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Site Seeing: Zoe Winters

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I’m extraordinarily late to the party here. As Zoe Winters seems to be pulling back from the web, I’m suddenly taking appropriate interests in her posts:

In coming back and not wanting the break to end, I’m making some adjustments to how I do things. It’s pointless to take a break like this, then come back and be crazy again. Being crazy sucks. Being stressed and depressed and wanting to quit because you’ve sucked all the fun out of what you’re doing sucks also.

As I said in retweeting this post, almost all relationships require boundaries, and the internet is a relationship. To whatever extent a computer terminal and access to virtual distractions might be a threat to anyone’s productivity, for a writer the seductions can be almost overwhelming.

Zoe’s voice is the voice of a working writer trying to grapple with all of the changes happening in the publishing space. Hers is also a voice devoid of the auto-branded corporate tone that some writers seem to gravitate to with frightening ease.

I don’t know Zoe, but when I read her posts I feel like I do. Enough said.

Update: Zoe seems to have wiped her old WordPress blog/site, which this post originally referred to.

— Mark Barrett

The CreateSpace Calculator Fail

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After looking at the available print-on-demand (POD) options I decided to go with CreateSpace. This decision was not unqualified, however, and there were certainly things about CreateSpace that gave me pause.

Chief among them: the CreateSpace Royalty Calculator. While it is possible to get a rough sense of the royalty splits for a hypothetical title, the calculator’s utility for the work I want to produce seems dubious, it not utterly useless.

And CreateSpace essentially admits this. The title above the calculator reads as follows:

Royalty Calculator*
Use the royalty calculator to figure out how much you’ll make every time your book is manufactured.

Clear enough, right? You plug in data and the calculator tells you how much you’ll make with every sale. Except…when you follow that nagging asterisk, here’s the text you find immediately below the calculator:

* Figures generated by this tool are for estimation purposes only. Your actual royalty will be calculated when you set up your book.

Okay. So the calculator won’t so much help you “figure out” what you’ll make, but rather give you an “estimation” that is both unreliable and non-binding. I guess I have to give CreateSpace points for being honest about the calculator’s lack of utility — after proclaiming its utility — but the clarifying and contradictory information doesn’t inspire confidence. And it gets worse.  [ Read more ]

Site Notice: Server Issues

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It’s almost beyond belief to me that I’m continuing to have trouble with my site host, Network Solutions. I apologize to anyone who’s tried to visit this site or the small site I put up at the beginning of the week. The amount of data I’m trying to move is trivial, but for some reason the addition of one site to NetSol’s server capacity seems to have crippled its ability to send pages to your screen — if it allows those pages to be served at all.

I am once again in tech support hell, and have once again managed to escalate the issue to NetSol’s tech support by demonstrating that the problem is not on my end. I have tried several of the fixes they asked me to try, and if they didn’t make things worse they did nothing to resolve the problems at hand. My hope is that the issue will be resolved shortly.

— Mark Barrett

WordPress as a “Known Issue”

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I put up a small WordPress site over the weekend. It’s on my shared-hosting package, meaning the new site resides on the same sever share that this site sits on.

After pointing people to the new site today I received a message that it couldn’t be accessed. I checked and it worked for me, but when I checked again a few minutes later I got a ‘permission denied’ page, as if the site was unavailable or under construction. Over the next ten minutes or so I was able to replicate the problem on the other site, and even on this site.

My first tech support call to Network Solutions — my site host — went well enough. They showed me how to reset the permissions on my site, and things seemed better after that. Until a couple of hours later, when the same thing happened again.

My second tech support call was less reassuring. Not only was I told that the intermittent errors were a result of total server load, but WordPress was specifically described as a ‘known issue’ in taxing server bandwidth.

Uh…no. If you’re one of the largest hosting providers in the world, and you’re having trouble feeding my WordPress pages to a small handful of visitors, that’s not a WordPress problem, that’s a YouSuck problem.

I’m now being pointed to some helpful tips on speeding up WordPress installs, and have been advised to try using WPSuperCache (a plugin I have considered before), but having one of the most widely-used blogging apps described as a known issue by my site host is a fail.

After allowing malicious code injections into my site, failing to notify me of such in a timely manner, degrading the response time of this site to +30 seconds, and now this, I can’t recommend Network Solutions to anyone else. I’ll probably play out the end of my contract, but between now and then I’ll be looking for reliable hosting without excuses.

The good news is that while I was on hold a robo-message informed me that J.D. Powers might call to ask about my tech-support experience. Please do.

