Too big to blog?

me: I have something I really want to post about but it is too big an issue

It will be a god-damned essay

Trying to think how to space it out across lots of posts

Her: parcel it out? good idea

me: can’t even get my head around the idea though

Can’t organise it

Every time I try and think my way through it I add more – realising it touches on more things

Her: what on earth is the subject?

me: its…well..

its…

=/

Its a continuation and extrapolation of word-count rants

Essentially I think there is something to be said about how much actual plot writers have in a given book, how well they know (or demonstrate they know) their characters and what they actually do with them

I think most books are stupidly plot light

One idea, a vague, stereotypical character and 19 miles of padding

Then you get people who are all about their lore like Tolkien

Tonnes of back-story in his head, not that much actual story

LotR – get ring, walk 200 miles, destroy ring.  Sure we get to see the build of characters – their depths and their friendships – but by christ it is slow.  He keeps wandering off to wax poetic about fields of daises.

The first book is the worst. By his own admissions he had no idea at all what he was doing when he set out but more importantly he clearly had no idea who his characters were.  Not until halfway through book 2 does he get his shit together and start to build plot.  And this being said by someone who adores Tolkien.

Even (say it softly) Banks is bad at it. My holiest of hollies!

He has great (if hateful) characters but he never shows  me who they are; he just tells  me

Constantly uses the device of “X happened putting Y person in mind of Z time gone by when 1,2,3,4 happened)

Used it 3 times in Excession so far and I am only 1/2 way through

And don’t get me wrong, that gimmick has its uses and I blatantly nicked that from him but I just wonder…

I find it WAY more interesting seeing the history

It is why I am writing out Brayan so long hand for book 2 – telling his full story.

I’d rather he had his own book in fact, but running it in real time as counterpoint to current events also works

But people don’t do that

Its just hints and reminders

Her: I like what you do, knowing the characters is better

me: but who does it?  Ever?

And if no one does it does that not tell us something?

Books are so fucking short!  Who has the time?!

They are films now – few hours of mindless entertainment.  You never know the back-story.  Not really at least

Her: just because no one else is doing it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t

me: well…it does in a way

Blindly doing what you want is not always good

Sure people have to break moulds but books are a dying thing anyway

Everyone bitches and moans about it but fact is, so few people really read

Or at least, really read anything worthwhile

Her: but with the shift to e-format the novel can be saved, even if the book in physical form is dead or dying

It’s waiting for the audience to catch up with the technology that’s the problem

me: Possibly

Her: you should copy/paste this chat as your blog post

me: lol

History gets in the way

Facts.  Bloody facts.  Who needs ’em?  They just get in your way.

Hours you spend, carefully crafting plot, artfully designing situations into which you can place your characters and astutely balancing your action scenes for maximum whizz bang.  Your whole scene is planned out and timed perfectly.  Fight scenes tumble along with poise and grace, revelations shock and awe: your high’s sparkle, your lows tug heart strings.

Its great.

“Wait.  What’s this?”

“What?”

“This ship you’ve got them on.”

“I dunno.  ‘s a ship.  They use it to escape.”

“Yeah, but its got 2 sails and a 2nd deck and is steered with a wheel.”

“Right?”

“Ships like that weren’t in use until about the 15th Century. You’ve set this in the 12th Century.”

“Okay…”

“Also, you’ve got them using a compass?”

“Right…?”

“Wrong. ”

“…Bollocks.”

Point is, while writing the 2nd book I am making certain I know what I am talking about.  Much studying has been done regarding New York (specifically Manhattan), the NYPD (fascinating stuff about how wrong most police procedurals are), the tunnel systems of New York (can you guess where book 2 is set yeah? Eh?) and continental drift in and around the Pacific Ocean (what?  Its relevant, I swear!).

Hopefully the same pitfalls I ran into first time round that resulted in me having to rewrite 4 chapters can be avoided, if only because my flashbacks this time are in a period of prehistory that we know nothing about.  That’s the trick you see – write about stuff that is totally made up and no smart-arse can catch you out.

Bloody know-it-alls…

177,781 – Part 2

My first post here touched on an issue that has baffled me for some time now and I’d be interested to hear what others have to say about the matter.

When did books get so damned tiny?

Or at least, when did people start thinking that books were tiny?

