The small business perspective: Starting up!

I'm certainly not the first person to note that when you start to self publish, you're starting a small business. Which, like I said, is nice, because you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

You do, however, have to recognize that your small business is not really like the average small business.

Compare writing a book to, say, opening a small retail operation. The good news: Your start-up costs are laughably tiny compared to having to rent or lease a retail space.

The bad news: Well, if you're buying scarves for $20 and selling them for $30, and you know how much foot traffic a place gets, you can make a fairly decent estimate of how many scarves you can sell. You can talk to other scarf-sellers in similar locations; you can spy on the guy who, say, sells sunglasses in the shop next to the place you want and see how much he sells.

In other words, you can plan. In fact, writing a business plan is one of the basics of starting a new business.

If you write a book, you have no idea how much you'll sell!

Am I exaggerating? No. Look at Kristine Katherine Rusch's latest post (which is a really good one, by the way). She notes, "I have books that sell really well and books I can’t give away." Most writers say the same--some of their titles do great, some don't sell well at all.

The problem is that with your first book, you don't know where you're going to wind up on that continuum. Hence the advice to Keep Writing, even if your book doesn't do well, because the next one may do better.

Rusch's husband, Dean Wesley Smith, says to think like a publisher and to project your likely income from your books. He hedges this around with lots and lots of caveats, but honestly, I don't even think that's worth doing if you don't have a track record.

When Smith cranks out his gazillionth Poker Boy story, he's got a rough--and more important, a realistic--idea of how it's going to sell. There are X many Poker Boy fans out there, and that can help Smith decide whether it's worth it to spend time on a Poker Boy project rather than another one.

If you've never produced a book before, you can't do that. I think the temptation is to build castles in the sky and say, Oh, I'm sure to sell a bunch here and I'll sell a bunch there and I'll sell a bunch there, too! But you don't know that you'll sell a single copy.

Which is why I'm a fan of starting small--and I don't just mean by starting with an e-book. Some of the advice I've seen for new writers about handling the business side of things is just insane. I was a full-time freelancer for many years and I never:

1. Incorporated (my father was in business for 40 years and he never incorporated--he never thought it made financial sense)

2. Had dedicated bank accounts for my business

3. Bought fancy equipment for my business

4. Rented space for my business

5. Registered a business name

Why not? I didn't need to, and I would look long and hard about your "need" to, say, shell out for an office or cough up hundreds or even thousands of dollars in accountant fees because you think that means you're serious.

You're serious if you write. Everything else is just froufrou.

But I'm supposed to aim high! you cry. Again, it is very easy to confuse the trappings of success with the strategies that allow you to be successful. The trappings of success are what's so expensive.

One thing you'll get told (over and over again, by people who have not the slightest idea what they are talking about) is that, hey, you should spend lots of money on your business because you get a really nice tax break!!!

Not really. Money you "write off" when you spend on your business comes out of your taxable income. So, let's take two people, who both make $40,000 on their business.

Person A spends $1,000 on business stuff, leaving them with $39,000 in taxable income.

Person B spends $10,000 on business stuff, leaving them with $30,000 in taxable income.

Person A pays $5,881 in taxes (I'm using the 2011 tax tables and assuming they are single)

Person B pays $4,079 in taxes

Person A is left with $33,119

Person B is left with $25,921

Person B spent $10,000 to save $2,000. That is not good.

Don't let people talk you into to spending like a drunk sailor on shore leave. Spend money after you get it, not before (Smith and I are 100% in agreement on that one). The after-not-before approach means that you won't set yourself up so that if you don't make a certain amount of money by a certain date, you face catastrophe. Remember--you have no idea if you'll sell even a single copy. No idea. Don't put a deadline on your finances; save them for your writing.

Obviously if you have the means (or score big on Kickstarter), you can do what you want, but if you don't, make your book earn its keep. After-not-before means that you pay to have a paper book made after you sell enough e-books to pay for it. After-not-before means that you buy expensive custom cover art after you sell enough books with stock-photo covers to pay for it.

Does this require patience? Yes. Does it require discipline. Yes. Does it mean you'll have to ignore the people telling you that you're sabotaging your own work? Yes. If anyone gives you a hard time about you not being ambitious enough, sweetly ask them if they plan to pay for whatever it is they're insisting you do.

But don't borrow money from them.

Of course businesses borrow money all the time, but again, given the low overhead for a self-published author, there's no need to. And it tends to stress the finances.

