More Ways to Get The Executive Lounge, and Some Thoughts on Sales Channels

I set up a Books2Read universal link for The Executive Lounge, so you can find it on a bunch of different stores with one click. If I add a new store in the future, the link will still work.

Get The Executive Lounge

Right now, links are live to Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Scribd, 24Symbols, Angus & Robertson, and Mondadori, although the book isn't actually available on Scribd yet. Sometimes it takes a while for everything to percolate through. :/

If you haven't heard of 24Symbols -- I hadn't until I saw it as a B2R option -- it's a subscription service similar to Kindle Unlimited, but it doesn't require any kind of exclusivity crap. Unless Amazon changes its policy, you'll never see my books in KU, but 24Symbols doesn't make any outrageous demands, so I'm giving them a try.

I've never set up a Books2Read link before, but it was easy to do. The web site is well designed and the process is pretty intuitive. And if you distribute through Draft2Digital, which I am for some vendors, those vendors are automatically included in your B2R link, because B2R and D2D are linked sites. Setting all this up is free, so even if you only make a few sales through the less-popular-in-the-US vendors, it's still worth doing. And I've made one sale in Euros so far, so yay!

I've heard some writers say that they don't go wide because their wide sales are negligible, and it's not worth missing out on KU sales. I think this is short-sighted.

I figure, nobody in Europe, or India, or Australia, or anywhere else besides the US and maybe Canada knows who I am at this point. You build a fan base one reader at a time, and that applies to each sales channel. If you're not available in European stores, then you're probably not going to have any European fans. If you start publishing books in the European stores (or wherever,) you're there, and you'll eventually start building your fanbase there. It might well take a while, but as Kris Rusch always says, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Looking at this another way, it reminds me of the way some tradpubbed writers were experimenting with indie publishing a while back, indie pubbing one book and then looking at their first month or two of sales. When they didn't earn thousands or even hundreds per month right away, they declared the experiment a failure, and said it proved that indie publishing was an overhyped bubble. Heck, I remember one writer, known for SFF novels, who indie pubbed a contemporary short story, saw a small trickle of sales in the first couple of months, and declared the whole indie publishing business a clear failure, with a bit of snarky smirking. [huge freaking eyeroll] Well, no kidding! That's not the kind of book you're known for!

The folks who tried going wide for a month or three, then declared it a failure and scurried back to KU are making the same mistake, I think. (Okay, maybe not the exact same mistake as the Contemporary Short Story writer-person, but plenty of others did the same experiement with the kinds of books they were known for. It still takes time to build up indie sales, when that's not how your fans are used to buying your books.) Any time you're looking to expand into a new market, it's going to take time. You're not going to hit it big in any new sales channel right away, unless you win the lottery. And "Step 5: Win the Lottery" doesn't belong in anyone's business plan.

And I have to think back on how many times I've heard a collective howl go up from the Kindle Unlimited community, whenever Amazon makes some major change in policy, or changes how they distribute money, how they credit "reads," how they require books to be formatted. Whenever Amazon tries to plug a hole being exploited by scammers and cheats, huge crowds of folks who were legitimately publishing through KU (but often were riding the edge, gaming the system while staying just this side of the line) scream and cuss and complain that their sales have tanked because of the change. They're collateral damage, and since Amazon's primary concern is the experience of its customers, not its vendor-partners, they don't care what the indie publishers think.

(Which I believe is a good policy in the long term, from a hard-nosed business perspective. If you piss off your authors, there'll always be more where they came from [that's how New York publishing has stayed in business so long, with the horrible treatment they give their writers] but if you piss off your readers, the authors will suffer too and the whole thing will spiral.)

I know some folks who see KU for what it is -- a right-now cash cow, that could change or shrink or go away at any time. If you grab the money and run month-by-month, paying off existing bills or making one-time cash purchases or just socking the money away, that'll work and it comes with little risk. The people who scream loudest whenever Amazon pivots are the ones who were paying their mortgage and buying groceries with their KU money, which IMO isn't a great idea. Amazon could make another change next week that'll completely tank their sales, and then they're screwed.

Personally, I'd rather build a fanbase spread across as many vendors as possible, to insulate myself from the effect of changing conditions at any one vendor. It's doable -- I know writers for whom Amazon is less than half their income. It takes patience and a long-term view, and I'm willing to give it that.

Peeking Through a Crack in the Door of Licensing

If you write fiction, read Kris Rusch's business blog for this week, on licensing.

This is a whole 'nother way of looking at doing business with your fictional properties.

And as a side note, I've heard Kris and Dean mention here and there for years about how SFWA screwed them out of many thousands of dollars, but never heard the details. Now I know what happened. Wow. :/

But seriously, even if you don't feel you're in a position to take action on this right now, this is stuff you should know if you're a writer.

Angie

Joanna Penn -- Retrospective and Resources

If you're a writer and you're not reading (or listening) to Joanna Penn, you're missing out. This post is a look back at her career, and her ten years of blogging and podcasting at The Creative Penn. She freely discusses what she did wrong and what she learned from it all, and flings links and resources in all directions. Check it out.

Angie

Dragged Kicking and Screaming into Social Media

So, I've finally succumbed to the Dread Lord Zuckerberg, and joined Facebook. :P An anthology project I'm in is organizing on Facebook. I'm not going to be precious about it, so I signed up. If you want to friend me, I'm here.

I have no idea how much time I'll spend on Facebook. I don't need another timesink, but I'll probably browse through periodically. We'll see how it goes.

There's a whole lot of stuff here, and I'm sure my page or wall or whatever it is looks pretty bare. I refrained from dumping my entire contact list from Gmail into the system. If I've ever e-mailed you, you're welcome. :) I still need to go digging through the privacy settings and figure out how to turn off as much of that stuff as I can. I've heard it's a pretty horrific experience, requiring a machete and several maps, so I'm not looking forward to it. :/

With any luck, it'll be fun too, though. I might even run into some folks I've lost track of over the yars; that'd be cool.

Angie, looking over her shoulder

The Legalities of Fanfic

I went to a panel at a convention recently on the legalities of fanfic. I've written fanfic in the past, and will probably read more in the future. And I look forward to the day when fans of my own writing like it enough to write fanfic based on it. So I was looking forward to the panel discussion.

Unfortunately, it seems none of the people on the panel knew anything about the actual legalities of fanfic. The discussion was mostly, "Well, I like fanfic, so I think it's legal," and "I think fanfic is stealing, so I think it's illegal," and back and forth from there, based on what the panelists thought and felt about it.

In the real world, what any individual thinks or feels about fanfic is completely irrelevant to the question. The moderator made it clear that contributions from the audience had to be 1) only questions, and 2) tweet-length or less, so I didn't bother trying to throw any actual facts into the mix at that time.

In actuality, 1) nobody knows for sure whether fanfic is legal or illegal because it's never been litigated, and 2) if it is, most likely only some of it is, and the rest is not.

The fact is, the Fair Use rules are purposely ambiguous.

Whether you're making money with your derivative work is one factor, and the fanfic that gets written and posted to people’s journals, tumblrs, on Facebook, on personal web sites, and on archives like AO3 and fanfiction dot net for anyone to read for free satisfy that particular factor. That's not the only point, however.

Another point is whether the work is used as criticism or parody, and some fanfic clearly is. I know a popular fanfic writer who thinks Dumbledore is an evil, sociopathic villain, and a dark lord himself if you look at what he did and what he allowed to happen over the course of the books. She also thinks Ron Weasley is a selfish, lazy, jealous git who turned against Harry at the drop of a hat, multiple times, generally an asshole. Pretty much all her HP fanfic reflects these two beliefs, in how she writes these characters. You could make a good argument that all of her HP fanfic is criticism of Rowling's books. And a lot of fics are clearly parodies of the original works, and therefore would be no more infringement than Bored of the Rings was an infringement on Lord of the Rings. (Believe me, if the Tolkien estate could've sued National Lampoon for that, they would've; they’re notoriously litigious.) Many other fics don't satisfy the criticism or parody points, so it's possible that the critical/parody fics are completely legal while the others are not.

