Category Archives: publishing:

Nicholas Carr on E-Books

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media httpsiwsjnetpub Abdop.jpg.scaled500 Nicholas Carr on E Books
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Nicholas Carr has an article in The Wall Street Journal about the malleability of e-books. Because a digital edition can be perpetually edited, it is never officially finished. He muses on how intrusive school boards and dictators will tinker in otherwise “published” e-books.

The section that interested me most (as I’ve pondered the article’s subject before) was this:

What may be more insidious is the pressure to fiddle with books for commercial reasons. Because e-readers gather enormously detailed information on the way people read, publishers may soon be awash in market research. They’ll know how quickly readers progress through different chapters, when they skip pages, and when they abandon a book.

I can absolutely see publishers doing this. It could create a world where books are tailored to fit a majority, in the same way market testing has resulted in a bevy of cookie-cutter movies. On the other hand, one could argue that this isn’t so different from the modern writers’ workshop.

One issue the article doesn’t delve into is how editable e-books can encourage more collaborative reading. One could imagine people trading versions of the Bible annotated by Christopher Hitchens or popular novels with erotic fan-fic written in, or copies of The Da Vinci Code with embedded photos of the art mentioned in the story. You’d end up with a variety of specially named editions floating around.

This would all serve to add to the notion of the physical book as a collectors item. With e-books as ephemeral, the printed book may continue to exist as the authority on what the final, official draft is. In the future when print runs decrease dramatically, having a personal copy of the rare, unchanging, printed book will give its owner a certain authority on the text and having a personal library will again become a status symbol.

Posted via email from Future is Fiction

Getting published: See Yourself in Print #1

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Because books are my bread and butter folks occasionally ask me how they might get into the business of being a writer. There are a lot of things you can do to get your polished prose in the hands of booksellers. Note that this isn't about self-publishing, but getting your book printed the old fashioned way.

Cat%252520with%252520Glasses%252520Reading%252520Paper Getting published: See Yourself in Print #1
Image thanks to Barbara Moldenhauer

This Week's Tip to Becoming A Bad-Ass Author: Establish Yourself as An Expert

The more you can do to convince the publisher that you're an authority in that area, the easier it will be for them to sell you to Barnes & Noble.

The simplest way to do this is to start a blog. A lot of potential author's worry about "giving away" too much info on a blog, so that there is nothing left for their book. Unless you write poetry, this is a non-issue and obsessing over it only looks unprofessional. It turns out people have no problem buying a book that reproduces the content of a blog they can read online for free. Go figure. And if consumers will buy it, somewhere there's a publisher who will publish it. Sites like Stuff White People Like, XKCD, and the Oatmeal don't worry about giving away too much.

Of course, once you're a blogger you have to start worrying about SEO and keeping up with other people's blogs and all kinds of HTML nonsense that has fuck all to do with writing your manifesto. Starting a blog is in some ways like joining a virtual, global community. If you're not interested in the existing community that exists around the glockenspiel, why would you expect anyone to read your potential book, Stop, Drop and Glock: How the Glockenspiel Will Set Your Roof on Fire? So while it is a lot of work, that work is seeding potential fans of your obsession (It is an obsession, right? If not, why bother?).

Another way to establish expertise is to write guest posts on other people's blogs, or articles for local newspapers. However, this is easier to set up if you already have a blog in the first place. Otherwise, what can you point them to that shows you have something to say on the subject?

Local organizing can be useful as well, but remember publishers are looking to sell your book all over the country. A monthly meet-up of thirty people isn't going to impress Simon & Schuster.

Building expertise is less true with fiction, but it is still true. Many writers now are experimenting with keeping up a blog about their process. This can include research notes, advice, and inspiration. There are sites like Urbis.com where writers upload pieces of their draft to be critcized by other writers. This is another way of joining communities and building a fan base.

This seems like a lot of work, doesn't it? It is. But if you've chosen your subject matter wisely it turns out to be just another way to immerse yourself in a subject you are passionate about.

