My husband was recently interviewed by a reporter from his hometown newspaper. He got a ton of website traffic from the feature they subsequently ran on him, and he was contacted by old friends he hadn't heard from in 20 years, and that's all good.

However, the staffer who interviewed him - a reporter who is not an intern, and who has written dozens of features for the paper - asked a truly jaw-dropping question: "So your books are self-published?"

This was the second question she gave him; she asked it in the same tone as the first, which was to ask if he was from Newark. In other words, it wasn't really a question, but more a statement of perceived fact she was double-checking.

This question floored us because:

1. It showed she hadn't done basic preparation for the interview and taken two minutes to do a Google search and find out that he's professionally published 20 books, etc.
2. It showed she profoundly misunderstood the process of becoming a professional fiction writer.

Gary, being the nice guy he is, gently told her that pro fiction writers don't self-publish and explained why. And he thought that would be the end of it, until he saw the feature in the paper and read this line:

"The author has never self-published because a lot of book stores will not carry self-published authors and it also can be expensive."

The reporter was likely on a strict word limit, so her including that line struck us as strange and unnecessary. In subsequent discussion on Livejournal, our friend Mehitobel made a comment that I think nailed it on the head:

"See, that's just a weird-ass line. I can see someone ignorant of publishing, or even so jaded with local author profiles that they expect a local author to have self-published, asking about it in an interview. But the line quoted above from the article suggests to me that the reporter may actually view self-published books as the norm, better, or more ambitious. It's like she has it backwards."

It's possible the reporter had been listening starry-eyed to some life coach who told her he'd sold a ton of self-published books and that self-publishing is the right and proper thing for an entrepreneurial spirit to do. If you are a self-help guru, evangelist, TV star or some other celebrity, sure, you can self-publish a book as an adjunct to your public speaking engagements and do very well. And independent comics artists have long been admired for DIY books. But if you're a non-celebrity trying to become a pro fiction writer, self-publishing is more likely to hurt than help.

I don't consider self-publishing to be synonymous with vanity publishing. Vanity presses are scam artists preying on the hopes and dreams of the naive; however there are places like Lulu.com that are straightforward, useful print on demand services.

I don't consider writers who choose to self-publish their work to be "cheating" or lacking in intelligence or moral fiber or anything like that. Want to make a book of love poems as a Christmas gift for your sweetie? Planning to put together a calendar or anthology to support a charity? Have you written an RPG rulebook or other game supplement you want to get into peoples' hands? After you've done your homework, does Lulu.com or a competitor seem to be the most economical way to get your project into print? Go for it.

But if you've got a novel or even a short story collection and you aspire to a larger audience than your circle of friends, you really ought to reconsider.

I know several people who've self-published poetry and fiction books. They're nice people. Most of them did it because they were frustrated by the long, tedious process of submitting their work to and being rejected by traditional publishers. I can certainly sympathize with their frustration.

But 99.99% of the time, if your goal is to establish yourself as a legitimate author and put yourself on a track to a career as a writer, self-publishing is going to be a costly mistake. The only time it's not a mistake is if you're an experienced publishing professional and you know you have the resources to produce, promote, and distribute a good book that can adequately compete with the 400 other books that are published every day.

But people who write pro-quality books almost never have to turn to self-publishing; they generally only do it if they have very specific, well-considered publishing plans in mind and want complete control of their projects. If a pro has a book that the big houses deem unmarketable, he or she can usually find a small press willing to get the manuscript into print.

The average advance for a novel is $5K or thereabouts. It might take you months or even years to finish your first book. It could also take you years to squirrel away that much money if you work an entry-level job. So let's think of finishing a publishable novel as the equivalent of having slaved away to save up $5,000.

If you told me you were taking your $5,000 and going to Las Vegas, I'd probably ask if you were going to splurge on a fun vacation.

If you replied, "No, I need more money; my bank doesn't pay enough interest, and the stock market's too darned complicated. I'm gonna hit the casinos and turn this five grand into fifty grand!", I'd think it was a phenomenally bad idea and try to talk you out of it. Yes, you could get lucky at the slot machines and come home with a fat roll of cash, but the odds are you'd come home hung over and broke.

If on the other hand I knew you were a statistics prodigy with an eidetic memory who'd been consistently winning regional poker games, I'd think you had a real chance. If you then told me how you were sure you could keep the casinos from figuring out you could count cards, but knew you might be wrong and detailed a plan to escape quickly and safely with your winnings, I'd think it was a daring scheme and congratulate you.

The notion of being a rebel writer self-publishing your way to grand authorial success is as bright and shiny as Vegas. But unless you're very talented or very lucky, it's just not going to pay off in a career.

I realize I'm probably preaching to the choir here. But based on the reporter's questions, some people might need to read this.

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N-Wing says According to this and this, the two biggest book costs are distribution and printing, both of which are essentially $0 for electronic formats. In a very small sampling, some ebooks were cheaper and some more expensive than paperbacks. Lets mention this greed thing again.

My reply: I'd have to know which ebooks you're referring to before I could posit a reason for the price difference. A few publishers price electronic versions and print versions exactly the same so as to not undercut print sales. However, many publishers do give their e-books lower prices than their print books.

But the price points are a bit irrelevant, because ebooks have largely been failures except when you're dealing with romance, erotica, porn, and technical documentation. Romance/erotica/porn readers tend to consume a whole lot of books, and e-books are cheaper and psychologically easier to discard than paper books. Plus, e-book readers provide the ultimate brown paper wrapper to prevent the other people on the commuter train from seeing garish covers featuring vast tracts of mantitty or heaving cleavage. Technical documentation ebooks sell well because the people who buy them mostly need tech books for quick, specific reference and don't intend to read large sections in one sitting as they would with novels or long nonfiction.

But, sales show that most readers of other forms of fiction and nonfiction prefer to buy books as physical paper objects. This may change in the future if better, cheaper ebook devices become available, but so far, the fastest way to produce a book that almost nobody will read is to release it in ebook format. Yes, some people enjoy reading long works on their computers; most demonstrably do not.

My first story collection was an ebook entitled Blood Magic which cost $3 (which fairly represented the cost of cover art, layout, etc.) as a download on Fictionwise and $6 in CD format (which fairly represented the additional labor/materials involved in putting the CD version together). My current book is a trade paperback that costs $18.95 at most places. You would think that a $3 collection would sell way better than a $19 collection. However, in the 6 months that Sparks and Shadows has been available, it has vastly outsold Blood Magic, which was available for 5 years. I've heard from a lot of other writers who've had similar results. I've also heard from publishers who got started doing electronic editions but who turned to print after they kept getting messages from customers who said they'd buy more if only the books weren't so expensive to print out.

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(Go back to Part One: Why New Books Are So Expensive or Part Two: Why new textbooks are so expensive)

spiregrain says According to Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, printing and binding a 100 page book costs $1, which is less than the admin cost of lending and taking back a library book. See here for what this might mean for book sales and lending models for public domain books.

My reply: It would be awesome if small press books could be produced for $1 a copy. Based on what I've seen, though, a 100-page perfect-bound book (that is, a paperback with a spine) on decent paper done through a reputable POD print shop will run $2.40-$2.75 per copy, depending on things like setups and proof changes. This is assuming the book has a glossy color cover and a B&W interior. More pages equals a higher per-book cost, of course.

If the publisher were able to order books in large volume, he could get the desired perfect-bound books for a cheaper per-book price from an offset printer -- but the publisher would have to order a minimum of 5,000 copies to even begin to get the per-book price down below $2.50 a copy.

To get it down around $1, he'd have to order 20,000 or so. Aside from requiring an investment of $20,000 from the get-go, that's a heck of a lot of books to store and process. Most small presses are 1-to-5-person operations and they don't have warehouse space, nor the funds with which to rent any.

And then there's the issue of being able to sell all those books and recoup the printing investment. The average small press short story anthology sells 150-500 copies. A fiction collection or first novel from a literary writer published by a university or specialty press may comfortably sell 1000-3000 copies. An established, award-winning literary poet who gets his or her collection used as part of the curriculum of college poetry classes can probably sell 1000-1500 copies; most other poets sell far more modestly. So, 20,000-copy print runs just aren't sustainable for many book projects, and so $1 books just don't happen.

On the other hand, the publisher could produce 100-page B&W saddle-stapled 5.5"x8" chapbooks on his own for less than $1 a copy if he considers his own labor to be free. This will require ready access to layout software, a copy machine and the proper folding/stapling equipment or an actual booklet-making machine (some models run about $10,000 new). The publisher will also need lots of time and a fairly large room dedicated to his assembling and storing the books. Chapbooks are most cost-effective if the publisher works for a company that owns a big copy machine and he or she can negotiate with that employer to bring in his/her own paper and toner to do print runs.

