Publishing

a few things, mostly short

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

serial publishing

Following up on her earlier post (which I talked about here), Audry Taylor has a new post called "The return of the serial – to big publishing." Important reading if you're interested in serial publishing.

netflix should offer these two in a single envelope

I just (re)watched Match Point and Scoop back-to-back, and it is really the best way to watch them, because they are the same movie – not because Woody was being lazy, but because that's the point, as I talked about here.

a novel is not a sacred text

I've seen a few blog posts here and there commenting that David Fincher's upcoming remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo changes the ending, which is apparently causing a furor among the Larsson purists. Well, the original movie changed a lot of things, mostly for the better, and if the part being changed is what is reported (I'm avoiding spoilers), then I'll say that in the book it was a really bad idea on a number of levels, and good for them if they changed it (the original movie did).

It reminds me of the people who got all worked up that the movie of Watchmen didn't exactly follow the ending of the original comic book. Hey, the movie ending was better. They kept the overwhelming cynicism (if that's what you're into), but at least they got rid of the giant squid monster thingie, replacing it with something better. Good for them. The Lord of the Rings movies made a lot of changes also, and some are for the better. Some aren't, but that's how it goes.

Occasionally it works when you film exactly what's on the page (The Maltese Falcon is really close to the book), but mostly you do need to make a film out of it. Making a movie by just filming the book is like a band with a really good stage act going into a recording studio to record their set as they play it for audiences, thinking it will make a great album. Mostly it doesn't.

what marketing is (and isn't)

I read an interesting post on Stephen Watkins' blog called "Clearing the Waters: Marketing with Traditional Publishers vs. Digital Self-Publishing." In it, he breaks down the common "Even if I get published by a major I'm going to have to do the marketing myself, so why not self-publish?" argument.

I won't try to summarize all of his points (anybody who's wrestling with the decision of how to publish should read the whole post), but he does break down the common idea that "Marketing == Promotion." Marketing has four components, as he details, which are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. He invited comment by people who have experience with any of these, and while I'm almost completely ignorant about three of them, I do have some experience with Product, since I have published a book, called A Sane Woman.

Which is good, by the way, and you should check it out. You'll like it.

(That's a sample of my Promotion, so I'll move along to Product now.)

First of all, A Sane Woman is an actual book, on paper, and as Stephen points out, there are advantages, but I'll start with questions that apply to all kinds of books, hard copy and digital. I'm leaving out the actual conversion to the various digital formats, since I have not yet published an e-book. But, in any case, Stephen (referring to publishing in general) talks about: "...Editing, Copy-editing, Type-setting, Cover Art, Art Direction, Interior Art, and of course Printing, along with others I’m too inexperienced to remember to point out. The author may have some input into each of these aspects, but collectively all of these non-writing inputs are the Publisher’s responsibility. Some writers prefer to have more input on these activities. And that’s great. But they’re not the writer’s job. Self-published authors, of course: all of these are your responsibility. You may like that. And that’s great. Or it may be a whole lot of extra work you’d rather not worry about. That’s a decision you’ll have to make for yourself. For those that would prefer to have this control, self-publication is a great option. For those for whom this extra non-writing work is a hassle, be aware of this before you choose to self-publish."

All of this is true, but I would add the important qualification that the desire to do any of these things for yourself (and I would add proofreading to the list) does not equal the ability to do them. Frankly, for any of these things, you have two options. Hire professionals (and professionals of course cost money), or produce a product which will not appear to be professional.

Because two facts are unquestionably true (I've read about this on other blogs, but can't recall where offhand, or I'd include links):

1) Even professionally produced books have mistakes (Inherent Vice, a professionally published book by a major author, has three typos, for example).

2) Self-publishers don't get the benefit of the doubt in this area. Nobody is going to dismiss The Penguin Press as a bunch of irrelevant amateurs because of a few typos, but they will dismiss a self-publisher for the same reasons.

Okay, make it three.

3) If your book is not professionally edited and proofed, it will almost certainly have more (and more embarrassing) errors than Inherent Vice does. Will this matter to your readers? Some of them, yes, but it is more likely to matter to any potential reviewers.

Well, say you do pay for professional help in these areas, then you still have to deal with Price, Place, and Promotion.

But what about real books? If you decide to go digital-only, is that because you think hard copy books are now irrelevant, or because digital-only seems doable for self-publishing and paper doesn't?

(I'm not making any proclamations on whether the future of publishing is paper or digital or both, by the way – I have no idea. But if you're dismissing the way books have been delivered to readers for hundreds of years, I'd think it would be a good idea, from a professional standpoint, to have some data to back up that decision.)

