SALE!

Because of the impending release of Book 7 in early July, the Kindle versions of Books 5 and 6 are temporarily on sale for $2.99! Pick them up while you have the chance.

 Click on the images to buy

Nuts and Bolts

This is not a terribly interesting post so here
is a cute image to go with it.

Very few people know how a novel comes together. Not even authors really know unless they self-publish, because the editorial and layout team at the publishing house handles it. That’s why so many self-published novels come out so badly – margins too wide, font too small, no page numbers, overly simple cover. People try to reduce page count to reduce price, which isn’t a good trade-off for the reader. And some people publish on eBook only and don’t worry about it.

I had some experience with this when I self-published Pemberley Shades as a POD (print on demand) back in 2008. I was trying to copy the layout of the 1949 edition to be loyal to the text, right down to the number of pages and the centering of the page numbers. But I had to guess at the font.

I’ve now done it eight times, and it remains tedious. When it comes back from the copy-editor, I review all the changes and upload it to Createspace, where they reformat it to my chosen trim size (which is very common but not preferred by their printer). Then it’s time to go in and chose the font, number the pages, and choose things like whether the chapters should have capital names and whether the count should start on page 2 and whether to number the introduction. Every single thing you see on the page is the result of a careful decision – or unfortunately, a not-so-careful decision, which is why I keep changing fonts between editions. Arial for Book 5 was a bad idea, but I didn’t know anything. Book 6 I used the recommended Garamond, but it turned out I had a weird edition of Garamond and that’s why it looks strange. Book 7 is in Minion Pro or something like that, or I hope it will be but it involves a lot of formatting issues with Createspace.

Boring, right? But it takes hours and hours and it’s something I have to do, always forgetting how long it actually takes until it’s 4 am and I’m still doing it and ON G-D IT GOES ON AND ON.

Book 7 (Young Mr. Darcy in Love) is almost done. We’re shooting for a July 1^st release, but it may be a bit later than that if Amazon holds it up with processing. It will be available on all eReader formats from Smashwords. If you would like a review copy, contact me. If you would like a print copy, you are eligible for one if you have reviewed at least five of my other books on Amazon. They don’t have to be long and they should be honest reviews, but it costs me money to send out print copies so I need some reliability.

Also coming up with July: Lots of giveaways and sales on my older books! So stick around. There’s lots more coming up. 

Publishing's Bad Business

Business first: The cover of book 7 is mostly decided, but I haven't officially sent it to my graphic artist who perfects the work because I don't have a page count yet, so you're welcome to comment on it. For more regular updates, you should really be visiting my Facebook Group Page, which is where all the action is. We're aiming for a July 1st release - in that range, anyway - with the eBook probably out a week ahead of the paperback because of the various waits in the approval process at Createspace. There are some big sales coming up - details to come - and contests around the release of the book, so stay tuned.

In addition to books 8-10 rolling out over the next two years, I'll also be working on a companion guide to the series, which lists all the dates and characters and historical background and discusses how the books generally came together. There's also short pieces and scenes that were left out of the print versions. After that ... well, I imagine, a rocking party in NYC where I celebrate never having to do anything Austen-related again.

In other news, I spent Thursday of last week at the Book Expo of America, publishing's trade show, where I was admitted as the assistant to my boss, a literary agent. They do technically allow self-published authors there but they don't WANT them there, and people with that on their badges generally get ignored. This is a trade show where editors and marketing people and book buyers and librarians have a chance to meet and do business and big publishers work up excitement about their new books. In BEA tradition, I was almost handed a ton of giveaway books I did not want because I would not read, and in the past few years I've perfected the art of not walking out with twenty of them.

It was also a time for attending panels where important people who think they have their finger on the pulse of their readers and a lot of charts and sales numbers to prove it say incredibly backward things about new technology and emerging markets. For example, there's publishers who are actually concerned about pirating and use expensive DRM (digital rights management) software to try to prevent it, which has never ever ever worked in the history of DRM. You could sink time and expense on hiring experts to protect you, or you could just go out into the woods and throw dollar bills into the biggest pit you can find. They will have the same result.

As outdated as this pirate's weapons.

Also in the panel someone said public libraries were the future of publishing, and people clapped because they were librarians and they don't want to be out of a job. But if libraries switch over to eBooks for their non-research materials, no one will go to them, and they won't need staffs. Or a building. I think this was lost on some people.

The main thing that occurred to me this year more than other years is the particular way in which the publishing business model is a bad model, and it only gets away with it because people agree to work there for far less money than other industries and there still is a certain worship of books, which is good. But their business model is super, super bad.

Anyone in business knows two basic things: (1) you have to produce a product people will want to buy, either because they actually need it or they think they need it, and (2) you have to sell that product at a price your customers can afford (only Apple is exempt from this). If I had a business selling backyard saunas, and twenty people came in each day and 19 of those people said they would love to buy my sauna but couldn't begin to afford it, I would have to seriously rethink my pricing to stay in business. Especially if the guy next door was selling perfectly usable, well-scrubbed, refurbished saunas for 70% off. Then I would be in real trouble.

