How Inequity and Deservingness Propel Readers Through Story

ByJohn Brown

Inequity and deservingness are two of the main factors that keep readers reading. If we want to write killer stories, we need to know how they affect readers. A few years ago I wrote an essay on this and thought it probably too technical for most folks’ taste. But I passed it on to a recent attendee of the killer workshop and he found it helpful. In fact, when he watched Pride & Prejudice shortly after reading the essay, he saw how these factors dramatically affected his rooting interest. So I’m thinking others will find it useful as well. 

In order to understand it you must first read George Saunders’ short story “The Bohemians.” You’ll find it here in The New Yorker, January 19, 2004. It would probably be rated PG for some profanity.

Now if the story doesn’t pull you in, stop reading. Because the essay probably won’t make any sense to you. You’ll only be able to understand it if the story works for you. But if it does, then ask yourself what the main character’s problem was and what drew your interest? Then read my essay, “How Inequity Evokes Reader Interest.”

Please note “The Bohemians” does present a character with a problem, and the story cycle applies, but not in the straight-forward manner it does with most stories. BTW, if you’ve ever read Patrick Rothfuss’s excellent Name of the Wind, you’ll see inequity is what shapes the story there as well. If you haven’t read it, I recommend you give it a go.

I’ll be interested to see your responses to Saunders’ story, my essay, and/or Rothfuss’s novel.

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  • Indie Thoughts: How To Sell Loads of Books

    ByJohn Brown

    From Russell Blake.

    This does not represent the only way to do things, but it’s my way, and is the synthesis of everything I’ve learned over the last 23 months of self-publishing:

    1) Pick one genre that’s popular and with which you are extremely familiar, and then write in that genre. Stick to it. Don’t hop around. It confuses your potential readers and muddies who you are in their minds, and will hurt your sales. If you want to write different genres, use a pseudonym, and if you like, let your readers know that moniker is you. But stick to one name, one genre, because you’re building your brand, and brand building is a function of clarity – clearly communicating what you do, and what your product is.

    2) Write a series. Why? Because readers like series, and you want to give readers what they like. Or you won’t sell as much. You can try stand-alone – I have – but my series outsell my stand-alone books 4 to 1. Once you have at least three books in the series, make the first one free. Earn your income from the rest, but give readers a whole novel to decide whether they like you or not.

    3) Write a lot. By that I mean try to write at least 3 novels a year. Don’t bother with short stories or novellas (40K or under) if you’re writing fiction – erotica, romance and non-fiction reportedly to do better with short form, but I don’t know from personal experience. Write 60-90K installments in your series, and release them AT MINIMUM every four months. Every three months would be better. Every two, better still. Momentum breeds success, and readers have short memories. The current market is a hungry animal, and you need to feed it, or risk being forgotten by the time your next one releases. Sorry. It’s the truth. And don’t start whining about how X famous author only puts out one book every Y years. If you’re Dan Brown and you sell tens of millions of novels each whack, then do whatever the hell you like. If you aren’t, listen up, or chock your strategy up to, “Become the next Dan Brown” and stop reading this drivel.

    . . . .

    5) Allocate time every day to write, and be disciplined. I suggest minimum one hour per day, or 1000 words. I actually ignore that and shoot for 5000-7000 a day when writing a novel, but that’s just my approach, and it’s not for everyone. My point is that you must be disciplined about your writing and develop that muscle. If you don’t make it a habit, you won’t write enough to put out one novel every four months, and you’ll already be way behind the curve.

    6) Allocate time every day to market. I recommend a 75%/25% writing to marketing mix. So spend an hour writing every day, and fifteen-twenty minutes marketing (social media, blogging, interviews, message boards like this). Two hours writing, half hour to forty minutes marketing. And so on.

    . . . .

    13) Price competitively and intelligently. Look at your genre. Where are most books priced? Are you undervaluing/underpricing your work? Price to sell, but don’t go cheap, no matter what Locke or Hocking did years ago. Use low prices occasionally to move product, as promotional pricing. But price your product consistently with the rest of your peers. Over time, you can increase prices, if your product warrants it and your readership is willing to pay it. My advice here is don’t price too low, or too high.

