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Why you can’t popularize literary fiction, part 2

ByJohn Brown

I voiced my opinions on the TC Boyle message board. Needless to say, I’m probably too aggressive in my stance. But a guy over there said: “(easy,chewable,harmless pages) shouldn’t be the goal of any writer with even the tiniest self-respect.”

Here’s my response.

—-

I don’t know any of these successful authors who don’t have self-respect because I don’t know any of them who try to write based on what they think will sell. Everyone of them that I know writes from passion. And I know some NY Times Bestsellers. They might look at 10 projects they have passion for and choose one that might be more marketable. But the passion comes first.

I don’t know how anyone could spend the amazing number of hours it takes to finish a novel unless they have passion for the project. In fact, I wonder if it’s possible to create something that’s actually sellable without it. Everyone’s always talking about these hacks out there with metal brains writing for money. But after all the writers I’ve met, I’ve yet to find one. In my experience they’re as scarce as the yeti.

So my intent wasn’t to say you can write for love or money, but not both. My intent was to say that I believe most MFA programs have made themselves irrelevant to the greater stream of literacy in the country. The teachers have passion for fringe genre and teach their students how to entertain that fringe reader. And if they DO have passion for the types of fiction most readers want, such enjoyment is always talked about as some form of slumming. There’s an apology or at least a statement making it clear they know such fiction is not something you bring to the table where serious writers work.

But this isn’t true. Serious writers, passionate writers work in those genres. And they deliver excellent work. By that I do NOT mean they deliver the tropes of literary fiction in drag. What they deliver doesn’t appeal to the fringe markets. But it’s excellent, nevertheless, because it delivers exactly what the people go to those stories for.

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    Amazon vs Macmillan = Big River Fighting to be Big Banana

    ByJohn Brown

    Here’s what this brouhaha is all about

    Amazon wants to try to replicate with digital books what Apple has done with digital music. So what has Apple done?

    According to Cnet’s “iTunes reps 1 in every 4 songs“:

    “iTunes-purchased songs now account for 25 percent of the overall music market–both physical and digital–in the U.S., says an NPD Group report released Tuesday.”

    That may not seem like a market leader position, but in the comments one person pointed out the following.

    “35% of the music sales are digital (there’s some conversion where 1 CD = 11 or 12 individual digital downloads). Apple owns 70% of the digital market. 70% of the 35% ~ 25%. So Apple has a 25% share of all music sales.”

    Whoa, Nellie. That there’s what we call a cash cow. Moo-la, Baby, Moo-LA! And this becomes even more significant when you consider the fact that many think the digital part of music sales is only going to grow and grow.

    According to the same set of data, TheStreet.com’s  “iTunes, Wal-Mart Dominate Music Sales” reports:

    Amazon accounts for only 8% of that market .

    How did Apple get the head lock on such a huge portion of the digital market? It appears it has to do with the fact that Apple was first to market with a good MP3 player solution, linked that to its iTunes store, and then bundled the software in such a way as to drive and then keep people coming back to iTunes. Here are a couple of articles. I’m sure we could google dozens more.

    Amazon (and many others) are forecasting digital books to become a very large part of book sales. Amazon wants to be the big banana in that space. Well, it can’t be (drum roll) the big Apple now can it?

    But what does this have to do with publishers?

    Big Banana’s Problem

    Amazon cannot become the big banana if nobody buys its stuff because consumers feel it’s priced too high.

    So why don’t they just price it low?

    Ah, there’s the peel.

    In this new proposed arrangement, Amazon cedes a huge portion of its pricing control to the publisher.

    But Apple’s doing that with its iPad.

    It is. However, Apple already has a model and ability to sell. I think Amazon wants to make sure it keeps the low-price position because this is one of the key reasons people go to Amazon. Amazon pulls online book customers in because (listed in what I estimate is importance):

    1. The new books are usually cheaper and if you really want a low price you can buy them used
    2. Amazon provide long tail stock (what book can’t you get out there?)
    3. It’s easy to type in a title and find out more info about the book (first chapters, user ratings, etc.)
    4. Completing the sales transaction is a snap 

    I’m assuming Amazon is worried that if it allows publishers to price their ebooks higher, then they lose one of their MAIN draws. And therefore their ability to become Big Banana.

    The Existing Supply Chain Model

    Right now you have these distribution or supply chains:

    • Publisher  –> Wholesaler  –> Retailer –> Consumer
    • Publisher  –> Retailer –> Consumer
    • Publisher  –> Consumer

    All of them exist side-by-side. For example, Scholastic will sell books via a Barnes & Noble retailer, but they’ll also sell direct via their school book program. You can get SERVANT at Barnes & Noble or you can get it directly from Macmillan here.

    Why have the middlemen?

    Because middlemen bring the cost of purchasing a book WAY down. Some people don’t think that. All they see is that the retailer buys the book wholesale and then jacks up the price.

    But imagine there were no Wal-Marts, Smith’s grocery, or any other kinds of stores. As a consumer you would have to go to farmer Bill for milk, travel 10 miles to farmer Jane for corn, travel another 10 miles to farmer gill for eggs, and on and on and on for the hundreds and thousands of different products we buy. Furthermore, because middlemen bring the products all together each producer has more incentive to compete on quality, value, and price.

    Middlemen SAVE consumers huge amounts of time and money. That’s why we’ll always have them with us even though producers may still sell direct at the same time.  And that’s why we’re willing to pay the little bit they ask for what they do.

    Price/Volume/Profit Control

    There are two keys to making all of this middlemen business work.

    First, usually only the two parties involved in any transaction control the terms of that transaction. So the publisher and wholesaler agree on a price for their transaction. The wholesaler than makes a separate agreement with the retailer. Finally, the retailer is free to make a separate agreement with the consumer. In each transaction the seller gets to control price, cut deals for high volume purchases, and, therefore control its profit.

    In all cases you negotiate a price/volume mix that’s good for both parties. Sometimes this includes a flat price. Sometimes it includes price deductions for larger volumes.  But in all cases it gives the producer something to count on. If a customer wants a lot of product, great, we’ll sell it to you for X price and make Z profit. If you want less, fine, we’ll sell it for Y and make Q profit.

    Second, wholesalers and retailers want to control costs. They need to be able to turn around and sell your product for some profit. If you sell your stuff to someone else for a humongous discount, then that allows their competitor to charge less and potentially shift volume to them. So buyers will often try to get commitments that you aren’t going to screw them somewhere else. And sellers who value long-term relationships are willing to make such commitments.

