2013 Self-publishing Summit (A positive blog entry for once)

Let’s face it, I’m a realist, glass is as empty as it really is, sort of guy.

This tends to make some of my random blog entries sound rather pessimistic.

I was interested to read Dan Hollloway’s entry on his experience at the 2013 Self-publishing Summit. Of course one reason I liked it is that it seems the self-publishing “industry” (if it can be called that) is saying some of the same things that many of us have been saying for awhile.

Dan highlights:

1. The absolute priority of craft.

This is something that many have espoused a number of times. Focus on writing and writing well. The reminder was, even at the self-publishing summit, that this a long haul. A reminder that ebooks live forever, so make sure everything you put out there is the best it can be.

2. The importance of direct engagement and live performance.

This was a surprise to me. There was a positive attitude that readings were getting better. Not surprising was that the venue is outside of the bookstore. Also, mixed media (music and readings) were mentioned. Given that I don’t see any readings with any attendance at most bookstores, I found this surprising, but the point made that bookstores are missing out and other venues are letting readers in was interesting.

3. The importance of niche.

This has been said before. If you are a generalist, it becomes hard to take advantage of building an audience slowly over time.

4. A subdued approach to social media.

Ah yes, the subject of prior blog entries here. The same things were stressed. DON’T SELL via social media. Inform. Entertain. Don’t Sell.

And finally, a surprise: a general positivity about changes in the publishing industry.

This last bit was a surprise and I would love to see some data on this. Publishers are returning to a model (so it is said) where they actually give authors more than one book to succeed? That has been my argument for small publishers, but this seems to hint that larger ones are doing the same. If so GREAT. Still, I would love to see some evidence of this.

Alongside of this, and I agree, is that publishers take more risks than most authors know. You just never hear about all the failures.

My take away from this is that self-publishing is really starting to become a real and accepted aspect of the publishing industry as a whole and is starting to mature. This is positive news for most self-published authors as it means that more doors will continue to open up—if you are a good author who sticks with it and keeps improving.

Authors Are Spending Too Much Time On Social Self-Promotion

First, let me point you to the source article I am grabbing my discussion from:

Indie Authors Are Spending Too Much Time On Social Self-Promotion

Note how I dropped the “Indie” on this. I think this applies to Indie, Small Press, Mid-sized press, and all authors who are not top tier sales at a large publisher.

The argument is a simple one. If you are spending too much time on social self-promotion then you are not writing, or working on your craft. The problem is that even publishers don’t seem to care about quality any more. They care – with good reason – about survival and survival is by sales.

The mistake is, in my ever so humble opinion, that this fundamentally insults readers over the long term. Sure, if the book goes viral it will launch your career 50 shaded ways, but your writing won’t improve and worse, what fans you do have won’t get that second, third, fourth book.

I love two quotes from this blog (one pulled from U.K.’s The Guardian—emphasis added):

In a recent article in The Guardian, Nesrine Mailk said, “A distinguished British author and historian recently told me in a private conversation that his publisher had forced him to go on Twitter in order to promote his latest book. Having joined just for this purpose, his timeline was an unbroken litany of self-advertisement. He soon realized that the constant promotion was backfiring, and that his ‘brand’ was being tarnished as followers were beginning to snipe at his hitherto exalted status. Indeed, the whole exercise was creating the impression that he was a pompous bore whose brash self-promotion did not match the profundity of his work – but he did not know how to rectify that.”

or

…take the advice of Bret Easton Ellis‘s friend, who reportedly told him at the Vanity Fair Oscars’ party: “You need to get off Twitter. People think you’re crazy.”

Now the authors are New Libri Press are going to remember that I said “go out and promote your book, because we don’t have a marketing budget that counts,” and say “what the f*ck? You’re telling me now NOT to promote my book.

No, we are interested in survival too. But, like many micro presses (publishing less than 25 titles per year) we believe in the authors. So, sure, we want it all. We want promotion and another book from our authors. But, for the good of writing in general and a long term focus, we know where we would come down on the question of “I can write, or I can promote, which do you want me to do?”

Write. Keep writing. Get better. Live long and prosper.

All You Can Read, All The Time

Not a new idea, a Spotify for books. The idea has been tried before and frankly given Amazon’s wealth of self-published books I am surprised that it has not been done by the gorilla yet. Amazon may yet try and do this now that another startup is attempting it: Oysterbooks.com, which is based in New York (still the hub of publishing, despite Amazon’s shifting the center of gravity slightly toward the West).

