Boy, discussion about “time” seems to be coming up a lot lately, especially in the context of writing and indie publishing. So let me take a hard look at the two routes only through the lens of “time.”
So why spend the time to talk about time now?
It was a week where I got hit with a number of factors concerning time.
I made some basic projections on speed and income in the last two posts in this column and had a number of people take me to task because there isn’t enough data to make projections, even though I was only using information from this very moment and saying “what if it holds?” Time seemed to be the issue and my use of it.
And then in the last few days Amanda Hocking made the USA Today bestseller list, while being excluded from the New York Times list. And of course, if you don’t understand bestseller lists, they are based on extremely flawed data that always has a time element in it. Usually one week. A bestseller is based on the old produce model and basically says a book sells more than other books in a certain time period in the places the list decides to look during that certain time period.
And speaking of time, I have shouted here a great deal about how indie publishers need to ignore the “book as event” or “book as produce” models, but yet few do, thus all the stupidity about self-promotion. Just let a story or book grow over time. Write more, but alas, my voice is shouting into a bad windstorm full of sand. Self-promotion seems to be the ugly curse of indie publishing. Sad, since the time used to promote a book will rob us all of books those authors might have written if not wasting the time on trying to push a few extra sales to come faster.
And then time ran into me this week as well as I worked to cut down one activity so that I would have more time to devote to indie publishing and working with WMG to get stories and novels up. I spent 15 hours a week playing on eBay as a hobby and now I want that time, so I am now shutting that hobby down completely.
And then on a major bestselling writer’s list, a number of writers were talking about how they didn’t have the time due to deadlines to learn how to do indie publishing, even though most, not all, thought it important.
So after all that, I figured the world was telling me it was time to talk about time.
Day Job and the Writer
Even professional writers are faced with deadlines and lack of time. All of us.
No writer, beginner or long-term professional, has enough time to write. Period.
I find it funny when a beginning writer whines at me that they have little time because they have a real job and I don’t. Yeah, and the heavens just open up and drop money on me. I work just like the rest of you. I just work at my writing. And see the last post on speed to understand that I also work a lot of hours, which is why I am considered fast.
Actually, the reason I am successful is because I work harder than anyone I have ever met. I don’t know what a vacation is, never took one. I work seven days per week, month after month, usually upwards of twelve hours a day. I watch all of five or six hours of television a week, and I play poker four hours a week. That’s it besides eating and sleeping. And I don’t expect others to do the same. Honest. But it does make me laugh when someone with a forty-hour-per-week job complains to me that they don’t have enough time to write.
Of course, I don’t laugh out loud. I just nod sagely, knowing full well that person will never make it because they can’t get around their own excuses for not writing. I had three jobs when I started getting serious about writing. Go ahead, whine. I dare you.
I got so tired of the whining by young professionals that Kris and I decided to prove it to a bunch of writers at our master classes how writing really works. For the two weeks of the class, we kept them in actual class, not writing, just over 40 hours per week. We also forced them to write and hit deadlines. And to read the other writer’s work. They all produced almost 60,000 words of fiction each in two weeks. And it wasn’t until the end of every master class that I stood in front of them and showed them that they had produced 60,000 words of fiction in two weeks, while reading, while working (attending class) basically a forty-hour-a-week job.
In other words, we took the excuse away from them. Some master class grads told me later that was one of the more eye-opening moments of the entire class. For some of them it didn’t sink in at all.
But basically, no matter your situation, there is never enough time to write as much as we all want to write. It is standard for all of us. And, to be honest, I’ve never learned to live with it. Most writers don’t. We all talk about it and complain about the lack of time and the push of deadlines. Nature of the beast called a writer.
Okay, got that out of the way. Now onto other details of time.
Traditional Publishing and the Writer
When a writer submits a finished story or novel to a traditional publisher, they have a number of tasks to do. They must print out the story, do a cover letter, do a SASE, and then find a market and address the envelope and get to the post office. And then they must keep track of the submissions and file the rejections and do the process again for the next market. Some of that is cut with electronic submissions, but not all.
This submission process takes time. One saving grace was that the time was spread out over sometimes years as the rejections trickled back in. Market research, bookkeeping, addressing envelopes, paying for postage, and so on and so on. It all took time. And some money. I got paid $235 dollars for a story once after 30 rejections and did the math to see if I had lost money. Cost of envelopes, cost of postage. I did not figure in cost of time or gas to the post office. But there was a lot of time spent keeping that story in the mail thirty times. I ended up making over a hundred bucks. Honestly surprised me. I thought I would have lost money, but if I would have figured my time for all the submissions, I’m sure I would have been way under minimum wage per hour on that story.
But this submission time was part of the process, so we all just accepted it and worked it in. Complained, sure, but it was an accepted part of the process. And the cash outlay was also part of the process. It was normal and expected. It still is in many ways. Even electronic submissions take time and bookkeeping and so on. Remember that.
Indie Publishing and the Writer
Indie publishers seem to be complaining a lot about lost time, and how much time it takes to get a story up electronically. The indie publisher has to do a cover, which includes finding the photo or the art, then format the manuscript, and then launch it on Kindle and Pubit and Smashwords, among others. And oh, yeah, put it up on their web site, announce it on Facebook and Twitter, and then push it somehow with tagging and all that. All takes time.
But, if you are doing it right and focusing on writing the next story, it’s time spent ONLY ONCE.
See where I am going with this? In the old traditional publishing, you had to constantly come back to a story when it was rejected and spend time on that story again to get it back in the mail. And you had to constantly spend money on the story to keep it out there.
Indie publishers only have one small amount of time spent and then it’s finished. Period. (Unless some new market opens up and you want to get it published on the new market.)
Indie publishers spend far less time getting their story into readers hands than a writer working the traditional system. Far less time and money.
Time and Novels
I’ll try to distract the questions about the extra time it takes to get a novel up. Sure, with a novel you want it proofed. Might cost you to hire a proofer or have a friend read it. Time to key in corrections. Covers, maybe POD formatting. But on the traditional side, not counting the submission time and energy, you have to go over the novel in the copyedit stage and in the page proof stage, and over the years I’ve had books where I spent full days on just fixing bad copyedits.
Putting a novel into print indie publishing takes fantastically less “author” time than traditional publishing. Not even on the same scale.
Time From Finish Writing to First Purchase
The difference between indie publishing and traditional publishing in this area shouldn’t even be compared.
I talked about it in a previous chapter, but a book indie published can be in reader’s hands under a month after the author finishes it, maybe faster. Maybe even just days. I finish a short story in my challenge and you all can read it within twenty-four hours or less. It appears in B&N and Amazon within a few days, within minutes on Smashwords, and within a week or two on Sony, iPad, Kobo, and the others.
For traditional publishing, even if you pull a miracle and get the book through everything and sold within a year after finishing, it will take the publisher another year plus to get the book into print. And magazines can have a lead time of six months easy.
How much money in sales can the indie publisher make in that same two plus years of time? If your name is Amanda Hocking, don’t even ask.
And the number is still not a small amount for the rest of us.
Time and Traditional Publishing Changes
Okay, you all know I am not a doom and gloomer who thinks traditional publishing will collapse on December 21st, 2012. Or whatever.
I do, however, think that traditional publishing is changing and changing drastically.
