The secrets of good writing have been debated again and again and again. But “good writing” might, after all, be the wrong ideal to aim for. In About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews, celebrated author and literary critic Samuel Delany . . . synthesizes his most valuable insights from thirty-five years of teaching creative writing. . . .

One his key observations is the crucial difference between “good writing” and “talented writing,” the former being largely the product of technique (and we know from H.P. Lovecraft that “no aspiring author should content himself with a mere acquisition of technical rules”), the other a matter of linguistic and aesthetic sensitivity:

Though they have things in common, good writing and talented writing are not the same.

[…]

If you start with a confused, unclear, and badly written story, and apply the rules of good writing to it, you can probably turn it into a simple, logical, clearly written story. It will still not be a good one. The major fault of eighty-five to ninety-five percent of all fiction is that it is banal and dull.

Now old stories can always be told with new language. You can even add new characters to them; you can use them to dramatize new ideas. But eventually even the new language, characters, and ideas lose their ability to invigorate.

Either in content or in style, in subject matter or in rhetorical approach, fiction that is too much like other fiction is bad by definition. However paradoxical it sounds, good writing as a set of strictures (that is, when the writing is good and nothing more) produces most bad fiction. On one level or another, the realization of this is finally what turns most writers away from writing.

Talented writing is, however, something else. You need talent to write fiction.

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn’t.

Link to the rest at Brain Pickings and thanks to Patricia for the tip.

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Franz Kafka

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Okay, we all know about this. Piracy, the great and terrifying force that’s destroying authors’ means to make a living on one hand, and getting their work in front of thousands of new readers on the other. There’s plenty of conflicting information out there.

. . . .

1. Piracy is not something that can be stopped.

This is because of the limits of technology. Sorry, guys. It’s not possible to stop piracy completely through technological means. If there was a way to do it, the big media companies would have found it by now, seeing as they’ve spent the last ten plus years throwing millions of dollars at the problem.

Now, having said that, let me elaborate a little. It’s possible for you to prevent your work from being pirated if you never publish it and keep it on your hard drive or in your notebooks forever. I’m assuming, though, that you intend to actually publish your work, or you’re already published.

. . . .

2. Piracy can be reduced, however.

You can, in fact, cut the rate of piracy. You know what’s working for the big media companies, whether they like it or not?

Netflix, and iTunes.

Think about it. What do these things have in common? They make it really, really, REALLY easy for a user to access the content. Netflix is a monthly fee, all you can eat option; iTunes is a one-click buy. This is what you want to aim for, when you’re selling your books. Piracy takes time and effort that plenty of readers just don’t have, but they’ll do it if they feel they have to. If you want to sell your book and restrict it to the US, for example, you better accept that it’ll be pirated outside the US by fans who don’t want to wait around for their local release. If you make your book inconvenient to read for some users, say by adding DRM, then they’re likely to pirate it to get a copy that ‘just works’.

. . . .

6. People have lots of reasons for pirating.

It’s not always about the money. When it comes to ebooks, it’s really not about the money. Everyone can afford a few bucks for a book. The denizens of the Internet are used to getting their content instantly and conveniently, to the device of their choice, in the format of their choice. Take away some part of this, and they’ll resort to technical means to get it back.

Link to the rest at The Raynfall Agency

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Nina Katchadourian borrows the words she uses for her unusual poetry from the spines of books. She arranges those spines, book upon book, so that they form brief poems that are often insightful and surprising.

Link to the rest at io9 and thanks to Joshua for the tip. You can buy Nina’s poems on Amazon

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From the earliest days, it was clear to me (and a few others, obviously) that Amazon was no ordinary company, at any level. However, three attributes set it (far) apart in my mind:

1. Vision and ambition that were orders of magnitude beyond those of others team that I encountered (until, that is, I met Google);
2. A cult-like dedication to customer experience/satisfaction that permeated every decision made by every person at the company; and,
3. A business model that not only valued long-term cash flow and absolute profit potential, but also deemed near-term profits and profit margin largely irrelevant.

Individually, these characteristics have been powerful; in combination, they have been revolutionary. Jeff Bezos’ worldview gave his entire team permission — in fact, it gave them the mandate — to think Big, with a capital “B.” Customers’ pure delight with every Amazon interaction gave the company permission to sell (almost) anything to (almost) anyone.

And, finally, management’s clarity of financial intent (i.e., to perpetually focus on long-term potential) has, from day one, conditioned shareholders and Wall Street to expect a business that will forever be amorphous and unpredictable, with razor-thin margins.

. . . .

Liberated from more typical corporate constraints, Amazon has evolved like few other companies in history — from its humble origins as an online bookstore into: Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute, Amazon Marketplace, Amazon Flexible Payments Service, state-of-the-art warehouses (~70) everywhere, Amazon Cloud Player, AmazonFresh, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Prime, A9, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Diapers.com, Silk, Amazon Cloud Drive, Zappos, Amazon CloudFront, Kindle, and so on.

