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Weekend Reads

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Welcome to the independent writer’s life. Put up your short story collection at the beginning of the week, get pounded by malicious code injections the rest of the week.

To help keep your own chin high and lip stiff, I offer herewith a helping of distractions and items of interest that could very well make or break your ability to ever again confront the horrifying solitude of the keyboard. Drink up.

Is It Safe?

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No, it’s not safe.

No matter how much money the powers-that-be put into making the internet seem like a sunny day in the park, the internet is the technological and societal equivalent of a dark alley. From the thugs working out of mom’s basement who are trying to steal your bank account login info, to the thugs at Facebook opting you in to efforts to track, exploit and sell your every click — and intentionally making it impossible for you to opt out — there is no safe place to be on the world wide web.  [ Read more ]

The Year of the Elm — Available Now

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I recently published a collection of twelve short stories on Smashwords. [Book removed 01/03/17].

The first three stories can be viewed free. The entire collection is $4.99, and available in a variety of formats.

Original post here.

— Mark Barrett

The Print-On-Demand Mountain

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At first blush, print-on-demand (POD) seems to be the middle-ground in the publishing revolution. It yields a physical book, much like traditional publishing, but is the result of a quasi-do-it-yourself process. To the extent that holding a book, or being able to physically transfer contents in book form, is important to an author, there are a wealth of companies providing POD services. (The big three are probably Lulu, CreateSpace, and Lightning Source, with Blurb anchoring the image-heavy end of the self-pub spectrum.)

Thinking that it would be nice to make a POD version of The Year of the Elm (TYOTE) available for anyone who wanted it, I spent a fair amount of time last night digging deeper into the POD process. What I’ve come away with today is both a renewed appreciation for the craft and complexity of publishing, and a growing conviction that I don’t want to go down the POD road, at least for now.  [ Read more ]

The Year of the Elm

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That’s the title — and this is the cover — for the short story collection I’ve been working on, which I referred to in an earlier post by the TYOTE acronym. I put the collection on Smashwords last night. [Book removed 01/03/17.]

There are twelve short stories in the collection. The first three stories are free. The price for the full collection is $4.99, for reasons that have been exhaustively detailed in previous posts. (Regular readers are now laughing themselves silly or suffering flashbacks.)

I am making three stories available for three reasons. First, I like the idea that a prospective online customer can peruse part of a work as they might in a bookstore. Second, I believe self-published authors have an obligation to demonstrate that they can carry a tune before asking someone to pay for their work. Third, I intendThe Year of the Elm to create an overall effect, and I feel an obligation to make the structure clear to the prospective buyer. Reading the first three stories should do that.

The next step for TYOTE is to put together a print-on-demand (POD) version, probably through Lightning Source. I’ll have more to say about TYOTE, and about the process of publishing it myself, in subsequent posts.

On the horizon, my next project involves a novel I’m revising, and what may or may not be an innovative attempt to meld the strengths of the internet as a medium with the craft aims of traditional storytelling. I believe that all mediums are eventually turned to fiction, and my hope would be to show how that might be better done with the internet itself.

— Mark Barrett

Art, Craft and Writer’s Block

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I don’t believe in writer’s block. I know full well there are days when the writing comes easy and days when the writing won’t come at all, but I don’t ascribe the difference to any unseen or mystical force. Rather, I ascribe the difference to the fact that writing is damned hard all the time, and any day when it’s going great is a miracle.

I was reminded of my feelings about writer’s block by a post from Stephanella Walsh, in which she herself talked about coming to terms with the myth of writer’s block. It’s a good post, and particularly so because it admits to change, which is something too few people are confident enough to do.

Stephanella does a solid job of listing reasons why people reach for the “I’m blocked!” excuse, and I don’t disagree with any of them. People have been using the excuse of writer’s block — and the premise: that writing necessarily flows from some hidden spring of inspiration — since the first caveman struggled with the first cave painting.

I would like to propose, however, that there is a basic choice that every storyteller needs to make when approaching their work, and that in making this choice a writer necessarily allows or precludes writer’s block as an aspect of the storytelling process. The choice I speak of is whether or not writing is viewed first and foremost as a craft.

