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Hello, new writers: do not pay to be published

November 20, 2009 by Wendy

So, there’s been massive blow-up over in romance writing world, as evidenced by the discussion at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books about the new Harlequin Horizons venture. It hit a nerve – it now has over 500 comments. The upshot is that Harlequin have started up a vanity press (not a self-publishing venture) and have now been dumped off the RWA list of recognised publishers. That’s pretty damn major.

I’m not a romance writer (nor a traditionally published writer), nor do I read romance much, so one part of me is merely watching the whole shebang with raised eyebrows. But I’m not dumb enough to think this can’t spread to other genres. Writers Weekly has been discussing the ever-lower rates offered to freelancers (insultingly low rates); writers’ work is being devalued and if other publishers see this make profit for Harlequin they may well also decide to “monetize their slush-pile”, as one commenter put it.

At least two commenters on that discussion said they had thought, before reading other people’s explanations, that they had to pay to get published.

Good God! I know I’ve said in the past on this blog that you shouldn’t expect millions from writing, but nor should you expect to pay out big bucks. If you too think you have to pay to get published but don’t want to read 500 comments to work out otherwise, here’s a summary:
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Book Giveaway: cover snark

November 16, 2009 by Wendy

It’s a dull old Monday morning, so I thought I would liven it up with a book contest and the chance for funny people to show off their funny skills.

Here’s the cover of my latest release, The Frog Prince’s Daughters.
Frog cover

And below the jump is the mock-up of the cover originally proposed by my publisher before he got hit by a clue-by-four:
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Rejecting genre fiction vs growing up

November 12, 2009 by Wendy

An article in the Guardian says, don’t patronise popular fiction by women. Patronise in the negative sense, not the positive sense.

The attitude talked about here, where women will read books aimed at women OR men, whereas men refuse to even try books written by or marketed to women, is so common as to be systematic. Little girls will happily read books with a male or female narrator/main character; little boys want male leads. Women will respond to ads with voice-overs by men or by women; men will ignore ads voiced by women (unless it’s an extremely sultry voice implying super hotness in an ad for alcohol). Men will get quite shitty with and contradict their GPS navigation system when the voice is female. I am not kidding. They did a study or something.

It’s not so much the automatic rejection, ‘that’s woman-focused, that’s not for me’ – marketing is about putting things into little boxes to reach who you think will buy it (and women buy books for themselves and others, and if men are sick of ‘chick-lit’ dominating the marketplace, they need to starting buying more books themselves). If you can’t bend your mind past the marketing to assess a product on its merits, that’s your issue. And on the other hand, if you’re not interested in a genre, no-one is forcing you to either read it or go online and whine about it.

It’s more the main thrust of the article, that the thought continues, ‘that’s woman-focused, that’s not for me…and therefore it’s crap’. If it’s not aimed at men, it must be trivial and shallow. It’s the same across the board, where women ‘gossip’ but men talk, and women ‘fritter’ their money away on shoes and beauty magazines and I don’t know, anything women like to buy, but men…what, invest in computer games and porn magazines?

So reading about women’s relationships and working life challenges is an empty, shallow pursuit, but reading about men’s relationships and working life challenges is worthy literature or high-brow humour or whatever. (Note: I tend not to read either genre as get bored with real-world settings, but if I avoid one like the plague it’s yet another literary recounting of a middle-aged man having a crisis at work and cheating on his wife).

It’s not breaking any new ground here to say women writers get dismissed as serious literature. And the fact that people reject and disparage a whole genre is hardly surprising (I’m over here in the SF/F ghetto myself, as a reader and a writer). It would just be nice if people could get past the ‘that’s different to my tastes, therefore it cannot be good’ mentality. Grow up, people.

Posted in The writing life, Writing news | Tagged , | 7 Comments »

A giant company named Virago…

November 9, 2009 by Wendy

…wants to automatically replace words in books with synonyms.

