Category: Journal

Getting fed up with Smashwords

First, the good: Smashwords exists. It allows independent authors to publish & sell their eBooks in a variety of formats, all without having to learn how to encode their own eBooks or build their own online store. Smashwords has also partnered with many of the major eBookstores out there, including Apple’s, Barnes & Noble’s, Kobo, and coming soon: Sony, Amazon, and Diesel, putting independent books on all the major eReader platforms. Smashwords takes only a moderate cut of eBook sales, leaving the authors with most of each sale.

Now, the bad/bizarre: I have been fighting with Smashwords for the last two months (and over & over with other issues over the last year or so) over their inconsistent and sometimes inappropriate application of their “style guide” and “Premium Distribution” rules. Currently, six of my eBooks are held up from “Premium Distribution” – all for things that are also “wrong” with my other 18 already-approved eBooks.

What’s wrong, you ask?

Well, when formatting my books, I like to use both an indented paragraph and a small trailing space (less than 1 line-height) after each paragraph. I believe that this enhances readability on dedicated eReaders, and I’ve been doing it for years. When my eBooks started getting rejected for this, I took a look and discovered that the Smashwords style guide explains how to do both, then says you are not to do both, but only to do one. All 23 of my eBooks have the same formatting, in this regard. When my 7 latest eBooks were rejected for this, I emailed support about this, making reference to the 17 others that had already been approved and my personal preference for it, and Mark Coker (founder of Smashwords) emailed me to say that “since this is what you want we’ll let this through.” One of them was approved, the others stayed rejected until I tried re-submitting them yesterday – now they’re rejected again for this and other reasons:

I use page breaks. Apparently (this is a new one to me, so I haven’t checked the style guide again today about it) the style guide advises that “since not all Smashwords formats respect page breaks we recommend you insert two paragraph returns before every page break.” Which I do, everywhere I feel it is appropriate. I’m aware that “not all” the formats respect page breaks! Last time I checked, only 3 of their 8 formats retained my page breaks. At the same time, I don’t feel extra line breaks are always appropriate where a page break would be the best option, and in some of my front matter I only put a single line break, so that -if page breaks aren’t available- the front matter doesn’t stretch on and on with unnecessary space. (ie: if it’s all going to be on one page, let’s try to keep it all on one page!)

Whoever reviewed my eBooks for premium qualification also decided that some of my books need new covers and new titles. They think they might be too confusing. Here, take a look at my books on Smashwords. You’ll notice that the top 7 eBooks have similar covers and titles. If you actually spent more than the briefest moment looking at them, I suspect it would become clear to you that 6 of them are individual short stories from the same collection, and the 7th is the full collection – since that’s what it says in their descriptions. And if you downloaded the preview of any of the individual short stories, so does the Preface to each story, very clearly. So since what I’d like is for people who try one of the individual stories to buy the full collection, I’m doing what I can to keep the stories connected to the collection, both by title and by covers. If you scroll a little further down the page, you’ll see I did the same thing with 7 short stories from my 2009 collection, More Lost Memories. (All 8 eBooks of which have been approved for “Premium distribution” more than once without my being told they were “too confusing.”)

Actually, when I’d originally submitted the first couple eBooks from this new collection, I got an email from Mark Coker asking what I was doing. I replied with an explanation similar to the above & never heard anything back… and now I’m seeing them rejected with this reason included once again in the long list of things “wrong” with them.

Prior to April of this year, when I went through and re-formatted and re-created all my eBooks for Smashwords (because they had their meatgrinder re-process all their eBooks and then decided to reject about half of them from “Premium Distribution” for the following), it was because they were rejected re: their Copyright declaration. At first it was that I used a correct Copyright declaration that said Modern Evil Press was the publisher (it is), but had failed to mention Smashwords. I also wasn’t using their recommended license statement, which I consider excessively informal, because I was using a proper, formal license statement instead. I guess their automatic filter was looking for either their recommended license statement or the phrase “Published By [publisher] at Smashwords” – I opted for the latter. Of course, then I had to go through and do it all again, when a few days later their system started rejecting for including the © symbol on the Copyright page.

You know, because some eReaders might not display it properly.

So I’ve been rejected for properly declaring my copyright. I’ve been rejected for making informed decisions about how I’d like my books to appear on eReaders. I’ve been rejected because my book covers might confuse readers, “especially once these go out to distribution.” (Because people who would spend $hundreds on an eReader are obviously pretty stupid, right?) I’ve even been told I need to change my books’ titles. The audacity.

