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The
Maplewoods Mirror #42 - September 2009
Welcome to my monthly newsletter on life and
writing. If you want to see my website for past issues and other
news, please visit www.chrismeeks.com. I also have an author site (click
here)
It’s back-to-school time. In fact, I start back
teaching college English this week. We’ll be reading and discussing two
great novels, Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen and Little Scarlet
by Walter Mosley.
In the spirit of learning, this issue is
particularly focused on the how-to of publishing. If that doesn’t interest
you, skip the first few stories and go right to my movie review, vacuum
review (Am I going nuts? I love the Dyson), or the photo essay at the end.
Happy September!
IN THIS ISSUE:
·
Story Collections on Kindle and in PDF (my
books)
·
Kindle: The Emerging Elephant in the Room (essay)
·
Self-Publishing Vs. “Real” Publishing – How to Get
Your First Book Out
·
The Challenges for the Self-Publisher (essay)
·
Dyson Heaven (a vacuuming experience)
·
(500) Days of Summer: Love and the People Who Live
It (essay)
·
Fires in L.A. (photos)
The
Kindle
STORY COLLECTIONS ON KINDLE AND IN PDF
My first two books, both short story
collections that won Noble (not Nobel) Awards for Best Fiction, are now
available for the Kindle and also in PDF form for your computer—both at
introductory prices. The
Middle-Aged Man and the Sea sells for $1.95, and Months
and Seasons for $2.95. Click on the book title, and you’re taken
to the Kindle store.
If you want to get either book in PDF format, click here to go to Lulu Books
where you can use a credit card. The same prices apply.
As you’ll see in the essays below, I’ve
discovered the Kindle market to be incredibly vibrant. The Middle-Aged
Man and the Sea makes the Top 20 Bestselling Short Story Collections
list often.
The book was also reviewed by Kindle reviewer
Red Adept, who said, “This book was written by a literary artist with a
firm grasp of the English language and knows of all that it is capable.”
You can read her full review by clicking here.
KINDLE: THE EMERGING ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
“Look at this,” my sister-in-law Annie said,
showing me her Kindle, the $299 wireless reading device from Amazon. It
looked like a giant cell phone with a big readable screen.
“I don't need to sync it up with a computer,”
she said, “because it connects to Amazon.com. I just look for the digital
version of books I want, and they appear on my Kindle in moments after I
select them. I love this thing.”
“But why?” I wanted to know. “I like
real books. They don't need batteries, and I can carry one anywhere. And I
don't need to spend three-hundred dollars for a special reader.”
“Try carrying twenty-five books at any given
time, then you'll see. This can also get the full text of newspapers and
magazines. And everything for the Kindle is far less expensive than the
printed versions. “ She's a voracious reader and constantly traveling for ThinkQ,
the consulting company she helped start after she left the Pentagon. I
could see how the Kindle worked for her.
A few days after she showed me, I noticed
someone outside the Los Angeles Museum of Art reading on a Kindle under the
shade of a tree. I knew then this was a device to be reckoned with. Even
so, as an author, until recently, I'd been so caught up in marketing my
printed books that I didn't get back to thoughts of Kindle versions.
A few weeks ago, my cousin Peter had a link on
his Facebook page that made my jaw drop. I was taken to an article that said how
author Boyd Morrison had self-published his novel The Ark -- not
in any printed version but only for the Kindle, where it became a
bestseller. Then Simon and Schuster acquired the rights, and it will be a
printed hardback book, out next summer. I decided to master uploading to
Amazon for the Kindle that very day.
I wrote my friend Henry about this, and he
directed me to an article he wrote
about Morrison that explained even more.
It took me a chunk of an afternoon to learn
better how to turn my books into perfect versions for the Kindle. Two
months ago was my first try. I'd assumed, wrongly, that the Kindle version
of any book looked just like the printed version—same fonts, same page
breaks, same overall book design.
Thus, I tried uploading the PDF file of one of
my books, which the book designer had painstakingly created. What I saw
onscreen, though, was messed up. The huge initial cap at the start of each
story was a small letter on its own line. Some paragraphs were
indented, others not. The table of contents were helter skelter, and what
did page numbers matter when there were no pages? Also, what appeared on a
page in Kindle depended on the font size selected by the Kindle reader.
I realized the converter much preferred an HTML
version. Thus, I brought up the Microsoft Word versions of my books, saved
them as web pages (which puts in HTML coding) and uploaded those files. It
worked. I needed to delete the tables of contents and rewrite them without
page numbers. I also had to replace the formally large initial caps at the
start of each story with regular letters.
