A couple of days ago I mentioned writing habits, in that case with regard to why I write on a little laptop with a keyboard I don’t like instead of using an external keyboard and a giant external monitor. I’d like to talk about the habits I’ve developed to keep myself writing.
I have said it before and I’ll say it again, and I’m not the first to say it: writing every day is the key to finishing a novel. There are, of course, other requirements, so let’s say that’s the first key. If you don’t keep writing, you won’t be able to end up with a novel since the novelisthe writing. This is obvious, but it is also the point where most writers drop the ball and don’t end up with a full draft that can later become a novel.
Because of the mental block I mentioned before—and I know for sure that I’m not the only one out there working against one of those—I needed to really coddle myself, almost trick myself into writing. I expected to do that until it became a habit, but it’s now become a habit to write every day and I still coddle myself. I don’t push myself to write for long hours. I don’t force myself to complete a scene or chapter if I don’t feel like it that day.
I don’t know if this is good or bad. I think I’ll tolerate that sort of nonsense from myself until I’m at the completed first draft level, at which point I will have to break out the right brain and get everything straight and clean. And probably use some of those Scrivener features I’ve been skipping.
By the way, what do I mean by every day? I am not sure whether writing teachers, or those hundreds of guys who write books on writing, would have a consistent answer to this. I’m pretty sure I once read where Stephen King said he wrote 10 pages a day, every day, no matter what, with the possible exception of certain holidays.
Personally my view is that it’s OK to write 7, 6 or 5 days a week, or possibly even less if you have no choice, as long as you are very consistent about it. The key is that it must be a habit that you reinforce massively and must not break. I am a flexible kind of guy and so I am willing to give myself a break once in a while as long as it is never two days in a row. I have been writing generally 6-7 days a week, and that has worked out for me.
I have hit walls a couple of times for reasons I will talk about in later entries, but other than that I haven’t even really wanted to cheat. That being said, there are a couple of major stipulations to this habit I have been fostering in myself. I haven’t exactly been a paragon of self-discipline, and my current writing habits may not even be sustainable long-term.
First of all, I don’t even try to write at home, not very often anyway. I go out to restaurants, or one of the little Starbucks here at Lake Tahoe, and I do it there. I don’t even like coffee, so I have to get it cloyingly saturated with chocolate. At least I stopped getting the whipped cream. I am hoping to be able to take the show on the road when I can start traveling for the year, when winter is over, and maybe even write in some locations that are in the book.
At home, though, all the distractions of heaven and hell are all around me all the time, not to mention Bernadette and other anthropomorphic entities, some of which pass the Turing test. When I am snowed in or otherwise stuck at home, getting my daily writing in is a serious problem because it requires a great deal more self-discipline to resist the temptations.
I am going to have to retrain myself on this point somewhere not too far down the road. At least I have found that if I was into a scene or other bit that I was writing at the time when I had to go home, sometimes I can pick it up that evening and work on it quite a bit more, even to the point of finishing it. That’s a ray of hope and a good precedent.
Second, I don’t have a job except this right now. That sounds like an enormous luxury, but it’s also a serious disadvantage in a couple of ways. When you are working full time or even solidly part time, you are using your wits to one extent or another. You are interacting with people, solving problems, dealing with politics, seeing little dramas play out in the office, that sort of stuff. When you are not going to a job most days, you get a hell of a lot less of that kind of stimulation. Your brain shuts down, you start to get rusty on what people are like, and your work ethic suffers. I find myself really wishing I had started this writing thing years ago when I was working my ass off 40-80 hours a week. I could have found some time to write, and I’d have been a lot more organized about it than I am right now.
So I’m in a position where mental stimulation is a rare commodity and writing at home is a problem. I’ve worked around these issues and the workaround seems to be working so far. Maybe you work full time and can only write at home. I would like to make the point here that it doesn’t matter. If I do what I feel I have to do to get myself to write every day, and I get a first novel out of it, then it doesn’t matter. Later when I am working on the second one with some form of success behind me (hopefully), I think I’ll be able to retrain myself to be more organized, flexible in where I can work, and ideally capable of longer hours.
Or maybe I should get a job at Starbucks.
Speaking of hours spent writing, it’s amazing how much you can produce in even a couple hours a day, several days a week, for three or four months. If you’ve been thinking about trying it, I would really encourage you to do so. I will never get back a single day that I procrastinated before beginning this process. Neither will you, you know. In a way, there’s lots of time to do all sorts of nifty things in life. But in another, more accurate way, there’s precious little, and it never stops leaking out the bottom of the hourglass.
More from Clements:
RG: I do love those buckling spring keyboards - basically Selectric keyboards for computers. Noisy but very worth it. Probably ought to order one for home though they are hard to find.
Clements: The patent expired so they are available from more places now than they used to be. I got mine here:
Last I checked they had one for Macs too.
RG: There has to be a better way of managing comments and multi-author posts than this, something that doesn’t require me to edit them to make it clear who said what. Gonna have to look into Disqus and such…
So, I decided to try Scrivener. I didn’t really have an urgent reason for doing this. It was sort of a combination of feeling like there might be something I was missing that could help me in my goal, and putting hope in hype.
