This is a post on, more or less, What Not To Do.

I am an impatient person. It has been forty-five minutes since I kvetched internally that one of my projects was taking too long. I'm also a perfectionist, an achievement junkie, addicted to new ideas and by Blaire Palmer's definition, hypercreative.

Those traits do not play together nicely. 

I love to master new skills. I've added so many strings to my bow over the years I could probably use it as a hammock. And it's not a problem when my learning is externally structured, like a degree. But when I get to set the pace of my learning, difficulties arise. Not difficulties, per se. More like insanity. It goes something like this:

I discover <new concept> and think "hey! that's really neat! I want to do something with that!" I look into <new concept> a little learn some basics. An idea forms - a fantastic thing that I could do with <new concept>. It's ambitious, it's out-there, it's probably pushing the edges of what <new concept> can or should do, and no one else is doing it that I can see. It's a great, massive magnum-opus of a project but it'll be awesome if I get it together. (Side note: it's always like this, because to me there's no attraction in creating something that's already there. It feels too much like copying.) I start to teach myself <new concept> by creating <magnum opus> with what I'm learning. Impatience competes with perfectionism and I get irritated that it's taking so long to learn what I need to know to do <magnum opus> properly. I hit some kind of snag or stall, or <newer concept> comes along and I repeat from step 1. Or both.

This is not a productive way to learn, or to create projects. And I still do this, even though I can see and recognise it. The novel that will (in theory) be my debut is not a standalone novel, or even part of a trilogy, but the first in a probably-nine-maybe-twelve-could-be-twenty-book interwoven multi-world, multi-generation multi-main-character series. To paraphrase George R. R. Martin, that's like learning to mountain-climb by scaling Mount Everest. It's frankly idiotic. In my defence, I decided upon this years ago, before I'd recognised this issue, and the sunk-cost fallacy is tying me to the novel as I don't want to "waste" all the hours I've already put into it. (Yes, yes, I know. I know. Let's move on.)

But I am learning, here and there. I started teaching myself interactive fiction programming by creating a small story that didn't matter. (I still shudder at those words.) Having entirely revised my design plans for SubTracker into not only a new programming language but a whole new paradigm, I decided to teach myself what I'd need to know by creating a much smaller piece of software first. This flies in the face of my impatience to have the project done already, and my perfectionism hating to create things that 'don't matter'. It's such an antithesis to my personality that the notion in itself feels like a brilliant new idea.

Hence, probably, my posting about it here.

But it's important to have things to practise on. Projects where you don't have to be worried that a mistake means a missed deadline or hours or work redone - because a mistake can just stay there, a reminder of what you learned. Contrary to what impatient-perfectionism may tell you, it is not a waste of time - it's far more efficient to learn in small controlled stages. Otherwise university degrees would be one giant research project.

Small projects, low pressure. For preference, tailor your project to what you're trying to learn or improve. Don't learn to mountain climb on Everest - it takes much, much longer to see if things aren't working because it's a hard climb, or because you're doing something wrong.

This is not a new idea. But it's one I forget every time a shiny new concept or project comes along that I could create if only I understood more about X...

 

 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?  

 

Something to think about - especially with the current self-pub/traditional question. Originally posted by Kristan Hoffman, who adapted it from Charles Schultz. However, her site seems to be reading her bandwidth cap pretty regularly, so I'll repost here (but hers has pretty pictures, and other interesting posts you should check out):

There are two “quizzes”. Scroll slowly and read carefully to get the full effect. It’s okay if you don’t know all the answers, just keep going.

Who are the 3 wealthiest writers in the world? Who are the last 3 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature? Who are the last 3 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? What are 5 of the “Top 10 Best Books” of last year? What’s the latest book on shelves that was signed for a 7-figure deal?

 The rest, for maximum effect, is hidden behind the Read More function...

I was all geared up to do Nano this year - of sorts. I was going to write a novel, but it probably wasn’t going to be 50,000 words. I didn’t know how many words it was going to be, and I wasn’t going to track it. Because that number, when you come down to it, is a nonsense way of judging whether you’re “done” yet.

