The American Booksellers Association wrapped up their fifth annual Winter Institute meeting this weekend.  The ABA discusses trends that affect booksellers, and their forecast for 2010 is also of interest to writers.  The association commissioned Verso Advertising to conduct a survey of book-buying habits, breaking down demographics, frequency of purchase, and the impact of e-books.  The results are both expected and surprising:

• Avid readers, those who read books five or more hours a week, comprise 28% of the US population
• 63% over those readers are female
• A significant portion of those readers are 45+, but a healthy number are also in the 18-24 age range.
• Avid readers buy 10 or more titles per year

These findings shouldn’t come as any surprise.  People with more leisure to read tend to skew older or younger because they are hampered less by jobs and childrearing responsibilities.  But it’s encouraging to know that people are still buying books.  Lots of books.

One surprising (or maybe not so surprising, given the demographics of the book buying public) is that the tipping point to buying an e-reader hasn’t been reached yet:

• 49% of readers are not considering a purchase of an e-reader in the next year
• The survey couldn’t come up with a meaningful quantification if e-book readers purchase more or less books, or how much they will be willing to spend on an e-book
• They warn that the scourge of the music industry, illegal downloads from online file sharing, is about to hit the e-book market.  Hard.

What can writers glean from these tea leaves?

What I take away from the survey is that the market for books is strong, but the biggest market segment of readers are an aging population.   These readers still like to buy (or borrow) books, but they aren’t rushing out to buy an e-reader anytime soon.

Also included in the survey is that the primary factor in a book purchase (52%) is “author reputation“.  Good books still sell themselves no matter what the market forces dictate.

Publishers Weekly is reporting that the Buy buttons are back for Macmillan authors’ books on Amazon.com. Says PW:

Although the buttons were not restored to all of its titles by late Friday afternoon, sources said an agreement has been completed and the e-tailer has begun putting back the direct buy option. It was not known if Macmillan offered any concessions to get the buttons restored.

Good news at last.

Lisa Black knows a thing or two about death.

She’s worked in a coroner’s office as a forensic scientist, has testified in dozens of homicide trials, and has examined her share of fingerprints. It’s no wonder that, as an author, she gravitates toward suspense novels and dark subjects. Though she’s written books under another name, Elizabeth Becka, her latest novels have been under the moniker Lisa Black. Her debut as Black, called Takeover, was a well-hailed book that earned her starred reviews; and her follow-up to that novel, Evidence of Murder, has also been highly praised:

In this sequel to Takeover, Black paints a believable portrait of a professional woman struggling to move on with her life….This fast-paced thriller features a lot of detailed forensics with a rip-roaring ending.
-Publishers Weekly

Black (Takeover, 2008), a former forensic scientist, knows her stuff and briskly leads readers along the trail of clues right behind her likeable, no-nonsense heroine. Smart science propels this intelligent, well-thought-out crime thriller. - Kirkus

So what does it take to write a scorching thriller? We’re thrilled that Lisa is here with us today to tell us all about it.

Interview with Lisa Black, Part 1

Q: Evidence of Murder is a sequel to your debut novel (writing as Lisa Black), Takeover. Can people read EoM without having read Takeover, or do they need to know something ahead of time?

LB: No, it stands alone, but as always for a series it’s better to read them in order.

Q: How do you manage that—writing for a possibly new audience while also keeping those who’ve read the first book satisfied and interested?

LB: It’s a difficult balance. I have to describe the characters and give enough background for readers who haven’t read the earlier books, but I can’t get too repetitious for those who have. I try to have the recurring characters have some kind of new problem in each book. I have a new plot for each book, I haven’t yet done something that’s strictly a continuation of a plot or a character from a previous book. And I always emphasize the forensics because that attracts the CSI fans.

