Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 43

No one buys books (?)

A post: No one buys books

In 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon & Schuster. The two publishing houses made up 37 percent and 11 percent of the market share, according to the filing, and combined they would have condensed the Big Five publishing houses into the Big Four. But the government intervened and brought an antitrust case against Penguin to determine whether that would create a monopoly. 

The judge ultimately ruled that the merger would create a monopoly and blocked the $2.2 billion purchase. But during the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the industry from the inside. …

And that is what the linked post is about.

I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).

Bold is mine.

I am actually not surprised. The reason I’m not surprised is that I’ve been looking at bestselling books lately, to look at first pages, and what is on the lists of bestselling SF novels, for example? Lots and lots of classics, such as DUNE, that have been out for a zillion years.

More from the linked post:

In my essay “Writing books isn’t a good idea” I wrote that, in 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. That’s still the vibe.

I’m very surprised that 268 titles sold more than a hundred thousand copies. That’s quite a lot more than I would really have expected. I’m also surprised that such a large percentage sold fewer than 1000 copies. I would have guessed that the mean sales would be at least twice that. But I wouldn’t have guessed that means sales were a lot more than twice that, though.

The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.

Fifty percent of traditionally published titles that come out from Big Five publishers sell fewer than a dozen copies? I find this very, very difficult to believe. I immediately downgrade this whole post because that is just impossible. OBVIOUSLY this is impossible. I’m trying to figure out what the author of this post has left out, what kind of context could make this be remotely accurate.

A) The lawyer was also collecting data on self-published titles. But how? Amazon doesn’t share data about sales. That’s why people estimate sales using tools like the calculator at Publisher’s Rocket.

B) Oh, wait, maybe the lawyer collected data on a whole lot of backlist titles, such as, I don’t know, Red Moon and Black Mountain, with a sales rank of approximately 2,394,000, meaning definitely under a dozen sales per year right now. The Publisher’s Rocket calculator won’t say anything more specific than “less than a book per day,” but also suggests that a sales rank of 100,000 equals about one book per day. So, if the lawyer meant that he’d collected data on 58,000 books, a lot of which are not available as ebooks or something, that could do it.

But, this would also mean that “published in a year” doesn’t mean “newly published.” It would have to mean “in print” or “sort of in print” rather than “published this year.” So … maybe this isn’t what the lawyer meant. But then what did he mean? Given that it is totally impossible that half of all books traditionally published in a year sell a dozen copies or fewer.

So, I went fishing, and found this article here: No, Most Books Don’t Sell Only a Dozen Copies

Well, I’m glad someone is both incredulous and willing to explain what is going on.

But publishing statistics are often not what you think. This extreme 12 copies claim joins a couple others that have gone around the internet recently: “98 percent of books sell fewer than 5,000 copies.” “90 percent sell fewer than 2,000 copies” “Most books sell fewer than 99 copies.” Etc.

Are all of these true? None of them? Part of the problem with evaluating claims of “most published books sell [X] copies” is that it—[apologies for the Derrida voice]—it all depends on what you mean by “book,” “published,” and “sell.” No, I’m not playing postmodern games here. It really is confusing.

Here are some of the things that create this completely bogus statistic cited above:

A) Every edition of a book is counted as “a book,” so if there are 135 different editions of Pride and Prejudice, each is counted as “a book” separately.

B) No, “published” does not meant “this year.” Yes, books like Red Moon and Black Mountain are counted.

C) They are probably using BookScan data, which means leaving out ebook sales completely, and also leaving out sales to libraries and various other kinds of sales.

Then this:

In terms of the dozen copies statistic, I can’t evaluate it because it is unclear what it’s referring to. Fifty-eight thousand books is more books than PRH publishes in a given year, but far less than their entire backlist. Is 58k all new books published with an ISBN, including self-published books? Is it something else? I really don’t know and none of the publishing professionals I follow seem to know either. (Editing to add: Jane Friedman, who posted this number originally on Instagram, noted there was no source given in testimony. Friedman gives her own guess in the comments.)

Friedman’s guess is that the numbers come from Bookscan and includes university presses but not ebooks and not sales to libraries. Friedman says that she thinks the “90% of books sell less than 2000 copies” is probably a LOT more accurate. For what it’s worth, I agree. That number seems in line with what people actually say about sales in the real world.

But! You know what is in the comments to this post? A long comment from … ready? … a representative from Bookscan. Here is what she says, which I am pulling out in its entirety below.

I am capitalizing PRINT every time it appears in the quote below because it is JUST CRUCIAL to be aware that these numbers DO NOT INCLUDE EBOOKS. Most but not all of the other all-caps is from the original.

***

Hey y’all, it’s Kristen McLean, lead industry analyst from NPD BookScan. I thought I would chime in with some numbers here, since that statistic from the DOJ is super-misleading, and I’m not sure where it originally came from, since we did not provide it directly.

It is possible it came from our data, and was provided by one of the publisher parties, but based on the 58,000 figure, it’s not obvious what exactly it includes in terms of “publisher frontlist”. 58,000 titles is way too small a number for “all frontlist books published in a year by every publisher”–that’s more like 487,000 frontlist titles–so it’s clear it’s a slice but I’m not sure HOW it was sliced.

