The Poor Abused Apostrophe and the Confusion It Causes

by Janis Patterson

I will admit it, I am a stickler for the correct usage of the English language, which means that these days my grammatical sensibilities spend a great deal of time being lacerated, usually over the abuse and misuse of the apostrophe.

The apostrophe is a humble and very useful part of grammar. Not only does it indicate ownership both singular and plural, it denotes a shortening of a phrase by standing in for a missing letter - both very needful in writing if one is not to sound stilted and stuffy. Properly used, it can clarify a point like nothing else.

So why do so many people abuse it? The rules, even though not totally consistent, are easy to learn and follow.

For example, ‘its’ is a possessive, meaning something belonging to it, where ‘it’s’ is a contraction for ‘it is.’ This is an exception to the general rule, but certainly not egregiously complicated.

Customer’s is a singular possessive - something belonging to a specific customer. Customers is a simple plural - more than one customer. Customers’ means something belonging to all or a great group of customers. Is that so hard?

Apparently. Not long ago I wanted to go to a certain store, but the large - and largely empty - parking lot had a sign proclaiming ‘Customer’s Only’. Being of a precise (and admittedly bloody-minded) nature, I parked carefully across the street where I could be seen by the cashier and walked over. Once inside I asked why they restricted their parking lot to only one customer when it was of a decent size.

Unable to answer, she called for her manager, who didn’t understand either even after I explained the different between singular and plural possessive and voiced concern that they were driving away business because of their signage. I even told them that they were remiss in not explaining what exactly was the singular customer’s. Though in this ungrammatical day and age I suppose parking could be logically extrapolated.

They asked me to leave. And I guess that some people have no shame in parading their ignorance to all and sundry, because until they day they went out of business (by a lack of multiply parked customers, I wonder?) they never changed their sign.

Again, in a novel I found the character talking (obvious in the context) about a family named Smith. It read something like, “The Smith’s are going to rent a beachhouse.” Well, this is wrong on so many levels. First of all, which singular Smith? And which singular Smith’s what? In this case it should have been a simple plural - the Smiths. 

Sadly there is a definite prejudice against self-published novels, especially romance, and examples of this disregard of correct apostrophe etiquette are often cited as the reason. What is never mentioned is that there are the same kind - and sometimes worse - examples are to be found in the theoretically superior and sacrosanct precincts of traditional publishing in a rapidly expanding number.

Something like “...it’s appearance was unworthy of the care one would expect the Carters family shop to have expended on something that would bear the Carter’s name...” is not only confusing, it pulls the reader out of the story, it becomes an exercise in translation. And no writer wants that, does he?

Like its much more challenging cousin the comma, the poor apostrophe is abused and misused with a blatancy that is astonishing, especially since the correct usage is so simple. All writers - and readers - should learn the proper forms and meanings.

And stop being an Apostrophe Abuser!

Publishing - A Basic Primer - Part Three

by Janis Patterson

Hope you had a lovely and romantic Valentine’s Day! We didn’t do much - just exchanged cards and shared a bottle of our favorite Veuve Cliquot champagne while watching some unfortunately not very romantic movies on tv. (The Husband prefers action-adventure movies and I prefer having my romance in real life, so we’re both happy with the way the evening turned out!)

I hope all of you are warm and safe during this terrible weather. We were without power for 30+ hours and the low was -1F! Not fun...

As promised, here is the third part of my originally conceived of two part series on the varieties of publishing. Nothing every really goes exactly the way you want it to, does it?

In the first two installments I covered the basics of and differences between Traditional publishing and Self publishing. Now I’m going to talk about a fairly new version of publishing, the Hybrid. I do so with some trepidation, as while I have published many times in both Trad and Self, I have never done Hybrid. So - if I make any egregious mistakes and you know Hybrid, please elucidate in the comments.

As its name implies, Hybrid is a melding of both Trad and Self where - basically - the writer pays for most everything but the mechanics of production are done by the company. It sounds as if it were a panacea with everything perfectly set out, but if things sound too good to be true they usually are. Hybrid pubbing can run the gamut between wonderful and supportive and worth it to just about the worst scam that can be imagined, costing the writer many thousands of dollars and delivering little to extremely little to - in a few sad cases - nothing at all.

In an ideal scenario the writer produces a book and contracts with the Hybrid, who produces a good editing, a good cover, a flawless format and uploading to the chosen market)s) and decent publicity with the writer bearing the cost. It is a true collaboration in every way, with the writer involved in every step. The author benefits from the radiated glory of being published by an imprint of a well-known and respected house. (The reader rarely knows or cares that the MyNewBook imprint is a hybrid arm of BigPublishingHouse and not a regular imprint.) Like the Cinderella principle mentioned in the Trad pubbing blog, it does on occasion happen like this - but very very rarely.

In the worst case scenario the writer produces a book and contracts with the Hybrid, who gives a slap-dash editing if any at all, an execrable cover, a so-so formatting and the only publicity is a listing on their usually pathetic website. Sometimes this kind of Hybrid demands that you give them your email and sometimes snail mail contact lists so they can aggressively market to your friends, relatives and other contacts. Unfortunately, this is more often about soliciting new authors for their publishing services than about selling your book. Sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between these low-life Hybrid outfits and a pure scam dedicated to separating a writer from his money.

