I began on November 1, for NaNoWriMo, a lark.  Or so I thought.  The truth is, this story has been rattling around in my head for [...]]]> Since November, I’ve been writing a serial novel for a blog, The OtherLand Chronicles, which I’ve written about here several times.  After two months, I have some observations.

I began on November 1, for NaNoWriMo, a lark.  Or so I thought.  The truth is, this story has been rattling around in my head for more than three years, gathering bits and pieces to itself.  Every so often, it came to me with a new shiny something, like a child who wants to play, and I would say, “Oh, that really is clever, but I don’t really have time right now to do anything with it.  Hang on to it, okay?”  The book-child wold nod and amble away, admiring her little treasure.

Over and over and over this happened, until I realized that I had a LOT of material.  Like an entire world and backstory and a story arc long enough for a trilogy.  It was all born from my walks in the parkways around Briargate, and that’s a lot of walking.  Every day, year in, year out, me and my dog and the story brewing.

Any writer knows that sooner or later, that work has to be done.  It will force its way into your schedule no matter what else you’ve got going on, and it will make itself so very attractive that you will have no choice. You’ll be seduced.

I was seduced. Now I find myself writing an entire book in public, which is not the most comfortable thing in the world. It forces me to find more time to write than I usually would, and for the first time in years, I’m really a hermit.  I don’t want to go anywhere.  I have work to do. So much work, all of it so different, and so much fun in its own ways.

I also discovered that as much as I’d like to do a “serial draft” where I don’t change anything, that was just not possible.  I had to go back and do some revisions for the sake of the story. I had to rewrite a couple of scenes pretty substantially and move a couple of them around, and until I did it, the book stubbornly wasn’t going to let me move forward.

But here’s the thing: this is my play project, so I get to make the rules.  My promise to the readers of the material is that I will finish.  I will not quit until I have a complete story.  Turns out my promise to the story is that I have to serve it first.  Which is always the way.

For the record, I am having a blast. This is as entertaining as anything I’ve done.

If you haven’t been reading along and wish to begin, start at the beginning.

If you have been reading, I finally got new material up after the long Christmas break.  Start at Chapter Eleven, Scene 4

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For three years, I wrote a column called The Care and Feeding of [...]]]> “Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.” — Edna Ferber

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For three years, I wrote a column called The Care and Feeding of the Girls in the Basement. It was a chronicle of my day to day struggles and rewards with the writing life. Much of it was written during an enormous transition in my life.  The column was written for a group of professional, commercial fiction writers. (NINK, for those who might know it.)   To my surprise, the columns were quite popular, and I really enjoyed writing it, but after three years, I’d written plenty and gave it up.

The story might have ended there.  Except that people kept telling me that they had kept the columns to re-read. They gave them to friends who were feeling discouraged.  And because the newsletters are private to the organization, they did not have a wide circulation. Aspiring writers never saw them.

So I decided to collect them for writers–aspiring and published alike–who might find a laugh or inspiration or encouragement in them.  There are two volumes of columns, but my ebook genius and I are collecting three books of the most popular class materials for release in the fall.  (First, the contemporaries to which I’ve regained the rights–stay tuned).

Without further ado, an excerpt from Book #1

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AN EXCERPT

Beginner’s Mind:   Keeping the Faith
from The Girls in the Basement

Talk on one of my email loops has been exploring the changes and ups and downs we all experience after five or ten or thirty years in this business.  Several writers are discouraged by crushing career news and financial setbacks and the challenges of living as a writer.

The discussion led to questions of faith.  How do we keep going? How do we recover that fire?  Where did it come from in the first place?  And how did it get lost?

Writer Raphael Cushnir says the dark night of the soul comes to all of us in different ways, but the emotions we experience during that dark night are all the same. A long-time writer who is struggling with reinvention or renewal is struggling with a disturbing set of questions. Was she wrong, all this time, about her vision? Is he, after all, a fool for loving this work, just as cousin Harry and his mother and Aunt Jane have said? Should any of us try to make this our life?

While this discussion was going on, I was also talking with a friend who is beginning to sell to non-fiction markets.  He’s been in the music business a long time and wants to write for a living so he can stay home with his wife and daughter.  He’s a pretty talented guy.  He’ll probably make it, and the writing life can’t be any worse than the music life. We had lost touch years ago, long before he actually made it into the music world and I made it into the writing world, and through the delights of the Internet, we have been spending many happy hours talking about old times and new.

And writing.  He always understood creativity.  Writing now burns in him the way songs once did.

He sent an email (from Ireland. I love writing that: my friend in Ireland. Very nice of him to end up there) that poured out his desires, his path thus far, what he thinks he might be understanding, what he has yet to figure out.

His longing filled me with a bitter-sweetness, a swift wish to return to the beginning, to the magic.  I find myself feeling cautious in my replies, as if he’s just fallen in love and I’m an old married hag, reluctant to douse his fever.

“So, tell me,” he emailed. “How did it happen? How did you sell your first book?”

My flood of memories may be not unlike yours. I was twenty-nine. It was November 22 (never mind the year), just before Thanksgiving.   It was a category romance I had called The Phantoms of Autumn, about a classical guitarist and a writer who met on a train journey.  My advance was four thousand dollars, which was almost precisely double my annual income as a bowling alley cook and attendant—a job I’d taken to help make sure I stayed focused on writing work—and more than enough to get my phone turned back on.

Beyond the simple facts, of course, are a host of emotions and memories.   The late nights with my headphones on while my very young sons and husband slept in their beds.  The jumble of undone housework that meant I never, ever allowed anyone to “drop by”.  The cloistered life I led during that passionate period when I had no time for anything but the books, the boys, the family.

I remembered, too, how I’d stood in my kitchen a few weeks before that magic phone call, weeping bitterly over a rejection that dashed a very real hope I’d had of making a sale to a literary magazine where the editor liked me.  I didn’t know how much longer I could stand to see yet another SASE with my handwriting on the outside, knowing it meant a rejection.  My fire, my belief in myself, was dwindling, and I didn’t know how I could keep going on like that, believing when no one else did.  When I look back, I’m not sure how I discovered the chutzpah to believe so absolutely that I would sell a book eventually.   But I did believe, with a depth of faith that—

Well, more of that in a minute.

The facts of that first sale don’t reveal how many pages I wrote trying to get there.  Thousands.  Many thousands, probably.  As you did, I’m sure. I wrote poems and short stories and aborted novels, and finished novels that were not particularly good, and journals and papers and articles that were published, first in the college newspaper (where I also had my first column), then in the local newspaper.   The facts don’t reveal how many pages I read, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, considering how fast and voraciously I put books away in my teens.

Telling Tom about that first sale, I found myself nostalgic for the time when I was yet dreaming.  The time of magic in the pages of every writer magazine, every tale of every writer’s first sale, every breath of lemon-scented hope that came on rejections scribbled by editors. When I spent endless hours reading, dreaming, plotting out books, scribbling new ideas. There was nothing I didn’t want to know, no stone I could leave unturned.  I thought of nothing much but writing for a living.

I’m sure you were much the same.

When I wanted to try to sell romances, I read them with a serious eye, taking them apart, highlighting the passages that illustrated the techniques the writers had used to increase curiosity or sexual tension, describe something, or create a mood.   I kept my favorites at hand when I needed to know how to do almost anything, so I could refer to the masters’ techniques.  I still remember the books I studied so intently: Rebecca Flanders had an entire section in my notebook, as did Sandra Brown.

I remembered, too, walking my five-year-old son to school in the mornings that fall.  I would say to him, with a sort of Julie Andrews, Sound of Music lilt to my voice, “One of these days, there will be a note in that mail box that says, ‘Yes, Barbara Samuel, we would like to buy your book.’”  He, small and blond and beautiful, would say, “I know!”

And he was the one, the day the call came in, who said, “Mommy, they said yes!”

(He is also the one who later said, “I will never be a writer. Give me a cubicle, a regular paycheck and health insurance.”)

I didn’t write all those things to my friend. I wrote just a few of them, to entertain, to inspire—he’s yearning so hard for book publication that his desire is a living being. After I wrote these things, I found myself tasting something in memory that I couldn’t quite capture.   Not quite hope.  Not quite dreams.  Something else.

And as will happen when I’m being Instructed to Pay Attention, I experienced a most unhappy writing week.  For one thing, the words themselves were being very, very stubborn.  I’d sit for a day and write a total of three or four pages.  It was agonizingly slow work in that beginning stretch where every detail is world building, and each new fact requires some thought.

I also had a business problem or two, and I felt sorry for myself for not getting  exactly what I wanted exactly when I wanted it.  I couldn’t seem to settle in and work, no matter how I chained myself to the monitor.  I grumpily wondered what the whole point of it all was.  Why bother? It would be much easier to open a restaurant or go lead adventure tours.