Amazon (for which Virago is a perfectly acceptable synonym, both having at least one sense referring to a large, agressive woman) has patented a ‘System and Method for Marking Content’. This “programmatically” substitutes synonyms into (electronic) text like books, reviews, news articles etc so that they can trace back the source of any illegally distributed material. I assume electronic text, anyway, unless they’re cracking down on the dastardly lending-printed-book-to-friend black market.

This is similar to the random pattern of dots overlayed on cinema reels to identify which specific reel was the one set loose as an illegal DVD copy or which cinema management was slack on spotting recording devices, except that instead of changing the movie-goer’s experience by irritating them with dots, they change the movie-goer’s experience by splicing in minute scene alterations – without even subjecting the process to a human eye to see just how annoying and wrong the change is.

Would a reasonable human say virago is an acceptable substitute for amazon? No, no way – the words may have the same meaning by a dictionary match, if you go down the list of meanings for each far enough, but they have substantially different senses in most people’s minds. Such a substitution would change the way the character so described is perceived.

Screw it, I shouldn’t even have to give an example of why this is so bad. I’m not making the claim that I choose every single word in my books with conscious care, but I certainly pay attention to nuances of meanings and to the rhythm of the sentences, and Virago (and not the perfectly well-behaved publishing imprint either) is tromping all over that with this system.

The patent also includes using “alternative misspellings for selected words”. Yes. That typo? That typo is not my fault. That was Virago the Giant Online Retailer.

If they’re that worried about pirates, why not adopt the system proposed by…that guy whose name I don’t remember…who said to flood the pirate market with error-riddled copies of whatever product, some only 10% different, some 90% different, so that people helping themselves to illegal material never know how true and reliable their copy is and it becomes easier to buy the appropriately priced legal material. That’s a system amenable to programmatic implementation.

That was the first time I’ve ever spelled rhythm correctly on the first go.

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Go Home On Time Day

October 30, 2009 by Wendy

Regular readers will notice I have skipped my regular blog posts this week. This is because I have been busy. Though not in the good Las Vegas way.

Which leads me to mention that The Australia Institute has declared November 25 to be national Go Home On Time Day. It is, and I quote, “in recognition of the more than 2 billion hours of unpaid overtime that Australians work each year” and “is intended to be a guilt-free way of raising awareness of the nature and extent of unpaid overtime in Australia and the important economic, health and social consequences it often has”. Check out the Go Home On Time Day website.

This has only the most tenuous link to writing, except that I will point out that:

  1. the more hours you work, the less productive you are,
  2. the more hours you work, the fewer hours you have to do your writing (no, really?), and
  3. work-life balance makes for happier person, which makes for more creativity, mental energy, focus and discipline left over for the things that really matter to you, like writing your novel.

Go Home on Time: try it sometime.

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Writing round

October 25, 2009 by Wendy

The big news for readers is of course the B&N Nook, which so far sounds like it beats both the Amazon Kindle and the various Sony eReaders in some functions (and its price-to-benefit ratio too). This report goes through the major benefits of the Nook (which name, while logical, needs to grow on me) over its competitors, but is summed up with this line: “Barnes & Noble is really thinking about how people actually read…[not] forcing you to change your reading habits rather than adapting to them.”

This NYT article talks about how the ease of ebooks has made people read more. But then there’s the woman at the end who is reading more on her Kindle – but not buying more, because she’s “borrowing” them from her friend’s Amazon account. I find it hard to condemn her, since she could easily borrow a physical book, exactly as the Nook has acknowledged.

And here’s a beautiful list of reading-related apps.

Ok. Vooks. Blended book and video. Adding multimedia is meant to attract people who don’t normally read. How about thinking about the people who already read, and being very, very careful not to alienate them? As the November Good Reading Magazine issue points out, most books aren’t profitable enough to justify the expense of adding multimedia. Thankfully.

