iBooks Author EULA scandal

Blog - The Author Business

Written by Sofie
Monday, 23 January 2012 00:00

 

You can use iBooks Author to create app-books for the iPad with pictures, disability access, movies, etc (they're aiming mostly at textbooks, here). They're aiming to make the creation of "enhanced ebook" apps extremely easy, most likely in an attempt to combat amazon and the kindle brigade. You can sell the resultant app on the appstore, giving Apple it's customary cut of the profits, or you can give it away free. All good so far, and good news for authors looking for a new product line.

What people are crying about is the caveat: that you can't sell that app anywhere else but the iTunes store.

There seems to be a lot of ignorance flying around here, really. This sounds like a terrible precedent - a software EULA (that's the thing you click "I agree" to when you install some software) is controlling what people can and cannot do not only with the program itself, but with the output of what they create with it. Ohnoes! The world is doomed! No other software on the planet does this, this is like Microsoft Word telling you you can only sell your short stories to Microsoft!

Can you see my sarcasm? I certainly hope so.

It isn't a precedent at all. I can easily think of five pieces of software - creative software - sitting on my computer right now that forbid me from directly selling any output I can create. For example, a cartography program I have that forbids me from selling maps I create with it. They can be included in books or other works, but I can't sell just the maps themselves. Other software packages such as the Adobe Creative Suite have clauses that prevent you using them for commercial purposes if you only paid for the educational license. Icons and graphics I occasionally buy from places like iStockPhoto often come with licenses that allow me to do whatever I want with the image provided I don't sell anything that results from that. Simulation products (like a solar-system simulator) forbid me from using the resultant calculations or simulations or video for any commercial purposes.

This isn't anything new. And it isn't even anything particularly inconvenient: unless the iPad jailbroken, which isn't common, the only way you can put apps on an iPad is through the iTunes store. So you can't take the resultant app you've created and sell it in other places but there really isn't anywhere else you could sell it anyway. This software only creates apps that run on iPads. It can't create things to run on the Galaxy Tab, or the Motorolla Zoom, or the Kindle Fire. It can generate PDFs of the book, but they've never been the ebook format of choice anyway. So the rights they're "taking away" from you aren't really ones you could have exercised anyway, and if you really want to exercise them, all you need to do is this: use something else to create the ebook.

This isn't a rule that applies to all books sold through the iTunes store. It's a rule that applies specifically and only to books created using this free app. Don't like it? Make your app the old fashioned way, or hire someone to make it for you.

Then there's a lot of people gabbling about how this is a copyrights grab, which is nonsense - Apple is limiting the rights to the version of your content that you created with their product. The limitation is tied to the actual final product created with the software and nothing else. They have no claim whatsoever to the original content, and no argument if you create enhanced ebooks for android and kindle devices and sell those - you just can't use their software to do so (and the software isn't capable of that anyway). The claim ends with the actual final product - which is just like the publishing world anway. When the rights to a novel revert to an author, that author can't just order another print run using the publisher's typography, layout and cover - they have to get it typeset again, and get a new cover for it. They don't get the rights to the final product that their publisher made; only to the (edited, unless the contract is really miserly) content that was used to create it in the first place - the manuscript.

Then there's the argument that everything sold through the Apple store is vetted by apple - you may spend months creating something only to have it rejected by them, and then have no way to sell it. Well, pardon me, but if you're going to spend all that time working on it and not even investigate a way to create a similar product for the other markets (particularly when some of those markets are far larger and more successful selling this kind of product) then it's your own damn fault. Add to that that Apple doesn't typically reject things for no reason: they'll tell you why it didn't meet the standards, and you can resubmit. That process is pretty much there to keep out porn, malware and things that would undercut Apple's own products (and books are unlikely to fall under that category).

