Indie Life / Writing Wibbles

Welcome, Indie Lifers, to the free-range insane asylum! Don’t forget to hit the linky at the end, and see what other indies have to say about their travails, triumphs, and tips this month. This is the final Indie Life post, as the Indelibles have decided to wind down this monthly meme/theme. (bummer!)


Time to Market

I’d planned to write this last month, but life got in the way.

A few years ago, while I was readying White Pickups for a wider audience, I was trying to decide how to proceed. Should I follow the traditional route, landing an agent who would land me a publisher? Or skip that and take my chances with this newfangled indie publishing thing?

So, taking Kristine Kathryn Rusch's advice to “treat your writing like a business,” I sat down and did a cost-benefit analysis. Best case, I could make millions either way (ha!). Worst case, I’d make a few bucks going indie and nothing at all traditional (if I couldn’t get an agent, etc.). Either way was essentially a wash, except in one aspect. My dayjob is in the high-tech industry, and time to market is a major consideration for any new product. Can we get it out the door before our competitors roll out something similar?

In time to market, going indie was the clear winner. Even if I landed an agent immediately, and that agent got me a publishing contract a week later, it would be another two years before my book hit the shelves. I needed an editor and someone who could design a decent cover; I could format the thing myself. Maybe a year, tops. Then lightning struck: my editor turned out to be sitting next to me in the church choir, and a Photoshop expert offered a special for a cover. Bing-bang-boom, and there was my book, ready to go!

Last year, I released the first three Accidental Sorcerers stories, a pace that traditional publishers would find hard to match. But now they’re trying (New York Times link). Due to the roughly 5 month pace, I think I’ll only finish (i.e. publish) two this year. But I have several other things I’m working on. I published EIGHT books this year, all told—but only because I had a backlog. Now my backlog is clear, and I’ll be hard-pressed to come close to that kind of output this year. I publish when the book’s ready, and they were ready.

But it was in December that the indie advantage of time to market really showed itself. I was looking over some Christmas-themed flash and short stories I’d written over the last few years, and thought “huh, I ought to throw these into a mini-anthology.” Thus was born Christmas Guardians (and Other Stories of the Season).

By this time, I was in the Green Envy Press co-op, and I contacted the cover designer. I had a photo that I thought was suitable (which would save money on a “lark” project). Instead, Angela came up with a cool microphotograph from Wikimedia Commons. I already had a “floral leaf” graphic to mark the end of each story, and I had experience formatting an anthology. We arranged the stories, did a quick edit-through, and I hit Publish.

Concept to product availability: two weeks. Let’s see a traditional publisher top that. My co-op partner is trying to top it, with a Valentine-themed micro-anthology to be written and released in time for VD itself. Fun times!


Now it’s your turn: How do you use your time to market advantage?

Thanks for reading, and check out some of the other Indie Life writers this week!

Writing Wibbles

With the weekend came February, and with February came time to re-open that first draft of Into the Icebound that had been waiting patiently for my gentle editing touch (and all the things I thought about and had written down in the last month). I found a few problems, mainly with timelines, and a few minor things. I then printed the sucker out, and read it through over lunch and into the evening on Tuesday. And, of course, I found a few more things.

So… ready for the beta readers? Not quite. Someone on G+ linked to a post by Hugh Howey, in which he talks about the three things required for engaging prose. Two of them (vocabulary and a plot that people will care about) seemed self-evident to me, but “an ear for the rhythm of words” stuck out as something new. Or maybe not so much new as “aha!” You see, my partner in co-op +Angela Kulig has it. It comes natural to her, and it sets her work apart. She claims to be a lousy writer, and denies my opinion that she’s a very good storyteller, but her books read like poetry. There’s that rhythm of words, that I instinctively try to not mess up when I edit her books.

Howey has a lot to say about rhythm, but I wanted to quote this part:

Rhythm requires mixing up long sentences and short. It requires repetition, so that key concepts are stressed a second time, that they may lodge in the brain. It often means breaking rules and dropping commas where they don’t belong, signaling to the reader to take a breath, to pause, to relax, to prepare for more to come.

I often abuse punctuation when I’m writing dialog. When my characters are talking, I’ll sprinkle commas, ellipses, and em dashes as I see fit—I use them to set the pace of the dialog, to try to plant the rhythm of the character’s speech in the reader’s head. Editors go nuts when we do that kind of thing, though.

So what-all does this have to do with my self-edit? Easy: I’m going to go through the printed MSS one more time, looking for that rhythm of words. Then… it’s beta time!

Writing Wibbles

The last few days have been fascinating, from the standpoint of an indie writer. First, Melissa Bowersock told us about The Editing Myth, where it turns out that traditionally published works might not get that thorough editing that we’ve all assumed they do. When at least sometimes, the reality is they accepted the manuscript verbatim and had zero editorial suggestions.

Fascinating.

But we’re not done!