NPD BookScan (BookScan is owned by The NPD Group, not Nielsen, BTW), collects data on PRINT book sales from 16,000 retail locations, including Amazon PRINT book sales. Included in those numbers are any PRINT book sales from self-publishing platforms where the author has opted for extended distribution and a PRINT book was sold by Amazon or another retailer. So that 487K “new book” figure is all frontlist books in our data showing at least 1 unit sale over the last 52 weeks coming from publishers of all sizes, including individuals.

Lots of press outlets have been calling about it today, so I did a little digging to see if I could reverse-engineer the citation, and am happy to share our numbers here for clarity.

Because this is clearly a slice, and most likely provided by one of the parties to the suit, I decided to limit my data to the frontlist sales for the top 10 publishers by unit volume in the U.S. Trade market. My ISBN list is a little smaller than the one quoted in the DOJ, but the principals will be the same.

The data below includes frontlist titles from Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmillan, Abrams, Sourcebooks, and John Wiley. The figures below only include books published by these publishers themselves, not pubishers they distribute.

Here is what I found. Collectively, 45,571 unique ISBNs appear for these publishers in our frontlist sales data for the last 52 weeks (thru week ending 8-24-2022).

In this dataset:

>>>0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more

>>>0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies

>>>2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies

>>>3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies

>>>5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies

>>>21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies

>>>51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies

>>>14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies

So, only about 15% of all of those publisher-produced frontlist books sold less than 12 copies. That’s not nothing, but nowhere as janky as what has been reported.

BUT, I think the real story is that roughly 66% of those books from the top 10 publishers sold less than 1,000 copies over 52 weeks. (Those last two points combined)

And less than 2% sold more than 50,000 copies. (The top two points)

Now data is a funny thing. It can be sliced and diced to create different types of views. For instance we could run the same analysis on ALL of those 487K new books published in the last 52 weeks, which includes many small press and independetly published titles, and we would find that about 98% of them sold less than 5,000 copies in the “trade bookstore market” that NPD BookScan covers. (I know this IS a true statistic because that data was produced by us for The New York Times.)

But that data does not include direct sales from publishers. It does not include sales by authors at events, or through their websites. It DOES NOT include EBOOK SALES which we track in a separate tool, and it doesn’t include any of the amazing reading going on through platforms like Substack, Wattpad, Webtoons, Kindle Direct, or library lending platforms like OverDrive or Hoopla.

BUT, it does represent the general reality of the ECONOMICS of the publishing market. In general, most of the revenue that keeps publishers in business comes from the very narrow band of publishing successes in the top 8-10% of new books, along with the 70% of overall sales that come from BACKLIST books in the current market. (Backlist books have gained about 4% in share from frontlist books since the pandemic began, but that is a whole other story.)

The long and short of it is publishing is very much a gambler’s game, and I think that has been clear from the testimony in the DOJ case. It is true that most people in publishing up to and including the CEOs cannot tell you for sure what books are going to make their year. The big advantage that publisher consolidation has brought to the top of the market is deeper pockets and more resources to roll those dice. More money to get a hot project. More money to influence outcomes through marketing, more access to sales and distribution mechanisms, and easier access to the gatekeepers who decide what books make it onto retailers’ shelves. And better ability to distribute risk across a bigger list of gambles.

It is largely a numbers game and I’m not just saying that because I’m a numbers gal. It’s a tough business.

And there you go, that is much more accurate information about PRINT sales.

So, how about ebook sales? Out of curiosity, I went over to KDP and checked TUYO. This book has been offered free multiple times, maybe six times or so since it came out? Something like that. This inflates the number of ebooks downloaded relative to the print books sold.

When you include the free downloads, 1.2% of the “sales” have been of print books. The rest have been “sales” of ebooks, but a lot have been free downloads, not free.

So let’s take the free ones out using KDP’s handy tool, and look again. Okay, now 16.7% of actual sales have been print. The rest have been ebooks.

None of that includes KU pages read. So, let’s look at that a different way. What proportion of all royalties have come from KU pages read compared to all sales? Ah, that looks like 63.4%.

What percentage of royalties are represented by print sales? A total of 5.4% of lifetime royalties have come from print sales. The rest of the royalties for this book have come from ebooks OR KU pages read.

This drives a pretty big stake through the idea that the BookScan numbers have a lot to say about the success of the books that occupy the long tail. The most successful books are wildly successful no matter how you slice it, but if print constitutes 15% of sales, then a novel that sells 1000 print copies may well have sold 5600 or so ebook copies — that isn’t so terrible.

I grant, a book that sold 12 print copies may by the same estimation have sold only about 65 ebook copies, and that is really dire. But what if that includes, say, The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization, from the U of Chicago press, priced at $50? Or The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work? That one is from Random House and it’s priced at $30. I wonder how many copies either of the above sold? I can see the second one selling a bit better, but I think “The Canary Code” is a weird title for something like this and I can see people who might be interested not noticing this book because of that title.

REGARDLESS, the idea that half of all traditionally published books sell fewer than a dozen copies is just wrong, it’s obviously impossibly wrong, and people ought to have known better than to assume that could possibly be true.

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In Memorium

For years, I’ve suggested that writers interested in traditional publishing should go read through some of the archives at Janet Reid’s website.

Previously, I used to suggest that people should go look at Miss Snark’s archives — without knowing that this blog was also Janet Reid.

For years, I’ve suggested that authors working on query letters should go read some examples of queries and the comments at Janet Reid’s other website, Query Shark.

