Think

Opinion pieces offering commentary on various aspects of book culture, publishing and self-publishing.

What NOT To Do On CreateSpace

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This post by Laurie Boris originally appeared on Indies Unlimited on 5/20/14.

When you’re getting ready to release a new title, it might seem handy to hop onto CreateSpace first to craft your print version and then hit the big magic button allowing them to format your e-book. Automation is more awesome than videos of tap-dancing kittens, right? Um, in this case, not so much. Allowing CreateSpace to make an e-book out of your print version is asking for trouble, and here’s why.

When you format an e-book directly from the word processing document you used to prepare your final manuscript, you have a good measure of control. Or as much control as you can have over a process in which the user can modify the appearance of the product and you’re trying to satisfy the quirks of a multitude of e-reading devices. If you choose to do your own formatting, and follow the guidelines supplied by your online retailer, you can prepare that document for upload to Amazon or a spin through Smashwords’ meatgrinder with tidy results and few if any formatting errors. (The Smashwords style guide is particularly user friendly, or see Melinda Clayton’s tutorial on how to use the “nuclear” option to zap weird coding errors out of your document.)

 

Click here to read the full post on Indies Unlimited.

 

Surviving in the Amazon Jungle – How Authors and Reviewers Can Co-exist in a Hostile Environment (and run to court if they don’t)

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This post by Pete Morin originally appeared on his site on 3/20/14.

Well, the Rice Petition has lost a lot of its steam as author after author continues to sign it with no apparent understanding of exactly what it proposes (based upon their own comments), but in the meantime, there has been a lot of discussion, and agreement, that Amazon’s review guidelines could use a few tweaks and a lot more enforcement.

There has also been a fair amount of criticism that demanding the true identities of ten million customers of Amazon products was too high a price to pay for a few dozen militant female reviewers to be “taught a lesson” by Queen Anne.

In that light, I began to consider the kind of actions the author and reviewer could take to both clarify their expectations in the book review arena and provide meaningful remedies against wrongdoers. There is no reason to send the cockroaches into the woodpile when a few well-coined provisos and wherefores can bring about harmony and understanding.

As a (dreaded) litigation attorney, I am forced to parse the language of contractual covenants, indemnifications, waivers, warranties, representations, certifications, promises and disclaimers. While the reading is excruciating, I take comfort in the fact that, pedantic and dull as they are, these kinds of clauses are usually enforceable according to their terms, no matter what they say. As long as both parties agree to the language and it is otherwise unambiguous and capable of only one meaning, it will be enforced in the event of a breach and consequent suit.

 

Click here to read the full post on Pete Morin’s site.

 

More Thoughts on Wattpad

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This post by Elizabeth Spann Craig originally appeared on her blog on 8/15/14.

I blogged in May that I was giving the publishing platform Wattpad a go.  I was somewhat worried about this decision at the time, wondering if my octogenarian protagonist and I would fit in among the youthful readers on the site.

From May to August, I went from several reads to steadily increasing reads.  Nothing I’d call spectacular.  But each day or couple of days I’d get a notification that I had someone else following (I think of them more as subscribers of) my story.  The number of reads (not readers, reads of each chapter) grew and with them grew more visibility.  That’s how it works at Wattpad.

Now, suddenly, I have over 18,000 reads.  I’ve done absolutely nothing to get these.  I’ve not been actively networking, not been joining groups.  I’ve been pretty darn introverted on the site except for my pleasant exchanges with readers who have commented on each chapter.

 

Click here to read the full post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s blog.

 

Pursuing the Creative Muse

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This post by J. Cafesin originally appeared on the Cafe 42 blog on 2/18/14.

How do you get good at anything?
Practice.

How do you get great?
Obsession—Practice most all the time.

Pick any famous author, artist, musician, and they’ll all have obsession in common. And while we, the public, enjoy the fruits of their creative labor, those closest to these individuals were/are generally left wanting.

Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip, “was an indifferent and often inattentive father and husband.”

Rod Serling, of Twilight Zone fame, “worked 12 hours a day seven days a week, [and] his wife, Carol, tended to their daughters, Jodi and Anne.”