— Mark Barrett

The Lost TYOTE Queries

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While digging through boxes recently I found some old rejections I received in response to queries about my short story collection, The Year of the Elm (TYOTE). In looking them over most seemed to confirm what I’ve been saying lately: the industry doesn’t care about the quality of your work, it cares about the marketability of your project. If you’re an unknown writer you’re probably out of luck regardless of your storytelling skills. If you’re a well-known celebrity and can’t spell your own name, you’re probably looking at a book deal.

The majority of rejections I received were photocopied form slips. (My favorite was the quarter-page slip that had been cut from a single sheet of four such notices. How much time had it taken to cut those pages into quarters, and how much money had it actually saved?) What seems abundantly clear in retrospect is that none of those agents made any sort of determination about the quality of my writing before saying no. They looked at the project only long enough to determine whether they could sell the collection, and since short story collections are death in the marketplace that determination took two seconds. Feedback about the quality of my work couldn’t be provided because those agents probably didn’t read far enough along to have an opinion.

Again, I understand all that in a business context. I don’t fault agents or editors for churning through submitted projects as quickly as possible, and I’m thankful to those who sent me any sort of reply. (Some couldn’t even be bothered to do that, despite the fact that I always included an SASE.)  [ Read more ]

Judging the Quality of Your Writing

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In the previous post I said there’s no relationship between writing quality and publication. Book deals are made for economic reasons, not because great writing makes the world a better place. If a prospective but marketable writer stinks, the industry will hire a ghostwriter, treating content as just another part of the manufacturing process.

I said the same thing in a recent spat with Jane Smith. I said the same thing when Sarah Palin’s book was announced. I’ve pointed to, and will continue to point to, incidents where publishers have failed to meet the same standards they routinely accuse unpublished and independent authors of failing to meet.

I understand why publishing wants to promote itself as the sole judge of quality and merit. Such status equates to power, and power in the marketplace equals money. But publishing’s credibility is so completely corrupted by its own actions that nobody in their right mind would take the sole word of a publisher, agent or editor when it comes to judging writing on the basis of quality, any more than one would try a case if the presiding judge had a vested interest in the outcome.  [ Read more ]

Snooki and the Real Writer

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The longer I look at publishing the more convinced I am that the most compelling reason to drive a stake through the heart of the industry is the hypocrisy of claiming critical authority on one hand while on the other reserving the right to justify any book deal on a purely economic basis. I was brought back to this theme late last week by the announcement of two deals that exemplify this hypocrisy, but in a way that may not be immediately apparent.

There was, I think, appropriate disgust at the announcement by Simon & Schuster that they had signed a deal for a first novel from Nicole “Snooki” Palazzi. If you’re not up on your pop-culture stars, Snooki is a developmentally-disabled Italian American who regularly appears on an exploitative MTV series called Jersey Shore. As a for-profit enterprise, it’s not wrong of Simon & Schuster to attempt to profit from Snooki’s celebrity, and I don’t fault the book deal on that basis. But having seen clips of Snooki communicating with the demons in her head it’s obvious that her capacity to write a coherent sentence, let alone a book, falls somewhere between the potential literary genius of metamorphic rock and small furry animals. If a ghostwriter hasn’t already been hired it’s inevitable that most of the words and all of the structure in her book will come from someone other than the credited author. Yet this fraudulent business arrangement is being funded and driven by an upstanding member of a publishing community which collectively insists on respect not simply as a money-making enterprise, but as a cultural bastion of taste and merit.

Contrast this with Knopf’s announcement last week of a $2.5 million book deal for the next novel by Kiran Desai. I’ve never read anything Kiran Desai has written, but there seems to be general agreement she can write, if not that she is an important voice. It might at first appear that Knopf spent all that money on the quality of Desai’s writing, except that’s demonstrably not the case. The deal was brokered not for a finished work, but over a four-page proposal. For all I know Desai’s next book will be unmitigated genius from start to finish, but it’s at least theoretically possible that hopes for the project may not be realized despite everyone’s best efforts. What that means is that either Knopf decided to gamble all that money on the quality of Desai’s next book, or Knopf already did the math on the market and expected sales even if the book stinks, and concluded they will make their money back and more.

While Shooki’s book is a fraud, and Desai’s book may aspire to the greatest of literary heights, the people throwing money at these projects are almost certainly doing so solely on the basis of the economics of the market segments they serve. From a cultural perspective, putting Snooki’s book out is pure capitalism, including the fact that the whole project is a lie. But so is Knopf’s bankrolling of Desai’s next project. If one is respected and one is not respected, that says nothing about why money changed hands.

