Ugh

Well, since I was feeling better I figured I'd better do some real-life crud first--namely, TAXES. Hopefully that's all done with.

I did do a little something for Trang today: I received some copies I ordered to be sent off for reviews, so I packaged those up, plus I contacted some review blogs that are OK with self-published science fiction. So hopefully something will come up there.

Oh, and I also e-mailed Amazon about linking the various editions, and they say that they're on that. Of course, the immediate result was that the search results got all screwed up, but I'm sure that will get fixed.

In which I prognosticate and possibly look like a major ass

I don't have any particular insider status into publishing, and when I was younger, I used to let that hold me back. I'd be working for a particular publishing house, and I'd be wondering how the hell we were going to stay in business, because I couldn't see how we were going to make money. Then I'd realize that I was just a young lady without much experience who didn't know anything and that the people running the place had much more experience and surely had everything under control.

And then the business would collapse, and I would be out of a job.

Once, when I worked for an encyclopedia, the entire industry collapsed. There we were, selling sets of encyclopedias for $1,000, and Microsoft was throwing in a set of encyclopedias on CDs for free whenever you bought a computer. Those CDs, by the way, were simply lifted off print encyclopedias, so we were like, These are an inferior product! But for free...? Versus $1,000...? Yeah, to save $1,000 you'll deal with Wikipedia's quirks. Plus now that the Internet is so robust, if you know what you're doing, you can find much better information on-line than you ever could in an encyclopedia--I still have the set they gave me when I worked there, but I almost never use it.

Was the collapse of the encyclopedia industry bad? Well, it sucked for me at the time (although getting laid off for the second time in sixth months inspired me to stop screwing around in editorial and go to journalism school), but as someone who looks stuff up pretty frequently, I freely admit that what replaced it was much better.

I think a similar thing is going to happen in publishing. I look at Trang, and you can buy it for $15, or you can buy the exact same book for $3. I just don't see a bright future for that $15 book. In addition, I make the same amount of money either way, so I have no motivation to try to limit your access to that $3 book--save yourself $12! Please!

Of course, in many cases you're not getting the exact same book--you're getting a self-published book instead of a traditionally-published book. You can talk about how special traditionally-published books are and about how hard editors work sifting through all the dreck on the slush pile, but for a 99-cent book, people will forgo the pleasure of fancy covers and will do their own spadework. Nobody cared about how hard we worked to make those $1,000 encyclopedia sets--they just cared that they cost $1,000, and other means of obtaining similar (albeit not identical) information did not.

Will print books vanish? Not in a hurry. But if print-on-demand publishers can profit (and make authors profit) from those 5,000-copy (or 500-copy, or 50-copy) book runs while traditional publishers cannot, the companies producing those print books will quickly change.

I think there still will be commercial publishing houses, but they will be both smaller and more profitable. That's because everybody will self-publish first. Sell over a certain amount? A publishing house will come to you and say, Wanna be in Target? Wanna be in airport bookstores? It will be a safer business for them, although a much smaller one, because by the time a house identifies a top seller, there's not much left to be done for it. They won't own a huge chunk of the rights, because all they're doing is extending the print reach of the book. And as more people own e-readers, fewer will be picking up books from the drug store, so even that value will shrink.

I predict a lot of blood on the floor for everyone in the publishing industry--in particular, I don't hold out much hope for smaller houses--but I think the people who are good at book editing and design will find new careers: They will sell services to authors who are self-publishing. There will still be a need for high-quality beta reading, line editing, copy editing, cover design, art design, and formatting services. Teaching writing will become an even-more viable profession as writing itself becomes more profitable. The major problem with self-publishing services nowadays is that they attract sleazy people hoping to take advantage of the naive and delusional, so some kind of professional organization with a code of ethics and standards is probably necessary. In addition, certain editors could essentially function as brands, much like certain publishing houses and imprints do today.

And clearly, if I'm churning out long posts like this one, I'm feeling better and need to get back to work!

5,000 units

Just to expand a bit on yesterday's post: When I first went to work in publishing, my employer kept copies of Publisher's Weekly in the break room. Publisher's Weekly is the industry magazine--emphasis on industry. Interested in writing and literature? Publisher's Weekly is not for you. Interested in how the ever-fluctuating price of paper is affecting profit margins? You've found your read.

