Mary Sisson's Blog, page 140

Prepping for Santa

As is apparently normal for me when I stop writing and start reading self-publishing blogs, I'm feeling deluged with marketing ideas. And of course they stress me out, and then I tell myself that the BEST way to market is to stop fiddling and reading blogs, and to write the next book! But then I feel like I would say that to myself whether it was true or not.

In any case, I do think it makes sense to prep for the post-holiday e-book shopping season (that we all hope will happen in 2012 like it did in 2011...one year is a pattern, right?), so I've tweaked the descriptions for Trang some more. Back before I got freaked out, I told the proofreader to take his own sweet time with Trang, and now of course I'm wishing I hadn't done that (he says he'll have it done this week). I updated the e-book interiors with little corrections that I and my sister found, as well as changing the interior covers, so even if he turns out to be a major flake, at least they will be slightly more polished. I've joined Goodreads, as I mentioned, and I've also joined Shelfari and Library Thing--you can RSS your blog to Goodreads and Library Thing, plus you can do that to Amazon Author Central (Shelfari is part of Amazon), so that looks like more ways to "build brand" (gag) and take advantage of the Hawthorne Effect (yippee!) without expending a lot of time on it. (Because time spent marketing is time not spent writing. It's not because I'm lazy and don't want to do it--oh, no!)

(But honestly, some of the advice out there--comment on other blogs, not because you like them and want to say something, but because you can leave a link back to your Web site! Do tit-for-tat interviews, "follows," and even book purchases! Seriously, talk about sucking all the joy out formerly pleasant activities.... I mean, honestly, I enjoy Twitter so much more now that I stopped following the vast majority of the self-pub people, who constantly spam your feed to sell you services, and limited myself to following people I either know or find entertaining.)

One thing that has annoyed me is that non-Amazon sites that carry the paperback still feature the hideous cover I drew myself. I'm not sure why that is, but I've pulled the book off that distribution channel in the theory that if I put it back up with a different cover, it will show the proper cover. Obviously pulling a book off the market (or part of the market) is never going to help sales, but I think it hurts the book to have such an amateurish cover show up in searches.

Is any of this going to help sales? Eh, probably not...I do think the best thing to do is get Trust up, and I don't know when that's going to happen. I'll try to do it ASAP, but of course I told the beta readers to take their sweet time because I wanted a break from it, and after those changes are processed, it needs to go to the proofreader, and then get laid out. Production will presumably be more efficient this time around: I've got the front cover and the description already. Last year, I was able to get hard copies up by March 1, which is still in that window of excitement for self-pubbed books (because one year is a pattern, right?)--I guess we'll just have to see what the beta readers come back with, and of course how resistant I am to delving back into it.

I was pondering doing some kind of discount on Trang, but Kris Rusch (who I guess will be my guru on this one, since I didn't really want to futz around with changing prices all the time anyway) makes a good case that it's not worth even offering a title for free if you don't have a bunch of other, closely-related titles to promote.

Those ARE some interesting numbers....

On Joe Konrath's blog, he posts some hard numbers (scroll down a bit to see this):

 

Here are my latest royalty statement figures for my six Hyperion titles and my Hachette title, for Jan 1 - June 30, 2011. Paper sales are hardcover and mass market combined.

Whiskey Sour paper sales: $1450.00
Whiskey Sour ebook sales: $5395.00

Bloody Mary paper sales: $463.00
Bloody Mary ebook sales: $2591.00

Rusty Nail paper sales: $226.00
Rusty Nail ebook sales: $3220.00

Dirty Martini paper sales: $415.00
Dirty Martini ebook sales: $3370.00

Fuzzy Navel paper sales: $485.00
Fuzzy Navel ebook sales: $3110.00

Cherry Bomb paper sales: $224.00
Cherry Bomb ebook sales: $3864.00

Afraid paper sales: $1608.00
Afraid ebook sales: $12,158.00

 

WOW. Well, that pretty much sums up where things are headed, doesn't it?

You must consider this....

This is an extremely valuable essay by Kris Rusch on what is obviously a bugaboo of mine: People naively overpaying for self-publishing services.

