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What Publishing Can Learn

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This essay, by Ted Striphas, originally appeared on his The Late Age Of Print blog.

This is the first in a multi-part series called, “what the publishing industry can learn.”  Each post will focus on a specific — and specifically instructional — facet of contemporary book culture.  The goal is to help those of us invested in books to imagine how the publishing industry might connect better with readers and thus remain relevant (and these days, solvent!) in an increasingly dense media landscape.


The series is prompted in part by Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ recent essay in Harpers, “The Last Book Party” (March 2009), which intimates that the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair will be the industry’s last happy occasion — at least for the foreseeable future.

You can expect to see more installments of “what the publishing industry can learn” appearing here over the next few weeks.  Check back for more.

I.  What can the publishing industry learn from The Da Vinci Code?

With tens-of-millions of copies sold, to say that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a bestseller’s bestseller would be an understatement.  How can we account for its astronomical success?  A gripping story full of mystery, code breaking, and religious heresies definitely is a good place to start.  I’d also suspect that there’s a Doubleday marketing agent out there somewhere who’s convinced that she or he made all the right moves in getting the book into exactly the right hands at exactly the right moment, thereby creating this runaway literary blockbuster.  A major motion picture directed by Ron Howard, starring Tom Hanks, can’t hurt, either.

I don’t dispute the accuracy of story, advertising, or spin-offs in explaining The Da Vinci Code’s astronomical book sales.  But as Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point shows, the success of nearly anything can result from banal — often overlooked — circumstances.  I want to focus on one such circumstance in thinking about what publishing might learn from The Da Vinci Code: chapter length.

Several years ago my sister asked me to buy her a copy of The Da Vinci Code for Christmas.  I obliged, despite her fears that I would judge her negatively for indulging in literary pap.  (I read popular literature all the time, I assured her.)  She was especially concerned that I would scoff at the length of the chapters, many of which are just a handful of pages each.  “The chapters are so short, they’re almost like scenes out of a movie,” I recall my sister saying, embarrassedly — this a year or two before the film adaptation was released.

She was on to something.  The chapters were remarkably brief, and in their brevity, I later realized, lie important lessons about The Da Vinci Code’s success.  My sister described the chapters as “cinematic.”  Perhaps that’s true, but having watched her read the book over the next couple of days, I couldn’t help but think that they were even more televisual in nature.  She could sit down and read for five or ten minutes at a clip, non-commitally, and even manage to finish a chapter or two in the process.  She could read distractedly, as the text didn’t demand that she sustain her attention for very long.  What’s remarkable is that the book, despite being more than 400 pages, hardly behaves like a substantial (as in long) work of fiction.

The Da Vinci Code isn’t the first book to be composed or read in this way.  Anyone who’s ever consumed or even simply thumbed through Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) or Understanding Media (1964) will recognize The Da Vinci Code’s distant kin.  The former are academic screeds composed of punchy “snack sized” chapters.  McLuhan understood better, and earlier, than almost anyone how to communicate effectively using the printed word in a time not only of ascendant electronic media but indeed of myriad other everyday distractions.

In saying that The Da Vinci Code’s success is attributable in part to the brevity of its chapters, I should be clear that I am absolutely not suggesting that people’s attention spans are waning, or that we have lost our ability to process long, slowly developing arguments or narratives.  Nevertheless, ours unquestionably is an age of myriad distractions — electronic or otherwise (a crying baby, a loud truck rolling by, the incessant drone of leaf blowers) — that make it more difficult to spend protracted periods of time with protracted amounts of text.

My suggestion that books might be better served with smaller chapters, à la The Da Vinci Code, thus is a pragmatic rather than a moral one.  Essentially I’m asking book publishers and authors to attune their sensitivities better to the fine-grain of everyday life, where reading happens, and to refashion their books accordingly.

More to come….

 

Read parts two and three of this essay series on The Late Age Of Print blog.

Ted Striphas is Assistant Professor and Director of Film & Media Studies in the Department of Communication & Culture at Indiana University, and the author of The Late Age of Print.

The Psychology of Writing, Part 4: Rejection As A Way Of Life

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Publetariat continues its series on The Psychology of Writing with the following essay, by author Merrill Joan Gerber. The essay was originally published in the Sewanee Review, and reprinted on The Rumpus on 1/23/09. In it, the reader learns rejection is never far from any writer, even one with a body of work as impressive as Ms. Gerber’s.

Why I Must Give Up Writing

First let me say I’ve been a dedicated writer for half a century. I’ve published twenty-five books, and I’ve even won some prizes. I know a real writer is supposed to write for the art itself, yearning only toward self-expression and the joy of creation, ignoring the fickle heart of the market place.

I know all about papering the office walls with rejections. I’m not a quitter, not a cry-baby (though I have cried a few times and once I crept into bed for a few weeks till a certain violent literary shock wore off). Looking back on my writing life, I see that some warning moments stand out.

In 1967, when my first novel, An Antique Man, was published, Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “I’ll be reviewing your novel for the Detroit news, and I’ll send you a clipping…” Three months later she wrote again: “…it is a most moving and painful novel, beautifully done, and I will retain certain scenes in my mind for a long time. If the long newspaper strike in Detroit ever comes to an end, I will certainly review the novel.”

I don’t know when the strike came to an end, but there was never a review. There were other hints to me about the nature of the writing life. William Shawn, at the New Yorker, read An Antique Man, and wrote to me that he and his staff had tried hard to find a section to stand on its own but they hadn’t succeeded. Two months later, one of his staff wrote me: “Mr. Shawn can’t get your book out of his mind, so please send it back to us so we can try again to find an excerpt that will work.”

Again, I took the trip to the post office with my mss. Some weeks later Mr. Shawn sent back the novel a second time. He was sorry, he had tried very hard, but he just couldn’t find a section to stand alone. The second rejection was much worse than the first —a kind of brutal blow to the delicate strand of hope that had been fluttering in my mind.

