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Articles about craft.

Can Amazon Save Your Life?

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This post, by Brandon G. Withrow, originally appeared on The Huffington Post on 6/27/12.

This last week I went to Amazon to look for a book. Did you know they sell those too?

Their home page directed me to an IndieReader.com article (also published here at The Huffington Post) by Jessica Park ("How Amazon Saved My Life"), author of several books, but whose book Flat-Out Love is her first Amazon book. Needless to say, Park is exuberant about her work with Amazon and for Amazon the feeling appears mutual.

Most of Park’s books were traditionally published under a standard contract with all its usual difficulties and blessings. Her article is an interesting look at the pros of self-publishing with a big force like Amazon and includes the benefits from choosing your own cover to the potential to make big money.

I admit that I was intrigued by the money side first. After all, as a traditionally published author, I (like so many others) hope to at least earn as much from the book as I spent in buying coffee while I wrote it.

Up until now, and outside of blogging, I’ve not given self-publishing too much thought. Part of the reason for that is the reputation that the self-publishing world has — whether it is deserved or not — for being average or even subpar. I am also a professor, meaning that promotion and tenure are things that require a certain publication history not generally associated with the self-publishing book world at this point.

Park pulled no punches in her opinion of traditional publishing, and her belief in the superiority of self-publishing was far from reserved. Declaring anything one’s savior is usually a bravado reserved for religious tracts. Should it be followed-up with "Amazon has a wonderful plan for your life?"

Despite the usual criticism of self-published books, I had an experience recently that reduced some of my skepticism of that industry.

I received an email a little while back from Nick Frieseler, a debut author. He asked me to look over his manuscript for his forthcoming book, Imago Dei: The Evolution of Man in the Image of God (WinePress Publishing). In this, Frieseler suggests a theological solution for discussions of evolution and Christianity. Reading my articles here at the Huffington Post on religion and evolution, he thought I could offer suggestions.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Huffington Post.

On Writing Strong (Female) Characters

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This post, by Daniel Swensen, originally appeared on The Surly Muse.

Every once in a while, the question makes its way around the writing circles: how to write strong female characters?

Well, I’m a guy, so I probably shouldn’t be the first person you ask. In fact, definitely not. But, because I’m a guy, here comes my opinion anyway. (Right away with the gender stereotypes — buckle up!)

Often, some wiseacre will reference the acidic, sexist crack from Jack Nicholson’s character from the movie As Good As It Gets: “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.” This is best used ironically, or not at all, as it’s not really constructive. It’s also wildly sexist. So there’s your example of What Not to Do, I guess.

Also on the list of smartass responses is this comic strip by Kate Beaton, which takes a swing at the tropes some writers seem to think make female characters strong, but actually really don’t. (I particularly like the lengthy justification of the boob armor, which I’ve seen in many an online argument about revealing superhero costumes.)

If you look at your typical urban fantasy cover, the answer seems to be “crop top, big knife, and tattoos.” This is a pretty hoary complaint by this time, and I feel a little self-conscious even making it, but seriously, show me a bad-ass vampire hunter with her midriff covered, and, well… I’ll be mildly surprised. Not that this is a bad thing in itself, beyond being something of a cliché at this point. But it does seem to reinforce the idea that “violence = strength.” Not that I mind ass-kicking characters, but groin-punching is a behavior, not a personality trait. The most iconic modern-fantasy female of them all, Buffy Summers, much more going for her than just beating monsters senseless.

The question’s also been kicking around the blogosphere recently. Oh, I just said blogosphere. I’m sorry. Anyway, for example, “The Fantasy Feminist” by Fantasy Faction (say that five times fast), points out some of the most common gaffes in writing female characters: 

These issues are, at their core, character issues. The problem isn’t the warrior or promiscuous personality in itself; rather, it’s the idea that to be a strong character, a woman must act like a man or shun feminine things or use her body to manipulate people or some other misconception. And even then, it’s really only a problem if the writer believes that the character must act that way to be strong. If the character believes it, then the writer has taken a first step toward creating a multi-layered person.

Michel Vaillancourt, author of The Sauder Diaries: By Any Other Name, relates how he carefully researched and constructed his female characters. Vaillancourt sums up the problem neatly: “Within our North American pop culture, we have built a mystic divide between the principle genders.” What’s most interesting about this post is the mixed reaction Vaillancourt got from female readers  – proving that there is no One True Way when it comes to writing characters, nor should there be.

My favorite answer to this question, however, came from a recent Google+ thread in which a writer asked, “how do you write female characters?” and someone answered:

1) I think of a character.
2) I make them female.

I love this answer, because I think it gets to the heart of the issue: gender plays very little part in what makes a good or strong character. So why start with gender at all?

What It Takes

So what does it take to make a (female) character tick?

 

Read the rest of the post on The Surly Muse.

15 Grammatical Errors That Make You Look Silly

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The following infographic, by BlueGlass, originally appeared on Copyblogger. The introductory text is by Brian Clark, and the infographic is shared here with Copyblogger’s permission.

We’re big advocates of conversational writing that’s engaging, persuasive, and fun. So that means it’s perfectly fine to fracture the occasional stuffy grammatical rule (and many times it’s preferable).

On the other hand, making some grammatical errors just makes you look bad, and hurts your effectiveness. Sometimes we even misuse words simply because we hear others use them incorrectly.

 

So, we’ve assembled the 15 most egregious grammar goofs into one helpful infographic. With this handy reference, you’ll never look silly again.

Thanks once again to our friends at BlueGlass for the infographic design that makes my silly little words look cool. Enjoy!

15 Grammar Goofs That Make You Look Silly
Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.

Pain and Stress Inform the Work, But Not Always Right Away, and Only If You Survive

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It may not seem like it at first, but this post is about coping with the tremendous, unprecedented pressure to produce and sell that all but the most established authors face these days. Specifically, it’s about coping with those pressures on top of other, even larger pressures, particularly when you’re an indie author in the early stages of your publishing career. So please bear with me: I’ll circle back around to this, I promise.

My favorite mantra for coping with pain, stress and the general asshattery and douchebaggery of others when it occurs is, "It informs the work. It informs the work. It informs the work." Sometimes I have to say it through gritted teeth, but it’s true: the most painful and troubling experiences of a writer’s life combine to fill a well of personal truth from which the writer can draw to lend authenticity and heft to his fiction. But like a fine wine or artisnal cheese, those experiences usually need to age before they’re ready for public consumption.

It’s only through the passage of time, and accumulation of new experiences and outcomes, that the writer gains distance, perspective, and a degree of objectivity that enables her to take something deeply personal and channel it into stories and characters that speak to others in a relatable way. And I’m not just talking about fictionalized memoirs here, I’m talking about dealing with the broad themes of loss, pain, denial, longing, failure and all the other negatives that challenge us as human beings, in fiction.

Writers are a sensitive lot by nature, and many of us are living through dire times. Some of you who are reading this post have recently suffered a job loss; some have been out of work for a year or longer. Some are losing—or have already lost—their homes to foreclosure. Some are coping with the loss of a loved one, divorce, a health crisis…or maybe even two or more of these major life traumas simultaneously. Some are just barely keeping the bill collectors at bay while living on a steady diet of ramen noodles and peanut butter. One day, the survivors will look back on these dark times and see them for the growth experiences they were. But not today, and not if they don’t survive.

Sometimes people ask me why I’m not producing one or two novels a year, as so many indie authors are advised to do if they wish to build up the kind of back catalog that’s necessary to truly make a living as an indie author. Some ask why I’m no longer a familiar face at writer conferences and events. Some wonder why they’re seeing more images and updates of my craft projects on Facebook than of my writing projects, and why I just generally don’t seem to be "working it" as an indie author, and haven’t been for some time. Well, I’ll tell you.

I came out of the chute like gangbusters back in 2007, when "self-publish" was still a dirty word. I got my books and myself out there, I launched and nurtured Publetariat.com, I became active with social media, I networked, I got involved with online writer and reader communities, I spoke at writer conferences, I taught workshops, and more. I’d built up quite a head of steam and forward momentum when…

…the bottom fell out of my life.

In early 2010 I learned I had a breast tumor [I’m fine now, thanks for your concern =’) ]. Two days later my husband of 18+ years announced he was leaving me. This meant I’d also soon be unemployed since my job at the time was as Office Manager for a business my then-husband and I ran together. I’d left a career in Software Engineering some six years previous to help establish and run that business, so hopping right back into my former professional field wouldn’t be possible. Divorce also meant I might soon be losing the only home I’d ever owned, and had recently remodeled, and loved, since I most likely couldn’t afford the mortgage payment by myself.
 
