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 linked to a writer beware article last week on a new publishing business that has sprung up. Writer Beware has long been a fantastic site and information tool for exposing dodgy business practices and people, companies, practices and opportunities that authors should generally avoid. This kind of behaviour obviously earns enemies, and Writer Beware has finally gotten theirs: The Write Agenda, now waging a disinformation campaign against Writer Beware and any other writer-education centre. A lot of writers have since been put on the "boycott" list of TWA - generally, anyone with a lick of sense who either supports Writer Beware or some similar initiative.

Don't believe their nonsense. 

In other dodgy news, yet another publishing company has turned up, this time targeting agents whose clients have backlist ready to go up. The publisher will take agented manuscripts, format for ebook and upload, and collect a tidy amount of profit before passing on a royalty, of which the agent (of course) gets a share. Passive Guy (the lawyer-blogger with a lot of useful stuff to say about our industry) has a great post analysing the pros and cons, and pointing out the (hopefully bloody obvious by now) conflict of interest on the horizon with this practice. Sigh.

 

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. 

 

This is going to be a bit of a link-fest, because so many people wrote posts in various places that made me go "ooh, awesome, must share with people who actually care about publishing writing and stories!" (and sadly, the venn diagram between that group and the group of people who follow me in Google Reader or Google+ has a microscopic overlap).

So, the on-topic links first: publisher Simon & Shuster has signed a deal with John Locke to publish his incredibly popular Donovan Creed books. But this is the important part: the deal is only for print distribution. Locke retains rights to his ebooks to sell how he wants, S&S are only doing the print distribution. Michael Shatzkin, in his usual style, has some interesting thoughts on where this might lead. It's what a lot of the peanut gallery have been pointing at and cheering towards, and I'm hopeful it's the next step toward a new publishing paradigm.

At the risk of sounding paint-dryingly dull, this is economic logic. If two entities can both produce the same materials, but vary in their efficiency of each, then the most efficient form of production is for each entity to produce the material that it can produce most efficiently and then trade with the other. Authors can produce and publish e-books far faster and more efficiently than publishers can - without the overhead of running a publishing company, their costs are much lower. However, print distribution is much, much harder for an individual author. A publishing house is equipped exactly for print distribution; their overheads (which make them poorer ebook producers) make them better qualified for print production. So logically, the most efficient solution is for the author to produce the ebook on their own bat, and for the publisher to select successful ebooks to turn into print editions.

Now, the extension of that logic is the publisher also taking a smaller chunk of the pie. Why? They're no longer taking huge risks on unproven works. Instead, they follow demand and produce print editions of what's already popular. (Though there's nothing stopping them then developing those authors as they used to, or keeping their existing authors in deals.) They use the only real "gatekeeper" - the readers themselves - to determine what should be published. 

Bad news for agents there, I guess. And it remains to be seen how feasible this is - after all, the more bookstores that disappear, and the less shelf space there is available, the less relevant print distribution becomes. While traditional publishing certainly isn't going to go away, it's going to have to make some pretty radical changes to survive. But the Locke deal is a sign of hope that they're starting to adapt and try new approaches in order to do just that.

In unrelated news:

Joe Konrath  and Blake Crouch have a conversation about ebooks and publishing. Interesting, insightful and informative as always.

Steve Saus posts some good links on the discussion of publishers having to justify their existence.

Eric, over at Pimp My Novel, has a list I'm tempted to print and stick to my wall - in keeping your butt in the chair.

And on a similar vein, Elana Johnson has a great post on balancing writing with other aspects of your life.

Still moving. Argh. You know how they tell you not to put too many books in a box, because it makes it too heavy to lift? That you should spread your books out between the boxes and put other things in there? Yeah. That doesn't work when 80% of what you own is, in fact, books. Sigh.

