Brave New E Book World

by Alexandra Sokoloff

I know, it’s a holiday weekend, but here at Murderati, no one sleeps.  

Last week I threatened to start a related series of blogs on indie publishing and how the whole e book revolution has been affecting me.

In my post I talked about how over the years I have had pretty good intuitions, cosmic nudges as it were, about moving in directions that have enabled me to make a full-time living as a writer for pretty much all of my adult life. And the latest cosmic nudge was about e books. Well, okay, maybe that was Joe Konrath, who tends to be even more insistent than the cosmos.

At any rate, I’ve done it – yesterday I put my first original e novel up for sale, $2.99, any format.

Buy for Kindle:

Buy on Smashwords

Buy for Nook

I’d already worked through this process with my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbook, with about a dozen very patient author friends who had already been through it talking me through the steps.  So this time was easier and faster because I’d already been through all the steps, and I know ALL of it is going to get easier and easier. Except, of course, writing the books. That part hasn’t changed, unfortunately.  

So that's the first point to cover, today.

FIRST, LAST AND ALWAYS, IT’S ABOUT THE BOOK.

Here's my story line:

Sixteen-year old Anna Sullivan is having terrible dreams of a massacre at her school. Anna’s father is a mentally unstable veteran, her mother vanished when Anna was five, and Anna might just chalk the dreams up to a reflection of her crazy waking life — except that Tyler Marsh, the most popular guy at the school and Anna’s secret crush, is having the exact same dream.

Despite the gulf between them in social status, Anna and Tyler connect, first in the dream and then in reality. As the dreams reveal more, with clues from the school social structure, quantum physics, probability, and Anna's own past, Anna becomes convinced that they are being shown the future so they can prevent the shooting…

If they can survive the shooter — and the dream.

This is a project that was very close to me and very hard to write.  You know, every book is different, but I know from my own experience and from talking to a lot of author friends (including several of the Rati) who started publishing at about the same time, that sometime around about your fourth book you start getting restless and you just want to stretch.

So I was experimenting with a lot of things with SPACE. It’s my first Young Adult, my first book in present tense, my first book set in California even though California is where I’ve lived for practically all my life (apparently I had to leave it to be able to write about it).

Also I was adapting my own short story, “The Edge of Seventeen”, which won the Thriller award for Best Short Fiction two years ago.  

Which I also just put up online, because that's what we can do, now!  Just 99 cents, any format.

(Both cover designs by my very talented sister, Elaine: ElaineSokoloff  at gmail dot com).

Buy for Kindle

Buy on Smashwords

Buy for Nook

I’m not new to adaptation, it was half the work I did when I was a screenwriter, but I really had to open up the story. That was the best part, it turned out – I always felt there was much more to the story I’d initially told, but I really surprised myself with how much more there was.

Add to all those challenges the fact that for the last two years I’ve been dealing with a devastating family illness and death. It’s easily been the hardest time of my life.

I guess it’s no surprise, then, that when I’d finally nailed the book, it was…. How to say this?  

Dark.  

Really, really dark.  Which I tend to be anyway, but under the circumstances… well, it was dark.

And it's about high school. Now, I personally had a better time in HS than most, because we had such a great theater department and that's what I was always doing. But that doesn't mean I wasn't acutely aware of the horror and misery going on around me, and that's what I write about in Space. And when you’re dealing with a sixteen-year old protagonist, everything seems all that much darker.

So that brings us to the second point.

WHY GO INDIE?

The first thing is always writing a great book. But once you have that great book, there’s the decision of how to market it. In traditional publishing, this has a lot to do with your agent deciding which editors are the best potential buyers at each house, and then the fate of the book is largely determined there. But with the rise of indie publishing, one of the new decisions is "Indie or traditional?"

Well, here's one of the things that’s so cool about e publishing - that you can use it for those slightly off projects that I KNOW all you great slightly off people have. In this case, I was writing a YA that was - even as edgy as YA has gotten – edgy enough to give me and my agent pause about submitting it to editors.

Not that it wouldn’t be totally great to have a banned book in my bibliography, but… I was writing from the perspective of a 16-year old who has seen WAY too much, just like the 16-year old that I was.  And while I myself was reading things that were way too old for me when I was - well, seven, actually, but certainly when I was 16 – what that meant was that I was reading adult books that were way too old for me. Because when I was a teenager there weren’t really that many YAs that were too old for anyone except for that twisted Flowers in the Attic series. And those were twisted in a way I was familiar with from my friends’ lives, unfortunately, so I didn’t really understand why the books were considered so twisted. I mean, why get upset about the books?  Try getting upset about incest and child abuse in real life, and DOING something about it, why don’t you…

Um, sorry, where was I?

