Smashwords unhappiness

Smashwords is the leading independent ebook distributor, in case you weren't aware. Everything I've released independently, barring those titles on Amazon, have been through Smashwords.

That may be changing soon.

Smashwords has gotten a lot of things right, and by availing myself of their services, I've been able to reach a heck of a lot of readers. but Smashwords has also gotten a fair bit wrong, the worst of which is how they respond to their customers' problems and complaints.

1) From the want ad they placed on craigslist:

"-Ability to maintain positive, helpful attitude, even if client is angry, irrational or misguided "

2) From the Smashwords facebook page (go ahead and watch the whole thing- it's funny, but it's also indicative of how Smashwords views the torrent of customer service queries that comes in. Basically we're impatient and spoiled, and should be grateful that their service exists.)

3) Another from the Smashwords facebook page. Subtext? If your book isn't showing up at the Apple store, it's probably your fault, dummy. When an author had the temerity to question this, they were basically told that their problem only affected five authors. The tone was pretty passive-agressive:

At the moment only ~5 people have this problem out of the ~13,000 on this FB Page

Does Smashwords have angry, irrational and misguided customers? I'm sure they do. I was in retail a long time. Every business does. Have some authors not followed the guidelines, and has this delayed Apple making their title available? I'm sure they have, even though ostensibly once your book has been approved for 'premium' status, that should be the end of it. But the cake-taker is the utterly unhelpful response on their facebook page. If only five people have the specific problem that that author had, that problem should be fixed already. If Smashwords feels the need to remind everyone to read up on what Apple requires, that means a lot of authors are having problems with getting in to the Apple store. I know I am.

And the thing is, all of this would be categorized under 'shrug' if Smashwords had a responsive customer service desk. They don't. As it stands, you have to wait days, sometimes over a week, to get a response that as often as not amounts to 'Sorry dude, can't help you.'

If Smashwords were the only viable way to get ebooks out the door and into retail sites, I'd just grit my teeth. But they aren't. Sure, the alternative is annoying and paperwork-filled, which is why I let Smashwords take a cut of my earnings. But they are shut out of Amazon, the single-largest ebook seller in the world. If they can't manage to get my books into the Apple store either, then their usefulness is limited to Barnes & Noble and all the 'also rans' like Kobo and Sony. Which means their usefulness does not outweigh their annoyance factor.

If the would-be emperor is wearing something, shall we say, scanty, he shouldn't be commenting on my fashion sense, even in a veiled, passive-agressive way.

Excerpt from 'The Blade That Whispers Hate'

"Have you ever hated- really hated, with every fiber of your being? True hate is a powerful thing. It can give you the strength of will to do things you never would have considered. Things you never would have believed yourself capable of. Unthinkable things. Awful and magnificent things. Hate is a powerful force because it lends an impossible strength. With enough hate, you could rule the world. Or end it."

"Is that what you want to do?" I asked him. "Destroy the word?"

He laughed. "I don't give a runny shit about the world, or anyone or anything in it."

"Then by all the dead gods, what do you want?"

He sat down on a cracked headstone across from me and leaned down with his arms on his knees. He looked tired.

"How old do you think I am?"

"Forty? Maybe forty-five?"

"I'm seventeen hundred years old. I saw the fall of Thagoth, and of Hluria. I was ancient when Havak Silversword was imprisoned behind the Wall. You people are mayflies to me."

"You're tired of life."

"You haven't the least idea. It's much worse than it sounds. Because of the curse laid on me, every moment that passes feels like a hundred. Listening to you talk bores me to tears. Listening to me talk bores me to tears. I've experienced this conversation as though it's lasted all fucking day."

"I'll try and talk faster," I said, but he waved it away.

"Don't bother. You can't speak quickly enough to make the least difference."

"So what do you want, Heirus?"

Suddenly he was in my face. I never saw him move.

"I want the Goddess's gods-damned Blade, you stupid cow!"

"Call me a cow again and I'll stick the Blade so far up your--"

I never saw the fist, either.

Works in Progress (Fantasy)

Time to take stock of what I need to finish. Until these are done, no new (fantasy) stories for me!

First up is The Blade That Whispers Hate. This is the prequel to The Thief Who Spat in Luck's Good Eye. It's sword & sorcery, of course, but it's also something of a murder mystery.

Then there's the sequel to 'Thief Who Spat' which is called The Knife That Parts The Night. That one is about, well, let's just say when you think everything is done and dusted, that's when life tends to punch you in the face.

