L’esprit d’escalier

A wee brief update, for anyone playing along at home!

If you glance over at the sidebar, you’ll see that “Running” clocked in at about 7,000 words.  A thousand more than I’d initially planned, but I think they’re pretty decent words all the same.  Now comes the shopping it around part, which induces nail-biting and hair pulling.  I’m not happy with the title, but brain-wracking hasn’t supplied me with anything better so far, sadly.  Thus, it goes out with its working-title, and we’ll see what happens.

You’ll also notice that the status bar on Night Owls hasn’t really moved.  I’m trying something a wee bit different this go-round:  the loosest of outlines.  Nothing terribly set in stone, just a sort of “this happens, then this happens, then this happens.”  We’ll see where it takes me, if anywhere.

Because, well, I have a little something else nibbling away in the back of my head, and I’m getting ready to poke it with a stick.  There’s what I might call a recurring character in some of my dabbles — none of which have really seen the light of day — and I think I might have figured out who she is and what she’s up to.  But this one’s going to take a wee bit of research before I get writing.  And when I figure out whether it’s a novel or a short story, I’ll give it a status bar.

I’ve been working at making Ye Olde Writing Space a little more mine. Which is sort of silly — my computer’s been in the same room for probably two years now.  But it was originally Greg’s office, so there’s still some of his stuff on the walls (not that I mind the swords, exactly.  If the zombie apocalypse comes, I’m well-armed) and there was this big curio cabinet thing looming over me.  The reason for that is simple:  we don’t have anywhere else to put this stuff right now, so it made more sense just to leave it where it was.

And yet…

Last weekend, in celebration of Massachusetts’ tax-free holiday, we went out and Bought Stuff.  I got a laser printer, since my Little Deskjet That Could was only printing about 230 pages per ink cartridge.  When “Running” is 32 pages long, that’s 14% of my ink right there.  If I wanted to print out, say, Nin, I’d need two or three cartridges.  So!  New printer!  And a new ladder-style bookshelf thing!

Which of course made the room look too crowded.  So I measured.  And plotted.

And wandered out to where poor Greg was trying to play some Starcraft II and said, “So if the cabinet technically fits in the other room…”

Bless his heart, he helped me move it.  Now, my printer table/filing cabinet is on the wall where the curio cabinet once was, and as soon as I hang a picture or something to cover the empty wall space, it’ll look pretty keen.  The walls themselves are a neutral beige color.  The new debate is whether I leave ‘em the hell alone and just redecorate with new accessories — hang up some of the stuff that’s been gathering dust, get new curtains, maybe paint the trim on the doors and windows — or whether or not I find a new color of paint to smear on the walls.

Decisions, decisions.

I know, it probably sounds a bit like cat vacuuming:  if I’m fixing up my space, I’m not writing.  To a point, it absolutely is.  But it’s also a bit of mental gynmastics.  If the room makes me happy, writing in it will, too.

Hill: I have a request
for l’esprit d’escalier

me: What’s up?

Hill: that you outline what the process IS we’re going through,
from writing to editing to query letter to partials to fulls and to representation
so I can link it to people
and go
HERE THIS EXPLAINS IT

—

Ask and ye shall receive.

Note: this is the third time I’ve tried writing this post. I keep veering off into tangents that, while they’re pretty relevant, take their sweet-ass time actually answering the above request.  So let’s see if I can stop trying to explain the whole of the book industry and just, y’know, explain what we’re up to over here.

As you know, Bob, Hill and I wrote a book. It’s a young adult fantasy novel.  It doesn’t suck. We went back and forth over the course of about a year and a half, writing 1,000-2,000 words before passing it back to the other.  Every now and then we’d get together and rehash what was left to write.  We wrote until it was done.

We had what I call our zero draft. It was a completed manuscript, yes, but it wasn’t ready to go out into the world.  We handed it over to a few people for a read-through, to help us catch inconsistencies and glaring errors, and then we edited the hell out of it. We took a look and got rid of scenes that didn’t advance the plot, cliches that didn’t spice up the writing, and put that bad cat into standard manuscript format.

