I just discovered (well, last week, but I'd already written posts by then) a new blog called storyfix.com, maintained by one Larry Brooks. While I'll admit he pushes his 'how to write a novel' book a little too loudly for my taste, a lot of the posts I've been reading so far have been great. Two in particular on story structure present great visual aids for structuring your story. They're PDF's (and pretty large PDFs at that) but they're great visual conceptualisations of story structure, arcs, plot points and turns.

On a completely different note, Dan Wells had a great article on the inherent commercial difficulties in using dramatic, world-changing events in your story - that it means the world that readers fell in love with no longer exists, and can't (easily) be used for other tie-ins, merchandise, sequels or other fund-generating avenues.

And on a more humerous angle, Michael Stackpole has a great article about how much spammers seem to know about him, and (drumroll) there's a new Simon's Cat video out - whee! Also, love the concept behing Neil Gaiman's recent tweet: I dreamed that people from Wikipedia came round to your house to adjust reality if it differed from what they had online. Given some of the discussion pages I've read on wikipedia, my gut response is *shudder*.

Yet more developments in digital publishing: Michael Stackpole has a great post about protecting yourself from having publishers just sit on your e-pub rights, and clauses you should have in your contract to prevent that, and another interesting one on the concept of measuring books by 'hours of reading pleasure (for the average reader)' rather than page-count, heft, size or other measurements better left to print-media.

In a smilar vein, Steve Saus has yet more comments on DRM and the problems with creating non-portable products that arguably should be portable. I fully agree with his sentiments - I see the format locking nonsense at the moment as equivilent to only being able to play my DVDs in a Sony DVD player - if I buy an LG player, or Sony changes their format, all my DVDs will stop working. That does not, in any way, stop me from pirating them should I choose to - in fact, it encourages piracy, because I'm certainly not going to go and re-buy my DVD collection just because my old DVD player wore out and I needed to buy a new one. Open-format is better for the industry, for readers, for authors and for publishers - hopefully common sense will prevail in time.

And finally - an upclose and personal comparison of the kindle screen versus the iPad - and you'd be surprised which one comes out second place.

According to the WSJ, Dorchester, one of the largest mass-paperback publishers, will be going all-digital, apparently effective 'Monday', in response to hard times / falling paperback sales / the end of publishing as we know it. All their titles will be released digitally or using print-on-demand, shipping books to bookstores 'as demand rises'.

Kristin, over at Pub Rants, has some reservations about the move, since apparently Dorchester has been "having difficulty reporting monies owed to the author for electronic book sales", difficulties that apparently still haven't been fully resolved for said authors. Eeek.

Keeping with the digi-book theme, Steve Saus over at IdeaTrash has had a pirate week - not talking like them, but discussing how they really affect authors, and what authors (not publishers) can do to help mitigate any harm done. Essentially - DRM doesn't work and is annoying, make a personal connection with your work - people will happily pirate from a faceless corporation, but baulk at taking money from a person, and if you keep producing, the pirate-appreciate-buy cycle actually works for you, getting you more sales than you lose to piracy.

And finally, Jared Axelrod gives authors a so-simple-it's-foolproof guide for which questions you should be hammering yourself with, depending on what stage your story's at.

So, Amazon's just struck a potentially killer blow for Apple in the ebook market - revamping the Kindle to a slimmer, cheaper model. They now claim seventy to eighty percent of the e-book market (though how they're measuring that - seeing as Bookscan doesn't handle ebooks, and no one is tracing books sold from author websites, etc - I'm not sure) - see the link for an interesting discussion with Ian Freed, vice president in charge of the Kindle.

Where Apple seeks to make things that work on Apple products only (wherever possible), Amazon is seeking to conquer every system and piece of technology that could possibly display an ebook. It's a difference in business strategy - Apple is leveraging the ebook market to sell more devices; Amazon is leveraging devices to sell its content. More at the link - there's some interesting discussion on the potential of the strategies, there. As purveyors of content-based products (books), I think I'd rather side with the monster who's interested in selling my content, rather than the monster who wants to use my content to sell his product.

Then again, if the net result is that my books are sold, does it really matter who by?

