My short story "Martin's Pond" published as an e-book

In spring 2003, the literary magazine Five Fingers Review published my short story, "Martin's Pond," in the lit mag's issue #20. It was a themed issue, titled Gardens in the Urban Jungle. You can still find back issues of FFR in some public libraries -- San Francisco and New York, among the few I'm aware of; and if you dig through Amazon you can find a scatter of copies available for sale. For the most part, though, "Martin's Pond" went out of print and became unavailable after its short sojourn on the lit mag shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores.

I list "Martin's Pond" among publishing credits on my website, but for a long while it hasn't seemed right that interested visitors had no easy way to find and read out of print work included there.

Problem solved:

As of late last week, "Martin's Pond" is available on the e-book publishing platform Smashwords. It's free, and you can read it on a Kindle, an iPad, a Nook, a Sony Reader, a Kobo eReader, or on your Windows or Macintosh computer. You can open it in a web browser, or obtain and print a PDF.

And so on ... Smashwords makes it very easy: an author supplies a single file and the platform's software does the rest. Writers: check it out.

My short story -- 4400 words, about 10-1/2 printed pages as it appeared in Five Fingers Review -- describes a young man, Martin, who likes to spend time by himself at a remote pond near a small city in Northern California. Martin isn't the sharpest knife in the block; he works as a restaurant dishwasher; and his family is less than fully intact. Martin's solitude beside 'his' pond is a refuge. He's therefore pretty unhappy when he discovers that -- after six years of having the place to himself -- a stranger has begun to swim there. When she doesn't go away on her own Martin devises one plan after another to encourage her to move along. One plan after another fails. They aren't the best laid plans. Eventually ... well, you'll see when you read the story.


I invite you to download a free copy of "Martin's Pond" for yourself. When you do, I strongly encourage you to sign up for a (free) account on Smashwords so you can leave a review that will help other visitors decide whether to read it themselves. Alternately, I hope you'll leave a comment here on One Finger Typing.

Enjoy!

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

De-occupying the web equals general strike?

So many people have written about what went dark on the web and why yesterday, you'd think there'd be nothing left to say. Well I'm going to give it a shot.

First the sound-byte version of the context of yesterday's blackout, taken from Wikipedia, perhaps the most visible and important site that participated in (led, really) the action:

Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge

For over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.

Google's TakeAction page posted yesterday -- titled "End Piracy, Not Liberty" -- gives a slightly more contextualized explanation of what it was all about ... this is the page that came up on 18 January (yesterday) if you clicked on the blacked-out Google logo on the search engine's U.S. home page:

Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA.

The Senate will begin voting on January 24th. Please let them know how you feel. [...]

Both of these sites gave visitors an easy path to express their opposition to PIPA and SOPA: a petition to sign in Google's case, and a quick link to contact your representatives in the House and Senate in the case of Wikipedia. What fascinated me most about this was the huge range of individuals in my Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ circles who posted in support of the blackout: from the most libertarian Republicans I know (yes, I do know more than a few), to the anarchist lefties.

So that's all great, and you probably heard all about it already. I hope you signed Google's petition or someone else's, and found your way to your Congressperson and Senators' in-box ... if you haven't, it's not too late. Yes, I contacted my legislators, and was interested to see that Senator Diane Feinstein's "E-Mail Me" page was down in the morning, so I had to come back for a second visit last night. Heavy traffic, you might imagine...

But here's a sampling of the 'little stuff' you might not have noticed unless you are one of the web's bazillions of content providers beyond Wikipedia. You know, if you tweet, blog, tumbl, share photos or video, and so on.

• Tumblr made it easy to black out one's own Tumblr blog for the day (see image)
• Flickr made it easy to black out one's own photo stream -- to darken as many photos as one might want
• Wordpress made it possible either to decorate one's blog with a "Stop Censorship" ribbon, or to blackout one's blog from 8am to 8pm ET

Were there other ways for individual content providers to participate in the content blackout organized to protest SOPA and PIPA? Oh yes, indeed. Check out Mashable.com's These Websites Are Going Dark... article of 17 Jan for detail. Did the blackout have any effect? Check out this from the NY Times article In Fight Over Piracy Bills, New Economy Rises Against Old:

When the powerful world of old media mobilized to win passage of an online antipiracy bill, it marshaled the reliable giants of K Street — the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Recording Industry Association of America and, of course, the motion picture lobby, with its new chairman, former Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat and an insider’s insider.