Then it was time to find an agent. There are several steps to this, so let’s break out the bullet points:

• First, we did our research. Would you ask  your vegetarian friend to taste your bacon-wrapped-in-bacon recipe and recommend it to other people?  Nope.  For that same reason, you need to find agents that represent the genre in which you’re writing.  You don’t submit, say, contemporary YA fantasy to someone who only represents non-fiction.
• Then, we worked on our query letter. Queries are nerve-wracking.  You have about a page — really just a few paragraphs — to explain why your book kicks ass, and why that particular agent would be right for you.  I’ve spent a lot of time at Query Shark, looking to see what other people got right and wrong, learning how to write something that should stand out.  In addition to the query letter, a lot of agencies ask to see the first 5-10 pages.  So, we have dual nail-biting going on there: the query is mostly me; the first few pages are mostly Hill.  Fortunately, the combination of the two seem to have garnered us some interest. Win!
• If an agent likes the query and sample pages, he or she requests a partial. “Partials” are pretty much exactly what they sound like: part of the manuscript.  The amount an agent will want to see varies.  For the most part, it’s been a request for the first 30 pages or first 3 chapters.  Others have asked for 50 pages/first 5 chapters.  It depends on how much of the story that particular agent needs to get a good feel for the story.
• If an agent likes the partial, he or she requests the full. “Full” is just like it sounds, too:  someone wants to see the whole gorram thing.  Hill and I have had a few requests for fulls so far.   If queries and partials were nerve-wracking, waiting on responses for fulls are even more so.  Because…
• If an agent likes the full, he or she offers representation. This is where, when it finally happens, we will run around in circles screaming and generally embarrassing ourselves.

Of course, having representation doesn’t mean we’re published yet, does it?

Once we have an agent, that agent will show the books to editors. And we start the whole damned process over again, only this time, we have someone who has the trust of editors and publishers on our side, being enthusiastic about our work and getting it on publishers’ desks.

If an editor likes our book, they will make an offer.  At that point, the agent would present the offer to us, go over the contract with us, and advocate for us so we get the best deal we can.  (Those two sentences alone could spiral into so many digressions.  Understand I’m oversimplifying here.  I’ll eventually post a little more in-depth about how offers get made — it’s not just “Hey, I like your book, have a wad of cash” — and why agents are so damned essential to the process.)

Once we’ve signed with a publisher (which is when you’d say our book has been aquired), we’ll go through rounds of revisions.  Editors make your book better.  They help with plot and pacing and turn your book from pretty awesome into wicked awesome.

When the revisions are done, and probably a thousand other things I’m glossing over, the book will be scheduled for release. It’s honestly probably about a year-long process, maybe even two, from when the book is bought to when it hits bookstore shelves.

Think of it this way:  right now, people here are working on books that will be in bookstores in the spring/summer of 2011.  They were probably acquired in the fall of 2009 or very early in 2010.  So, even if an agent were to offer us representation tomorrow and we had a deal by the end of the summer, chances are, Nin wouldn’t be on bookshelves until the fall of 2011 at the earliest.  More likely, spring of 2012.

Couple of things about all of the above, as if I haven’t thrown enough at you:

–Every agent is different.  Some have requested fulls right off of the query letter.  Some have online forms to fill out instead of the queries.  Some of them want a synopsis, too, which makes me weep copious tears.**

–Agents’ response times vary.  Some get back to us in a day or less.  Others take weeks.  Still others take months.  There are more than a few who state that if we don’t receive a response, we can assume they’re passing on the work.  That gets pretty frustrating, figuring out at what point we move the agent off of the “query response pending” part of the spreadsheet and stick it on the page I’ve named “Rejections “

–BEA was about three weeks ago.  It’s the big publishing industry trade show, where publishers, editors, agents, authors and booksellers go and gorge themselves on books for three days.  It also means everyone falls behind on what comes into their inboxes.  Some agents receive hundreds of queries a day, so imagine the overflow they came back to.  Which means when we’re going, “But Agent Awesome’s website says she’ll get back to us in three weeks and it’s been four,” we have to sigh at the calendar and remind ourselves she’s probably still clawing her way out of everything that came in during BEA.

Anyway. The TL;DR version of the post is this:

1. Write book
   
2. Revise manuscript
   
3. Query agents
4. Get partial requests
5. Get full requests
6. Get agent OMFG YAY!
7. Agent sends manuscript to editors
8. Editor makes offer
9. Happydance
10. A year-ish later, see our book on actual bookstore shelves.

So.  Questions?  Comments?  Anything I can clarify?  Any parts of this process you want me to go into in further detail?  Have at it!

