The Real World

No matter what your method of escape, there is always the factor of the real world. The real world can really muck things up. The real world is made up of all the people you have to please. Some of them are people you love, like family and friends. Some you don’t know, like bill collectors or the government. You live your life the way society dictates, and if you’re lucky, you may have a little time left over to escape. Henry David Thoreau left society to be his own man. He wanted to write, and he wanted to do it on his own terms, with nothing but the heart of nature to keep him company. It didn’t really work for him. Society followed him into the woods. He would go off for a walk and come back and find broken twigs, cigar stubs, and pieces of trash in his cabin—signs of visitors. These people would come to check on him, not understanding—or maybe not wanting to believe— that a man can enjoy the company of his own skin. Surely he must be lonely. Certainly, he’ll need help and guidance. Once, Thoreau actually ventured out into society, mostly to pick up basic necessities that the woods could not provide. At that time, he was arrested, merely because he was not playing society’s game (didn’t pay taxes). His was a great lesson for all of us that there is no true escape, not in the real world.

Anyway, that’s my longwinded way of saying that I haven’t been writing as much as I would have liked. My next book is with an editor and will hopefully be out on the market in the next couple of months. The real world for me has been pretty hectic and is slowing down my progress. I will try to pick up the pace. My head is about to explode with imagination.

That Last Bit

I finished writing my second book. Or rather, I finished writing the book except for that last bit. It’s always hard to end a story, to finally cut the cord and prepare the baby for the world. I danced around that last bit for months, knowing the end was near but always having an excuse to avoid it. The book was easy to write since it’s full of sarcasm, a language I speak fluently. As I neared the conclusion, however, that old familiar chanting began in my head: Perfect ending, perfect ending, perfect ending.

An impossible task, said an almost inaudible voice. I pretended to ignore that voice, promising myself I would end the book with a bang. It’ll be the greatest ending in the world. My readers will cry, cheer, yearn for more. I’ll work on it tomorrow. No, tomorrow’s no good. Maybe next week. Next week turns out to be a busy week. Then there are holidays and birthdays and…..well, a little video gaming (hides face in shame)….and books to be read, and thoughts to be thunk. It all just adds up.

I have a manuscript graveyard, a garden of nearly complete stories, each having met its fate through umbilical rot. Each story had dozens of lives inside, characters with feelings and histories who depended on me for closure. I failed them. Decades have gone by. I still promise myself that I will bring them all back to life and finally set them free. Perhaps I will.

I already made a commitment to move each new child through swiftly, from beginning to end, and send them on their way. To honor that commitment, I first have to admit to myself that there may not be a bang. The ending, I have to accept, may be completely anticlimactic. As Nike says, “Just do it.”

To my readers (if my readers ever read my blog), I apologize in advance. I can’t promise a fireworks show at the end of every book. I will do my best, but I need to keep the line moving. That means everyone out of the pool as quickly as possible. No loitering.

E-books: Lining my pockets with the death of a friend

A couple of weeks ago, I walked into a local Barnes and Noble and froze. I looked around, took a few steps back, and looked around again. Was I in the wrong store? Maybe I strolled into the AT&T store by mistake. In front of me was a huge aisle full of kiosks. They could have been cell phones. But no. They were Nooks. To the right of the Nook kiosks, where the computer, travel, and business books used to be, were aisles and aisles of electronics – adapters, battery chargers, headphones, electronic accessories. I stood staring for longer than natural, blood draining from my face. They killed my bookstore.

“What happened?” I managed to squeak out to the nearest B&N employee. He pursed his lips, looking just as unpleased with the new arrangement.

“This is how we stay in business, to keep up with the online bookstores.”

Online bookstores. I spend an average of a hundred dollars a month at online bookstores. They’re convenient, that’s true. But nothing can replace a real brick and mortar building full of books. Books made of paper. There’s a smell, a feel, a sense of homage. I make a point to visit them often, usually walking away with a handful of best sellers or informative nonfiction.

This particular Barnes and Noble, which I’ve been visiting for the past six years despite their complicated parking lot, does not smell like books. It smells like plastic. Regaining my composure, I remembered that I was there for a specific reason. I needed a best selling book that my son asked for, for Christmas. There were five books in the series and I already bought 1, 2, 3, and 5. I needed book 4. I made my way to the young adult section and located the author’s shelf. There was one each of all the books I already had. Naturally book 4 was missing. I march over to the customer service desk and ask them to look it up.

“Looks like that one is still in hard cover,” the store clerk says, empathetically. “We won’t restock until it comes out in paperback.”

“But it’s a best seller,” I argue. “Why wouldn’t you restock a best seller if it’s selling so well?”

“We don’t have enough room on our shelves to keep them stocked.”

