Let's Get Digital

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of writing, revising, revising again, getting published and then working your ass off to promote your own books, my model thusfar has been Robert Newton Peck's Secrets of Successful Fiction, a barely 100-page guide the author of A Day No Pigs Would Die and other books put together to show aspiring authors the ropes. There are better books on writing (Richard Rhodes' On Writing comes to mind) but for the budding author wanting a glimpse of the business from the point of view of a successful author, Peck's book, bar none, is the best out there.

There's now a companion to that volume, one primed and ready for the digital age -- and that's David Gaughran's Let's Get Digital: How to Self-Publish and Why You Should.

Both books are similar in content and length. Both advise the basics of writing -- getting your story and characters straight through revision after revision, seeking professional help whenever necessary and relentlessly promoting your own books no matter what your publisher may think or want to do on their own. Gaughran takes the voyage into the digital age, offering plenty of advice and ladders through the world of digital self-publishing.

There are a few interesting quirks in his book, however. One is a nit-pick, and may be due to his Irish upbringing, but throughout a book in which he preaches watching out for typos and errors that bug readers, he can't seem to find the cent symbol. I found out how to do it easily enough (Here is is: ¢. And here's how to do it). But again, that's picking nits.

The success stories -- I like hearing them as much as the next guy, but seriously, after the first ten of the 33 testimonials he has in the book my eyes were glazing. Those testimonials needed to be culled by at least half, with those presenting similar material to others cut completely. I know showing that many testimonials chimes in with his evangelical approach to demonstrating self-publishing success, but they're hard on the brain to read. They blended together a lot.

That said, this book is an excellent primer for anyone looking to get into (I won't say break into, because that breaking barrier is obviously gone) the self-publishing world. Lots of nuts and bolts features that every budding author should be interested in.

Package that Niche!

I’m here to say that ebooks may be the best thing to hit publishing since, well, mass publishing was invented.

And I don’t mean in the sense of opening up publishing avenues to any schlub with a story to tell – though that is certainly to our advantage as well – but I do mean in the sense that we as writers can get a feel for what exists out there, quality-wise, as we assess our own writing and compare it to what is getting published traditionally, what is being published electronically, and what is being put into the vanity press that is the ebook put out by the common man without a publisher, without quality control and, frankly, without much of a chance to succeed unless a mass following develops and forces that author into a wave of goodwill.
Yes I’m babbling a bit. But it’s good babbling.

You may recall earlier my review of Bob Brooks’ Tales from the Glades of Ballymore, an ebook I recently acquired for free. A good read all the way around – so it stuns me that it’s not been published by a traditional publishing house. Brooks may have his own reasons for going the electronic route, and for that I applaud him. He’s inspired me to do the same with Yershi the Mild this summer.

I also recently read Boyd Brent’s Diary of A Superhero Kid, and, frankly, didn’t think much of it. Boyd has published other books and, by the looks of the Superhero Kid, wants to ride on Jeff Kinney’s coattails into the kiddie lit market. Can’t say I see him succeeding.

So what makes the two authors and their books different? Both are, in my opinion, solidly written (though Brent has an odd mix of British spellings with Americanisms throughout, so he needed some better editing along the way).

First, I think the difference is a question of niche.

With the success of Harry Potter and the Wimpy Kid books, everyone is trying now to get into those niches. The good will rise while the bad will settle rather quickly to the bottom of the pool. Without illustrations – the strength of Kinney’s work – Brent doesn’t have much of a chance of standing out.

Brooks, on the other hand, hits his niche nicely and in a very quiet way succeeds in convincing his readers that his stuff is worth the time to read.

Then there’s also a difference in packaging.

Brooks teams up with a wonderful illustrator – how he managed that I don’t quite understand, but kudos to him for doing so. His writing is good enough he doesn’t need illustrations, but the illustrations augment the overall ebook package. Brent, whose book screams for illustrations, tries to get by with an acceptable cover and then abandons the reader with blocks of text and nothing else. A successful ebook, then, needs what a good print book needs: Packaging.

So that gets me to thinking: How can I get some illustrative packaging with Yershi the Mild? A back-burner thought is to have my kids read the book and to have my oldest, an aspiring cartoonist, help with the illustrations. That’s one approach. Maybe a bit twee and trite, but it’s an approach. I need something to spookify the entire spooky package in order for this book to sail.

BURGER WAAARRRRR!

