Michael Andre McPherson

Beyond the Slushpile

Archive for:

by

Publish or Perish: A New Deadline

Deadlines are hell.  Anyone knows that, but self-imposed deadlines are the worst because there’s no one standing over you with a whip.  You can wiggle out of them, pretend you never imposed the deadline or forgive yourself if you fail to complete your self-assigned task by your self-assigned deadline.

Unless you inform everyone you know of your deadline.  Then they’re all watching.  They’ll all know if you fail.  So here goes: Wednesday December 22nd.  By that time I vow to have the anthology of my Sioux Rock Falls stories e-published, complete with ISBN, the government of Canada willing.

I know that doesn’t seem like a big deal since six of the stories were already published in Storyteller magazine,  but I’ve promised many people that there will be two all new stories in the anthology, stories that have never seen the light of day let alone a publisher.

So here I go.  Work, kids, home renovations and just about anything else will stand in the way, but I’m determined that by Christmas anyone who cares to can download my anthology.

The thing is, I hate deadlines.  But damn if they don’t motivate.

by

Failed Communication Leads to Correct Decision

Life is full of surprises, like discovering that someone you were communicating with was having a totally different conversation.

When Fogel stated in her crit of In a Country Burning that there were, “Too many shoulders in this novel,” I took the comment as metaphorical.  I thought she meant that there were too many characters.  This lead to a decision to cut four characters, which also cuts the length of the novel quite a bit.

Here’s the big surprise.  It turns out that Fogel literally meant “too many shoulders.”  Too many people were patted on the shoulder, too many people shouldered their back packs, too many shrugged their shoulders.  She was trying to get me to use other body parts occasionally in my descriptions, which is good advice.

Yet now that we’ve cleared that up, I have no intention of putting the love interest and her family back into the novel.  It works without them.  It’s shorter.  It’s better.

So I’m sorry Rachel, Clare, Hugh and the collateral damage, Richard.  You guys will have to find a different novel, maybe in a sequel.

by

Conflicted About The New Publishers Taking Their Cut

Amazon and Sony have crossed the line from e-book stores to publishers, although they’re using a very old method to recruit want-to-be-authors:  self-publishers, also known as vanity presses.

There are still bent self-publishers out there, promising fame and fortune if you pay them to publish your novel.  But there are also new smart and professional self-publishers.  Amazon fronts CreateSpace.  The Reader Store has made two deals, one with  Author Solutions and the other with Smashwords.

Traditional publishers have been accused of being gatekeepers, of publishing only authors they know and not truly considering new talent, but the new e-book stores like Amazon and Sony are minding a different gate.  They’ll publish anyone and let the market sort them out, but they want their cut.

To e-publish with Amazon, you’ll get a 70% royalty.  This may be great compared to the 15% you’d be happy to get from a traditional publisher, but Amazon doesn’t have to hire editors, printing presses, trucks or pay for promotion.  What they’re charging 30% royalty for is simply the right to be on Amazon.

Sony’s deal is pretty much the same for their Reader store.  If you want to e-publish with them they’ll send you to Smashwords, who will put your novel into a number of formats, including the e-pub that you need for the Sony Reader store.

Now I could use Calibre open source software to put my novel into e-pub format and offer it for sale through my website for fans who own Sony e-readers, but the traffic on my website isn’t anything compared to the Reader Store.

So that’s why I would eat the 30%.  It’s not unlike the traditional publishers paying for prominent placement in brick and mortar stores.  Not that a self-published author will get front page placement on Amazon, but they’ll have the feel of legitimacy when they send friends to search Amazon or the Reader store for their novels.

And Amazon and Sony will be happy to take their cut of your friends’ money.

I guess that’s okay.  They’re not promising to make you famous.  Yet I’ve got that oligopoly feeling I get when I look at traditional publishers–that claustrophobic feeling that makes me want to shout unfair!  Who made you the gatekeepers?

