primary guidelines or criteria for making cuts are:

  • If something doesn’t move the storyline along, get rid of it
  • Be brutal about which characters are essential and which are not
  • Dialog should be kept short
  • Action must be the primary communication means used by the writer
  • Remember, keep the screenplay as visual as possible.

When I turned my first mystery into a screen play, I actually had to totally eliminate or reduce a few nonessential characters. I saw the same thing happen in the movie version of Stephanie Myers second novel. The wheelchair-bound Indian father of one of the werewolf boys had many pages of dialog in the book and numerous mentions of him by other characters. In the movie he got about 30 seconds of movie time. If a character or scene is not essential to the story, get out the editorial knife.

Remember showing vs telling is even more critical in a screenplay than in the book version. Keep it short but powerful.

The Bottom Line

Movies are far more expensive to produce than novels. Whereas a major publisher may invest several tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in a book, A movie production will require tens of millions of dollars. Unless it’s a major studio with very deep pockets, the production company often will have to find major investors willing to take a chance on the movie’s likelihood of returning the investment plus a sizable profit. A small, independent production company has accepted four of my screenplays; however, they have not been able to find enough willing investors to fund the movies. Being accepted, even if there has been no contract or upfront money, is gratifying, but it won’t buy any groceries. Most production companies prefer to use materials by previously successful screenwriters to minimize the risk to their bottom line. That is why it is so difficult to break into the business. Another factor that raises a barrier against writers is age. Many production companies believe only young writers can connect and communicate with younger target audiences—a major ageism factor.

Screenplay Formats

There is a very strict and detailed set of formatting requirements for screenplays. Don’t even try to write your screenplay in Word! There are too many possibilities for format errors. Use an established screenplay formatting software package. I have used several in the past and have found “Final Draft” to be my preferred program. Dramatica is another good company.

Final Consideration

Still, despite the barriers, cutting a novel down to screenplay length is definitely a worthwhile endeavor. You will learn so much about your writing and your work from this translation process that it becomes a wonderful self-education exercise. If nothing else, you will gain an appreciation for the screenwriters and their process. It will also provide you with new eyes when watching movies, knowing what goes into producing a screenplay. Remember, most movies are built upon screenplay that have ultimately been produced by the the consensus of committees. That is another reason many why so many movies don’t live up to their novels. Still, it is a worthy exercise to try just to improve your writing game.

 

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

Hashtags Could Save Publishing

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This post, from Jenn Northington, originally appeared on Shelf Awareness on 7/14/10 and is reprinted here in its entirety with the permission of that site.

Twitter has been hyped (and over-hyped, some would argue) in the book industry for many things, one of which is to improve communication between booksellers, readers and publishers. But trying to track conversations on Twitter is like trying to find a specific needle in a giant stack of needles–unless you have a hashtag.

Hashtags, for the uninitiated, are a way for people to "tag" their tweets with an agreed-upon word or phrase that follows the # symbol, so that others who may not be online at the same time or part of the same discussion can search for them, see who is saying what and join in. And yesterday saw the birth (and then explosive expansion) of #dearpublisher.

Booksellers will often tweet general musings and requests in the form of tiny letters; for example, yesterday afternoon I wrote:

 

HarperPerennial observed that a tag would be helpful in tracking these kinds of tweets and offered #dearpublisher as a solution.

The tag was swiftly picked up by booksellers, publishers and readers alike, and within a few hours a search for #dearpublisher turned up hundreds of diverse requests and observations, ranging in tone from thoughtful to snarky (and often both).

Katrina Lantz: Combine ebooks with hardcovers, but please don’t stop printing books ever. The book is not dead. It just had babies.

Bloggers[heart]Books: I’ve seen a LOT of gorgeous covers this year. But why are people not allowed to have a head anymore?

Kevin Smokler: Will I be able to pay one price for both a paper book and a digital copy anytime soon?

Justina Ireland: People of color don’t all live in the ghetto or have abusive parents or wish they were white. Why can’t we be vampires?

BriMeetsBooks: I really dislike books with wheels for kids. They never stay on the shelves.

And publishers responded, such as PublicAffairs: PublicAffairs code of conduct: I swear we will never publish a stupid book, books about zombies or vampires, or chick lit.

