Where: Salt Lake City at CONduit
Date: Saturday, May 24, 2008
Time: 2 PM – 4 PM
I had tons of great feedback from the last workshop. It seemed to be helpful to quite a few people. There are a number of other good workshops for writers going on before and after mine that you’ll want to look into as well.
For more information go to the CONduit website.
Because a number of folks have emailed or posted asking this question, I figured I should address it in a post.
This edit of SERVANT was signficant, but it involved mostly line edits, copy edits, resequencing, and one important adjustment and addition.
Line edits are things that make individual sentences or paragraphs read more clearly. I made line edits to almost every page. I think most readers won’t notice these. But then that’s the point.
Copy edits catch small things like typos and misspellings. There were a number of maddening copy issues that were introduced into the manuscript in the publisher’s version and others that weren’t flagged. I fixed a number of these and then had two copy editors read over the manuscript to find more. No book is perfect. I’m sure there are still some gremlins lurking in the text. But we caught a lot of the little buggers.
Resequencing is moving chapters or sections around and does affect the experience. The biggest resequence was switching the first eight chapters back to the original order I intended. This is an important change and will have a large effect on the reader for the first quarter of the book. Then there were three other smaller sections inside the story that needed to be moved around to make the chronology clearer and improve the suspense.
The line, copy, and resequencing edits make up the bulk of the edits. But I did adjust and add a short section to the ending immediately after the climax to clarify a few things that should have been revealed in the first version and that lead into book two.
What does this all mean?
It means that while this is a superior version of the tale, the base story remains the same. I care about the stories of Sugar, Talen, Argoth, Hunger, and the dilemmas they face. So I did not change their tales. However, I did significantly change the experience of those tales for the reader.
If you have already read SERVANT, you know everything that happens. However, you will want to get a hold of a copy of the new version to review the updated ending for the new information it includes. To avoid spoilers and confusion, I will not be releasing the ending in a separate document. But if you sign up for my release notification, I’ll let you know when I have my release sale so you can get it cheap.
One final note. Because I feel this is a superior version of the story, and because I do not want readers to be confused about which version to read, I’m releasing it with a different title and different cover art. It will be called “Servant” and include the series label “The Dark God Book 1.”
I think readers are going to be very pleased with this version. I know I am. And then we can move on to “Curse,” the next in the series, followed by “Glory.”
Look, this is just an excellent post by Robinson Wells: Five Things I’ve Learned In The Last Year About Writing.
I kept finding myself saying yes, yes, yes!
Yes! I hate “networking” too. Icky, icky, icky. Like squishy underwear. Like buddying up to someone to get them into your network marketing downline. Like flies in soup. I love how Robinson replaces that with the real deal. I think I’m going to summarize him every time anyone asks me about networking.
One point. I do think he might be overstating the you-need-to-know someone deal. It’s easier, sure. But Larry Correia didn’t know anybody. He just wrote a book a lot of people in a certain demographic loved. I didn’t know my agent from Adam. Didn’t know my editor, but did have an endorsement from one of his authors. But that didn’t get me any deal. It probably got me, at most, a fair consideration. I can name others who didn’t know a soul. In fact, go to the facts and figures page in the On Writing section. Look at the author polls there. A lot of authors didn’t know a soul. Of course, knowing someone can help.
Yes! Be cheerfully flexible. Oh, my gosh. This is such a good approach. And I’m living it right now, although there have been a few moments when I’ve had to regroup for a moment to capture the cheerful.
Yes! Sometimes the thing you love doesn’t work for the project. Sometimes it does. I would advocate making sure you get to the root of the issue. But we’re artists. If the thing we don’t love doesn’t work, we can create a new thing to love. That’s what it means to be creative.
Work! Yes! It’s amazing what happens when you work.
Good stuff.
I’m so bullish on this, I say Robinson for President.
Of what, I don’t know. But he should be President, of something.
This is J. K. Rowling’s 2008 Harvard commencement speech, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.” It’s one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. Watch and then watch again. Read the full text here.
Two quotes that in no way can do justice to the whole thing.
And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
. . .
Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books.
The folks at Mediabistro.com reported the American Association of Publishers sales for December 2011 and YTD: “The December report represents data provided by 77 publishers and only sales of the participants are reported. NOTE: All numbers have been rounded to one decimal point and may not add up to 100%”
The key takeaway, I think, is that ebooks will become THE largest book trade category in 2012.
Sales only need to grow 33% to surpass that of adult hardcovers. See the chart below. They already dwarf adult mass market, which took a HUGE hit last year. Sales can’t keep growing at more than 100% year after year. They must eventually slow down. But, given projections, it’s not going to be hard to make 33%. According to the estimates of a Barclays Bank analyst (link below), Amazon will sell an estimated 35 million Kindles and Kindlefires next year. Each owner would only have to purchase $10 worth of books in the year for the segment to grow 33%. And that doesn’t count the sales for the Nook, iphones, ipads, or any other ereaders out there.
This year ebooks become king of the heap.
Media Bistro report of AAP numbers: http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/mass-market-paperback-sales-down-nearly-41-in-december_b47625
Barclays analyst project sales of 35 million Kindles and Kindlefires in 2012: http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2012/02/23/amazon-barclays-cuts-kindle-kindle-fire-estimates/
Here is the PowerPoint that I used in my presentation for Brandon Sanderson’s class at BYU, March 23, 2017.
2017 Sandersons Class indie vs publisher
And here’s the Excel spreadsheet you can use to compare revenue numbers.
Author earnings as Indie vs working with Publisher
Enjoy!
Shiny.
They moved the David Drake blurb to the side, lightened the lettering and moved things so the title wasn’t covering the top of Hunger’s head. At first I thought they moved the lettering, but they didn’t. It appears the shrunk Hunger a bit so we could see more of him. Small changes, but I think they make a significant effect. I think the overall effect is better. I like how Hunger looks more menacing in this one. Sugar is different. Don’t know which version of her I like better. I’m leaning to the original. Your thoughts? Either way, we luvs Tor’s art and production department. Here’s the before and after.
