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On Storytelling Terminology: Alligators over the Transom

I’ve told the story before about the time I graduated from college, realized I needed to get a job (yes, in that order), freaked out, and then fell into a high-paying technical-writing position that was created just for me. My interview went, “Would you prefer to work in this cubicle, or that one?”

And then, just like that, I was a technical writer. It took maybe six weeks, total, from the thought, “Oh, wow, I’m not a highly-paid professional novelist. I need to be something else!” to filling out a form in the H. R. office that listed me as “Technical Writer.” The entirety of my training in that field had been one class my senior that broke my heart, and taught me almost nothing I’d use in my actual career.

Most of the skills I needed for my career were ones I’d picked up on my own, through years of writing terrible novels. (I made the smart career move of switching to writing great novels back in 2007, but this story takes place before that.) I also picked up a few tricks with regard to styles and templates as a survival skill, but that was all on-the-job stuff.

The Terminology of a Technical Writer

But most of my  professional training came in the form of terminology. And most of the terminology I know, I learned from my first supervisor, Mark Lee. He taught me about picas and gutters and widows and orphans. He taught me the term “Subject Matter Expert” which is an incredibly significant (and oft-changing) phrase within the tech writing world.

And part of the job of the tech writer is to become a subject matter expert. So while I was at Lowrance I had to learn about FishFinders, which meant I had to learn about fishing. I helped Bruce and Emilie translate the phrase “live well” (which means almost exactly the opposite of what you might first think, from the point of view of the fish). I learned about through-hull transducers and bait clouds and transoms galore.

And then he also taught me some of his own terminology. Picture a rustic, grizzled woodsman with all his wisdom tucked away in colorful old phrases. And he’s wearing flannel plaid. There you go. That’s Mark Lee.

One of his most-used phrases had to do with our work schedule. He said, “We can’t deal with the alligators because we’re too busy trying to fight off the snakes that are snapping at our heels.” That pretty much describes my five years at Lowrance Electronics, and it’s a lot of the reason I was so happy to leave there.

The Terminology of a Storyteller

Then last fall I showed up for Category Fiction with Deborah Chester and got to learn a whole bunch of new terminology. She talked about plates and “scene and sequel” as if I were supposed to know what that meant.

In our very first class period she was talking about how to develop a story’s plot and she mentioned an old teacher who used a phrase, “alligators over the transom.” She looked around the room, chuckled, and said, “I guess none of you know what that means. Anyone know what a transom is?”

And though I’d never heard the phrase, I had a clear and immediate mental image. See, in fishing terms, a “transom” is the flat back wall of a boat (the stern). I remembered Mark Lee talking about the snakes at our heels and the alligators in the distance, and suddenly I pictured alligators coming over the transom and I thought, yeah, that could up the suspense in a plot-driven novel.

So I raised my hand, Professor Chester blinked in surprise, and I told her what a transom was. And she frowned and ducked her head and said, “Well, okay, sure, but that’s not what I was talking about.”

See, this wasn’t a fishing term. This was a writing term. It was one made up by academics sitting snugly in their ivy-covered offices. In old architecture, a “transom” is the little window above a door, and there was a time when those windows were used like mail slots. You’d be sitting at your desk, quietly working on a manuscript, when out in the hall someone would come tromping down throwing envelopes and packages over the transom to land inside your office.

So, in storytelling, the phrase, “alligators over the transom” refers to that fine old tradition–to the idea you’re just sitting there minding your own business when something terrifying and totally unexpected appears out of nowhere, where it absolutely doesn’t belong.

It’s not part of your plot, it’s not something you’ve necessarily been setting up, or even something you’ve considered. It’s a way to jump-start a story that’s starting to drag, by throwing in something totally unexpected and totally terrible, hitting your characters with it cold, and then just seeing how they react.

My Own Mire

I didn’t share any blog posts last week. I’d intended to do a series on storytelling terminology (albeit without an interesting introduction), and then instead I got my own alligators. And in this case, both metaphors work.

Last week was my finals week at OU. I had to finish up 50,000 words on a novel and write two book reviews and a term paper for my other class (and that required me to actually read one of those books start-to-finish). Thursday night of the week before (back in April) I was kind of dreading a really busy weekend trying to get everything in place. I was sitting on the couch in the living room, working on my laptop while Trish and I watched some of our favorite comedies….

And then Trish got a call from her mom. Her dad had had a heart attack. They were at the hospital and he was okay, but they were going to run some tests and we’d know more by Friday morning. By Friday morning, we knew he needed a quadruple bypass, and the surgery was scheduled for Monday morning.

So my life temporarily relocated from Oklahoma City to Wichita, KS. Instead of drudging away at my homework I spent Saturday and Sunday playing Mr. Mom so Trish could spend time with her family. Instead of dealing with our alligators we were trying to manage the snakes snapping at our heels.

And like any good protagonists, we survived the complications to find our way to a happy ending. Trish’s dad came through his surgery and recovered astonishingly quickly. By Thursday night he was home again. Trish finally got caught up on her sleep, and (remarkably enough) I got all my homework done and turned in. There was an awful lot of chaos, but we came through it all.

And if you come back on Thursday I’ll get back to work here, too. I’ve got more of that storytelling terminology to share. See you then.

What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Jericho

Skeet Ulrich as Jake Green in Jericho

When it comes to movies and TV shows, I am continually behind-the-times. I grew up watching AFN (American Forces Network, which, as I understand, bought shows from stateside networks. This meant we saw TV shows 6-18 months after they started airing in the US. The delay was only frustrating if you were someone who’d grown up without it.