I read this post by Jason Black on Plot to Punctuation who gave a great argument against using word count as a daily goal. The little number at the bottom of the screen (or wherever) takes far more of your focus than the words you’re churning out to increase it, and tempts you to stop when you’re on a roll, just because you’ve reached today’s number, or keep pushing when all you’re doing is padding or waffling because you still have another 200 words to go.

I find when I give myself wordcount goals, that rapidly becomes the case. And because my first drafts of anything tend to be absolute-bare-bones, super-condensed story, I fight the urge to pad out my story when the wordcount’s a little low despite my being halfway through already.

When you consider that, especially for self-publishing, story-length really doesn’t even matter anymore, it seems fairly idiotic for me to focus so much on wordcount when it hinders me in so many ways. 

Black has a great solution that I really wish I’d thought of earlier. He’s ignoring wordcount, and focussing instead on scenes.

It makes so much sense. Instead of having some fairly arbitrary counter distracting you, you judge your progress by how much of the story you’ve completed. You know instinctively how far through the scene you are. Scenes invite you to finish them, it’s a much more natural, unobtrusive goal. You’re not tracking a number while you write, you’re just writing this scene.

Scenes in my novels range from 2000 to 5000 words. I can write a scene - or most of one, if it’s a long one - in a day’s writing, before and after work. And serendipitously enough, my novel broke down into exactly thirty scenes. So my great plan was: one scene a day (accepting that they’d be bare-bones scenes. I go back on a second pass and fill in the description and detail and everything else before I consider the draft ‘finished’).

I was due back from Paris the morning of the 1st (oh, yeah, I went to Paris. Again. Did I mention that? Pics in later posts. Luxembourg is beautiful.). That gave me, somewhat optimistically, a full day to write a scene. Allowing for jetlag, I still had several full free days before I had to go back to work. If I missed the first day, I could make up for it later.

I didn’t account for Qantas. I didn’t account for a three-hour delay on the euro-star. I didn’t account for jetlag to be coupled with illness, sunburn and my fridge breaking down, so that my brain was too scattered to even think about story until possibly last night. Well, Friday night. Because I write these in advance. Sorry.

So, a week late, I could still start and make the ‘spirit’ of Nano. I looked at my story-plot, all neat and organised in Scrivener. Then I realised that, while I’d plotted out my story, I’d skimped on the worldbuilding. Again.

Somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that spending time ‘worldbuilding’ outside of actually writing the novel or just daydreaming was a form of procrastination. Actually writing down the story bible was procrastination, and should be avoided.

Now, this is nonsense - I’ve even written about how important your story bible is, especially for series. But there was a little opinion in my head telling me I should just be writing the novel, not wasting time faffing about the edges making decisions on what plant to include near the desert. I’m a very impatient person, and I wanted the book done now now now. I wanted to be selling it already, and moving onto the next ones. I have way too many ideas, and not enough brains to channel them.

But there are no shortcuts, here. So - no Nano for me this year, not even to try out my snazzy new notion (though I will be trying it, once my planning’s done. Just not in Nano.). But for anyone else who tends to write their first drafts in ‘story shorthand’ - try aiming for scenes instead of numbers, and see how well those goals work for you.

 

 

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.

 

So the unpacking has all but finished - we're down to the "find homes for box of miscellanious things", and (and I suspect I'm going to wind up just putting said box of miscellaneous things in a cupboard somewhere...). Which means real life has to come back some time soon. 

Real life like writing, exercise, and not buying chocolate from the supermarket every lunch break to scoff in the afternoons. Real life like I haven't seen in about two months, now.

I find routines are the issue, here - either making them or breaking them. The chocolate-buying, for example, is a routine I have to break, and the writing and exercise are routines to be made. And they can both be made the same way:

1. Come up with a reasonable plan for a routine. For example, "I get up half an hour earlier and write every morning". Make sure it's realistic - if you already get up at 5am for other tasks, then getting up half an hour earlier might not be the greatest idea. Cutting your kilojoule intake from 9000 to 6000 is probably not a good idea. Ask yourself honestly - is this something you're really committed to do? If it's not, then revise it until you have something more reasonable.

