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Codexians Sweep Original 4 Nebula Awards

eBooks and Publishing

I have the great fortune to rub virtual elbows with any number of exceptional writers in Codex Writers’ Group, which I founded back in 2004 by creating an online forum and inviting fellow writers from Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp and the Writers of the Future workshop. This week the four original categories (Best Novel, Best Novelette, Best Novella, and Best Short Stories) of the Nebula Award, one of the most important awards in science fiction, were all won by members of Codex. (Two additional categories added more recently were not won by Codexians–this time!)

Ann Leckie is the first Codexian ever to win the Nebula for best novel, for her Ancillary Justice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vylar Kaftan won the novella category with “The Weight of the Sunrise.”

 

 

 

 

 

 


The Best Novelette award went to Aliette de Bodard for “The Waiting Stars.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Best Short Story went to Rachel Swirsky for “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”

 

 

 

 

Ann, Vy, Aliette, Rachel: way to kick some genre!

Congratulations too to Nalo Hopkinson, who won the Andre Norton YA award, and the writers of Gravity, who won the Bradbury for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation. (Neither Ms. Hopkinson nor the Gravity folks are associated with Codex in any way.)

A variety of other Codexians were nominated for the Nebula this year, including Kenneth Schneyer, Alethea Kontis (now a two-time nominee for the Andre Norton award), Ken Liu (the only person ever to have won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award for a single work), Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, Sarah Pinsker, Henry Lien, and Lawrence M. Schoen.

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How Do I Preload Books onto a Kindle I’m Giving as a Gift?

eBooks and Publishing

I’m collaborating with a group of five other science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction authors on a contest that will give away a new Kindle Fire loaded with about a dozen great books. (More on that later, when the contest is ready to announce.) One of the questions we’re deciding on is how we want to give someone  a Kindle with books already on it.

This turns out to be kind of tricky. When someone receives a Kindle, they have to register it to an Amazon account. When this happens, according to Amazon, all previous content (whether purchased or manually loaded) is wiped from the device. This means that you can’t just order someone a Kindle and have it show up with the books you want on it, and it also means that if the person who’s getting the Kindle is going to register it, you can’t have it delivered to yourself, manually load up the books, and then give it to that person. This holds true regardless of whether you’re gifting a new or a used Kindle.

Fortunately, there are several workable approaches. Here are the ones I know of. Please note that in most cases, it’s helpful to indicate when ordering a new Kindle that it’s a gift so that it isn’t automatically registered to your account. With a used Kindle, the recipient just has to re-register, in most cases.

1. Amazon gift card
This is the least creative approach, but it’s also the easiest: just buy an Amazon gift card to go with the Kindle. This lets happy recipients choose and buy books on their own. It’s no good if you want to include specific books rather than just suggestions of what to buy, and it doesn’t help if you want to load books that don’t come from Amazon’s store (including, if you’re an author, your own–unless you want to pay Amazon to buy your own books, which considering you receive a 70% royalty in many cases might be a perfectly good option too).

2. Books delivered after the Kindle is registered
This one’s pretty easy as well. In addition to buying the Kindle for your gift recipient, you buy the books, but indicate that they’re gifts and specify who to. Once the new Kindle is registered, the recipient receives those gift books on the new Kindle. Again, this one’s no help if you’re not including books from Amazon itself.

3. Send files
Kindles read not only Amazon’s .AMZ files, but also other formats, including .MOBI and .PRC (general eBook formats that aren’t limited to Kindle books); .DOC and .RTF files from Microsoft Word and other word processors; text files; HTML files; graphics formats like .JPG, .GIF, .PNG and .BMP (not good for reading); and Adobe Acrobat .PDFs. (Regarding .PDFs, a warning: many are designed for 8.5″x11″ paper and have to be shrunk down to a painful and sometimes unreadable size to be shown on Kindle). Any of these non-Amazon file types can be sent or given to the new Kindle owner through e-mail, download, thumb drive, CD-ROM, file transfer, or any other means that you would normally use to send files.

Once received, the files will need to be transferred onto the Kindle, usually using the Kindle’s USB cable. (However, Kindle owners can also use my #4 option, below, to send books and documents to their own Kindles, providing they’ve “whitelisted” themselves as described.)

