# Has anyone read Konrath's new blog post?



## kCopeseeley (Mar 15, 2011)

I'll admit, most of the time I don't care much about the whole us vs. them issue, but this one riled me up a bit. I guess since I just read this HORRIBLE(IMO) book called Shiver, which had just been through the very gatekeepers that Stephen Leather talks about.

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/05/guest-post-by-stephen-leather.html

Comment here if you choose, but I don't want to get into trouble if the comments get too angry, so let's try to be happy posters!


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## David &#039;Half-Orc&#039; Dalglish (Feb 1, 2010)

Nothing really new here: traditional publishing weeds out the bad, writers will release terrible works without knowing it because they haven't worked hard enough yet, being in print in stores is more rewarding than just kindle, vast majority of self-published is terrible, readers are bad gatekeepers, etc. I laughed my head off at one part though. Stephen wants every writer to spend 13 years writing before deciding whether or not they're good enough to self-publish.

Good thing I started writing at 14, eh?


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

Personally, I don't consider a book "real" unless it has had at least one run in cutem hominis, but some do cling to lesser standards. I'll allow Mr. Leather his.


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## Christine Kersey (Feb 13, 2011)

I think some people just get so comfortable in the old way of doing things that it scares them when something as big as the indie publishing  revolution comes along. The beauty of it is, each writer can choose for herself if she is ready to move forward on her own or if she wants to keep toiling away, waiting for the publishing gatekeepers to open the door.


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## Victorine (Apr 23, 2010)

Bah. I don't buy it either, David.

Sure, get other eyes on your work, writers are bad about seeing the flaws in their own stuff. But thirteen years? Come on.  

Vicki


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## D Girard Watson (Apr 4, 2011)

I don't know.  I don't think the 13 year thing is that crazy.  I write scientific articles for a living, and my writing now is way better than it was 10 years ago, even though I published those early articles.  Like every other skill, most writers get better over time.

I guess the question is really whether a writer should slave away for those 13 years eating ramen in their studio apartment waiting to be perfect before publishing, or should they make some money on their early work.  I think most writers would opt for the latter option.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Half-Orc said:


> Nothing really new here: traditional publishing weeds out the bad, writers will release terrible works without knowing it because they haven't worked hard enough yet, being in print in stores is more rewarding than just kindle, vast majority of self-published is terrible, readers are bad gatekeepers, etc. I laughed my head off at one part though. Stephen wants every writer to spend 13 years writing before deciding whether or not they're good enough to self-publish.
> 
> Good thing I started writing at 14, eh?


Thanks for the summary, which tells me I don't need to read it. Going by just what you said, I probably wouldn't disagree with much of what he said. I do think all the big errors in that kind of thinking, though, go back to "readers are bad gatekeepers." Um, whose gate are we talking about here?

As for the thirteen years.... Well, yes, to read the level of expertise he has arbitrarily set, that's a good idea. That's about the length of time for "mastery." But while Pulitzer prizes, or even recognition of excellence of peers, takes a higher level of mastery, the publishing industry has just spread out into a whole lot of areas which aren't about that -- which have a different goal.

But of course that's where the readers as gatekeepers come in. Sure, they aren't very good at choosing people to get into the palace, but they're the only ones who can appropriately choose who to invite to their own party.

Camille


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

D Girard Watson said:


> I don't know. I don't think the 13 year thing is that crazy. I write scientific articles for a living, and my writing now is way better than it was 10 years ago, even though I published those early articles. Like every other skill, most writers get better over time.
> 
> I guess the question is really whether a writer should slave away for those 13 years eating ramen in their studio apartment waiting to be perfect before publishing, or should they make some money on their early work. I think most writers would opt for the latter option.


This makes me want to clarify: I DO believe working hard for 13 years is a good idea -- but I think self-publishing should be a part of that 13-year learning experience. You don't learn in a vacuum.

Camille


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

_"You will probably be ignored, you might get a one-line rejection, but the fact is that if the book is good then it will be picked up."_

I have read this from several sources, and I wonder how they know. What reason is there to think American agents, which he describes as "horrible, self-centered, arrogant shits," will manage to get all the good books published? What reason do we have to accept that as a fact?

However, I do note he refrained from telling us we all can't be Hocking or Locke. That's progress.


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## Victorine (Apr 23, 2010)

Sure, we'll all be better after 13 years of writing. The Overtaking is probably a better novel than Not What She Seems. In fact, I know it is.  But I'm not going to pull Not What She Seems off the shelf.  People are enjoying it. 

Vicki


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## edwardgtalbot (Apr 28, 2010)

B. Justin Shier said:


> Personally, I don't consider a book "real" unless it has had at least one run in cutem hominis, but some do cling to lesser standards. I'll allow Mr. Leather his.


Now that would seriously filter the available work 

As for Leather's post - meh. modwitch has it right. Konrath's off-color line about gatekeepers had me laughing. I honestly don't care one way or the other - good or bad - about all the tradpub stuff. They can keep doing what they're doing, I'll keep doing what I'm doing and maybe sometimes we'll intersect. I wouldn't turn down the right deal, but I'm expending zero effort looking for one. Honestly, they've given me no reason whatsoever to take into consideration the advice they have.


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## David &#039;Half-Orc&#039; Dalglish (Feb 1, 2010)

I don't want to seem like I'm belittling working hard on writing. And I think everyone would readily agree the more you write, the better you'll get at it. But this 10,000 hour thing is generally for -mastery-. Yes, there is a place for the masters. But I could also go to a butcher shop run by a journeyman and still get something good to eat, and it might even cost me significantly less. The idea that everything prior to mastery is worthless is just bogus. Besides, if this were any sort of ironclad rule, then how could you explain the many, many authors whose best book is their first published work, and their later works inferior?


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## Die$el (Apr 24, 2011)

kCopeseeley said:


> I'll admit, most of the time I don't care much about the whole us vs. them issue, but this one riled me up a bit. I guess since I just read this HORRIBLE(IMO) book called Shiver, which had just been through the very gatekeepers that Stephen Leather talks about.
> 
> http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/05/guest-post-by-stephen-leather.html
> 
> Comment here if you choose, but I don't want to get into trouble if the comments get too angry, so let's try to be happy posters!


Wow, how stuck up. 13 years of writing doesn't mean 13 years of being shoved in a room with no life. If Mozart waited 13 years before he released his first song, we wouldn't have been able to hear his music at all. If Michael Jackson waited, he would have missed the MTV wave. You learn as you go, and I would rather learn how to play at the playground (Amazon) than wait until I get 13 years of playing expertise and then show my face to other people out there.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Is this the same Stephen Leather that got kicked off Amazon UK because of his spamming marketing?

For those of you who weren't there, he very cleverly, at first, cloaked his promotional threads in very creative titles. But they were ALL promotional threads. He went into numerous threads and found a way to (not so subtly) post his books. You would hardly go anywhere on Amazon UK without running into a Stephen Leather promo.

Then we had the anti-leather threads which were nearly as numerous as his promo threads. That gave him more scope for pushing his books.

Talk about sell-sell-sell. He's the king. Obviously it worked.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

D Girard Watson said:


> I don't know. I don't think the 13 year thing is that crazy. I write scientific articles for a living, and my writing now is way better than it was 10 years ago, even though I published those early articles. Like every other skill, most writers get better over time.


13 years is not far from reality. If you study quality vs time spent in doing the task in the arts or science you will see that those perceived as talented have a key difference from the rest. These things have received statistical analysis by psychiatrists and psychologists. All studies show that time is what provides the talent. The artists we admire have all hit the 10,000 hour mark in their craft. Those who never got any good stopped at 3,000 hours. The professionals are always 6,000 or more. The genius is not much of a genius considering the 10,000 hour minumum. The brain takes time to develop around a task, hard work has everything to do with skill and creativity. You have to train every system in order to get performance out of it. You need a work ethic.

At 3 hours a day that's more than 9 years. On a dedicated 9 hours a day schedule that's 3 years. Yes, those boys that play violin like the devil have put their hours on the meter, even if they appear to be too young.

I have never heard any artist claim that he/she was immediately talented when he/she approached the craft. Quite the contrary all verify the 10,000 hour rule if you read their interviews and memoirs. Their skill improved faster when they worked harder and allocated more time to training their system around the task.

It's a hard fact. The first novel will not be a masterpiece. Having an outlet for the work is not the problem. Publishers will notice, the audience will notice. If you are 18 when you write it, you will probably laugh at how bad it is when you are 28 or 38.

Writers could probably offset some of the time by being older and wiser. Experience goes a long way. If you start in your 40s you can probably get there spending 1/3 or 1/2 less time vs starting in your 20s. Not true for most other arts. Musicians that start late are actually at a disadvantage. They have lost the massive advantage of training at a young age when the brain can evolve and allocate resources around the task.


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## Rin (Apr 25, 2011)

> A good book will be published, eventually, by a traditional publishing house.


This was the line I couldn't get over.

I mean...sheesh, really, just...sheesh.

Ok, so we're disbanding the KB right? All going home and just waiting to get picked up by a legacy-pub house? Because all good dogs go to heaven good books get published.


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## Christopher Meeks (Aug 2, 2009)

I remember not too long ago when Konrath was incredibly vocal against self-publishing. People needed to pay their dues by writing book after book until they finally understood what storytelling was about. Konrath, if I remember right, wrote six novels before his seventh took hold. He definitely has a storyteller's soul now--he always grabs me on the first page--and he has switched 180-degrees in his opinion of self-publishing. He is the spokesperson for the independent author.

While I concur with Leather that the quality of writing is everything, today's authors are also trying to get in 10,000 hours of understanding marketing. Hey, following Konrath's mantra of a fabulous cover and blurb does not get you necessarily far on Kindleboards. I posted what I consider a fabulous blurb and cover three days ago, and I received 24 viewings before it faded from sight. (See it at http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,66600.0.html). My point is, marketing takes more than these two things. I'll be doing more than just a single posting and waiting a week to bump it up.

I've put my 10,000 hours in long ago as a writer, and the first reviewers and readers are quite taken with "Love at Absolute Zero." I've also worked for a publisher as a senior editor and for a PR office as a press release writer, and there's no such thing as knowing it all. I'm constantly learning. Writing well is just one important part of the process. So is a willingness to learn to do more in marketing.


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## CaedemMarquez (Mar 23, 2011)

Victorine said:


> Sure, we'll all be better after 13 years of writing. The Overtaking is probably a better novel than Not What She Seems. In fact, I know it is. But I'm not going to pull Not What She Seems off the shelf. People are enjoying it.
> 
> Vicki


Correction. Over 100,000 people are enjoying your book! Sweet!

Caedem Marquez


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## RachelAstor (Apr 2, 2011)

I guess I can see where he's coming from on some of it like the gatekeepers, but really, sampling takes care of weeding out the poor or inexperienced writing, no?

I do take issue with the comment that most US agents are awful. My agent, whom I also intern for, is lovely and kind and so are most of the agents I've met at conferences and follow on Twitter.

Just my two cents.


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## Pnjw (Apr 24, 2011)

I read Konraths latest blog entry a few days ago and was mildly annoyed. I am so sick of article after article belitting new authors and claiming everything is crap. Why can't we just be supportive of each other? Consumers vote with dollars. Let them.

Also the 10,000 hour rule and the never publish your first book rule is all BS.  Outlander by Diana Gabaldon was her first book and in my opinion her very best. There are countless other examples out there. 

We all just need to do what is right for ourselves and go into this self publishing with our eyes open.


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## ReflexiveFire (Jul 20, 2010)

Snore.

I'm halfway through this article and it is putting me to sleep.  These arguments seem less interesting the tenth time you've heard them.  It is the internet.  Anyone can post and/or publishing anything.  Get over it.


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## David &#039;Half-Orc&#039; Dalglish (Feb 1, 2010)

Gertie Kindle 'a/k/a Margaret Lake' said:


> Is this the same Stephen Leather that got kicked off Amazon UK because of his spamming marketing?
> 
> For those of you who weren't there, he very cleverly, at first, cloaked his promotional threads in very creative titles. But they were ALL promotional threads. He went into numerous threads and found a way to (not so subtly) post his books. You would hardly go anywhere on Amazon UK without running into a Stephen Leather promo.
> 
> ...


I thought for a sec maybe that was him. Seriously? The guy who had readers furious at him on forums, a guy who got banned for spamming, is grumbling that other indie authors only promote and talk about promoting? Woooow. I guess he's allowed to promote without care for rules or courtesy because he's put in those 10,000 hours, right?


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## Die$el (Apr 24, 2011)

Panayotis said:


> Writers could probably offset some of the time by being older and wiser. Experience goes a long way. If you start in your 40s you can probably get there spending 1/3 or 1/2 less time vs starting in your 20s. Not true for most other arts. Musicians that start late are actually at a disadvantage. They have lost the massive advantage of training at a young age when the brain can evolve and allocate resources around the task.


Interesting you say this. As a young writer, I find that younger writers tend to lack the storytelling aspect compared to older writers (because many lack the stories to tell, even though they have great imaginations). However, writers who start young tend to have better utility with language, and they are able to develop more sophisticated/nuanced styles of writing than writers who started when they were older (who tend to emphasize the story over the technique). Just my two cents.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Sorry, to repeat so many points of the article in my post, I just read it. I have read many papers on the issue of creativity and I can verify that was the article contains of the subject of training required has also been scientifically verified.

It looks like this:










And the stages look like this:










The amateur line represent roughly 20 minutes/day for 15 years. And this is probably far better than the 140 minutes every Sunday musician.

Nothing new. Write everyday, write a lot, dedicate. We have heard it a million times from so many important artists.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

Half-Orc said:


> I thought for a sec maybe that was him. Seriously? The guy who had readers furious at him on forums, a guy who got banned for spamming, is grumbling that other indie authors only promote and talk about promoting? Woooow. I guess he's allowed to promote without care for rules or courtesy because he's put in those 10,000 hours, right?


Right. The 10K hours rule.

You know, I've written all kinds of things working for lawyers and city government. I've written technical manuals and instructional manuals, job descriptions, motions, complaints, answers, interrogatories, business letters, not to mention all the things I've written as a college student. Oh, there's also over 13K posts here, over 3K posts on another forum, over 5K tweets.

I think I qualify. Now excuse me while I go sell, sell, sell.


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## Ben White (Feb 11, 2011)

Hmm.  I actually had been writing for thirteen years before I decided to self-publish.  Actually, let me amend that; I'd been writing for thirteen years before I judged myself good enough to self-publish.  I'm not saying you have to go through those 13 years/10,000 hours to be a good writer, but that's how it worked for me.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Here's something from another "touchy-feely snobby artiste" artform -- and yet it is so practical:

Acting teachers will often tell actors that "You must work." The context isn't that you must work hard, it's that to learn the job of an actor, you have to get in front of an audience. You have to perform IN PUBLIC, not just in the workshop or acting class. That may mean being a carnival barker or a street-corner mime. It may mean putting on a show in grandpa's barn. It may mean auditioning for every show and every part that comes your way.

There have always been venues for beginning writers -- generally magazines and newspapers, and yes, amateur zines. And good grief, even in the snottiest of literary writing circles, you're supposed to be submitting your stuff to these venues from day one.

At the same time, I do understand the horror of the traditionally published. I've got to be clear here:

*They are NOT saying that "I waited and you should to." Not at all.*

They're saying "Oh, gawd, how bad my work sucked when I first thought I was good enough. Thank heaven so few people ever saw that story. If that story were available to the public today, I'd shoot myself."

The thing is, today is different.

1.) The whole world is different. Everything is public and stays that way. We are learning to get over the whole embarrassment factor of the past. That video somebody took at a party when you got drunk for the first time? It's on the internet and you will never live it down.

2.) This ain't your grandpas publishing world. The audience understands that. For instance: News. We get it from twitter, now, man. How we get it is not from the tweets themselves, though. When a news story breaks, we get links to serious journalists, and local eye-witnesses, and goofy commentary sites. It's not that serious journalism has been replaced by social media, it's that serious journalism is now a part of a MUCH larger world, which includes the back fence and crazy people, and amateur photographers and everything.

The fiction publishing world just got bigger. It now includes a lot of areas (which were always there before) which weren't originally considered to be the publishing world. It's not so much a leveling as a mixing in. We're all on the same bus now, and there is no first class, but that doesn't mean we're all a part of the same exact thing. And the standards for one don't mean squat to the standards for another.

Camille


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## J.R.Mooneyham (Mar 14, 2011)

Leather writes about indie authors only talking about their marketing efforts and not about trying to improve their writing-- but apparently he hasn't spent much time on Kboards. For here I see authors discussing exactly that (how to improve the quality of their writing and books) quite often. And I know I personally put quite a bit of effort into that myself. For I definitely don't want any reader thinking my books are inferior in any way. Plus, I'm a voracious reader myself-- which just makes me that much more sensitive to any possible charge of writing a garbage book. Therefore I take pains to look up word definitions and concepts and historical events to make sure I'm using them correctly and accurately, when I edit my books. 

I constantly try to expand my vocabulary by checking out new word definitions on my Kindle when reading. I read lots more slowly now than I used to, in order to notice how successful authors handle certain challenging circumstances in their text. I essentially rewrite many of my stories many times before publishing them, trying to perfect them as best I can. If I encounter something in my writing which I'm unsure about how to handle or do, I try looking up the proper rules on the net (or in a hard copy reference if necessary). I take seriously all feedback I get on my writing, sometimes rewriting an entire story just due to that alone. If I find a significant mistake or missing item in a story, I do my best to rectify it immediately.

When I locate an informative online source relating to possible remedies for my own writing weaknesses, I make notes about its gist, then bookmark it for later reference if needed.

In short, Leather is grossly underestimating at least some of us, in terms of our commitment and depth of effort.

As for indies spending lots of time marketing, well, how's that different from spending lots of time sending your manuscript out to dozens or hundreds of agents or publishers over months or years, trying to convince them to write you your first ever contract in the traditional publishing industry? Schmoozing is schmoozing, and I fail to see how Leather's is somehow on a higher level class-wise than ours (unless Leather considers the readers we market directly to to somehow be inferior or lower class, compared to the agents/publishers he deals with?)


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## samanthawarren (May 1, 2011)

I'm a young (in comparison) writer, I self-published my first novel, I've only really been focused on creative writing since NaNo 2010 (I did participate and fail in NaNo 2009 and wrote nothing of substance between the two), the gatekeepers rejected me (well, two of them. One said it was good, but they had no money; the other said they wouldn't be able to sell it. Then I decided I really didn't care what they thought.) I guess I'm a fraud. I should give back the money I've made so far, tell my readers I'm sorry for wasting their time and that they won't be getting the sequels they asked for, and curl up in a corner with pen and paper. See you again in 12 1/2 years everybody!

That's sarcasm, in case anyone didn't get it. I'm not going anywhere. You're all stuck with me til I decide books are boring.


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## DDScott (Aug 13, 2010)

It truly is all about Writers Making Choices...

And choices that make the best business sense for their writing career goals.

We're doing an entire series on why writers are making the Indie Epub choice on my grog The Writer's Guide to Epublishing - aka *The WG2E *  - and y'all are more than welcome to join our conversations.

But anyhoo...do I think traditional publishing makes the best business sense for me? No way! Do I think it makes good business at all, right now? Also...a big 'ole NO WAY!!! But that doesn't mean it isn't "right" for another writer.

I made my choice to go the Indie Epub route after 10 years - not Konrath's guest's 13 years mantra (LOL!) - but not because I thought 10 years was the "proper" amount of time. That's just what my journey turned out to be.

And, the last two of those were as an agented author by one of the top literary agents, who "almost" sold my book - BOOTSCOOTIN' BLAHNIKS - several times to The Big Six Pubs, but never did seal the deal because my book was always said to be "too much this or not enough that to sell", by these experts who supposedly are the only ones who the trad-pub world claims can "properly vet" books.

LOL!

Last month, I sold 850 Bootscootin' Books on Kindle alone!

This month, I'm on track to make the 1,000-Sales-Per-Month-Club!

I made the choice that was best for me...and that's all that matters...plus the fantabulous reader and fan base I'm building of folks who love my romantic comedies with a chick lit gone country twist and now a cozy mystery twist too!

Why did I finally make the Indie Epub decision?

Here's the LMAO scoop on my decision...and yes, you should be forewarned that I do share the opinion, based on countless personal anecdotes, that many of the tradi-pub professionals are NOT professional and can be quite, quite mean...

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,20835.msg1071408.html#msg1071408

Cheers to all of you!!!


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

J.R.Mooneyham said:


> Leather writes about indie authors only talking about their marketing efforts and not about trying to improve their writing-- but apparently he hasn't spent much time on Kboards. For here I see authors discussing exactly that (how to improve the quality of their writing and books) quite often.


Very true. Why does he think we have beta readers and sometimes multiple beta readers? I definitely take suggestions from them and end up with a better more readable book.

I'm going to dump Mr. Leather into that dirty pool of trolls who say all indies are rubbish, all indie books are full of typos and errors, and all good reviews of indie books are written by friends and family. They just have to find something nasty to say.

This blog post is just another Stephen Leather promo. _Look at me. I've paid my dues. I'm traditionally published and I'm better than the rest of you so buy my books._


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Die$el said:


> Interesting you say this. As a young writer, I find that younger writers tend to lack the storytelling aspect compared to older writers (because many lack the stories to tell, even though they have great imaginations). However, writers who start young tend to have better utility with language, and they are able to develop more sophisticated/nuanced styles of writing than writers who started when they were older (who tend to emphasize the story over the technique). Just my two cents.


