Posts Tagged ‘ publishing ’

Epic Creep: The Urge to Expand a Series

You know what I liked about the Harry Potter books?

There was a road map for the series and they stuck to it. Seven years at school; seven books. Bam. Done. Further profits to come from merchandising spin-offs and movie adaptations, thank you very much, and phrases like “I just discovered that there was more story to tell” never left J. K. Rowling’s lips.

I’d like to see more of that.

Remember when we were going to get a movie version of The Hobbit? That was a pretty cool idea! Three movies, less so. And it crept up slowly — first it was one movie, then two, and now finally it’s three.

hobbit-logo

George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice books, same problem. A trilogy wasn’t quite enough space, so the fourth book was going to conclude it all! No, wait, it’s actually going to take a fifth book. The fifth book will conclude it all. Only it needs to be two fifth books, but each one is half of one book, or something. Or…three halves of one book, now. Sorry. Three fifth books. But he’s firm about ending the series there, quote “until I decide not to be firm.” So that’s something!

A_Game_of_Thrones_Novel_Covers

Or, remember when Robert Jordan died? That was pretty sad, but the good news was, he had worked hard to leave detailed notes and a partial manuscript for the final book. It would only take a little careful work by a trusted friend to finish his great epic! Or, you know, three books released over nearly five years, which is almost the same thing.

wheel-of-time-all-books-through-11

You get the point. I call it “epic creep,” and it’s not a good thing. It’s greed, by and large, and maybe some innocent vanity as well, that when a publisher says “gee, another installment would sell really well and maybe make yet another series of TV for HBO down the road,” the artist in a writer’s brain goes “yes, yes I do have more story to tell; I can write yet another brilliant book without resorting to filler and fluff!”

Which they can’t. If you’ve read Book 9 of The Wheel of Time, you’ve read Book 10, and the same goes for the later books of A Song of Fire and Ice.

I know there’s not much we can do to stop the trend (other than getting series books from the library, or skipping them entirely, rather than reward the continual expansion, which realistically I was gonna do anyway because poor). And if I were in, say, George R. R. Martin’s shoes, I’d probably have a hard time passing up free money myself — “You mean I can write any old crap as long as it has the same characters’ names in it, and get paid even more than I did for the good books?”

But it is nice that we haven’t heard any rumors about Harry Potter: After Hogwarts coming down the pipe yet. Or maybe J. K. Rowlings just realized there was no way that shit could end happily — we’ll never know.

Series creep, though. Don’t do it. You heard it here first.

2013
01/22
CATEGORY
Writing Life
11 comments

A Vanity of Reading

In college, I saved money by checking course books out of the library whenever it was possible, rather than buying the latest “critical edition” from the bookstore. (This was a lot easier in the English and History classes that made up the bulk of my education; science students get, as far as I can tell, fucked.)

There’d be occasional inconsistencies between page numbers and footnotes and the like that mildly irritated some of  my professors, but for the most part they were sympathetic to the “I can’t actually afford to buy nineteen ‘critical edition’ novels at $25 a pop this semester” argument. Bless their hearts.

As a result, I tend to associate the dry-and-dusty literature of American history with equally dry-and-dusty volumes, preferably ones in tough, plain-colored library bindings with the little white-stamped titles on the spine. And this has led to a peculiar vanity: that shamelessly misrepresented copy of The House of the Seven Gables I blogged about last week has been an unexpectedly unsettling thing to read in public.

For those that can’t be bothered to click through, the book looks like this:

And it reads like this:

There were curtains to Phoebe’s bed; a dark, antique canopy, and ponderous festoons of a stuff which had been rich, and even magnificent, in its time; but which now brooded over the girl like a cloud, making a night in that one corner, while elsewhere it was beginning to be day. The morning light, however, soon stole into the aperture at the foot of the bed, betwixt those faded curtains. Finding the new guest there,–with a bloom on her cheeks like the morning’s own, and a gentle stir of departing slumber in her limbs, as when an early breeze moves the foliage, –the dawn kissed her brow. It was the caress which a dewy maiden–such as the Dawn is, immortally–gives to her sleeping sister, partly from the impulse of irresistible fondness, and partly as a pretty hint that it is time now to unclose her eyes.

We discussed the incongruities in detail last week. At the time, however, I hadn’t assigned much personal significance to it beyond amusing blog fodder.

