Sea changes in self-publishing at the 2012 SF Writers Conference

The most notable trend at this year's SF Writers Conference (SFWC) was the sea change in how industry professionals across the spectrum are talking about self-publishing.

Advice on self-publishing was fragmented and tentative at the past two SFWCs, in February 2010 and 2011, respectively. Some editors and agents suggested that a self-published book that sold 5000 copies might whet a publisher's appetite; others warned that less than 5000 copies sold would likely kill interest in a book; still others insisted that a book that has been self-published is a dead project as far as the New York houses are concerned ... but the track record of a self-published book might influence a decision to acquire a subsequent project -- for better or worse.

This past weekend, at the SFWC 2012 held at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill, the story was nearly uniform.

Michael Larson, who co-organizes the SFWC and co-leads Larson-Pomada Literary Agents with his wife Elizabeth Pomada, said in an opening address, that "self-publishing may be the best option for you, if only to test-market your book, to see if it works."

Jennifer Enderlin of St. Martin's Press was unequivocal: There's no publisher who would be turned off by a self-published book that sold well.

Agent Dan Lazar: "I look at them [self-published books] as a manuscript." In fact, when I pitched my own novel, Consequence, to Mr. Lazar on Sunday, he had beside him a self-published (print) book written by a young writer I'd met two days before.

The voices of those who have been helping authors self publish for years & years (Joel Friedlander) or run self-publishing companies (Mark Coker of Smashwords, Brian Felson of BookBaby, Jesse Potash of PubSlush) are sounding louder.

In responding to a question during a panel discussion yesterday about the "stigma" of self-publishing, Joel Friedlander responded, "Stigma? It exists primarily inside unpublished writers" ... and Friedlander went on to assert that it is diminishing even there. That assertion resonates with the tenor of conversations I had with nearly all the writers I spoke with over the weekend.

"The times have changed," Mark Coker said, agreeing with Friedlander. He credited successful independently-published authors such as Amanda Hocking and John Locke (no, not the 17th century philosopher), who have set an example of the reach successful indie-publishing can attain. The Smashwords founder went on to assert that becoming one's own publisher has moved "from the option of last resort to the option of first resort for some writers."

Informative guidance on the what and the how of self-publishing are all over the intertubes, but a place to start for interested authors might be the guides written by Coker:

• The Smashwords Style Guide is focused on formatting requirements for publishing on that platform, but also gives a writer a clear idea of the kinds of complexities in a digital manuscript that would likely stymie conversion to e-book formats on any platform or using any conversion software.
• The Smashwords Book Marketing Guide offers 30 DIY marketing suggestions that are applicable to any writer; some of them will strike writers as obvious, some are less so.

Smashwords is all about e-books; PubSlush and BookBaby bridge the print- / e-book divide. For a novelist (a subspecies of writers of some personal interest), printed books are a connundrum: it's nearly impossible for an individual to place her/his books widely in brick-and-mortar stores. PubSlush claims it has distribution into brick-and-mortar stores through Ingram, a major distributor to independent bookstores, but it's a very new venture, independent bookstores are widely perceived to be on the ropes, and there's still the matter of convincing widely distributed buyers to place orders and keep a debut title on store shelves.

Does all that imply debut novelists ought to be thinking only in terms of e-book publication, at least until a book is proven in the e-marketplace? Some think so. I'm not so sure, but I also know I don't have room for too many cases of printed books in my livingroom.

Questions about what it all means for this unpublished novelist were ricocheting around my head all weekend at SFWC 2012. I suppose time will tell ... but in a world of diminishing advances and marketing budgets, a world in which only 7% of "traditionally published" books sell more than 1000 copies, it's fair to say that writers are taking a close look at value that large New York houses offer to authors in exchange for contracts that limit both royalties for and ownership of our work.

I can still say this: I would much rather have an agent to steer me through the thicket than go it alone. So far as I can tell, it's pretty much all quicksand out there.



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Publishing ain't dead, but it's a deer in the headlights
What's that you say about self-publishing, sonny?

Thanks to Briar Press for the image of an iron Baby Reliance hand press.

Data mining the 2012 SF Writers Conference

Last February I posted on the topic of the annual San Francisco Writers Conference (SFWC). I'll be attending again this year, for the third time, and have begun to look over the (still-tentative) schedule of sessions posted last week.

The conference will be held on Presidents Day Weekend, 16-19 February, at the Mark Hopkins Hotel. There's an impressive array of speakers, and seventy-five currently scheduled sessions and keynotes. The conference has sold out, but there's a waiting list if you're inspired to make a last-minute attempt to attend. There are also SFWC Master Classes offered on Monday 20 February, for which enrollment is still open.

Like last year, after reading through the listed sessions I was curious about the big picture view of what's on offer at SFWC. Since I have last year's categorization readily at hand, from last year's blog post, I have compiled counts of sessions in the same categories (almost) that I used last year, for comparison.

(For the record, by "almost" I mean that this year I broke out poetry into its own category, rather than grouping it with "Miscellaneous" sessions; to keep the comparison honest, I broke out last year's poetry-oriented session count in the new category as well.)

Et voilà:

Category	2012 Sessions	2011 Sessions
The industry: how it works, how to work it	18	13
Promotion (platform building, etc.)	14	15
Fiction (adult or general)	8	15
Craft and practice of writing	7	9
Poetry	7	3
Self-publishing, E-books	6	4
Books for kids and young adults	6	7
Non-fiction	3	7
Miscellaneous	6	2
Total	75	73

Same disclaimer as last year: Others might count some of the sessions differently than I did, and some would come up with different categories. Since the 'raw data' is the publicly posted schedule, readers are free to come up with their own schemes ... I'd be interested to see other slices and dices in comments to this post.

Like last year, I've used Wordle to generate a word cloud (see image, click to enlarge) from the SFWC schedule. Input to this year's word cloud was limited to session names, so the cloud gives a sense of the content of the sessions without the clutter of the presenters' names (I included names in last year's Wordle). No offense intended to the presenters, natch.

The big trends I'm seeing this year include an increase by more than twofold in poetry-oriented sessions, significantly more about the rapidly-morphing publishing industry, and a better-than-last-year emphasis on the new and disruptive kidz in the class, self-publishing channels and e-books. Also, interestingly, a halving of sessions oriented specifically to fiction and specifically to non-fiction; and a slight decrease in sessions aimed at the craft and practice of writing.

Six of the eight members of my on-line writers' critique group are attending this year -- traveling from as far as the midwest and Europe -- and a seventh will be returning from overseas in time to meet us for a post-conference lunch. I'm really looking forward to spending time with my circle of working writers after a year of contact limited mostly to e-mail and Skype.

Like last year, my on-line critique group will be looking for new writers to join us -- and because we communicate via the intertubes it doesn't matter where in the world new members live. If you're attending and think you might be interested, please feel welcome to seek me out; or send an e-mail ahead of time (you can find contact info on my web site). Our group's activities and guidelines are pretty close to the same as those I summarized in my post last year, How to organize an on-line writers' group; please have a look if you'd like to know more.




Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Data-mining the SF Writers Conference schedule
How to organize an on-line writers' group
Drafting vs. editing
Music, memory, nostalgia ... and the novel

Bookstores

I mentioned just the other post that I read a 1926 edition of Growth of the Soil recently, a 1917 novel that garnered the Nobel Prize for its author, Knut Hamsun. I picked up the book at Berkeley's Shakespeare & Co. Books, on Telegraph Avenue, an across-the-street neighbor of Moe's Books. Moe's -- which I've patronized since I was a university student -- is the source of, conservatively guesstimating, half the books I own.

