And this is just really funny

The IT Crowd has led me to Richard Ayoade's other stuff, in particular Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. It's extremely funny--the idea is that Garth Marenghi is a horror writer who was popular enough in the 1980s that his publisher financed a TV show. A terrible, terrible show, which was "rediscovered" only recently. And Marenghi's a terrible, terrible writer, who, just like Anne Rice, is utterly convinced that he is a genius. Since I find Rice completely hysterical (oh, that works on many levels, doesn't it?), Marenghi was an easy one for me.

The DVD is available only in the UK format (boo! I'd buy it!), but this is from the extras and has a lot of publishing jokes in it. At the 4:02 mark, they even make a joke about returns.

Honest vs. paid reviews

This article in the New York Times discusses the business of paid reviews. Apparently John Locke used them to great effect, something he just so happened to have left out of his how-to book.

Obviously I have huge problems with this on principle, so I am going to point out that:

1. The reviewers did not actually read the books. (So Locke's fantasy that he was buying reviews "from people that [sic] were honest"? Uh, yeah--honest people don't sell reviews.)

2. At least some of the reviews got pulled by Amazon.

If you think it's worth it to pay money for a vague "This is great, whatever it is!" review that may vanish, then I guess I can't stop you, but I suggest that you look past Locke. The guy who Locke hired was at one point making $28,000 a month, which means that he had between 28 and 280 clients every month, and only one of them managed to break out. The article also mentions another novelist who has spent $20,000 (!!!) on reviews and is no bestseller.

Also, it should be noted that Amazon doesn't pull paid reviews because they're some self-appointed Guardian of Reviewing Ethics. They pull them because customers don't like them. I mean, look at Yelp--I used to go there all the time to search for good local businesses, but I got steered VERY wrong a couple of times by bullshit reviews, and now I don't rely on them any more. Amazon really does not want that to happen, and I think that if you hope to sell there, you should appreciate their efforts to stay popular with customers.

I realize that giveaways at places like Library Thing can be unpredictable, but honest reviews frankly are more valuable to writers than paid reviews. Paid reviews are like edits written by your mom--totally uncritical, totally positive, and totally worthless as feedback. Honest reviews give you a wealth of information about how well you are positioning your book and what could be improved.

In addition, honest reviews are a far more valuable source of information to readers, who, it should be remembered, are completely hopeless when it comes to agreeing on what makes a book good. Reviews help you target your book: If everyone is gushing over your book because it's such a wonderful romance, I probably won't buy it. Believe it or not, that's exactly what you want.

Creating promiscuous characters who aren't douchebags

For my sins, I am continuing to read a novel starring Mr. Perfect Super Guy, who spends his quite copious spare time bagging the hot babes who reliably throw themselves at him even though he's not very good-looking and really has nothing to offer. (Plot? There's supposed to be a plot?)

Anyway, trudging through this book has led me to think long and hard about how to create promiscuous characters who don't make the reader want to reach through the pages of the book and strangle them. Obviously, you might at times want to create a character who is both promiscuous and an asshole, but you really don't want to do it by accident. And it's a little tricky, because it's safe to say that the large majority of readers have at one point or another in their lives been romantically disappointed, so you want to avoid triggering the "THAT BASTARD IS JUST LIKE MY EX!!!!" reaction.

How do you that? Well, it helps to understand that the main pitfall of a casual sexual relationship is that sometimes people assume or hope that a casual relationship is merely the first step to something more serious. If your character is someone who has zero interest in having the relationship become more serious, and you want the reader to like that character, then your character needs to guard against creating expectations in the other person that will never, ever be met.

In other words, when interacting with their this-is-just-a-casual-thing buddy, you character should NOT:

1. Make plans for the future.

2. Take the other person to meet their parents, or agree to meet the other person's parents.

3. Accept lavish gifts.

4. Tell the other person at length what a great catch they are.

5. Agree to be the sole source of emotional support or companionship.

NO, a quick talk at the outset of the relationship establishing your character's expectation that this relationship will just be casual is NOT ENOUGH. "Let's keep it casual" is not a magic spell that guards against emotional attachments and romantic expectations for all time, especially if your characters start spending a lot of time together. (And WHY are they spending all this time together?) The other character knowing that your character has other lovers also does not magically fix everything--it just makes the other character look increasingly desperate as they take your character on lavish vacations, have your character meet their parents, and repeatedly grill your character for details on these other lovers. (Honestly--that way leads to bunny boiling, OK?)

A likeable character is 1. aware that they can harm others, and 2. attempts to not harm others. They don't necessarily succeed, but they have to do more in that regard than sit around and think about how goddamned lucky they are.

