The philosophy of writing

Archived Posts from this Category

July 2, 2009

Measuring your success as a writer

Posted by Wendy under The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques | Tags: , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

For the last few weeks, I have been discussing how the art of writing intersects with commercial success. First I said that it’s already hard to write, but even harder when you choose your genre solely based on what you think will sell, rather than what you love. Then I pointed out that most writers don’t make a lot of money from writing anyway. And then I used actor Marcus Graham to prove that you’ll be happier if you moderate your ambitions to something realistic.

In all of this, how do you measure your success as a writer? Using how much money you make, as I’ve tried to make plain, is a poor measure. Using the number of sales is only slightly better, because it’s still directly correlated to how much money you’re making. There’s plenty of writers who have released a decent body of work, with large mainstream publishers, have had sales, and who still cannot give up the day job.

For example, there’s Tony Shilltoe, an Australian fantasy author who has “enjoyed moderate publishing success” with more than a dozen books, and who still cannot give up the day job (though maybe he doesn’t want to). The key point for him is that he has not broken out of Australia into overseas (the giant US and UK markets).

I cannot speak for this writer and how he feels about it; I’m just using him as an example – a writer who has, at least since 2002, produced one to two publishable books a year – and that’s pretty impressive for someone with a fulltime job.

So how would you measure your success? Measuring it by money will only make you unhappy. Choose other measures, and make them correspond to where you are in your writing life.

If you’re just starting out, your measure of success could be twofold: Do you sit down and write every day? And are you able to complete an entire book-length story? Plenty of ‘writers’ undertake lots of stories and never have the willpower to work through the mid-book grind to finish a complete draft, so you can be proud if you have.

If you’re further along, you might make your measure of success whether you write a certain number of words every day, and whether you go back and edit that first draft until it becomes something better.

And again, you might be further along than that, and measure your success in publishing credits – with small publishers or large, with short stories or longer works, with fiction or non-fiction. Or it might by awards and good reviews (though that is relying on external factors and opinion and I would not recommend it – other peoples’ opinions matter in terms of deciding if your work should be published or not, but they should not be used to determine how you feel about it). Your goals depend on you.

My measure of success is simple, but less quantifiable: Am I happy? Do I look forward to my day? Do I go eagerly once more unto the writing breach, dear friends (even when I “close the wall up with our dead English” words; ie when it’s not going well)? Yes. Then I am successful.

 

June 25, 2009

Marcus Graham agrees with me

Posted by Wendy under The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques | Tags: , , , |
1 Comment 

I love Elvis…um, Marcus Graham.

In this article, Graham talks about his career trajectory. In particular, and in relation to my last few weeks of posts, the article begins:

MARCUS GRAHAM tells a funny story about the moment, many years ago now, when he gave up on Hollywood. It meant, as for any actor, letting go of a big dream and, like any adult, discovering that the dream wasn’t what you thought it would be. But in that pivotal moment in Graham’s life, he grasped the seeds of something else.

“I’ve learned that the less the ambition, the greater the happiness,” Graham says cheerfully.

And then later: “Letting go of the blind ambition of his 20s and 30s made him happier and calmer.”

Life today creates strange pressures: it’s not admirable anymore to just be quietly good at something that you’ve worked away at for years. You have to be the best! And do it really young! And really quickly! In writing, that’s first-time authors winning the Booker or 16-year-olds writing bestselling fantasy novels that get made into movies and spawn lots of sequels (though, hey, it is fantasy, so there’s got to be at least three books).

It leads to expectations that work against new writers. They expect too much of themselves, too quickly, and too much of the publishing industry, and others expect too much of them too. Something like Harry Potter or Twilight….those are bolts of lightning. Those authors themselves were under pressure to re-create the phenomena with every new book. How can a new author expect to create the next phenomenon when it is unpredictable, crowd-driven, faddish? How can a literary author aim to win the Booker when the judges’ tastes change every year and their decision-making is often obscure and apparently random?

Becoming an A-list movie star in Hollywood is the pinnacle for many actors. Wanting to be the next Rowling appears to be the goal for many fantasy writers. Winning the Booker is the dream for many (British Commonwealth and Irish) literary writers. Those are the sorts of big and glorious ambitions that might set you on your path, whatever it might be.