I look incredulously from the clerk to the electronics ensemble behind me. He nods gravely and tells me that he can’t order the book for the store, but I can order it online and would probably have to pay for express shipping since it was so close to Christmas. I think about the logic in this. I already got into my car and drove out to the store so I wouldn’t have to wait or pay for shipping. The store is too busy building a Nook empire to keep a best selling real live paper book and suggests that I go all the way home, get online (which is what is killing the store to begin with), and pay extra to have the book shipped in two days. I ended up buying the book at Borders.

I am conflicted about electronic reading. As a reader, the idea of plastic devices replacing the warm papery comfort of a real book is devastating. I want to rebel, start a Kindle burning (ha ha), stand in front of Nook/Kindle manufacturers with a picket sign. As an author, however, I must embrace it. Kindle and e-books are lining my pockets. Physical book sales are pretty low compared to the consumption of e-books. I am just as guilty for contributing to the death of the paperback. If you think about it sensibly, storing hundreds of books in one small device is great idea. And I think that Barnes and Noble is smart to keep up with the modern electronic age. They made the decision to sacrifice printed stock for profit. How am I any different?

But my inner bibliophile is wounded. I fear that one day when I am old and can’t defend myself, my home library will be converted back into a dining room and my descendents will build a book mausoleum in the backyard. I shall mourn in advance.

A Page a Day

My first publishing experience is not going as expected, and believe me, I didn’t expect much. Amazon and B&N have the book listed, but not complete listings. Neither has the cover art yet, and although Amazon has a description, it does not have the “Look Inside” feature. I spent weeks trying to get hold of Wingspan to find out why they are not listing properly. It took a while for them to answer and when they did, said it was an error on the part of Ingram distributors. Seems very unusual to me that a distributor that deals with millions of books a year would mess up on mine (although Wingspan insists it’s not just me). Today, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I uploaded a cover picture to Amazon and added a book summary to Barnes and Noble’s site by way of a customer review (of course I noted that I was the author). It’s the best I can do at the moment, since it is difficult for me to deal with these sites directly.

You might be wondering what I am doing in the meantime. Am I sitting by the computer all day loading and reloading the online website to see if they’ve corrected the error? Am I staring at my ratings, watching for a change in rank and sales? Well yeah, okay, I do that. But not all day.

What I do in the meantime is write. In addition to my day job as a technical writer, I work daily at completing my next books. While I have always been a writer, I have now reached the status of author. If I want to maintain that status, I need to produce more books, and I need to keep them circulating. Right now I am working on two books simultaneously. Both are for the juvenile audience, but one is straight fiction (bordering humor, depending on your perspective), and the other is fantasy. One is short and simple while the other is a full novel with a pretty complex storyline. You can probably figure out which one I’ll publish first.

Because I have so many other tasks going on in my life – work, family, marketing, etc – it would be easy for me to make excuses not to write. A while back, I proposed a challenge to some great writer friends of mine on a forum called The Writers’ Block. Most of us spend many waking hours writing for other people and not much time writing what we enjoy. Many of my friends have talked about their bestselling novels, the ones that they dream about but never had time to write. I proposed to them that they take time to write a page a day for themselves. A page can take fifteen minutes, or it could take an hour. If you can sacrifice that small portion of your day, every day, it eventually becomes routine. I began taking my own advice. Instead of writing a page a day, I write for an hour a day. It is the hour I get for lunch each day, where I’m just sitting there staring into space, poking at some overly buttered cafeteria green beans. That hour has become vital to my continuity as an author.

Writers have to write from the soul. It is our sustenance. Some of us take paying jobs writing ads, articles, manuals, and copy. We have the skill to make someone else’s message clear to the reader. But a true writer cannot live on bread and water alone. We need to take the time to write out some filet mignon, maybe even a little champagne. Writing isn’t about splashing words mechanically onto a page. It’s about splashing creativity and passion onto a page. It’s difficult to get passionate about a client’s sales pitch. That’s why an hour a day of personal writing is so important. Without it, writing is no longer a passion. It’s a job.

Social Networking – A Reclusive Writer’s Worst Fear

I suspect a lot of writers are like me, sociaphobes who spend more time in their fictional worlds than out in the open. The real world is a scary place. It’s unpredictable and sometimes cruel. Fiction writers deal with this by creating mockups of the real world, adding elements that save or destroy, depending on the situation. It’s all about control, I think, especially control over our own fears. I once read an article about a horror writer who was scared of the dark as a kid. (I think it was someone famous, but I don’t want to mention the name, because I’m not sure.) He was scared of monsters and boogie men and whatever creepy things may go bump in the night. He overcame the fear by writing about them, the most horrible worst-case scenarios that a monster can create. It was his way of controlling the monsters, controlling his own fears. The same is true for other writers. We know that we can’t stop death and hate and pain in real life, but we can create worlds where these bad things happen at our command. We’re not detached from it, and a good writer won’t make the bad things convenient. In fact, the more emotional we get from a scene, the more powerful it’ll be for the reader. It’s controlled in that the reader and the writer can walk away from the experience—much like a thrill ride at an amusement park—without truly being hurt.