Indeed, Publisher's Weekly displayed at times quite a bit of resentment toward writers, who were generally seen as a bunch of whiny prima donnas who would occasionally do horrible things like switch publishers to get a better contract. (Remember: It's OK for publishers to be focused on the bottom line--it's just business. But writers should be above that sort of thing.)

I remember in particular an opinion piece whining about writers who whine about publishers. The guilty writer in question was a poet. He was complaining that publishers don't promote writers enough, and his last book, the woman who wrote the piece pointed out, had sold a mere 5,000 copies. In what other industry, she asked, are you expected to bust your ass marketing a product that sells only 5,000 units?

At the time I was fresh enough out of college, where I had majored in English literature, to be shocked and somewhat angered by the books-are-just-widgets mentality. (I am paraphrasing the piece from memory, but yes, she did refer to poetry as a "product" that in this case sold 5,000 "units.") On the other hand, I had to admit that she had a point--spend too much money on something that inherently has a pretty limited appeal, and you will be out of business very soon. From a business perspective, why would anyone be interested in a book that sold only 5,000 copies?

Fast forward to today. If the poet had sold 5,000 copies of his book as a $3 e-book on Amazon, he'd make $10,000 off it--not a fortune, but definitely a nice addition to the income he gets from his grants and his teaching gig. (And I'm sure $10,000 is quite a lot more than the guy actually made from his book back in the early 1990s.) Amazon would make a mere $5,000, but Amazon is set up to chase the "long tail"--to cheaply market, say, ukulele books to ukulele enthusiasts and poetry books to poetry enthusiasts--so they can make money off books that don't sell tons of copies.

This I think shows how dramatically the publishing business is changing. Selling 5,000 units is no longer something to be scorned--people and certain corporations can make money doing it.

Keeping expectations realistic

I am feeling better, and I should begin revising the historical biography proposal and/or my description of Trang tomorrow. (Today I bought a new ball and checked out the last new book on the subject of my historical biography--this one was very academic, so now I can continue in good conscience.)

But I'm going to toss out one last cranky, sinus-headache-induced rant about perceptions of self-publishing. It seems that whenever someone posts about the success they've had as a result of the current self-publishing environment, someone else feels obligated to comment: But don't you want to be James Patterson? Don't you want to be J.K. Rowling? Don't you want to be Stephen King? Don't you want to be Danielle Steele?

Don't you wish you were Tinkerbell and could fly and had a magic wand? Doesn't the fact that you're not Tinkerbell and can't fly and don't have a magic wand mean that any success you have had isn't actually worth anything, and you might as well go kill yourself right now?

Honest to Pete, talk about missing the damned point. The exciting aspect of self-publishing these days is that writers can make decent money without having to sell a gazillion bazillion copies--which, for the record, is something not a lot of writers have ever done or are ever going to do. I am less excited by the fact that some self-published authors have had tremendous success than I am about the fact that an author could make a decent living just selling a few thousand copies of each one of their titles. That is new. And that's what should excite people.

Speaking of cats and writers

Mine just popped my ball chair as I was sitting in it. That is all.

Speaking of covers

This has nothing to do with anything, but I'm reading some of the Philipe K. Dick works in this anthology, and the cover cracks me up. It's Dick, holding a cat, which ought to be cute except that 1. he is holding it with its front paws crossed, which is basically a straitjacket hold, and 2. that cat is PISSED. It is PISSED and it is EYEING HIM like it's thinking, BASTARD! The VERY SECOND you let my paws go, I AM CLAWING YOU TO DEATH!!!

More thoughts on marketing

So, between Amanda Hocking and Joe Konrath, there's quite a bit of advice on how to market.

1. They both rely a lot on book bloggers. This is another way to get reviews: You give copies of your book to people who post unpaid reviews on their blogs. They also often post the reviews on Amazon or B&N.com as well, which would be helpful.

The downside? I've read that it's considered a little crass to just jump in and say, "Wanna review my book?" Instead you're supposed to insinuate yourself into the community, commenting on this and that, and then pop the question. Considering how hesitant I was to do that to people I actually know, I don't think I'd be comfortable with that. I think what I'll do is search around until I find someone who seems to enjoy adventure sci-fi, and then just ask in an up-front, I-think-you'll-enjoy-this-book sort of way, not so much in a let's-pretend-I'm-your-friend sort of way.