If you view storytelling as a craft — as a mix of techniques and channeled authorial gifts (the stuff you just happen to be good at) — I don’t see how writer’s block pertains. When you write from craft you can say you’re stuck, or you’re tired, or you hate your life, but the idea that your muse is playing coy, or that something that happened in your childhood is getting in the way of your ability to bash the holy hell out of your keyboard is absurd on the face of it — as it would be if you were a ditch digger and complained of ditch-digger’s block.

On the other hand, if you view storytelling as art — as a nebulous, ill-defined process of introspection and pure expression devoid of any compelling need to communicate with the reader, or even to be intelligible — then I suspect that writer’s block is useful in an endless variety of ways. Including, perhaps most importantly, by connecting you in spirit to all the other great writers who sat back in a sunny cafe chair and bemoaned the lonely fate of the truly and tragically gifted.

It’s your call, of course. But if you’re thinking that what you’d like to do is tell stories, you might want to take a long hard look at what your storytelling is in service of. Giving your authorial fate over to the unseen or mystical strikes me as a both a considerable statement of intent and a mistake. Unless, of course, what you’re really interested in is the drama of being a storyteller as opposed to the end product.

— Mark Barrett

The Internet as Relief Valve

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Dan Wagstaff had an excellent post up over the weekend at CasualOptimist. Here’s the crux:

My point is not that we should not stop experimenting with new author contracts, transparency, formats, trade terms, or marketing — we need to try new things and be allowed to fail. But this should not come at the expense of consistently good, interesting (and inexpensive) books.

I encourage you to read the post. It’s a summary of things that have been and are being tried to in order to gain a toehold in the new publishing reality, but — as Dan points out — it’s also a reminder that the basic problem is not one of process but product. What is it that is the publishing industry should be selling?

In the comments to the post, I wrote this:

…if the industry needs to contract on the basis of content alone (ignoring other obvious reasons driving a coming contraction) — it seems to me that the internet is a useful mechanism by which that contraction can be managed, as opposed to happening at a more precipitous rate.

I think it’s clear that corporate publishing cannot continue in its present form. It’s top-heavy and badly listing, and sooner or later economic pressures are going to take their toll. Thinking about this over the weekend, it seems to me that even as the internet is the instigator of many of publishing’s woes, it’s also a relief valve of sorts in that it allows publishers to connect readers with content, while at the same time being more (appropriately) selective about which content is turned into physical books. (Note how completely this distinction seems to be lost in the current publishing dialogue at the corporate level, while it is at the heart of discussions at the authorial level.)  [ Read more ]

TYOTE

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The title of this post is the working-title acronym for my collection of short stories. I’m 99% sure the title is the one I’ll be going with, but until I’m 100% sure this is what I’m calling it.

It’s been interesting getting the stories in shape. I’ve pushed myself to make the stories good, and been pushed to do more by the finality of the act of publication — even if I’m only self-publishing them in digital form. Nobody wants to make an idiot out of themselves.

I’m pretty close to being able to put the stories up on Smashwords. I’ve worked through the formatting style guide, and I have a working comp for the cover art. I just need to do a final version of everything and a final read-through of the text and I think that’s it. (I’ll have more to say about the various steps in the process when I’m reasonably confident I didn’t mess things up.)

What I can say so far is that the impending act of publication has helped improve my work. Because I’m taking it seriously, that seriousness is producing benefits I hadn’t imagined. I’m not new to turning in final drafts of fictional copy, or scripts that will be produced by others, but this is a more solitary process, and I’m glad to find that it is not without rewards.

Even as I am starting to see the larger self-publishing movement as a fad or balloon that will inevitably go bust, I’m also utterly convinced that the internet as a distribution and publication platform is for real. I can put these stories where others can find them, and I don’t have to ask permission to do that.

As small as the collection is, and as limited as the economic upside might be, it feels like a big deal. Regardless of the outcome, I’m glad I’m doing this.

— Mark Barrett

The Successful Publisher

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I’ve been thinking about the previous post, and it seems to me the same advice holds for anyone looking to get into publishing — whether as a self-published author, or as a publisher of other people’s works on any scale. If you don’t define success yourself, the miserable soulless scorekeepers are going to define it by how much money you’re making, or whether or not you’re still in business.