If you want to create a Kindle version for your
book, start with Kindle's
sign-in page for its Digital Text Platform.
Once you have an account, add your book, and each screen that comes up will
help you put in all the right information.
In Henry's article, titled “A Kindle
Success Story: How to Promote a Kindle Ebook,”
I learned that Morrison made his book, The Ark, inexpensive. After
all, no one had heard of him, and he wanted to pull people in. Thus I made
my two short story collections inexpensive for Kindle.
Morrison went onto the Kindleboards often, which is
where one can write about Kindle books to the Kindle community. Before
long, he had an entire Kindle
Book Club devoted to his book, where he'd answer
questions. The Book Bazaar section of Kindleboards is the best place to
introduce a book, I've learned, so I went there and learned to use Kindle
Link Maker to create HTML code for one's book covers. I also saw there's a
way to insert YouTube videos, which allowed me to insert short
professionall produced videos of my books.
If you're curious, click on this link to see
how my introduction to my books look for Kindle: http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,12305.0.html.
In short, today's book marketing needs to
consider the Kindle community.
SELF-PUBLISHING VS. “REAL” PUBLISHING – HOW TO
GET YOUR FIRST BOOK OUT
My panel proposal for this topic has been
accepted at the country's largest gathering of creative writers, the AWP
Convention, which will be held in Denver in April. The Association of
Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) includes individual writers and most
graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs in this country and
Canada. Alternate forms of publishing have never been a topic of
conversation officially at the convention before, best I can tell, so I'm
excited to bring to writers possible paths to publication. I'm interested
in the pros and cons of the old and the new. Red Room CEO Ivory Madison,
with two other specialists, will be on the panel with me.
A new part of the market has come to my
attention recently: readers who use the Kindle, a lightweight electronic
reading device from Amazon.com. (I wrote about it in the above articles.)
I'm also witnessing what may be a re-creation of the success by Boyd
Morrison, who landed a two-book deal from Simon and Schuster after
publishing only for the Kindle. On Kindleboards.com, a reader gave a rave
review for a new book, Crack-Up by Eric Christopherson, saying, “Reading
this book will have you on the edge of your seat, unable to put it down. I
was actually sad to see it end... Ever imagine what it's like to be a
paranoid schizophrenic? This book will show you. You will cringe from the
emotions invoked by this thriller. You might even become a little paranoid
yourself.”
It sounded so good, I went to see how much a
print version cost on Amazon and learned the book is only available for the
Kindle. I sent a message to Mr. Christopherson to ask why he'd
only publish something for the Kindle. He wrote back, saying, “This book
was repped by Joe Veltre, who was an editor at a couple of major houses
before turning to agenting, and I incorporated his feedback prior to
submitting the novel to publishers. The book came close to a sale at a
couple of major houses but came up short in the end.
“I've always believed in the book,” he
continued, “and wanted to see it out there. I never considered traditional
print self-publication because I know little about marketing. I know that
if I were to put the book in print myself and it didn't sell well (perhaps
due to my marketing ineptitude) that the ISBN number I'd need to put the
book in print could be tracked by Bookscan, and the poor sales record might
come back to bite me should I try to sell the book again down the road.
“Kindle avoids the ISBN number issue while
giving me plenty of feedback from the reading public I couldn't get any
other way. One of two things will now happen: I'll sell lots more units and
end up with a Boyd Morrison-type deal, or I'll use the feedback I get to
revise the book and try to sell it again to major publishers, perhaps next
year, given it would then be five years since the book was on the market.”
This brings up another point about being a new
author. At a panel last year at USC on “The Changing Face of Publication,”
book agent Barbara Lowenstein, whose agency in New York is well-known, said
that despite economic turmoil, publishers still look for new authors. In
particular, they love authors who “have a platform,” meaning that if you're
a fiction writer, your work has been in literary journals and bloggers
write about your work favorably. Kindle may be another way to get a
platform.
As I've written about this topic on
Kindleboards.com, an interesting distinction has developed, the difference between
“self-publishing” and “independent publishing.” Self-publishing brings to
mind the vanity presses that were once popular, where an author would pay,
say, $5,000 and get five hundred copies of the book to sit in the garage.
With the advent of print-on-demand (POD) digital printing, one doesn't need
to make that kind of investment. It's as simple as uploading a Microsoft
Word file to, for instance, Lulu.com, and following a set of screens.
Your book is formatted and designed and ready for sale.