Q: Tell us a little about Evidence of Murder. What do you say when people ask what it’s about? Who is the main character, what does she want, what stands in her way? Continue Reading »

Still no sign of Amazon relenting to Macmillan, as all of that publisher’s books are unavailable to buy new from the site. In a (generous? mean-spirited?) half-concession, Amazon has been posting links to outside vendors who are selling those authors’ books — you know, like the used ones that won’t earn the author a single penny against her advance. I feel so badly for authors like Randy Susan Meyers, whose debut, The Murderer’s Daughters, released just two weeks ago to early acclaim. (See her Amazon page here.) Said Meyers in comments on our 2/2 post, “It feels like someone tripped me just as I started a race.” Check out her site, where you can find alternate buying options.

And what’s this? Coming off the heels of Apple’s iPad announcement, Amazon just acquired a touch-screen company called Touchco. Will a future generation Kindle have the touch capabilities of an Apple product?

Stay tuned.

COMPETITION:
To celebrate the re-release of my Bridei Chronicles in a lovely new Australian paperback edition, I have two complete sets of three signed books to give away. Make a comment on this post by Feb 12 to be in the draw – winners chosen randomly.

A Year of Learning

Today I send off the manuscript of Seer of Sevenwaters to the publishers. This is the novel I’ve been writing before, during and after seven months of cancer treatment. It’s been a time of considerable learning for me: learning my strengths and weaknesses, learning about breast cancer, learning about other people and how different their attitudes can be to something like this. I’ve also gained plenty of writing insights.

This book has a dual first person narration, with each chapter split between the two voices. Previously I’ve always used either a single first person narrator for a whole book, or tight third with a very limited number of POV characters. I experimented with dual first person in a novella I wrote early last year and was pleased with the result. I used both past and present tense in the novella, and I’ve done the same in this novel – one narrator uses past, one present. I love the immediacy provided by present tense. I also like the way it puts a cap on my natural tendency to wordiness.

I do still have doubts about Seer of Sevenwaters. That’s normal – this is novel number thirteen and I don’t remember thinking any of them was flawless at any stage! In fact, the manuscript in which I had the most confidence was the one that got the most critical reception from my editor. That galling experience taught me to expect absolutely anything.

The dual first person narration lets the reader see into the thoughts of the male protagonist, who has lost his memory at the beginning of the story and takes a long time to recover it fully. Allowing him a first person narrative makes him an interesting individual from page one. He lies in bed and hardly speaks for the first few chapters, and refuses to talk about his past for the next few. If we’d only seen him through others’ eyes he would have been not only a complete enigma, but boring.

Present tense seemed perfect for a character with memory loss, who must live from moment to moment. In creating his voice I took the following into consideration: Continue Reading »

The Intertubes were abuzz this past weekend, and not just because of Apple’s iPad. At least not directly.

Amazon.com, retaliating against Macmillan books for demanding that their ebooks be sold using an “agency model” (where Amazon takes 30% of a seller’s set price for a book) instead of continuing to allow Amazon to set low prices for those ebooks (generally at or below $9.99, even for bestsellers and new hardcovers), decided they weren’t going to support the publisher’s books at all — and took them off their site.

Yep. Gone.

Said Macmillan author John Scalzi in his post All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend:

Hey, you want to know how to piss off an author? It’s easy: Keep people from buying their books. You want to know how to really piss them off? Keep people from buying their books for reasons that have nothing to do with them. And you know how to make them absolutely incandescent with rage? Keep people from buying their books for reasons that have nothing to do with them, and keep it a surprise until it happens.

In case this is news to you, here’s a MacAmazonGate recap. The CEO of Macmillan, John Sargent, issued a letter via a paid ad in a special edition of Publishers Lunch on Saturday, which summarized things pretty nicely: Continue Reading »

My librarian husband, who regards e-book readers like Kindle and Nook with disdain (“and what will happen to libraries when there are no more books?” he asks rhetorically) said out of the blue the other day: “I want an iPad.” 

This is a guy who barely uses his cellphone and has a really old iPod Nano.  He’s a late adopter, this one.

