Monthly Archives: May 2010

The terror of sharing

31 Monday May 2010

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While I was writing The Roman and the Runaway I was very protective of the words on the screen. If anyone came into the room when I was typing, I’d close the word-processing program down so that they wouldn’t see what I’d been typing. I was surprised at how sensitive I was about it. Once it was finished and I was happy with it my attitude changed and I was able to contemplate showing it to other people.

The first person to read the book was my daughter, aged 11 at the time. Well she heard it, in fact, as I read it out to her. This proved to be a valuable activity in a number of ways. Most importantly, it was great to see and hear her reactions to the story. Here was someone at the younger end of my target audience; if she enjoyed it, then I hoped that other people her age and older would, too. The second benefit was in improving the writing. Words that look fine on the page don’t always sound felicitous when you read them out loud. It’s also easier to notice repeated words in this process. I did a lot of editing while I read the book to her.

After that first positive reaction to the story (and after all the editing), I was ready to share the book with my husband and then with his mother, who was staying with us at the time. I put it online and shyly started mentioning it to other family members and friends. It’s an interesting measure of love or friendship, I think: the reaction of someone to the news that you have written a book. There are those that immediately want to read it and those who don’t want to know. What if it’s terrible? (You can hear them thinking.) I’ll have to lie and say I thought it was good! Either reaction is fine by me: I wasn’t forcing anyone to read it, although I did hope that no-one would find it a hideously painful experience.

I’ve already talked about the strange set of reviews that the Authonomy website provides. Family and friends are similar, in some ways, Are they just trying to protect my feelings by saying positive things? I wondered. The other websites on which the electronic forms of the book repose have their own rating and/or review systems. Until yesterday, the book had not been reviewed but then I got an email saying that someone had reviewed it on Smashwords. This made me nervous. Here was my first ever unsolicited comment on the book from a total stranger. Unlike the Authonomites, this person had nothing to gain by being unduly generous with praise.

Clicking on the link to read the review, I felt almost as jumpy as I did when I was a teenager opening the envelopes containing the examination results which would determine my future.

The review was short (like the book, apparently!) but positive. Thank you Rebel: you made my day!

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Advantages of self-editing: swearing

28 Friday May 2010

Posted by in Editing, Indie writing

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In my last post I was talking about how not all self-editing is bad. In this one, I’m considering the positive side of being an independent author who is free of the constraints of a publisher. My feeling is that once writers have a publisher, they are so thrilled to be being ‘properly’ published that they are likely to go along with anything their editors suggest. Certainly on their first books, anyway. I imagine it’s different once you’ve got some clout to your name.

As a self-published, independent author you don’t have that pressure to conform to the publisher’s point of view. Which could be a bad thing, of course. I prefer to think of it as liberating. So in my book, aimed at anyone over 11, there are swear words. In fact the very first sentence contains what I’d think of as moderate swearing (from a British point of view) and the first chapter holds one strong swear word. Not because I’m a big fan of swearing, but because they were important to the progress of the plot. I’m fairly sure that an editor would want to take the stronger word out, given that my book would be likely to be read by 11 year olds. I’d battle very hard against such a decision – although I suspect that I’d roll over and cave in, for the reason given above.

I have close personal experience of this particular age group and I know that the inclusion of these words wouldn’t be a problem for them at all (have you heard a conversation between 11 year-olds lately?). Of course, it might be a problem for their parents but in the context of this particular story there’s usually an unfortunate consequence to any act of swearing. I hope this would provide a hint that it’s not the best course of action.

For now, then, I’m revelling in the freedom to include words that a mainstream publisher might think are inappropriate for some of my target audience. A distinct advantage of being my own editor, I’d say.

On pricing of ebooks

27 Thursday May 2010

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I was thinking of doing a post about ebook pricing anyway, but the discovery of my own book under someone else’s name for the bargain-basement price of $41.70 precipitated it, somewhat. $41.70! Who on earth would pay that? I could understand someone ripping off my content and presenting it for $2.99. That way they might actually sell a few copies!