    . . . .

    19) Have realistic goals. Look at what the average person does in their first year, and their second. That’s average. It ain’t pretty. If you want to be different than average in a good way, you need to do something better/different, and you need to make your own luck. Don’t get bummed because you haven’t been an overnight sensation. I sold $300 of novels in November, 2011, after six months of 15 hour days and seven releases. In December, 2011, I released five novels I’d been working on for months, to create a massive Xmas surge. I leaped to $1450. With a dozen books out. That’s not exactly a ton for the big Xmas season. But I continued writing as though my work was in hot demand. And I kept investing in my product, losing money, until it turned the corner and I started making decent money in Jan of 2012.

    20) Book selling is a retail business, and retail businesses are promotions intense. You’re only going to be as good as your last, and next, promotion. Promotions are a necessary fact of life in retail. You have to generate noise – the product won’t do it by itself. There are millions of books out there. Yours are just more books. Figure out how to get some visibility. I won’t advise you on how – there are plenty of ‘experts’ that will charge you $5 for a book on what worked two years ago. Simply put, it’s constantly changing, so you need to experiment and push the envelope, share information with others and stay ahead of the curve. But if you aren’t promoting, you’re stalling. In business you’re either shrinking, or growing. If you aren’t promoting, chances are you aren’t growing.

    There are 28 tips in all at “How to Sell Loads of Books.”

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  • Who Will Play in The eBook Supply Chain?

    ByJohn Brown

    I was reading this Konrath post by Barry Eisler on the “Attack of the self-publishing memes” in which he argues that there isn’t an inherent conflict of interest for agents to also help authors epub their books. This got me thinking about the steps (tasks) in the current supply chain, who was going to provide them, and where the biggest value lay.

    Here’s the process right now as I understand it from manuscript to reader. The numbers are only task identifiers and don’t represent sequential order in every case, although I did try to sort them that way.

    PAPER CHANNEL TASKS THROUGH BRICK & MORTAR OUTLETS

    SELL MANUSCRIPT TO PUBLISHER
    1. Promote manuscript to editor at publisher
    2. Negotiate contract with publisher

    EDIT MANUSCRIPT
    3. Story edit manuscript
    4. Revise for story edits
    5. Copy edit manuscript
    6. Revise for copy edits

    PREPARE BOOK
    7. Create cover design and art (a marketing/advertising function)
    8. Obtain ISBN
    9. Typeset book
    10. Print book

    MARKET BOOK TO WHOLESALERS, RETAILERS, AND LIBRARIES
    11. Establish book selling hierarchy (lead book, second lead, etc.)
    12. Obtain reviews from trade publications, newspapers, websites, authors, etc.
    13. Create sales catalog and other sales documents
    14. Contact book buyers and promote books (calls, visits, conferences, etc.)
    15. Take orders

    DISTRIBUTE BOOK
    16. Ship to retail outlets and wholesalers
    17. Warehouse book
    18. Process reader purchases & returns

    PROMOTE BOOK TO TARGET AUDIENCE
    19. Publicity, including free copies
    20. Advertising
    21. Co-op display purchases

    SELF-PUB EBOOK AND POD PAPER CHANNEL TASKS

    EDIT MANUSCRIPT
    1. Story edit manuscript
    2. Revise for story edits
    3. Copy edit manuscript
    4. Revise for copy edits

    PREPARE BOOK
    5. Create cover design and art (which you could lump under marketing)
    6. Obtain ISBN
    7. Format book for ereaders and POD services (CreateSpace etc.)

    DISTRIBUTE BOOK
    8. Upload book to retail and library outlets
    9. Warehouse the bytes
    10. Process reader purchases & returns

    MARKET BOOK TO LIBRARIES AND TARGET AUDIENCE
    11. Obtaining reviews from trade publications, newspapers, websites, authors, etc.
    12. Publicity, including free copies
    13. Advertising, including website display etc.

    AUDIO BOOK CHANNEL TASKS
    There are actually two channels here–physical audio books (CDs) and downloads (Audible, etc.).

