What's an Advance Worth? $67,850.

We hear of million dollar advances for celebrities who haven't conceived of a book yet.  And we hear of multi-million dollar advances to the eye-level-hot-stamping-checkout-megasellers.  I can't tell you much about those except that they are lottery tickets.  Sure, they happen.  But your odds are several million to one against.

I do know about advances in genre fiction (mystery, romance, fantasy, sci-fi, etc) and in non-fiction.  Even a few years ago, advances from a Big 6 publisher for these kinds of titles were averaging around $30,000.  Most of these advances would never "pay out", meaning, the book sales would never generate enough royalties for you to pay back this loan of thirty grand the publisher gave you at their risk, so you'd never (usually) see another dime.  In other words, you just sold your income from that one title FOREVER for thirty grand.  Given that the publisher had to find three HUNDRED grand to print and distribute and edit and design and promote your book, you got off easy.  If you think that the time you spent writing the actual product the whole thing was about was worth thirty grand, total, end of story.

The current average advance for genre fiction is now only $10,000.  Ten grand.  Two years to write it?  Ten grand.  Your life's work?  Ten grand.

(Oh, and in non-fiction?  Three grand.  And the average advance for books on, say, history or philosophy  or militaria or anything vaguely academic from indie academic presses?  Zero.  Advances from such corners are practically unheard of.)

So I'm about two days away from wrapping the first draft of this manuscript (I'm a pretty tight writer and stick to outline – coming from screenwriting I'm very disciplined about structure and story beats and dialogue, so my first drafts are pretty far along.  More like a third, usually, but I'm weird that way.)  Then a week's distance from the book, a two-day what-was-I-thinking-athon of quick edits, then it's off to the editor, who will kick my ass, and then we'll fight and then I'll surrender and the editor will have been right all along, and then I'll rewrite and fix things and tweak and spend a day to format and that's that.  I'll have a product worth paying for.

So what am I going to sell that for?  After all, it's my product.  I have a decision to make.

Okay, so I get a call from somebody who hears about this book and she says, hey, I have a publisher lined up, and they have a cheque here for ten thousand dollars.  Woohoo!  Mexico, here I come!  Take THAT, credit card payment!

Uh, no.  Not so fast, I have some math to do.

Let's safely assume that because I chose to invest my time in something marketable, having done my market research up front (this is a business, after all – who would open up a cupcake store without making sure people in the neighbourhood wanted cupcakes, in which flavours, and at what price?) I've written something people actually want to purchase.  So I went ahead and manufactured that product.  That took me x months (three, in my case, or just under).  What's three months of my time worth?

If I took the ten grand, that would cover my expenses, anyway.  I have to house and feed and transport the writer (me) and give him hardware and software and office space and coffee.  But it's not a business if it's just meeting production expenses.  There needs to be a profit, and there's "opportunity cost".

Ten grand would, therefore, not cover it.  A standard industry advance would be a loss for me for this product.  Oh right, a third of that is gone it taxes.  Now I'm basically hemorrhaging cash with every word I type.  That's a pass, then.

Okay, so let's say this agent / publisher is really good and she says "No no, we MUST HAVE your book, here's a c. 2007 era advance of thirty thousand dollars!"  That's better.  Of course, the person on the other end of the phone is going to want fifteen points at the top($4500, leaving $25,500, or around 18 grand after taxes).  That's not a whole heck of a lot better.  18 grand, and I'll never see another dime from my book?  That's not great business practice if I'm doing this full-time.

Remember, this is your product.  At this point 100% of the revenue and potential revenue is yours.  All you're doing with an advance is giving away about 85% of the revenue in exchange for a cash settlement.

Let's stop for a sec and talk about what publishers actually do, which is tons of stuff you're actually paying for by giving away your revenue.  They find you an editor.  They find you a book designer and (most importantly) a cover designer.  They set up interviews and send out review copies and go to trade shows and list your book in distributor catalogues and buy ads and fund book tours.  Okay, let's assume they do all of that.  Because most publishers will only do about half of that, for 85% of the revenues minus your cash advance.  Some publishers work very very hard.  Some do not.  No surprises there, that's just business.

 Let's see if I can do better.  I can hire my own editor – a good, proven, Big 6 editor, even – a book designer and cover designer, a publicist, etc.  But I'll pay them cash, not a percentage of future revenue for that book forever.  

Now, let's assume, based on gobs of research, that I can crack that top-1000 eBook ranking on Amazon, and keep it there for a while.  Let's aim low.  500 copies a month at the magic number of $2.99 which pays 70% (!) royalties, leaving me $2.09 a unit.  That's $1045 per month pre-tax, or $12, 540 a year.  Now, unlike paperbacks in the trad distribution model, my book doesn't have a 6 month lifespan, but a theoretically infinite lifespan.  But to be fair, let's say I can keep up that very modest sales rate of 500 copies per month for, oh, 5 years.  $62,700 pre-tax income in 5 years from that one title.  More than twice what the basically-no-longer-offered average advance from a traditional publishing house can do for me as an advance, and more than 6 times the current average.  Of course, if I spent $32,700 on editing, design, publicity, and promo, then I'd be breaking even.  But odds are I could cover all of that for about 10% of that, so around three grand.  That still puts me about $29,000 ahead of the game.  A game which, as I mentioned, isn't even being played much anymore.

There's risk.  Any business has risk.  Maybe nobody comes into my cupcake store.  Maybe my cupcakes, not reviewed by the top food critics, just suck.  Because there are no gatekeepers, the tastebuds and the budgets of the market will decide if my cupcakes fail or not.  Just as with a free 45 page preview on Amazon, people can decide whether or not my novel is worth the price of a latté or has half the entertainment value of a DVD rental.  That's up to them.  If they don't want to buy 500 copies a month for five years, they won't.  That's just business.  

But business says, this novel has an advance price – minimum – of about $59,000 + 15% for the person who makes the offer = $67,850.  I could project 10 years out, or 1,000 copies a month, but I like to make business decisions with conservative numbers.  Anyway, unless a not-gonna-happen-no-way-no-how offer comes in OVER $67,850, I'll decline.

Except.

