S L Flynn

An author's blog

Category: Observations

Seeking External Validation

March 24, 2021 /

Dice, chips, and cards

Image by Tom und Nicki Löschner from Pixabay

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Reviews and ratings play an important role in lives of books. They help readers decide which of many books to pick up next. The wisdom of the crowd is something we’ve come to rely on in an age of superabundant choices. A positive and articulate review from a trusted source will make a better case for readers investing their time in a book than the best advertising copy.

For the purposes of this post, reviews and ratings overlap but are not the same thing.

Ratings

Ratings are a simple score of how much a reader enjoyed the book. Four-point-three out of five stars! They provide a reader with a flash assessment. Being numbers, they are easy for a computer to file, rank, and analyze. Authors smile at high ratings. It’s nice to see that people like or value your work. Low ratings are a mix of disappointing, depressing, and frustrating. Failing and not knowing why you failed makes the world seem that much more arbitrary and cruel.

Stellar ratings suggest that all the pieces fit. This time. Do the same thing again. If you can. And it might work as well.

Terrible ratings suggest that one or more of the pieces failed catastrophically. Did you write a bad book? Market it to the wrong audience? Is it time for a new pen name? It can be hard to tell.

Reviews

A book review can go into greater depth. The reviewer offers a mix of insight into what they read and how they felt about it.

Prospective readers risks encountering plot spoilers and having their experience of the book colored by the review, but they learn more about what the story is about and why the reviewer liked or disliked it.

Authors should find reviews—positive or negative—interesting. The reviewer is opening a window into their experience of the book and many important questions might be answered, including, but not limited to…

Did they follow the plot?

If not, where did you lose them? Authors are free to play games with intricate plots, flashbacks, flashforwards, unreliable narrators, and a host of other devices with the potential to confuse. Readers may enjoy the story being a puzzle. They may appreciate how confusion conveys the chaos of the characters’ lives and world. They expect it to be intentional. For the most part, they expect the design to be revealed by the end of the book.

Did they feel the way you hoped?

And intended. It is mortifying to have what one has written in all seriousness read as comedy. It is frustrating to have what one wrote as satire taken seriously. It is best to know when these inversions have occurred and to adjust the marketing plan accordingly.

Were they the reader you imagined?

Whether an author is writing to market or not, they have expectations as to the type of reader who will be interested in their story. A reviewer from outside those expectations is promising or perilous from a marketing perspective. Promising if the book got a positive review from an unexpected quarter. There’s an opportunity to reach out to a whole new audience. Yay! Perilous if the book’s marketing landed it with someone whose tastes and sensibilities are incompatible with its contents. Now that reviewer is saying harsh things about how a cerebral examination of a family in crisis fails as a psychological thriller. Ooops!

Ratings vs Reviews

As you might guess, I find reviews more interesting than ratings.

Aggregate ratings such as Amazon’s can lead you to stay the course, try something different, or pull the plug on marketing a book. That’s something, and not a small thing. But it’s not meaty. Positive ratings from celebrities or authoritative sources can be folded into advertising to good effect. At least that’s what I suspect. I haven’t had any experience putting such into play.

Reviews can highlight strengths and weaknesses in your craft. They can lend weight in support of or against decisions you made while writing your story. Those lessons can be brought to bear on future writing projects. A sweet pull-quote from a favorable review is free quality advertising copy.

There aren’t many ethical ways to solicit ratings independent of reviews. Paying someone to give your book a high rating is straight-up wrong. Paying someone to honestly rate your book is problematic. Asking for ratings is considered tacky and you’ll probably get what you pay for. In either case, most rating aggregators won’t tell you who provided a simple rating, there’s no way to know how or if the rater did their job. Attributed ratings lack proof of work.

There are legitimate channels to solicit reviews (which may include a rating as a form of summary).

Some channels do not involve a money changing hands. A robust social network or diligent research can connect you with book bloggers who are intrigued by something about your book. Terms vary, but you are generally hoping for positive exposure and the blogger is hoping for the chance to write an interesting blog post. This is akin to querying literary agents. Bloggers are looking for what they’re looking for and even if you have it, their dance cards may be full.

The modest scope of my (excellent) social network and unhappy memories of the query-wait-hope-wait-wait-hope-wait-rejection cycle led me to look for alternatives. To date, I have tried two.

Reedsy Discovery

For a modest fee, Reedsy’s Discovery site will make your book visible to a pool of reviewers who might or might not choose to review it. Ideally you post it to Discovery as part of the build-up to your book’s launch to create buzz and win pre-orders. Discovery recommends posting weeks in advance of your launch date. I did not do this. I submitted Raether to Discovery on its actual launch date and set the Discovery launch date five weeks later. During that interval I hoped that some of the discovery readers would find it, read it, like it, and review it. They did not do this. Sigh.

Grumpy

The nice folks at Discovery offered to extend the (potential) review period. I took them up on that offer. Nada. Zilch. I oscillated between despair and anger, as one does, before settling into a grumpy curiosity. How much weight should I put on this failure? Who was it that wasn’t responding to the awesome cover and intriguing premise? Would it make sense to approach some of the reviewers directly?

Heigh-ho!

Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work I go. Off to the open-bit mines. I made my way through the directory of thriller reviewers (link goes to the current directory), dipping into each profile to see what mix of ratings and reviews each had done overall, in the last year, and in the last six months. This was slow-going, as Discovery only lists twenty per page and bounces back to the top of the first page when you return to the list from a profile. After examining the first forty-seven thriller reviewers (out of about 200), a pattern began to emerge.

Ratings Reviews 6 months 12 months
21 2 15 21
2 2 2 2
385 0 51 126
1 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
513 0 41 89
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
14 0 11 14
318 0 25 59
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
215 0 21 60
1 1 1 1
0 0 0 0
16 2 2 6
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
149 1 48 55
0 0 0 0
1 1 1 1
3 3 3 3
0 0 0 0
2 2 2 2
768 0 49 108
9 9 9 9
0 0 0 0
218 1 6 23
1 1 1 1
6 6 6 6
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
4 0 4 4

 

My read on these numbers was: Most of the reviewers are not engaged in the Discovery review process. The ones that are posting skew heavily toward rating vs. long-form reviews.