If communication is key, then Twitter could bridge the oft-lamented gap between publishers, booksellers and readers with initiatives like #dearpublisher. While publishing houses will certainly get conflicting feedback and some tweets will be less helpful than others, trends can become clear. For example, Katrina Lantz and Justina Ireland’s tweets quoted above had become "Top Tweets" (meaning that many other users had Re-Tweeted, or seconded, them) by 10 p.m. last night. At the very least, publishers will get to know readers and booksellers in a way that hasn’t been possible before.

Other tags on reading and the book industry, some more (ahem) playful than others:

  • #askagent, in which agents field questions from writers and readers
     
  • #bookrageous, chronicling some of the outlandish things readers and booksellers are doing in honor of their favorite books
     
  • #bookstorebingo, which tracks some of the crazier things customers say to booksellers
     
  • #followreader, featuring weekly conversations exploring the evolution of publishing as an industry
     
  • #fridayreads, which encourages Twitter users to exchange notes about what they’re reading on a given Friday
     
  • #pantyworthy, the book version of throwing panties at your favorite band
     
  • #pubQT, in which publishing veterans Ron Hogan and Ed Nawotka answer questions and encourage conversation about the future of publishing.

 

Pricing to Fail: Case Studies in Dumb Pricing – Harvard Business Review Short Cuts, the Irrelevance of Cost Issues

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This post on ebook pricing follows yesterday’s post on the failed pricing approach behind Stephen King’s baseball novella. As you can doubtless tell, it’s excerpted from a forthcoming book on ebook pricing and related issues.

Of course I exaggerate when I use any form of the word "failure" in a discussion about even the weakest-selling titles among Stephen King’s books, but there are plenty of other authors and publishers for whom dumb pricing can condemn otherwise viable book projects to death-like sales doldrums.

In January 2010 we noted the launch of an initiative called "Harvard Business Review Short Cuts." An Amazon press release at the time said that "Short Cuts are individual chapters and summaries from Harvard Business Review Press publications that are broken down by the time it takes to read them (i.e. ’30 minute read’ or ’10 minute read’). They are specifically chosen to give business readers quick and informative business information and theory while they drink their morning coffee, wait for a meeting or travel for business."

Six months later, the initiative looks like a failure, despite heavy promotion by Amazon and the valuable imprimatur of the Harvard Business Review Press. Most of the titles are languishing far out the "long tail" in Kindle Store sales rankings, i.e., over 70,000 in most cases. Part of the problem, it seems likely, is that the "Short Cuts" series is overpriced, with a list price currently set at $3.99, discounted 20 percent by Amazon to $3.16. Even at $2.99, a reader wanting to work through all eight to 12 chapters of the full books from which these short-form ebooks are drawn would have to shell out roughly $25 to $35.

One would think that anyone with the wherewithal to be able to digest Harvard Business School materials with his morning coffee would also be capable of the number-crunching necessary to determine that the convenience of bite-size ebook chapters is more than offset by the high price. At $1.49 to $1.99 each, "Short Cuts" might well be a winning proposition.

Sometimes bad pricing decisions result directly from bad publishing decision. An old friend and organizing colleague told me with some excitement that he was approached by a publisher with a proposal to collect some of his essays, speeches, and blog posts on labor organizing in what became a nice little 96-page paperback and ebook. Had my friend (and even perhaps his publisher) come to me first, I would have counseled them that as a first-time author with little marketing budget and a 96-page book for a niche market, they would have done well to price the paperback at $9.95 and the Kindle edition at $2.99. I would have told them how they could have secured print and ebook packages with a truly professional appearance and feel with a total front-end expenditure of less than $100, and earned, at the prices just quoted, royalties of $2.05 for every Kindle edition sold, $2.13 for every paperback sold to bookstores and libraries, and $3.82 for every paperback sold at Amazon.com.