Except there are some things that a legacy publishing model can do for me that I can't do myself, namely introduce my brand to a much broader audience.  They'd make me less money on this title, but could potentially open up new markets for subsequent titles.  I have to determine on a title-by-title basis if this is the right business decision for each book.  If I do *one* deal with a legacy publisher, is this it?  Do I want a whole series to go to a legacy publisher – at a significant financial loss to me, as I've detailed – but could catapult the next series into mortgage-burning sales?  That too is a risk.

What about the author who after years of sending her manuscript out to agents and publishers landed a (zero advance) deal for book one of a four-book series, only to have that press fold up right after launch?  No publisher wants a pre-published book, and no publisher wants books two, three and four if book one is unavailable.  See?  Risk.

It's just business.  

The Abundance Model

Everyone currently working in traditional publishing, from the publishers to the editors to the writers, learned the scarcity attitude. Everyone. That includes me. That includes any unpublished writer who tried to break in before 18 months ago. That includes agents. That includes book reviewers, copy editors, book editors, and the publishing executives.
Our attitudes got formed in a model based on limited shelf space and expensive production costs. On “gut” decisions instead of quantifiable decisions. 

On the idea that rarity increases value. 

...In an abundance model, scarcity looks like a mistake. Consumers who expect everything they want at their virtual fingertips get angry when they can’t get something. We’re seeing that a lot with traditionally published bestsellers. For a while, traditional publishers tried to release the e-books six months after the print books. All that did was anger the consumer, who wanted their e-book now. 

Writers raised in traditional publishing make similar mistakes. In the scarcity model, having a publishing contract equals security. Traditional publishing contracts were (are) rare, and were (are) hard to come by, so a writer who had one had achieved something major. Writers who had more than one contract over the years had managed to prove themselves valuable. In a world of limited resources, when a major company spent those resources on a writer, that writer knew she had value. 

That’s why writers saw publishing contracts as validation. And, as traditional publishers tossed books out into the produce heap, the writer had to prove her value over and over again. Because every traditional publisher relied on gut instinct as much as numbers (if not more than numbers, since numbers are so unreliable throughout all of traditional publishing), intangibles like a good review in a respected publication (like The New York Times Book Review) added value. Again, a good review in a respected publication was rare, scarce, something that didn’t happen often. 

..Traditionally published writers are at a disadvantage here because in the past, publishers did everything for them. Writers have to learn how to be business people, and from what I’m seeing among the traditionally published, the ability to learn business is also a scarce resource. Writers who knew business usually didn’t thrive in traditional publishing, with its arcane traditions.

Right now, the tension we’re all feeling in publishing comes from these warring scarcity and abundance attitudes. Sometimes those of us in publishing are not even speaking the same language, even though it seems like we are. 

We have to step back and see where our attitudes come from. Are we thinking of the limited amount of shelf space, of the handful of slots on the New York Times bestseller list, or are we thinking about making all of our work availble for the long term and trusting search engines and algorithms to help readers find us? Are we trusting our gut or are we relying on math? 

Read the whole thing.

My Local Bookstore 8 Years From Now

I'm walking into a local bookstore, and it's 2020.

The first thing I notice is that this is an indie, the chains having all packed up and bailed from the industry before 2016 was over.  The chains were propped up by the artificial economy of the Big 6, and since they became the Big 5, then 4, and now 3, the big-box-bookstores all went the way of Borders.

The second thing I notice is that it smells really good.  It's the old-book smell plus the aroma of good coffee.

There are screens hanging like posters, with changing cover art of best-sellers and books by local authors.  I can point my phone or e-reader at these, and the cup-of-coffee equivalent price will appear on my device instantly – the bookstore gets a percentage just like any other affiliate.  

There are comfy places to sit down.  An author is doing a reading in the back of the store, and signing postcards with cover art (and a QR code on the back to buy the book).  This reading is on the schedule; most nights are genre-themed book-clubs.  Thursday Romance. Friday Night History.  Saturday Night Horror.  Sunday Biographies.  These are free, but everybody buys the coffee which is what really keeps the doors open.

There are a few hundred new paperbacks, but these are a tiny minority compared to the quality-used-books that line the walls.  20th century cloth hardcovers, mostly.  They smell great, and nobody ever got laid by sending a lover an e-book of "Leaves of Grass".  Most of these are in the $20 range, but there's a $400 Salinger that's been set aside as a birthday present for a collector.  

Of course, e-readers are for sale, new and used, and fitted covers in felt or leather.  Some covers are mass-produced, but the ones that sell best are handmade.  The place is a temple to the written word, so fountain pens and Moleskines and writing sets are prominent.  

What's gone forever are magazine racks.  Periodical publication stopped making sense in print sometime around 2010, the same time e-books started outselling paperbacks.  The space the racks took up is now occupied by chairs.  Sit, stay, drink, talk about books.  When people talk about books, they recommend books, and that sells books.  That Philip K Dick novel you never heard of before?  You own it now.  You bought it ten seconds ago for $2.99 and the bookstore got 30 cents, just because you were sitting there.  If there's an old hard copy on the walls, it'll cost you $30, and you might spring for that because books are lovely and they smell good and they're never going to go away.  But disposable 1970s paperbacks have been disposed of.  

When the boomers' parents died, a whole generation of family libraries were packed away.  In every box of estate-sale debris was a dozen or so of good-condition quality cloth hardcovers or Franklin Mint leather-and-foil classics, and these have found a home in such places.

At the counter, there are two clerks:

The first is helping someone with an on-demand paperback order.  She wants a good Napoleon biography, and using the touch screen, has selected the type and size and page count and edition cover and language.  There's an Espresso Book Machine in the back, and she'll have her book printed on archival paper, bound, trimmed and ready to read in about 3 minutes.  (Cynically, the binding glue is scented vanilla, to subliminally suggest that old-book experience).

The second clerk is helping a customer with leather swatches.  He's making a book for his Dad's 75th birthday, and has used a social network to gather stories and photos from friends and family members, and is having the thing printed and bound.  The bookbinder only comes in twice a week, and the finished product is around $200, but it'll last for generations.  The book will take a while, because the bookbinder is very very busy, even after hiring another two apprentices.

