Kris talks about what happened and how it was reported (and has some fairly harsh criticism for the reportage about the incident), but of even more interest, she tells about what happened when one of her own novels was recently set to free for a while by the publisher without her knowledge. Mr. Crawford is incensed at the results of his unwillingly free book, but Kris is delighted with hers. She discusses what the difference was, and why the give-away worked so well for her and so badly for Mr. Crawford. The mechanisms and strategies she discusses are very useable by self-pub writers who have the freedom to mess with their own prices as they choose. Check it out.

Angie

Things specifically of interest to writers first:

Mike Lombardo brilliantly refutes some gentleman who thinks people shouldn’t ever get paid for their IP — thanks to Colleen Doran for posting this. I don’t watch many videos online, but I’m glad I watched this one. It’s a point-by-point refutation of a blog post that’s basically a regurgitation of every whiny excuse you ever heard a pirate give for why it’s right and proper for them to steal whatever they want, and why you’re a greedy bastard (blogger’s words, quoted by Mike) for wanting to be paid for your work. About ten minutes, entertaining, lots of snickers.

That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars — Another video, just to be all organized. This is Jason Scott, who runs Textfiles.com, among other things. (He’s also the guy who founded the Archive Team, the group that goes around rescuing terabytes of user-uploaded content (basically the internet’s history) from sites like Geocities when they got shut down, and whatever all Yahoo is deleting this week. He gets legal harassment mail pretty regularly, and this is a talk he gave at the DefCon 17 conference about one of those times, when a guy who decided that anyone who might’ve downloaded a free copy of his book (which he’d originally given away for free himself, and which he was stell giving away for free from his web site even as he was suing people who had free copies — seriously, you have to hear the story) took it all the way to a court case. Writers get sued sometimes, and so do bloggers, so I figured this might be interesting. At the very least, it’s entertaining. (Note that I’m assuming nobody who reads me regularly has to be told not to act like this particular writer. [cough])

Important Versus Urgent — novelist Camille Laguire talks about setting priorities, and the difference between important and urgent. A lot of common sense, with clear examples.

A Word or Two to Aspiring Writers — Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff uses examples from an unnamed book by a “Nationally Bestselling Author” (I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds like someone who should know better) to discuss the ever-popular What Not To Do. Even if you’re not an aspiring writer, this is worth a read, if only for the bogglement factor.

I knew the book had problems when I found myself reading the same dialogue over and over . . . at different locations and in different scenes.

“Trust me,” he says. “I’m here. I won’t leave you.”
“I can’t trust you,” she says. “I can’t let anyone in. I’m crazy!”
“No, your sister’s crazy. You’re wonderful. And I’m going to help you.”
“Really?” Can I trust him? I want to trust him. I don’t want to trust him. I …
“Trust me! I’ll protect you!”
“Okay.”
“Good. Let’s get out of here.”
“No! I can’t trust you!”
(Repeat as needed, with varying degrees of mild physical violence.)

Ooookay…. [blink] You know, if I knew you could do that and still be a bestseller, I could’ve saved myself a whole lot of work trying to hit wordcount targets. [Angie macros COPY and PASTE commands]

My favorite piece of advice is the last one, though:

No matter what genre you’re writing, strive to make your characters self-consistent. Don’t make a brilliant cryptographer suddenly unable to crack the Sunday Crypto-Quote. Don’t have your Oxford don talking like Eliza Doolittle pre-‘enry ‘iggins. And don’t have to women who’ve shown Darth Vader-like abilities when threatened, suddenly helpless in the face of a confrontation they’ve been prepping for throughout your whole book.

Hallelujah! Seriously, if the only way you can create tension is to give your character(s) a lobotomy, you’re doing it wrong. Really. I’ve seen this a lot and it’s always good for a few eyerolls. And why aren’t editors catching this? [sigh]

FROM PASSIVE VOICE:

What Happens When an Author Dies? — this is an excellent planning on death, wills and writers. Definitely read this if you’re a writer, or any other creative producer.

Indie Author Goes Traditional – A Cautionary Tale — in case you haven’t heard, Kiana Davenport was a writer who signed with a Big Six publisher back in January of last year for a novel, after having what sounds to me like considerable success publishing short stories. She had the rights to the stories, after they’d appeared in various places, so she e-pubbed a couple of collections of these previously published shorts. Then:

In January, 2010, I signed a contract with one of the Big 6 publishers in New York for my next novel. I understood then that I, like every writer in the business, was being coerced into giving up more than 75% of the profits from electronic sales of that novel, for the life of the novel. But I was debt-ridden and needed upfront money that an advance would provide. The book was scheduled for hardback publication in August, 2012, and paperback publication a year later. Recently that publisher discovered I had self-published two of my story collections as electronic books. To coin the Fanboys, they went ballistic. The editor shouted at me repeatedly on the phone. I was accused of breaching my contract (which I did not) but worse, of ‘blatantly betraying them with Amazon,’ their biggest and most intimidating competitor. I was not trustworthy. I was sleeping with the enemy.