I've likened a traditional publishing contract to a really bad loan. But thinking about it, I think a traditional publishing contract is actually a lot more like venture capital financing.

Now, if you don't know much about venture capital, and if you lived through the late 1990s, you probably think of venture capital the same way most people think about traditional publishing--it's Santa Claus coming to your door with a big bag of money.

That's what I thought when I first became a business reporter. Imagine my surprise when I'd ask a local tech startup, "Are you looking to get VC funding?" and the owners would look at me like I'd just asked them if they were planning to raise funds by selling their own children to pedophiles.

It turns out that venture-capital funding operates with a lot of the same limitations as traditional publishing. To wit:

1. You lose control of your business. Bye-bye, you.

2. They operate on a limited time frame. In that era, the typical VC fund wanted to be able to take the company public (which means making it big and of interest to a wide swath of investors) within 3-5 years. If the company grew more slowly than that, it was trashed.

3. It is a volume game for them. Most companies couldn't possibly grow that big that fast, so the VC funds scrapped them--shut them down and sold off the parts. They made their money on the few companies that could indeed grow that fast. So it wasn't about nuturing companies, or having really good management: The expectation was that the majority of companies would be destroyed by this process.

Of course, if you sold out to a venture capital fund, you made some money--just like if you get a traditional publishing contract, you'll make some money. But it was truly selling out--if you cared or wanted what was best for your company or simply wanted the most money, you didn't do it.

Progress report

That shrieking noise you heard was me realizing that I started Chapter 27 on the wrong page. It's OK. That meant two chapters to layout AGAIN, but 1. it was just two chapters, 2. one of them was the short epilogue, and 3. neither took very long. I also fixed that chapter (the infamous Chapter 13, of course) that needed to be expanded by a page. And I realized that I had italicized the page numbers on one side of the spread but not the other; they are now roman on both sides for improved readability.

I input the text fixes into the e-books and uploaded them. I also input them into the regular paper version--in some cases I decided that single paragraphs would read better if broke them into two, which affected that layout. So now I've printed out all the chapters that had significant alterations, and tomorrow I will read over them, make any corrections, then compile the chapters into books again and upload them onto CreateSpace.

AND THEN I WILL BE DONE! DOOOOONNNNNE!!!!

I am once again famous for cussing....

Stephen Merlino, who beta'd Trust and who is an excellent writer, put some excerpts from it up on his blog. They are from a scene told from the point of view of an alien who is using a translation device that, in Steve's words, "struggles to decode the expletives of the human space marines assigned to protect Trang." Now he's curious to know if other cultures are as fond of scatological and sex-based swears as English-speakers are, so if you know about that, go on over there and tell him!

And if you've read Trust and are going, Wait, the Giant Mankiller doesn't look like a T-Rex! know that Steve read an earlier version in which the Giant Mankiller wasn't described at all--he told me to fix that, so I did.

Progress report

I blew off yesterday, but today I read up to chapter 25. I caught something that is going to make a chapter one page longer, but I think I can make it two pages longer and therefore not screw up the layout from that point forward. Because I am really, really ready to be done with this layout!

You're running a small business--and that's a good thing!

I first became a full-time freelancer by accident. I was working in the encyclopedia industry and (you know where this is going) I got laid off. They then offered to rehire me as a freelancer.

Sounds like I was getting screwed, right? The thing is, I was horribly bored editing, but I was too risk-adverse to move on to something else. The layoff was the kick in the pants that I needed: I decided to go to journalism school. But of course I needed to earn a living in the meantime, so I jumped at the offer.

The pay was good, there was a ton of work to do, I already knew the job, and I could do it from home. Excellent!

Except that this was the place where the people who needed freelance work done were in NYC, and the people who paid the freelancers were in Ohio. The Ohio crew didn't care whether or not the work actually got done (in fact, that project got trashed after it was finished instead of going to the printer). Sure enough, the checks started coming later and later and later....

What with the layoff and all, I had a pretty good idea that this company was going down, so I had already started freelancing for other people (or freelancing more--everybody moonlights in publishing). I caught some flak for this from the poor encyclopedia editor, who wanted me to work on his project all the time. But I was like, I have to pay the rent at the first of every month no matter what those jokers in Ohio do. Sorry, but...

I must have many clients.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was being quite astute. Years later I was reading through a business magazine, and they had an article on how to run a successful small business, and one of the major pointers was:

You must have many clients.

