Author: Karen

Self-published novelists still make the same mistakes

Ten years ago, if you self-published your book people knew that you did it because you couldn’t get published any other way.

With the advent of ebooks, the internet*, print-on-demand, and the changing face of publishing in general, self-publishing doesn’t have the same stigma any more.

Even so, when someone tells me they have self-published their book, I smile and say, “That’s nice,” but in my mind I’m praying, “Please don’t ask me to read it.”

Why?

Because most self-published books are poorly edited.

Let me be blunt. You, as a writer—and by ‘you’ here I mean me, too, because I am a writer—cannot see problems in your own work. Yes, you can fix up most of it, and you should, because that’s where you need to be before you can even send it out to an agent, but once you have sold your book what happens?

First, it goes to a story editor, who picks holes in the plot and tells you things you didn’t want to hear. Like how the heroine you thought was so wonderful is a whiny, unlikeable creature, or that there was no way the hero could get from London to New York in fifteen minutes to save the day, and so on.

Okay, so I’m being a bit stupid here, but it’s amazing the obvious things you don’t pick up.

After you have fixed all of these, the copy editor comes in and red-pencils all your typos and grammar errors. Even after numerous edits it’s amazing what still needs to be fixed.

Thus most writers, even when they turn in what they consider to be a polished final draft, still have a lot of work to do once the book has been acquired.

Self-published authors don’t generally do this work.

I buy a lot of eBooks. For authors I don’t know, I read the excerpt provided and if I like it enough I buy it. Unfortunately, it’s got to the stage where if I know (or even suspect) that the author is self-published then I just won’t buy the book.

Why not?

Because they’re not polished. They’ve got plot-holes and typos and all the other problems I mentioned above. Because they’re amateur.

I don’t want to pay for half-finished work. I can get that from my online writing group, and at least I know what to expect from them.

Sometimes I think it’s because these authors are too close to their own work to see that their story isn’t finished. Sometimes I think they know it’s not but don’t care anyway. Occasionally they do care, but have calculated that what they will earn from new readers outweighs what they will lose because they don’t build up a following. This last happens a lot in niche markets where the reading audience is so eager for stories in their niche that they will buy anything, and works until the market becomes saturated.

The cost of editing

If you are determined to self-publish, then you should seriously consider working with an editor. Unfortunately, that doesn’t come cheap.

How much does it cost? You may as well ask how long is a piece of string.

Check out the suggested rates over at www.londonfreelance.org. Think about how long it would take you to do a story edit, halve it (because they’re going to do it faster than you) and multiply the number of hours by the hourly rate. You’ll find it’s a lot.

I know of  a published writer who used to charge $2 per page (250 words) to do a story edit. Think about it. That’s $800 for a 100,000 words and you still need someone to do a copy edit as well.

I have no idea how much a good editor charges but I can tell you this much, based on my own experiences as a technical writer. Editing is different to tech writing, but the principles apply for both.

• Good, experienced technical writers [and editors] charge more but they don’t take as long to do it, and their work is generally better
• It always takes longer than you think it will
• If I can’t make a living out of it, I’m not going to do it.

That last one is important. I have to live. I love my work but if it won’t pay my bills then I’ll find a job that does.  Editors have to live too.

Think about that when you consider the costs of getting a good editor.

One thing I am watching with interest is Dystel and Goderich’s (D&G) foray into ePublishing. See their announcement here, and Victoria Strauss, from Writer Beware‘s thoughts on it here. Read the comments, they’ll give an interesting insight.

In D&G’s model I don’t know what their 15% covers, or whether the author has to still fork out for editing costs. I expect they will. But some agents do fairly comprehensive edits on stories anyway. If you get a good agent who does that already, and if the agent is reputable (as D&G appear to be), you might get away with just the costs of a good copy-editor instead.

As I say, I don’t know their planned model, but it will be interesting to see what happens.

