Eight years ago. EIGHT. 8!!!
I wrote this: The Perfect Bookstore.
independent publishing
How to destroy a brand in one easy (lazy) step
So most of us DIYers out here are trying to brand ourselves. We spend our time on Twitter and Facebook and message boards and whatnot trying to build an audience and a fanbase.
Then the midlist authors come along and digitize their backlists, and everybody’s happy because they already have a brand and they’re simply supplying a product that people want. Yay.
And then there are the midlist and higher-up authors who self-publish new stuff. That’s kind of an interesting experiment. I like watching it all play out even though, well, their brand trumps my brand and I have to work harder at establishing my brand.
Thus, it should make me happy when a very well-established author self-publishes something new and it’s crap. But it doesn’t make me happy. It makes me sad.
See, one big slip, and the reader suddenly suspects that you’re not a very good writer and that your editors made you who you are, and…you’re going to throw away years of investment in your brand and your work product just because you want to cash in on a 99c romance novella heatwave or make money off your under-the-bed manuscripts?
You insult your readers. You insult your former editors. You make a mockery of your previous publishers. And you embarrass the hell out of yourself. Do you really not know how bad you look, or do you not care?
If your intent is to destroy the brand you worked for all these years because you just have to put up that novella right now because can’t wait because you’ll miss the self-publishing train if you don’t, then you are succeeding.
And you deserve it.
P.S. If you insist on going without an editor, learn how to fucking write. If you can’t do it after all these years and titles, you’re a fraud.
First rule of self-publishing:
Get a professional editor.
Period.
No excuse.
I don’t care how good your beta readers and critique partners are.
I don’t care if you’re a traditionally published midlist author going out on your own.
Get a professional editor.
You want to self-publish? Put in the time and the effort and the money, just like a big publisher would. This is a business and you are creating a product to sell to people. Give them a good product.
That product begins with a professional editor.
WD Do-It-Yourself Publishing
“Self-publishing is the kiss of death. (And you’ll go to hell, too. God HATES self-publishers.)”
So come see me at the Writer’s Digest conference, on the Do-It-Yourself Publishing panel, which is chock-full of super-awesome self-publishing types who are also going to hell.
When: January 22, 2011, 10:30 – 11:45 a.m.
Where: Sheraton Hotel & Towers, NYC
(Conference runs January 21 through 23.)
And who cares if I go to hell? I hear it has snowed…
Free agency
Mormon publishing is a small world, but since I only hover on the outskirts of the community as a fiction writer who is Mormon and not as a writer of Mormon fiction (albeit I have Mormon characters), I don’t have much invested in the state of the Mormon art.
Currently I’m involved in a discussion on the Association for Mormon Letters blog that led to these comments:
Author Annette Lyon said:
Angela also hit it right on the head when she said that it’s a bit tricky naming names and titles when you’re one of the LDS writers yourself. It was a different story before I was part of that group. It’s easy to praise, but this is a tiny sandbox. An offhanded remark can make an enemy, so imagine if I were to give an honest review of that other book. Yeah. Let’s just say I don’t dare.
Author Lisa Torcasso Downing said:
Like Angela, I’m hesitant to criticize other writers–and their publishers–because a) who am I to talk? and b) I need those publishers.
There was a level of pathos there that I don’t feel that deeply with unpublished writers of work aimed for the national market, and not a niche one, and such a niche one. Actually, it was the “I need those publishers” that made me hurt.
I can understand Annette’s position, as she’s established and seems to do very well within the niche. But this is what I want to say to Lisa et al: You do not need those publishers.
Look around. eBooks, podcasts, print-on-demand, serial fiction blogs. The landscape is changing drastically and at breathtaking speed.
My question is: Could you do worse on your own? Really?
Just think about it. Please.
New Year’s resolutions
1. Make a concerted effort to contact the authors of books I enjoy and tell them that, and why.
I only know how wonderful it makes me feel when someone took the time to email me and tell me that they enjoyed one or both of my books and why. I can’t imagine any other author wouldn’t like it as much as I do.
2. Seek out and read more independently published work.
I think I have a skewed view of self-publishing, since I came to this via really good writers who decided to self-publish. Thus, I’ve never encountered this mythical slush pile of dreck I keep hearing about. Maybe I’ll find some, and maybe I’ll let you know if I do. Or not.
