Self Publish or Traditional Publish? Which is the right way?

Yesterday, my cousin, who is also an author, posted this on my Facebook wall and asked my feelings about it.

Self-publishing has become a cult@Salon.com

The writer has encountered something I've heard a million times: If you go with a big publisher, you're selling out. If you go indie it's because you're not good enough to catch a bigger fish. If you're at a small press, you're almost cool enough to sit at the table with the hip kids, but you have to wear a scarlet P and sit at the far end.

Every day at every writing conference, this plays out.

And it's all BS.

Trust me, I grew up in cow country and I know bull poo when I see it.

I think the idea that there is one path to print is behind us. In some ways, the self-publishing movement and small presses that have grown out of it are the AAA ball of publishing. Some resent being referred to as minor leagues because it hurts their feelings. I don't care about your feelings. If you wear your heart on your sleeve, keep your book in the drawer where it belongs.

Publishers are inevitable. If the Big Six fell tomorrow, a thousand small presses would fill the vacuum because most of us have no interest in doing everything ourselves. And when we do it all ourselves, for the most part, we turn out some pretty crappy, un-or-unevenly edited crap.

There are exceptions, but not many. Publishers play those roles. The middle man is not a freeloader, they provide a valuable service for reader and writer alike. There will be some who can only find a readership on their own. For others, they will never find an audience, certainly not a broad audience, without an army shouting their name until it is heard above the din.

Want to do it alone and hire professionals to edit your book and design a cover and typeset your pages? Congrats, you're a publisher. I know what I charge for covers and it means you're better financed than most and applying that level of hurdle for writers to leap before they can reach an audience leaves out a huge portion of the voices telling stories that need to be heard.

For every one truly indie author that rises from the unwashed ranks of free self-published, unedited e-books, there are tens of thousands lost in the tumult. This is the primary role of publishers. Is it always fair? No. Is it easy to get over the wall? No. Is it always good? Of course not. But it is a system that has curated our literary culture for a few centuries now and they've done more good than bad. Because while we lambast them for their Davinci Codes and their encouragement of the "Me Too" market that has turned the YA section into the "Hot Vampire" section, the dollars spent on that pap gives cover to books like The Bookthief and The Adventures of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. And Davinci Code allows books like The Corrections and The Yiddish Policeman's Union a bit of breathing room to flourish and find their audience.

And while the midlist is frequently eulogized, it lives on in the smaller imprints that have risen up to take the slack and live leaner on smaller profit margins than the Big Six can sell to their stockholders.

Publishers are not evil. We just like to make them seem remote and uncaring and evil because it suits our personal narrative for it to be so. They're not the bad guys and we're not the heroes. We're all just trying to do the best we can to get our art made and in front of the people who want to read it.

The path for most will fall somewhere between. If you get your books in the hands of the people you want to read them and are able to write the next one, you did it the right way. If that doesn't suit someone else's vision of "The Right Way" to hell with them.

Extreme views in either direction make me stop listening. I don't have time for zealots.

tl:dr?
Watch John Green's acceptance speech for the ABA's 2013 Indie Champion Award. He's pretty darned close to what I wanted to say here.

Dumbo's Feather Revisited: Of Rituals and Writers

This is going to be a bit long. I apologize in advance.

I noticed recently that my coffee ritual has become rather sloppy of late. Rather than carefully monitoring the temperature of the water and the exactitude of my scoops of ground coffee, I've been sort of winging it -- phoning it in. Thankfully, the quality of your beans will save you to a point, but only just.

I've essentially perfected the mediocre cup of great coffee.

For those who think I might've sold out with that coffee cup logo, fear not. My favorite cafe has long since closed its doors and faded into local memory.

And whither goes the coffee shop, thither followed my writing ritual...

There just aren't enough writer-friendly coffee shops in the world any more. Speak not to me of the sundrenched sterility of the Starbucks lobby. I seek a dim place of creaky chairs and enthusiastically nerdy conversations. A place of fair-to-middlin' coffee and poor lighting. Lots of places to plug in a laptop are nice, but not required. Sketchy wifi is a plus because I get more done when Facebook's siren song is muted and unreliable.

