The Medieval Book Helpdesk

This sketch about how to use a book was written by Knut Naerum and first appeared on the Norwegian TV show Ostein og jeg in 2001.

When Self-Publishing Becomes Vanity Publishing

Writers amongst you may remember that, last autumn, the people behind the publishing website YouWriteOn announced that they would publish, free of charge, 5,000 titles in time for Christmas. You may be interested in learning how things worked out. If you visit Jane Smith’s blog at The Bookseller.com you can do just that.

It’s not a pretty story. In “Should you write on?” Jane makes it clear that in this case there was a fine line between self-publishing and vanity publishing. She reports that some authors now deeply regret ever getting involved in the YouWriteOn scheme. It seems that few writers who signed up for it will sell more than a handful of copies of their respective books; and although it was claimed by the publisher that one title had sold “more than 1,000 copies”, it later emerged that these had been sold direct to the book’s author.

In her follow-up post, “How self-publishing really works“, Jane explains the difference between self-publishing and vanity publishing, which is very informative and any new writer who wants to self-publish their first novel should put this article on the top of their required reading list. It certainly opened my eyes to what really goes on in the world of self-publishing, and it gave me the names of a few companies that it might be best to avoid, or at least approach with caution.

However, read Jane Smith’s articles for yourself and come to your own conclusions. I, for myself, will be adding her blog to my list of must-reads and I will report back on any further items of interest that I find there.

Two Cures for Writer’s Block

Over the last few weeks I’ve been struggling to find the enthusiasm and energy to write anything for this blog, but in my efforts to overcome this problem I’ve come across two potential cures for what bedevils most authors from time to time, namely, writer’s block.

The first is Wordlube, an interactive e-book by Tom Evans (aka the Bookwright) in which he claims that you can remove writer’s block in five days or less. In this book Tom recommends the use of meditation and mind-mapping techniques to clear away any obstructions that are preventing you from putting pen to writing pad or keyboard to screen. The e-book is designed to be read very quickly and it is recommended that first you should go through the whole book in one sitting to get a feel for the principles and exercises that are contained in it.

However, these exercises are meant to be completed over a period of five days and are claimed to have a cumulative effect, so by the end of the fifth day you should be thinking and working differently if you follow all of them as prescribed. Most of the exercises only take about 30 minutes each to complete, with the final one only taking you a maximum of 45 minutes.

So, after about three hours of work spread over less than a week your creative juices should be flowing in abundance. If not, then I suggest you tell Tom Evans because I’m sure he would appreciate your feedback. In fact, he encourages it.

Wordlube includes several embedded videos and audio clips, together with a weblink to Tony Buzan’s mind-mapping website so that you can download a trial version of the software used by Tom Evans to create the mind maps featured in the exercises.

The second cure, called Coffee Break, can be found on the Webook website. It is an interactive project that aims to provide a friendly and supportive environment where writers can try out new ideas and techniques, and refresh any skills that they may have but not use often enough. The project is led by a close friend of mine, Vanessa Cobb, whose pen name is Winterjazz.

The rules of the project are simple. You choose any one of fourteen exercises, follow the instructions and start writing. The exercises cover such topics as “Developing Characters”, “Creating Settings”, “Engaging Dialogue”, “Story Ideas” and “Imagery”. Vanessa invites users to suggest topics that they would like help with, and several new topics have been added since the project began.

Coffee Break provides you with plenty of great ideas that help you think about what you are writing and is something that is probably best used when you are trying to improve your writing skills but don’t know how, whereas Wordlube is probably best if you are struggling even to find a decent idea to start with. Each has its place in the writer’s toolbox and both of them are completely free to use. So, take your pick and give them a go!

Reverend Robert Shields – Would He Have Been the Ultimate Blogger?

Recently, while looking around for subjects to write about on my blog, I came across the story of the Reverend Robert Shields, who died a few months ago.

His claim to fame is that for 25 years he kept a diary – but not any old diary! From 1972 until 1997 he would spend at least four hours a day recording every detail of his life in five-minute segments. Nothing was left out – he even recorded his visits to the toilet (and what he did there) – to ensure that the entire day, every day, was accounted for. In his small office at his his family home in Dayton, Washington State, he kept half a dozen typewriters (Do you remember those?) on his desk just in case any one of them broke down due to over-use. He had them arranged in such a way that he could reach any one of them by using his swivel chair without having to get up.