(I should note that I am a little ambivalent about marketing. Both Hocking and Konrath earn a living from their novels; I don't. That said, I do want to give my book a good shot at finding an audience just on general principle. I don't care about becoming a best-seller or anything, but let's face it, if I didn't care about readers at all, I would just be journaling. And I would be a much crappier writer.)

2. Konrath likes to experiment with pricing. Both Hocking and Konrath think it's important to keep e-book prices low--I tend to agree, because all the e-reader owners I know are like, I just spent $100 on this thing, I'm not going to spend $15 apiece on the books for it! Also, given the royalty structure if you self-publish, you're making as much money off a $3 e-book as you would off a $15-$20 hard copy, so it just seems greedy to make the e-book really expensive.

But how low to go? You can go down to 99 cents, which Konrath is playing with. It's a big step because on Amazon, you get a 70% royalty if it's $2.99, but only a 35% royalty below that, so you have to sell a lot more to compensate for the loss in revenue. I think that's an experiment that might be well worth doing when Trust comes out: Drop the price of the first book in the series to 99 cents and use that as a hook into the rest.

3. Both think the cover is super-important! Yeah, again with the cover. I feel like at this point, my cover is not so bad graphically, but of course the actual cover illustration is worthy of Museum of Bad Art. And by shrinking the illustration down to hide the fact that I draw like a six-year-old with a neuromuscular disorder, the cover winds up looking less like its genre peers.

So I think I am going to hire an artist eventually. Not right now, because that's not going to be cheap, and also it might be good to have the same person do both Trang and Trust so that they look consistent. Also, you could argue that for every hot e-book with a really good cover, there's a hot e-book with a really amateurish cover, so maybe the cover doesn't matter. But maybe it does, and it would just be less embarrassing to have a good cover (although if my cover illustration actually gets inducted into MOBA, I'll be very happy indeed). Since a lot of self-published writers credit their artists, I'm reasonably confident I can find someone with an appropriate style, and I have a general notion at this point of what such an artist might charge.

4. Konrath thinks the book description is super-important. And his examples are really inspiring. One thing it didn't even occur to me to do was to have an "about the author" section in the description. It feels a little weird to me to trot out qualifications when talking about a freaking science fiction book, but on the other hand I think the awards and whatnot will help separate me from the people who don't take writing seriously.

Plus, revising the book description is free. So that's an easy one--I'll do that this week.

Poverty is a barrier

Since I've been unable to do much real work lately, I've been reading around some more about self-publishing. And there's been this unsurprising-yet-irritating conclusion that, if self-publishing becomes dominant, it will be a bad thing, because it will allow more writers to make a living writing what they want to write.

Horrible fate, no? Writers could pay the rent and buy groceries by happily producing goods that people want to buy. Awful, awful. Bad for writers, bad for readers, bad for America.

The idea basically is that by jumping through all those hoops to get published, writers become better writers, and if they didn't, they wouldn't. Once again there is the underlying assumption that commercial success and quality of work are the same thing, which of course is why The DaVinci Code was described by The New York Times as "Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence." Frankly, I think that you are either someone who thinks it's important to write well, in which case you'll work at it no matter what, or you're not, in which case you won't.

But the other, more pernicious assumption that is that writers aren't supposed to concern themselves with money. Writers starve in garrets, right?

Does starving sound like fun to you? How about starving while living in substandard housing, which is what a garret is? Nonetheless, many young writers start out thinking that they don't need to worry about money, an attitude that typically lasts until they try to move out of their parents' homes. The other people who share that attitude are the unscrupulous bastards (and there are many) who will have you write for them, SELL your writing FOR MONEY (because they're not supposed to starve to death, you are), and then not pay you for it. If you get upset about being stolen from, well then, you obviously aren't very serious about being a writer, are you? Shame on you!

But while that's annoying, the real issue is that most people aren't naive: They know what poverty is, and they have no interest in experiencing it. They want a house. They want children. They want to eat on a regular basis. So they don't become writers. They become lawyers, or write press releases, or work in advertising. If they are particularly hard-core, they do what I did: They become editors or reporters, accepting a substantially lower income in exchange for doing something that is somewhat closer to the writing they actually want to do. But they don't do creative writing.