Modern psychology tells us that when a relationship feels wrong, we’d do well to focus on a single issue that’s manageable—not to list all the old insults, failings and faults of the beloved. But the list of the failings of my beloved art continues to grow longer. I feel I can no longer live with them.

Recently, I found a letter from a publisher written to me in 1986. “Thank you for sending me your novel. I think you would have to be dead not to think this manuscript is funny and lively. The only problem with it is a certain lack of discipline…”

For four months I worked to insert certain disciplines the editor felt were essential. Then she wrote again. “I think that your revisions are excellent, and that you have successfully integrated the fantastic and the real. However, difficulties arise after our heroine leaves the hospital. So now what? Can I say to you that I think you have aimed your plot in a misguided direction? I don’t know if I can, but I certainly think so. If these very real difficulties can be resolved we can discuss a book.”

What difficulties did she mean? How was I to guess at them? We had no further discussions and my novel was never published.

In 1989, an editor from Little Brown wrote me about my longest novel, a 650 page family saga called The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn: “I found this novel to be wonderfully engrossing, full of the marvelously realized characters whose personalities propel them into their individual predicaments. But midway though the mss, I felt that the chronological sequence precluded the sort of definable story line that would give each character’s subplot satisfying form and substance. If you decide to rework the novel, I would very much like to read it again.”

Rework 650 pages? On speculation? With no contract? All the while trying to guess what the editor’s vision might be? I wrote, asking if she could be more specific. Well, she could not really point the way for me. I’d have to figure it out for myself. But I had already figured out the way the book should be constructed, that’s what had taken me several years of work. I put the book in the closet where one day I listened in to be sure its heart had stopped beating.

Read the rest of the essay on The Rumpus.

Merrill Joan Gerber’s most recent novel is The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn. She teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology.

The Talent Killers: How Literary Agents Are Killing Literature, And What Publishers Can Do To Stop Them

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This post, by Mary W. Walters, originally appeared on her The Militant Writer blog on 4/14/09 and is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Dear Senior Editor, Any Major Publishing House, Anywhere:

I am a member of a growing company of writers of literary fiction whose works you have never seen and probably never will.

It’s not that we are lacking in the talent and credentials that might attract your interest: indeed, we have already published one or two or three books with respectable literary presses, attracting not only critical acclaim but even awards for writing excellence. Our work has been hailed as distinctive, thoughtful, darkly comic. As fresh. Even as important! Reviewers have compared us to Atwood, Boyle and Seth. To Tyler, Winton, Le Carre.

That you have never heard of us nor read a single paragraph we’ve written is not—as you might think—a side effect of the cutbacks, mergers and downsizings that have devastated the book-publishing industry in recent months. Nor is it yet more evidence of the impact of electronic media on the printed word.

No.

The substantial and nearly unassailable wall that separates you from us has been under construction for decades. You can find the names of its architects and gatekeepers on your telephone-callers list, and in your email in-box. They are the literary agents—that league of intellectual-property purveyors who bring you every new manuscript you ever see, those men and women who are so anxious to gain access to the caverns of treasure they believe you sit upon like some great golden goose that they would likely hack one another’s heads off were they not united by one self-serving mission: to ensure that quality fiction never hits your desk.

*

I am sure that this news comes as a surprise to you, Dear Editor. I am certain that you were drawn to your career—and by “career” I mean “vocation,” including the spectrum of responsibilities that ranges from new-book acquisition to the kind of excellent substantive editing that makes great novels outstanding—because of your love of literature. You probably started with an education in the literary classics which you have since enriched by reading the very best writing being published in the world today. In your few spare moments, you may wonder why it is that aside from an occasional new voice that may become great in another twenty years, the only authors of literary value have been around for decades.

I can answer that question for you. I can tell you why your desk is piling up with flimsy bits of vampire literature, fantasy, romance, detective stories and the kind of first-draft bubble gum that used to be called chick-lit but is now shuffled in with other women’s writing in order to give it heft—although as far as you can see, neither the quality nor the subject matter has improved—which you are required to somehow turn into publishable books. It is because the vast majority of literary agents do not, in fact, have any interest in literature. They are only interested in jackpots.

*

As you know—better than anyone, perhaps, since you are the one who needs to negotiate with them—agents’ incomes come off the top of royalties that publishers pay their writers. The agent’s cut is generally 10 percent of the writer’s portion, which is in turn about 10 percent of the book’s cover price. Ten percent of 10 percent is not a lot. In order to create a decent cash flow, literary agents can only afford to represent writers who are going to sell truckloads of books (or millions of megabytes in the case of e-books) and therefore merit significant advances. The bigger the better: a substantial advance is money in the bank.

As you also know, publishing is a business, which means that publishing houses can only afford to offer advances they are likely to recoup—which means that advances only go to established writers with massive followings, and to particularly brilliant (or particularly sleazy) first-time novelists. They are generally reserved for what’s known as “commercial” fiction. (Of course, an advance is no guarantee that a book will sell. But that doesn’t matter to the agents. By the time the book’s not selling, they already have their cuts. They simply abandon writers whose books did not hit their projected sales numbers and move on to the newest shiny thing—indifferent to the fact that they’ve turned those abandoned authors into the pariahs of the slush pile.)

Clearly it is not in the best interests of literary agents to represent writers whose book sales are likely to build only gradually—perhaps after a well-thought, positive review appears in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail or on a high-quality books blog, inspiring a few people to buy the book, read it, and then recommend it to other readers who will also recommend it. It can be years before a literary agent can start sucking a living out of a writer with a book like that. Frankly, who has time?

