Despicable Me

There is a great book out there that I would encourage anyone who is thinking about writing to read: The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner. She was a former editor now turned agent, and it has some of the most insightful analysis of how writers relate to words and the neurotic responses that dog the process. In my admittedly limited writerly circle, one thing stands out for me, and that is that most of us have egos bigger than god (take your pick which god, I'm nothing if not ecumenical), and almost all of us--okay a lot of us--struggle with humongous feelings of inadequacy. It's that compelling desire to be seen and heard--me, me, me!--but from behind a bunch of paper (or bytes as the case may be these days).

I had a lot of trouble (aka horrible time) writing my second book. I'd gotten a lot of nice feedback on the first book, was nominated for a prestigious award, was a Booksense pick, got some decent reviews, and you'd think that it would have been a total slam dunk to write the second book. It had the opposite effect (and I know that I'm not alone in this). Many people have trouble writing that second book. I knew the plot, I knew where I wanted to take my characters, I had an excellent sense of the gestalt of the book (which is what gives a book its overarching theme), but I couldn't write it. Why? I was terrified. At least in my case, writer's block essentially boils down to fear of failure. You've tasted the sugar of success, and the last thing you want in your writing wine glass is the vetch of defeat. If you don't write, then you don't fail.

This is why the collapse of the legacy publishing system is devastating. Because the self-doubt is often overwhelming, and the one thing that the legacy publishing system does (or did) was to provide a modicum of legitimacy. Yes, you can write. You published a book. You were nominated for an award. You are one of us! Of course, I had all that and it didn't do a damn bit of good; I was still in a state of paralysis for years as I struggled to write that second book. But it was something of an emotional lifeboat when I was in that Grand Canyon of self-doubt about my writing.

There is no modicum of legitimacy when you self-publish. The only person promoting yourself is you. The only feedback that you're getting are the daily sales figures from amazon (and I'm ashamed to admit that I check those stats a minimum of 10 times a day) and the reviews (from those who don't know you).

Self-promotion suck (see previous paragraph vis a vis massive feelings of inadequacy). But, you say, you did book signings and were on panels at mystery cons and had speaking gigs places, and even did a radio interview (which was very cool). I did, but I also had an entity behind me (my publisher) who believed that my book was good enough to hit the marketplace. And there is so much competition to get a publishing contract that I basked in that approbation. The only monolith behind me in the self-publishing venture is me. I suck at being a monolith of legitimacy. It's scary and I'm not good at it.

Plus, OMG, the time suck. If I'm "networking," I'm not writing. It doesn't get any plainer than that. I'm editing full-time, I have editing gigs on the side, I have a huge yard that takes some time every weekend just to keep the weeds down to a minimum. Life is crazy busy. I find myself making choices in terms of my time every single day. Some aspect of my life suffers on any given day. I shortchange something to devote time to another something.

If someone asks me about Pen and Prejudice, I can say with total confidence that I think that it's fun, funny, and an excellent commentary on genre writing from the POV of a small-fry author. If you asked me, do you think this book is good enough for the larger market, I would say without hesitation, yes. It's a good book. What is more important, however, is that it's a marketable book. It would sell. Put my feet to the fire. I honestly believe this. And yet I'm also always apologizing for it at the same time. Why? Because the yin and yang between self-confidence and self-doubt that dogs most writers I know always comes down squarely on the self-effacement side of the equation when I dip my toes into the self-promotion tsunami.

And the water is so cold.

Am A Guest

Drive by comment:

I am a guest today on the Ladykillers blog. Come have fun with me: http://www.theladykillers.typepad.com/

 

Cheers,

 

Claire

So, How's that Book Selling?

So Pen and Prejudice has been out for a couple of weeks and not like I'm checking my amazon page like six times an hour or anything (of course not!), but I'm doing better than I'd hoped  and, of course, not as well as I would have like  (which, indulge me here, would have had it jumping within two days of uploading it to the best seller lists for both the paperback and the Kindle version). There have been a few surprises based on what I can glean from the sales info provided by amazon.

1.  The mystery community is not interested at all in this book, even though it's about writing and the mystery community. I didn't think I'd get a ton of mystery readers, but I thought I'd get some. Doesn't seem that I am.

2.  I'm getting a ton of buy-in from the Janites (those who love Jane Austen in all her lovely permutations). I thought that this would be my core audience and I was right. I knew that there were a bunch of novels out there that are just like mine (Jane Austen fanfiction), but I was actually surprised at how many there are. I will say briefly that I am a huge supporter of fanfiction, which is anathema to many authors, I know. I'd give my right eye to have one of my books becoming a fandom darling because that would mean sales for years.  I could retire. J.K. Rowling is one of the few authors who recognizes the power of fanfiction and what it does in terms of market share. There will be an upcoming post on fanfiction and how it is a way of extending the fantasy and benefiting the original author, but that's for another day.

