amazon

Amazon flexes its muscle… (reblog: Write to Publish)

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Robin Sullivan over at Write to Publish has a nice post about how, as an indie author, you can keep from being left in the cold as Amazon–love ’em or hate ’em–goes about its quest to retain market leadership in publishing (c.f., KDP Select exclusivity, flexing contract muscles on Independent Publishers Group, etc.).

Find it here: http://write2publish.blogspot.com/2012/02/amazon-flexes-its-muscleauthors-caught.html

My take:

  • It would be foolish to forget that authors’ interests and Amazon’s interests are often ALIGNED, but they are not IDENTICAL. I waxed poetic about this when Amazon announced KDP Select.
  • Diversification isn’t just a good word for crossword puzzles. Whether we’re talking financial investments or outlets for your writing, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Amazon is the biggest basket, but not the only one.
  • I find those who boycott or hate on Amazon without referring to history or the bigger picture irritating. This is hopping on a bandwagon. Where were those people when traditional publishers kept the majority of authors under their thumb and allowed publishing as an industry to stagnate for the last thirty years? You can recognize Amazon for what it is (a corporate entity running a tight P&L sheet) without pillorying it or hopping into bed with it. Celebrate them when they do good, chastise them (or even fight them) when they do bad. Extremists make life hard.

 

Sword of Kings: Available on Amazon!

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Hi Friends –

My short epic fantasy tale, Sword of Kings, is now available for just $.99 on Amazon.

This is an original fantasy of about 4,000 words and includes–as all my stories do–a Story Notes section that details the background and motivations for how I created the tale.

Description
King Andreas was confident, bold, courageous…until his sword–the living symbol of his power–began to die. With his brother Jon by his side, Andreas has little time to find out why the sword, passed down through a hundred generations, is failing now.

Excerpt
Had you been a courtier or a guard or a supplicant that day at the first court of the Harvest in the Kingdom of Mercia, with a sharp eye and a clear view, and had you been watching the young King Andreas Thad as he moved to end the assembly by lifting the sword of his ancestors from its black iron rack and placing it across his knees to signal that the justice dealt that day had the strength and power of the throne behind it…

You would’ve been witness to history.

.   .   .

The burnt gold of autumn was rolling across the land and plaintiffs filled the King’s Hall, eager to make good on claims before the snows of a harsh winter buried villages and crimes alike. King Andreas, in the second year of his reign, dispensed justice from his throne while his sword, the symbol of his right to rule, lay in its rack within arm’s reach. His brother Jon–named to the office of King’s Sword, his most trusted advisor for life–stood to his left. Three steps lower on the dais stooped the aged Chancellor Tallus, councilor to Andreas’s father and grandfather before him. A crowd filled the hall with a steady buzz which had, in turns, swelled and faded as the audience dragged on.

When the God’s Bell finally tolled three times to signal the end of court, Andreas gratefully stood to draw his blade and lay it across his knees. The court had lasted for hours and the entire hall was drowsy and bored, as was its young and impatient monarch. Andreas was a man of action, not thought, and he’d already been through more courts, audiences, and balls in his young reign than he could stand. Each interminable function seemed to require the ceremonial flourishing of the king’s sword, so it was with near boredom that he reached over, put his hand on the hilt of the weapon, and pulled.

He gasped as he nearly dropped it.

“Andreas?” Jon asked, taking a half-step towards his brother.

“Don’t,” Andreas said, gritting his teeth as he tried to lift the sword. A King of Mercia could not be seen receiving aid in his own court, but the surprise had made him clumsy. The sword clashed against the iron rack like a scullery’s pots being dropped. The buzz of the hall took on an edge as the crowd watched the King’s discomfort; heads turned to watch what was normally an unremarkable part of the court ritual turn into a struggle. Tallus turned to look over his shoulder at his liege, his sleepy eyes widening.

The blade was a deadweight. It took both hands and all of Andreas’s strength to lift it, stagger to his throne, and place the bared blade on his thighs. It required the rest of his composure to dismiss the assembly calmly. Tallus, sensing a crisis to be avoided, herded the crowd along, waving impatiently at the guards to chase the stragglers craning their heads to see what had left their liege shaking with effort. The court melted away, glancing back at the King’s pale face and sweat-slicked brow as they left.

“Andreas,” Jon said once they were alone. “What’s wrong?”

Andreas said nothing, instead running his hands over the sword that was his birthright. The blade, wider than a big man’s palm, was corroded and pitted;  the day before it had been as brilliant and sharp as a barber’s razor. Andreas had been able to see his reflection in it—a young king in his prime looking back from the mirror-like steel. Now he saw nothing but a pocked and frowning monarch late in years and he was frightened. He tried lifting the sword again, swinging it as he had a thousand times, but even with his veins standing out in his neck and his arms straining with the effort, the blade rose no more than a foot off the floor. He let the point sink to the ground, panting and staring at it as a sick realization washed over him.