It’s been over two years since the bombs dropped on me, and I’ve come a long way toward full recovery. But I’m not there yet. While the initial shock and emotional devastation are behind me, the fallout from these problems is still poking me with a stick on a daily basis, preventing me from establishing comfortable, secure new routines. In many ways, I’m still in survival mode. Surely all of these experiences will imbue my work with more depth and meaning than it’s ever had before. But not today. And not if I don’t survive.

Survival is job one, for all of us. If you don’t survive, you won’t be there to tell your stories when the crisis is over. If the pressures of your daily life are already pushing you to your limits as a human being, before you add the pressures of authorship, you need to step back. Give yourself permission to delay, though not abandon, your dreams. If you don’t, drive will turn into despair. Hope will turn into bitterness. The urge to create will turn into an urge to destroy.

For someone in survival mode, every bit of effort, time and money spent is a high-stakes investment, because there’s so little of those commodities available to such a person. Where entering a contest, submitting a manuscript, or publishing a new book would’ve been an event of nervous, but hopeful anticipation in the past, when you’re in survival mode these things become acts of desperate need. Rejections that would’ve been difficult, but manageable, before are crushing to someone in survival mode. Not only is it impossible to create your best work, you lack the emotional wherewithal to understand and accept it when others don’t respond well to your sub-par efforts. It becomes a downward spiral of fear, rejection and increasing desperation, all of which serves to further delay your eventual recovery and ability to come at authorship from a place of renewed strength and perspective.

Building a career as an author is a marathon, not a sprint. If you’re exhausted as you stand on the blocks, before the starting gun has even sounded, there’s no way you can hope to win that race. Do what you need to do to survive, so that someday, you can once again thrive.


This is a cross-posting from Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton‘s Indie Author Blog.

What was San Francisco like in 1880? The Economy

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Publetariat Editor’s Note: in this post, historical fiction author M. Louisa Locke shares some of the wealth of information she found while doing research for her novels. It’s worth a close read for anyone working in the historical fiction genre, as it reveals the levels of depth and detail required when doing this type of research.

This is the first in a multi-part series describing San Francisco in 1880. For those of you who have read either Maids of Misfortune or Uneasy Spirits, or my short stories, this will provide you with some deeper understanding of the city where my main characters, Annie Fuller and Nate Dawson, lived as children in the 1860s and returned to as adults in the 1870s. If you are not familiar with my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, I hope these historical pieces will pique your interest––although I promise my fiction is much livelier reading. All the material quoted below is from my thesis, “Like a Machine or an Animal: Working Women of the Far West in the Late Nineteenth Century,” University of California: San Diego dissertation, 1982 pp. 60-69.”  I must say, it is much more entertaining to convey historical information through fiction than heavily footnoted fact!

Part One: The San Francisco Economy

“In 1880 San Francisco, with a population of 233,959 residents, was the ninth largest city in the United States. Located at the end of the peninsula that separates the Bay of San Francisco from the Pacific Ocean, this city of hills, sand dunes, fogs, and mild temperatures had been only a small village called Yerba Buena less than forty years earlier.  This small village was one of the chief beneficiaries of the incredible influx of people into the region after the discovery of gold to the north in the winter of 1847-48.”

[For those of you who have read Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits––Annie Fuller, her parents, her Aunt and Uncle, and her housekeeper, Beatrice O’Rourke, were among those who traveled west and settled in San Francisco in those first years.]

“Commerce dominated San Francisco’s economic structure through out the nineteenth century. Its fine natural harbor and its location near both ocean shipping lanes and interior river routes stimulated much of the city’s early economic growth. The city served as the port of entry for the massive flow of people and goods into the region during the Gold Rush, and once agriculture developed in the interior in the 1860′s San Francisco also became the major port to handle goods shipped out of the region. The disruption in trade resulting from the Civil War further promoted the development of agriculture in the Far West, and San Francisco merchants worked hard in the 1850s and 1860s to ensure that all goods entering or leaving the region passed through their hands. By and large they were successful, and their control of the region’s trade remained firm until the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. As late as 1875, San Francisco still handled at least ninety percent of all the goods leaving the state and a major share of the trade leaving the Northwest.”

“As a commercial port city, San Francisco first developed manufacturing that centered around supplying shipping needs and processing the raw materials that constituted the bulk of the city’s trade. By the late 1850s a few firms also began to manufacture a significant amount of the heavy equipment used in hydraulic mining.  In the 1860s…the Civil War and the completion of the transcontinental railroad fostered the development of a new kind of industry within San Francisco––the manufacturing of light consumer items for regional markets. The dislocation of Eastern trade during the Civil War not only aided the development of agricultural lands in the Far West but also encouraged San Francisco’s manufacturing sector by diverting capital investment from the cities of the East to the Far west and by forcing the latter region to look to San Francisco to supply its consumer needs.”

“The high shipping rates of the Central Pacific Railroad acted as a protective tariff for the city, and the railroad gave San Francisco easier access to raw materials and to regional markets for its manufactured goods. The construction of the railroad also attracted great numbers of Chinese and European immigrants who flocked to San Francisco once their job with the railroad ended. This new abundance of labor, in turn, drove down wages in the city and encouraged the creation of the first large-scale manufacturing establishments in the city. As a result, by 1880 San Francisco had a mature, broadly based manufacturing sector that completely dominated the Far West. San Francisco ranked ninth among cities in the nation in value of products…most important industries in 1880 were meat packing and processing, sugar refining, boot and shoe making, heavy metal and machine making, men’s clothing, and tobacco and cigar making. San Francisco’s continued vitality as a commercial center and its growing manufacturing capabilities also insured that the city acted as the financial capital of the region. The headquarters of almost all of the California banking institutions were located in San Francisco, and banks in other cities were often dependent on San Francisco capital.”

“Despite this relatively favorable working climate, San Francisco was not in any way protected from the economic cycles that affected the rest of the nation, nor were the laboring classes immune form exploitation by their employers. In fact, the high wages of the 1850s and 1860s and the popular myth that fortunes were easily made in the Far West promoted unrealistic expectations that were dealt a particularly harsh blow when hard times hit the city in the 1870s. With the completion of the railroad in 1869, the chronic labor shortage that had kept wages high vanished, and for the first time there was severe unemployment throughout the state. The national depression sparked by the Panic of 1873 reinforced the local downturn in business, and in 1875 the collapse of the Bank of California and the decline in the output of the Comstock Lode (in which much of the city’s capital had been invested) added to the city’s difficulties.”

“Even though a visitor to the city in 1880′…was much struck by the depressed air of the tradesmen,’ and a Norwegian pastor implored his countrymen living in the Midwest not to come to San Francisco expecting to find jobs easily, by 1880 San Francisco’s economy shared in the recovery that was sweeping the nation. The development of manufacturing in the city, which had in part been fostered by the very economic difficulties of the 1870s (because it lowered wages), meant that the city entered the new decade with an economy that was more diverse and stronger than ever.”

[It was the Panic of 1873 and the subsequent national depression that had played a key role in Annie Fuller’s late husband’s financial ruin back east and it is the improvement in San Francisco’s economy that Annie takes advantage of as the clairvoyant, Madam Sibyl, when she offers business advice to local businessmen like Mr. Matthew Voss in Maids of Misfortune.]

 

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s site.

5 Mistakes of New Fiction Writers

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However many books on writing we read, and however many novels we have consumed in our genre, there are still things that we get wrong as new novelists.

I know I fall into these traps. I also reviewed a friend’s manuscript the other day and found myself telling him exactly the same things.

So I thought you might like to add your thoughts as well since we can all learn from each other. Please do leave a comment [on the original post] with your top mistakes of new fiction writers.

This is not an exhaustive list, but just some obvious things that, if fixed, may transform your manuscript. Aspects may also vary by genre.

(1) Show, don’t tell.

Now I know why editors and publishers say this over and over again. It really stands out in a manuscript when you read with a fresh eye. If the Nazis are marching into a French village, don’t report the event in third person. Instead, relate the event from the point of view of a character in the crowd. Make it personal and show their reaction to the event by their behavior. Deep, interior monologues can be replaced with characters doing something or saying something.

