Think

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

Unlocking the Story-Box

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This post by Sophie Masson originally appeared on Writer Unboxed on 7/14/14.

“Where do you get your ideas from?”

It’s the classic question you nearly always get asked, as a writer, and there are always the classic answers to give back: something you’ve experienced, read about, observed; a place, a person, an overheard conversation, a newspaper report, a dream, an emotion, a picture, a fairy tale, a poem. These are my usual kinds of triggers, some happened on by chance, others more deliberately sought. But there are other kinds of triggers: objects, things that by their very presence seem to fire off the story-nerve. And they can be the most exciting triggers of all. That’s certainly been the case for me very recently.

I’m back in Europe at the moment and the other week, in London, on my way to the British Museum, I took a wrong (or right!) turn and came across an antique shop. In the window were trays of old coins, small figures, and old jewelry—very old jewelry, for as soon became clear, this was a shop specialising in objects from the ancient world, in particular Greece, Rome and Egypt. Some of the things were very expensive indeed, but a few were in the affordable range, so on a whim, I decided to go in and have a closer look. And there was the ring.

 

Click here to read the full post on Writer Unboxed.

 

Poor Man’s Copyright – Newsome v. Oldham

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This post by Pete Morin originally appeared on his site on 6/24/14.

Hardly a week goes by without a discussion on the Internet about the legendary “poor man’s copyright.” This theory posits that an author may prove he is the creator of a work at a particular point in time by mailing himself a copy of the work, which is kept in the sealed envelope until such time as it may be needed. With the near ubiquity of email and the use of the Internet (especially by authors intent on selling their work), the old mailing tactic might just as easily be employed by one emailing himself a file.

With the advent of the Lanham Act, such quaint tactics are no substitute for registration with the United States Copyright Office, a process that takes minutes and costs only $35.

Nevertheless, the time may come when an author whose work is unregistered would discover her novel to have been stolen – perhaps by an unscrupulous beta reader – and fraudulently registered. Upon discovery, that unfortunate author might seek to register her own manuscript (as she must in order to maintain an action for infringement), which the USCO will not approve in light of the prior registration. Alternatively, the fraudulent author might (with breathtaking temerity) maintain an infringement action against the true creator.

How would the victimized author fare in her quest to prove she is the original artist?

 

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

 

Judge Orders Unmasking of Amazon.com “Negative” Reviewers

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This article by David Kravets originally appeared on Ars Technica on 7/11/14. While the case in question concerns nutritional supplements, this precedent has wider implications for ALL Amazon reviews, including book reviews.

Decision broaches anonymous commenting versus unfair business practices.

A federal judge has granted a nutritional supplement firm’s request to help it learn the identities of those who allegedly left “phony negative” reviews of its products on Amazon.com.

The decision means that Ubervita may issue subpoena’s to Amazon.com and Cragslist to cough up the identities of those behind a “campaign of dirty tricks against Ubervita in a wrongful effort to put Ubervita at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace” (PDF).

According to a lawsuit by the maker of testosterone boosters, multivitamins, and weight loss supplements, unknown commenters had placed fraudulent orders “to disrupt Ubervita’s inventory,” posted a Craigslist ad “to offer cash for favorable reviews of Ubervita products,” and posed “as dissatisfied Ubervita customers in posting phony negative reviews of Ubervita products, in part based on the false claim that Ubervita pays for positive reviews.”

 

Click here to read the full article on Ars Technica.

Also see this related story on Consumerist: Court Orders Amazon To Reveal Identities Of Negative Reviewers.

 

You Can’t Be Too Careful With That Precious First Page

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This post by Greta van der Rol originally appeared on her site on 6/30/14.

Authors, you can’t be too careful when crafting that precious first page for your tour de force. This is a case study.

Since he retired, my husband has read a lot of books. He tends to like crime, thrillers, mystery – that sort of thing. And he often picks up free books from Smashwords. As I explained in a previous post, if he enjoys the read, he’ll go and buy whatever else that author has on offer. Sometimes, he’ll share his new find with me. “Read this. I think you’d like it.”

