I went over through chapter 21--for whatever reason, the chapters in this part of the book are long, so that's actually a good deal of work.
I haven't really been getting the B tasks done, though, and there's other crap I need to do that I haven't been getting to. I think part of it is that I've been writing these huge blog posts--obviously, I find the subject as interesting as hell, but I probably need to pare back....
When I was a business reporter, in addition to enjoying covering entrepreneurs, I liked covering retail (and yes, there is considerable overlap between the two). The nice thing about retail is that you can see how it works, even if you don't realize at first glance what it is you're seeing.
One thing that baffles people at first glance is when they see, say, a Chinese restaurant open up, and then another opens up across the street, and a third opens two doors down, and a fourth opens one block over. They think, Oh, that must be bad for the first guy!
But it's usually not. If you have a bunch of Chinese restaurants in the same area, you have a district! The Chinese-food district! Got a hankering for Chinese? You'll go there, and then you'll look around and pick a place--the first place is really fancy, the second place just does take-out, the third specializes in seafood, and the fourth does spicy Sechuan.
Being located together helps all four restaurants.
It also helps that the restaurants don't all have the exact same menu or ambiance. They're not actually in competition, even if it seems that way at first glance. If you're in your sweats and just want something quick, you're going to go to the take-out place, not the fancy place. There may be some overlap (the fancy place probably carries some seafood, for example), but not a lot.
Each has a niche to serve.
Niches are key to retailers. Wal-Mart has a niche--low prices. The Wal-Mart shopper is extremely price-sensitive and doesn't care about anything else: You could put an $4,000 Cartier watch on sale at Wal-Mart for $500, and no one will buy it because $500 is still a lot to spend on a watch. Wal-Mart has for years attempted to move out of its niche and appeal to more-upscale shoppers, and for years it has gotten slammed for it--your Wal-Mart shopper goes to Dollar General when Wal-Mart's prices go up, and your upscale shopper will not shop at Wal-Mart. Ever.Wal-Mart could carry organic milk at half or a quarter of the price of Whole Foods, and your Whole Foods shopper wouldn't even know it.
Book retailing is niche-y, even if book retailers seem to be bent on pretending it's not. Take this Publishers Weekly article (via PV), which mentions a South Carolina regional publisher called Hub City that opened a bookstore last year to serve its niche market:
Last March, Hub City executive director Betsy Teter explained that “We have a Barnes & Noble in town, but it isn't terribly friendly to regional and local book producers.” In its first year, Hub City Bookshop sales exceeded projections by 77 percent.
Of course, the body of the article isn't about how indie bookstore realized long ago that they can't chase the same customer as Barnes & Noble and survive. No, it's about them getting upset about Amazon.
Do you hear the CEO of Cartier getting upset because Dollar General is challenging Wal-Mart? No? But, hey, they all sell jewelry--why shouldn't the CEO of Cartier give himself an ulcer over Wal-Mart's problems? Oh, because he knows his niche. He knows the average customer at Cartier would rather get shot in the face than buy jewelry at Dollar General or Wal-Mart. Likewise I'd bet the average Hub City customer doesn't even think about either Barnes & Noble or Amazon when they are looking for some South Carolina flavor--they just go right to Hub City, home to all books South Carolinian!
If you are selling your book as an author, it also makes a lot of sense to know your niche. It will not only help you position your book when you pick the cover and craft the jacket copy, it will also help you chose how to spend advertising dollars. You don't want to waste money advertising your romance to true-crime enthusiasts, for example, and if your book appeals to a relatively narrow niche, advertising that reaches a more general audience may well prove less effective.
When writers point out that getting press coverage or having a popular blog or using social media doesn't help sales (or conversely, that sucking at social media doesn't hurt sales), that happens because of niches. I think Joe Konrath's blog is wonderful--I read it regularly and really appreciate it. I also don't like horror novels, so I don't buy his books. His blog appeals to one niche (self-published authors) that I occupy, but his books appeal to another (lovers of the thriller/horror genre) that I do not. If Konrath wanted to, he could monetize his blog by selling ads, but his blog would still be a discrete business from his books--success in one does not translate to success in the other, because they appeal to separate niches.
