Progress report

Pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving (NO, this was NOT my idea, but I'm cooking for it somehow anyway) took up most of my time today, but I did manage to do some noise removal on the Chap 1 file, followed by some compression, which does make the talking easier to hear. Unfortunately it also makes the breath sounds easier to hear (I had no idea I breathed so loud!), so I'm going to do another round of noise removal later. You know, maybe after post-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving. (That's a joke. I hope.)

Progress report

Things were pretty quiet today, so I recorded chapter one of Trang and edited it. Editing is actually pretty easy--it's not like I'm doing anything that complicated, so it was pretty straightforward cutting and pasting. (I'm using Audacity for software, BTW.)

Gurus

The other day I was talking about an article about Hugh Howey, and Jim Self mentioned how nice Howey's humility was. And it was nice, because Howey freely cops to not really having anything to do with Wool taking off--it just did, so he did his best to encourage it. It actually kind of annoys him because he put much more effort into promoting his other books, and the one novella he didn't promote got all the love.

The reason that was so nice to read is that there's a lot of advice out there, and sometimes you wind up dealing with people who feel their success means that they know what's best for everybody. And many writers really want that--they want someone with all the answers, who can look at their book and give them some simple plan that will magically guarantee bestsellerdom.

With someone like John Locke, it goes even further, and you get sold a book with a simple plan that will magically guarantee bestsellerdom (although he left out some bits). Or maybe the person wants to sell you some services to enact this simple plan that will magically guarantee bestsellerdom. Or maybe they want you to buy those services from their cousin (who is certainly not kicking back a piece of the action).

And you'd be a fool not to pay for that, right? I mean, after all, this person sold a bazillion copies, and who are you? It's a simple plan, and it magically guarantees bestsellerdom--what's not to like?

I would point out two things:

Thing #1: It has, alas, never been uncommon in the world of publishing for people to realize that there are a lot of folks out there who dream of becoming a bestseling writer, and that all those people sure do have a lot of money floating around in their pockets. The fact that a person may have a legitimate and lucrative business (as an agent, a publisher, or yes, even as a bestselling writer) doesn't mean that they're necessarily inclined to let all that lovely money go.

Thing #2: Nobody can ever EVER EVER predict what books will become bestsellers! NOBODY!!! NOBODY can MAKE a book into a bestseller--EVER. The streets of publishing are littered with the corpses of executives who thought that they could. If God himself appeared in the sky in his fiery glory and said to me, "Mary Sisson, I can guarantee that your next book will be a bestseller," I would laugh and laugh, and then feel really bad that so many people believed in this guy for so long. Overpromising is the mark of a scammer.

The "I sold all these books!" card is actually not all that rare these days. It's really wonderful that so many people have been able to make self-publishing work for them, but if you dig down and try to find the "secret" to their success, you will find:

Some think you should offer free books, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should offer 99-cent books, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should advertise, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should use KDP Select, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should have your book available everywhere, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should be open to traditional-publishing deals, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should do giveaways and prizes, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should use social media, and some think you shouldn't.

Some think you should blog, and some think you shouldn't.

What do they have in common? All those people can point to their copious sales and say, "I'm an expert." It's the story of the blind men and the elephant.

Although it can be hard to remember this, it's actually a very good thing that there are several possible paths to success in self-publishing, instead of just one. It reminds me of the best advice I've ever seen regarding exercise: What is the very best, very healthiest exercise possible, the one that will get you the most fit? The exercise you actually do. If it works on paper and doesn't work for you, it doesn't work.

I mentioned before that I like Lindsay Buroker's approach. But I should also mention that I don't try to be her. Lindsay hires out just about everything. I hire out almost nothing! She likes to focus on her writing, and indeed her success is probably in no small part due to her copious output. I've already spent years experiencing the joys of writing seven fucking days a week, and it makes me happier to finally figure out why none of my mix tapes ever came out right.

With Buroker, 1. if it makes her want to hang herself, she doesn't do it, and 2. she's willing to try different things. I think those two elements are common to the vast majority of writers who have found success self-publishing. The willingness to explore, to find one's own path, to keep experimenting is really crucial.

