Mary Sisson's Blog, page 132

Progress report

I got up to chapter 11, which is the problem chapter. I did a little work on it, and then decided that I really wanted to start on it fresh tomorrow, so I stopped.

Love this

From an interview with Elmore Leonard.

 

You're 86 and still writing every day. What keeps you working when you could easily retire?

I still like to write. I might as well do it. I can't just sit here and look out the window. There's a lot of snow out there right now.

Luck and self-publishing

So, Joe Konrath is on track to make a gazillion dollars this year, and (as he often does) he's citing luck as a factor in his success (via PV).

I think it's important to acknowledge that luck is a factor in life, as opposed to thinking that you're one of God's little favorites or something. Live in a country where indoor plumbing is the norm? Luck. Parents sent you to school instead of putting you to work the minute you grew big enough to fetch and carry? Luck.

Konrath's success? Errr, I'll grant that he didn't get spectacularly unlucky, but I think the major luck portion was his decision one day to throw some books up on Amazon. Of course, he was someone who constantly tried different things to distribute and market his work, so...that was really him making his own luck there. You're a lot more likely to find a gold mine if you're willing to dig holes.

Another factor that I think is really important to his success is the fact that he is puts out a lot of titles (a strategy that also works for Dean Wesley Smith). As the Washington Post described in its profile of Nyree Bellevue, "the right recipe [is] a small but devout core audience; a readily available backlist for new readers to discover; a knack for writing fast; and an inherent appeal to a fan base that read[s] voraciously."

Is this something that is easy to replicate? Oh, hell no--a 200-title or even "just" a 40-title backlist? Are you crazy? That's, like, decades of work!

And it took him decades--like Monty Hall, Konrath is an overnight success who took 20 years. The reason he looks like a lucky-duck overnight success is that he's only getting his payday now. It took him years to establish that core audience, and it took him years of practicing writing to get to the point where that 40-title backlist wasn't just a load of unreadable crap.

Writing is work. Publishing (even self-publishing) is work. Konrath is successful because he worked very hard for a very long time. He was lucky in that he didn't get run over by a car and killed when he was 10 years old or something, but everything else--work.

And I leave you with a quote from a recent blog post by Kristine Kathyrn Rusch that I think is germane: "I have no idea why people want to hang onto the stories of failure, the impossibility of doing well without cheating or 'getting lucky,' but they do. They want it all now and they don't want to work for it. And when you tell them they must work for it, they get mad."

ETA: And now I've got Malcolm Reynolds' "You rely on luck, you wind up on the drift" speech stuck in my head. Great.

Progress report, Twain, Fellini

Today I edited up to chapter 8, so a good day there. It was a part with fewer problems, though, and I've got a chapter coming up that the beta reader really did not like.

The thing that's nice about good readers is that they're very focused on the main storylines and the characters, so they notice right away when a character starts doing something off, or when all the characters magically forget about the many problems that were causing them so much consternation five minutes before.

It's easy for the writer to lose track of that kind of continuity (I'm guessing because it takes a lot longer to write something than to read it, and you don't always write page 1 first). For example, with this problem chapter coming up, a long time ago I read Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and there's a hilarious bit in there about wearing armor. I'd always remembered that bit, so I thought I'd write a similarly hilarious bit about Philippe Trang and his suit.

The problem is that there's an awful lot of really serious stuff going on, and then all of a sudden it's all "Ha-ha! His pants are falling off!" and the beta reader felt that was inappropriate. And you know something? The beta reader was right. 

Last night I also watched Federico Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits. I've always liked Fellini, and by "always" I mean since I was about 10 or 11, and my sister and I very randomly came across La Dolce Vita flipping around television channels one afternoon. We watched the entire rest of the movie, and I vividly remember it, as does my sister. We both really enjoyed it, and not just because it was obviously about "adult stuff" we weren't supposed to be watching.

The reason I enjoyed Fellini as a kid is no different then the reason I enjoyed it last night: Despite all the surreal aspects of his films, they are very straightforward. Fellini was someone who was very sure about what he wanted to say, and everything in the film--no matter how random-seeming--actually serves the larger purpose. You don't get the feeling that a bunch of crap was thrown in there to make it arty. They are deeply logical.

So, I guess my point is that it's worth it to pursue that kind of continuity. No matter what's going on, it needs to at least make emotional sense.

Progress report

I edited the first chapter and part of the second chapter. There's a number of changes to be made there because my beta reader who hadn't read Trang was confused or overwhelmed with information at various points. Then I finished and uploaded the large-print edition of Trang, so that's done with, yay!

There was some weirdness, though. I found a tiny, tiny error in the large-print edition--really insignificant, and definitely not worth revising the paper book over. But I figured, let's do the e-books.

So I took the html version, edited it, and tried to switch it to ePub...and when I opened the file in Adobe Digital Editions, there was no text! I tried it again, and...no text! I downloaded the old file from B&N, and I can read the text just fine, so it's not a problem with Digital Editions.

Screw it--like I said, it's a super-duper minor error, and it's not worth the trouble.

More ballparking on costs

This is an interview at Joe Konrath's blog with an editor he has used and liked in the past. She's offering services ranging from basic proofreaching to a full edit, with prices ranging from $25 to $40 an hour. The proofreader I used, who I recommend heartily, charges $25 an hour. So, again, if you want to hire someone, that's your ballpark figure. Anyone quoting far higher prices needs to be treated with extreme caution.

And in the world of legal stuff....

HarperCollins is suing Open Road over e-book rights. (That link is worth clicking on if only to see the graphic representing e-book sales over the past three years. Wow. Unfortunately, it's the Wall Street Journal, so it may be that you can't see it.*) Now, I clearly have no love for Open Road, but HarperCollins is basically claiming that it obtained rights to e-books in the early 1970s, waaaaay back before e-books actually existed.