Another factor is whether the work is transformative. Did the fan writer clearly change a significant part of the IP to create something new? In this case, people who write further-adventures type stories, where Kirk and Spock beam down to a planet and stop two peoples from going to war against each other, are more likely to be in legal peril, while the people who write alternate universe stories where, for example, Kirk and Spock are each members of a different species of dragon, and their dragon clans have been feuding for a thousand years, but the guys meet and get together and bring peace to their clans, Romeo-and-Juliet style but without the tragic ending, are more likely to be in the legal clear.

And another factor is whether the derivative work is likely to negatively impact the earning potential of the original IP. If someone is writing My Little Pony fanfic that's just so wonderful and awesome that Pony fans stop watching the show (and buying the merch) and only read that fanfic, then the MLP IP holder would have a reason to sue, and might win. Although I don't know of many IP holders, either of books/stories or TV/movies, who'd be willing to stand up in court and say that the fanfic of their work is so much better than the work itself that it's cutting into their revenue. :)

And in actuality, if anything it's the opposite. Rabid fans of a property (and you have to be a fairly rabid fan to put in the work and effort of writing fanfic) drag their friends into the fandom by the ear, shoving books or boxed-set DVDs into their hands and practically forcing them to get into the original so that they'll understand the fanfic.

And some people read the fanfic first, then go looking for the original. I've done that a couple of times, in fact. I watched the first couple of episodes of Stargate: Atlantis, went "Meh," and wandered away. A couple of years later, a fanfic writer I like a lot started writing Atlantis fic, and I read it. I enjoyed it quite a bit, went back to the show, and (reading it through slash goggles that I won't apologize for, plus with the extra world- and character-building the fan writers had done in my mind) I enjoyed the show much more. I ended up buying all five seasons on DVD. I also read a really great fic based on the movie Blackhawk Down, then watched the movie, which wasn't my usual thing; I'd never have watched it if I hadn't read the fic first. This isn't the normal way people get into a fandom, but I'm not the only one who's come in through the side door this way. Fanfic and its writers/fans increase engagement with the canon IP, rather than decrease it. Creators who object to fanfic are, IMO, shooting themselves in the foot, and then refusing even a bandage out of sheer cussedness.

The fact is, nobody knows whether "fanfic" is illegal or not. There've been people, usually IP owners of one sort or another, who've very firmly insisted for a long time that it definitely IS, and who've gotten very nasty with their fans who write fanfic. This is stupid, but hey, if someone wants to piss in their own soup pot, that's their choice. For myself, I'd be delighted to find fanfic written about any of my published work.

Gaming the Times List

So, someone tried to game the New York Times Book Review list. What else is new, I know. But the story of how it happened and why, and how it was thwarted, is all in one convenient post on Pajiba.

Thanks to Kris Rusch, who blogged about this, and has some excellent comments and perspective. She talks about how this plot wouldn't have worked anyway, to achieve its apparent goal of getting the book's writer a movie deal. Worth a read for every writer who wants to keep up with how the business works.

Angie

On Ghostwriting

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff posted on Bookview Cafe on when to break up with your ghostwriting client, which also applies to editing clients and writer-writer collaborations.

I've never done a ghostwriting job, but I've collaborated on writing projects and I absolutely agree with her that you have to be able to trust your partner. If your collaborator or client starts going squirrely on you, it's time to bail.

Note that Maya was getting paid for her work regardless of whether the books got published, but bailed because she didn't want to deal with the squirrely client, money or no money. Sounds like she made the right choice.

Check it out..

Angie

Estate Planning for Authors by M.L. Buchman

Estate Planning for Authors by M.L. Buchman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Matt Buchman is one of the most organized, business-oriented writers I know. He was one of the instructors at the Publishing Master Class I took last October, and he talked a bit then about estate planning for writers. He was working on this book at the time, and I eagerly preordered a copy. It came out just a few days ago, and it's got me adding line items to my to-do list like crazy.

If you're a writer, or in any other profession where you're creating and holding the rights to IP, you need to read this book. The full title is Estate Planning for Authors: Your Final Letter (and why you need to write it now). It's not just about how you need a will (although you do), but rather it's about how to organize your business so someone else can pick it up when you're gone, and how to write a letter to your heir(s) so they can find what they need, learn what they need to know, and manage your IP estate without cussing you out, or giving up in disgust and letting your IP go dormant and fade from the public eye because straightening out the tangle is (in their opinion) more work than it's worth. Seriously, your heirs will be delighted if you read this book, and leave them a copy along with your will, your final letter, and all your files.

CONTENTS:

PART I: Getting Started
PART II: IMPORTANT TERMS
PART III: Managing the IP
PART IV: Where's the Money?
PART V: Organizing It All
PART VI: The Final Letter
THE FINAL LETTER
PART VII: A Plan of Action
PART VIII: Suggested Reading (for the author, not so much for the heir)

One of the first pages, right after the dedication, is a section called, "Purpose of this book." It says:

Your Will states who gets what.

Your Final Letter tells them what they can, and should, do with it once they have it.

This book is about the second bit. It suggests a method to write a "Final Letter" that will organize your literary estate and educate your heirs. Or, if the creator behind the estate didn't write one, this book can act as a guide for their heirs to understand what options exist to manage a literary estate.

That's the point of this book -- helping your heirs figure out what this whole writing/publishing thing is about, what they've just inherited, where it all is, and what to do with it. The book addresses different situations, from an average writer passing their books and stories down directly to their kid, to a much busier writer who owns multiple corporations and sets up a charitable trust.

You won't find step-by-step details in how to do something like set up a trust, but you'll find basic info on what the options are, why you might want to make a particular choice, and what kind of professional (CPA, IP attorney, that sort of person) to consult about it.

There are also examples of what happened in various real life cases, such as how Elvis Presley left a soon-to-be bankrupt estate and what his ex, Priscilla, did to turn that around. Or how Jane Austen's heirs sold all the copyrights to her novels for the price of 250 hardcover copies of her books, because they had no clue what they had or what it was worth.

I particularly like the story of Lucia Berlin, a short story writer who never made much money while she was alive. After her death, her heirs put together a collection of her short stories, which was published and hit the New York Times Bestseller List.

How many of you reading this are writers who think your work isn't worth much, financially? Lucia Berlin probably thought the same thing. Luckily her heirs were smart enough to manage her IP well and not only make some money from it, but get Ms. Berlin's stories in front of a huge new audience.

Getting organized and preparing your IP and your business to be handed over to your heirs, with enough information for them to hit the ground running, will make it much more likely that they'll pick up your work and keep it in print, keep it refreshed, look for new markets, new formats, new opportunities. Matt talks about organizing your computer files, including back-ups and off-site storage, managing your passwords and safely passing them down to your heirs, and keeping your contracts and tax paperwork organized and filed and findable. There's a lot of very practical info here. And a nice bonus is that once things are organized enough for your heirs to step right in and find everything, it'll also be organized enough for you to always be able to lay hands on whatever you want, right when you want it. Not that I ever have that problem [cough] but you know, in case anyone out there reading does. [wry smile]

While talking about multiple options, Matt centers his examples on his own estate planning, how he's organized his business, and prepared information and files and passwords and accounts for his heirs to take over. Matt is a very busy writer who has set up corporations for tax purposes, and has decided to create a living trust for his heirs. All the research he's done -- all along, for the business structures, and recently when planning his estate -- has filtered into this book.

