Operator: Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Reader: Yes, this book I've been reading has, you know, something really bad in it.
Operator: What is the bad thing, ma'am?
Reader: I can't say that over the phone. But it's really, really bad.
Operator: I need to know what the bad thing is, ma'am, or I can't help you.
Reader: Can't you just take my word for it and send the police to arrest the author?
Operator: No, ma'am, I can't do that.
Reader: Well, that's not fair.
Operator: You're free to destroy the book at your convenience, ma'am.
Reader: I can't, I need to turn in the book at the used book store to get credit for it.
Operator: Then do what everyone else does and post an anonymous review on Amazon.com. (switches lines) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Author: (sniffling) A reader just sent me a hateful e-mail and I read it and now I'm so upset that I can't write.
Operator: Was the e-mail accurate, sir?
Author: No, of course not. My book is wonderful. I'm a genius. This reader is a jealous idiot who's trying to make a name for himself by destroying my career.
Operator: Then why can't you write, sir?
Author: (lowers voice) What if I'm wrong? What if my book sucks? What if everyone in publishing is laughing at me right now?
Operator: I'm not laughing at you, sir.
Author: (eagerly) Did you read my book?
Operator: Sir, you need to delete the e-mail, block the reader from your mail account, and recite your writing mantra.
Author: But I don't have a writing mantra.
Operator: Repeat after me: "I am powerful. I am purposeful. I am published."
Author: I'm pathetic, aren't I?
Operator: That's not part of the writing mantra, sir. Please recite what I told you fifty times and stop reading e-mail for the rest of the day. (switches lines) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Reviewer: (whining) There's this writer who hates me. I read his blog every day. He says terrible things and I know he's talking about me.
Operator: Does the writer name you in his blog, ma'am?
Reviewer: Not exactly.
Operator: Has he ever mentioned your name once in his blog, ma'am?
Reviewer: You don't understand. He won't name me because then I'd have proof of what he does.
Operator: Does the writer ever link to you, or quote you?
Reviewer: No. Okay, look, he pretends like I don't exist. But I know he hates me. I can feel it.
Operator: Have you ever had any direct contact with the writer?
Reviewer: Well, I've read and reviewed every book he's ever written.
Operator: He doesn't hate you, ma'am. He doesn't know you. Stop reading his blog and read someone else. (switches lines) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Author: I've just seen my new cover art and it's horrible.
Operator: How horrible is it, ma'am?
Author: Do you remember that book that came out in January with bright metallic glow-in-the-dark pink albino Robin Hood on the cover?
Operator: (winces) Yes, ma'am.
Author: Worse than that.
Operator: I'm sorry, ma'am, but that's highly unlikely.
Author: (furiously) Don't you dare tell me it's not as bad as I think, because I swear to God I will come down there and kick your ass.
Operator: Calm down, ma'am. What color is the cover art?
Author: Green. Lurid Green.
Operator: Everyone is going green these days, you know. (flips through calendar) And St. Patrick's Day is coming up. You could do some clever tie-in promo and turn this tragedy to your advantage.
Author: Can't you just send the police to arrest my editor?
Operator: No, ma'am, I can't do that.
Author: Damn.
Operator: (tentatively) I can transfer your call over to the That Can't Be My Cover support and recovery group for cover-traumatized authors. The writer with the albino Robin Hood cover runs it, and she has complimentary chocolate-covered Valium at every meeting.
Author: Really? I thought she killed herself. Okay, transfer me over.
Operator: Thank you, please hold. (transfers call, switches lines.) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Reader: Hi, it's me again. I'm ready to tell you what the bad thing in the book was.
Operator: Go ahead, ma'am.
Reader: (whispers) Gee. Ay. Why. Es. Eee. Ex.
Operator: I don't understand you, ma'am.
Reader: (dismayed) I can't actually say it. I'm spelling it for you. Can't you spell?
Operator: No, ma'am, that's not part of my job requirement. (switches lines) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Reader: (angrily) I wrote a letter of complaint to this terrible author about his lousy book and he didn't answer and then he blocked me from his mail account.
Operator: (sighs) Have you recited your reader mantra today, sir?
Reader: Authors write for me. Authors must please me. Authors tremble in fear before me.
Operator: I think you'll be fine, sir.
Reader: But I have to tell this author much, much more about how much his book sucks.
Operator: Then do what everyone else does and post an anonymous review on Amazon.com, and get all your friends to vote that it was helpful and it will end up as the first review on the page.
Reader: That's not good enough. Can't you send the police to arrest the author?
Operator: No, sir, I can't do that. Have a nice day.
(Originally posted on 3/5/09)
Showing posts with label the biz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the biz. Show all posts
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Twenty Years, Twenty Minutes
Let's take a trip in the KindaWayBack machine to 1989, to when most of the world had yet to discover cyberspace. I started writing in 1974, but I didn't really get serious about pursuing publication until '89.
Back then it was a very different world for writers. Imagine: no internet, no e-mail, no social media, no cell phones, no Twitter or Facebook, no nothing for the writer but the writing and us all alone by ourselves.
I've talked to other writers of my generation, and we all went through pretty much the same thing. We wrote all the time, endlessly, wildly, often shivering with the delight of it because we were so close to it. None of us were perfect, either. We fumbled, we ran out of steam, we crashed, we burned, we resurrected ourselves only to do it all over again. We wrote clunkers and stinkers and failures. We began piling them up along with legal pads filled with even more ideas and story fragments and mini-rants.
After the work stopped sucking quite so much, we decided we were good enough and dared to write up a submission. This we typed on a typewriter with a correcting ribbon, because no matter how thinly we applied it liquid paper (aka white-out) could never look anything but globby. Also, sometimes the ink from the typos would bleed through and leave a little dark ghost of what we never meant to say behind the correct words.
I'll tell you a secret: sometimes I still miss the smell of metal, ink ribbon and white-out. It was our writing perfume.
Anyway, twenty-seven or forty-nine drafts and at least one typewriter ribbon later, we mailed off our submission in an unpadded envelope with rows of stamps we had to lick to make them stick. A week later we went to the mailbox with all our expectations, which were naturally dashed when no response appeared among the bills and junk mail. A month later we started waiting at the box for the postman to arrive. Three months later we suspected the postman had delivered it to the wrong address and went around asking the neighbors if they'd gotten it by mistake.
Six months later we got a thin white business envelope with vertical creases on it from the publisher we'd submitted to. We knew this because it was the SASE we'd sent along with the submission, on which we had neatly written our own address in ink. We put it on the kitchen table and stared at it for at least an hour, afraid to open it for fear it would actually kill us.
When we finally tore into it, the outpouring of praise and admiration we expected was actually a one-page form rejection. Thank you for your blah, it's not for us, good luck yada yada. Sometimes it was even signed. We carefully enshrined that first rejection somewhere so nothing would happen to it (and also so we didn't have to look at it) and then dragged ourselves back to the keyboard. By that night we convinced ourselves of a thousand reasons (all mistaken) for the rejection, and made up the next submission.
Now read the previous paragraph again. Read it ten times, fifty times, a thousand times. We didn't spend a year or two doing that every week. We spent five years, or eight, or ten, until our shrine/hiding place began to overflow with rejections. We shrugged them off in public and wept over them in private. We drove ourselves mad with wondering: What was wrong with these editors? Didn't they read that amazing opening line, the one we spent two years thinking up? And what about the rest? Nobody was doing anything like us. Was that it? Were we too different?
And on and on and on.
The only thing we ever figured out for sure was that no one was going to answer our questions. Ever. We had to find the answers by ourselves.
As the years passed we still wrote endlessly, but the wildness and delight subsided and became a more deliberate, focused quest. We looked at everything in our bag of writing tricks and started sifting and sorting through them. We weeded out what seemed wrong and kept what felt right. We studied how-to books for writers and subscribed to writing magazines (the sum total of available information for poor writers back then.) The more our submissions were rejected, the more determined we became. We would write the book that would sell, by God, or die trying.
New and interesting torture came in the form of editors who would write to request a full manuscript only to reject it three, four, five months later. We began to loathe the words Not what we're looking for and I just didn't love the story. Sometimes -- more often than you imagine -- the responses were personal, and nasty. We stood at the mailbox and imagined socking the postman right in the nose the next time he gave us a sympathetic look. No, what we really wanted to do was call those editors and demand to know what, exactly, they were looking for, and why the hell their love had anything to do with it.
As for the editors who got nasty, we indulged in vengeful thoughts as a kind of anger management self-therapy. We saved all the really inappropriate responses in a special file marked with something like "Send copy of first book" along with more scribbled, rehearsed lines for when we signed it for them: Too bad you passed on this one. Thanks for sending me to a way better publisher. Hey, nitwit -- looks like you were wrong. We prayed our first book would go platinum overnight, not so we'd make a ton of money, but just so we could also include a copy of the Times bestseller list in the nah-nah-nah-nah-nah packages we'd send to every pinheaded editor who'd stomped on, spit at or sneered over our work.
Then something actually happened; usually when we'd hit a really low point, and were thinking about throwing in the towel, admitting defeat, and finally putting an end to the torture. Another envelope with a single page arrived, but this one wasn't a form bounce, or the lukewarm invite for more humiliation.
No, this one was serious. Bizarre, too, for it offered praise mixed in with all the nitpicking. It asked if we were willing to make some changes. It gave us a phone number to call, and a name to ask for, and when we called it, we found ourselves stammering like an idiot and agreeing to everything the editor said because oh dear God the last thing we were going to do was piss off the one person who could make all our dreams come true.
We made the requested changes, and more changes after that, and more changes after that, always frantically cheerful and ridiculously willing. Of course we would change anything, anything at all, because obviously this editor was the smartest one on Earth. It didn't matter how many times we had to redo this or rewrite that, we had his/her attention. Attention meant they liked us. They wanted us. If we did everything right, they would be very pleased and request approval to purchase us.
The final phone call came, and at last the editor uttered the words we had been waiting to hear, praying to hear, working our ass off to hear: "We'd like to make an offer." Once we finished silently shrieking, we dislodged our heart from our tonsils and offered joyous yet still humble thanks. We would not let the editor down no matter what. Then (if we were stupid) we agreed to accept an offer for a manuscript we had been working on for three or four years, an offer that was equal to the pay a worker at McDonald's earned in ninety days, and a month later signed a contract that deprived us of most of our rights as an author. If we were smart, we promised to call back as soon as possible and started (hysterically) looking for an agent to represent us.
Either way, from there we turned pro. The euphoria of selling the first book did give us temporary amnesia, so (fortunately) most of us didn't mail out those F-Y packages to all those cruel editors. If we were lucky, we survived our rookie year. If we were very lucky, we got through everything else Publishing throws at a writer. If we were very very very lucky, we even sold a lot of books.
And then came the internet, and everything began to change.
Today -- right at this very minute -- there is a writer out there who has just received (electronically) their very first rejection. Tonight that same writer will format their rejected manuscript into an e-book, upload it via digital self-publishing to an online bookseller and begin selling it immediately.
Just like that. No muss, no fuss, no heartbreak, no torture, no problem. From there the writer will move on to penning their next work, untroubled by the depression, anger and self-doubt inflicted by the harshness of a lengthy traditional submission process. They need not analyze, improve or even compromise. They might even get lucky and sell a lot of books.
When a writer can do in twenty minutes what it took me and other writers who came up before the internet so many years to accomplish, I'm thinking it has to be better. More tempting, too. How could anyone resist something so easy and painless as self-publishing just to put themselves through the innumerable levels of hell that is (even with the internet) still the traditional submission process? Believe me, I totally get why so many writers are abandoning the still-dismal chances of publishing with a major house in the rush to self-publish for profit. If I was part of this generation, I probably would have, too.
Am I sorry I'm not? Nope.
Don't get me wrong, it's not because my twenty years of slogging my way toward publication makes me superior to someone who does the same in twenty minutes. Technology marches on, and even though the Publishing industry has had to be mostly dragged kicking and screaming along with it, things do have to change. If they didn't, we'd still be writing novels in longhand with quills on parchment and vellum (and just imagine what those writers would think of my speedy little manual typewriter.) Also, plenty of writers are still doing things the old-fashioned way, mailing off hard copy submissions to publishers and waiting months if not years for responses. I don't think that will ever go away.
But for all the speed and ease and no-hassle perks that today's technology offers for writers pursuing publication, I feel like something is still missing. I think it's time. For all the hell I went through, I also got a huge amount of time along with it to find out who I am as a writer.
I had -- literally -- two decades to practice and think about the work, and study it, and develop it, and try things and discard things. During the last ten years, I had all the time I needed to develop theories and work habits, look and find ways to improve my productivity, and teach myself how to be a working writer. Every day I did this; I thought about it, I was obsessed with it. Before I published one word I had like seven or eight different major shifts in what I wrote, too, the same way a painter goes through a blue period or decides to change mediums.
If you ever wonder why I never run out of stuff to talk about writing, it's probably because I spent all those years alone thinking about it.
The solitude, waiting and wondering what would happen, yeah, was not so great, but because I am self-taught I definitely needed the time to grow and mature as a writer. I didn't simply find out what I could do, I had the time to understand it and get it under control and channel it and learn to live with it. It's all the things that have nothing at all to do with Publishing and everything to do with who you are as a writer. I don't know, maybe today's writers can figure all that out in twenty minutes, too.
I am all about speed and efficiency, and I think being able to publish almost instantly is an amazing thing (another reason I've been playing with self-publishing as promotion for ten years -- it's quick and easy.) This is the first time since I turned pro that I feel some optimism for the future of Publishing, too. But as a member of the old typewriter and snail-mail generation, I hope self-publishing and technology doesn't eliminate the entire journey of self-discovery. As arduous and heartbreaking as it can be, I don't think it's a trip any writer should take in twenty minutes or less.
Back then it was a very different world for writers. Imagine: no internet, no e-mail, no social media, no cell phones, no Twitter or Facebook, no nothing for the writer but the writing and us all alone by ourselves.
I've talked to other writers of my generation, and we all went through pretty much the same thing. We wrote all the time, endlessly, wildly, often shivering with the delight of it because we were so close to it. None of us were perfect, either. We fumbled, we ran out of steam, we crashed, we burned, we resurrected ourselves only to do it all over again. We wrote clunkers and stinkers and failures. We began piling them up along with legal pads filled with even more ideas and story fragments and mini-rants.
After the work stopped sucking quite so much, we decided we were good enough and dared to write up a submission. This we typed on a typewriter with a correcting ribbon, because no matter how thinly we applied it liquid paper (aka white-out) could never look anything but globby. Also, sometimes the ink from the typos would bleed through and leave a little dark ghost of what we never meant to say behind the correct words.
I'll tell you a secret: sometimes I still miss the smell of metal, ink ribbon and white-out. It was our writing perfume.
Anyway, twenty-seven or forty-nine drafts and at least one typewriter ribbon later, we mailed off our submission in an unpadded envelope with rows of stamps we had to lick to make them stick. A week later we went to the mailbox with all our expectations, which were naturally dashed when no response appeared among the bills and junk mail. A month later we started waiting at the box for the postman to arrive. Three months later we suspected the postman had delivered it to the wrong address and went around asking the neighbors if they'd gotten it by mistake.
Six months later we got a thin white business envelope with vertical creases on it from the publisher we'd submitted to. We knew this because it was the SASE we'd sent along with the submission, on which we had neatly written our own address in ink. We put it on the kitchen table and stared at it for at least an hour, afraid to open it for fear it would actually kill us.
When we finally tore into it, the outpouring of praise and admiration we expected was actually a one-page form rejection. Thank you for your blah, it's not for us, good luck yada yada. Sometimes it was even signed. We carefully enshrined that first rejection somewhere so nothing would happen to it (and also so we didn't have to look at it) and then dragged ourselves back to the keyboard. By that night we convinced ourselves of a thousand reasons (all mistaken) for the rejection, and made up the next submission.
Now read the previous paragraph again. Read it ten times, fifty times, a thousand times. We didn't spend a year or two doing that every week. We spent five years, or eight, or ten, until our shrine/hiding place began to overflow with rejections. We shrugged them off in public and wept over them in private. We drove ourselves mad with wondering: What was wrong with these editors? Didn't they read that amazing opening line, the one we spent two years thinking up? And what about the rest? Nobody was doing anything like us. Was that it? Were we too different?
And on and on and on.
The only thing we ever figured out for sure was that no one was going to answer our questions. Ever. We had to find the answers by ourselves.
As the years passed we still wrote endlessly, but the wildness and delight subsided and became a more deliberate, focused quest. We looked at everything in our bag of writing tricks and started sifting and sorting through them. We weeded out what seemed wrong and kept what felt right. We studied how-to books for writers and subscribed to writing magazines (the sum total of available information for poor writers back then.) The more our submissions were rejected, the more determined we became. We would write the book that would sell, by God, or die trying.
