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On Kindle Publishing: Credibility (2 of 2)

This week I’m continuing my series on Kindle publishing with a look at the credibility issues associated with self-publishing. Yesterday I talked about the perspectives of publishers (who hate it, with dollar signs in their eyes) and readers (who really don’t care where a book comes from, as long as it looks and reads professional).

The ultimate significance of that analysis is that neither party really matters. The legacy publishers’ opinion hardly matters to a self-published author, except inasmuch as it could hurt a possible future legacy publishing career. But Amanda Hocking’s story directly refutes that — the darling of the Kindle publishing revolution was not only able to find a legacy publisher, she commanded an intense battle in an auction that ended with a multi-million-dollar deal.

And, of course, the readers’ general indifference frees a writer from any real concern about backlash from potential buyers. The only opinion left with any significance, then, is the writer’s own. And, tragically, that has proved one of the largest obstacles to Kindle publishing.

The Writers

Over the course of the last year, this topic has become the central focus of J. A. Konrath’s blog, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. That blog is targeted directly at writers. He certainly has some dedicated fans of his work in his readership, and he tries from time to time (with little apparent hope) to offer advice to members of the legacy publishing industry, but it’s clear in his choice of topics, in his approach, and in his appeals that he is speaking almost entirely to writers.

And he’s encouraging them, again and again, without hesitation, to dedicate themselves to Kindle publishing. This is a man with enviable success in the field, and extensive experience that has been shared on the record. For years he’s been experimenting and perfecting his own Kindle publishing model, and for most of that time he’s handled the question, “Should you self-publish,” with a carefully-worded, “It depends.”

In December 2010 he officially changed his answer to a resounding, “Yes.” He posted an article titled, “You Should Self-Publish” in which he reviewed all the factors involved in that decision.

In that article, he started with a primarily financial analysis but then moved on to a rhetorical question-and-answer section that dealt directly with some of the largest questions of credibility. Below, we’ll consider two of the more significant issues he addressed.

Publishers as Quality Control

Konrath started with a question that could be posed by a hypothetical reader (which is to say, a potential buyer), but it’s important to remember he’s writing to other writers. This isn’t necessarily a question of genuine concern to readers (as we discussed in yesterday’s post), but it’s one writers worry about readers worrying about.

Q: But I need the traditional publishing gatekeepers in order to know my book is good enough. Aren’t you concerned a whole bunch of wannabes will flood the Kindle with self-pubbed crapola?

A: Decades ago, pulp writers learned to write while on the job. Early books by many of the greatest mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, and romance writers, weren’t very good. But getting paid allow those writers to improve, and become the masters we now revere.

If you write crap, it probably won’t sell very well. But you can learn from it and get better. You can rewrite and revise your early work to improve it. With self-publishing, readers become the gatekeepers, and if you work hard, keep an open mind, and learn from your mistakes, you’ll improve as a writer.

Konrath’s response leans on the publishing of yore, but even in the strictly limited access of the legacy publishing industry, we’ve seen the same thing. It is extremely common (expected, even) for a writer’s craft to improve over the years. It’s also commonplace for a writer’s early works (perhaps works rejected with an alarming frequency) to see easy publication once that author has achieved success with a later title.

Readers as Gatekeepers

The writer’s problem with credibility in self-publishing, then, isn’t one of overall credibility but of immediate credibility. But Konrath would argue that it’s not the publication of the book that creates legitimacy, it’s the quality of the work. A book that’s good enough to sell in large quantities is, on its own, “good enough.”

In his characteristically frank language, Konrath calls out the legitimizing effect of publication, reviews, awards, and shelf space.

Years ago, self-pubbing was called “vanity publishing” because it existed to appeal to the writer’s ego.

Joining organizations, winning awards, getting into newspapers, and seeing your books in bookstores and libraries all seems like it caters directly to a writer’s vanity.

As a writer, I could give a shit what the New York Times thinks of my latest, or if MWA gives me an Edgar award, or if I’m on a shelf in the Podunk Public Library. Those are all ego strokes.

I care about money, and reaching readers, and none of these things are necessary to make money or reach readers.

So how does a writer go about making money and reaching readers in this new digital marketplace? The answer is self-promotion, and it depends upon the emerging digital supernetwork. We’ll talk about that next week.

On Kindle Publishing: Credibility (1 of 2)

Last week I started this series on Kindle publishing with a look at some of its biggest players (Konrath, Hocking, and Eisler), and then spent a while discussing the technological changes that have made this publishing revolution possible.

But even with the technological shift well and firmly established, there’s another shift that has to happen before Kindle publishing goes mainstream. Writers, every bit as much as newspapermen and prime time anchors face a credibility gap.

The Publishers

Naturally, the harshest critics of the credibility of Kindle publishing are those who have the most to lose with it. Legacy publishers collectively provide a sneering disregard for the opportunities available to authors today. A recent Time magazine article on the topic of digital publishing quoted Michael Cader, founder and editor of trade e-newsletter Publishers Lunch,

“The trick is not that the digital isn’t profitable,” says Cader. “Digital at its current level makes few or none of the costs of running a print business go away.” That means big warehouses, broad sales forces and extensive systems. The hope, of course, is that in time, digital will be cheaper to produce, but currently, publishers face a big expense in converting to digital.