So, feeling at something of a loose end, I sat down in my reading chair and opened the book on my tablet. It’s a crime novel, written in first person. I’ll say no more at this stage, because all I’d read was the blurb. In the first few sentences I met the protagonist, and a rather scruffy stranger. The exchange was very different to the usual polite frippery. He says, “Pleased to meet you.” She responds with, “No you’re not.”

So far so good. I’m interested. But then we meet a new character who is this lady’s boss. And this is where the author lost me. Not because a new character is introduced, but because I am immediately derailed into a far too long exposition of this person, his background, her background… All presented as her inner thoughts.

 

Click here to read the full article on Greta van der Rol’s site.

 

Self-Publishing as a Means to My Own Literary Revolution

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This post by Tejas Desai originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 6/26/14.

Much bluster has been made recently in the media regarding the Amazon-Hachette dispute, with multimillionaire authors, agents and self-published writers, among others, weighing in. Most have condemned Amazon for its bullying tactics in negotiations with publishers while self-published authors like Barry Eisler and J. A. Konrath have defended it for democratizing the field. Much of the rhetoric has involved terms like “sales figures” “copies sold” “promotional fees” and “marketing development.” Very little of the conversation has been about the more important issue of the current state of narrative and where literature is headed.

I published both my books, The Brotherhood (2012) and Good Americans (2013), through my own company The New Wei, after being frustrated with the traditional industry and the type of literature it was producing. I found most literary books I read to be bland in content and only passable in style. They often seemed to have some non-fiction market angle that hoped to sell the book and justified the authors getting teaching jobs and never publishing future books. Yet all of these books were acclaimed by major critics, newspapers, magazines, publications and writers, which caused me to question their impartiality, or at least their taste.

As someone who worked at a literary agency for years, I already knew how random publication tended to be and how difficult it was to sell a book. Most books never sold and those that did rarely earned out their advances. The contract terms were absurdly tilted toward the publishers and authors didn’t have much say in presentation or marketing. Most authors never got agents, and it had little to do with quality. Usually, it was just luck. Still I continued to have some faith in the industry even as I left it, became a professional librarian, received a MFA, wrote and rewrote my works. And while I received initial interest from several agents, I never got one. Even the independent publishers rejected it. All their stated reasons were different.

 

Click here to read the full post on Publishing Perspectives.

 

Amazon-Hachette: The Sounds of Silence

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This post by William Ockham originally appeared on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing on 7/13/14.

Everybody’s talking about Amazon’s latest move in the Amazon-Hachette kerfuffle and the reactions have been pretty predictable. Lots of confirmation bias going around. While the public broadsides, grand offers, and nasty anonymous leaks are full of sound and fury, I’m fond of looking for the truth in the silence. What the companies aren’t saying is as important to understanding the situation as what they are saying. I’m not sure if anyone has noticed, but neither side has denied any of the specific factual claims the other has made. In fact, if we read between the lines, we can cut through the noise and see what’s really happening. I have learned* the best way to do that is to make a timeline. Our brains have a tendency to remember the order in which we learned a set of facts and it has a hard to reassembling the chronological order of how things actually happened. We should be continually re-evaluating our understanding of this situation based on new information.

Recent statements from both sides have provided a lot more information about how this dispute got to this point. To avoid turning Joe’s blog into an academic article, I’m not going to footnote all of these events. If you want the source for a particular claim, just ask in the comments. My primary sources are the most recent Amazon-Hachette exchange and Michael J. Sullivan’s account of his interactions with Amazon and Hachette this year. If I have left off any significant events and gotten any of this wrong, please let me know in the comments [section on the original post]. I’m far more interest[ed] in getting this right than being right.

 

Early Jan 2014

Amazon makes the first move, sending an offer to Hachette. Based on Hachette leaks, we know that Amazon is offering a return to wholesale pricing.

7 Feb 2014

Amazon stops discounting Hachette titles.

 

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

 

Riding a Wave: How ‘Boys in the Boat’ Became a Best-seller

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This article by Mary Ann Gwinn originally appeared on The Seattle Times on 7/13/14.

