Mary Sisson's Blog, page 118

Barnes & Noble: Back in the game!

If you've been busy having a life or something: Microsoft has agreed to invest $300 million into Barnes & Noble's Nook unit in exchange for a 17.6 percent share. Getting a company with deep pockets as an investor will definitely help B&N with the whole running-out-of-cash problem.

And it's a deal with a lot of interesting strategy implications. It will give Microsoft a boost in its efforts to catch up in tablets. A recent investment in B&N by Jana Partners, which also has a stake in McGraw-Hill, could result in a big push into the college e-textbook market (via PV). Microsoft may focus more on generating a content platform that is device-agnostic.

You notice what's not getting talked about here? Traditional bookstores and traditional publishers. Of course the New York Times article features the CEO of B&N reassuring his good buddies in publishing that his company still really, really committed to brick-and-mortar bookstores (the closing of Borders now represents a big opportunity--funny that it didn't before) and that "Publishers are going to like this deal a lot" (because they'll have a lot of choice in the matter--HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA).

(Oh, and Mr. Prosecutor? "'These publishers are completely aligned with Barnes & Noble,' Mr. Lynch said." Clip 'n' save, clip 'n' save.....)

Anyway, my point is that he who pays the piper, calls the tunes, and the company paying the piper over at B&N is now Microsoft. It's not the publishing industry or "literary culture" or what have you--it's a tech company, one of the many tech companies that have looked at e-books and said, Oh! Digital media! I know how to do that!

It's possible that a lot of publishing people are looking at this news and saying, Whew! B&N is saved! Everything will go back to the way it was! But that's not the least bit true--B&N is going to change a lot. Even if the name is the same, the company and its business strategies are going to change a great deal. Will it matter if traditional publishers get upset? No it will not. To Microsoft, traditional publishers are just suppliers of digital media, like movie companies and even app developers are--they don't have this long, exclusive history. And Microsoft has been through the antitrust grinder before, so I doubt they'll be falling all over themselves to make a bunch of special deals to help one particular segment of their supplier population.

Self-publishing when you're broke

One of the problems when people give you perfectly sage financial advice like "pay cash for your car" is that it doesn't take into account the fact that, hello, you can't always afford it. And I don't mean that you can't afford it because you're dropping hundreds of dollars at strip clubs every weekend--I mean, you are careful with your money, but you just don't have enough coming in.

Why wouldn't you have enough money coming in? Well, gee, if you're writing a novel, you've got to make time for that somehow. And more often than not, you make time for it by not working a full-time job.

So, in the long years before I joined America's best-known secret society, the Illuminati, I looked at that sort of sage financial advice as an ideal. In an ideal world, I would pay cash for my car. Unfortunately, I lived in this world, and when the day rolled around that I really needed to buy a car, I had no cash--instead, I had a newly minted master's degree in journalism and a bunch of debt to go with it.

I borrowed money for the car, which allowed me to work my first journalism job, which won me four awards in 18 months (that editor was great), which allowed to me switch to a much better-paying journalism job. At that point, I paid cash for my car--or rather, I paid the car off early, saving a pretty penny in interest.

I didn't live in an ideal world, but I lived as close to the ideal as I could.

The problem with a traditional publishing contracts, especially these days, is that you can't make this kind of compromise--or rather, it's very hard. Both Rusch and Smith have tried to put time limits on their traditional publishing contracts so that they don't lose their rights forever and ever; both have tried to structure contracts so that the publisher is held accountable for failing to promote (or retail, or even produce) the book; neither has had any success. You can't make publishers behave in an ideal fashion.

So that leaves self-publishing, with its up-front costs. What can you do if you can't afford to hire an editor, hire a copy editor, hire a cover artist, produce a paper copy, produce an audiobook, buy ISBNs, start your own publishing house, and sell books on your Web site?

You start small.

Look at that list: How much of it do you need to do right off the bat? NONE OF IT. NONE.

A lot of that stuff is stuff you probably will want to do in the future--you know, after you've got a few books out. I am convinced that it is beneficial to have your book available in as many outlets as possible. That means I will have to buy ISBNs, produce an audiobook, start my own publishing house, and sell books on my Web site.