(2) Consistent Point of View (POV)

I don’t think I really ‘got’ point of view until I paid for my first professional edit. I jumped into the heads of the different characters within one scene which can be confusing for readers. Yes, some writers do it but it’s best to get POV sorted before you start playing around.

POV is also easier if you think in terms of writing scenes. Each scene has a setting, something happens to advance the plot or reveal character, and there is a point of view. Who is telling the story? Then be consistent within the scene, or if you change heads, then only do it once. There’s no exact science to this, but there are some conventions that make it easier for the reader.

For more on story engineering, check out Larry Brook’s fantastic tips in this interview.

(3) Deliver on the promise you make the reader.

If there is a murder at the beginning, then we need to know who did it by the end. No matter if it is a massive 7 part series. The story arc in the one book needs to be complete. This is one of the reasons I personally don’t like serial books. I like my story to be encompassed in one book. I want the payoff of a good ending.

There needs to be coherence around theme, character arc, plot as well as delivering to the promise of the genre you advertise the book as. I’m writing action-adventure thriller, so I can’t spend half the book in one room pondering the world as a literary fiction author could. If you’re writing romance, there needs to be a happy ending. (Although apparently, a love story can have an unhappy ending in the vein of Nicholas Sparks!)

(4) Overuse of first names in dialogue

This jumps off the page as the sign of an amateur, and I am absolutely guilty as charged in my first novel. Read your dialogue out loud – with another person. Someone has commented on the blog before about reading it aloud to a recorder and then playing it back again. This is all time-consuming though. I notice this in a lot of indie books.

(5) Overuse of exclamation marks

Yes, this can be fixed by a proof-reader/ copy-editor, but sometimes the text needs to be rewritten as well as the excess punctuation removed. It’s trying too hard to communicate emotion to the reader, without showing it in the action or behavior of the character.

Tips on usage from The Perfect Write.

“Some experts feel that exclamation points are the sign of a lazy writer, or worse–an amateur. Whether the rationale for either opinion is sound or not, there are well-grounded reasons for both.”

Conclusion: we can all improve.

One of the marvelous things about being a writer is how we can keep improving. Every word we write can be a step towards improvement. The editing process is all about improvement, about making the book the best it can be. Get people reading your work and critiquing it. We have to keep learning and this is the only way.

What do you think the tell-tale errors of new fiction writers are? Please do leave a comment [on the original post].

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

Kindle Nation Daily’s Letter to the Department of Justice in the DOJ eBook Price-Fixing Lawsuit Against Apple and Five Publishers

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This is a reprint of a post written by Stephen Windwalker, from the Kindle Nation Daily site, and is reposted here in its entirety with his permission.

([Kindle Nation Daily] Editor’s Note: As we have mentioned before the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed a major antitrust lawsuit against Apple and the five original “agency model” publishers charging them with a massive price-fixing conspiracy in violation of federal law. The DOJ Antitrust Division and the court wants to hear from members of the public during a 60-day comment period on the lawsuit which expires June 25, and what follows is my letter to the court. Please see this post for instructions on how to submit your comments. –Stephen Windwalker.)

June 18, 2012

Via Priority Mail

John Read, Chief
Litigation III Section
Antitrust Division
U.S. Department of Justice
450 5th Street, NW, Suite 4000 Washington, DC 20530

 

Dear Mr. Read,

I am writing to you both as an individual citizen, reader, author, and former independent bookstore owner, and also as the founder of  the Kindle Nation Daily website, one of the largest active communities of ebook readers and enthusiasts. Along with tens of thousands of other avid readers and thousands of other authors who are associated with the Kindle Nation Daily community, I am keenly interested in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) civil antitrust action (United States v. Apple, Inc. et. al., Civil Action No. 12-CIV-2826) against Apple, Inc., and five of the largest U.S. book publishers (defendants). My purpose in writing this letter is to share and underline several points that I believe should be central points of emphasis for the DOJ and the courts as this case proceeds and legal remedies are considered.

My single most important point is one that I am sure the DOJ and the court understands well, but which appears to be a matter of confusion for many others: the major parties in this case are the six defendants (Apple and the five publisher defendants) and the DOJ, which is empowered here to act on behalf of consumers. While it ought to be obvious that this is so, and that the alleged collusion has robbed tens of millions of dollars from American consumers and denied them the opportunity to read millions of other books that they deemed they could not afford, many who have commented on this case have tried to shift the focus, from this irreparable harm to consumers, to the consequences of judicial action for other interested entities who are not parties to the case, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and countless other booksellers, authors, literary agents, and other intermediaries and players in the book business. As recently as today the headline in the New Yorker’s coverage of the case demonstrates this confusion: “Paper Trail: Did publishers and Apple collude against Amazon?” Of course it would be naive not to recognize the importance of the case to these players, but to seat them at the table as parties is to miss the point of the irreparable harm to consumers.

In an effort to place the primary focus where it belongs, I would like to offer the following points and perspectives:

 

1. By colluding to raise new-release ebook prices by 30 to 100 percent, the defendants have caused irreparable harm to millions of readers of all ages, including public school and college students and other children, families, and people of limited means who bought ebook readers or downloaded free Kindle apps based on the affordability of ebooks before the defendants imposed the agency model. Prior to the launch of the Kindle it was widely believed that reading was on the decline in the U.S., as noted by the late Steve Jobs when he declared early in 2008 that the Kindle was a flawed concept “because nobody reads any more.” Among the reasons for the decline of long-form reading were rising prices for new hardcovers and paperbacks, the closing of many public library branches and bookstores, and the diminishing selection of physical books offered to the American public through existing distribution channels. The launch of the Kindle in 2007 and the fact that Amazon made Kindle apps free for anyone with a smartphone, a computer, or a Kindle meant that any reader could have a well-stocked bookstore at their fingertips just about anywhere in the U.S. and beyond. The Kindle platform succeeded because of its catalog, convenience, competitive pricing, and Amazon’s customer base and unflinching commitment to the platform, and its success has helped to fuel a resurgence in reading that is bridging the digital divide across class and age lines. The Kindle store pricing that some of the defendants and other Amazon critics demonize as “predatory” has had a wonderfully positive effect on this resurgence in reading, and has social, economic, and cultural value far beyond anything that would be achieved, for instance, by propping up the defendant publishers or another player like Barnes & Noble.

 

2. Illegal collusive behavior must not be separated from the consequences of that behavior, either in the punishment of the behavior or in the remedies proposed. Many of the more thoughtful critics of the DOJ action have taken pains to state that they have no knowledge or legal expertise about the collusive behavior alleged by the DOJ, but such behavior and its objectives are and must remain at the center of this case: the DOJ alleges with an impressive recitation of evidence that the defendants participated in an unprecedented conspiracy to force retailers to raise their new-release ebook prices by 30 to 100 percent. If that’s what happened, the defendants must be punished and retailers must be allowed to restore competitive pricing. For the publisher defendants to claim no wrongdoing after they kept their corporate counsel out of the rooms in which the collusion allegedly occurred is, if the defendants acted as alleged by DOJ, an insult to the court and to all interested parties. When companies collude or conspire to raise prices to the detriment of consumers, they know full well that they are on thin ice. In this case, because of the defendants’ collusion, consumers paid tens of millions more than they would otherwise have had to pay for ebooks. In countless other cases they had to refrain from buying ebooks they hungered to read. Because of what the defendants did, they should not only have to stop doing it, but they should remain under close regulatory scrutiny (as spelled out in the proposed settlement) for years, and they should be required to pay tens of millions, and ultimately perhaps hundreds of millions, in actual and punitive restitution to consumers.