I’m not a techie person but I appreciate innovation and convenience.  I have an iTouch (lurve it!) and the usuals.  No e-book yet, but we were thinking about getting a Kindle this year.  But I hadn’t heard about Apple’s new Must Have toy for 2010.  So I hopped online to find out what made my luddite husband salivate over one of these things.

David Pogue from the New York Times describes the iPad thusly:

The iPad is, as predicted, essentially a giant iPod Touch: aluminum-backed, half-inch thin, with a 10-inch screen surrounded by a shiny black border. At the bottom, there’s the standard iPod/iPhone connector and a single Home button. It will be available in models ranging from $499 (16 gigs of memory, Wi-Fi) to $830 (64 gigs of memory, Wi-Fi and 3G cellular).

So basically, it’s a hybrid between a Netbook and an iTouch.  The e-book application is handsome, the screen is in color and it looks sleek and cool.  What Apple has done is create an e-book reader for the hipster crowd.  And it will move people on the fence about e-book readers to finally taking the plunge.

As a writer and novelist, I’m pleased that there are things out there that make buying books easier.  I’m also pleased to read stuff like this:

In negotiations with Apple, publishers agreed to a business model that gives them more power over the price that customers pay for e-books. Publishers had all but lost that power on Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader.

With Apple, under a formula that tethers the maximum e-book price to the print price on the same book, publishers will be able to charge $12.99 to $14.99 for most general fiction and nonfiction titles — higher than the common $9.99 price that Amazon had effectively set for new releases and best sellers. Apple will keep 30 percent of each sale, and publishers will take 70 percent.

Apple isn’t trying to squeeze the publisher for every dime?  Publishers have power in the distribution game for once?  Could the iPad staunch the bleeding in the publishing industry?

The iPad isn’t coming out until April.  We won’t be waiting in line for one either.  It ain’t cheap.  But my book-loving husband is intrigued.  He’s coming off the e-book fence.  I wonder how many others are like him.

What do you think about the new iPad?  Will this get more people on board the e-book train or do you think it’s hype?  Are you waiting in line at the Apple Store the day it launches?  Or are you sticking with old fashion paper books for now?  Let us know in the comments.

Last month, I blogged about getting to know your characters—which segways nicely into the WU theme for this month: voice. I’ve always felt that voice is the reflection of your POV characters’ personalities, the way they want their story to be told. And I’ve found that I can’t nail down the voice for my novels unless and until I know my POV characters really, really well, and they’re talking to me in voices I can hear—sometimes as clearly as I hear the voices of my husband and kids.

That can take time, for sure. Somc character’s voices come quite easily, others much less so. Louis Menand had an article on voice in the New Yorker awhile back and wrote:

A better basis than speaking for the metaphor of voice in writing is singing. You can’t tell if someone can sing or not from the way she talks, and although “natural phrasing” and “from the heart” are prized attributes of song, singing that way requires rehearsal, preparation, and getting in touch with whatever it is inside singers that, by a neural kink or the grace of God, enables them to turn themselves into vessels of musical sound.

So don’t be discouraged if you’re not hearing your characters’ voices right away, or if it takes revision after revision until their voices are ringing off the page as clearly as they possibly can. View hard-nut-to-crack characters as an opportunity to experiment with alternative storytelling techniques. You might try writing a day-in-the-life diary for your main character. The diary entry doesn’t necessarily have to make it into your book—but it can be a great tool towards feeling your way towards your main character’s personality, and thus his or her voice. I had a character who wouldn’t talk to me (or the reader), but she was willing to talk to her best (platonic) male friend. Only when she started dictating letters to the friend in the middle of scenes, telling him how she really felt about what was going on did I finally get a fix on who she truly was and how her voice needed to sound.

