Writing Fiction

Writers and Twitter

The Tyee has published my article Real Writers Tweet. Excerpt:

Most serious authors, working in the early 21st century, must realize that the web is the most dangerous threat they have faced since alcohol and tobacco. 

No longer can you sit down, roll a sheet of paper into a typewriter, and start writing. Now you have to wake up your computer, check your email, answer your email, and visit a couple of dozen news sites and blogs. You post witty comments on some of them, and then post something on your own blog. 

You go back to your email, which just pinged because someone posted on your Facebook page. You go back to see if your witty comments have provoked any responses, and then your email pings again. 

So it goes, all day long. Before you know it, the sun is over the yardarm and as a serious author you are professionally entitled to a couple of stiff drinks. God knows you need them; you've got a classic case of writer's blog.

Editors and manuscripts (and knitting)

My wife, who has become a knitter lately, has introduced me to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, better known as Yarn Harlot. She not only knits but also blogs and publishes books about knitting. (Writers and knitters both deal with textus, which can mean either text or textile.) 

The Yarn Harlot's latest post is about dealing with the editing of her next book: Thoughts From Inside a Manuscript. Here's an excerpt that should make you click through to the full post and then to an exploration of her brilliant and very funny blog:

While I'm not done yet, so far this edit is easy.  The editor and I largely agree about what's funny, good, well written or not, and I think that in the end, all we're really going to go back and forth about is my addiction to ellipses.  (I didn't think there were that many, but you'd be surprised how they stand out when they're highlighted throughout a manuscript.)  

Usually the actual printed out manuscript comes mailed back to me, with things crossed out in red pen, and little notes jotted in the margins. This time the editor suggested sending an electronic file, and doing it all by using the "track changes" function in Word/Pages, and so I'm viewing all the notes and changes on my screen, and I admit I miss several things badly.  

While I don't miss the guilt about the paper use, I realize now, as I look at her notes, typed neatly into virtual post-its, that I miss the seeing the editors  handwriting.  I think you can tell a lot about someone from their script and how they wield the pen, and it seemed so much more personal to write back and forth that way- shipping an ever more altered manuscript between the two of us. 

All I have to do now, is look at her changes, and click a little box that says "accept" or "reject", and I find it rather unfulfilling, and limiting.  I can't click "consider" or "maybe" or "were you once harmed by a conjunction so that now you're unfair to them", I have only Accept or Reject, and for anything else I must flag the section or the word and type a note. 

Where have all the book editors gone?

Via The Globe and Mail: Where have all the book editors gone? Excerpt:

Authors, finding today’s downsized publishers increasingly unwilling to invest their own resources in the often laborious process of polishing rough diamonds into marketable gems, are now often forced to hire their own editors – before even before submitting their manuscripts for publication. 

Toronto literary agent Anne McDermid saw the landscape changing two years ago, when a publisher told her, “I cannot purchase a book I need to spend 40 hours editing.”

As a result, McDermid added, “we are now advising our authors that the material they present has got to be closer to the final draft than it ever used to be.” Sometimes the agents themselves act as pre-editors. 

“Or, for those authors who can afford it,” McDermid said, “the biggest-growing sector in Canadian publishing is the freelance editor.” 

Along with booming self-publishing services that offer various levels of editing as value-added options, a cottage industry of independent contractors is quickly replacing the fabled tastemakers who once shaped literary destiny, and the effect on its quality is an open question.

New commercial pressures on Canadian novels

I don't know the name of the comparable American service, but it doubtless exists. Via The Tyee, an article first published in Geist: Enemy of Canada's Next Great Book? BookNet. Excerpt:

A literary agent and a publisher meet for coffee. The publisher tells the agent that she's refusing a manuscript he submitted to her. "It's a big, sprawling novel -- we can't publish it..." 

The agent looks doubtful. He names some big, sprawling novels that her company has published. The publisher mumbles a single word: "...BookNet..." 

The agent sits up. "My client's BookNet figures aren't good enough?" He thanks her and leaves. 

This scene, with variations, is commonplace in Canadian publishing. The strangest fact about BookNet Canada, whose sales data program incarnates how corporate imperatives are squeezing the creative juice out of our fiction, is that it was set up as an altruistic, non-profit solution to the eternal Canadian problem of inefficient book distribution. 

The web site booknetcanada.ca proclaims that "we spend our days finding ways to make it easier to buy books, sell books, keep books in print, reach new audiences and ride the ever-cresting wave of new technology." 

This knight in shining armour has turned into the dragon it set out to slay.

Thinking about e-book sales?

Via The Authors Guild: E-Book Royalty Math: The House Always Wins. Excerpt (but read the whole post):

E-book royalty rates for major trade publishers have coalesced, for the moment, at 25% of the publisher’s receipts. As we’ve pointed out previously, this is contrary to longstanding tradition in trade book publishing, in which authors and publishers effectively split the net proceeds of book sales (that's how the industry arrived at the standard hardcover royalty rate of 15% of  list price). 

Among the ills of this radical pay cut is the distorting effect it has on publishers’ incentives: publishers generally do significantly better on e-book sales than they do on hardcover sales. Authors, on the other hand, always do worse.