Hugh Howey's Blog, page 25

Creating Your Book Cover

The third and final video for your book creation. Earlier, I went over creating your print interior using InDesign. I also showed you one way to edit your ebook. Now I’m going to do a quick and dirty book cover, mainly to show you how to set up the file properly, and how to create your own UPC code. You should take more time and do a better job with the design and art than I will here in less than an hour.

Some links you’ll need:

The CreateSpace Cover Guidelines

A Free UPC Code Generator

And here’s the tutorial. Hope it’s useful:

 

 

The Idiots Interpretation

Traditional media and governments don’t seem to understand tech.

This year, German media outlets cried “foul” on Google for excerpting their stories in search results. You know, the results that point people back to the original story. They wanted Google to PAY for these excerpts.

Google stopped showing these results, and the traffic at these media outlets TANKED. Of course they did. So they begged to have their content excerpted again.

Now Spain is in the act, instituting a tax on Google for excerpts on its News search results. Google just announced that they will be pulling the results rather than paying the tax. I think we know what comes next.

With a move this boneheaded, some are speculating that surely there must be a reason for a law this idiotic. Is it a gift from the government to print media ahead of upcoming elections?

I personally vote for the far simpler “Idiots Interpretation.” Remember that this was also the year that France instituted the “Anti-Amazon Law.” This made it illegal to discount books and ship them for free. Amazon, which offered free shipping prior to the law, promptly began shipping books for ONE CENT.

Old Media and the Old World are united in the fight against progress and technology. If you think this is about preserving an old way of life, I would argue instead that it’s about preserving established channels of money-flow.

In similar vein, Spain has also shut down Uber, the popular ride-hailing company. A judge reached this decision after complaint from the Madrid Taxi Association, citing “unfair competition.” As in: Too convenient to use and not expensive enough.

In my trade, the fight is with Amazon, which has made reading more affordable and more accessible for readers — and more lucrative and more egalitarian for writers. And we see how vehemently the old guard has reacted to all of that.

The problem going forward is that those happy with progress are quietly enjoying its benefits, while those unhappy are lobbying politicians to keep things the way they were (which is to benefit inefficient players at some cost to consumers). I argue that we, as happy progressives, need to be aware of these issues and do more than simply vote with our wallets. We need to mock those enacting bone-headed laws and ridiculous taxes. We should mock those who are appealing to courts rather than appealing to customers. We need to point and laugh. Laugh until we cry.

 

 

WOOL Reenactment by NYU Students

Check this out. A group of students put together a reenactment of WOOL for a class project. They did a stellar job, I think.

Fixing Typos in Your Uploaded Amazon E-Books

Another question I get a lot is how to edit our existing ebooks in order to correct small mistakes. (Another reason you might want to download an already-published ebook is to update the back matter with links to new releases.)

While I enjoy paginating my own print editions, I prefer to have someone else create my ebooks. There are little things that can go wrong with ebook creation that causes issues for readers on older devices. I swear by the folks at Polgarus Studio. You get perfect .epub and .mobi files without paying an arm and a leg.

But sometimes you just need to make a small fix to an existing file. For this tutorial, I started with an email from Amazon notifying me of errors in one of my ebooks. I then show you how to download that ebook file, convert it to an .epub with Calibre (download here), and then edit it with Sigil (download here).

Both programs are free. Donate to the developers if you can!

Turning Your Manuscript into a Paperback

I’ve had a few requests for details about how I paginate my print books, so here goes. Below you’ll find a 50-minute video of me walking through my pagination routine. It’s not quite everything, but I show 95% of what’s involved for a few sample chapters. From there, it’s just a matter of repeating the steps throughout the book. Once you do a few of these, it comes very naturally. You’ll also find that the process speeds up with practice.

First, download the templates (I use the 5×8 template in the video, but you can use either one):

The 5 x 8 Template for CreateSpace

The 6 x 9 Template for CreateSpace

To watch the video, you might want to make it bigger by expanding it or going to YouTube:

My favorite place to upload the finished PDF is CreateSpace. Check them out here. The service is completely free to use. You can even “proof” your work online without having to order a copy, though I highly recommend ordering a physical proof and going through every page one more time. A proof copy will cost you around $7, shipped, for a standard 300-page book.

I hope this is useful. If so, let me know. And if you want to make improvements to the template files and share them with others, feel free.

Also, if you want to see the results in person, you can snag a paperback copy of The Shell Collector right here. You’ll notice that I use the cream interior and the matte cover options, which I think look a lot more professional than white page interiors or glossy covers.