Part VI contains his actual Final Letter, with specifics like [the names of actual banks and lawyers and accountants] noted out. You could absolutely take this letter as an example, pretty much verbatim, and tweak it to apply to your own IP and estate decisions. He's also included, in Part V, a link to a page on his web site with a downloadable Excel starter file. This is a skeleton copy of the master file he uses to track his own books and stories. It's a great organizational tool for your own use, aside from how wonderfully useful it would be for your heirs.

If you can't tell, I'm pretty enthusiastic about this book. It's short, it's clear, and it's a gold mine of valuable info and resources. If you've ever published anything, if you own any IP, you should read this book. And get a copy for each of your heirs; if you get hit by a bus before you can write your Final Letter, at least it'll give them a leg up on figuring out what the heck it is you've left them and what they should do with it.

Kris Rusch on Marketing Your Books

Actually, this is part of a longer series -- Kris writes a blog post on the business of writing and publishing every Thursday, and it's absolutely worth a read -- but this particular post has some especially shiny gold in it.

She talks about how to use the alsoboughts on your books' sales pages to figure out who's reading your books and what they like about them, which helps you make marketing decisions and decide where to spend your limited time and money.

There's more too. Check it out.

Angie

Business Plans: The Writer's Busines Plan by Tonya Price and Business Planning For Professional Publishers by Leah Cutter

The Writer's Business Plan by Tonya Price

My rating: 4 of 5 stars for more business-oriented writers




Business Planning For Professional Publishers by Leah Cutter

My rating: 5 of 5 stars for less business-oriented writers






I'm doing something different this week. I've read two books about business plans for writers. Both are good books for the right audience. And in actuality, I think every writer should read both books once. You'll probably be drawn more to one, and want to revisit it periodically, but I think the other will give you some insights and things to think about.

Tonya Price is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. She publishes her own work, and also has an MBA and considerable experience in business beyond her writing and publishing. She approaches the creation of a business plan from the point of view of someone with that background and degree.

A Writer's Business Plan is a thorough explanation of how to produce a business plan, without any extraneous clutter. Some "business plan" books for writers only discuss the marketing plan, which is only part of an actual business plan. Or they go into great step-by-step detail about how to go about indie publishing a book (how to format, how to create a cover, how to upload the book, etc.), which is outside the bounds of an actual business plan. Tonya gives you what you need and only what you need.

Tonya's book is organized as follows:

Chapter One: Every Quest Has a Mission
Chapter Two: Plotting Your Writing Success
Chapter Three: Market Analysis
Chapter Four: Marketing Plan
Chapter Five: Your Financial Plan
Chapter Six: Your Business Strategy
Chapter Seven: Your Business Plan

Each chapter comes with one or more worksheets, which make it that much easier to get your ideas down and organized. She talks about mission statements, business organization, insurance, and why you need a lawyer and an accountant. She also discusses financing your business.

She explains how to set goals. Many people have goals which aren't actually goals -- they're too vague, the win condition isn't defined well enough, they aren't achievable by the person who set the goal through their own efforts, etc. Tonya describes the SMART system, devising goals to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timeframe Defined. This is a good system, and will keep you from writing, "Have a bestselling novel out before I'm thirty-five" on your Goals List, and then spinning your wheels for years before you figure out you can't control whether your novel is a bestseller. (Yes, I've heard a lot of writers say they have that kind of goal. That's a wish or a dream, not a goal.)

There's a lot of valuable information here, including commentary about when things aren't necessary. You don't need to go whole hog when you're just starting out, and probably can't afford to do so. Figuring out what you absolutely need, and what it's going to cost, is a valuable skill, and Tonya talks about separating the wants from the needs.

This book is set up so you can work on your business plan for a couple of hours a day, filling in the worksheets, thinking about the questions and finding answers a bit at a time, and end up with a business plan that a modern businessperson would recognize. And she says right up front that a business plan is not a static document; it's expected that the plan will change over time, as you spot problems, fix mistakes, discover more efficient processes, grow (or shrink) your business, or reach a point where you can now afford some of those nice-to-haves that you couldn't justify when you started out. A business plan isn't a trap or a permanent committment; it's a way of noting down what you plan to do and how you plan to do it, so you can figure out later on whether you're on track.

Even if you're not terribly business-minded, I recommend you read this book through once. I don't come from a serious business background, and although I want to conduct my writing and publishing in a businesslike way, this is maybe a bit of overkill for me. But while reading the book, I had a lot of little "Huh," moments -- things I hadn't thought of, things I didn't know to think about or plan for, things that don't apply to my business right now but might in the future. These are good to know about.

For example, I don't remember ever hearing about someone who was indie publishing doing a market analysis. That was a major, "Wait, what?" moment for me while I was reading. It won't change what I decide to write, but it's good foundation data for marketing efforts. Which I also won't be doing much of for a while, but it's something to keep in mind for the future, something I hadn't thought of before now. Unless you have a business degree yourself, you'll probably find at least a few similar "Huh," moments that make this book worthwhile.

[Note: I rated this book four stars instead of five because my copy is frankly riddled with typos and similar small glitches. They're easy enough to read around, and they don't affect the usefulness of the information, but they're distracting. A decent copyeditor could've done some good here.]

Leah Cutter is a writer and publisher. She owns a publishing business, which many writers can say these days. But Leah publishes other people as well as herself, which means she has complexities to deal with that your average indie-publishing writer doesn't have, and she's done them very well for some time. Leah is an excellent businessperson, but her background isn't in business per se.

Business Planning For Professional Publishers is written from the point of view of a writer/publisher who's read books like Tonya's, and wanted to swear and beat her head against a wall. Blaze Ward says in the Editor's Note:

What artists need is a book that breaks the MBA-blather down into terms an artist can understand, because, frankly, they are two entirely unrelated languages that both share English as a common tongue.

I enjoyed this read. It's a very voicey book, and Leah's personality shines through on every page. It's much more casual than Tonya's book, less "businesslike." And her frustration and anger at how poorly that sort of book fits the personality of so many writers is clear throughout. (After I read this book, I saw Leah and did the "Hey, loved the book!" thing, and we talked about it for a minute. As soon as I brought it up, she got very intense and I saw a reflection of those emotions I'd felt through her writing. I think her eyes started glowing with wrathful flames, just a tiny bit.) But seriously, there's some swearing in this book. If that offends you, well, read it anyway, but grit your teeth.

Leah's main realizations here are that 1) you can create a business plan for whatever period of time makes sense to you, and 2) a business plan is (mostly) "just a big f@#$%g to-do list."

Everything else builds on that, thus:

Chapter One:
-- The Differences
-- The Meat Of The Plan
-- The Pieces
Chapter Two:
-- Problems Planning
-- Beyond Merely Writing Shit Down
-- Control
Chapter Three:
-- Goals
-- Editorial Goals
-- Living Documents
Chapter Four:
-- NOTE ON THE WORD GOAL
-- Production Goals
-- Publishing Goals
-- Business Goals
Chapter Five:
-- Marketing -- What Is It?
-- Passive Marketing Goals -- The Beginning
-- More Passive Marketing Goal Planning
-- Passive Marketing -- Learning Sales Copy
-- Passive Marketing -- Reader Samples
-- Passive Marketing -- Pricing
Chapter Six:
-- Active Marketing -- The Beginning
-- Active Marketing -- Next Steps
-- Yet Another Caution
-- Choosing A Marketing Strategy
-- Succeeding Regardless
Chapter Seven:
-- Conducting Sales
-- Perma-Free? Or Not?
-- Bundles
Chapter Eight:
-- Patreon
-- Online Ads
-- Bigger Goals
-- Cooperative Marketing
-- Merchandising
Chapter Nine:
-- It's All About The Money
-- Publisher Mission Statement
-- The Vision
-- What To Do With Your Mission And Vision Statements

As you can see, this is more detailed in some ways than Tonya's book. It's not just a book about how to write a business plan, because Leah's not really into business plans per se. It is a book on how to look at what you're doing, figure out where you are, make plans for the future (however far in the future you're comfortable projecting) and make to-do lists to help keep your business on track. Which is basically what a business plan is for.

