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The State of Print on Demand Publishing
iMage
Patrick Swenson
Muffy Morrigan
M. Todd Gallowglass
Duane Wilkins
  • Even traditional publishers going to print on demand
  • The Oxford Dictionary is going to POD
  • POD: books never go out of print, so your backlist generate value.
  • You have the ability to quickly fix errors that are found.
  • Two major groups: Lightning Source (Ingrim) vs Createspace (Amazon)
  • They differ in whether they charge for changes. It costs you to make changes for Lightning Source.
  • ISBNs
    • If you take a POD-house ISBN, the publisher shows up as Createspace.
    • If you do your own ISBN, you can be the publisher.
    • Each edition needs its own ISBN: e.g. mass market paperback vs. trade paperback.
  • Pagecount and trim size affect cost of book
  • deviant art: 
    • hundreds of artists
    • easy way to find independent artists for doing cover art.
    • (make sure you have permission for any models/buildings/etc that are visible.)
  • iStockPhoto
    • reasons photos and art, royalty free
    • if you find an artist you like there, go to their website, because they may have other work not on iStockPhoto.
  • Be aware there are commercial and private fonts: you need to make sure you have the correct rights for commercial use.
  • Some cover artists do the entire cover including titles, etc, some only do the art.
  • Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal. Need 3-4 month lead time for ARCs to get reviews.
  • Your cover art should look good even icon sized: because most people are shopping online. 
  • Some small presses will still allow you to keep your e-book rights. If so, it’s a great deal, because you can sell a kindle book and keep 70%. 
  • Q: 
    • I’m self-publishing, trade paperback, and I want to keep the price under $10. So I have a pretty slim POD margin, less than my kindle version. And it’s worse even it it’s sold through a bookstore other than Amazon: then I get about 5 cents.
    • Any tips on how to get the cost down, or conversely, is there a cross-over point at which it makes sense to do a limited print run to get the cost down?

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Whining versus angst
Corry L. Lee, Alma Alexander, Elizabeth Guizetti, Stephanie Weippert, Anna Sheehan
  • Why do characters come from?
    • sometimes they leap out
    • characters take quite a bit of work. 
    • given the plot of my book, what’s a character that’s going to be interesting if they go through a change that mirrors the plot of the book?
  • If you have a character that says “here I am”, and then you have to write a story, what do you do?
    • Elizabeth: I need to start with a plot, their occupation, and their gender. once I have that, the rest jumps out. I’ve very plot driven, not character driven.
    • Alma: I wrote down character sketches (~5 lines) for nine different characters, then started writing. No idea of what the plot is.
    • Stephanie: I start with a starting scene. I imagine a woman driving in a stormy night. Then ask, why is she doing that? And it turns out she’s lost her job, and her boyfriend, and her apartment complex is being torn down. 
  • If you have a character where everything is going wrong, how do you keep them from being whiny?
    • Anna: I have a very passive character, who is that way because of emotional abuse. The trick to get away with it is to make it an unreliable first-person narrator. 
    • Stephanie: 
      • anger to overcome whiny
    • Alma: 
    • Elizabeth: Most of the characters I write about have real problems. If they whine a little bit, the reader understands that’s acceptable. But I also go to action: the character does something.
    • Corry: If you have somebody who is cycling on something in their past, they can’t just loop on the same thing, and say the same thing: e.g. “i lost my job. it sucks that I lost my job. i can’t believe i lost my job.” it’s time to progress: “oh, maybe i lost my job because i came to work with a mohawk.” or go into action.
  • What about action characters? If you have a really active characters, how does that balance out? (e.g. how do you write a two-dimensional action here?)
    • Elizabeth: they have to have real problems. they need to have personalities, likes and dislikes, friends. This rounds them out.
    • Anna: Has a character who is wildly angry, whose impulse is always to hit first. But need to keep him from being one dimensional. So he fights this anger. It has a background: he was institutionalized as a child. And it causes him problems.
    • Corry: Their personality needs to build with the world and intensify the story. Otherwise it is just tacked on.
  • Questions
    • What about secondary characters?
      • Corry: 
        • I like to look at the main characters. These are aspects of my main characters. Now how can I flip that aspect, and give it to a secondary character. Now each character and the aspects itself is more interesting.
        • Too often secondary characters are just milk-toast. They’re not interesting enough, or not weird enough. 
      • Elizabeth: Every secondary character has to fulfill a purpose, and if they aren’t fulfilling enough purposes, then combine secondary characters into one: makes them more interesting, fulfill more purposes, and have less names to remember.
      • Corry: Your secondary characters should want and need things, just as your primary character does. And if what they want is at odds with the primary character, all the better.
  • How do you demonstrate characterization?
    • Elizabeth: generally a quiet scene, something that furthers the plot, but something they do uniquely: e.g. the thief character who washes their laundry by hand and hangs it inside so it won’t be stolen.
    • Stephanie: Let the character make their own choices: big things: what are they going to choose if they can only save one of two things. little things: what music they listen to.
    • Anna: I do a lot of dialogue, and focus on the off the wall.
    • Corry: Action. Have your character doing something. The choice of what they do, and how they do it tells us a lot. Washing the blood out of the laundry is very different from someone doesn’t wash the blood out.
  • Q: What if you want to push your character over the edge and shatter them?
    • Do your research and make sure what kind of crazy it is.
    • You can’t go back.
    • Editors might not like it.
    • The character is changed permanently.
    • But they should be put together in a way that is functional.