Cader’s comment is absurd on its face. Digital does makes the cost of running a print business go away from the point of view of the author, of the reader, and even of the digital publisher. It’s only established print publishers that have those costs.

It’s astonishing how much the legacy publishers equate their business methods with “the publishing industry.” The whole shakeup going on in publishing right now is happening because these are two different ways of getting books to readers, but the established players are quick to describe digital as just an aspect of their legacy process.

And the trade press is carrying the publishers’ spin. Konrath linked to an unflattering Publisher’s Weekly article about his self-publishing “schemes” that seemed deliberately and harshly slanted against him, manipulating and omitting key facts in order to position Konrath’s choice to self-publish as one of desperation.

That is precisely the message publishers like to spread: that self-publishing is the last resort of an inadequate author so desperate to see his unfit book in print that he’s unwilling to spend the time and effort honing his craft and learning the market to get a deal with a traditional publisher. As we discussed last earlier, there was some grain of truth to those accusations when the technology and cost of self-publishing made legacy publishing the most legitimate path for an author.

Legacy publishers also insist their business model is the best (and perhaps only, as Cader’s quote above implies) in terms of sales and income. When Barry Eisler announced his decision to turn down a lucrative print deal to self-publish through Amazon, Mike Shatzkin wrote on another industry blog analyzing the decision.

They didn’t do the math on what the loss of print sales and print merchandising might mean in dollars and cents and how to address it….

Even if the math Konrath and Eisler put forth showing that the author share of ebook sales can increase by three or four times through self-publishing; even if we ignore (as they did) the fact that the higher percentage will be on a lower retail price (they trumpet the lower retail price they can charge as a key motivation for the shift); and even if we forget about the costs in time and actual expense involved in self-publishing, the author who follows this formula has to take into account the loss of presence and revenue from the retail channel.

All of that seems perfectly reasonable. That’s the core of the legacy publishers’ argument. It’s also completely wrong. The “math Konrath and Eisler put forth” is founded on some of the very elements Shatzkin accuses them of ignoring. Yes, Kindle publishing offers a higher percentage on a lower retail price, but that’s only true of gross sales. For authors, there is no loss. The higher percentage is so much higher that it completely offsets the lower price, in terms of author income, and the lower price can generate far more sales.

That’s not to say Kindle publishing is guaranteed to earn an author more money, but the industry analysts consistently repeat arguments so deeply rooted in the perspective of legacy publishers’ business model that it has no connection to the real situation of authors — or of readers, which is to say, of their customers.

The Readers

Even as publishers have fought to maintain a credibility gap between self-published and legacy-published books, readers have largely ignored their message. Perhaps it’s because they so effectively controlled legitimacy during the print era, but legacy publishers have so completely owned the market that (unlike their counterparts in news media) they have done astonishingly little to establish themselves as popular brand names among readers.

By and large, readers ignore publishers. Readers tend to buy books by author, by genre, or by cover. Publishers efforts at branding have focused on those last two, running separate lines and imprints specialized in popular categories and stamping the spines of their book covers with imprint logos. But apart from Harlequin, few fiction publishers have ever managed to become household names among buyers.

As a result, readers’ credibility assessment of novels has less to do with the pedigree of the publishing company than with the professional appearance of the book. Until recent years that has been a fairly insignificant distinction, as expensive printing technology reserved that professional appearance only to the large publishing companies that could afford it, but as we saw before, that has all changed.

Authors can now hire freelance editors, cover designers, interior designers, and technical formatting to prepare digital books for small, one-time costs, and it’s a simple matter for a good cover designer to imitate and even duplicate the look and feel of popular legacy-published covers within a given genre.

It’s really no surprise that readers are willing to overlook the pedigree of a book’s publisher. For much of the last twenty years, the trend society-wide has been away from respect for legitimizing “gatekeepers” and toward a larger respect for group approval — not just in the publishing industry, but across all of mass communication.

That shift goes hand in hand with the rise of the digital era. As it gets easier and easier for authors to reach wide audiences without the need for broadcast intermediaries (legacy publishers), and as it gets easier and easier for readers to find books by individual authors or on specific topics, the value and significance of the gatekeeper’s approval rapidly diminishes.

And that shift is exactly what Amazon has facilitated. Through their Kindle and Kindle Direct Publishing they’ve made it possible to produce books at an extraordinarily low cost. And through their browsing categories, widespread bestseller lists, and personalized recommendations, they’ve made it possible for readers to find book even without the huge promotional backing of a major publisher.

The result is precisely what we saw in Eisler’s anecdote above. His daughter, a member of the digital native generation, easily and immediately considered self-publishing a legitimate (and, in fact, obvious) direction for her father’s career.

There are still plenty of entrenched beliefs, but with every day that passes the reading public gets more access to the liberating digital tools provided by Amazon and their competitors in the e-Book industry, and the market for digital publishing grows larger and larger.

Sadly, the last true holdouts of the self-publishing credibility gap are those who have the most to gain with Kindle publishing: the authors. Come back tomorrow and we’ll talk about their role.