    So here’s business as it is today. A retail bookseller (Amazon, B&N, etc.) pays a fixed wholesale price for the book to the publisher. The bookseller might negotiate wholesale price breaks at different quantity levels with the publisher, but that’s a wholesale price/volume agreement that ensures certain profit levels for the publisher. As for the retailer, they maintain a different price/volume/profit control on their end with the consumers, fiddling with volume/price mixes that make sense to them. In this situation BOTH the publisher and the retailer maintain price/volume/profit control.

    What do you want to be–the Marketplace or the Seller?

    But this new percent-of-retail scheme decouples price from volume and forces the publisher or retailer to lose control of profit. Either Amazon or the publisher has to GIVE UP price/volume/profit control with their set of buyers.

    If Amazon gets control, then it can set the retail price however it wants REGARDLESS of volume. In this situation, because wholesale price is pegged to retail price via the %, this means Amazon would dictate the wholesale price to the publisher without any regard to volume. This takes price/volume/profit control away from the publishers, putting them at the mercy of the retailer’s whims.

    Scary, a total shift in the way they’re doing business. Publishers would have to budget for the worst case scenario–the lowest the retailer might charge.

    However, that’s NOT what happened. In this current deal Amazon ceded its control to Macmillan, saying, okay publisher YOU set the price for my customers. This isn’t foreign to Amazon. They do this right now with used book sellers. Those folks set their own price and Amazon acts as the market place. And once Amazon says “we’re the marketplace, not the seller” then they step right out of the “hey, you’re charging too much” equation. So nobody would yell at Amazon for this move. Well, some folks would, but they’d soon figure it out. For example, nobody yells at Amazon now when used book vendors want to charge $99 for a trashy paperback. Everyone gets that Amazon is just the marketplace just as they get that Ebay is the market place.

    However, in this case Amazon did want to retain some control. They said, let’s set a range of prices that are acceptable. You can charge $5.99 to $9.99 but no more or less. This would allow the publisher to sell a book for more money when it’s initially released and gradually drop the price as time goes on until we get the bargain basement price of the remainder tables. The articles I linked to in the original blog discuss this common selling practice.

    Macmillan said, the miminum is great, but we actually want to start higher–$14.99.

    Amazon said, no way, Dude. And the battle was on.

    Magic $9.99?

    But why? Why did Amazon insist on that maximum? Why not just do what they already do with used book sellers and step away completely from controlling price? Wouldn’t they WANT to make more money with higher prices anyway?

    Again, price directly affects volume sold which affects profit. But in this case, it’s not as much about profit but volume and market share.

    The only reason that makes sense to me is what I discussed at the beginning of the article–Amazon wants to dominate the digital book space as Apples does iTunes, and they feel the must keep prices low to continue to get people coming to their Kindle store and growing their customer base.  They’re hoping to spank the competition in this segment by being big first and getting all the volume–it’s the old five yards and a cloud of dust.

    Big Banana. Kind of like Wal-Mart is in its segment. Kind of like Microsoft is in theirs. Kind of like Apple is with digital music.

    And they obviously think $9.99 is the magic number to keep the customers pouring into their Kindle e-book world.

    ebooks cost nothing and my grandma plays in the NBA

    Isn’t $9.99 a good price for the publisher? I mean, heck, ebooks don’t use any paper, so they cost next to nothing to make, right?

    Um, no.

    The answer’s “no” because paper is only a part of the cost. And I’m not talking about the cost of the person who takes the Word document and converts it into PDF or Kindle or whatever the ebook format is. My kid could do that for twenty bucks.

    Every product is a mix of fixed costs that don’t change with the volume you produce and variable costs which do vary. Rent, electricity, buildings, equipment, editorial, art, design, author advances, marketing, etc.–all these things can be fixed costs. It doesn’t matter if you make one book or one million. You still have the same rent, same fixed cost for artwork, same cost for editors.  

    So how big are those fixed costs? Based on the blogs I linked to in the original article (and if I read them correctly), the fixed costs are estimated somewhere between $7,000 and $20,000 per book. But those numbers aren’t hard numbers. For example, books that have bigger author royalities and bigger marketing budgets are going to cost more. Furthermore, because those numbers don’t have any details backing them up, I’m leery of trusting them.

    But we can look at something that is public knowledge to see how this works. For example, Stephenie Meyer got $750,000 for Twilight. Most authors do NOT get that. Most get a $5,000 – $7,000 advance per book. Still it shows the fixed costs can be quite large. Meyer’s advance was a huge fixed cost that needed to be covered by each book her publisher sold.

    If they sold only one book, they’d have to have charged $750,000 for it just to cover that one cost. Do you know anyone willing to pay that for a book? No. So they priced it, hoping to sell thousands. If they were to sell 750,000 copies, then that advance only cost $1 per copy. If they were to sell 1.5 million copies, then it would be .50 cents per book. The more books they sell, the smaller the fixed cost per book. Of course, that’s just one fixed  cost! You need to add all the others in (marketing must have been very large as well). Furthermore, Meyer is THE best seller. The vast majority of authors don’t sell anything that comes close. Yes, they have smaller advances and marketing budgets. But you get the idea–fixed costs matter!

    So all these people saying that since no paper is involved ebooks should cost nothing are ignoring fixed costs. In fact, according to some sources, printing, paper, and shipping only account for 10-20% of the cost of most books. I don’t know if that’s an average at all volume levels. Again, there was nothing to back up those claims. But if it’s accurate, you can see the arguments demanding ebooks be sold for next to nothing become silly at best.

    The fact is that the publisher needs to cover those fixed costs. If you were the publisher, how would you do it? Would you price hardbacks to cover fixed + variable + profit? And then price paperbacks and ebooks at variable + profit? Probably not. Hardbacks are already pushing the price limits for consumers. I think you’d want to spread those fixed costs around. If anything, you might try to cover a higher portion of the fixed costs with the paperback and ebooks.

    My inner accountant is screaming for real data to crunch and display in a spreadsheet, but I don’t have any actual actual price/volume/profit matrices. What I can say is that paper has NEVER been the only cost. For midlist authors I suspect it’s probably the smaller portion of the cost of each indivudal book. Publishers must price the books and move the necessary volume to cover fixed costs + variable costs + some profit. And so it’s only reasonable to expect that ebooks be priced to do that.

    What’s the best for you, dear reader?

    I don’t know which specific potential leader will end up providing better prices, reading devices, services, etc. in the long run. Is that Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble? A whole bunch of retailers? Who knows?

    What I do know is that it’s good to have a number of companies competing for the customer’s dollars. My vote is with having lots of retailers. If Amazon can sell a significantly larger number of ebooks with their pricing, then publishers, authors, and readers all win. If they can’t, then it becomes a win-lose.  And the publishers and authors will be on the lookout for a way to improve the situation by seeking out other distribution channels.

