Carolyn's Blog

Friday, June 06, 2008

Why Sir Thomas de Kay is my Hero

Oh, Sir Thomas! I <3 you, indeed.

I am on my knees prostrating myself to a new god (to Americans) For this Brilliant Post

I read the original Forbes article and couldn't make my way through the ahem balderdash of the article or the comments in order to even think of posting my own comment or even a rebuttal over here. And even if I had it wouldn't have been as good as Sir Thomas's.

So, Amazon, where's my $8.7 Million?

Really. My day is complete.

Labels: Heroes, publishing, writing

(2) comments

Monday, February 18, 2008

So what do you think of this?

First I'm setting the stage, as it were. I'm a Web 2.0 Beta Project slut. I admit it. I've beta'd a lot of products the vast majority of which Did Not Work For Carolyn (DNWFC); that is, I got nothing useful or fun from them. The thing is, I'm busy. A beta has to be either immediately (and I do mean immediately) usable or so obviously a value-add for me, including fun by the way, that it's worth spending time when I should be writing. So, Twitter -- so easy and fun that I twitter still. Pownce -- seemed too complicated given my deadlines. Flickr -- fun easy and now with the use of the browser Flock a dream for the MySpace time suck. Like that.

I was reading about a product in beta called Smashwords. Two links: Smashwords Press Release and More about Smashwords. For the lazy, they want to make it easy for authors to publish and sell multiple formats of their work. Hmm. On the face of it, quite interesting. Really.

The Beta sign up is stupid, however. You have to answer a bunch of questions including selecting from a list that 1) was obviously written by an insider who understands COMPANY lingo, but not the lingo of possible users and 2) requires that stupid selection BEFORE you indicate you're an author. And NONE of the selections seems to apply to their target group -- authors. So I'm not going to bother with the beta.

I did skim through the two links above and I'm bothered by a few things, even though I think the idea is kind of neat and possibly convenient for authors.

The press release is a monument to unintentional humor, misstatement, omission and common misconceptions about the publishing business.

Authors receive 85% the net sales proceeds from their works, and retain full control over sampling, pricing and marketing.

Net not gross. Can anyone say Hollywood style accounting? That's been all over Publisher's Lunch for crying out loud. Full control -- but not over rights? Who gets them? What happens to them if you use this company? If you want to attract authors, then address the issues that matter to them.

The site offers authors free viral marketing tools to build readership, such as precent-based sampling; dedicated pages for author profiles and book profiles; support for embedded YouTube book trailers, author interviews and video blogs; widgets for off-site marketing; reader reviews; and reader "favoriting."

Overlooking the spelling error, one omission here is the fact that readers have NO LOYALTY to a publisher. Their loyalty is to the author. Suppose there are readers who love my books (there's some, I'm pretty sure!) They don't care who publishes me. They care that I'm published and they can, therefore, buy my books. I care who publishes me because that decision puts money and other career goodness in my pocket. That loyalty is why if J.K. Rowling changed publishers, her old publisher would be feeling sick and nauseous and her new publisher would be hiring some long-needed staff.

So, what's here that an author can't do on her own website, much more effectively from the point of view of the reader? Possibly the favoriting. None of this is a huge selling point for me, an actual author. Gosh knows I don't need yet another place where I have to maintain a presence. The Smashwords folks are confusing reader-centric benefits (favoriting) and writer-centric benefits (money and audience).

Also Viral Marketing? The whole problem with viral-anything is that you can't make it happen. To suggest that this is a method for going viral is well, in my opinion, dishonest. That Jedi-Knight guy on YouTube doesn't get a cent for the video in which he appears. YouTube sure gets lots from it though.

Amazon and Google Books are two huge competitors for most of this stuff. Well, competitors for that group of Authors Who Can Write.

"We plan to do for ebook authors what YouTube did for amateur video producers," said Mark Coker, founder and CEO of Smashwords, based in Los Gatos, Calif. "We make digital publishing simple and profitable for authors and publishers."