While the resulting booklets may have a charmingly DIY look, they are not going to be aesthetically competitive with perfect-bound books with glossy color covers. And it's hard to generate even 500 copies of a book this way. I've known several small-press publishers who started out doing chapbooks and 'zines by hand; most all of them eventually got tired of the labor involved and switched to using commercial offset printers or POD when they could.

(Go on to Part 4: Book distribution and printing cost too much. Why don't publishers switch to e-books?)

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(Go back to Part One to read about the mass market paperback pricing mentioned here)

I've heard from a couple of people who don't believe that the economics mentioned in Part One work for textbook prices.

I look at the biology textbooks I've used -- which have been massive, sturdy hardbacks with lots and lots of illustrations and photographs (pro photographers expect to get paid) and color ink and slick paper -- and I see pretty high production/printing cost right off the bat.

Specialist nonfiction of any kind pays much better than fiction, and publishers have to pay more to interest a professor in producing a textbook that will take a lot of his or her energy and time away from teaching and research (in some cases, choosing to write a textbook may actually harm a prof's career because a textbook doesn't "count" the same as other scholarly publications that may take much less time to write). The publisher might, for instance, have to recoup an advance of $40,000 or so across 5,000 copies, and I don't think it's greedy to expect $40K for authoring a book that takes a lot of expertise and several years to write. And finally, distribution will still be expensive no matter what kind of book you're producing.

According to the National Association of College Stores (NACS), Collegiate Retailing Industry, Higher Education Retailing Market, the breakdown of each $1 of an average new textbook's price goes like this:

Paper and printing: 32.1 cents
Distribution: 22.9 cents
Marketing: 15.3 cents
Author's income: 11.5 cents
Shipping: 1.3 cents
Publisher's operations: 9.9 cents
Publisher's income: 7.0 cents

So in the case of textbooks, printing costs more than distribution, and marketing and the author get the other big hunks of the cheese. The publisher ends up making about $5 profit from each copy of a $70 textbook, which costs about $22.50 to print. Percentage-wise that's not hugely different from what you get with a mass-market paperback.

(Go on to Why can't most publishers print books for $1? or Book distribution and printing cost too much. Why don't publishers switch to e-books?)

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The other day, I was in Barnes and Noble when I overheard a college student in the literature aisle say, "I'm not paying twenty bucks for this!" followed by the slap of an 80-page poetry collection being forcefully returned to the top of the shelves.

I'm sure we've all been feeling a bit of sticker shock at the bookstore, particularly if you are old enough to remember when pulp novels actually did cost just a dime.

So, why have new books gotten so damn expensive? Don't publishers realize they could sell a lot more paperbacks at $4 a pop than they can at $7 a pop?

The simple answer is, yes, they do, but the reality isn't simple. A book's pricing is based largely on how much it's costing the publisher to get into the readers' hands, and there's a lot that goes into that.

The basic formula goes like this:

author advance + design + printing + distribution + profit = price

At this point, you may be shaking your fist at the authors and muttering about how greedy they are. And I'm here to tell you that the author advance is often one of the smallest pieces of the book pricing pie. The advances offered by publishers to writers can vary hugely, as can the royalty percentages. But since I know what several mass market publishers generally pay and know their print runs, let's look at a theoretical mass market paperback publisher called Bighouse.

Most Bighouse paperbacks have a cover price of $6.99. An average Bighouse author may be offered an advance against royalties of $2500 and his or her book will have a print run of about 30,000. The publisher will hope that the book will actually sell about 25,000, and the rest of the copies will be stripped and returned¹. At 25,000 copies sold, Bighouse will have made back all their money from the advance, and they probably won't owe the author any more money (clauses stipulating the publisher's right to keep reserves against returns is a diabolical bit of contract evil that I'll address someday in another article).

So, regardless of the royalty percentage dictated in the author's contract (which will probably be around 7.5%), simple math tells us that in this case, about ten cents of every book sold goes toward paying the author's advance.

Ten cents. Whoa. That's not very much, is it? So that means that Bighouse is making a huge profit on every book, right?

Not exactly. There's the cost of editing the book, laying it out, proofreading the final copy, printing galleys, and paying for cover art and cover design, but since they're a big publisher and have full-time staff, this will cost them less per book than it would a small press publisher. I don't have hard numbers for this, but let's assume that it's about $2500 depending on how speedy the staff is. Either way, that's still not a big slice of the book pie.

Now comes printing time, and paper's much more expensive than it used to be. I've heard from a fairly reliable source that your average 350-page paperback costs about $2.25 per copy to print ... provided the books are ordered in batches of 30,000 or more. The per-copy price for small publishers, whether they go with an offset printer or a POD company, will be much higher, simply because they can't buy in volume. A certain amount of the printer's cost is purely the cost of setup, and that's the same price whether you're ordering 100 copies or 100,000.

So, from purchase to production to printing, a $6.99 paperback has cost the publisher about $2.50. Big profits time for the publisher, right? Only if they get to sell all their books directly from their own warehouse. And they don't: they need to send the books to distributors like Ingram so that the books get into bookstores.

And distributors like Ingram and Amazon.com generally want a 55% commission from the sale of every book they handle. Fifty-five percent, kids. Smaller bookstores may only ask for a 40% commission, but the big boys want 55%.

So, out of the $6.99 paid by a reader for the paperback at Amazon.com, $3.85 goes straight to Amazon. Once you subtract that and the direct production costs from the book, that leaves a whopping $0.64 "profit" per copy. If they've struck a deal and only have to pay a 40% commission, the "profit" rises to the kingly sum of $1.69 per copy.

But much of that $0.64-$1.69 isn't profit at all. Remember those 5,000 books that didn't sell? Those still had to be printed, and the publisher most often doesn't get them back. The bookstores rip the front covers off the unsold books, dump the books themselves in the trash, and mail the covers back to the publisher for credit. The book returns alone in this example would eat up $0.45 of the $0.64, leaving a mere 19-cents-per-book profit. And some portion of that 19 cents needs to be used to pay the other departments at the publishing house that aren't directly involved in production, such as the acquisitions department and the legal department, but most especially the marketing department.

After all, the marketing department is responsible for stuff like designing and placing ads and sending authors on book tours. They can make or break the book. I didn't include the book's marketing cost in the original equation because this is a very elastic cost for paperbacks. Sometimes a big publisher goes whole hog to promote a book, but sometimes they quietly release it to bookstores and let nature take its course.

Marketing costs take many more forms than paying an intern to set up author signings or paying designers to create the ads you see in magazines and newsletters. Do you ever stop to browse through the stacks of new releases placed prominently in the fronts of bookstores? That's not usually the staff sharing their new favorites; the publishers of those books pay to get their copies up front where people can see them.

If you want a number, though, possibly two to fifteen cents out of every dollar spent on the book (see below for statistics on textbook costs) goes toward marketing. But let's say that the publisher in this case has decided to back the print run with a bit of promotion, and they pay to get the book placed well for a week in stores and take out some magazine ads. The marketing budget takes up 50 cents per copy. And so if you subtract 45 cents for unsold copies and 50 cents for promotion from $1.69, the publisher gets $0.74 profit per book in a better-case scenario. But it could just as easily come to a $0.31 per book loss in the land of the 55% commission, or if there are a lot of unsold copies.

So in the end, it's the distribution costs that are the biggest expense of a paperback fiction book, followed by the cost of printing. No fiction publisher can refuse to deal with Amazon.com² or Ingram and expect to get their books into as many hands as possible, so they have to factor those big 40%-55% commissions into their book pricing.

(Go on to Part Two: Why new textbooks are so expensive, Part Three: Why can't most publishers print books for $1?, Part Four: Book distribution and printing cost too much. Why don't publishers switch to e-books?)

---

1: The number of copies printed and released versus the number of copies sold is called the "sell-through rate". An 80% sell-through rate -- that is, 80% of the released copies sell and 20% are returned -- on a mass market book is considered very good. Anything above 80% is awesome. I'm actually using an 83% sell-through rate in my example; most books will not sell that well, so the cost of paying back the author's advance would eat into the 64-cent profit outlined above.

And again, the 80%-as-excellent-sell-through applies to mass market books. Small press books with much smaller print runs may require sell-throughs of 90%-100% for the publisher to simply earn back the production and promotion costs. Or, a seemingly-unreasonable cover price: $20 for an 80-page poetry collection.