My impression from scanning the profiles was: Most of the reviewers are book bloggers, aspiring book bloggers, or the YouTube equivalent of book bloggers. Discovery reviewing is an adjunct to their book blogging platform and probably an experimental one at that. Reviewers follow each other and import their reading lists from outside, suggesting that for them, Discovery is a social media platform which is likely secondary to Goodreads.

Genre Shift

Someone from Discovery reached out to me during this second interval of quiet failure with a generous offer to review the cover and blurb and make suggestions on how to make them more appealing to the site’s reviewers. They weren’t able to suggest a change in wording but proposed moving the book into science fiction. Perhaps the reviewers there would be more receptive. This was a reasonable and good idea. The story has a science fictional component to it, as does the cover art. This did not work.

Down on Discovery?

Do I have a negative opinion of Discovery? A bit. I think it’s an interesting idea but that it lacks transparency with respect to odds making. It’s not an easy equation to figure and your odds certainly improve if you’ve written a book that people want to read. I may not have done that. But I get the sense that success on Discovery is also sensitive to the distribution of reviewer interests across genres and your timing relative to potential reviewer’s availability for engagement. Alternately: You need certain amount of luck place your book when and where it will get a review. This is not a bug from Discovery’s perspective so long as they have enough material coming in to interest readers and fill their newsletters.

All is not lost.

Raether emerged into public view on Discovery. A few people have seen it there.

Kirkus Reviews

Chances are you’ve seen Kirkus Reviews cited in book advertisements, especially their starred reviews. Kirkus has been around for a long time and is a known quantity in the world of book reviews. For indie authors, their deal is that for a fee, they will match your book to one of their reviewers. In four to eight weeks, they’ll get back to you with the review, which is by default private. If you want to move forward with the process, you tell them so and they publish the review on their website. You are then welcome to quote it subject to their guidelines. If you aren’t happy with the review, it remains private.

The fee will give some pause, but it is fair. You’re hiring a publishing industry professional to read novel and write a review. If the reviewer assignment process did a good job, the reviewer might well enjoy the read, but it is still work. They deserve to be paid for it. Amazon estimates that Raether is a nine-hour read. If you take out a cut for Kirkus and add in the time required to write the review, the reviewer isn’t making big bucks. It’s probably a freelance side-hustle or entry-level gig.

The fee didn’t give me pause. It’s a marketing expense. I have made peace with risking speculative investments in my book’s success. As a sensitive and insecure artistic spirit, I dreaded the possibility that this stranger would dislike my story, a dread I knew from querying agents but more acute and grounded by the fact that here it wasn’t my pitch or first chapter that was being tested, but the whole of the actual story. Any fault across those hundreds of pages could sink it. A minor irritation with the style would accumulate across 114,000 words and erupt in a caustic condemnation of the whole work. Yeah, I came up reasons not to enlist Kirkus. In the end, pride and curiosity won out. The promise that I could bury the review if I didn’t like it helped. I paid Tensile Press’s money, uploaded the manuscript, and began the wait.

Kirkus took their full time, two months, to deliver the review. During that interval, I was sanguine. It was going to be okay. When the email arrived saying I could download the review, the butterflies in my stomach took flight again.

It begins.

A Kirkus indie review begins with a short description of the premise.

Raether’s review does a good job of this.

And continues.

Next comes an in-depth paragraph that touches on characters, plot, highlights, and lowlights.

The reviewer starts with a light synopsis the story’s first act, which is mostly accurate and only a bit spoiler-y. The highlights and lowlights that follow are fair and more focused on characters and tone than plot. The review warns that the tone becomes dark and cites examples in a mix of specific and abstract terms. My first reaction was that this was entering spoiler territory. And it is, but in a way that I’ve come to understand and respect. The reviewer is cautioning the reader that there are nasty surprises lurking between the covers. Cruelty and violence that are outside of what some thriller readers may enjoy. Startling trope subversions. Readers seek out reviews to make informed buying decisions. This review’s warnings balance that purpose with preserving most of the reader’s experience of discovering the tale for themselves.

Then ends.

The review ends with a one-sentence summary judgement.

Raether’s review ends thus:

“A plausibly chilling what-if tale with a smart, sensitive hero.” — Kirkus Reviews

Well, there it is…

If you read the Kirkus excerpting policies, you know that for me to use that quote here, I had to release the review for publication on their website. Click here to read the whole thing. I sat on the review for a full day before pulling the trigger. It took a couple more days to get the cover art to display with the review. It isn’t the rave, starred review I wished for, but it is on the whole positive and that pull-quote may prove useful. I’ve added it as an ‘editorial review’ on Raether’s Amazon product page and will seek other opportunities to use it in my marketing efforts. Kirkus sent me a follow-up email with details about who to contact there about promoting the book on their site and in their magazine. I’ll pursue that in days to come.

Questions answered?

I suggested (above) that a review could answer questions an author should ask. Did the Kirkus review supply any of those answers?

Did they follow the plot? Yes. The reviewer synopsized the first part of the story accurately and didn’t note tripping over anything later.

Did they feel the way I hoped? I think so. They found the premise intriguing. They loathed the villains and liked Megan and her friends. They found the disturbing things disturbing. I’m not sure they liked being disturbed in those ways, but their response was appropriate. The ending worked for them on an emotional level.

Were they the reader I imagined? Yes, but…

One of the agents I queried required submissions to include a description of the story’s audience. It was a fair thing to ask and something I hadn’t thought through before I wrote the manuscript. Working backwards from the manuscript, I came up with:

Raether’s Enzyme is looking for adult readers who enjoy a provocative premise but may not be willing to enter the alien worlds of science fiction. They appreciate the brisk pace of a thriller but not at the expense of humanity and theme. They are intrigued by imperfect characters making (and avoiding) hard choices in a world where personal and societal ethics are in turbulent flux. They are comfortable with modern technologies and aware that there is a dark side to our connected world. Their reading tastes are eclectic enough to embrace a full-on geekfest colliding with the machinations of a brutal mercenary within one story. They may not have use for superheroes, but they are willing to cheer on an ordinary person as she struggles to master a power that Superman would envy.

