Mary Sisson's Blog, page 111

Some things are hard to write about

I know I haven't written anything about Ray Bradbury's passing. That's been kind of a hard one for me, like when Kurt Vonnegut died--it's surprising how much it can affect you when a writer dies. Even if you never met the person (and I never met Bradbury, although he did give a free talk to a massive arena full of schoolchildren when I was 11 or so that I attended, and he was entertaining in the extreme), if their work really influenced you, it's a bit like losing a family member. 

I grew up reading Bradbury.  My dad was a big fan. That in itself was interesting because by the time I was old enough to start reading adult fiction, my dad had stopped reading it--the rigidity and the extremely fragile sense of identity that would eventually kill him had already led him to stop reading anything that wasn't purely functional. But he was very pleased that I was reading Bradbury--Bradbury was, in his words, "a dandy writer" who specialized in the short story, a form that was for my father a guilty and even shameful pleasure.

In Bradbury's obituaries, it's noted that he married literature and pulp sci-fi, which was an extremely novel mixture at the time. But of course, if you grow up reading someone like Bradbury, the idea that science fiction is some kind of lesser genre that can't be used to talk about complex ideas, adult experiences, philosophy/spiritualism, or social issues is the novel one. I was well into adulthood before I noticed that sci-fi has its particular lowest-common-denominator (horny teenage boys) that the less-ambitious writers feel obligated to cater to.

That expectation that science fiction should not be dumb--that it should be challenging and well-written and non-formulaic and not all about wish fulfillment--was part of the reason it was so frustrating to me to realize that traditional publishing had become so rigid and narrow that if someone like Ray Bradbury--Ray Freakin' Bradbury--was just starting out today, his work would not get published. Because it was different. Because it was creative. Because it was unlike anything anyone else wrote.

At that is why people love it.

I am very much of the "Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!" school of thought--I like that there are no gatekeepers with self-publishing. I'm happy that people can publish stuff that's really freaking weird. Because without the weirdness--without the people who don't obey the rules--you get no Ray Bradburys. No Kurt Vonneguts. No Robert Silverbergs. No Philip K. Dicks. You just get the sexy girlie aliens in glittery spandex and the big alpha males with their enormous guns. You just get the kid stuff.

Progress report

I finished tweaking the large-print layout! Huzzah! It's printed out, and I will read it (probably Monday, tomorrow's busy), make any fixes I have to make, and then I won't have to lay out anything else until I finish writing Trials! Joy! And by that point, I'll probably have a better computer! Happy dance!

How I would think of traditional publishing

This post about (yet) a(nother) bestselling author who is making more money self-publishing went up on Passive Voice last week. The thing that really piqued my interest was a comment by Edmond saying:

You have to wonder whether the career path of a writer will become.
Self publish => Get attention => sign publishing contract => build following => return to self publishing taking readership with you.

That was interesting to me in light of Amanda Hocking's experience--she's definitely building a new audience, as she had hoped, while at the same time keeping a substantial number of self-published titles available. Instead of following Edmond's cycle, however, she's multitasking--since she has so many titles out, she never had to cycle out of self-publishing. She can advance on all fronts.

It doesn't change my very, very strong opinion that if you are a new writer and you want to get published, you should self-publish. (Like, OMG, you should self-publish. Don't be a fool.) Traditional publishing seems to work best for people who basically don't depend on it--they've got self-published titles to fall back on if things go to hell, and they've got self-published titles poised to gain sales if things go really well. (This necessarily means that they don't sign traditional publishing contracts that restrict their ability to write and publish other books.)

I think the best way to think of traditional publishing is as something akin to a Next Step, like doing an audiobook or creating a store on your Web site. You don't start out by seeking a traditional publishing contract; you start out by self-publishing an e-book. Traditional publishers could help you reach people who you might not be able to reach on your own, like those who insist on buying hardcover books at the airport instead of downloading a Kindle app onto their phone, just like an audiobook could help you to reach a previously-inaccessible niche.

But it's an expansion of your distribution model; it's not your only distribution model. It's not even your first or fundamental distribution model. It's something you bolt on, not something you use as your foundation. And for God's sake, don't put all your eggs into it--the future does not look bright for those people.

Random businessy stuff

The Passive Voice has been having some really good posts lately on the businessy end of publishing.

Today he let the comments run the show by asking people there's any predictable correlation between a book's ranking on Amazon and the number of books actually sold/money the author earns, and he asks about sales patterns. The answer about rankings seems to be a general "not really" (your ranking depends on your genre, and at the lower rankings you can jump way up by selling one book); as for sales pattern, not shockingly, the more books you have out.... Also people link to other sites where people have tried tracking data. I try not to worry about this stuff, because 1. I don't have to, and 2. nonetheless I can easily get really focused on that rather than, you know, focusing on writing books, an activity I actually enjoy. But if you're interested, there it is.

