Category Archives: Writing

Jigsaw Puzzles and Writing

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I am a sucker for jigsaw puzzles.  My wonderful family got me a couple for Father’s Day, and they have been sucking up my time ever since.  I really should be helping humanity by liking Facebook pages and retweeting hashtags.  I really should be finishing my novel.  But no, I have to be working on this.2014-07-26 14.01.28

Here are the ways that working on a jigsaw puzzle is better than writing fiction:

  • Each piece has one and only one place where it goes.  Find it, and you’re through with that piece.  None of this tiresome moving paragraphs around and changing motivations and fiddling with adjectives.
  • When you’re done, you’re done.  You don’t have to look at it when you’re finished and think: Maybe that boat on the right should be bigger.  Maybe the water in the middle should be a different shade of blue.
  • Even one of these hard 1000-piece puzzles only takes about a month in your spare time.  You don’t look up at the clock and realize a year has gone by and you’re still not done.

Here are the ways that writing fiction is better than working on a jigsaw puzzle:

  • You don’t lose pieces.
  • When you finish a jigsaw puzzle, no one asks you to do a sequel.
  • Every once in a while you earn a tiny bit of money from your fiction.  No one has ever offered to pay me for doing a jigsaw puzzle.

I’d say it’s about a tie.

The novel was pretty much finished on Tuesday, and then . . .

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. . . I woke up on Thursday with An Idea.  But that was OK — the Idea was limited to one section of the novel, and it wouldn’t require much rejiggering.

Then today I squinted at the novel from another angle, and that resulted in Another Idea.  This one would involve changing the motivation of a major character, with consequences through the story.

I think I need to follow up on both of these ideas.

But what will happen when I actually read through my draft?

John Steinbeck famously wrote The Grapes of Wrath in a few months.  Where did I go wrong?

 

Life is stupider than fiction: robot politician edition

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A friend sent me a link to this article, noting that “someone has been reading your book.”

“The election for U.S. House for Oklahoma’s 3rd District will be contested by the Candidate, Timothy Ray Murray,” Murray wrote in a press release posted on his campaign website. “I will be stating that his votes are switched with Rep. Lucas votes, because it is widely known Rep. Frank D. Lucas is no longer alive and has been displayed by a look alike.”

On the website, Murray claims that Lucas and “a few other Oklahoma and other States’ Congressional Members,” were executed “on or about” Jan. 11, 2011 in southern Ukraine.

“On television they were depicted as being executed by the hanging about the neck until death on a white stage and in front of witnesses,” the website claims. “Other now current Members of Congress have shared those facts on television also. We know that it is possible to use look alike artificial or manmade replacements, however Rep. Lucas was not eligible to serve as a Congressional Member after that time.”

The book in question is my novel Replica, whose basic plot is evident from its cover:

Replica cover

Replica was by far the most successful of my novels when it was first published. So far it hasn’t gotten much love as an e-book. Is it the cover? The price? It’s a pretty good book!  Here’s what Publisher’s Weekly said when it came out:

While maintaining a highly readable pulp-fiction style, Bowker takes the narrative through a gripping array of turnabouts, doublecrosses and twists.  Readers will be guessing the story’s outcome until the very end.

And here’s a customer review:

I’m not sure exactly what I expected when I bought this book, but I didn’t expect it to explore terroristic politics, development of artificial intelligence, and some of the challenges of AI/human relationships … all without becoming bogged down in the esoteric nature of the technologies involved.

It starts out more or less the way I thought it would, with various entities coming together to make it possible (and plausible) to substitute the President with an android. Almost everything after that, though, was a surprise … with plenty of twists and turns and misdirections and characters developing in ways you probably won’t expect.

This is a good read, and amazingly so given how long since its original publication. It’s not too often that near-future books involving technology or politics (and especially a combination of the two) are written such that they don’t become badly dated in a decade. This one is still fresh, a fun read.