But to paraphrase the article, the dream is not always what you thought it was going to be. The amount of publicity, pressure, and sheer fan obsession must have given Rowling cold sweats. In this discussion, a Booker prize winner complains of having no time to write because of the touring expected of her since she won. And Marcus Graham woke up in Hollywood one day, and thought:

‘Bloody hell, here I am getting paid all this money to not work, while I wait for a job that I actually don’t want. What the f— am I doing here?’ So I took the $US10,000; they decided I actually was too mysterious [for a show called Mysterious Ways] and I left town.”

But: “despite letting go of ego, he still has the drive to act.” A writer can let go of unrealistic dreams of fame and fortune, and still want to write and be motivated to sit down and write (rather than daydream about having already written and receiving the accolades). It’s about deciding on workable goals, realistic goals.

For me, it’s regular publication for a small, niche audience. I don’t want lots of money, I sure as hell do not want fame, I don’t need critical recognition in the form of awards and prizes. I want to say, here, here’s a fun book, hope you enjoy it (and I want my small audience to say, thanks, I did, when’s the next one coming out? Write faster, lady).

We’ve all been trained to think of sensible, achievable goals as giving up. It’s not. It’s reaching for the happiness, the satisfaction, the contentment within your grasp, not those fabled distant stars that are so far away that their light takes millions of years to reach us. Reach for the Sun instead; its light only takes 8.3 minutes – a star less daunting to reach for.

There’s a greeting card in that, somewhere.

 

June 18, 2009

It Ain’t A Get-Rich-Quick Scheme

Posted by Wendy under The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques | Tags: , , |
[3] Comments 

Continuing on from last week’s entry, I thought I’d address some major misconceptions for people who are specifically setting out to make money from writing fiction.

People are misled by the big popular books. They look at the mega-seller of the year, whether it’s a Harry Potter or a Da Vinci Code or a Twilight and that’s what they expect for their own book – and they often think it’ll be easy enough to write one to boot.

Writing is hard. Writing a publishable book is even harder. Actually getting it published is like winning the lotto (me to a friend: and maybe I’ll get published, hah hah. Friend to me: and maybe I’ll win lotto, hah hah. True, yes. Supportive, not quite).

And getting it published and then having it go on to not only out-earn its advance, if you even get one, but to sell several million copies? I don’t even have words for how rare that is. Well, OK, it’s like being hit by a meteorite.

Consider this. Crime writer (and writer on The Wire) George Pelecanos said in an interview last year in the Guardian’s Observer Magazine that he was paid $2500 for his first book and not much more for the second; for the sixth book, he got $7500. Only then did he get a two-book deal for $90,000.

So he had to write six books with low advances, and then he had to write two more to get what amounts to a yearly salary per book.

That’s eight books – eight books that sell enough to keep your publisher happy – before you can even think about quitting your day job. And most B-writers, even with lots of books out, still have to have outside work to maintain themselves. That’s why you can’t measure your success by how much you earn.

By all means, have lofty goals, aim high, reach for the stars. First-time authors hit it big sometimes. Long-time authors hit it big slightly more frequently. It does happen. But it doesn’t happen often.

And not only do most writers not ‘get rich’, it certainly isn’t ‘quick’, even putting aside the need to write many books. If you’re staring down the barrel of mortgage payments or imminent retrenchment, sitting down to write a bestseller is not going to solve things for you.

Let’s assume you are after all the next Dan Brown and that you’re a NaNoWriMo veteran and knock up your MS in a month. It still has to go through the whole submissions process (months in a queue) and, once accepted, publishing (editing, formatting, layout, proofs) process. Likely you won’t see any money from the thing for a good year or more after you’ve typed the final full stop.

I would say most authors who move on from writing as a hobby to wanting to see their work published daydream, even a little, about having a bestseller. That’s OK. And it’s OK to want it and to work towards it – it’ll impel your writing and, especially, marketing efforts.

Even optimistically expecting it to happen can be self-affirming and motivating to the personality type who thrives on eternal positive thinking. Though, having read Enough by John Naish, I think this approach is dangerous and will lead to discontent and unhappiness, personally.