An idea for RWA!
Publishing is changing, the latest clue being Torstar’s vanity publishing line, DellArte (clever me, I said Torstar instead of Harlequin)*.
But we all agree on this one point, right? I mean, publishing can be DOOMED, or it can be METAMORPHOSING, or it can be LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!! but something’s going on.
And we all know MWA, RWA, and all those types delisted Harlequin, which won’t make a damn bit of difference to Harlequin (or Torstar, hee!).
Mrs. Giggles and Karen Scott both get it about the DellArte thing: Say somebody wants to pay to play.
So what?
But then on Karen’s blog the thread turned to what RWA should do about it and she said (I’m sure mostly tongue-in-cheek):
Since the RWA took the step of delisting HQN, they may as well go the whole hog and have a fulsome ‘Vanity Press Is Evil’ programme that informs authors about the pitfalls of going the vanity/self-pubbing route, rather than leaving it to the likes of Writer Beware. Merely delisting HQN is far too much of a passive-aggressive way of tackling this potentially world-altering, humanity-defying problem.
You know what I think RWA should do instead of having a Vanity Press Is Evil program? I think the RWA should have a program to inform, instruct, and help those members who are interested in self-publishing, provide a publishing punchlist, which publishing services cost what (and what’s reasonable), how to do it right, with the understanding that no matter which self-publishing route you go, you are going to pay to play. The opportunities for information mining (read: conference workshops read: ka-ching) are endless.
DellArte would be cast as the devil by default, just on their prices.
But then, that would be a proactive thing to do.
The RWA is reactive. This is an organization that grits its teeth when forced to acknowledge the fact of successful e-publishers like Ellora’s Cave/Cerridwen Press, Samhain Publishing, Loose Id, et al.
Oh well. It was an idea.
UPDATE: Well, this is what I get for not waiting a day on new Publishing Doom news to post this. Some more clues might be:
Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Harper Collins have decided to withhold ebook release for some months to give the hardcovers a chance to earn some money. That might not sound like such a bad thing until you realize that a lot of money (read: people) would not have bought the hardcover and so by the time the ebook comes out, the money (read: people) will have forgotten about the book.
Some money (read: person read: me) had this problem last night when Smart Bitches feature “Bookmatch,” which is a type of internet handselling from a pro at Powell’s recommended a book. I wanted it. RIGHT THEN!!! And, uh, well, it’s not in E. I’ll forget about the book in another couple of days.
And then Kirkus Reviews (the chichi book review rag) closes.
Oh yeah. I think we can all agree publishing is changing, can’t we?
You wanna know how I came to self-publishing?
I’m camping out at KatieBabs’s blog today, spilling my guts.
There is no such thing as royalties
…in self-publishing.
Self-publishers do not “earn royalties.”
Stop thinking in terms of royalties.
It’s called “profit.” There is overhead. There are COGS. There is revenue.
Why? Self-publishers manufacture a product*; they have not licensed a product.
Sales – COGS = gross profit.
Gross profit – overhead = net profit (aka ka-ching)
There are no royalties.
Royalties do not exist.
Say it with me now: Self-publishers do not earn royalties; they have profit. Now put all that “royalties” BS out of your head.
And Amazon? I know you know this, but you use the term deliberately to blur the lines between your retail business and your POD service. You know very good and well you don’t pay royalties. You give us a rebate on our rental fee for your stalls, you know, like at a flea market.
*A lot of authors don’t like having their babies compared to widgets. A lot of authors don’t like having books compared to babies. My books are my babies. They are also my widgets.
Harlequin: Ur doin it rong
Harlequin, I see you’ve set up a, um, POD?/vanity?/subsidy?/self-pub? (no definitely not self-pub) arm of your company.
Congratulations. I think that’s brilliant.
However, you have negated that brilliance by the simple fact that you have obviously not gone about researching the industry any more than anybody you hope to make a customer.
What I do not think is brilliant is the following:
1. Partnering with AuthorSolutions, Inc.
Consider:
- Do you know that they use Lightning Source to print their books? Do you know you could get your own account with Lightning Source and do the same thing, only cheaper for you?