The other traps

It’s not just the cost of editing you have to think about.

Beware of rip-offs. The publishing industry is filled with scams. There are a lot of people out there who say they are editors and will take advantage of you.

You need a reputable editor.

Not only that, you need an editor compatible with your writing. There’s no pointing taking on an editor who loves literary and looks down on genre if you want them to edit your science fiction romance.

Respect your editor

Lastly, one thing that getting you book published through a commercial publishing company does is make you listen to the editor. You have to. There’s a book contract relying on it. You won’t agree with everything the editor says, but you’ll pick your fights.

When you’re self-publishing you don’t need to do that. If an editor makes a recommendation you don’t like you can ignore it. Sometimes you’ll ignore things you shouldn’t.

If you ignore too many recommendations, then it’s one of two things:

• You’ve chosen the wrong editor for your book, or
• You’re not ready to accept criticism.

Either way, you have wasted your money.

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* Why the internet? A lot of bloggers, in particular, have developed a strong enough platform that they become known as an authority in their field. They then publish eBooks on their topic and sell them from their website and make some reasonable money from it.

It seems that everywhere I’ve been on the web lately people are talking about how a strong sense of place can act as another character in your story, or really make a story more enjoyable.

• A strong sense of place, Cally Jackson
• Let’s think about place, Stacey Kendall Glick, Dystel and Goderich
• And even Popular strong sense of place books over at GoodReads.

Around the same time, I seemed to read a lot about how if you want to sell to the US market then you have to ‘Americanise’ your story. In particular, how the first Harry Potter was Americanised (or should that be Americanized) for the US market, while the later stories were changed less.

Some of the changes include:

English	US
Philosopher’s stone	Sorceror’s stone
Car park	Parking lot
Sherbet	lemon Lemon drop
Toilet	Bathroom
Mum	Mom
Dear Harry, (it said in a very untidy scrawl) I know you get Friday afternoons off	Dear Harry, I know you get Friday afternoons off, [written in a handwriting font]

 

Differences in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, The Harry Potter Lexicon

The changes were minor. Some people who read both version said they didn’t notice the differences.

I can’t say. I haven’t read the US versions of the book. I don’t know how much they changed the sense of place, but to me books that use ‘Mom’ and ‘bathroom’ give me a totally different sense of place to one that uses ‘Mum’ and ‘toilet’.

I know that these are only words to talk about, respectively, a parent and a room in which to perform ablutions. You can argue that this is nothing like the sense of place you get from, say, Carl Hiaasen’s stories about Florida.

You get a stronger sense of place from Hiaasen, but that doesn’t mean that Harry Potter doesn’t also have one. I believe it just means that Hogwarts is more familiar to you. Despite the fact that it’s a fantasy, it’s set in a school environment most readers are familiar with, even if they have never been to boarding school.

Yes, some stories bring place to the forefront and make it a character in the story. Other stories concentrate on the emotional development of the (other) characters and the place could be anywhere.

Even so, if you have written your story well the sense of place will permeate it. It’s there in everything the characters say, what they eat, where they go. And sometimes in what they do as well.

It’s also the differences between life as you know it and life in the book that evoke a sense of place. If you have lived all your life in the city, then a well-written book about life in a dying country town will seem exotic to you and give you a stronger sense of place than one set in a big city. If you are not French then a story set in France will be exotic. Or it should be, if it’s written properly.

It’s the little things that make a difference. Calling your mother Mom or Mum or even Mama.

That’s why I think the trend to Americanise books for the US audience is a sad thing. It takes away some of the strength the book gets from its setting; the thing that makes a particular book what it is.

Most of the time you don’t even need to change it in the first place. Let’s go back to Harry Potter. In the Philosopher’s Stone they changed nearly fifty words to suit their US audience. In Deathly Hallows they changed two words—cot and dresser.