It's also a lot harder to do than glomming onto someone's simple plan that will magically guarantee bestsellerdom. It's easy to be a child and get led by the hand. It's harder to be an adult.

Progress report, audio geekage edition

I didn't get much sleep last night, and it wasn't raining today (hard rain + metal roof = ambient noise nightmare), so I decided to take a crack at recording with the pop filter. It really does change things, and it took me a couple of readings before I found the best way to handle it.

If, like me, you're totally new to recording audio, it turns out that you have to fiddle a lot with something called input volume. That means the, um, volume of your, er, input--in this case, your microphone.

If you are old and gray like me, you probably made a few mix tapes back in the day. And since people still had a mix of vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs, the music for your mix tape came from a bunch of different sources. As a result, when you'd play your mix tape, some songs would be REALLY LOUD and others would be really quiet.

The problem, as I have discovered decades after being repeatedly baffled by this as a teenager, is one of input volume. If your input volume is too loud, you'll blow the ears out of the poor sod who bought your audiobook or downloaded your podcast. If it's too quiet, that poor sod will have to crank up the volume to hear it, and then they'll get their ears blown out when the next thing on their MP3 player comes on.

This is no way to treat a customer.

So, when you record, you set the input volume at a certain level. Well, duh, you're thinking, that sounds really simple. But it's not! The problem is that certain words will max out the volume of your recording even if everything else is normal, a phenomenon known as clipping.

You might think that clipping is caused by shouting, but you can make something clip, and clip mightily, without significantly increasing the volume of your delivery. For example, the first page of Trang contains the following passage:

And instead of a vacation, all he had gotten had been variations of the question, What, exactly--? What, exactly, was the Titan station for? What, exactly, could scientists do there that would ever justify its cost? What, exactly, was its purpose?

Now, with those lines, if you make "What, exactly," sharp--not shouting "WHAT, EXACTLY!!!" because that would be silly, but just using the snippy tone that someone would probably use if they were asking that kind of question--it clips like nobody's business. "What, exactly," becomes "WHat, exactly," and even "W[random distortion that is not at all pleasant to listen to]Hat, exactly."

The issue for me is that I have a quiet little voice and a tendency to mumble--people say things to me like, "Oh, I can understand you now that I've gotten the hang of lip-reading." I'm a little better about it at this point in my life, but still--my voice is soft. So I have to crank up the input volume (I'm assuming this is what the mellow-voiced NPR people do, because you can hear them fine), which means a lot more clipping.

The idea of the pop filter is to reduce the clipping, which it does. It also reduces your input volume--oops! So I had to crank it up to the absolute maximum, which meant that when I did clip, I clipped really badly--distortion noises and everything.

But I didn't clip very often, much less than I did without the filter. And I realized that, with the pop filter, it's actually pretty easy to modify the delivery of lines like "What, exactly," so that they don't clip at all.

Once you're dead....

Kris Rusch did a post on having a will and a literary executor, and Passive Guy (who is a lawyer) chimes in as well. (Note that any executor position is a job. People rarely want jobs for which they are not paid.)

My grandfather was also a lawyer and was the vice president in charge of estates and trusts for a bank, so I certainly had the need for things like wills drummed into my head at an early age. (In fact, I first got a will when I was in my early 20s and had no dependents, which amused the hell out of some people.)

But I'm going to point out something that may seem a little contradictory: You can't predict the future.

My grandfather thought he could. He knew all the ins and outs of estate law, and he drew up a monster of a trust designed to virtually eliminate taxes and to ensure that no one in the family would ever be poor again!!!

The problem is, he drew it up in the 1970s. Tax law has changed considerably since then, so strategies that were supposed to save us money no longer do. Instead, they greatly complicate record-keeping and greatly increase the fees we have to pay lawyers and accountants. The institutions that were supposed to look after us no longer exist. Coping with all this crap is extremely time-consuming, and we are planning to petition the court to dissolve this trust as soon as it is practical because we don't want the next generation to have to deal with it.

So, while I do think you should certainly have a will, don't be a control freak about it. If, a century from now, your great-grandkid blows all your hard-earned money on drugs and winds up in the poorhouse, that's on him. There's only so much you can do.

