A Pleasant Thought
I’ve been battering my head against a couple of bits of fiction I’m writing at the moment, for places other than this blog. Or, should I say, that I’m not writing, even though one of the deadlines is tomorrow. But I’m prevaricating *very hard* on both of them. (Don’t worry, people who asked for them, if you’re reading this. I don’t miss deadlines.)
One of the problems I have with writing fiction is my prose style. I don’t like it. It does the job, but is very Asimovian. My words never sing, there’s no real beauty to them.
This is not, incidentally, a way of persuading other people to tell me “Oh, your prose style is lovely!”. Even had I the turn of phrase of a Wodehouse combined with the clarity of an Orwell, I’m talking about my own reactions to my writing here. And I can see the joins. I’m a reasonably facile imitator of other people’s styles (which is why so much of my fiction is written in the voice of others — first-person narrative is much easier for me than third person, because I can use someone else’s voice) but I have no good style of my own.
And this has been holding me back, because I’ve been thinking “I’m in my 30s now. I’m probably stuck with the style I’ve got. I’ll not get much better.”
But yesterday, the new collection of Terry Pratchett’s short fiction — A Blink Of The Screen — arrived. Now this is, in many ways, a sad event. It’s the sort of collection of ephemera that would normally be published posthumously — it’s very like Douglas Adams’ The Salmon Of Doubt, for example — but given that Pratchett knows he’s living with a terminal illness, it’s come out more prehumously, as a tidying-up of loose ends. (Although it’s important to note that, as Granny Weatherwax would put it, he aten’t dead. This is his fourth book this year, and he’s writing more.)
So it’s a collection of all his post-fame short fiction (much of it very good), along with selections from his pre-fame work.
And the pre-fame work has *exactly* the same problems that my own prose does. From reading this, and from his early novels, it becomes apparent that Pratchett didn’t actually find his voice until he was about 37 or so — even though he was a working, professional, writer from the age of 18 (working as a journalist and press officer). Pratchett’s work from the ages of about twenty-eight to about thirty-five reads *very* like my own work. If anything mine’s slightly better. There’s the same rushed nature, as if he’s desperate to get to the ending, even if the ending isn’t very good. There’s the same sense of reading a couple of good sentences that suddenly land with a thud in a leaden cliche. There’s the same sense of someone who’s read a lot of good writing, and can recognise it, but can’t quite do it yet.
Now, I certainly wouldn’t hold Pratchett up as an example of Great Literature, but the man can *definitely* write now. But his ‘juvenilia’ lasted well into his thirties, while most of the writers I like had their style fully-formed from their early twenties.
So I think maybe there’s hope for me yet. I think I’ll get back to that story now…
One big rule if you’re writing about politics
There are people supporting every party and none who can make convincing arguments for a point of view, and who it’s worth reading whether you agree with them or not. But I find they are increasingly outnumbered by people who it’s simply not worth reading.
And there is a simple way of telling who they are — they use canned phrases that seem to come from some political party’s central office.
Mostly these seem to come from Labour supporters at the moment (possibly because Labour are the most popular party, possibly because my social circle skews leftwards). Some of these phrases sound reasonable, others definitely don’t, but they include “Conservative-led government”, “savage cuts”, “our NHS”, “most right-wing government in [insert time period]“, “ConDems”. The problem is when those phrases get used by everyone simultaneously.
It’s certainly not confined solely to Labour, though — “Tony Bliar”, “ZaNuLieBore”, “cleaning up Labour’s mess”, “Red Ed, the unions’ man”… these all have the same effect.
If you’re using these insta-cliches, which tend to spread through political twitterers and bloggers like herpes, then to anyone who is unaligned, or does not share your particular alignment, or even who agrees with you but has an aesthetic sense about the use of words, your post will actually be saying to that person “I have not actually thought about this issue myself, rather I have read a press release from the party of my choice, please ignore me.”
If I read someone saying “We must protect our NHS from the effects of the savage cuts brought in by this Conservative-led government, cuts which are too deep and too fast”, then I know that they haven’t actually thought about the issue themselves and there’s no point reading what they have to say.