The recent dissolution of HarperStudio is not simply a case in point, it’s a case that demonstrates the utterly bankrupt way the miserable soulless scorekeepers go about their business. What happened at HarperStudio, as far as I can tell, is that the guy who ran the place — Bob Miller — decided to go do something else. In a corporate context that’s the equivalent of leaving your wallet on the street, because there are always other factions in a corporation that want to play with the money in your budget. But is that the same thing as failing?

Seriously: how many people inside HarperCollins were rooting for HarperStudio, and how many were hoping it would fail? If you worked for the mothership, did you really want someone proving that a stripped-down version of what you were doing could actually work? Or did you want it to blow up, with or without your own finger on the trigger? I have no idea if Bob Miller was a hampered visionary or bumbling idiot, but that’s really the point. Does anyone know what was happening behind the scenes? Does anyone know what the money flow was like, and how HarperStudio’s subsidiary status with HarperCollins affected its ability to be successful?

What if Bob Miller had not decided to leave HarperStudio? What if he was still there, doing his job, but the company was badly in the red? Would that be a success story? Better yet, what if he was still doing his job, but he was embezzling money from the company and cheating authors at the same time? From the outside it would look like he was still in business, and thus not a failure — at least until he got caught. Is HarperStudio a failure because it tried to play fair? Are vanity presses that prey on naive customers demonstrating a better business model? (I’ll leave you to guess what the miserable soulless scorekeepers think.)

And what about the absurdity in all this? Anyone who thinks that HarperStudio failed in an objective sense has to reconcile that view with a larger context in which publishing is a wounded, dying animal that has little chance of continuing in its current form. If you really want to say that HarperStudio failed, isn’t the entire industry failing by that score? How many other companies are being held together by their leadership, while the bottom line bleeds out through an artery shredded by the internet? Isn’t there general agreement even now that the big publishers are playing for time in their dealings with Apple and Amazon, and their imposition of the agency model? Is there anyone who can point to a model that’s going to be an unbridled success a year from now? Five years? Ten? Are you shaking your head?

Publishers at every level need to define why they’re doing what they’re doing. Leaving that task to the miserable soulless scorekeepers will always result in the inevitable charge that you’re a failure, because that’s the point of keeping score. If you care about books or writers or publishing, defining that passion will prevent others from defining it for you. You won’t ever be able to get them to admit it, of course, but that’s not the goal. The goal is saving your sanity, if not your soul.

— Mark Barrett

The Successful Author

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When it comes to publishing in the modern age, I don’t think people care much about anything other than sales. As an author you can write something great, but if it doesn’t sell like hotcakes the miserable soulless scorekeepers in the publishing industry will say what the miserable soulless scorekeepers in every industry say: that you failed.

Because primacy of sales is not implicit in the word author, however, qualifiers become necessary. You can only be a successful author if you sell lots of books, or otherwise generate serious revenue in the form of t-shirt sales, film rights, speech-circuit fees, etc. It doesn’t matter if you generate all these sales by lying about yourself or duping your readers. The only thing that matters is the money.

If you write a book that is only read by world leaders, who take your words and change the planet with them, you will not be called successful. You might be described as influential, and the fact of your influence might drive future sales or offers to speak in front of go-go executives, but until the money rolls in you will never be described as a success. Not even if you save a million lives.

If you do not sell a lot of books but you receive critical acclaim then you can call yourself a critically-acclaimed author, or an award-winning author, but you cannot call yourself a successful author. Unless of course you were aiming for critical success all along, in which case you can pull a fast one and present yourself as a successful, critically-acclaimed author, thereby implying that you sold more books than you actually did.

If you are neither critically-acclaimed nor generating sales, then you can call yourself an author as long as you A) have written at least one book, and B) are working on another book, even if it’s only in your head. If you stop at any point, however, you become a failed author because you failed to achieve critical acclaim or financial success. In the writing business there is nothing worse than being a failed author. Except being a miserable soulless scorekeeper.

The antidote to all this, of course, is defining success for yourself. And I don’t mean that as a trite observation. Rather, I mean you should have an actual conversation with yourself about this issue and define why you’re writing and what it is you hope to give and gain by linking words together.

You don’t have to tell anyone what your definition is, and you can change it any time you want. What’s critical is simply that you know the answer yourself. Because if you don’t, the miserable soulless scorekeepers will gladly define success for you.

— Mark Barrett