4. Email via @free.kindle.com
My favorite option for getting files onto a Kindle, because it doesn’t require plugging in a USB cable or even being physically present, is to use Amazon’s @free.kindle.com e-mail address. This is a free (no surprise there) e-mail address provided to every Kindle user by Amazon, and it delivers files and eBooks via a wireless connection. There’s also a @kindle.com address that works over 3G for 3G-capable Kindles as well as over wireless, but documents sent that way are sometimes subject to a small charge to the recipient, so I always stick with the free version.

The one limitation of this approach, which is a sensible one, is that the Kindle owner must pre-approve (“whitelist”) the sending e-mail address before anything can be received this way. All this does is approve the e-mail account being entered to send documents or books to the Kindle, so unless you’re worried about the sender sending a bunch of things you don’t want, there’s no real danger to it. Approved e-mail addresses can also be deleted at any time.

To whitelist a sender, the recipient needs to follow these steps after registering the new Kindle:

  1. Navigate to https://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/manage#pdocSettings and log in if prompted
  2. Scroll down to near the bottom, where you’ll see a link that says “Add a new approved e-mail address.” Click this link
  3. In the dialog box that appears, enter the sender’s e-mail address.
  4. Click the “Add Address” button

Once this is done, the sender can forward books that will appear automatically on the recipient’s Kindle the next time it’s connected to a wireless network. Note that it takes a few minutes after starting and connecting to the wireless network for the Kindle to check for new items, find them, download them, and display them. Wireless connectivity has to be turned on through the Kindle settings for this to work, of course, but most users will already have it on.

Don’t send books or documents before the whitelisting is complete; they’ll just vanish into the void. Once this process is set up, though, it’s an easy way to get documents onto other people’s Kindles. This can be very handy not only for gift giving, but also for critique groups, work-related documents, sending articles for friends to read, etc. It’s one of my favorite underutilized Kindle features.

Of course, this approach doesn’t work for sending books purchased on Amazon; for that, try one of the earlier methods.

That’s all of the ways I can think of. Did I miss any?

Photo by sundaykofax

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Interview with Alex Shvartsman on Unidentified Funny Objects

eBooks and Publishing

Alex Shvartsman recently launched a Kickstarter project to aid in the creation of an anthology of science fiction humor from pro authors. It wasn’t until he mentioned his plan in a discussion that I realized I had never seen such a thing, and yet it’s a simple and appealing idea–an idea with legs, as they say.

So I made my first-ever Kickstarter contribution and asked Alex if I could interview him about the book. Here is that interview.


LUC: You’ve had some noticeable success both in writing (with sales to major markets like DSF and Nature) and in the gaming world. What made you venture into editing and publishing an anthology by pro writers?

ALEX: Although I really enjoy reading and writing speculative fiction, I’m a businessman at heart. I’ve launched several different companies over the years and it’s difficult for me to look at a business model without the question of “how would I do this differently” lingering at the back of my mind.

One of the first things I learned upon trying to get published is that content is way underpriced. Incredibly talented people work very hard to let someone publish their words for pennies per word. So why not put my business acumen to good use and let that someone be me? Even paying what’s considered pro rates I feel that I’m taking advantage of the authors, somehow. I hope to be able to pay even more, eventually, if UFO Publishing becomes a success.

Mind you, I’m not saying that I know better than anyone else, or that the way other publishers do things is somehow bad or wrong. Small publishers that make such claims come and go, and that sort of a statement is often a warning sign in itself. All I’m saying is that I’m willing to invest my time and money to put together the best book I possibly can, and see where that takes me.

LUC: Interesting. So with that in mind, why funny science fiction in particular?

ALEX: I love writing and reading light, humorous stories. Stuff that may be fun to read but won’t necessarily be considered by some of the SFWA markets. When trying to submit such stories for publication I’ve been frustrated at the lack of pro paying venues where they would fit, and realized that, surely, I’m not alone in this.

Can you think of an anthology of speculative humor published any time recently? A publisher that specializes in such material? I can’t. Yet Terry Pratchett books and, recently, “Redshirts” by John Scalzi are bestsellers. So why not short SF/F stories, too?  I believe there is a market for such books, and it may be a great niche for a fledgling company to fill.

LUC: How did you decide on a Kickstarter campaign for initial funding, and how did you address the perennial question “why is this book project worth supporting”?

ALEX: Kickstarter is a perfect platform for projects like this. It isn’t just about the money raised (though the money certainly helps!) – it’s about proof of concept. How many people will become excited enough about an anthology of humorous SF/F to support it by pre-ordering a copy, or even pledging extra money for other rewards? How many people will I be able to reach, make aware of the upcoming book, that might not have learned about it otherwise? This is marketing with an added benefit or raising money for a new venture rather than spending money. A godsend for any bootstrapping new publisher.

