Merry Christmas!

I would like to take this opportunity to wish my readers a joyous and merry Christmas. 

Here’s a little gift for you. It’s a lovely YouTube video of a large choir and congregation at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London singing Charles Wesley’s great carol, Hark! the Herald Angels Sing. You’ve undoubtedly heard this old hymn sung or played as a solo or an instrumental, but only a great multitude can truly do it justice. 

Here it is: 

I hope you enjoy it. But more than that, I hope the wonder of it captures your heart: God became man and dwelt among us that He might redeem us. Here’s the text to the second verse:

Christ, by highest heav’n adored, Christ, the everlasting Lord:
Late in time behold Him come, Offspring of a virgin’s womb.
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail th’ incarnate Deity!
Pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel.
Hark! the herald angels sing, “Glory to the newborn King!”

Merry Christmas, everyone!

SDG

 

Just in Time for Gift Giving

Here’s a good deal. The publisher of my book, Justice for Amy, has dropped the price of the e-book to 99¢ for the Christmas season. The sale runs through the end of January.

This is 66% off the already low regular price of $2.99—an incredibly good deal for a book that goes 290 pages in the print edition. 

The e-book is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. 

And speaking of the print edition, as of this writing, Barnes & Noble has it priced at $10.79, which is a 10% savings off the regular price of $11.99. 

So if you’re looking for gift giving ideas for the reader in your life—or even for yourself, give Justice for Amy some thought. The prices may never be this low again. 

Thanks, and Merry Christmas. 

AVL

 

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Every time those words come to mind I can’t help thinking about Snoopy, sitting on the roof of his doghouse, typing the opening sentence to yet another novel.

 I always assumed that these words were nothing more than just a cute line, penned by Charles Shultz for his imaginative little beagle. But not so; they comprise the actual first line of the 1830 book, Paul Clifford, written by the Victorian era novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton; who much preferred the title, Sir Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton. Here’s the first (really long) sentence: 

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” 

This type of florid, melodramatic prose is long out of style, but the Dark and Stormy Night phrase remains, helped, perhaps, by Snoopy, as a taunt to those of us who write novels. I mean, let’s face it, it really is a great line, but, alas, a line that probably will never be used again. 

In honor of great (or not-so-great) first lines, I put together, what I call, Writer’s Wallpaper for my computer desktop. Here’s what it looks like: 

  

The picture is of a late-night storm rolling into Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula (where I once lived) from Lake Superior. Something about it inspires me. I don’t know if it is the outright starkness of it, the drama it invokes or what; but whenever I see it, it brings to mind Bulwer-Lytton’s famous line. So I added the text to the picture, and now every time I boot my computer it reminds me I’m a writer. 

If you’re a novelist, a budding novelist, writer of non-fiction or just like the picture, I’m giving this wallpaper away for free. Click the link to go to my main web site and download it. And while you’re there, take a look around; sign up for my free Sherlock Holmes adventures or take advantage of the other free stuff I offer. And be sure to let your crit-partners and/or members of your writer’s group know about this offer. If we work together, who knows whom we might inspire? 

Here’s the link:  http://bit.ly/rpAqYP

SDG

 

Publishing (Part 3)

In the first two parts of our series, we talked about where publishing has been and where it is now, especially in regard to the publishing business model. And while there is much more that could be said about the current business model, suffice it to say for now that this is a bad deal for publishers and especially for authors. For part three, let’s take a look at the possible future. 

Publishers have managed to stay afloat in this worsening marketplace by shifting much of the marketing responsibility to authors. If you’ve submitted a book proposal to an agent or publisher in last few years, you know there is a requirement for a comprehensive marketing plan to be included. The buzzword for this is Author Platform. Authors are expected to blog, to be on Twitter, to be on Facebook, and, preferably, to have a large mailing list to which they can sell books. Some authors lament that, between a fulltime job and their marketing activities, they barely have time to write. This is not a good situation—especially when you consider that there has not been a corresponding increase in author royalties. 

Enter technology. 

Just as technology caused a paradigm shift to occur in the mid fifteenth century, it is causing another to occur in our day. The rise and proliferation of e-books and print-on-demand has removed the technological impediments to getting books into the marketplace. This has given both new and established authors pause to think about what is truly in their best interest. Truth be told, the one indispensable factor in the publishing equation is the author. The big publishers have either not realized this yet or are engaged in some form of subterfuge to keep their authors from recognizing what a bad deal they’re getting. However, savvy authors have begun to wonder why, if they have to do the bulk of the work anyway, they are not making the bulk of the profits generated by their own work. 