What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Allen Ginsberg

“Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don’t care who’s listening.”

–Allen Ginsberg

Submitting to Moodiness

Last night, I got in a quote-y mood. I’ve collected quotes for years, and lately I’ve been feeling the urge to revisit some of my favorite writings on writing. So, I sat down, pulled out the notebooks I’ve filled with quotes, and started tweeting my writing faves. (I’m @courtcan, if you don’t already follow me.)

As I perused and pondered and proclaimed, I came across the above from Ginsberg. Now, you should probably know that I’ve never actually read any of Ginsberg’s works. I don’t know where his quote originated; I just added it to my collection at some point.

But for my purposes, the source doesn’t really matter. What gets me is that even after reading that quote years ago and feeling its message resonate with me, I still haven’t put it into practice as intensely or as effectively as I want to.

Confessing the Muttdom

My cultural background is a bizarre mixture of American, German, and Amerigerman. Or maybe Germerican, I’m not sure. But to muddle things even further, I’ve also got a religious-cultural background that both transcends and is inextricably entwined with the Amerigermerican stuff. I’m telling you, the term “cultural mutt” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Anyway, I grew up in a religious culture that taught me to “hide the madness.” Admit that I have a dark side? Ha! I didn’t even acknowledge that to myself until I was in my late 20s. Revealing that darkness to others has been out of the question — with very few and quite hush-hush exceptions.

That darkness inside me…dare I call it simple humannness? Isn’t it nothing more than the gritty frailty within every human heart? If each of us were honest with ourselves, wouldn’t we admit that we all harbor a streak of that inner moonlight?

Don’t we all harbor a streak of madness?

Outing the Madness

We hide it away. I hide it away. I tuck it away someplace safe, where no one can see it or challenge me on it. With my moonlight madness veiled from prying eyes, I don’t have to explain it.

I don’t have to defend it.

I can keep on pretending that I’m better than human.

It’s funny — I’ve been thinking about these things a lot lately, long before I rediscovered the Ginsberg quote. I’ve been thinking these things in reference to blogging. Being genuine in blogging is difficult sometimes. It exposes me to criticism or even ridicule. It makes me vulnerable.

I struggle to write blog posts without worrying about who’s listening.

Following the Moonlight

I want to use Ginsberg’s words as a guide. I want to follow my inner moonlight and expose the madness and not care who sees or hears. If I hide the moonlight, I don’t connect with people. If I hide the moonlight, I communicate to my readers that they should be hiding their moonlight, too.

And if we’re all hiding the truth of our souls, then none of us are being genuine with each other.

When we hide, truth dies.

I want truth. I want the passion of self-revelation. I want every bit of the madness to shine forth as brilliant moonlight, so that others can see that it’s okay to be human.

I just want to be real.

And that’s WILAWriTWe.

On Kindle Publishing: Colors of Deception

In the midst of all this talk about the Kindle publishing explosion, I get to take a break to provide one more case study. She’s no Konrath or Eisler or Hocking (yet), but our own Courtney Cantrell has become a part of the phenomenon.

Or perhaps I should say we’ve made her a part of it. Consortium Books officially released her book today, April 12, 2011, although it’s been available on Amazon for most of a week now. If you haven’t already gotten a copy, go pick one up for 99 cents.

Publishing Colors of Deception has been quite the learning experience. Before that, I’d been playing the dual role of President of Consortium Books and published author for the last eight months, working two of my own books through from start to finish, but back in February we got to work on Courtney’s book, and for the first time I got to approach the process as just the publisher.

That gave me a new perspective, and an opportunity to see how much we’re doing right (and to fix a handful of things we’ve been doing wrong). Overall it was an incredibly encouraging experience.

Of course, it was made easier by the fact that Courtney has written a fabulous book with a striking setting, and that she brought her enthusiasm to every stage of the design process. She has carried it on since the final edits, too, promoting the book on Twitter and Facebook so effectively that she has, in a matter of days, achieved more sales of her book than either of mine has ever done in a given month.

Go Courtney!

And she didn’t stop there. She worked with our Director of Marketing, Joshua Unruh, to plan a book giveaway themed around her novel. Check it out:


In celebration of the publication of her first book, Colors of Deception, Courtney Cantrell is giving some copies away! Over the next two weeks, she’ll be collecting entries for a contest. Her two favorites will each win a free, signed paperback.

In Colors of Deception, cute college sophomore Holly Idaho discovers that a demon in stalking her. Over the course of the story, Holly realizes that this demon has a rabid and morbid fascination with the music of rock band INXS.

Why INXS? You’d have to ask the demon.

According to this demon’s favorite band, we all have “the devil inside.” But maybe this devil prefers a different kind of music?

Maybe you think a demon should prefer Country & Western. Or might demons just sing the Blues? Perhaps they go for the classics like Black Sabbath.

Maybe they’re insidious and love The Girl from Ipanema.

So here is Courtney’s challenge to you: In one hundred words or less, tell her what music you think demons listen to and why.

Be scary, be humorous, be ridiculous, or be whatever you want to be. Courtney’s two completely arbitrary favorite entries will each receive:

Courtney will probably post some other non-winning entries she thinks are clever as well.

