Laurie Boris's Blog, page 50

So You Want To E-Pub Your Novel?

You've finished writing your novel, your baby, your joy, your passion, and you're considering self-publishing as an e-book. Why not, with nearly everyone you know toting around a Kindle or Nook or planning to get one? It's awfully tempting to tap into that market, get your book out faster to your eager readers, and maintain more creative and financial control than with traditional publishing. But before you send that document to the digital arena, here are a few things to consider:

1. Editing. You are a professional, right? If you were to submit your manuscript to a literary agent or a publisher, you would present the best possible version, yes? Why approach this concept any differently because you're self-publishing? You can edit your own work, to some extent, although a second opinion may do a better job. Can't afford a professional? Find another aspiring writer and offer to swap. You'd be surprised what an objective eye can find. Until I employed a professional for the first novel I tried to sell, I had no idea that I'd started my story in the wrong place, had left a few plot threads untied, and had a character or two who could have been easily cut.

2. Proofreading. Ditto points from #1. For your own credibility, try not to do this yourself. After three or four read-throughs, even the best of us start missing little and big mistakes. If you don't have the budget for a professional proofreader (often NOT the same person who did the editing), find a fellow writer with an eye for detail and propose a swap, or offer to barter for other skills. Just because you can pull down your e-book, revise, and republish rather handily, don't let that ease make you lazy. Unedited, typo-strewn copies could already be out there, damaging your reputation.

3. Formatting. This can be a HUGE pitfall for the aspiring e-novelist. If you opt for the traditional publishing route, even if that publisher puts your novel out as an e-book, they are responsible for formatting. That means, for instance, new chapters start on a new page, paragraphs are properly indented, time/space breaks are properly spaced, symbols and punctuation are represented accurately, and your table of contents (if you have one) gets linked up correctly. You may be accustomed to checking for typos and grammatical errors, but how many writers think about formatting? (Well, me, but a background in graphic design will do that to a person.) Over several hundred pages of manuscript, formatting can get complicated. And worse, different platforms have different rules. Mess this up, and your e-book can become an irritating read. Fortunately, most of the major platforms know this. Amazon has a decent tutorial. Smashwords will even let you download a free e-book on how to format your manuscript to be compatible with their word-cruncher-uploader-doohickie that spits out proper file formats for different devices. Again, you can go through the learning curve if you feel inspired, or if you'd rather focus your energy elsewhere, outsource it.

4. Cover design. A cover alone may not sell a book, but a good one definitely helps. A dull design can get you passed over, and an inappropriate design might make a reader feel deceived. Again, here's a place where you'll want a professional. You definitely get what you pay for in this department.

5. Title. Consider your working title. Because you know your traditional publisher will. Does it suit the work? Is it too commonly used? Ask your writing and reading friends what they think of your intended title. Also, try Googling it. You can't copyright a title, but you can make sure it's not already in use for a book in your genre.

6. Read the fine print. Know what you're getting into before you publish. Some platforms reserve the right to yank your content if they don't think it's "fit" for public consumption. Some reserve the right to re-price it at their discretion, or even offer it for free during certain promotions.

Finally, be prepared to market your ass off. But that's a topic for another blog.

Are you planning to e-book it? Already a pro? Let's talk…

(Photo courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti)

Are Fewer TV Characters Reading?

Outside of Mad Men, conversations between and among our favorite television characters about contemporary fiction are rare. (Hey, in the early 60s, Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything was contemporary fiction.) But the appearance of books (printed or electronic) in general is getting rarer still, and that disturbs me.

I get it. Who wants to watch someone on television reading a book? Total snoozer, right? But do you remember The Cosby Show? Home Improvement? Mad About You? The rash of domestic comedies that followed? Pick any one of these shows and they probably had at least one scene that opened with a character reading. When a second character came into the room, the book was put down and the conversation began.

Lately, though, when a book is on the set, it's often used as a metaphor. As in, "I'm just going to sit here and read my book and ignore you." Or it's a prop, intended to show personality. The super geniuses of The Big Bang Theory don't seem to own any books, but least one has a Kindle, displayed on set in screensaver mode. (Inevitably, the non-owner would believe screen-saving mode to be less efficient than simply turning the thing off.)

