Mark – Page 32

A Writer Muses on Marketing and Sales: Part III

February 25, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

Whatever your art, craft or business, and whatever your interest in reaching customers, core aspects of your products or services are probably not going to change no matter what you learn about audience or customer preferences. Even when cash-rich corporations like Microsoft or Google decide to enter new markets, they still tend to favor businesses that reflect core interests, leverage strengths or offer an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.

Microsoft doesn’t make a ToastBox because there’s nothing to be gained by entering the toaster market — or at least nothing to be gained that can’t be gained by other, more synergistic means. Google doesn’t make a Fish Finder because there’s no way to tie Google’s advertising and search business to the echolocation of catfish or crappies. Both companies have the muscle to enter any market they want to enter, but even if an exec proved a profit could be made it’s unlikely they would pull the trigger.

Why? Because somewhere along the line a simple question would be asked: How does Product X fit with our goals as a company? If it couldn’t be shown that the ToastBox or Fish Finder was part of the company’s mission, the product would be shelved and resources devoted to something else. [ Read more ]

A Writer Muses on Marketing and Sales: Part II

February 23, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

There’s no right answer to whether you should view writing as a business or not. It’s a personal choice dependent on myriad factors. Knowing the answer, however, allows you to effectively navigate choices you’ll face in marketing and/or selling your work. While you should always control your costs, there’s a big difference between the expense of a print-on-demand book intended for friends and family and the effort you may need to embrace in order to take a work to the competitive retail market.

Inextricably Bound
In the previous post I said that marketing and sales were two ends of the same spectrum. The desire to resolve uncertainties about potential consumer interest is the glue by which marketing and sales are inextricably bound.

Exploring market uncertainties may involve advertising or promotional events or other common marketing and sales strategies. The results of those tests will be measured in pageviews, conversions, purchases or other metrics. As a writer, I think you should constantly remind yourself that marketing and sales are most useful when they are used to answer questions relevant to your personal objectives. Treating marketing and sales as gauges rather than goads means you will be less likely to sink cash into marketing and sales ‘solutions’ that are, at best, speculative, or be led astray by people who will gladly take your money in exchange for promises they can’t possibly keep. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Mr. SEO Evangelist.) [ Read more ]

A Writer Muses on Marketing and Sales: Part I

February 21, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

What exactly is the difference between marketing and sales?

That’s a question I asked myself recently, and after studying the subject a bit I think I have a useful answer. This post and the posts that follow represent everything I think I now know about marketing and sales, but I claim no mastery in the matter. I simply have a better understanding of how each relates to my aims as an author, and I offer these posts in that spirit.

If the average person has a general conception of marketing and sales it’s that they are aspects of business that drive customer purchases — at times by any means necessary. While true, I think this consumer-driven perspective misplaces the emphasis for authors who would like to profit from marketing and sales. Why? Because it’s hard to imagine an author who would like to have fewer readers, which in turn implies that all marketing and sales efforts are inherently useful for every author. They’re not.

In the great majority of cases, marketing and sales are not a means by which otherwise disinterested consumers can be compelled to spend. All the marketing and sales efforts in the world are generally not going to encourage someone to buy a new stove if their stove is working just fine. Treating marketing and sales as weapons of war may be what amped-up marketing weasels do in caffeinated team-spirit huddles, but I don’t think that’s a useful point of view for authors to adopt. And not just because the opportunity to sell books in a predatory fashion is minimal at best. [ Read more ]

Technology Risk and the Independent Author

February 7, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

Two years ago I looked at hundreds of WordPress themes in anticipation of putting up this site. I’d never paid for a theme before, but time and again I kept coming back to the themes at StudioPress.com. Their designs were clean, their support seemed solid, and after a while I decided to pull the trigger on their Streamline theme, which is the theme you see on this site.

For a year and a half I was perfectly satisfied. The support was excellent, the theme performed as expected, and I was able to get on with the business of blogging.

About six months ago, however — give or take — StudioPress became a subsidiary of CopyBlogger, the underlying software for the themes was radically altered, and the support on the site became spottier and more contentious. I never faulted the moderators for putting limits on the amount of customization they offered, but the tone and frequency of such reprimands seemed to signal an intent to drive additional fee-for-service revenue from the basic themes being sold.

Because I knew upgrading my current theme would break a number of modifications I’d made, I put off the upgrade as long as possible. At the same time I faced an ever-growing backlog of changes I wanted to make on my site, and at some point it became obvious that I should upgrade before making any additional changes to an older version I had every intention of migrating away from. [ Read more ]

Formatting TYOTE for CreateSpace POD

January 26, 2011 By Mark 5 Comments

This post documents the workflow I followed while formatting my short story collection, The Year of the Elm (TYOTE), for printing with CreateSpace. If you’re venturing down the same print-on-demand (POD) road I hope my experience makes your project a little easier. I also fervently hope this post reminds me of all the useful things I learned the next time I have a manuscript to format. (Had I not kept notes, ninety-percent of what follows would already be lost.)