This is why I am beginning to get fed up with Smashwords. Yes, all my titles are available to customers who go directly to Smashwords.com, and “Premium Distribution” isn’t the end of the story. Yes, if I go re-format all my books (because if I only go re-format the 6 currently rejected, I won’t have consistent formatting across all my titles – I’m trying to be professional and consistent, so if I take out the trailing spaces after paragraphs in some, I’m compelled to take it out of all of them – and resubmit them all, hoping they don’t get rejected for some other, new reason) for the third time this year to accommodate Smashwords’ ever-changing requirements, then it would simply be a matter of them telling me what I can and can’t name my books and what my covers are allowed to look like. Yep.

In other news, I don’t have this problem when selling directly into the kindle store. Everything there just works (once I’ve hand-coded my book into their proprietary format). Ooh, and apparently I can sell my eBooks directly through GoodReads, now? Maybe I should suggest to Mark Coker that Smashwords should partner with GoodReads as a “Premium Distribution” channel. Because (seriously) I’m nowhere near fed up enough with Smashwords’ frustrations to pull my books or otherwise give up on them; I like what they’re doing enough to want to see them do better. That’s why I suggested (to founders on both sides) that Smashwords and Podiobooks (both distributors of independent electronic fiction) should work together – and now they do. That’s why I tell every indie or aspiring author I know about Smashwords. I love hearing about upgrades, enhancements, and new partners… even when they do lead to some of my books going undistributed for months at a time.

I’m a Tesla, not an Edison

The rivalry between Tesla and Edison has gained much attention in recent years, though I have personally been aware of Tesla’s work since I was a boy. I have done a fair amount of research on Tesla, and some on Edison, but I’m just going to be painting their differences with broad strokes here, to serve my point – if you want to know more details, read (at least) their Wikipedia articles (and probably a book or two). The differences between them are striking in many ways, and some of those differences highlight things about me that separate me from other people.

The primary example I was intending to post about relates to Edison’s famous quote, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” This attitude correlates to what I know of Edison’s work habits and his process of “invention.” For example, we know that as the “inventor” of the light bulb, he started from the previously established invention of the incandescent light bulb and painstakingly went through many thousands of variations over several years in an attempt to improve upon the result. Meanwhile many other scientists and inventors were working on the same thing and at least one of them was awarded a patent on “Edison’s invention” a year before Edison had a working bulb. He worked with teams of people, worked things out on paper, worked things out through experimentation, failure, and repetition, then kept working. Living up to his famous quote, he put 99% of his efforts into working, and 1% into thinking.

Tesla, on the other hand, spent a lot of his time thinking. Visualizing. Solving problems (completely) in his mind before ever beginning work on them. When Tesla built the first induction motor, it didn’t take him thousands of tries, dozens of skilled assistants, trial and error after error after error. Instead, he simply built an induction motor, and it worked, exactly as he’d known it would. And the induction motor wasn’t simply a variation of an existing technology, it was a wholly new invention, the like of which had not been imagined by anyone prior to Tesla. The only thing which had stood in the way of its construction years earlier was a lack of financial backing.

That was another key difference between Edison and Tesla: Edison was very much a capitalist, working & creating what he did in order to build power and wealth. Tesla had intended, in multiple instances, to give his inventions freely to the world and tried to prevent them from being exploited for the creation of wealth at the expense of the greater good. Edison “invented” for money. Tesla invented to make the world a better place, to improve things, and because it was fun for him. Edison became powerful and wealthy. Tesla struggled with money, unable to complete (or sometimes begin) the construction of his later inventions for want of financial backing.

Then there’s me. As an author, for a long time when I’ve seen the apparently-universal advice to & from writers/authors about writing every day, editing everything over and over, revising, outlining, rearranging & reorganizing, polishing, tightening, and otherwise working very, very hard on the perspiration-parts of writing, I’ve always thought it seemed odd how far from my experience it was but had trouble expressing that difference. I realized recently that what other writers are doing seems very much in line with Edison’s famous quote, but that what I do is more in line with how Tesla invented.

They’re taking an idea and heaping upon it ninety-nine times more work to turn it into a somewhat improved iteration of the same thing everyone else is writing. They often believe there’s a “right” way to write, and that there are “rules” for writing a “good” book, and a lot of their work goes into trying to fold, spindle, and mutilate their ideas & words until they fit. Alternatively, I sit down and write a nearly finished draft on my first attempt. This wouldn’t be possible without weeks/months/years of ideas gestating in my mind, sure, but not in any rigid or organized fashion. Not with any ‘revising, outlining, rearranging & reorganizing, polishing, or tightening’ taking place mentally. As with Tesla’s visual thinking, all I usually have to do is open my mind and the story appears within it, fully formed. Then I simply have to sit down and, as Tesla built each of his inventions, write it as it appears in my mind – and it works!