If you do decide to do hard copy (in addition to or instead of digital), then you have all the tasks mentioned above to deal with, plus you have to design a book. There's the cover, of course (which you need for ebooks also), but there's also the interior pages. What font, what font size, what leading, what margins, how much indent? What about widows and orphans and bad breaks? Not only how to spot them, but also how to fix them in a way that doesn't make readers cringe. How many hyphens are acceptable in a single paragraph?

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. I've done desktop publishing professionally since before Microsoft Windows existed, but I had to learn a lot of new things to do A Sane Woman. And ASW is not a professional product, which is deliberate. I love the cover (which I did not draw), but no professionally-produced book looks like that these days, which is the idea.

Amateur has two meaning, after all. It can mean lacking in experience or competence, or it can mean someone who engages in a pursuit out of enthusiasm rather than as a profession. This is the sense in which Jim Jarmusch (possibly my favorite living movie director) calls himself an amateur, and that's an honorable route to choose.

And ASW has been extensively and carefully proofed, by the way, including by professionals. The punctuation rules diverge from the Chicago Manual of Style in a couple of ways, but that's deliberate.

But if you do choose the professional route you will be held to professional standards, and that's important to keep in mind when deciding if self-publishing is the best way to go.

Oh, and check out A Sane Woman. It's available for e-readers for free, and in hard copy for the modest price of $10.00.

(If you can think of a way I could give away a hard copy book without losing money, let me know.)

in which i talk about shyness and self-promotion

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

I started this post a few weeks ago, then something else came up that distracted me ("Ooooh, shiny!") and that was that.

But I thought of it again when Maggie over at Maggie Madly Writing posted "Don't Use It as a Crutch," about overcoming shyness, and that reminded me of the question of shyness as a specific problem for writers.

Now, obviously, writers sit indoors a lot by themselves, writing, and shyness isn't really a problem for that lifestyle. But then, when the book is done, it has to be promoted. This is essential if you self-publish (assuming you want to sell any copies, obviously), and from what I've read it's increasingly important even if you get picked up by a major.

This is why I paid attention a few weeks ago when I saw a very interesting series of posts on some blogs I follow, including Maggie's, on some closely-related topics:

  1. Maggie posted "Introverts vs. Book Marketing and Promotion,"
  2. Kristi Holmes posted "Doing Work You Love" (not specifically about book promotion, but about being an introvert),
  3. Jo Eberhardt posted "BWF: An Overview of the Brisbane Writer’s Festival," where she talked about writers standing up and reading their own work in front of a crowd.
  4. And there was one more post that I linked to when I started this post which has since been taken down (because the writer thought it was too personal and revealing).

BTW, I think reading in public is a particular skill, and not quite the same thing as self-promotion. I am not really comfortable promoting myself, or my writing, and this doesn't reflect insecurity about the work itself (which pleases me enormously whenever I read it). But I would be fine standing up in front of a room of people and reading from my work. I've performed on stage many times, and I've done training classes with 80-100 people, so I'd be fine with that.

BTW2, as I indicated on Maggie's blog, the fact that shyness can be overcome is important to remember for characters, too. It's easy to put our characters in boxes ("the shy one," "the cautious one," "the quiet one," etc.) and not give them a chance to surprise us. You know, the way real people do.

Anyway, I tell myself that one reason I've held back on hyping A Sane Woman is that it's old. Parts of it were written over 20 years ago, and it was finished nearly seven years ago. What I'm doing now is better. But, of course, this excuse will no longer apply when I finish the book I'm working on currently.

Fortunately, Dalya Moon just did a guest post on Bunny Ears and Bat Wings called, "How to Get Book Bloggers to Review Your Book." I've bookmarked that one, but first I have to finish the book (I'm currently 86% of the way through marking up a draft, and I've made around 200 notes, and then I have to make another floor plan, and a map, and write two epilogues...).

One way to get out of doing self-promotion is telling yourself that you don't know how to do it. Well, now I won't have that excuse anymore.

And one way to do it is to figure out what's really involved and find the things which work for you. Some people are shy in person but can be bolder on the internet. Nobody is born knowing how to write query letters, but that skill can be learned. If a particular task is too huge, break it down and do it bit by bit (which, as Dalya points out, can be good in other ways too, since you can send out a few queries, and then learn from the reactions before you send out the next batch).

But I think the main thing to remember is what Andy Warhol said (this is one of my favorite Warhol quotes):

"[I]f you say that artists take 'risks' it's insulting to the men who landed on D-Day, to stuntmen, to baby-sitters, to Evel Knievel, to stepdaughters, to coal miners, and to hitch-hikers, because they're the ones who really know what 'risks' are."

serial publication

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 11 Comments

There was a very interesting blog post this week at Audry Taylor's blog, called "Open Letter re: Serials to Editors, Agents, and Publishers." Here's a quote:

[T]he majority of published stories used to be serials. Newspapers put out many of the great 'novels' in regular installments for on-going serializations until a story had either exhausted itself or wrapped up as the author originally planned for it to. Dumas, Dickens…many of the writers whose words we worship had to write on the spur of the moment, turn in chapters on a weekly or monthly basis, and work to intense, year-long schedules that we ourselves are mostly unfamiliar with. Both great art and entertainment for the masses have been produced this way."