Often, in comedies, novels are portrayed as something to be avoided. Hence elaborate plot lines involving kids blowing off book reports, using Cliff Notes, or, in one of my least favorite Seinfeld episodes, George spends more time trying to obtain and watch a copy of the film version of Breakfast at Tiffany's than actually reading the book so he can impress his girlfriend at her book club. Novelists are often ridiculed as posers. Or, like Nathan Fillion's Richard Castle, are rarely seen writing.

What are we showing kids? People who read books are suckers? Reading and writing books requires too much work? People who have books in their homes are either rich or snobby?

Some say that certain behaviors shown on television, like sex and violence, have influence on the more easily influenced of us. Others defend the content as merely holding up a mirror to our culture. Do you think this dearth of small-screen reading is a reflection of the evolution of our society, or a slippery slope to illiteracy?

Maybe I should simply spend more time reading.

(Photo courtesy of Fox Animation)

Terra Nova: Nothing "Nova" About It

I'd seen the previews for Terra Nova on Fox months before it actually appeared.  Cleverly, their marketing people had positioned this as Jurassic Park meets Lost.

But for me, the actual show did not live up to the hype. The setup was kind of interesting, if not a little politically correct: a home planet we had ruined, 150 years in the future, by overpopulation and pollution, where signs on the street flashed with directions on how to breathe, where children were only allowed two to a family and had never seen clouds or the moon except in picture books.

Then, after some heavy-handed drama that went on too long, we follow our main characters, the Shannon family, as they enter Terra Nova. This is a new, old world originally found, or so goes the tale, through a crack in the space-time continuum. Terra Nova has dinosaurs, big, scary insects, and it's run by the rather pompous, arrogant Nathaniel Taylor, played by Stephen Lang from Avatar. His character reminded me of a cross between J. Peterman from Seinfeld and "The Most Interesting Man in the World" from the Dos Equis beer commercials. Every time he appeared on screen I kept hearing, "Stay thirsty, my friends."

In short, the dialogue was ponderous, the characters and situations clichéd, the plot predictable. One of the few moments that hinted at something freakish about Terra Nova, discovered by a band of teenagers who (surprise) took a road trip beyond the colony's gates and got into trouble, was wasted by having several characters continually point it out. We get it. It's weird. Stop telling me it's weird. Have they ever heard of dramatic tension? Seeding a few clues here and there, and leaving it to the viewer to wonder, and keep tuning in?

Sorry. I'm tuning out. I'd rather watch Jurassic Park again.

Drawing Breath: A Serial Novel

Charles Dickens did it in magazines. Stephen King did it with The Green Mile. I'm very excited to announce that now I'm doing it: publishing a novel in serial installments, which you will be able to download to your favorite electronic device.

In Drawing Breath, sixteen-year-old Caitlin Kelly wants to be an abstract painter, and wants to learn from her crush-worthy upstairs neighbor, Daniel Benedetto. An artist in his mid-thirties, Daniel suffers from cystic fibrosis, a chronic and often debilitating disease that usually kills by age twenty. Although he's on borrowed time, with a sister who frets over his every move, he longs to live as normal a life as he can. And if Caitlin's mother agrees, that may include taking the girl on as a private student. Whether that's a generous act of mentoring or a recipe for disaster remains to be seen.

I'm looking forward to sharing this tale of literary suspense with you. Chapter One is now available for Kindle at Amazon.com. Chapter Two should be up by the end of this week. Installments will appear monthly (or so) after that.

Nook version to come, as well as fantastic cover art from my favorite illustrator.

