L’esprit d’escalier

In my “if only I could write full-time” fantasies, part of my ideal day is dedicated not to writing, but to cooking.  So, when I have a stretch of days off, especially during the holidays, I start flipping through cookbooks, looking for things that I’d like to try.

Of course, the downside of  three out of four new recipes is that there are even more glitches than just trying one or two new ones.  My usual “I suck, who do I think I’m kidding?” devil that likes sitting on my shoulderwhen I’m writing came dangerously close to hanging out for my baking adventures.

In the end, though, I’m going to say it was a success (not a huge one, and there was no delicious, moist cake), but a success either way.

I started with what should have been the easy stuff:  peppermint bark.  I mean, really, all you do is smash some candy canes to smithereens, melt dark chocolate, pour it onto a baking sheet, then melt white chocolate, pour it atop the mostly-dried dark chocolate, and sprinkle the obliterated candy cane bits over it while still melty.

Simple, right?

And it would have been.  Should have been.  I had the peppermint smashy part down, and the dark chocolate melted and poured.  That part went just fine, though I felt slightly guilty for using the melt-by-microwave rather than the melt-by-double-boiler method.  Slightly.

The problem came with the white chocolate.

See, Ghirardelli white chocolate chips are not, in fact, actual white chocolate.  Therefore, they don’t melt like white chocolate.  Now, had I bought generic no-name white chocolate chips, this wouldn’t have surprised me.  But, I dunno, I expected that Ghirardelli would be the real thing. Hence why I bought the white chocolate chips in the first place, and didn’t just go straight to the bars.

Nope.  After a few short microwaving bursts, all I had was a lumpy mess of ick in my bowl, and rapidly cooling dark chocolate in the pan.

Thankfully, this could be salvaged. I had, in my cabinet o’bakey things, a single bar of real white chocolate.  Half the amount I needed, but it was better than nothing.  That melted and poured as it should have, though the pan looked a little sad only half-covered.  Not that I’m complaining.  I have leftover peppermint-flavored dark chocolate waiting for either a new use or simple gleeful consumption.

Then came the fudge.  It’s probably also very much a beginner fudge, since it’s from the Never-Fail Fudge recipe on the back of the jars of Marshmallow Fluff.  The woman who used to live next door to my parents made it all the time, and it looked easy enough.  Which, really, it was.  The hard part was getting the fluff out of the jar, and the line about “being careful not to mistake escaping air bubbles for boiling.”

Because of course that meant I spent a lot of time second-guessing myself:  Is it really boiling?  I think it is, but am I mistaking air bubbles for boiling?  They wouldn’t put that on there if it wasn’t a common mistake, right?  No, it’s boiling, I’m just being an idiot.  Wait, am I sure?

Welcome to my head.  In the end, it came out fine, maybe a little softer than I hoped, but it’s still fudge, damn it.

However, let me tell you, the fluff/evaporated milk goo that I sloshed over the side of the pot was not fun to clean up.

Then.

Oh, then.

Sunday afternoon, I decided it was time to try my hand at biscotti.  Something tasty to dip in my coffee in the morning, something not necessarily difficult, but at least a little complicated.

First off:  hazelnuts.  Fuck them and their impossible shells.  I am not in the possession of a nutcracker, so the breaking open in the first round had to be done with a heavy-bottomed pot.  Therapeutic, but loud, and if I went too hard on the smashy, I ended up with hazelnut bits that didn’t lend themselves to toasting, really.  Then came the toasting, and I dunno.  Something went wrong.  The recipe said to stick ‘em in the oven for 15 minutes, but when they came out, not only did the skins not want to come off, but the majority of the hazelnuts were over-toasted.

And the dough was unruly.

I followed the recipe exactly, but when the mixer got going, rather than forming “a stiff dough,” it remained at a cake batter consistency.  At some point I stood there, spatula in hand, debating whether to add flour or just give up and bake it like a cake and see what happened.

Instead, I shoved the bowl of not-dough in the fridge and walked away, munching on over-toasted hazelnuts and fuming.

Yesterday, I pulled the bowl out of there, gave it a warning glare, and set it on the counter to come up to room temperature while I performed Hazelnut Massacre II.  This time, rather than the poor pot, I used our meat tenderizer thing to break the nuts out of their shells.  Easier to concentrate the smashy force that way.  Thank you, Alton Brown, for teaching me that most kitchen tools can have multiple uses.

While the new nuts were a-toasting, I turned back to the dough to figure out how to fix it.

I didn’t have to.  Somehow, overnight, it had gone from batter consistency to — gasp — dough.  I’m still not sure how or why that happened.  The Lovely Anna asked if maybe I’d overworked the it to start, which is possible, though I still maintain I didn’t.  That sucker was never dough-like, at all.  But after resting overnight, there it was, so, yeah.  It was probably me, somewhere.