Oh, and let’s not forget that it was spring.  I’m an outdoor girl with a passion for gardens.  Who wants to sit inside and write books when there are flower beds to be weeded, roses to be pruned, trails to be hiked?  Not I.  Not when the grass is greening under a brilliant blue Colorado sky and the cats are coming in from the backyard with their fur mussed and scattered with seeds from rolls in the warm dirt.

Things felt stirred up in me, too. I was thinking of the discussion of long careers, and how to keep them going for even longer—the flexibility and lightness of attachment required, the terror of seeing how capricious the whole thing is.   And I was having this discussion with my friend (in Ireland, remember).

I was also teaching an on-line voice class to a small group of very talented aspiring writers who are struggling to understand their vision and song. Their hunger to publish reminded me, too, of how important to me it once was to cross that line.

Where is our faith? How do we tend it during a dark night of the soul?

We need to try to hold on to a beginner’s mind, a beginner’s passion.  When it becomes difficult to remember why we’re writing books,we should go back to the beginning. What did we dream about? What did we hope to accomplish?

In the beginning, we’re open to a dozen answers to whatever question might come up. We’re willing to fly, reinvent, start over, try again, always burning to have our words read.   As we become experts, however, we can become entangled in the desire to be read a certain way, to receive certain rewards.

I don’t discount the difficulty of this business.  It’s brutal, and only the most resilient survive.  But those people do, and it’s worth considering how it happens if you want to be one of them.

As I type this, Julie Andrews is singing in my head: “Let’s start at the very beginning…” Which makes me think I should go watch The Sound of Music again. It’s one of my favorites, hopeful, uplifting, happy.  It’s all about perseverance under difficult circumstances. Another one I like is Fame.

What are some of your favorites?

Are they favorites for the same reason? Has your faith faltered? What can you do to bolster it? What can you do to go back to a beginner’s mind? Become reborn? Believe?

One of the things I always tell voice students is that we are all stuck with certain themes and ideas and motifs that will show up in our work.   As I’ve been going through backlist titles to get them ready for sale as ebooks, I’m struck by how much of my writing voice [...]]]>

One of the things I always tell voice students is that we are all stuck with certain themes and ideas and motifs that will show up in our work.   As I’ve been going through backlist titles to get them ready for sale as ebooks, I’m struck by how much of my writing voice was there, even in the earliest books.

In the book I am finishing for Bantam, The Garden of Happy Endings (out in May 2012), there is food and a good, smart dog, and a woman who has some issues with the Church.  There is a pilgrimage that starts the whole tumble of events in the book, and a garden that provides a center of healing.

I recently reread A Winter Ballad, a medieval historical romance that was originally published in 1993 (and is now available again in e-book form) .  There is a woman who is at war with the Catholic Church, and a dog who has been a loyal companion to a knight, and the book culminates with a pilgrimage across France, to Avignon and beyond.  The main character is a healer who knows all the medicinal plants in the garden.  (There is also a cat named Esmerelda, which astonished me…that my cat, who only died in January, had been in my life THAT long!)

In virtually every novel I have written, in any genre, some major scenes will take place in a kitchen. There will be scenes written around food, the preparation of food, the feeding of people.   There will be dogs and/or cats, because it’s completely impossible to imagine having a life without the companionship of pets.  There are hints of the mysterious and the miraculous in them, too, and always a strong love story.   I am in love with England and Spain and walking and dogs and good food and the possibilities of faith and hope.  Those things all show up in my books, and have from the beginning.

Can you identify themes in your own life? Things you love that run through your work?

NEWS: The wonderful Sharon Schlicht and I are working on two collections of Girls in the Basement essays on the writing life, with a goal of releasing them by August 15th.   The first is The Care and Feeding of the Girls in the Basement, an upbeat guide to the writing life; the second is the GITB Year of Celebration.  Stay tuned!

Jenny: Yesterday we talked about practical considerations, the things writers need to know to make author-originated-digital publishing work.  But the thing that’s most interesting [...]]]> This is part 2 of my conversation with Jennifer Crusie about ebooks.  Tomorrow, there will be a part three on editorial considerations posted at her website, Argh Ink.

Jenny: Yesterday we talked about practical considerations, the things writers need to know to make author-originated-digital publishing work.  But the thing that’s most interesting to me is the emotional reaction writers are having to this.  The way readers feel, the way writers feel.

Barbara: Okay. Let’s start with that.  Writers are absolutely exhilarated for the most part.

Jenny: You told me yesterday that I was envious, and I am.

Barbara: It has put a lot of the fun back in publishing for me.

Jenny: ”Back into”? When was publishing ever fun?

Barbara: I used to think it was a blast when I first started.

Jenny: I hated it from the beginning.

Barbara: It was so amazing that I got published and people could buy my books and they PAID me to do this! I loved every bit of it.

Jenny: I’m not good with authority. “Change this please.” “No.”

Barbara: The cover worksheets, the author bio, meeting an editor.

Jenny: See all of that made me itch.  I didn’t want the attention. I liked the money, though. I like working under the radar. One of the reasons I like my pseudonym.

Barbara: I’m Little Polly Sunshine most of the time.

Jenny: From now on, you are Polly to me.

Barbara: I’ll take it. LOL. There must be something dark we can call you, something growly.

Jenny: Meg used to call me Eeyore.  ”Yeah, I made the bestseller list, but my tail will probably fall off.” But enough about me.  You seem so thrilled with everything you’re doing. Tell me about that.

Barbara: Rather than talk just about my own experiences, which I will, I would like to start with the fact that writers in general have very little control over the flow of their careers.  So many things are just completely out of your control…the covers, the placements, the fact that something like a railroad accident or a bad weather January can kill your numbers.  You’ve spent a year on a book, poured everything into it, polished, edited, etc, and in two weeks, the thing can be dead in the water and THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. Right?

Jenny: Yes, with reservations (g).

Barbara: I’m willing to hear the reservations.

Jenny: Publishing is a casino for us, certainly, but it is for the publishers a lot of the time, too. You just roll the dice. I’ve heard authors say that their publishers could have made them bestsellers if they’d wanted to, but I’ve never met a publisher who wouldn’t have made a bestseller if it could.  So nobody really has that much control. But within what you’re talking about–lousy covers, placement, that kind of thing–I agree.

Barbara: It’s not about blaming publishers at all. I agree, they want us all to do well. What’s the point of buying us to let us fail?  I think it’s possible you’ve had a wee bit more support in your career than the general run of writers. But anyway…

Jenny:  I know I’m spoiled by SMP. Especially on things like editorial support and covers.  I have an ideal situation.  But SMP is not the only publisher I’ve worked with. I have scars.  I was the one who threw a fit on the internet and called one of my publishers the Evil Empire, remember?  It hasn’t all been roses over here.

Barbara: Right. It’s just not the same thing to be a NYT best-selling author with a massive fan base and the workaday writer that most people are. But you have had a lot more POWER than most, and that’s what I’m talking about.

Jenny: The other argument–not yours–that I have is with people who say that authors are powerless and the publishing houses hold all the power. As long as you can say, “No” and walk away, you still have power over your career. But if an author wants to be published at any costs, yep, powerless.

Barbara: The writer’s lack of power is what makes the digital revolution so incredibly appealing. It’s real power. You have a chance to genuinely affect the outcome of things.

Jenny:  Yes. And that is exhilarating. I’m excited about it and I’m treated very, very well by my publisher.

I can only imagine what it’s like for authors with grievances.  But I still say that my power came from my willingness to walk away.  If publishers really want you and they know you’re willing to go unpublished rather than sign a contract you don’t like, that gives you all the power. The problem is that they have to REALLY WANT YOU. Which doesn’t happen all that often.

Barbara : This might be a side argument, but I think you’re speaking like a royal. It’s easy to say you’ll walk away when you know they’ll never let you.

Jenny: I walked away from HQ. Went without any publisher at all for nine months. And during that time I turned down three bad contract offers from other publishers.

Barbara: I remember. Because you knew what you wanted. I remember. I was there.

Jenny: I know. You were wonderful. Thank god for supportive author friends.

Barbara: It was bold and brave and I’m not discounting it. But things have been different since then, and most writers have not had that advantage. Which is why they are so empowered by indie publishing.

Jenny: But my point is, if my career had ended there, and a lot of people were saying it did, I still would have preferred that to signing a bad contract. All writers have that power. All they have to do is want a good contract more than they want to be published. My mantra has always been, “I don’t care if I’m published, but I’m passionate about being published well.” And as you say, that’s what the e-revolution is doing. It gives writers the power to choose to be published as they see fit, as they define “well.” Well, that’s one thing the e-revolution is doing. It’s doing a lot of things.

Barbara: I know an awful lot of writers who have had just rotten luck, over and over, and should have had more success than they have.

Jenny: Sure. A lot of this business is being in the right place at the right time with the right book. That’s not going to change with e-publishing.

Barbara: It might.  I’m not sure it’s great for the industry overall, but I also don’t think it can be stopped. A lot of writers are out there swinging.