But to rely on it? And to write solely for that purpose? I think most attempts at that fizzle. I don’t think it can be sustained in the face of the realities of the publishing business.

Unless you’re a celebrity already. Then it’s a Get-Richer-Quicker Scheme.

 

June 11, 2009

Writing for commercial success: love or money and why can’t it be and?

Posted by Wendy under The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques | Tags: , |
[4] Comments 

The February 2009 issue of Good Reading Magazine had an interview with author Margo Lanagan, who has since won a Ditmar for her novel Tender Morsels.

She had this to say about commercial success, or her relative lack of it:

I’d done five of my own books and I still didn’t have any money from the thing. I couldn’t see how I was going to get to the stage where I could give up my day job, and I thought ‘I really need to find a genre that’s going to travel overseas; Australia is just too small’.”

With its huge market reach in the US and the UK, and relative lack of localised content, fantasy fiction seemed the obvious choice. And so she set out to create (in the tradition of the genre), her very own fantasy trilogy. Unfortunately, all did not go as planned. For three years she attempted to construct this epic, but she couldn’t maintain control of the narrative and so kept hitting dead ends.

I believe her early works were short story collections (which rarely sell well now) and YA novels, while the acclaimed and award-winning Tender Morsels is literary fantasy (which means I will be very sure to seek it out).

I find the quote interesting because it illustrates one of the difficulties of writing: if you pick a genre to write in solely because you think it will sell, rather than because it’s what you enjoy, you will often have trouble writing something decent. This is for a number of reasons:

    1. You will not know the genre. The classic presumption that many people make is that certain genres – coughromancecough – are easy to write because they follow a formula. The presumption could not be more wrong. Every genre has its traditions and expectations and even if you’re going to break them, you have to know them first.
    2. You won’t really be enjoying yourself. Your heart won’t be in it, and you’ll run into the same kind of narrative issues Lanagan discusses above.
    3. Not even publishers and booksellers know what will be a commercial success – I refer you to the article I linked to earlier “93 percent of traditionally published books sell only 1,000 copies”.

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t writers out there who don’t perfectly well manage to write in whatever genre necessary for them to sell books. But in general, the best way to approach commercial success seems to be to choose a genre you like and know, and then work within that to produce books you think will have mainstream appeal, based on research into current or emerging tastes and trends.

As an anecdotal example, I once read (on a messageboard from an unknown contributor, so caveat emptor) that George RR Martin deliberately set out to write a bestselling fantasy series by asking fantasy fans what they liked and did not about popular series like the Jordon Wheel of Time books (You know what we don’t like, Martin? Writers who stop halfway through).

And that obviously worked for him, because Song of Ice and Fire has done amazingly well (except for the, you know, stopping halfway through – which maybe just illustrates the point about following your heart, not your hip pocket). So, my advice to those seeking commercial success would be to do your research – but start with what you love.

Now, as I have said before, I personally do not think aiming for commercial success is necessarily the best path to take. I do not write for or even aspire to commercial success; I have long-since accepted that I am not a mainstream writer. I should probably point out that I’m not literary/highbrow either, since that’s usually taken as the opposite of mainstream. I’m just me (I take a little of Montaigne’s philosophy of being satisfied with what you are instead of stressing yourself to become what you are not).

Because of my philosophy, I like the upshot of the interview with Lanagan:

casting aside any hope of financial reward, she now wrote as pure escape for herself…this collection of short stories received critical acclaim and lots of awards…

Slightly damaging to my point, the collection still didn’t sell well – short stories, don’t, remember – but she has now published the award-winning Tender Morsels which is published internationally rather than just in Australia, so she’s getting there. Hooray for writing for pleasure not profit!

Anyone with a creative hobby knows the tension between enjoying it for its own sake and making money from it. And unfortunately, some people, both writers and buyers of writing, appear to have taken the common writerly refrain of “I enjoy it so much, I’d do it even if I wasn’t being paid for it” as an excuse as to why writers don’t need decent renumeration (or copyright protection, apparently).

The upshot is all writers need to find their own balance between love and money. I’ve found mine, blockbuster writers find theirs, you will find yours (and let’s hope in every case it’s love and money).

