Mary Sisson's Blog, page 107

And lots of good things happened at Westercon

I'm halfway through Westercon--I'm was thinking about not going Sunday, but I hear that's a really heavy day for attendance, and I want to develop some idea if 250 flyers are too many or too few for that size con (which is supposed to be roughly 500-1,000 people--I'm guessing 250 is too many, but we'll see).

Anyway, obviously it wasn't all ignorant douchebaggery. As a matter of fact, I've met quite a number of really interesting and helpful people--despite the fact that I was having trouble not tipping over today and had to leave early.

One fellow was a writer named M. Todd Gallowglas (who said that self-publishing can be "like crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub," hee). He was on a panel on POD books, so I brought Trust (you know, just in case), and he looked at it and had a really good suggestion for the layout: I have large paragraph indents, and if I shrink them (and I could shrink them a lot without having it look funny; once he pointed their size out I was immediately like, Yeah, that is large), it would make the layout shorter and the book cheaper.

Am I going to run off and lay out Trust and Trang again? Oh, God no. I'd have to really be hurting for a beta project before I'd start another freakin' layout. But it's definitely something to keep in mind with Trials and Tribulations. I assume they are so big because Word (curse you, Word!) gives you an indent appropriate for an 8 1/2" X 11" sheet of paper and doesn't shrink that when you set the page to a smaller size.

Another panel on art in books was really interesting, because it was basically a bunch of artists discussing how they do what they do. Artists often aren't really good at explaining themselves in words, but they had to explain things to each other (because it's a new world for them, too), and there weren't any props.

Except that Frank Wu (who is marvelously entertaining, by the way) had a couple of prints. I knew about the importance of rays or lines, which he mentioned, but he also talked about how you can think of cover art as a bunch of shapes that fit together.

He showed us a couple as examples (pointing out that you couldn't take something with a vertical orientation and easily make it a square, since you'd have to chop up your shapes), and looking at them, I made a couple of quick sketches just getting the shapes down.

Of course, I can't find the originals to link to online, but rest assured that they are MUCH more artistic, beautiful, and detailed than what I'm going to show here. All I was trying to capture and to think about was the basic, underlying shapes, and the way they fit together.

So here's the first one:

Now, this was a story about a dragon. So the curvy line was the dragon, standing up on two legs menacingly, facing left. The pointy wedge was...light? I think? Like someone had opened a door to a dragon's lair and the dragon was not too thrilled about it. The beginning of the title actually kind of curved down to fit over the curvy dragon. (Yes, I am that limited as an artist--even my crude block-shape rendition manages to be a less-than-fully-acceptable crude block-shape rendition.)

This was a city of dragons. So you have both sides of an alley with two walkways spanning it (and tiny dragons on them). Down at the bottom you have a larger dragon poking his head up.

I had never really thought of cover art in this way before, but it makes a ton of sense--it draws the eye in, and it also likely helps when you have to scale a full-size cover down into a teeny little thumbnail.

Oh, and Wu loves to license existing art for book covers. It's free money!

(Other things to remember from the panels: If your cover artist uses stock photos, models, or even pictures of some locations (!), you need to be sure you have permission from those sources as well. A fascinating and unique cover can be made by buying a fascinating and unique item off eBay--like a hobo nickel--and taking a photo of it. And bookstore owners get really cranky when people go e-book only, because they can sell books--just give them a chance, damn it!)

I spotted a booth for the Northwest Independent Writers Association, and I got all excited! An indie writers' group in the Pacific Northwest! But then they told me that they're in the Portland area, not the Seattle area...le sigh. But it's something to look at and someplace to get ideas....

New stereotype!

OK, I've been at Westercon two days now, and I'm cranky. Why? Because my old-person stomach kept me up all night, and then my middle-aged-lady cats woke me up at the crack of dawn. (The sun was up, so why wasn't I?) And then, since Westercon is a con, today people kept assuming I was yawning and sleepy because I was up all night yiffing or something.

Anyway, last night as I was glamorously grabbing my stomach and wishing I was dead (because I am young! sexy! and exciting!), I realized that something was really bothering me about Jaye Manus' excellent post on not putting a bunch of weird formatting into your files. (To keep this from being a complete gripe fest--which, trust me, it's going to be--Manus also posted an invitation to send your source files to someone who is trying to develop software to automatically strip out the weird crap.)