The sword was dying.

Writing Resources

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I’m far from an expert on the craft of writing, but I do know what’s helped me and what hasn’t. This is a very small group of writing guides, but it’s my “marooned on a desert island” list. It also doesn’t include what I consider the indispensable basics, either, like Elements of Style or Garner’s Usage. These titles are more concerned with the intangibles of writing and its result.

On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft
Stephen King

On Writing is fittingly called “a memoir”, as much of it is made up of autobiographical musings by King. But the narrative style actually works well in putting the reader at ease, standing in stark contrast to other style, grammar, and writing books that can be terse and dry. I found it especially helpful when I began my first novel, as King touches on just about everything you need to get started: approach, commitment, daily word count, the importance of action, when to let yourself off the hook and when to put yourself back on. You won’t find a lot of hard and fast rules about writing or grammar here; as the title says, the book is more about the intangibles of craft. Worth reading in its entirety before you fully commit to a novel-length project. The book ends with a sample chapter of King’s with hand-written proofs and corrections followed by a short list of authors King admires.

Get it on Amazon

On Writing Well
William Zinsser

Zinsser’s books are primarily intended for those writing non-fiction, but his tips, guides, and anecdotes are a goldmine for any writer. Zinsser uses his own personal experiences to illuminate his career as a journalist, and result is a homey and comfortable approach to writing. Unlike King’s On Writing, however, he also has a lot of the “bolded-header” type of rules and regulations you might find in a manual: when to drop in an exclamation point, using the right word for the job, avoiding the wrong or hackneyed word, paragraph length, the best place for contractions and so on. He uses quoted examples of his own pieces as well as writers he admires so that you see the lessons in action. There aren’t any exercises, per se, as the whole book is meant to be instructional.

Get it on Amazon

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself Into Print
Renni Browne and Dave King

Self-Editing is the kind of book that puts a keen edge on the dull knife of your writing. It’s a more business-oriented version of the traditional help manual, pointing out the common errors, trite phrases, and basic mistakes that drive agents and editors crazy–and result in your manuscript being rejected. Browne and King aren’t just mercenaries with a red pen, however; they’re obviously concerned with good writing, just good writing that gets published, too. There are dozens of examples of bad and good attempts–made-up excerpts as well as famous ones–and each chapter has particular exercises meant to strengthen your writing in important areas: point of view, dialogue, tempo, sophistication, voice.

Get it on Amazon

The Art & Craft of Novel Writing
Oakley Hall

Hall’s Art & Craft is structured almost like a manual, with sections for dialogue, point of view, plotting, etc., but has always felt a little nebulous to me, with a suggestion here and a guideline there, and no real structure to sink my teeth into. Despite that, it’s the book I return to when I feel “rules” aren’t working anymore and I want to get back in touch with what makes writing, as the title implies, an art. There are many demonstrative examples of good, nuanced writing and many of the chapters are annotated. The book ends with a detailed examination of the entire first chapter of The Columbus Tree by Peter Feibleman, an example of a synopsis of one of Oakley’s own novels, then a lengthy reading list of other authors, focusing on the writing process and craft.

Get it on Amazon

Don’t Murder Your Mystery
Chris Roerden

This book and it’s less genre-centric big sister, Don’t Sabotage Your Submission, should be within arm’s length of all novelists of mid-level experience and onward…that is, those of us that know just enough to be dangerous (mostly to ourselves). Roerden addresses a host of writing mistakes that even veterans are known to perpetrate, from subtly bad POV to poor exposition to bad word choice. This is the book that will buff your writing to a high gloss.

Get it on Amazon

What’s helped you with your writing? Share it here with an explanation of how and why!

KDP Select: Promised Land or Indie Armageddon?

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An announcement made earlier this week by Amazon sent shock waves throughout the indie author world–and through the publishing world, no doubt. The event was the grand unveiling of KDP Select, a program that was being sold to indie authors as a way of increasing exposure and possibly bumping up royalties as well.

The deep pro’s and con’s have been discussed on the Kindle Boards, David Gaughran’s blog, Passive Voice, and many others, but the general gist is this:

What indie authors agree to
Indie authors that opt-in to the KDP Select program must remove their participating titles from all other electronic distribution channels (Barnes and Noble, iTunes, Smashwords, Kobo, etc.) including their own website for a minimum of 90 days. There is a 3 day grace period to opt out.

What Amazon does
Amazon enrolls the title in the Amazon Prime Lending Program. Amazon Prime customers, in addition to the continuing benefit of free 2-day shipping, get value-added in the form of being allowed to borrow one book per month for free from participating authors. Since Amazon was rebuffed by many Big Six publishers when asked to participate in the Lending program, they turned to indie authors to fill the digital shelves.