Here’s a secret that authors and publishers would give a lot to know: What makes a best-seller? Marketing campaigns? Social-media strategies? Media attention? Sales-pushing algorithms?

Redmond author Daniel James Brown has one answer, and it’s none of the above. Here’s the story of the success of one worthy book.

Brown is the author of the best-selling “The Boys in the Boat”(Penguin), the true saga of the University of Washington crew team, winners of an Olympic gold medal in 1936. This team of nine young athletes traveled to the Berlin Olympics, an event staged-managed by Hitler and the Nazis, and vanquished the Germans’ hand-picked crew. The book is in its fifth week as the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction paperback in the country, according to The New York Times. (It’s No. 5 on the best-seller list that covers all forms of nonfiction, both print and e-book.)

Improbably, no Seattle-based author had recognized the potential in the story until Brown, a California transplant, technical writer and author of two nonfiction books, made a visit to the elderly father of a neighbor in Redmond about six years ago. The neighbor, Judy Willman, had been reading one of Brown’s previous books to her dying father, Joe Rantz, and told Brown that it would thrill Joe if he would spend time with her dad.

 

Click here to read the full article on The Seattle Times.

 

Breaking Free – What Happened When I Left KDP Select

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This post by Nick Stephenson originally appeared on his site on 6/6/14.

“KDP Select is evil”. “Free promotions are pointless”. “Nick, you’re an idiot”. These are things I hear on a daily basis, the latter usually being something I say to myself when I’m looking in the mirror. As for the first two, I talk to a lot of authors who have a strong opinion on the relative merits of signing up for 90 days of exclusivity with Amazon, and the words “shackled” and “dungeon” come up a lot. It’s the same for free days – half of authors think they’re a God-send, the other half would rather cut off their own limbs with a rusty spatula than offer their work gratis. And that’s cool, I don’t have anything against people having wildly different opinions – and there are plenty of authors making a decent income without touching free promotions, and there are plenty who swear by them. But I like to look at the cold, hard numbers before coming to a conclusion, as everybody’s mileage seems to vary.

The two main strategies for free books I see most often are:

1. A variety of titles signed up to KDP Select, with rotating free promotions on each book. This is pretty easy to do with the 5 free days you get to play with under the KDP Select contract.

2.Titles NOT in KDP select, and up on other vendors, with the first book in the series permanently free. This is also pretty easy to do.

There are pros and cons for both approaches, but last month was the first time I’d tried option number (2). I’ve had a bunch of emails and comments asking for me to report back on the results, so here’s the skinny:

Income Report: All Books in KDP Select

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes sales graphs and detailed analysis, on Nick Stephenson’s site.

 

Dear Miss Austen

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This post by Kat Flannery originally appeared on Indie Chicks Cafe on 2/22/14.

We have never met, and with the many years between us, you being born in 1775 and me in 1977, the likelihood of this occurring is slim. However, I have admired you since I was sixteen years old, when I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time. You were talented beyond your time, and as I researched your life more, I was saddened to learn that you never received acclaimed status or rave reviews for your work as an author while living.

The early 1800s were not ready for women to be raising their fists while demanding recognition and a place in society, but you thought it so. You were eager and honest for women to be held in some form of esteem other than the mere whisper from behind their men.

You lived during the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the Industrial Revolution, and yet there is never any mention of them in your novels. These historic events seemed to have passed you by without notice. When I open your books, I’m transported back to a time where none of this existed. Instead, romance, common sense and reason are woven into your words.
 

Click here to read the full post on Indie Chicks Cafe.

 

So You Want To Make A Living Writing? 13 Great Truths

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This post by Bob Mayer originally appeared on his Write on the River site on 7/6/14.

This is the flip side of my 13 Harsh Truths post of 29 April.

It’s a great life. I’m my own boss. I wear shorts and t-shirts to work, which is in my house. I sit at my desk with a great view of the TN River with a blank stare, drool running down the side of my mouth, and I’m working. Well, not really. Because no one’s paying me for my great thoughts. They’re paying for my writing. I’ve been doing it for over a quarter of a century and here are some Great Truths I’ve learned about making a living as a writer.