The Shell Collector

Two weeks from release, and I just got the proof copies of the print edition in my grubby little paws. This might be the prettiest book I’ve ever assembled. The M.S. Corley cover is gorgeous, and I put a lot of time and care into the interior design. The book just looks amazing. No need to read it, you can just display it around your home!

The ebook is up for pre-order at several outlets already:

The Shell Collector on Amazon.com

The Shell Collector on iTunes

The Shell Collector on Kobo.com

I’ll put a Nook link up here as soon as the work is available there. It’s a measly $4.99 at all outlets. Fancy coffees cost more. So what’s the book about? It takes place in a very near future where sea levels have risen and the oceans have grown warmer. Mass extinctions have left seashells incredibly rare and extremely valuable. Hunting them down is the newest Dutch Tulip Craze.

As an avid collector and contributor for the Times, Maya Walsh frequently writes about shelling and the state of the seas. She is working on a four-part expose on Ness Wilde, the world’s foremost shell collector, and an oil company CEO. Maya blames people like Ness for what’s become of our world, and she has watched him profit mightily from the warmed and rising seas. As far as she’s concerned, Ness Wilde helped destroy her world. Now she’s out to wreck his.

The Shell Collector a mix of post-apocalyptic, suspense, romance, and environmental fiction. Mary Alice Monroe, the bestselling author of  The Summer’s End had this to say:

Green fiction at its finest! With science, romance and mystery, The Shell Collector will appeal to both men and women. I’ve been waiting for a hard hitting novel about the state of our oceans–and this is it!

I hope you all enjoy! And now for that unboxing:

Zoom In to Write Better

Often, when you aren’t happy with what you’re writing, it’s because you’re writing about your character from a distance. You’re seeing your scene as a bird might. Swoop down. Sit right behind the eyes of your protagonist. Is she sitting in a field? What does the sun feel like on her skin? Is he walking down a city street? Does the grass grow up through cracks in the sidewalk?

Another thing to remember is that your character is not your plot. They aren’t a vehicle for driving the reader through your story. They have their own history; their heart has been broken; they lie in bed at night and dream of being something else. They have siblings and cousins they’ve played games with, games only they know the rules to. They are scared. Confused. Confident. On the verge of being in love. There was that one time they danced in public, and they didn’t care how goofy they looked.

The only way to convince your readers that this world is real, that these characters are real, is to believe it first yourself. To do that, you need to zoom in. See the world as your characters do. Describe it through all 8 or 10 of their senses.* Know them as well as you know a dear friend. And then write to do them justice.

 

 

*It bugs me that we pretend there are only 5 senses. It ignores so many other ways we understand our world. There’s the kinesthetic sense, which is our ability to feel our own bodies in space. If you close your eyes and touch your nose, that’s your kinesthetic sense. When your character has an out-0f-body experience, they are feeling a breakdown of this sense. Balance is another sense, with the organs of the inner ear providing information about our orientation in space. Vertigo is an important sensation to convey to the readers. Hunger is a sense separate from taste. Hot and cold are sensed separately (Fun fact: The cold sensors within your epidermis are closer to the surface than your heat sensors, which is why, when you dip your hand or foot in scalding water, it briefly feels cold before it feels hot. The trigger for “extreme temperature” hits the cold cells before the hot cells).

The New Warehouse Workers

How cute are these guys? A Boston startup invented them. Supposedly, Amazon has adapted several of their distribution centers to use these puppies. Pretty soon, the complaints will go from working conditions at warehouses to lack of jobs at warehouses.

Another video and more over at The Passive Voice.

The DBW Writers’ Survey

The annual DBW Writers’ Survey is up!

Please consider participating and sharing. The more respondents, the more meaningful the results.

Of course, we’ll have to wait and see how those results are analyzed. In the past, the outcome of publishing paths has been the main focus of this survey, which does not help authors make decisions with their manuscripts. There is an implied assumption in those past results that authors can simply choose whether to traditionally publish or self-publish. And so aspiring authors who have not yet managed to get traditionally published do not have their $0 income factored in, while all self-published authors are counted.

Compounding the problem, hybrid authors (those who have published both ways) have been treated as a special case in the past. This is odd considering that the vast majority of hybrids have either been picked up because of success with self-publishing, or found success self-publishing a backlist that did poorly enough with a traditional publisher for the rights to revert. In both cases, it was the decision to self-publish that was heavily rewarded.

These issues can be handled in the analysis. One way would be to compare hybrids with those who have been traditionally published, as both groups represent the top fraction of two different freely made decisions: the decision to either query an agent/publisher or to self-publish. These two groups also have in common the ability to draw the interest of a publishing house, whether out of a slush pile or out of the pool of self-published titles.

