Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, Volume 1

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Ivonia

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Long post, but very informative! Thanks for the info Uncle Jim! It's certainly nice that there are people out there looking out for others, instead of everyone just being a potential shark (I've been burnt on enough things, and I certainly don't want to get burnt on my book).
 

JohnLynch

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James D. Macdonald said:
What Hatch fails to mention is that book sales have gone up as the number of new titles have gone up. Books are no longer selling in 1960 quantities. The number of bookstores has increased by an order of magnitude. More people are buying more books than ever before.
That's good to know. There's the opinion that it's "uncool" to read books, and that with movies people are reading less books.
 

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JohnLynch said:
That's good to know. There's the opinion that it's "uncool" to read books, and that with movies people are reading less books.
I remember highschool. The cool kids only accounted for maybe ten percent of the student body, and half of those were surprised to learn that the books I read didn't have pictures in them.

I'm happy catering to the nerds.
 

James D. Macdonald

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Not only are more people buying more books than ever before, but they're reading them later in life.

A part of that, I think, is that it's now socially acceptable to wear corrective lenses in public. (Speaking of movies, you know those movies from the forties and fifties -- "Miss Smithers! Without your glasses you're ... beautiful!") That was the social situation where wearing glasses was, all by itself, enough of a disguise for Clark Kent. Real men didn't wear glasses.

Now not only isn't there a social stigma on glasses, there are really good contact lenses, and laser surgery.

Booksales are going up every year.

Now this is both good and bad. Call it the Mustard Problem.

Used to be if you went to the store for mustard, you had French's yellow mustard and, if you had a big store in a big city, Gulden's brown mustard.

They sold a lot of mustard, Gulden's and French's, between the two of them.

Now ... you go into a grocery store and there's four shelves of mustards. You have your Gulden's and your French's still, and you have your Grey Poupon, and you have your State of Maine Sea Salt Mustard, and your Beer Mustard, and your Whole Seed Garlic Mustard, and your Creamy Dill Mustard ... and a lot more mustards beside.

More people are buying more mustard ... but no individual mustard is selling particularly well. The whole pie is divided by more slices.

Used to be you came out with a paperback original and if it sold less thanl 100,000 copies you'd wonder what was wrong. Nowadays, you come out with the same paperback original and if it sells 20,000 copies you're happy.

Royalty rates are still about the same, but the royalties are on a $8.00 paperback rather than on a $0.35 paperback, so the money is about the same overall. But in 1960 you could buy a house for $20,000, and now you can't. Bigger pie, smaller slices. Same problem as the mustard makers have.

This is a good thing for the readers, though, just like more choices are good for mustard users.

More different books published means more chances for quirky, original works to get published and distributed. This is a good thing.

And this is all oversimplified, but that's another picture of writing.
 

pianoman5

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Publish or perish

Great post, UJ. As good an overview of the mechanics/economics of publishing as I've seen in a while.

I read Denny Hatch's article recently and had sympathy for some aspects of his rant (not realising that he was an apologist for PA), but you've put those in perspective.

One aspect of the publishing industry equation that concerns me is the wastefulness of returns. The high proportion of books that become landfill must add significantly to their listed retail price, which necessarily also affects to some extent the quantity sold. As a business model it is not dissimilar to the perishable food industry, where items have a shelf life after which they cannot or will not be sold, so they are marked-up accordingly, to reflect anticipated wastage yet still return a profit.

Overall, though, the resultant cost-per-unit-sold is still probably less than a typical digitally-printed book, so one's concern is properly only environmental, not economic. The 'returns' system has certainly worked in creating a more vibrant market for authors, booksellers, and buyers alike by absorbing and managing the risk for so many new titles. As Jim points out, a title is self-promoting by its mere presence on a shelf.

The publishing industry today clearly has its faults and inefficiencies, including many frustrations for the neophyte; but as Winston Churchill observed of another activity:

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried."
 

Zane Curtis

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The overall impression that Mr. Hatch gives is that he thinks a publisher's editorial department doesn't exist. That there can't possibly be people who can judge a book's saleability, so it must be pure chance that Bloomsbury spotted both J. K. Rowling and Susannah Clarke.

I'm getting the same sort of vibe from this guy, only he says he is an editor. He's written a longish essay called On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile where he goes on about the utter randomness of breakout best-sellers, and all the alleged masterpieces that get left behind on the slush pile. Maybe I've misread it, but I have the impression that he thinks all the manuscripts on a slush pile could be best sellers too, if only they got the chance -- and if only the world was a better place when the sun shone brighter, and the flowers grew taller, and all the little children slept safe and cozy in their beds at night, protected from the predation of the evil first reader and the dreaded fallacy of survivor bias.
 