Submit your entries here, in Courtney’s email form. The contest ends at midnight, Central Standard Time [UTC-06:00], April 26th. Thanks for playing — and happy writing!

On Kindle Publishing: Technology

Yesterday’s post introduced three major case studies in Kindle publishing. Each of them came from a different background, and each approached (or is now approaching) Kindle publishing for different reasons.

Measuring a Writer’s Success

The largest thing the three share in common is success. All three have reached a lot of new readers though Kindle publishing, and earned ridiculous amounts of money. So much money, in fact, that all three of them can now speak of it almost offhand.

And all three of them have taken the time, at different points, to discuss something else related to self-publishing: credibility. It’s inextricably tied to the Kindle publishing movement, and while all three authors insist credibility can be found in self-published writing (Hocking’s millions of readers and USA Times Bestseller status should certainly prove that), it’s an argument that must be made again and again.

Before we can fully investigate the new landscape of a writer’s credibility, we must first talk about the revolutionary changes that have gotten us here. And the heart of those changes is digital technology.

The Cost of Legacy Book Publishing

The credibility question raised by self-publishing is one rooted in an expensive technology: offset printing. Offset printing is an old technology that allows mass production of high-fidelity printed material. In large volumes (in the book industry, that means more than 10,000 copies at a run), offset printing provides professional quality productions at low costs.

The problem with offset printing is the setup cost. While the price-per-copy at 10,000 copies is extremely low (a matter of pennies for a 300-page paperback), a print run of just 100 copies could easily cost thousands of dollars.

When that was the only way to get books made, there was a huge financial burden in publishing a book. It was not just a matter of total expense, but of up-front costs that created a significant investment. The legacy publishing industry was built entirely on the evaluation of this investment, weighing each new submission as a risk assessment with the assumption that only the best books (or, at least, those most likely to earn out their investment) ever got made.

But as long as there have been gatekeepers labeling certain books as good, there have been desperate writers willing to do anything to gain that mark of approval. So, for years, the self-publishing industry was built largely, not on the profit potential of books in a competitive market, but on the amount of money authors were willing to pay out of their own vanity to see their books in print.

These “vanity presses” seemed to be dedicated wholly to the opposite notion of the legacy publishers’ — while the legacy publishers were only willing to risk money on good books, vanity presses could only reasonably expect to squeeze their high prices out of the worst writers.

Thus the high cost of offset printing created a sharp (and fairly legitimate) divide in credibility between books endorsed by legacy publishers and the books self-published through vanity presses.

Print-on-Demand and Digital Distribution

For most of that time there was also a cheaper alternative to offset printing. Print-on-demand publishing relied on cheaper laser or inkjet printers to produce books one at a time. This technology couldn’t compete with offset printing’s per-book prices for large print runs, but for small runs, print-on-demand techniques could produce just one copy at a time for a rate comparative to offset’s retail price.

The fault of print-on-demand technology was in its quality. While offset printing could produce huge numbers of near-identical, high-quality copies, laser and inkjet printers struggled to match that quality for even one copy, let alone maintain their fidelity across many runs.

Thus, again, print-on-demand created a wide divide in quality (and, therefore, credibility) between the offset legacy-published books and the cheaper print-on-demand products available to self-publishers. Again and again, the distinction in quality has been based on the up-front costs of publication — initial investments so expensive they could only be made by large corporations.

But the technology has improved dramatically in the last decade. Print-on-demand can now produce paperback books of comparable quality to offset printing for only a fraction more.

More importantly, a new market is emerging. As book-buyers gradually adopt e-readers as their preferred format for novels, the industry is rapidly shifting to one where the only cost of publishing a book is writing a book.

Like print-on-demand, digital distribution has made it easy for writers to publish their books at no initial cost, paying only a portion of each sale to the digital distributor. And, significantly, that portion is often far smaller than the portion a traditional publisher would keep for the same sale.

Creating Credibility

So today’s printing and distribution technologies eliminate the inherent quality and credibility gap between legacy publishing and self-publishing, but much of the stigma still remains. There is also still a common difference in quality, not in the technology used to produce self-published books, but in the know-how and professional resources used in their production.

The two most important examples of this are cover art and editing. A legacy publisher generally provides, as part of the publication process, multiple reviews of each manuscript by multiple professional editors (including content editors, line editors, copy editors, and fact-checkers).

This quality-control creates an obvious and easily-recognizable distinction in quality between a legacy-published book and a self-published book that moves directly from a writer to the reading public. Such raw, unedited manuscripts can be published easily (and inexpensively) through Kindle publishing, and their existence creates a credibility problem for self-published manuscripts.

Likewise, the book covers produced by legacy publishers are generally the work of a team of professionals dedicated to that task — painters, photographers, graphic designers, and marketing specialists skilled in crafting a cover that will not only capture a reader’s eye but also effectively convey the book’s mood, style, and target audience.

But even more than high-tech inkjet printers and dedicated e-reading devices, the internet has been the great leveler. The very services that most set apart legacy-published books from self-published books are services that can be hired by self-published authors for a small one-time fee (Konrath says “a few hundred dollars”). Freelance editors and cover designers can be found with very little effort, bridging the last quality gap between legacy-published and self-published books.

