A Service For Writers

No, this is not the Emperor Ming

My friend Dan Moran, as in "Daniel Keys Moran," aside from being a writer of some excellence, is also one of those computer-savvy and literate fellows who knows about bits and bytes and oddball OSs and all that stuff which might as well be Greek when I hear it: Hi, yes, I have a blah-blah-blah system that runs blah-blah-blah megahertz ...


But because of this skill, Dan can do things like take a rough book manuscript and turn it into a file that can be put up on in an ebook store and look like it was done by somebody who knew what the hell he was doing. 


There are, believe it or not, writers with even less technical skill than I have, and an impediment to creating something they can put up as an ebook is the sheer terror of trying to figure out how to do it and not screw it up. Like a boulder in the road, with more rumbling down the hill, it tends to cause writers who might go down that path to slam on their brakes. 


So, even though he doesn't need the work, but is a workaholic who seems to think that idle hands are the devil's workshop, Dan will, for select folks, offer a service in which he will take a book file in .doc format and turn it into a whole bunch of others, including .mobi, epub, HTML, and PDF, blah-blah-blah, and then all you have to do is send it to the ebook store you like. Or, even, a POD place.


Since he owns an ebook site, he's doing some of this himself, and he knows what's what.


Now, here the caveats: While light editing is part of such a process, catching the odd typo or garbled character, he is not offering to be your book editor; nor to teach you how to write; nor to be your agent. This is aimed at people who are already professional writers who are looking to make the transition as painlessly as possible.


Let me emphasize that: This is aimed at people who are already professional writers who are looking to make the transition as painlessly as possible.

So, if you are one of those folks, and if you are looking at the whole ebook thing as if it is a vampire and you are scrambling to find a cross to hold up in front of it, you might want to drop him a note.  His rates are most reasonable. 


Here: danmoran909@yahoo.com.

People Get Ready, There's a Train a'Comin'

The ebook train hasn't pulled all the way into the station yet, but it is coming and not far away. Five years ago, the ebook share was less than 1% of the market. Now, it's at 6-8%. In five more years, I expect it will be considerably more; I've heard estimates from 30-60%.

The express carrying iPods rolled in and out in a hurry, and while I don't think book readers are going to take over the market as fast or as much as MP3 players did -- music draws more listeners than books do readers -- ebooks are going to change things.

Already traditional book stores are having troubles. A lot of the big chains have cut inventory, both in terms of titles and copies carried. Returns are up. Little stores are selling used books if they want to stay alive.

Traditional publishers are now competing with anybody who has a computer and a desire to see a book in print or online. True, the New York houses are the acme of the market now, in terms of production, advances, and distribution. But just as YouTube and MySpace have created musical stars and new video directors, it won't be long before somebody creates an ebook that hits it big, bypassing the traditional publishers.

Mostly, they still serve as filters -- at least there is a basic level of professional stuff. Anybody who can upload his or her own stuff without the chops probably won't do very well at it.

I like treeware and expect I will always prefer reading paper books to electronic ones, and I'm not alone. But there is a generation that doesn't care, or would rather read on their laptops or iPhones. They are jacked in. They are younger, and eventually, the market will cater to them. Paper books aren't going away, but the business won't be the same ten years from now.

When the etrain leaves the station, I don't want to be standing on the platform waving bye-bye. I'm getting my ticket now.

Some numbers:

Traditional publishers will give an advance against royalties, and then a rate -- at my level -- of 8-10% for a paperback book. The math is easy: Eight buck book, I might get eighty cents a copy sold, against my royalty. For the sake of argument and to keep the arithmetic simple, say I get a thousand-dollar advance. The paperback title has to sell 1250 copies for me to earn that advance, after which I start making eighty cents each. Twice a year thereafter, long as it is in print, I should get a royalty statement and a check.

Kindle's royalty rate is 35%. For a five dollar book, I therefore get $1.75. Twice as much plus as paper, on a title that costs 62% as much. 571 copies to get the $1000. They start paying after three months.