- Do you know you could’ve set up your own in-house programs and packages? You should’ve; you have the resources right at your fingertips.
- Do you know that the rates you’re quoting are outrageous if one went piecemeal to freelancers for those services? And if you do (which I don’t think you do), you would’ve gotten a bigger cut of it had you not partnered with AuthorSolutions Inc. You already have editors and artists and such. Use them. Hire a couple more if you don’t have enough.
- Do you know that AuthorSolutions Inc. doesn’t have the best reputation on the planet even amongst subsidy publishers?
- Do you realize that the 50% “royalty” you take from your customers could have been at a much higher dollar amount if you had set up your own shop?
Bad, bad business decision, just from a P&L standpoint. Geez, you’re cutting off your margins to spite your bottom line.
2. Attaching your brand.
I shouldn’t even have to explain this.
UPDATE: As of 11/19/2009 4:12 PM, Harlequin has decided to rename its vanity press division something other than Harlequin whatever. Pub Rants got the scoop.
3. Thinking/branding it as self-publishing.
Self-publishing involves setting up shop as a business and outsourcing the tasks you can’t do yourself. What you’re doing is a service company promoting way overpriced service packages.
4. Your website really does kinda suck.
Oh, sure. You’ll get a lot of customers, and that’s okay. I see nothing wrong with it. I just think you coulda gone about it a different way.
And this is what surprises me. Harlequin, you’re brilliant. You’ve made nothing but all the right steps in all these decades of publishing. You flourish where others founder. You took a great (welcome) leap with Carina, but this? This displays the business sense of a kindergartner.
It makes me think your parent company is setting all this up and making you (and by extension, Malle Vallik) take the fall.
The unmentionable alternative
I am constantly struck by the idea that writers “give up.” What does that mean, exactly? They stop writing? They stop submitting? Or they stop writing because they’re so disheartened by the submitting? My bet’s on that.
Keep on submitting and you will get published.
By “writer,” I mean good, unpublished novelists who don’t, for whatever reason, catch an agent and/or editor’s eye. I’m not talking about the people who don’t hang out on agent and editor blogs, learning every query trick in the book (some of which are flat wrong to some agents and golden to others). These are the writers who assume that the problem is with them, not with the odds.
Write a better book next time.
Oh, fuck that. It’s odds, folks, whether you want to believe it or not—and the odds get worse every week. And that write a better book bullshit? How do you know the one you just wrote is bad?
You don’t.
And then some of you will crack under the discouragement and say, “I write crap.” And you’ll stop submitting. You may even stop writing.
I did that.
I didn’t write crap, per se. I wrote slightly off-tick that didn’t hit the romance formula bullseye exactly right. Yeah, I said it. There’s a formula. I couldn’t hit it, and the misses were near enough that it was sickening.
This is not an anti-traditional-publishing rant. This is about writers, about you and your work and how much faith you have in it.
Why are you basing your goals on decisions someone else has to make? And, by extension, why are you waiting for validation based on odds that aren’t in your favor? And why are you acting like a job applicant?
You’re not powerless.
But somehow the idea of taking control of your work and presenting it to the public/the readers/the (gasp) curators is “giving up.”
Because “money always flows to the author.” Fuck that, too.
Yeah, you’ll have to assume some risk. Deal with it.
It pains me to see good writers on agent blogs talking about “when I’m published someday,” because “it will happen if I submit enough and don’t give up” and “I just have to write a better book next time.”
Stop thinking that way and start believing in your product.
Stop thinking you have no power.
Stop thinking like an employee and start thinking like an entrepreneur.
Go make your own damned job.
Update: To clarify, I’m using the term “curators” to describe the self-appointed task of the people who consume the work, like it, and recommend it to others, i.e., the readers/fans, the people who make being The Lone Artist all worth it. I’m not using the term as it has been tossed around the internet for the last year.
Everything is still biased against the lone artist.
I didn’t say it. Someone who shall remain nameless said that to me, and it started me thinking about The Lone Artist.
I’ve been to New Orleans, Paris, Venice Beach, New York, London, Amsterdam, and other places where The Lone Artist sets about attempting to earn a living or at least approbation from a crowd of strangers walking by.