This probably would affect me more if I were buying ebooks, not scrounging the interwebs for free ones or having free ones delivered to my Kindle Fire on a regular basis.

But as an author who is planning to publish his own ebook this summer, perhaps I should be worried: Free ebooks are nice, but they don’t pay for the mustard and ketchup.

“This,” of course, is the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Apple and publishers McMillan and Penguin, alleging the companies colluded to fix the price on ebooks so the companies could get more money at the expense of the book-buying public. Three other publishers (Hachette, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins) settled with the DOJ out of court.
No word yet on what the full legal defense from Apple et al will be, but I’m sure it’ll be interesting, with a swirl of accusations against Amazon for flooding the market with cheap ebooks in order to sell items like, ahem, the Kindle Fire, and plenty of stories of doom and gloom and more doom from publishers and authors and their children being tossed out in the snow with their frostbitten teddy bears because nobody (including me) is willing to pay premium prices for books, print or e, any more due to the changing times.

Bloomberg gets a peek at their strategery:

Apple and Macmillan, which have refused to engage in settlement talks with the Justice Department, deny they colluded to raise prices for digital books, according to people familiar with the matter. They will argue that pricing agreements between Apple and publishers enhanced competition in the e-book industry, which was dominated by Amazon.com Inc.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, writing at Fortune, has this to say on the situation:

According to the Journal, the government has argued that the waiting period would allow publishers and booksellers to resume a one-to-one relationship, "free of the taint of collusion."

The length of that cooling-off period is reported to be one of the sticking points for Apple, and it's easy to see why.

An extended cooling-off period -- in which Amazon goes back to selling bestselling e-books for $9.99 and Apple is still adding its 30% surcharge to the publishers' prices -- could seriously damage Apple's e-book business.

Worse still, it could keep the books off the iBookstore altogether.

Apple's lawyers seem to think they can make a case that going to the agency model actually increased competition, allowing e-book rivals to take back some of the 90% market share Amazon had amassed.

Moreover the company -- unlike most book publishers -- has pockets deep enough to do legal battle with the U.S. government for as long as it takes to get a settlement more to its liking.

More of his article here.

Matthew Yglesias, writing at Slate.com, takes up a contrary position, saying that the DOJ's involvement isn't nexessary:

What makes a major publishing house a major publishing house is its expertise in the manufacture and distribution of books. As an ancillary element of the business, publishers are also good at recruiting authors, editing prose, and publicizing new works. But firms with expertise in writing, editing, and publishing text are a dime a dozen. Slate has that know-how, as does every newspaper and magazine in the country and a huge quantity of independent and university presses. Even more troubling for traditional publishers, famous authors now have unprecedented ability to simply bypass the entire publishing system. If Suzanne Collins wants to sell a Hunger Games prequel directly to her readers, does anyone doubt she’d sell vast quantities? Celebrities could even potentially become their own publishing brands, using their fame to substitute for a traditional market apparatus. Oprah Winfrey has a proven ability to drive book sales. Why not launch an Oprah Press?

But the only way for these firms to stay viable is to publish books people like and to sell them at a price readers want to pay. Whether they merge, collude, or simply find a convenient confluence of interests around Apple’s efforts to compete with Amazon, there’s no real threat to competition here. Literary culture, for better or for worse, is dealing with a radically transformed business landscape. The Justice Department is, at best, irrelevant to this process.

As a soon-to-be-self-published author, there is concern here on both sides of the fence. While writing a book is in of itself a satisfying endeavor, it would be nice to think that somewhere along the way I could get a little money for all that work. The agency model under question by the DOJ does just that – it makes sure adequate gobs of money are changing hands so that the author – presumably – gets some of it too. I could say that as a self-published noob, that does not apply since I have no chance in hell of getting paid to publish anyway. That’s probably an accurate assessment. But a little part of me screams “I ought to make some kind of money along the way.” Even though that first ebook is going to be given away for free so’n I can build meself an audience.

The Rewards -- and Dangers -- of Internet Publishing

In his book "Here Comes Everybody," Clay Shirky makes it a point to say that with the Internet, the question of whether to publish something has transformed from "Why publish this?" to "Why not?" This is supposed to be a liberation of the realm of publishing from the bottlenecks and gatekeepers of traditional publishing, opening up the world to anyone with a website and a message to send out.

That's good, right?

It has a serious drawback: It opens up the world to anyone with a website and a message to send out.