What was bothering me was this: Why were people including all this weird crap in the first place? It's literally been decades since publishers set things in type--layout is all done on computers and has been for a very long time. Screwy codes mess up Quark just as badly as they mess up e-book conversions.

And then, of course, I remembered--it was always someone's job to yank out all the weird coding. A file would come in from a writer, and it would be all jacked up, and the very first thing that had to happen to it was that someone (usually a lowly assistant) would have to spent their day de-jacking it.

I would sometimes suggest that, hey, shouldn't we tell the writers that they're fucking everything up and making someone's life difficult by putting two spaces after every period or putting in a million tab characters and hard returns. Then maybe they wouldn't do it! Efficiency!

The answer, of course, was oh, no. Do not attempt to educate writers about publishing. The average writer is too dumb and too much of a prima donna to make minor changes in their habits that would save hours and hours of somebody else's time.

And there are writers who really embrace this concept, you know? These are the people who can't for the life of them produce a clean text file, even though it's probably easier to produce a clean one than a screwed-up one. This is how they wrote papers in college back in 1972, and they'll be damned if they're going to bother educating themselves or changing their ways, because they are writers, and their only job is to write.

Today, as I was groggily watching an ignorant and insensitive traditionally-published author act like a fool and an asshole, I realized that here is a new stereotype: The traditionally-published fool and asshole.

In the interest of not demonizing, I will note that I don't think all or even most traditionally-published writers are fools or assholes. But those who are seem to follow a particular pattern.

1. They are exceptionally ignorant. Exceptionally. This person opened the panel, which was about a fairly basic aspect of book production, by noting that they know absolutely nothing on the subject. They went on to state that they would probably be able to tell us only what their editor and agent say.

2. They spend 99% of their time bitching about how their agent and editor treat them. Their input is not welcome. They have no control. Bad decisions are made that have the potential to harm their book, and they are not allowed to stop or fix them. Their agent puts their editor before them. They are treated like a mildly retarded small child, and they resent it. If only some alternative business model existed, which allowed a writer complete control over their work. Too bad it doesn't!

3. They are convinced that self-published work must be crap. Oh, yeah. (And yes, I pushed back on that one. I was even fairly polite about it.) But apparently The Way of Self-Publishing is to half-ass it, because no self-published writer gives a shit about quality. At least, that what this author hears. You know: From their editor and agent and all the other good people at their publishing company. Who have no vested interest in this whatsoever.

Jesus Christ, I'm watching people beat themselves to death over quality, and this ignorant idiot has to blather on like they have the least fucking clue about anything--like they haven't put themselves in a position where they are at a very low risk of ever getting the least fucking clue about anything, because their agent and editor control all the information.

Ass.

And I'm so very sure Hugh Howey cries himself to sleep at night over the quality of his work.

Selling to bookstores

This is a good post by David Gaughran on selling to indie bookstores. Just remember--you're selling, and not just your book. You're selling yourself and your professionalism and reliability as a supplier. Don't just mail them crap 'cuz you're shy--nobody wants a supplier who can't freaking interact with people if there's a problem.

I am so happy

Somebody found this blog by Googling "who are proposed members of the Illuminati." Not proposed, baby, not proposed.

Remember: Nine out of ten people seeking to join a secret society choose the Illuminati! Classic for a reason!

Black & white flyer

I made a black and white version of that flyer. It looks like this now:

I'm not sure if that will xerox OK, or if I need to simplify it further, à la 11th Hour. Of course, if I start simplifying the book covers, they won't look like book covers any more, so....

Random things from around the Interwebs

These are a few things that have been rattling around my skull:

1. Jim Self posted his surprise at how easy it is to produce an e-book. It is! It's easy! Easier than Angry Birds! Don't pay $3,000 for it!

At least, it's easy if you haven't made it hard. Jaye Manus has a great post on how NOT to screw up your file so that it's difficult to clean. From what I've read by him and other people who charge money to create e-books, the really screwy files come from two sources. 1. Authors who put in a lot of weird formatting (so, you know, don't), and 2. authors who pass the file around to a bunch of other people, all of whom make their own inputs, many times using different software.

Honest to God, why would you ever do #2? You do realize that you are the author, yes? You have the final say? I guess this touches my discomfort with having someone line edit your novel--I just can't imagine handing my work over to someone else and saying, Here, do what you want with it, I trust your judgment more than my own. At that point you might as well just plunk down six figures for a ghostwriter.