Everything's FINE!!!

There's a movie out there called You Can Count on Me, which is about an adult brother and sister who have a troubled relationship. I didn't think it was a great film, but it does a really good job of capturing a certain sibling dynamic in which one kid (the sister, in this case) is The Good Kid, and the other kid (the brother) is The Bad Kid. Of course, The Bad Kid is only marginally more screwed-up than The Good Kid, but she's got it together enough to do things like hold down a job and stay out of jail that the brother can't seem to manage.

The whole Bad Kid/Good Kid pigeonholing is, naturally enough, very corrosive to their relationship as adults. That's captured in the first interaction you see between the two of them. They haven't seen each other in a while, and it should be noted that at this point, the audience knows that the sister (who has a son) is really struggling because she's a single mother who works, and she just got a new boss who's being a real dick and messing up her child-care arrangements for no good reason.

The conversation goes like this:

Terry [the brother/Bad Kid]: So how are ya?

Sammy [the sister/Good Kid]: I'm fine, Terry

Terry: So um... um, how's Rudy [her son]?

Sammy: We're fine, Terry. 

[beat] 

Sammy: How are you? 

Terry: Uhhh, yeaahhh... 

It's hard to capture the delivery, but when the sister says "I'm fine" or "We're fine" she's saying it very quickly, because what she's really saying to him is "We are not going to talk about that--we're going to talk about you, because you are the mess here."

The sister doesn't consciously mean to do this, but with her insistence that everything is fine, she's shutting her brother out of her life. She's not allowing him to sympathize with her or even to learn anything about her life--"I'm fine" presents him with a blank wall of superiority that has no handholds and no way in.

Think about that before you start creating characters who are all fine--confident and capable and unflappable and content and marvelous. With perfect teeth. And there's no self-delusion or naivete there--they honestly are totally fine and perfect!

For one thing, hello fantasy figure! I've known a lot of people whose lives look very good from the outside, but trust me, they have problems both big and small--think of Helen Harris III in Bridesmaids, Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, or more ominously, Vic Mackey in The Shield. Just because someone looks perfect, or worse yet, actually thinks they are perfect, doesn't mean they are perfect--in fact, it usually means quite the opposite.

For another thing, if your protagonist is Mr. Perfect Super Guy, why should I worry? I mean, he's clearly going to fix everything handily without ever breaking a sweat. He's never going to be wrong, or make a mistake, or worry that he might be wrong or might make a mistake. Everything's going to end happily for him--the bad guys will be defeated, and he will get laid lots and lots of times by hordes of fantastically beautiful women. Since I know all this without actually reading the book, why should I bother? You've built an impenetrable wall, and there's no way in.

A whole bunch of good links

Definitely a good day at the Passive Voice, and Edward Robertson has a good one, too...

This post (via PV) outlines what a bad deal Author Solutions' services are--the person is trying to be polite about it, but it's pretty damning.

This post (via PV) notes that Nook sales are flatlining, which is not good news for Barnes & Noble.  

This (also via PV) is a really interesting comparison of e-books and the introduction of paperbacks during the Great Depression. What's fascinating to me is the fact that, just like e-books, paperbacks weren't just a new kind of book--they revolutionized the entire industry.

If paperbacks were going to succeed in America, they would need a new model. [Robert] De Graff [founder of Pocket Books], for his part, was well acquainted with the economics of books. He knew that printing costs were high because volumes were low—an average hardcover print run of 10,000 might cost 40 cents per copy. With only 500 bookstores in the U.S., most located in major cities, low demand was baked into the equation.

Fascinating, no? Since the 1990s, we've been moving back to that pre-1940s model of bookselling, with book sales moving back into bookstores and books getting more and more expensive. At Westercon, Greg Bear said that, in his opinion, there had been a Golden Age of publishing that dated from about the 1950s to the 1980s, when the industry really did work and could sell a lot of books. In my opinion, it's not a coincidence that this Golden Age happened at a time when books were inexpensive and widely available in all sorts of places.

This is a pretty neat article (via, of course, PV) about why science fiction can be very cool.

Edward Robertson has a post for new writers. What I really like about it is his realism about initial sales, which will likely be extremely low if you are unknown (so, you know, plan accordingly), and his appreciation of the value of giveaways as a means of gathering feedback about your book's presentation.

Guess who's buying?

One thing that I've noticed since I started reading e-books is that I'm buying a lot more books rather than picking them up from my (excellent) local library. Part of this is because indie books aren't always available at the library, but a larger reason is that they're so cheap, half the time I don't even bother to check if the library has them.