On a completely different note - Tim Ferris writes about the lure of the Superstar, and how to utilise it for yourself. The article's long, but well worth the read.  For those in a hurry, though, the cliff notes:

1. People who are THE BEST in their profession receive accolades and rewards disproportionate to their level of achievement relative to the second-best. 2. This effect holds no matter how small, insignificant or unknown the niche in which you are THE BEST in. 3. Therefore, to be seen as above the pack, find a specific niche in which you can be THE BEST with a modest amount of effort. 4. Accolades, appreciation and rewards shall be yours.

So the publishing industry's wobbled again. This time, with Andrew Wylier and Odyssey Editions. Essentially, an agent publishing his client's backlist titles exclusively with Amazon, and the Big Boys are less than impressed, saying it's against the interests of everyone from the author to the man who makes the coffee down the road - a little hard to fathom, really, given the current deals offered by the Big Six for ebooks, and their habit of sitting on intellectual property that could be making money for both them and the authors, but alright. Mike Shatzkin has an excellent post on the issue over here.

At the same time, we have IndieProse, a site that's claiming to be the gatekeeper for self-publishers. Definitely a wait-and-see, in my book - the authors pay to be listed on the site, and as Henry Baum points out on SelfPublishingReview, with no costs other than bandwidth, and no financial consequences should they back a less-than-stellar title, it's difficult to see how they're resist the temptation to accept that sign-up money from all authors regardless of quality.

Lastly, colour e-ink capable of displaying movies is edging closer, with the development of electro-wetting, a concept that uses coloured oil droplets suspended next to a water layer that move within 10 milliseconds in response to current directed through said water layer. I think I've mentioned this tech before - I've certainly seen it before, but unfortunately there still doesn't seem to be a working demonstration available, for all the claims on liquavista's site.

So agents are turning publisher, new gatekeeping models rear their heads, and the technology marches on. It's going to be a fascinating few years.

Apple has finally announced how individual authors can sell their works in iBooks without having to go through an intermediary like Smashwords. The requirements aren't too stringent (from MacLife):

Their books would have to adhere to these criteria: each one would need to have a 13-digit ISBN, be in ePub format, validate against epubcheck 1.0.5, and contain no unmanifested files. If you are not familiar with any of these Apple suggests working with their aggregation partners.

Pretty simple, really. It looks like soon, authors who're prepared to manage fifteen different accounts could easily cut out the new middlemen (Smashwords - not that I'd advocate that, they seem to offer a good product) and do it themselves across iBooks, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.

There's a weird little addendum to those requirements, though:

 

Write a damning article about a successful mostly-self-published author's latest publishing deal complete with snide comments, backhand remarks and egregious factual errors. Publisher's Weekly sure are anxious about J.A. Konrath (whose rebuttal of the article corrects their howling mistakes). Or rather, anxious that his apparent success becomes less apparent. And rightly so, I guess - if everyone takes Konrath's path, the wallets of agents and traditional publishers (and bookstores)  - that is, the people who read this magazine - will be getting much, much thinner. Sky's not falling, folks, not to fret.

But still, there's biased-journalism and then there's just lazy idiocy. Most of the facts they had wrong can be found in about sixty seconds on Konrath's site. Writing that kind of slam about someone makes you look petty. Writing a slam based on nonsense? We have a word for that on the internet.

Troll.

The latest gadget in the all-in-one techno craze. Ereaders with stores, ereaders with bluetooth, wireless, 3G. Ereaders that find your keys, walk your dog and sync with your coffee machine so your cuppa is timed perfectly for the end of the chapter*. 80% of people** are under the impression that there are only two "real" ereaders on the market - the Kindle and the iPad. 20% tentatively ventured "wasn't there that one that let you share things?", which I believe referred to the Nook - interesting, as this is Australia, and the next most easily available reader would be the iLiad, being sold in Dymocks. But the general consensus was that the reader market was pretty much a two-party system. Hah.

I was thinking of doing a comparison of readers, hoping to bring to light some of the nifty options in the E-readers-that-aren't-kindles-or-iPads category, because there are some (like the iLiad and the Adam) that show a lot of promise for some of their features, like open-source goodness, but don't have the marketing machine behind them to get their names out there. However, preliminary research (read: the Wikipedia page on ereaders) showed a far better comparison than I was planning to do for a morning blog post (and a whole lot of readers I'd never heard of, either). So instead, I thought I'd talk about some of the key differences, and what they mean in 'real' terms.