Publishers and agents have long tried to build and maintain a mystique around the, so-called, gatekeeper function as a means of validation for authors—if you can get past the gatekeepers you have been validated as truly good. I’m sure some of them actually believe this, and I know many authors believe this. However, it is good to remember that publishing is a business—it’s not about validation—it’s about making money. Publishers need authors, but advances in technology mean that authors don’t necessarily need publishers any more. The authors who have recognized this have begun to abandon traditional publishing and the absurd notion of validation. 

E-books and print-on-demand have provided the path to product. Amazon and Barnes & Noble (among others) have provided the path to market. Traditional publishers are becoming more and more irrelevant in this new publishing paradigm, and I predict that things will get worse for them before they realize that business as usual isn’t going to cut it anymore. Pity the poor publishers who think they can go on forever operating on the old paradigm. Lacking the political influence to obtain government bailouts, they will go out of business. 

So the story of publishing, like all good stories, has essentially come full-circle. It is not necessarily a good thing that traditional publishing is in trouble, but it is a good thing that authors have more choices about how they will get their work into the hands of readers. 

This is good for readers, too. In the former paradigm, having a real choice was like Henry Ford’s fabled statement about the Model T—you can have any color you want, so long as it’s black. In other words, you had a choice, but only from the few books publishers made available. In the new paradigm, readers truly have more real choices than ever before. 

Will traditional publishing disappear? Almost certainly not; and it’s important to say that it’s not a bad deal for everyone, but when all dust settles the publishing landscape will look radically different than it does today. 

In future posts we’ll take a look at how to profit from this new publishing paradigm.

SDG

Publishing (Part 2)

In part one of our series, we presented a very brief and high-level history of publishing. If you’re just joining us, what follows will make more sense if you read part one first. For part two, let’s fast-forward into the modern era.

As the number of manuscripts that might be published increased, publishers took on the role of gatekeepers. This gatekeeper role is, at least of late, touted as a filter to keep out sub-standard writing. In some (many?) cases that might be true. However, the reality is that, whatever it started out to be, it has become a filter to keep out writing that publishers don’t think will sell in sufficient quantity to turn a nice profit.

From the publisher’s perspective, it’s not about reading. Publishing is a business—a business that, like any other business, needs to make a profit in order to stay in business.

Traditional publishing is essentially the managing of scarcity, i.e., only a certain number of books can be published by a given publisher in a given year. And even though there are a fair number of publishers, there are far less publishing slots available than there are authors with manuscripts waiting to be published. It’s a buyer’s market and publishers get to cherry-pick from among the manuscripts available to them which ones they will publish.

On its face that sounds fair, but it really isn’t. There was a time when it was fairer than it is now because the playing field was closer to level. Acquisition editors were always on the lookout for good manuscripts and an unknown author with a good book had a reasonable chance of being published. Unfortunately, the general decline in reading and difficult economic times have made this less likely to be the case these days. If it comes down to a publishing slot going to an unknown or going to a well-known author, it will go to the well-known author—even if the unknown author has written a better book. The truth is many great books have fallen by the wayside, not because they were not “worthy,” but because there were only so many slots to fill and the decision was to take the sure thing rather than take a chance. Remember this is business—it’s not about fair—it’s about making money.

Even so, the average book sells only about 500 copies or so and most don’t “earn out” (make enough money to cover the author’s advance); meaning that subsequent books by that author may not be picked up the publisher. This is bad for publishers and bad for authors—who end up working for what amounts to a fairly paltry salary, given the amount of time it takes to write a salable book.

One could argue that this is due to poor decisions on the part of publishers about which books they decide to publish, and there would be an element of truth in that. However, the greatest influence is more likely to be the publisher’s business model: Publishers don’t market to consumers, but to brick-and-mortar bookstores. Bookstores get books at somewhere around half of the cover price and they get to return the books they don’t sell. The meaning of this is that publishers are placing books in bookstores essentially on consignment. If a book is not a “hot” seller right out of the gate, it may have a shelf life of a few short weeks before being sent back to the publisher. This is hardly enough time to develop a word-of-mouth following (which is widely regarded as the best kind of advertising for books) so the book languishes and maybe fails for no other reason than its limited exposure.

Stay tuned for the conclusion.

SDG

Publishing (Part 1)

A brief history:

At its root, the word Publish means, “to make public.”

Before the advent of printing, manuscripts were hand-written. If an author wanted to publish a manuscript (make it public), he simply did so. If he wanted to publish additional copies of his work, he could make more—or hire a scribe to do it for him. All publishing, at the time, was self-publishing; this was the first kind of publishing.

Of course scribes could make and distribute copies of anything. In that sense, I suppose, they were the first commercial publishers. Not that publishing was big business. In those days most people couldn’t read or write.

