It’s true. I’ve finished making my last pass through The Lesson Plan and have sent it off to my editor. I’m beyond thrilled. There’s just nothing like that feeling of completion when you close the manuscript for the last time and send it off to the editor. (I think it might even be better than orgasm, but don’t tell anyone I said that. It’s not very romantic or very erotic, either, lol.)
So, will it be out by December 25 as I’ve said? Well, I have every reason to believe that I will have made all the final edits/tweaks, done all the formatting, and gotten it uploaded to all the sites through which I distribute by then. Whether it will be available for purchase at all of them on Christmas Day remains to be seen. I’ll certainly keep you posted.
In the meantime, if you are interested in an advance copy for review, please use the contact me link to send me your email address and let me know which format you prefer (epub, mobi/Kindle, or pdf) and I will gladly send you a complementary copy as soon as I have the edits in. All I ask in return is that you review it somewhere,1 whether on a review blog, a retail outlet like Amazon et al., or Goodreads.
———— 1Please don’t be afraid to give an honest review. I’m not one of those authors who gets pouty and aggressive if someone doesn’t like her book.
If you are a US resident and aren’t a self-publishing author, you probably haven’t noticed Amazon’s recent expansion of to include separate domains not only for the UK and Germany (amazon.de), but also for France (.fr) and today, Italy (.it) and Spain (.es).
Now, I’m all for making digital books more readily available to people in foreign countries, and I’m thrilled for readers in these countries because the availability of these new domains probably means Amazon will no longer charge them the additional $2.00 download fee they tack onto purchases made on the Amazon US site by people who don’t reside in one of the countries with its own domain site. (That is a tacky business practice, IMO. Pun intended.)
But the availability of these new domains is a bit of a conundrum for a self-publishing author because, the way Amazon calculates and pays revenues is per domain. In other words, sales are tracked separate for the US, UK, Germany, France, and now Italy and Spain. And Amazon doesn’t actually issue a payment to the author/publisher until the combined revenue for that domain reaches a minimum of $10. And once that $10 is paid out, you have to collect up an additional $10 through that domain before you’ll get paid again.
Additionally, if you want to have an author page for each of the domains, you have to build it separately with a separate Author Central account. Amazon doesn’t just copy your author page from the US site to the other domains. You have to build each one manually. (This hits ALL authors, not just self-publishing authors, but of course, many traditionally published authors don’t have any books that are being sold in these countries.)
In the six months since Amazon.de (Germany) came online, two copies of my self-published books have sold there. That’s awesome in that I’m thrilled that German readers have access to my books. The problem is, at that rate, I won’t actually get paid for those books or any others I sell until about 2050! I’ve sold none yet at Amazon.fr and since Spain and Italy just came online today, it’s unlikely I’ve sold any there, either. But I’m less troubled by selling NO copies on those domains than I am by selling a few dozen copies over the course of years and letting Amazon keep 100% of the revenue. Multiplied over time and many authors/publishers, this is a RACKET for Amazon. It’s a way for them to hang on to potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenues that it never has to pay out.
There’s a simple way to overcome this problem, of course. Amazon could choose to tally up all the revenues from each domain’s sales into one lump sum and pay for all sales on ANY Amazon domain. But they don’t do that and I don’t see any evidence that they’re planning to change their ways. And why would they? It’s likely to be a windfall for them, putting a little extra capital in their pockets to make up for the loss of those $2 download charges.
Now, as an author, I don’t want to and won’t limit my books’ listings to just the countries where I think I’ll sell enough copies to earn $10 in a reasonable period of time. That seems unfair to readers in those countries, who probably CAN’T buy my books from any other domains once a domain for their country is in place. But at the same time, it really KILLS me to know that these are sales for which I am very likely never to be paid. And that makes me feel less than enthusiastic about Amazon’s foreign expansion.
I guess in the scheme of things, I’d rather authors got hurt than readers. But that doesn’t mean I’m not getting hurt.
Mayor of Simpleton
by Andy Partridge, Copyright 1989
Never been near a university,
Never took a paper or a learned degree,
And some of your friends think that’s stupid of me,
But its nothing that I care about.
Well I don’t know how to tell the weight of the sun,
And of mathematics, well I want none,
And I may be the mayor of simpleton,
But I know one thing,
And that’s I love you.
When their logic grows cold and all thinking gets done,
You’ll be warm in the arms of the mayor of simpleton.
I can’t have been there when brains were handed round
(please be upstanding for the mayor of simpleton),
Or get past the cover of your books profound,
(please be upstanding for the mayor of simpleton),
And some of your friends thinks its really unsound,
That you’re ever seen talking to me.
