Constant Change is Here to Stay

Last week I started to write about what makes a good novel, and I'll come back to that soon, but this week I've be intrigued by the reaction to Harlequin's announcement that it is starting a self-publishing arm. Thomas Nelson, the foremost publisher of books for the Christian market, has already taken that step with its new WestBow imprint, and my goodness, from the reaction among writers and writers' groups you'd think all hell had broken loose.

The RWA has been almost hysterical, knocking Harlequin off its "preferred" list of publishers, with the result that Harlequin backed away from using the name "Harlequin" in the new venture.

Some writers' blogs have taken exception to both publishers' actions. They seem to think that both Harlequin and Thomas Nelson intend a massive conspiracy against writers. Neither could be farther from the case.

In my opinion, it's a business decision, pure and simple. And I think self-publishing with either subsidiary has something to recommend it.

First, the business decision. Far more people want to be writers than there are slots to fill with books. In 2008 I read two statistics about the numbers of books published in the U.S. alone. Nearly half a million titles were produced by traditional publishers; more than that came from self-publishers. Nearly a million titles altogether. Both publishers, and their competitors, receive who-knows-how-many queries every year, and a fraction of those receive responses. From that fraction even fewer become actual books, and the process from agent to finished book on the shelf can take three or more years. Why should a publisher not want to provide a service to writers whose books it cannot publish, but who are willing to front some of the cost of bringing out the book? Or, to put it crudely, why should they not cash in?

Many self-published books are pretty good, and some make money beyond the writer's immediate family. (Granted, some are atrocious.) I think it's a smart idea to have a self-publishing arm that will test a new, untried author in the market place. It would seem to me that, while neither self-publishing imprint will have the prestige of a Harlequin book or a Thomas Nelson book, it might be a way for new writers to catch the attention of the parent publisher. "Look, my novel sold 917 copies its first year."

At any rate, to those who poured their vitriol all over Harlequin and Thomas Nelson, I'd say, "Don't knock it if you haven't tried it."

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! See you in December!

What Makes a Good Novel?

I’ll back into this topic by saying at the outset that “good” and “flawless” are not the same. I've read flawless novels that weren't good because they lacked the spark that makes a reader – me, at any rate – shiver with recognition that reading this novel might enlarge my experience of humanity or change my thinking me.

I’ve also been disappointed by novels that could have been good but were not because they lacked the care that an author or editor needs to take to make a good book. Their mechanics were careless; typographical errors, misspellings, and homonyms reached critical mass. Their sentences were poorly constructed, and the writer showed by the sentence structure that he or she did not know where the meaning of the sentences lay. Descriptive phrases clogged the action, and the story barely moved.

In some, conflict might be absent. In one novel that remains unpublished -- and rightfully so -- a single character reflected on life as he sailed through space for years on end, his only companion the computer that ran the space ship. It was no HAL to give the story an antagonist. In another novel, the protagonist lay in a coma; all the action of the story took place in his head.

Neither of these worked because the authors thought they knew better than the readers in the critique group. The writing was good, but a novel needs a lot more than lovely sentences to interest most readers.

What does it need? That will be the subject of the next few posts.

I'll be writing as a reader and as a novelist.

Gus may be back to tell a story or two of his own.

Craig Lancaster: Building Edward Stanton

It's a very great pleasure to feature Craig Lancaster today! Craig is an up-and-coming young writer with a delightful, moving, and encouraging novel titled 600 Hours of a Life, just out from Riverbend Publishers in Helena, MT. Craig and his wife, Angie, live in Billings.

In his guest blog, Craig tells how he built the character of Edward, the protagonist of the novel. Here's Craig!


For any writer who attempts to breathe life into fictional characters, two questions are inevitable, and they often come in succession:
1. Where did you get the idea for your character?
2. Is the character you?

For purposes of discussing Edward Stanton, the protagonist of my debut novel, 600 Hours of Edward, I’ll deal with the second question first, by way of comparison points.

Edward is 39 years old. I was 38 when I wrote the book.

Edward lives in Billings, Montana. So do I.

Edward is enchanted by the following things:

the ’60s cop show Dragnet,
rock ’n’ roll performers R.E.M. and Matthew Sweet,
and the Dallas Cowboys.

I can recite whole sections of Dragnet scripts, own every R.E.M. and Matthew Sweet album and have sacrificed more Sundays than I care to count genuflecting at the Cowboys.