At these affordable prices, I would have been able to give the book a significant marketing boost via my Kindle Nation Daily blog, and my friend’s first experience as an author would have been a successful one. Instead, probably because he didn’t want to bother me, he made a bad deal with a publisher who made a bad deal with a printer and ebook publisher. Because of cost slices taken by intermediaries at each step of the way, they were stuck pricing the paperback at $12.95 and the ebook at $7.99. At those prices, the paperback and ebook are languishing far out the "long tail" in the Amazon and Kindle bookstores with sales, in a good week, of a copy or two a week. The unsustainability of the prices also makes it impossible for me to help: the author’s a great friend and I love him like a brother, but my Kindle Nation readers would laugh me out of the Kindlesphere if I recommended to them that they spend $7.99 on a 96-page ebook.

The lesson in that final case is a simple but essential one for everyone from the first-time self-published author to the Big Six publishing company executives responsible for property acquisition and the economics of pricing and cost: books of all kinds, but especially ebooks, must be priced based on the value proposition they present to their prospective buyers and readers. If you get forced into setting a high price because of your costs for editorial and creative, property acquisition and royalties, pre-press and publishing, or the slices taken by publishers, aggregators, distributors, wholesalers, or retailers, that high price is your problem, not the customer’s. Unless you have a truly hot property for which customers will pay above-market prices, the fact that you can "justify" your price based on costs is irrelevant. The book will not sell.

 

This is a reprint from Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily.

Weighing Up Traditional Publishing & Ebook Publishing

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This guest blog post, by Robert W. Walker, originally appeared on Buried Under Books on July 13, 2010. In it, Mr. Walker compares the traditional publishing model to the new ebook self-publishing models, and finds the traditional model wanting.

Robert W. Walker is a graduate of Chicago’s Wells High School, Northwestern University, and the NU’s Graduate Masters in English Education program.  Rob has taught writing in all its permutations (“All writing is creative writing but not all writing sings,” he says.) from composition and developmental to a study of the literary masters to creative and advanced creative writing.  His first novel was one only an arrogant youth could have conceived — a sequel to Huckleberry Finn (now published as Daniel & The Wrongway Railway, Royal Fireworks Press, NY), but his first suspense-techno-thriller-sf-mystery came in 1979, after college, a novel that won no awards entitled SUB-ZERO.

In any non-traditional publishing as in ebook publication, there is no such thing as “an advance against royalties”.  In Traditional Publishing as we know, now often termed DTB’s by our younger generations, ie. Dead Tree Books the “advance” has always been there. This is a significant difference. For the older generation, my generation, the first phrase that comes to mind for the author is “an advance against royalties” and what this means is the author gets a lump sum “loan payment” to start work on the process of crafting a book or novel. However, in ebook non-traditional publishing wherein everything is lower case, there are NO advances. In fact, in “non-publishing” as some like to call it, there are a lot of “NO’s” to the traditional model.

However, before we get too far afield, an advance against a royalty of a $100, 000 is a thing of beauty on the surface. No doubt about that. A writer can rejoice. However if it is for four books to be written over four years, that’s pretty much slave wages or $25,000 a year, which if one is independently wealthy makes for nice pen money. Not so with most people who are attempting to make a living (no joke) at writing.

To the midlist author who wins this arrangement or spin of the publishing wheel, 25,000 a year does not go far. It’s about minimum wage if that. Whereas in ebook publishing, there are NO advances and no paying back of that 25,000 a year either. On the one hand, your publisher grants you a “loan” to be paid back via your royalties (if royalties even occur); on the other hand, every cent of an advance must be paid back to the publisher via your royalties, and until that hundred thousand is worked off by your royalties (if at all) you see no additional funds from royalties. Should your sales be too low to return that advance to your publisher, you are both left with a bad business loan, and your name or reputation as a writer is mud thereafter.

The above is one area where traditional and non-traditional publishing go in very different directions. But there are far more differences for the writer as businessman as well. Below are some of the glaring differences other than no advances.

 

Read the rest of the post on Buried Under Books.

Upcoming E-publishing Revolution

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This just in: a new podcast and transcript from Copyright Clearance Center’s Beyond The Book site, which features a panel discussion for the Independent Book Publishers Association at their annual “Publishing University” program.

In this episode, featured guests Mark Coker of Smashwords, Jack Sallay of Vook and O Magazine Books Editor Sara Nelson explain the ongoing e-publishing revolution  with E-Magination: What’s Now & What’s Next in Ebooks.

The podcast and transcript (in pdf format) are available now.

Writer School?