If, on the other hand, I read someone saying “We need to protect *the* NHS from government cuts, which I think are far deeper than necessary”, I think “this is a person with whom I could have a discussion, and find out which cuts she thinks are most damaging and what we could do about them. It may turn out that she’s wrong, but it may not.”
Likewise, someone saying “The government need to do this because they’re cleaning up ZaNuLieBore’s mess!” gets instantly disregarded. Someone saying “Realistically, if we want the economy to recover, then some things need to be cut, and while it’s bad, better to cut this than let the recession continue” is, again, someone with whom discussion is possible. They may well be someone I disagree with, but I will at least be disagreeing with *her*, not with a press release she glanced at.
Each of these phrases sound focus-group-chosen to be convincing on an emotional level. “OUR NHS” sounds much more important than “THE NHS”, doesn’t it? But after hearing them a thousand times, they’re not. They’re manipulative, and to me at least they have an actively scary, creepy feel to them, like being surrounded by beings that have been mind-controlled by aliens.
But luckily, there’s a very simple rule you can follow, which will allow you to write convincingly and without people looking at you in the expectation that your faceplate will fall off to reveal the robot underneath. It’s this:
Think about what it is you want to say, and what words you can use to say that as clearly as possible.
It’s a simple rule, but one that’s rarely followed by bloggers and twitterers (and, reading through Orwell’s essays, it appears never to have been followed by pamphleteers).
If you’ve thought about something, and you have a clear idea of what it is you want to say, and you have chosen the words you think will best express your thoughts — chosen them yourself, not picked phrases that have been handed to you by a third party — then people will, when they read your writing, say “That’s a good point” or “I never thought of that”, or “You’re wrong, here’s why…” — all of which are useful reactions if you’re wanting to convince people of something.
If, on the other hand, you string a bunch of stock phrases together, you may well get five hundred retweets from people who already agree with you, but you’ll never change a single mind, except to possibly make some people who did agree with you before disagree with you in disgust.
(Doctor Who post will be up tonight, nearly a week late…)
Howto: Create a Manuscript in ‘Standard Manuscript Format’ in LyX
I’m currently in the process of submitting stories to various paying markets, and most of the big SF magazines, while they take email submissions, still want the files to *look* like they came out of a mechanical typewriter ca. 1970 – monospaced font, double-spacing and all.
This is a bit of a pain to do, and Google isn’t much help – if you Google Standard Manuscript Format LyX, what you get is people asking how to do it, and other people ‘helpfully’ responding “you don’t want to do that, LyX’s default is much prettier than that”.
But I’ve eventually found how to do this with a lot of Google-fu, and it turns out there is a simple template for LyX to do this. You will need the SFFMS LaTeX package, which should have installed with your LaTeX distribution, but if you want to check then it’s part of the package texlive-latex-extra in Debian-based GNU/Linux distros (other OSes may vary).
All you need to do then is to visit https://github.com/kcyarn/sffms-LyX-Layouts and download the two files sffms_novel.layout and sffms_short.layout. Copy them to the directory in which LyX stores its layout files (on Debianesque Gnu/Linux distros this will be /usr/share/lyx/layouts , but you can see it in Tools-Preferences-Paths in your copy of LyX).
Then in LyX go to Tools-Reconfigure, and restart LyX once this has finished. Now when you start a new document, go to Document-Settings and in the Document Class dropdown choose either SFFMS (Short Story) or SFFMS (Novel).
Kinks post later tonight or tomorrow morning.
Nobody Is Stealing Your Book!
I’ve been unwell since finishing work yesterday, so I’ve not got anything prepared for the blog today (I still haven’t replied to most of the emails I’ve had since Tuesday for that matter). Since I’m going to be away at Thought Bubble over the weekend, I’ll just post this, about two related but opposite things I see self-publishers doing over and over again.
The first, and most bemusing, is going to ridiculous efforts to lose money. $3 to $5 is a reasonable price for a full-length ebook, most readers are agreed. Certainly Amazon are trying to encourage that price – $3-$10 is the price range they want, and you get the highest royalties at that price.