Beyond that…there is still some difference in credibility between the two methods. It’s not one of real value, but of perceived value, and it exists far more prominently in the minds of authors than anywhere else. Still, the perceived credibility of self-published books among publishers, among writers, and among readers are all shifting along with this change in technology.

Come back next week and we’ll discuss the current understanding of credibility within the industry, the factors that contribute to it, and how authors can best manage their self-made brands.

On Kindle Publishing: Konrath, Hocking, and Eisler

I started the week with a brief introduction to a long series on Kindle publishing. I finished that introduction with the promise of some case studies.

If you’re at all familiar with Kindle publishing or the indie publishing “scene” that’s developing even as we speak, you probably could have guessed at least two of the three names that would show up in that discussion. Let’s start with the most obvious.

J. A. Konrath

J. A. Konrath, also known as Jack Kilborn, is the biggest poster-child for the Kindle publishing movement. The story goes that he was a mid-list horror/thriller writer with a multi-book contract with Hyperion when his imprint went under. That quickly, Konrath found himself back in the “query-go-round.”

He had an agent but no publisher, and as Konrath began shopping his novel to other publishers he faced much the same barrier to entry that so many unknown writers have to battle. Wherever he finally did find interest from a publisher, his editor insisted on major changes to the manuscript that Konrath felt would compromise the story he wanted to tell.

So he walked away. He walked away from the offer of a multi-book contract with a handsome advance, deciding to take advantage of the digital revolution and publish his own books. He started small, producing and selling his own PDF e-books through his personal website, but eventually stumbled across Kindle Direct Publishing and began releasing his books directly to Amazon.

Konrath was a success. He was a phenomenal success, and he continues to see growth in his sales, but much of Konrath’s importance has been his transparency. Konrath maintains a popular blog called “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing” at jakonrath.blogspot.com, and as soon as he committed to self-publishing, he started talking about it.

As early as 2009 Konrath was encouraging other writers to consider self-publishing on the Kindle. And as often as he recommended it, he backed up the discussion with numbers. He shared his monthly sales numbers, and the distribution across different platforms. He openly compared the success of his self-published titles to those of his handful of traditionally-published books.

For several years, Konrath was widely dismissed — usually as an anomaly. Critics suggested he’d only found the success he had because of his background in traditional publishing. Others said he only sold so many book because of the popularity of his blog, built on his outspoken criticism of the traditional publishing industry.

Konrath responded in 2010 with several blog posts rounding up and presenting other indie authors finding similar success on the Kindle platform. Month after month he dug up examples of authors with no traditional publishing cred and no major internet presence who were competing with him and other big name authors in terms of sales and income.

He started out with simple lists of names, paired up with Amazon sales ranks. Sometimes these posts included simple charts showing the distribution of indie-published books in various Amazon Top 100 lists, compared with Big 6 titles.

These posts built a pretty compelling case that Konrath was more than an anomaly. A trailblazer, perhaps, but hardly an outlier. And as the year wore on, he moved from long lists to detailed spotlights on other successful authors, often bringing them in to guest post with their own story of self-publishing success.

Amanda Hocking

One of the most impressive of these spotlights was on an indie writer named Amanda Hocking. While Konrath arbitrarily set his criterion for a “successful” self-published author at “thousands of sales a month” (Konrath himself was averaging around 4,000 sales a month across all his self-published titles at the time), Amanda Hocking started as a total unknown and, within less than a year, rose to eclipse Konrath completely.

He spotlighted Amanda Hocking on his blog in December 2010. At the time, she was selling an average of 10,000 books a week. He said of her,

She has no name-recognition. If you look at her blog, she only has a few comments per post. She has no traditional publishing background, either.

Compare that to me, who has some name recognition, and a prior platform in the print world. I’ve been doing this longer than she has by years, have a large installed fanbase, have a blog that gets a million hits a year, and it’s tough to find a discussion about self-pubbing or Kindle that doesn’t mention me.

Yet Amanda is creaming me in sales.

Her story went on to gain some mainstream attention in early 2011, and by then the stories were about her selling 100,000 copies in January and February. It made the news when she bought a house for cash with her self-published earnings.

And then in March she made news again when she began entertaining offers for a traditional publishing contract. She eventually agreed to a three-book deal including an advance well over two million dollars.

She made a blog post announcing the successful conclusion of that rights auction, and explaining the thinking that led her back to a traditional publisher, but the clearest explanation came in a post she published mid-auction:

But here’s what I can say – I’m writer. I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling emails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full time corporation…. I am spending so much time on things that are not writing.

That explanation not only reveals the appeal of traditional publishing, it also shows how a self-published success story is built.

Barry Eisler

And even as Amanda Hocking was announcing her happy entry into the world of superstar traditionally-published authors, another “brand name” author was announcing his exit. Thriller author Barry Eisler famously turned down a $500,000 two-book deal from traditional publishers to seek his own fortune with self-publishing.

Eisler made this big announcement in a 13,000-word interview with Konrath that was published on Konrath’s blog. When Konrath commented on the significance of Eisler’s decision, Eisler told a little story.