**A synopsis is a two or three page outline of your book, from start to finish.  Where a query letter presents the central problem without revealing the resolution, the synopsis wants the spoilers.  Query letters let you inject a little humor and your own voice.  A synopsis is just the facts, ma’am, or, as I put it to Hill: “It’s like watching the boring dude in the office explain the plot of last night’s Awesome TV Show.  It’s hard not to go, ‘but funny shit happens in here, I SWEAR!’“

I am finally, finally getting over this cold.  It has tried on many hats during the week-plus it’s been with me: cough, fever, sore throat, ohgodmysinuseswtf, different cough, and two boxes of kleenex worth of sniffles.  Interesting discovery!  I am in the category of people who, when they take sudafed, DON’T SLEEP.

This was not a pleasant discovery to happen upon between 3:30 and 7:00 AM Wednesday.

Anyway.  After some very positive feedback, Nin is going out into the world FOR REAL.  Hill and I have been putting together a list of agents to query, trying to find the ones that are looking for books like ours, and I think we have a pretty solid set to start with.  So… wish us luck!

I’ve spent enough time hemming and hawing over whether to get a netbook.  Tomorrow, I place the order.  My hesitation came from a few things: wanting a bit of a buffer in my bank account, first and foremost, but also the worry that I just wanted one for the shiny factor.  I mean, I have a desktop and a laptop at home.  Do I really need a third computer?

I’ve come up with a big ol’ yes to that.  While I can take the monster that is the Alienware with me on trips, it’s also, well, a monster.  It’s big and heavy, which makes it Not Fun to lug around an airport.  Also, since most of my travel is business travel, chances are I don’t really have time to do much more than poke around the internet when I boot it up.  If my choices between meetings come down to “nap or play WoW,” I’m going to nap.  So, while a machine with an internet connection and a word processing program is pretty vital to me during those days, my sweet gaming rig isn’t.

As for more local usage, I can absolutely see myself using a netbook during my commute to and from work.  On the train yesterday, the beginning of a story started clicking into place.  I’d managed, in cleaning out my bag o’tricks, to take my college-ruled notebook out, but never put it back in, so the writing down of thoughts had to wait another half hour until I could get to my desk and some scrap paper.  What’s there on the page isn’t exactly what was in my head originally.  Still decent, but I feel like I’ve forgotten some turn of phrase I’d really liked.

It’ll also be good to have if the weather here ever gets nicer.  Not just for getting outside and writing during lunches, but taking advantage of our backyard in the summer, as well.

Now, there’s still a little voice hollering at me that I can do all this with pen and paper, and that’s very true.  But I type faster than I write, and have already discovered during NaNo that pen-and-paper writing on the train is an exercise in frustration — awkward position, holy ow my wrists, and handwriting made illegible by the movement of the train.

So, there it is.  It’s going to take a couple of weeks before it’s in my grimy little paws, but I’m pretty excited about it.

A note on the story that I mentioned above.  See poor, neglected Night Owls over there on the sidebar?  I think this new tale might be set in the same universe.  The good thing is, the tone of the new thing is much closer to the tone I wanted with Night Owls from the start.  I’m hoping the time I’ll be spending with the short story will help me figure out what I need to do to bring that voice to the novel.

Onward!

The weekend took forever.  I kept waiting for the calendar to tick over to March so I could tell you this:

My flash fiction story, “Pomegranate,” is in the Spring 2010 edition of flashquake.

Go!  See!  And take a peek at all the stories there.  If you’ll pardon me, I’ll be over here /happydancing.

The short version: this past Friday night, after everyone who could respond had gone home for the weekend, Amazon.com pulled the buy button from all Macmillan titles on their site.  This includes Kindle editions and print editions.  You can still purchase them from third-party resellers, but not directly from Amazon.  If you are a customer and had any of their books on your Amazon wishlist, guess what, those are gone, too.

There’s not much I can say about this that hasn’t been said in better and smarter ways by people more directly affected by this than I am, so I’m going to keep this short and send you off to see what the professionals are saying about it.

As James D. MacDonald said in his comment on the Making Light thread:

To my way of thinking, that makes three times Amazon has pulled this kind of crap.

First, they decided to delist any POD publisher that didn’t print their physical books at CreateSpace. Then they made all gay books vanish from searches. Now this.

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

Other commenters pointed out that if you add in their yanking of 1984 from the Kindles of those who’d purchased the book and a similar incident to the Macmillan situation at Amazon UK (this time against Hachette UK), we’re up to five rounds of shenanigans.