I knew that she hadn’t been posting a lot this year. But, when I glanced in today, I was sorry to see this In Memorium post.

Janet Reid wasn’t my agent, and I had my first publishing contract before I ever heard of Miss Snark or Query Shark or anything. But I don’t know of anybody who was more helpful to everyone trying to learn about publishing and hoping to land a traditional publishing deal.

Many comments at the linked post.

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Update: Wow, this is tedious

Okay, so, RIHASI. What with the second round of comments, I started adding more words, and then I got fretful and annoyed about that because the length started to push 180,000 words AGAIN, and I don’t want to go over that length.

Though you know where I would break this story if I did it as two novels? Smack dab in the middle, of course, and you know what would be going on at that point? The STAB STAB STAB scene, that’s what. It would make a FABULOUS cliffhanger. Here we are, poised for that duel! And … break! Next month: how the duel actually comes out!

However, no need to worry, as I don’t have any intention of breaking this book in half. It works much better as a whole long story. Which is why the dratted thing is NOT going to go over 180,000 words and why I was getting so peeved about adding words.

Just one book for sure

Therefore, I spent a lot of the weekend reading through it from the top and (a) incorporating comments, but also (b) cutting yet again. Cutting is a lot easier if you start by chopping out an entire chapter. I didn’t do that with this book, so yay, I guess, but also, that means a lot of sentence-by-sentence trimming, which is getting to be pretty darned tedious by this time. EVEN THOUGH IT IS FINE, because it does result in a tighter novel.

This is reminding me so much of cutting the heck out of TASMAKAT. Though I suppose overall it’s not that bad, I’ve definitely cut a good 30,000 words by now. AND I have ALSO incorporated MOST of the comments, clarifying this and that, about what Soretes is doing — he is offstage during this story, but very busy — and about Sekaran and Illiethani — you mostly haven’t met her, she is Sekaran’s daughter. She’s a tough-minded young woman. We meet her here in order to set her up for later. And, I don’t know, other stuff. Things. Whatever. I had another bulleted list for a while, but it’s mostly all taken care of now.

AND, now it is back under 175,000 words, and I feel a lot better about it. If I add another couple of thousand words at this point, fine.

NEXT: fixing all the typos everyone has found so far, sending myself a new copy and making a new paperback copy. I should be able to do that tomorrow, or maybe the next day.

My mother is reading this book cold, she had no idea about the plot, so she keeps calling me to say things like, “I can’t believe she actually [redacted]!” and this is fun for me. I do enjoy imagining reader reactions. I’m especially happy that RIHASI seems so propulsive to a lot of early readers. It’s delightful to hear that it kept someone up all night. That’s a huge compliment, on a par with, “And I immediately went back to the beginning and read it again!”, which is another huge compliment.

I hope I’ll be ready to make the hardcover and epub versions this weekend. No doubt there will still be a handful of typos to correct after that, but hopefully not THAT big a handful.

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Whew, that took forever

All right, so the FIRST thing I did after sending RIHASI to a few more early readers and to proofreaders was … you can probably guess …

…. I finally finished that story about the boys who climbed the rainbow.

Image from Unplash

It didn’t take that long to finish this story, and I knew it wouldn’t take that long, but I just could not pull myself away from RIHASI long enough to actually do it. Well, now it is done, and I can move on, whew.

Also! Now that this story is complete, I can drop the second half into the May newsletter, so I have created that newsletter and scheduled it to be sent early Monday morning. If you would like to get these newsletters, sign up here. The monthly newsletters carry information about upcoming releases, upcoming sales, occasionally mentions of books I have read that I particularly recommend, occasionally a link to a book- or writing-related service or blog I particularly like, and installments of stories that range (so far) from about 3000 words up to about 6000 words. That is, the installments. The stories are running longish, so I am breaking them into pieces for the newsletters.

“The Boys Who Climbed the Rainbow” is about 11,000 words total; the first part was about 5000 words and this next part is about 6000 words. The whole thing, complete, will be dropping at my Patreon next week, a day or so after the newsletter goes out. These stories are available for anyone who chooses the lowest paid level of support. That tier pretty much exists in order to let anybody who wants those stories to download them so that newsletter subscribers won’t be stuck with the back half of a story and no way to get the front half.

Maybe I should write a story in a different world next. We’ll see.

Next up:

A) I need to send RIHASI to the kindle app on my phone so I can read it in that form and make a thousand little tweaks.

B) I need to re-read NO FOREIGN SKY because I want to write the first chapter of the sequel and have it sitting here. I am a lot more likely to go on and write a book once I have the first chapter or two actually written. I want to get this sequel kind of in my head.

That is what I want to do in May. Everything else is optional. Maybe … I realize this is a weird idea … maybe I will actually read some books that have been languishing on my TBR pile since last year. Or the year before. Or longer than that.

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Story structure: rhythm

I think of rhythm as a sentence-level thing, but here is a post by Patricia Wrede about rhythm as a story-level thing.

If the pacing in a story isn’t working, one way of adjusting it is to examine the rhythm. Story flow usually works best if there are highs and lows, but a long string of tense, dramatic, or action-packed scene followed by a series of slower reaction, recovery, processing, or planning scenes may not work as well as a sequence that has more variation. … it’s worth noting that rhythm effects stack—that is, if you have a scene that combines a slightly tense moment from a subplot with a main-plot moment that’s medium-tense, you probably end up with a high-tension scene, while pairing a low-tension main-plot with a high-tension subplot development can raise the tension to medium or more. A writer who’s aware of this can use it to great advantage; a writer who isn’t aware of it may end up wondering why the tension level in their novel seems flat.