Enter Johannes Gutenberg, who, in about 1439, invented the movable type printing press. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this occurrence in history. Certainly this one event played a key role in the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the spread of learning to the masses, among other things. It also ushered in the age of specialization—at least insofar as publishing is concerned.

An educated populace resulted in a demand for books. And the availability of the technology to print books in quantity caused a paradigm shift to occur: From the standpoint of both time and expense, it was no longer practical to hand-copy manuscripts. Pity the poor scribes who thought they could go on forever operating on the old paradigm. Lacking the political influence to obtain government bailouts, they went out of business.

Writers write: on its face a simple statement, but one that is profound in its implication. It is not a universal truth, but, generally speaking, those who are gifted with the ability to tell a story or to teach through their writing typically are not gifted in the production of printed books, and vice-versa. This does not make one group better than the other, it’s just the way it is—and it’s pretty much always been that way. So, if an author wanted a book to appear in print, he was obliged to hire a specialist—a printer.

At some point, it became clear that the market for books was wider than just the immediate region in which the author lived, and publishing as we now know it was born. Authors became, to use modern terminology, content providers. The printing, distribution, and sale of books became the province of others. These others became the middlemen of the printed word, adding additional layers of specialization into the equation.

This was not an altogether bad thing. True, the middlemen got some of the profit, but the author had the opportunity to reach a much broader audience than he might otherwise have done. So authors needed publishers and publishers needed authors and life was good.

Stay tuned for part two.

SDG

 

Happy New Year

Here’s a quote that I found interesting from Edith Lovejoy Pierce:

“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.”

How will we face this new year? What will we write? Will it be worth the reading for those who come after us, for those over whom we have influence? Will our influence be for good or ill?

Here are some words from Paul the Apostle:

“…one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13b-14 NASB)

I like that. I cannot undo what has been done in the past, but I can press on, I can do what I can do in each new day that God gives me. And I can remember that this day might be the day or this year might be the year that I hear the upward call of God in Christ Jesus my Lord.

“Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another as more important than himself; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:3-8 NASB)

If I get to January first of 2012 and this has been the character of my life, it will be a book that I would be proud for my grandchildren to read.

How about you?

Writing for the CBA Market

I think most of us who have been writing for a while, if we were to look back, would admit that when we first approached the idea of writing a book that it was with a certain degree of naivete.  I mean, all we wanted to do was write. Who knew, up front, that we’d have to be marketers? And who, in their wildest fantasies, had any idea of the interminably long time frames involved in the publishing process. 

It’s been an education, to say the least. 

In my more cynical moments, I’ve been wont to observe that publishing (at least in the CBA) is a business run by middle-aged women for middle-aged women. This observation is usually followed by me chastising myself for my cynicism and a stern warning not to think in stereotypes. However, I recently ran across the following on the blog of an agent who represents CBA authors: 

“Sometimes I’m given a manuscript that won’t be easy to sell for a number of reasons…Maybe it is commercial women’s fiction but has a male main character—something that is a tough sell right now…” (emphasis added). 

I have to be honest, as a male fiction writer, I’ve never considered this before—heck, such a thing never even entered my mind. 

As a male, I think like a male, I write like a male. And, having been married for forty-one years, I know enough to know that there is a difference between the way a male thinks and the way a female thinks. So I know that if I had to write a novel with a female main character, there is no way I could pull it off. I don’t think many men could. 

But, here’s the question: Would a woman purposely avoid buying/reading a novel for no other reason than it had a male main character?

In God We Trust

If you look at the coins of the United States you will see the motto, “In God We Trust.” This motto was originated by S.P. Chase, then Secretary of the Treasury, in the year 1864, and has appeared on all coins of the country ever since. 

In a letter to the director of the mint, Chase expressed how the nation could not expect to remain powerful or safe without the help of God. He then instructed the director to prepare a device to place the motto on all coins. 

It is unknown, but the motto may have well have come from the fourth stanza of the Star-Spangled Banner, written by Francis Scott Key in 1814: 

“Oh thus be it ever, when free men shall stand,
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation.
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land,
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!”

Just Thinking

Most of the people the world labels as brilliant are no more brilliant than the rest of us; they just do more thinking than the rest of us. They concentrate on an idea while the rest of us flit, like hummingbirds, from one triviality to another.

Sir Isaac Newton, known as something of a daydreamer in his youth, worked out the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and accomplished quite a few other mental feats of note. But, looking back over his life, he denied vehemently that he was any smarter than the next fellow. He attributed his accomplishments simply to, “the power of patient thought.” 

Practically every important benefit that has been developed for mankind has been the result of someone’s patient thought. So, in the unlikely event you should come upon someone thinking, you might want to think twice before you disturb him.