How did I get so reliant on rituals? When did I teach myself that I can only fly while clutching a feather in my trunk? And why is there a mouse wearing a drum major getup in my hat anyway?

You'll note that this is one of those posts where I laboriously link back to previous posts where I told all of you not to do the very things I'm complaining about. That's because I call out hypocrisy wherever I find it, especially in myself. And I have to remind myself that I should practice as I preach.

And no, for the record, it doesn't help. Not one bit.

Why is my coffee so pathetically mediocre and why am I not writing regularly?

It would be easy to blame my current Big Crazy Project™ which is quite a bit more physical than my usual projects. I'm supposed to be making neat things and writing about them. I've made a lot of sawdust this year, and even knitted a stocking cap, but not much with knitting together the words. I don't really know why.

Speaking of big crazy, I just built a kitchen full of cabinets from scratch. My home is in a bit of an uproar as only a kitchen remodel can make it. Blame that!

It's not the kitchen's fault. It's not because I can't really get in there to make a decent cuppa; done right, all you really need is a clean sock, a kettle and some patience.

Yes, a sock. Not that I regularly use a sock, but you can. (And many aficionados swear by it.)  But you don't find me at the bathroom sink with my socks in the coffee pot any more than you find me at the computer studiously applying words to pages.

I could blame work.

In January, after a lengthy stint of under-employment, I began working full time at the writing center, taking on additional duties of marketing and graphic design atop my usual stints of database management and other jack-of-all-trades job duties.

It's taken some getting used to, this working full-time thing. But I can't really blame that. I work a solid 40 hours a week and then I'm required by union rules and state law to knock it off. I wrote three novels working 50+ hours a week (at all hours of day or night) for Borders.

The truth is, I just haven't felt like it.  It's a stupid and simple as that.

I haven't been feeling like putting that much effort into perfect coffee or perfect prose. Hell, even mediocre prose has been a bit out of reach of late. It's not writer's block -- as you know, I don't actually believe in writer's block.

So what is it? Depression? Lack of ambition? Stress? Too much sleep? Uninspired?

Sometimes in the dark watches of the night as I lay staring at the ceiling I seriously ask myself: Am I out of ideas?  Then I get up and jot ten or eleven ideas in the notebook I keep next to my bed just to prove to myself that I can and go back to sleep.

At the end of the day, I'm stuck with the uncomfortable truth: I've just gotten sloppy. With my coffee, with my writing process. Sloppy. I allowed myself to become over-reliant on a space and defined period of time set aside to do it. Too reliant on ritual and not enough on the simple steps of getting stories from brain to page.

I've long been an advocate of approaching writing from the standpoint that amateurs wait for inspiration while the professional puts their butt in the chair and puts words on the page.

So I'm flipping my advice on rituals on its head a bit. I'm going to have to accept at some point that there's a certain amount of ritual that I require in my life. It starts with coffee this morning. And from there, I opened this blog and actually typed out a blog post. Something I've been regretfully neglecting this year.

This afternoon, over a cold sandwich, I will update the Renaissance Artisan project on my progress in that project.

Later tonight, (after the counter tops are installed and I've put up a few dozen linear feet of bead board) I will sit down to my novel-in- progress and begin the first-half rewrite. Wifi disabled, I will write until my fingers seize up and I realize it's time for bed.

And let that be my new feather and my new mouse-in-a-silly hat.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Readers make the best writers

She asked: How did you learn to write?

The simple answer was "In school, just like everyone else" but the simple answer is seldom true even when it is factual. Yes, I learned to write in school. But the real question I think this student wanted to ask was "How did you learn to be a writer?"

And between writing and being a writer is a difference with a definite distinction.

I didn't say "In school", what I said was "By reading a lot of terrible books."

I don't think she believed me, but it's true.

I think all writers learn essentially the same way; not by diagramming sentences, but by reading them. Want to be a writer? Read vigorously and voluminously. Read everything you can get your hands on.