On the heels of that bombshell, the Passive Guy blog ran a post about how a traditionally-published author blogged her own earnings over three years, then took down the post “for contract disclosure reasons.” The Passive Guy concluded with It’s not an iron-clad rule, but some of the worst contracts from an author’s perspective include some sort of prohibition on the author’s discussion of the contract.

By coincidence, Steve Zacharius (the CEO of Kensington, a second-tier publisher in New York) was engaged in a discussion on a different blog, and one of the commenters pointed him to this post. He joined the discussion, and it’s a most fascinating one. In fact, it triggered a second post, Response to Kensington, that garnered even more comments. What was telling: several commenters asked him, repeatedly, to provide a copy of Kensington’s standard boilerplate contract. He refused by using the standard executive tactic: answering as if the question were different (for example, “we don’t disclose specific details of an author’s contract”), and deflected related questions about average advances. Some authors did weigh in with how much they had been offered, figures from $2500 to $50,000.

Other authors complained about trouble getting rights reversions, or lack of editorial feedback (shades of “The Editing Myth”), and Zacharius did respond forthrightly to those people. Someone suggested a survey, where authors could respond anonymously, and he seemed to really like that idea. I really think he has his heart in the right place, but he can’t quite wrap his mind around the idea that authors no longer really need a traditional publisher—at least, not on the traditional terms. He continuously repeats “eBooks are only 30% of the market,” when those stats don’t include indie sales (which Amazon says are 25% of their eBook sales, and that’s a pretty dang big chunk of sales to ignore).

But the you-know-what got real when he accepted a dialog with Joe Konrath, a major cheerleader for indie publishing. This long but fascinating dialog might not be over just yet, and is definitely worth the time to read.

Some people say that reading the comments section of a blog is the way to madness. Not in this case. It’s eye-opening. Go see if I’m right.

Writing Wibbles: Looking Back

This will be the last Writing Wibbles of 2013, so I think it’s a good time to look back on what-all happened in my personal writing world.

It was a grueling year, production-wise. I started the year with a lot of stories completed or nearly completed, and ended up launching seven titles. That doesn’t count the books I edited or proofread for the co-op. The pace forced me to examine how I did things after the editor sent back those last changes, and I did manage to streamline a lot of the processes. Part of that was making checklists, so I didn’t forget something important.

That was the supply, what about demand?

In a nutshell: I was blessed. I didn’t make nearly enough to quit my day job, let alone rack up sales like Amanda Hocking or Hugh Howey, but I did a lot better than others. I haven’t dug up exact numbers for how many books sold (let alone how many of each), but most of the books sold were 99¢ each, giving me a royalty of 35¢ give or take. I have a reasonable handle on income and expenses. Being in a co-op, where we all help each other out, I didn’t have production-related expenses like editing or cover design (but I paid by editing and formatting other books). There were other expenses… so, here’s the round numbers:

Income: $3000

Promotional expenses (giveways): ($150)

Nook HD (for verifying EPUBs): ($180)

So while I didn’t pay off the mortgage or anything (rats), I was able to afford a badly-needed replacement for my ailing Civic, which died about a month after I came home with the Miata. Writing made a difference for me this year, an important difference, both financially and emotionally.

And for that, I’m grateful. With any luck, it will make more of a difference next year. I don’t plan to have such an aggressive release schedule, but maybe I’ll have more time for promotion and for rolling out paperbacks. That’s going to be interesting, especially once I automate the conversion from EPUB to typesetting markup. Stay tuned…

Green Tuesday Sale!

Save a tree, buy an eBook: it’s Green Tuesday!

My co-op, Green Envy Press, is running the show. I’m happy to be one of ten authors (not all of whom are in the co-op, mind you) offering twenty Kindle books for 99¢ or (even better) free, today. Go check out the sale page: http://www.angelakulig.com/2013/12/the-green-tuesday-sale-is-here-many.html On Twitter, follow the hashtag #GreenTuesday to join the festivities.

The sale runs until midnight PST (3 a.m. EST, or 0800Z).

Go forth, and load up your Kindle!

Writing Wibbles

Sometimes, when the first, second, and third opinions are unsatisfactory, the fourth opinion is the charm.

I’ve had some trepidation about The Sorcerer’s Daughter, knowing something needed fixing but unable to put my finger on what. Beta readers have been helpful with various details, and it’s definitely better than it was a couple months ago, but something was still nagging me. As I’ve worried about some of my #FridayFlash, and the pieces were well-received in the end, I finally decided it could be just me. I gave it to the editor and crossed my fingers.

Tonight, I heard back from the redoubtable Mrs. Harris. Yes, there are problems, but I have a handle on them now. One of them is that I shoved in one sub-plot too many for a novella-sized work. I can either double the size (30,000 words right now), or replace a sub-plot with some other details. I got my work cut out for me, but now I know what to do.

