Proofs approved!

Life has been rearing its ugly head--I had some bad chicken last night AND the smoke detector wanted me to know that its battery was low this morning, so today I'm barely able to eat, much less write. But I did get the Trang and Trust proofs back, and they were good, so I approved them.

You never know just exactly how a cover is going to look, though, and today proved that to me again. This time the Trust cover was shifted as far to the left as possible--the jacket copy was right against the edge, the spine spilled over onto the back a little, the front copy was off-center--plus the bar code was crooked. Nothing massively horrible, just a glitchy print run this time around, but you do just have to understand that stuff like that is going to happen. (And it's not because CreateSpace is God-awful or anything; that kind of thing happens in traditional publishing all the time.) It's kind of like formatting e-books: You can't control how any given device is going to render your design, so it's best not to get too exacting.

When good story elements crop up in real life

Lily White LeFevre just did a fascinating post about a show I absolutely cannot tolerate and have never watched more than a few minutes of: The Bachelor(ette). It sounds very much like a case of the show's producers lucking into a situation that provided the show with actual emotional heft, instead of them having to manufacture it with gauze and roses.

The first season I saw of The Amazing Race was like that: It was season five, which featured a team of extremely hard-charging racers who handily won every single thing they ever did. They completely dominated the race--until the stress got to be too much, and they had a massive melt-down near the end. They came in last on that leg, which usually ensures elimination, but it turned out to be a non-elimination leg (and those two almost had a stroke when they found that out--seriously, I was worried).

The season finale was fantastic: The strongest team was last, and there were three teams in front of them. Because the last team was so good, every single team in front of them was an underdog. It was like watching three pairs of minnows trying to outswim a pair of sharks--as much as you respected the sharks, you couldn't help but root for the minnows. It was one of the most exciting shows I have ever watched, and I watched quite a few more seasons of The Amazing Race before I realized that it probably wasn't ever going to be that good again.

People respond to story points--underdogs, love triangles--whether they happen in real life or in fiction. Why am I so interested in Block B? I like the music, sure, but the characters are funny and likable, and the storyline (injustice!) is compelling. Why were the Browncoats such activists? Well, you create a show about people getting screwed by The Man, and then Firefly...gets screwed by The Man! It really isn't that shocking that the people who found the fictional show compelling found the real-life events surrounding it compelling as well.

(And of course, this is something that someone like Lance Armstrong just doesn't understand. His storyline was the underdog triumphing over adversity. The fact that he cheated to win...oooh, that just ruins everything. You don't come back from that--you can't invalidate your own storyline and expect people to still like you.)

One of the best bits of advice I got in journalism school was, "Just tell a story!" Obviously, nonfiction has to be true, but other than that, it's very much like fiction--it's about story.

And the reverse is true--if something in real life is very compelling to you, it's worth it to take some time and pick apart what it is that you're responding to. After all, it might be something you can use....

Progress report

Back at work on Trials--it's hard to do a word count because I revised and expanded the first two chapters (which used to be chapters 3 & 4, so there's a lot of exposition to put in). I'm actually feeling pretty happy right now with the way chapter 1 is turning out--it's funny, which wasn't the approach I took with the opening of Trust, but I think it works.

Uf, fonts

I got the second set of proofs back from CreateSpace today--everything looks much better, BUT the jacket copy is still a problem. Now that it's in focus, I can see that the font itself is just really hard to read as white text on a black background (and it's one of those things that looks fine on a screen). I wanted a serif font, but the font I picked has too much contrast between the thick and thin parts of the letters, so it looks like parts of the letters are missing. Back to the drawing board....

Cover notes

So, I rejiggered all the covers and sent Trang and Trust back to CreateSpace--I'll know for sure when I get the new proofs back, but hopefully I took care of all the problems.

The main thing that I have to remember for Trials and Tribulations is that when I do the jacket copy, I need to adjust the font and the font box itself to get the text block to fit. If I treat it like an art element and scale it up and down to fit, the text gets really blurry.

The other interesting bit is that the bar code on the back of Trang and the bar code on the back of Trust were substantially different sizes! So that little hole I left in the cover design of Trials? It ain't there now....

You may have noticed that....

There's a few random things going on.

Thing #1: The paperback books are gone!

Exciting, isn't that? That's because I redid the covers--CreateSpace now takes your books off the market until the new covers are OK'd.

They didn't used to do that. Changing covers is free with them, and I think they got tired of indecisive people changing their covers a gazillion times. So now you have to go on a time out so that you can think about what you've done.

I also got my first payment for paper books, like, ever. So I do occasionally sell paper books--I even sold a large-print copy! But it doesn't happen enough for the time out to bother me. The other impact is that if you search for Trang on Amazon, the large-print cover shows up. Eh--still don't care.

Thing #2: The paperback books are still gone!

I got the proofs back from CreateSpace today, and oy. It's a bunch of piddly getting-the-hang-of-GIMP stuff that needs to be fixed on all the covers. Crap like, if you scale the jacket copy to make it the right size, it's going to be blurry.