2: HW Press refused to deal with Amazon because of their commission rates. The publisher didn't want to bump the book price by $3 just to account for Amazon.com's cut. Selling on the web is selling on the web, right? But it's not. Amazon.com goes around the world and offers a bunch of discounts and incentives that a Mom-and-Pop distributor can't match. Amazon.com offers rewards credit cards, for instance, and was able to negotiate cheaper shipping costs for itself with the US Postal Service because they do such a high volume. Furthermore, LibraryThing and Bookcrossing and a host of other sites pull their data directly from Amazon's data, and if you're not in there, it's like your book simply doesn't exist for a certain number of potential readers. Amazon.com is the 15,000-pound gorilla in publishing. People look at you funny if you tell them that, no, you can't get the book on Amazon, even more than when you tell them they can't find your book down at the local Barnes and Noble, either.

And when you come down to it, Amazon.com's cut is not necessarily unbridled greed. They have warehouses to maintain and staff to pay. The free shipping you get with every $25-or-more order gets paid for out of their commission. I know one online bookstore, Shocklines, that only charged a 40% commission; the owner is having to close down the shop because he ended up doing too much business to keep up with on his own, but he could never quite make enough to hire an assistant. It's an expensive business.

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by Gary A. Braunbeck

If you look at a book, usually on the dustcover, paperback cover or somewhere in the first couple of pages you will see something like "'(This author's) writing is a dazzling bravura of wild imagery and nail-biting suspense.' – Reed McReaderson" or "'A wonderful book! I couldn't put it down!' – Gush Auteur".

These little cover raves are known as "blurbs".

I am a firm believer that a handful of strong blurbs can be just as effective as the same number of positive reviews; they're shorter, they're direct, and they reveal nothing spoiler-like about the work in question. This, to my mind, makes them a good alternative for potential readers who don't want to chance having a review give away too much of the story.

Some -- but not all -- blurbs are culled from reviews. Probably half the time (or more) a writer will contact other writers and ask them if they would be willing to read something with an eye toward providing a blurb. I have gotten several wonderful quotes this way, and have also provided them for other writers. (I don't always do this; in the past 4 years I have been asked to read several novels for which, in the end, I couldn't in good conscience provide a blurb because, well...I didn't like them.)

Let me quickly address a few misconceptions about writers providing blurbs for other writers:

1. Yes, a lot of the time these writers know or are at least acquainted with one another -- but that in no way means that a good blurb will be guaranteed. A writer worth any blurb value has his or her reputation to uphold, and publicly praising a bad book won't help that cause one bit.
   
   
2. I can't speak for others, but I myself do read, from first page to last, each and every book I am asked to blurb. (There seems to be a rather cynical belief that writers don't bother reading their buddies' books before giving them a blurb -- while I don't doubt that this happens every so often, it is most assuredly not the norm.)
   
   
3. Yes, any writer providing a blurb is aware that it's going to be used to entice a reader to buy this particular book, and will slant their blurb to that end -- but bear in mind that is because they like and believe in the book to begin with, so its integrity needn't be called into question.
   
   

This is not to say that things can't go wrong here, as well. If a book is saturated with too many blurbs, one gets the feeling that the publisher is overcompensating and perhaps trying to sell you a bill of goods. The first book in Dean Koontz's Frankenstein series has ten pages of blurbs inside.

That's overkill, because the sheer amount of them robs each individual blurb of its effectiveness. You're so numbed by the time you reach the end of the damned things you almost don't feel like reading the book -- which turns out to be quite a lot of good, old-fashioned fun. But because it starts off by pummeling you with page after page of rave blurbs (almost none of which refer to the book itself), you go in with the creeping feeling that someone is trying to convince you a sow's ear is actually a silk purse.

My own personal cutoff point is two pages or a dozen blurbs (whichever comes first); after that, I ignore them. With blurbs, less is definitely more. (The ideal for me, by the way, is a single page containing somewhere between five and ten concise, tantalizing quotes.)

I am very careful to make certain that none of the blurbs used for my books are taken out of context -- I don't want readers to feel that these quotes have been employed to mislead them, and I don't want reviewers to feel that I've misrepresented their theses by "doctoring" their comments.

What it boils down to is that strong blurbs can serve as the middle ground for readers who want some sense of what to expect from a book but don't want to chance having anything "spoiled" for them ... and reviewers can write whatever they damned well please without fear of being accused of "spoiling" anything.

I still think the best solution is to read the first few pages of a book to figure out if you're going to like it or not. But if that's not possible for whatever reason, then seek out a review; read the first two paragraphs and the last two paragraphs if you want to avoid encountering spoilers. If that doesn't appeal or work for you, then turn to the blurbs.

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Have you ever seen or purchased a limited-edition book that came already signed by the author or contributors? Yeah, it's pretty neat getting a book like that, and collectors are willing to pay quite a bit extra for a book signed by a famous writer.

Some people think that the publisher rounds up all the authors for a wine and cheese party at which everybody signs the books, but that's not usually what happens. Trying to get a bunch of writers together in the same room at the same time is like herding cats, and mailing boxes of books around the world is terribly costly.

So, what publishers do is mail around stacks of pages -- signature sheets -- that the authors then sign and ship to the next people on the list. After the sheets are filled with signatures, they're added to the rest of the book's pages and bound into (or simply tipped into) the finished book.

If you aspire to be an anthology editor, be aware that signature sheets -- while they are indeed a cool thing to do for a limited edition -- are often a big huge expensive pain. This is particularly true if there are more than 10 authors involved and they're not local (if they are local, you can attempt to host the aforementioned sheet-signing party and get it done fairly painlessly).

If there are more than 20 authors from all over the country involved in your project and you've got to get everyone's signatures on the sheets, it's just like Disneyworld, if Disneyworld involved sitting in a hardbacked chair for 10 or 12 hours only to have circus midgets rush out of a closet and pelt you with dead fish at the end of your wait.

Things that will likely happen to signature sheets:

1. The post office will go "OMG! Big box = teh bomb!" and haphazardly slash it open with a boxcutter and consequently slice or otherwise munge up the top and bottom sheets in the process. *
   
   


2. At least one author will have carpal tunnel syndrome and not be able to sign the sheets for months and months.
   
   
3. While the author is recovering, one of the author's cats will climb to the top shelf where the signature sheet box has been put for safekeeping, and thoughtfully hork a big wet hairball therein.
   
   
4. While the author was recovering, postal rates went up, thus rendering the postage you included in the box insufficient. Author is dead broke due to having to pay the doctor for carpal tunnel surgery. You will have to overnight a money order to the author to enable her to send the box along to the next author.
   
   
5. Next author in line finally receives the box, then proceeds to pitch a fit because "there are way too many signature sheets" (you included 20% more in a futile attempt to compensate for boxcutters, hairballs, and coffee spills) and thus the publisher is trying to cheat him. So you have to call author up in an attempt to explain the presence of additional sheets to cover for loss, but he's not hearing any of it. Author holds entire box hostage until his wife counts up the sheets and tells him that you were right all along. He signs the sheets and sends them along without apology.



6. Somewhere between Bloomington and Boise, the post office will lose the box entirely. *
   
   Alternate Scenario: the box arrives safely in Boise, but the author's angry drunk spouse believes the box is from a lover, and throws it in the dumpster.
   
   Alternate Alternate Scenario: the box arrives, but is stolen off the front porch by a creepy stalker who's been going through the author's mail; signatures of some authors will later show up on Ebay.
   
   Son of the Return of the Alternate Scenario: After the box arrives, the author's town is hit by a flood, hurricane, tornado, volcano, alien invasion, or plague of paper-devouring locusts.
   
   Regardless: you'll have to print up a whole new set, and reobtain the first bunch of signatures.
   
   

* Both of which can happen to book shipments, too. We recently got a box of chapbooks which had been obviously opened by/broke open at the Post Office, spilled onto the floor, possibly stepped on, and hastily dumped back in the box and resealed. Moral: use strong packing tape and plenty of bubble wrap.

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Preface: This essay was written by Tim Waggoner and is reprinted with his permission. I, too, have had a novel deal go bad under slightly different circumstances. My situation was that I sold a short novel on proposal to a seemingly well-funded specialty publisher, got a contract that everyone signed ... and the publisher abruptly went under three months later when their .com parent company started cutting off less-profitable subsidiaries. I had a lot of the same thoughts that Tim expresses here, so I hope that those of you who aspire to become published novelists will find this piece useful.

---

"They decided to withdraw the offer on your novel."

