Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail
First Week of March
by Jen Wilcher

March 5, 2013
Due to the horrific weather, nobody met at Barnes & Noble.

Who’s up next . . .
March 12: Andy Pheiffer (chapter rewrite, People), Rebecca Rettemund (chapter 21, The Cheese Logue), David Mayer (chapter, Time Traveler’s Definitive Guide, Vol 2), Bill Eisigner (short story), Jen Wilcher (“Work Drama”), and Jack Frieburger (chapter, Jesus at the IHOP).

March 19: Lisa McDougal (chapter 10-11, Follow the Yellow), Millie Mader (chapter 42, Life on Hold), Pat Edwards (???), Clayton Gill (chapter, Fishing Derby), Aaron Boehm (film script/part 4, “Whole Again”), and Jerry Peterson (chapter 4-5, The Last Good Man).
Alternates: If Pat is not ready, Rebecca Rettenmund (chapter 18, The Cheese Logue).
If Clayton is not ready, Amber Boudreau (chapter 9, Noble)

March 26: Carol Hornung (scene, Ghost of Heffron College), and Terry Hoffman (chapter, The Great Tome). Room for five more.

April 2: Amber Boudreau (chapter, Noble), Rebecca Rettenmund (chapter, The Cheese Logue), Michelle Nightoak (chapter, memoir), Andy Pfeiffer (???), Clayton Gill (chapter, Fishing Derby), and Alicia Connolly Lohr (chapters 3-4, Lincoln’s Other War)

What role should libraries have in an electronic world? . . .
Good question. Here are YA author and blogger Nathan Bransford’s thoughts:

Children’s book author Terry Deary stired up some controversy last month when he said libraries have “had their day” but no longer make sense in today’s world. He cites the lack of compensation for authors and damage to bookstores, who have to compete with an institution giving away the book for free:
“People have to make the choice to buy books. People will happily buy a cinema ticket to see Roald Dahl’s Matilda, and expect to get the book for free. It doesn’t make sense.”
Deary may have staked out a particularly anti-library position, but he’s hardly the only person within the publishing industry who is grappling with the role of libraries in publishing economics in an electronic world. Penguin was among other publishers who pulled their e-books from libraries before restoring them with a new program.

There’s no doubt that libraries have played an important role in society in democratizing access to information and reading, and fostering a love of reading in children. Libraries are also an important source of sales for small presses in particular. They do buy books, and they can be a significant customer for publishers. Read the entire post here: http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2013/03/what-role-should-libraries-have-in.html

Thanks Jerry for the article

Pixar Story Rules
Pixar story artist Emma Coats has tweeted a series of “story basics” over the past month and a half — guidelines that she learned from her more senior colleagues on how to create appealing stories:
#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.
#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
#8: Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
#9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
#10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
#13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
#17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
#18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
#21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
#22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.
Presumably she’ll have more to come. Also, watch for her personal side project, a science-fiction short called Horizon, to come to a festival near you.
Thanks Rebecca for the article.

Self-publishing Lessons by Pat Edwards
Self-publishing is no longer considered the bottom-dweller it was before e-Reader and iPad tools came along. I’ve learned a lot about the tools and techniques in the past few weeks publishing my poetry compilations. I’m a do-it-yourself kind of gal, when I can. I figure I can click through image editing and watch a “House” re-run at the same time. There are also several good companies (websites) that will do almost all the work for you – short of actually writing your book. Here are just three:

CreateSpace – https://www.createspace.com/
This is an Amazon company that links seamlessly to Kindle publishing but also offers soft-cover publishing. Like all of these self-publishing-packagers, they offer editing, cover assistance, e-book formatting, and marketing. While you do control the price and royalty of your book sales, these services range from $299 to full service at around $1798. For $1798, they should load them into the trunk of my car and drive around with me to sell them!

CreateSpace has a large publishing and marketing advice forum that is valuable no matter how much or little you use CreateSpace services, and it’s free to sign up. One of the best articles I read there recently was how to think about formatting differently for e-books, “What is a book? Seems like a simple question, doesn’t it? But the basic form of the traditional book comes from binding pages together inside a cover. What this means, if you think about it, is that all the pages are connected to each other in a printed book. When you open the book, what you see is two pages side by side, or what we call a spread. The page spread has historically been the basis of book design, since you never see just one page all by itself.” – Joel Friedlander. Read the whole post here: https://www.createspace.com/en/community/community/resources/formatting_your_files?view=blog

BookBaby – http://www.bookbaby.com/
BookBaby is the same company as CDBaby, the number one independent music seller site on the web. They’ve taken that model and modified it to enable you to publish your e-book or print book. They have all the usual features in an easy-to-choose, menu format and very competitive short-run print book packages. If you publish and e-book, they facilitate distribution to the biggest retailers, including Apple’s iBookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony Reader Store, Kobo, etc. Mostly, I enjoy their “we’re not gonna let The Man tell us we’re not good enough to be published” vibe.

Lightning Source – http://www1.lightningsource.com/
Lightning Source has a very large, international distribution channel. The main differentiator (to me) is they require you be a publisher (or publishing company) to use their services. Being a publisher requires only a company name. As a writer, you should have no problem creating a publishing company name. Now that you are the publisher, you have greater control and possibilities for revenue. Their costs are comparable to CreateSpace, without the Amazon/Kindle limitation. Worth looking into, especially if you want physical books. Who knows? You may be big in Japan!

DYI – my frugal, hands-on method
You can do most of these activities yourself, especially if you want only an e-book. However, some tasks require more technology skills than others. For example, getting your MS Word document-format book into the formats required by the publishers for Kindle, Nook, and Kobo is pretty simple. Nook and Kobo will do the converting for you from a .doc or .docx format into the standard EPUB format (libraries can use this format). Kindle requires you “save as” into an .html format before you upload the document and they convert to their proprietary format. I’m using the packager sites as a cheat-sheet for where to go (next for me is the iBooks on Apple). Still, all modes take just a few clicks and you’re published!

You absolutely have to have a cover image for your e-book, and this may require a little more technical skill if you want to modify one of your own images or modify one you buy from royalty-free sites. Creating the cover image for my poetry chapbook, The Shape of the Universe (shameless plug), I learned each of the big three e-book formats requires a different size and image quality (pixels per inch ratio). Kindle is the more stringent requiring a very large, high quality image. I bought a reasonably-priced, royalty-free image online, but had to re-size the image to meet their requirements. I use the open-source image tool GIMP to do my edits.

There are sites like http://fiverr.com/ where you can get a book cover graphic for five dollars (really) and many freelance sites for cover art like https://www.elance.com that can range in cost up to several hundred dollars. For this service, though, you should get all the various image sizes required for each vendor. Most IMPORTANTLY, be sure and check the licensing and use agreement WHEREVER you get the image.

For my next poetry compilation I’m using an old, scanned family photo of myself, so I know I have unlimited usage rights for that. You can use pictures you created, but you also need to be sure you have permission to use what/who is on the image, too. A purchased image from iStock (or GettyImages, etc.) comes with usage rights up to a half-million prints and impressions of the image for my $45 fee and un-restricted usage for about $200. Some licenses can be used only for e-books, but not for print. Be sure and check carefully or ask the artist how you can use the image you purchase and if you need to give photo credits.

I’m happy to help anyone through the steps I’ve done for my own work. If you come to a TWS with your document file, with a web connection, we can get your book online in a few minutes. What are you waiting for??