Jenny: I think author-originated publishing is good for the industry, actually.

Barbara: That’s not what I would have expected you to say. How so?

Jenny: I think that anything that upsets a long standing apple cart probably shakes out a lot of rotten apples. Not rotten in the sense of cheating and lying but just business practices that have been set in stone.  Wearing away at stone like water on a rock doesn’t change things fast enough.  But if something comes along and smashes it, you can pick up the valuable stuff and leave the rest behind. (Give me a minute and I’ll think of another metaphor to cram in there.  Mix much?)

Barbara:  Like the idea that all publishing must be based in New York City (an old fact I think is hurting the industry desperately at the moment).

Jenny: There are good reasons for that, though. Tell me why you think it’s bad.

Barbara: Not bad…just crippling. Manhattan real estate is horrifically expensive. We’re all on computers now…there’s no reason for agents to have to take a train into the city, or editors to have to go to the office.

Jenny: Ah. Good point.

Barbara: It would be much more sensible if they all worked from home and came in for meetings once a month or something.

Jenny: See, there I don’t agree.

Barbara: The computer industry is dumping real estate like crazy and people telecommute.

Jenny: Yes, but computer people aren’t book people.

Barbara: But why do book people need to be face to face?

Jenny:  Because they’re book people, because they are in an emotional business. It’s not just balance sheets; that kind of thinking is what got publishing into the mess it’s in today. Books are about people, not numbers, and selling books is about selling emotion, not balance sheets.  The social network in publishing is crucial I think.

Barbara: But isn’t it the words and stories that sell the books? I have never sold a book face to face. Social networking can be done online.

Jenny: I don’t think so. I think something is lost.

Barbara: The difference could mean the survival of some companies. Telecommuting as a part of the industry would be helpful.

Jenny: Yes, but not the editing and sales part.  I don’t care if the lawyers and the number crunchers telecommute.  They deal in facts. But I want my agents having lunch with my editors. I want my editors hashing out what makes a book appeal in person.

Barbara: There could still be gatherings on a regular basis. I don’t talk to my editor in person when she’s editing me.  Why would they need their own expensive offices in the city to have lunch together? They occupy these tremendously expensive buildings. That’s really old school.

Jenny: They need to be able to walk down the hall and talk to each other.

Barbara : Why?

Jenny: Because that’s how synergy happens.

Barbara: Why can’t they email each other?

Jenny: Jen walks down the hall to Matthew’s office and says, “I just thought of this,” and they sit down and hash it out. They stop by a bar for a drink on the way home and come up with something brilliant for marketing my book. It is not the same online. The synergy is lost. But I will give you this:  Those horrific rents are part of the overhead problem, definitely.  So move everything but editorial and marketing somewhere else?

Barbara: New ways of doing that would arise. That particular cost, coupled with the price of shipping books, is one of the things crippling traditional publishing.

Jenny: I agree.  Plus warehouse costs.  And of course the return policy for bookstores has always been insane, but there’s nothing that can be done about that now without destroying the bookstore business which is already reeling.

Barbara: And IMO, it’s one of the most difficult and most important things that have to shift. Indie skips over all of that. ALL of it. I would love to see traditional publishing benefit from the freedom of some of that, too. Again, we’re dealing with paradigm shifts, which are very, very difficult for people to manage. It’s hard to think outside of the ways we’ve always thought.

Jenny: Meanwhile, the light and fast author who is publishing herself in e-books moves like the wind with comparatively little overhead. It’s the British against the Spanish Armada.

Barbara: Laughing. Yes.

Jenny: And if you’re a writer who feels screwed over by the Spanish Armada, it must feel pretty damn good. I can understand the crowing some people are doing (not you, you don’t crow).

Barbara: I don’t feel screwed over by the Armada.  I love it.  I am a writer who likes to experiment, and this is a lot of fun.  It’s west coast vs east coast, though I know you don’t like that comparison.

Jenny: I think there are differences between the coasts. I just don’t think it’s Harvard types vs free-spirits.

Barbara: Not at all.  It’s flexibility vs old guard. One of the other things that’s so exhilarating for writers is actually having hard numbers.

Jenny: The numbers thing is huge. One of my royalty statements has numbers for the royalties, but not for the number of copies sold.

Barbara: Real numbers, every day. This book is selling better than that one by x number of copies. Why? If I shift the cover or tweak the blurb, will it change things?

Jenny: Oh, that would be fun. Hell, just royalty statements you can understand would be great.

Barbara: Plus, you know exactly how much money you will get in 60 days. For a lot of writers, that’s a kind of freedom we haven’t had in a million years. We have what Christopher Robin calls, “Advance addiction…”

Jenny: He’s right.

Barbara: We’re all strapped for cash about half the time.

Jenny: Well, so is most of America.

Barbara: But most of American gets paid every couple of weeks or once a month. Not every six months. That regular money is very freeing for some people.

Jenny: Depends on whether they’re on salary or commission. We volunteered to go into publishing and to be paid twice a year.

Barbara: Yes, we volunteered, but that doesn’t mean all parts of it are great.

Jenny: No, of course not. But print publishing can’t give that salary unless we agree to work for a salary instead of a cut of the profits. In print publishing, we’re not employees, we’re partners in a gamble.  I agree that publishing ourselves digitally gives us something that regular publishing can’t, but it’s “can’t” not “won’t.”

Barbara: Not saying traditional publishing should be different, just pointing out one of the reasons some writers feel freer as indies.

Jenny: Right. Sorry. This is my emotional reaction to this, I think. I’m annoyed at people (not you) who are crowing that traditional publishing deserves this because they screw authors over. So I over-react.

Barbara: NONE of this is meant to be a criticism of traditional publishing! I say again: I LOVE my career, love traditional books and paper and the old way of doing things.  I also think it’s fun to play with the digital model.

Jenny: That part I get. I want to try this with non-traditional projects. Just the thought of it is exhilarating.

Barbara: I hope that some of our play will end up helping the traditional model, too. (Which is a classically female way of dealing with change…I will go on a quest and find the answer and bring it back to the tribe, my people!)

Jenny: LOL. Yeah, our tribe could use some help.  I think the traditional model is toast.

Barbara: It doesn’t have to be toast.

Jenny: I think it does. Not traditional publishing, the traditional way traditional publishing has published.

I think the smart publishers are looking the e-revolution and saying, “Okay, saddle up, we need to change.”

And the hold-outs are looking at it going, “How can we control this?”

Barbara: I think so, too. Exactly.  We all have to think in new ways (including new ways of creating synergy, maybe).

Jenny: Basically, my emotional reaction to all of this is Janus-like. On the one hand, I’m really annoyed with all the writers who are saying, “Yay, traditional publishing is dead and it deserves to be” while riding on everything traditional publishing has done for them and sending newbie writers into uncharted territory.

On the other hand, I really WANT to drink the Kool-aid. I want to try this, it sounds freeing and exhilarating and fun.

Barbara: Maybe it doesn’t have to be either/or.

Jenny: Oh, absolutely. I’m like you, I want both. But I’m surprised by how emotional my reaction is to all of this. And how conflicting my emotions are.

Barbara: Most of the writers I know who have been extremely successful financially and critically with traditional publishing are having the same reaction.

Jenny: Usually, aside from a few rages over re-issue bookcovers, I’m pretty un-emotional about this business.  I think it’s the unfairness of some of the comments about traditional publishing that got my back up. Not that we owe traditional publishing anything in the way of staying there if we can do better elsewhere, but the unfairness of claiming success as all your own when traditional publishing set it all up for you. At least, that’s what bugs me.

Barbara: The alimony angle.  :)

Jenny: If you say, “Traditional publishing gave me my start, but I’m building on that start and making a lot more money this way,” I say, “Good for you.” But if you say, “Traditional publishing never did enough for me, and now I’m making a lot more money and I did it all on my own and you newbie writers can be just like me” then I think you’re a dick.

Barbara: Are people really claiming the success is all their own, though? I haven’t seen that. I’ve seen writers take backlist and repackage and republish it…their original work, and see it do better than it did originally.

Jenny: Not you, Barbara.

Barbara: Okay, no, I get what you’re saying.

Jenny: Oh, they absolutely have the right to make all the money they want off their backlists. It’s the sneering and the gloating that gets to me.

Barbara: If you are playing Pied Piper to lead people off a cliff, that’s wrong. Or at least clueless.

Jenny: And that crap about “legacy publishing.” I think a lot of it may be cluelessness. Or arrogance. I don’t think anybody is trying to shaft the newbie writer. But there’s a gloating aspect to a lot of this that is pure emotion. I’m not talking about the exhilaration.  I’m good with that. Things are really exciting, people should be enthused about it. I’m talking about the people who are thrilled that traditional publishing is dead and are telling everybody to leave because the boat just hit this big iceberg.  So people leave the boat, which isn’t sinking, and drown. I’m doing a lot of boat imagery today. I like the happiness part of this, the excitement, the new worlds opening up. That’s the part I want to try. I hate the mean-spirited gloating that puts really bad info out there to people who are trying to learn what the hell is going on.