Wow. Everyone else is figuring out that having more product available in the marketplace stirs up more interest in one’s work. If anything, Kiana’s publication of those two anthologies would generate more interest in the novel, not less. And the stories were already out there — “Most of the stories in both collections had each been published several times before, first in Story Magazine, then again in The O’HENRY AWARDS PRIZE STORIES anthologies, the PUSHCART PRIZE stories anthologies, and THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, 2000, anthology” — so chances are it wouldn’t be too hard to get most of those stories from libraries anyway, right? All the publisher could see was that they were competition, and apparently the fact that they were competing on Amazon made a rather large difference.

So, here is what the publisher demanded. That I immediately and totally delete CANNIBAL NIGHTS from Amazon, iNook, iPad, and all other e-platforms. Plus, that I delete all Google hits mentioning me and CANNIBAL NIGHTS. Currently, that’s about 600,000 hits. (How does one even do that?) Plus that I guarantee in writing I would not self-publish another ebook of any of my backlog of works until my novel with them was published in hardback and paperback.

Not only is that outrageous, it’s impossible. And seriously, do you want a publisher that thinks it’s even possible for an individual to delete “all Google hits mentioning” her and a book from the internet to be responsible for doing your marketing? Because I wouldn’t have any faith at all in the ability of a publisher with that little understanding of the internet and of Google to do any kind of effective marketing online, where a lot of the current book buzz resides.

The publisher declared Kiana to be in breach of her contract — although Kiana says she wasn’t; it depends on the exact phrasing of the noncompete clause — and demanded their advance back. Kiana has decided that it’s worth $20,000 to be out of that mess, and to know who the enemy actually is. I have to agree. Wow. And as Passive Guy comments, this situation is a great example of why a writer might need a lawyer, even if she has an agent. Click through to Kiana’s blog for more details.

And a follow-up to the previous post, with PG commenting on comments from Brian DeFiore, a publishing insider, on why Kiana “obviously” made a huge mistake in publishing her anthologies, and how if they were print books, “we would understand in a flash that publishing two books prior to a contracted-for work would constitute a breach of contract.” Really? You know, unless Mr. DeFiore has seen Kiana’s publishing contract, and knows the exact wording of her noncompete clause, I have no clue where he’s getting this. PG can’t figure it out either.

The reason an author understands publishing competitive books is a breach of contract is if it’s actually written in the contract. Passive Guy knows this is a shocking idea in the publishing business, but, alas, that’s the law.

Exactly. You know something is contractually required or forbidden because it’s in the contract. If it’s not, then it’s just a publisher (or whatever party to any given contract) using hand-waving and intimidation and scary-sounding language to try to bully the other party into compliance.

Passive Guy is brilliantly snarky (and informative in his point-by-point demolition) in response to Mr. DeFiore’s rather condescending comments. Definitely click through and read the whole thing.

Jutoh — TPG linked to this software product that’s supposed to help you format your manuscript for various e-book file types. I haven’t tried it myself, but if it does what it says it does, it should be a great help to anyone self-pubbing electronically. There’s a free demo, too.

What’s going on with #yesGayYA — as is often the case when a major issue goes nuclear, Cleolinda has a great summary and set of links. In case you haven’t heard, Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith guest posted on the Genreville blog on Publisher’s Weekly.

Our novel, Stranger, has five viewpoint characters; one, Yuki Nakamura, is gay and has a boyfriend. Yuki’s romance, like the heterosexual ones in the novel, involves nothing more explicit than kissing.

The agent suggested that perhaps, if the book was very popular and sequels were demanded, Yuki could be revealed to be gay in later books, when readers were already invested in the series.

You can guess how well that went over. There were discussions, mostly pretty angry, on various blogs and sites.

A few days later, Joanna Stampfel-Volpe, an agent who works for the same agency as the agent referred to above (who was not named by Brown and Smith, nor was the agency named) posted a refutation on another blog, essentially calling Brown and Smith liars, only slightly more diplomatically. More fireworks, including a bunch of people who decided that Brown and Smith must have lied since Stampfel-Volpe said they did, and anyone who took Brown and Smith’s word was stupid because clearly Stempfel-Volpe’s word was… wait, what?

What it seems to come down to is that there are people who are outraged and offended that Brown and Smith called them or their friends or their coworkers evil homophobes, even though Brown and Smith didn’t do that. They went public not to talk abou their specific case — which couldn’t be done anyway, since they hadn’t said which agent had made them the straightwashing offer, so there was no one specific for anyone to be angry with until Stempfel-Volpe outed her agency by responding — but rather to discuss the institutional barriers to GLBT characters, or characters with other diversity characteristics, in YA fiction.

