A writing friend recently sent a new “publishing opportunity” to me. I’m not going to name-and-shame the particular company, because I don’t think they’re being malicious in this case, merely naive, but it’s a great example of a terrible trend in this industry. Here’s the opportunity, scraped from their site (non-relevant information cut):

 Enter our competition for the opportunity to have your book published in 2012. [...] Should your entry be successful, a publishing contract will be offered to you. [...] The books will be published through Lightning Source Australia and distributed through Dennis Jones and Associates. Morris Publishing Australia will handle all cover design and setup for printing, and develop a marketing campaign for the book, all at no cost to the author.    We are looking for books in the following groups:  Confident readers (7+) - generally between 8000 and 20,000 words. Independent readers (9+) - generally between 25,000 and 50,000 words Teenage readers (12+) - generally between 40,000 and 80,000 words Young adult readers (14+) - generally between 40,000 and 80,000 words.  Adult fiction.

 Can you see what’s wrong with it?  

 

I had a post. It turned into a rant. Joomla then ate it, which is probably for the best. Must as I'm annoyed. But foremost: Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a great post about fear, and how it makes writers make terrible mistakes, like signing awful contracts. You should go read. I'll wait.

Second, there's a new publishing business in town called PubSlush, which promise wonderful things. They're basically Kickstarter for books - if enough people pledge to buy your book, PubSlush gives you a bonus and publishes it. But they're asking for a lot more than they're giving, and they're telling you even less - see the Writer's Beware posts on them. You hand a lot of stuff over to PubSlush just by submitting a book

Personally, I think you're better off staying in control of your own business. They're not doing anything you can't do yourself without a little learning and work. 

And that was really the point of my rant: that writing is a business, and it always has been. And business really isn't that hard. People running hotdog stands can manage it. The best part about this business is, it's not high finance. There aren't millions at stake. If you make a mistake, you can almost always correct it, and if you can't - you can learn for the next book. Fear of something being too hard to learn or do is just procrastination wearing a silly hat. 

 

I thought I'd do something crazy, and write about something else I'm working on other than writing.

Some of you may have wandered around this site enough to find the software I'm slowly piecing together - SubTracker, which started as a way to track submissions to publishers, because I got sick of working out which magazine would give me the best price / fastest turnaround / take the least rights for any given story or how much any story/publisher had paid me, and because the excel spreadsheet quickly became very, very unwieldy when I added more than a dozen or so publishers. It grew from that into a concept of something to manage the whole business side of writing - basically project management, submissions tracking, sales, revenues, rights and all that jazz. 

This kind of stuff requires a hell of a lot of thinking to do it properly. You can code up a macro-enhanced spreadsheet and be done with it, but the point of SubTracker is that it's eaisier to understand and use, more powerful and (most importantly) can adapt to different needs. Freelancers need different kinds of things than novelists, indie-publishers need different things to tradpubbers. Then there are the poets, comic writers, script writers, screenplay writers and researchers; the agents, magazines, competitions and grants, workshops and editors, indie-pubbers (Amazon), indie-aggregators (Smashwords) and traditional houses. All of those have different requirements, and I haven't even gotten into rights and contracts, yet.

You would be amazed how much information you're playing with when you try to turn the literary industry into a dataset and a list of rules.We have so many exceptions, so many little by-laws and secret rules. And when you have a problem like that, you have two options: create a simple one-size-kinda-fits-all-with-some-shoving which offers little support to the user, or build a complex system that "understands" the information it's playing with, and verges on "magical".*

I've chosen the second. Partly because, as I said, I want software that will do the mundane thinking for me. But I also want something that will help educate authors about the information they should be dealing with, and what their options are. Something that will point out that there's information missing from their royalty statements, or that some rights haven't been clearly stipulated in their contract. Something that'll help them feel empowered when dealing with the manipulative double-think they'll encounter. 

There have been about four versions that never made it past alpha-release**, because there were show-stopping problems in the way I was approaching the solution - too close to the one-size-doesn't-fit-anyone-properly. I'm currently designing the fifth, and taking a very different tack, and so far it seems to be working well - there hasn't yet been a scenario that this version wouldn't be able to handle, and it gives me a lot of flexibility to do things for the user.

It does mean I have to start small. The first beta-release (I don't release my alphas publically, they have too much attitude.) will be very small in comparison to the final build - just submitting stuff to people, and some deadline/event management, and not even the full-featured version of that, either. There are some fundamental aspects that need to be tested with the first release, like the basic user-interface concept, that take extra time at the start. And thanks to full time work, househunting, novels and short stories (not to mention research for the actual algorithms and coding), I don't have a date for the beta release yet.