I hope publishing-industry professionals will cover their eyes as I type this: I still buy a lot of books used.

Publishing people don't especially like the used book market, for reasons that are pretty obvious once you stop to think about it. The profit in the used book trade doesn't go to publishers, editors, agents, or even authors. It goes to readers who recycle their libraries, and to workers at and owners of used book stores. Used bookstores do leave customers with a bit of disposable income that may or may not find it's way into the coffers of a major publishing house. Probably not. Maybe a little.

I have no objection to buying new books, mind you. And I've bought a fair few, nearly every one from an independently-owned store.

Buying from an independent bookseller used to be a whole lot easier in my part of the world, when Cody's was still going strong. Cody's was a legendary bookstore that once did business in the same block of Telegraph Ave. as Moe's and Shakespeare & Co., three blocks south of the UC Berkeley campus. We're serious readers here in Berkeley, no surprise there. Thank heaven for Mrs. Dalloway's and Diesel and University Press Books and Books Inc.

But let's not gloss over Cody's. Why was Cody's legendary, anyway?

Well, leaving aside a magazine section of international scope and dazzling depth and obscurity; the shelves of literary magazines; the shelf-yards of poetry; a technical and technology section unmatched by any bookstore I ever saw anywhere; an enormous selection of travel books; more dictionaries than even a dictionary-fetishist like yours truly could possibly take home and consult; deep benches in history, sociology, and philosophy; cookbooks for every cuisine you'd never heard of; a spectacular spread of kids' books; and on, and on, and on ... leaving aside all that, there was the legendary second floor.

Upstairs is where Cody's hosted readings, many each week. There was a big room with bookshelves-on-wheels that were pushed to the walls when authors read. Hung high on the walls of this room were photos, a gallery above the bookshelves, all the way around. The photographs were portraits of well-known authors. Not random portraits of well-known authors. These were portraits of well-known authors who had given readings at Cody's. Tom Robbins, Norman Mailer, Bill Clinton, Ken Kesey, Jimmy Carter, Maurice Sendak, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Walker, Joseph Heller. Salman Rushdie dropped by once. You'd look around at the portraits and the hair would stand up on the back of your neck ... the ghosts of all those minds in that one place.

I once passed by Cody's on my way home to find lines around the block waiting to get into a reading. Hundreds of people. Maybe thousands, that's what the news articles said later. So who the heck was reading and signing books that day in 1990? I happened to come by as the revered author was being dropped off at the curb and escorted into the store. I looked. I did a double take. I nearly dropped my teeth: it was Muhammed Ali, the legend himself.

The last reading I attended at Cody's was Leslie Larson's, when she signed copies of her first novel, Slipstream. Leslie is a neighbor, she lives down the street. Andy Ross, the fellow who owned and ran Cody's from 1977 until 2006, is an agent now. I pitched my own novel manuscript to him at the SF Writers Conference last year, after thanking him for all the books he sold me. Nice guy. He passed on the chance to represent Consequence.

When Cody's closed, The New York Times reported it.

Is it obvious by now that I have a very very soft spot for bookstores?

Feeling as I do, what was I supposed to make of a colleague's bombastic comment earlier this month that he hates bookstores? Or, to be fair, he hates what bookstores have become.

This colleague went so far as to say he hopes they all close. All they are now is coffee shops, he said. And he's not even a tiny bit interested in buying a "new" book over which somebody else has already spilled coffee. This colleague is an avid reader, sharp as a razor. He reads technology books because he's a top-notch software engineer and reading technology books is what it takes to keep up one's game in that space. He reads history and economics because he's voraciously curious. So what does he do for books if he so loathes bookstores?

Two vowels: the A-word and an i-Thing. Yep. Amazon and an iPad.

O brave new world, that has such readers in't.

Do you like bookstores? Did you ever? Do you like them still? Do you still like them well enough to buy books there?






Thanks to Galaxy fm for the photo of Muhammad Ali signing an autograph for Pope John Paul II, shared via Flickr.

Social media as author platform

In Data-mining the SF Writers Conference schedule I wrote, a week before the conference began, that I was "a bit disappointed" to see only a few scheduled sessions that touched directly on the topics of "e-books, the changing landscape of self-publishing options, and What That All Means to writers."

In the actual event, I was glad to partake of an abundance of sessions focused on giving authors and prospective authors guidance on What Is To Be Done to put any book in the hands of readers, whether the book is brought out by a New York publisher or self-published, whether it is distributed in paper or digital form.

The bottom line across all of these means of book packaging and distribution was this message: it doesn't much matter who publishes your book or how. In an age of savaged marketing budgets even for books brought out by the Six Sisters, promoting a book is largely an author's responsibility. Even a novelist needs a platform to succeed.

What does that mean?

As Christina Katz explains in her book Get Known Before the Book Deal, excerpted from Chuck Sambuchino's blog, "The wo[rd] platform simply describes all the ways you are visible and appealing to your future, potential or actual readership. Platform development is important not only for authors; it's also crucial for aspiring and soon-to-be authors. Your platform includes your Web presence, any public speaking you do, the classes you teach, the media contacts you've established, the articles you've published, and any other means you currently have for making your name and your future books known to a viable readership."

The first session I attended at SFWC, titled "Get a grip: be your own best promoter," was given by Teresa LeYung Ryan and Elisa Southard. I wasn't crazy about the style of this session, but I did find value in the core exercise.

Teresa and Elisa led the room through initial development of a "talking tagline": a way of stating concisely what an author claims s/he delivers to a reader. For a non-fiction author peddling an area of her/his expertise, the focus of such a statement is relatively easy to find: it's all about rock climbing, or building birdhouses, or paying lower taxes, or making a relationship work. For novelists, a "talking tagline" might be more elusive. The YA author sitting next to me agreed that it was easier for a novelist to describe what s/he is delivering in a particular book than over the course of many fiction projects. Nonetheless, the attempt to frame what a reader of Consequence would get out of my current novel kept running through my head as I attended other sessions and readied myself to pitch to agents on Sunday morning.

If LeYung Ryan and Southard focused on the message -- what that "viable readership" needs to hear -- sessions I attended that were led by Tee Morris, Rusty Shelton, and Stephanie Chandler focused on the means of getting that message out into the world. In a self-actuated, digitally linked 21st century, they all insisted that the means is social media.

Tee Morris and Rusty Shelton talked up Twitter in a session called "Finding Your Tweet Spot." I know, I know. I went anyway.

I've never quite gotten Twitter. I've also heard about a zillion others say the same thing -- though it's worth a nod to yesterday's blog post from literary agent and "query shark" Janet Reid, who tore into authors who make excuses for avoiding social media. At the conference, Tee and Rusty made a credible case that the ability to rapidly connect with others through a medium that encourages linking out to other social media (videos, blogs, music, any content you can imagine) provides a powerful platform for networking with potential readers and fellow-writers. Rusty offered an interesting pair of similes: if Twitter is a cocktail party, Facebook is a family reunion. If you're aim is to connect with people you know, Facebook's the place. If you're aiming to extend your circle, try Twitter.

I'm giving it a try. Tee Morris's book Teach Yourself Twitter in 10 Minutes is one way to get savvy about the platform; or check out the platform's on-line support and Emlyn's 10-tip guide to Twitter posted last week on Novel Publicity's blog (also follow the links she provides to past posts) ... thanks again to Janet Reid for pointing me to Emlyn.