A musician does get input, the music they study is great. But training is the main fuel for their art, most of them are just interpreters of music not composers. They learn the tool but if they are young, they don't have much to say. They are basically training their ears, eyes and brain.

A writer though, is a composer. Composers have to have input in order to produce output. The input is life experience itself, it fuels the processing part that consciously and unconsciously produces the creative output. Maturity itself is a great filter. The wider perspective of life and the ability to understand the behavior of other people is indispensable. The ability of the writer to use the tool itself, the language, is not very important. An editor can fix that. Even illiterate people can compose good stories if they have enough experience, maturity and intelligence.


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## Ian Kharitonov (Mar 1, 2011)

Speaking of the "10,000 Hours" concept -- does the same rule apply to agents, editors, publishing execs? Do they only become good at their jobs after 13 years of practice? Hmmmm!

That said, Stephen talks sense.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Ian Kharitonov said:


> Speaking of the "10,000 Hours" concept -- does the same rule apply to agents, editors, publishing execs? Do they only become good at their jobs after 13 years of practice? Hmmmm!
> 
> That said, Stephen talks sense.


Of course it does. At least 20,000 for these professions, 20,000 to 30,000 for the more important positions in publishing. A low position gives you 2,500 hours a year seeing the good the bad and the ugly. It's not that many years but it takes some serious time to get high in publishing.

13 years is 2 hours a day for 10,000 hours. Anyone can do better than that.


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## Ian Kharitonov (Mar 1, 2011)

It takes years to get high in publishing, but I'm afraid even 30,000 hours may not be enough to be good at it considering where the industry is now.


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## JimC1946 (Aug 6, 2009)

Half-Orc said:


> Good thing I started writing at 14, eh?


Uh oh. I was 63.


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## xtine (Feb 17, 2011)

_When I hear "Indie" writers talking about their books, all they seem to talk about is how they go about marketing their work. How they blog, how they work their Facebook contacts, how they post on the forums. I never hear them talking about how they want to improve their craft. For most of the ones I come across it's all about the selling. I get emails all the time from "Indie" writers asking me what the secret is to selling a lot of eBooks. I don't get any asking how they can become better writers._

Slightly insulting, if it was ever possible to insult me (it's not).
How many trad pubbed authors ask how to improve their craft?
Oh yeah, never.

There are places I go to talk about improving my craft. Kindleboards and Facebook groups are not the place though.


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## CJArcher (Jan 22, 2011)

I kind of agree with Leather, but only kind of.  Some indie books are crap and some are just plain ordinary.  BUT that's just MY opinion.  I hated Twilight.  I think it's a badly written piece of junk.  Pretty much the entire world disagrees with me, and passionately.  So what do I know about good writing or about what makes a mega-sellers?  What does Leather know?  On the flip side, there are some great indie books that were rejected by the gatekeepers and selling their socks off now.  So what do THEY know?  Truth is, none of us know what makes a book sell, or even what makes writing "good", we can only have opinions and those can be wrong. 

As to the 13 years thing and suffering for your art, well I've done my 13 years and 10,000 hours and then some.  I have almost 20 completed novel-length manuscripts sitting on my hard drive.  All except 5 are awful and need re-writing.  But that's just me, I'm probably just a slow learner.  As many people have pointed out, there are great books out there that are first novels.  Every author's journey is different, there's no point comparing one of us to another.  All I know is, I'm not writing Pulitzer prize winning stuff but those 5 good novels are the ones I've now self-published.  I'm not waiting another 13 years or another 20 manuscripts in the hope I write what the gatekeepers think is hot this month.  Life's too short and I don't need the validation anymore.  I was pretty sure my writing was good just before I self-pubbed and now that I have, the readers are agreeing with me.  As Shrek would say "That'll do, Donkey, that'll do."


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## Monique (Jul 31, 2010)

I'd better go unpublish my book and put in more hours before I'm worthy to post it again.


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## 41419 (Apr 4, 2011)

There is a lot of crap out there, of course there is, anyone can publish.

But, I have two problems with "13 years".

First off, you can get there quicker or slower depending how much time you put in. If you only write a couple of hours a week, it will take forever. If you are able to write full time, you will get there a lot quicker.

Second, some people learn faster than others, whether that's poker, writing, or the fiddle.

Third, some people need less practice to get to a high standard. They just start off better.

And anyway, the whole thing is undermined by several examples mentioned above, and the notion that you have to be a master before you can publish.

One of my favourite writers, Haruki Murakami, took four or five books to hit his stride, and the truly excellent ones came by book seven or eight. Doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the early ones.

Sometimes it's exciting watching an author grow from book-to-book. I've read many debut novels that were a little uneven or had some other flaw, but could see huge potential. Readers love that. 

It heightens anticipation for the next book. Sometimes the same flaws are there, and you ditch the writer, sometimes they knock it out of the park, and you feel great for them, because you are invested in their career now.

Equally, if I discover an author when they are at the top of their game, I am fascinated to go back and read their early stuff, watching how they assembled their toolkit.

It would be terrible if there was some kind of system in place where an exclusive group of people decided if you could enter the publishing club.

Hold on, I think they have that already.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

The 10k hours is credentialism. This is the practice of evaluating a product by the credentials of the creator, or limiting creation of the product to those with a credential. In many cases it makes sense. 

But it doesn't matter for a book. The product can stand on its own merits and be evaluated without even knowing the author.

And it sure doesn't matter for making money from a book. That depends on sales, not credentials or quality.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> I have read this from several sources, and I wonder how they know. What reason is there to think American agents, which he describes as "horrible, self-centered, arrogant shits," will manage to get all the good books published? What reason do we have to accept that as a fact?


I know a lot of agents and editors. Almost all of them are great people who love writing and books. They discover and promote many good, even great books. They are still wrong sometimes, and in both directions. The industry misses some gems and publishes some stinkers.



> A good book will be published, eventually, by a traditional publishing house.


The Righteous was rejected by a bunch of agents before I found a few who wanted to rep it. It went on submission twice, a few years apart, and garnered lots of positive, almost-bought-this rejections. But nobody wanted to take a chance and put down money to publish it.

Is it good enough to be published by a traditional publishing house if only I had waited long enough? I don't think so. However, now that it has sold over 30,000 copies since the first of March, I've suddenly had agents and an editor contact me, unsolicited, about the series. What happened? It's the same book it always was.


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## Anne Victory (Jul 29, 2010)

Just to make a point.  It's not 13 years.  It's 10,000 hours.  He just calculated that if you only write 2 hours a day that it would take you 13 years to reach the 10,000 hour mark.  But the 13 years isn't the magic number.  As for the rest of it - he makes some good points.  Whether you agree with them or not is another matter.


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## MonkeyScribe (Jan 27, 2011)

Arkali said:


> Just to make a point. It's not 13 years. It's 10,000 hours. He just calculated that if you only write 2 hours a day that it would take you 13 years to reach the 10,000 hour mark. But the 13 years isn't the magic number. As for the rest of it - he makes some good points. Whether you agree with them or not is another matter.


I want to know if the 10,000 counts time spent at your local critique group, or beta reading your friends mss. How about reading critically, or all the time I spent with the two heavy shelves filled with books on the art of writing? For that matter, we all started reading at a tender age and probably racked up thousands of books read before we tried to write anything. Does that count for anything?


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## Guest (May 14, 2011)

I agree with the premise that a large majority of self-published books are not worth reading. I disagree with the conclusion that people should take a run at agents and major publishers to see where they fall.

I like to think that each book I've published has been better than the last, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't have published my first book (which was not the first one I wrote). 

Oh yeah. I also wanted to say that most of the time I don't talk about what I'm doing to improve as a writer. I've been spending a lot of time reading philosophy for my upcoming dystopian novel. I just picked up 1984 for the first time to get me thinking about pan-opticism, and I'm re-reading The Hunger Games to get a feel for the kind of pacing I'm looking for. Most people probably don't care to know about that. Marketing is our common ground here, not my prep work for future novels.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

How did suffering get into the equation? Is writing suffering for anyone? You don't have to suffer, but if you do you will get there faster. Quiting a dayjob is suffering but it can make you advance 4 times faster if you can survive. Think of the extra time you get and the focus you can achieve. Many writers have choosen to do that and they were a lot more successful than those who chose to work 1 and 2 hours a day. I don't recommend it, it's hard and 95% will quit soon having lost their connection to their previous line of work.

There are no geniuses. When you see an 8yo violinist playing like an expert it's because behind the doors, after an introductory stage of 2hours day that lasts a year or so, the poor kid is forced to practice 8 hours a day (3,000 hours a year). By the time he is 8, he already has a massive amount of training, equivalent to what I will not get even in my 90s by my amateur musician approach.

There is very little difference in the capacity of humans to do a task. It could make you 20% slower or faster at most. Training and friction with the task at hand is everything. If there appears to be a massive difference in performance, it's because of training. Else, we should also believe that the average african american parent has a lower IQ than the average caucasian parent just because his race were not treated as equals until very recently. We should also accept that asians are more intelligent than caucasians just because their culture conditions a very high level of work ethic. We know we are all equally capable, everything is in the environment.

I don't understand how the stereotype of the artist that reached perfection by working a little and producing miracles was established. All the greats did massive ammounts of work, for hire or for practice. The great inventors left behind 10,000s of paper of notes, trying and failing. A great art teacher once told that you have get the first 2,000 sketches out of your system, because they will be bad. How many pages is the equivalent of that?

The geniuses did not simply capture the inspiration from an angel. Hard work conditioned and prepared even the least probable breakthroughs. Success without hard work is just a myth pushed by writers of inspirational nonsense who have never actually written anything significant. You can't produce something from nothing. You need input and proper processing and nobody is born with that. Humans are basically advanced animals, no baby comes with a great skill in literature. Have you noticed that many times these traits runs in the family? It has to be genetics! No, it's because families are full cultural systems that shape development. If you grow in an environment that floods with music you will be trained in music before you even consciously invest time in it.

I was lucky to meet many succesful published writers and many artists in person. Their main advantage is the work ethic. It doesn't matter if it's best selling pink literature or sculptures that will be studied for decades to come. They all work extremely hard. They approach their art in the same way a farmer approaches the daily demands of his work. They get up in the morning and go to their studio or computer. Every single day. Not doing it every day breaks the conditioning to a degree. It's only when they are already experienced and successful that they can sit back and relax by working only 4 hours a day. Only a few do that anyway.

The forum is probably flooded with young people interested in writing. Suddenly being a writer looks easy. We got rid of the publishing barrier! You upload it and you are done. See, these guys got $1 million contracts! Yes, but they also have been writing for 8 years at least, even the youngest ones. And a few of them are hacks, it's evident if you read their work. A hack can sell to 14yo kids especially if a major corporation decides to use the hack in marketing a new platform. We know how media loves rag to riches stories. Free publicity worth millions. Publicity a traditional publisher would pay serious money and still wouldn't be able to achieve.

We don't have to attack or ridicule those who step up and go against the current of overenthusiasm. It's a new market. Any way we look at it, there is a lot to learn. The most important thing is that very little things have actually changed. The barrier to publishing was not the publisher's inability to understand how good we are, it's usually our own writing skill. Even if one publisher is not good enough to realize the potential of your novel, by trying a dozen you can average out the problem. Somebody will eventually accept it. They cannot all be idiots, they have been doing it for 20 years and they have read their share of literature. It's their dayjob.


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## Gone 9/21/18 (Dec 11, 2008)

RachelAstor said:


> . . . but really, sampling takes care of weeding out the poor or inexperienced writing, no?


IMO, no. I sample everything, and if you mean strictly weeding out poor writing, you can make the case, but what sampling can't tell you is if there's a coherent, believable plot, and that's where a lot of books fail, at least for me. And I increasingly believe in Dean Wesley Smith's theory that what matters most is good storytelling, not pretty sentences, although of course the ideal is both. Maybe I'll get there in another Heaven knows how many hours. (Does anybody keep track?)

I used to get angry over people like Leather who showered their superior wisdom on us. It's not that I don't agree there is a lot of dreadful stuff out there or that the percentage of dreadful is much higher in indie work. What angered me is the elitist attitude of telling us _all _we were inferior _per se_ and should all go away. While they deny it, I see this as their desire that we go away so that there are fewer indie books out there, and theirs have a better chance of being the ones seen. They all worry so much about the flood of drek, but somehow I don't believe they're concerned about all the poor drowning readers, but the chances of drowning themselves.

Now, after a year of it, this stuff just makes me weary. As someone said, after the tenth time....

As to those *@!# agents, I think everyone here ought to read Kris Rusch's columns over the last few weeks dealing with what's going on in the traditional publishing world. Even if you never plan to have anything to do with that world, it's an eye opener. If you do have ambitions in that direction, it's frightening.


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## Guest (May 14, 2011)

The majority of ALL books are not worth reading, the way I see it. 

And talent--what about talent? Sure hard work can improve one's writing, and as a Peter Elbow disciple and former Comp. teacher I do believe any one can write well. but talent--what does it take in talent to be a good storyteller, the underpinnings of any great novelist? Well, first it takes a certain amount of intelligence, some experience from which to draw on, but most of all it takes IMAGINATION. 

Now most all children have great imaginations. Schools, parents, siblings, society--all beat most of it out as time goes by. Writers must reconnect imagination. 

As for the argument about traditional vs. self, well I'm biased, as I hate most rule structures, find agents obstacles more than vehicles, and have enough confidence (even arrogance) in my own work to think it is highly readable. I've never had a review on anything published that criticized the quality of writing. And yet until I hit 50, I couldn't tell a good story in a way that satisfied me. It took a decade of immersion in all sorts of fiction, craft studies, books, critique groups, etc. before my "voice" came through. I sell enough ebooks for beer money, though I've given up buying beer. I'd like more, sure, but I refuse to:

Twitter, blog, and be insufferable all over the Internet in pumping my books. I'm insufferable anyway so trying to sell makes me doubly ineffective. I'm sick of the focus on "virtual marketing"--give me face to face & I can sell the pants off of customers. Well, maybe. My books are out there and at times gather some sales. I'm focusing on writing another novel and re-studying the craft. Oh yeah, and reading the genre I write in. Joe Konrath is right. Leathers is right. 

And I vote pretty much right. PCness be damned.


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## AnneMarie Novark (Aug 15, 2010)

OMG!!!  I thought it was just me!!!

I read Konrath's blog religiously, but rarely respond because lurking is my default mode. I just read and soak it in and learn.

This particular post also pushed some of my buttons.

Especially when someone (not naming names) said readers suck as gatekeepers.

Hello? It's all about the readers!!!

Sheesh!!!


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

_"The barrier to publishing was not the publisher's inability to understand how good we are, it's usually our own writing skill. Even if one publisher is not good enough to realize the potential of your novel, by trying a dozen you can average out the problem. Somebody will eventually accept it. They cannot all be idiots, they have been doing it for 20 years and they have read their share of literature. It's their dayjob."_

I'd suggest the barrier to publishing has been the feet of retail shelf space that can be deployed at a profit. One doesn't have to be an idiot to work within the constraints of the industry. That's the challenge.

We simply do not know what level or quantity of quality has been rejected because of market capacity constraints.


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## Monique (Jul 31, 2010)

Tis merely a marketing post. Don't let it get you too upset.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Ian Kharitonov said:


> Speaking of the "10,000 Hours" concept -- does the same rule apply to agents, editors, publishing execs? Do they only become good at their jobs after 13 years of practice? Hmmmm!
> 
> That said, Stephen talks sense.


Yes, of course it does. It applies to every profession. That bit of wisdom CAME from the business side of the picture, and is really common wisdom.

That's why the way to break into publishing is not only with a degree, but also years of interning and being an assistant for 60+ hours a week. You don't get anywhere in publishing without that kind of time behind you.

Can you hang out your shingle as an agent without any of these above? Sure, but even if you sucker some clients into taking you on, you will have a harder time getting your client's work read than if the clients just went straight to the editor themselves.

I also want to point out something else -- Leather isn't the one who brought up the 10,000 hours on Konrath's blog, he was freaking quoting KONRATH HIMSELF. The 10k theory is something INDIES have co-opted from the business world, not something from traditional publishing.

I took a quick read through Leather's article, and yeah, the guy is ignorant of a few things and has some prejudices, but for goodness sakes, folks, you're putting words in the guy's mouth. He's not a rabid, slathering anti-indie troglodyte. He expressed a disagreement as to when a writer is ready to publish. This is equivalent to expressing an opinion as to when somebody should buy a house. It's an excessively conservative judgment, but it's just advice. It's not a moral judgment on your souls.

So I have to ask this, (because this is a smart, successful group and you'd think people would shrug it off without getting so personal about it):

Why is everyone so defensive about this? Why be so dismissive?

Honestly, he's just another indie writer. Your opinion and experience and success is just as valid as his... but his is just as valid as yours. He could learn from you, but you know, you could learn from him too. That's why Joe gave him a guest post slot.

Camille


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

MikeAngel said:


> As for the argument about traditional vs. self, well I'm biased, as I hate most rule structures, find agents obstacles more than vehicles, and have enough confidence (even arrogance) in my own work to think it is highly readable.


It does take confidence in your own abilities to put yourself out there for public consumption and/or criticism ... either that or someone behind you with a cattle prod (that was my method).



> I've never had a review on anything published that criticized the quality of writing. And yet until I hit 50, I couldn't tell a good story in a way that satisfied me. It took a decade of immersion in all sorts of fiction, craft studies, books, critique groups, etc. before my "voice" came through. I sell enough ebooks for beer money, though I've given up buying beer. I'd like more, sure, but I refuse to:


Agreed again. I've always felt I had the what it took to write a book but until I was in my 50's, all my attempts were depressing. I mean the premises themselves were depressing. Yes, I guess I found my "voice" but that voice has been growing and changing over the course of seven books. I hope that I, and my work, continue to change and grow as I continue writing.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> The 10k hours is credentialism. This is the practice of evaluating a product by the credentials of the creator, or limiting creation of the product to those with a credential. In many cases it makes sense.
> 
> But it doesn't matter for a book. The product can stand on its own merits and be evaluated without even knowing the author.
> 
> And it sure doesn't matter for making money from a book. That depends on sales, not credentials or quality.


I agree, I have never heard about a novel being rejected because it was the first novel. Nobody asks for a 10,000 hour certificate. It's the work they do not like. If the previously published author author is more acceptable it's also because of a novel, the previous one.

10,000 hours or whatever is a guideline for creative writers, and artists in general. It attempts to protect them for early dissapointment and quiting. The piano teacher does that for the trained musician. Nobody does it for the aspiring writers, on the contrary, everything these days makes them believe it will be fast and easy. Writers should't expect great or even sellable literature to flow if they have only been writing for a few months. Even if they have been reading great literature for years, the actual writing takes practice. The friction with good literature will make it a lot easier and productive.

A problem I see is that since getting published is a given, the focus shifts from the actual work to the marketing effort. It's sad that many aspiring writers spends only 3 hours a day writing and a full 6 or 8 hours marketing. It's a tragic loss of time and potential. It's a focus shift from what counts to what should come last.

You do need years of experience in order to land a good editor's position. Credentialism does exist in publishing because it's a great responsibility to judge creative work. It makes the publisher feel a little more secure. From a business point of view, investing in creativity is an admirably stupid endevour.


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## Anne Victory (Jul 29, 2010)

daringnovelist said:


> I took a quick read through Leather's article, and yeah, the guy is ignorant of a few things and has some prejudices, but for goodness sakes, folks, *you're putting words in the guy's mouth. He's not a rabid, slathering anti-indie troglodyte.* He expressed a disagreement as to when a writer is ready to publish. This is equivalent to expressing an opinion as to when somebody should buy a house. It's an excessively conservative judgment, but it's just advice. It's not a moral judgment on your souls.
> 
> So I have to ask this, (because this is a smart, successful group and you'd think people would shrug it off without getting so personal about it):
> 
> ...


This. 'Specially the bolded part.


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## Kathelm (Sep 27, 2010)

> Besides, if this were any sort of ironclad rule, then how could you explain the many, many authors whose best book is their first published work, and their later works inferior?


Here's a wild hypothesis:

The first book was something the author wrote of his own volition, because he had a story to tell. The rest were written to fulfill a contract obligation to a publisher, under close supervision/direction from an editor.

Wait...no, that can't be right. Media corporations wouldn't do that, and besides, their very involvement makes everything better.


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## Lanie Jordan (Feb 23, 2011)

I believe there are some people who are just naturals at writing. It's like with anything else in the world--some people are good at something with little to no practice and some people won't ever be good at it, even with years of practice, or, 10,000 hours. Heck, even 20,000 hours. I could run a mile a day every day for the next 20 years and I could pretty much guarantee that I would never, in a million years, be good enough to go to the Olympics or win at any kind of competition unless everyone else had to hop backwards on one foot to the finish line while blindfolded (and probably not even then). 

Do I think there's a lot of crap out there? Yes, I do. But I don't think it's all self-published/indie crap. I've read plenty of NY books that made throw them against the wall and wonder why in the world no one set fire to it before it saw the light of day. Do I think some people should wait before they try to publish? Yeah, I do. I don't think every self-published/indie book out there needs to be out there, but who am I say who has to write for 10,000 hours before they should be able to publish? It's not my call.

That being said, I do agree that the more you write the better you'll get. My first book was okay, and my next one a little better, etc. And I hope that pattern continues. I don't want to get stuck thinking I've learned all I can. I want to always try to improve my craft.


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## StormWorldSeriesGuy (Apr 28, 2011)

> The vast majority of self-published eBooks are bad. Worse than bad. Awful. There, I've said it.