And completely away from Amra and Holgren's various troubles, I've been working on a... complex epic fantasy that probably has more in common, DNA-wise, with Rashomon and Philip K. Dick than Tolkien or Jordan. This one has taken years, and may take years more. It comes along at its own pace.

And I'm also working on a fantasy novella series (The Sword-monk). Three are planned: Blood-Tempered, Weaving Steel and Kissing the Blade. They also come along at their own pace.

So yeah, that's what's on my plate for the foreseeable future. Of course plans change. Sometimes I get stuck, or get enthusiastic about a new project. But I need and want to finish these. As always it's a question of time, discipline, and life poking its nose in, demanding attention.

The end.

The saga of Thagoth is finished, Dear Readers. Amazon has pulled it. Barnes & Noble has pulled it. Ditto Sony and Diesel.  It's still available at the iBookstore and at Kobo, but should be disappearing from these venues in the next few days.

Finally.

Nobody say Thagoth to me ever again, ok? Now it's 'The Thief who Spat in Luck's Good Eye', it's been revised,  and it's available, currently over at Smashwords and at Amazon, but soon to all the other places I mentioned.

For those interested in finding all the typos I surely missed despite going over the entire manuscript three godawful times (I'm not bitter), you can go on over to Smashwords and use this handy dandy coupon code to get 'TWS' for free: HH43V. It's good until the 22nd of this month, so get to downloading. And, you know, mocking.

Grumpy

I noticed that I have recently entered a grumpy phase. Please take all words with a grain of salt until further notice. (I suspect said grumpy phase will pass once I've finished the edits on the novel formerly known as Thagoth.)

And now, as a sort of grumpy cleanser for any who have been adversely affected, this:

The worst thing

Did I ever tell you my biggest fear, writing-wise? It's not getting raked over the coals in a bad review. It's not getting undeserved praise in a good one. It's not even sitting in obscurity, no-one ever reading my words at all. These things have all happened to me at one point or another, to one degree or another. They range from unpleasant to deeply painful, but they're not the worst thing.

The worst thing doesn't have to do with any external factor. It's all inside my writer's psyche (wherever that is). The worst thing, the biggest fear, is endings.

Endings are the most important part of the story. The beginnings are where you get to show how clever you are as a writer. The great humping middle is an exercise in endurance and ingenuity. But the ending-

The ending is where you've got to step up to the plate. It's where you have to make a stand, and in some form or fashion let the reader know what it is the book stands for.

A bad ending, a false ending, an ending that takes a cheap or easy way out, ducking the story questions- when I read one of those, I think 'what the hell did the author waste my time for?' I don't have to agree with an ending, or even understand it. But I do have to respect it. Give me truth, or failing that give me beauty, but don't leave me empty handed.

For quite a few years I couldn't finish anything because for those years I knew I was going to leave the reader empty handed. I told myself everything I was writing was trite, and some of it was. But the problem wasn't that. The problem was, I was in a place where I could not end anything with truth or beauty, because they were both things I no longer really believed in.

There are other, valid ways to end a tale, don't get me wrong. They're just not my way. I don't even mind trying and failing. The worst thing is starting over and over, knowing you'll never be able to write an ending.  

Scalpel, hacksaw, sutures. Meditate

I have been introduced to the arcane art of OCR (optical character recognition software) thanks to Expat @ Large, and am no longer retyping Thagoth from printouts of screenshots of my ebook. This is good.

I hate my book. This is less good news, though perhaps to be expected. After all, it was written almost ten years ago, and it was my first novel, and it shows.

This evening I converted almost 10,000 words to manuscript format (OCR is not good with 'w' or 'I' or 'mr' recognition, and confuses , for . as well as often missing " so there's quite a bit to fix. It also does not catch paragraph breaks. For all that, I'm still moving a lot faster than transcribing by hand.)

The thing is, it started off as over 15,000 words.I took a hacksaw to a major subplot of the novel.

Why? Because it was cheesy, it didn't add anything except a bit of (trite) characterization, it slowed down the pacing, and I hate it with a fiery, hate-filled hate that gives me heartburn. I have no idea what I thought I was doing when I wrote it.

I also took a scalpel to a whole lot of sentences. Needless dialog attributions, unnecessary filler words, snicker-snack, the vorpal word-processing highlighter cut them right out.

