9-11 Ruminations

On September 11, 2001, I was living overseas. I remember that a local newspaper carried the headline, the next day, “Superman Cries.” I very much wanted to buy a copy, but I had other priorities at the time. My mom was scheduled to be on an airplane on that day, and I was trying to track her down, make sure she was safe (she was), and then I spent a lot of time on the phone or trying to get online to talk it over with her and other loved ones. By the time I tried to pick up a copy of the newspaper, they were sold out.

It’s interesting that at a moment like that, people would turn to a fictional character to try to make sense of the tragedy. They could have used the Statue of Liberty or Uncle Sam, the more usual allegorical figures of nationhood, but instead featured the comicbook Superman, with a single tear.

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Via, Mind Hacks, An emotional timeline of 9-11.

UPDATE: See my thoughts 2011 reflections on 9/11 here.

New Agent – Denise Little

There’s a new agent who handles science fiction and fantasy, among other genres: Denise Little.

As you can see, she’s already up to her ears in slush. She seems quite nice, and experienced in the publishing world.

I’m excited to be trying something new, after over thirty years in the book business. I’ve sat on every side of the table in this field, from bookseller to chain book buyer to editor to book packager, and now–I’m an agent.

I’ve got a head full of industry knowlege that’s uncommon for anyone in publishing, simply because I’ve worn so many hats in the the book field. Lots of agents have publishing experience, for example, but I don’t think too many other agents have first-hand inside knowlege of what goes on at the world’s largest bookseller, Barnes & Noble.

I think it gives me an edge in figuring out what will sell that few other agents have.

In addition, I’ve been an author myself. I know exactly what it feels like to submit, then wait for an answer with my heart in my throat for what feels like forever–and sometimes is.

I love working with new writers, but I’m very blunt. If I don’t like something, I’m likely to tell you straight out that I don’t. But if I love something–I’ll tell you that, too, and work my heart out for you.

I would love to jump on the dogpile — who doesn’t love the chance to write a query letter? — but I’m going resist the urge. 🙂

Towers of Midnight – Book Trailer

Just to be completely unfair, I’m going to contrast the video in the book trailer of the previous post with this one.

See? That’s how video and voice over should be, if you are going include them. Of course, the budget for this was probably larger than the budget for my wedding, because we are talking Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Tor could afford to make this look good. It’s pretty hard to compete with the flagship title for a major publisher. Still, it gives all of us little guys something to aspire to.

Oh, and I have this theory that the sweet spot, length wise, for a trailer, is 70 seconds, or one minute, ten seconds. Notice the length on this one.

China Doll – Book Trailer of the Day

This video tackles two of the problems we’ve seen before: (1) trying to make video look professional, (2) combining what seems to be a documentary with the trailer for a novel. I feel the same way I do about Druids and Ghost Horse Hollow. Folks, I love that you tried, I really do. The acting and cinematography in this is surprisingly good. But it still just doesn’t look professional. If you compare this video to the quality of a lot of book trailers out there, it stands head and shoulder above the rest, but if you compare it to standard Hollywood output, it comes up short. The problem is that the viewer subconsciously thinks if the video quality is not top notch, the writing won’t be either. This is a fallacy, of course; writers are good at writing, not necessarily video production. But subconsciously the thought is there.

Finally, length. Very, very seldom does a book trailer need to be long. I would target 100 seconds as the upper limit. This book trailer could have ended at 49 seconds and packed a punch.

Cinders – Book Trailer of the Day

This trailer is by Michelle Davidson Argyle, my friend, for her recently published literary fantasy, Cinders. Read my interview in an earlier post, if you haven’t had a chance yet. I believe she did it herself. It’s simple, and low-budget, but the pace is good, the stock footage is well-integrated and doesn’t feel like modern pictures just slapped into the trailer of a story sent in a medieval kingdom.

One thing she did which makes this trailer stand out is that you will notice several shots of the title character, in appropriate attire, in different positions. This helps give the whole thing a unified feel. How did she do that? Well, she designed the dress, had it sewn and then took the pictures of the model herself. Michelle is also a photographer.

One question I asked myself is whether video would have worked better. She had the model and the dress — she could have done video easily. But I’m not sure it would have improved it. Unless you have a professional set-up, it’s harder than most people think to make video quality look good. And bad video is worse than good still shots moving across the screen with music. There is enough sense of movement here with the twirly-swirls and the pans to create a sense of action. The teaser lines don’t try to tell you the whole plot, they say just enough to give a feel for the book. And the trailer doesn’t go over one minute.

I am hoping Michelle will talk about making the trailer on The Literary Lab as part of her series on self-publishing.

How Much Money Should You Spend to Self-Publish?

The comments in the Gizmodo article by FastPencil are quite lively. I’d like to respond to a few of the points brought up:

Banana Fish Today wrote:

Fastpencil is a scam. This is not real publishing. This is a combo vanity publisher/editing service. A real publisher approves only the best writing, then handles the publishing at no cost to the author. Fastpencil here charges $200 to put your book on Amazon. And the link at the bottom of this post is their full pricing page. Cover design starts at $400. Illustrations are $140-$240 apiece. Line editing costs $.029 a word. A novel is generally 80,000 to 140,000 words. So the top-end would run about $4000. And that’s just to fix typos; if you’d like advice on your ideas, just triple that number. They also claim to offer marketing, but they give out quotes for that. I get the feeling the price is pretty steep.

Real publishers do all this for free. A publisher’s business model is “sell books to readers.” They filter the best writing from the slush and spend tons of money on editing, marketing, and distribution in the hopes they’ll sell thousands of copies of the book. But Fastpencil’s business model is “sell services to authors.” They don’t give a shit how bad your book is, they’re not trying to sell it to people, they’re trying to sell shit to you. The author, not the reader, is their customer.