Really, this sounds like a lot of crying from people who don't spend all that much time with new software. I'm not even going to go into the complaint that it's in the EULA and not in a separate agreement. The EULA is where this kind of agreement should be. The End User License Agreement is there to stipulate, amongst other things, what you can and can't do with this software. If you don't agree after downloading the software, then don't install the damn thing. That goes for any new software you download. Complaining that you don't get to find out about this before you download it is just, well, naive. "You don't know about the agreement until after you've committed to the software" - it's a free app. That's really not much of a committment. Download more software and learn how that world works, because this isn't anything new.

Tutorials 101: How to write a tutorial

Blog - Technical Writing

Written by Sofie
Tuesday, 17 January 2012 00:00

Well, this risks getting terribly meta, doesn't it - a tute on writing tutes. But I've been teaching myself Dojo lately (it's a javascript toolkit. Just nod and smile, there won't be questions), trying to combine a book that's about six versions behind with web tutorials that are one version behind, and I've come to a rather disappointing conclusion: very few people on the internet know how to write a good tutorial. 

I suppose that's reassurance that my day job has a real purpose, but it's rather disappointing that the basic fundamentals of education and communicating information are lacking in so many otherwise-clearly-very-intelligent people. The way our current online-society is going, it should really be something taught in fundamental education: communicating your ideas clearly and concisely, how to think from the point of view of someone who knows nothing about what you're teaching them.

So here's my Tutorial Writing 101: Entertaining Subtitle. (I'd like to claim that as being all meta, but really I couldn't think of a good subtitle that didn't involve swearwords. It's been that kind of morning.) In the interest of following my own advice (below), to get the most out of this tutorial you need to have:

• a high-school level grasp of lanauge, (your language of choice, and English in order to read this. Duh.)
• an ability to empathise with people who know less than you (not sympathise. Emphathise. As in, put yourself in their shoes.)
• basic language and concept analysis skills
• something you want to write a tutorial about. 

Read more: Tutorials 101: How to write a tutorial

Techniques for Not-Really-Scheduling - peaks and lulls

Blog - The Writer's Life

Written by Sofie
Monday, 16 January 2012 00:00

 

It's now two weeks into my deadline-based scheduling system, and I've noticed something. Primarily, that I'm letting things slide already, and I think that's largely because the TODO list is too long - I'm trying to do bits of pieces of five or six projects spread out, instead of focusing on the few that are due next. And for some of them, that's necessary, because they are steps that will take longer than the amount of time allocated between them and the previous deadline - they need thinking time, or in some cases they just take a long time to do. But that needs to be balanced against making myself feel like there's just too much to do. If I'm tired when I come home from work, I can manage one or two things, maybe a third after dinner, but not six - even though most of them aren't more than 15 minutes' work. It's the length of the list that makes it difficult - purely a psychological rebellion against switching to so many different thought processes. I haven't missed any deadlines yet, but I'm not getting to everything I want to.

When I was at university, there were natural peaks and troughs in the workload formed by clusters of assignment due dates, mid semester breaks, SWATVAC weeks, etc. Each cycle was typically four to six weeks long, with a break after, during which not much had to be done. It made it easy to focus, because I could ignore anything that wasn't in that cycle. Future assignments, exams, etc, they would all be dealt with after the current cycle. It meant I could work in sprints - focussed and frenetic on what had to be done, with one eye on the break at the end - rather than a marathon.

This isn't uncommon, actually - researching for project management at work, I came across the notion of SCRUM - a way of managing progress in a team. It includes organising things into 'sprints' of four to six weeks, during which an agreed number of things will be completed. You can't add new objectives onto the board while a sprint is underway - they have to wait until the next sprint.

I think, especially when you're dealing with large projects, using short, intense bursts of effort is more effective. Focussing your energy on producing these one or two things right now is much easier than producing these five things that are due at various times - the immediacy gives you motivation and simplifies your decisions on what to work on.

So I'm going to rejig my work process - not the deadlines, becaue they fall into peaks and troughs somewhat naturally - where there's only one or two things due in a while, and ten due in two weeks. But I'll work more in sprints, rather than spreading the work out to a tiny bit on so many projects at once.