It never ceases to amaze me how many critics of self-published authors rely on sweeping generalizations in place of hard evidence. This Stephen Leather is entitled to his informed opinion, but how informed is it when he's barely scratched the surface of self-published work?

We live in an age where self-publishing and traditional publishing are in tremendous flux and where conventional definitions of publishing are changing, yet so many still cling to these cliches without backing them up.

The truth, as I see it, is that there is no hard and fast formula for writing and publishing and that there never will be. The only way to determine quality is to actually read the book, and few are willing to put in that kind of time before making convenient generalizations based on small and allegedly representative samples.

The beauty of writing is that is isn't a science; it's an art. If a book speaks to a single reader, it has a purpose, and who is to say that purpose is not worthwhile or of sufficient quality?


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> I'd suggest the barrier to publishing has been the feet of retail shelf space that can be deployed at a profit. One doesn't have to be an idiot to work within the constraints of the industry. That's the challenge.
> 
> We simply do not know what level or quantity of quality has been rejected because of market capacity constraints.


By the word Quality I mean quality and marketable potential as perceived by the editor/publisher in the present situation. We are going through difficult times, the industry will publish the good novels and try to get them reviews, even at a loss and with very low advances, but this type of contract will only pay in the long run. Publishers have to survive commercially, what can sell fast and in great quantities is a lot more important.

So, there is room for both types of novels. I believe good fiction will not be rejected by a large numbers of publishers. Writers rarely realise that a rejection, regardless of how it looks when put into writing, can be a sign of the times. It could not be the type of literature the publisher is looking for, the market could be at a saturated state, the publisher might simply be out of cash for advances, printing and marketing.

When the best selling ebook writer/publisher is invited by the large publisher, it's not because of respect for his/her work, it's not because the writer got any better or because the publisher house accept their mistake. It is because the writer proved the novel can find an audience, but also because the writer has already made a publishing effort which the publisher can exploit with a limited investment. The writer has created a lively active persona in the new media that can be systematically exploited. The electronic distributors and the media will pick up the story and push marketing further for free. If the advance is high the marketing and news exploitation will work even better. If you ever reach such a deal, keep that in mind during the contract signing handshake. Chances are they are buying the publisher, not the writer.

Now, a publisher investing in an unkown writer based on a mere manuscript, that's an entirely different thing, even if the advance is low. The only thing you offer is your manuscript and you can be sure they only want your writing.

I'm just saying this because writers are romantic creatures. It's not important from a business point of view of self-publishing.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

_"Nobody does it for the aspiring writers, on the contrary, everything these days makes them believe it will be fast and easy."_

I have yet to encounter that "everything." Nor have I encountered the belief it will be fast and easy. I see much written warning beginning writers that they have little chance of becoming Amanda Hocking, warning it isn't easy, and warning they have unreasonable expectations. After the Hocking contract was announced there was a flurry of articles telling people they couldn't all be Hockings. But I'm not sure what or who they were refuting. I don't see evidence of those expectations. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places. That's certainly possible, and perhaps likely. Where are these unreasonable expectations being expressed?

I can attest to one very steady and constant bit of advice being given on KB by many people. It never stops, and can be summed up as, "Write, Write, Write." But I have never seen anyone encouraging the notion it is fast and easy, and I have never seen anyone relating a story that could be interpreted as an endorsement of the notion of fast and easy.

Maybe someone can demonstrate how out of touch I am?


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## mrv01d (Apr 4, 2011)

Well I'm the weirdo in the corner trying to edit my first ever novel into something publishable.  I just re-read it for the first time in years, the writing needs work but the plot holds so I think/hope it's worth the time to rework it.

But since the ms is about 10 years old*, I'm pretty much at the 10,000 hour mark so maybe it will work out.

M

*The weird part of editing has been updating the technology. They have iphones, not cell phones. Angry Birds etc... Surreal!


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## RJ Keller (Mar 9, 2009)

I read the post. He's giving the same arguments we've been hearing for years. Lather, rinse, repeat. Whatever.

And a hearty dash of Tabasco sauce'll make your Ramen taste pretty good.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Lanie Jordan said:


> I believe there are some people who are just naturals at writing. It's like with anything else in the world--some people are good at something with little to no practice and some people won't ever be good at it, even with years of practice, or, 10,000 hours. Heck, even 20,000 hours. I could run a mile a day every day for the next 20 years and I could pretty much guarantee that I would never, in a million years, be good enough to go to the Olympics or win at any kind of competition unless everyone else had to hop backwards on one foot to the finish line while blindfolded (and probably not even then).


1) Those who say they wouldn't be better have never invested the time and effort. Not even 1/10th, sometimes even 1/100th of it. How do they know for sure?

2) Those who have actually put much time and received decent guidance have managed to be very good at what they do. They are professionals. There is no room in the market to make everyone a celebrity and not all people try as hard but they are damn good compared to those who work less. It's interesting to see how small difference is between the 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc in sports. They are all very good at they do. Why don't we ever see a miracle without a background that reveals massive practicing in the specific task?

3) Those who are actually good at what they do all spend hours and hours every day in work and training. If some people are natural talents and since they are already trained and accomplished, they could stop practicing or minimise it. Why don't they do that? They have a lot of money which helps finding many good ways to spend your time with friends and family. Why do they punish themselves? Why do all athletes follow equally strict training when preparing for an event if talent can substitute hard work?

4) Those who were good but dropped training and working in a professional full-time fashion have quickly deteriorated. There are many examples in every single art or profession considered to be shaped by talent.

Could it all be concidence? Work is not only critical to developing a skill it's also critical to maintaining it. After all the dedication in developing it, it's still very easy to lose the edge. Athletes in particular, are aware of the fact more than anyone else. Their task is usually simple and mechanical, the standards are strict and everything is measurable with precision. It could take a couple of novels until the publishers and the readers notice that my writing is getting worse, it's all very subjective, so it's easier to forget how important dedication is to a writer.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

modwitch said:


> I think it annoys me simply because there are a *whole lot* of people lately who are writing the "advice to new writers" posts who assume I (as a new writer) need to do my time.


This makes me want to bang my head against a wall. Instead of thinking about what it means, you're assuming someone is telling YOU you're not ready. Obviously that is not so.



modwitch said:


> But I have a question for those of you with lots of experience in the writing field. If you went to a class of creative writing hopefuls in university or at a workshop, can you not see talent? And can you not see people who, even if they work really hard, and really long, aren't very likely to make it? You surely can in most other fields.


I used to teach creative writing in college, and I can tell you that, unfortunately, you can't tell talent from someone's writing. You might tell it from how they talk about writing and what they do -- what their habits are. Honestly, there are extremely talented naturals who are AWFUL at their first efforts. And there are always people who can toss off a story because they're smart and a good mimic, but they really don't have anything to say, so they just don't continue.

The problem comes with your definition of what constitutes "work." I think this is why you have felt insulted by some of the comments around here lately. You said something earlier about being somebody who loves stories and thought you'd like to write them. I can tell you that an awful lot of the people in my creative writing classes in college NEVER CRACKED A BOOK WHICH WASN'T ASSIGNED TO THEM. They didn't actually like reading. They liked the idea of _being_ a writer. Of having written a book.

This is much like the statistics for poetry -- I think someone once did a survey and found that four times as many people write poetry as read it. This could just be apocryphal, but from what I've seen, I can say it's true of people I know.

So, think about this: Before you wrote down your first word of fiction, you had already done hours and hours of "work" which many people have never done. You know what good writing looks like, what it sounds like. You know what's satisfying. I don't know where you are in the grand scheme of things, but even if you currently flying by the seat of your pants on "satisfying" you've built the tools to get buy until you understand it on a deeper level. You've primed your instinct, at the very least.

I don't know if you read my "Mary Sue" posts, but if so, the second one talked about how you can log a lot of of those 10,000 hours when you're a kid, just playing.

If you've worked as a copy writer, or a journalist, or just write a heck of a lot of blog posts (in which you are careful to edit at least) you have logged a lot of those mastery hours too. Your education counts -- just not all of it. And not the parts you didn't pay attention to. But any part where you got enthralled and learned to look deeper, that does count. Also anything you did with meticulous precision and care. Any time you learned to pay attention and sweat the small stuff.

The problem is that nobody knows how much of that time others have put in. A lot of people do go through life, floating on the surface and never going any deeper at anything. And maybe for those people 10,000 hours wouldn't be enough. (On the other hand, they clearly have put in the time learning to fake it, so maybe the 10,000 hours of faking it will allow them to fake this too.)

I will say this, if you've been around traditional publishing, you learn to beware of those who will waste your time because they aren't as serious as they claim. People who ask for help or emotional investment, and then give up too easily. So if people here sense some emotional knee-jerk reaction in a trad-pub person, imho, it probably comes from that more than any bitterness of their own. The way to save yourself from emotionally investing in somebody who will give up on you is to try to make them give up now. If they don't, they'll make it.

Camille


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## DanoJ (Apr 29, 2011)

I think the notion that you should spend 13 years writing to get good enough to publish is garbage. Having said that, though, I'm nearly 50 years old, so I have certainly been writing longer than 13 years--but not on one book. I think if it takes you that long to finish a novel, there is something ghastly wrong with the story. I'm rather annoyed by people who sell a lot of books assuming that, because they do, they are better writers than authors who sell many fewer books. It's like Snookie thinking she's smart because some University paid her $40K to speak to the student body. Really? Correlation does not equal causation.


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## DDScott (Aug 13, 2010)

AnneMarie Novark said:


> OMG!!! I thought it was just me!!!
> 
> I read Konrath's blog religiously, but rarely respond because lurking is my default mode. I just read and soak it in and learn.
> 
> ...


It was sooo NOT just you, AnneMarie...that was a tough one to absorb...

But...that said... I do think it's a very prevalent way of thinking...and a viewpoint we, as Indie Epub authors, must learn to deal with...then, LM(and your)AO at while we continue to watch our Indie Ebook Sales rise and our fantabulous reader and fans bases grow!!!

We are Writers...and nothing should matter to us other than making our Muses happy (during our writing process) and our Readers happy too!!!


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

StormWorldSeriesGuy said:


> It never ceases to amaze me how many critics of self-published authors rely on sweeping generalizations in place of hard evidence. This Stephen Leather is entitled to his informed opinion, but how informed is it when he's barely scratched the surface of self-published work?


I have a challenge for you. (And for everyone, both sides of the issue.) Go to Smashwords and download samples of the latest ten uploads. (However, not more than one of a single author -- that way you're getting a wider sampling.) (EDITED TO ADD: you may skip erotica or certain genres you simply can't stand to read.)

Read the first few pages (or more if you have time) of each, and rank them. Don't _grade_ them, rank them. This is important because it gets you past your prejudices (good or bad) and makes you look at the writing itself. You can however, chose your own criteria.

Do this several times (once a day, once a week) until you've ranked one hundred books.

When you've done that, you will have a sampling of what kind of writing is really out there. You will be surprised one way or the other -- but it's a good surprise.

And here is another step, which IMHO, could be eye opening to some (though it is biased toward the Trad Pub view): Ask yourself, are you interested in buying any of those books? How many? (And if you haven't gone on to buy them, why not?) Of those books you don't want to buy, how many would you have bought if they were more to your tastes?

That last step, as I said, is biased toward the gatekeeper view -- but try to keep in mind that you are NOT judging whether the book should be offered for sale, but only if you'd buy them. You're taking a reader's eye view.

Camille


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## Mrs. K. (Dec 31, 2010)

Question from a non-writer: is there something that happens between years 12 and 13 of writing that makes one's work suddenly acceptable? Some moment of epiphany?   

Nah, didn't think so...but had to ask anyway.


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## SuzanneTyrpak (Aug 10, 2010)

Stephen Leather likes to stir things up! It's all marketing.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

_"Go to Smashwords and download samples of the latest ten uploads."_

I wouldn't dispute what you find there. But I'd add another experiment.

Wait six months and go to Amazon and find those ten books in some way other than author and title. See if you come across them browsing the various genre lists, Also Boughts, category searches, etc. I don't know how to test it, but I'd also ask how many of the ten showed up on Amazon personal recommendation pages and email recommendations.

The first test illustrates that we can find lots of crappy books on Smashwords, using SW as a surrogate for all independents.

The second test illustrates that it is very hard to find them unless one already knows about them and is actually targeting them.

What we have is an example of self-organization, and it illustrates how the market is doing a very good job of discrimination. Millions of nodes are acting independently and generating a very credible system. And Amazon does us all a favor by collating.

So, while the SmashWords test is disconcerting, it really isn't much of a real world concern. We are as likely to find those ten books as we are to find a paper book that had one printing in 1953.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Rin said:


> Ok, so we're disbanding the KB right? All going home and just waiting to get picked up by a legacy-pub house? Because all good dogs go to heaven good books get published.


Um, no, even if every author in the world stops writing now (indie or traditional). There are plenty of books already "in print" for Kindle owners to discuss. KindleBoards is here for Kindle owners.... just thought I'd mention that here. 

Otherwise, carry on.  Similar discussions go on in the art quilt community all the time. And in other art forums. The expression we use is "do the work." 

Betsy


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Terrence OBrien said:


> _"Go to Smashwords and download samples of the latest ten uploads."_
> 
> I wouldn't dispute what you find there. But I'd add another experiment.
> 
> ...


Well, what you might find disconcerting is how many people will find lots of great books in that Smashwords test. (Different strokes.)

Your test would be interesting if we could do it, but without BEING the people Amazon would recommend the books too, we could not actually prove anything. However, there are other ways to measure viability. Ten years from now, what do you find when Googling the author? Where and what kind of mentions?

Let's not forget that awful books may be successful if they find their niche - and such books even if they don't have grand success, must still be considered viable. Did they find their audience? Did they succeed to the point where the author was satisfied? Those are harder questions to answer, and I think those are the ones that are really the source of the difference between people like Learner and many people here.

Camille


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> _"Nobody does it for the aspiring writers, on the contrary, everything these days makes them believe it will be fast and easy."_
> 
> I have yet to encounter that "everything." Nor have I encountered the belief it will be fast and easy. I see much written warning beginning writers that they have little chance of becoming Amanda Hocking, warning it isn't easy, and warning they have unreasonable expectations. After the Hocking contract was announced there was a flurry of articles telling people they couldn't all be Hockings. But I'm not sure what or who they were refuting. I don't see evidence of those expectations. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong places. That's certainly possible, and perhaps likely. Where are these unreasonable expectations being expressed?
> 
> ...


I'm talking about the media and the marketing. Rags to riches. That's what the general public gets from this whole development. It's hard when you see people dissapointed, going into a fight without being aware of the basics and getting defeated. The defeat usually hurts the writer half not the publisher half and it's massively discouraging. I'm not saying that the problem is marketing, the writing is equally incompentent and generally worse than the marketing, but I hate to see young writers get crashed before even understanding how writing works.

In the past, we had the editor/scapegoat, now we don't even have that. The scapegoat, just like in community and business, served to alleviate the guilt and allow community members to go on with their life or profession. Now we just get crashed young writers that might quit at the spot. Any potential is immediately written out before it even flourishes, but the hard reality of business.

This is a great issue because lots of young people are "inspired" by the ebook self-publishing success stories. You know how youth is with the new media. Everything is fast, hits hard, and shapes effectively. A teen is a teen, a young adult is a young adult. There is no comparison to a writer at a mature age that just experiments with the ebook medium.

In traditional publishing the refusal is personal, especially in smaller houses. In ebooks it's a mere faceless figure that is created by hard sales. There is also the negative impact that a business approach has on the creative writing process. Even older writers will eventually get sick of dealing with the business and marketing side of self-publishing. Young people are not equiped to handle these things, they are not ready for handling the business side, promoting, investing money in marketing or anything else across these lines is not fit to heir way of thinking.

Regarding the writer forum enviroments, it is not my intention to insult anyone, but competition gets in the way. It makes sense on a writing board and in writer's blogs to make everything look hard. Harder than it really is. Assume you are interested in writing and you join an ebook writing board. Do you expect other ebook writers to tell you it was easy and that you should start writing their genre? Do you want their successful marketing methods analysed also? That will never happen when there is money involved. It's not always a hobby.


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## jtplayer (Jan 8, 2011)

I thought it was an informative blog post by Stephen Leather.  Unfortunately, many here have distorted and misinterpreted what he wrote and used that as a springboard to vent their anger...at what I have no idea.  Seems to me lots of reactionary and defensive folks hang around this place.

If you are secure in your decision to go the indie route, and you are equally confident in your abilities and your craft, then in my mind there is no reason to get all twisted up over a different opinion.  No matter how it is expressed.


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## Guest (May 15, 2011)

jtplayer said:


> I thought it was an informative blog post by Stephen Leather. Unfortunately, many here have distorted and misinterpreted what he wrote and used that as a springboard to vent their anger...at what I have no idea.  Seems to me lots of reactionary and defensive folks hang around this place.
> 
> If you are secure in your decision to go the indie route, and you are equally confident in your abilities and your craft, then in my mind there is no reason to get all twisted up over a different opinion. No matter how it is expressed.


+1 to this. I read the post looking for anything that might be controversial and really didn't find anything.


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## Tom Junior (Apr 4, 2011)

People are taking the the whole 10,000 hour rule a bit too seriously. This 'rule' as it were simply states it takes 10,000 hours (or 10 years) for the average person to 'master' a skill or profession.

Or more succinctly: 


> The 10000 Hour Rule is just that. This is the idea that it takes approximately 10000 hours of deliberate practice to master a skill.
> 
> For instance, it would take 10 years of practicing 3 hours a day to become a master in your subject. It would take approximately 5 years of full-time employment to become proficient in your field.


The 10000 Hour Rule is a THEORY created by noted Psychologist Dr. K. Anders Ericsson. He developed this THEORY during his research using students from the Berlin Academy of Music as subjects. Unfortunately, this THEORY gets frequently tossed around out of context.

The germ of it is very simple: To be good at something takes a few years of dedicated practice! 

That being said, I do think quite a few people rush to publish before they are ready. But that's really no one's business but their own. I haven't published any of my work yet, because it still feels unpolished to me. Again, no one's business but my own. If someone wants to dive into the pool without first taking a lesson, so be it. Maybe they'll drown, or float, or need a lifeguard to save their ass! However, it was their fate and that individual made his/her own choice. It's not a decision that can be made for them.

*Sorry if the above sounds ranty! But as a former Psychology student pop psychology being tossed around as fact, drives me nuts!!!*


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## JFHilborne (Jan 22, 2011)

Informative post, although too long to hold my interest to the end. Pity he discounts eBooks as "real" books. No matter the format in which a book is published, the same sweat and effort went into creating the work. Paperbacks, hardbacks and E-format are all real books. If I download music, it's as real as if I bought a CD.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Half-Orc said:


> Nothing really new here: traditional publishing weeds out the bad, writers will release terrible works without knowing it because they haven't worked hard enough yet, being in print in stores is more rewarding than just kindle, vast majority of self-published is terrible, readers are bad gatekeepers, etc. I laughed my head off at one part though. Stephen wants every writer to spend 13 years writing before deciding whether or not they're good enough to self-publish.
> 
> Good thing I started writing at 14, eh?


He would want that. Then he would more or less have kindle to himself.


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## jtplayer (Jan 8, 2011)

JFHilborne said:


> Informative post, although too long to hold my interest to the end. Pity he discounts eBooks as "real" books. No matter the format in which a book is published, the same sweat and effort went into creating the work. Paperbacks, hardbacks and E-format are all real books. If I download music, it's as real as if I bought a CD.


I think you misinterpreted what he wrote. When he spoke of "real" books, I took it to mean physical printed books. Here's what he wrote:

_Here's the thing. I love books. Real books. I always have. And one of the biggest kicks I get is to walk into a bookstore and see a shelf-full of my books. I've got more than twenty 'real' books in print so often I get a shelf to myself. And I get an even bigger kick if my 12-year-old daughter is with me and she can see for herself the results of Dad locking himself away on the laptop for hours on end. I never get the same kick when I see someone reading a Kindle. It's just not the same. So I'll be sticking with real books, for a while longer at least!_

Anyway, I think you're stretching it a bit when you assume all ebooks go through the same "sweat and effort" of traditional books. I don't doubt for a minute many indie authors are cutting corners like crazy just to get their latest & greatest to market and see the bucks start rolling in


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

foreverjuly said:


> +1 to this. I read the post looking for anything that might be controversial and really didn't find anything.


Exactly. It takes a work ethic to read a long article especially if you sense it conflicts with your perception of reality. It's far easier to not read it and repeat the 13y figure to ridicule it. Others that also lack the work ethic to read the article will also believe it's a ridiculous article because 13y sounds like a very long time and it really is. They will still not read the article to see how the 13y figure came up, even after being provoked by how fun and ridiculous the article might be 

13y = no more than 3 years of hard work. 3 years sound much better, I just don't like the hard part


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## jtplayer (Jan 8, 2011)

The point Leather was making, and as Camille noted Konrath himself first brought this up on his blog, is the time it takes to get proficient at something.  I don't think anyone here who is serious about writing will deny that it takes years of doing it to learn the craft well.  

It might simply be a matter of rewriting your first book fifty times (as I seem to have done ), or writing a trunk load of crap before you feel you've hit your stride, but the concept remains the same.  IMO, there was nothing derogatory or inflammatory in what Stephen Leather wrote.  No more so than the typical stuff Konrath writes on a regular basis.  

If you feel offended, perhaps you should go back and reread the post with a clearer head.  And it you haven't read it, but are offended based on the comments posted here, well then shame on you.