Why? Because that way if one client screws you, you don't go down in flames.

The temptation is not to diversify--it takes work, and people are lazy. And if GinormoMegaCorp offers you a huge, extremely lucrative contract to work with them, you of course will get all excited and wriggly like a puppy and you will drop all your other clients and you will run right over to latch yourself onto the GinormoMegaCorp teat. And you will forget that she's actually just a big old bitch who will snap at you and take off whenever the mood strikes her.

All small business people struggle with this. All of them.

All of them struggle with the fact that you never have start-up capital when you're actually starting up. All of them struggle with the fact that you don't know when--or if!--you'll start making money with your business. All of them have to remind themselves to Keep costs low when there are so many enticing ways to spend money. (Spending that will help the business "in the long run"--you know, like after you file for bankruptcy and a creditor swoops in and takes over your brand and profits off all that start-up spending. Happens all the time.)

The nice thing is, they talk about it. You are not alone! There's a whole section on the U.S. Small Business Association's Web site about funding your business! There are countless articles and Web sites about running a small business! (There are also countless people who want to take your money, but ignore them.)

You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Yes, contemporary self-publishing is a new business, but it's still a business. You can learn from other business people.

Let's take You must have many clients as an example. This is why I get nervous when people act like they should retail and market only through Amazon. Of course I don't ignore Amazon--Amazon is important. But the minute you start acting like Amazon is your only client, you are setting yourself up to have the rug pulled out from under you.

Plus, you're losing sight of the fact that Amazon is not actually a client--your clients are your readers, and Amazon is just one way to reach one group of clients. Likewise traditional publishers are not clients, they are just one way to reach another group of clients.

There are so many other examples of small business advice that applies to self-publishing:

Your competition is not your enemy, or even really your competition. Works if your products aren't interchangeable, which books are not. Crate & Barrel and The Container Store boost sales by operating side-by-side. Think of the Chinese food district. Can you do something like that with your books and books by other authors?

Get diverse perspectives. Writers tend to talk to other writers--that's our "affinity group." Most readers are not writers: They don't haunt bookstores and worry about the future of editing; instead, they go to feed stores and hang out in gun forums.

Existing clients are your best clients... They're cheaper to reach and easier to sell to. This is why writing lots of books works so well: You've got a base already. It's also why I think it's worth it (if you can afford it--see Keep costs low above) to have multiple formats available: People will indeed buy the same book twice if they want to give it as a gift or listen to it while they exercise.

...but they must be reminded that you exist. The seasonal businesses in that article have to remind people they exist each year--much like writers have to each time they come out with a new book.

Track promotions. That seasonal business article actually has some good advice on that one--the more you do, the less money you will waste. Derek Canyon shows you how to track returns on advertising expenditures, and Lindsay Buroker outlines the revenue-per-customer limitation--if you're paying a dollar in marketing for every client acquired, those clients need to be giving you more than 35 cents.

More generally: Realize that there's a community and knowledge bank out there. What you're doing isn't easy, but many, many people have faced similar challenges. They may wear suits and be Rotarians and refuse to read fiction, but they are your people. You can learn from them.

Why I want a Mac

Look at that! Look at those ornaments!

Oh, yes, I know, they have Scrivener for Windows nowadays, but you know it only works about 90% as well, and that final 10% is what allowed that to happen. And my computer couldn't run it anyway because Adobe Acrobat is taxing its CPU to the nth degree already....

I am terribly jealous, if you hadn't figured that out yet.

Space...opera?

Today I was watching my niece, but I took advantage to her tragic addiction to Wild Kratts to do some noodling with Amazon categories. Having realized the hard way that the Trang series is not, in fact, adventure sci-fi, I've been classifying it as general sci-fi. But now that I actually have two books out and it is actually a series, I e-mailed Amazon asking that it be placed as well into the Kindle category "Science Fiction: Series," which still has less than 200 books.

Oddly enough, there is no "Science Fiction: Series" category for paper books. (Why not, I do not know.) That was kind of a bummer because there are freaking 86,419 paper books classified as general science fiction. But in the paper books categories there is a subcategory "Science Fiction: Space Opera," which has over 5,000 books--still a lot, but better than 86K, am I right? (No? That's still too many books for it to matter? Have you tried shutting up?)

And I was like, "Space opera? Didn't some of the people who reviewed Trang call it a space opera?"