More Reasons Why I Hate Your Website

A while back, I wrote a post about irritating website features. I've just done another round of heavy Internet research, and ran into more disturbing trends–not as much in the data, but in the execution. Maybe these features sounded like a good idea when you planned your website, but consider their effect on the user. Or at least on this user. Here are six more reasons why I hate your website:

1. Slideshows. Oh, how I hate slideshows. When I'm doing research, I'm on the clock. I want my information and I want it quickly. If I'm writing an article on cooking with insects, I don't want to manually scroll through 45 separate windows containing a paragraph each on different ways to serve Madagascar hissing cockroaches. This makes me not only want to leave your site and never return, but write you a nasty letter demanding a refund for all the time I wasted going through all those slides. Yes, they can be fun and entertaining. But please, either limit your slideshows to ten panes or offer the information in a quick list form.

2. Save your surveys. Imagine that I've just arrived at your home page. I'm quickly scanning the information, looking for what I need. I find the right link, and just before I'm about to click on it–Bam! The entire window fills with an invitation to take your survey. I am not happy. I don't know you, you've done nothing for me, but you're asking me how I like your business. If I approached a brick-and-mortar establishment, and a salesperson stopped me as I was opening the door to ask what they could have done to improve my shopping experience, I'd wonder what she'd been imbibing during lunch break. If you have given me information, for instance, if I've downloaded something or signed up for your newsletter, if I'd spent a lot of time on the site or was a returning customer, then I'd consider your survey invitation more seriously. Otherwise, keep it to yourself. New Balance's website, shopnewbalance.com, has this down to a science. They wait until you've bought a product to ask for your comments.

3. Readability, people! I was recently sent an HTML e-mail chock full of links. It was for something that I really wanted: a fun-filled day at ComicCon as a reward for attending a trade show last year. Unfortunately, these links were dark blue on a black background. I couldn't even read them to figure out what I wanted to click on. Prevent this from happening by sending a preview of your HTML e-mails to someone over 40 before you blast them to your entire database.

4. The geek factor. Now, I love geeks. I am 70% geek, by my estimation. Even if your website was designed by your IT department, don't make it look that way. Dead giveaways? Type that runs all the way to the edge of the windows. Lots of charts. Too many fonts and no apparent thought as to their alignment. More attention given to navigation than design. For the best combination of user appeal and user friendliness, your site should be designed by an artist who has been trained to create websites, rather than a technologist who has been trained to create art.

5. No means no.  Unless I've experienced a power failure, leaving your website requires a decision and a physical action. When, upon deciding to leave, various windows keep opening imploring that I reconsider my decision to go elsewhere, it smacks of desperation. I've made my mind up. Leave me alone. Okay, maybe I'll tolerate one reminder in case I've accidentally closed the window. After all, my software says, "Are you sure?" to my decisions throughout the day, so I'm accustomed to one bit of nagging. But that's all. I mean it. Don't make me come down there.

6. Proofread. Just because you can make changes to your website any time you wish does not excuse you from throwing it up there full of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. We're all human (gasp, even me!) and we all make mistakes. But when the errors are excessive or unfortunate—for example, "pubic" when you meant to write "public" (yes, I've seen this, in an e-book)—it makes your pages unreadable and seriously undermines your credibility. If proofreading isn't your thing, hire a professional. Otherwise, I'll be navigating somewhere else.

What are you seeing lately on the web that ticks you off? Anything going on that you especially like? Let's talk!

A Tale of Two Book Signings (and what I learned from both)

I miss Bob and Betty's Bitty Bookstore (not its real name), a small, independent bookstore that thrived for years in a nearby college town. With the advent of the mega-bookseller and the Internet, the prime real estate occupied for decades by this merchant is now a Venti-sized Starbucks.

Aside from fulfilling my desire to support locally-owned, independent stores, Bob and Betty also brought a string of "big name" authors twenty minutes from my home so I could come hear them read from their books and hopefully grab a moment of conversation or a sliver of writing advice while they signed my newly-purchased copy.

Even though I was not a published author back then and had not yet put on my first book "event," I was apparently soaking up knowledge from watching these authors, tucking it away for my first release.