Of course, you could shop for the book you just bought anywhere: on the bus, in the park.  But readers are contrary creatures, as social as they are solitary.  So they gather where other readers are, where authors are, and they learn and share and talk about books.  The smart bookstores figured this out early, and embraced both digital and used books early on.  They bought ads with links to their affiliate sites and posted their own reviews, inviting locals to weigh in on their favourite titles.  The understood that it's the social nature of readers that would keep them in business, and that being wedded to the schedules of legacy print publishers would be disastrous.  Those who jumped that ship survived and thrived.

The stores who bought x hundred paperbacks from the Big 6 and sent half of them back at the end of the quarter are long gone. But hey, this place is still here, and I'll come back tomorrow.

The Story Rebuild

Okay, it's 12 minutes, but THIS is pretty much what I do with client scripts/manuscripts.

http://blastr.com/2012/02/video-shows-exactly-how-t.php

Let's keep all the core events of your first draft, streamline it, underscore character motive, reduce clutter, make some deliberate foreshadowing choices, and tighten it up.  And omit Jar Jars.  Some stories are just better when one character is gone completely.

Editors!  More than just grammer. speeling and : puntchooation.

New Book Cover: Brendan Myers' Fellwater

Lessee... jewel tones, vignette, upper case, short blurb, full-bleed image, contrast.  Yep.  It's a book cover.

Special bonus feature: is the type presentation extensible to a series, so that the next one will tie into this one?  You need to think about such things.  So that's another "yep" there.

George RR Martin Can't Write and Nobody Cares

Mega-bestseller Game of Thrones author George RR Martin can't write a decent paragraph.

But that's okay, neither can Christopher Paolini, mega-bestselling author of Eragon and others.

Now, these are great books that are much loved by millions of fans.  They are great stories.  They're just not well written.  Their paragraphs and sentences are frequently clunky, cliché, overly-sincere, maudlin, and trite.  But that doesn't matter.

What both of these authors have done is build incredibly believable, or desirable-to-beleive-in-able, worlds.  The success of these authors is world-building.  Histories, genealogies, motives, intrigue, geographies.  Their worlds seem inhabited somehow.  They're great testaments to imagination.  They're just poorly written.  And that's okay.

What I'm saying is, you can write a better book than these guys.  There are certainly days when I would rather read a bad paragraph in a great story than read Hemingway about grocery shopping.  So don't beat yourself up about the quality of your writing.  Tell a great story with great characters as best as you are able, and hire a great editor to polish it as much as they can.  And relax.  Don't let your lack of confidence prevent you from writing.  Just write, and write more.  You'll get better. And if you find that the book you published last year is embarrassingly awful by comparison to what you can do now, yoink the book of Amazon, give it a rewrite with a  refreshed cover, and put it back up there.  You don't need anybody's permission to do that.  So just go and tell your story right now, and don't wait.

Here's another funny and important George RR Martin story:

Here's the first version of the cover of his first book:

It was release in Australia and moved modestly.  It may have approached sales expectations, on the shelves with hundreds of other titles.  It was okay.  Just not  the kind of mortgage-burning success authors dream of.

And then, the publisher did this:

And BOOM.  Walk into any major bookstore chain and you'll see 4 of the top 10 in store sellers are by this guy.  A TV series and merchandising and ridonkulous amounts of money.

Exactly the same book.  Different cover.  Very different results.

So that's the thought for today.

The Career Benefits of Boycotting Charity Art Auctions

Instead of tossing away another great artwork to a good cause, join the good cause of boycotting charity art auctions. When you join this cause ...

• You stop taking revenue out of the art world
• You stop shifting art collector dollars to the bottomless pits of recurring annual Beg-A-Thons
• You don't contextualize your art as being a synonym of pretentious panhandling
• You don't announce that your art is worth low bids
• You don't risk that your work will be publicly seen getting no bids
• You don't empower strangers to devalue your artwork
• Most importantly, you stop publicly proclaiming that you give your art away

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mat-gleason/charity-art-auctions-_b_872953.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

Confessions of a Dinosaur: E-books and the Monetization of Content.

I'm not bitter.  I'm going to sound bitter.  But I'm not bitter.  I'm genuinely excited and optimistic.  But here's the story.

Back in 1986, I was the second (not the first) "Desktop Publisher" in my city.  I had a $4,000 Mac Plus with no hard drive and a pirated beta copy of Aldus Pagemaker (version 0.9B) that a tech journalist had smuggled for me.  I made newsletters with up to 5 fonts, as long as those fonts didn't need to be over 72 points high.

But freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, and I owned one.  I launched myriad publishing ventures, hit obscure vertical markets unserved by traditional periodical publishing, spawning 'zines and ponies at an unprofitable rate.  And that was just it.  It was conventional publishing in microcosm, and that mean ad sales.  Which meant staff, and payroll, and all kinds of overhead that defeated the whole purpose of being fast and indie and agile.  So the whole thing turned into a service business, like a house painter.  Tell me what you want (corporate newsletter, restaurant menu, whatever) and I'll charge you by the hour.  It was an industry that consumed itself and congratulated itself with (ironically) newsstand publications like Publish! and conventions and professional associations so that we could pretend we were somehow more creative than cab drivers – tell us where you want to go, and we'll take you there with the meter running.  The content-creator in me was, shall we say, disappointed.

Then came CD-ROM.  Requiring much of the same skill set as Desktop Publishing (DTP, remember that acronym?), including writing, editing, graphic design, tech-savvy and a budget that meant buying more stuff from Apple while PC users laughed at you, CD-ROM was, at least, a content bucket that people would pay for (unlike DTP-produced dead trees). $10.  $20.  $40.  Suddenly major distributors of content got on board, locking up retail shelf space and isolating indie producers and authors.  But it did prove that people would pay for stuff, and writers could make a living writing.  For about an hour and a half.