I’ve seen the same thing happen in race discussions, where someone says, “You know, this particular statement/action is kind of racist,” and twelve people slam them with variations of “OMG how dare you call me/my friend a racist, you evil #$%&@!” and it’s all mushroom clouds from there on. People don’t get that an action is not a person. A statement is not a person. That it’s possible for an action or a statement to be homophobic or racist without the person who did or said it being deliberately or even knowingly racist. That’s not the point. If you take a step backward and land on someone’s bare foot with your bootheel, you’ve hurt them; the fact that you didn’t mean to doesn’t make their broken toes hurt any less. When they say “Ouch!” the proper response is “Oh, I’m so sorry!” not “How dare you say I assaulted you!” There’s a too-common disconnect between what’s said and what’s heard when it comes to bigotry issues; too many people assume that they always must be personal attacks, when often they’re not.

Brown and Smith said in the PW post:

This isn’t about one agent’s personal feelings about gay people. We don’t know their feelings; they may well be sympathetic in their private life, but regard the removal of gay characters as a marketing issue. The conversation made it clear that the agent thought our book would be an easy sale if we just made that change. [bolding mine] But it doesn’t matter if the agent rejected the character because of personal feelings or because of assumptions about the market. What matters is that a gay character would be quite literally written out of his own story.

We are avoiding names because we don’t want this story to be about one agent who spoke more bluntly than others whose objections were more indirectly expressed. Naming names can make it too easy to target a lone “villain,” who can be blamed and scolded until everyone feels that the matter has been satisfactorily dealt with.

Colleen Lindsay, who hosted Stempfel-Volpe’s response post, said, “I later discovered that not only did I know the agent in question, but that this person was actually a dear friend of mine, someone who most certainly wasn’t homophobic.” She’s clearly taking this personally on behalf of her friend. The bolded passage above shows that Brown and Smith weren’t attacking the agent for homophobia; they were addressing an issue with the YA fiction business as a whole, wherein there’s a perception — whether true or not — that books with GLBT characters are harder to sell. Because that’s all it takes, some number of agents or editors saying “No” because they think a book might not sell, or might be more difficult to sell, or might sell in lesser numbers. No one in the business has to be personally homophobic for that behavior to exist.

Some people came out and insisted that this never happened, that they’d be shocked if it happened, that nobody in the YA fiction business would ever ask for something like that and they should know because they know a lot of people in the business, or that they published a YA book with a GLBT character and no one had a problem with it therefore there isn’t a problem. Uh huh. (That’s like saying “But we have a black president now, so there can’t be any racism in the US.” [sigh] One person, or even a bunch of people succeeding, doesn’t mean there aren’t barriers. If there’s a twenty-foot wall around the supermarket, some people will still get groceries. That won’t stop me and my arthritis — and a whole lot of other people who just don’t happen to own grappling hooks or really long ladders — from going hungry.)

Does it happen? Apparently so. A lot of people commented on the Publisher’s Weekly article with their own experiences, and quite a few of them said the same thing happened to them. Cleolinda quotes quite a few of them, toward the end of her post.

Malinda Lo has numbers on GLBT characters in YA since 1969. The good news is that the numbers have gone up quite a lot. The bad news is that “up quite a lot” means that 0.2% of YA books published in 2010 had GLBT characters. Some generous estimates put the 2011 figure at about 1%, which is better, but still ridiculously low for a group of people who comprise 10-15% of the general population.

John Scalzi is wonderfully succinct, which is obviously not one of my skills:

My particular take on it is that the authors did the right thing by saying “thanks, no,” and that in general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a).

I hadn’t meant to write quite so much about this issue, but this is important. There’s more in Cleolinda’s post, and I encourage you to click through.

Segueing into a Couple More GLBT Interest Links:

Why Can’t You Just Butch Up? — an article by Bret Hartinger about effeminate men and why they can’t (or shouldn’t have to) just behave more like macho dudes.

Gotta Love Clint Eastwood — Clint’s not the most liberal of guys, but I was mentally applauding while reading this article. In a nutshell:

“These people who are making a big deal out of gay marriage?” Eastwood opined. “I don’t give a fuck about who wants to get married to anybody else! Why not?! We’re making a big deal out of things we shouldn’t be making a deal out of.”

Go Clint!

The first chunk of comments is actually sane and rational, which is pretty amazing. Soon enough the homophobes and trolls show up, though. You have to love the people who can say with a straight typeface that if we legalize gay marriage, everyone will marry someone of the same sex, no more babies will be born, and the human race will die out. Wow. Logic — get yourself some.