Compare and contrast

Passive Voice has two links up today that were pretty interesting to read in juxtaposition.

The first was titled, "Hugh Howey Doesn't Need a Publisher, Thank You Very Much" (a title that made Howey feel compelled to point out that he does have a publisher for his print editions abroad, a fact that is mentioned in the body of the article). It is very upbeat, noting the Howey has gone from an unknown wanna-be to someone who has sold 300,000 copies of Wool alone, despite the fact that he did very little promotion for the book.

The funny thing was, Howey didn't need a publisher. He was doing just fine on his own. "You do so well self-published, it's hard for publishers to compete with what you can do on your own," he says. "I make 70 percent royalty rates on sales here in the U.S., and if I went with a publisher, that would be cut to almost one-sixth. And so, you know, we sat down with them, and they had some nice offers, but I'm handing them a bestseller with a film contract attached and all of these other things attached and what they're offering is just not as good as what I'm doing currently. I showed them what I'm earning now, and they kind of said, I don't know if we can compete with that."[...]

If Howey had his way, all authors would go the self-publishing route. "My opinion these days is that everyone is better off to start out with self publishing," he says. "It's no longer the career-killer it used to be. ... All publishing success is like winning the lottery, whether you do it along the traditional path or the self-publishing path. You have to get lucky several times over either way. Neither one is a way to make it rich."

He adds, "My realization has been that whatever kind of book you have ... you'll earn more and be in a better position if you own the rights. This is true for a book that will hardly sell, for a blockbuster, and for everything in between."

The second article is titled "Book Publishing Crisis: Capitalism Kills Culture." As you might guess, it's more of a downer.

If you work in, say, journalism, or the music business, you’ve seen this kind of thing before: the erosion and then collapse of an industry, often after mergers and acquisitions announced with buzzwords – “synergy”! – or reassurances that new ownership means that nothing significant will change because, after all, we really value the kind of work you people do. Will publishing continue to slide, gradually, or will it fall apart, like newspapers – which have lost approximately a third of their staffs since the recession and seen advertising revenue sink to 1953 levels — and record labels – where annual sales of the top-10 albums have gone from over 60 million to about 20 million in roughly a decade. Members of the creative class have been here, and it hasn’t worked out real well for them. [Actually, David Byrne says it works out fine and gives the numbers to prove it, but what does he know?]

“It’s really painful,” says Ira Silverberg, a veteran editor (Grove/Atlantic, Serpent’s Tail) and agent (Sterling Lord Literistic) now serving as director of literature for the National Endowment for the Arts. ”I’m sure I’ll have tons of former colleagues looking for work, and they won’t find it. Regardless of what [executives] say, it’s going to be a smaller business.”

Obviously, the article views the world through the lens of traditional publishing lens, quoting a former agent and editor, not some scruffy writer. In fact, a major focus of the articles is, how will the changes in publishing affect editors?

But what about the scruffy writers? Oh, pity them, for they shall live without advances!

And while self-publishing has brought some good work out along with a lot of bad, there is little to no money at the front end. (We tend to hear about the rare exception of runaway success, not the hundreds of thousands of self-published books per year that go nowhere or lose their authors money.) For the independently wealthy, those who married well, or businessmen writing valiantly on the secrets of their success, these are real options. As with much of the Internet-driven transformation of the creative class, authors hoping to make a middle-class living with a modest advance will increasingly be out of luck.

This is one of those things where everything said is true, but basically irrelevant. There is no money at the front end in self-publishing--in fact, there are up-front costs. Life is indeed easier for self-published writers (and traditionally-published writers, and all sorts of other people) who already have money. If you want to live from advance to advance, you'll be SOL because there won't be any advances.

What's not mentioned? Oh, what was it Howey said?

I make 70 percent royalty rates on sales here in the U.S., and if I went with a publisher, that would be cut to almost one-sixth.

Ah, yes....

The article's "solution" to all this is--a huge new government program! A ministry of culture, which will obviously provide corporate welfare to traditional publishers and ensure that nothing ever changes again! Because that's totally going to fly in this specific country at this specific time with this specific deficit, just like the Department of Justice was totally willing to exempt the very special industry of publishing from antitrust law. That is one clear-eyed appraisal of the landscape right there!