In a lot of ways, I like being a lone artist. When I go to authors’ websites and read about the difficulties they have working with a publisher, I’m glad. When I go to readers’ websites and read about how sad they are when a favorite author gets cut off mid-series, I’m glad. When I sit down to write and realize that I can do anything I want without having to account to a sales staff, I’m glad. When I know that the readership I’m gathering one by one, to whom I am ever so grateful, now has enough faith in me to go where I take them, I’m glad.
There is one respect I really don’t like it. I don’t like the near absence of distribution. But . . . that’s about the only way I can think of that I don’t like it. After all, a street performer can only play to the audience that walks by.
It’s not easy. Some days it’s damned depressing. I count on the readers to talk to me and remind me that there is something of worth in what I do, and believe me, I remember it. I count up those emails and screen shots and snippets of conversation here and there, and I keep them, put them in my hard drive bank like coins in my hat.
So when bedtime comes (if it comes) and I fall in bed exhausted from everything I have to do to be a lone artist, it’s the good kind of exhaustion.
Howard Roark laughed.
It’s work time.
I have nothing to say and too much to do. I meant to get my edits on Stay finished this weekend, but the widespread WordPress attack [dead link] hit theproviso.com and I spent my weekend, instead, cleaning up after that mess. And I still have a bunch to do before I’m satisfied with my sites.
The blog I just linked made the assertion that we should’ve upgraded. I made a deliberate decision not to because the last time I auto-upgraded, it broke my shopping cart and photo gallery plugins. I had to rebuild Peculiar Page’s shopping cart twice (which still doesn’t work and redirects to B10 Mediaworx), and B10 Mediaworx’s once, which, thankfully, works. To me, it was a no-win situation and in hindsight, I see that I would’ve had to waste all that time anyway.
There was one thing that kept me from being hit on all my other sites, and that was the fact that I didn’t have “Anyone can register” checked. Only on theproviso.com did I have that, and sure enough, that was the one that went down.
I made a Zazzle store for products with quotable quotes from or inspired by The Proviso and Stay. Culled them from fans, and I’m nowhere close to finished, but I’m trying to be more like the musicians who can merchandise the hell out of their music. Now, if I could figure out a way to go on tour …
In other news, Mrs. Giggles says she’s bored with romance bloggerland [dead link]. So’m I, for all the reasons she listed. And you know, as much as I hate feeling like every time I post somewhere or tweet, it’s self-promotion (because it is, except most of my Twitterstream is me being completely silly stoopid or whining about something), at least I don’t have 90 days or fewer to make certain my sales numbers are enough to sell another book. That’s not a brag. It’s a statement of gratitude. I’m bored of most of all the rest of my regular blogs, too.
I also won’t be reading much of anything for pleasure.
Anyhoo, I’m making my blog vacation official since, you know, I haven’t actually said anything in a week or so because I tend to not speak when I have nothing new to say. Check my archives. Whatever it is, I’ve said it already. Twice.
I have much to do before Thanksgiving and I intend to get it all done.
My editor likes me!
Scroll down to #64.
064) Stay by Moriah Jovan (MS POLICY), finished July 15.
My faith that I put in Moriah after reading The Proviso was justified. This book is good. Parts of it are excellent. And it’s still only a draft. It still has explicit sex (though not as much) but you should have no other qualms about checking this one out when it’s released in a few months.
Congratulations, Moriah, on a great book. Keep ’em coming.
MS POLICY
I am positively giddy.
Also, independent publishers Zoe Murdock and Riley Noehren and I had a roundtable chat about independent publishing. What we have in common: We’re female, LDS, and publishing ourselves. That transcript (and awesome discussion) are up at A Motley Vision.
Retreads: I rode this train for so long…why?
My blog’s been around long enough now, with enough posts, that nobody wants to go digging through what I had to say a buncha long time ago (centuries in blog time). I’m coming up short on content lately (heh, didja notice?), so I’m going to recycle some of this stuff because now people have been asking me questions I’ve answered in my earliest posts.
This [original article with comments are here] is from June 13, 2008:
I have a buncha novels on my hard drive that have been sitting around collecting dust since, oh, 1990 some time, I guess. In ’93 I wrote one that got me an agent, and another that year that got me a contract—before the publishing company was shut down (because, according to the rumor at the time [get this] it was making too much money and it had been created to take a loss for tax purposes) (remember Kismet? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?) [dead link]; one in ’95 that got me an early-Saturday-morning phone call from Harlequin to pleasepleaseplease overnight the manuscript; and a fourth novel in ’98 that got me a different agent.