One point Leah brings up is that formal business plans are largely produced to be shown to other people. If you want to start a business, or want to expand your existing business, and you want a bank or other institution to loan you money, if you want to attract investors, if you want to persuade someone who has skills or resources your business needs to go into partnership with you, the first thing you do is give them a copy of your business plan. Having a good, thorough, well organized business plan with all the right topics and terminology in it helps convince other business people that you're at least worth listening to for five minutes. You speak their language, you've done your homework, you have some business expertise to bring to the party.

Indie publishing writers don't need any of that. We rarely seek loans, we don't want formal investors, and anyone we'd want to work with probably thinks like we do, not like the MBAs do. To a writer, your business plan is purely for you, something to help you figure out what you're doing, what you want to do in the future, and how to get there. It's something to help keep yourself on track. It doesn't have to be structured like the plan a marketing or electronics entrepreneur would come up with, and it doesn't have to be written in formal business language. You'll probably never show it to anyone, so it can be written and structured in whatever way suits you.

If all you want is a big f@#$%g to-do list, then that's all it has to be.

To someone who does have a business background, I imagine the thought of being this loose and disorganized is pretty appalling. If you're comfortable with spreadsheets, and making detailed plans for the future makes you feel like you have a firm handle on your business, then you'll probably like Tonya's book a lot. But read Leah's book anyway; she has a lot of great ideas for staying organized on a day-to-day level that even someone who prefers a more formal business plan might find useful.

These are both great books. Which you'll prefer depends on your background and your preferences for how to plan and operate. Leah's book speaks to me more, and I've been using a big f@#$%g to-do list ever since I first read it, but I'm glad I read Tonya's. Try them both, and see which one resonates with you.

Bundling

So, bundling is a thing. Has been for a few years now. Some writers I know are into bundling, and various people whose blogs I read post about this or that bundle that's going around. I bought a few, back when they were new and cool, and there were a few books in a bundle that I wanted, and the price was great so why not?

Well, it turned out there was a pretty big "why not." And that's this -- the only way I've found to sideload an e-book onto my tablet ends up with that book in the "Documents" area about 3/4 of the time, stripped of its cover, added to a plain text list that I hardly ever look at. I fiddled around with it, and finally kind of gave up. At this point, I don't even particularly go after free books, unless the author doing the give-away is using Bookfunnel*.

And all those bundles I bought? I never did download any of them, because the thought of struggling to get them onto my tablet (in the Books section) just made me want to go hide under the covers. :P Eventually I stopped buying bundles. Why pay the money if I wasn't going to actually get the books?

Well, now there's an solution to that problem.

A new(ish) outfit called Bundlerabbit has a great innovation -- they not only sell you a bundle themselves, they'll also sell it to you through your favorite vendor. So if, like me, you read your e-books on an Amazon tablet, you go to the Bundlerabbit site, find a bundle you want, click the "Purchase" button and then select where you want to buy the bundle. If you buy from Bundlerabbit directly, you can pay what you want, from the minimum up to whatever. If you want to buy from a vendor, like Amazon, you'll just pay the minimum price to get all the books. That is, if there are multiple tiers that give you different numbers of books, the whole set is offered at the third-party vendor sites, at whatever the minimum price is to get that tier. So Bundlerabbit and the authors involved are theoretically losing some money here, whatever extra amount readers might've decided to pay, but on the other hand they can capture purchases from people like me, who don't want to hassle with side-loading books. I wouldn't have bought their bundle at all if I couldn't buy it from Amazon. And I'll bet I'm not the only one who feels that way.

From the author's point of view, Bundlerabbit is easy to use, and Chuck Heintzelman, the guy who owns the business, is very helpful and responsive to questions. You create an author account, and can upload your books (novels, short stories, whatever you like), with marketing blurbs and keywords to help potential bundle curators find your books that fit their theme. If a curator wants to include a book of yours in a bundle, they contact you and you work out the terms. If you want to curate a bundle, you can do that too. If you want to edit an anthology but don't want to hassle with collecting money from all the vendors, doing the math and cutting your sixteen authors each a check every three months, Bundlerabbit will do that for you -- set up your anthology like a short story bundle, have your authors upload their stories to the site and curate your anthology, and Bundlerabbit will pay you all. (Seriously, this is the one big hassle that's made me shudder at the thought of ever editing an anthology, having to do all the accounting and the math, and cut everyone a check for $2.18 every six months. :P With Bundlerabbit, it's not an issue anymore.)

Bundlerabbit is also working on offering accounting services for multiple creators on one project -- sort of a reverse bundle. So if you want to collaborate with someone -- if you and a friend worked together on a project, you can publish it through Bundlerabbit and they'll handle all the accounting from all the different vendors and pay you individually. If you co-wrote a novel with two other writers, plus you had an artist do the cover art and a map and some interior illos, and you promised them a royalty percentage, Bundlerabbit will handle that accounting for you. These collaborative accounts are in beta right now, but should go live some time this summer.

Yes, I've heard Chuck speak about this a few times. :) I know him, he's a good guy. I haven't used the author-end of Bundlerabbit yet myself, but I know a bunch of writers who have, and who've been very happy with the experience.

Chuck also did an interview with Joanna Penn recently, so go check that out, give it a read or a listen, if you're interested. Or just check out the Bundlerabbit site, try buying a bundle, and/or create a free author account and poke around.

This is a great service, with a lot of cool features the other, better-known bundling sites haven't even thought of yet. I hope it gets huge.

Angie


*Bookfunnel is an excellent app that lets an author (or whoever is giving away a book) upload whatever formats they have to Bookfunnel, and then give folks a download code. You go to the Bookfunnel site, download their free app to your reader or tablet one time, then get your book. Bookfunnel downloads the right format and installs it on your device. If you have trouble, or need some help the first time, Bookfunnel handles all tech support, which is a very good thing for the writers using their service. I've used this to get free books from several authors, and it's worked wonderfully every time. Highly recommended, whether you're a reader who likes free books, or a writer who wants to give away some books but doesn't want to get stuck doing dozens or hundreds of hours of tech support on reader platforms you're probably not familiar with.

The Write Attitude by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The Write Attitude by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

1. Habits
2. The Importance of Routines
3. Churning It Out
4. Getting By
5. Following the Crowd
6. Indispensable
7. Beginner's Luck
8. One Phone Call From Our Knees
9. Controlling the Creatives
10. Believe in Yourself
11. Out! All of You!
12. The Writer You Want to Be

Kris Rusch has worn pretty much every hat in writing and publishing. She writes fiction and nonfiction, at all lengths, and has won awards and been a bestseller in multiple genres. She's edited short fiction, both anthologies and magazines (including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), and is, in fact, the only person on the planet to win the Hugo Award for both writing and editing short fiction. She's been an owner, with her husband Dean Wesley Smith, of two publishing companies (they currently own WMG Publishing) and several retail stores. She was a low-level employee at a publishing company she didn't own when she was young, and worked as a radio journalist and news editor for some years. She's made her living off of writing and publishing, without having a separate day job, for about three decades. She takes the long view, which separates her from a lot of the folks who've had some success in the last year or five or ten, and give advice based on what they've done short term. Which is useful, up to a point, but if you want a long-term career, the best advice comes from someone who's had one, and is still going strong.