Another way to make a fair comparison would be to combine hybrids with self-published authors — and on the other side, combine those who have written a work that has not yet been picked up with those who have been traditionally published. This allows the choice on whether to query or self-publish to be compared. This sort of analysis would factor in the 95%+ who never sell a single book through querying due to never acquiring an agent or a publishing deal.

In the past, this survey has left out those who never get picked up by publishers out of the traditional side while including every self-published book on the self-pub side. It then takes hybrids, those who can attribute most of their success to the decision to self-publish (both originally as in Amanda Hocking, and with backlist as in Joe Konrath), out of the self-pub side.

Past surveys were fine if the goal was to look at what happens to highest-performing 1% of books along one path with the lowest-performing 99% of books along the other (remember that the top-selling indie authors are taken out and labeled “hybrids”). But these surveys have not been useful for authors weighing what to do with their manuscripts. Nor have they been useful to publishers, who aren’t able to gauge the value they bring when they see such a tilted comparison.

While at RWA this year, I took a picture of how bizarre these comparisons are during a presentation given by the person who usually crunches this data. Let’s hope with new management and a clearer understanding of these issues that the 2014 results will prove to be far more useful. Barring that, let’s hope we’ll be provided with the raw data so others can play around.

Everyone is in the Middle

There are people to both sides of you. Everyone is in the middle. We’re all part of a continuum.

This is the theme of the book I’m working on right now, a sequel to SAND. The idea is that while we are all looking in one direction —  whether with envy or judgement or longing or disgust — there is someone on the other side of us looking our way with the exact same emotion and with just as much cause.

I played with this theme in HALF WAY HOME, where I pointed out that today’s moral progress will seem slow and obvious to future generations, and at the same time some “modern” behavior of ours will one day appear barbaric. It might be the eating of meat. It could be allowing people to drive cars well past the day the technology existed to revamp our fleets and save hundreds of thousands of lives.

A glance at history suggests that it will be many things. All generations crow about how much better, more inclusive, more enlightened they are than previous generations, and then some facet of their culture seems outlandish just a generation or two hence. Slave-owning American Founders who preached equality and freedom come to mind. The institutional racism and sexism of “The Greatest Generation” does as well.

These are some examples of how we’re in the “middle” of generational moral progress. It’s why we should be careful castigating previous generations, be super careful touting our own, and understand that future generations are going to be horrified at our current behavior.

Being in the middle as individuals means that anything we long for in one direction, there is someone behind us longing for what we have. As writers, it means that everyone agonizing over a lack of sales is sitting on a finished work, which someone with a rough draft can’t imagine. And the person with the rough draft is idolized by someone stuck at 80% for what feels like forever. And that person is a hero to the writer with just an idea and a dream.

In the other direction, being in the middle means that any snubbing we do in one direction, we are making it impossible to unhypocritically be offended by snubbing coming the other way. This means is that if you write science fiction and you make light of those who write erotica, don’t complain when someone mocks your genre. And if you write literary fiction and you mock any of the genres, prepare to hear how yours is a genre as well, one no better than the rest.

Glancing in both directions is useful in making sure we aren’t being assholes, hypocrites, or ingrates.

This idea applies to pretty much all facets of life. But I want to concentrate on writerly stuff. Publishing biz stuff. Because I’ve seen a few areas in the past months where I think we can easily fall prey to looking in only one direction without considering the historical perspective or the fact that we’re all in the middle.

The first is KU, where I’ve watched some of my private FB writing groups express very powerful opinions in both directions. Kindle Unlimited is hurting income for some writers. It’s helping income for others. Personally, I’ll be withdrawing most of my titles from KU because of the unpredictable payment structure of the program, the exclusivity requirement, and the way it pays per percentage read rather than per page. And yet I’m also happy that the program is working for some writers, even if it ends up not working for me. Why?

Because this is just what trad-pubbed authors probably thought about Amazon’s launch of KDP. I’ve seen the following sorts of statements issued by indie authors regarding KU: “There’s a flood of short works. This only benefits a handful of genres. Now everyone thinks they are a writer. People are just slapping stuff up there. Everyone is devaluing their work by getting excited over $1.30 payouts.”

This last complaint is rich considering it often comes from indie authors who launched their careers by employing KDP Select to give their works away for free. But what is really disturbing is that the same denigrations tossed at those embracing this new tool for being discovered and hopefully launching careers sound a lot like the same abuses heaped on indies by non-indies just a few years ago.

Trad authors said we undervalued our works, priced them too low, that we were ruining everything, that certain genres had too many undeserved advantages. Now some indies are saying that about subscription models, 99 cent boxsets, and so on. We took advantage of the tools offered to us to break out. Now we see tools that we deem to be beneath us, and yet others are daring to use them, and we’re as critical of them as others were of us.

