David Kudler's Blog, page 16

Everything Amazon Slides

Here are the slides from my presentation with Ruth Schwartz on Everything Amazon:

It was — as always — a great meeting! If you have any questions about any of the slides, please comment.

ETA: The URL for CreateSpace (slides 8–12) should be http://createspace.com, not createspace.amazon.com.

The post Everything Amazon Slides appeared first on Stillpoint Digital Press.

All Things Amazon

Along with Ruth Schwartz, I’m going to be offering a presentation at the monthly meeting of the Bay Area Independent Publishers Assocation ambitiously titled All Things Amazon!

Come join us in lovely Novato — the meeting is from 9:00–4:00, but our presentation is from 11:00–12:15. (There are going to be break-out sessions in the afternoon.)

Here’s the blurb:

Let’s face it—Amazon is a giant in the publishing industry, traditional and indie. So understanding how to use this powerful tool to help you to promote and sell your book is an essential key for success.
And you can get the answers at the BAIPA meeting and special afternoon workshop on September 12!

Led by indie publishing veterans and BAIPA board members David Kudler and Ruth Schwartz (with assists from other BAIPA members), this day will give you a map to the many ways in which you can and should interact with Amazon.

Morning Session

How Can Your Indie Book Flourish in Earth’s Largest Commercial Ecosystem?

The morning session will survey all Amazon programs affecting the independent author/publisher. We will explore the various Amazon programs and subsidiaries that we as independent publishers need to take advantage of. We will start with an overview, and then plunge into 10 key programs.

Amazon—Opportunity and Controversy: What’s all the fuss about?
CreateSpace—Your Amazon Print-on-Demand Book:Tips on submission and marketing.
KDP—Your Amazon Ebook: A quick map of the great KDP Select divide (exclusive or non-exclusive?), and the consequences, including KindleUnlimited and the new subscription payment system.
Kindle Scout: A new offering from Amazon. Kindle Scout is reader-powered publishing for new, never-before-published books. It’s a place where readers help decide if a book gets published.
AuthorCentral—Your Amazon Author Page:Why you need one, and how to improve what you’ve got.
Amazon Affiliates—Your Amazon Associates Relationship: Earn a little for every customer you send to Amazon. Is your own A-store helpful?
Amazon Reviews: Best practices for getting them
Amazon’s Goodreads: How to engage reviewers for your book.
Amazon Advantage: How to sell your offset-printed books on Amazon.
Amazon Seller Central: How can you sell autographed copies of your books and other merchandise on the world’s largest marketplace?
Audible Creative Exchange (ACX): How Amazon creates and controls the development and distribution of audiobooks.

Afternoon Session

All Your Amazon Questions Answered: Presentations and Table Topics to Assist in Your Amazon Success!

The afternoon session (1:00-4:00pm) will be set up to respond to your real-world questions on Amazon.

We will offer a combination of in-depth presentations and roundtable breakout discussions about how best to take advantage—and avoid the traps—of working within the Amazon ecosystem. There will be plenty of time for answering your specific questions.

1:00-1:50pm—Q&A with David Kudler and Ruth Schwartz. Ask us anything about Amazon. However, if your question relates to any of the following topics, please attend that session.

2:00-2:50pm—Two concurrent roundtables around Book Production: one on CreateSpace with Ruth Schwartz, and one on KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) with David Kudler.

3:00-3:50pm: Three concurrent roundtables around Marketing: Amazon Reviews with Judy Baker, Author Central with Ruth Schwartz and Categories and Keywords with David Kudler.

3:50-4:00pm—Catch our breaths and pack up for the day.

David Kudler, the current vice-president of BAIPA, is an expert provider of publishing services and a consultant to independent and self-publishers. He is the founder and publisher for Stillpoint Digital Press, and since 1999, has managed the publication of more than 60 print, ebook, audio, and video titles. A traditionally and self-published author himself, he is preparing the June, 2016 release of his young adult historical adventure novel Risuko.

Ruth Schwartz, aka the Wonderlady, has been a member of the BAIPA board for more than three years and currently oversees the BAIPA website and email marketing. Known as a book Midwife, she helps authors get clear about the steps needed to turn out a professional book that looks as good as anything coming from a traditional publisher. She also provides marketing, proofreading and book interior/cover design services, and helps clients to set up basic author websites. You can find out more about her at thewonderlady.com.

REGISTER AT THE BAIPA SITE OR AT THE DOOR!

And if you just want to hear me talk about books, here’s me from the beginning of the summer getting my geek on about Goodreads:

The post All Things Amazon appeared first on Stillpoint Digital Press.

Help choose a cover concept for Risuko!

We're trying to choose what cover concept for Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale to send to the designer! Help!

