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JB Speculates: eBooks, Book Contracts, Agents, and Libraries

ByJohn Brown

I’ve looked in the crystal ball I hide under my desk and caught a glimpse of what ebooks will change in the next few years. Specifically I saw what will happen to:

  • Book Contracts
  • Literary Agents
  • eBook Aggregators and Libraries

After showing me the vision, the ball thanked me for shopping at Walmart. Weird.

PRINT ONLY CONTRACTS

The only reason to have a print publisher is to get distribution you cannot obtain on your own, or to get it more cheaply than it would cost you if you tried to get it on your own. That’s it. Now, it’s true publishers have excellent art departments and story editors. But you can contract out cover art, copy editing, formatting, and even story editing yourself.

Distribution is the main thing publishers offer that you can’t get anywhere else.

BTW, when I’m talking about distribution, I’m talking mostly about getting the books out to places people can see and purchase them. For example, publishers can get your book into hundreds or thousands of books stores all at the same time–Barnes & Noble, Hastings, Walmart, Costco, indie book stores, airport book stores, grocery stores, drug stores, etc. Publishers can get you display in those stores so consumers see your book. One form of that are the racks and new book displays. Another is one that Scholastic does so well, i.e. displaying and selling titles in tens of thousands of classrooms with its book catalogs. A single author just can’t do that. 

It’s also true publishers can convince some platform venues, that would never look at a self-pubbed author, to spotlight your book.  For example, it’s unlikely a self-published author will be able to convince Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, which have huge platform for library book purchasers, to review a book.  But publishers have no problem getting their stuff in there. Likewise, it’s often much easier for publishers to get endorsements from other authors or people with platform than it is for a single author.  Of course, there are so many places that have some kind of platform, that publishers don’t have a lock on them all, e.g. Goodreads and Amazon reader reviews.  But for the sake of simplicity, let’s just look at the distribution end.  

Because 90% of book sales are still hardcopy, the only way to have HUGE sales numbers, right now, is through a print publisher. I’m talking about the numbers you see in the Publishers Weekly top selling books, where you have to sell at least 100k copies in hard back, 500k copies in mass market, to even make the list.

Publisher’s lock on this ability will erode. We can see signs of this in the USA Today Top 150 already. I consider this to be the most accurate picture of what truly is selling the most. Here’s why. And ebooks are starting to be the best selling format for a number of books. On that list, they add up sales of a title in all formats and then list the best-selling format. So when you see an (E) at the end of the listing, you know it’s selling more ebooks than any other format. E’s are starting to pop up all over and we’re still in the early adopter stage for ebooks and ereaders.

So what does this mean?

If I put on my author business slacks (why does it always have to be hats we change?), I’d be crazy to turn down a publisher that wanted to offer me monster distribution. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. You offer me $500k now, I’m taking the money and running all the way to the bank and then the $6.99 Indian all-you-can-eat buffet.

Of course, I’m not likely to get that kind of an offer. We new writers are more likely to get an offer for, what were Hines’ numbers? $6k – $12k? And for that the publisher will want all our ebook rights and will tie them up for years and years and years. And then they’ll try to give us a fraction of what we could get selling directly. Furthermore, they don’t provide such books the same push to garner platform spotlight. They don’t spend the money to give them the prime display in bookstores. This means the difference between what they bring to the table for us smaller authors and what we can do on our own is much less. And the ebook has narrowed that even further.

How much further? Well, how many books would you have to sell to make that advance of $6k – $12k? If you’re selling your books for $2.99 for the Kindle, you get about $2.00 a book. That means you’d have to sell 3k-6k copies of an ebook to earn as much as that average advance. 

Do you think you can sell 3k – 6k copies of an ebook at $2.99?

Some authors will be able to do this. Some won’t. If you wanted to do that in three years, you’d have to sell about 150-350 books per month. For a more in depth comparison between traditional publishing and self-publshing ebooks, see Dean Smith’s blog on cash flow.  

Maybe you don’t think you can make those numbers. But maybe you can. The point is that if you think you can, then you can make as much on your own as you can with a publisher. This means there is absolutely no financial reason on earth to take the publisher’s deal. None. Now, if you have non-financial reasons, that’s another thing, but when looking at dollars and cents, it’s fairly clear the publisher’s ability to put you into their distribution channels isn’t worth what it will cost you. Especially since the ebook is forever and may keep selling for years to come AND because the market for ebooks is still in the early adopter phase–it’s only going to grow massively over these next years.

But this doesn’t mean paper publishing is dead. It’s not. Nor will it be for some time. Just because SOME authors can make as much in the ebook market on their own as they can with a publisher through their distribution channels doesn’t mean all of them can. Furthermore, publishers with distribution have something to offer even those who successfully publish ebooks themselves.

Let’s say you have an ebook series that starts to sell well for you, 1,000 per month. That’s $2k per month, $24k per year. If a publisher wanted to buy the rights to that from me, they would have to pay me MORE than $70k as an advance. MORE. Because I can make that on my own in three years selling it myself. In fact, since ebooks are forever, I have to look at the present value of all of those years of sales. That income stream is going to be a LOT MORE than $70k, even if we think sales will taper off after five or six years.

How many big publishers are going to want to pay that?

Probably none. Or, at least, I suspect those deals will be few and far between. But there is money to be made in paper, even if that market is shrinking. There will be some smaller publishers who, for the right price, will offer paper distribution. And if they can get me distribution that I couldn’t get myself for paper, or do it at a lower cost, then I’d want to sell them paper rights. Why not?

And so what I see in the crystal ball are some authors, the ones who do well selling ebooks, being able to sign contracts with publishers that sell paper rights only. I know the big publishers probably won’t go for that in the near term, but smaller publishers will see the value and step up to the plate.

AGENTS

What about agents? Are they going to die?

I think if we remember that literary agents are SALES agents, then their future becomes clear. The only reason to get a sales agent is because doing so makes my property worth more (same reason for getting a publisher, btw). If, by letting them focus on sales and letting me focus on getting more product out the door, I make more money than I would if I tried to do BOTH the selling and the producing, then I want an agent.