I've stopped boxing my books and started piling them instead. I've emptied two bookshelves (one of which was mostly DVDs - they HAVE been boxed, they fit so neatly in, I couldn't resist!), and I have six thigh-high piles of books. I have another three bookshelves to go, all of which are packed at least two books deep. Then I'm getting those sturdy cloth supermarket bags, and putting them in those. Or I will, when I have bookshelves at the other end to put the books in.

I may have a slight book obsession.

In book-related news, there's a review of Google's new e-reader that I mentioned last week, which addresses one of my concerns at least - it is multiplatform, but doesn't make it easy for you.

And, in the face of all those who say we'll suffocate under an avalanche of Kindle Crap, The Pauper's Book Club is a site that helps you find books within a certain price bracket and a certain category (eg 'High Fantasy'). Presumably they're amazon affiliates. The site's beautifully designed and they claim not to censor for content, but to "censor for crap" - that is, remove the books that should really have been publishing with a shredder. Will keep an eye on them.

Still in my mess of moving out, but some interesting news: Google has announced their e-reader, made by iRiver. Retailing for $140 at the moment, it'll be available at Target (and presumably will eventually make its way across the pond(s)) and allow you to read google ebooks downloaded over wifi (no 3G).

I'm very surprised they didn't announce multi-format compatability. They've granted it in the opposite direction - manufacturers can make their devices google-aware with google books API, but Google can't read kindle books. Google is definitely one where I would have expected "read your Amazon, Sony, epub and Google ebooks" in big bold letters. But still, will be interesting to see how this pans out.

At some point, someone has to come up with a device that'll let people integrate fully - that'll dial into Amazon, B&N, Sony, Google and Apple and download your books into one place. Yes I know "there's an app for that" but that's not one place, that's five different apps. I meant the ability to have just one library, no matter who I buy my books from. I will buy that.

When we see that come out, things are really going to get interesting.

 

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.

-  -  -  -

*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.

 

I'm currently reading Richard Curtis' How To Be Your Own Literary Agent, partially because I'm curious about how the system really works on the inside, but mostly because I need to figure out exactly how the minutae of contracts, royalties and rights work for the second part of SubTracker.

In short: it's an awesome resource. You can stop reading this right now if you go buy it. Yes, it's a little outdated regarding e-publishing and self-publishing (the last update was 2003, cut him some slack for not being prescient) but the areas where that shows are not areas where he's saying anything important to the core of the book - ie royalties, contracts and rights. Even if you're planning to self-publish, you should read this book to understand how the rest of the industry works.

The more I've read various blogs over the past few years, the more it has amazed me just how many authors get along without actually understanding their contracts. They leave all that to their agents or their publishers. This is their business, their livelihood, and they're just trusting other people won't screw them over, when screwing them over is pretty much in the agents and publishers' best interests.

These people do not work for your benefit, they work for their own. And if that benefit means quietly pocketing your money, or not telling you things you need to know, then they may well do that, even if it ends up tanking your career. If you can't understand your own contract or your own royalty statement, how are you going to protect yourself? This is the real world: you have to look after yourself, no one is going to do it for you.

Understanding contracts is not astrophysics - it's just careful consideration of phrasing and word choice. We're writers, for heaven's sake, this should not be on our forbidden list. Yes, it's legalese and utterly dry and boring, but it can be understood after some practise, just like shakespeare. And you don't lose points for having an IP lawyer (not a regular flavour one - IP is a special area and requires specialist knowledge) help you out with understanding (or negotiating) - if the result is that you understand the piece of paper you're supposed to sign, that's a win.

Ditto on your royalty statements and your rights. They're not hard, they just need some thinking. And Curtis' book makes that thinking a lot easier. Go read or buy, before you start sending stuff out.

 

Okay, not a writing game, but this is a great resource I had to share:

Over the past few months, Steve Saus has been slowly posting the step-by-step process for creating an ebook from scratch, without a magic converter - it's not as hard as it sounds, and his instructions make it possible even for those who aren't comfortable with these newfangled computer things. Example post here.