1. You can. You constantly hear “No one makes a living writing novels.” I’ve heard it for decades. In 2012 I was at a conference where I gave a keynote, then was listening to another keynote speaker saying “Don’t quit your day job”. And it started to worry me, until I realized my day job was writing. So I didn’t quit.

2. It’s the best time ever to be a writer. I’ve been doing it for over 25 years and have heard all sorts of gloom and doom, but I can honestly say, I don’t think there’s ever been a better time. That’s not to say it isn’t an extremely confusing time, but that’s why I’ve done other blog posts on that, including one about 99% of advice coming from 1% of authors.

3. There is more information than ever before out there. Which could be bad too, but seriously, you can garner a wealth of information about the craft and business of writing without leaving home.

4. Leave home. One of the greatest mistakes I made in my early writing career was not networking. Even in self/indie publishing, it’s key to network with people. I know you’re an introvert, but get out there and talk to people. It’s a people business. And network with a couple of other serious writers on your craft. I’m not a fan of large writers groups getting together and doing line by lines, but 2 or 3 serious writers working on story, like we do in Write on the River, is invaluable. Find better writers than you to work with.

  

Click here to read the full post on Write on the River.

 

The Struggle That Makes the Art

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This post by Heidi Cullinan originally appeared on her blog on 6/6/14.

If there’s a frequently asked question I get which isn’t a variation on “How can a girl write boy sex?” it’s a riff on “How can I be successful as a writer?” I think I get the question a lot because I’m clearly mid-list, doing well but not even in the same zip code as people whose signing lines wrap around the building. I have the career a lot of people want, because everybody knows those megawatt stars are rare. But I’m making well more than a living wage as an author, and that seems an attainable dream. It’s just that nobody can figure out how to do it. How did I? How can others emulate me?

I can answer the question, but I’ll warn you right now a lot of people won’t like the answer, and even more won’t even hear it. Because how I did it is that I worked hard. I mean, I worked. Like a dog. Like a crazy person. Like a desperate freak. I struggled like I’ve struggled for nothing else, and I haven’t stopped. I stripped myself down and made myself understand who I was and what I could do, and then I did what I could to expand my limitations. I believe my struggle and pain, both personal and professional, define and make my art. I believe anyone, everyone, can do this too. Yet the short version of why so many people don’t make it even to a comfortable middle ground has nothing to do with the difficulties of publishing or whether or not we should all toss off publishers entirely, or the quality of the art, or whether or not Amazon is an asshole for bullying Hachette. Most people’s art doesn’t earn them a living because they cannot let go of the fantasy that all they have to do is show up with a product and the world will hand them cash. Most people cannot accept the truth that the work required to get money from art is so onerous it changes the nature of the art itself.

 

Click here to read the full post on Heidi Cullinan’s blog.

 

Reading Lessons of a Religious Upbringing Without Modern Books

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This post by Sarah Perry originally appeared on The Guardian.

I was raised by Strict Baptists, so I was deprived of any recent literature, but blessed from very early on by a huge library of classics.

When I was eight I searched for something to read and found a white-jacketed book full of illustrations. It was about a bullied orphan who left boarding school to live in a haunted house and marry a black-haired man, and though now and then I had to ask my mother to decipher a word, I was enthralled. No one told me I was too young for Jane Eyre.

My parents are devoutly Christian, members of one of the few Strict Baptist chapels left in Essex. It’s hard to explain how it was to be brought up in that chapel and that home: often I say, laughingly, “I grew up in 1895”, because it seems the best way of evoking the Bible readings and Beethoven, the Victorian hymns and the print of Pilgrim’s Progress, and the sunday school seaside outings when we all sang grace before our sausage and chips in three-part harmony.

Though we by no means resembled an Amish cult, there was an almost complete absence of contemporary culture in the house. God’s people were to be “In the world, but not of the world”, and the difference between those two little prepositions banished television and pop music, school discos and Smash Hits, cinema and nail polish, and so many other cultural signifiers I feel no nostalgia for the 80s and 90s: they had nothing to do with me.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Guardian.

