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!

Some of them are questions I can answer!

1. what’s the counting crows song that goes ba da ba da da

That’s an easy one.  “Another Horsedreamer’s Blues,” based on the play Geography of a Horsedreamer by Sam Shepard.  Here, give it a listen:

2. what to say to a valued publisher when the price is too high

Uh.  Okay, this question is kind of vague to me.  I’m assuming this is someone upset over the price of a book or eBook.  It appears that by calling them a “valued” publisher, you have some respect for their other work and have purchased their titles in the past.  So, first of all, approach them respectfully.  Most publishers will have an address you can write to with concerns.  It might appear to be a generic customer service email address, but it will get filtered on to the appropriate people.  When you write to them, lay out the reasons that you believe a price is too high:  is the binding falling apart, or the paper quality poor?  Are they charging $25 for a 50-page book with lots of blank white space on every page?

Be honest, but be polite.  And, also, do  your research.  Do you think eBooks shouldn’t cost more than $9.99 or less?  Why?  If your answer is “because they don’t cost anything to make,” close your email program right now, do not press send, come here while I smite you. Someone finally talked about the cost of books, both e- and print, in the New York Times.  Go read that.  And go read Tobias Buckell, who posted about this a while back.  Also, Charlie Stross, who’s taking us step by step through how books are made.

Now, if you dropped $400 on a Kindle and don’t feel like shelling out $10 for an eBook because it’s too expensive omg, I’ll give you a running start.  Would you whine about buying a car and then having to pay to put gas in it?  Or buying a refrigerator and having to buy food to put in it?  No?  Then stop crying about having to pay for books to read on the device you bought for the purpose of reading books.

Another context for this question that occurred to me:  are you an author who feels that the price your publisher has set on your book is too high?  Do you have a literary agent going to bat for you?  Talk it over with your agent, first.  If you’re unagented, ask your editor (again, politely and respectfully) how the publisher came to that pricing decision, and if there’s any wriggle room with it.

3.  tales from the kitchen cannibal

I… what?  Okay, I can’t answer this one, but I feel like it has the potential to be a hilarious zombie story.  Someone write it and entertain me with it. GO!  In the meantime, there’s an episode of The I.T. Crowd entitled “Moss and the German” that might give you a giggle.

4. how to say roy in french

I believe that would be kind of like roo-wah.  Though, the way you say roi, meaning king, is more like rwah.  I could also be completely wrong, since it’s been something ridiculous like fifteen years since I took French.

5. stuff of legends ian gibson

Needs to come out NOW.  But, alas, unless I can scrounge an ARC out of someone at Ace Books, I’m stuck waiting six more months for it just like the rest of you.  However, in the meantime (and through some googling of my own), I see that fellow Feathermooninite Ian Gibson has a blog.  To which you should go.

6. all royalties are based on net amount received by publisher (wholesale price achieved)

I don’t get what the parenthetical statment at the end means, and I’m neither an agent nor a lawyer, but your standard royalties for print books from a commercial publisher should be based off of your book’s cover price, not the net.  I can’t really speak to ebooks, since the times, they are a-changin’ in that regard.

That’s about all the wisdom I have for today, though if you have any other burning questions for me, go ahead and leave ‘em in the comments.  I’ll see what I can do!

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!

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.

So, my tweet from last night (upon reading that Hachette will also move to an agency model for ebooks) not only got quoted by GalleyCat, it also became the post’s headline.

Um, hi, GalleyCat readers!
/shy wave

Before I send more links at you with Yet Another Update, I figure I ought to state this for the record (even though it’s probably kind of obvious anyway, and I know you’re a smart lot, but just in case):

I do not actually think Amazon should pull the buy buttons from any books, no matter how big or small the publisher, or how well any particular book or author is selling or not selling.

This hurts the authors. I don’t like hurting authors. I think pulling the buy buttons sucks, and that there had to be ways Amazon could have communicated their disagreement to Macmillan without kicking authors in the teeth.

The tweet was my smartassed, bravado-laden way of saying I’m so gorram proud of Hachette right now I could dance. True story: when I read the original GalleyCat post about it, I crowed “HA!” so loudly I scared a cat. (I did not, however, actually burst into dance, as I have no rhythm and the poor cat was already freaked out enough.)