I want to sell as many rights as I can to as many people as possible–gaming, film, audio, foreign, merchandise, etc. I’d be a fool to say, well, no, I’ve got this little ebook gig going. I’m not going to sell any of these many other rights to anybody. No, I’m just going to let them sit in my basket and earn me nothing. Let them go to waste.

!?

A good agent should be able to sell more than I could on my own because they have a better ability to reach AND close editors AND other people that are in the market for purchasing rights to my property. They’ll also allow me to sell more because all the time I would have spent selling, I can now use to create more product. So not only do I have more books, and therefore rights, to sell, I can hopefully sell them for a better price and terms than I could on my own.

I’d be a fool not to increase my revenue. I’d be a fool not to have a good agent.

So as long as there are people who want to purchase these non-ebook rights, and an agent can make a sale I couldn’t or can make it for less than what it would cost me to do it on my own, then agents will be useful. Because of this, because we’ll always have more than ebook rights to sell, I don’t see a role for good agents ever going away.

EBOOK AGGREGATORS & LIBRARIES

When more and more people begin reading ebooks what happens to the libraries?

Ebooks cost less. So a lower price per book would simply allow libraries to purchase more books and expand the collection. But wait, they don’t need rooms and rooms to hold all the paper. You can store the world’s library in one computer room. Shoot, this means that housing the collection on a server instead of on the shelves would cost less. This would allow for an even bigger collection. But why maintain a server and manage your own collection if you can network to the collection down the road?

In fact, what if there were a mega service with millions of titles you could subscribe to? That would be even cheaper. Then you wouldn’t have to pay book purchasing agents or IT folks to keep your server running.

Enter the ebook aggregators–the Netflixes of ebooks (I know somebody somewhere is working on this business plan; is it you?)

I’m betting the whole library system goes national. I’m betting you’ll have some government aggregators, but they’ll probably be dwarfed by the private companies. You’d subscribe to the aggregator’s service just as you do Netflix today and many university libraries currently subscribe to electronic periodical collections.

The aggregators will probably charge users as Netflix does for a certain number of books checked out at the same time. If a large entity like a library wanted to subscribe, I bet the aggregator would charge access to the collection based on number of users at the library. The library would pass some of that fee onto patrons. The rest of the fee would be paid by the community’s tax dollars, just as those tax dollars pay for the current collections. You might even have device manufacturers coupling subscriptions with purchase of the product as incentives to buy their devices.

When the aggregators step in, we suddenly end up with a different mix of distribution channels that will coexist:

  1. Author –> ebook retailer (Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, etc.) –> reader
  2. Author –> subscription aggregator –> reader
  3. Author –> subscription aggregator –> public and school libraries –> reader
  4. Author –> publisher –> subscription aggregator –> then option 2 or 3 above
  5. Author –> publisher –> current distribution channels

Surprised by #5? Well, the current distribution channels are not going away until every book can be read on an ereader and everyone who reads has and wants to read on such a device. That’s going to take some time, if it happens at all.

Why would readers buy individual titles ala distribution channel 1 above? Some people just want to own. Other readers will be happy to purchase the books because they don’t want to wait for a checkout slot to open up, e.g. I already have my allotted number of books checked out and I really want this one on hand all the time because it’s Suzie’s favorite. Other readers will want to customize a book with highlights, margin notes, links, etc. just as many of us like to mark up paper texts. We’ll need our own copy for that. Still, I think the bulk of reading will move to the subscriptions. For example, right now I purchase DVDs I love, even though I can get them from Netflix. But the number of DVD’s I own are a fraction of those I watch. Most TV and film I watch once and it goes back to Netflix until I want to see it again. And this checking out becomes even easier where there’s nothing physical to send through the mail.

Please note: there will probably be some form of gatekeeping with the aggregators. I doubt they will carry every scrap of anything ever written. They’ll carry a lot of stuff, but not every written word. Furthermore, when you have hundreds of thousands of titles, you’ll need mechanisms for helping your subscribers find great content suited to their tastes. A lot of “people who read this read that,” review services, etc.–the next generation of Netflix recommendations, Goodreads reviews, and Pandora like tools. 

Aggregators won’t be the only gatekeepers, however. The key is in getting notice. And there will be many places with platform that will be able to shine a spotlight on a book. Think about all the places you find out about movies today—radio movie programs, TV movie reviews, Rotten Tomatoes, Newspaper Reviews, Yahoo viewer and critic review summaries, Kids-in-mind, and on and on. Look at all the ways you find music. There will be just as many ways to find books.

As far as paying authors, I suspect aggregators will pay authors each time a book is checked out, or, if it’s a must-have name author, they will pay to list the title plus a per use payment.

So that’s the future I saw in my strange little ball. Feel free to comment or add your own thoughts.

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  • Gandhi & Waiting for Superman

    ByJohn Brown

    Enthralling History

    The miracle of Netflix means that no movie or television show becomes unavailable. And there are so many produced over the last fifty years that are so very good. I recently re-watched the 1982 Gandhi with my family and have to say it is one of those fabulous movies that’s amazing every time I watch it. Not once did the production feel dated. And even though I’d already seen it, I found myself enthralled with the events and the character played so well by Ben Kingsley. No wonder it won eight Academy Awards.

    The movie portrays the last 50 years of Mahatma Gandhi’s life. It starts in 1893, when Gandhi, educated in the UK, is thrown off a South African train for being an Indian and traveling in a first class compartment. Gandhi decides to start a non-violent protest campaign for the rights of all Indians in South Africa. Quite an undertaking in those years. He’s arrested and finds himself in a number of dicey moments, but ultimately brings change.

    Gandhi is then invited back to India, where he is considered a national hero. Leaders there urge him to take up the fight for India’s independence from the British Empire. Gandhi agrees and mounts a non-violent campaign of unprecedented scale. Nothing of this magnitude has ever happened in the recorded history of the world. Which is why it’s a rough road all the way to the end.

    There’s suspense and humor and heartbreak in this movie. But it goes far beyond entertainment. This movie will move you. It has power to change. This movie is what history should be. If you haven’t seen Gandhi, or haven’t seen it in a while, let me recommend you get it this week and sit down with friends or family to enjoy a wonderful experience.