(It was interesting to read a few days after hearing Rusty and Tee speak that Nearly Half of Americans use Facebook; Only 7% Use Twitter. The article, on Mashable.com, noted that "Twitter [...] is driven largely by so-called power users, and only 21% of registered users are actually active on the site. Another interesting and related Twitter usage stat: 22.5% of users are responsible for 90% of all tweets." This is not necessarily inconsistent with the message I heard at SFWC. If authors, agents, editors, book bloggers, and especially people others trust & like to hear from are the people tweeting, those are the people with whom an author looking for readers wants to connect.)

Stephanie Chandler gave a presentation at SFWC titled "Storming Cyberspace" ... and a lot of what she had to say is outlined in her 22 February Authority Publishing post, Elements of an Online Marketing Plan for Authors -- a great 'consolation prize' for those who didn't have the chance to hear her speak. She echoed something Rusty said in the "Tweet Spot" session and emphasized again in another, titled "Digital Publicity": professional journalists and editors comb the web for stories & topical expertise, and you'll be glad if what they find is you ... because taking a ride in an established media vehicle, whether it's a popular blog or a well-circulated magazine or newspaper is another excellent way to get on readers' radar.

It was interesting to recognize something that happened to me late last year as proof of the fact that established, mainstream media editors are keeping a close eye on the intertubes. In November an old friend who works as an editor for a top-shelf magazine based in New York serendipitously found one of my blogs cross-posted on Daily Kos. He liked what I'd written, and jotted a quick e-mail to tell me so. This was during the middle of a weekday, East Coast time: he was working, not idly surfing. I didn't know you blogged, he wrote. I sent him a link to One Finger Typing. If my editor friend is combing the blogosphere in search of the zeitgeist, so are his peers.

[Of course -- keeping atop latest breaking trends -- the (somewhat silly) question whether blogging is over is in the air. Nathan Bransford asked it the week before last, in his post "You Tell Me: Have Blogs Peaked?" A few days later the NY Times was chewing over the same topic -- Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter -- which may or may not prove that the Grey Lady is following Nathan's blog. But take the NYT's conclusions with a grain of that Mashable.com article I linked to a few paragraphs back: "only 7% use Twitter." And then there's the damper thrown on rushes to judgment by Mathew Ingram, in his post "Blogging Is Dead Just Like the Web is Dead" (thanks to Nathan for that link).]


The self-promotion, the tracking of which channels are viable in a quickly evolving mediascape, the networking as if your literary future depends on it -- none of this is the sort of stuff I thought I was signing up for when I decided to write long-form fiction. But in a world of socially networked content, people turn more and more regularly (and exclusively!) to the internet for things to read, learn, and do. An author trying to attract a readership would be missing the boat if s/he failed to build an on-line presence.

As Janet Reid wrote yesterday, "There isn't any other option."







Thanks to GustavoG for the image of Flickr represented as a network of people sharing photos, circa 2005.

CORRECTION: This post originally misattributed Christina Katz's definition of platform to Chuck Sambuchino (who excerpted from Ms. Katz's book on his blog). Apologies for the error, which has been corrected as of 9 Mar 2011.

Publishing ain't dead, but it's a deer in the headlights

I attended the San Francisco Writer's Conference this weekend, met a lot of people, and learned plenty. I also had the unexpected pleasure and honor of falling into a hotel lobby conversation with keynote speaker Dorothy Allison, an author who I have admired since I read Bastard Out of Carolina soon after it was published in the '90s.

There was more at the conference to blog about than I'll ever get to, but I have to remark on an odd session on Saturday afternoon, when eight fiction editors from a mix of large New York houses and small presses introduced themselves to a crowd of some hundred or so writers and then fielded questions. There's a lot of anxious Kremlin-watching among authors and would-be authors in this era of e-books, major publisher consolidations, and mammoth bookstore chains going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Everybody wants to know what's next. Nobody has a clear view of the future.

The editors on the panel had a lot to say about what kinds of fiction they wanted to buy, whether authors should consider hiring a freelance editor, how self-publishing affects a book's prospects for New York publication (poorly) or a second book's prospects (a better story, depending). Good stuff, worth hearing.

Then talk turned to e-books. And here's where it got strange.

Most editors on the panel represented large New York houses. They were mostly thirty-somethings, I guessed, employed by the likes of Macmillan, Bertelsman AG, Simon & Schuster, et al. And when they answered questions about the shift in book format from paper to digital, they weren't copping to the fundamental upheaval in the industry. You can't actually blame them. They're only the tip of a huge, sinking iceberg, and they're not making decisions in the executive suites of the Six Sisters. They can't speak publicly in contradiction to their employers' Official Line. Not if they want to keep their jobs. I'm guessing they're all polishing CVs & working out back-up plans for when the next round of pink slips are handed out. I think I would be.

So the answers to writers' questions tended toward tweaking placement of deck chairs on the Titanic.

Piracy was a big issue for these editors. One trotted out the fascinating confession that publishers are worried Amazon might underreport the number of electronic books sold, since there's no physical check or balance on the retailer's unverified assertion. What we need, the editor mused, is some kind of 'phone home' record of a digital book being unlocked by an end-user. You know, like Microsoft has been printing on their software distribution media for fifteen years.

A couple of brave writers posed more pointed questions to break open the subject behind the subject. After one editor insisted that publishers were existentially bound to Amazon, however devious and untrustworthy Jeff Bezos might be, a writer asked "Why do you need Amazon? Couldn't publishers get out from under Amazon's thumb by setting up a distribution arm that the major New York houses can promote as a go-to destination for buying books without a middleman?"

The answers were breathtaking in their lack of inspiration. There was truth in each. But ... the pedantry!

"The beauty of Amazon," one editor said, "is that everything is there."

"Can you name ten books published by [insert name of any particular publisher here]?" asked another.

"Amazon handles the piracy issue," yet another explained.

And another was quick to imply that the Six Sisters would be busted for monopoly practices if they tried to move in lockstep.

Does any of this sound familiar? Wasn't there another media industry (hint: used to sell vinyl, then CDs) that has more or less crucified itself on the same sort of recalcitrance over new content formats and business models? I'm not claiming to have a prêt-à-porter solution to hand to NY publishers (if I did, maybe I could convince one to publish my own book and quit all the shilly-shallying around with agents and queries and whatnot).

But did anyone on the panel name alternate means to the NY Times bestseller lists or Amazon's recommender features to refer readers to books they might like? Goodreads? Library Thing? Facebook? Book bloggers? Book tweeters? No, no one did. Of course, none of these are an instant panacea. But nurturing and promoting a diverse ecosystem of distribution and recommendation channels has to be in publishers' best interest, right? To counter the weight of big, bad Jeff Bezos?

Why not invest in doing so?

Sure, any attempt to shift the status quo will be riddled with risk, though perhaps no more risk than sinking slowly (or not) into the tar pit of literary history. No, I don't understand the publishing business one one-thousanth as well as the least knowledgeable editor on that panel. I'm not a good businessperson in the first place. Yes, I get that Bezos has a lot of publishers by the short hairs because Amazon is a distribution channel that must be reckoned with. Yet it doesn't take Warren Buffett to see that publishers are taking refuge in sand castles as a tidal wave approaches.

Here's what editor Jennifer Joseph of of Manic D Press, also included in the panel, said of the publishing industry on Saturday: "This is the most revolutionary time since Gutenberg invented the printing press." Here's something else she said: "We're trying to fit great literature into a different way of living" [i.e., into a way of living that increasingly fails to make time or attention for books].

