Think

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

Will Barnes & Noble be gone by New Year's?

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This editorial by Michael Levin originally appeared on The Contra Costa Times News on 5/2/14.

If anyone gives you a Barnes & Noble gift card, be sure to cash it in by the end of the year.

This may be the last year that Barnes & Noble bookstores remain open.

It’s bad news for people who love books. It’s worse news for the next generation of readers, who may never experience buying a book in a bookstore.

B&N has been closing about 20 stores per year since 2012 and has said it will continue to do so for the next several years. But its financial position is bleak.

This follows a decades-long period of expansion, moving into neighborhoods where privately-owned bookstores thrived, destroying those stores with cut-price best-sellers, and all but owning the book business.

Borders collapsed because of poor choices — weak locations, an overemphasis on music, and, worst of all, selling off its online bookstore to Amazon for $20 million in the 1990s. Chump change, by today’s standards.

So why is B&N on the ropes, if it has virtually no competition today from chains or privately owned bookstores?

 

Click here to read the full editorial on The Contra Costa Times News.

 

The Writer’s Dread – Marketing #RomFantasy

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This post by Denyse Bridger originally appeared on her Fantasy Pages blog on 5/5/14.

I know, I can feel the cringe already among those who have to devote way too much time to this chore, and have to leave the art of writing to wait when it’s all we really want to be doing. At any rate, I thought I’d make a few observations, and this is my official disclaimer that all comments are my own thoughts and opinions in the event anyone gets ruffled or takes offense.

A lot of new authors don’t seem to understand the basics of marketing and branding yourself and your product. I see so much pushing of the same excerpt, or just endless postings of the same excerpt over and over. I know it’s very important to all of us to get our books out there before readers, but when entire Yahoo digests come from one author or your promo company, neither of you is doing your efforts any positive impact.

Promotion and marketing means more than getting your newest book in front of people, don’t kid yourself. HOW you present your material makes a huge impact on whether readers support you or avoid you. There’s also the fact that if you don’t focus at least some of your attention on creating a recognizable brand for yourself, you’ll never find that audience you want so badly.

 

Click here to read the full post on Fantasy Pages.

 

Wattpad Gets into the Digital Publishing Game

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This post by Michael Kozlowski originally appeared on goodereader on 5/2/14.

Wattpad has popularized the notion of serialized digital books on their website. Millions of readers and writers use the free service to hone their writing skills and develop a loyal following. The serialized approach is the most dominant on the platform with readers giving their feedback after every chapter. Wattpad is now getting into the publishing game with two of their most seminal stories.

Wattpad is using Amazon Createspace to make physical versions of the books available. This will give people the ability to buy printed versions of the books and allow the authors to do book signings. Wattpad is also distributing the books digitally with Amazon, iBooks and Kobo.

 

Click here to read the full post on goodereader.

Also see: Wattpad Raises $46M From OMERS Ventures And Others To Grow Its Social Publishing Network, from TechCrunch.

 

Forest in the Trees: The Challenges of Shaping a Book (not a Collection) of Essays

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This post by Rebecca McClanahan originally appeared on Brevity on 1/18/14.

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard seems to warn writers away from embarking on a collection of individual works: “…[S]ince every original work requires a unique form, it is more prudent to struggle with the outcome of only one form—that of a long work—than to struggle with the many forms of a collection.” As someone who has written both kinds of books (long form, book-length nonfiction, as well as books of individual essays), I must agree with Dillard. In fact, she’s letting us off easy by warning of only one challenge: the struggle to find the best form for each individual piece. Several other challenges await the writer who shapes a book of essays. Note that I wrote book of essays, not collection. To my mind, the two are vastly different. A collection merely gathers individual pieces under the same roof—the cover of the book. A well-shaped book of essays is another genre altogether; though each essay can and should stand alone, each also relates to the other essays in significant ways. If you embark on shaping a book of essays, here are some of the challenges you might face:

1. Choosing which essays to include

I never set out to write a book of essays, nor do most of the essayists I know. Rather, we find ourselves writing one essay, then another, then another. (I like how that sentence came out—we find ourselves writing—as if writing helps us find ourselves, which of course it does.) After a while, the essays accumulate. “How many do you have now?” a writer-friend asks. “Enough for a new book?” Well, that depends. Maybe enough for a collection, but a book?  I’d have to think about that. Do all the essays talk to each other in interesting ways? Is there a center point, a hub, into which all the spokes fit? If I had to write the cover copy for this book, what central elements would I highlight?

