Research your criminals

Last night I attended a talk by Peter James, "Britain's #1 bestselling crime author," at the offices of HarperCollins Canada. It was, appropriately, a dark and stormy night, which we had a great view of from the floor-to-ceiling windows in HCC's fabulous 20th-storey offices.

James spoke to an intimate audience of crime writers and fans about his writing process, his sources of inspiration, and the effect on his psyche of writing about gory murders all day. (Apparently the antidote is vodka martinis.)

To add realism to his stories, James has been cultivating relationships with police, criminals, and victims for decades. He goes out on patrol, witnesses arrests, hangs out in jails...the whole bit.

While not all authors have the luxury of totally immersing themselves in the world of their stories, I think any author could benefit from the general lesson of seeking inspiration through research. So often in manuscripts I find that the very best writing comes from what the author knows best, that the most developed characters and settings are the ones that are clear stand-ins from the author's life experience, and that the characters and plot points that are the most "made up" are the haziest, even if the author means them to be interesting and important.

The best thing about this is that it's an infallible excuse for field trips! So go feed into that author stereotype thing where you get to do all kinds of weird, fun things because it's "research for your book." I think I am going to start researching a book about a horseback-riding ballerina who hangs out in tea shops reading her brand-new stack of British crime thrillers now.

Also, he's totally talking to me in this picture. I am Britain's #1 crime author by association.

Comprehensive (?) list of e-readers

I came across this list of e-readers/tablet things that people read on. And as a big fan of lists, I thought I would pass it along. I haven't even heard of a bunch of these and will have to look them up.

**************************
Adam (Notion Ink)
AS 100 (Toshiba)
iPad (Apple)
CherryPad (Cherrypal)
Cruz (Velocity Metro)
Cybook (Bookeen)
Galaxy Tab (Samsung)
eDGe (enTourage)
Eee Pad (Asus)
EliteBook (HP)
IdeaPad (Lenovo)
Inspiron (Dell)
Kindle (any version)
Kobo (Borders)
Kyros (Coby)
LifeBook (Fujitsu)
Navigator (Netbook)
NOOK
NOOKcolor
Pavilion (HP)
PlayBook (Blackberry)
Protégé (Toshiba)
PC Tablet (Archos)
Skiff Reader (Hearst)
Slate (HP)
Sony Reader (any version)
Streak (Dell)
ThinkPad Tablet (Lenovo)
TouchPad (HP)
TouchSmart (HP)
WISEreader (Hanvon)
ViewPad (ViewSonic)
XOOM (Motorola)

Blog revivalism

Oh, hello!

I've been off running about for the past year, pursuing a graduate certificate in book and magazine publishing in Toronto. That's all done now, which in theory makes me an accredited publishing professional, which is a lovely thing to be!

I've learned a lot about the publishing industry in the past year, and I'm looking forward to taking that out into the world now. At the moment I am freelancing and job-hunting, and that is what I will be blogging about. Soon.

Writing your own back cover copy

The fact that authors have to write their own blurbs and cover copy when they self publish is a very awkward thing. For the authors, I imagine it's akin to torture. Poor authors - you've written the book, you've gotten it all fixed up, you've said what you wanted to say in 70,000 words, and now you have to say it all again in 50.

The results usually aren't too bad...back-cover copy is pretty formulaic, and you can't go too far wrong just typing in the copy from a published book in your genre, and replacing the key words.

The key thing is that you're trying to sell your book, right? So you say things that you think will make people want to buy it. That's good thinking, but sometimes I wonder if the authors have actually read their own books, the cover-copy is so far off the mark. Comparisons are made to books without the faintest resemblance either in plot or voice to the book in question. Allusions to authors, styles, and literature movements that the author hasn't been exposed to since 11th grade Lit class 30 years ago are demurely smuggled in. Characters are identified as the main character who aren't the main character. Really.

I understand the need to talk up your book, but really* - don't compare yourself to Crime and Punishment if the only similarity is that a crime occurs in your book and the perpetrator suffers because of it. It's like comparing your book to the Bible because it has God in it. And don't say your book draws from the surrealist movement just because you threw in a couple of vaguely weird bits that nobody would have noticed if you hadn't made a character say "Wow, this is so weird, I feel like my watch ought to start melting soon."

Moral: Back cover copy should both sell and remotely resemble the book you have written. It's bloody hard, but I promise it can be done.

