Category Archives: Publishing

August 14, 2014 · 9:12 am

Amazon vs. Publisher Kerfuffle Continues

Though I don’t yet have a dog in the race, I’ve been following the Amazon vs. Hatchette/authors battle. Looks like there’s been another volley, and it’s just a bit silly. Amazon apparently emailed a bunch of “their” authors (those who have used the KDP) requesting that they email Hatchette and cc Amazon’s PR folks on it…to prove it, I guess?

Basically, they wanted to use the authors are human battering rams against their rival corporation. The funny thing about writers, though: they like to write things. So I saw a cascade of folks offering up their opinions.

Here are some good ones to read:

  • Neil Gaiman:  “It’s like Godzilla battling Gamera, and we’re looking up from the sidewalks of New York rather worried that a skyscraper might topple on us.” And he points out some independent bookstores people might populate instead.
  • Chuck Wendig: Who wrote a long, detailed and really great post about the whole thing. “It’s a cheapy tactic meant to drum up support from a group of people who don’t really have a huge dog in this fight — this is a fight with traditional publishing about traditional publishing. “
  • John Scalzi: The following quote is only tangentially related to the controversy, but it hit home for me.

“Look, here’s the thing: You can construct in your mind a world where there are the tough and scrappy self-published authors on one side of a battle and the posh and pampered traditionally published authors on the other, and pretend to set them against one another, like flabby, middle-aged Pokemon. But I think that’s kind of stupid and I’m not obliged to live in that particular fantasy world. Nor do I believe that the successes of other writers take away from my own. It’s not actually a zero-sum game where only one publishing model (and the authors who use it) will survive and the rest are eaten by weasels, or whatever. The world is large enough to have authors publishing one way, or another, or by some combination of various methods.”

Considering that Amazon has widened its fights to include a drag-out fight with the monolith that is Disney, I can’t see this slowing down anytime soon. However, I must say it has given me pause regarding whether I’ll publish with Amazon. I mean, I probably will–they’re the biggest fish in the pond in the ebook space, and it’s sort of crazy to ignore that–but it does make me hesitate.

Anyone else keeping tabs on this? Thoughts?

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July 26, 2014 · 11:48 am

Self-Published Authors Make a “Living” From Sales

This isn’t a great article–it doesn’t give much new information–but I thought I’d share it to show how the changing publishing marketplace is making headlines even outside of writers’ circles.

Five years ago, printing your own book was stigmatized and was seen as a mark of failure.

“But now,” says Dana Beth Weinberg, a sociologist at Queens College who is studying the industry, “the self-published authors walk into the room, and they say, oh, well, ‘I made a quarter million dollars last year, or $100,000, or made $10,000.’ And it is still more than what some of these authors are making with their very prestigious contracts.”

Weinberg says there is still a strong financial case to be made for publishing books the old-fashioned way, but there are now many well-known independent authors who have made a fortune self-publishing online.

You can read the whole article here.

I’m not sure what to believe, and it looks like there isn’t really clear data either way. (Here’s what I know about writers’ rates by type of publication, though.)  It’s still such a smoke-and-mirrors, get-lucky business. What do y’all think?

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July 15, 2014 · 9:36 am

Money, Money, Money: Amazon vs. Publishers

For a writer on the sidelines (*ahem* not yet published, I mean), it’s an interesting time. Self-publish, indie publish, Amazon CreateSpace, imprints, university presses, Big Five… it’s sort of a mess right now. The Amazon-Hatchette showdown is definitely the matchup to keep an eye on right now: worst, I don’t even know what side, if any, I’m on.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the news, Amazon–the big gorilla in the current publishing market, dominating ebooks, self-published, and even books published more or less traditionally under their imprint–is duking it out with Hatchette, publishing’s fourth-largest company. We don’t know for certain what they are fighting about… well, we know they’re fighting about money. But we don’t have details.

Some folks have guessed that Amazon wanted to own 50% of every book sold, instead of 30%. That’s a big price hike, particularly in an industry that hasn’t been doing that great. (But, says Amazon, most of your customers are buying from us anyway. Without us, you will fail.) Because Hatchette didn’t budget, Amazon has been slowing down the deliveries of customer orders.