*

There is no room for gourmet tastes or discerning palates in this system. Agents’ websites may trumpet their dedication to literary fiction, but what they really want is books that sell. These purveyors of literary costume jewelry seek out the kind of quirky but unsubstantial mental junk food that is as similar as possible to last season’s bestsellers—fiction that will sell quickly and widely by association with the almost-identical books that have preceded it. See last week’s best-seller list for an eloquent guide to this fad-based publishing system.

Since they know what they are looking for, literary agents are able to post tips and pointers on their websites and blog posts for the benefit of would-be clients: they want books that are going to get their immediate attention, impress them within the first five pages—books that are going to sell.

(If you click through the links I have provided here, Dear Editor, you will become aware of a certain tone of disdain toward the target audience. This tone is very common among literary agents, who are doing their best to undermine the confidence of writers as a group. Please also note the fawning tone of the comments by the authors responding to these blogs. We have lost our self respect, I am afraid. We have learned to see ourselves as unworthy, stupid, and probably unclean. We’ve forgotten we’re the talent.)

Having set out what they do and do not want from writers, the agents then demand that we, their would-be clients, condense our novels into 300-word “pitches” that will convince them of the marketability of our books. (One might think that this would be the agent’s job—to develop pitches for the manuscripts by the writers they represent which they will then present to publishers. But no. That is not the way this system works.)

Next the agents engage “interns”—usually selected from among the wannabe writers enrolled in one of the creative-writing courses that proliferate at our universities and colleges—to read the queries that we, the writers, have written about our books. The interns measure our pitches against the criteria the agents have devised, find the disconnects, then write us our rejection letters. These interns don’t get paid, of course: they get credit for “work experience.”

The upshot is that fine fiction writers who are crappy copy-writers attempt to write fast-paced pitches about their own serious novels that will make those novels sound as much as possible like commercial drivel. Most of us aren’t very good at that (how do you describe The Road in 300 words and make it sound like a piquant coming-of-age story? Or A Confederacy of Dunces a sweet novel of redemption?) but we have no choice but to try. We submit our pitches in good faith by email or snail mail (depending on the dictates of the individual agent-god. They tell us how they want us to submit right on their websites!) where they are read by interns with little experience of literature or life, and are rejected.

Some of us have had our query letters rejected more than 50 times.

No one has asked to see our manuscripts.

Read any good Kafka lately?

Read the rest of the article on The Militant Writer blog.

Mary W. Walters is a writer and editor whose fourth book will be published in the fall of 2009.

Five Reasons Good Writers Fail

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This article, by Jennie Nash, originally appeared on the Topic Turtle website on 4/7/09.

Let’s assume you are a good writer. You have learned the mechanics of language, you understand the structure of your chosen genre, and you have the ability to write a sentence, a phrase and a paragraph that has rhythm, resonance and meaning.

Let’s also assume that you have the desire for your work to be read by someone other than your cat. And let’s go way out on a limb and assume that by the time I finish writing this piece, there will still be book publishers in business, booksellers who have kept the faith, and book buyers with disposable income. For the majority of writers, these assumptions hold true.

So why do some writers succeed (which is to say that they finish their work, they get it into they marketplace, they continue to find inspiration and joy, they keep putting words on the page) and other fail (which is to say that their work languishes, they never send it out, they become someone who used to love words, who used to see the world through story, who used to have a dream of being a writer)?

There are, of course, as many answers as there are writers, but in my years as a writer, a writing instructor and a writing coach, I have seen some of the same ones occur again and again. Here are five:

1. Delusions of Grandeur.

A lot of first-time writers believe that they’re going to sell their book for several million dollars, lure Julia Roberts into taking an option on film rights, and land a spot on Oprah — all within a few hours of finishing their manuscript. It happens like that every once and awhile, but if you count on it, chances are you’re just setting yourself up for failure. Successful writers set goals that are much more attainable – like writing three good pages or getting one sentence to sing.

2. A Warped Sense of Reality.

Most would-be writers have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the job actually entails. You know all the drama, camaraderie and excitement you see on TV sitcoms about ad agencies and law firms and police departments and emergency rooms? None of that shoulder-slapping fun happens for writers, ever, because we’re always sitting alone in rooms.

Every so often, you may see a famous, bestselling writer under the bright lights, making witty comments and wearing great shoes, but when the show is over, that writer is going back to her quiet room and she’s sitting there, alone, for several more years until her next book is done. It’s exceedingly lonely work – and most people simply aren’t comfortable being alone with themselves and their thoughts for that long. They fail simply because they like the idea of being a writer, but not the reality.

Read the rest of the article on the Topic Turtle site to learn about reasons 3-5.

Where's The Bailout For Publishing?

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In a recent article posted on the Daily Beast, Stephen L. Carter says:

Like a lot of writers, I am wondering when Congress and the administration will propose a bailout for the publishing industry.

Carnage is everywhere. Advances slashed, editors fired, publicity at subsistence levels, entire imprints vanished into thin air. Moreover, unlike some of the industries that the government, in its wisdom, has decided to subsidize, the publishing of books is crucial to the American way of life.

Seriously.

Books are essential to democracy. Not literacy, although literacy is important. Not reading, although reading is wonderful. But books themselves, the actual physical volumes on the shelves of libraries and stores and homes, send a message through their very existence. In a world in which most things seem ephemeral, books imply permanence: that there exist ideas and thoughts of sufficient weight that they are worth preserving in a physical form that is expensive to produce and takes up space.

He goes on to say:

In a library, you can stand beside the shelf and run your finger along the spines. You can feel the book-ness of what has been written. It is a very unsophisticated reader indeed who conceptualizes the library principally as a place to obtain information. A library is a shrine to the book. When we eliminate the name “library,” as some universities and communities have done, creating such vulgarities as “information resource centers,” we are, implicitly, denigrating the very object that the library is intended to preserve. The book, we are saying, is not important; only its information content matters.