So far, I’m very pleased with the results. Over 125 individuals backed UFO in the first three weeks. Hundreds more learned about it through social media and are at least aware of the book, even if they didn’t elect to pre-order. By the time the crowdfunding campaign is over in September, the numbers it generates will give me a much better idea of how many physical copies of the book to print, how much to spend on advertising, etc. And, of course, an infusion of cash at this stage is supremely helpful.

As to the reasons to support the project, there are many. If you are a reader/fan who enjoys speculative humor then, I will repeat once again, UFO is the only anthology of this kind being released in the foreseeable future and supporting it helps promote light/humorous SF and support authors. If you’re a writer, you will find UFO’s systems and procedures to be very friendly — we respond to all submissions within 1-2 days, often provide personalized feedback, pay pro rates, don’t demand excessive rights, pay promptly upon contract … I can go on!

LUC: How have the submissions you’ve received so far–and especially the stories you’ve bought for the anthology–compared with what you expected? What exactly are we in for, here?

ALEX: Both the quantity and the quality of the submissions far exceeded my expectations. There have been over 750 submissions already and way more of them are excellent stories than what I can hope to squeeze into the book.

Let me tell you about just a few of the yarns that will appear in UFO. There’s a novelette by Mike Resnick about a spell-casting Albert Einstein battling the Nazis with some help from Eleanor Roosevelt. Ferrett Steinmetz writes about a wizard who powers his spells through tantric masturbation. This story is a lot more PG-13 than you might expect but still, it isn’t something you’re likely to read elsewhere.

There are also stoned computers, down on their luck vampires, omnivorous sex-maniac pandas and a zombear.

Not every story is over-the-top slapstick humor. Some are gentler, light tales, like Stephanie Burgis’ “Dreaming Harry” about a child whose dreams literally come true and the parents forced to deal the consequences of that. Or Nathaniel Lee’s “The Alchemist’s Children” about a scientifically-minded daughter’s quest to reconnect with her alchemist father. I am going for variety, but I try to avoid dark humor and humorous horror. I want the tone of the book to be very optimistic.

A great example of what’s to be found in the book is Jake Kerr’s story of an alien invasion told via Twitter. We posted it for everyone to read for free, and coded the page to look just like a Twitter stream. It can be found here:
http://www.ufopub.com/twitter .

Let me leave you with that, because Kerr’s story is worth reading and probably a good litmus test for whether or not this book is for you. At the time of this writing, the Kickstarter project is more than 70% funded with a week to go (though less by the time you read this).

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Three Pillars of Writing Success for Any Publishing Environment

eBooks and Publishing

This piece originally appeared in April 2011 as part of my Futurismic column “Brain Hacks for Writers”

Lately I’ve been looking, for the sake of my sanity, for some principles of writerly success that I can really depend on. These are a tad elusive when the publishing world is being shaken up by the complete redefinition of self-publishing and the whole eBook thing. I don’t know about you, but I look at all this and say “Hey, how am I going to make a living as a writer in this mess–or even just find a readership–when we don’t even know what the publishing world will consist of in five years?”

Uncertainty is a terrible motivator.

Comfortingly, I think we can distill a few principles that apply to virtually anyone who wants to write and be read, whether on paper or screen, selfpub or tradpub. They are

  1. Be passionate about what you write
  2. Focus your efforts
  3. Grow your long-term readership

Why do these matter? Because as long as you’re doing these three things, your writing career is going in the right direction, and as soon as you stop doing them, your writing career is in danger.

Be passionate about what you write

We already know that to be successful in writing, you have to write a lot. To take it a step further, I suggest that we need to write a lot and love the work we’ve chosen.

There are two ways to do this, and most of us need both: First, there’s being captured by the project, getting excited about starting it. Second, there’s taking a project you’re already working on and finding things in it that make you eager to keep diving into it.

The initial lure of the project is something I know all too well: I love to start things. The opportunity, the promise, the creativity, the fact that I haven’t screwed anything up yet–it’s easy to get excited about something I’m not working on. But it’s also important, because if you can’t get excited about your own work, how likely is it that your readers will? I imagine you’ve heard that nugget of wisdom before from more authoritative sources, but it’s a good nugget.