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## Tom Junior (Apr 4, 2011)

Also....the whole 13 Year time frame is often misquoted. The theory really states it takes the average person 13 years to become a *master* in a given field. (i.e. an elite Soccer Player, or Master Celloist, or another Shakespeare).

It doesn't imply that it takes that long to become good or competent. It states it takes that long to become an expert! Which is totally something different.

Here's the actual article the people grab the whole 10,000 hours sound-byte from: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07wwln_freak.html?
If you read it you realize that the guy is saying something entirely different than what most people have interpreted.

So take heart budding writers, it won't take you 13 years to get where you want to be! At least in theory.


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## SuzanneTyrpak (Aug 10, 2010)

foreverjuly said:


> +1 to this. I read the post looking for anything that might be controversial and really didn't find anything.


I think it's funny that Stephen talks about his FB friends promoting their books--he frequently promotes his books on FB. To give him credit, he also posts a lot of funny articles from UK newspapers. I like Stephen, but I feel a bit disappointed that in this post he makes a negative statement about indie quality. I'm sure there's a lot of truth in what he says, but he generally aligns with indies (on FB and on UK Amazon--before they kicked him off), so I'm surprised by his stance.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

_"I'm talking about the media and the marketing. Rags to riches. That's what the general public gets from this whole development."_

OK. What I'm looking for is some reason to think authors are developing unreasonable expectations that it is fast and easy. That's what I don't see.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

It would be nice if everyone did the 100 book experiment.
Or the 100 spec script reading exercise.
Or the 100 auditions with aspiring pop singers test.

That's what an acquisition person does for a living. Tha's how an editor feels. You will eventually start to skip pages or only read a chapter or 10 pages from a script. After doing the tests a few times you will notice you can even read less to see if it has any potential and any time you invest time in reading the whole thing you are verified.

If you do not like it already, increase the pressure. Imagine you will spend your money in publishing it. Then increase the pressure even more. It's now your publisher's money, not yours. Imagine how your job is on the line depending on your criteria. You would still want to say yes to everyone. But you can't do that, the material has to be good. Depending on your position in the chain, the entire responsibility on the investment by your publisher could be in your hands. $20K, $50K or $200K. You are the editor. Make a decision about all these novels. Which one would you recommend? Perhaps you should check some more novels before deciding what is worth of a full reading?


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## SuzanneTyrpak (Aug 10, 2010)

Panayotis said:


> It would be nice if everyone did the 100 book experiment.
> Or the 100 spec script reading exercise.
> Or the 100 auditions with aspiring pop singers test.
> 
> ...


Interesting exercise. And I've been in that position as a script reader. But don't you think all that pressure (often from the marketing department) is part of why trad publishing has become so bogged down? Just like the movie industry, everyone is looking for a "sure thing," something sure to be a money-maker. Once in a while, someone takes a chance--but most of the time they're just looking for something similar to what's already been successful.

No risk, due to fear, has opened the door for indie writers.


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## DanoJ (Apr 29, 2011)

I'm with you on this point. People ask me how long it took to write my novel, and my response is, "that's hard to quantify...pretty much a year after I got serious about it." If that's a get-rich-quick scheme, I wouldn't want to have to sell the how-to manual on an infomercial.


Terrence OBrien said:


> _"I'm talking about the media and the marketing. Rags to riches. That's what the general public gets from this whole development."_
> 
> OK. What I'm looking for is some reason to think authors are developing unreasonable expectations that it is fast and easy. That's what I don't see.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> _"I'm talking about the media and the marketing. Rags to riches. That's what the general public gets from this whole development."_
> 
> OK. What I'm looking for is some reason to think authors are developing unreasonable expectations that it is fast and easy. That's what I don't see.


Don't look for hard proof. It's just my perception observing writers in my enviroment.


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## AnnaM (Jul 15, 2009)

Panayotis said:


> It would be nice if everyone did the 100 book experiment.
> Or the 100 spec script reading exercise.
> Or the 100 auditions with aspiring pop singers test.
> 
> ...


Clearly it is a difficult job for the print publishing acquisitions team. While a publisher must invest 20K, 50K or 200K to produce and market a book, the investment for a self-published author (beyond their writing time, which is the same whether they self-pub or go with traditional publisher) can be as little as $500 to $1,000 (depending on cover art and editing costs).

In your 100 books experiment it would be easy to say 'yes' to all 100 ebooks, knowing that one will hit a home run, and 10 will be midlist sellers. The other 85? Pfft. So, you've invested a few hundred in each? Easy call. Accept them all. That's what ebook publishing has done. The cost barrier to entry is practically nil, so the risk is low in publishing any given title. This is the business model Carina Press (a division of Harlequin) is operating on . . . they are accepting a much higher percentage of submissions, because it is so much cheaper to go digital-only. Sure, some of them are stinkers, but the profitable titles more than make up the difference. Its like stock picking. You never know which stock will be a runaway hit, so you diversity with a portfolio. When one stock outperforms you add to it and keep it in your basket. You let the dogs go. In the new ebook system, you can pick more stocks (books) because your risk (cost of production) is lowered.

So, the readers decide which one of the hundred ebooks is a hit. The investment made by the author (or a digital-only press, such as Carina) is far less than the old vanity publishers scammed out of the author (I knew some who paid thousands of dollars to "publish" a book to sell out of the back of the car), and what's more, for the low entry fee an author has access to the largest distribution channel in the world (Amazon). Not a bad deal, and it's a decent way to find out if the work is marketable. It takes far fewer sales to break even and move into the black.

If a book is crap (or not marketable) the author will know in short order, and can move on to other pursuits. Seems simple to me.


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## AnnaM (Jul 15, 2009)

PS:  What I've outlined in my post is called "the free market". It works.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

SuzanneTyrpak said:


> Interesting exercise. And I've been in that position as a script reader. But don't you think all that pressure (often from the marketing department) is part of why trad publishing has become so bogged down? Just like the movie industry, everyone is looking for a "sure thing," something sure to be a money-maker. Once in a while, someone takes a chance--but most of the time they're just looking for something similar to what's already been successful.
> 
> No risk, due to fear, has opened the door for indie writers.


It believe it will be easier now for editors and publishers. Many writers will stop trying to get published and go direct to ebook. More time will be available for development and mining for good stuff. This has always been a real problem in the past years. Some books only need good editing, but they are not even considered because costs must be kept down due to flooding and focus on genre fiction commercialism. With less book offers and projects to handle, more time can be spend on each project. More resources per book. Publshing houses are limited just like film studios are limited. Publishing supports art but it's no different from selling canned food. We might see some high quality canned food in the stores now, even fresh food

Some genre fiction might progressively migrate to ebook just like print erotica migrated to the web. The writers directly and the publishing houses themselves. I imagine that erotica readers will prefer to use an ebook reader instead of carrying erotica mass market with them. The covers are always embarassing.

In the long run I believe the print book will survive and literature as an art has a lot to gain.


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## Eric C (Aug 3, 2009)

Regarding Malcolm Gladwell and the 10,000 hour rule, the Beatles got paid playing Hamburg. They got paid while racking up their 10,000 hours.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

AnnaM said:


> In your 100 books experiment it would be easy to say 'yes' to all 100 ebooks,


This is part of why I said, "Don't grade it, RANK it."

I've been a script analyst, and I've been a competition judge. (I've also been a teacher, as I mentioned here.) IMHO, the most valuable experience for a writer who has never read slush is to sit down and rank a whole LOT of stories, relative to each other.

It's easy to pick several "A" students out of a pile in a class. If your job isn't dependent on it, it's easy to give some unnecessary "consider" rankings out just because you're tired on passing on everything. But when you have to choose "better" among what's already best, or "worst" of what's already bad, then you really have to think and look. You have to decide what really is important. Should you award "best" to the story that was a little more polished, or to the one that tried to do something more difficult, or the one that has a more important and resonant premise?

Judging a couple of hundred published short stories for an annual award really changed my perspective on a lot of things.

And yes, this is an exercise I have been pushing for more people to do. It really makes a huge difference in your ability to look at your own work. If you don't want to look at Smashwords, then read through multiple issues of a fiction magazine or a set of anthologies in your genre -- judge the best rather than the worst, but get out there and judge it.

Camille


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## Rin (Apr 25, 2011)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> Um, no, even if every author in the world stops writing now (indie or traditional). There are plenty of books already "in print" for Kindle owners to discuss. KindleBoards is here for Kindle owners.... just thought I'd mention that here.
> 
> Otherwise, carry on. Similar discussions go on in the art quilt community all the time. And in other art forums. The expression we use is "do the work."
> 
> Betsy


*blush*

Right. I keep forgetting there are other boards here. Honest, I try and go and play out there, but then something updates in the Writer's Cafe and I just come back.


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## SuzanneTyrpak (Aug 10, 2010)

Panayotis said:


> It believe it will be easier now for editors and publishers. Many writers will stop trying to get published and go direct to ebook. More time will be available for development and mining for good stuff. This has always been a real problem in the past years. Some books only need good editing, but they are not even considered because costs must be kept down due to flooding and focus on genre fiction commercialism. With less book offers and projects to handle, more time can be spend on each project. More resources per book. Publshing houses are limited just like film studios are limited. Publishing supports art but it's no different from selling canned food. We might see some high quality canned food in the stores now, even fresh food
> 
> Some genre fiction might progressively migrate to ebook just like print erotica migrated to the web. The writers directly and the publishing houses themselves. I imagine that erotica readers will prefer to use an ebook reader instead of carrying erotica mass market with them. The covers are always embarassing.
> 
> In the long run I believe the print book will survive and literature as an art has a lot to gain.


This is the most hopeful take on trad publishing that I've heard in a long time. Thank you. I want to see traditional books survive, and I want to see publishing thrive.

From what I've seen on these boards, many agents and publishers are looking at the indie sales--and when a book sells well they jump on it.
So, I believe, indie publishing is great for writers who might not otherwise get a chance, because editors never get to see their work. It's also great for established writers who aren't being treated fairly by their agents and publishers.

Options are good.


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## AnnaM (Jul 15, 2009)

daringnovelist said:


> This is part of why I said, "Don't grade it, RANK it."
> 
> I've been a script analyst, and I've been a competition judge. (I've also been a teacher, as I mentioned here.) IMHO, the most valuable experience for a writer who has never read slush is to sit down and rank a whole LOT of stories, relative to each other.
> 
> ...


I've judged writing contests. I understand ranking. The point is that you don't need to judge or rank ebooks. The reader will do it.

I understand why big publishers have to rank. Shelf space is limited at the B&N. They make a 20K or 50K or 200K (as stated in an earlier post) investment before a single copy is sold. They can't take that risk with many books.

Space is infinite in the digital world, and the self-pubber takes all the financial risk (which can be very little, far less than 20K). The reader (consumer) ranks, judges, reviews the work. If it isn't marketable due to quality or content then the author will know. Feedback might take a few months, but it is often faster than response from queries or partials sent to an agent.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

AnnaM said:


> If a book is crap (or not marketable) the author will know in short order, and can move on to other pursuits. Seems simple to me.


It's might be that simple for Harlequin but not all publishers do their line of work and they wouldn't want to use them as a paradigm.

It is only a sign of the times that print publishers have deteriorated to merchants that expect delivery of finished and fully polished product that can be immediately marketed to a given genre that is supposed to be well perceived by the audience.


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## AnnaM (Jul 15, 2009)

Panayotis said:


> It's might be that simple for Harlequin but not all publishers do their line of work and they wouldn't want to use them as a paradigm.


And you know this, how? This is speculation on your part.



Panayotis said:


> It is only a sign of the times that print publishers have deteriorated to merchants that expect delivery of finished and fully polished product that can be immediately marketed to a given genre that is supposed to be well perceived by the audience.


This will continue to be the case as pricing pressure won't abate for them. With low price of ebooks, the big publishers have no pricing power (no ability to raise prices) on the print side of the business.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

AnnaM said:


> I've judged writing contests. I understand ranking. The point is that you don't need to judge or rank ebooks. The reader will do it.


NOOOOOOO! You missed the point entirely. The ranking is for your own judgment -- it's a learning exercise. You don't "rate" them or tell anyone. You learn how to judge your own work by examining the work of others. Did you miss the context somehow?

Sigh.

Camille


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## AnnaM (Jul 15, 2009)

daringnovelist said:


> NOOOOOOO! You missed the point entirely. The ranking is for your own judgment -- it's a learning exercise. You don't "rate" them or tell anyone. You learn how to judge your own work by examining the work of others. Did you miss the context somehow?
> 
> Sigh.
> 
> Camille


OK, I get it, but don't all writers perform this exercise continuously, with every book they read? I've been performing this "learning exercise" throughout my entire reading life. I just assumed all writers do this . . . why would any author on this board suddenly need to judge 100 books now? Haven't they already done it with thousands? If they haven't they can't be critical of their own work, and they can't possibly be good writers. Becoming a good writer begins with critical reading. Anyone who skips that step is working blind with no hands or legs.


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

AnnaM said:


> If a book is crap (or not marketable) the author will know in short order, and can move on to other pursuits. Seems simple to me.


AnnaM, this was dangerously close to a sensible comment. Please make your points more convoluted in the future. We might get somewhere if you're not careful.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

AnnaM said:


> I've judged writing contests. I understand ranking. The point is that you don't need to judge or rank ebooks. The reader will do it.


There is a problem. When you judge someone's creative work and the material is almost there, you sometimes avoid the boilerplate and take the time to explain why. Someone with experience should be able to provide some solid advice that will help without discougraging.

Then we have the ebook. The writer gets sales figure. 3 sales/day good, then 0 sales/day no good. Then 134! Then 24. Then 2. I see lots of potential for psychological problems. A lot of stress. A lot of analysis. A lot of anxiety.

Writers are sensitive human beings as it is. They statistically need a lot more pshychological help not to mention phyciatric treatment compared to the average guy. They are more prone to alcohol, suicide and everything else.

We could easily blame the publisher rejection for all this. Our ebook reality will provide happiness to all writers since publisher rejection belongs to the past. But is the rejection by sales figures any better? We are talking massive failure % compared to traditional publishing, light editing and no professional marketing.

Writers have also traditionally felt bad about reviews from critics. Now anyone can give them a bad review. And the good reviews, some of them do read like nonsense anyway. They do not provide a sense of accomplishment. No improvement in the review deparment either. Add the five star reviews from fellow writers. That can make one feel like a hack.

The writer could develop half of what's listed on DSM IV while marketing a book and checking sales and reviews Juding by the standards of the phychiatric community, they will invent some self-publishing related disorder and publish it in the DSM.

Is anyone drinking alcohol while checking sales? Checking sales every hour? Considering suicide after the 1 star from hellokitty_175?


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

If what you describe is true, and if many writers are emotionally and psychologically unsuited for the challenge, then they will be driven from the industry and it will be left to a different class of writers. OK. That's how it is in many areas.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

AnnaM said:


> OK, I get it, but don't all writers perform this exercise continuously, with every book they read? I've been performing this "learning exercise" throughout my entire reading life. I just assumed all writers do this . . . why would any author on this board suddenly need to judge 100 books now? Haven't they already done it with thousands? If they haven't they can't be critical of their own work, and they can't possibly be good writers. Becoming a good writer begins with critical reading. Anyone who skips that step is working blind with no hands or legs.


I think you're still missing the point.

This isn't just about being critical. Which is again, why I say you don't judge, you rank.

(NOTE: the original context was that this is a way to see for yourself just how good or bad indie writing is, but my point is beyond that.)

Let me try again: no, just being a critical reader is not at all the same. Being a part of a high powered workshop, going to graduate school, NONE of this gets at the kind of learning you get when you read slush, and even slush reading doesn't get you to the point which relative judging does.

The reason is that most critical reading is "absolute." And that actually slows you down, because it only teaches you to apply your standards, but it does nothing to change or improve them. It doesn't force you to look any deeper than necessary. The story is either good enough or it isn't, and you can look at why, but you don't have to go further.

With ranking you have to evaluate it properly, regardless of whether it's good or bad. You can't just dismiss something that's bad enough to know it's bad. You have to understand and evaluate what makes it worse than that other really bad story. Even more important is when you have to rank a bunch of stories which are all really really good. These stories may be even better than you can write or understand. By examining them to find which is better, you push yourself into new territory.

I have never had a student who hasn't made an enormous leap in their writing after doing this exercise. Hey, it may not work for you, but I suspect you will learn a lot if you try it -- especially if you try it among either all excellent stories, or again, 100 opening samples at Smashwords at random.

Camille


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

Panayotis, I appreciate your concern, but my day job is a bit scarier. People either have to grow up and become professionals, or pick another career. We're in the business of being judged. We're asking for people's money here. They've earned the right to critique me—and frankly, if my work is bad, I need to hear it. That said, thanks for showing up on this board, your viewpoints are most valued.


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## SuzanneTyrpak (Aug 10, 2010)

@Modwitch

Terry Brooks, one of my teachers and mentors, always tells his students:

The key to being a good writer is Write,write,write  Read,read,read, Write,write,write  Repeat

If you don't read, how can you write? You're living in a vacuum. Reading is great preparation for writing.


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## AnnaM (Jul 15, 2009)

daringnovelist said:


> I think you're still missing the point.
> 
> This isn't just about being critical. Which is again, why I say you don't judge, you rank.
> 
> ...


Yes, I've done this in judging writing contests (partials, comparing works against each other and giving a ranking). But an avid reader (and any writer should also be a voracious reader) does this constantly amongst books. I've read up to 350 books a year, and when someone asks me to rank them (usually to give a recommendation on what to read) I'm doing the same thing -- ranking them based on various criteria. Any good writer is constantly ranking works he/she is reading, whether it is for a writing contest or not. Your method is one way to do it, but not the only way.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

B. Justin Shier said:


> Panayotis, I appreciate your concern, but my day job is a bit scarier. People either have to grow up and become professionals, or pick another career. We're in the business of being judged. We're asking for people's money here. They've earned the right to critique me-and frankly, if my work is bad, I need to hear it. That said, thanks for showing up on this board, your viewpoints are most valued.


But the majority of good writers are unstable. Most creative people are. I did not mean it as a bad thing


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## Anne Victory (Jul 29, 2010)

SuzanneTyrpak said:


> I think it's funny that Stephen talks about his FB friends promoting their books--he frequently promotes his books on FB. To give him credit, he also posts a lot of funny articles from UK newspapers. I like Stephen, but I feel a bit disappointed that in this post he makes a negative statement about indie quality. I'm sure there's a lot of truth in what he says, but he generally aligns with indies (on FB and on UK Amazon--before they kicked him off), so I'm surprised by his stance.


But, Suzanne, he really has not taken an "anti-indie" stance. Seriously. I think a lot of people got defensive without really considering what he wrote, and it's not "anti-indie", IMO. Anti-shit, sure. But shouldn't anyone who's serious about writing be on that side of the fence?


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

AnnaM said:


> And you know this, how? This is speculation on your part.


Of course it's a speculation. You can judge a publishing house by what they invest in. Every house has a personality.


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## Bob Mayer (Feb 20, 2011)

I thought the blog was well-balanced and thoughtful.  Leather explained his reasons for doing things and Konrath has certainly made it clear how he feels.  After sitting for a little while today listening to an agent in a workshop go on for 30 minutes about what she didn't want, and quoting from query letters that were stupid and ripping them apart, I got up and walked out and felt a little Konrathish.
There are some natural talents who can "stream" a book.  I can count on one hand the number I've met.  For the rest, oh yeah, 10,000 hours at least.  Pretty much every successful novelist I know works extraordinarily hard to the point of obsession.
Reading certainly counts.  80% of American believe they can write a book while only 50% reads books.  Enough said on that.
But there is no substitute for writing.  A lot.


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## SuzanneTyrpak (Aug 10, 2010)

Arkali said:


> But, Suzanne, he really has not taken an "anti-indie" stance. Seriously. I think a lot of people got defensive without really considering what he wrote, and it's not "anti-indie", IMO. Anti-sh**, sure. But shouldn't anyone who's serious about writing be on that side of the fence?


Absolutely anti-sh**

But I'm disappointed that he felt the need to say: "The vast majority of self-published eBooks are bad. Worse than bad. Awful."

Truly, I think he said that partly for effect. It might be true, but it's been stated so often, and Stephen aligns himself with indies, so I was sad to see him take that stance.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

B. Justin Shier said:


> Panayotis, I appreciate your concern, but my day job is a bit scarier. People either have to grow up and become professionals, or pick another career. We're in the business of being judged. We're asking for people's money here. They've earned the right to critique me-and frankly, if my work is bad, I need to hear it. That said, thanks for showing up on this board, your viewpoints are most valued.


Scarier than being a writer? Stand-up comedian?


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## Anne Victory (Jul 29, 2010)

DanoJ said:


> Having said that, though, I'm nearly 50 years old, so I have certainly been writing longer than 13 years--but not on one book.


Jesus. Add me to the :headdesk: group. Nowhere, not at ANY place in that blog article did he say that it should take you 13 years to write a single book. Good lord.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

_"But the majority of good writers are unstable. Most creative people are. I did not mean it as a bad thing"_

I suppose that depends on what is meant by "creative." Is the designer of a new computer chip creative? The guy who designs a new catalytic converter? The marketing manager who comes up with a new campaign? The eye doctor who invents a new micro-scalpel? The designers of a new depropanizer at an oil refinery? The guy who wrote Linux?

