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An Author’s Guide to Publishing in 2012 – A Guest Post by Amy Rogers

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Last September, I wrote an enthusiastic review of Petroplague by Amy Rogers http://wp.me/pYql4-1ep. With a PHD in microbiology, Dr. Rogers is uniquely qualified to bring her considerable writing skills to bear on a thriller in which an oil-eating bacteria ravages Los Angeles.  Airplanes fall from the sky.  Millions of cars stall on the streets and freeways.  No food deliveries.  No ambulance, police, or fire service as a greedy corporate criminal and deluded eco-terrorists strive to suppress a solution.

On two occasions, New York agents represented Amy Rogers’ work but were unable to sell it.  With a keen understanding of the turmoil in traditional publishing, Amy decided to take matters into her own hands.  After I posted my review, I invited her to write a summary of her experience for us.

Last week I received an email saying she’d finished a “5,000 word treatise” on current publishing options for writers.  This will form the basis for her presentation at the June meeting of the Sacramento California Writer’s Club branch.  She graciously sent a 1500 word, abridged version, for thefirstgates.  I am delighted to be able to share her account, for I think her observations and experiences can serve as as Ariadne’s thread as we work our way through the current publishing maze.

Because of the length, I am going post this article in two parts.  Meanwhile, I invite everyone to visit Amy’s blog, Science Thrillers.com (listed on my blogroll), and to follow her on Twitter at, @ScienceThriller.  Also, check out her Facebook fan page, where you’ll see that she has been invited to participate in the New Author’s Breakfast at the Left Coast Crime 2012 conference in Sacramento at the end of the month. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Amy-Rogers/202428959777274

And now, without further delay…

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An author’s guide to publishing in 2012 by Dr. Amy Rogers

Part 1: What’s going on with publishing today?

Book publishing is undergoing a revolution unlike anything seen since the invention of moveable type, an explosion of diversity in the paths leading to publication.  After centuries in a desert of limited choices, writers now have a rainforest of options to get their work in front of readers.

But the changes are so profound and happening so rapidly, many writers can’t keep up with the business.  We’re writers, so we write, but what then?  The simple formula—write book, sell rights to a print publisher, collect royalties—doesn’t apply to the majority of published books today.  Is this a bad thing?

The big changes in publishing are both challenge and opportunity.  Whether the changes are “good” or “bad” depends on where you stand.  In this series, I’ll first summarize some of the major trends in the book business that are affecting the way books get published and sold.  In the second, I’ll discuss how writers seeking “publication” of their work can navigate the path that’s right for them.

So why does the publishing business feel like a Kansas farmhouse in a tornado?  Simple: technology.  Digital disruption devastated the music industry; now it’s rolling over publishing.  The end results for various stakeholders (authors, publishers, readers, retailers) are far from certain.

1.  Ebooks

Top of the list of disruptive technologies: e-books.  Amazon’s Kindle e-reader is now in its third or fourth generation.  The critical $100 price point has been breached (a Kindle now costs as little as $79).  Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader and tremendous numbers of Apple’s iPad plus various smartphones (which can also be used as e-readers) give millions of Americans easy access to e-books.  (Not to mention ubiquitous laptop and desktop computers, which can be used to read e-books, though uncomfortably.)

How rapid is the rise of the e-book?  The Economist reports that in the first five months of 2011, “sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books” and “amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books”. http://www.economist.com/node/21528611 Granted, Amazon’s experience does not represent the entire bookselling business, but it is significant.  In my own genre—thrillers—over half the books sold are now in digital formats.

2.  Distribution

Digital technology is changing the way books are distributed.  Obviously, e-books can be sold online—from anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world, no neighborhood bookstore required.

But it’s not only e-book sales that are affected by digital tech.  The emergence of amazon as a global book retailer with no physical presence in communities has also changed how paper books are sold.  People are shopping for paper books over the Internet and getting them shipped.  Neighborhood and mall bookstores are struggling.  Browsing is nice, taking your book home with you on the spot is nice too.  But amazon’s price advantage is killing these stores.  The giant online retailer subsidizes much of its bookselling business, has smaller fixed costs, and still dodges sales tax in most states.