Turns out I’m susceptible to a deep literary vanity.

I deeply disliked reading this particular edition in public. I’m too fond of myself for self-consciousness, most of the time, but something about reading a “classic” that looks like pulp fantasy bothered me far more than actually reading pulp fantasy in public (which I’ve done on many an occasion).

Pure literary snobbishness. We all want to be seen as challenging ourselves, at some level — Gosh, he’s reading Hawthorne for fun. That’s a smart boy there!

I’d have denied it, of course, if it had somehow come up in conversation. I like The House of the Seven Gables, and all the other Hawthorne I’ve read over the course of my years too; I don’t need to impress anyone to enjoy it.

But I can’t deny the impulse to stop the barista as she sneaks a glance and say “It’s an American classic, I swear!”

Nosce te ipsum. Apparently I like my classics to look like classics. Makes you wonder if there’s a market for trashy science-fiction or romance novels done up in dusty leather jackets, doesn’t it?

2012
09/13
CATEGORY
Personal Life
10 comments

Amazon Knows What Page of “War and Peace” You Gave Up On, No Matter What Your Goodreads Review Says

I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, but often only make it through the front section on any given day. (On busy days I only manage the editorials; I have a strong childhood reflex for reading the funny pages first.)

So I probably would have missed this e-book article entirely if it hadn’t quoted romance author and blogger-par-example Tawna Fenske, who promptly provided the link on her blog for all us fans. And that would have been sad, because there’s lots to talk about in it!

Did you click through and read the article yet? I know no one actually does, but it’s a good one. Give it a try. And for the truly lazy, here’s the core of the story:

“The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books.”

There’s a lot more detail, but that’s the basic gist: when you read an e-book, the company whose software you are using gets to collect all your usage data. How long after the purchase it took you to start reading, how long your average reading session was, where you stopped, which passages you bookmarked or highlighted; the works. As the Journal‘s headline says, your e-book is reading you.

And yes, you did agree to allow all of this, back when you accepted the terms of use for your Kindle or Nook or whatever you use. Hadn’t noticed, had you?

There are some interesting tidbits here and there in the story, gathered along with all that other data:

“Science-fiction, romance and crime-fiction fans often read more books more quickly than readers of literary fiction do, and finish most of the books they start. Readers of literary fiction quit books more often and tend skip around between books”

Predictable enough, really. Unfortunately, the e-book publishers that are interested in this data aren’t just thinking about how to market broad genres now that they don’t have a physical bookstore layout to guide consumers — they’re also looking at how to make individual stories that are sure-fire sellers:

“Barnes & Noble, which accounts for 25% to 30% of the e-book market through its Nook e-reader, has recently started studying customers’ digital reading behavior. Data collected from Nooks reveals, for example, how far readers get in particular books, how quickly they read and how readers of particular genres engage with books. Jim Hilt, the company’s vice president of e-books, says the company is starting to share their insights with publishers to help them create books that better hold people’s attention.”

I think it’s worth stopping to think about what audience-driven metrics have done for television and film. Let’s face it, we live in a world where Buffy the Vampire Slayer is edgy and ground-breaking. The threshold for “experimental” is embarrassingly low in visual media because it’s not what audiences want (on paper, anyway), so there’s huge institutional barriers to ever making, marketing, and selling something genuinely different.

I don’t want that to become the case in publishing. We do not want a world where books are getting rejected because they didn’t focus group well. Audience-pleasing pulp has its role in the world, but right now fiction publishers — who have many bad traits of their own as gatekeepers, don’t get me wrong — are at least willing to take a loss on the advances for most of the books they put out, on the assumption that a few successes will pay for the rest. It makes it possible to take risks that, very occasionally, give us the great literary works of a generation.

The wealth of new data the internet has given us allows a lot more businesses to be run by the same tiny market fluctuations and minute-to-minute changes that drive our financial sector. It’s worth pausing to ask ourselves if we really think they’ve done such a bang-up job these last few years that we want everyone else going that way too.

2012
07/03
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
2 comments

If All Else Fails, Publish a Coffee Table Book

Do you remember that Seinfeld storyline where Kramer wanted to make a coffee table book of coffee tables?  (I don’t, as it happens, but I know it exists because people bring it up whenever I advance this theory of publishing.)  The joke was basically that there’s already a big, glossy-paged book of full-page images with text captions for almost anything you can think of.