Go to Risuko.net and tell us which cover you like best:





Drawing the Sword

Miko Walking

Sword Over Head

Vote Now!

What IS an Ebook?

Recently, I was honored to have been invited to post on Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer on the subject of ebooks — a subject I love talking about, having been designing ebooks since 2010. (In this industry that makes me practically an old-timer.) This is the first of a monthly series of posts on the subject. It was originally released here.

There are lots of very complex questions when it comes to ebooks:

text and image formatting,
different file formats,
various workflows for creating ebooks,
and much more.

Defining “eBook”

For this post, before we get into the more esoteric issues of ebook design and publishing, I’d like to start by defining the subject: just what is an ebook?

This may sound like a very simple question to answer, but it isn’t as straightforward as you might think, and being able to answer it correctly will make many of the thornier issues of creating ebooks just a bit easier.

If I were to ask most folks to answer that question they’d probably say that an ebook is a digital file for reading text on a digital device — a computer, tablet, or smart phone. And that answer would be true, so far as it went.

Unfortunately, that definition would cover a wide variety of documents that aren’t ebooks. A Microsoft Word file, for example, is a great way to compose and share formatted text — heck, you can even add images and hyperlinks, just like an ebook.

Word docs, however, are by definition meant for writing and editing the text, not for distributing it commercially. We don’t want our readers rewriting sections of our books without our permission, do we? If they don’t like what we’ve written, fine; they can write their own books!

PDFs

A kind of digital file that is frequently referred to as an ebook but that isn’t is the PDF — the now-universal Portable Document Format invented by Adobe as a way of distributing print documents digitally. Not only is it how we share our own personal documents (letters, etc.) through the internet, but it’s how publishers have been transferring print-ready files to commercial printers for decades. How is that not an ebook, you ask?

The PDF isn’t truly an ebook because it retains its format no matter the size of the screen that displays it. It will always be an accurate representation of the paper document that it represents — on a 27″ monitor, on a 13″ laptop display, on an 9.7″ iPad screen, or a 4.8″ Galaxy s3 phone.

The basic unit for a PDF is the page. And so as the screen shrinks, so does the page size, and with it the size of the words, and with them both the readability. Anyone who’s tried to read a PDF on a small screen knows what I mean.

Characteristics of an eBook

What a true ebook, then, does, is to present correctly formatted text and images no matter the size of the screen it’s being displayed on. In order to do this, ebooks get rid of the idea of a page; the text will format to flow properly, and when one screen is full, will flow to the next — that is, they are reflowable.

Images will resize (if the book has been properly designed) to the proportions of the screen. Ideally the book will be attractive and easy to read on any device — and because each software application for reading ebooks has some reader controls, some whose vision is no longer as strong as it once was (like, say, me) can make it larger, while someone who doesn’t like serif fonts can have the book display in sans-serif or, heck, Zapfino (don’t try this at home). And this can all be done without changing the ebook itself — the changes are simply user preferences within the app.

To give an idea of what I mean, here is a photo of the same book displayed on a number of different devices — just the ones that I happened to have on my desk:

The History of eBook Formats

Now, there’s another kind of file that is meant to do very much the same thing — and you’re looking at one right now. Web pages provide exactly the flexibility that ebooks require. And so when the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) started looking at trying to create a new ebook standard over a decade ago, they looked to the language of the Web — HTML — as a basic building block.

At the time, there were many competing “ebook” formats that publishers and distributors were trying to get tech companies to use:

PDFs,
Palm’s mobi or Mobipocket files (the database-driven basis for the original Kindle file format),
Microsoft’s LIT (an HTML-based format, but proprietary, intended for books to be read on the Microsoft Reader app),
and a few more.

The IDPF created a format that specified a self-contained set of HTML files in a very specific format, and called it ePub. In the past decade, it has become the standard ebook file format. Most ebook reader apps and devices use some variation on the ePub file format to display text and images properly. That includes:

Apple’s iBooks,
Barnes and Noble’s Nook,
Rakuten’s Kobo,
and many more — including all of the Kindles that Amazon is currently shipping.

And the ePub file itself is nothing more than a self-contained package containing a group of HTML files, with its own set of styles for formatting and a navigation document (or two) for making sure everything gets displayed in the right order.

And that is what an ebook is: a website in a box.

Next time, I’ll talk about what that actually means.

Add to that the scriptability of the ePub format (the ability to add widgets that pull data from the Internet or keep track of reader choices, to add a read-aloud track, say), and while fixed-format ebooks may look like PDFs, they aren’t the same thing. (And if you don’t understand any of that — don’t worry. I’ll be defining those terms in coming months.)

