It has been a little while since I posted here, so I thought I should stroke out a few words to prove that I still live and breathe. The process of preparing By the Light: A Novel of Serial Homicide for publication as a Kindle e-book has begun.
The first step was to listen to the current manuscript all the way through on my Kindle. It was not the first time I have listened to it. I did it the first time back in February. Listening to one's own work of novel length is an interesting experience, one I enjoyed immensely. This time through I was listening with an ear for planning a strategy to rewrite the parts I want to change. It was still enjoyable but not as much.
My New York editor, Hillary, suggested two significant changes in the storyline. The read-through was fruitful, as I was able to envision how I wanted to implement her suggestions.
She also suggested a name change for one of the key characters. Her premise was that readers might not understand the intended pronunciation from the spelling I used, so I changed the spelling. A singular change for this character was not sufficient. Her first name is Irish, as is her maiden name. Her married name was not Irish. It is now, as I decided that a good Irish first name deserved a fitting Irish last name. It seems to be fashionable to go green these days, so I did.
A very talented author from upstate New York, Chris, told me that my use of Bond as the surname of the lead male character would rub 007 fans the wrong way. Since he is just such a fan, I took his advice and changed the name.
Once I was down in the ditch with all of the names, I decided to change a few for my own reasons. There was one minor character who I originally called Betsy. I changed her name to Carrie as a nod to my mom's sister, who passed away recently, and to my paternal grandmother. Each of them had two names, and both of them primarily used their other name rather than Carrie. Regardless, they were in my heart when I made this change.
A key supporting character was originally named Calvin, Cal for short. When Kindle reads to you in text-to-speech mode and Cal's name occurs at the end of a sentence terminated with a period, Kindle says "California," mistakenly thinking that Cal-period is an abbreviation for the Golden State. Calvin/Cal has been changed to Randall/Rand. Using the find and replace functions in Word was a piece of cake for all of my other name changes. Cal was different. It required case sensitivity to avoid turning a word like magical into magirand. I started out with Cal followed by a space, but that didn't take care of everything. It was necessary to also find Cal followed by periods, commas, apostrophes, and question marks. Ultimately, I balanced back to all 138 Cal usages in the manuscript.
The reading device has some other amusing habits. For instance, if you write "mmmmm" as an expression of enjoyment of a morsel of food, Kindle likes to say, "em em em em em." There are others that are sometimes hard to avoid. The generic Ms. that can do double duty for either Miss or Mrs. reminds Kindle of milliseconds, and that brings to mind another oddity. If you refer to a woman as Miss at sentence end with a pesky period behind it, Kindle likes to talk about the Magnolia State.
All of these name changes were really the easy part. I am a little over a third of the way through the final polish and rewrite process. After that, I'll do another read of my own. Additionally, some of my original readers have volunteered to read the modified novel. I'm honored that they want to do that and will probably take some of them up on their offers.
Out there in the wings, my artist daughter, Erin, is working on sketches for my cover art. I'm looking forward to seeing what she creates for me. Her talent can only be a help to her old dad.
I'm getting excited about going public with my story and anxious to see how Kindle readers will review it. Soon. Soon. My fingers will be so crossed.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Elated About E-Books
After I finished writing By the Light: A Novel of Serial Homicide, I embarked on an odyssey. No longer would I need to settle on a traditional hobby by becoming a numismatist or a philatelist. The former is the study or collection of coins and other forms of money, while the latter is the study or collection of stamps. I’m not so sure about the second one. Say it out loud. Doesn’t it sound less like it is about stamps and more like it is about naughty sex? Anyway, trying to persuade literary agents to crash the gates of publishing on my behalf became my new hobby, pastime, obsession, and curse. Over time, I sent out about 80 query letters. Four of the agents requested my complete manuscript. The first such request came from the Sandra Dykstra Agency, which represents Amy Tan of Joy Luck Club fame. I’ve read that only five query letters in 200 prompts a full read. Another dozen or so of my letters yielded requests for partials of 50 or more pages. I’ve read that if you are not getting positive results from 20 percent of your query letters, you need to work on you querying skills. Though I am happy with my number of full requests and percentage of play, I still do not have a professional advocate to champion my product to the Grand Poobahs of publishing.
In most areas of life, neophytes are naïve and idealized. When I was a young college student during the Vietnam era, I had my liberal leanings. It was the liberals who were most vocal about ending the Asian war. I was in favor of that happening before Country Joe and the Fish’s "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag” became less about being an entertaining protest song and more about being my swansong. My foray into the publishing world also had a decidedly idealized perspective. People would ask me why I didn’t self publish. I would answer that I did not want pay my own freight through a vanity press. Affirmation from an agent and a publisher was the brass ring. I wanted to be told that the product of my pen is worthy, and I wanted to be told by people who make their living “worthifying” written works. Nothing else would do.