New and interesting torture came in the form of editors who would write to request a full manuscript only to reject it three, four, five months later. We began to loathe the words Not what we're looking for and I just didn't love the story. Sometimes -- more often than you imagine -- the responses were personal, and nasty. We stood at the mailbox and imagined socking the postman right in the nose the next time he gave us a sympathetic look. No, what we really wanted to do was call those editors and demand to know what, exactly, they were looking for, and why the hell their love had anything to do with it.
As for the editors who got nasty, we indulged in vengeful thoughts as a kind of anger management self-therapy. We saved all the really inappropriate responses in a special file marked with something like "Send copy of first book" along with more scribbled, rehearsed lines for when we signed it for them: Too bad you passed on this one. Thanks for sending me to a way better publisher. Hey, nitwit -- looks like you were wrong. We prayed our first book would go platinum overnight, not so we'd make a ton of money, but just so we could also include a copy of the Times bestseller list in the nah-nah-nah-nah-nah packages we'd send to every pinheaded editor who'd stomped on, spit at or sneered over our work.
Then something actually happened; usually when we'd hit a really low point, and were thinking about throwing in the towel, admitting defeat, and finally putting an end to the torture. Another envelope with a single page arrived, but this one wasn't a form bounce, or the lukewarm invite for more humiliation.
No, this one was serious. Bizarre, too, for it offered praise mixed in with all the nitpicking. It asked if we were willing to make some changes. It gave us a phone number to call, and a name to ask for, and when we called it, we found ourselves stammering like an idiot and agreeing to everything the editor said because oh dear God the last thing we were going to do was piss off the one person who could make all our dreams come true.
We made the requested changes, and more changes after that, and more changes after that, always frantically cheerful and ridiculously willing. Of course we would change anything, anything at all, because obviously this editor was the smartest one on Earth. It didn't matter how many times we had to redo this or rewrite that, we had his/her attention. Attention meant they liked us. They wanted us. If we did everything right, they would be very pleased and request approval to purchase us.
The final phone call came, and at last the editor uttered the words we had been waiting to hear, praying to hear, working our ass off to hear: "We'd like to make an offer." Once we finished silently shrieking, we dislodged our heart from our tonsils and offered joyous yet still humble thanks. We would not let the editor down no matter what. Then (if we were stupid) we agreed to accept an offer for a manuscript we had been working on for three or four years, an offer that was equal to the pay a worker at McDonald's earned in ninety days, and a month later signed a contract that deprived us of most of our rights as an author. If we were smart, we promised to call back as soon as possible and started (hysterically) looking for an agent to represent us.
Either way, from there we turned pro. The euphoria of selling the first book did give us temporary amnesia, so (fortunately) most of us didn't mail out those F-Y packages to all those cruel editors. If we were lucky, we survived our rookie year. If we were very lucky, we got through everything else Publishing throws at a writer. If we were very very very lucky, we even sold a lot of books.
And then came the internet, and everything began to change.
Today -- right at this very minute -- there is a writer out there who has just received (electronically) their very first rejection. Tonight that same writer will format their rejected manuscript into an e-book, upload it via digital self-publishing to an online bookseller and begin selling it immediately.
Just like that. No muss, no fuss, no heartbreak, no torture, no problem. From there the writer will move on to penning their next work, untroubled by the depression, anger and self-doubt inflicted by the harshness of a lengthy traditional submission process. They need not analyze, improve or even compromise. They might even get lucky and sell a lot of books.
When a writer can do in twenty minutes what it took me and other writers who came up before the internet so many years to accomplish, I'm thinking it has to be better. More tempting, too. How could anyone resist something so easy and painless as self-publishing just to put themselves through the innumerable levels of hell that is (even with the internet) still the traditional submission process? Believe me, I totally get why so many writers are abandoning the still-dismal chances of publishing with a major house in the rush to self-publish for profit. If I was part of this generation, I probably would have, too.
Am I sorry I'm not? Nope.
Don't get me wrong, it's not because my twenty years of slogging my way toward publication makes me superior to someone who does the same in twenty minutes. Technology marches on, and even though the Publishing industry has had to be mostly dragged kicking and screaming along with it, things do have to change. If they didn't, we'd still be writing novels in longhand with quills on parchment and vellum (and just imagine what those writers would think of my speedy little manual typewriter.) Also, plenty of writers are still doing things the old-fashioned way, mailing off hard copy submissions to publishers and waiting months if not years for responses. I don't think that will ever go away.
But for all the speed and ease and no-hassle perks that today's technology offers for writers pursuing publication, I feel like something is still missing. I think it's time. For all the hell I went through, I also got a huge amount of time along with it to find out who I am as a writer.
I had -- literally -- two decades to practice and think about the work, and study it, and develop it, and try things and discard things. During the last ten years, I had all the time I needed to develop theories and work habits, look and find ways to improve my productivity, and teach myself how to be a working writer. Every day I did this; I thought about it, I was obsessed with it. Before I published one word I had like seven or eight different major shifts in what I wrote, too, the same way a painter goes through a blue period or decides to change mediums.
If you ever wonder why I never run out of stuff to talk about writing, it's probably because I spent all those years alone thinking about it.
The solitude, waiting and wondering what would happen, yeah, was not so great, but because I am self-taught I definitely needed the time to grow and mature as a writer. I didn't simply find out what I could do, I had the time to understand it and get it under control and channel it and learn to live with it. It's all the things that have nothing at all to do with Publishing and everything to do with who you are as a writer. I don't know, maybe today's writers can figure all that out in twenty minutes, too.
I am all about speed and efficiency, and I think being able to publish almost instantly is an amazing thing (another reason I've been playing with self-publishing as promotion for ten years -- it's quick and easy.) This is the first time since I turned pro that I feel some optimism for the future of Publishing, too. But as a member of the old typewriter and snail-mail generation, I hope self-publishing and technology doesn't eliminate the entire journey of self-discovery. As arduous and heartbreaking as it can be, I don't think it's a trip any writer should take in twenty minutes or less.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
True Publishing Tees
My mother gave me this T-shirt as a Christmas gift a few years ago, and every time I wear it someone asks if I'm really a writer. Instead of answering I just smile mysteriously. Mysterious smiles get me out of a lot of dumb conversations.
As long as I could write the logos, I wouldn't mind going into the Publishing T-shirt biz. I think we need some more truthful tees for writers and other industry folk, though. What would really be great is if everyone had to wear a T-shirt identifying who they really are. Wouldn't that save everyone a lot of time, misunderstandings and headaches? Imagine going to a writing conference where you saw writers wearing these:
Better Agent Hunter
I'd be a bestseller by now, if not for that last idiot
Competition Backstabber
I've got a 1-star Amazon.com review with your name smeared all over it
Cookie Cutter Novelist
What, Me Have a New Idea?
Erotica Writer
Yes, I am imagining you naked
Pathetic Poser
Why write when I can talk about how much I suffer when I write?
Promo Queen
Here, have a bookmark while we chat about my new release
Publishing World Weary
You think Home Depot is hiring?
Quote Slut
If you've got a pulse, I've got a blurb
Self-Published and Proud
Say one word about how crappy self-published books are and I'm beating the snot out of you
Title Snatcher
I've got a novel for every great title you publish first
We'd also have to have some T-shirts for the editors and agents, too:
Anti-Pitcher
Too many acquisitions, not enough TUMs
Aspiring Allergic (editor version)
If you don't have an agent, get away from me
Aspiring Allergic (agent version)
If you don't have a contract offer, get away from me
Author in Disguise
Here, have a bookmark while we chat about my debut release
Bestseller Snob
If I don't know who you are, I don't want to know who you are
Habitual Dumper
The minute you stop making money for me, out you go
Indifferent Idler
Yeah Uh-huh Whatever
Kindly Liar
It actually wasn't that nice to meet you
Secret Vacationer
I'm just here for the shopping and the theme parks
Way Overworked
Where's the damn Tiki Bar?
All right, it's your turn: what sort of true publishing tee would you like to see? Tell us in comments.
Better Agent Hunter
I'd be a bestseller by now, if not for that last idiot
Competition Backstabber
I've got a 1-star Amazon.com review with your name smeared all over it
Cookie Cutter Novelist
What, Me Have a New Idea?
Erotica Writer
Yes, I am imagining you naked
Pathetic Poser
Why write when I can talk about how much I suffer when I write?
Promo Queen
Here, have a bookmark while we chat about my new release
Publishing World Weary
You think Home Depot is hiring?
Quote Slut
If you've got a pulse, I've got a blurb
Self-Published and Proud
Say one word about how crappy self-published books are and I'm beating the snot out of you
Title Snatcher
I've got a novel for every great title you publish first
We'd also have to have some T-shirts for the editors and agents, too:
Anti-Pitcher
Too many acquisitions, not enough TUMs
Aspiring Allergic (editor version)
If you don't have an agent, get away from me
Aspiring Allergic (agent version)
If you don't have a contract offer, get away from me
Author in Disguise
Here, have a bookmark while we chat about my debut release
Bestseller Snob
If I don't know who you are, I don't want to know who you are
Habitual Dumper
The minute you stop making money for me, out you go
Indifferent Idler
Yeah Uh-huh Whatever
Kindly Liar
It actually wasn't that nice to meet you
Secret Vacationer
I'm just here for the shopping and the theme parks
Way Overworked
Where's the damn Tiki Bar?
All right, it's your turn: what sort of true publishing tee would you like to see? Tell us in comments.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Buy My Hardcover, or I'll . . . .
My daughter told me tonight that author James Patterson is running a TV commercial in which he threatens to kill his protagonist if people don't buy his new book. I think Stephen King already did that once in The Dark Half and it didn't work out so well for the guy (wait, no, twice, he did it in Misery, too.)
Maybe it's a joke, but getting all Abraham with your readership is like telling your editor what you really think of him. Just don't go there. Ever.
I know the steady decline in hardcover sales is costing the big names lots of bucks (according to Publishers Weekly, adult hardcover sales were down 13% in 2008 as a result of a 5.3% drop in gross sales plus 10.8% increase in returns, and while I don't have any reliable figures for 2009, friends tell me it's been a bad year for the hardbound.)
I buy mostly paperbacks, but I'll admit, I didn't buy as many hardcover novels in 2009 as I have in years past. 99.9% of what I did buy were for blog giveaways or were copies I passed along to friends with tight book budgets. It's always been tough for me to pay $27.00 for a hardcover when I can get three paperbacks for $24.00, and I only do it for a couple authors like Mary Balogh and Linda Howard. I'm also now having trouble holding heavy hardcovers for long periods of time, and most of the big fat ones like Stephen King's latest I read from a bookstand or from the tabletop, which sometimes gives me a neck crick. Since I can't use an e-reader, paperbacks really are the most comfortable reads for me.
I think most readers are being pretty cautious when it comes to buying hardcovers, too, as I'm not seeing the booksellers moving much of their big name stock. I saw one novel by a critically-acclaimed author marked "Clearance -- 50% off" at BAM last week, which was a huge shock. Why? This particular author was advanced millions, had a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign, plus the book was just released this fall. I'd heard that it tanked, and badly, but to hold a firesale before it's even had three full months on the shelf? That is troubling.
To be published in hardcover is nice -- I've had about ten books debut that way -- but these days they're just not selling (and with the economy the way it is, I doubt that's going to change.) I'm sure the big names have enough in the bank to weather the storm, but until prestige pays the bills the working writer has a better chance of earning out and even making a profit in paperback -- and even more so in electronic format. If I were ever given a choice (most authors don't choose how their books are printed, btw; publishers decide that) I'd pick paperback every time.
Another downside to hardcovers is the short shelf life. I've notice a lot of paperback reprints of hardcover titles being released within six months of the hardcover (it used to be a year or more) which pretty much kills the sales of hardcover editions. With less time on the shelves, it's likely that a larger percentage of hardcovers are being remaindered sooner than they should be (which may also explain why the returns in 2008 were so high.)
That day at BAM I almost bought a sympathy copy of the millionaire author's 50%-off title. I know, it's weird, but in the past I have bought books because I felt sorry for their one-hit wonder authors. But evidently the economy and the plight of too many midlist authors has changed my attitude. As I picked up the book, I thought of two paperbacks I wanted that I could buy for the same price as the one hardcover. In the end I went for paperbacks instead, and honestly? I didn't feel guilty at all. I felt I was being supportive of two authors who interested me and who I know don't have millions in the bank.
As for James Patterson, I never followed any of his series books so it doesn't make any difference to me if he kills this character or not. I bet his fans feel differently, though.
I'm curious -- what, if any, hardcovers are you guys buying these days? Do you have any criteria as to what you will buy in hardcover? Do you find you're more inclined to wait for the paperback, or buy books that are first released in paperback versus hardcover? And last but not least, would an author threatening to kill off a character compel you to buy their book? Let us know what you think in comments.
Maybe it's a joke, but getting all Abraham with your readership is like telling your editor what you really think of him. Just don't go there. Ever.
I know the steady decline in hardcover sales is costing the big names lots of bucks (according to Publishers Weekly, adult hardcover sales were down 13% in 2008 as a result of a 5.3% drop in gross sales plus 10.8% increase in returns, and while I don't have any reliable figures for 2009, friends tell me it's been a bad year for the hardbound.)
I buy mostly paperbacks, but I'll admit, I didn't buy as many hardcover novels in 2009 as I have in years past. 99.9% of what I did buy were for blog giveaways or were copies I passed along to friends with tight book budgets. It's always been tough for me to pay $27.00 for a hardcover when I can get three paperbacks for $24.00, and I only do it for a couple authors like Mary Balogh and Linda Howard. I'm also now having trouble holding heavy hardcovers for long periods of time, and most of the big fat ones like Stephen King's latest I read from a bookstand or from the tabletop, which sometimes gives me a neck crick. Since I can't use an e-reader, paperbacks really are the most comfortable reads for me.
I think most readers are being pretty cautious when it comes to buying hardcovers, too, as I'm not seeing the booksellers moving much of their big name stock. I saw one novel by a critically-acclaimed author marked "Clearance -- 50% off" at BAM last week, which was a huge shock. Why? This particular author was advanced millions, had a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign, plus the book was just released this fall. I'd heard that it tanked, and badly, but to hold a firesale before it's even had three full months on the shelf? That is troubling.
To be published in hardcover is nice -- I've had about ten books debut that way -- but these days they're just not selling (and with the economy the way it is, I doubt that's going to change.) I'm sure the big names have enough in the bank to weather the storm, but until prestige pays the bills the working writer has a better chance of earning out and even making a profit in paperback -- and even more so in electronic format. If I were ever given a choice (most authors don't choose how their books are printed, btw; publishers decide that) I'd pick paperback every time.
Another downside to hardcovers is the short shelf life. I've notice a lot of paperback reprints of hardcover titles being released within six months of the hardcover (it used to be a year or more) which pretty much kills the sales of hardcover editions. With less time on the shelves, it's likely that a larger percentage of hardcovers are being remaindered sooner than they should be (which may also explain why the returns in 2008 were so high.)
That day at BAM I almost bought a sympathy copy of the millionaire author's 50%-off title. I know, it's weird, but in the past I have bought books because I felt sorry for their one-hit wonder authors. But evidently the economy and the plight of too many midlist authors has changed my attitude. As I picked up the book, I thought of two paperbacks I wanted that I could buy for the same price as the one hardcover. In the end I went for paperbacks instead, and honestly? I didn't feel guilty at all. I felt I was being supportive of two authors who interested me and who I know don't have millions in the bank.
As for James Patterson, I never followed any of his series books so it doesn't make any difference to me if he kills this character or not. I bet his fans feel differently, though.
I'm curious -- what, if any, hardcovers are you guys buying these days? Do you have any criteria as to what you will buy in hardcover? Do you find you're more inclined to wait for the paperback, or buy books that are first released in paperback versus hardcover? And last but not least, would an author threatening to kill off a character compel you to buy their book? Let us know what you think in comments.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
What Goes Around
A Timeline of Publisher Evolution
1450: Gutenberg invents movable type, which allows the Holy Bible to be massed produced in Germany. Jesus heard weeping.
1834: The world's oldest continuously published magazine releases its first issue, which contains the first hatchet job of The Pilgrims of the Rhine by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
1864: The telegraph is used to send out unsolicited SPAM for the first time, reported to be an ardent plea for the public to buy Jules Verne's latest novel or the author may have to get a day job.
1896: A prominent American university publishes its first independent student newspaper, which it calls a news-letter. Slipped in among the medical articles is a bootlegged copy of the first chapter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard.
1922: Radio advertising begins. Publishing decides to hold out for NPR to be conceived so it can pimp obscure literary authors on Fresh Air.
