(no subject)
Jul. 2nd, 2011 10:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cblj_backupUgh. I'm not going out today. It's not reclusiveness, it's a zillion degrees out. I'm going to stay in and bond with the air conditioner.
I've been alternating between cleaning and creating, which sounds nicely pithy, though at this point cleaning mostly involves Roomba supervision. While the Roomba was running in the kitchen, occasionally bonking into my ankles, I made ice cream; I forgot to chill the mix before I put it in the machine, but it came out all right anyway, and while the machine did its work I did some messing around with the cover for Trace.
And then this got very philosophical, so I'll toss the rest under a cut.
Shopping for an image is always difficult. For Nameless, I had a great high-res photo I took myself, so that was no real matter, and I lucked out with Other People Can Smell You, but for Charitable Getting I spent ages trying to find something appropriate and finally Claire had to take a picture of a gong for me -- that image on the cover is actually the gong that inspired the gong in the novel.
The problem is that the image has to fit several criteria: it has to be quite high-res to go on the cover of a 6"x9" book, has to fit the colour palette "mood" of the novel, has to be (of course) representative somehow of the content, has to catch the eye, and has to be either rights-free or very cheap to obtain. I have a bunch of "free stock" photo/image websites bookmarked; National Geographic has the best photos but they're never high-res enough, and I find more and more the only one that's really worth a damn is Flickr. I don't really like how Flickr functions as a site, but it does have the Creative Commons, where I can search and browse loads of free-with-attribution high-res images easily.
On the one hand, cover design is where a pro publisher and their graphic design department would be appreciated. On the other, I do like doing the layouts myself -- the frustration of finding an image aside, there's something quite satisfying when you finally nail it. Plus you do hear horror stories; authors have basically no control over their covers and we've all seen dreadful covers with content only vaguely relevant to the novel. Recently there were a few cases where characters of colour were whitewashed.
I don't usually blame the artists; often they don't get to read the book before doing the design, and frequently they're getting low pay to do what they're told and STFU. I blame the publishers, because it's emblematic of a greater issue, not just the publishing houses wanting to control an author's content but their distribution points want to as well. There was a brilliant article I read recently which I now can't find to save my life which gave the example that Tesco's in the UK will sometimes decline to carry books based on their cover design.
So as ever, I am for the concept of the small or even individual press; of people being allowed to write what they want and publish it however they want. I am for whatever keeps a writer's vision intact for the reader.
But the problem always comes round to gatekeeping, because I don't want to waste my money on a shitty book and nobody else I know does either, with the result that nobody takes a chance on selfpub books. I tried to look around Lulu and see if there were any good books, and I couldn't fucking tell, and I haven't got the kind of cash to take a risk.
This is the question, then: who is promising you, the reader, that the book you get will be readable?
When you buy a book in a bookstore you're taking a chance, but the odds are backed by an agent, publisher, editor, and to some extent the bookseller as well. You do generally have a guarantee of good typesetting, few spelling errors, and correct grammar. You might not like the book, but there is a baseline of material quality that pro publishers promise you.
Say, just for the sake of argument, when you buy a book in a bookstore or from a known pro publisher online, your chances of a book you will enjoy are 70%. I'm basing that on the last six months, where I read thirty books and found about 25 readable, 20 actually enjoyable. (There's an interesting if occasionally enraging discussion about risk-taking in fiction books here, if you'd like a longer examination.)
When you buy direct from Lulu.com, or when you buy a selfpublished novel on Amazon or from the author's website, that percentage drops like a stone. You have no guarantee that anyone other than the author ever even saw the manuscript, let alone made suggestions. No guarantee that someone professionally edited or typeset the book. Recently I received a shipment in error, twenty-five copies of a cookbook instead of twenty copies of my book. The writing was all right, but the layout was dreadfully unprofessional. I can't even calculate how many good writers versus bad writers are out there self-publishing, but I'd fix your chances of getting an essentially readable book somewhere around 20%. Getting a good book, perhaps 15%. And that's being kind.
