Archives for September 2009

Self-Publishing and Me

September 30, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

The following post is my entry into the Backword Books Contest, which ends today. And yes, I almost forgot.

As I noted in a previous post, until very recently self-publishing was tainted with the implication of failure. It was tacit admission of inability in a world where ability is deemed equal parts talent, determination, networking, pedigree, bombast, salesmanship, sensationalism and hype.

For writers unable to find traditional publishing outlets — for whatever reason — there have always been self-publishing options, including subsidy and vanity publishers. Whatever you think about those options, the important point here is that technology has always been available to pursue one’s own publishing objectives, provided one had the money to do so.

So if the technology has always been there, what’s changed? Why is self-publishing no longer inherently considered a sign of failure? The internet is the answer, but not for the reason you think. [ Read more ]

Reality as Anchor

September 30, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

HarperStudio floated a link on Twitter today pointing to a post on their blog. The post, titled Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose and written by Bob, reflects on a recent panel discussion of publishing bigwigs which was moderated by Chris “Long Tail” Anderson.

After detailing Anderson’s recent experiment of giving away e-versions of his most recent book (which Bob does a poor job of relating: see comments for Chris’s corrections and Bob’s apology), Bob says this:

“The problem is when authors want to have their cakes and eat them, too…getting a large advance but wanting to experiment with free content models, or getting a large advance and then deciding that what they really want is more marketing.”

It’s hard to respond to this sort of thing, in the way that it’s always hard to talk to someone who has an entirely different reality base. [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: 1899.ca

September 29, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

If you don’t know who MCM is, I’m going to skip any explanations myself and instead quote from the 1899.ca About page:

Hi there! I’m MCM, an all-around lunatic.

Note that ‘lunatic’ here is not pejorative. In fact, I think MCM is the only person I’ve run across so far who manages to take online fiction and self-publishing seriously and not seriously at the same time. For example:

Next Tuesday, I’m going to embark on a very intense adventure to write my next novel Typhoon in three days. To achieve this goal, I will need some help from you, and also a whole lot of structure. Here’s the general idea…

A day (as you may have heard) is made up of 24 hours. I am going to set aide 4 of those hours for sleep, because I don’t want to die midway through the event. I’ll wake up at 6am and stop work at 2am the next morning (all times Canadian Pacific time). I will also need 3 more hours a day for eating, bathing, and bringing-kids-to-schoolness. All in all, about 17 hours of solid work time, repeated three times. 51 hours.

Read the whole post and it makes complete sense — except for the insanity of the premise. Then again, people volunteer themselves for Ironman Triathlons andultramarathons, so why not a novel in three days?

When MCM is not at home you’ll see sightings on other sites like this one, and this one. Those two links are a well-thought-out two-part series on why online writers need good reviewers and vice-versa. (Incredibly, there’s almost no lunacy.)

You can also find MCM in the comments here, on another thread having to do with online reviews of online works. Which, if you take the time to read them along with the other links, will make it clear that this is someone who’s thinking hard about how to turn online and self-published works into viable products.

And that’s not as crazy as it sounds.

— Mark Barrett

Feedback and Distortion

September 29, 2009 By Mark 5 Comments

In what has turned out to be a nice bit of convergence, I started this post last night (title included), then woke to find a very nice interview of Richard Nash by Guy Gonzalez that helped focus my thoughts.

Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed myself hesitating to write a few comments on sites for fear of A) appearing like a self-marketing weasel, and B) appearing like a know-it-all weasel. It’s not so much that I’m trying to pass along anything even remotely controversial, but that, as a writer, I’m intensely conscious of how my comments or feedback may affect other readers’ or visitors’ perceptions. To the extent that all information in a conversation affects the next part of that conversation, these things are inevitable. Distortion in this sense is neither positive or negative: it’s simply the effect of the weight of one’s words on the subject at hand. [ Read more ]

An Up-Close Look at the Sausage Machine

September 29, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Imagine for a moment that you can write a story — any length, any genre — and when you are finished you can make it available for the whole world to read. You need a very small amount of money to do this, for computing and technology-related costs. You need some understanding of technology, but nothing prohibitive, and people online will help you learn what you need to learn for nothing other than the satisfaction of doing so.

Hold this idea in your mind and linger on it. You write a story, and the whole world can read it. There is nothing between you and your audience….