Some writers will research their manuscript like crazy, and then they won't spend five minutes on the kind of research needed to keep from getting robbed. Please don't be like that. And please keep in mind that Rusch is both dyslexic and especially dyslexic when it comes to numbers, so however bad at math you believe yourself to be, she is much worse, and yet she is able to comprehend when someone is trying to steal from her. Not everyone is to be trusted, especially not everyone who tells you that they can be trusted.

In short, if a stranger offers you candy, don't get in the van!

Be careful what you wish for

I blew off writing Trials today--this is typical for me, I always take a little time to actually start. Instead I finished reading The Passive Voice archives (I told you I was addicted--now, the withdrawal will have to begin).

There were two good entries about blowing off work, so you know, at least it's all thematically connected. The first provides an actual scientific-sounding name for why I have a blog: The Hawthorne Effect. Basically it's the strategy of forcing yourself to tell people that you're slacking off, in the theory that the humiliation will make you slack off less.

Proof that the Hawthorne Effect doesn't always work? A different post about the Internet controversy over George R.R. Martin's work habits. God help me, I find the whole thing hilarious. My feeling about ANY Internet controversy is that 99% of the people flaming away have absolutely no skin in the game and are just doing it for the fun of it. (For the record, I haven't read Martin, either. These kinds of sprawling fantasy epics are so popular that a lot of writers just churn out 600-page books that are 550 pages of boring filler, followed by a 50-page cliffhanger designed to make you buy the next book, so I'm very skeptical of them.)

But to take that impulse to just force a writer to write seriously for a moment: There's actually a real problem with making writers work on a series or book that they don't want to do anymore. And that happens all the time--when a series gets popular, publishers want only books in that series. Had another idea that excites you? Too damned bad! The only thing you can get paid to do is to crank out volume 230 in the Will This DIE Already? series.

That's the reason most series degenerate over time. To use a television example: I'm a huge Joss Whedon fan, and I think season 7 of Buffy should not have happened, because he was clearly done with it before it ended. As it was airing, I was at a party with a bunch of other Buffy fans, and they were all complaining about how awful that season was turning out to be. Yet, they all categorically refused to watch Whedon's new-and-very-good show Firefly, because it was going to be Buffy or it was going to be nothing, and damn that Whedon fellow to hell if he was trying to do something that actually interested him! I was amazed, because they seemed to have no comprehension that there was a person behind all this, and that person might get a little tired of writing the same story for seven freaking years.

But the worst is definitely what happened to P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster books. The early books are great: Bertie Wooster is a young, upper-class British man who, although not unintelligent, always manages to get himself "in the soup" thanks to a certain obtuseness. (For example, he believes that if a woman erroneously believes that you have proposed marriage to her, the gentlemanly thing to do is to marry her, even if you really, really don't want to. Otherwise you might hurt her feelings.) Jeeves saves the day eventually, but it's not easy for him.

The later books are horrible--Wodehouse had clearly come to hate his characters (and I'm sure, his readers) with a fiery passion. Bertie is now simply a moron--barely intelligent enough to breathe. Jeeves disappears for most of the book, only to appear at the end having magically resolved every last little problem. The contempt and resentment are palpable.

I really wish the creative process worked differently. I'm not proud of taking forever to edit Trust: I have a strong work ethic, and it annoys the piss out of me when I can't get going on something. But it's not like making widgets, or even like cranking out X many earnings briefs per day. You just have to respect it, because the results when you don't are never pretty.

Bad! Scary! Bad!

I've mentioned my tragic addiction to The Passive Voice blog, and my discovery of The Business Rusch. Passive Guy is a lawyer, and Kris Rusch used to be a reporter, and between the two of them they have complied the most hair-raising accounts of what you find in agency and publishing contracts nowadays! It's bad stuff--and the most disturbing thing is that these aren't the dirtbag "agents" or vanity presses, which you can assume are out to rip you off. It's the respectable people doing it nowadays. 

Seriously, read these guys if you are thinking of signing with an agency or a publisher. With Rusch, I would start here at the bottom of the page and work my way up to the more-recent posts. With The Passive Voice, look at the "contracts" section (he's a bit of a tougher read because, you know, lawyer, but soldier on).