Well, that was before the internet.  Or not before it, but before the internet of lolcats and Michelle Bachmann’s eyes superimposed on other celebrities and, to pick the example that put this post in my mind, hipster puppies.

Hipster Puppies is out in large paperback format for $14.00, and it is a wonderful example of how you can make picture books of anything, especially if it’s something that’s been on the internet first.  Of course, they’re also publishing it as an e-book, which sort of seems to defeat the purpose of a photobook unless you leave your Nook lying around the coffee table.  I suppose soon enough we’ll be able to hook it up directly to the HD viewscreen built into the table.

So if you’re currently struggling with creative writing and publishing — just can’t seem to get a book out there — grab a camera and start clicking.  A coffee table books of coffee table books, perhaps?  It’s a thought.

2011
09/27
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
Writing Life
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“Self-Published” Isn’t “Published”

Today’s thesis should be clear, I hope, from the title.

But don’t panic; it has nothing to do with what the best way to publish a book might be.  There are a number of paths to authorial fame and fortune, and I really do not begrudge anyone their preferred methods.  (Frankly, says I, try them all.  Anyone who makes his or her daily bread by writing knows it doesn’t hurt to have a few different money-making projects out there at the same time.)

Still and all:

A self-published author is not the same thing a “published author.”

This has nothing to do with judgments of value.  It is about meaning.  A self-published book can become a runaway bestseller, earning the author well-deserved fame and fortune for producing what is an undeniably fine piece of literature.  That person is very surely an author, and his or her book is unquestionably a real book that people can pay real money for.

But a rather specific (and on the whole unpleasant) experience has not happened to the author.  He has not, in fact, “been published”; the publishing has not happened to him.  It happened, in a new and unusual sort of way, to the book, but not to the author.

This has nothing to do with what publishing system produces the best books, or best rewards its authors.  It is simply the reality that the traditional road to publication (agents, submissions, contracts, reviews, etc.) is its own job, largely separate from the actual experience of sitting down and writing a book.  It’s a skill that you have to practice and perfect just like any other.

So if you haven’t done all those steps, don’t use the phrase that makes people think you have.  Have a little pride.  Say you’re a self-published author.  Then talk about why, if you like.

I’m very tall, so people often ask if I played basketball in college.  The answer to that question, technically, is yes:  I shot some hoops with a few guys from the math department now and again.  But if I answer “yes,” what I’m telling them is that I was on my college’s team.  And that’s just a whole different set of skills, responsibilities, and time commitments that I never made.

Self-publishing can produce very good literature.  It can even produce solid profits for an author, perhaps more than a traditional contract would have.  I don’t think that one method is inherently better than the other.

But they are different jobs.  Please — use the different terms.

2011
08/08
CATEGORY
Writing Life
3 comments

What Writers Want from Their Publishers: Short Fiction

I declare this a People’s Revolutionary Post!

Aspiring writers already know What Editors Want (or What Publishers Want, or What Agents Want, or whatever).  That information appears on many blogs, forums, and workshop-type websites.  I’ve read plenty of it myself — enough to realize that the actual advice writers need is “read the submission guidelines, stupid,” because Editor A hates sans-serif fonts and will bounce any story that uses them, while Editor B wants only serif fonts and Editor C couldn’t care less but personally sends death threats to the home of every writer that puts two spaces after ending punctuation marks.  And if you’re very, very lucky they might even tell you that.

Those of us in the unenviable “on spec” market — submitting fiction unrequested, on the hopes that it will be in the minute percentage that sees acceptance in any given publication — are familiar with bending over backward for each set of specific requirements.  And to some extent there’s nothing wrong with that.  If your business is reading a few hundred pieces of writing every week, it’s pretty reasonable to want them to be readable.  But — People’s Revolutionary Post, remember — at the end of the day it’s the writing that pays the publication’s bills.  You, the writer, are the indispensable part of this equation.  So today, rather than telling writers what will better please their editor, I aim to tell the publishers of short fiction what will please their writers.  Forward the post to the editor in your life — you have nothing to lose but your chains! Or your dignity.  Or a book contract.  We’ll work on the slogan later. 

