Guest Post: Gender Portrayals and Genres at Apex Book Company

This month, I talk about Gender Portrayals and Genres over at Apex Book Company.

In early science fiction and even horror, gender roles were often idealized according to the culture and the author’s views and experiences at the time the work was written. A good example of that are the few female characters in H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction and his attitudes toward other races and classes. While it may be extremely difficult to read some of his stories now, because they are rife with depictions that we would not deem to be politically-correct, Lovecraft was also a product of his generation. Could the absence of women in Lovecraft’s work be the reason why there are so few mainstream horror female authors today? Hard to say. I think what we can say is that an author’s lifestyle and background often play a subconscious role on the evolution of their characters, too. Whatever Lovecraft believed played a role in not only what he had written, but how he wrote it.–SOURCE: Gender Portrayals and Genres

Stop by and read the post, or check out a preview of THE CHANGED by BJ Burrow, which was published by Apex Book Company. I have several of their titles on my “to read” list, so if you’re into horror and science fiction, you might want to check them out.

February 18, 2010
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Writing and Conventions

For the past, few months I’ve been taking a serious look at my short-term and long-term goals, and I’ve come to some pretty interesting conclusions.

When I look back at the projects that I have published, I realized that I have just as many that fell through the cracks due to bad business partnerships, horrible contracts, etc. I am very fortunate to have had the experiences that I’ve had, but at the same time it’s very frustrating. Even though there’s enough success out there to be had by everyone, there is a dark side to the industry that kind of gets glossed over sometimes. For example, some people believe that unless you’ve been published through a “big house” your work doesn’t matter; others plagiarize blatantly or take credit for someone else’s work and they still seem to make a name for themselves. The list of misconceptions and/or preconceived notions goes on and on and on. To top it all off, your work almost gets lost in the shuffle sometimes because “Everyone has a book to shill.”

That’s the bad part. The good part is that I have been pretty active figuring out not only what I want to write, but who I want to write for.

My strong background in business allows me to see publishing and the entertainment industry for what it really is. It is, in short, a very complex industry that is focused on selling as many books/games/movies as possible. I have no illusions that publishers need to make money because otherwise, at the end of the day, they can’t stay in business any longer. On top of that, I work in the field of online marketing every day. The signal-to-noise ratio is often staggering, and I’ve found that some of that noise is pretty distracting — especially when there’s not a lot of substance behind the noise.

I know all of these things in my head, but admittedly I can’t always reconcile them with how I feel about the quality of my work. That’s part of the reason why I’ve decided to pull back from a lot of extracurricular activities like conventions. I don’t want to become a total introvert, but I’d rather roll up my sleeves and get back in the trenches to “do something” than whine about what I’m frustrated with or not doing. In my world view, the hand of publishing doesn’t come down and pluck a writer out of thin air. You need to sweat a little, and maybe even bleed a little.

Well, I’m back to sweating. I have a lot of stories in my head and a metric ton of manuscripts to revise and submit. Conventions seem to take a lot out of me right now; as John Kovalic put it last night- “Every con takes away three weeks of creative thought, minimum. One to prepare, one during con week, one to recover…”

He’s exactly right.

February 17, 2010
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On Writing a Historically-Accurate Paranormal Short Story

Currently, I’m working on revisions for a short story entitled THE QUEEN OF CROWS that will be released as part of a digital product through Flames Rising Press. Set in the late 1800s, the plot revolves around a Navajo medicine man who is trying to summon a vengeance goddess called Mahochepi, the Queen of Crows.

This story has evolved several times from its original incarnation, but the process of editing it has taken longer than some of my other stories. Why? Well, part of the reason is because this story was inspired by a historical event called the “Long Walk.” At the time, the U.S. government had planned to develop a center for Native Americans at a place called “Bosque Redondo.” The center would function as a kind of “rehabilitation” center, where Native Americans would be (for lack of a better word) Americanized. Needless to say, there’s a lot of pieces to the story that required research. For example, did you know that the Navajo refer to themselves as the Diné? Or that they lived in houses called hogans?

