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What book is everyone writing right now?

Skeptic Ginger said:
I think there are quite a few. They seem to be the places thieves are raiding to sell stolen work as their own though, like fictionpress.
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Well that's no good. Should I just take my old stories and try to submit them to online publications, despite their already having been published offline? I know you're not supposed to do that, but the stories I had published offline are effectively inaccessible.
 
Frozenwolf150 said:
Well that's no good. Should I just take my old stories and try to submit them to online publications, despite their already having been published offline? I know you're not supposed to do that, but the stories I had published offline are effectively inaccessible.
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I would think this was all up to the rules of whomever you would use as a publisher and what ever contractual arrangements you had with the original publishing.
 
I guess the reason I'm asking is that I sort of want to share them with JREF but have no way of doing so, short of posting them here. However, submitting a previously published work isn't likely to go very far very quickly. To make matters worse, duotrope.com is no longer free.

This is the part of writing I hate most.

ETA: I just checked their site and Duotrope has taken down all of the services for non-paying members, meaning my account there is now useless. Does anyone know of any alternatives?
 
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Frozenwolf, several of my previously-published short stories are also published elsewhere - depends on the agreement you have (non-exclusive, time period, etc.) with whomever published them first. As SG says, go back & look at what you agreed to when you put them up the first time.

Websites and blogs are fairly cheap. I used to just buy a domain and then create my site using html code in Notepad, so it's not even necessary to have a page-making program (although I use one now). Maybe talk to folks in the computer section here about posting stories & password protecting them or something, so you could share them with specific people here?

As far as ebook publishing - it's easy through Smashwords, KDP, and other services. You can do it yourself if you follow the formatting rules carefully & check each upload before okaying it. Creating a paperback version is more complicated but also self-doable nowadays. The biggest problem is publicity & getting your work seen and noticed!
 
OK thanks. What about alternatives to Duotrope though? I don't appreciate having to pay now for a subscription just to keep track of my own submissions.
 
Got me on that one. I've never used something like that, so I don't know any alternatives.

ETA: you might check Firstwriter, but there is an annual fee and I'm not sure it would meet your needs...
 
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I just got my manuscript back from the copyeditor, and at first glance (sorry, too busy wrestling with a bug in Firefox last night to look closely) he hasn't suggested changing much. A lot of what I saw was just quibbling that the longer dashes that Word automatically creates (sometimes) when you type space-hyphen-space were just short hyphens. Yeah, doofus, that's because WordPerfect doesn't have that in its autocorrect. You want it changed, just say so.

So, was it worth the money? I'll have to check through more closely, but I guess it's debatable. On the one hand, someone has looked at it from a copyeditor's point of view and thinks most of it is OK as it is. On the other hand, I still agonise that it could be further improved by the right person. A pro author who looked at it said it would be none the worse of "a close copy-edit", which is why I sent it for this in the first place. But back on the first hand, the pro author is a humourless sort of type who wanted me to take out all the personal asides that almost everyone else said were what made the book readable for them.

I think it's got to the "tolerance" point someone mentioned above, and "the excellent is the enemy of the good" and all that sort of platitude. If Caustic Logic gets his act together and finishes off the handful of illustrations he's doing for the book, it could be getting typeset next week.

Rolfe.
 
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Awesome! My experience with editors has actually been rather alarming; as I think I mentioned before, when looking for a new editor, I sent him a sample of my work to be edited - a sample that had already been edited by a previous editor. When I got it back, it had been totally changed, and he disagreed in multiple places with the first editor, in some spots changing things back to the way I'd had them in the first place. He also wanted to formalize dialogue. Seeing how different the two edit jobs were was quite an eye-opener. Editing is obviously an art, not a science, and your best bet for an editor is to (somehow) find one whose output you like (in my case the first editor). Or, if you're good enough, run it through alpha and beta readers and a word processing program, re-read it twenty times, and save yourself the $$$.
 
Bear in mind that my book is non-fiction. It must be harder with fiction, because there's a lot more individual style to contend with.

About half a dozen people have read my book. There has been a general consensus of "it's OK but it's quite hard going because of the density of the argument". However, a friend who had little prior familiarity with the issues got through it and was quite impressed, and apparently her husband also read it because he allegedly said "she should get on Newsnight with that".

I once had a scientific paper which I thought was fine edited by someone at the journal which published it, and it was amazingly better afterwards. I re-read the original and though, yes I still think it was fine like that, but I'd like to buy that editor a drink. Perhaps I was hoping for a similar effect here.

As I said, a pro author who is thought by some to be Scotland's leading novelist said it needed copyediting, which was part of why I went with it, that and the general belief that there's no such thing as a book that can't be improved by editing. I'm not sure this has been improved by as much as the copy-edit cost, and I'm not sure it couldn't be improved again, but I'm going to take this as reasonable validation of what I've written and just get it out there.

Oh, I forgot. One of the people who read the book is Terry Waite. He has written a short but very good foreword for it. So not just having the foreword itself, but I can put on the cover "with a foreword by Terry Waite, CBE". Two of the other people who read it (the reasonably famous pro author and a law professor who is a recognised expert in the subject) also gave me cracking quotes for the back cover. This should all help attract interest.

Coming down to earth with a bump, I also discover that a lady I play recorder with at workshops is the operations manager for a big city-centre bookshop. Hmmmm. How do I raise the question of a book signing, I wonder?