We learn to write by reading what others have written. We see what others did and imitating the ones we like and not the ones we hate. Slowly and by fits and starts we discover how to make dialogue sound like speech. And most importantly, we learn how to make decisions by making guesses about what will happen next and getting as excited by being wrong as we are when we're right. Because if we are wrong about the outcome of the story, that means we've come up with a new story, an alternative decision.

My dad called that daydreaming, but in reality it's the first steps of storytelling.

Sure, Scott, but you said "Reading lots of terrible books."

Bad books are in many ways more informative than the good ones. I learned plenty reading books I loved and cherished. My shelves are full of those books, but the ones I learned the most from are the ones I didn't buy or got rid of as quickly as possible. In many ways, I learned to write by reading books I hated and then making a point of not doing what those authors did.

Want to be a writer? Read. You want to try to recognize what the writer is doing, but before you do that, you have to read. Good books, bad books, fiction and non-fiction, blogs, newspapers, magazines, and comic books. In libraries and classrooms and secret reading nooks, under trees by the light of the sun and under the covers by the light of Mag. If it makes you want to throw it across the room in anger or frustration, fine.

But then go pick it up and try to figure out what it is that made you turn a book into a missile. Because that... that is a writer's homework in the only education we get. And a writer, as I always say, is someone who volunteered to keep doing homework everyday for the rest of our lives.

There aren't many rules to writing. Don't let English teachers tell you different. But there's one that I abide by without fail: don't write them unless you read them.

The perils of non-fiction...

For some reason, I find that non-fiction is harder to write about than fiction.

At this point in my writing life, it's strange and exciting to be doing something entirely new. To slake my appetite for words with some new flavor and test my tools on new materials.

My apologies for not posting more often. If you are following my non-fiction project blog "School of the Renaissance Artisan" you'll know that I haven't died or gotten lost in the woods. It's just that I haven't as much experience writing nonfiction, so I don't feel authoritative enough to really give good tips or even talk about it much.

For one thing, the "characters" I'm writing about are real rather than figments of my imagination, so I must be more careful with them. And they certainly won't do as I tell them or go where I want them to go at the whim of making a good story. And I can't just write them out of the narrative if they're being recalcitrant.

I can see why memoirists have been so notoriously prone to making stuff up.

And then there's the constant distraction of my drug-of-choice: research.

I've written before, at length, about the dangers of too much research. Often it becomes an excuse for procrastinating the beginning of a project. One more book and I'll be ready. I must constantly fight the impulse to get so lost in the minutia of a project that I never actually get around to beginning it.

The internet is especially good at sucking me down the research rabbit hole, yet this project would be next to impossible without it. Though I honestly profess to a Luddite streak a mile wide and a preference for the thousands of physical printed books on the shelves around me, without my e-Reader and computer, I would not have access to many of the reserves of the great libraries of the world. The Internet Archive alone is a font of knowledge that just keeps flowing and refilling like the oil can in the Hanukkah story. The historical works of Roubo and Moxon would be out of reach without a lengthy trip to the libraries that still hold copies behind glass and subsequent negotiations with their caretakers for access.

Without this font of distraction that is the internet, I would not have access to the consistently generous of masters of their crafts Chris Schwartz and Peter Follansbee; I would never have met virtually with historical cordwainer Francis Classe; nor would I have had the unpublished pin research of Rachel Jardine drop unannounced into my email inbox.  The curator emeritus of the Museum of London's medieval collections would likely never have sent me a parcel of research books as he did electronically at the outset of this project.

Technology is, as ever, both angel and demon, giving with one hand as it takes with the other.

As strange as it sounds, the hardest part of this project has been to remember to write about it. As dangerous a drug as research can be, more perilous by far is the lure of Making Neat Things. And I did not anticipate the high I get from discussing Making Neat Things with other makers online and in person. It's akin to the feeling of stepping from the workaday world into a writer's conference and for the first time finding yourself surrounded by hundreds of people who live the best parts of their lives internally. The conversations are different, the kinship you feel with almost everyone you encounted is intoxicating... and if you're not careful you'll spend so much time talking you forget to do.