This leads to some really fun exchanges between ebook designers and their clients. I love getting lists of notes from clients saying that a particular problem shows up on “page 23.” I have to point out to them that page 23 on their laptop may be page 12 on my big monitor or page 124 on my phone.

Okay, that’s a bit of a simplification: Amazon’s so-called KF8 format that you may have heard of is in fact a variation on the ePub standard, as are the AZW3 files that you may have loaded into your Kindle or Kindle app (but not simple AZW files, which are just mobi files with digital rights management attached). KF8 files are a kind of Frankenstein monster with an ePub file to load onto newer Kindles and Kindle apps and an old mobi file to load onto older Kindles. Still: there’s ePub in there!

So you want to start your own small press?

Over on Quora, an anonymous reader asked me to answer the question, “How should I go about starting a small, independent press?“

This question was asked by someone who was already publishing his or her own work, but who was considering expanding beyond that to publishing others’ books.

This got me thinking. Thinking a lot. Probably way more than the poster wanted. If you don’t want to read all of what I came up with, the TL;DR version is down at the bottom.

Here’s what I had to say:

As Anastacia Moore and Randall Reade have pointed out, running an independent press is not easy, and it’s not something to do for the money. Not just for the money.

If you’re a self-publisher, you already run an independent press. You’re not affiliated with any of the Big Five (is it still five?) corporate publishers, nor with any university, nor with any governmental organization. You’re an independent publisher. Congratulations.

The hard part isn’t running an independent press (though that’s hard enough). It’s making it earn enough for you not to have to rely on other sources of income. There are a number of ways to try to do this:

Expand your offerings (but rationally). The more titles you have in more media (ie, ebook, print, audiobook), the more discoverable you are as a publisher and the more discoverable your books are for potential readers. Nothing markets a book like another book. The best marketing is a series — book 1 sells book 2, and so on. But books by the same author sell each other, especially if they’re in a similar genre.The next best book-to-book marketing tool is genre, and this is one of many reasons that large publishers break their book lines down into imprints or brands. TOR/Fantasy is a brand that one set of readers follow; they are not exactly the same as those that watch for new releases from TOR/Science Fiction (though obviously there’s some overlap).The point here is not just cross-marketing (see below). It’s also the fact that by expanding your offerings you will develop a larger readership, a larger online presence, greater Google “juice” — and a diversified portfolio, if you feel like looking at these pieces of intellectual property as investments (which is what they are). By developing both depth (lots of books by a particular author or in a particular genre) as well as breadth (multiple authors and genres), you’ll start experiencing some economies of scale and some security if one work or genre stops selling. You’ll drive more people to your site and (hopefully) develop more readers. You also may find that the market begins to teach you what does and doesn’t work — which is hard to notice when the books are few and yours.An example of this last: two years ago I was mostly publishing books on philosophy (Stillpoint/Thought) with a little romance (Stillpoint/Romance)  and my own books of myths and folktales for children (Stillpoint/Youth). In late 2013, I started publishing Stillpoint/Eros (warning: adult readers only), a line of erotic romance books — not what I’d intended at all when I started, but the writers were good, and the stories slowly took off. They now represent about 80% of my royalties, and growing.I’m now also developing a science fiction line (Stillpoint/Prometheus)See my point about being flexible below.
Cross-market. Every book should have a preview in it from another book. Preferably from the next book in the series, but another book by the same author or in the same genre will work (if the author of the books don’t object — do ask first). Every book should list others in the same series, by the same author, or in the same genre that you’re putting out. Ebooks should include live links to the landing pages for the books either on your site or on the retailer where the book is posted. (Never include a link to buy the book on Site A in an ebook you’ve uploaded to Site B!)Put together box-sets/collections of different authors’ articles, stories, or books. Not only will there be a certain synergy — Authors X, Y, and Z will all encourage their own readers to purchase the collection — but there is obviously the opportunity to introduce each author’s readers to other authors’ works. Make sure that the works will appeal to a common audience.Have a site. Have a good site. If you don’t already own your own domain (not mypublishingcompany.wordpress.com or whatever), spend the money. It will be worth it. Pull together a visually appealing, informative, interesting site — WordPress can do just about everything you’re going to need.Part of cross-marketing is having a dynamic, interesting site where readers can come and find out more about your authors and their books. Not just descriptions and order buttons — previews, interviews, blog posts, etc. It doesn’t have to be a fully functional ecommerce site (thought those are not as hard to create these days); each book’s (and author’s) page can include links to buy at various retailers sites without ever having to set up your own estore.(If you do want to sell your own digital downloads, know that you won’t make a huge amount of money at it; most folks want to buy through the channels they’re used to. Still, if you want to go for it, I highly recommend WooCommerce for WordPress. I’ve used a number of ecommerce solutions and it’s easiest to set up and use. That’s not to say that it’s simple… but simpler than anything else I’ve found.)Another major part of cross-marketing is building your mailing list. It’s essential for authors to have an active list of folks interested in their writing, but for a publisher of multiple authors its a matter of life and death. A good book on how (and why) to build a mailing list is Nick Stephenson’s Reader Magnets: Build Your Author Platform and Sell more Books on Kindle (It’s a freebie — though obviously, being an author in the book marketing business, he’s got lots of upsells available. Still, it’s a great nuts-and-bolts introduction to the art of the mailing list.)
Find other ways to market your books. I hate to say it, but get over the “I’m no good at marketing thing.” Neither am I, by nature. Neither are most people. Marketing requires a special kind of imagination that’s quite separate from the creative imagination most authors possess.Your options are:



find someone else to do the marketing for you
give up
learn to do it yourself

#1 is probably out of reach unless you’re related or married to a marketing genius, since the odds are very low that you’ll make more in increased sales than you’re spending on your marketer — at least until you’re big enough where you’ll need a partner or employees, in which case, a marketing genius is a good thing to find. #2 is probably good practical advice, but I’m going to assume that you’re not willing to take it at this point. #3 is your best bet then.

I’ve written a post on some good free ways to market books. To be honest, there are an infinite number of ways to let the people who should know about your books know about your books — and most of them won’t cost money, just time and effort. Be willing to put the time and effort in.

Try to be as sparing as possible in using paid advertising (through programs like AdWords, Twitter Ads, etc.)  Unless you’re dealing with a fairly high budget, the economics are iffy at best. Internet advertising works best on large sample sizes with a lot of market research. (Goodreads giveaways are the most effective “advertising” tool I’ve found, and cost very little: wholesale printing price plus shipping. You can even drop-ship from your print-on-demand distributor.)

Find other ways to monetize your assets. There are lots of ways to use a site or a book as a way to make money. Look at selling ads on your site (See on Quora: How to sell ads directly on my website? or Are there alternative ways for a vertical website to sell display ads?)Look at appropriate affiliate possibilities (Affiliate Marketing). (Every link to someone’s book on a retailer’s site should be an affiliate link — you’re driving traffic elsewhere, you might as well take advantage of it.)
Find other ways to monetize your own skills. I actually started not as a publisher but as a publishing services provider. I’m an ebook designer, an editor, an audiobook producer, and a print layout designer. I offer a service to add social networking links to ebooks (Smidget – the social media widget for ebooks), I do covers, I research permissions… If it has to do with books, I’m happy to hire myself out to do it for someone else — for the appropriate fee.Find things that you can honestly say you’re skilled at and offer your services on your site (eg, What Can Stillpoint Do for You?). Offer your services on sites like Writer.ly, Bibliocruch, Elance, or even Fiverr. Join a guild like Editorial Freelancers Association. Let everyone you know now about your services. Build up some experience and a sense of what you can charge and how time and energy a job is going to take. (Just know this: it’s always going to take a lot more of both than you think it will — especially at first.)Know this too: this will be another huge energy and time sink in terms of marketingOne thing to be very, very careful about if you go this route: always be clear when you are offering a service (in which case you are working for pay — your client is the publisher) and when you are offering to act as a publisher yourself (in which case you are either paying to use the author’s writing or offering to split royalties with the author). A lot of new authors don’t know the difference, and a lot of sleazy so-called publishers prey on their ignorance. (AuthorHouse? Hello?) To quote Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil.”
Reach out to other indie publishers. There are formal and informal organizations where you can exchange ideas (here in the the US, there’s an association called the Independent Book Publishers Association that you really should join). There are also local groups that meet talk about all of this sort of thing. At the moment I’m the vice-president of the Bay Area Independent Book Publishers Association (BAIPA), which brings about a hundred of us together on the second Saturday of every month — there are local equivalents across the continent.

I’m still working at all of these items. I make a living from my company — but not as much as I’d like or (frankly) need. Stillpoint Digital Press is just busy enough that I can’t do all of the work myself, but not yet big enough to hire the kind of help I need. Still, it’s happening. I’m proud of it. I wish you the best of luck.

TL;DR: Running a small press is incredibly difficult with lots of challenges — but it also can also be incredibly rewarding work that offers wonderful opportunities. Good luck!