The thing is (and according to Wikipedia, this dates me) I never considered calling something a space opera any kind of compliment. Space opera = soap opera in space = histrionics and bad dialogue.

But apparently kids these days (like Brian Aldiss, who should get off my lawn) use space opera to mean "the good old stuff." (Hey, aren't I marketing these books as 1960s retro sci-fi? I believe I am!) And if you're going to define it as "colorful, dramatic, large-scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character and plot action, and usually set . . . in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone" I'll definitely take it!

("Military space opera," though...hm. One of my beta readers thought Trust would appeal to military readers, but my concern is that most of the problems in the series are solved via diplomacy--i.e. talking, not shooting--which is likely to annoy most fans of military SF.)

Most important, if you look again at first page or two of the books categorized as space opera on Amazon: Ender's Game, The Hitchhiker's Guide, The Martian Chronicles, Hyperion, a Vorkosigan saga book--need I mention that these are all books I love?

OK. It's on the to-do list--when I input the latest corrections, I shall re-classify both Trang and Trust as...space opera! I fully expect Opera Man to swoosh through wearing deely boppers when I do.

Progress report

I read through up to chapter 11--very few art errors are left, I'm happy to say. I haven't quite reached the point where I'd rather put my own eyes out with my trusty red pen than read Trust again, but it's safe to say that I'm getting there.

The power of a book in hand

I linked to this in my previous post, but it's a Wall Street Journal article, which means it probably won't be available to read for long. So I wanted to go into a little more detail on it.

Here's the gist:

Author Michael Ennis submitted a draft of his novel, "The Malice of Fortune," to New York publishing houses but was rejected. He revised, edited and submitted once more but was rejected again.

Then he got a tip from his agent: Try booksellers first.

Mr. Ennis and agent Daniel Lazar of Writers House self-published bound galleys of the novel using Lulu.com and a local print shop, and sent 48 copies to influential booksellers such as Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books in Miami and Sarah Harvey of Tattered Cover in Denver.

Out of those, 23 booksellers responded enthusiastically, writing strong praise for the book. Using such quotes, Messrs. Ennis and Lazar submitted the manuscript a third time to publishers. Within days, Knopf Doubleday snapped up U.S. rights to the book for a six-figure sum. Doubleday, an imprint of Bertelsmann AG's Random House unit, will release "The Malice of Fortune" on Sept. 11, with a first-print run of 75,000 copies.

This might at first seem different from someone self-publishing, building a up a sales record, and then getting a contract, but really it's not. It's someone using their self-published book to indicate to publishers that it does indeed appeal to a particular audience: Bookstore owners. Doubleday is willing to gamble that a book that appeals to that niche will have big sales.

Once again, actually having a book available is key. There's value in that.

Money, writing, and realism

This is something that I know is going to make me sound like a real ass, BUT: Writing fiction is not a short-term solution to your serious financial problems.

OK?

I know people look at the overnight successes and say, That could be me! But what they're ignoring is that there is no such thing as an overnight success. Amanda Hocking? NINETEEN NOVELS UP. Joe Konrath? FORTY. Smith & Rusch? TWO HUNDRED. Again, they just look like overnight successes because their many, many years--or decades--of work paid off all in one go.

But what about the people who do make one book work? Well, generally speaking, they've spend years building up an audience in some other way, or they have a background in marketing and don't mind doing that all the time. And I do mean all the time--I wish I could find the link, but I remember reading a story about one guy (who had, like, decades of experience as a writer, but anyway) who made one self-published novel work for him, and on an ordinary day, he spent five hours marketing that sucker. Those were not his "marketing days"--he spent more time than that marketing on the days when he was actually making a push.

And it's not just time they spend--they spend money. They buy ads, pay for reviews in places like Publishers Weekly or Kirkus Reviews (unethical, guys!), pay to enter writing contests (gee, I won my stuff for free)--OK, clearly I have a lot of issues with all this, but apparently the return-on-investment is sometimes there. (Sometimes. You're just paying for PW to consider reviewing your stuff. And be aware that they and Kirkus have gone over to the Dark Side of reviewing with this--they just have.)

What I'm trying to say here (in between rants) is that, if you have no money to pay for marketing, and you have no time because you need to work for a living, the MARKET! MARKET! MARKET! approach to overnight success is not going to work for you. You can't buy overnight success if you have no money to buy it with.

So overnight success is off the table. What should you do? Should you start looking for a traditional publishing contract?