I hesitated, not quite believing what my agent had just told me. "What? Why?"

"The editor said she was no longer 'comfortable' with the book. Whatever that means."

The publisher in question had made an offer on my novel The Harmony Society over a month before. Not for a large advance, but they had seemed enthusiastic about the book. After years of trying to sell a novel, I thought I'd finally done it -- finally was a Writer with a capital W. And now this.

My agent commiserated with me a bit before promising to keep sending the book around. I thanked him and hung up. I knew publishing was a volatile business and that this particular house had a reputation for somewhat eccentric business decisions. But no longer comfortable with my book?

I felt awful. I'd come so close to achieving my dream of being a published novelist, only to have it yanked away from me -- two hours before I was due to attend a local science fiction convention as an author panelist.

Needless to say, I didn't feel like going. Even with dozens of short story sales to my credit, I felt like a failure and a fraud. I didn't want to have to sit on panels and pretend that I knew what the hell I was talking about. Didn't want to have to face friends and acquaintances and have them ask how things were going with my writing.

I was angry at my agent for pushing the editor too hard for more money and better contract terms, perhaps scaring her off; angry at myself for having been dumb enough to believe that the offer had been a firm one in the first place. Angry that I had no clue exactly what had happened to screw up the deal and that I probably never would. But most of all, I was angry that I had wasted so much time pursuing my dream. A dream which had turned around and bit me hard on the ass.

In the end, I went to the con, if only so I'd have some friends to complain to. They were all perfectly sympathetic, of course, but several of them said with a wistful tone, "At least you had an offer."

I felt like telling them the grass was definitely not greener on this side of the fence, but I didn't. I knew they wouldn't understand. I wouldn't have either, not before.

I moped around all weekend, felt miserable, talked about quitting writing, and stuck more than a few mental pins in an imaginary voodoo doll labeled EDITOR.

Then the con was over, my friends returned home, and I was left with only my wife to complain to. But I didn't feel much like talking anymore. I realized that I'd actually been fortunate to have a con to go to. While it hadn't exactly kept my mind off my stillborn book deal, it had, if nothing else, kept me busy and provided some measure of catharsis.

But now it was Sunday night and stretching before me was my first full week as a failure. The question was, what was I going to do with it?

The next day I sat down and started to write another book.

I wanted to get back on the horse, was afraid that I might never write a novel again unless I did. I used an outline which I had completed some months back so that I wouldn't have to worry about developing a plot and characters. I could just write.

And write I did, well over ten pages a day in between teaching college composition courses and caring for my then one-year-old daughter. I took all the emotional energy churning inside me and channeled it into my book, writing like a man possessed. I finished the novel, titled Necropolis, in twenty-nine days.

I tinkered with the manuscript, editing and revising over the next several weeks, then blasted it off to my agent. But now doubts began to set in. What if I'd written Necropolis too fast, hadn't revised enough; what if it was absolute crap?

Sure, my writers' group liked it, but how could I trust them? They were my friends; they knew how emotionally fragile I was just then. I could have probably scribbled out a grocery list and they'd have praised it as a surefire Nebula contender.

The con had taught me that I needed to keep busy, but I couldn't bring myself to write any more fiction, not then. Nearly a decade earlier, I had worked as a reporter for a small weekly newspaper, but I had written very little nonfiction since. Still, I occasionally thought about getting back to it, and now seemed the perfect time.

I threw myself into reading about nonfiction writing techniques and researching markets. I tossed around different article ideas, finally deciding to write a personal essay about my experience with testicular cancer. I developed a query letter, sent it out to fifty magazines, and sat back to wait. A few days later I received an e-mail from an editor at Penthouse. He was interested in seeing the article.

A couple weeks more, and the article was finished and in the editor's hands. The check was welcome, of course, but I had gained something far more important than money: I felt like my words were valued again -- not by my wife or my writers' group, not even by an editor of a national magazine. But by me. And I needed to feel that way, needed it like a man lost in the desert needs a drink of cool, clean water.

I toyed with the idea of saying to hell with fiction altogether and writing nonfiction exclusively, but I couldn't do it. Despite the instability (and occasional insanity) of a fiction writer's life, I loved it too much to quit. I returned to working on short stories and noodling around with novel ideas. My agent called to let me know he liked Necropolis and would start submitting it to editors.

I'm not the only one who's had a book deal go sour on him, of course. SF novelist J.R. Dunn (This Side of Judgment, Days of Cain, Full Tide of Night) once had an editor send him a two-page letter of revision for a novel. Dunn made the revisions, turned the novel in, and it was rejected.

"Naturally you're going to be furious when your book's rejected," Dunn says, "but you want it to be rejected for good grounds, not a minor technical point." It turned out the editor "basically didn't understand what a radio was. I told my agent to drop the publisher and go on to another, and that's what we did." The novel, This Side of Judgment, came out two years later in hardback to good reviews. Dunn says the moral is "not all editors are idiots" and advises writers to "keep banging your head against a wall" until your book finds a home.

Editor Gordon Van Gelder says that having a book deal fall through is "definitely not common at all." He advises authors to research a publisher to determine size, longevity and stability before submitting. Smaller houses are especially precarious financially.

Van Gelder assures that there is "no stigma" for authors who've had book deals collapse on them, and that actually the book's more attractive to other editors because it had a deal before. For instance, Van Gelder once bought a book by Tanith Lee that had been abandoned after the Abyss line of horror novels folded. Not only did Van Gelder think it a fine book, but it was a sequel and he felt Lee's fans should have a chance to read it.

"It was the right thing to do," Van Gelder says, "plus I made some money for St. Martin's in the process."

Happy ending time. My first daughter is now seven, and my second is two. I've long since gotten over my anger at my agent and continue to have a great working relationship with him. The editor who rejected my book because she was "no longer comfortable with it" was fired years ago. I have a full-time, tenure-track job teaching creative writing at a community college, and I've published over sixty stories in various anthologies and magazines.

Given the mergers and downsizing in publishing over the last few years, and the fact that The Harmony Society was a slipstream novel not easily pigeonholed, my agent and I decided to investigate the possibility of placing the novel with small-press publishers. A recent start-up, DarkTales Publishing, seemed a likely prospect. They publish offbeat horror/dark fantasy novels and have brought out work by such authors as J. Michael Straczynski, Yvonne Navarro and Mort Castle, among others. We decided to give them a try.

And they took my novel, with every intention of publishing it. But after a couple of years, the publisher realized their business had grown too big, too fast, and they needed to slow things down. DarkTales would still be bring out my novel, but they couldn't say when. So, after letting out a long sigh, I decided it was off to market once more.

The Harmony Society finally found a home with Prime Books. The advance was less than that offered by the original publisher, but the overall terms are much better. More important, my book is with people who are enthusiastic about it and who intend to do their best to promote it. If the original publisher had brought out the book, while I would've made more money on the initial advance, there would've been little to no promotion, and most likely The Harmony Society would've come and gone without much notice. I'm confident that Prime will do my book justice. Who knows? We might even sell a few copies, too.

Since placing The Harmony Society, I've also published an erotic mystery novel and a short story collection. As for Necropolis ... well, it's still making the rounds. I'm hopeful that one day it'll be published too, but if it isn't, it won't be the end of the world -- or my career, for that matter.

I've learned the most important lesson an author needs to learn: I don't need publication to feel like a writer. The only thing I truly need is to keep writing.

Final note: all the novels Tim mentions in this essay have found happy homes, as well as several others he hadn't even started at the time he wrote this essay.

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by Tim Waggoner

Want to write horror? A lot of folks do. The mainstream publishing industry may have momentarily turned its collective back on the genre, but the small press scene is thriving, not to mention the burgeoning number of horror sites on the Web. Unfortunately, a great many stories published in these markets are uninspired (to put it kindly) and just plain bad (to put it honestly). Want your work to stand out from the rest of the lycanthropic pack? Want to start selling to larger and more prestigious markets? Want your horror stories to be so good that people breathlessly race through your prose, barely able to whisper an exhausted, "Goddamn, that was something," when they've finished reading?

It ain't easy. But I've got three tips to offer that will increase your chances of joining the dark pantheon of horror writers who kick major ass.

1. Beware of clichés.

Read widely, both inside and outside of the horror genre, so you can recognize plots that have been done to (living) death. Then you'll know better than to write a story which ends, "And it was all a dream" or "And then he realized as his lover sank her fangs into his neck that she... was... a... VAMPIRE!"