And I’m wrapping up the first draft of the fourth Accidental Sorcerers story, Into the Icebound. I don’t think there will be many problems with this one; it’s a straightforward action/adventure in a fantasy setting. Can’t go too far wrong there. The first three books have brought them to the point where we can have some real fun…


I’m going to include a quick link here, but it deserves (and will get) its own blog post. My co-op, Green Envy Press, is sponsoring a Green Tuesday Sale! “Save trees, buy 99¢ eBooks!” If you’re an author, you don’t have to be part of the co-op to join in—just hit the sign-up link and add your books to the list. If you’re a reader, be sure to come back on December 3; there will be plenty of selections.

Indie Life / Writing Wibbles

Welcome, Indie Lifers, to the free-range insane asylum! Don’t forget to hit the linky at the end, and see what other indies have to say about their travails, triumphs, and tips this month.


The Almighty Checklist

As all indies know, there’s more to publishing than writing the book. Covers, editing, formatting, publicity… it can get overwhelming, especially if you have several projects in various stages.

The good news is, each book needs the same things to happen before you hit that Upload button. At a former workplace, where we produced technical documentation (that’s my day job), we had a similar situation. To track our progress, and make sure nothing important was dropped, we created a “pre-publication checklist.” It was a good reminder of all the little details that had to be addressed before we were ready to say a manual was complete and ready to go to the printer.

When you have several projects going, in various stages, it’s easy to forget a detail. It has really helped me to have a blank “Prepub Checklist” template in +Evernote. When I get finish that first draft, I create a copy of the checklist in the appropriate notebook:

The “master” checklist has the templates tag, so I can find it immediately. After copying, I rename the checklist, tag it with the project name, and start filling in checkboxes as I go:

So now, I can pull up the checklist for any active project, and see what I need to do. In this case, I need to get serious about starting promotional efforts for the upcoming release of my third Accidental Sorcerers story while I’m waiting on the editor to get back to me. ;-)

Now it’s your turn: How do you keep track of your own projects?


Thanks for reading, and check out some of the other Indie Life writers this week!

Indie Life / Writing Wibbles

Welcome, Indie Lifers, to the free-range insane asylum! Don’t forget to hit the linky at the end, and see what other indies have to say about their travails, triumphs, and tips this month.

Muddle in the Middle

Let’s pretend a shiny new writing idea just happens to come by when you don’t have any other pressing projects going on—or maybe you’re just burned out on your current WIP and need to pound on something else for a while. A pivotal scene, perhaps the climax, is just itching to get out of your head and into your computer or notebook.

You start working on this new project, and a couple weeks later it’s taking shape. The beginning looks good, and the ending is awesome! If only that big gap in the middle would magically fill itself in… and now, the real work begins.

This happens to me enough that I have a name for it: the muddle in the middle. If I plotted out the whole thing to start with, I have a series of blank scenes in Scrivener with a title and maybe a paragraph or two describing what's supposed to happen in one or two of them. If I pants it… same hole, different (or no) name.

Usually, logic and time (and persistence) are enough to straighten out the muddle and get a story finished. Logic is a great tool to keep handy—simply ask yourself how does your hero get from Point A to Point B? and remember that very few paths are arrow-straight. It’s not only the journey that’s important, it’s how your hero grows on that journey. There’s a central conflict to win, after all. Even if the hero has what’s needed to begin with, like Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz (the movie), she still has to learn the how or why.

Time is another helpful tool, especially if you aren’t on a deadline. Sometimes, just closing the project window and walking away is the best thing you can do for a story. Let your subconscious chew on the plot, and sooner or later you’ll know what to do.

Now it’s your turn.
How do you work through that muddle in the middle?


Thanks for reading, and check out some of the other Indie Life writers this week!

Pigments of My Imagination Blog Tour

All aboard!

When I first ran across Angela Kulig a few years ago, she had posted an excerpt to her novel in progress on her blog. A girl starting art school stumbles across a boy painting swans in a pond. But the water in his painting ripples, and the swans swim and fly. I was captivated by this sample, and figured (given a sufficient amount of justice) Pigments of My Imagination would be a hit.

Time went by. Angela got picked up by Red Iris, rewrote Pigments of My Imagination to suit the darker tone of their titles, split with the publisher, rewrote it back to something closer to the original. She founded a co-op, I was invited to join, and most of the other members fell away, leaving the two of us having each others’ backs. As she puts it, I make the insides look good (editing, formatting), she makes the outsides look good (cover art, marketing). We spend a lot of time IM’ing each other.

But Pigments of My Imagination was still “coming.” It went through yet another rewrite. I’d poke her about it every once in a while. Be careful what you ask for… she got me to edit and format it. I wasn’t the only one waiting for the finished product, and never expected that I would be a major part of it getting finished.

But it’s done. It’s out.

And it delivers. And I get to be the first stop on the blog tour!

Here’s the synopsis:

From the moment Lucia steps into Bayside Art Academy, she is fed a steady stream of lies, but it’s not until she meets William that she begins to question the people she trusts. Unraveling fact from fabrication seems impossible until Lucia finds her first painting, and discovers the dead do not lie—at least not to her.