Yes, I am a cynic, but I’ve been in this crazy business a long time (since 1979) and know how bad it can get.

Worst of all, these kind of Hybrids offer low royalties, some as low as the genuine Trad publishers - literally pennies on the cover price. Getting your money - whether much or little - is the next problem. Sometimes writers never see a cent or even get a statement of how many books have been sold. If any. The line between Vanity and these low-type Hybrids is sometimes very blurred.

Now before you inundate me with emails praising your Hybrid publisher, let me say that there are good ones out there. Some are very good. Some are honest but not very effectual. Sadly, many more are barely a hairsbreadth above the scam level. 

Personally, I cannot understand why anyone would risk such huge amounts of money and - on occasion - losing the copyright and ownership of their book by Hybrid publishing when they could hire out everything on their own and retain control. I just can’t. I have seen a bad Hybrid contract where the poor writer paid in the lowish five digits for basically nothing - a badly edited, badly covered book that got no publicity from the ‘publisher’ at all. The royalty scale was less than 5% of cover price - and I don’t think there was ever a copy sold except those the writer guilted friends/family into buying, and he didn’t even get royalties on those! However, I know there are many writers who prefer Hybrid pubbing and they deserve the respect due their freedom of choice. 

So how do you find a good Hybrid? First of all, read everything you can about any Hybrid house in which you are interested - and don’t assume that just because they are affiliated with a recognizable publisher they are aboveboard and honest. There have been a couple of real scandals through the years about semi-scams - at least from the writer’s point of view - in which exactly that and worse happened. Thankfully I haven’t heard of any concerning a big house recently, so maybe that sad time is over.

Which doesn’t mean that there aren’t ugly sharks out there just waiting to gobble up little wide-eyed writers’ money! You must do your research! Google the company and look at both good and bad comments. Best of all, ask your fellow writers. Most writers today are connected through at least one eloop, or know someone who is, and your fellow writers are the ones most likely to know if a Hybrid is good or bad. If they say it’s good, believe them - but verify! If you can get hold of their contract, go through it word by word - and you might be best served if you show it to an attorney. Who owns the copyright to your book? What input do you have in editing/cover/whatever? What are they offering - i.e., what are they guaranteeing in writing - for the money you are paying? Don’t be dazzled by smoke and mirrors and pie-in-the-sky promises. Publishing is contractual, and the contract should be equitable and airtight.

There are good Hybrid publishers out there - there are so many more bad ones. If this route is your choice, do your due diligence and be careful in your choice.

So - these last three blog posts have been nutshell descriptions of our publishing options. I believe there are so many variations and permutations of these three basic types that it would take a work bigger than War And Peace to cover them all, and by the time it was finished there would be new ways appearing.

Whichever you do, be careful, look out for yourself and your work, and choose wisely. And whichever way you decide to go, I do wish you the very best of good fortune.

Publishing - A Basic Primer - Part Two

by Janis Patterson

 

Happy New Year! Hope your year is starting well and that all things are good with you.

As promised, this column is going to talk about the newest iterations of publishing - Self and Hybrid.

Self publishing has been around for centuries. Some of the very earliest novelists - such as Fielding and Richardson - Self published, but that was a very different time and a different business model. In the last century Self publishing was pretty much limited to Vanity publishing - see last month’s column - but thanks to the technological revolution Self publishing has become its own respectable and sometimes very profitable industry.

Ebooks have changed the face of publishing. No longer do writers need the heavy hand of a Trad publisher to shape and validate their work, nor do they have to put up with the Trad’s domination of the distribution system. Someone can write a book and put it up by themselves on several electronic vendor platforms. Easy-peasy! That is not to say, however, that they should.

A Self publisher is exactly that - a publisher, and he should take on the duties of a publisher - all the duties. Get a good editor and cover artist and, if putting books out to a lot of vendors, a formatter. And yes, you will have to pay them money, because professionalism and quality are not free. 

Ah, you say, didn’t I tell you that money should always flow TO the author, not FROM the author? It’s still true - but when you are publishing your book you are the Publisher You, not the Author You. Publisher You is responsible for everything, from getting a very good editor to make Author You’s book the best it can be (and no one should ever put out a book without having an editor look at it!) to getting a cover artist to getting a skilled formatter to uploading to the vendors to doing the publicity necessary to get the book in front of the public. Now there are those who are talented enough - or have friends/family who are - to do the covers and formatting and publicity themselves. Most of us are not. Don’t rely on a friend or relative to do your editing, though; get a professional.

Publisher You also has to take charge of the niggling but oh-so-important details of publishing - do you need an ISBN? Should you copyright through the government? Do you go exclusive with Amazon/KU or do you go wide? Should you put out a paper version as well as an ebook? And those are just the beginning of the decisions you need to make. Are you going to use your name or a pseudonym? Do you/should you have a website? What kind and how much publicity should you do? Do you hire a publicist? And the list goes on...

I will admit that I am a great fan of Self publishing; it takes you out of the unholy circus of rewrites and endless edits to tailor your story to the (occasionally unreasonable) demands of traditional agents and publishers and all too often leaves you with a product that has only a passing resemblance to your original work. You also make a great deal more money per individual sale than with Trad publishing. The downside is that whatever is done has to be done by you - or at least, by someone you hire. All the responsibility for quality and opportunities for success and failure resides squarely on your shoulders. 