On my blog, a PDF for $5, the royalty rate is 100%. To get the thousand, only 200 copies. Payment comes before I email the book.

POD -- print on demand -- my costs for a book are about twice what I'm charging, a few cents less, and then the book has to be printed and shipped. An ebook gets there faster, no postage, and once done, almost no cost to me.

Granted, if I am suddenly overwhelmed with orders on my blog, I'll probably have to hire somebody to fill them. Not that I am ever likely to get that many orders this route. At the moment, however, it takes me about a minute. I click on the customer's email address, and send him an email with the PDF attached. I have enough bandwidth from my server to do that all day every day.

Neither Kindle nor my blog offer me a royalty up front. And the numbers of sales via them aren't anywhere near what I get on my paper books, even as a midlister. However, those numbers are probably going to get bigger as we roll along. Just as the music industry had to come to terms with the net, so are the book companies.

Ebook readers are still expensive and clunky. But there have been a couple million downloads of the Apple iPhone reader app, and readers will get cheaper. When you can get one for $99, which is less than the cost of four hardback books, watch. They won't be able to make them fast enough.

Barnes & Noble is about to jump into the fray with their own reader. Apple continues to lie about theirs, but don't believe them, one is in the works. Kindle has a million units out; Sony claims twice that. There are ten million iPhones out there. The Chinese are cranking up their factories.

Beat a better path and the world will build a door to your mousetrap ...

I'm not great at predicting the future, but you don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows ...

From the Front Lines of Bookery

Okay, the official announcement that I will pass along to my–ah–social media ...

The best e-version of The Dreadnaught, by Reaves and Yours Truly, is now up at Dan Moran's. You can find it elsewhere, but this version is the best-looking, and it costs the same, plus you can get it in pretty much any format you can read. Plus Dan is a nice guy.

In fact, anything that is available in Dan's store is going to be a nicer-looking version than you can get electronically elsewhere.

Because Dan is a nice guy, he gave me a PDF version of the novel that is suitable for POD–that's print-on-demand, and I have uploaded that file to Lulu.com and made the book available that way. In theory, you should be able to find it here. (But it's not fully processed yet, so it might be another day or two.)

Not that I'm worried, but you might wait a few days before you rush to get the print version; I've ordered a copy and I want to check it and make sure it didn't print funny, itty-bitty type or some other thing I got wrong when I uploaded it. I'll stick a note up here when it shows up next week. 

The reason I'm not worried overmuch about this, and not to poison my own well or anything, but POD is wheezing along a distant third in the race among ebooks, traditional books, and POD, and not only unlikely to catch up, it's falling farther behind every lap.

Here's why: First: Cost. This novel is a big 'un, so if you print it as a trade paperback, it runs just under six hundred pages. In order to make it available this way, I have to charge $19.99, and that gives me a profit margin more than 25% less than I make on the e-version. And this is split two ways, recall, since it is a collaboration. 

So, if you want this book, your legal choice is, a fat trade paperback for twenty bucks plus four bucks shipping, and a delivery of 4-7 days via snailmail. (You can get it overnighted by UPS, but it'll cost as much as the book itself.) Or, you can get the ebook delivered to your reader in maybe two minutes for $7, no shipping cost. I make more money, so you are doing me a favor–not to mention a favor for your own pocketbook by paying two-thirds and some less.

Second: Convenience.

Let's look at the comparison:

Trade paperback: ~ $24 + 4-7 days for delivery. More than three times as much as an ebook.

eBook: ~$7, and you can be reading it in less time than it takes you to finish this post telling you all this. 

Having gone down this road before, I can tell you that all the people who told me, "Oh, a new novel? Well, I don't do electronic books, but if you make it available in print, I'll grab it up!" 

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, most of them lied ...

I recognize that there are readers who prefer paper over plastic, and frankly, I'm one of them. But to offer paper books of which I will the publisher be, it'll cost a premium price. No way around that.