Kris herself is the first to say that every writer is different, and that you should examine any advice you get to see if it will work for you, or how you can make it your own in a way that'll be useful. But basically, when she talks about writing or publishing, I listen, and I usually agree with her.

This book is a collection of essays originally posted on her blog over a period of some years, all on the topic of how a writer's attitude will affect their success.

Writing and publishing is an area where about 90% of success seems to come from just doing it, over and over, year after year after decade. It's easy to kill your own career -- or strangle it in the crib -- by having the wrong attitude, looking at things from the wrong perspective, buying into myths, thinking short-term instead of long-term... so many ways of wandering off the path. Kris talks about some of the trickiest detours into the underbrush, the ones lit up in neon and advertising themselves as shortcuts or expressways or well-lit, well-trodden paths to Success! which are actually no such thing.

She starts by looking at your habits and routines, which are two different things, in the first two essays. Developing good habits and routines can make you more productive by offloading a lot of the thinking and planning. Habits are how you do things, while routines are how you organize your day. So Kris is in the habit of, whenever she cooks, cooking enough to freeze leftovers so she doesn't have to cook all the time. Going to cook? then cook a lot, is a habit. Drinking some water before a writing session, then sipping tea while writing, is another habit; it forces her to get up and move around about once every hour, to keep her from getting crippled up from spending too much time sitting and typing. Sitting down to type? Drink some water and make a mug of tea.

She gives her routine as well, from getting up to going to bed, including several writing sessions per day, and also talks about when she has to deviate from it, and how she gets back to it as soon as possible. I appreciate that she shows the bumps in the road and how to recover from them -- much more useful than pretending to be Superwriter, or urging her readers to be.

The third essay talks about the damage that comes from internalizing the idea that writing fast is bad. There's a strong meme going around the larger society, and particularly pushed by English teachers and book reviewers and agents and many tradpub editors, that anything written quickly has to be crap. It was churned out, cranked out, dashed off -- clearly it can't be any good. That's a poisonous idea that doesn't belong anywhere near your writer brain, and Kris does a good job shooting that myth and burying the corpse.

The fourth essay is about people who do just enough to get by, and how that hurts them if they're a writer. I'll admit I was one of those people in high school. High school contained little that I was interested in and less that was actually useful. I learned some things, sure, but that was a minority of what was presented, and I learned a lot more on my own. Ignoring homework to read or write might not have been great for my GPA, but I think it was the right choice in the long run, even if I didn't make that choice for such great reasons at the time. It's easy to get into the habit of doing as little as possible, though, and feel good about getting away with that. Maybe that's not so bad if you're a minimum-wage slave, but when you're doing something you really want to do, and transition to working for yourself (as all freelance writers do, essentially) then the cliche about "You're only cheating yourself" becomes very true. This essay made me think about my own habits, how they've changed over the years and how they haven't. In some ways, I bust my butt when I'm working for someone else (and always have, even with that first minimum wage retail job) but in others I'm good at doing as little as possible so I can get on to the good/fun/interesting stuff. Being conscious of that means I'm applying my highly developed "efficiency" skills where they'll actually do the most good, rather than applying them reflexively.

Number five is about following the crowd, something I've never been very good at, even if I wanted to. Probably just as well, but this is another area where I'd prefer to be able to do some "crowd following" type things -- consciously and with forethought, of course. I'm probably better off with my inner writer being stubbornly unable to, though. If you find yourself thinking, "I'd better write this, or I should write like that, because that's selling," this essay is for you.

The sixth essay talks about how writers become indispensable to their genre or subgenre, and what Kris means by that. This is one of those things you can't just do -- it's not like finishing a novel, or taking a class in how to design covers. Kris gives seven tips you can follow to give yourself the best possible chance of being one of the indispensable writers in your genre, but like success itself, all you can do is prepare, and make sure that when it starts raining soup, you're standing outside with a pair of goggles and a big bucket.

Number seven is about how fast and early success can hurt you. Not something I have to worry about :) but it's an interesting read. Having great success right off the bat sounds like a great upside risk to have to deal with, but it is a risk, and thinking about how to handle it is worth some cogitation time. And I think a lot of this applies to great success no matter when it comes; it's easy to fall into the traps she discusses, no matter when that sudden boost comes.

Number eight is about major life rolls -- some catastrophic event, like a major illness, a death in the family, a house fire, a divorce, things that happen that feel like a knife in the gut -- and how they affect your writing (along with the rest of your life.) You might not recognize that what happening is affecting you until later. Kris gives an example of how this happened to her and she didn't recognize it until months later. It happened to me in 2012, when my husband's retina tore. He needed two surgeries, months apart, and his doctor couldn't say whether his vision would go back to what it was before, or whether the surgeries would just keep it from getting any worse. Jim is legally blind and doesn't have any excess vision to play with, and I was a quiet wreck for most of that year. I was more than halfway through the year when I realized exactly why my writing had gone to hell, and accepted that it probably wasn't going to get any better until the crisis was over with. It was hard to come to that conclusion -- I had plenty of spare time, there seemed to be no logical reason why I couldn't write. I just... couldn't. Deciding not to beat myself up about it anymore (which just added to my stress) was the best decision I could've made. Good essay.

The ninth essay is about how letting the battles and bad attitudes of your fellow creatives suck you in and take up real estate in your brain can hurt you. From the sheer time lost following online flamewars (and I'll admit this is me, depending on the subject of the fight), to the slams and sneering and flaming echoing in your head and preventing you from writing what you want to write, your fellow writers can really poison the well.

Number ten is about believing in yourself and your work, and sticking up for yourself and for a book or story or series, for a genre or subgenre you want to write, for a style of writing that feels right to you, no matter who is telling you you're wrong. Kris gives some great examples -- The Phantom Tollbooth, The Cat in the Hat, and Starship Troopers, of books that would've never been published if the writers had listened to their agents or editors, books that went on to become genre-changing classics.

Number eleven is related to number ten -- it's more about sticking up for yourself, but specifically about clearing people who are actively obstructing you out of your life and work. Kris talks about the example of Sally Field, who'd had success on TV playing Gidget, a vapid airhead, and similar roles like The Flying Nun. Now she wanted to move into movies, but her agents, her business manager and her husband all told her that she wasn't pretty enough and wasn't good enough.

Field's response? "You're fired."

You're fired.

She didn't bow her cute little head and listen to their advice. She didn't let them bully her. She left her agents, her manager, and her husband (who agreed with them). She ends the anecdote with this:

[That time] was like 'Out! All of you!'

Four very important words.

Out! All of you!

All of you who don't believe, who offer bad advice under the cloak of good advice. Who recommend that something innovative get tossed because it's unusual. Better to blend in, better to be like everyone else. All of you who are afraid of risks. You--out!

There's more. This is one of my favorite of Kris's essays.

The last essay is about figuring out what kind of writer you are, what kind you want to be. It can take some time, and our early guesses can easily be wrong. Or we might change somewhere along the line. This is about exploring the territory, trying things on for size, tasting what the field has to offer rather than just deciding that the one thing we've been munching on all along is our favorite by default. I've known a lot of writers who seem to be so paranoid that they might be falling behind that they dash as fast as they can down the first road they hit -- the first genre or even subgenre they start writing, or the first one they have some success with -- that they don't even look at all the other possible paths, much less explore any of them. "Oh, no, I'll just keep doing what I do best!" is, in my opinion, one of the saddest things a writer can ever say. Also, as Kris says:

If you look at what you're doing bit by bit, piece by piece, you'll probably end up with the same kind ofhybrid that I have. A bit of traditional here, some indie there, a little self-publishing in the middle. You might end up with a preference ... and that preference might remain the same for the rest of your career.