Another thing that has led to several posts is a lot of news about companies expanding in e-book retailing and self-publishing. Kobo is going to allow self-publishing and is trying to be author-friendly. A new social e-book app has been announced. Wattpad (where you give away stories for free) got a bunch of money. And Forbes did a profile on Mark Coker of Smashwords, which includes exciting (at least to me) tidbits like Smashwords recently expanded from three employees to fourteen, and that it expects $12 million in revenue in 2012. (And $1 million in something called "pretax profit." OK, guys, that's bullshit--I know private companies can say whatever, but why even report that number? Unless Coker plans on counting his money while sitting in jail for tax evasion, it's not a profit until after he pays his taxes.)

And Coker financed the company by borrowing $200,000 from his mother. Gotta love those entrepreneurs!

Progress report

Another day saved by the timer--I got up to chapter 20 done.

But I found mistakes! Argh! It was something I thought I had been really careful about--a couple of chapters are told from the point of view of an alien who is supposed to refer to the humans as "it" throughout, but I found a "he" and worse yet, two "her"s, which is truly a marvel considering that that alien comes from a species that has only one gender! Ugh. I had noticed I was slipping back into using "he" later on, so I went over that part really carefully, but of course I managed to throw in a couple very early. After I read over this layout one last time I'll input those fixes.

OTOH--as I was futzing around and procrastinating and fiddling with stuff around the house, I actually came up with some very good ideas for Trials. Sometimes busy work helps with the thinky work...

Abstraction in art and literature

This is an interesting article on abstraction in art, including literature. It concludes:

You can also see the mark of abstraction on a fair amount of 20th-century literature—and not just the avowedly experimental writings of James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, either. Countless modern writers have been influenced by Anton Chekhov's short stories and plays, which renounce plot-based structure, concentrating instead on the quasiabstract sketching of character and mood. This approach long ago became the basis for the vast majority of short stories published in the New Yorker. Somerset Maugham, a staunch traditionalist who believed in the iron necessity of plot, liked to tease younger writers who embraced the magazine's famously ambiguous house style: "Ah, yes, those wonderful New Yorker stories which always end when the hero goes away, but he doesn't really go away, does he?"

But Maugham's sly quip also reminds us that nonvisual "abstraction," for all its historical significance, has never become truly popular with mass audiences—and neither, for that matter, has visual abstraction. Though it has no shortage of devotees, most people are still more comfortable looking at paintings with a subject, just as they prefer novels and plays with complicated plots and four-movement symphonies with familiar harmonies, and my guess is that they probably always will.

Yet despite what seems to be an innate preference for more or less literal representation of the visible world, the abstract idea remains to this day both seductive and perennially relevant. Why? Because the best abstract art has the power to cut through the rigid conventions of direct representation and externalize interior essences—to show us things not as they look, but as they are.Balanchine may have understood this better than anybody. "We choreographers get our fingertips on that world everyone else is afraid of, where there are no words for things," he told Jerome Robbins. He knew that a wordless glance across a near-empty stage, or a splash of color in the right place on a canvas, can sometimes say more than…well, a thousand words.

I feel like abstraction can be done well, in which case it's VERY interesting, or done poorly, in which case it's predictable, derivative, self-important, and dull. You know, like pretty much everything else when it's done poorly.

But I do like plot. And I think sometimes people get too wrapped up in the abstraction in a really admirable piece of writing and forget about the fact that there's a good story in there, too. Even a book as dense and experimental as James Joyce's Ulysses has some great storylines--the whole saga of the marriage of the Blooms was just heart-rendering, and the reveals were handled masterfully. I totally thought I knew where F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night was going, and I was totally wrong. I like Michael Chabon's books because he usually has a rip-roaring story going on along with the excellent writing (and The Yiddish Policemen's Union is my least-favorite because the plot is really predictable, especially if you've read his other stuff).

Progress report

Yes, I actually made progress today! I blew off yesterday (saw Cabin in the Woods--hee!) and was tempted to blow off today, but instead I was very good and set a timer instead. (This is what I do when I really can't settle down--I set a timer for 90 minutes and tell myself that I can quit when the 90 minutes are up. By that point I'm typically more into the groove and keep working.)

Anyway, I am 10 chapters down (out of 28) on the large-print edition--I lost a page, so basically I have to lay it out yet again, because all the spreads have moved over one. But I'm much fresher than I was, and there are relatively few art mistakes left by now, so that's actually going fine.

The idiocy of snobs

I have to vent: When you've got no leg to stand on, you can always just be a big fat snob about things. You put other people down to make yourself feel better. Why? Because that is the only way you can feel good about yourself.

Snobbery is pathetic. Snobbery is a mark of desperation. Happy, confident people are not snobs--they just don't need it.

Guess who does?

Apparently certain members of the Author's Guild, who recently spent a pleasant evening making fun of people who are not like them, like the woman who wrote 50 Shades of Grey!

The really convenient thing about snobbery is that it lets you abandon all pretense of logic. (Why do you have to buy Frette sheets? Because they're Frette sheets! What do you mean, they feel like burlap? They're Frette sheets!!!) You can sneer at someone who isn't traditionally published because they write mommy porn. But of course traditional publishers produce a ton of mommy porn--that's pretty much the large majority of romance books, which are the industry's biggest-selling genre. Take away the mommy porn, the quack diets, and the celebutard books, and traditional publishing collapses overnight.