I downloaded a free trial version on both a Mac and a PC. The Windows edition of Scrivener is relatively recent and is basically at the 1.x level in the software maturity cycle, though it seems to be pretty solid, TBH. The Mac edition is at the 2.x level, and that’s the one I wanted anyway. But I thought it might be nice to be able to send the files back and forth (see below).
The free trial actually lasts a lot longer than the 30 days it is supposed to. This may be a bug in the trial time reckoning algorithm or it may be intentional, but it seems like it really gives you 30 days of usage rather than 30 days of realtime from first run. I spent most of a whole day running through the extremely long tutorial and going through about half a book on Scrivener that I borrowed from the Amazon ebook lending library thingy.
It’s a pretty feature-rich program. Most of these features are centered around the premise that it is better to chop up your novel (or other document) into lots of little pieces, such as scenes, descriptive passages, character intros, and all the other bits that a novel consists of. The idea is that you can then move these things around, and view them in outline and onscreen index card modes.
Some people seem to really like this. Just a few days ago, an old friend happened to suggest I use Scrivener, not knowing I already was, and I’d never have imagined she’d even know about it, but she’s been using it for her dissertation. She apparently really liked being able to move chunks around in this fashion.
I, myself, apparently do not. I really don’t see the big advantage to chopping everything into pieces and compiling them later, which is what Scrivener is all about. I have no problem with cutting and pasting chunks of text around, personally. I tried to get the Scrivener mindset and haven’t really been able to. Furthermore it is inconvenient and dangerous that instead of a single file that’s easy to copy around, Scrivener stores all these little pieces in a folder structure of lots of little files. They even tell you in their knowledgebase that trying to move your Scrivener project back and forth between machines, say, using Dropbox, is riskier than it would be for normal word processing files and can result in data loss, because of all the files that need to be kept in sync. This is a bummer because I liked the idea of being able to work on my outlining on this Windows machine I am writing on now and, of course, writing on the Mac laptop I mentioned before. Now I’m scared to do it, certainly not more than once in a while, while taking great care to make sure I don’t lose anything.
I’m not putting down The Scrivener Way. I don’t have anything bad to say about the product other than that I don’t like the multifile storage thing. By the way, storing data in a folder structure of files is common for some other types of software like music recording studio apps, although in that case it’s hundreds of megabytes of high-resolution audio data spread across a bunch of files instead of just a few hundred pages of text.
But I just don’t get what the big deal is with the whole assembly-of-chunks idea. I can see that it could be nice for either a totally disorganized person who needs the structure, or an obsessively organized person who enjoys it; and who wants to start from an outline, or go back and forth a lot from outline to writing, or who moves around scenes or other pieces, a lot more often than I do. Everyone does these things. The question is, how much focus do you really want to put on outlining and organization vs. going on instinct for as far as it will take you? And the answer is well known to differ massively from writer to writer.
I will add here that my friend with the dissertation has a fundamentally different problem from a novelist, or at least me. In nonfiction you have a lot more flexibility as to what order to put information. She had a lot of points that could be placed anywhere, and she really did need to move things around a lot. In fiction, or at least my fiction, for the most part it seems pretty obvious what happens in what order. Subplots for different characters need to be interspersed and there’s some flexibility there, but other than that I just don’t need to move things around much, especially pieces large enough that I’d want them in separate files.
Evidently I’m considerably less Type A than I used to be, and I seem to do as little organization as possible, at least so far. Being something of a nervous virgin here, anything that distracts me from writing is a problem. I do know that as I approach the completed first draft stage, I will soon need to start filling in gaps, and making sure my main storyline and various character arcs all fit together right. Scrivener has some nice features for that sort of thing, such as the ability to associate story characters (protagonist/antagonist/etc.) with files and set up saved searches that show you the concatenated text for a given character from start to end with nothing else. This can be done for locations or time periods or any other tagging scheme you need. Clearly this is a cool feature. I just…don’t use it, at least yet.
The thing that finally got me to start using Scrivener is that it is supposed to be able to compile your document in various formats, including manuscript submission (courier 12, ancient style), plus both MOBI (Kindle) and ePub (everything else) ebooks. I am very skeptical about this because it sounds too good to be true—if Scrivener does a good job of this, it is an incredible and almost totally unique capability.
I have not experimented with it much yet, but I’ve tried a few compiles and they seem to work ok, except that you have to provide different versions of front material (title page, acknowledgements, etc. in different formats) if you want them to be output differently (e.g. manuscript format vs. ebook). It seems like they could have built a very basic template system that would make this easier…or maybe I just don’t know the trick. One thing that’s a possible problem is that the Windows and Mac versions have completely different compile options, and I’m talking about hundreds of options. I don’t understand why they didn’t standardize this.