There are solutions -- I'm actually discussing some with various people now -- but none perfect. From an author's standpoint, the options are few. From a reader's standpoint, everything requires research: finding a reviewer who does selfpub book reviews, studying sample chapters to find an author you like and sticking with them, following blogs of writers who self-publish.
With the right equipment, and depending on how much time and money they're willing to invest, there is nearly nothing a pro pubisher can do that a self publisher can't, now that PoD is going strong and ebooks are flourishing. The one thing a self publisher cannot do is gatekeep themselves. You can't make a guarantee to a reader that what they're getting from you has a high likelihood of being a good book. The only way to do that is by building a relationship with your readers, and that's incredibly hard to do if you haven't got many because nobody will take a chance on your book. The hard sell doesn't usually work very well for books.
I'm lucky in that way, because I had people willing to take a chance and I had a body of readers who followed my fanfic to my original fiction. But it is a slow process, and there's no manual for how to do it. Even I don't know how it happened, and couldn't re-create it if I tried.
The best thing we can do as writers and as readers is, essentially, to take the fanfic model and apply it to original fiction. Because so much fanfic can be so shitty, we've found a way to save our reading time (the corollary would be a cash investment for a book, in original fiction) and with reasonable accuracy bring up the good stuff. We use recslists and recc communities, supporting the ones we find most to our tastes; we hold discussions about stories (yes, even in anon memes) and we tell our friends about the ones we like. We form fandom communities in which we all put in a bit of effort and get back a reasonable guarantee of quality. Say, 70%?
Readers -- and I include myself here even though I'm shit at reccing stuff in fandom -- need to talk about books. We need to review them, loan them to friends, support authors we respect, even support small publishing companies when we know they produce quality work and treat their authors with respect. As a writer with writerly contacts, I try to do this as much as I can, with projects like Hold Something (for which I also edit) and Candlemark & Gleam (for whom I sometimes headhunt authors).
This process of communal gatekeeping will never, ever sell as many books as Tesco or Borders or the big publishers, and it takes effort on the part of the reader. But it will support artists who choose to present their vision honestly and it may, in time, change the way traditional publishing sees their reader. That's a bit idealistic for me, but I do try to live in hope.
And all that from a whine about how hard cover design is. I should write a book or something.
I've been alternating between cleaning and creating, which sounds nicely pithy, though at this point cleaning mostly involves Roomba supervision. While the Roomba was running in the kitchen, occasionally bonking into my ankles, I made ice cream; I forgot to chill the mix before I put it in the machine, but it came out all right anyway, and while the machine did its work I did some messing around with the cover for Trace.
And then this got very philosophical, so I'll toss the rest under a cut.
Shopping for an image is always difficult. For Nameless, I had a great high-res photo I took myself, so that was no real matter, and I lucked out with Other People Can Smell You, but for Charitable Getting I spent ages trying to find something appropriate and finally Claire had to take a picture of a gong for me -- that image on the cover is actually the gong that inspired the gong in the novel.
The problem is that the image has to fit several criteria: it has to be quite high-res to go on the cover of a 6"x9" book, has to fit the colour palette "mood" of the novel, has to be (of course) representative somehow of the content, has to catch the eye, and has to be either rights-free or very cheap to obtain. I have a bunch of "free stock" photo/image websites bookmarked; National Geographic has the best photos but they're never high-res enough, and I find more and more the only one that's really worth a damn is Flickr. I don't really like how Flickr functions as a site, but it does have the Creative Commons, where I can search and browse loads of free-with-attribution high-res images easily.
On the one hand, cover design is where a pro publisher and their graphic design department would be appreciated. On the other, I do like doing the layouts myself -- the frustration of finding an image aside, there's something quite satisfying when you finally nail it. Plus you do hear horror stories; authors have basically no control over their covers and we've all seen dreadful covers with content only vaguely relevant to the novel. Recently there were a few cases where characters of colour were whitewashed.
I don't usually blame the artists; often they don't get to read the book before doing the design, and frequently they're getting low pay to do what they're told and STFU. I blame the publishers, because it's emblematic of a greater issue, not just the publishing houses wanting to control an author's content but their distribution points want to as well. There was a brilliant article I read recently which I now can't find to save my life which gave the example that Tesco's in the UK will sometimes decline to carry books based on their cover design.