Which is not to say that my books work in the same way that all those Edisonian writers’ books do. In fact, if you attempt to judge my creations by the rules of what is currently considered “good” books you’ll almost certainly find them lacking. This is because that is not what I was trying to write. I’m not trying to create the ten-thousandth iteration of any of the same styles/structures/ideas that are already out there, that many other people are working on. I’m trying to create the polyphase induction motor in a world of brushed DC motors, not to build a slightly-longer-lasting or slightly-brighter-burning light bulb or a slightly-better telephone transmitter (all Edison goals/”inventions” and all also “invented” by others).

My favorite of my novels embodies the experience of depersonalization disorder, which multiple characters experience within it, through its own structure, style, and in the way its confusing resolution erases the only actions that happened on its pages. This is clearly not done with making money in mind. Forget What You Can’t Remember exists because I believe it is an experience worth having, an experience different from anything most people have to face. It is not my least-popular novel, but it is close. It is certainly my most-loathed novel. Being nearly the opposite of a thriller, and the structure of a thriller being at the core of the “right” way to write a “good” book, it isn’t going to please everyone. I guess financial struggles are another thing I’ll continue to have in common with Tesla for the foreseeable future, too.

As long as I’m still on the more-thinking side as well, I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.

Next/new writing project

First: No, I haven’t painted anything recently. In fact, I’ve only painted one thing since the first week of February, and that was the cover of Time, emiT, and Time Again. I’ve put some effort into reading through part of the correspondence art course, but I haven’t finished working through it and I haven’t done more than a few sketches. I don’t know whether I’ll be showing at the Art Walk in September or October, but at the current rate, if I do, it’ll be all “old” work. (Not that 99% of people at the Art Walk would know.) Now:

I’m working on Untrue Tales… Book Four. I know I mentioned it on Twitter/Facebook, but in case you haven’t been following me; I began writing Book Four while I was in Las Vegas recently. (During the day while we were there, my wife Mandy was at a teaching conference, so I had plenty of time to work. Evenings were for having fun.) I got about 5700 words written in Vegas, and haven’t added a word in the three weeks since. Actually, I’ve been pretty darn depressed lately -including the last three weeks, comicon, Vegas, and for quite some time before that. I’m a bit surprised I was able to write anything at all. Luckily, I’ve been working on feeling a bit better and in the last week or two, and while I haven’t managed to get any actual writing done (and have actually experienced stress to the level of physical pain the last two times I tried to sit down to work on Book Four), I have been working through the story quite a bit.

I’ve seen/remembered quite a bit of the rest of the story, and it looks like instead of 7 books (or more) as I recall originally envisioning, the story will be well told in 6 books. The first three are done, you can read them now. I should have Book Four done within a couple of months. (ie: before NaNoWriMo’10) Then maybe I’ll write Book Five for release in early 2011 and Book Six for release in mid- or late-2011. I am planning on keeping them all very close to the same length as each other and as the first three books. The writing may (or may not) go quickly through all 3 books, one after the other, but I’m beginning to get used to the idea of investing months per book for editing/preparation/recording in advance of an official release.

I’ve just looked at a calendar, and if Book Four is ready by October 8th & I start podcasting it on the Modern Evil Podcast that week (immediately after TeaTA finishes its run), then it’ll run out in mid-December… Two more books of the same length would be another 5 months of episodes, if posted back-to-back, which would put the release of Book Five in December 2010 or January 2011 and Book Six in March 2011. Which I suppose would be alright. The first three were released in 2004, 2005, and 2006. I somewhat wish I could release the next three in 2010, 2011, and 2012… but I also don’t like the idea of sitting on a finished book for a year or more… and I kinda want to get all three books written as quickly as possible.

Of course, pre-2008 I was only writing/publishing about one book per year.

Now, for the release, I’m thinking of doing a modified version of what I’ve been implementing with my more recent releases (though certainly in line with the current availability of the first three Untrue Tales… books). I’m thinking of releasing the individual books 4-6 as eBooks and audiobooks and not as individual paperback books, then putting out the second trilogy as a combined paperback after all three books are done. I brainstormed a variety of models for putting out various other combinations of paper/eBook/audio at various intervals, doing various fundraisers, even thought about limited hardback releases, but due to the expense of paper (and the miniscule interest I’ve seen over the years in the individual books in the series in paperback) I think this will be the most reasonable plan. Then, maybe, I’ll look into doing a limited hardback release encompassing the full series.