When I was in my teens, I wrote a horror story with the embarrassing title of "Scary Christmas." In it, a young punk torments and kills an elderly man whose ghost comes seeking Yuletide revenge. At least I had the good sense never to send this piece of crap out. Revenge stories are one of the biggest clichés in horror fiction, and beside that, there's no tension in them. Readers know exactly how they're going to turn out every time.

Still, you can make clichés work for you. In my story, "Blackwater Dreams," published in Bruce Coville's Book of Nightmares 2, I tried my hand at another ghostly revenge story. Only this time I took the cliché and gave it a twist. The man character, a young boy who blames himself for the drowning death of a friend, is visited in his dreams by his friend's ghost. He fears the spirit has come seeking revenge, but the friend isn't angry -- he's lonely. At the end of the story, my protagonist has to make a terrible choice: leave his friend to his loneliness, or join him in his watery afterlife.

In my story "Alacrity's Spectatorium," I twisted another cliché around. I took the notion that vampires don't cast reflections and created a dark mirror which displays only the reflections of vampires. What price would vampires pay for a glimpse of themselves in such a unique mirror? More, what would such a glimpse mean to them?

Instead of ending with a cliché, why not begin with one? Start with "It was all a dream" and build your story from there. Why not begin with a man discovering his lover's a vampire and see what happens after that? Or flip the cliché around. What if a vampire discovered his lover wasn't another nosferatu but was instead (shudder) a human?

And try to avoid the most overworked plot in horror fiction, which author Gary A. Braunbeck describes as a story in which the main character exists only to get "slurped by the glop." Stories in which characters are merely props to be eaten, drained, eviscerated, sliced, diced and turned into julienne fries by your monstrous "glop," whether it's a vampire, werewolf or the ubiquitous serial killer. These stories aren't just boring; they're insulting to readers who deserve better.

Probably the best way to avoid clichés is to adhere to one of the hoariest: write what you know. Draw on your own experience for your story ideas, write about the things that excite and disturb you, the people, places and events that form the unique fabric of your existence, which make your life different than any other that's ever been lived before. If you do this, you can't help but be original.

2. There's a difference between disturbing readers and simply grossing them out.

Too many beginners think that writing horror is all about detailed descriptions of disembowelments and gushing bodily fluids. They mistake the use of such elements for artistic audacity and cutting-edge (pun intended) writing. The truth is, though, that such writers are the literary equivalent of the kid who jams his finger up his nose and pulls forth a big old nasty booger so he can wave it in his friends' faces.

Good horror -- like all fiction that truly matters -- is about affecting readers emotionally. True, revulsion is an emotional reaction, but it's a simplistic one with a limited effect on readers. They finish your story about a penis-munching condom, think, Man, that's sick, and immediately forget all about it. You've failed to touch them save on the most shallow of levels.

I'm not saying you should avoid writing about the dark and disturbing. That's what horror's all about, from the quiet subtlety of a half-glimpsed shadow on an otherwise sunny day to the in-your-face nastiness of blood dripping from the glinting metal of a straight razor. But if you are, as Stephen King puts it, going to go for the gross-out, it has to arise naturally from the story itself, to be so integral to the tale you're telling that it can't be removed without making the story suffer.

In Gary A. Braunbeck's novella, "Some Touch of Pity" (also an excellent example of a writer taking a cliché -- the werewolf story -- and putting an original spin on it), there's a flashback detailing a character's rape. Not just the physical aspect of it, but what the character experiences emotionally as the rape occurs. The scene is absolutely brutal, but it's also completely necessary to the story. If the scene were toned down, or worse, removed, the story would be far less emotionally wrenching.

In my story, "Keeping It Together," forthcoming in the SFF-Net anthology Between the Darkness and the Fire, I write about a gay man living a heterosexual lifestyle in a home and with a family that he has created from his own desperate desire to be what he perceives as "normal." But it's an illusion which can't be sustained, and as the story progresses, the house, his wife and young daughter all begin to decay around him. In one scene he has sex with his wife out of a sense of husbandly duty, and since she is well along in her dissolution by this point, their lovemaking . . . damages her. I created this scene not merely to make readers go "Ooooh, yuck!" but to further dramatize the impact of such deep-seated denial on both my main character and those around him.

Remember that extreme elements, like anything else in fiction, are only tools to help you tell your stories in the best way you can. But like any powerful tool, they should be used sparingly, cautiously and always with good reason.

3. Give us characters we care about.

Let me say right up front that this bit of advice doesn't mean that we have to like your characters. It means your characters should be so well developed and interesting that we want to read your story to find out what happens to them. There are characters -- Captain Ahab, Sherlock Holmes, Hannibal Lector -- who aren't always likable (and are sometimes downright despicable) but who are so unique, so fully realized, that they can't fail to fascinate. Compelling characters is what memorable fiction is all about, whether you're writing for The New Yorker or Cemetery Dance.

In my story, "Seeker," which appeared in the White Wolf anthology, Dark Tyrants, I write about a disillusioned crusader who has lost his faith in God and has gone searching for a nest of vampires in order to prove to himself that there is some sort of spiritual aspect to existence, even if that aspect is evil. The plot runs on two tracks. First is a narrative of the crusader penetrating the forest where the vampires live, being attacked by them, and finally dealing with their leader (who I made not merely a vampire but one who has merged with the Wood itself). The second track details, through various flashbacks, the events that caused the crusader to lose his faith and make him so desperate to find a sign -- any sign -- that there's Something More to life.

If I did my job right, readers will be interested not only in the action in the story, but also in the crusader himself, so that when the story reaches its climax and the character's quest is fulfilled in a way he -- and hopefully readers -- never imagined (no, he doesn't become a vampire himself; remember what I said earlier about avoiding clichés? I try to practice what I preach), there's not only an emotional pay-off, but hopefully readers will leave the story thinking a little bit about their own spirituality.

There's a lot more to writing good horror, but if you take the three morsels of advice I've given you to heart, you'll create stories which will not only rise above the generic tales of flesh-munching zombies and blood-lusting serial killers that are out there, you'll create fiction worth reading -- and worth remembering.

---

This article was originally published in EWG Presents, July 1998 and was translated into Portuguese by Ricardo Madeira and reprinted on Terravista in July 2000.

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by Tim Waggoner

"It's not what you know, it's who you know."

That bit of conventional "wisdom" is often cited by writers to explain everything from rejection letters to the lousy state of publishing. It's not my fault, they think. It's the publishing good-old-boy network keeping me out.

There's no denying that networking is important -- perhaps even vital these days -- in creating a writing career. But too many people hold a narrow view of what networking is. They imagine standing around at a publisher's party at a conference, free drink in hand, schmoozing with editors and agents, regaling them with wit and wowing them with a verbal description of their latest (planned) 300 thousand word opus. But in its purest sense, networking is simply about making connections, and you don't have to be a mainstay of the New York publishing scene to do it effectively.

One of the first ways that writers can start making connections is by taking classes. Creative writing classes are offered through colleges and universities, of course, but they are also sponsored by adult continuing education programs, libraries and local arts organizations. Taking a creative writing class can provide an excellent opportunity for feedback from a (hopefully) skilled instructor, and from other student writers. But it can also provide the beginnings of a writer's network. Your instructor will be able to point you toward resources -- reference books, writing programs and conferences in your area -- which can, if nothing else, decrease you writing career learning curve.

Your instructor should be able to give you advice on publishing, perhaps even provide you with some contacts. But the truth is that many creative writing courses are staffed by instructors who've published little, if at all. Always try to learn something about an instructor's credentials if you can before signing up for a class. Ask to see a bibliography of the instructor's published works, and try to track down and read some of them. Caveat emptor.

But even if the instructor is far from a best-selling author, that doesn't matter much. Because the most important networking opportunity is the chance to connect with your fellow students. From creative writing classes, writers' groups are born. Groups which can continue providing feedback on your work long after the class ends; groups which also can pool their knowledge of marketing and submission strategies.

But what if there aren't any creative writing classes offered in your area? How can you establish a writers' group then? By advertising, naturally. Put up notices in libraries and bookstores. WANTED: ONE WRITERS' GROUP.

Author readings and signings are other excellent networking opportunities. You might be able to chat with the author for a bit and ask questions. (Maybe even more than a bit since signings and readings are notorious for being poorly attended. You may well have the author all to yourself.) You can also meet other beginning writers. Take a notebook with you and, at an appropriate time, announce you'd like to form a writers' group and pass the notebook around for interested parties to write down their addresses and phone numbers. You can also pass out business cards if you have some (and you should).