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Line Editing vs. Copy Editing
S.A. Bolich
Muffy Morrigan
iMage
Carole Parker
Mike Shepard Moscoe
  • In general, money goes to the author, not from the author.
  • But if you are indie published, you are the publisher. Then there are expenses, including editing.
  • Line editing
    • grammar errors, 
  • Story editing
    • plot holes, characters acting out of character.
  • Story editing can improve a book, not just fix errors.
  • Suggested rewrites… sometimes writers don’t make the exact change, but get what the error is, and address it another way.
  • One of the drawbacks of indie publishing is that not everyone has an editor.
  • If you’re going to do an independent publication, you still have to treat it as a traditional house would. You need a story editor, you need a line editor.
  • “This is a great story. Can you rewrite it from third person POV?”
    • Seemed like crazy feedback. But I did it. 
    • It became so much more powerful. Better story, grew wordcount to appropriate length.
  • Muffy: 
    • Have an amazing editor. Every suggestion she’s ever made has made the book better.
    • Have done both line editing and story editing.
    • story editing should check continuity (facts remain constant in the book, e.g. dead in scene 3 is still dead in scene 9) and historical/world accuracy.
  • “It only needs a light edit” –> it’s never true.
  • “fix it” –> the key words for story editing
    • sometimes it only takes two sentences to fix a major story element. can change “out of character” to “in character”.
    • the key is to tell a writer that something needs fixing, not how to fix it.
  • you want your first readers to give you this kind of feedback.
  • Q: How do you find an editor?
    • First, do the best you can with a writing group, or by reading Strunk & White, by using first readers — to get it in the best shape possible. Otherwise you can spend a fortune on your editor.
    • Second, editors should give you references and have credentials. Anyone can call themselves an editor.
    • Third, go to cons, and take note of the names of panelists. 
  • As writers, we all have a tick. using the word “just” or “a little”. editors will come back and say “you need to remove 75% of ‘justs’”. this is good feedback.
  • When you’re shopping around for an editor, you need to ask what they read and work in. You need to find someone literate with your genre.
  • Have more than one first reader, and do them serially:
    • first one reads for story edits.
    • later ones receive the fixed version, confirming that story edits worked and now nit-picking.

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Building Cultures
Ted Butlet
Robin Hobb
Rhiannon Held
Frances Pauli
S.A. Bolich
  • When you are creating a culture (or recreating a historical one), if things differ, you need to spend time educating the reader: and you have to pick and choose what you spend that time,
    • e.g. historically women wore these incredibly tall french wigs that we would consider ridiculous looking. if you want to make that work, you have to show people flirting with that women, so the audience understands it is attractive. but is that worth it, or do you pick something else to spend the energy on?
    • e.g. werewolves heal really quickly, so a werewolf culture might be prone to fighting/tussling. a reader might perceive that as extremely violent. so you can choose to tone down the violence or educate the reader. 
  • cultures don’t stay static. how far back do you go to understand the culture?
  • you don’t want to dump all the culture on the reader. the writer needs to understand it.
  • we bring all of our cultural assumptions with us when we read. “it’s beneficial to be faithful.” can we write a culture that doesn’t have that?
  • avoiding infodumps
    • Ted Butler:
      • assume intelligence on the part of the reader
      • do it implicitly.
      • if something needs to be explicit, bracket it with action scenes.
    • Robin Hodd
      • book was in 1st person
      • but needed to convey information that the first character wouldn’t have known or have naturally shared.
      • so each chapter started with a letter or a news article or something.
      • also, in our culture, we teach our children through nursery rhymes and sayings. we can use this in writing.
    • Rhiannon Held
      • it comes up in problem solving scenes. who gets to speak, who has to argue for their ideas vs. whose are just accepted. who doesn’t get a voice.
  • you can create cultures based on earth cultures:
    • the wolf cultures are based not so much on wolves, but on hunter-gatherer societies, and how they achieve status within their culture.
    • spaceship cultures can be based on sailing ship cultures… a closed ecosystem, long time enclosed, etc.
    • or weird cultures: 
      • eskimo: elderly walking out into the cold to free up community resources. 
      • baby boxes: for abandoning children
(Buy Silver by Rhiannon Held: werewolves in urban setting, how they fit into human culture)

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I was lucky enough to see Melissa Hart speak at Willamette Writers‘s monthly meeting. Here are my notes from the meeting. (Melissa’s a fast speaker, so my notes are spotty, but still worthwhile.) I felt like I learned a ton of useful information even though I currently write fiction.