Of course they’d probably reply that the internet is a big place and I can go anywhere I want, and try to sell my novel anyway I want.  Which is true.  It would just be much easier with Amazon and Sony.

So I’m conflicted.

by

Fogel Defends Hard and Soft Cover Books

Guest Post by Melanie Fogel

Not everyone who reads books keeps them. Those of us who do line our walls with books do so because we love books. We like looking at them; we like holding them. Some of us even enjoy dusting them.

I’ll assume somewhere in the world there are people who like to “show off how smart they are by what’s on their bookshelf,” but that’s not me, nor the people I know. And on behalf of all book lovers, I take exception to your dismissing us like that.

Book lovers are a subclass of readers. I suppose there are book lovers who don’t read, but I’ve yet to meet one. They may not love books for the same reasons I and the people I know do.

There’s something wonderful about sitting in a room surrounded by books. It’s like sitting in a room surrounded by friends and family: no matter where you cast your eye, you see someone with whom you have an emotional bond. And unlike family, you can chuck the ones who made you angry or sad. So there’s only good memories in a room full of books.

Books aren’t just containers for ideas, they’re artifacts to appreciate in their own right: their colours, their textures, their smells. As packages, they beat heart-shaped chocolate boxes hands down. More than that, reading—at least in the age of paper books—is a tactile experience, and just touching a book can recall memories. Opening one is even better.

Unlike electronic books, paper books can hold more than ideas. Signatures, for example. Or bookplates, which are somehow more intriguing when you’ve acquired the book second hand, and you wonder why anyone who took the trouble to paste in a bookplate would later give the book up. Then there’s the miscellany of what else you use for a bookmark: postcards, photographs, shopping receipts, dollar bills. Or bookmarks themselves—be they embossed leather gifts from friends, souvenirs of a book launch, a giveaway from a bookstore no longer in business. All memories at least as rich as photographs, that spring at you unexpectedly when you open a book.

A room lined with books is a room filled with potential that you can “see.”

I have no doubt that today there are children who will become adult readers who’ve never read a paper book. They won’t know what they’re missing, which is probably a good thing for them. But I have to wonder what they’ll fill their rooms with, and if it’ll be anything near as satisfying as a room full of books.

by

Are Male Readers from Mars and Female Readers from Venus?

My novel, In a Country Burning, is about redemption, about accepting fate and even a little romance, but mostly it’s about war.

It’s about the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and highlights two of the ten years of bloodshed and genocide that took place during that occupation.  Let’s not even get into the disaster the Soviets left behind for the rest of the world to clean up.

So I have to ask myself: will women read this book if I manage to squeeze in a little romance?  I’ve been told women read a lot more than men.  Any expert in the publishing industry will tell you that women are an important audience if you want to sell.

But Fogel says, “there are too many shoulders in this novel.”  She means that I’ve got too many characters, all vying for attention and all fighting to make it into the final scene.  So as I rewrite, it occurs to me that I could ditch the love interest and her family and go straight for the war story.

But will women read a war story?  How many girls snuggled up on the couch with their guys to watch Band of Brothers?  I’m guessing not many.  There will still be one woman in the book and even a heavy bit of amorous action, but for the most part it becomes a novel about men at war.

Which is what it always was about.  I made a desperate and painstaking stab at making it more like The English Patient, but I’m afraid it’s actually closer to The Hunt for Red October, but without all the cool technology.

So sales be damned.  This novel needs to be shorter, sharper and more focused.  Will it sell better?  Well, if I don’t rein it in it won’t even make it to market.

So to all the female readers: I’m sorry.  I don’t think it was going to work for you anyway.  To all the men: put down the remote or the game controller and start reading again for heaven’s sake!  I’m writing for you here.

By the way: if anyone feels slighted because they don’t like being squashed into a stereotype, well then read my book when it comes out.  It’ll be available to both Martians and Venusians.

by

Is My Sony E-Reader Doomed?