A dozen lifetimes ago, Lucia started a war. Not a war with armies or guns, but a bloody war nonetheless. The path leading Lucia to the truth is hidden within lovely art that spans the ages. In this life, however, Lucia doesn’t know where to look. Lost, she turns to the one thing she knows with certainty—she is in love with Leo, and has been before.

Of the Green Envy Press titles, this is the first to have both eBook and paperback editions! To celebrate, Angela has a Goodreads giveaway of two paperback editions. Go forth and enter!

There’s also a Rafflecopter—win a Kindle Fire and other cool stuff:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

If you want a better shot at winning the raffle, follow Angela so you can get to the next stop on the tour:

• Blog: angelakulig.com
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/angelakulig
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/authorangelakulig

And if you can’t wait, you can grab an eBook (or paperback!) at Amazon, B&N, or Kobo.

Writing Wibbles

A couple weeks ago, I hit one of those “I suck, why do I think I can write” phases that is something all writers go through from time to time. (If you haven’t, hang on. You will.) A couple nice reviews, that popped up on Amazon soon after, put me mostly right.

I got myself the rest of the way right by starting The Lost Years and posting the first episode last week. As part of the angst-fest, I got to thinking about some of the writing things I really enjoyed doing—and that included posting the latest episode of a long-running serial every week over a four-year period (two years each for FAR Future and White Pickups). As long as this blog has run, that’s still half its lifetime, right? I wanted to recapture the magic of those days, when I had no pressure except to remember to queue up the next episode and add it to the Tuesday Serial collector.

One of the things I’ve recaptured, something I haven’t done for nearly a year, is writing at least some of the scenes by hand. This is part of next week’s episode; even if you can read it, much will change before it’s officially Episode 3:

If you can read this…

And who knows… when I get it finished, I’ll probably turn it into an eBook and put it on the market. But there’s a lot of writing to be done before I get to that point. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the weekly posts.

Indie Life / Writing Wibbles

Welcome, Indie Lifers, to the free-range insane asylum! Don’t forget to hit the linky at the end, and see what other indies have to say about their travails, triumphs, and tips this month.

Extreme Pantsing

One of the more fun things about being an indie writer is the forever-ongoing “plotter/pantser” debate. I haven’t run across anyone who takes it seriously, we’re just pretending to debate (or argue) the issue because it’s a good way to share a laugh with our friends. One of my friends in the pubished-writer camp is a dedicated pantser: “The one time I tried to do a detailed outline, I ended up not wanting to write the damned book, because in my head, it was finished.”

Me, I go both ways. I like to have an idea of how a story is going to end, but I don’t exactly demand that of myself before I start writing. I’ve plotted two stories. One is in slow progress, the other I haven’t started.

Have you ever been there? An opening scene typed up, and it’s pretty cool. Now if you could only figure out what happens next…

That’s when you should consider a technique that I call “Extreme Pantsing.” Like any “extreme” activity, it’s not for the faint of heart. But like the first time I jumped a speed bump on rollerblades, just going for it might bring success, and not trying at all is a guaranteed faceplant.

Extreme Pantsing works like this: you take that cool opening scene, clean it up, and post it on your blog. Tell all your friends on Twitter that you’ve started a serial, encourage them to read it and leave feedback. When Tuesday rolls around, add the link to the Tuesday Serial collector and make sure to mark it “DEBUT” (only for the first episode). Include the episode number and genre (if you can) in the title line, like this: Long Story, Episode 1 by Joe Bloggs - Litfic - DEBUT. Now you have an incentive to keep writing the story—your readers are going to expect regular updates! If nothing else, you have a weekly deadline to turn in 1000 words or so.

(Disclosure: I’m one of the TuesdaySerial staff. It’s all-volunteer, no ads even, and we’re always looking for guest posters.)

I first tried Extreme Pantsing in 2007, when I’d not even heard the term “pantsing,” and I wasn’t on Twitter and hadn’t heard of TuesdaySerial. I posted Episode 1 of a story I called FAR Future; the title was a pun on my blog name, and the story depicted blog posts from an oil-depleted near future (a little too near, as it turned out, oops). I had no idea what I was doing, where the story was going, or how long it was going to be. There were weeks that I didn’t get an episode up. But I kept cranking away, and the story unfolded… and kept going… and going. It run over two years, with 104 episodes total.

Not content to take a break, I started posting White Pickups shortly after FAR Future wrapped up. Again, I had no idea of how it would finish, but I had a good head start (about ten episodes written) when I started posting it. I thought it might run 30 episodes. HA! It ran 90, another run of nearly two years, and turned into a 100,000 word novel that demanded an 80,000 word sequel (Pickups and Pestilence).