    Edit for Macmillan Announcement

    2/4/2010 4:05 PM

    It appears Macmillan and Amazon have come to an agreement.

    Notice Macmillan CEO claims this new agreement will result in them making LESS money than they do with ebooks currently. But it provides a reliable and rational market. I think what he’s saying is that this allows publishers more predictability, even if it comes at a price.

    From what I understand Amazon currently pays 50% of suggested retail price for an ebook. The publisher sets the SRP (you see it on the book often), but Amazon has full control to charge whatever it wants to the customer. Here are the numbers for SERVANT.

    • SRP = $25.99
    • Amazon pays the publisher 50% of $25.99 = $13 for each copy of SERVANT they sell
    • If they sell it for $9.99 they lose $9.99 – $13 = $(3.01) per book
    • If they sell for $14 (about what they’ve been listing it for, the make $14 – $13 = $1 per book

    Under the new deal the publiser sets the SRP and the consumer price. On each sale Amazon gets 30%, the publisher 70%. Here are the number for SERVANT under this scenario.

    • SRP = $25.99
    • Publisher sells ebook for $14
    • Amazon pays the publisher nothing until the sale.
    • Amazon earns $14 x 30% = $4.2. This is MORE than they are making under the current system.
    • Publisher earns $14 x 70% = $9.8. This means the publisher earns $(3.20) less, just as claimed, under the system they WANTED versus the existing method

    So why earn less? As Macmillan says in the announcement above, they’re willing to take less to have a more rational and stable market for ebooks

    Over the last few years we have been deeply concerned about the pricing of electronic books. That pricing, combined with the traditional business model we were using, was creating a market that we believe was fundamentally unbalanced. In the last three weeks, from a standing start we have moved to a new business model. We will make less money on the sale of e books, but we will have a stable and rational market. To repeat myself from last Sunday’ s letter, we will now have a business model that will ensure our intellectual property will be available digitally through many channels, at a price that is both fair to the consumer and that allows those who create and publish it to be fairly compensated.

    We have also started discussions with all our other partners in the digital book world. While there is still lots of work to be done, they have all agreed to move to the agency model.

    So this is how all ebooks will work with Macmillan going forward. I’m betting most or all the other publishers will follow suit.

    I think this is good news for readers, publishers, and retailers. Readers get it for less than hardcover. It will be at the higher end of the range settled with Amazon (I think it was $5.99 – $14.99) unless the publisher decides to run discounts as they do with many blockbusters now in hardback. But the price will drop as time goes on. I imagine when they release the paperback for a book, they’ll have to drop it for certain. And when books go to the remainder tables, they’ll drop again. I can see old ebooks or promotions costing $5.99 – $9.99, new ones $14.00.

    BTW, the standard now for many authors is to be paid 15% royalty of the SRP on ebooks up to a maximum of 40-50% of the net amount publishers get from the retailer (btw, contracts stipulate different royalty rates for ebooks, hardback, mass market, etc.). Something the industry is considering, as mentioned in Sargent’s letter, is setting a % rate of the amount received by Macmillan from Amazon. So instead of paying authors 15% royalty on the SRP, new contracts will likely pay authors 20 -25% of the 70% the publisher receives as royalty. You can do the math. It’s very clear this new deal doesn’t earn the author more per book. 

    Hopefully, then, we’ll simply sell a heck of a lot more copies. One glitch in all this is the fact that publishers haven’t really been setting prices with consumers. That’s been the retailer’s job. And so they’ll probably have a learning curve trying to get the prices right in the beginning. Or maybe not. We’ll have to see.

    Edit to answer Jason_Young @ 2

    2/5/2010

    Your point is, hey, if they have three products (hardback, paperback, and ebook) to spread the fixed costs across, then should that allow them to drop the price of all three products? $100 / 2 = $50. $100 / 3 = $33.3. Have I got the question right?

    FIXED COSTS AND VOLUME

    If so, then the answer is it all depends on the relationship between volume and fixed costs. It always depends on that relationship. In fact, that 20% figure may or may not be accurate because . . . it all depends on volume and fixed costs. Both of which can change.

    Let’s take a totally FABRICATED and SIMPLIFIED situation to see how it works.

    Fixed costs: $10,000
    Variable costs hardback (paper, printing, binding, etc.): $3

    Cost per book by volume printed.
    Printed / Cost per Book / Variable as %
    1 / $10,003 / 0.03%
    1,000 / $1,003 / 0.3%
    5,000 / $5 / 60%
    10,000 / $4 / 75%
    20,000 / $3.50 / 86%
    50,000 / $3.20 / 94%

    Now remember: printing has fixed and variable costs as well. But I’m going to say the printing’s all variable to keep this manageable. And that you sell every book you print (something that never happens). The thing to see here is that when you keep fixed costs constant and increase the volume printed, then the fixed cost amount and % per book goes down. Conversely, variable costs become a larger and larger portion of each unit’s cost. Remember, however, that often fixed costs go up when you plan on printing significatly more books (Twilight etc.) But given a set budget for a book, you want to sell as much as you can.

    VARIABLES CHANGE

    So your argument is that when ebooks come along, the fixed costs have already been covered by the hardbacks and papers, cause they’re all still priced the same and the variable and fixed costs haven’t gone up that much since two or three years ago.

    Here’s some of the assumptions you’ve made that might be false:

    1. Fixed and variable costs haven’t gone up
    2. Publishers are selling the same number of copies per book as they were in the past
    3. Ebooks aren’t cannibalizing sales of hardcopies

    The truth may be that costs have gone up and that books aren’t selling as many copies in their various formats as they used to. But even if both of things have not happened, why should we suppose that ebooks don’t cannibalize hardcopy sales, dropping the volumes and, therefore, increasing the cost per hardcopy? Or that they won’t cannibalize even more in the future as ebook readers become better and better.

    On the revenue end, you’re also assuming publishers are selling books for the same prices they were in the past. SRP may be high, but have you noticed the prices on new books on Amazon and other outlets? My $25.99 SRP book came out and sold for $17. It sold for $15 and change before release! And I’m not a big name they’re trying to drive volume to. This is newbie no-name they’re having to discount.

    What I expect has happened over the last five years is this. Costs have risen. Hardbacks are already pushing the limits on price. Furthermore, sellers and consumers are asking for more and more discounts. Paperbacks still haven’t crossed the $9.99, but there’s still pressure to keep them low. Ebooks are adding revenue, but a significant portion of that comes at the expense of hardcopies. So it changes the mix of products sold. It doesn’t simply open up a whole new stream of untapped cash. Because of this, ebooks allow the publisher another method to earn profit that’s getting squeezed away.

