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Monthly Archives: February 2009
Monthly Archives: February 2009
“Me have idea.” This is my toddler’s latest phrase.
Ok, I said what I don’t like about ebooks.
But the advantages still outweigh the disadvantages.
1.
Ebooks open up new lengths, a new range of lengths.
At the short end, online publishing has created whole new genres of flash, defined by various degrees of short:
>100 words
>500 words
>1000 words
Short stories of the traditional lengths (1000-7000) remain popular.
But what do you do with those awkward 13,000 word stories which you can’t cut down to fit in a magazine but clearly isn’t a novel?
This is not a problem for an ebook.
Novel length guidelines on many epublishers look like this:
Quickie: up to 15,000 words
Novella: 15,000-29,999 words
Short Novel: 30,000-44,999 words
Novel: 45,001-69,999 words
Plus Novel: 70,001-99,999 words
Super Plus Novel: 100,000+ words
What about mega-books of 240,000 words? There’s no reason these couldn’t be published as ebooks either. I haven’t seen it much yet, although perhaps long books could also be sold as serials.
2.
One word: $$$$
Gotta say, I like how ebooks pay money. Maybe this is just because the only good money I’ve ever earned from writing has been on ebooks. (And I’ve only had three published. The bigger your list, the better the mullah!)
Plus, epublishers get your manuscript from submission to royalty check in just a few months, as opposed to a few years. This is a HUGE difference in the life of an author.
I wrote my first ebook when I was pregnant with my oldest son. I was able to buy Baby’s First Christmas presents with my royalty checks. If that had been a print book, it would have been coming out… oh, right about now, probably. He’s two.
3.
Another word about $$$$.
Ebooks don’t pay an advance. To me this is an advantage. As an author, I don’t have to wrack my nerves praying my novel will earn out my advance. Although my books were reasonable sellers, they weren’t bestsellers. Yet I don’t have any fear my publisher will drop me if I try to sell them a new book. Ebooks pay a larger percent of cover price to the author, another good thing.
My books remain happily on the backlist. Ebooks share many of the costs of print books — a reputable publisher will still need to pay editors, a marketing team, cover artists, etc.
The COVER ARTIST is very important. PEOPLE DO JUDGE EBOOKS BY THEIR COVER!!!
But the difference with print books is that backlist costs almost no additional money. Bandwidth is a lot cheaper than brick-and-mortar real estate. As an author, you want to keep your backlist. Those royalty checks, even if it’s just a little here, a little there, can add up.
It isn’t just the cost of paper which makes print books more expensive to produce. Think about it. Every time you buy a paperback, chances are you are also paying for the rent on an office in New York, some of the priciest real estate in the world. Ouch!
I would be quite happy if print publishers would adopt the epublishing business model. Drop the advances, increase royalty percentage. This alone would enable publishers to take bigger risks with new authors, because even if the author doesn’t sell well, the publisher is not going to go into the red over that book.
4.
My fourth point is actually a wish, not a reality. Yet.
Right now it seems ebooks only work in certain genres.
There’s only a few epubs for Sf/f for some reason, and every time I check their sites, they’re closed for submissions. I guess readers just don’t buy one a week, like readers do with steamy romances. (This reflects print sales, where romance accounts for half of all genre sales, I believe).
If there were more sf/f epublishers, I would definitely consider selling my mss to them.
And if I weren’t too busy right now, I’d take a page from the book of Jaid Black and start my own epublishing house. That would be a tremendous amount of work, but it would be great fun.
5.
The final thing I love about epublishing is that it has completely turned the tables on Vanity Press. Vanities used to be scam artists who robbed vulnerable writers of their money. There still exist such entities online, sadly, such as Publish America.
But self-publishing is now so much more.
Authors who simply tire of waiting for a publisher to want their work, or who want more artistic control of their oeuvre, now have the option of putting together a decent product together themselves for a reasonable amount of money.