It changed hands in both cases because these names will sell. In neither case was quality the determining factor.

— Mark Barrett

Cover Design Week Conclusion

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This post concludes the extended two-week run of Cover Design Week. To see the previous posts, click the CDW tag below.

If you’re thinking about hiring a cover designer the critical first step is thoroughly considering your needs, abilities and tolerances. Because of the work I’ve put in I now know why I’m looking for help with the TYOTE redesign, and what it is I want to come away with when I have someone help me. This in turn helps me define the qualities I’m looking for in a designer, apart from any budgetary limitations.

As to who I’ll hire I don’t know yet. I received a number of helpful responses in reply to my request for recommendations, and I encourage you to ask for recs from people you know or writers whose covers you like. You may not get a response from everyone, but if you’re polite and patient I’m confident you’ll end up with designers worth considering.

Having previously noted that cost is not a useful metric for determining quality or effectiveness in a book cover, and that nobody really knows how a particular cover design will impact sales, the objective I’m now aiming for is a cover I like. Because every independent writer is also their own marketing department and sales force, I think it’s important to have confidence in the first impression my book will be making.

The obvious problem is that not only do some writers have no idea how to design their own book cover, they may not (or should not) trust their own eye when looking at the work of others. If you think you’re in that boat, ask a few friends or peers for feedback on designs you’re considering. (Do NOT put someone else between you and the person designing your cover. You will complicate the process, diminish the effectiveness of the collaboration, and learn little or nothing that will help you the next time.)

Finally, I think there’s an obvious point that needs to be made about all of this. No matter how much time and money you have, no matter how talented you (and your designer, if you hire one) are, there are diminishing returns to agonizing about your cover. And that point arrives fairly quickly.

While we’ve all seen covers we found horrendous, the truth is that most covers are acceptable. Your goal, then, should not be designing the perfect cover, but avoiding the unadulterated abomination.

— Mark Barrett

Contemplating the TYOTE Cover (Re)Design

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This post is part of Cover Design Week. To see other posts click the CDW tag below.

Here is a large version of the cover of my short story collection, The Year of the Elm (TYOTE):

You can see a smaller version in the right-hand column on this page, and on the Smashwords page where the collection is currently being sold. [Book removed 01/03/17.]

One of the few practical things I knew when I set about designing the cover was that the small image would be more important than the large image. The reason was that the cover would almost always be shown as a thumbnail to interested readers, rendering subtleties all but indistinguishable.

For that reason, along with aesthetic reasons I’ll get to momentarily, I decided to make the title of the work and my name clearly visible at almost any size, and to make the composition simple enough that it wouldn’t be corrupted by a reduction in size. Whatever you think about the design, I feel confident I achieved this practical goal. I did have to resign myself to the fact that the subtitle would not be visible at reduced size, but I felt that was an acceptable loss. Whether this calls into question the inclusion of a subtitle I’m still not sure.  [ Read more ]

Cover Design Decision Criteria

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This post is part of Cover Design Week. To see other posts click the CDW tag below.

In an earlier post I talked about how the value of hiring a cover designer is directly related to the potential time savings. For me the prospect of hiring a cover designer will save me time in a variety of ways, including some that are unconventional, or at least idiosyncratic.

I have a fair amount of technical knowledge. I’m reasonably comfortable with computers, and if I don’t have specific familiarity with a given application I can usually get it to do what I need in fairly short order. In putting together the e-book cover for my short story collection, The Year of the Elm (TYOTE), I used an open-source application called GIMP, which is a free and fairly powerful image editor.

GIMP is not, however, easy to embrace. Even armed with a helpful book about the program I found myself bashing my head on my desk when trying to do simple things, including changing ColorA to ColorB. Like many graphics programs, GIMP uses a dizzying mix of image-editing terminology and application-specific geek terminology to describe various functions and aspects of the interface. If you don’t know which term means what, doing even simple things can become a nightmare.

On the art/design side of the cover-design equation, I’m not an artist, but I have a fairly good eye, and I understand basic composition. Whatever you may think of the current TYOTE cover design, it’s pretty much what I was aiming for from concept to execution. Not only do I ‘know it when I see it’ (some people don’t), but I am also able to imagine what I want in advance or work toward it in the image-editing process. I may need to try a few things and discard them, but over time I’ll be able to focus my efforts and reach an acceptable result. What I cannot do is draw very well, but as image libraries continue to grow in size that skill is becoming less and less critical.  [ Read more ]