Anyway, links to people far smarter than your hostess:

A new statement from Macmillan’s CEO. (For those of you keeping score at home: Macmillan 2, Amazon 0 on that. Still not a word from Jeff Bezos.)

Over at the Whatever, John Scalzi tells us why publishing isn’t going away anytime soon. In the form of a three-act play. With ass-kicking. He also interviews himself about the ongoing Amazon/Macmillan situation. He is truly a man of many talents.

Via GalleyCat, a picture of the New York Times ad for The Checklist Manifesto which lets readers know that the book is “available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon.” (Dear Macmillan marketing and/or publicity departments: /fangirl. Love, falconesse.)

Jackie Kessler gives us a one-week update and some thoughts on eBook pricing.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden responds to and expands upon Susan Pivar’s HuffPo piece.

Cat Valente talks about what would happen in a future in which everyone self-published. (Spoiler: it’s not filled with rainbows and ponies and frolicking.)  Also, look at her comments on what the people at her publisher do. A quote!  For pony awesome!

If I hear one more person toss off editors like their completely irrelevant to the process, I’m going to have to smack an internet. This is not an auteur kind of gig. It is a team effort, and that is a good thing. What happens when one person has all the power to make artistic decisions without input from anyone else? The Phantom Menace, that’s what happens.

Blake Charlton, whose book Spellwright is coming out from Macmillan this week, has a conversation with the universe about What Happens to a Debut Author’s Brain on #Amazonfail

Also, my order filled with Macmillan-author goodness has shipped from Porter Square Books. /happydance. My offer from the other day still stands! Go forth and purchase books, o ye readers!

(And one more update, filed under “holy crap, the internets are full of win today:”  The Authors Guild launches Who Moved My Button? since y’know, Amazon doesn’t notify you themselves. h/t to the ever-awesome Lilith Saintcrow.)

Update #2:  First, Tobias Buckell does math for us, wondering why people want more expensive backlist titles.

And, according to PW, the buy buttons are starting to come back on Macmillan titles.  No word yet on what the terms of the agreement were, though I suspect it’ll be Macmillan who steps up and fills us in, not Amazon.

John Scalzi outlines All the Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend.  He also puts out a call to support the authors, who in the end are the ones getting hurt by the Amazon/Macmillan standoff.

Jay Lake brings up some very salient ponts in his open letter to Kindle and eBook activists, including this one that’s been bothering me since Amazon’s snide little forum post:

So far as supposed corporate lying goes, note that Amazon was quick to inform you of the high side of the Macmillan proposal, but not of the part of the proposal that benefits you. That’s lying by omission, and it certainly fanned the rage of the Kindle community quite effectively. That’s a piece if corporate spin which has kept you from seeing the long term advantages to Kindle owners of what’s been proposed.

I caught that in the Amazon post as well, and it made me fume.  Amazon cited the highest price point that Macmillan wants to use, and conveniently left out the part where the low end of the range is $5.99, and that the books that start out at $15.99 will eventually drop down in price.  Just like print books do as they go from hardcover to trade paperback to mass market.

Here’s where Jay Lake starts fighting with Tobias Buckell for my internet heart:

Third, much of the anger I see is from people who assume that ebook prices are a rip-off because an ebook obviously costs much less than a print book. This is not true on the plain face of the facts. The actual physical costs of a print book — paper, printing, binding, packaging, warehousing, etc. — are less than 10% of the cover price, even in small volumes, and drop to less than a dollar per book for large volume titles such as bestsellers. The money that goes into a book is dominated by acquisition costs, editorial costs, production costs, layout and design, art, marketing and business overhead. Ebooks must bear all those same costs as print books.

[...]

If you don’t understand why it costs a lot of money to make a story into a book, go learn about it. You’ll be surprised at how many people work very hard to put that story in your hands, whatever your preferred format. And every one of those people has to eat, pay rent, and get through life, just like you do. That means they need to be paid, and that means the book costs money, regardless of the publishing format.

I love you, Jay Lake.  (Yes, I’m one of those people working hard to put stories in readers’ hands, even though most readers will never even know my position exists or understand why it’s important.)