If I get the rights back on the Matador novels and decide to offer POD versions, those will be mass market paperbacks and short enough I can probably get the cost down to maybe ten  bucks, plus shipping; which isn't so bad compared to traditional paperback prices. Still twice as much as the e-versions are apt to be. (If I sold them at cost, made no money at all, they'd still cost more than traditional paperbacks the same length.)

Hard to slice this pie so POD comes out with the biggest piece, no matter how you place the knife.

More on eBookery

So I took a break from real work this afternoon, and did some more research on eBooks versus paper books. Like the idea or not, the ebook train is 'a'comin', and for the biggest reason of all in American biz:

Money.

Not "green," but "long green ..."

No inventory. No shipping cost. No spoilage if the warehouse floods. Very little overhead, almost instant delivery.

I'll always be a treeware guy at heart, I like the feel of an old book in hand, and the batteries never run out, but I'm a dinosaur and I can hear the nasty little egg-sucking mammals skritching around down there in the underbrush ...

At the risk of repeating what I've offered up here before, some things:

An ebook version of a short novel that sells for $6.99 makes the writer about four bucks a copy each one that sells.

The major publisher's paperback version of that same book makes him seventy cents. A hardback? Maybe two or three dollars, per, depending on the cost and royalty, but that's with a $25 cover price.

There are between three and five million Kindles, more or less, floating around. Ten times that many iPhones and iPods, and probably this year alone, four or five million iPads reach consumers. Not to mention Sony readers and laptop computers.

At Smashwords, you can have your book translated into HTML, Java, RTF, Text, PDF, ePub, mobi, palm doc and LRF, and if you qualify, have an ISBN # your book can be sent to all the major ebook houses to be put into their catalogs.

Doesn't cost you anything. No advance, and you won't hit the bestseller lists until you are already on them, but even so, you can sell a handful and still make some money.

For the fun of it, I checked with Lulu.com to see what a POD paperback would run.

You are gonna love this: $21, plus shipping. That could come down a little, but you can't list anything that size for under almost twenty bucks -- they won't let it out of the house for general sales, and my cost if I want to buy them? Fifteen dollars apiece. On Lulu, I make nine bucks per copy. If it sells on Amazon.com, how much of that $21 do I get?

Seventy-eight cents.

Wonder how many of those I'd sell? Probably about as many as sold of the other title I put up there, which is to say hardly any.

People talk about how they love paper books, but they vote with their pocketbooks more often than not.

The Truth Waits ...

... for eyes unclouded by longing.  

Which in this instance means I won't be spending too much time with the truth today ...

The grass has riz. Flowers have bloomed every which way, the sun is shining through clear skies, and it's gonna hit seventy-five degrees F. here today, maybe a tad warmer, which has resulted in spring fever.

Spring fever. Those of you unfamiliar with the term, it means that my desire to work is nil. Not so much that I want to go bask in the day, though walking the dogs is more fun when it's not raining and forty degrees; it's that the desire to play hooky permeates everything. 

Didn't want to get up from the cozy bed, don't want to crank on the book that's due next. Don't want to think about responsibilities I slip into with my clothes each day. Kind of feel like playing the guitar or the ukulele and staring out the window at passers-by is overly ambitious ...

But, okay, a little work here, for the writers ...

Pursuant to the Stellar Rangers ebook coming out, which I happened to mention in the post immediately prior to this one, I picked up a yellowing copy of the novel last night and started to read it. 

But before I get too far down that road ...