 

Click here to read the full post on Brevity.

 

Appeals Court Reinstates Lawsuit Against Harlequin

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This post originally appeared on The Passive Voice on 5/1/14.

Keiler v. Harlequin is a proposed class-action lawsuit by Harlequin authors against Harlequin for actions by the publisher that resulted in massive underpayment of royalties to authors for ebooks. Some authors report receiving as little as six cents in royalties for sales of each of their ebooks by Harlequin. PG has posted about the case previously here, here and here.

The trial court ended up giving HQ a win, but the authors appealed. Today, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the trial court on one count, allowing the HQ authors a chance to move forward with their case at the trial level. Here’s the appellate court’s summary of its decision:

 

Click here to read the full post on The Passive Voice.

Also see this coverage, from The Hollywood Reporter site – Appeals Court: Book Publisher Must Face Self-Dealing Lawsuit “Suing romance novelists believe that Harlequin used foreign subsidiaries to create artificially low net receipts on eBooks”

Click here to visit the Harlequin class action lawsuit website.

 

Balancing Productivity and Art

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This post by David Farland originally appeared on David Farland’s site on 4/21/14.

If you are producing anything—toy dolls, bread, vacuum cleaners, or novels—there are some variables that you have to work with. Ideally, a publisher would like you to bring them in 1) quickly, 2) beautifully written, 3) and at a low price.

If you are producing anything—toy dolls, bread, vacuum cleaners, or novels—there are some variables that you have to work with. Ideally, a publisher would like you to bring them in 1) quickly, 2) beautifully written, 3) and at a low price.

But buyers will almost always be willing to make tradeoffs. Your goal is to provide two of the three. For example, I used to know an editor who handled a series of novels based on a major television series. A couple of times he asked me, “Could you write a novel for me in two weeks? I’ll pay you twice what I normally do for it.” In other words, he wanted a good novel quickly, and he was willing to pay through the nose. He wanted two out of three.

I told him “No” every time. The reason was that I felt that writing a novel that quickly would hurt the quality of my work, and ultimately a sub-standard novel would damage my reputation. In the short term, I might make some good money, but in the long term it would hurt my career. I’d rather write one great novel than ten bad ones. (Besides, I wasn’t a fan of that particular series, so it seemed a distraction.)

Yet more and more, it seems, this career demands that you be productive, that you up your word count. For many writers, that might seem frightening. They might feel that they are being pushed to write too quickly.

 

Click here to read the full post on David Farland’s site.

 

When An Author Should Self-Publish And How That Might Change

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This post by Mike Shatzkin originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on 4/17/14. a

There is a question that every agent and publisher is dealing with, because authors surely are. And that’s this: when should an author self- (or indie-) publish?

The answer is certainly not “never”, and if there is anybody left in a publishing house who thinks it is, they should think a little harder.

For a number of reasons, the belief here is that most of the time for most authors who can get a deal with an established and competent house, their best choice is to take it. It’s good to get an advance that is partially in your pocket before the manuscript is even finished and assured once it is. It’s good to have a team of capable professionals doing marketing work that authors are seldom equipped to do well themselves and which can be expensive to buy freelance, particularly if you don’t know how. It’s good to have a coordinated effort to sell print and ebooks, online and offline, and it’s good to have the supply chain ready for your book, with inventory in place where it can help stimulate sales, when you fire the starting gun for publicity and marketing. And it’s great to have an organization turning your present book into more dollars while you as an author focus on generating the next one, and start pocketing the next advance.

Publishers have heretofore really had only one model for working with authors. They acquire the rights, usually paying an advance-against-royalties, and own and control the entire process of publishing. It is generally understood that all efforts to make the book known can show benefits in all the commercial channels it exploits. So publishers have generally insisted on, and authors have generally accepted, controlling all the rights to a book when they pay that advance. The two pretty standard, time-honored exceptions have been cinematic (Hollywood) rights, which are rarely controlled by the publisher, and foreign territory and language rights, which are only sometimes controlled by the publisher.