I do think that over the next three years many stores will go down, many distributors will go bankrupt, and many publishers will be out of business.
So, in the last discussion on the “speed” chapter, I was taken to task about not having any information to make projections on electronic publishing into the future. I’m going to go out onto that same limb again here. I have no real numbers, no real projections. Nothing. I am just watching the same news articles and discussions as the rest of you.
But even though I do not believe traditional publishing will end, in the turmoil that is coming I do believe some publishers will go down. But I don’t know which ones.
Which publishers survive and which don’t will depend on a series of changing factors, including bookstore collapses and more importantly distribution system collapses. And which publishers can move fast enough to electronic based sales in their accounting systems. And which publishers are not on an edge and which have bad cash flow situations, and so on and so on.
So here is the question I keep asking myself:
How safe do I feel mailing a book I spent a lot of time on into that traditional system right now?
Especially knowing that it might be up to three years out before that book sees print?
What will publishing look like three years out?
I don’t have a clue, to be honest. Traditional publishing will still be going strong, but I have a hunch the face of it will have changed dramatically.
Second question: Do I want a novel I spent a lot of time and energy and expense writing and getting out there to be trapped in a bankruptcy?
For those of you who don’t know, the bankruptcy clause in writer’s publishing contract is not valid, and when your publisher drops into bankruptcy, your book is an asset of the company and is treated like one and can be sold off to anyone for any purpose and you have no say over anything. Sure, the court must abide by the letter of your contract, sort of. But trust me, you don’t want a book in such a mess. It will be years before you see it again. (I am being general, okay. Not giving legal advice of any sort here. Just a warning for writers to think about.)
Summary
—Every writer I know, professional or beginner, complains about not having enough time to write. Those who make the time are the successful ones, the rest aren’t worth any of our time to try to help. This is the same for both traditional and indie publishing.
—Traditional publishing submission process takes a lot of time and sometimes costs money, and the time is spread out over the length of the submission process until the story or novel sells.
—Indie publishing takes time and maybe a little money, but the time is all lumped up front and then, until something changes in markets, no other time is required to be spent. The story or book is just slowly finding readers and making money.
Note: In my experience, it takes me less time to indie publish a short story than it does to look up a market, get the manuscript ready, do a cover letter, do stamps and SASE, and go to the post office to mail it. Once.
—Time between a reader getting your book in indie publishing and a reader getting your book in traditional publishing can be years. Clear win indie publishing.
—Traditional publishing is in waves of change, and many companies are going to be going down, while others come in to take their place. In the two to three years it takes to get a finished book to market, the market may change completely. It might not. No one knows. But having a book trapped in a corporate bankruptcy is just a nightmare to be avoided if possible.
Does this sound like I’m suggesting that writers go more and more indie publishing?
When it comes down to just looking at things through the lens of time, the answer is yes. Completely.
But there are other factors to look at as well. But since this post was about time, the answer is very, very clear.
And now it’s time for me to go write some fiction.
Bye for now.
Time spent on promotion is something I have been wondering about lately. You seem to be the only writer that says it isn’t necessary. If a new writer puts his book on line it will be on the new release page for a time. I have noticed that on smashwords in a matter of minutes a book can go from page 1 to page 5 on new releases. I’m sure the other sites are the same. When the book drops off this list it is just one more book in a pile to be sifted through by readers. It seems that some promotion would be necessary until the authors name is known.
For me this is countered by the fact that I can’t spend money on any sort of advertising. I mention a release on facebook and my blog. I comment on forums with a link in my signature. I wonder though if all this does if cause other curious writers to look at my blog, maybe read the book description, look at my cover art and then move on. This would help sales very little if at all.
I hear it said that if the book is any good it will be found and purchased and word of mouth will increase sales. If it can’t be found in the first place how does word get around? At the moment it seems like mere chance that a new writer makes it. Even with an excellent book.
Brad, the key is have more work than one story. Sure, if you have only one book, it is just not going to be noticed much. No reason for it to.
However, if you have a bunch, and have done minor announcements as you said about each one, and mention them every-so-often, and the writing is good, a reader will find one, then find others if they like it, and then tell friends, and they start climbing.
It takes time. A produce model gets the books out and then the book vanishes. A slow build model takes time, but the more you put up, the more presence you have and thus readers find you. That’s why it makes me sad that new writers put up a book and promote it to death while not writing anything more. The book has no chance in hell and neither does the author. Oh, it might make a few sales, but the readers will soon forget the author if that is the only book.
One book does nothing. Ten books do a lot. See why I am doing a hundred stories this year? One hundred short stories also equals about 30 five-story collections and a dozen or so ten story bigger collections. All a reader has to do is find one, like it and then go find others, and off it goes. And I’m doing this in one year. In my spare time.
Writing is the best promotion. And the best use of a writer’s time.
I’ve electronically self-published 6 of my backlist titles in an entirely DIY process: proofreading, formatting and converting to Mobi and ePub, creating the cover, uploading to e-stores.
Semantics aside (I think “independent publisher” is an absurdly grandiose phrase for this process; I’m self-publishing, that’s all), what I have found was that the initial stages of this process were ENORMOUSLY time-consuming. Researching how to do this and comparing possibilities to decide the best way to do it; researching which markets to get into, and how, and when or in what order; researching software choices; making decisions about pricing; learning the actual process of formatting and coversion; learning to create covers (for which I wound up using two different graphics software, depending on which works best for what tasks); learning the best and most economincal way to license cover images; learning to make improvements in the formatting so the interior of an e-book looks a bit more professional. The first time I uploaded a book, it took me a LONG TIME to just find the damn upload pages for Kindle and Nook!
I also made a number of mistakes (which I only realized afterwards–such as not including a rights-clause in the frontmatter of the first book posted) which I had to go back and fix.
So the overall research, prep, and learning curve to get this up and running was indeed enormously time-consuming for me. And there are still more hurdles to come. But once something in this process is researched, compared, chosen, learned, accomplished, and the bugs/mistakes worked out… the next title is easier, and the next one easier, and the next easier still. It’s definitely a process where quantity pays off the initial investment, since my 7th title will be a LOT easier for me to e-publish than the first one; and the 15th will be easier still.
But in the prep, research, and learning phase, with NY deadlines looking over me at the same time that I was up at 3AM trying to learn all this, and gathering masses of information, and making mistakes… I seriously questioned on a number of occasions whether I wasn’t AN IDIOT for choosing a DIY process and for doing this now, rather than waiting until the whole thing became a lot simpler and more self-explanatory.
I’m through that phase and am glad I persisted, and the whole market is snowballing so fast that I’m glad I didn’t throw up my hands and decide to wait. But it definitely involved perseverance and time… and with things changing so fast, I won’t be astonished if half of what I’ve so far learned and done is obselete in a year or two.
Got that, right, Laura. The learning curve is just a series of swear words. (grin)
But I’m now over 140 books and stories and it is just weirdly easy. I now have to go back and fix some of those earlier stories, but thankfully I experimented on short fiction, a ton easier than novels.
In October Scott Carter and I spent a weekend teaching about 30 professional writers to put up their own work. We’re going to do something similar next fall, but not announced or date set yet. That one will be called How to Be Your Own Publisher and not only will have the lessons on how to put stuff up, but also all the publisher stuff and business stuff about being a small publisher.