As I and other writers have often said: writers aren't writers unless they write something. The same can be said of makers and any other of hundreds of trades such as these.

So I have been making a concerted effort to do more than I talk, which is sort of against the blogging aesthetic. Hence my lengthy absences for which I apologize.

Now if you will kindly excuse me, the sun is out and I've some doing to do.

~ Scott

The School of the Renaissance Artisan is a yearlong project to unlock the histories of the renaissance craft guilds and reunite the author with his craftsmen heritage. One man, 54 Livery Companies, 111 trades, 52 weeks. Join the fun at http://renaissanceartisan.blogspot.com/

Designing Books with the Hilariously Legendary Chip Kidd

Cover Story: King's Raven by Maggie Secara

If you aren't busy waiting for the Mayans to destroy the planet on 21 December 2012, may I suggest an alternative event? King's Raven, the sequel to The Dragon Ring and second in the Harpers Errant series by Maggie Secara, will be released.

When last we left the Harpers Errant series, I had just completed a cover for The Dragon Ring, based on a sketch by folklorist and amazing author in his own right, Ari Berk. (You can read more about that here.)   This time around, though, Ari was working on the release of his own beautiful and magical book 'Nightsong' so I was on my own with the new cover.

Maggie wanted something based on a greenman with a raven or two worked in somehow. In the last book, she had been shooting for a green cover but it didn't work out, so I really wanted to get her a properly green solution for this one.

With some ravens worked in.

Thanks for the most part to my wife the textile artist, my home library has a number of historical embroidery and design books, including this one (below) from a 1532 book of "voidwork" embroidery.

For the timehopping urban fantasy/historical fiction story like this, it was an excellent place to begin. In other words, it was exactly what I needed and yet nothing like what Maggie wanted, so into the Photoshop it went...

The 16th century green man looks like a bit of gloomy Gus. Look how long his face is! I wanted something livelier and a bit brighter in the eyes, certainly the King of Faery should be a bit more well fed, not to mention leafier.

In keeping with the 'woodcut' style of the cover illustration Ari and I collaborated on for the first book, I re-drew the green man from the original sketch, adding detail and taking nearly as much away.  Several layers of texture and a title block later, we had this:

 "While Oberon, immortal king of Faerie, lies under a terrible curse, the artistic spirit in the world is slipping away. The king's Raven would do anything to lift the spell, if only it hadn't also stripped him of his magic and flung him into an iron-bound past with a damaged memory. The only thing that can save them both is sealed inside a riddle wrapped in a puzzle that spans the centuries. Even with the help of an Elizabethan magus, a Victorian spinster, and a mad reporter, can mortal musician Ben Harper find Raven in time to solve the riddle, stop a witch, and restore the creative heart of the world? First he has to find the key."  - by Maggie Secara

I

Bearing letters patent...

I had a rant about the Apple "page turn patent" but it wasn't nearly as good as this one from Ron Charles, book critic for the Washington Post...

Our patent system is broken.

Adventures in Storytelling: A Giant Robot Road Movie

It's no secret that my inner child is a mad scientist. Back in 2010, when I was in the character-exploration stage for the first Howard Carter book, I explored some alternative storytelling methods using the @LaughManiacally twitter account as though "live tweeting" actual events of a mad scientist's marital spat. It was an interactive twitter short story that played out over the course of several days.

Just for fun: Here it is, laid out sequentially for the first time, On the Road with Dr. Villainous Deeds.
----

It began like any other day at the Deeds Labs. Igor brought me my morning coffee with the requisite three lumps of evil and all was well in my ongoing pursuit of the questionable sciences...

I forget, is it don't add evil to coffee, or is it don't add coffee to evil? #Ilosemoreinternsthatway
— Dr. Villainous Deeds (@LaughManiacally) June 22, 2010

Then the light on Igor's forehead began to flash, indicating that he had a message waiting. Only one person has Igor's number... then it struck me. Oh crap! It's Mrs Deeds's birthday!