Michelle Haley's version of 'The Roman and the Runaway'

(Click on the image for a closer look)

I love the way she used my cover for the book, complete with my name, and then claims the copyright in hers. It’s quite funny, really. The book does carry a Creative Commons licence which permits sharing, so long as the book remains unchanged. So she followed those guidelines, but conveniently forgot to notice the ‘non-commercial’ element of the licence. For some reason she has categorised it under ‘Craft and Hobbies’. I suppose it was a hobby of mine while I was writing it, but it doesn’t really reflect the content that well…

Anyway, back to the pricing issue. I mentioned in another post that I’m reluctant to pay anything at all for ebooks. (Maybe that’s just because I’m mean.) I do most of my fiction reading through our excellent public library system or via freely-available online material. I do occasionally buy printed books, although I try to limit that spending, otherwise the house gets full up of books too quickly. It tends to be mainly non-fiction that I buy these days: cookery books, for example. This might change if I get some sort of ereader, but the price of those is too offputting for now, too.

I enjoyed an online lecture by James O’Donnell on the Kindle, where he described his own ebook pricing barrier: $9.99 in his case. I suspect that many people share his scruples. There’s something too insubstantial about an ebook to warrant paying more than that. Or more than $5 or $3, perhaps. $41.70 would definitely be pushing it, I feel.

I’ve reported Michelle’s pirated copy of the book to the Lulu powers-that-be and have uploaded a free version on Lulu for good measure. Be interesting to see if they take the pricey one down.

Self-publishing and poor editing

26 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by in Editing, Indie writing, Reviews

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One thing I seem to read a lot, in the context of self-published books, is that they suffer from poor editing. It seems to be generally assumed that indie writers are not capable of writing well and paying attention to their grammar and spelling. Rich Adin’s An American Editor post from a couple of months ago is a prime example. He doesn’t say that all self-published ebooks suffer in this area, only that they are likely to.

It’s not always the case: in a later post, Rich recommends the ‘Promises to Keep’ quartet by Shayne Parkinson as a well-written self-published series of books. On his recommendation, I’ve read Sentence of Marriage, the first, and would agree, it’s a great story, well-written, and I didn’t notice any spelling or grammatical errors. There are clearly exceptions to the generalisation that self-published=poorly-edited.

If you look at the top ten Smashwords (non-adult) titles (in terms of downloads), you’ll notice that Sentence of Marriage is in the top five. In the top two if you discount the Smashwords-specific books. It is highly-rated there, too, with ten reviews, each giving it maximum marks.

Perhaps we’re going to find a future where the best of self-published books will end up at the top of charts like Smashwords’, as people recommend them in the way that An American Editor has done for Shayne’s work. Then we will be able to start using sites like that more confidently, as a way of filtering out the dreadful.

Or is this wishful thinking?

New publishing models lead to bitchiness

24 Monday May 2010

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An interesting article on the Publishers Weekly site today, entitled ‘Agents Weigh the Growth Of Alternate Publishing Options‘. Not the catchiest of titles for an article, perhaps, but the content makes up for it. It discusses the recent deal made by J. A. Konrath (a figurehead, of sorts, for the indie author movement – his blog is required reading) with AmazonEncore for his new book, Shaken.

Usually AmazonEncore picks up on overlooked already-published materials (ones with high ratings by users of the Amazon site) and re-presents them. The difference in this case is that Amazon will be publishing an entirely new piece of work, but at a low price: $2.99. According to the article, 70% of this will go to the author.

The reason I thought the article worth mentioning was the response to the news from the traditional publishing industry. The comment by Ira Silverberg of literary agents Sterling Lord was spectacularly bitchy (I thought):

Certain authors will feel they’re doing well in schemes like this. They flip off the publishers who rejected them, claim new technology will support their career, and they get attention they never had before. Let’s see if we remember who those authors are in a few years.

Let’s see if anyone remembers what literary agents were in a few years.

Early history of The Roman and the Runaway

17 Monday May 2010

Posted by in Writers, Writing

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According to the diary I kept as a teenager, I started writing The Roman and the Runaway in 1985. This was when I was sixteen years old and just beginning the first year of the sixth form of a large Oxfordshire comprehensive school, where I was studying A level Biology, English Literature and History and doing an O level in Russian on the side.

January 1st 1986…I’m reading and enjoying Little Dorrit and listening to Vice Versa (F. Anstey) on the radio. On November 17th I started writing a book of my own & wrote quite a lot – but I’ve become annoyed with it recently – & unable to find the willpower to arrange it properly.