Angie

It does rather leap from the page that “Simon & Schuster’s operating income before debt and amortisation (OIBDA) more than doubled to $7m”, which the publisher said “was driven by lower shipping, production and returns costs because of the increase in digital sales”.

At one major publishing company that I know of, when editors draw up a profit and loss projection when they are considering acquiring a book there is no column for e-book costs because they are regarded as being functionally zero and are simply dumped on to the hard back costs.

[Note -- I inserted the Bookseller link; Futurebook had it earlier in their post.]

So at least one of the big publishers considers the costs of e-books to be negligible and doesn’t even project for them. Yet the big publishers are still moaning and wringing their hands and trying to convince us all that they HAVE to charge $15.95 for an e-book because they’re expensive too and if they lower the prices on e-books they’ll be losing money, oh noes!

Sure. If the costs were that high, they’d show up in the P&L projections. In actuality, they have to be pretty tiny to be completely disregarded in the preliminary estimates.

Give it up, guys. You show up to make your public speeches wearing a barrel, but we all see the servant waiting behind you with your suit ready to put back on.

On bad contracts, check out Don’t Sign Dumb Contracts by Passive Voice, who used to be a lawyer. Lots of good advice there; I particularly like this bit:

2. Every contract is negotiable, so negotiate what you don’t like. “This is our standard contract” is the oldest scam in the world. Standard contracts are for banks who print them by the million. Publishers and agents may want “standard contracts,” but they probably also want world peace. You don’t have to accept their standard contracts. If a publisher or agent is interested enough in your book to want a contract with you, they’ll be willing to change some things. Negotiation is the process by which each side to a potential contract discovers how much they want the contract.

Authors are in a terrible psychic spot in negotiating their first contract with an agent or publisher. They sent out a million queries before they got an agent. Ten publishers turned down their manuscript before one became interested. Authors are inclined to think, “I’ll sign anything. Just don’t tell me no again.” Don’t get into that mode. Your old buddy, Passive Guy, will guarantee that you’ll be in a worse psychic spot if you and your manuscript are treated like trash under the terms of a bad contract. You must be ready to walk away from a bad deal.

Sometimes the contract they hand you will be fine — I’m happy with my publisher’s standard contract. But I read the whole thing, nodding all the way, before I signed the first one, and I look over subsequent contracts to make sure they’re the same, or contain only changes that’ve been discussed beforehand.

Read the whole thing — this is good stuff.

Then read Advocates, Addendums, and Sneaks, oh my! by Kris Rusch, which Passive Voice links to in the post above. I’ve linked to Kris before; she’s worth subscribing to.

Here she’s talking about the potentially adversarial relationship between authors and publishers, and how an agent used to be the author’s advocate with the publisher, but isn’t any longer. Publishers are tightening up so much that even top agents don’t have the clout to get advantages for their clients in contract negotiation anymore, and many agents are more concerned with protecting themselves and their agency than with protecting the interests of any individual client.

Dean Wesley Smith (Kris’s husband, and another long-time pro writer who supports himself on his fiction income, as Kris does) has been advising writers not to bother with agents for a while now. Kris hasn’t completely agreed with him before, but now she does. Read the whole post to find out what new information and developments made her change her mind.

Angie, who’s in Long Beach at the hotel, enjoying free internet before boarding the ship

Slightly more thoughtful writers who’ve been successful through New York for a while tend to give indie publishing what they think is a fair shot. They’ll put one e-book up on Amazon, watch sales for a month or three, then report that they’re only making $12.82 per month and that clearly indie publishing is no way to make a living.

Well, no, not with only one book. The trick is to keep going.

Dean Wesley Smith (who in addition to being a successful writer who lives on his writing income, also owned and ran Pulphouse Publishing and knows that end of the business as well) has been posting chapters of Think Like a Publisher where he discusses the publishing end of the business, and how to make it work on a practical, steps-and-details level. His latest chapter is The Secret of Indie Publishing, subtitled “Why Having More Product Is Better Than Having Less Product.”

This sounds like a “no kidding” kind of thing, but it’s something a lot of folks don’t seem to get.

Dean says: An indie publisher needs a lot of products across a lot of sales locations all selling small amounts.

It’s not about having one huge blockbuster that makes the new NYT electronic bestseller list. It’s not about duplicating sales numbers that’d make a New York publisher happy, because New York publishers want your book to sell out in six months. Indie publishers are in it for the long haul, where even modest sales per book accumulate as you get more and more books up, and add up to a very nice income without your having to assume any luck or miracles or bestselling hits.

Dean talks a lot about the “produce model” of publishing on his blog.

Publishing for the last sixty-plus years has worked on the produce model, meaning that traditional publishers treat every book as if it is a piece of fruit that will spoil if not sold quickly. They made every book into an “event” to help sell the books quickly. And if the books didn’t sell quickly, they were pulled from the shelves like bad fruit and trashed.