Melissa Hart
Writing Memoirs
  • “I got started at age 16 writing bad cat poetry. Would you like to hear some?”
  • The Assault of Laughter
  • Gringa
    • In 1979, my mother came out as a lesbian, and (as was common at the time) lost custody of her children as a result.
  • Short memoir in magazines: love this genre.
  • Contrary to what lots of people are saying, memoir is not dying: People want to read about other people’s lives. 
  • Ariel Gore: “A memoir is to journalistic autobiography as a movie based on real-life events is to a documentary”.
  • Memoir has narrative arc: rising action, climax, falling actions.
  • Form: Essay, social or political commentary, slice of life vignettes (look up Orion magazine Brian Doyle: amazing page long memoir that will knock your socks off).
  • It must teach us something. Offer the reader a gift. Examples:
    • 21st century foraging: giving us adventure tales of learning to eat what is outside our house.
    • another way the river has: the gift of traveling down the columbia river in a handmade boat.
    • growing up rich
    • growing up in poverty
    • relationship to candy
  • “90% of the submissions he receives are too personal. it’s too bad your grandmother died, but what are you going to tell the thousands of readers who grandmother’s die every day?” you need to teach the reader something.
  • you must tell readers how to think about a given subject. 
  • a.j. jacobs: immersion journalism. 
    • “my year of living bibically.”
      • his year of living literally as close as possible to the bible
  • natalie goldberg: wrote: old friend from far away.
    • memoir doesn’t have to be a “one time” thing. you can write about your relationship to coffee, or to the men in your life.
  • you don’t have to be old to write a memoir. you have what you need by the time you’re 12.
  • example:
    • candy freak
    • one man’s owl: biologist writes about an owl he adopted that 
  • exercises to do:
    • what’s one thing that makes you unique: (my teen years were something like Lindsay Weir: a mix of math team and stoners.)
    • what’s one thing about which you are passionate about: (freedom to pursue my dreams.) 
  • a glut of memoir right now about: cancer, alzhemiers, moms dying.
  • surprise is what grabs an editor. fill your writing with surprise, whether it is long, short, or just the query letter. 
  • memoir must start in the midst of conflict. you can always flashback. or you can ignore the past.
    • first page, first paragraph, first sentence
  • setting: you must tell us about the session, the tree that fell on the roof, the dust on the wall.
  • the cure for depression: immerse yourself in the sensory details of the present moment: what do I see, what do I smell, what do I feel, what do I hear?
  • this must be in your writing. 
    • make a table with five columns, one for each sense, and one row for each chapter.
    • make sure that each chapter engages every sense of the reader.
  • fun, fun, fun: you must have characters and dialogue.
    • don’t make people up.
    • but you create the people: your mom, your dog, your friend.
    • what are these people like? what is their body language like? what is their way of speaking? what do they do when they get nervous? how do they dress? (this stuff all engages the reader, and it’s fun.)
    • “what my hair style means to me.”
  • dialogue
    • no one wants to read 300 pages of narration.
    • but you can’t remember what your uncle said 40 years ago before he went to vietnam.
    • you have to have dialogue.
    • the dialogue has to be true to the person, as much as possible.
    • dialogue reveals character. and it’s important for moments of revelation.
  • surprise
    • do the following exercise: what’s one surprising thing about your life: (I blew up a car.)
  • give us scenes / anecdotes.
    • give us scenes with character, dialogues, and setting.
    • but it can’t just be scene after scene: then you might as well write fiction.
    • the reflection is what makes it a memoir.
    • and we need theme
      • the theme is usually:
        • my family is crazy and i survived
        • my dog is crazy and i survived
        • sickness is crazy and i survived
      • the theme must be throughout the work
  • simile and metaphor is OK
  • but hyperbole: a little is OK if you are writing humor.
  • there should be narrative arc on every page, in every chapter, and for the book as a whole.
  • writing process
    • free writing
    • shitty first draft (annie lamott)
    • make yourself uncomfortable: wear a too tight dress, and write until your piece is done, being desperate to take it off.
  • after you’ve finished your rough draft, ask yourself:
    • what’s at stake for my narrator and other characters?
    • where is the victim in my work and how can i delete?
      • (no one wants to read about victims. we want to read about empowered people.)
  • how do you get published?
    • for short length: look for submission guidelines. read them. they are what the publisher likes. and exactly how they want you to submit (hardcopy, electronic, etc.)
    • for book length: pitch at writing conference. it could be portland, or you could go anywhere in the world.
    • sha.com: 
    • most editors and agents want to see the full manuscript.
    • look for interview on website about self-publishing
  • questions
    • what are the legal ramifications about writing about living people?
      • they should not be able to be identified. change names, regional information, etc.
      • volunteered from audience “give the character a small penis” – they’ll never own up to it.
    • but won’t your parents be identified?
      • your parents will certainly know. but you don’t want to hate on them, even if estranged. i legally changed my last name so that my father couldn’t be identified.
    • but what about vernacular?
      • use a particular syntax up front a few times to establish them, and then let it go.
      • a choice word here and there.
      • a few sentences up front, and then let it go. otherwise you exhaust readers.