Author A had been published in the New Yorker when I was still learning the proper usage of the semicolon. He rarely landed on bestseller lists, if ever, but had and still has a motivated fan base. He was a college professor by day. He had also made it his personal mission to breathe life into what was often a deadly dull exercise: the marketing of the literary novel. Therefore when he hit the road and took the improvised stage at Bob and Betty's Bitty Bookstore, he dressed less like a college professor and more like one of his students, and one who was barely hanging on by his polished-black fingernails, no less. When he read, he performed, with no trace of that studied, sing-song-y lilting thing that normally put half the audience to sleep and made the other half perturbed that they missed "American Idol" for this. During the Q&A he was engaged, interested, and gave thoughtful answers. He made eye contact. He gave each signer personal attention. When I left with my signed book, I felt important, and not just because I put a few dollars in his pocket.

Author B, a skilled and experienced writer, hit it out of the park with her first published novel. Her quirky love story plucked a nerve with the tender thirteen-year-old that resides in every woman and some men, and quickly rose to the top of many bestseller lists. Word had it that a movie was in the works. Gaggles of excited women (and the men they dragged) queued up around the corner and down the street to see and meet her. But she seemed tired. Too many cities, too many interviews and her anecdotes were shopworn. At Bob and Betty's Bitty Bookstore, she did that sing-song-y, lilting thing, but mainly sounded like she'd rather be home in bed. She appeared uninterested in the audience during the Q&A, and worse, at the signing desk, an appointed minion hustled people along. I got to ask one question and she brushed me off. When I left, I felt like something she scraped off her shoe. If not for the signature inside my book (Did she spell my name right? I wondered), I would have returned it and gotten my money back.

So…when I was preparing for my first book event (unfortunately, Bob and Betty had moved on, but I had the great luck to be supported by Tina's Tiny Bookstore, a new local venue, and again, not their real name), I did not want to be Author B. But I didn't have the experience in front of an audience to look and feel as confident as Author A. Regardless, this is what I hoped to accomplish:

1. Show up rested. I meditated and did some deep breathing before I left for the bookstore. It helped me cope with the inevitable things that would be out of my control. For one, the venue's fan was just behind where I would be reading. No big deal; I'd have to talk a little louder. Imagine how Author B might have responded to that.

2. Show up prepared…but allow spontaneity. I rehearsed. I rehearsed again. I rehearsed some more. But when the task started feeling tiresome, I stopped. Okay, when I had the floor, I was still nervous. But I did it without wetting my pants.

3. Show the audience why they're there. They didn't come to hear me flub a word or two. (Or a couple dozen.) They came to see me and buy a signed book. I vowed to try to be like Author A in this respect, and not make my audience regret missing "Minute to Win It."

Most importantly, I wanted to simply show up. Be present. This was harder; staying in the moment was like herding cats. Would we run out of books? Would I forget my character's names? Would I forget my own name? Mess up a signature? Oy. At some point it occurred to me to just enjoy and focus on the one thing in front of me. Sign a book. Answer a question. Smile. Much better.

I Will NOT Go The F**k to Sleep by Richard Crasta – A Review

I had the pleasure of meeting Richard Crasta years ago at a networking event, and if not for that meeting (because he's mainly been published in India), I might have lost out on the experience of his clever wordplay and the playful but biting satire that peppers his writing. Immediately I purchased a copy of his first and most well known book, "The Revised Kama Sutra: A Novel of Colonialism and Desire." (Buy it if you can.)

Through an accident of the Internet, our paths crossed again, though we are now living on opposite sides of the globe. And through the magic of electronic publishing, I was able to catch up on the books that I missed.

The one that caught my eye first was a book of essays titled, I Will NOT Go the F**k To Sleep, the title meant to be a satire on the recent and popular Adam Mansbach children's book that's more for parents, Go the F**k to Sleep. It is, indeed, the title of the first essay in this book, a Stewie Griffin-meets-Bart Simpson take on this command from the child's point of view. The humor continues, some essays with a political bite, some with inspired silliness, but thoroughly enjoyable.

For instance, one essay, "What You Don't Know about Bangaloring Could Hurt You," is a wisecracking look at outsourced American jobs from India's point of view. Another, "On The Trail of Sex in Kama-Land," got him censored in his homeland. Crasta also includes an especially funny excerpt from The Revised Kama Sutra, in which our hero, at a tender age and with a repressed upbringing, is disturbed to discover the assertiveness of his male appendage. "A Tale of Two Weddings" puts a satiric lens on the stereotypes many people have about Indian culture.