Now, with electronic publishing and POD publishing, the shelf space is unlimited. And there is no hurry. A book can just sell along at a pace and as readers hear about it and find it, the sales can grow slowly.

Putting up one book and watching sales for a month or three months or six months before declaring success or failure (and usually failure) is missing the point. Indie publishing is not like New York publishing, and if you try to treat it the same or evaluate it with the same measuring stick — calibrated on the produce model — it will look like it’s not working. (Unless you’re wildly lucky, but we’re not going to assume you need wild luck to succeed here so ignore that possibility.)

Dean is very fond of running numbers, which he does here in this chapter. He shows how small numbers add up, even when you use tiny, conservative sales estimates. Anyone who’s even vaguely interested in indie publishing, whether for now, the near future, or maybe some time later on, should be reading Dean’s blog, and not just this one series.

Definitely read this one chapter before deciding that indie publishing only pays peanut shells.

Dear Editors:

== If there’s nothing in your submission call about what you plan to pay your writers, I’ll assume you’re not planning to pay us, and respond accordingly. Note that I shouldn’t have to click through to some other page to find the pay rate; if you’re paying then that info should be in the main call wherever it shows up, and if you’re not then that should be in the main call wherever it shows up. If you’re doing a for-the-love antho, step up and say so.

== When your list of things you won’t accept includes “anything racial” or similar, I have to wonder exactly what you mean by that. If it means you won’t take any racist work, why not say “anything racist?” Refusing to take any “racial” stories could easily be interpreted to mean you only want stories about white people — is that really what you intended?

== Glitches and errors in your submission call make me wonder about your editing skills.

== If your web site is hard to read because of choices you’ve made (medium to light text on a lighter but not white background, eye-searing colors, text of any color over a full color photo such that random words and letters fade into the background, that sort of thing) I’m going to wonder about what kind of cover you’ll choose, and whether I’d want my name on it.

== If your call is buried in your forum (and nowhere else clearly obvious) where topics churn often and there’s no permanent link to the vital submission info, I’ll wonder whether your records (scheduling, editing, sales, cash flow, etc.) are as chaotically organized as your communication with potential contributors. And about your professionalism in general — is it really not worth it to you to put up a simple web site with basic info in a stable format?

== Everyone’s entitled to their preferences, but if your guidelines page is dominated by an abusive, multi-paragraph rant about (for example [cough]) the stupidity and incompetence of any writer idiotic enough to ever use a semicolon, be aware that I’ll back away slowly and never submit anything to you, ever. And I’d probably do the same even if I didn’t generally use semicolons, ’cause dude, chill!

Anyone else have any to add…?

Angie

Big Al gave Ms. Howett’s book a two-star review that I thought was even-handed and clear, and very kind, considering the rating. He said “I think you’ll find the story compelling and interesting,” which is something any writer would love to hear. What brought the rating down were the extensive spelling and grammatical errors. Big Al reviews indie books published on Amazon, and it looks like Ms. Howett didn’t hire an editor, or if she did then she needs to ask for her money back.

Ms. Howett popped right up as the first commenter, saying “You obviously didn’t read the second clean copy I requested you download that was also reformatted, so this is a very unfair review.” She went on to say that she’d gotten four- and five-star reviews on Amazon, and that she’d “stick to” them, thanks. Then she posted three more comments, each one quoting those good Amazon reviews. Because clearly Big Al and the people who read his review blog were just dying to read those reviews, and couldn’t figure out how to go to Amazon and find them for themselves.

This was bad enough. At this point, Ms. Howett had already made herself look defensive and foolish, but she didn’t stop there. A couple of anonymice commented negatively on her behavior, then Big Al responded, saying that he had indeed downloaded the newer copy. It sounds like the second version was to fix formatting issues that came up in the file conversion, but those weren’t the errors Al was talking about in his review. He repeated that his rating was based on editing and proofing errors in the text itself, and gave examples:

Here are a couple sample sentences from the first two chapters that gave me pause and are representative of what I found difficult while reading.

I understand what both are probably saying. I do question the sentence construction.

Wow. Okay, those examples make it clear exactly what errors he’s talking about. That second sentence in particular is incredibly awkward, and any competent editor would’ve squawked both of them.

Ms. Howett comes back:

My writing is just fine!

You did not download the fresh copy…. you did not. No way!

[sigh] She goes on after that, telling him to remove the review because it was “in error,” calls him a liar for saying he’d downloaded the fresh copy, and generally rants and rambles. She also says:

Besides if you want to throw crap at authors you should first ask their permission if they want it stuck up on the internet via e-mail. That debate is high among authors.