This tactic may have backfired, however; authors big and small, including the likes of Stephen King, got together to sign a petition against Amazon, complaining this tactic is anti-consumer (and anti-author). Amazon lashed out, saying Hatchette was using authors as “human shields.” (Woah now.) [Hugh Howey and Chuck Wendig have also both weighed in, on opposing sides of the debate, despite being published by Amazon.]

The big publishers (and especially the small publishers) say they can’t afford any more fees, that Amazon is a near-monopoly and a “bully.” Amazon claims the publishers don’t treat their authors well enough, that they can’t keep up with the times, that they are an obstacle to affordable and accessible literature, and basically just need to put up or shut up.

I…don’t know what should happen. Amazon’s demands do seem extreme to me, and I am deeply concerned with the idea in which Amazon were the only “publisher” left. It also alarms me that Amazon might one day turn on their authors; perhaps they’ll have a bot they think can churn out better fiction? And then they’ll see no need for us. Then again, I think traditional publishers don’t do enough for their authors anymore (both in support and in money). [Here’s the chart featuring how much in royalties you can make in different formats.]

I’m still on the fence about my publishing path, but I have recently been leaning ever-closer to self-publishing. It’s not a free and easy path, however; just different.

What do y’all think of the recent controversy between Amazon and the publishers?

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May 15, 2014 · 10:31 am

The Burning Jealousy of the Not-Quite-There-Author

Let’s talk about jealousy. I have it.

Of course I have it for the biggies, the JK Rowlings and the Stephen Kings and the Shakespeares and the Jane Austens of the world. That’s a given, but that kind of jealousy is motivational: those are the success stories everybody looks up to.
To a lesser degree, I’ve got that for the Hugh Howeys and the Suzanne Collins’, our most modern wave of authors who, one way or another, adapted to the changing face of publishing and owned it.  But even so, that’s not the kind of jealousy that seeps in under your skin and makes your heart clench up.
No, that kind of jealousy is more intimate… reserved for the people who you (or, at least, I) think I’m at least on par with, maybe in terms of skill, or concept, or–mostly–in terms of starting point. The other newbies; the ones who get just ahead of me.
The shoulda-been-me’s.
I feel spasms of jealousy periodically on twitter, when someone I don’t even actually know announces a book deal or landing an agent or winning a contest. But lately, I am struggling with a big weighty ball of jealousy brought on by a real-life connection.
See, someone I have known pretty much my whole life has just self-published. She wrote the book in less than a year. Months ago, she asked me for the basics on advice for how to get published, and I gave her the Cliff Notes version: you can do the long slog or you can self-publish. She said self-publishing sounded more like her speed, and I pointed her to some resources and offered my editing services at a “friends” price. She turned me down, and I didn’t hear much about it, until she asked me to be a beta reader on short notice. I’m a little overbooked right now, so I declined and wished her well.
Two weeks later, BOOM, there’s her book out on Amazon, and she’s promoting it like crazy. She’s doing interviews, working her contacts, shilling that book everywhere on Facebook–you know, the stuff you do when you’ve just published a book on Amazon and you’re trying to get the numbers up.
But, oh, does it burn me.
I’ve been to the conferences, I’ve read the books, I’ve built a blog and joined Twitter like I was told. I’ve gone the traditional route because of promises of greater potential. I’ve entered the big open submissions opportunities. I’ve written the succession of query letters and dutifully waited while working on something else.
In other words, I followed “the rules.”
It feels like a sharp and painful contrast to this woman, who right out of the gate “broke” the rules: she compares her book to a game-changing classic; she didn’t have any internet or social presence before publishing; she never did a contest; she’s never written before at all!; she didn’t get a professional editor to work on it; and, of course, she self-published.
But people in our circle are talking about her. She gets glowing praise on her Facebook page. She can call herself “an author” and not be questioned.
It burns me right up.
But I realize this kind of jealousy isn’t helpful. This is my problem, and her being different doesn’t mean I’m illegitimate.
(However, I will say that much of the claptrap super-small authors or aspiring authors pump out about “there’s room for everyone” and “your time will come” and “celebrate everyone!” feels like a lie right now. I have a hard time believing “anyone” can be an author…)
So I need to get over this. I may have to start by buying her book.
How do you cope with author jealousy?

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March 25, 2014 · 10:10 am

Query Conundrum

Fellow authors–I need advice.

If you have a nontraditional story format, how do you handle page requests?

Both of the novels I’m currently querying for are–unusual, to say the least. I actually think that’s a strength of them, but I’m worried now that it is handicapping my querying. One, Undead Rising, is a gamebook, in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure books.

