Other orientations

Lily White LeFevre has a really good post on how your historical romance hero probably doesn't have the least idea what the heroine's clothing is made out of. She notes:

Certainly my husband can’t remember my clothing. I am not sure he could describe his favorite of my dresses other than to say “that 50′s dress.” Maybe he would get that it’s black and white polka dots. But he’s not going to talk about cap sleeves and under-bust gathering and bias-cut swish on the high-waisted A-line skirt.

I don't know LeFevre's husband, but I don't think it's much of a stretch to assume that she could probably remove the sleeves of that dress tomorrow, and he wouldn't notice. If it's a really good dress, he might not even notice if she removed her arms.

That's because most straight men don't really much notice an attractive woman's arms, much less the clothing over those arms. The reality is that, if you like women, you're probably focused on the T&A. Maybe you're more into the legs or you really don't care about the T as much as the A or the A as much as the T. A minority have foot fetishes and the like, but for people who dig women, it's mostly T, A, or some combination of T&A.

That can be hard to write about. If you occupy one end or the other of the Kinsey scale it's a challenge to write from the point of view of someone who is attracted to a gender that doesn't really light your fire. It feel weird and off and kind of rude and maybe even like you're insulting people or promoting stereotypes. I mean, hey, in the previous paragraph I just said that all men care about is T&A! Except that I didn't--what I'm saying is that if your character is supposed to be a straight man, and he is supposed to be encountering a woman he finds attractive, he should be looking someplace other than her arms (like, you know, the area between her arms).

I've had to think a lot about this with the Trang books because the main character is a straight man and I'm a straight woman (which is why the photos below are of Chris Hemsworth and not Scarlett Johansson--hey, it's my blog). I really wanted to avoid being like the women who write the sort of historical romances LeFevre is complaining about. These women are way more interested in historical costuming than they are in breasts, and they are way more comfortable writing about historical costuming than they are writing about breasts, but guess what? If a man is more interested in a woman's clothes than in the body that occupies those clothes, she is shit out of luck in the romance department.

It's the same with gay characters (who I feel should actually be gay--it's kind of a pet peeve of mine when people decide to be "inclusive" by having asexual gay characters and areligious Jewish characters and the like). Fourteen years in New York City meant that I experienced quite a number of lesbian pick-up attempts. At first, I kept not recognizing them for what they were, which led to confusion and I'm sure some hurt feelings. Eventually I realized that there is a world of difference between "That shirt looks great on you" and "You look great in that shirt."

Noticing clothes = not attracted. Noticing bodies = attracted.

Don't believe me? Think that people pay just as much attention to the frame as they do the picture? Let's see!

Are you thinking about his clothes?

Well, you should give that a try. Why? Because a big reason this photo is so eye-catching if you like men is because of the pants. I mean, yes, Hemsworth has a lovely upper body, but the thing that makes you want to throw your hands over the eyes of any impressionable youngsters can be found a little lower down:

Those pants are low--if Hemsworth were to stretch his arms up over his head, we'd be seeing Mjölnir for sure. Which, you know, is the point. You can't shy away from the fact that people are really going to notice anything that points the way to the genitals.

So the pants are definitely working for Hemsworth here--they are an effective frame. But if you like men, it's not as though you notice the pants themselves, at least not until you calm down and decide to analyze what's going on. What you notice--what rivets your attention--is those three inches of skin above the pants.

Is the body the only thing people care about? Of course not. But even if your main character finds another attractive because of their humor and compassion and intelligence and marvelous inner qualities, once that switch is flipped, they need to start finding that other character physically attractive in a way that is believable.

The other side of this is that you can't have characters get all lathered up about body parts they shouldn't actually care about. Let's say you really, really love the boobies. You've got to understand that your straight female characters should not give a shit about the boobies. To a straight woman, breasts are tactical assets, nothing more. There are only two reasons a straight woman looks at another woman's breasts: 1. the other woman has huge fake breasts and is wearing a see-through blouse with the words, "LOOK AT MY BOOBS!!! I'M INCREDIBLY PATHETIC AND/OR A SEX WORKER!!!" bedazzled on it, or 2. the woman is trying to figure out if men (or a particular man) will think that other woman is hotter than she is. Likewise a straight man looks at Chris Hemsworth up there and thinks something along the lines of either: 1. that guy is trying way too hard, or 2. how can I look like that?