So, on the strength of hope re: the ebook generation feature, I bought Scrivener and started using it. My reasoning was that I can always compile the document and output it back to Pages anytime I want. I mostly find myself just writing whole long chapters and then maybe chopping them up a little in case I want to intersperse storylines (although I could do the same thing perhaps more easily with cut/paste). Once in a while I do move things around. I really haven’t taken to the outlining/index card/compile methodology, at least yet.
Scrivener is cheap. I bought the Mac version out of the Apple Mac App Store so that updates are easy. Unlike Dramatica Pro, you don’t get both the Mac and Windows versions for one price. But you can buy both for less than one cross-platform license of Dramatica Pro. Don’t take this price comparison to mean one is better than the other, since I really never had the chance to learn Dramatica Pro before it became the software equivalent of a bricked smartphone (the OS 10.7 debacle I wrote about before).
It’s 4.0 because 1.0 was manual, 2.0 was Selectric, 3.0 was word processor, and 4.0 is specialized. See?
So, there I was with a Macbook Air 11 and a browser open to some random website (that I suspected of being malicious) that had a list of writing software packages. Looking through them, three choices stood out for me.
The most attractive choice was no choice, at least for a while, by which I mean, not choosing a novelists-specific software package. As I mentioned before, I had a major mental block against getting started, and simpler things were better. I almost decided to write in notepad, or whatever the mac equivalent is, textpad or something. But let’s call “Pages” the “no” choice for now.
Pages is Apple’s simple word processor that exists on both Mac and iPad but, lamely, is not very compatible between the platforms. That’s too bad because syncing would have been handy for things like review and editing (can’t type a novel on an ipad, obviously, unless you’re more masochistic than me). Pages was OK to use, though, and I actually spent probably a month writing on it before developing even the slightest desire to try something else.
But desire can get you into trouble and cost you money, and that was what happened with Dramatica Pro. This is among the most expensive writing packages out there, and arguably the most comprehensive. I wish I could tell you more about it in detail, and maybe someday I can, but I never got a chance to learn much about it. I installed it and barely got a chance to try it out, then upgraded Mac OS to 10.7: “Lion,” a.k.a. the big cat of homicidal incompatibility.
See, one thing I didn’t know in advance of the upgrade (and that the upgrader did not tell you, as it should have, in huge letters) was that 10.7 would break compatibility with a large number of older programs. I never bothered to find out the details. I’m sure there was some fabulous reason for this. But the result was that the program I had just paid big bucks for stopped working before I ever got to use it for real writing.
And at this writing, it is still broken: Dramatica Pro will not run on 10.7, so you have to be running a several-month-old OS that’s incompatible with most new stuff, in order to use it.
I don’t know whether to blame Apple or Write Brothers for this, but I felt pretty hosed by both. Write Brothers says they are not going to make the current version of Dramatica Pro compatible with 10.7, ever. Instead they will make their next major upgrade, 5.0 I think, compatible. Which almost certainly means I (and hundreds of thousands of others) will have to pay significant money to get that upgrade. That would just be the icing on the crap cake there.
In Write Brothers’ favor, a) I don’t know for sure that they will charge for that upgrade, whenever it may happen; and b) they did give me a free Windows version bundled with the Mac version. But I don’t want to write on a PC…although the reasons for doing so are mounting up.
So Dramatica Pro was a costly lesson, though I’m not sure what I learned. I just kept writing in Pages for a while. By the way, the reason I didn’t use Microsoft Word was that a) Word for the Mac is weird and awful for someone who’s used to it on PCs, although the latest PC version is weird and awful too; and b) all the bells and whistles constituted complexity, and I needed simple in order to not distract me and keep me writing.
One day for no real reason I decided to try Scrivener. I guess my page count was getting up there and I thought I could use some structural tools or something. Scrivener is a program with legions of rabid fans, much like the Mac itself. I figured there had to be something there.
And hey, these blog entries have been too long, so let’s split that off for tomorrow.
Here’s a post from Mike Clements regarding keyboards, OS and apps:
I switched to Linux (Ubuntu) about a year ago, for everything - desktop apps, programming, writing, internet, etc. Linux has always been a solid server platform yet the desktop and apps have come a long way in the past few years. It’s a rock solid OS, community support that beats anything Microsoft or Apple can offer, excellent out of the box hardware compatibility, a choice of 4 mature desktops - Gnome, KDE, Unity and XFCE, and a surprisingly wide variety of surprisingly mature applications that are compatible with the MS equivalents. I’ve hated MS Word ever since Microsoft came out with the ribbon menus a few years back, actually prefer using LibreOffice Writer, which seamlessly reads & writes MS Word format when you need it.
RG: The ribbon menus are the thing I hate the most about the new Word, yeah. No interest in Linux personally, although (and this is getting ahead a bit) I did notice that it appears Scrivener has a Linux version in beta.
Nothing beats a good old buckling spring keyboard. I got one from Unicomp in 2001 and still use it every day. Two companies, many thousands of lines of code and other writing later, it is still going strong like new. I have 2 others in both offices home & work. It’s the only keyboard that enables me to do 100 wpm with 99% accuracy. I’ve never found its equal in typing touch, feel and confidence.