…Publishers are a necessary filter. They spend millions of dollars to ensure the few books they do select can turn a profit. And vanity services aren’t a way out of the slush pile and into the hands of readers either. The pile just moves from an intern’s desk to Amazon’s long tail. …. A handful might end up as success stories. The rest just end up with a book and no one to read it.

I disagree. FastPencil, like Amazon CreateSpace, is not a “scam.” These services do not, like PublishAmerica, pretend to be traditional publishers. It is perfectly clear, to anyone with a brain, that they are selling services to the author and it is the author’s job to sell to the reader. I feel sorry for naive writers taken in by vanity presses like PublishAmerica, which do prey on writers like carnivorous unicorns on sweet young virgins. But I don’t feel sorry for anyone using CreateSpace or FastPencil, and I very glad these services exist now. These services do for books what a service like animoto or xtranormal does for videos. You pay them to help assemble the product.

It’s also important to remember that traditional publishers do not provide their services to authors for “free.” Hello, welcome to capitalism 101, look up the chapter “Free Lunch, Lack Of.”

Facilitated self-publishing, whether POD or ebooks, is simply a different business model. The whole issue about gate-keepers is actually a red herring. Both models throw up hurdles to the aspiring author and neither guarantees success with readers. Here are the differences:

Facilitated self-publishing:

* Author is entrepreneur
* Author purchases service from other providers (editors, artists, publicists, distributors etc.) for a flat fee
* Author must invest capital up front

Traditional publishing:

* Author is a business partner with other service providers (the publishers)
* Author shares royalties from sales with partner/s
* Author does not need up front capital but shares profit dividends (royalties) with partner/s

The main difference is who pays whom when. Nothin’ is free, however. Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer choice. And there’s no question of doing away with gatekeepers. Money is always the gatekeeper. Writing is exactly like another other business. It requires time+work. Which =money. So you either need enough time to both write your book, print it and sell it door to door; or you, the writer, in order to spend most of your time writing, need to hire someone else to do the boring stuff.

In fact, most publishing ventures involve some mix of these options (up front vs dividends). Publishers usually pay artists a flat fee and editors a salary, while agents get a percentage of the royalties. Authors receive only 10-15% from the sales of their product because they pay the rest to their business partners. And just so you know, this is not a scam or a cheat or the exploitation of artists. The services the author is paying for really do eat up that much of the profits.

As far as I have been able to determine, high end service prices look like this (jump in if you know more):

Cover Art – $4000
Editing for 80,000 word novel – $4,000
Printing – not sure
Distribution – I have no effing clue
Publicity – Sky is the Limit, but see the list on my previous post for an idea; for a fancy book trailer, add another $4000; and you can also get a nice website for, oh, let’s just say, $4000. I like that number.

So, self-publishers, at a minimum, $16,000 would be a good figure to invest in your book. And those of you who are trying to interest an agent or traditional publisher in your book, add a minimum of $4000 for your own advance, and realize you are trying to sell you book to someone for $20,000, so they can resell it for more. Someone has to believe your book is worth that much. No wonder it is hard to break into publishing.

I don’t know about you, but I am reluctant to take out a business loan for $16,000.

Of course, you can fall back on doing it yourself or finding someone to do it who is not in the top-quality/high price range.

But suppose you had the money. Would that still not be equivalent to going to a traditional publisher?

Phwoar says:

Being able to select your own editors is dangerous. They’re there to mould your work into something that’s worth reading, that will sell and that will appeal, which is an inherently painful experience for an author. Whether they can take that criticism or not depends on their success, but judging by a large proportion of self-published authors I’ve met who have skins that are millimetres thick, I don’t suspect there are.

There are high-end self-publishing facilitators who will do just about everything for you, even ghost-write the book, if you have the cash. Are these scams? Not if you understand you are making a business investment. The majority of new businesses fail. It’s not surprising that the majority of self-published books fail as well. But is moving the slush pile to Amazon a bad thing? I really don’t think so.

And here’s the best part. Although there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there is such a thing as a new opportunity. When things change quickly, it is an opportunity for smaller mammals to out-evolve the larger dinosaurs. Technology makes some middlemen unnecessary, and some services cheaper. The costs of books are dropping in all areas — art, printing, distribution. Large publishing houses have a harder time than small houses, new companies and authorial entrepreneurs in taking advantage because of the inertia of size. However, the gap won’t last forever. Soon, the big players will enter the arena, or, more likely, new big players (think how fast companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter have popped up out of nothing) will dominate the field. I’m thinking — move fast, or get squashed.

About the only things that are not cheaper are writing and editing the book. I’m still waiting for the iBrain, that device that transcribes the stories directly from my mind, comes out. C’mon, get on it, tech wizards!

For this reason, when I publish my short story anthology, I am going to pay for editing, and do everything else myself, except distribution, which I will do through Amazon. I will pay them by giving them 30% of my profits on each book. Since I won’t have invested $20,000 in the book, I won’t expect it to make $20,000 either. It’s possible that if I take my own time into account, as writer, cover artist and book trailer producer, that at the end of the day, I will make less, per hour, for my work than a factory worker in China. So in that sense, the book might be a “failure.” But hey, at least it won’t be a $16,000 failure; and it might even turn a small profit. I can be an entrepreneur, without risking my mortgage, and still spend most of my time doing the part of the business I love best, the writing.

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Today’s discussion at the Literary Lab is relevant. Michelle invested $1200 worth of capital in her business venture, an order of magnitude less than the high-end minimum, yet she created an extremely beautiful product. Furthermore, she has almost broken even after a mere six weeks. In my opinion, this is very good and I would be happy to do as well as she has.

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As always, most of this blog post consists of OMAFs [Out Of My A$$ Facts] so feel free to jump in if you have actual information.