*titles and genres have been changed to protect the innocent

Traditional- and Self-Publishing Aren't Mutually Exclusive

The internets tell me that there seem to be two violently opposed camps in the publishing world - those who say that traditional publishing is where the money is and self-publishers are deluded idiots, and those who say that traditional publishing is dying a horrible death as we speak and self-publishing is the shining future.

As usual, I firmly oppose extremes, and get all anxious-like just thinking about them.

First of all, in what other art form are commercial and indy work mutually exclusive? Does anyone say that bands that record their own cds and play shows out of their lofts shouldn't make the effort? Where would painting or fashion or film be if there weren't people out there experimenting in their own studios? In all of those fields, a lot of the indy stuff is crap by people who don't know what they're doing. But a lot of it is wonderful, much better than comparable pieces put out by Chanel or Hollywood or whoever. Some people hate the "sold-out" big names and only go with the indy stuff, and some people don't want to go to the effort to find the indy stuff so they just go see blockbusters and look at commissioned art in magazines. And that, my friends, is what makes the world interesting.

Really the only sensible position, and the one I think most people actually take, is to like what you like and not give a damn who put it out.

That's my first reason. There are more. Can you think of them?

The Times has an article today where a longtime publishing professional muses about the atmosphere in publishing houses from the '60s to the present. With the upshot being, of course, that everything is currently much more efficient, much more competitive, and much less fun and romantic.

It's kind of sad, but it helps answer that question I always get about why I'd rather freelance than work in a publishing house. This is why - I'd have loved to work in a '60s publishing house. Now, it's too much like working in any other office.

Site changes and editing update

I am very pleased to announce that I now have a proper website for my editorial work at kallisti.ca. This is doubly delightful because, as a new Canadian permanent resident, I'm allowed to have a .ca domain, which I think is very neat.

The site was designed and built by Christopher Kahn, to whom I am eternally grateful. I think he did a marvelous job--I wanted the site to be simple and helpful, and I think that's just what it is. What you don't get to see is the amazing project database he also made for me, which is like magic. It leaves me free to assault misused hyphens and dangling modifiers instead of trying to strong-arm my math skills into properly organizing deposit invoices. Brilliant.

Just in time for the site launch, I got a lovely shout-out on the Self-Publishing Review for my work on Henry Baum's upcoming novel The American Book of the Dead, which I had the pleasure to edit last month. It's been really gratifying to hear some kind words from my authors even after they've spent weeks reorganizing subplots and rewriting their least-favorite scenes because of me! I've heard some horror stories of authors feeling very abused and browbeaten by freelance editors, and I really hope that I can make the experience a little more pleasant for the authors I work with.

Just finished off a YA project, and I'm taking the rest of the week off to finish up all the paperwork I need to do for my residency, all the chores I've fallen behind on...you know. Everything. I'm really looking forward to my next project--it's a delightful novel by an Authonomy author that's already in great shape, and I can tell we're really going to be able to make it shine. That'll probably be my last project for this month, and then I'm accepting submissions for the fall.

Kindle sample chapter reviews

I was lucky enough to take a little vacation in the States last weekend, and of course I brought the Kindle along to witness the glory that is the Full Kindle Wi-Fi experience. And, well...wow. I mean, I adore my Kindle, Wi-Fi or no, and I already have more to read on it than I'm going to be able to manage in half a year at least, but all of that is just base logic...the truth of it is, I fell in love. You can order books. All the books. From. Your. Bed. Or from the car mid-roadtrip. And then, because I get motion sick and can't read in the car, you can have it read your new acquisitions to you. I took out a sample subscription to the New York Times, because we were in New York, and it downloaded to my Kindle each morning as I had my tea in the hotel cafeteria.

Oh! And we saw an ad for it in the subway. That was neat.

Okay, so I won't front - the wi-fi is an insanely amazing thing. But I also don't have an iPhone, so maybe it's just because this was my first exposure to handheld 3G anywhere-internet. Though to be fair, the connection was a bit lousy - I had to log into facebook again every time I did anything, so log in, type a wall post, log in, post the wall post...sigh. So the iPhone would probably win that battle. But still. You can Beam Books Out Of The Sky. It's like heaven.