Or it might not.

The message I get is to stay aware. Aware of what's out there, and aware of what you're doing -- all of it. It's easy to dismiss or overlook that little side project, or that "not really published" stuff you do on your blog for six years, or non-fiction that doesn't really count because... why again?

And aware of what's going on in your own head. That's really what this whole book is about -- being awake and aware of what you think and what you believe, and how it affects what you do and how you do it. There's a lot of good stuff here, enough to reward several readings at intervals. Highly recommended.

The Nine Worst Provisions in Your Publishing Contract by David P. Vandagriff

The Nine Worst Provisions in Your Publishing Contract by David P. Vandagriff

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

David Vandagriff is a lawyer with a lot of contracts experience, who got interested in publishing when his wife started writing fiction. He's worked with a number of writers on contract issues, and has been collecting contracts from many more writers to keep up with what sorts of contracts are being issued by traditional publishers. He blogs at The Passive Voice, posting mostly links of interest to people in the writing/publishing business, but he's also posted a lot of commentary about publishing contracts and similar matters, from the point of view of a lawyer looking in from the outside at things writers and publishers have taken for granted for decades. Check out his blog, particularly things posted under the "Contracts" category.

In this book, Vandagriff looks at the worst clauses routinely found in publishing contracts, one per chapter:

Your Contract Lasts Forever -- Life of Copyright
No Minimum Performance Standards -- Out of Print
Non-Compete Clauses
Option Clause
Rights Grab
Assignability of Contract without Consent
All Money to the Agent -- Agency Clause
Unlimited Liability
Payment Every Six Months with Reserve for Returns

Each chapter is organized in the following parts:

What is this Provision?
What's the Problem?
What does it look like? (sample language)
How do I fix it?
Rationale for Change
Special Notes

If you work with a traditional publisher, or are considering doing so, I highly recommend you read this book. It's short and to the point, and is easily readable. This isn't some long, dense slog through the legal swamps.

About Audio

Dan Sawyer, a guy I know who's been doing audio for a long time -- from audiobooks to movie soundtracks -- did an interview with Joanna Penn on audiobook production, distribution and sales recently. I finally got around to reading it, and it's good stuff. (Joanna does a podcast, but she also posts a transcript, so you can listen or read, whichever you prefer.)

They talk about a lot of different audiobook-related subjects. Here's a chunk of one that made me sit up and think:

Your copyright on any work, and any work meaning finished form, applies to the finished form and everything contained in it, including derivative rights, transcription rights, everything else.

...

There's a lot of stuff that's been ferreted out by case law, but it all reinforces that principle. Things like audio rights are not a single right, they're a basket of rights that can be as multiferous as how you define that and what the market will bear. Currently, there's about 36 different kinds of audio rights that have proven market viability.

And you get those by adding on one axis the number of readers, on another axis the style of production, and on a third axis the level of abridgment, and on a fourth, the level of adaptation. Each of those has a couple of viable options in the current marketplace and you multiply them together, you get 36 potential forms of audiobook.

Even if you never plan to produce your own audiobooks, or directly hire someone to produce one for you, knowing about the rights involved is vital if you're signing contracts with, say, a traditional publisher that wants audio rights. There's a lot there, so if your publisher wants the whole kaboodle, make sure they're compensating you for it.

There's a lot of good stuff here. Read/hear the rest at Joanna Penn's blog.

Also, Dan wrote a book for folks who want to do their own audiobooks, or who want to know about what goes into it so they can be informed consumers when they hire someone to do an audiobook for them. It's called Making Tracks, and he just last month released an updated second edition. Check it out.

Angie

Kris Rusch on Non-Compete Clauses

Anyone who's ever considered tradpubbing a book really needs to read Kris's Business post this week on non-compete clauses.

Some choice quotes:

If you sign any version of a non-compete clause, you will never be a full-time professional writer. Writing will not be your career. Something else will, and you will write on the side for the rest of your life.

I know of at least two mystery writers who need their publisher’s permission to put up a blog post. I know of several more who have had to get a document granting them blanket permission from their fiction publisher to write nonfiction.

Your current publisher might not enforce that clause; the publisher/business your current publisher sells out to might enforce the clause, and make you pay damages for anything you’ve previously published after you signed the contract (and ignored the clause).

Interested yet? Good. Go read it. Seriously, this is important. :/

Angie

2016 Anthology Workshop

It's been over two weeks since I got back from the Anthology Workshop. I meant to do a write-up about it before this, but I caught some kind of crud on the flight home (best as I can tell, looking at the likely incubation period) and I've only just gotten over the hacking and sniffling. I hate trying to sleep when my sinuses are clogged up; I think the sleep deprivation is worse than the actual hacking and sniffling. :P

Anyway. Great workshop as always. I only sold one story (an SF mystery to John Helfers for an anthology called No Humans Allowed,) but I had a great time anyway, and learned a lot. I had a chance to talk to a bunch of folks, get to know some new people and some people who've been around, but we just never had a chance to really sit down and chat before.

The whiteboard John built his TOC on. My story's on the right, in darker marker; it was a "Hold" at first, and he decided to add it at the end, when he was filling in stories to make his wordcount.

We wrote stories ahead of time, as always. About 45 attendees wrote about 250 stories, totalling 1.1 million words of fiction. The reading was like a tidal wave, seriously. We're supposed to be learning to read like editors -- who definitely do not read every word of every story that's submitted -- but it's hard when you're dealing with quality this high. If this were open-submission slush, most stories could be rejected after a paragraph or two. That's not the case here. This is a pro-level, invite-only workshop, and people who attend are ridiculously good at this stuff.

Six of the editors -- John Helfers, Kerrie Hughes, Kris Rusch, Mark Leslie (aka Mark the Kobo Guy), Kevin Anderson and Rebecca Moesta -- had established books they were reading for. We got guidelines for one book per week we were writing, and had a week (or a bit less) to write a story in accordance with the guidelines and get it in. Dean Smith was the odd guy out this year; he read all the stories and had to put together an anthology out of the ones the six other editors didn't choose, coming up with a set of stories that created some kind of theme as he went. He ended up with a bunch of stories on the theme of Hard Choices, and he had to fight a few of the other editors for some of those stories.

It was fun to watch. :) If the editor for whom a story was specifically written doesn't want it, any other editor who thinks it'd fit their book really well can steal it. All the editors with established books had dibs over poor Dean, who often found himself wanting a story, but standing in line behind two or even three other people. By the time he put his TOC together on the last day, he said the process had been a lot harder than he'd expected. I definitely wouldn't want to have to do it, although watching him do it was educational.

Most of the workshop was spent watching and listening as the editors went through the stories one by one, evaluating, disagreeing, arguing. There were a lot of WTF?? expressions scattered through the week as one or more editors loved a story that one or more other editors hated. Discussion got pretty heated once or twice. In the middle of all of this, Kris reminded us that this was because the stories were all very good. If this were a beginner workshop, where all or most of the attendees were still learning how to write, the editors would all agree. Obvious flaws would stick out to everyone. In this group, everyone can write, so the disagreements and arguments were all a matter of individual editors' taste. Even the common disagreements that sounded like craft issues -- like Kris and Dean insisting that a lot of stories had "no setting" (since they're both really aware of setting) while John and Kerrie often loved those stories and thought they had just the right amount of setting, or that the characters and plot were so interesting they hadn't noticed or didn't care that there wasn't much setting -- were really matters of taste. There are readers like Kris and Dean, and there are readers like John and Kerrie.