This could explain why it took me until 2009 to get it finished…

Until I picked up these diaries again recently, I had forgotten that I had ever written about the book in those very early days of writing it. It is quite funny to look back and see that I had recorded the date of beginning it. The diary had no entries for November and December 1986 – I was obviously too busy writing the story! I wrote more diligently in my diary in the rest of 1986 and 1987 and there are odd mentions of my book-writing throughout those years:

Friday 10th January…Mum got a typewriter – am learning to type.

Sunday 11th January…Taught myself more typing – very frustrating at times.

Sunday 19th January Went swimming & played squash at the College. In p.m. played cards with Mum, wrote a bit more of masterpiece & watched The Taking of Pelham 123.

Sunday 26th January…Revolutionised theme of my novel…

Saturday 1st February…Wrote bit more of blockbuster.

Sunday 2nd February Wrote a lot more of bestseller – spent most of day on this…

Monday 3rd February Cold again. Got 8/8 in Russian test on time. Got stuck on book – creative flow hit a dam. Sore throat.

Monday 3rd March…Have written new beginning to book. Quite good, I think…

Tuesday 4th March…Wrote first part of book yet again.

Thursday 6th March Copied & re-wrote more of book.

Tuesday 1st April Spent most of day reading Little Dorrit and writing – re-writing, the first chapter of my story.

Monday 21st April …I’d love to be a writer.

Sunday 1st June …Thought out more of my story on journey home.

Monday 2nd June …Having my story in my mind is like having a big sum of money for a rainy day – or a warm bed to climb into – a comfortable thing to think about. It makes me happy just thinking about thinking about it! I can’t work on it until after the exams – but I’m always aware of it.

Wednesday 4th June …Thought some more about story.

Monday 23rd June …Started my book – for the fourth time. One day I’ll be able to write it all. The idea won’t go away though, so there must be something in it.

Tuesday 24th June …Told Emma the story behind my novel – she was quite interested. Made me think about how on earth I’m going to end it.

Monday 30th June Wrote a lot more of masterpiece…

Tuesday 1st July …Emma liked my book-so-far. Mum – not so much.

Monday 25th August June …Read some Biology. Then wrote book – first term – settling in.

Sunday 22nd September …Made a few revisions to my story.

Friday 3rd October …The three Rachels in Biology were thrilled to hear about my story. Nice to be appreciated. I’d love to be an author.

Friday 28th November …I read Power of Three and Charmed Life – children’s stories by an author I really admire – Diana Wynne Jones. I’d like to write books as enthralling as hers.

Easter Sunday 19th April, 1987 …I’d like to go down to the South Downs this year…for my much-neglected and sorely-missed story. The only time I get to think about it is at night, before I fall asleep!

I love the references to masterpiece, blockbuster and bestseller (I’m fairly sure they were meant to be ironic!). I do remember that I used to write on the bus on the way to school. I don’t have any of these early versions of the book – I started from scratch on numerous occasions over the years whenever I had time to write (which wasn’t very often). The premise was always there, lurking at the back of my mind and demanding to be written. The current incarnation of the novel was started (again) at Christmas 2007. All that remains of those earliest versions is a single, (badly) type-written scrap, found in the pages of my diary:

Fragment of an early version of

Back then, Ned Kelly was ‘Mr Pengelly’ – but Luke was already Luke. I’m pleased to say that this scene did make it through to the final, 2007, version, although many of the details have changed!

Authonomy

16 Sunday May 2010

Posted by in Websites, Writers, Writing

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Authonomy logo

I promised a post about Authonomy and here it is. It’s hard to describe this website in a few words, but, at its simplest, it is a place for writers to freely share their work and for others to read and comment upon it. I put The Roman and the Runaway up there in February this year. It is a bit nerve-wracking at first, having your work open to criticism, but generally the mood is supportive and a lot of the comments I received were extremely helpful and have resulted in significant edits to the text.

It is genuinely fascinating to read other people’s works-in-progress and to be able to ‘talk’ to other writers who are in a similar position to yourself. Some of the books are excellent: have a look at Little Krisna and the Bihar Boys or Jabin as a YA example. Pinpoint was pretty good, too. It’s hard to stop now I’ve started recommending things. Go and have a look and you’ll see what I mean. If this site is an online example of a typical slush pile, then it seems clear to me that publishers are missing some real gems.