Publishers, be advised!  Your writers have basic needs:

1.  Clear Formatting Guidelines

In all seriousness, if you refuse to read anything that isn’t in twelve-point Courier, you need to tell writers that up front.  The days of a “standard manuscript format” that everyone who was serious knew and respected are over and done with; the internet and plain-text submission forms have killed them for good.  Anyone who’s dedicated to getting published will happily oblige individual publisher’s formatting preferences, but those preferences need to be clearly stated.  And if you do say that formatting doesn’t matter, take it upon yourself to transfer that eye-straining, green-on-black, ten-point, single-spaced, Times New Roman submission into something you can read more easily and give it its fair shot, because you told the writer anything was fair game. By the same token, bounce anything that directly contradicts a clearly-stated formatting guideline like it was a Superball — folks gotta learn.

2.  Clear Content Guidelines

The internet has arrived, and if you’re publishing on it you know that it takes ten minutes tops to update your submissions page with a few sentences on what you’re looking for this issue.  If there’s a theme — say it’s October and you only want spooky stories — tell your prospective writers that, rather than bouncing anything that isn’t scary because it “doesn’t meet our needs at this time.”  With turn-arounds of a month or more, submitting a story that’s guaranteed not to meet the needs of the time can be a serious dent in a writer’s potential income, which brings us to the next point…

3.  Quick Rejections

The acceptance process can be a long and difficult one.  We understand that.  If it takes a few rounds of reading, some close votes, and a while of deliberation to accept or reject a story, that’s part of the game.  But for pity’s sake, once you’ve tossed something in the “NO” pile, let the writer know by the next day.  Unless you allow for simultaneous submissions, a submitted story is useless to a writer until the reply comes back.  If it’s just not what you’re looking for, or it’s total crap, or whatever, and it gets eliminated at the first glance, send it back then rather than when you send the notices to the writers who just barely missed publication after months of painful deliberation.  Remember, the story sitting idle in your rejection pile may be the writer’s only hope of paying off Vinnie the Shark!

4.  Accurate Estimates on Response Time

I can’t tell you how painful it is to get a rejection long after the “usual response time” for a publication has passed.  You try not to get too optimistic in this business, but when a magazine that claims to get back to writers in two to three months sits on a story for four months plus, you can’t help but think it’s because you’re in some kind of final round or who knows what.  If it takes four months to get to a story, consider it, and make a decision, say as much.

5.  Online Submissions

This is another of those “the internet is here” things.  Depending on your genre, some of the longest-standing and best-established periodicals are still clinging fiercely to the mailed-in manuscript submission, but let’s be realistic here — if I have my choice of a dozen periodicals paying about the same rate, and two of them require me to print on good-quality paper and pay for postage while the rest don’t, I’m going to submit to those two at the absolute last, when everyone else has rejected me.  Doesn’t matter how prestigious you are, doesn’t matter how long you’ve been around.  This is no longer a “gatekeeper” method for keeping lazy writers away.  This is shooting yourself in the foot.  By the same token, charging for your online submissions is just going to drive writers to every other available publication before yours — and there’s plenty out there.  No one should have to pay you for the privilege of having their work considered, and inevitably no one will.

6.  Real Reasons for Rejection

All right, this is mostly a pipe dream.  Magazines get a lot of submissions; it really is impossible to write a detailed critique for every rejection.  But a sentence or two saying “it’s not quite dark enough for us” or “your plot was boring and we hated the dialogue” or something like that doesn’t take long — hell, make a form letter with check boxes and take the extra ten seconds to mark the reason for rejection.  It can only improve the quality of submission from writers who submit more than once to the same publication, and that’s in everyone’s best interest.

At the end of the day, these are all just so many wishful thoughts.  The relationship here is pretty much a one-way street — there are enough writers out there submitting on-spec that magazines can get all the stories they need without taking any steps to make the process easier or fairer.  But viva la revolución!  There are some very fine publications out there that are now offering some or all of the gestures described in this post (where do you think I got the ideas from?), and they are inevitably the ones I turn to first.  My hope is that other writers are doing the same, and that publishers are sitting up and taking notice of who gets the best submissions first.  Rates are about the same everywhere, give or take a few cents a word, so this is what’s making the difference.  The oppressors have been warned!

The author of this post is not in actually particularly revolutionary.  But he does like Socialist posters and things like that.  Leave a comment with your thoughts if you like!