Oh, fuck no. Seriously. Going for a traditional publishing contract because you "can't afford" self-publishing is like relying on payday loans and check cashing services because you "can't afford" to go down to your local credit union and open a no-fee checking account. It's bullshit. The financial benefits are an illusion. Assuming you actually get anywhere (which you probably won't), you'll pay up-front money to find a publisher (including maybe paying to self-publish your book! Isn't that awesome!), you'll pay up-front money once you get a publisher, and you'll pay a lot more money in the long run.

What should you do?

You treat writing like a hobby.

What!?! you shriek. I am not a hobby writer! I am a serious professional!

Notice how people like to join together the words "serious" and "professional"? I hate to break this to you, but there are many, many writing professionals out there who aren't the least bit serious. Why do you think the word "hack" exists? All "professional" really means is that you get paid.

I am not suggesting that you don't take writing seriously. Take it seriously. Be open to criticism. Do your best to make your story something you would want to read if it were written by somebody else. Be disciplined in your work habits.

If you are serious about making money writing--which is different from being serious about writing itself--you need to think long and hard about the kind of writing you're doing. Don't be like me and write science fiction: Pick a more-popular genre, ideally one where expensive cover art is not the norm. Focus on speed and quantity of output. Write shorter pieces you can sell more than one way.

But from a financial standpoint? Treat your creative writing like a hobby!

Or better yet, treat it like a small business! Control your costs! Start with the cheap and easy stuff! Expect to make no money for a good long time!

But wait! you shriek (again--you know that's no good for your throat). You always rip into people who say writers shouldn't make money!

Ah--I rip into the people who make money off those writers. If you're writing for me, and I sell your work, and then I screw you over, and then I say, "What? You're not supposed to be in it for the money!" guess what that makes me? A confidence artist! (And an asshole!)

If I say, "You are more likely to become rich overnight by buying lottery tickets than by writing books," then I am telling you the truth. I'm sorry.

Self-publishing is a better business model than traditional publishing. You are more likely to be able to make a living by self-publishing--eventually. It is more predictable than traditional publishing.

It is not perfectly predictable. You don't know when you'll start making decent money, and you don't know for sure that you will ever start making money. It is certainly not a sure-fire way to make money, especially not in the short term.

I know that's not something that anyone wants to hear. But it's the truth. Self-publishing is better than traditional publishing, but that doesn't mean that self-publishing is easy. It just means that traditional publishing is truly horrible.

Some things are hard to write about

I know I haven't written anything about Ray Bradbury's passing. That's been kind of a hard one for me, like when Kurt Vonnegut died--it's surprising how much it can affect you when a writer dies. Even if you never met the person (and I never met Bradbury, although he did give a free talk to a massive arena full of schoolchildren when I was 11 or so that I attended, and he was entertaining in the extreme), if their work really influenced you, it's a bit like losing a family member. 

I grew up reading Bradbury.  My dad was a big fan. That in itself was interesting because by the time I was old enough to start reading adult fiction, my dad had stopped reading it--the rigidity and the extremely fragile sense of identity that would eventually kill him had already led him to stop reading anything that wasn't purely functional. But he was very pleased that I was reading Bradbury--Bradbury was, in his words, "a dandy writer" who specialized in the short story, a form that was for my father a guilty and even shameful pleasure.

In Bradbury's obituaries, it's noted that he married literature and pulp sci-fi, which was an extremely novel mixture at the time. But of course, if you grow up reading someone like Bradbury, the idea that science fiction is some kind of lesser genre that can't be used to talk about complex ideas, adult experiences, philosophy/spiritualism, or social issues is the novel one. I was well into adulthood before I noticed that sci-fi has its particular lowest-common-denominator (horny teenage boys) that the less-ambitious writers feel obligated to cater to.

That expectation that science fiction should not be dumb--that it should be challenging and well-written and non-formulaic and not all about wish fulfillment--was part of the reason it was so frustrating to me to realize that traditional publishing had become so rigid and narrow that if someone like Ray Bradbury--Ray Freakin' Bradbury--was just starting out today, his work would not get published. Because it was different. Because it was creative. Because it was unlike anything anyone else wrote.

At that is why people love it.

I am very much of the "Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!" school of thought--I like that there are no gatekeepers with self-publishing. I'm happy that people can publish stuff that's really freaking weird. Because without the weirdness--without the people who don't obey the rules--you get no Ray Bradburys. No Kurt Vonneguts. No Robert Silverbergs. No Philip K. Dicks. You just get the sexy girlie aliens in glittery spandex and the big alpha males with their enormous guns. You just get the kid stuff.