2. Come up with a carrot. Something you will enjoy as a treat, and - this is important - not something you were planning to buy/get/do/have anyway.

This was where I always used to run afoul with my routine-instigation - I'd come up with a reward that I really wanted, but I wanted it so much that I knew I was going to do/buy it for myself anyway, regardless of whether I kept the routine. In short, I took something I'd already decided to do/buy and made that my reward. That doesn't work, because it no longer matters if you break the routine. So - pick something that would be fun, but is in no way important or needed - something that you could deny yourself. The point of the reward is just to be a little celebration of a milestone, not for you to be 'working for' something you really want - because that just pulls your self discipline in two directions - you're too tempted to just buy the thing anyway.

3. Come up with another few carrots. About four is good. Make them increasingly rewarding if you like, but that's not important, as long as they all obey the rules in step 2. They should probably be different things, (you'll see why in step four).

It's advisable to make them things that don't directly contravene your overall goal or lifestyle. For example, if you're also wanting to lose weight, food-rewards are probably not the best idea. If money is tight, buying things might be an issue - pick something that isn't going to make you feel guilty in another part of your life.

4. Come up with a timeframe for the rewards. For example, if I can go a week without buying chocolate on my lunch break, I get to buy some lolcat magnetic poetry for my fridge. If I can go two weeks in a row, I can buy the minecraft fridge magnets*. Three weeks, and I can buy something off my amazon wishlist. etc.

Note that the timeframes don't have to be consecutive. If I buy chocolate on Thursday, I just start counting over again from the next day. Assuming most people have the odd slip-up, it'll take about two to three months to reach your four-week goal. And that's long enough to have made it a habit - then it'll continue on its own. Or at least, be a lot easier.

There's no punishment for not meeting the goal, ever. That's not helpful - you're not at war with yourself.  Just a small reward for getting there, something to remind you that this is something you want to work towards, and something to celebrate when you manage it.

As a final note - don't try to make too many routines at once. One at a time, if they're a big change, maybe two if they're small, but no more. I know that sounds crazy when you're looking at six or seven things in your life you feel you need to change, but it's important. It's too hard to keep track of more than two; you pull yourself in too many directions and the number of changes you're making will scramble your nerves. Take it slow, and be patient with yourself, not antagonistic.  

After all, there's nothing stopping you from doing / not doing those other things occasionally anyway. They're just not the focus right now.

*Honestly, I don't have a fridge magnet fetish, I just made the mistake of looking on Thinkgeek the other day for other people's presents. Want!

 

There've been a couple of posts lately in various blogs I read about literature vs genre. Ursula le Guin's post Petty Expectations stood out for me, especially her examination of the Y.A publishing trends. Go read, I'll wait.

The argument of literature vs genre, in all its forms, is a bugbear of mine. Largely because it crippled my writing for years. I spent four years in a degree that worshipped literature, where my desire to play with otherworldly ideas was met with scorn and, on occasion, pity. I accepted and resented their assumption that literature was intrinsically "better" than genre, and despaired as I realised that it was not what I loved to write. But it was what I had to write, or fail. And I developed a terrible habit: I wrote to show I was clever. And I kept that habit for another three years after I left.

It didn't stop me writing. But my stories tended to hit people over the head with their concept, and shout There! Aren't I smart, Oooh, is it the old lady or the girl? Faces or vase? Isn't your mind blown? Hmm? Hmm? Praise me, praise me! They weren't bad, per se. Perhaps a little self-satisfied. But it was limiting what I could write - I would only write what I thought could be clever. And that's ridiculous.

My mother has an apt phrase for the distinction between genre and literature: one is written primarily to entertain, the other primarily to communicate a message or theme. Neither is better than the other, they're just different priorities.