One of the concerns I've seen expressed around and about, both by apologists for traditional publishers and by proud-to-be-indie authors, is that Amazon could create a monopoly on books. The concern is that Barnes & Noble will go down the toilet, and the major publishers will follow, and the only one left standing will be Amazon.
I don't doubt that Amazon would create a monopoly on books if it could--any company (really, any person) would love to have a monopoly on anything at all. If you have a real, honest-to-God, Ma Bell-style monopoly, you are in Fat City. You don't have to spend money on research and development, or customer service, or new infrastructure, or technology. You don't have to keep up with the times, keep clients happy, or hustle in any way. You are at that spot on the supply curve where everybody wants to be. That's why we have to have antitrust laws, and that's why they have to be enforced--monopolies are just too tempting.
But is it possible for Amazon to create a monopoly? Keep in mind that there's a huge difference between dominating a market and having a monopoly. You could control 90% of a particular market and not have a monopoly. If everybody buys a GM car because GM makes the cars everybody wants to buy, that's market domination. If everybody buys a GM car because if you buy another kind of car, the police come to your house and shoot you in the head, that's a monopoly. The same is true if gentler forms of coercion are used: If you buy a non-GM car and cannot buy fuel for it because GM owns all the gas stations, then you are facing a monopoly.
Right now, Amazon is selling the majority of e-books, and a number of authors are making their titles exclusive to Amazon, because Amazon does a better job selling indie titles than other Web sites. It might be fair to say that Amazon currently dominates the indie e-book market; it's certainly fair to say they are a major player.
But could they create a monopoly on books? Now, I have argued that Amazon poses no special threat to indie bookstores, but let's say I'm totally wrong. E-books get so fully adopted that you can't give your paper copies away, brick-and-mortar bookstores have nothing to sell, and they all go under--every last one.
On the Web, there is Amazon and...oh, there's Barnes & Noble and Smashwords and Google Books and the Sony Reader store and Kobo and the iBookstore. Oops.
Not a monopoly.
No, you say, Barnes & Noble is going down! Well, OK, that leaves Smashwords and Google Books and the Sony Reader store and Kobo and the iBookstore.
Not a monopoly.
Plus, I could sell e-books from this Web site. You could sell e-books from your Web site. People kick up this huge fuss over Amazon's proprietary system of Mobi files and Kindle readers, but I can and do make my own Mobi files, I could sell them here if I wanted to, and Smashwords certainly sells them. It may be more convenient for someone to buy Mobi files for their Kindle on Amazon, but they don't have to.
Where are the barriers to entry into this market? You don't have to build your own bookstore chain; you don't even have to tangle with Ingram. Look at Smashwords, a company that began operations all of four years ago. They're not some huge corporate entity with phenomenally deep pockets--Mark Coker describes the company's financial backers as "me, me and me." And yet, there they are, reportedly profitable and also a major player in indie e-books.
How could Amazon create a monopoly? They could try underpricing everybody, selling books at a loss, and that might work...for a little bit. Drive Smashwords under, though, and another will take its place, because the barriers to entry are not that high and there's money to be made off indies.
Amazon could also turn on authors, demanding exclusivity and offering increasingly-crappy royalties in exchange. That would require them to believe that people buy books on Amazon because they're on Amazon--not because they're written by an author the reader likes. The problem with that strategy is that the authors could always say, "Screw you!" and offer their books elsewhere. That's actually kind of what the traditional publishers are doing right now, and I think that strategy would work for Amazon just as well as it's working for them.
The change to self-publishing and e-publishing isn't a simple exchange, where you swap one group of corporate overlords for another. It is a completely different ecosystem. It is technology at its most disruptive.