Whoa. Talk about some slight-of-hand! What did YouTube do for amateur video? Gave them a forum. It did not put money in their pockets. There's no profit for YouTube content producers. None. Besides, YouTube created a fun and easy forum where none existed before. Before YouTube, there was no fun and easy method of sharing video. But legions of writers already post stuff on their websites and in their blogs. What Smashwords would do for them is provide a forum. But it won't have them quitting their day jobs anytime soon. Heck, writers who already get paid for their words can't quit the day job. Smashwords isn't going to change that. They will be profiting from all the people who want to write but can't really. I can do most of that stuff over at Amazon and it doesn't cost me anything but time. The Smashwords forum might be quite nice. But I' compelled to point out that for writers who CAN write, digital publishing is already cheap and profitable. More about that later.

The inspiration for Smashwords grew out of founder Mark Coker's frustrations as an aspiring novelist.

Prediction: Authors who know the business cringed inside when they read that.
Fact: 98-99 percent of all the people who think they can write a novel 1) can't and/or 2) don't work hard enough at it. The Press Release goes on to describe a Roman-a-Clef project that sounds pretty interesting on its face, but the Roman-a-Clef bit has legal issues all over it. If they were rejected for the stated reason I would like to point them to Ursula LeGuin's famous rejection letter. I'm guessing their project wasn't any Left Hand of Darkness but nevertheless, two years isn't all that long when you're trying to get published (see press release for more ifo).

Coker concluded that in today's digital age, there's no reason why authors shouldn't be able to publish anything they want - and readers should determine what's worth reading, not just publishers.

Ohmygosh. Authors already can publish anything they want. Can you say Vanity Press? Here's the reason publishers SHOULD have something to say about what gets published: POD-dy Mouth.

Readers already do determine what's worth reading. It's just that no one has a sure-fire way of figuring out what that's going to be.

From the other article:

The hope is that ebooks, which failed to gain a foothold almost a decade ago, have advanced far enough both technologically and in the eyes of readers to be an acceptable alternative to traditional books

Huh? eBooks didn't fail. The closed, proprietary eBook Reader device failed. eBooks have been profitable and flourishing for quite some time. And that profit has flowed to authors. See Ellora's Cave. eBooks thrived among the population most invisible to mainstream businesses and geek-types: women readers of romance. The money's been there for a long time.

OK, this is way too long. Smashwords sounds interesting and possibly useful, but someone needs to proofread their Press Release -- there's way more than one typo -- and maybe have them cut down on the hype.

Labels: publishing

(1) comments

Monday, February 04, 2008

And Another Thing!

I can't help myself -- does this sound cool or what? From Publisher's Lunch:

NON-FICTION: BUSINESS/INVESTING/FINANCE
Reclusive CEO of Blackwater Worldwide Erik Prince's WE ARE BLACKWATER, an insider's account of the controversial company that has supplied bodyguards and support-and-rescue personnel to hot spots around the world, including the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, promising to "refute criticisms of the company, and take the reader on thrilling missions into hostile territory," to Regnery.

Check out the Danger Room Blog for interesting background and links. I'm not so sure Erik Prince is reclusive, since he's certainly been in the news a lot lately. And can you say, Damage Control? Search the Danger Room Blog for the Blonde Rescue story. It's hilarious.

Also, here is the tea I drink every morning. I love it. I used my cell phone to take a picture of the Welsh side of the container as I am convinced that improves the taste.

Speaking of Fun Tricks With Cell Phones, my Grand Central editor emailed me about either faxing or sending her a scanned copy of my signature to stick in a teaser thingee for My Wicked Enemy. So, I'm thinking, Fax? Scan? What the?? Way too much work people. So I signed my name on a sheet of paper, took a picture of it with my cell phone and emailed it to her from the phone. Took about 2 minutes. A while back when my work laptop was blue-screening, I'd take a photo of the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) and send them to tech support so they could read the error messages. Because as any Windows user eventually learns, once you get a BSOD, your computer is frozen and there is no way except by writing it down to save the error message*. Until the cell phone camera... Same thing here, I thought. The lighting for my signature pic was not ideal, but so far I haven't heard that the jpeg wasn't usable.