But I am taking names for people interested in testing, and I'm listening if anyone has feature requests in the comments. (No guarantee they'll be implemented, but I'm listening.) Will keep you posted.

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*I think I lose points for sucumbing to a Steve-Jobs-ism, but "magic" is the kind of impression I'm aiming for.

**For the development-uninitiated: an alpha-release is like a teenager. Nobody likes it,  if you ask it to do something it's just as likely to do something entirely unrelated, it claims that nobody understands it and may well go sulk in its room and paint the walls black. A beta-release is more like a college student: still got a lot of stupid things left to do, but you can generally get it to do what you want, with the occasional surprise frat prank thrown in and a tendency to skive off to attend random protests. A final release is an adult in the workplace: everyone agrees it's supposed to be working and to not poke it too hard in case it stops.

 

In an interesting move, Amazon has declared it will grant access to Neilson's Bookscan data for any author with an Author Central account. In street-monkey terms, this means if you sell books through amazon, either through self-publishing or the traditional model, you can view your books' print sales figures by geographic location for most of the world.

Bookscan collate the sale of books through various outlets, displaying which books are selling how much, where and when. This information is invaluable for publishers planning marketing campaigns, or deciding whether to back an author's next novel.

The reason this is news is that a subscription to Bookscan typically costs in the tens of thousands. Large publishing houses and large agencies (perhaps) can afford the data, but most of us get by with best seller lists, royalty statements and the good old fashion reckoning, as in: "I reckon they're selling alright." Suddenly, authors will have access to a rich source of data for how their book is doing in the brick-and-mortar world, without having to pay for it (unless they want more than the last four weeks' worth of data).

I looked at one of these mythical iPads in the city yesterday. It was chained to a bench and surrounded by teenagers, and by the time I got my grubby mits on it it was plain that a thousand mits of equal or greater levels of grubbiness had been there before. The screen had been near-obliterated under a a hundred thousand fingerprints, and I had to resist the urge to wipe it down before I had a play.

I had to say, I didn't experience any of the "magic" I was promised by Lord Jobs. I put it back with a 'shrug' and a 'meh', still convinced it's just a big brother to my iPhone.

There's been some hooplah lately in the blogs I read about giving your work away for free. Arguments for, against and sideways abound, and it's getting so that use emerging authors feel totally lost when it comes to advice about promotion and free stuff.

As I see it, there are two basic arguments, and a whole host of nonsense:

Giving stuff away for free can raise your profile, help build a following, get people interested in your work. It lowers the cost of entry for people to try your stories and writing, which will (assuming you've given them the good stuff) lead to more readers, and hopefully paying readers. Giving stuff away for free snarfs your first publiaction rights, so your chances of a traditional publishing deal with that material are pretty much lottery-level.

There's been a lot of carping that the idea of 'first publication rights' is antiquated, and doesn't fit with today's online era. That we authors need to show publishers the error of their ways in adhering to this outmoded idea. Excuse me while I snort into my coffee.

One of the best and worst qualities of the internet is that everything you do reflects on itself. If you run a business, and step out as a voice for that business, then anything and everything tied to that voice reflects upon that business. That means that good things can spread quickly, and that people may take notice if you have something important to say.

It also means that any unprofessionalism immediately attaches itself to your business. You must always be in your business-hat. A case in point, on the blog of an agent I follow occasionally. An author made a very polite query to the 'boss' of the agency (who maintains the blog) about the status of his partial-submission, because he'd not received a requested update from the agent handling the submission.

The agent sent back a very curt and rude email, culminating with "You are welcome to pull your ms. from the pile or wait your turn."  The author, not surprisingly, pulled his MS, and the agent (apparently surprised) then wrote a blog post, including posting the entire email exchange (with names and titles nearly-entirely redacted) online, without permission of the author.

Even if your internet addiction is slightly more under control than mine, you've probably heard of Apple's forthcoming iWannaBeAKindleKiller. It's typical Apple - a sexy, sophisticated, super-hyped and scandalously-priced version of something we already have.  It's got Amazon backing nervously into a corner, offering authors a whopping 70% royalty on kindle books (with enough caveats to sink a canoe); rumours running wild about deals with HarperCollins to set the prices and add-ons of the ebooks; and Sports Illustrated's infomercial about the revolutionary format the tablet offers magazines.

I admit, the Sports Illustrated video had me earmarking part of my creditcard balance for one. I'm a sucker for gadgets, and much as I dislike Apple's business philosphies, the thought of that sleek little gizmo sitting in my bag was jumping gleefully on the I WANT button. The hype is that Apple's about to revolutionise the publishing industry, just as they did the portable-music and smart-phone ones. And yet...