Dale’s Comments (group member since Sep 15, 2017)

Dale’s comments from the Navigating Indieworld Discussing All Things Indie group.

Sent mine. Thanks!

Thank you, everyone. They're doing a lymph node biopsy today, which is a surgical procedure. After she recovers from that, they think they can release her, probably over the weekend. She's doing pretty well today. The list of issues she's faced is a bit long and strange, but includes pleural effusion (fluid around the base of the lungs) and some heart issues. She's now on beta blockers and eventually will need to be on a blood thinner for the latter. The rest of it is okay for now. At this point they're just trying to figure out what's causing her issues and striking out on nearly everything they test for. As one of the doctors put it, she's an enigma. :-P

Carole wrote: "I don't know- I've read some real dogs put out by reputable publishing companies. I think Wool was Simon and Schuster."

I'm not sure people are getting what I'm saying. Maybe I'm not saying it well. (That's always possible.)

A "real dog" is to a certain degree in the eye of the beholder. I personally regard Ray Bradbury as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. But not every one of his stories is my favorite, and some people have criticized him for one thing and another. But that man could write. You cannot say that his writing was incompetent, even if you absolutely hated his stories.

I've read some indie fiction recently that I thought were great stories, but not very well written. Some of these stories, as good as they were as stories needed so much work that I feel they were nowhere near ready to be published.

I have never read Wool or the other titles mentioned here, but I'm willing to bet that they were not so badly written that they were nowhere ready to be published. They might have been wretched stories, and they might have had other sorts of flaws. But I'll bet the writing itself was at least mostly competent.

Unfortunately, that's not the case with a lot of indie publications, and I'll even include my own first two novels in that. While I don't think mine were as poorly written as some I've read, I can see now that they needed more work. It's a process, of course. It's just that before the indie revolution, that process mostly took place through long years of struggling to get one's work up to publishability, whereas now it gets shoved out into the world without anyone there to really tell the author, um, sorry, this isn't ready yet.

My only goal right now is to get my wife home from the hospital. That's sort of a writing goal, because until that happens I'm not being very organized at anything else, writing included.

I have, however, started a couple of series of posts on my blog, so one goal is to keep both going regularly, and to send out a regular newsletter to help promote them.

Another goal is to get my next novel, Ice on the Bay published. That was supposed to happen by the end of the year, but now it may slip a bit. Because my editor is my wife, and my wife is in the hospital. Domino effect . . .

Alex wrote: "The odds are that Amazon has an algorithm in place that auto deletes reviews that hit certain criteria (criteria that is unknown probably even to the majority of the people working for Amazon)."

That's certainly possible, in which case reviews that vanish when they shouldn't would be like non-spam emails that get sucked into the spam folder. :-P

Alex wrote: "I'd dispute this one, publishing houses have proven remarkably bad at knowing which book is going to be a hit."

That's true, but that wasn't really my point When they do publish something, it's been reviewed and found worthy of publication. That's not to say that everything worthy of publication is found by them, nor that everything they publish will be great. Just that what they do publish will be written reasonably well. Poor writing is weeded out by the selection process.

Since Ted isn't in it this week, I'll ask for your vote.

The stories are at https://www.indiesunlimited.com/2017/.... Mine is the first one, in the comments section.

The voting page is at https://www.indiesunlimited.com/2017/....

Please cast your vote for Dale E. Lehman. Thanks!

Question (because I have no clue about this): Is it possible to determine if reviews were intentionally removed as opposed to inadvertently lost? Being a professional software developer, I could tell you some horror stories about data going missing through human or machine error. It seems just possible to me that vanishing reviews could sometimes be errors rather than intentional, but of course there is no way to tell unless the owner of the site chooses to reveal what happened.

Great design. I agree that your name could be a bit larger. It would also be good if "Constellation Saga" could be larger. I suspect that won't be readable in thumbnails. But you don't have a lot of room down there, either. On the border, hmm, I don't think that's likely to be an issue, but I see the point. The image should bleed at least 1/4 inch beyond the trim on all sides, of course, to allow room for slight errors in the trim location.