Emotional continuity

I finished reading Wool last night, and before I launch into my complaints, I'm going to note that it's a very good book--very good. I liked it a lot. (This will be important later: I also like Christopher Moore a lot.)

Buuut...there are issues with it that are similar to the issues a beta reader flagged in an early draft of Trust: The reader is set up to care about certain things that get forgotten. (This post is going to get spoilery about Wool and some of Christopher Moore's books, so look away if you don't like that sort of thing.)

In the course of Wool the main character stumbles upon a group of very isolated, very helpless individuals who are clearly not going to do well without outside assistance. The main character is quite rightfully very worried about these people and makes efforts to help them, efforts that for one reason and another aren't successful the first time she tries them.

And then she leaves them.

You know--leaves them flat. Thinks to herself, God, these people are screwed! and goes on her merry way. Smell ya later!

At the very end of the book, when the main character emerges triumphant from her labors, she decides to reach out to someone who she has neglected--no, not the people she abandoned and could help now, but her father, who the reader has spent very little time with and who obviously has Asperger's and doesn't give a shit about his kid anyway. His survival is in no way threatened, of course.

Honestly--all it would have taken was a sentence to fix this. One sentence. By the end of the book, the main character is in a position to really help people--and she has great plans to help...her own people. Not those other people. They're gross. She doesn't even think about them.

It's a frustrating choice, and I think it goes to show how hard it is as a writer to recognize what you've set the reader up to care about. It can take months or years to write something that it takes mere hours or days to read, and that disconnect between the writer's experience and the reader's experience can be a tough one to bridge. It's also obvious in Wool that Hugh Howey wants the main character's relationship with her father to be A Major Theme--every 300 pages or so we get another little reminder that She Is Estranged From Her Father And That Is Very Bad (Although Her Father Doesn't Care In The Least, So I Am Skeptical About How Meaningful Any Reconciliation Can Possibly Be).

Anyway, it reminded me of a post I wrote on my old blog back in 2007 when I started reading Christopher Moore's books. I started with Bloodsucking Fiends, which I believe was his first book. I've pretty much read them all that this point, and although his books are really funny and entertaining, the very best you can expect from his endings are that the book will just lurch to a halt.

Here's the old post:

Ending well

Various people whose opinions I respect have recommended Christopher Moore books, so a couple of weeks ago I read Bloodsucking Fiends, and I thought, eh, it's OK but not great. He's funny, but the writing tends to meander. I'm not unhappy that I read this book, but neither do I feel a need to go out and read everything this guy has written.

And then a friend gave me Moore's Practical Demonkeeping and Fluke for Christmas. I just finished reading Practical Demonkeeping, and it is much better than Bloodsucking Fiends--it's just a lot tighter, and there's less of a sense that we're constantly going out of our way because Uncle Chris thinks there might be a joke over here and he'd like to root around for a bit to find it.

But it doesn't end well. It doesn't end horribly--it's not like the narrator wakes up and it was all a dream or anything like that. The plot winds up in an appropriate manner. It's not even as bad as the ending of Memoirs of a Geisha--I'd still heartily recommend this book, while that book is so very good up until the dreadful, forced, Harlequin-romance ending that I never quite know what to tell people.

But the ending of Practical Demonkeeping isn't as satisfying as it could be, and the reason is that Moore spends a lot of time in the book establishing a major romance, which then comes to naught. As in, the two characters involved in the major romance not only don't wind up together, they each wind up with another person. They both had previous relationships with the people they end up with, but in one case the relationship was brief and took place 70 years before the story begins, and in the other the relationship has fallen completely apart, and we only ever see those two interact when they fail to communicate over the phone. In addition, another random man and woman who we have never seen together suddenly become a couple at the end. All these couples live happily ever after, which is nice for them, but...why should I care?

It just feels contrived, like Moore thought it would be neat if the couples ended up in Configuration A, and for some reason he didn't think it would bother the reader if the entire novel was spent setting up Configuration T. The disconnect between character and action is so bad [this part is REALLY spoilery, you should probably skip it if you haven't read the book] that when a character loses her spouse of some 70 years who she genuinely loves and who loves her, she weeps about it for about two minutes, and then she hooks up with some other guy. Way to go, lady! No need to let your husband's violent death interfere with your getting laid!

Last day, sticky or not!