While the trend seems inevitable, with concept of “owning” a book disappearing—realistically how many times do you really read the same book in, say, the same few years—it is unclear how this will effect publishers and authors. If the effect is the same as the music industry it will be a mixed bag. Generally, less revenue for the author and less corporate support for the unknown artist (supported by the revenue of best sellers).

The problem is none of that can be made up by a live concert! How many people are going to pay to hear you read from your book!

I also suspect there will continue to be a shift toward shorter writing. Short shorts, sometimes called “flash fiction” is already becoming more popular. The push for reading on any mobile device, anywhere, anytime, will also push for shorter content. At New Libri we played with the concept of “Coffee Break Shorts” on Amazon with this in mind and no doubt this will play well in subscription based venues. In fact, this might be an area where a Oysterbooks attracts a lot of authors. For short cheap fiction on Amazon the return is 30%, instead of the somewhat standard of 70%. There is no reason for this, other than Amazon wanted to keep prices above a certain level. This means that there is less to be lost by putting short stories on a subscription service.

My hope is that Oysterbooks will embrace the smaller publishers first. Yes, this is a selfish viewpoint as part of a micro-publisher, but I also think it is where the most benefit for all is—initially. Through a subscription based service the reader is more willing to risk time, versus time and money, on a new author. If they use algorithms similar to Spotify, this also should be easier for them to explore within their comfort zone.

Amazon is the 800lb gorilla, but it would be foolish to say it is invulnerable to the innovations of startups. Having worked at both Amazon and Microsoft, I see Amazon as making similar management steps as Microsoft in the early 1990s. Innovation is still strong there, but it is not startup strong. It is so busy trying to “spin the flywheel” that it may ignore great ideas and then, just as Microsoft did, it will start innovating by acquiring.

As the saying (coined in an old science fiction book, not from any Chinese proverb) goes: may you live in interesting times. If you are an author, publisher, or independent bookseller, you certain do live in an interesting time!

Limited Omniscient POV?

All writers who have studied the craft end up obsessing on point-of-view at one time or another. When critiquing, it is one of the first areas that a writer tends to criticize. That criticism is generally when a writer violates the rules.

The irony, of course is that there are no rules, just guidelines, and those guidelines are often misunderstood, or too rigidly interpreted.

All writer’s start chanting “show, don’t tell” early in their learning. Then, once they leave the warmth of the first person and jump into the third person, they start chanting “don’t switch POV suddenly,” and “the POV is confusing,” and “how could he know that, you’re out of his POV.”

This criticism is fair if it is a beginning writer. Guidelines need to be understood before they can be violated. But, they are guidelines, not rules. They are violated by every published writer all the time. So, how important is the POV? Really, what are the gray areas and how can they be used effectively?

Third person POV is full of gray areas. If you are in limited third person, say George’s POV, and you see this:

George told Sheila the news. She had three options, plead guilty, plead no contest, or plead not guilty. George recommended no contest. Sheila hated ambiguity. She wrestled with the concept. Her conscience just wouldn’t let her implicitly admit guilt, which is what everyone would assume with no contest. Even if the cards were stacked against her, she couldn’t go that route.

“Not guilty,” she said.

Is this a violation of POV? No, not really and those who get their typing fingers in a cramp are over analyzing. If we, as readers, understand that George knows Sheila well, this is easily his interpretation of her thinking. Limited third person does not mean that it doesn’t allow dives into George’s guesses and insight. In fact, if we have a later chapter with Sheila’s POV and show that this interpretation by George is wrong, we then get information that maybe George isn’t such a great judge of character. Could a key word here, or there, be added to make it clear that we are George’s head? Sure, but sometimes that becomes clumsy. It is a gray area. The choice is up to the author who consciously, or unconsciously, may be making a point, or may understand his, or her, audience better than the reviewer.

This should not be viewed so much as a POV shift from one limited third person to another, but from limited third person to limited omniscience.

Obviously, the term limited omniscience is an oxymoron. What I mean by limited omniscience is that when the narrator shifts focus she can divulge information that would be unavailable through limited third person. This is done all the time, it simply doesn’t jar the reader all the time. Often at the beginning of a scene the reader accepts this.

Outside the storm raged. Wind blew down trees. A garbage can rolled down the street. George was oblivious to the tempest as he read the latest Miss Grey bodice ripper, while curled up by the fire.

The POV police would probably argue that this is wrong. If he was oblivious, how could he know a storm was going on, let alone that a garbage can was rolling down the road? The reader will probably accept it as a setup, especially at the beginning of a chapter. We are used to movies, TV, and camera angles, and this feels like the camera outside, moving in and then staying with the character. The reader accepts this.