* OK, I'm sure the Windows event log has the message logged, or if not there, then in the stack dump, but have you ever tried to read a stack dump? And besides, some of those BSOD's are fatal errors. You'll never get to that hard drive again. Sending a photo is a lot faster.

Labels: Fun With Cell Phones, publishing, Tea

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Friday, June 15, 2007

What Publishers can learn from my Cat

This quote is from Publishers Lunch:

There is a slow but steady worldwide decline in the sales of printed products, roughly matched by growth in sales of electronic media, and gravity is reasserting itself in the UK trade. In 2006, it became clear that book publishers should probably expect medium and long-term sales stagnation and decline in their printed products, just as newspaper publishers do.

Anyone who checks out the A-list bloggers of the Tech Altiverse (I just made up that word since the Uber-Geeks do, in fact, inhabit an alternate universe: see e.g., Tech Crunch, Guy Kawasaki or Robert Scoble) knows that the geekish are rolling their eyes at newspapers for not understanding what's happening to their business model. For the most part, the Uber-Geeks are right. Newspapers moan about Craigslist taking their revenue without making the leap to gee, maybe readers want want ads that work like Craigslist so we better do that! It took me about 2 minutes, maybe three, to post my old printer on Craigslist and within 2 minutes, I kid you not, I had a taker. Could I have done that, as easily or as quickly on any newspaper want-ad site? No. Do I go to newspaper websites that are behind a pay wall? No, I do not. I go get my website news somewhere else, and by the way, view someone else's ads when I do. Lest you think that there's no money in Google's ad-sense, I've seen creditable reports (but not proof) that many of the the A-listers make a few thousand a month in ad sense revenue. (A-list bloggers have hundreds of thousands of impressions, not a few hundred. For comparison's sake Miss Snark, despite her avid fans, would not have been considered an A-lister, though before her retirement from blogging, I was starting to think she might get there.)

The cat analogy is coming up, by the way.

Have people become news averse? No. They're just consuming it in places where it's convenient for them. But I still look through 2 print newspapers at home, too.

So here's the cat analogy. My cat Jake loves to sleep on my printer. My brand-new printer! So I keep it covered with two thin-ish kitchen towels. The other day I thought, hey, I'm going to cover the printer with this much bigger and vastly thicker cloth! The printer will be even more impervious to cat hair and Jake will be comfier, too!

That's not what happened.

Jake refused to sleep on the printer. Instead, my big, fluffy 15 pound cat decided to sleep in the space where I put my manuscript binder when I am transferring paper edits to the computer. At first, I thought, man, this is just so inconvenient to have him trying to sleep on my MS! We spent a couple of days irritated with each other about that. And then I removed the big cloth from the printer and Jake got up on the printer and went to sleep on the two thin cloths.

Oh. There was no abandonment of cat-napping behavior, merely a displacement of its location.

See where I'm going with this? If this publisher is right, the medium is changing. But the need for stories people want to read is not.

So authors have no need to panic. Publishers do, if they don't wake up to the translocation.

In writing news, I've deleted two chapters from Magellan's Witch. But things are getting better.

Labels: editing, Magellan's Witch, publishing

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Wednesday, June 13, 2007

This N That

Galley Cat on one of my favorite authors Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart was my intro into African literature. Mind opening.

Interesting blog post about imprints from a publisher who always has interesting insights into the business.

Even more interesting blog post about imprints. I TOTALLY agree with this. Readers just don't care about imprints. File this under the publishers should be doing market research...

Physicists blog about Being in Love. Read it. You'll be surprised.