This time, the hazelnuts came out okay, and most of the skins came off without too much of a fight.  I folded them into the dough, shaped it into logs before it decided to turn back into goo, and popped ‘em into the oven for the first round o’baking.  When I pulled them out and sliced them up, they actually looked like biscotti.  And, sampling them after the second round of baking, I think they came out all right after all.

Thus, they’ve been dubbed The Little Biscotti That Could.  I wish I’d taken pictures for you lot so you could see the progression from fail to kind of proud of myself.

(Though, my plan to be all fancy with them was foiled by the white chocolate fiasco above.  That bar I had in reserve was supposed to be melted and the ends of the biscotti dipped in it…)

Needing to feel like I could get at least one thing right on the first try, I made a batch of plain ol’ chocolate chip cookies, too. Success!  Though, I’ve noticed that my “rounded tablespoons” tend to get bigger towards the end of the batch.  Not that I end up with monster cookies, but my batch ended up being 32 cookies instead of the 50 the recipe said I’d end up with.

I’m okay with this.

If you participated and won NaNo this year, you might have seen the offer from FastPencil for a free bound copy of your NaNo project.  Sounds pretty keen, doesn’t it?  Write a book in November, see it published in December?

Yeah, not so much.  Printed in December, sure, but not published.

Look, you’ve just written at a brain-breaking pace for thirty days.  What you’ve got is a good start — you wrote something!  That’s amazing!  But it’s not done.  It’s not polished, it’s not the best story it can be.  It’s not ready to be published.

And when it is — when you’ve gone ahead and made your changes and made sure it’s ready to be published, why not shop it around first?  Why not give it a chance to get the kind of distribution that gets books into bookstores?

I’m a little alarmed to see Galleycat’s post today, “Fast Pencil Sees National Novel Writing Growth.”  While FastPencil’s not doing the exact same thing DellArte is, they certainly marketed themselves to a similar audience — people who’ve just finished their books, who are excited and passionate and hopeful about it — but people whose books are just not ready.  And people who, it’s very likely, aren’t very savvy about the publishing industry and how it works.

There are going to be NaNoers who take advantage of the offer as a novelty — it’s a souvenir, a bit of tangible proof that they cranked out fifty thousand words in a month.  Maybe they wrote the book just for mom or grandpa or their BFF, and they have no intentions of trying to get it commercially published.  To those people, this is a neat deal.

But to the writers who have dreams of being the next Nora Roberts or JRR Tolkien, well… This isn’t the way to go.

FastPencil offers packages that are very similar to the ones you see at DellArte or AuthorHouse, though they certainly offer more information about pricing — there’s a calculator that lets you see the base price of your book, much like Lulu.com has.  They even break down some sample pricings so you can see what your royalties would be.

One thing that makes me a bit uncomfortable:  the information on how you get paid is buried waaaaaay the hell down at the bottom of their FAQ:

How and when do I get compensated for my publications sold through the FastPencil MarketPlace and third party retailers?
FastPencil accumulates author royalties by calendar quarter, and then pays them out to authors using NET30 terms. You must have accumulated 100.00 USD in royalties to generate a payout; otherwise it continues accumulating into the next calendar quarter.

So, let’s look at this a bit.  (Oh god, she’s mathing again.)

If you want to sell your book exclusively through the FastPencil Marketplace — no distribution or listing with other online retailers — that’s not terribly expensive.  The cost of one “proof” of your book or $19.99 for an eBook.  (Digression the first: paying for a proof seems strange to me.  The whole point of a proof is to make sure everything is laid out properly and to catch typos before the book is released to the masses.  Why charge for that?)

But, well.  Why would you want your book’s only exposure to be on their site?  Don’t you want it to be out there, sharing the same virtual space as other books from other publishers?

Of course you do!  And you can do that for the low low price of $149.99 — $199.99 if you want an eBook format, too — plus the cost of one “proof”.

What you’re paying for there, essentially, is your ISBN, and FastPencil releasing your ISBN/title info into ye olde data feed.

Ahem.

Through R.R. Bowker, the ISBN agency in the U.S., a block of 10 ISBNs is $275.00.  That’s $27.50 per ISBN.  So what exactly is FastPencil doing with rest of the $121.50 ($151.50 with the eBook option!) they’re charging you?  Surely, it doesn’t cost that much to enter your title info and make it go live.  That’s not even an hour’s work, surely.  (If there’s someone out there getting paid $100+ an hour to enter that data, someone send me an application!)

Let’s go with their numbers here.

They offer two choices, targetting a retail price or targetting a profit margin.  In both examples, the book in question is a 5×8, 200 page trade paperback.  Going with a $14.00 retail price obviously gives you a smaller profit than setting the price at $17.12.