And who can blame them? It's a pretty harsh exchange: You can either make a living, or you can write fiction. When I decided to focus on creative writing I: 1. Moved away from New York City (it's expensive to live there), 2. arranged my new life so that my housing expenses would be minimal, and 3. went from working full-time to working part-time. That's what it took, and even so I had to do things like take a year off my writing to do paying work.

The other common way to do this is to work full-time and write on the side. It seems to me like a lot of people who do this work "full-time"--they're paid to work a 40-hour week, but the job is so unchallenging, or they do it so half-assedly, that they knock off their work duties by noon and spend their afternoons writing. I honestly don't see the fabulous benefits of that arrangement: I'm sure the writers would rather not have to show up at some office in the first place, and I'm sure the employers would rather have employees who aren't just doing the bare minimum to keep from getting fired.

And to be blunt, most of the people I know who write on the side don't write as well as they could, especially if they have more-challenging jobs. If you're getting up at 4 am to write because the kids wake up at six, and you don't get to bed until 11 pm--well, I salute you if you can be on that schedule and crank out anything that is even remotely coherent, because I couldn't. And I hate to point it out, but "remotely coherent" isn't the same thing as good. It takes time to produce good writing, especially good novel-length writing--time to write, and lots of time to revise. When you write on the side, it usually shows--but of course for most people it's either write on the side, or don't write at all.

If the economic penalties for focusing on creative writing weren't so severe, I honestly think it would improve the writing out there. More people--educated people who have other career options--would be willing to write, because writing wouldn't be the sure-fire path to destitution. More writers would almost assuredly mean more mediocre books, but more writers and more books would also increase the likelihood that some real gems will turn up. People would have more time to work on their writing: Someone who churns out mediocre crap but has literary ambitions could afford to take the time to improve.

In addition, writers could get more experience, because their failures wouldn't be so catastrophic. If a book flops, it wouldn't mean that the writer's publisher drops them and they never write again--they could learn from that experience and move on in their writing careers, just like people do in most other careers.

OMFG

I was planning to spend the evening reading one of the new books on the subject of the historical biography I plan to write. I was a little worried, because there's always a possibility that I will sit down and read the exact book I want to write. And then I will have no choice but to throw up the project altogether--which is what happened to the very first novel I wrote after I read Of Human Bondage.

This book didn't look very threatening--in fact, it looked self-published (but it wasn't, which is just sad). But you never know: Look in any academic library, and you'll find many really crappy-looking but perfectly respectable print-on-demand books that happen to be on obscure topics. So, I sat down, opened it up, and--

it's a novelization!

WTF? Nowhere on the cover does it say that this is fiction. "Inspired by a true story?" No. "Based on real events?" No. Obviously geared to children? No.

You open it up, and it's nonexistent dialog, handy tertiary characters, imagined drama...sold as nonfiction.

This, this, this crap, this inexcusable! unethical! crap! is why I want to write a book on this subject. We're not talking about George Washington here. There aren't a thousand well-researched, yet entertaining and accessible, books about this person to balance out this fictionalized piece o' shite. There are 1. obscure academic works, and 2. cheap hack jobs like this one. And believe me, this historical person is the most interesting person ever! His life deals with momentous social change! I have yet to explain who he is to someone and have the person respond with anything other than, "Wow! That sounds like a great book! I want to read that!" The editors who rejected it want to read it! And THIS is what's out there--fucking fake fictionalized fairy tales. God help me.

Uf

Today was a day spend messing around with passwords, fiddling with files, uploading files, checking files, etc., etc., etc. A pain with this stupid sinus infection, but it's all good news: Smashwords should put Trang in Apple's iBookstore fairly soon and the Sony Reader store shortly after that, and in a little while you should be able to read a tantalizing chunk of Trang on Amazon (as well as searching inside to, I dunno, count how many times the word "dogfucker" is used or something), and they've got the descriptions up, too.

Wise beyond her years

I'm reading Amanda Hocking's blog--she's a successful self-published writer, and all of 26 years old. She makes a good point here about something that I think people worry about unnecessarily: There's no reason to worry that you'll alienate traditional publishers if you sell a lot of copies self-publishing. On the contrary, if you are successsful, you'll have more appeal because you will have established a track record for yourself as a writer who sells a lot of books.

