Howdy. I'm a writer, and editor. This is a blog for those on the outside looking in at the world of writing.
It's not sexy, and it's not an emporium.
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One thing I tend to find myself cutting lately is little asides that ease the protagonsists' minds. It's surprising how often I've put in little thoughts and narrative cues that set both characters and readers at rest, when I should really be cultivating dramatic tension. Take this example where I've sent a character who's investigating a series of incredibly violent attacks, to a place he believes to be the villain's secret hideout. He's going into the unknown, potentially exposing himself to extreme danger, and at the start of the chapter where he arrives there, I've gone and put this...
"It looked safe enough, for the time being; Calloway appeared to be alone here."
Why the hell did I do that? Hey, nerve-wracking situation! Let's castrate you by telling the readers everything's fine!
DELETED!
Or from earlier in the same manuscript, the lead character has been forced to work with a woman, when he prefers to work alone, and he's just found out that she lied to get the job. There's silence between them after they've argued and she's worried she'll be kicked off the job. For some reason my narrative tells the audience.
"It wasn't really that big of a deal to Linc, but he was happy to let her sweat for a while."
So I've instantly negated a source of antagonism for the main character, and killed any speculation (no matter how slim, I mean, your guy needs a gal around, right?) about whether this woman will be along for the ride or not.
DELETED!
If you want readers rooting for a character, antagonise those who protagonise. Dump crap on them, tons of it, and keep it coming, and don't make it okay. Smug characters who take everything in their stride are no fun, and defusing dangerous situations as soon as they've started is a dramatic dead-end.
Even if you really like your characters, don't go easy on them! It's not real. you know?
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Books, I try to read every word. If someone has troubled to write it, I try to take the trouble to read it, but on this here internet, my butterfly net-flitting means my patience runs out quite quickly unless an article is riveting. You're bored already, aren't you? TITS! I apologise, I felt you slipping away.
Once I hit that point, I'll tend to read just the first sentence of the next paragraph, then the last sentence, if nothing seems to have moved on I ignore the middle and skip to the next paragraph, then I'll just read the first few words, and if that doesn't grab me I start skipping whole paragraphs, just scanning for interesting words.
If you don't want your hard-wrought words to get this kind of treatment from readers you have to treat your own work this way. Let lazy reading guide your axe-hand.
If you've got a paragraph that doesn't move things on, you need to rip that sucker out. If it had a phrase or a little couplet you liked and don't want to lose, move it into the previous or next paragraph.
If it's something you'd skim in a blog post or an article, you don't need it, or want it.
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| Another fresh year is upon us, and ebooks and e-readers continue to make the headlines, and make a lot of money (and still cost a fair bit of money, too).
One thing that wasn't among my predictions last year was Andrew Wylie's entry into publishing with Odyssey Editions. With big publishing in a Mexican stand-off with Amazon over pricing, Apple's iPad gave publishers a glimpse of a market entrant who could challenge Amazon's dominance. The Wylie agency bypassing traditional publishing for it's clients e-editions certainly put a new spin on the industry head-banging over the Agency Model.
The news that old James Bond books would be published for the benefit of the Fleming estate, cutting Penguin out of the equation for ebooks was a big surprise for old-school publishing too.
Joe Konrath's experimentation with giveaways and low pricing showed keen pricing can make for big sales (although being a name author helps a lot), and our poll on what people felt was a fair price showed while being cheap can boost sales, you needn't be too cheap to attract the thick end of the market.
For the year ahead, I think we can expect a good deal more of publishers "not getting it", when it comes to pricing on ebooks, or even having a presence in the ebook market. It can still be very hard to get older titles as e-editions, and pricing is still frequently considerably higher than for discounted paperbacks.
I don't predict any game-changing new entries to the ereader market. The iPad is a premium price item, and though prices for dedicated ereaders are trending down, they're still a way off the "10 paperbacks" price point I feel is the tipping point for ereaders becoming as ubiquitous as mp3 players.
If you have an ereader, I highly recommend Zoe Winters' Becoming An Indie Author (Smart Self-Publishing) whether you decide to try traditional publishing or are thinking of going the indie route, it's well worth sharing Zoe's experiences.
Happy reading, and happy writing. Happy 2011.