And what did Dorothy Allison say in her keynote the day before? In her slow Southern drawl she told the room that "publishing ain't dead." Allison was looking at the big picture, considering the simple truth that everything changes. She spoke of attending an historians' conference decades ago, before all the intertubes were fully screwed together, and hearing the academics describe changes coming down the pike exactly like the ones we're experiencing now. As she put it, "historians think long." But just because publishing is changing doesn't mean it's finished. At least not for those who adapt to its evolution.

Jennifer Joseph and Dorothy Allison -- seasoned women who have been around the block more than a time or seven -- sounded like they were grappling with things that are actually happening. Certainly more so than most of the editors representing their very large, very slow-to-respond publishing houses. Or so it seems from the oblique angle this writer has on the industry.

I have nothing against very large publishing houses. I don't think paper books are going away. I would like to see my work published by one of the New York houses sooner than later. But it's not confidence-inspiring when editors from the Six Sisters pretend they're dealing with a little brush fire burning in the far corner of Podunk ... when everybody can see that the brush fire is an inferno and it's burning in the heart of literary New York.





Thanks to wwphotos for the image of Jeff Bezos from the photographer's flickr stream.

Does a writer need a writers' group?

If you're a writer and ever talked to an agent or editor, one of the first questions you might have been asked is: "Do you have a writers' group (or critique group)?"

What's that about? Well, the theory goes that it's all well and good to let your friends and your family read your work. But they're your friends. Or your family. They may like to read, but they also probably like you, and want to support you, and have this hilarious idea that what 'support' means is to tell you that your work is fantastic.

In the real world, almost nobody's work is fantastic when they first drag it onto a page. Everybody's work can use a critical editor's eye. A good writer is good at casting a critical eye on her/his own work, and making changes for the better. This ability improves with practice. It is said that this ability improves exponentially in a circle of practice, that is, in a group of people who regularly read and critique each others' work. In a writers' group, people do just that, and discuss (or even argue sometimes) about conflicting ideas concerning what works and what doesn't in a dialog, a scene, a chapter, or a whole manuscript. This is a great way for writers to get better at writing.

But, you're wondering, can't I just read The Elements of Style, Writing Fiction, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, The First Five Pages, and Letters to a Young Novelist? Well, you should do that too.

But, you're wondering next, can't I just pay an editor? You can, yes. But caveat emptor. Be warned that if your editor is any good, s/he's going to charge a hefty fee. And even so, if your book is going to be a contender you're going to have to filter all that editorial advice ... it's up to you whether to take it or leave it. It would help a whole lot if you were well-equipped to make those decisions. Nathan Bransford, my favorite blogging former-agent, had some great advice in this vein in October 2009: Should You Pay Someone to Edit Your Work? Worth a read.

I went for years thinking I had no need to work with other writers. Workshops didn't interest me. I am fortunate to have many well-read friends, some of whom are writers, and over the years many of these friends read my stories and novel manuscripts, and gave me terrific, helpful, critical feedback.

It wasn't enough.

Forming or finding a writers' group

So if you're a writer, and you don't have a group ... what do you do?

What you can't do is throw any six or dozen writers together and call it an effective, worthwhile group. Some writers have a good eye for reading others' work, others don't. Some are good at articulating what can be done to improve a piece of prose, some can't quite figure out how to tell you what comes to them naturally. Some are good at talking about the fine points of craft, some are good at analyzing character or narrative arc or stylistic tics.

If you want a good writers' group, you'll need to pick your focus and balance your members carefully. And then you'll need to nurture the group along.

Many writers' groups (on-line and face-to-face) exist and seek new members. Try Google or Bing. If you search for "writers' group" you'll find lots of advice.

I got lucky myself: I got invited into an existing writers' group, one that was already on a roll. I attended the SF Writers Conference last year, and met some good people who are also good writers. They asked me to join their writers' group. I hemmed, I hawed, I e-mailed a few of the people I'd met, then I took the plunge. This turned out to be a very smart move.

Within a couple of months I'd learned enough from these writers that I was able to embark on a major overhaul of a novel I thought was finished when I met them. My manuscript is radically improved by this most recent go-round. I can't actually explain what took me so long to find an arrangement like the one I have now. Mind you, none of the members of my group had published more fiction than I have ... it's not only about publishing credits. It's about attention, care, craft, engagement.

This can happen to you if you attend writers conferences: networking goes a long way. (There are those who would say that the fact I found my group attending SFWC wasn't luck at all. It was, they might say, a corollary of the choice I made to attend the conference. With a little bit of luck, I would hasten to add.)

Alternatively, you could try books like The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide published by Writers Digest Books, and build from the advice you find there. You can search for needles in haystacks like the one maintained by The Writer magazine (actually, their search interface permits you to narrow pretty quickly, but doesn't help you pick out the online groups -- which don't depend on members' location). If you're hooked into LinkedIn you can seek group members there. eHow has an article enumerating steps to take if you want to start a writers group that holds face-to-face meetings ... it's kind of old-school, but if you supplement locally-focused on-line venues to their advice about advertising in local newspapers the advice seems reasonably sound to me.

If the first group you join (or try to form) doesn't work out after you give it a serious chance, try another.


The on-line option

My writers' group works on-line. Some of us live in California; some in the midwest; and our founder lives in France ... he just moved there from Canada, and is lobbying to hold an in-person conclave on the lovely property where he and his family now live. How cool is that?

What do we write? Well, we're not all cast from the same genre mold. If I were pressed to describe common characteristics I might put it this way: Each of us writes work that doesn't quite fit a single category. What we share is a commitment to quality. We all want our books to be compelling, but are not satisfied if they are only entertaining.

We share our work by exchanging files, and use a discussion forum format to exchange feedback. It's not the same as face-to-face, but it actually works. In some ways, it works better: we don't have the difficulty of finding times everyone can meet, and no one has to get out of their pajamas to participate. For me, it's ideal.

I'd like to tell you how our group works in detail because I think the example might be helpful to folks trying to form an on-line writers' group. I'd also like to propose a set of questions to ask and answer in the course of forming and organizing a new group, whether on-line or face-to-face.

Alas, this post is getting pretty long.

So I'll extend my Monday & Thursday blog-posting habit and continue with "How to organize an on-line writers' group" tomorrow. Stay tuned...



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Craft and art: erasure and accent
Aleksandar Hemon on Narrative, Biography, Language
Drafting vs. editing



Thanks to Greg Turner for the image from his Flickr stream.

Data-mining the SF Writers Conference schedule

A tentative schedule of sessions to be given at the 2011 San Francisco Writer's Conference was published last week. The conference is next week -- 18-20 Feb -- at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, and it's sold out ... though there's always next year.

(Word to the determined: I was able to attend last year even though the conference was sold out by the time I decided I absolutely had to go. I got on the waiting list, and there was a cancellation that yielded me a place.)

A few facts about SFWC. The conference website lists 21 editors, 25 agents, and nearly 50 authors who will present or hunt for fresh, content-extruding meat (that's us, the writers). Guesstimating from last year, there are three or four hundred writers who pay to get in, many of whom are looking for an agent or some other way to get traction on work that's either finished or in progress.

Translation: there are plenty of networking opportunities here.