The reason genre gets so bad a wrap is frankly that our various puritanical influences have devalued and even perverted the notion of entertainment for its own sake, and people forget that there is often a message or theme behind the genre-work, it's just not the primary purpose. But being 'entertained' just for its own sake is seen as wrong, somehow. A waste of time and resources, childish, pseudo-masturbation for those who couldn't put their brains to deeper thought, and that prejudice prevails over any closer examination of the merits of the work.

The reason literature is seen as so high and mighty is that so many of those books have forgotten the 'entertain' component entirely - and gotten away with it, too, for the same reason.

Books that have both rise above their category, whatever it is. But while we might scorn a message-less genre book, literature that doesn't entertain is alright - you're just not 'deep' enough to get it. Or smart enough. You haven't seen the cleverness of the work. How the author pulled in components from these classic (and also probably not very entertaining) texts, how the symbolism fliped the whole story on its head, and even though it has no protagonist, no plot, no entertainment value and is in fact a very boring diatribe about a chair in somebody's living room, it works, you see.

It's the same principle behind the incoherence of many academic texts - if you don't understand it, it must be good. Because if you admit you don't understand it, everyone else will look at you, shake their heads, and try patiently to explain it to you in as complex and convoluted manner as possible to disguse the fact that they don't get it either. It's an agreed code of conduct. They spent ten years of their lives geting to a place where they could garner respect for pretending to understand things; if people start writing things simply, then anyone could get in.

I should point out here that by 'they', I don't mean indivuals. I don't think any of my professors ever thought "No, I can understand too much of this, take it away and obfuscate it until I'm only 30% sure I even know what you're talking about". This is a mob-process, created by the gathering of specifically-similar individuals into its own entity, and propelled forward by the momentum of its own existence. Its purpose is purely to maintain the status quo - to keep itself in the undercurrent of the mob. And it does this by seducing the newcomers into unknowingly believing in it.

I'm not saying "don't write literature". I'm not even saying "don't write experimental literature that doesn't work", because you can't find what does work until you've found a bunch of things that don't. I am saying:

don't feel that "just" entertaining people isn't enough don't feel that you have to make some new and groundbreaking point about humanity with every story don't feel you have to be clever - don't try to be clever. 

Just let the story be what it needs to be. There are no new ideas. Especially now, when everyone and their dog is publishing. Ever since we had fire, we had stories to entertain us while we huddled in from the cold. So tell us one that speaks to you. That's all you need to do.

 

On Friday, I took the Emerging Writer's Festival masterclass on Business for Writers. They covered everything from tax, business legals and invoicing to time and project management to social media, marketing and promotion in six pretty grueling hours (some great key points of which have been summarised by E. Markham over here.)

It was probably the best workshop / class I've ever taken. While a lot of the business and money side was stuff I realised I already knew from Uni, (and it reinforced my conviction that nobody can "teach" you social media, other than the two rules of Don't Be An Arse, and It's Not All About You) there was some really great discussion and tips on marketing and managing things - especially time.

 

This isn't so much a writing exercise as an exercise to help you write more often, but it's in tune with the theme I've been having this week (more on that tomorrow).

We all procrastinate, writers especially. For any number of reasons, whether it's to do with feeling too tired, uninspired, worried that we can't do justice to the idea in our head, or feeling that the job is too big to start. If you're anything like me, you may watch entire days go by that you'd intended to spend making progress on your project, that instead get spent with a hundred other things that probably didn't need to be done on your day off, that could have waited for a spare moment another day.

We know that just "forcing ourselves" to sit down and work only works some of the time; for the rest of the time, you really need to understand why you're flabbering around. The point of this exercise isn't to stop procrastinating, but rather to start understanding how and why you do. It also doesn't have to be about writing - if you're procrastinating learning a language, getting a report done, even doing the dishes or the laundry, just substitute your activity for "writing" in this exercise.