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Writer School?
WRITER SCHOOL?
Copyright 2003, Michael LaRocca
http://www.michaeledits.com/

Here’s something from my mailbag. “Dear Michael, do you need to do good in school if you want to be a writer? I stink at school and all my friends laugh at me when I tell them I want to write, but I’m serious.” Followed by a sentence or two of “I need your words to encourage me” or some such nonsense.

Fortunately, a writing sample is rarely attached. If it is, either it’s excellent or it stinks like rancid yak butter. There’s a lot of middle ground in the writing world, of course, but for some reason it never seems to accompany these emails.

The message is usually (but not always) so filled with errors that I’m not gonna reprint them here or correct them when I reply lest I destroy some sensitive soul like a jackhammer to an eggshell. It’s ridiculous that I should even have such power, being a stranger and all. Let’s move on to the relevant part, the question, which actually contains several. This writer gets bonus points for brevity.

Do you have to be good in school? Given what’s passing for English in some places, I’d certainly like to see more effort given to school.

If you aspire to be an author and you did poorly in school, or if you’re just plain uneducated, don’t let it stop you. What we do as authors isn’t taught in school. They teach grammar, and bless them. I can’t teach that subject. If you’re very fortunate, as I was, you’ll stumble across some teachers who also encourage you to think. But thinking is the beginning of writing, not the end, and grammar can be fixed later if you find some long-suffering editor (like me) willing to do it.

In other words, school can help you with the first step or two of your journey to be an author. Considering how many steps come after those, don’t be discouraged by test results and report cards.

To distill what you think, feel and believe from all the trash floating around in your head, and then to actually put that on paper the way you mean to put it, is a skill that only comes from years of practice. I struggled at this for 20 years or so after I graduated from college. I didn’t learn to write in a classroom.

In my travels through the Intergoogle, I’ve met blind authors, deaf authors, dyslexic authors, authors writing in a second or third language, authors suffering partial paralysis, authors with various psychoses, authors who deal with more than one of these obstacles. What they overcome makes my complaint, that I’m too left-brained to be in this business, seem absolutely pathetic. And yours, about doing poorly in school.

I could cite you a VERY long list of authors who did poorly in school. If I did my job as an editor, you’ll never know who they are unless I call them out by name. And I won’t. Probably because I can’t remember them.

(I’m joking. Editor/author confidentiality protects them, even if it exists only in my imagination.)

Our emailer then mentions that her friends laugh at her when she tells them she intends to write. Why does she care? I’ve lost count of how many projects I’ve undertaken despite criticism. Not just writing, either. Life. But let me narrow my focus just so I can end this rant.

You have a reason for writing. You know what it is, even if you can’t put it into words. I can’t put it into words. (“It” can mean your reason or mine in that sentence.) But it’s there. Why do you give a rat’s ass how many people tell you not to even try? People who I doubt have even read your writing, I might add. Your classmates won’t understand why you write. Nor your friends. Nor your family. You’re lucky if you find ten non-writers in your lifetime who have a clue. And you don’t care. You just write.

If you’re ever lucky enough to “arrive,” then all the doubters will claim to understand why you write. And they’ll all be wrong.

Also, by the time someone out there is embracing your work, you’ll already be three books beyond it and sick of hearing about your old trash. No, it won’t be trash, but you’ll think of it that way. There’s a big time lapse between creation and that Oprah interview.

What I never write to those emailers is this.

I shouldn’t have to tell you why you write. You don’t need my vindication or anyone else’s. If those who haven’t even read your work can discourage you, give up. Or do an Emily Dickinson and leave it all for people to find after you die. But if you’ll let something as silly as your grades in school stop you from even beginning to write in the first place, nothing you have to write is worth finding after you die.

And if you’re angry at me for saying that, good. Prove me wrong. Write a book.

The One-Plot Wonder

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The One-Plot Wonder
THE ONE-PLOT WONDER
Copyright 2003, Michael LaRocca
http://www.michaeledits.com/

Back in the mid to late 1980s I was a security guard. The pay was lousy, but it gave me many hours in seclusion to write short stories and novels. However, I usually worked over 80 hours a week. No one can write that much unless his name is Isaac Asimov. Thus I discovered the joys of my local libraries. Recently, I decided to look up an author who gave me great pleasure in those days. Most of his books are now out of print, I’ve learned, even the one that became a movie.