Thagoth was, if I recall correctly, about 86,000 words. The complete version of the rewrite will likely not break 80,000. And that's quite alright, as long as every word counts.

First meditation: Every word of your manuscript should pull its own weight. Too much of Thagoth is seriously dead weight. I am tempted to pull it all apart and start from scratch, but that way lies madness.

And the thing is, it's been so many years since I've looked at the book in its entirety, it's almost as if I'm some disinterested observer. Parts of what I've edited so far, I actually got a bit excited about re-reading. "Oh, yeah, the part where she meets the naked old tatooed man and the freaky ghosts. Cool!" Stuff like that.

Those are the parts, the set pieces that were the most fun to write, I realize, when I was sitting in that 24 hour coffee shop across from the University of Texas, chain smoking, wired on caffeine, chuckling to myself. The bits that drag? Those were the times I was just knocking out my apportioned word count. Thagoth never got the second draft revisions it needed, for all that it was looked over by a real live New York editor. (I suspect she knew she was on her way out, and just sort of phoned it in.)

Second meditation: being done with your first draft is not being done. You need to let that baby simmer, then stir some more. Just try not to let a decade pass.

I'm also inserting a few continuity points here and there, since Thagoth (renamed The Thief Who Spat In Luck's Good Eye) will soon be the second book, chronologically, in the Amra & Holgren series (The Blade That Whispers Hate being the first, unless I decide life is just too easy and write a pre-prequel.) It's the little stuff you have to keep an eye out for when you retrofit a novel. Stuff like when Character A says they've never been to Character B's house, but in the prequel they visit often.

Well. Anyway it's late here. Enough babbling.

All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well

I haven't posted. I apologize. Life has been rather busy of late, both work-wise and family-wise. I hope to catch up on all my obligations this week, so if I've promised you something, keep an eye on your inbox.

On the writing front, a few items of note:

• Random House has agreed that, yes, the copyright for Thagoth has indeed reverted to me, and that they 'grant my request'  that they stop selling it. Of course, they're still selling it at the time of this writing. I'm supposed to wait for a letter that is supposed to arrive this week (cue eye roll). I'll be re-releasing Thagoth (once Random House finally stops selling it) as the full version of 'The Thief Who Spat In Luck's Good Eye'. Target date: Who-The-Hell-Knows.
• In preparation for this momentous event, I got my lazy ass in gear and took screenshots of every page of Thagoth and and am in the midst of transcribing the resulting jpegs into word format. Lesson imparted: Always, always keep multiple backup copies of your work. Retyping 86,000 words is only slightly more fun than stuffing a pipe cleaner up your urethra.
• Anybody know a good, cheap typist?
• After reading this interview, I've realized I need to stop obsessing over the rankings of my books. That time can be much better spent.
• As expected, I've received a polite, professional 'no thanks' from the literary agent I previously mentioned. I also expected to feel some rancor, or at least disappointment. Instead, my reaction was a sort of mild relief. Now I can focus on the (independent) path ahead. We'll see if my 2013 prediction pans out as well.
• Much as I love them, and much as they helped me jump start y creativity and overcome writer's block, I'm putting any future Pill Hill Press writer's shootouts on hold. I've simply got to focus on the mountain of longer fiction that I need to complete, not new short stories.
• Man, I've been especially gassy lately. I love a good fart as much as the next dad, but there comes a point where nobody is willing to pull your finger anymore.

A steak knife, a cow and a military officer

What do these three things have in common? I have no idea, but I need to figure it out before Sunday.

 (That's the final prompt for the Pill Hill Press Winter Shootout. I have a feeling this is going to be an interesting story to write; and by interesting I mean 'oh crap'.)

New Story: Fade Into You

I've just completed my first time travel story. Would anyone like to beta read it?  : )

A teaser

Because, you know, if I put on the blog, then it has to happen. No take-backs.

This one I have plotted out in my head. Three novellas: Blood-tempered, Weaving Steel, and Kissing the Blade. Many a moon ago I wrote about how I had a character stuck in my head, a sword-monk. I know his story better now, and am more confident about telling it. I just need more time.

Also, the wonderful poet Megan Arkenberg has graciously given permission for me to use her poem 'Song Before a Quest' as an epigraph for the story.

Self Publishing: The old paradigm vs the new

My dream was always mass market. I wanted to walk into bookstores and see my books on the shelf, right after Anne McCaffrey's. I wanted it so bad that I would go in to bookstores and feel hate for the physical books of writers that I believed couldn't write as well as I did.