And I also used to hate the term indie publishing until I realized that was exactly what we were doing. Since we have all the experience with Pulphouse, it was only logical for us to fire up a publishing company (not running it like last time) and put our backlist through that company. Small press, indie publishing. Whatever. WMG is still a publisher and will down the road take in other writers besides just me and Kris. But right now, since we helped start it, and I sort of work on my stuff through them, they are too busy to do anything else. (grin)
And no, we do not give anyone working for WMG a percentage in any way of our books. All contract work.
Yep, great post Dean. I know the master class helped me realize how much more I could write and came out with nearly five novels finished the year after and a bunch of short stories. This year I’m doing even more along with bringing everything up online. All while working a full-time day job. The fact is that I enjoy writing, the only way I’ll write less is if I don’t write.
My few pennies…
DW, being the modest gent he is, didn’t bother to mention one HUGE investment in time that he saved me and all the rest of you fellow babes-in-the-evil-woods that follow his expertise & advice …
How about the HUGE amount of time (I’m talkin’ bloomin’ YEARS) that he’s saved us by “cutting to the chase,” so to speak and simply telling us things he learned from doing it successfully for for a couple of decades!
If you count the step-by-step processes he posts (for free) on how to self-publish, his advice on mixing trad./self-publishing, his breakdowns on what cash-flow will look like (if you listen to him) … and all the secrets/short-cuts he shared and pitfalls to avoid (some he suffered and by warning us, has potentially saved us from them) – that equals YEARS & $$$ that he’s saved me (and anyone else that heeds his WoW)!!!
For me, it was more. I was confused, depressed and frustrated by the query-to-agent process and the traditional publishing route in general. I read all there was on how to go about it and only by God’s grace did I come upon a comment from Laura Resnick (actually she shredded some article on traditional publishing myths). I contacted her and she was kind enough to point me at DW.
All I can say is that after 25 years of wanting to write novels, and two years of attempting to go about it the traditional way only, literally ONE MONTH after I came to this site, I published for the first time (and for about the same amount of pennies I would have spent on a good night out with my wife (sorry Lisa, will make it up to you when I publish my 15th novel)! More than that, I now have a Cyber-Mentor (sounds like a Trek novel) in DW that will embarrass my sorry butt by reminding me every day that if I’m not writing the next novel, I’m a lazy low-life form (I added the low-life form in to inspire me… 9-))
It goes along with a plaque my dad used to have hanging in his office that read, “Selling is like shaving, if you don’t do it every day, you’re a bum!” DW helped me replace the word ‘selling’ with ‘writing.’
Thanks (again) to Laura & Dean!
g
Wow, Gerard, thanks for the kind words. My goal, and my wife’s goal, is to tell writers what we wish we would have known when we were starting out. That’s all.
Actually the saying I apply to writing is something Ben Hogan said about practicing golf. He said, “Every day that you don’t practice is one more day it’s going to take you to become good at the game.”
I took that to heart early on and like every new writer got in a hurry and jammed at my writing every day. I wanted to learn something new, some detail, every day.
“Every day I didn’t write was one more day it was going to take me to become a successful writer.”
It really is that simple.
Thanks again, Gerard. Keep writing.
First, indie publishing, indie author, indie book… I’m my own publisher, so that makes me an indie author.
I’ve nearly stopped promoting, except for a few tweaks and guest blogs. With my first book, I emailed a lot of reviewers. With my second, I emailed about 1/3 of the first. I was too busy working on my next book, Dragon Blues (had to get that in there, lol), which will be available on the 21st. I’m going to have a BIG online release party for a week, and I’ll probably guest on a few blogs if I get asked. That will be the bulk of my promotion.
I’ve noticed that the one thing most bestselling indie authors have in common is many books for sale. So, putting up good books in as fast a time as I can write them is my goal.
There’s an interesting parallel here because the subject of time isn’t really unique to writers. If you widen the lens and look at society, people claim no time for exercise, prep of real food, or saving money for purchases. Instead, they choose the easy path and ignore their health, eat crap, and use credit. I once interviewed Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix and he said something to me that still resonates. He was talking about business, but it applies to everyone and everything: “Americans love convenience and choose it over every other thing, constantly.”
Which means they avoid inconvenience over every other thing, constantly.
Effort is usually inconvenient, or involves physical or mental sweat. Which is why two-thirds of the nation is overweight or obese and the average person carries a credit card balance of $15,700 and change. Effort is also why such a small percentage of people who dream of writing actually write.
(Jeez, can you tell I do a lot of service journalism?)
This is good news, business-wise, for you, Dean, because it means there will always be a market for how-to-improve material as it applies to writing and the business of writing. The people who will never really put in the time will always seek out the material they think will help them overcome whatever it is holding them back from their goals. The same way a constant market exists for self-help material in weight-loss, exercise, career, sex & relationships, and on and on. I don’t say this to be cynical. It’s just human nature.
Dean’s right, folks. Just write, baby. Write lots.
Mike Zimmerman
Writers and their excuses. And believe me, I’ve said them all.
I just finished a novel I started eight years ago. Did it take eight years to write? No! Did I have excuses like three babies and a start up? Yes. Truth is I still had the time. Wasted it on sports, movies, and, worst of all, dreaming.
Now I’m serious. Pulled the plug on cable, quit following sports, etc. All that stuff that just gets in the way. I realize now I’m only happy when writing—the other things were only a distraction.
If a guy with a sixty hour a week job, and a house full of kids, can write, you can. Period.
Writers are their own biggest obstacles.
PV, you have a great story to tell young writers on panels. You can hold the book up and say with all honesty it took you eight years to write.
Star Trek: Hard Rain took me almost a year to write. And I have said that on convention panels when asked how long it takes me to write a book, because any real answer just makes young writers full of myths angry. It actually took me a year to write the book. I don’t say that along the way, while writing it, I wrote seven other novels as well. I just tell them the truth. Star Trek: Hard Rain took me a year to write.
See how myths get pushed along by truth. And why do us old time pros do that? Because you ain’t seen the anger if we don’t play into the myths. It is ugly and I don’t go to conventions to make people angry at me. No point in doing that. I do enough of that right here.
Dean,
The time lag you mention for traditional publishing–several years after completion of the manuscript until it sees print–is to me one of the greatest advantages of independent publishing. It’s also why, as a writer, I *love* the idea you have floated around of independently publishing a POD version and mailing a copy of it to an editor. It takes a lot of the sting out of a lengthy submission process, and when an offer does eventually come you have some data to let you know whether or not it would be wise to accept it.
I’m curious if you know of anyone for whom such a process has actually worked.
I know that several authors have been offered contracts based on self-publishing success. For some like Amanda Hocking, they were doing so incredibly well on their own that it would be stupid to accept those offers. But in all the cases I know about, publishers wanted them because they were, or at least could be, bestsellers.
Do you know of it ever happening for a midlist-level book? Someone selling at the 3 or so copies a day mark you keep using for your back of the envelope calculations, and chosen not because of phenomenal sales but because the editor liked the book and treated it the same as a traditional submission?
I don’t know at this point if pursuing a traditional publisher is worthwhile given the speed at which everything is changing, but I am also nervous about hamstringing my chances with them. Because if it takes bestseller type numbers to get that idea to work, then its kind of pointless. Because at that point you don’t need them.