In ’95 I wrote my senior thesis; since my major was creative writing and journalism, I wasn’t required to write a paper deconstructing anything. Instead, my assigned professor (a Latin professor, no less!) asked me to write 25 pages of a novel. When I came back a week later with 100 pages, polished, perfect, she switched gears and asked for me to write a paper describing my creative process. She was fascinated with how I’d done what I’d done.
However, that 100 pages was the basis for The Proviso and I knew I had something different, something that would probably never sell. I set out to continue the flow of the short story I had written the semester before. I had become fascinated with a throwaway character (Knox Hilliard) I’d created simply as a tool for the protagonist of the story (Leah Wincott) to complete the allegory. Knox is a bastard. He would never sell in genre romance and I knew that.
On the other hand, my four attempts at writing romance to spec failed to impress since the three that didn’t get picked up missed something somewhere. So between those four instances of “oh so close but yet so far away” and the impossibility of selling an anti-hero when anti-heroes were de trop, the whole thing got to me. I threw up my hands and said, “No more.” Then I woke up one morning last summer [2007] re-energized.
So today. Just now I’ve read two articles that have left me pursing my lips and thinking maybe it’s just as well I never grabbed the brass ring. As I’ve said before, technology caught up to me and got cheap enough to not break the bank, the atmosphere changed (and is still doing so as more authors get publishing savvy), and I’m older with enough DIY skills and a little money to do it right.
The first takes my breath away with regard to artistic integrity:
In an age when reading for pleasure is declining, book publishers increasingly are counting on their biggest moneymaking writers to crank out books at a rate of at least one a year, right on schedule, and sometimes faster than that.
It takes my breath away because I could probably do that … but why would I want to? And all that for …
I have no words.
As the one person (other than I) who reads this blog already knows, I come down firmly on the side of taking the risks and reaping the rewards. And at this stage of publishing’s evolution, why shouldn’t I?
I drank the Kool-Aid of being A Published Author when there were no other viable options, so I don’t feel my time was wasted at all. At the same time, I watched my author friends churn out three, four, five category romances a year to make a decent living and that I can’t do. I don’t have the discipline or talent to write within those specs and on that timetable.
Caving to instinct and capability
NOTE: This is the sixth in a series of several posts David Nygren of The Urban Elitist and I have been cross-blogging concerning the issue of authors (whether traditionally published, e-published, or self-published) actually getting paid for their work.
And it’s my final entry because after reading David’s interview with Tao Lin, I’m tired. Don’t get me wrong. Doing this series has forced me to take a good look at what I’m doing and why. Because of all the things 
converging on the world at the same time, I have been forced to take a candid look at my resources and limitations with regard to A) putting my art out there to begin with and B) getting paid for it. It would seem to me that David’s list of what you have to do to get read, much less paid, can be boiled down to 1 starting point:
Get noticed.
Until you do, you won’t get read. Until you’re read, no one has a reason to pay you for your work, much less your writerly ephemera and dross.
This takes marketing.
This takes time. Lots of it. As Paul said over at Publishing Renaissance,
There is a time limiting factor, people expect you to pay as much attention to their work as they are paying to yours. Many people will only continue to read or comment on your bloggedy blog if you read and comment on theirs. As a result a kind of whirlpool effect is generated, a lot of time and energy expended for very little reward.
Well, I don’t know about looking for reward, but in our heart of hearts, that is the goal, no?
I hang out and comment on a lot of industry blogs: writer, publisher, agent, etc. My name-link in the comments section is an opportunity for someone to click and find me, even though I’m simply participating and not actively selling. But I’m selling. I HATE that. 
Every single day, something knocks on the door of my brain and says, “Why are you marketing to writers and industry people? Writers have their own projects and if publishers and agents wanted you, they’d’a said so when you were querying.” Every single day, I have the same epiphany:
Go where the readers are.
Well, where the hell are they?
The minute I started to answer that question for myself, the economy tanked, and I had the startling epiphany:
They’re in the financial doghouse, like everybody else.