2010
10/08
CATEGORY
Writing Life
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Writing Life: StumbleUpon and Your Web Presence

Web Presence for the Writer – Short Articles on Improving Your Internet Profile for Authors

If you read the last Web Presence for the Writer article (all about Google searches), you should be getting the overall goals here — be noticed, but only for the good stuff.  Getting your Google returns looking like you want them to is a good first step.  After that, there’s about 4,326,754 social networking tools (very precise statistic) that might or might not do you any good at all.  I’m still trying them myself, so I can’t weigh in on everything, but I’ll try to visit all of the big ones at least once.  Facebook is the obvious first choice, and I hate being obvious (and also trust all of you to have at least a passing familiarity with Facebook), so let’s take a look at StumbleUpon.

What Is StumbleUpon?

I’m so glad you asked.

StumbleUpon is very easy to explain if you use Pandora (and seriously, who doesn’t?) — it’s Pandora, but for webpages instead of songs.  You pick some things you’re interested in (writing, say), click the giant button that says “Stumble” on it, and the search engine pulls up a random webpage that it thinks you might like.  If you like it you click the thumbs-up graphic, if you hate it you go thumbs-down, and if you could go either way just hit “Stumble” again and keep surfing.  The search engine gets smarter and smarter about what you like and don’t like, and the new pages just keep getting better — theoretically.

Help for Writers

Obviously, a tool that lets you waste time on the internet doesn’t scream “writing productivity.”  In fact, I may be introducing people to a previously-unknown time-waster here, and I do apologize if that’s the case.  The value of StumbleUpon lies in getting other people to Stumble you — your blog, your publications online, your articles on Wikipedia or Google Knol or  whatever else you want more exposure for.

The advantage of StumbleUpon from the perspective of someone who wants to be StumbledUpon (as it were) is that the search engine takes a sort of brute-force approach to all new content that’s added.  That means that the first time someone gives your webpage a thumbs-up (more on that in a minute), StumbleUpon will start throwing it at anyone whose established preferences even vaguely justify a look at your content.  The engine is looking for better data, seeing who is and isn’t into what you’re giving it, and it needs a lot of initial points — meaning a lot of initial views during that first twenty-four hours or so.

After the initial rush, StumbleUpon drops how frequently it’s offering a particular page, and from then on it seems to keep about the same rate of referral unless a couple people happen to “thumbs-up” the site within a short period of time.  Then the engine will say “hey, maybe they’re onto something” and start offering to a broader audience again.  Pretty simple, right?

So Get Your Writing Stumbled

StumbleUpon relies on user recommendations, so until someone recommends your site, this isn’t a useful tool.  The good news is, there’s no rules against self-advertisement.  Plan on a ten or fifteen minute time investment the first time you pick up StumbleUpon, but after that you shouldn’t be looking at more than thirty to sixty seconds of work getting everything you put on the web a few hundred hits for free.  Generating content that keeps those viewers there is up to you, but the initial data-gathering period once you add a site to StumbleUpon will guarantee that a wide range of people at least glance at it.

So if you haven’t, go to the website and create a profile.  Get the browser tool, because without it you won’t be able to automatically “thumbs-up” sites that aren’t in StumbleUpon already, and that’s mostly what you’re interested in doing.  Actually Stumbling around and marking things you like or don’t like isn’t necessary, though it can be fun — and it’s nice to have something in your list of “favorites” besides your own stuff, just in case someone does check your profile out.  You don’t want to seem too greedy.

Once the browser tool is installed, the work is mostly done.  From here on out, every time you add a post to your blog, or put a new page on your home site, or in general get something on the web that you want people to take a look at, click the little blue-and-green StumbleUpon logo as soon as the new content is up.  Since you’ll be the first person to “Stumble” that page, you get to write the short summary and review — go ahead and flatter yourself.  You’ve earned it; just taking the time to install the browser tool is more effort than most web users are going to.

Just remember that the rush of views will happen during the day or so after you add a page to StumbleUpon, so keep the first visible content as high quality as possible for that period.  You don’t want to add a little one-line blog post about being out of town and then Stumble it with a thumbs-up, for example — that’ll just refer people to a really boring post, and they’ll be unlikely to visit your blog again.  It’s a shotgun approach to readership, but the barrel’s still got to be pointed in the right direction.