You can read the rest of the article at The Daily Beast. 

Mr. Carter’s bibliophilia is not all that different from the lust-for-vinyl that keeps purists shopping for LP records rather than making the switch to digital music. Digital music hasn’t killed music, and digital content will not kill literature. In fact, digital music has ushered in a new era of choice and freedom for both artists and their audiences, and the same is now happening with books. If that revolution results in the death of some businesses, some unsustainable business models, and some delivery systems, so be it. Progress inevitably sacrifices some of the old in order to usher in the new.

Where once we had music megaconglomerates dictating what music would be made available to the public, fixing the prices and formats of the music they released such that their span of control reached as far as our very headphones and speakers, thanks to digital music and the web, now we have individual artists and music fans calling the shots for themselves.

Indie bands are offering their songs individually on their own web sites. Consumers can create their own, customized streaming web radio stations online, and even create and download their own ‘mixes’ directly from the source music files of such forward-thinking artists as Beck, Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead—with the artists’ full approval and involvement. Musicians have the means to reach out to their fans as never before, and those fans have unprecedented access to their favorite musicians. Music has become as much about building community as the music itself, and both artists and consumers are the beneficiaries.

Priorities have at last been appropriately re-shuffled: the artists, their music, and the community are the only things that matter now, the delivery system (CD, LP, MP3, etc.) has become irrelevant. Of course the music megaconglomerates are unhappy about this, because the delivery system was the piece that used to be their bailiwick and primary profit center. When you cut out the middleman, the middleman is never happy about it.

The same kinds of changes are now in their infancy where publishing is concerned, but to my mind as both an author and a reader, they can’t come soon enough. Indie authors are following the lead of their musician brethren, bypassing publishing conglomerates and other gatekeepers to reach out directly to a readership. None of this would be possible without the digital revolution in print and Web 2.0.

And just as record industry executives before them, the titans of mainstream publishing are doing all in their power to stop—or at least slow—the technological and cultural progress that spells their doom, rather than embrace the new opportunities available to them. I’m afraid that they, and Mr. Carter, are part of a dying breed.

Ask anyone under 30 if they mourn the loss of chain record stores like Tower, The Wherehouse and Licorice Pizza. With the exception of those vinyl purists, the answer will be either, "No," or, "What’s a chain record store?" Give it maybe 20 years, then ask someone under 30 if they mourn the loss of chain bookstores. Give it 20 more and ask if they mourn the loss of paper-pulp books.

A long time ago we learned that The Medium Is The Message, but we also learned the message is typically manipulated to suit corporate needs. Where the mass media are controlled by profit-driven corporations, the message is forced to the back of the bus: behind profit, corporate vision, marketing concerns, political concerns, and even packaging concerns.

Mr. Carter, while you and others fret over the cultural impact of a change in semantics that may one day see libraries referred to as “information resource centers”, the rest of us celebrate the improved reach and accessibility technology can bring to literature. Free the message from its corporate-imposed shackles and it will proliferate seemingly of its own accord.

Fear not, Mr. Carter. First we had the stone tablet. Then we had the parchment scroll. Next came the codex. And when Gutenberg came along, I have little doubt he faced the outcry of people like yourself who found the printing press a poor and vulgar substitute for the hand-copied texts of the day, but progress prevailed, to society’s benefit.

If the written word is worth reading, worth knowing and sharing, how can making it more widely and readily accessible ever be a bad thing?
 

Your First Draft Is Always Going To Suck

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This article, by Alexandra Sokoloff, originally appeared on Storytellersunplugged on 3/24/09.

It’s an interesting thing about blogging – it’s made us able to get a glimpse of hundreds of people’s lives on a moment-by-moment basis. I don’t have a lot of time (well, more to the point, I have no time at all) to read other blogs; I can barely keep up with posting to Storytellers, Murderati and my own blog. But I do click through on people’s signature lines sometimes to see what they’re up to; it’s an extension of my natural writerly voyeurism.

And a certain pattern has emerged with the not-yet-published writers I spy on.

It goes something like this: “My current WIP is stalled, so I’ve been working on a short story.” “I’ve gotten nothing done on my WIP this week.” “I have reached the halfway point and have no idea where to go from here.” “I had a great idea for a new book this week and I’ve been wondering if I should just give up on my WIP and start on this far superior idea.”

Do you start to see what I’m seeing? People are getting about midway through a book, and then lose interest, or have no idea where to go from where they currently are, or realize that a different idea is superior to what they’re working on and panic that they’re wasting their time with the project they’re working on, and hysteria ensues.

So I wanted to take today’s blog to say this, because it really can’t be said often enough.

Your first draft always sucks.

I’ve been a professional writer for almost all of my adult life and I’ve never written anything that I didn’t hit the wall on, at one point or another. There is always a day, week, month, when I will lose all interest in the project I’m working on. I will realize it was insanity to think that I could ever write the fucking thing to begin with, or that anyone in their right mind would ever be interested in it, much less pay me for it. I will be sure that I would rather clean houses (not my own house, you understand, but other people’s) than ever have to look at the story again.

And that stage can last for a good long time. Even to the end of the book, and beyond, for months, in which I will torture my significant other for week after week with my daily rants about how I will never be able to make the thing make any sense at all and will simply have to give back the advance money.

And I am not the only one. Not by a long shot. It’s an occupational hazard that MOST of the people I know are writers, and I would say, based on anecdotal evidence, that this is by far the majority experience – even though there are a few people (or so they say) who revise as they’re going along and when they type “The End” they actually mean it. Hah. I have no idea what that could possibly feel like,

Read the rest of the article on Storytellersunplugged.

The Neverending Story: The Highs and Woes of Writing a Series

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This piece, by Stephen Woodworth, originally appeared on The Apex Blog on 3/27/09.  