RG: I do love those buckling spring keyboards - basically Selectric keyboards for computers. Noisy but very worth it. Probably ought to order one for home though they are hard to find.
Disclaimer in perpetuity:
I’m writing this latest batch of entries, as usual, with Bernadette the six-pound Burmese wrapped in my robe and tucked under my arm. This clearly suggests that she is at fault for misspellings, bad judgment regarding the use of profanity in blog entries, holes in my houseclothes, and anything else either you or I or, say, a publisher I might later want to get to know, could find offensive.
I tried to get a picture but, being a cat, she escaped, I mean moved, before I could get to the camera.
The last few entries were a long but important digression to discuss how self-publishing in ebook form is a reasonable path to take with new fiction these days. I’ll talk more about what I’ve seen about that process, but for now I’d like to go back and spend some time on the writing/learning side.
I’d like to go into specifics now, regarding the tools I’ve been using. There are a lot of choices on the software side and a couple of key decisions on the hardware side, and I’ll explain why I chose what I chose.
For starters, I had to decide PC vs. Mac. A lot of creative types will say, oh, it’s no contest, of course get the Mac. The reality is that there are good reasons pro and con, as with most things in life. The Mac OS is supposed to be simpler than Windows to use—and I don’t want to get into this whole discussion unless someone really wants to argue it in comments—but I don’t personally find it so, for a couple of reasons.
These days Mac OS is a big old unix core with a GUI on top of it, which means it’s debatably even fiddlier than Windows under the hood. I certainly don’t have any idea how to tinker with it when something goes wrong. Also, I like to use keyboard shortcuts for everything, and some of the ones I use a lot on Windows don’t seem to have parallels on the Mac.
On the other hand, the icons are pretty.
Whatever; I think it’s a wash these days in absolute terms. The hardware is the same now and the operating systems aren’t very different, so you have to pick the platform that runs the software you want to use. It turns out that both operating systems are suitable for running a variety of writing software, and there is no wrong choice. (Except, there was a wrong choice, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Or actually, a day.)
I ended up picking the latest generation (as of this writing) Macbook Air 11, maxed-out version, for my own writing. I am not necessarily recommending it for others, but here were my reasons:
I was always worried about the chickletish keyboard that Apple seems to believe in these days. As a very fast touch typist, I am baffled by this keyboard design, which seems to be on all of their models and which has been imitated by some aftermarket products. After extensive use, this keyboard has proven to be a problem for me in terms of slowing my typing speed even more than a laptop normally would, due to the lack of a) meaningful tactile feedback and b) the usual boxing-in effect that helps you find keys fast without looking. Just use a full-sized external keyboard, you might say, but that gets into the topic of writing habits and the short version is, no can do most of the time.
In the end, it’s been ok. Mainly the hotkeys and the keyboard have bugged me, and I also am not a big fan of trackpads, but I can’t blame Apple over anyone else on that one. In any case, the hardware choice had been made. Next, I had to get the software.
Which software do you choose for writing fiction?
You know the old joke:
An old bull and a young bull are up on a hill watching a bunch of cows. The young bull says, “Hey, let’s run down there and **** one of those cows!” The old bull says, “No. Let’s walk down and **** ‘em all.”
This is an apt, if vulgar, metaphor for the choices publishers have for dealing with the new world of ebook self-publishing.
What is a publishing company? It is a professional editing engine embedded in a consumer product marketing machine and steeped in a weird combination of tradition and cutting-edge mentality. There is a lot of risk and overhead involved in the business of printing up thousands or millions of physical books and trying to sell them through brick and mortar stores worldwide, not to mention through internet retailers where they have precious few tools for manipulating interest.
As such, some publishers panicked when ebooks started taking off. They played games with Amazon, who had a good start on an effective monopoly (which could have been disturbing, however well-earned it was). They were encouraged by Apple (for business reasons that were understandable given Apple’s position in the ebook market). And they succeeded in keeping control of the pricing of the ebook versions of their products. As a free-marketeer, that sounds good to me, in principle.
The problem was that a lot of them instantly chose to use this power for ill: specifically, to keep their ebook prices unreasonably high, in a move that seems transparently punitive toward those consumers who choose ebooks. I cite as an example the latest Dresden Files book, Ghost Story, which costs 50% more in Kindle edition than it does in paperback. This is asinine, and obnoxious, and can only be the result of desperate decision-making within a publishing house that doesn’t seem to realize it needs to court ebook readers’ goodwill rather than punish them for having grown out of the old game.
It doesn’t have to be this way, though, and some publishers are evidently starting to realize this. Perhaps more accurately, some people within publishing companies are starting to realize this. I say it this way because I would not be at all surprised to learn of a single company simultaneously playing the punitive pricing game and bringing successful self-published authors on board.
What I’m talking about is the enormous opportunity self-publishing affords mainstream publishers, whose biggest problem has always been risk. Imagine: you’re an ebook author and you’ve chosen self-publishing as the lesser of terrifying choices. You wrote a good book, you’ve gotten some traction, you’ve got some good reviews and ratings, the book bloggers have taken notice, and you’re selling hundreds or even thousands of ebooks a month. Where do you want to go from there?