People beginning in the Self pub market now are so fortunate - there are books and groups and FB pages and eloops centered on the Self pub industry from which the novice can learn just about everything necessary. When I first Self pubbed in 2013 I couldn’t find any of them; there may have been some, but I couldn’t find them, so in my usual heedless fashion I jumped in feet first and forged on. Yes, I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned. And some of my ‘mistakes’ turned out to be blessings in disguise. Some turned out to be... not. Still, I am glad I went ahead.

Above I said ‘opportunities for success and failure’ because there is always what Mary Roberts Rinehart called the Blind Villain - chance. You can do everything just right - writing, editing, covers, publicity - yet still there is the possibility that your book will just lie there like a dead flounder while other books, not as good in any or all ways, will take off to the stratosphere. Just do the best you can and accept the chance of this outcome, because there are some things in this world that are uncontrollable. It’s sad but very true, and must be accepted. The only answer I know is to keep going on and write more good books. 

Most of Self pubbing is relatively simple - mechanical and very picky, but still basically simple once you understand and accept the principles. I believe that anyone who really wants to do it can master the production end. And probably the publicity end, too, though that is my personal bête noir.

You see, with every other aspect of Self pubbing, each task is finite - writing, editing, formatting, cover selection - but publicity is ongoing. Sometimes I wonder how some writers manage to do all the publicity they do and still have time to write, let alone have a life. Yes, some do employ Virtual Assistants or Public Relations companies, but the affordable ones are so booked they have waiting lists of potential clients and others are so expensive they are out of reach of anyone but the highest of best sellers.

Not long ago I looked into a PR company to boost the sales (embarrassingly small) of my favorite book, perhaps the best book I’ve ever written. Not only was the basic campaign eye-wateringly high, but it cost more for one month than that book had earned in the past year! Needless to say, it was beyond my means and I politely declined. That said, I am blessed that my newly-retired, science-oriented husband has stepped in and taken over my publicity, learning the job as he goes. It is an interesting journey!

So - if anyone is looking for a ready-made niche, a true bird’s-nest-on-the-ground, may I suggest starting an AFFORDABLE publicity firm for writers. They will have potential clients lined up out the metaphoric door.

Ooops! I have made a mistake - something you get used to when you Self pub. Last month and even above I said I would cover Self pubbing and Hybrid pubbing in this post. Well, this post has gone on much too long, so I will save Hybrid for next month. Hope your New Year is starting out well, and 2021 is the best year ever for all of us! 

Publishing - A Basic Primer

by Janis Patterson

I’ll admit it - 2020 really snarled up my life. I lost the best publishing opportunity of my career, missed a lot of really fun trips and fell victim to the endemic malaise that seems to be affecting everyone. Instead of doing my regular three to five books this  year, I barely finished two. What’s worse is that I have five full manuscripts, all professionally edited and lacking only formatting and covers, ready to publish. And yet they sit (metaphorically) on my desk gathering dust. The dust, by the way, is unfortunately all too real. I don’t need a pandemic to help me skimp on housekeeping!

However - things do seem to be a-changing! I’ve seen a definite uptick in professional talks among writers. I’ve seen more interest in marketing techniques and websites and craft than I’ve seen in months. It’s like after a long enchanted (cursed?) hiatus the industry is coming alive again, bringing with it a steady stream of newbies or close-to-newbies eager to be published.

Many of the questions they ask (and there are NO stupid questions, by the way) show their ignorance about the most basic part of getting a book published - publishing itself. What kind, what charges, what to expect. 

So, as a battle-scarred veteran of many decades of publishing, I’m going to give a nutshell course about the basic types of publishing. Unfortunately there are no clear-cut dividing lines between the major types of publishing today; every form is blurred slightly or complicatedly with the others. The main thing is, what kind of publishing do you want and what will you do to achieve it? Make money? Be famous? Print your family history for your relatives? Just have the ego stroke of being a ‘published author’? Whatever you want there’s an outlet for it. Just know what you are doing and why - and be prepared to pay for it in some kind of coin.

Traditional publishing - this is the Holy Grail for many authors. A big publishing house which gives you an advance, takes care of all the expenses such as editing and covers, gives you lots of publicity and sets up booksignings and tours, and helps you make best-seller lists is every writer’s dream. The house will take writers under their wing, manage, guide and promote their careers and allow the writer to concentrate on writing. Yeah. Sure. Indeed, that’s the dream of many authors and - except for a miniscule few - it’s pretty much just that... a dream. 

Trad publishers these days in general offer small if any advances, all too often have pathetic edits, uneven quality of covers and do little advertising support other than put out their new release list and maybe a couple of press releases, as they now expect you to do almost all your own publicity. All for low-single digits percentage royalties per copy. The dream scenario does happen, but so rarely a lot call it the Cinderella Syndrome. Still, there is a cachet to being published by one of the Big Five - or maybe now it’s the Big Four; the number changes with unsettling regularity as the large publishers buy, overtake and generally cannibalize each other.