Re-infusing excitement is essential for most of us too, because virtually every long-term project seems to have its ups and downs. Maybe you’ve gotten to a point where your story has gone off track, or you’ve begun to question whether your whole idea wasn’t stupid in the first place, or you’ve just lost enthusiasm for rewriting the damn thing a third time.

This column isn’t about the specific ways to renew that passion (though there are a lot of specific tools for that in my eBook The Writing Engine: A Practical Guide to Writing Motivation). This is just a reminder that not having that passion makes it very difficult to keep coming back and cranking out the words, and without passion it can feel pointless even when you do crank out the words. Passion isn’t everything, but it makes a hell of a difference.

Focus your efforts

The topic of focus brings us back to my “oh, I thought of a great new project!” problem. Running off after every charming new story idea, or writing a book but not cleaning it up to submit, or not sending stories back out after they’ve been rejected, or spending all your time writing for your blog and none on your books–all of these are symptoms of unfocused effort. Focused effort means knowing what your most important writing goals are and sticking with them until you’ve seen them through. This is essential whether you need to crank out words, submit query letters, promote selfpubbed eBooks, or anything else. If you’re just writing to write, that’s great as long as you don’t care about getting anything published or read, but if you want readers and completed projects, don’t let your head get turned by other projects–and don’t let your concern that something might be rejected prevent you from sending it out there over and over until it finds a home or until you’ve proven conclusively that it doesn’t have one.

I will be sure to come back and harp on this point some more once I’ve mastered it myself.

Grow your long-term readership

This item is the one that has the most to do with your career as distinct from your writing, whether you’re just looking to get an occasional story published, are trying to go (or stay) full-time, or are shooting to break the bestseller lists. If the things you are doing outside writing itself pay off well in terms of connecting you with more people who will want to read your work for a long time, then they are good as long as they don’t hog too much of your writing time. Any writing-related activities that don’t serve that purpose need to be considered for possible elimination.

So working really hard on rewriting that dragon porn novel that you intend to publish under a one-time pseudonym is a fail on this front: even if it becomes very popular, unless you intend to cultivate that pseudonym and write more dragon porn, it’s a career fail. So is spending an hour a day on Twitter if your followers are interested in you because you are dutifully retweeting news items instead of in ways that would get them interested in your writing. Publicity is useless if it doesn’t build up a sustained following of people who are interested in you and what you write. This is one reason begging for retweets and commenting across the Internet with pleas to buy your new book is as unhelpful as it is degrading.

But selling a book to a traditional publisher, or self-pubbing a book that you are really excited to continuously get word out about, or maintaining a snarky blog about fashion when you write snarky chicklit, or pushing to get foreign rights to your latest novel sold–these are all getting your name out to people who are interested in you because of what you write and who you are, people whose reading needs you can help satisfy and who can support your career. Successful promotion, like successful livestock breeding, pays off for everyone involved.

photo courtesy of Ann Arbor District Library

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Smashwords Releases Revealing Analysis of eBook Pricing and Selling

eBooks and Publishing

Smashwords founder Mark Coker just released a presentation and related free eBook revealing the results of analyzing sales of more than 50,000 books over several years. Admittedly, what applies to Smashwords might not apply to Amazon, but based on what I’ve seen here and on the data I’ve seen from various writers (successful and not) who have been experimenting with Amazon eBook sales, this analysis does seem to reveal some basic truths about pricing, selling, and positioning eBooks.

Among the thought-provoking findings: the sweet spot for eBook pricing, as many of us suspected, is in the $2.00-$5.99 range. Books priced in the $1.00 to $1.99 range not only earn less money–they also often sell fewer copies!

It was also eye-opening to see what Coker did not find, including consistent patterns of eBook sales growth individually or in aggregate. Basically, past sales don’t predict very well what any particular title is going to be doing in future.

Coker emphasizes that books don’t sell well unless they’re great books, and that writing a great book is the hard part. With that said, selling a selfpubbed ebook is also no walk in the park, and Coker’s information helps selfpub authors to see the way a little more clearly.

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Finding Your Place in Tradpub versus Selfpub

eBooks and Publishing

Writing for publication has always been tricky–not to mention challenging, exhausting, unpredictable, and demoralizing. Still, for many years at least the path was clear:

  1. You write a book.
  2. You submit the book to publishers and/or agents.
  3. Agents and/or publishers either do or (much more often) do not express interest.
  4. If there’s interest and you’re lucky, you cut a nice deal with someone.
  5. Your book gets released, and it sells badly, decently, well, or ridiculously well.
  6. Depending on your sales, you’re then either able to sell additional books more easily or else you have to go back to the drawing board, possibly with a pseudonym so that bookstores won’t be prejudiced against stocking your titles given your underwhelming performance under your own name.

