Tag Archives: writing

We’re on Google Play! And Scribd!

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When Google started selling books, their site was a bit of a mess, and my publisher stayed away. Now things look much better, and my publisher is onboard. You can see my books here, along with all the other stuff that comes along when you search for my name. The one weirdness is that their list prices are much higher than you see on other sites, but the prices are discounted so that they end up around those standard prices.

My publisher is also onboard with Scribd, the book subscription service that competes with Kindle Unlimited.  The idea, as we’ve discussed before, is to be a Netflix for books. For $8.99 a month, you can download as many books as you like from their catalog. They have fewer books than Kindle Unlimited, but they’re better quality.  From the author’s perspective, they pay better royalties than Kindle Unlimited and, most important, they don’t demand exclusivity.

Finally, their interace is really nice.  Here’s Scribd’s page for The Portal:

scribd

Happy belated birthday to William Blake

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I seemed to have missed it by a day.  Here is his great poem “London”.  Did anyone ever write a better phrase than “mind-forg’d manacles”?  And did any two words ever pack more of a punch than “marriage-hearse”?

I wandered through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

Is this the greatest novel in the English language?

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Middlemarch, I mean.  Wikipedia tells me that this is the opinion of Martin Amis and Julian Barnes.  It also quotes Virginia Woolf, who calls it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

I first read it back in high school or college, when I read pretty much everything.  I doubt that it was assigned reading — it’s about a billion pages long.  So I probably spent a chunk of my spare time devouring it one summer.  This time around, almost out  of the blue, I decided to have my hero Walter Sands read it in the course of Where All the Ladders Start (coming soon to an ebook store near you!), and I decided I’d better take another look at it myself, to make sure the things I said about it were true.

It surely is a novel for grown-ups.  I can’t imagine subjecting a middle schooler to it, the way we make them read Oliver Twist.  I can’t imagine what I would have made of the book in high school.  A few more thoughts:

  • Middlemarch has its moments of rustic humor, but Eliot is never as funny with her rude mechanicals as Dickens is with his working-class folks.  And she even doesn’t try to be as funny as Jane Austen when it comes to relations between men and women.  That is serious business.
  • There’s a bit of social commentary in the novel.  I didn’t recall this from my first reading, but it’s actually a historical novel — written in the 1870s but taking place in the 1830s.  So we see the railroad about to make an appearance in the area, for example, and the Reform Bill is in the air.  But that material seemed fairly bland to me.
  • Where Eliot is great — and maybe unequaled — is when she deals with love and marriage, and the complexities of serious relationships in a serious world.  Dorothea and Casaubon, Dorothea and Will Ladislaw, Rosamond and Lydgate — by the end of the book, we are so deeply inside these characters’ heads that we seem to know them as well as we know ourselves.  That’s a pretty impressive achievement.

That is to say, I re-read the whole damn thing, which used up a large chunk of my reading time for the year.  It was worth it.

Amazon vs. Hachette — The Final Blog

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Amazon and Hachette have finally settled.  Thank goodness.  The settlement appears to follow the outlines of Amazon’s recent agreement with Simon & Schuster — the publisher can set its own price for its ebooks, but they get better terms if the price is in the range Amazon likes.  This is exactly how it works with independent authors — we only get the lovely 70% royalty if we set our price between a dollar and $9.99.  Anything higher or lower, we only get 35%.

This all seems perfectly reasonable.  Clearly, Amazon wasn’t trying to put mainstream publishers out of business.  It wasn’t trying to destroy literature and “disappear” authors.  It was using its clout as a reseller to get ebook prices where it thought they ought to be, to maximize sales. Business as usual.

Hugh Howey sums it up:

Conflating our love of books with the virtuousness of those who package them is a very bad idea. Publishers belong to multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporations. They need to make profits. They do this by pushing prices up on readers and pushing wages down on writers. I don’t blame them for that (though I do try to pressure them to be more fair to both parties).

