Titling this post makes me absurdly glad we don’t use the metric system; nobody would want to hear about kilometerstones.

Milestone one: I finished my edits to the typeset pages of HAMMERED, which are also called first pass edits or galleys. That itself is a milestone, because it means I’ve completely finished my first three books. But it gets cooler: in this third book o’ mine, there is a map! I drew it all by myself. This is a big deal for me because I purrrrrrr over hand-drawn maps. When I’m thinking about buying a fantasy book, I actually consider the map first and decide if it’s a world I’d like to get to know. If it looks cool, then I’ll read the first page and see if it grabs me. Having a map printed has me geeking out even more than usual.

Milestone two: This is sort of a dubious one, but apparently it’s something all authors endure these days. Some giant douche is selling an ARE of Hounded on eBay. Already. Another author told me, “Come for the anger, stay for the futility” in fighting the sale of advance copies. That made me laugh; I can certainly see how the situation could raise one’s blood pressure. After all, advance copies have a big sticker on ’em that says they’re NOT FOR SALE. And this seller (or someone he knows) is a reviewer who typically gets plenty of advance copies, because he’s selling a lot of other early editions, too—he even brags that he’s been selling books since 2000. He (or his source) must actually write reviews at some point or he wouldn’t keep getting books. But damn, I don’t think he even read mine! His description of my book is completely inaccurate. If the seller is the reviewer (which I doubt) he’s going to write a terrible review—and the fact that he’d rather make a cheap buck off a year of my work than read it really chaps my hide. He’s not just a thief; he’s an illiterate thief.

BONUS! Milestone three: I think it’s time to have a contest thingie, in order to promote literacy and good karma and so on. Every action (such as a skeezy person from Jersey selling my work without compensating me) must have an equal and opposite reaction (giving away books I’ve paid for and thus the author’s been paid for). I’m going to give away a couple o’ books from my personal library that I think someone else might enjoy also. It’s gotta be U.S. only, sorry. The first is WHO FEARS DEATH by Nnedi Okorafor:The second book I’m givin’ away is ZERO HISTORY by the inimitable William Gibson:Both of these are hardcovers.To win one (I’ll have two winners!), all you gotta do is comment. You can say, “Yay for maps!” or “Boo to evil book pirates!” or even “Suck it, metric system!” Or whatever you’d like, honestly. I’d just like to see comments. :) Contest runs till Tuesday, and I’ll announce winners Wednesday; winner chosen randomly, o’ course.

Peace and carrots and literacy…

This series chronicles all the stuff I’m finding out about the publishing business in the months leading up to my debut.* If you missed the first couple installments, #1 is here and #2 is here. Shall we on?

I don’t know how to make a book trailer.

And from what I can tell, few people do. The existence of book trailers escaped my notice until I saw other writers here and there talking about them on their blogs. There are a lot of bad trailers out there. There are also some pretty good ones—the high-budget stuff from this list of Moby Awards is fairly entertaining. But even those great trailers didn’t make me want to go out and buy any of the books. Exploding zombie brains, for example, look great on film (bring on the popcorn!), but that doesn’t mean the words on the page are going to be great. They might be, of course—I’m just saying that films and books are completely different mediums, and anyone who’s ever read a book and then been disappointed with the movie version knows all about the difficulty of translating the printed word to the screen. (Look at the difficulty of bringing The Great Gatsby to life. How can you ever take the deliciousness of Fitzgerald’s prose and do it justice as a dramatic production? It hasn’t been done right yet.) The screen version often falls short or misrepresents the book entirely—and honestly, I think that’s a danger of doing a trailer. I imagine a mediocre or poorly done trailer can actually depress sales, rather than encourage them. The trouble, of course, is that there is no way to measure the effect book trailers have on sales. If a marketing genius can provide proof that $2K invested in a trailer will lead to an extra $3K in royalties (or whatever), then I’m sure I’ll line up to make one myself. In the meantime, it’s tough to justify shelling out major bucks and time on an enterprise of dubious worth.

Well, I take that back. I think Harry Connolly is making one for the right reason: He thinks it will be cool, and since he’s got some people working for him who know what they’re doing, I’m willing to bet he’s right. Since I already know Harry’s writing is awesome, I don’t need to watch the trailer to be convinced to buy his book, but I’m going to watch it when it’s ready anyway. The world can always stand to get a little cooler.

Comparison is a stepping stone to dribbling, babbling, madness.