For example, the current disdain for serial publication is shown in the way that "graphic novels" are often considered to be more legitimate than good old comic books, despite the fact that a lot of the most revered "graphic novels" (Maus, Watchmen, the Sandman series) are actually regular monthly comic books repackaged in book form.

I've always liked serials, both to read and to write, as I talked about here.

What I'm not sure about is Audry's assertion that the Internet is the best vehicle for serial fiction. It is for me, since I'm not trying to get paid, but Audry is definitely approaching this as a professional, so for that I have another idea.

The New York Times arrives on my Kindle every morning (it is actually the best way to read the daily Times). I don't even have to think about it, it just pops up. So, here's my idea:

The first chapter of a serial novel is posted online for everybody to read. Those who want to read the rest of the story can subscribe, and subsequent chapters will appear on their particular device every month (or whatever interval) until the story is over.

I think the main point is that there could be an audience, not the technology. For example, the Internet is the ideal vehicle for hypertext fiction, but there has never been any indication that there is an audience, as I talked about last time. But serial fiction? There is a lot of evidence that people like that. As I said in my comment on Audry's post:

People have loved serial fiction in many forms: magazine serialization of novels, radio shows like I Love a Mystery, TV shows like The Sopranos (and regular soaps, of course), plus movie serials back in the early days.

I sent a link to Audry's post to Astoria (the cover artist for my books), and she responded, "I totally subscribe to Audry's serialization plea; as a reader I can't think of anything that would give me more pleasure than having, say, a monthly treat of a story chapter on the computer. Tell her to keep pushing. You too."


Later: Audry posted a follow-up, called, "The Return of the Serial – To Big Publishing."

and worry about it later

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 5 Comments

This week there was some interesting discussion about Amazon and e-books. And no, I'm not talking about the Amazon Fire, their new entry into the tablet world, since I don't really care anything about tablets (at least at the moment).

I would direct people to some very good posts over at Stephen Watkins' blog (The Undiscovered Author) about Amazon, and about e-book self-publishing in general. I won't put direct links, since there have been about five or six posts, but they're all recent so they'll be easy to find. Stephen's premise (and his documentation is thorough) is that 1) Amazon will not make you rich as a self-publishing e-book author (unless you're really lucky), and 2) Amazon does not exist to make you rich anyway (well, duh).

I have no strong feelings about Amazon one way or another, mostly because my experiences have run the gamut from sublime to dreadful. To quote one of my comments:

I’ve had a wide variety of experiences with Amazon. On one hand, they gave me probably the best customer service experience I’ve ever had with a large corporation: u-town.com/collins/index.php?p=1993. On the other hand, some of my websites went down for over 48 hours(!) because Amazon is pretending to be a web hosting company: u-town.com/collins/?p=2121. Those are probably the extremes.

I do like the Kindle, though I use it mostly as a writing/editing tool, for which it is very well suited (the majority of the files on my Kindle are things written by me). Also, early 20th century books that are out of copyright are basically free (the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, all the Philo Vance books, Henry James, Ulysses, etc.). And, as I've said before, it is the best way to read the New York Times every morning.

So, I was thinking of doing my new book (in progress now) as an e-book as well as a real book. I even poked around Smashwords a lot, which was rather discouraging, since an e-book has to be in a lot of different formats, and you don't have much ability to tweak formatting. And all the e-books I've read have had unexplained indents, paragraph breaks in the wrong places, and other unsightly mistakes. I'm used to print and web, where you have a lot of control, especially if you understand the tools.

But I was still thinking about it, until one of the articles Stephen linked to (from this post) mentioned that one thing which isn't known is how books will display that aren't all text. You know, books with illustrations.

Well, my mystery stories have illustrations. Maps, floor plans, even a scan of a vital written clue. How would they display on different readers, different tablets, different phones? Well, I don't have to see them on a phone to know how they'll display: they won't, at least not properly, since they're bigger than that little tiny screen. This is an issue for Stephen as well, since he works in the fantasy genre, and fantasy usually has maps.

So, that settles it. Hard copy and web, where I have control, and that's it. No e-books, at least not for this project.

Oh, and it was pleasant that with the various new Kindles announced this week, I had no buyer's remorse for having the one I do have, because none of the newer ones have keyboards, and I get a lot of use out of that little keyboard.

a puppy? a cuddly, fluffy one?

~ Anthony Lee Collins

linux

There's a new version of Puppy Linux, which is very exciting. I'm trying it out now, and so far so good.