On the writing itself: (Possible spoilers ahead) I haven’t written -or been in the mindset that created- books in the Untrue Tales… series for over four years. Since then I’ve been through a variety of life changes, not the least of which was my marriage in 2007. Despite Trevor’s having been reunited with his wife at the end of Book Three, their being together for the remainder of the series, and Book Four being about their life together before his being exiled to Earth, my relationship with my wife actually distances me from the relationship Trevor has with his wife. Writing Book Four has been an emotional stumbling block since (perhaps) 2005, and is the primary reason I’ve not previously continued the series. It was supposed to be about Trev & Toni’s love story, which led directly to his exile on Earth… and writing the core of that story is one I may never be able to do.

Luckily, upon examining the way the story needs to be told and how events unfolded prior to Trevor’s exile, I discovered that the emotional core of and the how-they-met-and-fell-in-love part of Trev & Toni’s story doesn’t get told in Book Four or (probably) anywhere in the series. Book Four is still nearly-all-flashback to what led Trev into exile, as told by Toni, but she’s keeping a vital element secret. Something that won’t be revealed until the cliffhanger ending of Book Five. Something which, since she’s keeping it secret (for good reason), means she won’t be telling the story of how they met, fell in love, et cetera, either. This takes a huge weight off my back re: writing Book Four.

I’ve also discovered that the tall man, the closest thing to an antagonist in the first 3 books, figures into Trev & Toni’s backstory and into future books – would you believe he’s actually a complex, sympathetic, and manipulated character? His love story, I get to tell.

Most of the rest of what I have planned, I can’t tell you about here. It would give too much away. But it’s going to be awesome. The main battle sequence in Book Five is mind-blowing, and the twist at the end of Book Five… well, the main storyline has been planned from the beginning, it’s just a few details that have needed ironing out. Most of which happens in a process very similar to remembering something that happened to me long ago… or far into my future. It’s hard to tell the difference, sometimes.

It’s coming. If you want to get early access, you can volunteer to be a ‘Beta Reader’ – you’ll get to read the books before the general public does, in exchange for giving me feedback on them. You don’t have to be a professional editor, you just have to be an interested reader (and familiar with the first three books in the series).  Email me, or comment below, if you’re interested.

blog adjustments

So… I installed WordPress 3.0 today here. It’s supposed to be wonderful, or terrible, depending on who you ask. I’ve seen some people swear by its exciting new features. I’ve seen other people, without actually trying it, decry the changes and declare that they’re going to stop using WP and code their own blog from scratch instead.

My experience so far: it looks mostly the same, except for all the things that are broken. It pretty-much broke all my plugins, one way or another, including Disqus comments. (Which I can have enabled, and then the WP admin pages break, or I can disable it… which I was thinking of doing anyway… possibly turning comments off altogether, since they certainly don’t happen around here the way they do on “real blogs”) Then, since I’d made quite a few custom changes to my theme to work with the various plugins, the site broke. I glanced at currently-popular free WP themes for a couple minutes, then decided to use the exciting, “new” default theme. Several features of which also appear to be broken.

I’ll probably tweak it a bit, and if you have suggestions please feel free to comment… comments ought to be working correctly… but yeah, that’s why it looks different. WP 3.0.

positive feedback

I was awakened yesterday afternoon by a phone call from an unfamiliar phone number. I always take calls from unknown, unfamiliar, and blocked phone numbers, preferring to lean toward optimism. Even when it interrupts my incomplete sleep cycle. (As I wrote in an essay in my upcoming release, Time, emiT, and Time Again, I live fairly ‘Unstuck From Time’ and the hours I sleep and wake drift casually around with little regard for the rotation of the Earth. In this instance, I had gone to bed a bit after 10AM and my phone rang a while after 3PM.) I answered the phone as politely as I could.

I do not recall the precise details of the conversation, but it began with a confusion. When the caller insisted that something must be wrong, that Untrue Tales… wasn’t all there, I immediately went into tech-support mode and tried to determine where their problem downloading might be. Soon, as they explained further and my mind wakened more, I realised that what they meant was that the story didn’t have an ending.