Experiences with early readers expanded that envelope to the point where I think the Kirkus reviewer was akin to readers I already knew.

Place your bets.

And take your chances. It’s not a game of complete information.

My small bet on Reeds’ Discovery crapped out.

If I can translate my Kirkus review into a few hundred sales, it will pay off.

Time will tell.

The story of my story is still being written. Stay tuned.

Scribophilia At First Sight

February 17, 2020 /

Putting the ‘Social’ in Anti-Social

Wanda Wilcox: “I can’t stand people. I hate them.”
Chinaski: “Oh, yeah?”
Wanda: “You hate them?”
Chinaski: “No, but I seem to feel better when they’re not around.”

– Charles Bukowski via Barfly

It has been said that writing is a solitary endeavor, but very few writers work in total isolation in our connected age. Many writers meet in local critique groups. Others split the difference between being cloistered and interacting with actual people at a fixed time and place by joining online writers’ groups.

My Raether’s Enzyme screenplay was lightly workshopped at the defunct Helium Exchange website*. The novel was written in isolation. For The Gray God, I resolved to experiment with my writing processes. I moved from Word to Scrivener. I employed additional editing tools. And I resolved to join a writing group.

Actually meeting people seemed a bit much and I wasn’t optimistic about the odds of finding a local group that was a good impedance match for my strange signals. I set off in search of an online community to commune with aspiring authors. As you might well guess, the /r/writing subreddit has a great many people to connect with. Oh so very many. Over one million. The signal-to-noise ratio is less than one. Much less. Moving on. WritersCafe has fewer people and a better s/n. It’s free to join, and that may be part of the problem. It attracts all levels of interest and engagement. Its commitment to openness leads to a wild proliferation of ad hoc groups. Finding people with something interesting to say seems to be a matter of luck. Moving on.

Scribophile filters for commitment by operating on a karma economy. To get feedback on your work, you must first provide quality critiques of other writers’ submissions. To keep things flowing and manageable, the text is limited to a few thousand words at a time. The site is well-designed with good tools for inline feedback. There are still myriad groups and plenty of discussion forums to wander around in when you should be writing, but Scribophile offered enough structure and support for me to give it a try.

Editorial Pachinko

The population of Scribophile is self-selecting. The site is open to all experience levels and ambitions. Sign up and you’re welcome to participate. Contrast this to a Masters of Fine Arts program and, as you might expect, you get a wider variation in skill levels and ambitions. We can look at the population in various ways, but let’s look at experience and ambition.

Two ways to dice-and-slice Scribbers

On the horizontal axis, we have ambition. Hobbyists are writing primarily because it is something they want or need to do. They have no expectation of publication but they do enjoy being read and sharing in the writing life. Aspiring Professionals have publication as a goal. Participation in the community is a means to that end. If you asked the population, many or most would describe themselves as aspiring professionals. If you asked us to list the steps we have taken to reach professional status, many or most would have a short list indicative of being closer to the hobbyist end of the spectrum than we’d like to admit.

On the vertical axis, we have experience. Neophytes are new to the craft and are there to learn. Old Oaks have been writing for years, have mastered many aspects of the craft, but since they’re here, they probably haven’t broken through in the publishing world. Neophytes benefit from the oaks’ feedback. Oaks help each other refine their craft and have opportunities to learn from teaching the neophytes. There is virtue in paying forward the efforts of earlier oaks.

Absent access to user surveys and data analytics for the site, I’m going to guess that users are scattered up and down both axes and that the distribution is not a nice bell curve centered in the middle. More likely, it is multimodal.

Scribophile’s karma economy and primary workflow are such that you earn your karma and then launch a piece of your novel into the reviewing spotlight. The reviewers that critique your work (to earn their own karma) can come from anywhere on the graph. It’s like pachinko. You might get lucky. Three karama-hungry old oaks might be looking for work to review when your piece enters the spotlight. Or three (other) hobbyist neophytes might jump on it and give it their best. As with pachinko, success is subject to a complex array of variables that you might hope to control, but chances are it’s really a matter of chance. To get a polished manuscript out of this process, you must either be incredibly lucky or be willing to resubmit every piece of your story through this process enough times to accumulate the experienced critiques and edits they need.

Are you saying Scribophile is foolishness?

No. Pachinko is a multibillion-dollar industry that’s bigger than Las Vegas. As with Vegas, Pachinko and Scribophile provide entertainment to most of their customers. For a minority, pulling the handle or working the karma become addictive goals of their own. Know yourself and know your budget and you’ll be fine.

And the payout on Scribophile’s editorial pachinko is not bad. It’s good. Every story benefits from reader feedback. Learning to weigh and incorporate feedback is a valuable skill for a writer to develop and maintain. Keep your goals in mind, periodically evaluate the effort vs. reward, and Scribophile can be a productive part of your writing process and evolution.

I intend to continue my Scribophile experiment for a while yet. I’ll go back, Jack, do it again…

  • If you browse to www.heliumexchange.com you will discover that garish animated GIF banner ads are alive and well. If that’s your thing, go ahead and click the link.

That Sinking Feeling

October 21, 2019 /

Uncle Jack (Michael Bowen) and Todd (Jesse Plemons) – Breaking Bad _ Season 5, Episode 14 – Photo Credit: Ursula Coyote/AMC

You know the one…

It’s that fishing weight sliding down your throat and landing in your stomach. It’s the one you get when you realize that a part of your story, one which you were quite happy with, was lifted from the fiction of another. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t deliberate theft. The reader will see it and say, “I recognize that! He totally stole that from X.”

There I am, preparing for El Camino by watching the final episodes of Breaking Bad when the badness breaks. Jesse Pinkman has been enslaved by a white supremacist meth gang. His main tormentor is a stone-cold psychopath named Todd. Todd reports directly to the gang’s leader. Todd addresses the leader as “Uncle Jack”.

Doom. On. Me.