Now, does Amazon have to sell Macmillan’s books?  No.  Nor, by the way, does Macmillan have to sell their books to Amazon to redistribute.  But the ones who lose in either scenario are the readers and, especially, the authors.  Could Amazon have perhaps pulled just the Kindle editions instead of all print ones as well?  Certainly.  Still not a great solution, but at least one that makes the point without kicking the authors in the teeth quite so hard.

And hey, if 50% of all their books sold are Kindle editions, as Bezos likes to claim — without providing any evidence to back it up, mind you — then wouldn’t removing the eBook editions still make Macmillan take notice?

That said, I think yanking all editions — print, Kindle, or crayon-on-wall — is a shitty solution no matter what way you look at it.  You’re a bookseller.  Your job is to provide books to readers. I can’t help but feel it’s unprofessional to drag your readers into your dispute with the publisher.  Which is probably also part of what Amazon’s doing, by the by:  telling their customers that Macmillan’s the bad guy here, because they want to charge more money for eBooks, so it’s the publisher’s fault.

But if you look at what Macmillan actually wants to do, which is start eBooks off at a higher price when they’re first released, but eventually lower the price, similar to the way prices go down as print books go from hardcover to trade paperback to mass market editions, that’s hardly a bad thing.  The people who want to read something on release will pay the higher cost.  Others will wait until it goes down a few dollars.  Others will just borrow it from their local library in its physical form.  The same way we do with dead tree books.  The same way we do with just about any product, really, be it clothing or gadgets or movies.

I’m guessing Amazon’ll be putting Macmillan’s buy buttons back tomorrow or early this week, having “shown them” what going against Amazon’s wishes can do to them.  I’m hoping that Macmillan will stick to their guns on eBooks, and that other publishers will back them up.  (Hint:   I’m looking at you, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Random House and HarperCollins.)

Before I let you go, might I recommend you show some support for the Macmillan authors and for your indie bookstores?  Click on over to IndieBound and treat yourself to a book!

Right, so.  Linky time.  Go refill your coffee and get clicking.

Let’s start off with a primary source.  Amazon’s not commenting, but Tor.com has A Message from Macmillan CEO John Sargeant that was sent to the publisher’s authors, illustrators, and the literary agents that work with them.

SFWA is hosting Tobias Buckell’s post about “Why My Books Are No Longer Available on Amazon.com” – if you read no other articles about this situation, read Buckell’s. He makes his point in a clear, calm way.  He also explains why producing an eBook isn’t all that much more expensive than producing its print equivalent.  I’ve said it here before: the price of printing and binding a book is between $1 and $3.  Everything else goes to what Buckell lists: editing, copyediting, design, marketing.  He mentions that the publishers’ offices are part of that cost, but I’d add a little more to it: the paychecks of the customer service department, the finance department, the IT group.  All those departments that every company anywhere has exist at a publisher, and their operation comes out of whatever’s left after you subtract the bookseller discount from a book’s cover price.

Another excellent post is over at Charlie Stross’ blog: “Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight.” It takes a good look at Amazon in regards to the supply chain for books.

John Scalzi has two articles over at the Whatever: “A Quick Note on eBook Pricing and Amazon Hijinx” and “It’s All About Timing.” The second article takes a look at why Amazon would pull their stunt on a Friday evening as opposed to a Tuesday morning.

Making Light, home of Tor editors Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, has a short post, “Amazon and Macmillan,” but that’s because the commenters are brilliant people, and the discussion is one to follow.

Jay Lake’s title says it all: “Bug off, Bezos.  And take your damned bookstore with you.”

Jackie Kessler has a great analysis of the situation at “Amazon vs. Macmillan, part 2.”

More quick links:

Laptop Magazine: “Amazon, Macmillan, and the eBook Price War”

Laura Anne Gilman, “AmazonFail, part 2?”

I’ll update as more comes up.  I’m equally anticipating and dreading Amazon’s official comment, when it comes.

Update 1: Amazon’s finally responded, and, as predicted, they’re trying to make Macmillan into the villains here. I’m frothing too hard at the mouth to even really respond to it right now, except to say that while they “don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan,” I hope they do.

Update 2: Laura Anne Gilman does a line-by-line of Amazon’s response better than I ever could.  “Holy shit. Amazon, seriously? Sulky 5-year-old much?”  ahahahaha

And Tobias Buckell has a brilliant idea: “Together, Let’s Break the Amazon Monopoly on Kindles.”