This has always been true. Heard of Bridges of Madison County or What Color Is Your Parachute? Self-published, sold a lot copies, picked up by a publishing house. Terry McMillan? A self-published author who sold a lot of books and got a contract with a major house. The so-called stigma of self-publishing didn't apply, because there was money to be made. The real stigma with self-publishing was that self-published books tended not to sell well. That could be because of quality issues, or it could be because the book's topic was esoteric, or it could be because the book's author lacked access to a major distributor and wasn't willing to hand-sell out of the back of their car the way McMillan did.

I think people who worry about "stigma" are once again forgetting that publishing is an industry that needs to sell a lot of books, not some sort of quality-control board for an academic literary salon.

(For the record, J.A. Konrath thinks you shouldn't worry about alienating traditional publishers anyway, because nowadays you can make more money self-publishing.)

The hard copies are up!

Whoo-hoo! Trang is up on Amazon, as is the large-print edition! Whoo! Look at that page with all of them on it!

Yay!!! Boy, I'm glad that's all taken care of!

I don't know why when you look up one edition, it doesn't automatically link you to the others, though. I'll see if that fixes itself, or if I need to e-mail somebody over there about it.

I was going to experiment with sponsored results, but it seems that Amazon doesn't run that program any more (that article is actually quite old). I have signed on as an author on Amazon, though, and I'm going to enable their "Search Inside the Book" feature as soon as everything goes through.

I'm still sick. I didn't even get any reading done. (ETA: After posting this, I did get some reading done. I am ever unpredictable.) Today my big accomplishment was that I got groceries, and frankly, even that was a bit much. But I'm happy the books are up!

I am not alone!

Oh, go read this guest post by Jon Merz on Joe Konrath's blog. He got told "the world needs Jon F. Merz's voice" in the course of a rejection. See? It's not just me!

Also, you'll note the arbitrary way his first publisher treated him--business considerations mattered less than the fact that the agent he fired was all palsy-walsy with his editor. That doesn't surprise me--publishing is a VERY small world, and people in that little club can have far more influence than you might expect. My first agent dropped my historical biography because an assistant of his had taken a class and become enamored with a crackpot theory on the topic. So the only way to write the book was to focus it on this crackpot theory, despite the fact that, hello, there is very little evidence to support it and a great deal of evidence to the contrary. I actually do take journalism quite seriously, and I'm not going to write a book that I think is a lie, period, and I'm especially not going to do it to make some boneheaded assistant happy. Need I add that the agent, who initially LOVED the proposal, had decades of experience in the industry, while his assistant had very little and was, in fact, leaving publishing? But it didn't matter that she was credulous and ignorant and inexperienced--she was in the club, so her opinion mattered most of all. (Oh, and when I finally got an agent who was willing submit the proposal to editors, guess how many decided to pass on the book because it didn't focus on the crackpot theory? None. Not a one. Thank you.)

Sinus infections are the mother of invention

All right, I am officially Too Sick To Write. That's annoying to me, because I'm finally really and truly done with Trang and ready to start on Trust, so it's the perfect time to get so sick it took me a solid two minutes to put the cap back on my pen.

But I don't want to just sit around, coughing and fouling handkerchiefs, so I think I'm going to update my proposal for the historical biography. I know I'm all, "Yay self-publishing!" these days, but the thing is about my historical biography is that it's a Serious Book. Like, a really, truly, Serious, Important-Type Book. It's not like Trang, which aspires only to be entertainment. If Trang appears to have been written by a crackpot (which you know it was), who cares? It's about aliens and space Marines, and anyone who thinks that they are actually an expert on those two topics is by definition insane. But a Serious Book about a Serious Topic I think deserves a Serious Publisher, if only so that people don't assume it's the rantings of a crackpot (which in that case, it isn't, because I'm actually quite careful to keep my nonfiction, you know, not fictional).

Since that Serious Publisher won't be a commercial house, that means an academic press. So, I need to do two things: 1. read through anything new that's been published on the topic since I gave that proposal to that agent two years ago, and 2. revise the proposal. The proposal especially needs to be revised because in it, I disparage the books produced by academic presses on this topic as totally dull and lacking appeal to most readers (which they are, but I obviously need to rephrase that sentiment so that it's less insulting to people who work for such presses). That's good order to move in as I (hopefully) recover from this stupid illness--first I read, which is not so taxing, and after a few days of that, presumably I'll feel well enough to revise.