Well I don’t know how to write a big hit song,
And all crossword puzzles well I just shun,
And I may be the mayor of simpleton,
But I know one thing,
And that’s I love you.
I’m not proud of the fact that I never learned much,
Just feel I should say,
What you get is all real,
I cant put on an act,
It takes brains to do that anyway. (and anyway…)
And I can’t unravel riddles, problems and puns,
How the home computer has me on the run,
And I may be the mayor of simpleton,
But I know one thing,
And that’s I love you (I love you).
If depth of feeling is a currency,
(please be upstanding for the mayor of simpleton),
Then I’m the man who grew the money tree,
(no chain of office and no hope of getting one).
Some of your friends are too brainy to see,
That they’re paupers and that’s how they’ll stay.
Well I don’t know how many pounds make up a ton,
Of all the Nobel prizes that I’ve never won,
And I may be the mayor of simpleton,
But I know one thing,
And that’s I love you.
When all logic grows cold and all thinking gets done,
You’ll be warm in the arms of the mayor of simpleton.
You’ll be warm in the arms of the mayor of simpleton.
You’ll be warm in the arms of the mayor.
(Please be upstanding for the mayor of simpleton.)
The other day, several folks on Twitter (Jane Litte of Dear Author, Angela James of Carina Press, and a few others) were discussing how long ago a book has to be set before it can reasonably be considered a “historical” romance. Some said the 1920s, others the 1950s, and there may have been other responses I didn’t see. One thing that seemed pretty clear, though, is that everyone agreed a book set in the 1980s isn’t a “historical” romance. My first impulse is to agree with that–the 1980s don’t seem very much different from today. Well, okay, except for the Internet, smart phones, the end of the Cold War, the end of Happy Days, and…well, I could actually go on and on.
And all those things that have changed since the ’80s (which, by the way, I remember quite well) are what make me wonder why it’s NOT proper to call a book set in the 1980s a “historical”? I mean, the 1980s are definitely history; my kids are learning about Ronald Reagan and the fall of the Berlin Wall in history classes, after all.
But it does seem odd to call a book set in the 1980s (or even the 1960s) “historical” because the things we associate with historical romance and historical fiction don’t seem to hold true. Fashion, mores, technology, sexual politics, etc. don’t seem to have changed much in the past 40 or 50 years. At the same time, though, there’s something not quite right about calling a book that isn’t set in the time period in which it’s being written a “contemporary,” because that’s obviously equally untrue.
On a side rant, it drives me absolutely bonkers that most retailers classify Austen as historical romance. To us, her stories are set in a historical period, but when she was writing them, they were contemporaries. (And, of course, romance didn’t exist as a genre with the conventions it currently has, so Austen certainly didn’t think of herself as writing romances, either, but that’s a separate issue.) Either way, it seems ludicrous to me to classify a book as “historical” based on the relationship of the time period it’s set in to now. By that rationale, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is historical fiction. So is War of the Worlds and Sherlock Holmes. And if a book set in the 1980s isn’t historical, the George Orwell’s 1984 must now be considered a contemporary novel. Does that makes sense? I certainly don’t think so!
All of this is my way of saying that it’s pretty clear that trying to divide what I’ll call “real world” (as opposed to paranornmal/science fiction) romances into two simple categories, historical and contemporary, really is insufficient. Although I’d hesitate to use the term “historical” for a book written today and set in the 1980s (or even the 1990s) because it carries too many false associations, I can’t call that book a contemporary, either. To be a contemporary, the books should be set in the time period in which it is being written. And the book doesn’t become historical at some time in the future because the time period it was written in is now sufficiently far in the past to be considered “historical.” It’s still a contemporary, because the author was writing it as such.
This dividing line seems important to me because writing a story set in your own time period is fundamentally different from writing one set in the past (just as it is different from writing one set in an imaginary world or in an imagined future). Maybe we need some additional terms for books set in the recent past–Modern Historical? Vintage Contemporary (Angela James’ suggestion)–but calling them contemporaries is just wrong, as far as I’m concerned.
And while we’re at it, can we stop lumping Austen in with Historical Romance? Because frankly, after almost 200 years, she’s STILL outselling my ass and messing up my rankings!
A few years ago, I briefly did a feature I called “Lyric Thursday” where I’d post the lyrics to a song that I found interesting, inspirational, or just plain fun. I got lazy and stopped doing it, but lately, I’ve been listening to music much more (mainly because I’ve been spending so much more time in the car!), and I keep finding songs I want to share. With that in mind, today I’m starting Music Monday. I hope you enjoy it!