Posted via email from Future is Fiction

Some Predictions About Books By Way of Some Predictions About Music

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There’s been a lot of talk lately about the “future of publishing.” After all, books have never had as much cash to spare as the recording industry, and look at the mess they’re in. Already it is not so difficult for a self-published manuscript to sell itself on Amazon.com. What will happen when everything goes digital? The suggestion is that there will be an opening of the gates, and the latest best-seller will stand on the same virtual shelf with thirty self-published manuscripts. The optimists claim that this is where the great unpublished books will be discovered and pessimists point to the unleashed masses of poorly thought-out, half-written tomes filled with spelling errors. But it doesn’t matter if fantastic self-published books are available if they’re drowned out by countless other books vying for the consumer’s attention.
I’m thinking of this issue again because Chuck Wendig just wrote a post on this very subject. I must requote a quote that he included in his piece from a Salon.com article (“When Anyone Can Be A Published Author“)

Furthermore, as observers like Chris Anderson (in “The Long Tail”) and social scientists like Sheena Iyengar (in her new book “The Art of Choosing”) have pointed out, when confronted with an overwhelming array of choices, most people do not graze more widely. Instead, if they aren’t utterly paralyzed by the prospect, their decisions become even more conservative, zeroing in on what everyone else is buying and grabbing for recognizable brands because making a fully informed decision is just too difficult and time-consuming. As a result, introducing massive amounts of consumer choice leads to situations in which the 10 most popular items command the vast majority of the market share, while thousands of lesser alternatives must divide the leftovers into many tiny portions.

Chuck says in response, ” that doesn’t sound like what will happen when the FUTURE OF PUBLISHING is made manifest. It sounds like what happens right bloody now.”
As it is, there are about 100,000 brand new titles published and printed every year, and it is fair to say that even the most devoted readers may touch 1/100th of that. That doesn’t take into account the thousands of reprints of absolute classics that exist. I am pretty sure that if I devoted my entire life to reading I would not get through every book on my imaginary wish list before I breathe my last breath. Now imagine compounding this with an onslaught of unpublished manuscripts, from gorgeous to garbage, that would land on the market place if the result of this revolution were a totally leveled playing field. What would happen?

We Burn Books

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Burning the library in slow motion: how copyright extension has banished millions of books to the scrapheap of history Boing Boing.

I came across this nice article by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing wherein he makes some interesting points on how current copyright laws have censored the majority of books.

the legal changes introduced in the years after Fahrenheit 451 did more than just extend terms. Congress eliminated the benign practice of the renewal requirement (which had guaranteed that 85% of works and 93% of books entered the public domain after 28 years because the authors and publishers simply didn’t want or need a second copyright term.) And copyright, which had been an opt-in system (you had to comply with some very minor formalities to get a copyright) became an opt out system (you got a copyright automatically when you “fixed” the work in material form, whether you wanted it or not.) Suddenly the entire world of informal and non commercial culture — from home movies that provide a wonderful lens into the private life of an era, to essays, posters, locally produced teaching materials — was swept into copyright. And kept there for the life of the author plus 70 years. The effects were culturally catastrophic.

This issue brings to mind the hardest part, for me, of working in publishing—seeing how many books are destroyed and being powerless to stop it. You would think that out-of-print books are worth more, since the moment it is declared out of print it is limited edition, i.e. those that exist now may be the only copies left in the world. The book industry in the only one where retailers are allowed to return the product if it doesn’t sell. But if they hold onto the book after it is out of print, the publisher will refuse the returns. Thus as soon as a book has been declared out-of-print book sellers nationwide box up every last company and return them to the publisher, who, having nowhere to sell them, has them demolished.

Naturally, you are wondering why they don’t just donante the books to libraries or other book-hungry institutions. The problem is again returns: they assume that a certain percentage of these would find their way back to the bookstores,  who will return it for full price. On each of these books the publisher, author and distributor are then paying the bookstore for the book and making zero profit—a risk they’re not willing to take.

So every time a book goes out of print, it is also removed from the shelves and incinerated. Yay, capitalism!

One Writer’s Process

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As some of you may recall, I started writing a novel  in November 2006.  It’s a jerky process.  And by “jerky” I mean both Steve Martin-esque and filled with more stops and starts than a  pimply teen learning to drive a stick shift.  I can hardly believe it has been two years and  my best hope is that it will be no more than another year before I am willing to show it to a stranger.  Not before then, surely.  Coming November I’d like to participate in National Novel Writing Month again, which is the event that prompted me to start the thing in the first place.  So I have set the goal to get the plot written out before November, hopefully with a week or so to plot out the project I’ll begin for NaNoWriMo becuase it will be no fun  writing daily without a plot.  Even less fun editing it later. Trust me, I know.