I named one of the antagonists in The Grey God Jack Hughes. He is the protagonist’s mother’s brother. There are even a physical resemblance and a nexus to the drug trade. My cunning, ruthless, manipulative character was so heavily, if unconsciously, inspired by the big bad on Breaking Bad that they have the same name. Sigh.

To be fair to Jack Hughes, he’s not a neo-Nazi. He may be a terrible surrogate dad, but he is important to the plot and to Pete. I’m not going to edit him out of the story. I do need to create some space between Jack Hughes and Jack Welker. To start with, Jack Hughes needs a new first name.

The Rules of Names

Character names are crafted. An author can assign a random name as a placeholder, but the reader is due a bespoke name for every character of importance. That doesn’t require the name to be fanciful or even colorful. It means the name has to be right. Or at least not wrong in a way that throws the reader out of the story. It’s important to set reasonable goals.

At this point in my writer-hood, I’m working with the following character name heuristics.

The name should:

  1. Fit the setting. Duh. A modern name in ancient Egypt won’t work.
  2. Match the character’s background. If an Amish woman in the story has a Spanish surname, that’s okay, but the reader may well want some backstory there.
  3. Be distinct from other character names in the story. Unless confusion among Jeff Lebowskis is part of the story, avoid having overlapping names, including Bob/Rob/Robert. I know a family where all the kids’ names start with D and another where they begin with J. I try to scatter names across the alphabet.
  4. Be pronounceable by the intended audience. The reader needs to a least think they’ve got a handle on the name or they’ll stop in their tracks and try to puzzle it out. Westerners are notorious for mangling Asian names.
  5. Sound good every time you use it. Tyrannosaurus Murphy may sound awesome at first, but the reader will tire of it quickly. A name that’s colorful and long is a problem. His friends call him Ty. Tyrannosaurus should be used sparingly.
  6. Not be shared by family or close friends. Even if the character is super-cool. It’s just not worth the hassle.

Working with these guidelines, I’m closing in on a replacement name for Uncle Jack. Progress on this is now imperiled by my desire to write about the adventures of Tyrannosaurus Murphy, PI.

The Freedom of Horror

August 22, 2019 /

Courtesy of geralt (pixabay.com)

A Pattern of Madness

I recently attended the North Bend Film Fest. My Saturday pass allowed me five events and access to the VR lounge. I signed up for the following:

Short version: My predilections and the tastes of the festival organizers combined with constructive interference to produce an overload of strange.

Long version: As the shorts program progressed, spooky fatigue was setting in. Everything was dark. Nothing made any sense. The Ghosted augmented reality experience at least had a sense of humor. Monument made less and less sense as it progressed, was relentlessly bleak, and played a trope card at the end that enraged me. Knives and Skin’s dark content was leavened by humor and empathy but muddled with sprinklings of magical realism. To be honest, the strange storytelling was blessedly straightforward.

My younger self would have grooved on all the trippiness and let it all wash over him. As the day evolved, my current self grew increasingly frustrated and resentful. Nobody was doing the hard work of telling a story that made sense end-to-end. They were using the uncanny as a crutch, stringing together scenes with primal resonance or baffling imagery and hoping that hitting enough of those beats would be enough to satisfy the audience. I wasn’t satisfied. I was angry.

A Danse with the King

I’ve read Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. King knows the genre like few others and he’s specific about how horror can and should elicit terror, horror, and revulsion. Horror’s gotta horrify. I respect that. And a film festival whose tagline is “Something strange is coming to North Bend” might be expected interpret strange as disturbingly irrational and program accordingly. Caveat emptor. As Super Chicken often said, “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.”

Sympathy for the Diabolical

I needed to stop whining and grumbling and look for an opportunity to fish something edible from this sea of nonsense. There had to be something more than sheer laziness in play. Something more rewarding that fealty to the genre’s irrationality. The pay-off appears to be that if you give yourself over to the genre, you are absolved of having to be coherent. You can pursue the most startling and evocative images that come to you if they are some manner of scary. If you’re feeling guilty afterward, you can work to retcon some diabolical plot to tie it all together.

This makes sense to me in the abstract. I just don’t know how to let this arbitrary, uncanny stuff flow. And that blind spot may compromise The Grey God, which is supposed to be a horror story.

What you can’t unsee…one year earlier.

September 16, 2018 /

One post earlier, I discussed how the ubiquity of an opening hook can seen as an artifact of the literary agent’s workflow. Then and now, I’ll agree that a hook can also be a great storytelling device. It can serve as evidence of the writer’s bona fides that the story will take you somewhere remarkable if you continue reading.

The hook isn’t limited to traditional publishing. The Martian is a triumph of web/indie/self-publishing. It opens with, “I’m pretty much screwed. That’s my considered opinion. Screwed. Six days into what should be the great month of my life, and it’s turned into a nightmare.” The Wikipedia entry notes that Weir first shopped the story to literary agents, so the hook could be an artifact. He was unable to land an agent. To get his story to its first readers, he serialized it on the web, where the hook took on new importance. Sure, the story was “free”. So was the reader. Free (and likely) to click away if the story didn’t immediately engage.

Hooks are cool. Except when they’re not. I’m about to do something bad. I’m about to say harsh things about the work of another. Worse yet, I’ll say these harsh things without having given that work a fair chance. It’s just wrong, so fell free to read this as an indictment of me as much as it is critical of the Amazon Original series Tin Star. And there will be spoiler-ish content. So many bad things. Here we go…

Not in our stars…

Tin Star was promising in the way that data-driven programming has a special power to be. I’ve enjoyed Tim Roth’s work since I mistook him for American in Reservoir Dogs. The Canadian Rockies setting was made for 4K UHD HDR viewing. I started watching it shortly after writing my artifacts post. The phrase “gratuitous in medias res” was fresh off my fingertips. You can guess what’s coming.