And it turns out I'm not the only one buying more. E-book readers are more likely to buy their own books (via DWS). I would argue that it's the low, low price combined with the fact that e-books are harder to borrow. (Not that it's impossible to lend them, but it takes some thought--are we on the same format?--and it only takes one click of a button to buy....)

How does the future look? Well, according to the press release for the latest 2012 U.S. Book Consumer Demographics and Buying Behaviors Annual Review (via PV), younger adults, who are more likely to read e-books, are now the spendiest readers. 

GenY's 2011 book expenditures rose to 30 percent -- up from 24 percent in 2010 – passing Boomers' 25 percent share. And with 43 percent of GenY's purchases going to online channels, they are adding momentum to the industry shift to digital.

A job is not a story

One thing a reporter really has to focus on (and which certainly applies to writing novels) is how to write a coherent story from the chaos that is life. Basically you have to discard 99% of reality and focus on the 1% that makes a story. For an event to be considered a story, it must be what is called newsworthy.

When people think newsworthy, they think it's the same thing as important, but there are many very important things going on that are not, in fact, news. For example, it is extremely important to life on this planet that the Sun continues to shine. But you do not see headlines every day saying, "SUN STILL SHINING," because that's what it regularly does.

I covered health care for a publication in New York City, and one of the things that happened on a fairly routine basis was that some random doctor would decide that he needed to become famous. Of course, if you want that, there are scores of extremely-reputable public-relations professionals who are more than happy to assist you by vacuuming all the money out of your wallet. These fine public-relations professionals would call me to tell me that they were representing, say, a cardiologist, and that this cardiologist SAVED LIVES EVERY DAY by providing cardiologic care to patients. He took people with sick hearts, this cardiologist did, and he made them better and SAVED LIVES EVERY DAY. Shouldn't I write a story about this cardiologist who SAVED LIVES EVERY DAY, because he SAVED LIVES EVERY DAY?

I never quite had the nerve to inform one of these outstanding public-relations professionals that they should call me once their cardiologist started RUTHLESSLY MURDERING PATIENTS, because that would be news (considering the personalities involved, they would probably have offered my words up as serious advice, and their client would have taken it). I did, however, point out that what their client was doing was not, in fact, news. Medicine is of course a noble and important profession, and I appreciate everyone out there who saves lives, no less than I appreciate the fact that the Sun continues to shine. But news? Someone doing their job is not news. It is not a story.

When I read a novel about a person learning a job and eventually coming to perform it competently, or simply performing a job competently without ever learning it, I feel toward the author some of those same warm feelings I once felt for those lovely, honest, capable public-relations professionals who made such valuable and pleasant use of my time. A person learning a job--gaining confidence and finding a place for themselves in society--is a premise and a character arc, but it is not a story. Someone consistently doing their job well is not even an arc. It does not matter if the job is a sci-fi job or a magical job or a spy job or even a cardiology job; you also need a plot. Harry Potter does not simply learn how to perform magic--he learns how to perform magic AND KILLS VOLDEMORT. That last bit is rather important.

That whole marketing-at-conventions notion...

I have to say, I'm fairly down on it at this point. I distributed 4,500 flyers, and I've seen only a handful of downloads as a result. It was impossible to track the Westercon downloads separately from the Summer/Winter Sale downloads, so I couldn't quantify results there, but I could with GeekGirlCon, and...yeah, no. I mean, you could argue that if I improved the flyers, blah, blah, blah, but I'm saying, 4,500 people each received a flyer in their hot little hand, and the VAST majority of them did not choose to take advantage of it. And advertising in a con program didn't work. All this makes me question the fundamental validity of marketing books at cons.

I already canceled the Foolscap table, just because I didn't think the group was ready for something like that at this point. If it turns out that people really, really want to do a table, I'll join in, but I'm not going to push for it. I think it's an awful lot of work for a not-very-promising shot at results.

The conventions have been fun so far. I'm still going to Foolscap and Norwescon (and you know, since I'll be there anyway I'll do flyers), but I'm mentally reclassifying them as entertainment as opposed to a meaningful marketing opportunity. I mainly seem to attract other writers, which is fine as far as it goes (I sincerely hope they find the blog worthwhile), but obviously marketing should focus on reaching actual readers.

Hey look, the Internet!