Since publishers until very recently effectively monopolized the path to market, they could effectively make the rules about what an author could publish.asdf

 

Click here to read the full post on The Shatzkin Files.

 

“It’s Complicated.” (Wrong Answer.)

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This post by David Corbett originally appeared on Writer Unboxed on 4/28/14.

I’m not sure whether to be heartened or dismayed by the number of my students and editorial clients who exhibit the same problem I routinely have as a writer.

If asked what the story is about—what the protagonist wants, why he wants it, what stands in his way—I often encounter the same creased brow and thoughtful nod I provided my own teachers, with the inevitable, “It’s complicated.”

And the response is equally inevitable: “That’s exactly the wrong answer.”

To mangle a phrase: I can overthink a goddamn potato.

My mind sees endless variation and nuance in the simplest things, and what elaborations it doesn’t see it creates.

I used to consider this a sign of intelligence. I thought that those constantly harping on the KISS Principle—Keep It Simple, Stupid—were mediocrities lashing out at those who had an IQ over room temperature.

The kind of people who think all modern art could have been churned out by their four-year-old.

The kind of people who mock the blues and country music as crude and opera as, well, operatic.

The kind of people who think money alone measures excellence.

But that was snotty arrogance on my part. I wasn’t just mistaken. I was lying to myself.

 

Click here to read the full post on Writer Unboxed.

 

Writing Fiction: 5 Lessons From Game Of Thrones

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This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn site on 4/8/14.

Game of Thrones fever is at its peak as Season 4 finally hits the screens.

We haven’t had a TV for years now, but in the last few months, we’ve watched the whole series, glued to the drama of Westeros and the battle for the Iron Throne.

As a viewer, I have been addicted to the story, and as a writer, I bow my head to a master story creator and world builder. It must be the ambition of every creative to see their work loved as widely as Game of Thrones now is. The adaptation to screen is fantastic, creating new fans outside the realms of the fantasy genre and drawing more into the books.

Even if you haven’t watched it, here are my lessons learned from the fantastic books and TV series.

(1) High stakes = excitement, anticipation and addiction in your audience

The stakes can’t get much higher than those fought over in this saga, and it keeps viewers hooked as the plot ratchets up each episode. The stakes include:

Control of the Iron Throne which guides all the battles. Who will rule the Seven Kingdoms?

Life and death. The body count is truly incredible, with no character safe from the executioner’s axe. Each character is fighting for survival – against the other families, against the cold and the supernatural forces of the north, against their own kind. Favorite characters are killed off all the time, and the shock of their deaths makes the uncertainty of existence ever more real.

Family honor. What use is your life if you haven’t upheld the honor of the family?

Religion. As the Lord of Light seems nascent, the followers of the Seven, as well as the Old Gods still fight for their believers.

(2) Take the audience out of their lives for a time

 

Click here to read the full post on The Creative Penn.

 

On Becoming A Writer

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This post by Jayaprakash Sathyamurthy originally appeared on Former People: A Journal of Bangs and Whimpers on 4/25/14.

There are two stories that kicked off what I like to think of as my writing career. The first is Aranya’s Last Voyage, which won a short story collection held by the Deccan Herald in 2009. I had talked myself into giving up writing – do all writers do this from time to time or just the whiney ones like me? – but I’d had this story in the back of my mind for a long time and decided to take a chance and write it for the contest. It was based on a dream that I had had a long time ago – I still remember the house in Jayanagar where I was at the time. My first attempt to turn the dream into a story had been a science fiction story, but this time around I found a register that was better suited to what I wanted to do. With ‘Aranya’, just the act of naming the main character seemed to make things fall into place. Even though I gave my character an Indian name, he is not an Indian and the story is not set in our world. But using an Indian name gave me a link to the character. Also, Aranya means ‘forest’ and while there are no forests in the story, the imagery made me think of sages in jungle ashrams, and helped build up a picture of a certain kind of wise, austere and diligent man. I remember writing the story in a few intense bursts. Once it was done, I did very little revision before sending the story off. I’d always balked at finishing my stories because of the sheer length I imagined they had to be, but the contest’s word limit – under 5000 words – helped me focus on just getting the beginning, middle and end of the story in place. Learning to finish was the hardest lesson for me to learn, and the most important ability that separates a writer from someone who just kind of wants to write. Winning the contest made me feel like my notions that I could write well and tell an interesting story were maybe not just self-delusion.asdf

 

Click here to read the full post on Former People: A Journal of Bangs and Whimpers.