Yet on Wednesday this formidable old guard was forced to make way for the new as Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts and cascading criticism, sending an unmistakable message to lawmakers grappling with new media issues: Don’t mess with the Internet.

As a result, the legislative battle over two once-obscure bills to combat the piracy of American movies, music, books and writing on the World Wide Web may prove to be a turning point for the way business is done in Washington. It represented a moment when the new economy rose up against the old.

So this all gets me to thinking:

Wikipedia serves community-generated content, and is one of the most visited sites on the intertubes.

Tumblr, Flickr, Wordpress -- ditto, in a much more distributed, everybody-says-their-own-piece kind of a way. And these sites get a lot of eyeballs too, day in and day out.

So what we had yesterday was a political action that was, in some very significant venues, enabled by technology companies that are big and staffed and funded and organized to fight for its own self-interest ............... but that was realized by the individual writers, photographers, and videographers who pulled their contributions for the duration of the action.

That, methinks, looks a lot like a general strike.

Somebody calls a general strike. Unions and other organizations may help to make it easier by providing food, signs, organized pickets, and so forth ... but it's the people who walk off the job who make it happen.

What was proven yesterday was that an online general strike can have real political effect in the highest levels of government. Again, from the same NY Times article quoted above:

First, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising Republican star, took to Facebook, one of the vehicles for promoting opposition, to renounce a bill he had co-sponsored. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who leads the G.O.P.’s Senate campaign efforts, used Facebook to urge his colleagues to slow the bill down. Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina and a Tea Party favorite, announced his opposition on Twitter, which was already boiling over with anti-#SOPA and #PIPA fever.

Then trickle turned to flood — adding Senators Mark Kirk of Illinois and Roy Blunt of Missouri, and Representatives Lee Terry of Nebraska and Ben Quayle of Arizona. At least 10 senators and nearly twice that many House members announced their opposition.

That's pretty interesting, wouldn't you say? Seems there are a fair few people who are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore.



What next?




Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Rescuing freedom from U.S. government predation
The Occupy Movement and UC Berkeley's Free Speech Monument
Bioneers and Occupy Wall Street

Is blogging a lot like academia?

Last week, a SUNY professor I am happy to know posted a link on Facebook to a clip from the 2009 movie Leaves of Grass, in which Edward Norton plays the roles of twin brothers. As IMDB has it, "An Ivy League professor is lured back to his Oklahoma hometown, where his twin brother, a small-time pot grower, has concocted a scheme to take down a local drug lord." The NY Times called the movie "a straight-twin/stoned-twin story."

The clip nails academia in a mere forty seconds:



But ... isn't what Edward-Norton-as-Brady-Kincaid describes also a lot like blogging?

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.

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?

Graffiti

A new graffito recently appeared on the unisex bathroom wall at one of my favorite cafés in Berkeley, Café Milano, just across the street from Sproul Plaza: "Life is short. Spend it making history."

I keep half an eye on graffiti on the campus and in cafés ... it's a way to track a certain segment of the zeitgeist. I find it amusing, aggravating, fascinating, or just plain dumb. Depending.

My friend and University of Chicago colleague, Quinn Dombrowski, has a much more regular and rigorous habit. She has photographed nearly 1500 pieces of graffiti from U Chicago alone; and has also conducted foraging expeditions to Brown University (930 photos), the University of Colorado (262), Arizona State University (507), and UC Berkeley (142).

Legacy readers of One Finger Typing will recall that Quinn's book, Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur: Confessions of the University of Chicago, was an element of my early post Forays into self-publishing. Crescat Graffiti... is available on Amazon; and, as I mentioned some months back, generated a nice portfolio of media attention, from a Chicago Tonight TV appearance to the Wall Street Journal, to Der Spiegel.

Quinn's latest project in this vein is to analyze graffiti at the five schools she has sampled to categorize them topically and rate their "interestingness." Her methodology was unveiled on 28 November, and while one can take issue with metrics and methods at least Quinn is explaining what she's up to. The first (and "least interesting") school analyzed on her blog is Arizona State; Colorado's graffiti came up for review on Friday; and Berkeley is next. Quinn is "publishing the data from least interesting to most interesting, to end the year on a good note." As an alumnus and employee I am obliged to be disappointed that Berkeley didn't percolate to the top of Quinn's analysis -- but, hey, it's her rubric and she does have her own loyalties....