And that brings us to today… or maybe yesterday would be more accurate. I’ve been wanting to write some historical fiction about my fictional world, Termag, for some time now (does that make it fictional historical fiction?). The story was reluctant to be written, but I had an opening scene that looked good. So I forced the issue. If you have a mind, go check out The Lost Years, Season 1, Episode 1. (Breaking up a serial into “seasons” gives you the luxury of taking a break once you hit a good stopping point, just in case you decide to start plotting.)

Sounds scary, but it has worked for me before. Why question success? Start posting, and pants the hell out of it.


Thanks for reading, and check out some of the other Indie Life writers this week!

Adjusting the Balance

Image source: openclipart.org

It’s often difficult to keep some kind of balance in life, and that goes double for a writer. You have a job to maintain (until you hit it big, of course… I’m still working on that), the Muse is often prodding you with shiny new story ideas or driving you crazy by withholding same. There might be things you want to attend to on evenings and weekends besides writing. (Like blogging?)

Lots of little projects have been back-burner’ed over the years here, and not all of them because I was busy writing. But the new-to-me car sort of forced the issue, and in a good way. After putting the insulation back up, and making enough room to actually park a car in the garage (imagine!), I spent this last weekend attacking the mess on and around the workbench… which, of course, led to other sections of “my” half of the garage (The Boy has his band stuff in the other half). The wife, a while back, bought one of those shop-vac heads that snaps onto a 5-gallon bucket. I got it out of the box, found a donor bucket, and it became the new home for spider webs (and the spiders themselves, when I could catch 'em). I got a truckload of trash out of there, by which I mean it about filled the back end of a Tacoma pickup. A large tool box that was constantly in the way ended up on the bench, as did a drill press that we’re “storing” for someone and has been in the way for years. I collected enough antifreeze to… oh, I don’t know what. We won’t have to buy any for a long, long time. Various pieces of lumber went up in the rafters.

I’m not quite done arranging things, but I’m getting close. Close enough to actually get back to tackling a project that has been hanging fire for a long time: making a fan bracket for the little Suzuki. When I put the big gas tank on, I was able to flip the horn bracket, but there wasn’t room for the OEM fan. Many people just ride it without a fan, but you can mount a computer fan. I just needed to cut holes in a piece of sheet metal, and the new Dremel was well up to the task.

So with Evernote keeping track of stuff I’m remembering I wanted to do, and a place to actually do them, I’m back on track. And I still have plenty of writing time in the evenings. Except that I’m supposed to be editing a book for +Angela Kulig right now… so back to it!

Launch!

I tuned the Launch Cannon to fire at B&N and Amazon pretty much simultaneously. That actually worked out pretty well. As I’ve been researching in the last month or so, I’ve learned several ways I could further streamline the formatting process. Now, I have extremely clean EPUB and MOBI output, which takes less than an hour to clean up from Scrivener, and a fairly easy way to get the text to a typesetting program for printing (the next frontier).

Next up, the dreaded Smashwords thing. Actually, I’m going to hand them an EPUB and see if anyone complains about other formats before I do the .DOC file thing… so if you depend on Smashwords for anything non-EPUB, let me know right away!

Just in case you missed the cover reveal and blurb last week, I’ll go ahead and repeat it for you here:

Infiltrating a nest of rogue sorcerers can be hazardous… to your heart.

Mik and Sura are growing ever stronger as apprentice sorcerers, but neither knew what living in Mik's hometown would do to their relationship. Torn apart by misunderstanding, Mik volunteers for a hazardous mission in a distant land. Now Sura must learn to trust, and Mik must learn the true meaning of home.

And now, I get to take a brief break from writing, editing, and production for a while. I’m going to read some stuff now!

Writing Wibbles

As you have certainly realized by now, I changed the blog template. Some readers have told me the contrast (or lack thereof) made it hard to read, and I chafed at the hassle of trying to make the sidebar wider. The old template, called Abrasive, was a third-party template. I was able to tweak a few things—most notably moving the tags to the top, and putting comment links at both top and bottom—but at last, it was time to move on. The new Blogger-supported template is from awesome.com, and I customized it a little: the online tools let me make the sidebar wider (yay!) and change the background. I now have a little nicer-looking mobile template. I had to hack on the HTML to put a comment link at the top, but haven’t yet figured out how to put the share buttons up there without breaking everything.

OK, on to the writing stuff…

Water and Chaos is still with the editor. I hope to get it back this weekend, then finish it up next week. If all goes well, it will be in Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords before the July 4 holiday, and the other stores after a couple weeks. Sales at B&N are pretty slow, so far, but the Nook Press webapp is cool enough that people need to support it. If you find a typo a few minutes after publishing (yes, this has happened to me), you can edit the book on site—no edit/respin/upload cycle to go through!

Now if you’re on my mailing list, you’ve already seen the cover and blurb for Water and Chaos. If not, you’ll get to see it tomorrow. I’ll have it on this blog, the Green Envy Press blog, and Goodreads. So while you’re waiting… why not sign up for the mailing list? If you want to get in on the announcement fun, leave me a comment with an email address, or email me at lkollar at gmail dot com, and I’ll shoot you some attachments. Book bloggers interested in a quick-ish read (it’s about 44,000 words) can get an ARC by request.