One thing that did bother me slightly, but only after I looked at it five or six times: the lady's right elbow seems to vanish into nothing. It looks a bit weird once you notice it, because the background forest is continuous, so you expect the foreground to be continuous as well. But nobody else noticed that, so maybe it's just me.

As a one-time archer, I like the accuracy of the lady's stance and grip on the bow and the string. I'm a bit worried that if she doesn't move that left index finger before release, she might get sliced by the fletching. Ask me how I know. But I wouldn't bother changing anything regarding that in the image. I'm sure she knows what she's doing. ;-)

Matt wrote: I don't see it as a David (trad publishers) versus Goliath (Amazon) type scenario, where we're all supposed to cheer for David."

No, nor do I. There are tradeoffs in everything, and most companies will try to use their power (when they have it) to force things to get done in whatever way they see as advantageous to themselves.

At the same time, from a variety of perspectives the power that a handful of extraordinarily large, powerful corporations have seems problematic to me. If publishers didn't feel they needed Amazon, Amazon wouldn't have the power it does over them. But that's the relationship, and it's not an entirely friendly one.

I actually think there is less wrong with traditional publishing than a lot of people think. It has its strengths, among which are the facts that: (1) before a publisher will offer a contract to an author, the author's work has been reviewed by professionals and found worthy of publication, and (2) before a work is released, it has been fully and professionally edited.

The main downside to traditional publishing is only that publishers have their own programs, which does in some measure limit an author. If we write something that doesn't quite fit with anyone's program, we have nowhere to sell the work. But it's not wrong that they have their own programs, anymore than it's wrong that different homeowners have their own ideas of what color their kitchens should be.

The strength of the indie model is great freedom in storytelling, without genre boundaries and other "rules" (within reason, anyway; one generally can't effectively break the "rules" without first understanding what they are and why they exist). Its great weakness is that it allows anyone to publish anything, no matter how incompetent, and puts the onus on readers, instead of editors, of wading through the slush pile before finding the gems. I have to wonder what effect that will have on readers over the long haul. Time will tell.

Amy wrote: "Only wondered because I'm in the UK and I've read a lot of things on these groups over the months that make me wonder whether aspects of this industry are different depending on which part of the w..."

There may be some regional differences. I think we (me, too) spend too much time tying ourselves in knots over details, though. If you have something good enough to publish and you keep pushing it, it's possible to get somewhere, but it takes a lot of stamina. That's my problem. I tend to get flustered if the first three submissions go nowhere. :-P Fortunately I own my own publishing company now, so I can get books out there that way, so long as I can get them past my wife (which isn't as easy as you might think!).

I've been paid for a couple of essays in Sky & Telescope and for a couple of long-ago articles in software development journals (once in print and once online). The only fiction I've managed to get published so far is through my own company. However, I'm getting better at writing it and plan to send my SF/humor novel around to some agents to see what happens.

Genre mashups probably work better for indie writers and publishers than the big publishers, but it's entirely possible that books that don't toe the genre lines might not sell as well, which might be why the big publishers don't usually want to risk them. I dunno. Like most things, though, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. The traditional publishing model has one big benefit: those who haven't yet learned how to write well have less chance of getting published, which forces them to learn to write well if they really, really want to make the grade. The indie model lets anyone put anything out there, no matter how incompetent, which makes it harder for readers to find the good stuff.

Always trade-offs. ;-)

Amy wrote: "Speculative Fiction was a new term to me a few years back. It's not one I've ever heard my brother use. He's almost 7 years older than me and has been reading what he calls sci-fi or science fictio..."

Yeah, I'm not sure too many people ever used it. I first ran across it in the 1980's, I think, but it's probably not a category publishers much use.

Why do you think you wouldn't stand a chance submitting to a publisher? (Not that anyone ever does, given how much material publishers receive and how picky they have to be.)

Amy wrote: "What part of the world are you in Dale?"