It's very simple: make a mental note of the times you intend to write. When those times come around, if you're not writing, note down the time, what you should be doing, what you're doing instead, and why. For example:

11:49: writing the big fight scene from chapter 5. Tidying desk because it's too cluttered to work 11:58: writing the confrontation scene in chapter 6. Got up to get a drink, was up to hard part in scene 12:17: writing the escape in chapter 7. Checked email to see if Jim had responded because I really need to know about that cheque.

This is best done over a about a month, whatever time scale fits with your schedule. You want to record at least ten attempted (or supposed-to-be) writing sessions, preferably closer to thirty. The more you do it, the easier it will be to spot when you are procrastinating (which is also part of the exercise) and recognise the reason why.

When you've got a fair number, try to find a patterns in your procrastination:

are there common times or situations that cause you to flit away, like at the start or end of a session, whenever you finish or are about to start a particular thing, whenever it's late at night or early. are there common reasons you procrastinate, like feeling you don't know what to do next, or being unhappy with your environment, or too tired, or thinking about other things are there common things you do to procrastinate, like tidy things, check email, play with the dog are there pitfalls in your project that cause you to procrastinate, like trying to write something when you're not sure what happens?

Recognising these pattens is the first step to addressing them. You won't be able to eliminate procrastination entirely, but you'll be able to start addressing some of the reasons - whatever they are - that you're not letting yourself work.

 

I have a book that I've been working on for about three years now. Probably closer to four. I wasn't really keeping track of drafts or versions, but best I can tell, it's on about version 7 or 8. Possibly twelve, if you count the attempts that were aborted before the end of chapter 1.

None of those versions ever made it to the end of draft 1. Many were written with completely different processes, but in each I could tell there was something fundamentally wrong with the book - not the writing, which is fixable, but the story, which is not.

I was getting rather discouraged with this - I had a plan, you see, to be writing full time. I'm a touch-typist and a trained student*: I can write quickly. When in the habit of it, I can write several thousand words a day, with time for exercise, general life and my day job. Put that into a routine and you have a draft in a few months. Add another few months for editing and polishing, and you have a book in four to six months. Combine that with the fact that these processes can be overlaid - I can plan one story while writing another and editing a third (I know this because I do it now), and I can have several books a year. 

That was The Plan. Roughly: self-publish several books a year, average not-very-many sales across all of them a month, and be able to write full time in five or six years at the current salary I get from my day job.

Taking three years for one book was throwing not just spanners, but hammers, screwdrivers, allen keys and a disgruntled plumber in the works. But this week, three important things happened for me and my plan - or rather, my disappointment in my plan.

 

 

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.

 

Hi, my name is Sofie, and I'm a project-a-holic.

I tend to have a lot going on in my life. A fairly recent example: working forty hours a week between four jobs whilst studying two masters degrees (one full time, one at half-load) and writing a novel. With a social life and other personal projects on the side. Admittedly I don't cook around here and my idea of housework is sweeping my eyes over a room, but most people will admit that's a lot to pack into one point of life. 

There are lots of terms for people like me. "Hyper-Creative" is the buzzword this decade, previously it's been 'dippers' (verses 'divers' , and I no longer remember where I read that one). To my friends, it tends to be 'crazy', 'insane' or occasionally "Yeah, Sof, but you're just... well, you", with 'you' in that tone usually reserved for That Weird Guy On The Bus. But I'm constantly drawn to the new idea, the new project, the new thing to create. It frustrates me that my story ideas take so long to come to fruition, because there's a traffic jam of ideas in my head that's backed up down the mountain and out to the ferry. Filling my life with new things - learning, projects - is my standard operating procedure.

It's not without sacrifices. Sleep tends to be the first thing to go, closely followed by other sensible things, like taking the cardboard recyclables out (I have a small fort), or putting your shoes back in the wardrobe (there's a boot-mountain by my bookshelf). But I discovered recently (well, several months ago by the time you read this, but as I have travel coming up, I'm writing this in December) one of the first things to go is the writing.

Which is, on one hand, like every other writer out there, really. But on the other hand, it's absurd.