Then came the web, and WHAMMO, writers were prized and penniless.  You could reach mass audiences – far greater than DTP or even CD-ROM –globally and instantly and at low-to-no budget.  But it also meant that you didn't get paid.  Except for ads.  And that meant ad sales, which meant staff and… waitaminnit.  We've been here before.  Yup, it was the revenge of DTP.  The web was not to be a path to the monetization of content, but yet another ad platform.  And of course, yet another service industry.  So the ex-DTP, ex-CD-ROM heads (Macromind Director, anyone?) were now web designers.  Get in the cab, where would you like to go? We pretended we were artists, but we were drywallers.

The only other avenue for authors to get paid was to go what we now deliciously call Legacy Publishing.  You wrote your novel for free ("on spec"), printed it out, put your manuscript in the box the paper came in, and FedEx'd it to a hundred agents and a hundred publishers.  At minimum wage and expenses and shipping, each of these cost you about $60.  Times several hundred.  Almost all of these were unopened, let alone unread.

Oh, authors got signed to agents and agents found publishers and books got published and authors got royalty cheques.  It just took a combination of decades-long tenacity and shithouse luck, with talent having almost nothing to do with anything.  The best novels of the last 50 years are sitting, unopened, in the pre-recycling strata of landfills.  The gatekeepers were just too good.  And once you were in, if you were the fraction of a fraction of 1% who did get in, you got to keep somewhere between 7% and 17% of your work.  The web is choked with stories of authors who were told by agents "We love your book and are this close to a deal" or even "I'm in the publisher's office and she's just signed the contract", only never to hear of such agents and publishers again.  It was – and is – a lottery.  One in a million win, and win big.  One in hundreds of thousands win, and win small.  Royalty advances that never earn out, so that the ten or twenty or thirty grand you got for your book that took two years of your life is all you'll ever see.  Don't quit your day job.

I've been through all of this. The silence of the void into which submitted manuscripts go.  Agents who said yes and then nothing. Publishers who said yes and then nothing.  Publishers who said yes and came through and cut royalty cheques – likely the last I'll ever see on those titles.  And I'm not bitter.  I'm optimistic and excited, like I said.

For the first time since CD-ROM, twenty years ago, there is a bucket of content users will pay for, that doesn't require getting past the gatekeepers.  This is a revolution for authors.

At $2.99 on Kindle, and author makes $2.09.  That's more per book than many Big 6 publishing-house A-listers make.  And you can do that this afternoon.  Your book might suck, it might be Shakespeare, but there's nothing between you and the reader and their cup-of-coffee cash.  There are tens of thousands – soon (and possibly already) to be hundreds of thousands – of authors who put their book up on Amazon 4 months ago and are quitting their day-jobs.  Writers are paying their mortgage with their words.  That's astonishing.

Maybe it's the trashy romance novel you cranked out last summer for fun, maybe it's 10 Tips for Buying a Used Lawnmower.  Whatever.  There's a market for it.  And if your book is properly formatted, priced, covered, and reviewed – all of which is entirely under your control – you can monetize your content.  Without advertising, without agents, without gatekeepers.  Just 70% royalties.  Forever.

I can't think of a better time to be content-creator.  Because what's next?  $2.99 downloads of movies from garage filmmakers.  $4 coffee-table iBooks featuring visual artists, telling the story of your art with video interviews and 3D rotation of sculpture.  You know, like a website.  That people will pay for.  Happily.

Oh, and if you're not one of the 40 million people who own an iPad, or the 20 million people who own a Kindle, you're still reading this somewhere, likely a laptop, and half of all e-books are read on laptops.  That little factoid doesn't get enough attention. 

So, it's been a whole year since e-books have been the number one format for new books according to unit sales.  What are you doing this year to take advantage of that?

Your Cover is 40% Of Your Sales

Price point is another 40%.  Reviews and social and "I liked your last book so I'll give this one a go" is your remaining 20%.  How great your book is does not affect sales directly, because no one has any way of knowing (aside from your social and reviews, which obviously can be manipulated, and people know this).

But you have total control over 80% of your sales, via cover and price point.  Price point is more forgiving, and harder to predict.  That makes it soggier.  A book might do 500 copies in one month at $1.99 and 2,000 the next month at $3.99.  You have to experiment, tweak, revise, review, until you find a groove for that title.

But cover?  That's binary.  A cover is either a cover or it isn't.   It's very likely that yours... isn't.  Let's take a look at some top-selling genre fiction (YA, fantasy, sci-fi) kindle editions at amazon.

Buyers judge books by their covers; it's all they have to go on.

COLOUR: Jewel tones.  Notice that?  Not "blue" or "red" or "green."  But sapphire, ruby, emerald.

VIGNETTE:  Most get darker around the edges (or at least one side), to tell you to ignore the images next to the cover, and draw the eye to the center.

TYPE: Look how little variation there is here.  Trajan is the big winner by a huge margin, often with accentuated caps or letterspaced (L I K E   T H I S).  For sans-serif faces, long, narrow, condensed and closely set.

CONTRAST: Overwhelmingly, white or gold type set on a darker background.

FULL-BLEED: Image goes all the way to the edge, all 'round.  It's not bordered, it's not in a box, it's not with a solid band of colour on top.  In one example above, there's a semi-transparent box, in the same tones as the illustration, to give the white type some contrast.

CASE: Upper.  I don't see any mixed upper and lower here.

MORE: You can't yet put "NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER" above your title, but you can likely put "A MAIN CHARACTER NOVEL" or "BY THE AUTHOR OF SOME OTHER BOOK".  Sometimes you can throw in a one or two line slug "Oh my God... unbelievable... I couldn't put it down...amazing" - Some Writer Friend, author of Yet Another Book.  There shouldn't be very much of this, but you can see where it goes from the samples above and how much there should be of it.

The cruel, ugly reality here is that if your cover doesn't look like this, it won't sell the way it should.  This is what a book cover is: it's unforgiving, it's inflexible, it's binary.  And it makes all the difference in the world.

There's no way to do this in Word.  There's no way to do this with online cover generators – although by using the rules above you can probably get pretty close.  You just need to really pay attention, and even if you hire a cover designer, keep asking yourself, and others around you, "Does it look like one of these?"  Because it has to.

Word Count: How Long is a Piece of String?

I get asked this one a lot.  