In publishing, the company decides what books will be sold largely on guesswork, then decide on a price through a set of factors that are complex and can't possibly be seen by the average consumer, who probably just thinks that hard cover books cost too damn much. I for one have a reading habit well beyond my ability to pay, and when you consider I would have to pay $10 per book to take it out of the library (subway both ways to get it and then to return it), the only way to satisfy my needs it to find books on the used market, where I usually go for the cheapest possible price (or next-to-cheapest, if the cheapest one is in really bad shape to the point of being unreadable). I pick up books on street stands, in Salvation army stores, at flea markets, and from Amazon's used book shop. This is a blind spot for publishers because they have no reason to track non-sales (they make no money off a resale). And I can't be the only one doing this. Book costs decrease because they're resold; the only time I ever buy a new book is after Amazon marks it down or I have a coupon and I have also ruled out finding it cheap on the used market.

In other words, most books are too pricey for me. We're taking into account the fact that I'm poor, yes, but if people want to be reading as many books as I'm reading per year, or anything close to that, and they don't want to spend time and money going to the library only to find out they have to wait for the popular book to become available again, they're going to go used.

Indian book publishing has a different model. They price books based on how much the literate market can afford to pay for them. Even books that are imported for sale from abroad can prove to be too expensive so they reprint them in India, where paper is cheaper, at a drastically lowered price. This meets the demands of India's flourishing literary culture that they inherited from the British (or the English-language part did), which increases as more people become literate. So if they can meet the demands of the market, why can't the industry in America? If people are going out of their way to buy cheap e-editions or used books with damage to avoid high prices, it means prices are too high.

To be fair these recommendations would be hard to implement. Amazon can afford deep discounts because it sells its books at a loss, making up the money with high end electronics. It does this because it wants to dominate the market, which has worked out pretty well for them. But books shouldn't be a luxury item. Publishers have to face the idea that people are buying books cheaper because that's the real selling price the market can bare, not the ever-increasing prices set at a time of higher economic prosperity. And no amount of blogs and Facebook pages and Pinterest accounts and Twitter accounts and Goodreads author pages that they beg authors to throw up are going to change that.

The Greatest Gatsby

Last time I compared The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice. Tonight I'm just going to talk about the movie, which has no connection except that Daisy is played by Carey Mulligan, who played Kitty Bennet in 2005th Pride and Prejudice. Too bad Kitty Bennet has never been an interesting character.

First If you have 6 hours left in your life, download and listen to the audiobook of The Great Gatsby. Second, if you don't have 6 hours left your life, G-dspeed and stop wasting time with this blog. But for the rest of us, I recommend avoiding the Jake Gyllenhaal read (the guy who sounds and looks like Tobey Maguire, who's actually in the movie, but isn't the same guy to confuse you) and trying the Frank Muller version so commonly floating around on torrent sites. It is a great read but I enjoyed it more in audio form, something that is rarely true for me when it comes to books.

Then I recommend trying the most recent movie, partially because the other versions were lousy (particularly the Robert Redford one) and partially because it is awesome. I enjoyed Baz Lurmann's choice of directorial style, the one known as 'totally insane.'

"One of the greatest books in the English language and set in the 1920's? Let's make sure the movie is in 3D and feature as many modern rap stars as possible! Some of the scenes won't even be in focus! It'll be great!" And thank G-d no one stopped this asylum patient who is somehow allowed to direct movies.

The Great Gatsby is a book about excess and wild parties, or the first half is, and it really works for the first half, except maybe the first 10 minutes of the movie where the camera speed is turned up to "meth addict" and I'm serious when I say some important shots aren't even in focus. It's really disorientating and makes you grateful when people are just standing around and talking instead of trying to go places, but it also speeds up the duller moments that need to be in there, such as that critical first scene at Tom and Daisy's that establishes the tone for the book but is agonizingly slow. Things only get better with the scene at Myrtle's apartment (or her sister's, I was never clear on that), one of the slowest moments in the book where bored rich people say boring, dumb things and none of them involve Gatsby. Worst orgy scene ever for reasons not involving the technicalities of an orgy, and I've read Mr. Darcy's Diary (Sorry Maya. Thanks for making that scene short). In the movie it's a great amount of fun that you feel like you're having and Nick actually gets off some funny lines, which he continues to do in the movie in a way that doesn't pop out so much in the book because you're not staring at Tobey Maguire's confused expression.

Then Gatsby finally shows up in the fantastic set of a party just as glamorous as you were hoping and movie continues full tilt but with less confusing tracking shots as it builds up the relationship between Nick and Gatsby, which is harder to see in the book because Nick is the narrator looking back on the past and making harsh judgments and the movie he's more obviously a character. The sweetest scene in the movie is when Nick agrees to host the tea party with Daisy. Gatsby rushes to essentially reward him with free money via business connections, and Nick just says he'll do it as a favor, because he wants to, and Gatsby is shocked. I never noticed it in the book.