I'm in the Baltimore suburbs. Why do you ask?

Having "grown up" as a writer largely writing science fiction, I thought I'd mention something that will, no doubt, seem very picky to many people, but might be of some small importance to anyone wanting to sell SF to a magazine or publisher that deals predominantly in that genre.

Serious SF readers and writers hate that term "sci-fi." They do.

Forrest J. Ackerman is credited with coining it as an abbreviation analogous to hi-fi (high fidelity) which was then in vogue in the sound reproduction world. But it seems it was a bit too cutesy for most aficionados of the genre, who preferred the abbreviation SF instead. In that world, sci-fi came to be regarded as a term best suited to schlock and B-movies, not serious, well-written science fiction.

SF can also stand for "speculative fiction," a broader moniker covering science fiction, fantasy, and various sub-genres that don't fit neatly into either, such as alternative history.

As a term, sci-fi has taken hold among the general public, and most people are totally unaware of this controversy. Probably most would find it idiotic. But if you're writing in that field and want to sell to serious SF publishers, it's probably something of which to be aware.

Got your email, Kay. I'll see what I can do to help promote the event . . . once I get my life back. I'm hoping that will happen sometime this week, but so far the doctors have been keeping it chained up. *grumble*

Matt wrote: "It's a race to a point near the bottom, perhaps, but not at the absolute "lower than a snake's belt buckle" bottom."

Oh, I don't disagree with any of that. But "bottom" is a relative term. Obviously no company is going to intentionally commit corporate suicide, but there are only so many ways to get to the lowest possible cost, and many of them result in sacrificing quality, be it in the writing, the editing, the physical production of a print book, the formatting of an ebook, etc.

Amazon did in fact try to force large publishers to cut prices on ebooks below what publishers felt was reasonable, and even had the gall to ask authors to pressure their publishers to capitulate. (I know because I got that email.) It took the power of a company like Hachette, the oldest and one of the largest publishers in the world, to say no to them, and that refusal came at the cost of lost sales.

To say that Amazon cares about customers more than suppliers is definitely true. But without suppliers, they wouldn't have any customers because they'd have nothing to sell. Forcing your suppliers to slit their own throats is one characteristic of a race to the bottom. A company should have a somewhat more holistic view. It's one thing to try to get the best deal. It's another to dictate terms without regard for the realities the other party must contend with.

By the by, as a small niche publisher, I know something about dealing with Amazon. I don't sell print books through them because their non-negotiable terms would require me to take a loss unless I managed to publish a book that sells significantly better than any I've yet published. B&N I can at least deal with. But I sell more books directly and through a couple of specialty distributors than I do through either retailer.

Amy wrote: "I'd change the whole lot if I was using a different name."

There are plenty of successful authors who have written cross-genre under their own names. I'm not planning on changing my name for my SF/humor novel even though so far I've only published mysteries. However, I can see the point of doing it in some cases. It may make sense for you. Then again, if your original novels didn't get much traction, it might not matter too much. Short version: I dunno . . .

I've heard some pretty weird pseudonyms. Personally, I like my own weird name. ;-)

I don't really have an issue with winter, although my son-in-law had a problem with SAD at one time. I don't know how he copes with it now, but I don't sense it's that much of an issue for him anymore. I think having sufficient lighting in the house is important, however.

One of the great things about winter is the night sky. Some of the most brilliant parts of the sky are up on winter nights: the band of sky from Cassiopeia to the north through Persius, Auriga, Gemini, Orion, and Canis Major is stunning, even if you live under considerable light pollution. Okay, it can be cold out, but bundle up and have a look some clear night in December or January or February!

Faith wrote: "Anya wrote: "flood with it. But neither would medical dossiers and..."

Normally, it would be better to avoid starting a sentence with a conjunction. It's okay to do it perhaps once in a book, at t..."

Eh. It depends. I do it with some frequency (more than once per novel), but generally I agree, with the exception of in dialogue. You can get away with having a character talk that way regularly (but maybe no more than one).