Make no mistake about it. I do not regret the process as I have experienced it. When I write posts for this blog, I enjoy myself. There are lots of agents, editors, writers, educators, and others who also blog, and I’ve selected a stable of them whose commentary is a source of daily enjoyment, enlightenment, and inspiration. From time to time, I’m compelled to contribute comments to their daily installments. Writing tweets for Twitter and six-word memoirs at Smith Magazine are other forms of marrying creativity and words. Honing my skills in writing query letters, as with almost all writing I’ve done in my life, has been a pleasurable learning experience.
This brings you up to date with how I got to this moment, this moment of discovering that the world has changed. This change is a publishing world in a state of flux the likes of which has not been seen since Guttenberg invented his printing press. E-book is change’s name. Amazon and Kindle, Barnes & Noble and Nook, the Sony Reader, and !!!boom!!! Apple and iPad are fueling the metamorphosis. I am poised to benefit from the transformation, poised with a book to be published behind the letter e and a hyphen.
One of the agents whose blog I read religiously is Nathan Bransford. He also occasionally writes for The Huffington Post. The title of one of his HuffPo contributions was “The Rejection Letter of the Future Will Be Silence (And Why This Is a Good Thing).” That post spoke of the paradigm of heretofore, to filter and then publish. In contrast, it considered a paradigm borrowed from the Reverend Leroy Jenkin’s (Flip Wilson) “Church of What’s Happening Now.” To publish and then filter is the new gospel. In other words, agents and publishers attempt to identify the works that have literary or commercial legs and publish them. In the new digital world, authors can self publish an e-book through Amazon’s Kindle Store and other outlets for nothing or close to it, and the public can either say “yes, I’ll buy that” or dispatch a rejection in the form of silence. Of course, there will still be hardbacks and paperbacks. Otherwise, Nathan would not be saying the future he described is a good thing, what with him being an agent and all. It does appear that there will be room for additional players in the game.
Other recent articles and posts that I have read tell of a very near future in which only 20 percent of books will be sold in brick-and-mortar outlets. Accounting for this includes the vast majority of physical books being sold through the Web and e-books usurping a substantial share of the book market. Jeff Bezos, the founder and head of Amazon, recently said that e-books have outsold hardbacks nearly three to two in the last three months and almost two to one in the last month at amazon.com. In one of his posts, Bransford points out that the price of and reading experience from e-readers will continue to improve in leaps and bounds, and he predicts that this will only fuel the fire for e-books.
Another source of recent information that has helped me form my thoughts about self-publishing by e-book is material posted by J.A. Konrath in his blog, “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.” He is the author of an array of print books and e-books, including a series of detective novels featuring Lt. Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels of the Chicago Police Department. All of the books in the series have cocktail names, such as Whiskey Sour. Konrath details his experience with offering his print books as e-books, as well as books he wrote specifically as e-books, at Amazon’s Kindle Store. According to him, the difference between what an author earns for each $25.00 ($2.50) hardback sold compared to the author’s share for each e-book sold at $2.99 ($2.04) under the new pricing model adopted by Amazon’s Kindle Store is 46 cents.
I already believe and Konrath specifically mentions that if a book is not good enough it will get bad reviews and will not sell. That’s okay by me. To get feedback from readers will be a welcome change from getting rejection letters from agents. Until someone finally agrees to represent you, even full reads ultimately result in a rejection. I understand, even when they’ve asked for a complete manuscript or a substantial partial, agents generally do not have time to provide meaningful feedback. Most of them barely have time to simply read all of the query letters they receive. If I have missed my guess and readers blow my story out of the water, I’ll take heed of their comments, remove the e-book from the market, and do what I’m already doing: write new stuff with benefit of all that I have learned.
So, with a little tweaking here and there, I plan to soon put that baby out there. My hope is that a few folks will like it and that I can make some pocket change. I won’t be allowing vanity to jeopardize my pocketbook. Rather I’ll be offering readers a story for a reasonable price. Another neat thing makes this exciting for me is that I have my artist daughter, Erin, working on cover art for me. It is our first creative collaboration. It is bound to bring me luck. We’ll see how it goes.