Now getting published means one of two things: Getting published in the traditional sense, as in via some kind of entity with editing and quality controls and a method for paying the producer a little bit of money for the trouble, or the kind of publishing you're not reading on this blog now since this blog has a worldwide audience but NOBODY is coming here.

My gosh, what a choice.

It's liberating, yes, to realize that there are so few gatekeepers and bottlenecks between me and my audience. It's disheartening, however, to realize that, as of right now, my audience doesn't exist. And you know what, now that everyone can publish, the traditional publishing houses that give you money rather than fifteen picoseconds of Internet fame, they're trolling Oh yeah, they're trolling. But if you don't have a built-in audience now -- one you've had to work for, of course, through your labors -- they won't touch you. The playing field hasn't been leveled, it's just been digitized.

Not that we shouldn't have audiences we hand-build. That's the great advantage of the Internet age. But to "get published" in the traditional sense, you'd better have a hot commodity and the audience to back it up. You can't just have a good book now -- it seems you've got to have a following. It's like the publishing houses have seen the light and realize that maybe they can save a little money by choosing commodities from the flotsam of the Internet that already have a following so they've got a built-in audience for their product once it starts rolling off the assembly line. So it's pretty much what the Amigos did in "Shootin' for Love."

About That Long Tail . . .

When I was a journalist, occasionally we’d get a book in the mail. It was mailed to us by some obscure author from some obscure, distant place, in the hopes that we would read it, like it, publish a review and soon have the local populace beating a path to the author’s door. I read the books; I worked at a twice-weekly paper in a small town with really nothing going on, so I had the time on my hands. Rarely liked them. And we never published any reviews.

More than just occasionally, a zealous local author would call or barge into our offices, freshly-printed copy of their book in hand, and insist we publish a story about their book and about their achievement. Again, I worked at a slightly larger paper in a slightly larger town with slightly more news occurring, so I read the books. I had the time on my hands. Unquestionably, we wrote and published the stories. Local Author Makes Good, we’d say. And, because we’re not grossly stupid and wanted to preserve our readership, our well-standing in the community, and because the author’s puppy-dog eyes were focused so appealingly on us, we said nice things about their books. Even if they didn’t really deserve it.

We were their marketing. The really zealous ones got their books in the local bookstore, back when it sold books. Others tried all sorts of gimmickry, from advertising book-centered websites by stringing up banners on highwayside bales of straw to setting up booths a local street festivals, stacks of books on hand, eager pen ready to sign autographs.

We have one local author of note: Jack Weyland, of “Charly” fame, who went the route of publishing fiction through a niche publishing house which markets to a strictly niche audience.

The rest, well, they’re in that long tail of published authors that no one has ever heard about, and for good reason: They’re not very good. I include myself – unpublished – in their company.

I don’t want to be there.

Like many authors, I believe what I’ve written to be pretty decent. Fifty thousand, six hundred some-odd words of – and I’ll be honest here – first-draft prose. I know it has its faults. First drafts, and tenth drafts, and hundredth drafts, always do.

I am exploring my options. I have looked into self-publishing, you bet your boots. And prices in the self-publishing realm are going down. A few years ago, a run at self-publishing would have put me back about $1,000. Thanks to my brother-in-law over at The Lithium Press, I now know of fastpencil.com, where the prices – for an e-book at least – have plunged to a mere $150. That’s less than a day’s wages; much more manageable.

But at what cost?

Assurance of resting in that long tail. Forever.

Assurance of haybale URL marketing.

Assurance of going, hat and book in hand, to the local news outlets. The local bookstore.

This is the bone I have to pick with self-publishing: Despite the promises of liberation, of more control, more profit, more this and more that – you get less. Far less than taking the long, certainly mostly fruitless haul of trying to find a literary agent interested in your work. They send out, hat in hand, to market your book – your far inferior book – while they come at you, hand out, waiting for the fee.

Going the self-publishing route and want someone to edit your book? Yes you can. For a flat $199 fee, fastpencil.com will provide “a professional copy editor” to review your book “to give you invaluable advice.” Who are the professionals? Schlubs like me. Parlaying their career as journalists and technical writers into freelance editing careers. It’s Russian roulette – what kind of editor will you get? And what will that valuable advice entail?

Not satisfied with that? For 76 cents a word, get an advanced editorial review – “a tailored review of story ideas, plot development, suggestions for improvement of the work as a whole.” They even toss in copy editing! And for a book of 50,600 or so words, that comes out to a fee of $38,456.

Gulp.

All that, and you’re still in the long tail.