For my first entry, I’ve chosen a song by Timbuk 3, most famous for The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades. This song, however, isn’t nearly so well known, as it comes from one of their later and much less famous albums, Edge of Allegiance, which was released in 1989. I love Timbuk 3 for their incisive, amusing lyrics and their harmonies. This song isn’t one of their absolute best on the lyric front, but the reference to monkeys and Shakespeare makes me smile every time, and the refrain “Don’t give up on me,” is really speaking to me these days!
Don’t Give Up on Me
by Pat and Barbara MacDonald, copyright 1989
I’ve been a beggar, I’ve been a thief,
I’ve given you all kinds of grief.
I’ve been bad, but I’ll be good, you’ll see.
Oh baby, don’t give up on me.
You’ve been a prisoner for quite some time
Since I forced you into my life of crime
Just one more big one, and then we’ll be free.
Oh baby, don’t give up on me.
Your time’s not wasted, believe what I say.
Your big investment’s gonna pay off some day.
They say that a monkey in the right frame of mind
Given enough paper, and given enough time,
Is bound to type Shakespeare eventually.
Oh baby, don’t give up on me.
In the school of hard knocks, I’m the class clown.
The only thing I’m good at is fooling around.
But one more semester and I’ll have my degree.
Oh baby, don’t give up on me.
Oh baby, don’t give up on me.
This song is nowhere to be found on the internet as far as I can tell (at least not unless you have a subscription), so if you want to listen, click here.
No one is allowed to find anything else I need to change ! Things I did change/settle on for the final version:
1) I’m using a shadow instead of beveling to get my name to stand out. I didn’t like the way the beveling seemed to pixellate in smaller sizes.
2) I changed the color of the text on the headstone from a steely gray to a more taupe-y gray to better match the headstone itself. I think it works.
3) I went with the “engraved” text that seemed to be the most popular option among commenters. Sorry if you were an outlier and I didn’t go your way.
Here’s the final result in three different sizes:
Now, I really need to get back to doing what I’m supposed to be doing–writing. But I must say, that was a great way to procrastinate for three days! I’ll never be as good at this as the professionals, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
Stephanie Draven posted a few suggestions in the previous thread for improving the cover art for Wrong Side of the Grave, most of them having to do with font choice/colors. I still kind of like the Papyrus font for the title, but I did a couple of versions using different fonts (for one, I chose Perpetua because a headstone engravers’ website suggested it as appropriately “stately”). I think I prefer the fonts that look more eroded, but that could just be me. Her point about my name disappearing a bit was a good one, though, and I tried a couple of different text effects to correct that.
So, here are three new and (I hope) improved versions:
Option 1
Option 2
Option 3
So, which version of my name and title do you like best? (You can mix and match. Believe it or not, all the names have a slightly different bevel setting.) I think I need to nail this down pretty soon, or I’ll be doing more cover art designing than writing!
Last week, I decided that I wanted to put out a short story as a prequel to INCARNATE. The heroine of the series, Elodie Capshaw, has a pretty interesting backstory and I thought it would be fun to explore her history a little more fully. I also thought a free short might spur interest in the series when the first book comes out.
But not only did this mean writing another several thousand words, it meant coming up with a title, a storyline/cover copy, and cover art for the prequel. Of the three, I was most worried about the cover art. I’m not a graphic artist, but I can’t afford to pay a professional like Nathalia to do artwork for a story I’m giving away for free. I needed something I could do myself using relatively inexpensive stock art and my limited skills. I started poking around on iStockPhoto, but I wasn’t expecting to find anything I could use right away. And then I came across an image that was so near perfect, it seemed like the artist who created it must have had my story in mind. It was a fairly expensive image to purchase, but I think it was well worth it.
So, here are two versions of the resulting cover. (They are pretty much identical except for the color of the tagline text.) I’m leaning towards the version on the left, so if you strongly prefer the one on the left, let me know!
I’m still toying with the cover copy, but I have the bones of it:
On a chilly morning in 1852, Elodie Capshaw gets the surprise of her life when she wakes up dead. As if her sudden demise at the tender age of twenty-four isn’t enough of a shock, Elodie discovers that she is capable of materializing in fully solid form. This appears a welcome reprieve from the hollow existence of the spirit world, but it has its own set of hazards. First, her family is convinced her resurrection is the work of the devil and is determined to drive her out of her childhood home. Next, her ability to maintain her physical form will vanish if she doesn’t return to her grave periodically and pour the blood of a living animal into the soil. And finally, there are The Reapers—angels whose mysterious and seductive beauty lures unsuspecting specters into shuffling off their immortal coils.