 

Jericho

Fast-forward to today, and I still don’t keep up with shows as-they-air. If I watch TV at all, it’s on Netflix. I guess I’ve got that acceptance and expectation of delay programmed into me now. In keeping with that, I recently started netflixing* the TV show Jericho, which ended in March 2008.

For those of you dear inklings not yet in the know, the title Jericho refers to the small town of Jericho, Kansas. The premise concerns how the people of Jericho deal with the literal and metaphorical fallout of a nuclear attack that destroys 23 cities nationwide. There’s panic and chaos, love and bravery, fear and hate, disease and injury, courage and justice. Oh, and a bratty IRS lady from New York City. (“New York City?!”)

Pretty much everything you’d expect to find in a post-apocalyptic story, you’ll find in Jericho. I am a fan of the genre (in fact, my very first novel was post-apocalyptic, in case you didn’t know), so I’m pretty well hooked into sticking with the good folks of Jericho until they bootstrap* themselves back into some semblance of normal.

Of course, things keep happening that impede the bootstrapping somewhat. A gang of thieves and murderers steals town supplies. High tensions break already-cracking relationships. People don’t want to share food with their neighbors. Brave farmers try to defend their crops from fallout. The weather’s turning cold, and nobody has enough gasoline to run generators. The bar’s satellite TV works but shows nothing except a video of people in a big city, running from a mushroom cloud. Over and over again.

Of course, it all boils down to the question: How can a group of people rebuild civilization after civilization collapses around them?

I’m in Season 2, and I’m satisfied that Jericho‘s doing a good job of answering that question.

But.

Where The Plot Came Tumblin’ Down

As much as I’m enjoying the show, I can understand why it nearly didn’t make it past Season 1 and why it was canceled after Season 2:

  • Shortly after the bombings, a teenage girl throws a big party, even though she’s pretty sure her parents have been killed. This might work as a character development point — except that there’s nothing to indicate she might be throwing the party as an avoidance-of-pain tactic. She and all the other teens act as though it’s party-as-usual. (And there’s no hint as to what’s going on with the other kids’ parents.)
  • Everybody’s hair looks great. Even as generators fail and an EMP wipes out all electronics** — which, one assumes, would include any electronics involved in running water treatment facilities and in pumping water through pipes and into homes — everyone consistently looks showered, well-dressed, and well-pressed. The only exceptions are the folks who looked kind of raggedy even before the bombs, or the guys who’ve just confronted the thieving gang of murderers. Okay, and maybe the nurses at the clinic look a little frazzled…but one episode later, all the women might have stepped out of an Herbal Essences commercial.
  • **An EMP wipes out all electronics…but there are magical generators and cars. These still work great, and they appear as though from a magical, EMP-immune, convenient-car-and/or-generator factory anytime they’re needed. But a little deus ex machina never hurt anybody, right?
  • Nearly two months after the bombs go off, the town holds a mayoral election. Need I delineate why this makes no sense to me?

I Love the Show, I Really Do. But.

Though I am given to easy suspension of disbelief when watching TV shows or movies, there are some things up with which I cannot put.

Sure, every episode presents at least a few small skirmishes between order and chaos — but the writers of Jericho dithered for two months’ worth of fictional timeline before things got gritty on a grand scale. Call me a doom-and-gloomer, but I just don’t believe that a large group of humans can hold back the chaos enough to organize a mayoral election two months after a nuclear attack on everything they’ve ever known.

Picture it: A nuclear bomb goes off 250 miles from where you live. You’re going to stay put? You’re going to take part in a subsequent Fall Festival (yes, there was one of those, too)? You’re going to take a break in your search for food and water in order to fill out a voting ballot?

Um. I dunno about you, but I ain’t.

Get In Late, Get Out Early

If you spend any time at all here at Unstressed Syllables, you know that Aaron and I talk about this concept a lot: Don’t spend time telling your readers a lot of backstory. Get into the action as it’s already happening; explain the backstory in hints of dialogue and characters’ actions; get out of the action before you have to start slogging through some kind of epilogue. If you ignore the get-in-late, get-out-early rule, you are going to lose readers.

Jericho‘s writers ignored this rule, and they lost viewers. Fans of the post-apocalypse genre expect the collapse-of-civilization point to come fairly early on in the story. What these fans are looking for is the bravery, the courage, the depth of character it takes to rebuild after the collapse. These fans are not looking for mayoral elections. Jericho‘s writers took too long to get to the point.

A few episodes before the end of Season 1, they started getting there. They picked up the pace. They stopped protecting their characters and let more things fall apart. I’m already sad that the show got canceled, because I could definitely handle a few more seasons of what they’re offering me now. Alas, ’tis not to be. If only they’d sped things up starting in Season 1, Episode 2. (Episode 1 is pretty awesome.)

So don’t lollygag, y’all. Get in late, get out early. Keep the show on the road, instead of letting it shuffle off onto the shoulder to wash its hair or fill out a ballot. Otherwise, by the time you get going again, you’re gonna be going, going, gone.

And that’s WILAWriTWe.

* While you’re at it, don’t forget to verbify everything! 😉

On the Business of Writing: Stockholm Syndrome

This week I’m talking about a series of lectures my Professional Writing professor taught on getting started in traditional publishing. In yesterday’s article I talked about the hard work and the patience that has to go into making a career out of writing (even after you’ve put in the hard work and patience to land your first book deal.