However, Trads have always and still do have the magic ingredient - distribution. In the days of paper-only books whoever could get them to the book outlets (bookstores, drug stores, wherever) held the whip hand. Those who self/vanity published often ended up with a garage full of books which they could sell only by contacting each outlet individually. Trads still have the advantage here, but with Print On Demand and a more savvy buying public the balance of power/distribution is slowly shifting. As long as there are paper books, however, I believe that as long as they control the major distribution networks Trads will always have a place, albeit a small one.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Vanity publishers. These in the main are predators out to make money from wide-eyed writers with stars in their eyes. It sometimes takes a sharp eye to tell a Vanity from a Trad, as their appearance is carefully crafted to appear as legitimate as the Trads, like the innocent-looking camouflage of a lurking predator. They don’t offer advances (but so few legit publishers do these days, either) and their ‘editing services’ are either pathetic or non-existent. The biggest tell that they are a Vanity is that they ask for money, and lately the contacts for all your friends and relatives as well. Heaven only knows what they do with the contacts, for the full responsibility of selling your book falls directly on your shoulders. Basically, you are paying an astronomic amount (often in the double-digit thousands) for a couple of hundred mediocre physical books delivered to your house to take up residence in your garage until you sell them. In these days of electronic publishing, the Vanity house might throw up an ebook on one or two of the main retailers, often for an extra fee.

As sales depend on distribution, those who control the distribution networks control the industry - and the Vanities don't have any distribution facilities or networks.

One very important thing to remember is that in this industry whatever the publishing model the money should flow TO the author. These Vanity companies make their money FROM the author. If they have no investment of their own in your book they sure aren’t going to push it. They’re getting their money from you, not from sales of your book.

That said, I will add one caveat - there is a single small niche where Vanity is not only acceptable but often desirable. If someone writes a family history, for example, or a collection of Grandma’s recipes - something for family and friends only, something they are not interested in putting out on the open marketplace, Vanity publishing is a viable option. Just be very careful in choosing which company you decide to business with. A very few of the Vanity publishers are trustworthy and provide a good product. Do your due diligence. Then just to be sure, do it again.

Next month I will discuss the newer incarnations of the industry - Hybrid and the 800 pound gorilla that started the revolution in publishing, Self. We’re still in the Wild West in this area, though things have begun to settle down a little because of - or perhaps in spite of - the constantly changing landscape of technology.

Now I wish to give each of you a personal good wish for a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Good Yule, Happy Kwanzaa, or whatever else you celebrate, and a very Happy New Year. I think we all deserve them.

Deadlines and Other Oddities

by Janis Patterson

Did you ever wonder about the etymology of the word ‘deadline’? It sounds so vaguely threatening. “You reach this line (time?) or you’re dead.” Did the kings of old give their serfs a deadline for bringing in their tributes and lop off their heads if they missed it? Come to think of it, I have known a couple of old-time editors who would have just loved the power to do that – in fact, getting one’s head (or job) lopped off on occasion would have been considered preferable to their reactions.

I wonder that those of us in the wordsmith world have not been able to find a more pleasant, less belligerent term for the time a manuscript/whatever should be turned in. Final day? Term line? End time?

Not that it makes much difference these days anyway. I grew up in advertising, back when deadline really meant deadline. Even being a few hours over the limit was enough to get you raked over the coals. When I moved over into journalism, missing a deadline could get you fired. Now it seems that a deadline is more of a suggestion than a distinct cut-off date, which is something I don’t understand. If you’re given a contract and a date your project is due, hadn’t you better uphold it?

Now there are a few reasons for missing a real deadline without notification to your publisher – death, ending up in a full body cast at your local hospital, things of that order – not that you feel you need a small vacay and will need an additional two months, or that you had another contract come up that offered more money, or any other reason, legitimate or not. If someone realizes they can’t make a deadline, they should notify their publisher immediately. I don’t see why people don’t get that.

On the other hand, there’s a lot about the other side of publishing I don’t get. Why have advances fallen, the quality of editing and proofing gone into freefall and all the responsibility for publicity fallen on the shoulders of the writers? (Unless you’re in the Roberts-King-Koontz stratosphere and, of course, generally excepting a listing in the catalogues.) Why are advances to celebrities and politicians astronomical (in the millions) when it’s pretty much accepted that their books not only won’t earn out, but will be seen on remainder tables and cut-rate bookstores for the next decade or two? This, when working mid-list writers, the ones who write the books people actually like to read and who are the mainstay of the publishing industry, find it hard if not impossible to support themselves on their writing.

I don’t understand. Too much focus on money, not enough on books, or the quality of books. Seems contra-indicative.

Like I said, I don’t understand, but I’ve got a deadline blowing dragon breath on the back of my neck and I’ve got to go work. If anybody figures it out, let me know.

Traffic Jams and Dreckers

by Janis Patterson

Last week The Husband and I went to the Novelists Inc. conference in Florida. It was a simply splendid conference – it always is – with so much truly useful information concentrated into just a few days that it felt as if my overstuffed head exploded regularly. An organization for professional, working novelists, NINC is fantastic. The location – the luxurious Tradewinds Resort in St Pete Beach, Florida – isn’t bad, either, and the chance to network face to face with one’s peers while sitting beneath a palapa looking at the beautiful ocean and indulging in an umbrella-garnished tropical drink is downright luxurious. Okay, so the last is more wishful thinking than actuality – the conference is so intense and so wonderful you don’t want to miss a minute of it. There are moments of relaxation and conversation, though…

The Husband and I drove to the conference, hoping to make a mini-vacation out of the trip. Mostly we succeeded, enjoying the scenery and the intimacy of being just the two of us in the car. It was wonderful. We stopped at graveyards and courthouses in Mississippi indulging our passion for the Tombstone Twitch (sometimes known as genealogical research) and searching for his ancestors who fought in the Late Unpleasantness With the North. We had so much fun doing this that we cut our time extremely short, meaning the last day we had to drive way into the night in time to make it home so he could get back to work on schedule.