The people I blame are those who should do their homework, understand this business better, and get on the right side of these debates. The real damage has been done by those who refuse to fight for the little guys; the real damage has been done by the parties who seem to think that publishers can do no wrong and that Amazon can do no right.

This includes the New York Times and many other traditional media outlets. It includes The Authors Guild and Authors United. By waging a PR campaign without understanding the issues (often stating things that were patently untrue), these parties caused severe damage and helped to prolong this negotiation. They aligned themselves with a party that has broken the law to raise prices and refuses to pay authors a decent digital royalty. I don’t think this damage is done intentionally or with malice but by simple ignorance.

First sentences

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I finally got around to starting my new novel today.  I wrote the first sentence, which goes like this:

I was standing in the snack-food aisle of the 7-11 when I saw her.

Pretty good, huh?

Let’s compare it to first lines of the top 20th century English-language novels, according to these guys.

Here’s Ulysses, which came in first:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

That’s fine, although it doesn’t stand by itself.  In second place is The Great Gatsby.

In my younger and more vulnerable days my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Again it doesn’t stand by itself; you need to read on to find out what the advice was.  Next is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo . . .

Well, first sentences just don’t get any better that.

Let’s try number 4, Lolita, skipping the hilarious foreword:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

OK, that one’s great, too.  The whole first paragraph is incomparable.

Fifth place is Brave New World:

A squat gray building of only thirty-four stories.

Good but abrupt.  Like Lolita, missing a verb, and you need to read the entire (short) paragraph to get the point.

Anyway, I’ve been put in my place.  And now I want to re-read some novels.  Which I’d better not do, or I’ll never write the remaining ten thousand sentences.

Writers in movies: The Romantic Englishwoman

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Another in a random series.

The Romantic Englishwoman is a 1975 movie with A-list credentials: it stars Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson, it’s co-written by Tom Stoppard, and it’s directed by Joseph Losey (who also directed Accident and The Go-Between).  I love Tom Stoppard, but I hated this movie.

Caine plays a successful novelist and screenwriter; Jackson is his do-nothing, dissatisfied wife.  They have a beautiful kid, a beautiful house, beautiful friends, a nanny, but, well, you know.  Jackson goes off to Baden Baden for reasons she can’t articulate.  Caine is insanely jealous.  She comes home and in turn is jealous of him and the nanny.  He decides to write a screenplay about all this.  He invites the good-looking drug dealer she met in Baden Baden (Helmut Berger) to stay with them, basically trying to stage-manage his screenplay.  There are complications.  Jackson runs off with the drug dealer; Caine goes in pursuit.  They get back together again, in an abrupt ending that neither my wife and I understood in the slightest.  But perhaps that’s because we had long since stopped caring.  (By the way, that sexy poster has nothing much to do with the movie, although Jackson does have a brief, weird nude scene.  It’s kind of depressing to think that she’s now 78.  We should all stay young and gorgeous forever!)

You can see that intelligent people were behind the movie.  It’s about fiction mirroring reality (or maybe vice versa), and it seems like half the shots in the film involve showing someone’s reflection in a window or a mirror.  The plot has the makings of a thriller (the drug dealer is being pursued by bad guys), but the movie shrugs this off in favor of baffling deep meanings.  (And the Caine character tells his producer that he doesn’t want to write a thriller.)  But the movie didn’t bother making anyone even slightly sympathetic, so I just wasn’t interested in the deep meanings.

Caine’s character isn’t particularly interesting.  He’s a selfish jerk, which is of course entirely accurate for a writer, but we don’t get any sense of why he’s so successful, what makes him tick, or how he writes.  I can think of a couple dozen Michael Caine movies that I enjoyed more.  And virtually anything else by Tom Stoppard.

Bad advice for writers; also not funny

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At first I thought this article on Bad Advice for Writers was pretty funny:

Advice #4: Correct negative reviews

There are only two types of reviews: the positive kind, and the kind where the reviewer didn’t understand the book. A bad review of your book is actually a cry for help!