Independent publishers, as I see it, are those
people who do what traditional publishers do: hire editors, designers, even
publicists and marketing people. Digital printing is still used, however.
One writer on the Kindleboards made this
distinction: “The difference between an ‘independent author' and a
‘self-publisher' is in perspective, not technology. There are some
brilliant independent authors who, regardless of whether or not they use
the Kindle or POD, will produce exceptional work. And there are those
that have no business killing a tree. The Kindle is NO DIFFERENT from
a POD service, except there isn't a print book. But the actual
process from concept to publication is the same.
“An independent author will take the time to
get constructive feedback on his or her work. They will put in the
effort to make sure their books look professional. They will invest
and get help with those things they can't do themselves. In short,
they will act like business people. Whereas the self-publisher
uploads a document that may or may not have gone through a spell checker
and considered himself a published author.”
For the “how-to” part, here is one good way to
get your book to market. Specifically:
1) Write your book, and get a lot of feedback
on it. If it means taking a class at UCLA
Extension's Writer's Program or elsewhere, do so. There
are a lot of online choices these days.
2) Once you think it's as good as you can get,
hire a professional editor and take it to the next level. An editor is not
a proofreader per se. An editor considers the book's structure as well as
ways of delivering imagery and information.
3) When your rewriting is done, get several
trusted English-major friends or a professional proofreader and make sure
every sentence is tight. After all, your editor may not have paid as much
attention to proofreading if larger issues were at hand.
4) Write an extraordinarily good query letter,
and send it to agents with sample pages from your book. If you get an
agent, that's all you have to do for now. See if your agent can get a book
deal. It may take a year or more for a new author.
5) If that doesn't work, consider the
self-publishing or independent publishing route. A new first step, though,
is before you go to print, hire a graphic designer and create a cover image
for the book that grabs, even when it's not much larger than a thumbnail.
6) Upload the book and cover to Kindle, which
is at https://dtp.amazon.com/mn/signin.
7) Introduce your book on Kindleboards. Become
active in the community by responding to other people's threads and mention
your book when appropriate.
8) If you do well on Kindle, perhaps you can
interest an agent or publishing company to take on your book. If not,
publish it yourself through your own new imprint and Lightning Source or
through such companies that guide you such as CreateSpace, iUniverse and Lulu.
I'll write more on this topic over the next
months as I learn more.
THE CHALLENGES FOR THE SELF-PUBLISHER
A few years ago when I first used Lulu.com to
publish and distribute my first book, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea, I
happened to go into the Barnes and Noble store in Union Square in New York
City and found my book for sale there. I was ecstatic. I later called
Barnes and Noble's Small Press Department in New York to find out if my
book was in any other stores. It wasn't. Odd how I found the only B&N
in the country that had it.
I asked why the book wasn’t in more stores. I
said, “The book received great reviews and even a great mention in Entertainment
Weekly.” One problem was because of the pricing. The
book sold for $12.95, but B&N's price from the distributor was $11.
“Eleven dollars?” I asked. “How can that be?
I'm only making a dollar per copy.”
That's because Lulu received a share of the
profit, and so did the distributor, and I couldn't control the discounting.
I also learned then that to get one's book in bookstores, you have to meet
two criteria:
1) The bookstore needs at least a 40% discount
from the list price.
2) The book has to be returnable.
This is the way bookstores work, so by moving
the printing to Lightning Source, I could control the pricing and match those
criteria. This brings up, however, the dilemma first-time authors have.
Nobody knows you. If you want to make your book inexpensive to seduce
buyers, the costs are such that you can't. It simply costs to make a book.
To be specific, at Lulu, the author's cost for
printing is $4.53 plus two cents a page. Thus, the author’s cost of a
short, 200-page book would be $8.53. If that book was to be available
through Ingram for bookstore ordering, with a mere $1 profit, the book
would have to be priced at $16.70 (which I came to using Lulu's retail
price calculator). That's a bit much if you're trying to seduce buyers and
build your name.
If you took only a 33-cent profit, the book
would be priced at $15.24. People won't flock to Amazon at that price,
either.
Another example: a friend with a new fantasy
book who uses Lulu told me his book will be at least 700 pages in a 6 x 9
format (trade paperback). That means his cost at Lulu will be at least
$18.53 per book. If he wants to make a $4 profit on a book that large, the
book will need to be priced at $42.20 retail. Almost no one will buy a
paperback for that price.