Each day he would type about 3,000–6,000 words describing in fine detail his daily activities on to single sheets of paper. Eventually, he would bind these sheets into ledgers, which were stored in huge cardboard boxes and stacked to the ceiling just outside his office. As well as detailing his trips to the bathroom, he recorded his body temperature, blood pressure and his daily medication; he described every piece of junk mail he received, every meal he ate and the cost of virtually everything he bought. He even attached a nostril hair to one page so that scientists could study his DNA. He would sleep for just two hours a day so that he could describe the dreams he had experienced. In a good year he would write three million words, but in a bad year he would manage just one million. He would type everything down spontaneously as it came into his head and didn’t correct or edit anything. He said that he didn’t read any of the entries afterwards because if he did he wouldn’t have time to do anything else.

Eventually, in 1997, he succumbed to a massive stroke that curtailed his writing activities although he did attempt for a while to dictate his journal entries to his wife but, perhaps not surprisingly, she quickly became bored with the task. In 1999, he handed over his diary to Washington State University in 91 boxes on condition that it would not be read or subjected to a word count for at least 50 years. However, one sample page has found its way on to the Internet and can be viewed here.

I wonder what Robert Shields would have made of today’s blogging technology. Would he have used it to update his diary for all of us to read and comment on or would he have shied away from it because it was just too public an arena to reveal the details of his private life and personal thoughts? At his age, would he have understood or been afraid of Web 2.0, Windows XP/Vista or Mac OS 10.4/10.5? Or would he have become the world’s ultimate blogger and acquired the same sort of following that ‘Geriatric1927‘ (Peter Oakley) has amassed on YouTube. I suppose now we shall never know!

Something Quite Interesting About Book Sales

I’m a member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders and I’ve been following a recent thread about books sales on their e-mail discussion forum, SfEPLine.

Apparently, a book publisher told one of our members that over half of all the books published in the United Kingdom sell less than 200 copies in their entire lifetime (or should that be shelf life?), which at first sight may seem somewhat surprising. However, with the advent of self-publishing and print-on-demand services, this sort of statistic does have a ring of truth about it because a large number of self-publishers don’t print that many copies of their book anyway and would consider themselves extremely lucky to sell even 100 copies to their friends and family.

Then another SfEP member, who specializes in editing works of fiction, told us that sales of a first novel in hardback produced by a commercial publisher are commonly very low and that total sales of just 600 copies per book was not at all unusual. Although the traditional way of publishing a book is to bring it out first as a hardback and then in paperback if potential sales warrant it, a lot of novels are published just as paperbacks. On the other hand, a lot of hardbacks are sold to public libraries – in fact some books would never have been published in the first place if it hadn’t been for the library market. Unfortunately, the bottom has fallen out of this market recently, which has caused big problems for publishing companies who produce fiction titles.

However, to a certain extent these lost library sales have been replaced by sales to a new breed of ‘collectors’ who buy autographed hardbacks as an investment. The rumour is that these collectors don’t actually read the books but keep them locked away so that they remain in mint condition so that they can be sold at a premium at a later date – perhaps when the author’s later works have broken into the best-seller lists.

Nowadays, public libraries are buying as many books as possible in paperback in order to save money but publishers prefer to sell them hardbacks instead because they have to sell far more copies of a paperback in order to break even financially. This means that novels with a smaller market (e.g. by a first-time author) are not viable to publish as a paperback. So unless publishers feel that they can sell enough hardback copies of a novel (or any other book) to make even a small profit they will reject a first-time author’s manuscript every time. And that is why there are so many hardback copies of celebrities’ autobiographies, cookbooks, etc. on the shelves in bookshops irrespective of how good they are – enough people buy them to make it worthwhile for publishers to produce them.

So, my advice to anybody who is writing their first novel is to publish it yourself! It will give you a great deal more satisfaction than receiving all those rejection slips and you will learn what it takes to produce, promote and sell a book. Give it a go and see where it takes you!