And that's the point. Just because one editor, or even five editors, rejects your story, that doesn't mean it sucks. It might just mean it wasn't to that editor's (or those editors') taste. Keep trying. Some of my stories that didn't sell would've sold to one of the other editors if they'd been editing that particular volume. Which is the point. Keep going. Too many writers get a rejection or three, decide the story sucks and stop sending it out. Don't do that!

As we've done before, we had sign-up lunches in small groups with most of the editors, and a few other subject matter experts, like Christy Fifield, who writes fun cozy mysteries, and is a hotel Controller in her day job; she's a great source of info for finance and accounting and such. We also had an audio expert, and someone who writes comics for major publishers, for folks who are interested in that. I went out with John, Dean and Christy, and had a great time with each of them, and the other writers who signed up to go with.

Other days we grabbed lunch with whoever was available, and there's plenty of talent in the room and lots of brains to pick. Dinner was also chaotic in a fun way, and I hung with a lot of different people at various times. Sometimes it's fun sticking with a few friends -- I usually do that at SF conventions, that sort of thing -- but at this kind of event, the more people you can hang out with and get to know, the better. The networking at these events is worth the workshop fee all by itself.

Allyson, the Publisher at WMG, announced that they're starting up a companion line of anthologies called Fiction River Presents. These will be reprints of stories that've already been in Fiction River, remixed in various ways. Fiction River is starting its fourth year now, and a lot of people only heard about it recently. Doing the reprint volumes is a good way of giving folks different mixes of stories, so if one theme from the past didn't appeal to you, maybe another will and you'll see some stories you'd have otherwise missed.

From the WMG site: "Appropriately, the first volume, Debut Writers' Showcase, commemorates first sales by up-and-coming authors. Future volumes will revolve around themes such as family, thrillers, offbeat stories, and Readers’ Choice."

My first professional sale was "Staying Afloat" in How to Save the World, and that story will be in the Showcase volume.

Othere random bits I noted down during the workshop:

Short fiction is an entryway to your work for people who've never read any of your other stuff.

Anthologies are an exception to BookBub's one-book-per-author-at-any-one-time rule. You can only have one novel up at a time, but you can have multiple multi-author anthologies, or a novel and an anthology, or whatever combination.

If you're looking to build up your sales ranking on sites like Amazon, advertise sales on multiple sites in succession rather than all at once. Start with BookBub and then go through others week by week. BookBub will raise your book up the ranks, and the smaller lists will keep it up there.

A workshop attendee who writes romances puts out a new short story each month. He makes it free on his blog for a week, with a buy button on the page. He sells a few during the free week, then when the story comes off of free, sales shoot up. He sells the e-books for $2.99 and paperbacks for $5.99, and he gets bookstore/warehouse sales; he sees batches of 10-15 of the paperbacks selling. He does this once a month, and now makes a third of his income off of short fiction this way.

"Free" is the most popular search term on Kobo, always, no matter what else is going on or what hot book's been released.

Writers are generally pretty awful at writing our author bios. I'll admit I hate doing it, and the standard one I use isn't great. An author bio should talk about your writing. It doesn't matter that you have five cats unless there are cats prominently in your work. It doesn't matter that you like to garden or knit unless your characters are gardening, or some detail about historical knitting is a plot point in your story. What do you write? What have you published? Have you won any awards? Or been nominated? Made any significant bestseller lists? When writing your author bio, remember -- not too long, not too short, not too modest. Most of us seem to have a problem with that last bit. :P

If your story is set during a big, horrific event, it's hard to get your readers to hang on to it. If you deal with it head-on, it's better to deal with a smaller part and make it representative of the larger events, with a close emotional grab. Trying to deal with the whole, sweeping thing will probably require a lot of tell-tell-tell narrative, which can get boring. Keep the reader down IN the events, focused on a representative character. Also, use little details, like in the middle of a huge event that's caused shootings or protests or whatever, there are going to be closed streets. Have your characters deal with that, to make the larger events have an impact on their lives in a given moment.

Make your manuscript readable. Small fonts are bad. Courier is iffy.

Make sure your name and the page number are in the header of every page, because some editors still print things out to read. If they drop a stack of pages, or they go for coffee and the printer spits the pages for a dozen stories all over the floor, the editor's not going to bother to play literary archaeologist to figure out which pages belong to your story and what order they go in.

Give your story a significant file name. Some markets call out file name formats, in which case follow that. But if a market doesn't specify, don't call it "Story.doc" or "Fantasy.doc" or whatever.

Story titles should be memorable. On the one hand, that means that calling something "Aftermath" or "The Game" or "Conflict" probably isn't a great idea because that kind of title doesn't call a particular story to mind. On the other hand, words and names in your title should be reasonably familiar and pronounceable. You want readers to be able to talk about your story to their friends, and editors to be able to remember your title when thinking about their up-coming book or issue, or when talking with their staff. They can't do that if they can't remember or pronounce your alien name, or your transliterated Arabic phrase. Put the linguistic fireworks in the story, not in the title.

First person can be very distancing because the reader is NOT the person doing whatever

There's a convention of a type of mystery fiction by people who don't know police procedure perfectly and that's fine. You're just aiming for a different audience of readers than the folks who are experts on procedure and make that a major focus of the narrative.

Put something in the body of the e-mail when you sub a story, or even just edits. Blank e-mails with just an attachment end up in the spam filter. Also, you're trying to foster a relationship with the editor, so say hi, looking forward to working with you, something. Not a Christmas letter, but a line or two.

If a published story gets picked up for a reprint, gets into a Year's Best, nominated for an award, whatever, let the original editor know. They might want to use it in their marketing, and even if they don't, it's a fuzzy to them too, just to hear about it.

If you're writing about one of a series of events, what's special about this occurrence, this character? Why are you writing about this particular one and not the previous one, or the next one, or the first one? Let the reader know why this person/thing/occurrence has a story written about it.

We were talking in the workshop about the layoffs at Random Penguin, which happened while we were there. Someone there who knows people at PRH said that Nora Roberts's editor was one of the people layed off, which... seriously? How could anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together for mutual warmth argue that that particular editor wasn't pulling in enough money for the business to justify their salary?? o_O So when word came out about a week later that Ms. Roberts had taken a hike up the road to St. Martins, I wasn't at all surprised. That was a ridiculously expensive round of layoffs for Random Penguin; I'm sure someone was called to explain WTF they were thinking, or will be when the company start to feel the lack of Ms. Roberts's sales in their bottom line.



We had a funny thing happen on the way home. I rode back to Portland with Lyn, who was driving, and Laura. We stopped at Laura's hotel to drop her off, and ran into Brenda in the parking lot. Brenda had dropped Michele off at the airport and decided, spur of the moment, to stay at that hotel herself. Lyn had planned to drive farther before stopping, but with two other writers from the workshop there, she decided what the heck, that she'd stay there too, so she ran in to get a room. I think she and Laura ended up sharing. I had a room at another hotel a couple miles away, and was having dinner there that night with a writer friend who lives in Portland. Under other circumstances, though, it would've been pretty awesome to have one more "workshop" night at the hotel. Or better yet, if they'd all been in mine -- it's the hotel I always stay at when I'm flying out of Portland, and my husband got a great deal on a suite. I had a for-real suite, with a main room and a separate bedroom, and my main room had a full size dining table and six chairs. We could've stayed up for hours gabbing. :) Maybe next year.

I had a great conversation with Amelia, and a decent flight home the next morning. I came down with the creeping crud a couple of days later, but the trip itself went wonderfully well. I'm already signed up for next year, and there's still space. If you write short fiction, the Anthology Workshop is an awesome experience, and one I can't recommend strongly enough.

Thanks to Dean and Allyson for organizing the event, all the editors for helping make it happen, and all the attendees for making it rock. So long as they keep throwing these workshops, I'll keep going.