The promotional materials promise "over 50" sessions; my count from the just-posted schedule is 75. Stepping back from that list of 75 sessions, I was curious about the big picture about what's on offer at a major writer's conference known for its focus on the business of publishing. Pursuing that big picture view, here's how I sliced & diced, in order by the number of sessions in each of my categories:

• 15 - Fiction (adult or general)
• 15 - Promotion (platform building, etc.)
• 13 - The industry: how it works & how to work it
• 9 - Craft and practice of writing
• 7 - Books for kids and young adults
• 7 - Non-fiction
• 4 - Self-publishing & E-books
• 5 - Miscellaneous

Others might count some of the sessions differently than I did, and some would come up with different categories. My idiosyncrasies include a decision not to break out the two sessions touching on memoir (I put one in Fiction, one in Non-fiction); or the three on poetry (one in Promotion, two in Miscellaneous).

But hey, this is my blog. Your job is to complain in the comments.

Another way to slice and dice is with a word cloud (cf. image, thanks to Wordle). I did a bit of editing on the input end to de-emphasize meals and frequent recurrence of "a.m." and "p.m." ... but otherwise the word cloud is a view uninflected by my categorizations. Words that occur more frequently in the SFWC's session schedule are larger in the word cloud.

I signed up for this year's SFWC in Fall, and got the idea from initial publicity that there was going to be a heavy tilt toward the herd of elephants camped out in publishing's living room. What herd? E-books, the changing landscape of self-publishing options, and What That All Means to writers as publishers shed editors, huge bookstore chains declare bankruptcy, and the highly-consolidated New York based industry wonders what's next.

I'm kind of surprised -- and a bit disappointed -- to see only four sessions that touch on these topics directly. As you can see from my first-pass spread, above, none of those four made it onto my dance card yet ... but before the conference kicks off I'll pare back on Promotion and Craft sessions to get some skinny on where Those Who Know think books and publishing are heading in the 21st century.

Attending the conference should provide plenty of benefits beyond the sessions. I'll get to hang out with some members of my on-line writers/critique group, into which I was invited at last year's SFWC. I'll be looking to network with writers who might want to join our group (look for more about that next week). And I hope to speak with agents and editors who might be interested in my novel manuscript.

I'd love to hear from this post's readers: what have you gotten out of writers' conferences you attended, and how has that matched up with what you hoped for?

Speed dating for the bookish

Speed dating for lurve

In Friday's print-edition of the SF Chronicle, the article Singles check one another out at SF Main Library told a story that would warm any bookish heart: the San Francisco Public Library sponsored a speed-dating event for readers. Actually, there were two events scheduled on successive evenings, one for people seeking opposite-sex partnerships, another for same-sex.

As reporter Jessica Kwong tells it, "Twenty-five lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender participants, and 38 straight participants the night before, got a chance to find love before Valentine’s Day [...]." Books in hand, participants spent five minutes talking about what they're reading, how they chose the book, and how they like it so far. Then a bell rang, and they'd lather, rinse, and repeat.

There was nothing magical about it, says Kwong. Awkward pauses, shy fumbling, all that. You have to figure that speed-dating always has awkward moments, squirmy silences, and what-am-I-doing-here crises -- as does blind-dating or even the vast majority of first dates. Perhaps it's fair to say that literary speed-dating is bound (is that a bookish pun?) to be especially awkward because the participants are more likely to be introverts than your average club kid. These are speed-dating bookworms.

I met the love of my life on a blind date at a café in a San Francisco bookstore. More than a dozen years later, we read together in cafés, at the breakfast table, on public transit, and at home in the evenings; and we're still jabbering away about what we're reading and writing with each other and our reading group pals.

The SFPL set up their event for folks in their 20s and 30s, which left a lot of single San Franciscans out. In fact, the library turned away 50 would-be participants because they didn't have room for everybody who wanted to come. But because of the huge interest in speed-dating for bookworms, in the coming months "the library is looking to include silver foxes and cougars for their own speed-dating event."

San Francisco isn't the only city where bookish convergence is the stuff that matches are made on. On the same day the SFPL speed-dating event was reported in the newspaper, Rachel Stout of New York's literary agency Dystel and Goderich, blogged about a bookstore called Word in Greenpoint (Brooklyn, NY) that features a board to which slips of paper are tacked by people looking for ... other people. As Ms. Stout explains, "They’re all the same format, with spaces only for "I'm a _____ looking for a ______" and what books/authors you do like and those you don’t. That’s it! No other personality traits or qualifications, these matches are made based on books and writing preference alone."

Speed dating for authors and agents

I first discovered "Speed Dating for Agents" when I looked into attending the SF Writer's Conference last February (I'll be attending again at the end of next week). To play this game, attendees pay fifty bucks beyond the base cost of attending the conference for a chance to spend an hour lobbing three-minute pitches at agents seated around the perimeter of a hotel conference room.

The recommended best practice is to spend a minute or so introducing yourself and making your pitch in a conversational way (60 seconds is a very short time for this), then take a deep breath and let the agent begin to lead (120 seconds is not very much more for Phase Two). If you're lucky, you win the prize by the time the bell rings -- an agent "date." This is not to be confused with the formality of engagement, let alone of marriage. What you're hoping for is a business card and an invitation to send a query -- and perhaps some pages -- with the hallowed words "Requested Material" on the envelope or in an e-mailed subject line.

In other words, the prize is a chance to query an agent above the scrum of the slush-pile.

The experience was nerve-wracking for me last year. No more nerve-wracking, I suppose, than the query-from-home process that I blogged about last week, except that it's all concentrated in that one intense hour of three minute performances.

I did pretty well at SFWC 2010, all things considered. I hadn't shopped my manuscript around to any literary agents before the conference, yet I finished the hour with six invitations to query from among the eight agents with whom I spoke. None offered representation in the end, but I got some excellent (albeit concise) feedback about my novel mss. That feedback helped to fuel last year's revision of Consequence ... very much for the better, judging by the response of friends and writing-group members. And I also gained valuable insight into pitching my work ... not something that comes naturally to this writer. Selling oneself and one's work are cultivated skills for many who spend as much time alone as writers do with their pages and their imaginary friends (a.k.a. "characters").

Jim McCarthy, also of the agency Dystel and Goderich, blogged a couple of weeks back from an agent's perspective about the agent-writer form of literary speed-dating. The event in which he participated was in Manhattan, at the "Writer's Digest Pitch Slam at which seemingly every agent in the universe sat around the perimeter of a Sheraton ballroom in midtown while aspiring authors lined up for the opportunity to pitch them."

Mr. McCarthy wrote that would have liked longer to talk to the authors he met. I suspect that desire was mutual ... three minutes do fly.


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Losing libraries (guest post)
Six things about e-books
Book clubs in a box from the public library

Thanks to the SFWC for permission to use a photo of Agent Speed-Dating from the conference website; and to theunquietlibrary for the photo of Speed Dating Article Interviews on Social Media for Social Good ... in a library ... on flickr.

Sound bytes from the SF Writers Conference

It's been more than a month since I attended the SF Writer's Conference, and nearly a month since I've blogged my principal posts about what I learned. This past weekend, I hung out with a writer friend for the first time that wasn't virtual since the SFWC (that is, we saw each other in-person), and I tried to remember all the important stuff I hadn't already blogged about ... to share the wealth, as it were. The exchange made me realize that it's high time I go through my notebook scribbles once more to mine what's left unposted.

So here it is in categorized bullet points, with apologies to paraphrased presenters for whatever I've lost through poor listening or note-taking.

[Some of my notes have specific attributions, others are 'somebody said this on a panel' attributions. While some of the information given may be contradictory, I only included notes from presenters who I judged to be well-informed and articulate -- which, I should say, was a resounding supermajority of those who spoke at SFWC.]

