One of the best articles on responding to stories and listening to responses that I have ever read. Ever. “The Business Rusch: Perfection” by Kristine Rusch.
For those of you that have seen my presentation on The Hunger Games, you’ll recognize the idea immediately. O, but Kristine says it with so much more insight and grace.
No, I’m not going to comment. Just go read that essay.
Here’s the third episode I recorded with the Writing Excuses guys.
In the first podcast we talked about putting and not putting ourselves in our writing and making characters who don’t all sound like the author. In the second, we talked about how to not repeat yourself as an author. In this one, I shared some basics about generating emotion in readers and dealing with negative emotions writers face when they encounter rejection, compare their career with others, hit writer’s block, or hear someone didn’t like their story.
As usual, the guys had some great insights. Check it out: Emotion in Fiction.
“More than 50% of all traditionally-published book sales of any format in the US now happen on Amazon.com.”
That’s just amazing. But I found something even more amazing this week.
Author Earnings released a report this week of their analysis of a million titles on Amazon. Data Guy, the tech guy behind the software gathering the information and crunching it, posted this graph in the comments.
Do you see the amazing thing?
Well of course you do, I gave it away in the title of the blog. Science fiction and fantasy sell MORE units than thrillers.
More.
What?!
For, like, ever I thought SFF was a tiny portion of the market. Not so, my friends.
Some may say, well, but this only represents Amazon. What about the channels traditional publishers sell through? Author Earnings explains a way to account for that in their report. Basically just double the size of the purple and red bars. If you do that I think thrillers might just edge SFF out. But it doesn’t dwarf it by any means.
Furthermore, for an indie author, I don’t worry about those other channels because they’re not really a viable option for me. My world is selling online. And the online market for SFF is the SECOND BIGGEST MARKET after Queen Romance.
Oh, BTW, next book in the queue is volume 1 of Lord of Bones. It’s going to start with something like this.
The four men did not leave. Instead, they spread out just a bit in shallow semi-circle in front of Blaze.
Four of them. One of him. There was definitely going to be blood.
“You don’t want to do this,” Blaze said.
The big one drew his sword and swung it a bit to loosen his shoulders. “Oh, but we do. Because you’re not handing over the blackmeal. And we’re not leaving without it.”
No, he was not going to hand that over. Couldn’t. Not if he valued the lives of his wife and boy.
Two of the others drew their swords. The fourth brought his staff up and laid it on his shoulder in a two-handed grip.
The big one would be the obvious target to take first. But Blaze knew that would be a mistake. The big one was there just to focus his attention. To fix Blaze in place. And then the silent one would slice him up the side.
The man with the skinny face said, “Old man, the vultures will be picking your eyes out before lunch.”
Blaze said, “Well, if you’re so determined, let’s not keep them waiting.” And then he rocked forward.
I’ve not forgotten the Dark God series. I will finish it, but I need to get this smaller volume of Lord of Bones out.
Alan Peterson runs the Meet the Thriller Author podcast. He recently met with me to get my advice for new writers. The interview is now up on his site. After that, you’ll want to listen to some of the others. He’s talked to some great authors.
One of the things I enjoy about being an author are the emails I receive from readers. A few months ago I received one from Mr. Edward Bear. He’d purchased Servant and, as he was reading, found an unclosed dialogue quote.
Mr. Bear could have simply noted it and read on. But he did not. Mr. Bear is a proofreader. And so he practiced a bit of wizardry, found that I had a handful of quote goofs, and emailed them to me.
Many of them ended up being weird smart quote issues Word introduced into the text when I broke a line of dialogue with an action like this: “You will not”–he scratched his nose angrily–“share another pair of my panty hose with that woman!”
You’d think that would be enough for a doughty reader. But Mr. Bear didn’t just notify me of the errors. Oh, no. He also included the page from his proofreader’s grimoire that allowed him to find those quote issues in a matter of minutes in the first place.
As soon as I had the time, I tested the spell on Bad Penny, and, voila, in a matter of a few minutes found a couple of issues in that text. I was delighted.
But Mr. Bear wasn’t satisfied with mere delight. He then sent me another page from that grimoire to help with spelling. We luvs wizardly readers, Precious.
Copy editing and proofreading require patience, painstaking reading, and a knowledge of what to look for. You have to know not only the mechanics of the written word (capitalization, spelling grammar, syntax, punctuation, abbreviations, usage, etc.) but also, if you’re reading for a printed edition, interior formatting (widows, orphans, word or hyphen stacks, headers, and so forth). There’s a lot to it. And anything that speeds up the process and minimizes errors is welcome.