(Digression #2:  As was pointed out to me in the comments to one of the Harlequin Horizons posts, retail price and cover price aren’t always the same thing, since retailers can take discounts off of the cover price.  Royalties should always be based on the cover price.  I’m going to try to use the term “cover price” from here on out, but “retail price” is the phrase that FastPencil uses to describe the price set by the author.)

Experiment with me!  Go to your bookshelf.  Pull out three commercially published trade paperbacks.  Count how many pages they have and tell me their cover prices.  (If you have a ruler, check the trim size, too!) My results:

Book 1: 365 pages, $13.99 5×8
Book 2: 208 pages, $12.99 5 1/4 x 8 1/2
Book 3: 312 pages, $13.99, 5×8

See the start of the problem here?  Setting the price of the book at $14.00 is the more competitive option, even though the other two $14.00 books have 100 more pages than the FastPencil sample.  The 208 page book is a dollar lower.  Do you have a 200-page book on your shelf?  Go pick it up.  See how skinny it is?  Would you pay $17.00 for that book in trade paperback, or would you move on to something cheaper?  ($17.00 in hardcover, sure, but trade?  Really?)

I’ll do the math on both prices.  Let’s assume our eager NaNoer goes with the print and eBook option, since she’s hip to this whole eReader thing.  That’s $199.99.  A proof of her 200 page 5×8 book will run her $7.80.  So she starts out $207.79 in the red (I’m not counting tax and shipping, but they do charge both.)

With the “Target a Retail Price” Method:

Her book has a cover price of $14.00.

Sales of the printed book through FastPencil’s Marketplace earn her $4.96/book.
Sales of the printed book through Amazon/B&N/Ingram earn her $0.48/book (and doesn’t that come close to the Harlequin Horizons/DellArte math?)

Remember how they send out payments?  No payment until you’ve accrued $100 in royalties.

Before she receives a royalty check, she will have to sell:

$100/$4.96 = 20 copies through the FastPencil Marketplace

OR

$100/$0.48 = 208 copies through Amazon/B&N/Ingram.

Before she’s earned back her initial $207.79, she will have to sell:

$207.79/$4.96= 42 copies through the FastPencil Marketplace

OR

$207.79/$0.48= 434 copies through Amazon/B&N/Ingram

With the “Target a Profit Margin” Method:

Her book has a cover price of $17.12.

Sales of the printed book through FastPencil’s Marketplace earn her $7.46/book.
Sales of the printed book through Amazon/B&N/Ingram earn her $2.00/book

Before she receives a royalty check, she will have to sell:

$100/$7.46 = 14 copies through the FastPencil Marketplace

OR

$100/$2.00 = 50 copies through Amazon/B&N/Ingram.

Before she’s earned back her initial $207.79, she will have to sell:

$207.79/$7.46= 28 copies through the FastPencil Marketplace

OR

$207.79/$2.00 =  104 copies through Amazon/B&N/Ingram

With the “Sell Your eBook” Method:

Let’s say she goes with the eBook price everyone is used to, kindly set for us by Amazon (yes, that’s sarcasm): $9.99.  Through their Marketplace, FastPencil takes a flat $2.00/eBook.  The other $7.99 goes to the author.  Through Amazon/B&N/Ingram, FastPencil takes $1.00, then the reseller takes $6.49. The author gets $2.50.

Ready?

Her eBook has a cover price of $9.99.

Sales of the eBook through FastPencil’s Marketplace earn her $7.99/book.
Sales of the eBook through Amazon/B&N/Ingram earn her $2.50/book

Before she receives a royalty check, she will have to sell:

$100/$7.46 = 13 copies through the FastPencil Marketplace

OR

$100/$2.50 = 40 copies through Amazon/B&N/Ingram.

Before she’s earned back her initial $207.79, she will have to sell:

$207.79/$7.99= 26 copies through the FastPencil Marketplace

OR

$207.79/$2.50 =  84 copies through Amazon/B&N/Ingram

Now, if I knew someone looking to go through FastPencil, and if they refused to listen to my “Oh god, clean it up and shop it around first” advice, and further refused to listen to my “Dude, Lulu.com” advice, well…

/sigh

I’d have to say their best bet here is to go for the retail price method and encourage everyone who’s purchasing a copy to buy it in eBook or printed form through FastPencil.

Which, y’know, covers friends and family.  Maybe.

There are, of course, other services available through FastPencil, much like the ones offered by AuthorHouse/Harlequin Horizons/DellArte.  FastPencil’s line editing is $0.006 cheaper than DellArte’s.  FastPencil’s “advanced editorial,” however, is only $0.001 cheaper than DellArte’s.  Of course, FastPencil touts their community as a great way for their authors to have peers edit their books for free.  From their “Example Scenarios“:

Barbara writes a 200 page personal memoir and enlists the reviewing and editing help of her friends Clara and Frank. The three friends use FastPencil’s free online writing tools.

and

Jose writes a 300 page history book and has his colleague Minda review and edit his work in FastPencil for free.

