Mary Sisson's Blog, page 125

Read an e-book week!

Things are a little frantic here--I told the copy editor I'd get the layout to her March 9th, and I'm realizing once again just how long it takes to input corrections into a layout. It's not like a manuscript--every little change changes everything else.

But enough about my problems! It's Read an E-Book Week over at Smashwords, which means it's time to get Trang for free! Here's the link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/42407, the coupon code is RE100, and it will be on sale from March 4-10! Go get 'em!

Progress report, the finding-a-copy-editor edition

So I forgot to post a progress report yesterday, but I actually did make progress, proofreading the Trust layout. I proofed more today and will either proof still more after I write this or input the corrections, I'm not sure.

Another thing I did yesterday was line up a new proofreader! Yeah, the very good one I used before vanished. I don't know what's up with that (hopefully he's just swamped with work and it's nothing bad), but that's the drawback of using freelancers, they're not always available. (Aaaaand every editor I ever said no to just experienced a quiver of schadenfreude.)

So I reached out to another friend who works in publishing, and it turns out that she's the queen of copy editors these days, so she had a whole list of people. (And more on the back burner! Apparently they are all pretty busy pushing through the fall list, which I hope is what happened to my first proofreader.) I hooked up with one of them, so I'll mail her the layout in a few days, and if everything goes as planned, she should get it back to me by the end of March. I think she'll be good--she was highly recommended, and she's so hardcore book publishing that I confused her by asking for a proofread instead of a copy edit. Imagine what would have happened if I'd asked her for a technical edit!

I mentioned to my friend how hard it is for indie writers to find decent copy editors, and she was like, Yeah, I've been toying with the idea of starting some sort of cooperative for copy editors geared to indie writers. I hope she does--of course, she works full time, so she may not want the hassle. Still, the thing about copy editors is that there's a HUGE difference between the good ones and the others, and it's not really obvious until you pay one of them to copy edit your work and they either suck or are awesome. (Of course, if you're really new, you may not even realize they suck.) So I really hope she goes through with it--if she does, I will definitely tout it here. (One pointer I can give right now: Oftentimes the really good copy editors have full-time jobs and freelance on the side. So if you find one that works full time as a copy editor for a book publisher, they're probably good.)

I should note that this new copy editor also charges $25 an hour....

Corporate PR

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a nice post today about not getting all wound up by all the corporate news and controversies that either don't actually apply to you or is stuff you could manage if you weren't so busy freaking out. Her prescription, unsurprisingly, is: Get back to work!

Like me, she used to be a business reporter, and she mentions something that I think people sometimes don't understand: When news comes out about a company, it is almost always coming either from that company or from that company's business rivals.

Not always: Sometimes it's stuff like earnings reports, which are required and regulated by the SEC. Other times it's coming from the District Attorney's office or the FBI (those are always the good ones). But companies themselves generate a HUGE quantity of press releases, studies (Miracle Whip causes actual miracles!), surveys, announcements, anniversaries, awards, etc., etc.

Oftentimes this stuff looks or sounds really important and worthwhile, but it's not--it's coming from the company's marketing department (or an "independent institution" that was founded, staffed, and housed by the company's marketing department), and it was developed to generate adventageous coverage for the company. Such coverage could help knock down a rival, or it could help a company sell an asset, or it could just goose sales.

A big part of a business reporter's job is ignoring all that crap. You look up the SEC filings instead of relying on press releases; you don't publish the dodgy studies. But it takes a lot more effort to generate stories from reliable sources than it does to be a shill for corporate America--companies will even send you story outlines to "make your job easier" (because your job is apparently doing their marketing department's work for them). And it's not like nobody falls for the bait: You'll get something like that, you'll toss it, and then you'll see that exact story appear in a respectable paper that should do better (yes, New York Times, I'm looking at you).

Nowadays with the Internet, this stuff is readily available to normal people. You can subscribe to Large Company's press releases, and you can spend your time reading Web sites and blogs that just cut and paste the text from those press releases into another format and call it news. So it's wise to be skeptical, both of the quickie Web news sites and of the respectable papers--if you don't think a story like this wasn't more than half written by a corporate PR department, you are very naive.