Oh, right.  Nowadays there is a ton of edgy YA out there – edgy being the encompassing word for books that cover incest, rape, cutting, eating disorders, mental illness, child abuse of any kind, teen criminal behavior, school shootings, suicide…  no taboo is left, actually.  But in The Space Between I cross a supernatural thriller and edgy YA, which takes things a little further out there.

Now, that didn’t discourage my agent. But because of the life interruptions of my last year, I’m in the interesting position of having several interrupted spec books that I’m just now getting back to. So because The Space Between is my first and only YA, and one of my others is much more along the lines of my other adult thrillers, only even more mainstream, and because my agent is really aware of and supportive of my desire to get into the indie publishing business, we decided that I would indie publish Space, and he will shop the adult thriller traditionally (if that still makes the most sense when I finish that book).

It’s an experiment – because at least at the moment YA is not generally a great seller in e books, so it could be that a traditional publishing deal would be a better way to go. But things have changed so much in publishing in a year that e publishing first does not preclude doing a traditional publishing deal later; in fact it’s more and more common for traditional publishers to pick up indie books for traditional publishing.

I’m in the lucky position of having multiple projects and a steady income from previous contracts, so I can take some risk.

So the KIND of book SPACE is figured into that decision.

Another factor was price. I have traditionally published books out on Kindle at the publisher's price of $11.99 and $12.99 and it just feels like publishers are killing all chance of sales at that price.  I absolutely gladly pay twice that for a hardcover of an author I love, but for an e book?  No way. Who wouldn't gravitate toward a $2.99 book in the same genre? In this economy?  Sorry, but that's such an obvious reality it just makes me sick to see publishers ignoring it - and killing authors' sales in the process. 

The other big factor, of course, is rights and money. One of the biggest pulls for me about getting into the e book business now is - of course - the 70% royalty rate on Amazon, slightly less for most other formats.  That can change, but at least if it changes I'll still own full rightst to the book and can take it anywhere I want from there. I have no idea what kind of sales I can expect for a fiction YA; the only numbers I have to go on are the sales from a non-fiction workbook. But non-fiction is statistically the WORST selling genre in e books, and I've already done well enough with it to totally justify doing it as an e book rather than a traditional deal. And those were the kinds of numbers and comparisons that my agent and I were talking about in our discussions on the subject.

So the lessons here?

YOUR AGENT IS YOUR BEST FRIEND. At least if you’ve chosen well, and those Rati who share mine will testify to the awesomeness of ours.  You and your agent make these decisions together.  If you don’t have an agent and are considering doing directly to indie publishing, I would strongly suggest that along with writing the best damn book you can write, you be doing reading every day on what indie publishing actually entails so you are going into it with real knowledge.

Here are the most essential resources I know of for indie publishing information:

- A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing 

Not that anyone here doesn’t already know, but Joe’s is the one essential site on e publishing.

- The Kindleboards  
    
Browsing this message board a couple of days a week will give you a very practical crash course on everything from cover design essentials (what works for traditional publishing is NOT what works at thumbnail size), to promotion, to what indie authors’ actual sales figures are.  People on the boards are friendly and helpful; I also found my two great proofreaders there.  It’s also interesting to see the politics of indie vs. traditional publishing; personally, I just don’t see it as an Either/Or proposition.

- The Business Rusch Publishing series

Everyone, and I mean everyone, should read Kristine Rusch’s incredible series on the essentials of publishing and the changes in our world.

And speaking of agents, this is an interesting article by Barry Eisler on a new trend:

- I’ve also been hearing plugs for Digital Book World: but I haven’t read enough to give a personal recommendation.

Okay, I think that’s enough reading to get your through the four-day weekend (sorry about that!) so I’ll save my step-by-step guide of what I've learned about prepping a book for e publication and getting it up and published: editing, formatting, cover design, pricing, distribution, promotion, and the kitchen sink - for my next post.

So, questions. Does anyone else have something twisty there in the back of that drawer that you've been thinking of putting up as an e book? Anyone out there reading edgy YA, and if so, there any taboos you haven't seen broken?

And - is anyone else watching 1776 for the holiday weekend? (Hi Allison!)  Have a great one.

- Alex

Brave new e world

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Well, Tess said something apocalyptically frightening in her post on Tuesday:

E-book land is going to be a busy, anarchic universe with a dizzying array of great books sold along with bad books, and lord knows how it's all going to shake out.

And hanging over us all will be the one thing that could doom us all.  Piracy.  Once books can be copied and disseminated for free, there will be no way to make a living in the writing profession. I fear that it's only a matter of time before that happens.

And we will look back on this era as the last age of the professional writer.

Thanks, Tess, just what I needed to hear going into a new year.

I guess it’s no big secret anymore that the publishing industry is undergoing a revolution that has us all in shock, awe, fear, or simple paralysis.

One of the components of this revolution is the e reader, as Tess talks about in her post.