I will say that there's something about "interestingness" as Quinn measures it that doesn't capture dimensions of what I think makes some graffiti zingy and sweet. I didn't ask how she'd score "Life is short. Spend it making history." But I don't think it would earn as many points under her scoring system as graffiti that referenced or quoted "high culture" (you know, the kind of stuff university students are supposed to espouse), or even pop culture. The thing about the graffito in Café Milano is that it's not so much derivative as prescriptive, in a joyful, engaged, activist sort of way. Seeing it warmed this grizzled rabble-rouser's heart.

When I searched for "Life is short. Spend it making history." I didn't find an original source. Anybody out there recognize it as a quote? By whom, and in what book or song or film or revolutionary screed?

Check out Quinn's collection, and the analysis on her blog. I'd be interested to hear what kind of graffiti makes your heart skip a beat. Tell me in the comments?

Crowd-sourcing editorial feedback: a novel approach

Rafael Lima is an author, screenwriter, and lecturer at University of Miami in Ohio. He's been selling a draft of his novel-in-progress on Amazon for $0.99 (as an e-book for the Kindle) in order to "crowd-source" responses that he has been using to refine his manuscript. Lima's novel ploy for soliciting editorial suggestions on his novel manuscript came to my attention last week via Jennifer Howard's blog in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a post titled Finding an Editor -- or Lots of Them -- in the Crowd.

According to Ms. Howard's post, "Having watched the shrinking of the publishing industry and the dwindling of old-school editors, Lima didn’t like the odds of getting much creative help with the book if he went the traditional route. He uploaded a draft of the book to Amazon’s Kindle store as a 99-cent download and invited readers to tell him what they liked and what they didn’t."

I've had twenty or so readers of my own current novel project, Consequence, a dozen of whom have read the full mss. in one or more of its incarnations. Their feedback has been beyond helpful, it's been essential to refining my manuscript. Some have given big-picture feedback (this character is superfluous; that chapter sticks out like a sore thumb; the core plot is terrific but that sub-plot needs to be yanked; are you nuts? -- etc.). Others focus on the small stuff (word choice, the verity of a line of dialog, even the fine points of punctuation).

Much more often than not, a reader's suggestions help me out ... sometimes in ways they didn't necessarily intend. One reader, for example, told me that Consequence gave her nightmares. I jumped for joy! Not because I'm mean, but because her experience told me that my characters were real. They got under her skin.

But the art of interpreting readers' feedback is often complicated. In general, I'd guesstimate there's about a 15-30% chance, depending on the draft and the pool of readers in play, that if two people comment on the same aspect of my mss., their opinions will diverge. Now, don't get me wrong! Even that divergence is valuable. It's an essential reminder that I have ultimate responsibility for filtering feedback and measuring it against my own intention and craft. While my readers often lead me to see a sentence, scene, or chapter in a new and improvable way, sometimes a reader's opinion is, well, idiosyncratic. Sometimes, for example, readers fixate on exactness in rendering of place that is not so important to my story, or in rendering an obscure historical event -- to the detriment of drama that is better supported by a sprinkling of poetic license. Sometimes they want me to write a different book than the one I'm writing.

Making the most of my readers' feedback takes time and attention. And I do want to make the most of it, especially considering the hours and effort I know that each of them has so generously given to responding to my work-in-progress.

Rafael Lima, who not only solicits feedback from Kindle readers of his $0.99 draft but also from the students he teaches in the School of Communication at University of Miami, receives feedback from all angles. His mss. for Screenwriter hit "number 27 on the Kindle Store’s list of most-downloaded paid-for titles," Lima says (it has since come down several orders of magnitude, but, hey, life is flux). So when I read in Ms. Howard's post that Lima says of his experience, "There’s all these pluses, and I have found no minuses in the experience at all" I've got to wonder: how does he do it?

It sounds straightforward the way Lima explained the process to Jennifer Howard -- opinions that pop up frequently are the ones he pays attention to -- but I have a hard time imagining tracking and filtering dozens or hundreds of converging and diverging opinions coming at me from all sides. Three or four or five at a time is about as many as I can productively juggle.