 

April 23, 2009

I’ve forgotten how to grocery shop

Posted by Wendy under The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques | Tags: , , , , , , |
Leave a Comment 

For the last three years, I lived in Libya. Grocery stores there tend to have limited stock: a limited range of products, and limited choices of brands within each product type.

Having returned, first, home for a holiday, and now to a new posting in Malaysia where supermarkets exist and are fully stocked, I have discovered that I’ve forgotten how to go about grocery shopping.

I become nonplussed by the products choices, both of brands, types and environment-related (do I want local fruit that came from 20 miles away but is double-wrapped in plastic and styrofoam, or fruit flown from the US that at least comes in a single plastic bag?). I get distracted by products I haven’t seen for three years. I have to read all the labels to work out which particular brand, type and flavour of hand-wash I want. I forget what I was doing and where I was going, and have to go three times down each aisle before I finally get through the shopping list.

It used to take me about 20 minutes to whip through a weekly shop; it feels like it’s taking at least twice that and I invariably forget something and have to go back again later…My ‘grocery shopping’ muscles have atrophised over the last three years.

The moral is simple: do something regularly, and it really doesn’t seem that complex or overwhelming because you are developing skills and knowledge to manage it. Don’t do it regularly, or don’t do it with a meaningful level of effort, and it becomes hard, time-consuming, and inefficient.

The lesson is simple too: Keep your writing muscle working by exercising it regularly.

 

April 2, 2009

Writing villains: understanding without endorsing

Posted by Wendy under The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques | Tags: , , , |
Leave a Comment 

Some of the ideas in this entry were informed by the Perth Writers Festival session Into the Firing Line, panel members Stephan Faris, Benjamin Gilmour and Peter Rodgers.

In particular, Faris has spent time reporting in Iraq as an ‘un-embedded’ reporter ie he was not travelling (relatively) safely with the invasion forces but in the infinitely more dangerous position of independent reporting. Gilmour, meanwhile, has worked with the tribesmen in Pakistan who are said to be fundamentalists allied to the Taliban.

This raised the inevitable question of how to present both sides of an issue, something the media is notoriously bad at. The panel discussed the idea that you need to recognise that there is always two sides – but that they don’t necessarily have equal moral standing/weight. In writing, you can and should try to understand ‘the other’, the villain or the enemy, which does not translate to endorsing them or legimitising them. It does however, open a path to, in some way, dealing with them.

In fiction, this empathy – note, empathy, not sympathy – extends to your villains. The trend for some time has been to make villains less black-and-white, less cartoon-evil and more real. Helping your reader understand your villain’s motivations, making them realistic, making his or her tribulations valid, makes for a more interesting character, and a better foil for the protagonist (if, of course, the protagonist isn’t the villain in the first place…).

One way to do this is to think your way into situations, actions, speech, that you might normally find morally repugnant – and then go one step further, in thinking of how such actions etc might be justified to the person committing them. Conveniently, if somewhat sadly, there’s plenty of sites and message boards online which will give you an insight into any hateful way of thinking and acting that strikes your fancy.

‘Because he/she is evil’ is not a good enough reason – people and life in general is just more complicated than that, and good fiction reflects and clarifies that messiness.

We are not all that good at seeing the other side, especially in today’s moral climate – we can’t seem to tell the difference between sympathy and empathy. Look at the UK teaching pack which asked students to “prepare a brief presentation on the 7/7 bombings from the perspective of the bombers”: such was the outcry – helped along with headlines like ‘children told to think like terrorists’ – that the pack was withdrawn amid much finger-pointing, and now it looks like a witch-hunt has ensued over it.

Here is the revised module [pdf] which asks students to consider the perspectives of relatives of victims, Muslims, and (the replacement for the bombers) the people in Britain – which is odd, since the students are people in Britain already, are they not? They don’t actually have to think too hard about this question; it does not require them to think beyond themselves. On the other hand, the whole-class discussion asks ‘what might have prevented the bombers’ action?’ Now, here, you would think, it would be really helpful to, I don’t know, consider the perspective of the bombers.

But that, it seems, would require empathising with them – understanding their position – and that is too close to sympathising for many people in today’s scared and inward-looking society.