Writers bite back!

A bunch of reports on 2011 book sales have come out, and not shockingly, e-books are up and paper books are down.

Also not shockingly, profits are up at places like Penguin and Simon & Schuster. This is due in part to the fact that, yes, e-books are cheaper to manufacture, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar who has absolutely zero respect for your intelligence.

The other major contributing factor? Publishers have been screwing authors over! If you don't have to pay your suppliers for the product you sell, you make a lot more money!

And in the past, authors have been happy to get screwed. As Kristine Kathryn Rusch notes:

Either writers give the traditional publisher 15% of gross or 25% of net [of e-books], or there is no contract. Some publishers are getting even stingier: 15% of net, not gross, and if you don't like it, writer person, walk away.

So many writers don't walk. Hell, I have several contracts with those numbers in them, and back when I signed them—ten and five years ago—I too thought e-books would remain a subsidiary right.

In other words, these 2011 profits you're seeing are a result of decisions made in the past. Writers had no choice if they wanted to be published, and they were generally OK with getting the shaft on e-books because those things were never going to make money anyway.

But are authors going to continue to be compliant? Some say yes, because authors are stupid. I say no, because authors need money just like everybody else does.

And making me feel even more secure in my opinion is, of all people, Jackie Collins. Bless her leopard-print soul, but it even sounds like she's self-publishing because she feels hampered by traditional publishers--she wants to write short fiction, and they're telling her no, there's no money in it. (Tell that to Stephen "It took three days, and I've made about $80,000" King.)

(Man, I wish I wrote short fiction!)

Anyway, I realize there's a big debate over whether big publishers will go under or live forever thanks to the largess of their corporate parents. I feel that, like so many debates about publishing, if you are an author, it doesn't matter. Big publishers may well live on as imprint names or as companies that cherry pick bestselling indie writers or as companies that provide services to self-published writers or as companies that specialize in elaborate pop-up books.

In any case, I seriously doubt things are going to stay the way they are. The financial results you'll be seeing for publishers in the future will be the result of decisions authors are making now. And I think publishers who may be celebrating their 2011 results have a serious sustainability problem--authors feel like they've been screwed (because they have been!), and they are making different decisions today than they did just a couple of years ago. Even writers who would rather not change and love their publisher and don't want to learn new things--well, if their advances are getting smaller and smaller, and they can't sell additional rights because they signed them all away for a pittance of an advance, and they have a life set up on the expectation that they will be making X number of dollars a year...they'll change. They won't like it, but they won't have a choice.

Laying out paper books with cheap software

As you may know, I use Word (evil, evil Word) to lay out the paper editions of my books, because proper layout software is really expensive. Today, Passive Voice has a postabout using OpenOffice, and he mentions that he also uses Word, and then down in the comments (always read those!) people talk about tricks to use with Word as well as something called LibreOffice, which is like OpenOffice but allegedly better. I use neither OpenOffice nor LibreOffice, so I can't judge the worth of those tips, but they may help you. I also don't know if the Word tips will help me, since my version of Word is a decade old, but I'm definitely going to give them a shot.

One thing that gets mentioned is the value of templates. I have to agree that templates (whatever kind works for you) are awesome. Laying out Trust went so much quicker this time because I essentially had a template (i.e. the Trang layout with a few tweaks), so I just replaced the text and changed chapter and page numbers. In the past I've been a little dumb about it and opened up brand-new files for each chapter, which meant I had to input and format the headers, format the chapter numbers, etc., etc. It cuts the amount of time you spend laying things out probably by at least a third if you just save the last chapter under a new name and use it as a template.

Finishing

Although I am all, "Whoo!" about finishing the layout, coming to the end of a project actually dredges up all kinds of anxiety for me. Part of it is just anxiety over actually putting the book out there To Be Judged. Part of it I think is a relic from my freelancing days--as long as I was working, I knew I was getting paid, but when a project ended, I had no guarantee that another one would come along. Part of it is workaholism--when this is over, whatever will I do with my days? (Hint: Start the next book!)