Andrew, actually I know of a couple of writers who just got contacted and sold books because of their indie books. They didn’t sell their indie books, but others they had and that were not up. I have only seen one jump from indie to midlist so far, but again this is still very new in the timeline of traditional publishing. Try to remember back what everyone was talking about two plus years ago? That would be when books being publishing now were bought. So that pipeline and the writers who are trying it has yet to begin to even fill. Give it another year or so and I bet we’re hearing of a bunch.
Oh, trust me, an editor will have to like the book and treat it like a regular submission no matter what the case, unless the book is selling off the charts. And like Amanda Hocking, she’s too smart to sell to a traditional publisher at this point because she’s making too much money doing it her way.
I see no issue at doing an electronic book, then a POD and even if it isn’t selling much, use copies of the POD as part of your submission package to a traditional publisher. Zero issue. (But for heaven’s sake, stay away from agents when doing that. Just go directly to editors.)
After your last post on speed & getting stuff out, I made the decision to carve out more time “somewhere” to double my productivity. I’m normally a 600-800 word per day writer. It took a little clever manipulating of my day job projects (I’m not admitting or denying anything), but I’ve managed to meet that goal, and will more than likely exceed it should the week continue as planned. As you said, more time, not necessarily faster writing, still equals more output (I write around 2 hrs total per day/night now). I only have two books out at the moment, and would like to end the year with 2 more in that genre, a series of short stories plus a collection in another, and 1 novel in the third genre I’m writing in. I’ve made good progress on those goals already, and I’m fairly confident that even with revision/editing time I’ll reach them (barring conflicts with my editor’s time).
I do format my own work (print and ebooks), but I decided from the start that even though I could learn to do covers, I didn’t want to spend the time. So I have a cover artist do that for me, which saves me the time for writing.
I do minimal promotion – just enough to keep my books out there until I’ve built up a healthy shelf of ‘em.
In any case, just wanted to “de-lurk” and let you know these posts always inspire me to push a little farther and keep my eye on the goal. So thanks.
Dean,
By the way, a few days back someone posted on Konrath’s site something I found interesting. He said that his novel had been selling at a rate of about 80 or so a month. Then he ran a Kindle (or something else) giveaway contest and his sales jumped to close to 700 in December I believe it was.
When the giveaway contest was over, the next month his sales were down again. He didn’t give a number so I don’t know how far down but he was clearly disappointed.
So he goosed his sales, got some, but it didn’t last. Got ahead of the word of mouth feedback loop, maybe?
One of the things no one mentions consisently on other sites is length of time. (Dean does of course and Konrath is beginning to more.) Sales build up for most over timesometimes a lot of time. Even Konrath admits this though it hasn’t been on one of his success lists. And there is a tendency to want to tinker when you hit the report button and nothing comes up.
And Laura, sounds like you got up to speed pretty fast. Some of us took a bit (read: a whole lot) longer. But the sources of information were kind of scattered about. Anyway, pretty Impressive.
I’m looking forward to the discussions in a few weeks at the workshops, especially the novel one. I hadn’t really thought about the publisher bankruptcy possibility, nor did I realize that your book became their asset. That’s an important fact to factor into any deals. And while I’m not ruling out Big Publishing and will continue to send them proposals, it certainly makes me very cautious.
And if time is money… then, to return to a favorite subject of mine… The more I work without a literary agent, the better compensated my time is. I’ve sold two books this month, and since it’s an option deal, BOY, am I seeing savings and continued improvement in my income. As I’ve said before, my legal fees for the first deal with this house were a small fraction of what a 15% agency commission would have been. This time, although there may be a little tweaking to do, since we started clause-negotiations for this deal on the basis of the final contract we hammered out last time (and with which I have been very happy), my legal fees are this time a small fraction of what they were last time–whereas, if I were represented by an agent, I’d being paying a full 15% commission on this deal (and also on royalties). Even though the “effort” of negotiating this deal was a friendly ten-minute discussion in which I and my editor were very much on the same page about the immediate future, followed by receiving a contract that’s within a few phrases of where it needs to be. And for THAT… I’d have paid THOUSANDS of dollars, if this were now being handled by an agent rather than a lawyer (for whom my bill will be in the low hundreds).
In fact, since I quit the agent-author biz model, the now increases the differently between my legal fees and what I WOULD have paid in agency commission, for my book earnings since then, to over $19,000. The differene between what I’ve spent by working with a lawyer on my recent deals rather than an agent. Or, more than $6K/year that’s been going into my pocket after legal fees that WOULD HAVE gone into an agent’s pocket instead.
(And, actually, it would NOT have gone into an agent’s pocket, because the money I’ve been making in the past three years has been with books no agent ever liked or wanted to handle.)
So my time is being better compensated without an agent than with.
Laura, spot on the money, and I look back at all the years I paid an agent for nothing and just shake my head. Folks, it takes time to get past some of these myths. And some writers just never get by them. And don’t want to.
But when it comes to time and money, I get so much more done when I’m not constantly worrying about how to talk to my agent about something, calling my agent to try to get them to do something, and so on and so on. I can’t even begin to count the amount of time I have saved over the last six years not having an agent. And how much extra money I have made. The number would just stun me I’m sure if I bothered to add it up.
And that is not agent bashing, for those of you who think I agent bash. I do not. I stupid writer bash, and I was a stupid writer for way, way too long for my own comfort. And I have no idea why.
Awesome post. I loved that you included the section pointing out the time and money involved in sending stories out and out and out again to traditional markets.
I freely admit that my past marketing efforts sucked like a huge sucking thing. But now that I’m indie publishing? I actually have more stories out to traditional markets than I’ve had in a long time, plus I’m still publishing stories via my indie press.
How is that possible? Well, for one thing, with this whole writing a new story every week challenge (15 weeks and still going strong!), I have more new product to market. I also have a huge honking inventory of short stories, some of which have never seen the light of day outside of my file drawer because I sucked at traditional marketing.
And indie publishing is fun! The fun part alone means I want to spend time getting my stories out there, which translates to more time spent creating not only new fiction but brainstorming collections and series and related worlds and….
Yeah. It’s all about having enough time. But when it’s fun, it’s easier to make the time.
Annie, that’s what I am discovering, that the indie publishing is just a blast.
What Laura said about it taking time to learn formatting and so on when you first self-publish: yes. It does take time, and I found that I had to put everything else aside for a while and concentrate or it would have taken even longer. But once the first book was done (a collection) and the individual stories therein done separately, I have found now that I am working on the second book that it is a lot easier.
Preparing the first book for digital publication took a lot of time, but what took even longer for me was preparing it for POD print publication. The layout is more complicated, you have to figure in headers and footers and so on – and for print I had someone else do the cover. But I guess I’m old fashioned; I love to hold a book in my hand. And now that it’s done, it’s done – it’s on sale at Amazon and I have gone on to the next project. In my opinion the time invested in getting the book in print on CreateSpace is well worth it too.
And as far as time to write is concerned – I have a full time job and come home exhausted, and five kids too, but recently (that is, since I have been absorbing Dean and Kris’s blogs) I have realized that I can write and I have to write no matter what. Writing has to come first, period. Away with excuses!
John, a friend of mine has a couple of kids and a wife and a very exhausting day job where he is sitting at computers all day, so writing at night even after the family went to be wasn’t possible. So he started getting up at 5 in the morning, writing until 6:30, then getting everyone else up and going off to work. The in the evenings he was free to be with his family.