Read through chapter 16, tightening and fiddling. Looks pretty good at this point, but of course I may just be burnt out....
The Passive Guy does a great post on the economic advantages of self-publishing here, and in the comments M. Louisa Locke notes that you may be a good writer, but if you're traditionally published, good luck beating her sales, because her book is $10 less than yours (except she says it much more nicely).
So, I finished going over the epilogue, and now I'm giving it another read-over and then printing out the chapters to read as hard copy after I take a couple of days off to get fresh eyes. I've finished chapter 8.
This makes me glad I had a writers' group and a beta reader who haven't read the first book read the first few chapters, because to me, especially now, those chapters seem so slow because they contain so much exposition. But it's clearly necessary if you aren't profoundly familiar with the fictional world and the events of the first book. And you know, when I read out a series, I do just sort of skim over the exposition in the beginning, but it's not like I resent it or anything--I know why it's there, even if I don't really need it.
...publishing gets really, really ugly. Watch out, people.
There's an interview with the publisher of Grand Central about how they really, REALLY care about their books, and do all sorts of wonderful things for them, and love and cherish their authors, and are just the best thing for writers.
It's very touching. You read it, and you wonder why anyone would self-publish. And then you read things by people who have been or who know people who have been published by Grand Central, and a rather different picture emerges. Crappy advances. Authors who are expected to do so much promotion they don't have time to write. Poor financial returns. Minimal and ineffective marketing.
Basically, the publisher of Grand Central has a fantasy about what the company is doing for writers. If you're trying to understand traditional publishing, a big part of the challenge is that the people in it tend to talk about what they wish they were doing. Very few people go into publishing because they want to get rich (and those who do are as dumb as rocks). The vast majority really and truly want to be contributing to literature and don't think they ought to worry about money. The rest are trying to rip you off.
Which is why they all lie about the bottom line--it's a culture that believes it is nobler than filthy lucre. That's why I saw an agent tell a roomful of writers that there was only maybe a tiny bit of truth in the notion that agents are interested in commercial books, when the truth is that any agent who wants to stay in business won't touch a non-commercial book with a ten-foot pole. That's why the nation's largest bookstore chain can tell implausible lies about market share, and everyone else in the industry backs them up.
The problem with this from an author perspective is that figuring out what you should do in traditional publishing is really difficult, because despite the pretentions it is still a business, and you can't make good business decisions without accurate information about how the money is made. And no one is willing to tell you that--they either want to believe the fantasy themselves, or they want you to believe it so they can steal from you.
What's really nice about someone like Joe Konrath is that he'll break down the numbers for you. But even if he didn't, or even if he was lying through his teeth, self-publishing is just far more transparent. The amount of money a writer makes off of, say, selling an e-book at a certain price on Amazon is public knowledge. It's why, if you're nosy like I am, it's so easy to do the math and figure out who's making what. It's why you can easily see what's a good deal and what's not. The information is there, it's verifiable, and you aren't reduced to taking the word of someone who has an agenda.
So I recently did a post about talking to readers about your book, and JW Manus did a post about it, too, that got picked up by Passive Voice and had some good comments.
And of course, we're all talking about how to communicate to readers what's in the book. And as Manus points out, you're also trying to entice readers. Manus writes:
What are readers getting excited about? Seriously, make a list of the buzzwords. Readers who liked those popular titles will be looking for similar titles to enjoy. To help them find yours, focus your book description on what the readers are actually looking for.
She's not talking about lying to people about what's in your book--that's going to backfire, badly. She's talking about figuring out how people who love books with X, Y, and Z in them figure out whether or not a book has X, Y, and Z. If your book also has A, some B, C, D, something between H and I, Q, T, and a little W, don't highlight that--it's too complicated for a description. Keep it simple: If you like X, Y, and Z, read this book.
In other words, you are designing a signal. You are creating a code.
When readers talk back, they also talk in code. Even if they don't know it.