The BookBub promotion for “Dover Beach”: a preliminary post-mortem

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The BookBub promotion for Dover Beach expired yesterday, I think.  I just have the Amazon numbers at this point.  I’ve sold about 600 copies there, plus a bunch of copies of its very fine sequel, The Distance Beacons.  That doesn’t quite give me a profit, but the returns from Barnes & Noble and lesser markets probably will.  At Barnes & Noble, Dover Beach peaked in the 100’s in sales rank and has now dropped back to about #1100; on Kobo, it’s still in the top 100 for Science Fiction Adventure and at #188 overall for Science Fiction.

Regardless of whether I end up in the black for the investment, I’m going to consider this a success. Anyway, because this is my blog, I’m going to mention that Dover Beach is still available for $0.99, and while I’m at it, I’ll subject you to a customer review. This one is from B&N and is titled “Excellent story!”:

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. The writing style was easy to relate to and the characters had a realness to them that was very refreshing. I love books written about how a society survives after war and the author did a great job explaining the mood of the aftermath. I also appreciate that he didn’t have people being held as prisoners by some thrown together street gangs, that seems to be a plot that comes up way too frequently. It makes more sense that most people would go out on their own or team up with one or two other people. I will be buying more of his books.

The second draft is done!

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As I hoped, the second draft of my novel went a lot faster than the first.  By the time I had finished the first draft, I had pages of notes about what I needed to change, and I came up with lots of new ideas before beginning the second draft.  New characters showed up!  Old characters disappeared!  Motivations got rejiggered!  New plot twists got twisted!

There’s more to be done, but at least now the thing feels like a completed novel.  It exists; before it was more or less a jumble in my mind.

Here’s the kind of thing I’m going to have to do now: the last words of the novel used to be “Gwen repeated.”  But this morning I decided they should be: “Gwen said again.”  But as I say the words over in my mind, I’m not entirely happy with the internal rhyme.  Will anyone care?  No.  But I think I better change them back.  Or maybe not.

A note on the authoring process: somewhere on this blog I’ve talked about rewriting on a computer.  Computers make it easy to use your original draft as the basis for the rewrite, but that lessens the incentive to re-imagine your content.  This time around I started with a blank document, but I copied the first draft into it chapter by chapter.  Often I would use a sentence from the original; occasionally an entire paragraph.  But mostly the text was there to remind me of what was going on, and most of it got deleted as I completed its replacement.  Overall, I managed to reduce the books length by about seven percent, which was one of my goals.  The first draft didn’t feel quite streamlined enough for a private eye novel.

Now on to the tweaking!

Another author complains about the new digital world order

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This one is Tony Horwitz, who wrote the wonderful Confederates in the Attic. He recounts his tale of woe in a New York Times op-ed.  He got an offer from a new digital media outfit to write an e-book about the Keystone pipeline.  They in turn contracted with an ebook publisher to produce and market the book.  But the digital media outfit collapsed before he got his advanced, and the ebook publisher collapsed after the book was published.  He now has little prospect of getting sufficient revenue from the ebook to make the months of research and writing worth while (although the publicity of a Times op-ed is going to help).

But now that I’ve escorted two e-partners to the edge of the grave, I’m wary of this brave new world of digital publishers and readers. As recently as the 1980s and ’90s, writers like me could reasonably aspire to a career and a living wage. I was dispatched to costly and difficult places like Iraq, to work for months on a single story. Later, as a full-time book author, I received advances large enough to fund years of research.

How many young writers can realistically dream of that now? Online journalism pays little or nothing and demands round-the-clock feeds. Very few writers or outlets can chase long investigative stories. I also question whether there’s an audience large enough to sustain long-form digital nonfiction, in a world where we’re drowning in bite-size content that’s mostly free and easy to consume. One reason “Boom” sank, I suspect, is that there aren’t many people willing to pay even $2.99 to read at length about a trek through the oil patch, no matter how much I sexed it up with cowboys and strippers.

It’s a sad story, but Horwitz’s main problems seem to have been shaky publishers and the lack of demand for long-form journalism, not the ebook model itself (which let him publish his story within days of its completion, while it was still in the news).

