The E-Pub Revolution as Gold Rush

July 8, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

The current revolution in electronic publishing is like the California Gold Rush^† in a lot of ways.

It’s real.
Underneath all the hype and ballyhoo and frenzied hysteria of 1849 lay a bedrock of sober fact: There really was gold in the California hills.

Today, a similar feverish atmosphere surrounds electronic publishing, and in particular electronic self-publishing. Publishers are scrambling to secure electronic rights; authors are scrambling to retain them; and web pundits and tech mavens are urging publishers and authors alike to get with the program now, right now, before it’s too late. A person of cynical bent might be forgiven for suspecting that the e-publishing revolution is in fact nothing more than a balloon full of hot air, rising high only to go *pop!*, but that person would be wrong. Electronic publishing really is a big new thing. Maybe even the big new thing.
Some people will make a great deal of money at it.
In every gold rush, a few prospectors strike it rich. The creek that runs through their claim turns out to have more gold dust in it than sand, and the caves to either side of it are littered with gold nuggets the size of tennis balls. They go up into the hills bearded and starving and wearing jeans and flannel, and come down again wealthy enough to buy a mansion and a yacht and a couple of United States senators. In the e-publishing gold rush, a few electronically self-published writers will sell a lot of books and make a great deal of money and — if they want it — get picked up by established publishing houses.
Other people will make moderate amounts of money.
Most of the prospectors who headed out to California in 1849, or up to the Klondike in 1896, didn’t strike it rich. Some of them, though, did succeed in panning enough gold to go back home and marry their sweethearts, or set themselves up in business, or do whatever else they thought was a good thing to spend their money on. In like fashion, a fair number of electronically self-published writers will make enough money over time to take a vacation, or repair the roof, or keep the pantry stocked for another month.
But a whole lot of people aren’t going to make any money at all.
A few of them won’t care, because they only went West, or into e-publishing, for the adventure of it in the first place. The exciting times and narrow escapes they had, and the colorful stories they have to tell, are all the reward they ever really wanted. But bunches and bunches of people are going to head back to civilization even more broke than they were when they started out, and without ever getting close to realizing the dream they left home with. Assuming, of course, that they ever make it home at all.
Because some of those people will have very bad things happen to them.
They might drown in the spring floods, or get dry-gulched by bandits, or succumb to malnutrition because they spent all their money on mining equipment and none of it on food. They will fall prey to swindlers who salt the claims, and to bad advice that leaves them stuck in Donner Pass with winter closing in.

If they are in e-publishing, they will start publishing houses with no capital and no business plan. Or they will entrust their manuscripts to scam agents, or submit them to publishers who are all façade and no action. They will hear all manner of bad advice, and take it all.^‡
But some people will make money without ever staking a claim.
They’re the ones who make it their business to sell mining equipment and blue jeans and flannel shirts and canned food and camp supplies to the miners. And the people who end up making steady reliable money off the e-publishing revolution are going to be the same sort of people: freelance cover designers and web-page maintainers and editors and copyeditors and e-text preparers.

The astute reader will note that a number of these goods and services are ones that established publishing houses handle — and pay for — as their share of the work required to turn a manuscript into a book.^§

†Or the Klondike Gold Rush, or the Australian gold rushes of the mid to late 19th Century — insert local historic gold rush of your choice; there’s been a bunch of them.

‡They should read Writer Beware, and Preditors and Editors, and AbsoluteWrite. Then they will at least have a good set of maps and directions to work from.

§The astute reader will also note — per my sidebar link — that I’m doing my bit in the sale of picks and shovels. If you’ve got a NaNoWriMo book or other project that you’re interested in whipping into better shape, we can do business.

(In the spirit of full disclosure: This post originally appeared in my personal LiveJournal; I’m reprinting it here in the interest of reaching a wider, or at least more public, audience.)

Sentence Structure Peeve of the Day

July 6, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

(Because I’m the sort of person who gets peevish over sentence structure.)

It’s a common fault in the work of beginning writers, or in the early drafts of texts by experienced writers (but what makes the writers experienced is that they know how to spot their faults and remove them in the second draft): They will write sentences where the important idea, or one of the important ideas, is relegated to a subordinate clause — or, worse, a modifying phrase — like this:

Fred’s brief attempt at independence subsided, his desire to act on his own still surging through him, but in the end he had no choice except to obey.

That’s a bad sentence for a lot of reasons (and deliberately writing a bad sentence is work, let me tell you), but structurally it’s a bad sentence because there’s an important idea buried in it that should be given space to stand on its own. Important ideas deserve their own independent clauses. Like this:

Fred’s brief attempt at independence subsided. His desire to act on his own still surged through him, but in the end he had no choice except to obey.

It’s still a bad sentence (or set of sentences.) But at least it’s not a structurally bad sentence.

Other Voices, Other Rooms

July 5, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

The alert reader will have noticed by now that I quote, from time to time, “another writer — I don’t remember exactly which one.” This isn’t so much due to absent-mindedness as to the fact that a lot of the people I hang out with, both in person and on the internet, are involved in some way with the writing and publishing trades, and all of them are in the habit of saying and writing clever things.