The story opens on an old sign outside an abandon-looking gas station on a mountain highway. At the bottom of the sign is an addition that offers 24-hour pay-at-the pump. Jim Worth (Roth) and his family drive past. Inside the car, everyone is tense. The low-fuel light comes on. Worth curses and turns back for the gas station, circling a road-killed coyote. At the station, he tells his family to stay in the car. He checks his rearview mirror. He exits the car and we see a pistol on his hip. He opens is wallet to pay at the pump and we see a police badge. As the gas pours in, he spots a fresh tire track leading out of a puddle nearby. He finishes refueling and gets back in the driver’s seat. His son needs to use the restroom. Angela Worth (Genevieve O’Reilly) gets out to help the boy. During this distraction, a masked gunman steps out in front of the car. A shot rings out, the windshield shatters, and blood sprays onto the face of the Worth’s teenage daughter in the back seat. Cut to titles. Whoa. Way to set the meat hook. After the titles, Worth wakes up in bed and offers prayer for one more day of sobriety. Was it a dream? Superimposed in the lower right corner are the words, “one year earlier”. Maybe not.

Again, I might have been primed to be annoyed, but my reaction was: “BITE ME!”

It was cheap. It was the showrunner deciding things needed to start with a literal bang. It screamed that the writer(s) didn’t have faith in the material that followed. It oozed an adolescent need to shock.

But in ourselves…

This anger of mine may not come from a consistent or principled place. I enjoyed the heck out of Fight Club. The book and the movie open with the narrator at gunpoint, high in a skyscraper that’s set to explode. They do a “maybe I better explain this” and we’re back in time to when things are a lot less violent. It’s a wild, crazy, abrupt shift that worked for me in a way that Tin Star’s didn’t.

This anger of mine may be related to my frustrations with HTML TABLEs and transparent GIFs. Back in the ‘90s, I was a soldier in the Browser Wars. (We won.) While I worked on the browser, it became difficult to just read a web page. I stopped seeing the content and fixated on how it was built and whether it was rendering properly. Before CSS matured, designers used and abused HTML TABLEs to gain control of web page layout. Blank space of a desired size was created by placing a transparent GIF image in a table cell and stretching its width and height as desired. This was one of many hacks that corrupted HTML. Knowing such things were there allowed you to see them. Once seen, they could not be unseen.

It follows that even here in the shallow end of learning storytelling, what I have been made aware of changes how I experience a story. These changes can add layers of appreciation. They can also raise distracting awareness of structure, technique, trope, and artifact. If I’d started this journey earlier, I’d now be that much further along. If I knew then what I’m beginning to know now, I’d have seen the seams and heard the engine noise of many of my favorite tales. And I’m left with a noodle-baking question: If it opened next week, would I still enjoy Fight Club?

Artifacts of Agency

September 5, 2018 /

Artifacts tend to be ancient, at least in the common use of the word. The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III. The Antikythera mechanism. Paleolithic Venus figurines. In a more general sense, artifacts are made things, products of human craft. Merriam-Webster adds: “something characteristic of or resulting from a particular human institution, period, trend, or individual.” Science and engineering love to appropriate common terms for their specialized use. On the science-y end, artifacts are a type of error that arises from the instruments used to gather and analyze data. In the computer science arena, artifacts are errors that creep into data as a result of how we sample and transform said data.

In this picture the apparent arc of the skyway lines is an artifact of the algorithm that combined a series of pictures into one panoramic shot. If you zoom in to the picture, you can see more artifacts.

The blockiness is an artifact of breaking the image into little pixel boxes. The blurry haze around the tower and the skycar are compression artifacts resulting from the camera using JPEG compression to squeeze a bunch of pixels into less space on its storage card. High resolution screens and better compression algorithms insulate us from these sorts of errors, but they’re in there none the less.

What on earth does all this have to with agency or storytelling? You know: the things the post and the blog purport to be about, respectively?

Fair question. Bear with me a moment longer. Pixelation artifacts are intrinsic to the raster displays we use to work with our computers. Come and see the errors inherent in the system! The blurry edge artifacts in JPEG pictures represent a trade-off between quality and image size. What’s more important? The fidelity of the picture, or how many pictures you can store on your phone/camera?

My earlier post discussed how traditional publishers relied of a wall of literary agencies to filter out unsuitable manuscripts and direct viable works to the right editors. In an ideal world, the agency would read would read every manuscript and form a holistic appraisal. In the real world, agents receive queries from multiple authors every day. It’s just not practical to read all those manuscripts. The agent must rely on her own rules (algorithms and heuristics) to manage the river of dreams flooding her inbox. This is unavoidable and not unjust. It also introduces artifacts into the traditional publishing system that distort the population of new stories and voices that reach the bookstore shelves.

The Query

The query is typically the first thing the agent sees. It is a sales pitch by the author. In the course one page, the author must sell the agent on quality of the story’s core and the desirability of establishing a long-term working relationship with the author. A clumsy query can doom a wonderful story. This is sad, but there are a great many authors with stories to tell and an agent needs some evidence that a given author/story are worth pursuing. An artifact of the agent’s query filter is that authors who can’t sell their story and themselves within the constraints of the query letter won’t move on to the next stages of consideration.

The Synopsis

Some agents will ask to see a synopsis before they commit to looking at the complete manuscript. By its nature, a synopsis is a form of lossy compression. Chapters get pixelated into paragraphs. Memorable characters are squeeze out. Tense is flattened into a brisk present. An author has to be deft or very lucky to preserve the qualities of the story such that a synopsis does it justice. An artifact of the agent’s synopsis filter is that authors who lack this specific skill won’t move on to the next stages of consideration.

The Hook

Agents themselves emphasize the importance of “hooking the reader” in the opening sentence or page of the book. This requirement is echoed throughout the para-publishing industry. An intriguing question must be raised, or a dramatic event unfold, right out of the gate. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Any reader could enjoy it, but the general reader doesn’t demand to be hooked. A review, a friend’s recommendation, the jacket copy, or even the cover art, has already got them past the initial commitment to explore the story. The hook is as much for the agent as it is the end reader, perhaps more so. It frontloads the story. The agent doesn’t have to dig far at all. An artifact of the agent’s need to quickly divine the intrigue and/or excitement of the story is that authors seeking agents’ approval must begin with a particular class of beats.