 

3. The U.S. publishing industry is fond of saying that “the DOJ doesn’t understand the book business.” However, the defendant publishers and their associated intermediaries and gatekeepers arrived in the 21st century very poorly prepared for the future either in their fundamental economic cost structure or in their commitment to invest in innovation. The industry’s major players do not deserve any fate other than that which a collusion-free marketplace holds for them. On the other hand, over the past decade, increasing numbers of authors, booksellers, publishers and others have combined innovation, the use of new technologies, and some risk-taking to circumvent what many feel has become a rather calcified literary-industrial complex and instead established new and profitable models for making more direct connections between authors and readers. In spite of the fact that readers are paying less for ebooks than they have paid in the past for print books, most of the authors of distinction who are taking a direct route to publishing are earning greater royalties than they would ever have received from traditional publishers. They have shortened the publishing timetables from years (or in some cases decades) to months or weeks. While traditional publishing players lament the costs, for themselves, of disintermediation, tens of thousands of others are clear winners in a world where intermediaries are no longer sheltered from the need to prove their worth. The defendants and their apologists have attempted to lock in the wastefulness and flawed economic decision-making of the industry and its intermediaries by passing their costs on to consumers in the form of the 30 to 100% price increases imposed by the agency model, but claims that DOJ should protect the intermediaries in the publishing world have neither a legal basis nor any value for the culture or the country. It would be more accurate for publishers to say that the DOJ “doesn’t understand our book business the way that we understand our book business.” That would be fair in a certain sense, but the truth is the publisher defendants’ focus on their own understanding of how the publishing business used to work has kept them from evolving and understanding how the publishing business works now, and how it may work for at least a few years in the future.

 

4. The U.S. book publishing and bookselling business has been undergoing enormous change and disruption for decades, but the book trades are not a public utility. It is not the role of government or the courts to prop up the industry or any of its players. It would be especially inappropriate for the government or the courts to manage the aforementioned change and disruption so as to punish innovators, provide life support for second- and third-movers or protect industry players whose demise may be imminent due to their lack of innovation or financial discipline. The number of independent booksellers has been in steady decline for decades and will almost definitely continue to decline for the next several years, regardless of the DOJ action. Over the 20-plus years since I owned an independent bookstore and was a member of the American Booksellers Association in the 1980s, there have been many bogeymen blamed for the demise of independent brick-and-mortar bookselling, including of course Barnes & Noble itself. Like Borders before it, Barnes & Noble may well go out of business in the next few years because of poor management of real estate costs and its late, second-mover entry into the two major growth markets for bookselling in the past 15 years, online bookselling and ebooks.  But the idea that the DOJ should be in the business of propping up Barnes & Noble by reframing the remedies in this case is as odious as it would be if we were to substitute the name of WalMart in the equation, particularly after Barnes & Noble has played as great — and some would say as “predatory” — a role as any other company in hastening the demise of independent retail brick-and-mortar bookstores over the past few decades. Nor should DOJ prop up independent booksellers, as much as we may lament their demise. Sadly, the focus on the various bogeymen blamed for these developments, and booksellers’ ideological opposition to the Amazons and others, has too often taken those booksellers’ focus away from the kinds of innovation and entrepreneurial thinking that have saved some bookstores and might, if in greater evidence, have saved far more. Nor is it true that even a single independent bookstore would be saved were the DOJ or the court to reframe its proposed remedies so as to save Barnes & Noble or to soften the impact for the defendant publishers.

 

5. The widely promulgated notion that the agency model has created a lush garden of innovation in the ebook business is patently untrue. The initial Barnes & Noble Nook was widely seen as a second-mover product that was very nearly dead on arrival when it was launched several months before the advent of the agency model. It began to gain traction only when the agency model guaranteed Barnes & Noble a 30% gross margin and freed it of any need to compete with Kindle Store pricing. By Barnes & Noble’s own public admission, the Nook might well have failed in free-market competition if it had not been for the agency model conspiracy. The primary Nook “innovation” advanced to date is the relatively minor enhancement of a front-lit glowing screen, and other elements of the Nook infrastructure such as the Pub-it authorship platform are barely distinguishable from previously existing elements of the Kindle infrastructure. Much and perhaps most ebook reading on the iPad and iPhone occurs in the Kindle environment, and Apple’s claim that the iPad and its search-unfriendly, thinly populated iBookstore are successful innovations is a fantasy: the primary success of the iBookstore has been that it made the agency model price-fixing scheme possible in the minds of the defendant publishers.

 

6. Many of the arguments against the DOJ’s action and proposed remedies are based on intense fear and loathing of Amazon, none of which is surprising in an industry which is both change-averse and especially well-connected to the chattering classes in the national news media. It is absolutely appropriate for the DOJ and other government agencies to continue to scrutinize Amazon’s behavior as a corporate taxpayer, as a direct or indirect corporate employer, as a gatherer of customers’ private information, or as a competitor in the national and global business marketplace. DOJ may well be justified in taking future action on one or more of these issues, but there is no basis for penalizing Amazon now because it is big, because it is an aggressive innovator whose success is based on disrupting existing business models, because it has shown a creative capacity to reduce consumer prices while still paying full wholesale prices itself, or because smart disintermediation allows it to pay an author a higher royalty for a $5 ebook sale than a traditional publisher would pay an author for a $25 hardcover sale. If at some point in the future Amazon uses its growing marketplace clout to squeeze authors or publishers, for instance, DOJ should not hesitate to haul the company into court, but such behavior cannot be presupposed, and indeed it would require such a radical change in Amazon’s business model that it would be immediately obvious to all.

 

7. Although Barnes & Noble attorney David Boies indulges windy, sweeping prose on behalf of “the national economy and culture, the future of copyrighted expression and bookselling in general,” he does not provide any evidence or argument that cultural and business trends that are already well underway would be reversed if the DOJ action were not taken. The bottom line in Boies’ argument is the bottom line for Barnes & Noble, a failing company that is choking to death on its own expensive real estate leases and its lack of innovation during the decade when its former primary position in the U.S. retail book business was overtaken by a much more innovative upstart competitor. In service of that bottom line, Boies wants DOJ to frame its actions so as to prop up and protect Barnes & Noble so that, for as long as it is able to hang on, it can wring as much profit as possible from its second-mover status in the ebook marketplace. But the bottom line for consumers should take precedence over Boies’ desire to keep Barnes & Noble on life support. Consumers who purchase and read ebooks have lost tens of millions of dollars because the defendants conspired to raise the prices of bestselling ebook new releases. The defendants’ behavior described in the court documents has been reckless, avaricious, and destructive — perhaps even to “the national economy and culture, the future of copyrighted expression and bookselling in general” — and the DOJ should not rule out the possibility of criminal prosecutions if facts warrant as this action proceeds. Finally, it is somewhat surprising that we must take pains to correct some of the utterly inaccurate notions with which attorney Boies has burdened the record in this case. Among the country lawyer’s tricks with which Boies has attempted to dazzle us are his claims that the American public opposes the DOJ action because Manhattan Senator Charles Schumer opposes it, or that authors oppose the action because Boies has offered up a quotation from Scott Turow, president of the notoriously litigious Author’s Guild, which has been on record in the past as opposed to public library book borrowing.

 

8. The proposal by some that fairness could be achieved via a decision to allow publishers to mandate uniform retail prices would be catastrophic for readers. Such a mandatory price-setting scheme would reward the colluders and would do more to maintain the outmoded status quo in the publishing world than other step that has been proposed. Worst of all, of course, it would allow the defendants to continue to steal tens of millions of dollars each year from the pockets of consumers.

 

9. Instead of innovating to become leaner, faster, and more profitable in the new world of publishing, the defendants decided to try to stop time by breaking the law. Faced with the fears that motivated the agency model conspiracy, publishers might have taken a different, more innovative path. They could even have followed such a path collectively without fear of violating anti-trust laws. When Amazon launched its new, disruptive ebook business model, beginning ever so slowly in November of 2007, publishers might have reimagined and restructured the book business with new, innovative, more efficient, and profitable roles for themselves. They might have created their own online retail outlets to offer their titles in Kindle-compatible ebook form. They might have worked with brick-and-mortar booksellers to bundle ebook and digital formats at handy little kiosks in every bookstore. They might have turned ebooks into the 21st century reincarnation of Literary Guild and the Book-of-the-Month Club, those 20th century behemoths that managed to sell millions of hardcover books for 99 cents each without creating any significant scare over the erosion of “the value of the book.” They might have tried to strip away the excess weight of unsustainable corporate costs and their reckless addiction to gamble huge advances for bestsellers, to rework their economics at new, competitive price points. They might have said, “We’re no longer going to pay for intermediaries that add no value.” They might even have pursued one of the collective strategies that they considered and rejected back in 2009, called Project Z or Bookish, to create a joint venture that would establish a new ecommerce platform to sell ebooks wholesale to retailers, or retail to the ebook-buying public.