So, that will be tomorrow's task. Believe it or not, I was actually reading through Trials today in preparation to (gasp!) start writing again, but that will have to wait until after the covers are sorted. Still, what I read today didn't suck, so that was nice....

Thing #3: There's a new tag!

I went ahead and made a tag for the posts on music. I'm not trying to turn this into a music blog, but from an industry perspective, there are a lot of similarities--musicians basically went through what writers are going through now a decade ago, so their experiences can be instructive. (The "audio" tag will still be used for audiobook-related entries. Presumably I'll start making those again, someday.)

Thing #4: Speaking of covers....

OK, this isn't a thing of mine, but Isobel Carr has a nice post up about making a cover for a historical romance. That's a genre where cover expectations are fairly rigid and potentially expensive, but although Carr hired people to do her cover, she approached it as a learning experience (imagine!) and wound up with some good pointers for those who can't afford to do much more than jazz up stock photos.

Progress report

Tribulations' cover is mostly done, I think.

I'll add that I know the "HELP ME" isn't particularly visible, but I think the cover works even if you don't notice it, so I'm going to leave it as it is as a little reward for the sharp of eye.

Emotional decision making

Lily White LeFevre posted a nice little take-down of Star Trek Into Darkness. I wasn't able to truly enjoy that movie either, but for me the big, glaring problem was the same big, glaring problem that plagues 90% of J.J. Abrams' output: Things happen because they are convenient.

For Abrams, it's always about ginning up some drama, logic be damned. So there's no safety system to prevent space ships from crashing into major population centers, and Khan gets free because Scotty decided--for no reason in particular--to stop paying attention to him.

When LeFevre complains:

[W]hat we’re given [in Abrams' Kirk, who she calls Emo Kirk] is someone who does not think the same way Kirk thinks, rather than someone who weighs his thought process against different life experiences. I didn’t mind his emotion-based decisions in the first movie, because he was so young and untried, but I felt like he learned nothing from that experience. Throughout this film he makes his decisions based on his feelings, NOT on his instincts. Huge difference. Kirk sometimes followed a path that seemed illogical, but was actually highly logical – it just relied on data that Spock did not have at his disposal, and that was Jim’s sense of tactics and knowledge of human nature, which is driven by irrationality, so it sometimes seemed illogical.

I think that she has a totally valid point, but I also think that Emo Kirk is really "Emo" Kirk, whose supposed emotionalism and irrationality is just a convenient excuse to have him go gin up some drama.

I'm seeing that again now because I'm watching The Vampire Diaries, which at this point is rapidly devolving into a soap opera about super-powered bloodsuckers. It turns out that vampires, conveniently enough, are really, REALLY, REALLY emotional and irrational, so they can be relied upon to do all kind of stupid, self-destructive crap for no other reason than to--you guessed it--gin up some drama.

This never works. NEVER. It's obvious string-pulling.

Does this mean that characters should never make impulsive or emotional decisions? Of course not. People make these kinds of decisions all the time. Recently I made an impulsive and emotional decision to pull my books from Barnes & Noble, despite having long claimed that it's important to make your books easy to buy and that it's important to diversify your retail base.

Guess what? One book was never actually pulled, because it's on B&N through Smashwords. And I realized that I could do the same with the other book, so I checked a box and it should be back up on B&N soon.

Even when people are emotional, they tend to be consistent.

Being emotional and impulsive doesn't mean that people just do whatever. Even crazy people have particular triggers and patterns of behavior--what they are doing may not make much sense to you, and they may not understand why they do what they do, but there is a logic to it. Inconsistency is often a highly consistent trait, something The Larry Sanders Show understood very well. Writing emotional and impulsive characters is like writing a book where the characters can use magic: Have rules, and it can be very engaging. Use it as a crutch, and suddenly all interest drains from a story.

Real people have patterns that can be really stubborn. Fictional characters need to have that core as well, otherwise they just aren't believable. If I can't believe, I can't care. And if the only thing I can believe is that the writer is desperately attempting to generate drama, then I really can't care.

Progress report

Today has been a day of taking care of little things, like all the itty-bitty changes people want when you upload new covers. Yes, what was OK before is sometimes less OK now--or it's totally OK now, and they just think it's less OK. It depends.

Anyway, I also decided to start the Tribulations cover because I've got a lot of the design elements for the series in my head at the moment, so I figured it would make sense to do most of it now. It shouldn't take too terribly long, and then I can get back to either writing or procrastinating about writing.

Getting there

 

So, this one was kind of tricky because I basically have one enormous image spanning the front, spine, and back, which made it harder to get the front cover/thumbnail to look right. Also finding a good color for the author name took some time--I was thinking purple, but when I beveled the letters they went magenta on me, which I don't think is right for the series. It seems odd to go with a color so close to the color of the portal, but ironically darker blues blended into the background more.