Writing the alpha male

Part two of a series on the alpha male, and how writers can get it wrong.  In part 1 I talked about how the alpha male behaves.  In this post I want to talk about how bad it can be when you get it wrong.

Last night I purchased a self-published book from Amazon. The premise was interesting, and even though the preview was a little choppy the price was right and I liked the idea enough to download it anyway.

The book was so bad I ended up deleting it from my Kindle. It’s sitting in my archived items now, and if I could get rid of it altogether I would.

What made it so bad?

The love interest in the story was truly repulsive. The author had tried to write someone strong and protective. Instead she gave us a domineering, arrogant tyrant who had no respect for the other characters at all.

Worse, I could see from the way she wrote that she thought she was giving us an alpha male.

If you haven’t already done so, read Angela Knight’s The Care and Writing of Alpha Males. As well as being an excellent article all round, she makes some valid points about the alpha males of old who were actually the villains of the story, even when they were the hero.

That’s what the author of the story I read last night had created. A villain, even though she didn’t realise it.

It was as if she had taken a list of alpha qualities that and checked them off.

• Alpha male is decisive. So, alpha male must make the decisions. Always. Even if the love interest has already made a sensible decision. Alpha overrides it with a stupider one of his own because it’s his decision and he decides.
• Alpha male protects. Love interest is hospitalised with what turns out to be a stress-related ulcer. Afterwards, alpha won’t let love interest do anything (and I mean anything) because she’s just come out of hospital. Even though love interest has had ulcer for months (see money problems, below) and has been doing fine without alpha’s help all this time.
• Alpha male is rich. The love interest has money problems. Alpha male, naturally, throws money around to solve it. This is a deus ex machina for me, anyway. Don’t we all wish someone rich would come along and save us? But it wasn’t so much the doing it, as how he did it. You have to read to book to see how repulsively it was done. All I can say is if someone walked out on me four years ago, left me to run a business on my own and then came back four years later when I had practically bankrupted the business paying his grandfather’s medical bills and then takes the business out of my hands and runs it himself because he has ‘saved’ it by paying off the debts, I’m not going to stand by meekly and say, “Thank you,” like the love interest did.

Worst of all was the way the character didn’t run true to himself. He had all the characteristics of the alpha male but nothing to bind it together, and without anything to bind it, his behaviour was simply obnoxious, overbearing and totally unjustified.  Not to mention erratic, because it didn’t gel with his behaviour outside these ‘alpha’ scenes.

I mentioned at the start that the book was self-published.  I think that if it had been through a proper editing process, or even a better critiqing process, many of these problems would have disappeared before it went up.

I know from my own experience that when you write you cannot always see how bad a character comes across to other readers.  The trouble with the alpha male is that they’re difficult to write anyway because you do have to tread that

… fine line between confidence and arrogance, protectiveness and condescension.
The Care and Writing of Alpha Males, Angela Knight

And to quote Angela Knight again

…no character can make you slam a book against a wall quicker than an alpha male gone bad.
The Care and Writing of Alpha Males, Angela Knight

I am a member of three writing organisations*.

• The Victorian Writers’ Centre (VWC) (www.vwc.org.au)
• Queensland Writers Centre (QWC) (www.qwc.asn.au)
• Romance Writers of Australia (RWA) (www.romanceaustralia.com)

I’ve been away on holiday. In the mail when I arrived home were the August newsletters for each group as well as emails from VWC and QWC in my email inbox. It was interesting to read one after the other and to compare the three organisations.

I am, unashamedly, a genre writer, and this bias shows. When the various writing organisations ask for feedback, the first thing I say is ‘more genre, please’.

Victorian Writers’ Centre (VWC)

The VWC is, in my opinion, the most literary of the three. It has become even more so since they moved to the Wheeler Centre and Roderick Poole became director. I’m not sure if this is a deliberate direction Roderick is taking them, or if I am just noticing it more since the redesign of the website and the magazine. They’re big into poetry, literary writers and into writing festivals (not all literary I might add).