Just think of it! A unified, ongoing marketing campaign! Cross-promoting bestsellers! A rabid fan base! A backlist that remains in print forever as hungry readers snap up the volumes they’ve missed! And, best of all, you can have a lifelong career without the tedious work of having to invent an entirely new world or cast of characters for each book.

The temptations of series fiction for both authors and publishers are well-nigh irresistible, and in an age when commercial branding has become mandatory, aspiring writers in every genre have felt increasing pressure to think in terms of establishing a franchise when planning their upcoming books. However, the same characteristics that make series so appealing can also make them difficult to sustain, as I learned when writing my paranormal thriller Through Violet Eyes and its three sequels.

Psst! Let’s Be Discrete. Or Should that Be Continuous?

In terms of structure, any given series tends toward one of two forms, what I would call “discrete” versus “continuous” storylines. In a discrete series, each installment (whether novel, television episode, or comic-book issue) is utterly self-contained. They require no knowledge of other events in the series and they have little or no set chronology. The characters—including the series protagonist—are introduced as if the reader has never encountered them before, and each story in the series concludes with a satisfying resolution of the conflicts presented at the beginning. Classic detective stories of the past century often employed the discrete format. With few exceptions, Agatha Christie wrote her Poirot mysteries so that one need not read them in any particular order, thus allowing new readers to dive into the series at any point without feeling like they’ve missed something.

Because of the importance of drawing new audience members, most dramatic series in episodic television once had strict rules that forbade stories that required more than one program to tell or plotlines that would cause major changes in the series’ principal characters. Writers could not have characters marry, bear children, or die off—at least until an actor’s contract ran out. (Soap operas were always an exception to this rule, of course.) No matter what cataclysmic ordeal the Enterprise crew confronted on the original Star Trek, you could be sure that Kirk and Co. would be over the post-traumatic stress and ready for more adventure in time for next week’s show.

The static nature of discrete series creates formidable problems, however. First and foremost of these is an obvious lessening of suspense. The audience catches on very quickly that Kirk, Spock, and Bones are in no real danger because they have to survive for the next episode. (Try to keep a straight face as you read these words: “He’s dead, Jim.”) In order to have victims for the bad guys to kill, the series has to trot out some expendable guest stars, leading to the notorious “Red Shirt Syndrome” that has claimed the lives of many a walk-on Enterprise security officer.

Furthermore, static characters seem two-dimensional, unrealistic, and, in the worst cases, boring. We all know that real people change throughout their lives—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse—as a result of their experiences, and we want fictional characters to do the same. The drawbacks inherent in discrete series have caused them to fall out of fashion in both fiction and television in favor of continuous storylines that span whole seasons (à la 24) or even entire series (as in the revamped Battlestar Galactica). Writers of continuous series now enjoy the freedom to have their characters evolve in response to events and can ramp up the tension of their drama by introducing actual uncertainty about which of the principals will live or die.

Such freedom has its price, for, in a continuous structure, chronology and context become of paramount importance. When characters change as a result of their experiences, we must see those experiences in sequence in order to understand their cause-and-effect relationship upon the personages of the tale. Such a requirement can be good for retaining fans that are already hooked on the story since they’ll have to stick with it to find out what happens, but it can prove baffling and alienating to prospective audience members who joined the tale too late to receive crucial information. Consider the current example of Lost, whose title pretty much describes how you’ll feel if you miss even a single plot point of this labyrinthine drama.

Continuous series can be even more daunting for would-be fiction readers, since novels require a far greater commitment of time and mental energy to sample than merely flicking the remote of one’s flat-screen. Longtime devotees of Frank Herbert may be delighted that the universe he imagined has been perpetuated in books like Dune: House Harkonnen, yet such a volume is clearly aimed only at the Dune cognoscenti. It rewards the faithful for their loyalty, but offers little to recruit the uninitiated, who know nothing of Dune, the Harkonnen, or their House.

The Best of Both Worlds?

In order to expand their readership, many series writers (myself among them) attempt to exploit the dynamism of a continuous series while granting it the accessibility of a discrete series. In this paradigm, each novel in the series is a self-contained adventure that does not rely upon backstory from prior books, nor does it oblige the audience to read future sequels to reach a dramatically satisfying, cathartic conclusion. However, ongoing character arcs and conflicts can build bridges between volumes, creating a timeline in which readers who choose to continue with the series will see how the unfolding events of each book have shaped the characters’ lives.

Read the rest of the article on The Apex Blog.  

pdf download sales

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Hi,

I’m sure this is a simple question. What’s the best way to sell pdf downloads? Not as in marketing, but as in technically. In other words, what software do I need so that someone clicks a button, which pays money into my paypal/google checkout and gives them the pdf straightaway in return? And is this the kind of thing I can bolt on to a normal website?

 

Thank you

 

Good to see some familiar faces!

 

Does Writing Cause Insanity, or Are We Nuts to Start With?

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Wow, am I ever glad to find this site. I was a member for maybe three minutes when I hopped to "The Dreaded Moment of Suck," by Alison Janssen.  About writers/editors’ anxiety. Can I relate to that.

For a long time, I regarded my crumbling self esteem in the face of a completed or in process manuscript as evidence of my Scandinavian ancestry. "We do angst." But apparently it’s an occupational hazard.

I want to share with you the post from my personal blog, http://www.sandranathan.net/?p=175,
that led to the creation of an entirely new blog for writers, http://yourshelflife.com.

I started Your Shelf Life: How Long Will You Last? as a resource for writers in  December 2008. At the time, I was agonizing over what to do with my writing carreer. Keep using a micropress or submit to the majors? If I submitted my work to large presses, I faced both the pain of possible  rejection and the perils of acceptance. If they accepted my work, would I see it published three years later with a pects and cleavage cover, stripped of its core?