Now, my professor is no kind of fan of Kindle publishing. But nothing I’ve ever read from Konrath or Eisler or Hocking has ever done as much to convince me I don’t want a traditional deal as those two hours listening to Deborah Chester describe how it’s supposed to go.

Numbers Shipped

In fact, after Wednesday’s lecture I chatted with some of my classmates about it in the hall, and I told them there was only one point in the entire series that gave me any kind of pause at all. It was the number 72,000.

Remember yesterday when I said that, in order to get a publishing company to believe in you, they needed to sales on the order of 50,000-100,000 paperbacks sold? That was eye-opening for me. As my professor was describing her hypothetical scenario with a “decent” first novel, she casually mentioned a royalty statement that showed 72,000 paperbacks sold.

And that’s a big number.

Now, Konrath takes that number into account. Everything we’ve said about the relative value of self-publishing for authors takes that number into account. But on its own, financial matters aside, that’s a big number. I want 72,000 people to read my book!

But there’s another caveat there. Publishers don’t sell books to readers. Publishers sell books to bookstores. And I know you’ve heard this before, but it’s a big deal:

Publishers sell books to bookstores on consignment.

Those 72,000 copies sold could mostly be boxed up in a warehouse somewhere. And if they haven’t happened to sell after a certain number of weeks, the bookstores return the unsold copies for full credit–and that’s money you (the author) just don’t get.

Royalty Statements

The significance of that factor came through loud and clear when Professor Chester showed us a sample royalty statement and taught us how to read them. Or…how to decipher them. Inasmuch as it can be done at all.

Author royalty statements are complex and confusing (probably deliberately so). They are produced 90 days after the close of a 6-month sales period, so by the time you get your statement you’re learning how your books were performing nine months ago.

A statement will tell you how many hardcover copies a title sold, and how many paperbacks, and how many foreign copies, and any other sales this particular publisher has made. And then, she said, there’s going to be a deduction against returns. The sample she showed us had total earnings of $38,000, and then a deduction of $10,000.

In other words, the publisher had sold enough copies that the author was owed $38,000 (before the agent and Uncle Sam), but the publisher arbitrarily chose to withhold $10,000 of that as insurance against bookstore returns. She said it’s impossible to know how they calculate that amount. Publishers reserve roughly a third of the book’s sales amount, and there’s nothing an author can do about it.

The scariest part of it is that last bit. Publishers use a punishingly opaque accounting process, and writers just have to accept it. That’s been a common theme throughout this class, whenever we’ve discussed the relationship between the publisher and the author.

Publishers hold all the power, and authors just have to accept it. Konrath likes to call that Stockholm Syndrome–the publishers have held us writers hostage for so long that we’ve come to see them as our friends even as they abuse their power and mistreat authors.

Systematic Abuse

A week ago I would have shied away from making that last claim, but I got to see it firsthand in a week’s worth of lectures by a successful fantasy author, and then I came home from Wednesday’s class to find an email from Josh pointing me to a blog post by author Kristine Kathryn  Rusch.

Remember those deliberately unintelligible royalty statement I mentioned? Well it appears big publishers have made a habit of falsifying e-book sales numbers on them. That matters. That’s a really big deal. And it seems likely that it’s been standard business practice for years now, but it’s taken the explosion of Kindle publishing to bring the matter to light.

Writers are so dependent on publishers that publishers can casually, consistently, even openly rip them off, and there’s nothing writers can do about it. We accept corrupt and outdated business practices that directly impact our personal finances because, well, that’s the only way we’re going to get published at all.

“Making It”

But the most disturbing part of the whole process is hearing how little it actually offers. Even when you do get your publishing contract, even when you do start selling, it’s a slow climb up to real money. As I said yesterday:

What you’ve got to do is get a lot of books out there and wait 4-5 years (after signing your first contract). If you do that–and if you have a good book that ends up with a good cover image and good product description–you just might end up with a career in writing that pays your bills.

Now one more recap. I’ve made references a couple times to J. A. Konrath’s rules for self-publishing success:

  1. Start with a good book.
  2. Get an effective cover.
  3. Write a compelling product description.
  4. Get lots of stuff out there.
  5. Wait at least a year.

Of course, I structured my earlier quote deliberately to incorporate those elements, but my professor’s lecture boiled down to precisely that. It’s not that publishers get you there sooner, or give you more money, or give you a better chance. Even when you “make it,” you’re still stuck in the same patient, hopeful place you’d be if you’d just thrown the books up on Amazon yourself.

The difference is how much money ends up in the publisher’s pocket. And how much ends up in yours. And, more than anything else, the difference is control.

Deborah Chester said right up front that she doesn’t want to be an entrepreneur. She doesn’t want to be CEO of Deborah Chester, Inc. She just wants to write stories and get paid for it, and that’s happening for her.

I wouldn’t say I want to be a businessman, but I prefer that to the neglect and abuse I could expect for my stories and for my finances if I ended up with a major publisher.

Sure, I’ll have to learn how to manage my own finances and do my own performance tracking across my titles and formats…but that doesn’t seem like such a terrible thing to me. And as Kristine Rusch’s story showed, you might just end up there anyway.

On the Business of Writing: Breaking In

One of the more interesting parts of my professor’s lectures on the business of writing this week was what she called “career building.” She started with a hypothetical first book, and worked it through a new writer’s burgeoning career.

That’s the sort of long-term financial projection Konrath likes to work through from time to time to demonstrate the financial appeal of self-publishing. Professor Chester wasn’t taking that approach at all, though. She was just trying to give us a realistic idea what to expect.