I’ve found it fascinating to read all the posts on voice this month. There have been so many great insights, so many fabulously helpful thoughts on storycraft. And yet I felt like we all struggled a bit to clearly pin down just what voice is and how writers go about developing their own. I think that’s because however much you try to dissect and analyze it, in essence voice is magic. You know Pinoccio? Voice is the touch of the Blue Fairy’s magic wand that turns characters from wooden puppets into real live people who jump off the page.

Since Writer Unboxed is focusing on voice this month, I thought I’d add an unconventional riff to the awesome contributions already put forth.

I love reading prose fiction — but in my heart of hearts, I’m a movie junkie. It’s a brilliant way to economically tell stories, and I enjoy the creative constraints the medium has: running time, MPAA ratings, budget. The mission? To cram as much narrative — both spoken and unspoken — into the frame as possible.

Notice that I said “unspoken.” That’s key. I believe prose fiction writers can easily learn about voice by watching and studying movies — especially when they pay attention to those unspoken bits.

Writing great books and short stories hinges greatly on your authorial voice — but always remember that your voice requires tonal flexibility. This can be defined by a character’s point of view, the pacing of a scene, or what’s happening in that scene. Thoughtful characters and slower-paced scenes can permit a more lyrical authorial voice; peppy characters and action sequences often demand something else.

Now I can’t tell you how to craft your voice; like Barbara, I believe your personal world view defines most of that. I also believe that the best authorial voices don’t attract attention to themselves. But if you’re looking for ways to appropriately use your voice for characters and scenes, I suggest popping in a DVD, muting the volume, and watching what unfolds.

Don’t watch the actors. Try to ignore the blitz-cut editing. Forget trying to decipher what’s being said. Instead, look for what’s happening in the frame overall — mostly the use of colors, color saturation and lighting. In the hands of filmmaking masters, these techniques represent the invisible art of cinema: the ability to wordlessly evoke emotion. To me, they represent the “voice” of the overall film, or a particular scene.

I think there’s wisdom there … and if you look for patterns, you’ll find them. For instance, most films these days depict workplace interiors — no matter how much sunshine is streaming through the locale’s windows — as cold, emotionless, antiseptic places. Filmmakers achieve this by clever lighting, or by processing the film (or digital footage) in such a way to suck the color from the moving images. The result is often a gray- or blue-tinged scene, with its characters looking as happy as a herd of zombies. Continue Reading »

Your voice already exists, right now, every time you sit down to write. It is inescapable—your voice is you. Voices can be obscured, even buried, under avalanches of helpful advice and nudges to be more literary or more commercial or less gritty or less sexual, but it cannot be entirely lost.

I was once hiking with a multi-national group, and one of the guys was an Australian who treasured his American accent imitation. When he finally let us hear it, the two Americans burst out laughing. We didn’t mean to be cruel, but he sounded like Tony Soprano—he’d absorbed his “authentic” accent from Mafia movies. The poor Aussie was crushed.

All too often, this is what happens to the emerging voice of a writer. The perfectly natural, perfectly beautiful accent of an Australian ends up sounding like New Jersey circa 1976.

How does it happen? How do you prevent it and allow your natural voice to emerge?

Of all the craft subjects in writerdom, voice is my favorite. I’ve been teaching it online and in workshops around the world for a long time, and it never, ever gets old. I teach it as a hands-on, down and dirty, gritty and joyful exploration of…YOU. Voice is the sum of all your parts—your passions and interests, the geography that most clearly resonates with you, the cadence of your ancestors and neighbors and your education, and the major events that have shaped your life-view. Your voice already exists, right now.

It becomes thinned and anemic when you listen too much to outside influences. Like critique partners. Editors. Contest judges. Your mother. Not that there is anything wrong with that input. We all need feedback. The trouble comes in getting lost in what everybody else says.

Your voice becomes more fully your own when you listen to your inner guidance, studying yourself as much as you study craft. (Notice I did not say: abandon all studies of craft and other writers and never listen to anybody else ever again. I said, study yourself, too.) The most authentic and beautiful gift each of us has to offer the world is our own peculiar, unique view of the universe.