Rolfe.
 
Ashles said:
Finally finished my book.

I love fantasy books.

But I always wondered what it might really be like if you were an office worker who was suddenly transported to a world like Middle Earth or Narnia. Right now. With only the clothes you were wearing and an Pod
And all you have to defend yourself is a Management Strategy diploma, an extensive knowledge of 80s music and fairly decent Excel skills.

It's intended to be a sort of deconstruction of the fantasy genre through the eyes of three everyday people from Brighton. Any thoughts are welcome.

(The building-audio-speakers-in-Middle-Earth section is thanks to a JREF forum poster - Uruk)

No More Heroes
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Wow, that's long. I love your cover. Where did you get that done?

Rolfe.
 
Hmmm. I'm not sure if I'm chuffed to bits, or a bit narked about having paid for a copy-edit that so far as I can see has done nothing more than a basic proof-read. Most of it is quibbling about the lack of some things Word does as autocorrect but WordPerfect doesn't. Irritatingly, he tells me how to make Word do these things. Actually, I just need to find out the WordPerfect codes and do a quick replace. And saying that some numbers should be written out as words.

However, the notes at the start are encouraging. "This is an in depth, thoroughly researched and riveting forensic analysis with great attention to detail." I hope this isn't just stock self-publishing ego massage for paying author. (But at the very end he then sneaks in "It all reads very well :) ", which seems genuine.)

Ah, I shall just set to and make WordPerfect adhere to Word conventions.

Rolfe.
 
It's been a long time since I used WP but IIRC search and replace is a simple task. (Or maybe I've misread your issue?)

And I don't know about your keyboard commands because I have a Mac but I can get three dash sizes with keystrokes:

- (self explanatory)

– (alt -) an en dash

— (alt shift -) an em dash
 
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Rolfe, I just walked into a bookstore and said, "I'm a local author. Can I leave some of my cards here?" They said yes and I've done a couple signings there now. Bookstores usually like signings because it brings people in. Your friend will probably be fine with you just mentioning it straight out.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
It's been a long time since I used WP but IIRC search and replace is a simple task. (Or maybe I've misread your issue?)

And I don't know about your keyboard commands because I have a Mac but I can get three dash sizes with keystrokes:

- (self explanatory)

– (alt -) an en dash

— (alt shift -) an em dash
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Yes, it's a simple search-and-replace. I only had to figure out how to force WordPerfect to produce the en-dash and em-dash codes once, then paste that into the find-and-replace utility, and job done. I feel a bit sorry for the poor editor who has marked every one individually. The thing is, Word does this as an autocorrect and as far as I can see often does it inconsistently. WordPerfect doesn't do it at all, which I think is preferable to being inconsistent, and I hadn't forced it to do it. It's handy to know where the instances are though, and exactly how the editor wants the debatable ones treated.

He's also marked a lot of what he thinks are inconsistent spaces, but they're only artefacts of the justification. I checked very carefully that the spaces were typographically consistent before I sent the manuscript.

He wants a lot of numbers changed from numerals to words, and I think he's basically right, so these are having to be done individually, by hand. There's also an issue about numbering the figures which I think is good advice.

Ellipses are a problem. WordPerfect again doesn't auto-correct to an ellipsis at all, and I have a habit of typing four dots. Again it's an easy search-and-replace, when I find out how to make WordPerfect do a bloody ellipsis. I may have to find one somewhere else and paste it in, to get the right code - I've utterly failed to find a way to force the code.

Rolfe.
 
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Tiktaalik said:
Rolfe, I just walked into a bookstore and said, "I'm a local author. Can I leave some of my cards here?" They said yes and I've done a couple signings there now. Bookstores usually like signings because it brings people in. Your friend will probably be fine with you just mentioning it straight out.
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That's encouraging. This is a big Blackwell's Bookshop in Edinburgh, right across from the university, but also, amusingly, right across from the law courts, the Crown Office and where all the lawyers hang out. Quite funny under the circumstances.

I was wondering about making a signing there into a mini book launch, but that might be pushing my luck a bit.

My own local-local bookshop in the village will do a signing for sure, but it's tiny. And the village is quite small too. I'll sell some there, but realistically, I won't shift a lot.

How do these things work? Surely the bookshop isn't going to order in a lot of books just on spec? Especially not a self-published book by an unknown? Of course I can just show up with a box of them from the printer. Is that protocol? If so, what cut of the cover (or sale) price would the bookshop want for its trouble? How much would you discount the book at a signing or launch?

I was at a book launch recently, star-author's crappy Lockerbie novel that is causing all sorts of waves and has sold out two appearances at the Edinburgh Book Festival, what it is to have a name. (OK, it's having the desired effect, don't knock it, but honestly the plotting is dire.) Anyway, they were selling the £15.99 cover-price hardback for £14 as far as I remember. But that wasn't in a shop, but in an arts venue, and the publisher simply showed up with boxes and boxes of them. And they sold a shed-load.

I'm a total novice on how these things work.

Rolfe.
 
One of the biggest concerns I have is exactly what you're talking about Rolfe;

I think getting someone else to thoroughly edit your work is pretty important, but when they're working for you rather than a publisher, surely they're going to have a sort of notion in their head of not upsetting their client, and therefore won't do a decent job.
 
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