In most areas of life, neophytes are naïve and idealized. When I was a young college student during the Vietnam era, I had my liberal leanings. It was the liberals who were most vocal about ending the Asian war. I was in favor of that happening before Country Joe and the Fish’s "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag” became less about being an entertaining protest song and more about being my swansong. My foray into the publishing world also had a decidedly idealized perspective. People would ask me why I didn’t self publish. I would answer that I did not want pay my own freight through a vanity press. Affirmation from an agent and a publisher was the brass ring. I wanted to be told that the product of my pen is worthy, and I wanted to be told by people who make their living “worthifying” written works. Nothing else would do.
Make no mistake about it. I do not regret the process as I have experienced it. When I write posts for this blog, I enjoy myself. There are lots of agents, editors, writers, educators, and others who also blog, and I’ve selected a stable of them whose commentary is a source of daily enjoyment, enlightenment, and inspiration. From time to time, I’m compelled to contribute comments to their daily installments. Writing tweets for Twitter and six-word memoirs at Smith Magazine are other forms of marrying creativity and words. Honing my skills in writing query letters, as with almost all writing I’ve done in my life, has been a pleasurable learning experience.
This brings you up to date with how I got to this moment, this moment of discovering that the world has changed. This change is a publishing world in a state of flux the likes of which has not been seen since Guttenberg invented his printing press. E-book is change’s name. Amazon and Kindle, Barnes & Noble and Nook, the Sony Reader, and !!!boom!!! Apple and iPad are fueling the metamorphosis. I am poised to benefit from the transformation, poised with a book to be published behind the letter e and a hyphen.
One of the agents whose blog I read religiously is Nathan Bransford. He also occasionally writes for The Huffington Post. The title of one of his HuffPo contributions was “The Rejection Letter of the Future Will Be Silence (And Why This Is a Good Thing).” That post spoke of the paradigm of heretofore, to filter and then publish. In contrast, it considered a paradigm borrowed from the Reverend Leroy Jenkin’s (Flip Wilson) “Church of What’s Happening Now.” To publish and then filter is the new gospel. In other words, agents and publishers attempt to identify the works that have literary or commercial legs and publish them. In the new digital world, authors can self publish an e-book through Amazon’s Kindle Store and other outlets for nothing or close to it, and the public can either say “yes, I’ll buy that” or dispatch a rejection in the form of silence. Of course, there will still be hardbacks and paperbacks. Otherwise, Nathan would not be saying the future he described is a good thing, what with him being an agent and all. It does appear that there will be room for additional players in the game.
Other recent articles and posts that I have read tell of a very near future in which only 20 percent of books will be sold in brick-and-mortar outlets. Accounting for this includes the vast majority of physical books being sold through the Web and e-books usurping a substantial share of the book market. Jeff Bezos, the founder and head of Amazon, recently said that e-books have outsold hardbacks nearly three to two in the last three months and almost two to one in the last month at amazon.com. In one of his posts, Bransford points out that the price of and reading experience from e-readers will continue to improve in leaps and bounds, and he predicts that this will only fuel the fire for e-books.
Another source of recent information that has helped me form my thoughts about self-publishing by e-book is material posted by J.A. Konrath in his blog, “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.” He is the author of an array of print books and e-books, including a series of detective novels featuring Lt. Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels of the Chicago Police Department. All of the books in the series have cocktail names, such as Whiskey Sour. Konrath details his experience with offering his print books as e-books, as well as books he wrote specifically as e-books, at Amazon’s Kindle Store. According to him, the difference between what an author earns for each $25.00 ($2.50) hardback sold compared to the author’s share for each e-book sold at $2.99 ($2.04) under the new pricing model adopted by Amazon’s Kindle Store is 46 cents.
I already believe and Konrath specifically mentions that if a book is not good enough it will get bad reviews and will not sell. That’s okay by me. To get feedback from readers will be a welcome change from getting rejection letters from agents. Until someone finally agrees to represent you, even full reads ultimately result in a rejection. I understand, even when they’ve asked for a complete manuscript or a substantial partial, agents generally do not have time to provide meaningful feedback. Most of them barely have time to simply read all of the query letters they receive. If I have missed my guess and readers blow my story out of the water, I’ll take heed of their comments, remove the e-book from the market, and do what I’m already doing: write new stuff with benefit of all that I have learned.
So, with a little tweaking here and there, I plan to soon put that baby out there. My hope is that a few folks will like it and that I can make some pocket change. I won’t be allowing vanity to jeopardize my pocketbook. Rather I’ll be offering readers a story for a reasonable price. Another neat thing makes this exciting for me is that I have my artist daughter, Erin, working on cover art for me. It is our first creative collaboration. It is bound to bring me luck. We’ll see how it goes.
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