Or shall I say, LAST DAY!!! OMFG!!! Yeah, last day to get Trang for free on Smashwords, except that I signed it up for Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale, so starting tomorrow you can get it there free, too. And I'm going to be giving away flyers with a free Smashwords coupon on it at Westercon next weekend (different code, so hopefully I can track the two promotional efforts separately). And I had an idea when I was on vacation--I want to see if it's possible to run test giveaways on sites I'm thinking of advertising on. And eventually it will be free all the time. So, you know, don't get all in a lather about it.

But Trust is going up to $4.99 tomorrow, and I'm presumably going to hold the line on that one.

All these promos on Smashwords really make me wish it was better-designed as a retail site. It's great that you can do coupons on it, but the sales aren't "sticky"--there's nothing to bring the book to the attention of people who haven't already grabbed a freebie. That's what sounds appealing about Kobo, and that's why even with the new, less-freebie-friendly Amazon algorithm I think it's worth trying out KDP Select. (Oh, and Edward Robinson has started bringing his intense algorithmic focus to bear on the iTunes store, which is worth a read. He follows this stuff obsessively so that I don't have to, right?)

You know, what I really need to do is to stop thinking about this stuff and start up on Trials again. (And how many times am I going to write that Trails? Will the cover title say Trails?)

Should I be pleased or worried?

I try not to look at my blog stats very often, because I don't want to become a blogger instead of a novelist, but I did take a peek today. And it turns out that my most popular blog post in the past month is (drumroll, please!):

The one entitled No money down! Easy payments!

Which perplexes me, because on the one hand, I feel like there's a lot of important advice there, so I should feel good that people are going to it. On the other hand, I hope people aren't going to it because they really are hoping for no money down and easy payments and maybe another housing bubble.

Then again, if they are looking for that, and they find instead that blog post explaining why that sort of thing is going to cost them an arm and a leg, I guess that's good.

It's tied for popularity with Self-publishing when you're broke, by the way.

"A ‘fair’ donation"? Are you kidding me?

I was thinking that it might be nice to hook up with the Awesome Indies people. They're basically a collective--the idea is that your work is reviewed, and if the reviewer likes it, you're featured on their Web site and get some extra visibility.

OK, that's fine--you can't ever tell if a given gatekeeper is going to like you or not, but I figured it was worth a shot. So I went down the list of reviewers, and...hey! This one wants to sell you marketing services! And that one wants to sell you editing services! And that other one will review your book (or product!) in exchange for "A ‘fair’ [sic] donation to support the work of my blog (see Donate button on sidebar) that reflects time required to complete the review or achieve your goal."

Holy shit. Way to raise the bar there, folks.

This is something I do not like about this brave new world we're in. Accepting any consideration in exchange for a review is a serious ethical violation in the old-skool world of print journalism.

How serious? Well, I worked at a newspaper where it turned out that the music reviewer had a secret side business managing bands. So he was reviewing bands that he was also managing--a classic conflict of interest.

When this was discovered (if I'm recalling correctly, someone sent something to the newspaper on the wrong letterhead), he was given 10 minutes to clean out his desk and leave the building.

If you're pushing quality, you can't have gatekeepers who will give something four or five stars in exchange for "A ‘fair’ donation." But it's not like the once-respectable sources of book reviews are being any less sleazy nowadays.

And this is what REALLY bothers me--people are doing this because either 1. they don't know any better, or 2. they know that they're dealing with a bunch of newbies who don't know any better. It's why pretty much all the contests for indie writers have entry fees, when a few years ago that was once something that no respectable writing contest did.

A couple of interesting things....

Since I was away (at Cape Perpetua on the Oregon coast, a vacation spot I heartily recommend), the Wall Street Journal decided to do a number of stories on the new world of publishing.

This article talks about Tracy Garvis Graves, whose romance On the Island sold 360,000 copies self-publishing. (And I'm happy because she didn't shaft herself with her pricing.) It also mentions Brittany Geragotelis, a young-adult writer who got a six-figure contract because she has a big following on Wattpad. And then they have this article on Seth Godin, who continues to tweak his self/trad/whatever-works strategy (which they more efficiently term a hybrid approach).

If you're still wondering whether you really can get a traditional publishing contract via self-publishing, or if the horrible stigma against it, which never really existed, still exists, I suggest you roll up a week's worth of paper copies of the Wall Street Journal and whack yourself in the head with it until you beat in a clue. With that accomplished, you can note that, not only can you get a contract this way, but it seems to be a good way for new authors to get really nice contracts, the kind that don't leave you angry, bitter, and impoverished.