My brain is already on vacation, although it doesn’t start until July 6. I’m going to try spending the entire vacation reading instead of writing. I have a lot of catching-up to do.

Addendum: Thanks to Jim C. Hines for linking to my Writing Wibbles of two weeks ago. It’s one of the most-clicked of these columns to date!

Indie Life/Writing Wibbles

Welcome, Indie Lifers, to the free-range insane asylum! I have a short post this month, but I hope some of you find it valuable. Don’t forget to hit the linky at the end, and see what other indies have to say about their travails, triumphs, and tips this month.


As writers, you know the value of beta readers, right? They’re the people you trust to tell you what isn’t working in your WIP, and why it isn’t working. And often, they call upon you to do the same for them. My upcoming release, Water and Chaos, is the second story in the Accidental Sorcerers series, and the beta round gave me a lot of heartburn. It was necessary heartburn, but I haven’t had a story chewed on quite this thoroughly before.

But… haha… that’s not what this post is about. Beta readers are important, not only when you write your story, but when you write the synopsis. The way I do it is to propose several different blurbs and loglines, as I did two weeks ago, then put them all up for a vote. I try to tweet it and plug it on Google+ to get some traction, then post the results.

The whole point of beta readers is to get people to point out things you’re not aware of, simply because you’re too close to the story. I had a fair amount of feedback, not all of it on the blog—I got some votes on Twitter, and a couple on another blog I frequent. It was there that I was made aware of a word that is often offensive—and to people I really want on my side, no less. Some say (not sure if I agree) that your cover gets people to read your blurb, and your blurb is what closes the sale. If (if) it’s true, then you don’t want to burn down the market, huh?

So when you go looking for that all-important feedback, don’t forget to get some feedback and suggestions on your blurb.

How do you get your blurb to attract attention?


Thanks for reading, and check out some of the other Indie Life writers this week!

Writing Wibbles

This has been an interesting week. Maybe it was synchronicity, or maybe it was the universe sending a message. Anyway, let’s start with a summary of the logline and blurb voting from last week’s wibble.

		Men	Women	Total
Logline	A	1	1	2
	B	1.5	2	3.5
	C	4.5	3	7.5
Blurb	1	1	1	2
	2	1	3	4
	3	3	2.5	5.5

I arbitrarily assigned a half-vote where voters suggested that either of two were good, or picked “this one, but I liked that one as well.” That’s why the totals don’t equal out. (I included votes received on Twitter, and on a community blog of sorts that I frequent.) Here’s how I interpreted the results:

• Logline C is the clear winner.
• I was a little surprised that the men preferred C at least as much as the women. I thought it might be too romance-y for the guys.
• Blurb 1 is the one that +Angela Kulig rejected. The voting confirms her opinion, which I expected.
• Women liked Blurb 2 far better than the men.
• Voting on blurbs 2 and 3 was close enough that I’d be comfortable using either one (with modifications as described below).

I got some back-channel feedback about the word “exotic” in the blurbs. I wasn’t aware that it’s a red-flag word for some women. Ironic that the person described as such, comes from a matriarchal society! Now one could argue that exotic simply means “foreign,” and it’s a fool’s errand to avoid all offense, but why offend the very people I hope to have as supporters? (duh) I found and struck the one use of the word in the text. Fortunately, it was easy to remove.

What’s interesting is how this all ties into last week’s big ugly blowup at the SFWA, over unintentional(?) sexism in their quarterly bulletin. A woman in a chainmail bikini on the cover, along with authors Mike Resnick and Barry Malzburg discussing the physical attributes of women editors, led to some protests. Resnick and Malzburg threw gasoline on the fire by claiming censorship, using language more appropriate for teabaggers than authors in a supposedly forward-looking genre.

Don’t take my word for it. E. Catherine Tobler’s public SFWA resignation did a fine job of covering the details, and described some of the blowback that she and others got. Lest you think this was just an isolated incident, Anna Guirre’s experience(s) suggest that sexism is endemic to not only the SFWA, but cons and especially the panels that claim to represent the genre and its writers. And she also received some nasty blowback.

The SFWA leadership was caught flat-footed, but (to their credit) got it together and acted. First off, outgoing SFWA President John Scalzi issued an apology, saying (in part), “when all is said and done, I personally am responsible for the Bulletin and what is published between its covers.” Shortly after, the SFWA formed a task force to see “how the publication needs to proceed… to be a valuable [member resource].” This is a good start. However, the task force is four men and three women, which doesn’t exactly give me the warm fuzzies. I don’t think it’s the intent—but given how women are marginalized at panels and the like, this could easily turn out to be a pinkwash.

And now… it’s rant time.