Anyway, I think when you read the news from one part of an industry, and it's all happiness and we're-in-the-money, and then you read something from another part, and it's all gloom-and-doom and we're-going-down-without-a-huge-bailout, you do need to ask yourself, where am I in all this? If you're a writer, are you set up so that you can get the hell out of the collapsing side of things? If you're an editor or a cover artist or someone else who provides services to writers, are you reaching out to indie writers and learning about their needs, or are you locking yourself in with a single client who may soon vanish?

Focus!

Life has not been letting me focus on writing--I assume this will only get worse as the holidays descend. But I've been reading some less-than-fully-enjoyable things that have caused me to think a lot about focus, or the lack thereof.

One of the things that separates the modern novel from the picaresque novel of yore is simply this matter of focus. In your typical picaresque novel your loveable lower-class outsider goes over here and has an adventure...and then he goes over there and has an adventure...and then he goes over there and has an adventure...and then he goes over there and has an adventure...and then he goes over there and has an adventure...and then he goes home. The end.

In other words, there's not some larger storyline holding the whole thing together. You could break the picaresque novel up into its component bits, and each bit could stand alone without any trouble.

And it's really less satisfying, at least in my opinion as a modern reader. Nothing builds. There's no larger A plot moving things along and hooking your interest.

I can see the temptation to write a picaresque novel, especially if you've got a bunch of fantastic worlds going on in your head. But just spitting them out onto the page, one right after the other, with very little to connect them--well, it's like after they ran out the Kobol plot in Battlestar Galactica. You're basically asking me to gin up interest and become emotionally invested in an entirely new scenario every 50 pages or so, and that's hard for me to do, especially because your last scenario wound up not really meaning much.

Right now I'm reading a novel that I'm probably going to ditch because it's so unfocused--and I basically never quit novels without finishing them, so that should tell you something. In this case, the lack of focus affects detail.

This book is a blizzard of details. Every thought, every word, every gesture, every object is recorded in loving and extensive detail. The result is a book that is VERY long and not going anywhere. There's no filter and no focus.

You can definitely get deep within a character's point of view and tell me all that they're thinking--but there needs to be a reason behind it. I don't need all the thoughts and feelings of a random person making a minor decision unless there's something really interesting going on with that random person. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulker is a good example of that done well--you are intently within each character's point of view, and they are all desperately screwed up and sometimes quite terrifying people, so it's actually quite interesting.

If you don't have that sort of ambition--you just want to write a plot-driven adventure--then that's great! In that case, don't give me the entire stream-of-consciousness blow-by-blow thought process of someone as they get in a car and get dinner. It's not important.

And don't give backstory by having your characters sit around with nothing to do (a nothingness that is described in, you guessed it, excruciating detail) until boredom drives them to ask each other about their respective backstories. (And then they each discuss their backstory in turn, neatly combining the too-much-detail problem and the picaresque-plot problem.) If your characters are that bored, imagine how the reader must feel.

Signs of the times

MacMillan has decided to stop producing a print dictionary (via PV). Oh, and HarperCollins is getting rid of the last of its warehouses in the United States.

Just tossing that out there as a corrective for all those people out there arguing for one reason or another that this change isn't happening, or has stopped, or doesn't matter, or whatever. You don't stop change by ignoring it; you just set yourself up to get bit on the ass by it.

How Audiobooks Work

Things have been a little chaotic here--hopefully by Wednesday everything will have settled and I'll be able to write. Anyway, I did manage to read David Byrne's How Music Works, which was interesting to me on a lot of levels.

He has an entire chapter on the many different ways to distribute music nowadays (he uses examples from his own career, breaking out expenses and revenues--he's a very open guy). That section was of special interest because while I don't mind giving Trang away as a free podcast, I'd also like to have an audiobook that people can buy if they want, plus if I record the later titles I would want to do them as paid audiobooks and not as free podcasts.

A lot of the places he was talking about just do music, because the only way onto Amazon or iTunes if you are an audiobook is via Audible, and that means going through ACX. The issue with that is that they have pretty specific production requirements--I don't know if they are impossibly specific, though, mainly because I don't know what's involved in mastering. You also have no control over price.