*That last one's made up. But it's only a matter of time.

**Statistic taken from the five people I surveyed on the train this morning.

 

J. A. Konrath, he who makes us want to open a Kindle store and watch the moolah roll in, has a great post about ebook piracy. In short - it's going to happen, 1000 pirates does not mean 1000 lost sales, and it often even helps rather than hinders your book sales. The actual article has some great answers to the standard knee-jerk questions and demands - go read it. I'll wait.

I'm far more familiar with the piracy/DRM debate in the video game industry - at a rough guess, I'd say they're about a decade ahead of publishing, and possibly even close to emerging from the other side of the DRM-tunnel. I'm really hoping the publishing industry can learn a little from the music, movie and game industries as a whole - that, in short, DRM and lawsuits are useless. Just make a great product and focus on getting the sales you can get, not the ones you think you've lost.

There's been some hooplah lately in the blogs I read about giving your work away for free. Arguments for, against and sideways abound, and it's getting so that use emerging authors feel totally lost when it comes to advice about promotion and free stuff.

As I see it, there are two basic arguments, and a whole host of nonsense:

Giving stuff away for free can raise your profile, help build a following, get people interested in your work. It lowers the cost of entry for people to try your stories and writing, which will (assuming you've given them the good stuff) lead to more readers, and hopefully paying readers. Giving stuff away for free snarfs your first publiaction rights, so your chances of a traditional publishing deal with that material are pretty much lottery-level.

There's been a lot of carping that the idea of 'first publication rights' is antiquated, and doesn't fit with today's online era. That we authors need to show publishers the error of their ways in adhering to this outmoded idea. Excuse me while I snort into my coffee.

Having spent three hours searching for the files of something I was working on, I feel compelled to write:

In addition to a regular, reliable backup system, you need organisation. You need to be able to find exactly what you're looking for within a few moments. Not just stories, but publication details and dates, contracts, receipts (conventions and equipment can be tax deductable) and your entire writing business. They all need to be in the same place, stored according to the same system.

This is not negotiable - doing anything less is not taking yourself or your work seriously, and if you're not going to, why should anyone else?

But there are two kinds of filing systems - the kind designed for easy filing, and the kind designed for easy retrieval.

I'm not going to go into whether you have books on your desk or juggling balls, whether there's a blanket for your cat to nap on, or a small den of not-quite-pet spiders under the monitor. Though I'm sure we all drool over the possibility of our own dedicated writer's room, most of us have to make do with the same space that we use for bill-paying, web-surfing and possibly dinner-eating

Nor do I think it particularly matters whether you like to write your drafts out longhand and transcribe them. Personally, I loathe transcription, and taught myself a decade ago to work on a computer from idea to final draft - as a touch-typist, my typing is at least five times faster than my writing, and the ease of editing quickly sold me over the loss of "feel". (Just in case you're thinking of switching.) Mind you, if longhand drafts are good enough for Neil Gaiman, it's hard to argue against.

But there is something that writers seem to shy away from doing properly. Work backups. Oh, so humdrum. When you've lost 70% of a manuscript, you can tell me how humdrum it would be to have to back your work up. But it's really - really - not that hard, not that tedious, not that scary.

 

So the 'leaked' iPad app list is out over here courtesy of Gizmodo. There's a link on the page you can browse the whole archive yourself, including visit individual app pages.

There are a lot of duplicates in there - and I don't mean the full version plus the lite version, but identical copies of the same app turning up more than once. This makes me rather doubt the 1350 apps claim (were they just hoping people wouldn't look too hard?) but some are looking useful:

Vanity publishing has been around probably as long as publishing itself. In an industry where the cost of entry is so high and so lauded, it's hardly surprising that a predatory sibling grew to gobble up the unwary fish. Can't get editors into your book? Come with us, ignore them, let's just focus on making a really great book. Of course, you understand, really great books don't come cheap...

Most authors who've bothered to do more than a modicum of research have the brains to avoid those kinds of deals. But there are other versions of the vanity publisher and similar predatory practices still cropping up today.