Caveats

Before we can really lay out a scenario, we’ve got to consider some of the caveats that go along with the numbers. You may have heard that the average advance on a first novel is $5,000, but how do you actually get that money?

We’re talking legacy publishing here, so I’ll assume throughout that you’ve already got an agent. That’s how my professor approached it, too.

So if you sign for a $5,000 advance, you’re giving $750 of that to your agent in commission. And you don’t get the remaining $4,250 all at once.

You’ll usually get a third of it ($1,417) at signing, a third on submission, and the rest on publication. The way the industry works, that’s going to take about 12-18 months, all told.

Each time the company cuts you a check they actually send it to your agent. He’ll take out his cut, then (within a couple weeks), send you yours.

But don’t go spend it! First, you need to withhold your taxes, or you’ve going to have a really bad day early next year. You canfill out forms and do the math, or you can get pretty close by just keeping back about a third of the check.

So your $5,000 first book advance?  You’ll actually get it in three low, low payments of $472 dollars of spending money.

An Aside

Now, lest you think I’m being too snarky, I should concede that Gods Tomorrow has been for sale for six months now and it’s only earned me a touch over $300.

If I’d signed it with a publisher last October instead of putting in on Amazon, I’d have something closer to $700 on it by now. Then again, I didn’t have an offer at the time. If, instead, I’d started shopping it last October, I might have an agent by now, who might be sending it to interested publishers, who might be offering me a deal sometime in the next year. And that would be worth precisely $0 so far.

A Hypothetical Career

But we’re not talking about real current earnings today, we’re talking about career building. I didn’t take detailed notes on the precise imaginary figures she used, but I can convey the overall idea.

The way it happens, she said, is that you start with a hardcover deal with a medium-sized hardback publisher. You’re a total unknown, so they offer a $2,500 advance. Several months after that your agent finds a paperback publisher willing to pay a $5,000 advance (that deal is actually the $5,000-average-first-book-advance you’ve been hearing about), and maybe he even finds a publisher in the UK who throws $2,500 at you, too.

There are even more complications in how you get paid for that, and those three deals are going to be staggered over more than a year, but eventually (with a few earned royalties) you’re going to bring in about $12,000 on that book. Your agent takes his 15% and Uncle Sam gets 33%, so after a couple years you’ll get to spend about $7,000 of that.

If your book performs well, even if you never earn out your $5,000 paperback advance, you’re going to get better deals on your second book. Not a lot better, but maybe $3,000, $6,000, and $3,000 from the same three publishing companies. That nets you an extra $1,200 (spread out over two years) and, more importantly, some name recognition.

The Escalation

The thing is, if you want to build a career in legacy publishing you need more than those $5,000-$10,000 advances. To get that, you need to get your book in major bookstore chains. Or, better yet, in grocery stores and airports. The only way that happens is if your publisher puts your book there, and they only do that if they believe in you.

“Believe in you” means 5- or 6-figure advances. It means 50,000 to 100,000 paperback sales on your record, and you can’t get that until your publisher is at least pushing you hard at the bookstore chains.

So you start with a $7,000 income over two years and keep your day job. You sell another book your second year and pay down some debt with the $8,200 you get to spend. Maybe you land some big promotion on book three, get some serious sales, and jump up to a higher tier of publisher (and a higher tier of advances) for book four.

ANd by then you’ve got a name. By then your agent is selling foreign rights all across Europe. By then you’re selling movie options to Hollywood. Your US paperback advance might still just be $10,000-$15,000, but across everything your fourth book might clear $75,000 smooth. Even after your agent’s $10,000 and your government’s $20,000, you’ll get $45,000 in spending money.

Spread out over two or three years, of course.

That’s…well, it’s still not enough to let you quit your day job. Of course, if you can maintain those sales year after year, the “spread out over two or three years” doesn’t matter too much once it really gets rolling. It can accumulate into a decent, regular income.

In other words, what you’ve got to do is get a lot of books out there and wait 4-5 years (after signing your first contract). If you do that–and if you have a good book that ends up with a good cover image and good product description–you just might end up with a career in writing that pays your bills.

What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Writing Horribly

Dear inklings, in case you didn’t already know, you should understand this now: I am an insane person.

I’ll not waste your time with a longish preamble as to why this is so; instead, I’ll show you the proof:

NO.

This, my dear ones, is the printout of my manuscript Legend’s Heir (working title).

Legend’s Heir (working title) is the prequel to Triad, my epic fantasy novel that both Aaron and I have mentioned before.

The first draft manuscript of Legend’s Heir (working title) is, as you can see, 3.5 inches thick. I estimate that it’s 200,000 words long.

I haven’t looked at it in more than eleven years.

I have started rewriting it.

Stop The Insanity — And I Mean It!

If you’ve been paying attention (and I know that you have, for that’s just the kind of precious, blogophile inklings you are), you know that Aaron and I have committed ourselves heart, soul, body, and mind to Kindle publishing. (There might have been a contract signed in blood involved somewhere.) One of our shared goals is to publish our respective novel backlogs under Consortium Books.

In just over a year, the selection-to-publish from my backlog will be Triad. At some point after that, we’ll want to publish the novels that go with Triad. Right now, that’s Legend’s Heir (working title).

I’m explaining to you because you look nervous.

Anyway, having no idea whatsoever how long it might take to rewrite Legend’s Heir (working title), and needing a writing project other than blogging (so that I wouldn’t go crazy), I sat down this past weekend and started rewriting what I am now referring to as The Monster Epic Fantasy Novel (MEFaN) — thereby proving that I have gone crazy.