But a few people noticed that they could sell more books at 99 cents, and that by doing so they’d sell enough more that they could make the difference up. And that worked for a few people. But now everyone’s doing that, except those like myself who’ve realised it no longer works. I can sell a hundred copies of a book at $5 and make $350, or two hundred copies at 99 cents, and make $70. The maths isn’t hard.
So now people have noticed that selling their books for 99 cents doesn’t work, they’re trying to force Amazon to give them away. Amazon have a minimum price of 99 cents, but Smashwords (who distribute to Barnes & Noble, iBooks and so on) don’t, so people will put their books on both, set the price on Smashwords to free, then report a lower price on Amazon, who have a price-match policy.
The idea is supposed to be that you can gain additional publicity from this, and thus stand out from the crowd and sell copies of all your other books. That’s standing out from the crowd of other people doing this, and selling copies of all your other books to people who think even 99 cents is too much to pay for a novel. There may be a flaw in this argument. And those of us who know the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ can expect people to be paying readers to get their books within a year, for ‘exposure’.
Weirdly, some of these people are also the prime advocates for DRM. Now, I’ve already explained why Digital Restrictions Management is a horrendously bad idea. Without even getting into its immorality, or the impossibility of what it’s attempting (seriously, every DRM scheme by its nature amounts to giving someone a locked padlock, a key, and a note saying ‘do not put key in padlock on pain of prosecution’), DRM makes it more difficult for readers to pay for your work than to ‘pirate’ it.
It is impossible to compete with ‘free’ on price, so we have to compete on ease of use.
But a lot of self-publishers are absolutely terrified, beyond all reason, of ‘piracy’, of plagiarism, and of some filmmaker stealing their idea and making a billion dollars without giving them any.
Now, there is, of course, no evidence that ‘piracy’ has any negative effect on sales at all, and some anecdotal evidence that it increases sales. For example, I heard good things about the SF writer Greg Egan, so I torrented one of his books, Permutation City to try it (I would have borrowed from the library, but I have a habit of losing library books and getting massive fines). That was in April. As a result of that, I’ve bought Egan’s books Permutation City, Quarantine, Schild’s Ladder, Axiomatic, Oceanic and Luminous in paperback and Incandescence, Zendegi and The Clockwork Robot as ebooks. (I since discovered that Mr Egan has a lot of free stories available on his website. I would have tried those instead rather than torrenting had I known about them).
But assume I’m wrong. Assume ‘piracy’ matters. Assume every copy on a torrent site is a lost sale, pure and simple. Are your books going to be ‘pirated’?
I had a quick look at the top twelve Kindle bestsellers (as of 11:33 PM on the 17th November) on Amazon’s US site (where the vast majority of sales come from). I searched for each on two top torrent sites. I won’t link those sites here, but one ends in ‘bay’ while the other ends in ‘noid’.
The Journey Home by Michael Baron
Search terms – Baron The Journey Home
Results on site 1 – nothing
Results on site 2 – 28 hits, including Star Wars comics, DangerMouse cartoons and a documentary series by Jonathan Miller on atheism. The book doesn’t show up.
Rescue Me (a quirky romance novel about secrets, forgiveness and falling in love) by Sydney Allan
Search terms – Allan rescue me
Results on site 1 – nothing
Results on site 2 – 16 results, including a 1917 Douglas Fairbank silent film, a collection of albums by jazz-fusion musician Allan Holdsworth and a collection of 882 NES games. The book doesn’t show up.
Best Friends by Consuelo Saah Baehr
Search terms – Best Friends Baehr
Results on site 1 – No results
Results on site 2 – One result, the jazz album Moment To Moment by Roy Hargrove
Last Breath by Michael Prescott
Search terms – Last Breath Prescott
Results on site 1 – No results
Results on site 2 – One result, a collection of books by someone called Lisa Marie Price
Ghost in the Polka Dot Bikini (A Ghost of Granny Apples Mystery) by Sue Ann Jaffarian
Search terms – Jaffarian Polka
Results on site 1 – No results
Results on site 2 – A hit! A palpable hit! – one result, a torrent containing this book and the other book in this series.