He did this for years, mailing out books and getting rejections, many, many times wanting to quit. Until one day things just broke and he made a large amount of money from a three book contract, lots of overseas sales, and lots of promotion. Years and years of getting up alone, early, when he was tired to make his writing come first. Wow, did it pay off. And wow, did I do anything to help him that I could, which wasn’t much. You don’t often see drive like that, and I admire it more than I can say.
Every message of Laura Resnick’s has some worthwhile information. It’s like a bonus/prize for coming to Dean’s blog for one’s daily dose of cheerleading/”pull up your socks!”
I’ve been putting up short stories the last few weeks. Nearly ten up not counting my books. Only one has sold any, but waiting to see how the rest do.
And, yeah, I have a 50+ hour a week job.
Dean wrote: “I can’t even begin to count the amount of time I have saved over the last six years not having an agent.”
And that’s certainly the case in my option deal. In addition to costing a LOT of money, my own experience with agents and option deals has also been that everything takes longer–for no good reason.
As I’ve stated before, I’ve sold the majority of my books myself during my career. So I’ve only had an agent handle an option deal on two occasions.
On the first occasion, it was an option deal with a publisher where I had broken in on my own and had previously sold 9 books on my own. Then I hired an agent, who handled the option deal for my 10th book sale there. It was a longer, more laborious process full of relays and delays (I talked to the agent, the agent talked to the editor, then got back to me, then got back to the editor, then there was an wait, then I nudged the agent, who nudged the editor, then the paperwork reached the agent, then it reached me more than a week later, etc.)… and (1) the agent didn’t improve ONE SINGLE THING in the contracts I’d been getting on my own, so the delay wasn’t because anything new, additional, or better was being negotiated on my behalf, and (2) the agent also didn’t get any more MONEY that I had been getting on my own, so by virtue of now paying 15% commission on that option deal for an agent’s services… everything was taking longer and my income went down (because now I only got 85% of the money).
On the second occasion, years later, I was at a house where the agent had placed me, with an editor who was a pal of the agent (an editor who, it soon turned out, I found it VERY difficult to work with). The agent did get me a raise on the option deal, but the option deal took (wait for it) A YEAR to occur. Uh-huh. That agented option deal took a YEAR. For 6 months after I delivered the option proposal, nothing happened. Then negotiations were unbelievably slow and sporadic, taking months (and only recommencing each time because I nagged the agent–which, since this was yet another agent prone to biting my head off, was very stressful for me, ergo MORE wasted time fretting about whether or not to contact the agent and suggest, oh, contracting the publisher again). Then when negotiations were finally concluded, it took a couple more months for the contract to arrive. To my shock, although the agent had (yes) negotiated a good raise for me… the contractual terms were actually WORSE than on my previous contract. And I’d had no warning about this. Several key clauses appeared to be basic publisher-boilerplate clauses, as if never negotiated at ALL. And the agent refused to do anything about this. I meanwhile, had by now been hoping for well over half a year to get my signing check soon and didn’t feel I could fiscally cope with further delays based on trying to get my balking, recalcitrant agent to negotiate a better contract some 8-9 months after I had sent in my option proposal. So I signed… and waited ANOTHER 3-4 months for the on-signing check to arrive… by which time it was, yep, a FULL YEAR since I had sent my OPTION proposal.
Those were my two option experiences WITH agents. UNBELIEVABLE amounts of my time wasted!
By contrast, my current option deal as an agentless writer is going quickly and smoothly, despite the conventional wisdom being that I supposedly need an -agent- to (wait for it!) protect my interests in this situation. My publisher and I agreed easily and quickly on the deal, very much on the same page about things. The contract came promptly (essentially a carbon copy of the final contract we settled on last time). I’ve reviewed it and sent one minor question to my lawyer (there’s a clause that has some new language about–what else?–digital rights). My lawyer sent me a same-day email saying she’ll review the whole contract today or Monday and respond then.
So as much as we have talked often and at length here about how much you do NOT need an agent to break into publishing or to submit and sell a book to a house where you haven’t sold before… you CERTAINLY don’t need an agent for an option deal. In fact, my own individual experience has been that enormous amounts of my time were wasted on the only two occasions I ever had literary agents handle my options (not to mention the money I wasted, too).
Again, Laura, I completely agree. A friend of mine just got through an interesting agent experiment. Same publisher, two offers at the same time, one an option book, one a brand new series under a new name. Friend kept the new series but let the agent handle the option book. With the non-agent deal, the contract came quickly, one phone call and the author negotiated the deal, new contract e-mailed, signed and returned. Check came within a month. That was about two months ago. As far as the option book the agent was doing, the author has yet to see the contract. Not kidding.
What agents do to waste time like that is just beyond me.
Dean and Laura,
I’ve read you, and many others, talking about the time it takes to format manuscripts for kindle and other ebooks, and I’m wondering if I’m deluding myself with something. I use a Mac. A few weeks back, I found the Scrivener program, which is, I believe, html based. Since reading your goals post, I decided to work on some short stories in addition to the book I started. For giggles, I went ahead and used Scrivener’s compiler, along with the Kindlemaker plugin that I downloaded from Amazon, and had the short stories kindle formatted in about 10 or 15 minutes. When I pulled them up in Kindle for Mac, they looked fine to me. Then I tried it on the first few chapters of my book. It took a few more minutes to get the table of contents down and few other things, but still in about 15 minutes I had something that worked. It’ll also compile to epub format, .doc, .pdf, and a bunch of others. I haven’t tried to actually upload anything to their site yet because I’m still working out business paperwork, and I kind of want to have a lot of put up all at once (I’ve only got two shorts right now), so I’m not sure how it’ll translate in the actual store.
I presume you’re working in Word, and probably on a PC. I think there’s a Scrivener for Windows version, but I’m not sure. My question is this: do you folks know others who have used this application, and had success with it? The Scrivener site lists a lot of authors who use it, but doesn’t go into detail about exactly what they do. After reading about the effort required to format things properly, I’m all of a sudden leery about just compiling away and then uploading. Maybe I’m missing something here, because from my perspective it seems really easy with this program. Maybe too easy?
Michael, I work on Macs, and in Word. I still write my manuscripts in the old professional manuscript format, then just format then in a new file and upload the Word file. Not sure at all what you are talking about. Can you explain that again. I us layman’s terms, as to why using something besides Word is worth all the effort? It is frighteningly easy with Word as well, once you know how to change your formatting.
There is just a slight learning curve that can be shortened a great deal by going to Smashwords and walking through their little book step-by-step.
Here is what I do in word. I use Times New Roman, 12 point. 1.5 spacing. Indents set only three characters in. No title font over 14 point. No tabs at all. No headers or footers. Save as final version, meaning turn off in the final version your track changes. That’s it. Takes me about one minute to take a manuscript formatted story and switch it over.
Thanks.
John–as a fellow writing parent, here’s a few things to experiment with when starting out to figure out which works best to get in 15-30 minutes/day of writing during workdays…
“the Mary Higgins Clark shift”–as a widow with 5 kids to raise and a daytime job, she wrote from 5am to 6am each morning before the kids woke up.