1941: Television advertising begins. Publishing can't afford it.
1950: Telemarketing begins. Publishing can't afford that, either.
1970: E-commerce begins. Publishing perks up.
1971: The Gutenberg Project gives birth to the e-book. Publishing believes no one will ever read an electronic book and yawns.
1980: Computerized SPAM begins. Publishing thinks, "Well, if we're not seen doing it directly . . . "
1984: Guerrilla marketing begins. Publishing misreads the announcement and does nothing because it can't figure out how to connect gorillas with books.
1985: Desktop Publishing begins. Publishing grows vaguely suspicious.
1994: First weblogs appear on the internet. Publishing thinks, "Hey, authors could do some of those . . . "
2000: Tired of trying to keep up with the changing technology, Publishing decides authors should do more self-promotion.
A Timeline of Author Evolution
2000: Authors begin keeping regularly-updated web sites.
2004: Authors begin keeping daily weblogs along with maintaining their web sites.
2005: Authors begin sending out monthly newsletters along with maintaining their daily weblogs and usually-updated web sites.
2006: Authors begin keeping daily MySpace pages along with sending out monthly newsletters and maintaining their weblogs three times a week and occasionally updating their web sites.
2007: Authors begin keeping Facebook pages along with sending out monthly newsletters every couple of months and maintaining their MySpace pages when they feel like it while making excuses on their weblogs for not updating them and crashing their web sites because they forgot the codes and stuff to use while updating them.
2008: Authors begin releasing free e-books while sending out monthly newsletters twice a year and forgetting to maintain their Facebook and MySpace pages while letting their weblogs and web sites go static.
2009: Most authors begin keeping Twitter accounts with hourly updates, in which they bitch about each other, the free e-books they're supposed to be writing, the monthly newsletters they haven't sent out since 2008, and the idiots who have hacked their Facebook and MySpace accounts. Some recall they once had weblogs and web sites but can't remember the URLs anymore.
2010: Most authors collectively collapse from a mysterious form of mental exhaustion combined with an irrational, hysterical fear of technology that makes them incapable of using computers or cell phones. Disorder is nicknamed "Selfpromophobia" and appears to be incurable.
The Future Timeline of Publishing:
2011: In a surprise move, the Amish purchase all of the now-bankrupt major publishing houses, install Gutenberg presses and begin forcing their new employees to shut up and print only plain, utilitarian copies of the Holy Bible in the colloquial form of German only the Amish can read. They hire unemployed authors to work in their warehouses packing boxes.
1450: Gutenberg invents movable type, which allows the Holy Bible to be massed produced in Germany. Jesus heard weeping.
1834: The world's oldest continuously published magazine releases its first issue, which contains the first hatchet job of The Pilgrims of the Rhine by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
1864: The telegraph is used to send out unsolicited SPAM for the first time, reported to be an ardent plea for the public to buy Jules Verne's latest novel or the author may have to get a day job.
1896: A prominent American university publishes its first independent student newspaper, which it calls a news-letter. Slipped in among the medical articles is a bootlegged copy of the first chapter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard.
1922: Radio advertising begins. Publishing decides to hold out for NPR to be conceived so it can pimp obscure literary authors on Fresh Air.
1941: Television advertising begins. Publishing can't afford it.
1950: Telemarketing begins. Publishing can't afford that, either.
1970: E-commerce begins. Publishing perks up.
1971: The Gutenberg Project gives birth to the e-book. Publishing believes no one will ever read an electronic book and yawns.
1980: Computerized SPAM begins. Publishing thinks, "Well, if we're not seen doing it directly . . . "
1984: Guerrilla marketing begins. Publishing misreads the announcement and does nothing because it can't figure out how to connect gorillas with books.
1985: Desktop Publishing begins. Publishing grows vaguely suspicious.
1994: First weblogs appear on the internet. Publishing thinks, "Hey, authors could do some of those . . . "
2000: Tired of trying to keep up with the changing technology, Publishing decides authors should do more self-promotion.
A Timeline of Author Evolution
2000: Authors begin keeping regularly-updated web sites.
2004: Authors begin keeping daily weblogs along with maintaining their web sites.
2005: Authors begin sending out monthly newsletters along with maintaining their daily weblogs and usually-updated web sites.
2006: Authors begin keeping daily MySpace pages along with sending out monthly newsletters and maintaining their weblogs three times a week and occasionally updating their web sites.
2007: Authors begin keeping Facebook pages along with sending out monthly newsletters every couple of months and maintaining their MySpace pages when they feel like it while making excuses on their weblogs for not updating them and crashing their web sites because they forgot the codes and stuff to use while updating them.
2008: Authors begin releasing free e-books while sending out monthly newsletters twice a year and forgetting to maintain their Facebook and MySpace pages while letting their weblogs and web sites go static.
2009: Most authors begin keeping Twitter accounts with hourly updates, in which they bitch about each other, the free e-books they're supposed to be writing, the monthly newsletters they haven't sent out since 2008, and the idiots who have hacked their Facebook and MySpace accounts. Some recall they once had weblogs and web sites but can't remember the URLs anymore.
2010: Most authors collectively collapse from a mysterious form of mental exhaustion combined with an irrational, hysterical fear of technology that makes them incapable of using computers or cell phones. Disorder is nicknamed "Selfpromophobia" and appears to be incurable.
The Future Timeline of Publishing:
2011: In a surprise move, the Amish purchase all of the now-bankrupt major publishing houses, install Gutenberg presses and begin forcing their new employees to shut up and print only plain, utilitarian copies of the Holy Bible in the colloquial form of German only the Amish can read. They hire unemployed authors to work in their warehouses packing boxes.
Saturday, August 08, 2009
Other Newsy Bits
With many misgivings I finally downloaded B&N.com's free eReader software to see how much of a free sample they are giving away of the e-book version of Crystal Healer. It's stored in their online library and you can access about 21 pages of front material (quotes, titles, copyright page, etc.) but only 4 pages of chapter one. I also got a bunch of stuff in my online library that I didn't want, namely all the public domain novels they touted as freebies during their launch. If this big brother approach is the direction e-readers are going, I'm definitely not jumping on the bandwagon.
Related to our discussion on the Book-o-Mat, On Demand has a promotional video on YouTube here that relates the specs on and demos the operation of their 2.0 version of the Espresso Book Machine. Kind of hypnotic to watch, actually.
Lulu has taken over Poetry.com*: "Lulu Poetry is about winning prizes and recognition for your poems, creating and selling beautiful books of your poetry, and learning tips and tricks from other enthusiastic poets just like you." I hope they don't pick up where the old Poetry.com left off.
Another very bright glimmer of what's ahead on the electronic horizon -- a fusion of internet, video and book: Vook.
*via Absolute Write
Related to our discussion on the Book-o-Mat, On Demand has a promotional video on YouTube here that relates the specs on and demos the operation of their 2.0 version of the Espresso Book Machine. Kind of hypnotic to watch, actually.
Lulu has taken over Poetry.com*: "Lulu Poetry is about winning prizes and recognition for your poems, creating and selling beautiful books of your poetry, and learning tips and tricks from other enthusiastic poets just like you." I hope they don't pick up where the old Poetry.com left off.
Another very bright glimmer of what's ahead on the electronic horizon -- a fusion of internet, video and book: Vook.
*via Absolute Write
Friday, August 07, 2009
The Next Big Mash-up
Perhaps it will soon be a truth universally acknowledged that a writer in possession of a good public domain novel that can be populated with things that go bump in the night will not be in want of a publisher.
According to this post over at Wake the Dead Podcast, the success of mixing zombies with Austen may result in a new sub-trend of classic literature ~ paranormal/horror mash-ups. We can look forward to at least one: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters.
Uh-huh. And that faint spinning sound you hear in the background is probably Jane doing 1000 rpms in her grave.
I wonder how many more classic lit reads will end up being repopulated with monsters and mayhem:
Around the World in 80 Nights
Beneath the Shores of Silver Lake
Far from the Maddening Zombie Crowd
Ivanhorror
Jane Eerie
Les Monstre Miserables
Little Undead Women
Moby Demon
The Blood-Scarlet Letter
The Count Dracula of Monte Cristo
The Great Ghost Gatsby
Uncle Tom's Cabin of Doom
Vanity Were
I hate to admit it, but I kind of like the idea of Little Undead Women. Jo and her sisters would have made interesting vampires. Hey, Beth could get staked! Okay, I know, shut up.
What about you guys? Any classics you can imagine as the next big mash-up? List your potential titles in comments.
According to this post over at Wake the Dead Podcast, the success of mixing zombies with Austen may result in a new sub-trend of classic literature ~ paranormal/horror mash-ups. We can look forward to at least one: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters.
Uh-huh. And that faint spinning sound you hear in the background is probably Jane doing 1000 rpms in her grave.
I wonder how many more classic lit reads will end up being repopulated with monsters and mayhem:
Around the World in 80 Nights
Beneath the Shores of Silver Lake
Far from the Maddening Zombie Crowd
Ivanhorror
Jane Eerie
Les Monstre Miserables
Little Undead Women
Moby Demon
The Blood-Scarlet Letter
The Count Dracula of Monte Cristo
The Great Ghost Gatsby
Uncle Tom's Cabin of Doom
Vanity Were
I hate to admit it, but I kind of like the idea of Little Undead Women. Jo and her sisters would have made interesting vampires. Hey, Beth could get staked! Okay, I know, shut up.
What about you guys? Any classics you can imagine as the next big mash-up? List your potential titles in comments.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Book-o-Mat?
Southern Living magazine had an interesting article back in their January issue about the Art-o-mat project, which repurposed 80 old cigarette vending machines to instead dispense original art by some 400 different artists. While looking up a recipe tonight I re-read the article and (since none of the machines are in my area) decided to order an Art-o-Carton to see what they are like and use as little inspirational gifts (and I'll report more on that when my order arrives.)
The UK already has novel vending machines; I saw the one at Heathrow last time I was over there. They're selling all sorts of things in airports these days; Doug Aamoth reports here on all the cool vending machines he saw at the Dallas airport last year (which included a Sony vending machine that dispensed e-Readers.)
If they're not already here, I think it's only a matter of time before we see vending machines for print books in the U.S., too. Practically every hotel I've stayed in has chips, candy, soda, ice cream and even condom vending machines, why not install in the lobby or by the pool a novel vending machine? They'd be great in hospitals (gift shops do sell a limited number of paperbacks, but they're rarely open 24/7.) They'd be wonderful in medical office buildings; I'm tired of reading those old, smudgy magazines in doctor waiting rooms.
It's all about convenience these days, and it would be great to make books more convenient to purchase on demand. As a person who buys at least five books a month from my local grocery store (because I admit, it's more convenient for me to pick them up along with the Cheerios and laundry soap than it is to drive twenty minutes to the nearest book store or wait a week for them to be delivered by an online bookseller) I'd be overjoyed to find some book vending machines in places where I know I'm going to have to wait. Also, having an interesting selection of debut novels available by vending machine might prod me into trying a newly-published author; something I might not do if I have all my old reliable-read authors at hand as I do at the book store.
What do you guys think? Good idea, bad idea, silly?
Saturday, July 18, 2009
VW #6 -- Diversify and Survive
The winners of the VW#4 giveaways are:
StarDoc Novels: Amelie Markik
Goodie Bag: sandy l
Winners, when you have a chance, please send your full name and ship-to address to LynnViehl@aol.com, and I'll get your prizes out to you. Thanks to everyone for joining in.
I. Crunching the Numbers
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2008 there were 44,170 writers and authors surveyed who earned hourly wages* ranging from $13.47 to $51.26**. The industries with the highest employment and wages for our occupation were Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishers (employing 8,790 writers); Advertising, Public Relations, and Related Services (7,260); Radio and Television Broadcasting (3,100); Motion Picture and Video Industries (2,340) and Independent Artists, Writers, and Performers (2,140).***
Of these surveyed writers, the highest-paid were the 2,140 Independent Artists, Writers, and Performers, who earned an hourly mean wage of $48.37, or an annual mean income of $100,600. Sounds lovely, doesn't it? What a great job!
Well, maybe we should first consider in addition to those nicely employed writers how many other writers are actually employed or seeking employment (because they didn't survey all of us.) How many of us are there out here?
Many writers are members of writer organizations who are always happy to count heads. Let's assume everyone who belongs to Romance Writers of America, for example, is actually serious about pursuing a professional writing career. The membership currently stands at about 10,000. Then you can add in all the writers who belong to the other writing organizations: AG (8,000+) SFWA (about 1,500), ASJA (1,100) HWA (400+), NINC (300+), and of course we shouldn't forget the screenwriters, as they're always picking up media tie-in novel work, so add in the members of WGA (12,000) and the DGA (6,000).
That's roughly about 40,000 writers. If I'm looking at the math right, then according to the wage survey we should all have nice writing jobs making at least thirteen bucks and change per hour, with some left over. Okay, workshop over, everyone go home and collect your checks and have a nice writing life.
I'm kidding. The numbers sound wonderful, but they don't really add up if you go by other figures. According to statistics offered in an interesting look at the future of publishing by author Steven Mather (you can get a .pdf version of it here), publishers each receive on average 2,100 manuscripts submissions per year, for an industry-wide total of 132 million submissions. Sounds a bit much, until you consider that there are over 75,000 publishers in the U.S. (that's how many report statistics to Bowker, anyway) and that 2,100 per year breaks down to 40 submissions per week per publisher, which sounds a bit excessive to me, but for the sake of argument we'll run with that.
So every year the forty thousand of us serious writers have been sending . . . 3300 submissions each? Holy Toledo. I better hurry up and get the other 3299 of mine typed and in the mail.
II. Help, Three Thousand People Want My Job!
The problem with statistics and random numbers is that they are the products of surveys, and surveys are limited in their accuracy to the number of people surveyed and what portion of the industry they represent. Whether or not there are 75,000 publishers in the U.S., I can safely say most of them would not consider publishing anything I'd write as Lynn Viehl. With the type of writing I do in that genre -- dark fantasy/paranormal romance -- I'd say my prospects are limited to about 100 publishers. Of those 100, about 75 aren't my top choices and likely wouldn't make it onto my submission list.
This is why I don't have to be concerned with the 132 million writers and their submissions; with the 25 publishers I am interested in I have to compete against about 52,500 other writers. About fifty thousand of them are probably not published, and less than one percent of them will make it to the show, so let's drop the fifty thousand who for whatever reason aren't going to make it into print. That leaves 2,500 other published writers competing for the same sale. We'll add back in the one percent of the writers who have never been published but who will be eventually, and kick that total up to 3,000. Yep, that sounds about right.
So every time I submit a novel, in theory I have to beat out three thousand other writers for that sale. That's how dazzling I have to be -- as good or better than three thousand other dedicated, serious, talented writers who are actively going after the same job. I think it's safe to assume that many of them are younger, prettier, better writers, more willing to do things I won't do, or have other advantages over me that could allow them to sell more books and make more money for that publisher.
My Lynn Viehl books could also fall from popularity at the same time something else one of those 3000 writers submits becomes very hot. It's the way this gig works, and those 3000 writers will continue to compete against me for my job every day of every week of every year without fail. They'll get younger every year while I just get older. Publishing isn't concerned with my job security at all. They want to sign someone who will make money for them. So it's not a question of if one of those 3000 writers will take my job from me, it's a matter of when.
Frankly I'd be worried if all I had to depend on were my Lynn Viehl books. Fortunately that's not all I write.
III. Learning Lessons from Nature
"At some point, humans are going to have to realize that our production-line mentality, which seems so efficient to us, is not really the best way to do things. We like farming just one species in neat rows because it’s easier for us to comprehend. But easier to comprehend is not the same as more effective.." -- Tom Konrad, Diversification: Nature Knows Best
Nature is a master of diversification. Since the beginning of life on this planet, she has survived and flourished through evolutionary diversification. It's the reason why there are twenty-five thousand species of flat worms, one hundred and twelve thousand species of mollusks, and maybe as many as eight million species of arthropods. Nature insures the longevity of her creations by having them adapt to the climate and environment by specialized evolution, which results in all the different species. That adaptive diversification minimizes Nature's risk and maximizes her growth potential by spreading out the total number of her creations in a variety of different forms custom-designed to survive by their genetic evolution, which responds to their specific environment.
We know from the demise of countless species that anything that can't or won't adapt and evolve is doomed to extinction. Earth doesn't have a one-size-fits-all environment, which is why we have 25,000 different species of flatworms -- there were 25,000 different reasons that triggered each species' particular adaptation. And here the numbers do make sense: what has a better chance of surviving, 25,000 species of flat worm, or one? Or, if one species of flatworm were to become extinct, which is better: having 24,999 other types of flat worms left, or none?
