Death of the Oxford Comma

Mary Elizabeth Williams writes:

Grammar lovers today were saddened, shocked, and mightily displeased at the news that the P.R. department of the University of Oxford has decided to drop the comma for which it is so justly famed. As GalleyCat reported, the university's new style guide advises writers, "As a general rule, do not use the serial/Oxford comma: so write 'a, b and c' not 'a, b, and c'." Cue the collective gasps of horror. The last time the nerd community was this cruelly betrayed, George Lucas was sitting at his desk, thinking, "I shall call him Jar Jar."

View the rest of the very funny impassioned argument in favor of using the Oxford Comma here: Don't kill the Oxford comma!

Agents Becoming Publishers: Sharks in the water

Courtney Milan, a writer with a background in law, has written two excellent posts on the subject of the conflicts of interest that can arise when agents act as both a client's agent and publisher.

For example, say Alice is a writer and Sue is her agent. Sue is negotiating with ABC publishing for the rights to Alice's latest book: A Tale of Three Cities. The agent has just opened up an publishing division for electronic books. If Sue thinks that Alice's book is going to be a bestseller and wants it all to herself, how hard do you think she is going to work at getting Alice a deal with ABC publishing? How hard do you think Sue is going to work at getting any other publisher interested in the manuscript?

Further, if Alice decided to publish with her agent rather than a traditional publisher, what motivation does the agent have to get the best possible deal for her client? None, since the more money her client gets, the less money she gets.

Courtney's first post: a mea culpa
Courtney's second post: agency publishing and conflicts of interest

Passive Guy, a retired attorney, has this to say about Courtney's posts:

Passive Guy congratulates Courtney on presenting the conflict of interest issues in a way that any non-lawyer should be able to understand. She describes real-life situations for agents and authors and how the conflict inherent in the agent-as-publisher can poison those relationships even if both parties have the best intentions.

Had you sat through as many legal ethics presentations as PG has, you would have a greater appreciation for Courtney’s achievement.

Here's the link to PG's post: Agents Who Publish Their Clients are Engaging in Unethical Behavior – Courtney Drops the Hammer.

Update: In PG's comments, Pat Chiles kindly posted a link to, The (Publishing) Times They Are Achanging, by accordingtohoyt. Another good read.

Foreign Rights: A Rosy Future For Self-Published Writers

Foreign rights represent a barely tapped market for self-published authors. This is the message of Joe Konrath's last blog. He writes:

Times have changed. The potential to make money world-wide is an unprecedented opportunity for vast riches that makes current ebook sales pale by comparison. There are billions of people in 196 countries. More and more have acquired computers, cell phones, and mp3 players. Ereaders will come next.

Read the article here: Thinking Global

David Baldacci On Writing

Crime writer David Baldacci chats about his novel, The Sixth Man, on BBC Breakfast. David gives a great tip on how to guess who the killer is in a crime novel.

(I attempted to embed the video, but it's not working. To watch the interview, click here.)

Link: Author David Baldacci on crime writing

Photo credit: "Sunrise on Dundas Square" by Laura D'Alessandro under Creative Commons Licence 2.0.

Blogging Tips

I'm always trying to write a better blog post so when I looked at The Book Designer and saw the article Writers’ Blogs: 5 Essentials for Engaging Your Readers I read it with interest.

Writers know blogging is important, and not just because we have to build that mysterious thing called a platform, but also because it's a great opportunity to fulfill the first rule of writing: writer's write. But still, again and again, the question looms large: what to write about?

The following points are inspired by The Book Designer's post.

What to do:

1. Figure out what your blog is about. 

When I began this blog I thought I might write about the experience of writing and post excerpts from stories I was working on. I also thought about making my blog focus on one small area such as, say, apps for the iPad.

I guess it's about both those things since I decided to focus on anything writing related with an emphasis on topics relevant to the self-published writer.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately!) that excludes as lot of subjects I think are important (the debt crisis) or worthy of coverage (the famine in Somalia) or just downright cute.

2. Post consistently. 

This is something I have trouble with. I shoot for twice a day with a tweet or two thrown in if I come across an article I think would interest my readers.

Of course--as anyone who reads this blog knows!--intentions are one thing and execution quite another. If I blog and tweet once a day, I'm happy. (If anyone comes across an article they think would be good material for this blog, send it to me!)

3. Be considerate. 

If someone takes the time to leave a comment, thank them for it.

Also, I think being considerate means taking points (1) and (2) seriously. Even though I think this video of Big Dog is amazing (and a little bit creepy) doesn't mean my readership wants to see it.

Similarly, just because I watched I Am Number Four last night and feel it would be a public service to tell everyone it was the worst movie in the history of bad movies, doesn't mean that's something I get to include in my blog. (Unless, that is, you can find some way of sneaking it in. ;))

4. Google Analytics is your friend. 

Your best friend.

Blogging can be lonely. How do you know if anyone is reading your blog? How do you know if your numbers are going up or down? When people do read your blog, what do they most want to read about?

Google Analytics can help you answer all of these questions, and many, many, more.