“the Sinclair Lewis commute & lunch shift”–he’d write on the train while commuting to and from work, and during his lunch break. Just be careful NOT to use company computers or supplies when writing during a lunch break. Go out to a deli or coffee shop if possible.
“the James Baldwin shift”–he’d write late at night after everyone else was going to bed or in bed.
“the harried parent sprint”–A short story (or the last 50 pages of a novel) is amenable to what I like to call the “harried writer wanting a huge block of time without kids around shift”, which is 10pm to 3am on a Friday or Saturday night. It’s hard to do more than 1 night a month like this, because over the age of thirty one tends to be a semi-zombie the next day with the kids.
I also like recommending Ralph Keyes’ THE WRITER’S BOOK OF HOPE to writers juggling parenting and work and writing. It’s a booster shot against despair to read about other writers dealing with the exact same time shortage problems. I found out about it several years back when Jennifer Crusie mentioned it as one of her favorites, bought it, and the stories of writers that Keyes shared in the book kept me going during some really bad times schedule-wise.
A little tangetial, but relevant to the last two NWP posts: Jason Dark.
This is a pseudonym for a German author, who you can read about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Dark
Interesting quotes:
“The stories (usually of around 100 pages in length) have mostly been published as pulp magazines and have now reached the astonishing number of nearly 2,000 separate novels. ”
Holy cow.
“He continues to write three or four novels ”
I’m going to assume we’re talking 100 pages for each of the novels, but that’s still a heck of a pace.
Must. Write. More.
I think the most frustrating thing is when I have some time, I sit down at the computer, and can’t think what to write. Not that I’m asking for advice on how to get around this problem. I’ve got a whole tool kit of tricks that work sometimes. It’s just that time has to work with energy and inspiration.
That said, there’s one unknown time suck that we’re eventually going to worry about, which is protecting intellectual property. I look forward to the day when, as an indie publisher, I’m doing an Amanda Hocking or whoever. And I’m also wondering how much time it’s going to take to deal with lawyers and piracy issues. That’s one advantage traditional publishers can have: lawyers.
Obviously, I wish I had this problem now (grin).
Any quick thoughts on this intellectual property protection and the indie writer? At least in the context of time?
heteromeles, let me simply say The Copyright Handbook. You need to buy a copy and look at it regularly.
Protection of intellectual property is already automatic. How much you go against someone taking your book or story and streaming it depends on how much you don’t understand the stuff. I put my stuff for free on my web site, Neil Gaiman has The Graveyard Book still up on his web site and had it there for free the entire year he was on the bestseller list.
I have hired an attorney exactly twice in my 30 plus years of writing, both took no real time. One was when SFWA stole and was using an article of mine that made me look bad. I had to have an attorney to stop that, but he really did nothing. And I got more than his fee from SFWA for the infraction.
So to answer your question. Not much, if any. Sure, there will be some theft. Who cares? Just keep your prices decent and readers will pay.
Did you know that there is a series on some obscure channel that is set in a bar where the bartender and regulars help people solve problems by time travel? Just started. Sounds familiar, huh, if you have been reading my jukebox stories over the last twenty-five years. Shrug, I got more to write, not my issue. When someone uses a time-traveling jukebox set in a bar with the bartender helping people, then I might hire an attorney.
Shit happens in this business. Shit happens in any business. As an almost attorney, but not one, I can tell you that hiring an attorney is no big deal. You do when you need one, you don’t otherwise. And worrying about people taking something is just silly.
One thing professional writers do is band together on e-mail lists. We have numbers of powerful e-mail lists and when someone reports a major site taking our work, a bunch of us and a bunch of corporate attorneys descend on them and shut them down, often within hours. It’s sort of fun to watch. We just did that to some poor guy on eBay the other day.
Dean,
I heard about this program from a writing podcast, and decided to check it out after watching some of the video tutorials on the developer’s site. When you start a new project on it, it has templates for short stories, novels, scripts, poems, non-fiction, and a bunch more, that are (from what I can gather from the research I’ve done about it) already laid out in the standard format. It makes handles individual scenes, chapters, etc separately so you can move them around or whatever as you wish. It’s also got a compiler feature, that will take all your various pieces and put them together in any of the formats it can support. Clearly for you, with all your practice, it might not be necessary. But for a guy like me, who’s just starting to learn how all this stuff works, it looks awesome. I’m probably not explaining it very well. The link’s here:
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
I’m really just concerned about whether it actually does the compiling correctly. I guess if you’ve never heard of it, that says something.
Never heard of it, Michael, and it sounds frightening to an individual voice. Last thing I want is a computer programmer (no offense meant) in my fiction writing. I don’t want anyone in there, which is why I turn off grammar and spell-checkers as well. Nothing to get in the way of the flow of creative side of my brain, nothing to remind it there are “right” ways of doing things as prescribed by some program. I’d run, not walk from something like that. It’s designed for writers who think there are short cuts to learning how to write. There just aren’t.
Imagine playing a violin solo on stage with a machine doing all the bow work. Yeah, that’s going to be art all right. (grin)
Howdy Dean and friends, I talked about Dean and the recent post on “Speed” (Feb. 5th) as we discussed Heinlein’s rules and rewriting in the most recent episode of the Adventures in SciFi Publishing podcast. That talk starts around minute 6 of the podcast.
Dean, I would comment on this post (it was great), but after reading it, now I need to go write.
Amazing post as usual, Dean. =) I love the boost I get reading this blog. Thank you.
Re: Scrivener. I tried it during the Windows Beta they did during NaNoWriMo. It’s not bad. It’s not what you’re worried about – programmer stuff stifling creativity. It’s more like a set of tools handed to the author to help with outlining, shuffling scenes around, and such. And it does have a good epub export (in the Mac version, anyway – it’s not in the PC beta yet).
It’s not really my cup of tea. I prefer to just use a regular word processor (used OpenOffice for years, swapped to LibreOffice since I think that will be the OpenOffice branch to follow now that O.O was bought, and playing with the free MS Word to see if I want to buy that instead). I do my outlining, when I use them, on a paper notebook. And O.O/L.O./Word all export ebooks just fine now, too.
But Scrivener isn’t BAD software, not like some of the “writing packages” I’ve seen. It doesn’t do things for you, just hands you tools to play with. No shortcuts – just imagine taking your typewriter, post-it notes/index cards, and notebook, stacking them all into one software package and integrating them together. They aren’t tools I need or want, but other folks have been quite happy with them.
For the record, Scrivener has nothing to do with WHAT you write. It doesn’t make suggestions (unless you have the spellchecking turned on). It just makes outputting the final draft in multiple standard formats — from rtf, to pdf, to epub — available with basically a couple of clicks of the mouse. It also lets you rearrange your text more simply than Word does because you can grab an entire scene without having to manually select all the text and drag-and-drop it elsewhere.
It has multiple tools available so writers *can* use it to aid them in their plotting — Scott Westerfeld, for example puts “stamps” on each of the index cards representing different scenes, indicating whether it represents tension, action, or status quo, so he can make sure he’s pacing the story the way he wants to, at a single glance. But that’s not something the program does FOR him, it’s something he does WITH the program.
Scrivener is a tool, a software program used for writing and formatting, just like Word, but with more flexibility on the output formats. It doesn’t do the writing, any more than Word does.