Oh, so I downloaded some sample chapters. And by "some" I of course mean "every one I could get at before my battery ran out." Now that my pet rat has gotten old and his greatest joy in life is to be read out loud to, I've been reading him a whole variety of NYT bestsellers, and he seems to be quite enjoying it. To date:

Swimsuit: I was relieved that this ended when it did. This man does many things I never would have allowed as an editor, plus I'm not really big on the whole "gruesome murder" bit. Benji enjoyed it.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: Is that right? This one was a big hit all around, and even the Manfolk, who pretended to be playing video games and not listening, let out a couple of good chuckles over it. I would definitely accept this one as a gift, if I have any admirers.

Twilight: Ah. I see.

Finger-Lickin' Fifteen: Um...maybe I just wasn't in the mood? I'm rather pleased that there's this huge series of popular books with a Latina heroine, so we'll give this a thumbs up, but...meh.

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll: Now, this one actually takes advantage of the sample chapter setup. Unlike stupid James Patterson, whose fancy "publisher" apparently didn't have enough time to look and see that 60% of his sample was the table of contents, this here book gives a big fat juicy sample, unhindered by massive quantities of front matter. I'm only a few pages in (Benji was dissatisfied by the lack of dialogue), but the narrator seems like a sweetheart and he's saying all those smart things about Blues music that always make me go all weak in the knees.

Stay tuned for a guest post from that boy who downloaded all the sci-fi sample chapters.

Iceberg ebook application

This is cute. Instead of something as crass as the "progress bar" the Kindle shows to let you see how far through the book you are, this thing for your...(iphone? Is that an iphone?)... actually shows you a picture of a book with your spot marked. Awww.

Also, how obvious is the Photoshop job? Or does chapter one of Twilight really extend to page 146?

Book Reviews

I admit it - writing is hard for me. I think it might be just that that I'm out of practice, but it's really an uphill battle. I admire authors immensely for being able to produce pages and pages of words, when I totally struggle to string together...like...two. Words.

Anyway, I've been writing book reviews for the website Self Publishing Review, which I've been quite enjoying. It's really fascinating to read the books that people have self-published! It must be terrifying to send your book off to be reviewed, especially without the buffer level of knowing that a publishing house accepted/edited/designed it. That way at least you can blame the publisher for any mistakes, and know that even if the reviewer didn't like it, at least the acquisitions editor did!

With the kind permission of Henry Baum, the mastermind behind the Self Publishing Review, I'm going to be going into a little more depth on the editing angle of the books I've been sent for review. I've made a few remarks on editing in the SPR reviews, but I'd like to talk more specifically about what another edit could have done for each book. It'll be a paragraph-structure adventure! But not right now, because I'm sleepy.

For the time being, you may revel in the glory that is my SPR reviews:
Daywalker, by Rebecca Rock (Vampires)
The Legend of Jimmy Gollihue, by George LaCas (Literary fiction)
Fairy Senses, by Frances Ruiz (YA Fantasy)

Espresso Book Machine coming to Montreal!

For those who haven't heard of this - it prints books for you. In under 5 minutes! Out of this snazzy case it's reminiscent more of a couple of printers, some knives, and a hot-glue gun duct-taped to a folding table, but what the whole package amounts to is something that's going to save really a lot of trees. And make it so you can print off a quick book on your way to lounging in the sun in those big fields in front of t I'm kind of in love.

And the McGill library is getting one this spring! There aren't too many out in the world yet, so this makes me very happy. I can't wait to go print a book on it! I wonder what book I'll choose.

Read more about it:
OnDemandBooks website
Self-Publishing Review article

iUniverse cover quality

As I've been researching POD options, I kept thinking that all the price levels and comparative service packages are a distraction. So the company offers cover design at a reasonable price - but are the covers professional and effective? So they offer editing - are their editors skilled and qualified and motivated to do a good job? That kind of thing. In other words, I want to actually see the books to see if they look good, and read them to see if they're full of mistakes.

My first face-to-face encounter has been with a small perfect-bound paperback iUniverse book. Whose cover curls. And not just a little bit - the damn thing stands open like you've put a mid-sized rodent in there as a bookmark. Front and back, from the day it was brand new to its present well-read state. This lead to all sorts of shenanigans as I was reading and reviewing it, because it was just so damn annoying I had to set something on top of it whenever I set it down. My friends would joke about it and poke it when they came over.