I'm curious what other writers think. Is crowd-sourced editing something that would help you refine your novel? Would it distract? Confuse? Clarify?

Meditations on blogging

Seventy-five. It's not really so round a number, but it's not square either. This is my 75th blog post. It's not the 100th, and I'm only 2/3 of the way to my blog's first birthday. So I'll try not to draw too many insupportable conclusions on this fraction of an occasion.

Still.

Here's a bit of what I wrote in that first, Hello World post to One Finger Typing on the day I came home from the San Francisco Writer's Conference: 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. [...] But somehow, this weekend was my tipping point. So. Here I am...

Energized by the conference, I was convinced that "you have to develop" ought to begin right away, so I might have a backlist, as it were, by the time one of the Six Sisters started doing handsprings over my novel manuscript. I still have a bit of time, I think, on those handsprings. But the backlist is coming along. And it turns out that posting a couple blogs a week has yielded some unexpected benefits.

Some costs too.

The major cost is obvious. It takes time to blog. Lots of time. Lots and lots of time in my case, because I'm the kind of person who revises everything, even e-mail. So there's the madly typed idea; then letting it percolate a bit; then maybe jotting down a few bullets to organize my thoughts; then the draft; then the revision; then the second revision in the course of which I wonder whether I really believe what I wrote; and then the two or three or six passes to get the sentences right. I don't always get the sentences right. Some might say that I don't always get my thoughts organized either. Anyway, another reason it takes lots and lots of time because I do go on. I mean, yeah, sometimes I can slip a quick one by whatever part of my brain is forever bolted into the "bloviate" position, but mostly my blogs run long (this month so far: 1544, 861, and 985 words before today, and 1119 today).

But, from the perspective of someone whose writing activity and interest revolves around fiction, here are some pretty nifty benefits:

Deadlines. Okay, I didn't see that coming, not as a benefit ... but in retrospect -- duh! I took eight years to give up on my first fully-developed novel manuscript (220K words, four or five file boxes of notes and drafts in the back of a closet). It's been fewer than that many years actively drafting and editing Consequence, a far slimmer manuscript, but not so very dramatically fewer. Let's just say Consequence has taken more than a year to write. More than three. More than ... well, let's just say never mind the strict accounting. In any case, writing a novel takes orders of magnitude more time, and involves a whole lot more meandering around and tweaking and fiddling and razing and remodeling than a person has time for if the goal is to post two coherent pieces of eight or twelve hundred words every week. Pumping out the volume means that self-imposed blog deadlines sometimes feel like they're crowding out my fiction time. Except that they're not. In fact, what's happening is that I'm getting a lot better, and a lot faster, at editing chapters. Why? Probably a few reasons, but one of them has to be that it's hard to get too attached to your words when you're letting them go every few days. As I put it to a writer friend this past weekend, blogging has hardened me so that it's a whole lot easier to dump the words that aren't working in my fiction. Just pick up the red pen and .... don't worry! There's more where those came from. I demonstrate that twice a week, on blogspot.com.

Multiple tracks. For a writer of fiction, this one really shouldn't be understated. I've known for a long time that there's value in switching focus: I work part-time, usually splitting my days, so that my morning's work (writing fiction) refreshes my focus and freshness for my afternoon's work (playing Professional Geek at a local university), and vice versa. Augmented by caffeine, this arrangement is a great way to stoke the workaholic fires. And, it turns out, writing blog prose is a great way to refocus in a third direction, one that has a whole different feel from writing and editing fiction manuscripts. Even better? More often than not, blogging is an excuse to work out ideas that are substrates of my fiction. How sweet is that?

Readers. Thank you readers! It's a fine thing when somebody reads your words. It's even finer when they leave comments, as I've explained in posts past. I've had a bit of work published in that old timey, pre-digital way -- that was pretty fabulous, and I'm looking forward to more. But this on-line business let's you see right away that people are paying attention, through tools like Google Analytics and Feedburner, and the comments people do leave on your blog, and retweets, and Likes on Facebook. Nice!