At the end of the year, along with my agent, I made the decision to publish Screenwriting Tricks For Authors, the workbook I wrote based on my blog and the story structure articles I’ve posted here at Murderati, at the Kindle store.   It’s now up for sale here.

There were a million reasons.   Well, okay, not a million, I just always like the sound of that number, and I’m a Pisces and can’t count to save my life.

But some of the reasons are –

- I TRULY needed to get the information on my blog into a coherent order, and a blog is not the greatest format for what I am trying to convey.

- I’m being asked to teach a lot, these days, and I can’t possibly take the time anymore to print the workbook at Kinko’s for distribution to my students, and when Amazon started making Kindle books available to PC users, and is promising a Mac version imminently, that made Kindle publishing the easiest instant solution.   And a Kindle or PC version is far cheaper for students to buy than a hardcopy version, about a third of the cost.   That part was just a no-brainer.

- I am constantly adding to the info on my blog and with Kindle, you can republish a new version any time, instantly, without cost.   Now that is cool.

- It’s not huge money, but a LOT more in royalties, comparatively, than other options.

- Publishing on Kindle doesn’t tie up other publication rights – if I am offered a good book contract for the workbook, I can just take it.

- Peer pressure from Joe Konrath, who has a lot to say about Kindle and other e publishing, but you could start here.     

Really, this is a revolution, and while I’m not personally comfortable publishing a novel on Kindle, at least not yet, I am excited to stick at least a toe in the water by publishing this workbook.   Anyone can take the time and click through links on my blog and get a lot of the same info for free, but if you find what I’ve written on the subject is useful,  $9.99 is not such a huge chunk of change to put down to have the whole deal in coherent order.   Plus, you know, supporting an author whose information you are using is good karma.

So this is a New Year’s experiment, which I’ll keep everyone posted on.  So far the only drawback I've experienced is intense complaining from non-Kindle, non-PC (meaning Mac) readers who want the book downloadable or in hardcopy for them NOW.  

In the meantime I’ll keep blogging about craft, because God knows it’s exhausting – if not outright terrifying - trying to keep come up with posts on your personal life. 

So I’ve been teaching another online class these last two weeks.   NOT the greatest time for an online class, actually, because everyone is still so dazed from the holidays and just trying to get back in the swing of things.   Um… especially me.  Still, I am as always finding the teaching completely inspiring  – I love hearing other writers talk about their stories and characters and writing processes.   And new writers have all that, you know - hope.

The discussion so far has completely reinforced my belief that the best thing that you can do to help yourself with story structure is to look at and compare in depth 5-10 (ten being best!) stories – films, novels, and plays - that are structurally similar to yours.

The late and much-missed Blake Snyder said that all film stories break down into just ten patterns that he outlined in his Save The Cat! books.  Dramatist Georges Polti claimed there are Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations and outlined those in his classic book.

I think those books on the subject are truly useful – as I say often, I think you should read everything.  But I believe you also have to get much more specific than ten plots or even thirty-six.

(I also think it’s plainly lazy to use someone else’s analysis of a story pattern instead of identifying your own.  Relying on anyone else’s analysis, and that for sure includes mine, is not going to make you the writer you want to be.)

For example, in the class that I’m teaching now, without giving details of anyone’s plots, there is a reluctant witness story, a wartime romance story, an ensemble mystery plot, a mentor plot, a heroine in disguise plot.   And others.  

Each of those stories has a story pattern that you could force into one of ten general  overall patterns – I guess – but they also have unique qualities that would get lost in such a generalization.  And all of those stories could also be categorized in OTHER ways besides “reluctant witness” or “hero in disguise”.   

Harry Potter, for example, is what you could call a King Arthur story – the chosen one coming into his or her own (also see Star Wars, The Matrix…)  but it is told as a traditional mystery, with clues and red herrings and the three kids playing detectives.   It’s also got strong fairy tale elements.   So if you’re writing a story that combines those three (and more) types of stories, looking at examples of ANY of those types of stories is going to help you structure and brainstorm your own story.

If you find you’re writing a “reluctant witness” or "accidental witness" story, whether it’s a detective story, a sci-fi setting, a period piece, or a romance, it’s extremely useful to look at other stories you like that fall into that “reluctant witness” category – like Witness, North By Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Conspiracy Theory, Someone To Watch Over Me.

If you’re writing a mentor plot, you could take a look at Silence of the Lambs, The Karate Kid, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, An Officer and a Gentleman, Dirty Dancing, all stories in completely different genres with strong mentor plot lines, with vastly different mentor types.

A Mysterious Stranger story has a very specific plotline, too:  a “fixer” character comes into the life of a main character, or characters, and turns it upside down – for the good, and the main character, not the Mysterious Stranger, is the one with the character arc  (look at Mary Poppins, Shane, Nanny McPhee, and the Jack Reacher books).

