This piece, by Eric R. Danton, originally appeared in The Washington Post on 3/7/09.

There’s a curious divide in the pop arts world over the do-it-yourself ethic and the different, and opposite, ways it applies to books and to music.

Since the ’60s, rock bands have operated outside the major-label system, recording and releasing their own records. By the ’80s, the American underground rock scene was large enough for musicians, and some fans, to build an independent-music infrastructure, thus birthing indie labels such as Sub Pop, Touch and Go, Homestead, SST and Dischord.

In the current decade, of course, thanks to the Internet and the increasing affordability of recording gear, bands have attracted an audience even without the help of independent labels. A few such groups, including the New England jam band Dispatch and New York indie-rock act Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, built considerable fan bases without a record company.

"Nobody’s going to tell me what to do from a creative standpoint. If you’re not involved, then what . . . sort of authority is there that would make somebody imagine that they could suggest certain things?" Clap Your Hands singer Alec Ounsworth said in a 2006 interview, just before the band self-released its second album. "We’re not making albums for the record label or anybody, really. We’re just making albums."

Things work differently in the literary world.

Bands have the comparative luxury of writing songs and then performing them before they ever record them, which helps hardworking (and lucky) groups build audiences for the albums that might eventually follow. Writers, by contrast, traditionally have relied on finished products, such as books, to build their audiences, although that’s starting to change as more post their writing on blogs.

"Maybe that’s where the parallel is," Paste’s Jackson says. "You have bands going out and playing live shows, and you, as an author, can congregate an audience through a blog. Bloggers are getting book deals all the time these days, but I think it’ll be interesting to see if bloggers start self-publishing."

Read the rest at The Washington Post.

This essay, by author Neil Gaiman (Coraline, The Graveyard Book, American Gods, Anansi Boys, Neverwhere and much more), originally appeared on his site some years ago. It offers fascinating insight into his creative process, which may help you with your own creative struggles.

Note that links have been added, and open in pop-up windows so that looking at the books being referenced will not close this window.

Books have sexes; or to be more precise, books have genders. They do in my head, anyway. Or at least, the ones that I write do. And these are genders that have something, but not everything, to do with the gender of the main character of the story.

When I wrote the ten volumes of Sandman, I tended to alternate between what I thought of as male storylines, such as the first story, collected under the title Preludes and Nocturnes, or the fourth book, Season of Mists; and more female stories, like Game of You, or Brief Lives.

The novels are a slightly different matter. Neverwhere is a Boy’s Own Adventure (Narnia on the Northern Line, as someone once described it), with an everyman hero, and the women in it tended to occupy equally stock roles, such as the Dreadful Fiancee, the Princess in Peril, the Kick-Ass Female Warrior, the Seductive Vamp. Each role is, I hope, taken and twisted 45% from skew, but they are stock characters nonetheless.

Stardust, on the other hand, is a girl’s book, even though it also has an everyman hero, young Tristran Thorne, not to mention seven Lords bent on assassinating each other. That may partly be because once Yvaine came on stage, she rapidly became the most interesting thing there, and it may also be because the relationships between the women – the Witch Queen, Yvaine, Victoria Forester, the Lady Una and even Ditchwater Sal, were so much more complex and shaded than the relationships (what there was of them) between the boys.

The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish is a boy’s book. Coraline (released in May 2002) is a girl’s book.

The first thing I knew when I started American Gods – even before I started it – was that I was finished with C.S. Lewis’s dictum that to write about how odd things affect odd people was an oddity too much, and that Gulliver’s Travels worked because Gulliver was normal, just as Alice in Wonderland would not have worked if Alice had been an extraordinary girl (which, now I come to think of it, is an odd thing to say, because if there’s one strange character in literature, it’s Alice). In Sandman I’d enjoyed writing about people who belonged in places on the other side of the looking glass, from the Dreamlord himself to such skewed luminaries as the Emperor of the United States.

Not, I should say, that I had much say in what American Gods was going to be. It had its own opinions.

Novels accrete.

American Gods began long before I knew I was going to be writing a novel called American Gods. It began in May 1997, with an idea that I couldn’t get out of my head. I’d find myself thinking about it at night in bed before I’d go to sleep, as if I were watching a movie clip in my head. Each night I’d see another couple of minutes of the story.

In June 1997, I wrote the following on my battered Atari palmtop:

A guy winds up as a bodyguard for a magician. The magician is an over-the-top type. He offers the guy the job meeting him on a plane – sitting next to him.

His life has just fallen apart anyway. He says yes.

Which is pretty much the beginning of the book. And all I knew at the time was it was the beginning of something. I hadn’t a clue what kind of something. Movie? TV series? Short story?

I don’t know any creators of fictions who start writing with nothing but a blank page. (They may exist. I just haven’t met any.) Mostly you have something. An image, or a character. And mostly you also have either a beginning, a middle or an end. Middles are good to have, because by the time you reach the middle you have a pretty good head of steam up; and ends are great. If you know how it ends, you can just start somewhere, aim, and begin to write (and, if you’re lucky, it may even end where you were hoping to go).

There may be writers who have beginnings, middles and ends before they sit down to write. I am rarely of their number.

So there I was, four years ago, with only a beginning. And you need more than a beginning if you’re going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you’ve written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.

A year later, I had a story in my head about these people. I tried writing it: the character I’d thought of as a magician (although, I had already decided, he wasn’t a magician at all) now seemed to be called Wednesday. I wasn’t sure what the other guy’s name was, the bodyguard, so I called him Ryder, but that wasn’t quite right. I had a short story in mind about those two and some murders that occur in a small Midwestern town called Silverside. I wrote a page and gave up, mainly because they really didn’t seem to come the town together.

