Beyond the Elements of Style

Hope for Authors?

Does Apple’s new iPad represent hope for authors?

Okay, yeah, so I’m a Mac girl, and of course my cult believes that the world will be saved by the Macintosh. But a new product offering hope to those of us who spend our days sitting in a room and writing?

Bear with me for a moment here. Let me take you back to the beginning of the century, when record labels suddenly realized that musicians could make a perfectly good living without them. Creation and recording? Online. Distribution? Online. Marketing? Online. And while the music consumer in me loved the change (iTunes rocks, let’s face it), the author in me said, hey, wait … at least there’s still an income stream here for musicians. The song itself isn’t the product: the concerts, the t-shirts, those have become the products. Musicians can thumb their noses at the establishment and still pay the rent. But what about authors? Come on, who’s going to spend $75 for a favorite author’s face on a sweatshirt? Or pay $150 to go to a reading?

Ain’t going to happen.

So along with other writers I’ve been watching events unfold with some trepidation. And while I will admit to owning a Kindle and having become addicted to the ease of download and portability, I also have concern about the monolithic control of Amazon. So I was interested in this article by Eliot Van Buskirk in Wired magazine (and thanks to my friend Pete Tedlie for turning me on to the article!):

Wired.com’s Brian Chen and Dylan Tweney were right about Apple launching a book store to complement the iPad. The new iBook store will work pretty much the same as iTunes, functioning as one of 12 new apps that come installed on every tablet, and allowing users to choose books from a growing catalog. People who may never have contemplated actually buying an e-book before might consider it, now that it’s something they can do on their shiny new tablet. Authors and book publishers will have a larger market to pitch to, and they could take more risks on lower-selling authors, given the low cost of distributing e-books.

Still, books have not fared well during the growth of other electronic media and will face the same stiff competition on the iPad that they face elsewhere. Either way, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos should feel a bit tense today facing new competition from an extensible device that also does e-books and can be had for less than the price of a DX Kindle.

I was able to perceive some hope there. I have an acquaintance who makes a very nice living, thank you very much, exclusively writing ebooks. Right now the only categories that afford that kind of income are erotica and romance, but where they lead others may follow.

And anytime more people have books accessible to them, it’s a Good Thing. Consider the possibilities of the future, and then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

The London Book Fair

Full disclosure first: I’m offering this as a resource, but have never myself attended this particular show, so can’t comment first-hand on its usefulness.

But FYI, the London Book Fair will be taking place this spring from the 19th to the 21st of April, 2010.

The London Book Fair is one of the global marketplaces for rights negotiation and the sale and distribution of content across print, audio, TV, film and digital channels. It’s not as large or as famous as the Frankfort one, but well worth taking note of. As the advertisements say,

Even in the digital age, the power of meeting face-to-face cannot be underestimated. Wherever in the world you want to do business, you can do so much more, at The London Book Fair.

Take a look at what’s going on—it’s a lovely time to visit England! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

The Book Industry in 2009

There’s obviously a lot to say … it’s been an amazing year (not always in a positive way!) for the book industry.

A 2009 roundup of the happenings in the book industry is offered here by USA Today. it covers the emergence of ebooks, the question of whether literary novels are dead, and the rise—yet again—of the vampire genre.

My best advice? Read about the trends, but follow your heart. Write what is in your soul to write. If it’s meant to be out there, it will be, eventually. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Calling Poets and Fiction Writers!

Okay, so it’s been a while since I posted to my blog. Bear with me: my personal life has been in an upheaval (to put it mildly) but it seems that I’m getting it back on track, so I’m back to my blog now as well!

Today I want to point all poets and short fiction writers to a tremendous web resource of which you might not be aware. Duotrope lists an amazing amount of information about an amazing number of publications, both print and online, that are open to submissions. It tells you about reading periods, whether simultaneous submissions or reprints are accepted, the average response time, genres, comments … in short, just about anything you might want to know about the publication.

Duotrope also keeps track of the frequent changes in the literary world: which publications have folded, which aren’t accepting submissions, which new ones have appeared, etc. And you can have all of that information sent to your inbox for free by subscribing to either the poetry or the fiction edition of the digest here.

So check it out! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

More on POD, self-publishing, etc.

Since I wrote my post a couple of days ago, I’ve been pointed to some interesting articles and helpful resources on the subject, a couple of which I’d like to share with you here.

Yesterday’s New York Times carried this article, Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay The Tab. (Misusing in the process several terms as author Motoko Rich refers to “self-publishers”—in fact, the article is referring to subsidy presses—and speaking of iUniverse as a “print-on-demand” company. One sees the writing on the wall: once the Times has misused a term, it’s hard to regain accuracy!)