"Not much happens" was a HUGE screaming signal that I had incorrectly positioned Trang as adventure sci-fi. It was not subtle to me, because I have heard many, many jokes made about people who don't like [INSERT CLASSIC OF ENGLISH LITERATURE HERE] because "nothing happens"--it's right up there with "Shakespeare uses too many big words" among Responses That Will Instantly Evoke Scorn Among the Literati. And it means something specific: It means that the reader likes plot and doesn't care about characters or prose.
I was lucky that that response was so stereotypical. I was also lucky that I have almost 20 years of making a living as a writer to give me confidence in my writing. I don't read something like that and think, "I have failed" or "I'm a bad writer." I read that and go, Oops! Better change the cover!
I think if that kind of review is going to make you extremely upset, insecure in your abilities, and (most important) like you don't want to write any more, and if you can't possibly control that response, then I guess you probably should refrain from reading reviews. But if you can take a step back, disconnect your emotions and your self-esteem from what is written, and read reviews for the feedback they contain about what readers were expecting and what they got, they can be very helpful.
Even when I receive positive reviews, I don't think to myself, Gee, I guess that means I can write! Of course I like getting those sorts of reviews--I'm not made of stone--but if I couldn't write, I would have starved to death back in 1992. What those types of reviews tell me is that 1. Trang is positioned correctly, 2. it will work as a loss leader, and 3. I better get Trust out, because people are waiting for it. That is all very useful and motivating information to have, but it doesn't change my opinion of my book or of myself as a writer.
I think the important thing to remember when communicating with readers is that there's no such thing as an empirically good book. It simply doesn't exist. I know someone who likes only political nonfiction, I know someone who likes only lesbian erotica, I know someone who likes only classical Greek and Latin literature. You could never, ever get those three people to agree on whether a particular book is good--it's just impossible. And you don't have to--you just have to make sure that your book on health-care policy, your story about nude cheerleaders who spank, and your translation of Euripides all wind up in the right hands.
Yay progress! Technically, I finished this editing pass today, but I added new material to the Epilogue, so I want to go over that one more time before I really consider it done. I've got the kid tomorrow and Wednesday's kind of booked, but this should be totally done on Thursday. Then I think I'll take a few days to deal with the tax & house crap that's piling up, and then read through it again.
Yeah, no progress today. I was going to throw this chair out, and then I realized that I could fix it, and then I realized that they had designed it so that it was a total pain the ass to fix, because they want you to throw it away and buy a new one, so I fixed it anyway.
Then I ran some errands.
This was all stuff I was planning on doing...as soon as I was done with this editing pass. Upon reflection, I think it's nerves--they become a problem the closer I get to actually finishing something.
I should just stop reading The New York Times' coverage of the book industry, right?
But I read this story on Barnes & Noble and how it can't possibly go under because traditional publishers don't want it to.
Well, that sounds like a sound business plan.
Of course the article regurgitates the not-at-all made-up fact that Barnes & Noble controls 27% of the e-book market. And we know this isn't self-serving propaganda from Barnes & Noble, because all those traditional publishers--you know, the ones who will be totally screwed if Barnes & Noble goes under?--they swear up and down that it's so!
Yeah, that number is definitely not self-serving propaganda from Barnes & Noble, it's self-serving propaganda from Barnes & Noble and the traditional publishers. Good to know. (Even if you think that they're not just lying--and publishers do have a long and storied history of lying about book sales--then this would still indicate that Barnes & Noble's figures apply only to to e-books from large, traditional publishers.)
And of course despite the fact that Barnes & Noble has been plowing under indie bookstores since its inception, they have to trot out the poor, poor indie booksellers.
Did you know that, according to the article, "Since 2002, the United States has lost roughly 500 independent bookstores — nearly one out of five." Sounds awful, huh?