The other option (actually, it looks like you can do both) is Bandcamp, which is a straightforward retail arrangement--no distribution included. They charge a percentage of your sales, but other than that it's free. You can set your price there however you want, which is nice.

Serendipitously, Erin Dolan of Unclutterer, a site I often read, has produced her own audiobook. In her case, she just put an E-Junkie shopping cart onto her Web site--a click on the link takes you right to PayPal.

That looks interesting, doesn't it? For $5 a month I could sell every e-book format plus the audiobooks directly from this Web site. Well, that's going into the Must Investigate in the Future pile.

There's no need to rush

I read two blog posts, one right after the other, by two writers who are both feeling SO overwhelmed by all the stuff they have to do. Just reading those things gave me knots of sympathetic stress.

I've written for a long time, and I think it's important to think hard about how writing is going to fit into your life--after all, if you do it right, writing is something that you can pursue well into old age.

Music is that way, too: You can enjoy music in all sorts of ways throughout your life, and you can do that without ever becoming a full-time professional musician. You can be a doctor who sings bass in a variety of choirs, as was my father, and no one blinks an eye at it.

There seems to be a resistance to approaching writing that way, I assume because of the myth that getting published is some marker of quality. And since self-publishing has rather suddenly begun to offer the possibility of turning writing into lucrative full-time work, people think that they must exploit that possibility. They feel like they gotta do their damnest to hit the jackpot. They gotta write write write write write write!!! and they gotta promote the hell out of everything all the time! Including when they're writing! You just write with your right hand and tweet with your left--don't be a slacker!!!

And don't do anything else! You have no other interests now--you're a writer! You can't possibly expect to get anywhere if, say, you're a doctor who, instead of singing bass in choirs, writes poetry in your spare time. That's just crazy: You can only be one thing!

There was a time where that kind of insane focus was totally necessary--go back and read some of Joe Konrath's pre-self-publishing posts if you don't believe me. But that time is past, and clearly it was yet another symptom of how dysfunctional publishing had become--it's not like things were going swimmingly for Konrath despite all his work.

The problem with the old paradigm was, you either had to sell like crazy, or you had no career whatsoever--your books would never see the light of day. For Konrath, it was scramble or die. But nowadays, if you're not a bestseller, so what? If your book just trundles along, occasionally selling a copy here and there (or not), it's not going to kill you. No one is going to stop you from publishing your next book because your current one isn't selling--believe me, if that was the case, Trust would never have come out.

The other thing is, in the old days, when a book had only a few months to make it, it made sense to scramble to promote it for that short period of time. But now there are no limits to shelf space, and no time limits on your book. So if you're scrambling, there's no end to it. E-books are forever. You will burn out long before your book ever leaves the store.

Which means you need to think long and hard about what you "have" to do to promote, since you'll be doing it for the foreseeable future. The thing I really like about Lindsay Buroker's approach is that she molds tasks to her own personal preferences--she doesn't spend huge hunks of her time doing unrewarding stuff just because someone else told her she has to. There's stuff she hires out, there's stuff she does in the most-efficient way possible, there's stuff she does in her own way, and there's stuff she just does not do, because she's not comfortable doing it. She always looks at these tasks through that paradigm: Do I want to be doing this?

Even writing tons of books--the go-to approach for people who don't like marketing--is only worth doing if you enjoy writing tons of books. Maybe you don't want to do nothing but write all day. Maybe you only have an idea for one book. Maybe you actually enjoy what other people sneeringly call your "day job." I've always preferred freelancing to regular full-time work, but mine is by no means the only way: Despite his fame, Harvey Pekar never left his dead-end job as a file clerk until he retired. His job didn't interfere with his art, and the structure of it helped keep him sane, so he sensibly held onto it.

We get it drummed into our heads that we have to have ambition, that we need to grab that brass ring, that when opportunity knocks, we'd damned well answer the door. What doesn't get mentioned is that after you get that brass ring and open that door, you still have to live your life. You're still you, and you can still be made miserable if you're not careful. Publishing has gotten a lot more flexible; there's no point in ruining that with your own rigid expectations.