Crasta is funny, yes, sometimes with a Pythonesque goofiness, but often with an irreverent poke in the eye to those in power. But all good satirists, from Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain to Christopher Buckley and Bill Maher, know that humor is the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. Or, as C. K. Chesterton put it, "Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle."

Or, as Crasta writes in his introduction, "The king's jester had no sacred cows, and was the only one who could laugh at the king and not pay for it with his life–why? Because to prevent a society from going insane, it needs a band of men and women who have carte blanche, carte blanche to point out that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes, or even that black polka dots on his polka dot pants are not dots but holes."

Why You Should NEVER Trust Your Spell-Checker

It's all Maria Mariana's fault. She was one in a group of six linguists from Georgetown University who, back in the 70s, first developed an automated way to check spelling and grammar on word processing programs for IBM. Perhaps, though, she meant well. Thought it would be a good thing to create this seductive monster that can batch-attack the often time-consuming and ponderous human task of checking one's work for errors.

Backfire, Maria. Semi-total epic FAIL! Spell-check has made us lazy. It has lulled us into a false sense of security with its offers to change your grammar or correct that questionable word. We all have stories of spell-checking failure, some with embarrassing and humorous results. Here are a few more reasons you should never trust that pathetic plug-in with your important work.

1. Spell-checkers are notoriously obtuse. Consider the following passage:

My physical therapist worked out a weight-bearing routine for me that stimulates my osteoblasts, which are the cells that build new bone.

The spelling and grammar checker in my version of Microsoft Word wants to replace "stimulate" for "stimulates." It believes that the subject that is being stimulated is plural…actually, I have no plucking idea what it believes. It's just wrong.

2. Spell-checkers can't parse your intentions. Like this one:

"Pete's working again."

Spell-check suggestions for this alleged error in "subject-verb agreement" include "Pete's is working" or "Pete's was working." The writer's intention was to state that Pete is once again gainfully employed. But good old SC doesn't know this, and assumes that something of Pete's is now or formerly was functional.

3. Spell-checkers can't find missing words. "Ted raced the sink" has a rather different meaning than "Ted raced to the sink." In a long document, particularly one you've been poring over draft after draft, your brain will supply the missing word. So, you may miss it in the proofreading and lead your readers to believe Ted has been imbibing and sincerely believes he and the sink are in competition.

4. Spell-checkers can auto-correct you into situations in which you do not want to be auto-corrected. A former colleague, who normally relied upon his assistant to correct and send out his correspondence, decided to give her a break and take care of some of his own. In an e-mail that went out to the entire sales staff, he intended to ask for their opinions on a new sales program. He ended with, "I look forward to seeing your evaluation." Only, because of his less-than-stellar keyboarding skills, his spell-check program decided he meant to type "ejaculation." Yeah. It went out that way.

5. Spell-checkers won't tell you if your formatting is inconsistent. This is one reason why you should never abandon something as format-dependent as your resume solely to the eye-chips of your computer program. It won't tell you that you've ended some bullet-text items with periods and left them off others. It won't tell you a heading is in the wrong font or tabbed in too far. These sorts of things are CRUCIAL to swing by your own eyeballs, especially if the job you desire has anything to do with attention to detail.

6. Spell-checkers don't measure up to humans…at least not yet. Flawed as we are, we're still better than machines at certain tasks, like knowing what we meant to say. Don't have time to proofread or can't tell if your participles are dangling? Hire a human.

Have any good spell-checking horror stories?

The Fonts of Our Lives

Have you noticed a subtle shift in the use of typography in supermarkets lately? Probably not, because, like most people, you're more concerned about what's in the box rather than what's on the box. Or, unlike me, you have not been indoctrinated by a career in graphic design into the habit of identifying every font that you see. This especially annoys people in movie theaters when I randomly call out, "Gill Sans," or "Memphis Bold" when the opening and closing credits roll.