If I truly knew the answer to that I’d be a rich stock investor and not a writer with a day job, but this article makes me wonder if sometime in the next couple of years there might be a great opportunity to short Sony stock.

For those of you who have a life and don’t have time for the article: the salient prediction is that Amazon and the Kindle will move from 50% e-book market share to 90% market share.

This is because Amazon wisely treated Kindle as a platform rather than a device.  You can download Kindle for free to everything from your Blackberry to your PC and then buy your e-books from Amazon.

Remember all those predictions about i-pad being a Kindle killer?  Most people now use the Kindle app to read books on their i-pads, which means they’re buying e-books from Amazon instead of the i-bookstore.

I still use my Sony E-Reader, but I remember beta VCRs and I wonder if one day one of my kids will find a dusty Reader sitting on a shelf and say, “Hey Dad, what’s this thing?”

by

Looking Outside the Box for the Juicy Gossip

I opened that hideous box last Monday, the one containing my perfect manuscript now covered with Fogel’s scrawls.  There’s a lot of work to do on my novel, no doubt, but the comments that concern me the most are the ones I got by e-mail before I received the box.

One of Fogel’s main complaints is that I don’t have a clear picture in my own head of my characters.

What!  I’ve written and re-written this novel more than ten times.  These characters are like very close friends.  I thought I had a clear picture of them in my head, thank you very much.

But when I calmed down and thought about it, I had each character in a specific box of time and place.

So I started thinking about my real friends in real life.  I know where they went to high school.  I know where their parents dragged them to church each Sunday (and which religion) until adulthood.  I know which ones still go to church.  I can recall career successes and failures, drunken nights on the town or weekends camping.

Life’s big and stuff happens.  I think of my dad today because it’s Remembrance Day, a paratrooper at too young an age, scarred for the rest of his life not just by the war but also because he lost his mom to TB near Christmas of 1945–before he even had a chance for that well-earned moment of peace, to feel safe back home.  What if I didn’t know that about him?  Would I describe him just as a old man, recently deceased?  There’s so much more there.

As for my friends, I know what they had hoped to become and how that turned out for them.  I know whom they slept with and whether it was a good idea.  Sure, I don’t know these intimate details for everyone I’ve met.  I’m just talking about close friends, because I’d better know my characters at least that well.

So I began asking questions and had to spend two days answering them, and it took a lot of research.  I not only had to fill out biographies for them, but their parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters.  Who got along in the family and who hated each others’ guts with the intensity that only sibling rivalry can inspire?  Who was a disappointment to their father/mother/son/daughter?  What caused friction in the family?  Who went to war and who dodged the draft? Who refuses to go to mass at Christmas despite his mother’s pleas? Who got a good job and who had the bad habit?

You get the idea.  I need to know what they smell like after a hot day of work.  I need their biographies from birth to death, even beyond the time frame of my novel.

So damn if Fogel isn’t right again, because as I fill in these details, many of which will never appear in the novel, my characters, their motivations, their likes and dislikes become clearer with each new tidbit of juicy gossip.

Many of you writers already knew this.  I thought I did.

But now I’m trying to think outside that box.

by

The Fogel Speaks Again

Guest Post by Melanie Fogel

Here’s the thing:

I’m a great believer in writing from the inside out. What that means is that, although good story is more important than good writing, writing is the only means you have of conveying the story.

So at some point, you stop writing story and take a hard look at the way you’ve used the words. You aim for the lightning rather than the lightning bug (I assume you know Twain’s quote on the subject). But if you haven’t got the story firmly anchored in your head–the character, the setting, the meaning of the climax–then you can’t come up with the lightning words.

In one of the great climactic scenes in Caryl Férey’s Zulu, he uses the word “totem” to talk about the stillness of the protagonist. He could have used “statue,” or “carved figure,” or “rock,” but believe me, “totem” is killer lightning. It took everything that happened in the novel prior to this point to make “totem” so striking (pun intended).  And you gasp, not only at the brilliant writing, but at the significance of the sentence to the story.