Barbara: Fair enough. I tend to let it all just roll off my back. I used to feel so exhausted by the hysterical self-promoters, too, and that feels like the same thing.

Jenny: I think part of this is that I came to this whole conversation through somebody on the forums who said, “I read this blog and I can make millions if I self-publish my first book so I’m not going to bother with traditional publishing, it’s dead.”  And several of us came on and said, “Wait a minute.”  So that’s when I started to really research this. And to talk with you.

Barbara: Really? And yet, you just said that you think traditional publishing is toast, too. So….?

Jenny:  No, no, I didn’t say traditional publishing is toast.  I said the traditional ways that traditional publishing works, that system is toast.  I don’t think the big print publishers are going anywhere,  But the ones that are going to do well are going to change radically.

Barbara: Okay. That’s my feeling, too. I don’t see books dying. I do see some enormous change required. Every writer and publisher has to figure out where they will fit on the continuum.

Jenny: But some houses are still thinking it’s just another format.  It is another format, but it’s going to eat their other formats and take dominance. So it’s an emotional thing on the publisher level, too. Do they see it as an opportunity or as something to be controlled? Are they embracing the new format or are they trying to protect their old formats?

Barbara: It is absolutely going to dominate. Eventually someone, probably Amazon, will give a cheap reader away and then everyone will have one.  Just as we all have mp3 players.

Jenny: Actually, everybody probably has one now: can’t you read e-books on a laptop?

Barbara:  Sure.

Jenny: More than that, they have a readership now that is used to reading on screens. It’s a shift for people of my generation, it’s the norm for kids in high school today.

Barbara: There’s a funny demographic in a subset of baby boomers that keeps them away from technology, as if it’s all part of The Man.

Jenny: Huh. I’m a baby boomer. I’m all over technology because it makes things easier. You’d have to be an idiot to stay away from computers because of The Man.

Barbara: But this is something I’ve observed a lot, and it seems to sometimes show up in publishing too…this weird suspicion about technology.

Jenny: Like those people who brag about not having televisions. As if that makes them better.

Barbara:  Right. What, exactly, are you getting from that?

Jenny: Well, for them, a feeling of superiority.  It’s that emotional component again. It screws up all the conversations on this topic. Not ours, of course.

Barbara: Which ties into….do you think people still have disdain for self-published books?

Jenny: I think that’s disappearing. For one thing, it’s a lot harder to tell self-published on the net. In the bookstore, the lousy production values always made the self-pubbed book stand out. Like bad teeth.

Barbara: Well, sometimes. I mean sometimes you can’t tell online.

Jenny: On the net, the covers can still hurt you, but it’s not as evident. You get a good online cover, nobody notices whether you’re self-published or not since nobody looks to see who published a book.  So it’s a leveler there.

Barbara: My friend Barbara Freethy has done spectacular job of republishing and repackaging her books. I can’t tell at all which were the originals and which were the publisher books.

Jenny: And with that kind of production, nobody’s going to check to see who published them. Nobody really cares who published them.  They care about the quality of the book.

Barbara: That’s very true.

Jenny: And since you could often associate poor writing with poor production values, the self-published book was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But not on the net. I think the production values are going to be where the stigma is.

Barbara: Except I can see right now that there are books with bad production value selling quite nicely at Amazon.

Jenny:  Right. But we’re not talking about sales, we’re talking about self-publishing as a stigma. Once the perception goes away that a self-published book is self-published because the author couldn’t get it out there the “real” way, there’s no stigma.  So if you’re self-publishing a wildly popular book, nobody is going to say, “But she published it herself.”

Barbara: That seems to be what Amanda Hocking did for the industry, all by her little lonesome. She knocked that wall down hard.

Jenny: Yes, she did.  She’s an icon.  A very smart, level-headed, incredibly hardworking icon.

Barbara: I don’t think that wall exists anymore, honestly. People are choosing books according to their tastes and desires, browsing around for new things.

Jenny: Plus there’s the big emotional plus for readers of being able to read what they want RIGHT NOW. Browsing an almost limitless selection and getting it immediately.

Barbara: That’s HUGE. I’ve found it to be my downfall in terms of spending money on books. I buy on impulse constantly…but I’m also reading a lot more than I was because I’m buying what I want to read today, not maybe next month when I get to it.

Jenny: Instant gratification.  It’s all part of the emotional whirlwind that’s e-publishing right now.  I really do believe that the most important thing right now in understanding what’s happening is the emotional component. For writers, for publishers, for readers.

Barbara: We’re in a better place, too, than music was a few years ago. We’ve seen what happened, how that industry was transformed, and that it will happen here, too. So how do we work WITH it, rather than against it? (I buy a LOT more music than I once did, too, because I can buy a song or two and it feels like I’m not spending that much.)

Jenny: Me, too. I think what publishers and writers have to do is strip the emotional reactions out of their calculations and decisions while paying attention to the reader’s emotional reactions. Because the business is driven by readers.

Barbara: This is a critical piece, absolutely.

Jenny: It isn’t what format is most highly regarded by publishers, it isn’t what writers are most comfortable with, it’s where readers are taking the market and why.  Traditional publishing is something publishers understand, but if it doesn’t evolve, it is dead, so traditional publishing better update its traditions fast.

Barbara: Every big change brings with it both opportunity and loss. We have to keep that in mind and stay in balance. Enjoy the opportunities, but be mindful of the risks.

Jenny: Right. And don’t let the excitement of the new override the facts. The ramifications of the emotional are so important. One of the big ones is apparent value. How much is an e-book worth? That one’s giving traditional publishing nightmares right now. And the flip side, how much does discounting e-books hurt the apparent value of the story itself. You said there was howling when you priced at book at $.99.

Barbara: Well, a lot of traditionally published writers would like to form a band of “no lower than 7.99 or 3.99″ or whatever their particular price point is. But that’s not realistic. The publisher prices on ebooks are too high.  Maybe they don’t need to be 99c, but some of my traditionally published books are on sale in ebook format for 14.99. Who would buy that?? This is pure capitalism. The readers are speaking. They are controlling the price points.

Jenny: There I agree with you.  I think “too high” is an emotional reaction, though. To a certain extent.  I mean if the price point is too high, they don’t buy, absolutely. But there’s also the aspect of pricing the books so low that the readers expects e-books to be less and therefore values the form less. There is a real correlation between how much somebody pays for something and how much they value it.

Barbara: I just don’t buy that argument. ha ha. Maybe because I’m a value shopper and always have been.
Books have become ungodly expensive the past few years.

Jenny: Yes. Way too expensive. Which brings us back to overhead again. Because publishers are not making much profit even at those prices.

Barbara: There is a point that’s too low, of course. But I’m not sure how you keep people from setting low prices.

Jenny: Oh, you can’t keep people from setting low prices.

Barbara: But they have to find ways to be competitive in the ebook market, and currently, the prices are just too high. I don’t have answers. It’s just reality.

Jenny: Although there are some books I’d pay $14.99 in e-book format for because I WANT THAT BOOK. Emotional again.

Barbara: That’s true. I do that, too. I try not to, but I do it.

Jenny: I think the $.99 window has closed or is closing shortly.

Barbara: Closed? In what way?

Jenny: Some very smart people (like you) did it early when it could get you on lists and get high visibility. But once everybody starts doing it, then there’s no benefit to anybody who doesn’t have a name to put you at the top of this list again. When twenty people were doing it, you could get the visibility of the bestseller list. When 20,000 people are doing it . . .

Barbara: Ah. Well, that may be true. I think mostly people think they are worth more than 99c and they think people will buy their books at a higher point. But you are probably correct, and that would be good for all of us.That’s too low, really.

Jenny: I could see it as a loss leader for a short period of time. “Buy my new X and get my backlist title X for 99.”

Barbara: I am more than happy to pay 4.99 for a book. It’s a reasonable price. Loss leaders…right. That’s the game. Giveaways and coupons, all that.

Jenny:  SMP did a nice thing when Maybe This Time was coming out in hardcover; they put Bet Me up at $2.99 in ebooks to get new readers to drive to the hardcover.  But when we asked SMP to give away the e-book of MTT for free for a week when the trade came out (buy the trade, get the e-book) and they said no because of the devaluation of the e-book format. And I think they were right. Because it would have made the trade seem like the “real” book. And the e-book like something they could give away for free.

Barbara: Hmm. Not sure I agree. I begged for that. Begged and begged and begged…wanted 99c price for Lost Recipe e-version, before HTBPL. They would not agree. They did not want to do it because it would hurt the brick and mortar stores. Which I get, too. In the end, I think all of us would have benefited…me, the brick and mortar stores, publishers.