I haven’t been around much, mostly because we went to Ireland at the beginning of the month, and I’m taking my sweet time getting back into the swing of things.  We took a lot of pictures, which you can see here.  I was reminded, while snapping photos, that I’d really like to take a photography course at some point.

Of course, on seeing the Long Room at Trinity College in Dublin, I also declared that I shall become a bookbinder, and spend the rest of my life restoring old books.  We took two steps inside and I stopped, gazing up and gaping, and wishing the ropes didn’t block off the books because I wanted to just plunk myself down on the floor between the shelves and breathe them in.  Of course, that’s precisely why they’re cordoned off, so that people can’t reach out and touch the books with oily fingers and do damage to them.

But oh, I could be very happy among those books.

So, other things I’ve done in the last month:

Nin got cleaned up, edited, and passed along.  It’s an exciting first step, but of course, now comes the waiting.  The person who has it has other duties, and the person she’ll show it to has other duties, both of which I understand take priority over reading the manuscript.  Doesn’t stop me from biting my nails.   So, while the method of passing it on isn’t exactly your typical querying process, the waiting part is about the same.

Still trying to settle on a project.  Grailchild makes me go argh when I open it.  Night Owls would be the less frustrating one to go with, but man, part of me says, “Dude, the market is glutted with vampires.”  Then of course my practical voice argues back that writing for “the market” is pretty ridiculous.  What’s big now might not be big in three years.  Or maybe it will still be going strong, or maybe it will have seen a lull and a resurgence.  Then there’s poor Karris, who needs some serious worldbuilding before I go back to him.  Also, “Kate.”  Also, Lil’s story.

And, even less helpful, this morning I had the idea for what I think could be a clever little story, if done right, but I’m afraid it’s gimmicky, or trite, or both.

I should probably just shut up and write it.

I’ve done some reading, though not nearly as much as I’d like to.  The pile of books is ever-growing.

I finally read The Gathering Storm, and loved it.  Sanderson’s an excellent writer.  What struck me, even in the first few pages, was this:  of course I didn’t go into it expecting Robert Jordan’s voice.  I expected Sanderson’s, and wasn’t disappointed.  What I didn’t expect was to feel like I was coming home as I read the prologue.  Sanderson has often said that he was a WoT fan from the start, so I was fairly certain he’d do a respectful job at finishing the series.  Maybe it was simply reading about places and people I’ve been wondering about in the back of my mind for so long, but I think it’s more than that.  He got it.  I’d go so far as to say he nailed it.

Obviously, since there are still two books to go, not all of the loose threads have been tied up.  The ones he did focus on, however, had me cheering.  I don’t want to get all spoilery on people, so I hope I’m not spilling too much when I write holy shit, Verin!

I’m still on my first play-through of Dragon Age: Origins, and having a blast.  There’s so very much story here, I don’t want to miss a single thread.  Which of course means I’m maybe 2/3 of the way through the game (I think? Maybe?) and I don’t want it to end.  I know I’ll play it through at least once more, as a different race and class, and probably rotate out more of the characters.  I’ve mainly kept Morrigan, Alistair and Leliana in my party, and when I put Sten and Thrall in for a little while the other day, there were suddenly even more interactions I realized I’ve been missing.  (Yes, I stop and watch the idle back and forth between my party members when we’re wandering around, even though it’s less plot-progression and more comic interactions.)

I’ll probably also pick some of the meaner answers next time through, since I’ve gone the “I want you all to think I’m awesome” route this first time.

There are RP plots afoot in WoW, which means a good chunk of writing on that front for both Threnn and Annalea.

So, pen in hand, butt in chair.  My only real goal for 2010 (aside from paying off bills and saving money) is to get something published.  Which means I need to get things submitted.  Which means I need to get them finished.

Which means I ought to close out this post.

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!

In the comments on my rant about the Amazon/Wal-Mart/Target price war, my friend Eric and I digressed a bit into eBook pricing, and book prices in general.  Specifically, if you take the cost of printing and binding and shipping out of the equation, why shouldn’t eBooks be cheaper than dead tree books?

In today’s post, literary agent Nathan Bransford breaks down the costs associated with producing a book, including how much the publisher actually makes off of the cover price.  As he points out,

Unit costs (i.e. producing the actual book) also varies anywhere from $0.75 to $3.00 depending on the format, quantity of the print run, etc.