Both the hate and the dream are dead.

I don't need bookstores anymore, just as I don't need publishers.

 Last night, in bed, I got two new books. Books that I couldn't have bought in bookstores, not because they were self-published, but because they were out of 'print'. The bookstore as we know it, my friends, is marked for extinction. This I've blogged about before.

Before, if I used a print on demand service, I'd have had the books sitting in a box somewhere in my house because I wouldn't have been able to get them in stores.

Now, though the option is available, I can't be bothered. Why should I, when I can electronically distribute to virtually every English speaking country, virtually instantly? Why should I, when I can do the same to almost every country in Europe with a mouse click? Yes, I could go through Createspace and have physical books available through Amazon, but paper numbers are simply paltry compared to ebook numbers, for indie authors.

Publishers still have a lock on distribution to bookstores, but that doesn't mean very much anymore, and it means less every day.

I almost want to call print on demand a vanity thing,but it's not, for most, not anymore. Instead, it's either a nostalgia thing, or it's a sign that the author hasn't figured out which way the wind is blowing.

My dream was to hold my book in my hands. Now it is to get my works into the hands of as many people as humanly possible. The old paperback is, sadly or otherwise, on its way to the dustbin of history.

Publishing myth #1: You need a traditional publisher for distribution

When I first started out in the writing game, I knew nothing (which is why I signed a contract in 2002 that meant my book would only be an ebook forever and ever amen). I had many beliefs, but essentially no knowledge regarding the publishing industry.

My education was painful, and costly. But it was also, it must be said a very thorough one.

When it became apparent that Random House had absolutely no interest in publishing my books in a paper format, I thought I was very clever in asking for those rights. "I'll just print them myself," I thought. "Who could resist my sword and sorcery genius, once they have it in their sweaty, trembling hands?"

Random House basically said "Sure, kid. Knock yourself out." They knew what I didn't know: Traditional publishers had a lock on distribution to all the retail chains. Borders and Barnes & Noble were never going to stock any book from Lulu or Xlibris. I count myself fortunate that I figured this out before I spent any money on printing Thagoth.


For a while I would tell people I'd written a book and had it published, but after the twentieth or thirtieth time having to explain that it only existed in electronic format, and no, they couldn't get it at their local bookstore, I just shut up about being a writer. And soon enough I stopped finishing anything new anyway, fiction-wise, so it didn't really matter.

Fast forward a few years.

When Random House finally responded to my emails regarding rights reversion of Thagoth, and my request that they stop selling it, their reply was, essentially, "Sure, kid. Knock yourself out."

So what has changed? Everything.

Let's look at where Random House distributes my ebook to right now, compared to where I can distribute to on my own (English speaking countries):

The United States:

Random House - everywhere
Me: everywhere

Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland & Australia:

Random House - nowhere
Me - everywhere


Am I worried about losing sales by leaving Random House? Let's put it this way: The population of the United Kingdom is 62 million.Canada, 33 million. Australia, 23 million. Ireland, 4.5 million.

By leaving Random House and distributing on my own, I increase my potential reader base by 122.5 million people. Now let's say 1% of this seething mass of English speaking humanity has some reasonable chance of being interested in reading my work. Likey it's less, but I'm not so good at math, so let's keep it simple. 1% equals 1.2 million people, rounding down. 1.2 million possible readers I was shut out from with Random House, because they did not distribute my book to those countries.

That's 1.2 million reasons for me to indie publish, on top of the ones I've discussed elsewhere. So when the powers that be at Random House finally deigned send me a reply to my several emails regarding Thagoth, this time around I didn't mind their supercilious tone.

"Sure, kid," I thought. "Knock yourself out."

The self epublishing 'bubble'

Ewan Morrison writes in The Guardian that we are at the start of an epublishing bubble. Go on and read it. I'll wait.

Now here's the thing: All the words have meaning and all the sentences are coherent, but this article doesn't make a lick of sense. Mister Morrison, if he can bear to look back at what he wrote five years from now, will cringe at the hash he made of predicting the future, and the logical contortions he forced himself through to get this piece written.

1. Trying to compare cultural shifts to macroeconomics is pointless and absurd, right on its crazy face.

2. For there to be a bubble, there has to be a boom and a bust in the cycle. I see the boom. For the life of me, I don't see a bust in the scenario. It's not like people are suddenly going to throw up their hands in despair en masse and stop writing.