3.  Publicity

The best way to get a person to buy a book is word of mouth: a trusted source, whether a friend or a reviewer, mentioned the book.  Digital technology—the Internet and “social networking”—is truly revolutionizing word of “mouth”.  Successful book marketing is increasingly based in this virtual world.  Book bloggers, readers’ collectives like GoodReads and LibraryThing, Facebook, Twitter, book trailers on YouTube—this is what sells books.  Reviews remain critical, but the traditional venue—newspaper sections devoted to in-house book reviews—is vanishing.  Only a few papers still publish their own book reviews, and generally these reviews are few in number.  So authors and publishers must go online to get reviews and build “buzz” around a title.

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Section two of Dr. Amy Rogers, A Writer’s Guide to Publishing in 2012 will be featured in my next post.

Life: The Movie by Neal Gabler – A Book Review

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In his final movie, Being There, 1979, Peter Sellers plays Chance, a gardener with a low IQ, who becomes an advisor to the president and business tycoons. In one iconic scene, Chance is accosted by a knife wielding youth in Washington, DC.  He pulls out his TV remote control and clicks it to change the channel.  He is puzzled when the assailant doesn’t vanish.

Peter Sellers as Chance in “Being There”

This might be the perfect illustration for Neal Gabler’s, Life, The Movie:  How Entertainment Conquered Reality, (2000).  Gabler quotes historian, Daniel Boorstin, who wrote in the early 60’s that, “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.”  Done deal, according to Gabler, who calls us, not just a “post-modern culture,” but a “post-reality culture.”

At times I had to keep my own assumptions in check:  subjects like reality and imagination open onto psychological and spiritual vistas beyond the scope of this or any other single book.  But when Gabler cited concrete examples, I found myself nodding my head on almost every page.

“You know how to brood because you have seen Rebel Without a Cause,” Gabler says, quoting cultural analyst, Louis Menand.  “What better model does the world offer?”

Gabler charts the ascendency of entertainment in America from the early 19th century, where the split between high and low culture was fueled by our democratic suspicion of all elites.  Calling someone “aristocratic” was a serious insult.  During the 1840 presidential campaign, when a man called Daniel Webster an aristocrat, he thundered back that he’d grown up in a log cabin, and anyone calling him an aristocrat was “a coward and a liar.”  ( Sound familiar? )

Nathaniel Hawthorn despaired of the fate of serious writers amid the flood of “trash” being published.  One publisher sold four million dime novels in five years, at a time when the US population was only 25 million.

In 1850, 1% of the population owned 50% of the nation’s wealth and held almost all public offices.  Upward mobility was a myth, since 98% of that wealth had been inherited.  While the one-percent held the power, then as now, culture wars raged, sometimes with a violence that we (thankfully) haven’t seen yet.  One night in New York, rival Shakespearean actors, one British and one American, were both scheduled to perform, the former in an uptown theater, the latter downtown.  Police ejected the rabble who had bought tickets solely to heckle the British actor.  A much larger crowd gathered across the street to throw rocks as the “aristocratic” crowd tried to leave.  The militia was called, a riot ensued, and before the night was over, 22 lay dead and more than a hundred wounded.

In the end, it was movies that won the day for popular culture.  The 1% stayed away from the early nickelodeons, which tended to be crowded and crass.  Later, with middle-class patronage, refined behavior became the norm, but the elite have never fared well in the movies, from the Marx Brothers  Night at the Opera, to the present, where a too-expensive suit is always the mark of a villain.

Three Stooges + high society + pies = disaster

As he charts the history of high vs. popular culture, Gabler makes a telling point.  It isn’t just about high brow and low brow – it’s about the ascendency of entertainment.  Being entertained is easy, and the corollary is that when the goal is entertainment, grabbing and holding audience attention is the supreme value, and “things that do not conform – for example, serious literature, serious political debate, serious ideas, serious anything – are more likely to be compromised or marginalized than ever before.”

