Ebooks, Good or Bad?

I am still a lover of the paper book. I love the smell and feel of the pages and the beauty of the binding, even if it is a mass market novel. I think I will always want to have a paper book around to read. I sure don't know how my religious devotions would fare with an ebook - I tried the Bible on Kindle and I just couldn't make it work for me.

But I see people I know and people I don't really getting into ebooks. I myself love to read the ebooks I purchase. But I have some doubts about the statistics.

In April, I read a statistic from the "Big 6" publishers in the U.S. that said that from February 2010 to February 2011, sales of print books was down 46% and sales of ebooks was up 150%. That translates to print books going from 100 to 54 and ebooks going from 100 to 150. I don't dispute the statistics, I just dispute the meanings.

I remember fondly in 2006 and 2007, while in library school, my friends and I going to the local Barnes & Noble (and then me to the Books-a-Million alone) and browsing the hundreds and hundreds of titles they had on the bargain book tables. These were books that they could not sell at full price and had to sell at insane discounts like $1 and $2 and $5. From February 2006 to May 2007, I remember seeing the same titles on these tables - they just were not selling.

I think what really happened in America is that the number of readers increased with Generation X and Generation Y coming of age as adult, but the number of book buyers decreased a lot, too. The fact of more readers made the print publishers publish more and more titles, but there were just not book buyers out there. This was, I believe, because these new buyers were not really readers, just eligible readers. They had stopped reading.

When I was teaching college classes to Freshmen, I asked them, every semester, how many had read a book in the last six months that was not assigned for a class. Invariably, out of a class of 30, only 2 or 3 would raise their hands. See, I think that that Generation X and Generation Y were not trained to be readers. Their attention span is too short for them to actually read a book. Sure, they'll read magazine articles and Facebook posts, but not long books.

Then, ta da! The advent of the ebook and the ereader. Then sales started picking up because a reader could buy short or long books for as low as $0.99 (some even free!) and read what they wanted to read when they wanted to read. They could polish off a short story in a few minutes and say they had read a "book." Print publishers cannot publish individual stories by themselves, but ebooks can be individual short stories. So if I read one book of ten short stories in print, I read one book; but if I read ten short stories in ebook format, I can claim to have read ten books.

The reason ebook sales have gone up, I believe, is because few, regardless of generation, wants to read a print book anymore. An ebook will do. Print book sales went down not only because of the lack of new print book readers, but because ebooks are cheaper and easier to manipulate for the wireless generation we live in.

So ebooks, are they the future? Yes, in part. But I think print books will still be around, just in smaller numbers.

Christmas Tribute to Oldtime Editors

I cannot imagine what editing was like before computers. An editor had to take a red pen and go through a hand-written manuscript and make editor's marks (which I still love!) to make corrections. Then the author went through the same pages and accepted or rejected the editorial suggestions.

When I think of the length of manuscripts written by great authors like Dickens and Tolstoy, the editing job must have been frustrating and tedious. I have it easy by editing on a computer. Even if it is a PDF that I have to create a TXT file writing out the suggestions, my job is still so much easier.

St. Francis de Sales is the patron saint of editors for Catholics. Imagine what his editors had to go through; he was a prolific writer himself.

So this Christmas weekend, I will raise a toast to editors of old for trailblazing the profession I now practice.

Word Hang-Ups

Every author has a hang up with a word or phrase. The good author will recognize this themselves or after someone points it out to them. The good author will work hard to eliminate that hang up and move forward, becoming a better writer.

I once had a student who was an exceptional writer. But she was hung up on the preposition "among" and used it as often as she could. I pointed this out to her and suggested that she perform a "search and find" for that word and then re-write each sentence that contained "among." She did and later told me that not only had her writing improved, but her grades for written papers were higher!

I just finished editing a double-novel (twice as long as a normal novel) and the author had to hang ups - one a word hang up and the other a mechanics hang up. The word she used time after time was "still." Every paragraph had the word, no kidding. The mechanics hang up was that instead of using the word "until," she used "till" - spelled wrong, anyway, but also spoken English and not written English. And this word is a word hang up itself. I suggested she fix them, but have not heard back from her.

Find your hang ups and correct them. Move from being a good writer to being a great writer.

Represent? Manage? Coach?

Just what does a literary agent do? There are probably as many answers as their are literary agents and literary agencies, but the basics are the same. It is the extras that set one apart from the pack.

REPRESENTING
The basics: a literary agent reads your manuscript and may or may not comment on it. They may or may not offer or recommend editing services for you. If they accept it and put you under contract, they will craft a query letter for you and send that letter to a publisher or to publishers. Once a book is accepted for publication, the literary agent waits for the royalty check and then sends payment to the author for their percentage.