I like to drive. I like long driving trips. I would just as soon drive as sit, so I ended up doing most of the driving while we chatted or The Husband slept. The only thing is – the roads are just too d****d crowded, even in the wee hours. The lanes going the other way were almost brim full, as were the lanes going our way. Remember, this was mid-week, not a weekend. Since it had just gone midnight and we were in deep country far away from any town I couldn’t help but wonder where in the world all these people were going!

For a while the driving was easy – everyone was tooling along at a respectable 80 or so and traffic moved smoothly. But as nothing nice lasts for long, the crazies started taking over. There were two rust-bucket sporty-style cars that were obviously racing each other, darting between cars like maddened mosquitoes. They didn't stay around long and were soon out of sight. (There’s never a policeman around when you need one!)

And there was this cattle truck – a big 18 wheeler double deck cattle truck – that zipped in and out of lanes as if he too were driving a sporty-style car. Then he would slow down to a decorous 65 or 70 for a few miles, then be off speeding and zig-zagging again. His trailer must have been empty – not only did it wobble somewhat alarmingly during his more precipitous maneuvers, but any animals in there would have been panicking and probably have overturned it. To say nothing of being very seasick.

Up until now, racers and a mad cow trucker aside, the traffic had been going fairly smoothly. Everyone was going just about the same speed and it was easy driving. Then – still far away from any town – the traffic flow began to slow and jam up. My first thought was, “Great! I’m stuck in a traffic jam going 70 miles an hour!”

Inexorably the traffic clot thickened and slowed until we were down below 50, then 40… and everyone in the right lane was making things worse by shoving their way into the left, slowing the clot even more.

Finally the cause became obvious – in the right lane was a gigantic fifth-wheel RV being towed by an equally impressively sized pick-up, trundling along at a decorous 50 miles per hour. Both lanes of the traffic clot, as visible in my rear-view mirror, were a solid chunk of headlights that went back further than I could see, which in this flat country meant it extended for miles. The pick-up/RV kept puttering on at the same speed, ignoring the chaos it was causing behind it. They couldn’t help but know they were causing a problem, for as soon as a vehicle pulled past them it would shoot away into the dark. That, plus - I surmise - the air surrounding the RV was probably bright blue from the curse words hurled at it by probably hundreds of frustrated drivers. And yes, before you ask, that definitely included several of mine.

Before you get upset, I will admit that it is legal (most places) to drive the minimum speed limit of 50 on a crowded superhighway. That feather-footed idiot did have the right to do so… legally. Morally… I’m not sure. A great number of people were inconvenienced and probably endangered to say nothing of enraged by his doing so. (For your information, the speed limit on that stretch of highway is 75.)

Just because one can do something does not mean that one should. For an analogy, think of MicroSoft and the way they quit supporting perfectly good programs just to make us buy expensive new ones chock-a-block full of stuff we neither use nor want… just because they can. And, of course, they want the money.

For that matter, think of self-publishing. Now I love self-publishing. I self-publish almost exclusively these days. It gives writers a new freedom and access to the public that is unparalleled. Unfortunately, it also empowers people who think that if they string X number of words together they will have a book which will guarantee them fame and untold riches. All they have to do is get it in front of the public. Even more unfortunately, their numbers are legion.

Seriously, do you have any idea of just how much total dreck is out there? I mean, have these people never heard of editors? Or even spell-check? It’s revolting how bad so many of these books are. What’s worse is that this dreck is giving all self-published books a bad name. Many multi-published traditional writers are now self-publishing, only to run into roadblocks built to “maintain literary standards” (a phrase a book store manager used to me not too long ago) – meaning to keep out the dreckers. (Is that a word? If not, it should be.) Reviews. Bookstores. Signing events. Just mention that your book is self-published and immediately shoulders start turning cold.

I’m not advocating a return to the era of the rigid gatekeepers and the write-by-committee mentality that seems to grow there… but there has to be some way of distinguishing real books from badly-written wish-fulfillment rubbish. Reviews on electronic sales sites like Amazon? Hardly. Some of the worst books have many many glowing reviews, doubtless begged from everyone from the author’s next door neighbor to their milkman. Word of mouth? It happens, but it’s hard for anyone to instigate efficiently, from drecker to NYT author. A committee of recommendation would be too much like the elitist old agent/editor gatekeeper system.

I don’t have any answers… just questions. Somehow you’d think the world would be better ordered.

A NOTE  - For years I have blogged two times a month on Make Mine Mystery, on first and third Wednesdays. It’s been great, but an onslaught of new contracts and other obligations has severely cut into my time, so this is the last time I will be blogging on first Wednesdays. I’ll still be here on third Wednesdays, so please don’t forget to come by.