Edward is 6-foot-4 and about 280 pounds. I am in the neighborhood of both of those numbers – in the case of the weight, only if it’s a very large neighborhood.

And yet, for all of those similarities, Edward is not me. He’s more afflicted than I am (he has obsessive-compulsive disorder and Asperger syndrome). He’s not as jaded. He trusts only what he can see and verify, while I tether myself to hunches. And, at his core, Edward is sweeter than I could ever be.

He isn’t me.

But for 25 magical days last November, as I furiously drafted his story, I became Edward.

Edward’s story spills onto the page in a first-person, present-tense point of view. My decision to approach the story in that way was grounded in practicality: I wanted his story of transformative change to happen on the ground, in the moment, as he saw it. The immediate side benefit of that approach was that I slipped into Edward’s head almost from the get-go. His flat, non-ironic tone found its way from my imagination to my fingers on the keyboard. Rarely has writing been so effortless for me, and that was true all the way through the first draft. I never lost my footing, and I never lost the threads of the story, even as my imagination of them changed dramatically. I ascribe that entirely to being overtaken by a character who rang true in my head and in my heart. I have no other way to account for it.

Casting Edward as an obsessive-compulsive Aspergian was another calculated move. In the earliest conception of the story, I wanted a main character who lived his life in patterns. Among other predictable behavior, Edward ends most of the 25 days of the story by watching an episode of Dragnet (in sequential order) and then writing an unsent letter of complaint to whoever is addling him (that the letters are never sent is the idea of his therapist, Dr. Buckley, which is all the better to keep him out of trouble). By structuring the story in such a way, I figured that I could build a dramatic arc into the infrastructure of Edward’s compulsions. This worked out better than I could have ever hoped. But some stroke of luck, many of the morals of the Dragnet episodes proved applicable to the corresponding junctures of Edward’s story. That this was so can be chalked up only as a happy accident.

Edward came with two primary challenges in the drafting and revising stages.
First, it would have been all too easy to make him a butt of a book-long joke, given his condition. That was unacceptable to me, and I suspect that it would have been unacceptable to readers. People who have read the book have generously complimented the comedy that pervades the story, but not once has anyone accused me of creating that fun at Edward’s expense. In retrospect, that was a niftier trick than perhaps I gave myself credit for achieving.

Second, his delivery is so flat that I became intimate with the maxim “kill your darlings.” Each time I took a whack at the manuscript, I would hammer into submission the occasional florid phrase where Edward’s sensibility had fallen away and mine had taken over. I deleted several sentences that, in the drafting stage, had filled me with pride. While it hurt to see them go, it was the right choice. Edward’s believability lies, in part, in his consistency.

To illustrate this, I offer up the following section of the story. It’s fairly late in the book, and I needed Edward to plumb an emotional depth that he had never experienced, but in his own words:

I find myself wishing that I had taken pictures of that snowy day in front my house, when Kyle was riding his Blue Blaster and Donna and I were throwing snowballs. Photographs, it seems to me, are both moments in time and bits of memory. I have the memory of that day with Donna and Kyle, but I also know that the camera that created the memory is imprecise. If I’d had a real camera, instead of just a memory, I could have caught the moments so that they would never escape me. If Donna has decided that she no longer wants to be my friend, I’ll have to desperately hold on to those memories so that they never get away, because I won’t have the chance to replace them.

When my 25 days of being Edward Stanton came to an end, I brimmed with something approaching melancholy. Fortunately, it didn’t last. These days, I get to revisit him every so often, be it through a venue like this one or when someone reads his story and is kind enough to share what it meant. I treasure those moments, just as I treasure him. On my horizon, I hope, are dozens of characters waiting to be discovered and explored. And yet I’d be surprised if I come to like any of them more than I like Edward.

I hope you like him, too.

on Amazon.com.

Craig's Web site: craiglancaster.net

Craig's blog: A Mind Adrift in the West

Love or Money?

For writers, that's often the question. I knew a writer once who said she didn't write for the market, and as one might expect, none of her six novels was ever published. I hope she stuck with it and eventually had the success she was looking for, however she defined success.

Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784), who wrote the first dictionary of the English language (1755), famously wrote that "none but a fool writes for aught but money." One way or another, Dr. Johnson, who emphatically did write for money, has been a towering figure in the English-language literary scene for the last 250 years because James Boswell's biography, Life of Johnson, still a classic of biographies, made him famous.

Myself, I write for love and money. Both. While I'm writing a novel, I'm in love. I leave it as regretfully as I'd leave a lover, and come back to it with the same joy a reunion with that lover would bring. I wrote God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana with all the emotions of being in love: joy, frustration, despair, fear, and happiness.

What do I love about writing? I love the characters. Martha's desire for a better life, Jacob's exultation in freedom from Cossack pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe, Tabby and Albert Rose's wary adjustment to life after slavery, Dotty's enjoyment of "pretties," and Timothy's gradual understanding that Dan won't exploit him. And I love Dan Stark. He's a kind of amalgam of all the good men I've known, especially father and husband. I can't say I love Tobias Fitch, but I love finding the well springs of his greed.

Along with all this, I love the writing itself. It's like turning a kaleidoscope to bring the inner pattern into focus. Draft after draft, turn after turn, and then -- it's there! Sentence rhythms and structures, metaphors, actions, dialogue: everything works together. There's no high like it that I can imagine.

Once the book is done, it's like dropping off a cliff. I'm lost, bereft, as if a lover had left me. Until the next one. Then I can fall in love again, as I have with the current WIP, Gold Under Ice.

With the book in my hands, everything changes. It's "Bring me the money, baby." A curious objectivity sets in, because the love of the last couple of years (seven in the case of God's Thunderbolt) has become a product. I tell it to get out there and make us some money. If you will, the fickles artist leaves her lover to the businesswoman.

I don't write for love or money. I write for love, and go after money later.

I've been lucky with the first book, in that people like it. After all, that's the point, isn't it? To write something that people like to read.

Distribution: A Gordian Knot Still Tied

Last week I began what I envisioned as a series about distribution for self-publishers, but now, frankly, I'm not sure I'll have much to say about it.

Self-publishers have plenty of opportunities for widespread distribution, but none of them is very satisfactory. Or so I think. Maybe something will happen to change my opinion, but right now I'm still waiting for an enterprising distributor to slice through that knot.

The reason I'm looking for widescale distribution is to get into brick-and-mortar bookstores. God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, my Spur-award-winning literary Western, is already doing well on Amazon.

Let's be clear. I'm talking about the bound book, not ebooks, audio books, or podcast books. For paper-based books, publishers (self- or traditional) have limited avenues available. They can produce books in quantity and store them somewhere in fulfillment centers or they can produce books as POD (print on demand). The two major distributors, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, distribute both forms of books. B&T is a relative newcomer in producing POD books; they announced their TextStream system last week. Ingram's wholly-owned subsidiary, Lightning Source, Inc. (LSI) has been printing POD books for some time. Both companies are rather less than the best solution for independent publishers and authors, because they require that the POD book, for mass distribution, be produced through their systems.

If a self-publisher wants to use either distributor, that author must furnish what used to be known as "camera-ready" copy. "Throw and go" might be another term for it. This means the author must furnish the PDF file that LSI or TextStream can print, bind, and ship. For me, at any rate, this is a significant problem. Huge, even. I sent for B&T's instructions on creating the PDF file. (PDF stands for Portable Document Format, and it's produced by software from Adobe, Inc., the company that makes Photoshop and Illustrator and a host of software for building Web sites.)

There are two primary problems with making the PDFs. For one thing, you can't just write your book in Word, click a button, and have Word convert it to the sort of PDF file acceptable to LSI or TextStream. For one thing, the documents have to be formatted with running headers and footers and margins and chapter headings (if you use chapter breaks) -- everything just the way a book is done. Second, TextStream, at any rate, does not accept TrueType fonts, the fonts that come pre-packaged with your word processing software. These fonts have coding that enables them not only to be printed on paper, but on the Web as well. TextStream doesn't accept that coding.

The fonts also have to be embedded into the file. I haven't a clue how that's done.

Third, the author would have to purchase special software. Adobe Acrobat Distiller is not acceptable because it apparently does not produce high enough resolution to be print-worthy. LSI, last I checked, will accept 300 DPI* (dots per inch), the same resolution that magazines use to print photographs. TextStream (read Baker and Taylor) wants 600 DPI* resolution.