Progress report

Well, I was kind of distracted by my shiny new toy today, and I recorded the first chapter of Trang instead of writing Trials. (Yeah, fine, beta tasks are supposed to be done only when alpha tasks cannot be performed. But it's a shiny new toy!)

Anyway, the recording went fine--my neighborhood is usually pretty quiet, and the cats didn't decide to freak out, so ambient noise wasn't an issue. Adjusting the input volume was easy to do, and I think I'm at a good sound range. When I flubbed a line, I just went back and re-read the paragraph. If I didn't like the way a paragraph sounded when I listened to the chapter, I recorded it again. I think the main issue in my delivery is that there are a number of breath noises.

So, I'll have to figure out how to edit all that together, and take out the breath noises. I get the feeling that's going to be the less-fun part, so maybe that will motivate me to, you know, actually write Trials.

Let's do it better!

Camille LaGuire made a good comment on the Passive Voice. The post was another one about the never-ending paid-review scandal, but LaGuire points out that "simple group behavior" can trip up an algorithm, too:

Let’s say there is a large forum frequented by authors who are all interested in promoting their books, along with some book bloggers who are into the same culture....

They all review more than your average reader. And everybody who reads their books and interacts with them on blogs or elsewhere hears again and again how important reviews are to authors, so they also have a “bubble” in their reviewing behavior. They also all submit to the same book bloggers. And they all have an overlapping readership, and even though they avoid mutual reviewing… the authors and their fans tend to read a lot of books from other authors in the same forum. And so their reviews are clustered in the same pool.

From the algorithm’s standpoint, it sure looks like a mutual admiration society, and in some ways it is. It’s not intentional, but people are using leverage to get an unnatural number of reviews, and the reviews are created with a different pre-conscious agenda than most reviews are.

And this pattern shows up really obviously in an algorithm....

Your best bet is to not to work against what the goals of the algorithm are. The goals of the algorithm is to NOT favor one book over another but to make every book equally available to the people who would most want it. Therefore, the best way to work with the algorithm is to work on good labeling, appropriate covers, titles, blurbs — and, of course, good content.

Or alternatively, you can just keep coming up with new leverage strategies when Amazon cuts off the old ones. That’s perfectly legit. Just don’t be all surprised when Amazon cuts those off too.

I liked this because I think there's a temptation for indies to revert to the clubby sort of reviewing that marks a lot of traditional publishing--after all, that's what we know and what appears to have worked for them.

But the clubbiness of that world actually limits the usefulness of those reviews--a lot of people don't bother with, say, The New York Times book reviews because they know that paper only reviews certain kinds of books, so if you like, say, potboilers or romances or erotica, you'll never find anything useful there. Amazon works as a retail outlet because it's good at getting things in front of people that they actually want--it doesn't worry about who's in the club, it just offers up the goods. And readers have clearly responded quite favorably to that, which benefits us all.

What life is not like when you are a woman

Yeah, I’m reading lowest-common-denominator sci-fi again. You know, the kind of stuff where an omniscient narrator tells me repeatedly that a female character is sexy and desirable, even though 1. I thought it was “show, don’t tell,” and 2. I am never, ever going to want to have sex with your female characters, so please stop trying to make me.

Anyway, I thought I’d toss a couple of reality checks out there:

Reality Check #1: Men will NOT make major sacrifices for a woman just because she is cute.

It’s one thing for a teenage boy to “loan” soda money to a cute girl. It’s another thing for an adult man to risk execution or give up enormous wads of money for a woman he barely knows just because she's pretty. Teenage boys (and teenage girls, for that matter) have the high hormone levels, poor impulse control, and lack of life experience that makes them vulnerable to all kinds of sexual exploitation.

Adult men, as a rule, have it a bit more together. Even if they are willing to trade favors, they tend to be more skeptical. The women I know who profit financially off male sexual impulses do not simply bat their eyelashes, because that stopped working back in high school. They put out, and they make it very clear that they are willing to put out in exchange for X and Y. It’s about as subtle as any other fee-for-service arrangement.

Also, think about what you’re having them trade, and try to keep it within reason. Call me cold, but I don’t think there are a lot of men out there who would be willing to risk a bullet in the head in exchange for a blow job.