Jenny: The perception is already out there that e-books are free to produce so why do they cost so much? The perception is that people are paying for the format and not for the work.

Barbara: That’s a good point.

Jenny: And too deep a discount on the e-book reinforces that.

Barbara: I keep saying, whatever format a book is published in, I will still have to take 6 months to a year to write it!

Jenny: For me, it’s closer to eighteen months.  I’m slow. The thing is, the argument that e-editions are cheap to produce is beside the point. They’re not paying paper or ether, they’re buying the story. So what’s the story worth?

Barbara: What the reader will pay.

Jenny: Exactly. But what the reader will pay depends a lot on her perception of worth. If she thinks she’s getting ripped off by an e-book priced at $14.99 she won’t buy it. But what if she comes to think that $7.99 is too high? Because there are all those great books out there at .99? If they can publish those books for .99, why not all of them? It’s the emotional component.

Barbara: Well, what if she does? What can be done to change that? I’m not sure it can be changed.

Jenny: No, but it can be used.  If none of my books are priced lower than $7.99 or $4.99, I can establish the premise that my books always cost that.  That Crusie does not write $.99 books. You don’t want to pay more, you don’t pay more: don’t buy her.

Barbara: But will you sell any?

Jenny: Yeah, I will. Not as many as I would at .99, of course.  Absolutely not as many. But enough that I’ll still make probably the same amount of money without devaluing my brand.

Barbara: That’s certainly one answer.

Jenny: BUT that’s because traditional publishing established my brand.

Barbara: Right.

Jenny: The thing about the .99 price point is that it was great at getting new readers when not very many people were doing it. And there are a lot of people who browse the .99 cent lists so it’s a way of getting new readers. But ultimately it’s a loss leader, and writers have to look at what it does to the perception of value of their books.

Barbara: It did work. And it is winning me a new audience of readers who have never picked up my books.

Jenny: I think $14.99 is dead in the water. But I’m not sure the .99 is really a smart move any more either. It’s that emotional component again.

Barbara: The bottom line for me, however, is that I’m absolutely practical. I’ll do what works, whatever that is. My prices are 2.99 for the most part on backlist. Frontlist is 6.99 and up (and those prices are set by my publisher. I’d like to see all but the newest titles be sold for 6.99).

Jenny:  See, that pricing makes sense to me.  I’d go 9.99 until the hardcover version is done and we move to trade paperback, but I think 6.99, 7.99 is the sweet spot.

Barbara: As an indie, I’m in control of moving that price point as I wish. I can raise or lower at will.

Jenny: I think I could go to $7.99 and still sell. That’s about my own cut off point.

Barbara: I had this conversation 20 times over the weekend. Everyone can cry about the downturn of prices, but the fact is, a lot of books sell at the 99c and 2.99 price points. As long as they do, those prices will exist.

Jenny: I think that the people who are trying to protect the higher prices—the $16.99 and the $14.99—have missed the important thing here, which is that readers have already decided what they want to pay.  People who are trying to preserve those price points are defending an empty barn.

Barbara: I agree. The consumer has already decided. Unless there is value added to the basic product, no one will pay more. I can watch as many movies as I wish on Netflix for 9.99 per month.

I can buy a song for 99c.

Jenny:  Plus readers have all those concerns about not being able to lend e-books out, about the platforms disappearing like Betamax, about the theoretically low cost of production making the higher points price gouging.   They don’t see e-books as just another format, they see them as a different format, with different pros and cons.

Barbara: Something always shows up to replace the outdated form.

Jenny: On that poll I put up on Argh Ink, only 3%, 12 people out 422, thought $12.99 was a fair price for an ebook.

Barbara: VERY telling.

Jenny: The poll asked “What’s a fair price to pay for an e-book?”  Which I think turned out to be “What’s the most you’d pay?”  The big winner with 204 votes out of 422: $6.99- $7.99.  Or mass market prices, basically.

Barbara:  Did you discover what they usually DO pay?

Jenny:  Only anecdotally in the comments to the post because actual buying depends on the book. For somebody eagerly awaited, like Pratchett, they’d go higher. For a new author, they’d go lower.

Barbara: And how many people said $3.99 or $2.99?

Jenny: 37% or 157 votes.  But I left out $4.99 to $5.99 and some of the said they’d have gone for that so it was really $2.99 to $5.99. I should never write polls.

Barbara:  I suspect that’s a bit skewed, honestly. The numbers I see in practice are pretty insistent.

Jenny: What are they?

Barbara:  That 2.99 is great, but 99c moves books insanely. I’d love to push the price point higher, but the market won’t tolerate it (at least from me), at the moment.

Jenny: Of course, my sample was skewed. It was people who read my blog, and most of them are fairly passionate readers.   3% said 99 was a fair price. 11 votes. But I think the low number means that most of them felt authors should get more, not that they wouldn’t be delighted to pay that. Which is why I think the answers were really, “What the most you’d pay for an e-book?” Because I’m pretty sure they’d ALL pay .99.

Barbara: A lot of the 99c readers are the people who once haunted used bookstores and bought books used because they are such passionate readers they wouldn’t be able to afford their habit any other way.

Jenny:  Right.  And I have my own bias.  I didn’t even put $14.00 or $16.99 on there as a choice because I thought those were insane.  But that’s what some of my books are going for.

Barbara: Some of mine are, too. Crazy.

Jenny: And then you get to the question of length.  One of the exciting things about this is that you can publish short fiction this way. But how much is a novella worth?  How much is a short story worth? : I don’t think I’d put out a short story by itself.  But a collection of shorts, that I might do.

Barbara: It goes back to “what will readers pay?”

Jenny: Is $2.99 too much? Too little?  Some of them are flash fiction. A thousand words. Some of them are really long. 10,000 words.

Barbara: I think the answer is that we all have to experiment and check it out. See what works. What flies? What doesn’t?  I’m not sure length matters as long as you label it a short story. It’s not that we are ever paid by the word.

Jenny: But I think people see value in length.

Barbara:  Meh. I’m not sure it matters that much.

Jenny: Of course, I’m guessing here; you’re the one with the real world experience.

Barbara: It matters whether it is a full-length novel or a short story, but not a short short story and a long short story.

Jenny:  Nobody in NYC is interested in short story collections because they don’t sell, which is perfectly understandable. But on the net . . .

Barbara: That’s the great beauty of this process. It’s thrilling to sell books to the people who want that specific reading experience.

Jenny:  Or to be able to write a novella and get it out there without worrying about finding two more to make a book.

Barbara: It’s thrilling to be successful selling directly to readers of a certain ilk, like the medieval readers who have been underserved in recent years.  There were markets for that long ago but not so many now. Or any.

Jenny:  Or, for me, to show people the stories I wrote to prep for a novel.

Barbara: What a great idea!

Jenny:  Or the story I wrote for SMP as a prequel to Agnes that was rejected because it was too violent.  I understand completely why it was rejected, but on the net, I can put a violence warning on it, and put it out there.

Barbara:  For me, it’s a chance to play around in any number of ways. I have always liked playing in many sandboxes, and e-publishing makes that possible. It makes my brain feel alive and real to be able to dance in the middle ages, then in the kitchens of the present, and maybe offer a collection of my columns on writing.  I can differentiate the brand to offer all of them.

Jenny: And to not worry about how many copies are sold. About earning out. That’s so freeing creatively.

Barbara: About earning out. That’s the anvil always hanging in the air. Mass market means a book has to have mass appeal, which means somehow hitting somewhere in the middle ground usually. That’s never been my strong suit.

Jenny: You’ve really talked me around on this. Which almost never happens with anybody (g).

Barbara: It would have surprised me if it had not appealed to you, the artist.  The business woman is nervous, understandably, but the artist is doing backflips. How could she not?

Jenny: Fortunately, I’m not the business woman. That’s Mollie.  And she’s all for it. Very excited.

Barbara: Yes, I’ve spoken of my support team here.

Jenny: I was really burning out, seriously thinking about quitting.

Barbara: That happens so much!

Jenny:  But now I can do non-fiction, story collections. a book on collage, anything I want. It’s not that SMP isn’t endlessly supportive because they really are. It’s that they can’t support what they can’t sell. It’s business.

Barbara: This discussion has helped you imagine ways to write for the joy of it?

Jenny: Talking with you really helped me break through that ”It has to be a novel” wall I was beating my head against.  I don’t fault SMP for not wanting to buy what won’t sell, that’s just common sense.  But all of a sudden there’s a place for whatever weirdness I want to do.  And I think it’ll lead me back to the joy of writing novels, too.  We really need that variety of creative experience, I think, but when you’re writing to pay the electric bill, you get focused on what will bring in money. Tunnel vision.