Life: the Movie is a complex and disturbing book.  Gabler says in the introduction, it is diagnostic and not prescriptive.  To offer easy answers, he says, would be like the movie illusion where we meet the monster in act one and see it vanquished in act three.  Writing 12 years ago, Gabler said:

“One is almost compelled to admit that turning life into escapist entertainment is a perversely ingenious adaptation to the turbulence and tumult of modern existence.  Why worry about the seemingly intractable problems of society when you can simply declare ‘It’s morning in America,” as President Reagan did in his 1984 reelection campaign, and have yourself a long-running Frank Capra movie right down to the aw-shucks hero?”

I read this book after watching Neal Gabler speak on the fictions that lace the current election campaign on Moyers & Company, as I described in the preceding post. Because of it’s scope, I would recommend Life: the Movie only to those who want to delve into this issue in some depth.

But  I would recommend that everyone watch the ongoing conversation this year between Gabler and Moyers.  The confusions and illusions surrounding the political process are more convoluted than when the book was written, but Neal Gabler remains a reliable guide to pulling back the curtains and helping us draw closer to the truth.

Ann Patchett Interviewed on the Colbert Report

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By a happy coincidence, I was channel surfing Monday night at just the right moment to catch author and indie bookstore owner, Ann Patchett, on the Colbert Report.  In an earlier post, I discussed Ms Patchett’s bookstore venture. http://wp.me/pYql4-1qW.

Author and owner of Parnassus Books, Ann Patchett

Colbert played devil’s advocate, arguing that brick and mortar bookstores are obsolete, and besides, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is no one to mess around with – didn’t he bludgeon the owner of Borders to death with a tire iron?

Patchett said, fine, stay indoors, never talk to anyone, live your life online, “But you’ll wake up one day and find you’ve become the unibomber.”

“A strong argument,” Colbert conceded.

From the sound of it, Patchett’s Parnassus Books has become a community gathering place – not just a bookstore, but a literary salon, a poets corner, a venue for local musicians, and a place where the staff is composed of avid readers who can make suggestions for every taste.  If I were an independent bookstore owner, I’d be tempted to travel to Nashville to look at this model of success.

The full episode is available online: http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/mon-february-20-2012-ann-patchett.  The Patchett interview is about 2/3 of the way through the show, though with a cup of coffee and a slightly twisted sends of humor, you may enjoy listening to it all.

A Day With Anam Thubten

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Last summer I wrote about a retreat I attended with Anam Thubten. http://wp.me/pYql4-Wp .  Another time I posted about his first book, No Self, No Problem. http://wp.me/pYql4-gg.  Just over a week ago, I join a large group to attend another retreat with this Tibetan master.  The event coincided with the publication of his new book, The Magic of Awareness.

The magic of awareness cover

At first I was not going to write about the day because, in Anam Thubten’s own words, “I don’t have so much to say today.”  After a pause, he added, “I think you already know these things.”  A lot “happened,” that day, but not the sort of things you  can write about.

I thought of the Buddha’s flower sermon.  One day when a group of monks assembled to hear Sakyamuni Buddha, he simply held up a white flower someone had given him as he climbed onto the teaching dais.  One monk, Mahākāśyapa, smiled in understanding, and we date the practice of Zen from that moment.  A lot happened that day too – we remember it 2600 years later – but there is also not much to write about.  What are you going to “say” about holding up a flower?

That’s sort of the point.  And the point of this post.

For some reason, I was wide awake at 5:00am this morning.  I got up, made coffee, and dug into the Sunday paper – for some other unfathomable reason, I was really looking forward to catching up on all the news (what are they putting in the water these days?).  It only took one article on the presidential campaign to cure that delusion and cause me to trash a political post I almost had ready for Monday.  No way I wanted to add my $0.02 to the chatter.  There in the pre-dawn quiet, I thought again of Anam Thubten, the wisdom of silence, and the Buddha’s flower.