Despite opinions to the contrary, a writer is slightly more sophisticated and evolved than a flat worm, and while we all belong to the same species, we each have the potential to make our own adaptations to the changes in Publishing's climate and environment. If we remain the same species of writer, and only adapt to one situation, then we run a greater risk of career extinction. But if we do dump the assembly-line mentality and instead adapt to multiple Publishing climates and environments by career diversification, I think we do stand a better chance of survival.
IV. Your Writing Diversification Plan
Yes, I'm going to make you think about planning again. You should know by now that I delight in torturing you this way. Before anyone whines about how tiresome it is or the reasons why they can't make a plan, let me assure you that you can have a Publishing career without a plan. Lots of writers are happier taking the Trust in Dumb Luck approach, and some of them even manage to stay in the business for a few years. And hey, anything's possible; you might become the first John Grisham of the Clueless.
For those of you who would rather not trust your future on how well the planets align on any given day, you need to think about how you might evolve as a writer. I advocate diversification because it's helped me to survive a lot of changes and tough times. If you're interested in doing the same, follow these steps:
1. Inventory and list what you currently write by market category and type of writing, i.e. romance novels, nonfiction how-to articles, SF short stories, etc. If you only write one thing, that's fine, you'll have a very short list.
2. Make a second list, also by category and type, of types of writing you have done in the past and/or haven't yet done but are interested in. For example, my list would be have on it greeting card poems (I used to sell those), sermons (ditto), mystery short stories (wrote one), contemporary horror and Christian YA fiction (am interested in these.) Also, take some time to look around at the market ops for these projects, too -- you don't want to spend valuable writing time working on a project you can't sell.
3. You should already have a work and submission plan for list #1, but if you don't, write up a general plan for what you'd like to write and submit this year. Put together a rough estimate of how much writing time you need to devote to your current projects.
4. Now take list #2, and pick at least one item from it that you can comfortably fit in with your current writing schedule, and that has the best chance to sell (this will be based on the number of market ops out there.) Also create a rough estimate of the writing time involved in this project.
5. Using both lists, create a master work plan that allows you to a) complete everything on your current projects list and b) gives you some time to work on your interests list project.
For those of you who have never tried to diversify before now, I suggest first starting with a small project from your interests list. It can be anything from a how-to writing article you submit to some trade magazines to a short story to pitch for an open submissions anthology.
Working up a diversification plan is going to be easier for as-yet-unpublished writers, or newly-published authors. The more category-established an author you are, the more difficult it will be to sell to another/new market under that name. However, you one-category old-timers can always try to pitch a new market under a new pseudonym, or work around your category in related projects (for example, an established author with a long backlist of only science fiction novels would still be an attractive prospect for science nonfiction magazines, how-to publishers, and web sites that cater to the SF writing community.)
Contests of all types also provide opportunities for writer in all career stages to try out new interest projects, because usually you don't have to be established in that category to enter them, and what you've already published won't matter.
V. Other Reasons to Evolve as a Writer
Avoiding Labeling: A couple of years ago when we were discussing multi-genre writing and selling, someone mentioned an agent in the industry who recommended writing and publishing three books in one genre to establish yourself before you try publishing in another. With all due respect to the agent, I don't agree with this. By the time you've established yourself with three books, you're labeled with that one genre as a writer, and judged by your publisher according to your sales performance in that one genre. This narrows your chances of publishing in another area, as publishers prefer to stick with proven sellers versus taken on new risks.
Writer Self-Discovery: you think what you're writing right now is the best choice for your career, and chances are you're probably right. But what if you're not? What if you were meant to do something else you haven't tried yet? I can think of one writer who had a nice career writing cozy mysteries, and yet for some reason one day she decided to write a vampire novel. The new project was black-humored and really nothing like her other work. From what I understand she encountered a lot of resistance to it and had a tough time selling it. But she stuck with it, and it paid off handsomely. Last time I checked the Times List, three of those vampire novels were in the top twenty. HBO has just started running the second season of their television series based on those novels. So if Charlaine Harris had played it safe and stuck to writing cozies, there's be no Sookie Stackhouse novels or True Blood.
Stretching Your Writing Range: It's easy to become complacent and satisfied with one type of writing (or so I'm told), and there are some arguments that say the only way you can rise to the top of your category is to stick with it. Certainly it's the safest way to do this job, and there are enough successful cookie-cutter novelists out there to support the theory. But as a writer I'm restless. I'm also always looking for ways I can increase and improve my understanding of the craft and grow as an artist. If I did the same thing over and over, not only would I be bored out of my skull, I think I'd stagnate. For me the well would run dry. Diversification allows for writer self-improvement by forcing us to reach for more than what we already know and can do, and in the process learn new things and become better writers.
Writers aren't flat worms, but just the same our survival depends on how well we adapt. There are a ton of factors we can't control: luck, timing, buzzworthiness, etc. What we can control is what we do with the work. We can try one thing, over and over, and hope for the best, or we can diversify and try many things, and learn to adapt to the changes in the industry. However you decide you want to evolve, just be sure not to write yourself into extinction.
V. Related Links
Craigslist New York is a good resource to check if you're looking for freelance writing, editing or copy-editing/writing jobs. Just be sure to check out any listing and employer thoroughly and understand the terms of employment before you commit to work or sign a contract with anyone.
Duotrope's Digest has an online fiction and poetry market search engine; input your word length, genre and other details and it will give you a list of potential sub ops.
During a hunt for freeware back in June, I found this freeware toolbar for writers looking for jobs. I haven't tried it myself but I thought it looked neat.
Look for all manner of writing jobs at FreelanceWriting.com
Gary McLaren's article How To Find Foreign Writing Markets has some good advice for those of you who want to sell to other countries.
I regularly hit the many market listings over at Ralan's Webstravaganza for SF/Fanasty/Horror/Weird/Strange/Whatever sub ops to list here at PBW.
My ten things list on additional places to find writing jobs.
Some ideas on how to beat the recession: Diversify to Keep Freelance Dollars Coming In ~ Economy-Proof Tips for Writers by Mary Yerkes
Photo credit: David Hughes
*"Annual wages have been calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a "year-round, full-time" hours figure of 2,080 hours; for those occupations where there is not an hourly mean wage published, the annual wage has been directly calculated from the reported survey data."
**All wage amounts shown are in U.S. dollars
***"Estimates for detailed occupations do not sum to the totals because the totals include occupations not shown separately. Estimates do not include self-employed workers."
Today's LB&LI giveaways are:
1) A MusicWish (any CD of the winner's choice which is available to order online, up to a max cost of $30.00 U.S.; I'll throw in the shipping)
2) a goodie bag which will include unsigned new copies of:
Burn by Linda Howard (hardcover)
Way of the Cheetah by Lynn Viehl (author-printed, signed and bound in a three-ring binder)
Halo ~ The Cole Protocol by Tobias Buckell (trade pb)
88 Money-Making Writing Jobs by Robert Bly (trade pb)
The Pajama Girls of Lambert Square by Rosina Lippi (trade pb)
Between the Lines ~ the Subtle Elements of Fiction Writing by Jessica Page Morrell (trade pb)
Animal Attraction by Charlene Teglia (trade pb)
Taken by Sin by Jaci Burton (paperback)
Touch of Darkness, Scent of Darkness and Into the Shadow by Christina Dodd (paperbacks)
Round the Clock by Dara Girard (paperback)
Amazon Ink by Lori Devoti (paperback)
Hawkspar by Holly Lisle (paperbacks)
The Iron Hunt and Darkness Calls by Marjorie M. Liu (paperbacks)
plus signed paperback copies of my novels StarDoc and Evermore, as well as some other surprises.
If you'd like to win one of these two giveaways, name a genre you'd like to write in, or comment on this workshop before midnight EST on Sunday, July 19, 2009. I will draw two names from everyone who participates and send one winner the goodie bag and grant the other a MusicWish.
Everyone who participates in the giveaways this week will also be automatically entered in my grand prize drawing on July 21st, 2009 for the winner's choice of either a ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-P 10.1" Seashell Netbook or a Sony PRS-700BC Digital Reader.
As always, all LB&LI giveaways are open to anyone on the planet, even if you've won something here at PBW in the past.
Other LB&LI Workshop Links -- new links are being added every day, so keep checking the list for new workshops (due to different time zones, some of these will go live later in the day):
E-publishing: From Query to Final Edits and Beyond -- Authors Madison Blake, Paris Brandon, Cerise Deland, Fran Lee, Afton Locke and Nina Pierce provide helpful insights and tips on e-publishing. Today's author: Fran Lee
Writing Transformative Sex - Part Two by Joely Sue Burkhart -- So you know you want to avoid Plot Interrupted and Tab A/Slot B mechanics, but how do you get “down and dirty” into the emotions of a really deep sex scene?
Bird Migration by Suelder -- third in a series of workshops on birds that will focus on the science as well as how to adapt this information to writing.
Why You're Not Writing by JM Fiction Scribe -- Examining the reasons behind your writing block - because the identifying the 'why' of the problem is the best way of getting past it.
How-To Books that Saved My Life by Alison Kent -- a look at the three how-to books the author can't write without, and why.
Break through your fears and write! by Tamlyn Leigh -- One of the biggest obstacles on a writer's path is their fear. It can be for anything: fear people won't like their stories, fear they aren't good enough. In my workshop I want to offer tools to break through that fear, and get everyone writing!
Writing Prompt Series by Rosina Lippi -- catch up day.
Have No Fear by Marjorie M. Liu -- third in a series of workshops about different aspects of writing and publishing.
From Pantser To Plotter: How I Joined The Dark Side by Kait Nolan -- five workshops on the transformation of a pantser to a plotter.
Writing Sex Scenes That Matter by Jenna Reynolds -- Readers sometimes say they skip over the sex scenes in a book. And usually it's not because they have a problem with the sex. It could, however, be because, other than the sex, nothing else is going on. This workshop provides some suggestions on how to write sex scenes that matter and that readers won't skip over.
Defining the Basics by Midnight Spencer –– Query, Cover letter, Blurb, Synopsis, ms or mss, SASE, SAE, Copyright, Electronic Rights, Electronic Submissions, Erotica (some people do not know that romance and erotica are two different types of writing), Genre, Hook, Pen Name, Proof Reading, Fair Use, Joint Contract,
Left Behind in Interesting Times by Charlene Teglia -- e-publishing in interesting times.
Epubs-wondering where to start? by Shiloh Walker -- Info for those curious about epubs and where to start.
Killer Campaigns: Volunteerism by Maria Zannini -- Passive promotion at its best
StarDoc Novels: Amelie Markik
Goodie Bag: sandy l
Winners, when you have a chance, please send your full name and ship-to address to LynnViehl@aol.com, and I'll get your prizes out to you. Thanks to everyone for joining in.
I. Crunching the Numbers
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2008 there were 44,170 writers and authors surveyed who earned hourly wages* ranging from $13.47 to $51.26**. The industries with the highest employment and wages for our occupation were Newspaper, Periodical, Book, and Directory Publishers (employing 8,790 writers); Advertising, Public Relations, and Related Services (7,260); Radio and Television Broadcasting (3,100); Motion Picture and Video Industries (2,340) and Independent Artists, Writers, and Performers (2,140).***
Of these surveyed writers, the highest-paid were the 2,140 Independent Artists, Writers, and Performers, who earned an hourly mean wage of $48.37, or an annual mean income of $100,600. Sounds lovely, doesn't it? What a great job!
Well, maybe we should first consider in addition to those nicely employed writers how many other writers are actually employed or seeking employment (because they didn't survey all of us.) How many of us are there out here?
Many writers are members of writer organizations who are always happy to count heads. Let's assume everyone who belongs to Romance Writers of America, for example, is actually serious about pursuing a professional writing career. The membership currently stands at about 10,000. Then you can add in all the writers who belong to the other writing organizations: AG (8,000+) SFWA (about 1,500), ASJA (1,100) HWA (400+), NINC (300+), and of course we shouldn't forget the screenwriters, as they're always picking up media tie-in novel work, so add in the members of WGA (12,000) and the DGA (6,000).
That's roughly about 40,000 writers. If I'm looking at the math right, then according to the wage survey we should all have nice writing jobs making at least thirteen bucks and change per hour, with some left over. Okay, workshop over, everyone go home and collect your checks and have a nice writing life.
I'm kidding. The numbers sound wonderful, but they don't really add up if you go by other figures. According to statistics offered in an interesting look at the future of publishing by author Steven Mather (you can get a .pdf version of it here), publishers each receive on average 2,100 manuscripts submissions per year, for an industry-wide total of 132 million submissions. Sounds a bit much, until you consider that there are over 75,000 publishers in the U.S. (that's how many report statistics to Bowker, anyway) and that 2,100 per year breaks down to 40 submissions per week per publisher, which sounds a bit excessive to me, but for the sake of argument we'll run with that.
So every year the forty thousand of us serious writers have been sending . . . 3300 submissions each? Holy Toledo. I better hurry up and get the other 3299 of mine typed and in the mail.
II. Help, Three Thousand People Want My Job!
The problem with statistics and random numbers is that they are the products of surveys, and surveys are limited in their accuracy to the number of people surveyed and what portion of the industry they represent. Whether or not there are 75,000 publishers in the U.S., I can safely say most of them would not consider publishing anything I'd write as Lynn Viehl. With the type of writing I do in that genre -- dark fantasy/paranormal romance -- I'd say my prospects are limited to about 100 publishers. Of those 100, about 75 aren't my top choices and likely wouldn't make it onto my submission list.
This is why I don't have to be concerned with the 132 million writers and their submissions; with the 25 publishers I am interested in I have to compete against about 52,500 other writers. About fifty thousand of them are probably not published, and less than one percent of them will make it to the show, so let's drop the fifty thousand who for whatever reason aren't going to make it into print. That leaves 2,500 other published writers competing for the same sale. We'll add back in the one percent of the writers who have never been published but who will be eventually, and kick that total up to 3,000. Yep, that sounds about right.
So every time I submit a novel, in theory I have to beat out three thousand other writers for that sale. That's how dazzling I have to be -- as good or better than three thousand other dedicated, serious, talented writers who are actively going after the same job. I think it's safe to assume that many of them are younger, prettier, better writers, more willing to do things I won't do, or have other advantages over me that could allow them to sell more books and make more money for that publisher.
My Lynn Viehl books could also fall from popularity at the same time something else one of those 3000 writers submits becomes very hot. It's the way this gig works, and those 3000 writers will continue to compete against me for my job every day of every week of every year without fail. They'll get younger every year while I just get older. Publishing isn't concerned with my job security at all. They want to sign someone who will make money for them. So it's not a question of if one of those 3000 writers will take my job from me, it's a matter of when.
Frankly I'd be worried if all I had to depend on were my Lynn Viehl books. Fortunately that's not all I write.
III. Learning Lessons from Nature
"At some point, humans are going to have to realize that our production-line mentality, which seems so efficient to us, is not really the best way to do things. We like farming just one species in neat rows because it’s easier for us to comprehend. But easier to comprehend is not the same as more effective.." -- Tom Konrad, Diversification: Nature Knows Best
Nature is a master of diversification. Since the beginning of life on this planet, she has survived and flourished through evolutionary diversification. It's the reason why there are twenty-five thousand species of flat worms, one hundred and twelve thousand species of mollusks, and maybe as many as eight million species of arthropods. Nature insures the longevity of her creations by having them adapt to the climate and environment by specialized evolution, which results in all the different species. That adaptive diversification minimizes Nature's risk and maximizes her growth potential by spreading out the total number of her creations in a variety of different forms custom-designed to survive by their genetic evolution, which responds to their specific environment.
We know from the demise of countless species that anything that can't or won't adapt and evolve is doomed to extinction. Earth doesn't have a one-size-fits-all environment, which is why we have 25,000 different species of flatworms -- there were 25,000 different reasons that triggered each species' particular adaptation. And here the numbers do make sense: what has a better chance of surviving, 25,000 species of flat worm, or one? Or, if one species of flatworm were to become extinct, which is better: having 24,999 other types of flat worms left, or none?
Despite opinions to the contrary, a writer is slightly more sophisticated and evolved than a flat worm, and while we all belong to the same species, we each have the potential to make our own adaptations to the changes in Publishing's climate and environment. If we remain the same species of writer, and only adapt to one situation, then we run a greater risk of career extinction. But if we do dump the assembly-line mentality and instead adapt to multiple Publishing climates and environments by career diversification, I think we do stand a better chance of survival.
IV. Your Writing Diversification Plan
Yes, I'm going to make you think about planning again. You should know by now that I delight in torturing you this way. Before anyone whines about how tiresome it is or the reasons why they can't make a plan, let me assure you that you can have a Publishing career without a plan. Lots of writers are happier taking the Trust in Dumb Luck approach, and some of them even manage to stay in the business for a few years. And hey, anything's possible; you might become the first John Grisham of the Clueless.