Really? I don’t know what authors Ms. Howett hangs out with, but none of the authors I know think that reviewers need to ask the author’s permission via e-mail before posting a negative review. That’s not the way things work on my planet, and as a writer I wouldn’t want them to; reviews are for readers, and reviewers have to be free to speak their honest opinion. It’s to everyone’s benefit if readers have a way to feel confident that they’re buying books they’ll probably like; people who enjoy most of the books they buy, buy more books. If someone isn’t going to like one of my books for whatever reason, I don’t want them wasting their money on it. I’d rather they buy something they will like, and maybe try something else of mine later that’s more likely to suit their taste.

The comment thread goes on, with Ms. Howett eventually reduced to cussing people out. She doesn’t seem to have any conception of just how big the internet is, or how connected, or how quickly word (and links) spread whenever something entertaining is going on, and unfortunately her indignant ranting is very entertaining. :/ The review post went viral, spreading through Twitter and Facebook to other places where writers hang out and share news. (Thanks to Emily at the EREC blog for posting the link I saw.) After around noon yesterday, comments piled in fast and hard, and most of the 307 comments went up between then and 4:36, when the last one went up before Al closed commenting down. The density of commentary indicates a lot of notice and interest, surging up as the news circulated. Once word started to spread, it took only a few hours for the publishing end of the internet to hear about this, and at that point I’d say Ms. Howett’s reputation was pretty much shot.

It really looks like she thought she could safely act out on what seemed at first to be a tiny little review blog with few readers; if you look at older posts, comments were extremely sparse before Ms. Howett’s demo of unprofessional behavior. Maybe she thought she could yell at the blogger without anyone ever hearing about it? If so, she got a harsh lesson in just how small our chunk of the internet is, and how quickly a crowd can gather to gawk at a wreck, even on a street that usually gets little traffic. I hope she realizes now how she trashed her own reputation by her behavior, and keeps that in mind for the future.

I also hope she spends some time studying her craft. The way her comments are written just confirm the impression one gets from the samples Al posted that Ms. Howett’s grammar is very weak. Al said the story itself was good, and that’s the hard part; if she’s a good storyteller, then she’s most of the way there. Learning craftsmanship is very straightforward, if a writer will only admit that they need to learn. Ms. Howett clearly does, and putting some effort into the learning would let her show off her already praiseworthy stories to best advantage.

I’ll be keeping a set of virtual fingers crossed for her.

Angie

On scheduling, for short stories, it’s usually not that big a deal, time-wise. For longer stories (or short stories with a tight deadline) I recommend at least reading through all the comments as soon as you can, to get an idea of what’s there and what it’ll take to work them all off. Some editors (particularly one person I’ve worked with, but I’m sure there are others) have this habit of giving you these short little comments that ripple through the whole manuscript, so getting through the edits can end up taking a LOT longer than you thought after just a quick skim.

After that, I mentally sort the comments into types; each type takes a different amount of time and/or thought to work off.

There are the facepalm types, the obvious mistakes that you have no idea how they got into the manuscript, the ones you want to hug the editor for catching ’cause it saved you from looking like an idiot. These are easy, usually just a quick accept and you’re on to the next one.

Next are the quick fixes, the ones it’s not tough to do but you have to make the change yourself rather than accepting an editor’s change. Still easy, almost as fast as the above.

Sometimes a suggested fix is completely off because you miscommunicated so badly in the original text that the editor got the completely wrong idea of what you were trying to do. (This is often traceable to CUT/PASTE errors, although sometimes it’s just raw talent. [cough]) In this case, it’s great to have the problem pointed out, but the actual fix will be something totally different. This one usually takes some time to figure out, and requires a fix AND a note, to explain what was up and why you rewrote those three paragraphs on page 28 instead of the marked line on page 91.

Then there are the things that make you go “Huh?” If you don’t understand why something was changed, and you can’t figure it out (style guides come in handy here, as does Google), don’t be afraid to ask. You might learn something new about grammar or punctuation or whatever, or you might find that it’s a miscommunication, as above. Note that having time for a few back-and-forth conversations like this is another reason to start working on your edits well before their due date.

Note that some things are just house style. Every publisher has their own weirdnesses; you can’t really argue, much as you might want to sometimes. Grit your teeth and deal, and keep in mind that it’s no better anywhere else — at best it’ll be a different flavor of weirdness.

There’ll probably be some times when you just plain disagree with your editor about how something should be written, and this is where it gets delicate and takes some consideration. There’s a balance here between being a prima donna who’s a pain to work with, and being a conscientious pro who wants your story to be the best it can be. As with the “Huh?” items, be ready to discuss these with your editor. Explain what you’re trying to do and why you think your way is the best way to do it, and listen to their side. If your editor has a better idea, great; it might turn out to be a case of miscommunication again. If not, you’re entitled to argue against a change if you’re sure about it, but be SURE you’re sure. If you’re new to this, you’re probably better off going along, but if you’ve been writing and studying writing for a while (like several years at the very least; more is better) there’ll be times when you’re really sure. Bottom line, it comes down to what the publisher as represented by your editor is willing to agree to, but don’t be afraid to make your case if you feel strongly about something.