Queensland Writers Centre (QWC)

To me, QWC strikes a better balance between genre and literary. In the August issues both magazines talked about local writing conferences and poetry, but the QWC also had an article on the Australian crime scene and another on writing historical romance.

Both magazines cover a good range of workshops, writing opportunities and competitions.

Romance Writers of Australia Inc. (RWA)

Now we’re really talking genre. While Hearts Talk is nowhere near as polished as The Victorian Writer or WQ, this is the magazine I read from cover to cover. This is industry-specific news and networking. This is the sort of information a genre writer needs to keep them enthusiastic. And I am not even primarily a romance writer but a science fiction/fantasy writer who adds romantic elements.

The August magazine contained an article on creating characters, a note on the response to Meghan Cox Gurdon’s criticism of young adult literature being too dark plus Lynne Wilding award nominees for the RWA volunteer of the year, as well as member news and releases.

Obviously, for me, the RWA provides more value for money than either of the state-based writing groups.

I first decided to join RWA after talking to a fellow speculative fiction writer at a VWC workshop. She wrote fantasy, I was writing science fiction at the time. And I think that probably says it all. To the VWC, ‘speculative fiction’ is one small (and sometimes it seems to me, unimportant) type of writing, while RWA is genre-based enough to recognise the different genres within, while always with a view to the romance genre, of course.

Different types of writers will find different writing groups more valuable than others. For me, as a genre writer, the best value for money is in my RWA membership, even though I don’t actually write romance per se. If I wrote, say, literary fiction or even mainstream fiction, I imagine I would get more value out of my VWC membership.

If you can afford it, I think that you should become a member of your state writing organisation. If nothing else, it keeps you in touch with other writers and what is going on in the writing world.

On top of that, join any genre organisation that is suitable.

* I am also a member of the Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (ASFFA) (http://www.asffwa.com/). I can’t speak for them, as I haven’t really had much contact with them.

Amateurs smirk, professionals don’t.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but when characters smirk in a story it always makes the story seem just that little bit more amateur. One character, one smirk, is bad enough. But when all the characters start to smirk, one after the other, oh boy.

I’ve been reading a lot of two and three dollar eBooks lately. Some are great stories, others so-so, and some are downright bad.

It’s purely subjective, but for me one of the indicators of how good a story will be is the number of times characters smirk. One smirk is acceptable, but two or more close together early in the book, especially when it’s different characters doing the smirking, usually denotes a book that needed a lot more editing before it went to press. Or, to put it bluntly, self-published books.

When I read about characters smirking in a novel it’s often in a romantic part, where one character smirks to the other just as they’re about to get down and do it. What the writer usually means is that the character is feeling pretty pleased with themselves about something, that they are smiling in a self-satisfied manner.

Except to me, this is not what smirk means.

The Free Dictionary defines a smirk as:

To smile in an affected, often offensively self-satisfied manner

Dictionary.com as:

to smile in an affected, smug, or offensively familiar way

Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary:

a smile that expresses satisfaction or pleasure about having done something or knowing something which is not known by someone else

Reverso:

a smile expressing scorn, smugness, etc., rather than pleasure

The origin of the word, according to most of the sites cited above, is from the Old English smearcian, related to smer derision; and the Old High German bismer contempt, bismeron to scorn.

It’s not the sort of smile you’re about to give to the man or woman you are having a romantic moment with. Not unless you’re raping or blackmailing them.

Even worse is when the characters always smirk. I mean, how often do you smirk? How many of your friends smirk all the time? I recently read a novel where there were six smirks on the one page, shared amongst two people.

It was Mark Twain who said that the difference between the right word and almost the right word was the difference between lightning and the lightning-bug. Smirking is like that. Oftentimes when it’s used, it’s not quite the right word. It always takes me out of a story. And I’m sorry to all you smirkers out there, but most times it makes the writing feel a lot more amateur.