The offending cover, compared to a book that's behaving itself rather better

There were other problems, like the gutters were too narrow and the editing was so poor in places (both in the "this story is confusing and has obvious gaps and errors" sense and the "wow, there's another typo" sense) that I can only hope that the author didn't use iUniverse's in-house editing services. But those things are only really evident once you've bought the book and are sitting down to read it, so in a sense they're less immediately important than the cover, which I think has both turned me off of recommending this service to authors and given a number of my friends a poor impression of POD books.

The very nice customer service fellow I talked with at iUniverse tells me that although this does happen, the company hasn't recieved any official complaints about the matter. Well, now I guess they've got one.

Has anyone gone the POD route and seen this problem?

BookaBook - sad but true

Next on my list of author/reader networking websites is the Dutch site Bookabook.com. This site, which seems to have only a handful of users at the moment, screams "scam"...though it could also, to be fair, just be a well-intentioned but thoroughly impractical and poorly thought out business plan.

The idea is that you put your book up in the site, and at the same time 1,000 shares in the book are offered for sale at 15 Euros apiece. Once all thousand shares are sold, Bookabook publishes the book.

Right off the bat, this is absurd - They're making 15,000 Euros ($20,000 US) off the shares before they've even published the book. When you can publish a book through iUniverse for around $1,000, or through CreateSpace or similar companies for...well... $0. Though to be fair, they'll never make any money off of it because they allow users to get their money back any time before all the shares are sold.

Before publishing your book, though, Bookabook will edit it. They will not do a nasty developmental edit and mess with your artistic vision, but they will do a copy edit and check for typo's (sic). Yes, they had a typo on the word "typo." A quick scan of the rest of the site established that the quality of their text was uniformly atrocious. But I digress.

Once the shares are sold and the book is published, you start raking in the profits. Bookabook takes 60%, of course, and the author gets 20%. The other 20% is split among the 1,000 shareholders.

The math hurt my head so I shopped it out to the computer science student on my other couch. He laughed at me and explained some basic principles of algebra that I failed to absorb at any level. The result, however, is that with a postulated $15 cover price, the company would have to sell 75,000 Euros worth (6,800 copies) of a book before shareholders would make back their initial investment.

And that, my faithful reading public, is today's lesson in why the stock market crashed.

Authonomy dramaz report

Hellfire broke loose this evening on Harper-Collins's Authonomy author-networking website, when it was determined that the "glitch" that was keeping the site slow or crashing all day was none other than a tech-savvy author who posted a youtube video asking his wide network of friends to join the site and vote for his book.

The video itself, by an Irish writer, vlogger, and Starcraft afficionado, is strikingly harmless. He sounds like a nice enough fellow, and it's actually super funny to hear somebody walk you through the Authonomy process in that friendly tech-support style. But as it happens, this fellow has a lot of friends, and they're gamer friends with plenty of time to spend fiddling around on the computer, and they've come out in droves to visit the site and comment on his book.

Together with totally crashing the site all day, the concept of doing this, and being sucessful at it (the book in question has shot up the rankings and is already #1 on the weekly chart), has raised some ethical questions. Which are all being expounded, in greater or lesser degrees of coherence, politeness, and rabid fury, by pretty much everyone who's on the site right now. The author started out trying to defend himself, but faced with the onslaught of hate he's pretty well been reduced to calling everyone "jealous" and pretty much looking like a big ol' douche. But to be fair, everyone is so furious at him he'd have to be a saint to make himself look good at the moment.

The book itself... well, the first couple paragraphs were so bad I didn't keep reading, but a few people who did say it improves a lot after the first couple pages.

Anyway, he's a gamer, and he's gamed the system. Certainly, this kind of behaviour will totally sink the site and the community behind it if more than a couple people do it. But on the other hand, it's legit - he has a Starcraft-centered fanbase and he can ask all those people to vote for him, just like everyone is always asking all their Facebook friends to vote for them in whatever contest they're involved in. It's taking the contest into a whole other league, and I can really appreciate why the people who've found a really nice community in Authonomy would object furiously to this first advent of spam-warfare.

What will happen? Will the interloper be chastized? Banned? Shot?

Stay tuned.

"Desktop Miracles" publishing?

It's the funniest thing, I can't find any sort of outside review of this place, anywhere on the internet. I know it's a real place, I've even worked with them a bit when my former employer published a book through them. I wasn't impressed with their editor, but the finished product is a lovely book.