Reality Check #2: Sexual abuse is NOT normal.

The first time I was sexually harassed, I was 12. The first time I was offered money for sex, I was 14. I’ve been sexually assaulted; stalked via phone, on-line, and by foot; and sexually harassed at work. I have dealt with all manner of perverts, from frotterists to Peeping Toms.

These are not everyday occurrences. If they were, trust me, I would never leave my house, which I would have long ago outfitted with large and sturdy locking metal shutters. It’s not the majority of men who do this sort of thing, or even a large minority—it’s a small minority of unfortunately quite industrious individuals. In fact, a lot of men (especially those without a lot of life experience) respond to stories of sexual abuse with utter disbelief, because they would never do that sort of thing and can’t imagine that anyone else would.

Which is unhelpful, but anyway, my point is that if you’re going to have a female character be sexually abused every where she goes, there needs to be a reason for it. She’s a hated outsider, the institution she’s interacting with is profoundly dysfunctional, something. Otherwise it starts to read like maybe you get your rocks off on that sort of thing.

Progress report

Yesterday was Halloween, and I wound up in charge of the kidlets, so nothing got done on the book. Today's pretty busy, too, but the microphone has arrived, I found my notes on that podcasting panel, and I got a book on podcasting from the library (five years old, so I'm assuming a lot of the technical advice is out of date, but advice on things like diction should still be valid).

The blog, if you haven't noticed, is being slow and buggy, which is presumably the fault of Sandy. I hope the Squarespace guys are staying safe and hanging in there!

False precision

When I was working as an encyclopedia editor (back when there were encyclopedias and dinosaurs roamed the Earth), one of the things the editors always got into a lather about was something called false precision. You know, stuff like "There are 1.24 billion stars in the sky"--where people would assign seemingly precise values to things when they could not possibly know what those values actually were.

They were ardently opposed to it, because the feeling was that simply by having a number (even if you noted that it was just an estimate), you distorted people's perception of what was possible. It's like anchoring--simply by my saying there are 1.24 billion stars in the sky, I have influenced what you consider to be the likely number of stars in the sky, even though we all know that I just made that number up.

Their opposition actually got kind of annoying--when the Hubble Space Telescope went up, for example, it drastically altered the estimated number of stars in the sky, but I wasn't allowed to write about THAT. But Dean Wesley Smith had a recent post that reminded me of why false precision is often a good thing to avoid.

Smith had posted earlier that e-books made up only 25% of the book market. People questioned that, so he cited other studies with similar results.

The problem is, a bunch of bad studies are not any more accurate than a single bad studies. And these studies are all bad, because the data is bad.

How is it bad? you ask. In two seemingly opposite ways!

Way 1: The data is too narrow. Smith is impressed by the fact that the Association of American Publishers responded to criticism of its methodology by reaching out to 1,200 publishers!

But that's a bit like being impressed by my survey, which I just conducted now in my imagination. I conducted a survey about who is going to be elected president next week.

Most people think it's going to be a close one between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney. But my survey found a landslide win for Romney!

Of course, I only surveyed Republicans.

Oh, look at you complaining about my methodology. Fine. I'm doing my survey again--this time I'm going to survey many more Republicans. And I'm still finding Romney winning in a landslide! So there!

The problem is not the number of publishers the AAP surveyed. The problem is, they are publishers. I'll quote myself again, because I love doing that: "If Random House and Simon & Schuster lose e-book sales because all their writers have gone indie, the data will indicate that e-book sales have fallen, even if those newly-indie writers are selling e-books like gangbusters on their own."

But the AAP is including small publishers this time! (And moderate Republicans!) It doesn't matter. Why use a publisher in the first place? Because they are better set up to sell paper books to brick and mortar bookstores. That is an advantage most publishers continue to have over most indie writers. Surveying publishers is going to skew your results toward paper just as surveying indie writers (or Democrats) exclusively would skew your results in the other direction.

Way 2: The data is too broad. (I told you these would seem contradictory!)