He figures in bookseller discounts and author royalties, and then gets into some expenses that are less obvious to readers:

But you have to deduct all marketing costs (ads, sending out copies for review, bound galleys/ARCs if any, co-op), other production costs (cover, seasonal catalog, etc.), and overhead (salaries, health insurance, rent, etc.) before you get to the profit.

How much does all the rest of that cost? I don’t know, I’m not a publisher. But my guess is that all adds up to a pretty good chunk. And let’s not forget that historically most books don’t earn a profit and those have to be paid for as well.

This is the part I want to touch on, both looking at the author’s side and at the publisher’s side.

First of all are the advantages to authors.  Commercial publishers market your book for you.  They put the titles in their seasonal catalogs, and sales reps go out and present those titles to book buyers all over the country.  Even if a book isn’t getting a full-page ad in the New York Times Book Review section, it’s still getting far more exposure than books put out by a vanity press.

Also included are the costs of galleys and ARCs.  Now, not every book will have these, but a lot of times, publishers will make them available, especially for debut authors.  Why?  Because the best advertising isn’t something you can fit into a newspaper ad.  Getting the book into readers’ hands is.  When booksellers are talking up a book before it’s released, that’s what we call buzz*.  This enthusiasm passes from bookseller to readers — the book’s pub date arrives and booksellers start handselling.  “Hi Mrs. Murphy.  Remember how much you loved The Case of the Pilfered Plotbunnies? We just got in this new book called The Plotbunny Detectives and I think you’ll like it.”

Galleys and ARCs are expensive to produce.  They tend to cost more to print than the final version of the book itself.  This is because the print runs are far smaller, so you don’t get as much of a bulk discount.  (Though, with several publishers launching e-galley programs, I’m hopeful that we’ll see even more books getting into booksellers’ hands early.)

Co-op is short for co-operative advertising.  It’s money publishers make available to booksellers for the purposes of advertising their titles.  This could be a mention in a store’s newsletter, a table display featuring certain titles, a newspaper ad highlighting certain books, or a spot on local radio stations.  It helps booksellers mitigate the cost of advertising, and it’s win-win on both sides:  the bookstore gets people to come in and shop, and the publisher sells some books.

Somewhere in that publisher’s cost are the salaries of the editorial staff, and the people designing the cover art, and the people setting up the book’s layout.

Which segues nicely into the publisher’s side.

Something to consider: the only way a publisher makes money is to sell books.  I know it seems kind of obvious, but there are so many costs associated with actually making a book a success that we rarely take into account.

There are all the positions at a publisher that the average reader might never come into contact with:  the customer service reps, the finance department, the sales force, the people working in the warehouse who put the books in boxes and ship ‘em out to bookstores.  Their salaries have to be factored into the cost of the books.

Then there’s the last line that I quoted from Mr. Bransford: “And let’s not forget that historically most books don’t earn a profit and those have to be paid for as well.”

Which means that the books that don’t earn a profit get paid for by the books that do.

Is that fair?

Hell.  Yes.

It’s part of what gives debut authors a chance to shine.  The money made by the bestsellers lets editors take a chance on an unknown and lets the marketing and publicity departments get the word out, the buzz started.  Maybe it lets them give that midlist author whose books they love another solid push.

There’s a lot of talk about how commercial publishing is an old, creaky, clunky model.  There’s days it feels like shiny new gadgets and technologies are coming so fast, publishers can barely keep up.  They start figuring out how they’re going to deal with today’s invention knowing that in a week or a month, it might be obsolete.  But for now, it’s the model we have, and it still gets books into readers’ hands.  It still gets writers paid.  Money flows towards the writer, remember?

That’s not to say that we should turn up the stereo so we don’t have to hear the creaking and clunking.  There are brilliant people out there, taking a good look at changes that can be made, at new ways of selling books.  I think we’re going to see some very cool and unconventional things coming that will work, and will challenge the way we think about publishing and distribution (or continue to challenge, might be more accurate).  But neither do I think we should just scrap the old way of doing things.  It’s so hard to get rid of because it works.  It’s imperfect, yes, but publishers and booksellers are going to be looking for ways to merge the old and the new to make something that works even better.

It’s going to be interesting as hell to see what they (we?) come up with.

*Funny thing, I’ve never liked the word.  It probably has something to do with my inexplicable fear of bees.  I see a bee flying around and it’s all oh god get away run oh god HALP. So I hear it referring to stirrings about a book and I cringe.  Hey, some people hate the word “moist.”  Language is awesome.