So Far, My Favorite Dramatic Line Is:

The pain was as bad as a hangover. Worse. It wound its way around the top of his skull, resting there like a vicious reptile, sending forked tongues of agony down the sides of his head. Even the sockets of his eyes ached, as though that oviparous creature had laid two painful, throbbing eggs and left them in place of his eyeballs.

That’s what she said.

*Le Sigh*

Once upon a time, I was a college student, and I wrote such things. Nowadays, I’m a little more seasoned (mmmm, cilantro) and a little less impressed with my own vocabulary. No, I don’t use the word “oviparous” in daily conversation. (Although I’m rather pleased to see that even back then, I was good friends with the third person singular neuter possessive pronoun.)

What I’m sighing about, though, is the fact that line-by-line, there’s not a lot from this manuscript that’s salvageable. For the first time in my writing career, I am faced with a rewrite that’s a genuine rewrite and not just a major overhaul-your-ass edit.

The Good News Is…

…that the story itself is still pretty cool. Yeah, I’m gonna have to do all the prewriting exercises Aaron talks about before I start the actual writing. And yeah, a main problem with Legend’s Heir (working title) is that when I penned it, I didn’t know my characters at all.

I mean, I’ve got Jael showing empathy toward James (soon-to-be-renamed) after she slugs him.

Jael would never feel sorry for slugging him.

*ahem* Anyway, I’ve got a ginormously embiggened pile of work ahead of me concerning this story — but it’s still a good story. Cool swordfights are fought. The good guy doesn’t get what he wants in any scene. The bad guy is creepy hot. Elemental magic happens.

Also, there are elves.

What’s really freakin’ awesome is that as I’m reading, skimming, and bemoaning this manuscript, I am also writing out the list of scenes-and-sequels I’m going to use when I finally sit down to write the MEFaN into something less monstrous and more enjoyably epic.

Rewriting Is Hard — But I’m Lovin’ It

And that’s WILAWriTWe!

On the Business of Writing: Alternatives

I’ve talked before about Deborah Chester, the core professor of my Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Oklahoma. She’s a phenomenal teacher, and she consistently displays a deep understanding of the process of writing commercial fiction.

That’s a skill worth having, believe me.

She also teaches several classes on the undergrad level, and when I first started the program last fall it was in the slash-listed course Category Fiction (which I’ve also discussed around here). When I say “slash-listed,” I mean the course was open both to Masters students and to high-level undergrads, and we had a good mix of both.

As a result, the majority of the class already seemed to know Professor Chester pretty well at the beginning of the semester. She’d start talking about some writer’s bad habit of indulging in exposition, then wag a finger at one of the students and say, “Just like you!” And everyone would laugh.

I felt pretty left out of all that. I’ve mentioned my issues with social anxiety, and feeling out-of-the-loop is an easy way to trip into that downward spiral, so as soon as I recognized what was going on I decided to fix it. I sent Professor Chester an email asking to schedule an appointment during office hours just to come in and get to know her. And she graciously obliged.

I was more than a little nervous going into that meeting, but she was friendly and open. She’s made it her life’s work to help writers find their way in an incredibly complicated and punishing career field. And (like so many of us) she’s an introvert herself, so she was pretty forgiving of my nervousness.

And so, eventually, we talked. I learned that she had done her undergraduate work in this very program, and through her professor’s connections she’d sold her senior writing project (a fantasy novel) to a traditional publisher the summer after graduation. Then she came back for the Masters program, and after that hired on to replace her professor primarily on the strength of her sales record.

I told her some of my stories, too. The one where I got embarrassed about my fantasy novel, and the one where I tried half-heartedly to shop my unsolicited manuscript to top-tier publishers, and the one where I gave up on writing for five years at a time. And, to end it on a high note, the one where I got back into writing in 2007 and finished three novels in one year.

And by then we were running out of time, but I had a question strong on my mind. This was last October–about a week before my first novel was scheduled to go up for sale on Amazon–and I wanted to know where she stood on the issue of self-publishing and e-books in general. So I asked.

It was an emotionally loaded question given my circumstances, and I didn’t give her any indication of my circumstances (which isn’t really fair), so she answered honestly. In her opinion, e-books were a flash-in-the-pan, an insignificant portion of sales, and self-publishing was pretty unprofessional and, honestly, a waste of time. Because what can you really hope to get with it? 500 readers? She shook her head and dismissed the concept out of hand.

I disagreed. (If you’ve been reading my blog for the last weeks, you know I obviously still do.) But my opinion is one based on the evidence and arguments of others. Hers was one based on extensive first-hand experience. She’s got 38 novels published. It’s hard to argue with that.

So I kept my mouth shut, kept my head down, and paid attention. I didn’t change my plans at all, but I didn’t speak them too loudly around campus, either. The last thing I needed was for her to get wind of it and consider me an unprofessional hack, when I would eventually need her on the chair of my graduate committee!

But the Professional Writing program is an incredibly small community, and even though I’ve only talked about my self-publishing exploits with a couple of my classmates, word has gotten around. There’s another class going on right now, “The Business of Professional Writing,” and when they started talking about the opportunities in self-publishing one of my classmates chimed in with all kinds of informed opinion.

I’m told the professor asked, “How do you know all this stuff?”

And my classmate tilted his head, frowned, and said, “Don’t you read Aaron Pogue’s blog?”

And of course the professors talk. I suspect word has finally gotten around, because Professor Chester came into class to talk about the submission process and “getting a book deal” for yesterday’s class.