Well, okay. Maybe I should just be grateful my (non-publishing) business has some income. The fact of the matter is, I invested in a leisure time industry (well, two, but that’s a different story). Right now, folks are trying to put gas in their cars to either get to work or get to job interviews. We’ve been extraordinarily lucky thus far, but those around us haven’t. If I think twice about buying a book or an e-book, it’s very likely others will, too.
I recently got active (well, semi-active) on Twitter and every time I log on, I wonder why I waited so long. I love Twitter. I love it far more than blogs and fora. It’s the methadone for my chronic IRC and Usenet withdrawal (even though I do have a really really good newsgroups provider and I hang onto mIRC like a fiend). When I tweeted my frustration with Amazon and that I feel my presence on Amazon is solely as marketing and visibility, and NOT as a revenue stream, I got this:
Along with the book marketing advice I’ve sometimes seen given: “The best marketing is to write another book, build your backlist,” this had me thinking for days.
- About my limitations as a writer/publisher/marketer.
- About my limitations as a writer.
- About my limitations as a mother and wife.
- About my limitations as a business owner (other than publishing).
- About my obligations and priorities, to whom I owed what first.
- About that little economic concept called opportunity loss.
The sad fact of my life is that I’m not a sales person and I don’t think creatively about ways to market. Tao Lin’s creativity in this knows no bounds, yet it stymies me, even when it’s laid out in detail. Every single new idea that comes to my attention seems like a chore of enormous proportions, adds to my to-do list, and takes the joy out of writing and, moreover, out of meeting people because I start to think of them as sales targets and my web stats start to become the measure of my worth.
Do I want to monetize my art? Yes, I do. I surely do want to make money doing what I love, but I have had to come to terms with the fact that I probably won’t, or at least, not anytime soon. I not only don’t enjoy marketing, I find it drains my energy for anything else in my life I could or should or want to be doing because I’m always chasing that next sale. It decreases my enjoyment in online and real-life interactions.
As an independent, I can be in this game for as long as I want; I have no restrictions other than whatever my resources allow. I can afford the time to wait out the economy, to build the backlist, to interact with a community of people who like my books.
But in the end, it only boiled down to one thing: I had to come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to close my main business and write full-time. Not now. Maybe not ever. I had to decide that if the best I can do is make the books pay for themselves and give that many people a good read, then I have to be at peace with that.
Monetizing art? It’s a gamble at best, especially with the roadblocks in the way: market saturation, financial doom’n’gloom, loss of leisure time and money, changing technologies. But it’s not like most of us are going to stop doing the art. I’m not. David’s not. Tao Lin’s not. Zoe, Kel, Robin, J.M. Reep, and Ara aren’t. Scalzi and Wheaton and Gennita Low aren’t.
My instincts say to me, “Mojo,” they say, “a lot of people have paid money for your book and they like it and they want more. Ultimately, your loyalty should be to them, and what you owe them is another book and, if you’re feeling generous, a whole multi-media playground in this world you’ve built.”
Eventually, the economy will cycle around again (economies are cyclical, though it seems everyone forgets that), people will have money, and they will spend on leisure activities. In that time, I will have built my backlist and my world so that those people who find me and want to immerse themselves in what I’ve created will be able to pay for it.
So what have I come to? It’s simple really:
Work at the money-making business I’ve got.
Write.
Be patient.
Patient? you hoot. Yeah, in this society, whatever.
No, really.
If the only real resource you have is time, use it.
Go to bat for Zoe, folks
Blogpal Zoe Winters is in a competition for an erotic short story contest. Let’s help her win, shall we?
Go here. Vote for hers. Even if you don’t read it, vote for it, ’cause it’s good and I wouldn’t tell you it was good if it wasn’t. I just wouldn’t say anything at all and here I am, pimpin’ for the girl!
Go! Go now!
Are authors like journals?
NOTE: This is the fourth in a series of several posts David Nygren of The Urban Elitist and I will be cross-blogging concerning the issue of authors (whether traditionally published, e-published, or self-published) actually getting paid for their work.
Yesterday (grimace) was David’s turn and he’s got me seriously thinking about that whole FREE thing again. I swear, the more we hash this out, the fewer solid opinions I’ve got.
The problem of genre: “Grit Romance”?