Progress report

I finished tweaking the large-print layout! Huzzah! It's printed out, and I will read it (probably Monday, tomorrow's busy), make any fixes I have to make, and then I won't have to lay out anything else until I finish writing Trials! Joy! And by that point, I'll probably have a better computer! Happy dance!

How I would think of traditional publishing

This post about (yet) a(nother) bestselling author who is making more money self-publishing went up on Passive Voice last week. The thing that really piqued my interest was a comment by Edmond saying:

You have to wonder whether the career path of a writer will become.
Self publish => Get attention => sign publishing contract => build following => return to self publishing taking readership with you.

That was interesting to me in light of Amanda Hocking's experience--she's definitely building a new audience, as she had hoped, while at the same time keeping a substantial number of self-published titles available. Instead of following Edmond's cycle, however, she's multitasking--since she has so many titles out, she never had to cycle out of self-publishing. She can advance on all fronts.

It doesn't change my very, very strong opinion that if you are a new writer and you want to get published, you should self-publish. (Like, OMG, you should self-publish. Don't be a fool.) Traditional publishing seems to work best for people who basically don't depend on it--they've got self-published titles to fall back on if things go to hell, and they've got self-published titles poised to gain sales if things go really well. (This necessarily means that they don't sign traditional publishing contracts that restrict their ability to write and publish other books.)

I think the best way to think of traditional publishing is as something akin to a Next Step, like doing an audiobook or creating a store on your Web site. You don't start out by seeking a traditional publishing contract; you start out by self-publishing an e-book. Traditional publishers could help you reach people who you might not be able to reach on your own, like those who insist on buying hardcover books at the airport instead of downloading a Kindle app onto their phone, just like an audiobook could help you to reach a previously-inaccessible niche.

But it's an expansion of your distribution model; it's not your only distribution model. It's not even your first or fundamental distribution model. It's something you bolt on, not something you use as your foundation. And for God's sake, don't put all your eggs into it--the future does not look bright for those people.

Random businessy stuff

The Passive Voice has been having some really good posts lately on the businessy end of publishing.

Today he let the comments run the show by asking people there's any predictable correlation between a book's ranking on Amazon and the number of books actually sold/money the author earns, and he asks about sales patterns. The answer about rankings seems to be a general "not really" (your ranking depends on your genre, and at the lower rankings you can jump way up by selling one book); as for sales pattern, not shockingly, the more books you have out.... Also people link to other sites where people have tried tracking data. I try not to worry about this stuff, because 1. I don't have to, and 2. nonetheless I can easily get really focused on that rather than, you know, focusing on writing books, an activity I actually enjoy. But if you're interested, there it is.

Another thing that has led to several posts is a lot of news about companies expanding in e-book retailing and self-publishing. Kobo is going to allow self-publishing and is trying to be author-friendly. A new social e-book app has been announced. Wattpad (where you give away stories for free) got a bunch of money. And Forbes did a profile on Mark Coker of Smashwords, which includes exciting (at least to me) tidbits like Smashwords recently expanded from three employees to fourteen, and that it expects $12 million in revenue in 2012. (And $1 million in something called "pretax profit." OK, guys, that's bullshit--I know private companies can say whatever, but why even report that number? Unless Coker plans on counting his money while sitting in jail for tax evasion, it's not a profit until after he pays his taxes.)

And Coker financed the company by borrowing $200,000 from his mother. Gotta love those entrepreneurs!

Progress report

Another day saved by the timer--I got up to chapter 20 done.

But I found mistakes! Argh! It was something I thought I had been really careful about--a couple of chapters are told from the point of view of an alien who is supposed to refer to the humans as "it" throughout, but I found a "he" and worse yet, two "her"s, which is truly a marvel considering that that alien comes from a species that has only one gender! Ugh. I had noticed I was slipping back into using "he" later on, so I went over that part really carefully, but of course I managed to throw in a couple very early. After I read over this layout one last time I'll input those fixes.

OTOH--as I was futzing around and procrastinating and fiddling with stuff around the house, I actually came up with some very good ideas for Trials. Sometimes busy work helps with the thinky work...