It was never half as thrilling as the daydreams we have of writing a bestseller that the critics praise to the skies (though even that can backfire: see my comments on Harper Lee in “The Courage to Suck” ).

You could say that none of the above has changed–after all, there are still agents and publishers, and the steps are still about the same with them as they have been for a number of decades. At the same time, there’s this new thing, the eBook self-publishing approach.

Self-publishing used to be easy for me to understand: I’d decided it was mainly for people who couldn’t make it in traditional publishing or didn’t want to put up with rejection after rejection, who wanted the quick and easy path to becoming “a published author” even if it meant shelling out cash instead of getting paid for writing and not having a real readership. It was also for the niche writer who had an audience too small to interest big publishing houses but whose topic and readers were clearly-defined enough that the book could be sold directly.

For someone who has always aspired to writing for large audiences, to me the upshot was that [self-publishing==failure]. It was utterly to be avoided.

The game changes
But then came Print On Demand and Lulu and CreateSpace, and after that came the Kindle. Suddenly the possibility opened up that writers could publish their work to a potentially wide audience with very little trouble or cost. For instance, let’s say I had a modestly successful novel that went out of print a few years ago but that still had loyal fans. If the rights had reverted to me, either through a request to the publisher or though an automatic operation based on how my contract was set up, there was no real barrier to republishing it for the Kindle, and some people out there–an increasing number of whom would have Kindles–might be looking for it and end up buying it. One of my friends has done just this, parlaying a series whose traditional publisher had utterly failed to market properly into ongoing Kindle and POD sales that are providing him a full-time income. The books are making a good deal more selfpubbed than they ever did on bookstore shelves.

Or you might be one of those authors with an established following who decides to publish directly for readers who already know your work, like J.A. Konrath; or even an unpublished writer whose Kindle books catch on with readers to become Kindle bestsellers, like Amanda Hocking.

(Of course there are other places–BN.com, Google Books, Smashwords, and so one–where you can publish your eBook, and you can publish through Print on Demand technology in addition to or instead of eBooks, but Kindle sales are driving this revolution, so I’m focusing on those.)

Two roads diverged in the Interwebs
The point is, there’s now an almost completely new, second career path option available to writers. What are we supposed to make of this? J.A. Konrath and Amanda Hocking are making boatloads of money on their eBooks, but the vast majority of people who have self-published eBooks are selling very few or no copies*. Most of the time, ePublishing your book gets it to about as many people as would read it if it were only available in the form of photocopied manuscripts hidden under an old rug in your basement.

This makes self-ePublishing–I’ll call this “selfpubbing” for short, even though selfpubbing can include Print on Demand books too–both an incredible source of motivation and an incredible source of disappointment. You can selfpub your just-finished or multiply-rejected novel, novella, novelette, short story, collection, or poetry book for free in just a few hours, if you can put together a cover and follow the formatting requirements. Within a day or so, searching for your name on Amazon will bring up an actual (e)book that people can actually buy! Books that have merit but are difficult to categorize, books that were too long or too short or too much like a book that just came out or not enough like a book that just came out can be published and have their chance to find a readership.

Of course, if you just publish the eBook and wait for the cash to pour in with no promotion, as I suspect most selfpubbers do (and I’m not counting repeated pleas on Facebook and Twitter for friends to buy the thing as promotion), you’re likely to be disappointed. If, however, you get reviews and get people to blog about your book, give interviews, find newsworthy angles and pitch them to news outlets, get mentions from people much more famous than yourself, and so on, then at least your book has a chance of reaching someone, and ideally it will reach a lot of someones, and those someones will love it and refer it to a lot of other someones. Unless you’re famous through some other means, you can’t launch a book to success all by yourself, but you can if more famous people or more far-reaching media take up your cause, or if you get readers excited and they start spreading the word.

Wait–why am I still in Kansas?
It’s always possible, of course, that you’ll exhaust yourself in promotional efforts and get nowhere–a few people will buy your book, hardly anyone will review it, and the moment you start to rest all interest and sales will vanish. Does this mean that you’re an awful writer? Or that you’re not cut out for selfpubbing and should stick to the tradpub approach? Or that you just need more promotion? Or different promotion? Or that you should be writing different books? How do you know when to put time into writing and when to put time into social media or contacting bloggers or buying Google AdWords?