The complexities of free

For reasons that I hope are obvious, I haven't been paying ANY attention to marketing or the like over the past few months. And yet, sales of Trust are just chugging along at a remarkably steady rate.

So when I saw Lindsay Buroker's post a couple of weeks ago wondering if giving away a free book on Amazon was still a viable marketing strategy, my initial response was along the lines of, Well, duh, yes. I'm not arguing that I'm maximizing my sales here, but I think there's something to be said for a marketing method that will continue to work without any active engagement from you--like, at all. Because sometimes life drops a brick on your head, and there ain't no warning.

But the issue kept rattling around the back of my head, because according to Buroker's post other authors are seeing lower sales and blaming the lower visibility of the free lists on Amazon.

The problem with that is, there are a lot of reasons why sales drop. Summer is traditionally a slow period in book publishing, so much so that in the industry there are "summer hours" (typically Friday is off or a half day--you're supposed to make that up the rest of the week, but you don't, and nobody cares) and all the hiring happens in September.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Amazon also rejiggered its categories, at least for science fiction. This doesn't seem to have affected me much: Trang went from being on the first page of the free Science Fiction: Series books to being on the front page of the free Science Fiction: First Contact books, so I'm guessing the audiences for those two lists are pretty similar in size. That said, I could see how shifting categories around could drastically affect sales--if your book got moved into a much bigger pool of books, it would vanish off the bestseller lists, and you'd be screwed.

Out of curiosity, I decided to look up how many copies of Trang I've given away each month for the few months that it's been free. And the result really surprised me: That number has bounced all over the place. Last month I gave away about half as many copies as the month before, and about half as many as I'm on track to give away this month.

Which is weird, because my ranking has been relatively stable, and my sales of Trust have been really steady.

I have no explanation for it, and I think focusing on these short-terms shifts and trying to determine an explanation for them is a waste of brain power. Think of how dynamic the situation is: The Science Fiction: First Contact category is a new one, which means that readers and other writers are still discovering it, so I have no idea if it will continue to be a friendly category for me or not. I also don't know if Trang will go stale with that audience, or if that bestseller list will consistently attract new readers.

I really don't know why my numbers have done what they've done. But do I think it's a little more complicated than "Amazon ruined free!"

Why'd you do that?

Lily White LeFevre has a great post that asks, Why is your story set where and when it is? I've definitely read quite a few stories where the writer has obviously been taken with a particular setting but hasn't bothered to create a compelling story to go with it. LeFevre puts her finger on a similar issue, where people create a story that could have happened in any era or place--or worse yet, could have happened only in contemporary America--and jam it into a historical or "exotic" setting that they clearly think of as being more glamorous. That kind of thing does not make the story more interesting, sorry.

The other Jay

The very evening after I wrote my post bitching about Jay-Z's latest release, a post popped up in my Facebook feed notifying me that Jay Park's latest EP was out and giving me a link to where it was on iTunes. I clicked on the link, previewed the songs, and bought the ones I wanted--easy-peasy.

Then I wrote up an addendum to that post to contrast the two experiences, but I decided not to post it. I mean, we all know who Jay-Z is--people who know nothing about hip-hop know who Jay-Z is--and we all know that his album already sold a gazillion copies before it was even released. If you don't live in Asia, however, you've probably have never even heard of Jay Park.

So you know, he is a Korean-American singer and rapper who tried to go the traditional K-Pop route but ran afoul of his label and is now basically independent (he works with labels, but he's not owned by them the way Korean musicians so often are). Since he was born and raised in the U.S., Park really understands the way Americans use the Internet, plus his first language is English. He's really got it on the ball when it comes to social media and the like. When I was trying to figure out how I wanted to do my Block B Web site (NO, the domain name doesn't work yet, God damn it! I don't know what the fuck is wrong with Hover, but I am calling them tomorrow--AGAIN. ETA: OK, I called--apparently the problem was the "name servers," whatever the hell those things are. But the person was lovely and supposedly it will be working within 48 hours. EATA: OK, now it's functional), Park's Web site was the one I looked at. And he has a Facebook page that updates just often enough so that I know it hasn't been abandoned, but not often enough to annoy me--plus it provides me with convenient links to his new music the minute it is available for purchase.

And whaddya know, Park's EP debuted in the top 10 of iTunes' R&B list in fifteen different countries, including hitting #4 in the U.S.

In other words, a few days ago the #4 bestselling digital R&B album in the United States was by a guy you've never heard of. And was largely not in English.

Hey, I guess I get to make a post out of this after all!

I mean, think about it--who's the writer equivalent of Jay-Z in this day and age? Stephen King, Scott Turow--all the folks who did it the old way, who can coast off their existing reputations, and who can rely on large corporations to throw enormous bags of money their way regardless of the quality of their work. They do things a certain way, which makes sense for them, because they've already made it big. It's not a path that's actually available to someone who hasn't made it big yet.

But what Park has done? That focus on lowering barriers to entry? Making purchasing beyond easy for the consumer? Samples? So something indie writers can do.