Although this story is a work of fiction, I wanted to give the work an authentic feel without giving my readers a history lesson. Therein lies the need for multiple revisions. You see, regardless of what my intent for the story is, my readers still have to enjoy what I’ve written. Writing anything based on a historical time period is tricky business for any writer. In my case, I found it hard to swallow my editor’s comments that there were sections that came across as being too preachy. What I wound up realizing, was that I was trying too hard to offer readers a chance to empathize with the main character. To me, the idea of being removed from my house to be re-trained to live in a different society is pretty terrifying. While that concept is part of my story, it’s really only one aspect of it. After all, this story is about what happens in my fictional world, not what happened in a factual timeline.

Because this story will fit together neatly within my Violet War setting, there are a number of paranormal elements to it. Those elements give me a wider berth in terms of what should be (or what shouldn’t be) historically-accurate. Once you introduce magic into any setting, the standard rules may no longer apply. I’m finding that the history portion needed to be there, because it serves as a great foundation. Now, I can go in and “adjust the volume” to better integrate the paranormal elements.

While I didn’t expect to go through another round of revisions, this process reminded me that it’s easy to have a distorted view of your story when you’re really close to it. By the end of the day, however, this will be a much better story once its done. To me, it will never be “good enough,” but like all writers, I’m definitely my own worst critic.

February 10, 2010
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This Is Not Another Amazon Post

If you haven’t heard, there was a bit of an awkward business kerfluffle between Amazon and MacMillan this past weekend. No, I am not talking extensively about it other than to say that I believe we are seeing the result of what happens when people are anxious and start to panic. E-Books are a hot topic, but if history holds true, it will take years before the technology is standardized, affordable, stable, and readily accessible to everyone (including libraries). If you’re curious, Lilith Saint Crow has a lot of information and links on her post entitled, “Good News and Amazonfail Wrap-Up.” I do, however, want to talk about something related to this.

You see, I am concerned. I am concerned about the rampant misinformation and rumors that are circulating around the web whenever anything “happens.” Since Friday, I have heard nothing but questions and confusion when it comes to people’s perceptions about e-books and running a business. People that a) don’t work for an online retailer and b) consume products that they either want for free or at a lower price than what they’re already paying for it.

I am a bit conservative, in that I do not believe in 100 percent transparency with the customer. I feel that readers should not be privy to the inner workings between a retailer (like Amazon) and a publisher (like MacMillan). Why? because the minute you put that deal on the table, the customer is forced to pick a side. That customer isn’t an “informed” customer, because they shouldn’t have to know why things are priced the way that they are. They should, however, have a choice. That choice pretty much comes down to a) yes, I want to buy this product or b) no, I don’t. Their decision should be based on what they want to buy, not who they want to punish (or reward) by buying it.

However, this is the age of “too much” information. Some businesses don’t really have a choice “but” to offer their customers some form of communication because often their customers demand it. When a business doesn’t respond (or doesn’t say the right thing), sometimes customers believe that the entire business is evil. The truth is, most businesses want to paint themselves in a positive light. This is neither “bad” nor “good,” it’s just the nature of how businesses work.

The problem that I have with complete transparency, is that most customers don’t care about the “business” side of this communication, but instead have a pre-formulated opinion based on an “emotional” reaction. That “emotional” reaction often causes a lot of problems, because customers are sharing their reactions with other people as “fact.” We all know how powerful word-of-mouth advertising can be, but sometimes I think we “forget” that it’s easier to distort the truth than it is to spread the facts. Once the misinformation is out in the open, it’s next-to-impossible to try to correct it. And yes, before you say it — I have been guilty of it, too. We all have.

I’m not saying that customers “should care” about the business side of things; what I am saying is that they shouldn’t have to. They should not have to get embroiled in a war between two businesses or be privy to private information, because it takes longer than a single blog post to explain how an entire industry works. Instead, I’d love to see the true victim of these wars — the customer — treated better. Treat them like gold, and they will keep coming back. Treat them like crap, and they will go elsewhere.

Unfortunately, I feel that this will not be the last time we see things like this happen. Sloppy news reporting combined with clicking on whatever appears through search results (regardless of whether it’s factual or not) provides instant access to anything and everything. I know that a lot of writers naturally exercise caution, I just hope that everyone else remembers to do that, too. It’s certainly something that I plan to be even more careful with in the future.

February 1, 2010
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Calculating the Cost of an E-Book

CalculatorI’ve had a lot of positive feedback from my previous post entitled Weighing in on E-Books, so I wanted to talk about ways to calculate the cost of an e-book.