A Cinderella story, well, where do you even start?  Pretty Woman, Cinderella of course, Arthur, Rebecca,  Suspicion, Maid to Order (I think that's the one I mean), Slumdog Millionaire.

A deal with the devil story – The Firm, Silence of the Lambs, Damn Yankees, The Little Mermaid, Rosemary’s Baby, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Devil’s Advocate.

And you might violently disagree with some of my examples, or have a completely different designation for what kind of story some of the above are…

But that is exactly my point.  You have to create your own definitions of types of stories, and find your own examples to help you learn what works in those stories.   All of writing is about creating your own rules and believing in them.

So I guess that’s what I wanted to say today.   Identifying genres is not enough.   Identifying categories of stories is not enough.   What’s the kind of story you're writing – by your own definition?

When you start to get specific about that, that’s when your writing starts to get truly interesting.

So what kind of story ARE you writing?  Would love to hear some, and brainstorm some great examples.

Have a great holiday weekend, everyone!

- Alex

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Related posts:

What’s YOUR structure?

Meta Structure

Fairy Tale Structure

What is High Concept?

Hooptedoodle and The Barbossa Principle

by J.D. Rhoades

When you're a beginning writer (and for a long long time thereafter) it's enlightening, and often comforting, to read books and articles on the craft, especially by writers you already admire. And when those nuggets of advice are distilled into nice tidy lists of numbered or bullet-pointed rules, you begin to get a sense that maybe you can actually get a handle on this thing. I for one, still pull out and read Elmore Leonard's   New York Times essay entitled  "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points, and Especially Hooptedoodle" at least once a year. After all, who the hell am I to argue with Elmore Leonard, especially when he's offering advice like "try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip"?

  I'm also quite fond of Kurt Vonnegut's "8 Rules for Writing Fiction", which contains gems such as "Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for," and "Start as close to the end as possible."

Most recently, I've gotten a kick from Joe Konrath's cranky and hilarious list "How Not to Write a Story," a cri de coeur which sprang from  Joe's experiences wading through the dross of a short story contest he was judging.

But here's the thing. Once you internalize these rules, you begin to notice more and more writers--good writers, mind you--who break them and get away clean. For instance, both Leonard and Konrath say you should "Never open a story with weather."  And yet, Orwell's 1984 opens with just that: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Chandler's short story Red Wind begins with a description of said wind:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Leonard and Konrath warn against starting stories with prologues. Prologues would also seem to violate Vonnegut's dictum "start as near to the end as possible." However, two books I've read recently which I absolutely loved (Neil Gaiman's NEVERWHERE and John Connolly's THE UNQUIET) both have brilliant prologues. So do Lehane's A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR and Michael Connelly's ECHO PARK, to name just a couple randomly plucked from my nearby bookshelf.

Vonnegut tells us "Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for." But Tom Wolfe's THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES is full of characters I found myself wishing heartily would all die in a fire. Even so, I couldn't put it down.

Konrath warns against the narrator directly addressing the reader, and both Konrath and Leonard warn against lengthy character descriptions, especially at the beginning. But  Twain's THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN begins and ends with Huck addressing the reader directly:  You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. THE MALTESE FALCON begins with a memorable description of Samuel Spade (who can forget the image of Spade as a "blonde Satan"?) and Megan Abbot's QUEENPIN begins with the narrator addressing the reader with a lengthy description of the title character, particularly her  legs.

All that said, the "rules" are there for a reason. While some people are prone to chafe at the idea of rules for writing in general,  the fact remains that many works of fiction that flout them do, in fact, suck. They suck with great vigour. Lest we forget, "It was a dark and stormy night" (opening with weather) has become an archetype of the lame opening.

So what are we to do?   Are there no signposts to guide us on our way? Are there rules or aren't  there?

Over the years, I've developed an attitude towards "The Rules" much like that of Captain Barbossa in the movie  PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN. You may remember the scene where the plucky Elizabeth Swann tries to talk her way off the pirate ship and back to shore by rule-lawyering the Pirate Code, which she apparently knows only from books. Barbossa just smirks and tells her, "The Code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl."

Most of the time, though. the pirates DO follow the Code. Because it makes sense. Except when it doesn't, and then they don't. 

So look at it this way. Go ahead and learn the rules as set down by more experienced writers. But when you come across a situation in which you want to break a rule, think once. Then think twice. Then think again. If after three thinks, you still believe  it's a good idea, then go ahead. It's your story, after all.

You should still leave out the parts that readers tend to skip, though.

So here's today's exercise: tell us a rule you've read, either at the linked lists or elsewhere.  Tell us about a work you've enjoyed that breaks that rule succesfully and tell us why the story still works. Writers, tell us about a rule you've consciously broken and why.

And for more discussion on this subject, check out the quite spirited debate at Steve Mosby's The Left Room, which was the inspiration for this post.