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!!!
January 1st, 2012
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.
December 16th, 2011
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:
- Maggie posted "Introverts vs. Book Marketing and Promotion,"
- Kristi Holmes posted "Doing Work You Love" (not specifically about book promotion, but about being an introvert),
- 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.
- 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."
November 6th, 2011