If you’re contracting your proofreading out, a cleaner copy can also translate into lower rates. Knowing that many of you who visit this website are writers, and because your host’s generosity knows no bounds, I asked Mr. Bear if he might be willing to share his wizardry with you. The wizard responded with a yes.
By Edward Bear I’m Ed Bear. I work, both professionally and otherwise, as a proofreader. I’ve gone over books for my publisher and I’ve done scan/OCR/check against paper books for republication, both electronic and back-to-treeware. When I mentioned some of the “ancillary tools” I have for aiding the work, John offered me this guest post slot in his blog. Feel free to pass this stuff around. I’ve found these techniques invaluable in getting the job done faster, and with better quality.
First, though, I need to tell you about the tools themselves. The biggest component is the software for electronic text editing. However, I’m NOT talking Word or anything like that. I’m talking about an editing program which can a: work with plain text and b: handle Regular Expressions. (What are those, some of you ask? I’ll get to that.)
Since I’m a windows user, I have two such programs available. My favorite is a program called TextPad (www.textpad.com). I’ve used it for years and it’s become invaluable to my work. They currently charge $28 for a single user license, but IMO, the program’s so useful that, even though upgrades are free, I buy another license every time they bring out a new major release. The other program is free. It’s called NotePad++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/) I’ve tested it and it can handle the methods I use, but I haven’t used it much, since TextPad and I are long-time buddies. If anybody out there knows a program for the Macintosh which will do these jobs, please mention it in the comments.
You don’t have to be a wizard to use them. The tutorial over at http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html describes them elegantly: “Basically, a regular expression is a pattern describing a certain amount of text.” They are also called a regexp or regex, and I’ll be including the regexes I use in this post.
I have a small library of regexes, and two of them are critical to aiding the proofreading process. One of them allows checking dialogue quotemarks, to insure that speech is properly closed off, and the other makes it possible to generate a word list of each unique word in the book. I’ll be walking through the usage, including screenshots.
One of the challenges of checking dialogue passages is that, with one exception, every opening quote (“) needs to have its matching closing quote (”). The exception, of course, is when the same character is speaking in the next paragraph. This can lead to a heavy false positive load if the characters are loquacious.
The first time I tried this stunt, I found 73 paragraphs with unbalanced quotes. Only 6 of them were errors. But being able to find them quickly so they could be fixed in minutes instead of hours? That paid for the effort.
The process itself is simple: You take the document and convert it to plain text. If it’s an RTF or Word document, you simply select ALL, hit copy, and paste it into Textpad. The result will look something like this:
What I normally do is turn on word wrap, so I can see the whole paragraphs as I go. So it looks like this:
Now, we go hunting. The next step is to set up the search pattern using a regex. The one I use for this is the following: (?!^([^“”\r\n]++|“[^“”\r\n]*”)*$)^.+ Complicated little brute, isn’t it. I didn’t write it, but I knew who to ask if he could write one, and the above is the result. FYI, there’s also one for straight quotes: (?!^([^”\r\n]++|”[^”\r\n]*”)*$)^.+ You use it the same way. So go into find, and put the regex into the “Find what:” box:
Notice that the “Regular expression” box is checked. I also “Wrap searches” just in case I miss something and want to loop around. Click “Find Next” and:
The paragraph highlighted has two opening quotes, one at the beginning and one at the end. Word assumes that a quote preceded by a space is an opening quote, so you need to correct it in your RTF/DOC. Wash, rinse, repeat. You keep doing “find next” all the way through, checking for situations like the following:
As I said, same speaker, next paragraph, so this one is good. This post is getting a little long for a blog entry, what with illustrations, so I’ll break off here. Stay tuned for part two: checking spelling and spelling consistency. In the meantime, here are the RegEx tool commands plus a few bonus goodies: RegExToolCommands.
About this time last year I got the last of my rights back to the Dark God properties. I thought it would take twenty or thirty hours to figure out the whole indie publishing thing. And then the awesome John Brown story machine would kick in gear.
Reality promptly woke me up and slapped me around a bit. This last year has been quite the learning curve. Here’s what I’ve had to pick up:
One of the things I love about this business is that there is always more to learn. But I’m happy to be over that curve. For folks just starting out, let me share some of the resources I found super helpful with a number of the things listed above.
Posts by a mega indie-seller Russell Blake to give you the right perspective about indie publishing. I’ve read a lot of posts the last few years about being an indie author. These are the best I’ve come across.
Online courses to help you on the publishing side.
The most practical and clear-headed books about indie promotion I’ve read. For other clear-headed advice, see the Russell Blake posts above.
The most helpful book on copyright.
