Got Busy

Sorry for the missed posts the last couple of weeks. I do most of my blogging on the weekends, and I was travelling (actually camping) the last two weekends, and then I got caught flat-footed when the week arrived. I’m getting back to the content queue now.

In other news, my self-publishing efforts are moving forward. I setup my publishing company, Quantum Forge Press. It has a domain, a blank website, a bank account, and ten ISBN numbers. I’m starting on the book cover now. While I missed my self-imposed deadline of April 1st, I’m still hopeful about getting it out this month.

See you later!

The Crash of Details

Remember when I talked about all those little things I was going to have to do to get my book out? Well, they’re crashing down around me as my self-imposed deadline of April looms ever closer.

I blame a lot of this on the fact that I’ve been fighting a really nasty cold for FIVE WEEKS now. I mean it, seriously. It went all bacterial on me, hitting my sinuses and touching on my lungs. I’m now on my second round of antibiotics – the first one providing adorable twin side-effects of insomnia and fatigue – and I still feel like I’m coughing up a lung. My head hurts. My ribs ache. And to top it off… I’m whining! Blech! I hate whining. And yet here I am.

So, back to the book.

Before the cold hit, I was moving along towards filing my DBA, opening a bank account, and ordering up a batch of ISBN’s. Alas, the name I had chosen for my little publishing venture was a little too close to another existing publishing company. If they published textbooks or travelogues it wouldn’t have stopped me, but they publish fiction in some of the same genres I write in, including a few by some of my favorite authors. I hadn’t chosen the exact same name, but I think there was some possibility for confusion, so I gave it up.

So, a month later, armed with a different name, I’m off to file my DBA, open a bank account, and order up some ISBN’s. I worry that this particular process may come with the occasional “two to four weeks” of delay that crops up in paper-based transactions. Then again, maybe some of these things have stepped forward into the twenty-first century. We’ll see.

I do have the copyedit corrections back on the manuscript. It turns out it was fairly clean, but she still caught enough errors that I would have been embarrassed to see them myself in the printed copy. I’m still in the process of incorporating them into my master document since I’m anal enough to want to approve each correction individually.

It’s also paranoia driven by a recent experience C.J. Cherryh had of seeing her most recent Ateva novel butchered by the copyeditor. Apparently that editor saw Cherryh’s careful rendering of the Ragi language into English as far too indirect and passive and decided to “fix” it. Shudder. Fortunately, so far my copyeditor has committed no such sins, nor am I expecting her to. But I’m a little paranoid.

Then there’s the cover. I confess it’s still entirely in my head, and that worries me. Part of this is it’s still been so long since I’ve painted, and part of it is that until I finally see it in one piece as a cover, with all the typography and everything, I won’t really know if the image I have in mind will actually work as a cover or if it’s too busy.

Then there’s the formatting. Fortunately, the research and experimenting I did earlier on e-book formatting gives me some confidence here. As for the print formatting, I’m pretty sure I can bend MS Word to my will enough to manage the formatting requirements of fiction. My main worry here is actually getting all the necessary parts, i.e. the front matter and the back matter. You know, title pages, copyright pages, acknowledgments, and so on.

Then there’s the actual dealing with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Createspace, and so on. I’ve seen quick how-to guides on those, so I’m not expecting much of a hurdle. Still, it almost seems worth the effort to go through it with a short story just for the trial run.

Oh yeah… and then there’s a completely unrelated tax snafu that I need to deal with in the next couple of weeks. Grrr…

Sufficed to say, I’m still trying for the start of April, but I may very well miss it by a mile.

We Need a New Yog’s Law

I recently sent off my novel “Beneath the Sky” to be copy-edited. A friend of a friend recommended a friend as a copy-editor, which means, I suppose, that my novel is halfway to Kevin Bacon. But that aside, I’m paying to get have it copy-edited in a professional manner because I want to put this thing out there in a professional fashion, but with that act, I run smack into that old publishing stand-by, Yog’s Law.

Yog’s Law states an old truism of traditional publishing:

Money flows towards the writer.

For years (decades?), I’ve heard writers and publishers quote this law. The backstory is here, where apparently James McDonald boiled down all the anti-scammer wisdom he could into one simple phrase. In that, he did a fabulous job. It’s clear, to the point, and memorable. Golly, it’s almost as if he knows a thing or two about writing, eh?

In traditional publishing, this little gem has saved a lot of aspiring writers from becoming aspiring victims. Don’t pay an agent to read your book. Don’t pay your so-called publisher for copy-edits or cover design. And for the love of God, don’t pay your publisher for the actual printing! Money flows towards the writer.