The Ever-Growing Peril

by Janis Patterson

Being a writer is a hard life. Not only do you have to come up with a multitude of ideas that you can shape into a coherent, interesting story, you have to then write the thing, all the while you have to check your facts, make sure your grammar and spelling are correct and your character names are appropriate to the time of the story. Then once the book is finished, you have to edit it to the best of your capability. Once that is done you can start the unholy dance of submitting it to agents/editors and waiting for months if not years for an answer. Then even later once the story is contracted you begin editorial combat, reworking your story to fit their prejudices and guidelines. Sometimes more than once. Then you continue to wait until your time comes up in their publishing schedule, which again can be more than a year. Or two. Or, if you are self-publishing, you send your story to an independent editor for their version of editorial combat. This time, however, you have the final say – it is your story after all – but never forget that you are paying them for their expertise and you very well may be too close to the story to see the holes. Then you get do work with cover artists, formatters, publicity/advertising and the various vendors.

Ain’t none of it easy. Any way you look at it, writing takes time, some money and an emotional toll.

That just adds insult to injury when others take your stories and either give them away for free or, what is worse, sell them without your permission and with no benefit to you. There’s a reason they’re called pirates.

Now of course I’m not talking about the promotions the author her/himself does through legitimate outlets. I don’t always agree with that attitude – training readers to expect a full book that has taken perhaps several years to write for nothing or for a pittance cannot be good for any of us or for the industry as a whole. Plumbers and carpenters and pastry chefs and just about everyone else don’t give their services for free or close-to-free in hopes that you’ll come back to them when you’re ready to spend money. More and more most people will just go on to the next freebie. However – free or .99 is a legal decision when made by the owner/author.

What really frosts me is the blatant way in which our works are simply taken. “If it’s on the internet it has to be free” is something we hear a lot. Pirate sites simply scoop in books and give them away to anyone. To my mind that’s theft, but apparently beyond a feeble ‘that shouldn’t be’ our legal agencies aren’t doing much of anything to stop it.

Amazon itself is fostering a kind of theft – the returns scam. A customer will buy a book, read it, then return it for full credit, which is then subtracted from your earnings. Now I’ve returned a book I’ve bought – when I find out it isn’t the book I thought it was, or my sometimes unreliable and arthritic hands click when I don’t mean them to, or some other legitimate reason, but almost always within the space of twenty-four hours, and not very often – like less than once a year. However, some people brag that they get the books, read them and return them – sometimes as many as four or five a week! I know Amazon is proud of its commitment to customer service, but surely they should be able to see that this is a form of theft, not only from us but from them! Surely they keep some kinds of record about who returns what and when…

And we won’t even go into the subject of plagiarism, where someone gets a book, sometimes does a search-and-replace on names and towns (and sometimes not!) then publishes the book as their own creation. Even when such an egregious crime is exposed Amazon does nothing about giving just recompense to the actual author. The plagiarist walks away with the unjustly ‘earned’ money.

Even though it doesn’t seem possible, it does get worse. A bunch of crooks on eBay are selling multi-book collections – sometimes numbering in the thousands – to which they have no right. Worse, they are also selling RE-SALE rights, telling their customers that they not only have the rights to these books, that they can sell them the rights to re-sell them themselves. Everyone makes money – except the creator of the books. After all, what do we matter? All we did was write them… To add insult to injury, in spite of being told many times about this situation, eBay has done nothing about it.

There’s another scheme out there that seems a little bit shady to me, but it is legal. The site – and there are many of them –  advertises that they have all kinds of books, but when you click on a book, it takes you to the Amazon page, where you can purchase the book. It’s an affiliate scheme, where the site gets a few pennies for every book sold because the purchaser came through their link. It’s true they’re using your book to earn money without your permission, but it is a legal purchase and the author does get what they’re due. That alone makes it acceptable.

However – as loath as I am to support crime, there is a bright spot on the horizon. There are sites that claim to have just about any book in the world for free, but to access them the freebie hunter (i.e., the thief) has to give them his credit card number in order to browse, or to pay for a membership, or to make some token payment like a dime a book, or whatever. The good thing is that the site has no books – it either uses the freebie hunter’s visit to plant ad/malware/viri on his computer or it’s just a plain old phishing scam that rips off his credit card number. The thief looking for free books thus gets stolen from. Golly, karma is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

So it’s not enough that we have to research and write the books, we must also be our own policemen, sending out DMCAs, which are more often than not ignored, and be constantly alert against the theft of our books. Some authors have just given up, saying that it takes too much time and the people who steal books aren’t going to buy them anyway, but that sends out the signal that theft is okay, and that offends my sense of what is right. I don’t know what the solution is, other than our government and legal agencies stepping up to the plate and actually doing something about such blatant theft, but that ain’t a-gonna happen. Anybody got any ideas?

What About Self Publishing?

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

On one of my loops there has been for some time a very spirited discussion about self-publishing – some correspondents are very outspoken that it should just ‘go away and let real publishing take over again.’ Some admit to being confused or uninformed. Some – including me – are quite vocal that self pubbing is not only here to stay, but that it should be. Because I feel so strongly about this, I have taken my response to this somewhat contentious thread and put it here.

For all those who think that ‘self publishing should just go away and let real publishing take over again’ I ask... Why? Self publishing IS real publishing, with the added benefits of freedom and due rewards for the writer. It gets the story from the writer's mind into the reader's hand, and that's the rock-bottom basis of publishing. For centuries writers have been treated as at best the red-headed-stepchildren of the publishing industry, at worst nothing more than a necessary evil. While there are the mega-bestsellers who receive fantastic amounts, the majority of writers are paid least and last, which is egregiously illogical as without them the publishing industry would not exist. Trad publishers are notorious for keeping authors in the dark about sales figures and give them little or no input into covers, marketing (when any marketing is done at all) and basically tell writers "Give us the books we will accept, allow us to shape them, take what we give you without any questions and go away."