Have I done any of that stuff now? Dear God, no. Hell, I've hardly done any marketing, because I have only one book out, and it's the first book of a series to boot. That stuff is long-term stuff. It will happen eventually, not right now.

All you need to do to start with is to put an e-book up on an online book store, and that costs nothing. Sure, there's a little formatting to do, but it's easy.

But what about the stuff you need to produce a really great e-book? Like good copy editing? Clearly, I think it's really important! But of course, Amanda Hocking did just dandy with terrible copy editing. So, maybe you can get away with amateur copy editing, at least at the outset. I'd be as careful as I could be with that--and of course with amateur editing as well; as I've said before, you're going to have to invest something, and if it can't be money, it's going to have to be care, time, and effort.

What about amazing cover art? Like Joe Konrath has--his cover artist is really, really good! And Konrath saw an immediate boost in sales once he switched to this guy! "Sales went up 30%"! Which, um, means that Konrath was actually making money before the switch.

The point here is not to encourage writers to lazily throw up any old piece of crap. The point here is to not allow your inability to live the self-publishing ideal--you know, where every aspect of your book is at maximum perfection--to paralyze you, or to panic you into signing your work away to someone who promises to take care of you.

Start small. Scale up. It's doable.

Funny me

You know, now that it looks like the copy editor is going to have Trust back for me May 1st...there goes my motivation to work on Trials. Oops. I dunno--today was mostly spent shopping, and while I know people who think that paradise would be day after day of shopping, lying in the sun, and consuming their preferred controlled substance, the reality is that it's boring and feels like a waste of time. I don't think that's just me--there are some way-past-their-prime beach bunnies around here, and they strike me as angry and unhappy.

I also revised the flyer to include the book description--I was thinking that it wouldn't be necessary because people would go to the link and see the description there, but of course, you need to motivate them to go to the link in the first place.

One of the reviewers (who isn't really actively reviewing right now) wants me to do a guest post, so tomorrow I'll probably work on that.

Thinking more long term: I'm kind of hoping to have a draft of Trials done by the end of the summer. My summer is actually pretty truncated because half of August and part of September is spent looking after kids, and I have a big trip after that, so we'll see how that works. I'm kind of hoping I can fulfill the need to put Trials aside for a bit by immediately starting in on a draft of Tribulations. Of course, I may be completely burned out by that point, or if I finish the Trials draft right before the kids/trip marathon, I may come back raring to edit. But the thing is, I've got almost as many notes on Tribulations as I do on Trials, which makes me think I might be able to write them in tandem. We'll see.

Cussin' in the past

This is a neat article on dialog in historical novels--do you use terms that modern readers wouldn't understand because they're authentic? It's a balancing act. (Of course, you can go the other way. In my books, the Special Forces soldiers all have fairly rude nicknames, and one of them is called Ofay, which was a turn-of-the-century derogatory term for a white person (in the 1920s it was shortened to "fays")).

And at the end the authors notes that people in the past didn't curse the same way we do. It's true! I realize that "fuck" has been around forever, but if you read, say, Chaucer complaining about how much people swear, what he talks about is the horrible blaspheming--swearing on the wounds or various body parts of Christ. That's what people did.

And that was the problem I had with the cussing in Deadwood--they even called people "motherfuckers," which is an expression that did not come into common use until after World War II. I mentioned that to my dad, and he noted that when he was growing up, the older generation was remarkably fond of farm-related curse words--"jackass," "bullshit," "horseshit" (while bullshit implies nonsense, horseshit is more malicious--if you've paid for something and the store owner isn't delivering it like he's supposed to, that's horseshit, not bullshit), "chickenshit" (cowardice).

What's going on

Yesterday I had to get up at the crack of dawn and get shots for a trip I'm taking, so it was not a good day for writing, and today and tomorrow I have too much house & family stuff going on.

But the good news is: I heard from the copy editor, and she's chugging away on Trust and thinks that May 1st is totally doable. Huzzah!

No money down! Easy payments!

I realize that I am beginning to harp on this subject but: Please think long and hard before deciding against self-publishing because of up-front costs.