Labels are terribly useful to the majority of human beings. I find them useful insofar as I understand the definition of the label used, although this is usually a 50/50 proposition for me. As a method of efficient inventory control and meeting customer expectations, genre labels simply can’t be beat. The publisher knows which buyer to go to and the bookseller knows where to shelve it.
But lately, there’s been a lot of cross- and mis-labeling going on inside genre fiction, leading readers to scratch their heads and wonder, “This isn’t X. Why did they put it on X shelf?”
Science fiction with romantic elements or a science fiction romance or a romance with a science fiction backdrop?
Fantasy, ditto above permutations.
Paranormal, ditto above permutations.
Speculative fiction/steampunk/cyberpunk, ditto above permutations.
Suspense, ditto above permutations.
Erotic! and ditto above permutations.
Mystery, ditto above permutations.
Spy, ditto above permutations.
Whatever other genres I missed, ditto above permutations.
A reader may or may not be willing to go along with the story regardless what it is and where it takes them (that’s the kind of reader I am), but some buy books specifically on spine label, cover cues, and back blurb so that they can get exactly (or pretty close to it) what they want.
Today, some independent publishing friends and I have been discussing our books, about how disparate our stories are, how we view ourselves in completely different genres, and how our books all have one thing in common: They are not classifiable, except by “drama.” (Well, why can’t “drama” be its own genre? Or is it? I don’t see it used anywhere.) They’re all a mix, all dark and gritty, with romance and a happily-ever-after (the one and only real requirement to be considered romance).
I don’t know how to classify The Proviso. I never did. Drama? Yeah, plenty of that. Family saga? Check. Epic? Uh, most definitely, as it takes place over the course of 5 years. But epic what? I can’t think of a book I could compare it to. Healthy doses of religion and spirituality mixed in with money and explicit sex? What? What’s anybody supposed to do with that? It’s not LDS romance/literature/fiction (defined as anything that could be sold at Deseret Book/Seagull), although I could call it Mormon fiction if a criteria of “Mormon” is that a Mormon wrote it. I call it a romance because I see myself as a romance writer.
The editors at one publishing house liked The Proviso, passed it around to get a roundtable opinion, but ultimately rejected it. “We don’t know where to put it. The religion isn’t going to go over with our erotic romance readers and the explicit sex isn’t going to go over with our inspirational readers.” That was good to know.
I know that RJ Keller, whose Waiting for Spring, got the attention of several agents, was told that she would have to extensively revise her book to be commercially viable. Most egregiously, she’d have to cut out the drug references, except…the drugs is the keystone of her plot. Hello? She finds her book marketed on all the free sites as a romance, but she does not consider herself a romance author.
Kel pointed me in the direction of Lauri Shaw, whose book, Servicing the Pole (that title’s as ballsy as using The Bewbies for my cover), had a lot of interest, but would have required extensive changes in order for it to be considered commercial. This is from Ms. Shaw’s website:
However, when professionals who were interested in selling my work insisted I’d need to make drastic changes to Servicing the Pole to make it a commercial prospect, I had to ask myself if the end justified the means. After all, these people were able to guarantee me little to nothing on the front end.
I was told that the book was too dark. That I’d have better luck catching the reader’s fancy if I made the story into something upbeat. The suggestion I took the most issue with, though, was that I ought to transform Emily into a more ‘likeable’ character. To do so would have been to change virtually every theme in this story.
I’m proud of the story I’ve written. It’s a story I can stand behind.
Servicing the Pole also has a happily-ever-after (or at least a happily-for-now), but I don’t know how Ms. Shaw labels herself as a writer, as I have not spoken with her.
Note: Our books are all dark, gritty, nasty, twisted, with a happily-ever-after. That is what’s genre-busting about them.
You can call ’em drama or epics or family sagas, or whatever you want.
Kel calls ’em “gritty romance.”
Gritty romance.
I like it.
How valuable is knowledge?
NOTE: This is the third in a series of several posts David Nygren of The Urban Elitist and I will be cross-blogging concerning the issue of authors (whether traditionally published, e-published, or self-published) actually getting paid for their work.