For those of you who would rather not trust your future on how well the planets align on any given day, you need to think about how you might evolve as a writer. I advocate diversification because it's helped me to survive a lot of changes and tough times. If you're interested in doing the same, follow these steps:
1. Inventory and list what you currently write by market category and type of writing, i.e. romance novels, nonfiction how-to articles, SF short stories, etc. If you only write one thing, that's fine, you'll have a very short list.
2. Make a second list, also by category and type, of types of writing you have done in the past and/or haven't yet done but are interested in. For example, my list would be have on it greeting card poems (I used to sell those), sermons (ditto), mystery short stories (wrote one), contemporary horror and Christian YA fiction (am interested in these.) Also, take some time to look around at the market ops for these projects, too -- you don't want to spend valuable writing time working on a project you can't sell.
3. You should already have a work and submission plan for list #1, but if you don't, write up a general plan for what you'd like to write and submit this year. Put together a rough estimate of how much writing time you need to devote to your current projects.
4. Now take list #2, and pick at least one item from it that you can comfortably fit in with your current writing schedule, and that has the best chance to sell (this will be based on the number of market ops out there.) Also create a rough estimate of the writing time involved in this project.
5. Using both lists, create a master work plan that allows you to a) complete everything on your current projects list and b) gives you some time to work on your interests list project.
For those of you who have never tried to diversify before now, I suggest first starting with a small project from your interests list. It can be anything from a how-to writing article you submit to some trade magazines to a short story to pitch for an open submissions anthology.
Working up a diversification plan is going to be easier for as-yet-unpublished writers, or newly-published authors. The more category-established an author you are, the more difficult it will be to sell to another/new market under that name. However, you one-category old-timers can always try to pitch a new market under a new pseudonym, or work around your category in related projects (for example, an established author with a long backlist of only science fiction novels would still be an attractive prospect for science nonfiction magazines, how-to publishers, and web sites that cater to the SF writing community.)
Contests of all types also provide opportunities for writer in all career stages to try out new interest projects, because usually you don't have to be established in that category to enter them, and what you've already published won't matter.
V. Other Reasons to Evolve as a Writer
Avoiding Labeling: A couple of years ago when we were discussing multi-genre writing and selling, someone mentioned an agent in the industry who recommended writing and publishing three books in one genre to establish yourself before you try publishing in another. With all due respect to the agent, I don't agree with this. By the time you've established yourself with three books, you're labeled with that one genre as a writer, and judged by your publisher according to your sales performance in that one genre. This narrows your chances of publishing in another area, as publishers prefer to stick with proven sellers versus taken on new risks.
Writer Self-Discovery: you think what you're writing right now is the best choice for your career, and chances are you're probably right. But what if you're not? What if you were meant to do something else you haven't tried yet? I can think of one writer who had a nice career writing cozy mysteries, and yet for some reason one day she decided to write a vampire novel. The new project was black-humored and really nothing like her other work. From what I understand she encountered a lot of resistance to it and had a tough time selling it. But she stuck with it, and it paid off handsomely. Last time I checked the Times List, three of those vampire novels were in the top twenty. HBO has just started running the second season of their television series based on those novels. So if Charlaine Harris had played it safe and stuck to writing cozies, there's be no Sookie Stackhouse novels or True Blood.
Stretching Your Writing Range: It's easy to become complacent and satisfied with one type of writing (or so I'm told), and there are some arguments that say the only way you can rise to the top of your category is to stick with it. Certainly it's the safest way to do this job, and there are enough successful cookie-cutter novelists out there to support the theory. But as a writer I'm restless. I'm also always looking for ways I can increase and improve my understanding of the craft and grow as an artist. If I did the same thing over and over, not only would I be bored out of my skull, I think I'd stagnate. For me the well would run dry. Diversification allows for writer self-improvement by forcing us to reach for more than what we already know and can do, and in the process learn new things and become better writers.
Writers aren't flat worms, but just the same our survival depends on how well we adapt. There are a ton of factors we can't control: luck, timing, buzzworthiness, etc. What we can control is what we do with the work. We can try one thing, over and over, and hope for the best, or we can diversify and try many things, and learn to adapt to the changes in the industry. However you decide you want to evolve, just be sure not to write yourself into extinction.
V. Related Links
Craigslist New York is a good resource to check if you're looking for freelance writing, editing or copy-editing/writing jobs. Just be sure to check out any listing and employer thoroughly and understand the terms of employment before you commit to work or sign a contract with anyone.
Duotrope's Digest has an online fiction and poetry market search engine; input your word length, genre and other details and it will give you a list of potential sub ops.
During a hunt for freeware back in June, I found this freeware toolbar for writers looking for jobs. I haven't tried it myself but I thought it looked neat.
Look for all manner of writing jobs at FreelanceWriting.com
Gary McLaren's article How To Find Foreign Writing Markets has some good advice for those of you who want to sell to other countries.
I regularly hit the many market listings over at Ralan's Webstravaganza for SF/Fanasty/Horror/Weird/Strange/Whatever sub ops to list here at PBW.
My ten things list on additional places to find writing jobs.
Some ideas on how to beat the recession: Diversify to Keep Freelance Dollars Coming In ~ Economy-Proof Tips for Writers by Mary Yerkes
Photo credit: David Hughes
*"Annual wages have been calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a "year-round, full-time" hours figure of 2,080 hours; for those occupations where there is not an hourly mean wage published, the annual wage has been directly calculated from the reported survey data."
**All wage amounts shown are in U.S. dollars
***"Estimates for detailed occupations do not sum to the totals because the totals include occupations not shown separately. Estimates do not include self-employed workers."
Today's LB&LI giveaways are:
1) A MusicWish (any CD of the winner's choice which is available to order online, up to a max cost of $30.00 U.S.; I'll throw in the shipping)
2) a goodie bag which will include unsigned new copies of:
Burn by Linda Howard (hardcover)
Way of the Cheetah by Lynn Viehl (author-printed, signed and bound in a three-ring binder)
Halo ~ The Cole Protocol by Tobias Buckell (trade pb)
88 Money-Making Writing Jobs by Robert Bly (trade pb)
The Pajama Girls of Lambert Square by Rosina Lippi (trade pb)
Between the Lines ~ the Subtle Elements of Fiction Writing by Jessica Page Morrell (trade pb)
Animal Attraction by Charlene Teglia (trade pb)
Taken by Sin by Jaci Burton (paperback)
Touch of Darkness, Scent of Darkness and Into the Shadow by Christina Dodd (paperbacks)
Round the Clock by Dara Girard (paperback)
Amazon Ink by Lori Devoti (paperback)
Hawkspar by Holly Lisle (paperbacks)
The Iron Hunt and Darkness Calls by Marjorie M. Liu (paperbacks)
plus signed paperback copies of my novels StarDoc and Evermore, as well as some other surprises.
If you'd like to win one of these two giveaways, name a genre you'd like to write in, or comment on this workshop before midnight EST on Sunday, July 19, 2009. I will draw two names from everyone who participates and send one winner the goodie bag and grant the other a MusicWish.
Everyone who participates in the giveaways this week will also be automatically entered in my grand prize drawing on July 21st, 2009 for the winner's choice of either a ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-P 10.1" Seashell Netbook or a Sony PRS-700BC Digital Reader.
As always, all LB&LI giveaways are open to anyone on the planet, even if you've won something here at PBW in the past.
Other LB&LI Workshop Links -- new links are being added every day, so keep checking the list for new workshops (due to different time zones, some of these will go live later in the day):
E-publishing: From Query to Final Edits and Beyond -- Authors Madison Blake, Paris Brandon, Cerise Deland, Fran Lee, Afton Locke and Nina Pierce provide helpful insights and tips on e-publishing. Today's author: Fran Lee
Writing Transformative Sex - Part Two by Joely Sue Burkhart -- So you know you want to avoid Plot Interrupted and Tab A/Slot B mechanics, but how do you get “down and dirty” into the emotions of a really deep sex scene?
Bird Migration by Suelder -- third in a series of workshops on birds that will focus on the science as well as how to adapt this information to writing.
Why You're Not Writing by JM Fiction Scribe -- Examining the reasons behind your writing block - because the identifying the 'why' of the problem is the best way of getting past it.
How-To Books that Saved My Life by Alison Kent -- a look at the three how-to books the author can't write without, and why.
Break through your fears and write! by Tamlyn Leigh -- One of the biggest obstacles on a writer's path is their fear. It can be for anything: fear people won't like their stories, fear they aren't good enough. In my workshop I want to offer tools to break through that fear, and get everyone writing!
Writing Prompt Series by Rosina Lippi -- catch up day.
Have No Fear by Marjorie M. Liu -- third in a series of workshops about different aspects of writing and publishing.
From Pantser To Plotter: How I Joined The Dark Side by Kait Nolan -- five workshops on the transformation of a pantser to a plotter.
Writing Sex Scenes That Matter by Jenna Reynolds -- Readers sometimes say they skip over the sex scenes in a book. And usually it's not because they have a problem with the sex. It could, however, be because, other than the sex, nothing else is going on. This workshop provides some suggestions on how to write sex scenes that matter and that readers won't skip over.
Defining the Basics by Midnight Spencer –– Query, Cover letter, Blurb, Synopsis, ms or mss, SASE, SAE, Copyright, Electronic Rights, Electronic Submissions, Erotica (some people do not know that romance and erotica are two different types of writing), Genre, Hook, Pen Name, Proof Reading, Fair Use, Joint Contract,
Left Behind in Interesting Times by Charlene Teglia -- e-publishing in interesting times.
Epubs-wondering where to start? by Shiloh Walker -- Info for those curious about epubs and where to start.
Killer Campaigns: Volunteerism by Maria Zannini -- Passive promotion at its best
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Writing with the Stars
ANNOUNCER: Live from New York, this is Writing with the Stars!
JOHN: Yes it is! Welcome to an all new season of Writing with the Stars. I'm John Burgeoise--
SMANTHA: And I'm Smantha Airhead. Tonight in this live, two-hour premiere event, we kick off a random search for brand-new champions.
JOHN: As you may have heard, the drama has already started, and our writers haven't even been properly introduced. And so as they take their first steps down our brand-new grand staircase, let's welcome the writers of season eight!
(Band plays intro music, audience applauds wildly)
JOHN: Horror legend Steven "Twinkletoes" King and aspiring writer StephaReneeEsme Mayer!
SMANTHA: Suspense powerhouse Deano "Pup-Daddy" Coontz and aspiring writer Patti "Armed and Dangerous" Cornwall!
JOHN: Romance wonder Nick "I Don't Write Romance, You Ass" Sparklies and aspiring writer Laura "What's Romance Mean Again?" Hammytown.
SMANTHA: Literary giant Tom "Big Bad" Wolfman and aspiring writer Audrey "Betcha Can't Say it Five Times Real Fast" Neffenhortonhearsawhonegrabutnotasluryouunderstandegaraffra!
(audience cheers)
JOHN: I love opening night! So there they are, the most anticipated collection of publishing darlings and hopefuls ever assembled. Only four of this season's thirteen couples stand before us, as last week the other nine dropped out due to self-inflicted injuries, which some have said were bullshit excuses so they could accept better offers from Publishing Idol, but that's how it is with writers, money-hungry lying gold-diggers that they are. Later on we'll reveal the names of whoever we could scrounge from the Tiki bar at the Maui conference to replace them.
(audience boos)
SMANTHA: As for some other writers, love is already in the air. We've got Polaroids of what was going on in the green room between takes. (wags finger) Stevie and Laurie, you naughty wordsmiths.
STEVEN: (indignantly) It was just some research for my next love story: Laurel's Story. See, when I was a boy, my grandfather, the mayor of our small little town in Maine that was hiding a terrible secret that all of us knew about but didn't really know about, sat down and told my father--
LAURA: (studying manicure) Oh, please. (to Smantha) I'll have you know that he wouldn't even slap me around a little.
STEVEN: (turns red) Well, at least I didn't come here wearing a merry widow, spike heels and screw-me red lipstick.
LAURA: (smothers yawn) Why not, did the wife borrow yours again?
PATTI: (takes out nine millimeter) I brought my piece. The one I sleep with under my pillow. You know I'm being stalked, right?
(audience hoots)
JOHN: I was really hoping these relationships would last for a change. Guess not. But we've been chuckling over the training videos, as it seems this season we've got two of the worst writers in the history of Writing with the Stars.
(audience laughs)
DEANO: Hey, you better not be talking about me. My dog is sitting right backstage and I'm not afraid to give him the "kill" signal.
PATTI: (perks up) Really? Huh. (looks at gun) Never thought about keeping a dog under my pillow. Bet the right kind would make mincemeat out of my stalkers.
STEVEN: (to Patti) You're nobody. You have to be somebody to be stalked, you twit.
PATTI: (angrily) I am too somebody.
STEVEN: Are not.
PATTI: Am too, am too, am too!
TOM: Excuse me, children, but the bickering is getting a bit much. (to Deano) Oh, is that what happened to your last novel, dear boy? Did the dog get at it first, I mean? It certainly looked like your sales were, ah, terminal. So sad to see it happen, too, you being such a (makes air quotes) prolific little hack.
PATTI: Asshole. (to Deano) Want me to shoot him for you?
NICK: (to Patti) Now, Patti, put that gun away before it shoots someone's eye out. (to Tom) Tom, is that any way to talk to your fellow competitor?
TOM: (sniffs, looks up at the ceiling) That Sparkly man is trying to speak to me again.
AUDREY: (leaning over to glare at Nick) Yo, fruitcake. The Man in White doesn't want to talk to you. So shut the hell up.
STEPHARENEEESME: (folds arms) I'm not writing if Audrey keeps using bad language like that.
AUDREY: (flips off StephaReneeEsme) You're just jealous 'cause my pseudonym is longer and more interesting than yours.
STEPHARENEEESME: Am not.
AUDREY: Are too.
STEPHARENEEESME: (shrieks) Am not!
AUDREY: (shrieks back) Are too!
PATTI: (eagerly, to John) Want me to shoot one of them? I took lessons at Quantico. Really.
TOM: (sighs) Contrary to popular belief, that isn't a substitute for a penis, Patti dear. Trust me, in these matters I'm an expert.
STEVEN: (to Tom) You are so self-absorbed you're turning into a black hole. (to Patti) If you don't shut up I'm going to start stalking you. (to StephaReneeEsme) You couldn't write your way out of a paper bag even if it were open and being shaken upside down. (To Audrey) Audrey's Story has kind of nice ring to it. What are you doing after the show?
LAURA: (to Audrey) Don't go there, girlfriend. Guy is so not the woman-hater he's made out to be. I speak from boring experience.
JOHN: Ladies and gentlemen -- and I use those terms loosely -- it's time to start the competition!
(Stage hands wheel out computer stations with eight old used Gateway computers, coffee-splattered keyboards, and one shared dot-matrix printer with a frayed splitter cable.)
STEVEN: (to Laura) Am too a woman-hater. Just ask her (pokes StephaReneeEsme).
SMANTHA: Okay, writers, time to sit down and do some writing with the stars!
DEANO: (checks watch) Oh, dear, it's time for Bestseller's kibble and bits. Must run. S'been lovely. Ta. (walks off stage.)
PATTI: Hey! You want me to shoot you? (follows Deano offstage.)
STEVEN: I can't write like this. I need a beer. Brownies. Baseball. Something other than this blank-page loving bimbette. I remember when my uncle, who was the town sheriff during that terrible summer, told my older brother, who told me . . . (walks offstage.)
STEPHARENEEESME: Wait, Stevie. I can prove to you I'm a great writer. It's all implied, you see. (follows Steven offstage.)
TOM: Come, darling, let's go and get an espresso. (offers his arm to Audrey) I'll tell you all about that summer when Updike and I went midnight skinny-dipping in Buckley's pool. Did you know he wasn't circumcised? (Tom and Audrey walk offstage.)
LAURA: Great. And to think I spent two hours having myself laced into this black satin whaleboned mother for nothing. (walks offstage.)
NICK: (shoves hands in pockets, takes center stage, smiles sheepishly) Looks like I win again.
SMANTHA: (admiringly) And you didn't even have to type a single word to do it -- just like the last seven seasons! You're such an amazing writer!
JOHN: Well, folks, that does it for another season of Writing with the Stars. Although at this rate we may have to rename the show Not Writing with the Stars. Anyway, thank you for joining us, and be sure to tune in for Season nine next week!
JOHN: Yes it is! Welcome to an all new season of Writing with the Stars. I'm John Burgeoise--
SMANTHA: And I'm Smantha Airhead. Tonight in this live, two-hour premiere event, we kick off a random search for brand-new champions.