 

10. Although neither Amazon nor Barnes & Noble are full parties in this case, the DOJ and the court should impose one burden on both companies (and on defendant Apple Inc. and perhaps other ebook retailers) as part of the remedies associated with the actual and punitive restitution that defendants should be forced to pay to consumers. Specifically, the ebook retailers should be required to provide to all of their customers a detailed record of all ebooks that they ordered during the full period of the agency model from April 1, 2010 until the present date or beyond, in order for customers to qualify for the restitution payments due them.

I am grateful to the DOJ and to the court and all parties for your consideration of these matters, and I hope that all concerned will take these views into account in this case.

Sincerely,

Stephen Windwalker

Info Dumps, AYKB, and Other Author Intrusions

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This post, by Jodie Renner, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

When you’re revising your novel, be on the lookout for any obvious blocks of information or mini-lectures that you may have inadvertently wedged into the story here and there.

Author intrusions and info dumps come in various shapes and sizes, but whatever their form, they can be perceived as an obvious and clumsy attempt by the author to quickly impart some facts, clarifications, or personal opinions directly to the reader. It might even be considered lazy—it’s much easier to just insert a bunch of backstory in about a character in one lump than to find ways to artfully weave in that information through dialogue and thoughts, etc. But do we really need all that information on the character, anyway? Definitely not at the risk of turning off your reader, who’s just been wrenched out of the story to be filled in on details, opinions, or background info.

Or, say you’re really riled up about an issue that you feel people need to pay attention to. Maybe you want people to care about the environment more. Or stop eating so much junk food and exercise more. Or maybe you’re just passionate about something like gardening or Ancient Greece or figure skating or poodles or scuba diving. Should you use your fiction to convert others to your causes or enlighten people about your pet topics? If you do, proceed with caution! People read fiction for entertainment—to escape their boring or stressful life and get immersed in a fascinating story with great characters doing exciting things. If you really want to stop cruelty to animals or raise awareness about anorexia or talk about sailing or World War II history or French cuisine, make sure the info comes out in small doses, and in a natural way through a character who is passionate about that topic—and that it actually works for the plot and is believable for that particular character.

Some common types of author intrusions include:

Interrupting the story to explain facts or details at length to your readers

Readers like to stay immersed in the story, not be pulled out of it to be given a lengthy explanation of something as an aside by the author. This can include long, detailed explanations of a specific type of gun, for example, or stopping the story to describe in detail a castle or a family lineage or some historical facts or the customs of a different country or epoch. Yes, do your research, for sure. But pick and choose what you actually share with your readers, and blend the info in in a natural way, through dialogue, introspection and short expository (explaining) passages, preferably filtered through the viewpoint of the POV character.

Soap-boxing about an issue or cause

Maybe you’d like to increase consciousness about worthy topics such as the plight of whales or the lack of clean water worldwide, or unfair treatment of minorities, or lack of green spaces. You say, people really need to be made aware of the situation—we all need to sit up and take notice and do something about it! That’s true, but you could always write letters to the editor, or newspaper or magazine articles on the issue, or even blog posts. Or give talks at the library or to local groups. Or insert allusions to it here and there in your novel, as long as you have a character who is passionate about that issue and knowledgeable. It can work in small doses, as long as you don’t go on so long about it that it comes across as preaching. And it needs to fit naturally in the scene, with the character’s personality, politics and thoughts.

Giving the readers a history lesson or a lecture on a topic

Say you’re passionate about Aztecs and Aztec ruins and want to tell the world about this fascinating subject, so you decide to write a Raiders of the Lost Ark type of adventure story. You have a main character who’s an archaeologist, and because you can’t resist sharing your knowledge, you have this character giving impromptu detailed lectures on Aztec history to anyone who will listen. Not a good idea. Just drop in a few tantalizing tidbits here and there to pique your readers’ interest. If you get them curious enough, they can easily google Aztecs and find out a lot more on them. You could even add some info at the end of the story somehow, as an Afterword or Glossary or related links or whatever.

Dumping in a pile of backstory about a character

While it is a good idea to create background information on all of your main characters for yourself, be sure to avoid copying and pasting it into your story in blocks, like a mini-biography or a resume. I’ve edited novels where a new character comes onto the scene and the writer feels compelled to immediately write several paragraphs or even pages of background on that character, to introduce him or her to the readers. The problem with that is that the plot has just come to a skidding halt while you fill us in on this person. Secondly, why would we even care about all those little details when that character has just come onstage? Wait until we warm up to them a bit, then provide any pertinent info little by little as we go along.

For example:

Jessica heard her cell phone ringing. “Excuse me.” She grabbed it from her purse and flipped it open. It was her husband Richard.

Richard, who was 42, was an engineer for the city. He and Jessica had met while both college freshmen. Jessica was in Nursing and Richard was in Engineering, and they’d met at a dance arranged by the two faculties. They dated through college and married the year after they graduated. By then, Jessica was a nurse and Richard was an engineer. They waited a few years before starting a family…. yadda yadda.

 “Hi, Richard,” Jessica said into the phone. “What’s up?”

Does the reader need to know all that backstory? Probably not. Certainly not all at once, in the second between the ringing of Jessica’s phone and when she answers it. Any of it that you feel is necessary can be introduced gradually through dialogue, thoughts, and short exposition. Jessica can be thinking about her college days or chatting with a sister or friend, or Richard can be talking to a colleague or golf partner, or Jessica and Richard can be talking to each other. But still, make sure the info fits naturally and organically into the conversation, and doesn’t look like it’s been planted there by the author to get the info across to the readers. Which brings us to our last subtopic:

Info dumps disguised as dialogue: AYKB – “As you know, Bob…”

This is where the author has one person telling another a bunch of stuff they both know, just to impart that information to the reader. Here’s an exaggerated example, to illustrate:

 Ralph said to his brother, “As you know, Bob, our parents were both killed in a car crash when we were young, and we were raised by our grandparents.”

Readers today are too sophisticated to go for this type of heavy-handed information-sharing, and if you do it too often, it’s sure to lose you respect and credibility.

Or it can seem off even when it’s more subtle, as when one homicide detective says to another, “Serial killers have usually been abused as children, and their victims often have similarities.”

You get the idea. 

How about you? Just for fun, can you make up an obvious, AYKB dialogue for us? Use the comment boxes below and go for it!

Copyright © Jodie Renner, June 2012

Jodie Renner is a freelance fiction editor, specializing in thrillers, mysteries and other crime fiction. For more info on Jodie’s editing services, please visit her website.

25 Ways To Fight Your Story's Mushy Middle

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This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site.

For me, the middle is the hardest part of writing. It’s easy to get the stallions moving in the beginning — a stun gun up their asses gets them stampeding right quick. I don’t have much of a problem with endings, either; you get to a certain point and the horses are worked up into a mighty lather and run wildly and ineluctably toward the cliff’s edge.

[Publetariat Editor’s note: strong language after the jump]

But the middle, man, the motherfucking middle. It’s like being lost in a fog, wandering the wasteland tracts. And I can’t be the only person with this problem: I’ve read far too many books that seem to lose all steam in the middle. Narrative boots stuck in sucking mud.

Seems like it’s time for another “list of 25″ to the rescue, then.

Hiyaa! Giddyup, you sumbitches! BZZT.

1. The Solomonic Split Of The Second Act

Fuck the three-act structure right in its crusty corn-cave. See, right there’s your problem — first act is small, third act is small, and the second act is the size of those two combined. Go for a four-act structure, instead. Take the second act and chop it clean in half. Whack. Each act is its own entity — though it connects to the rest and still has its own rise and fall. Allow each its own shape, its own distinct feel. And don’t forget that when one act moves to another it is a time of transformation and escalation.

2. Fake A Climax

Hey, when you fake an orgasm, you gotta commit. You can’t just do a few eye-rolls and go “oooh, ahh, mmm, yes,” and then sit up and flip on CSPAN. You’ve got to sell it. Make ‘em think it’s the real deal. Scream so loud the dog starts howling. Break a lamp with a flailing limb. Release the fluids. And that’s what you gotta do in the middle of your story. The “false climax” is a powerful trick — you make it seem like things are coming to a head, that the pot is boiling over, that the fluid-release cannot be contained. You want the audience to be all like, “Whoa, this feels like the end but I’ve still got 200 pages left in the book. SHIT JUST GOT REAL.” (Of course, do make sure the actual climax is even bigger, yes?)