And she opened it by saying, “There are different processes. There’s the very old one where you mail in actual paper submissions. There’s the newer one where what they really want is email. And then of course there’s self-publishing on things like Kindle. Some people really like the idea. I don’t know much about that, I’ve never done it, so I can’t comment on it. But I’ll tell you all about the other method.”

That wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned self-publishing in class, but it was certainly the most generous she’d been toward the concept. She mentioned it a couple more times over the course of that class, and always in the same way: “I don’t trust it, but some people really like the idea.”

She didn’t look at me. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But I suspect she knows. I think we’ve gotten to the point where everybody knows where everybody else stands, and we’re all very politely not talking about it.

And I’m okay with that. Konrath has five rules for self-publishing, and the last one is, “Wait at least a year.” That’s what I’m doing now. I’m investing that time in perfecting the other four rules, and trying not to pay too much attention to my sales figures in the meantime. If and when I pass that 500 readers mark–if and when I start making serious money off Gods Tomorrow, then I’ll go and talk with her from my first-hand experience. In the meantime, I’m willing to wait and see.

But there are things she said in our “business” lectures that I need to talk about here. Especially after the series I’ve run for the last three weeks. So stick around for more on the business of writing, and what you could expect from a legacy publishing deal.

On Kindle Publishing: Building Your Brand

Today I’d like to wrap up my introduction to Kindle publishing. I’ve spent the last several weeks describing the kind of remarkable success indie authors can find self-publishing on Kindle, and why that success is suddenly possible.

The key to it, as I explained yesterday, is the emergence of the global information network. As our society grows more and more comfortable with the digital network we’re immersed in, we also grow more accepting of localized data providers. That’s fancy-speak for indie publishers.

Of course, it’s not enough that readers are willing to buy books by Kindle-published authors. That fact has made Konrath and Hocking wealthy, but it doesn’t immediately generate sales for anyone else.

For new authors to seize these remarkable opportunities, they must understand the dynamics at play and participate in the new network (just as I described Courtney doing in Tuesday’s post). Below, I’ll discuss a few ways that’s possible.

Useful Text

One of the biggest threats to old media is that they’re perceived as catering to political, moneyed, or self-interest instead of providing content that’s genuinely useful to their audience. That’s an easy factor to see in the politicization and partisanship of primetime news shows, but it’s just as true in the book publishing world.

Legacy publishers chasing sure profits have become obsessed with bestsellers. In that chase, they’ve made a habit of slashing their midlists and eliminating niche imprints, focusing their attention more on “mainstream” fiction at the expense of local communities.

That’s precisely how Konrath got his start in Kindle publishing. He was a midlist author writing for a niche imprint, and when that imprint dissolved he had trouble finding another publisher willing to provide his sort of books to the readers who had been faithfully following him for years.

So he struck out on his own, catering to a “project community” (in his case dark, comedic pulp thrillers), and provided his readers with what they wanted, when they wanted it, the way they wanted it. And they rewarded him with an astonishing success story, and a message he has shared with the world.

The same thing can be seen in the story of established romance author Connie Brockway, who recently announced that she’s “going rogue.” Brockway decided to self-publish because her ongoing contract with her publisher limited what she could do as a writer.

Over the last couple years, as print publishers have been facing numerous financial crises, it has felt like they’ve become less likely to buy a book that doesn’t fit snugly within the parameters of last month’s success and since last month’s success was dictated by the previous month’s success (and so forth and so on) there hasn’t been a whole lot of room left in which to play. And I dearly love to play.

Connie writes historical romance, and the legacy publishers are insisting “most” readers of historical romance want tales set in regency England. As they push writers to cater to that overbroad “most,” they’re alienating huge audiences. Brockway goes on:

There’s evidence that there’s a huge pool of readers out there who got left behind while the legacy publishing houses were tightening their parameters, and who are starving for a gritty western or an gentle American or a bloody medieval or, blush, an off kilter sheik story.  Why, Masha Canham has topped 6000 eBook sales on Kindle since the first of the year re-issuing her wonderful pirate novel, Swept Away. And she’s done so without benefit of a Facebook page or one single tweet.

That last line is almost as surprising as the one before it (and, of course, that’s why she included it).

Engaging with the Community

But even though Canham has seen success without engaging in digital social networks, there’s plenty of reason to believe she would have seen a lot more success if she had. Amanda Hocking, Kindle publishing’s golden child, has made a life for herself on Twitter and Facebook.

In fact, the rise of digital social media is the last piece of technology that has allowed Kindle publishing to make legacy publishing obsolete. While e-Books and high-quality print-on-demand services made indie production and distribution competitive, legacy publishers still held the advantage when it came to reaching readers. It used to be the only way to get books to readers at all was to get them in stores.

But as I discussed yesterday, society has rejected the old media model of centralized broadcasters pushing content out to passive audiences. Instead, audiences today work as tight-knit groups, co-evaluating and co-distributing content within local project communities. And as this trend has become more and more apparent, the most successful authors, self- or legacy-published, have been those who engaged with readers within the readers’ local community groups.

So how do you reach into project groups? Participate in digital social networking. That’s precisely what it’s for. Facebook facilitates project groups by allowing them to accumulate around individuals (your list of “Friends”), and around products, brands, or causes (Facebook pages you might “Like”). Twitter does the same thing with lists and hashtags.

One of the most relevant examples to our discussion, though, is a site called KindleBoards. KindleBoards is a low-budget, plain-looking web forum, but it has attracted a vibrant community based around one simple commonality: its visitors use and love the Amazon Kindle.