It’s similar to how seniors can throw freshmen into bushes — when all seniors were once freshmen who got thrown into bushes. We have magical powers of group-think and self-rationalization that allow us to get away with this. What was true then is different now. Why? Because we’ve moved on, that’s why.

Here’s the thing: KU will be bad for many authors. KU will be the best thing that happens to some authors. What concerns me is that I’ve seen a handful of authors make an effort to burn the entire thing to the ground because they might be in the former camp. This is the same attitude people on the trad side had toward KDP and self-pubbing in general. Make it go away so the world can go back to normal. And by “normal,” they mean that thin slice of time where the world benefited them the most.

Being in the middle means being aware of the times when what you’re saying about someone else is also being said about you. You didn’t like it. Maybe this other person doesn’t either.

I see a lot of fear of change from indies, when change is what made their careers possible. This is the same place that much indie and self-pub bashing came from. Trad authors saw sales decline, advances shrink, offers disappear. They watched their small presses go under or stop payments. What program was to blame? Amazon’s KDP. The very thing that gave many of us careers as writers. Helps to understand their anger, doesn’t it, now that indies feel some of the same? And maybe it helps others understand that we can just as easily become the dinosaurs we made fun of.

Another way we should be wary of what we wish for is the fact that our careers as fiction writers may one day be in doubt. I mean this first on a professional level, as in a group of people who can make a living or supplement their income doing this. It’s not inconceivable that ten or twenty years from now, most people will entertain each other for free, just as a hobby or a past time. If this sounds crazy, keep in mind that it’s probably already true. Facebook and Twitter are little more than self-publishing platforms for ideas, images, videos, gossip, news, chatter. How many hours do people spend creating content for zero pay? How many hours do people spend consuming that content practically for free?

Wattpad, Write-On, and fanfic sites already consume a lot of reading hours. Could this grow and swamp paid reading? Dismissing this is the same as dismissing self-pubbing five years ago. We are all in the middle. Look in the other direction. While you’re overtaking a staid and kludgy machine, the person gaining on you is thinking the same thing.

What about those who seem to take glee in the disintermediation of publishing jobs? Agents are threatened right now, not just by self-pubbing but by the ease with which publishers can scout talent and contact authors directly by noticing a blog, a Twitter account, a self-pub bestseller, a YouTube video, or anything that goes viral. Publishers themselves are sometimes viewed as eventually doomed. I occasionally worry about them. But I worry — I don’t find joy in the prospect.

Why? Because every job that feels completely crucial and irreplaceable tends not to be. Travel agents likely said that no one could sort the time tables, understand the various routes, know which carriers had which amenities, and could do the job as well as they do. The idea that computers will ever write fiction sounds bonkers to many writers, who view themselves as irreplaceable, and yet I can see how it might happen.

In many areas of life, we enter as wide-eyed and vibrant rookies and begrudgingly retire as wizened but worn-down veterans. And it’s always the same: The rookie complains about playing time, says it’s “my time now. Get out of the way, old man, you had your turn.” And that same person is one day a veteran saying, “Slow down, Rook. You’ll get your turn. I paid my dues. Let me have just one more year.”

The intern wants to know why they can’t have a corner office. The senior staff think they should be paid well for doing less than they did in their prime, that they’ve earned it. Just as we often look in only one direction, forgetting to turn around, we also tend to look at our current situation, forgetting where we came from. We are in the middle both in space and in time.

None of this is to say that people can’t have it both ways and embrace the contradiction. If you want to say, “I want what’s best for me, and screw the rest,” that’s perfectly valid. It’s even valid to embrace hypocritical stances and embrace that hypocrisy. But those who are unreformable and unrepentant don’t concern me as much as the incurious do. Because the latter probably wants to know about their own blindspots in order to remedy them. There are good people who make these mistakes. Because these mistakes are damn easy to make.

I know from lots of experience. I make these mistakes every day, and I’ve been thinking on these issues for a very long time. I’m not only guilty of everything mentioned here, I’m guilty of much else that I’m completely unaware of. What I really don’t want to be is someone who thinks they’re on the right side of history, because this just isn’t possible. History has no side. It goes on and on. Today’s mammals are tomorrow’s dinosaurs.

If we can’t prevent that, or even bring ourselves to embrace it, we should at least be aware of it. We should at least take a look around now and then, realize where we are, how we got here, and that everyone is on a similar journey. They might be where we were or where we hope to be, but they’re all us. We’re all the same. We’re all right here in the middle.