About writing, for new novelists:

• Why isn't it easier to get published? Well, it's hard to write a good book. Tom Robbins took 5-6 years and 4-5 drafts to write his. (Alan Rinzler, Executive Editor, Jossey-Bass/John Wiley & Sons)
• It's the content. Most of what's written is not very good. (Katherine Sands, Literary Agent, Sara Jane Freymann Literary Agency)
• Expect revision -- perhaps radical revision -- at both the agent's and editor's stage of engaging with your work. Authors must be prepared to respond professionally to suggestions. (Elise Capron, Literary Agent, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency)
• A platform is helpful, even in fiction. But. Craft first. (Laurie McLean, Literary Agent, Larsen-Pomada Literary Agency)
• It takes two years to get from a completed manuscript to a published book. Trends are really hard to judge into the future. Write what you need to write, not what you think is today's trend. (Daniela Rapp, Editor, St. Martin's Press)
• The reality of advances for new fiction writers? Don't dream bigger than $20,000, especially if you're going to a small press. Publishers will not risk a lot on new ideas. (Elise Capron, Literary Agent, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency)
  
• How polished is a manuscript when it's "done"?
• The first 100 pages have to feel really good. Solid. An agent is the best judge of whether a manuscript is done enough to be sent to an editor. (Jeanette Perez, Editor, HarperOne)
• Characters and plot have to be solid. The basic structure, framework, vision. If your readers group says they'd buy it for $25, that's a good sign. (Daniela Rapp, Editor, St. Martin's Press)
  

About getting an agent:

• Make yourself the object of an agent's chase. Publish wherever you can (quality on-line 'zines are absolutely a legitimate venue). It's about producing work. (Elise Capron, Literary Agent, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency)
• You owe it to yourself to submit simultaneously to agents. Just tell the agents to whom you are submitting what you're doing. (Non-fiction agents panel)
• First novels must be complete and polished before submission to a literary agent. (Paul S. Levine, Literary Agent)
  
• Agents in the current market need to deliver a mss. that is very close to 100% perfect before going to a publisher. Editors no longer have time to edit. (Non-fiction agents panel)
• Will agents shy away from older writers? Maybe. It depends on the project. But writers in their 50s get a first book published all the time. (Elise Capron, Literary Agent, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency)
  
• Literary agents are dousers. Most often it's a voice that compels interest. (Katherine Sands, Literary Agent, Sara Jane Freymann Literary Agency)
• An author's job is to write. An agent's job is to know the business and sell. (Ken Sherman, Literary Agent)
• Know what you want from a literary agent, and -- only after s/he has expressed interest in representing you -- ask whether they will give it to you. (Cameron McClure, Literary Agent, Donald Maass Literary Agency)

About the publishing industry generally:

• 80-90% of books don't make money. Too many books are published; it's cheap enough to publish and see what happens. (Alan Rinzler, Executive Editor, Jossey-Bass/John Wiley & Sons)
• Pre-orders significantly influence a publisher's decision about how many copies of a book to print. Higher numbers means a greater footprint in stores, more visibility, and possibly higher sales. But higher numbers also risk a low 'sell-through' which makes publishers very unhappy. A publisher's initial announced print-run of a book is usually inflated, significantly. Reprint decisions depend on the velocity of sales. There's about a two-week window to establish a toehold that keeps a book in the stores. (Daniela Rapp, Editor, St. Martin's Press)
  
• Debut novels are booming. Not having a track record is an advantage. Every publisher is looking for the next big thing. (Alan Rinzler, Executive Editor, Jossey-Bass/John Wiley & Sons)
  
• Publisher's don't have huge promotion budgets. An author's professional engagement is core. You can buy professional publicity for $500-$15,000, and this can be the right strategy when a publisher isn't stepping up; an agent can advise. (Elise Capron, Literary Agent, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency)
• No one gets book tours. Yes, of course there are exceptions; but this is the rule. (Daniela Rapp, Editor, St. Martin's Press)
  

On what makes a "successful" book:

• Best sellers sell 100,000s fewer copies than they did even 10-20 years ago (Kevin Smokler, CEO, BookTour.com)
• If success is defined as books that earn out their advance & the publisher didn't "spend too much" producing it, maybe 65% of books are successful; and 25-35,000 copies in "a certain time" would be a best seller; a flop is a print run of 5000 of which 4500 come back. (Daniela Rapp, Editor, St. Martin's Press)
• The NY Times doesn't sell books (necessarily). Buzz sells books. (Alan Rinzler, Executive Editor, Jossey-Bass/John Wiley & Sons)
  

Memorable lines:

• An author's enemy is obscurity, not piracy. (Mark Coker, SmashWords.com) [quoted earlier]
  
• Guys don't buy books. (Daniela Rapp, Editor, St. Martin's Press) [quoted earlier]
  
• Publishers are running out of money. The model is broken. Celebrity publishing is really a series of desperate Hail Mary passes. (Dan Poynter, self-publishing guru & author of 126 books)
• Web 3.0 is video. (Philippa Burgess, Creative Convergence, Inc.)
  
• Everything happens for a reason, but not necessarily a good reason. (Jacquelyn Mitchard, author; quoting her brother)
• Don't give away the end before we care about the story. (Advice given at SFWC's Friday evening "Pitch Contest")

Guys don't buy books

I thought I could sling hyperbole with the best of 'em, but I was humbled when Daniela Rapp of St. Martin's Press looked around the room halfway through an SF Writer's Conference session called Creating A Book Out Of A Manuscript and remarked:

"I see a lot of guys here. But guys don't buy books."

Yow. This, I thought to myself, is a woman with a very different perspective than mine. And it's her job to know what she's talking about.

All the guys I know buy books, and read them. Okay, not all the guys I've ever met, but all the guys I'd call a friend -- even a Facebook friend! Even the guys I know who pay attention to sports also pay attention to books (sorry sports fans, personal blind spot there).

But Ms. Rapp wasn't the only one talking about women as the market that matters for books. Rebecca Oliver, an agent with William Morris Entertainment, said almost the same thing in a hallway conversation: since most books are sold to women, she remarked, "all books are ultimately women's books."

Statistics, please:

The press release for Bowker's 2008 report, 2008 U.S. Book Consumer Demographics and Buying Behaviors Annual Report ($999 for single-use PDF!) says that "57% of book buyers are women" and "women purchase 65% of books sold in the U.S." (that's nearly two-thirds, or it was the last time I did the long-division). And "women made the majority of purchases in the paperback, hardcover and audio-book segments" though "men accounted for 55% of e-book purchases" (way to go, guys...).

A fascinating set of slides presented by Kelly Gallagher, also of Bowker, and apparently riffing off the same report, counts mystery/detective (34%) and romance (24%) genres as more than half of the fiction market. Women are 63% of all fiction buyers, 73% in general fiction, and (no surprise) 84% in romance fiction. The only genre category in which guys take the prize is science fiction, at 55%. When you start counting dollars spent, the numbers are even more skewed: women pay 71% of dollars spent on fiction.

What does that mean to an author who is also a man? Maybe not so much? Consider Grisham, King, Brown. Updike, Roth, Murakami. And my reading group. Membership fluctuates, but over our 11+ years we've been mostly women by a long stretch (for years I was the only guy) ... but two-thirds of the books we've read together were written by men. The book we just discussed last night was written by a woman in a man's voice (Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson).

What do you think? If you're a woman, does the fact that a book was written by a man make you less inclined to read it ... or more inclined ... and why? If you're a man, what proportion of the books you read are written by women, and how would you characterize the difference -- if you see any?