By writing out the plot, I mean writing every scene that takes place in the book.  Right now I have a chapter by chapter outline, scenes of which are written in caps like this: IF JANET IS GOING TO SHAG ROCKY, MAYBE ADD A SCENE HERE WHERE SHE SINGS TO BE TOUCHED?  For many months I struggled to wholly finish the chapter outline because there was one character I just hadn’t gotten right from the start.  He kept whispering, I’m not who you think I am.  And I knew he was right.  It made it damn near impossible to write his scenes because his  dialogue and movements were all uncertain.  Its one thing to write a scene with the expectation that the writing may be crap and will have to be redone.  Its even more annoying to be unclear about what characters are thinking/doing because a wrong fork may mean you have to redo every scene following.

About a month ago it all came to me, in the form of a power outage of all things.  The power outage introduced a new and significant character as well as a subplot that threatens to dwarf the major plot.Maybe not.  The major story arc was finished almost two years ago and I am seldom working on it so it is tough to say. And now that i have this new subplot I’m thinking I may not need all the others.  But they are so intrinsically tied into my story that I’m not sure where I would snip them. I’m just going to run with it.  If whole sections need to be cut out, now is not the time to decide that.  I have to stay focused on the goal of getting the whole thing written out first.  Like I can’t worry about if the protagonist is likeable enough (not a major deal, though I hear books with femaie protagonists don’t sell if the lead isn’t likeable) because there are more opportunities to flesh out her motivation as more gets added.

I find I spend more time than I would like adjusting the outline to reflect changes in chapter length, story, etc.  The outline is essential because it is really easy to forget where you are in the story (what secrets the protagonist knows, if someone is dead and whether someone else knows it, for examples).  If Shakespeare wrote with a feather and a candle I have no room to bitch.  But next novel, I’m using some kind of outline program.

Now that my plot is written out, I went ahead and counted how many scenes I need to write for my goal.  I came up with eighteen.  This is a misleading number because more often than vice-versa, what seemed like one scene will take multiple scenes to develop when pen gets to paper.  I don’t think this is overwriting, it is a sign of maturity as a writer in my mind.  Sure sign of an amateur is an underdeveloped plot—you know, the guy and gal are making out and they just met last scene?  Still, 18 scenes could definitely be written in a month!

Hopefully, post November I will have the seeds of another novel to puzzle over.  That should be put aside for December, when I plan to pick this one up and look at it afresh.  At that time, I have a number of read-throughs to do, each of which will involve reading the whole thing from start to finish.  These include:

*making sure the dialog is consistent for each character’s personality
*plotting everything on a calendar to find inconsistencies.
*Make depressed character more sad.
*One plot point that afflicts the character needs to be brought up and developed more throughout.
*I noticed on the show Weeds that every character in every scene wants something and this adds more drama to every scene.  I want to do a read through where I think about that.
*Make dream sequences more surreal and tighter, better written. There’s only one I’m happy with now.
*The five senses: what season is it?  What’s the weather?  How does the room smell?  Some scenes are strong on this but I still have whole scenes that suffer from talking-head syndrome.
*The verb tenses are all screwed up, but I think I can deal with passing this problem along to my volunteer editors.
OK, now the good news! Since I did that count a few weeks ago, I am down to thirteen scenes that need to be written.  Out of 20 chapters, I have the story written out for nine.  This means I’ve written five of the eighteen projected in under a month.  And through that chapter, things flow pretty smoothly, meaning I didn’t just plug the scene in with no context, I wrote the necessary stuff to make it fit in with the story line, even if that means rewriting parts of Chapter one.  I even entirely rewrote one of the later chapters.  There was nothing wrong with it, I just decided I could do it better.  One sentence entered my mind and then another and another and before I knew it, dawn was upon me and the chapter was reborn.  It felt great.  It felt like writing should feel: exhilarating, liberating, total immersion. Today was another great day.  I watched an episode of telly, ran some errands and then threw myself into it for 12 hours, stopping only to intake and elimate fuel.  Every two hours I would look up and be surprised that so much time had passed.  Then I would keep on truckin’.