Monthly Archives: December 2011

Getting close

07 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Cover design

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I have the one big revision to do and I’m going to tackle that tomorrow. Then I’ll start the read aloud, which ought to be fun. Then a copyright page, then deciding whether to learn how to create a real TOC for the Kindle. It seems as if it might be a good idea but I don’t know whether anyone cares. Still, learning is useful.

Today was playing with cover files, though. I believe my preference is number 3. Maybe, anyway. I wish I didn’t start to get so insane about the fonts. Powerpoint just doesn’t have the right tools for them.

Credit where due

07 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Cover design

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I just spent a frustrating hour searching for the image that I used on the Ghosts cover. I think I’ve basically decided that it is the real and final cover (maybe some tweaking), and so even though the image was public domain, I wanted to credit the photographer and the website on the copyright page. Argh. Of course, I bookmarked the site, but then I lost all my bookmarks.

For future and current reference: Lightning Strike by Adam Weeden is the original image.

Following the rules

03 Saturday Dec 2011

Posted by in Writing

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Agents don’t like . . . 

If you want to sell, you should  . . . 

I’ve heard that it’s bad to use . . .

Using (word) slows down your writing, you should always . . . , Never put . . . , You should . . . , You must . . . You have to . . .

I’ve so appreciated the feedback I’ve gotten from other writers over the last few weeks.  Really, I have. But I need to vent anyway.

When did writers become so rule-bound? How has publishing managed to inflict such an endless list of shoulds and have-tos and musts on people who want to be creative? I’m not talking about knowing the fundamentals. (Although, frankly, I’m perfectly happy to break those rules, too. Most of the time, yes, your sentences should include both a subject and a verb. But not always.) No, I’m talking about writers following rules they don’t even understand. Someone’s told them a “rule,” and suddenly every sentence with “was” should be re-worded, even if doing so changes the meaning of the sentence. How can meaning be less important than following a nonsensical rule?

I admit, when I was an editor, I was guilty of inflicting some arbitrary rules on authors myself. I remember telling one author never to use a pronoun. But his sentences were getting tangled. Forcing him to think about the real noun behind every “it” helped him clarify his meaning, and in some cases, probably his thinking, too. And I would not have told him to write pronoun-free fiction, nor would I have tried to make it a universal rule.

I do have some of my own rules that I try to follow. Most of the time, one exclamation point per paragraph or page, because I tend to get excited. Try to change “thing” to a real noun, because using it is easy but often unclear. Use vague language, including “just,” “sort of,” “kind of,” “pretty much,” inside quotation marks, but not outside, because it makes dialog feel real but writing feel sloppy. But I know the reasons for all those rules, and I know that I can break them whenever I want to.

I think the saddest aspect of seeing all these people following all these rules is the belief behind their actions: if I follow the rules, I will sell books. If I do everything “right,” I will succeed. But book publishing doesn’t work that way, never has. If it did, Harry Potter would not have sold. Twilight would not have sold. Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts . . . best-selling authors break the rules. And it’s not because they became best-sellers by following the rules and then started breaking them. Harry Potter breaks the rules on page one. And yes, that’s why it was rejected by multiple publishers before finally getting picked up. But last year over a quarter of a million books were published in the US. Most of them made it to print, but didn’t make it to success. That’s because publishers don’t know what sells. Not really. Neither do agents. Neither do writing teachers. Neither do I, for that matter.

I do know, though, that writing for money is a waste of time. Most people would do better by getting a minimum wage job and spending their entire paycheck on lottery tickets. (Favorite writer joke: Know the difference between writing a bestseller and winning the lottery? You can improve your chances of winning the lottery.)

Writing for fun, on the other hand, is a wonderful way to spend your time. Writing for fun and then trying to sell what you’ve written so that other people can enjoy the world you’ve created? Also makes total sense to me.

 The dog is looking imploring and she’s a half hour late for her walk, so off I go. And when I come back, I’m working on Thoughts. But tomorrow, I want to write more about self-publishing.

The phoenix

01 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by in Self-publishing, Writing

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I just wrote this as a mile-long comment on Stellar Four, and I decided that I liked it so much that I wanted to post it here, too . . .(somewhat abbreviated).

I worked in publishing for more or less the past twenty years, book publishing for the last eleven. I’m cool with hating B&N: the rise of B&N meant the slow but steady demise of the independent bookstores and the proliferation of copycat books.
The book buyers for B&N had incredible, terrifying, horrifying power to determine what books people read. If the B&N buyer, God forbid, didn’t take a book of ours, then there was no point in publishing. We couldn’t sell enough copies of a book to make it worthwhile to print the book if it wasn’t going to get on the shelves of B&N. When I started in publishing, we had a sales force for the indies, people who spent their days  wandering from one independent bookstore to the next. Over the course of the last decade, those people all lost their jobs as the indies died. The only places that mattered were B&N and Borders and Amazon, and really, that meant B&N and Borders, because Amazon was happy to include any title.
At the same time, as a person earning a living from publishing, I had to be grateful to B&N. Printing books is such a ridiculous business from a financial sense. A few hugely successful titles support dozens of unprofitable titles. The idea that publishers would lose money on many of their titles was almost a given when I started in publishing. That was just how it worked. Over my decade, though, more books became at least break-even because B&N and Borders could place such large orders. So yay, B&N.
Except, back to being a reader again, it was killing publishing. Publishers had to print books that were being churned through a mass market system. You look at YA publishing right now — it’s the most innovative and interesting area of publishing and it’s because Harry Potter and Twilight made it possible for YA publishers to take risks. And that creates a supply and demand cycle. B&N gives the books more shelf space, more readers see the books, more people buy the books, B&N gives the books more shelf space, and suddenly YA has rows and other areas lose theirs. Other areas of publishing — well, it’s always possible to find some good books. But innovation and creativity and diversity and quirkiness were being largely stifled by the need for a book to get into the shelves of B&N for two months. Basically, what I’m saying is that B&N was saving *printing* but killing publishing.
E-readers change all that. E-readers mean that little presses can spring up out of nowhere to publish quirky little books that a mainstream publisher could never afford to print. Yes, a ton of dreck is going to get published and for a time, the market is going to look like one giant slush pile, but a decade from now, acquisition editors aren’t going to have to say, “I love it, but I don’t know how I’d sell it, so I can’t take the risk” because the risk is going to be so minimal in a primarily e-book world. (And yes, I said that exact line more than once in my career. If we couldn’t figure out what shelf B&N would put the book on, there was no point in publishing it. It would never make the money to support the paper costs.)
I love paper books, I do. I’m quite sure that there will never come a day when there aren’t some print books in my house. But e-readers are going to save publishing — not necessarily the big publishers — but the part of publishing that is about telling interesting stories and finding interesting voices and sharing interesting information. That part of publishing was dying in the paper world, because paper, printing, shipping, etc. were so expensive.
Watching the independent bookstores die was heartbreaking. Watching the independent e-publishers rise is like seeing the phoenix. E-readers are the fuel.