Generally speaking, if I can’t remember which of them said a particular thing, I look first at what you might call the usual suspects:

Sherwood Smith, fantasy novelist extraordinaire, who blogs regularly over at the Book View Cafe.
James D. Macdonald (aka Yog Sysop, aka Uncle Jim), who is one of the moderators and front page posters over at Making Light and a moderator and regular poster at Absolute Write.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, another member of the Making Light blogging team.
All the instructors at Viable Paradise (when you have eight writers and editors and twenty-four students living cheek-by-jowl and laptop-by-netbook for a solid week, a lot of memorable things get said by a confusing number of people.)

If you want to read yet more stuff about writing and publishing, you could do worse than to check out the public online haunts of all of the above people. They are, without exception, smart, sharp, and insightful.

It’s the Fourth of July…

July 4, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

…and therefore, like every good freelancer, I’m working.

But in honor of the holiday, I won’t be working quite as much.

(To quote another writer of my acquaintance: “Being a freelance novelist is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”)

A Second Set of Suspenders Wouldn’t be Too Much

July 3, 2012July 4, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Or, Let’s Talk about Backups. Continue reading “A Second Set of Suspenders Wouldn’t be Too Much” →

Rules? In a Knife Fight?

July 2, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

The rules of grammar are not rules in the same sense that the rules of baseball, or chess, or tiddlywinks are rules. The latter are prescriptive: if you want to play those games, they describe how you must play them. (Note, however, that even rules of this sort allow for locally recognized variants.) Rules of grammar, however, are descriptive: they exist to set forth the range of utterances which can be made and understood by native speakers of a language. In that sense, “It’s me” is in fact grammatical — no native speaker of English is going to misunderstand what is meant by it.

Grammar, however, is not the same thing as usage, or as idiom, even though prescriptivist grammarians try to conflate the three. “It’s me” is colloquial usage, or casual written usage; “It is I” is formal written usage, in that a contemporary native speaker is highly unlikely to utter it in normal conversation. Similarly, “ain’t” is grammatical — a native speaker of English will understand what is meant by it — but in terms of usage it is at best colloquial, in addition to being strongly marked for region and class. A good teacher of English will make sure that his/her students are able to recognize and employ standard usage; a really good teacher of English will do so without stigmatizing his/her students’ own speech habits. There are not as many really good teachers of English as there should be.

“It’s me” is also an English idiom — idioms being those bits and bobs of a language that don’t fit into any of the standard tables at the back of the textbook, the ones where the instructor informs the class, grimly, that they’re just going to have to memorize those bits because they don’t make any regular sense. Every language has them: the fossilized snippets of extinct grammar, the vocabulary items borrowed whole from other sources and only halfway bashed into regularity, the words and phrases whose sound or meaning or function has shifted so far from the original that the logical connection has been severed.

Most of the time, when native speakers of a language complain about the grammar of other native speakers of a language, it’s actually their usage that’s being complained about — and thus, indirectly, their social or economic status.

Thought for the Day

July 2, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

(For yesterday, actually, by now. Oh, well.)

When writing extraordinary characters: follow the default normal person in the story.

We meet Dr. Watson, the former army surgeon with the budget and housing problems, before we meet Sherlock Holmes the eccentric genius, even though meeting Holmes is the point of the exercise.

Things I Know (Because I Learned Them the Hard Way) about Research

June 30, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Research is fractal. The more you do of it, the more you know you have to do.

Research is essential. Unless you’re drawing all of your fiction from your own lived experience, you’re going to have to look things up, try things out, go to places in person to see. And even if you are drawing all of your fiction from your own lived experience, you’ll still need to double-check and make certain that your memories and recorded reality match up. (The near past is possibly the trickiest of all eras to write in. Just keeping track of things like when cell phones went from being expensive, bulky, and rare to being cheap, small, and ubiquitous can be a writer’s nightmare.)

Research is impossible. No matter how thoroughly you research your material, there’s always going to be something that you miss, because the world is very large and you are only one writer trying to finish your book some time before the heat death of the universe. And no matter how small the thing is that you get wrong, some of the people who read your book are going to care very deeply about it, and at least one of them will write you an angry letter, or flame you in their blog, or give you a bad review on Amazon. Pretty much the only thing you can do about it is resign yourself to the inevitable, and be gracious when it comes around.

That being said, there are a couple of things you want to try exceedingly hard to get right, because the people who care about them are even more passionate than the other people who will find errors in your stuff. One of those things is guns, and the other is horses. Horse people and gun people (who are usually two different sets) are on beyond passionate about their subjects — “fanatical” might be a good word. Your best bet, if you find yourself committed to a project that’s going to involve a lot of guns or horses or both, is to get yourself a gun expert or a horse expert, as needed, and consult with them frequently during writing and revision. The good thing about horse people and gun people is that they like to talk about their passion, and are usually happy to play instructor. (Don’t forget to thank them profusely in your acknowledgements. That way other horse and gun people will know that at least you tried. The same goes for any other people who may have been sources of professional expertise.)

And finally, research is distracting. At some point, no matter how fascinating the trail of breadcrumbs you’ve followed in search of some telling detail, you have to put the books back on the bookshelf and write.,

It Used to be Easy

June 29, 2012 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Plunging a room full of freelance writers into gloom and melancholy, that is.

All you had to do, most days, was whisper the phrase, “health insurance,” and you had them.

Now, thanks to President Obama, the Democrats in Congress, and the Supreme Court, that particular source of dark thoughts in the dead of night is, if not gone, at least mightily shrunken.

If you want to terrorize a room full of freelancers, you’ll have to stick to bringing up the IRS instead.