If this author only took 33 cents of profit,
the book would still retail for $33.24. That's still too much. With a large
book, you aren't even on the playing field. This same author, however,
could take his book to Kindle and sell the massive tome for 99 cents to
earn the same 33 cents, or sell it or $12.00 to earn a four-dollar profit.
When I worked for a publisher years ago, our
400-page trade paperbacks cost $1 a copy to print, and we retailed it at
$10.95. Self-publishers don't have the cost advantage that a big publisher
does. Kindle, though, evens that out. Kindle, as I mentioned in two earlier
articles, is a lightweight reading device from Amazon. You order books
wirelessly on the Kindle and they magically show up in your unit.
To try out Kindle, I set the price of The
Middle-Aged Man and the Sea at only $1.95. Guess what – it's selling.
For that little, people are taking a chance with me. In fact, it reached a
short-story collection bestseller list earlier this week.
A Kindle user explains Kindle marketing this way:
“Some e-books are free, some are inexpensively priced, and others are at a
fair market value. The combination not only gets the word out about these
books, but also it makes it more of a sustaining effort. I know, even with
some of the unknown authors I've read through free or discounted e-books
that I have become fond of more authors.
“I know they won't profit directly from selling
that inexpensive/free version, but I am definitely more apt to purchase
higher-priced books in the future. It's the number of other books put out
by the author that make it more profitable.”
Author R.J. Keller, who wrote the fabulous Waiting
for Spring, points out, “It isn't about presenting myself as an
amateur vs. professional; it's about being realistic. I could not, and did
not, expect people to shell out $9.99 for an e-book on an unknown,
self-published author. I am extremely confident in my talent, almost
obnoxiously so, and don't feel any great lack by not
having a degree, but since I write literary fiction, I'm aware that other
people do.
“The stigma surrounding self-publishing makes
that battle even harder. It's not fair, but neither is life and it's a
reality I have to deal with. Fortunately, the web has opened up so many
avenues to get around that--IF writers are willing to take a chance on
trying unconventional methods to get themselves and their work noticed. I
am.”
Her novel Waiting for Spring takes
readers beyond the Maine tourists know, beyond lighthouses and lobster and
rocky beaches, and drops them instead into a rural town whose citizens
struggle with poverty and loss, yet push onward with stubbornness and
humor. To see how she's drawn over 1700 readers to her thread on Kindleboards.com, click
here: http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,10124.0.html
So these are the realities. If you're a
first-time author self-publishing, believe me, lightning is not going to
strike. It's highly unlikely you'll make more than the cost of a pair of
shoes. Still, people do it. To quote the end of Annie Hall, “We
need the eggs.”
DYSON HEAVEN
My nuclear family has six pets at this
point—four cats and two dogs. Each came to us under special circumstances,
so it’s not like we’re collectors of living things. We’re not becoming the
kind of people who wear t-shirts with our pets’ photos or drool and chatter
about canned pet food versus kibbles. However, I will talk about the amount
of pet fur that lands on our carpets—more fur than on Tony Soprano.
We’re tidy people, so we vacuum a lot. Hoovers
and Eurekas choke and die quick deaths in our house. For the last two
years, the Shark Infinity has been perfect in that it was particularly
powerful and used no bags. It could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.
There’s also a particular satisfaction to SEE what’s collected while
vacuuming. Of course, it sounded like a malt shop while we vacuumed with
lots of whirring noise where you couldn’t think beyond the mantra of “must
get the animal fur.”
However, this vacuum met terminal congestion
this weekend. Enough hair became caught somewhere on the inside and no
amount of Heimlich efforts could cough up the blob. I even bought a baby
bottle brush to try to clear it. It didn’t work.
I took the upright back to Best Buy, where I
had proof of the extended warranty. Guess what: the warranty worked, and
they took it back with a smile. They were ready to swap out my two-year-old
machine for a new one. However, they didn’t carry the Shark Infinity
anymore, so they said go choose any vacuum I wanted. I applied the $205
credit toward the dream machine. A Dyson.
I’m in love. It’s bagless and inhales air like
a 747 engine—and it’s quiet. There are fewer things to keep clean compared
to the last machine, and it slides over the carpeting like a ballerina on
ice. The air it expels is HEPA clean, meaning the act of vacuuming removes
allergens, dust, and anything it can get a hold of—perhaps including the
cats and dogs.
Ah, the pleasures of middle-age….