This is a brief post. I would like a longer treatment of this topic, which involves the creation of the “page-turner” effect — the compulsive can’t-put-it-down thing.

I’m not sure that “compulsive page-turner” and “high tension” are the same thing. The linked post mentions urgency, stakes, and how much the characters care about the outcome as all things that increase compellingness, which I think is true, but I do think it’s also possible to have a series of low-urgency, possibly low-stakes scenes that are still compulsive page-turners (at least for me). I’m thinking here of various scenes which are basically, “characters are finding out good things about each other and getting their lives in order.” I mean like the “here are our new apartments, I hope you like your place” scene in Regenesis by CJC. This is possibly the lowest-stakes, least urgent scene in the entire novel. It’s also one of my favorite scenes. I just like to watch people move cautiously toward being happy, I guess, and that is what this scene involves.

Regardless, I think rhythm is certainly important in the structure of the story. I believe that with RIHASI, I was thinking of the rhythm kind of like this

Introduce Rihasi … get her together with Kior … event … transition toward the next event plus building the relationship … exciting event … transition plus relationship … exciting event … transition plus relationship … and so on.

I don’t know that the pacing is totally even troughs and waves like the above implies, but it’s mostly fairly even, probably. Not sure how to categorize the part near the end where Rihasi finally lays out the situation and what she’s been doing. It’s a fraught conversation type of scene, I suppose. I do enjoy those. But is it a trough (given that nothing is happening except people talking) or a wave (considering that there’s a lot of emotional freight being carried by those conversations? I’ll tell you: it’s a wave. Why do I think so? Because it’s surrounded by transition/relationship scenes, that’s why. My personal expectation is that many readers will enjoy the exciting events, but also really be into some of the quieter scenes. After all, the story is a romance. The relationship stuff matters.

Oh, now, thinking of rhythm and thus beats, I’m curious whether, I happened to follow standard romance beats without actually thinking about it, kind of similar to this:

Let me see. Introduce the heroine, check. Introduce hero + meet cute, check. No way we can be together, check. Raising the stakes at the end of Act I, actually, yes, I think so, check. Growing awareness of attraction, definitely check, though this is fairly understated. But I think it’s there, given the reactions of early readers.

Totally not there at all: Imagining the happily ever after or feeling like the HEA is within reach. That’s completely absent. Neither Rihasi nor Kior has any expectation of a happy ending, either apart or together. That’s not much like the romance beats on the sketch above.

Also, this rise, crisis, fall looks just a lot too simplistic. Plus the crisis isn’t really a “black moment” and there’s no aftermath/misery beat. (Misery beats, ugh.) And I don’t see why the epiphany and grand gesture are falling action. Those seem like they should be peaks in the story. And where’s the actual climax?

Let me see what other story structures are out there. How about this:

Rising for a good while, the first crisis well past the midpoint, the crisis followed by falling action followed by the real climax. This looks closer. But I’m starting to feel like I can draw a better diagram than this. Plus I’m missing a lot of the romance beats shown in the first diagram.

Neither Rihasi nor Kior expects a happy ending at any point, but Rihasi is striving for a different kind of victory, nothing to do with romance; and Kior is increasingly committed to helping her get there. They don’t expect a happy ending for themselves, but they do expect victory. This is pretty different from an actual romance. They’re not focused on their feelings for each other, though they are developing those feelings. They’re much more focused on achieving a totally different goal, not related to romance in any way. In fact, achieving this goal will spike the romance. That’s what they think. They’re moving inexorably toward victory that will destroy any chance of romance. There’s no way through to a happily ever after. But they’re not miserable about this. More resigned.

So, let me see if I can do a more accurate plot curve for RIHASI:

I mean: spoiler, there’s a happy ending. I’m sure that’s not actually a shock, right?

Anyway, looking at the above, this is what I mean by a trough-and-wave pattern. Lots of waves. Four. Four main waves, with rising action or falling action or level interludes between the waves. That’s more what I think the structure of the story is. Regardless of skipping a lot of beats, I think the structure that includes —

Getting to know each other … coming to admire each other … developing attraction for each other … wishing we could be together, but it’s impossible … unexpected HEA

is definitely a romance structure.

You know the first chapter of RIHASI is available at my Patreon, right? I’ve revised it a bit, but not a lot. And the first bit of the second chapter is the teaser in MARAG. I would call this a meet-cute, or close enough.

Personally, I find

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Mystery Covers by Subgenre

Here’s a post at Kill Zone Blog that ties into the recent mystery subgenre post: Covers That Capture Readers and Convey the Right Mood

This post is actually about putting subgenre-suitable covers on mysteries so that people who want a Cozy don’t pick up a Hardboiled novel by accident, and vice versa. I thought, sure, show me some covers!

And we see … a wide stylistic variety in what we might call “General Mysteries,” while Cozy Mysteries have a different vibe, and mysteries aimed at YA readers are more stylistically unpredictable again.

One thing I personally dislike on a cover is this:

What is that last word? I honestly find that difficult to read. I don’t understand why you would do that. it just shouldn’t be that hard to make the title clearly readable. Maybe the author is famous and her name, which is readable, is considered much more important than the title.