2. Lindsay Buroker has a post on negative reviews. I of course tossed in my observation that a negative review can provide you with important marketing information.

But my other observation was a little less rosy, and may be something you have to deal with: The very first reviews of Trang were from a reviewer who hated the book. They were a 1-star review on Goodreads and a 2-star review on Amazon. And if you compare the average number of stars on Goodreads and Amazon versus LibraryThing and Smashwords, you'll see that Trang averages a star lower on the first two sites than on the latter two.

Now, obviously, this could just be because of the different audiences, but I think this is an example of the power of what economists call anchoring, which is where people decide the worth of something based on a figure tossed out by someone else.

Let's say you read a first-contact social sci-fi book about a troubled diplomat. You like it fine. You could give it three stars, you could give it four...and you go over to a review site. There you see that, on average, people are giving it four stars. Guess what you do? Guess what you do if there's only one review, and it has two stars?

I don't really see this as something you can fix, at least not unless you're willing to pull down the book and republish under a different title. But I do wonder if that's something that contributed to people's willingness to buy it on Amazon after looking at it on Smashwords. I mean, the Amazon people think it's just OK, but the first group you saw were the Smashwords people, and they loved it, so it's probably worth buying!

3. Kris Rusch has two really good posts on perfectionism and how damaging it can be. Just keep in mind that the only thing you can as a writer absolutely guarantee is failure, and the best way to guarantee failure is to stop writing. Just stop producing.

Writing is technically a manufacturing job--did you know that? That's how economists classify writing. And that's how you should think of it--if you aren't putting anything out, you aren't getting anything done. Your little manufacturing operation has ground to a halt, and the workers are either sitting idle around the plant (and probably getting hammered), or they are polishing and re-polishing and re-re-polishing and re-re-re-polishing items that you never seem to get out of the damned door. Getting up the nerve to finish is tough, but you have to do it--otherwise you might as well never start.

Yeah, this weekend's shot to hell

One day at Westercon makes it clear that it is going to eat all my time. Fingers crossed to start in with the writing on Monday.

Freebie books and the cost of time

Joe Konrath and Blake Crouch discuss freebie books here; it's thought-provoking conversation both about free books and about exclusivity. (Lindsay Buroker also touches on both topics here.)

Freebie books are of particular interest to me in light of the past month. As I've mentioned, I've been pimping Trang around for free on Smashwords during the month of June. Every place I plugged Trust, I also plugged the giveaway of Trang.

The thing that I found interesting was that, what with all the pimping, I sold as many copies of Trang on Amazon as I gave away on Smashwords.

It wasn't a huge number of sales, but it was a definite uptick. I think that people heard about Trang because of my plugging, but instead of picking up a free copy on Smashwords, they decided it was easier to pay for the books on Amazon. So that's what they did.

And that brings home an important point: $2.99 just isn't that much money. It's little enough money that people thought, "Well, I can get it on Smashwords for free, but first I have to register there and then I have to sideload the file. I'd rather pay $2.99 and have it with one click--it's more convenient."

I've said this before, but June really proved it to me: The main cost of a book to the reader is not money, but time.

How much does that time cost? According to Wikipedia, the average reading time for prose is about 275 words per minute. Do the math, and it would take the average reader six and a half hours to read Trang.

The average wage earner in this country makes about $23 an hour. Multiply that by 6.5 and round it, and you get $150.

The value of the time it takes the average person to read Trang is $150.

So the question facing people wanting to read Trang is not, do I pay $2.99 or do I get it for free? The question is, do I spend $150 on this, or do I spend $152.99? If a reader grabs the free book, it's not a cost savings of 100%--it's a cost savings of 2%!

Taking down the Authors Guild

David Gaughran has an excellent post ripping into the Authors Guild for their latest letter on the antitrust suit. He points out that they steer their members to a publishing service that gouges them. Wow.

I'm going to chalk this up as Example #The Gazillionth of why you should trust processes, not names.

Life is random, busy

I've had a lot of random crap to catch up with now that the trip is over and the houseguest gone, plus some family stuff because the kids are out of school. That all should be settled after the Fourth of July, but of course then I have Westercon. I'm going to see if I can't work starting Trials in while that's going on, but knowing me, it will fracture my focus and I won't get anything done until Monday. We'll see.