Fiction, however, should do a better job, and in your own fiction, villains with realistic and rounded characteristics and motivations will make your story more solid than a cartoon evil-for-the-hell-of-it bad guy. The first step to lifelike – and therefore scarier and unforgettable – villains is to swallow your own moral stance and step honestly into theirs.

 

March 5, 2009

Honesty in storytelling

Posted by Wendy under The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques | Tags: , , , , , , |
[5] Comments 

My next few blog posts will be informed by some of the sessions I attended at the Perth Writers Festival. I’ll try to acknowledge the particular sessions and authors whose ideas and discussions helped me formulate each blog post where I can, though my notes did not extend to recording who exactly said what verbatim.

But this entry is devoted to something that I got generally from the festival across all the sessions I attended. This was the notion of truth in storytelling. Over and over again, authors spoke of being true to the story they were trying to tell, of making plot and character decisions with their eyes focussed firmly on what worked for the story over what would be popular or mainstream, of writing the best story they possibly could and letting the commercial/publishing chips fall where they may.

This was a sentiment that was incredibly refreshing for me to hear coming from successfully published mainstream (by which I mean, available in a bookstore) authors (though maybe they can afford to shrug it off and let the marketing department sort it out, since they’re already published and have a following…). It sometimes seems to me that the advice on writers’ sites and in writing books is so severely intent on the holy grail of getting published (writing as a business) that the notion of storytelling in itself (writing as an art) is lost, even derided as naive and foolish.

Some of the authors spoke of how the commercial concerns can be paralysing, if you’re constantly self-censoring (more on this next week) based on what might sell, whereas putting all that aside and being true to the story and the characters is incredibly freeing.

There is a hint, too, in the growing popularity of non-fiction, particularly memoir: people seek truth. Perhaps they are turning from fiction because the storytelling in fiction no longer illuminates the truth (or a truth) like it once did.

If there was a theme to this festival for me, it was the repeated mantra of truth in storytelling. Tell the best story you can. Read all the advice you like on the craft of writing (the nuts and bolts how-tos) and the business of writing, but the art of writing centres on sincerely telling the best story you can.

You can still listen to sessions at ABC Perth, and read more about the festival at its website.

 

February 26, 2009

New writers and trends in the arts

Posted by Wendy under The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques | Tags: , , , , |
1 Comment 

With the release of the list of finalists for the 2009 Archibald Prize (annual Australian portraiture art competition), The Australian’s Christopher Allen has commented that “the painters are driven by the irresistible force of the struggle to survive, and nature, or the Archibald judges, will ruthlessly select in favour of the best-adapted.” In other words, because big heads tend to win the Archibald, entrants paint the portraits bigger and bigger to try and please the judges in this particular art ‘microclimate’.

Writers trying to find favour with publishers and editors will follow the same logic. If Dan Brown-style historical-puzzle-thrillers are in and selling like hot cakes, writers will try to produce something similar – and why not, since publishers will be desperately looking for something similar: these big hits pay for all the losses.

However, if you’re sitting down to write your first novel, I wouldn’t recommend this approach, for two generalised reasons.

The first is purely practical/logistical and has to do with lead time. If you’ve only just realised Twilight is the next big thing and your most likely path to publication is to write a knock-off, you’re already a few years too late. By the time you’ve written the thing, got it out to agents or editors, had it accepted and edited and laid out and produced and printed and finally to the bookstores, the world’s moved on from sparkly crazy-stalker vampires to chocolate-addicted flying werewolves or invisible shape-changing unicorns (Oh yes. You heard it here first). You need to be lucky enough to already have a suitable book under the eyes of agents etc when a new trend makes itself known (or be the reliable go-to author a publisher will hire to turn out a book meeting a new trend).

A related part of this logistic reasoning is that you’re not the only person who has noticed the trend: by the time you’ve got your book ready to send out, so have hundreds of others, and all at once, editors are swimming in vampire stories and primed to reject them all (no matter how much better yours is than everyone else’s). You won’t stand out if you swim with the other little fishies: which is fine when you’re avoiding sharks but not good if you want to get…the…hook…that analogy went awry but you see where I’m going.