PJ Parrish, at the KZB post, specifically asks about this cover:

They don’t like it. I think I kind of do. Also, the title is VERY good at conveying what kind of story this is, or at least, I assume it’s accurate rather than misleading. Not something I want to read, but I think this ought to be a successful cover.

This is the one mystery that leaped out at me:

The title is so much fun! This looks like a fun story, not a psychological thriller. So I clicked through, and here it is on Amazon:

A USA Today bestseller

A lonely shopkeeper takes it upon herself to solve a murder in the most peculiar way in this captivating mystery by Jesse Q. Sutanto, bestselling author of Dial A for Aunties.

Vera Wong is a lonely little old lady—ah, lady of a certain age—who lives above her forgotten tea shop in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Despite living alone, Vera is not needy, oh no. She likes nothing more than sipping on a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy detective work on the Internet about what her Gen-Z son is up to.

Then one morning, Vera trudges downstairs to find a curious thing—a dead man in the middle of her tea shop. In his outstretched hand, a flash drive. Vera doesn’t know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. Vera knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer.

What Vera does not expect is to form friendships with her customers and start to care for each and every one of them. As a protective mother hen, will she end up having to give one of her newfound chicks to the police?

Oh, look at this, it’s a bestseller! Average star rating of 4.4, about 7500 ratings. Since it’s a bestseller AND it looks appealing to me, sure, let’s add it to the list of books where we look at the first page and see if we’d go on:

***

Vera Wong Zhuzhu, age sixty, is a pig, but she really should have been born a rooster. We are, of course, referring to Chinese horoscopes. Vera Wong is a human woman, thank you very much, but roosters have nothing on her. Every morning, at exactly four thirty, Vera’s eyelids snap open like roller shades shooting up. Then the upper half of her body levitates from the mattress-no lazy rolling out of bed for Vera, though admittedly sitting up in bed now comes with about half a dozen clicks and clacks of her joints. She swings her fuzzy-socked feet out with gusto and immediately finds the slippers she placed next to her bed with military precision the night before. She takes a quick moment to send a text to her son, reminding him that he’s sleeping his life away and should have been up and at it before her. He is, after all, a young man with a whole world to conquer. Late mornings, Vera believes, are only for toddlers and Europeans.

After a quick wash, Vera dons her morning gear-a polo shirt with a Ralph Lauren logo so big that it covers her entire left breast (well, okay, thanks to the ravages of time and gravity, it covers the top half of her breast) and sweatpants. Arm sleeves are yanked on and adjusted so that there isn’t an exposed sliver of skin between her shirt sleeves and the removable ones. Many years ago, when Vera was a brazen young woman, she never checked her arm sleeves and often walked around with a tanned strip of skin around her upper arms. Those were obviously the wild days, when she lived life on the edge and took unnecessary risks.

Sleeves on, Vera nods at her reflection and marches to the kitchen, where she gulps down a pint of room-temperature water — cold water, Vera believes, would freeze the fats in your arteries and give you heart disease. At the door, Vera dons her orthopedic sneakers and her tortoiseshell sunglasses, and finally, the last and perhaps most vital article of clothing — a visor so enormous that there is no way that a single ray of freckle-causing, wrinkle-making sunlight could snake its way onto her face. Then, without a backward glance, Vera strides out into the world.

And all of this happens without the aid of alarm clocks. Vera should really have been a rooster, but she isn’t, she is a pig, and perhaps that is where all the trouble began.

According to the Chinese horoscope, pigs are diligent and compassionate and are the ones to call upon when sincere advice is needed. Unfortunately, very few people call Vera for sincere advice, or even insincere advice. The one person who should be calling her at all times for advice-her son, Tilbert-never does. Vera doesn’t quite understand why. When her parents were alive, she often went to them for advice, even when she didn’t need to, because unlike her son, Vera was a filial child and knew that asking her parents for advice made them feel needed. Well, no matter. Vera is a diligent mother and goes out of her way to give Tilly all the advice he could ever need anyway. Her previous texts are as follows:

Sent today at 4:31 a.m.:

Tilly, are you awake? It is 4:31 AM, very late. When I was your age, I wake up at 4AM every morning to cook breakfast for Ah Gong and Ah Ma. Qi lai! Seize the day! Carpe diem! Kind regards, Mama.

Sent yesterday at 7:45 p.m.:

Tilly, I notice that this girl @NotChloeBennet has liked TWO of your videos on the TikTok! I think this means
she likes you. I look at her profile and she pout a lot, but I think she will make good wife. She went with her mother for manicure last week, this means she is a filial daughter. Perhaps you should slip and slide into her DM. Kind regards, Mama.

Vera had been particularly pleased about using the phrase “slip and slide into her DM.” Vera insists on keeping up to date with every trend. She doesn’t believe in getting left behind by the younger generations. Every time she comes across a nonsensical-sounding phrase, she looks it up on the Google and jots down its meaning in her little notebook.

Sent yesterday at 5:01 p.m.:

Tilly, it is 5PM, I hope you have eaten your dinner. Your Uncle Lin eat dinner at 7PM every night and he didn’t even live past thirty. You better eat dinner now. Kind regards, Mama.

This one actually garnered a reply.

Tilly: Uncle Lin died because he was hit by a bus. And I’ve told you to stop calling me Tilly. I go by Bert.