They made me pull out and read over my old agency agreement. Yes, I fired them, but with some of these contracts, that doesn't matter. I don't see anything too frightening there--I did read before I signed it, but events have proven that I was too trusting back then, so no harm in double-checking.

I had read that the agent I fired was doing things that I thought were a little sleazy, but I kind of chalked it up to the fact that he clearly was the sort to cruise on reputation, so what would you expect? But apparently that's just par for the course nowadays--the distinction between reputable and disreputable is becoming very thin. It makes me worried for the people I know who are seeking agency representation and hoping to get a contract with a commercial publisher....

Unpleasant characters

(I think I'll start in on Trials tomorrow--I have a couple of left-over production tasks on Trang, but I'm really getting bored with that sort of thing, so it's time to mix it up. In the meantime, I'm going to ramble on about writing and literature!)

I've read books that I've hated, but the character I felt the most violently opposed to, the character I (in all seriousness) wanted to see run over and killed by a garbage truck? That character was Rabbit, from John Updike's Rabbit, Run--the last Updike book I will ever read.

Why did I hate--and I mean, I hate this character with a passion--Rabbit so much? Well, part of it was that the book is set in the late 1950s, which was back when it really was a Man's World. Rabbit, being male, has certain prerogatives. For example, he dumps his preganant wife and takes up with a girlfriend. And when he tires of the girlfriend, it's an easy matter for him to get back with his wife, who is expected to be all sweetness and light about everything. Why? Because getting divorced--even when it's not her fault--is going to hurt her far worse than it hurts him, so she's better toe the line and give him whatever he wants if she knows what's good for her. He knocks up his girlfriend because he refuses to wear a condom--of course she has to go along with that, because the only prospect of respectability she has is to get him to marry her.

Does he feel guilty about occupying such a position of privilege? My stars, why would he? It's a Man's World! Why should he care about what happens to all those silly little gashes around him? It gets worse--there's a silly little gash, his baby daughter, who DIES because Rabbit is such a jackass. How does he feel about that? Guilty? Devastated? Oh, hell now--she's just a girl! Who gives a fuck about some baby gash? He feels...wait for it...sorry for himself. Boo-hoo. Poor Rabbit.

And I cannot emphasize this enough, but there is nothing in the book to suggest that the reader should feel anything but sorry for Rabbit. Poor, poor Rabbit, ruining the lives and KILLING the women around him. I think that, instead of writing more Rabbit novels, Updike should have written the heart-wrenching tale of a poor, poor slave owner whose slaves are always so difficult and give him so much trouble. It's awful, the poor guy sprains his shoulder beating them to death--don't you feel sorry for him? Or maybe a serial killer who kills children--and people act like they can judge him, and the kids are so uncooperative about it all, and life is really difficult for him. Your heart bleeds.

OK, deep breath. (God, I hated that book!) Now, some years later, I read Michael Chabon's The Wonder Boys. The protagonist of that novel is not so different from Rabbit--an annoying and overprivileged male Baby Boomer with a wife who has left him (for good reason) but who might come back, and a pregnant girlfriend, plus a juicy co-ed.

But--and this makes all the difference in the world--the main character knows he's a dick. I cannot tell you what a difference that makes. It's not like he's devoid of self-pity, or that he's above taking advantage of his position (oh my God, yes on both counts). He is, however, vaguely aware of other people--he knows that they exist, that they have rights, and that his actions may have an effect on them that is maybe not so positive. It's a tiny bit of self-awareness and self-criticism, but it's just enough for the reader to feel some sort of sympathy toward this guy.

Letting characters basically take the fall for their personalities is key, I think. No one is flawless--everyone has their limitations, even if they're not necessarily horrible people. If you let them own that--let them know that they always do X in a situation when they should probably do Y--and allow them to feel frustrated or disappointed with themselves, that's something that anyone who doesn't suffer from narcissistic personality disorder can relate to.