As posted previously, I finalized my cover redesign, uploaded the files to CreateSpace, and got the proof back in short order. To my utter amazement, all of the decisions I made turned out exactly as I hoped, and I was quite pleased with the result.

But I worked hard for that happiness. [ Read more ]

Two Spaces After a Period

January 19, 2011 By Mark 70 Comments

It is acceptable to use two spaces after a period.

Why am I moved to make this declaration? Because every so often a typographic tyrant goes off their OCD medication and launches a caustic diatribe at anyone who prefers to use two spaces between adjoining sentences. These deranged attacks, absurd as they are, can do real damage to writers. Ditchwalk will not tolerate anyone who uses authority or prominence to ridicule or intimidate writers, or in any way make writing more difficult than it already is.

The Question in Context
As a writer of any kind — private, professional, traditional, experimental — you have two obligations. The first is to be honest about your own intentions. The second is to communicate your intentions to the intended reader as effectively as possible.

These obligations hold whether you are writing an email to a single person or publishing a work for the masses. They remain your responsibility even if you choose to involve others in the process. Agents, editors, publishers, typographers and others who make a living off authorship are peripheral to your work as a writer. They may be central to your goals as a business person, they may be central to your ability to produce a physical book or e-book file, but they are not writers.

You are a writer. Your job is to write for your readers. That’s true whether you’re an established author or just starting out. The problem, of course, is that when you’re just starting out you’re not sure what you’re doing. Complicating matters is the fact that some of the agents, editors, publishers, typographers and others who make a living off authorship will gladly claim expertise and authority even in matters they know nothing about. This includes everything from telling you what your obligations are as a writer to how many blank spaces should follow a period.

Why would someone do this? Because it makes money. Because they are control freaks. Because they genuinely believe their little corner of the universe is the only thing that matters. Because they have confused the needs of the reader with the demands of the market. Because they hate the fact that you can write and they can’t. Take your pick.

Whether you choose to defer to peripheral voices or ignore them, no choice voids your basic obligations as a writer. There are no shortcuts. You must ask and answer a million questions in order to write well. At times you may find there is no agreement about an issue. In those instances you will have to choose what you prefer or think best, not what’s right or true.

The most important thing I can tell you about navigating any writing issue is this. The second most important thing I can tell you is to always keep perspective. Relative to the eternal obligations of every author, the question of how many spaces should follow a period is a flea on the great stellar flank of our galaxy.

You should also be particularly wary of any agent, editor, publisher, typographer or other person peripheral to the writer-reader relationship who uses a claim of expertise to cow you into conformity. Authorship is about making conscious, informed choices, not about blindly accepting the opinions of others.

How many writers have ever said that two spaces after a period is a sign of amateurism? How many writers would dismiss your content outright if you used two spaces instead of one? Is this a common source of discussion at writing workshops and retreats? Have you ever seen a breakout session at a convention titled The Two-Space Debate? Has anyone ever said, in the entire history of the world, “This would have been a great book, but because the author used two spaces after a period it is an unmitigated disaster.”

If you are writing a book narrowly targeted at people who believe two spaces after a period is a portent of the End Times, then yes, you should probably use a single space after a period. Other than that, you should learn as much about this and every other issue as you can, then make your own case-by-case decisions.

For myself, I have generally used two spaces after a period to no ill effect. No one who has ever paid me money to write, or ever received a document written by me, has ever asked me to use a single space after a period, or even commented about my practice. Recently, however, after twenty-five years of writing, I did come across an instance in which I found two spaces to be distracting, and I will expand on that experience below.

In the remainder of this post I intend to: dismantle a recent diatribe against the use of two spaces after a period; explain when and why I use one space or two spaces after a period; make the case that excessive interest in this issue should be included as classification criteria in DSM-5. [ Read more ]

The TYOTE Proof Arrives

January 9, 2011 By Mark 1 Comment

On December 31st I ordered the proof for my first print-on-demand (POD) book, a short story collection titled The Year of the Elm (TYOTE). I’m using CreateSpace (CS) to manufacture the book, and CS gave me three shipping options for the proof. I chose the slowest and cheapest option: three weeks for a little over three dollars. I did so because I couldn’t imagine it would actually take three weeks for the proof to arrive, and it didn’t. It took eight days, including a long three-day weekend. [ Read more ]

Sticking a Shiv in Mark Twain

January 4, 2011 By Mark 6 Comments

I ran across a story yesterday about NewSouth, Inc’s intent to publish an expurgated version of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which the n-word has been replaced. At first I assumed this to be some sort of fringe, crackpot effort. Upon reading further, however, I realized that a lot of thought had gone into the decision, and that the people behind the effort seemed sincere. That their objectives are misguided and ultimately untenable in light of their own stated beliefs only makes the decision to go ahead with the project that much more confusing and disappointing.