3.  No surprises regarding Kindle versus paperback sales: Kindle sales far outstrip paperback sales by a wide margin. Some of it is that I priced the Kindle version to be less than a cup of coffee, and some of it is why pay more for a paperback version when the Kindle version is roughly $6.50 cheaper? I believe that the reading experience for this particular book works much better as a book than a Kindle offering, but Kindle readers, I thank you from the bottom of my heart!

4.  I'm ashamed to say that I didn't time the release of this book to coincide with the release of the movie Austenland. I wish I could say that this was due to sheer brilliance on my part--helloooooo, Austenland, how lovely to see you in the theaters--but it was actually just luck. But I will take it. Note to those of you considering self-publishing: Time all book releases with some related movie release as there is bound to be a bump of some sort. I can't say for certainty that the release of Austenland has helped book sales, but my gut says it has. Plus, it certainly can't hurt!

I'm going to try to post here more often. I am shooting for weekly Sunday blasts of trivia and opinions (no surprise, I always have lots of opinions), and I owe everyone a review on Myer's The Borgias).

For those of you who have bought the book in either one of its incarnations: thank you. For those of you who were kind enough to leave reviews on amazon: thank you! For those of you who have been willing to host me on your blog(s), thank you. Speaking of which, this upcoming Friday, August 30, I'm going to be featured on the blog The Ladykillers, which is authored by a host of lovely people who also write mysteries. Stop on by.

And We Are Live!

Houston, we do not have any problems!

Oh, there were some linkage issues and perhaps operator error as I kept uploading these documents over and over again, but to beat any and all metaphors to death, we are now cooking with gas.

Pen and Prejudice is up and for sale!

My sister, Valerie Mighetto, did the cover and I think it's all kinds of awesome. I wrote it. Which, hello, is also kind of awesome. As a writer, when you finish a piece and then see it bound up in its own little concept, all whole and largely saying what you want to say, well, amazing doesn't quite cover it. But to the important stuff...

I have priced it so that basically I make four cents on every copy. Although I am thrilled at each and every single possible sale, be it the paper version or the e-version, I think that the paper version "reads" better because of the formatting issues that I've discussed ad nauseum. I tried to address the formatting crap in the e-version and while I think it works, the print version works better, if you know what I mean.

Print version is available here: HERE

E-version is available here: HERE

Recap: This is not a mystery but it is about the mystery writing world. Using the mystery writing world as a backdrop, Pen and Prejudice is a modern pastiche of the Jane Austen classic, Pride and Prejudice, but instead of our witty, playful heroine and attractive but arrogant suitor willfully misunderstanding each other while attending balls and dinner parties in the nineteenth century, they metaphorically duke it out in the twentieth at mystery writing conferences. For those of you who have ever attended Malice Domestic, Bouchercon, Left Coast Crime, or Thrillerfest as mystery readers, this is an insider's look at these conventions from a writer's PO. A cross between I Don’t Know How She Does It and Bridget Jones’ Diary, this novel is a social comedy that provides an insider look into the struggles facing most writers of genre fiction.  Plus, you know a romance, plus, you know, a happy ending! Enjoy! BONUS! The Kindle version of Pen and Prejudice is currently FREE, YES, FREE if you are a member of amazon Prime.




And it goes without saying that my traditional mystery novels, Beat Until Stiff and Roux Morgue, are available in both trade paperback and Kindle versions. Enjoy those as well. Hell, Beat Until Stiff is only 99 cents on Kindle. A steal!

The Perils of Self-Publishing Pen and Prejudice

Things I've learned about self-publishing Pen and Prejudice so you don't have to:

1.  The more clever you are with your manuscript, the greater the headaches. I got cute and once it was written I couldn't really "uncute" because the cute aspects of the book were integral to the general gestalt of the book. But it ate up a zillion author hours as I wrestled with html.  I think it looks fairly decent now, but it came at a cost in terms of my time and sanity.

2.  Clever doesn't translate well to ebooks. Yes, I made it work. Yes, I bashed that html seven ways to Sunday so that a fair approximation of the "book" translated to the e-version, but it was a total BITCH to pull off, and there are parts where I don't think it looks as good as it should. But then I couldn't possibly afford to pay someone to do all this.

3.  When you upload to amazon, try to work from two screens at once. I have a lovely 24-inch screen desktop and a 17-inch laptop. I uploaded the book or the e-book onto the laptop and had the same file open on the larger screen so that as I flipped through the pages on amazon's previewer, I was able to catch mistakes (AND TYPOS, OMG! STILL!) and fix them directly. Seriously, and I am not joking, I uploaded that books roughly fifteen times and roughly ten times for the e-version before I got it right .

4.  The e-version. This is where it gets complicated. And yes, my book was something of a formatting nightmare, but I think these issues are endemic and these tips might help you from making the same mistakes I did.