There’s no way to tell for certain. If your books don’t sell, your writing may indeed be nowhere near good enough (yet) for people to want to read it. Or it could be spectacular, but you may be no good at promotion. Or maybe the writing and the promotion are great, but your book isn’t packaged properly: the title and/or cover and/or price and/or supporting information are wrong.

A selfpub experiment
Let me give you an example: about six months before this writing, I selfpubbed a collection of 172 flash fiction pieces called Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories , which like most collections, sold very lightly. A few months later I got around to putting out a 99 cent sampler that included stories from Bam! plus one new story as a bonus: this I called 17 Stories About the End of the World. A while back, as an experiment, I dropped the price of Bam! to 99 cents, so that the sampler and the full book cost the same despite one having ten times as much content as the other.

The result was downright weird: the sampler has been outselling the full collection by a margin of five to one. At the same price. Through the same venues. That’s the shorter book selling better, now.

To me, this is a clear demonstration of the importance packaging and presentation: clearly people are much more interested in “here are some stories about the world ending! (by some guy you’ve probably never heard of)” than they are in “here are some stories that are awfully short (by some guy you’ve probably never heard of)”. Or they might prefer the sampler’s cover (which I started but which was greatly improved by my friend Elise Catherine Tobler).

So what am I doing? A new experiment: I’ve broken out the book into nine separate samplers like My Friend in Hell and Other Very Short Stories and 19 Very Short Stories of Talking Animals with Serious Issues, which I’ve just released as of this writing. I’ve upped the price of the collection to $2.99, in part to help people who buy the samplers feel like they’re not overpaying by comparison. At the very least, this should tell me whether my End of the World book is a fluke or not, and provide me with some fascinating (to me, anyway) sales information. What kinds of stories will turn out to interest readers the most? [Later update: none of the other samplers did nearly as well as the End of the World one, and I eventually removed them. I suspect the continued relative success of 17 Stories About the End of the World is due partly to the topic and partly to the cover. I’ve tried to coax Amazon to make the sampler free, but they are not biting so far.]

Selfpub isn’t working! What now?
But enough of my example. If you’ve tried selfpub and you’ve tried self-promotion and you haven’t made significant sales, you have three choices.

  1. Choice number one is to relax and keep doing what you’re doing. Statistically, it’s likely that things will stay the same as they are and you’ll never see significant sales, although things could begin to pick up over time, especially if you’re doing some kind of promotion. If you’re writing for the love of writing alone and don’t much care about income or audience, this approach may be for you.
  2. Choice number two is to become a combination economic researcher and marketing maven. Try different covers. Try different pricing, different promotional methods–even different kinds of books.
  3. Choice number three is to say “screw this” and go back to tradpub, which may not welcome you back with open arms, but which probably wasn’t throwing itself at you before, so you probably haven’t lost any ground.

They’re all legitimate choices. My suggestion in choosing among them is finding the method that gets you fired up. If you thrill to an “almost, but not quite” rejection letter (they’re a lot better than a form rejection!) or start feeling queasy when you think of having to dive into Twitter every morning, maybe your path is to be published traditionally. That’s also probably the way to go if you’re not sure of the quality of your own work. It’s all too easy to selfpub something just because it’s finished without really knowing whether it’s any good or not (see “Your Opinion and Twenty-Five Cents: Judging Your Own Writing“).

If on the other hand, you want to embrace social media but can do so without frittering away all of your writing time on Facebook, and if you’ve gotten enough clear feedback from people who aren’t your mother to know that your writing works for people sometimes, then maybe selfpub is worth a whirl.

Or you could go both ways
Or you may be like me, pushing projects on both tracks at the same time while simultaneously sending out short stories for good measure. I don’t especially recommend this approach because it dilutes my efforts, slowing me down in every direction because I’m constantly exerting effort on several things at once. But then, this approach excites me, and I have a hell of a lot of energy. Ultimately I’m probably slowing down my overall progress, but at least I’m having fun doing it, and I’m moving forward.

I’d suggest that it’s much less a business decision than a decision of the heart. We’re lucky enough, at this point in history, to have at least two viable ways to make a living writing narrative fiction. Choosing the one that makes you excited to write will not only get you writing more, but will get you working more toward finding your audience–and I’ve yet to find a writer who complains about being too industrious at either.