But in self-publishing (or “indie” publishing as the cool kids say) this is getting blurred. I’m a writer up to the point where I think the book is ready to go, but then I’m the publisher when I put it through copy-edits, cover design, print setup costs, etc. These are legitimate tasks that a publisher performs when publishing someone else’s book, and publishing companies hire people (i.e. PAY someone) to do those tasks. Then when it’s all done and out the door, I suppose I’m somewhere in between, money flowing back to me the writer while also setting some aside as the publisher to cover costs for the next book.

John Hartness opined on this last year, and James MacDonald (YOG himself!) stopped by to comment on it. He pointed out that his law is still valid as long as you keep track of which hat you’re wearing, i.e. writer vs. publisher, and that ultimately the publisher’s money is still flowing towards the author. “That it’s only moving from one pocket to another in the same pair of pants is immaterial.”

I get that, and be assured that I’m being pretty tight with any cash outlays towards this self-publishing venture, but I could have been less so. I ran into one company, 52 Novels, that does a lot of the publishing work for you. For a fee, they handle e-book formatting and for a little extra will even do print-book layout. They can farm out cover design, and if you ask nicely, I think they’ll even hook you up with a copy-editor or other literary services. By all accounts, they are quite ethical and have a reputation for doing high quality work for a reasonable price.

But I’ve heard of others that are maybe not so ethical, yet they look quite similar. Perhaps the crucial difference is that after you pay these less-ethical cousins for their services, they do you the added “favor” of publishing the book for you to various e-book outlets and POD fulfillment channels, only keeping a mere 20-50% of the perpetual royalties in exchange for this bonus service. With that one little detail, I’ve suddenly gone from paying a professional to do the job right to paying someone to rip me off. At least, that’s what it looks like to me. (To be clear, 52 Novels is a pay-for-service company, NOT a publisher or scammer.)

The key difference seems to be that when I pay my friend-thrice-removed to copy-edit my book or hire an artist to paint my cover, I am retaining all control as the publisher of my book. But that’s not boiled down into such a nifty little gem as Yog’s Law.

I suppose what we need is Yog’s Corallary, something like: But if you do pay for necessary services, be sure you keep control.

Yeah, not quite so clean and pithy. Yog, where are you when we need you?

Note: an extra bit of googling found a professional response to this question of Yog’s Law in the self-publishing era, including some good logic and a big-ass flow chart, so check out The Write Agenda.  It’s very informative and promises an impending white paper on the subject. But still, nothing quite so clean and pithy as the original.

2012: The Open Road Before Me

Yep, it’s goal setting time! I don’t generally do resolutions as they tend towards wishy-washy half-promises that evaporate by February. I prefer goals, since they’re less about making abstract changes and more about achieving concrete objectives. So, I thought I would share my writing goals for 2012.

The short of it is this: My goal is to publish two books this year, write two more, and keep up with the bloggy stuff.

Now let’s try that a bit slower.

Publishing:

I have decided, for now at least, that I’m going to pursue the self/indie-publishing route rather than traditional publishing. I’ll say a lot more about that in a later post, probably next week, but for 2012 and probably 2013, that’s the course I’m taking.

My first novel, Beneath the Sky, is pretty much ready. (I would argue that it’s not really my first novel, but that, again, is a whole’nuther post.) It still needs my copy edit pass, and then I’m seriously considering hiring a copy editor I know to give it a professional combing. You know, catch all the their-there-they’re stuff.

However, even then, it will be ready as a manuscript, not as a book. I need to do the formatting for Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc., as well as for print books. Yes, I intend to go with both e-book and physical book versions. That’s not as much work as you might think since it’s really only three formats: Kindle, e-Pub (which Smashwords will translate and push for you), and whatever format CreateSpace wants.

I will also need to do the cover. In a previous life, I was a half-decent artist and a pretty good graphic designer. However, I haven’t painted anything in over a year, and even that was a year of not painting much. As much as I’ve focused on my writing lately, my painting has been quite stalled. (Ironically, it was my frustration with a book cover commission that did a lot to sap my passion for painting.) So, I’m a little undecided on this. I could whip out my artistic toolbox and see if I can muster something up, or I could go to one of my artist friends and ask them to paint something for me. I can provide sketches. I just don’t know if my current skill set can make those sketches look good.

As a side note, if you’re interested, here are a few of my pieces from that former life:  Night StormAging ImmortalThe Offering (a little racy), and Priestess of Tides (more than a little racy).

So, while I think I understand the basic process, I’ve never done it before and don’t realistically know how long it’s going to take me. However, as a ballpark, I’m going to aim for three months, so hopefully I’ll have something to show for my efforts in April.