Of course, a site like that isn’t going to escape the entrepreneurial eye of business-minded self-publishers like Konrath and Hocking. (In fact, both of them have been frequent commenters there, and both of them recommend it as an invaluable resource for Kindle publishers.)

Every self-published author should establish a presence at KindleBoards. And that needs to be more than just a marketing message. The moderators at KindleBoards have strict regulations about where and when and how authors can promote their own books or websites.

But despite those rules, authors see huge rewards from participating at KindleBoards, not in a strictly promotional sense (that hearkens back to the “broadcast” model our society is rejecting), but by participating in the discussion, by engaging with individuals, and by making friends. In other words, the trick is to genuinely become part of this project group.

Once that’s achieved, the author can recommend his book directly to his peers. And as we’ve already seen, that’s a profoundly powerful marketing message.

On Kindle Publishing: The Role of the Global Information Network

On Tuesday I interrupted a three-week introduction to the Kindle publishing phenomenon for a case study near and dear to our hearts: Courtney Cantrell’s Kindle publishing success story.

Now, admittedly she’s no Hocking yet. She’s a success regardless. She has already sold well beyond her immediate circle of friends and family, and even out past one remove. She’s not making enough money to pay the bills yet (not even close), but her book is being read by new people–by strangers–and there are more and more of them with every day that passes.

Konrath’s formula for Kindle publishing overnight success goes

  • Write really good books, with good covers, and good product descriptions
  • Get lots of books out there
  • And wait at least a year.

Courtney’s got one book for sale, and it’s been out for a couple weeks. Considering that, she’s doing fine.

But today I want to talk about Konrath’s rules, and why they work (and, by extension, why I can now call Courtney a success with such confidence). It all has to do with some fundamental changes in society–specifically with the end of The Media and the rise of the Global Information Network.

Accessibility

One of the books I had to review for Readings in Mass Communication was Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility, edited by Andrew J. Flanagin. The book was all about how the new generation of “digital natives” views and interacts with mass media. You’ve seen glimpses of their findings throughout my claims over the last three weeks.

One of the most important (and dramatic) findings in their research is that digital natives equate credibility with the accessibility of useful information. By comparison, credibility used to be evaluated primarily by the quality of the source (in our case, that would be the publishers). But digital natives have grown up with ready to access to vast stores of information, and thanks to aggregators and search engines and user-generated content, it’s often difficult to know the true source for any given piece of information.

So they’ve turned more and more of their focus from centralized legitimizing sources to more personal metrics like the speed and ease of access. If those things sound familiar, those are precisely the things we’ve been talking about throughout our discussion of Kindle publishing.

Specifically, Kindle publishing provides authors with speed and ease of access to the publishing process. That’s the primary appeal of it. A direct result of that, though, is that readers gain all the advantages of in their own access to the books they’re looking for.

According to Konrath, publishers are adamantly uninterested in publishing more than one title per author per year. (Incidentally my professor Deborah Chester, who is much-published and a staunch supporter of legacy publishing has unknowingly backed him up on this in lectures.)

Kindle publishers, on the other hand, can release multiple titles in the same time. Consortium Books, my little indie publishing company, is on track to publish 6 titles in 2011 and we hope to publish 12 in 2012–18 titles total, and nearly all of them from just two authors.

Amanda Hocking addressed the same issue, when she announced her legacy publishing deal. Even as she’s signing a three-book deal with St. Martin’s Press, she announces she’s also going to release multiple titles on her own before the end of the year. She has no intention of abandoning Kindle publishing because she has a massive backlog of (extremely valuable) books–twenty titles of her own–and it would take decades to get those pushed through the legacy publishing process.

Instead, she’s taking advantage of the speed and ease of access that Kindle publishing creates to get more books out there, and have them selling longer–two of Konrath’s core rules for success. As she does that, she’s providing speed and ease of access to her books to her readers–something legacy publishers can’t do–which increases her credibility.

Social Collaborative Endorsement

The other major method digital natives use to evaluate credibility is something called the “bandwagon heuristic” or social collaborative endorsement. That means, for a given reader, the more of his peers who seem to find something credible, the more he finds it credible.

That might seem obvious. But, to be fair, the point of the study wasn’t to find something shocking, but to understand how we interact with this revolutionary new information network we’re all immersed in. And one answer that’s critically significant to our discussion here is that, in the network era, we’ve taken credibility assessment away from centralized legitimizers (again, legacy publishers) and placed it in the hands of the masses. We’ve crowdsourced gatekeeping.

The easiest way to understand this is that, in broad strokes, popularity equals credibility. That’s why we care about a site’s pagerank, or how many hits it’s gotten. That’s why we care about the number of views a YouTube video has, or the number of downloads of Firefox compared with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

And that’s why Bestseller lists matter. Even as readers reject legacy publishing as a central source of authority, they turn to Amazon’s Bestseller lists to find books worth reading. If a book appears on Amazon’s Bestseller list, that means a lot of a person’s peers have deemed it credible.

Amazon has demonstrated an uncanny grasp of social collaborative endorsement and they’ve done everything they can to build it into their system. They’re constantly refining their recommendation engine to advertise products to their customers based on the preferences of other customers who have exhibited similar tastes (or, in other words, the customers’ peers).

That’s compelling information. Above and beyond sales numbers, studies show that digital natives prefer the reviews or analyses of their peers over the reviews or analyses of professionals or experts.

And there, again, Amazon is ready and willing to facilitate the collapse of the old media. Customer Reviews, one of the most popular features of the Amazon shopping experience, cater to precisely that sort of peer feedback. Amazon even encourages customers to rate the quality of each other’s reviews. At every opportunity Amazon has created a market that caters to social collaborative endorsement.

