Mary Sisson's Blog, page 81

The beginnings of later books

One of the things I did with Trust was go to great lengths to make it accessible to someone who hadn't read Trang. Since I haven't been able to write this week, I've put a lot of thought into how to do that with Trials, because the current opening would be of zero interest to someone unfamiliar with the other books, and I wanted to fix that.

It's been surprisingly difficult to work out (although I think I have a fix now), so I've been wondering if it was even worth doing, since it is book three of four--shouldn't people who haven't read the first two books expect to be left behind? But that line of thinking was recently debunked for me by a fellow author. This person is writing a VERY long series, and there was a production glitch with, oh, let's say book #23 that didn't affect the text, so they gave the defective copies away to a random group of people that included me.

It's not necessarily the kind of book I'm interested in, but I'm always on the lookout for presents, so I tried giving it a read. And it reads like this:

MO: Did you hear about Jo?

BO: Jo? You're asking me about Jo?

MO: Well, I thought you had a right to know--Jo is thinking about visiting Akron.

BO: Mother of God!!! Not Akron!

MO: I know it sounds crazy.

BO: Especially now that--he can't be thinking of Akron!

MO: Well....

BO: And--he's not thinking of taking Ko to Akron, is he?

And on it goes. There is never any attempt to explain to the reader the nature of Bo, Mo, Ko, and Jo's relationship, or why going to Akron is such a big deal.

I'm planning to struggle through, but I have to say I'm not optimistic that it will get better for me. Since I'm not enjoying the book now and probably won't be able to, the chances of my buying the first book in the series for someone else are quite slim.

So much for that working as marketing.

In contrast, take Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books. I have read the entire series, and in every one last one O'Brian manages to 1. tell you who the major characters are, and 2. orient you to the world of the 18th-century British Navy.

By book #18, did I need this information? No, I did not. In fact, I'd skim or skip those sections. Did that put me off the books? Oh, hell, no. I was hooked. It didn't matter to me if I had to jump over most of pages 3-4 to find out what those two were up to!

Likewise the Vorkosigan Saga--when, say, Miles' cousin Ivan gets introduced, I'll breeze right over the part that explains who he is, exactly, because I already know. I know it because I've read all the Vorkosigan books, so clearly, I don't resent it.

My point is, you never know how someone is going to get into your books. (And even with series I really like, often I'll let a year or two lapse between books, so refreshers are welcome.) A paragraph I skim over hardly even qualifies as a minor annoyance. Feeling like I've walked into a party and no one will give me the time of day, because they're all so excited to be talking to each other again? That's a lot more irritating.

Progress report

The roofers finished the roof today, although there's still gutters and some miscellany to do. I listed to the MP3 files through Chapter 5 of the Trang audiobook and found some fixes.

I also realized that I can't really create a final MP3 file, because different audio- and podiobook outlets have different requirements. It was worth generating these MP3s so that I could give them a final listen with earphones, but given how many different versions I'm going to have to generate. there's no point in doing more than a spot-check of the MP3 files I actually release.

Progress report: Pay-attention-to-that-language-advisory edition

The roofers are here! The cats are freaking! I tried doing noise removal on the first half of Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook, but the banging is just too much--I'm going to try listening to the MP3 files on my earphones instead.

Oh, and I got another 1-star review on Amazon by someone who quit after the first page upon seeing profanity. At least 1. he did not insult me, and 2. he acknowledges that he should have noticed the language warning. But he also says that he "read the blurb up through 'Heinlein.'" Um--where does "Heinlein" appear, exactly?

(I actually do like me some Robert Heinlein, and it is social sci-fi, but I hate Starship Troopers, and I know a lot of so-called Heinlein fans are actually Starship Troopers fans. Which means that they don't like books with actual stories in them, so I assume they wouldn't like Trang. Or pretty much anything else Heinlein wrote.)