I still think that, eventually, self-publishing will be the only way novelists get traditional publishing contracts. If you prove to a traditional publisher that your book sells, then that eliminates the guesswork and the risk--they know they have a hit. They will be able to pay accordingly, because they won't be losing money on books that can't flourish under their business model.

And whaddaya know! Other people think so, too! From the article on Godin:

For Mr. Godin, his hybrid approach—which essentially supplements his publisher's efforts with his own promotional work—could well become an industry template because it eliminates much of the uncertainty for booksellers and publishers deciding which titles to bet on.

"The pressure on the bookstore and the publisher is to pick stuff that will work," said Mr. Godin. "I'm saying 'Hey, Mr. Bookstore Owner, the world has spoken. There are lots of people talking about these books.' "....

Addressing the response to his new project, Mr. Godin, said, "What this shows is that if you build a tribe, you can use it to calmly build a publishing career that doesn't involve a roulette wheel experience where you only have a week to succeed."

Mr. Godin's experiment comes as publishers and authors alike seek out new ways to build stronger direct ties with readers.

"You have to go direct to consumers today because it's gotten harder to get attention from general media," said Dee Dee De Bartlo, a principal in the marketing and publicity firm February Partners. She herself is taking a direct approach in marketing a new title from Rodale Press, "The Starch Solution," which preaches the benefits of a plant-based diet. Her firm is targeting self-proclaimed vegans on Facebook.

Ms. De Bartlo thinks Mr. Godin's hybrid approach may appeal to other authors. "It's hard to convince publishers to take on some authors unless you can prove you have a fan base," she said. "This is one way to do it."

I'm back...and you are being watched

I'm back from vacation--a bit brain dead, but anyway. This is a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal about how companies can monitor your reading on e-books (cue spooky music)....

For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.

The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books....

Mr. [Jim] Hilt[, Barnes & Noble's VP of e-books,] says that the company is still in "the earliest stages of deep analytics" and is sifting through "more data than we can use." But the data—which focuses on groups of readers, not individuals—has already yielded some useful insights into how people read particular genres. Some of the findings confirm what retailers already know by glancing at the best-seller lists. For example, Nook users who buy the first book in a popular series like "Fifty Shades of Grey" or "Divergent," a young-adult series by Veronica Roth, tend to tear through all the books in the series, almost as if they were reading a single novel.

Barnes & Noble has determined, through analyzing Nook data, that nonfiction books tend to be read in fits and starts, while novels are generally read straight through, and that nonfiction books, particularly long ones, tend to get dropped earlier. Science-fiction, romance and crime-fiction fans often read more books more quickly than readers of literary fiction do, and finish most of the books they start. Readers of literary fiction quit books more often and tend skip around between books.

Those insights are already shaping the types of books that Barnes & Noble sells on its Nook. Mr. Hilt says that when the data showed that Nook readers routinely quit long works of nonfiction, the company began looking for ways to engage readers in nonfiction and long-form journalism. They decided to launch "Nook Snaps," short works on topics ranging from weight loss and religion to the Occupy Wall Street movement....

Amazon, in particular, has an advantage in this field—it's both a retailer and a publisher, which puts the company in a unique position to use the data it gathers on its customers' reading habits. It's no secret that Amazon and other digital book retailers track and store consumer information detailing what books are purchased and read. Kindle users sign an agreement granting the company permission to store information from the device—including the last page you've read, plus your bookmarks, highlights, notes and annotations—in its data servers.

Amazon can identify which passages of digital books are popular with readers, and shares some of this data publicly on its website through features such as its "most highlighted passages" list. Readers digitally "highlight" selections using a button on the Kindle; they can also opt to see the lines commonly highlighted by other readers as they read a book. Amazon aggregates these selections to see what gets underlined the most. Topping the list is the line ["Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them"] from the "Hunger Games" trilogy. It is followed by the opening sentence of "Pride and Prejudice."

The Early-Bird Special is running out

It's the last week to get Trust for $2.99 and Trang for free. Just check out those links to the left there for all the need information. As thou snoozeth, so shalt thou loseth....

Obviously I need to work on my fanaticism

You know, I'm clearly pro-self-publishing, and I even took Dean Wesley Smith to task for being too fair to traditional publishing.