Michael: I use Scrivener too, and while I haven’t tried the Kindle export yet, I have heard about it with no complaints. I follow Scrivener (@ScrivenerApp) on Twitter and they linked a while ago to a blog post raving about how easy the Kindle export was and how well it worked. Now obviously they’re not going to link to any blog posts complaining about it, but it was great for at least one person!
Dean, frankly, I’m surprised at you! I won’t try to describe Scrivener since Kevin did a good job of it, and I certainly won’t try to persuade you to try it, but I’m surprised that you would make assumptions and dismiss writing-related software so easily. Aren’t you the one always saying that writers should keep up with the technology?
Scrivener isn’t for everybody, of course (what is?) but it works really well for some people, including me. I didn’t make any changes to work with Scrivener–I chose it because it works so well with the writing process I already had. My writing process has evolved since then to take advantage of Scrivener’s capabilities better, but I know my writing process would have evolved regardless of what program I was using, and the changes have made me a better and faster writer.
Kaitlyn and Erin and Michael, you are forgetting something about me. I don’t rewrite. And at the moment I don’t need to output anything in ePub. All I had heard about Scrivener was that it was another of those programs that help people format, that give suggestions, that sort of thing. You know the write-a-story-in-five-easy-steps program. I have never looked at it. And have no reason to look at it.
And why would I ever want to rearrange text? Sounds like rewriting to me.
Sorry if my comments insulted you Scrivener users. Didn’t mean to.
Dean, I’m not forgetting that you don’t rewrite. (Did I say anything about rewriting?) Scrivener is not necessarily for rewriting; it can make rewriting easier, sure, but it also makes keeping track of scenes and other things easier for me.
Sorry for the Scrivener pile-on. I’m not offended. I just wanted to answer Michael’s question and prevent any spread of false information. I don’t know who told you that Scrivener is a “write-a-story-in-five-easy-steps” program (and I’ve definitely heard of those things too, never understood the point) but that is–to borrow one of your favorite phrases–flat wrong
Okay, Kaitlyn, guess I am just dense tonight, but why would I want to keep track of scenes??? Or anything else?? Sure, in a series, such as Poker Boy or the Jukebox Stories or in my thriller series, I do a bible to help me keep track of names and dates and such. But why would I keep track of scenes? Or even need something like that. Again, that smells of helping a writer rewrite tool. Again, just don’t understand what is the point of Scrivener. You are telling me it’s a word processing program, right? That can output different formats, right? Just like Word. Right? Now I have troubles like everyone with Word, but why would I switch to another word-processing program? What makes this so different than Word? Explain that to me. And don’t use any tool that a writer can use to rewrite or mess with their story. I can copy and paste and cut and paste just fine in Word. So someone explain the point. Other than a program that goes directly at Word.
Dean, what do you think about Heinlein’s rule #3 in an indie publishing environment where you don’t need to have editors approve your stories? What takes the place of “editorial order?” Something else, right?
I think, basically, it’s whatever freelance editors you hire, but now we have to be the ones to make sure there’s a freelance editor in place to recommend changes–not that you’d want to follow every suggestion a freelance editor makes, obviously.
Moses? I am lost. Why would you hire a freelance editor? Do you not trust your own skill and your first reader’s skill at finding typos?
Heinlein’s Rule #3 is DO NOT REWRITE UNLESS TO EDITORIAL DEMAND. Not all editors make you rewrite, and it certainly isn’t a check and balance and trust thing with traditional publishing going the way it is going. Most stories don’t need any more than copyediting. And minor copyediting at that for the most part once you get past the early stages of learning how to be a professional writer.
So you question makes no sense to me, honestly. Try it again with different words and maybe my think skull might catch a clue. (grin)
Dean,
I wasn’t insulted. I was concerned. I read Laura’s comment about how long it took her to get the formatting down. Unless I’m mistaken, you had a similar learning curve. Other writers have, on their blogs, painted a similar picture. Then I, the newbie, with this fairly cool little program, got an output that seemed to work in 10 or 15 minutes on my first try, and now, after a three or four more tries, in under a minute. Clearly, I HAD to be missing something. It couldn’t be that easy, if all you professionals had such a learning curve to follow. You know the old saying: if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. I asked because I wanted to know if I was missing some poison pill or something. Based on the last few comments, I guess not.
So no worries. Thanks.
Dean, the only other reason that I could see to use Scrivener besides rewriting that I can see is if you’re like me and don’t write in a linear fashion.
For instance, for the novel that I’m working on right now I have separate folders set up for each of the viewpoint characters and I put new scenes in the appropriate folders. I do this until the story takes shape and I put things together in the manner that feels right. Sometimes that’s linear. Other times? Not so much.
I guess this could get confusing for other people but it doesn’t for me. Also, I don’t write an outline before I write but I keep one while I write.
Maybe some people get confused and need software to help them? I just use a notebook but to each their own.
Dean, I guess you are dense tonight because I am not telling you that you need to keep track of scenes! The only thing I’m trying to tell you about Scrivener is that it’s not what you thought it is. It’s just a word processing program with a different structure that works for some people.
I am definitely not telling you to switch to another word-processing program. You’re happy with your system so I would never ask you to do anything different. I just wanted to come to the defense of my favorite program because you were saying you thought it was one thing, when it’s really another. I just don’t want anyone who might be interested, or might just be looking for a different word processing program, to get the wrong idea.
All right, I gave up and went and took a 15 minute tutorial on Scrivner. I will say this. If I ever am stupid enough to go back and work for Hollywood, I’ll get this thing for the script feature alone.
And for those of you who outline and love to rewrite, this might be a program worth looking at, I agree.
For me, just using it would add in dozens of steps I don’t have at the moment with every story. But again, that’s me. It is a great rewriting and editing tool program. And outlining.
Way, way to critical brain for me. But now I at least understand what you all are talking about. Thanks for forcing me to take a look at it.
Now, if writers can’t send in a professional looking manuscript to an editor, there is something wrong with them. (grin) There’s a program for that now. Who would have thought.
Thank you. I read very few blogs. I find most are a waste of time and I devote as much time as I can to my writing.
But you got me. You offer an interesting and informative perspective on the industry and I like your direct, no b.s. style. I look forward to reading more.
Enough of this already. I have characters waiting …
steven j. daniels
Curious about it after reading this discussion, I went and did the 15 minute intro tutorial, too.
There are definitely features about Scrivener, as portrayed in the tutorial, that I like. One being the binder with all research notes and multi-media files organized in one place, right next to the software project window. I would find that very useful. I can also see how this would be a very good software for certain types of projects, such as screenwriting or (one that pops into my head, as an enthusiastic amateur cook) writing a cookbook–this software would be a great way to organize recipe files and section of a cookbook.
For that reason, i.e. things I might someday to OTHER THAN writing novels, short stories, and articles, I’ve bookmarked the site, since $45 strikes me as a very reasonable price for this software, and I can definitely see potential uses for it.
OTOH, its tools and processes aren’t compatible with how I write novels, short stories, and articles, which is what I spend the vast majority (nearly all) of my writing time doing. One key component, for example, is that “Scrivener doesn’t think in terms of pages.” Well, I do. It’s how I learned to write. FUNDAMENTALLY how I learned to write, back in the old TYPEWRITER AND PAPER days (yes, I go back that far–but I was a zygote at the start of my career). And it is STILL how I write.