JOHN: As you may have heard, the drama has already started, and our writers haven't even been properly introduced. And so as they take their first steps down our brand-new grand staircase, let's welcome the writers of season eight!
(Band plays intro music, audience applauds wildly)
JOHN: Horror legend Steven "Twinkletoes" King and aspiring writer StephaReneeEsme Mayer!
SMANTHA: Suspense powerhouse Deano "Pup-Daddy" Coontz and aspiring writer Patti "Armed and Dangerous" Cornwall!
JOHN: Romance wonder Nick "I Don't Write Romance, You Ass" Sparklies and aspiring writer Laura "What's Romance Mean Again?" Hammytown.
SMANTHA: Literary giant Tom "Big Bad" Wolfman and aspiring writer Audrey "Betcha Can't Say it Five Times Real Fast" Neffenhortonhearsawhonegrabutnotasluryouunderstandegaraffra!
(audience cheers)
JOHN: I love opening night! So there they are, the most anticipated collection of publishing darlings and hopefuls ever assembled. Only four of this season's thirteen couples stand before us, as last week the other nine dropped out due to self-inflicted injuries, which some have said were bullshit excuses so they could accept better offers from Publishing Idol, but that's how it is with writers, money-hungry lying gold-diggers that they are. Later on we'll reveal the names of whoever we could scrounge from the Tiki bar at the Maui conference to replace them.
(audience boos)
SMANTHA: As for some other writers, love is already in the air. We've got Polaroids of what was going on in the green room between takes. (wags finger) Stevie and Laurie, you naughty wordsmiths.
STEVEN: (indignantly) It was just some research for my next love story: Laurel's Story. See, when I was a boy, my grandfather, the mayor of our small little town in Maine that was hiding a terrible secret that all of us knew about but didn't really know about, sat down and told my father--
LAURA: (studying manicure) Oh, please. (to Smantha) I'll have you know that he wouldn't even slap me around a little.
STEVEN: (turns red) Well, at least I didn't come here wearing a merry widow, spike heels and screw-me red lipstick.
LAURA: (smothers yawn) Why not, did the wife borrow yours again?
PATTI: (takes out nine millimeter) I brought my piece. The one I sleep with under my pillow. You know I'm being stalked, right?
(audience hoots)
JOHN: I was really hoping these relationships would last for a change. Guess not. But we've been chuckling over the training videos, as it seems this season we've got two of the worst writers in the history of Writing with the Stars.
(audience laughs)
DEANO: Hey, you better not be talking about me. My dog is sitting right backstage and I'm not afraid to give him the "kill" signal.
PATTI: (perks up) Really? Huh. (looks at gun) Never thought about keeping a dog under my pillow. Bet the right kind would make mincemeat out of my stalkers.
STEVEN: (to Patti) You're nobody. You have to be somebody to be stalked, you twit.
PATTI: (angrily) I am too somebody.
STEVEN: Are not.
PATTI: Am too, am too, am too!
TOM: Excuse me, children, but the bickering is getting a bit much. (to Deano) Oh, is that what happened to your last novel, dear boy? Did the dog get at it first, I mean? It certainly looked like your sales were, ah, terminal. So sad to see it happen, too, you being such a (makes air quotes) prolific little hack.
PATTI: Asshole. (to Deano) Want me to shoot him for you?
NICK: (to Patti) Now, Patti, put that gun away before it shoots someone's eye out. (to Tom) Tom, is that any way to talk to your fellow competitor?
TOM: (sniffs, looks up at the ceiling) That Sparkly man is trying to speak to me again.
AUDREY: (leaning over to glare at Nick) Yo, fruitcake. The Man in White doesn't want to talk to you. So shut the hell up.
STEPHARENEEESME: (folds arms) I'm not writing if Audrey keeps using bad language like that.
AUDREY: (flips off StephaReneeEsme) You're just jealous 'cause my pseudonym is longer and more interesting than yours.
STEPHARENEEESME: Am not.
AUDREY: Are too.
STEPHARENEEESME: (shrieks) Am not!
AUDREY: (shrieks back) Are too!
PATTI: (eagerly, to John) Want me to shoot one of them? I took lessons at Quantico. Really.
TOM: (sighs) Contrary to popular belief, that isn't a substitute for a penis, Patti dear. Trust me, in these matters I'm an expert.
STEVEN: (to Tom) You are so self-absorbed you're turning into a black hole. (to Patti) If you don't shut up I'm going to start stalking you. (to StephaReneeEsme) You couldn't write your way out of a paper bag even if it were open and being shaken upside down. (To Audrey) Audrey's Story has kind of nice ring to it. What are you doing after the show?
LAURA: (to Audrey) Don't go there, girlfriend. Guy is so not the woman-hater he's made out to be. I speak from boring experience.
JOHN: Ladies and gentlemen -- and I use those terms loosely -- it's time to start the competition!
(Stage hands wheel out computer stations with eight old used Gateway computers, coffee-splattered keyboards, and one shared dot-matrix printer with a frayed splitter cable.)
STEVEN: (to Laura) Am too a woman-hater. Just ask her (pokes StephaReneeEsme).
SMANTHA: Okay, writers, time to sit down and do some writing with the stars!
DEANO: (checks watch) Oh, dear, it's time for Bestseller's kibble and bits. Must run. S'been lovely. Ta. (walks off stage.)
PATTI: Hey! You want me to shoot you? (follows Deano offstage.)
STEVEN: I can't write like this. I need a beer. Brownies. Baseball. Something other than this blank-page loving bimbette. I remember when my uncle, who was the town sheriff during that terrible summer, told my older brother, who told me . . . (walks offstage.)
STEPHARENEEESME: Wait, Stevie. I can prove to you I'm a great writer. It's all implied, you see. (follows Steven offstage.)
TOM: Come, darling, let's go and get an espresso. (offers his arm to Audrey) I'll tell you all about that summer when Updike and I went midnight skinny-dipping in Buckley's pool. Did you know he wasn't circumcised? (Tom and Audrey walk offstage.)
LAURA: Great. And to think I spent two hours having myself laced into this black satin whaleboned mother for nothing. (walks offstage.)
NICK: (shoves hands in pockets, takes center stage, smiles sheepishly) Looks like I win again.
SMANTHA: (admiringly) And you didn't even have to type a single word to do it -- just like the last seven seasons! You're such an amazing writer!
JOHN: Well, folks, that does it for another season of Writing with the Stars. Although at this rate we may have to rename the show Not Writing with the Stars. Anyway, thank you for joining us, and be sure to tune in for Season nine next week!
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
The New Venture
The agent e-mailed me tonight to let me know that yes, several publishers are interested in providing financial backing for my new venture. So I think it's safe to finally unveil the project: a brand new web site devoted to exposing the most serious problems affecting the publishing industry today.
I think the title says it all: Bootleggers, Buzzkillers and Blurb Sluts
Has a nice ring to it, don't you think? Kind of like lions and tigers and bears, only without the fur. Anyway, my new web site will be devoted to hunting down, exposing and perpetually plaguing the three Bs, who are of course the root of all evil in our industry. Here's a look at some of the debut week articles:
Meet Your Favorite Bootlegger!: Names and addresses of those misguided souls who illegally scan and post print books online, along with driving directions and car pool forums for authors who want to go as a group to talk to multiple offenders.
A Day at Work with the Buzzkiller: How to organize a protest rally at your favorite buzzkiller's workplace, and let their boss know what they've been doing on their work computer when they were supposed to be balancing out those toilet seat accounts.
Correcting the Blurb Sluts: Sharpie marker giveaways all month so you can black out the b.s. quotes from cronies on the covers of all those over-hyped underwritten books. Markers also come in handy when you want to draw funny mustaches on the blurb slut's book jacket photo.
Bonus: Interview with a Buzzkiller! Find out why Ms. Anonymous really posted 978 one-star reviews on Amazon.com last month, just as soon as we find her, tackle her and threaten to tickle her until she confesses.
I can't wait to get started on this, frankly, because it's the kind of work I was meant to do. Yes, I know, I'll have to give up writing novels, change my name, dye my hair and live in a small village that has no indoor plumbing in France to escape persecution, but the work is so important I feel that any and all sacrifices on my part are simply worth it.
As soon as Bootleggers, Buzzkillers and Blurb Sluts goes live you guys will be the first to know. In the meantime, cross your fingers, wish me luck and mark this date on your calendar. You do know what day it is, right?
I think the title says it all: Bootleggers, Buzzkillers and Blurb Sluts
Has a nice ring to it, don't you think? Kind of like lions and tigers and bears, only without the fur. Anyway, my new web site will be devoted to hunting down, exposing and perpetually plaguing the three Bs, who are of course the root of all evil in our industry. Here's a look at some of the debut week articles:
Meet Your Favorite Bootlegger!: Names and addresses of those misguided souls who illegally scan and post print books online, along with driving directions and car pool forums for authors who want to go as a group to talk to multiple offenders.
A Day at Work with the Buzzkiller: How to organize a protest rally at your favorite buzzkiller's workplace, and let their boss know what they've been doing on their work computer when they were supposed to be balancing out those toilet seat accounts.
Correcting the Blurb Sluts: Sharpie marker giveaways all month so you can black out the b.s. quotes from cronies on the covers of all those over-hyped underwritten books. Markers also come in handy when you want to draw funny mustaches on the blurb slut's book jacket photo.
Bonus: Interview with a Buzzkiller! Find out why Ms. Anonymous really posted 978 one-star reviews on Amazon.com last month, just as soon as we find her, tackle her and threaten to tickle her until she confesses.
I can't wait to get started on this, frankly, because it's the kind of work I was meant to do. Yes, I know, I'll have to give up writing novels, change my name, dye my hair and live in a small village that has no indoor plumbing in France to escape persecution, but the work is so important I feel that any and all sacrifices on my part are simply worth it.
As soon as Bootleggers, Buzzkillers and Blurb Sluts goes live you guys will be the first to know. In the meantime, cross your fingers, wish me luck and mark this date on your calendar. You do know what day it is, right?
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Such a Deal . . . Not
FantoPro.com pointed me to a troubling article on how Marvel plans to lowball and (essentially) own writers developing their B-List superheroes.
Some key points:
"Terms call for Marvel to own whatever the writers work on during the year."
Marvel has a history of demanding all rights from various artists and entities involved with them, I believe, so this doesn't surprise me.
This is what made me blink a few times:
"Also Marvel has included in the contracts that Marvel gets a first look and last refusal to any and all projects the writers have previously written or will write for 2 years in the future."
I can understand a first look on future work (publishers do that) but last refusal? Previously written work? Oy, not good. The article writer offers this final warning:
"So to sum this up if you are lucky enough to write for any B list Superhero's for Marvel they will own your ass even if they fire you for up to two years after the fact."
Agreed. One should not be forced to sell one's soul like this, even for the opportunity of exposure with a company as large and well-known as Marvel.
Some key points:
"Terms call for Marvel to own whatever the writers work on during the year."
Marvel has a history of demanding all rights from various artists and entities involved with them, I believe, so this doesn't surprise me.
This is what made me blink a few times:
"Also Marvel has included in the contracts that Marvel gets a first look and last refusal to any and all projects the writers have previously written or will write for 2 years in the future."
I can understand a first look on future work (publishers do that) but last refusal? Previously written work? Oy, not good. The article writer offers this final warning:
"So to sum this up if you are lucky enough to write for any B list Superhero's for Marvel they will own your ass even if they fire you for up to two years after the fact."
Agreed. One should not be forced to sell one's soul like this, even for the opportunity of exposure with a company as large and well-known as Marvel.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Better Lies for Auto-Replies
I've been auto-replied six times this week. You know, that computer-generated response e-mail that tells you the person to whom you are writing is not in their office, will not return until such-and-such a date, and if you have an emergency you should contact this that or the other person.
Aside from auto-replies being mildly annoying (especially when it comes from someone who just asked me to drop everything to work on and send in something on deadline, and then they're not there to get it) I think they're utterly boring, too. If you're going to have your computer give me the brush-off, why not at least be a little more creative with the wording?
Artistic: When the planets align in the proper formation, my crystals realign my chakrahs and Pices enters the seventh house, I'm sure my muse will be at the level of maximum energy to allow me to compose the perfect organic reply to your e-mail. Until then, I hope you'll respect my process and pray to the Earth Mother for my well-being, as I do yours.
Busy: Look, I can't read this right now. In fact, I'm so swamped I can't remember the last time I went to the bathroom. So give me a couple days and I'll get back to you. Unless I blow out a kidney.
Contrite: I cannot believe that I actually missed your e-mail. What was I thinking, taking this week off to sit by my mother's bedside while she's in ICU? She's a strong old gal, I'm sure she'll live. I am so, so sorry. Believe me, you have no idea. And I won't be able to make it up to you for at least a week. Can you ever forgive me? Say you'll forgive me. Please.
Environmentally Conscious: Sorry I'm not here to answer your e-mail. I'm off trying to reduce my carbon footprint before the polar bears go extinct. Please don't waste any more of our planet's resources by trying to contact me until I get back next Monday, thanks.
Honest (artfully): Hey, thanks for your e-mail. You know, I'd respond personally but I'm in this terrible place right now, and I need some alone time. At least that's what the people at Intervention are telling me. You understand.
Honest (brutally): You again. Jesus Christ, if one more damn person whines at me I swear, I'm getting Daddy's rifle and climbing a water tower. Save some lives and leave me the hell alone for a week, will you?
Incapacitated: Would love to reply to your note, and plan to just as soon as I make bail. And just so you know, those sheep? Were asking for it.
Reassuring: Not to worry, I'm still speaking to you. Just not this week. Pay no attention to those rumors about me putting out my resume and looking to jump ship; I am 100% committed to you. Any calls asking for references are just for a car loan, I promise.
Superior: I'd answer this e-mail, but obviously you're not important enough to bother. Write back when you've achieved a bit more in life. If you ever do.
Tired: They're calling it (yawn) narcolepsy but basically twenty years of (yawn) insomnia just caught up with me. So (yawn) I'll get back to y . . . .zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Oddly enough writers never send me auto-replies, or at least none have to date. I don't think that's fair; writers should also have auto-replies for those special days when we just can't get to the e-mail. Something like:
Thanks for your e-mail. I'm busy tearing out my hair over that scene where Lucan confronts Sam over the incident in the nightclub bathroom. You know how it is; he wants to make love; she wants to shoot him with the gun that has copper bullets. It's taking forever to get through this scene, and I think if my dialogue gets any lamer Christ won't be able to heal it. So talk to you when I figure it out or I'm bald, whichever comes first.
Okay, your turn -- how would you word your auto-reply? Let us know in comments.
Aside from auto-replies being mildly annoying (especially when it comes from someone who just asked me to drop everything to work on and send in something on deadline, and then they're not there to get it) I think they're utterly boring, too. If you're going to have your computer give me the brush-off, why not at least be a little more creative with the wording?
Artistic: When the planets align in the proper formation, my crystals realign my chakrahs and Pices enters the seventh house, I'm sure my muse will be at the level of maximum energy to allow me to compose the perfect organic reply to your e-mail. Until then, I hope you'll respect my process and pray to the Earth Mother for my well-being, as I do yours.
Busy: Look, I can't read this right now. In fact, I'm so swamped I can't remember the last time I went to the bathroom. So give me a couple days and I'll get back to you. Unless I blow out a kidney.
Contrite: I cannot believe that I actually missed your e-mail. What was I thinking, taking this week off to sit by my mother's bedside while she's in ICU? She's a strong old gal, I'm sure she'll live. I am so, so sorry. Believe me, you have no idea. And I won't be able to make it up to you for at least a week. Can you ever forgive me? Say you'll forgive me. Please.
Environmentally Conscious: Sorry I'm not here to answer your e-mail. I'm off trying to reduce my carbon footprint before the polar bears go extinct. Please don't waste any more of our planet's resources by trying to contact me until I get back next Monday, thanks.
Honest (artfully): Hey, thanks for your e-mail. You know, I'd respond personally but I'm in this terrible place right now, and I need some alone time. At least that's what the people at Intervention are telling me. You understand.
Honest (brutally): You again. Jesus Christ, if one more damn person whines at me I swear, I'm getting Daddy's rifle and climbing a water tower. Save some lives and leave me the hell alone for a week, will you?
Incapacitated: Would love to reply to your note, and plan to just as soon as I make bail. And just so you know, those sheep? Were asking for it.
Reassuring: Not to worry, I'm still speaking to you. Just not this week. Pay no attention to those rumors about me putting out my resume and looking to jump ship; I am 100% committed to you. Any calls asking for references are just for a car loan, I promise.
Superior: I'd answer this e-mail, but obviously you're not important enough to bother. Write back when you've achieved a bit more in life. If you ever do.