Double Exposure by Michael Lister
Search terms – Lister Double Exposure
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – nothing
The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse by Dan B. Allender Ph.D. and Dan B Allender
Search terms – Allender Wounded
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – nothing
The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan
Search terms – Mill River Darcie
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – Another hit – several copies of the same torrent, containing this and other bestsellers.
Come Back To Me by Melissa Foster
Search terms – Foster Come Back
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – one hit, a solo album by the former lead singer of Hootie And The Blowfish
Flat-Out Love by Jessica Park
Search terms – Flat-out Park
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – Another hit, a torrent of this book.
How to Be a Writer: Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice and Play by Barbara Baig
Search terms – Baig writer
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – nothing
WIRED by Douglas E. Richards
Search terms – Wired Richards
Results from site one – nothing
Results from site two – another hit – actially in the same torrent as Mill River Recluse
Just for fun, I also searched for myself, to see if any of my books showed up. On site one, nothing showed up, and on site two I saw the DVDs of the three Transformers films, and a copy of The Name Of The Rose in Italian.
So, of the twelve biggest selling books on Kindle, each of which must be selling hundreds of thousands of copies, only four of them are even available at all – so if you make it to the very, very top of the best-seller list, you still only have a one in three chance of having anyone bother to torrent your work.
There are currently 887,909 books in the Kindle store. If the books at the top aren’t being torrented, what do you think – really – that the chance is of your book, when it enters at 887,910, being pounced on?
As far as I can tell, the most sensible strategy is the one I follow:
Make at least some of your work available for free, like I do through this blog, so anyone who wants a taster can have it.
Make it as convenient as possible to buy your books in whatever format people want. Have them available as paperback, ePub, Kindle, PDF… as smoke signals if someone wants that.
Don’t give anyone a reason *not* to buy. DRM is a reason not to buy.
Sell for a reasonable price. Ideally you want to sell for a price where every sale will net you a noticeable amount of money, but not enough to put anyone off. I go for $5 for electronic copies (except short stories, which are 99 cents). The paper copies have to be more expensive because they cost much more to produce, but I get the same money (or less) from them.
Put the book out and tell people about it. And by ‘tell people’ I mean ‘tell people who are interested in your writing and/or the subject matter’, not ‘spam forums whose only readers are other self-publishers and then complain that you’ve got no sales’.
Then write the next one, and don’t worry about who’s doing what with the last one. If it’s good, people will pay for it if you charge fairly. If it’s not, people won’t even take it if you give it away.
Caveat – I’m not a full-time writer, so I’m obviously not *that* successful. But I *am* doing well enough that my income from writing makes up a significant percentage of my income.
I’d be interested, therefore, if anyone had any better strategies, or any refinements on the above.
Some Tips For Self-Publishers
Having self-published four ‘real’ books, plus a small ebook of short stories, I’ve figured out quite a few things that I think would be very helpful to any aspiring writers, so thought I’d share them with you all.
Use LyX to write your book in. It has the least user-unfriendly interface of any word processor I know of, and produces beautiful typesetting in a variety of formats. The book Self-Publishing With LyX will give you a few tips. Output your book as a PDF – this can be used directly to typeset the printed version – and as an RTF file, which can be edited in LibreOffice, OpenOffice or similar to produce the text for your ebook versions.
If you have an index, don’t do it until *after* you have produced an RTF or .doc version for ebooks. LyX has a wonderful indexing system, but it leaves formatting marks in your RTF output, which will cause problems for ebook versions.
Serialise your book on your blog. This will build a readership – and you can later link every post to the released book. Don’t worry about people reading it for free who would otherwise pay – blogs and books are such different media that people *will* pay for a book version of blog posts they’re interested in. What I tend to do is add an introduction, extra footnotes, an index and so on to the book, so it still gives purchasers a reason to buy. I also revise everything before publication – and here the eyes you’ve got from your blog posts are invaluable, because people will have noticed the most obvious mistakes before you put them in print.