How not to write a novel #8 - the ending that doesn't

Blog - Writing Craft

Written by Sofie
Tuesday, 10 January 2012 00:00

This is the lastest instalment of How Not To Write A Novel, a series that began as a review (of sorts) of a book that was too terrible to be named, broken down into all the things it did that you Really Shouldn't Do. The series is broadening to encompass the howlers in other books I've read in the meantime, but to keep things simple (and avoid unnecessary tact and diplomacy) I'm going to refer to all of them as Nameless, as identifying which books are Doing It Wrong isn't really the point, here. Previous instalments are listed here (the early ones are down the bottom of the page).

The ending is the most important part of the book. Oh, sure, the first fifty pages will get your book picked up and purchased, but the ending is what you leave your reader with. If you nerf your ending, you have one very grumpy reader, who feels that the hours of their life they just entrusted to you were wasted, because the book all came to nothing. They're unsatisfied, they don't have closure to the emotional journey you put them on, and they may even feel depressed or angry without necessarily knowing why. But they almost certainly won't pick up or recommend any of your books.

For the moment, I'm not talking about epilogues - they're slightly separate to an ending, and I'll deal with how to muck them up in another post. But there are a lot of ways you can screw up your book's ending, but they mostly boil down to any, some or all of:

End your book at the wrong moment

The best example of this is actually a film - anyone who's seen The Return of the King has a foggy memory of the ending, or rather endings. The film culminates in about 5 or 6 endings (possibly more), each seemingly closing the story, fading to black and signalling to the audience that the story is over, before lifting the curtain once more to say - oh, wait, no, not yet! The result is a confused mess of emotion, as the audience keeps feeling that this is the final moment of tying things together before being reminded - but wait, there's more! 

Books can have run-on endings as well - endings that seem to just not get to the point, or perhaps find the point and hammer it into oblivion. But even worse is the book that ends before it's ready. Think back to Return of the King - what if it ended as soon as the ring was destroyed? No rescue mission for Frodo and Sam, no wedding or coronation, and even more importantly - no moment where the hobbits run the rangers out of the shire, proving once and for all (and to their own people) that they are heroes in their own right. (That ending had to be cut from the movie because it would have mucked up the pacing. That's why they have Aragorn and the entire coronation assembly bow to the four hobbits - it achieves the same emotional meaning of the hobbits having earned respect for themselves and their race.).

Nameless did this - ending the story three-quarters of the way through a train journey back to the character's home town, where she would have to finally face the choice and love triangle that's been plaguing her the entire novel. Instead of the character showing how she's grown and changed through her story, the story ends just before that moment (because the author wanted to save that final moment of change for the series ending, instead of the book ending. Unfortunately, she naffed that one up, too, but in a different way.) The result is a story that just stops, rather than ends. It feels cut off, like the transmission ended, rather than closing, and the reader is left looking for the point of the story.

Don't close the chief storyline

 A novel typically has two main storylines - the external one (Frodo's going to destroy the ring) and the internal one (Frodo's struggle with the ring's power). An ending has to tie up and close both of them - not just finish one and hope the other sort of works itself out. Internal stories are the most-often neglected here, where the character starts to grow and change but get stalled partway through when the external story takes over. All that's really missing are a few key scenes where the character can demonstrate their change, but instead we're left with a complete external story and a half-baked internal journey. 

The problem is, it's the internal journey that's the point; the external one is just the impetus for change. The real story is people; external stories are just Stuff That Happens, and it loses all meaning if the People It Happens To story peters out halfway. Imagine if Frodo carried the ring all the way to Mordor, through all the trials and tests, scaled the mountain struggling, then just dropped the ring in with a sigh of relief. Boooorriiiiing. That story has power because Frodo's character is inverted. He struggles with this mighty task, doing his best and taking the hard road because that's what will lead to completing it, and then at the critical moment, he fails. He can't give up the ring. This pure and good person has succumbed to temptation, and all is lost. The fact that Frodo's character has changed gives testement to how incredible his task and journey is - that's why we care. But he also needs to be redeemed from that moment - we need to see that once the ring has been destroyed, the goodness of Frodo returns. He can never be as he was - his innocence is destroyed in that moment of failure - but he can be reborn into something new.