He's now pulled the posts together into a how-to book that he's selling for US$9.99 from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and his own site. If you're considering making your own ebooks, this is definitely worth the price.

 

The past two weeks have had some interesting and scary revelations for traditionally published authors. Kristine Kathryn Rusch has detailed it most succinctly (and I must add - fairly) in these two posts.

They're great posts. Long, but worth the read. 

In a nutshell: a disturbing number of large publishing houses have been underreporting authors' ebook sales, sometimes by a factor of ten or even a hundred. That is, they're telling authors they they've sold 30 ebooks for three months, when the real figure is closer to 3000. One publisher in particular is apparently not even looking at the sales figures, but using a flat formula based on the print sales, as evidenced by the fact that authors have noted their books (and their colleagues' books) of similar print sales figures have exactly the same ebook sales. For example, Joe, Fred and Bob all have three books out, each of which sell roughly 2000 books a month. Their ebook sales are reported as 27 books for the period, for all nine books.

Furthermore, some authors report that their royalty statement has sales reports that are actually lower than their BookScan sales figures. Which isn't possible: BookScan represents at best 70% of all book outlets. It records sales as they happen, and it can't get all of them. Your royalty statement, by straightforward logic can't be lower than your bookscan figures.

 

So, there's crazy drama in the publishing world right now. Bestselling author Barry Eisler has walked away from a half-million dollar book deal to self-publish. Cue several hundred blog posts on this being a huge wake up / nail in the coffin / natural-disaster-of-your-choice for the publishing industry, including one very interesting though overlong (really overlong, guys. Nobody has time for a thesis on the internet. But most of the good stuff's in the first half or third) conversation between Eisler and self-pub-king Joe Konrath on the publishing industry and self-publishing. 

Barely two days later, news breaks that self-publishing-darling Amanda Hocking has been shopping one of her novel series around to traditional publishing, with bidding reaching over $2 million before she signed with St Martin's Press. And an avalanche of blog posts condemning, supporting, analysing and foretelling springs forth before Amanda posts her own reasons for her decision.

 

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).

In new this week (well, some from last week, but ssh), Barnes and Noble have announced PubIt, which offers self-publishers a deal similar to Amazon: 65% of royalties for $2.99-$9.99 prices, and %40 for either side - less than Amazon in the 'sweet' spot, but more outside it. There've been reports of teething troubles, but that's hardly surprising for new ventures.

Speaking of price, Steve Saus has some interesting thoughts on the morality of ebook pricing, from a reader's perspective - why it is we feel ebooks are worth less. He makes a good point about the difference between worth and cost, and asks why we're so adamant that ebooks not be shared when we'd happily share one copy of the latest Pratchett with half the family and a small circle of friends. Meanwhile, Richard Mabry has some great insights into what those Amazon rankings actually mean for authors (both a lot, and hardly anything) and how they work.

In more writerly news, there's a fantastic post from Ray Rhamey on Flogging the Quill on writing bad guys. In essence, treat them as the protagonist of their own story. He has some really interesting points to make.

And because I adore it: the latest Simon's Cat.

So the premier desktop publishing package Adobe Indesign has just released a Kindle plugin - convert your InDesign projects directly into Kindle books. It already handles EPUB format and PDF (obviously), making InDesign probably the path of least resistance for authors wanting to self-pub their own well-formatted books. (Yes, you can do it with Microsoft Word, but you shouldn't. It's like roasting a turkey by setting fire to a nearby elephant - there's a lot of unnecessary work, and you can't help but make a mess.) For $700 (InDesign only; the complete CS5 package is rather more than that), it's not a bad investment for authors looking at self-pubbing seriously, and the classes to learn the basics of using it are generally only a few hundred more (not to mention online tutorials).

Since I'm talking about self-pubbing again, the now-almost-obligatory J. A. Konrath post, where Konrath refutes the classic "Yeah, but you aren't J. A. Konrath" argument for why he's a freak example, and nobody else can make a living self-pubbing. The statistics do make one pause for thought, at least.