    Education and Teachers Unions

    I find it interesting that teachers in Utah, one of the most conservative states in the union, send almost three million dollars each year to the National Education Association. That’s the $165 in NEA dues for each of the roughly 18,000 union members in Utah. This is interesting because the NEA, the largest labor union in the United States, is one of the biggest supporters of the Democratic party.

    For example, the NEA spends roughly 85-90% of its direct candidate donations on Democrats. The NEA is quick to point out that those direct candidate donations do not come out of the three million Utah teachers send to them, but from additional donations to one of their political action committees. It’s illegal, in fact, to contribute directly to candidates with money received from union dues. However, there are a lot of other ways to support candidates and causes in addition to direct donations. 

    Mike Antonucci, a teacher’s union observer, explains just how that works in his article “How Much Does the NEA Spend on Politics”. The upshot is that the NEA can spend as much as they want on politics with their dues. And the lion’s share of that spending goes toward liberal causes. ACORN, for example, has been a beneficiary of NEA grants.

    Now, I don’t see anything wrong with that. People should be able to donate to whatever cause they think is important. The NEA has just as much right to make their voice heard as anyone else. I just think it’s interesting that so many conservatives have been led to donate their cash to these causes. And it’s not just in Utah. About 60% of NEA members identify themselves as conservative or independent. And yet they donate to these liberal causes via the union. What’s even more ironic is that most of them probably do not personally donate anything close to that to conservative candidates and causes. It’s not like teachers have tons of extra cash.

    It’s a neat trick to get conservatives to donate so much money to liberals. And perhaps some teachers feel it’s the price they have to pay for the services they want from the union. I would think it would be better to start another union, but that’s me. However, this is not the only kink teachers unions have introduced into the education system.

    I’m not going to argue that teachers unions are evil. These unions arose in a time when female teachers were heavily discriminated against. They do some good things. But mixed in with the good is, well, you’ll have decide for yourself if it smells.

    A great place to begin is with the documentary Waiting for Superman. You should know this movie came out of the gate with a huge strike against it in my mind–it’s produced by Davis Guggenheim, the same guy who did An Inconvenient Truth. Good grief, that’s all I wanted was another two hours of Chicken Little running around saying “sky is falling, the sky is falling!”

    But I didn’t find any of that in the film. For example, the film doesn’t say all American schools are awful. It doesn’t say teachers are terrible. Contrary to what the movie’s critics claim, including the NEA and its many state and local affiliates, the film doesn’t suggest charter schools or standardized testing are the silver bullet answers to our issues. I simply didn’t encounter the sensational propaganda others claimed would be there.

    No. What the film does is examine some of the issues in our current system, which put so many children at a disadvantage, and the role the teacher unions play. It does not, as some critics claim, go on to suggest any solutions. It presents a problem, experienced by real parents and children right now, then poses a question: what can be done?

    I found it eye-opening and thought-provoking. I think it’s a must-see. If you have children or grandchildren in school, if you’re one of our many fine teachers or school administrators, you’ll want to watch this movie and then ask yourself that same question. What can be done? What works? What’s best for the children? And does the current way our unions operate work in any way against those interests? For those who elect not to go into immediate union-attack or union-defense mode, I think this film will introduce some valuable points to the discussion about education.

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  • Flaming Gorge, Ticket to Ride, Thai Evergreen

    ByJohn Brown

    I want to tell you about a river that is emerald green, clear enough to see the rocks on the bottom sixteen feet below as well as the trout, and provides a wonderful family getaway. I’m talking about the Green River just below the Flaming Gorge dam in north-eastern Utah. 

    Yes, that picture’s of the Green River. Yes, it’s that beautiful and that clear in the calmer parts, of which there are many.

    We just ran the seven mile stretch that starts just below the dam and goes down to the Little Hole campground with our four girls (ages 6 – 15) and had a ball. During our trip we saw otters swimming  up the river not more than six feet from our raft, a herd of mountain sheep off the side of the road, fish and more fish, a snake a long as a man with a light silvery skin mottled with black rectangles, and two osprey (one that dove under the water to get a fish and a second flying about twelve feet over our raft with a fish in its clutches). We ran some class II rapids. This time of year they weren’t scary to me, but provided plenty of thrills and stress for the kids. The water was warm enough to swim in, but cold enough to give you a shock. And it was so CLEAR.  Of course, there were spots too deep to see the bottom. But there were plenty where you could see the river plants, rocks, and aquatic life. And all of it in that emerald hue.

    The girls were in the water inbetween every set of rapids. We packed a cooler and so stopped a number of times. Once to check out a waterfall, another time to snack, another to play on a sandbar, yet another to chase those otters, a bathroom break (outhouses provided by the park service), another time to swim.  

    The Flaming Gorge area features the beautiful landscape seen in Southern Utah–red rock, pines, junipers. People come from all over to run the river and fish. We didn’t fish this time, but there were plenty of anglers who had rented boats. Still, it didn’t feel crowded at all. There were long stretches where we had the gorge to ourselves. Next time I think I’m going to bring a book (in a waterproof ziplocok) and we’ll spend a little more time on one of our stops to sit and relax.

    Some tips:

    • Bring a cooler. You’ll want to put in along the river and enjoy the gorge. There’s no hurry to finish.
    • Bring good water shoes that have a sole with traction and netting to keep gravel out. (I got a pair at Wal-Mart that made the whole ride wonderful.) Also bring a hat and sunscreen. If you wear a cotten tee-shirt and quick drying shorts you’ll enjoy the ride even more.
    • We stayed at the Flaming Gorge Resort the night before our run. It’s been around a while and the condos showed it, but it wasn’t bad. The condos had a kitchen. And the restaurant had large servings of good food.
    • You might also want to bring a way to transport the raft inflated. We put ours on top of the minivan and had no problem taking it to and from the rental shop. However, I wished I had learned the trucker’s knot. The knots I tied cinched up into nasty snags that proved very difficult to untie.
    • Bring two vehicles or a bicycle. The businesses there charge close to $50 to shuttle your car the 9+ miles between the launch below the dam and Little Hole. That was outrageous to me. Next time we’ll bring a bike, lock it up by Little Hole, and have one of us bike back for the car. Or you can park half way inbetween at Dutch John after you’ve launched your raft and make the hour walk down. Of course, if you’re an early riser, the rental shop in Dutch John offers a $20 shuttle from Little Hole to the Dam, but only at 8:30 AM and 9:30 AM.