Self publishing has changed all that. The author is now in charge and is finally getting paid in proportion to their contribution. It's more work for them, but the rewards are worth it. Is there dreck in self-publishing? Of course. Freedom is always messy, but that's no reason to condemn a new process when there are so many benefits. Self-publishing is the essence of freedom - let the market, ie the reader, decide what they want.

If self pubbing were not good for the writer, why would so many trad pubbed writers be switching? They want commensurate rewards for their work. They want control. They want to know what is happening and be able to try new things. In return, every real writer I know puts more care into their self pubbed books than most traditional publishers. Check a trad pubbed book (especially one of the Big 5) against a professional writer's self pubbed one. I’ll bet you there are more mistakes - typo, formatting, etc. - in the trad pubbed. The professional self pubbing writers I know hire editors, formatters and artists, many of whom have quit the big houses and gone into freelancing. They too want to make more money. And what is wrong with that?

Should everyone self publish? Obviously not. But - ! Every writer should have the freedom to choose whether they want to self publish or not.

Self pubbing is also good for the reader. Self pubbing gives readers the freedom to choose what kind of books they want. Niche publishing flourishes with self pubbing. Specialized stories or cross-genre books, each pulling too small an audience to interest the big boys are now available. Readers can now choose the specific type of stories they want to read and not be forced to choose from just what is profitable for the trad publishers or acceptable to their gatekeepers. The reader is now in control, just as is the writer.

It's too late to put things back the way they were, even if the trad houses were suddenly to wise up and do everything right. The genie is out of the bottle. If Amazon - the 600 lb gorilla of self-publishing - were to decide to stop putting out books for self pubbed authors or to change their payment schedules some other profit-minded entrepreneur would step in.

And what about the dreck, the garbage books? There have always been garbage books, even under the big trad pubbing umbrella. Yes, there are more now, but that will pass. Millions of people have always thought they could write a book better than the one they're reading, and a very few of them were right. Many try and most never even finish their manuscript. Of those who do many go right on to publication, ready or not. In the old days pre-self pubbing, these tyros were mainly caught by the gatekeepers. They either quit writing or learned to write well - and to conform to the Procrustean bed of the trad pubbers. Now they can string together as many words as they like, call it a book, put it out and then be shocked when it doesn't bring them instant success and fortune. Then they either quit writing or buckle down and learn to write.

Is the system perfect? No, of course not. No system ever is, but with the option of self pubbing, the new gatekeepers are the writers and the readers themselves. And that's the way it should be.

The Party's Over....

by Janis Susan May/Janis Patterson

To tell the truth, I kind of halfway believed that this day would never come. On 30 October my publishing blitz ended. Unless you’ve been living under a rock this summer, you probably have heard more than once that I’ve been doing a blitz of one book release (two new works, the rest re-releases of reverted backlist) every two weeks since 30 June.

That’s a heck of a lot of books.

And an insane schedule. Why would anyone do anything so utterly mad?

Back in late May, when this idea first appeared, I had no idea of how much plain old work – and plain old money – would be involved. Each book was re-edited, re-formatted, given a wonderful new cover and released in both electronic and paper versions. Sounds deceptively simple, doesn’t it? It wasn’t. Without the most wonderful team in the world – scanner, editor, formatter and cover artist – behind me I never would have made it. No – without them I never would even have considered it!

In May I did FAMILY OF STRANGERS, a tasty little classic gothic romance set in Victorian Scotland. It took several weeks to get it up and running, and it has done rather well. Deciding to do the rest, I jumped in with both feet, my normal way of doing something. Concentration has always been a problem with me, and after several weeks I had done something on every book, but not one was completely finished and ready for publication.

Some of the older books were so old that no electronic version existed. Appalled at the thought of re-keying them, I had them scanned. My scanner Melynda Andrews is the best in the business, but inaccuracy is the nature of the beast no matter who does it. Age and texture of the paper, ink density, type font and the letters themselves all affect what is translated from paper to pixels, so each letter must be checked. For example, ‘his’ morphed into ‘liis’ and ‘rain’ into ‘min’ and so forth – but never with any degree of predictability. Some of the results were horrific, some were hysterical, but each had to be checked.

It’s not the big errors that get you – it’s the little, almost invisible ones. On getting the scan back, I had to go through the manuscript almost pixel by pixel. Years ago during my magazine editing days I learned to proof by starting with the last word and going backward. That way I was seeing the words and letters themselves and not getting lost in the story. At least, it helped.

After that tiring and sometimes hilarious chore, I started at the beginning and did the editing on the re-releases myself; the two new works went to my wonderful professional editor Laree Bryant, and then through a rigorous round of revisions. As the re-releases had already been edited by their respective publishing houses, I didn’t see a reason to submit them to my editor, but I went through them with a fine-tooth comb, tweaking and doing a little bit of rewriting. No book is ever really finished, you see. As long as we can get our hands on it, we can always find some little something that can be improved.