Tired: They're calling it (yawn) narcolepsy but basically twenty years of (yawn) insomnia just caught up with me. So (yawn) I'll get back to y . . . .zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Oddly enough writers never send me auto-replies, or at least none have to date. I don't think that's fair; writers should also have auto-replies for those special days when we just can't get to the e-mail. Something like:
Thanks for your e-mail. I'm busy tearing out my hair over that scene where Lucan confronts Sam over the incident in the nightclub bathroom. You know how it is; he wants to make love; she wants to shoot him with the gun that has copper bullets. It's taking forever to get through this scene, and I think if my dialogue gets any lamer Christ won't be able to heal it. So talk to you when I figure it out or I'm bald, whichever comes first.
Okay, your turn -- how would you word your auto-reply? Let us know in comments.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Publishing 911
Operator: Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Reader: Yes, this book I've been reading has, you know, something really bad in it.
Operator: What is the bad thing, ma'am?
Reader: I can't say that over the phone. But it's really, really bad.
Operator: I need to know what the bad thing is, ma'am, or I can't help you.
Reader: Can't you just take my word for it and send the police to arrest the author?
Operator: No, ma'am, I can't do that.
Reader: Well, that's not fair.
Operator: You're free to destroy the book at your convenience, ma'am.
Reader: I can't, I need to turn in the book at the used book store to get credit for it.
Operator: Then do what everyone else does and post an anonymous review on Amazon.com. (switches lines) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Author: (sniffling) A reader just sent me a hateful e-mail and I read it and now I'm so upset that I can't write.
Operator: Was the e-mail accurate, sir?
Author: No, of course not. My book is wonderful. I'm a genius. This reader is a jealous idiot who's trying to make a name for himself by destroying my career.
Operator: Then why can't you write, sir?
Author: (lowers voice) What if I'm wrong? What if my book sucks? What if everyone in publishing is laughing at me right now?
Operator: I'm not laughing at you, sir.
Author: (eagerly) Did you read my book?
Operator: Sir, you need to delete the e-mail, block the reader from your mail account, and recite your writing mantra.
Author: But I don't have a writing mantra.
Operator: Repeat after me: "I am powerful. I am purposeful. I am published."
Author: I'm pathetic, aren't I?
Operator: That's not part of the writing mantra, sir. Please recite what I told you fifty times and stop reading e-mail for the rest of the day. (switches lines) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Reviewer: (whining) There's this writer who hates me. I read his blog every day. He says terrible things and I know he's talking about me.
Operator: Does the writer name you in his blog, ma'am?
Reviewer: Not exactly.
Operator: Has he ever mentioned your name once in his blog, ma'am?
Reviewer: You don't understand. He won't name me because then I'd have proof of what he does.
Operator: Does the writer ever link to you, or quote you?
Reviewer: No. Okay, look, he pretends like I don't exist. But I know he hates me. I can feel it.
Operator: Have you ever had any direct contact with the writer?
Reviewer: Well, I've read and reviewed every book he's ever written.
Operator: He doesn't hate you, ma'am. He doesn't know you. Stop reading his blog and read someone else. (switches lines) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Author: I've just seen my new cover art and it's horrible.
Operator: How horrible is it, ma'am?
Author: Do you remember that book that came out in January with bright metallic glow-in-the-dark pink albino Robin Hood on the cover?
Operator: (winces) Yes, ma'am.
Author: Worse than that.
Operator: I'm sorry, ma'am, but that's highly unlikely.
Author: (furiously) Don't you dare tell me it's not as bad as I think, because I swear to God I will come down there and kick your ass.
Operator: Calm down, ma'am. What color is the cover art?
Author: Green. Lurid Green.
Operator: Everyone is going green these days, you know. (flips through calendar) And St. Patrick's Day is coming up. You could do some clever tie-in promo and turn this tragedy to your advantage.
Author: Can't you just send the police to arrest my editor?
Operator: No, ma'am, I can't do that.
Author: Damn.
Operator: (tentatively) I can transfer your call over to the That Can't Be My Cover support and recovery group for cover-traumatized authors. The writer with the albino Robin Hood cover runs it, and she has complimentary chocolate-covered Valium at every meeting.
Author: Really? I thought she killed herself. Okay, transfer me over.
Operator: Thank you, please hold. (transfers call, switches lines.) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Reader: Hi, it's me again. I'm ready to tell you what the bad thing in the book was.
Operator: Go ahead, ma'am.
Reader: (whispers) Gee. Ay. Why. Es. Eee. Ex.
Operator: I don't understand you, ma'am.
Reader: (dismayed) I can't actually say it. I'm spelling it for you. Can't you spell?
Operator: No, ma'am, that's not part of my job requirement. (switches lines) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Reader: (angrily) I wrote a letter of complaint to this terrible author about his lousy book and he didn't answer and then he blocked me from his mail account.
Operator: (sighs) Have you recited your reader mantra today, sir?
Reader: Authors write for me. Authors must please me. Authors tremble in fear before me.
Operator: I think you'll be fine, sir.
Reader: But I have to tell this author much, much more about how much his book sucks.
Operator: Then do what everyone else does and post an anonymous review on Amazon.com, and get all your friends to vote that it was helpful and it will end up as the first review on the page.
Reader: That's not good enough. Can't you send the police to arrest the author?
Operator: No, sir, I can't do that. Have a nice day.
Reader: Yes, this book I've been reading has, you know, something really bad in it.
Operator: What is the bad thing, ma'am?
Reader: I can't say that over the phone. But it's really, really bad.
Operator: I need to know what the bad thing is, ma'am, or I can't help you.
Reader: Can't you just take my word for it and send the police to arrest the author?
Operator: No, ma'am, I can't do that.
Reader: Well, that's not fair.
Operator: You're free to destroy the book at your convenience, ma'am.
Reader: I can't, I need to turn in the book at the used book store to get credit for it.
Operator: Then do what everyone else does and post an anonymous review on Amazon.com. (switches lines) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Author: (sniffling) A reader just sent me a hateful e-mail and I read it and now I'm so upset that I can't write.
Operator: Was the e-mail accurate, sir?
Author: No, of course not. My book is wonderful. I'm a genius. This reader is a jealous idiot who's trying to make a name for himself by destroying my career.
Operator: Then why can't you write, sir?
Author: (lowers voice) What if I'm wrong? What if my book sucks? What if everyone in publishing is laughing at me right now?
Operator: I'm not laughing at you, sir.
Author: (eagerly) Did you read my book?
Operator: Sir, you need to delete the e-mail, block the reader from your mail account, and recite your writing mantra.
Author: But I don't have a writing mantra.
Operator: Repeat after me: "I am powerful. I am purposeful. I am published."
Author: I'm pathetic, aren't I?
Operator: That's not part of the writing mantra, sir. Please recite what I told you fifty times and stop reading e-mail for the rest of the day. (switches lines) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Reviewer: (whining) There's this writer who hates me. I read his blog every day. He says terrible things and I know he's talking about me.
Operator: Does the writer name you in his blog, ma'am?
Reviewer: Not exactly.
Operator: Has he ever mentioned your name once in his blog, ma'am?
Reviewer: You don't understand. He won't name me because then I'd have proof of what he does.
Operator: Does the writer ever link to you, or quote you?
Reviewer: No. Okay, look, he pretends like I don't exist. But I know he hates me. I can feel it.
Operator: Have you ever had any direct contact with the writer?
Reviewer: Well, I've read and reviewed every book he's ever written.
Operator: He doesn't hate you, ma'am. He doesn't know you. Stop reading his blog and read someone else. (switches lines) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Author: I've just seen my new cover art and it's horrible.
Operator: How horrible is it, ma'am?
Author: Do you remember that book that came out in January with bright metallic glow-in-the-dark pink albino Robin Hood on the cover?
Operator: (winces) Yes, ma'am.
Author: Worse than that.
Operator: I'm sorry, ma'am, but that's highly unlikely.
Author: (furiously) Don't you dare tell me it's not as bad as I think, because I swear to God I will come down there and kick your ass.
Operator: Calm down, ma'am. What color is the cover art?
Author: Green. Lurid Green.
Operator: Everyone is going green these days, you know. (flips through calendar) And St. Patrick's Day is coming up. You could do some clever tie-in promo and turn this tragedy to your advantage.
Author: Can't you just send the police to arrest my editor?
Operator: No, ma'am, I can't do that.
Author: Damn.
Operator: (tentatively) I can transfer your call over to the That Can't Be My Cover support and recovery group for cover-traumatized authors. The writer with the albino Robin Hood cover runs it, and she has complimentary chocolate-covered Valium at every meeting.
Author: Really? I thought she killed herself. Okay, transfer me over.
Operator: Thank you, please hold. (transfers call, switches lines.) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Reader: Hi, it's me again. I'm ready to tell you what the bad thing in the book was.
Operator: Go ahead, ma'am.
Reader: (whispers) Gee. Ay. Why. Es. Eee. Ex.
Operator: I don't understand you, ma'am.
Reader: (dismayed) I can't actually say it. I'm spelling it for you. Can't you spell?
Operator: No, ma'am, that's not part of my job requirement. (switches lines) Publishing 911, what's your emergency?
Reader: (angrily) I wrote a letter of complaint to this terrible author about his lousy book and he didn't answer and then he blocked me from his mail account.
Operator: (sighs) Have you recited your reader mantra today, sir?
Reader: Authors write for me. Authors must please me. Authors tremble in fear before me.
Operator: I think you'll be fine, sir.
Reader: But I have to tell this author much, much more about how much his book sucks.
Operator: Then do what everyone else does and post an anonymous review on Amazon.com, and get all your friends to vote that it was helpful and it will end up as the first review on the page.
Reader: That's not good enough. Can't you send the police to arrest the author?
Operator: No, sir, I can't do that. Have a nice day.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
The 22 Immutable Laws of Publishing
(dedicated to to Al Ries and Jack Trout)
1. The Law of Co-op
It's better to be in the front of the store than the back of the store. Unless you're caught there stacking your books in front of John Grisham's. Then you're in for it.
2. The Law of Genre
However you shape your novel, it has to fit into a type of fiction. If it doesn't, they'll make it fit. We call this categorization in theory, and sledgehammering in practice.
3. The Law of Importance
The more important you are in publishing, the harder it is to get you on the phone. Unless you're a writer, in which case you should really borrow the money from your mom to get your service reconnected.
4. The Law of Depth Perception
People in publishing always appear smarter, more popular and much more successful than they really are. They always believe they are, too, and they will stomp the ass of anyone who adjusts those vanity mirrors.
5. The Law of Soft Focus
Book jacket photos of authors are as accurate as images beamed down from the Hubble (after it's been hit by a couple of meteors and had a couple of key lenses smashed, anyway.)
6. The Law of Excommunication
Thou shalt not talk about the stuff we do not talk about in Publishing, else ye shall be banned, blackballed, fired, reviled and labeled as poisonous, unless you're more famous and rake in more money than everyone else you piss off with your big mouth. In which case, we'd like to do lunch and talk about a book deal.
7. The Law of Perpetual List
Once you make the NYT bestseller list, you are a NYT bestseller forever. Even if you only hit it once on a slow week when all the writers' new books don't reach the bookstores because of a freak computer glitch at every distributor's warehouse across the country.
8. The Law of Suits
If you're wearing a suit, you are obviously not a writer. Unless it's a bathing suit. Or your birthday suit.
9. The Law of Identity
You are never as famous or as obscure as you think you are, unless you're being introduced to a jealous rival, who has never read your work and in fact had no idea you were publishing in the same genre. Who are you again, anyway?
10. The Law of Revision
No manuscript, however perfect, can pass through the hands of an editor unmarked.
11. The Law of Respect
You are only as important to publishing as what you do today. Yesterday no longer exists. Neither will you tomorrow unless you stop playing on the internet and get back to work, you slacker.
12. The Law of Cookie Cutter
If the book is successful, they will want more of the same. Maybe with sprinkles, as long as they're close to the original color. And none of that changing the flavor, either.
13. The Law of Suffering
No important writer was ever a happy, well-adjusted, satisfied person with zero emotional baggage, a good marriage and a comfortable situation in life. No, they suffer in silence, sitting and sweating in a dark airless shed in the back yard while they watch cockroaches mate and think about crafting their next exquisite homage to the agony of existence. And you, the rabble, will never, ever understand their pain, so don't even try.
14. The Law of Acknowledgment
There is always a full page of them, gushing and teary, in the first book. Three affectionate paragraphs in the second. Four hohum dutiful lines in the third. One frosty line in the fourth, usually flipping off the ex-spouse. The acknowledgment page disappears by the fifth book.
15. The Law of Truth
No author ever writes a bad book, no editor ever makes an error in judgment, no reviewer was ever wrong, and no publisher ever prints a novel with a pink albino Robin Hood on the cover on purpose. Okay, we might have to revise this one a little.
16. The Law of Number One
If you have to pee at a writer's conference, don't wait. The lines at the bathrooms are always a mile long.
17. The Law of Title Assumption
Got you with that last one, didn't I? See.
18. The Law of Nonsuccess
Everyone fails. No one admits it. Fingers are pointed. Names are called. Then we go to lunch, fire the agent, jump ship and start over. Where we won't fail this time. Really.
19. The Law of Repeated Failure
Okay, so it didn't work out exactly the way we planned. But it wasn't our fault. Look at all the reprints on the list. Geez.
20. The Law of Buzzkill
For every book that is much loved by the readers, a pool of sharks will gather to dine on its author.
21. The Law of Trend
To illustrate, a conversation about a trend between two writers: *"They want vampire novels." "They don't want any more vampire novels." "They want vampire novels." "They don't want any more vampire novels" (repeat from * about a hundred times.) "Why are there all these freaking vampire novels on the shelves?" "Because they want vampire novels." "But God, if they read one more vampire novel they'll probably puke." "Okay, they don't want vampire novels." "Hey, what about vampire werewolves? Think they'll like that idea?"
22. The Law of Publication
If you print it, we'll write it.
1. The Law of Co-op
It's better to be in the front of the store than the back of the store. Unless you're caught there stacking your books in front of John Grisham's. Then you're in for it.
2. The Law of Genre
However you shape your novel, it has to fit into a type of fiction. If it doesn't, they'll make it fit. We call this categorization in theory, and sledgehammering in practice.
3. The Law of Importance
The more important you are in publishing, the harder it is to get you on the phone. Unless you're a writer, in which case you should really borrow the money from your mom to get your service reconnected.
4. The Law of Depth Perception
People in publishing always appear smarter, more popular and much more successful than they really are. They always believe they are, too, and they will stomp the ass of anyone who adjusts those vanity mirrors.
5. The Law of Soft Focus
Book jacket photos of authors are as accurate as images beamed down from the Hubble (after it's been hit by a couple of meteors and had a couple of key lenses smashed, anyway.)
6. The Law of Excommunication
Thou shalt not talk about the stuff we do not talk about in Publishing, else ye shall be banned, blackballed, fired, reviled and labeled as poisonous, unless you're more famous and rake in more money than everyone else you piss off with your big mouth. In which case, we'd like to do lunch and talk about a book deal.
7. The Law of Perpetual List
Once you make the NYT bestseller list, you are a NYT bestseller forever. Even if you only hit it once on a slow week when all the writers' new books don't reach the bookstores because of a freak computer glitch at every distributor's warehouse across the country.
8. The Law of Suits
If you're wearing a suit, you are obviously not a writer. Unless it's a bathing suit. Or your birthday suit.
9. The Law of Identity
You are never as famous or as obscure as you think you are, unless you're being introduced to a jealous rival, who has never read your work and in fact had no idea you were publishing in the same genre. Who are you again, anyway?
10. The Law of Revision
No manuscript, however perfect, can pass through the hands of an editor unmarked.
11. The Law of Respect
You are only as important to publishing as what you do today. Yesterday no longer exists. Neither will you tomorrow unless you stop playing on the internet and get back to work, you slacker.
12. The Law of Cookie Cutter
If the book is successful, they will want more of the same. Maybe with sprinkles, as long as they're close to the original color. And none of that changing the flavor, either.
13. The Law of Suffering
No important writer was ever a happy, well-adjusted, satisfied person with zero emotional baggage, a good marriage and a comfortable situation in life. No, they suffer in silence, sitting and sweating in a dark airless shed in the back yard while they watch cockroaches mate and think about crafting their next exquisite homage to the agony of existence. And you, the rabble, will never, ever understand their pain, so don't even try.
14. The Law of Acknowledgment
There is always a full page of them, gushing and teary, in the first book. Three affectionate paragraphs in the second. Four hohum dutiful lines in the third. One frosty line in the fourth, usually flipping off the ex-spouse. The acknowledgment page disappears by the fifth book.