Early Word points out that, despite their professed love for the $9.99 price point, there are plenty of Kindle books out there that are much more expensive:

Amazon has worked to give customers the perception that Kindle e-books cost $9.99, but if you are not buying bestsellers, Kindle prices can be quite a bit higher than that. Of the nine titles with full reviews in the current NYT BR, only one is available in a $9.99 Kindle edition; three are not available at all (these do not include any Macmillan titles; curiously, the one Macmillan title reviewed, from Palgrave Macmillan, is available for the Kindle. Guess Amazon doesn’t realize they’re part of Macmillan) and the rest were just $1.13 to $2.83 less than the hardcover price. In one case, the hardcover through a third-party retailer was cheaper than the Kindle version.

Now, they further point out that consumers prefer the lower prices:

none of the titles in the 100 top-selling Kindle titles was above $9.99 when we checked yesterday; the majority of the top “sellers,” 55 titles, were free; 25 titles range in price from $.01 to $9.60 and just 20 titles were at the magic $9.99 price.

And as many of the authors weighing in have said, that’s fine, too.  But they want their publishers to have the chance to give higher prices a try, not have it dictated to them by a retailer.  If no one will buy the eBooks at $15.99, guess what?  Publishers will lower the prices.

And here’s something that makes me boggle at Amazon’s tantrum, via Marion Maneker: under Macmillan’s plan, Amazon will make more money than under the current system.

I know far less than I should about how and why stocks rise and fall (despite my grandfather’s valiant attempts to teach me when I was in high school), but Amazon’s stock price took a hit on Monday.  Because of the announcement of the iPad?  Or because of their treatment of Macmillan and its authors?

Today, the Authors Guild responded, backing Macmillan and calling this “the right battle at the right time:”

If Macmillan does indeed prevail, the economics of authorship in the digital age are likely to improve considerably. We may go through some rough stretches to get there, however.

I’m still hoping very much that some of the remaining big six will respond and stand with Macmillan.

Have I linked to Jackie Kessler’s line-by-line of the Amazon response?  If not, here ’tis.

You know who still hasn’t said a word?  Jeff Bezos.  The only Amazon response so far is from “the Kindle team” on their forums.  I don’t even know what to make of that tactic.  I suppose he could be going for “this is beneath me,” but I’m going to trust a company a lot more if their CEO stands up and defends its actions somewhere visible (it’s called a press release, Jeff, use it), rather than farming the job out to nameless minions who post it on a message board.

So, here’s the deal: I’m putting my money where my mouth is, and answering Scalzi’s call for support.  Just purchased from Porter Square Books, all published by Tor:

John Scalzi, Old Man’s War
Jay Lake, Green
Tobias Buckell, Crystal Rain
Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension
Elizabeth Bear, All the Windwracked Stars

Now, I’d like to share the love a bit, and am trying to figure out how.  Here’s what I’ve got: from now until next Friday, February 12th, for the first three people to comment and show me that they’ve purchased a book from a Macmillan author, I will match that purchase, up to $25, with another book of your choice from a Macmillan author.  So, if you buy a $7.99 paperback, I’ll match it with another book for $7.99.  You get to pick which one, obviously.

A couple of questions I’ll answer pre-emptively.

–Proof-of-purchase = a picture/scan of your receipt, or if you buy it online, a screenshot of the purchase (go ahead and fuzz out identifying information, though.)  I will also accept action shots of you buying the book in a bookstore.  Bonus points if it’s an indie bookstore.  (Though, if you get the hapless sales clerk in the shot and plan on uploading the picture to flickr or something, make sure you get the bookseller’s permission to do so, please!)

–The books you buy, or the ones I match, don’t have to be Macmillan books, as long as the author you choose has at least one book out from Macmillan.  For example, Elizabeth Bear has books from both Tor and Bantam Spectra.  You might already own all of her Tor titles.  Therefore, her Bantam Spectra books do count for this, since, as I said, this is in support of the authors.

–This should go without saying, but should Amazon decide to magically relist Macmillan’s books between now and the 12th, Amazon purchases do not count.  If you send me a picture of you opening your box full o’Amazon stuff, I will come through the internets and smite you.

Anything else I can clarify?  Let me know!

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.”

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.

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.

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.