As soon as I began the process of writing my book, I started to be assailed by people telling me how I should go about my task.  They badgered me with rules and regulations on what one should and should not do when writing.  Some of this advice was helpful – most of it was not.  But one thing that struck out above the rest was this: people – publishers, readers and writers alike – are obsessed with word count in a book.

“Don’t make your book too long, no one will read it.”

“Don’t make your book too short, it wont be taken seriously.”

“Don’t spend to much time on narrative – people prefer characters.”

“Don’t spend too much time on characters – people prefer narrative.”

As with 99.999% of the advice I was given, all four of those statements are totally incorrect.  As far as I am concerned – and if you think about it, I am certain that you all, writers and readers alike, agree with me – a book should be as long as it needs to be.  You need to take a sensible amount of page-space to tell the story you are trying to tell.  Padding it our with fluff to make it longer can lead to a bored reader who is starting to worry that you have lost your way while truncating your story by missing out narrative, explanations or plot-lines can leave your reader bewildered and thinking that maybe they skipped pages in error.  This is not to say that sections should not be trimmed to remove things that are impeding your flow nor that it is not worth elaborating on important sections so as to increase your readers immersion and enjoyment.  Both of these things are very different from what I am talking about.

The problem is that publishing industry does not agree with this.  They think that books are a standardised thing that should be churned out via a standardised mould.  To be even more annoying, that standard changes depending if this is your first novel or a subsequent one.

Why?!

I can see an amount of logic there if you look into the cost of printing books and consider the risk/reward issue of trying to get a first time author to sell.  A publisher may well like your work and be interested in representing it but they will understandably be twitchy about publishing a half-million word epic.  If, heaven forfend, your masterpiece fails to shift all its copies, the publisher is bound by contract to buy back the unsold copies, thus sending them into debt.  I get that and I can see why the word count of a book is relevant.

My concern is why the industry has settled on such a tiny figure as its “recommended book length”.  Wikipedia has some horrifying figures regarding the length of fiction writing.  40,000+ words, it says, is the length of a novel.  Most publishers will recommend that your novel, especially if it is a first novel, should be around 70 – 100,000 words.  While that is certainly more realistic as I simply could call anything around the 40,000 word mark a “novel”, it is still very, very short as far as I am concerned.

Upon hearing these figures, I took an interest in the matter and began to examine the book collection that myself and my partner have.  Taking rough estimates for word count (no. of pages * lines per page * average words per line) yielded some interesting results.  Of the 500+ books we have, I would estimate that the average word count is something in the region of 150,000 to 220,000, considerably more than is apparently “average”.  Let me be clear too that ours is a not a collection stuffed full of nothing but Tolkien, Tolstoy and Proust and that when I made this estimate I also ignored the vast, groaning weight of words that is my partners historical biographies.  Sure, there are short books in there but they are mostly things like Pratchett and my odd collection of 70’s paperback Sci-Fi (Harry Harrison, E E Doc Smith, T J Bass, James Tiptree Jr. and so on) but these are essentially strings of jokes and sociological observations (Pratchett) or expanded “Tales of the Unexpected” style, single twist books that have nowhere really to go.

What I am looking at is a wall of books from the likes of Banks, Larsson, Stephenson, Bear, May, Zelazny, Novik, Kostova et al.  These are all popular books, often from first time authors, that can still be found now, adorning the shelves of your local Waterstones.  Sure, there is a preponderance of the more fantastical end of the “fiction” section, but these are not tiny, niche books that struggled to see a profit.

So my point is, from where do publishers get their ideals?  Is it the case that they let the books that sell the best – chick-lit, romance, tweenage targeted vampire/wizard/werewolf nonsense – dictate what they think will sell?  Sure, the old Mills & Boon still flies off the shelf at a staggering rate, but can all fiction really be contained within the same boundaries as genres that, with the best will in the world and with full acknowledgement that they sell better than anything I will ever write, have no plot at all?

At the end of the day, word count made me paranoid.  I had a damned good tale to tell but with every 1000 words that I got down, I became more and more frightened.  I began heavily editing my book and drastically changing my style.  This resulted in the Keepers of the Key being written slightly oddly, relying heavily on plot exposition to be expedited by character conversation rather than by a narrator.  I started to shrink everything I was writing, cramming as much as I could into as few words as I could. If truth be told, I actually cut out a number of chapters that could have easily added another 40,000 words and that was before my first, heavy-handed edit that removed a further17,000 words I had already written.  In an ideal world, the Keepers of the Key would have been roughly 250,000 – a length that is apparently considered just ludicrous, but one that would have made the story that much more rich in my opinion.