First, let’s pull some arbitrary numbers. (And by arbitrary, I mean that these are not precise figures.) Let’s say that we paid our author $3,000 for their novel that was 100,000 words in length, which is the equivalent of about 3 cents per word. Then, let’s say we paid an editor a flat rate of $1,250 to edit the novel and an artist $500 for cover art. Add in production costs of $250 to create an e-book, and that gives us a grand total of $5,000 as the sum of the costs for our imaginary publisher.

In order to make up the costs of producing the e-book, we would need to sell a certain amount of copies at a specific price. Say that we priced the e-book at $10.00. If we kept one hundred percent of the revenue, we would need to sell 500 copies of that e-book to make up our costs before we made any money off of the book.

We decided that a retailer, like Amazon, is the best way to offer our e-book for sale. Currently, Amazon takes 65 percent of the cost of the book for all Kindle editions. Recently, they announced that they will lower that rate to thirty percent, but the new rate won’t kick in until June 30, 2010. (Read Amazon ups author royalty for Kindle, matching Apple per CNet.)

Let’s calculate our cost based on the 65% rate, because I think it’s important for you to see how that affects a publisher’s bottom line.

Now, we’d only make $3.50 for every book sold at a price of $10.00. At that rate, we need to sell approximately 1,429 or almost three times the amount of e-books if we took 100% of the revenue to make up our costs. Some retailers take less than 65 percent, but they still take a percentage to offer the book through their store. If you sign up with a One BookShelf site like DriveThruHorror e-books for example, they’ll only take 30 percent. Our profit would now be $7.00 for every e-book sold. So, we need to sell approximately 715 e-books to make up our costs at the $10.00 price rather than 1,429.

Even though we’ve estimated a price based on our costs, we need to think about something else — demand. Is this title only available as an electronic book? Or do we have a hardcover or paperback edition? Will pricing the e-book on sale at $5.99 sell enough copies to warrant the discounted price? How popular is this particular author? The volume of e-books that we need to sell might be different, depending upon any number of additional factors. One issue might come down to the original agreement that a publisher has signed with the author. Unfortunately, there are contracts that pre-date the release of electronic formats so it’s not uncommon to see authors providing a publisher with print rights but not digital or audio rights.

For me, I’m factoring in demand based on the reader’s awareness of my work as an author. Chances are, my soon-to-be-released small press product is not going to sell 1,000 copies at a price of $9.99 within a reasonable amount of time. Because I’m projecting lower sales, I’m lowering the costs of developing my digital product. Instead of paying an editor a thousand dollars, the publisher is offering a direct royalty payment that pays per product sold. We also are reviewing ways to make the product more valuable and attractive to readers by researching different types of graphics and layouts. Still, I needed to come up with two pricing structures; a retail price and a sale price. For me, my e-book price is lower than $9.99 because my costs and the demand for my work are both lower than a mainstream author. Those two things combined also mean that it may take me longer to recoup my costs.

Personally, I have a lot of trouble with people offering e-books at heavily discounted prices or for free, because this devalues the books considerably. What would you think of a print book that’s “on sale” for only ninety-nine cents? It’s original price is only $1.99? To me, this pricing structure seems pretty arbitrary. If your costs were $1,000 and you offered the book through OneBookShelf, you’d still need to sell approximately 720 books to make up that cost. (If your costs were $5,000, you’d need to sell 3,598 copies!!!)

Regardless of whether you self-publish or not, I feel that it’s a smart idea to calculate price based on your costs and your projected sales. By doing that, it can help you set reasonable expectations for your e-book pricing structure and prevent you from losing money over the long haul. Keep in mind, that the biggest mistake I see publishers making, is offering their e-book through a digital retailer like Amazon.com or OneBookShelf, and then “forgetting” about that book. If you want to make up your costs, be sure to include marketing your books — wherever they are being sold — into your plan. Sometimes, you need to make readers aware that you now offer your books in a different format, in order for them to buy those products.

If you’re curious about Amazon’s rates, be sure to visit Amazon.com’s Terms and Conditions or the Terms and Conditions for DriveThruRPG through OneBookShelf. (The Terms and Conditions for the DriveThruRPG site are very similar to the fiction and the comic book sites.)

January 25, 2010
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