The other big reason has to do with motivation and creativity. When you’re first coming to writing, the writing itself can be hard enough – creating the habit and finding the words, controlling a plot and managing characters – having to do all that for a story that you yourself aren’t all that invested in anyway is a sure recipe for failure. On those days when things are going badly for me, I can still force myself to sit and write…but I couldn’t imagine maintaining that willpower if it was something I was churning out because I thought it would sell well rather than because I genuinely loved the underlying story. Write what you love, love what you write.

Of course, if what you’re really into right now happens to be vampires, don’t let the current popularity of sparkly vampires put you off either. It’s not a genre that’s going away, and there’s always rooms for more, if you make it original and compelling.

And lastly, there is a place for observing trends in writing – those fashions like the rise of first person narrators over third-person POV, or the more modern styles of fantasy and so on, which are likely to last a while – changes in style or ongoing developments in your genre, as opposed to temporary fads. That’s why you read widely and pay attention what seems to be working well – not to copy, but to learn.

Caveat: this advice comes courtesy of a self-proclaimed niche writer who is not mainstream, never will be, and has no desire to be. If your aim is to be a bestselling bookstore author, then, actually, yes, you should be monitoring and researching trends and sales and trying to catch the next wave, and you’re perfectly welcome to think this entry is the dumbest advice you’ve ever heard…

 

November 6, 2008

Writing rules, misapplied: don’t consult your thesaurus

Posted by Wendy under The philosophy of writing, Writing tips and techniques | Tags: , , , |
[4] Comments 

About six weeks ago, the editors of Collins English Dictionary announced they were thinking of dropping the following words from the next edition because they’re not used enough (dictionaries are descriptive; they reflect actual use of language and therefore do not record ‘dead’ words):

abstergent: cleansing or scouring
agrestic: rural, rustic, unpolished, uncouth
apodeictic: unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration
caducity: perishableness, senility
caliginosity: dimness, darkness
compossible: possible in coesistence with something else
embrangle: to confuse or entangle
exuviate: to shed (a skin or similar outer covering)
fatidical: prophetic
fubsy: short and stout, squat
griseous: streaked or mixed with grey, somewhat grey
malison: a curse
mansuetude: gentleness or mildness
muliebrity: the condition of being a woman
niddering: cowardly
nitid: bright, glistening
olid: foul-smelling
oppugnant: combative, antagonistic, or contrary
periapt: a charm or amulet
recrement: waste matter, refuse, dross
reborant: tending to fortify or increase strength
skirr: a whirring or grating sound, as of the wings of birds in flight
vaticinate: to foretell, prophesy
vilipend: to treat or regard with contempt

Now. There’s a writing rule that says you should 1) only use words you’re familiar with, and 2) with synonyms, you should choose the simpler word over the more complicated word.

There’s good reasons for this rule: new writers do tend to assume longer words make them sound more authoritative whereas such multi-syllable monstrosities can be cluttering and ruinous to rhythm; there’s also the fact if you choose a word from a thesaurus rather than from solid knowledge of its application, you might miss its nuances and muddy your meaning. And then there’s the stupid part of the reasoning: we couldn’t possibly want to make our readers reach for a dictionary to find out the meaning of a word they haven’t encountered before.

But look! Look at the result of the rule. It’s killing words! Killing them, I say. Or, for the sake of precision and accuracy (over-rated!), it is making writers and readers lazy.

If you comfortably accept this rule as a writer, you won’t stretch yourself to finding the perfect word: you just go ahead and use ’smelly’ instead of ‘olid’ (and by the way, ’smelly’ didn’t used to mean smelling bad – that’s also what happens when people don’t use the words they’ve got, they pervert perfectly decent and innocent other words).

And you won’t stretch your reader. Speaking as a reader, I love it when I have to go consult a dictionary. It doesn’t make me feel stupid. It makes me feel fond of the book; it makes me feel like the author trusts me.

Yes, you don’t want to use long or complex or unusual words just to make yourself look smart. But you don’t want to use simplistic or inappropriate words just because that’s the first one that occurred to you or just to make sure your readers don’t feel dumb. You want to use the right word, even if that does mean consulting resources like a thesaurus (for options) and dictionary (for nuances of meaning of the options if you’re uncertain).