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James D. Macdonald

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Trade books (hardcovers and trade paperbacks) are whole-copy returnable.

Mass market books are the ones that are stripped and discarded, and that's a byproduct of hitching book distribution onto the existing distribution mechanism for newspapers and magazines.

You don't return yesterday's newspapers and last week's TV Guide to the warehouse and try to sell them to some other news stand -- they're stripped, the cover (or masthead) sent back for credit on the next shipment, and the rest tossed in a dumpster. If you're going to use the distribution system, you take the bad with the good. It's cheaper and faster (and less wasteful in terms of trucks and fuel) than building a whole 'nother distribution system to reach grocery stores, bus stations, and news stands.

Stripping and discarding paperbacks may seem wasteful, but...

a) Paper comes from pulpwood, and pulpwood is a cash crop. It's planted, tended, and harvested to make paper. "Use less paper! Save the trees!" makes as much sense as "Eat less bread! Save the wheat!"

b) It's quite literally cheaper to throw out the copy of a mass market paperback and print a new one than it would be to return it, inspect it, and repack it in a warehouse if it's still in saleable condition. Think Economy of Scale. Publishers could throw out half of a printrun and still make a profit. Prices are set for it, the entire system is geared toward it.

c) Paper is biodegradable and recycleable.

Think of mass market books as weird-looking issues of Newsweek, and you'll get the idea.
 

BlueTexas

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On the whole returns thing...

Most product has the price of its return included in the original price. How else on earth could a manufacturer warranty a product?

Uncle Jim mentioned glasses above...I sell glasses. Most people who buy glasses ask me about the warranty policy. I tell them that it's warranted for a year--this means if they break their glasses, they bring them back and I replace them. For me to do this, my costs on the replacement pair have to be covered in the original sale, or else I either a) lose money or b) lose customers who are furious that the glasses they sat on and smashed won't be replaced, by me, who did not do the smashing.

The manufacturer knows this, and the prices they charge me for the frame and lenses include the cost of me sending unusable product back to them. The frame manufacturers also know that if a frame sits on my board for a few months and no one buys it, I'm sending it back for one that will sell, and again, their price to me reflects this. They also know that the frames I reorder again and again will make up for the ones I send back.

All retail trade works this way. You wouldn't buy a stereo, a car, or an electric shaver without a warranty. And a retailer won't stock a product that they can't return. No one can make money if something can't be returned. Books are products, and while they don't get returned by consumers in broken bits, they do languish on shelves, and retailers who can't freshen their stock will sell less, causing the whole industry to slow down.

That would be bad for manufacturers (authors) and for consumers (readers). Who wants that?

The next time someone whines about book returns being the ruin of the book world, they should check and see how many warranty cards they've sent in, and shush! Ridiculous!
 

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Hi everyone

Hi, I'm fairly new here. I've been reading this thread for about a week trying to catch up, but the task seems monumental, so I decided to skip ahead a little bit (I still have thread seventy-something open in another window). I'm just jumping ahead to introduce myself, and say that I've been following the BIC method for awhile. I'm doing pretty well at it I think, though I'm not always able to get 2,000 words a day (I go by that standard rather than an hourly count.)

Thanks for all you're doing, Uncle Jim.

--Matt
 

James D. Macdonald

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Welcome, Matt.

==================

Let me expand on my earlier comment about the slushpiles not being full of unrecognized gems.

We've all heard of publishable manuscripts, including famous best-selling ones, bouncing through a dozen slushpiles before finding a home.

True, it happens.

But isn't that a contradiction to my statement about the slushpiles not being full of unrecognized gems? What about the slushpiles they were in?

Well -- first there's the "full" thing. In a pile a hundred manuscripts deep only ten or so will be readable, and only one or two will be publishable. What the slushheap is "full" of is things only generally recognizable as English.

But take those one or two. They're publishable. But are they publishable here? The publisher only has so many slots a year. If they publish twenty books a year, and the slush pile is 4,000 manuscripts deep ... forty to eighty of those manuscripts are publishable, but twenty to sixty (wonderful, potentially award-winning and best-selling as they may be) will get rejection slips. Or more -- those twenty books the publisher can afford will include books by established authors contracted years before, the latest episode in a series, the novel that the editor solicited, and so forth and so on.

Or the book may be wonderful, but just two days before they bought a slightly inferior but very similar book from someone else. Or it may not quite fit their line. Or they might love it but not know how to market it.

When you're close, that's when you start seeing those hopeful little notes, like "Please send us your next," or handwritten "I loved this book, but alas! I can't buy it. I'm sure you'll soon find a home for this wonderful story."

When you're in the top one or two percent, the game changes.

All those horrible books you see on the shelves -- those were the best books that publisher could find. You should have seen the others.