This can be made to work in service of the story. It can be made to work well. The first of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books opens with, “I was arrested in Eno’s diner.” Boom! Our narrator is in trouble! Who is he and why is he being arrested? A dramatic event and an intriguing question rolled into one sentence. Cormac McCarthy spreads it out over the first paragraph in All the Pretty Horses. Who died? What did the dead man mean to the man standing over his body? The convention meets the needs of the agents and can serve the interests of the reader. But it is, in part, an artifact of how agents judge manuscripts. It encourages gratuitous in medias res, which isn’t necessary for good storytelling. Huckleberry Finn opens with a brief recap and some exposition where you catch up with Huck after Tom Sawyer. You get some time to adjust to Huck’s voice and learn about his character. Moby Dick does not open with a harpooning. The artifacts of modern literary agency shape the stories we read.

That warm analog sound

As I hinted at above, while artifacts are technically errors, the distortions they introduce result from trade-offs that are part of how the traditional publishing system works. It is even possible to stop worrying and love the artifacts. Ask an audiophile. There can be a deep affinity for the “warm” quality imparted by the artifacts of an analog amplifier. To some ears, vinyl recordings are more alive than the best digital music. Many of your favorite books are infused with artifacts of agency.

Perfect Pitch

September 1, 2018 /

Short version

There’s no such thing.

Long version

Let’s stipulate the following:

  • You have written a novel-length manuscript.
  • You love the story, its characters, and its theme(s).
  • Your beta readers enjoyed reading the early drafts.
  • Your manuscript has benefitted from their feedback.
  • Editing and proofreading have refined it to the point where you’re ready to share it with the world.
  • You are willing to share the fruits of your labor with a publisher in exchange for access to their considerable talents and resources.

That last point means you’re not done writing. For myriad reasons, publishers won’t invest their talents and resources in just any story. It is up to you to convince them that investing time, sweat, and tears in your story will help keep their lights on and put their kids through college. This expectation is absolutely fair. In a world of infinite bandwidth, every publisher would read every manuscript and judge the stories holistically. Ours is not a world of infinite bandwidth. Far from it. Publishers have a very finite amount of time to choose which stories to they want to add to the catalog that they will offer to the millions of potential readers. The 21st Century publishing ecology is inhabited by an astounding number of writers. So many that the publishers have retreated behind a layer of literary agents. The agents filter out the noise of unready, unreadable, and unmarketable manuscripts. They use their industry knowledge to route promising stories to receptive publishing house editors. Before your manuscript is seen by an editor, you must convince an agent to represent it. In our world of finite bandwidth, an agent will not judge your story by reading your manuscript from start to finish. That’s where the additional writing comes in.

In Hollywood, they call it a pitch, as in sales pitch. The pitch may take one of many forms. It may summarize the story. It may highlight the emotional journey. For a character-driven story, the pitch may focus on the fascinating people rather than the plot. It might try to sell the story by comparing to hit movies. “It’s Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman!” A key feature of a movie pitch is that it’s much shorter than the actual movie.

The literary world sees itself as more dignified than Hollywood. You don’t pitch a book. That would be vulgar. You ever-so-politely submit a query.

“Would you be interested in representing this story?”

The thing is, the query is essentially a pitch. You have one page to sell the agent on your story and yourself. This may seem brutally arbitrary and capricious, but it is also a rather elegant solution to several problems. The fixed length enables the agent to budget her query reading time reliably. The brevity provides a quick test of the author’s writing skill, not unlike a whiteboard coding problem in a software job interview. Abiding by constraints of the query hints at the writer’s ability and willingness to function within the commercial literary system. The query letter is a lossy compression scheme that folds information beyond “what’s the story about?” into the agent’s input in a digestible format.

There are innumerable books, magazine articles, blog posts, online communities, and services that offer recipes and coaching to help your write a great query letter. By studying the common features of several prominent such sources, I produced what I thought was a worthy query letter. A couple of rounds of revision with an industry professional produced a better take on my original and an alternate query that the pro recommended. I had two viable query letters. At the very least, I could deploy both in a form of A/B testing. Over time, I might learn which, if either, got better results. That was something. Right?

Yes, that was something. Something, but not enough. I researched literary agencies and discovered that that even within a given agency, individual agents might be looking for different things in a query. The query gurus counsel that to be appealing, your query should be seasoned to the taste of the given agent. The actual requirements amount to distinct recipes. In some cases, the recipes are prescriptive enough to cross the threshold from cooking into baking. My two polished queries were a good start, but they are ultimately just raw ingredients.

In Seanworld, queries would be XML documents whose schema encompasses the full range of the publishing industry’s requirements. Authors would populate the document with word count, a short biography, contact information, back cover text, synopses of various lengths, agent-specific text, the manuscript, and whatever other metadata the industry might be interested in. Software on the agent’s end would display only what the agent needed to see to make her decision.

In the real world no such schema exists. Agents operate from personal experience and taste. They set their requirements accordingly. The first step pleasing an audience of readers with your story is pleasing an agent with a bespoke query. Such is the path of traditional publishing that I have set out to explore.

Traditional Publishing from 10,000 Feet

August 29, 2018 /

This post is for friends and family who are curious about what I’ve learned while working on my book. For readers who walk the writer’s path, there won’t be much news here. Folks who are farther along the path may even roll their eyes or gently shake their heads.

I am pursuing a publishing deal for Raether’s Enzyme. I would like a book publisher to pay me money for the right to print my story as a book and sell copies on the open market. The terms are negotiable, but I’d expect a certain portion of the proceeds for each copy sold. This general arrangement is quite old and used to be pretty much the only way to bring a novel to market. Here in the 21st Century, e-books and print-on-demand technologies have changed things enough that the classic author-and-publisher business model is now referred to as traditional publishing. In the course my pursuits, I have learned enough to refine my very hazy notion of how the publishing business works to where I can now form a 10,000-foot view*.