Creativity is all around us and these folks aren't unstable. It might be a bit more difficult for the average person to appreciate and understand their creativity, but the creativity that went into the machines we are all using here matches anything an author does.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

modwitch said:


> I'm feeling feisty on this issue lately. A very well known indie writer in fact said this *to me* about *my book*, just a couple of days ago. They weren't willing to acknowledge that there was any way I'd written a decent book. The fact that it sells, that readers like it - none of that could sway them from the fact that it was the first novel I'd ever written, and therefore it must be crap.
> 
> Enough echoes of that in the 10,000 hours rule that it admittedly pushed my buttons a little. Ah, well. It happens.
> 
> ...


Okay, that just makes me want to say "OUCH!" All my life, all of my mentors have stressed the same thing that young writers don't take seriously enough: you must read your genre. That's a part of what they mean when they say you must do the work. Don't just read the classics (or worse, don't ignore the classics) -- you have to know your genre. (But when I say reading is a part of it, I didn't mean it's the whole thing.)

And I'm very sorry to hear that someone told you that you weren't ready to publish when clearly you are as ready as you need to be.

While Mr. Leather may think you need 10,000 hours before you start to publish, I have to question whether everyone who espouses the idea really means it that way. My reading of Joe Konrath is that he figures you need that much before you succeed (as a guesstimate, the way we used to say you needed to collect 100 rejection slips before you'll sell a story). It's a guidepost, and when he looks at what he did to learn to write, and also to learn to be a self-publisher, in both cases it came to about that much effort. But I don't think he's saying that you shouldn't try before you get that many hours in, because frankly he is telling you that you have to put in those 10,000 of _publishing_ before you can master that.

You know, thirty years ago, I went to the Clarion Workshop, and the first week, Algis Budrys told me that I would have no trouble making a living in this business (boy was he ever wrong, but he didn't realize I was unable to stick to a genre to save my life), and the last week, Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm read my partial novel and told me in great detail how it was utter crap. It was hard to take, and in the course of the evening I did point out that the story I got into Clarion on was only the third story I'd ever written. They looked at each other in surprise, and then burst out laughing. "Oh! Well that explains it! You're doing fine. You're just out of the egg. Keep up what you're doing."

Looking back on it, I can see that all three of them were both wrong and right. Kate and Damon were holding up a mirror as to what editors see (which was a whole lot of immaturity) but they also didn't see beyond the surface immaturity and cliches to the story that was worth writing. They couldn't. I wasn't a good enough writer to tell that story yet, and frankly the story was too silly for their way of looking at things. (Orson Scott Card was also at that Clarion, and I was gratified to hear from him that he saw I was not writing science fiction humor, I was writing P.G. Wodehouse -- and for that I personally forgive his recent obnoxiousness. He did make me see that what I loved was valuable and not to be hidden.)

So, same young writer, one big name said I was ready to make a living, another saw I had a dream worth following, and two more saw I was immature as heck. It was like the blind men and the elephant. It has been thirty freaking years putting that fractured picture together and figuring out who I am.

But as you pointed out -- indie publishing is a part of that picture. I have a sense for story, and I have a vision/voice of my own -- but that voice is not aligned with the sophistication of traditional publishing (and trad pub has been headed away from me for those whole thirty years). I truly believe indie publishing would have helped me back then too -- it would have prevented me from chasing all those wild geese in the meantime.

Camille


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## Anne Victory (Jul 29, 2010)

SuzanneTyrpak said:


> But I'm disappointed that he felt the need to say: "The vast majority of self-published eBooks are bad. Worse than bad. Awful."


Point taken. I honestly don't think anyone can really make that statement. Well, they probably could after doing the 100-book test on Smashwords, but short of that, it's hyperbole.


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## MosesSiregarIII (Jul 15, 2010)

T.J. Dotson said:


> Also....the whole 13 Year time frame is often misquoted. The theory really states it takes the average person 13 years to become a *master* in a given field. (i.e. an elite Soccer Player, or Master Celloist, or another Shakespeare).
> 
> It doesn't imply that it takes that long to become good or competent. It states it takes that long to become an expert! Which is totally something different.
> 
> ...


Thanks very much for your comments. I appreciate the sanity about this 10,000 hours thing.



> "I think the most general claim here," Ericsson says of his work, "is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it."


So two of the main points here are that 1) you have to practice a lot if you hope to perfect your skill, and 2) no matter how much talent you have or don't have, you're not going to become a master of your craft if you don't work really hard at it. Simple, sensible information.

There's another point made in the article that's much more interesting to me. I'll add another post about that in a few.


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## J. Carson Black (Feb 27, 2011)

Arkali said:


> Jesus. Add me to the :headdesk: group. Nowhere, not at ANY place in that blog article did he say that it should take you 13 years to write a single book. Good lord.


Agree with you. And... your cat is beautiful! Been meaning to mention that for some time.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Arkali said:


> Jesus. Add me to the :headdesk: group. Nowhere, not at ANY place in that blog article did he say that it should take you 13 years to write a single book. Good lord.


If you obsess enough with the details it can take a lifetime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSzzirIP0No


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Here is the paper:

The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fprojects.ict.usc.edu%2Fitw%2Fgel%2FEricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf&ei=vE3PTe8Hief6Bs742OsJ&usg=AFQjCNFF-PBn76ueIbL9RQpwc_5Gn5ymaA


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## MosesSiregarIII (Jul 15, 2010)

Here's another excerpt from the article T.J. Dotson gave:



> "Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task - playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, *obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome*."


Now this is important. People say that to master writing you have to write a lot. Well, yeah. But there's a big difference between writing a million words in a vacuum and writing a million words with a lot of *feedback.*

The cliche that sticks in my craw sometimes is that you have to write a million words of crap before you can write anything good. Granted, plenty of luminaries have said this (especially after they're conveniently past that point). But again there's a huge difference between 1) writing a million words and not utilizing feedback to improve your craft versus 2) writing those same words, getting extensive feedback, and using that feedback to improve your technique (then writing more).

Over the last two years, my writing has improved tremendously. The main reason is that I get A LOT of feedback on my work (starting a while back with hundreds of comments on Authonomy--some of which was very helpful). I use lots of beta readers and I've hired three different editors for my book. And I learn different valuable things from each editor and reader. If I didn't seek out as much feedback, my writing would be considerably worse.

So here's what I think about the "million words" thing. It's more important to write and get feedback than it is to just write. Just playing a C-minor scale 100 times or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket doesn't help you master your craft as much as getting pointed, knowledgeable feedback and using that to improve your technique.


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

Panayotis said:


> Scarier than being a writer? Stand-up comedian?


LOL, let's just say my job is to not knock them dead.


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## JFHilborne (Jan 22, 2011)

jtplayer said:


> Anyway, I think you're stretching it a bit when you assume all ebooks go through the same "sweat and effort" of traditional books. I don't doubt for a minute many indie authors are cutting corners like crazy just to get their latest & greatest to market and see the bucks start rolling in


Yes, actually you are right about this. I mean the same effort comes from those serious about churning out a good quality product.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

MosesSiregarIII said:


> Here's another excerpt from the article T.J. Dotson gave:
> 
> Now this is important. People say that to master writing you have to write a lot. Well, yeah. But there's a big difference between writing a million words in a vacuum and writing a million words with a lot of *feedback.*


And _immediate_ feedback is also important.

They did a study about memory sometime last year. They were testing whether the idea of having references at your fingertips -- like Google -- really did harm our ability to remember things. However, what they found appeared to support the opposite:

They had people memorize a bunch of facts, then they quizzed them on them. Whenever they couldn't remember something half the group was allowed to look at the answer right away, and the other half was forced to try to remember on their own. What they found was that those who were forced to struggle... just learned to struggle. Those who could look it up right away actually learned the information.

I don't remember all the details right now, but part of their conclusion was that in training their brains to struggle, they actually made it harder to learn more information too. (I might be making that last part up, though. My brain _is_ trained to make stuff up.)

The key there is good feedback is important. I'm not sure indie publishing is actually better at feedback -- both cultures involve a lot of mutual support. But I agree that just hiding in a closet and writing is not what makes you great at writing.

Camille


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## DanoJ (Apr 29, 2011)

That's not what I'm saying. I only have one published eBook is the point. I'm saying that my writing (which has gone on for many more than 13 years) was not merely practice for this one book that I have managed to produce. I'm trying to make the argument that, at least for those of us who aren't still very young, 13 years (and in many cases, many more) are ALWAYS involved in the production of what we write today, but not directly in support of this one production. We all hone our craft over a great number of years, and in many different ways (not all of them dealing with improving writing mechanics--sometimes in getting better at taking critique, or being better editors, or being better readers.


Arkali said:


> Jesus. Add me to the :headdesk: group. Nowhere, not at ANY place in that blog article did he say that it should take you 13 years to write a single book. Good lord.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Immediate feedback.

In traditional publishing, editors looked at your work and you got feedback. In an ebook world a substitute is required. That would be fellow writers and beta readers. I would trust an editor more, but if you can get a lot of people to read it, it should work.

In any case, I don't think the actual market is the best way to test your skill while developing. It makes sense to go there once the feedback from other sources is good.


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## J. Carson Black (Feb 27, 2011)

jtplayer said:


> I thought it was an informative blog post by Stephen Leather. Unfortunately, many here have distorted and misinterpreted what he wrote and used that as a springboard to vent their anger...at what I have no idea. Seems to me lots of reactionary and defensive folks hang around this place.
> 
> If you are secure in your decision to go the indie route, and you are equally confident in your abilities and your craft, then in my mind there is no reason to get all twisted up over a different opinion. No matter how it is expressed.


Eminently sensible. It was one man's opinion. And I know from my own experience that if you read the best and strive to make your writing better and better, that is a good thing. A lot of indies do that. And a lot of indies don't.

There are poor writers who have managed to get book contracts and continued to write poorly. But these days, even very good writers can't get anywhere in traditional publishing, because publishers are afraid to take a chance on anybody unless they have a platform. So good writers and poor writers alike are self-publishing. With sampling, I don't see the need for gatekeepers. But a good editor is a good editor, and I, for one, miss mine.


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## jtplayer (Jan 8, 2011)

JFHilborne said:


> Yes, actually you are right about this. I mean the same effort comes from those serious about churning out a good quality product.


In my mind, someone serious about it will go through the same steps a traditionally published book goes through, minus the evil publisher


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## MosesSiregarIII (Jul 15, 2010)

Panayotis said:


> Here is the paper:
> 
> The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.
> 
> http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fprojects.ict.usc.edu%2Fitw%2Fgel%2FEricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf&ei=vE3PTe8Hief6Bs742OsJ&usg=AFQjCNFF-PBn76ueIbL9RQpwc_5Gn5ymaA


Here's the summary:

The theoretical framework presented in this article explains expert performance as the end result of
individuals' prolonged efforts to improve performance while negotiating motivational and external
constraints. In most domains of expertise, individuals begin in their childhood a regimen of
effortful activities (deliberate practice) designed to optimize improvement. Individual differences,
even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. *Many
characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice
extended for a minimum of 10 years.* Analysis of expert performance provides unique evidence on
the potential and limits of extreme environmental adaptation and learning.

I'm reading sections of the paper now, including some of the sections on practice. I'll report back if I find anything interesting


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## jtplayer (Jan 8, 2011)

Panayotis said:


> Immediate feedback.
> 
> In traditional publishing, editors looked at your work and you got feedback. In an ebook world a substitute is required. That would be fellow writers and beta readers. I would trust an editor more, but if you can get a lot of people to read it, it should work.
> 
> In any case, I don't think the actual market is the best way to test your skill while developing. It makes sense to go there once the feedback from other sources is good.


Agreed.

One thing that blows my mind is the notion that you can self-publish your ebook, and tweak it along the way, _after_ it's gone live. WTF is up with that? That is the most ludicrous thing I've ever heard. Make it right the first time. I can understand fixing minor typos and format issues. But I've read of folks changing covers and making editorial changes. To me, this is completely lame.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

jtplayer said:


> In my mind, someone serious about it will go through the same steps a traditionally published book goes through, minus the evil publisher


Or they could embrace the traditional publishing system once success comes. Isn't that the case for most successful indie writers? They suddenly realise that they love the feel of a real book, they understand how the publisher helps, they like the advance, they like to know their new book will recieve good editing.

It's not like indie filmmakers do not take the first offer from the studio system when the succeed with their film. It's good to be an indie director, but being just a director and not having to carry heavy equipment on set is even better. Who can say no to production money.


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## Anne Victory (Jul 29, 2010)

J. Carson Black said:


> Agree with you. And... your cat is beautiful! Been meaning to mention that for some time.


Oh, wow! Thanks so much  Her name is Emmy - she's a sweetheart. Here she is nappin' with my hubby when she was a baby. Too darned cute... 










Yeah, I'll show off my fur-babies at the slightest invitation. Sorry, y'all!


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## SuzanneTyrpak (Aug 10, 2010)

I agree, the book should be the best you can make it BEFORE it's published. But one of the good things about epublishing is that typos can be corrected easily.

If you have a great cover, and it's working, there's no need to change it. But if the cover doesn't work, why not change it? Covers get changed in trad publishing too. Also, if your book has been traditionally published, and you get back your rights, you have to get a new cover.


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## Anne Victory (Jul 29, 2010)

DanoJ said:


> That's not what I'm saying. I only have one published eBook is the point. I'm saying that my writing (which has gone on for many more than 13 years) was not merely practice for this one book that I have managed to produce. I'm trying to make the argument that, at least for those of us who aren't still very young, 13 years (and in many cases, many more) are ALWAYS involved in the production of what we write today, but not directly in support of this one production. We all hone our craft over a great number of years, and in many different ways (not all of them dealing with improving writing mechanics--sometimes in getting better at taking critique, or being better editors, or being better readers.


Thanks for the clarification. That makes much more sense, and I actually agree with this post.


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## MosesSiregarIII (Jul 15, 2010)

modwitch said:


> This. And I think readers can be a very valuable form of feedback. People who know the craft of writing can help you polish all kinds of important things, but I think the readers and the market can tell you some very different important things.


That's so true. I try to get this type of feedback _before_ I publish, of course, but some of the most helpful feedback I've received has come from people who don't read my genre or from people who don't read much. If they can't get into something I've written, then I need to figure out why and try to do better. In some cases, I've been able to do that and it's taught me more about what people like and don't like.

For example, many of these readers don't want to be confused by too many names of things they don't understand, so I make try to keep those to a minimum or explain them soon enough. For me these readers didn't like it when they couldn't visualize things, so I always try to be mindful to give enough description (though not too much) so that readers can feel like they know where they are in each scene. Etc., etc.

To me, Joe Test Reader is the person who tells you if your book is ready to publish. If Joe Reader enjoys it, then you're ready to publish. If not, don't do it! You won't learn as much about technique from Joe Reader, but he'll tell you when the book is done.


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## jtplayer (Jan 8, 2011)

SuzanneTyrpak said:


> I agree, the book should be the best you can make it BEFORE it's published. But one of the good things about epublishing is that typos can be corrected easily.
> 
> If you have a great cover, and it's working, there's no need to change it. But if the cover doesn't work, why not change it? Covers get changed in trad publishing too. Also, if your book has been traditionally published, and you get back your rights, you have to get a new cover.


Sure, the covers get changed on subsequent reprint editions. But in the ebook world you've got indies changing covers after a few weeks in an effort to spur sales. Sometimes the ability to tweak things endlessly and easily is most definitely _not_ a good thing.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

_"But in the ebook world you've got indies changing covers after a few weeks in an effort to spur sales. Sometimes the ability to tweak things endlessly and easily is most definitely not a good thing."_

Why is changing covers to spur sales not a good thing? It's really not even a cover. It doesn't cover anything. It's just an image that appears with the book.


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## jtplayer (Jan 8, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> _"But in the ebook world you've got indies changing covers after a few weeks in an effort to spur sales. Sometimes the ability to tweak things endlessly and easily is most definitely not a good thing."_
> 
> Why is changing covers to spur sales not a good thing? It's really not even a cover. It doesn't cover anything. It's just an image that appears with the book.


Sure it's only an image. I didn't come up with the term "cover". You all throw that one around every day around here. Image, cover, whatever you want to call it doesn't matter to me. Just make it right the first time. If you're gonna go indie, then have confidence in yourself and your work, and stick by it. That's my opinion. YMMV of course


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

Why stick by something that isn't working?


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## jtplayer (Jan 8, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> Why stick by something that isn't working?


How do you know it isn't working?


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## MosesSiregarIII (Jul 15, 2010)

I just found a really interesting section of that Ericsson deliberate practice study.

He talks about the difference between activities for work, play, or deliberate practice.

Play is the most fun, and also teaches you the least. "This state of diffused attention is almost antithetical to focused attention required by deliberate practice to maximize feedback and information about corrective action."

I'd liken "play" to writing a first draft and being in a creative flow. That stage isn't particularly about learning or improving your craft, partly because there's little feedback involved, and partly because that's just not what it's mainly about.

He says doing something for work typically doesn't allow you to learn as much as deliberate practice either. Instead of having time to practice and try new things, or to get corrective feedback, when it's "work," you have to just do the best job you already know how to do. The purpose is to get some external result, such as money or to meet a deadline, not specifically to improve on what you already know how to do.

I think when we're in a stage of just "getting a manuscript ready to publish," it's like his comments about "work." Trying to make a book or story passable isn't mainly about getting better at what you do, it's more about selling sausages, er, books. Of course we all have to do that, but it doesn't teach us as much as ...

The stage of writing when you're getting critical feedback from editors or readers is more like "deliberate practice." Here you can analyze technique, try new things, and be able to actually get considerably better at what you do. This is also generally the least enjoyable stage because it actually is work. It's repetitive, it's difficult, and it requires a lot of effort. It can mean lots of rewriting and revision. It can also cost money to get expert help. But _that's_ the stage where you can really get much better at your craft, and doing this sort of thing often (for, say, ten years or more) is what can most help you to reach a true level of expertise (which does take years, no bones about it).

"Consider three general types of activities, namely, work, play,
and deliberate practice. Work includes public performance,
competitions, services rendered for pay, and other activities 
directly motivated by external rewards. Play includes activities
that have no explicit goal and that are inherently enjoyable.
Deliberate practice includes activities that have been specially
designed to improve the current level of performance. The
goals, costs, and rewards of these three types of activities differ ..."


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Panayotis said:


> Immediate feedback.
> 
> In traditional publishing, editors looked at your work and you got feedback. In an ebook world a substitute is required. That would be fellow writers and beta readers. I would trust an editor more, but if you can get a lot of people to read it, it should work.
> 
> In any case, I don't think the actual market is the best way to test your skill while developing. It makes sense to go there once the feedback from other sources is good.


But frankly, traditional publishing is neither swift nor very good at giving feedback to rank beginners. Let's face it, they're downright lousy at it. You have to get somewhere before they give you more than a form rejection - and that takes 4 weeks to a year. And that's fine, because it's not their job to teach you the business. It's your job to learn the business and when you're close, and it's worth their time to nurture you along, THEN they start with the personal notes, and then maybe a nice letter, and finally some notes toward revision.

The only reason traditional publishing does so well at nurturing writers is because a whole culture has grown up around it. Part of what you learn is how to find critique groups and mentors and teachers. And that's already here in indie publishing too -- the only difference is that we have a lot of beginners who haven't had the rejection slips that tell them they need those mentors yet.

What traditional publishing gives us is a structure and clear markers to help us pave the way -- an a motivation to seek out knowledge.

I have been thinking hard on this lately. I am into systems thinking, and I believe that systems adjust to fill their needs or they collapse. I don't see this collapsing, but I don't yet see exactly what is to come. It's getting clearer though:

Those of you who are into traditional publishing will not like this. Some of the radical indies will not like some of what I have to say either, but....

I think we're going to see the rise of the hobbyist writer. We are indeed going to see a lot of people throwing a rough draft up and tweaking it after, and that's not going to be a bad thing. Instead, it will be like blogging. The concept of "self-publishing" will very soon not have a negative connotation because we're all doing it. As matter of fact, I suspect that the BEST writers will be the ones doing it most, while the mediocre get caught in scams by agents who promise legitimacy and only fleece the writer for all their rights forever and ever.

There's also going to be a shakeout off the people who thought they were going to have wonderful success right away at this. Some of them are going to give up. But a lot of them are going to be just like traditional writers with rejection slips -- only they can't blame "The Man" for their failure. They will just look at their choices and decide to write for fun. Because they CAN. They don't have to spend money on great covers. Heck, they can draw their own awkward pictures, or not have a cover at all. They can do what's fun.

And like all hobbyists, they will hang out with others and find mentors and follow leaders and throw themselves into it, and some will be happy (and even very successful) with their awkward covers and all. They may have a niche which they fill perfectly and have no reason to move on. Others will will find they have acquired the skills they lacked earlier, and they will start hanging out with more ambitious people. Some will acquire very high level mentors.

The thing that will change from now is that this structure -- this path -- will be more clear. The equivalent of critique groups and writing clubs will be via publishing.

Camille


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

jtplayer said:


> Sure it's only an image. I didn't come up with the term "cover". You all throw that one around every day around here. Image, cover, whatever you want to call it doesn't matter to me. Just make it right the first time. If you're gonna go indie, then have confidence in yourself and your work, and stick by it. That's my opinion. YMMV of course


I think what Terrence is saying that it's an _ad_. There is no reason not to rotate and refresh ads all the time. Do split tests, play around with it.

IMHO, you're right that indies churn all their marketing too fast, but that's a part of the learning process.