About this time, a friend contacted me. She’d been in some really big life trials, the kinds of things you do not want happening to you. She told me, "When I was going through it, I kept thinking about that article you wrote about the horse show where you kept losing and losing, until you won the grand prize for the show.

Here, in all its glory and copiously illustrated with photos of horses in actual horse show situations, is the blog post I wrote about that show:
http://www.sandranathan.net/?p=175
This true story probably illustrates that I was nuts to start with.

Turned out that show had been ten years before. I’d written a bit on our ranch website and forgot about it, but my words helped this really nice person who was in a bad spot. I realized what I wanted for my writing was shelf life.

I started YourShelfLife.com and history is still being written. The blog has had almost 29,000 requests for pages in its short life, with minimal publicity efforts on my part. It contains the write up of my disastrous Amazon Bestseller day, a killer article on personality type by Reader Views’ Irene Watson, my addendum about Jungian type and writing, and my new article on winning book contests (I have 8 national awards), I’ve got guest bloggers lined up to the rafters and am having a blast.

Please join me as I join you,

Sandy Nathan

 


 

Writing First Person POV

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This post, by Joshua Palmatier, originally appeared on his blog on 3/13/09.

This was the last panel I was on at Boskone, and it’s one of the typical panels you see at lots of cons. I was also the moderator, so I took more notes on this one than the others. That still doesn’t mean I have good notes, just more (unreadable) scribbles than the others. *grin*

So, the idea was to discuss writing the first person POV in books. In particular, I wanted to discuss why you would want to use first person in the first place, or why you shouldn’t use it, and what advantages and disadvantages it has.

Pretty much all of that is tied together. I also wanted to discuss on the panel why some people have such a strong opinion about reading first person POVs. I’ve run into this quite a bit: a strong aversion to first person POV.

So, the mechanics first, I guess. First person POV, where you’re inside the head of one of the characters and ONLY in that person’s head for the duration of the book (or those scenes in the book), is a great way to pull the reader into the story, because the reader in essence "becomes" that first person character. They see everything through that person’s eyes, they get that person’s innermost thoughts, and it gives the reader a sense of immediacy, a sense of actually LIVING the novel. If it’s done right of course.

As you read, you feel like you are THERE, doing what the character is doing, feeling what the character feels, hating and crying and loving and laughing right along with that character. I think emotions are more raw in first person. Pain hurts more, grief is more shattering, love is more intense. Overall, EVERYTHING is more intense.

That’s why I chose to use first person for my books. I wanted the reader to be there, in the scene, experiencing everything first hand. Also, the magic that my main character uses is more personal than in most fantasy novels. There aren’t any streaks of lightning or fireballs in the first novel. Such things exist and some of the magic is visible in my world, but most of the REAL magic is happening on a different level, one that can’t be seen and is hard to describe UNLESS I use the first person.

I think the emotional impact of first person is the real reason I chose to use it thought, because the magic COULD have been done in third (it would have been harder but possible), but I wanted people to live Varis’ life along with her. Because the story really is about Varis, about HER, not the world. It’s a very character driven story, and character driven stories about a single character are often better done as first person.

So, some reasons to use first person: immediacy of action and emotion; pulls the reader deeper into the story; magic of the world (or some other part of the plot) dictates first person; a single character is the driving force behind the story; it’s a character-driven story.

That list isn’t complete of course, just some of the things that came up during the panel. And of course, it only works if the first person is done well.

When shouldn’t you use first person? Well, the general response is when the story involves more than one POV. If parts of the plot or action must be told when the main character (the potential first person POV character) isn’t around or isn’t involved, then the novel probably shouldn’t be told in first person.

Yes, you can get away with having other characters tell the first person POV character what happened second hand, and you can even manipulate the book enough to have that first person character "accidentally" overhear an important conversation that reveals incredibly important information . . . but you can only do that so many times in a novel before such techniques become trite and obvious and just plain stupid. (My general working theory is that you can only do such things ONCE in a novel and get away with it; the second time you do that, you’ve blown it . . . unless, of course, you have a magical throne that allows the main character to ransack a person’s memories. *grin*)

So, if the main characters isn’t there for a significant portion of the main action . . . first person is probably not going to work. Because with first person, you MUST restrict yourself to that one person’s thoughts, actions, and feelings. You have to get across everyone else’s thoughts, actions, and feeling by using what that one character sees and hears and notices. And this is hard.

Another reason to NOT use first person is voice. If you’re going to use first person, that characters must have a very strong voice, and that voice must in some way be relatable. The reader has to be in sync with the character and has to understand that character and their motivations, and the reader has to be able to put themselves in that character’s place.

If they can’t get into that character’s head in a believable way, then the book isn’t going to work for them. They’ll be constantly kicked out of the story because they just can’t relate to what the main character is doing. So the character’s voice has to be strong, because it has to "overwhelm" the reader’s own character to some extent, so that the reader can set themselves aside and become this new person, so that they can live this new person’s life.

And again, this can only work if the first person is done well.

So how can first person be done horribly? Oh, there are so many ways. The first is just at a grammatical level. One of the biggest traps (I found) with first person is sentence structure. The tendency is to write things using the "I" all of the time. You end up saying things like: "I felt a pain in my back as I lifted the crate full of lead ingots."Or: "I saw the man cross the street and enter the darkness of the alley."

One of the biggest things I learned while writing that first first person book was that there’s no need for the additional I’s. In fact, I tried to eliminate as many I’s as possible while writing first person. We’re supposed to be inside this person’s head, so we don’t need them. The reader knows who’s speaking, who’s thinking, who’s feeling, who’s seeing, etc, so you can leave all of that "I" crap to the side as much as possible. Just say what’s happening! "A pain exploded in my back as I lifted the crate full of lead ingots." "The man slid across the street and entered the darkened alley." Much more immediate and much more succinct and engaging. So eliminate as many of the I’s as possible when writing first person.
 