From my 10,000-foot perch, the traditional publishing world (in the United States) looks something like this**:

Feel free to correct me in the comments.
Attribution for crowd scene: By Sérgio Valle Duarte
Wikidata has entry Q16269994 with data related to this item. CC BY 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons

Working our way from top-to-bottom and left-to right…

Readers

  • There are still a lot of them.
  • Their appetites range from voracious to picky, so each year an author may have many or few opportunities to connect with them.
  • Their tastes range from refined literary fiction to fun commercial genre fare to a wide variety of nonfiction subjects.
  • They consume novels as eBooks, paperbacks, hardbacks, and audiobooks. The latter three formats remain a strong suit for traditional publishers.
  • Usually prefer novels from authors they’ve read before and non-fiction from authors with established platforms.

Sellers

  • Buy books from publishers. There is usually a clause in their agreement that allows the seller to return unsold books after a specified time.
  • Present books for sale to readers in their bookstores and on their websites.
  • Promote a limited number of new books by placing them near the front of the store, on the aisle endcaps, and higher in their web pages. This can make or break a book’s commercial success.
  • Amazon and Barnes & Noble are also publishers. Self-publishing authors can place eBooks in their marketplaces directly and offer paperbacks via print-on-demand services like CreateSpace.

Publishers

  • Acquire publishing rights for manuscripts from authors via contracts brokered by literary agents.
  • Edit manuscripts to raise the quality and character of the writing to meet their standards and commercial goals.
  • Format and design the interior of the book in consultation with the author and agent.
  • Produce cover art and jacket text for the exterior of the book.
  • Print, or arrange to print, paperbacks and hardbacks.
  • Design and prepare eBooks for electronic distribution.
  • May produce or edit the audio book.
  • Provide variable amounts of sales and marketing support. New authors can expect less of this in the modern publishing world.
  • Take a risk by publishing new authors.
  • Have a finite catalog of books, new and old, that they publish.
  • Have a limited number of slots in their publishing calendars, most of which are spoken for by established authors.

Para-marketing

This is my term for a portion of the industry which is outside of the sellers and publishers. It serves readers by informing them about new books and serves publishers and sellers by bringing new books to the attention of the readers.

  • Provides readers with reviews of new books.
  • Prominent reviewers are courted by authors and publicists.
  • Favorable (or cleverly excerpted) reviews are blurbed on and within books, promotional materials, and on web sites.

Agents

  • Buffer the publishers from the vast number author manuscript submissions enabled by the word processing revolution.
  • Solicit submission of author query letters matching the agent’s interests/specialization by announcing their interest via websites, wish lists, and by participation in real-life events such as writers’ conferences and workshops.
  • Represent a small number of authors at a given time.
  • Pour through large numbers of query letters and manuscript samples to find the rare query or proposal that justifies the risk of investing their time.
  • Work on spec. The agent gets paid a percentage of the books sales (typically 15%). If the book doesn’t sell, the agent doesn’t get paid.
  • May offer to edit the manuscript make it more marketable.
  • Use their experience, tastes, market insights, and intuition to identify which publisher’s editors are in the market for a story that matches the author’s manuscript.
  • Pitch their clients’ stories to appropriate editors.
  • Broker publishing deals between authors and publishers.
  • May offer career management services for authors they represent.

Pre/para-publishing

Another one of my terms. Here I’m talking about a segment of the industry that is largely invisible to the reading public. It’s general function is to provide advice to authors on the craft and business of writing. No one organization is likely to do all of the following, but they link to and advertise each other.

  • Provides how-to advice on a wide range to topics: story structure, genre conventions, characters, pacing, market trends, writing query letters, etc.
  • Publishes directories of literary agents and publishers.
  • Offers freelance editing services that scale from developmental (structure, plot, characters, pacing, tone, etc.) to proofreading (this word is misspelled, needs a comma here, the word you want here is abstruse – not obtuse).
  • Organizes conferences and workshops where writer’s gather to learn craft and business, usually from speakers with industry experience.

Writers’ Conferences

  • May be organized by para-publishing organizations or writers’ groups.
  • Speakers may include literary agents or publisher’s representatives.
  • May offer opportunities to pitch stories to literary agents in-person.
  • Provide opportunities for real-time Q&A with industry and para-industry professionals.
  • Provide opportunities to network/commiserate with other writers and contact new writers’ groups.

Writers’ Groups

  • Provide authors with socialization in an endeavor that can be very, very lonely. Oh, so very lonely.
  • Provide a first line of readers to critique and encourage a writing project.
  • The success of one member can benefit other members with referrals to agents, blurb-able endorsements, etc.
  • You have people to hang out with at Writers’ Conferences.

Authors

  • Make up stories about people and events that aren’t even real.
  • Struggle to make these lies compelling enough that readers will want to believe them.
  • Want someone, somewhere, to affirm these made-up stories with praise and/or renumeration.

Oooops! I did it again!

Okay, for all its 10,000-footness, that’s probably more than any of my friends and family really wanted to know. Friends who were also coworkers might offer a rueful smile in memory of my overstuffed Brownbag talks*. Sorry. Then, as now, I have trouble with the short story format.

* Back in the day, there was a program within the engineering division called Brownbag Talks. These were scheduled at lunchtime. Bring your own lunch. An engineer prepared a thirty-to-forty-minute presentation about something her or she was working on. There were PowerPoint slides. Early in such talks, the engineer oriented the audience with a high-level overview of the subject. “How high?” you ask. The number typically cited was 10,000 feet. That’s a ways up there. You don’t see any intricate details, but the whole of the landscape is visible.

** In the unlikely event that someone working in the industry reads this, the choices here were the result of googling in August 2018. No offense of exclusion was intended.

Tomorrow is Fragile

June 30, 2018 /

A Cautionary Tale?

Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy built titanic writing careers by telling ripping yarns that spiked our familiar world with seed crystals of tomorrow’s technology and deftly avoided being categorized as science fiction. No, these weren’t stories about spaceships and aliens*, they were techno-thrillers. Keep that straight or the marketing department will have harsh words for you.