Notice that a number of times I say “the reader.” Ultimately, what works does depend on your audience. If you are a writer, you are a reader. No good writer can remain relevant without constantly reading. Even the most literary reader will read some commercial fiction and many writers read quite a bit of commercial fiction. The tendency in commercial fiction that sells well today is to be fairly careful with POV and stick to the limited third person very carefully. Switch one chapter at a time. If you switch mid-chapter, do it with a double space or three asterisks. The reason for this is that you generally won’t go wrong this way, but it can lead to very long novels, that sometimes feel awkward. Limited third person is great for plot focused story telling. You are generally not reading it for the language. You also are accepting that it will take some time for the story to unfold because summary language really stands out in a limited third person. It feels like an information dump. Limited third person feels best in scene. Even summary is best done as action, as a summary scene.

George’s summer was a routine of wake up, scrambled eggs, jog for twenty minutes through the park where the squirrels gathered around the old man sitting on bench feeding them stale peanuts from the discount store, followed by a long hot shower and a latte made with frothed milk and instant coffee. The first Monday in August that routine was interrupted.

This summary feels as if it is still a scene. It is this sort of summary scene building that omniscient can do all the time and not feel awkward. The omniscient can give us a richer world, which is why authors, who want to play with words, or world build, rather than focus on the plot, will use omniscient. The Lord of the Rings is a classic instance of this. It is omniscient and while the story is hugely important, the world building is even more important to Tolkien.

What I like to call limited omniscience is the use of omniscience precisely for the world building and the richer context of the world’s characters, but in general to stick with one character and limit the reader’s knowledge and POV during that period to one character.

Yes, I am throwing out a series of qualifiers and seeming wishy-washy, because I am. There are no rules, just guidelines. In general (yeah, I know, repetition of a phrase or word), the biggest critics of POV are writers, not readers. As long as the reader is not confused, or steps out of the moment too much, then you as the author are doing well. Writers make terrible normal readers. We are forever tainted in the way we read. We are never fully in the moment, or rarely, and we intentionally get confused because part of our brain is over analyzing.

What I hope is that more writers will start to carefully drift into the gray areas of POV without getting paranoid about it. Fantasy writers do this with more ease than most writers, although even in fantasy the plot driven writer gets bogged down in trying to stay in limited third person. They will contort their writing by trying to remain true to the character. “I don’t believe that a twelve year old girl would think in those terms.” This sometimes borders on nonsense. The terms one thinks in to describe a scene are the terms of the reader, not the character (remember I am concerned with limited third person, not first person). What is important when criticizing (or determining how to use) language while in a third person POV is the level of penetration. Too often a writer who is a reader will confuse level of penetration with falling out of character. Say an eight year old stumbles through a portal to a version of the middle ages, near a castle.

Todd stared up at the tall castle. The two guards walking along the parapet walk paused and looked down at him.

Wait, the stickler will cry out. Todd is eight. He probably doesn’t know the word parapet walk. “I don’t believe Todd would use the word parapet.”

Well, he didn’t. The narrator did. Parapet is precise and short. There is no reason to write an entire paragraph trying to process in Todd’s language what he sees. He is processing the view as an image, not necessarily in words. Describing what he sees in adult language is not a violation of POV. It is, at worst, a bit of omniscience. It is giving the reader a bit more knowledge than Todd, but only through language. The POV has not been lost and it borders on nonsense to say it has.

Now, if you wrote:

Todd stared up at the castle. I wonder if those guards up on the parapet are scared, he thought.

Now the writer has probably violated the POV character—because we hear his voice saying parapet and we doubt that an eight year old would know that word. The eight year old is NOT the narrator in the limited third person, but there is a narrator in the background with a limited third person. There is a bit of license with a narrator who takes us from one third person to another. The language choice is part omniscience and part level of penetration into the character.

It is for this reason that omniscient can work very well even in popular (aka commercial) fiction. If the omniscient is “limited omniscient” as I characterize it, it feels very close to limited third person, but it can build a rich world and quickly give us insights. Neil Gaiman does this often. In the Graveyard Book we follow characters around one at a time, but we are given insights into characters we meet, without ever jumping into their POV completely. This increases the tension and simultaneously builds a world without having to learn it in the ponderous method of a slow reveal to the character. The main character is an infant that doesn’t speak yet. Just think how ponderous it would be to try and stay “in character” of a two year old.

Bottom line: you are already using elements of omniscience. Don’t be afraid to experiment with it, especially in the gray areas, the limited omniscience.