3. Fewer Curves, More Angles

The shape of a story — especially the shape of a story’s middle — is a lot of soft rises and doughy plateaus and zoftig falls. Each hill giving way to a bigger knoll. But sometimes, a story needs fewer hills and more mountains. Angles instead of curves. Fangs instead of molars. Think of inserting a few jagged peaks and dangerous ditches — take the story and the characters on a harder journey. Let things change swiftly, accelerate the plot, go left, feint right, don’t let the audience feel complacent and comfortable. Rough ground can be a good thing in the middle of a story. Some stories need more turbulence.

4. Opening Presents On Christmas Eve

When I was a kid, Christmas Eve was the most interminable time because, y’know, Christmas morning is everything. All else is chaff and dust and ash in your greedy little mouth. If setting fire to the tree would make Santa come earlier, shit, you’d do it. So, what do some parents do? They let a child open one gift on Christmas Eve. Adopt this strategy as a storyteller. All this time you’re introducing mysteries and conflicts and character arcs that you promise will be resolved by the conclusion of the story. Take one, conclude it early. Give the audience some payoff. (I’d argue if Lost gave viewers a few early Christmas presents the show wouldn’t have dragged its itchy doggy ass across the carpet for the middle seasons.)

5. Introduce A Character

Sometimes, a story needs a bit of new blood in the form of a new character — someone interesting. Not, y’know, “Dave the Constipated Cab Driver,” or “Paula the Saggy-Boobed Waitress,” but rather characters with an arc, characters who will have an impact on the story. You don’t need to replace your protagonist (and probably shouldn’t), but a new strong supporting character may grant the story new energy.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 20 more ideas for fixing your mushy middle, on terribleminds.

Dare to be an Indie Author?

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This post, by Laxmi Hariharan, originally appeared on The UK Huffington Post. It includes a handy quiz you can use to figure out if you’re built for the indie author life.

I am just back from The Literary Consultancy’s (TLC) http://www.literaryconsultancy.co.uk/ revolutionary Writing in a Digital Age conference. Organised by the inimitable Rebecca Swift–the speakers included leading authors and industry figures such as @harikunzru @lindasgrant, @nicolamorgan, @zubaanbooks (Urvashi Butalia), @simontrewin, @caroleagent (Carole Blake), @gavinjamesbower, @saqibooks (Rukhsana Yasmin), @karolinasutton and many more–#TLC12 brought together the traditional and the Indie on the same stage, a first of firsts.

The person who stood out was Rob Kroese, author of the self published, bestselling, humorous, apocalyptic novel Mercury Falls and its sequel, Mercury Rises. He is the creator of Mercury (the title character in Mercury Falls)–an acerbic, anti-establishment angel who is well-meaning but not particularly well-behaved. Rob @robkroese is funny, genuine and as one of my fellow delegates commented, "he is one of us". He likens the league of published authors to an elite night club, with gatekeepers, who decide who gets in and who does not. It struck a chord with me, and I suspect with many of the other ‘waiting to be discovered’ wannabes.

One of the most hotly discussed topics was whether to self publish or not? If Indie movies are accepted, why not Indie books? So taking a cue from Rob’s talk (thanks Rob!) I have put together my own quiz, to help you find out. Here are the questions

1. Do you want to be discovered or somewhere along the way have you discovered yourself?

2. Do you write to be published or do you write to be read?

3. Are you an entrepreneur, at heart? Do you normally jump in and think of the consequences later. Are you pragmatic about failure–enough to pick yourself up and move on swiftly to the next?

4.Do you like to experiment, and cannot resist a challenge? Do you thrive under pressure, and when the odds are stacked against you?

 

Read the rest of the post on The UK Huffington Post.

Writernese

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This post, by Tina Pinson, originally appeared on her Write Where I Want To Be blog on 6/7/12.

You have mastered the English language, well, sort of… and you are fluent in three different languages, like me… okay not really. I have a hard enough time with English as a first language. Took four years of German and one of Turkish and remember barely enough to get by.

Then, just when I thought school was over, I had to learn Writernese. What is that you may ask? Simply put… it the language of writers. Writerspeak.

Writernese.

And if you’re a writer, you know that writerspeak is often times hard to grasp. Kind of like cyberspeak. IMHO BTW LOL

I thought it would be prudent to take a look at Writernese and see if we can decipher some the meanings behind the words and acronyms to help us speak the language.

Common Writernese Terms and Acronyms. Trying to understand these few aspects of Writernese could be a brief exercise in madness, but it’s a start.

EC: External Conflict (oppositions or physical threats to heroine or hero reaching their goals–i.e.: villain, journey, opponent)

IC: Internal Conflict (character’s emotional struggles and growth)

GMC: Goals, Motivation, Conflict

Goals– your character has a goal that he or she needs to reach.
Motivation– what sends them out to accomplish the goal?
Conflict — all the trials and thorns thrown in the path of your character to keep him/her from reaching goal. (when established, these set up the premise of a book, the overriding theme)

Climax — a moment of great intensity that usually brings events to a head and moving toward the conclusion.

Foreshadowing — adding hints and important information earlier on in the story that tip the reader off to what may come.

Resolution — can be done on varying levels, like resolving problems in the story. Or resolving the main conflict.

Genre — the kind of story being written; Gothic, Mystery, Romance, Inspirational, Sci Fi, Women’s Fiction, Speculative… etc.

HEA: Happily Ever After (the resolution/ type of ending expected in a Romance novel) Think Fairy Tales. Hello, Prince Charming.

H/H: Hero and Heroine
Protagonist — the main character
Antagonist — opposition to protagonist… enemy

MS: Manuscript

WIP: work in progress. Unfinished Manuscript

POV: Point Of View — What a character can see or hear. (If it’s dark he or she probably can’t tell you someone’s eye color. If it’s behind them they can’t give detail.)

1st person POV — Spoken and told by one character in their viewpoint alone throughout the story. Uses I to lead sentences and so forth.

3rd person POV — Storytelling told using third person pronouns like he/she. This POV can be Limited or Omniscient.

Limited — The writer sticks closely to one character’s feelings, thoughts and viewpoint, while other characters are added externally.

Omniscient — The storyteller knows all the views and can bring in several character’s point of views for the story. POV purists prefer that one POV is used in one scene to avoid head hopping.

 

Read the rest of the post —and maybe even bookmark it for future reference— on Write Where I Want To Be.

Indie Authors Can Succeed: What Terri Did And How You Can Do It, Too – Part 1

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This post, by Novel Publicity President Emlyn Chand and author Terri Giuliano Long, originally appeared on Novel Publicity on 8/24/11.

What does it take to be successful as an author? How can one go from simply dreaming a dream to living its reality? Is there any hope for all of the starving wordsmiths of the world?

Why, yes. There most assuredly is.
 
Terri Giuliano Long: A Case Study

To prove this point to all of the starry-eyed optimists and cynical nay-sayers, allow me to present a case study. It’s no secret that Novel Publicity has been working with literary fiction author Terri Giuliano Long almost since we opened our web portal to business back in March 2011.

Terri published her first novel, In Leah’s Wake, in October 2010. She put in a lot of hard work and hard-earned cash to promote it, and by July 26th, 2011, she had sold her 1,000th copy. A milestone few authors ever reach, indie or not.

1,000 copies—that’s really exciting. But what’s even more exciting is what happened next. It took nine months to sell those 1,000 copies, and only another twenty-nine days to sell 1,000 more. Now Terri’s sales are above 100 per day and show no signs of sinking. Is it fair to say she’s made it?

I think so.

Now that we’ve laid the framework to show that, yes, an indie author can achieve at least a modicum of commercial success, let’s move forward and answer the more pertinent question and get to the real reason you’re reading this blog post anyway: how did she do it?

Perhaps more accurately phrased as: how can you do it?

Let’s explore this question chronologically. Along the way, we’ll discuss what Terri did that was right-on and what she could have done better to give you the chance to learn from both her mistakes and her triumphs.
Write the best book you can.

Not the best book in the entire history of humanity. Just the best one you can possibly write. Give it the time to take root and really grow. Don’t rush to meet a deadline. Don’t try to conform to what’s popular or what somebody else expects. Respect your artistic vision and respect the English language. That’s step one.