Of course, not everything is wonderful, or even good, and there are several big drawbacks to this site. The original plan seemed to be that books which had garnered the most ‘backings’ (i.e. recommendations) from the Authonomy community would rise to the top of the chart (the ‘Editor’s Desk’) and be looked at by staff at HarperCollins, who run the site. However, human nature being what it is, it became fairly easy to game this system by blanket-bombing other members of the site and begging them to back your book. So ‘success’ becomes a question of how much time you have to spare to undertake this activity.

Not everyone is honest in their criticism, either. Or perhaps they are and I’m unduly critical, myself. Helpful, constructive criticism is rare, but very valuable. Often people seem more worried about being backed in return than they do about helping to improve their co-writers’ work, which is a shame. As a consequence, there are a lot of comments dripping with (in my opinion) insincere praise, which makes it hard to identify genuinely positive feedback.

I’ve stayed away from the forum on the site. Again, for me, it’s a time issue. I can see that it would be all too easy to get sucked into the message boards, but at the moment I don’t think it is worth the investment in time. I’ve also noticed a degree of unpleasantness on there that I don’t want to get involved with. Too many creative egos in one place, perhaps.

On balance, it’s a useful site and an interesting place to find new writers and see what other people are doing. Some of the books are complete, so it’s another way of reading books for free (always a good thing!). I would caution against believing everything that people say about your work: some comments are going to be too positive to be believable, while other commenters have clearly read no further than your back-of-the-book pitch. Others damn you with faint praise. My favourite, so far, in this latter category, is this one:

Clearly this wasn’t written for me to identify with but, I am sure it would appeal to it’s [sic] target audience. More than happy to back it if you’ll have a look at my effort. It’s in the way of adult fiction.

Authonomy is a site I would definitely recommend to emerging writers. I’m not clear on the business model for it, from HarperCollins’s point of view, but it’s an interesting place to spend time. My advice would be not to get too sucked into it. Unless you’ve got hours and hours to spare. And if you have, shouldn’t you be writing instead? 😉

Influences

15 Saturday May 2010

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Third Year at Malory Towers cover

Third Year at Malory Towers

Two people on the Authonomy site (about which there will probably be another post in due course) have mentioned that The Roman and the Runaway reminds them of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers books. Although both of them spelt it Mallory Towers. I think I should find this slightly offensive, except that I did love the Malory Towers books myself when I was a child and still have a soft spot in my heart for them. I used to save up my pocket money (a whole 10p a week) until I had enough to buy the next book. A children’s paperback was 35 pence in those days, so I had to rely on the school and public library systems to supply the bulk of my reading.

I hope that The Roman and the Runaway is a more complex read than the Malory Towers series, but there’s no denying that those books did have a big influence on me when I was young. I went through a Jennings phase, too, I recall. Perhaps those early memories have stayed with me.

As far as other influences go, I would have to single out Diana Wynne Jones as the one author whose children’s books have been a constant presence on my bookshelf and in my hands ever since I first read Charmed Life in the late 1970s. Indeed, it is thanks to Diana Wynne Jones that I ever read anything apart from Enid Blyton (my poor mother was starting to despair!).

My tastes have got slightly more eclectic since then. I’ve been trying to keep a log of my reading on the LibraryThing website. This holds details and reviews of all the books I’ve read since emigrating to Canada in June 2007. I’ve got 87 books on there at the moment. Which works out at around 2.5 books a month. I still get most of my books from public libraries but I suspect my reading rate was much higher when I was a child, even though these days I could probably afford to buy more than one book a month!

Another epublishing model

13 Thursday May 2010

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Aventine for iPad

I had an email yesterday from the director of acquisitions at Rubicon Media, Inc. His company is developing an iPad and iPhone app called Aventine which is an ereader backed by a bookstore offering “new and original material by unpublished authors”. People like me, in other words.

Rubicon Media’s model is an interesting one. They pay their authors according to how many sales each author’s combined works make. So if I sell up to 500 copies of my ebook(s) through Aventine, I would earn 20% of the proceeds. If over 1,000, it would be 30% and so on, up to a maximum of 50% once my works hit 16,000 downloads.