 

Thank Goodness For The Fairer Sex

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This post by Michael W. Sherer originally appeared on The Crime Fiction Collective blog on 4/23/14.

There are hundreds of reasons I love women, but one of the most important is how much smarter they are than men. (Unfortunately, too many women don’t give themselves credit for it, and more unfortunately most men will never admit it.) I believe one of the reasons they’re smarter is because they read more than men do.

The statistics are out for 2013, and once again women surpassed men in the number of books they read. According to Pew Research, 76 percent of all adult Americans (18 and over) read at least one book last year. But that breaks down to about 69 percent of men and 82 percent of women.

Not only are more women reading than men, they also read at greater rates than men do. The average number of books read by all adults last year was 12, and the median number was five (meaning half of all adults read more than five and half read less). Both numbers are higher if you include only adults who read at least one book—a mean of 16 books and a median of 7. But here again, women outpaced men by a substantial margin. Women read an average of 14 books, compared to 10 for men.
– See more at: http://crimefictioncollective.blogspot.com/2014/04/thank-goodness-for-fairer-sex.html#sthash.WQM33fDw.dpuf

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes some informative charts, on The Crime Fiction Collective blog.

 

Everybody Arcs! How to Use Emotional Growth to Propel the Story and Capture the Reader

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This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on 4/24/14.

I’ve heard people say some books (or genres) are plot-driven and others are character-driven. My POV? This is a fallacy. All good books are character-driven and plot is what makes that possible. Characters have to make us give a hoot about the plot. If we don’t like or empathize with the characters, we don’t care about their problems.

Conversely, plot is the delivery mechanism and crucible for character (even in literary fiction). Characters can only be as strong as the opposition they face. Weak problems=weak characters. In a nutshell, character and plot can’t be easily separated.

For instance, in the Pulitzer-Winning The Road, the plot is simple. Man and Boy must make it to the ocean. Yet, since this piece is literary, the plot goal is subordinate to character goal.

It is less important that Man and Boy make it to the ocean than how they make it to the ocean. The world has been obliterated, killing every living thing other than humans. Many have returned to the animal state, resorting to cannibalism to survive. The question in The Road is less “Will they make it to the ocean?” and more “How will they make it to the ocean?” If they resort to snacking on people, they fail.

But I will say that while plot is great, characters are what (who) we remember. We have to be able to empathize. We want to love them, hate them, root for them and watch them fail, then overcome that failure. As the late Blake Snyder said, “Everybody arcs!”

Often, this is the trick with series and why early books generally are more popular. Once our main character evolves, we are left with three choices:

 

Click here to read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

On Their Death Bed, Physical Books Have Finally Become Sexy

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This article by Mireille Silcoff originally appeared on The New York Times Magazine site on 4/25/14.

A few years ago, I started noticing a small wave of a new kind of book: highly displayable coffee-table books about the display of books. They had names like “At Home With Books” and “Books Do Furnish a Room,” and felt a bit like an adjunct to that classic, recursive “Seinfeld” gag: Kramer’s coffee-table book about coffee tables that could double as a coffee table.

It has shown little sign of flagging. There was, more recently, “Bookshelf,” another book about the creative storage of books, and “My Ideal Bookshelf,” a collection of drawings of the spines of famous authors’ favorite books. This rash of metabooks felt prescient in a way, so prescient as to be slightly depressing in fact, because they seemed such a clear sign of physical books’ imminent death. When a book becomes pure décor, it ceases to live its intended life. So in this way, every fabulous wall of curated volumes in the loft of the TriBeCa bond trader who reads one rock biography a year is held together with coffin nails — an end of an era, described in furniture.