Here’s something that happened about a year ago. Anecdotal, but still telling, I think. My wife and daughter and I were sitting around the dinner table, talking about what kind of contract I would do next, and with what publisher. And my then eleven-year-old daughter said, “Daddy, why don’t you just self-publish?”

And I thought, wow, no one would have said something like that even a year ago. I mean, it used to be that self-publishing was what you did if you couldn’t get a traditional deal. And if you were really, really lucky, maybe the self-published route would lead to a real contract with a real publisher.

But I realized from that one innocent comment from my daughter that the new generation was looking at self-publishing differently. And that the question–“Should I self-publish?”–was going to be asked by more and more authors going forward. And that, over time, more and more of them were going to be answering the question, “Yes.”

This is exactly what’s happening now. I’m not the first example, though I might be a noteworthy one because of the numbers I’m walking away from. But there will be others, more and more of them.

He went on there, and on his own blog, to discuss this decision openly and with lots of hard numbers. In the end, he said, the decision was a purely financial one, and he was convinced that he could make a lot more selling the books on his own than he could selling them through a traditional publisher.

Many of the calculations and reasoning he used would be familiar to any Konrath fan, because Eisler was leaning heavily on Konrath’s logic. In fact, Eisler (a friend of Konrath’s) admitted that even though Konrath has been pushing him, he was a long-time holdout on the self-publishing game.

But the core of Konrath’s argument hinged on some pretty simple and straightforward factors: the time value of money, the disinterest and decline of the publishing industry, and the brand power of individual authors. When Barry Eisler weighed those issues, his ultimate decision was to self-publish.

The desire to self-publish — to shed the burden of publishers’ timetables and marketing departments’ meddling and, at the same time, to keep a larger portion of the profits — is not a new desire. The difference today technology. It’s the resources available to writers that now tilt those three factors listed away from legacy publishers and toward self- and indie-publishers.

We’ll talk about the technology of Kindle publishing in tomorrow’s article, and exactly how it’s so disrupted the established publishing industry.

What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Painting

Tattoo Dragon by Courtney Cantrell (not for Taming Fire)

I know I’ve mentioned this here a few times before, but in case you’re not yet in the know: I oil paint.

My first foray into painting took place in high school, and it involved a less than stellar application of watercolors to paper. (Less than stellar in my opinion, anyway. My teacher seemed oddly pleased with the results.) I didn’t plunge into oils until my last year of college.

I fell in love and haven’t looked back since. I now have close to 100 original oil paintings to my name.

Commissioned Cover Artist? Really

When Aaron first approached me about painting the cover for his fantasy novel Taming Fire, I was skeptical. “I paint for fun,” I explained. “I’ve never undertaken a painting project so ambitious. I’ve never painted something that could be critical to someone else’s financial success.”

Aaron looked me square in the face and replied, “But you’re good. And I think you can do this.”

My dear inklings, if you hadn’t already figured it out, I’ll say it on-record now: I’m a sucker for a compliment on my creativity.

And that’s how I became a commissioned cover artist.

That was about 8 months ago. I finally started painting last December. (You do the math.)

Cloudy Complications

I got as far as the basic black background — and then I got sick and stayed sick for the better part of 10 weeks. I had neither the frame of mind nor the energy with which to paint. The blackened canvas sat and dried and sat and dried, while I tried to recover from the various maladies that had decided to plague me most inconveniently.

As soon as I got back on my feet, it was time to delve into the publishing process of my own Colors of Deception. There were final edits and drafts of back cover copy. There was a major photoshoot and a pickup truck full of dead trees (don’t ask). I was organizing and cooridinating, and the right side of my brain — where I prefer to live — fled the horrors of structure and went into hiding.

Aaron, gracious soul that he is, didn’t nag me. He didn’t push or threaten me with a cattle prod. He wisely waited until a sort of calm had reestablished itself in my life…and then he asked gently, “What about my cover art?”

Okay, right-side-of-brain. Time to emerge from your hiding place and get cracking.

Last week, I painted clouds. And a moon behind the clouds. And moonlight shining on clouds. And a rainstorm on the horizon.

I think it’s been about 4 years since I last painted clouds. I put brush to canvas, dabbed a little, smudged a little — and bolted to my computer to seek out an online tutorial on cloud-painting.

An hour later, I thought, “This isn’t working. This is impossible. I can’t be frantically searching the Internet for every new element of this painting!”

But I felt as though I’d un-learned all of my technique accumulated over the course of 12 years.

I’ve painted in the last year! What the heck was wrong with me???

Clarity

I didn’t figure out the answer to that question until last night. Around 22:00 (that’s 10:00 p.m. for you non-Europeans 😉 ), I settled in for some cover art painting. I referenced a few pics I’d found online, took a deep breath, and started painting the dragon.

Oh yes. There’s a dragon. Had I not mentioned this? ; )

After a few false starts, I felt my body relaxing into the rhythm of my work. More importantly, I felt my mind relaxing into it. At one point, I leaned back to glance at the clock.

More than an hour had passed, and I hadn’t even noticed. Even better, my night sky now contained the outline of a swooping, wings-spreading, tail-lashing, neck-sinuousing* dragon.