I've tried to stop doing that, even though I secretly wonder which is more annoying in theaters: hordes of people texting in the dark, errant ringing cell phones, or my typographical Tourette's.

Let's go back to the supermarket, shall we? Grab a cart. No, you may not have a candy bar. But take a look at that box of cereal, or crackers, or macaroni and cheese. We're going sans serif. Serifs are the little "feet" that appear on the ends of the letters. Times Roman, for example, is a serif font. Helvetica is a sans serif font. Historically, and as measured by studies of ease of reading, sans serif fonts are often used for headlines and subheads while serif fonts are often used for body copy, as they have been judged more readable in blocks. Serif fonts are really cool, in my opinion. I love the grace note they put on a character, and how various shapes and flavors denote different periods of history.

But this is not a lesson in typography. I'll save that for others who are currently working in the field, or for me, when I run out of ideas. This is more about what the Internet has been doing to our eyes, as well as our social discourse and our culture.

I've written before on what turns me off about people's websites, and some of those reasons have to do with typographical choices. But I never thought that the Internet itself, and our reading habits, could change typography. For instance, when using white text on black background (which is a total bitch for anyone who no longer has twenty-year-old eyes), serifs tend to melt into the page and disappear. They also disappear on certain types of screens. Clever marketers, studying the various screens of our lives, have seen a pattern. Extrapolating into a two-hundred-slide PowerPoint presentation unveiled at a conference in an undisclosed location (Akron, Ohio), they have deemed sans serif fonts to be old-fashioned, frumpy, and altogether the domain of "losers" who still gather their information from words printed on dead-tree pulp and would not deign to purchase an electronic reading-type device unless the price dropped below a certain level or they received one as a gift. (Or so I've been told. Now that I'm out of the field, I've been blacklisted, and even had to return my pica pole and vow to erase the secret handshake from my memory.)

Therefore, packages of crackers and cookies are now devoid of serifs, those nasty, dated, printers' nightmares, and now sport a clean, modern design, and what has been shown in focus groups to be a younger look. Never thought that buying a package of saltines can make you look younger, did you? Skip that four-hundred-dollar face cream and the Botox injections and just fill your grocery cart with Saltines and Oreos.

I feel younger already.

Review: When the Killing's Done by T.C. Boyle

Even when his subjects are arcane, for instance, historical novels about the life and work of Alfred Kinsey (The Inner Circle), or the women in Frank Lloyd Wright's life (The Women), I can always find something to love in TC Boyle's work. He is a master writer of accessible literary fiction: deep, thought-provoking stories that are readable, haunting, and often wryly humorous.

When the Killing's Done, his latest novel, centers on the flora and fauna of the Channel Islands, a grouping of islands just off of Santa Barbara. Sound dull? Heck, no. Add in a colorful cast of environmentalists, hunters, scientists, protesters, government officials, and various others just along for the ride and this becomes a brilliantly told cautionary tale about how human interference, despite its best intentions, can seriously impact our ecosystems.

The human drama circles around Dave LaJoy, a local business owner and environmentalist, who is in desperate need of anger management, and Alma Boyd Takasue, a seemingly uptight biologist who works for the National Park Service. As we learn in the first chapter, Alma is the granddaughter of a woman who became shipwrecked on one of those islands.

Alma's aim is to return the islands to their original state by "controlling" various species that have been introduced by man. This includes, at various times, a rampant overgrowth of rats, golden eagles, fennel, and wild boar. Dave's goal is to thwart the scientists and stop the killing. But like the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, he is frustrated at every turn. Eventually, his efforts end in disaster.

My only quibble—and a minor one—with this otherwise excellent work is that an intriguing scenario set up in the first chapter is not resolved. Is it important to know that Alma's grandmother was shipwrecked on the islands, therefore setting up her fascination with them? Sure. But why leave me wondering about the backstory between her grandmother's two male companions, who seemed to be locked in an epic struggle that was partially responsible for the wreck?

Or maybe he's got a sequel in the works…

While this isn't my favorite Boyle novel, it's still very good. Read it for the beautiful language, the depth of detail, and his wry and quirky sense of humor.