Since Shawn mentioned regionalisms and specialized knowledge, that’s another kind of fix that maybe shouldn’t be fixed. I remember having to explain to an editor what “teabagging” was once; obviously she didn’t hang out with any gamers but it was a term my character would have used. If specialized dialect or terminology gets flagged, consider whether it’s clear in context what you mean, and whether it needs to be perfectly clear; sometimes it doesn’t. If your SF characters on a starship about to blow up are running around in a panic, blarking the frammistats and clearing the ion squoozers and rebooting the hadron dingusizers, it’s probably obvious to the reader that they’re trying to fix a technical problem, even if each exact word isn’t clearly defined. Too much of this sort of thing is a bug rather than a feature, but a little can add flavor without actually losing the reader. But as Shawn also mentioned, if the editor and both proofers are all going “Huh?” then it probably needs to be reworked.

Re: disputing changes, how much is too much? The way I look at it is that we each have a kind of bank account where we deposit good will. Whenever you want to buck someone else, you’re spending out of your good will account with that person. (This is true for every relationship you have, not just publisher edits.) If you spend until your good will is gone, you might find that person doesn’t want to interact with you anymore, whether it’s a lover who disappears, a friend who backs off, an employer who fires you or a publisher who decides it’s too much trouble to contract your fiction anymore. Before you squawk a change, think about how much good will is likely in your account, and how much of it you’ll need to spend on this change. Being professional in how you approach the situation will spend less good will than being indignant or snarky or whiny; being able to explain clearly what you want and exactly why will spend less good will than some vague, hand-wavy artiste type rant.

Make sure you always have a positive good will balance. And yes, I know this isn’t exact — it never is when you’re dealing with other people. What it comes down to is making absolutely sure you feel strongly enough about a change to want to argue against it, absolutely sure you’re right that your way is better (better for the story, not just for your ego), and that you’re direct, polite and professional in how you handle the discussion. If there’s any doubt in your mind about it, don’t; save that good will for when you feel like you’ll have to change your pseud and switch over to another genre if the book goes out as it is with your name on it. [wry smile]

And make your deadlines. Turning things in late spends good will too; save it for the important stuff.

Angie

Arlene Harris started using iUniverse’s services back when they were actually kind of reasonable. Their prices have gone up considerably, however, with no significant increase in services, so she’s decided to take her business elsewhere. She wrote to them to terminate their business relationship, and got a snarky reply from some self-righteous marketing weasel, which begins, “Hello Ms. Harris, I wish there was something I could say to pacify your hurt feelings,” and goes downhill from there.

Arlene happens to be friends with Colleen Doran, a very successful comic artist and writer. Colleen has been successful both through large publishing houses and on the self-publishing side. As she puts it herself: Unlike most of the people reading this, I have been a successful self publisher and have sold over 300,000 copies of my works via self publishing, not to mention all the books my name is on that I didn’t self publish. So Colleen knows whereof she speaks. Colleen has a huge blog audience, and decided to point out to iUniverse, line-item by line-item, exactly why any writer with a brain in his or her head would decide to forego their services. It’s great — read it here.

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From the Department of Wasn’t This SF a Few Years Ago? — a Chinese company has plans for a humongous kind of bus, two lanes wide, that runs on tracks and is hollow on the bottom so cars can run under it. It’s kind of like a big mobile tunnel with a passenger cabin on top. Check it out. Thanks to Tobias Buckell for the link.

It’s worth watching the video, even if most of it is just some guy speaking Mandarin. (Of course, if you understand Mandarin, I’m assuming it’s geometrically cooler.) There are bits in the video-within-a-video, though, showing how cars go under the bus, how the bus goes over stationary cars, how people get on and off, how they prevent trucks and cetera that are too big from running in the bus lanes, and what they’ll do to get the passengers off in case there’s some kind of wreck anyway. The last bit is almost at the end of the video. Cool stuff — definitely a good idea for adding really big busses to city streets without adding to traffic congestion. From an SF writer’s POV, though, it’s necessary to keep up with this sort of thing. It’ll let your near-future Chinese story sound a bit more realistic, and will prevent you from having your 24th century civil engineer dramatically unveil his Brand New and Original Mobile Tunnel-Bus idea. [wry smile]

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Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Freelancer’s Survival Guide is done. If anyone was waiting for the whole thing before reading, the whole thing is now there. She’s working on getting both an e-book and POD print version up and ready to go. I’m getting the paperback, myself. I’ve been reading along and there’s a ton of excellent info here — more than most publishers would be willing to stuff into one volume, so rather than let the publisher decide what to cut, she’s putting it out herself, complete and entire. This is a great resource, whether you’re a writer or any other kind of freelancer, which includes anyone who owns a business or otherwise works for themself. Highly recommended.