    PRODUCT MIXES AND CONTRIBUTION MARGINS

    The best way to look at this is to look at the cost in two ways. One way is to allocate fixed costs and get a price per unit. But if you look at it only that way, you can make a number of bad judgments on the value or price of a product. This happens because of that relationship between fixed costs and volume. So you also want to look at the contribution margin of each product. And, in fact, this is a better way of judging the profitability of an item.

    In this method you lump all the fixed costs together and then examine each unit of the different products (hard, soft, ebook) only by its variable cost versus revenue to see if each unit sold is contributing something above its variable cost towards the fixed costs. Then you estimate the volume you expect (hope) to sell at given prices and try to price them all in a way that will move enough volume of each type of product to cover fixed costs and provide some profit.

    So you don’t consider each product type individually. You look at the MIX of product and the MIX of contribution margins. And you work it so that together the MIX of products covers costs and earns you a profit. And gets enough volume to keep your author a going concern, growing his numbers so he becomes more profitable as time goes on.

    Edit for Modesitt’s insight

    2/6/2010

    Please check out this blog by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. “Why Amazon and Some Readers are Wrong”

    Second, what’s been overlooked is the fact that a tremendous number of book titles actually lose money. Depending on the publisher and the year, that can range from as little as 30% of all titles published to more than 60%. That means that successful books not only have to cover their own production costs but the losses from unsuccessful books if the publisher is to remain in business.

    Third, hardcover sales of successful books effectively subsidize paperbacks or less successful books. Ten-dollar Kindle books would have created price pressures that would either reduce the sales of hardcovers or replace them with e-books, and as more adaptable e-book reading devices become available, that would reduce overall revenues even more than would $15 e-books. This, in turn, would reduce the ability of publishers to try “new” authors and approaches, and would likely result in more “mass” entertainment and less diversity in a field that is already having trouble publishing books for limited audiences.

    Just in case you didn’t connect it to the discussion above. A HUGE cost that needs to be covered by the contribution margins of the successful books are the fixed AND variable costs of each book that fails to contribute enough segment margin (the contribution margin of a segment of your business, in this case a book in its various formats) to pay for itself.  Look at Modesitt’s percentages of books that lose the publisher money. Think about that. For the publisher to continue to bring in new authors who might not sell well in the beginning but have great potential in the long run to sell well, they have to cover the “start up” costs of those authors.

    He makes a lot of other important points. It’s a good read.  And it all plugs into the fixed costs, volume, price, contribution margin equations.

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  • Generating Story 4: The Story Setup

    ByJohn Brown

    Okay, I lied. I was going to get into idea generation techniques, but decided to do one more short post on development objectives. Actually, I suppose this is a technique.

    In the last post, I said one of the main objectives of your initial story development is to have the story to come to life in your mind. I explained that the best method I’ve come across up to this point for making that happen was to focus on developing the 6 core parts. Then I explained in general what I’m shooting for when developing those parts at the outset of a new project.

    You can use a number of different types of documents to capture your thoughts on those 6 core parts. You might end up with a rough two-page sketch of the story. You might write brief character bios of some sort. You might bullet the general steps of the plot. Maybe you create a map. There are a lot of types of documents you can use to capture what you’ve developed. And often the creation of those documents not only captures what you’ve developed, but helps you develop the parts in the first place.

    I want to suggest a “document” that will help you capture and develop the essence of your story setup.

    This is ONE tool.  It is not THE tool. There are many ways to capture the essence of your story. There are many tools that can help you clarify your thinking. But I think this is a good one because it forces you to get right to the core of your story and clarify it in a compact manner.

    An idea that’s core and compact has great power because it focuses the mind.

    There are so many things to juggle when writing a story that it’s easy to get lost in the weeds.  I’ve found I become so much more productive when I know the core situation that’s driving the story.

    There are a lot of things that drive reader and author interest. There might be a thematic question, fascinating characters, genre stuff (chase scenes, romantic scenes, scare the soup out of you scenes), humor. One of the main things that rivet readers to the page are the hopes and fears they have for our characters.

    A reader’s hopes and fears are driven by presenting:

    • An event that causes
    • An interesting and likeable character to
    • Face a compelling and concrete problem—a threat/danger, lack/hardship, opportunity, or mystery.
    • The character decides he must try to solve the problem (which results in the character goal the story revolves around)
    • And struggles against significant opposition.

    That’s the core of the story setup. As David Howard puts it: “there is one basic dramatic circumstance: somebody wants something badly and is having difficulty getting it.”

    Of course, stories provide a lot of delights that require you to do more than define the person and the thing they want. But the setup is at the heart of a lot of what readers go to story for. Part of the initial development of a story should focus on helping you clarify this central dramatic situation.

    So here’s a tool to help you do that. I read about it years ago in Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer, which was written in 1965. Swain calls it the “Starting Line-up.” I read about another version of the same thing more recently in Dan Decker’s Anatomy of a Screenplay written in 1998. He calls it the “Story Line.” The hugely published romance writer Leigh Michaels calls it a “Framework” in her On Writing Romance: how to craft a novel that sells. The agent Donald Maass calls it the “premise of a novel” in an interview published in Agents, Editors, and You by Michelle Howry.  Jim Butcher calls it a “Story Skeleton.” Let’s look at each of these variations.

    Swain’s “Starting Line-up”

    Swain asks you to include five elements:

    1. Focal character
    2. Situation
    3. Objective
    4. Opponent
    5. Threatening Disaster

     These are to be cast into two sentences.

    • Sentence 1 is a statement that establishes character, situation, and objective.
    • Sentence 2 is a question that includes the opponent and disaster and can always be answered in a clear yes or no

     Here are his examples.

     John Storm

    Sentence One

    • When humans suddenly begin to grow to twelve-foot height [situation],
    • John Storm [character]
    • tries to find out why [objective].

    Sentence Two

    • But can he defeat the traitors in high places [opposition]
    • who want to kill him [threatening disaster] in order to make the change appear to be the result of an extraterrestrial plot?

     Irene Boone

    Sentence One

    • Lonely, frustrated, and tired of living in a home where she’s treated as an unpaid servant [situation],
    • widowed Irene Boone [character]
    • wants to marry widower Frank Dawes [objective].

    Sentence Two

    • Will she lose this chance for happiness [threatening disaster]
    • because her selfish sanctimonious daughter, Connie [opponent] accuses her of immorality?

    Dale Boulton

    Sentence One

    • Sick of the conformity and hypocrisy that go with his highpaid job, and with a modest life income assured [situation],
    • Dale Boulton [character]
    • decides to retire ten years early, to go live on a shanty-boat and poke through crumbling river ghost-towns, in fulfillment of a boyhood dream [objective]. 