Authors: 6 Reasons You Have to Be on Goodreads

This past Saturday at BAIPA, I led a roundtable about the reasons that every independent author and publisher (as well as every “dependent” author) needed to have an active presence on Goodreads.com. It was one of three roundtable sessions at the time, and I assumed that most BAIPA folks (who are pretty savvy) would already know most of what I had to say. I was surprised to find that not only did they not, but they were very hungry to hear about the world’s largest book review site

Because they all found the material I presented to be helpful, I thought I’d share my major points here. This is why you have to be on Goodreads:

The readers are there. What if I told you there was a social networking site where more than 40 million book lovers gather daily to review, discuss and share their favorite books and find out about new ones? Goodreads.com is that site. There are readers interested in every subject and genre — and lots of them. These people are passionate about their books; that’s why they’re on Goodreads.
Your books are there . Goodreads members (and Goodreads affiliate companies) have added 1.1 BILLION books to the site’s database — ebooks, print, audiobooks, not-yet-published, out-of-print. No matter how you cut it, that’s a lot of books — and if you’ve already published a title or two, they are probably already there.

When I led the BAIPA roundtable, a number of author/publishers found their books already on Goodreads, ranging from thirty years old to a book that hadn’t yet been released. And if the book (or edition) isn’t there, you can add it —including the cover, description, publication date, and a link to where you want readers to visit to get more information (ideally on your own site or blog). You can even do this before the book has been released. For example, I’ve created a record for my YA novel Risuko, which isn’t due out until this time next year. That will give me a place to send ARC reviewers to share their reviews pre-publication.
The reviews are there. There are over 43 million reviews on Goodreads, and more every day. Members review the books they’ve read — and are pretty scrupulous about posting honest (but not abusive) reviews. The rankings there, then, carry a lot more weight than those at, say Amazon, which tend to be skewed to the extremes (lovers and haters), since those are the folks motivated to leave a review on a commercial site. You can use a number of means to encourage and solicit more reviews, from exactly the people who are most likely to enjoy your book. (See below.) Goodreads even posts code for widgets that will allow you easily to share a list of a book’s reviews to any page on your blog or site.
The groups are there. Goodreads groups are an easy-to-overlook part of what Goodreads has to offer the publisher. There are thousands of groups, ranging from huge groups that focus on broad subjects (like, say, History), as well as smaller ones dedicated to discussing the work of a particular genre or even a particular author. Not only are these places where authors and publishers have an opportunity to let folks interested in just their kind of book, or to announce a sale, a new release, etc., but they are also virtual communities where you can talk with folks who are interested in the same things you are, where you can ask and answer questions. You can find beta readers or early reviewers — all while building up your own fan base. The best way to build up a loyal readership is to develop a group of passionate readers who know and trust you. Participating in a group or five is a great way to do that.
The promotional opportunities are there. One of the participants in the BAIPA roundtable muttered about it being “that freebie site.” Well, Goodreads isn’t that — at least, it’s not just that. Giveaways are a powerful tool for generating interest and review at a relatively low cost, but that’s not the only opportunity you have to promote your book on Goodreads. (Two giveaway pro tips: give away just one copy, since five copies doesn’t generally generate a lot more interest; and, since most of the sign-ups will happen during the first and last day, have a two- or three-day giveaway, rather than one that’s weeks or months long.)

Another easy promotional opportunity is the self-serve advertising available to folks with Goodreads Author accounts (see below). These small ads can promote a book’s page on Goodreads, your site, on a retailer, a Goodreads giveaway — whatever. As I mentioned above, most groups also have an area where you can let you share information about your book and any promotions that you may be running. These are especially effective if you’re an active member of the group.
YOU are there (or soon will be). Every author with a book listed on Goodreads has a “list” — click on the author’s name, and you’ll see every title that author is associated with (including titles they edited, narrated, or illustrated in addition to titles they wrote, if they’re jacks-of-all-trades like me ). If you join the Goodreads Author Program, however, not only will you be able to run ads, but you will be able to set up a Goodreads Author Page. There you can share not only your books, but posts from your blog, video trailers, giveaway announcements, etc. There’s an area for readers to ask you questions (they don’t show up until you answer them). It’s an invaluable tool, one that everyone with a book on Goodreads should have. Once you have signed up as a user, just click on the Author Program link at the bottom of any Goodreads page, and it will lead you through the process of signing up. Being a Goodreads Author, not only creates that expanded profile, but gives you access to information about who is interested in and reviewing your books.

I’m still learning about Goodreads and the opportunities it affords. If you know other ways that the site serves authors and publishers, please let me know!

PS The support on Goodreads is terrific. Still, sometimes it’s helpful to get just a bit more information. A great resource for exploring all of these points in more detail is Michelle Campbell-Scott’s Goodreads for Authors. It was published a couple of years ago, but she’s kept it fairly up to date. It’s available as a paperback as well as through KindleUnlimited.