The other day Cherie Priest commented on her blog that she had hit 108k on her latest manuscript.  That seemed high to me, having read her other books.  When I asked her about it, she mentioned that her first novel in her latest series tipped in at 120k.


Right now I'm working on a novel, and I think it'll settle somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 words.  This is the standard range for the YA (Young Adult) audience I'm aiming for.  


That's in the neighbourhood 200 pages in trade paperback.  One could cheat and make an "A format" pocketbook (4.3 x 7 inches) and set the thing in 14 point Goudy (like this copy of this book in my 9 year old daughter's fantasy box-set) and push it to just shy of 300 pages.  Pricier to print but feels better in the hand.  Up to you.


Your basic mystery novel, spy thriller etc. averages 70-80k, and fantasy – where you have to spend a lot of words explaining how objects and culture and politics and geographies work – can reach and exceed 120k.


For whatever reason, a lot of writers have 100,000 words in their heads as a "legitimate novel" length.  I'm not sure where this comes from, except perhaps that it's an accidental inversion of the agent's tendency to NOT READ mss over 100k.  So it's not a minimum, it's usually a maximum.  (Obviously depending on genre, above).


There are of course exceptions to the rule.  Twilight is the rare breakout YA novel that hit 120k.  Collins' phenomenally successful Hunger Games squeaks in at 99k.  But here's a little perspective, looking at some familiar classics, both adult and YA.

Rowling, Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone: 77k
Salinger, Catcher in the Rye: 73k
Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises:  67k
Golding, Lord of the Flies: 60k
Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five: 50k
Average Nancy Drew Novel:  47k
Bradbury, Farenheit 451:  47k

Vonnegut's manuscript is no less legitimate for weighing in at half your aspiring author's ideal length.  The Science Fiction Writers of America define a "novel" as 40,000 words or above.  

Even then, the market's understanding of "novel" is being radically re-invented by e-readers.  Your cover image at 90 x 135 pixels, and your $2.99 price point, look as "valid' or as "legitimate" as anything put out by the Big 6 publishers.  Your readers are going to buy your book if your cover is amazing, if your reviews are good; and they're going to love it if your writing is good.  Word count is completely meaningless to your long term success.  Is Farenheit 451 less of a novel than Twilight?  Do I have to ask?

So tell your story with the best writing you wrench from your talent, and just don't worry about word count in your final manuscript.  Worry about word count in your productivity.

How I'm Putting 60,000 - 70,000 Words Together

On Tuesdays, my (amazing) wife does everything with the kids.  Gets them breakfast, makes their lunch, gets them to school, picks them up, makes them dinner, gives them a bath, gets them ready for bed.  Everything.  And I spend that one kid-free day per week writing 5,000 words.  That's a pretty decent daily word-count. At this rate I'll have a solid first draft mid-March, And a few furious weeks of editing to make my mid-April deadline.  

On Thursdays, I do everything with the kids so she can go to the studio and paint.

Thing is, I know I only get this one day per week to move the novel forward, so that time is sacrosanct, and I don't stop until I have 5,000 words on the screen.  Takes me ten hours solid.  I have a plan for exactly what has to get done each-writing day, and I don't waver.  I don't cheat.  I push.  Because that's all I get.  I don't care if I'm not inspired or if I don't feel like writing.  I don't get to sleep until those 5,000 words get hammered into pixels, and that's that.

I have a plan for the first draft.  I have a plan for the edit. I have a plan for revisions.  I have a plan for proofing.  I have a  plan for the formatting, and eBooks, and promo and marketing.  Even though I'm not even half way through the first draft, I've started shopping for a cover artist.  Because the PLAN is the razor of truth and justice and fluffy kittens and that's just the way it is, dammit.

I'm so grateful for the ability (and the help!) to set this time aside and deliver on my commitment to my manuscript.  But without goal, without limit, without PLAN,  I could be at a-bunch-of-random-notes-and-great-ideas stage 6 months, 2 years, 5 years from now.

Ten Bits of Advice Writers Should Stop Giving Aspiring Writers

9. Write that "million words of crap"; give yourself six years to get published; collect 250 rejections, etc etc..This advice is much like another piece of bad advice—buy pants with a 36-inch waist. Well, the plurality of people wear 36-inch pants, so... Outside of the basic advice of "Try, and a significant number of times", any specific measure is foolish and leads to aggravation.  [...] This is how the Soviet Union ended up making tractor engines so heavy they'd fall out of the machines—they measured factory productivity via tonnage produced per year. Any advice that involves anything other than "Write something publishable, attempt many times to get it published" can lead to artificial goals such as the collection of rejection slips or the production of unpublishable stories.
The same is true about other "advice" like—write short stories first, writer shorter short stories rather than long ones, join a writer's group, make sure your characters are likable, write/don't write for the "market", etc. All of this is "buy typical pants" advice.

http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1732344.html 

How Julian Schnabel Breaks Through Creator's Block

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/16/julian-schnabel-creative-ruts_n_1209025.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

If you don't paint you're not a painter.  If you don't write you're not a writer.

Konrath's $100,000

Self-publishing rock star JA Konrath reveals the numbers behind his strategy for success.

We can directly and instantly reach hundreds of millions of consumers in a global marketplace. We can set the list price, and we get to keep the majority of that list price. Readers can buy our work instantly on devices that they love. They don't have to go to the store, the store is in their hands. Once a book is written and formatted it can sell unlimited copies, forever, without any costs to the writer other than the initial time investment and monetary investment (formatting, editing, cover.) 

No other industry allows this. There are always continuing production costs and shipping costs. There are always middlemen who take cuts. There is always a limit to distribution. There are always times when something is sold out or unavailable. 

Not anymore.

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2012/01/100000.html 

Kindle Format 8

New specs are out for KF8...

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A2RYO17TIRUIVI

What will YOU be self-publishing this year?

OmmWriter

Okay, this would drive me com-puh-LETE-ly mental, but if you're looking for a word-processing experience that's more spa-like than Word...

http://www.ommwriter.com/

Now, on the plus side, you can strip the interface down to a beautiful, minimalist no-distractions user-experience that is among the best I've seen.  The strength is that you can dial this thing from Bauhaus squeaky-clean antiseptic all the way to "Jimi Hendrix" freakout.  If you crave stimulus while you get your wordsmith on, but find all the distractions distracting, this at least keeps all your distractions in one place, as it were.