Read the rest of the post on Joshua Palmatier’s blog, and also check out his follow-up post on the same subject.

Are You Struggling Over A Small Readership?

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This article, by James Chartrand, originally appeared on the Men With Pens site on 3/27/09.

How many people read your blog? 1,000? 500? 300? Maybe even just 100 readers or less. Those numbers might discourage you.

Just 100 readers. That’s nothing, you think. You look at the big blogs you admire, and with a low heart, you notice their reader stats so proudly displayed. They have thousands of daily readers showing up. They have the readership you dream of, the stats that make you envious.

Maybe those numbers make you feel small. You might wonder if you’re writing every day or two for nothing. You may feel like you’re wasting your time.

I’d like to turn that line of thinking on its head and give it a good ass-kicking. It’s time to put stats into perspective.

The Biggest Show in Town

Imagine you have tickets to a fantastic show – your favorite artist, too. It’s going to be huge – an extravaganza! The biggest thing to hit the region!

Have you ever been to a big rock star performance? I have. It’s crowded. It’s noisy and there’s no place to sit. You can’t see the stage well. So you stand uncomfortably and watch the big screens that show clips and bits of the most exciting parts of the show.

There are lights shining in your eyes. People around you are talking, and you can’t hear well over the background noise. Someone jostles you. It smells funny. It’s long. Your legs are tired. Maybe the weather isn’t the best, either – of course the show is outdoors.

Who could fit that many people in an auditorium?

When you leave at the end of the show, you’re glad to be out in the fresh air. It’s good to stretch your legs. Your ears are ringing from all the noise. You had a good time, sure! It was the biggest show in town – amazing!

Really? I don’t think so.

Biggest Isn’t Always Best

Now imagine a different show. It’s smaller – in your home town. In fact, the performer about to take the stage is you.

So you walk out on stage. The lighting is basic. There aren’t any big screens. There aren’t many seats in the auditorium, either. Your show isn’t at rockstar levels, and you wonder if anyone is going to show up.

You take a deep breath, and the curtains open.

Look out at the auditorium. It’s small, but the seats are full. Expectant faces look back at you. Everyone is seated comfortably and they’re waiting for your performance. The sound is good, there’s not much noise, and when you begin your show, you manage to reach every single person in that audience.

Up close and personal, too. Now that’s a show I like to attend.

 

Read the rest of the article, and many more excellent pieces for writers, on Men With Pens.

2009: The Year Print On Demand Goes Mainstream

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This piece, by Wil Wheaton, originally appeared on the End User blog on 3/27/09.

"2009 is the year that print on demand goes mainstream." – Warren Ellis

We are living in an incredible time, both as consumers and creators. As consumers, whatever entertainment we want, whether it’s television, music, movies, games or books, is easier and faster to get than ever before. As creators, the barriers between us and our audience are falling faster and more easily than ever before, the time between creation and release is shrinking, and thanks to the Internet we can reach more people with less effort than we could as recently as a decade ago.

Earlier this week, I came across a post in my blog archives from September of 2002 where I said:

 

Remember how so many readers have been telling me to write a book? Well, I listened. Watch this space for details on how you can get it in about a week or so, maybe two.

I was talking about my book Dancing Barefoot, which was created from material I cut out of Just A Geek. I looked at that post and felt a little nostalgic, because that’s where my journey as a published writer and champion of indie publishing began. 

In 2002, I was just another struggling actor and fledgling blogger. I figured that, since I was having such a hard time getting work as an actor – where I had a huge resume and a lifetime of experience – it would be nearly-impossible to sell my books to a publisher. I did some research, figured out that I was able to reach a few hundred thousand people with my blog, and decided to reject the "traditional" publishing route in favor of self-publishing.

I needed an education in self-publishing, and read two books that made all the difference: The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing and The Self-Publishing Manual. They were both filled with great advice, like the importance of hiring and respecting an experienced editor, a good designer, and putting together an intelligent marketing plan. I’m not sure what the current versions of the books say, but in 2002, they both warned authors away from using print on demand, largely because the per-unit costs were unreasonably high, and when you held a POD book in your hands, it really felt like you were holding a POD book in your hands.

My, my, my, how the times have changed. The prejudice against POD persists, but that tactile difference in quality has vanished, and after a couple of my friends used print on demand from Lulu to release their books, I decided to give it a try myself. I wrote in my blog:

 

If this works the way I think it will, it’s going to be super awesome for all of us as I release books in the future: You don’t have to worry about me screwing up your order, I don’t have to invest in a thousand books at a time, you get your book in a few days instead of a few weeks because I’m not shipping it myself, and I can spend more time creating new stories while remaining independent. Best of all, I’ll have the time to write and release more than one or two books a year.

Read the rest of the post on the End User blog.

The Psychology of Writing, Pt. 2 – Writing For A Living: A Joy Or A Chore?

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Publetariat’s series on the psychology of writing continues with this piece, which originally appeared on The Guardian UK site on 3/3/09.

Colm Tóibín claims he does not enjoy writing very much. Do other authors share his view?

AL Kennedy

AL Kennedy

The joy of writing for a living is that you get to do it all the time. The misery is that you have to, whether you’re in the mood or not. I wouldn’t be the first writer to point out that doing something so deeply personal does become less jolly when you have to keep on at it, day after cash-generating day. To use a not ridiculous analogy: Sex = nice thing. Sex For Cash = probably less fun, perhaps morally uncomfy and psychologically unwise. Sitting alone in a room for hours while essentially talking in your head about people you made up earlier and then writing it down for no one you know does have many aspects which are not inherently fulfilling. Then again, making something out of nothing, overturning the laws of time and space, building something for strangers just because you think they might like it and hours of absence from self – that’s fantastic. And then it’s over, which is even better. I’m with RLStevenson – having written – that’s the good bit.