And yet, when he suggested that short-story writers send work out to traditional short-story outlets (magazines and the like), I totally whiffed it. I looked at that and said, "Makes sense! You'd be swapping a delay in self-publishing for the possibility of ready money and terrific marketing exposure! The risks should be minimal, since unlike some publishers, magazines don't typically tie up rights to your work until the end of time or force you to stop writing."

Apparently, I should have looked at that piece and said, "Die, unbeliever!! Tradpub is THE DEVIL!!!"

But that's what I get for being a pragmatist.

I think part of the issue is that its intellectually easier for people to just lump everything into two categories: GOOD and BAD. Traditionally-published writers are professional; self-published writers are amateurs. Traditionally-published writers are stupid; self-published writers are smart. These are nice, easy categories, and you can use them without having to do all that troublesome research to discover the facts of the matter.

The larger problem with the divide-and-demonize approach is that it ignores process, and process is key to making good decisions. You need to look at your situation, think long and hard about what will work for you, and then go do that. Honestly, I don't care what you wind up doing, as long you've put actual, rational thought into making that decision.

What infuriates me is the people who don't think. People who give away half their royalties or spend exorbitant sums of money because they don't want to bother learning the first thing about what's happening in publishing. The people who think the only way to create a paper book (that you can hold in your hand! It's such a great feeling! Well worth giving up a hundred million dollars!) is to crawl before a publisher. The people who spout off completely ignorant, unhelpful, and out-of-date advice to new writers. The people who think you should sign contracts without reading them, or even thinking about it.

And of course traditional publishers encourage you to not think. They don't think. They believe these quaint little myths about themselves, wherein they nourish new talent and promote literature and never have to worry about turning a profit.

But the appropriate remedy to a harmful myth is not another myth. It is to tell the truth. Connect to reality. Don't say, "I don't want to sign with GinormoMegaCorp because they are EVIL MONSTERS!" Say, "I don't want to sign with them because the terms they are offering me are unacceptable."

I really, really, reallyreallyreally believe that new writers are completely wasting their time when they pursue traditional publishing deals. But that's not because these companies are inherently and eternally evil. It's because as a new writer, you have no track record of sales, so you are in the worst possible position to pursue a publishing deal. If you manage to sign a deal, you have no leverage, so you will get the worst possible terms, and you are in the worst possible position if your publisher pulls the rug out from under you.

How can you get in a better position? How can you develop a track record and have some leverage as well as some income security if everything goes to hell with your publisher? Self-publish. Get books out.

Once you're in a better position, by all means if you are offered a deal you like, feel free to sign it! Don't worry about "betraying" your fellow writers, or the indie-writer movement, or whatever. A far-more serious betrayal is feeding the myth that writers ought to be poor.

Progress report

I'm tired and may be coming down with a cold, so that meant I felt perfectly well-occupied editing the blog's links. All done now, yay!

Slippery numbers

I haven't slept, and I went on a mondo hike today that I was in no way prepared for (which was actually really nice after being chained to my desk to push out Trust for so long), and I'm exhausted and should probably just turn the computer off and go to bed.

But, although I'm sure I am far from the first, I want to talk about two things I saw in Passive Voice the other day. (No, not today. I'm a little behind, OK?)

Thing #1: Barnes & Noble had crappy financial results, and is still losing oodles of money.

The interesting bit with the numbers: They're still maintaining that magical 27% market share in e-books! Let's tout that number some more! 27%! 27%! Rah! Rah! Rah!

But, hey, they're still losing oodles of money. Hmmm....

Yeah, that number's not worth much. Their financial results reflect my earlier point that e-books and e-book readers are not, in fact, the same thing. B&N has decided that those two businesses together constitute The Nook Business (which at least answers a lingering question on that front), but expect them to try to highlight whichever business is doing better and to ignore whichever business is doing worse. (In other words, expect press releases that go, "Business is great! We lost a billion dollars!" There are a lot of those.)

The other thing about that number is that, in the best-case scenario (you know, the scenario where they're not just making the number up out of whole cloth), it applies only to e-books produced by traditional publishers. B&N has not done a good job promoting self-published writers, but however this is hurting them, it's not going to be reflected in that magical, unchanging 27% figure. It going to be reflected in their financial results, though. (I will note that I find it...curious...that that market-share number never seems to change. They very quickly took this big hunk of the market, and just as quickly, their market share completely stagnated. That is...odd.)