I find this head-desking incredible. I’m a middle-aged whitebread dude, and I have my issues, but I fracking try to do better. And yes, common tropes in Fantasy include putting a woman in a chainmail bikini. Or making her the damsel in need of rescue. Or part of an embarrassing sexual encounter with the hero. “Judas Priest, what the hell is this?!” as my Mom might say.

We know better, and should strive to do better. There have been examples of “better” since the 70s, now-classics by Anne McCaffrey, CJ Cherryh, and Ursula K. LeGuin. Yes, as writers, it can be work. When I first started writing, the characters were all guys all the time. I had to make a conscious effort to create female characters, then give them more than a few lines, then put them on an equal footing, then cast women as the main characters. But dammit, I did the work, because I knew it had to be done if I was going to be a decent writer. It wasn’t all that hard.

Fortunately, this is a problem that time is about to solve. Looking at my Writers list on Twitter, the vast majority of them are women. Bowker also tells us that women are 62% of the book buyers. As writers and authors, we have to appeal to women if we’re going to have any chance of success. That doesn’t mean everything has to be steamy romance—although erotica has (ahem) thrust its way to the top of the charts—but authors (especially new authors) have to understand what the market looks like these days. I’m not saying we should do nothing now, but in the long run, we’ll win. The old boys’ club is dying of old age.

I wanted to wrap this up with a survey of gender roles throughout Termag’s history, but this has run long enough. Maybe next week.

Writing Wibbles

Hooray, I’ve finished cranking in the Water and Chaos beta comments! Of course, that means I can no longer put off writing a synopsis (aka blurb). And this story has been amazingly blurb-resistant. I’ve tried four or five times to get something down, and finally managed to do something on Sunday. I sent it to +Angela Kulig, who shredded the living **** out of it.

You know what that means, right? It means I wrote two more.

Now it’s your turn. Below are the three attempts, plus a few candidate loglines. I’d like to include a brief emailed quote from +Craig Smith, but he hasn’t told me it’s okay to use yet. ;-) So… vote for logline a, b, or c, and blurb 1, 2, or 3, based on which one makes you most interested in reading the book, or “none of the above.” Feel free to suggest modifications, or what worked (or didn’t) in each attempt. And thanks much!

Meanwhile, this article on CreateSpace might be helpful for your own blurbification: How to Write an Effective Book Description.

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Loglines

a. What is home, when everything has changed?

b. One does not see. One does not trust. Two are torn apart.

c. Infiltrating a nest of rogue sorcerers can be hazardous… to your heart.

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1In the service of the Conclave, Mik returns to Lacota with his mentor and fellow apprentice. A hero’s welcome soon strains his relationship with a homesick Sura. After he and Sura are torn apart by a misunderstanding, Mik volunteers for a mission in a distant land. Far from home, his only friend an exotic girl, Mik must learn where his loyalties lie… and the true meaning of home.

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2A hero’s homecoming.
A tragic misunderstanding.
A dangerous mission.

In a distant land, sundered from Sura, his only friend an exotic girl, Mik Dragonrider must learn where his loyalties lie, and Sura must learn to trust.

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3Mik and Sura are growing ever stronger as apprentice sorcerers, but neither foresaw the strains that living in Mik’s hometown would put on their relationship. Torn apart by misunderstanding, Mik volunteers for a hazardous mission in a distant land. Now Sura must learn to trust, and Mik must learn the true meaning of home.

Writing Wibbles

The Pickups and Pestilence launch party is over, the prizes have been handed out… and White Pickups is still 99¢. I think I’ll wait for the holiday weekend to finish before resetting the price. If you’ve been sitting on the fence, you still have a few more days to get it at a discount!

I’ve finally begun the post-beta phase for Water and Chaos. The final third of the title describes the situation pretty well… maybe that’s a little exaggerated, but there’s a fair amount of work to be done. One of the beta readers went in deep, and found a lot of things that the editor would have caught… but the tighter everything is before edit time, the quicker that should get turned around!

Formatting eBooks has suddenly become a hot topic in the last week or so—it’s shown up both in a Goodreads forum I frequent, and in my Twitter feed. Strange, how all this is coming together all at once… I’m working on a “Best Practices” document for work, right after diving in and producing optimized files for Pickups and Pestilence. I thought I’d share the beginnings of some general principles for setting up eBooks here. Be warned: I do get somewhat dogmatic about this stuff. Most of you who read this blog are younger than I am, and you guys are supposed to be the generation that “gets” computers. ;-) Just sprinkle IMO, IMHO, or IMNSHO as needed.

So… what I call the First Principle of formatting eBooks, is widely known in programming circles as the Principle of Least Surprise, or the Principle of Least Astonishment. When producing eBooks, this simply means Respect the defaults. All of them. People expect to be able to set their font, type size, spacing, and so on, in their eBook readers. You need a very good reason to override that expectation—children’s books and comic books are two good examples. Fortunately, this makes your job easier, too—your CSS (styles) is shorter and easier to maintain.