And, of course, be generous — once you have the browser tool, it’s literally one click and a quick, one-sentence summary to add someone else’s content to StumbleUpon as well.  If you see something you like, give it the thumbs-up!  Odds are they’ll be grateful for the traffic.

Thoughts on using StumbleUpon?  Furious with me for introducing you to this new time-waster?  Came here as a Stumbler in the first place?  Drop a comment; let me know!

2010
05/05
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
Writing Life
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Writing Life: Successful Debuts

The Writing Life:  Things worth noticing, thinking about, or just hearing once and then forgetting for writers of all kinds

Everyone wants to write the next bestseller and never work again (or to write the next bestseller and continue working, but at your own pace and without all that hassle with day jobs and paying the bills and never having shirts that aren’t all frayed at the cuffs).  Is that so much to ask for?  In many cases, yes.  But as an inspiration to us all, today’s “Writing Life” post highlights a few well-known authors who started out that way and never looked back — instant superstars who hit the magic sweet spot in public approval the moment their debut works rolled off the press.  At some point we’ll flip the coin and follow it up with a list of now-famous authors who died in impoverished obscurity, but for today, relax and enjoy the literary successes of…

Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird remains one of America’s most beloved novels, and it was the only one Harper Lee ever wrote.  Perhaps that’s inauspicious for those of us hoping to enjoy a successful first novel and a long literary career…but she holds the highest civilian honor awarded by the United States government, so we could all do worse.

Margaret Mitchell – Another single-novel Southern woman (although experts discovered and verified an unpublished novel of hers years after her death), Margaret Mitchell defined the Old South for an entire generation in Gone with the Wind.  She also made a pile of money doing it.

Oscar Wilde – His first and only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was the cornerstone of his literary success, and the best-known of his works during his lifetime (which was short, and, securing him a place in the next list, ended in poverty and unhappiness).

Agatha Christie – The Mysterious Affair at Styles launched a literary career for Agatha Christie that earned her a title, a fortune, and more sales than anyone since the Apostles.

Anna Sewell died only a few months after publishing Black Beauty, but that was enough time to see it shatter sales records.  It remains one of the best-selling books of all time, with over fifty million copies sold, and it spawned an entire genre of children’s literature.

F. Scott Fitzgerald – Not exactly a poster child for happiness in success, Fitzgerald nevertheless holds a place on the list of blockbuster debuts.  This Side of Paradise earned him enough success to convince Zelda Sayre to marry him, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Ralph Ellison only wrote one novel – The Invisible Man – but he published essays on a wide range of subjects up until his death, making it the promising start of a successful literary career.

The Brontë Sisters (with Charlotte leading the pack) are poster-children for the successful first novel.  All of them captured audiences’ attentions with their respective debuts, and the ones who lived long enough capitalized on the success with quick follow-ups.

J. R. R. Tolkien‘s first books were academic, but his first novel, The Hobbit, sold out its first run in a few months and remained in high demand throughout the wartime paper rationing.

And, of course, whether you like the works that followed it or not, J. K. Rowling‘s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone put her on the Forbes list and the order of precedence.  We should all be so lucky.

Know of other first-time successes?  Got an author who needs to make it onto the “died miserable” list when it runs?  Drop me a comment!

2010
04/28
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
Thoughts & Musings
Writing Life
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Writing Life: Google and Your Web Presence

Web Presence for the Writer – Short Articles on Improving Your Internet Profile for Authors

Readers of this blog probably have blogs of their own, so I’m assuming that the concept of “web presence” isn’t wholly a foreign one.  But being a writer who’s fond of his personal space — mental and physical — myself, I know that it’s not always the most comfortable arena for the quiet, creative sort to jump right into, either.  Having a well-maintained blog is just the tip of a very hard, chilly iceberg, as I’m discovering for myself.  So over the next few posts (likely interspersed with other things, as the blog usually goes), I’ll try to lay out some of the basic first steps that I’m stumbling through.

From a writer’s perspective, trying to keep up with the social networking explosion can be a painfully large time commitment — hours spent tweeting, stumbling, digging, and so on are hours not spent writing, and unless you’re successful enough to have quit the day job, those hours come from a pretty small reserve.  But the payoff is the leg up with potential publishers that previous generations never had, and that lets well-networked writers slip around the traditional process of desperately submitting “cold” until someone picks up enough of your stories to make approaching agents and publishers directly a possibility.  Web presence allows for a first impression that isn’t dependent on either knowing someone on the inside or cobbling together a sufficiently-impressive portfolio of random credits, freelance articles, and essay contests you won in college.