And you don’t have to deal with shaky publishers to have a tale of woe.  I sold my novel Senator to an enthusiastic editor at William Morrow, a well-established publisher.  But my editor subsequently left the company amid rumors that Morrow was going to be acquired.  The book was therefore an orphan, assigned to a foster-editor who had no stake in its success. Without any publicity or editorial push, it sank without a trace — until I resurrected it as an ebook.  These things happen.

Parents, don’t let your children become authors.  Teach them Java and C++, and let them write code, not books.

Slate weighs in on Amazon vs. Hachette

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This article makes a couple of interesting points.

First, mainstream publishers are screwing authors on e-book royalties:

“Look at Harper’s own numbers,” DeFiore wrote. “$27.99 hardcover generates $5.67 profit to publisher and $4.20 royalty to author. $14.99 agency priced e-book generates $7.87 profit to publisher and $2.62 royalty to author.”

Looks fishy, doesn’t it? And the same basic math holds throughout the industry, including at Hachette.

The 15% royalty on hardcovers has always been justified by the costs of manufacturing, storing, and shipping the physical object.  Those costs disappear with an e-book.  But apparently the publishers are not passing much of that savings to the author.  And Amazon knows this.

By leaving royalty rates where they are, publishers have left their nice digital margins hanging out there for everyone to see. And when Amazon sees someone else’s healthy profits, it’s like a dog smelling a steak. As Jeff Bezos has said, “Your margin is my opportunity.”

The other point the author makes is that reduced profits for publishers means a brain drain as fewer people decide to write books:

If publishers make less money on every book, they are going to pay people less to write and edit them, and talented people will decide to do something else with their time. Consider that it takes at least five years, and usually more, to write a definitive presidential biography. If an advance of $100,000 exceeds the budget that an Amazon-dominated world will allow, then the only author who can write such a biography must be either independently wealthy or subsidized by a full-time job, probably teaching at a university.

Do you buy this argument?  I suppose it could be true for mainstream non-fiction.  It certainly seems untrue for fiction — or, at least, it would be balanced off by an influx of talented writers who are simply bypassing the barriers put up by mainstream publishers. If I earned more from my writing I could quit my day job and write more, but that’s fundamentally a function of success in the marketplace, not advances from a publisher.

Publishers as gatekeepers

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One of the arguments made on behalf of mainstream publishers in the Amazon-Hachette war is that publishers act as gatekeepers — keeping the junk out of the market and using their editorial skills to improve the books they do let into the market.  Here’s a writer offering up a paean to these gatekeepers in the the pages of Publishers Weekly:

In a market of unlimited book options, how does an audience make choices? At the moment, most of that burden is carried by the book business. The publicity and marketing campaigns and cover designs and flap copy—the things that publishers do—are not just methods of selling books; they’re also readers’ main tools for discovering books. The same is true of the curating and merchandising in stores, and book coverage in the media. Without reviews, staff recommendations, and endcap displays, unlimited choices aren’t narrowed down—they’re overwhelming.

Second, if all books become cheap or free to readers, then writers are unlikely to earn much (if anything). Who will want to write if writing doesn’t pay?

Third, without the gatekeepers, those who do write will create books that are worse—and not just authors whose dormant genius must be drawn out by patient editors, but all authors. Every book that doesn’t first have to get past a gatekeeper or two, or 10, before being put in front of the public will be worse.

He then goes on to describe how much his manuscript was improved in the process of being submitted to agents and publishers.  Well, your mileage may vary; mine certainly did.  As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, the editorial support and advice I got while I was part of the mainstream publishing world ranged from trivial to nonexistent.  Editors didn’t have the time or the interest or the talent to make my novels better.

Two further points.  First, the main idea behind being a gatekeeper is to keep out the bad stuff. But of course fallible human beings are making judgments that could well be wrong.  The most poignant case of this was John Kennedy Toole’s amazing A Confederacy of Dunces, shunned by mainstream publishers and only published by an obscure university press years after his suicide at the age of 31.