•  WORD is a rigid, unforgiving program. When you make changes and reformat material and change things and then change things back and then change things again, all this meta happens behind the scene. All this confusing code is still there, you just can't see it. Who sees it?  The program that converts your material to an html file, or in WORD-ese: "Web Page filtered." So if you have extra lines and spaces and your paragraphs don't line up and suddenly the font changes sizes or none of your italicized material is in italics, it's because the code is confused.
• How did I solve this? I edited out all that garbage using Dreamweaver. You can do it in Notepad but it's a lot more difficult. But needs must. All that extra code creates problems and it needs to go.
• Limit yourself to two fonts. TWO. No more. I thought I'd be clever (which always bites me on the ass), and since I was using Dreamweaver I put back in all the fonts differentiating the different "speakers" in my book. I have a lot of email exchanges and it helped (see real book) differentiate between who is speaking by using different fonts for different "voices." This works in the book. It doesn't work in the e-version. All that lovely formatting was stripped out, and I was left with what I started with: basic text but now it was laden down with all these code (because I'd changed fonts), which meant that phantom lines appeared and a host of other problems. Yes, I know I could have had paid to have this formatted so that all my clever little ideas translated to the page, but frankly I can't afford it.
• For some odd reason all my basic formatting (italicized and/or bolded words) didn't translate to the html version. You could probably hear my screams in New York. My advice is to create your final version and then make an "E" version. Go into your "E" version and hunt for every single italicized and/or bolded word and add html code. I would also recommend doing this for em dashes and ellipses, which I seem to use a lot of. Perhaps too much, as evidenced by all the coding I ended up putting in.

5.  What did I learn from all this? It takes a tremendous amount of hours to format a book so that it looks professional, and now I understand WHY there is so much complaining about the e-versions of books. Creating a book for the page is not the same as creating the book for the "screen." Clearly a lot of publishers ARE treating these entities as one and they are not. They need to invest time in making the e-experience worthwhile. There's a lot of competition for a reader's time. Don't piss them off by sloughing off a badly formatted e-book.

Home Stretch: Pen and Prejudice

Yes, this is almost ready. I'm in the final stages of uploading it to amazon, both a printed and Kindle version. This has been an eye-opening experience, let me tell you. I've gone over this manuscript a thousand times and I'm STILL finding minor typos. This is what an editor does. In addition to content issues, on the most basic level she/he offers a fresh pair of eyes. At a certain point one's brain says, "Hey, I've seen this before. Let's conserve energy. I'll just slip in a mental snapshot of what I've seen before. I won't tax cells that I don't have to." And, lo and behold, typos are born.

Anyway, this book has been in the making for three years. I couldn't find an agent who would shop it. I thought about putting it up on amazon myself, but then personal issues overwhelmed to the point where it was, book, who cares about that stinking book? Fast forward eight months, I began a spate of dead-on serious editing that is Nobel prize-winning material and is so far above my ken that I essentially hunt for subjects and verbs and try to make them agree and assume a whole hell of a lot. When you edit that much and material that is that complex, you just don't have the energy to do anything at the end of the day but, well, knit. Even at that I can only manage hats. I have several. Anyone need a hat? Finally, I entered it in the amazon breakthrough contest. I got to round two, but sadly didn't make it to round three.

It was back to the drawing board or more correctly the formatting board.  Sigh. This book is REALLY problematic because of the formatting issues. It didn't seem anything of a challenge at all until I began to format it myself. My Dreamweaver skills have improved tenfold. My right wrist is killing me, I am surrounded by dust bunnies the size of small dogs. But it is done. The only thing left to do is navigate the createspace upload process. Wish me luck.

I think it's a fun book. It's most definitely a beach read. It says a lot about trying to scratch out a writing career when you have a job and kids. And in the end the girl gets the guy (who has more than a passing resemblance to Mr. Darcy).

I'm not interested in making any money out of this so it will be priced based on amazon's threshold. I just want people to read it. I worked like a dog on this book, and I like it, and I want you to like it.

Stay tuned.

An Embarrassment of Riches

I went into my local Barnes and Noble store today and while standing at the new releases section for history, I practically had an orgasm on the spot. I found seven books that I was dying to read and five that I was pretty interested in, and four that I found mildly interesting. I seem to be reading much more non-fiction these days. I don't know why. Maybe because I know what happens behind the curtain of fiction far too well. I know what levers Oz is pulling, so to speak.

Anyway, I took my smart phone and snapped a ton of pictures of covers of books that I must read at some point. What I am most excited about (and I bought a copy because I couldn't resist) was Myers' new book on the Borgias. I loved his book on the Tudors, and if there is a family that more interesting than the Tudors (a fairly high bar), it is the Borgias.

Stay tuned for the review