Writers, like actors, have different relationships with their work. Some never look at stuff they've done before. Once it is finished, they move on; that story is over, finished, no point in going back and noticing all the spots that weren't spackled and painted cleanly because you really can't fix it. (Yep, I could touch-up an ebook, it being a new edition, but some of the touch-ups go to things like fixing yesterday's future. Book was written nearly twenty years ago, and some of what was cool and futuristic tech looks a little dated. I could change the CD-ROM into a biomem or visual purple storage, but the tone would still be off without a major rewrite. I read a couple books of collected short stories by John D. MacDonald once upon a time, in which he had gone back and tried to update things like how much a new radio cost, or what a train ticket ran. It clunked–and that didn't happen much with Travis McGee's daddy. The reason was that a fresh coat of paint wasn't enough. Sure, he could make the radios and bus tickets more expensive than they'd been when he'd written the stories in the 1950's, but listening to radios instead of watching the tube, and taking the Greyhound instead of riding in one's car were part of the times-tone. Better he should have left them period pieces; didn't hurt Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler.)

In the course of a book's creation and going off to market, writers are apt to read it several times. There is the day-to-day re-reading of what's partially done. A read for errors once the draft is finished, and again after the rewrite. Once the editors go over it, there is the copy-edited manuscript. Then the galleys. And when it is published, a final read to check for typos. So five reads, which is enough for most of us. It goes onto the shelf. Slightly fewer reads with an ebook, since there isn't a copy-edited ms, nor a galley, but still.

Now and again, after a decade or two, I'll pick one of my books up and start into it. I find it interesting to see how I treated certain tropes and situations of which I am fond in earlier incarnations. Oh, yeah, that's where I came up with that the first time. Huh.

By and large, rereading the old stuff is not an unhappy experience. I was on a panel with Ursula once, and a fan asked her if going back and reading her early stuff was painful. Actually, no, she said. I'm usually surprised with how much better it was than I remembered.

Me, too.

So, there is something to be learned from revisiting stories from long ago.

So far, I'm enjoying the ranger as he moves through his adventure against the bad guys. There are some fun touches, nods to the Matadors, guns, martial arts, and one I had forgotten: The old rancher he's working with is named "Gus Kohl." If you are a fan of McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, and how can you not be? this is a pretty obvious pairing of names in a bow to the master.

Um. Okay. All done now. Let's go see how I can fritter away work time doing something else ...

The Love of Money: The Publishing Biz

Appropriately, maybe, lyrics from the Randy Newman song, "It's Money That I Love:"


It's Money That I Love/
It's Money That I Love/
(Spoken:) They say that money/ 
Can't buy love in this world/
But it'll get you a half-pound of cocaine/
And a sixteen-year old girl/
And a great big long limousine/
On a hot September night/
Now that may not be love/
But it is all right ...


On the surface, and as yet unproven, it appears that there is a problem in the publishing industry in regard to ebook royalties for the authors. 


Several writers of larger sales stature than I have noticed that there seems to be a discrepancy or five in the reports from their publishers, to wit:


eBook sales have been underreported.


There has been some back-and-forth among us, and even with only a handful as a sample, the evidence, while sketchy, would seem to favor this notion. Money that should be in the writers' pockets isn't getting passed along in a timely manner. Or maybe not at all. A better look at it here.


This concerns me, of course, though less directly than it does some of my fellow scribes. That's because most of my ebooks are titles that a) I published myself, or: b) shared-universes, for which I don't get a piece of the electronic action. I do have a couple that were mine put up as ebooks by my publishers, and while it might not ding me as hard, the ding is apt to be much bigger for those who sell more books via traditional publishers' e-tie-ins.


So far, we are talking anecdotal, and I won't bandy about the stories, save a general happenstance: Say a writer has a series of books set in the same world. Some in print, some not, and the publisher puts one up as an ebook, the writer puts up a different title. The one the publisher puts up supposedly sells thirty copies, and the one the writer puts up sells three hundred copies. 


Now there are reasons that this might be so, availability, for instance. But if a writer sticks up a backlist book that never did well that sells three hundred copies, and the publisher puts up one that is a current New York Times Bestseller and it sells that many, or fewer, you can understand how a writer might look at that and wonder. And if five or six writers all notice the same thing, that might indicate a pattern.


Maybe not. But: If it's a pattern, is it deliberate? Or is it poor accounting from hidebound publishers who haven't even figured out how to turn on their Kindles? Or is it a–gasp!–conspiracy!? 