I know I'm not the only one who sees the end of a project coming and goes, AIIIIIGGGHHH! Matt Groening has a great cartoon on being a graduate student that says in part, "The Simple Way To Avoid the Stomach-Churning Agony of Having To Finish Your Thesis: Read Another Book. Repeat When Necessary." The Perfectionism-Procrastination-Paralysis trifecta rears its ugly head about now. Especially if you're unaware of what's going on, it's really easy to get caught up in getting just one more read from that cool person you met in writers' group...and then just one more read from your old professor...and then just one more read from your Aunt Edna...and then just one more read from that guy behind the counter at the gas station who seems pretty articulate.

You just have to soldier through and GET THE BOOK OUT. It's especially tough when you aren't in a traditional work environment with a boss and explicit deadlines--even (or especially) your friends will enable you by saying things like, "Hey, you sound unsure about this. Do you want me to read it over again? I'm pretty busy, but I'll have some time off next Christmas, so I could read it then." Beat them away with love.

There is no such thing as a perfect (or even just an empirically good) book, so let that go. What traditional publishers do is they have a process. For example, at my first job, the manuscript was proofread three times, and then it was laid out, and then it was proofread two more times. And there were still errors in the final book, but it was pretty darned clean. So I would suggest that if you're having problems with eternal re-reads, you should set some limits--you'll have it read X number of times by X many beta readers, and then it goes to a proofreader. And that's that. You set up a process you can trust, and then you do indeed trust it to get you a not-perfect-but-reasonably-good end result.

Progress report

I finished the layout--whoo!

I have the kid tomorrow, and then I'll proofread the layout as well as input some corrections a beta reader made.

Progress report

I'm currently in the midst of laying out the ninth chapter today--yeah, I'm way more productive today than I have been, which is what happens when I actually sleep.

I was going to do more than nine chapters, but I'm going to stop after I finish this one because--you guessed it!--Word has started to go insane. Right now I'm running the maintenance tools; when that's done I'll restart and hopefully I'll be able to finish Chapter 19 without Word taking the entire computer down.

The perils of comma placement

So, I know I've been rattling on about how you need to assume your reader reads quite literally and should watch your grammar. Well, today I went grocery shopping, and I bought something that made my pedantic little heart go pitter-pat!

What I bought was a package of spicy nori strips (which were made by Sound Sea Vegetables and quite tasty). I was reading the back of the package as I was noshing down the nori (Noshing the Nori is the title of my food-themed erotic novel), and I saw my favorite kind of grammatical error--the kind that screws up a warning!

Here's the text:

Please note that this selected nori requires care to keep its crisp texture and flavor at its peak. It has been packed with a moisture absorbent, which is not to be eaten, and is best kept away from children.

The first sentence is a bit of a puzzler ("selected nori"? and I'd give the latter half some parallel construction) but not too bad for marketing copy, which often throws in fancy-sounding words like "selected" and "artisinal" whether or not they make any sense. The second sentence, however, really suffers from that extra comma.

Two commas around the phrase "which is not to be eaten" means it's a parenthetical phrase. So, let's replace those commas with parentheses:

Please note that this selected nori requires care to keep its crisp texture and flavor at its peak. It has been packed with a moisture absorbent (which is not to be eaten) and is best kept away from children.

Oh-ho! So the phrase "is best kept away from children" does not apply to the moisture absorbent. Instead, it refers to the pronoun that begins the sentence, "It," which in turn refers to...the nori itself!

A bit shocking to be selling a snack food that should be kept away from children, no? Especially since the package also describes the nori as "a very popular snack food with children"!

Progress report

I laid out five more chapters today, yay. I also figured out how to create block quotes on this blog, which is something that sounds like it should be easy but hasn't been. The trick is to just do the post with normal formatting, and then after that's all done, tag the relevant paragraphs as block quotes. In the past, I was trying to do it by creating block quotes as I pasted in the text, and trust me, that does not work.