The catch here is that the impression can be a good one or a bad one, and no impression at all defaults to “bad” in most people’s books.  The web is huge and knows many things, so if it doesn’t know anything about you, there’s an automatic sense that you haven’t done much with your life.  This can be completely untrue and it doesn’t matter — realistically, the first thing anyone who wants to find out more about you is going to do is Google your name and see what comes up.  So be prepared for it:  Google yourself.

Make a Name for Yourself

People with less common names are obviously at an advantage here.  I’m the only “Geoffrey Cubbage” on the web (and probably the only one in the world), so most of the websites that Google turns up if you search for me are at least tangentially related to me.  People with more common names might do well to both write and maintain their various webpages using a middle initial or even the full middle name; if even that doesn’t set you apart from the masses, it may be time to consider a pseudonym.  Just be sure that everything you do is under the same name, whatever you choose it to be — since I go by “Geoffrey Cubbage” on the web, signing myself as “Geoffrey Alan Cubbage” makes the phrase a less-perfect match for search engines and pushes that particular hit lower on the results.

Move the Important Things Up

Once you’ve found yourself on Google, take a look at what it’s turning up, and in what order.  Odds are that your Facebook page will be first (and Facebook is something I’ll look at closer in another post), and if you’ve done your job on it, your blog or other personal webpage that you want people to see will be close to the top as well.  If it’s not, get to work making it a more relevant match for your name — and for the most part, that just means using it more.  If you can get it in an actual page header, so much the better; “Free Association:  the Blog of Jerusalem Keynes” is going to come up higher on a Google search for “Jerusalem Keynes” than “Free Association” would.  Slip the name in other places, like an “about the author page” or a contacts listing, and in the case of a blog, you can even consider simply “signing” your posts with a dash followed by your name.  No one is likely to notice it as terribly invasive of their reading, and it will tell Google that your website is more about you than other sites your name turns up on.

Improve Any Content You Control

After Facebook and a properly name-laden personal website, you may be looking at an awkward potluck of Google returns, depending on what you’ve been doing on the web.  Clean up any pages that you have editorial control over — no one is going to expect your Facebook page or a casual blog like this one to look like the front page of the New York Times website, but you probably don’t want pictures of you doing body shots at the strip club popping up either.  Since we’re talking about web presence for the writer here, be sure that anything you can add content to or edit a profile for mentions you as a writer in some context.  You want to seem like it’s a serious part of your life and how you identify to anyone who’s looking, even if they happen to be looking at your Cat Fancier forum profile.  Be a writer that fancies cats.

Add New Search Results

Once you’ve cleaned up anything you can, resist the temptation to say “it’s out of my hands” and let the other random junk — old sites that mention you by name, forums you may have defunct posts on, those random genealogical search engine scams, etc. — sit on the first couple pages of a Google search.  Even if it’s harmless content (a small newspaper article you were quoted in, for example), boring old stuff is just that.  It’s old, and it’s boring.  It’s probably an overall positive that I was the Illinois state champion in Lincoln-Douglas debate my senior year in high school, but do I really want people to think that I haven’t done anything worth mentioning since then?

Instead, load the web with newer, fresher things that use your name.  Join some forums and post under your real name (but only nice things, please).  Use a blog or a book reviewing service to put up occasional short pieces on what you’ve been reading lately.  Submit some replies to how-to sites, or write a “guest post” for another blogger (offer them the same opportunity, of course).  Keep dropping your name so that it appears more recently and more frequently than it does on the old junk pages that Google’s returning, and they’ll soon drop off the first couple pages (which is all anyone is going to look at, unless they’re a government employee running a professional background check on you).

What I’m finding as I go along with all this (and anyone who Googles my name will realize that I have work to do yet) is that web presence is a time-hungry beast with a lot of heads.  I’ll talk more about it in future posts, but for now, start out small — keep a blog or a webpage and work on getting it toward the top of the Google search returns for your name, clean up anything else Google pulls up that you have control over, and try to get some new content out there with your name on it to replace all the old, defunct stuff.  If nothing else, you’ll get to spend a day Googling yourself and calling it work!