I'm seeing a lot of things like this:

I’ll be honest, the up-front costs of self-publishing scare me. . . . [With a publishing contract t]here isn’t an upfront cost, nor is there a payment of any kind of front. The royalties are lower. . . , but I’m not spending anything out of pocket.

Have you ever done one of those cost calculators where you plug in your credit card debt and your rate of interest, and you figure out how long it would take and how much you would pay to pay that debt back if you only ever made the easy-peasy minimum payments? And the answer is always something like "850 years" and "a kajillion dollars"? That's what's going on here.

When people don't see an upfront cost, they tend to assume there is no cost. Intellectually, they may know it exists--but it's just a lower royalty, right? It's not real money.

Except that it is. This is called "loss aversion," and it's a well-documented phenomenon--people would rather forgo future gains than give up money they already have. If I say to you, You have to cough up for an editor, a copy editor, and a cover artist, you look at that discrete dollar amount, and you say, I can't afford that. Emotionally, you are programmed to hold tightly onto what you have. You don't want to invest, and with self-publishing, you do have to invest.

But if I say to you, With a traditional publishing contract, the more successful your book becomes, the more money you will lose, that doesn't really mean anything on a gut level. It's too vague, it's an indeterminate amount of money, it's off in the future, and it's "just" lost revenue--you'll never see that money, so you'll never miss it. It will just slide painlessly away from you, just like the interest on those easy-peasy minimum credit-card payments does.

The irony is, the very things that make self-publishing painful and scary are what will save you money in the long run. You'll (hopefully) be more motivated to shop around and look to more inexpensive alternatives (do you really need custom cover art? could a stock photo do? can you recruit a good amateur editor?). And once that money is spent, that's it--if the job was done to your satisfaction, you never have to pay for it again.

Once people figure this out, that's when they start foaming at the mouth about how you should pay cash for your car and you should pay off your credit-card bills every month and you should save up for stuff before you buy it and you should never give anyone a share of your royalties. Those people are a pain, right? And one reason they're such a pain is that you know that they're right--they're the voice of experience and they used to do what you're doing until they figured out how absurdly expensive it was.

Here's one; he goes by the name Dean Wesley Smith. He writes:

If you pay for a task to be done, pay a set price. Period. There are lots of new start-up businesses that offer a menu of tasks for set prices.

But let me also say this clearly right now. If you are worried about money, spend the time to learn how to do this yourself and have no real costs. This is not rocket science.

And what did I do today?

I sent out offers for advance review copies of Trust to various reviewers. I used this list this time. I believe you have to register to access it, but I have to say, the sites looked much more professional than the ones I found last time--no odd and pathetic requests for love, affection, and [redacted] in the submission guidelines. And he won't list anyone who asks for money! Yay!

I wound up mainly just going for the places that focus on science fiction and fantasy (although with some of them it's more like science fiction and FANTASY). Not only does this mean I spend less time sending out queries, which is good because I am lazy, but I feel like science fiction is a specialized genre, so it's not actually very helpful to market to a general audience.

It took longer than I thought it would. That happens whenever I send out queries--it's amazing how long it takes, especially if you want to take care and not send out a bunch of robo-queries to people who clearly wouldn't be interested. I was kind of beating myself up about it because it meant that I didn't write more on Trials, but then I thought about it and was like, duh, Trust is coming out fairly soon (hopefully), it's totally OK to work on the launch. I don't have to be in angsty artist mode all the time....

For the person who Googled Mary Sisson + sexual harassment

I have kept the e-mails and would be happy to provide them to anyone from the EEOC or your lawyer. Don't believe anything you are promised--I was promised many things, many times, and it was all hot air. They will never change anything unless they are forced to, and it just wasn't worth it to me. Some good guidance for you is here: http://www.equalrights.org/publications/kyr/shwork.asp 

You people crack me up

I usually don't check my blog stats, since I feel like these sorts of writer-focused blogs don't really do anything to attract readers, but I did tonight. And there was a big leap the day I published a post where the word "bullshit" appeared twice in the title.

Seriously, guys, if you liked that, you should totally buy Trang. You will love Shanti.

More portal!

OK, here's what the flyer looks like now:

Of course, it's probably going to cost an arm and a leg....