PPS Goodreads was bought last year by Amazon. To date, they’ve been very hands off. The only visible change is that it’s now even easier to buy a book from the Amazon link on the book’s page. (There are also links to a wide variety of other retailers, and even libraries.)

Getting Grammatical: What's the Big Deal with the Passive Voice?

An author I work with recently asked me, “What’s the big deal with the passive voice?” My first instinct was to answer, “Well, would that question have made as much sense as ‘The big deal with the passive voice is about what?'” Three things stopped me:

First of all, that’s a very New York Jewish sentence construction and so I didn’t want to dis my forebearers
Second of all, it was snarky, which isn’t a great way to communicate anything
Third, she’s a bright, articulate, and talented writer who deserves a better answer.

So I thought I’d give it here.

Subject-Verb (Sorry!)

To understand why editors and English teachers cringe at the sight of a passive sentence, we have to review basic English syntax. (Sorry.)

English is a highly malleable language in just about every way except for sentence structure. Unless you are asking a question (called an interrogative sentence), ordering someone to do something (imperative), or just shouting in joy/frustration/surprise (exclamatory), most (declarative) English sentences include a subject that comes before the verb.

The Active Voice

To put that another way, the actor — the one who does the thing — comes before the act — the thing that the actor does: Dick runs. (Run, Dick, Run!)

[Dick] is the subject/actor; {run} is the verb/action.

Now, we can complicate the heck out of that sentence: [An All-Indian sprinter before coming to Northwest Central State, Dick Tuljapurkar] {runs the 100 and 200 meter dashes and the 100 meter hurdles as well as being a member of the 400 and 800 meter relay teams that won gold medals in last spring’s Division III championship meet.} (Run, Dick, Run!)

Complicated, sure, but the [subject] (and everything that modified it) still came before the {verb} (and everything that modified it — which is known collectively as the predicate).

To paraphrase that wonderful font of popular education, Schoolhouse Rock, Dick “is the subject of the sentence, and what the predicates says, he does.”

We call this the active voice.

Notice that I didn’t say anything about the verb to be — a perfectly good and often even essential verb that can be used in completely active sentences (in the sentence above: “…as well as being a member…”).

The Passive Voice

Still with me? Okay, now let’s look at the passive voice, and what’s wrong with it.

A passive sentence takes the actor and places it after the verb: [The running] {is done by Dick.} Note that the subject of the sentence is now the running, even though Dick is the guy who does it; he’s been demoted to the object of the preposition by, which modifies the verb. He’s lost there, way at the end of the sentence. Poor Dick.

So? What’s the big deal?

The big deal is two-fold: the passive version of the sentence is longer; and, because it’s less clear who did what, it’s not as powerful.

Passive constructions are almost always longer and less direct than active ones. I used to teach report-writing workshops to sheriff’s deputies and correctional officers — a group whose favorite class in high school generally wasn’t English. Writing reports was their idea of hell, and yet documenting exactly what happened — who did what — was a huge part of their job.

They taught me just how bad passive sentences could get.

Cops love the passive voice, for the same reason that less-experienced writers everywhere do: they think that, because it’s more complicated, it sounds more sophisticated or official. In fact, the opposite is the case. My students would write things like The suspect was apprehended by this officer instead of I arrested her or The vehicle which had been absconded with was pursued by me in my police vehicle instead of I followed the stolen Ford Taurus in my police car. Honest to goodness — they really did write this stuff. If you were a jury or a supervisor, which would you find clearer and more effective?

The other problem with passive constructions is that they bury the actor, which makes the sentence weaker and more obscure. To stoop to the example that I used in the 1980s with those cops, would you rather see Debbie Does Dallas or Dallas Was Done by Debbie?

So when should I use the passive voice?

There are occasionally times when the emphasis really should be on the person/thing acted upon, rather than the actor: President Kennedy was killed by a rifle shot to the head. McKinley and Reagan, on the other hand, were shot in the chest.

The other time when the passive voice should be used is when the writer doesn’t know who took the action or wants to obscure the actor.

In the example I used about the Kennedy assassination, I could have written in the active voice: Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy with a rifle shot to the head. Suppose, however, that I’m trying to prove that Oswald wasn’t the assassin, or imagine that I was writing the afternoon of November 22, 1963, before the assailant’s name became known. Then I might drop Oswald out of the sentence — and use the passive voice.

This last trick is a great favorite of corporate, military, and governmental folks everywhere. They turn to it in press releases and at press conferences whenever something has gone pear-shaped, solemnly murmuring, Mistakes were made. This much-abused passive sentence makes it clear that whatever it is that happened was bad, sure, but it also completely avoids taking or assigning any responsibility.

So that’s the big deal about the passive voice: it obscures the relationship of the actor to the act. Unless that’s what you want to do, avoid it!