Literary v Commercial

As I prepared to pitch my recently-completed novel (Consequence is the working title) to agents at the SF Writer's Conference last weekend, one of the murkiest questions I had to clarify was whether I'd written a work of literary fiction or ... something else.

I never thought much about this before. That is, I had an opinion -- I thought I was writing literary fiction -- but never really questioned whether that was actually so, or why. Why did I think my fiction fit that category? Well. Um... Because it clearly isn't genre mystery, thriller, romance, or police procedural? Because it includes at least a couple of big words in every chapter? Because I have a degree in English Literature, from a top university? As my grandmother might have said, "Feh!" None of these seemed especially convincing, maybe not even marginally credible, once it was time to tell a well-read publishing-industry expert & perfect stranger, in sixty seconds or less, about the product of my every spare moment gleaned from the past [number redacted] years of my rather inconsequential life.

What to do? I Googled, of course. And discovered, unsurprisingly, that this question has vexed plenty of authors, agents, and editors before me. What is literary fiction? How does it differ from "commercial" fiction (leaving the more clearly demarcated genres aside)?

In fact, the question was the topic of lunch conversation on the first day of the SFWC, when I met agent & entertainment attorney Paul S. Levine, whose bracingly no-nonsense answer to the confusion was that the difference is a red herring. It doesn't matter at all, said Mr. Levine. Guy walks into a bookstore. It's all in the "Fiction" section, alphabetized by author. Case closed.

A number of others at SFWC said roughly the same thing (Caitlin Alexander, a senior editor at Random House: "It's fairly arbitrary"). The "I know it when I see it" defense seems to be popular. Plot first (commercial) vs. character/voice first (literary) is another well-used set of markers. But it gets vague very quickly. My novel is about characters grappling with the moral and political themes that drive the plot forward ... but it certainly has a plot, and tension, and conflict, and even a bit of romance. In the end there's blood, triumph, tragedy, and even a big 'splosion. So what is it?

The most coherent musings on the question I've seen were contributed to the intertubes by Nathan Bransford, an agent with Curtis Brown, who blogged on the topic of What Makes Literary Fiction Literary following the 2007 SFWC. I won't steal his well-articulated thunder, but he boils his distinction down to this: "In commercial fiction the plot tends to happen above the surface and in literary fiction the plot tends to happen beneath the surface." This is more-or-less the Plot vs. Character line, but Bransford gives his answer some nicely knitted nuance. Check him out.

In the end what seemed most helpful to thinking out my own answer was to consider the attributes of books I like best.

While page-turning plot is as gripping to me as to anyone, I have often noticed that if a book offers a lot of plot and a lot more than plot, and if I want to get a lot more than relief of plot tension out of it, I have to read it twice. That is, plot can distract me from what I most care about in a book. Or, alternately, I devour plot like candy, which is terrific for a while, but if I want something from a book that lasts beyond the sugarplot rush I have to go back and mine the work's deeper strands after resolving the plot-tension by reading through to the end. These are the best kinds of books for me: the ones that pull me along with heart firmly lodged in throat, only to leave me wanting to go right back to Page 1 and start again.

I want to read about characters grappling with real issues. With questions that matter. This doesn't have to be arcane or intellectual. Cormac McCarthy's The Road, to take a commerical-literary hybrid, has pretty superficial plot concerns. Getting to the coast. Avoiding the cannibals. Eating (but not eating other people, thank you very much). But what matters in that exquisitely spare and mercilessly taut novel is that a man is spending everything he has and is to save his son. There was no question as I read The Road that this character was on a quest, that his drive was moral and primal, that completing his mission was as substantial an undertaking as anything a human being might be called upon to achieve.

I've read for diversion before, and enjoyed it. But even in my adolescence, when I gulped down science fiction by the shelf-foot, what stayed with me longest, what compelled re-reading, were stories that addressed a moral dimension. Those are the books I remember, and the ones that seem worth caring about.

So to spin Nathan Bransford's distinction: perhaps commercial fiction describes what it's like to navigate a world; whereas literary fiction reveals what it's like to be.

When it came time for me to pitch agents at the SFWC last Sunday morning, I told them something like this: "I thought I was writing literary fiction, maybe it's commercial crossover, but after hearing the categories blur at this conference I think I'll let the agents and editors duke it out."

What do you think?

More about E-books

Okay, some more about e-books from SFWC and beyond...

I guess I'll start with some more about Smashwords 'cuz Mark Coker (founder) was at the conference (the presentation audio and slides can be accessed via Mark's blog). Smashwords has been around for about a year, and claims to have published 387,372,989 words as of tonight. They list 16 fiction categories in their catalog, and ten in non-fiction (including poetry ... which strikes me as kind of odd, actually ... I'm thinking W.B. Yeats, "Who Goes With Fergus," for whatever perverse reason ... or Ovid ... or ...). 3,567 authors. 7,807 titles. As I wrote in my last post, the drill is to upload electronic manuscript and Smashwords converts it ten e-book formats, then lets the author set a price.

So one of the questions that's begged here is whether people buy e-books. Another has to do how an author ought to set a price for her/his work.

Do people buy e-books? The jury hasn't been fully polled on this one, as far as I can tell. According to Mark Coker, about 2.3% of the market last year was sales of e-books. Jeff Bezos of Amazon said last month that where both e-books and printed formats are available, 6 e-books are sold for each 10 paper copies. E-books seem to be an impulse buy (cheap, easy, fill up your nifty new device). Coker's nifty graphs showed wholesale e-book revenue coming in at $100M in 2008, and an estimated $200M in 2009. E-books, Coker says, are "the fastest growing segment of the publishing industry." You get published instantly. You never go 'out of print.' You can publish at any length (short stories, a poem, a 100,000 word novel).

Some of the most provocative ideas Coker put forward had to do with pricing. For example, he suggested that higher prices may encourage piracy: if it's cheap, why go to the trouble of moving a file from one device to another, just download another for cheap? (I will say, in counterpoint, quoting a certain sophomore at UC Berkeley who will remain unnamed in this blog, that "college students never pay for downloading music" ... and if that's so, the "people don't share e-books" trope is probably not far from myth).

But this was really interesting: in a (very small sample size) experiment in which books were offered for whatever a consumer chose to pay -- where free is an option -- 85% didn't pay anything. But. 15% did, and they paid an average of $3.20 (a $3.00 mean for the statisticians out there). When you average out the price paid among those who paid nothing and those who paid something, the figure came to $0.49 per copy distributed. Coker's suggestion: that's not so bad at all if you can get your book read, which is often an author's principal goal ... and it's lucrative as anything if you can get it read widely. His rhetorical question was a little, well, rhetorical, but when he asked who would take $0.49/copy if they could get a million readers pretty much everybody in the room put their hand up.

One of Coker's best soundbytes was this: "An author's enemy is obscurity not piracy." That's worth a second thought.

Smashwords, of course, is not the e-author's only option. Scribd publishes your electronic manuscripts as web pages. Amazon lets you publish for the Kindle. (And there's the print on demand universe too, through avenues like LuLu.com; the ubiquitous Amazon through their subsidiary, CreateSpace -- now incorporating what used to be BookSurge; or another SF Writer's Conference attendee, AuthorSolutions.)

Food for thought.

What's that you say about self-publishing, sonny?

One of the tensions at the SF Writer's Conference featured the many writers attending in order to get a leg up in a traditional publishing track -- agent, NY publisher, $25 hardcover editions, well-oiled distribution machinery, reviews, bestseller lists, reprints -- confronting enthusiastic promoters and enabling vendors of self-publishing opportunities and viral marketing and e-book formats.