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 Once upon a time, for better or for worse, publishing had things its own way. Books were sold, profits were made, authors were nurtured, marketed and published. Retail was healthy, with a wide selection of titles on sale. Going round a bookshop was like exploring a treasure trove.Is this nostalgia? Maybe, but I can't remeber the last time I went into a bookshop and felt spoilt for choice, spending an hour or more trying to pick just a couple of books out of a dozen to finally spend my limited money on. These days, the push is celebrity, novelty and bestsellers. This is just good commercial sense, of course, but the balance of stock between high-volume and niche titles is now hugely out of whack.
In the UK, publishing and retail had a built in protection of sustainable revenue called the Net Book Agreement. Essentially, this was price fixing. Any retailer who sold books below a price agreed with the publisher would receive no more books from that publisher. While this was a restriction on retailers, there was a broader benefit that they would not get into damaging price wars with other booksellers, and independent book shops could compete with big chains.
If there was a victim, it was the consumer, but publishing isn't just a business, any more than an art gallery is just a business. It's a cultural pillar. While customers may have been forced to pay more, in return there was a much broader spectrum of work to choose from, whatever you tastes. Higher price for a wider choice was not a bad trade-off, in my view. Sure it was designed to make publishers more money, but there were upsides for retailers and readers alike.
The Net Book Agreement stood for 95 years, before finally succumbing to the calls for it to be scrapped. Initially, the ability to discount heavily led to a surge in sales, and seemed to prove the book trade was better of without it. As time has gone on, forces such as supermarkets and Amazon selling cheap have driven the market towards focussing on giving more space to trusted sellers, meaning a much smaller selection of titles on the shelves. Retail book buyers focus higher up publishers lists, reducing choice for readers, giving fewer opportunities for new writers, and making for a riskier market for publishers to try to develop new talent or sell less commercial works.
Hey! Books are cheaper, win for readers, right? Not if you value bookstores. The heavy focus on what's new, what already sells, and ghost-written celebrity memoirs will make bookstores less and less relevant to the sort of people they need most. The more the front of book stores resemble supermarket bookshelves, the less reason there is not to buy your books with your groceries. The retail side of book selling is in serious trouble, and as ebooks are going from strength to strength, the situation will only worsen if things go on as they are.
Though I felt at the time the scrapping of the Net Book Agreement was a bad idea, and believe that's proved to be the case, you can't turn back the clock. But publishers seem to be attempting to do just that, with the push towards the agency model. By dictating prices for ebooks, publishers are trying to reassert control over pricing.
This is causing quite a backlash, not least of which because the focus is on gaining revenue from the least substantial product, ebooks. Selling a few hundred kilobytes of data for four or five times the price of heavily discounted paperbacks is a ludicrous approach. It is completely backwards. The product with the least intrinsic value is the one publishers are trying to burden with the highest price. There can be no pretence that this benefits bricks and mortar retailers, or readers. The only people to benefit are publishers.
The only plausible model for the future is for ebooks to be the mass market, and for print to be the premium product. Let ebooks do the heavy lifting in revenue raising, by making them well priced (not necessarily cheap, but fair) so they generate revenue by volume, not by artificially high prices. On the print side, publishers and retailers must work together by creating a physical product people want to own, and in agreeing a common pricing structure that rebalances the market. Physical products that have to be stored, transported and displayed, physical products that require physical infrastructure should carry the premium.
The biggest threat to this model are heavy discounters like Amazon, and the supermarkets, those that profited most from the publishers grip on pricing being released in the first place. These are also the groups who have least interest in the survival of high-street bookshops. Publishing does need to take on these interests, but the ebook agency model is not the way to do it. By forcing prices up with no benefit to hard-pressed high-street stores or readers, it's big publishing that comes off looking like the bad guy.
Hughes.
Extra: If you're interested in having your say about pricing andthe future of publishing, FUTUReBOOK have a survey that's worth taking, here.
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What were Bananarama trying to tell us about novel writing in that inscrutable song? That's right, nothing. And with this thin premise for an intro done away with, let's talk about that rapidly approaching time of the year known as "NaNoWriMo", which, not being a fan of the not quite an acronym, not quite a portmanteau name myself, I shall hereafter be referring to as "Bananawrimo".
| Don't you love it when someone writes a blog post so you don't have to? Well, when you're neck deep in revisions and editing like I am right now, you certainly do.
io9's Charlie Jane Anders has articulated feelings that echo my own on a subject that always irks me when I see it thrown out on yet another writing site or blog. Here Charlie Jane explains why and when it can be perfectly okay to "Tell" rather than to "Show".