Thing #2: Another claim that it costs almost as much to make an e-book as to make a paper book--80% as much.

This ones a little weird, because it's someone reporting (favorably, which is hysterical--he knows it doesn't add up, but he loves it and even calls it "smart") on another story that I can't read because I don't subscribe to the New Yorker. Obviously I think the overall claim is worthy of great scatology, but the main thing that struck my eye was this quote of a quote:

E-books are cheaper to produce, by about twenty per cent per book, because they do away with the cost of paper, printing, shipping, and warehousing. They also eliminate returns of unsold books—a significant expense, since thirty to fifty per cent of books are returned. But they create additional costs: maintaining computer servers, monitoring piracy, digitizing old books. And publishers have to pay authors and editors, as well as rent and administrative overhead, not to mention the costs of printing, distributing, and warehousing bound books, which continue to account for the large majority of their sales.

This doesn't make any sense. For starters, the author is including "the costs of printing, distributing, and warehousing bound books" in the cost of making e-books, which is like saying that your Kia cost almost as much as your Ferrari because you have to include the cost of buying a Ferrari in the cost of buying a Kia. He also includes the cost of maintaining computer servers, despite the fact that you totally don't have to.

But what I found really interesting is the line, "E-books are cheaper to produce, by about twenty per cent per book, because they do away with the cost of paper, printing, shipping, and warehousing."

Do you know what's not necessarily counted in the cost of producing a book? The cost of paper, printing, shipping, and warehousing! Depending on who is talking, production can mean what you do to get a book ready to be published: Line editing, copy editing, book design, layout, proofreading, cover art.

I could see e-books being 20% cheaper to produce if you don't count the cost of printing. I could see it if you count only the costs incurred to get a book ready to be printed or uploaded.

What do I think happened here? I think the reporter made some assumptions about what was meant by production, and the PR people just kept their mouths shut about what they actually meant.

I think I'll stick with the Wall Street Journal for my business news. The New Yorker guy clearly does not know squat about venture capital, either--it really cracked me up that he and I made the exact same analogy but meant such different things by it. (Another thing that really cracked me up was Mira's reponse to the article.)

Why I wish I wrote short fiction

Dean Wesley Smith has a great article on selling short fiction and all the different markets you can approach, including traditional and indie. He makes a good point, which is that the marketing value of getting a story published in a magazine makes it worth sending stuff there, even if the chances of making a sale are very low. I also think he has a point that you're probably better off bundling two stories and selling them for $2.99 than publishing them separately for 99 cents--it's making $2 one way versus making 70 cents the other, and that's going to add up. (Yes, you might lose impulse sales, but I think with the math being what it is, it's worth trying....)

Why the large-print edition was such a bear this time

You may have noticed that the large-print edition of Trust caused me no end of problems, which you might think puts the lie to my assertion that large-print layouts are easier to do than regular layouts.

The reason is was so difficult was simple: I didn't check the length, so I went long, and I had to narrow the margins to make the book the right length.

This was extremely tricky because with a large-print edition you do not indent paragraphs. Instead, you use block paragraphs. So there only thing indicating that two paragraphs are separate from each other is a line of white space caused by an extra hard return.

If you lay a book out in Word, like I do, guess how you force lines onto the next page? With an extra hard return! What about if the last line of a paragraph is the last line on a page? Well, then the next page starts with a white line, which is no good. So you remove that line by removing the extra hard return.

If the paragraphs are indented, it's really easy to recognize the difference between a paragraph break and anything you just moved around to make your layout work--the stuff you moved around isn't indented. You can see that simply by glancing over the layout.

With a large-print edition, the only way to tell those things apart is to actually read the text of the book again--carefully. In some cases I actually had to go to the regular edition to determine if I just sort of changed subjects within the paragraph or if I had lost a hard return.

Option B would have been to start the layout from scratch, but I don't think that would have saved me any time. Next time, I'll go with Option C, which is to be sure to estimate the page length first!

Trust got reviewed!

Trust got a really nice review in Futures Past and Present--yay! It's oddly nerve-wracking to speculate that someone who liked the first book might not like the second.

Argh, but look how much better he describes Trust than I do. He says:

When the book opens, the Cyclopes still on the station are starving.  No one on their home planet has sent any food.  That's because no one is running the government.  They're all too afraid of offending the Magic Man after he killed most of the previous government, so no one wants to step up and take responsibility for anything.  When Trang tries to find a solution to the problem, the Magic Man appoints him as interim head of the government.  Which is a rather awkward position for a diplomat from Earth to find himself in.