One of the best and worst qualities of the internet is that everything you do reflects on itself. If you run a business, and step out as a voice for that business, then anything and everything tied to that voice reflects upon that business. That means that good things can spread quickly, and that people may take notice if you have something important to say.

It also means that any unprofessionalism immediately attaches itself to your business. You must always be in your business-hat. A case in point, on the blog of an agent I follow occasionally. An author made a very polite query to the 'boss' of the agency (who maintains the blog) about the status of his partial-submission, because he'd not received a requested update from the agent handling the submission.

The agent sent back a very curt and rude email, culminating with "You are welcome to pull your ms. from the pile or wait your turn."  The author, not surprisingly, pulled his MS, and the agent (apparently surprised) then wrote a blog post, including posting the entire email exchange (with names and titles nearly-entirely redacted) online, without permission of the author.

It seems to be the general thrust behind a lot of articles and publisher's new contracts and policies. E-books are going to demolish print book sales, and leave publishers swinging in the wind, and they're anxious for us to know that producing an e-book isn't that much cheaper than a print one. A New York Times article even has a nice article comparing the relative cost of ebooks, concluding that where a publisher can expect about $4.05 from a $26 hardback, their e-book revenue is from $4.50 - $5.50 - more, but less than the general public expects.

Which is a nice bit of statistical chicanery, really. Good for an article, but utterly useless for a realworld comparison.

 

From the last two posts, we can summarise that while making a self-published career successful is a lot of work, it's actually not that much more work than making a successful traditionally-published career. You still have to do a lot of the same things, you swap once set of annoyances for another, and trade brick-and-mortar sales for more control and a bigger cut of the pie (though it may well be a smaller pie).

So far, it seems largely a question of how much work you want to do by yourself. Does the idea of designing, producing and selling your own books excite you, or fill you with dread? Does the notion of asking permission from hundreds of gatekeepers if they would deign to consider your work offend or inspire? Do you long to see your work on the shelves of B&N, or would you happily watch the numbers roll into your paypal account?

Who said it had to be either/or?

 

Following yesterday's post about what publishers really offer in the quasi-digital age, let's take a look at what you can manage without a traditional publisher behind you. There've been some excellent and inspiring posts out recently. So, what benefits can you gain from going solo?

The whole Amazon/Macmillian/Apple kerfuffle, and the less-than-savoury antics of many publishers regarding author royalties for ebooks has given me some pause for thought in my general business plan. I'd always assumed - like most writers out there, I suspect - that traditional publishing was really the only bar in town, and that self-publishing was for people whose writing / book was so bad, they couldn't get the 'real' kind, or books that you didn't really expect anyone to actually buy.

Which is really a load of prejudicial bullsmatter.  I've discovered through various blogs that a number of authors are quite happily publishing their own stories via kindle and various self-publishing avenues and making a tidy profit. Not megabucks, but certainly more than you'd expect. I recently discovered Smashwords, an online business that allows you to publish to all manner of e-book formats, and list yourself in Amazon, B&N, and other major online book stores, giving you a generous 85% of the royalty.  Hopefully when Apple gets iBooks up and running, they'll integrate there, as well.

So, if it's now not only possible, but almost easy to publish your own works, what does a traditional publisher give you for that 90% of the list price you're handing over?

There's a lot of hooplah going on at the moment about Amazon and Macmillian. The digest version is:

Amazon said "we'll match Apple's profit-cut for e-books if you agree to price books between 2.99 and 9.99, and not offer a cheaper one anywhere else." Macmillian said "9.99 is below what we sell them to anyone for, and will harm the brick-and-mortar industry, and the publishing industry in general in the long run. You can either allow us to price books from 12.99 to 14.99, or we'll just release the e-books after the hardback sales have finished, so as not to undermine the printed books." Amazon said "nuh-uh!" Macmillian said "Them's your options, pick one." Amazon said "If you won't play by our rules, we won't sell ANY of your books! So there!" Macmillian said ".... that's the stupidest thing I ever heard. What use is a bookseller that only sells 5/6ths of the books? People will just buy our books elsewhere. PS: you're not actually a monopoly." Amazon said ".... um... oh yeah. Okay, you can sell at 14.99, because you're a big mean bully who's hurting the publishing industry with unsustainable expensive prices."

The big questions here are - what should be the price of an e-book, and how will the publishing industry have to change to manage that?