At the retreat, Anam Thubten gave few instructions on meditation beyond this: “The essence of meditation is doing nothing.” He elaborates in his first book:

“to rest means to pause, to pause from working very hard, to pause from continuously constructing this world of illusions, the dualistic world, the world that is based on the separation between self and other, you and me, good and bad.  When you completely take away the egoic mind, the creator of this illusory world, then realization is already there and truth is automatically realized.  Therefore, the heart of Buddhist meditation practice is to relax and to rest.”

When you think about it, those are really quite enough words for a lifetime…

Gaia’s Secret by Barbara Kloss: A Book Review

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I met Barbara Kloss a year ago at a California Writer’s Club workshop. We talked during the breaks, and later traded a few emails, based on a shared interest in young adult fantasy, but we lost touch when she and her husband moved to Phoenix.

Last fall, when Barbara emailed that she had published her first novel to Smashwords, I offered to review it here.  Due to the holidays and a penchant for multi-tasking, I am only getting to it now.

Daria Jones lives on a ranch outside of Fresno.  Her biggest worry is talking her overprotective father into letting her go away to college – that is, until her father disappears, and two non-human creatures show up at the ranch to kill her.  Family friends she has known all her life hustle her through a portal into Gaia, a world where magic not only works but can easily get you killed.

Gaia’s Secret introduces an appealing heroine whose 21st century sensibilities do not mesh well with the her destiny as a “special” child who was hidden away for her own safety.  Daria reacts as we might, with anger and fear, as all of her certainties crumble.  She doubts herself, her sanity, and her friends in turn.  It is her human failings, her pouts and impetuous actions, that make her so appealing, and save her from the “secret princess” cliche of so much YA fiction.

Early in the story, an ally of Daria’s father plays chess with her as her party hides from pursuit.  “You learn a lot about a person by their strategy,” he says.

“What about a person who has none?” Daria asks.

“Having no strategy is still a reflection of character,” her father’s friend replies.  “You’re impetuous and you don’t understand the consequences of your actions.  And you don’t have the patience to learn, which prevents you from making good decisions.”

Daria fumes but later admits that he’s right as her party ventures farther into a magical world where bad decisions become increasingly dangerous.

Structured along the lines of Joseph Campbell’s hero story, Gaia’s Secret also appeals as a quest tale and a romance, thought Daria’s temper and “bad decisions” lead to muddles on all fronts.  They ultimately deliver her into the hands of the traitor who started by sending assassins to kill her on earth.

Can Daria harness her newly emerging and uncontrolled magical powers in time to save herself, her father, and friends?  Since Ms. Kloss has said on her website that she is working on the sequel, I don’t think it’s a huge spoiler to say the answer is yes. http://scribblesnjots.blogspot.com/

Author, Barbara Kloss

Daria attains her quest in the end.  She and her father are reunited in safety.  She and her heart throb finally admit their love for each other, but that doesn’t mean things end happily ever after.

The world of Gaia is ruled by a king, and though it’s a magical world, as a young woman at court, Daria has far less freedom than she did in Fresno.  When temper overrules caution, and she mouths off to the king, she winds up with guards outside her door – for her “protection,” and no chance to marry the man she loves.  Good thing a sequel is coming.

A click on the book at the top of this post will take you to Smashwords where you can read the opening pages.  Those who enjoy  YA fantasy will probably choose to download the rest of this lively story with its feisty and endearing heroine.

Lunch with Ebook Advocate, Mark Coker

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According to Time Magazine, in 1812, the year Charles Dickens was born, 66 novels were published in Britain.  Many were written by “Anonymous,” since novels were not very reputable.  No one dreamed of making a living writing them.  Dickens, the first literary celebrity, whose bicentennial we celebrate this year, was instrumental in changing that, but he never could have imagined today’s literary landscape, which his work helped to create.