    *

    While in Provo this year for the Freedom Festival I purchased Ticket to Ride (European version). I wanted to do more than walk around or swim at the pool with the family. It was an excellent purchase and recommendation from the folks at Games People Play in the Orem mall. Of course, the kid at the store had played everything in the store and knew just where to steer us. It only took a few minutes to figure out how to play and everyone from the 6 year old to both Nellie and I had fun. It’s so fun we’ve played it a number of times since we got back.

    *

    Both Nellie and I learned to love Indonesian food during the years we spent in the Netherlands. Alas, not many Indonesian restaurants around. In search of something similar while living the in the San Francisco area, we found Thai food.

    Ah, that dream within a dream.

    And now we found yet another Thai restaurant in Utah with excellent food. So good my two oldest daughters get cravings to go back. The first is Thai Evergreen in Orem, Utah. It looks like a family owned operation and is. And their food is delicious. Four family’s went while at this year’s Freedom Festival, which meant we ordered quite a variety of food. Everything I tasted was delicious.

    The next is Kamin in Logan, UT. Again, wonderful. Nellie and I have eaten there a number of times and never leave unsatisfied.

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    The average American reads 17 books per year

    ByJohn Brown

    Americans and Reading

    The Pew Research Center has just published their findings on reading in America. It’s called “The Rise of E-reading“. There’s a LOT of fascinating information in the report. Here’s a taste:

    1. Americans 18 and older read on average 17 books each year. 19% say they don’t read any books at all. Only 5% say they read more than 50.
    2. Fewer Americans are reading books now than in 1978.
    3. 64% of respondents said they find the books they read from recommendations from family members, friends, or co-workers.
    4. The average reader of e-books read 24 books (the mean number) in the past 12 months; the average non-e-book consumer read an average of 15.

    Building an Audience

    I also want to recommend this week’s post by Kris Rusch on Audience. She has a number of interesting things to say about the dream of being a best seller and building an audience. The money quote comes as she refers to a post by Tracy Hickman:

    “The point here is that you do not have to feel as though you are in competition with the entire world. You don’t NEED the entire world to be a successful writer. What you need is an audience—just enough of an audience, mind you—who reads your words, is changed by them and wants to come back for more.”

    An audience. More importantly, an audience that reads and “is changed by” your words. Not an audience who loves them, not even an audience who likes them. An audience who is changed by them, and because of that experience, “wants to come back for more.”

    Simple. Important. Usually forgotten.

    She talks about lots more. Read the whole thing.

    My thoughts?

    First, there’s no need for authors or readers to worry about wading through “crap.”

    According to Pew, readers only read 15 or 24 books a year on average.  That’s not a lot of books.

    More importantly, it takes about 3 seconds to get a lead for a good book.  You hear something from a friend or family member, you look at the USA Today best sellers list, you browse a few books at a store or online, you read a blog and suddenly you’ve found a book. 

    Readers fill up their book reading slots much more quickly than they can ever empty them.  That’s why we all have years of reading in our queues.

    It doesn’t matter that there are millions of other books out there, a good majority of which might have been written by monkeys. There’s no need for authors to worry that readers will have to wade through a mountain of crap to find a good book. They don’t need to because they have leads for good books coming out their ears.

    Second, people purchase books that friends, family, and co-workers love.

    Which means that when you deliver a great experience to one person, it’s going to ripple out. It’s probably not going to be linear. It’s probably going to ripple out like viruses do into different population pockets. Or seeds do into different environments. It will run through one pocket, make a jump to one or more others, or it may not jump at all. Some pockets are big, some are small.

    The way to keep a virus going is to release it in a lot of places where it’s likely to thrive or in places that a lot of people travel through. And as Kris points out, writing is all about repeat business–making sure you have a stream of good product (something I hope to rectify with my own writing this year).

    Bottom line: the best way to build your writing business is to simply write the best book you can, and keep them coming.

    Third, the market is BIG. 

    If you read Rusch’s and Hickman’s articles, you’ll see that even the mega sellers only reach a fraction of those who read. This is reinforced by the statement made by Thomas McCormack, former CEO of St. Martin’s that you can read here. So just because 100,000 people read one book doesn’t mean 100,000 others won’t read mine.  

    Moreover, e-books and online shopping are broadening distribution. Brick and mortar stores only have so many slots for books. Every 8-12 weeks they rotate the old books out (like 12 weeks is old) and replace them with the new ones, unless, of course, your book is selling very well and gets “modeled” at the store.  The point is: when you only display a few books at a time, those books will get bigger sales numbers. This happens because there isn’t anything else to purchase.

    But you don’t have that limitation with e-books and online shopping. Nothing rotates out of the store. Sure, things rotate on and off the best seller lists. But the books are always there. With an ever growing selection, there won’t be as many mega sellers.  Publishers Weekly discusses this trend in their 2011 Facts & Figures articles, which list best-seller numbers (make sure you click through to the Trade Paperback article as well). The same thing has happened with TV station viewership with the explosion of channels, DVDs, and online streaming. Same thing happened with music.

    What this means is each author has a better chance of getting his or her books to those who will love them. We’ll still have best-sellers. But we’ll also have a lot more medium sellers as well. And that’s great for authors everywhere.

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  • Good Stuff! Two movies, a book, and a shovel

    ByJohn Brown

    We’re going to start with the shovel because it’s been dumping snow this year, and I know there are some folks out there who want a quicker way to clear the snow from their driveways and walks. And, boy, do I have something for them.

    I think it’s safe to say that the Brown family clears more snow by hand than the average American family. We have a driveway and street that together are a little over a tenth of a mile long. Here’s a picture.

    We clear that lovely stretch of road by hand with shovels. (Yes, we are crazy; more on that below.) Most of the time we have it cleared long before any city plow shows up. But we love our city plows because they can do the heavy work at the edges on the bottom two-thirds. And they do all the work on that bottom part when it gets really heavy and deep. We love our neighbors with tractors who’ve come to our rescue as well.