 

Why Self-Publishing Authors Must Think Like a Publisher

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This post by Stacey Aaronson originally appeared on The Savvy Book Marketer on 3/18/14.

So many authors write for their love of writing or their desire to share their story or message, but if we want to sell books, it’s important to treat publishing like a business. In today’s guest post Stacey Aaronson discusses the mindset of thinking like a publisher.

After working with over twenty independent authors over the past two years as their editor, book designer, and publishing partner, one glaring issue has come to light:

The majority of self-publishing authors don’t realize that they can’t merely think like a writer; they must think like a publisher—if, that is, they want to sell books.

The thing is, it’s not easy for writers to shift into this mode of thinking—and I would venture to guess that most writers don’t even know they should be thinking this way before they even begin a manuscript. As a writer myself, I confess I didn’t consider the publisher’s mentality until I became a book production professional in the indie publishing realm, so I know firsthand how foreign it can seem.

But here’s the unsavory truth: the various self-publishing portals that have opened the door for would-be authors to get a book into readers’ hands are great, but many writers are running to upload all degrees of manuscripts—from the languishing and rejected, to the unedited and poorly designed—without honoring the legacy of traditional publishing. In short, thousands of substandard books are entering the literary marketplace because a multitude of writers are sadly stuck not only in ego mode, but in the belief that producing a book is somehow not a craft and an art. If we don’t want to destroy the reputation of books altogether—and if we want to reap a financial benefit as an author—this mindset has to change.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Savvy Book Marketer.

 

Amazon Speaks!

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This post by Alex Shephard originally appeared on the Melville House blog on 7/3/14.

Amazon does not like to talk. And Amazon especially does not like to talk to the press—when the company felt it had to address its dispute with Hachette in late-May it avoided the media completely, and instead released an odd, condescending statement on its Kindle forum. In every report about its ongoing negotiations with Hachette you could expect to find one, beautiful sentence: “An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.”

That changed late Tuesday, when an Amazon representative—Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of Kindle content—did comment, to the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg. The timing was, perhaps, deliberate—Trachtenberg’s piece went up shortly before “Amazon: Business as Usual?” a panel discussion hosted by The New York Public Library began. That panel discussion featured a number of outspoken Amazon critics, including James Patterson, Bob Kohn, and Tim Wu. Amazon was clearly paying attention: it paid to fly self-publishing blogger and pro-Amazon zealot David Vandagriff to New York City to participate. (That Amazon finds Vandagriff, who does little to hide his disgust with “traditional publishing” on his blog, to be an appropriate spokesperson for the company’s aims is interesting, though it’s possible that they merely wanted to counter-balance the other panelists’ anti-Amazon views. Fight fire with fire: the Amazon way.) Once again, Amazon found the media narrative slipping away, and it decided to fight back.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Melville House blog.

 

Write Relatable Characters

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This post by Ksenia Anske originally appeared on her site on 6/25/14.

Why? Is the first question you ask. Why should I write characters that are relatable? What about villains? The bad guys? The killers? The perverts? The awful awful people that do bad bad things? Well, here is the deal. Even the awfulest people are human. And by human I mean, we all simply want to be loved and to love. We may have a ton of shit piled up from the past, a ton of fear and anger, to the point when we want to kill somebody. Still. Killers feel too. They kill because they feel. Pain. A tremendous amount of pain. So much pain that they don’t know it’s pain anymore. They’re human, not robots. They have feelings. Think about the last book you read with a really evil character. Somebody so horrible, you couldn’t possibly root, but you did. I can tell you one. I read AMERICAN PSYCHO and even though I should’ve felt hate and disgust, I rooted for Patrick Bateman. Why? Because he was human. He doubted himself, he tried to find love and beauty in things, albeit, the wrong way, but you could feel it, see it, identify with it, perhaps think about that time you squished a bug to see what’s inside and realizing you killed it and feeling bad and sorry and…you know. All of us had these moments.

Because the characters are relatable.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ksenia Anske’s site.