It’s a wonderful afterlife…if Elodie can survive it.
It goes like this: There’s this video of a chimp raping a frog. It’s had over 11 million hits on YouTube. So Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler riffed on this viral video when they put out a free book called “Be the Monkey,” subtitled “A Conversation about the New World of Publishing.”
So yeah, I get it. The book is purporting to help authors avoid getting screwed. And given some of my experiences in the wild, crazy world of publishing, I have occasionally felt like I got bent over a barrel, metaphorically speaking.
The problem is that, even though I get the joke, I don’t find it very funny. But the reason I don’t find it funny ISN’T because I’m interpreting this as some kind of slur against women. I certainly don’t think Konrath and Eisler are advocating rape. I don’t think when they say “Be the Monkey,” they are addressing men and suggesting said men go out and rape women.
But Konrath apparently thinks that’s what I think, as his tweet to me suggests: “@jackiebarbosa “Be the Monkey” DOES NOT EQUAL “Rape women.” Shame on you for saying it is the same. Shame, shame, shame.”
So, here it is, in black-and-white and for the record:
Women aren’t the only ones who get raped. Men get raped, too. So do children (hello, Jerry Sandusky, in case we’ve already forgotten). Rape isn’t about gender. It’s not a women’s issue. It’s EVERYONE’S issue.
And the reason the “Be the Monkey” joke just isn’t funny (to me, anyway) is that there’s a big difference between not making yourself an easy target for victimization (i.e., doing smart things that help keep you safe) and actively victimizing other people. Even if the metaphor is supposed to be “take control and have power over your publishing career,” that’s a far cry from the actual message, which is “don’t just avoid getting screwed over, screw people over yourself.” I’m sorry, but it’s just not amusing to me, even outside the context of the actual, real-life problem of rape.
It’s also not true. You don’t have to actively harm others to succeed in publishing. Whatever route you take.
So please, let’s not advocate doing so, even as a metaphor. Or a joke.
If you haven’t already tapped into the current internet publishing world brouhaha that began when Barry Eisler (in response, I think, to a Twitter conversation he had with me and Isobel Carr and a couple of other authors a few days earlier) used an incendiary term in a post on J.A. Konrath’s blog, you’ve got some catching up to do. There has since been a further discussion on Courtney Milan’s blog that I’m referencing here simply so I don’t have to repeat it.
Eisler has been complaining (not entirely incorrectly) that people have become so fixated on the incendiary terminology, they’re not addressing the substance of his post, in a nutshell, is this:
“Why are so many authors afraid of a possible monopoly while sanguine about a real one?”
The “real monopoly” Eisler is talking about here is the Big 6 publishing houses, and the “possible one” is Amazon. Well, I’m willing to take that on.
Eisler contends that since all so-called “legacy publishers” offer the same royalty percentages to all authors, they are effectively a monopoly because authors can’t get another deal. But authors can get another deal and have been able to for a long time.
First of all, an author who gets offers from multiple legacy publishers can choose the deal that pays the biggest advance. That’s an absolute guaranteed minimum the author can expect to earn from the book, and frankly, it’s one of main reasons why I might choose to accept a lower royalty percentage.
But if an author doesn’t like any of the deals offered by the larger publishing houses, she can also choose to publish with a small press, whether print+digital or digital only. These presses may not offer advances, but they typically offer considerably higher digital royalties than the major print publishers do (30% to as much as 50% in some cases). Going this route provides wider distribution, plus the author doesn’t have to out-of-pocket for cover art, editorial, and any other costs associated with bringing the book to market.
Finally, for the time being, an author can also choose to self-publish at reasonably low cost with relatively high rates of return. But this is also clearly the riskiest option, because it isn’t free. There’s obviously a sliding scale of cost associated with publishing a book yourself, but I won’t do it without paying for professional-looking cover art and ensuring the work is thoroughly and professionally edited. Of course, there are authors who do have the skills to create their own covers and who are confident enough in their own editing skills to put out a book without paying for an editor, but I think it’s a very small subset of writers that can do both well enough to produce a truly quality product. But even for those who can, there’s a time cost involved. The time you spend as an author on making your cover, editing your book, formatting it, and uploading it to various retailer sites is time you’re not spending writing your next book.