If you’re interested in seeing what I have on offer for the Kindle, here are the titles I currently have available:

[ *My estimates of typical Kindle sales are based on comparing Amazon sales rankings for the total range of Kindle offerings to the rankings of eBooks for which I know specific sales figures through discussions with the authors and experience regarding my own books. ]

This article is reposted from my Futurismic column “Brain Hacks for Writers.”

Photo by Fabio Said

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Digital Book World’s ePublishing Predictions for 2012

eBooks and Publishing

The Digital Book World site recently posted “Ten Bold Predictions for Book Publishing in 2012,” and while I certainly can’t speak with authority on all of the subjects they address, none of their predictions struck me as unlikely.

Significantly, all of their predictions had to do with electronic publishing, except that some of what they said about the publishing industry as a whole would apply to paper books as well as eBooks. They don’t really take a shot at many numbers, although they did predict a new, larger Kindle tablet and name both the size and the price they expected.

I’d be interested to see predictions of impacts on libraries and bookstores and market share predictions for eBooks and for independent authors. Since it’s the season for predictions, though, I probably just have to keep my eyes open and those predictions will appear.

What do you expect to see happening in publishing in 2012? Will things get crazier or settle down a bit?

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Free until 12/26: Family Skulls – Curse-fighting in rural Vermont

eBooks and Publishing

My young adult novel Family Skulls, about a 16-year-old trying to break a generations-long curse on his rural Vermont family, will be free on Amazon for Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/Family-Skulls-ebook/dp/B00573Y36W until Monday 12/26.

One of the things I enjoyed most about writing this book was conjuring up elements of my Vermont childhood on the page. The story’s hero, 16-year-old Seth Quitman, is much more self-possessed and practical than I was as a teen, but the dirt and gravel roads he bikes down, the house he lives in, and much else are very familiar to me.

I also was very fortunate to get the chance for a cover by artist Dixon Leavitt, who managed to bring all of the key elements of the story (like the warmth and occasional claustrophobia of a close-knit family, menace, mystery, and the vastness and brilliance of a starry sky on a dark night) into his piece. I’ll be posting about the development of that cover in the near future.

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How Can Libraries Survive the Rise of eBooks?

eBooks and Publishing

In a previous post (“Are Libraries Doomed?“), I talked about the forces that I believe are likely to bring libraries as we currently know them to an end. In this post, I’ll talk about the one approach I know of that I hope might save some libraries.

It’s all about the community
One facet of libraries is unlikely to ever become entirely obsolete, and that’s being a center for community activities. Many libraries already offer events like readings, talks, meetings, and play space for children, and this function could be expanded to turn the library into a key event venue, a meeting space, a hangout, and a focal point of local culture. While electronic communication continues to cannibalize face-to-face interaction, some face-to-face interaction is essential to us as human beings, and we’ve lost many places we used to have for doing that. If libraries can expand on their existing roles to become a major force locally as teen center, community center, senior center, performance space, meeting space, event space, workout space, dance space, and more, they could come to mean even more to their local communities than they do today.

Swans becoming monkeys
Unfortunately, there are at least a couple of problems with this approach. The first is that social activity is not what people who run libraries have devoted their lives to. It’s easy to imagine a library as a cultural center, sure, with some social events–but the great strength of libraries and librarians has always been providing materials and resources to the community, not organizing Swing Dance Saturdays or boffer battles or remaking a room into an inviting teen center. Fortunately, a number of librarians have a lot of these skills–and yet sometimes the change in job would be like a swan becoming a monkey. The stereotype is that librarians are obsessed with quiet. Can the average librarian depart so far from that stereotype to embrace pretty much its exact opposite?

The other problem that comes to mind immediately for me is that as wonderful as such a center might be, we–at least we here in America–aren’t generally used to having a community center where we want to go regularly. We would have to be convinced and retrained to stop by just to see who’s around, to check the event schedule regularly, to think of new things to do there, and to go to the library instead of a coffee shop or bar–and instead of just going home to watch TV. Can we make that change?

My prediction: a few libraries will succeed at this brilliantly. Many will try and fail. Many more won’t try and will just fade away. And a few–a very few–will continue to be supported as a sort of quaint curiosity doing what they have always done: making physical media available to people in person.

Photo  by peaceman494

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Are Libraries Doomed?

eBooks and Publishing

Before I start here, I want to make one thing clear: I love libraries. They have been a haven and a treasure trove to me since I was young. Whatever I may say in this post about the future of libraries, please know that it’s not because I want anything bad to happen to them.