How do we check? 


Well, here is the dreaded word: audit.


Most book contracts offer a passing nod to the writer's right to ask for a look at the books. Practically-speaking, this seldom happens, because the roadblocks are many, tall and wide. It has happened that a writer demanded an accounting and got it, but it is rare.


However, there are a number of writing organizations, each genre has them, science fiction and fantasy, mystery, horror, romance, etc. If several of these band together and truck on down to the publishers' houses, it is more likely that the bean-counters will be turned loose.


If there's no problem, then that's the end of it. If it is just pen and paper trying to run with the computers, the methods can be updated.


If it turns out that any significant amount of money has been withheld and directed into the wrong pockets? Then we are talking class-action lawsuit. 


And probably interesting times. 


The times, actually, are already interesting. Traditional publishers are losing sales on hardbacks, starting to seriously lose them on paperbacks, and making more every day on ebooks. Might be that somebody is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and if so, we need to know about it.


Stay tuned.

The Dreadnaught Sails At Last

A while back, my collaborator Reaves and I wrote a doorstop-fantasy. The final version came in at over 150,000 words, cut down from 175,000 or so, and we thought it was the cat's pajamas and the bee's knees. 


Timing wasn't so hot, because of the recession, but there wasn't anything we could do about that. My agent shopped it around, and they liked it well enough in New York City that we got a couple of offers from traditional publishers on it.


We didn't think the offers were so hot, and one of them was contingent on producing a second book, which we weren't interested in doing for the money they were offering. Not that we were being greedy, nor against the notion of another book or books set on our world of Eilandia; we just didn't want to be tied to a second book for a lowball offer. 


The economy was down, and the publishers were among the first to jump on that wagon as an excuse to buy cheap. (Book sales didn't fade that much overall–in hard times, a book is a good deal–you can read it, you can pass it around, and later, you can swap it for another book or even cash. I think they were off 1.8% overall in '09, though ebook sales started climbing. But like gasoline, if a sheik sneezes, they raise the price, just, you know, in case.


So we passed on the offers. 


But we liked the novel, we thought it was good, and since the ebook market has begun to come on strong–I'm actually making enough there now to pay for dinner out more than once a month now–we thought the time might be right to take a shot at it.


So we have. The Chronicles of Eilandia: The Dreadnaught, is going up. It will be available at the usual outlets, FS&, Amazon.com, B&N, AppleBooks, Smashwords in–we hope–short order. It's a good read, and if we can get the word out, might have a chance to do some decent business, since it will only be available as an ebook–unless, of course, it sells like ice water in Hell and the treeware folks come knocking. Stranger things have happened.

You should buy a copy. Get all your friends to buy a copy. Tell everybody you've ever met to buy a copy. Get introduced to somebody at a party? Tell them to buy a copy ...


Or not. See how it goes ...

eBook Info

Dunno if I posted this here before, but I got a query, not the first, about what format the ebooks are in.


Here's what Smashwords offers -- and if you buy there, you can choose any or all of these.

Available Ebook reading formats:

Format	Full Book
Online Reading (HTML)	View
Online Reading (JavaScript)	View
Kindle (.mobi)	Download
Epub (open industry format, good for Stanza reader, others)	Download
PDF (good for highly formatted books, or for home printing)	Download
RTF (readable on most word processors)	Download
LRF (for Sony Reader)	Download
Palm Doc (PDB) (for Palm reading devices)	Download
Plain Text (download) (flexible, but lacks much formatting)	Download
Plain Text (view) (viewable as web page)	View

Amazon.com's version is .mobi, and B&N's is whatever B&N's is. There are a couple here on the site not available elsewhere and they are in PDF. I expect that most of the dedicated ereaders and computers out there can find something here that works for 'em.

Bristlecone, a Novel

I have officially gone over to the dark side.

Well, a little bit ...

Okay, behold the official flackery for my most recent novel, the ebook Bristlecone.

The blurb:

“Old age and treachery overcomes youth and skill every time.”