I've had this in my head ever since I drew up the schedule on my Web site and realized that my due date on this is 2015. Given that it apparently takes two years for people to reject things these days, they'll bounce it back to me with a letter saying that it's totally awesome, they loved it to pieces, they're looking forward to reading it, and they can't publish it in early 2014, which will give me plenty of time to make that deadline publishing it on my own. In fact, I should probably quote the rejection letters on the back cover, except that I don't remember who wrote what.

A whole new world

So, Joe Konrath's most recent blog post is about his experiment with dropping the price on one of his books to 99 cents. It's fascinating.

OK, it's fascinating to me, the ex-business-reporter weenie. What's really fascinating is that Konrath is dealing with a buying public whose behavior he can't predict--that's why he has to conduct these experiments. Will e-book buyers act like regular book buyers? No one knows!

One thing is obvious: Book publishing is in the midst of enormous change. Thanks to new technology, e-books and even print-on-demand books are really cheap to produce. This is hurting traditional booksellers (which shouldn't shock me: I used to work in the encyclopedia industry, which was basically eliminated by first CDs and then the Internet). Writers, however, can make money--Konrath reports that he is making $187 a day off his 99-cent book, which is on Amazon, which isn't exactly going under selling 99-cent books, either.

Which is why stuff like this is so off the mark--this person, who no big surprise, sells services to self-published writers, thinks that to be "competitive" you have to cough up more than $40,000 to produce a book.

Let's turn our heads away from the fact that, duuuude, if you want people to buy stuff from you, you're opening line should not be, "Wanna go bankrupt?" Let's ignore the fact that you can spend all the money you want on a review package, and the major media outlets still won't review a self-published book. And let's not focus on the fact that people like Konrath and Karen McQuestion have done very well for themselves spending waaaaaaay less than $40K.

Isn't that $40K in start-up and promotion costs exactly what is wrong with traditional publishing?

I mean, let's say it's really vital to me that I break even on Trang (it's not). Given my start-up costs and that ad I bought, I need to sell, what, 450 copies of Trang to make back that money? Compared to 20,000 copies if I were "competitive"? With that kind of spending, it's no wonder a writer at a major house will not get a new contract if their sales are south of 30,000 copies.

Who the fuck am I supposed to be "competitive" with here? And what am I competing for? If the competition is to avoid Chapter 11, I'd say I'm already ahead. If the competition is to, I dunno, outsell J.K. Rowlings or something--with my non-commercial science-fiction book that lacks an alpha-male hero and features lots of bad language--then what I really need to do with that $40K is to plow it into therapy in hopes that one day I will become less delusional. Or maybe I pile it up in my back yard and set it on fire--that would work about as well, and I'd get more enjoyment out of it.

Anyway, yes, I need to stop reading provocative blog posts and get to work on Trust. That "something" I was coming down with is apparently a sinus infection, though, so we'll see how productive I am....

Whoot!

The proof of Trang arrived and looks good, so I have approved it! Both editions should be up on Amazon pretty soon. I also signed on to Google Books--I realized that instead of creating a massive, unmanageable Web page by putting the first half of Trang on marysisson.com, I could just put a note on there with a link to Google Books explaining that you can read even more for free there. (I could also link to Smashwords, but I worry that it would piss off Amazon and Barnes & Noble.) Anyway, that should be up shortly as well.

Ugh, I'm so tired--a long day of real-life crap, plus I think I'm coming down with something. But I have hot water now, yay!

Some interesting blogs

So, I still don't love Twitter, and yet I am finding it extremely useful. I'm following the Twitter feeds of some people who are interested in self-publishing. Not shockingly, it turns out that most people who are interested in self-publishing are interested in making money from it, and not necessarily by writing self-published works--they want to sell services to writers who want to self-publish, which obviously doesn't automatically make them dodgy, but it pays not to be too trusting.

Nonetheless, they are, indeed, following trends and stories and offering advice and whatnot, and through them I have found this really interesting blog by Joe Konrath, who is a traditionally-published-turned-self-published writer. He's also an evangelist for self-publishing (especially e-publishing), but what's nice about him is that he's willing to talk numbers and even conduct experiments in pricing with his own books to see what happens. His openness has allowed another blogger interested in e-books named Dave Slusher to write this analysis of how Konrath's can optimally price his books to maximize revenues. So that's all pretty cool, and very informative and useful to authors considering self-publishing in this day and age.

