publishing

three short things: the carol corps, a laptop, and galleys

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

It was nice to read this: “The inspiring Captain Marvel #17 pays tribute to fans and sets the stage for the future“

I’m not sure why the series has to stop and then re-start again, but it was indeed a pretty special issue of a pretty special book. And, though the writer of this article doesn’t mention it, it does matter that Captain Marvel doesn’t wear some sort of impractical peekaboo superhero costume (unlike, you know, some female superheroes). That sets a certain tone right from the start.

I talked about Captain Marvel before (at the bottom, after the part about Moonrise Kingdom).

 
Android laptop

As I said in my comment to my post about backups, my one complaint about Android tablets is that it’s entirely too difficult to back things up to external media (hard drives, flash drives).

Well, it turns out that there is a solution to this without leaving the Android world — there are Android laptops, and I’m writing this on one. 🙂 So, all the advantages of Android, plus I can easily copy to external drives.

 
Galleys and ARCs (Advance Reader Copies)

This kind of puzzled me, I admit: ” Is It Ethical For Bookstores To Sell Uncorrected Proofs?“

The questions about bookstores selling advanced reader copies are one thing (I remember record stores that sold review copies of albums, which was also a no-no), but I’ve always assumed that Advance Reader Copies were different  from galleys.

Galleys are, by definition, unfinished, and why would you give them to anybody who didn’t have some responsibility for checking and polishing them? I would think (and I invite clarification if I’m missing something) that if something isn’t final enough to sell, it also isn’t final enough to send to a bookstore to pique their interest. Would you send it to a critic to review?

I have an ARC of A Simplified Map of the Real World (which I’m not selling 🙂 ), and my understanding is that it’s pretty much the final version of the book. On the other hand, I have received beta copies of various works which I’ve read, and which I would never share with anybody.

So, what am I missing?

the job of writing

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 2 Comments

For me, the ultimate test of a magazine is that I often read articles about subjects that I'm not actually interested in, either because I learn things or just because they're well written. I've talked before about how I always read Joan Acocella's dance articles in the New Yorker even though I don't care about dance.

Well, that's also true of the New York Review of Books. However, I've never paid that much attention to the NYRB website, which I've always found to be rather disorganized and unpredictable. But the most recent issue of the magazine had a little ad for the blogs on the website, and the title of one of the stories caught my eye: "E-books Can't Burn."

That was intriguing enough, so I went to the website and read that and also another post by the same writer which was just as interesting. (Typically, even though "E-books Can't Burn" was featured in the print edition of the magazine, I had to use Google to find it on the website.)

"E-books Can't Burn"

This made me think of my post "(Mostly) Not Sentimental About Books." As it says, books are just a long series of words. But he took the thought a lot further than I did, into different areas.

"The Writer's Job"

This really clarified some of my unease about a lot of the way fiction writing has become a career path these days. The paragraph about self-promotion really caught my eye, too. It doesn't sound like a job I'd like, I can tell you that. And "Literary fiction has become a genre like any other" definitely fits in with what I've observed. I could go on, but the whole thing is worth reading.

Both pieces are by the same writer, Tim Parks. I'm definitely going to follow his posts from now on.

happy new year!

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 9 Comments

Happy New Year!

fweeeeeeppppp!!!

In my last post, I talked about some ideas about what I might work on during 2012.

Since then, I've read a couple of good posts about New Year's plans and resolutions. Maggie at Maggie Madly Writing talked about her goals, and Laura Stanfill talked about hers (and said some very nice things about Maggie's post and mine).

As I said in a comment on Laura's post:

My one definite goal for next year (I think) is to publish some sort of e-book. I’ve been reading up on all the formats and conversions and so on, and I’d rather start with something that doesn’t have illustrations (my mystery book has floors plans and other illustrated clues). Emerald gave me the idea of publishing a novella, as opposed to a full-length novel. I’ve always thought of publishing as being just for book-length works, but with e-books obviously that doesn’t apply.

But we’ll see. I could always do an e-book of A Sane Woman, but I’d really rather start out with something newer.

I've been reading up on the various formats and so on – in between blowing my noisemaker and brushing all the confetti off my keyboard – and I've learned some things.