The Internet has been a boon to writers. You can take classes online and connect with other writers via newsgroups and chat rooms. You can exchange stories for critique through e-mail and of course share those all-important marketing tips.

Author web pages are also wonderful resources. Not only do authors sometimes post articles on how they got started or offering advice to newcomers, often authors' e-mail addresses are also provided. Got a question or two? Go ahead and e-mail an author, though don't be surprised if he or she's too busy to respond. And don't bombard them with "where's my reply" follow-ups. Annoying people is not an effective networking strategy.

Writers' organizations are also great networking resources. Often, you need to have only one pro story sale under your belt to join as an affiliate member. You won't be able to vote in officer elections or for awards, but you'll be entitled to receive the organization's publications, such as handbooks, newsletters, even directories of members (with those handy e-mail addresses). Even if you haven't made a pro sale yet and don't qualify for membership, you can still often purchase and subscribe to an organization's publications.

Conferences and conventions are prime networking opportunities. Not only can you attend workshops and informative panels on writing, but you can often speak with program participants -- authors, editors and agents -- in the hall after a panel or at other slow times during a conference. Come prepared with questions and always bring along a manuscript or two. Never thrust your work upon someone, though. Always wait to be asked.

You can also become a program participant yourself with only a few sales to your credit. I began sitting in on panels at Science Fiction conventions after only having sold a handful of stories. All I did was write the conference's director of programming, introduce myself as a local writer, list my credits, and relate my desire to be on a few panels.

My first convention as a program participant made all the difference in my career. Not only did the other writers see me more as a peer, I was able to find a writers' group which counted several published novelists among its members. I can't begin to tell you how much I've learned from them, and far more important, I made some great friends.

And that's what networking is all about, really. Not cold-bloodedly using other human beings to advance your career. It's about making connections, making friends. I began this article with a bit of writing wisdom. Let me close with another: Good writing happens when good people get together.

Good careers can happen, too.

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by Gary A. Braunbeck

After a while, regardless of how well-focused, disciplined, and determined you are when writing a book, you just don't, well... see it any more. It happens to all of us at some point on every project. You spend so much time writing, cutting, revising, and polishing, that you risk either not seeing the forest for the trees or become so over-focused on one particular tree that you don't notice the forest fire until it's too late.

Okay, carried that metaphor just a little too far, sorry, but hopefully you've already discerned the point: that there comes a time during a book-length project when you've spent so much time working on it that you lose perspective.

Here's the thing: by the time you, as a reader, pick up a copy of an author's book, the author him- or herself has read it over at least three times -- and this is after the countless hours spent writing, re-writing, and polishing. If you want to include all that, as well, then I think it's safe to say that by the time a book goes to print, its author has read it through, from beginning to end, a minimum of seven times, probably more.

This is a necessary evil. Editorial suggestions and changes must be considered and/or made, the manuscript must then be read through to make certain that these changes mesh with the overall story (tone, narrative arc, continuity, etc.), and if a problem is then discovered, it must be fixed, and the whole process starts over again.

I'm oversimplifying this because to describe the process in painstaking detail would not only rob the reading experience of some of its magic, but bore you to tears.

But when the book is finally out there, and everything looks good, the author and the editor can sit back and smile at having done their job to the best of their abilities. Authors often cite their editors as having been "instrumental" in helping to shape a book that may have encountered some rough spots along the pot-holed road to publication. Editors deserve all the credit that an author cares to cast their way, no arguments here.

But there is a group of unsung heroes in the publishing process, people whose names often don't appear anywhere in the book, but without whose effort, insight, and input, a lot of us would look like illiterate fools.

I am talking about proofreaders, those folks whose thankless job it is to go through your manuscript once you've ceased being able to see it anymore and look for the signs of a possible forest fire (see over-extended metaphor at the beginning). Many people think a proofreader's sole responsibility is to check spelling and punctuation.
While that is definitely right up there on their list of duties, many of them go the extra mile -- hell, many of them go several hundred extra miles -- to ensure that the book they're working on is the best it can possibly be.

And they do this by deliberately searching out those elements that you, the writer, ceased to be able to see somewhere around Draft #3.

Two personal examples: a few weeks ago, right before my second Cedar Hill collection, Home Before Dark was being prepped for the printer, one of Earthling's marvelous proofreaders noticed that in my story, "Palimpsest Day", the age of the mother did not add up if one stopped to consider her dates of birth and death. Now, I know that a lot of people tend to read such details with a quick eye and don't stop to do the exact math ... but that's no excuse for sloppiness, and that is exactly what this mistake was -- sloppiness on my part. I had become so over-focused on fine-tuning the story so that it fit into the overall arc of the Cedar Hill cycle that I overlooked a small but significant detail -- making sure the mother's age added up. While a mistake of this sort probably wouldn't have ruined the story, its mere presence would have lessened the story's value. I had read through the manuscript so many times that I simply didn't see this problem any more, and thanks to a sharp proofreader, neither will you.

Second example: up until its fourth round of proofreads, my novella In the Midnight Museum contained a glaring continuity error that, while in and of itself quite small, would have damned near pulled the rug out from underneath the entire story had it not been caught by the proofreader. It was a quick, minor detail that very well might have been overlooked by most readers, but those readers who would not have missed it would have had the entire second half of the story ruined by this nagging inconsistency. (You've noticed, haven't you, that I'm not telling you the exact nature of this mistake? That's because I am so embarrassed by it that I dare not share the specifics, lest you think me, well ... simple. "My God," you'd say. "A sponge would have seen that." And I'd prefer you leave this essay thinking I have an IQ higher than my shoe size.)

But, again, this potentially destructive detail was overlooked by me because I had stopped seeing the whole of the moon and focused only on the crescent (I figured it was time to switch metaphors).

So consider all of the above to be a preamble to this: a song of gratitude to all proofreaders, those unsung heroes who labor over our manuscripts almost as long and intensely as we do, whose unblinking eye often catch the flaws that we can no longer see, and whose objectivity gives us a fresh perspective just as we need it the most.

I'm going to end this by getting even more specific: Paul Miller, Don Koish, Deena Warner, John Everson, Ron Clinton, Robert Mingee, Jack Haringa, and -- my own personal major domo, Mark Lancaster ... thank you. A thousand times, thank you. Thank you for caring about my work enough to go those extra hundred miles and always pointing out even the smallest problem, no matter how testy I get about your nitpicking. You are why I look like a good writer.

My gratitude and admiration knows no bounds.

Now see how many mistakes you can find in this blog entry. Just don't tell me about them or I might throw a hissy fit.

---

Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of 14 books and over 150 short stories. If you enjoyed this article, take a look at his book Fear in a Handful of Dust: Horror as a Way of Life.

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Ad compositors put together the advertisements you see in the newspaper. Sometimes they design the ads themselves based on a client's needs (which can change at the drop of a hat), but often they replicate or scan in a client's existing design. They will also do a lot of typesetting, proofreading, and correction. Ad compositors generally don't need to know how to draw or do illustrations, but if they do have artistic talents, they may find themselves called upon to do more interesting stuff if they work in a good shop (or, alternately, they may find themselves frustrated that they're never called upon to use the full range of their skills).

These days, most ad compositors do their work on computers (often Macs) using programs such as Multi-Ad Creator, Photoshop and Pagemaker. However, some compositors may do physical paste-up with waxed bits of printed stock art, text segments and design elements cut up with an X-acto knife and assembled on galley paper over a light box.

My year working part-time as an advertising compositor was the most stressful job I've ever had, and at minimum wage, no less. Our ad room had deadlines three times a day; the workload and pressure were incredible. A friend of mine worked professionally as an ad compositor for a small daily paper -- she was unbelievably burnt out after a year, and I think she maybe got $18K a year in exchange for elevated blood pressure and perpetual sleep deprivation.

If you seek out a job as an entry-level ad compositor, you can expect to learn a lot about graphic design and computers in a short period of time. Most newspapers, if they don't actually require a portfolio of advertising design work, will require at least some journalism or graphic design coursework and evidence of computer proficiency before they'll hire you. You may also have to pass a typing test or test on keyboard shortcut commands (I had to take the latter; I don't know how common that is, though).

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To get a job as a copy editor, you must have a rock-solid sense of grammar, spelling and punctuation and a keen eye for errors and typos. You must be able to read quickly and accurately. You must be able to write well and speak well. You must be able to work alone with very little direction, but you must also be able to work as a team member under a micromanaging senior editor; either work scenario is possible, as is anything in between.

Copy editors at magazines and book publishing companies check materials for grammar, punctuation, readability, style, etc. They also generally do fact-checking and suggest minor revisions. They may do research for writers, and they may be called upon to produce materials for websites.

