Indie Writing

Unconscionability (also known as unconscientious dealings) is a term used incontract law to describe a defense against the enforcement of acontract based on the presence of terms that are excessively unfair to one party. Typically, such a contract is held to be unenforceable because theconsideration offered is lacking or is so obviously inadequate that to enforce the contract would be unfair to the party seeking to escape the contract.

If you read this blog, you know where I'm going with this. I'm going to point out some of the more one-sided, onerous terms in a standard publishing contract. And make no mistake--these are practically universal, and for the most part, non-negotiable.

exploitation: The act of using another person's labor without offering them an adequate compensation.

Are writers being exploited? I'm talking about writers working for what I call Big Publishing (Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Harlequin, Hyperion/Disney, Scholastic, Tyndale, John Wiley & Sons, Thomas Nelson, and others.)

Here are my thoughts.

**Please Feel Free To Post Updates As You Find New Great People. These were all the ones I've collected so far, but there are a lot more out there, and I'd love to add them to the list**

The first chapter was “The Early Decisions” which included picking a business name, setting up checking accounts, and so on. There were no real costs at all in those early steps unless your state had a small fee for registering a business name. Checking accounts are free, so are PayPal accounts, and so on.

So, the question on this second basic business-planning chapter is: “What are your expected costs?”

For those of you with a basic understanding of business, you can now see the structure of how I am setting up these chapters. Before starting into a business, there are certain things that need to be figured. Set-up costs, projected production and business costs, and projected income. You have no real data on the costs or the income, at least not accurate data, but anyone with a lick of sense who is starting a business will sit down and try to figure these factors out to some degree.

It would seem that expected costs should be tough to figure. But actually, in this business, they are not. At least for most levels. It just will take a little homework is all.

So, let me first divide this discussion into three major areas.

Cost in Money.

Cost in Time.

Set Costs.

All three areas are critical to figuring overall expected costs of producing a product.

In the first two categories I’ll divide the discussion down into three major ways of running your company: 1) Do All Work Yourself. 2) Do Some Work Yourself, and 3) Hire all work done.

And, of course, the categories cross over. If you find your time more valuable than your money, then hiring things done will be more of an option. And so on.

I’m a little nuts today, a little furious. I’ve been reading screenplays again.

Now, in my travels, in airports, in bars, on the internet and in my teaching, I meet lots of people, “civilians” let’s call them, who tell me they have a story, or that they want to write a screenplay, or a novel, or y’know, “The Hunger Games”. Somehow they’ve gotten the idea that since they’ve watched a lot of TV, they have pretty much everything they need to write those cool words for the actors to say. And who has not watched a lot of TV?

That attitude makes my head explode. But hey, they’re civilians, they probably aren’t going to be writing anything any time soon anyway, they’re harmless. But that’s not what has me so nuts today. No, I want to talk about another attitude I’ve run into lately that’s even worse.

If you're a regular reader of my blog, no doubt you've heard about the Department of Justice filing suit against five of the Big 6 publishers for collusion. If you haven't read the complaint, you should.

Personally, I don't care if their alleged collusion was illegal or not. I've been known to break laws on occasion myself.

What I do care about is how authors are reacting to this news.

I’m writing this to mainly help one person’s request on formatting their book for publication on Kindle, but I’m hoping this might be useful to a few others as well. This will be a broad, basic, step by step process to try and catch most common formatting errors. Long as nothing’s completely bizarre with your Word file, this should get a nice, clean upload.

Over this last year as indie publishing has ramped up, I have gotten the same question a great deal. The question is simply: When should you send a short story to a magazine or book collection and when should you just publish it yourself? And that’s a great question, so I figured I would talk for a moment about how I make my decision and then you all can decide for yourself, since we are all different.

But let me say this clearly right up front. I believe that selling short fiction to magazines and collections is the only major aspect of traditional publishing still worth the time and effort. (Translation and overseas sales are a distant second.)

Some authors still seem to be confused about Agency pricing, what it means, and how does it compare to wholesale pricing on ebooks and paper books. They somehow think Amazon is a bad guy for trying to lower ebook prices.

Here's a deeper explanation.

To actually get a profit-and-loss calculation for a book project, you must now make some pricing decisions and projections of income.

Yeah, I know. I know. This is all so new, how can anyone predict how much money they will make on any project? Well, you can’t. Not really. But you can try. And you want to know a dirty little secret. New York traditional publishing can’t predict how much they will make on any book either.

But they try.

And that’s the key. To really act like a publisher, you need to understand what you are trying to gain. You need to know how many sales will get your expenses back. And you need to know at how many sales will you start making a profit.

So this chapter is about why you need to try to determine set income ranges, and how to do that at this moment in 2012.

This is the last of the basic three set-up chapters. After this one, we start getting into more detail on specific areas.

I did a New World of Publishing post a few posts back talking about how I could find the balance between short fiction indie publishing and short fiction traditional publishing. And then I did another post about how I could NOT find the balance between traditional novel publishing and indie publishing. And from some of the comments that came in, I think I didn’t talk clearly enough about the main point I was trying to make.

So let me try once again from a slightly different angle, and, I hope, a little more directly on my point.

First off, I need to clear up one thing. I still have two books under contract with traditional New York publishers and I plan on writing both to the best of my ability. So I haven’t jumped completely to indie publishing just yet. And unless a few things change, as I said in the last post, I find it hard to imagine ever doing another book for traditional publishers except for rare exceptions.

Unless things change.

That’s the key.

Unless things change. And the changes I am asking for are in the contracts and are fantastically simple.

When it comes to when and where to write, everyone is different. Maya Angelou starts early and works in hotel rooms with bare walls, Truman Capote claimed he could only write when in bed, horizontal, and Vladimir Nabokov scribbled on index cards for entire nights. Some authors hold themselves to 10 pages per day no matter what (Stephen King), while others force out 500 words a day (Ernest Hemingway). Despite these differences in approach many writers share one commonality: a routine. Like competitive athletes, writers don’t show up for practice when they feel like it. They commit to a schedule and stick with it. Yes, some days will be good, and some days will be bad, but in order to improve one has to keep going.

To be clear there’s no “right” routine, only what works best for you. So what is that? Well, first off, what do you want to achieve? Are you hoping to finish a 100,000 word novel in 12 months? Or complete a short story in 60 days? Once you know, write your objective down and put it in a place where you’re sure to see it every day. A constant reminder will hopefully spur you forward.

Now that you know what you want to achieve what’s next?

It’s possible I hate your main character.

Now, that might be on me. The list below? Entirely personal. And, as always, in the hands of a master, none of this shit applies. A masterful storyteller can break all the rules and make the breaking of the rules seem like that should’ve been the rule all along. Your Mileage May Vary, but just the same I thought it an interesting exercise to list those things that make me want to punt your main character into a pterodactyl nest. Where he will be promptly ripped into ribbons and gobbets of man-meat.