Writing is an incredibly personal, intimate, finicky process.  I would rather remove my own organs with a blunt stick than write an entire manuscript in Word.  Personally, I use the get-outta-my-face Text editor that comes with a Mac for all my writing (yes, all my books were written in Text), unless it's a screenplay in which I case I use Final Draft and only-ever Final Draft.

I don't want style palettes and 30 format buttons across the top and pale, colour-coded icons parading around the outside of my anything.  And I sure as hell don't want an American programmer correcting my grammar with a squiggly line simply because one of my characters said "ain't" in a line of dialogue.  For me I want to get as close to a blank sheet of paper and a magic typewriter with copy-paste-undo as possible.  The full screen mode in OS X Lion is great for that.  A white expanse of limitless possibility, and each black letter a footprint in the snow.  And nothing else.  Just the writer and the naked, exposed word.  A black null in a sea of liquid crystal.  Nothing else going on.

Multi-tasking was a lie, but that's another blog post.

But to organize my thoughts, I have a $40 Cross steel-nibbed fountain pen and a small, hardcover Moleskine notebook (I'm addicted to these).  I just can't read my handwriting after, but the process is valuable for me.  Muscle memory, the way your writing has to slow down with a fountain pen, how you have to wait a moment before you turn the page as the ink dries.  Sip coffee, think about it.  So my own writing quirks run from the brutishly minimal to the exquisitely complicated, and often in the same hour.

Writers are weird.  Creatives are weird.  But the sooner you grok exactly the way in which you're weird, the sooner you can work with that and get down to it.

in honour of the fact that life is short: ecstatic sex, quitting, and wearing your best

if you feel like you're always failing, consider that this is part of being an artist. let it be a divine inclination. keep going.

http://whitehottruth.com/white-hot/in-honour-of-the-fact-that-life-is-short/

10 Reasons Your Freelance Career is Failing

If your freelance business isn’t where you want it to be, then it’s time to own up to your choices and make a change.
Here are 10 reasons your freelance career is failing. If you want to turn it around, then it’s up to you.
Consider this your “tough love” article of the week.

1. You know your craft, but not your business.

Sure, you’re an excellent artist or a skilled tradesman. You understand your task and you can do it well.
But you don’t understand marketing or sales or any of that other business stuff.
Guess what? It’s on you to figure it out. Learning new skills and adapting to the environment is part of the job.
You can either sit around and complain that less-skilled freelancers are beating you out because of “stupid marketing tactics” … or you can read some books, try some new things, and play the game.

2. You’re lazy.

Sorry. That’s not what you want to hear. And it’s not what I want to say.
But most of the time, it’s the truth.
Your business isn’t growing because you want to sleep in. Your business isn’t growing because you want to take Saturday off. Your business isn’t growing because you want to watch TV for two hours every night. Basically, you’re too lazy to build a business.
Don’t act like there isn’t enough time. Time doesn’t change. You can’t create more or less of it. You can only choose to use it better.

http://freelanceswitch.com/freelancing-essentials/failing-freelance-career/

Kobo to become a publisher

Canadian-based e-book seller Kobo is following in Amazon's footsteps and creating a publishing arm that will deal directly with authors, CBC News has learned.

Kobo, whose major shareholder is Indigo Books, will roll out its program sometime next year, according to CEO Michael Serbinis.

Like Amazon, which announced two weeks ago that it would be publishing 122 original titles this fall, Kobo will be offering complete publishing services for authors, including book editing and design.
"It's part of the new market and if you expect to be a number 1 player in that market globally it's table stakes — you have to provide it," Serbinis told CBC News.

Amazon's move into publishing cuts out the middle man — the traditional publisher — and promises writers more of the proceeds from their e-book sales.

– more

NYT: Amazon Rewrites the Rules of Book Publishing

SEATTLE — Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers.

[...] Amazon has started giving all authors, whether it publishes them or not, direct access to highly coveted Nielsen BookScan sales data, which records how many physical books they are selling in individual markets like Milwaukee or New Orleans. It is introducing the sort of one-on-one communication between authors and their fans that used to happen only on book tours. It made an obscure German historical novel a runaway best seller without a single professional reviewer weighing in. 

via NYT

Chick Lit Book Covers!

Covers for client, friend and author Nuala Reilly:

Web Portfolio

Click to embiggen...

Social Media Experiment (Phase II): 36 hours to get $100 worth of coaching for just $20

The first phase was a discounted e-book, to a select network.  Now I'm testing a different product, at a different price point, to a different network.

Here's how it works;

• Purchase a 45 minute coaching session to be conducted via Skype or phone - a $100 value.  Learn more about the process and approach here:  http://jordanstratford.com/icoachcreatives/

• Buy before Saturday, October 2 at midnight Pacific time, and you pay only $20.

• Send 3 questions relating to your business, creative venture or personal life to jordan@jordanstratford.com

• Include the name 1 person you'd like to meet for whatever reason, and I'll look through my network for someone who can be of similar benefit to you – and I may even know that person.

• We'll work out a schedule and conduct the coaching session in the next 60 days.

• When you purchase, share this link on your Facebook, Twitter, or network of choice.

Additionally, I'll share the methodology and the experiment results here on the blog – so we can learn collectively what works in terms of discount, reach, and network.

Never worked with a coach before?  Here's a great way to experiment yourself.  

Paypal will be processed by the lovely and talented Zandra via zandra (at) zandra dot ca

Here's the button!

Five Reasons Why Best-Selling Authors Are Going Direct

Many best-selling authors are going direct by publishing through epublishers instead of traditional publishing companies. Here's why.