When a long-retired couple of black-bag assassins are pulled back into the game, it's only a matter of hours before there's a body in their quiet back yard.

Much against their desires, Hull and Khadra find themselves facing Milos, an old nemesis from decades past whose plans could mean the deaths of millions.

Hull and Khadra have lost a few steps; but, despite being qualified for A.A.R.P. membership, they are far more experienced and still better-suited to deal with Milos than the young operatives at the secret agency known only as The Department.

In Bristlecone, Steve Perry, New York Times Bestselling co-author of Tom Clancy's Net Force series, offers a tale of spies and assassins, old grudges, and a fast-ticking clock of looming epidemic violence ...

This is going to be available as an ebook only, unless NYC hammers down my door and starts shoveling money at me.

You can get it at Smashwords, for assorted kinds of viewing -- should be something everybody with a reader or computer can view.

Apple iBooks now has it available on for the iPad, and in theory, so will B&N for the Nook, and Amazon.com for the Kindle.

Bristlecone, $5.99.

Buy a copy now! Baby needs a new iPad ...

New eBook from Rory Miller

Rory Miller has a new ebook on violence out, at Smashwords. You can download a preview here.

Worth checking out -- the man knows the subject.

Possible New eBook in the Offing

Been having a continuing discussion with Alan Bard Newcomer, who has the e-file that Don Ahlquist used for TTBMTCSOS, which is the novelette Thong the Barbarian Meets the Cycle Sluts of Saturn Reaves and I did back in the day for a small print run. If you can find a copy of the hardback, it is a spendy little collector's item. There were three versions: 1) with a dust jacket and plain boards; 2) a numbered/lettered blue-leather edition, and a red leather version of which there were ten copies done. That last one, I keep locked up.

Alan is having some trouble coming up with a file that I might turn into an ebook–what happens when you go through various permutations of software and hardware over the years. If he can manage it, I'll see about publishing it. I dunno if we can include the art, or even if we can come up with a clean file, but we'll see.


The art, interior and exterior was cheesy, as was the text, but in both cases, deliberately so. If you go here, you can read the first page and see that we were having way too much fun spewing adverbs and making the prose as purple as we could. It's not "The Eye of Argon," but it's in the same ballpark ...


If we can pull it off, I think hardcore SF&F fans will love this one. At least if they have a sense of humor they will.


Stay tuned. 


Oh, another CGI Alan sent:

And don't we look fetching in our leather bikinis ... ?

Ways to Avoid Doing Work

I've washed the dishes, folded a load of laundry, walked the dogs, and picked up a package at the post office. Then I needed to shoot some pictures -- for the day when I might want to use one as a b.g. for another book cover. Then I figured, what the hell, how about I do a book cover for somebody else ... ?


(Addendum: Here's what I had to say about Moran's book, a couple years back -- I had a review of it for the local paper, once upon a time, but lost it:


"Moran is one the best space-opera writers ever. I thought The Last Dancer, the third book in the Emerald Eyes, The Long Run, um, trilogy, was as good as they get.

Probably hard to find these day, and buying them used doesn't put any money in his pocket, but if you can find copies, you should read them."

Since it's going to be an ebook, you should get a copy of that instead, since it will put money into his pocket..

Well. I guess I have to go to work now.


Okay. Just one more ...


(Addendum the Second: And here's the last graph of I said about Reaves's book in my review when it came out:


"Reaves skillfully weaves these and other disparate characters into a tangled web, never losing a thread. The feel of the writing is real enough to wilt your clothes, to make you sweat, to swat at the clouds of buzzing mosquitoes. Against the dark and humid New Orleans spring, with the workings of voodoo, the French Quarter, and even a bleak trip into the Louisiana State Prison of Angola, the players are bound for a horrific showdown, upon which their fates and that of the world itself hinges. Voodoo Child is a welcome addition to books that go bump in the night."

I dunno its status as an ebook, but you can still find used treeware copies on Amazon.com.)