There are a fair number of stories now of this kind of moderate success, and where a lot of them will go from there is to self-publish the sequel, or simply other books. But some of them, perhaps most, would like to come in out of the cold, given the opportunity. They might like the stability afforded by an advance on royalties, or the prestige of a contract.
To a publisher, this state of affairs represents an opportunity that is as revolutionary in its own way for them as the ready accessibility of self-publishing is for authors, and as the cheap plenty of ebooks is for readers.
What we’ve seen so far is that a few publishers have started picking out diamonds in what is from their perspective the rough. We’ve read stories of how fat contracts have been offered to certain ebook writers who achieved stardom in self-publishing. This is a good precedent for all concerned. Some of the more radical proponents of ebooks might view this as selling out, but that’s patent nonsense. It is the writer’s life and livelihood we’re talking about, not a political point.
Already we’ve seen cases where the writer takes the contract and at least one case where he’s famously turned it down. It’s hard to decide who to cheer for harder.
But my point here is a little different, centered on the publisher.
Granted, publishers have had it good in some ways, at least from the perspective of the writer. They’ve had almost all the power. They get all the submissions they could ever want coming at them, and they have total control over which they choose to develop, the changes that get made to the content before publication, the amount of marketing a given book gets, and all sorts of other advantages.
Looked at another way, though, these advantages really only serve to make a tough position a little less untenable. I haven’t worked at a publishing company, but I have had some experience in independent film production, and there are certain similarities. Let me tell you, getting submissions from random people all the time is not a wonderful thing. It’s a burden at best and a legal time bomb at worst (if someone claims you stole an idea or something). It’s easy to understand why recommendations from anyone with a remotely professional reputation—an agent, or a well-known writer, or an editor’s brainy 10-year-old—can carry weight. It’s just so much better than nothing.
I mention these things to show a slice of what I surmise content sourcing has traditionally been like from the perspective of the publisher.
But think about what publishers have available to them now. They’ve got hundreds or thousands of writers self-publishing, taking all the risk, doing all the work. They can follow the trails of reviews directly to the cream of the crop, at least as far as the customers are concerned. For an average of what, $3? they can buy a copy of any book that shows potential, read it, and if they like what they see, they can get in touch with the author right then and there. If I were starting a publishing company now, this would be the only way I would source material.
If you ask me, instead of trying to hang on to a business model that’s already showing signs of massive decay (e.g. the downscaling and outright failure of massive brick/mortar bookseller chains), publishers should be thanking Amazon and the other ebookstores for what they’ve done here. They’ve given publishers unprecedented access to eager, creative authors; free, near-perfect market research; and a fast-growing group of customers who will be reasonably happy if they only have to pay the same amount for an ebook as for the much higher-overhead paperback edition.
All they have to do is walk down to where the writers are peddling their wares, and be nice.
Self-publishing in any form carried a heavy stigma as recently as five years ago. Even three years. Many things have changed since them, though, and I would be surprised if they were to change back, ever. That means we are at a turning point in history on the scale of the invention of the printing press itself.
Historically—meaning the late aughts (00s) and a century or three before—if you had a manuscript you wanted published, you had two choices. You could cast yourself into the crucible by submitting your manuscript to publishers and hoping someone at least read it, and if you were really lucky they might include comments upon rejection, and maybe someday after enough rejections and luck and dogged determination, magic would happen and you’d get into the system. Or you could skip all of that and pay to print up copies of your own book, and try to sell them by mail or in small bookstores.
In a way, nothing has changed, in the sense that these are still your choices. Submitting a manuscript to publishers is, I’m told, basically the same procedure now as ever. The thing that has changed is that self-publishing has become a practical option, partly thanks to ebooks/e-reader technology and, frankly, largely due to business decisions by Amazon that have made them unpopular in various quarters.
The process of submitting a manuscript through the publishing chain is so miserable that many writers are disheartened long before they even try. I can’t speak authoritatively about this from either side, but I’ve seen nothing that convinces me anything’s changed there. I’m not saying success via this route is impossible, and I’m not even making the statement that the alternative is necessarily better in most cases. But there are a lot more things you have to overlook to go this route these days.
Conversely, the process of self-publishing has changed massively. I’ll likely go into more tech detail down the road, because this post is about perception, not practice. But the short version is that you write your book, ideally hire a story editor and a copy editor when you’ve got it as far as you can on your own, decide when you think it’s done, then format it or hire someone to format it as an ebook (in one or two formats depending on where you want to sell it), and post it up. From there it’s a question of marketing it, which is a whole other discussion.
You can also set up your book for print on demand if you want to try to sell physical copies, or be able to produce them for various marketing-related reasons. The economics of print on demand are still very much less attractive for both writer and reader. So I view it as a loss leader and check-box-tick more than a plausible moneymaking option, but I am likely to research this more later and report on it separately, and maybe I’ll turn out to be wrong, who knows.