People seeking entry-level copy editing positions at magazine/book publishers generally need a bachelor's degree in English or journalism. However, publishers that produce scientific, technical, or highly academic works will often accept (or might even require) degrees in relevant academic fields along with evidence of being able to do the particulars of the editing work.

Editing for technical publications often pays better than similar jobs at mainstream publications. So, if you want a job as an editor and are majoring in something besides English or journalism, you can do well provided you get some decent experience on a student paper or magazine while you're in school. Conversely, English and j-school majors will do well to supplement their degrees and student editing experience with a good grounding in other disciplines, particularly the sciences.

Copy editors on newspapers are usually called upon to create the headlines for stories in addition to editing copy; they will also often lay out the stories.

I worked as a copy editor for a small daily paper many moons ago when I was in grad school. It was a tedious, stressful, utterly thankless job. The paper had to be laid out and delivered to the printer a little before midnight, and often reporters and desk editors didn't get copy delivered until well into the evening. I remember several instances in which there were two of us who had less than an hour to check the entire paper before it had to be sent to press.

Newspapers often have a hard time retaining copy editors, which doesn't surprise me given my own experience. The pay was practically nil, you got little appreciation from the other staff when you did your job properly, but if you messed up and overlooked something, you got your butt chewed out.

The only advantage to working as a newspaper copy editor is that it gives you invaluable experience so that you can get better, saner work later in your career. If an employer sees that you could cope with daily newspaper work, he or she will know you can handle an enormous amount of deadline stress and chaos.

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Many of us remember the ultra-plainly-labeled, über-cheap generic foods sold in bulk at grocery stores a few decades back. Stuff like bulk beer, which came in plain white cans with just the word "BEER" in stark black letters, plus minimal nutrition information and a bar code.

Fewer people remember that, for a very brief period of time in the white-label heyday of the early 1980s, someone attempted to market generic genre books.

Yes, completely generic paperback books. They had a plain white cover with just the title in black block lettering: ROMANCE or SCIENCE FICTION or HORROR or WESTERN.

They released one book in each genre; an older friend of mine collected the whole set. The books had no back-panel blurb, no author information, no publisher information, not even a copyright page.

My friend said the novels were uniformly awful, but entertainingly so. Apparently the writer or writers went out of their way to incorporate every possible genre cliché into the paper-thin storylines.

I'm guessing the white-label SCIENCE FICTION novel had a bad case of white room syndrome.

The books, of course, failed miserably except as a collector's oddity for bibliophiles. It's hard to get authors to do good work when they're not even given a pseudonym, and it's even harder to get readers to pick up a book without the benefit of snazzy cover art, a catchy title, or author name recognition. And, of course, without publisher information attached to the product, there's not much possible motive or method to marketing.

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U.S. copyright law is intended to foster artistic and intellectual endeavors by protecting creators' rights and thus their livelihoods. However, copyright law can easily turn into a stifling intellectual monopoly (some MP3 fans would argue that this has already happened). Thus, the law contains a lot of compromises to try to keep it fair to other creators and to works' users.

The "merger doctrine" is one such compromise aimed at keeping creators from claiming unfair rights.

One of the basic tenets of copyright law is that you can't copyright ideas (industrially-useful ideas can be protected by patents, but that's a whole different subject), just the original expression of those ideas. This is codified in Section 102(b) of The Copyright Act:

In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

But it seems like someone could get around this by copyrighting, say, a dozen different little ways of expressing the same simple idea so that nobody else could feasibly use that idea, doesn't it? That's where the merger doctrine comes in: if there are a limited number of ways that somebody can express an idea, then you can't copyright expressions of that idea at all. This is to keep the idea itself free for everyone to use.

For instance, you can't copyright the sentence "Fred spoke." Sure, you could write it "Fred made an announcement" or "Fred shouted" or the all-time favorite "Fred ejaculated", but when you come down to it, it's expressing the simple idea of a man speaking. There are only so many ways to express that. (Whatever Fred says can of course be copyrighted if it otherwise meets the not-too-difficult criteria of original expression, of course)

The merger doctrine was upheld in a case called Toro Co. v. R&R Products Co. in 1986. The 8th Circuit Court ruled agreed that the doctrine is important in keeping a creator from monopolizing an idea. Most courts since then have ruled that the doctrine prevents an author from copyrighting a passage in the first place. However, some have ruled that the creator can copyright the passage, but that others will only be guilty of infringement if they use the exact same expression (many people don't realize that they can normally be found in violation of copyright even if they change the wording of a passage somewhat).

Labels: copyright, publishing

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Vanity publishers will publish anything if the author has the money, be it a family history to distribute to relatives, a guide for classes, or a volume of badly-written poetry. With a vanity press, there's no editor making an informed decision as to whether or not the manuscript in question is good, bad, or indifferent. The lack of a "gatekeeper" makes all works published by vanity presses suspect in the eyes of the publishing world.

Thus, the lack of editorial process is the first reason that writers, reviewers and editors scorn books put out by vanity presses.

The second reason is that many vanity publishers are crooks, plain and simple.

Many vanity presses -- and bogus literary agents who work with or own vanity presses -- advertize in the backs of literary magazines and appeal to a frustrated writer's, well, vanity in assuring them that their opus will see print.

What's not mentioned is that the costs will be high, the quality of the product low, and its chances of being taken seriously lower still. They also don't mention that they'll push the services of a "book doctor", who will charge you high fees to "improve" your manuscript. Some vanity presses will take an author's money, but never actually print the books. Vanity presses engage in a lot of borderline or outright scamming; they ensure their own profits, and the clauses in their contracts often create a situation where the author becomes their best customer.

The bottom line is this: the money should flow from the publisher to the writer, not the other way around.

If you submit a manuscript someplace and the "publisher" writes back praising the work to the heavens -- but then says you need to pay an "editing fee" because your manuscript has a few weensy problems and they know someone who can fix it right up -- run fast and don't look back. Likewise, if your inclusion in an anthology is contingent upon your buying the anthology, you're dealing with a vanity publisher who is trying to take advantage of you.

The same goes for many publishing contests (frequently poetry contests) that require a fee. Typically, these scams want you to pay $25-$50 as an entry fee, and the work of all the "winners" (read: everyone who shelled out the entry fee) goes into a large anthology that the "winners" are pressured to buy. These things sometimes get announced in the "community" section of smaller local newspapers, falsely lending legitimacy to the scams.

A few of the vanity publishers out there include:

• 1st Books Library
• American Book Publishers Group (to be avoided because they've scammed authors)
• The Amherst Society
• Commonwealth Publications
• The International Library of Poetry
• Iliad Press
• JMW Publishing
• Lee Shore literary agency -- works closely with vanity publishers to help disguise their nature
• Northwest Publishing
• Minerva Press
• poetry.com
• The Poets' Guild
• Poetry Press
• Poetry Unlimited
• The National Archives
• Gardenia Press
• GMA publishing
• Sparrowgrass Poetry Forum
• Trident Publishing / Washington House (an arm of American Literary Agents of Washington, a fee-charging agency that makes its money by charging authors rather than from selling books) (also, not to be confused with Trident Media Group, which is a legitimate and respected publisher)
• Vantage Press

Self-publishing is not synonymous with vanity publishing. You aren't paying a publisher to run your work -- you become a publisher. If you have a track record with or knowledge of traditional publishing, either as a writer or editor, you can successfully self-publish a work that was deemed unpublishable due to commercial or genre concerns.

For instance, Kelly Link's critically-acclaimed story collection Stranger Things Happen was published by editor Gavin Grant (then her boyfriend, now her husband), after she'd collected a stack of positive rejections and a couple of conditional offers from established publishers (most genre publishers thought her stories too literary and most literary publishers turned their noses up at the genre elements). Link and Grant were both experienced publishing professionals who, after research and discussion, decided they could do her book best themselves. Their production of Stranger Things Happen was definitely self-publishing, but a very far cry from vanity publishing.

The key thing is that successful self-publishers have gotten enough objective external feedback to be confident that their manuscript is indeed worthy of publication and will be of interest to readers. They have done the market research to identify a legitimate printing company (such as Thompson-Shore) or are prepared to go the DIY route of using their own printing equipment (many chapbook publishers go this last route). They are prepared to competently edit, design, distribute and market the book themselves.

Print on demand (POD) is also not synonymous with vanity publishing. While some vanity publishers do run POD operations, there are also POD printers such as Lightning Press that will not do business with you unless you're an established editor (and can prove it). POD is a technology that is being embraced by the mainstream publishing world for its convenience.