No one ever told me that I’d be neurotically compelled to compare my word counts to other authors. (I don’t think there’s a pill for it yet, but I have no doubt it’s in development and side effects include self-flagellation, runny nose, and glossolalia.) Before I got my deal, I didn’t give a damn if I wrote three words a day or three thousand. Now I feel unworthy if I don’t write a couple thousand a day to keep up with the fast kids, and since I don’t make it most days, there’s a certain amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth going on. I’m fully conscious that it’s silly of me; if I average just 500 words a day, that’s two novels per year. I can do that without burning out, and I am doing it, and it’s fine. But still. I wasn’t expecting this sketchy little gremlin to land on my shoulder and whisper that I don’t have an awesome author beard like that one guy, or that I should have finished my epic already, etc. I’m aware that these are nice worries to have in comparison to worrying that I’ll never be published; I’m just warning everyone that getting published will not cure you of  your neuroses. You will always worry about something, so gird your mental loins.

Mental loins? Clearly I need to stop writing now. I promise the next installment will be loin-free.

*Since the calendar flipped, now I get to say I have three books coming out this year!

Continuing the series about stuff I never found out until after I signed the contract. If you missed part one, here’s the link for it.

First, I’d like to give a shout-out to A.B, who commented on the first post—your suggestion was great and the backstage look at creating the cover is in the works. It’s a collaborative effort because it was a collaborative project; you’ll hear not only my side of things, but also my editor’s and maybe the designer’s as well. That’s coming sometime in January. For now, on with the goodies.

Laws in other countries actually apply to writers.

Hmm…that probably didn’t sound right. What I meant was, TAXES. Oh, and ROYALTY RATES. Both are going to be different from the United States if you get a foreign contract, and before you say, “Well, duh,” think about trying to keep track of them all if you sell rights to your book in, say, ten countries. Or, heck, pretend you went the full Rothfuss and got sold in thirty or so. And say that they’re releasing different editions in each one—mass market paperback in Australia, trade in Thailand, hardcover in Russia, etc. What surprised me is that you’ll have to fill out a tax thingy for the IRS to tell all those other countries not to worry, the U.S. will tax you on all that money just fine. If you don’t fill out the tax thingy—well, I’m not sure what would happen, but I’m sure I’d rather not find out. Something to make you rue the day you didn’t fill out the tax thingy. The point I’m trying to make (because I did want to make a point eventually) is that A) I’d never be able to keep track of this without my agency, B) I’d have no sense of what’s a good deal and what isn’t because I don’t have my finger on the pulse of Poland’s economy, and C) I’d probably never have any foreign contracts at all without my agency. I wonder how many foreign contracts unagented authors manage to secure. My (uneducated) guess is close to none. To people who say, “Dude, 20% commission on foreign sales is so whack,” I say, “Dude, I’ll happily accept 80% of any money that I never would have had otherwise.” So, in addition to these excellent reasons why you should get an agent from an editor’s perspective, an agent will open locked doors in faraway lands and prevent foreign revenue agents (also known as ninjas) from confiscating all your worldly goods.

There are known knowns and then there are known unknowns, and it all means we don’t really know

One of the things I’ve found astonishing is that there’s no efficient method in the industry to keep track of book sales. Months go by—yea, even a year sometimes—before people get a semi-clear picture of how your book is performing. All those Bestseller Lists are based on incomplete data and a lot of guesswork. It makes me wonder what arcane system “the people in Accounting” are using. (They are almost always called “the people in Accounting,” by the way, with a sense of mystical dread, and for me it evokes a picture of gray spectral figures huddled around an abacus.) I am sure there are good and sufficient reasons why this hasn’t been modernized; I confess that I’m not sophisticated in accounting practices and any discussion of numbers that lasts more than thirty seconds will send me screaming to find a happy place. Still, I’m suffering a bit of cognitive dissonance here. On the one hand, you have that calm, intellectual guy on the UPS commercials doing magic shit on a whiteboard and casually suggesting global domination using his company’s real-time tracking system; on the other, we won’t know for six months if your book got sold in a Kentucky Walmart.

I’m not going to worry. Every other author has dealt with it and survived because that’s just the way it is. But, um, why does it have to stay that way? If there are any smart cookies out there looking for a place to build a better mousetrap, tracking book sales could use the attention of a genius or two.

That’s all for this go-round. Hope that shed a scintilla of light on the business for the uninitiated. :)