It just seems really strange to me, this complete silence about a company in an industry I wouldn't probably go that kind of route with a book again, but it was an interesting experience, and I really would like to know what other people think about the company.

Not, like, the general "it's a vanity press even though it says it's not omg they'll charge so much and you'll never sell." I'm comfortable with that bit :)

Authonomy shoots self in self's foot

So, this site Authonomy. I've only been a member for a couple weeks, but it's a pretty cool thing. It's a site for authors to share their work and critique each other, and there's a lot of good stuff available.

Its gimmick is that it's run by HarperCollins (or is it just Harper now?), and there's this ranking system for all the books. And every month, the top five books in the rankings are read and critiqued by real live HC editors.

What seems to have developed is a very reciprocal system - a perfectly transparent "You read my book and I'll read yours" exchange that everyone involved is expected to participate in. I feel like a bit of an anomaly, actually, because I'm reading a few books and I don't expect anything in return. I mean, the idea is certainly floating around in my head that a lot of these people are probably going to self-publish and need a good editor who they're not going to have to mortgage their house to pay for... but I'm really viewing my participation in the site as more a recreational activity and low-key networking attempt than as an actual, aggressive advertising adventure (see what I did there? With the alliteration?).

Anyway. The result of this reciprocal, social-network-based system is that you have to put a LOT of time into the site to make your book climb the charts. Granted, it helps if your book is good. These people are authors, after all, many of them experienced and published, and though your book can go a long way on self-promoting forum activities, quality does play a role. So that's good. But really, if your book is in the top 5, you are putting hours and hours into reading and reviewing other peoples' books, chatting with them, thanking every single person for their support if you get it, and so on. All with the hope of attracting the attention of an agent, and possibly getting the sweet reward of a fair read by an HC editor.

So today (or yesterday in England, where most of this is happening), the magnanimous editors have handed down their views of the lucky top five. All of the reviews ended with "Unfortunately...at this time...not marketable...difficult period in publishing...sorry, no." But that's okay. The problem was that, while four of the reviews were in-depth commentary with a lot of honest, helpful advice (though they do seem quite prone to telling fantasy books to be more realistic and realism books to be more fantastic), one of the feedback posts was, well, a synopsis. Paragraph after paragraph just happily describing the plot of the novel. And then two lines at the bottom saying the "sorry, no" thing.

This must have been so disappointing for the author, after putting all that time in to win the prize, writing a book that people liked, and then just getting nothing. A lot of the more cynical forum-participators are saying that he's got to just move on, maybe they really just didn't have anything to say, and there's no guarantee anywhere that they're actually going to provide helpful feedback.

All of this may be true, but if HarperCollins wants to keep this site afloat, they're not going to do it if people feel like there's a chance that they're going to get such pathetic feedback. They may not have written something that will get published, but at least they want their book to be better because of it, and there's no point in HC even being involved in the site if they're going to make such a weak effort.

That is all.

Reading/Networking

Alright, well, I'm networking. Of the social-book-reading sites I've been looking at, Authonomy is definitely the most lively. It's made up mainly (or entirely?) of authors, and everyone seems happy to offer feedback and advice and be pretty nice about it in the process! Must be a British thing. The system is very reciprocal, and most people are being pretty upfront about that - you review my book and I'll review yours. I, however, don't have a book to contribute, but I'm still having fun offering up my opinions and seeing if they help. I've gotten a really positive response so far.

DailyLit I couldn't live without right now, but it still gets a mixed review. It has tons of classics, and tons of aspiring bestsellers, available to read free, and it'll send a little bite-sized read to your email every day at a specified time. The personalization options are fantastic, and it's so easy to get exactly what you want out of the function. Though I admit it's a bit weird reading Ulysses in 5-minute segments in the morning. But I've gotten further in reading it this way than I ever have before, so maybe there's something to be said for the method. On the other hand, the boards are pretty dead, and you get things like "27 comments, in 25 threads", where nobody is really talking to anyone. I think they should play up the book-club angle more, to get groups of people reading the same thing so they can talk about it.

Twitter I just can't figure out. It seems like people are making friends and forming lively communities, but there's no explanation of how this works anywhere on the site that I can find. Hmph.

Smashwords, Scribd, and Issuu I'm still working on... these sites all suffer a bit from being too geared towards writers and not accessible enough to people who want to be an audience. We'll see if I can figure them out any better in the days to come.