POD has not improved the reputation of vanity publishing in any way. Vanity publishing, because it lacks standards and is rife with scams that prey on writers, will always have a well-deserved bad reputation. What POD has done has put small press publishing and self-publishing within the financial reach of many do-it-yourself writer/editors. Some of the results have been amateurish, of course, but some have been of very high quality. But before POD technology became available, they might not have been feasible at all.

A reputable publisher isn't just a middleman, but that's a topic for another article.

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As a college student, I really came to love used record and book stores. Sometimes I'd find the most amazing books and albums that had been out of print for years. And sometimes, I'd be able to find brand spankin' new stuff that I just couldn't afford at Borders or Tower Records.

Later on, I was still broke but in grad school studying journalism. I started to learn about copyright law. More important, I started to get to know authors who were just as broke as I was but who didn't have a light at the end of their financial tunnel in the form of earning a commercially viable degree. Copyright was more than an abstract concept to them -- article sales and royalties paid their rent and kept food on their table.

Armed with just enough copyright knowledge to keep me out of court for libel and my new insights into the working author's life, I saw used bookstores and CD shops in a whole new light. All these books and albums for sale -- and no money to the publisher! No royalties to the authors! Holy shit!

Was the FBI gonna come busting down the doors of Half Price Books for copyright infringement someday? Because it all certainly seemed like a violation of the spirit of copyright -- the stores were doing a pretty brisk business, and every used copy sold was money that never reached the creator. But still, my author friends visited the used shops just like everybody else did, and for the same reasons: they wanted stuff that was not available elsewhere, or they just couldn't afford to pay for new.

While some big-name musicians like Garth Brooks periodically raised a stink about used CD sales, it seemed that everyone turned a blind eye to the whole thing because cracking down on used bookstores would create far more problems than they'd solve.

As it turns out, selling used books, CDs, movies and software is perfectly legal due to what's known as the "first sale doctrine".

Section 109 of the U.S. Copyright Act codifies this doctrine. Anyone who is a lawful owner of a physical copy of a copyrighted work can do as they please with that physical copy.

They can destroy the copy, paint it pink, put blinkenleits all over it, rent it to somebody, or transfer ownership by giving it away or selling it. They can't, of course, duplicate the copyrighted content or reuse it or sell it in some way -- the first sale doctrine deals with the physical object, not the intellectual expression it contains.

However, when cassette tape players and recorders came along, the U.S. recording industry started to fear for their profits. (Sound familiar? You bet!) So, they put their vast financial resources to work influencing legislators. In 1984 the Record Rental Amendment was passed on the logic that renting out albums made it too easy for people to copy music without paying for it, thus dreadfully harming the RIAA's copyrights.

As a result of that amendment to Section 109, you can't rent an audio CD or tape or phonograph. Due to legal extrapolations of the Record Rental Amendment combined with the fact that software is often set up for licensing rather than sale, you can't rent a piece of software, either ... unless you're talking about a video game, which is not seen by the courts as being software. At any rate, that's why you can't rent the latest Britney Spears opus at Blockbuster along with Fatal Frame for your Playstation.

Fortunately, the RIAA didn't take the step of preventing libraries from lending out music albums, nor have they seriously attempted to stop the sale of used CDs. However, all that could change if they decide that these activities are excessively limiting their profit margins.

The book publishing industry, by contrast, has neither the lobbying power nor the motivation to try to change the laws as they exist.

It's perfectly legal to rent a novel, for instance, but sadly reading just isn't popular enough to support the development of a Bookbusters chain.

Labels: copyright, music, publishing

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Asking "Is file sharing theft?" is a bit like asking "Is driving a car murder?" (If during the course of a drive you intentionally run somebody down with your car in an effort to kill them and they die, yes, of course it's murder ... but otherwise, no.)

File sharing is, as a general concept, not a problem. It's a perfectly legal thing to do if you either own the materials you're sharing or have the right to share them because they're in the public domain or the owner has granted permission for them to be shared.

The real question is ....

Is file sharing other peoples' intellectual property theft?

Now we're getting down to business!

What is theft?

Theft, all by itself, is a general term that is not given a technical legal definition at the federal level in the U.S. (some states do define it; others don't). It's often used synonymously with larceny (which is defined technically, which we'll get to in a minute).

The 'Lectric Law Library Lexicon defines theft as commonly meaning to secretly and dishonestly take someone else's property (in other words, steal it) for the sake of money (either to sell the property or to simply avoid paying for it). It further defines theft-bote as being the crime of knowingly receiving stolen property from a thief.

Thus, both stealing an item and receiving stolen items can be considered forms of theft under those definitions.

The Oxford Dictionary of Law (which covers British law, which is similar but by no means identical to U.S. law) defines "theft" as "The dishonest appropriation of property belonging to someone else with the intention of keeping it permanently."

Criminologist Thomas O'Connor states that "all modern theft laws have their origins in the ancient law of larceny."

He further says that:

Larceny is the wrongful taking and carrying away of personal property which is in the possession of another with the intent to convert it or permanently deprive the owner thereof.

Okay, so what's larceny? And what has it got to do with filesharing?

According to O'Connor and other sources, classic criminal larceny involves:

1. Wrongfully taking something from someone else (stealing) To do this you have to have control over the object -- but it doesn't have to be actual physical control. You can claim that a book on a shelf is yours and sell it to someone else. When the person walks off with the book they think they've legitimately purchased, they have not committed larceny, but you have. When an item has been taken for personal use, a common defense is to claim that the person was only "borrowing" the item and intended to return it. In that case, it's up to the court to decide whether the evidence surrounding the incident indicates an intent to steal or a real, honest intent to return the item.
   • The act of ripping and making a copyrighted MP3 available for upload has been seen by the courts as wrongfully taking control of an intellectual property. Once other anonymous users have downloaded copies, there's no feasible way to "give it back" to the rightful owner. On the downloading side, however, a user who downloads an illegal copy, tries it out, and then deletes that copy could arguably be seen as just having "borrowed" it.
     
     
2. Taking the item away from the place it was stolen (asportation) There's a lot of variance in how this is interpreted. For instance, in some states, a person can be convicted of shoplifting if they are observed taking and sequestering an item but abandon it in the store before they are apprehended. Theft laws also cover people who can't really asportate anything in a legal sense, such as a parking lot attendant who is given a customer's keys and then goes for an extended joyride in the car.
   • Transferring a file to a fileshare server certainly seems to fulfill the broad asportation criteria, as does downloading it.
     
     
3. The stolen item being personal property. According to modern laws, personal property can be real property (land, houses, etc.), tangible property (moveable things like cars), services, information, intellectual property, and even contraband. Under the vast majority of legal systems, the value of the item determines whether the act of stealing it is considered a misdemeanor, felony, or civil matter.
   • Courts have well and thoroughly upheld that reproduction rights to things like songs and stories and art are valid intellectual properties. Thus, the extent of the financial damage to the holder of the copyright determines whether or not the case would be pursued as a felony, misdemeanor, or civil action.
     
     
4. The item being in the posession of the thief. Most laws require the owner of the item to prove that it was taken without their consent, that they can identify the object as being theirs, and that they did not abandon the item (thus creating a situation in which a reasonable person might think the property was free to whomever wanted to take it).
   • If you've made an illegal copy of an intellectual property and make it available for upload, you are quite obviously in possession of it. However, you might be excused if you legitimately thought the intellectual property was abandoned (for instance, because it was out of print) or in the public domain due to a lack of a copyright statement.
     
     
5. Taking the item with the intent to sell it, gain a reward for its return, or to permanently deprive the owner of it. The "permanent deprivation" part is a little complicated. Courts have ruled that cases like taking a car temporarily for joyriding constitute larceny. Why? The item has been taken recklessly without permission, and the owner stands a strong chance of suffering some kind of financial loss due to the item being damaged while in the thief's control. So, even if the thief always intended to return the item, the risk of permanent loss to the owner makes it larceny.
   
   In other words, larceny (theft) either permanently deprives or has a strong risk of permanently depriving the rightful owner of money.

As I mentioned previously, some U.S. state laws explicitly define theft. For instance, the Ohio Revised Code defines theft thusly:

2913.02. Theft.

(A) No person, with purpose to deprive the owner of property or services, shall knowingly obtain or exert control over either the property or services in any of the following ways:

(1) Without the consent of the owner or person authorized to give consent;

(2) Beyond the scope of the express or implied consent of the owner or person authorized to give consent;

(3) By deception;

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