The other, Alt.World, is told through the eyes of two main characters–but “news” articles illuminating the pre-dystopian past, as well as cryptic messages, are folded in. All these pieces make complete sense by the end of the book, but at the beginning, it’s pretty open-ended and…well, a bit weird, if you’re expecting the normal “Chapters 1-3.” (It’s not unlike Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin or The Handmaid’s Tale or maybe even Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. The pros do it! But then again, they’re pros, they can do whatever…)

I recently had a page request for Alt.World, and while there was praise in the response I got back (“Solid writing!” *swoon*), she was (understandably, perhaps) confused by the interspersed news articles and the preliminary far-too-cryptic-to-be-yet-understood messages. And she passed on it.

So I’m wondering what I should do: send in 50 pages, excluding the news articles/messages, etc. to make an easier read for agents by putting it in a format they expect? Or continue sending it as it is, as the story truly is, and hope to eventually find an agent who “gets” it–and possibly creating a harder path for myself in the meantime?

Anyone have any experience in this situation?

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February 13, 2014 · 10:29 am

Author Robin Hobb Offers Brilliant Writing Quotes

Robin Hobb, fantasy (and science fiction) writer extraordinaire, did an AMA on Reddit recently. This was one gem from the conversation:

Question: from user Livin_Right

How much time to you spend daydreaming about your stories before you put pen to paper? Do you have most plot ideas worked out in your head first, or do you start writing and let it take you where it may?

RobinHobbAMA Author

Daydreaming? That’s almost my full time occupation! But from the time I get an idea to the time when there is enough of it to say, “This will be a book and it’s time to start writing” is usually at least a year, and often much longer. Many times I’ll get a tiny gem of an idea, and I love it, but it’s not really enough to be a whole short story, let alone a book. So I set it aside and wait. And other bits of it come to me, dialogue or names or settings, and I add that to it. And Wait. And what usually happens is that I’ll be perusing the story seeds, and I’ll suddenly see that two or even three or four are all parts of the same story. When you put them together, they start striking sparks off each other, and growing. It’s wonderful. Then it’s time to write the book.

I love this comment so much. It’s just so perfect. With my first book, I had the idea a good three years before it formed itself into a nice book-sized concept, and it took 6 months to complete (even with the 50,000 words clocked during NaNoWriMo!). Just so fantastic!

Question: from user -August-

Hello and welcome back. I’ve read you will write a story without trying to form it along a certain path and just let if flow, if you will. While I enjoy this idea when reading it, seeing the characters go through good and hard times, I’m sure it could have its ups and downs on the writing side. Do you ever regret writing like this? Is there anything you would change?

RobinHobbAMA Author

I think of Story as this big river. If I can get out into the main current and then hang on for dear life, it will sweep me along and I just follow the story wherever it goes. It works wondrously well for me. Except when it doesn’t. And when that happens, when I suddenly find myself stranded in the muddy shallows with the story going nowhere, then I have to ‘lighten the raft’ so to speak, usually by discarding the last 50 or 100 pages that I’ve typed. So. Yes, there are definite hazards to trusting your Muse, but my experience has been that the rewards are greater than the risks.

This is fantastic, too. I’ve never cut out 50-100 pages of a story before (and OUCH does that sound painful!) but Robin Hobb is an excellent fantasy writer and I’m completely with her comment regarding trusting the muse. I could not have told you how my book would have ended when I began. I had a feeling, but not a certainty. It took working with the characters and the environment to formulate it into a cohesive whole.

I’m glad I discovered this AMA; it’s excited me as a writer and as a reader. I read a crush of Hobb’s Rain Wild series in middle school, but lost track of the series. I think I know what I need to pick up as my next book!

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January 31, 2014 · 10:00 am

The Secret to an Awesome Novel? Science Knows. Kinda.