I've been using Linux for twelve years, as near as I can figure it. I use Puppy for most things. For the few things that Puppy can't do, I use Mandriva and PC Linux.

paper and pixels

One thing that I do use Mandriva for, Open Office to be precise, is laying out books. That's how I did A Sane Woman. I've been working on a second book, of the Jan Sleet mystery stories, but I've put that project on hold.

I do believe, as is talked about here, that reading on paper is different than reading on the screen. Everything I write (well, all the fiction) is written by hand first, usually with a fountain pen. Then I put it into the computer and edit it and edit it, and then (as with the writer of the article) I print it out and immediately see everything that's wrong with it.

When I was working on the book I made a lot of notes of corrections and changes (mostly very minor), and my thinking was that I would make the corrections in the book, which would be the definitive version, and I wouldn't try to make them all on the web as well.

But that doesn't really make sense. The fact is that most people who read my stuff read it on the net, or by printing it out (hence the convenient printable mysteries), rather than by ordering a copy of A Sane Woman. So, once "The Sister Mystery" is done I will start to go back and make those changes in the online version. And, since both the blog and the printable mysteries draw from the same database, both will be updated.

I will do the book at some point, but I want to wait for another reason, too. Since the mystery stories have, rather unexpectedly, turned into the story of Jan and Marshall adding Ron to their family, I want to see a bit more about how that's going to go before I put it on paper.

Oh, and speaking of "The Sister Mystery," more is posted, starting here.

mr. language person

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

(With apologies to Dave Barry.)

I'm sick, so I have no idea if I will post this, or if there will be more of "The Family Murder Case," or both, or who knows. But, lying feverishly in my bed for the last few days, surviving mostly on tea, I've had a few thoughts.

gerunds

I'm obviously a bit of a fanatic about some aspects of grammar and punctuation, but other areas I'm not strong in. One is parts of speech. This may go back to diagramming sentences in high school, which I (and pretty much everybody else) thought was a big waste of time. I wonder if current education theory would say that we were missing out on something really vital, or is diagramming sentences actually a silly idea?

Anyway.

Nouns, I understand what they are. Verbs, they're pretty easy. And adjectives, too. But then you get into the complicated ones, like past particles and marsupial phrases, and those have always baffled me. But the one which baffled me the most was gerunds.

I always thought the gerund was something like the infield fly rule. You could understand it as it was being explained, but after a few minutes, the information would drift away. But a week ago (admittedly before the fever started), I looked it up in The Chicago Manual of Style, and I got it. And I still remember it. A verb used as a noun.

Walking is the best exercise.

Walking is clearly a verb (anything that describes moving yourself around is a verb), but here it's being used as a noun. So, it's a gerund.

As McCarthy says in The Time of Your Life: "It's so simple, it's amazing!"

Now I guess I'll have to learn about the propositions and the injunctions and so on.

I already know what a conjunction is. That's pinkeye.

Oh, and, if further proof was needed that The Time of Your Life has altered my brain, I just figured out why the bum in "The Church Murder Case" was named Toledo. It's because so many of the stories Kit Carson tells in the play are about Toledo ("Did you ever try to herd cattle on a bicycle?").

Oh, and, emboldened by my mastery of the gerund, I decided to investigate another question. The next mystery story will be called "The Golden Mystery" (I explained before why it wasn't "The Golden Murder Case," but I'm sick so that means I don't have to find where I said it and put in a link). Now, obviously, if the events of the mystery were suffused with a golden light, "golden" would be an adjective. But "Golden" is actually a name, so it's more like The Greene Murder Case (which is an actual Philo Vance, not one of mine). So, is that not an adjective?

Well, I looked that up, and it is a "proper adjective" (which of course makes me think that the other adjectives must be improper in some way, or maybe that just comes from watching Gosford Park). So, that's settled, too.

interesting development

According to Time Magazine (or possibly it was Newsweek – who remembers?), more books were self-published last year than were published by conventional publishers. This is the first year of which that has been true. Ever.

Wow.

So, let me put in a plug for my book, A Sane Woman. Available from Amazon.com or directly from lulu.com.

It's good. You'll like it. Good characters, interesting plot, snappy dialogue, a good ending. And it has a really nice cover. Order some for your friends.

more on the gerund (or "why I like the CMOS")

The Chicago Manual of Style section on the gerund is one short paragraph. The Wikipedia entry goes on for a very long time, and includes "passivization," "pronominal substitution," "clefting," and "left dislocation."

And, no, I didn't make those up.

This is the sort of thing that discourages me from pursuing these sorts of questions. It makes me want to say, "That's all very interesting, if that's your idea of a good time, but I'm having too much fun writing my detective stories to take ten years off to learn all that."

Or maybe I'll just give them all the good old bilabial fricative.