Camille


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## MosesSiregarIII (Jul 15, 2010)

Here's another nice excerpt from that study:

"Raskin (1936), who analyzed the 120 most important scientists and 123
most famous poets and authors in the 19th century, found that
the average age at which scientists published their first work
was 25.2; poets and authors published their first work at the
average age of 24.2. Moreover, many years of preparation preceded
first publication. The average ages at which the same
individuals produced their greatest work were 35.4 for scientists and 
34.3 for poets and authors. That is, on average, more
than 10 years elapsed between these scientists' and authors'
first work and their best work."


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

_"How do you know it isn't working?"_

Lack of sales. There can be a number of reasons for this. One of the easiest things to try is a cover change since, as Camille says better than I did, it's an ad. A blurb is also an easy thing to change. Confidence is fine until events demonstrate it is misplaced. So when that happens, if it can be fixed, just fix it.


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## Will Write for Gruel (Oct 16, 2010)

MosesSiregarIII said:


> Here's another nice excerpt from that study:
> 
> "Raskin (1936), who analyzed the 120 most important scientists and 123
> most famous poets and authors in the 19th century, found that
> ...


There's a lot of evidence that a young mind is capable of a kind of genius that an older mind isn't. I remember Dylan saying that some of his early songs were gifts and he didn't know where they came from. He also said that he's older now and while he can't write songs like those early songs, he can do different things.

However, the rules for a genius are different than the rules for the rest of us.


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## jtplayer (Jan 8, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> _"How do you know it isn't working?"_
> 
> Lack of sales. There can be a number of reasons for this. One of the easiest things to try is a cover change since, as JT says better than I did, it's an ad. A blurb is also an easy thing to change. Confidence is fine until events demonstrate it is misplaced. So when that happens, if it can be fixed, just fix it.


Actually, it was Camille who said it was an "ad". I'm not sure I agree with that, as the image is sure positioned like a cover. Either way, you would have no way of knowing the cover was the reason for lack of sales. It's all guesswork really. And to me, it seems a lot of indie authors spend way too much time obsessing over this stuff, and in the end they might change something that really _was_ working, and completely miss the part that wasn't.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

daringnovelist said:


> But frankly, traditional publishing is neither swift nor very good at giving feedback to rank beginners. Let's face it, they're downright lousy at it. You have to get somewhere before they give you more than a form rejection - and that takes 4 weeks to a year. And that's fine, because it's not their job to teach you the business. It's your job to learn the business and when you're close, and it's worth their time to nurture you along, THEN they start with the personal notes, and then maybe a nice letter, and finally some notes toward revision.


When you have been operating in the circuit for a while, you meet some editors, make some friends and eventually get one or two that like your work even though their publisher has reasons to not publish it. Rejection slips are obviously not very efficient, they are not even personalised these days.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

jtplayer said:


> Actually, it was Camille who said it was an "ad". I'm not sure I agree with that, as the image is sure positioned like a cover. Either way, you would have no way of knowing the cover was the reason for lack of sales. It's all guesswork really. And to me, it seems a lot of indie authors spend way too much time obsessing over this stuff, and in the end they might change something that really _was_ working, and completely miss the part that wasn't.


Well, let's put it this way. A cover is a part of the product. What we call a "cover" in ebooks is not really a part of the product -- it's just the product image. For anything but a book, a product image would be considered advertising and treated as such. Split tests, multiple versions and rotations.

But I think the real issue is that a lot of indies are too focused on marketing, without actually understanding how it works.

Camille


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

MosesSiregarIII said:


> Here's another nice excerpt from that study:
> 
> "Raskin (1936), who analyzed the 120 most important scientists and 123
> most famous poets and authors in the 19th century, found that
> ...


Both artists and scientists probably had 8-10 years of experience by the time they were 24-25. Especially in these early decades. People started sooner than they do today. 8-10 years of full time education or work add up more than 20,000 hours.

The 20,000 hours in the 10 years that followed did help also. Even a stereotypical bohemiam would put at least 4 hours a day for a total 10,000 hours


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Panayotis said:


> When you have been operating in the circuit for a while, you meet some editors, make some friends and eventually get one or two that like your work even though their publisher has reasons to not publish it. Rejection slips are obviously not very efficient, they are not even personalised these days.


The networking argument is moot, because that's the same in both cases. You network, you gain mentors, THEN you get feedback. There's nothing inherent in either system that encourages that more than the other. For how to learn to write well enough to start getting attention, beginners are still stuck doing it themselves: reading writing books and joining local critique groups and finding friends on line.

Camille


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

daringnovelist said:


> For how to learn to write well enough to start getting attention, beginners are still stuck doing it themselves: reading writing books and joining local critique groups and finding friends on line.
> 
> Camille


A writer is alone indeed. Things were not very different in the past.


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## skyrunner (Dec 28, 2010)

After due consideration and thought, I like to keep things simple.

So I like, and agree with  everyone who said  " the world had changed .. get over it " 
Along with the changed world, opportunities for aspiring authors have changed - and choices for readers have changed and expanded. 

For the moment ( and lets hope it stays that way )  the publishing world looks more democratic, presenting a landscape where writers can learn as they go, with the experience of published works behind them, while readers can trial and chose their reading at a lower unit cost. Hallelujah!

In the new world, the best writers will tend to rise to the top, just as they always have.


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## 41419 (Apr 4, 2011)

MosesSiregarIII said:


> Here's another nice excerpt from that study:
> 
> "Raskin (1936), who analyzed the 120 most important scientists and 123
> most famous poets and authors in the 19th century, found that
> ...


That's interesting, but here's another way to look at it.

How many of those writers would have gotten better if they just wrote that stuff and put it in a drawer.

The most honest feedback is from strangers. I've learned a lot from reader's reactions to my last release.


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## J. Carson Black (Feb 27, 2011)

Arkali said:


> Oh, wow! Thanks so much  Her name is Emmy - she's a sweetheart. Here she is nappin' with my hubby when she was a baby. Too darned cute...
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Works for me, Arkali! I like her markings - kind of like marble rye. Cute as a button as a kitten, too.


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## William Peter Grasso (May 1, 2011)

Sorry I'm so late to this discussion...life got in the way.

This whole _13 years_ thing made me question, once again, whether literary gatekeepers possess any original thoughts. It just sounds like a riff on the Anne Enright quote: _the first twelve years are the hardest_. I've seen this quote in a bunch of places, but here's one link:

http://blog.booktopia.com.au/2010/03/01/kylie-ladd-answers-ten-terrifying-questions/

Some of us have been drawing comparisons in this thread between the development of musicians vs. writers. As a bassist/guitarist who did quite a bit of hard rocking in his younger days, I can say one thing for certain: when you only play by yourself, you're the greatest player in the world. The minute you go play with some other guys, you'll probably find out in about ten seconds how badly you suck.

Doesn't that sound exactly like what happens when you put your writing out there for all to see?


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

One other place where the original study is limited -- they were studying performance, and a certain KIND of performance too.  Mastery of an instrument with classical music (and when I say "classical" I don't mean just the period, but the whole overall approach which includes modern and "pops") is a specific and restricted thing.

When they say "play" is not as useful, well that's because they're not talking about learning to compose music, or arranging, or to play jazz.  You can't "practice" any of these via the same kind of guided rehearsal.

I do believe in the 10k hours concept as a goalpost that pulls us through the process -- but I think it's possible to get a little to wrapped up in the details.

Camille


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## kCopeseeley (Mar 15, 2011)

Umm.... just checked back here this morning after being gone since I posted that blog link.  HOLY COW, did I miss one hell of a conversation.  

I honestly don't have a thing against Leather or his opinions per se.  As a writer (and a reader) of course I agree that you need to put in a lot of time and effort in the pursuit of becoming better.  I would love to read a post where a writer says the opposite of that.  I haven't seen it yet.  

What I took umbrage with is the idea that the Traditional publishing houses are the true gatekeepers and should remain so.  And when I took umbrage, it was as a READER, not a writer.  For years now, I've seen the quality of books published for the mass market go further and further downhill.  This was before the "ebook revolution".  Did I read Twilight?  I sure did.  All four badly written books of it.  And so did millions and millions of other people.

The publishers have caught on that they don't need to be as concerned with good writing.  They will still sell a TON of books.  Shiver, the book I mentioned earlier, by Maggie Stiefvater is yet another horrible example of this.  It is a bad (almost one star) book to ME, but out of the 20,000 reviews left on goodreads, 12,000 of them are five star.  And that is kind of my point.

This was part of my post on Joe's blog:
"Writing doesn't matter to everyone. It's a shame, but it's true. So, why should it matter whether you publish or self-publish? 
Either way, the readers are going to choose. I agree with Joe, readers are and always will be the gatekeepers. 
Caring about writing these days is like caring about the fact that Justin Bieber sings dumb songs. No one who pays the money for them agrees with you. And there are a LOT of people paying. "


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## MosesSiregarIII (Jul 15, 2010)

kCopeseeley said:


> matter to everyone. It's a shame, but it's true. So, why should it matter whether you publish or self-publish?
> Either way, the readers are going to choose. I agree with Joe, readers are and always will be the gatekeepers.
> Caring about writing these days is like caring about the fact that Justin Bieber sings dumb songs. No one who pays the money for them agrees with you. And there are a LOT of people paying. "


As I mentioned on Joe's blog, I love this because it's so true LOL.

That said, I still care about the writing


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

kCopeseeley said:


> The publishers have caught on that they don't need to be as concerned with good writing. They will still sell a TON of books.


The old is new again. Too bad they still don't cost a dime:

_"This theme of protected virtue was lost on the middle class, however, who focused instead on the dime novel romance's sensationalism and decidedly unmiddle-class notions of gender relations in which young girls took active roles in courting men and pursuing love. This new "seductive and dangerous" literature, in the words of Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1872, aroused a new round of outcry over the reading choices of women. This time the outcry was not against women reading in general, as it had been earlier, but specifically directed against women who read "degraded" literature. Critics such as Stowe feared that this new genre represented a nation in moral decline."_

http://chnm.gmu.edu/dimenovels/intro.html

Me, I rather liked Twilight. Never seen a C-section like that before.

B.


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## kCopeseeley (Mar 15, 2011)

MosesSiregarIII said:


> As I mentioned on Joe's blog, I love this because it's so true LOL.
> 
> That said, I still care about the writing


Me, too, sadly. It makes for some depressing reading sometimes.  Other times, I'm pleasantly surprised, in the traditional and indie arenas!


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## kCopeseeley (Mar 15, 2011)

B. Justin Shier said:


> The old is new again. Too bad they still don't cost a dime:
> Me, I rather liked Twilight. Never seen a C-section like that before.
> B.


Too true! Everyone acts like their age is the first age of everything. 
As for Twilight... that last book was just CRAZY!!! In every single way.


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## MosesSiregarIII (Jul 15, 2010)

B. Justin Shier said:


> The old is new again. Too bad they still don't cost a dime:
> 
> _"This theme of protected virtue was lost on the middle class, however, who focused instead on the dime novel romance's sensationalism and decidedly unmiddle-class notions of gender relations in which young girls took active roles in courting men and pursuing love. This new "seductive and dangerous" literature, in the words of Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1872, aroused a new round of outcry over the reading choices of women. This time the outcry was not against women reading in general, as it had been earlier, but specifically directed against women who read "degraded" literature. Critics such as Stowe feared that this new genre represented a nation in moral decline."_
> 
> http://chnm.gmu.edu/dimenovels/intro.html


Wait, women have begun to read?!? What is this world coming to!


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## David &#039;Half-Orc&#039; Dalglish (Feb 1, 2010)

MosesSiregarIII said:


> Wait, women have begun to read?!? What is this world coming to!


Quick! To the horses! We must ride with torches to cleanse this abomination from the purity of our villages!


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## David &#039;Half-Orc&#039; Dalglish (Feb 1, 2010)

modwitch said:


> Your villages are pure?


With enough fire, anything is pure.


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## Guest (May 15, 2011)

MosesSiregarIII said:


> As I mentioned on Joe's blog, I love this because it's so true LOL.
> 
> That said, I still care about *Justin Bieber*


Fixed.


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

modwitch said:


> Well, have fun in your fire purified village full of randy warriors and no women.


I'm pretty sure that's a viable genre.


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## Joseph Flynn (Sep 29, 2010)

As several people have already mentioned, the more you write, the more likely it is your writing will improve. But this arbitrary apprenticeship of thirteen years to achieve something as ineffable as mastery is silly stuff.

One of my favorite writers, the late Ross Thomas, wrote his first novel, The Cold War Swap, in six weeks and it won an Edgar. He'd worked in other areas of writing before that so he had experience as a wordsmith, but to hit a major league home run in your first at bat is mightily impressive. It goes to show that different people start with differing amounts of talent and some are able to develop their talent much more quickly than others.

"You will probably be ignored, you might get a one-line rejection, but the fact is that if the book is good then it will be picked up."

As far as that notion goes, Mr. Leather, maybe it's so on your side of the pond not over here. When I had a two-book deal with Bantam, they rejected the first manuscript I submitted to be the second book. It languished until I self-pubbed it recently. Now, Nailed is on pace to sell 600 copies this month and should be selling 1,000 per month before the summer is out.


http://www.josephflynn.com/


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## skyrunner (Dec 28, 2010)

modwitch said:


> Well, have fun in your fire purified village full of randy warriors and no women.


nice writing - made me laugh.


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## Anne Victory (Jul 29, 2010)

modwitch said:


> Your villages are pure?
> 
> But don't worry. We only read the ones with small words and cute kittens on the covers.


They're pure after Qurrah gets hold of 'em


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## lacycamey (Apr 25, 2011)

I'm so glad you started this post! Because if you had not, I was going to!  

Yes, he did ruffle my literary feathers! I even wrote out a reply to post on my blog about it to encourage other writers. Of course, I was going to leave the "author" and Konrath's blog, anonymous. I tend to not engage in debates, but this, I just had something to say!

-First, I rather spend my time learning kinetically, I.E, writing books, self publishing, connecting with other authors and readers, while I make money. Instead of waiting maybe one or two years of my life "hearing back" from an agent. I love the momentum of self publishing. 

-To say that self publishers are horrible, lazy, or whatever negative things he said, is pretty insulting, but I won't let the sting linger for too long . It just gives me the fire to prove people like him wrong!
-Why not take advantage of this evolving market? 
-Will my writing when I'm 40 be substantially better than now? Absolutely! But, to not let others "read" my craft, my stories now, just because I'm 27, is a little "lame" . 

I absolutely love being able to write in multiple genres, collaborate with my husband, collaborate with my sister, and provide books to readers, NOW. I would not be able to do this going the traditional route because most likely, after pitching all 8 of my stories I currently have, most likely "most of the gatekeepers" would say "the market is too saturated with this or that". On the flip side, would I love an agent? Absolutely! But my goal is to hopefully write well enough, and enough material, that agents will seek me out.  It can happen! It happened to Victorine Liesk! (way to go!) 

Bottom line, don't let fear and people's opinions paralyze you to where you do "nothing". People will always have opinions. But what is more powerful are our actions and determination. Every art that is completed in the world, whether that be a painting, a song, film, etc., is in itself a success. While success is subjective, every artist who allows his or her work out into the public is already a success; they did not let fear stand in the way and they actually completed something, which is one more piece of art the average citizen of the world has yet to create!


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## lacycamey (Apr 25, 2011)

Oh! and just to note, I am absolutely ALL for studying and the 10k hours. I will be a writer until I die! I'm a writer for my day job, which I am thankful for! But, as far as fiction writing, I can't wait to look back years from now and see how much I've improved. I can't wait to get my masters and one day,hopefully, doctorate; because I love to learn.

All I am saying is if I waited "to publish" until I'm 40, with my 10k hours of writing, I honestly think I would miss out on a lot of stories to share with the world! 

Lauren Weisenberger was 27 when she released "The Devil Wears Prada". Anyway, just wanted to share my extra few cents 

[email protected] Carson Black, I love your picture of your kitten! I have a cat, too. Love them!


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

_"So, why should it matter whether you publish or self-publish? Either way, the readers are going to choose."_

I agree. But it matters a great deal if you are making your living getting the book from the author to the consumer. That's what agents, publishers, bookstores, and their employees do.

It also matters if you are a published author and think market share is moving away from published authors and toward independents. That lessens the value of the relationship you have worked so hard to build with agents and publishers. People who have an edge don't want to lose it.

However, the consumers don't care what anybody thinks about it. We have seen that in other industries where there has been a technology disruption. They just buy what they want. The winners continue on, and the losers do something else.


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## kCopeseeley (Mar 15, 2011)

modwitch said:


> Your villages are pure?
> 
> But don't worry. We only read the ones with small words and cute kittens on the covers.


Speak for yourself, honey! I only read the ones with small words, euphemisms for egg beaters, and pictures of hunky MEN on the covers.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Joseph Flynn said:


> When I had a two-book deal with Bantam, they rejected the first manuscript I submitted to be the second book. It languished until I self-pubbed it recently. Now, Nailed is on pace to sell 600 copies this month and should be selling 1,000 per month before the summer is out.


Publishers does not reject a book because it's not good. They reject it because they believe it doesn't make sense to publish it at their business and market, with their costs, including your advance, editing, print and cover design, review copies, marketing, distribution and overall edition costs.

Your book might sells thousands of copies and still be impossible to publish profitably.

You can't prove the publisher was wrong by selling 10,000 copies of an ebook. You don't have all the required information and you can only guess how your book would do on paperback with paperback pricing.

Would you be happier as a writer if you received an advance and the book failed with the publisher taking the loss for the entire investment? That's no different than convincing a friend to get into a bad business idea of yours. You come out with some compensation for your effort and your friend comes out with a loss.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Panayotis said:


> You can't prove the publisher was wrong by selling 10,000 copies of an ebook. You don't have all the required information and you can only guess how your book would do on paperback with paperback pricing.


Absolutely.... but a part of the point is: just because a publisher rejects a book doesn't mean it's not ready for publication. It means it's not right for that publisher. I might be exactly right for self-publishing.

A traditionally published book has a lot of baggage to carry. An indie published book can fly lighter.

Camille


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

This is probably a good reason we should not include a publisher's evaluation of marketability as a factor in assigning Quality.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

edwardgtalbot said:


> Now that would seriously filter the available work
> 
> As for Leather's post - meh. modwitch has it right. Konrath's off-color line about gatekeepers had me laughing. I honestly don't care one way or the other - good or bad - about all the tradpub stuff. They can keep doing what they're doing, I'll keep doing what I'm doing and maybe sometimes we'll intersect. I wouldn't turn down the right deal, but I'm expending zero effort looking for one. Honestly, they've given me no reason whatsoever to take into consideration the advice they have.


Ditto. And I'm not tying up work while some publisher "thinks about it" which I had an invitation to do not long ago. I said thanks, but no thanks. Talk to me with money in your hand.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Panayotis said:


> Publishers does not reject a book because it's not good. They reject it because they believe it doesn't make sense to publish it at their business and market, with their costs, including your advance, editing, print and cover design, review copies, marketing, distribution and overall edition costs.
> 
> Your book might sells thousands of copies and still be impossible to publish profitably.
> 
> ...


The publisher is going on a business model. I is nothing like "convincing a friend to get into a bad business idea".

Now whether the traditional publishing model as it _currently_ exists is a good business model is very frankly open to question, but it is not a business model that ANY author convinced publishers of. It is one that publishers, on the contrary, have forced on authors who had no choice except to accept it until recently.

Now we have a choice. Make the one that's best for you. I'll make the one that's best for me. What publishers do, I frankly couldn't care less.

Edit: The funniest thing about that blog post was that he claimed that being a journalist taught him to write fiction. Now I know plenty of journalists who don't care much about writing the truth--but I don't many who write dialogue or descriptive narrative.

They're two different skill sets even though they both involve writing down words.


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## judd.exley (Mar 31, 2011)

While I love Konrath and would hump his leg after a few beers, I confess I'm getting pretty sick of the whole "this person's sold lots of books so they must be brilliant" take on blogs and articles and who to listen to.

Personally, I've learned more by the lesser-known, more-modest-in-sales, authors on this forum, than I have in a 100 other blogs and articles. Don't get me wrong, Konrath has some Biblical-passage-like posts, and I've bookmarked them for posterity, but the only guy that I know of out there who's putting up the information in an impartial manner and sharing every relevant post he can find is: The Passive Voice.

That guy is bloody brilliant, and I'll be reading him while some of Konrath's pretentious blowhard guest posters can kiss my taint.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

JRTomlin said:


> Edit: The funniest thing about that blog post was that he claimed that being a journalist taught him to write fiction. Now I know plenty of journalists who don't care much about writing the truth--but I don't many who write dialogue or descriptive narrative.
> 
> They're two different skill sets even though they both involve writing down words.


Weeeelllllllll.....

A lot of the greats learned their storytelling skills from Journalism. Of course, journalism is a little different today than it was, but really, being a journalist is an "apprenticeship" of longstanding for fiction writers. I mean, come on - Jack London, Mark Twain, Damon Runyon, O. Henry, Margaret Mitchell (which, if you would recall, that was her main writing experience before GONE WITH THE WIND)....

This is the one place where I think Leather is dead on. Writing day after day, finding the story and identifying the interest, that has done a lot of writers a lot of good.

Camille


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

JRTomlin said:


> The publisher is going on a business model. I is nothing like "convincing a friend to get into a bad business idea".
> Now whether the traditional publishing model as it _currently_ exists is a good business model is very frankly open to question, but it is not a business model that ANY author convinced publishers of. It is one that publishers, on the contrary, have forced on authors who had no choice except to accept it until recently.


What do you mean by "a business model"? It's not rocket science or some abstract system. A manuscript is a business proposal. The writer asks the publisher to invest in it with money, resources, experience and an actual advance on profit that might not come. That's the definition of publishing. It would be nice if more writers realised what it really is.