Barbara: I don’t fault any of my publishers for not wanting all of my various projects, either. I mean seriously, A Bed of Spices sold 11,900 copies. That’s a losing proposition for a publisher, but I have no doubt it will eventually sell that many copies by the end of its lifespan in ebooks. It will just happen over a long period of time. Which is okay. That avenue is available because the book doesn’t occupy physical shelf space.  It doesn’t have to be moved out of the way to make room for the next wave of novels.

Jenny:  It’s actually better, the book with legs, rather than the book that hits and disappears.  I want all my novels at SMP. But self-publishing opens up a huge creative playground for me. As long as I don’t damage my brand, I can do anything I want.

Barbara: This is one of my pet subjects, as you know. That writers are creatives and we need to have space and room to let our passions fly all around. Not all projects are viable, but if we can’t play in any way, then we get stuck and cranky and unable to move forward.

Jenny:  Yes.

Barbara:  I also want the experience of writing for Shauna at Bantam and growing as a writer, because every time we do a book together, I grow. I learn more about my craft and the way readers read. I love the entire team at Bantam and they’ve worked very, very hard to get my books into the hands of the readers who love the books.

Jenny:  Yes. I’m a better writer because of Jen. MUCH better.  The thought of writing an entire novel without her . . . not going to happen.  Let alone PUBLISHING a novel without her. That would be dumb.  But these weird-ass projects that I want to do? Absolutely.

Barbara: I have four desires for this revolution.  The first is that all the major publishers hire some computer geeks and pattern watchers to figure out how to price ebooks and keep up with that trend.

Jenny:  Yes.

Barbara: The second is that publishers, writers, and brick-and-mortar stores can all figure out ways to be proactive and face into the change instead of shying away from it so that we can all thrive.

Jenny: Yes.

Barbara: The third is that five years from now there will still be many paper books, and everybody will also have a reader.

Jenny: I think your third is a given. Maybe not readers for everybody, but for the majority of book-buying readers.

Barbara : The fourth is that lots of writers will play and play and play, just to find out what gives them joy. That’s going to give ME some awesome books to read.

Jenny: That’s the exciting part, the good emotional part, watching the amazing stuff that’s going to come out of the revolution.  New ways to write books, new ways to structure books, interactive stories, animation . . .

Barbara: Voice overs, holograms (I talked with a woman who is working with that technology…OMG!)

Jenny: I feel the way I felt when I moved from an electric typewriter to my first Mac.  (Yes, I am an old.) All of a sudden there are all these POSSIBILITIES.  It’s a brand new world for everybody in publishing which I know is causing a lot of trauma, change always does, but for writers, it’s more exciting than anything else.  I don’t think it’s the Perfect Solution Writers Have Been Waiting For, I don’t think it replaces print publishing or that print is dead (and if one more person tells me I write Dead Tree Books, there’s going to be blood on the screen), but is this an amazing opportunity for creative people everywhere?  God, yes.

Barbara:  There has never been a more exciting time to be a writer, not ever.  It’s the wild wild west, and anything can happen.  I’m planning to find ways to enjoy all of it.

Jenny: Hi. I’m Jenny Crusie. I’ve [...]]]> Jennifer Crusie and I have known each other and debated many things for a long, long time. When we became embroiled in an email debate about ebooks, we decided to share our conversation with you. This is the first of two parts.  Come back tomorrow for Part 2.

Jenny: Hi. I’m Jenny Crusie. I’ve written twenty novels with traditional print publishers, and I’m watching what happens in digital publishing (especially author-originated digital publishing) with interest and not a small amount of envy.

Barbara: Hi. I’m Barbara Samuel. I’ve written forty novels in 3 subgenera of print publishing. I’m currently writing women’s fiction for Bantam as Barbara O’Neal. I’ve also dipped a toe into the digital market with seven backlist books.

Jenny: A toe? You’ve dipped a whole foot.

Barbara: It felt like a toe, but now it’s really a leg, I have to admit.

Jenny:  In it up to the hip.  Maybe that’s what we should call this post: Hip Deep in Author-Originated Digital Publishing.

Barbara:. I love it.

Jenny: Please notice how careful I am to avoid the term “self-e-publishing.” Barbara and I have been having one of our traditional heated discussions online, this one on the phenomenon of authors doing their own publishing.

Barbara: We do have some heated discussions.

Jenny: How many years have we been arguing about things?

Barbara: Starting back on GEnie in what? Somewhere in the 90s.

Jenny: The point is, if you hear us yelling at each other later, we do that a lot. With a great deal of warmth and respect (g).

Barbara: We do yell and scream and really disagree, but I think somebody has to disagree with you. With love. Like sisters.

Jenny: Absolutely.  So our current heated discussion began when I posted on my blog my thoughts about authors doing their own publishing digitally.  Which I was calling “self-e-publishing” a clunky but still descriptive term.

Barbara: And I would like to it call indie publishing, which has become a standard, although some people dislike it, too.

Jenny: I think it’s confusing because I think it also refers to small press publishing, but mostly it doesn’t tell people what it is.  Which is authors taking the publishing process back from traditional publishing houses and publishing their work themselves on the internet.  Except, you know, shorter than that.

Barbara: I’ve never heard that term in reference to small presses, I’ve only heard it in reference to people publishing themselves in electronic format. Either way, we are referring to the same thing. Terms are important here because the paradigm is shifting, and language is a way to reflect that.

Jenny:  I agree. Barbara raised a really good point during our previous discussion which is that “self-publishing” and “e-publishing” have generally not been highly regarded in publishing circles.  So calling author-originated publishing “self-e-publishing” is kicking a brand new world of opportunity in both knees right off the bat.

Barbara: And I can hear a lot of the forerunners chortling in the background. Turns out they were right and they fought hard to get respect. Which they really did not get

Jenny: Well, I’ll debate “right.”  E-publishing then is not what e-publishing now is.  There was good reason that the current state of that kind of publishing wasn’t respected.   It’s a whole new world now.

Barbara: They were right that things were changing rapidly and we would all be reading e-books.

Jenny: Yes, but they said that for fourteen years.

Barbara: Right. I would agree with that. It was not the same world at all, which is why we are having this discussion. Things have come a long way.

Jenny: I remember arguing with one group back in the day, telling them that they’d need a game-changer to make e-publishing really relevant. And they told me that all they needed was one big name like mine. So I published a short story on the net as a test. Sold five copies. The audience was not there. Of course, I’m not that big of a name.

Barbara: She said ever-so-modestly. <g> Stephen King tried it, too, and I’m not sure he did that well in the long run.

Jenny: And then came the Kindle.

Barbara: Kindle was the game changer. And I remember when I saw it for the first time, I knew it would be.

Jenny: I resisted it. It looked clunky. But you cannot pry my iPad from my sweaty little fingers.

Barbara: I, too, am completely besotted with my iPad.

Jenny: So now all of a sudden, e-publishing isn’t just viable, it’s taking over the place. Half of the sales of my first week hardcover sales were e-sales.  That settled down to about 20% later, but that’s still a huge chunk. We were surprised (g).

Barbara: That’s an amazing percentage, and illustrates how fast things are changing.

Jenny: The thing is, we still don’t know if those who bought the e-version that first week are people who dropped the hardcover purchase to buy, or people who would have bought the paperback and went for the lower price, or people who just like e-books. Which is why this so fascinating. NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

Barbara: Absolutely. Nobody knows ANYTHING. Which makes it all terrifying and scary and exciting and confusing, especially for people who have been in the business a long time and don’t have any other marketable skills.

Jenny: Except Barbara knows because she’s been doing this.  One of the things I wanted to talk about was indie publishing for different levels of writers. So let’s start at the top with you.  You’re a multi-published writers with bestseller status and a well-known name with many Ritas.  How many Ritas?  (For those of you not in the know, a Rita is the Oscar of the romance-writing world.)

Barbara: Six. And they’ve been a help in my digital adventures, since one of the books I have for sale is Heart of a Knight, which won the RITA.

Jenny: Six.  Not that I’m jealous. So you were sitting around one day looking at your backlist and your significant other said, “There’s this thing called the internet . . .”

Barbara: He’s a computer geek. He kept chanting, “backlist, backlist, backlist.” I so did not want to deal with it. Too much trouble. Too many software things to deal with. Scanning…Covers….Ugh! I wasn’t going to bother with it.   The thing that changed was that my blog and websites all crashed and I could not get them back. My cousin Sharon, a computer geek who happens to have lots of artistic talent, got irritated and went to bat for me.

Jenny:  Went to bat.  Tell me what’s involved in that.

Barbara: What’s involved in an e-book publication is first, an electronic copy of a book. Since my books were on older computers, I didn’t have copies, so they had to be scanned. Then proofread. Then turned into an electronic file. Then uploaded to three different sites in three different forms. See why I said forget it?? No. Freaking. WAY.

Jenny: When you say “scanned” do you mean face down on a plain old scanner, page by page?

Barbara: Yes!

Jenny: Oh. Argh.