It wouldn't be a truly genuine One Finger Typing blog post if I didn't go off on a bit of a tangent. Today's tangent is lifted from Mark Sample's blog of a couple weeks back in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The topic on 27 September was A Rubric for Evaluating Student Blogs. What do you think of this scale ProfHacker and others use to "quickly and fairly evaluate blog posts"?

---

4 - Exceptional. The blog post is focused and coherently integrates examples with explanations or analysis. The post demonstrates awareness of its own limitations or implications, and it considers multiple perspectives when appropriate. The entry reflects in-depth engagement with the topic.

3 - Satisfactory. The blog post is reasonably focused, and explanations or analysis are mostly based on examples or other evidence. Fewer connections are made between ideas, and though new insights are offered, they are not fully developed. The post reflects moderate engagement with the topic.

2 - Underdeveloped. The blog post is mostly description or summary, without consideration of alternative perspectives, and few connections are made between ideas. The post reflects passing engagement with the topic.

1 - Limited. The blog post is unfocused, or simply rehashes previous comments, and displays no evidence of [...] engagement with the topic.

0 - No Credit. The blog post is missing or consists of one or two disconnected sentences.

---

So -- setting aside what all this bloviating does for me -- how do you think I'm doing?

Safeguarding cloud ephemera Part II: keeping your blog alive

Last week I wrote about the vastness of the information universe and how unlikely it is that most, let alone all of it, will last.

To recap from last week: Artist, poet, and longtime friend Leah Korican commented on a recent post with this suggestion:

"Here's something I wondered about that you might write about...the longevity of these blog posts and other internet publishing. In other words is it important that they are preserved? Do you print them out and save them? What is their lifespan? Will they still be around in 10 years or 50? I have printed email and saved it occasionally but wonder if all the digital stuff will vanish."

This week I'll take a look at a smaller problem Leah asked about: the longevity of blog posts.

Getting Practical: Preserving Your Own Blog Posts

So leaving aside the grandiose questions for a moment, let's suppose you post to one or more blogs and don't want to lose what you write. A reasonable and reasonably common desire? Okay, then. There are a few problems to think about and address:

1. If your current blog platform goes away, how can you migrate your stuff to a new blog platform? I'll write mainly about Blogger and Wordpress in this post.
2. How can you preserve blog posts in more general formats, to have a reusable record (digital or otherwise) of the work you did creating them?
3. Who's going to care after you're dead?

Technology folderol aside, if you're blogging you know that the effort and the value in the exercise is in the posts you write, including the research that undergirds your posts; the synthesis, often in the form of hyperlinks, that points to sources of your research; and your brilliantly crafted prose.

That you rely on, say, Goggle's Blogger, or Wordpress.com, or TypePad as the venue by which to publish your work is really secondary to the effort you put into blogging. If you have downloaded Wordpress or Movable Type software to run yourself, as part of your own website, these are infrastructural efforts you have taken on in order to publish your blogging work, but are not the work itself.

To protect your blogging investment -- as opposed to your blog publishing investment -- you'll want to be able to easily save the blogs you create in a format that (1) won't disappear; and (2) can survive disruptions your to publishing platform (from platform failure to your change of heart about which you wish to use)

You don't want to lose your hard work, and you want to be able to keep it available on the internet.

1. Migrating between blogging platforms

Whatever platform you use to publish your blog, a key consideration is whether and how you can get your stuff -- the blogs you've researched, written, linked, tagged, illustrated, and decorated -- and upon which your bazillions of faithful readers have extensively commented -- off the original publishing platform and onto another, if you choose to or need to.

I'm going to talk about how this works with Goggle's Blogger or Wordpress.com because those are two widely used and popular platforms, and I know more about them than I know about others. The same ideas apply to any other platform, and you'll want to look into ability to export your blogs -- and what you can do with the export files once you've got them on your hot little disk -- no matter what platform you use. Ideally, you'll know something about how this works before you make a decision to invest a lot of blogging time on a platform ... because you're going to have to live with the consequences of your choice. Try before your buy.