Passive Guy is, of course, all over this (he's even quoted in the WSJ article), with a great post about the legal motion here. It's not necessarily a slam-dunk, but it's fairly well established that you can't license copyright to a technology that doesn't exist.

Of course, legal precedent doesn't necessarily stop large corporations from filing frivolous suits in order to intimidate people into doing what they want. But just be aware that these types of lawsuits fall into that official category known by journalists as "Mostly Bullshit."

 

* OK, I couldn't find a graphic, but the data they used was from BookStats, and it looks like this, "e-books have grown from 0.6% of the total Trade market share in 2008 to 6.4% in 2010. While that represents a small amount in the total market for formats, it translates to 1274.1% in publisher net sales revenue year-over-year with total net revenue for 2010 at $878 Million." So imagine a bar graph showing 1,274.1% annual growth in revenues, with most of that growth happening between 2009 and 2010.

Progress report

Today was one of those days when I opened up Trust, looked at it, and said NFW. It's a little like jumping off the high dive--some days, you just aren't up to it.

So instead I went over the layout of the large-print edition of Trang, caught a few minor errors, and input them. I've got the kid tomorrow, so I probably won't do much, but if she naps a lot I may give the PDFs the final once-over or work on the cover.

Oh, I also read a short novel that began as a fairly entertaining tale and devolved into an utterly pointless travelogue. I realize that if you include the details of your vacation in your book, you can write at least some of the cost off your taxes, but if it doesn't forward your story, please please please leave it out. Please.

Progress report

I basically did a rough edit of Trust today--going through and marking the places that are going to need more in-depth work while also making the quick changes.

While I was doing that, I printed out the large-print Trang layout. I always fall into the trap of thinking I can "just" print one thing while working on another--I guess that would work if printers didn't require constant babysitting. This time was especially bad because I decided to use the handy-dandy Draft Mode, which is supposed to save you time and toner. Well, I hereby rename it Jam Mode, and speculate that you use at least as much toner and even more time because so many pages get jammed up in there and have to be fished out and reprinted.

News flash: One size still not fitting all!

I've been reading some things that are very dogmatic about how you MUST go about self-publishing and how you're an IDIOT if you do it some other way. And hey, I also get frustrated when I see writers who I don't think are valuing their work properly.

But the fact of the matter is, we are all individuals with different goals, who are motivated by different things.

If you look at the advice I gave Crabby McSlacker, for example, you'll notice that there's a lot of "Well, I did this, but you may want to do that" in there. Is that because I think I made a bunch of horrible mistakes? No, it's because, being a fan of Cranky Fitness, I know that Crabby is very different from me. I just want to write books--that's it, from here on out, that's what I'm doing. Crabby has another career, plus a very strong interest in health and fitness that she's built into at least a half-career at this point. So the math around things like, "Should I hire someone to lay this out, or should I do it myself?" is going to be different for her. It would be really silly of me to go foaming at the mouth because she hired someone to do something that I did myself (as long as she's not getting totally ripped off, of course), or because she put her book up only on Amazon because she didn't want to figure out Smashwords, or because she decided to give her book away for free, or whatever. Her life is not my life, and she's going to make different decisions.

People have different goals and are motivated by very, VERY different things. I don't think it's appropriate to judge those goals and motivations by any standard other than, "Are they mine?" I don't think it's sensible to heap scorn on people who differ from you, nor do I think it's sensible to slavishly copy the career moves of someone whose goals may be completely unlike your own. John Locke is quite happy to make 35 cents per book sold--he knows that he could easily make more money, and he doesn't care. If that keeps him motivated as a writer without causing him serious money problems, I say more power to him. But someone who is relying on book sales to pay the rent or is simply more motivated by money should probably investigate other pricing strategies.

I learned pretty early on not to be too judgmental about what motivates people. This happened because in my first publishing job, I wound up ghosting for a Notable Academic. Said Notable Academic was (to my mind) an utter sell-out: We never met, and he didn't even know who was ghosting for him--he thanked someone else for their "help" in the introduction to "his" book (to my knowledge, he actually did write the introduction).

Of course I had nothing but contempt for this Notable Academic! God, what a money-grubbing creep! Why was he so greedy? And then later on I found out why: Notable Academic has a seriously handicapped child, who will always require very expensive medical care.

Ooohhh....

That was about when I got off my high horse about being someone who simply isn't that motivated by money. And I'm not: I've learned the hard way that if I'm in a miserable situation and have lots of money, I'm still extremely miserable and the money doesn't help at all. Really, as long as I'm housed and fed and have enough shoes, I'm happy. (Not that I don't find money damned interesting to write about, mostly because people have such neuroses about it. Money = survival, and that kicks off all kinds of things in our primal brains.) 

The fact that money doesn't motivate me doesn't mean that I can't be motivated as a writer (indeed, if I was more motivated by money, I never would have started writing--I would have gone to law school). It also doesn't mean that the things that do motivate me (feeling like I'm producing good-quality work, feeling like people appreciate said work) are somehow wrong or bad or stupid. They're just different from the things that might motivate someone else.

Of course it bothers me when I feel like an author is being taken advantage of or is making decisions out of ignorance--I really, really doubt that Michael Chabon carefully investigated the world of e-publishing before deciding to sign away half his profits. (To Open Road. Not to a charity or something.) But I'm a total agnostic when it comes to what motivates you or what your goals are--whatever works, works. As long as you're being realistic, honest with yourself, and mindful of your real goals, then knock yourself out. This world is big enough for all kinds of writers.