At last, a way to trade books online comes to Australia! They have a joining fee (I think because it’s for swapping books rather than selling them, and there’s no way to take a percentage of that), but it’s free to join at the moment. You earn points by swapping books, or if you see a book you want and don’t have enough points, you can purchase extra points. You can also sell books that are worth over $40. There’s different levels of membership, but the site’s a little unclear on costs (but the ‘bronze’ membership is free). Australian readers, give it a go just by signing up and entering the ISBNs of some unwanted books. Some aspects of the site aren’t great (Can’t browse, only search? Tags must be betwen 8 and 15 characters?), but should improve.

Or people in Sydney and Melbourne can take the higher moral ground.

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How to get story ideas in fiction-writing

October 22, 2009 by Wendy

There’s a couple of questions you hear often when people find out you write fiction, one of which is, “where do you get your ideas from?”. People, especially people who do not consider themselves creative, seem thrown by the very thought of making things up.

There’s two parts to the mystical Getting of Ideas: one is the initial story-spark, and the second is the plot ideas to turn an initial premise into an actual story with characters, events and outcomes. Many writers are great at that first part – the original story idea – and not so good at sticking with it and generating the ideas needed to write a rounded story. Others struggle with generating story ideas, but are better at coming up with plot directions once they have eventually come up with a solid premise.

Too many ideas in either area requires a special sort of ruthless discipline to finish a manuscript, but what about when you can’t come up with anything? For those who are feeling the dearth in one or both areas, the good news is that creativity can be trained and developed.
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Vellum: the book of all hours by Hal Duncan

October 20, 2009 by Wendy

Vellum cover image I started to read the sequel or second volume, or – maybe – second half of this book in the form of Ink: the book of all hours, the first part of which was available as a sample read via Stanza. I was so lost and yet so intrigued that I sought out of the first, Vellum so I could start from the beginning.

The plot, once you work through the myriad iterations and time-twists and exuberant use of language, is simple enough. One set of stories revolves around Phreedom, her brother, and her mentor and sometime-lover, and the eternal story of betrayal they must play out with each other across time and epochs. The other set of stories centres on the brother, Thomas, and his lover, Jack, and another two men. It runs across multiple universes or worlds; sometimes Jack is driven mad by Thomas’s death, and sometimes he is the agent set to capture him. Around all this is the battle of heaven and hell, with angels on both sides determined to recruit Thomas and Phreedom into their epic battle.
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Writing round

October 18, 2009 by Wendy

Vaguely relevant to my recent post on Andrew Burt’s analysis that relationships elevate standard SF books into stand-out SF books, some guy over here bemoans moronic relationship drama in space. And how this means boys won’t be scientists anymore. Ah yes, men are the rational, logical ones in the oh-so-over-it gender wars, as his post eloquently demonstrates. Candy at Smart Bitches says more.

Completely out of the blue (for me, anyway), Australia is getting the Kindle. And paying more for it and for the Kindle-format books. And Google has another go at books, by planning the launch of an ebook store.

Nick Cave’s new book, The Death of Bunny Munro is out as an iPhone/Touch application, published by Enhanced Editions, for $29.99. Usually there is just no way an electronic version of a book is worth hardback price (not when they so easily be lost due to format changes or computer crashes; plus DRM issues), but here the publishers have actually put some thought into it: the edition includes the ebook; an audiobook synchronised to the text and read by Nick Cave, with an original soundtrack; and videos of him reading the book. In other words, it incorporates multimedia without being overly gimmicky about it.

Let’s play Google bomb with Scott Baio (aka Charles in Charge, to my generation), who is acting like a chachbag.

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The Frog Prince’s Daughters: written AND spoken

October 18, 2009 by Wendy

The Frog Prince's Daughters coverMy book, The Frog Prince’s Daughters, has been on Amazon for a while now in Kindle edition format, but it’s just come out in hardcopy for those who are still attached to the printed word. Buy the print edition here.

Or if you’d like to listen to it being read by yours truly for free, you can find out more here.

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