Tag Archives: publishing

September 9, 2014 · 8:52 am

Editing Quick Hit: How Many Spaces Go After A Period?

Spacebar: the Final Frontier

I’ve been saving this image so long; I can’t believe I can finally use this joke.

An unexpected furor popped up among some family friends last month, and because I work as an editor, I was the subject-matter expert (in other words, the controversy swirled around me). And it all started with a 3-year-old online article.

The very important question: How many spaces go after a period ending a sentence?

The question-asker had stumbled upon this article from Slate: Space Invaders: Why You Should Never, Ever Use Two Spaces After A Period.

And it’s full of fightin’ words.

Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong,” Ilene Strizver, who runs a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. “When I see two spaces I shake my head and I go, Aye yay yay,” she told me. “I talk about ‘type crimes’ often, and in terms of what you can do wrong, this one deserves life imprisonment. It’s a pure sign of amateur typography.”

Yowza.

But, yes, the accepted standard is now one space after a period, in all cases. (If you’d like to look it up yourself, it’s in section 6.7 of the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition.)

It came to be with typewriters, which didn’t leave enough visual space between a period and the next letter with just one space. But you probably haven’t touched a typewriter in years, so it’s okay to drop the preference.

I know, it’s likely you learned the habit in school–or maybe just picked it up as a sly way to increase the page count on assigned homework–but you’ll make your editor’s life easier if you slim your manuscript down to just one space after the period. If it’s challenging to unlearn the long-engrained habit, you can also use your search bar in Word to search for two spaces, then use the replace function to replace it with one space (it’ll look like you’re searching for nothing, but this works).

Does it really matter? Not truly. It’s just one of those accepted rules. Consider it like brushing your hair before you leave the house. Sure, you don’t have to, but you’ll look more polished and professional if you do. I don’t care if you put two-three-four! spaces after a period in your personal emails, your journal, your thank-you notes–but when finalizing a manuscript, stick to just one.

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September 4, 2014 · 9:29 am

Off the Fence and Into Self-Publishing

Icat on a fence‘ve written a lot about publishing versus self-publishing, and have made it pretty clear that I’ve been fence-sitting: researching both, querying agents, and monitoring the self-publishing world and the struggle between the two methods of publication.

Well, I just got pushed off the fence.

At DFW Writer’s Convention in 2013, I was able to sit down with two agents for pitch sessions. They both went really well, and I went home with two full manuscript requests for my zombie gamebook, Undead Rising. I sent them in, and began my patient waiting.

After a few months, I received a rejection from one of the agents. It was short and vague. I found out a week later that she had switched agencies, so I think she probably picked up only her favorite things and took them with her. So my feelings weren’t that hurt.

And then I waited some more. And, frankly, I had a really busy year… so I forgot about it.

I just this week got the other rejection. That’s 15 full months (a year and a quarter!) of waiting to hear back one way or another on a  requested manuscript; she’d already shown enough interest to get me to “phase 2” of querying.

Now, the agent was really kind in her rejection and apologized for the “unconscionable delay,” which she attributed to her “large backlog of requested material.” In fact, the rejection was largely positive; she mentions a quibble or two, but it (in my opinion) seems extremely minor and not a big deal. She said it was “well-executed” and that there was “a lot to like here.” Which is good to hear.

I’m not trying to call her out here–I’m not going to say who the agent was; she was very nice in person and I would have liked to have worked with her. But a 15-month delay on a requested manuscript seems ridiculous. Particularly because it is considered good manners to not consult other agents while a manuscript is with an agent (though I could have, had I notified her. Like I said, I forgot.)

This isn’t the only reason–the stars in general are feeling like they’ve aligned for me–but this is a big reason that I’ve decided to self-publish this book. The traditional publishing structure seems to be oriented toward very narrow types of books (whatever the gatekeepers think will sell well immediately) set on incredibly long-term time frames (making the process more about luck and timing than content). That combined with the lower rate of return… I just don’t feel like my oddball book will ever be a good fit in the industry. And that’s disappointing.

But it’s also exciting.

So, by Halloween of this year, I intend to have a complete zombie gamebook adventure available for sale as an ebook (and maybe a print book). I look forward to getting Undead Rising: Decide Your Destiny to an audience in time for All Hallows Read!

If you’ve self-published, can you offer any tips or tricks?

 

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August 28, 2014 · 9:03 am

Author Hugh Howey Has Good Questions for Amazon

I admit it–because of all the Amazon/publisher tiffs lately, I’ve started to view breakthrough author Hugh Howey as a bit of an Amazon brown-noser; he always seemed quick to defend the ebook giant, even when they made strange choices. But I think maybe that assumption was wrong.

He recently published a long list of questions directed at Amazon, titled simply “Stuff I Want to Know.” Some of his questions seem…trivial:

I would love to know why we don’t have any sort of gamification of writing implemented yet? Writers should receive little congratulatory badges for hitting reasonable sales milestones.

Why don’t you all create a newsletter system for authors?

But he also has some extremely good and pointed questions, and it’s good to see his perspective as a super-producing Amazon insider. For example:

I want to know why you all haven’t come out and explained that the 70% cut we make on ebooks priced in a certain range aren’t really royalties. (See #5 of this list for an example of improper usage of the term). When they’re called royalties, the 70% seems exceedingly generous. Because publishers pay a lot less. But publishers provide other services, like editing and cover art. We are handing you a finished product. As a distribution fee, you taking 30% (plus more for delivery fees) sounds less crazy-generous. It seems downright reasonable, in fact. Or even an area where you all could afford to give a little more.