Outside of David’s and my continuing exploration of how to monetize our work (and for me, this means fiction), I’ve come across some interesting things that really only cement my opinion that, in a misguided attempt to be generous, knowledge is flung around like rotting leaves on a late fall day: plentiful, soggy, and seemingly worthless.
In ages past, knowledge was specialized and carefully husbanded, passed down from father to son or from master to apprentice, under the craft guild’s auspices: tailoring, goldsmithing, masonry, jewel cutting. These trades were respected, well paid, and each had their—get it?—guild to watch out for the trade. (I won’t go into the differences between a guild and a union at this time.)
Not that long ago, esoteric specialized trades with their own secrets began to write how-to books. I still liken this to the groundbreaking This Old House (and if you don’t know how groundbreaking this was in the building and remodeling industry, you just weren’t paying attention or you weren’t born yet). In 1979, I was 11 and I ate it up, glued to PBS every Saturday morning. (There’s a genome for DIYers, you see.) Still, the how-to books got bought and people learned these things—and they paid for the privilege.
A couple of years ago, I thought I’d undertake the task of making drapes, so I bought (oooh, there’s that word again) an e-book on the subject. It was self-published, an A-to-Z how-to with simple instructions laid out for an idiot ADDer like me, and far superior to anything I’d seen in a bookstore or at the library. It was $24.95 and worth every penny. (Never did get around to doing the drapes, but now I understand the concepts and principles of drape-making.)
Today, I went looking for how to create dollhouse plans and build a dollhouse. Now, I have never been into dollhouses and this project has to do with my current WIP, Stay, for which I want to build Whittaker House (a gothic revival mansion inn) and its surrounds in miniature. And I found this: FREE dollhouse plans and instructions.
I would’ve paid money for instructions like that, perhaps as an e-book or as a serial or a do-along project. I mean, she seems to know what she’s talking about, right? I wondered, “What’s wrong with that woman?”
But then I looked at the header of my own blog, where it says, CREATING E-BOOK SERIES. I’ve been spending hours and hours building the next post on this (in case anybody was wondering where the hell it was). What’s wrong with that woman in the mirror?
Three things:
1) I’m a dilettante. I’m not sure I’m doing this the “right” way. I can only share what I’ve done; thus, I’m not sure my knowledge is actually worth anything.
2) I like to teach, and any bit of knowledge will spur me on.
3) I’m a compulsive helper. Knowledge is power and I think there are a lot of people out there who could use some empowerment.
If I had a penis and had gone to a master to teach me, say, stone cutting, my father would have paid the master to take me on as an apprentice. I would have served in his household in whatever capacity in exchange for room and board and knowledge for a period of 7 years (or more), which would have made me little better than an indentured servant. And then I would have struck out on my next phase as a journeyman and continued training. Once I earned the title of master under stringent training and specification, I could then say, “These are my credentials because I gave 14 years of my life to my trade in money, blood, sweat, and tears, and I am now in a position to charge money for my expertise and get my own little slave.”
If I had gone to college and enrolled in their fashion program, I would have paid tuition and gained credentials that told people, “Yeah, I kind of know what I’m talking about, so you need to pay me for my knowledge.” Oh, wait. I did do that. And I have a couple of awards to show for that. In my particular field of textiles, I’m considered a bit of an expert. So I charge.
But I didn’t go anywhere to learn how to create e-books. I learned my CSS and (X)HTML on my own from the free sites online (which sites exist in order to promote a standard markup). I learned the software programs by hit-or-miss. Nobody taught me; I didn’t ask anybody to teach me. I don’t feel I know enough to charge.
So why am I doing it?
To get traffic here into my blog to get you to buy my book. I am an expert on the subject of The Proviso, so I want to get paid for it. I am fortunate in that a couple of people have mostly agreed with me on my level of expertise.
Rightly or wrongly, some knowledge has to be given away to entice you to buy my product. Sometimes, those enticements don’t seem related. Obviously, there are some problems with the method I’ve chosen, which is to say, the people most likely to show up here to take the knowledge I’m offering free are probably writing books of their own and I should view them as my competition. They probably view me as their competition, too.
But say I’m wrong and it’s painfully obvious to everyone (except me and the people who take my advice) that I have no clue what I’m doing. Well, then my competition will screw up, too.
Sometimes free isn’t worth what you paid for it and can actually cost you a whole lot of real time and cash.