I found that two of his books were available, so I ordered them. One I’d enjoyed before. The other was a straight thriller from the days before he created the “Appleton Porter” spy spoofs, re-released in 2001 in POD. I didn’t know this before they arrived at my home in China.

Since I’m giving away THE plot spoiler, I won’t identify the author or title. A man who deeply loves his wife buys her a hotel outside London. She is very happy there, at first. This is a fine suspenseful read as she notes oddities and eventually appears to be losing her mind and such. Suicides, an eventual murder. Finally, her husband pays a doctor to kill her.

Her husband arranged all this, we learn at the end, because she was dying of a horrible and incurable illness. Rather than let her suffer the indignity, he tries to give this lover of mystery novels some final days filled with clever puzzles and wonderful memories. He never realizes that he ended her days with a living hell.

The writing was fine, aside from some stupid typos of the sort common in unedited POD titles. He’s obviously a sincere, hard-working, talented author. The plot was wholly consistent and everything “worked.” So why is it a weak book? Because the plot I described is all there is. It’s a one-plot wonder.

As an author, if you find yourself floundering, if you find your work-in-progress failing to make progress, ask yourself. Is it a one-plot wonder?

Here are some best sellers I’ve read over the past 30 years.

During the Cold War, a Soviet commander steals a top-secret submarine and tries to defect to the US with it. A good and idealistic young law graduate accepts a job too good to be true, only to eventually learn he’s working for the Mafia. An alcoholic author and his family become caretakers at an old Maine hotel, alone during the winter, and he eventually goes nuts. A US President declares war on drug dealers, a “clear and present danger” to national security. A crippled author is kidnapped by the ultimate fan.

I’ve chosen these titles because I’ve read the books and seen the movies. None of my plot summaries are wrong. But with some of those novels, there are many more plots and subplots at work. These are the novels that didn’t always translate well to the big screen due to time constraints and/or loss of nonobjective voice.

I love a well-conceived “what if” scenario, and none of these books lack that. But more importantly, I love a novel that’s rich with the fabric of life. That’s where multiple plots come into play. Very rarely will a movie capture this as well as a novel can.

A one-plot wonder is a boring read. It’s a boring write. It’s not realistic. And, it’s a hard sell. All your eggs are in one basket. If the editor isn’t enthralled with that sole plot, you aren’t published. If the reviewer isn’t enthralled with that sole plot, he pans you. If the potential reader isn’t enthralled with that sole plot, he doesn’t buy your book. Or if he does, maybe you don’t get any repeat business from him. You don’t get mine.

Plus, we should be setting the bar a bit higher for ourselves anyway. We entertain, but we also enlighten and educate. Or at the very least, provide needed escape. But it’s hard to escape to a one-plot wonder. I keep taking coffee breaks between chapters.

I single out no writing medium with this. All are guilty. Come on, TERMINATOR 2 has more subplots than many successful books these days. And it’s not just “these days,” incidentally. The title I reviewed early in this article is from 1979. Published, successful, well-written, flat.

Craftsmanship is fine. Craftsmanship is wonderful to behold. Craftsmanship is a necessity. But it’s not enough. Do you want to build a horse barn that never leaks or do you want to build a two-story A-frame home that survives five hurricanes undamaged? My carpenter did the latter and I can’t do the former. But if I had the ability to build a leak-proof barn, I certainly wouldn’t limit myself to barns. I’d try to build houses. Just like the sheriff (Gene Hackman) in UNFORGIVEN.

I’m not talking about weighty tomes. Times change, readers change, and most people don’t read those tomes any more. What was once considered gripping is now considered boring.

But one-plot wonders also bore readers. They read it, enjoy it moderately, then go look for something else to do. There’s little satisfaction at the end. Rarely the big “wow” that made you start writing in the first place.

I’m talking about shooting for five stars instead of two or three. I’m talking about richness of story, raising the standard, writing your absolute best instead of settling for adequate.

I risk oversimplification here, but I’m seeing far too many one-plot wonders. People are buying them, too. But it’s time for us, the authors, to quit writing them.