Sound familiar? It should, because this transformation mirrors that of Google, itself, which began as “just” a search engine company focused on “organizing the world’s information,” and has now become: Gmail, Maps, Apps, Drive, Chrome, Android, Motorola, YouTube, Wallet, Voice, Google Cloud Storage, Shopping, Chromebook, Google App Engine, Google+, and so on.

While not perfectly matching each other solution-for-solution, Amazon and Google now find themselves overlapping across, and competing within, most major categories of Internet-fueled technology and business.

. . . .

I actually think there’s one final aspect to Amazon’s business with which Google cannot (yet) directly compete, and which may prove to be the difference-maker in this faux-ish battle: Data.

With 17+ years of history and hundreds of millions of transactions across almost every category of goods, Amazon now has massive quantities of data about the actual buying habits of tens, if not hundreds, of millions of consumers around the globe.

. . . .

Armed with this unique transaction- and SKU-specific data, at scale, Amazon.com has the potential to become one of, if not the most signficant advertising platforms in the world, in my view — matching, if not besting, Google.

. . . .

For instance, do you think Volvo, Toyota, Lexus, Ford, et al., might be willing to pay a small fortune to be introduced to an individual in Huntington Beach, CA, who suddenly begins buying newborn diapers by the pallet? What about Gymboree? Gerbers? Whole Foods? Safeway? Fab? Gap? Pottery Barn? Ross? Home Depot?

Link to the rest at ReadWrite

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A New York editor once said that, “Sarah McNally has a combination of Canadian seriousness, rapacious, wide-ranging intelligence and curiosity, and salesmanship and an idiosyncrasy that clearly comes from a deep place.”

She’s a bit ethereal. But she’s tough. She just opened The McNally-Jackson Store — Goods for The Study — in New York City.

It is her second business. When 28-year-old Sarah McNally opened a bookstore in Manhattan, The New York Times called her the ‘Defiant Newcomer.’

It was December 2004, and a tsunami had hit the bookselling world. A thousand small, independent American bookstores drowned in the wave.

. . . .

Sarah grew up in Winnipeg, surrounded by books. Her parents founded McNally–Robinson, one of Canada’s largest independent bookstores.

. . . .

McNally-Jackson books is still in trendy Soho and business is booming – up 18 per cent over last year. This year the store will sell more than $6 million worth of books.

. . . .

She says her mother – who was the book buyer for her own stores for decades — gave her the best piece of advice she ever received. “Never forget the wonks, and the weirdos, and the people who will be delighted by this book that they never could even have imagined could exist and they will find on your shelf.”

Sarah is a stickler for detail and chooses everything from the colour of leather on the chairs to the style of calligraphy on the signs, always trusting her instincts as “there is no rulebook for what makes a good bookstore.”

. . . .

Amazon now controls one quarter of the American book market. Ebook sales have taken a huge bite: print book sales have dropped by 22 per cent in the past five years.

. . . .

The lessons Sarah McNally learned as a daughter of booksellers on the Canadian prairies continue to help her survive in the Manhattan jungle.

Oren Teicher is the chief executive officer of the American Bookseller’s Association. He says, “By being able to adapt and not relying on some corporate headquarters miles away making decisions, Sarah McNally has a real competitive advantage.”

Link to the rest at CBC News

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In a commencement address to business students at Columbia University, New York Times CEO Mark Thompson hailed the company’s digital subscription strategy and dismissed skeptics who say media outlets can’t reinvent themselves.

“[T]he launch of the pay model is the most important and  most successful business decision made by The New York Times in many years. We have around 700,000 paid digital subscribers across the company’s products so far and a new nine-figure revenue-stream which is still growing.”

Thompson added that media pundits predicted that the Times’ subscription model, which is based on a so-called “metered paywall,” would be a disaster when it launched in 2011. Since then, he noted, it’s become a standard for the rest of the newspaper industry.

Link to the rest at Paid Content

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So here’s the situation: You have a book to publish and you have a budget. You need to know how best to spend your budget to produce a profitable product. The “experts” are the wrong people with which to have this discussion. They can give you facts and figures. But. An editor will tell you, and mean it from the bottom of her heart, that editing is most important. An ebook formatter will tell you formatting is most important. A cover designer will tell you that without a top-notch cover your book is dead on arrival. Marketing and PR will insist that they are the ticket to success. Any of those experts could be right, but they could also be dead wrong.

To know why, you have to understand the reality. Up until the self-publishing boom, it was a rare writer who was making a living from his writing. I can’t recall who said it: “You can get rich writing fiction, but you can’t make a living.” For the longest time that was true. Even best sellers had to work “real” jobs. Even writers who commanded respectable advances weren’t making a living. They might get a $100,000 dollar advance, but that might be their only income from writing for three or four years, and when you factor in taxes and agent commissions, that figure shrinks considerably. Genre fiction writers fared slightly better. Those who were prolific and could consistently please their publisher, could publish multiple titles each year and make a living based on output. (There is a reason best selling writers who make tons of money are news–it’s because they’re rare!)

With self-publishing, more and more writers are making a living. There is a reason for that. Availability.

. . . .