Of course, that's since 2002. Pick a different start date, like they did in this Washington Post article published last August, and the picture looks different, too:
The American Booksellers Association, the national trade organization for independently owned bookstores, counted a 7 percent growth last year and has gained 100 new members in the past six months. The association now counts 1,830 member stores across the country, up by 400 since 2005, according to Meg Smith, the association’s spokeswoman.
Hmm.... So there has been a big decline in independent bookstores, but it's a result of what was happening between 2002 and 2005. I'd guess it had something to do with the economic conditions following Sept. 11th. It's certainly got very little to do with what is driving Barnes & Noble under in 2012, which I would argue is the result of them adhering to a business strategy (large selection plus low prices) that Amazon does better.
Then we stop getting numbers, because that would involve the reporter actually having to do some work. Instead, we rely on weepy, unsupported generalizations straight from the mouths of traditional publishers. The backlist "would suffer terribly," which is exactly why so many writers are fighting to get the rights to their backlists returned to them. And the CEO of Macmillan (you know, one of the publishing houses currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Union, because traditional publishers would rather break the law than adapt to the new world of bookselling) assures us that "Anybody who is an author, a publisher, or makes their living from distributing intellectual property in book form is badly hurt...if Barnes & Noble does not prosper."
Wow. Tell that to Joe Konrath.
Buroker did a tweet I liked: "#promotip Stop whining about whether free ebooks frak up the marketplace and test this and other price points for yourself."
Her tweet was funny, but I've seen people fretting themselves into high blood pressure and an ulcer over the availability of free e-books. They're not worried about whether or not they should offer a freebie, they're worried that everyone else will offer everything for free, and the bottom will fall out of the market.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the supply/demand curve. You look at the demand half, and sure thing, demand goes up as the price goes down. Prices get too expensive? People switch to a substitute good.
There's no question that this happens. This is what destroyed the encyclopedia industry that once employed me. This is exactly why I am optimistic about self-publishing and e-books.
But there are several important things to keep in mind before freaking out because other people might offer their books for free (aside from the fact that it's almost never helpful to freak out about things you have absolutely no control over).
Thing #1 The supply/demand curve relies on several assumptions that don't actually exist in the real world. There are many of these (for example, in the magical world of classical economics, everyone knows every price available for every item), but the most important one for our purposes is that it assumes all the goods for sale are identical.
Books are not all identical. At all. Now, I would argue that if I'm asking you to pay $26 for Mystery A, and Mystery B, which is similar, is available for $4, you are fairly likely to choose Mystery B. But you could be a big fan of the author of Mystery A, in which case you might gladly pay $26, or even way more than that if it's a first edition or something.
Why are you being so economically irrational? That brings us to....
Thing #2 The cost of a book to the reader is only partially represented by its cost in dollars.
When I read The Fountainhead, it costs me nothing in dollar terms, because I got it from the library. It cost me hours and hours of my time, however, because that damned thing is 800 pages long. It also cost me a great deal of mental and emotional anguish, because it's a terrible, simple-minded book, littered with identical two-dimensional characters making the same point over and over again, and it was written by a mentally-defective, sexually-dysfunctional bore who thought she was the wisest person in all the land.
There are many more Ayn Rand books in the library, and they are free, but I swear to you, I will go to my grave without having read another.
Reading a bad book is a ghastly experience. A bad book makes you wonder why you even bother with humanity. If people invest their time and energy into a bad book, they are just as pissed if the book is cheap or free as they are if it is expensive.
If the cost of a bad book is $0 + your time + your frustration and rage, and the cost of a good book is $4 + your time + your joy and delight, the good book is actually less expensive. People do this math unconsciously all the time: Many people pick up free books and never read them. I strongly doubt that these people aren't reading at all. They just aren't reading the free books, because they'd rather spend their time and energy buying and reading books they know they're going to like.
(The problem traditional publishing faces is that they're offering a very similar book experience but trying to charge $10-$20 more for it. By and large, that math isn't going to work.)
Thing #3 The supply/demand curve has a whole other half to it, called the supply curve.