The post Getting Grammatical: What's the Big Deal with the Passive Voice? appeared first on Stillpoint Digital Press.

Getting Grammatical: What’s the Big Deal with the Passive Voice?

An author I work with recently asked me, “What’s the big deal with the passive voice?” My first instinct was to answer, “Well, would that question have made as much sense as ‘The big deal with the passive voice is about what?’” Three things stopped me:

First of all, that’s a very New York Jewish sentence construction and so I didn’t want to dis my forebearers
Second of all, it was snarky, which isn’t a great way to communicate anything
Third, she’s a bright, articulate, and talented writer who deserves a better answer.

So I thought I’d give it here.

Subject-Verb (Sorry!)

To understand why editors and English teachers cringe at the sight of a passive sentence, we have to review basic English syntax. (Sorry.) English is a highly maleable language in just about every way except for sentence structure. Unless you are asking a question (called an interrogative sentence), ordering someone to do something (imperative), or just shouting in joy/frustration/surprise (exclamatory), most (declarative) English sentences include a subject that comes before the verb.

The Active Voice

To put that another way, the actor — the one who does the thing — comes before the act — the thing that the actor does: Dick runs. (Run, Dick, Run!) [Dick] is the subject/actor; {run} is the verb/action. Now, we can complicate the heck out of that sentence: [An All-Indian sprinter before coming to Northwest Central State, Dick Tuljapurkar] {runs the 100 and 200 meter dashes and the 100 meter hurdles as well as being a member of the 400 and 800 meter relay teams that won gold medals in last spring’s Division III championship meet.} (Run, Dick, Run!) Complicated, sure, but the [subject] (and everything that modified it) still came before the {verb} (and everything that modified it — which is known collectively as the predicate). To paraphrase that wonderful font of popular education, Schoolhouse Rock, Dick “is the subject of the sentence, and what the predicates says, he does.” We call this the active voice. Notice that I didn’t say anything about the verb to be — a perfectly good and often even essential verb that can be used in completely active sentences (in the sentence above: “…as well as being a member…”).

The Passive Voice

Still with me? Okay, now let’s look at the passive voice, and what’s wrong with it. A passive sentence takes the actor and places it after the verb: [The running] {is done by Dick.} Note that the subject of the sentence is now the running, even though Dick is the guy who does it; he’s been demoted to the object of the preposition by, which modifies the verb. He’s lost there, way at the end of the sentence. Poor Dick.

So? What’s the big deal?

The big deal is two-fold: the passive version of the sentence is longer; and, because it’s less clear who did what, it’s not as powerful. Passive constructions are almost always longer and less direct than active ones. I used to teach report-writing workshops to sheriff’s deputies and correctional officers — a group whose favorite class in high school generally wasn’t English. Writing reports was their idea of hell, and yet documenting exactly what happened — who did what — was a huge part of their job. They taught me just how bad passive sentences could get. Cops love the passive voice, for the same reason that less-experienced writers everywhere do: they think that, because it’s more complicated, it sounds more sophisticated or official. In fact, the opposite is the case. My students would write things like The suspect was apprehended by this officer instead of I arrested her or The vehicle which had been absconded with was pursued by me in my police vehicle instead of I followed the stolen Ford Taurus in my police car. Honest to goodness — they really did write this stuff. If you were a jury or a supervisor, which would you find clearer and more effective? The other problem with passive constructions is that they bury the actor, which makes the sentence weaker and more obscure. To stoop to the example that I used in the 1980s with those cops, would you rather see Debbie Does Dallas or Dallas Was Done by Debbie?

So when should I use the passive voice?

There are occasionally times when the emphasis really should be on the person/thing acted upon, rather than the actor: President Kennedy was killed by a rifle shot to the head. McKinley and Reagan, on the other hand, were shot in the chest. The other time when the passive voice should be used is when the writer doesn’t know who took the action or wants to obscure the actor. In the example I used about the Kennedy assassination, I could have written in the active voice: Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy with a rifle shot to the head. Suppose, however, that I’m trying to prove that Oswald wasn’t the assassin, or imagine that I was writing the afternoon of November 22, 1963, before the assailant’s name became known. Then I might drop Oswald out of the sentence — and use the passive voice. This last trick is a great favorite of corporate, military, and governmental folks everywhere. They turn to it in press releases and at press conferences whenever something has gone pear-shaped, solemnly murmuring, Mistakes were made. This much-abused passive sentence makes it clear that whatever it is that happened was bad, sure, but it also completely avoids taking or assigning any responsibility. So that’s the big deal about the passive voice: it obscures the relationship of the actor to the act. Unless that’s what you want to do, avoid it!