See? There are reasons books cost a certain amount at the bookstore, coming from a traditional publishing house. They may be inefficient, slow to change, cantankerous, railing at technology – but they filter. They help an author hone and caress, mill and shape as part of the package. They put in an investment they hope they can get out. And if they don’t see the potential, they’ll tell you. Bluntly. And as often as it takes to get the message through your thick little authorly skull.

I know this, and I haven’t even gone through the process. And maybe after this long process, if you make it through, you’re still in the long tail. But at least you paid in sweat equity, not cold, hard cash.

Self-publishing is tempting. But you get what you pay for. Self-publishing – until their prices to hone and refine come down to what the market will bear – will be like going to the lumber yard and coming home with a tree.

But – but – what about that organic collaboration I blogged about earlier in my post on the Creative Commons? Well, the self-publishing industry, as it stands now, makes that approach even more appealing.

We must hang together, or assuredly we will hang separately.

Achtung! Minen!

Ethicist Randy Cohen, over at the New York Times, has wandered into a minefield.

For an ethicist to parse language as he does shows that ethics and ethical behavior is certainly in the eye of the beholder. But when the complex system that brought the ethical quandary to the fore shows it's not working to satisfy its consumers, you've got to wonder where the blame really lies.

Not really. The blame lies with the Cohen questioner, seeking absolution for pirating an electronic copy of a book after paying for a hard copy, and in Cohen, for giving the absolution sought for.

But one could argue that an accessory to the crime is the publisher, who is not exactly giving the consumer what he or she wants.

Read Cohen's column here.

The language he uses is interesting. He points out what the questioner is doing is illegal, and that his/her action is "not pristine." Yet he condones it in saying this:

Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform. Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology. Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability.

So very wrong. but then again this is coming from an industry that gave away its content as the Internet came into being and then suddenly wondered where all of its readership and revenue went. Maybe they want to see others suffer that same ignominious fate. It kinda makes me want to knock over a bunch of newspaper kiosks to steal the papers there just because I read Cohen's column online. So to suggest stealing an e-book is ethical -- albeit illegal and "not pristine" is okay because the questioner earlier bought the hard copy of a book is wrong. Ethically.

I feel the reader's pain, however. I rarely buy new books. Typically, I buy them used, and I know not a penny of the fifty cents, the dollar, the two dollars, goes back to the author. The reader expressed willingness to buy the electronic copy of the book but was thwarted by the industry's practice of "windowing," putting out the hard cover edition of the book first and holding back on the paperback (and e-book) to drive sales of the original, ten-peso version. I understand that theh publisher wants to maximize profits on the hardcover edition. But you'd think that they'd look at the volume sold, rather than the platform, in seeing how well a book is doing. Selling an electronic copy is as equivalent a value as a hardcover as far as best-seller lists go. But maybe I'm wrong.

Clay Shirky speaks a bit on this, in an essay he wroteon how complex systems often fail to adapt to new technologies and new strategies not because they can't but because they won't. You can read the full essay here. This is what he says in regard to paying for content in the Internet age:

"Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don't know how to do that..."

In the future, at least some methods of producing video for the web will become as complex, with as many details to attend to, as television has today, and people will doubtless make pots of money on those forms of production. It's tempting, at least for the people benefitting from the old complexity, to imagine that if things used to be complex, and they're going to be complex, then everything can just stay complex in the meantime. That's not how it works, however.

The development of the quattro threw book publishing on its ear back in the daym, because suddenly books could be produced cheaply and be thrust into more and more hands. Publishers then were liivd because it was undercutting their organized way of doing things. But thanks to the quattro, more people became literate, more people read, and more books were eventually sold. Maybe publishers and authors earn less on an e-book sale than on a hardback sale. I should be concerned about this as I'm writing a book and want to be a published author. But because of the way the machine works, my chances are slim. If books could be produced less expensively -- say, in e-books -- more authors might get a chance. maybe more schlocky authors, like me, will pollute the reading pool. But maybe publsihers could make more money on smaller, less-expensive authors, right?
 
Here's another example: Birdemic. It's a completely schlocky, terribly written, performed, produced and edited film by an amateur filmmaker who, in the Hollywood machine, wouldn't have gone anywhere. But the movie is so fantastically bad it's being put into limited release throughout the nation because, hey, this outside Hollywood weirdo made a really, really bad movie. Maybe his is bad. But maybe his can prove to be an example of content created outside the framework of the traiditonal machine. He could pave the way for much better movies.