Vera: Don’t talk back to your elders. I raise you better than that. And what is wrong with Tilly? It’s a good name, your Baba and I think long and hard about your name, you should treasure it.

***

What do you think? I think this is well-written and rather charming. This, in combination with the description, is certainly enough to make me hit “send a sample,” although this traditionally-published book is too expensive for me to actually buy it unless I decide I actually want to read it.

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Legal News

From the Passive Voice blog: Authors Guild Supports FTC’s Proposed Ban on Non-Compete Clauses

That made me sit up straight. GOOD FOR AUTHORS GUILD. These non-compete clauses are stupid and awful.

What it is:

A non-compete clause prevents an author from having a different book come out from one publisher if one book is coming out from a different publisher at approximately the same time. “Approximately” can mean within a year or more. From the post at TPV, it looks like they can be even worse than that.

What these pernicious clauses do is PREVENT YOU FROM PUBLISHING STUFF. Everything else is details. You have books you cannot publish or cannot offer for publication because of the stupid non-compete clause. As though authors don’t have enough to contend with!

The Passive Guy, who is, as you may know, a lawyer, says:

When PG was still representing authors who were signing publishing contracts, he routinely banged heads with in-house counsel about their existence and their wording. For him, the idea of a publishing non-compete was ridiculous because, in a very real way, every book competes with every other book for a reader’s attention and money. Every Regency Romance competes with every other Regency Romance. Every science fiction novel competes with every other science fiction novel. The standard line given to authors by publishers (directly or via a literary agent) is, “You wouldn’t want to compete with yourself.” Why not? If you’re competing with yourself in a particular reader’s mind, they’re going to buy one of your books or another.

EXACTLY.

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Finalizing your novel

A post at Writer Unboxed: Finalizing your novel

’m currently working on my fourth round of these revisions, after which I might* be happy enough with the book to send it out to beta readers. It’s been a long process, so time consuming and, at times, tedious that I began to wonder whether other writers also scrutinize each of their sentences multiple times when trying to finalize their work, or if I’m alone in my OCD-like obsession with synonyms, syntax, and eliminating modifiers.…

Nope, definitely not. I mean, I make no particular effort to eliminate modifiers and think the effort to do so is largely wasted and sometimes harmful, but sure, I mean, if you happen to write dialogue tags such as he said gleefully all the time, maybe you do need to thin the herd. I am currently beta- reading a book written in the most ornate style with zillions of modifiers, and I must say, I was really in the mood for something like that, even though the main characters are both young, impulsive idiots and that is painfully annoying.

The one I’m beta reading is the sequel to this one, by the way. Link goes to BVC because this is the only ebook version available. You can read the first chapter at the link, but let me show you a bit:

In such a small capital royalty is not remote. Beryx had crossed my path a score of times, riding out with hawk or hound or border cavalry, banqueting in guildhalls, dispensing justice or inspecting half-built porticoes, overseeing the wine and oil weighed in market when the Confederate traders came. That night in the palace still seems my first real sight of him.

Red light from burning tarsal wood and golden light from pendant hethel lamps overflowed the hall, cascading through open arches into the sky where Valinhynga, the evening’s herald, loveliest of planets, was just pricking through. In Saphar, men dress their halls in air and dress to allow for it. All down the table the lords wore fur-lined jackets and trousers of creamy Quarred wool, with gold chains of office shining over everything. They answered the silver tableware, the ruby glow of wine, the glitter of gems on the ceremonial sword sheaths propped against each chair. But at the table’s head Beryx leant a little aside, chin in palm, elbow on the arm of the king’s seat, and all the light of the hall seemed to gather on his royal crimson cloak, his raven hair, and his long, lazy, twinkling green eyes, that saw so much and made such a joke of it all.

Sea-eyes, the name means, so it was of sea I sang: not Nerrys’yr, the wide blue ocean, but Berfing, the green southern sea where the whalers of Hazghend stain the ice-floes red with blood. Everyone knows that in boyhood he ran away to ship with them. As I sang I could see the royal brooch, a huge circlet of whale-tooth ivory, rich cream upon his crimson cloak.

Okay, got the feel of it?

Good, then let’s just take a look at this again, this time removing all the modifiers. This is going to impact the middle paragraph of the three. The other two paragraphs are provided largely for context.

In such a capital royalty is not remote. Beryx had crossed my path a score of times, riding out with hawk or hound or border cavalry, banqueting in guildhalls, dispensing justice or inspecting half-built porticoes, overseeing the wine and oil weighed in market when the Confederate traders came. That night in the palace still seems my first sight of him.

Light from burning wood and light from lamps overflowed the hall, cascading through arches into the sky where Valinhynga, the evening’s herald, was pricking through. In Saphar, men dress their halls in air and dress to allow for it. All down the table the lords wore jackets and trousers of wool, with chains of office shining over everything. They answered the tableware, the glow of wine, the glitter of gems on the sword sheaths propped against each chair. But at the table’s head Beryx leant a little aside, chin in palm, elbow on the arm of the king’s seat, and all the light of the hall seemed to gather on his cloak, his hair, and his eyes, that saw so much and made such a joke of it all.

Sea-eyes, the name means, so it was of sea I sang: not Nerrys’yr, the ocean, but Berfing, the southern sea where the whalers of Hazghend stain the ice-floes red with blood. Everyone knows that in boyhood he ran away to ship with them. As I sang I could see the royal brooch, a circlet of whale-tooth ivory, upon his cloak.