The most helpful book on copy editing as well as info to put into front and back matter.
Helpful threads on Kindle boards
Other great resources
Good luck!
I don’t know how it’s possible to aruge that media does not influence our decisions. The evidience is simply overwhelming. Here’s another report of a study linking media sexuality to teenage decisions about sexuality.
“CHICAGO — Groundbreaking research suggests that pregnancy rates are much higher among teens who watch a lot of TV with sexual dialogue and behavior than among those who have tamer viewing tastes.” Full article here.
The study shows that while teenage pregnancies have dropped overall, those teens watching racey shows had, not just a small incremental risk, but TWICE the risk of getting pregnant.
Now, I know this article by the Guttmacher Institute focuses on the 1990’s, but it still is enlightening. It discusses the reasons for the dropping teenage pregnancy rates during those years. It’s conclusion is that both abstinence and usage of more effective contraception are the main factors for the drop in teenage pregnancies.
When I put the two articles together, it makes me wonder if the racey shows are encouraging more sex among the teens who watch them or the use of less-effective contraception or both. My guess is that the shows are influencing a decision for more sexuality.
Either way, what does this mean for a writer?
To me, it means that while I’m never responsible for someone’s actions nor in 100% control of what people take from my writing, I AM responsible for those things I know are highly likely to influence folks one way or another. I hope my works provide a wonderfully entertaining experience, but also avoid influencing people into decisions that will lead them down paths that will limit their happiness.
Comments are closed.
I read Kris Rusch’s post yesterday, too, and it struck me like the proverbial thunderbolt. In the past I’ve been guilty of delivering an all-too thorough prescriptive critique with the best on intentions. More recently I’ve tried doing differently, but still hitting the prescriptive part. I think it was you that actually spelled out the difference between descriptive and prescriptive critiquing. Rusch goes even further with her three simple questions. I also find Card’s “three ughs”– where was it unclear, unbelievable and uninteresting a very handy tool.
Keeping in mind the intended audience is crucial, too, isn’t it?
Well, I don’t know how you keep the intended audience in mind if you’re not part of it. Unless there’s something specific to include or exclude that’s part of the package.
For example, you may like a MG novel, but it has profanity that won’t fly with parents. So you could point that out. Or you might like a novel a lot, but because it’s using huge college-level words, you might wonder if the MG readers will be able to get it. I can see stuff like that.
But I think the key insight is that you read, looking for an experience, not to critique. You just experience it. You put it down where you would if it was in the store. If you don’t like it, that just means you don’t. Not that it’s bad. And you do NOT focus on rules. As a writer, you don’t take counsel from those who hate your story. The goal is that readers are entertained, not that you follow rules. And you don’t expect 100% perfection.
“A good plan, violently executed right now is better than a perfect plan next week” — Gen. George Patton.
At the same time, I do think Kris’s three responses can be taken too far so they become fairly unhelpful. That’s all you’re going to say? You must say nothing else? Really?
A wise reader CAN help you improve a story IF that wise reader is simply reporting their experience, and doesn’t come to critique, and stops where they normally would. AND if the writer treats their report as nothing more than it is–ONE data point.
So let’s say you have a reader who read to the end and said “I loved it.” Was there anything confusing? Anything you didn’t believe? Any parts where you started to skim and got bored?
Notice: you’re not focusing on rules there. You’re just focusing on effect. On experience. And you’re doing it with someone who liked the story.
Brandon Sanderson is selling books getting millions in contracts. He does multiple drafts. Ken Follett is a grand master and sells millions and does drafts. Orson Card has his wife read everything. If it stalls or doesn’t work, he’ll write it again. A lot of best-selling excellent writers do.
So if Kris is suggesting excellent writers do not do that, then she’s demonstrably, flat-out wrong. But I think her post was focused on the mindset we take when testing our stories and providing responses.
John,
I agree about the key insight. That’s an excellent point, and one that too many writers (this one included) can overlook all too easily. Moreover, critique mindset can keep the writer from experiencing story as an eager reader, and instead comparing everything to, well, a perfect standard that doesn’t exist. If I *have* to read something with an idea of contrasting it with that standard, I won’t have the reader’s experience, which is to sit down, begin reading, and see where it takes me. And if I can’t read further, then I can ask myself, why did I stop?
As for feedback, again I agree with you. I need more than she asks for– Card’s three points help a lot here.
As for doing multiple drafts, it is a necessary and a fundamental part of the process for me. I think it is for most writers. The stories I’ve sold wouldn’t have done so without rewriting and multiple drafts.
Happy writing!
Awesome post. Thanks for pointing it out! I really need to bookmark Kristine’s blog…