    Still, we do most of the clearing.

    We began our mad shoveling craze for one simple reason: we couldn’t get to our house when it snowed. And it was a pain in the neck to hike that tenth of a mile.

    Part of the problem is that we live on a hill, and there are a couple of steep stretches. Another part of the problem was that we had not availed ourselves of this higher technology called snow tires. We thought all-weather tires would do just as fine.

    Wrong. Big wrong. They don’t even come close.

    With all-weathers, on a hill, you have to keep the road clear. As in to the blacktop. Because once you build up even a small layer of snow, you’ll get slick patches, and then the all-weathers do nothing but spin.

    But we didn’t discover that until a few years into it. And by that time, we’d learned that shoveling such a long drive was not only good exercise, but it also was a great way to teach our four girls how to work hard and not fear projects that seemed daunting.

    I know some of you are thinking, dude, why not purchase a snow blower, or a pickup or four-wheeler with a plow?

    Because snow blowers at the time, much less four wheelers and pickups, were out of our budget. Because I’d much rather spend the money on a family trip somewhere fun. Because why spend the money when you can line up as a family and create your own Brown Family Snow Blade and give your kids stories to tell their kids about living in the Gulag?

    Anyway, it’s what we do. Fast forward now to this year. Three of our daughters have grown up and gone off to college. Nellie, my youngest daughter, and I can usually still get it done. But this year’s record snows kicked our butts. Royally.

    Now, we’ve tried all sorts of shovels. I can guarantee, if it was at a store for sale, we’ve tried it. We’ve used brooms. We’ve used all sorts of configurations of girl, woman, and dad power. After all that experimentation, we found a standard push shovel to be the best for general snow and a square garden shovel to be the ticket for ice. But this year our trusty tools weren’t cutting it.

    So, after one long day on the driveway, I went on line looking for a better shovel. And after looking at quite several contraptions, I found The Snowcaster.

    You can see it in action below. It’s basically a plow. One made for a human to push.

    When I saw it, I thought this thing had to be better than pushing shovels. So I ordered it and assembled it. The curved blade of incredibly hard plastic rises 9 inches above the ground and is three feet long. Its nifty design allows you to simply flip it to change the direction of the blade.

    After using it these last six weeks on multiple snows of everything from ten inches of powder to three inches of watery slush, I will simply say that it’s amazing. It’s so good, I ordered a second unit.

    The Snowcaster does have a limit—you’re not going to plow three-feet of snow with it. You’re not going to plow a build-up of two feet. If you’ve got a lot of wet snow over a large area, you will break a sweat. And sometimes you’ll still need a shovel to toss snow at the edges. But for moving large quantities of snow out of the way on asphalt or concrete, it’s the best thing I’ve found to date.

    If you are like me and don’t want to purchase a machine just yet, have snow to move, and want to dramatically reduce the time it takes to move it while providing some fun for the kids, I think you’ll love The Snowcaster. I ordered mine directly from the company here: https://thesnowcaster.com/. The model I chose was the 70SNC. I wouldn’t suggest the long model unless you rarely get snows above three inches. I say this because on some days with lots of snow the three-footer was about all I could push.

    Okay, onto the movies. I have two excellent ones to recommend. Both of which are based on true-life events.

    The first is Denial, a British-American historical drama, that tells the story of how Deborah Lipstadt, a holocaust scholar, was taken to court for libel in Britain by David Irving, a man who claims the Holocaust never happened. In America, you’re always innocent until proven guilty. However, in Britain, with libel, the burden of proof is upon the defendant. So how do you prove you weren’t slandering someone? The movie was thrilling and fascinating. And gave you something to think about afterwards. If you enjoyed Woman in Gold, you’ll enjoy this.

    The next is Hidden Figures, an American biographical drama, that tells the story of female African-American mathematicians at NASA. These women were employed as computers—that was their official job title. Of course, this was before electrical computers and calculators, and what they did amazes me. The story is about the USA struggling to catch up to the Russians in the space race, and how four of these women helped while dealing with deep-seated prejudice against Blacks and females. It is full of humor, poignant moments, and surprises. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen these last few years. I don’t know what to compare it to. All I know is that you will laugh, be amazed, become outraged, and cheer.

    Lt. General Michael T. Flynn. Flynn is a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and Assistant Director of National Intelligence and is now our National Security Advisor. If you want to understand how he is likely to advise the president about our war against radical Islam, let me recommend his book The Field of Fight. In the book, Flynn describes his background as an intelligence officer and how critical good intelligence is in this fight. He then describes his take on who the radical Islamist enemy is and how he thinks we can win the war against them. He shares several surprising insights that only someone with his experience can and reveals as well how good and smart leaders can disagree about strategy. One of his main points is that we will never win the war by killing bodies—this is an ideological war, much like the war we fought against communism. For those wanting to get past news blurbs and hear the man speak for himself at length, I think you’ll find this book interesting.

    And because, Dear Reader, you read all the way to the end, I will give you two more movie recommendations. Moana is a great, fun, family film. La La Land is an enjoyable musical romance that will probably break your heart. It did mine.

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  • Generating Story 2: No Clue, No Solution

    ByJohn Brown

    I want you to think about Ed Smylie, who helped save the Apollo 13 astronauts with his duct tape contraption. What if the authorities had come to Ed, but instead of saying, “Look, we need to fit the round CO2 scrubbers into the holes for the square ones,” they’d said, “We want you to do something; it involves thinking.”

    Ed would have blinked. Waited.  “Yeah?”

    “That’s it. Something. A lot is riding on this.” And then maybe they urged him on with a significant wave of their hands.

    Can you see Ed at this point?

    “Sure.” He’d say. “I’ll get right on that.” Then he’d wonder who put these guys up to this practical joke.

    Do you see how impossible it is when you frame things that way?

    To come up with solutions, you have to have a clue about what it is you’re trying to do. Even if it’s just a rough idea. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to fix a space ship, roast hotdogs, or write a story.