Barbara: Horrible. I paid someone to do the first couple of books, In the Midnight Rain, I think, and A Bed of Spices, and they were EXPENSIVE. Like $700, so I said, no. That’s crazy.  I have absolutely no patience for the detail work involved in proofreading. I hate it, so that wasn’t going to happen, either.

Jenny: $700 just to scan? I’d have rolled over in bed and said, “You know that idea you had? The scanner’s over there.”

Barbara: And the scans were horrible. There are much cheaper ways to do it now.

Jenny: Well, they were already proofread, right? Because they were published?

Barbara: No. They were not proofread, because the scans don’t read that easily. They have lots of glitches and there is no software to read and correct.

Jenny: Already, I hate this.

Barbara: Exactly. No way. I’m a writer. I LIKE writing. It’s my favorite thing to do.

Jenny: But you kept on going. Good for you.

Barbara: But I didn’t keep going. My cousin and my beloved kept going. They kept saying, “Let’s do this. Let’s find a way. I bet we can do it. Come ON.” So Christopher Robin, my beloved, talked Sharon into the scans and all that, and she hates it, too, but she’s detail-oriented and I paid her.  (She has turned this expertise into a business: www.littlebytesdesign.com)

Jenny: It’s amazing what family will do for you if you pay them.

Barbara: She designed the covers, which I think are simple and clean and beautiful, but it took us many versions to find a look that we liked. (And there are issues, here, too, since there is not much artwork for historical novels).

Jenny: And that’s really important, even in e-publishing. It’s the first look at the book.

Barbara: The covers are extremely important. I see a lot of bad artwork out there. Not art that you might like and I don’t…just bad. It’s just not good for the format.

Jenny: I agree. It makes it look amateurish which is the impression you’re already fighting historically.

Barbara: Really good point. The art has to be better than what you’d find on a paper book. And you might not get it right the first time out.   Learning Photoshop would be a very good idea, which my assistant did.

Jenny: So the first thing I’m noticing here is that you have back-up.

Barbara: A lot of it.

Jenny: All the stuff writers hate to do, you strong-armed family into doing.

Barbara: I also want to say that I had some money. Not a ton, but enough to hire help and buy good art and pay for somebody to do the annoying parts.

Jenny: That’s a really good point. You need capital to become a business. And that’s what publishing yourself on the net is, a business. You’re not putting on a show in the barn, this isn’t a hobby, this is part of your career, your brand.

Barbara: It is. You do need capital and you need assistance. You have to do good work and make it look good so you don’t drag down the rest of your brand.  And, this comes later, probably, but because I had already been through a very rigorous editing process, editing, line editing, copy editing, I had a lot of confidence in the product.  This is very specifically backlist publishing.

Jenny: More than that, READERS had confidence in your product. So now you’ve got scans and a cover. Then what happened?

Barbara: I uploaded most of the books over the fall, and they sold small numbers. Then–this is the classic Kindle story….I decided to experiment with lowering the price to .99.

Jenny: Wait a minute. ”You uploaded . . .” ’Splain that to me, Lucy. Pretend I know nothing. Because that’s what I know.

Barbara: I didn’t upload. I can’t explain it. My cousin, who is now my official assistant in all things web and e, and has a lot of experience, did it all for me. She uploaded the files to Kindle, Smashwords, and Nook. They are all slightly different, I gather. I have heard from others that it is not difficult. I just don’t want to deal with any of it.

Jenny: Ah, the excellent staff. Okay, moving on. How many books did you upload at once? And did you experiment with the price point with all of them?

Barbara: They went up a couple at a time. They sold modestly, but gathered steam as we posted more, and now we have six historicals and my first women’s fiction.  We started experimenting with price, lowering the price on half of them to see what would happen.  Those books caught, then brought the numbers up on the others. You have to understand, I had no expectations whatsoever. This was–is–just play for me. I have my traditional books and they are doing well, and I love writing them. But I wanted to see those historicals available. I loved them and the market wasn’t right for them at the time they were published.

Jenny: Why do you think those caught?  The lower price point? How did that get them to the readers’ attention?

Barbara: I don’t know. That’s the honest truth. Nobody knows why things work, why that works, and then doesn’t work. NOBODY KNOWS.

Jenny: What I was fishing for was, did the $.99 price point put you on the e-books bestseller list thereby alerting readers that you were there?

Barbara: It did. And then they bought like crazy. There are lists that alert people to cheap books, too, and the 99c point seems to be an impulse buy, like a song on iTunes.

Jenny: And now CR goes around singing, “I told you so,”

Barbara: Boy, does he ever.

Jenny: LOL. Did you do other promotion? Your blog? Reader lists? Goodreads? Mention it on Smart Bitches? Interviews?

Barbara: When a book went online, I posted to my blog and Facebook, but that’s it. I am not a marketing person for the most part. It takes too much time.

Jenny: So it was pretty much the price point that got the word out.

Barbara: Yep.

Jenny: This also sounds like it got you new readers, not just Barbara Samuel fans who wanted the chance to glom you in e-versions.

Barbara: A lot of new readers.  And I know people howl about this, but honestly, at 99c, I’m getting the same royalty I got per book in print.

Jenny:  Let’s talk about the howling tomorrow because that’s interesting, too.  Right now, I want to talk about how this is going to have a terrific impact on your traditional publishing, too.  Except for CR gloating, it’s a world of win out there.

Barbara: I hope so. I hope it draws readers to my print books, to the new titles.

Jenny: This explains why you’ve been wearing that T-shirt that says “ASK ME ABOUT INDIE PUBLISHING!”

Barbara: (Laughing.) I don’t think I have been wearing the t-shirt. I think I’ve just been arguing that there are some opportunities there. And I think you ARE jealous, mi amiga.

Jenny: Why would I be jealous of a six-time Rita winner living with a cute Englishman who’s making a fortune on her back list?  Jeez.  So this has been a huge success for you.  Do you think that indie e-publishing is always better?”

Barbara: I do NOT think indie publishing is always better. Or even most of the time. But in some cases, it’s a very smart, real, deal. Especially with backlist.

Jenny: So what kind of things would traditional publishing have to offer a writer for her backlist to make it better than indie publishing?

Barbara: The pluses in indie publishing are speed of publication (the books can be published next week instead of next year), the speed of payment…getting paid within 60 days instead of the next 12 years, and getting money every month in a reliable way.

Jenny: It sounds to me that unless the publisher is going to sweeten the deal considerably, there’s no upside to traditionally publishing your backlist. Of course, that’s assuming you have the resources to do it well, but we’re assuming that. I don’t own any of my backlist or I’d be trying it, believe me. Next topic: Would you publish a new book this way?

Barbara: I don’t know. I loved doing historicals so much, and in indie publishing, I wouldn’t have to worry about trying to attract such a HUGE audience. I could publish my medievals and find the readers I love. Or finish the Georgian series I had completely mapped out.

Jenny: So one of the benefits is not worrying about sales. I mean, a lot of sales are nice, but your career isn’t over if they’re not huge.

Barbara: Right. The downside is editorial.

Jenny: Agreed. I don’t want to write a novel without Jennifer Enderlin.

Barbara: My editor is one of the big reasons I’ve had success. She’s brilliant and she pushes me. I also have an agent who is brilliant and pushes me and holds me back from the cliff.   I don’t know how you find that without traditional publishing. That’s a grave concern. I’m not sending a book out raw—I want a really good editor to read it and help me shape it.

Jenny: I agree absolutely. That’s where some of my skepticism about indie e-publishing wiping out traditional publishing comes from. Editors and agents are not decorative, they’re necessary.

Barbara: Amen. And they are not a dime a dozen. You can find copy editors all over the place, but a great editor has a particular talent and ear that’s quite rare.

Jenny: Yep. I’ll leave Enderlin when she pries my cold dead fingers from around her editing hand. So even for well-established writers, indie publishing is going to be a risky route for new work. Of course so is traditional publishing, but I think the risk is great in indie. Backlist is almost a no-brainer, but the new stuff would take some careful thought.

Barbara: It would take a support structure I’m not sure exists at the moment.

Jenny: But tune in tomorrow because everything is changing so fast. So enough about writers with names; let’s look at midlist.  These are authors who have been published in traditional publishing, but haven’t established the name and the readership that you have.  And a lot of them are hurting because mass market is dying underneath them. Midlist has always been purgatory for writers, but now it’s more like hell.

Barbara: It’s a very tough place to be writing.

Jenny: So a lot of them are looking at indie publishing.  Which is where I start to get worried. Because they are less likely to have the money to get that support group you’re talking about and less likely to know publishing well enough to know how it works let alone indie publishing which is a whole new ball game. I’d never say, “Don’t try it,” but I think a lot of the evangelists for indie publishing are promoting it as a can’t-lose proposition, and that’s not true. So pros and cons for the midlist writer who wants to go indie. Over to you, Barbara.