Better still, with the internet, authors have an actual chance at successfully marketing a self-published book.
Large publishers and some agents are beginning to see a self-published book, not as the kiss of death, but a legitimate way to prove selling power.
I wouldn’t particularly want to self-publish my fiction. I have no real desire to do all the editing, marketing and selling myself. I’d rather write.
However, it’s nice to know that there is an alternative to traditional publishing — especially in a dismal market like this one, where so many publishers are buying less from new authors.
Maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Without a doubt, new tech and new media are part of the reason for the slump in the old-fashioned publishing industry. As the old-timers retract into a more conservative stance to protect themselves from loss, more new authors will be forced to turn to the new media as an alternative route to exposure. The old-timers will then pick only the proven sellers from the vanity-slush to bring to print.
Maybe this will even become the new model of printing for a while, with self-publishing becoming an almost necessary step for new authors, the way it used to be necessary for aspiring sf writers to publish short fiction in the pulps before they could sell a novel.
I think ebooks are close to having curl-up-in-bed portability. All the other stuff like, “I like the smell of musty paper” is something that is just a matter of what you’re used to. It’s meaningless in terms of giving print books any real advantage over ebooks on a reader.
Some people hate ebooks because they think they can’t curl up in bed with an ebook. Some people hate ebooks because they miss the musty smell of paper, and the tactile delight of turning pages.
That’s not my beef at all.
Here’s the main difference in advantages I see between print and ebooks.
I have to update the programs on my computer every frickin’ six months. I have actually lost some early pieces of writing because they are on floppy disks. I still have them physically, but they are inaccessible. In contrast, I also have books I’ve inherited from my grandmother, some of which are over two hundred years old. I can read them easily. They have permanence, solidity and accessibility in and of themselves — they don’t rely on someone else’s platform.
Some people think ebooks will allow publishers to charge more for bestsellers than for newbies. This is one possible model, but it doesn’t strike me as likely. It’s not a model I would want if I were a bestseller!
I prefer the itune model for books. Sell every book of a set length for a set price (this is how epublishers do it now) and let reader-reviewers and word of mouth augment marketing in guiding readers what to buy.I actually think it would be very profitable for authors.
However, I’m not sure, as a reader, I like it in the long run. I already worry about what I’m going to do with itunes library if I want to move it to a new computer, never mind a new medium. It frustrates me that I might buy thousands of books and then if some company tanks or some computer grows obsolete, that’s it, those books have to be re-collected all over again. And forget passing them to my grandchildren.
I’ve published three books. But I have no bound copy of any of them, since they’re ebooks.
It bugs me.
Once I fell in love with a man who didn’t fall in love with me back.
* * *
I’m a writer. So when I write a Valentine, it tends to turn into a novella-length opus. And I’ve embarrassed myself by sending lengthy, unrequited love letters, more than once.
The first time I sent one to my high school / college sweetheart. I wasn’t sure I was in love with him, but I wrote him a long, sappy letter anyway.
He called me in response to my letter to tell me he was now seeing someone else and planned to marry her.
Ouch.
Still, in this case, it was my pride which was hurt more than my heart.
Not so with the second time I wrote a love letter.
* * *
This time I was convinced I was in love with one of my co-workers.
I did everything I could catch his attention, but he never even noticed I had fallen in love with him. He didn’t act like he loved me — I’m not even sure he liked me. My friends, who had probably read too many romance novels, assured me not to give up, because they were sure the fact he picked fights with me was a sign he, too, loved me — secretly, of course.
I wrote him a love letter, but chickened out before I gave it to him.
Eventually, I had to face the fact that, no, he was not secretly in love with me, no matter how romantic that would have been.
On the day we parted, I gave him the love letter. I suppose it was one, last desperate attempt to win his love. Maybe as he would read it, tears would come to his eyes. He would say, “I can’t believe you wrote this. Because, you see,” — here he would hand me a thick piece of folded vellum — “I wrote you one too, and like you, never dared show you how I felt until now.”