    Once we have a rough idea of what we want to accomplish, the mind automatically kicks into gear to perform its wonders. Until we do that, we’re going to be like Ed in the example above—staring at a blank wall, wondering if our superiors aren’t a bit cuckoo.

    So what are we trying to do?

    Think about your reader. Is it a woman? A teen? A crazy dude? Do you remember my book tour with Larry Correia in 2009 and the guy who, during a booksigning / doughnut party at a Phoenix Barnes & Noble, proclaimed my book to be true?  Aliens really were eating our souls and enslaving humanity. They were lizards living in the hollow portion of the earth.

    The point is: what are your readers hoping your story provides them? In fact, since you’re the first audience, what do YOU want from your stories? Why do you read?

    I want you to write down five stories you really like. Movies, TV shows, novels, short stories, plays—I don’t care the genre or type. Just write down five. Do it now. Here are five random stories I like.

    • The Incredibles
    • The Good Guy by Dean Koontz
    • Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
    • The Sound of Music
    • Runelords by David Farland

    This is going to be a powerful exercise for you. It was for me the first time I did it in a class on interior design.

    A few years ago, Lovely Wife and I were building a house. We wanted to make our living space sing. We wanted our surroundings to make us happy, but we didn’t quite know how to go about doing that. So we took a class on interior design, hoping to learn the principles involved.

    Except when we showed up in the first session and saw the many different design styles, it overwhelmed us. Some styles were ethnic (Southwestern, Asian, French, Gothic, Pygmy), some philosophical or religious (Zen, Feng Shui), many were artistic (Modern, Arts & Craft, Minimalist, Art Deco, College Room Mate ), a lot were mixtures. Some were about making statements and creating moods, some about practicality (here’s a taste of those styles).  How in the world were we going to learn this?

    Luckily, we had a very perceptive teacher. She knew that most of us were there, not to learn all the styles, but to decorate our own houses. So in our second session, she brought dozens of home magazines. She spread them out on the tables we were sitting at and told us we would go through the magazines. When we found a picture or image we liked, we were to rip that page out and put it in our personal stack. So for about 45 minutes we looked and ripped and looked and ripped. Lovely Wife and I each ended up with a pile of a few dozen pictures.

    Then the teacher told us to spread our pictures out in front of us and look for things that the images had in common. Colors, features, design elements.

    I spread my pictures out. Lovely Wife spread out hers. And it was like magic. Boom! Right there in front of us. I loved arches and eyebrow windows. Loved dark blues and purples mixed with creams and whites. Loved the color of blond wheat and a navy blue sky. I loved wood. Loved Arts & Craft with a few tweaks.

    Lovely Wife’s pile was equally revealing.

    The teacher then said, “This is your personal style. This is what’s going to make you happy.” She told us that when designing the rooms in our house, that we should think about their function and merge them with these elements. And if any of us were to work with clients, we’d do something similar with them and find out their wants and likes.

    With our styles now beginning to be fleshed out, Lovely Wife and I went to work. Some of her elements and colors overlapped mine. Some didn’t, like her idea of sleeping bliss: a bed with sheer red drapes hanging from some lamp shade contraption in the middle.

    I told her I didn’t know if I could keep my man card and sleep in that bed. She decided I should keep my man card, but said she couldn’t sleep in a plain-walled zen room. We compromised. She got textured red on the walls. I got a bed without too many frills. We came up with designs for our spaces that did what we wanted them to do.

    But we couldn’t have done this if we hadn’t identified what we were after.

    So I’ve adapted that visual art technique used in the design class for our purposes. It’s just as powerful with literary arts. Which is why I want you to write down five stories.

    I want you to take a moment and identify what you’re after, in a big picture general way.

    I can’t do this for you.

    You and I are different. Just like Lovely Wife and I are different. While our tastes may overlap in some places, they’re going to diverge. You don’t want to write my stories. You want to write YOURS.

    So write down five stories. Then write down what you really enjoyed, over all, about each of those five stories. You might do this on five pieces of paper. What did you enjoy with each of the main story elements—character, setting, problem, plot, and text? What kind of an experience did they give you? What drew you to them in the first place?

    You don’t need to go all crazy detailed on me with this and do a twenty page report. Just hit the highlights. The stuff that will fit on one page without writing in four point font.

    When you finish that, step back and look at all five pieces of paper side by side. What common elements do you see? Circle them.

    This is your style. This is what, in general, you’re going for.

    If you found the exercise insightful, do five more stories. Ten is such a nice number.

    I’m going to predict that 99% of the things you identify have to do with what the story did to you. The stories made you laugh, smile, scream, want to fall in love again. They made you curious or jealous or feel some type of desire (be a Ninja king, strong, beautiful). Maybe they gave you insight. Maybe they affected you so profoundly that it changed, if even in a small way, how you decided to live your life.

    Stories–the ones people pay money for; the ones people stay up until four a.m. reading with a flashlight; the ones people tell their friends about–make people feel things.

    A while back I wrote about this in three parts. I believe the things you’ll read in those short posts, if you don’t know them already, will change how you think about stories. They did for me. And it all begins with lipstick.

    1. Lipstick
    2. Getting specific
    3. My big draws

    Okay, I hope at this point you are getting a general idea of why readers pay money to read the stories we create. Why YOU pay money and spend countless hours reading what others write.

    This is the first step in being able to produce on purpose, not on accident. This is the first step to becoming the Ed Smylie of fiction—understanding what you, as a writer, are trying to do.

    This week, keep your eyes open. Notice what stories do to you. Notice how you feel about different characters and plots. If you feel like taking it farther, notice the effect of different beginnings and ends of novels, chapters, or scenes. Notice the effect of different ways authors describe characters, places, and actions.

    Of course, while knowing these general objectives is critical, it’s not enough. You need to know what you’re reaching for with the current story, the current characters, the current plot. How do you translate all this general stuff to the specifics of the story in front of you? Do you have to define everything up front? And what if you don’t know what you want in the current project anyway? What if you are clueless and have nothing but a handful of random ideas that for some reason are generating electrical sparks? What do you do then?

    In the next post, I’ll talk more about those questions and where the how-to’s fit into all of this, and then we’ll get into the principles of invention.