What Terri did…

I wrote the first draft as my graduate thesis – the entire first draft in three months. It was terrible, of course – awful writing, a lot of summary, lacking story development. I then spent about four years – while teaching and doing other writing- revising. I started from scratch, meaning I didn’t cut and paste; I started from a blank page and retyped the entire manuscript. This is important because it helps you see the novel with new eyes. I replaced summary with scene, created new scenes, developed characters. There is a lot of drug-related information in the novel. To get it right, I had to research. I also researched protocol on runaway teens, and I looked up information on construction practices, economics and so on. I then looked at thematic issues – this is a story about community and connection. Once I realized this, I worked to develop and pull the themes forward. I always read my work aloud, so tend to edit for style (vocabulary, syntax, etc.) as I write; while I did polish, I didn’t feel a need to style-edit the entire novel.

Package the book in a way that will appeal to readers.

This means, for the love of all that is holy, please PLEASE hire a professional editor. Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, readers will notice if your formatting or your punctuation is off. You can’t cut corners if you want to be taken seriously. And this goes beyond the editing.

You also need to present an attractive exterior—I’m talking about your book cover. Saying this goes against that cliché moral code of not judging a book by its cover, but people can and will judge your beloved novel in this way. Don’t give anyone the chance to discount your book for such a superficial reason. Cover your bases.

What Terri did…

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes four more strategies, on Novel Publicity. Also see Part 2, on the same site.

A Dozen Do's and Don'ts on Prepping Your Novel for ePublishing

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This post, by K.A. Hitchens, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog on 5/29/12 and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

Well, as you all know, I originally promised to blog, two weeks ago, about the ISBN monopoly controlled by initially the ISBN.org and then, here in the US, Bowker.  However, that post was delayed by an unforeseen “cat-astophe,” when The Amazing Zep (“Zeppelin,” properly known as Suncoon Tucson), a 7-month old Maine Coon kitten, decided he could fly off the top of our 7’ cat condo.  Obviously, I’ve allowed him to watch entirely too many Marvel Comics movies. 

He leapt from the top of the Condo, aiming at a nearby artwork niche, and the results were, shall we say, not good; he nearly came to be known as Hindenburg.  Half a house-payment and 5 exhausting days later of caring for him 24/7, he’s fine, the little monster, but I apologize for missing the blog.  His nefarious face is shown here, so all will know the miscreant.  (And, yes, because most people look at kitten pics and go, “awwwwwwwwwwwwww…;” I’m shamelessly exploiting your weakness for kittens.)

But yesterday, Editor Extraordinaire Jodie Renner dropped me a line, and asked me if I happened to have a list, or a link to a list, of tips for preparing your Word document for e-publishing, whether you’re going to use an eBookformatting company like mine, or DIY.  She suggested it would make a good blog post—and I’d do anything to oblige her.  So today’s topic is What NOT to do in your Word document, either to keep costs down, or to make it easier for yourself/your formatter, to create your book in a gorgeous style.

 

1.  Everybody already knows #1; use Word’s built-in styles whenever possible.  Use them to automatically indent your paragraphs; don’t use the tab key or the space-bar (5 times or however many).  Now, an experienced formatting won’t have difficulty with this.  But if you’re using someone new, or doing it yourself, this will cause you problems.  Moreover, if you use Word’s built-in styles for all your regular narrative paragraphs, you shan’t have a problem, when you upload to the  KDP, with inconsistent paragraph styling—which you will have if you “style” every paragraph differently, not deliberately, but through misadventure, by not knowing and understanding Word’s styles. 

If you don’t have a basic understanding of how these work (and how to see how they are working), take a few minutes and watch this video (not from my company, but we think it’s nice and clear enough that we host it in our Knowledgebase) on our Knowledgebase (you can enlarge it to full-screen for easy of viewing): http://booknookbiz.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/182863-video-on-word-styles . Our Tutorials section also has a video on the TOC and how to use headings (just click the “Tutorials and Videos” breadcrumb to take you to that section, or click “Home” above the article header to rummage around to your heart’s content.

 

2.  Speaking of…Header styles.  Very few people seem to know about or use what used to be called the “Document Map” in word.  If you use “Header Styles” to create your chapter headers, you’ll be able to easily navigate through your document by simply enabling the “Navigation Pane” on the left-hand side  (In Word 2007-2010, “View—> Click “Navigation Pane”).  If you’ve used header styles for every chapter head—lo!  Right there in the Navigation Pane, you’ll be able to see (and jump to instantly) the beginning of every single chapter.  An even bigger “freebie” side effect of doing this—you can auto-generate your Table of Contents. 

This is incredibly handy for those of you determined to “DIY.”  For the video on how to do this, please see our second Knowledgebase video: http://booknookbiz.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/182864-video-on-headings-and-toc-in-word . If you don’t like the LOOK of the header styles that are available to you, you can change that with a simple click—but that’s generally covered in the first video, so by the time you get to the second video, you should already know how to fix that.  This can also save you some ducats at the formatters, depending upon how their pricing lists are structured.

 

3.  Lists.  Ironically, for either price-savings or saving yourself DIY brain-damage, don’t use numbered or bulleted lists, IF they are indented.  If you must have a bulleted or numbered list (yes—like the one I’m using here, hence the irony), and you’re going to publish to Amazon, it’s a giant pain.  If you can live with the bulleted or numbered list at the left-margin, it will work fine.  However, if you are attempting to indent them, what will happen is that the wrap-indents will NOT align perfectly. This is due to the ability of the Kindle e-reader (of all kinds, excluding the Fire, which can do this quite nicely) to rescale fonts. 

The “wrap,” inside the secret-sauce code of a kindle book, is set in (either) a percentage (of the available screensize) or “ems” which are relative to the font, unlike text measurements—which are absolute.  What this means is that your text wrap will, on an indented, bulleted or numbered item, look perfect at one font size—but  will creep, ever so slightly, left-or right, as the font-size changes, relative to the selected font-size, if that makes any sense.  To wit:  if you increase the fontsize, you increase the amount of the second-line “indent” in the wrap.  However, the first line remains as it was set up (don’t ask), so your second line creeps left or right.  If this doesn’t faze you, then rock on.  If you have bulleted lists, and want them to align as perfectly as possible—well, you know where to find us.  ;-).  Making them perfect can’t be done in Word.

 

4. Return-itis.  This one may seem obvious, but, I kid thee not, we get at least one manuscript a week in that is actually typed with a “return” keyed at the end of each LINE.  Not paragraph, but LINE.  Seriously; we have authors who don’t understand that Word wraps automatically, nor how to set line-spacing, so in order to make their manuscript “submission-ready,” they type to the right margin, and hit “enter” twice.  Please:  for your sanity and mine, don’t do that.

 

5. Don’t create a dedicated STYLE to italicize or bold your text.  Simply highlight the text you want to italicize, and use the “I” button at the top of the ribbon/menu.  Same for Bold.  If you create styles, but also use the buttons, you can create inconsistencies in your work, and if you’re not a Styles-Genius, it can get confusing.

 

6. Fonts!  If you ever read what I write here, you know that you have to license any copyrighted fonts you use.  That’s the first thing; the second thing, however, is equally important.  If you use fonts in your book, to set apart various types of content—for example, the interior FP thoughts of your killer—be aware of the following:  the Kindle e-ink devices, as well as the majority of all e-ink devices, like the Nook e-ink readers and the Kobos—do not support more than a single font.  In the Kindle legacy devices—still the most widely-used of all reading devices, of any brand—they have a single font, called “Caecilia,” which is a Times New Roman clone. 

Therefore, although you can license and embed fonts that will work spiffily in ePUB readers and in the Kindle Fire, be aware that firstly, that second font, despite your wishes, won’t show up on the Kindle legacy devices and second, if you’re trying to do this from Word on a DIY basis, it won’t work.  Despite your best efforts, as far as I know, if you endeavor to upload a Word file with multiple fonts in it, you will not obtain the desired result; font embedding has to be done from within HTML or XHTML (HTML you used to be married to) to work correctly.  On a Kindle you can use a second font—a Courier monospaced font—if absolutely necessary, but it doesn’t reflow like the TNR font, and it’s not very attractive.  You should, if you are going to DIY, consider using a fleuron or some other graphic device, to set that “other font” or inner thoughts, or whatever it is, apart from the rest of your regular narrative flow.