Oh, did I mention that advancement in the Cyclopes government is by assassination?

That's so much better than what I have. I was just thinking that I need to revamp the description because it's kind of dull. Part of me was thinking, Oh, just tell them what it's about, you only have to sell people on the first book anyway. Which is really a dumb approach, right? There's aliens and cussing and aliens trying to understand cussing and a spaceship crash and excitement! I should at least try to make it sound entertaining.

We'll see when I get around to that--the houseguest is here, so the next couple of weeks are going to be busy-busy.

App makers, Tin Pan Alley, and indie writers

This article in the Wall Street Journal draws a lot of parallels between today's app makers and the Tin Pan Alley musicians--there's a big market and barriers to entry are low. The problem is getting people to notice you. (Hey, notice any parallels between those two businesses and a certain third?)

Marketing and selling the app remains a crude undertaking. It's still difficult for users to discover new apps much beyond Apple's "Top 10" lists. As in Tin Pan Alley, a mercenary world of gimmickry and "hit-making" middlemen promise to push an app onto these charts. Song-plugging has even returned. Today it's called "pay per install"—in which app developers pay anywhere from a quarter to a few dollars for each app download....

Typical costs now run roughly $1.50 to $1.80 per installation, a stiff sum for a free or 99-cent app. Games companies are now spending 60% to 70% of their gross income on this marketing, he says.

It's both interesting and a kind of cautionary tale: There's pressure to lower prices in the face of all the other products (a pressure that I think is more intense because people are cranking out "me-too" apps by the dozen, and the only way for those to stand out is by being cheap), but if you lower your prices too much, any money spent marketing will necessarily be a complete loss.

Collectives, cooperatives, and groups

I've been pondering writing collectives/co-ops/groups for a while now--not critique groups, but organizations of writers who work together to promote their work.

I'm interested because I've seen how effective group promotions can be. Offering a Smashwords coupon by myself isn't nearly as effective as taking part in their annual e-book sale. That seems to be a major draw for something like the Indie Book Collective--I think that when I put Trang into KDP Select I will also look into taking part in something like that.

The other thing is that groups can do certain things that individuals aren't really allowed to do. For example, I took part in a Meetup group focused on e-book production and promotion. One of the people there went to a sci-fi con, hoping to pass out promotional material for her books, and felt very overwhelmed. Well, back in my Browncoat days, we'd get tables at sci-fi cons to spread the word about Serenity--if your organization isn't selling anything and you put in your request early enough, you can usually get the table for free. Hanging out at a table full of promotional material is presumably less intimidating for the writers, while said table full o' goodies is presumably more interesting to the readers.

So, using the Meetup group's name, I put in a request for a table at Foolscap, and they gave it to us. Immediately, the group stopped meeting (oops), but I'm hoping that people with books out are still interested in doing it. (In fact, if you write speculative fiction, live in the Puget Sound area, and want to participate, fill out that "Contact Me" form over to the left there. I'm encouraging people to do actual promotions--coupons, links to free fiction, whatevs--rather than just boring ads that say, "Read Me! I'm Awesome!")

We'll see how it goes, but you know, if doing a table works for the readers and works for the writers, it seems silly to not do it. There needs to be an organization, though--the cons would be a lot less willing to offer a free table to an individual writer.

Another thing that might be easier for a group to do is to sell to independent bookstores. Obviously this would not be easy, just easier--you'd have to do the Web site and flyers (which would be an up-front cost). But if it's a question of getting enough paper titles together to have a catalog, that's going to be a lot easier for a group of writers to do than an individual.

People talk about this sort of thing here--it does sound like a lot of these groups are very author-centric, with people just Tweeting about how awesome other group members are, which I don't think would be helpful. (And some of it is really just regular writing-buddy type stuff.)

In some cases they pitch in to buy ads together, which could be helpful. I suppose you and a writing pal in the same genre could decide to split the cost of an ad in Romantic Times or Locus or whatever. On the other hand, if it were an on-line ad, where would the link take you? There would need to be a Web site with links to both writers' e-books--so you're back to an organization....