Which is correct. Only the first three books of the series are written, so far, and I have plans for at least another four (possibly six) books to complete Trevor’s story. I have been putting off continuing the story for the last several years. Book Four is supposed to be nearly entirely flashback, filling in the story that led to Trevor’s exile on Earth and separation from his true love, and I’ve worried that I won’t do the story justice.

I wrote & published (via Cafepress, originally) Book One in 2004, Book Two in 2005, and Book Three in 2006. In 2007 I began seriously working on starting Modern Evil Press, buying ISBNs, contracting with Lightning Source, and getting several books both in print and available for purchase everywhere. And got married. In 2008 I stopped working a day job and started being a creative full-time, devoting quite a bit of that time to creating audio versions of my existing books and writing Forget What You Can’t Remember and More Lost Memories, which were published on 1/1/2009. In 2009, in response to certain feedback from readers of FWYCR, I spent the better part of the year doing research on zombie novels, then wrote Cheating, Death. Then edited together the Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut for sale as an eBook. So far this year I’ve put out the print edition of LaNF-DC and am nearing completion of this new collection of short stories and essays, Time, emiT, and Time Again. I’ve been busy.

Then, while I was working on Cheating, Death I had a few ideas for an alternate history universe where I could tell at least a few good stories. I’ve been doing a fair amount of research on the period and characters from which I intend to develop these stories from, but the task is far and away the most research-intensive project I’ve ever attempted. (Normally I prefer simply to write the stories and worlds that originate in my own imagination, rather than to attempt to start anywhere near actual history and real people.) So I’ve postponed it a bit, too. In fact, putting together (and expanding) Time, emiT, and Time Again was partially because I suspect that I might not feel ready for the first book to see print by the end of 2010, and I wanted to be sure to put out at least 2 new books this year.

On the other hand, I’ve received my first enthusiastic contact from a fan since Dragons’ Truth also led a few people to ask me if/when there would be a sequel. (My response to that is a question of where, exactly, one might go from the end of Dragons’ Truth. As soon as someone has a reasonable idea, I don’t see any problem with pursuing it.) I know thousands of people have downloaded the eBook and Podiobook versions of each of the three Untrue Tales… books, but the dropoff in readers/listeners from Book Two to Book Three is fairly significant, feedback & reviews are sparse & mixed, and I’ve long suspected that people aren’t getting to the end or don’t like the series very much. The only people who, prior to today, had asked me about continuing the series were people who hadn’t read it yet and were avoiding it because it was unfinished.

Actually, I’ve still been asked more frequently about the description of the fireplace in Book Three than when or whether Book Four will be written. As in: “I really liked the whole series, except for the description of the fireplace in Book Three. What was that about?” That, dear readers, was in the same vein as the entirety of Forget What You Can’t Remember; I was trying to simulate in the reader, via writing style and structure, the experience the character is having – forced on you by the act of reading itself. You like to feel tension and excitement while reading the tense, exciting parts of a thriller. You like to feel as though you are being romanced while reading a romance. I just tried to do the same thing with irritating distraction (in the fireplace), depersonalization disorder, and amnesiac confusion and ethical doubts (in FWYCR).

Yet I’ve now had a great conversation with someone who not only liked the Untrue Tales… books, but is eager and excited to read the rest of the series. Eager enough to look up and call the author’s phone number, to ask about the rest of the story. Which is, in itself, perhaps enough motivation to attempt to squeeze Book Four into my schedule before starting on the alternate history series. At first glance, I think perhaps if I start thinking about it now, I might be able to finish it & publish it by the end of August. Or perhaps September.

Even though I’m not much motivated to write it. I’m a bit distanced from the explicit erotica, violence, and (the core of the thing, which most readers will never notice) the central motivation for the whole project being the satire by exaggeration of the way series like Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events were unfolding at the time. Rather than despising such frustratingly written yet inexplicably popular books and wanting to mock them by emulating and exploding them, I just don’t care about them any more. Technically I had already got to that point by the time I published Book Three, but it has been a real stumbling block to the continued writing of the series. I will have to determine whether I can either simulate or replace that motivation, in order to continue the series without drastically altering the storytelling style.

Perhaps this comes down to that question of ‘why’ – Why I write, why I publish, why I do all this work. If I write “for the readers” I’ve got to finish the series. If I publish to be able to write what and how I want to write, I’m fine to go on ignoring it. I think it’s complicated and contains some of both of those (and other factors), which is why I’ve neither written the next book nor taken the first three out of print. I shall continue to think about  it, and I’ll see if I can start working on it this summer.