    I would assume the physical audio would follow the marketing, distributing, and promoting aspects of the paper channel tasks and add in the audio production tasks. Downloadable audio would follow the marketing of the ebooks and add in the audio production tasks.

    THOUGHTS
    I’m sure I’m missing some key steps somewhere. Somebody please supply them if you see gaps.

    As for the future, here’s what I see. The paper channel tasks aren’t going to change much. Nor do I think the people performing the various tasks will either. For example, I just don’t think POD machines are going to catch on in stores and wipe out distributors. They may take out printers (#10) of trade and mass market paperbacks. But I haven’t seen a POD machine that can do hardbacks. Maybe the PODs will move to the retail outlets. But I don’t think so. Somebody disabuse me of the notion.

    However, I do think there will be some interesting developments in the ebook/POD channel.

    Right now a lot of authors are spending time performing tasks 6, 7, and 8. Some literary agencies are wanting to charge 15% forever for those steps with maybe a little cover design. But tasks 6-8 are the tasks that require the least amount of skill and will soon be automated.

    Formatting for ebooks now is like coding html was for webpages 10 years ago–people in the code spending hours tweaking crap. Right now it takes you about a day to learn how to format a novel for the various ebook readers. Once you know how to do it, you’ll spend a day, maybe two, formatting your novel and uploading it. Or you can pay someone else to do it–any responsible teenager will do.

    But within the next year I predict an application coming (if it’s not already here) that will hook into Word and other programs that will make the labor obsolete. Creating a Kindle document will be like creating a PDF document in Word today—you just click Save.

    Uploading could be automated as well across various sites with some application. But it’s fairly easy now.

    So for which tasks are these ebook distributors wanting to charge 15% forever? Obtaining an ISBN?

    I don’t even think they even do that.

    Amazon and the other ebook retailers have a lock on 9 & 10. It would be incredibly hard to dislodge those gorillas. So I think the place where literary agencies and others who want to play in the indie ebook/POD supply chain are going to flourish is in the other tasks that require the most skills–editing, cover art, and marketing, which I’ve marked in blue.

    Authors interested in the indie ebook/POD channel are going to want service providers who can deliver great editing, cover art, and marketing. They’re going to want folks who can help them sell into traditional domestic and foreign paper distribution channels. They’re going to want folks who can help them sell rights to other buyers–audio, film, etc.  And they’re going to want help with their contracts.

    If I were an agency, graphic artist, editor, intellectual rights lawyer, or some other entrepreneur trying to serve indie ebook/POD authors, that’s where I’d spend my time.

    Dystel & Goodrich literary agency recently announced they would do something like this . . . almost.

    Over the past months and years we’ve come to the realization that e-publishing is yet another area in which we can be of service to our clients as literary agents. From authors who want to have their work available once the physical edition has gone out of print and the rights have reverted, to those whose books we believe in and feel passionately about but couldn’t sell—oftentimes, after approaching 20 or more houses—we realized that part of our job as agents in this new publishing milieu is to facilitate these works being made available as e-books and through POD and other editions.

    Right now, you’re thinking, oh, DGLM is going to be another of those agencies that has decided to become an e-publisher and charge clients whose books they can’t sell 50% of their income for the privilege of uploading their work. Some of you may be mumbling, “Uh…that’s a conflict of interest.” We get it and we understand how that can be the perception. However, we have no intention of becoming e-publishers. As we said above, we have too much respect for the work that publishers do and too much respect for the work we ourselves do to muddy the waters in such a way.

    Again, what we are going to do is to facilitate e-publishing for those of our clients who decide that they want to go this route, after consultation and strategizing about whether they should try traditional publishing first or perhaps simply set aside the current book and move on to the next. We will charge a 15% commission for our services in helping them project manage everything from choosing a cover artist to working with a copyeditor to uploading their work. We will continue to negotiate all agreements that may ensue as a result of e-publishing, try to place subsidiary rights where applicable, collect monies and review statements to make sure the author is being paid. In short, we will continue to be agents and do the myriad things that agents do.