The software can be purchased from Adobe, Inc., but it's expensive. So is the learning curve. A self-published author told me she spent a full year, maybe rather more, learning how to do it.

Perhaps eventually the time and investment in the software would yield a satisfactory return on the investment, but at this point it's not an experiment I'm likely to make. I'll keep looking into other avenues for widescale distribution.

Don't forget: November 5, Craig Lancaster, author of 600 Hours of Edward, just out from Riverbend Publishing of Helena, MT, will be here to tell us how he built the character of Edward, a man afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder and Asperger syndrome. It's sure to be interesting and delightful, just like Craig himself! Besides, I loved the book.

*DPI: Ink is put on paper in tiny dots. If you look at a photo in a magazine or newspaper with a strong enough magnifying glass, you'll see the image disintegrate into its dots. 72 DPI or PPI (pixels per inch) is the common resolution for images that you see on a computer screen. Paper needs at least 300 DPI.

Distribution: The Self-Publisher's Gordian Knot

You did it! You wrote and published your own book. Along the way you mastered the sometimes arcane terminology of the publishing process, but now you're baffled. How do you get the book into the hands of readers?

Distribution.

Some of you might say, "No problem. I'll put it on Amazon." That works, but putting a book on Amazon, even if sales do well there, not in the Sarah Palin category or Dan Brown's, but OK for a new author without fame and hype to back up the book, is only part of the story. Only one strand of the Gordian Knot called distribution.

Another vital strand is called "brick and mortar." That includes bookstores, both chains and independents, and non-bookstore outlets such as gift shops, feed stores, grocery stores, and Costco. People who visit those places may or may not buy your book, or mine, from Amazon.

Salespeople say, "Look for customers always and all ways." A writer can, of course, choose to promote a book online through a variety of social marketing media. But that may drive sales to the local stores, as well as to Amazon. This is too small a sample to be any sort of trend, but during the summer two men with whom I've become acquainted over the Internet e-mailed me that they had bought God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana. One bought it at his local Borders store; the other ordered it from Amazon.

Both are, obviously, Internet-savvy. Yet one went to a store and the other went online.

I've been contemplating the distribution problem -- for it is a problem to many self-publishers. I want out of the distribution loop. I don't want to manage inventory, or track it, even if it's only 50 - 60 books at a time. I don't want to sell on consignment to bookstores and wait sometimes 90+ days to get paid.

So how do writers get our work into the hands of readers? You can put it on Amazon and other online booksellers, all of whom tell you how and how much it'll cost. I'm not sure many of the online booksellers are very effective, but my novel is only on Amazon, alibris.com, and abebooks.com. Amazon has done well by me, but I went through Booksurge, one of its wholly owned subsidiaries. That made selling the book on Amazon much easier.

This blog begins a series on distribution methods. I am satisfied with the route I chose, but my solution would not satisfy everyone, and it leaves out the brick and mortar stores.

To start with, I'll share what I know about a limited segment of online distribution. My own Web site, www.swanrange.com, does not have a shopping cart. Instead, it links to Amazon for those who visit the site and want to buy the book. Each of these Web sites has information to tell you how to you can sell your book their site.

Amazon: At the bottom of the main book page are lists of links. In the list headed Make Money With Us, is a link, See All... Clicking on this link will lead you to a page that has information about how to use its distribution services. You can use either BookSurge or CreateSpace, but it provides only the link to the CreateSpace Web site. BookSurge is www.booksurge.com. If your book is already published, click on the label Amazon Advantage. You will find information on this page for converting your text files to Kindle, as well.

Alibris.com has an Alibris Affiliate program about which I've sent for information. In the meantime, you can visit the Web site to learn more. Near the top right corner of the home page, click on the tab Sell on Alibris. You'll find some information there, but for something more in depth, you'll probably have to send them an email.

Abebooks.com is another well respected online bookseller. To find out more, go to the Web site, and in the red bar across the top of the home page, you'll find the link Sell Books. Click on the link, and you'll find three choices from which to choose. If you want the widest online distribution, Become a Professional Bookseller may be right for you. The other two choices involve Abebooks's "buy back" program in which you sell used text books and other books direct to Abebooks and they sell them on. Beyond that, I know practically nothing about their programs, except that one or two self-published friends have used Abebooks and tell me they're happy.

