Too Good To Be True

So there's this anthology looking for stories on a specific theme, and, if accepted, you'll be paid $500 for your story. Not bad, right? Except there is one little important detail worth mentioning (the bold is mine):

I am looking for 10-12 publishable stories by new and upcoming authors, and I will see that you are paid $500 for your story, though it may take some time for you to receive your payment as I have to get an agent and publisher on board with this project. I will also solicit 2-4 stories by better-known authors in order to make this volume a bestseller at Jewish book fairs.

So right now, basically, there is no money. There could be, somewhere down the line. But publishing being publishing, it's just as possible (and quite likely) that there will be a big load of nothing when it's all said and done.

Not that I'm trying to discourage anyone from submitting to this market. For all anyone knows, the editor could quite possibly secure an agent and publisher and the anthology could be a big success. But I've seen these types of guidelines before, a hopeful editor offering an incentive that he or she doesn't have and quite possibly never will have. (Also, let's not get too much into the math here, but 10-12 publishable stories x $500 = $6,000 at most, and that's leaving the editor with nothing. Is that kind of advance believable? If you have a new Stephen King story, sure, though he alone will probably require at least $5,000.)

This happened to me a couple years ago: I sold a story to a themed anthology and was supposed to be paid a nice amount for it. Only thing was, the editor was still searching for a publisher. But if and when the project did find a home, then I was promised to receive said amount. But the project never came together, and quite honestly, I wasn't too disappointed as the story was a reprint to begin with. It wasn't like I had written it specifically for the anthology in question and then waited and waited and waited for nothing to happen and then, when nothing did happen, I was stuck with an unsold themed story.

And then, sometimes, a project is all set to go, there's a publisher with money, and then it all falls apart in the end anyway. This, too, happened to me years ago. It wouldn't have been such a big deal (shit happens, right?) except I later learned that some of the contributors had been paid upfront, while others (like myself) were not paid a cent.

Anyway, I think a lot of editors and publishers start out with good intentions. But sometimes I think a lot of editors and publishers promise more than they can really deliver. So it's always important to stay alert and remember that if it's too good to be true, it probably is.

Novel Workshops, Fonts, And Kindle Grit

Nick Mamatas has some good insight into this piece over at The Millions about "10 Thoughts on Academia’s Novel Crisis" and the one thing that really stuck out to me was this line: "The obvious solution is simply to understand that one cannot workshop a novel." And it got me thinking about a particular workshop I went to several years ago that workshopped novels. There were, I think, about 20 other writers. You submitted the first 40-50 pages of your novel and a 1 or 2 page synopsis of the rest, and those sections were copied and put in huge binders and sent to the 20 writers to critique weeks before the actual workshop. And then once the workshop came around, those 20 writers would sit in groups and discuss those particular sections with those particular writers (there were established authors there as mentors, as well as an editor at a large New York publishing house). And I remember thinking how, well, stupid it was that they we were just critiquing the first 50 pages and synopsis. Yes, there was some value to the experience, I guess, and it's true that you can judge a novel by the first few chapters just as you can judge a story by its first few pages (if not paragraphs), but I remember a few of the writers admitting they read those first 50 pages with interest and just glossed over the synopsis. I have to admit I think I did the same thing too. Because a novel, in my opinion, should be the length it is because it can't be described in only a couple pages. If that's the case, then it should just be a story. Sure, you have the basic summary (and that, I guess, was one of the reasons for doing it: to see if the writer was the on right track, had a good story arc, etc.), but you can't experience the novel that way. Especially if a novel is complex on a Peter Straub level; just how are you supposed to show the reader all these different complexities in only a page or two, and even if you can, how can the reader really tell whether or not it's effective? They can't, and that's why if you critique a novel, you should read the entire novel and not just the first couple chapters and synopsis. (The basic lesson from that workshop? Start your book off on a really great opening hook. Like that isn't already obvious.)

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Over at Salon.com, Laura Miller suggests that hideous fonts might actually be good for you:

A recent study out of Princeton, and brought to wider attention by Jonah Lehrer at Wired.com, suggests that ugly, irregular fonts can boost the amount of information readers retain from a text, while easy-to-read type is more likely to just sort of slide out of their minds. The study, titled "Fortune Favors the Bold (and the Italicized): Effects of Disfluency on Educational Outcomes," found that people remembered more from worksheets and PowerPoint presentations when they were composed in a hot mess of hated fonts like Monotype Corsiva, Haettenshweiler and the dreaded Comic Sans Italic.