    Sentence Two

    • Can he make the break successfully, when his hostile wife, Sandra [opponent],
    • fights him all the way and, finally, threatens to have him declared incompetent [threatening disaster]? 

    Decker’s “Story Line”

    Decker requires three components:

    1. The main character described by an adjective
    2. The inciting event or decision that propels the character into the story
    3. The main character’s objective, stated in concrete terms

    You can add other components—other characters described by an adjective or other important events or decisions. He prefers you start with a “when.”

    Here’s an example.

    When a booksmart savings and loan bailout accountant takes over the business he is assigned, he discovers it is a bordello and teams up with the Madame using his business skills to fend off a hostile take over and save the business.

     Another.

    When a blood thirsty killer and his gang are coming to kill him, a strong-willed, decent cop must fight them over the objections of his pacifist bride who will leave him if he does.

     Another.

    When he is given a factory full of doomed Jewish workers, a greedy, opportunistic Nazi deceives his taskmasters to save them.

     Another.

    After a tornado carries her off to a strange land, a spunky teenaged girl must face a series of challenges to get home.

     More.

    When his blundering uncle throws their building and loan company into insolvency, a despairing small town banker with low self-esteem has to find a way to save the bank.

    Leigh Michael’s “Framework”

    Michaels suggests four elements in her framework, although she doesn’t stipulate a specific form.

     This definition summarizes the four crucial basics that make up a romance novel:

    1. A hero and heroine to fall in love
    2. A problem that creates conflict and tension between them and threatens to keep them apart
    3. A developing love that is so special it comes about only once in a lifetime
    4. A resolution in which the problem is solved and the couple is united

     She then lists a number of questions to help an author think about those four elements. The document that could capture this is a summary of the answers to those questions.

    Donald Maass’ “Story Premise”

    Donald Maass was asked what he looks for in a query or pitch. Like Michaels, he doesn’t specify a form, but does include some basic elements.

     I’ll tell you exactly what I need, and I can get this information after just a few questions.

    First of all: What type of novel are we dealing with here? Mystery? Mainstream? Young adult?

    Second thing: Where and when is it set? Contemporary? Historical? Magical place? A real place?

    Third: Who is the main character?

    And lastly: What is the basic problem that the character faces?

    Those things wrapped up together are the premise of a novel, and I know right away if it’s the kind of work I handle, if the idea sounds original, if the main character is sympathetic, and whether I care about the problem. That’s all i need. If all those things are a go, then I want to read the work. It’s as simple as that.

    Most authors might perceive this as additional pressure. It’s exactly the opposite. What is means is that their job is much, much easier than they think.

     If you think about a query, this is something that should be contained in a few short paragraphs.

    Jim Butcher’s “Story Skeleton”

    A reader drew my attention to a short essay Jim Butcher wrote on this subject. I thought it was excellent. Here’s Butcher:

    The story skeleton is a description of the main plot of your book, broken down into its simplest elements. . . The story skeleton (also called a story question) consists of a simple format:

    *WHEN SOMETHING HAPPENS*, *YOUR PROTAGONIST* *PURSUES A GOAL*. But will he succeed when *ANTAGONIST PROVIDES OPPOSITION*?

    For instance, look at Storm Front. (Yes, I’ll use my own books as examples, because I’m just that way. 😉 Also, I’m more familiar with them than I am with almost any other writer.) Storm Front’s story question:

    ****************************
    When a series of grisly supernatural murders tears through Chicago, wizard Harry Dresden sets out to find the killer. But will he succeed when he finds himself pitted against a dark wizard, a Warden of the White Council, a vicious gang war, and the Chicago Police Department?
    ****************************

    See! It’s oh-so-simple! Almost to the point of looking ridiculous–and I have no doubt that some of the people reading this article will think that it *is* ridiculous. They’re wrong. 🙂 This is a fundamental description of the core conflict in your tale–and stories are all about conflict.

    Go read his whole essay.

    My Version: “The Story Setup”

    Did you notice any similarities in the examples above? Character, inciting event, problem, goal, opposition. Let’s go back to the core of story I listed.

    1. An event causes
    2. An interesting and likeable character to
    3. Face a compelling and concrete problem—a threat/danger, lack/hardship, opportunity, or mystery.
    4. The character decides he must solve the problem (which results in the character goal the story revolves around)
    5. And struggles against significant opposition.

     Written even more succinctly:

    1. Character
    2. Inciting event
    3. Problem
    4. Goal
    5. Opposition

    I like the idea from Swain and Butcher of projecting us forward using a question. I like the idea from Decker and Butcher to use “when” to state the inciting incident. I also like adding in the character adjectives. I like Michael’s and Maass’ focus on problem. But I also like flexibility. My version uses key elements of the others as guidelines, keeping it simple and core by limiting the statement to 90 words.

     Here’s one for The Incredibles.

    Bob is a frustrated retired superhero, living a boring life as an insurance claim processor. When he gets an offer to do illegal superhero work on the sly, he decides to take it and pursue a double life, even though he’s forced to lie to his wife about it. But his dream job employer is actually trying to settle and old score and kill him.  Will he lose his family when he’s drawn into a showdown with a super villain that has him outmatched?

    In many longer works there are often more than one story running. Sometimes the main character has an external conflict and an internal one. Or maybe a related subplot. Sometimes other characters have related B, C, D, and E story lines. In Curse of a Dark God, for example, I have at least eight story lines that I have to braid into each other. To keep them all straight, I found it very helpful to list out the five elements for each. The goal isn’t to make these into slick marketing tools: they’re to help me focus my efforts. However, I find that when they include all the elements, they have great power to pique my interest.

     Here’s one of the “inner” conflicts of Curse.

    Talen has escaped the clutches of the Mother, but something is growing inside of him. When he begins to hunger after the Fire and soul of those around him, he realizes he’s not all human. Will he be able to resist the growing and overpowering desires, or will he become the very thing he’s fighting against?

    Here’s one of the related “outer” conflicts.

    The Mother of Mokad wants Talen—to make him into a thrall or devour him. He escapes the first attempt to capture him, but will he be able to shake the Mother’s powerful hunter and his dreadmen now that he and his sister are on their own?

     Here’s a third story line in the book, the big external plot.

    Argoth is trying to build up an army of sleth that can free mankind. But the Mother of Mokad sends her Guardian to exterminate every last one of them. Will Argoth be able to defeat Mokad’s vastly superior army, especially when the Guardian has infiltrated his ranks?

     But Argoth has another plot line for the reader to worry about.

    Argoth damaged his son. Nettle’s condition is growing worse. A foreign Divine offers to heal Nettle in exchange for Argoth’s allegiance. Will Argoth betray those around him and save Nettle? Or will he let his son die and lose him to the perils in the world of the dead?