Amit Chaudhuri

Amit Chaudhuri

Writing novels is no fun; nor is, generally speaking, reading novels. Reading people writing about novels is not always fun, either, because relatively little of this kind of writing is any good. Then there’s the group of people who don’t enjoy being novelists, to which I probably belong; whose lives are at once shaped and defined by, and to some extent entrapped in, the act of writing fiction. I still find it difficult to believe that I’m something called a ‘novelist’; but this hasn’t stopped me from dreaming, frequently, of alternative professions: second-hand bookshop owner; corporate worker; cinematographer. There are many reasons for this unease. One of them is a fundamental discomfort with narrative itself, and involves admitting to yourself that you derive your basic pleasure not from knowing what happens next, but from arrested time or eventlessness; this makes you constantly wish, as you’re writing, that you were elsewhere, or it makes you work to make the novel accommodate that impulse. Another reason is the professionalisation of the vocation, so that the novelist is supposed to produce novels as naturally, automatically, and regularly as a cow gives milk. In such a constraining situation, money can certainly be a compensatory pleasure; so can that paradoxical and sly addiction, failure.

Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru

I get great pleasure from writing, but not always, or even usually. Writing a novel is largely an exercise in psychological discipline – trying to balance your project on your chin while negotiating a minefield of depression and freak-out. Beginning is daunting; being in the middle makes you feel like Sisyphus; ending sometimes comes with the disappointment that this finite collection of words is all that remains of your infinitely rich idea. Along the way, there are the pitfalls of self-disgust, boredom, disorientation and a lingering sense of inadequacy, occasionally alternating with episodes of hysterical self-congratulation as you fleetingly believe you’ve nailed that particular sentence and are surely destined to join the ranks of the immortals, only to be confronted the next morning with an appalling farrago of clichés that no sane human could read without vomiting. But when you’re in the zone, spinning words like plates, there’s a deep sense of satisfaction and, yes, enjoyment…

John Banville

John Banville

Civilisation’s greatest single invention is the sentence. In it, we can say anything. That saying, however, is difficult and peculiarly painful. Whether we are writing a novel or a letter to our bank manager, we have the eerie sensation that we are not so much writing as being written, that language in its insidious way is using us as a medium of expression and not vice versa. The struggle of writing is fraught with a specialised form of anguish, the anguish of knowing one will never get it right, that one will always fail, and that all one can hope to do is ‘fail better’, as Beckett recommends. The pleasure of writing is in the preparation, not the execution, and certainly not in the thing executed. The novelist daily at his desk eats ashes, and if occasionally he encounters a diamond he is likely to break a tooth on it. Money is necessary to pay the dentist’s bills.

Will Self

Will Self

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn’t enjoy writing novels I wouldn’t do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn’t faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I’d go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don’t write I’m not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.

Read the rest of the piece, which includes responses from Joyce Carol Oates, Geoff Dyer, Ronan Bennett and Julie Myerson, on The Guardian UK site.

The Dreaded Moment of Suck

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This piece, by Alison Janssen, originally appeared on the Hey, There’s A Dead Guy In The Living Room blog on 3/29/09. In it, Ms. Janssen talks about that dreaded moment of self-doubt many authors and, apparently, editors sometimes feel when looking back over a finished manuscript: the (hopefully) fleeting moment when you’re absolutely certain the work is horrible and you’re a fraud.

During the lifespan of a Bleak House book, I may read the same text seven or eight times. Sometimes a time or two more, sometimes a time or two less. (It depends upon my working relationship with the author and the way we work through revisions.)

Suffice it to say: I read each title *intensely* before it’s bound between hard covers and made available for mass consumption.

And over the course of those months, at some point after my initial acquisitions read but before my final check-all-tiny-last-minute-changes review, I experience a moment while reading when I think,

"Oh god. This book is terrible. Is this book terrible?!"

*Gasp*

I know! I’m almost ashamed to admit this. I certainly don’t want to give the impression that I think any Bleak House book is less than stellar. Obviously, right? What would that say about the company? Our authors? Heck, my own professional skill set?

But I want to talk about this because I sometimes hear authors address a similar feeling, and I find it fascinating. I hear them talk about the moment of self-doubt which seizes them — wholly unfairly — and convinces them that the ms they’re slaving over is utter crap. Some authors I’ve heard speak to this say the feeling creeps up just after they reach the halfway point of their first draft, when they’ve set everything up, invested a ton,and know pretty well where it’s all going, but still have to get it there.

That makes sense to me — having focused so much on a ms, worked mostly in solitude, and being essentially past the point of no return, I can believe that it’s easy to doubt yourself. No matter how many previous titles you’ve published, no matter how many bestseller lists you may be on. Bestseller status doesn’t fill blank pages for you.

My experience with a ms is much different from the author’s, of course. My work is not creation, but refinement. I still, however, spend a lot of time with the mss. And I certainly feel a sense of ownership when I usher a book from query through publication.

I want to be proud of the work that I do, and I want to be praised. (That’s natural, yeah?) I want Bleak House to be renowned for publishing great crime fiction. And I believe in what we do, and the titles and author in which we invent.

But, just like the authors I discussed above, I encounter that moment — when I’ve been shut up so long with a ms, trying to brainstorm a solution to some little character flaw, or soothe some plot hiccup, or elegantly replace some overused (but totally awesome) word. The dreaded moment of suck. 

Read the rest of the post on the Hey, There’s A Dead Guy In The Living Room blog.

The Dragon's Pool Preview on CreateSpace's new tool

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Since the 3rd Book of The Jade Owl Legacy Series – The Dragon’s Pool, is nearing publication in early May, I decided to use CreateSpace’s kool new PREVIEW tool to get feedback on the first chapter. Here’s the link:

https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1056199

Ed Patterson