Just for the record... Petrie Dishes make lousy earrings. #WifesBirthdayFAIL Good thing I know how to make diamonds. #WifesBirthdaySAVE
— Dr. Villainous Deeds (@LaughManiacally) June 23, 2010

But the Carbon-o-matic was on the Fritz and in desperation  I gave her the prettiest bacterial flora I could find. I find staphylococcus aureus particularly lovely in the right light. She seemed happy, but the following morning...

The Third Party: Why America is politically bilateral and what you can do about it

Every fourth October, my Facebook and Twitter feed are overtaken by people wondering why we don't have a third party in the United States.

The simple answer is that it only occurs to most of us to wonder this once every four years.

The more complex answer is that the United States electorate polarized because multi-party voting created chaos too many times and was abandoned over time.  Let me repeat that: We had several political parties and we voluntarily abandoned it because it created problems.

Why?

Electoral math.

For presidential elections, the United States operates on a principal of indirect election. Our individual votes are tallied at the state level and then votes are apportioned to the candidates by electors nominated by the state on a basis determined by that state. Every state handles these things differently. The first candidate to hit 270 electoral votes takes the prize.

As you might remember, this is how Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 but failed to win the presidency. George W, Bush won in states that had more electoral votes. The people said one thing, the election went another way.

The electoral college is the reason that a multi-party scenario is a recipe for constitutional chaos.  And until the electoral college goes away, this is unlikely to change.

Why?

Electoral math (again).

More specifically, because there's a constitutional mandate in place on how to decide a tie. In a race divided three ways, the odds of any one candidate having 270 electoral votes are pretty remote, which throws the presidential election into the House of Representatives and the vice presidential election into the Senate*.

Taking into account the way that electoral votes are apportioned among the states, this can lead to some genuine problems. The House of Representatives is not actually proportionally representative  and no clear path to victory for one party in a three-way race. Which makes the idea of fixing the duality of American politics a bit of a hail Mary.

What can you do about it?

The first step is to think about it more than once every fourth October. A recent poll by Gallup shows that there's hardly a groundswell of support for a third national political party.

The second is to think nationally and act locally. The idea of instituting a third party from the presidency down is mostly foolhardy. The game has to change from the ground up because it's the only way that the math works out.  In other words, before a third party president has a chance in a three-way race is if they have voices of their own in the legislature when their inclusion in the Electoral College voting throws the results into the House of Representatives.

The ground game is about getting third party senators and representatives elected before anything can happen at the executive level.  Without that, a third party presidential vote won't accomplish anything.

I won't say it's wasted but it is certainly ineffectual.

Why not just eliminate the Electoral College?

The problem with eliminating the Electoral College is that it's not all bad. It mitigates somewhat the ability of the more populated states to impose their will on the rest of the country and vice-versa. Electoral math has played a significant role in balking the rise of a number of candidates like Strom Thurmond, who ran on a segregationist ticket in 1948. Without the Electoral College, regional candidates might swing an out-sized bat.

Many attempts have been made to modify the American electoral system with mixed results.  I encourage you to familiarize yourself with them before taking a whack at it yourself. (It's worth noting that in 1970, even the aforementioned Strom Thurmond voted against a constitutional amendment eliminating the Electoral College, citing its history as a balancing force in divisive national elections.)

American elections are broken in many ways. From the billions in unregulated money being thrown around to the fact that there's no contingency in place for a natural disaster or terrorist attack that interrupts election day. Imagine if Superstorm Sandy struck a week later than it did. What do you think turnout would be like in the northeast then?

Here's a great video from YouTube's Explainer-Of-All-Things CGP Grey that lays things out the whole twisted scenario quite well.




* Deciding the two separately is a hold-over from the time before the 12th Amendment modified US election law to guarantee the president and vice president would be from the same political party. Prior to the passage of the 12th Amendment, the highest vote-getter in the electoral college became president and the second-highest, vice president, regardless of party. Needless to say, this scenario can be awkward to say the least.