As for the second book, Hell Bent, I have more work to do on the manuscript itself. It’s not yet ready for the beta readers, but that task is coming up soon, well before Beneath the Sky is likely to see paper or Kindle. Then, once I have some reader feedback, I’ll be fixing all the holes and lame characters that they find, and then… well, it will need to simmer a bit. But then hopefully it will just need another copy edit pass (possibly a professional one), and then formatting, cover, etc. In short, it will need all the things I discovered Beneath the Sky needed but didn’t know in January. My goal is to get this one out in the latter part of the year, maybe as early as July, but to be safe I’m giving myself until October.

Writing:

So, I’ve written two drafts in the last fourteen months, and that span included a stretch of about nine months when I wasn’t writing any fiction at all. I hope to avoid another nasty stretch like that and crank out two new drafts in 2012. As I’m trying to alternate between SF and fantasy, the first one this year will be fantasy. In fact, it is likely to be a sequel to Hell Bent, since that was written intentionally as the first book in a series. Of course, before I set finger to key on that one, I’ll need to have gotten good enough feedback from the beta readers of Hell Bent to feel confident that a sequel is in order. I hope to write that one sometime in the spring to early summer, probably after I get Beneath the Sky out the door.

Then, somewhere in there, I need to do a first pass edit on my just-completed-last-week draft of Ships of my Fathers. There are two reasons for this. First, I want to keep the pipeline full so that I can do a similar 2+2 goal next year, and second, because I want to get the beta reader feedback to see if Ships of my Fathers is worth a sequel. Why? Well…

The second draft I’m planning to write in 2012 is a sequel to Ships of my Fathers. Much like Hell Bent, it was written intentionally to be the first of a series. However, while I can see Hell Bent leading to any number of books, Ships of my Fathers is much more likely to be limited to a 4-6 book run. Hell Bent can easily be “the continuing adventures of…” whereas Ships of my Fathers is headed to a very specific destination. Once it gets there, it’s either “live happily ever after” or “let me toil eternally in anguish for my mistakes”, and no one wants to read that. Or at the very least, I don’t want to write it.

This might be leading me to a soft fur-lined trap of bouncing back and forth between these two series for 5+ years, but that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. On the other hand, if I can pull off 2+2 for a year or two, maybe I can up the ante to 3+3 and splice in some extra variety. But for now, I’m shooting for 2+2 to keep the pipeline flowing for the next year.

Blogging:

I’m reasonably happy with what I’ve been doing with the blog so far, and I’m likely to keep the same kind of schedule, namely an essay on Monday, a writing/publishing article on Wednesday, and a book review on Friday. Other things will pop in randomly, but that’s the basic idea. However, I do plan on two relatively minor changes.

First, the Monday essay is going to see a few multi-part essays. When I started brainstorming ideas to write on, I ran into several that I really wanted to expound on but would require far too much text for a single blog entry. Well, too much for an entry I expected anyone to actually read. So, I held off on them until now. After all, I didn’t want to start the blog with “A Study of the Interstellar Migration of Butterflies, parts 1 through 22”.

Second, as I get more into the publishing game, the Wednesday column is going to turn a bit more personal as I share the gory details of the process, especially this first time through. Later, I’ll probably shift more to talking about the actual writing stuff. That may very well bore readers to tears, but I’m afraid it’s inevitable: if you give a writer a blog, sooner or later he starts blathering about voice, pacing, and the superiority of the Oxford comma.

Note: my original concept for this blog was to do it as a podcast, likely a weekly one, where the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday entries were simply different sections of the podcast, probably coming in at the 20-40 minute range. However, some hiccups with recording and sound editing kept the blog on hold for over a year before I finally set the podcast idea aside, at least temporarily. I don’t expect to pick it up again this year, but you never know. However, even if I did add it as a podcast, I would almost certainly keep the text portions as they are.

So that’s it for 2012. Hopefully, I’ll be greeting 2013 with success. At the very least, I’ll be greeting it with a big raspberry for all those Mayan calendar doofuses… doofusses… doofi… hell, why doesn’t the dictionary ever conjugate the one word you really need?

Beneath the Sky, draft 2.1

I just finished off the edits to Beneath the Sky, bringing it up to draft 2.1.  Many thanks to my alpha/beta readers (Andrew, Julia, and Rose) for their feedback on the earlier drafts.

I still have to do another copy-edit pass on it (draft 2.11) before I can really declare it finished.  And then I’ll have to figure out what to do with it, but that’s a whole other topic.