Taking shortcuts to get to the ending

This is how the Nameless book above stuffed up the entire series. It's very similar to not closing the chief storyline, but the omissions happen before the story ends. In Nameless, we have a character (B) who has fought the notion of love for the entire three books. Love is dangerous, it makes you vulnerable, and she's not sure who she loves, how she loves or whether she's even capable of it. And that part of her character is pretty firmly sketched - she's clearly not someone who really understands love or herself terribly well. 

The ending of the series has her finally (apparently) loving one of the partners (A) from her love triangle, and him loving her back. But the problem is that these feelings of love occur over about two pages. We have two people, one of whom has been broken and brainwashed quite recently, and the other who's been broken the entire series. Not twenty pages ago, character A was arguably insane and trying to kill his former beloved due to brainwashing. And said beloved is utterly emotionally broken over the death of her sister and the gruelling journey she's been through, and never seemed to understand or accept love in the first place. But in the space of two pages, they're lovers and happy together.

It doesn't work because the key character change (learning to love for character B, redeption (from his insanity) for character A ) happens off-screen. It's told, it's summarised, and so it rings false. We don't believe it.

Crucial moments of your character's story must not be skimmed over. I find that series thoroughly depressing to read, because what I take from it in the end is two people who are irredeemably broken pretending to love each other because they don't know how to put themselves back together, in a world that's utterly shattered. Which is not, I suspect, what the author intended.

If we had seen evidence of their change - actions, rather than just words - it would be a different story (hah), but you must show the moments of change that your story relies upon.

Not following the character arc

 This is one that, I must admit, I kept running into when trying to plan my own novels. The ending works, drama-wise, but it's just not in keeping with the arc of your character. Imagine Frodo has spent all his energies fighting the ring's temptations and battling to get to Mordor, and when he gets there he has to fight with Sauron himself. Very dramatic, yes, but ultimately not really where the character arc was headed. Frodo's arc was about resisting temptation, staying true to yourself, doing the right thing despite fear. While you can fit 'battle giant evil lord' into that, it has too many aspects that weren't foreshadowed.

The climactic moment of the story should distill the internal journey down to its core - nothing but Frodo and the choice to keep the ring or destroy it. Otherwise your key moments are lost in the noise.

How to get things done without a schedule

Blog - The Writer's Life

Written by Sofie
Monday, 09 January 2012 00:00

 

Aannd we're back! I hope you all had a safe and pleasant new year. I spent the past two weeks preparing a housewarming-cum-new-years-eve party and trying to work out how I'd tackle my projects this year so that they actually eventuated, instead of being hijacked by the new shiny every month.

It involved a lot of reading various books and a lot of internet searches. I discovered a disturbing number of books that claimed to tell you how to organise yourself in a right-brain way, spent chapters telling you how hard it was for right-brainers to keep to schedules and organise in a standard pattern, only to culminate their advice with "make schedules and keep to them".

Welp, if only someone had thought of that.

I came up with two main realisations:

Realisation 1.

I'm very visual, I like pretty things, and I love infographics. When I stumbled across a coffee company that had produced an infographic poster for people to fill in to record their consumption I had a brainwave - that recording my project time and progress in a similarly visually pleasing way would probably do a great deal towards rewarding me for getting work done, especially during the long slogs like draft writing, where there's no "I've finished this bit!" buzz for weeks.