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One experiment has shown that snails might have a homing instinct. Ruth Brooks had snails in her garden, as many of us do, and since she’d rather not hurt them, she tried collecting them and taking them over to (waste land? sounds like a vacant lot, maybe?) and leaving them there. But they kept coming back, which was rather boggling, since scientists had thought the snails didn’t have enough brain to manage something like a homing instinct.

This was only based on Ruth’s own findings, though, which really isn’t enough data. So Ruth is organizing a larger-scale experiment. They’re in England, and they’re only looking for a particular kind of snail, but it looks interesting anyway; I hope they get a lot of participants.

Speaking for myself, back when I did a lot of gardening, there was an alley behind our back yard, and on the other side of the alley were a bunch of front yards of houses facing the alley. I’d go out at night hunting snails and slugs; I’d pick up the snails and pitch them over the back fence. Every now and then I’d pick up a snail with a crunchy shell; he apparently hadn’t learned his lesson and had come back. I’d pitch him again. The thing is, I had a decent arm, and after the snail landed, there would’ve usually been plant life (on the other side of the alley) closer than our back yard. But a lot of the snails came back anyway. Which is all completely unscientific, but I’m tending toward agreement on the whole snail-homing thing. Also, on the belief that snails are really stupid.

This is another data point for SF writers, though. You might well not need to invent a creature with a brain the size of a pigeon’s to have something that’ll find its way home.

Although I still think butterflies are the most amazing homers. I got this from a thing the spousal unit and I saw on TV (Life? Planet Earth? something like that) so I don’t have any links, but butterflies — Monarchs, IIRC — actually migrate in three generations. They start out at one end of the migration path, fly to a waypoint and reproduce, then die. The next generation is born, pupates, flies on to the next waypoint and reproduces, then dies. The third generation is born, pupates, flies back to the starting point, reproduces, then dies. The thing is, none of the butterflies who are migrating have ever been where they’re going before. Migratory yak and whales and swallows and salmon are born, then migrate somewhere else, then go back to where they were born, so they’ve been there before. Most of them will even have older members of their herd/pod/flock to show them the way. But butterflies keep flying between the same waypoints when none of them have ever been there before. That’s freaky, in a pretty neat way.

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The Fourth Vine over on Dreamwidth gave several Good Reasons for a Professional Fiction Writer to Fear Fan Fiction. This is an issue which pops up periodically and gets completely rehashed, with the usual griping, snarking, whining, and hystrionics. Fourth Vine summarizes the logical arguments neatly, and lets you know which arguments are not at all logical and will get you mocked. My favorite is the last one, but they’re all excellent, as is the accompanying commentary. This isn’t a brand new post, but it’ll be a fresh issue soon enough, and then again, and again after that; classics are always relevant.

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I’m up in Reno visiting my mom and my brother this week. The third was my birthday, although we’re going to dinner tonight; this is my brother’s first day off. I’m spending a lot of time on the laptop, as usual, but if I take a while to get around to various blogs, or don’t comment as often as I usually do, that’s why. [wave]

Angie

Funny, smart commentary about burqa bans — the idea of a government body dictating what people can wear, short of the really riciculous exception examples cited in this piece, is ludicrous. If Moslem women want to wear a burqa then they should be able to. Anyone who wants to wear a burqua, or a veil, or a T-shirt saying “Our Government Is Full of Idiots!” should be able to do so. Banning a traditional item of clothing which causes no harm to anyone is an outrageous infringement of freedom, and racist to boot.

Period Speech — this xkcd comic pretty much says it all about various writers’ attempts at period speech. (It also applies to various kinds of accents and dialects used by writers who apparently have never been exposed to same.) It’s easy to see how silly it looks when our era is one of the ones being mangled, but plenty of writers trying to write “medieval” or “Southern” or whatever sound pretty much like this.

Jane Austen’s Fight Club — this is a really wonderful video. I’m not usually one for videos, but my husband e-mailed me this one and I was LOLing. Watch and enjoy.

As Josh says right off, Before we delve into what to look for in a publishing partner — and what to avoid — I want to point out that this post relates to niche publishing with small and indie presses. Much of what I’m discussing here is a non-issue in mainstream publishing. Running Press and Carina aside, m/m is still dominated by small presses and niche publishers, so that’s where the focus of the article is. That said, most of what Josh talks about is something even folks aiming at New York should at least be aware of.

Lots of good stuff here, and I’m not just saying that because she quoted me. [duck] Seriously, check it out.

Angie