(500) DAYS OF SUMMER: LOVE AND THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE IT
While I like to think of myself as adept when
it comes to relationships, a handful of former girlfriends and an ex-wife
have shown me I may as well be a toll taker for the Bridge of Sighs. That
hasn't stopped me from writing stories about love, and my male characters,
like me, tend not to see situations for what they are. Men often need help,
which is why Deanna Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation,
epitomizes what men lack. She's an empath, part human, part betazoid, who
has the empathic ability to sense emotions. I swear my wife Ann is similar.
We can go to a party, and she'll tell me how she feels sorry for so-and-so,
who is clearly troubled.
“She is?” I'll say. “But she said everything is
good. She and Jerry just bought a new house.”
“Couldn't you see the strain on her face?
Notice that Jerry didn't say anything.”
“He never says anything.”
“This time, he said nothing for a different
reason.”
Thus, when we go to movies, Ann often grasps
things differently than I do. That's what I love about movies, by the way.
People see the exact same actions and dialogue and come up with different
interpretations. Our differences in the new film (500) Days of Summer
betray exactly what the film is about.
In the story, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a
greeting card author in Los Angeles, falls for his boss's new assistant,
Summer (Zooey Deschanel). When she actually pays attention to him, he can't
believe his good fortune, and he just wants to do no wrong.
A quick digression: Last semester, love came up
as a discussion topic in my English class as we read the amazing book, Water
for Elephants. A male student from France said, “Women have all the
power. They know men want them, and men sometimes will do anything and say
anything to stay in their favor.” This epitomizes Tom, and he's forever on
edge because Summer early on says she doesn't want a deep relationship. “We're
young. Might as well have fun while we can,” she pronounces early on.
“Wait. Wait,” Tom says. “What happens if you
fall in love?
“You don't believe that, do you?” Summer
replies.
“Well, it's love. It's not Santa Claus.”
Thus, as they see more and more of each other,
Tom doesn't want to outright say he loves her--that her every atom spins
his universe.
The film chronicles the 500 days of their
relationship and jumps back and forth in time, from, for instance, Day 488
to Day 2. The contrasts pull out in bas relief the ups and downs of any
relationship. The interesting thing is it's the man, Tom, not the woman,
Summer, who is the more emotional being. This is the secret about men: they
feel a lot--not that they can talk about it.
It's at this point, I have to give a bit of the
plot away, so if you want to see the movie, you might stop here. At the
beginning a narrator says, “This is not a love story.” I didn't believe
him. Of course it was a love story. That's why we were there, and I soon
saw Tom and Summer were perfect for each other.
This is where Ann perceived things differently,
saying, “Summer said it up front that she didn't want a relationship. She
was true the whole time.”
“No,” I said. “You could see they were right
for each other. They had such incredible chemistry. They had so much in
common: the same employer, the songs of the Smiths, the art of
architecture.”
“She didn't love him,” Ann said. “Not at any
point did she lead him astray.”
I could have pointed out--but I hadn't thought
of it at the time--that she did deceive him after they had a fight and she
shows up at his door, all wet from the rain. She kisses him. I'm a fool for
women in wet shirts who kiss. The same scene in Spiderman won me
over.
As the relationship ripens, Tom becomes braver
in telling Summer his thoughts, to which she says they fight all the time.
In her words, “We've been like Sid and Nancy for months now.”
“We have some disagreements,” says Tom, “but I
hardly think I'm Sid Vicious.”
“No. I'm Sid,” she says.
“Oh, so I'm Nancy?”
Again, Ann would point out Summer is not
leading him on. She's honest that she's cold-hearted.
Ah, but I saw her heart as warm. He's warm.
They're perfect.
“No,” said Ann. I have to believe her. She sees
things.
I also have a feeling (500) Days of Summer,
directed by first-timer Marc Webb, working from Scott Neustadter and Michael
H. Weber's witty script, is a Rorschach test about love.
FIRES IN L.A.
Friends and family have been calling to see if
the fires they see in the news have been getting close to us. From our
house, we see at times just over the hill huge columns of smoke
that look like a volcano has erupted--sometimes two volcanoes. Below,
the photo is an example of what we've been witnessing from
our balconies for the last four days.
As I went up the hill, I saw the source of the
fires across the freeway. They haven't been a danger to us besides the
smoke that sometimes fills our little valley. Sometimes flakes of ash fall.
A couple we know live right near those fires,
and we heard they had to flee. As they did so, fire approached their home
from two sides. Thankfully, the fire departments beat it back enough to
save their house. This is called "summer" here.
See you next time,
--Chris
For reviews or more information on my books below, click on the
cover.
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