 

7. Poetry, song lyrics, and other miscellaneous material that is indented and somewhat “columnar.”  For ease of formatting, both for yourself and any formatting company, don’t use “enter” at the end of the line; use a line break, which is SHIFT+ENTER, as opposed to the usual “enter.”  Don’t use this coding pair to create a new paragraph, but if you intend to display poetry or song lyrics, this is the combo to use at the end of each “line.”  At the end of each STANZA, however, you would use the usual “enter” key, twice, as you would for a scene break.  (Yes—there are better ways to do this, using Word’s built-in Styles, but this will work “okay” for both DIY and for any formatter worth his/her salt.)

 

8. Spelling.  Yes, I know—how obvious is this? But you would be shocked at the huge number of manuscripts we get in here that are chock-full of spelling mistakes.  I think that authors invent character names and places, which Word, naturally highlights with the ubiquitous red line; and they get so accustomed to seeing that, they ignore the REAL errors.  If you have invented names, places, etc., in your ms, tell your spellcheck to “Ignore” those, so that you stop being “spellcheck blind.”  Correcting spelling errors that your readers find, post-production, is embarrassing for you; and if you’ve used a formatter, it’s expensive, as editing in HTML isn’t like editing in Word.

 

9. Hyphenation and Track Changes:  (A Twofer!). First, if you’ve used hyphenation throughout the document, for line endings (optional hyphens), you should do a search and replace, and remove all optional hyphens.  If you don’t, they can show up as regular, non-optional hyphens in the finished eBook product, which you obviously don’t want.  Use Find > Advanced Find > More > Special > Optional Hyphen, and replace with nothing.  As far as Track Changes goes, ensure you’ve “accepted all changes” in your document.  If you do not, the edits that are now invisible to your eyes—all your additions, deletions, etc.– will show up in your ebook, just as if they were typed in the text.  I can’t emphasize enough the importance of these two “pre-flight” items.   

 

10.  Explicitly marking your scene breaks.  If you are going to use a formatting service, ensure that you explicitly mark your scene breaks.  If you haven’t been a religiously neat typist, and occasionally have extra “enters” between paragraphs, a formatter can’t infer when you want a scene break used (a flush left paragraph with vertical whitespace above it) and when you do not.  If, like some authors, you have multiple types of scenebreaks—one that uses a flush-left, and one that doesn’t, due to whether or not it’s simply a passage of time, or a POV shift—then be sure you mark them differently and explicitly. 

EBook formatters don’t read your book and can’t read your mind, so be sure to tell them what you want.  At Booknook, we have our clients use the old convention of *** to indicate any scene break where they desire the visual cue of a flush-left paragraph with vertical whitespace above.  Alternatively, of course, you can use a graphical fleuron—but be aware that using fleurons requires extra coding for use in Kindle, as the e-ink devices will try to grossly enlarge them (that’s the default Kindle behavior.)  If you use a formatter, the cost will be higher; if you try to do it yourself from Word, the results, on the actual e-ink Kindles, may not be what you expect.

 

11.  Broken Paragraphs:  If you’ve used any form of conversion software, (please see Tip #12, below), or perhaps typed the file on different computers, over a long stretch of time, make sure you diligently scan your document for broken pararagraphs.  If you’ve converted it from any other format, or had it scanned & OCR’d, the incidence of broken paragraphs will be quite high.  To find broken paragraphs, turn on your Pilcrow icon (if you don’t know what this is, please see my blogpost here called “Pilcrow A Go Go,” from last October), and scan the right-hand-margin. 

If you see a Pilcrow mark hanging out in the right-hand margin, in the middle of what should be a paragraph, that’s a broken paragraph, and that’s the way it will convert in an eBook—as two separate paragraphs, broken right where the Pilcrow is sitting.  If you see one sitting there, highlight it and delete it, and fix any formatting around it (usually, a space is needed before the ensuing word).  For additional information on the “end of line” pilcrow problem, please see my post on “Pilcrow No-No’s, Part II,” from last November, which addresses this exact problem.

 

12.  Don’t Convert!  Okay.  Here’s a tricky one.  This will sound contrary to everything you’ve read, on the KDP forums, etc.:  but don’t convert from Mystery Format A into Word.  If you have a PDF of the interior of your print book, just find a competent eBook Formatting company and hand it to them.  If you have a Wordstar File from the dawn of time, hand THAT to them.  WordPerfect?  Pretty much the same (although later Wordperfect files convert very nicely, but some don’t, and you end up with a manuscript full of “@” signs where you should see left-hand-quotes, and a host of other glitches). 

We get roughly 2-4 manuscripts a week in from prospective clients that know that we have a higher charge for PDF than for Word (as do all formatters that are serious), and they’re all the result of either using Calibre, or some online “You can convert your PDF file to Word, Easy/Free/Cheap!” website.  Here’s the actual truth:  It does NOT work, not at all.  What comes out looks, on the surface, like a pretty good Word file; but lurking beneath what your eyes can see is a disaster waiting for a place to happen. 

Believe it or not, it’s cheaper, in the long run, if you simply hand a PDF file to a converter, who, quite frankly, will scan it, OCR it, and proof it, just to get the same starting point as  a Word file—because the results from that are 100x better than what you’d get by using Adobe Acrobat X Pro and attempting to export the file as a Word file.  If you have an endless amount of time, and knowledge of HTML, you can use the “auto-convert” method; and spend days or weeks cleaning up the ensuing HTML.  But if you hand a file like that to a converter, like us, they’ll charge you for all those man-hours.  Honestly, the scan option is probably cheaper.

 

And there you go.  An even dozen items for you to use in creating and “pre-flight checking” your book for e-formatting.  We have other frequently asked questions, along with the two videos I already pointed you to, in our Knowledgebase, which you may find by clicking here.  Not many are actually about formatting, but we do have some nice links about marketing, Retailers, and a few hints and tips on Social Media.

(And yes, for those of you who’ve emailed, tweeted, and asked:  yes, it’s true.  We have Jackie Collins in the house; you should expect to see “Chances,” her first Lucky Santangelo novel, in eBookstores around the end of the first week of June!)

– Hitch

 

K. A. Hitchens is the owner of Booknook.biz, an eBook formatting and production company, specializing in producing affordable and professional conversions for every author–from first-timers to NY Times Bestsellers.  You can follow us at Twitter (@BooknookBiz), Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Booknookbiz ), Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/booknookbiz/) or  LinkedIn (just search for us).

 

 

My Foray Into Making Audiobooks

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This post, by Michael Hicks, originally appeared on his site on 10/11/12.

I’ve been asked by a number of readers if my books were ever going to be available as audiobooks. The short answer is “yes”. Getting there, though, has been an interesting journey so far!

While my book sales have freed me from my former day job (I hope permanently!), I’m still not at the point where I feel I can afford to pay a pro to do the voiceovers. Maybe someday I’ll be able to hire James Earl Jones, but I suspect that’s not going to be any time real soon!

And, like many things (other than electrical and plumbing stuff, which I never mess with!), I’m sort of a do-it-yourselfer. Partly because I’m cheap, but mainly because doing something myself is always a great learning process. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Do the thing, and you will have the power…as long as it doesn’t involve electricity, plumbing, or power tools.”

Being a gadget addict, I was initially focused on the gear. It’s always about the gear, right? At least until you know better. Anyway, I had a Blue Snowball microphone I’d gotten a while back, and I made a couple of test reads of passages from IN HER NAME: EMPIRE, which I’ll be offering as a free audiobook when it’s done, here in my junk-room-turned-office.

Okay, I’m not an acoustic genius, but I could tell the audio quality in this room sucked. So, I looked around a bit for potential solutions. I didn’t want to build a sound booth, so I settled on the Porta-Booth Pro, which is also something I can take with us when we go out in the RV (actually, the latter is the main reason I got it).

I set the thing up in my closet upstairs, plugged my Snowball into my MacBook Air, brought up EMPIRE in the Kindle app of my iPad (yes, yes, I’m a cheap gadget freak – go figure!), and off we went with a chunk of chapter 1.

That’s when I discovered what’s REALLY important in a story told through audio: HOW it’s told. How you present it to the audience. The first take sucked. I was just reading in a monotone, same cadence throughout. I could’ve been reading the phone book, and it would’ve been just as interesting (or not).


Read the rest of the post on Michael Hicks’ site.

Pixar Story Rules (one version)

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This post, by David A. Price, originally appeared on his The Pixar Touch blog on 5/15/11.

Pixar story artist Emma Coats has tweeted a series of “story basics” over the past month and a half — guidelines that she learned from her more senior colleagues on how to create appealing stories:

#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes 15 more story tips, on The Pixar Touch.