Adrienne Armstrong, wife of Billy Joe Armstrong of Greenday said of her husband after the release of the album American Idiot, “I think it challenged us to a new level, pushed us pretty far, the farthest I ever want to go.”

The creatives above are all men. All married and all had/have children.

Now let’s explore a few famous women.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Cafe 42 blog.

 

Why Write?

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This post by Cathy Fyock originally appeared on The Working Writer’s Club on 8/14/14.

Getting clear on the purpose for your writing is one of the significant hurdles to getting your book completed. If you don’t know how you’ll use your book in your business, you may miss the mark or fail to leverage the full value of your authorship.
By being clear on how your book will benefit you and your business, you’ll find that you can justify the necessary time to write it. You’ll also find that identifying your purpose will provide fuel for your motivation and drive.

Look at the list below and determine which of these benefits of writing a book will fuel your motivation for getting your book completed. And, be sure to add to this blog by commenting [beneath the original post, here] on the benefits you plan to derive (or are currently receiving) from authorship.

To give to prospects as a “calling card”

To help sell your professional services

To establish your credibility

To gain media exposure

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes MANY more specific reasons for writing and publishing, on The Working Writer’s Club.

 

Konrath's Advice to Publishers

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This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 8/17/14.

Over four years ago I wrote a blog post about ebooks:

Joe sez in May 2010: I’d always assumed that print publishers would begin to lose market dominance once ebooks took off in a big way, and they’d have to either restructure or die.

But now I’m predicting another death for them.

What is going to happen when authors stop sending their books to publishers?

If I know I can make $100,000 on a self-published ebook in five years of sales, and I have the numbers to back up this claim, why would any informed writer–either pro or newbie–ever settle for less?

The dominance of ebooks is coming. I have no doubt. But I always thought it was the readers who would lead the charge, based on cost and convenience.

Now I’m starting to believe that the ones with the real power are the ones who should have had the power since the beginning of publishing. The ones who create the content in the first place.

The authors.

It’s a wonderful, dynamic, empowering time to be an author. For the first time, we can command our own ships.

We’re the ones who write the books. We can reach readers without any gatekeepers at all. And we can make money doing it.

The print publishing industry’s biggest fear shouldn’t be the eventual dominance of ebooks over print.

 

Click here to read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

 

The New Bestseller Lists

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This post by L.J. Sellers originally appeared on The Kill Zone on 8/11/14.

Elements of the publishing industry have never been more hotly debated! The most passionate discussion is the Amazon/Hachette dispute over distribution terms and pricing, but another issue has come up that may have a broader effect on authors. Or at least, a more personal influence.

Amazon’s new Kindle Unlimited program was unveiled recently, and it’s already affecting the measure by which authors all live—the Kindle bestseller lists.  I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the background: Kindle Unlimited (KU) is a subscription service for ebooks. For $9.99 a month, readers can download all the digital books they want. So far, the books included in the service mostly come from the Select program of Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and Amazon Publishing (AP) imprints.

[You can enroll in the KDP Select program by clicking on the box when you upload your book. When you click the Select box, you’re agreeing to make that ebook exclusive to Amazon and not sell it in ebook form anywhere else. In exchange, you get various promotional opportunities, plus you’re enrolled in KOLL (the lending library), so you get paid each time someone borrows your book. And now, with the new program, you’re also in Kindle Unlimited, for even more paid sales.]

 

Click here to read the full post on The Kill Zone.

 

The Ideas Have It

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This post by Philip Jones originally appeared on Futurebook on 8/12/14.

When The Bookseller launched the FutureBook Hack earlier this year, I wrote that the “book business has a remarkable record in publishing innovation, and a terrible reputation for digital inertia”. Part of the reason for this is that there are more ideas about this business, and what might be changed about how we go about the business, than there is capacity within it for the ideas to be given the oxygen they need. Just last month I noted a list of ten innovations I thought deserved greater attention, and last week Porter Anderson interviewed Headline’s Ben Willis, the person behind Bookbridgr.com, an idea which I cruelly left off my original list.