Or:

I would love to know how many readers borrow a book and then go on to buy a copy of the same book. I’ve done this before, and I tend to doubt my uniqueness. For Prime members especially, who only get one borrow a month, do they ever love an ebook so much that they decide to own a copy for good?

It’s great stuff, providing both a peek behind the curtain and some food for thought. Read the whole post here.

I’m still only gently wading into the publishing world, but do any of you have questions for Amazon or any of the major publishers? What are the things you want to know? So much of the process is cloaked in mystery; there has to be something.

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August 21, 2014 · 9:53 am

Don’t Let Rejection Weigh You Down

This New York Times article is…weirdly composed. It’s a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster (what do odd resume’s and rejection lists have in common?), but I’m glad it brought the rejection list to my attention.

Basically, author Monica Byrne has kept track of every single rejection she has ever gotten. There are more than 500 now on her list, compiled over 6 years. Which just has to be brutal. But I found her comments about it inspiring:

“Of all the things I’d ever submitted to or applied for,” she writes at The Washington Post, “I’d gotten only 3 percent of them. That’s a 97 percent rejection rate. That means I got 32 rejections for every acceptance.”

But she DOES have acceptances, including a book deal and a sold-out play. I also liked this quote:

“The anti-résumé remains my deceptively simple answer to the question, ‘How do you do it?’: that I persisted during all those years of rejection for no other reason than that I loved writing so much I wanted to spend all my time doing it. Writing must be its own reward, even for the most talented and hardworking writers, or they’re going to have a tough time.”

I’ve not had much success with courting agents. I’ve gotten some nice comments, a few requests for manuscripts, but nothing has really gelled. And it’s been frustrating. Sometimes I think back on my rejection list and wonder if maybe I’m “doing it wrong”–“it” in this case being “everything.” But Byrne reminds me that this is sort of just how it is. Just keep going for it.

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August 19, 2014 · 9:40 am

Real Costs of Self-Publishing

I found this excellent peek behind-the-scenes of self-publishing from Writer.ly’s CEO Abigail Carter.** It’s the kind of information that is just hard to come by, and I found it really useful.

She describes not just the costs she has put into the book pre-launch, but also the struggle to get recognition via reviews. It’s a good reminder that self-publishing means you have to take on a lot more than you would if you were picked up by an agent and publisher (though the difference in your royalties may be worth it to you).

Before launch, Carter spent $2,570 to get the book ready (yeah, that number rocked me back a bit, too, but it’s so great to have actual hard numbers). In a week, she made… $75.41.

She followed up recently with another post, detailing more of her expenses, in particular her hard work to get those vital Amazon reviews. She got 102 reviews and more sales, and her expenses went up to $3,183. With sales at only $441.94. Yikes, that’s a big cost. Hopefully it will pan out for her.

If you’ve self-published, have you “broken even” yet? What did it take to get those early reviews?

**Full disclosure: I work with Abby sometimes through Writer.ly, because I find it to be an excellent resource for writers, editors, and illustrators. She’s a nice person. No one paid me to write about this, however.

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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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July 8, 2014 · 9:02 am

What is Editing?

At its most basic, editing is making changes to a written text. Simple enough, right? And yet, not, because folks have different understandings of when it is okay to make those changes.

Case in point: I once knew a writer-turned-editor who felt “editing” meant she always needed to make a change to the original text, sort of as a way to prove that it had, in fact, been edited. This led to a lot of ridiculous edits, such as the substitution of a word with its synonym: ex. “Clifford the big red dog liked to play” would become “Clifford the enormous red dog enjoyed playing.”

The original meaning of the sentence wasn’t changed or improved at all by those kinds of edits; many of the writers she worked with felt like she was just wasting everyone’s time and was only interested in her own self-aggrandizement.

On the small scale, this kind of substitution editing can be harmless to mildly annoying. On the large scale, it meant the editor was taking a lot of her time completely rewriting copy, without a good reason for it. (When asked, she said, “I thought it sounded better.” That… isn’t a reason to make edits.) Her editing ethos was: “The editor knows best.”

Basically, she was the Loki of editors:

Is there a better way?

I think so. My editing philosophy is: “First, do no harm. Second, make it better without impeding the author’s voice and meaning.”

In other words, it is never my job to make a change just for the sake of making a change. If I were hired to copy edit a piece and I couldn’t find a single mistake, I’d congratulate the author for doing an excellent job (I’d also want to shake their hand, because that’s a feat!).

An editor is really second fiddle to the author. Particularly in the changing publishing marketplace, an editor acts as adviser and clean-up crew–but the author is the boss. When I make edits as a freelancer, I always provide complete transparency, using Word’s Track Changes feature to literally show each and every change. If a change is subjective, I leave a comment explaining my actions. Then it is up to the author to decide which changes to keep and which to disregard.

Editors are powerful, it’s true, but at the end of the day, they–like our pal Loki–are small gods.

Author Hulk here is expressing his feelings toward his overly intrusive editor, Loki.

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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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