The hypothesis is that the added difficulty in reading these texts forces more cognitive engagement, which leads to greater comprehension. While we naturally think that we learn better from texts that are pleasant and easy to read, the opposite may be the case. For Lehrer, who admits to loving his Kindle but also to worrying that it makes "the act of reading a little bit too easy," this is an ominous sign.

One thing I do love about e-books is the option of changing the font and the font size. Kindle (at least the app on my iPad) doesn't really let you change the font, but iBooks gives you six different kinds to choose from. Currently my preferred font in iBooks is Palatino, for whatever it's worth. What should you take away from the Salon article? Basically if you want high reading comprehension, read everything in Wingdings.

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Speaking of e-books, it was announced yesterday that True Grit will be available next week on Kindle. Sweet, I thought, it's about time. Only when I checked it out, I saw that it's priced at $12.99. Okay, I thought, that's not too strange. But Amazon has the trade paperback listed for only $8.08. So ... yeah. Not sure what the thinking currently is with the publisher on that one, but best of luck to them. I mean, it's not like Random House isn't doing really well pricing some of their e-books accordingly (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is currently #1 in the entire Kindle Store, and why? Hmm, maybe because it's priced at $5.00. Just a guess.)

Parasites

Here's an interesting response to yesterday's post:

Am I wrong in calling some of these hints “parasites”? I kind of resent the pieces that couldn’t exist without someone else’s work. Without the Gorgon myth, “Before Perseus” is meaningless, but okay, a myth has no author. The worst is the Mamatas piece which creates nothing on its own, but trades entirely on Beckett’s play. He’s got no story of his own, just Beckett’s, which he trivializes.

I never heard of the term "parasites" before but I guess it makes sense, in a way. Not that I agree that the stories in the collection are in fact parasites. They, like all good literary re-imaginings, bring something new and unique to the table. Yes, Nick Mamatas's piece relies solely on Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, but so what? Yes, some fun is had in the piece at Beckett's expense, but I don't think it trivializes the play. If anything, I think Beckett would have gotten a good chuckle out of the story if he were alive today and read it. Either that or become insanely angry and order a fatwa on the author's head.

Still, the term "parasites" got me thinking about other books that rely on famous literary classics. Like Grendal by John Gardner, or March by Geraldine Brooks, or Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, or, most recently, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. The list goes on and on. Are they, to an extent, being parasitic? Each, I believe, brings something new and unique to the table. Each uses a famous literary work as a starting off point and builds from there.

But what about other books that exist merely to capitalize on literary classics?

The most recent is the unauthorized Catcher in the Rye sequel which has once again found its way back into the spotlight. The author's intent, in my opinion at least, was to simply make some money off an already famous classic (though, let's be honest here, fewer and fewer people are reading Catcher in the Rye anymore). It's like someone writing a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, telling the story of Scout forty years later, where she, no doubt, lives in an top-floor apartment in a big city with two dozen cats and shoots at mockingbirds with a BB gun for sport.

Of course, the most parasitic trend going on right now are the zombie mashups. Look, while I have no desire to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I have to hand it to Seth Grahame-Smith and the people at Quirk Books for coming up with a brillant concept. But it should have just been left at that. Except no, we have to beat a dead horse (or zombie horse) because why the hell not? That's why now it seems nearly every public domain novel is fodder for a zombie retelling. The worst of the bunch are those that don't even understand the concept of a mashup. The idea here is to take two completely different genres and put them together, but now you have books in the same genre mashed up (one in particular was released in bookstores not so long ago). It's like the author thought, Hmm, this is already a horror story, but maybe if I added zombies, it would make it even more horrorer (sic).

No, numbskull, it makes it boring and unoriginal and makes you nothing more than a hack.

P.S. With all this hoopla over the "cleansed" version of Huckleberry Finn, someone should write a novel from Jim's point of view, maybe his life years later, and call it N-word Jim ... but, you know, actually use the real word. Now that title there, that will sell books. Anybody want to take the ball and run with it, go right ahead. Just make sure you mention me in the acknowledgements.

Judging An E-Book By Its E-Cover

With the rise of self-publishing in today's digital marketplace, one of the most important aspects is cover art. This is nothing new or earth-shattering. An attractive cover will, in theory, attract readers, hence give the potential for more sales. Obviously, the work itself is the most important thing, and there are times when a really great cover can't hide the fact that the book is a dud. Sometimes it happens, just as sometimes really awful covers almost shoo potential readers away from a really great piece of art. Such as:

This cover is designed by Chip Kidd, and while I like a lot of Kidd's work, I'm split on what he did for the hardcover design of The Road. It almost seems like after much thought and consideration, he said "Screw it" and drew the design using a paintbrush program on his Mac. Either that or he woke up one day, realized he'd missed the deadline, and knocked it out in that before-mentioned paintbrush program.