And is that an improvement? No, it is not. It removes practically all the flavor. That’s why this author’s modifier-heavy style leaped to mind when I saw this about going through a finished draft sentence by sentence and obsessing over synonyms, syntax, and eliminating modifiers. By all means, obsess over syntax, but I really don’t think it’s wise to make a religious commitment toward cutting modifiers.

Regardless, what does this post suggest about final revision? The post gathers comments about process from different authors. The first two both listen to the book aloud, either by reading it aloud themselves or doing a text-to-speech thing. I don’t. I wonder whether authors who find this more helpful actually subvocalize? I do, so I sort of “hear” the words without actually speaking them out loud. Craig once pointed out once that I can’t really be subvocalizing because I read too fast to be pronouncing the words in my head. This is an interesting observation because I very definitely perceive the words as though I am hearing them. In fact, for Tuyo-world novels with continuing characters, I hear the voices of the characters in the voices the narrator gave them. Whatever is happening seems to be faster than actually reading out loud, though.

What else?

I see one author says she sends the book to her Kindle to read it in that form. That, I find really helpful. I use the Kindle app on my phone. I definitely perceive the book differently on my phone and do a lot of final-final tweaking that way.

The post finishes this way:

I also asked these authors how they know when a manuscript is actually finished—a difficult determination for any writer. Liz Michalski says when her agents think a book is in good shape, she trusts their judgement. Roz Morris knows a manuscript is done when she can read through the whole thing without having anxiety. When it comes to my own work, I fall into the same camp as Annalisa Crawford and C.B. Bernard.

Crawford says a novel is finished when she “literally cannot bear to read it through one more time.” While Bernard says, “Somebody smarter than I once told me that you have to come to hate a book to finish it. That’s a pretty good mile-marker. When I’m sick of it, it must be done.”

That’s funny because I don’t always get to the point of being so sick of a book I declare it’s just got to be done, but I’ve come close. I don’t know, though. Mostly I feel books are done too early; then beta readers point out totally obvious things I missed and I’m like OH, NOT DONE. The hope there is that the things are easy to fix, which sometimes they are and sometimes not so much. With MARAG, things were easy to fix. With NO FOREIGN SKY and INVICTUS, not so much. With those, I really did get super sick of working with them, but I grimly continued until I thought they were truly finished. I don’t know what makes a book seem truly finished to me, though. I just decide it is and toss it out for final proofreading.

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Available for Preorder: RIHASI

Just letting you know, RIHASI is now up for preorder at Amazon. For some reason, Amazon does not put paperbacks or hardcovers up for preorder, although you can schedule their release ahead of time. I haven’t put together the paperback or hardcover templates, but later this week I will do that. This will let me tell the cover artist how many pages so they can finalize the pdfs for those covers. I plan to schedule them to release at the same time as the ebook, or maybe a bit earlier to compensate for shipping time.

Rihasi Gerogevet of Saraicana has a problem.

She knows just who can help her solve it: Lord Aras Eren Samaura, the king’s most powerful scepter-holder. But Lord Aras is in Gaur, a long journey from Saraicana, and getting there safely isn’t going to be easy. Especially as a lot of people are determined to make sure she doesn’t get there at all.

Kior Voeret has a secret.

The absolute last person he wants to face is Lord Aras Eren Samaura. But he can’t let a naïve, inexperienced young man get himself killed on the road. That’s all right: Kior doesn’t have to commit to going all the way to the scepter-holder’s doorstep. He can escort the young man to the border of Gaur, then walk away long before he gets close enough for Lord Aras to notice anything unfortunate.

It’ll be fine.

Really.

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Great Mysteries (Where The Detective Is Not “Defective”)

Okay, in response to that post last week about “defective detectives” in a particular subgenre of mysteries and police procedurals and related fiction, let’s pull out some mysteries that are not that.

First, mystery subgenres:

1) Cozies.

Cozy Mysteries never have the alcoholic, self-destructive, deserted detective protagonist. This is because, I mean, they’re cozy. They have a quaint or interesting setting that is usually a small town or neighborhood; they have a quirky, protagonist who is not self-destructive, not deserted by her family, essentially always female, essentially always a small business owner or other non-professional; and they almost always center romance and follow romance beats.

I am not talking about the conception of a Cozy Mystery as anything, no matter how grim, set in a small town or little English village. I think that is a thoroughly outdated definition and one hundred percent not in line with the mysteries that are today called Cozy and marketed as Cozy, which fit the parameters above. One example of a Cozy series is the Wisteria Tearoom series, which I like quite a bit.

At one end of the spectrum, Cozy Mysteries become Cutesies. These are too cute for me. Exactly where Cozies become Cutesies is up to the individual reader, but if the title is a pun or play on words, it’s probably a Cutesie. One reason I like the Wisteria Tearoom series is because they aren’t overly cute.