Angie

Anthology Sale

I just sent back a contract for a short story called "Ghosts of the Past," which will be published in the ninth Valdemar anthology, a collection of stories set in Mercedes Lackey's Kingdom of Valdemar. This is the first time I've been invited to submit to a closed anthology, and it was a different experience. I'll admit I was nervous at a few points. :)

John Helfers, an editor I've worked with on a couple of Fiction River volumes, knew I was a fan of Misty Lackey's work and invited me to submit a proposal for a story. I've never worked that way before -- usually I read the guidelines for a book, then write a story and sub it, and I'm frankly not very good at judging ahead of time how long a story's going to be. There are writers who can aim for a 5K short or a 15K novelette or an 80K word novel, and hit right on, within a couple hundred words for the shorter lengths and within about a thousand for the novel, but I'm not one of them. I guess that's one of the skills you develop with a lot more practice and experience than I have. But I needed to sub a story synopsis and commit to bringing it in under the limit. So rather than just writing down my idea, I started writing the story. Good thing I did, because I got a few thousand words into that first idea and realized I had at least a novella on my hands.

Okay, scratch that and start over. I came up with another idea, pulled up a fresh story file and started writing again. After about 3K words I got a sense of where the story was going and how long it'd take to get there. I was sure I could bring it in under the wordcount limit, so I wrote up a synopsis and sent it in. John and Misty both liked it, and I got a go-ahead to write.

The writing was fun, and this is one of the areas on the commercial side of writing where having fanfic experience can be a help. All the characters on the page were my own inventions, but I wanted to do justice to Misty's world, and to the tone -- in computer OS terms, the "look and feel" of it -- so that the story sounded like a Valdemar story, and felt like something Misty could've written. I sent it in, got some edits from John, and we eventually got it hammered out such that we're both happy with it. Misty liked it too, so I got a contract.

[I've had questions about this before, so just in case anyone's wondering, my experience has been that contracts are issued after edits. That way, you get paid for the actual number of words that are going to appear in print. And I've never gotten the feeling that an editor was trying to shave things down to save a few bucks. In fact, most of my edits have resulted in the story being a bit longer.]

I found I was a little more nervous about this one than I've been about other anthology submissions. I think it's because I was playing in someone else's sandbox, borrowing their toys (even if I brought some of my own) and I didn't want the sandbox's owner to think I was doing it wrong, or being disrespectful. It's like going over to someone's house for the first time and wanting to make a good impression. :) Getting the final okay on my story, from John and Misty both, was a great relief.

The book will be out in December, from DAW. I'll post a cover when I have one.

Angie

Cover Design

Chip Kidd has been doing book cover design for Knopf for about twenty-five years, and has done some awesome work. He discusses it, with illustrations, in this TED talk, which is well worth a watch, whether you do your own covers or hire other people to do them for you. Knowing what a good cover looks like, and what the possibilities are, is massively helpful when it's time to decide whether or not the person you're paying is doing a good job for you.

Note that Mr. Kidd has the unfortunately common Major Attitude toward e-books. [sigh] I wish people would just get over the whole, "But-but-but the smell of a book!!!" thing already. :P As someone who prefers paper books, it's embarassing how some folks who (unfortunately) share my preference get all sneering and snarky about it. Dude, it's a format. You're allowed to prefer whichever one you like. No reason to insult the other format, and by extension, all the customers who like it. I mean, seriously, do these people really think that if they just slather on the snark thick enough, often enough, the rest of the world will eventually smack its collective forehead and exclaim, "Wow, you're right! This whole e-book thing was a horrible idea! Let's just stop making them and go back to good old (smelly) paper!"

That one annoying quirk aside, Mr. Kidd is a incredibly talented designer. If you have anything to do with making book covers, whether putting them together yourself, or approving and paying for the work of others, give this a watch.

Angie

How to Get a Reprint Offer

So, back in December, I got an e-mail from John Joseph Adams, one of the better known anthology editors in SFF. He'd read my story "Staying Afloat," and wanted to know if he could have reprint rights for a climate fiction (CliFi) anthology coming out in 2015. I said "Heck yeah!" and we made a deal. The project was confidential for a while, but it's been announced, so I can talk about it now.

The word rate was good (twice what I've seen at a lot of reprint markets, plus potential royalties if the book sells well) and the contract is author friendly. What's important here, though, is that at the time Mr. Adams wrote to me, I had one (1) science fiction story in print -- this one. I was as much of a nobody as you can be while still being published in the genre, but my story came to the attention of a prominent editor. I had someone (who had plenty of options to choose from -- check out the TOC below) find me, and write to offer me money, out of the blue.

The take-away here is that you don't have to be famous or even well known to get subsidiary rights offers, but you do have to be findable. Dean talks about this periodically, about how you don't need an agent to get sub rights offers, but you need to have a very findable home online, with an obvious way to contact you. Whatever name you write under, that name needs to be easily found, and -- no matter how much you hate spam -- you need to have an e-mail address out there that folks who want to offer you money can use.

Don't wait until you've "made it" or are "established," or until you have a "reasonable" number of stories published, or until you've had some award nominations, or whatever bar you think you have to clear before anyone will be interested in offering you money and/or work. If you have a single story published, it can happen. Don't sabotage your own career by hiding.

And now for the book:

This is the definitive collection of climate fiction from John Joseph Adams, the acclaimed editor of The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and Wastelands. These provocative stories explore our present and speculate about all of our tomorrows through terrifying struggle, and hope.

Join the bestselling authors Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nancy Kress, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jim Shepard, and over twenty others as they presciently explore the greatest threat to our future.

This is a collection that will challenge readers to look at the world they live in as if for the first time.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

o Shooting the Apocalypse—Paolo Bacigalupi
o The Myth of Rain—Seanan McGuire
o Outer Rims—Toiya Kristen Finley
o Kheldyu—Karl Schroeder
o The Snows of Yesteryear—Jean-Louis Trudel
o A Hundred Hundred Daisies—Nancy Kress
o The Rainy Season—Tobias S. Buckell
o The Netherlands Lives With Water—Jim Shepard
o The Precedent—Sean McMullen
o Hot Sky—Robert Silverberg
o That Creeping Sensation—Alan Dean Foster
o Truth or Consequences—Kim Stanley Robinson
o Entanglement—Vandana Singh
o Staying Afloat—Angela Penrose
o Eighth Wonder—Chris Bachelder
o Eagle—Gregory Benford
o Outliers—Nicole Feldringer
o Quiet Town—Jason Gurley
o The Day It All Ended—Charlie Jane Anders
o The Smog Society—Chen Qiufan (translated by Ken Liu & Carmen Yiling Yan)
o Racing the Tide—Craig DeLancey
o Mutant Stag at Horn Creek—Sarah Castle
o Hot Rods—Cat Sparks
o The Tamarisk Hunter—Paolo Bacigalupi
o Mitigation—Tobias Buckell & Karl Schroeder
o Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet—Margaret Atwood
AFTERWORD: Science Scarier Than Fiction—Ramez Naam

PRE-ORDER THE BOOK:

Amazon | Kindle
B&N | Nook
Other Retailers

How We Got Here

Camille Laguire just did a great post on the recent history of publishing that's worth a read for any writer, and curious readers. Those of us who are old enough remember when you could often find a dozen different books by a favorite midlister on the shelves of a bookstore, and when there were book racks everywhere -- every department store and variety store and convenience store and hardware store and grocery store and half the gas stations sold new books, even if it was just a spinner rack, and each store had a different selection. That's all gone now, and Camille talks about why, and what the ramifications have been. She's focusing on the mystery genre, but the events she discusses affected the entire fiction market.

Definitely worth a read -- recommended.

Angie