And yet ... I do sort of like it. It definitely sets the tone of the novel, though I think this is one of those instances where Cormac McCarthy's name is what sold readers on the book and not the design. Or, to say it more bluntly, had this cover been given to any other writer, the book probably would have failed. Of course, that's just my opinion, but here's what Kidd had to say in a 2007 interview:

"I piggy-backed my career on the backs of authors, not the other way around. The latest example of that is The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I'm lucky to be attached to that. Cormac McCarthy is not lucky to have me doing his cover."

Another cover Kidd is famous for is the original Jurassic Park novel:

Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures had the foresight to buy the rights to the design, which was eventually plastered everywhere when the movie came out. It is, quite simply, iconic. Of course, Kidd didn't think so:

"Jurassic Park would absolutely have sold a similar amount, whether it had my cover on or not. I'm very much against the idea that the cover will sell the book. Marketing departments of publishing houses tend to latch onto this concept and they can't let go. But it's about whether the book itself really connects with the public, and the cover is only a small part of that."

A year or two ago I would have agreed with Kidd, but nowadays I think a cover is so much more important, as many potential readers are browsing these covers on Amazon or on their Kindles or iPads or whatever other e-readers they might have. A reader can no longer pull a book from the shelf and flip through the first couple of pages to decide whether or not they want to purchase it. Well, okay, a reader can still do that, but as we move toward more and more e-books becoming available, what happens now is a reader looks at the cover, description, possibly reviews, and then decides whether or not to spend the extra second to download a sample. Do they then immediately read that sample? Perhaps. Or maybe the sample goes unread. It's impossible to say. I know personally I always download the sample before I purchase an e-book, because sometimes the formatting is wacky, and if that's the case then I'm not going to bother.

But the cover is what is becoming more and more important in this digital age. And it's not just a cover so much as a thumbnail. That's basically all potential readers are going to see anyway, so I always find it odd when authors want to add small text to their e-book covers, like a blurb or "something-something award winner" because, as a thumbnail, that text becomes gargled.

But hey, to each his own. There are a lot of great graphic designers out there, and a lot of great book designs. If any (graphic designers or books) stick out to you, please let me know in the comments, maybe even include a link. For the time being, I leave you with some other of my favorite Chip Kidd designs.

The Worth Of Words

So last week I talked about how books are both physical and an experience and it got me thinking about how everyone doesn't want to pay too much for e-books. To their thinking, there is no printing costs involved, no shipping, so the e-book should be practically free. It made me realize that the physical connection is no longer there, just the experience, and somehow that lacks value. Such as:

Say a publisher is offering a chapbook containing a story between 10,000 and 20,000 words. You'd pay about $5 for that, right? I mean, that sounds somewhat reasonable. And depending on the author, you might even pay more. Why? Well because it's something, isn't it? It's substantial. You can hold it in your hands, turn the pages, and then, once you're done, you can pass it along to someone else or let it sit and accumulate dust.

Now what if that same story was available only as an e-book?

You probably wouldn't even consider paying $5 or more, not unless it was by someone like Stephen King, and even then you might have reservations.

Why?

Well, I'm not completely sure. This all really boils down to the worth of words. It seems now in the digital age, potential e-book readers are becoming more concerned with file size and word count than the actual work.

For an example:

A writer friend of mine told me a story about how an e-book of his (a 10,000-worder) was priced at 99 cents. Someone purchased it, read it, and reviewed it favorably, even going so far as to recommend it ... but said she thought some readers might be upset having to pay 99 cents for so few words.

Huh?

Again: she thought some readers might be upset having to pay 99 cents for so few words.

E-book price points are all over the place these days. Some writers offer a 2,000-word story for 99 cents, while others offer 90,000-word novels for the same price. The e-book readers, I think, are becoming confused. Or are they? It's impossible to tell. But remember that little sale I had after Christmas, where I was offering my three e-books for 99 cents each? I decided to keep them at that price for the time being. The truth is they were hardly selling at $1.99. And I don't think $1.99 was too unreasonable, especially for The Silver Ring which, along with the bonus short story, comes in at about 20,000 words. But since I've kept the price at 99 cents sales have been better. For now at least.

So what does this all mean for the worth of words in the digital age? At this point, I don't know. It's more of a guessing game now than ever before. But I am curious to know what others think. How much does the price really matter when purchasing an e-book, and how much is too much ... and how much do you focus on the file size and word count?