Assuming a writer knows the difference between interesting writing and waffling for the sake of hearing his own voice, is having more words not a good thing?  I have tried to discuss this with some people and have been surprised by their answers.  I have argued that character development can be great fun in and of itself.  The sections in Look to Windward by Iain banks where its main characters wander off to have fun on a massive cable-car system are without doubt some of my favorite parts of that book.  No plot is moved along and nothing hinges on anything they do or say there: its simply fun to hear them talk.  Others don’t agree, telling me that if it is not moving the plot along, they don’t want to hear about it.  I think these people are just insane.  They make reading sound like a chore, that they just want to march through in a straight line from first to last chapter and not bother with any asides.  How deliriously dull.

So, to restate my point: are books too small and plot light these days?  Have we managed to  refine the art of storytelling so much that it takes up less space or are publishers forcing writers to pander to ever shrinking attention spans?  I personally think its the latter and I will continue to pour scorn on books that are little more than overly elaborate pamphlets but what does anyone else think?

ePublishing – Finally.

So your editing is done.  Well largely.  Ok, as much as its going to be.  You are at the stage were the book looks presentable and it takes a discerning eye to spot the errors that are left.  Moreover, if someone says anything about double spaces, semicolons or speech-marks you will attack them with a stuffed badger.

You are as done as you are going to be.

ePublishing then: what’s that all about then, eh?

Well, your experience and mileage will vary depending on how you go about it and with whom you decide to publish.  I began the process with Amazon as they struck me as being the biggest eBook distributor out there and therefore having the largest possible target audience.  While this is technically true, Amazon have turned out to be very insular and largely unhelpful.  If I had the chance to do this over, I would definitely have gone with smashwords.com right from the start.  Don’t get me wrong, Amazon are not doing anything bad, they are just…unhelpful.

Firstly their conversion tool is archaic and unfriendly.  I’m sorry, but even as someone who is way above the curve in the “tech savvy” department, I find the concept of being handed a command-line document converter to be pretty damned ludicrous.  In the end I went with Mobipocket eBook creator (available here).  Its a reasonably friendly piece of software, although it has way more options than you are ever going to need.

Once you have started to toy with the converter things begin to get tricky.  Amazon offer you no information whatsoever as to how you should format your eBook.  They have nothing to say about copyright pages, legal disclaimers or even good formatting practices.  They will, if we are brutally honest, let you upload any old garbage.  And this is the crux of it.  The shear volume of work released on the Kindle store each and every day boggles the mind and the standard of this work is horrifying.  Amazon, it seems, just don’t care and as a result their Kindle store is a flea market whose wares range from the competent and professional to the ravings of blunt crayon wielding madmen.

Smashwords.com are, however, a very different beast all together.  As well as supplying all would-be publishers with a highly informative guide on how they expect eBooks to be published, they also do the conversion for you.  Their conversion software, affectionately known as “meatgrinder”, takes your uploaded work and, in one automated sweep, converts your book to every format known to man while also creating a sample of your book (the length of which is dictated by you) in each format at the same time.  Once done, it then actively gives you feedback on what you may have done wrong!  It is really quite marvellous and I cannot praise it enough.  Even once you have followed all their advice and gotten your book into a far more respectable state, they are not done helping you.  All books that are submitted and pass basic formatting check are then considered by the staff for inclusion into their “premium catalogue” and if they qualify they are then eligible to be promoted into a much wider market.

Beyond the merely technical aspects, smashwords are also far superior in other ways.  When publishing a book you need an ISBN code that uniquely identifies your product in the market.    To publish to Kindle you do not need one as Amazon use their own system but to publish just about anywhere else, an ISBN is most definitely required.  Trouble is, ISBNs are damned expensive.  You have to buy them in lots of ten from the ISBN Agency for around £110 – money that I imagine most budding writers do not have.

Smashwords however publish in formats for a range of devices from the Kindle to the Kobo to the Nook and so an ISBN is required to publish with them.  Thing is, smashwords will simply GIVE you an ISBN for the asking!  How this works I am utterly unclear.  I have scanned through all their documents regarding the subject and I can find nothing suspicious or underhand about their offer.