All of this machinery makes it possible to publish your own novel (or other book) with historic low levels of difficulty and cost. That’s not really what makes it work, though—this is:
For now let’s stay focused on perception. As a reader of genre fiction, in my case urban fantasy and sci-fi, I will often look for a new series, buy one book in the series, and if I like it, buy the rest in one pass. I would do this based on the publisher’s blurb, same as from the jacket of the physical book, and the ebook versions might cost a little less than the physical book, or in some insane cases where the publisher and not Amazon sets the price, quite a bit more.
Nowadays the process is the same except that there are many self-published ebooks/series out there to choose from as well. These are almost always cheaper, but otherwise unless you’re paying attention to the details of the sales page, that might be your only clue that it was self-published.
Historically, self-published books had a greater chance of weak content, from trite stories down to spelling and grammatical errors. This is, of course, still a potential issue. But then again, I’ve seen all these things in standard-publisher-published ebooks, too.
This is why #2 above, ratings and reviews, are so important. Really this is the only thing that matters now. An urban legend, which may also be true, says that Abraham Lincoln once endorsed a product by saying ”people who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing that they like.” That’s exactly what these reviews achieve, without the facetious undertone.
To wrap this up so we can move on to other topics, it boils down to this: if you are willing to bet your book’s success on your own judgment as to its quality, and your willingness to take on 100% of its marketing, you have a receptive place to offer it up for sale. You have a large and growing audience of ravenous readers who are looking for more of what they like. If you can get your ebook in front of them somehow, via linked also-likes or paid ads or whatever it takes, they will see it right alongside mainstream-published books. They will take it as seriously as the title, cover, blurb and sample pages deserve. And they do not care if it came from a publisher. They will judge it based on the reviews written by their peers.
And like that (*snap*), the stigma of self-publishing was gone.
I’m willing to go even further. I would stipulate that—and I base this on nothing but my own opinion as a heavy reader and once-and-future writer—we will start seeing genre fiction that takes more risks and deviates from formula in more interesting ways than publishers can afford to experiment with. Granted, if an author goes too far afield, he will pay the price for failure alone…but if he strikes a chord, this sort of thing can make his career. I think we’re going to see a lot of self-published ebooks coming out that will actually be better than a lot of the same-old that publishers have to put out to keep their finances predictable.
Of course on the flip side we’re always going to see a lot of crap the author should not have self-published because it wasn’t ready or good enough. But then, Sturgeon’s Law applies equally no matter who does the publishing.
Is this revolution good or bad for publishers? The answer isn’t as obvious as I originally assumed…
This was sent in by Mike Clements, and I’m not sure why it didn’t get filed under the last entry, but maybe one day I’ll figure such things out:
I agree for books like novels that consist mostly of text, eInk beats even the best LCD. Where an iPad or Android tablet shines is technical documents having large detailed diagrams, as the screen is larger, in color, and faster. These docs don’t work well on eInk readers. Even the big Kindle isn’t ideal for these docs, as it lacks color and is too slow to render complex pages.
P.S. LCD displays don’t flicker. Most refresh at 60 hertz which can cause rendering artifacts if video is being displayed at a different frame rate. But the refresh is flicker-free. That’s one thing I like about my big LCD monitor, over the old-school CRT I used to have. I would crank up the refresh rate on the CRT but it still wasn’t as nice as the steady glow of an LCD.
Gryphon’s response is:
First of all, I use an iPad for some things, so let’s get that on the record. The screens on smaller tablets are not much bigger than the one on the Kindle Touch, so I don’t think they’re much better at rendering big pages usefully. There is certainly some accuracy to the rendering speed point, though many tablets are not speed demons either. Unfortunately, the faster the device, the more battery it burns, generational leaps notwithstanding. The iPad’s screen is a bit over twice as big, which is part of what makes it too big and heavy for comfortable long use as a reader. Even so, I don’t think it’s big enough for a lot of documents, like diagrams that would be printed across pages in a paper book. This is why I like very big screens on my computers. Although some people might try to print and tape…shudder.
So, it’s certainly better to have a bigger screen for bigger pages, and in some cases it’s even necessary. Color is a separate issue and its value to technical documents is subjective enough to be better avoided here. Coincidentally, I was talking to a friend just yesterday about the future of textbooks. My comment to him was that if Amazon would put out a reader with a big enough screen at a low enough price, they ought to be able to make a dent in that long-running moneymaking scam that colleges foist on students. The large-screen kindle was a…try, not a great try…a now-dated model that was always awkward, and its screen was still not big enough for reading periodicals or textbooks IMO.
This blog is primarily concerned with reading lots of fiction, though, and as you say, there’s simply no contest between e-ink and refreshing screens for that application. Speaking of which, if perhaps “flicker” was a technical term used imprecisely, constantly-refreshed and backlit images burn a lot of battery in CPU and image display and are still harder on the eyes for reading than inert images. They kind of bring the advantages of TV-watching to reading.