The techno-thriller trades robustness for accessibility. It only asks its readers to believe one impossible thing before breakfast. Accept that one dollop of Andromeda or the purr of Red October’s stealth drive, and you’ve bought your ticket to a wild ride. Millions of readers did so at the bookstore. Millions more bought tickets for the film adaptations. The price paid is that the stories aren’t durable. The technologies brought to bear on containing the Andromeda Strain were bleeding edge in the late 1960s. A modern-day WILDFIRE lab would have vastly more sophisticated tools on hand. Red October’s (movie) magnetohydrodynamic drive remains futuristic. The novel’s take on the stealth drive has been more-or-less implemented. (Clancy did major research on near-future submarine warfare.) The Cold War that the drive threatened to destabilize is long over. These two tales of tomorrow became alt-history novels in their author’s lifetime. I admit that I’d be happy to fail in a similar fashion. #BestsellingAuthorProblems

Moore’s Law Looms

Moore’s Law has proven to be prophetic, both in terms of literal chip density and in anticipating the expansion of software applications made possible by the more powerful hardware. Progress across all fields of technology is accelerated by advances in computing. Writing a techno-thriller in a world where Moore’s Law is in play is like surfing a huge, churning, fast-moving wave. Aiming your story just ahead of the wave is a tricky balancing act. If you don’t position yourself at the right point on the face of the wave, it will overrun you and wipe your story out.

The threat extends beyond story’s seed crystal. Characters in a techno-thriller employ today’s tech to meet the challenge of tomorrow’s invention or discovery. If there’s an app for a problem, they should use it. If that app is Uber, and between the time the story is written and is published Uber falls into obscurity as Johnny Cab takes over, then your day-after-tomorrow story seems rather yesterday.

Place Your Bets

As its own take on the techno-thriller, Raether’s Enzyme has already been buffeted by the waves of change that have been crashing around us in the early 21st Century. Per a previous post, the story required a technological upgrade and some changes to the plot in the course of novelizing the old screenplay. Working through those changes brought the subject of this post into sharp focus. Technology is intertwined with our lives like never before. If I neglected a contemporary technology, today’s reader would rebel at the oversight. If I invested too much of the story in the wrong tech, my techno-thriller would become a retro-thriller for tomorrow’s reader. It was a tricky balancing act, and it is not over.

Without getting into too far into spoiler territory, here are some of the techno-bets I made:

  • Facebook, hashtags, and viral media are with us for the immediate future.
  • Identity remains fragmented and susceptible to theft.
  • Computer security continues to be a problem for governments, companies, and individuals.
  • Online anonymity is still possible if you’re willing to put in some effort.
  • Government surveillance is formidable, but not omniscient.
  • Corporate surveillance is formidable, but not omniscient.
  • Private surveillance is more formidable than most people know, but not omniscient.
  • Blockchains and cryptocurrencies have not disrupted banking or common contracts.
  • Analyzing and synthesizing complex biomaterials is a hard problem.
  • Smartphones continue to claim an important share of our attention.

At the point when any of these bets are lost, the story becomes a retro-thriller.

The biggest bet in Raether’s Enzyme is one that I would be overjoyed to lose. As of this writing, we do not have a general cure for, or vaccine against, cancer. If an unexpected discovery, a glorious Black Swan, upended our understanding of this complex class of diseases by revealing a single agent of deliverance, I would set my manuscript aside and dance in the street. Until then, the mysterious and wholly imaginary substance known as Raether’s enzyme remains the seed crystal that catalyzes the plot and nucleates the themes of my techno-thriller.

Beyond Technodome

Technology isn’t the only threat to techno-thriller shelf-life. Fashion, pop culture, and slang can also drag the story back into last year. This problem is exacerbated for techno-thriller movies. Michael Crichton wrote and directed a number of films when he wasn’t writing best-sellers, including Westworld, The Great Train Robbery, and The 13th Warrior. One that you probably haven’t seen is Looker. The techno-thriller seed crystals for Looker are fresh enough to work today. A high-tech advertising company is paying models to get very specific plastic surgeries, after which the models are scanned and their digital replicas go on to have a career with the company and the model collects royalties. Except the models are dying under suspicious circumstances and their killer may be invisible. The story works today, but the film captures the early 1980s in an amber of hairstyles, clothing, and, well, everything.

A novel can limit how much of the present sticks to it, but there is a cost. Sparse descriptions of characters allow/require the reader to dress and coif them in a contemporary style. Choosing common and long-lived makes and models of vehicles lets/demands the reader supply the right model year. Unless Tesla’s marketing department is paying you for Model S product placement, it’s safer to put your executive in an Audi sedan. As the /’s above suggest, the cost is born by the reader, who has to supply the details the author omitted. The deal can work for both parties. A reader doesn’t usually select a techno-thriller in hopes that the author will pause the action and use a detailed description to capture a trenchant snapshot of the zeitgeist. If the reader knows the character, the details will follow as needed.

The greater challenge is with dialog. By their words and deeds are characters known. Dialog must reveal a mix of who the character is and how she wants to be perceived. Voices must be distinct and provide color, even if that color is a somber earth tone. If the color is the lime green slang that was hip when the story was written, odds are that it will have oxidized to a 1970s avocado green before the second printing. One way to avoid this is to draw slang from an argot palette. This works well in the techno-thriller genre, which leans towards military and technical characters. Military and technical readers will eventually see stale slang, but the general audience is less likely to be bothered by it. Characters from outside the mil-tech milieu may benefit from customized argot. This involves creating a style which is consistent enough to be recognizable as itself and is distinct from contemporary trends. A prime example of this approach is Buffy Speak. Raether’s Enzyme uses a blend of these approaches for its core group of young technologists.

Pop-culture references aren’t typical in the techno-thriller genre, but I thought my younger characters would make use of them. You see the problem. The solution I arrived at involved blending extremely old references (arising from the characters’ joint ironic exploration of old movies) with call-outs to obscure anime of my own invention. It’s something of a kludge, but it adds some light humor and illustrates a generational divide that plays out in the story’s conflict.

A dragon lives forever…

but not so techno-thrillers. I accept that. My story belongs in the very near future. That’s where it will make its stand.

* To be fair, The Andromeda Strain did feature a spacecraft returning to Earth bearing an extraterrestrial organism.

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