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Just Released: The Expanded, Illustrated 2nd Edition of Talk the Talk: The Slang of 67 American Subcultures

Luc's writing projects

About two and a half years ago, when I set about putting together a Kindle edition of my 2006 book Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures, I thought I was looking at a couple of week’s work in whatever time I could spare. It turns out that updating my term database with the original edition improvements, adding three new subcultures, putting in multiple photographs for every subculture, editing, adding some terms that didn’t fit in the first edition, and otherwise preparing this new edition have taken … well, two and a half years. Yet I think it was worth it! Check it out here.

 

Talk the Talk: The Slang of 67 American Subcultures

 

I was very pleased to find that no significant corrections were required from the original edition. Despite my careful research, I had half expected the day after the original book’s release to be deluged with telephone calls by irate members of the subcultures I’ve documented correcting my facts–but there weren’t any, then or since.

My favorite credibility moment came when a blog post upbraided me for using the term “shank” to refer to a cell-made prison weapon instead of what the post’s author (who like me, has not served time) put forth as the proper term, “shiv.” I didn’t have to defend my research, though: an actual former inmate commented on the post instead, saying that “shiv” was a popular media term, but the word that was really used “inside” was “shank.”

Regardless, whether you check the book out to browse the new photographs of all the unexplored corners of American culture, to test your knowledge of carnival slang (the public radio show Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me used the original edition to do this to guest Julia Sweeney back in 2006), to come up to speed on Renaissance Faire or snowboarding slang, or to just enjoy the range of words model rocketry enthusiasts use when they talk about things blowing up, there’s likely to be something of interest to practically any culture afficianado in what BoingBoing! called “the kind of quirky thing that is endlessly fascinating and full of odd insights into worlds you never suspected existed.”

If you’re interested in a review copy, whether for publication or simply for your blog, Amazon, or Goodreads, etc., please use the contact form here on my Web page.

The print edition should be released next month.

(By the way, astute readers may have noticed that I mention adding three subcultures, but the number listed on the cover only increased from 65 to 67. That’s because hip-hop slang, which to my way of thinking is much too widely used to be considered subculture speak, was removed from the new volume. Instead, I made it available for free on Talk the Talk‘s Web site at www.subculturetalk.com.)

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Free Historical Fantasy Novelette Wed-Thu: The Violin-Maker’s Wife

Luc's writing projects

Some time back, my friend Maya Lassiter and I participated in a Codex collaborative story contest and created a historical fantasy story about deadly lights plaguing a small family in post-Civil War Missouri. Even after the story won the contest, we revised and rewrote and rewrote and revised, finally settling on a version that satisfied us both.

Today and tomorrow (Wednesday through Thursday, November 7th and 8th), our e-novelette “The Violin Maker’s Wife” will be available free on Amazon.com: click here to get it.

If you do get and read the story, we’d be very interested in hearing what you think! Comment here or post a review on Amazon.

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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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Collaboration Leads to 1800’s Witchery: The Violin Maker’s Wife

Luc's writing projects

I met fellow writer Maya Lassiter (who writes an eclectic and highly entertaining blog about her yurt-living, kid-and-goat-raising, writing life) back in 2001, when Orson Scott Card ran his first annual writing week, called Uncle Orson’s Literary Boot Camp. The workshop was open to 20 of us, who auditioned with writing samples, and it was completely transformational to my writing. Scott Card was the first one to get me to understand that you didn’t have to wait for ideas, that you could go out and find them whenever you needed them. He was the one who explained that most of us write about a million words of garbage (literally) before we really start getting good. He was the one who explained to me the principles of writing clearly rather than prettily.

It’s not a great surprise to me that many students of that Literary Boot Camp have gone on to substantial success. Doug Cohen became a successful fiction writer and the editor of a major fantasy magazine. James Maxey authored multiple successful novels, including the Bitterwood and Dragon Age series. Jud Roberts‘ deeply-researched and adventure-filled Strongbow Saga has garnered eager fans for its first three books, with a fourth on the way. Ty Franck’s collaboration with Daniel Abraham (as James Corey), Leviathan Wakes, became a bestseller. I could go on.

In any case, I later founded a group called Codex, which many Boot Camp alums joined, including Maya, and on Codex we like to have fiction contests. When we held a collaboration contest, Maya and I got together and came up with a story about violin making and badly-understood magic, a novelette that was eventually titled “The Violin Maker’s Wife.” It won that contest.

A couple of months ago, Maya and I decided to put the story out where it could be read and published it for the Amazon Kindle. Note that Amazon Prime members can read it free by using their free monthly Kindle rental.