I was going to say a few words about how to use Google Analytics but that is a series of posts all on its own!

5. Get feedback directly from your readership. 

After all, who knows what they want to read about more than your readers!

Comments are already available on most blog posts but it's easy to give people polls if, for instance, you're trying to decide between book covers and would like feedback.

6. Be lucky. 

Blogging is like anything, you can do your best and results can take a long, long, time in coming. Sometimes you might wonder if it's worth it. As long as you persevere, keeping steps (1) through (5) in mind, you'll develop a readership.

Photo credit: "Maximum Comfort" by Alan under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0.

Writing and Self-Sabotage

This morning I was excited to receive an email containing an, apparently, new blog post by Lawrence Block. I read it and enjoyed it and immediately knew I wanted to blog about it so I headed on over to LB's site to copy and paste a teaser paragraph when I found out the post wasn't new at all!

That's okay, the topic of the post is timeless so it doesn't matter. The subject of LB's post is negative thinking and that is something I have been guilty of for many, many, years.

Toward the end of his post LB writes:

Each of us has a ruling negative principle to which we’ve proved as loyal as the Shreveport Schlepper to his. Any of these ring a bell?

I’m not good enough.

It’s not safe to let people know the real me.

Writing is a struggle.

I’m boring.

I’m too old.

No one wants to hear what I have to say.

I’m stupid.

Success would separate me from the people I love.

I’d go on, but you can figure out yours on your own. And why not? It’s been running in your head all your life.

All. Your. Life.

When I read the negative affirmation, "Success would separate me from the people I love," it was eerie, that's exactly what I believed for years.

And then it happened anyway. It felt as though God, or the universe, or fate, or I-know-not-what decided to take that particular excuse away from me and give me a kick in the pants.

So I'm writing now and my writing is about the only thing I do have but, you know what? It feels good.

Oh, in the quotation LB referred to the Shreveport Schlepper. That's explained in his post and it's one of the best stories I've ever read.

Link:
The Power of Negative Thinking

The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread: Amazon's Text Stats

Update (Oct 30, 2012): Apparently Amazon's Text Stats have disappeared. A shame.

Text stats at Amazon aren't new, they've been around since 2007, but I never knew about them until I read Gabe Habash's article, Book Lies: Readability is Impossible to Measure.

Apparently, for every book in Amazon's "Search Inside" program you can see its readability statistics as well as how these stats compare with other books.

Gabe Habash writes:

One of Amazon’s best and little-known book features is its “Text Stats” page, a tiny link that’s tucked three-quarters down a book’s page under the “Inside This Book” heading. Clicking the link takes you to a page with graphs and numbers, the most interesting (and objective) of which is word count. It’s always fun to compare War and Peace’s word count (590,000) to major textbooks, and to see that Tolstoy smashes most of them with his stern Russian will.

But there are other figures on the page, and these are meant to tell you, as close to objectively as possible, how readable and how complex the book is. We put these measurements to the test to see how accurate they are in determining how readable and how complex a text is. The six books we sampled are Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, and Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.

As an example, let's take Great The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Here's the book page for The Scarlet Letter. About 2/3 down the page you'll come to the heading: Inside This Book (this is after both the Customer Reviews, and the Customer's Also Bought headings). Here you will learn what the first sentence of the book was as well as various statistically improbably phrases, capitalized phrases, a concordance of 100 most common words and (drum roll please) a link that will take you to a place called "Text Stats".

If you click this link, you will learn that the Fog Index for The Scarlet Letter is 14.1 (the number of years of education you need to understand the text), the Flesch Index is 14.3 (90-100 would indicate a book very easy to read, 10 would indicate one abominably difficult) and so on.

Now, what's really fun is comparing books. The first thing I did is look at Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, but it didn't have readability statistics. In a mischievous mood I pulled up Twilight, but while it did display certain readability statistics, the text stats were missing.

Disappointed I headed on over to The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Midnight but that one didn't have text stats either.

Not to be put off, I looked at Great Expectations and was not disappointed. Apparently you need four less years of education to read Great Expectations than you would for The Scarlet Letter and the words Dickens used are, overall, 4% less complex than the ones Hawthorne chose.

I'm not sure how useful this is, but it would have been fun to compare, say, the text stats of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to Twilight.

Links:
Book Lies: Readability is Impossible to Measure
The Scarlet Letter
Text Stats for The Scarlet Letter
Great Expectations
Text Stats for Great Expectations

Indie Film Makes $200K in iTunes Sales

An Indie film, made with absolutely no money and a DSLR camera, has grossed over $200,000 and climbed into iTunes Top 100 Movies.

Read the story here.

Just the other day I was wondering why I hadn't heard about a no- or low-budget movie that made good money from being sold on iTunes. Speak of the devil.

Of course, that it had Stana Katic in it didn't hurt.

As the technology to make films becomes ever cheaper, and avenues of distribution for indie projects expands, it seems likely that movie fans will encounter an increasing number of movies made well outside the Hollywood system. We’ve seen under-the-radar hits in recent years – from Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi to The Blair Witch Project on to recent sensation Paranormal Activity – but those films still eventually had studio involvement before they hit it big. Such is not the case with For Lovers Only.