Nope. He read it and thanked me politely for the letter. I never saw him again.
Even at the time, painful as it was, I knew that if a man did not love me, he wasn’t the one for me. Someone else was, and I would find him eventually. Still, it was one thing to tell myself that. It was another thing to make myself feel it.
I was heartbroken for a long time.
Like an idiot, I fell in love again. Worse, I realized what I had felt before paled before real love. If this man rejected me too, it would be time to think seriously about my plan to go stay in the nunnery in Nepal where I had once studied Vajrayana Buddhism.
We were good friends, but did he feel more than that? How could I tell?
Being a writer, I wrote him a love letter. Yup, even though this method hadn’t helped me before, I was stubborn and I tried it again.
It was quite long and I’m not going to bore you or embarrass myself by reproducing it. In essence, I asked him, “If you’re going to break my heart, please tell me now. Otherwise, let me be yours forever.”
And yes, it was that tacky. It was a Valentine’s Day love letter, after all, hand-written on parchment wrapped in a cover of red, red roses. I gushed on and on. I swear the thing was at least sixteen pages long.
I waited anxiously for his answer. I surfed the net for Nepali nunneries with good internet connections, just in case.
* * *
The moral of the story: If you give someone a Valentine begging, “Please be mine forever”, it doesn’t matter how kind they are when they tell, “Sorry, I just want to be friends.”
And yet, no matter how hard it is to believe at the time, it really is for the best.
Sometimes writing a query letter feels like writing a love letter. It’s not quite as intimate, of course — thank goodness! — but you are sharing something you love, your book, and asking if another person can find it in their heart to love your book too.
And sometimes, they just can’t. Although it doesn’t feel like it at the time you see that polite rejection slip, it’s for the best. You wouldn’t really want to marry someone who doesn’t love you. You wouldn’t really want an agent who doesn’t love your book. An agent who loves you book is worth waiting for.
* * *
The other moral of the story: There is, of course, one thing even better than finding the perfect agent.
That’s finding a man who man who loves you so much, he isn’t driven away, even by a gushy sixteen page Valentine in red, red rose wrapping paper. (He will, however, torture you for the rest of your marriage by trying to read out loud every Valentine’s Day.)
We’re married now with two beautiful children.
* * *
Btw, don’t send sixteen page query letters. *grin*
The Secret Agent contest isn’t over yet, but s/he’s left comments on about half the entries already, including mine. Based on the agent’s lackluster response, I don’t think I can expect to win any invites to send a full.
I can only hope this agent wasn’t one of those on my short list.
The agent passed on a few entries I liked, but also expressed interest in one I liked. (The pirate story.)
Whenever I receive a rejection my inclination is to do the following:
1. Go back and try to improve and strengthen the writing. That’s probably a good reaction.
2. Go over my short list of agents, including the ones who still have a partial or a full.
The Secret Agent has been slowly working her/his way through the entries in the contest, expressing interest in a few, dismissing others as too cliched, confusing or overwritten.
Mine was crushed like an empty beer can at a tailgate party.
Not hooked. Sorry. I felt like there was a lot of overwriting in the first two paragraphs.
“languoruous, bear-sized roots”
“Kavio debated himself briefly”
And then the wrap up that he must kill her becuase she’s dancing without magic just seemed too out of the blue for me to take seriously.
If he knows about this law, then he would be immediately on edge when seeing a secret dancer, correct? The scene would need to be written completely differently if that is the case.
I’m not too worried about the purple prose. The Secret Agent has no way of knowing, but I do, that I probably got a little carried away with this prologue. The other concern — that he would be immediately on edge seeing a secret dancer, is a bit harder to do anything about. Although, originally, when the prologue was about 300 words instead of 250, there was a “foreshadowing” about the law and the dancing. Maybe I should put that back in.