- Geoffrey Cubbage (see what I did there?)

2010
04/23
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
Writing Life
3 comments

Writing Life: Working Titles

If you read Wednesday’s post, you probably picked up the general theme of “lots of details before publishing.”  After writing, after editing, even after letting other people butcher the work and then making those edits — the fun’s still just starting.  And at some point in there, you have to slap a title on the work, which regular readers of this blog already know is the part I’m happiest to farm out to some other schlub.

But what the hell, it’s the twenty-teens now, and DIY is hip.  So in that spirit, I yanked down a pile of books from the shelf and started thumbing through the spines.  A couple hundred volumes later, I’ve broken everything down to a couple fundamental approaches that you loyal readers can always keep in mind — other authors seem to like them, or at least their editors did, and their books got published.  What more recommendation do you need, really?

The Literal Approach

I was shocked to discover how many books were getting away with titles that I would have discarded as boring and stupid-sounding — and I’d never even noticed.  Some were old favorites!  For centuries, people have been pulling a relevant noun out of their book, slapping the definite article in front of it (or not, in the case of proper nouns), and publishing happily.  Pick a genre, and literal, one- or two-word titles are going to litter it.  Don Quixote, Oliver Twist, Wuthering Heights, The Hobbit, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — you can go highbrow, lowbrow, kids, adult, fantasy, literature, some combination of all those things, and find plenty of simple, literal titles.

There’s reasons for this.  One of them is doubtlessly people like me, who don’t know what the hell else to call their story, but I like to think that there’s also some inherent merit in putting what the book is about right on its cover.  At the very least, it’s a service to browsers in the bookstore — someone who thinks unicorns are stupid can probably skip The Last Unicorn, say.  You won’t impress anyone with your cleverness this way, but sometimes it’s okay to let the work speak for itself, rather than relying on a catchy title to grab people.

The Thematic Approach

Just about as common are books with a title that grabs a big idea from the text, rather than a specific character or place or other physical thing.  The Wind in the Willows isn’t actually about a breeze, but the image fits both the pastoral setting and the personal philosophy of several of the free-spirited protagonists.  The Grapes of Wrath works in much the same way, directly linking the setting of the novel to the Book of Revelation’s “winepress” by way of Julia Ward Howe’s well-known lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic.  (Steinbeck, interestingly — a man who loved a good quotation, and the more meanings it could pack the better — struggled with a title for The Grapes of Wrath, and wound up taking his wife’s suggestion.)  The thematic approach to titles seems to particularly dominate the science-fiction and fantasy epics:  Stranger in a Strange Land, Ender’s Game, A Game of Thrones, Shards of Honor, and many, many other “genre” works pick a general theme or idea out of the work and turn it into a short-phrase title.

I think of this approach as an overall compromise between helpful description and clever wordplay; like any compromise, it either leaves all parties happy, or all parties unhappy.  Sometimes you wonder what the publishers were trying to say, and other times it’s a clever link between the text and an outside idea.  I’m not sure how I would go about constructing this sort of title myself, other than by the Steinbeck-style fragmented quotation, but the key seems to be making sure that the ideas your title conjures are actually the ideas that appear in the book.  So choose your words carefully…

The Non-Referential Approach

And then (on the subject of carefully-chosen words) there are titles that don’t have any direct connection to the work, or a very tenuous one.  They’re designed to be interpreted, and quite possibly to be misinterpreted as well, depending on the author.  Shakespearean quotes also seem to feature heavily, for some reason — Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace all jump to mind as books whose titles are relevant but not necessarily very related to the stories themselves.  Certain authors (Faulkner, Vonnegut, etc.) seem to have a strict rule against conventionally literal titles, while others only indulge occasionally.  These are idiosyncratic beasts, so I’m hard-pressed to give you a rule on how to make them work, but Shakespeare seems like a good place to start.  Just be careful, since the line between clever allusion and sophomoric punning is — as this blog frequently proves — a thin one…

At the risk of crossing that line, I direct your intention to the header on this post for interpretation — does it refer to the “working title” placeholders that occasionally find their way into print?  Is it just about making titles that work?  Or am I evoking the idea of “working” a title like clay, or some other malleable substance…you tell me.  It’s easy to get too clever with these things.  But pretty cool how it works, no?

2010
04/16
CATEGORY
Writing Life
1 comment

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