It also saves you from scapegoating, which is simply not that interesting to read. To trot out another famously misogynistic writer, Kingsley Amis has a terrible, terrible attitude toward women--they're all crazy and evil, except for the one designated Madonna. And yet, Lucky Jim is enjoyed by many people (including myself) who think the rest of his books are not worth the time (not so much because they are offensive as that they are very, very predictable). That's because the central problem for Jim is not that all women (except the designated Madonna) are horrible people, the problem is that he will not stand up to the horrible people in his life. The problem is within. And that's something I think anyone with a little life experience can relate to--there's no way to completely avoid bad people or bad things, the only thing you can control is your response to them.

What does professional even mean nowadays?

When someone talks about a persion doing a professional job, typically they mean that 1. the person is experienced, and 2. the person is familiar with and works according to the standards and practices in the industry.

Of course, all "professional" really means is, the person got paid.

How are the professionals doing with e-book formatting? Well, according to this (note PDF, non-PDF excerpt here), the answer is pretty badly! The gory details:

In recent days, Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobswas removed from the iBookstore and replaced with a new version because of formatting errors. One iBookstore reviewer wrote: "I want my money back. The formatting errors in the iBooks version are appalling. At first, a caption is missing or just a word, but it soon becomes illegible. The publisher should be ashamed."

Similarly, the Amazon Kindle release of Neal Stephenson's eBook Reamde recently made headlines because line breaks, missing passages, and hyphens preceding words such as "people" and "couple" were scattered throughout the eBook. One Amazon reviewer wrote: "…the reading experience is fatally tainted," and demanded a full refund of the $16.99 price.

 

Think about that the next time someone tells you it's worth it to pay them $3,000 to format an e-book, because they are going to take good care of you--you can't even trust the large publishing houses (charging $17 a copy!) to do a decent job.

No matter if you hire someone (and you can do that for much, much less than three grand) or do it yourself, you need to read over the e-book before you publish it. And you can do that pretty easily even if you don't own an e-reader, just download Mobipocket reader to your computer to read a Kindle file, or Adobe Digital Editions to read a Nook file.

I know I've made this analogy before, but it is really just like dealing with a car mechanic or a home contractor: If you have no idea what the person is doing and no intention of checking the work, you will have no way of judging whether the fee charged is fair or if the work was done well. In other words, you will get screwed.

Book lengths

I'm doing a little housekeeping today--getting rid of inches and feet and the like. I ran a word count on Trust--it's about as long as Trang, a little under 110,000 words.

It's funny because with all the reading I've been doing lately, I've noticed that an awful lot of these books come in at, oh, about 30,000 words. Science fiction tends to clock in with six-figure word counts anyway, so I don't worry about mine (I have no idea how you'd keep a sci-fi book to 30,000 words, unless you were writing something like a Star Trek or Star Wars novel where you don't have to bother with all that pesky world-building).

Nonetheless, on a purely practical and commercial level, there's good reason for you to keep your books short, even if I don't: They take a lot less time to write, so you can crank out a lot of titles.

The problem with longer works is that they take an exponentially longer amount of time to write. I used to be a business reporter, so I will give you an example of a short literary form that I am very well acquainted with: The earnings report.

These clock in at less than 100 words and go something like this:

GinormoMegaCorp reported sharply lower profits on increased revenues yesterday. Profits for the last quarter, ending October 31, were $5 gazillion, down from $6 gazillion the same quarter the previous year. Revenues, in contrast, were $85 bazillion, up from $70 bazillion in the quarter ending October 31, 2010. Company executives attributed the lower earnings to additional expenses stemming from the merger of Ginormo Corp. and Mega Corp. two years before. Shares in GinormoMegaCorp closed at $15.65 on the New York Stock exchange yesterday, a drop of 4 percent.

 

So, that's 88 words, and it took me four minutes to write. If I was writing an 880-word imaginary feature on GinormoMegaCorp (which is a longish feature, a little more than 20 inches of newsprint), it would take me considerably longer than 40 minutes to write, even if I were to make it all up.