Thoughts on the “Death of the American Author"

A fairly recent (April 7) commentary by Scott Turow, the president of the Authors Guild, is titled “The Slow Death of the American Author.” 

While ostensibly a commentary on the first use aspect of printed books, it is a bleak assessment on the ability of an author to make a living in the U.S. And by author, I and he mean full length manuscripts and books.

I want to rail against his assessment, but the problem is that over the past few years my assessment is rather similar to Scott’s.

Think how scary it would be for the author if Amazon wins the right to “resell” used ebooks? No royalty for that second and third re-selling of an ebook. All those self-published authors who think Amazon is the next best thing to sliced bread might re-assess that if one book gets sold, via the “used” market one million times. Net royalties for the author: $2. Net revenue for Amazon, $2 million. A scary permutation of the “first use” law that will probably NOT happen, but given the U.S. copyright and patent law rulings of the past 10 years, not totally out of the question.

The changes are slow. There will be some upsides along the way. But, I wish I had a great response to counter Scott. I don’t.

Size does matter

OK, I just couldn’t help the double entendre.

A recent study on continued trends shows some interesting correlations between genre and what type of eReader the user is using. Thus, the title.

First, the number of people reading eBooks continues to increase. No surprise, but it is important to get that out of the way. This stuff matters if you are an author or a publisher.

Dedicated eBook readers tend to be the smaller, less powerful device. They are cheaper and focused on one thing: reading books.

Tablets are multifunction and the reader is simply an app on the tablet. They tend to be bigger (although a smart phone is fundamentally a micro tablet).

Finally, you still have the PC. Yes, quite a bit of reading still occurs on the PC.

Why should you care? Because the capabilities of each is different as is the type of reader.

Dedicated eReader users tend to buy general fiction, mystery, literary fiction, or romance. Computer readers tend to buy technical manuals and similar non-fiction. Phone users tend to read travel guides. Tablet users are the rest.

This matters because of the type of material presented and how you might expect it to look to the end reader. The travel guide writer and publisher needs to think about how to present key information on very small screens. But, with eBooks, you can add navigation. Easy navigation becomes important on a phone.

Technical manual writers, and other similar non fiction, can depend on a larger screen and more processing power. Sure, there will be someone who tries to read your book on a phone, but that will not be the “average” nor the trend.

Full fledged tablets will have fairly big screens, with higher resolution. Artwork and illustrated novels could work. So can cookbooks. Science Fiction and Fantasy will probably be read on a tablet.

This can matter even in the sense of the “free” partial book that you include as a publisher. If you know that the reader is on a tablet, you might not pitch the literary fiction novel there (say via iTunes).

Size/format/form factor/technology does matter and publishers and authors will need to think a little bit about which device they think their reader is reading from, because in on form or another, over 50% of your audience is on one of these devices.

View from the trenches: Query Letters revisited.

New Libri Press has only two editors, so take what I say with a grain (or lump) of salt. We don’t represent every editor (or agent) out there—by a long shot.

Small (micro) publishers, especially newer ones, tend to be more forgiving and flexible than larger organizations. We are more casual. We tend to be technology savvy and submissions by email are the norm (the preference).

All that said, when you go into Microsoft (where I have worked) or Amazon (where I have worked) for an interview do you wear jeans with holes in them and a ratty T-shirt? You are allowed to wear those as an employee, but would you interview that way?

I hope not.

The query email (let’s not even call it a letter for many organizations) is still your interview. It’s your preliminary interview. The full interview is still the manuscript, but first impressions are important. Dress up a little bit. You can wear those ratty jeans (as I do) after you are in.

The simple stuff is important:

1) Don’t have dumb misspellings in the query. We all make mistakes, but catching it in that 200 word query should be easier.

2) I am sure this has been said a million times, but cute and wacky don’t work very often in a query.

3) In the age of Facebook, Twitter, etc., there is a temptation to do super brief, one liner queries. Just as too much isn’t great, 140 characters or less doesn’t really cut it either.

4) Need it be said, read the publisher’s/agent’s website.

5) We don’t need to hear that your goal is to get the book published. We don’t need to hear that the book will make us millions. We don’t need to hear that we would be stupid to turn it down. We don’t need to hear how great the novel is. Or how thrilling. Or how romantic. This is a bit of the old show not tell. Don’t tell us how to feel about the novel. Show us, via the novel and the query.

This sounds like a rant. It really isn’t. We love getting manuscripts and we have seen a steady average quality and quantity increase. The problem is, as we see the volume and the average quality go up, guess what happens with first impressions? They matter more.