Interesting pricing, considering that Smashwords deliverers 85% of the income for sales from its site back to its authors (regardless of how many books have been sold). Smashwords is also a distributor to other ebook sites, including Apple’s iBookstore: the figure received by authors for sales there is around 70%.

The only advantage I could see in the blurb I received from Rubicon Media is that there is some degree of quality control: “Aventine will automatically reject works that are incomplete or riddled with grammatical errors.”  Smashwords’ quality control is mainly focused on the formatting of books (although there are some restrictions in their terms of service regarding “hateful, discriminatory or racist views” and “advocation of illegal activities”). The Aventine app will not hold adult-oriented content, which is also quite different from Smashwords’ position. If you look at the top 50 Smashwords books, about 75% of them are aimed at over-18s.

I got the email because of my “success on Smashwords” with The Roman and the Runaway. So it seems that Rubicon Media are contacting Smashwords authors with the aim of populating their new application. It’s certainly an interesting approach and business model. My current feeling about it is that they aren’t offering enough of a financial incentive (says she, whose book is available for free anyway!). I’m also not convinced by the level of quality control that they’re offering. I suspect that the quality threshold for inclusion is going to be fairly low, certainly to begin with, as they try to get enough ebooks to make the application worth using. It also is limited in that it only sells to iPad and iPhone users. Not everyone has one, you know…

I’m reserving judgement at the moment – but would be interested to hear about other people’s experiences with this company.

Becoming an ‘indie’ writer

11 Tuesday May 2010

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When I finished The Roman and the Runaway in September 2009 I was not sure of the best way to get my book out to its potential public. I was new to the whole business of publishing and all I really knew was that it is horrendously difficult to get ‘properly published’. Just the idea of having to write to hundreds of agents or publishers in order to receive as many polite rejection letters seemed hugely daunting (not to mention time-consuming and utterly pointless).

I read Chris Anderson’s book, Free, online at around the same time as I finished the novel. I had read only one other book in digital format before (Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, if you really want to know (also available for free at the time!)). The combination of online reading and the subject matter of Anderson’s book resulted in a lightbulb-style moment of enlightenment. It suddenly became obvious that what I needed to do was to publish the novel online somehow.

I think I’d originally been looking at publishing electronically (and charging for the book) through Amazon, only to find at the last minute that I needed to be living in the US in order to do so. After that, the first site I chose to put the book on (for free) was Scribd, where the book got a few downloads and reads. 14 and 388 respectively, at the time of writing this. Hardly spectacular. The main problem with Scribd is its categorisation of works. No-one seems to take them seriously, so there are huge numbers of things in the ‘novels’ category which are not novels at all and there aren’t any subdivisions to the category which would help people find different types of novels. It seems that anyone can upload anything, anywhere: there’s no checking involved.

A month later, I somehow found out about Smashwords. Initially I put the book on there as ‘Reader sets the price’. After a fairly short period of time I changed the price to ‘free’. The logic behind this was that I wouldn’t want to pay for an ebook from an unknown author myself, so how could I expect others to pay for my work? I actually have yet to pay for an ebook from a known author. That might change if I get a dedicated ereading device at some point, but right now I don’t see an ebook as having the same intrinsic value as an ink-and-paper one.

If I really like a free ebook, then I will pay for a paper version. This happened with Megan Whalen Turner’s book The Thief, which I originally found as a free ebook on HarperCollins’ site. I read it, enjoyed it and decided that my daughter would love it too. So I bought it in paperback. Not just that one, but the three sequels, too!

Ebooks are just too ephemeral for me to want to pay anything for them. So I’m happy to share my first one for free. If I ever get the sequel finished, I might put a (low) price on that…

Smashwords is a fantastic site: I can’t praise it highly enough. It’s easy to use, the support (if you need it) is rapid and friendly and there are some great free stories on there. The categories for the books make sense and there is a considerable degree of vetting by the site administrators, which adds to the confidence of the site’s users.

Am I still hankering after getting ‘properly’ published? Not really. I’ve got one rejection letter under my belt already and another one probably on the way in a few months’ time. In the meantime, my book has gone past 3,000 downloads on Smashwords and I’m just happy that it is finally out there for other people to enjoy. At least I hope they’re enjoying it: there aren’t any comments or ratings on it yet… 😉