And then awful, awful Daisy, played very well by Carey (her husband is even better), and the movie slows down as the book does. But Baz Lurmann somehow made the scene of Daisy crying into a pink shirt not ridiculous, which was a masterpiece of directing as far as I am concerned. If the was an Academy Award for not fucking up an awful scene from a book, he would win it. He would win ten of them. He would get nominated a bunch of times and then win a bunch of times. Getting that scene right means you win Great Gatsby.

The reason I was so impressed involves my high school encounter with the book. One day our teacher let us watch part of the 1972 movie with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, which she explained was a total flop. "And this is the most ridiculous scene! Everyone just laughed and laughed! Killed the whole movie." And Mia's crying into this pink shirt and it's just awful and we all agreed with her.

The rest of the movie is a little dull, and at times still a little too over-the-top to be achingly sad, though there's one brief moment where I forgot that this book was a cautionary tale and begged that maybe this version wouldn't work out that way, and they would actually end up together. (Spoiler: they don't) I'm not a huge fan of DiCaprio, but he really sold me on Gatsby not just as an obsessive weirdo - which, to be fair, he is - but as a guy totally lost in his dream. Also bravo to whomever was in charge of making sure the actors had red eyes as if they'd just been crying or were going to cry, which had to be a good 40% of the movie. At some point even Tom looked like he at least had allergies or something.

Comic by Kate Beaton

In the end I obviously recommend this poignant, well-acted, incessantly well-crafted movie that makes the best of narration to capture the literary genius of Fitzgerald's descriptions. And the book has perhaps one of the best final lines of all time (even if it has a confusing run-on sentence), and it's also in the movie:

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning —— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

You can even listen to it:

Starts at around 1:54.

Up next: Hopefully I get back to talking about my upcoming book, which does not involve the facade of the American dream and instead involves British people trying to marry each other.

Gatsby vs. Darcy: An Unwinnable War

I had a long drive over the weekend and spent seven hours listening to the audio version of The Great Gatsby (the Frank Muller version), a book I hadn't read/heard since high school. I do recommend the audio version because when the book gets a little dull and you space out, the book continues as if you've continued reading! It may be one of the best English-novels ever written but there certainly are a lot of places to space out.

Had you asked me to describe it prior to the weekend, I would have said based on fuzzy memories, "There's a narrator living in a house next to a rich guy named Gatsby who is in love with a married woman and her husband is a jerk. Then I think there's a car accident and someone probably dies off-screen and the novel's over." Which is mostly accurate. As Kate Beaton pointed out in her book Hark! A Vagrant, it's a great novel for high school kids to read because it's basically a primer on how to find metaphors in books but it doesn't have many likable characters to relate to.

Compare this to the beloved but mostly metaphor-less Pride and Prejudice, which seem so to be its opposite in many respects. Both are about rich people trying to get married to the right people but mostly spending lots of time hanging out because they don't have anything else to do. When I first read Pride and Prejudice (also in high school) I found the first half mind-splittingly boring. It wasn't until Elizabeth got her explanation letters from Darcy that I suddenly realized I was reading a truly great book. In Pride and Prejudice you're agonizing over every moment of Elizabeth and Darcy's romance; in The Great Gatsby you're trying to determine what Fitzgerald is trying to say about G-d via the eyes of T.J Eckleberg's discarded advertisement in the valley of ashes. Darcy gets the girl, and Gatsby doesn't, mostly because he doesn't have the right kind of money ("old money"), another issue that is a focal point of Pride and Prejudice - inherited vs. landed money.

I could go on about this, but I'm not writing a paper for an English class. I will say that I recommend the audiobook version and taking another swing at the novel, whose beautiful words don't really translate to screen.

In other news, Book 7 (Young Mr. Darcy Falls in Love) has gone to copy-editing, so we're looking at a July release. It's a longer book than Book 6, and set safely back in England, where young people are again trying to pair up. There's going to be a lot of contests and giveaways and sales on the older books when we get nearer, so keep watching this space.

Week of April 7th

What I Learned This Week

(1)   When you’re at the bottom of your career, earning-wise, you have nowhere to go but up. Right? RIGHT?!?

(2)   The day before I die, I should write whatever the hell I want but try to make it bittersweet, knowing it will be read in place of an obituary written by other people.

(3)   That if I had a cat I would name it “David ben Purion.”

(4)   The guy responsible for inventing printed gun technology is the kind of person who clearly should not own a lot of guns, which is unfortunate. I put the odds of him dying in a shootout/gun accident at 50/50.

(5)   That I should have written more off these down when I thought of them and not put it off to Friday.

A Writer in Comics (Badly-Drawn Ones)