The demand curve is pretty easy for most people to understand, because most people have hunted a bargain or two in their lifetimes: If it's cheaper, more people will buy it.
But the supply curve sometimes takes a little thinking. Let's say you have a job offer from Firm A that pays $40,000 a year. Firm B offers you a job--identical in every way to Firm A's job--but it would pay you $80,000 a year.
Which job would you take? The one that pays more! Guess what? You're a supplier (supplying labor in that example). Suppliers want to be paid more. The more money that can be made by supplying something, the more people will supply it.
So you look at that supply curve again, and you look what happens when the sale price of the good reaches zero--the number of suppliers does the same thing.
In short, people are greedy, or at least they want to be able to make a living. Surprise! (And hey, it looks like traditional publishing is on the wrong side of that curve, too!)
But gee, there are a ton of free books out there, right? Sure. But I would argue that the majority of them are by people who are either 1. supplying a loss leader, or 2. not serious writers. The people in the first group are offering one free title in hopes that readers will try it, like it, and (this is key) buy more. These authors aren't training readers to get books for free; they're training reader to seek out their other titles. And I'd say they have a lot of evidence on their side that this works. They are your competition, I suppose, but it's not like you didn't have any before.
The people in the second group don't ever expect to make any money writing--they just feel it's important to get the word out about how the Martians have allied with Al Qaeda and Mossad and are remotely controlling President Obama via the ozone layer and Kindle readers. They tend not to work too hard on their craft.
Thing #4 There is nothing new with having a gazillion free books available to compete against yours. It's called the library, and it's been around a while.
Edittorrent (via PV) has a disturbing post on a bad new agency practice (she starts out thinking it might just be a rumor because it sounds so bad, but no, it's real). Some agencies are asking authors to sign away 15% on revenue earned by books the agency doesn't sell to a publisher. If you sign this sort of contract, and the agent fails to sell the book, and then you self-publish (completely on your own), you owe the agent 15% of what you make, even though they failed to provide any service of value.
An agent is an agent, guys. You don't pay random real-estate agents fees for houses you bought without their help. You don't pay headhunters fees for jobs you got without their help. You shouldn't have to pay literary agents fees for revenue you have earned without their help. "We only make money if you make money" does not mean "if you make money entirely by your own devices, with zero assistance from us," OK?
The recent changes in publishing have not be easy on agents, and as a result, sleazy contracts are becoming more common. Watch out and take care.
I went over the new scene and edited the next scene so that it fit in. Then I edited the next chapter. Buuut I'm going to have to go over that sucker again--the new scene is rather dramatic, but because it didn't exist before, in the next chapter it's like everyone got bonked on the head and completely forgot about it! So there's going to have to be some more significant reworking of the final chapters for continuity's sake.
One of the things that I'm going to have to do after I finish this editing pass is to cook up jacket copy for Trust and polish the description.
Whether you self-publish or publish traditionally, you have to get the hang of writing about your book, which is a very different thing than writing the book itself. Basically you have to sort out who would want to read your book and why--which was something I struggled mightily with in my initial description.
My current description mentions things like, "Hey, this book is character driven," which I think falls in the same category as "Hey, this book has a language advisory" or "Hey, this book is erotica" or "Hey, this is a short story." Certain things you really need to be very up-front about, because there are readers who are really looking for it and others who will get extremely upset.
The New Podler quote serves double duty: It's a favorable review (you want to highlight any quality markers you have, which is why the first sentence is that review and the next sentence begins "Award-winning writer"), and it plays up the '60s social sci-fi thing, which some people really like.
You also have to show the reader in the description that you can actually write this sort of book. Wacky comedy? Your description had better not be dry and dull. Tender romance? Your description should make people cry.
In some ways, it's easier if you self-publish because it's clear what the description is--it's what people see when they click on your title on Amazon. Obviously, it's marketing copy written to sell the book.