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Wow, I went camping for five days. In that time:

1) Avogadro Corp won the Gold award for Science Fiction Book of the Year from Foreword Reviews.

2) My article on How To Predict the Future went live and was syndicated across dozens of sites and tweeted about almost two hundred times.

3) Brad Feld wrote a review of A.I. Apocalypse, saying “Suarez and Hertling are geniuses at what I call “near-term science fiction” and required reading for any entrepreneur or innovator around computers, software, or Internet. And everyone else, if you want to have a sense of what the future with our machines is going to be like.” 

It was fun to watch all the hubbub at the far end of a very thin data connection through a smartphone. I should go camping more often!

(Massive shout out to Brad Feld and the fine folks at Foreword Reviews.)

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The Uncanny Valley by Masahiro Mori is a highly referenced 1970 paper about human reaction to realistic robots. The first authorized and reviewed English translation has been published in the IEEE Spectrum, and is available online. He starts the paper by explaining, “in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley, which I call the uncanny valley.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Since creating an artificial human is itself one of the objectives of robotics, various efforts are underway to build humanlike robots. For example, a robot’s arm may be composed of a metal cylinder with many bolts, but by covering it with skin and adding a bit of fleshy plumpness, we can achieve a more humanlike appearance. As a result, we naturally respond to it with a heightened sense of affinity.

Many of our readers have experience interacting with persons with physical disabilities, and all must have felt sympathy for those missing a hand or leg and wearing a prosthetic limb. Recently, owing to great advances in fabrication technology, we cannot distinguish at a glance a prosthetic hand from a real one. Some models simulate wrinkles, veins, fingernails, and even fingerprints. Though similar to a real hand, the prosthetic hand’s color is pinker, as if it had just come out of the bath.

One might say that the prosthetic hand has achieved a degree of resemblance to the human form, perhaps on a par with false teeth. However, when we realize the hand, which at first site looked real, is in fact artificial, we experience an eerie sensation. For example, we could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its texture and coldness. When this happens, we lose our sense of affinity, and the hand becomes uncanny.

Here’s the diagram, as published on IEEE Spectrum:

Read the entire article.

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A great article by Dean Wesley Smith on The Secret Myth of Traditional Publishing.

An excerpt from his section on the “well known myths”:

– Traditionally published books get better promotion. Well, not really, unless your advance is way, way above six figures, and even then you are going to be doing a ton of it yourself. These days a midlist book out of a traditional publisher gets NO promotion. You do it either way.

– You get more respect if you sell your book to a traditional publisher.  Well, maybe in your own head, but real readers never care if Bantam or Bongo Books published the book they love. If it looks professional and is clean and easy to read, they will never notice the publisher. This one is only a concern to insecure writers who need professional help. Or authors who care nothing of writing, but only want to be published to brag and sit on panels at conferences or join writer’s organizations. They are not writers, they are authors.

Read the whole article here.

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Suicide Girls has published an excerpt of the final piece of The Rapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow. Here’s a bit:

The Burj Khalifa’s in-room TV gets an infinity of channels, evidently cross-wired from the cable feed for Hilbert’s hotel. It uses some evolutionary computing system to generate new programs on the fly, every time you press the channel-up button. This isn’t nearly as banal as Huw imagined it might be when she read about it on the triangular-folded cardboard standup that materialized in her hand as she reached for the remote. That’s because — as the card explained — the Burj has enough computation to model captive versions of Huw at extremely high speed, and to tailor the programming by sharpening its teeth against these instances-in-a-bottle so that every press of the button brings up eye-catching, attention-snaring material: soft-core pornography that involves pottery, mostly.

She goes on to have angst over that fact that each button press is creating and killing hordes of herself.

You can read the full excerpt here. The Rapture of the Nerds is available on Amazon.