This is the latest in semi-ongoing series about misapplied writing rules. The others are linked below:
Kill your darlings
Write what you know
Cut 10% in editing
Avoid adjectives and adverbs
Show, don’t tell
Just keep writing

 

October 30, 2008

Stanza for the iPhone or iPod Touch: affordable ebook reader

Posted by Wendy under Authors, Book reviews, The philosophy of writing | Tags: , , , , |
[4] Comments 

I’m a big supporter of the somewhat shaky ebook revolution (as you might expect, given my books are primarily electronic, with the printed version available as an afterthought). However, up until now I did not own any ebook reader device.

One, they’re not widely available in Australia (we’re not getting the Kindle any time soon, that’s for sure; neither is Libya, where I currently live), and two, they’re phenomenally expensive for something that does just the one thing. I know this is something that has put off many people (the other major factor being the entirely understandable attachment to tactile books).

Apple to the rescue! Or more accurately, Lexcycle to the rescue, with their wonderful Stanza application for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. One free download from the iTunes store to my partner’s ever-versatile Touch, and all of a sudden, we have an ebook reader that can handle pdfs and all the ebook ‘standards’ (when there’s five or six formats, you can’t really claim a standard).

Two caveats: one, you need wi-fi internet to transfer books over to the iPhone/Touch, and two, if you buy a lot of books through major ebook vendor Fictionwise, you may find you have protection issues and will have to use their own ebook reader for iPhone or iPod Touch (find it in the iTunes store).

(Self-plug alert! My own book, After the Dragon is available in multi-format from Fictionwise and its associated sites (like ebookwise) and you won’t have any protection issues.)

The other major factor slowing uptake of ebooks (aside from the love of the print version, expense of the reader, and the hassles with formats and rights protection – I speak as an author here when I say, for the love of god, drop the protection, it just interferes with honest folks’ ease of use; pirates were never going to pay for the product in the first place)…where was I (damn these long-winded bracketed asides)? Oh yes, the other major barrier is the cost of ebooks themselves, which is usually the same or or not much less than the cost of the printed book.

The biggest cost of producing a book is in printing, distribution and delivery (you’d think paying the writer would be a major cost but no). For the price of a paperback book, at least half of that goes to the bookstore (real-life or online store); of the rest, a fair proportion is the cost of printing the book and storing it or getting it to the store’s warehouse so they can sell it to you. Ebooks take those costs away (’distributing’ it – hosting it on a online bookstore’s website – still costs significantly).

Now, publishers point out the labour costs associated with producing an ebook in up to eight (eight! Tell me again there’s a ‘standard’) different formats. To which I say: that’s an upfront one-off cost for the title, same as preparing the print file (also, if your labour costs are that high when producing different versions of an electronic file, you need to look into automation procedures, my friend), whereas printing and distribution costs are per copy of a printed book, not per title.

Yes, ebooks aren’t free to produce, but once produced, they have minimal additional cost – except for the advertising and distribution, and maybe publishers need to be honest and admit that instead of crying pity on labour costs (after all, the most labour comes from the author, and yet they’re not seeing any additional royalties from ebooks; I’m talking about major publishers, I have a very fair deal with my own small publisher).

And let’s not leave the distributors out of my sweeping condemnation: since online bookstores have reduced physical warehousing, leasing and stocking costs, they could probably re-think their pricing structure to give ebooks a fair chance.

It’s time ebook prices started reflecting the savings, especially if the fledgling industry is to follow the music industry into the bright shiny age of bits.

(Self-plug alert! After the Dragon is available for $4 or less from Fictionwise, Books for a Buck, or Books on Board – my money’s where my mouth is on this issue: ebooks should be substantially cheaper than printed books).

I don’t think ebooks are going to beat out print books: I think they should be an easy way of reading a book and then deciding if it’s worth getting the print version (there’s plenty of books I’ve read for free out of the library and then bought my own copy; the same process works with ebooks). They’re convenient, especially for travellers and holiday-makers; they’re good for the environment; they don’t take up physical space; they’re economical (or should be); they can be borrowed from public libraries (maybe not yet in Australia) or paid online libraries…

…and they can be read on your iPhone or iPod Touch with Stanza.

Added Nov 23 2008: Books on Board have now added instructions for buying their Stanza-compatible books directly in the iPhone or iPod Touch (but you’ll still need a wi-fi connection to be able to get to the website).

 

Next Page »