Barbara: What I would say is that there are probably some possibilities in indie publishing that don’t exist in mass market, and there are chances in mass market that don’t exist in indie publishing. The biggest advantage to writers in mass market is the access to editorial guidance.  I know some formerly midlist writers who are doing amazing things with indie publishing.  One of them, Bella Andre, showed up in the Washington Post, talking about the challenges and rewards in indie publishing.  (Note how hard she works!)

Jenny: But how is the midlist writer going to sell books on the net if she can’t in print?

Barbara: The same way she sold mass market books–by being compared to other writers like her, by being reviewed by online publications, by showing up on blogs. She can be referenced by listmanias and show up on recommendations.

Jenny: But if that didn’t work for her in traditional publishing, why will it make a difference now?

Barbara: I personally find a lot of books through the recommendation lists on Nook and Kindle…”you bought this so you might like this book, too.”  Remember, it doesn’t have to be as many books to create success in the epublishing model.

Jenny: Yes and no. It doesn’t have to be as many books to make as much money, certainly. But if you define success as readership, then it does have to be as many books/readers.

Barbara: Does it?  Why?

Jenny: Let me rephrase: If you define success as the money you make, yep. If you define success as the number of readers you get, then it’s the same problem as mass market. Unless there’s something about e-publishing that makes it easier to get readers.

Barbara: What if you define success as reaching the readership that will love your books and making enough money to live on? That has not been possible in the current marketplace for very many writers, while it could be quite possible in a digital world. That’s part of this discussion, though–that success as it has traditionally been defined is not necessarily the way it will be defined.

Jenny: I think every author defines success his or her own way. There really isn’t one yardstick. I’d rather have fewer readers and less money and the freedom to write whatever I want.

Barbara: Of course. But I would say that artists define success by supporting themselves by doing the work they want to do. Would you agree? I have that now and that’s success to me.

Jenny: Nope.  I would not trade making a living at this for having the freedom to write what I want.

Barbara: What if you could have both? Not riches, necessarily, but a living wage.

Jenny: Are you saying that e-publishing can give me that?  (Although I have to say in the interests of accuracy, SMP is giving me that and has been giving me that for a number of years. )  What I’m not seeing is how indie publishing is going to give that to those midlist writers. It’s worth trying, sure. I just don’t see how their chances are better in indie publishing than in traditional publishing.  They both have the lost-in-the-crowd problem.  So what would you tell the midlist writer who’s frustrated with her career and sees mass market slowly disappearing?

Barbara: I would tell her to give indie publishing a try. But to do it judiciously, and hire editors and good help. If she can’t do that, go the traditional route because traditional publishers have some things to offer, like distribution and the chance to make a name for themselves. That’s big.  And if they’re going to do indie publishing, remember : covers, editors.   Covers, editors. Covers, editors.

Jenny: I think a lot of midlist writers think the traditional route has disappeared. In which case, they’ve got nothing to lose. But I think they do have something to lose if they don’t remember, quoting you now, covers and editors. And marketing. If they don’t do indie publishing well, they’re going to look unprofessional.

Barbara: They will.

Jenny: Because indie publishing really is still fighting that stigma you were talking about, the idea that if these authors were any good, they’d be in print. That idea is obsolete, but it hangs on. So I think indie publishing actually has to be shinier and more professional that print publishing.

Jenny: And now we come to the people I’m really worried about: unpublished writers. They’ve always been the most vulnerable, and the people who are holding out indie publishing to them as a path to millions make me . . . angry.

Barbara: I agree with you. I am more worried about the new writers than anyone else.

Jenny: So what would you say to a new writer?

Barbara: This is very similar to the things I always say about agents. A great experience is nirvana, but a bad one is worse than not having one at all.

Jenny: Yep.

Barbara: It’s agonizing to be aspiring and fear you might not ever publish, but far worse to publish work too early.

Jenny: Or badly.

Barbara: One of the worst things that happens to a new writer is the Freshman Rush, when a newbie is rushed by a publisher and gets a lot of money and attention and then…the book doesn’t perform. It could be for any reason…  Bad timing, bad cover, bad editing, bad whatever…  But the author is then scarred for life.

Jenny: Yep.

Barbara: You can never redo your first book. It’s hard to get published. It’s always been hard. But it takes time to learn what you need to learn. Takes time to hear your voice.  Find your stories.

Jenny: Just plain learn the craft.

Barbara: I worry so much that new writers of great talent are going to be demolished by the ease of self-publishing and no editing.  Maybe they will find their voices in public, but ow. So my advice is to stick with the traditional method for as long as you can. Traditional publishing does have cachet, after all. And access to things digital publishing does not.

Jenny: One of the things traditional publishing tells you is that you’re not ready yet. They’re not always right, but a lot of the time, they are. I’ve been eternally grateful to every editor who turned me down in the beginning.  I would not have wanted those books to have been made public even though I thought they were great.

Barbara: Oh, me, too!

Jenny: But sometimes you’ve written a good book and they turn it down because they think they can’t sell it. Even if your book is good, you’re going to need good production values.  And no matter how good you are, you’re going to need an editor. You can’t edit your own stuff. It’s like taking out your own appendix. It doesn’t work.

Barbara: Editors. Editors. Editors. They do not get the attention and appreciation they deserve.  [Yawns} I need to call a halt pretty soon. I turn into a pumpkin at 10.

Jenny: Okay, let’s wrap this up.  My advice to a debut author would be to spend a helluva lot of time researching how to publish a book. Then find a good editor (more research) and a good cover designer (more research) and if you can afford it, a good marketing team. And then work your ass off promoting the hell out of the book everywhere on the net following that marketing guidance. And then when you don’t sell as many books as you’d hoped, you pick yourself up and do it again with the next one. And the next one and the next one.

Barbara: Very good.

Jenny: Because indie conventional wisdom says you need about seven titles before you’ll stick. And those need to be GOOD books so that people come back.

Barbara: Really? I didn’t know that.

Jenny: Also, you are not Amanda Hocking.

Barbara: Just as you are not JK Rowling or Stephanie Myers.

Jenny: Give me time. I have this idea about a wizard that sparkles . . .   But really, every time somebody says, “Amanda Hocking made millions from her first novel so I can, too,” I want to say “Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France; even though you have a bicycle, I don’t see you doing that, too.”

Barbara: She’s very lucky and very smart and very, very determined.

Jenny: She’s amazing. A phenom. And she worked her butt off for that success. The stuff that makes me crazy in all of this is the idea that this is EASY.  It’s not easy. It’s just a different kind of hard.

Barbara: I love her blogs. She’s the real thing.  She’s so devoted and so intense and such a WRITER.

Jenny: And so damn smart. And she took a publishing contract for her next series.

Barbara: Smart choice, IMO.

Jenny: The take away I’ve gotten from talking about this all week is that all of these venues are options, and writers should take advantage of every option they can.  But do it with open eyes.

Barbara: The more you know, the more choices you have. All of us have. That’s true even of publishers. If you choose indie publishing you need as much information as you would if you choose traditional.  Indie means INDIE. You’re doing it, all of it. That’s money, but also so much work. Like a restaurant owner.

Jenny: Traditional publishing isn’t dead. Indie publishing isn’t the grail.  But indie publishing is very exciting (g).  Okay, I am jealous of you. Satisfied?

Barbara: Well, I guess. But I’m still Crusie.

Jenny: No, I’m Crusie. You’re Samuel, Wind, and O’Neal.  Lucky CR. It must be like having a harem.

Barbara: Still NOT Crusie. LOL  I’m fading.

Jenny: We’re quitting for tonight because Barbara can’t remember who she is, but we’re going to do this again tomorrow because we have more aspects of indie publishing to talk about, specifically the emotional aspects of the revolution.

Barbara: More!  Later!  When I have a brain!

Jenny:And goodnight all.

Barbara: Good night.

Comments?  Are your reading books in ebook form? Is is changing the way you read?  If you’re an author, have you experimented with ebooks and what is the result?

The winds finally took out the twenty-five [...]]]> Have been scarce finishing the new book, attending to the wedding of my younger son, and generally running from one urgent thing to the next.  But I thought you’d like to know that the garden beds are going in this week! So excited.  A couple of photos.

The winds finally took out the twenty-five year old fences in our neighborhood so we had to have those replaced.  (The houses look much closer than they actually are, but you can see why we want to plant for more privacy.)  This photo was taken this morning, by the way.  A surprise snow storm struck overnight.

This is this afternoon, from the upstairs window, looking down on the mapped-out garden beds.  You can see how desperately the sandy soil needs amending. Just out of the photo on the left is one of the best things about the yard, which is a tall, healthy, beautiful Ponderosa pine that will get its own box, so we can keep the desiccating needles out of the rest of the garden. That’s a whiskey barrel toward the back, about four feet from the fence, for size estimations:

This is a tomato plant, robust and nearing readiness for transplanting:

And here is a pretty flat of basil. I will have to give some away.

As I type this, there is snow coming down again, but spring can’t hide from us much longer.