    For more in this series, see How to Get and Develop Story Ideas

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  • |

    You’re invited to join the novel writing workshop pilot

    ByJohn Brown

    I am developing an online novel writing course and am looking for folks to pilot it with me and give me feedback. I’m thinking I want to limit it to 10-12 folks.

    It’s free and will probably take two or three months to complete. If you join, your job will be to do the work. And there will be work. I’m thinking 10-15 hours of work per week. Please don’t ask to join if you don’t want to make this commitment. I only want folks who are serious and ready to give this a shot. In addition to the work, you’ll need to report your experience with the course as we go, sharing with me where you get stuck, what’s confusing, what’s helpful, what does and doesn’t advance your skill. In fact, if at some point the course just isn’t providing you any value, you are welcome to drop. That’s good feedback too.

    It’s going to be a blended format that includes self-paced work and some type of weekly online meeting. I will be guiding the class. At the very least, we’ll meet and chat at my site. I don’t know if we’ll do a live meeting or not. Still working that out.

    I struggled for many years, trying to figure this stuff out, then had a number of epiphanies during Orson Card’s boot camp and continued from there. Of course I still have lots to learn. But I want to share what I have.

    I love teaching and have been teaching in one form or another for the last 20 years. I’m currently an education program manager at a large software firm. What this is all means is that I’m trying to build a course that guides folks through a process that will help them learn to WRITE novels. Not just talk about them.

    So this is not a series of lectures with quizzes that test your ability to recall, although I will quiz you.

    It’s not a course with an end goal of teaching you what I’ve learned about the concepts and principles of plot, character, and setting, although you will need to learn that.

    This is about increasing your ability to get ideas, develop them, and then write.

    It’s about doing the work. It’s about production. It’s about finishing product. And having a good time doing it.

    If you already feel comfortable with your ability to finish novels, this is NOT the course for you.

    You can learn more about the course here by clicking The Path in the On Writing menu.

    Probably the only other thing you need to know is that the class is a PG-13’ish class. While the stories can deal with intense and adult themes, as the teacher, I’m not interested in working with stories with explicit or detailed sex or lots of language of the sort that would earn a movie rating more restrictive than PG-13.

    Remember, this is a pilot. Even though I’ve taught about writing for a number of years to various audiences, there might be some rough spots. We might find we need to change the work requirements or activities or any number of things.

    If you’re interested, click on the Contact link on the menu of my site, and shoot me an email.

    Edit 1/30/15: I’m getting a number of excellent questions about the time commitment and schedule. Let me answer them here.

    The gap I’m trying to fill

    First, you have to understand that I am not interested in talking about novels and writing novels. I’m interested in helping folks finish novels. That’s a big gap I see in most writing instruction. It’s the gap I had. There was nobody to help me move from the theory to the writing, and writing all the way to the end. So this isn’t a class about novels. It’s a class where I hope to help you learn a number of techniques for developing and finishing one. And to learn those techniques, you have to actually use them. Which means you have to develop and finish a novel 🙂

    So why 10 hours as a minimum?

    If you’re a slower writer, it’s going to take you around 50 hours to develop and write a novel of 25,000 words. That’s the size of one of Louis L’Amour’s smaller novels (which we call sometimes call “novellas” today). It’s the size of some smaller romances. A lot of indies are writing serials around this size. If you want to write a 50k book, it’s probably 100 hours, maybe more. A 75k novel? 150-200 hours. The development and first draft of a 100k novel? 200-300 hours.

    These are not exact times. Some writers are faster. But you get the picture. Writing a novel is a big project. And I’ve found that it’s just too hard to get any traction on less than 10 hours per week. When you spend much less time than that, you spend most of your time just trying to remember what the story is about. I’ve found it’s best to keep your writing engine hot, or at least warm.

    So will these 10 hours be in meetings?

    No. I don’t want to have a lot of meetings. That’s the beauty of online. We will have deadlines. But you should be able to complete you work during the times that suit you best.

    What’s the course schedule?

    I can’t give you an exact schedule. I haven’t timed everything. Figuring that out is part of what we’re doing in this course. But I do know what I want you to learn and how I hope to help you learn it. We’ll just have to see how far we get with each weekly 10-hour chunk.

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7 Comments

  1. Now where the thinking gets fuzzy and quite interesting is how publishers and authors will have to deal with libraries once ebooks take off, especially if those libraries are all connected together.

    There will definitely have to be a pretty big amount of cashflow for the rights to a book. A physical copy of a book has to be replaced by the library every so often, when they’re damage or stolen. This puts money in the publishers’ and authors’ pockets. An ebook is forever. No damage, no way to lose it (short of an apocalyptic server failure).

    Right now, as I understand it (and please correct me if I’m wrong), the temporary fix for this new market has been publishers making libraries pay every year or so to “renew the rights” to a particular ebook. The libraries are also forced to put a number on exactly how many “copies” of their ebooks they have (which really cracks me up).

    It’s total bull, since the library doesn’t have a lost or damaged copy of the ebook, and since a digital copy of a book could be shared a million gazillion times (that’s the true number, as I understand it), but since there’s not a better infrastructure in place, we’re essentially running on bull here. Printing our own money, so to speak.

    That always blows my mind when I think about it. I wonder how that infrastructure will change in the coming years when libraries start to move to a much larger scale ebook operation. I’d guess that the costs will probably be passed along in the form of a small membership fee for most libraries, which will give you access to some sort of massive ebook database. I’m also guessing that libraries will have to keep the “specific number of copies” model, since that’s the only way a publisher or an author could make any money at all.

    One scary thought for authors is the potential for several of those chains to dry up if libraries start to connect together without the “number of copies” model in place. If I can get a digital copy of the book at the library (where I’m already paying a small yearly or even monthly fee) on launch day, then I have absolutely no reason to visit the author’s website and buy the book from him, or from his publisher, or from amazon or anyone else. BAM, all the channels except the library are suddenly dry, and the author gets paid precisely one time. This is why I think that publishers and big stores like Amazon are going to make a concerted effort to lobby against any libraries working in concert to provide ebooks, as well as try very hard to keep the “number of copies” rule in place, or even find something better than that.

    Just my two cents.