    Here’s one of Sugar’s.

    When Sugar sneaks behind enemy lines to retrieve some items her mother left for her, she’s given the opportunity to learn a powerful lore and use it to scout for Argoth’s army in the world of the dead. But each time she uses it, she comes closer and closer to death herself. Will she be able to survive as she’s asked to serve in more and more dangerous situations?

    Here’s her inner conflict. I wanted to develop a moment of dilemma for her just as I did Argoth.

    Sugar wants to keep her brother Legs safe. But as Mokad’s army arrives, it becomes apparent Argoth doesn’t have a chance. She and her brother might not survive. Sugar’s been learning the lore with a handsome and battle-hardy loremaster who saves lore users who have become true sleth. When he asks her to sail with him and his crew before it’s too late, Sugar has to decide if she will flee and abandon her friends or stay and fight and risk losing everything in this world and the next.

    Now you see why it’s virtually impossible to write such a book with so many story lines in the normal 100,000 words. And why I question my sanity in trying to write it.

    Anyway, there’s much more to writing a fascinating and compelling story than capturing a story setup, but I’ve found that working on stating the simple core of the story clarifies many things for me and makes me much more productive. I developed a short statement of all my story setups early on in the writing.

    There are a number of ways to capture the story setup. Let me suggest you give one a try. And if you aren’t to the point where you have enough material to capture a story setup yet, that’s fine. That’s what development is for.

    One last note. If you want to read an expanded description of how one writer develops story ideas, read Write Away by New York Times Bestselling author Elizabeth George. I loved the book.

    Bonus: Miss Snark Happy Hooker Examples

    Miss Snark was the pseudonym of an agent who I believe was Janet Reid of the JetReid Literary Agency.  When she was incognito, Snark had a blog. On her blog she’d often invite people to submit their story statements used in queries to hook editors and agents to ask for more.  These entries were called “Happy Hookers.”  Snark would rate them on her crap-o-meter, sometimes giving comments and suggestions.  Let me suggest you read 50 or 100 of those hooks.

    As you’re reading, look at Mrs. Snark’s comments. But more importantly, note the hooks that excite you and the ones that don’t. Because, frankly, Snark is just one person with one person’s tastes. In this exercise, you’re not trying to figure out what she likes. You’re trying to see what story elements work for you. So don’t be dissuaded by her tastes. Identify the hooks that interest you and the ones that don’t. Ask yourself where they were unclear, unbelievable, or boring. After you’ve done a few, you’ll start to see story patterns and ways to capture your own story setup that will be useful to you. 

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

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  • |

    I want to be Scott Westerfield

    ByJohn Brown

    Laura Miller at Salon.com has it all wrong when she says promoting books with movie-style trailers is a silly idea.

    Here, watch this book trailer for Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan.

    Yeah, I know you want to–go ahead, watch it again.

    Miller looks at book trailers, sees that the vast majority of them are lame, lame, lame (actually, this is the FIRST I’ve seen that’s any good). Sees that they reach no markets and then concludes that all trailers are silly. It’s true: lame trailers ARE a waste of time and money. But ANY advertisement (print, video, audio, whatever) that’s lame is a waste of time and money. Making killer trailers that nobody sees is an even bigger waste of time and money. But that’s true of ANY killer advertisement that nobody sees.  

    Look. I’ve never read Westerfield. Don’t know much about him or his books. But I saw that clip and now want to read that book. Hum, trailer worked for me. I AM a reptoid mutant, but I suspect there are others out there like me. I mean, come on. Good gravy, woman–“Do you oil your war machines? Or do you feed them?” Killer!

    Movie trailers, book trailers–any advertisement–isn’t about delivering what the person is going to experience on the spot. If that were the case, then you’d never show a print ad of a meal at Olive Garden because it doesn’t deliver the goods right there on page 10 of Woman’s Day. Nope, all you’d do is go around giving out samples in places with Italian mood.

    Miller’s error is not understanding the difference between making an offer and delivering on one. What an ad is supposed to do is make the offer. Let you know this thing is available. Because you’re not delivering the actual experience,  you can make the offer via all sorts of media. Now, if you can give them a taste, that’s great. But you don’t need to deliver the full deal right there.

    So what do you need in an offer? You need the offer to say, “Hey, I’ll deliver this type of experience.” It needs to call to some action, either directly or by implication–“buy this” or “be here.” You also need it to say, “You can trust this will be worth it” and make the consumer believe that’s likely to be true. It communicates this last bit by being a quality piece of work.

    Making an offer is exactly what book covers do–they make the offer and give the consumer a little taste. And book covers matter. This has been proven over and over. Just like most people, when I see a cool cover, I pick up the book and check it out. When I see a lame one, or one that offers something I’m not interested in, you’re going to have to threaten me to pick that book up. Or it better dang well have some righteous word of mouth. It’s that simple. We all judge books by their covers because the cover is making an offer. And lame offers don’t get very many takers.

    Book trailers are nothing more than deluxe book covers. The cool thing about them is the cool thing about movie trailers–you can make the offer by providing a little taste. You do that by giving the audience the story situation, the pitch. You do it by communicating the feel of the experience and raising curiosity. You do it by making it a pro job. The good  ones make you laugh, say cool!, or raise curiosity and expectation.

    And that Westerfield trailer does that.

    Dang, “Do you oil your machines? Or do you feed them?”

    Run that on TV. Run it on the radio. Put it up on sites where people are likely to see and click. Confirm it in print. Make the offer to real people. Get it infront of young readers. I’ll stake my eyebrows that ad can sell as many books as a good movie trailer can sell movie tickets.

    Crimeny, now I want to be Scott Westerfield.

    Edit, I lied

    I have seen another book trailer that’s as good as Westerfield’s. Do you remember this: http://thesecret.tv/movie/trailer.html ?

    Very effective advertising for the book. I think the content of the book is crap, but that trailer made me pick it up just to see what it was all about.

    Do you notice that this one and the Westerfield one combine extreme professionalism AND they make the pitch in a clear and grabbing way? The pitch for both was what the book was about. For fiction it’s the concept. For non-fiction how to it’s the promise.

    So many of the book trailers lack one or more of those things. For example, look at the book award finalist for THE FALLEN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsLE6bNaIrk. I don’t know what the heck the book is even about after a long 2 minutes. They’re trying to make a movie.

    Something else. On both of these you have a voice over PITCHING the book to you just as someone might do it in person or to an editor. It’s a powerful method, I think.

    Notice also how short the Westerfield one is. Just over a minute. Westerfield’s really is like a query pitch or cover copy–in just a few lines tell me what your story is about. We get genre, setting, character, and the story problem or concept.