Then there were the covers. It was by pure blind luck that I was fortunate enough to find Dawn Charles of BookGraphics, one of the best cover artists in the world, who worked tirelessly with me turning what I wanted, what was possible and what I could afford into an elegant cover. She also provided me with a huge banner proclaiming both my names – Janis Susan May for romance, Janis Patterson for mysteries – for when (if) I do signings, and created some positively fantastic bookmarks.

Working with my wonderful formatter Vickie Taylor was the easiest thing. I had already gone through the manuscript, making it as clean as possible (studying those pixels again), taking out any extraneous spaces, returns, etc., and putting the various elements in the order I wanted them for both the electronic and paper editions – copyright page, dedication, other books available, by the author and all that. I would email the files to her and tell her which electronic distributors to program for and in a few days I would have individualized files for electronic and print that only required me to point-and-click to upload. Being a total techno-naif I love point and click!

Yes, I know there are loads of authors who do this themselves. Joy go with them. There is nothing wrong with my brain-box (at least, I hope not) and I could learn do the formatting myself. After all, in the dark ages of computers I wrote a couple of decent COBOL programs. However – I am a believer that one should do what one does best and hire out the rest. It’s only good time management, besides saving my nerves. I frustrate very easily.

Then a couple of days before official release day – so I would have links to hand out on release day – I would upload. First would be the print version at CreateSpace, because I wanted time to order a proof and still get the distributor buy links in time. Then, closer to The Day, I would upload to Amazon, BandN and Kobo myself. iBooks/Apple always went through Draft2Digital. While many people swear by them, I don’t like some of Apple’s practices, and Macs are too expensive for me to consider anyway.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Basically it is, but it is both complex and time-consuming. And, believe it or not, this was the artistic part.

There is also the business part. First I got a DBA for my publisher name. Forming an S corp or an LLC didn’t make financial sense at this point, but I did want the ability to cash any checks that might come in the company name.

I copyrighted with the government those books which had not already been done. It’s the cheapest intellectual property insurance I know, and I advise every writer to do it.

In addition, there was the acquisition, assigning and registration of ISBNs through Bowkers – and Heaven help you if you get two numbers mixed up! Each book had its own specific copyright release on the copyright page, because they need to state if, when and by whom the book had been published before. There were the individual dedications. Print and electronic versions each needed their own special order of contents. Front matter and back matter were different.

Because I wanted to get them all done as quickly as possible so all I would have to do was upload (didn’t work, by the way – every release day was an edge-of-the-seat affair) I worked on a lot of books at once and got very confused. Finally I created a spreadsheet to keep me organized. One row for every book, one column for every action. At one time I had forty two columns. It’s come down a little since then, but it’s still an impressive amount of data. For a while I was so stressed I couldn’t sleep – I’d wake in the morning at some dreadfully early hour and, my mind churning with what had to be done, be unable to get back to sleep, so I’d get up and start work. By the way, writing is my only job, other than looking after The Husband, the animals, the house, the yard, some volunteer work and assorted family and friends.

The Husband became accustomed to eating frozen things for dinner – mainly pizza – and we ate out or got takeaway more than ever before. Laundry became a hit-or-miss proposition. With three animals (two cats and a bossy little dog) we’ve always had a recurring crop of dust bunnies, but they took advantage of my concentration on the books to grow into aggressive dust hares until in self defense The Husband started wielding the vacuum cleaner. At night I was too tired even to read. Writing? Forget it.

But now it is over. I’m glad I did it, because the books are done, and in self-publishing there is no worry about shelf life. For good, bad or indifferent, these stories will be out there forever, hopefully generating some income while I go on to the fun part of creating new books. I say hopefully because my MasterCard is still on life support.

Speaking of money, I’ll admit to being disappointed that sales have been much lower than I dreamed – even lower than I expected. However, on my writers’ loops everyone has been saying that their sales are down as well, so I take faint comfort that I’m not the only one or that it’s not my books themselves being ignored. I’ve spent some money – more than I could afford, really – on advertising, but nowhere near enough to make a real difference. Still, as Scarlett said, tomorrow is another day, and we can only wait to see what it will bring.

Have I given up on trad pubbing? Of course not. At this moment I am under contract to two traditional publishing houses and intend to continue with both. And, if one of the Big 5, or however many of them there are this week, comes waving a contract with a healthy advance attached just watch me jump.

Do I intend to keep on self-publishing? Yes, most definitely. The freedom to do what I want, to tell the story I want without having some little editor girl forcefully ‘suggest’ that my heroine be a deep-sea diver instead of an insurance investigator or another editor that the story take place in the mountains of Montana instead of downtown Dallas. Even if such ‘suggestions’ would strengthen the story (which they most definitely would not have) I know nothing about deep sea diving and even less about Montana. My sense of outrage at such needless meddling was only exacerbated by the fact that I have shoes older than either one of those little editor girls! Now I can tell my stories with the voice I want. Of course, they will be professionally edited, etc. That’s a given.

Not giving up on self-pubbing, however, does not mean I will put my husband, myself or my books through an insane blitz like this again. My future self-pub efforts will be done in a civilized manner, at a manageable speed of one, maybe two releases at a time. I’m too old for nonsense like this, but will certainly admit that this blitz taught me more about self-pubbing than I ever knew possible.

I’m glad I did it, but now it is time to tell myself (in my execrable Latin) Dire, Faire, Taire – loosely translated, Say It, Do It, Shut Up.