3. There are three groups who are going to get hurt because of the paradigm shift away from print to electronic publishing: Traditional publishers, brick and mortar retailers, and any indie hopeful who pays hard money for anything to do with his/her writing without doing their homework. This does not a bubble make, any more than the printing press did.

Look, I'm quite certain that the makers of illuminated manuscripts first scoffed at, then became alarmists about the printing press. The makers of buggy whips, I'm certain, denigrated automobiles to no end. But at the end of the day, it's wasted effort to battle inevitability. Worse, it's wasted time.

Time that should be spent playing catch-up, hell bent for leather.

Farewell, Thagoth

I've finally received acknowledgement from Random House that I wish them to stop offering Thagoth for sale. I will not miss seeing my name mis-capitalized, nor will I miss the dreadful hash they made of the NCX file (the programming bit that lets you jump to different sections of the book).

Now, with the benefit of eight years of additional wisdom (ha!), I'll give it a nice edit and re-release it as the full version of The Thief who Spat in Luck's Good Eye. 


For those kind visitors who have read Thagoth, I have a question: Is there anything you'd like to see changed in the revised edition? The comments section is open, or you can email me at mcclungmike [at] yahoo [dot] com if you want to avoid potential spoilers.

Johnny Zero has entered the building

I love hardboiled detective stories - Chandler, Hammet, Spillane. What's more, I love hardboiled fantasy detective stories - Jim Butcher's Dresden Files & Simon Green's Nightside series especially. I've been working on something in the genre set in Singapore for a while now, but before that one, I'd thought of a premise, a tiny germ of an idea for something several years ago. It's been sitting on a shelf in my brain for a while now. Last week, I dusted it off after getting a prompt. A story ensued.

There's a lot going on to this story; the setting is an alternate America where magic is real, and mages have suffered from witch hunts, both political and literal, in the past. The specific city where the story takes place is Los Magi, commonly referred to as Miracle City, and it's a place that shares elements of modern day Las Vegas and Los Angeles of the 1930's. It's also not unlike Brigadoon.

I don't want to give away any plotty stuff, so I'll just say that I had a lot of fun writing down Johnny's casefile and meeting his partner. I'm quite sure Johnny will be back around to tell us about some of his other cases, sunglasses firmly in place, day or night.

Requiem for a hamster

When the kids ask
I'll say you're on holiday
Not passed away
From some obscure hamstery malady.
So will everyone else -
If they know what's good for them.

Ireland loves/hates me

Of course, what else should I expect from the birthplace of my ancestors besides a dysfunctional relationship?

Waste Land is the #1 free iTunes sci fi short story there. It's also #1 in the broader free science fiction and literature category, and #5 in the free 'sci fi & fantasy' category, the broadest of the categories I can hope to aspire to (after that it's just 'books', which includes every book published). That's the first time I've broken the top ten in any country, in the SF & F category.

'Thief who Spat' on the other hand is only #18 in its epic category, #132 in general fantasy, and doesn't even make the top 200 in the free sci fi & fantasy.

To which I can only say to Ireland, I love/hate you, too*.

(*Just kidding. Only love flows from me as from a font towards the Emerald Isle of my progenitors.)

Waste Land Update

Hi there, cats & kittens. Currently have a monstrous headache that won't go away, but thought I'd let you know that Waste Land is the #1 Sci Fi short story in the US (iTunes free category), and is featured at the #1 spot in the 'New & Notable' section for Sci Fi shorts and in the broader 'Sci Fi & Lit' category.

Roll on, free...

Projecting into the future (always a risky proposition)

In 2012 I will:

• Double the number of titles digitally available by moi (financial success comes from a deep title list) 
• Finish two novel-length works (screw you, writer's block)
• Force myself to learn how to outline (you're an artisan, not an artist, Mike)
• Take my first stab at formula fiction (see above)
• Chop my WIP list in half (closure!)
• Take back Thagoth from Random House, revise it, and re-release it with a new cover (oh, yes, every writer needs the editorial guidance, marketing power and cover art that a publisher provides. That I got essentially none of that, and still manage to sell copies of Thagoth, says that I don't need them. I just need to get serious, and get busy.)

In 2013 I will:

• Be approached by a literary agent because of the success I'm having as an indie author
• Turn him/her down

That, on the occasion of my 41st birthday, is my plan, and I'm sticking to it.