In traditional publishing, it's a little confusing, because when you send off your book to an agent or editor, you include what's called a synopsis. We all wrote synopses in English class, right? It's a summary of the plot of the book. When I first started sending stuff out, I bought a book about selling novels, and it told me that it was very, VERY, VERY important that the entire plot get crammed into that synopsis.
You know what I found out? People who sell books about selling novels don't actually sell or buy novels. In other words, that was completely wrong advice. Actual agents and published novelists will tell you that a synopsis is a marketing document. The job of the "synopsis" is to do exactly what a description does--to sell your book. You're selling to an agent or editor, not to a reader, but the goal is the same--someone should read that puppy and say, "Oh my God! I've GOT to read that book!"
And JW Manus has done a very funny and useful post on book descriptions (via PV--read the comments). Aunt Edna sure gets around!
I wrote more of the new chapter 25--it seemed to be taking kind of a long time, so I ran a word count on what I wrote yesterday and today (I don't remember exactly where I stopped yesterday). Anyway, it turns out that I've written 3,550 words, plus quite a bit of editing, so that explains that.
I should be able to finish out chapter 25 tomorrow (it's mostly chopping down the last scene, which now doesn't need to be nearly as long), and then the final chapters don't need that much work.
Then I think I'm going to take a few days off from it and work on some cover and marketing B projects (plus some tax crap). Then I'll read it over, print it out and read it over, and start laying it out.
For whatever reason, I find the Web site Unclutterer to be surprisingly inspirational. (It also motivated me to organize my house a little better, although honestly, I think it's impossible to read that thing and not organize something.)
This is one of the more inspirational posts. Erin is writing about her toddler son, who likes to build forts and builds them all the time, everywhere she will let him.
My son’s obsession with forts has reminded me how truly simple it can be to pursue the life you desire. My son likes building forts, so he builds forts. He doesn’t talk about building forts or wish he were building forts or make excuses for why he can’t build forts, he simply builds forts. When he is tired of fort building, he will play with trains because he wants to play with trains or whatever interest is next on his agenda. Unless I tell him he can’t do something because it’s unsafe (like building a fort inside the stove), he’ll do whatever it is he wants to do.
When I was first considering moving into creative writing, I was really intimidated by it--I grew up reading and majored in English (going the hard-core honors route) and all that. And if you have basically worshipped writers your whole life, it's hard to think of little ole you actually writing, you know, real books.
The question I had for myself was, Would I produce anything any good? And one day, it occurred to me that, before she started writing, Flannery O'Connor did not know she was Flannery O'Connor, Legend of Literature. There was no hand coming out of the sky, writing with burning letters in the air, "GO, THOU, FLANNERY O'CONNOR, AND WRITE! YOU'D BE REALLY GOOD AT IT!"
No, Flannery O'Connor had to do it the hard way--she had to write, and then see if her writing was any good.
And you know, that was an important realization: Writers write. If you want to be a writer, then you have to write. You can talk about it until you're blue in the face, but you won't be a writer unless you get words onto paper. There's no intermediate step. (I mean, yes, Flannery O'Connor got into the Iowa Writers' Workshop, but she had to write first to make that happen.) No one can do it for you. You just have to make that leap and then see what you've got.
Yes! There is progress to report!
Basically I'm adding a largish scene near the end, so chapter 24 became chapters 24 and 25, and the book is now 27 chapters plus an epilogue. There may be another chapter added, or I may stop there--we'll presumably find out tomorrow.
Why yes, I do plan on working today. But first!
This is a neat post from Kristine Kathryn Rusch about why you should focus on writing instead of getting all caught up in marketing to the detriment of actually producing books.
And
This is a good post by Camille LaGuire (found via PV comments--seriously, read those things, they go off on the most interesting and useful tangents) about how Google ranks things and why you should really not run about spamming blogs.
I realize both these bits of advice happen to coincide with my own prejudices, but I still maintain that if someone's marketing advice makes you want to shoot yourself in the head, then don't follow it, because ultimately it will make you less eager to finish your book.