“Huh,” thought I. “I guess this is going to work out after all.”

And that’s when it hit me: The only problem had been me. Ever since Aaron first asked me to paint his cover art, the only obstacle in my path was me. I was standing in my own way — and though Aaron and others tried to reassure me that yes, indeed, I had nothing to fear, I wouldn’t be able to rise above that fear until I recognized that I was the only true hurdle.

Is this still an intimidating project of unusual magnitude? Sure. Does it still make me nervous? You bet. But last night, as I applied blue-black paint to the long curve of the dragon’s neck, I realized that in spite of feeling nervous and intimidated, I wasn’t afraid anymore. I wasn’t subject to fear anymore.

I could trust myself.

Conclusion

Now. Take everything I’ve said here about paint and painting and canvas — and replace it with words and stories and writing. How often do we writers stand in our own way? How often do we look at our habits, our preferences, our conveniences — ourselves — and let it all overwhelm us into shoving a story idea aside and not doing anything with it?

How often do we let our fears keep us from writing what we’re really meant to write?

All the time.

My conclusion is this: Writer, trust yourself. Trust the part of you that was inspired with that story idea in the first place. You envisioned it — that means you have everything you need in order to write it. Muses don’t give us ideas we can’t do anything with.

Get out of your own way. Trust your inspiration, and trust yourself. There is nothing to fear. There be no dragons here.

Except for the ones you dream up yourself.

And that’s WILAWriTWe.

*From Courtney’s Rules for Living: Verbify anything.

On Kindle Publishing: Readings in Mass Communication

In January of 2011, I started taking a class called “Readings in Mass Communication” in pursuit of my Master of Professional Writing degree at the University of Oklahoma. It’s an interdisciplinary theory course that combines lectures and select readings in the academic literature to explore the changing role of mass communication in society, its withering credibility, and the role of today’s rapidly-changing technology in that shift.

The professor came from a newspaper background and the majority of the students in the program owed their allegiance to the college’s journalism school. That frame of reference shaped the conversation some, so when we talked about the credibility crisis in mass communication, we were primarily discussing the credibility crisis of journalists and public relations professionals and news shows.

As the discussion unfolded, though, I came to recognize clear parallels between the changing state of news media and the publishing industry. The technology developed in the last decade has allowed a massive upheaval in the established ways of doing business, the importance of centralized distributors is collapsing, and the most successful participants in the new market have established themselves not through the authority of a central source but by participating effectively in the digital supernetwork and encouraging discussion of them and their products within local networks.

And nowhere is that industry shift more visible than in the rise of the Kindle publisher. I’ve discussed Kindle publishing here before, and while it represents just one of many new (and viable) distribution methods available to the self-published or indie-published author, digital publishing through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing provides a clear and powerful look into the future of the publishing industry.

Over the following weeks I’ll look at several examples of major participants in the Kindle publishing phenomenon, then discuss how new technology has impacted each of their stories, what their stories reveal about the credibility and authority of traditional publishers (and how that differs among writers, readers, and distributors), and finally look at the role of the supernetwork as the new medium for mass communication, and how Kindle publishers can best engage with it.

It should be an interesting conversation. I’m looking forward to the things I’ll have to research to fill it out, and I really like the idea of having a complete take on the topic down on paper.

I’d originally intended to address the topic of copyright pretty heavily in the discussion, too, but my preliminary research into that topic revealed a lot of legal opinion and a lot of personal opinion, and virtually nothing in between. I think an investigation of the process of Kindle publishing, rather than the legal incentives and risks behind it, will reveal far more about the topics we really want to discuss.

So come back Thursday and we’ll talk about J. A. Konrath (you knew that was coming), and a couple others.

On Writing Technique: Building Characters through Sequel

In yesterday’s article I introduced the concept of sequels in classical scene structure. They act as a kind of transition, a moment of reflection, and (as I said at the end) they provide your protagonist with a critical opportunity to shine.

I described the sequel as a progression:

It starts with an emotional reaction to catastrophe, moves through a thoughtful processing of the new dilemma, and leads to a decision as to how the protagonist will forge ahead.

Each of those three elements is a valuable opportunity to build your characters.

Heart

The first reaction to any catastrophe is an emotional one, but which emotion says a lot about your character. His girlfriend walked out on him, or she just watched her best friend get turned into a vampire, or his mother just got shot by hunters.

How does your protagonist react? Shock? Outrage? Fear, frustration, or fury? The immediate, base emotions that rise up in response to a specific setback (as well as the cumulative impression built through emotional responses to an ongoing, escalating series of setbacks) shines a huge spotlight on who your character is.

Mind

After the protagonist’s immediate emotional response, he should move into considered reflection. He should review what happened and try to understand it and place it in context. Part of that is a service for the readers — helping them understand the complicated story you’re telling them — but while you’re at it you’re showing your character.

What does he pick up on? What does he overlook (again and again)? Which connections seem important to him? What are his biases and blind spots?

Those are all tools you’re used to seeing in stories, so they’re all tools you’re already using in your own. But if you use them consciously, if you take a moment to think about it, you’ll see how much those questions really say about who your character is.