I spent some time devising various templates to show what I wanted, but was ultimately displeased with what I could achieve with the programs I had to hand (no Creative Suite for me yet.) The necessity of having 'guides' so that I could manually colour in the graphic as I went automatically made it much less visually pleasing to me. So I went with my next choice - devise a program that will show me pretty things if I put in the data. I'm creating it as a mobile web-app (there'll be a desktop equivilent eventually, too). I'm using it as the first stage in learning HTML5 and Dojo, which is what my other software is going to be coded in, and I'll be putting up the occasional blog post about my experience trasitioning over from Java and strict-typed OO (if that sentence was so much greek to you, don't worry. The programming-posts will be clearly marked).

However, I did discover that the act of designing the infographics was quite enjoyable, so at some point I'm going to finish them up and put them up here, in case other people find them useful.

Realisation 2.

Common sense says to look back at a time when I consistently completed things under my own initiative, and see how I did it. University is a prime example - after two years of the traditional student method (aka write an essay at 4am when it's due at 9am that morning) I realised that completing things before they were due was much less stressful (duh). My honours thesis, something that students traditionally run late with, was finished with a month to spare. I juggled two masters degrees at once, with all assignments finished well before the deadline.

The interesting thing is that I didn't use any manner of scheduling to do this. I had the hard deadlines of the due date, and soft deadlines of when I'd *like* to have it done by, and that formed the priority for any spare time I had to work. 

On a notepad on my desk I would keep a list of the next two weeks' worth of assignments (or parts of larger projects) in order of their due date (modified by how much work they represented). In the space below (or around, or on top of, or wherever else there was space) I would break it down into components or steps where necessary, and assign deadlines to those, too.

The deadlines on my notepad became immutable - though they were actually at least a week before the final assignment was due, I would work to my dates, instead of the formal ones. I made no plans for when I would do something, just when it had to be done by. And when I sat down to work, I would work on something that had an approaching deadline. Not always the one that was soonest - I would work on what I felt like working on, but it would be tempered by the knowledge that X and Y had to be finished this weekend.

And it worked.

The problem I've had in the past is that, when I create deadlines for my creative work, they're always wishy-washy. I'm aware that I don't know how long something will take me, so I estimate long, and then give a heap of leeway, and the deadline ends up meaningless.

But when looking at how I managed for university, I realised: deadlines aren't a magical number for how long you think something should take. And they're not always fair - sometimes you have to crunch to get that assignment in on time, or sometimes four or five deadlines coincide on the same day. That's just tough. The deadline stands unless you have seriously mitigating circumstances (and any kind of time management excuse was never accepted by university faculty).

So my approach for this year, as an experiment has been:

1. Decide which projects have priority
2. Break those projects down into stages and steps
3. Assign deadlines to each of those stages
4. Treat those deadlines like my university assignments - immutable, not always fair, only extendable in serious mitigating circumstances.
5. Record the time spent working on each project.

I've been doing this technique for a whole week now (hah) - so far, it's working. My brain doesn't question the deadlines/priorities on my notepad, it just accepts that these things have to be done by then. I'm not sure how long that spell will last, but I suspect the fact that almost all of these deadlines cascade into the next step (so being late on one will mean being late on a whole swathe of others) will help in taking it seriously.

When I have my little timekeeping app up and running, I'll be able to record how much time I'm spending on each project and when, and how much I'm getting done in that time, and that will arm me for planning how long these kinds of things will take in the future.

Generalising out

Obviously this solution is focused on a single person - I've worked out what should (probably) work for me. But the steps I took to do that should work just as well for you:

1. Think of a time when you got things done successfully. It might be university or high school, it might be at a particular job where you were given some freedom in working, it might be around the house with the household chores. Have a hard look at what you did to make sure those things were completed, and think about what you can take from that to use elsewhere.
2. Find something to help reward you for working on a task that you can't finish just yet - for keeping going through that draft, for making that fifth editing pass, etc. There are a number of techniques you can try, from paying yourself to rewarding yourself with a treat or activity after X minutes spent on the task, to just highlighting for yourself when you've worked.
3. Combine 1 and 2 to develop your approach - how you'll get the task done, and what you'll do to reward yourself for doing it.