I've intimated before that I'm not a big fan of "The Rules" of writing when they are laid out like holy decrees, all of which you can find shattered to pieces in some of the greatest works ever written. If you frequent any writers sites you've probably seen the same rules crop up again and again "if they said it then just say 'said'", "never use -ly adverbs" "don't head-hop" and the evergreen "Show, don't Tell".
These rules will generally keep work tighter, and help to hone writing craft. They help stop writing from becoming overcomplicated, confusing, or tedious, but the fact is, the vast majority of book buyers aren't reading with the eyes of an editor. They may be aware things have slowed down, or have become hard to follow, but they won't be tearing their hair out if, once in a while, a character "responded" to something "wistfully".
Adverbs exist. When someone tells you you should always show instead of telling how a person reacts or responds, that takes no account of what a writer may be trying to achieve in terms of pacing. If you have a fast paced scene, moving the reader through it quickly by using an adverb like "aggressively" or "impatiently" better matches the narrative to the pace of the scene than actually describing aggressive behaviours and facial expressions. Narrative controls pace, when rules harm narrative flexibility, the rules are flat out wrong.
Likewise rapid scene setting can be hampered by trying to artificially create a scene where exposition or back-story can be introduced. If you already have the reader chapters deep into a book, beginning an occasional chapter with a paragraph or two of well written info-dump will likely go unnoticed by the vast majority of readers. If your narrative style is confident and you've cut the information back as hard as possible, a quick info-dump will actually help the reader press on through the story rather than act as a roadblock, like a clunky explanatory scene which would more likely run to a couple or more pages would. A paragraph or two versus a page or two, in the name of a rule that's supposed to help readers through the story?
So many of these rules are thrown out as a quick excuse for a place-holder blog post, they can go from being useful guides to becoming oppressive truisms that if applied universally actually bloat prose rather than improve it. If everybody followed all of these rules, we'd all wind up writing exactly the same books as each other.
As with all rules, know them, and know what they're trying to achieve, then, if you feel really the need to break them, do it, and move on with your life, because you've probably made the right choice.
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The most popular post so far is the poll on ebook pricing, with over 1,700 views, and many helpful retweets and blog mentions from too many lovely people to name. Out of all of that, only 45 people actually took the poll, which if nothing else proves that it's much easier to get people on the internet to look at something than to do something. The poll produced definite results though, so thanks to everyone who voted (the poll's still open, by the way)
A lot of my New Year's day long term predictions have come to pass alarmingly quickly, and the trade is much changed from how things were those few 12 months ago when I started this thing. From a self-publishing sceptic to a full-on supporter of Indie writers. From someone who had only ever considered print publishing by traditional means to someone who is in final preparations for a self-published book, I've changed too.
Thank you for reading. Thanks for commenting. Thanks for subscribing. Thanks for the retweets and the blog mentions. To celebrate all of this, there's no contest and no prizes, but why don't you buy yourself something nice? Go on, treat yourself.
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| A finished manuscript is a big thing to wrestle with; tens of thousands of words stretching for hundreds of pages. It can feel like playing with a Jenga tower, worrying that pulling at the wrong piece could cause the whole thing to collapse.
Sometimes a chapter needs a lot of pushing and pulling, cutting and pasting, hammering and amputating to whack it into shape. It's much better to do that away from the main manuscript.
When revision time comes around highlighting and copying the chapter you want to work on into a new document will leave the original chapter intact, so you can be as brutal as you like without worrying you'll be messing up your manuscript. You'll also have the original to refer back to if you feel you've inadvertently cut something you shouldn't have.
You can break the chapter into chunks to make it easier to tackle dialogue, descriptive passages and action, without the pressure above and below, and without worrying about harming any formatting you've arranged in the original document, and once you've beaten that thing into shape copy it and paste it back in and move onto the next chapter.
To aid the lengthy revision process, it's also worth making chapter headings into bookmarks, which will make it much easier to navigate quickly through all of those words. Also, make sure to end chapters with page breaks rather than return strikes to the next page. This will preserve formatting whatever shape each chapter takes, and will also make eventual formatting for any e-book versions a great deal easier.
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Howdy. I'm a writer, and editor. This is a blog for those on the outside looking in at the world of writing.
Howdy. I'm a writer, and editor. This is a blog for those on the outside looking in at the world of writing.
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