So as ever, I am for the concept of the small or even individual press; of people being allowed to write what they want and publish it however they want. I am for whatever keeps a writer's vision intact for the reader.
But the problem always comes round to gatekeeping, because I don't want to waste my money on a shitty book and nobody else I know does either, with the result that nobody takes a chance on selfpub books. I tried to look around Lulu and see if there were any good books, and I couldn't fucking tell, and I haven't got the kind of cash to take a risk.
This is the question, then: who is promising you, the reader, that the book you get will be readable?
When you buy a book in a bookstore you're taking a chance, but the odds are backed by an agent, publisher, editor, and to some extent the bookseller as well. You do generally have a guarantee of good typesetting, few spelling errors, and correct grammar. You might not like the book, but there is a baseline of material quality that pro publishers promise you.
Say, just for the sake of argument, when you buy a book in a bookstore or from a known pro publisher online, your chances of a book you will enjoy are 70%. I'm basing that on the last six months, where I read thirty books and found about 25 readable, 20 actually enjoyable. (There's an interesting if occasionally enraging discussion about risk-taking in fiction books here, if you'd like a longer examination.)
When you buy direct from Lulu.com, or when you buy a selfpublished novel on Amazon or from the author's website, that percentage drops like a stone. You have no guarantee that anyone other than the author ever even saw the manuscript, let alone made suggestions. No guarantee that someone professionally edited or typeset the book. Recently I received a shipment in error, twenty-five copies of a cookbook instead of twenty copies of my book. The writing was all right, but the layout was dreadfully unprofessional. I can't even calculate how many good writers versus bad writers are out there self-publishing, but I'd fix your chances of getting an essentially readable book somewhere around 20%. Getting a good book, perhaps 15%. And that's being kind.
There are solutions -- I'm actually discussing some with various people now -- but none perfect. From an author's standpoint, the options are few. From a reader's standpoint, everything requires research: finding a reviewer who does selfpub book reviews, studying sample chapters to find an author you like and sticking with them, following blogs of writers who self-publish.
With the right equipment, and depending on how much time and money they're willing to invest, there is nearly nothing a pro pubisher can do that a self publisher can't, now that PoD is going strong and ebooks are flourishing. The one thing a self publisher cannot do is gatekeep themselves. You can't make a guarantee to a reader that what they're getting from you has a high likelihood of being a good book. The only way to do that is by building a relationship with your readers, and that's incredibly hard to do if you haven't got many because nobody will take a chance on your book. The hard sell doesn't usually work very well for books.
I'm lucky in that way, because I had people willing to take a chance and I had a body of readers who followed my fanfic to my original fiction. But it is a slow process, and there's no manual for how to do it. Even I don't know how it happened, and couldn't re-create it if I tried.
The best thing we can do as writers and as readers is, essentially, to take the fanfic model and apply it to original fiction. Because so much fanfic can be so shitty, we've found a way to save our reading time (the corollary would be a cash investment for a book, in original fiction) and with reasonable accuracy bring up the good stuff. We use recslists and recc communities, supporting the ones we find most to our tastes; we hold discussions about stories (yes, even in anon memes) and we tell our friends about the ones we like. We form fandom communities in which we all put in a bit of effort and get back a reasonable guarantee of quality. Say, 70%?
Readers -- and I include myself here even though I'm shit at reccing stuff in fandom -- need to talk about books. We need to review them, loan them to friends, support authors we respect, even support small publishing companies when we know they produce quality work and treat their authors with respect. As a writer with writerly contacts, I try to do this as much as I can, with projects like Hold Something (for which I also edit) and Candlemark & Gleam (for whom I sometimes headhunt authors).
This process of communal gatekeeping will never, ever sell as many books as Tesco or Borders or the big publishers, and it takes effort on the part of the reader. But it will support artists who choose to present their vision honestly and it may, in time, change the way traditional publishing sees their reader. That's a bit idealistic for me, but I do try to live in hope.
And all that from a whine about how hard cover design is. I should write a book or something.
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no subject
Date: 2011-07-07 03:53 pm (UTC)