Never underestimate the commercial value of mental illness.
I don’t know this woman from Eve. What I do know is that everything about her online presence screams master craftsman and überprofessional.
Got a scene? A masquerade party? A Labyrinth con? A Venetian extravaganza? Mardi Gras? Need some sleep? Want something exquisite to hang on your wall? This is only a sampling. Visit her gallery to get the full effect.
Then buy something from her. This kind of exquisite craftsmanship needs to be rewarded.
(I may make this a regular feature.)
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:
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.
For every woman who’s made a fool of a man, there’s a woman who’s made a man of a fool. —Samuel Hoffman (near as I can tell)
I read this quote long, long ago, and I swear to high heaven it was in one book of Anne Rice’s vampire trilogy (maybe Queen of the Damned?).
It resonated with me then and it still does, and I finally figured out why.
This sentiment is the heart and soul of genre romance: What woman doesn’t like to think she has that much power in either direction?
Can we find a word other than “book” as a descriptive for the digital version of glue-and-paper? The word “book” is way too loaded for those who profess a love of “that new book smell” and their reactionary hatred of digital delivery.
Print books and digital book are two completely different species. They don’t have to compete. They shouldn’t try to compete. Yes, the content is the same. Yes, the delivery system makes all the difference in the reading experience.
Consider the reading evolution:
Handhewn tablet → papyrus scroll → parchment leaves → illuminated manuscripts → Gutenberg Bible → mass market paperback → computer.
None of those are the same epistemologically or anatomically, so why is the progression to reading digitized text on a handheld device difficult to accept?
Just as a tablet is not a scroll, and a scroll is not an illuminated bundle of leaves, and an illuminated bundle of leaves is not a ream of paper saddlestitched and bound in leather. It is an electronic method of getting to text.
An ebook is not supposed to be like a printed book. Expecting it to be invites frustration on everybody’s part, and completely misses the point
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.