One of the first things I do in ANY word processing document is turn on the “page count” function, because I pace myself in terms of pages (which I have been formatting -exactly- the same for 24 years, across a variety of technologies). This is -particularly- true of novels, where page count gives me a sense of how a chapter is pacing, and whether I need to cut it, expand it, split it, etc.
I also -like- seeing my whole 100K-word document open in one place. This again relates to how I learned to pace fiction and create story flow, stagger or juxtapose my scenes, create tension, measure story logic, etc. Because that’s how I learned and how I work, in a habit developed and cemented over the course of writing more than 2,000,000 published words, I would just find it confusing and frustrating to break up my book into separate documents of scenes and chapters.
But, as I said, if I ever write a cookbook or certain other types of many-short-pieces-combined book, I can definitely see how this would be useful. Something like this would also be useful for some projects I’m doing in self-publishing wherein I’m collating and assembling short stories and articles into collected volumes–which is a nuisance in MS Word. So I’ve bookmarked the site with a possible view to purchasing the sofware to make such projects more convenient to work on.
But for novels? This just isn’t how I work. It’s not how I learned to write a story 24 years ago, and not how I have been improving my craft ever since. If someone starts out differently, learns differently, constructs a story differently than I do, then this may be a great tool for them. But a tool has to suit the writer, or it’s not useful.
Laura, I did the same thing, went to Scrivener and did the tutorial. And like you, but for different reasons, it’s just not the way I write, and I also learned on a typewriter. But I honestly think the tool would be good for a nonfiction book. So the Scrivener believers won me over that much. (grin)
I did my ramp-up on short fiction for the publishing side. Lots and lots of short stories, and then worked my way into doing a few collections with all the hyperlinks and such. Now doing the novels, still mixed with short stories. I can format my manuscript formatted in Word document of a challenge short story and launch it to all three major places in less than 15 minutes, and that includes the filling out the forms and such on Kindle, Pubit, and Smashwords. Novels on the other hand are another task. Just the hyperlinking of chapters to the table of contents takes dull time.
Some of you on books might want to do what WMG has started to do on books. A short table of contents up front, then the long one in the back out of reading and sampling way. The short one up front says simply this:
Start Reading
Table of Contents
Copyright Information
About the Author
Start reading is linked to opening of book, the other three are linked to the stuff in the back of the book. Just a thought.
Michael, I’ve learned to format in Mobi and ePub using ZappTek’s Legend Maker.
It was the learning curve which was the problem, since I am very nearly a technophobe. Once I got through that first book, the second was easier. Since getting through that second book, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh projects I converted were even easier. The formatting takes a bit of time and is painstaking, but now it’s becoming routine for me and can be squeezed into my schedule pretty easily. And once the formatting prep is done, the conversion is very quick.
The long part of the process for me now is proofreading MSs to prep them for reissue, since I don’t have the copy edited version of my old MSs (and also like to do a light line-edit on projects that are by now years old). Next up in my e-venture, I’ve got a trilogy of more than 700,000 words to proofread. Gack.
Okay, I have to be missing something very, very large that is driving me crazy. Unless you are selling books off your own web site direct to readers, why would anyone need to format in Mobi and ePub formats? I am confused, clearly. I understand both formats and what they are used for. I just don’t understand why anyone does it. So what am I missing?
Michael wrote: “I went ahead and used Scrivener’s compiler, along with the Kindlemaker plugin that I downloaded from Amazon, and had the short stories kindle formatted in about 10 or 15 minutes. ”
In that case, it doesn’t sound like this necessarily works faster than what I’m using. I have formatted one short story for “single” release, a 6,000-word romantic-comedy short story that doesn’t “go” themetically with any of the short-fiction collections I’m collating.
The single story took me 5-10 minutes to format.
For my first-ever project, which took me about two days (much of which time was because I was BRAND NEW to this, of course, reading the instructions for the first time as I went along and making mistakes), I was formatting:
A 75,000-word nonfiction book with about 25 chapters with individual chapter headings, some of which chapters had internal formatting (ex. block quotes with different margins and highlighted in bold-text), a table of contents, extensive backmattter (free sample text from about 5 of my books, preceded by an internal highlighted-links pages listing the titles, in addition to their listing in the ToC; author bio and photo; ackhowledgements), and–because what is life without a CHALLEGE–decorative flourishes throughout the book to make the text look professional/designed (rather than like a manuscript).
So, yes, if I had spent two full days and much hair-tearing learning to format and convert a short story for the first time, probably I would be on the wrong track. But I worked on something more complicated than that. My mistake, I realize in looking back, is that I did NOT start with a single story! I started with a project that was way to complicated for a first-time effort, so getting it right was a baptism of fire!
However, by doing it that way, I sure learned a LOT early on in my tech process…
Dean wrote: “Unless you are selling books off your own web site direct to readers, why would anyone need to format in Mobi and ePub formats? ”
So I can upload my ebooks to Amazon/Kindle (which uses Mobi format) and BN/Nook and various other e-stores (ex. Kobo, iBooks, Sony) which use ePub format.
Laura, I upload in Word and they convert them just fine. On all three sites. That’s why I am wondering what I am missing.
The results of their work aren’t as good as the results I want.
Laura, unless I am mistaken, you still have to upload the Mobi file to Kindle, right? And they still put it up on their site, right? So you doing the conversion is the only difference. Right? Or am I still missing something? Because I can go check the Mobi file after the Kindle conversion just fine and often do to make sure nothing messed up at that stage.
What I am finding interesting is the download from the main site to each person’s kindle. Lots of connections and wireless networks. A simple blip in a wireless network introduces weirdness in a Kindle file.
So I have seen the same story downloaded that has a paragraphing glitch in one person’s Kindle and no glitch in the next person’s Kindle and no glitch showing in the main file on Kindle site.
I think we all forget there are lots of places along the way that a file can get corrupted. In fact, when I think about it, I am amazed files make it through as clean as most do.
But I sure don’t see how starting with a Mobi file on your computer or having Amazon do the conversion makes any difference. That’s where I am lost. Sorry for being dense.
Dean wrote, “What I am finding interesting is the download from the main site to each person’s kindle. Lots of connections and wireless networks. A simple blip in a wireless network introduces weirdness in a Kindle file.”
Is that so! Makes sense when I think about it. Now I am less puzzled about the weird paragraphing issues I’ve had with a very few Kindle books. Heh. Thanks for explaining that random thing for me, Dean!
This is certainly food for thought. I’ve started this process in the last few weeks. Just keep writing. I found I was complaining about not having time to write, but I was really just pushing it aside. Once I got into a groove, I’ve found I’m writing a lot, and I mean a lot more than before. Thanks so much for your insightful posts on the New World of Publishing.
Hi, Dean.
I skipped to the end without reading all the comments because you mentioned, as something which takes up your time, going to the post office, so I thought I’d share a tip. (Imagine a beginner like me, sharing a tip with you!!)
You don’t have to go to the post office. Check out stamps.com I started using it with my legal practice. I haven’t been to a post office in years, and I cannot tell you how much TIME I save.
The other thing you need, in addition to subscribing to stamps.com is a good postal scale from the post office (the one you get free for joining is worthless). The scale costs about 50 bucks.
Cheers! (Now I’ll scroll back up to read all the comments)