Maybe one first book in 100,000 will make a noticeable splash, money-wise. It’s a rarity. Quite frankly, those are lottery odds. If you’re a serious self-publisher who intends to make a living from your writing, then you have probably figured out by now that blowing your wad on any individual title is a fool’s game, especially early on. I will go so far to say that depending on where you are in your career, some of the money spent will be a total waste.

Once you have a product in hand (a book is only art when you’re creating it; when you try to get people to pay for it, it’sproduct), you need a budget. Once you have a budget, you have to allocate those funds. What you need to do is put on your businessperson hat and figure out the best way to use your budget to get the greatest return on your dollar. In order to do that you have to ask the right question:

What do my readers value?

. . . .

Take editing for example. If your readers value quantity more than quality, then using a large part of your budget to pay a developmental editor is probably a waste. You can save a lot of money by using beta readers, then use your editing budget for a competent line editor to find your most egregious mistakes. The perversity of publishing is this: The smaller, more exclusive, your intended audience, the more you’ll need to pay for editorial.

What about covers? Do some market research. I popped over to Amazon this morning and did a quick survey (very non-scientific). I looked at the top selling ebooks in science fiction and fantasy. Overall, the covers are VERY good. Very artistic. Most look expensive. What this tells me is that readers value “high-dollar” covers–why, I don’t know, but that’s the surface appearance. On the flip side, I looked at the top sellers in romance. The covers? Not so good. In fact, a large number in the top one hundred are pretty crappy, with the majority being mediocre. What that tells me is that–perhaps!–while romance readers are looking for covers that look like romance covers, they aren’t judging the quality of the story inside by the covers. Do better market research than I just did. While a gorgeous, beautiful cover never hurts (unless it’s not a good fit with the genre), spending more than you need to can hurt your pocketbook and put you in the red longer than is necessary.

. . . .

[I]n my opinion, based on observation, you’ll get a better return on your dollars by burning them on an altar to the BestSeller God than you will by spending them on advertising. UNTIL you have a decent sized body of work available for sale. Early on in your career, rather than shelling out big bucks for ads, book trailers, PR services, paid reviews, etc. write more books.

Link to the rest at JW Manus and thanks to Julia for the tip.

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From the Smashwords blog:

For the study this year, we analyzed over $12 million in sales for a collection of 120,000 Smashwords ebooks from May 1, 2012 through March 31, 2013.  We aggregated our sales data from across our retail distribution network, which includes the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and Amazon (only about 200 of our 200,000 titles are at Amazon).  As the world’s largest indie ebook distributor, I think our study represents the most comprehensive analysis ever of how ebooks from self-published authors and small independent presses are behaving in the marketplace.

. . . .

1.  Ebook Sales Conform to a Power Curve
Most books don’t sell well, but those that do sell well sell really well.  This finding wasn’t a surprise.  Just as in traditional publishing, very few books become bestsellers.

However, the underlying dynamic of the power curve is extremely significant, especially when you consider it as a framework for evaluating the survey’s findings.  As a title moves up in sales rank, its sales grow exponentially.  We see this in our sales results all the time.  On any given day, a #1 bestseller in an ebook store might be selling twice the number copies as the #5-ranked title on that day, and triple or quadruple the number of copies as the #10 bestseller.  In our data over this 11-month period, the #1 Smashwords bestseller, measured in dollars, sold 37 times more than the book ranked #500, and #500′s sales would put a smile on most authors’ faces.

The opportunity for every Smashwords author and publisher is to make decisions that cause their books to move up in sales rank.   This is power of my Viral Catalyst concept.  When you consider that there are potentially dozens if not hundreds of factors that can make your book more (or less) discoverable, desirable and enjoyable, then you realize that you – the author/publisher – have more control over your book’s destiny than previously thought.  Your opportunity is to make dozens of correct decisions – big and small – while avoiding the poor decisions that will undermine your success.

. . . .

2.  Viva Long Form Reading:  Longer Books Sell Better
For the second year running, we found definitive evidence that ebook readers – voting with their Dollars, Euros, Pounds, Krone, Krona and Koruna – overwhelmingly prefer longer books over shorter books.

The top 100 bestselling Smashwords books averaged 115,000 words.  When we examined the word counts of books in other sales rank bands, we found the lower the word count, the lower the sales.

Now consider how authors can use this finding, combined with the knowledge of the power curve, to make smarter publishing decisions, and to avoid poor decisions.  Often, we’ll see an authors with a single full-length novel break the novel into chunks to create a series of novellas, or worse – they’ll try to serialize it as dozens of short pieces.  When you consider that readers overwhelmingly prefer longer works, and you consider that bestselling titles sell exponentially more copies, reach more readers and earn more money than the non-bestsellers, you can understand how some authors might be undermining their book’s true potential.

Like every finding from this survey, you should use this information as one data point.  There will always be exceptions to any rule.   If your story deserves 50,000 words – nothing more and nothing less – because this is the length packs the biggest pleasure punch for readers, then by all means don’t bloat your perfect story with extra words just because the data shows that longer books, on average, sell more.  Do what’s right for your story because that’s what’s right for your reader.

Link to the rest at Smashwords

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

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