Mark Coker, guest speaker for January’s California Writer’s Club lunch, described an experience that is emblematic of the challenges faced by new writers today.  Coker and his wife co-wrote a novel.  They went through the revision process, and eventually became clients of a prestigious New York agency.  Two years later, their book remained unsold.  Coker’s solution was Smashwords, an ebook publishing service he started in 2008 that is at the forefront of changes rippling through the industry.

Mark Coker

Coker says that large publishers “look in the rearview mirror” for what has worked in the past.  There is little financial incentive for them to risk new concepts and new authors.  Even an author who wins the publishing game and gets a book on the shelves has no guarantee that a title with slow sales will not be remaindered within a matter of weeks.  That may not be enough time to establish the buzz that drives success.

Publishing on Smashwords is free and fast.  Correctly formatted books are distributed to all the major ebook publishers, and authors receive 85% of the sales.  Books do not go out of print, so there’s time for word of mouth to evolve.  Smashwords usage is growing exponentially.  Authors uploaded 140 books in 2008.  In 2011, the total was 92,000.

Smashwords historical usage, from a chart on their blog

Coker’s talk was animated with a sense of mission.  He said what gets him up in the morning is, “enabling writers to express themselves.”  He never suggested it’s easy, however, and most of the rest of his presentation detailed what is required.

First in importance, of course, is a really good book.  Coker suggested as many revisions and beta readers as necessary, and possibly professional editing.  At stake is the trust of readers, hard to build and easy to lose.

Next in importance are a well designed cover and compelling blurb.  Coker says polls reveal that “discovery” accounts for 50% of ebook sales – in other words, we still buy books by their cover.  This is good news for indie authors.  Only 18% of readers polled reported sticking with authors they know.  This means that for independent authors without design skills, hiring an artist is almost essential to come up with a cover that will capture attention as readers scroll through pages of thumbnails.  An email to list@smashwords.com will generate an auto reply listing 3d party artists and people who handle format.

Coker presented more information than I can cover in one article.  He has free guides to ebook formats and marketing at https://www.smashwords.com/.  Other topics are covered on the Smashwords blog, (referenced on the blogroll here) and at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-coker.

With ebook sales continuing to climb; with Apple’s move into electronic textbooks; with Smashword’s impending foray into library distribution, it becomes increasingly clear that ebooks are where the future of publishing lies.  Mark Coker used the phrase, “democratization,” which again brought to mind the Time article on Dickens I referenced to begin post.

“The flood of books in the 19th century elicited two powerful institutional responses:  the rise of prize culture and the rise of literature as a field of study.  The message (sometimes subliminal, sometimes not) was that the masses needed help figuring out what to read, and the cultural elite…was going to provide it.”  (“Charles in Charge” by Radhika Jones in Time, Jan. 30, 2012)

Noting that such elitism broke down well before the advent of ebooks, (for example, with the rise of Oprah as our great taste-maker), Radhika Jones ends her article with a question that would likely delight Mark Coker and maybe Charles Dickens as well:  “Will the readers of the future find their 21st century Dickens on the Pulitzer roster or the best-seller list or FanFiction.net?”

“The future is in your hands,” said Coker at the end of his talk.  “The power of publishing is shifting to the authors.  Go and serve your readers.”

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan: A Book Review

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I’ve been less active on my blog this week because of the happy event of finding a book I couldn’t put down. Like most such discoveries, I came to it by word of mouth.  In December, we called my sister-in-law to ask what our fifth grade nephew might want for Christmas.  She said he had really enjoyed  The Lightening Thief by Rick Riordan, the first book in a middle grade series called Percy Jackson and the Olympians.  Without even stopping to read the blurb in that hectic season, we ordered the boxed set on Amazon, had it shipped as a gift, and forgot about it – until this month, when I spotted a display of the series at the local Barnes&Noble.