MANAGING
Like other agents, we don't make money until the author does, through royalties. But we believe in hedging our bets. We manage our authors and their unique "brand", doing some things our competitors might not:

Pre-Acceptance/Pre-Publication
Before your book is even accepted by a publisher, we begin marketing you (the author) and establishing your "brand." We recommend the following to you and help you along the way:
1. Author website
2. Author Facebook fan page
3. Author Twitter account
4. Author LinkedIn account
5. Author Google+ account

We also provide you with a unique email address to use for all of the above so that your fans, as they come along, can email you through our super spam filter, eliminating 1) needless spam and 2) the need for your fans to know your personal email address.

Post-Acceptance
When your book has been accepted, we develop a marketing plan that is suitable to you and your lifestyle. Not all authors can work full time to promote their boo. Not all authors can afford outrageous marketing fees. That is why our marketing plan is tailored to the individual author. We recommend and even set up, if necessary:
6. Blog interviews
7. Radio and television interviews
8. K-12 and College classroom visits and readings
9. Newspaper interviews and articles
10. Book review contests on Amazon and Barnes & Noble
11. Book launch parties
12. Book signings at bookstores and other places.
13. Book readings at coffee shops, bars, and other places.

We arrange (at author's expense) for marketing materials like bookmarks, posters, postcards, and buttons to be produced for the author to distribute to build their brand and sell their books.

We encourage our newly-published author to continue to promote themselves through the social media mentioned above and through such things as posting to regular threads in Yahoo! Groups that the author is interested in and/or is the subject matter of the book they just published.

And we continue to promote you, our author, from our own website, Facebook fan page, Twitter stream, LinkedIn status updates, Google+ updates, and press releases on the web, to your local community, and elsewhere.

We also encourage your publisher, through phone conversations and emails, to go further than they normally do by entering your book and your book's cover design in contests for such things.

The more we promote our authors and help them get noticed and build a fan base in their local communities and nationwide, the more money the author makes and, thus, the more money we make.

COACHING
But we also coach our authors throughout their writing, waiting, and publishing processes. We regularly inform all of our authors about free and fee-pay contests and competitions. We also regularly update them on current calls for submissions for anthologies, literary journals and magazines, and ezines. We believe that A) a writer gets to be a better writer if they write more, B) a writer who publishes short stories will be in a better position to convince a publisher to publish their books, and C) a writer that is happy for us for one book's run through the publishing cycle (and our role in the process) will extend their contract with us, which only benefits both parties.

So the question to ask when looking for a literary agent is: Do I want an agent to represent me, manage me, or coach me? Your answer will determine just who you choose to be your agent.

Luck Is In the Cards

The past few weeks has been a bit hectic at James Literary Services. I have been awarded more editing contracts and my authors are starting to get published.

I am used to working on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday in a very hectic schedule to meet my weekly rent on Friday morning. But lately, I've received a continuous stream of contracts. The money doesn't seem to be increasing that much, but the smaller paying contracts are coming in. I've also been hired as an affiliate/developmental editor for one publisher and as a short story editor for another. So the editing part of the business (the "now" money) is going well.

On the literary agency side (the "later" money), things have had some ups and downs. I had an author leave the fold because she wanted to be published NOW instead of a year from now, as the publishing world goes. But I've just signed a couple who have written a great Christian fiction piece and three of my authors have been published.

C. B. Carter has signed a contract with Brighton Publishing to publish his book Seated Beside the Wolf, which is sure to be a best seller if I can find some way to promote the hell out of him and the book! C. B. has also had a story accepted for publication in an adult paranormal fantasy anthology being published by Silver Knight Publishing.

Serena Pettus has had a story accepted for the same anthology. And Daniel Carter just found out tonight (actually, as of this writing, not sure he knows yet heeheeh) that his story was accepted for their young adult anthology. A relationship is forming with Silver Knight Publishing, it seems, which makes me very happy.

Onward and upward!!!!

A Tale of Two Authors

Two authors signed with an agent, both having written exceptional books. Both waited and waited and waited for six whole weeks to hear back from publishers.

Author one wanted so badly to be published and went off on his own to self-publish, so he could say he had written a book that he could show to his friends and family.

Author two got an offer from a subsidy publisher, a great deal, if she could come up with the $5000 needed for the buy-in.

Was either author properly served by the agent? Should author one have waited longer to get a positive response from a publisher? Should author two wait for another publisher or spend the money and take the offered deal?