Primarily I love libraries because they’re places we’ve created as communities to share the written word. Few things in life, it seems to me, are cooperative, highly useful, and (in a limited sense) free.

If libraries were to end, I also would hate to think of communities losing that anchor of identity, of the waste of beautiful buildings, of paper volumes being shredded or dumped or moldering away, and of librarians (who in my experience are disproportionately great people) cast off into unemployment.

Yet my honest sense is that libraries, by and large, are doomed.

What changed?
Maybe “what’s changed?” is the wrong question: after all, we all know what changed–or to be more accurate, is in the process of changing right now. It’s eBooks. Since before the Sumerians started making marks in clay 5,000 years ago, the written word has been intimately bound with physical objects. As personal computers and later other devices started to become more common, certainly a lot of electronic words sprang into being, but most of us don’t want to use a computer to read: it’s just not physically comfortable, and sometimes it’s not practical. So while magazines and newspapers have been feeling the dark tendrils of obsolescence grope at them for a decade or more, until recently bookstores and libraries were largely unaffected.

In fact libraries expanded to embrace the availability of electronic media, adapting to offer computer terminals, free wi-fi, and online resources.

Now, though, eReaders have begun taking hold. This mundane-looking type of device with its limited features and lack of any sense of glitz has been quietly stealing away reader after reader from physical books (and some other printed media). I was stolen away about a year ago, when a friend bought me a Kindle. I thought I would really miss physical books. I was pretty much wrong.

I know there’s debate over whether eBooks can replace physical books. People make good points like the physical experience of reading a book or the ability to hand a physical copy of a book to a friend. It’s certainly true that there are some nice things about physical books. Not the trees mowed down to produce them or the excruciating returns procedures the publishing industry is locked into or the storage space requirements, but certainly the satisfaction of having a physical object that represents a wonderful experience, the ability to leave books lying around for children to stumble upon, the ability to pass along stories ideas by handing something to someone.

Yet having looked at the issue in great detail, I have to conclude that eBooks are going to almost completely replace physical books within the decade. You may disagree with me, but if you care about libraries, you may want to pretend for the moment that you grant the point and explore with me what this might mean, since if I’m right, libraries may have to change now if they are going to have any chance of surviving.

As with physical books, so with libraries
Although libraries were created to store and share physical books, they’ve adapted beautifully to new media. First reel-to-reel audio and films, then cassette tapes and video tapes, then CDs and DVDs became staple items at libraries. Libraries often provide free access to the Web and have a library Web site where you can look up books. The old card catalogs have turned into searchable databases. Microfilm and microfiche have yielded to digital storage.

Yet libraries are still tied to a physical experience in a specific place. The entire reason municipal libraries are funded in the first place is to benefit local citizens. While it’s true that you can get digital media from libraries–as with some eBook borrowing programs–you can also get digital media from a lot of other sources, and you don’t have to go to the physical library to get these in most cases anyway. Vermont librarian Kata Welch recently commented, ” If people want e-books, libraries will find a way to supply them and meet their patrons’ needs.” I think she’s right that libraries are more than able to accomplish this–but I don’t think libraries can survive this way.

After all, what’s the use of a physical building when you’re sharing materials that can be easily shared with someone at any other location? And what’s the use of a small local library online if there are thousands of other small local libraries online? If libraries take this approach of still being a source for sharing written and other media, but in electronic rather than physical form, then first they’ll be forced out of buildings and onto the Web, then they’ll inevitably join forces with other libraries because the economies of scale are so significant, and eventually the services will be so widespread that any sense of locality will be utterly lost–if the approach even survives at all. Given all the free material (books, stories, blogs, and so on) that’s available for eReaders and how easy and sometimes inexpensive it is to buy eBooks, I’m not convinced that many people will continue to rely on borrowing books at all, regardless of form.

But libraries are more than books!
It’s true, libraries are more than books. The problem is that sharing media–books, films, audio recordings, magazines, etc.–is the essential, core service that libraries provide. If libraries are no longer mainly about providing that service, can municipalities continue to justify paying as much as they do for them? How many people would use them? Enough to justify the space and expense?

I think there’s one way many libraries might be able to survive, but it would take a lot of effort and change and still wouldn’t succeed everywhere. I’ll talk about that in my follow-up post in the next day or two.

Photo by aaron.michels

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