It also helps explain his motivation and action. If you show your readers a scene, and then you show them in the sequel how your protagonist understood that scene (which won’t necessarily match how your readers understood it), it’ll be easier for them to understand why he reacts to that scene the way he does.

Body

And that’s the final piece of the sequel: action. Based on his emotional response and his intellectual review of the situation, the protagonist is going to make a decision. He’s going to figure out what to do next, and then he’s going to do it.

That’s the moment where your protagonist becomes a hero. That’s the moment where he becomes active instead of reactive. Yes, something just hammered him down, but instead of running from it he’s going to figure out a way to fix the problem, and he’s going to put it in action.

Of course it won’t go well. That’s the next scene. Unless it’s the last one in the book, he’ll go (all active) to put his new plan in action, and then an antagonist will show up to oppose him. A catastrophe will bat him back down. That’s what scenes are for.

But in the sequel that hasn’t happened yet. During the sequel, during the planning and first steps of execution — right up until the moment when the antagonist starts the next scene’s conflict — you get to show your hero acting. You get to show him in fine form. He’s not crying in the gutter, he’s bringing the war to the enemy’s door.

And, yes, it hurts to do that to our characters. It hurts to knock them down again and again and again. That’s what stories are for, though. They’re a chance to show how your character responds to adversity. It’s a chance to show “true character” (as Professor Chester would say), by putting your character through the purifying fire of setback after setback after setback.

A hero isn’t somebody with a lot of power. A hero isn’t somebody who has it easy. A hero is someone who keeps going, through it all, and sees the story through to its gritty end.

On Writing Technique: Scene and Sequel

Last week I told you all about classical scene structure for novels. The core of it is that the scenes driving your story should always be tightly focused on a direct conflict between two characters, and the scene should end in catastrophe for the protagonist.

One More Word on Catastrophe

Now…there is a great range of things that can be called “catastrophes,” and your story’s genre, your own style, and the desired tone of the book can all determine just how grave the catastrophes really are. If you’re writing a cute little story about deers and bunnies, you don’t have to end a scene with the protagonist’s mother dying tragically.

Then again, Disney made it work.

Whatever your catastrophe is, relative to the protagonist’s story goal it needs to represent a significant setback. In fact, the catastrophe should be as significant as you want the scene to be. And they should get progressively bigger and bigger as the story goes along.

That doesn’t mean things have to get crazy-out-of-control by the end of your novel. It means you’ve got to pace yourself and plan ahead. It requires a delicate balance, but managing these things is exactly how we build gripping stories that drag the reader from start to end and deprive them of much-needed sleep.

A good scene drives the reader through it, without leaving a moment to breathe, plunging straight toward the catastrophe. And then the catastrophe should generate enough concern to keep them reading to the next scene. It’s fiendishly clever.

Filling in the Gaps

So! I’ve talked a lot about scenes now. I just mentioned the need to hook readers until the next scene. And if you read last week’s articles, you know that a scene is a very specific, rigorously-defined thing. The scenes make up the most interesting portion of your story, but they can’t be all of it.

So what’s left? There are actually a couple designations Deborah Chester uses, but by and large the most common of them is the “sequel.” In classical scene structure, a sequel is a moment of reflection following a fast-paced scene.

During a scene, there is no backstory, no explanation, no exposition at all. Everything is action and reaction — stimulus and response — and every word of a scene is tightly focused on the conflict in question. That gives a scene much of its power, but you can’t tell a whole story that way.

So we use the sequel as a chance to go back over the ground we just covered, filling in the missing pieces. Our protagonist pounds a fist on her hip and asks herself, “How could I be so stupid? I’ve known for years that the Knights of St. Newton never use indigo-colored laser blasts!”

(Actually, that didn’t turn out to be a good example at all, but I cherish the concept so much that I refuse to cut it out. Let’s forge on!)

Post-Traumatic Stress

During the sequel, the protagonist reflects on the things that happened during the scene, providing necessary context or explanation. He might tie the scene question into the larger story question, figure out some key element he’d overlooked during the heat of the conflict, or just provide a slow-motion recap of what actually just went down.

And during this moment of reflection, one of the main things the protagonist is going to think about is the catastrophe. That’s the nature of catastrophes. It makes for easy writing, and it’s usually a compelling read, too. We learn a lot about a character by how he reacts to adversity, and scene-ending catastrophes are excellent sources of adversity.

So the protagonist needs to review the overarching story goal, and figure out how this setback plays into his plans. He needs to recalibrate, and pick a new path. That’s the natural evolution of a sequel — it starts with an emotional reaction to catastrophe, moves through a thoughtful processing of the new dilemma, and leads to a decision as to how the protagonist will forge ahead.

And that part is critical. We want our protagonists to be active heroes, not reactive wimps. The first time I heard this noise about every scene ending in catastrophe, I thought, “If you do that, how can you avoid having a protagonist in a constant state of battered post-traumatic stress, reacting (at best) or driven to a standstill (at worst).”

The answer is in a well-made sequel. If you manage it right, the scenes make your story while the sequels make your characters. I’ll talk more about that tomorrow.