News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #3…
#15: Joe Konrath has spoken about the gate-keeping mentality of agents. It’s obvious, of course, why they don’t like eBook self-publishing. Joining the ranks still propagating the myth of legacy publishers (this myth states that an author needs an agent, editor, publisher, and publicist, although the agent only gets you out of the slushpile and to the publisher, and the publisher rarely helps you with marketing, while all four reduce your royalties to nothing), the author will find many reviewers. Among these, one will find those who concentrate on “literary fiction” (they generally also refuse to consider anything self-published—I refrain from giving examples, some of them very well known).
This sort of snobbishness is exactly what I was talking about in my blog post “Writing for Readers”—these reviewers comprise the old boys’ club of literature. Of course, I’m biased too! I think “literary fiction” is a genre name that is snobbish all by itself since it implies that all other fiction is not literary.
#16: An equally festering sore of mine is the phrase “American fiction.” This phrase is particularly ironic since foreign authors have dominated recent Nobel prizes in literature (most recently, Tomas Transtromer—the last American, if memory serves, was Toni Morrison, 1993). Fiction is universal. The fact that we’re so provincial that we don’t read fiction from other countries beyond the United Kingdom is just another wrinkle to the ugly American stereotype (“Gee, mom, I got off the plane and they were all speaking a foreign language!”).
Of course, many Nobel Prize winners are in the genre of “literary fiction,” so if you really want to piss me off, talk about “American literary fiction” (see above). (The Nobel Prize winners in any field are determined by the old boys’ network in that field—although some old girls now get in the act, a good thing. The only real surprises occur for the Peace Prize, like Mr. Obama.)
#17: Lately I’ve been receiving many “atta-boy” comments to my blog posts. Please read my rules for comments, reviews, and interviews. In particular, “atta-boy” comments, while flattering, are often generated by e-mail bots. I consider these spam, even if they get past my spam filters. Since I do not test to see if the commenter is human or not (I find these tests annoying on other websites), I’ll simply delete your comment without publishing it.
Even if your “atta-boy” is legit, please realize that your kind comments do me no good unless you say what you liked about the post. The simple rule is: positive comments explaining what you like allow me to give you, the reader, more of that; negative comments allow me to give you less; and all comments beyond just good and bad join us in a conversation that adds interest for the reader.
Of course, the same can be said about reviews and interviews. In particular, simple “atta-boy” reviews of my books will not be accepted, even if most reviews of books on Amazon that are of that type. The reader has no way of knowing whether the review is legit or contributed by the author’s old aunt Nell. Amazon ratings are largely useless for the same reason.
#18: Here’s a concept whose time has come: Remember those deals on the Lord of the Rings movies if you buy the whole trilogy? Or, the Alien/Aliens series? Books come in series too. In particular, my two sci-fi thriller eBooks Full Medical and Evil Agenda form a tightly bound pair which I’m calling “The Clones and Mutants Series.”
At $4.99 and $2.99, respectively, these two novels are already bargain eBooks. (Why the different prices? See #19.) However, I thought it would be nice to give a reader a deal when he or she purchases both of them at the same time. Donna Carrick of Carrick Publishing had the same idea (our e-mails crossed, in fact). Currently we are researching how to do this with Amazon’s KDP and Smashwords. If anyone out in virtual space knows how to do this, drop me a line: steve@stevenmoore.com. I’ll keep everyone informed of the results. Donna probably will too.
#19: My eBook pricing might be confusing. eBook pricing is confusing, in general. Some of the Big Six charge almost as much for the eBook as the trade paperback or hardbound. If you’re like me, you probably rebel at that.
For my Infinity trade paperback/eBook pairs, I tried to follow Infinity’s eBook guidelines, which are based on Apple’s for iBooks and Amazon’s for non-KDP eBooks (although U.S. Amazon and U.K. Amazon, for example, give different royalties to the author). This leads to the weird pricing—but the eBooks are still a bargain.
All my eBooks that don’t have a corresponding trade paperback (the Full Medical eBook fits in this category, since it’s a second edition) have more logic in their pricing—better said, I can understand the logic better since it’s mine, not Apple’s or Amazon’s.
The Secret Lab is $0.99 for two reasons: (1) as a young adult novel, it’s shorter than my other novels; (2) it’s priced so that young adults and adults young-at-heart can get to know me. By the way, young adults can read my more serious novels—I was certainly reading adult stuff at twelve or thirteen and young adults today are more precocious than kids from my generation. For parents worried about the need to censor their kids, you’ll not find anything unusual in my books—unless you only allow your teens to watch Nickelodeon.
Full Medical is $4.99 because I’m still trying to recover some of Xlibris’ exorbitant POD publishing and marketing costs—it’s a second edition and still a bargain compared to the trade paperback price of $18.69 at Xlibris ($21.99 at Amazon—don’t ask!). (Yeah, I know, I’m undercutting myself—par for the course in these topsy-turvy days of the digital revolution in publishing.)
Finally, Evil Agenda is $2.99, also for two reasons: (1) it’s a revised and expanded version of the serialized novel that appeared in the pages of this blog; (2) it cost less to publish, so I have fewer costs to recover.
#20: Given that the eBook version of Full Medical is a second edition, I have the problem of figuring out what to do with my author’s copies of the corresponding trade paperback, the first edition. Authors get these, usually at reduced price, for book signings and so forth, but the eBook has changed all that. (The same question will arise when I make Soldiers of God into an eBook.)
I thought about denoting them to libraries, but that either costs me money for mailing or for gas, both undesirable on my lean writing budget. When I become famous, some PhD student might want a copy of the trade paperback to compare to the eBook in order to write a thesis on my evolving psychoses. Or, maybe a writer wanting to study the difference in my writing praxis will compare the two editions. Or, maybe a reader with too much time on his hands just wants to see what I changed.
If you have an idea, e-mail me: steve@stevenmmoore.com. I’d love to give them away to some literacy project or to our soldiers overseas, but again the shipping costs make that impossible (remember, I paid for the books). I’m sure this is a common problem. I’ll research it on the internet, of course, but maybe someone out there can save me some time.
In libris libertas…