The big complication in the e-publishing world is that Amazon uses one format for the Kindle, and the rest of the world uses the EPUB format. So, to publish an e-book, you really have to publish twice. (There is a rumor going around that Amazon may soon support the EPUB format, which would make everybody's lives easier – including theirs – but who knows if that will happen.)

I know a lot of people use Smashwords for e-publishing, but there were some things about their instructions that I found annoying. They not only insist in Word format for submission, they really insist on Word itself, saying that files produced with other programs will probably not convert properly even if they are saved in Word format. This is annoying, particularly since Microsoft is unlikely to release a version of Word for Linux.

Lulu (the company that published A Sane Woman) also does EPUB conversion, but apparently their conversion process is somewhat more sophisticated because they can take RTF files from OpenOffice (the program I used to create A Sane Woman). The only annoying part of the Lulu instructions (and it's not their fault) is that apparently the EPUB format includes a mandatory navigable table of contents. This may be a problem with the mystery story book (which is not going to be published in 2012, but I'm thinking ahead), since it's possible that I will not want to have a TOC with links. Although it is a book of mystery stories, I do want people to read it in order.

The most encouraging guide I've read so far is the one from Amazon for Kindle Direct Publishing. They take HTML, and they don't require a TOC. If your book isn't formatted correctly when it's converted, you just fix the HTML and try again. Since I'm very comfortable working with HTML, this seems ideal for me.

So, no immediate plans, but I do have two questions.

1) For those who have published an e-book, how did you do it? Amazon and EPUB, or just one, and who did the conversion?

2) For those who read e-books, how do you read them? On a Kindle, or on another device, or on your computer (and if the last, using what software)?

Oh, and Happy New Year.

fweeeeeeeeeeppppp!!!

(mostly) not sentimental about books

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

There was a post on Slate a few days ago called "Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller: Buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you." You may have heard about it. There was a bit of a furor.

I just read a response on Salon called "What Slate doesn’t get about bookstores" (which could have been subtitled "Slate, you ignorant slut").

Both pieces are flawed (though at least Salon didn't go ad hominem, unlike Salman Rushdie who apparently tweeted that Farhad Manjoo, who wrote the Slate piece, was a idiot).

The Slate piece is flawed because (like the anti-NaNiWriMo piece I wrote about here) it poses two things as either-or which aren't either-or at all (which is always a good way to rouse up the old interwebs). The Salon piece is flawed because it tries to answer Slate's argument (which is largely about how people relate to books) by talking about how people like to hang out at bookstores (which is true, but it's not the same question). It is quite possible that the people who hang out in the bookstores then go home and order their books from Amazon, because of the enormous price differential.

But what this made me think about is how passionate a lot of people are about books, and I realized I'm not. (Though it is worth remembering that writers – and all of these pieces are written by writers, of course – may be more sentimental about books than everybody else at this point) I knew this before, of course, but this made me aware of it more clearly than I had been until now.

I love words. I love stories. But I don't love books. I like books – they've been the main way I've received words and stories until recently – but I'm not attached to them as items. For reading, books are far superior to computer screens, but e-ink screens are about as good as books for me.

But I understand the sentimental attachment, since I do feel that way about two very specific types of books.

1) Comic books should be comic books. I would not be surprised if at some point comic books will only be available on some sort of screen, and that will really be too bad. And, while I hardly ever go into bookstores (pretty much whenever Thomas Pynchon publishes a new book), I go into a comic book store every week to buy new comics (as I have been doing since 1964 – Fantastic Four #26 was the first comic book I ever bought).

2) My stuff should be books. A Sane Woman isn't available as an e-book because I don't want to do additional promotion for a book which was mostly written a long time ago (much as I like it). The next book, whatever that ends up being, will almost certainly be an e-book, but (unless print-on-demand goes away between now and then) it will also be a real book. Which is a lot of extra work, as I talked about last time, but I will still do it, because it's a book.

Other than that, just keep the stories coming, in whatever format.

Oh, and Mr. Pynchon, if you're reading this, please put your books out in e-book format. When (or if) they are ever available, I will buy at least three of them immediately.

Thanks.

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."