The short story for Blogger and Wordpress is this:

• Either of these platforms permits export of your blogs in a fairly complete way, including the text, links, tags, embedded images, and comments
• Wordpress software can import a blog exported from Blogger, directly and without special tweaking or processing
• It's possible to migrate to Blogger from Wordpress, but this isn't as easy as the other way around

To export or import a Blogger blog to/from "Blogger export file" format, follow the instructions on the Blogger help site. The export file is a structured data document in XML format, but that's probably not important to you. The point is that you can take data exported in this format and either (a) create (or re-create) a Blogger blog with it; or (b) create a Wordpress blog with it. (Presumably you can create a Movable Type or TypePad blog from a Blogger export file too, but I haven't tried this so caveat emptor.)

To export your blog from Wordpress.com, follow instructions on the Wordpress Export support page. With the export file -- also an XML file in what Wordpress calls "WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR" -- you can create another Wordpress blog, either on Wordpress.com or on an installation of Wordpress software that you manage. If you want to migrate your blog content from a Wordpress platform to Blogger, you can try out the WordPress2Blogger web service as explained in this article ... I haven't tried this, so I can't say whether or how well it works.

Wordpress.com claims to make it simple to import a blog you have created on Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Typepad, Posterous, Vox, and Yahoo! 360 -- in theory, you "Simply log into your WordPress.com blog dashboard, then go to Tools -> Import, choose your previous platform and follow the instructions presented." I can tell you from personal experience that import to Wordpress.com from a Blogger export file is a snap. Works like a charm, just as advertised.

Remember that just because you exported posts from your blog once doesn't mean later blog posts are saved! Export as often as you need to in order to maintain a safe, portable, reasonably current copy of your work. Back up your back up files, storing them someplace safe; or, better yet, store them in several someplaces!


2. Keeping stable copies safe

Moving between blogging platforms may not be enough to satisfy. You might also want to save your work in some usable, accessible, shareable format that's independent of whether or not blogging platforms exist. Maybe you'll want to do something else with your magnificent material next year, or ten or twenty years into the future. Technologies die, as I wrote last week.

There are a number of strategies you can take to preserve your blog's content.

One idea is to create your blogs using an independent tool, saving the created content independent of your blog's publishing platform, and copying it to the platform when you're ready to publish. For example, you could create your blog using a word processing program, or with Google Docs, then do the old copy-paste. If you use a word processing program on your own machine, you know how to save files, and your backups can include digital copies stored on multiple devices or disks and stored in multiple safe places; and/or printed copies, also stored in multiple safe places. More copies and safer places leads to better likelihood that you won't lose your stuff. If you use Google Docs, you can save copies of the cloud-stored files (on Google's servers) to your own disks, DVDs, flash drives, etc., in a variety of formats, such as HTML, OpenOffice, PDF, RTF, Text, or Word. Of these, HTML, text, and RTF are probably the safest (longest lasting, most independent of particular software tools). Plain text doesn't let you keep any formatting.

An ongoing way to export your blog is to e-mail it to yourself. Then you can use the same methods you use to assure that your e-mail is backed up (you do back up your e-mail, right?) to back up your blog's content. Blogger allows you, as the blog owner, to choose a small number of addresses to which each post will be e-mailed as they are published; to do this, go to your blog's Settings | Email & Mobile page and type in the e-mail address(es) to which you want the posts sent (as I write this post, Blogger's help page on this is more-or-less correct, but the illustration is a little bit out of date). Wordpress.com enables Blog Subscriptions that permit people (including yourself) to receive e-mail copies of blogs as they are published.

(What if your e-mail itself is "in the cloud" -- i.e., if you use Gmail or Microsoft Live? You might consider setting up a local e-mail client that downloads your remotely-stored e-mail to your local computer. I use Thunderbird myself, which is an open-source e-mail client from the Mozilla Foundation, the folks who make Firefox. You'll have to open/use the client to effect the downloads. Make sure you're downloading full e-mails, and test that it's working as expected by disconnecting your machine from the internet and making sure your mail is still available. You'll want to back up the local e-mail files, of course.)

And there's always paper. Paper has a better track record than digital media for long-term preservation (in large part because we humans invented paper a long time ago, digital media not so much). The downside? It's more tedious to reuse and revise paper copies of your work. You have to scan it into digital format, losing content and/or format in the conversion; or retype from scratch; or -- imagine! -- transcribe it with ancient twentieth-century instruments, like ball point pens. Still, that's easier than resurrecting something you wrote years before from wetware (a.k.a. your natural memory), at least for most of us.