That said, before you publish your book, get at least four other people to read it over – ideally have two or three of them be people who know something about the subject/genre in question, but also have one or two be people who know as little as possible about the subject, but who are proficient in some other area (especially important is to get at least one person who is able to spot your spelling and grammatical errors – which you *will* have). I learned this after my first book, when two separate people (Plok and Mike Taylor) said “It’s a good book, but…” then made the same suggestion, which would have improved it.
Use Lulu for print versions. Yes, I know not many people buy print versions of books online, but some do, and you want every sale you can get. Make your book available as paperback and hardback, as well as PDF. Hardbacks won’t sell very much, but there will be *some* people who want them – some will even buy both versions of the book, to have one as a reading copy and one for their collection.
Do not, however, make your books available as ePubs from lulu. Lulu use an insanely complex auto-checking system that falsely marks many valid ePubs as being badly formatted – I suspect so they can sell you their ePub formatting service. Don’t fall for it.
For ebook publishing, the single most important thing you can do is to get on the Kindle. You can upload an RTF document at kdp.amazon.com. Don’t put DRM on your book. All it does is annoy customers – anyone who wants to ‘pirate’ your book will do so anyway. Learn from the mistakes of the music business, don’t repeat them.
Make sure you price your book above $2.99 in the Kindle version, as that’s the point at which Amazon will let you take 70% of the revenue, rather than 30%. My own experience has been that about $5 is a reasonable price for a ‘proper’ ebook (i.e. not one like my book of short stories, which is only 20 pages long). You’ll get slightly more sales at a lower price than that, but not (in my experience) enough to make up for the lost revenue. On the other hand, pricing the book at any more than that just makes you look greedy.
The pricing advice, however, will vary depending on how fungible a good your books are. Amanda Hocking, who writes stories about teen vampires in love (or something like that – ‘dark fantasy’ anyway) prices her books (or at least the first in each series) at 99 cents, because that’s a market with a lot of competition (and she’s managed to sell over a million books, so she’s doing something right in that market). Joe Konrath, who writes thrillers, publishes at $2.99, and again sells more than me. But I think in the case of Hocking or Konrath, their customers want ‘a dark fantasy’ or ‘a thriller’, and have thousands of choices. If your book’s in a more niche market, as all mine so far have been, you can afford to price it higher.
Also get your book onto smashwords.com – they will get your book into all other major ebook channels (Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Nook etc), and will convert your RTF into the appropriate, DRM-free, formats. Make sure you follow the Smashwords Style Guide though (you can use your smashwords-formatted RTF to upload to KDP too).
Don’t let Smashwords put your book on Kindle, though – make sure you do that separately, yourself. Smashwords only pay quarterly, *and* take a percentage of what you make, *AND* it takes time for them to get paid by third parties, *AND* if you’re outside the US you have to jump through tax hoops which can take five months or more unless you want to lose another 30% of your money. If someone wants your book, direct them to Lulu or Amazon – Smashwords is only there for the less than 15% of the market who want ePub books. Put your book there and look at any money you make from it as a pleasant surprise.
Get a decent cover. People *do* judge books by their covers, and even if you can’t design things very well yourself (and don’t have a friend who offers, as my friend did for the cover of my Beach Boys book), there are enough public domain images available that you can get something quite striking.
Get somebody to read your blurb over. This is even more important than getting your book proof-read. I’ve seen some truly horrendous blurbs on Amazon from self-published writers – some actually illiterate.
DON’T join in any self-publishing author fora. There may be some useful advice there, but it’s lost in the noise of pyramid-scheme “I’ll buy yours if you buy mine” and people ‘reviewing’ others’ books (just giving them encouragement, rather than advice on how to get better). If you want to see what self-published authors are doing, look at some of the links in Joe Konrath’s blogroll, and just read the blogs that seem useful to you.
Write a *lot*. You won’t make much from any one book, but each of my books makes me between £25 and £50 per month. That’s not enough to live on, but that’s because I only have four books out – the more books I put out, the more money I’ll make. That said, it’s important not to churn out crap. Every book you publish *must* have a reason for existing. There’s nothing in any of my books that I haven’t felt compelled to write.
And finally, if you don’t have time to go through that whole list of advice, just look at this, do the opposite of what she did, and you should be OK.
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