15. The Law of Truth
No author ever writes a bad book, no editor ever makes an error in judgment, no reviewer was ever wrong, and no publisher ever prints a novel with a pink albino Robin Hood on the cover on purpose. Okay, we might have to revise this one a little.
16. The Law of Number One
If you have to pee at a writer's conference, don't wait. The lines at the bathrooms are always a mile long.
17. The Law of Title Assumption
Got you with that last one, didn't I? See.
18. The Law of Nonsuccess
Everyone fails. No one admits it. Fingers are pointed. Names are called. Then we go to lunch, fire the agent, jump ship and start over. Where we won't fail this time. Really.
19. The Law of Repeated Failure
Okay, so it didn't work out exactly the way we planned. But it wasn't our fault. Look at all the reprints on the list. Geez.
20. The Law of Buzzkill
For every book that is much loved by the readers, a pool of sharks will gather to dine on its author.
21. The Law of Trend
To illustrate, a conversation about a trend between two writers: *"They want vampire novels." "They don't want any more vampire novels." "They want vampire novels." "They don't want any more vampire novels" (repeat from * about a hundred times.) "Why are there all these freaking vampire novels on the shelves?" "Because they want vampire novels." "But God, if they read one more vampire novel they'll probably puke." "Okay, they don't want vampire novels." "Hey, what about vampire werewolves? Think they'll like that idea?"
22. The Law of Publication
If you print it, we'll write it.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
The Copy-Edit Electric
I did finish the copy-edit four hours ahead of deadline, plus I learned something new in the process: Never try to do a copy-edit in only 24 hours. I think I sprained a retina; I'm pretty sure the production team up in NY did, too.
I once did a copy-edit over the phone with an editor, with us both reading from our copies of the ms. and her marking the production copy. As copy-edits go that one was very light, maybe a dozen queries and corrections total, but still it took us a good two hours to work our way through the stack of pages.
This time I did an electronic copy-edit, which is all done in Word (and which is eventually going to become the standard method by NY publishers, I'm told, for doing all copy-edits.) It's basically working with queries typed in those little sidebar comment balloons instead of hand-written notations, but it takes some getting used to. With the exception of that phone call copy-edit, I've always done mine on paper, not on the screen. The benefit for me is that I can use the Dragon now instead of scrawling all over the ms.
Btw, it now looks like Master of Shadows will make our target release date. More details will be coming soon, I promise; I just want to make sure the date is chiseled in stone and I see the final edition before I spill all the beans.
What's up with you guys? And why does it smell like a donut shop around here?
I once did a copy-edit over the phone with an editor, with us both reading from our copies of the ms. and her marking the production copy. As copy-edits go that one was very light, maybe a dozen queries and corrections total, but still it took us a good two hours to work our way through the stack of pages.
This time I did an electronic copy-edit, which is all done in Word (and which is eventually going to become the standard method by NY publishers, I'm told, for doing all copy-edits.) It's basically working with queries typed in those little sidebar comment balloons instead of hand-written notations, but it takes some getting used to. With the exception of that phone call copy-edit, I've always done mine on paper, not on the screen. The benefit for me is that I can use the Dragon now instead of scrawling all over the ms.
Btw, it now looks like Master of Shadows will make our target release date. More details will be coming soon, I promise; I just want to make sure the date is chiseled in stone and I see the final edition before I spill all the beans.
What's up with you guys? And why does it smell like a donut shop around here?
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
From the Trades
Grassroots Publishing Co. Inc. is seeking 3-5K short stories that are "contemporary, historic, inspirational, paranormal, or any other theme as long as love and romance are the main thrust of the story", pays $300.00 flat rate for "first global publishing rights and electronic and internet rights in all languages as well as future anthology rights", electronic and snail mail subs okay, see guidelines for more details here (spotted in the November print issue of The Writer.)
Jewish Community Center of San Francisco Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for Poems on the Jewish Experience offers $3,000 in prize money annually to a first-place, second-place and honorable mention. Submit four copies of up to 3 poems, no more than 10 pages in length by December 1st. No entry fee. See specific guidelines and read last year's winning poems here. (found in the Nove/Dec print issue of Poets & Writers)
I also enjoyed reading the Q&A with Algonquin editor Chuck Adams in the Nov/Dec print edition of Poets & Writers; it shows how a great interview piece can liven up an otherwise yawner of an issue. There's an online expanded version of it you can read here, but be warned, he's pretty merciless on just about every topic.
Jewish Community Center of San Francisco Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for Poems on the Jewish Experience offers $3,000 in prize money annually to a first-place, second-place and honorable mention. Submit four copies of up to 3 poems, no more than 10 pages in length by December 1st. No entry fee. See specific guidelines and read last year's winning poems here. (found in the Nove/Dec print issue of Poets & Writers)
I also enjoyed reading the Q&A with Algonquin editor Chuck Adams in the Nov/Dec print edition of Poets & Writers; it shows how a great interview piece can liven up an otherwise yawner of an issue. There's an online expanded version of it you can read here, but be warned, he's pretty merciless on just about every topic.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Quick Heads Up
There is an order system computer glitch affecting author Elizabeth Bear's new novel, Ink & Steel ISBN 978-0451462091, which is creating distribution problems and preventing the book from getting into stores. If you are looking for the book and can't find it at your local brick & mortar, please ask them to order it by ISBN (evidently it is not in the order system under byline or title.)
I've also had reports (which I've since confirmed are true) that my new StarDoc novel, Omega Games, is now being shipped by B&N.com. Which really isn't a problem except that it's being distributed two weeks ahead of the laydown date. Nevertheless, if you want to get it early, that's where to go.
I've also had reports (which I've since confirmed are true) that my new StarDoc novel, Omega Games, is now being shipped by B&N.com. Which really isn't a problem except that it's being distributed two weeks ahead of the laydown date. Nevertheless, if you want to get it early, that's where to go.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
No Hoops, Please
At last major publishers are beginning to leap onto the free e-book bandwagon and offer various titles to internet readers. Hooray! I saw that HarperCollins's Eos is giving away a Sara Douglass title, The Serpent Bride, to celebrate the imprint's tenth anniversary.
A free Sara Douglass novel sounds like a neat thing to me, because I've never read her and I'd like to give her stuff a try, but not enough to spend eight to fifteen bucks -- which makes me a typical internet free e-book reader.
So I followed the banner ad, went to the HarperCollins web site page, and clicked on the Adobe format icon for Sara's free novel. And got this page, which informed me that the book was $15.96. Obviously I clicked on the wrong thing, so I went back to the first page and read the fine print:
"To obtain your free e-book of The Serpent Bride, click to download in the format of your choice. By redeeming the coupon code EOS3 you will be simultaneously subscribed to our Inside Eos newsletter and our e-books newsletter. If you are already a subscriber you will only receive the free e-book."
Coupon code. Right. So I'll checkout and enter that, and I know it will zero out the $15.96, and then I will get my free e-book. Yes?
No. As it turns out, I will go to a sign-in screen. And then, after I enter my e-mail address, on to a registration/password screen to set up my HarperCollins account. Which I do only because I've come this far and now I have to see how many more hoops they're going to make me jump through to get this e-book, which at this point had better be magnificent.
The registration/password screen takes me to yet another a checkout screen, with the e-book still listed as $15.96, plus now they want my credit card information, but wait, there's the little box in the middle where I can put a coupon code. I put in the code, and finally it does zero out the cost of the e-book, and I only have to go through two more screens to actually get to the download itself.
It's downloading now as I type this. I went back to the main screen to re-read all the fine print, and found more hoops:
"Offer valid to legal residents of the United States only, ages 13 and older, and expires on July 31, 2008 (12:00 am EST)."
I understand the age 13 and older -- God forbid we encourage twelve year olds to do something as disgusting as reading -- but why is the offer valid only in the U.S.? Are we only allowed to celebrate an imprint's anniversary within our borders? What if someone throws a party for Eos in Rio? Will they call the cops on them?
And what's this bit about me being a legal resident? Why do you care? How are you going to check, for that matter? Do I have to show a green card or a work Visa to my computer if I'm not?
Disclaimer: I grew up in South Florida. Half the people I know came here illegally. Oddly enough, they could still read and buy books. Incredible, I know, but true. But wait, there's more:
"Limit of one free copy per person. Multiple copies will not be sent to the same e-mail address. Not responsible for mistransmitted submissions. Fraudulent submission of multiple requests may violate state and federal laws and could result in prosecution."
Ah, there's no marketing strategy quite like inviting people to try a book by one of your authors while simultaneously threatening them with criminal prosecution if they make more than one request. I'm tempted to try to download it again just to see if they send the Feds to my house. Author arrested for downloading two copies of free e-book, film at eleven.
Publishers, here are some suggestions from a writer who has been doing this freebie thing for a very long time. Don't make people check in, sign up, register, or enter codes. Don't send them your newsletters or SPAM them. Don't shove your politics in their face by questioning their residence status, and don't stiff the rest of the readers on the planet for not being American residents.
If you advertise a free e-book, just give people a free e-book. Give it to anyone who wants it. Whoever they are, wherever they live. Don't put them through hoops or ask for anything in return. Because if these readers are interested enough to download the book, they may like it so much that they'll order the next book in the series, and the next, and the next.
P.S. There is no such word as mistransmitted. Please stop using it.
A free Sara Douglass novel sounds like a neat thing to me, because I've never read her and I'd like to give her stuff a try, but not enough to spend eight to fifteen bucks -- which makes me a typical internet free e-book reader.
So I followed the banner ad, went to the HarperCollins web site page, and clicked on the Adobe format icon for Sara's free novel. And got this page, which informed me that the book was $15.96. Obviously I clicked on the wrong thing, so I went back to the first page and read the fine print:
"To obtain your free e-book of The Serpent Bride, click to download in the format of your choice. By redeeming the coupon code EOS3 you will be simultaneously subscribed to our Inside Eos newsletter and our e-books newsletter. If you are already a subscriber you will only receive the free e-book."
Coupon code. Right. So I'll checkout and enter that, and I know it will zero out the $15.96, and then I will get my free e-book. Yes?
No. As it turns out, I will go to a sign-in screen. And then, after I enter my e-mail address, on to a registration/password screen to set up my HarperCollins account. Which I do only because I've come this far and now I have to see how many more hoops they're going to make me jump through to get this e-book, which at this point had better be magnificent.
The registration/password screen takes me to yet another a checkout screen, with the e-book still listed as $15.96, plus now they want my credit card information, but wait, there's the little box in the middle where I can put a coupon code. I put in the code, and finally it does zero out the cost of the e-book, and I only have to go through two more screens to actually get to the download itself.
It's downloading now as I type this. I went back to the main screen to re-read all the fine print, and found more hoops:
"Offer valid to legal residents of the United States only, ages 13 and older, and expires on July 31, 2008 (12:00 am EST)."
I understand the age 13 and older -- God forbid we encourage twelve year olds to do something as disgusting as reading -- but why is the offer valid only in the U.S.? Are we only allowed to celebrate an imprint's anniversary within our borders? What if someone throws a party for Eos in Rio? Will they call the cops on them?
And what's this bit about me being a legal resident? Why do you care? How are you going to check, for that matter? Do I have to show a green card or a work Visa to my computer if I'm not?
Disclaimer: I grew up in South Florida. Half the people I know came here illegally. Oddly enough, they could still read and buy books. Incredible, I know, but true. But wait, there's more:
"Limit of one free copy per person. Multiple copies will not be sent to the same e-mail address. Not responsible for mistransmitted submissions. Fraudulent submission of multiple requests may violate state and federal laws and could result in prosecution."
Ah, there's no marketing strategy quite like inviting people to try a book by one of your authors while simultaneously threatening them with criminal prosecution if they make more than one request. I'm tempted to try to download it again just to see if they send the Feds to my house. Author arrested for downloading two copies of free e-book, film at eleven.
Publishers, here are some suggestions from a writer who has been doing this freebie thing for a very long time. Don't make people check in, sign up, register, or enter codes. Don't send them your newsletters or SPAM them. Don't shove your politics in their face by questioning their residence status, and don't stiff the rest of the readers on the planet for not being American residents.
If you advertise a free e-book, just give people a free e-book. Give it to anyone who wants it. Whoever they are, wherever they live. Don't put them through hoops or ask for anything in return. Because if these readers are interested enough to download the book, they may like it so much that they'll order the next book in the series, and the next, and the next.
P.S. There is no such word as mistransmitted. Please stop using it.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
The 53% Solution
Last year 400,000 books were published or distributed in the U.S., and some 15 million writers were working on some type of WIP. However, 53% of the Americans surveyed admitted that they did not read a single book in 2007. These NEA stats come courtesy of Rachel Donadio's NYT article, You're An Author? Me Too.*
Now, before you get depressed, according to this UK web page, there are 105+ million active internet surfers and 165+ million people with internet access in the U.S., as well as some 450 million internet surfers in 21 countries around the world.
Why should we be happy about this? To use the internet effectively, you have to be able to read. It's not that there aren't enough readers out there -- it's that they're not in the bookstores. They're on the internet.
As an experiment, and because I needed a reliable hosting service, I started moving my free e-books from my private FTP to Scribd* on January 2nd of this year(Scribd is a free service and hosts everything at no cost to me or the readers.) To date, the 22 freebies I've posted over there have been viewed a total of 9,273 times. That's an average of 78 views per day since I started the project. *Note 9/3/10: Since Scribd.com instituted an access fee scam to charge people for downloading e-books, including those I have provided for free for the last ten years, I have removed my free library from their site, and no longer use or recommend using their service. My free reads may be read online or downloaded for free from Google Docs; go to my freebies and free reads page for the links. See my post about this scam here.
It doesn't sound like a lot, until you consider the cost of mailing out 78 books every day to people all around the world. With Scribd, there's no paper, shipping, packaging or address-hunting involved. Best of all, only readers who are genuinely interested in reading my work view the stories, so there's no harassing advertising or SPAMming going on. On the reader's end, they get 22 free books and stories that they can read online or download, print out, share, use for educational purposes, etc. Win/win.
Scribd readers have been terrific. They've e-mailed me to ask questions and to request more e-books about their favorite characters (surprisingly, the most frequently requested is Holly Noriko of Lunar Marshall.) I've had a few interesting discussions about the biz with other writers who have contacted me via the site. The Scribd readers are also buying my print novels, because I'm getting a lot of questions and feedback about those as well.
I'm able to access visitor maps for each document I post on Scribd that show me where the viewers are located. Most are in the U.S. and Canada, but I've also discovered that I have new readers in places like Russia, Dominica, Japan, Uganda, and Afghanistan. My print books are hard if not impossible to get overseas, so to have this sort of access to so many readers around the globe is an enormous privilege for me.
The internet, Scribd and giving away free e-books are not a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of building a readership during an era when it seems like no one reads. Still, I think it's encouraging, especially for writers who can't afford expensive forms of self-promotion and advertising. I know we can find other creative avenues like Scribd on the internet that can help us reach more readers with our work. We just have to keep thinking in new directions.
*Registration may be required to access the article.
Now, before you get depressed, according to this UK web page, there are 105+ million active internet surfers and 165+ million people with internet access in the U.S., as well as some 450 million internet surfers in 21 countries around the world.
Why should we be happy about this? To use the internet effectively, you have to be able to read. It's not that there aren't enough readers out there -- it's that they're not in the bookstores. They're on the internet.
As an experiment, and because I needed a reliable hosting service, I started moving my free e-books from my private FTP to Scribd* on January 2nd of this year
It doesn't sound like a lot, until you consider the cost of mailing out 78 books every day to people all around the world. With Scribd, there's no paper, shipping, packaging or address-hunting involved. Best of all, only readers who are genuinely interested in reading my work view the stories, so there's no harassing advertising or SPAMming going on. On the reader's end, they get 22 free books and stories that they can read online or download, print out, share, use for educational purposes, etc. Win/win.
Scribd readers have been terrific. They've e-mailed me to ask questions and to request more e-books about their favorite characters (surprisingly, the most frequently requested is Holly Noriko of Lunar Marshall.) I've had a few interesting discussions about the biz with other writers who have contacted me via the site. The Scribd readers are also buying my print novels, because I'm getting a lot of questions and feedback about those as well.
I'm able to access visitor maps for each document I post on Scribd that show me where the viewers are located. Most are in the U.S. and Canada, but I've also discovered that I have new readers in places like Russia, Dominica, Japan, Uganda, and Afghanistan. My print books are hard if not impossible to get overseas, so to have this sort of access to so many readers around the globe is an enormous privilege for me.
The internet, Scribd and giving away free e-books are not a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of building a readership during an era when it seems like no one reads. Still, I think it's encouraging, especially for writers who can't afford expensive forms of self-promotion and advertising. I know we can find other creative avenues like Scribd on the internet that can help us reach more readers with our work. We just have to keep thinking in new directions.
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