There was a dream I woke up from, somewhere back then, sweating and confused, about a dead wife. It seemed to belong to the story, and I filed it away.

Some months later, in September 1998, I tried writing that story again, as a first person narrative, sending the guy I’d called Ryder (who I tried calling Ben Kobold this time, but that sent out quite the wrong set of signals) to the town (which I’d called Shelby, because Silverside seemed too exotic) on his own. I covered about ten pages, and then stopped. I still wasn’t comfortable with it.

By that point, I was coming to the conclusion that the story I wanted to tell in that particular little lakeside town … hmm, I thought somewhere in there, Lakeside, that’s what it’s called, a solid, generic name for a town … was too much a part of the novel to be written in isolation from it. And I had a novel by then. I’d had it for several months.
 

Read the rest on Neil Gaiman’s site.

Writing is a lot like building a bridge. Each scene serves as scaffolding or supports for your entire story to rest on without sagging.

Maybe you’ve made a great start. You have a dynamite hook (some of my favorites: "The last camel collapsed at noon." Ken Follet, "The man with ten minutes to live was laughing." Frederick Forsyth). You’ve gotten off to a good strong start. Maybe you know how your book is going to end, and even have the final scene written.

Now, how do you get through the middle part without it sagging and possibly collapsing?

First of all, you don’t need to write chronologically. You can write scenes out of order. (See my article Overcoming Writer’s Block ). Pick out some highlights and write those scenes, then see if you can figure out what you might be able to fill in between A and G.

Now, send your inner "nice guy" out for ice cream and figure out just how mean you can be to your character. Conflict is the key to keeping a story moving, to shoring it up. You’ve introduced your character and the problem she has to solve. You know what the goal is at the end.

Let’s say Cathy Character wants to be the first teenage girl to climb Mount Huge. What are her obstacles? Her parents are against the idea. It’s too expensive, too dangerous, she’s not in shape, who else is going?, etc. Cathy has to overcome each objection, solve each problem.

Maybe her neighbor is a banker, so she approaches him for a loan. If he smiles and says," Sure, Cathy, anything for you," the problem is solved too quickly. The story can get boring and the reader’s interest will sag quickly.

But what if he says no? Now Cathy has to figure out another way to raise money. What should she do – a bake sale, a part-time job, rob the local drive-in? (You can see the various paths this story could take.) There are all kinds of ideas and none of them should be easy.

Every time your character figures out a way over, around or through a problem, throw up another obstacle, within reason, of course. You don’t want her to fail at everything. She needs to learn and grow through these experiences.

But when she solves the money part of the problem, there should be another one waiting. Who, besides her parents, are going to oppose her? Does she have a rival? Or is there a friend who is supposedly helping her, but is actually sabotaging Cathy’s efforts?

Building a story is like constructing a bridge. You need conflict as the pillars that shore up the middle.

For each scene you write, ask yourself:

• What is the purpose of this scene?
• Does it move the story forward? (What if I take it out? Does the story flow without it?)
• Can the reader identify with the character’s problem and struggles?
• Have you created suspense? (Will the reader want to keep reading to find out how your character solves this one? What’s at stake for him/her?)

Have fun being mean to your character and building your bridge!

This piece, by Jim Barnes, originally appeared on Independent Publisher.

50 days. An offset-printed book, from concept to the street in 50 days. Unheard of, right?

Yes, it’s unheard of, but it happened. San Francisco-based Berrett-Koehler published Agenda for a New Economy, by David Korten, in just seven weeks and two days — just in time for the inauguration of President Obama.

The book questions the Wall Street bailout and argues that our hope lies not with Wall Street but with Main Street, creating real wealth from real resources to meet real needs, and returning to an economy firmly rooted in the long-term health of people and the planet.

How the Berrett-Koehler team accomplished this feat is a tribute to the energy and resourcefulness of a dedicated independent publisher, the expertise of a brilliant author, and the technical abilities of a cutting-edge book printer.

It all began back in the fall of 2008, when best-selling author Korten, whose previous books, When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community are considered must-reads for understanding our global economy, was asked by YES! magazine to write an article about the big Wall Street bailout. The piece argues that the bailout was a mistake, and calls out to President Obama for a “basic redesign of our economic institutions.”

Meanwhile, Steve Piersanti, president and publisher at Berrett-Koehler, found himself awaiting jury duty in his Contra Costa County, California courthouse, and having brought along some reading material, read Korten’s article. It must have had a big impact. By the next evening Piersanti and Korten had brokered an agreement — with one important stipulation – books had to be ready in time for a major presentation by Korten on January 23 at the Trinity Institute on Wall Street.

“Here is one of the most important, most timely, and most exciting books on which I have worked during my 27-year career as a book editor,” Piersanti recalls thinking. "Would such a timeframe even be a possibility?"

In order to get the book from concept to finished product as quickly as possible, Piersanti knew he would need an extraordinarily fast printing schedule. Enter Malloy Incorporated, the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based, family-owned printer that offers a new express offset printing service for this kind of "rush job."

“We understand the value to Berrett-Koehler of getting this time sensitive book out when the new administration takes office” said Bill Upton, president of Malloy. “We saw this last year with a biography of Sarah Palin when she was picked by John McCain, and the overnight success last June of the memoir by former White House Press Secretary, Scott McClellan.”

“Publishers need to capitalize on sales opportunities that suddenly materialize due to events beyond their control. We introduced Express Service for the publisher who needs more than a few hundred books right away. They come out ahead going with offset printing at Malloy versus a digital printing solution.” [Publetariat editor’s note: POD is a digital solution]
 

Read the rest of the article at Independent Publisher.