In the 'Other News', George Lucas has decided he hasn't fiddled with Star Wars enough - now it needs to be in 3D. Everybody ready? One, two, three - groan. George, I'm sure somewhere in the universe, there are times when it's a good idea for someone to revisit their opus, but it's not you, and it's not now, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. Leave it alone already and work on some new things. It's not that I care what you do to new versions of Star Wars, it's just that you need to move on.

And for laughs, Robert Jackson Bennet on Orbit books posts a great tongue-in-cheek look at author workspaces.

I followed a chain of "X has a post abut Y's psot about Z's post about..." to find a great little article by Stephen King on writing. Originally written in 1986, the advice still holds (although the jury's still out on #11 - but to be fair, when this was written, agents were for legal things and self-publishing was for people with more money than sense.) It's lightly funny and it's to-the-point, a good read.

Joe Konrath has another post about ebook pricing, this time explaining why he thinks the new ebook price is $2.99, and why that's a good thing. I'll admit, having considered buying vairous ebooks, the near-paperback price of most of them has always turned me away. I think he has a number of good points, there.

As for pricing, how about free? Michael Stackpole has a great post on Project Gutenberg (Philip K. Dick? Yoink.), and the number of classic sci fi authors that can be found there for free - and what publishers should be keeping in mind with their pricing models.

Speaking of free, Jane Friedman on Writer Unboxed has a few words to say about giving your work away for free (as promotion, natch) - what to consider. Like anything, really, it's not a matter of just throwing things around and waiting for magic to happen - it needs careful strategy and follow-through behind it.

And finally, a great post on how to answer that question that we all hate (except if it's from an agent): "So, what's your book about?" without sounding like you're reading from the dullest plot in history.

So, in a random selection of Things I Found Interesting On The Internet This Morning:

There's a great experiment going on - the online novel, a collaborative novel written 'live' by a bunch of authors. Go watch interviews and other happenings as the authors write their novel over six days.

Dean Wesley Smith (of 'Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing') has a great blog post comparing the traditional publishing book-as-produce model with the self-published possibilities. His math is entirely based on suppositions, but it's still a good read, and something to consider. In the vein of traditional publishing, Carolyn Kaufman on QueryTracker has an excellent suggestion of what to do during the agonising wait to hear back from an agent or editor - bug other agents and editors with submissions of other stories. So simple! So sensible!

On the author-business side of things, Steve Saus has some interesting things to say on the notion of using 'tip jars' on your website, and the CEO of Kobo, who've released an e-reader of their own, has granted an interview with CBC News discussing the future of e-books and publishing as he sees it.

And for fantasy and horror lovers: How Many Ways Can You Write About Zombies, ('nuff said), and how fantastic do we want our fantasy -  some brief thoughts on the real effects of those 'fantasy trappings' we proclaim to love.

For lovers of the Old Spice adds - Cthulhu Old Spice.

And, as promised - Terry Pratchett, who is to be knighted, has made his own sword for the knighting from iron-ore in his local village and meteorite. Squee!

Following up from previous links to Henry Baum's experience with the Kindle Nation (and the subsequent delisting thanks to Amazon's draconion price parity policy), Smashwords CEO Mark Coker ventures his thoughts on the impact of Amazon's enforcement of their policies. In essence, it works to Amazon's steep advantage, discouraging authors from even listing with other retailers lest said retailers drop the price below Amazon's, and works against authors' interests. Coker calls on Amazon to review their policy, but unfortunately fails to provide a reason that it would be in Amazon's interest to do so. Still an interesting read, though.

Still on Amazon, S. G. Royle has published a great guide on some of the tax and legal issues for foreign authors wanting to publish on Amazon (so many forms!), while Steve Saus examines some key factors to success in digital publishing, and another Steve from York Writers is rebutting Phillip Goldberg's article (Huffington Post) about what writers really need. Steve has some great points to make about the illusions of advances, and how they might not be such a healthy thing after all.

