Meow?!

If you’ve ever worried what long-term effect text-messaging, LOL or 733+ speak might have on literature, I have good news.

Child #1, who is fourteen now, has reported that one of her friends on the internet told her the following:

“However many exclamations you leave in your manuscript is how many cats you’ll have when you get old.”

Fear not. The future is in sarcastic, but good, hands.

Something New

Okay, so it’s already June 22nd, but I finally posted my first montly editor’s pick over on the LPI blog.

Poor Aubrey. We’ve had to sit on this first pick forever, thanks to some red tape.

Anyway, erotica snobs, rejoice. There are literary authors out there who can scorch your toenail polish. My first pick proves it beyond any shadow of a doubt.

And for the record, I did hesitate to make an editor’s pick: “But it reeks of favoritism!”

You’re darn right it does.

Follow-up on RWA

Okay, so I got to thinking today, which is never good.

Let’s say someone DID start a new romance organization specifically geared toward digital authors.

What would the “legitimate publisher” guidelines then be? What would they be based on?

All Right, Already

After five emails asking why I wasn’t all in a tizz over the RWA happenings, here’s my official statement. My opinion might be unpopular, but it is what it is, so…

First, I personally don’t believe the value of RWA truly lies in what RWA can do for you, rather its membership. For a majority of its members, it’s the camaradarie that counts: the inclusion, the friendships, the support, industry news (and gossip) shared between writers with similar goals.

The fact RWA now gates exposure between members, editors and publishers pretty well negates the organization as a worthwhile financial investment when the same camaraderie, inclusion, friendships, support, news (and gossip) can be had for free online.

Every publisher has a website. Nearly every editor’s email is widely available. Few publishers would shoo or ignore an author writing in with questions.

Furthermore, we have blogs, Twitter, Cover-It-Live, and .pdf that can deliver all workshop information in a permanent medium. Those tools can also be used to conduct editor appointments and any number of other things.

What I’m getting at is, if the members are ticked off because RWA can’t get with the times, the members and publishers are equally at fault for not embracing the digital tools at their disposal. Of course, the toys are not the same as getting together with 3 or so thousand of our closest friends, but that too could be arranged without the RWA stamp of approval.

Bottom line, if RWA members are serious about providing specialized support to digitally published authors, then stop seeking approval or permission from RWA for every little achievement, step up to the plate, and start a new organization for eRomance.

(Don’t look at me — I’m too busy actually working in publishing to do any such thing)

…an den?

Brian just showed me one more reason to love the internet.

Already?

I’m not sure how, but it’s gotten to be nearly that time again… 

RWA National is almost upon us. I’ve decided not to go this year, so I’ll do an online workshop again.

It sure helps to have a topic, and that’s where y’all come in.

Suggestions?

(Bear in mind I’m an editor, Jim, not a marketing/branding guru)

eHouston, We’ve Got A Problem

ETA: This has been sitting in my drafts folder for almost a week, and I had every intention of letting it languish there indefinitely because it read too much like a rant, and I’ve been doing too much ranting lately.

But then I saw this DA post and changed my mind, because the crux of it has suddenly become all too relevant.

ORIGINAL POST:

Think the golden age of digital publishing is finally upon us? Well…someone grab that eagle, because it’s nowhere near ready to land.

Digital publishing has problems. SERIOUS problems, and if the problems aren’t solved, we could be doing irreperable harm to the very industry we’re trying to promote.

I’m talking today about print convention —  the many spatial and symbolic building blocks that relay an incredible amount of information to readers, without words. Things like indents, font type, white space, dashes (Kindle’s still Latin1? Really? Hell-ooo), double quotation marks, font sizing, pagebreaks, and etc.

I’ve recently taken part in a grueling production system overhaul. My goal was to ensure Lyrical’s ebooks would be xml compliant in order to keep them viable for some time to come. I learned very early on that html/xhtml and print convention do not work and play well together. It is extremely hard to mimic crucial print convention in a digital medium.

If you’ve ever tried to post an excerpt on your blog or website, you no doubt know exactly what I’m talking about: the excerpt ends up laborious reading because the spatial requirements of print convention are dang near impossible to reproduce without a whole heck of a lot of CSS.  

If you were working with a web designer to perfect this, and ultimately gave up, consider yourself forgiven — the coders think you’re being ridiculously picky when you’re only trying to please your readers.

Add to this another problem: the device developers want toys, options, bells and whistles to make their devices appealing to consumers. So what do they think is appealing?

San-serif font, apparently. Yet there’s a very good reason why traditional print books use serif fonts. If you don’t know what it is, you probably shouldn’t be developing reading technologies.

And then we arrive at my own personal nemesis: indent depth. This has been turned  into a “user setting” so readers can “personalize their reading experience”, which has caused many devices to completely ignore any CSS controlling that vital print convention, and often results in no, or too shallow, an indent to clearly define the start of a new paragraph.

For anyone who just thought “big deal,” let me explain why my knickers are braided about this frontlines battle in the xml vs. print convention wars. As a parent volunteer, I spent a lot of hours being read to by kids at a local elementary school. Everyone ought to be just as concerned by the following as I was:

A boy was reading to me, tracing his finger along a line of narrative. He kept getting hung up from one line to the next because the indents in the book were so shallow, he didn’t understand that one paragraph had ended and another had started, and thought he’d missed something.

This boy was 7 years old. He already knew the print convention. The convention wasn’t followed, and he got frustrated to the point he very nearly gave up. Had it been anyone else but me sitting there, able to explain that he was 100% right that the print didn’t make things clear enough, and that the book was at fault, not him, our industry might have lost him forever.