    Our intention is to keep on trying to find books we think we can sell to traditional publishing houses, to negotiate the best deal (always), and to give our authors as many options as we can. Because we will continue to be commission-based, we will not be automatically pushing authors into e-publishing. Again, we want to give our authors options and empower them to do what they set out to do all along: have their work read by the largest possible audience

    However, from what I understand they’re not offering to perform the necessary tasks for 15% forever, only the project management of the tasks. Which means the author will still be paying for the editing and cover art and marketing.

    15% forever for project management (a list of to-do’s in this case) and a service provider contact list? Where the author still pays for the editing, cover design and art, and marketing?

    Ummmmm, no.

    Others like D&G will pop up. But the ones that indie authors will eventually go to will be those that deliver on the high-skill tasks for reasonable rates.  Those will be the ones playing in the ebook supply chain of the future.

    Many authors will contract the tasks separately themselves.  But a lot of authors won’t want to do that. They’ll want a one-stop-shop. Or one that does most of it. Some of those one-stop-shops will charge an upfront fee and will probably accept anyone who can pay. Others will make most of their money on a % of the sales to readers and libraries, footing the initial costs of the tasks, and will only work with clients they think will pay out, which if you think about it isn’t really an idie (self-pub) model at all. That’s the space traditional publishers play in right now.

    But in the ebook/POD world distribution is no longer a key barrier to entry for new competitors. And so I expect to see a whole bunch of new publishers coming to play in that space. Those that select, edit, and market well will flourish.

    Meanwhile, I don’t think most of us authors care which road we take and who we play with. Well, as long as they play nice and don’t poop in the sandbox. We just want to get our stories in to the hands of massive numbers of delighted readers.

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  • On writing lesson 5 is up

    ByJohn Brown

    In lesson 5, I share insights on creativity that elude many who start down the path of writing. Not knowing them can cause a lot of frustration and convince writers to quit. Don’t be frustrated. You’re going to learn:

    • What creativity really is
    • How it actually works
    • What it requires
    • And two of the main tools that will help you practice it–hunting zing and creative Q&A

    Here it is: Lesson 5: How do you get and develop ideas?

    Enjoy!

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  • Lessons 2-4 on writing now available

    ByJohn Brown

    I’ve added 3 more writing lessons to help you learn:

    • The fundamental parts of story
    • Story structure
    • Plots
    • How suspense works
    • What makes characters interesting
    • How to see and sensitize yourself to how a story works its magic
    • The core driver of your story
    • And more

    Find them on the menu or link to them here.

    Lesson 2: How in the world does that work?

    Lesson 3: Learning to see

    Lesson 4: More cause and effect

    Enjoy!

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  • I hate mission statements, but…

    ByJohn Brown
    Stephen R. Covey (or is it Lex Luthor?)
    Stephen R. Covey (or is it Lex Luthor?)

    First of all, if I could look like Stephen R. Covey does in that picture, I would shave my head and never look back. Holy moly, I love that picture. But that’s not why I’m writing.

    James Maxey is a writer who I respect and whose comments on the boards of Codex Writers often make me think or laugh. He recently started a thread about writing mission statements.

    Ack!

    I groaned when I first read the title of his topic. I know first-hand how useful goals are. I know how vital it is to identify what’s vital in any endeavor. Heck, I’m a Covey-lover through and through.

    But every mission statement I’ve seen has either been useless corporate toilet paper (because they’re printed on stuff that’s too stiff and rigid to be of any help in the bathroom) or it’s a personal artifact that has a six week half life, after which it turns into something like that singing fish you bought and can’t for the life of you figure out why or where to put it now that you realize you could have eaten a steak for just as much money and the pleasure would have lasted longer.

    And yet consciously thinking about how you want to live is so powerful. I think the corporate world ruined the term for me. I cannot bring myself to write a “mission statement.” I know what I want to do in my various roles in life. I know how I want to live. But I cannot use that label. Alas.

    So here’s my “what I want to do” as far as writing is concerned. It’s not crisp and clean. And if I had to write it again, it would come out differently. But it has the gist.