At the FutureBook Conference last year we asked a panel of industry experts for their big ideas. Each speaker got 5 minutes to pitch one way in which the industry could improve. The ideas looked at adapting to a shifting digital landscape, cultivating innovation and how to make the most of technological changes.

 

Click here to read the full post on Futurebook.

 

Historical Fiction with Catherine Czerkawska # 1

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This post by Catherine Czerkawska originally appeared on the Edinburgh Ebook Festival 2014 site on 8/11/14.

1 THE CURSE OF PRESENTISM

Thanks to Valerie Laws of Authors Electric for helping me out with the term presentism. I wasn’t aware of it, but it neatly encapsulates a point I want to make – and it seems like as good a beginning as any to this residency. Here’s a useful Wikipedia definition: Presentism is a mode of literary or historical analysis in which present-day ideas and perspectives are anachronistically introduced into depictions or interpretations of the past. A quick scan online will reveal plenty of blog posts and other pieces pontificating (with some justification) about anachronisms in historical fiction as well as in film and television programmes. Sometimes they can be deliberate. The judicious use of anachronism in movies like A Knight’s Tale where the fuss and adoration surrounding participants in these Mediaeval tournaments is beautifully paralleled by that accorded to gladiatorial athletes like Ice Hockey players, manages to be both accurate and illustrative of a genuine truth about the times. We recognise the parallel and extrapolate from it. It’s also enjoyable and entertaining. There are novels as well as movies where these deliberate anachronisms are used to illuminate some kind of parallel between past and present culture and society. In many ways they involve the opposite of presentism, using present day ideas and preoccupations to elucidate the past.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Edinburgh Ebook Festival 2014 site.

 

Reading Instead of Tweeting: Part II

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This post by Kelly originally appeared on the Little Pickle Press blog on 8/7/14.

I don’t just watch trends happen in education when it comes to reading: I live them daily. In my two decades as an educator in various capacities, I have seen my share of trends come and go when it comes to instruction of reading, but there are some constants and hard data that educators and parents use to make decisions about reading. The research is telling us a number of disturbing trends about how fewer parents are reading to their children and that in the previous 30 years we’ve seen reading decline further and further amongst children.

So, when I hear things like “Kids just aren’t reading these days!” I have to stop myself from arguing against it when the research and data tells us that it’s true. Developmentally, reading is a part of what makes our imaginations blossom and our worldview expand, but I also know that there are other things capturing the attention of children.

Naturally, much of this discussion comes with advances in technology and apps that are appealing to younger and younger children. Getting my own teens to continue reading long after I stopped reading to them was a battle but we got lucky in that they found what interested them early on and it they were varied genres. Of course, I didn’t have to compete with smartphones or easily accessible apps to get my own children to read. While they were growing up the media that vied for their attention was the television or video games and even that wasn’t seen as an “addiction” like many believe it to be today.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Little Pickle Press blog.

 

How To Promote Yourself And Your Books On Social Media Without Feeling Like A Soul-Selling, Sleaze-Sucking Slime-Glob

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 8/10/14.

In my experience, most authors dislike self-promotion.

Some downright despise it.

And they detest it for good reason: becoming a marketing or advertising avatar for your own work feels shameless. It feels adjacent to the work — like it’s something you didn’t sign on for.

I JUST WANT TO WRITE BOOKS, you scream into the mirror around pages of your manuscript, the pages moistened with saliva and tears. I DON’T WANT TO BECOME A HUMAN SPAM-BOT, you cry as your teeth clatter into the sink, as your ear plops off, as your nose drops away. In all the gaps, a faint glimpse of whirring machinery, gears turning and conveyor belts churning, all of your mechanisms pink with the slurry of Spam…

Thing is, you’re probably gonna have to do it anyway.

Reasons?

First, publishers expect it, to some degree.

Second, if you’re an author-publisher, it becomes wholly more necessary.

 

Click here to read the full post on terribleminds.

 

Writerisms and other Sins

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This post by Alexander M. Soltai originally appeared on Notes From An Alien on 8/11/14.

Dare I say it—there’s too much crappy advice for writers on the Web.

Far too much of it aims to teach the rules of genre-writing rather than the ways to write clearly.