The Death of the Book has loomed over so many other eras, but today it seems more certain, at least when it comes to the physical book, because the e-book has been outselling the paper kind on Amazon since 2011. With reading, we all know what direction we’re now going in — it’s bright-at-night, it’s paved with e-paper, it’s bad for focus, it’s incredibly convenient. Those of us — myself included — who can’t yet bring themselves to read on a Kindle or an iPad feel increasingly fusty saying the same old thing: “I just like the feel of paper in my hand! The intimacy!” We preface the words with that thing about not being a Luddite. We talk about the fixity of real books, and the frightening impermanence of one you can download in seconds. We feel our sentences grow stale the second they leave our mouths.

 

Click here to read the full article on The New York Times Magazine site.

 

MacAdam Cage Authors Look to Resolve E-book Dispute

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This article by Calvin Reid originally appeared on Publishers Weekly on 4/23/14.

Despite complaints from former MacAdam Cage authors that they have not received e-book royalties or regular statements for years, Mark Pearce, publisher of MP Publishing, the publisher and e-book distributor that controls their e-book rights, claims all royalties have been paid and all statements are up to date. Pearce blames the legacy of problems at MacAdam Cage on its late publisher, David Poindexter, although he is urging former MacAdam Cage authors to contact him to resolve disputes over post-bankruptcy e-book rights to their titles.

At the same time, Jan Constantine, general counsel at the Authors Guild, who has examined the e-book agreement, told PW that the e-book rights agreement negotiated between Poindexter and Pearce in 2009—Pearce purchased the e-book rights to the bulk of the MC list for the life of copyright—is legitimate and survives the MacAdam Cage bankruptcy. All print rights reverted to former MC authors in March of this year, 60 days after MC filed for bankruptcy.

However, she also emphasized that Pearce must “comply with the agreements in the contract. If he doesn’t then he’s in breach and the authors can reclaim the rights to their books.” Constantine urged former MacAdam Cage authors to immediately demand “back dated and current royalty statements” from Pearce and to “make sure he is in compliance.” The Authors Guild is also circulating copies of the original MC/MP Publishing e-book agreement and amendment to authors and urging them to examine the licensing agreements. The Authors Guild will monitor the situation.

 

Click here to read the full article on Publishers Weekly.

 

The Significance of Plot Without Conflict

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This post originally appeared on the still eating oranges tumblr on 6/15/12.

In the West, plot is commonly thought to revolve around conflict: a confrontation between two or more elements, in which one ultimately dominates the other. The standard three- and five-act plot structures—which permeate Western media—have conflict written into their very foundations. A “problem” appears near the end of the first act; and, in the second act, the conflict generated by this problem takes center stage. Conflict is used to create reader involvement even by many post-modern writers, whose work otherwise defies traditional structure.

The necessity of conflict is preached as a kind of dogma by contemporary writers’ workshops and Internet “guides” to writing. A plot without conflict is considered dull; some even go so far as to call it impossible. This has influenced not only fiction, but writing in general—arguably even philosophy. Yet, is there any truth to this belief? Does plot necessarily hinge on conflict? No. Such claims are a product of the West’s insularity. For countless centuries, Chinese and Japanese writers have used a plot structure that does not have conflict “built in”, so to speak. Rather, it relies on exposition and contrast to generate interest. This structure is known as kishōtenketsu.

Kishōtenketsu contains four acts: introduction, development, twist and reconciliation. The basics of the story—characters, setting, etc.—are established in the first act and developed in the second. No major changes occur until the third act, in which a new, often surprising element is introduced. The third act is the core of the plot, and it may be thought of as a kind of structural non sequitur. The fourth act draws a conclusion from the contrast between the first two “straight” acts and the disconnected third, thereby reconciling them into a coherent whole. Kishōtenketsu is probably best known to Westerners as the structure of Japanese yonkoma (four-panel) manga; and, with this in mind, our artist has kindly provided a simple comic to illustrate the concept.

 

Click here to read the full post on the still eating oranges tumblr.