The latest news has reflected a shift in best-selling authors who publish their manuscripts through epublishers rather than traditional publishing companies, and it's for a good reason. Readers are chomping at the bits for ebooks. Just recently the Association of American Publishers reported that ebook sales have increased by 176 percent in 2009, while print-book sales continues to decrease. The list of benefits for ebook writers is endless, but one major upside is that the authors are taking home more of the book sale profits. Not to mention that the editing process is simplified and that ebooks are produced much, much quicker. It also helps that authors have more control during the entire book production process and access to a whole new audience. The publishing industry is paying attention to the major move, including traditional publishers. More and more literary agencies, such as Andrew Wylie's agency, have plans to start agencies that deal exclusively with epublishers. It's no wonder why more authors are going direct.

- read more via Gizmodo

Screenwriters: What 4 words are you never going to put together in a script?

Book Launch 2.0

For all my author clients:

$30 DIY GlideCam

A $15 monopod, some PVC, and you have a steadycam based on the idea of extending the center of gravity out beyond the camera itself. Clever.

http://www.techtilt.com/2010/06/06/diy-glidepod/

For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path

Since graduation in 2008, Mr. Eich, 23, has gotten magazine assignments here and there, but “industrywide, the sentiment now, at least among my peers, is that this is not a sustainable thing,” he said. He has been supplementing magazine work with advertising and art projects, in a pastiche of ways to earn a living. “There was a path, and there isn’t anymore.”

[...]Amateurs, happy to accept small checks for snapshots of children and sunsets, have increasing opportunities to make money on photos but are underpricing professional photographers and leaving them with limited career options. Professionals are also being hurt because magazines and newspapers are cutting pages or shutting altogether.

“There are very few professional photographers who, right now, are not hurting,” said Holly Stuart Hughes, editor of the magazine Photo District News.

That has left professional photographers with a bit of an identity crisis. Nine years ago, when Livia Corona was fresh out of art school, she got assignments from magazines like Travel and Leisure and Time. Then, she said, “three forces coincided.”

They were the advertising downturn, the popularity and accessibility of digital photography, and changes in the stock-photo market.

– NY Times

10 Tips for Indie Directors

10 Tips for Indie Directors

1) Listen to light - Shoot stills
Work with the DOP to see where the light is and the shapes that are made from it. Maplethorpe isn't a great photographer because he shoots weird naked people, he's a great photographer because he works with angular blocks of light. So once your actors are blocked out, shoot digital stills and put them up on the monitor. Look at the geometry of the shot and use it for dramatic effect (or change it with lighting).

2) PA's
Use your production assistants. They're excited, they're happy to be there, and they'll endure a 14 hour day and come back and do it again. So give them something to do and tell them why it matters. Blocking street traffic matters while you're trying to get a noise-free shot. Getting coffee matters because you're cross-eyed before your fourth Americano and you can't read the shot list. Ask them if they've had a break, or had enough to eat. The answer will be "no" but as a director you'll seem less self-involved.

3) Rehearse, but not too much
Let the actors rehearse amongst themselves at the location, getting comfortable, listening to their voice-throw. Stay out of their way. Then do one or possibly two runs through the scene with you. Not too much. Give them notes, but don't let them rehearse the notes to keep it fresh. Some directors like to rehearse a LOT, so it's a matter of taste.

4) Don't sit down
Director-chairs are cliché. Stand up next to the script super but not too close to the DOP. Let them work, but why should you sit down when your crew is on their feet on a concrete floor all day?

5) Locked master
Just in case it's all going to go horribly, horribly wrong, lock down the camera and get a wide master shot of the whole scene first. That way if technical or personal crap rears its ugly head, you can still keep that scene in the movie. Entire films are made with locked-down master shots. Visually boring, but it's an insurance policy.

6) Block actors with the shot list; clockwise over shoulders
Let the actors see the storyboards just before go-time. Double check the shot list and block accordingly. Then, after your master shot take, you can move the camera over a shoulder and get the first "pup". Move the camera again over another shoulder and get the second "pup". If you have more than two actors in a scene, shoot your over-the-shoulders clockwise. But...



7) Don't break the line
If you cross over the invisible meridian line, your footage will have characters flipping back and forth. In the footage, character A should ALWAYS be on the left, and character B should ALWAYS be on the right. Otherwise your audience will recoil in horror without knowing why.


8) Cat in the window
Okay, so far your two actors have done one with-director rehearsal, one master take, and two pups. You need them to go through one more take with a moving camera, shooting close up of hands, or props, or tie-straightening, or some kind of ambient element in the location (a cat in the window). This gives the editor something to cut away to if a fly goes up the starlet's nose.

9) Don't produce while you're directing
More than half of indie director projects mean double-duty for the director, and writer/director/producer combos are becoming the norm rather than the exception. But while you're directing, direct. Use your associate / assistant producer to handle producer shite while you're shooting. You don't want to be mid-notes with the actors when someone from the location wants to talk about parking or to tell you craft services needs a cheque.


10) Establishing shot on the way out
Don't get your establishing shot when you show up – get it on the way out. You'll have a different understanding of the place after you've been there for a few hours and it will inform your shot. Also you need to spend daylight on your actors. A drive-by establishing shot is the easiest (possibly the only easy) shot to get later if you run out of time.

Bang! Bang! Writing Gunplay

This is of interest to me as I'm in the middle of writing not one but two crime-drama scripts for clients, and one of those scripts has a lot of shoot-em-up.

4 That 100 yard “sniper shot”? Piece. Of. Cake. Unless you’re using a pistol.

Range is a funny thing. Barrel length, bullet-shape, -size, and -weight, wind direction and speed all alter this number. Hell, even the grain count between two types of rounds in the same gun can change the maximum range. And, at certain distances, the round isn’t traveling with enough energy to do damage. To cut out the ambiguity, shooters tend to focus more on the “maximum effective range” – the largest theoretical distance at which damage can be inflicted upon a target with a specific firearm under the broadest conditions.

Besides maximum effective range, there are other things to consider – like the vision of the shooter, the lighting conditions, attached optics, and how exposed the target is. The equations can get complicated but here are a few rules of thumb – for a snub nose revolver you’re working in feet, ten or fifteen at most for an accurate shot. For a full-sized pistol, a man-sized target twenty-five to fifty meters away is a two-handed reality with practice. And with a rifle? Even without optics, a 300 meter shot is fairly easy with minimal training.