I do honestly think people who don't read a book have no standing to review it (not just MY books--every book, and play, and movie, and song, and piece of visual art. The sad thing is, there are "cultural critics" who strongly disagree), but I did not report this guy's review. Mainly because he's a lot less infuriatingly sanctimonious, but also because, once again, I think it will help ward away the prudes and attract the literate.

Progress report: Compression edition

The weather remained unchanged, so I was able to finish re-recording the messed-up lines in Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook.

And then I compressed it. Have I ever explained dynamic range compression? No, I have not, and that's because I'm not entirely sure what it is. Here's the Wikipedia article--it's full of terms like "side-chaining" and "attack and release" and "flux capacitator," so maybe you can understand it, but I can't. I just set my compression tool to what ACX tells me to and let 'er rip.

My guess from working with it is that dynamic range compression basically does what it says: If you imagine a range of sounds from very quiet ones to really loud ones, compression adjusts all those sounds so that they're all at medium level of loudness. That's helpful in getting rid of clipping and fixing any places where your voice gets timid. It also just generally helps keep the volume constant, so that nothing's inaudible but nobody's ears get blown out.

Compression is less helpful with breath sounds, which it makes louder. That's why you always do your compression before you do your noise removal.

A quick note about January and Trust

So, since I enrolled Trang in KDP Select, I had one set of free days in late December and another set a few days ago. As I've mentioned, I have given away scads of copies of Trang.

That's all well and good, but it's not like I can make money giving away free copies, right? In my accounting, free copies are not tracked and don't count.

But sold copies count. How has giving away so many copies of Trang affected sales of Trust?

Well, they've had quite the impact! We're still not talking huge numbers here, but in January alone I sold 85% as many copies of Trust as I had in the last six months of 2012 (Trust came out in June). And that percentage is probably a hair smaller than it should be, since presumably some of December's sales happened after the late-December giveaways.

But of course I lost revenue on sales of Trang, right? Actually, it's been a good month for Trang sales--not as good as Trust sales, but good. (Let's hear it for the also-bots!)

Of course, if I make Trang permanently free, then I'll completely lose any chance to make revenue off that book, and as it sells more, that becomes a tougher call. On the other hand, all this is happening because Trang had free days! So I'm still confident that free is the way to go.

This makes me laugh, but not in a good way

PV linked to this article, about how Amazon's 70% growth in e-book sales is actually really bad news for the company and e-book sales in general. In fact, as Edward Grant pointed out, once again double-digit growth in e-book sales has magically becomes a reduction! 

Got that? SEVENTY PERCENT GROWTH is reason to swig down a bottle of antifreeze. I'm sure Jeff Bezos will get right on that. After all, remember what a 34% growth rate looks like? So sad....

Meanwhile, over at Publishers Weekly, publishers are arguing that a 5% growth rate in the sales of paper books is fantastic!!! (OK, fine, it is actually a nice number for a mature industry.)

Having worked in publishing, I know that many people in it are not great at math. But I would think that even my fellow English majors would realize that there's a HUGE difference between a 70% rate of growth and a 5% rate of growth, that one segment of the market is growing much faster than the other (helpful hint: the one with the bigger number is growing more), and (stay with me here) growth in a market is not a decline.

Pigs fly! And Amazon releases sales info!

Here's some FASCINATING news: Amazon released a teeny, tiny bit of information about e-book sales! (Via PV.) OMG! This is especially exciting to the people in Hell, who also received a glass of ice water.

What did Amazon say? That e-book sales increased 70% over the past year!

So, here's the score so far on e-book growth in 2012:

Amazon: 70% increase

Publishers: 34% increase

Barnes & Noble: 13% increase

Just looooook at those numbers. Looooook at the big fat gaps in growth rates.

Look askance at any projection that relies on just one of those growth rates.

A good link about editors

Kris Rusch has a good post on editors--what kind you actually need, what kind you can probably replace with insightful beta readers. I've done a couple of posts on the subject, too. She talks about having a proofreader go over your layout after a copy editor goes over your manuscript--I've done fairly well by laying out my book first and then having a single person do both jobs at once. Saves money, anyway.