There are certain kinds of books that, I think, will always sell in paper. Children's books, how-to books (I'm not getting The Complete Guide to Home Plumbing as an e-book, nor Auto Repair for Dummies), cookbooks (at least for the minority of us who actually cook with them), and art books will never move completely, or even just mostly, to e-books.

I'll go further and say that I wouldn't be surprised if an increasing number of publishers specialize in these paper-friendly genres, because paper is what publishers do well. 

Do I, as a writer of adult fiction, care? No. I'm not writing for people who aren't old enough to hold Mommy's iPad. I'm not writing for people who want a book that will stand up to hot grease and marinara sauce. I'm not writing for people looking for elaborate pop-up art.

Is there good data out there for me? No. But there are hints that suggest that the percentage of e-books in the market that actually interests me is much higher than 25%. For example, an unnamed publishing executive just said that e-books account for 30%-50% of adult fiction sales. And a recent story about HarperCollins said that, in the U.S. at least, e-books count for about half of that company's revenues.

So, now I've gone and given you another bit of false precision to glom on to--50%!--when what I really want you to do is to embrace the notion that we don't know what the real number is. We don't know. We also don't know what the future holds--although things are looking worse all the time for the national book chains.

And it wouldn't matter if we did know. No matter what percentage of the market is still paper, a paper book is harder and more expensive for an indie writer to create and distribute than an e-book. For most writers, that's what matters--what is what percentage of the book market is really an academic concern.

Revolution 8

Ruth Harris has a good post over at Anne R. Allen's blog on ways to improve your writing. Allen liked point #8, and I do, too:

8. Don't repeat yourself. Once is enough. This is a fairly common problem and not always quick or easy to fix because it involves actual thinking. Be on the lookout for places where you convey the same thought two or three times in different words. Usually, this kind of repetition means the writer hasn’t quite thought through what he/she is trying to say.

This has been on my mind a lot lately because I have little shorthand ways of describing my characters, but I'm thinking by book #3, I need to freshen that up and come at those descriptions from a different angle. In some ways, this falls under the category of Things That Are Different To Read Than To Write: A good deal of time may have passed for me between writing Trang and writing Trials, but for anyone who picks up the first book, likes it, and starts to plow through the other two--well, they're really, REALLY going to notice if I'm essentially cutting-n-pasting those character descriptions. I know this because Garrett did that on occassion in the Lord Darcy stories--I'm sure he thought it would work fine, because he wrote them over the course of several years, and it's not like they were even all originally published in the same place. But stick them all in an omnibus together, and...oops.

More on the merger--delusions ahoy!

This is a good backgrounder from the Wall Street Journal on the proposed Penguin/Random House merger. (There's also a follow-on here. Nothing about News Corp. coming back with a vengeance, but I'm not counting them out!)

Some interesting details: The talks began just a few weeks after the Justice Department filed its antitrust suit against Penguin and others. The companies could save costs by closing warehouses, so there are some economies of scale to be had. They're hoping that the deal could close by the end of next year, and Pearson doesn't want to sell Penguin because it would take a tax hit. And an unnamed publishing executive at an unnamed house said that e-books now account for 30%-50% of fiction sales, so any suggestion that e-books aren't such a big deal these days needs to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

So far, so good, but read on down and things start to get weird:

[Random House Chief Executive Markus] Dohle said the two companies were just starting to analyze the potential cost savings, including those in distribution, warehousing and information technology. But "this deal isn't based on synergies; it is based on future growth," he said.

[Penguin Chief Executive John] Makinson said the merger will allow the companies to invest more heavily in social media and other new technologies. With fewer traditional bookstores around, he said, "it becomes harder and riskier to take a chance on new writers because you can't be sure of finding an audience." Social media can help remedy that.

Wow. There's not a thing there that makes sense to me. They're merging so that they can Tweet better? I mean crazy me, I thought the purpose of merging was to cut expenses by consolidating operations, but according to them they haven't really thought that part through, except to decide that they aren't cutting any imprints. (Penguin not thinking things through seems to be a theme lately.) And what's this vague "other new technologies"? Don't they know that Calibre is free?

The end of the article spirals down into absurdist humor, including a quote from (you guessed it) Scott Turow, and a note that this joint venture could go public in five years! Sure! That'll happen!