Yes, I did just use a poorly printed traditional book as an example. Read on.

Now hand that same kid an ereader and let him go nuts with the settings. Will he understand why the book is so dang hard to read? No. Chances are, some crazy old editor won’t be sitting next to him explaining print convention.

Yeah, user preference settings are great, when you know what you’re doing. Most readers won’t understand the consequences of print convention’s absence, and they shouldn’t have to. Publishing isn’t merely the act of distribution. Publishing is, in large part, quality assurance, and coders, designers and manufacturers are now just as much a part of publishing as authors and editors.

In all the haste to add user features (and God forbid value) to ereaders, the device  manufacturers don’t seem to understand the mantle of responsibility they’re so eager to wiggle into. People won’t buy devices just to set them on a shelf. They’ll want to actually use them. But what happens to reading enjoyment in stock projections, market share and patents? Do the corporate and tech sides forget what makes reading enjoyable in the first place?

Given everything I’ve learned in the last two years, I’m forced to conclude they do, so here I am with a reminder. The desire of any reader is to FORGET THEY’RE READING and become completely caught up in the story. Bells, whistles, toys…they’re distractions rather than desirable features.

Which brings me to display errors: As an editor, I am all over anything that breaks immersion. Any distraction or disruption in the reading experience can cause a reader to put a book down and never pick it up again.

Explain to me, coders, why it is in any way acceptable to have illegal character boxes or big huge blank spaces in ebooks. Yes, there’s a coding error in the ebook file itself. But you know what? eBook publishers wouldn’t have to produce 90 different file types in 90 different character sets if the manufacturers weren’t quite so eager to hogtie their consumers with proprietary file types.

That’s how mistakes happen. That’s how immersion gets broken, and that’s how our industry is losing the fight we ourselves started.

We’re already bucking a few hundred years of print tradition by taking books digital. If we ignore the importance of print convention — and the neurological processes going on behind the scenes — with our shiny new medium, we are damaging, maybe irreparably, the experience of reading for many generations to come.

It’s imperative that device developers, xml coders and traditional print publishers have a meeting of the minds now, before the state of print convention is devalued even farther in favor of shiny things.

We will never coax print-readers over to the digital side until we can expertly mimic the print experience. The way things seem to be headed right now, with all camps divided and serving themselves instead of readers, digital publishing will never, ever be able to deliver the experience — or reap the rewards — we all desire.

And no DRM. Paying customers aren’t thieves. DRM is a hold-over from the traditional publishing model, and even a majority of “new” digital publishing models are profoundly defective. 

If we want this industry to survive the digital age, all camps have to get on the same page (if you’ll forgive the pun) and borrow Bezos’s talent for revision.

Meanwhile, while I’m keeping myself awake nights trying to figure out how to save print convention and defend a reader’s right to actually enjoy a book on their 9-gabillion dollar chunk of e-ink and plastic, I’m hearing a lot of celebrating on some big blogs about how our day has finally come.

Maybe it has, but we are not ready for our close-up, Mr. DeMille.

First, we have to go back to the very fundamentals of reading to make sure we’re reinventing only those parts of the wheel that need re-inventing.

Print convention isn’t broken. The technology we’re pursuing is. We need smart innovation, and we need it now.

A New Pet-Peeve

Egregiously busy around here, as ever.

And of course I surface to gripe about something that used to annoy me, but now makes me downright mad.

Secondary characters in romances: You know the ones — the mother, the sister, brother, partner, gay BFF who says the right thing at just the right time. The “heartfelt talk” that helps either the hero or heroine see their romantic interest in a different light, or perhaps see just how badly they’re screwing up.

Pick up any romance — at least 7 in 10 will have a scene like that these days. From a theory standpoint, that secondary character could be serving as The Mentor, The Trickster, The Herald, or a Threshold Guardian, depending, but…

Why the HELL aren’t the hero and heroine having these conversations with each other? People don’t choose romance to get a character reference from some random bobble-head secondary character.

If you’re writing a romance and you’ve used this tired old device as a stand-in for real conflict intensification and resolution, think twice. Unless there is an extremely compelling reason — and I do mean extremely – why tension and understanding can’t be accomplished between the main protags alone, take the binky out of your mouth and rewrite the scene between the hero and heroine.

Yes, I can hear your protests. “But that wouldn’t work because…”

Hey, despite what the rest of the literary world might lead everyone to believe, no one said writing romance was easy. Or if they did, they’ve never written beyond chapter 1.

And never use the word “chuckle”, lest ye forget.

Can’t…Stop…Laughing

Maybe I’m just over-tired, but… aaaaaaahahahahahaahhaahah

http://failblog.org/2009/05/20/attempted-murder-fail/

Adventures in Publishing

We (Lyrical) had something happen this week I think it’s worth sharing with authors, a sort of “please never do this” caveat.

First, let me repeat for the umpteenth time that publishing is a business. A contract for publication is a legal document that holds both the publishing house AND THE AUTHOR to very specific obligations.

Once you sign that contract and return it to the publisher, it becomes legally binding. After signing, you can not suddenly decide to sign a contract for the same work with another publisher and ask the first house to tear up their contract. 

Mind you, Lyrical took one for the home team and let it go. We’re not interested in getting this particular author in hot water with the other publisher in question, and we’ve issued a release of rights.

The point is, any other publisher might not have responded the way we did. (And personally, I feel we set a dangerous precedent, here, but were left little other choice.)

So please don’t do this. If you submit simultaneously to a number of houses, please wait until you’ve received response from all parties before accepting a contract for publication. It IS legally binding, and this is a real good way to land yourself on the “unprofessional ” list.