If a writer is trapped in someone else’s mold, their true creativity will be strangled.

My all-time favorite fiction writer (after my Best Friend) is C. J. Cherryh; and, I’m going to share some of her writing advice.

She’s written more than 60 books since the mid-1970s and won multiple awards.

One of the most interesting things about her is that even her most adoring fans say she’s challenging to read…

Yet, it’s not because she’s lost in florid prose or chained to a genre-muse.

She does write in certain “genres” but she creatively bends them to her writing-will—never a tortured trope, never a borrowed plot, never a bunch of hackneyed characters…

 

Click here to read the full article on Notes From An Alien.

 

Crap Someone Should Have Told You Writers By Now

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This post by Rebecca T. Dickson originally appeared on her site on 9/4/13.

Sometimes, you don’t need preamble. Sometimes, you need someone to give it to you straight.

Hi. *waves*

This is for every writer on this whacked out planet.

• Your early work will suck.

• Your later work, in its early drafts, will still suck.

• No one cares about your writing unless you’re at (or near) the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

• Seriously. You could win the Pulitzer in literature and your friends would be, like, “Yeah, she’s writing or something boring like that. What a waste of time.”

• You cannot please everyone.

• YOU CANNOT PLEASE EVERYONE.

• So don’t try.

• Write for yourself. Failing that, write for one person.

• Listening to ten other people means ten extra people in your head when you write.

 

Click here to read the full post on Rebecca T. Dickson’s site.

 

What Makes People Buy Self-Published Books?

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This post by Tara Sparling originally appeared on her site on 7/31/14.

In this post, I discussed the findings of a scientifically incontrovertible study (of myself) on the factors which influenced me when buying a self-published book.

The findings surprised me (which surprised me, because I was surveying myself). I found that I knew what made me buy a self-published book when it was in front of me, but not what put that book in front of me, unless I was browsing by genre (e.g. today I feel like reading a romance set in Ulaanbaatar: therefore I will now search specifically for such a story).

It was still hard to know what put those books in front of my eyes in order to buy them; to quote one of the commenters on that post – this is the thorny issue of “discoverability”. How will we find these books in the first place?

So I did the unthinkable, and asked some other people. I surveyed readers and writers alike, in online groups for different fiction genres of crime, fantasy and general fiction, and more than a few other people who just like to talk to other people about reading and writing. I asked them what factors influenced them most when buying books – particularly self-published books and any other books which aren’t pushed by the major houses.

 

Click here to read the full post on Tara Sparling’s site.

 

What Does Amazon/Hachette Have to Do With Me?

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This post by Barry Eisler originally appeared on his blog on 8/9/14.

In connection with the $100,000 ad some reactionary authors bought to run in tomorrow’s New York Times, Amazon has sent a letter to its self-published authors. It’s a good read, with some interesting historical context, for anyone who values low-priced ebooks and fair royalties for writers. And if you want to share your opinion on those topics with the CEO of “Big Five” publisher Hachette, you can email him — just scroll down the Amazon letter. Here’s what I said:

Hi Michael, even if the Big Five (why would anyone imagine something called the Big Five could be a cartel?) still had the power to control the market — and you don’t — the best you could do through agency and windowing and the like is delay the inevitable mass market transition to digital. Is that really who you want to be? A reactionary, focused on shoring up the next quarter rather than expanding your opportunities for the long term?

I don’t want big publishing to die — I want it to get well. But to get well, you’re going to have to change the lifestyle that’s led to your ongoing decrepitude.

Please, think about the future. Think about your place not just in the Big Five, but in the world. Stop impeding what’s best for readers, writers, and reading. Don’t fight progress. Be progress.

Sincerely yours,
Barry Eisler
www.barryeisler.com

I’ve seen some interesting reactions to the Amazon missive. I responded to some of them over at The Passive Voice, which consistently has some of the best industry coverage I’ve seen (both for Passive Guy’s presence and the insights of the people who comment there). I’ll address those reactions here, as well:

1. Amazon and/or Hachette are trying to get me to do their bidding, drag me into their war, dragoon me, etc.

 

Click here to read the full post on Barry Eisler’s blog.