    Now, piracy is a whole other issue. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how authors are going to keep afloat in a world where ebooks are the norm, and most people are becoming increasingly more comfortable with the idea of getting something for nothing for all forms of media.

  2. I think the pricing for libraries will be more like what we get with cable or a subscription to Lexis/Nexis that universities have or that large ERP software users have. It’s not based on number of copies of a book, but users. And then, as with ERP companies, you would have random audits of these big institutions to make sure the user count is accurate. Libraries may require fees or just use tax dollars. On the back end, the aggregator would pay authors, I’m thinking, like I said above. How do content providers for cable and satellite TV get paid? I’m thinking it would be similar. Or like Amazon, per checkout. Pricing to individuals might be the same as cable today or use the Netflix model.

    As for piracy, I don’t know. I think if it’s easier to get it legit, most people will. Piracy flourishes when you make it hard and super expensive to get a product. I don’t think we should let pirates run rampant and ignore them. But I think the first thing to do is simply make it easier to obtain it legit.

  3. I am curious if you know how demanding publishers are of digital rights at this time? If I send my new manuscript out, are they going to demand the digital rights? If I refuse, will it be a deal breaker? Because I wanna keep ’em. Unless it’s an apocalyptically good deal, I’m not going to sell my soul to the devil (i.e., sell my ebook rights). Because I’m pretty sure I can do a better job, for cheaper, and make more money, by selling my own ebooks than a publisher can right now.

    Ben

  4. As far as I know, the bigger publishers currently demand them. It’s a deal breaker. Which is why authors who can sell the quantities I mentioned above themselves, and who get the smaller offers, will have no reason to sell their ebook rights or take any such contract. The bigger publishers will insist. But I’m sure other, smaller, publishers will step up because there’s money to be had in paper. When an author gets a much larger offer, then it becomes a different situation.

    Of course, not all authors will be able to sell even the numbers I listed above.

  5. John,

    Thanks for another thought provoking post. I love your observations.

    As a writer I’m excited at the prospect of e-publishing. I’ve owned a Kindle for over two years, but I’ve wanted ebooks for much longer. I’m equally excited as a reader. It’s been frustrating over the years to discover that authors I enjoy were unable to continue publishing books in a series because sales had dropped below the numbers their publisher and book sellers considered successful. Big publishing became fixated on best sellers but not every book can be a best seller. As I believe you observed a while back, even the most popular books are not read by most people. The midlist has seemed to shrink to such paltry numbers that it must be very tough for full time midlist writers to make ends meet.

    Until very recently the received wisdom on self-publishing fiction was in general, don’t. It worked for Christopher Paolini and a few authors, like Larry Correa, primarily as means of leveraging a contract with a traditional publisher. But in the past year or so, that wisdom no longer necessarily holds. Here in Oregon, Colleen Houck, having self published her first novel through Amazon’s BookSurge program, saw the Kindle version take off and she was offered a large contract and also had the series optioned for film. But now we see the possibility of “going Indie” and becoming your own e-publisher, aiming at long term success in the ebook format.

    Kris Rusch stated in last Thursday’s installment of the Business Rusch that advances for new authors have shrank to as a low as $1500, well below the numbers shown in the Hines survey. Like you, she noted that publishers increasingly want electronic rights, and also world rights, denying authors the income they might receive from selling foreign rights on their own. Distribution is the big thing publishers can bring to the table, as you note, but that system has had problems for some time. I recall reading stories beginning the 90s with the major chains remaindering books that hadn’t even been unboxed and put out on the shelves.

    Up until very recently I had dismissed going the “Indie” route—because of a perceived stigma about self-published fiction (and the fact is, much of it isn’t very good), from the sense that traditional publishing was the only way to success. There was also the validation of being published by one of the New York houses. At the same time, I worried about my first book or books not meeting big publishing’s threshold for success, and that is with me focusing not on being a literary writer, but on being a story teller. Indie publishing changes all that. Of course, it brings in another set of challenges—you have to either contract out your cover art, layout, etc or do it yourself. You have to figure out how to market your book, what the audience is and how to reach them.

    The biggest issue I see for someone like myself, published only in short fiction (online only, and semi-pro markets only) is how to reach readers with e-books and avoid what I call the “pebble tossed into an ocean” problem. I have some ideas on how to do this but I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue.

    I also thought your suggestion that libraries collectively develop (or subscribe) to a national ebook distribution system ala Netflix very appealing. I work for the largest library system in Oregon (over 400,000 patrons) and interest in ebooks is skyrocketing. Last spring Library 2 Go, the Oregon Digital Library Consortium, finally began making ebooks available online, after having offered access to digital audio books for several years. In the past month I’ve answered a number of questions from patrons concerning ebooks—how to get them, the fact that Library 2 Go typically only has a copy or two of any one title, and that title is usually checked out, so the e-Book must be reserved.

    A larger system, with access to more “copies”, perhaps even along the lines of Netflix’s streaming option, would prove very popular. Of course, authors and publishers need to be compensated.

    Another issue is making it easier to borrow an e-book. Just today I downloaded the Overdrive app for my iPhone, used it to check out an e-book. I had to create an account through Adobe and have just a week to read the book. Having a longer check out period would be nice, as well as allowing for more platforms to read the format.

    I’d love to see Kindle be able to read the EPUB format used by Overdrive, but that’s up to Amazon.

    By the way, I shared your thoughts on Ebook aggregators and libraries with my fellow reference librarians at my branch; definitely great food for thought that I hope will be shared with our entire library system and beyond. We in library land want to remain relevant to our patrons and to readers, and continue to serve as guides for our patrons in finding books, be those books print, audio, or electronic. The question is, how. Providing access is a crucial part of the answer, and book aggregation could provide that wider access. As you wrote, someone has to be working on this.

    Thanks again for another terrific post.

  6. Dale, I agree. Get your book vetted by readers you can trust then get it up for sale. You can shop it to publishers while it’s for sale as an ebook. As for getting notice, I’d check out Robert Sawyer’s site. He has a number of articles on it like this one: http://www.sfwriter.com/ow11.htm. Then I’d scour Konrath’s site and some of the other big-seller sites to see what they did. Then get another book finished and up. 🙂

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