Honestly, I could teach an entire writing course based on that novel.

Mike’s Note: This article will find a permanent home under “The Fogel Speaks.”

by

John Grisham’s Revelation

I know I said this yesterday and last week, but now John Grisham has said it too.

He was commenting in the Wall Street Journal about the first week’s sales of his new novel The Confession.  It seems the number of hardcover sales were well below the first week’s sales of his previous novel The Associate, way back in February of 2009.

Here’s what surprised Grisham and his publisher: the ebook sales of 70,000 units more than made up for the fewer number of hardcover sales.  More people were reading his book even though fewer people were buying the hardcover.

“The e-book sales are astonishing,” says Grisham.  “Would anybody have thought that a year ago?  The future has arrived, and we’re looking at it.”

With the hardcover at $30 bucks and the Kindle e-book at $9.99, it’s not hard to see why e-book sales are taking off.

Grisham’s publisher, Doubleday, has printed 1.5 million hardcovers instead of the 2.8 million that they had originally planned to print.  Good call.

And hey, think of all the trees they saved, and the trucks that aren’t farting around the country delivering boxes of books.

I’m breathing easier already.  I like the future.

by

What I Wrote for The Crime Writers of Canada

E-readers: A Fad or the Future?

Way back in 1994, a CBC television producer told a researcher I was dating that the internet was just a fad like CB radios.  If she wanted to build a web page for the show, she’d have to do it on her own time.  Oops.

The producer can be forgiven this assessment of the internet because he was confusing a device, a radio, with a new and highly versatile medium of expression.  C.B. radios had only one purpose, and no one could use them for advertising.  He was also probably thinking about that eight-track tape player gathering dust in his basement.

E-books are the new must-have gadget, and they are everywhere.  Last week the new color version of Barnes and Noble’s Nook reader launched.  They’ve sold over a million of the old (so last year) black and white version, and they expect to sell a million of the color Nook over the next year.  Combine that just with Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony e-reader and you’ve got a lot of consumers looking for content for their new toys.  Let’s not even get into the tablets like the i-pad.  Avid readers can also get apps for their smart phones that’ll allow them to purchase e-books, so every Blackberry, Apple i-phone or any phone with Google’s Android operating system is a potential e-reader.

But I’m sure some authors and publishers are still thinking about all those eight-track tape players or their Beta VCRs.

They should think again.  E-readers are evolving platforms for expression.  Cookbooks will be able to insert how-to videos, and advertisers can find nooks (pun intended) and crannies to sneak in their less than subtle messages.  People can find new ways to make money.

More importantly, like the internet, e-book readers are going to enable content providers and facilitators to appear from unexpected places.  Who’d ever heard of Google, E-bay, Wikipedia, Facebook or even Craigslist in 1994?

E-readers are going to allow small publishers to distribute electronic downloads on an equal footing with big publishers.  No trucks required.  No expensive warehouses.  There will be price wars, content wars and jostling for attention.

I don’t predict the imminent death of the hardcover or paperback because some people still like to show how smart they are by what’s on their bookshelf.  But like the newspapers, big publishers are going to have to get used to slumping sales of paper books–sales that never recover to the glory days of the twentieth century and fade with the boomers.

Yet e-readers may be good for writers.  There’s opportunity for creativity, a new and (for now) more egalitarian platform from which to sell your words.  It’s exciting.  I’ll go out on a limb and say that it’s the future.  You heard it here first.

By the way, I married the researcher.

Mike’s Note:

The Crime Writers of Canada asked me for an article on e-books for their newsletter.  The article I wrote above turned out to be very similar to one they’d published last month.  Who knew?  I’m not the first person to see this coming.

I slashed off a different article for the newsletter, but above is what those Crime Writers would have read if they hadn’t aleady read it somewhere else.