Well, that’s great, but what kind of editing experience do these friends and colleagues have, precisely?  They sound much more like beta readers to me — infinitely valuable to any writer, definitely able to help find flaws and weaknesses in a work and offer suggestions for improving it (if they’re good beta readers, that is, not just friends who are going to say “OMG I LOVED IT OMG!!!!”) — but beta readers are very rarely also editors.

There are more services available, of course — formatting and layout, illustrations of varying quality, cover design, etc.  And all of which, when you add on to your package, makes you that much farther from turning a profit.

Also, all of which are done for you by your publisher, if your book is published by a commercial house.  And did I mention that if that happens, you get paid?

Do I think FastPencil’s doing something shady here?  Ehhhhh.  Not exactly, or at least not in the same way others have.  They’re not luring people in using a respected name, like DellArte did in its fledgling days as Harlequin Horizons, or suggesting that their books might get picked up by another house, or even that you’re headed for bestsellerdom.  Their prices are all laid out (though if you want to use them to market your book, you need to call for details, so I can’t speak to the reality of what they’ll do for marketing and publicity).

What makes me uncomfortable is the NaNo offer, because so many of the participants are new to publishing.  They’ve just finished a book!  Many of them probably haven’t done that much research into the whole business of getting published.  So, here’s this offer dangled before them, telling them they can be published without ever having to get rejected.

As FastPencil’s VP of Sales and Marketing, Steve O’Deegan, told GalleyCat:

“We’re extremely pleased. We’re just now starting to see submissions coming in. About five percent of our total user base came in over the last 30 days of the NaNoWriMo campaign.”

and

“It’s growing substantially, and NaNoWriMo was a big part of that.”

Is that a savvy business move, offering a free trial during NaNo?  Definitely.  They know their audience, and know that November is the time to get the word out and get noticed.  But I can’t help but wonder how many writers who use FastPencil’s services could — given some time and revision — have sold their books to a commercial publisher, where not only would the books be available via online bookstores, they’d be on the shelves of actual, physical bookstores, too.

Le. Sigh.

Hoo boy, did I ever not make it.  I broke 10k, which was good, but I let myself get distracted by other things, which is bad.  Other things being: work-travel, Under the Dome,Thanksgiving, and frothing at the mouth about Harlequin Horizons/DellArte.  I’m proud as hell of the posts about that fiasco, and intend to do a follow-up or two and expand upon a few points that came up.  But, time spent writing them was time not spent working on my NaNo.

So, I didn’t finish, didn’t even come close, and I’m okay with that; I was from the start.

But what have I learned?

Well, a few things:

• I really ought to outline. Not as in rigid, scene-by-scene bullet points and Roman numerals.  Just a more structured looking-ahead.  Hill and I checked in every so often on where we were with Nin: what happens in the next few chapters?  How far do we have to go and what needs to happen on the way?  I’ve never done it with my own writing, because, well, that’s a pretty one-sided conversation.  Have to find a good way to start.
• I probably get more done in the mornings. I’m still training myself to unplug while writing — setting gtalk to “Leave me alone, I’m writin’ here,” resisting the urge to see what the internet is up to when I get stuck on a phrase, etc.  But I’m also more prone to cat vacuuming at night, for some reason, both in meatspace and in the virtual world.
• Worldbuilding, worldbuilding, worldbuilding. I have this terrible habit of not committing to NaNo until the last week of October, which means I spend time on infodumps in the plot that are going to be cut out later, to the tune of “Oh god I suck.”

Now, my stalling out on NaNo doesn’t mean I didn’t do other writerly things in November.  Matter of fact, I dedicated the time that would’ve been spent on the NaNo stuff to editing Nin this past week.  I started a bit of a character bible for us to refer to, since it has a pretty big cast.

I’ve also been doing a lot of heavy thinking about Grailchild and whether or not it’s the book I should be writing right now.  (The sequel to Nin is a given, that’s in the works already.)  I’m talking more about solo projects, and trying to determine whether my feelings about this book are just general silly jitters about Getting it Right, or whether the fact that I’ve been waffling about it for the better part of six years is a sign that I ought to concentrate on something else.

Another way to ask the same question: have I managed to intimidate myself with the scope of it? I love the characters and the concept.  I know what needs to happen.  So am I disinterested, or just plain lazy?

I’m not quite sure how to answer that, yet, outside of seeing how I feel during Butt in Chair time.  I mean, writing is still happening.  There are other things I’m excited about and working on.  I just feel incredible guilt over the idea of abandoning this particular project yet again.

Enough whining from my camp.  How did the rest of you NaNoers do?  What did you learn over the last month that will carry through while you finish your current projects and start the next ones?  Yes, that’s right.  Writing doesn’t just happen in November and then go away until next year’s NaNo.  Keep writing!