Writing & depression

Anne R. Allen has a though-provoking post on writing and depression. I always question the notion that writing causes depression--I think a lot of people who go through hard times write as a coping mechanism, so they can be correlated without the former causing the latter. Also writing requires solitude, and a lack of social connections is correlated with depression, and then if you throw in how impossible it's become to succeed in traditional publishing.... But I will admit that I probably do my best world building when I'm a little bored, somewhat isolated, and not terribly happy.

It doesn't mean much now...

OK, I am doing the truly mindless task of re-addressing the links in old blog posts. I got all the ones that point to the old LiveJournal blog out, which was a real pain because I had to look those posts up to get the address. Now it's just yanking the Web host's name out of the addresses, which goes much faster (although I am beginning to wish that I was both a less-prolific blogger and less industrious about linking to every last old post).

Like a lot of things--like getting the book into less-populated categories, or doing a large-print edition, or even doing social media--there's no immediate reason for me to be doing this. I'm happy with my Web host; I haven't had any problems with it.

But is that always going to be true? I was happy with LiveJournal, until I wasn't. I think it's important to position yourself so that you won't be locked into a situation in the future that you might not like. It's kind of an omnivorous approach to publishing--try different things, because you don't know what might pay off, and you don't want to become so narrowly focused on one approach that you can't adjust to change.

Progress report

Done! DONE! DOOOOOONNNNNNE!!!

I'm very happy about this.

Being thrifty with covers

In a comment to my last post, Jim Self noted that it's worth it to invest in covers--be it time or money.

I agree wholeheartedly, and I would throw in another thing you really should invest: Thought.

Thought was something I decidedly failed to invest when I released Trang. I released it with no cover at all, because I knew something deep down in my bones: A cover artist was going to take care of all that.

Didn't work out that way, did it?

The thing is, I'm actually happy I didn't pay someone to do the cover initially. Why? Because my concept was all wrong.

Here's that hideous cover I drew myself. (Warning: I cannot draw. At all. I have a seven-year-old niece who draws a THOUSAND times better than I do.)

If I had paid someone a lot of money for a well-drawn, far-prettier version of this cover, it would not have helped. Even with the horrible drawing, the cover was quite effective in communicating the idea that Trang is wacky adventure sci-fi, which it is not. Of course that upset readers who wanted that kind of book. If I had spent a lot of money, that would not have improved the fundamental problem in communication--indeed, it might have attracted many more people who were never going to like this kind of book.

Plus, if I had spent a lot of money on a beautiful version of the cover, I might not have scrapped that cover concept quite so quickly (loss aversion!). Not only did I save money, but I made it easier to test cover ideas and discard those that do not work. (Not that I realized it at the time.)

And as Lindsay Buroker discovered, you can have a professional cover that is technically excellent but that just does not get the job done--simpler is in many ways better.

Witness:

That's the power of good design right there--it's a very simple image and (I believe) a standard font, but the result is both eye-catching and suggestive of the book's content.

But what can you do if you aren't the least bit artistic?

Well, for starters I would question the idea that you aren't the least bit artistic. You have opinions, right? You can say "ugly!" and "pretty!" Certain things, you notice.

Take advantage of that fact. Notice what you notice.

For example, Passive Guy recently linked to The Public Domain Review, which is seriously awesome. (Yeah, if you can't do anything when there's stuff like this and this and this and this out there, I can't help you.) He posted this picture:

My first thought was, "That's eye-catching! That would make a great book cover"

Noodle with it a bit more, and it's a science-fiction cover!

Really, the possibilities are endless....

And this is just me screwing around for a little bit because I don't feel like tackling that layout. (I would noodle with the lettering to improve visibility if this was something that actually mattered.)

I'm not artistic. I don't even have real photo-editing software--just a freebie program that came with the computer I had before I got this one. Imagine what I could do if I had real software and actual talent, like Passive Guy and Barbara Morgenroth.

Both of them are also good photographers--I'm not, but I know a few good hobbyists, so I could crib off them. And basically, whenever anything catches my eye, I try to make note of what works, and if possible, how it works. (This is sometimes kind of a problem, because most visual artists aren't that good with words, so they often literally can't tell you what their process is.)

For example, if I was trying to put together a cover for a thriller, I would be cribbing big time from Carl Graves, Joe Konrath's cover artist. If you look at the way his lettering is positioned, he tends to guide the eye to the middle third of the book, and he'll even throw in some rays to pull it in. (Oh, and what's that I see on the photos? iStockphoto lettermarks!)