You might as well have designed and prototyped a new toy. You are trying to convince a company to release it. You are asking for money and you are asking them to put faith in your work. It's a gamble.

You are certainly not going to a publisher to gather your salary or what you believe would be good compensation for your work. You have no idea how much your effort is worth, the publisher doesn't know for sure either.

The publishers are the weakest links in the book production and marketing chain. Weaker than the writers themselves. When a book project fails, everyone has made money, except the publisher who takes a loss.

Of course, those who have no experience in publishing know nothing about what happens after the book deal. For them it's 8% to 15% for them and the rest for the publisher. No different from a customer buying petrol and believing the store makes the full price.

Intead of talking about exploitation, a writer should actually be ashamed if he/she does not get any money after his advance. He has put the publisher in debt. He got more than he deserved and the publisher's trust was misplaced.

True authors think of the editors and publishers as valuable partners. They are satisfied when the publisher can use their work but there are no hard feelings when they can't. You will never hear them compaining about the publishers exploiting them, they know that's not the case. It never was.

Any publisher would be happy to not give you an advance, invest in publishing your book and share the profit 50/50 after expenses. You wouldn't like that number though. Chances are you would spend quite a long time gathering the equivalent of your advance.

I know how writers feel, but here is what I believe. Publishers practically publish every single piece of average nonsense that comes their way until they cover their catalog for the season. They are trying to put too many releases at very low cost in order to stay in the market. They want to keep their retail space. They thin resources by publishing rubbish. They give advances to books that shouldn't be published while they should focus, invest in higher quality acquisistion and develop the few good projects they get every year.

They believe it's the right thing to do but every year the situation is equally bad with the previous one or worse. They are feeding the losers by the money they make on the best selling authors. Sometimes they cover their advance. Most of the times they don't. Instead of focusing on intelligent acquisition, they are allowing statistics to run their business. More people can say "Hey! I'm a published writer." but the culture gains nothing. Good books cannot be marketed or even noticed in a saturated market and we are gradually shifting to stategically targeted best sellers in order to feed even more losers, searching for another best seller.

In small countries it's even worse. Soon it will be 50% pink genre fiction in the local language, 25% translated pink fiction and 25% translated best sellers in other genres.


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## kurzon (Feb 26, 2011)

I just had to shake my head reading that post.  The attitude which perhaps is most perplexing is the "If it's good enough to be published, then an agent/publisher will pick it up."  Because if you reverse that statement you find yourself saying: "No book not given a passing grade by an increasingly competitive and money-tight industry is 'good'."  Way too broad a statement.

The second attitude which perplexes me is this "people who self-publish stop improving as writers".  I can only say "huh?" to that one.  People who write, and continue to write, are inclined to try to improve.  I don't see how self-publishing breaks the self-improvement cycle.

I was extraordinarily fortunate to have one of my own self-published novels shortlisted for this year's Aurealis Awards (a 'mainstream' SFF award), which means that a different group of arbitrary judges has given me something to point to and say "See!  Not bad!".  But I think it's going to be a long time before any of us see the end of these tedious blanket statements which ignore the fact that agents and publishers reject many "good" books.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

Panayotis said:


> What do you mean by "a business model"? It's not rocket science or some abstract system. A manuscript is a business proposal. ...
> 
> Of course, those who have no experience in publishing know nothing about what happens after the book deal.


Edit: Deleting my comment. If you want to believe all that tosh... feel free.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

daringnovelist said:


> Weeeelllllllll.....
> 
> A lot of the greats learned their storytelling skills from Journalism. Of course, journalism is a little different today than it was, but really, being a journalist is an "apprenticeship" of longstanding for fiction writers. I mean, come on - Jack London, Mark Twain, Damon Runyon, O. Henry, Margaret Mitchell (which, if you would recall, that was her main writing experience before GONE WITH THE WIND)....
> 
> ...


There have been a number of writers who had been journalists. That doesn't mean that Mark Twain learned to write fiction from being a journalist any more than he learned from being a Riverboat pilot. There have been a number of writers who were scientists and physicians and lawyers. The same holds true there.

Any journalist who tries making up dialogue in their journalism MAY get away with it if they have a really stupid editor--until they get caught, but if they try writing descriptive prose I don't know any news editors who won't slap them down fast. Advertising copy may come closer but not a whole lot.

You learn to write fiction by writing fiction.


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## David &#039;Half-Orc&#039; Dalglish (Feb 1, 2010)

See, there's this faulty logic that writers try to improve solely to improve their chances of getting published; hence the logic follows that once "published" a writer has made it and can just coast along.

This is absolute nonsense. Anyone can read Weight of Blood, and then Dance of Blades, and see a monumental leap in writing ability. Self-publishing didn't reduce my desire to improve: it heightened it. Suddenly I wanted to write more, faster, better. I wanted work out there, to be read, not suffer in year-long slush piles. I get honest, brutal feedback in star ratings, goodreads, posts on forums, as well as encouragement over what I did right, especially in actual emails from fans. Heck, I want to improve so much that I can finally feel, however delusional, that I'll be safe from 1-star trolls claiming the writing is bad. And I'll improve by writing, rewriting, editing, and writing some more. I loved the Beatles comparison. Sure, they played like mad prior to hitting it big, but they were still getting _paid_ during all those hectic small-time tours.

If anything, playing the traditional game can make you a worse writer, because then you're not writing the stories you want, nor letting them grow organically. Instead you're adopting to fit the desires of the agents, and following their vague, slap-dashed comments telling you things like "set the novel in New York instead."


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## Saffina Desforges (Dec 8, 2010)

Personally, I don't think it was his wisest move to date, calling all agents...AND, I note with interest that MANY reviews os SLs books mention poor formatting and editing. Go figure!


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## Nell Gavin (Jul 3, 2010)

I didn't find it offensive. What he said is largely true. The indie focus is mostly marketing, rather than improving our craft. I think it's good that we're being shamed into upping our game, and getting bombarded by naysayers who force us into taking a good hard look at our output. We should all be hiring editors, and maybe doing one or two more rewrites - maybe 100 - before we publish. 

In the dawn of POD, you had to have about $500 to $1500 to publish. Now you don't need a dime. However, we should shift our priority and consider that we still need that cash upfront. It should still cost $500 to $1500 to publish, but we should spend it on editors and cover art - things that improve the quality.


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## Amy Corwin (Jan 3, 2011)

Nell Gavin said:


> I didn't find it offensive. What he said is largely true. The indie focus is mostly marketing, rather than improving our craft. I think it's good that we're being shamed into upping our game, and getting bombarded by naysayers who force us into taking a good hard look at our output. We should all be hiring editors, and maybe doing one or two more rewrites - maybe 100 - before we publish.
> 
> In the dawn of POD, you had to have about $500 to $1500 to publish. Now you don't need a dime. However, we should shift our priority and consider that we still need that cash upfront. It should still cost $500 to $1500 to publish, but we should spend it on editors and cover art - things that improve the quality.


I agree, too. It's a shame, really, that it's so easy to publish. For most people, their first book should never see the light of day. LOL My first five books will never see the light of day, that's for sure. They were just AWFUL. My sixth got me an agent and got published, and I've gone on from there.

I would never have worked so hard to improve my writing skills (I'm still working hard on it) if I hadn't gone through all the torture and rejections.

It's a shame, but in a way, it also reflects our attitudes about other endeavors. We want everything (school, work, life) to be easier, but it is working through challenges and difficulties that make us learn and grow. Things that are easy are without value. Except vacations. LOL You have have have *some* breaks!


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## Nell Gavin (Jul 3, 2010)

Terrence OBrien said:


> _"So, why should it matter whether you publish or self-publish? Either way, the readers are going to choose."_
> 
> But it matters a great deal if you are making your living getting the book from the author to the consumer. That's what agents, publishers, bookstores, and their employees do.


I disagree. Most publishers don't put most books on bookshelves. Most books that they put on bookshelves stay on those bookshelves for a few weeks, and then come back as remainders. These publishers and agents don't market those books or do anything to get the book from the author to the consumer.

Most of the time those books are pulled out of print after a year, and are lost. The myth they would have you believe is that you'll sell more, if you subscribe to their paradigm. But you won't. Look at the sales rankings of traditionally published books. They aren't selling any better in bookstores - in fact, they sell the most books in the first six weeks after publication, and sales go down from there. Indies are beating the pants off most of those guys, except for perhaps the 0.01% of books at the top (I don't know the real percentage, but we all know it's minute).

Publishers performed a service in ages past: They brought us books we could not obtain otherwise. Now they aren't so important. They don't sell our books. They don't promote our books. They DO tell us what to write and how to write it, and when it's due. They drop us if we don't perform.


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## Courtney Milan (Feb 27, 2011)

Panayotis said:


> Intead of talking about exploitation, a writer should actually be ashamed if he/she does not get any money after his advance. He has put the publisher in debt. He got more than he deserved and the publisher's trust was misplaced.


This is just not true, on multiple levels. The most important one being: publishers can make money even if the advance is not earned out. And they do. Regularly. Also, a book can earn out an advance and the publishers can still lose money on it. And they do that, too. Regularly.

But other important considerations: When a book doesn't earn out the advance, it's not always the writer's fault. Sometimes it's the publisher's. Or it's because of a host of independent factors: if you happened to have a book out the same week that the GFC hit, or the month that a major distributor closed, you just won't sell as many books.

You keep talking about publishing being a business, but you're using the language of "friendship" and "trust" and "shame."

I don't feel ashamed if I invest in five stocks and one of them loses value. I don't feel ashamed if I buy a house and the housing market fluctuates. I don't feel ashamed if the company I work for has a poor month. I'll do what I can to correct the problem--choose different stocks, try to maintain property values by keeping my house looking neat, work hard to try to keep the company solvent--but for heaven's sake, I feel ashamed when I don't call my mother. This other stuff is just business.


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## TheSFReader (Jan 20, 2011)

Courtney Milan said:


> This is just not true, on multiple levels. The most important one being: publishers can make money even if the advance is not earned out. And they do. Regularly. Also, a book can earn out an advance and the publishers can still lose money on it. And they do that, too. Regularly.
> [...]
> I don't feel ashamed if I invest in five stocks and one of them loses value.


Moreover, the Publisher's job is also to invest in different author's/works, knowing full well that some/most will fail, and making enough on the winning ones to recoup it's costs. So if a writer fails to get money after his advances, we can probably tell that it's the publisher's role and responsability. Thats the EXACT explanation for the "traditionnal" royalties repartition!


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## Lori Devoti (Oct 26, 2010)

I am traditionally published and I was rolling my eyes repeatedly while reading this blog post. 
What I always wonder is who is this all-knowing all-powerful person who gets to decide if a book is "ready?" 
Look at about any major best-seller and you will find plenty of people who declare it crap that should not have been published. Twilight and Davinci Code are two prime examples of extremely well loved by many, definitely commercially successful books that many, many people trash. 
Writing isn't science. There is no litmus test to decide what is "ready" and what is "good." And I have to admit I get tired of people acting like there is. 
And to say all good books will eventually be published by NY is just too idiotic to even discuss. 
Lori


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## xandy3 (Jun 13, 2010)

Lori Devoti said:


> I am traditionally published and I was rolling my eyes repeatedly while reading this blog post.
> What I always wonder is who is this all-knowing all-powerful person who gets to decide if a book is "ready?"
> Look at about any major best-seller and you will find plenty of people who declare it crap that should not have been published. Twilight and Davinci Code are two prime examples of extremely well loved by many, definitely commercially successful books that many, many people trash.
> Writing isn't science. There is no litmus test to decide what is "ready" and what is "good." And I have to admit I get tired of people acting like there is.
> ...


^^ Amen to that!


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## Ian Fraser (Mar 8, 2011)

I'm traditionally published, and aiming for more of the same - but also loving the freedom that self publishing brings. 
Oddly enough, I think both Konrath's POV (on the triumph of self publishing), AND his guest's POV (about legacy publishing) have equal weight. 
Its a little confusing to me  
Perhaps the truth of the matter rests somewhere in the middle ground between Konrath and his guest's position?


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Ian Fraser said:


> I'm traditionally published, and aiming for more of the same - but also loving the freedom that self publishing brings.
> Oddly enough, I think both Konrath's POV (on the triumph of self publishing), AND his guest's POV (about legacy publishing) have equal weight.
> Its a little confusing to me
> Perhaps the truth of the matter rests somewhere in the middle ground between Konrath and his guest's position?


The truth of the matter is the blind men and the elephant. There isn't ONE answer -- they're both right about the part which they have experience with. And there are many more facets which also are a part of the truth.

Dean Wesley Smith and Kris Rusch are very much into BOTH indie and traditional publishing. Very enthusiastic about both. (However, both are prolific, phenomenal workers, and can support multiple careers at once with their writing.) And, I'd like to point out, Dean in particular advises not only getting a million words of writing under your belt, but also learning on the job.

Camille


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## xandy3 (Jun 13, 2010)

kurzon said:


> The second attitude which perplexes me is this "people who self-publish stop improving as writers". I can only say "huh?" to that one. People who write, and continue to write, are inclined to try to improve. I don't see how self-publishing breaks the self-improvement cycle.


Yeah, I guess that goes along with the mentality that if they don't see it/read about it/hear about it than it's just doesn't exist?

To presume that since you don't hear/read about indie authors seeking to improve their craft means that they don't care about it is stupid.

There are certain things you don't reveal to your consumers/audience. I might do a blog post about characterization, or world building...I might even do a post about the revision process. But, I keep all the "honing my craft" discussions, and thoughts behind closed doors most of the time.

If I were a dress designer, and a girl came to me asking me to create her a bridal gown I wouldn't tell her of my journey to become the best designer and seamstress ever. I wouldn't tell her about my years of sewing classes, design school, all the mistakes I made along the way. The seams that fell apart, the crooked biases, and general "fashion don'ts" I created in my earlier days.
I especially wouldn't go into detail with her about any of the mistakes I made with her own dress...How I had to throw it out and start from scratch, how I had to re-do the sleeve, or the struggle I had finding sheer or lace of good quality so that it wouldn't bunch up or tear in the process. 
What would matter is that I've created the bride's "dream dress" and that she is pleased with the final product.

The end product would be what matters...and pleasing the reader. And, I don't think any of us want to appear like a novice to our readers, or someone who is "just learning" as far as writing.

Yes, we always discuss things like marketing and promo, cover design, etc....but that's business-related talk. And, yes we all want input with that (because most of us are just learning that side of self-publishing).

That's just my take on things.

All that being said, there have been discussions about writing on this form, as well as a few others I frequent. However, none of it sounds "novice-like."


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

JRTomlin said:


> Edit: Deleting my comment. If you want to believe all that tosh... feel free.


Those are some pretty solid arguments. I assume they come from years of experience in the publishing business.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

_"Intead of talking about exploitation, a writer should actually be ashamed if he/she does not get any money after his advance. He has put the publisher in debt. He got more than he deserved and the publisher's trust was misplaced."_

BOOK-1: Advance = $10,000. Royalty rate = one cent per book. Book sells 500,000 copies wholesale at $10/book. Author gets nothing after advance.

BOOK-2: Advance = $10,000. Royalty rate = one dollar per book. Book sells 10,001 copies wholesale at $10/book. Author gets $1 after advance.

How does BOOK-1 put the publisher in debt? Who should be ashamed?


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Terrence OBrien said:


> _"Intead of talking about exploitation, a writer should actually be ashamed if he/she does not get any money after his advance. He has put the publisher in debt. He got more than he deserved and the publisher's trust was misplaced."_
> 
> BOOK-1: Advance = $10,000. Royalty rate = one cent per book. Book sells 500,000 copies wholesale at $10/book. Author gets nothing after advance.
> 
> ...


While I agree with a lot of the points Panayotis was trying to make, this is indisputable: Publishers do the math before offering the advance, and they are responsible for what they offer. There is nothing for the writer to be ashamed of there.

(IMHO, this particular line in the original post is a reminder of why we should be careful to remove incendiary statements from our posts -- it doesn't matter how thoughtful or reasoned or important the rest is, everybody will respond only to that incendiary statement.)

Camille


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## Guest (May 16, 2011)

I've never heard of the guy.  Don't really care what he says.


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## jackz4000 (May 15, 2011)

Lori Devoti said:


> I am traditionally published and I was rolling my eyes repeatedly while reading this blog post.
> What I always wonder is who is this all-knowing all-powerful person who gets to decide if a book is "ready?"
> Look at about any major best-seller and you will find plenty of people who declare it crap that should not have been published. Twilight and Davinci Code are two prime examples of extremely well loved by many, definitely commercially successful books that many, many people trash.
> Writing isn't science. There is no litmus test to decide what is "ready" and what is "good." And I have to admit I get tired of people acting like there is.
> ...


Agree. They do make mistakes. The list of rejected books that have gone on to become bestsellers is endless. Some are rejected 50 and more times by agents and publishers before it ever gets published. I think JoeK has a rant going and I don't think one size fits all.

For new writers traditional publishing really changed when the corporations began taking over the in the family NY publishing houses years ago. Corps view everything and the bottom line by the quarter and want the #'s to look good for themselves. Short term. The old model of publishing houses took the time (years) to help nurture and develop new writers and absorbed losses if they believed in the writer. Long term. That model went out with the entry of corporations and the quarterly need for profit. The IRS1996 law did not help the publishers with new accounting for books and on what ledger. Are the corps evil--no they are just a business like all the others.

Today it is more difficult than ever for a new author to get signed, possible but more difficult. A book has to have for them a certain commercial appeal, sell a certain # and they do take a gamble which sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. A friend who is a bestselling author who sells an average of 200K plus hardcovers per year told me it's very tough and most signed new writers don't realize the amount work they have to do to help sell their book. He's been selling books for years but he's glad he is not starting out today as a new author.

With Indie publishing there will be some trash and some mediocre books but there will also be some gems and I think solid stories well written books will rise to the top.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> BOOK-1: Advance = $10,000. Royalty rate = one cent per book. Book sells 500,000 copies wholesale at $10/book. Author gets nothing after advance.
> 
> BOOK-2: Advance = $10,000. Royalty rate = one dollar per book. Book sells 10,001 copies wholesale at $10/book. Author gets $1 after advance.
> 
> How does BOOK-1 put the publisher in debt? Who should be ashamed?


That's so far away from reality...

If you bring exaggeraton down to reality you will see that the math makes sense.

It's 8%, not 1%.

$10,000 advance will not come with a 500K run, more like a 10K if you are lucky. Publishers actually calculate these things.

Even by removing exaggeration your examples are flawed, and it's not our fault, most writers do not understand how this works. Perhaps they imagine that they will sell millions. Perhaps their agents, lawyers, etc convince them that they will make millions on a book that is not above average. And the advance is "just for now" and money will come "in the future". If the book was so promissing it would get a high advance and a better publisher. They want you to make the deal because they will make money. Even on the small advance. It's better than nothing and they have already done all the work.

The advance is commonly CALCULATED so that at reasonable return rates the print run will cover the advance and a reasonable profit for the publisher. You get everything you should get before the book even sells. You got 10K on the advance and the publisher made 0K to 10K or 15K. Why are you complaining? Where is the exploitation? You got paid. It's an advance on profits. Your profit was even paid in advance. Would you prefer to get it when and if it comes, like the publisher?

If you are easy to sell, more print runs will come and you will get more income. Since the publisher is already making money without additional investment (advance, edit, prepare), the publisher will even increase your percentage if your sales go high. This is fair and logical.

If the advance is not enough for you, you should write something that appears to be more promissing in order to get a higher advance and a higher print run. If you keep getting $2 or $5 or whatever and you books take more time than this would pay for, you shouldn't consider this a profession.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

Of course it's far from reality. But it was addressing a claim that was also far from reality. You told us,

_"Intead of talking about exploitation, *a writer should actually be ashamed if he/she does not get any money after his advance. He has put the publisher in debt.* He got more than he deserved and the publisher's trust was misplaced."_

Obviously that is false.

Where did the answer you gave Courtney go? Does the publisher go in debt if the author gets nothing beyond the advance? Does the publisher take a loss on a book if the author does not get anything beyond the advance?

And print runs? If an initial $10,000 advance matches a 10k print run, what happens after the 10k are sold? If there is a second print run, does the author get more advance? Third print run? Fourth print run?

[EDIT: The answer to Courtney I reference above has been posted below.]


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> Of course it's far from reality. But it was addressing a claim that was also far from reality. You told us,
> 
> _"Intead of talking about exploitation, *a writer should actually be ashamed if he/she does not get any money after his advance. He has put the publisher in debt.* He got more than he deserved and the publisher's trust was misplaced."_
> 
> ...


Indeed my wording was not very careful. With standard advances and reasonable print runs that's not always true. The fact that you do not get anything over the aedvance means that the publisher has either lost a lot of money, made no money, made a little, or made as much as you did. In most of these cases, you got the better end of the partnership.

I thought I deleted a duplicate I created by quoting instead of correcting the typos in the next post. It turns out I deleted the wrong post. I will see if undo will do the trick on the text editor. If you have the post open in a window or cache please repost it so I can recover it.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Courtney Milan said:


> This is just not true, on multiple levels. The most important one being: publishers can make money even if the advance is not earned out. And they do. Regularly. Also, a book can earn out an advance and the publishers can still lose money on it. And they do that, too. Regularly.
> 
> But other important considerations: When a book doesn't earn out the advance, it's not always the writer's fault. Sometimes it's the publisher's. Or it's because of a host of independent factors: if you happened to have a book out the same week that the GFC hit, or the month that a major distributor closed, you just won't sell as many books.
> 
> ...