Rest assured, plebeian writers of Earth: science can now solve all your problems!
That’s right: Science has cracked the code to a best-selling novel! And the answer is…
Wait, this can’t be right. The answer is…” heavy use of conjunctions such as “and” and “but” and large numbers of nouns and adjectives.”
The Telegraph reported on this story, which says that Stony Brook University in New York used science to analyze the best-selling novels (and even poetry!) to analyze what factors led to one book becoming successful over another. They found their analysis could predict with an 84 percent accuracy whether or not a book was successful.
But it’s pretty hard to take this and figure out what, exactly, made one book successful (perhaps–dare I say?–authoring is more art than science?).
The article says the secret to success was “range of factors determine whether or not a book will enjoy success, including “interestingness”, novelty, style of writing, and how engaging the storyline is, but admit that external factors such as luck can also play a role.”
So is there anything useful to authors here, in terms of boiling down the magic to success? Well, maybe.
First, it’s probably not a good idea to write Jaws except with a whale, but it still eats people and the boat is still too small. Being completely original (or “novel”) is certainly a challenge, but it pays off.
There’s no note on how “style of writing” or which style of writing leads to success, but that can be seen as another way of saying “develop your own voice.” Chuck Wendig’s writing “sounds” very different from Joe Hill’s. The only real way to do that is by writing.
“Engaging” and “interestingness” might be ways of saying “keep things moving.” That can be a struggle in some stories, but as you edit, be sure to ask yourself “does this move the story along, or is this scene filler”? I’ve been playing through the “LEGO Lord of the Rings” game and it has made me realize how, while the background story is very basic, Tolkien really kept throwing new perils at the little Hobbits (oh, you managed to survive that horde of orcs? Great. How about an Oliphant?!)
Regarding the “heavy use of conjunctions”: that sounds like “complex writing” to me. It means using advanced writing forms, rather than a series of simple sentences. That takes skill and, again, practice. You could take a class in this (or hire a good editor to help connect the dots), but the best thing you can do is just keep doing it. And read the good stuff; you’ll pick up on the rhythms subconsciously.
It’s great that they acknowledge luck. I’m very grateful for that, because too often a lot of “how to write” books make it sound like you really can boil down some sort of methodology and it comes across as a get-rich-quick scam. It’s not. Just keep chugging.
I am not particularly worried that an agent, editor or publisher is going to start running manuscripts through the SuccessCalculator5000 anytime soon, so this study gives me a rudimentary baseline: Do good work, and keep doing it.

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January 28, 2014 · 9:58 am

Disappointment and New Decisions

After waiting for 15 months, I finally heard back from HarperVoyager’s open submission contest yesterday.
Considering the odds (12 selected out of more than 4,500!), it isn’t surprising that I got a rejection. But it sucks to be so close (in the final week!) and yet still not be among those selected. (Worse, I just got a form letter. I had been hoping for maybe something more personal–and helpful in terms of understanding what to change–since I am in the final tier.)
On the other hand, each piece was looked over by several editors and other readers, and they liked my work enough to keep it to the bitter end. That means it must be pretty strong, right? Nigh-publishable, even if not exactly to their particular taste? That, in a way, is good news.
It’s still a bitter feeling to have waited so long and come so close, but I’m trying to take a positive feeling from it. It does, however, leave me to wait for new decisions: What do I do now?
I submitted that manuscript, Alt.World, to HarperVoyager’s contest because I had already gone through an unsuccessful round of queries that got me little response, and I was emotionally exhausted by the process. But now I have new hope and renewed energy, and I think I am going to spend a few months at least, using all that I’ve learned about writing a good query letter, to pitch it to agents again and restart the process.
However, it is a tough choice, and sometimes I wonder about self-publishing it and going (hopefully) the Wool route. It is a near-future speculative fiction work, after all, and I have some concerns that it is a little too close to real-world timelines. I feel like there is an imperative to get it out relatively soon before it becomes less relevant.
Tough choices.

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December 31, 2013 · 9:18 am

2013 Unresolved

I am one of those people who makes resolutions.

I think most people “become” a resolution person for at least 2 hours around New Years’ Day, and stop being a resolution person, definitely, but January 3.

But I make resolutions and actually try to do them; at least, I have for the past few years. I contemplate the year ahead, write out some goals, and stick them on the door to my closet, where I’ll be forced to look at them every stinkin’ day. For the most part, this keeps me on track and I feel like I’m accomplishing something, so I like it.

Last year, I made a swath of resolutions, but three are particularly pertinent.

  • Build a website.
  • Send out queries for my most recent book.
  • Devote 4 hours a week to personal writing or editing.

The first one,  you’ll note, went pretty well. I launched this blog on February 12, 2013, and I have more or less stuck to a schedule of publishing at least two posts a week since then. WordPress tells me I’ve written 138 posts this year. Not too shabby, and I’m still proud of my little self-made blog. Not too bad at all.