    —-

    I want to make people fall in love like I did when I first watched the Sound of Music–that sweet, pure yearning. And when they’re out of love, I want them to see a way back.

    Every once in a while I want the ground to shift under the feet of my readers like it shifted under mine when I first watched Les Miserables with Anthony Perkin.

    I want them to laugh.

    I want to give them the wonder and adventure that was given me when I read the Hobbit.

    I want them, at least once, to shout in triumph.

    I want to share my delight in people who are fascinating, flawed, salt-of-the-earth, odd, funny, strong or a hundred other wonderful things, but who show some courage, a little or a lot.

    I want readers to weep at the hope of redemption. I want them to despair at loss.

    I want the sun to shine. I want the world to crack.

    And when my readers are done, when the book’s closed and they sit back, I want the story and people to linger, I want my readers to want to go back. I want them to feel it was, not only a surge of living, but a good thing to have once been lost in the pages of my book.

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4 Comments

  1. John, I haven’t had a chance to finish reading Bohemians, and I haven’t read the inequity article, but I have to say that I must be missing the boat on Name of the Wind. I just don’t understand why this book is praised so heavily. It’s probably just not my kind of book. I haven’t finished it, yet, but I’m having trouble getting to the ending, and my wife assures me that nothing happens in the rest of the book.

    The writing is superb. The characters are good, but the plot is so plodding that I have put it down twice already, and may not pick it up again. I have 200 more pages to go. I think that if I were reading this one piece at a time, perhaps as serial fiction on the Internets, I would like it more, as it seems very episodic.

    In the end, perhaps it’s that for me there’s no real big question, such as: will he save the world? Will he get the girl? None of that. The only real question there seems to be is: why is Kvothe so famous? Just not compelling enough for me. Since that question is so broad, the spine of the book is lacking. The plot is all over the place. There’s a little story here, another there. Very nice, and tells me about Kvothe, but I’m just bored. There doesn’t seem to be any progression towards the resolution of an over-arching conflict. I guess for me the spine is weak.

    Anyway, I just had to say that to someone.

  2. I don’t think you should feel you’re missing the boat. You’re just not in the audience for that tale. Nobody is ever in the audience for everything that gets published or even most of what gets published. I can pull 10 books off the shelves that folks rave about and can only hope that 2 or 3 pull me in. The best thing I can do at times like that is figure out what was lacking for me and let it guide my writing. AND tell myself that my stuff won’t be universally liked either and not expect it to be.

    It’s true the book does have a weird structure. I felt the book ended on about page 600 or so, because that’s when the main plot question resolved for me. The last part was a weird tack on. Mildly interesting, but had nothing to do with the main story line. Rothfuss wrote it as one big honking two gazillion page thing and tried to break it up. But I did like everything else that went before. Enjoyed it immensely. The scene where he did his master performance in the tavern/music hall–holy cow, he was plucking MY strings there.

    Still, I think it’s always counter productive to feel you should like a specific work. Then it becomes medicinal. And who wants to read for that reason?

  3. Only two years late, but whatev. I came here from the SFWA website.

    I went and read the Bohemians, and am partway through your essay, but I thought I’d let you know my thoughts about the story before reading the essay. I feel like the problem that drives me in theis story is the helpless feeling of being a kid, and especially a kid in a less than ideal situation. Your parents and other authorities can do whatever they want to you, you don’t know what’s real and what’s not, you’re mean because you don’t know how not to be mean. The end of the story offers some resolution to the problem: the characters learn a real truth (Mrs. H is not what she seems), and an inhuman monster (Mrs. P) turns out to be something different as well. They gain in sympathy and self-determination. It’s not that anything really great happens to them, but that they take some steps out of the hell of childhood and into maturity.

    As for the Name of the Wind, I don’t remember being bothered by the “early ending”. What really kept me reading was the question of how Kvothe went from being that boy to being that man. I think framing the tale as he did was a masterful move on Rothfuss’s part. The “three silences” at the beginning are so intriguing that they carry us clear through the book. Also Bast is very interesting. Anyway. I will read the sequel just as soon as my husband releases his death-grip on it. 😉

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