Whatever way you save your blog posts, backup matters. For your digital copies -- whether in blog export format, e-mail, word processing formats, etc. -- be sure you take the same kinds of precautions with the data that you would with any other file(s) you hope to keep beyond the life of your current computer's hardware. Back it up. Save it in a safe place, on a device that you will be able to read into the future. When technology changes, it's your responsibility to move data to a format or device that the new technology can read. If you delay this chore, it can become onerous or impossible, as my experience converting a pile of near-obsolete 5.25" floppy diskettes showed me earlier this year. There are no magical solutions to this problem ... letting a "cloud" provider safeguard your data works until it doesn't; and that nifty floppy / CD / DVD / Zip disk / external hard disk / flash drive will become obsolete in two or five or ten or fifteen years. Bank on it.


3. But ... will my work be immortal?

You can do your best to preserve the things you research, write, and link -- and the comments people make about them -- but that's no guarantee of immortality, or even continued existence for a few human generations. Publishing your work in a format someone else (like a librarian) is likely to archive, and having it widely read is your best bet, because it spreads the task of saving your stuff to a broader set of people who care -- a situation many aspire to, but few achieve.

Even so...

Libraries fail. Unsold books are pulped every day. Boxes saved in the attic might last a few years or fifty or a hundred before whoever has custody of them loses interest or loses track.

With respect to archiving blogs -- as Leah put it, "is it important that they are preserved?" -- I suppose the best way to answer that question is with another: important to whom?

I ended Part I of this series with a nod to George Harrison's All Things Must Pass. How about a little T.S. Eliot today, from the opening of the second of his Four Quartets, "East Coker":

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

(This post is the second in a two-part series. The first, Safeguarding cloud ephemera Part I: the big picture, was published on 2 September 2010.)


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Breaking technology: Google's Blogger outageMoving one's life to the cloud
Safeguarding cloud ephemera Part I: the big picture

Forays into self-publishing

Getting back to non-traditional routes from author to a vast and happy sea of readers...

I mentioned in my initial post that some of my author friends & family are actively pursuing self-publication. As I think about what they're up to, I naturally filter it through a 'will it work for me?' lens. Here's what each of three self-realizing authors are up to:

Kate Raphael is writing a series of mystery novels set in Palestine: the Palestine Mystery series. Kate gave me the opportunity to read the first of these, Murder Under the Bridge, in manuscript form in the summer of 2008, and since then has taken it through further full edits, worked with an agent for a time, and submitted the mss. directly to a couple of small presses. Well into writing the second novel in her series, Kate became discouraged and impatient with her lack of progress through the usual channels. I've known Kate as a political activist for many years, and I assure you she is not the type to sit idly and wait for the world to catch up with her. A couple of months ago she let me know she was thinking of serializing her novel on-line ... and now she has begun. You can check it out on her Wordpress blog (the latest chapter posted shows up top; to start at the beginning, use the "Chapters" drop-down selector on the right side of the page). I thought Murder Under the Bridge was an engaging evocation of a complicated place (the West Bank) when I read the earlier draft, and the plot was intricate and twisty in compelling ways ... but Kate has since sharpened it up even further. I'm having a great time reading it again. And the serialization thing is terrific. What worked for Charles Dickens in the mid-19th century is still a great way to lure readers through a story that tends to end chapters with cliffhangers. Kate is doing some great self-promotion, soliciting reviews where her natural audiences are likely to see them, hooking up with webzines like SynchChaos who have indicated they'll happily publish an excerpt pointing to the 'live' serialization, and using her platform as a longtime blogger on (mostly) political topics to draw readers to her fiction. Meantime, she is busily working on that next novel in her series, and is no longer being distracted by the time-consuming business of finding agents & publishers.