(As a corollary, I launched my official Twitter presence at about the same time, and I’m up to 629 followers, utilizing my “don’t follow any particular strategy” strategy. However, this factoid is depressing when I realize that literal spambots have more followers than me, by the thousands. At that point, I start to hate humanity, give up on counting followers and go eat some chocolate or something.)

For the second goal, I … I was doing pretty well until May, then it came to a screeching halt. But I swear that is for a good reason. In May, that book I was sending query letters out for received two full manuscript requests. Courtesy says you are expected to stop trying to solicit other agents when this happens, so I stopped, completely. Which…maybe I shouldn’t have been courteous, because one agent declined the manuscript because she was switching agencies and the other, even now, hasn’t responded to me. Ah well. Perhaps next year.

However, I did learn that all the massive failures of my query to attract attention was, most likely, not because my book sucked, but because my query did. I had gotten a little overeager and tried something “different” in my query, which seemed brilliant at the time, but I found, at DFW Con, that it was getting me insta-rejected. So have heart! It may not be your book that’s the problem; just your query.

Finally, the writing goal. I was inspired by Stephen King and his dedicated blocks of writing time every week. Four hours a week was pretty ambitious for me, but I “allowed” myself to count blog-writing time as that personal writing time. At first, I was doing pretty well. In fact, here’s the chart I used to keep track:

2013goals

Each little X after the first two columns (used to track a different goal) represents 30 minutes of writing time. Each row is a calendar week. So from my helpful fridge chart, we can see that I did a damned decent job of writing or editing for myself for… half a year.

And then it’s blank.

I got some bad and stressful news in June, and basically lost the willpower to keep up with this fairly difficult goal. But I didn’t entirely quit writing (after all, blog posts continued to flow!). I lost the gumption to keep track of my writing, and to motivate myself to try more personal work, more flash fiction, or working on my novel. If I had to guess what the remaining six months would have looked like, had I bothered to keep track, I’d guess there would be a few blank weeks, but most of the weeks would be at least partially filled in. (Especially November. I wrote like a demon in November in order to win NaNoWriMo).

Even though I did an impressive pratfall on my writing resolution for the year, I found it to be a very helpful goal. It was too hard for me, regardless of what Stephen King manages to do, and I’ll have to recalibrate for next year, but having that little chart to remind me was a good way to get that “butt in chair” part of the equation going. I’m still figuring out what I want to focus on for my already-busy 2014, but I know that should be in there somewhere.

What are your writing/publishing goals for the coming year? How will you keep yourself on task?

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December 17, 2013 · 10:02 am

They’re Just Not That Into You: Ego vs. Humility

I was reading a publishing forum the other day and was appalled by one commenter. She had just gotten her rejection notice after months of waiting, and was (obviously) disappointed. But rather than just expressing her disappointment, she went sassy, saying she wasn’t going to bother to thank anybody because they didn’t give her a real chance anyway, and she was going to self-publish this one and all the rest. You could just hear the “so there” implied in her rant!

It’s one thing to be disappointed. That’s completely normal! Expected, even.

It even is perfectly understandable to think all of those things: nanny-nanny-boo-boo, I can get published without you!

But it was just nasty and mean-spirited to do so in a public forum, and, really, all I think she achieved was making people not WANT to work with her (I wouldn’t want to). And that’s really the opposite of the message you want to be sending with your internet transactions; the next time a publisher or an agent comes along, they might Google you, and the way you act online might — fairly or not — influence their decision to take you on.

It’s a tricky thing for sure. To write a novel and begin the publishing process, you have to have a bit of an ego. It’s an egotistical thing to think “Oh yeah, I have a novel in me. I should be published instead of all those other people.” That’s a powerful drive, and it takes a lot of time and effort to get published, so that kind of ego can keep feeding that drive, even when things are hard and the wait is long.

But you also have to be humble. As special a snowflake as you may be, the agents and publishers out there are in a blizzard. It’s a competitive market, and it’s only getting more so. It really is a miracle that some people get plucked from obscurity (the slush pile, or the deep dark dregs of the ebook list) and become authors with a decent market. That is downright amazing. But, unlike any jolly red elf miracles, it just doesn’t happen over night. It takes work, and it takes some skill, and it takes a lot of luck.

And try not to embarrass yourself with the gatekeepers too badly. That helps, too.

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