When you get in line with that, that’s when you start to own what editors and agents call “a strong voice.” When you develop that particularity within your work, that’s when you don’t have to be afraid of going down the wrong track with your work—because you’re listening within as well as without. Listening to your voice will tell you what genre is right for you, what settings, what kinds of characters you should be writing.

For example, I’ll use a man who isn’t a writer, but could be—my father. He was a cop and then an insurance salesman. As a very young lad, he knew a lot of death and loss. He grew up entirely in Colorado Springs, the youngest of the family because the younger brother died. He has a dark view of the world, and a practical one. He knows terrible things happen and he does his best to protect himself and his loved ones from destruction. He’s a no-nonsense kind of guy.

I’m sure you are shocked to learn he only reads mystery novels, and nothing flowery about them, either. If he were a writer, that’s what he would write.

You are as clearly defined as my father, as any writer out there who has tapped into his own voice by accident or intent. Most often, those writers who have tapped in powerfully, enough to start bidding wars and land gigantic advances, have done it because they are passionate about what they’re writing. Look at the writers you’d like to emulate and see if that isn’t true.

So how do you find your own authentic voice? It’s a big subject, but here are a few exercises to help: Continue Reading »

Today’s guest blogger is Becky Levine, author of The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide: How to Give and Receive Feedback, Self-Edit, and Make Revisions, a new, comprehensive book about the critiquing experience published by Writer’s Digest Books. Becky’s with us today to tell us more about surviving critique — because, yeah, who hasn’t experienced–and wish they knew how better to handle–caustic critique? And how many of us have “handled it” by not saying anything at all? Here’s another alternative. Plus, comment on this post for a chance to win either an actual or virtual (PDF) copy of Becky’s book!

Becky, we’re thrilled to have you with us. Take it away!
–
How to Survive a Critique…and More: Let’s Talk Troubleshooting

In my book, The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide, I’ve got a chapter about troubleshooting. It’s toward the end of the book, after chapters on getting started and staying organized and learning some tools and tricks about critiquing. It’s at the end, because—yes, even after you’re an experienced critiquer, even after you’ve participated in a group for a few years, you can still run across problems. Groups are made of people, and people interact—not always as smoothly as we’d like.

The important thing is, I think, to catch these problems before they become, well…big problems. Most of us are nice people; as writers, we struggle enough having to make bad things happen to our characters. We don’t like to complain, we don’t really want to nag, and we are not at all happy with serious confrontations. But if you don’t talk about something, guess what? It’s not going away.

Here are some common situations that can make critique partners uncomfortable, unhappy, and—if not dealt with soon enough—angry: Continue Reading »

Uber-contributor Ray Rhamey just dropped us a line to let us know that he has launched his Buzz Blast contest to promote his new book The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles.  Click the link for details.  Prizes are:

First Prize: to the largest number of emails/tweets sent, a choice of gear (t-shirt, mug, water bottle, etc.) from the FtQ Press store PLUS a signed copy of The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles. The designs are on the right, and you can see the styles available in the online store.

Second Prize: to the second-largest number of emails/tweets sent, a choice of gear from the FtQ Press store OR a signed copy of The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles.

Third Prize (random drawing from all but top two entries): a signed copy of The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles.

Check out the video to get a taste of the page-turning lunacy that is The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles.

Finally, writers who are looking for alternative paths to publication will be thrilled to learn that Ray has launched his micro-publishing company Platypus.   

Platypus aims to publish compelling fiction that meets these criteria:

• we love the story
• we see marketability
• doesn’t fit into a genre

At WU, we’ve seen authors such as MJ Rose and our own JC Hutchins break into the market by using alternative methods.  Platypus could be the right match for you.  Click the link to check it out.

Congratulations, Ray!  We can’t wait to see this exciting new chapter unfold!