Barnes & Noble also struggling

Their problems aren't as bad as Borders', but Barnes & Noble just suspended its dividends. If you don't know what a dividend is, when you buy a share of stock, you can make money one of two ways: The stock can go up, and you sell at a profit; and/or you get a dividend, which is a share of the company's profits paid out every quarter. Not all stocks pay dividends, but most investors like them because it's a regular income, meaning that if you have enough stock, you can actually live off dividends and don't have to work; and because with dividends you're less dependent on the crazy ups and downs of the stock market to make money--you could actually sell a share of stock for less than you paid for it and still come out ahead, because all the while you were holding that stock you received dividend payments.

So eliminating a dividend means that a fair number of your investors will immediately sell your stock and not buy it again until you reinstate it. It's a big move made by companies that are in a lot of trouble--which is why B&N was actually borrowing money to pay dividends before now (also not a good sign). They say that they are suspending their dividend to have more money to plow into the Nook and e-books. In other words, even if this gamble pays off, it will pay off because B&N will no longer be as reliant on bookstore sales. And even B&N executives are not trying to spin the Borders bankruptcy as a positive for their company. None of this bodes well for traditional bookstores....

Thoughts on marketing

So, you know how I was joking about procrastinating by working on the house? Well, apparently my hot-water heater is not to be trifled with, because it was sufficiently enraged by that joke and by my working on other parts of the house that it shorted out. It's dead, and judging from the scorch marks, it did its level best to burn the rest of the house down with it. Lovely.

Real life sucks! On to marketing! That's an issue with self-published books, because a major marketing tool for books is reviews, and most reviewers won't touch books that don't come from a publishing house. I have found three Web sites that review SF and that apparently do accept self-published books for review, although they're pretty up-front that your chances of actually getting reviewed are not high. (That's true any place--that journal I interned at did reviews, and they probably received 20 books for each one they reviewed. Of course, some of the books were laughably inappropriate: If you have a book on Marilyn Monroe's "murder" that was written by a team of psychics, it's probably not going to be reviewed by a hoity-toity journal, OK?) That's fine--I'm willing to pony up to buy and mail out three copies of Trang for a chance at a review, because if I get one I can excerpt it at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The other traditional marketing thing that I have done is buy an ad. Yes, I've bought an ad--I feel like such an entrepreneur. We shall see how this works, because ad buys can get very expensive very quickly. I started small, with an ad in the program of Norwescon, because it 1. is a large con, 2. is a more-literary con, 3. had pricing information on its Web site, and 4. wasn't that expensive ($100). The con takes place April 21-24, so I'll see then if there's a bump in Web traffic and sales. If it gets reasonably close to paying for itself, I'll try other con programs, plus I'm thinking of doing an on-line ad at Locus magazine's Web site. (If I'm just dying to spend more money, I could buy sponsored results on Amazon, although it doesn't sound that promising for a novel. OTOH, that guy did go for very general search terms: "communism"? "Reagan"? How many people searching those terms are looking for a vampire novel? "Brian Lumley" worked better--I'd probably do "Vorkosigan" and "Bujold," since I think those books are closest in spirit to Trang.) (ETA: It turns out you can't do this anymore anyway.)

Obviously I am hoping that sites like Amazon will basically market Trang for me. That approach has the considerable advantage of being free, although I do wonder how much "you get what you pay for" applies. Smashwords has a really annoying marketing guide (it should be titled, Promote Smashwords!), but the site does recommend something that I at first thought was crazy but now think is a good idea for a novel: Make the first 50% of your book available as a free sample. That's pretty savvy (although I don't think I'd do it for nonfiction, where people are more likely to just look up what they want and then go on their way), because someone who makes it halfway through a narrative story is probably really hooked. In fact, I may add more chapters to the Trang excerpt on my Web site, although that page is pretty damned unwieldy as it is.

Anyway, after I approve the hard copy I think I'm going to sign on to Google Books. That's something I've kind of gone back and forth on: I thought that signing up for that would put you on the Espresso Book Machine, but it won't, and it turns out that there just aren't that many of those machines, so I probably shouldn't worry about it anyway. There are some issues with Google Books: They don't list what your royalty rate will be if you sell e-books on their site, which isn't promising, and if you want to link to a site where people can buy the book, you can't link to a site like Amazon--you have to be selling your book on your site, which I don't. But I don't actually have to sell through them or link to a sale site: Just partnering with them will likely boost your Google page ranking (nice and incestuous, that), and you can offer free sample chapters of your book...say, the first 50% of it? Hopefully anyone who reads all the way through the first half of Trang is someone who likes it enough to actually look up where to buy it. Either that, or they are someone who seriously needs to work on their time-management skills.