Progress report

It's raining today--hard enough that the roofers couldn't work, but not so hard as to create a lot of noise. So I figured I'd better record while I could. I recorded Chapter 7 of the Trang audiobook, the warning for Chapter 1, and a quick fix of a flub I had come across while looking for something else on Chapter 4. I also re-recorded enough of the flubs in Chapter 6 to divide it into two halves--the first half I can work on without re-recording, but the second half will have to wait for another quiet day, because I'm bushed.

There's a person in my Meetup group who does a lot of voice work, and she suggested that it's a good idea to stand while you read. I'd already found that it's easier to read chapters if the microphone is high and you have to sit up, so I thought that sounded like worthwhile advice and did that for Chapter 7 today. I don't know that it's actually going to make me louder--that pretty much is handled by input volume and compression--but it meant less restarts because the chair made noise, and I think it's easier to stay well-placed at the microphone that way.

The bad old days

The Passive Voice has this link to a post by a writer who wasted five years of his life and career with a literary agency, but who still thinks getting a literary agent is a really good idea.

(Think about that one. "I wasted five years of my life shooting heroin. You should totally try it--it's the best!" ETA: OK, now he's getting sucked into the PV comments and hopefully is beginning to realize that There Is Another Way. Run to the light, Scott! Run to the light!)

The thing that really makes me wince about his post is that he has a little pep talk about how writers should feel free to contact their agents about stuff:

[W]e writers usually are introverts, and the idea of bothering anyone (especially someone that promised to make us rich and famous), is just too nerve-racking an idea to consider.

What if I said something that ruined everything? What if I make them change their minds? Our creative minds will reel with horror possibilities that could all occur because of one simple phone call or e-mail.

OK. Do you why people think that you risk total rejection every time you contact a traditional publisher or agent to ask what's going on?

Because it's true. Or at least it was when I was doing it.

How true was it? Well, when I was first submitting Trang, I submitted it to a large sci-fi publishing house that didn't require an agent. Thinking about it later, I decided that I didn't want to submit it to them after all--it was too niche for them. I knew that big publishing houses took forever, and I didn't feel like waiting years for what was basically guaranteed to be a form rejection. Under the unwritten rule of traditional publishing, I couldn't possibly submit my book to more than one publishing house at a time--only agents were allowed such a privilege. As a lowly author, I would need a rejection from this publishing house before I could submit Trang to another.

So I sent the publishing house a letter saying, I'd like to have a decision on my book.

I got my form rejection shortly thereafter.

I should note that my letter was perfectly polite--publishing is a small world, and I didn't want to get a reputation as a scary crank. But, as I knew it would be, a simple, polite request was treated with extreme prejudice, and I got my rejection.

There is so much wrong with that story, isn't there?

I seriously doubt anyone at that publishing house ever even read Trang--the letter was a lot shorter. But the letter nonetheless gave them something everyone in traditional publishing is looking for--a reason to reject a book. Remember, traditional publishing is no ordinary industry: It is an industry forged in an environment of scarcity. That makes it extremely risk-adverse.

Which is a huge problem for you the writer, since you basically are the risk. That's why you get treated like crap: Chances are, you're career kryptonite.

Why would you want that? Why? When I hear people say, "I finished my first book, and I'm sending it out to agents," I want to throw my body in between them and the danger, the way you would if a small child ran past you toward a busy street. I yammer on about how you'll be in a better position to negotiate if you self-publish first; what I'm thinking is, Nooooooo!!!!! Don't do it! Noooooo!!!!

As Laura Resnick writes in the PV comments:

The problem [with agents] is not specific individuals whom you can readily avoid by taking down their names.... The problem is the business model–and the sh*t the writers keep putting up with from agents as the “normal” s.o.p. of the biz....