An older article that appeared in Information Week in 1999 spoke to the hopes and plans surrounding the print-on-demand technology. In Barnes and Noble, IBM to Develop Electronic Books, analyst Tischelle George discusses another use of the technology: a kiosk in every bookshop that will in fact print a book immediately and on-demand so that every book on the planet is available, all the time. This is a truly breathtaking use of the technology that, sadly, has not come to pass; and now we’re stuck with the term referring to authors willing to pay to have their books (at best) enter into public discourse or (at worse) gather dust on Aunt Edna’s bookshelf.

This past weekend I was sitting in the green room of a theatre, waiting for a play I’d written to go onstage, and was reading to pass the time. One of the actors looked at me in surprise and asked, “What’s that?

“A Kindle,” I responded. He continued to look baffled, so I expanded: “It’s an ebook reader.”

The actor shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said, “what any of that means!”

Soon he will; soon just about everybody will, as electronic books are the literary technology most likely to survive hard economic times and downturns in reading rates. I’m probably a lone voice crying in the wilderness here, but I believe that the way we name and communicate about these various ways of making books available to the public matters.

Think about what you want to communicate, and how you want to communicate it, so that you too can be … beyond the lements of style!

POD, Subsidy Presses, Self-Publishing, and More

Every so often I need to go through explaining what is what in publishing, as a new crop of writers and would-be writers starts slinging terms around without thinking about what those terms actually mean.

So let’s look at some definitions:

1) POD: this stands for print-on-demand. It is not a kind of publishing, it’s a publishing technology. Subsidy presses, self-publishers, and traditional publishers alike all use POD technology. It’s used most extensively in the subsidy press arena, causing many to confuse the terms. Resist that temptation. It’s a printing technology that developed after the advent of digital printing, enabling the company or individual to print a copy of a book when it is ordered, as opposed to accumulating expensive inventory. As Wikipedia says: “Many traditional small presses have replaced their traditional printing equipment with POD equipment or contract their printing out to POD service providers. Many academic publishers, including university presses, use POD services to maintain a large backlist; some even use POD for all of their publications. Larger publishers may use POD in special circumstances, such as reprinting older titles that had been out of print or doing test marketing.”

2) Subsidy presses: they used to be called vanity presses; they take your money and in return publish your book for you. Anything can and is published (few require editing;some offer it at additional expense), meaning that the books published by subsidy presses vary wildly in quality. Leading subsidy presses include iUniverse, Authorhouse, Booksurge, XLibris, and Trafford. Contracts vary: some provide all necessary services for a set fee, others are more a la carte in their offerings; some copyright your book in their name, others allow the author to retain copyright.

3) Self-publishing: Here you set up your own publishing company, and contract with printers, distributors, editors, graphics and design folks, cover artists, marketing professionals, and so on, to perform the tasks associated with publishing. Many self-publishers only publish their own books; others go on to take on other authors and eventually may become small independent presses.

If we as writers can’t get our terms right, what can we expect of the rest of the world, those who (theoretically at least!) follow our lead. So don’t use these terms interchangeably: use them properly. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Whither Publishing?

As the new year begins and people in publishing begin to take stock of the fallout from last month’s Black Wednesday, a few scenarios are beginning to emerge. There are, of course, the doomsayers who argue that publishing as we know it is over—and that, in fact, it may be over altogether, in any shape or form. Others press on.

A Salon article from the end of December posits one of the (unexpected) benefits of the crash: the reemergence of the small publisher.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, Open Letter Books, a small press based at the University of Rochester, illustrated how a more nimble firm can benefit from the freeze. The publisher bid on the English translation of Mathias Enard’s novel, “Zone” — a single sentence that stretches for 500 pages. An influential translator had called the work the “book of the decade,” and Open Letter director Chad Post expected tight competition for the rights. But no one topped his offer, and he hopes to publish the translation in 2010.

“There’s not much to cut at smaller presses, so they are going to stay the same — they will have an identity coming into the recession, and they will be the same when they come out,” Post says. “It will open up opportunities for the smaller, more stable presses. The bigger houses like Knopf and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are going through an identity shift. It will become very murky what kinds of books they produce.”

(for the full story, click here)

Years ago in this column I wrote that, in essence, the mills are closing. When the economy forced the closure of New England’s textile mills, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and a lot of people—a whole lot of people—found themselves without work, without help, without hope. An entire industry had changed. Those who survived were those able to take their skill sets and refashion them for other opportunities.

Sound familiar?

The mills are closing—most of the big ones are having fire sales as we speak—and the production of literature is changing, too. We too need to refashion our skill sets as well as our expectations of how we will continue to read. Reading isn’t going away any more than the wearing of textiles has. You’ll still be buying (and, some of you, writing) books ten years from now. Will they be different? Probably. But isn’t the essence of literature—communicating ideas, enabling readers to fly away on a magic carpet of fantasy—more important than how it’s delivered?