The last freebie-marketing thing I was thinking about doing was going on Twitter. Twitter has never had any real appeal for me, and I'm not crazy about the 140-character limit. But I could essentially Twitter-fy this blog--in fact, right off the bat I could just tweet a bunch of links to specific blog entries and hash-tag them as #self-publishing or something. (ETA: OK, I'm on there as mary_sisson--that didn't take long. I think I'll tweet an old entry a day for a bit.)

So, am I ever going to get off my ass and start working on Trust? Honestly, probably not until later this week, at which point I hopefully will have hot water and be able to wash my (increasingly gross) hair. Fingers crossed....

What you can learn from porn

This is a funny video called, "So You Want To Be a Novelist," but I think it's a little naive. I agree that it's great fun to laugh at people who think of writing as a way to make lots of money, but the person who wrote it clearly thinks Quality Literature = Bestselling Status, and it will not shock you to hear that I disagree.

One specific check to the would-be bestselling author's ambitions is that "your characters are as one-dimensional as the ones in a pornographic movie." You know what sells well? Porn. And when has having one-dimensional characters ever hurt sales of non-porn? I have just finished reading Twilight, a monster bestseller that has been roundly criticized for featuring not just one, but two lead characters who lack anything approaching multiple dimensions.

That criticism is certainly valid: Bella is clumsy. Edward is perfect. Bella loves Edward because he is perfect. Edward loves Bella because she is clumsy. This has led to some angry ranting about the book's gender roles, which will presumably result in a generation of women who think that falling down and nearly getting killed all the time is a sure-fire way to meet Mr. Right. But I used to write jacket copy for paperback romances, and 99% of them have this setup. The woman has zero self-esteem, and the guy is perfect: Rich without being spoiled, good-looking without being vain, brave without being cruel, compassionate without being wimpy, and more than willing to perform unreciprocated oral sex on this woman who enthralls him for no discernible reason.

In other words, it's fantasy. It's fantasy the exact same way porn is fantasy: In romance novels, conventionally-attractive men delight in giving homely women exactly what they want; in porn (at least straight porn), conventionally-attractive women delight in doing the same to equally homely men. The idea is that you, Joe or Jane Average, can appeal to a real winner despite (and this is key) not putting forth effort. You don't have to work at anything--you don't have to tend to your looks, you don't have to be likeable, you don't even have to work up the nerve to ask the person out. You don't have to be Angelina Jolie or George Clooney. You just deliver the pizza or show up to school, and Sexy Perfection Fabulousa will throw him or herself at you. You won't be able to keep him or her away!

There are other fantasies, but most monster bestsellers that I've read hit the wish-fulfillment buttons pretty damned hard. (Some of the funniest bits in How I Became a Famous Novelist are when he's cynically trying to figure out how to hit those buttons.) In most cases, the result is a book that's predictable and forgettable (and maybe a little pathetic).

But not always. The whole Fair Unknown motif, where a seeming Joe Average nobody turns out to be both of noble birth and awesome, has had an entirely respectable and popular run in literature, most recently with the Harry Potter books. Other children's books like the Chronicles of Narnia or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler are big on fantasies of autonomy: The kids are separated from their parents, but they survive without any problem and wind up doing totally awesome stuff. Right now, I'm reading Dorothy Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey books: While what hooked me in Whose Body? was the unexpected departure from the fabulously-wealthy-playboy fantasy, the fact remains that Wimsey thinks nothing of dropping a gazillion dollars on antique books and fine sherry, or running off to Venice on a whim, and that has a certain lifestyle-porn appeal.

So it's possible to have your cake and eat it, too. But don't ignore the mass appeal of porn--we have an Internet today because of it.

ETA: There is, by the way, an economic argument for writing good-quality literature: If it's good, people will continue to buy it, and if it's really good, it will wind up in course curricula, and you will have a captive group of students who are literally required to buy your book every year whether or not they want to, without you spending a dime on marketing. But that's different from producing some big bestseller, and it's a market with its own restrictions (such as a bias toward Serious Literature).