– Read the whole thing

Free / Cheap 3D Book Cover images for E-Book Sales

This looks pretty good, and is worth checking out.

Remember, your cover IS your book.

1) Amateur cover signals amateur, poorly-written book. Hire an experienced cover designer.

2) Generic covers signals "already read it" to potential buyers.

3) Aim for distinctive, not "unusual". The latter means "too far outside readers' experience".

4) No one will or should read anything that's been contaminated with clip art or Comic Sans.

That being said, maybe you have a simple graphic or photo background and Helvetica in mind, and this thing will crank out a "photo" of a stack of your books, even if you never print a single copy. $10 allows you to make 100 covers in one month, so if you have 4 or 5 e-books this could make a lot of sense.

Also works for CDs, credit-card looking membership cards, DVD clamshells, software boxes, 3-ring binders... Clever.

How To Write A Hollywood Rom-Com in 10 Easy Steps

The truth is, they make that kind of scratch because they tap into a familiar formula that boring people find comforting and recognize as one of their own, rather than attacking with pitchforks like they would an intellectual challenge, or the town ogre. And now, because I’m such a righteous dude, I’m here to explain that formula to you, the cretinous layperson.

[...] Step 2: Title

The last thing you want in a rom-com is confusion or surprises, so your number one goal in a title should be an already-familiar phrase (preferably a song title) which communicates the entire premise. I.e., The Proposal, What Happens in Vegas, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Runaway Bride, 27 Dresses, Ghost of Girlfriends Past, The Break Up, My Best Friend’s Girl, etc.

Snarky, but spot-on.

More from Gizmodo: 2 Great Posts About the Inner Machinations of the Record Industry

This is survival-level information for independent recording artists looking at either going it alone or signing with a major label

The first:

The biggest music stores are now virtual, so there's no need for someone to go gladhand every Sam Goody manager so they give you endcap space for Use Your Illusion II. The iTunes Music Store sells 25% of the music sold in America as of last August, and that number is definitely going up, not down.

[...] But for unsigned bands, companies such as TuneCore and CD Baby act as middlemen between them and digital storefronts like iTunes for very small amounts of money; getting your album up on major stores such as iTunes, Amazon and eMusic will set you back about $47 through TuneCore. And you retain all ownership of your music and keep all royalties, unlike working with a record label.

[...] Furthermore, these days it's easier than ever for musicians to record music without an expensive studio. Software such as Reason, Pro Tools and Logic can be bought for $300 or less, and run on a mid-range laptop. Cheap mics and gear can be found all over eBay and Craigslist. Tie everything together with a $200 to $500 mic preamp analog-to-digital/digital-to-analog box, and you have a mini-studio in your bedroom.

And music blogs have turned the way artists are discovered on its head. It used to be that high-paid A&R executives would scour clubs to find underground bands to sign, acting as the filter between the millions of mediocre bands and the discriminating public. Today, obsessive music fans scour clubs and the web for free, discovering new acts and writing about them on blogs. Labels then discover bands from these blogs. The A&R system is no longer as relevant.


[...] And signing to an indie instantly connects you to that labels fans, Bonacci says. "Nobody really cares about Sony records or Universal. You don't seek out stuff that's being released on Universal as a fan. Independent labels, be it Domino or SubPop or whatever, those labels have fans."

[...] The fact of the matter is that bands do still need someone working for them, 360 deal or not. For some bands, just having a small team of a dedicated manager, publicist and lawyer who can handle the nitty-gritty of online sales, tour organization, merchandising and marketing will be enough for them. But many can still benefit from the huge networks that labels have with their contacts in every facet of the industry. Sure, you can print your own t-shirts, but a label with contacts with clothing manufacturers, stores and distributors can make that process a lot easier. And just how much of this work do you want to do yourself?

[...] But clearly, the money that's to be made in music is no longer just in album sales. And bands seem to be presented with a choice: they can either allow labels to become more involved in everything that they do, and give up money that used to go exclusively to them in the process, or strike out on their own. Either way, they'll entering a landscape where getting their song on Gossip Girl for 40 seconds is more important than any amount of FM radio play, where getting a music video posted to Stereogum is more important than getting it on MTV and where you make more money touring behind an album than selling that same album.

And there's this one:

My $62.47 Royalty Statement: How Major Labels Cook the Books with Digital Downloads

E-books, Formats, and Devices

I've been following with great interest the various device-and-format standards for indie pubishers / self-published authors. I'm predicting that the iPad will open up huge opportunities for small-press publications, doubling the sales of obscure, vertical and sort-of-out-of-print books – which is to say, if your Lulu-published guide to hamster grooming sold only 200 copies, you're about to sell another 200 copies on the iPad.

So gizmodo has a great field guide to the issues and challenges around open formats available for publishers here.

Okay, so the easiest way to put this in perspective is to quickly list what formats the major ebook readers support. (Why these four? Well, they're the ones due to sell over 2 million units this year, except for Barnes & Noble's, which we're including as a direct contrast to Kindle just because.)

• Amazon Kindle: Kindle (AZW, TPZ), TXT, MOBI, PRC and PDF natively; HTML and DOC through conversion
• Apple iPad: EPUB, PDF, HTML, DOC (plus iPad Apps, which could include Kindle and Barnes & Noble readers)
• Barnes & Noble Nook: EPUB, PDB, PDF
• Sony Reader: EPUB, PDF, TXT, RTF; DOC through conversion

You'll notice a pattern there: Everybody (except for Amazon) supports EPUB as their primary ebook format. Turns out, there's a good reason for that.

[...] The other path for digital publishers: Build an app to hold your books and magazines. This is the route magazines are taking, because they're envisioning some fancy digital jujitsu. With Adobe AIR, which is what Wired and the NYT are using in various incarnations for their respective rags, they're able to do more advanced layouts, more rich multimedia, Flash craziness, and other designer bling that EPUB can't handle, says Adobe's Bogarty. Also, importantly you can dynamically update content, like when new issues arrive, which you can't really do with EPUB.

Interestingly, the publisher Penguin is also taking the app route for their books, building apps using web technologies like HTML5 for the iPad, so their books are in fact, way more like games and applications than mere books. So it's another tack publishers could take...