And on an unrelated note, some posts I enjoyed on the worldbuilding-vs-story issue that seems to crop up far too often in SF texts.

AussieCon runs this week, Thursday to Monday, with about a bajillion panels on everything from fantasy cities to cyberpunk feminism. I've gone through the program, marking the panels I want to attend (and wishing that I had a few shared-mind clones to see the ones that clash), and wondering how the whole process is going to work for people who can't take an entire morning off to register tomorrow... eek. Ah well.

In actual news, Wylie's lost his fight against Random House for the ebook rights. The rights return to Random House - a strong reminder to read your contracts carefully for which rights revert when and why.

Jessica at Dystel and Goderich muses on intellectual property vs creative commons. There's long been the argument that IP exists solely to protect a wealthy nation's ability to make money at the expense of poorer nations. While the argument's obvious with pharmaceutical companies, it also covers authors' copyright. While I'm a strong advocate of copyright, there does seem to be an issue to resolve, here.

Joe Konrath is musing on some of the possibilities that self-publishing grants in terms of creative control - releasing different versions of books, for example, or revitalising the 'choose your own adventure' style of novel into a more literary concept. I'll admit, I'm intrigued by the notion of playing with the format like that.

Henry Baum gives us a brief impression of his day on Kindle Nation - complete with supposed SNAFU by Amazon. Amazon disabled his buy-button in the middle of the promotion because Kobo had undercut the price of the book in a way that wasn't in Baum's control. Mini-Macmillian-dummy-spit all over again.

And on a completely unrelated note, because someone asked me the other day: Nathan Bransford explains to us what 'High Concept' actually is - and it's not what it sounds like.

Yet more developments in digital publishing: Michael Stackpole has a great post about protecting yourself from having publishers just sit on your e-pub rights, and clauses you should have in your contract to prevent that, and another interesting one on the concept of measuring books by 'hours of reading pleasure (for the average reader)' rather than page-count, heft, size or other measurements better left to print-media.

In a smilar vein, Steve Saus has yet more comments on DRM and the problems with creating non-portable products that arguably should be portable. I fully agree with his sentiments - I see the format locking nonsense at the moment as equivilent to only being able to play my DVDs in a Sony DVD player - if I buy an LG player, or Sony changes their format, all my DVDs will stop working. That does not, in any way, stop me from pirating them should I choose to - in fact, it encourages piracy, because I'm certainly not going to go and re-buy my DVD collection just because my old DVD player wore out and I needed to buy a new one. Open-format is better for the industry, for readers, for authors and for publishers - hopefully common sense will prevail in time.

And finally - an upclose and personal comparison of the kindle screen versus the iPad - and you'd be surprised which one comes out second place.

According to the WSJ, Dorchester, one of the largest mass-paperback publishers, will be going all-digital, apparently effective 'Monday', in response to hard times / falling paperback sales / the end of publishing as we know it. All their titles will be released digitally or using print-on-demand, shipping books to bookstores 'as demand rises'.

Kristin, over at Pub Rants, has some reservations about the move, since apparently Dorchester has been "having difficulty reporting monies owed to the author for electronic book sales", difficulties that apparently still haven't been fully resolved for said authors. Eeek.

Keeping with the digi-book theme, Steve Saus over at IdeaTrash has had a pirate week - not talking like them, but discussing how they really affect authors, and what authors (not publishers) can do to help mitigate any harm done. Essentially - DRM doesn't work and is annoying, make a personal connection with your work - people will happily pirate from a faceless corporation, but baulk at taking money from a person, and if you keep producing, the pirate-appreciate-buy cycle actually works for you, getting you more sales than you lose to piracy.

And finally, Jared Axelrod gives authors a so-simple-it's-foolproof guide for which questions you should be hammering yourself with, depending on what stage your story's at.