I’ve been told, mostly by Apple’s marketing department, that something on the order of seventeen billion people prefer reading books on an iPad. I am not one of them. The iPad, the Kindle Fire, the color Nook, and all other tablets have backlit color LCD screens that refresh 60 times a second, basically strobing light into your eyes like the computer screens they are. These are not the same as e-ink screens, which are kind of like etch-n-sketch screens that don’t have to refresh unless you turn the page. So, e-ink screens refresh 300-400X less often than tablet screens, saving massive battery and being much more similar to printed words on paper as far as your eyes are concerned.
I went and read a whole book on my iPad 2 right after I got it. It was almost impossible to read on outdoors during the day. Indoors, it wasn’t long before it was hard on my eyes, just like reading for hours on a computer screen is, and trying to read in bed after a tiring day? Forget about it. The device itself was too big and heavy to be comfortable to read on, even in sideways “2-pages” mode, and I constantly worried about dropping it as I have often dropped the Kindle, which is a little dinged up but survives a lot better than a tablet like the iPad would. (If you carry anything around in one hand for 10-15 hours a day as you go about your business, you’re going to drop it every so often).
I also didn’t like the reading software Apple provided, which could not be configured to cram a lot of words on the page like you can choose to do on a Kindle or Nook. The Kindle Fire does a little better in this regard, but it is very heavy for its size and is still a flickering computer-type screen. The people who I know personally who read on these devices are not voracious readers. They are not bad people nor morons; they’re my friends, but they just don’t happen to read 250 books a year. They may read a novel every couple of weeks, and they like to look at colorful magazines and web pages, as. That’s what color tablets offer.
Still, I would rather read on a color tablet than lug around and trash physical books, especially when traveling. If I can choose a Kindle or Nook or other e-ink reader, I’ll do it every time. But even a tablet is more convenient to read on than “real” books because I can have a lot of books in a compact piece of gear I would have had with me anyway.
How does this change things for writers and publishers?
I’ve gone through several e-reader devices since the first e-ink ones came out. I tend to favor the Kindle system in terms of title availability, convenience of purchase and delivery, and reading experience on the device. The bizarre combination of features the first Kindle system comprised really changed the world for a lot of heavy readers, like me. Amazon has made some missteps, and I switched to a Nook Touch for several months due to the horrible battery and performance problems the Kindle Keyboard has with large libraries like mine. Now I’m on a Kindle Touch, which is fine, though personally I see little value to touch screens on these devices.
I have read at least a thousand books on e-ink readers, mostly Kindles, since they came out. In that time I have read only a handful of paper books, mostly back a couple of years ago when I still had a backlog of paperbacks sitting around. I found reading on e-ink-screened e-readers immediately and massively better than reading the paper books I had been surrounded by for my whole life.
Very recently, I was forced to read two books in hardback for the first time in 2-3 years, I found the experience annoying to the point where the distractions caused me to get less out of the material. Ink smears and papercuts. The weight on my wrist, having to turn pages physically, dog-earing corners to mark topics, dust jacket sliding everywhere as I held the book up…I couldn’t believe how miserable the experience was.
Granted, cutting back on nicotine gum might have made me a little twitchier than usual. But I really did find the experience annoying and was constantly wishing these books were available as ebooks.
I’ve read articles or comments by people who claim they have sincerely tried the Kindle or Nook but still prefer physical books. They talk about the tactile sense of the paper, the enjoyment of turning the pages, that kind of thing. Personally I don’t read books to rub the paper. That’s a kink I don’t have.
I think these guys are either lying or crazy, and should be watched carefully because they are almost certainly lizard men from V under the skin.
OK, that might be a little harsh. They are just sticking with what they have always done. But I genuinely don’t get it. For reading a lot of fiction, nothing beats an e-ink e-reader. It was obvious from the first time I tried it.
Do tablets make good e-readers?
Why would my friend believe ebook self-publishing was a viable choice? First, let’s look at how ebooks changed things for heavy consumers of fiction.
I’ve been a huge fiction reader for my whole life. If you’re reading this blog, you probably are too. As a kid I spent lots of time in libraries reading fantasy, hard and soft sci-fi, occasional horror like Lovecraft and the very earliest Stephen King, whatever else caught my fancy. My tastes have remained pretty consistent over three decades and more, with one exception: my favorite genre these days, urban fantasy, has only achieved wide audiences in the last few years.
So, I’ve read 200-300 books a year, every year, for as long as I can remember. During my paperback years, I would leave a trail of dog-eared, broken-spined corpses behind me on buses, in airports, doctor’s offices, wherever I finished reading them.
When ebooks came out on devices like the PalmPilot long ago, I had the devices and high hopes, but readability and battery life and book availability never really came together on those things, so I stuck with paperbacks.
Then true e-readers like the Kindle came out, with the e-ink screens that soothed sore eyes and stretched battery life from hours to weeks. Large numbers of heavy readers started seriously considering switching over.
Making the switch has been easier for some than for others…
Just as I made up my mind to make the move from nonfiction to fiction, a series of improbable coincidences manifested into a lucrative job offer in another state. Now I was at a crossroads.
In a Seinfeld-style “do the opposite” move, I took the job. I would go make money for a couple of years and then return to The Plan with resources to keep financial worries from stifling creativity.