I was instantly impressed as I realized these books feature the 12 year old son of Poseidon and a mortal woman in a 21st century America where the figures of Greek mythology – and their numerous offspring – are on the loose.  If you remember your Greek myths, you recall that the gods were best avoided by mortals.  There was a lot of collateral damage in the Olympians’ constant bickering.  Think of Troy.

Percy Jackson, our half-blood (aka, demigod) hero, would not wish his fate on anyone.  Dyslexic, diagnosed with ADHD, and a D student, he has been shuffled from school to school six times in six years.  And that was when his life was easy – before one of the furies and the Minotaur try to kill him.  By sheer luck, he finds refuge in Camp Half-Blood, but not for long.  Zeus believes Percy has stolen his thunderbolt thrower.  If Percy does not return it in ten days time, a battle will erupt on earth, “that will make the Trojan war look like a water-balloon fight,” according to Chiron the centaur, Percy’s mentor.

Though this book is aimed at a young audience, it has all the attributes writers are taught to build into their novels:  an engaging protagonist, a unique premise, tension on every page, and ever-rising stakes.  I love the way this story encourages younger readers to explore the classics.  One of the items I saw on display at the Barnes & Noble was an illustrated summary of the figures of Greek myth, presented in contemporary form.  Zeus had shoulder length hair, a pin stripe suit, and the good looks that could land him on the cover of a romance novel.  Dionysus was a pudgy, middle-aged reprobate, given to loud Hawaiian shirts.  Such images make the gods more immediate than the older toga and grape-eating portraits.

I am late to this party.  The Lightning Thief was published in 2005. A movie version was made in 2010. I don’t know if it was ever released, but the Wikipedia summary shows it diverges significantly from the novel.  That makes me wary since I liked the book so much.

Most of the online reviews I read were written by adults who enjoyed Riordan’s stories as much as younger readers. Several mentioned the kind of pleasure they found in Harry Potter.  I can’t say for sure, since I’ve only read the first book, but I know I’m looking forward to reading the others.

Bill Moyers is Back!!!!

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On Sunday evening, I was delighted to catch the first episode of the new PBS series, Moyers & Company.  You can view it, and a lot more, on the new website, http://billmoyers.com/.

Moyers interviewed political scientists, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of, Winner-Take-All Politics:  How Washington Made the Rich Richer–and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.

The conversation startled me, as Hacker and Pierson said they were startled during their research.  They found that the current income gap in this country – greater than in some third world countries like Egypt – was not an inevitable consequence of free market dynamics or trends like globalization.  It was politically engineered over the last 30 years.  Hacker and Pierson argue that the current American leadership more closely resembles a third world oligarchy than the democracy our parents knew.

“Who’s the culprit? “American politics did it– far more than we would have believed when we started this research,” Hacker explains. “What government has done and not done, and the politics that produced it, is really at the heart of the rise of an economy that has showered huge riches on the very, very, very well off.”

Bill considers their book the best he’s seen detailing “how politicians rewrote the rules to create a winner-take-all economy that favors the 1% over everyone else, putting our once and future middle class in peril.” – (from billmoyers.com)

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson on Moyers & Company

Winner Take All Politics is going into my already overcrowded book-queue, since it appears to be of critical importance.  The first step in correcting a problem is gaining an accurate understanding of its nature.  The fact that the assault on the middle class was created and not fated is good news, according to Hacker and Pierson.  Something done can be undone.  Along with Moyers, they agree that our current national sense of outrage is a positive sign.

Moyers’ work and website are important to bring up today.  On the website you can find an April, 2010 interview with two African American lawyers, discussing what Dr. King would have made of America today. Lawyer Bryan Stevenson said:

“I think in America, the opposite of poverty is justice. I think there are structures and systems that have created poverty, and have made that poverty so permanent, that until we think in a more just way about how to deal with poverty in this country, we’re never gonna make the progress that Dr. King envisioned.”  http://billmoyers.com/content/bryan-stevenson-and-michelle-alexander/

These are important things to consider, especially today.