This leads to the second principle: KISS (Keep It Simple, Silly!). A work of fiction isn’t a complex technical document, and I’ve formatted many of those in my day job. You have paragraphs of body text, section breaks, chapter titles. Plus a few special things you’ll do in the title page, and various highlighting in the body text. Each of these gets a “class” name. You should have a dozen or less, all told, including the classes used only on the title page. The other part of KISS is to eliminate anything that isn’t absolutely required to format your book.

More to come later. Lots of eyeball-melting details.

Writing Wibbles

The last couple weeks, I’ve been doing just about everything but writing. Taxes, yard work, driving long distances, working… you name it. That changed a little in the last few days; I got a little new material down in Into the Icebound. But I’m starting to panic a little; I’m nowhere near done with adding beta feedback for Pickups and Pestilence. The only saving grace there is that my editor wanted to beta it, and opined there shouldn’t be much more to clean up. Whew. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about this week…

Set the Wayback Machine for 1989. At the time, I worked for a company, now long-defunct, called DCA. The management decided to give themselves a free vacation, and sent themselves to Hilton Head for a “strategic planning conference.” Uh-huh. They were out of the office for two or three weeks… and things ran more smoothly during that time than at anytime they were around. Imagine what would have happened if they’d just sent all the administrative assistants off for a couple weeks, let alone all the other employees: the place would have ground to a halt by Day Two.

Now, just a couple days ago, a link to The Passive Voice turned up in my Google+ feed. There’s a lot of gems in this post, like “At this stage in the disruption of the traditional publishing business, publishers need authors more than authors need publishers. Smart authors already realize this…”

Yes, indeed. Just like any company bigger than a mom-and-pop needs its employees far far more than it needs managers. After all, without authors, what would publishers have to publish? But the crowning glory comes at the end of the post, with a suggested “submissions” policy:

Publishers wishing to submit proposals for publishing any of author’s books should send them to queries@author.example.com. Proposals should be no more than 250 words and include the amount of the proposed advance, royalty rates for hard copy and ebook editions, the number of years of publishing rights requested and the amount of the guaranteed promotion budget for each book. Proposals that ask for rights for a period of longer than ten years or include ebook royalties of less than 50% of net revenue will not be considered. Regretfully, Author does not have time to respond to proposals that do not meet these requirements.

You can quibble about the details, but this is pretty good. Me, I’d give them more than 250 words to describe what they’re going to do for me. Other commenters said they’d reject proposals that weren’t strictly for print rights (ala Hugh Howey). Seriously, though, publishers are already cherry-picking the blockbuster indies—when they, like they did for Howey, make an attractive enough offer. But there’s a very finite number of indies who have that blockbuster pre-packaged for publishers to poach, and some of them aren’t interested in going traditional at any price. So the bravest and most forward-thinking publishers may soon start looking down-market, hoping to discover authors who haven’t “broken out” yet. They’ll find a hungrier crowd down there, authors that might be willing to jump at a mediocre or worse contract, and many works that require a minimum of preparation (i.e. already edited).

I suspect that will be a future version of the original Hydra/Alibi-type of publishing contract, tempting indies who are willing to trade control of their destiny for an up-front advance or that ephemeral “validation.” Perhaps, like Random House modifying those “e-publishing house” contracts after all the negative publicity they got, there will be a period of adjustment as both traditional and indie authors (and agents) have the opportunity to vet them. Agents will still be relevant, for vetting contracts and keeping everyone honest, but the whole “querying” process might get tossed out the window—if publishers are already expressing interest in an MSS, after all, that would eliminate the need to decide whether they could sell it to that publisher.

These are interesting times. And, as others have said, no better time to be an author.

Sideloading EPUBs into iBooks

Sideloading: the process of transferring data between two local devices, in particular between a computer and a mobile device [such as an eReader].
— Wikipedia

While a backlit LCD isn’t the best kind of screen for reading eBooks, Apple does make the experience as pleasant as possible with its iBooks app. On an iPhone, it hyphenates long words, to avoid making the margins too horrible. While Stanza is growing ever more outdated, there’s still a need to load EPUBs into a reader, just to make sure they’re right if nothing else. And sometimes, you might buy an eBook from Smashwords that you still want to read on your iOS device.

Fortunately, the process is straightforward.

1. Find your eBook.
When you download an eBook, whether on MacOS or that Microsoft thing, it usually ends up in your Downloads folder. Leave the folder window open on your desktop.

2. Open iTunes.
If you’re like me, you already have iTunes open in the “mini player” view. You need to open the expanded view. If you’re using the latest version, display the sidebar and look for “Books.” Select it to see the books in your library.

3. Drag and drop.
Arrange your Downloads window, and the iTunes window, so you can see them both. Drag your book file into a blank area of the iBooks window. It may take a few seconds for the new book to show up in your library, be patient.

4. Sync and go.
Plug your device in and let it sync. It will automatically copy your new eBooks over.

You can actually do the first three steps in less time than it takes to read this blog post… although the sync process will take a while longer.