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  • | |

    Speculative Fiction, Gateway Drugs, and Literacy

    ByJohn Brown

    You can read the transcript of my remarks at the American Librarian Association (ALA) conference in Chicago on July 11 below as well as the supporting information.

    IS SF/Fantasy Key to Teen Literacy?

    Intro

    I am so happy to be here. And I’m happy share some good news. David McCollough, the Pulitzer prize winning historian shared this fact in his commencement speech at the University of Utah this spring. “There are yet “more public libraries in America than there are McDonalds.” [Cheering]

    We have not yet been assimilated!

    Of course, this is due in a large part to you, the librarians who care for the collections and take care of the patrons. Which is why I think you deserve a big round of applause. Give yourselves a hand. [Applause]

    Fiction is a literal drug

    I want to start my remarks with two quotes.

    Ray Bradbury was recently interviewed in a NY Times article  He said, “I don’t believe in colleges and universities.” This is what he said, “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries.” He said this because when he graduated from High School he didn’t have enough money to go to college. So he went to the library three days a week for ten years.

    The next quote is from the great poet Dylan Thomas–“Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light”–that guy. He said,  “My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.”

    If you look at Bradbury and Thomas, they read, not because there was some grade involved, not because someone went after them with a stick—they read from hunger. From thirst. They read with wild abandon because they found in reading something they couldn’t find elsewhere.

    I want to suggest one thing they found was a drug. [Laughter] I’m not speaking in metaphor. I’m talking about real physical response. As real and physical as the response you get when you or I take aspirin, brandy, or crack. Well, I hope we’re not taking crack. [Laughter] 

    When we think about drugs we think about pills, smoke, injections. But those are simply one set of delivery mechanisms for chemicals that trigger a physical response. There are other delivery mechanisms. Other triggers. One of them is fiction.

    Now I don’t have time today to detail how this works. But I will write it up on my website for those who are interested. The key thing to remember is that fiction, the kind of fiction we love, the kind that keeps us up at night sitting on the edge of the tub or locked in a closet with a light, the kind of fiction goes beyond cognition, beyond data and facts. We find it so pleasurable precisely because it triggers and guides a physical response.

    So how does all of this apply to science fiction and fantasy? Here’s the deal. And here’s where we come to our topic. Science fiction and fantasy is, for our youth, one of the most powerful gateways drugs into the fictive experience. Of course, there are ideas in science fiction and fantasy that ripple out to the society. But even if there weren’t, the happy side-effect of an addiction to this drug is improved literacy. And we all know how much that impacts.

    Numbas

    Now I know those of you who work with young adult circulation have seen this. But I thought it might be interesting to get some actual numbers so we can start to gauge the scope of the science fiction and  fantasy effect.

    My interest in this began when I saw the results of the latest NEA survey. They have this graph showing reading rates in all age groups dropping horribly since 1982. By 2002 the graph is taking a nose dive.  Then in 2008 everything turns around. And among the young adults (18-24), we see the biggest increase—9%.

    I saw they had a genre preference question in this survey. Of course, I wondered about science fiction and fantasy. So I contacted the NEA and dug into the details. It appears that 34% of the 18-24 group say they like to read science fiction and fantasy. That’s a big number. That’s 1 in 3.

    Of course, I wanted another data pont, so I went to BookScan and asked for data on book sales. Because the wonderful people there love librarians and Tor Books, they said of course. We looked at juvenile fiction sales from 2004-2008. What we saw was that science fiction and fantasy grew 144% during that period. All the other genres only grew 23%. We also saw that science fiction and fantasy currently make up almost 30% of the juvenile fiction market. So about 1/3.

    Now there are some problems with the BookScan data. Yes, it only cover 60-70% of the market. It’s not in Wal-mart, grocery stories, and a few other places. But what’s more problematic for this issue is that they don’t break up the juvenile sales by age. It includes everything for folks one month old to age eighteen. So I’ve got books like Go Dog, Go in the dataset along with Twilight and Go Dog, Go isn’t categorized as fantasy. [Laughter] My suspicion is that if we narrow it down to the middle grade and YA group, we’ll see more science fiction and fantasy.

    So I needed someone who did break it up by age. Well, who does that? You do. Libraries do. Besides, a lot of youth don’t have the $ to buy lots of books. So I went to some libraries in Utah and Ohio and got their YA fiction circulation stats. Here’s what I found: 60-80% of the YA fiction circulation is science fiction and fantasy. This does not include graphic novels or magna. It’s text fiction.

    Folks, this is a big drug. I don’t know what part science fiction and fantasy played in the rise in reading rates, that would require a larger and more rigorous study. But I can tell you this: We want to see the impact of science fiction and fantasy on our society? We’re seeing it right now.

    My Story

    This large effect makes sense because science fiction and fantasy deliver experiences that are intersting to and matter to youth. It’s chock full of and encounter with the strange, weird, and wonderful; adventure and danger; doing something meaningful; being someone special, someone desireable, someone wanted in the group. All that coming of age stuff. So no wonder it’s a huge gateway drug.

    I know that it was in my case. I wasn’t a reader. I don’t think I read more than twenty or twenty-four book from kindergater to sixth grade. I look at the little fellows in my local school today and they read that many titles in the first six months of the first grade. But I didn’t. I wasn’t a reader. I do remember loving the look and feel of these small chubby books. [Laughter]

    I would take them them up to the librarian to check them out. She’d look down at me. “Are you going to read all that?” she’d ask. “Yes,” I’d say. Of course, it was lie. [Laughter] It was a huge lie because I would take them home and put them up on my dresser and just look at them.  Just loving the look and feel. And then when it was time to check them in, I’d take them back and give them to the librarian. “Did you read all that?”

    “Yes,” I’d say. And that’s how I became an author–lying to librarians. [Laughter] 

    Now in sixth grade my sister, we were in the car, I had four sisters and we had one TV, and so you had to reserve the time for your programs. So my sister says, “I have to watch The Hobbit for school.” Now I don’t know anything about The Hobbit. It sounded like a romance. [Laughter] I protested. No, way–we’re not going to watch some dumb kissing thing.

    “No,” she said. “It’s got dragons.”

    “You’re lying,” I said.

    I was convinced I was doomed. But it didn’t matter. We watched it. It had dragons. And I loved the experience so much I wanted another hit. Shortly thereafter my mother and father went on a business trip. I went over to my buddy’s house. So the first day we come up out of the basement to go to school and I said, “Oh, I’m feeling sick.” So my buddy went off to school and I went back down into the basement and played hookie for two days and read The Hobbit.