The real world doesn’t give you that option. There are infinite possibilities of tragic events that cannot be controlled. They can be reduced and sometimes prevented by not putting yourself in a vulnerable position in the first place. Enter the recluse, the person who tries to control fate by isolating him/herself. The best way to avoid a car crash is to not drive. The best way to avoid negative confrontation is to not confront. Distance yourself from all means of social interaction. Don’t use the phone. Don’t join clubs. Don’t talk to too many people who might judge you. It’s a cushy little world – until you become a published author.

Enter social networking, a reclusive writer’s worst fear, but one of the most vital tool for marketing your books. I knew this stage would come. I’ve been bracing myself for it for years. As I patched up the last edits of my book, I was intensely aware of the social grim reaper looming over me, black cloak billowing in the wind. I can’t write him into submission, can’t stab him from my life with a fountain pen. This is something I have to deal with head on.

I’ve met many awesome virtual friends in the past few weeks, writers like me, some experienced and some new, who are going through the process. I’ve joined writer networks and now follow blogs that I actually read. It comforts me to know that these writers are human like me, not monsters or boogie men hiding in dark corners. This social networking gig isn’t as bad as I thought. It’s actually been a pretty positive experience so far. I’m not saying that I’m ready to pick up the phone and chat with people now – I probably won’t be attending any video conferences or all-night book signing parties any time soon. But I definitely see the value – no, the urgency of shedding my public phobia. It’s time to embrace the social reaper.

A Little Brighter

Maybe this situation is salvageable. Wingspan replied back that they can drop the listing price for the hard cover to $27.95 (at a lower royalty, of course). That’s still pretty pricey, but I checked BN.com today and found that they are listing Mourning Under the Bridge for a discounted rate. The hard cover is $23.72 and the soft cover $12.92. I’m pretty happy about that, because what is the point of publishing your book if no one can afford to buy it?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with my second book. POD seemed to be the easiest route, but I’m giving away a lot of my profit for nothing. I mean, I’d gladly pay the price if the publisher actually did something, like provide a professional layout without me having to tell them what to do. I’d love it if they edited their own work after they dumped the files into InDesign. For the money I paid, I shouldn’t have had to tell them that they misaligned several pages.

So what do I do? Should I go through submission hell with a hundred different publishers and agents only to lose my rights and get low royalties and very little marketing? Should I buy my own copy of InDesign and do the layout myself? I’m not sure I know the business enough to be comfortable with that. There really are a lot of options these days. I’ll have to look into what is available. I know Amazon has a program where you can upload your own book and they’ll do a print on demand for you. I’m not sure how that works yet, but I will put finding out on my to-do list.

In the meantime, Mourning Under the Bridge is listed on BN.com, but the entire listing is not complete yet. I’ve heard that it takes a few days for the cover art and summary to catch up with the listing. I don’t expect any sales until the listing is complete. When it is, I will post a link here.

Lessons Learned

I knew that my first published book would be a learning experience. I braced myself for the worst. Obviously I couldn’t imagine what the worst was. I think I have a better idea now. Yesterday, I got a congratulations email from Wingspan telling me that my book would be available at Amazon and bn.com in the next few days. They said I could order books for myself at cost if I wanted. Curious as to how much “at cost” was, I logged onto Wingspan’s site. I wasn’t so much shocked by how much they’d charge me for my own book. I was shocked to see how much they were going to charge my customers. My hardcover children’s book will be selling for a whopping $32! The softcover will be something like $16. My whole body went numb when I saw those prices. $32? Who in their right mind would pay 32 bucks for a first time hard cover book for their kid?? I personally spend hundreds of dollars a year on books, but I get a lot of books for that. I wouldn’t spend 32 bucks for Harry Potter, even if it was the first edition with J.K. Rowling’s eyebrow hair on page 145.

I am having a hard time not hyperventilating. I contacted my account manager to see if there is something that can be done about the price. I should have seen this coming. I asked them to set the book up in electronic form. The retail price they listed was pretty high even for e-books. I opted for the lowest listing price, but I still think it’s high. The royalties from Wingspan are pretty lame. I think it’s like 20%, which sounds great when you compare that to a traditional publisher’s standard 8%. The difference is that a first time, self-published book that is listed for $32 is not going to bring in any sales, whereas the lower priced publisher house book, even the worst story in the world, will at least bring in some stragglers. I am going to see if I can salvage this disastrous situation. The way I see it, the only way I can sell the book cheaper and still make money is if I buy the books myself (at cost) and sell them at a discounted price.

We can definitely mark this down as a hard lesson learned.