Rest in Peace, Sir Terry. You’ve Earned It

As you probably know, Sir Terry Pratchett died today. His is a great loss to the world of letters — but I still can’t think about him without smiling.

I can’t help but think that he’s got Death chuckling. In small caps.

He was a very funny writer of wildly amusing fantasy novels, and so it could occasionally be easy to overlook how profound some of the ideas were that he was exploring in his books.

Here’s one of my favorite bits, a piece from one of his wonderful Discworld novels, Witches Abroad. It focuses on the nature of narrative:

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.

Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is Power.

Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped spacetime, have been bowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strong have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling… stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.

And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.

This is called the theory of narrative causality, and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.

This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.

So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story.

It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed.

Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.*

*And people are wrong about urban myths. Logic and reason say that these are fictional creations, retold again and again by people who are hungry for evidence of weird coincidence, natural justice and so on. They aren’t. They keep on happening all the time, everywhere, as the stories bounce back and forth across the universe. At any one time hundreds of dead grandmothers are being whisked away on the roofs of stolen cars while loyal alsatians are choking on the fingers of midnight bandits….

How can I promote my book for free?

Every author wants to know how to get the word out about his or her book — and most are frightened that it’s going to cost an arm and a leg. To be honest, the most effective marketing that an author can do doesn’t involve paying money. Just lots and lots of time and effort. So not free, really, but no-cost, at least!

Before you hire a publicist or start looking at paid ads on Facebook, Goodreads, Google Adwords, Bing, Twitter, etc., be sure that you have done everything that you can to let the appropriate people know about your book. Contact all of your friends and family, obviously, and encourage them to share the information about your book with everyone they know. Send well-crafted, focussed press releases to newspapers, magazines, and radio stations that might be interested in your subject.

Next (and most importantly) build your Author Platform — whether that’s just a blog on a site like Blogger or WordPress or your own hosted web page. Spend the money to register both your name and (if you can) the title of your book as URLs — this is probably the best money you’ll ever spend, marketing-wise, and it shouldn’t be expensive. You can forward those URLs wherever you want — either to your own site or a page on someone else’s. Wherever that may be, make sure that your book has a dedicated landing page (ideally with links to all of the retail outlets that carry your book) and that all press releases, comments, blog entries, and social media posts link directly back to that page. Post regularly, not just about your book, but on your thoughts on the subject matter, how current events relate to your book, etc. If it’s available (either on sale or presale), include links to buy your book — whether on your own site or elsewhere. Share the content that you create on your page/site on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Find as many online forums, newsletters, Goodreads lists and groups, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, Google+ groups, blogs, etc. that focus on your book’s genre or topic. Comment there — don’t just spam the feed with “MY BOOK IS COMING OUT BUY IT NOW!” but actually participate in conversations; get to know people, and let them get to know you. (Make sure that you include your book’s title/genre and a link in your bios and profiles!)

Many, many online reviewers and review services are free to the publisher (this is as it should be; paying for reviews has always struck me as ethically fraught, to say the least). Look for reviewers who like books similar to yours — or whose opinions you find you really agree with. Be very careful not to submit titles that they’re not likely to read or like!

Goodreads has a number of ways for you to promote your book without having to pay for it. First of all, make sure that they have a listing for each edition of your book (paperback, ebook, audiobook, Kindle, etc. If you publish through CreateSpace and/or Amazon’s KDP, they will create a listing automatically). As I said above, there are groups there for just about every genre or subgenre — find one or more that fits your book and become a regular there. Also, you can hold giveaways — Goodreads will promote a raffle for copies of your (ink-and-paper) book; people have to say that they want to read your book in order to participate, which not only means that your book is now on their to-read list, but their friends will get a notification that your book has been added, which will hopefully make them want to check it out. Typically, hundreds more people sign up for a giveaway than actually win it, so this can be a very effective form of marketing — even after a book has been out for a while. Make sure to create a Goodreads author page — even  if you only have only one book, link it to your blog so that readers and potential readers have a chance to get to know you and your book.

Create an Author Central page on Amazon — not only will you be able to create a page that includes information about you, with photos, videos, events, and links to your Twitter and blog feeds, but you’ll be able to keep track of sales and reviews on the largest book retailer site.

Once you have established all of that, then you might consider some paid advertising — though that needs to be carefully thought through and have a clearly defined target audience to be effective or you’ll end up spending far more than you’ll make back. Paid ads are most effective in large volume — so if you are trying to market a single book, your money might be better spent on designers and editors.

(When should you start doing all of this marketing? NOW. There’s a saying — and I wish I knew the source — that the proper time to start marketing a book is two years ago.)

Good luck!

Image: Bookstore by Nataia Romay. Used through a Creative Commons license