    It was amazing. More amazing than the movie. I had to have that experience again. And so I read Ursula LeGuin, Patricia McKillip, Donaldson, Terry Brooks. I kept reading because it delivered a cognitive-physical experience I loved. Of course, I didn’t put it that way back then. It was more along the lines of, duuuude. [Laughter]

    Now I got a BA in English and a Masters in Accounting. Those degress required a lot of reading. But I didn’t develop the requisite literacy skills in school. I developed them in science fiction and fantasy.

    And so when I started to write I was naturally drawn to fantasy. Having experienced this wonderful thing, I wanted to produce that and share it with others. So this novel that’s coming out has the gosh-wow I still love. It’s set in a world were humans are ranched by beings of immense power. There’s a young man and young woman in terrible trouble. So it has monsters, magic, and mayhem. But I also found fantasy big enough to let me explore other things that have become more important to me as I’ve aged. Like family, sacrifice, and redemption. And I hope people enjoy all that. But ultimately, I hope this book does for someone else what The Hobbit did for me and opens a door to a wonderful addiction. And, of course, as a powerful side-effect, improves the literacy of some rascal or rascaless. [Laughter]

    Conclusion

    I want to end where we began with that Thomas quote.

    “My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.”

    That kind of wild abandon will happen when the drug takes effect. And for many of our youth, probably at least one in three, that’s going to be when they ingest a few ounces of SF & Fantasy.

    Thank you.

    [Applause]

    Supporting Numbers

    How fiction is a drug

    Emotion is not a cognition, although cognition plays a part. It’s not just in your brain. It involves a physical response, which means it involves chemicals. 

    We sometimes forget that our bodies produce a staggering number of chemicals. Sometimes they produce in response to external stimuli—the sun triggers the creation of vitamin D, ingested sugar triggers the production of insulin, the sight of a ravening lion standing not five feet away with nothing between him and me produces, among other things, adrenaline.

    Lots of these reactions, we don’t notice. But there’s a whole group of these physical responses that we do. We lump them together and call them emotions.

    Jenefer Robinson in her wonderful book Deeper Than Reason, explains, “Emotions are our way of responding to events in the environment (either external or internal)” that matter to us. They are “physiological changes that register the event in a bodily way and get us ready to respond appropriately.” Fight, flight, pursue, woo, investigate. They focus our attention, get us ready to take action, and communicate all this to others.

    So while I might not feel the production of vitamin D, I do feel the fear of the lion. Fear is a wonderful thing—it keeps us alive. It raises our heart rate, pumps us full of drugs that prepare us to flee or fight. The emotion writes itself on our faces in order to, among other things, communicate the situation to those around us, warning others and calling for help. It is a physical response. Yes, there are cognitions involved, but there are also chemicals.

    The latest research on emotion shows that emotion is a process that involves three things. (1) An affective appraisal of our environment that signals something important to us—a threat or opportunity. (2) This triggers an immediate physical response (chemicals, galvanic skin response, accelerated heart rates, facial expressions, etc.). (3) At this point cognitive (conscious thought) appraisals kick in and help us monitor the situation and moderate the physical response.

    For example, I go out to the yard and step on this thing that slithers through the grass. The sensory signals immediately trigger a physical response to get me ready to flee or fight–heart rate, adrenaline, etc. Then I notice the snake is far too long. I look closer. It’s the garden hose. My physical response changes. I laugh, feel relief. Research has shown that when we read text, the same process occurs. We do indeed have the same types of physical responses. In some cases they’re more intense.

    Now here’s the thing. This physical response is triggered not just by threats and opportunities we perceive with our senses, things out there. It is also triggered by thought. Thoughts deliver a physical response just as surely as crack does. We have the research to prove it. In fact, sometimes thought delivers a more powerful physical response. Here’s but one example. Did you know that people with a phobia of snakes have a stronger reaction to reading a passage about snakes than they do to the actual critter?

    This is where fiction comes in. As I stated in my speech, fiction, the kind of fiction we love, the kind that keeps us up at night sitting on the edge of the tub or locked in a closet with a light, the kind that lingers in the fabric of our clothes and our hair long after we close the book, that kind of fiction goes beyond cognition, beyond data and facts. That kind of fiction triggers a physical response.

    It does this, and this is one difference from emotion triggered by our own thoughts or the sensory data we pick up from the world, because fiction, by its very nature, its very structure, is actually guiding our emotional response. Our physical response. This management of the response is in fact one of the things that we find so pleasurable about it.

    To find out more, please read:

    • The Science of Emotion by Randolph R. Cornelius
    • Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art by Jenefer Robinson

    You may then want to search out texts by Dolf Zillmann, Jennings Bryant, and Peter Vorderer.

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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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  • Trusting the writing process

    ByJohn Brown

    I’ve experienced yet again the miracle of manure, of starting from scratch, and following the zing.

    This last week I’ve been rewriting a beginning to a novel. It’s a bit tricky because I can’t just rewrite it without constraint. Such a rewrite would cause massive changes to everything else in the book. In fact, a complete, unfettered rewrite of a beginning might end up requiring a totally different book. But Tor bought the book in hand. Besides, I don’t have time for a total rewrite even if they did want one. So the new beginning had to fit into the rest of the current story.

    At three different spots where this beginning needed significant changes I have had to write a pile of cow crap because it’s all I had in me at the time. I knew I couldn’t use those plops when I finished them. But there they were.

    The problem was compounded by my reading the recent Time article about Stephenie Meyer and starting to listen to Empire by Card. I have a weakness for comparing myself to others, and this time the comparison yeilded some depressing results.

    Then I asked myself what wasn’t working and how I might meet the goals of those scenes a bit better. I followed my heart. But in all three cases I had to stop trying to use the brilliant words I had written originally. Not the cow crap revision, but the original stuff.

    I’m not talking about the general prescription that we writers need to “murder our darlings” because the darlings are usually bad writing. I find general prescriptions to be wrong much of the time and that one in particular to make no sense at all.

    In this case one of the things I had to jettison was a beginning segment that had compelled 90% of the readers who glanced at it to read more. A beginning page that snagged agents and editors. A beginning page I still loved, even after reading it as many times as I had.

    But it just wouldn’t fit, couldn’t fit with the new structure. When I tried to hang onto it, I wrote crap. Which was fine. There was some good stuff in the crap. But I eventually had to trust myself and come up with something else completely.

    And while I don’t know if it’s going to suck readers in like the original, I think it’s pretty dang good. Back before Card’s boot camp I would have never made it to this point. I would have given up. But this is just the process for me now. It took some time to learn and trust it. But now I know that while sometimes I can write hot. There’s no reason to despair if I don’t. Sometimes it takes a few tries before I get to the good stuff.

    As for Meyer and Card, well, it’s not my goal to be a one-trick pony, now, is it. 🙂

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