Yeah, I was out in the boonies for a bit--I'm back in civilization now. Apparently while I was away Sue Grafton admitted that she doesn't know the first thing about the publishing industry nowadays. Yeah, we knew. I mean, apparently I'm supposed to be glad she's willing to admit that she was shooting off her mouth about something she knows absolutely nothing about, thereby possibly doing serious damage to the careers of countless would-be authors who respect and admire her, but I'm more amazed by the fact that she spins "Everything I said was completely wrong" as "I need to clarify something I said." If you are hoping to one day reach the level of wealth and fame where you are surrounded at all times by fawning sycophants who will praise everything you ever do or say, please look at that and reconsider. (Seriously, how hard would it have been for her to simply decline to give advice? That's what I do when people want to know how to get their kid into Harvard.)

In less-bitchy remarks, the Wall Street Journal has a couple of interesting bits from a few days ago. There's this little piece on how even though the economy is slowly recovering, paper shipments are falling, and "the divergence between paper shipments and GDP growth began around the time the iPad was introduced." That's especially interesting given how fast tablet computers are being adopted--it's expected that 47% of Americans will have one by next year. (!!!)

All the new tablets that are coming out are pressuring Barnes & Noble to cut prices on the Nook, which the WSJ notes is an issue because the company is losing money: 

B&N has effectively used its bookstores, which are profitable, to finance the Nook. But that isn't sustainable. Financial realities suggest B&N will be unable to stay in the hardware business in the long term without help from better financed partners.... On that front, B&N will get $300 million from Microsoft if the software giant's deal for a 17.6% stake in a newly formed Nook and college businesses joint venture closes in October as expected. But it is unknown exactly how that will play out, particularly as Microsoft now is launching its own tablet.

Progress report

I only wrote 800 words today--I was feeling kind of itchy, and that took me to the beginning of a big scene, so I decided to start fresh tomorrow. I also decided to try making flyers for Foolscap, primarily to see what art-editing options I had. A little of using what came with the computer inspired me to download GIMP. We'll see how that does.

Jane said, Have you seen my wig around?

OK, fine, she didn't--but how awesome would that have been?

The panel with Jane Espenson was about her Web sitcom Husbands (they gave us an early showing of the first episode of the second season, and it was really funny), and a lot of the discussion centered around the digitization of television and how much it has changed things.

In fact, the show wouldn't have existed were it not for YouTube. One of the characters in the show is this young, kind of vapid, kind of ditzy man named Cheeks, who is played by Brad Bell. I didn't know this, but Bell created Cheeks a long time ago and has had a YouTube channel for quite some time. Espenson discovered one of his videos, and that led her to contact him and develop the series. Bell also writes and produces the show, and he is not the least bit vapid or ditzy--it was one of those cases where of course I knew that the character and the person were different, but it was a little surprising to see how very different they are.

Anyway, Espenson paid for the first season out of her own pocket (Battlestar Galactica money--Bell made fun of her, saying, "Here is a hole I can pour all my money into! I could burn it, but this is a faster way!"), and the second season they funded mostly through Kickstarter (although Espenson kicked in some of her own dosh as well). I asked if it was smaller than a normal television production, and the answer is, kind of, but it was still 40 people (many of whom were doing Espenson favors) and two Steadicams. So the barriers to producing a professional-quality Web show are lower than they used to be, but I wouldn't really describe them as low.

What Espenson really liked about going indie was (say it with me) the control (THE CONTROL!!!) and the timeliness of it--she was able to get a show done in a fraction of the time it would have taken a network, which was important to her because the show is about gay marriage, and that's a hot topic right now. "We're not being told what we can and cannot do," she said. "We're figuring out for ourselves what the audience wants, instead of being told what the audience wants." Earlier, she asked who in the audience had contributed to the Kickstarter campaign. Several people raised their hands, and she told them, "You're the network that renewed us."

Once again, the analogy to novels was made, this time specifically regarding digitization--they all think that people love scripted television because it's novelistic, and that they will follow novelistic writing wherever it goes. Espenson pointed out, "Newspapers are dead, novels are not," and Bell agreed, "They just change platforms." (Clearly, these people ignore Scott Turow and don't realize that literature! is! dying! Good for them.)

Espenson also described "a growing hunger for content" with video. Which is interesting, because the podcast people said pretty much the same thing about audio, and it's also true about books--you will never be able to produce content as quickly as the audience can consume it.

Podcasts?

I went to GeekGirlCon today--my flyers were, indeed, in the goodie bags, and some copies have already been downloaded, so yay.

I wasn't feeling very well, so I wound up just going to two panels, one on podcasts and one with Jane Espenson, which I'll cover in the next post.