Just trying to keep things in perspective, which keeps me … beyond the elements of style!

How Long is a Novel?

Nearly every writing list I’ve been on, every writers’ forum I’ve visited, every writing magazine I’ve seen, and every fiction client I’ve worked with has asked this question. As though there’s some magic number that is the “correct” length. As though reaching (and not exceeding) that magic number will ensure acceptance.

I may well have answered it in the past, but my friend and colleague Richard Bylina has recently done so far more eloquently and clearly than I ever have. Here’s his take on it:

Novel lengths vary greatly, but in general…

…50,000 is considered the threshold for a novel; however, there are many fine examples of novels shorter than that criteria: “The Great Gatsby”, “The Old Man and The Sea”, “A Christmas Carol”. They are very short novels.

Each genre has a tendency to certain lengths, for instance, some romance lines have guidelines to keep the novels at 60,000 words or cozy mysteries between 60,000 – 70,000 words. Science fiction or fantasy has a tendency toward longer lengths.

I’ve not read a lot of Patterson or Koontz, but Koontz appears to be pushing well past 100,000 words most of the time. But it would be unfair use them as a guideline. Since font, formatting, and page size vary, counting the pages of a novel for comparison becomes a fruitless exercise; however, if you want to imitate Koontz, for example, you could type in some typical passages from several books, get an average page, and then multiple by page count for a rough estimate.

For first time novelists, the generally acceptable range to target is 70-90,000 words. Somewhere around 100,000 word crosses a business threshold of initial investment in a book for an author, and first time novelists will get an additional level of scrutiny when crossing that threshold. Remember, it is a business decision for the most part.

A good thing to do is know your genre or sub-genre. What are the typical lengths of those books? Check the publishers who put out the books in your selected genre. What are their requirements?

The best thing to do is write the best book possible without worrying about the guidelines, and write it tight. Have an opening chapter so compelling that the agent WANTS to read the rest of the novel. If your best chapter is chapter 8, well, maybe that’s where the book really starts.

It’s a tough business and agents are going to be no more ruthless than critiquers who salivate over a fresh opening chapter to review. And they do it not to be ruthless, but in anticipation of something that will really grab them and keep them reading for 40-50-200,000 words. If they are disappointed, sometimes you hear about what didn’t work in no uncertain terms, or in the case of an agent – REJECTION. You don’t want to give agents any reason to start reading your novel on the defensive. If you send in a 200,000 bodice-ripping story to Harlequin…expect to be rejected without the first brilliant sentence being read.

KNOW YOUR MARKET. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. WRITE A GREAT BOOK.

He’s right, people. Listen carefully. Write what you need to write, but know that there are certain realities in the publishing world that you’ll ignore at your peril. Listen to Rick, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Updates Chez Penguin

News from the publishing front! Penguin Group (USA) has launched Penguin 2.0, a digital publishing program offering a range of new digital and print-based products and services. Penguin 2.0 lets readers customize, personalize, and access the publisher’s content in new ways online, and begins with a pair of digital initiatives:

1. Penguin Personalized: Readers can add personal dedication pages to a variety of Penguin titles
2. Penguin Mobile: Allows readers to access Penguin content from iPhones and other web-enabled mobile devices

The plan is to add features and programs, including social networking and community functions, over the next year.

Interesting news, and it seems clear that this is the beginning of a trend for publishers to diversify in the wake of last week’s Black Wednesday industry shakeout. In some ways I think we’re going to see lines being more and more blurred (if they’re not already!) between publishing, distribution, production placement, production, and other means of reaching potential customers as the book industry grapples with the need to grasp pieces of an arguably shrinking pie.

Stay tuned, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Resources for Magazine/Freelance Writers

Need to do some market research? Find new venues for your work? Here are a couple of places you can start:

A lot of magazine writers subscribe (for a fee) to
Freelance Success, partly for its market guides,
guides to various markets (individual publications, what they want, who to pitch to, etc.), based on interviews.

Similar market guides are available from the American Society of Journalists & Authors (ASJA), which is more expensive to join (and not always easy to get into).

Writers Weekly has a great list of both jobs and gigs for freelance writers.

The Great Britain-based Burry Man Writing Center not only has gigs but hosts a terrific networking site for writers called Inked-In.

One of the best resources for finding magazine and journal submission requirements that are up to date is subscription-based, but well worth the cost: it’s Meg Weaver’s Wooden Horse Database.

These reources are a great place to start … and I’ll share more as I come across them. Remember that diligence and Google are your friends! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!