Quinn Dombrowski is one of the most savvy acrobats in social-media space that I've had the privilege to know. Quinn and I met as colleagues in an ongoing, multi-institutional technology project to support arts and humanities scholarship, and watching her work has been an ongoing lesson in social media. Quinn has her own website; 40,000+ photographs on Flickr.com; and a thoroughly entertaining blog called Women, Snakes, and Stalkers in which she deals with the fact that she can't read Indo-Iranian languages by publishing freely-associated interpretations of cover art from the Indo-Iranian section of University of Chicago's Regenstein library. Then there's the book, self-published through LuLu.com. Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur documents -- in photographs, transcriptions, and translations -- graffiti in public study areas in that same, main library at UoC. Quinn blogs about that too. You can preview Crescat Graffiti on Google books and find it in a couple of Hyde Park bookstores. Like just about everything else that's for sale, you can buy it on Amazon. As evidence of her media skills, I invite you to peruse her list of citations on the Crescat Graffiti website, which include articles in a half-dozen print and on-line local publications, and blog posts from the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. Quinn even got slashdotted, which for a geek approximates a cross between going to heaven and winning a MacArthur Prize, only harsher and without the big fat check. I've heard rumor of even more impressive publicity in the works, but won't spoil the surprise. The point is, it's clearly possible to get terrific attention for a self-published project ... Quinn has run out her own stock of books (which she also sells directly from her website) a couple of times I'm aware of, but the good news there is that LuLu will print as many more copies as she likes. That's the joy of print-on-demand.

David Masover is my brother. He beat me to monograph publication by going the non-fiction route and, like Quinn, electing to self-publish. His Mastering Your Sales Process debuted last month, and you can find it on Amazon, where reviewers are giving it 4.7 stars (as of this post's timestamp). David blogs about his book and the framework of sales techniques on which it is built, and has two more books in the hopper that will form a series. He has amassed an extensive collection of blurbs, and is making an impressive dent in social-media space, promoting himself through Squidoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. A couple of weeks ago he started running a promotion allowing folks to read 30% of the book for free, confident that the material will sell itself.

These are three authors I know personally who are taking publication by the horns. There are no end of success stories elsewhere, self-publication that nets huge readerships, but the fact that these are friends and family compels my particular attention to the question of whether one or another of these strategies is right for me. First reaction? Heck no! But I will admit that a big part of my visceral response has to do with what it "costs" to produce a novel-length manuscript in the world I inhabit. I'm not Stephen King, or Steve Berry. This Steve takes multiple years to complete a mss., not mere months.

Of the three examples given above, Kate will probably have the hardest time recruiting the number of readers appropriate to her publication category ... which has nothing to do with the quality or intrinsic interestingness of her work. It's just tough to stand out from the crowd of fiction authors. We generally don't have much in the way of platforms to stand on, not until an author morphs into a brand (like King, or Berry, or Danielle Steele, or Nora Roberts). One of the key advantages of publishing fiction with a major house is that a novel gains a certain weight simply by passing the "gating" process (agent, editor, publisher). This functions for fiction authors the way "platform" -- visibility among a community likely to take an interest in one's work -- functions for writers of non-fiction. Quinn, for example, has a natural platform among the many students, faculty, staff, and alumni of the University of Chicago; David has a natural platform among the salespeople he works with, trains, and advises through the business-oriented social media forums in which he participates.

Kate will undoubtedly be helped in her arc as a novelist by the fact that she's writing a mystery series, and she's setting her series in a place and culture that is both poorly-understood and of current interest to many western readers. She'll bring the audience built for Murder Under the Bridge forward as new books in the Palestine Mystery series emerge. Still: a tough row to hoe.

If my new novel manuscript is a compelling read (and those who have seen it in manuscript thought so) I'm not ready to launch it short of diligent effort to find the publisher, promotion, and review it can earn. To get a leg up on a platform, I'm aiming to get the mss. onto the right desk. If a key reason for my attachment to a 'traditional' publishing venue is that my next project will take years, not months, before it is complete, there's also a certain safety to taking this path -- a fallback position. Any decision to stick to finding an agent now doesn't preclude my own foray into self-publishing somewhere down the road. I can change my mind if the mss. fails to find that right desk, or if the editor sitting behind it is crabby and hung over when it rises to the top of her to-read list.

What do you think? Are certain types of work better suited to self-publication than others? Certain genres of fiction? Is there a self-published book that rocked your world, and if there is, what drew you to it?

(P.S. If you happen to have the June 8-15, 2009 issue of the New Yorker at hand, open it to page 46. If not, imagine an author sitting across a desk from his agent. She's trying to buck him up. He's looking worried. "Great news!" the agent exclaims. "Your novel is in a medium-size pile in the middle of the floor about four feet from the left side of Oprah's assistant's desk." Now laugh. Bitterly.)

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...)