Now consider this:

The sheer book-length nature of books combined with the seemingly inexorable reductions in editorial staffs and the number of submissions most editors receive, to say nothing of the welter of non-editorial tasks that most editors have to perform, including holding the hands of intensely self-absorbed and insecure writers, fielding frequently irate calls from agents, attending endless and vapid and ritualistic meetings, having one largely empty ceremonial lunch after another, supplementing publicity efforts, writing or revising flap copy, ditto catalog copy, refereeing jacket-design disputes, and so on — all these conditions taken together make the job of a trade-book acquisitions editor these days fundamentally impossible. The shrift given to actual close and considered editing almost has to be short and is growing shorter, another very old and evergreen publishing story but truer now than ever before.

From the point of view of an author considering doing business with a publishing house, this is the kind of behind-the-scenes look at the book industry that has prevented me, for most of my writing life, from ever really trying to break in. Yes, I’ve made a few attempts, but at some point — and fairly quickly — I’ve realized that the game is so heavily weighted against me that I would be better off buying a lottery ticket. [ Read more ]

Parallel Publishing

September 29, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

There is word today that e-book publisher Smashwords is partnering with Sony to make Smashwords-published titles available on Sony’s e-book portal (and, by obvious extension, to Sony’s line of e-book readers). With Smashwords’ earlier announcement of a distribution deal making e-book titles available through Barnes & Nobles’ retail stores, it’s clear that the barriers to entry for independent authors in every market are falling by the wayside.

As a writer who wants to reach as many readers as I possibly can, and do so on their terms by supporting the format and technology that each individual is most comfortable with, it seems to me that I am very close to being able to do just that. I understand that there are a lot of issues to be worked out including compatibility problems, standards issues, proprietary attempts to own markets, etc., etc., etc., but from my point of view as a writer I don’t think I need to worry about these issues except to the extent that I need to understand the current offerings in order to exploit them. [ Read more ]

The Publishing Beat

September 29, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

Over the past month or so, as I’ve been learning about the publishing business, one of the things I’ve been looking for is a good writer/reporter who covers the industry. I know where to get wire-service rewrites of industry press releases: what I want is someone who knows the business inside and out.

Today, while digging through some dusty old search results, I came across the name Marion Maneker attached to two different stories from late spring concerning Amazon and its Kindle e-reader. Both were written by Maneker for a site I’ve never heard of — The Big Money — which seems to be a sub-section of Slate.

At the bottom of both stories I found this:

Marion Maneker is the former publisher of HarperCollins’s business imprint.

I don’t know anything about HarperCollins’ business imprint, or even about Marion Maneker. But the Amazon/Kindle stories seemed to be written from the point of view of someone who knew the lay of the publishing land. [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: Kassia Krozser | Booksquare.com

September 28, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Kassia Krozser is the proprietor of Booksquare.com. I don’t know her, but I feel like I know something about her from reading this post on her site:

Welcome back from whatever you did this summer. Me, I spent my time building a digital publishing company. It went mostly okay, though, in the end, there was no company to show for it.

It’s a smart piece written in the face of real loss, but among the ashes Kassia not only finds useful lessons learned, she takes time to map her own experience onto the broader publishing revolution.

Then again, Booksquare is a quiet site not given to spasms of pop-culture linkage, but rather to more considered thought and analysis of the rapidly evolving book world. Which means it’s my kind of site.

— Mark Barrett

The Agony of Success

September 28, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Why do storytellers tell stories? There are as many reasons as there are writers. Here’s a sampling.

One thing I’ve never been comfortable with, however, is a storyteller — and particularly a successful storyteller (however you gauge success) — who talks about how difficult, unbearable, agonizing, hopeless, unrewarding, soul-destroying, righteous, brutal, painful, exhausting or heroic the job of storytelling is. [ Read more ]

The Coaching Encyclopedia

September 28, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I had no idea there was anything called a book coach. (Obviously this says something about my own impoverished imagination and lack of initiative, but for equally obvious reasons I would prefer not to dwell on those subjects.)

And I have to say, the questions being asked by the book coach at the other end of the above link are good questions. But I’m still stuck on the idea that book coaches even exist, and I can tell I’m not going to be able to shake free of this new obsession before this post ends. [ Read more ]