I hope this can help you get started -- before you publish your book -- thinking about distribution. After all, you may have begun by thinking of your book(s) as a labor of love, but once it's in covers, it's a business.

Reviewing Self-Published Books

FLASH!! Craig Lancaster, author of 600 Hours of Edward, soon to be released by Riverbend Press, will be a guest on this blog Nov. 5. He will discuss how he built the character of Edward, a man afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder. (I favorably reviewed this novel on Self-Publishing Review under its self-published title, 600 Hours of a Life.)

People often disagree on whether a book is well done or not. Some people think literary fiction is the only kind worth reading. Other people dislike anything that is not written in their favorite genre. Still others consider literary fiction to be dull, depressing, and not worth the tree that was cut down to make the paper. They are entitled to their own opinion.

Over on Self-Publishing Review, another reviewer and I come at this from two different perspectives. I’m a novelist as well as a reader. An odd thing happened when I changed over from reader to novelist-as-reader. I lost the ability to read purely for pleasure. I read all novels critically, not simply for enjoyment. I’m always alert for the poorly cast sentence, the major and minor errors in usage, the misused idiom, the poorly placed modifier, the flat characterization, the illogical plot step. At times I’ll find writing that moves like clotting blood because it’s so dependent on prepositional phrases to carry the meaning rather than on the kernel that I discussed in previous posts. Some novels I absolutely love, but my critical mind has to admit that they might not be very good books. If I were to review a book that’s not so good but I like it anyway, I’d still be duty bound to state what its flaws are. I have hated some novels that won the Pulitzer Prize, and I think the Nobel Prize is politically motivated and not a reliable judge of good literature. However, I could be wrong. The Nobel judges look at literature worldwide, and admittedly my knothole is much smaller. I thought the female characters in Lonesome Done were flat, but it got the Pulitzer and has much to recommend it.

My liking a novel does not mean I think it’s necessarily the best book ever, still less that it has no flaws. I like some books because the characters are interesting as well as sympathetic, because the story takes me into the world of that novel, because the writing sings, or because the setting is fascinating. Or all of the above. I thoroughly enjoy Robert B. Parker’s minimalist style and I love James Lee Burke’s stylistic opulence. Reading the two of them at the same time is great fun and somewhat mind-bending because they’re so different. In terms of truly great books, the novels of E L Doctorow stand first for me, although most of them are not especially accessible. My all-time favorite of his is The March, but his latest, Homer & Langley, while gorgeously written, won’t be ending up on my shelf. The first paragraph contains a sentence so long and beautiful that only a master of the English language could have written it with the control he demonstrates, but the novel is about two handicapped brothers’ slow decline toward death. Not for me. I prefer stories that are more upbeat.

When I review a book, I read it in context of all the English and American literature that I’ve read in more than 60 years, coupled with a PhD in English Lit. I also read with a mission regarding self-published fiction in general.

I hope every time I open a self-published novel to find a book that can help dispel the prejudice against self-published novels. So far, out of 20+ by other self-published writers I’ve found three: Craig Lancaster’s 600 Hours of a Life; Francis Hamit's The Shenandoah Spy, about a young woman during the Civil War who became a spy for the Confederacy; and Celia Hayes's The Gathering, book 1 of her Adelsverein Trilogy. The Gathering is about German immigrants struggling to settle the Fredericksburg area of Texas.(I haven't read the other two in the trilogy.)

Why was Craig Lancaster's book picked up by a publisher but not the other two? Perhaps it's fashion. Lancaster's novel has a contemporary setting, but Hamit's and Hayes's novels are historical fiction. An agent who rejected my novel, God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, said, "Period pieces aren't selling now."

People judge a self-published book against everything else they’ve read when they look for a good read. Watch people in bookstores. They look at the title, then the front cover, then read the back cover, then open the book and read the first paragraph, maybe a page or two. Every step of that process is a judgment call that leads up to the final question: buy or not buy? All the time they’re weighing the book against what else they like to read. Occasionally, a self-published book is picked up by the stores and has to meet those same readers’ standards. It has to compete with all the other books in the store for the readers’ limited discretionary spending.

Writers, hang out at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble, grab a coffee, and watch people decide what to buy to read. Watch them with your book. It’s not easy, but it's a good reminder. Readers are truly ruthless. They are the ultimate critics. They’re the ones who judge all books.