 

This year I've been involved in a several group-base projects. Rather than writing groups, where individuals come together with their own personal projects, I'm talking about groups where individuals work together on a single project. Some of these groups have worked brilliantly, others have been a shambles of who's-doing-what-when-and-where's-the-bit-I'm-supposed-to-be-doing? 

 During uni, and even more so this year, I have learned that rules apply to Working With Groups, whether it just be a group of staff members working together in an office, a pair of novelists collaborating, or a group of people working on a product. A lot of these are perhaps obvious to people who've worked in teams their whole career, but I still find myself winding up in groups who don't understand these basic means of functioning.

 

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).

 

The final days of Nano draw to a close, and I'm spectacularly behind. I've even forgotten to update the Nano counter on the page (though a quick glance reveals I was only remembering to do that once a week anyway.) As so often happens (in November especially, it seems) life intervened. But that's okay - as I said last week, focus on what you have achieved. I have an extra seventeen thousand words that otherwise I mayn't have written for several more months, a good notion for where the novel is actually going, and I enjoyed feeling part of the community of people who were attempting this. The many tweets from Nano-ites all over the world were great to read - this was the first year I'd tried Nano as a tweeter.

Congratulations to those of you (I've heard there are quite a few) who made it over the line, and equal congratulations to those who didn't - you still wrote something that you mightn't have otherwise, and that is, after all, the whole point.

A quick review of Nano's wordcount scoreboard puts Melbourne at #19, with a total of  20 million words, well ahead of many US and European cities (and countries!) with a much greater population than ours. Not that it's a competition. But hah! Fantasy has also clocked 471 million, more than twice the wordage of the next highest genres (Young Adult, at 227 million, with SciFi not far behind at 210 million).

Of course, for a lot of the world there's still 48 hours to go, so rankings may change, but I feel a certain pride that my city and genre are so highly represented amongst people writing an arbitrary number of words to see if they can.

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!

This weekend I had my second masters degree conferred - well after it should have been, thanks to some clerical errors and Melbourne University replacing their student administration system after I'd completed. I donned the cap and gown, sat in a hall, listened to speeches and clapped as about two hundred students walked across the stage before me, and another hundred walked after.

I've never been one for ceremonies. Perhaps my private school's love of formal ceremonies (with mandatory attendance, of course) for absolutely everything trained me out of their significance, but I usually find them more of a chore to be sat through than something to be stirred by.  I confess, however, as I listened to the occasional address this weekend, that I did feel a small glimmer of pride at what I'd completed.

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.

So, Amazon's just struck a potentially killer blow for Apple in the ebook market - revamping the Kindle to a slimmer, cheaper model. They now claim seventy to eighty percent of the e-book market (though how they're measuring that - seeing as Bookscan doesn't handle ebooks, and no one is tracing books sold from author websites, etc - I'm not sure) - see the link for an interesting discussion with Ian Freed, vice president in charge of the Kindle.

Where Apple seeks to make things that work on Apple products only (wherever possible), Amazon is seeking to conquer every system and piece of technology that could possibly display an ebook. It's a difference in business strategy - Apple is leveraging the ebook market to sell more devices; Amazon is leveraging devices to sell its content. More at the link - there's some interesting discussion on the potential of the strategies, there. As purveyors of content-based products (books), I think I'd rather side with the monster who's interested in selling my content, rather than the monster who wants to use my content to sell his product.

Then again, if the net result is that my books are sold, does it really matter who by?

On a completely different note - Tim Ferris writes about the lure of the Superstar, and how to utilise it for yourself. The article's long, but well worth the read.  For those in a hurry, though, the cliff notes:

1. People who are THE BEST in their profession receive accolades and rewards disproportionate to their level of achievement relative to the second-best. 2. This effect holds no matter how small, insignificant or unknown the niche in which you are THE BEST in. 3. Therefore, to be seen as above the pack, find a specific niche in which you can be THE BEST with a modest amount of effort. 4. Accolades, appreciation and rewards shall be yours.