Dan Poynter delivered a keynote at the end of the first day of the conference. Likening the changes roiling the publishing industry to a wind that no author can control, he recommended trimming sails as the only viable option. Publishers, he asserted, are running out of money. The business model is broken, and the big houses are too stuck in their ruts to contemplate fundamental changes. Throwing seven figure advances at celebrity authors is nothing more than a series of desperate Hail Mary passes. Independent bookstores are folding, so fewer resources are devoted to pre-publication reviews aimed at their buyers, and there are fewer sales reps servicing them. As independents fade away, so will the practice of returning unsold books back to publishers (an option that encourages independents to risk shelf-space on new & unknown work) -- and thus remaindered books will go the way of the dinosaurs too. As e-books gain traction, there will be no used books either ... and this is a good thing for authors, because they'll get paid for each new reader (e-books, claims Mr. Poynter, don't get passed around the way those old fashioned, germy paper things do ... especially if they're priced low). Something has to change, and since authors can't change publishers' behavior or market tendencies, we ought to change how we conduct ourselves in rapidly shifting conditions.

Okay, Poynter didn't say anything about germy paper. But he was terrifically entertaining, in the mode of a snake-oil salesman ... and he might even be right about the rigidity and vulnerability of the large publishing houses, what do I know? I can say that his talk made me nervous. After all, I was attending the conference to get a leg up in the traditional publishing track.

Mr. Poynter didn't have much good to say about the Six Sisters -- the last publishing conglomerates standing in the current trade publishing market, Bertelsman AG; Simon & Schuster; Hachette Book Group, USA; HarperCollins; Penguin Group; and MacMillain U.S. Poynter said the publishers owned by these conglomerates -- the New York houses -- take too long to bring a book to print, increasingly produce cheaply crafted editions, and keep most of the revenue generated on the backs of content-producing authors.

As for the second of three available options he laid out, vanity presses, Poynter dismissed them as a scam. Okay. I'm with him there.

What's left? Self publishing, says the sage -- especially in electronic formats. Do as Dan Poynter does. Smashwords, a conference sponsor, will take an author's manuscript as an electronic file, convert it to 10, count 'em, ten e-book formats, then permit the author to set whatever price s/he chooses. No fee to publish. Each time someone buys a copy, Smashwords takes a 15% cut if the e-book is sold from their site, more (up to 58%) when the sale is made through a major online retailer, like Amazon. The content creator gets the rest, which is a better deal than any NY house will ever give any author. Publication is more or less instantaneous.

Sounds pretty cool. Of course, there's plenty of fine print, much of it openly acknowledged on the Smashwords site.

Leaving aside e-books (which made up perhaps 2.5% of the market in 2009, according to Smashwords founder Mark Coker in an SFWC session the following day) -- is this self publishing thing viable?

Who knows?

Sticking to the facts, though, we learn from Bowker, the folks who bring you Books In Print, that 275,232 new titles and editions were published in 2008 (a decrease of 3.2% from the prior year). Fiction, I was sad to learn, suffered an 11% drop in new titles published during the same period. On the other hand, "On Demand" and "short-run" books scored 285,394, an increase of 132% over 2007 and 462% over 2006.

Dang.

In the big picture, then, Poynter seems to describe the shifting terrain accurately.

On the other hand, his frame of reference is grounded in the fact that he writes non-fiction, a world in which platform -- the means by which an author reaches a book's audience directly, or DIY promotion -- is almost everything. I write fiction, though, and I'm left wondering how my mileage would vary (though Poynter did make sure to highlight a current reality of publishing, which was echoed by many others at the SFWC: promotion budgets allocated by the NY Houses for fiction are small or rare, and authors are largely expected to promote themselves).

Poynter's 'argument' for the rising wave of e-book consumers was pretty flimsy ... he mentioned at least half a dozen times that he travels 'all the time' and that he 'always' sees people using e-book readers 'wherever he goes.' Well, yeah. Business travelers in big airport hubs, and the next seat over in business class? Duh. The cool new gadget, too much disposable income cohort. I'll freely acknowledge there's a lot of e-book potential on the horizon (e.g., Apple's iPad and the devices that Amazon and Sony will inevitably bring to market to compete with it) ... but I'm not seeing any done deals. To paraphrase a certain 19th century author, perhaps reports of the book's death have been exaggerated.

It's generally accepted wisdom that many excellent manuscripts of all sorts never see the business end of a printing press. There's something random (or lucky) about who makes it over the hurdles to publication, and beyond that which excellent published books find their audience in time to avoid being burned to heat the warehouses that distribute the next crop of contenders (Poynter claimed that's what happens to books returned to publishers when they aren't temporarily revived as remainders ... and it may well be so).

Does that mean that agents, editors, and publishers are failing to provide the 'gating,' the vetting, the quality control that is the core of their value proposition? Are they instead an impediment to information that wants to be free, and stories that want to be read? Are readers really better off choosing from 275,232 books published by publishers rather than 560,626 books published by publishers and authors combined? Is the New York Times Book Review a tyrant in a Grey Lady's disguise?

Hey, I'm always happy to have books recommended to me by readers I know to have tastes that are reasonably congruent with my own -- especially if our differences skew suggestions in directions I might not have pursued in isolation. And I like to browse in bookstores, especially independent stores in which staff recommendations are featured in ways that cut through publisher-paid promotional fog. Those are modes of navigating potential reading material that don't appear to require publishers and editors to narrow my range of choices. Maybe keeping track of what my friends are reading on Goodreads or LibraryThing can and will supercede my reliance on editors and bookshop owners who have steered me well until the socially-networked now.

But I'm certainly not sure enough to tear up my query letters, and neither were most of the authors I spoke with after that Friday evening keynote.

In the end, Poynter sounded to me like a free market ideologue: it's the sales figures, stupid. And, by the way, quantity is a function of well-executed marketing, not some fancy New York editor's concept of quality. Specific examples (especially his own successful self-publication record) is evidence to Poynter that his size fits all.

A little hyperbolic, do you think?

For myself, I'm still partial to wheat from which the chaff has been separated ... at least for now.

(And, yes, I'll try to post more concisely in the future. Still getting my sea legs here...)

Hello World

I just got home from the seventh annual San Francisco Writer's Conference (with plenty to type about ... but this first post will be a short one).

One of the conference's many take-aways was that if you want to get read you have to develop an on-line presence. Yeah, yeah, I've heard it before. I've seen friends like recently-republished novelist Leslie Larson (Breaking out of Bedlam) prodded by a publicist to blog. Another author friend, Kate Raphael, has just begun serializing the first novel in her mystery series, Murder Under the Bridge, in an eponymous Wordpress blog. A friend, colleague, and recently self-published author Quinn Dombrowski, seems to be blogging in several places at once simultaneously, especially about her book, Crescat Graffiti. My brother, David, just self-published his first book (Mastering Your Sales Process) and blogs about it. But somehow, this weekend was my tipping point. So. Here I am...

Why "One Finger Typing"? I picked that name a little over a year ago, when I almost decided to start blogging but didn't. It's the obvious reference -- what's the sound of one hand clapping? -- and I mean it as a reminder to myself. If I'm blogging, I'm not writing fiction ... even if I'm thinking about it ... so the title is a warning that too much time spent here is leaving the "real work" idling.

(P.S. It would be a grave strategic error to post on Valentine's Day, refer to the blogs of three terrific women and a brother, and leave out one's own sweetheart ... Matthew blogs too.)