That's because a feature ten times longer than an earning brief is far more complex. With the brief, I can just plug the numbers in and add a one- or two-sentence explanation of why a company is making more or less money. A feature requires an actual story line--I'd need to figure out what I'm going to say about the troubled merger between Ginormo and Mega. Structurally, I'd need a good lede, a paragraph summing up whether people think GinormoMegaCorp is going to succeed or fail, another paragraph noting that it might do the opposite, and then lots and lots of detail (in this case, a lot about what the hopes for the merger were and why it's not happening yet), ending with a nice concluding paragraph that sums up everything beautifully and will be cut for space.

It's the same thing going from a 30,000-word novel to a 100,000-word novel--in all likelihood, it is going to take more than three times as long to produce the latter. You've simply got more to keep track of (and if you feel like you don't, you seriously need to take a hatchet to that mother).

Seasonal buying patterns for e-books?

I'm writing blog posts instead of writing or polishing off some production chores--bad I know. But I'm taking a break. Everyone gets all excited about flow, but I'm realizing that I missed some routine-yet-important tasks while I was caught up editing, so I need to reconnect with real life for a little bit.

Anyway, something that happened last year that people are assuming is going to happen again this year (remember, self-publishing has been viable for all of two years, so there's not a lot of data to extrapolate from) is that there was a big surge in e-book sales after Christmas. The assumption is that many people received e-readers for Christmas and then went looking for e-books to fill them.

Reading through the archives of The Passive Voice (which I am now shamelessly addicted to), I found a link to this article charting self-published best-sellers on Amazon for the first half of 2011, which finds that self-pubbed books did really well in February and considerably less well by June. Now, Selena Kitt makes the case over on Joe Konrath's blog that 99-cent e-books aren't going to sell more than higher-priced (by which she means $2.99-$4.99, not $12.99) e-books, because Kindle readers have tried the really cheap books and decided that most of them weren't very good.

Trying to see a pattern here, it seems that the people who receive e-readers go through an initial period of scooping up everything that's really cheap, and then after a little while, become more selective, and start looking only at the pricier titles. Soooo...how should you play that? Put the book on sale in, say, February, and then crank the price back up a month later?

(My own experience is that dropping the price to 99 cents in April didn't do squat for sales, but of course I'm being a prima donna and not really marketing, so you can safely ignore me.)

The half of a balance sheet that you can control

This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday noting that, yes, different self-published authors have wildly different levels of sales. (This will shock you, but apparently it helps to already have a fan base.)

I'll stop mocking Captain Obvious and will note that I agree that, if you are unknown, your sales are completely unpredictable (this is why agents and traditional publishers generally don't like new writers). You might not sell any books, you might sell a ton, you might sell almost nothing for months or years and then suddenly sell a bunch. Who knows? The world is a crazy place.

That makes life difficult if you hope to turn a profit: You can't control your revenues. This is true for basically all entrepreneurs--you might have a hit, or you might have a flop. Marketing can help, but there are no guarantees that you will be making X amount of dollars.

But there's something you can control: Your expenses. The less money you spend, the less revenue you have to bring in to turn a profit. If you spend an excessive amount, then you've backed yourself into a corner where you absolutely must generate huge revenues--which is bad, because you can't control revenues.

In the article, there is a woman featured who paid $3,000 to a so-called digital publisher. As far as I can tell, that money went to 1. format the e-book and 2. distribute it on Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble. She seems to have done all her own marketing, so they're not doing that.

I'm going to take a deep breath here. I'm going to stay calm. And then I will simply point you to the post where I outlined my book expenses. What number appears under "Spent on creating e-books"? Oh, yes, a zero.

I am the first to admit that formatting e-books is kind of a pain. But seriously, it was two days of work. Do you get $3,000 for two days of work? Would you pay someone $3,000 for two days of work? It's not like they formatted her e-book, put it up, and gave her a pony--she paid $3,000 for what I'm going to guess was more like two hours of work, because these guys presumably weren't doing it for the first time.

I understand that some people are afraid of technology, but there is a lot of help out there, and much of it is free. At the very least please, please, please try to get an idea of what is involved in doing it yourself before you cough up some huge wad of cash. You cannot control revenues: You may never see that money back. You can control costs: If you don't spend it, you'll be that much closer to turning a profit.