Ah, well--I'm sure E.L. James is crying all the way to the bank. I bet she could buy and sell David Rakoff and Sarah Jones a hundred times over at this point. And if that makes Rakoff or Jones uncomfortable, maybe they should look at the financial terms that were offered them by their precious, precious traditional publisher--who, it should be noted, would cut them both loose and blacklist them both in a second if they could sign James by so doing.

Oh, is it mean to point that out? Is it mean to point out that traditional publishing is a business, not a literary salon? Is it mean to point out that your financial interests and those of your publisher don't always coincide?

In half a second.

And then there is Steve Wasserman's article in The Nation (via PV and Rusch's excellent post on the industry overall): 

Readers of e-books are especially drawn to escapist and overtly commercial genres (romance, mysteries and thrillers, science fiction), and in these categories e-book sales have bulked up to as large as 60 percent.

OK, where to begin?

With a quiz!

Q. Readers of e-books are "especially drawn" to romance and mystery/thriller because....

A) They are stupid stupid stupidheads who are stupid with their stupid e-readers and their stupid iPhones and their stupid gadgets and stupid kids these days and their stupid stupid stupidness!

B) Uh, aren't those pretty much the most popular genres in any format?

Wasserman's a book editor--isn't that pathetic? Of course, he's at Yale University Press, so he's somewhat protected from having to know his own industry.

Which is why he does things like lump together genres like romance, mystery/thriller, and science fiction.

From a commercial perspective, these genres are nothing alike--science fiction is not a big seller. Which is why traditional publishers largely abandoned it. Which is why indie titles dominate the e-book bestseller lists.

It's harder for indie authors to produce and (especially) to distribute paper books--you have to lay the book out and reach out to indie bookstores (forget the chains). Science fiction is big in e-books because it's simply not as available in paper. I wanted to read Wool (I haven't yet! No spoilers!) so I downloaded it--what choice did I have? My local library doesn't have it, and I seriously doubt The World's Worst Barnes & Noble does.

Oh, but I forget! Wasserman has the Power of Snobbery, which handily defeats the Power of Logic, or the Power of Actually Knowing What the Hell You Are Talking About!

All these genres the same, because they are...escapist!

You know, like the science-fiction novel The Hunger Games, which is about a teenage girl living on the brink of starvation who is forced by an oppressive government to fight other teenagers to the death. That book was many things--violent, brutal, and stressful to read--but escapist? No, escapist it was not. I just finished another science-fiction novel, The Windup Girl. Again, a very good book, but again--escapist? What the hell are you trying to escape from? Having enough food to eat? Good health? Being able to walk the streets in safety?

And thrillers? Honestly, there are many books in the thriller genre I don't read because I just can't handle all the violence and gore and sadism and death and...escapism.

Anyway, if Wasserman wasn't so busy being a snob and a gloom-and-doomer (big time! That article's kind of a Nation special--everything's just awful, although you're not sure exactly why), he might have noticed something really pretty exciting about e-books and self-publishing: Books are becoming bestsellers that, not long ago, never would have been made widely available. Books are being published that, not long ago, never would have seen the light of day.

Why not? Because they were not considered commercial enough.

He writes that with traditional publishing:

We...feared bloated overheads would hold editors hostage to an unsustainable commercial imperative. (We were right.)

Now these bloated overheads are gone. Now no one is a hostage. Call me crazy, but I like that.

The Trust paperback is on Amazon

It's here--I have to ask Amazon to link the two editions.

Gleaning information from giveaways

Hmm, no one is signing up for a free copy of Trang on Library Thing!

You might think it's too early to draw conclusions, but the last time I did this a good chunk of the people who wanted a copy jumped on the offer the minute it went up.

So, I think there's one (or both!) of two things going on:

1. The audience is pretty much the same as it was six months ago. I though there might be some churn there and that some people who didn't want the book before would want it now that it has positive reviews, but it doesn't look like it

2. The cover is a generic default cover. Other books also have generic covers (or no covers at all--they're having cover trouble over there); overall those books do seem to have lower levels of sign-on.

What does this mean?

Well, given my suspicions about #2, I should continue to hold off on a Goodreads giveaway until Goodreads decides that it is, indeed, physically possible to correct the cover art.

But #1 means that I need to start branching out instead of trying repeatedly to tap a well that has evidently run dry. And given the lack of interest in a free sci-fi book on Kindleboards, I really need to start looking at sci-fi oriented Web sites.

You know, the nice thing about using giveaways is that you're basically conducting marketing experiments without having to pay for advertising. It's a good way to test the waters.

Anyway, obviously it's going to take time, effort and thought to figure out where to market, and I'm wondering if I want to bother with that before I make Trang free. It seems to me that advertising is just going to work better with a free book (especially if people don't have to go to one specific retailer, register, and enter a coupon code). So for now I'll focus on finishing the large-print edition and writing Trials (not to mention family stuff--I've got a lot of trips/houseguests coming up); marketing-wise I'll just focus on sci-fi cons (I may have some interesting news on that front in a little bit), then enroll Trang in KDP Select, and then make Trang free and worry about ads.