What authors get
The sure thing that authors opting-in to the program get is a slice (the size of which is based on the total number of downloads in a month) of a $500,000 pie. It didn’t take long for authors to figure out–when total opt-in titles topped 30k–that those slices would be small indeed. As a result, most indie authors see it as a tool for increased exposure for their titles. Helping with that is the option for authors to make their title free for up to 5 days of the 90 (a common tool for promotion that was unavailable directly through Amazon until now).

What is still unclear
The $500,000 pot is an arbitrary amount chosen by Amazon with no particular reasoning being given for the choice. Numbers such as “$6 million in 2012” have been hinted at for future pots, but–again–this is an arbitrary number seemingly unattached to other factors: downloads, rankings, retail cost of the book, anything. There’s also a conspicuous lack of guarantee behind this number.

The division it’s caused
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that KDP Select is an attempt by Amazon to drive its competitors out of the ebook business, or relegate them to such a minor role that they might as well be gone. For most authors, whether this move by Amazon is ethical or not takes a backseat to the question of whether it benefits that author. For most indies, they have Amazon to thank for creating the independent book space in the first place and many report that the overwhelming majority of sales (often 95% or more out of hundreds or even thousands of downloads) come from Amazon. Amazon is also credited with having the best reporting, financials, search functionality, distribution model, and chance for exposure. They point to Amazon’s competitors’ lack of sophistication in these areas and shrug.

Looking out for Number One is a natural tendency, and especially so among indie authors who have to make hay when (and where) the sun shines. And it’s not often shining anywhere but on Amazon.

The long view
Those that take the longer view fear that the decisions we make today–and the concessions we agree to–will forge the future of all independent authored content, even if Amazon doesn’t become a near or true monopoly. They encourage restraint and caution; if authors send the signal to corporations that they will run to any deal that improves on the last one, they only have to dangle the carrot just enough to get the majority of authors to bite. And if one company does rise to become the dominant player, you can bet those terms (the carrot) will favor the company and not its content providers.

How I see it
The current situation can be divided into two major areas that are not mutually exclusive.

The first (looking out for #1) is “how, as an indie author, do I respond to Amazon’s overtures to tempt me away from their competitors and is the way they’re doing it fair?” And the overwhelming answer is pretty easy and self-evident: if 99% of your sales come from Amazon, competitors aren’t willing to match A’s distribution and exposure successes, and KDP Select is on a 90 trial, there’s no argument

The second and less easily answered question (the “long view”) is: if no competitor can or will respond to Amazon’s moves and it does corner the Ebook/indie market, where does that leave the future of indie publishing? And the uncomfortable truth seems to be that it doesn’t matter, because the only thing an indie author can do at the moment to push back against this possibility would be to refuse to join KDP Select in (a somewhat symbolic and empty) protest. Doing that, however, might signal to Smash, Apple, B&N, that there’s no need to compete or improve, that there are enough indies out there willing to stick it out against Amazon.

Which leaves me feeling distinctly like the horseshoe on the anvil. I don’t want to be beholden to Amazon, no matter how good they’ve been to me in the past. Call me a cynic, but as much as I owe to Amazon, I can never forget that our goals right now are aligned, not identical. Indies have proven to be a nice revenue stream for the behemoth, but I can’t help but think that we are also the tool that Amazon has tried to use to bring Big Six publishing to heel. We are the wedge that’s begun to dislodge antiquated business practices from the publishing industry. But a wedge is still a tool.

When that process is done, we will only be a line item on the ledger sheet. And if there are no other competitors around when there’s some accounting to be done (say, the need to impress Wall Street or the majority of shareholders), indie authors will see their presumably inviolate rights mutated, transferred, or taken away as the situation demands.

I also don’t want to be stuck with the other distributors who don’t seem to care about making a sound business model. Each main competitor seems to have one component of the puzzle, but no more: Apple has the money and the reach but not the desire; Smashwords has the desire but not the know-how, clout, or reach; Barnes and Noble has the pedigree and the desire, but can’t seem to keep from tripping over itself. If none of these blind giants gets their act together, Amazon is going to nudge them over–because they’re already stumbling towards–the cliff.

The subversive in me thinks the only solution is an author co-op where writers take control of their own future. Call me crazy, but an online store that is owned and funded by authors would be able to generate higher royalties while benefiting from the synergies of aggregated promotion and distribution. No exclusivity contracts, instant opt-in/opt-out. Advertising abilities that would dwarf any single author’s efforts.

Unfortunately, the idea is so far from reality that it’s hard to even talk about it with a straight face. But the landscape is changing and things we thought impossible yesterday (like independent electronic publishing, for instance) will become commonplace tomorrow.