So, the reason I’m not worried about a real monopoly that exists now is that I simply don’t agree that there is one. I don’t agree that the Big 6 publishing houses are an evil monolith that consign authors who sign with them to indentured servitude. This is not to say that I am not realistic (some might even say cynical) about traditional publishing. It’s not a perfect system, it doesn’t offer any guarantees of a successful career, and plenty of authors get the shaft from their publishers.
But self-publishing is not a panacea. It’s also not a perfect system, it also doesn’t offer any guarantees, and it’s a safe bet that plenty of authors will wind up not only not making money at it, but actually losing money.
When authors like Eisler and Konrath, both of whom started their writing careers with those supposedly evil legacy publishers, tout self-publishing as not only an option, but as the first, best option for making money as a writer–well, I kind of have to wonder what they’ve been smoking. Yes, there’s Amanda Hocking. And John Locke and HP Mallory and probably a few dozen others who started out in self-publishing and have done very well for themselves. But there are far, far more authors who have made a healthy living by selling their books to traditional publishers and a sizable percentage of the authors who are doing very well in self-publishing right now didn’t begin in self-publishing. Moreover, before digital self-publishing became cheap and vogue, there was The Shack. There have always been the occasional phenoms who manage to make a career out of self-publishing; that doesn’t make it a sure-fire “get rich quick” scheme, or even a sure-fire “make a little pocket money” one.
And that’s even before we take a realistic look at the biggest player in the self-publishing game, Amazon, and the fact that it’s not any more a charitable enterprise out to make authors rich at its own expense than the Big 6 publishers are. Amazon is in business to make money for itself and its shareholders, not to ride in on a white horse and save poor, benighted authors from the big, bad publishers who take advantage of them.
Add to that Amazon’s very real dominance in digital book sales and its current forays into becoming a publisher (with its own books being available in digital format only through its site), and you have what I see as a potentially dangerous situation for publishers (both publishing houses and authors who are their own publishers). In short, the danger is no one can afford to run afoul of Amazon. If you can’t get your digital books on Amazon, you are invisible to at least half of the digital book-buying public.1
This doesn’t make Amazon a monopoly, by any means. Not yet. And maybe not ever. But I don’t think it’s as simple as “Amazon will never do anything ‘bad’ to self-publishing authors because it has no incentive to do so.” That simply isn’t true. Amazon’s primary incentive and motivation is to make money, and listing/storing hundreds of thousands of digital books isn’t free. Disk space may be relatively cheap, but the cost of supporting servers isn’t negligible (climate control for a huge bank of computers is pricey, people!), and Amazon also “vets”–at least to some degree–every book that is published through its Kindle Direct Publishing service. It has to have actual humans on hand to field questions/service issues related to Kindle Direct Publishing.
All of that put together means it’s not unrealistic to imagine that Amazon may decide it can’t afford to continue being so generous to those who publish through that service. And as an author who is primarily self-publishing right now, yes, I worry about that because, although I’m selling more books now than ever before, I’m also very far from making a living at it.
And I guess that’s really what it boils down to. To ME, the supposedly monopolistic practices of Big 6 publishing houses don’t represent much of a threat. They aren’t publishing my books right now, and I don’t have any particular expectation that they’ll be publishing them in the near future, although I’d be more than happy to sell a book to a major publishing house under the right circumstances. But the elephant in MY room is Amazon, which has the power to cut my sales in half if it chooses. Will it choose to? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean I’m nuts to be concerned about the possibility, especially if Amazon continues to be or becomes an even bigger force in the digital market.
The irony, really, is that some people seem to assume that because Amazon is doing X today, it will continue to do X indefinitely, but given the rapid pace of change we’ve seen in publishing over the past few years, it seems to me the only thing that it’s safe to assume is that it’s going to change more. A lot. It’s not unreasonable to wonder what those changes will be or to be concerned that they may not be to the advantage of anyone other than corporations and their shareholders. Because frankly, that’s what corporations do.
1I know there are people who think this isn’t true and that there are plenty of sales to be had elsewhere. All I can tell you is that, in my self-published catalog, my sales are currently about 80% attributable to Amazon and 20% to B&N, All Romance eBooks, and the retailers that get my books through distribution from Smashwords. Moreover, when my small epublisher converted their books from Mobipocket to Amazon, my sales of my backlist more than doubled. In other words, what I’ve seen supports the contention that Amazon, while not a monopoly, is such a strong driver of digital sales that anyone who wants to sell digital books cannot afford to ignore them.
! Things I did change/settle on for the final version:
Option 1
Option 2
Option 3