Don't lose faith. Just write another book, and keep sending them around. And learn. Study the craft. Write new things, better things, different things.
 

aplath

Does anyone have a ballpark figure on the rate between publishable manuscripts spotted by a publisher in his slushpile and those that actually get published?

I mean, that should give a better idea of the odds of getting published than the rate between books that actually get published against the whole slush pile.

From a purely statistic point of view, if such odds were around 5% (one in twenty publishable manuscripts found in a given slush pile sees actual publication), it would mean that after submitting it to over 20 publishers you would have over 60% of chance of getting published.

Hmmmm ... I guess I have way too much free time today ... I really should use it to finish my novel instead of this ... ;-)

Andreas
 
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alaskamatt17

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So handwritten notes really do mean something?

Four years ago I got a rejection slip with a handwritten note from an editor at Tor saying she'd love to see my next book. That really helped, but I think I was a little naive at the time, because instead of working on that "next book" I slacked off on my writing. I kept sending out that book to other publishers, until one day I actually read it. Then I decided I didn't want to burden anymore slush readers with it.

But my second book is finished now, I've been keeping it out in the mail. Just got another rejection slip two days ago. Anyways, I'm gonna go put in my 2,000 words for the day.

--Matt
 

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Writing Lesson

John Lynch and those interested

For another good lesson on how to write backstory read "Holes." You'll be amazed! I'm thinking of getting a copy of that book and studying it page by page to see how he managed it.

Faye
 

James D. Macdonald

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aplath said:
I mean, that should give a better idea of the odds of getting published than the rate between books that actually get published against the whole slush pile.

Looking at it as "odds" gives you a distorted worldview.

If you've written a good book the odds are good that it'll eventually get published. If you've written a bad one, the odds are terrible.

But ... the usual guess is that 1-2% of the slushpile is publishable.

So of those 4,000 books in the slush heap of the publisher that puts out 20 books/year, 40-80 are publishable.

But... they don't only print books by first timers from the slush pile. Perhaps there are only five slots out of those twenty that aren't already spoken for. 6.25-12.5% of the good, publishable, maybe award caliber books in the slush heap will get picked up by that house that year. But maybe there's only one truly open slot. Maybe there are none. Or maybe there are ten. There are too many variables to make any sort of determination.

There are many slush piles.

Editors don't buy books they don't like to keep up their percentages if enough ones they do like fail to arrive in the mail that month.
 

Zane Curtis

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I take a perverse sort of pleasure in seeing books in a bookshop that I think are a bit iffy, as far as writing quality goes. It proves that the publishable standard isn't some kind of impossible holy grail, but something achievable.
 

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Uncle Jim, lately I've noticed some writers tend to repeat the same facts over and over again. Sometimes it's done to emphasize how much someone is thinking about something, other times it isnt' done for that reason. For example lets say I've got a sci-fi book and Trantor is the capital world of an empire. The writer will write something like "the capital world of the Hanseatic Empire, Trantor" or "Trantor, the capital world."

A fact is repeated throughout the chapters several times.

Is that a good or bad technique?
 

James D. Macdonald

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It's a balancing act.

If you really, really need to get a fact across, the rule is you slide it in three times. You're trying to get things across so the deaf old lady in the back row can still follow the story, at the same time keeping from boring the clever buggers in the front row.

On the other hand, the examples you gave sound a lot like padding.
 

Galoot

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Of course, if the Trantor you're reading about is in one of the books from the trilogy, you've got to cut the author some slack. The books are basically collected stories, each of which needed to lay out the same...uh...foundation as the one before it.
 

James D. Macdonald

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The Best of HapiSofi

The Best of HapiSofi:

This is a repost from upthread, with the links to posts on the Old Board. One of these days I'll find where these posts went on the new board. For right now, these posts contain some Good Writing and Good Advice.


Lee Shore Literary Agency

Need Advice

Agents Charging Fees

Sex Scenes (...How?) Sex Scenes, version II

Typesetting

1st Books was OK

Prologues

Midbooks

Tone

PA Authors

ST Comments I Love It!

All PublishAmerica Titles are in the Library of Congress

Decent Typesetting
 

Kate Nepveu

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MacAllister

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by happy coincidence, I was chasing down the links for "Best of HapiSofi" on the Uncle Jim, Undiluted thread, the last couple of days. Uncle Jim's post gave me the push needed to finish.

Reposting, with updated links:



The Best of HapiSofi:

This is a repost from upthread...these posts contain some Good Writing and Good Advice.


Lee Shore Literary Agency

Need Advice

Agents Charging Fees

Sex Scenes (...How?) Sex Scenes, version II

Typesetting

1st Books was OK

Prologues

Midbooks

Tone

PA Authors

ST Comments I Love It!

All PublishAmerica Titles are in the Library of Congress

Decent Typesetting
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