Naturally, it didn’t play out the way I’d anticipated. Good things happened and bad, and several more years than I’d expected passed before I was in any kind of position to go back to The Plan.
But by that time, it had been so long, and I’d changed so much, that The Plan wasn’t on hold anymore. It was forgotten. It was someone else’s plan.
So I did other things. And many more years went by.
It was a few years later, just a few years ago now, when I was going through a rough patch and it started me thinking about The Plan once again. A friend and I talked about both getting back to writing.
Nothing came of it at that time, but the seed was planted again.
Then another friend told me she was thinking about self-publishing an ebook….
I want to talk about the wall I hit and couldn’t write past the other day. It was a key turning point and I learned a lot in the aftermath.
But first, this being a new blog, I’d like to answer this question:
Why did you decide to start writing fiction now, and what makes you believe you can do it?
Once upon a time, I was a freelance writer for computer magazines. On the side from my real job, I wrote programming articles, product reviews, that level of stuff. I liked the work so much that I quit my job to do it full time, still purely freelance.
When I got to up to 90 published articles, and the nonfiction book I had lead-authored was published, I decided it was time to start thinking about moving over to fiction. A few years earlier, I had sent a few short stories to magazines and received encouragingly-worded rejections, but I had taken on adult responsibilities and had to put the stories aside for a few years. Now I would dust them off.
And so, Our Hero was making preparations to move into a solitary, Unabomber-style shack in an isolated area (just about exactly where, many years later, the Twilight series would be set, coincidentally). I would monk up and focus on fiction. I was really going to do it.
Then, Something Happened….
The quote by Sol Stein in the previous post discouraged me deeply when I first read it. It annoys me freshly as I see it here again. This statement seems to promote writing as a mystical and exclusive activity, a notion that is strangely at odds with the premise of the rest of the book it appears in. It suggests that a real writer is an obsessive fulfilling a compulsion, not a workman constructing a product of the best quality his training and practice can yield. Yet the main premise of that book and any number of others is that writing effective dramatic fiction is a craft that can be taught and learned.
When I made the decision to write with the goal of completing a novel (and perhaps more beyond), I was facing mental blocks that were years old, even decades depending on where our analysis begins. It took me a couple of years of considering it and a solid year of taking the idea seriously before I wrote the first words of the story. When I made the decision to begin writing for real, though, I knew I had to form the most important habit from day one. The most important habit, of course, is writing every day.
It was a delicate thing, getting started. I was unused to this kind of work, and the huge task I was starting could be massively daunting if I had been inclined to think about it. So, I didn’t, really. I had chosen what book I would write, and had ideas on characters and plot. On the first day I just wrote for a little while, whatever little bit of the book I felt like working on. I stopped before I wanted to stop, and I put the laptop aside.
The approach worked; I left me wanting more. I actually looked forward to writing the next day. This was something of an achievement considering I was operating against a massive mental block and many years of momentum in another direction. This was the reason I had taken so much time to think before starting - to psyche myself up to start. Anyway, I kept it up, never writing beyond where I felt like stopping, and as the days pile upon each other, it’s become a pretty compelling habit.
There is a difference between consistent practice and obsession. I’m a big fan of obsession when you can get it—loads of fun, and who needs sleep. But you can’t go from mental block to obsession in a single step. I’ll keep working on that, but for now, I waggle my body parts at the quote in question and say that what matters is getting yourself writing every day by any means necessary…not whether you inherently “can’t not.” I’ve been doing it very consistently for a handful of months now, and it’s not fun every day, but then, what is?
Although creating a book involves work other than writing the prose of it, the writing is the stuff the book will eventually be made of, so whenever I can, that’s the part I work on. Except when I hit a wall the other day….
I have a cat named Bernadette who is eleven years old and easily weighs in at less than six pounds. She doesn’t like milk, which is strange. She loves tuna, though, which is not so strange, and which is also probably not so great for her, but you got to die of something. Watching her eat a whole can of tuna is like whale-watching in choppy waters: vaguely nauseating, and if you blink you miss it. She’s a great cat, except when she’s ripping holes in my clothes and skin or eating me out of house and home. Or deleting inspired prose with the magic ”maximum catastrophic delete” key that only cats can find. Or insisting on lying on my arm when I’m trying to type. You get the idea.
OK…as premises go, “will write for cat food” is flimsy. But there’s a certan logic to it. Isn’t there? Of course there is. Anyway, it seems to have gotten your attention, or something did, so here we are.
This will be a blog about the process of learning the craft of writing the modern dramatic novel, as experienced by me, Robert Gryphon. I will write about the thought process that prompted me to get started; about the experience of getting organized and going on the actual writing; and about some of the things I learn along the way. If you find my experiences interesting, inspiring, amusing at my expense, or useful in any way, please let me know. I have opened up this blog for contributions on anything related to writing, as well as relevant questions, though I can’t claim any particular qualification to answer them.
Thanks for your interest, and I’ll get you caught up on my progress soon.