Less poignant, but of more immediate interest to me, is my novel The Portal, which my agent several years ago declined to market, deeming it unpublishable.  So now it’s out there in the self-published universe, and the rave customer reviews are starting to pile up.  Here’s one of many:

A Terrific Read! I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading this. Would the promising story idea deflate once it got past the initial set-up, as so many other books do? It definitely did not, and stayed entertaining all the way through – I could not put it down. I have kids around the same age and I really felt for these boys – they’re lost and are doing whatever they can to stay alive, stay together and hopefully get home. Glad the book was complete in itself, but it would be great to see them have more adventures like this. Overall, two very enthusiastic thumbs up!

(The semi-poignant part of this saga is that in the years after my agent rejected it I managed to lose the final draft — no hard copy, no soft copy.  Luckily, my friend Jeff managed to hang on to the final Word file.  Apparently he had more faith in it than I did!)

The second point is that gatekeepers are going to let stuff through that they shouldn’t.  Not all books that come out from major publishers are worth reading, or are as good as they could possibly be. The two most recent Jack Reacher books could certainly have been improved — one by going through another draft, the other by being tossed into the wastebasket.  But apparently the publisher doesn’t care — they just want a Jack Reacher book every year.

I don’t know anything about Emma Donoghue, but her latest novel, Frog Music, is a historical mystery and apparently very different from her previous “worldwide bestseller,” Room.  The Boston Globe hated it, the New York Times hated it, and lots of Amazon and (especially) Barnes & Noble customers also hate it.  My guess is that her publisher, Little Brown (part of Hachette), was hoping for another Room, but this is what the author delivered to them.  So they were stuck publishing something they didn’t much like.  (Also, the Kindle version costs $12.99, which suggests that the e-book pricing wars haven’t quite started yet — it’s actually a buck cheaper at B&N.  So I’d just like to mention that you can buy pretty much all of my e-books for the price of one Frog Music.)

Thoughts on Amazon vs. Hachette

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Amazon is apparently playing hardball in negotiations with the publishing conglomerate Hachette, and as usual people are outraged.  As usual, I find it hard to understand what the problem is.  Certainly some Hachette authors will be hurt in the short run, but that’s not really Amazon’s concern.  Authors are always buffeted by changes in the marketplace. There is certainly a possibility that Amazon will become something of a monopsony — the only place to which publishers can sell their books.  But the remedy here is legal, not calling Jeff Bezos an extortionist.

Joe Nocera of the New York Times sums things up like this:

No matter what you think of Amazon’s tactics, they surely don’t violate any laws. It is acting the way hardheaded companies usually act — inflicting some pain on the party in a dispute to move it toward resolution. On some level, the book industry has never fit comfortably in the contours of big business. But over the years, as one house after another was bought by conglomerates, as they merged with each other, as they tried to increase profits with the kind of regularity that pleases Wall Street, they began the process of commoditizing books.

Jeff Bezos? He’s only taking that process to its logical extreme.

One other thing: Nocera mentions Walmart and cable companies as examples of big companies that squeeze its suppliers.  But books are not fungible, the way air conditioners and other things you buy at Walmart are; if you want J.K. Rowling’s latest book, you’re not going to accept a substitute.  And there are way more suppliers for books than there are cable providers for your home.  If Amazon makes it hard for you to buy a Hachette book, Barnes & Noble will happily take your order — and, if they have any brains, they’ll give you a special discount.

The only issue here is that Kindle users are more or less tied to Amazon for their e-books.  But if they find that they can’t get a lot of their favorite titles on the Kindle, maybe they’ll buy a different e-reader.  This is no different from Netflix, which has a large but incomplete selection of movies and TV shows to stream.  If their selection doesn’t satisfy you, you have to go to Hulu or some other vendor.  Not having their books available from every conceivable bookseller is not great for authors and their readers, but it’s also not the end of the world.