Abstraction in art and literature

This is an interesting article on abstraction in art, including literature. It concludes:

You can also see the mark of abstraction on a fair amount of 20th-century literature—and not just the avowedly experimental writings of James Joyce or Gertrude Stein, either. Countless modern writers have been influenced by Anton Chekhov's short stories and plays, which renounce plot-based structure, concentrating instead on the quasiabstract sketching of character and mood. This approach long ago became the basis for the vast majority of short stories published in the New Yorker. Somerset Maugham, a staunch traditionalist who believed in the iron necessity of plot, liked to tease younger writers who embraced the magazine's famously ambiguous house style: "Ah, yes, those wonderful New Yorker stories which always end when the hero goes away, but he doesn't really go away, does he?"

But Maugham's sly quip also reminds us that nonvisual "abstraction," for all its historical significance, has never become truly popular with mass audiences—and neither, for that matter, has visual abstraction. Though it has no shortage of devotees, most people are still more comfortable looking at paintings with a subject, just as they prefer novels and plays with complicated plots and four-movement symphonies with familiar harmonies, and my guess is that they probably always will.

Yet despite what seems to be an innate preference for more or less literal representation of the visible world, the abstract idea remains to this day both seductive and perennially relevant. Why? Because the best abstract art has the power to cut through the rigid conventions of direct representation and externalize interior essences—to show us things not as they look, but as they are.Balanchine may have understood this better than anybody. "We choreographers get our fingertips on that world everyone else is afraid of, where there are no words for things," he told Jerome Robbins. He knew that a wordless glance across a near-empty stage, or a splash of color in the right place on a canvas, can sometimes say more than…well, a thousand words.

I feel like abstraction can be done well, in which case it's VERY interesting, or done poorly, in which case it's predictable, derivative, self-important, and dull. You know, like pretty much everything else when it's done poorly.

But I do like plot. And I think sometimes people get too wrapped up in the abstraction in a really admirable piece of writing and forget about the fact that there's a good story in there, too. Even a book as dense and experimental as James Joyce's Ulysses has some great storylines--the whole saga of the marriage of the Blooms was just heart-rendering, and the reveals were handled masterfully. I totally thought I knew where F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night was going, and I was totally wrong. I like Michael Chabon's books because he usually has a rip-roaring story going on along with the excellent writing (and The Yiddish Policemen's Union is my least-favorite because the plot is really predictable, especially if you've read his other stuff).

Progress report

Yes, I actually made progress today! I blew off yesterday (saw Cabin in the Woods--hee!) and was tempted to blow off today, but instead I was very good and set a timer instead. (This is what I do when I really can't settle down--I set a timer for 90 minutes and tell myself that I can quit when the 90 minutes are up. By that point I'm typically more into the groove and keep working.)

Anyway, I am 10 chapters down (out of 28) on the large-print edition--I lost a page, so basically I have to lay it out yet again, because all the spreads have moved over one. But I'm much fresher than I was, and there are relatively few art mistakes left by now, so that's actually going fine.

The idiocy of snobs

I have to vent: When you've got no leg to stand on, you can always just be a big fat snob about things. You put other people down to make yourself feel better. Why? Because that is the only way you can feel good about yourself.

Snobbery is pathetic. Snobbery is a mark of desperation. Happy, confident people are not snobs--they just don't need it.

Guess who does?

Apparently certain members of the Author's Guild, who recently spent a pleasant evening making fun of people who are not like them, like the woman who wrote 50 Shades of Grey!

The really convenient thing about snobbery is that it lets you abandon all pretense of logic. (Why do you have to buy Frette sheets? Because they're Frette sheets! What do you mean, they feel like burlap? They're Frette sheets!!!) You can sneer at someone who isn't traditionally published because they write mommy porn. But of course traditional publishers produce a ton of mommy porn--that's pretty much the large majority of romance books, which are the industry's biggest-selling genre. Take away the mommy porn, the quack diets, and the celebutard books, and traditional publishing collapses overnight.

Ah, well--I'm sure E.L. James is crying all the way to the bank. I bet she could buy and sell David Rakoff and Sarah Jones a hundred times over at this point. And if that makes Rakoff or Jones uncomfortable, maybe they should look at the financial terms that were offered them by their precious, precious traditional publisher--who, it should be noted, would cut them both loose and blacklist them both in a second if they could sign James by so doing.

Oh, is it mean to point that out? Is it mean to point out that traditional publishing is a business, not a literary salon? Is it mean to point out that your financial interests and those of your publisher don't always coincide?

In half a second.

