News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #45…
#248: New ebooks for your enjoyment. Let’s start with my most recent release, The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. Thriller and conspiracy lovers, take note. Women tired of vampire romances, take note. Baby boomers tired of watching ups and downs of their retirement funds, take note. This book is fast-paced entertainment that’s gripping and thought-provoking. What would you do if the U.S. government sponsored a retirement plan designed just for agents and other employees with early onset dementia and Alzheimer’s and too many secrets?
Detectives Chen and Castilblanco, my favorite NYPD homicide detectives from The Midas Bomb, Angels Need Not Apply, Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java, and Virginia above will be featured in my very first true mystery titled Teeter-Totter Between Lust and Murder. Besides the title themes, they will take on arms smugglers and militia members in their new adventure. I’m in the final editing stages on this one—look for it. Coming soon!
#249: Review of Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James. I write reviews; this is not my review. Mandi M. Lynch, author and reviewer writing for the Book in the Bag book review blog, tells it like it is. She made the effort to read the book and try to find some redeeming qualities. I never had the courage (Prurient interest? Misogynist sociopathy? Puerile curiosity? Pornographic sadism?) to even consider reading this book. I do want to see a sociology or psychology thesis on why this book is so popular with suburban soccer moms and their desperate husbands trying to find out where the closest S&M-hardware shops are located. The review confirmed my opinion (well developed, even though I didn’t read the book) that this book is just trash. What’s your opinion?
#250: Amazon will buy Goodreads. Mixed emotions here. I have no particular love for Goodreads—I barely use it, but many people do. I find it to be like an old inner tube—patches, patches, and more programming patches. It has the most user-unfriendly interface of any website for readers and writers that I’ve ever seen. I understand what happened. It started out as a nice friendly site where readers could say what they’re going to read, what they’re reading, and discuss what they’ve read. More and more bells and whistles have been added—including groups and stuff mostly useful to authors (e.g. this blog is RSSd to Goodreads—if anyone reading this came to do so via Goodreads, please let me know!). I use the stuff for authors as best I can, but my patience wears thin. It’s like infrastructure in this country—it’s in need of a major overhaul.
Nevertheless, many people use the site, and slide through on their way to Amazon and other online book outlets. I presume now that Amazon will own it outright, the slide-through will be only to Amazon. I can also envision Amazon transferring all its author-related resources to Goodreads. Hopefully, a thorough user-friendly improvement will be added as a first step. Both Goodreads and Amazon’s interfaces with authors have many examples of what not to do in online interfaces. Maybe it’s just me, but I too often find that what I want to do is just not doable. And I’m not a computer novice. God help those authors who really want to reach out to readers in this manner (I do, I do, but, oh the pain!).
#251: Lies, misconceptions, and statistics. I’ve recently been speaking my mind in a few discussion threads treating topics of importance for indie authors and publishers. First, let’s understand statistics. Let me limit the discussion that follows to fiction writers. Let’s take population X = those authors who traditionally publish and Y = those authors who self-publish, either through POD, ebooks, or both. X and Y have common authors, of course, but let’s assume not (it’s dynamical in time anyway, some authors migrating from X to Y or vice versa, but at any one time slice—e.g. working on his or her next book—let’s assume the decision has been made on how to publish it).
Here’s the first statistical observation: #Y > #X (read this as the number of fiction authors in Y is greater than the number in X). Now, take any silly error E, like using “it’s” when you mean “its” or vice versa (whether this error is a spelling or grammar error is debatable, I suppose, so I’m just calling it an error). Let’s assume P(E), the probability of error, is the same for both X and Y. Then P(E)#X, the number of X members you expect to commit E, is less than P(E)#Y, the number of Y members you expect to commit E.
You can tweak this all you want (for example, it could be argued that P(E) is larger for group Y), but with normal variations, one wouldn’t expect the conclusion to change: because #Y > #X, we expect E in more of the Y books. Does that mean that traditionally published books are better? Not necessarily, if you weigh traditionally and self-published (indie) books by the total numbers of authors in each group. Yet many people, from the media (obviously biased toward traditional publishing) to traditional authors with an axe to grind, treat this as a stigma on indie publishing. (Of course, it’s important whether the stats are normal—many are, but not all—and even whether the stats are Gaussian, i.e. a bell-curve shaped distribution silly teachers often depend on to assign their grades. Because I don’t have data on X and Y and the various errors, it’s hard to say anything more!)
The truth is, success for authors in X and Y can be measured in many ways—for example, have you written a book that has more than N readers, where N is some large number? (Contrary to popular opinion, being on the NY Times bestseller lists is NOT a useful metric—no one knows what metric they use! Moreover, N is not the number sold. In my counting scheme, if Jack reads a book and lends it to Jill, who subsequently reads it, I count that as two reads—difficult to measure, but more indicative of a fiction author’s popularity.) The question important for authors is: Is there anything an author can do to guarantee success? There might be a silver bullet, but, all other things being equal, traditionally publishing your book is not one of them.
The catch phrase is “all other things being equal.” Both threads I participated in analyzed various aspects of this phrase.
#252: Is spell- and grammar-checking better in traditionally published books? Many readers, snooty or not, spokespeople for traditional publishers, and quite a few authors, egotistical or not, would answer yes to this question. Considering that #X < #Y, one shouldn’t be surprised that there are more indie books with > n simple spell- and/or grammar-errors (you choose n—I like 10 or 20)—is that what we mean by better? No! What is really meant is that we’re more likely to find > n simple errors in a self-published book than a traditionally published book because all other things aren’t equal!
For example, too many indie authors, for lack of funds or sheer laziness, skimp on proof reading and copy editing when they need it. (“Proof reading” means you’ve minimized the errors in the process of formatting your POD or ebook. “Copy editing” means you’ve minimized those simple spell- and grammar-checking errors. “You’ve minimized” means that you or someone you’ve hired or arm-twisted has gone through the corresponding process to limit the number of errors.)
#253: Are traditionally published books worth the exorbitant prices? For trade paperbacks (where POD can be compared to traditionally published at the print level) are generally more expensive for self-pubbed books. POD means that indie publishers don’t make large printings where they can realize an economy of numbers, so their prices generally run higher. (This generally means their business model is biased to the publisher—they save big money on not owning and maintaining those warehouses for storing books, for example.) Ebooks, on the other hand, go the other way. It costs much less to make an ebook, so indie authors and publishers can pass some of these savings on to the consumer, much more so than traditional publishers authors with the traditional publishers’ nooses around their necks. (In fact, many traditionally published ebooks are nearly the same price as the corresponding ebook!)
A related question (which appeared in a thread discussing ebooks v. paper books): are indie ebooks charging too little? Other things being equal, the answer is yes! Here’s a tautology to always remember: Any business, in general, has to cover the costs of production before it can make a profit! You might write off free ebooks or $0.99 ebooks as advertising for name recognition, platform, etc., but, if you keep that up, you’ll eventually go broke.
My general and fuzzy rule is that I’ll take a traditional author in my genre, consider his ebook prices, and divide them by two to get a target price for my ebook. I’ve put just as much work into writing my thriller and probably have forked over more of my own capital in trying to make all those other things be equal. Moreover (and this is a big assumption, I’ll admit), my stories are as entertaining or more entertaining than his, so any lower price devalues my product and insults my creativity. I know other authors, particularly indie authors, don’t share this opinion. Too bad!
In libris libertas….
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