Saving myself 15 years of bad luck. Maybe. I was cough cough mumble on mySpace cough working hard when I came across this, which unlike most horoscopes, seems to describe me exactly. Please read the foregoing and following, with no sense of being serious at all, okay?

TAURUS: The Freak in bed

Aggressive. Freak in bed. Rare to find! Loves being in long relationships Likes to give a good fight for what they want. Extremely outgoing. Sexy as ...u no!..... Loves to help people in times of need. Outstanding kisser. Very funny. Awesome personality. Stubborn. Sexual as ......... Most caring person you will ever meet! One of a kind. Not one to fuck with. Are the most sexiest people on earth! 15 years of bad luck if you do not repost.

In writing news, Magellan's Witch is going okay I think. I got to chapter 10 this time before I had to massively rewrite and that only took a day. Last night I got through a lot.

And now, I really do have to go work hard.

Labels: Authors, Magellan's Witch, marketing, publishing

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Monday, June 11, 2007

Are You Covered?

There's a really interesting post over at Word Wenches. Erika Tsang of Avon is blogging today and posed a question about covers. Make sure you read the comments to the post, by the way or you'll have missed the point.

A week or two ago the blogosphere and the print press was abuzz with talk about how publishers do no market research into readers. Articles mentioned that RWA was the only organization that even came close to doing such research. As a reader, I know there are things that many, many readers dislike, and covers are a HOT hot issue with them (us). EVERYONE, (except apparently, publishers) knows that readers hate covers that misrepresent the story. Hate it. Go read the comments to the post above.

Does anybody believe publishers are really listening? That's valuable market research right there in the comments, and from people who buy a lot of books.

Just thought that was intereesting.

Back to work

Labels: Book Covers, publishing

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Saturday, February 24, 2007

You're not paranoid if...

Tess Gerrittsen has this post that's well worth reading. The comment trail is good, too. Romance authors are definitely not paranoid. Alas.

Labels: publishing, romance genre, writing

(0) comments

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Some Post Title Here

Here's an interesting post from Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog. I'm not sure I agree with everything that's said, but the notion that used book sales on Amazon have hurt publishing is quite an interesting idea. I don't know if that's right, but I know that when I see my January 2007 release on Amazon, practically on the day of release, mind you, with links to used copies at a less-than-new price, I don't feel so good. I need people to buy my book new. Otherwise, my publisher thinks I can't sell books for them.

I disagree that agents and publishers act as a closed door to publishable projects. My own experience with reading MSS by unpublished authors says 99% of the books aren't good and probably 98% are really, really bad. I know these same people are sending their stuff to agents and editors and getting rejected --- because their books are bad. If the author of a good book doesn't keep revising and submitting, that's not the fault of agents and editors. For proof, I offer up this post from Marjorie M. Liu in which she talks about her submittal process for her first book, a sale out of slush.

Rejection is typically a sign that there's something wrong with the project. If all you get are terse form rejections then, sorry to say, the problem is almost certainly with the project. But if you get nice rejections, encouraging rejections, referral rejections (and by the way, I've had all kinds) then your project is probably pretty good and you should be reading those rejections closely and re-reading your MS even more closely. And you should continue submitting.

I've read a few POD books by acquaintances who said they were frustrated by their rejections, some even said they thought NY simply wasn't ready for their opus. Without exception they were not good books.

Fellow writers: Rejection is trial by fire. Rejection tells you to keep working at your craft. So far, NY is The Show for writers. If you want to have the public read your book, then a print publisher with a editorial review board is where you need to place your manuscript. The editor's job isn't to reject worthy books. It's to publish books that readers will buy. (New. Not used.)

In my opinion, POD means you're accepting less from yourself. It's the worst thing you can do to yourself as a writer. You can't grow as a writer without rejection. I really wish it were otherwise, but it isn't.

Labels: publishing, slush, writing

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