And then there is Steve Wasserman's article in The Nation (via PV and Rusch's excellent post on the industry overall): 

Readers of e-books are especially drawn to escapist and overtly commercial genres (romance, mysteries and thrillers, science fiction), and in these categories e-book sales have bulked up to as large as 60 percent.

OK, where to begin?

With a quiz!

Q. Readers of e-books are "especially drawn" to romance and mystery/thriller because....

A) They are stupid stupid stupidheads who are stupid with their stupid e-readers and their stupid iPhones and their stupid gadgets and stupid kids these days and their stupid stupid stupidness!

B) Uh, aren't those pretty much the most popular genres in any format?

Wasserman's a book editor--isn't that pathetic? Of course, he's at Yale University Press, so he's somewhat protected from having to know his own industry.

Which is why he does things like lump together genres like romance, mystery/thriller, and science fiction.

From a commercial perspective, these genres are nothing alike--science fiction is not a big seller. Which is why traditional publishers largely abandoned it. Which is why indie titles dominate the e-book bestseller lists.

It's harder for indie authors to produce and (especially) to distribute paper books--you have to lay the book out and reach out to indie bookstores (forget the chains). Science fiction is big in e-books because it's simply not as available in paper. I wanted to read Wool (I haven't yet! No spoilers!) so I downloaded it--what choice did I have? My local library doesn't have it, and I seriously doubt The World's Worst Barnes & Noble does.

Oh, but I forget! Wasserman has the Power of Snobbery, which handily defeats the Power of Logic, or the Power of Actually Knowing What the Hell You Are Talking About!

All these genres the same, because they are...escapist!

You know, like the science-fiction novel The Hunger Games, which is about a teenage girl living on the brink of starvation who is forced by an oppressive government to fight other teenagers to the death. That book was many things--violent, brutal, and stressful to read--but escapist? No, escapist it was not. I just finished another science-fiction novel, The Windup Girl. Again, a very good book, but again--escapist? What the hell are you trying to escape from? Having enough food to eat? Good health? Being able to walk the streets in safety?

And thrillers? Honestly, there are many books in the thriller genre I don't read because I just can't handle all the violence and gore and sadism and death and...escapism.

Anyway, if Wasserman wasn't so busy being a snob and a gloom-and-doomer (big time! That article's kind of a Nation special--everything's just awful, although you're not sure exactly why), he might have noticed something really pretty exciting about e-books and self-publishing: Books are becoming bestsellers that, not long ago, never would have been made widely available. Books are being published that, not long ago, never would have seen the light of day.

Why not? Because they were not considered commercial enough.

He writes that with traditional publishing:

We...feared bloated overheads would hold editors hostage to an unsustainable commercial imperative. (We were right.)

Now these bloated overheads are gone. Now no one is a hostage. Call me crazy, but I like that.

Gleaning information from giveaways

Hmm, no one is signing up for a free copy of Trang on Library Thing!

You might think it's too early to draw conclusions, but the last time I did this a good chunk of the people who wanted a copy jumped on the offer the minute it went up.

So, I think there's one (or both!) of two things going on:

1. The audience is pretty much the same as it was six months ago. I though there might be some churn there and that some people who didn't want the book before would want it now that it has positive reviews, but it doesn't look like it

2. The cover is a generic default cover. Other books also have generic covers (or no covers at all--they're having cover trouble over there); overall those books do seem to have lower levels of sign-on.

What does this mean?

Well, given my suspicions about #2, I should continue to hold off on a Goodreads giveaway until Goodreads decides that it is, indeed, physically possible to correct the cover art.

But #1 means that I need to start branching out instead of trying repeatedly to tap a well that has evidently run dry. And given the lack of interest in a free sci-fi book on Kindleboards, I really need to start looking at sci-fi oriented Web sites.

You know, the nice thing about using giveaways is that you're basically conducting marketing experiments without having to pay for advertising. It's a good way to test the waters.

Anyway, obviously it's going to take time, effort and thought to figure out where to market, and I'm wondering if I want to bother with that before I make Trang free. It seems to me that advertising is just going to work better with a free book (especially if people don't have to go to one specific retailer, register, and enter a coupon code). So for now I'll focus on finishing the large-print edition and writing Trials (not to mention family stuff--I've got a lot of trips/houseguests coming up); marketing-wise I'll just focus on sci-fi cons (I may have some interesting news on that front in a little bit), then enroll Trang in KDP Select, and then make Trang free and worry about ads.