This post could be about ten authors, or a hundred, or a thousand. It would not matter. The publishing world is fickle. We've all read books that we think should never have been published. Some of us have written books that should get a publishing contract right away. But in the publishing world, it can often take six months to get a response from a publisher. This is very, very hard for some authors, and even harder for an agent who does all the work she does and doesn't get a dime in return until after the first royalty check, which can be two years away!

Yes, the publishing world is fickle. I was chatting with a publisher just this afternoon and was told that he gets over 200 manuscript submissions a week and turns down over 90% of them. He told me about one of his authors, who was turned down 113 times before landing a book contract that has now turned into both a best seller and a movie deal!

Two authors diverged on an agent...
One took the traveled road and self-published...
The other took the less traveled road....
And waited, and waited, and waited....
And got an offer, but not the one expected...
Which one fared better?
Who knows?

(A little tribute to one of my favorite poets, Robert Frost).

Yes, the publishing road is fickle. But it is our world and we live in it and have to live with its ups and downs, its excitements and disappointments. We cannot change it.

The good thing about the above two authors - I think they both did the right thing, for them, personally. There are many roads to publishing. Which one is right for which author?

Breast Problems?

I have been editing a lot of romance novels lately and there seems to be one grammatical mistake that every one of the writers has made. It concerns the part of the female anatomy that I call "breasts." This is an example of what I regularly find:

He ran his hands over her breast, cupping each one. But both her breast did not respond like he wanted.

Why is it that something as simple as this is being overlooked in writing, and not just by one author, but by at least eleven? Yes, eleven different authors, fourteen different books, and they all made the same mistake, over and over again. No exceptions.

I asked one of our authors the other night about it and she said agreed with me that it could be because some big-wig romance author did it once, everyone read her, and now everyone makes the same mistake. Is it a sub-culture mindset that accepted the mistake as fact and never corrected itself? I don't know, but it is sure funny. It wasn't funny the first ten times, of course, but it is now.

But let me be clear on this simple rule: one is a "breast" and two are "breasts."

Copyright and Copywriting

I am always amused when an author tells me, their editor, before they give me the manuscript, "Remember, I own the copyright. You can't take it from me." I know this is because it is not common knowledge that copyright belongs to the creator until it is expressly assigned.

Of course, it is normal to worry about who owns copyright to your life's work. Sometimes, however, it is amusing. I had a potential client recently who told me he was not going to give me the manuscript until he heard back from the U.S. Copyright Office that he did indeed own the copyright. To me, this set off a red light.

As it turned out, he had taken someone else's nonfiction ebook and paid someone to rewrite the book. I know that means he owns copyright and I'm sure there was no flagrant plagiarism, but to me that is unethical. I refused to edit anything he had that had been "rewritten" because it was not his work or the work of his ghost writer - it was the work of the original author.

Copying is still cheating, even if you change the words around. Copyright is for the expression of ideas and sometimes for the ideas themselves. But rewriting someone's work is cheating, is unethical, and is not something an editor like me (who prides himself on his ethics) can edit and still be "clean."

Tips for Getting a Literary Agent

I was recently surfing the web to find other literary agents. In doing so, I saw a lot of advice on how to approach a literary agent. I agreed with most of it and thought I'd summarize the advice in a few rules:

RULES FOR GETTING AN AGENT
1. Make sure your manuscript is edited before approaching the agent.
2. Write a summary paragraph about the plot/story lines of your book. Any more and it is overkill.
3. Be honest with the agent about your previous publications.
4. Send ALL of your contact information to the agent.

That is all that is really needed. A good agent will read your summary paragraph and be able to tell right away if it is worth seeing the manuscript. Don't send the manuscript yet, however. Do that after you are asked. But please make sure the manuscript has been edited. If you don't have it edited and the agent asks to see it shortly after you send the query, then you will be embarrassed and may be turned down for representation.

Who Do You Write Like?

I was recently asked by an author this question: "who do you write like?" May answer was simple: "I write like myself."

I am paraphrasing a billboard not far from where I live, when saying that I cannot write like someone else because that person's writing style is already taken.

When I compose a query for an author, to send to a publisher, I try to include a biographical statement. A part of that statement is the author's literary influences. In other words, who does the author see as influences as to both what they write and their writing style. But who your writing style is like and who influences it are two different things. The first is impossible, the second is the fun of meeting writers.

Who are my literary influences? Well, let's list them:

James Ramsey Ullman
Frank Slaughter
Bl. Pope John Paul the Great
Thucydides
Robert Remini
Alexandre Dumas
Anne Bronte
Ralph McInerny
Margaret Truman
Robert Frost
Russell Kirk
Orestes Brownson
Parke Godwin
Taylor Caldwell
Louis L'Amour
W. P. Kinsella

I know that is a big list, but I am a complicated guy!