The film, which was helmed by twin filmmakers Michael and Mark Polish, had a production budget of $0 and an advertising budget to match. The title, which is a black- and-white tale of old lovers reconnecting in Paris, was shot with two actors (one was Castle’s Stana Katic, the other Mark Polish) and on a Canon EOS 5D Mark II still camera. Thanks to Twitter and word of mouth, the film currently sits in the number 2 slot in the iTunes Romance category, the four slot on the indie films chart, and is in the top 100 in rentals on the mega site. Oh, and it’s made $200,000 so far.

While the Polish brothers talk of the film as a way to “get back to the real energy of filmmaking,” this isn’t your father’s version of the movie business. The filmmakers’ experiment revolved around the idea of shooting a film for nothing and then letting an audience find it through the magic of new media. So far, it’s been a complete success. Star Stana Katic’s tweets about the project ignited a firestorm amongst her fanbase – who then spread word far and wide across the Internet.

Read more at Movies.com, 'For Lovers Only' Demonstrates No-Budget Films Can Become Hits in the Internet Age

Links:
No Budget Indie Film Has Grossed $200K in iTunes Sales
'For Lovers Only' Demonstrates No-Budget Films Can Become Hits in the Internet Age
How the Polish Brothers Are Raking It In With a Stealth, No Budget Movie

Flipboard: Best Free App Ever

Actually, Flipboard is one of my favorite apps, whether free or paid, and the one I use most often.

I love the way the app displays twitter feeds like a virtual newspaper, taking the links tweeted and displaying the first part of the article so I can easily scan it to see if I'm interested in viewing the whole thing.

From Flipboard's description in the App Store:

Named Apple's iPad App of the Year and one of TIME's top 50 innovations of 2010, Flipboard is a fast, beautiful way to flip through the news, photos, videos, and updates your friends are sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Flickr, and Instagram. See your social media in a magazine layout that is easy to scan and fun to read. Catch up on the latest stories, videos and posts from popular publications and people such as National Geographic, The New Yorker, Wired, Rolling Stone, Oprah, Forbes, Robert Scoble, and Brain Pickings' Maria Popova. Share articles and photos, comment on posts, and like or favorite anything. Customize your Flipboard with sections created from your favorite news, people, blogs, and topics.

Well said. I know this might sound like a paid advertisement, but I'm not receiving anything in exchange for this review. Truth is, I was going through my feeds on Flipboard and having trouble coming up with a story or topic that grabbed me when it came to me: Blog about Flipboard! It really is, for me, a killer app and the unbelievably great thing is that it is free! Something that is important to me as a starving artist. :)

If you're interested, go check it out at the iTunes store.

Link:
Flipboard at the iTunes Store

Lawrence Block has a blog!

The first book I read by Lawrence Block was, "Telling Lies for Fun and Profit."  It was great!  I highly recommend it, not only for writing tips but because it is a pleasure to read.

Now, thanks to John Locke, LB has his own blog! He writes:

... John Locke got a ton of press for selling his one millionth Kindle book. And, as soon as he did, he released a book he’d had waiting in the wings all along. He called it How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months, and offered it not at his usual price of 99¢ but $4.99 (or $9.99 in paperback).

Yeah, right, said the snarky voice that lives inside my head. Who could resist paying five bucks to learn how to write mediocre fiction?

I told the voice Thanks for sharing and ordered the book. This was on June 21, and I started reading it on my Kindle that night. I read the rest of it the following day, and started re–reading it the day after that. And the next day was June 24, my birthday, and I started the day doing something I’d been absolutely certain I would never do. But what the hell, I figured I was finally old enough. So I joined Twitter.

Because John Locke told me to.

That day or the next, I asked my web guy to set me up with a blog. Five years ago I was on a book tour in aid of The Burglar on the Prowl, and each night I made myself write a newsy paragraph on the day’s events, and emailed it for him to post on my website. It was a pain in the ass, and it didn’t accomplish anything, and that was the end of my blogging. But now I wanted a real blog, one I could manage myself, and that’s what I asked for.

Because John Locke told me to.
....
John Locke’s background is in sales, and he blogs and tweets with the aim of increasing his own sales. He wants you not only to buy his books, but to help him get others to buy them. As he explains, the actions he takes online are frankly manipulative; he outlines a method of gaining a reader’s allegiance and illustrates it with a blog about Joe Paterno and his mother that leaves one gaping. The damn thing seems so calculating. . .

But here’s the thing. It’s not cold and calculating. It’s warm and calculating.

Read the entire blog post here.

I had been wondering if I should buy John Locke's book; after reading LB talk about Locke I don't see how I can not buy it.

Links:
Telling Lies for Fun and Profit
Block's Amazon Author Page
Lawrence Block's Blog
Thanks to Dean Wesley Smith and @PassiveVoiceBlg for spreading the news about LB's blog.
How I Sold 1 Million eBooks in 5 Months