Whenever you see a negative review that makes you say to yourself, “I should reach out to this person, perhaps in a borderline illegal fashion,” by all means do so. Find out where they live if you want! Show up on their doorstep and offer to politely explain how they simply failed to understand your novel. Make it clear that this is something they need to resolve within themselves and not a reflection on your work, and also that there’s no need whatsoever to call the police, so please put down the phone and stop crying.

Interaction is what reviewers are really looking for from you, the writer. Words like “awful” and “incomprehensible” and “this may have been written by a very dumb parrot” are really their way of saying, “I have failed to fully grasp your clear brilliance and would like for you to explain it to me”. So get out there and interact!

Then I read this, and I stopped laughing:

In an update to the fabulously written Goodreads review of Brittain’s awful self-published opus, a reviewer going by the pen name of Paige Rolland describes how Brittain stalked her Facebook page, discovered where she worked and traveled all the way to Scotland where he violently hit her over the head with a full bottle of wine, causing her to be hospitalized.

The reviewer describes the attack:

I was in the cereal aisle, bending down to get something from the bottom self. When I stood up, something hit me on the head. Hard. At first, I thought that maybe I’d hit my head off the shelf, and as everything started to spin and go black, I wondered how the hell I could be so stupid as to hit my head so hard. My vision was black, and my hearing was muffled, but I was very much conscious – I did not pass out (and this is important ’cause of my pride). I turned and put my hands out to lower myself to the floor gently, which is something my mother has always taught me to do should I think I’m going to pass out. It prevents further injury. As I lowered myself, I heard the tinkle of a bottle on the floor and I thought that something had fallen on me (even thought there is definitely no wine in the cereal aisle).

This is inconceivably awful.

And then there’s this weird story.

Who are these annoying little people who are reviewing my book on Amazon?

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Advice-columnist Margo Howard is distressed that she received bad reviews of her recent memoir from real, ordinary people on Amazon.  The reviews were written by Amazon’s Vine community, and Ms. Howard didn’t like them one bit, finding them “inaccurate, insulting, and demonstrably written by dim bulbs.”  She finds the very idea of being reviewed by these folks distressing:

I can see the value—maybe—for man-on-the-street reviews of cold cream and pots and pans, but books?!

(I love the interrobang.)  And:

Books, of course, can be and are reviewed pre-publication—but by reviewers who are attached to magazines or newspapers. “Book Reviewer” is considered a profession, and reviews are done by other writers. Good sense would seem to militate against any group of people unschooled in creative and critical reviewing coming up with a worthwhile review. The Vine people, who deal mostly with products for the home and the body, seem inappropriate bellwethers regarding products for the mind, if you will.

Luckily, Jennifer Weiner is around to offer some sensible words in response:

Howard frets that the Amazon attack hurt her book’s chances. There’s no way to tell if that’s true, but I’d give readers the benefit of the doubt. My guess is that they can sniff out a review that’s the result of baseless jealousy or an unfounded agenda, the same way they’ve learned to dismiss five-star fan-girling from an author’s BFFs, colleagues, or mom.

If the Amazon reviewers slammed Howard’s work without reading it, that’s a problem, and Amazon should address it. If they panned Howard’s book because they didn’t like it, that’s reality, and Howard need to figure out how to live with it, and to come to terms with publishing in 2014. Everyone is a critic. Everyone’s got a soapbox. And the worst fate for a writer isn’t being attacked … it’s being ignored.

Here, by the way, is a review that just popped up on Barnes & Noble about my novel The Distance Beacons:

Wow, Violet! This was great! Thanks so much for recommending it to me! (Haha, sorry for the typo) Your style is absolutely wonderful! Please keep going, and l will keep reading! <p> Thanks again for reading mine, Ring &infin

Huh?  Actually, there seems to be a random conversation going on between a couple of people, carried out via reviews of my novel.  Luckily, all their reviews are 5-stars.  At least I’m not being ignored.  I think.