And as it happens, that market is an incredibly friendly environment for Kindle publishers. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll talk about how an author can get the most out of the global information network.

What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Taking A Break

Signing books at the Book Launch Party!

Greetings, my dearest inklings!

I come to you today, having officially launched my novel Colors of Deception into the great wide world — and having fried my brain in the process.

The result of said frying is that I have no WILAWriTWe to share with you today. Aaron doesn’t know this yet, so I hope this doesn’t get me fired. 😉

Actually, I just lied. I do have a WILAWriTWe to share with you, and it is this:

What I Learned About Writing This Week is that I need a break.

So I’m taking one. 😉

Have a great week, my lovelies!

On Kindle Publishing: Courtney’s Tweetlings

Tonight is the official launch party for our own Courtney Cantrell’s Colors of Deception. If you’re in the Oklahoma City area, come join us at Vintage Timeless Coffee to celebrate her success.

And, remarkably, it’s already success. Even though the launch party is tonight, the book has been officially “launched” for a week now. That gave everyone time to order their paperbacks and have them shipped in time to get signed at the party tonight. Clever, eh?

And, for that matter, the e-Book was actually on sale the Wednesday before that. So, all told, the book has been available for 13 days now. In that time, she’s sold 109 copies. By the time you read this, it’ll be more.

Now, those numbers are not going to put Random House out of business. But to put them in context, I released Gods Tomorrow on October 12 and hit 111 sales on December 31. That’s 81 days. Courtney should reach 111 sales sometime today. That’s 13 days to my 81. She’s in business.

She’s on the bestseller lists, too.

She’s been as high as #3 on both lists.

What She’s Doing Right

So how exactly did Courtney blow my numbers out of the water? The answer to that comes in two parts. The boring answer is that the Consortium has gotten a lot better at selling books since we debuted out very first book last October. I’ll talk a little more about that below.

But first I want to talk about what Courtney has done right, especially because that dovetails neatly with the series I’m running on Kindle publishing. This week we’re going to talk about networking as the new mass medium, and Courtney had been working the network like a master.

She talked about it on her blog just today, with an article sharing 3 newbie lessons from getting published. I’ll let her explain it in her own words.

Thus far, Twitter, Kindleboards, Facebook, and blogging have been my greatest allies in promoting Colors of Deception. I’m tweeting and posting — and to my delight, followers and friends are retweeting and reposting. (Thanks, everybody! You guys are cramazing.)

The result of all this networking isn’t just book sales, though — it’s connections all over the place. It’s encouragements coming in from all sides. And it’s tweets and messages that deserve a personal response.

Right now, I’m happily responding, and I’m making the social media work for me.

The next word after that quote is “but,” and it’s worth reading the article because she makes a very important lesson out of it, but that doesn’t detract at all from what she’s said here. I told Courtney a year ago that she needed to start participating on Twitter to build her brand and for the sake of her blog (which didn’t yet exist). I told her three months ago that she had to get involved at Kindleboards and become a part of that community. If she did, I promised, it would sell books.

Courtney practiced what I preached. I haven’t. I haven’t maintained a regular Twitter presence since that time a year ago when I was first recommending it, and I’m only moderately and grudgingly active at Kindleboards. I could recognize both as valuable media, but Courtney actually put in the time and made them work.

And they’ve worked. If Courtney maintains her presence on those bestseller lists, she’s bound to find her audience eventually, and that will mean the kind of success we’ve been talking about for the last two weeks.

What We’re Doing Right

Now, even though I haven’t been hitting the social media as hard as Courtney has, it would paint an incomplete picture of the situation if I left the conversation at just that. Part of the reason we’ve seen so much better numbers for her is that we, as a publisher, have gotten much better at publishing books.

  • A week after Gods Tomorrow went live at Amazon someone convinced me to set up its product page at Goodreads. I took my time, but over another week or so I got the book’s details filled out, added lovely cover art, uploaded a digital sample for Goodreads members, and finally started my own author page there and started filling that out.
  • Sometime later I was poking around on Amazon’s forums and read a passing mention of the value of Amazon Author Pages. I’d never heard of them. So I did my research, filled out the request, and sometime in November I had my own author page there, too, with links to my book and blog and a bio and a pretty profile pic (courtesy Julie V. Photography).
  • While my sales ticked steadily in, I kept doing what I could to improve them. I reread my product description a couple times, but couldn’t really find any way to improve. Then back in January I thought to name Joshua Unruh our Marketing Director, and asked him to give the description a once-over. He hadn’t even read the book, but he immediately spotted some major flaws in it and helped me rework it to find more zing.
  • In February I dropped in at Kindleboards.com for the first time ever. It’s a phenomenal community built around the people who own and love Kindles–which is to say serious readers who love books. Every Kindle publisher needs to have a presence at Kindleboards. I started building mine in February. I learned the ropes, figured out how to format a signature that would passively promote my book without irritating the heck out of all the readers, figured out what we could get away with in terms of self-promotion and what sort of conversation got the best return on investment (which, incidentally, was also the most fun sort of conversation: idle chit-chat).

After I launched Gods Tomorrow, I spent the next six months figuring out what information needed to be out there, and where, and how to make that happen. When we launched Courtney’s book thirteen days ago, all of those pieces were already in place for her.

We’re learning as we go. We’re getting better and better. I’m thrilled with Courtney’s success, and I see all kind of promise in it. We’re already seeing accelerating returns, and it should only get better from here.

Random House…watch your back.