Maya worked with her regular cover artist, Ida Larsen to devise a cover, and recently we finished the formatting and took it live. Here’s the description:

“The Violin Maker’s Wife” is a historical fantasy novelette, set in 1870s Missouri, and is about forty pages long.

Nora Warren always knew there was something uncanny about her husband Tom’s work. What she didn’t know what that his enchanted violins could be deadly. Tom’s friend has one of the exquisite instruments, as does Tom himself. So does Garrett, Nora’s only son.

But Tom has looked too deeply into his own magic, and Garrett is in danger. Now Nora must find the answers Tom can’t give her, even if it means searching for spells hidden in his workshop, questioning a secret society of musicians, and following dangerous lights out into the wilderness. Tom has looked where he shouldn’t, but to save Garrett it’s Nora who must find who–or what–has looked back.

 

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Bam! Stories of the Impossible and the Wildly Improbably: Free eBook This Weekend

Luc's writing projects

This weekend I’ll be attending Readercon near Boston, Massachusetts, and while there I’ll be doing a reading of stories from my flash fiction collection Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories. Bam! has been available for Kindle since last year, and the paperback ($11.95) is just coming out now, already available here and scheduled to show up on Amazon.com within the next week or two.

In celebration of all this, Bam! for the Kindle (and all devices that can run the free Kindle viewer, including PCs, Macs, iPads, iPhones, Android devices, etc.) will be available free today through Sunday. Feedback, good or bad, is always welcome. Enjoy!

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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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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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Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories free on Amazon until 12/15

Luc's writing projects

My flash fiction collection, Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories, is part of an Amazon Kindle promotion and is free just until December 15th: here’s the link.

“It’s not easy to inject an entire world into one scene, but Reid does that time and time again. The characters, whether they live in one sentence or 20, are real people.”
– David Kopaska-Merkel in his review of Bam! on Dreams & Nightmares

“172 fantasy and science fiction, flash stories … each of them short enough to read in a few minutes, each of them rich, well crafted, meaningful.”
– Deborah Walker in her review of Bam! on Skull Salad Reviews

“thanks to this author’s unfettered imagination, quirky sense of humor, and great touch with twist endings, these short stories provide entertaining and often intriguing micro reading experiences. Highly recommended!”

“Bam! is like a magic pocket that is way bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. You reach in and never know what you’re going to pull out.”

“These stories were funny, memorable, meaningful. Dark chocolate, flashes.”

“Some absolute gems hide in here, such as the ingenious and infinitely anthologize-able ‘The Last Log Entries at the Philadelphia Office of the Centers for Happiness Control.'”

–Amazon.com reviews

“Reid’s smart humor and eye for irony are sure to attract plenty of readers, and keep them perusing the collection at their leisure.  The wit he employs in the stories is perfect for setting up the most poignant of stories … because just as you begin to anticipate more humor, the weight of what is being said sort of sneaks up on you.  It makes for a great read.”
– Shelly Bryant, reviewing Bam! at SlothJockey.com

 

 

 

 

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Sandra Tayler on Some Persistent Advantages of Plain Old Paper Books

eBooks and Publishing

Sandra Tayler, a friend from Codex, recently posted her reasons for sticking to a large extent with paper books over eBooks. While she has a much different take than I do on the issue, she makes some very meaningful points, and I especially like her ideas about children’s books, which she makes better use of than many of us parents. You can read her thoughts on the matter at http://www.onecobble.com/2011/11/05/kindle-update-why-i-still-buy-paper-books/.

Photo by altopower

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Amazon Starts Free Kindle Lending Library

eBooks and Publishing

This came as a surprise: today Amazon announced they are starting a free lending library for Kindle owners who have an Amazon Prime membership. Amazon Prime has to be one of the most unlikely bargains out there. Who thought of putting streaming movies, free shipping, and temporary eBook access together in one package (for $79 a year)? Counterintuitive or not, it’s an attractive option if you order a lot of things on the Web.

Even if you do already own a Kindle and have Amazon Prime, don’t plan on suddenly being able to read whatever you want for free. Amazon is only offering a limited number of books under the program, with a maximum of one loan per month per Prime member. With that said, though, there’s an impressive array of books available–more than 5,000 of them, including some current bestsellers.

I continue to worry about the fate of libraries as eReading spreads and the eBook world becomes more flexible and friendly to readers. Post your comments, links to articles elsewhere on the Web, or links to your own blogging on the subject below.

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