At the other end of the spectrum, Cozy Mysteries segue into —

2) Mystery Romance

Not all mysteries that center romance are Cozy. If the mystery involves enough suspense and there is more of a sense of danger and a fast pace, then eventually it stops being Cozy and becomes something else. If there is a centered romance, then I suggest calling it a mystery romance, and you know who writes these? Jennifer Cruisie / Bob Meyer, as in for example Agnes and the Hitman, which I hereby declare defines the subgenre by example. There’s comedy as well, but still, I don’t think that makes this a Cozy. I think it’s not Cozy. I think it’s Mystery Romance, and I think that people who love mysteries should not think of Crusie and Cruisie/Meyer writing romance, but as writing Mystery Romance. There has been a very strong mystery component to all or almost all of Cruisie’s that I’ve read so far.

This category may also segue into —

3) Classic Mystery. These are mysteries that aren’t Cozy and don’t center romance, though romance may occur.

This is a big, diverse category. I guess I’d say they’re defined by tone (not being Cozy) and by what they don’t center (romance). The mystery is central, but character is also central and so is setting. Let me see. All right, I’d say Hambly’s Benjamin January series is a great example that is also historical. This is my favorite mystery series, by the way, but it is very dark in places. Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series is a contemporary example. Oh, and I really love Beverly Connor’s forensic anthropology mysteries.

4) Classic Mysteries with Iconic Characters

Here, I am thinking of series where the detectives go on and on and don’t change at all, or hardly at all. This is like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. It’s also like Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Allyn. It’s also like Brother Cadfael. The detectives might have basically no backstory that matters, like Archie Goodwin; or a really interesting backstory, like Brother Cadfael. There could be just a bit of character development over the course of the series, as with Roderick Allyn, but basically very little.

A lot of these are excellent, especially the ones which were being written in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. They are still being republished and sold now because they’re great. Whatever was in this category that wasn’t as good has probably vanished in the mists of time. They are not all great in the same way. For use of the English language and particularly for clearly hitting different “registers” in dialogue — from very informal to very formal — you can’t beat the Nero Wolfe series. For historical setting, you can’t beat the Brother Cadfael series. If you enjoy theatrical backdrops, that’s Roderick Allyn.

5) Puzzle Mysteries

I’m thinking of these as like Dorothy Sayer’s earlier books, before Gaudy Night. Gaudy Night brought the characters out way more and shifted subgenres — it’s a Mystery Romance. Puzzle mysteries are also the locked room type. And things like And Then There Were None. Stories like that. Sherlock Holmes, probably. I am not really interested in puzzle mysteries, which is one reason I never got into Sherlock Holmes and why I love Gaudy Night far more than earlier books in the series.

6) Hardboiled

I don’t particularly like Hardboiled Detective novels and don’t know much about them. I think of the style as curt; the detective as competent, one-dimensional, and isolated; the setting as gritty and filled with corrupt institutions. I wouldn’t defend any of this as definitive, though, because I haven’t read many, because I don’t much like them. If anybody has an example of a great novel in the Hardboiled subgenre, I would be at least mildly interested, although my TBR pile is so high, I really do not need to pile a lot of books on the top.

7) Noir

The setting is gritty. Institutions are corrupt. This is the subgenre that got swallowed whole by Everydetective. The detective is self-destructive, or morally very dark gray, or unable to push back effectively against the corrupt system, maybe all three. BUT, I don’t think Noir has to have detectives like this. I think it used to have detectives who were effectual, competent, not self-destructive, not recovering from awful pasts. In that case, the gritty setting and institutional corruption probably remain, but I’m not sure what else would define them. I mean, Noir is a tone more than anything else, right?

8) Police Procedural

I rather like police procedurals. Those are the ones that follow a case in detailed steps from discovery of the crime to arrest, and often have an ensemble cast. Lots of emphasis on procedures as the detectives collect and examine evidence. I like that part. You know what, I think the Hillerman mysteries might fall into this category, unless they’re Classic Mysteries. I suppose there’s a lot of overlap. I really like the Chee/Leaphorn mysteries because of the setting, but you know what strikes me now, thinking about it, is how this series contrasts with an Iconic Character series. Both Chee and Leaphorn change and grow quite a lot through the series. Their lives at the end are quite different than they were at the beginning. I like that too.

9) Mystery Horror

I’m thinking of Hambly’s Ysidro series here. Basically dark mysteries that are all about the historical setting, with vampires. But I really love both James Asher and Lydia, as well as Simon Ysidro. The first book is great and stands alone. As the series go on, the historical settings begin to take center stage and the pace can become quite slow. I like them, though, and I wouldn’t mind if she would pick the series back up.

10) Mystery SFF

For example, T Kingfisher’s White Rat novels. They all seem to have a strong mystery component, a strong romance component, and of course they are fantasy.

Another one, which is a Police Procedural Fantasy with a great secondary world setting, is River of Lies by R. Morgan.

Oh, there’s also The Tally-Master by JM Ney-Grimm. That’s an amateur detective mystery in a secondary world setting.

But I don’t know that Mystery Fantasy has to have a secondary world setting. The Shadow Unit series by Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, and Will Shetterly, are fun contemporary mystery / police procedurals / superhero shared world stories. The series does get darker as it progresses, but I highly recommend the first one and then you can decide whether to go on with the series or not.

There are also mysteries with SF settings, such as Sharon Shinn’s Wrapt in Crystal, which she described to me as using Western tropes, and I can see that, but it’s definitely a mystery novel as well.

I wasn’t particularly trying to do a Top Ten List for Mystery Subgenres, but I guess I kind of did! So I’ll stop there, even though possibly there are other subgenres.

Okay! Favorite mysteries, any genre — drop ’em in the comments!

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