Before I question the individual and collective rationales that have led what appear to be otherwise decent people to the precipice of insanity, I want to make a larger point. Anyone over the age of twenty knows that you do not alter an author’s text to fit your world view. No matter how personally offensive you find an author’s words, no matter how society may have changed since a text was written, no matter how difficult open discussion of an author’s work might be, you do not, ever — ever — change an author’s text to make your life easier or better. You can write your own book, you can write volumes of criticism about the original text, but you’re not allowed to rewrite history for your own ends.

Everybody knows this, and until now I assumed that literary scholars and publishers understood the reasoning behind this prohibition better than most. That the initiator of this particular act of literary barbarism is Twain scholar Alan Gribben, a long-time English professor and head of the English Department at Auburn University at Montgomery, is almost mind-boggling. The publishers aiding and abetting Professor Gribben at NewSouth are Randall Williams and Suzanne La Rosa.

Anticipating pushback against his bastard child, Professor Gribben has already gone on a name-calling offensive:

Gribben has no illusions about the new edition’s potential for controversy. “I’m hoping that people will welcome this new option, but I suspect that textual purists will be horrified,” he said.

If you’re not familiar with the hallowed halls of academia, this is the kind of thing that professors say when they they’re trying to protect shaky intellectual turf. Accusing people of textual purism is a transparent preemptive attempt to demonize those who object to Professor Gribben’s literary crime. It also conveniently ignores the fact that intentionally changing words in order to make a work more appealing or salable has nothing to do with textual purism. What Professor Gribben is doing is not disputing or advocating for a version of Huckleberry Finn, but actively rewriting Mark Twain in a demented attempt to save Twain from himself.

That NewSouth has decided to publish Professor Gribben’s version of history is perhaps understandable from a business perspective, but disappointing in terms of the cultural stewardship we hope all publishers embrace. Again, no dissection of the publisher’s motives need be undertaken in order to understand how flawed this decision is and how completely it undercuts the foundations of authorship, history and culture. Any publisher’s attempt to alter an author’s words is a violation not just of that author’s work, but of every author’s work, and anyone who proposes going down that road for any reason — and I mean any reason — by definition lacks the necessary steel to assess, edit or publish literature. [ Read more ]

CreateSpace Shipping for Proofs

December 31, 2010 By Mark 4 Comments

My desire to offer a print-on-demand (POD) version of my short story collection, The Year of the Elm, is close to fruition. I’ve completed the content formatting and cover design, and passed CreateSpace’s submission tests for both files.

Yesterday I ordered my first proof. While filling out the ordering form I was given the following shipping options:

Economy Shipping $3.61 Estimated Arrival Date: Tue, Jan 18, 2011
Standard Shipping $6.39 Estimated Arrival Date: Wed, Jan 12, 2011
Priority Shipping $24.78 Estimated Arrival Date: Tue, Jan 04, 2011

Now, keep in mind that I ordered my proof on December 30th. That means the estimated shipping times for the above options are 19 days, 13 days and 5 days respectively. Those times also include 3, 2 and 1 weekends, respectively — and all include a national holiday for New Year’s Day. [ Read more ]

Character Flaws

December 29, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

When I started Neil Rorke’s character blog I knew it would be difficult if not impossible to drive reader interest through plotting. Foreshadowing a big plot event, then delivering on that moment, could easily (if not necessarily) lead to a soap-opera/cliffhanger mentality. Not only would that kind of storytelling compel more of the same, it would reveal me as the author-orchestrator of those events and diminish any sense of character I might be able to create. And that would be the exact opposite of the effect I wanted to have on readers.

By sticking with aspects of character, and by sticking with the manner of posting inherent in real-world character blogs, I’m giving readers very little to hang on when they drop by. Whatever it is in plotting that drives a story, I’m not making that available.

That’s a conscious storytelling choice, of course, but it’s also consistent with Neil as a person and with what’s going on in Neil’s life at this moment. So instead of trying to drive Neil toward some particular plot event, or even some revelation of character, I’ve been trying to let Neil be Neil. He gets to post about things that interest him, and he gets to say whatever he wants to say, whenever he wants, as long as it’s in character. [ Read more ]