I didn't say publishers do not make money until the advance is covered. Publishers do make money before the advance is covered by sales. That's the whole point of the partnership. Not immediately, but that point is sometimes reached at some point. When the advance is covered in full, the publisher has also made money, typically an equivalent amount. But the writer has received an advance while the publisher starts with at loss because of investment and advance.

It's a partnership, they are both responsible. But publishers use similar marketing methods, most of them are boilerplate actually. It's a dynamic market but books in the same genre with yours were published at the same units, went through the same channel and sold better. IMHO and, also, statistically, chances are the material was not as "good" in this particular book.

I have compared a book deal to a partnership because that's how I percieve it. Is business about your partner being you enemy and someone you do not put trust on? If I wrote something with 80% returns I would be ashamed. I got my chance on the shelf with a print run equivalent to what other writers get in similar deals. Publishers do not simply print books to throw them away. If they print 100,000 and your book sells 20,000, that usually means that your book is not as good as the average books in the same genre and by the same publisher. The model does fine with the average book. That means you book was either below average at that genre, or possibly too good, diffucult and unque, and beyond the comprehension of the market.

How can a writer ignore his responsibility against the other side of the partneship and blame the other side for all things that go wrong in the project? Especially when the publisher has done many projects of the same type with much better success that very same year? If I were a writer on my 5th book and all other 4 sold well, there is a chance that I would blame the publisher, but I would first consider my possible contribution to the failure.

You should be ashamed if you recommended stocks to someone else and they lost money on your recommendation. In this case, the stocks are actually stocks from your own company. The market changes, luck contributes, but it's not the first thing I would blame when my writing gets published and does not find an audience.

I know that this sort of thinking is not very good for the writer's psychology, but it's realistic. If you propose projects that fail, the market will soon not accept your work. You might only get one or two chances in the publishing business if you get too high before you are ready. Even the average level $50K advance and 100K print run might turn out to be a nightmare instead of a dream.

( P.S. This post was recovered thanks to 30 second autosave interval )


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> And print runs? If an initial $10,000 advance matches a 10k print run, what happens after the 10k are sold? If there is a second print run, does the author get more advance? Third print run? Fourth print run?


Of course. Have you even seen the opposite? It's not an advance, it's a profit. The advance itself was profit. Profit before agents, expenses and taxes, but that's another story.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

_"Of course. Have you even seen the opposite? It's not an advance, it's a profit. The advance itself was profit. Profit before agents, expenses and taxes, but that's another story."_

I haven't seen the opposite. I gave an earlier example of a $10k advance and sales of 500k. You responded by saying,

_"$10,000 advance will not come with a 500K run, more like a 10K if you are lucky. Publishers actually calculate these things."_

So I was illustrating that a $10k advance could stand with 500k sales.

I'm not sure what you are saying about profit. Whose profit? Profit before expenses?


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Btw, regarding advance and other profit.

I have heard lots of stories about writers that do not get paid.

There is a delay inherent to the publishing businesses. A part of the advance gets delayed until the the book is printed. Delays are always in months, 6months is typical for sales/returns reports. Liquidity is important and books take a lot of time to be printed, stored, shipped, and returned. It's a slow way to move intellectual property.

Publishers do pay royalties to the writers according to plan. You have the right to know what your book sales and you have the right to be compesated according to standard business pratices. But publishers do go broke or low on cash. If they do, you can go after them like all their other suppliers and partners or wait like many partners do. They are not expliotative crooks by definition.


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## David &#039;Half-Orc&#039; Dalglish (Feb 1, 2010)

Yes, because if a publisher chooses a horrendous cover, markets it as one genre when it really is another, decides I'm barely worthy of any significant promotion, and launches my Fantasy book in the same week G. R. R. Martin releases Dance With Dragons, it is clearly my fault if I don't earn out an advance. I mean, I should be out there spending every dime of my $5k advance doing book tour after book tour, right? A book's quality is soooo the 100% deciding factor on sales amounts, right? I mean, Twilight must be the most amazing writing ever. And James Patterson, oh boy, he's still got it after all these years, don't he?

Would I be bummed if I didn't earn out the advance? Sure. Would I be _ashamed_? Oh please. This is right up there with "every good book will eventually be published." To act like the writer is the sole responsibility of sales implies that publishers will always do everything right to sell a book, which is just...dumb. I mean, heck, let's just apply the flip-side. If your self-published book isn't selling, you should be ashamed of its low sales. It is all your fault, because your writing must be terrible! All those other things you stress on, covers, author blurbs, blog tours, title, description, early reviews: pointless.

Can a publisher do everything right and be let down by a poorly written book? Yes. Can a writer do everything right and still be let down by a publisher? Yes. I'd love to meet the person who seriously believes neither happens.

*edit*

I've looked to see if there's any information on what percent of authors don't earn out their advance. Sadly nothing concrete, but I'm seeing quotes from agents going from 25-50%. That's a lot of ashamed authors.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> _"Of course. Have you even seen the opposite? It's not an advance, it's a profit. The advance itself was profit. Profit before agents, expenses and taxes, but that's another story."_
> 
> I haven't seen the opposite. I gave an earlier example of a $10k advance and sales of 500k. You responded by saying,
> 
> ...


If you mean 500K in the long run, yes, that might happen even in a small project although I haven't seen it happen yet. I have seen 50th editions on very old contracts in some small countries where everything starts with very small print run and sell steadily for years.

All profit from contracts is before agents get their share. It's revenue in the business sense. If you subtract a 10% or 15% for the agent, you have your income before taxes. Then you remove your expenses, count in your taxes, and decide if you want to keep writing

You have written 5 moderately successful books and approach a big publishing house with a manuscript they like. You might get something like $50K and 8% and they might do a 100K run.

A 8% paperback will not flood you with income. It's $0.60 to $1,20 per copy in paperback. You will probably make your advance back in 18months to 2 years. Then you might make some more money.

It makes sense if one is starting out to consider that the advance is evrtything he/she is going to get from that particular book. It's not an absolute, it's a practical reallity and nobody is being exploted. The publisher knows the market, they had so many books in the past they will estimate what it can sell and hope for statistics to keep them away from tragical mistakes.

$50K is still good money. You have already been paid for 42K to 83K units on the very advance. But you need to have something really good or previous books to get that deal.

On an ebook you decide about everything. No advance though. You even have to pay for some small expenses for editing and marketing.

In order to get the equivalent of the $50k advance on an ebook you need:

An $0.99 you make about $0.31, so you need 160,000 ebook units. Can you sell it on kindle in 18 months or so? If you can, you save a lot of time for the publisher by doing an ebook instead of a print book deal.

At $2,99 you make about $2 per unit, so you need 25,000 ebook units.

The decision is yours, but both distribution channels have their advantages and disadvantages. It depends on where you are at the point.

If you are in a saturated genre and all you can get from the publishers is a $5K advance, it becomes an easier decision. 16K units at $0.99 is not that much. 2,5K at $2,99 does not sound hard either.

The problem with the $5K deals or the ebook equivalent is that one or even 4 books per year cannot support a writer. He/she needs a dayjob.

I believe even a mid-level book deals in the traditional publishing world are worth more than an ebook endevour, even for some of the moderately successful indie ebooks that sell 40K or 100K per year. The problem is that you can't get to such a deal overnight. It could take 2 years and you might be rejected by 30 publishers.

For the aspiring writer with no catalog, an ebook is a good plan. You might sell 160K units on ebook and get a publishing deal or simply more ebook sales on the next book. The ebook sales will even get easier to notice when approaching a publishing deal. They might even come to you

Most of the times, it's not a choice. The books got rejected from the publishing world so ebook is the only option. It's only mid level writers with moderately good sellers and a back catalog that need to make a choice.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Half-Orc said:


> Can a publisher do everything right and be let down by a poorly written book? Yes. Can a writer do everything right and still be let down by a publisher? Yes. I'd love to meet the person who seriously believes neither happens.


I know both things happen. It's mostly the writer and the rushed acquisition process IMHO. You know that I'm pushing the argument so that those who only see if from the writer's perspective will get a different perspective.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Half-Orc said:


> I've looked to see if there's any information on what percent of authors don't earn out their advance. Sadly nothing concrete, but I'm seeing quotes from agents going from 25-50%. That's a lot of ashamed authors.


They would be much happier with multiple editions

Look at the other edge of the deal. Many books are a loss for the publisher. The writers do get the advance but they still complain with all those complex updates on the sales, the returns, etc. Their complain could be justified but it would be nice if some would stop and think: Did the publisher just lose money by trying to sell my product?

That's a very serious question because the publisher is the only one actually hurt by the sales and that's because it's the only partner the writer has in the sales chain. The printer printed the books on profit. The distributor gets a profit. The bookstores can return the books.


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## David &#039;Half-Orc&#039; Dalglish (Feb 1, 2010)

Panayotis said:


> That's a very serious question because the publisher is the only one actually hurt by the sales and that's because it's the only partner the writer has in the sales chain. The printer printed the books on profit. The distributor gets a profit. The bookstores can return the books.


Except an author who sells poorly on their first book may very well be doomed for the rest of their career. If they get dumped, and it is a series, no one will pick up the series. Every later sale becomes difficult, because well, they lost money for Publisher A, so Publisher B is interested in their book because...? There will always be a massive slush pile of authors desperate to have their chance to shine, and publishers know this. And seriously, only the publisher hurt? If I spent forever working on a book, got it published, made a measly $5k-$10k advance, spent a large chunk of that on hotel rooms and gas driving around doing everything I can to promote it, and then it still doesn't earn out...well, I'm not out of anything right? Unless you're not counting time, or money, or effort, or potential future earnings.

A book selling poorly hurts the author and the publisher both. A publisher, however, has many, many different books for sale that can cushion the blow (and this is expected; it is a rare business that will make a profit on every single product it creates). An author, especially a young author, may have just that one book. One book out of many, versus one single book total. Tell me again who would suffer more? Even better, tell me that "the publisher is the only one actually hurt by the sales".


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

The author and publisher are not partners unless that's what the contract says and they have established a partnership. The contractual terms stand regardless of whether the publisher made or lost money trying to sell an author's book.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Half-Orc said:


> Except an author who sells poorly on their first book may very well be doomed for the rest of their career. If they get dumped, and it is a series, no one will pick up the series. Every later sale becomes difficult, because well, they lost money for Publisher A, so Publisher B is interested in their book because...? There will always be a massive slush pile of authors desperate to have their chance to shine, and publishers know this. And seriously, only the publisher hurt? If I spent forever working on a book, got it published, made a measly $5k-$10k advance, spent a large chunk of that on hotel rooms and gas driving around doing everything I can to promote it, and then it still doesn't earn out...well, I'm not out of anything right? Unless you're not counting time, or money, or effort, or potential future earnings.
> 
> A book selling poorly hurts the author and the publisher both. A publisher, however, has many, many different books for sale that can cushion the blow (and this is expected; it is a rare business that will make a profit on every single product it creates). An author, especially a young author, may have just that one book. One book out of many, versus one single book total. Tell me again who would suffer more? Even better, tell me that "the publisher is the only one actually hurt by the sales".


Publishing is dangerous. You can't write off the past, even in ebook delivery. The quality of writing will be there for everyone to see in the future, the success or failure will show. When you are given a chance you should be sure you are ready.

The author is obvsiouly hurt when sales are bad, but it's even worse if the advance is not what he considers proper compensation for the work. I believe writers should only accept book deals where the advance covers their time and expenses.

An author does gamble on a single book. It's not as safe as publishing a fulll catalog, but from a monetary point of view the costs involved in self-publishing are far lower than the traditional publishing expenses. Besides money, I know how hard writing is and what investment and sacrifice in requires in every part of a writer's life.

After all, it's your book. Who will believe in it if you don't?


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> The author and publisher are not partners unless that's what the contract says and they have established a partnership. The contractual terms stand regardless of whether the publisher made or lost money trying to sell an author's book.


Inventor contributes prototype product and personal time required for promotion.
Company contributes money and resources to bring the product to market.
Inventor get a percentage of revenue.
Inventor can get a non-refundable advance on sales.

Why do you find this is not a partnership? Simply because registration of a new company is not required? If publishing a book was more dangerous, I bet more we would form an LLC for each one like we do for a movie.


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## daringnovelist (Apr 3, 2010)

Panayotis said:


> I know both things happen. It's mostly the writer and the rushed acquisition process IMHO. You know that I'm pushing the argument so that those who only see if from the writer's perspective will get a different perspective.


Unfortunately I really think you're pushing the wrong part of your argument and losing the point altogether. You aren't helping anyone see it from another perspective, because instead of following your original point -- about the publisher's decision making process -- you're locked in an argument about authors, and not publishers.

Publishers who reject a manuscript are not wrong, or stupid, and frankly I would bet you that few of those editors who turned down Harry Potter really regret it. It was not right for their list. They could not have done as well with it, because couldn't see a way to make it work for them. They were RIGHT to turn it down.

I think that was the point you were originally trying to make.

Let's not get sucked into an argument over who is to blame for things going wrong, and especially let's not blame authors for publisher's bad decisions.

Your very own point illustrates the fact that it's reasonable for a publisher to reject a book. It's only the responsible thing to do if they don't think they can make a success out of it, no matter how good the book may be. If they accept it and pay for it, it's THEIR responsibility to make it successful from that point. The author, once the final edit has been turned in, has done his or her due diligence.

If the author does a piss-poor job of his part of the deal, the publisher doesn't publish. But if the publisher does a piss-poor job, there is nothing the author can do. That's the nature of the deal, and you are right, there is no point in moaning about it, but that doesn't make it the author's fault -- and we lose track of the point by debating whether it is.

(And yes, Terrence is right, that publishing is not a partnership. It's a supplier/manufacturer relationship. Which is also true of an inventor.)

Camille


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## Courtney Milan (Feb 27, 2011)

Panayotis said:


> I have compared a book deal to a partnership because that's how I percieve it. Is business about your partner being you enemy and someone you do not put trust on? If I wrote something with 80% returns I would be ashamed. I got my chance on the shelf with a print run equivalent to what other writers get in similar deals. Publishers do not simply print books to throw them away. If they print 100,000 and your book sells 20,000, that usually means that your book is not as good as the average books in the same genre and by the same publisher. The model does fine with the average book. That means you book was either below average at that genre, or possibly too good, diffucult and unque, and beyond the comprehension of the market.


Well, it depends why the book had 80% returns. There are a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the black squiggly things printed on the inside.

The book could have had a crappy cover or other similar problems in packaging. Maybe the publisher switched ink and the text looked faded when people picked it up. Maybe nobody actually looked at the cover in bookstore level lighting, and so never noticed that you couldn't read the author's name on the book.

And those are just publisher screwups. Maybe the book came out the same month as another book by a major author in the same genre--a book that had the same premise. Or the book could have come out in the fall of 2008--you do know what happened in the fall of 2008, don't you? That's when the global financial crises hit, and credit dried up. There were books that hit the shelves and were sent back without even having a chance to sell. That happened because the bookstores needed to return inventory, fast, so they could get the Christmas books on the shelves. Publishers got more returns that month than ever before. So if your book was on the shelf for only a few weeks...no, I don't think I would blame the author for that. That can't possibly be the author's fault--the book was sent back before people even had a chance to read it and word of mouth to spread.

Not all chances on the shelf are equivalent.

And here's the thing: sometimes, books fail because the book itself isn't good enough. But sometimes, books fail because the publisher screwed up. You seem to think that publishers can misread the market and screw up by offering an advance to an author whose book wasn't good enough. Why would it be so hard to believe that they could misread the market and give a book a cover that doesn't sell well in the genre? I'm not saying my publisher is my enemy, but you can't say in one breath that the publisher partners with the author and then say in the other that the author bears the moral blame for the failure of a book.

If the publisher loses money on the book by their own screw-ups, the author has every right to be furious, and no reason to feel shame--because at that point, the publisher is losing the _author_ money, too, both on royalties not earned after the advance, and in future contracts.

You're talking about partnerships, but you only place the moral obligation on one set of shoulders. No author is obligated to wear a scarlet U (for unearned advance) because a publisher makes a business decisions that means she won't earn out.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

_Why do you find this is not a partnership? Simply because registration of a new company is not required? If publishing a book was more dangerous, I bet more we would form an LLC for each one like we do for a movie. _

Of course the reason is because there is not registration or formal partnership contract. That's what makes a commercial partnership.

Likewise, an author and publisher have not defined a LLC unless they expressly take steps to do so. Nor is a movie an LLC unless they take express steps to create it. Same with a partnership. These are important distinctions for business relationships, and they are important distinctions for anyone involved.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Terrence OBrien said:


> _Why do you find this is not a partnership? Simply because registration of a new company is not required? If publishing a book was more dangerous, I bet more we would form an LLC for each one like we do for a movie. _
> 
> Of course the reason is because there is not registration or formal partnership contract. That's what makes a commercial partnership.
> 
> Likewise, an author and publisher have not defined a LLC unless they expressly take steps to do so. Nor is a movie an LLC unless they take express steps to create it. Same with a partnership. These are important distinctions for business relationships, and they are important distinctions for anyone involved.


You can easily form a partnership under the exact same terms. The only difference is efficiency and cost. Nothing changes in the nature of the project.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

daringnovelist said:


> Unfortunately I really think you're pushing the wrong part of your argument and losing the point altogether. You aren't helping anyone see it from another perspective, because instead of following your original point -- about the publisher's decision making process -- you're locked in an argument about authors, and not publishers.
> 
> (And yes, Terrence is right, that publishing is not a partnership. It's a supplier/manufacturer relationship. Which is also true of an inventor.)
> 
> Camille


Since the majority of writers believe they are exploited by incompetent publishers, I think I'm pushing the argument the right way in order to balance it.

The only reason many writers cannot understand why moderately successful writers might have antidiametrically different approaches to the ebook/traditional publishing issue, is that they are not in their shoes. They don't have their options. For these writers the clear way is ebook self-publishing. It's the only way.

I know of no supplier/manufacturer agreement where the two parties share the dangers and the profits. That is not be acceptable because they do not want to be partners.

Statistically, the bottom line of publishing is a 50/50 partnership on net revenue between writer and publisher. Forming a deal in this fashion would make it impossibly slow and expensive because every single discount through different channels would have to be justified to a writer that is usually not experienced of the business. Just imagine writers constantly complaining about discounts and being notified about everything. It would be an accounting and communcation nightmare. Writers would have to play a part in the decision making. A fixed royalty on SRP makes it a lot easier. All deals in the intellectual property business are essentially partnerships. There are a few exceptions of course. Work for hire deals that shouldn't even happen and lexicography/dictionary/encyclopedia work with dozens of contributors, where sharing profits is not cost effective. It's all about being efficient.


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## Panayotis (May 12, 2011)

Courtney Milan said:


> Well, it depends why the book had 80% returns. There are a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the black squiggly things printed on the inside.
> 
> The book could have had a crappy cover or other similar problems in packaging. Maybe the publisher switched ink and the text looked faded when people picked it up. Maybe nobody actually looked at the cover in bookstore level lighting, and so never noticed...


The example you are presenting passed quality control on the printer and also on the publisher? I see that Mira is an imprint of Harlequin and this was even printed in USA. I don't believe they actually put copies like this in distribution. It's amazing that the printer thought it was fine because handling a mistake like this will cost 3 times as much as reprinting it on the spot.

We agree. Both writer and publisher should make sure they do their best for the book. You are giving the publisher a fair share so you can focus on writing. If you are going to do their quality control, they are not doing their job.


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## Anne Victory (Jul 29, 2010)

daringnovelist said:


> Publishers who reject a manuscript are not wrong, or stupid, and frankly I would bet you that few of those editors who turned down Harry Potter really regret it. It was not right for their list. They could not have done as well with it, because couldn't see a way to make it work for them. They were RIGHT to turn it down.


This. Look, I used to do recruiting. My specialty was programmers of a specific programming language which was primarily used in manufacturing companies and banks. There's something called a "bridge of activity". That is, will effort spent on Task A easily benefit you elsewhere? Case in point, in the course of making phone calls to see if Companies X, Y, and Z had openings, I'd pick up not just MORE opportunities, but also new candidates. You take your juiciest candidate and market them to companies to get job openings. Then you take your juiciest employer and market them to potential candidates to get more recruits. You keep matching people up and keeping the pipeline flowing because ALL of your effort is concentrated in an area.

Now, let's suppose that while I'm calling around, I get approached by a hospital that doesn't need a programmer, but, by golly, they really could use a new OB-GYN. Should I take that job opportunity? What if the initial salary was going to be $100,000 (that's $30k for me)? What if the hospital is located in Hawaii, and they'll pay relocation plus yearly bonuses - ie. this is a DREAM job? What if they're willing to pay me a retainer to find this person for them?

The answer is no. Why? It's not that it's not a good job that would be fillable - it obviously is. But what happens when I spend a month working on this? All of that time, effort and money was expended in a vacuum. It benefits nothing past the here and now.

Similarly, when an agent or a publisher turns down a book, it's not necessarily that it's a bad book (though it might be ) - it might just be that there's no bridge of activity for them.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

_"You can easily form a partnership under the exact same terms. The only difference is efficiency and cost. Nothing changes in the nature of the project"_

Sure. But it isn't a partnership unless you actually do it. And unless you do it, the publisher and author are not partners. The legal nature of the partnership is different from a other forms of business. These are important distinctions. The very detailed contract the publisher presents the author does not create a partnership. The publisher knows this. So should the author.


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