The podcasting one was interesting, but I'm not really sure what to do with the information I received. The folks at the panel create what are basically radio shows, which they give away--it's a hobby and they're not trying to monetize it. So of course their focus is on keeping costs low--apparently you're better off with a decent but not really nice mike (they liked the $99 Blue Snowball), because if you get a fancy mike you also need a fancy soundproof room in order to use it.

The problem for me is that I wouldn't mind doing a free podcast of Trang, but I'd like to be able to sell an audiobook as well, and apparently the retail sites don't like home-made audiobooks. It would be really annoying if I paid for the equipment to do it myself only to have to pay again for professional production.

In addition, while it's not expensive to do a podcast yourself in terms of money, it's a BIG investment of time. They were saying that it takes about an hour to produce a minute of material--now, these people are doing dramas with multiple voices and sound effects and what have you. But even assuming it takes an hour to produce five minutes of material, that's six hours for a half-hour podcast--and I have no idea if I could even get through a chapter in a half-hour, especially if I'm trying not to mumble!

So, I don't know. Maybe if I regarded the podcast as strictly a marketing task, I could justify it, but then again, maybe that marketing time & money would be better spent on something else. It seems such a potentially huge time suck--like redoing the layouts of the first two books. Not a task to be undertaken lightly!

Creating vs. receiving

You may recollect that, when I first tried to figure out what kind of book Trang was, I failed miserably. I thought it was "fun action adventure!" which it was clearly not. And I'm not the only one who has had these problems.

I mentioned this difficulty once to my sister, specifically this notion that Trang was fun action adventure. She immediately said, "What? Oh, no. I could see why maybe it was that way to write, but to read? No."

I've been watching The IT Crowd, which is excellent. One episode, "Something Happened," really applied here: In the episode, an IT guy named Roy (who is vaguely social and is played by Bridesmaid's Chris O'Dowd) confesses to another IT guy, Moss (who totally has Asperger's and is played by Richard Ayoade), that when he got a massage, the male masseuse ended the session by smooching him on the fanny.

Roy was quite traumatized by this and is afraid to tell anyone because he is terrified that people will find it funny. Of course, the audience did and does and always will. Roy confesses all this to Moss, who stares at him, without responding, for what O'Dowd later describes as a "giant pause." The longer Moss pauses, the funnier the scene becomes, because the audience is just waiting for him to start laughing. It's completely on par with the schawarma scene in The Avengers--the longer the silence lasts, the funnier it becomes.

Buuuuuuut...if you watch the blooper reel, you discover (8:12) that the giant pause was because O'Dowd forgot that the next line was his.

So, if you're O'Dowd, that episode is "The one where I totally blew it, and they left the mistake in to keep me humble, I guess." If you're the viewer, it's "The episode where Ayoade proves, without a doubt, that he is the on the same level as Gene Wilder as a comic-pause genius!!!"

You just never know. Everyone totally loves the scenes in Trust that are told from the point of view of an alien, and yet I was very nervous about those scenes, because they're such a departure from the rest of the book. But even though I was nervous about it, I went for it. I think you have to, because what people really love about, say, The Avengers is the weird, quirky shit--the schawarma--not the fact that it's a competent action movie.

Oh, hello, wall

The writing has been going so well! It's been getting easier and more fun every day, I have a great sense of where things are going, everything's just humming along.

So of course I get kind of lost in it and forget that I'm going to have to stop. Like, today.

I can bargain, try to keep the momentum going, get in dribs and drabs while I can. Sunday and Monday I may be able to write some. Tuesday, Wednesday Thursday, Friday and Saturday are completely out of the question, however. Maybe I can get a little in Sunday, but Monday the kids become my full-time responsibility until school starts.

We can pretend I'll write on the weekends, but let's face it--I'm going to be spending the time lying very quietly in a dark room. I love those kids, but God they're noisy.

After the kids go back to school, I get to spend the greater part of September babysitting an aged relative who wishes to cross things off a bucket list. I may have fun, or I may spend a great deal of time in the waiting rooms of various hospitals--we shall see. I'm trying to suspend all expectations.

In any case, I'm grateful for the progress I've made, which has been substantial. Not only have I written quite a bit, but I've largely gotten over that initial "How do I start this thing!?!" hump and am into the A plot, which is a good place to be. Not that I won't be utterly freaked out when I start writing again in late September/early October.

Coming up

I have GeekGirlCon this Saturday--should be fun! I'll be making sure my flyers are actually in the freebie bags and reporting back on any interesting artists or panels. And Jane Espenson is going to be there--her blog is actually a really good resource for writers, even though she stopped updating it two years ago and it's specifically about television. Still, there's a lot of really useful stuff there on pacing, characters, plotting, and dialogue.