To add further frustration, Amazon offer two different grades of royalty schemes – 30% and 70%.  Now, if you are smart, you will realise that book one is not there to make you money, but rather to get your name known.  While making your book chargeable to lift it above the vast slew of freebies out there is a sound idea, you realistically want to charge as little as possible for it, thus encouraging the impulse buyers.  The obvious choice then is to go for the 30% royalties then, right?  Wrong.  Unless you accept the 70% scheme, your book is not eligible for Amazon’s sharing scheme that let’s kindle users “loan” books to their friends for short periods.  So you sign up for the 70% scheme.  Thing is, the minimum price you are allowed to sell at then goes up from 99 cents to about $3.  Sure, $3 is not gonna break anyone’s bank but there is a psychology to things that cost less than a buck – people will just shell out that much more easily for them.  By comparison, smashwords have one royalty rate (a little over 60%) and you can set your minimum price to 99cents – another clear win for them.

So, not all ePublishers are created equal.  I’m not knocking Amazon completely – there is still a certain satisfaction to having your book on a site as prestigious as theirs – but they are too much of a Swiss Army knife.  Smashwords offer a far more focussed and coherent service and dealing with them, for me at least, was just a more pleasant experience.

ePubli…wait! Not yet.

So the next step was ePublishing.  The companies I should have been able to turn to, to market and promote my book were…otherwise engaged, so it was down to me to get my product out there.  Cue: Amazon.

But it is not that simple, is it?  While you may have worked hard – damned hard – on your manuscript, it will not yet have  received a good editing.  No one has sat down and crossed the T’s, dotted the I’s and pointed out that your spell-check is, in fact, quite, quite insane.

Trouble is, editing is job numero uno  for the publisher that takes you on.  They pay an army of little nitpickers to take your beloved work apart, word by word, sifting through each and every page with the mother of all red pens.

Problem is YOU are your publisher now, kiddo, so break out your own red pen.

So I did.  I bought a cheap laser printer and ran out a 2-pages-per-page copy of my book.  Sitting down, red pen in hand, I thought it would be quite nice to see my own work as a reader for once.  It would be enjoyable.  I’m pretty handy with a word processor and I’m already that guy who annoys his friends by correcting their grammar and telling them when they use commas incorrectly.  This will be a breeze!

First run through was a breeze.  I just looked out for the really obvious stuff: problems with speech-marks, extra spaces, duplicate words, capitalisation and so on.  No worries.  The red marks grew at an alarming rate but, well, that’s to be expected, right?  I may know how grammar works but I’m a lousy typist.  It’s all good, right?

Wrong.  To cut a very long story short, I was astonished – nay, appalled – by the sheer volume of errors I found. Mistakes related just to typing must have numbered close to 500 – and those were the ones I managed to find.  It was the other mistakes, the ones you only spotted by slowly and carefully reading and digesting every single word in every single sentence.  You have to grasp each tiny section of the story in its entirety and not only make sure that it makes sense, but that is also makes sense in relation to everything around it.

You see the thing is, as I learned very quickly, it is deeply, deeply difficult to edit your own work.  Not only are you snow-blind to the text as you have done nothing but stare at it for 18 months, but you know what it is supposed to say.  Your brain tricks you, filling in missed words, overlooking swapped words (I swear, form rather than from) and in fact Spackling merrily over huge holes in logic.  It wasn’t until the third full read-through of the book that I realised there were 3 glaring timeline errors buried in here, with characters either doing things impossibly fast or ludicrously slow and it wasn’t until the eighth read-through that I realised I was calling a character by 2 different names!  In the end I stopped, 12 read-throughs later, as I was really quite certain my eyes were going to explode and that I was on the verge of loathing my own characters.

Safe to say that my respect for those who proof-read professionally has gone up exponentially.  The sheer determination and unflinching focus it must take to read through so much text, pulling it apart and making sense of it, staggers my brain.  Even now, now the book has been on sale for some months, I still find errors!  I know that, as books go, mine is not short, but it is not War & Peace either.  How on earth one would go about editing a genuinely massive work (again, looking at you Neal Stephenson) is simply beyond me.

So: did I learn anything?  Hells yes.  The two most important things I have taken on-board as I write the sequel are:

1) Planning is paramount, especially when your plot gets complex or convoluted.  I planned a great deal for the first book but never with enough detail to stop me running fowl of my own attention span.

2) While writing, don’t walk away mid-section or at least, if you have to stop, make notes about where your thoughts are.  Having looked back through the book to see where the worst mistakes were (track changes – gotta love it), I notice that they seem to occur right in the middle of a chapter or a sequence.  My best guess is that I will have stalled or become frustrated and simply got up to do something else, possibly not returning to write for days at a time.  By then, of course, the buzzing cloud of plot ideas and character actions will have quietened and I will have gone on to finish the section differently than I originally planned.

Hopefully this will make a difference when I am at the point of editing the second book but, to be frank, given that this book is looking to be much longer, with more characters and a more complex plot, I cannot say I am that convinced.  I guess we shall see…

So…what’s next?

Well, with the writing done (some time ago if we are brutally honest – editing is quite possibly the most time consuming task the world has ever known – again: more later) what was next?

I foolishly assumed that the hard part was over.  While writing I had kept reading, kept my ear to the ground with what was popular and what was selling and kept a keen eye on what genres and styles had vanished like so mush Scotch Mist.  I thought I was well informed, clued into what the public wanted, ready to sell my work to a publisher safe in the knowledge that I had written something that was fresh, that was relevant, that ticked all the little boxes on their retirement plans.  I was convinced that, given my work was written well enough (Tolkien or Banks I am not – of this I am painfully aware – but I at least know how to use words, how to build sentences, how to create atmosphere and how to define interesting and engaging characters), formatted nicely and neither a million word Neal Stephenson epic (bless him – I’d love to spend 10 minutes in his head – it must be the most fascinating place in the world) nor an over-inflated short story, that I was in with a real chance.

Unfortunately in the few years I had been writing 2 things had happened:

1) eBooks

2) Certain online and high-street stores had taken the legs out from under the publishing industry.

Grasping my freshly printed samples with one hand a huge wedge of self-addressed envelopes in the other, I threw myself into the Writers and Artist’s Yearbook with glee, expecting lively discussion on the merits of my work, a huge wave of rebuttals (either because their ledgers were full, they do not publish work like mine or maybe even ‘cos they found me downright offensive!) and then, eventually, after many tries, maybe a glimmer of interest.

What I actually got was apathy.  Speaking to publishers is entirely akin to trying to have a lively conversation with a co-worker who just got fired and is busily stuffing their personal belongings into a small cardboard box.  My packages were sent back unopened, my carefully chosen (and might I add, cheery and fun) postcards which I dispatched with each manuscript (so that they could bung them in the post, letting me know they had received my work) were “misplaced” and generally all my hard work was casually filed under B1N.

In fact, apathy turned out to be the good response on occasion.  More than once I get a reply from a publisher berating me for even daring to send them my work!

“We don’t deal in such matters here, Mr Howard, and if you had even bothered to read our website, we are certain you would know this.”

Regrettably I am not the kind of person to take stupidity on the chin so I found myself in heated debates with such people, carefully and in painful detail explaining to them that I am not bloody psychic and that if they are going to have ludicrously finickity rules about the types of work they are interested in then it would help if they actually told some bugger about them!

Yes.  Fun.  The upshot was that after sending out to every last publisher in the mighty tome that is the Writers and Artist’s Yearbook who might even have a passing interest in my work (just over 50), I received a grand total of 7 returned postcards, 5 nicely worded rejections (predominantly “sorry, we have too many clients, but good luck to you”), 3 flame-bait emails and 1 utterly heart warming letter from some poor chap down in a forgotten basement of some large publishing corporation who actually took the time to climb out from under the landslide of submissions he was being paid to wade through and say that he loved my work and really wished he could have passed it up the line but that their ledgers were full and they simply would not consider any new authors at this time.

I sent that guy a thank you card.  I like to believe he got it and it made him smile.

18 months well spent then.  So.  Next step: ePublishing!

177,781

177,781.

That’s a lot of words.  A startling amount of words it turns out.  Three times as many words as the average length of an eBook.

I don’t think I will ever stop finding that surprising.

So, a few years ago, I decided to finally try and write out one of the stories I have had in my head for far too long.  Some 20 months worth of writing later (glossing gently over the periods in which I yelled “To hell with this! I cannot write!”) I am done and the book is published on Amazon and now Smashwords.com and I cannot believe how much I have learned about this writing lark.  Most notably that a) I did have enough to write (too much it turns out – we’ll get to that) b) that writing is by far the most difficult, arduous, infuriating and yet mesmerizingly rewarding thing I have ever done and c) that books are apparently a damn site shorter than when I were a lad.

177,781.

I swear its not that much but apparently the industry has changed without me ever noticing.

Anyway, here’s how I did it and what I learned…