RonVitale

eBooks

I did some research and came across Fictionwise.com. I heard of the site a year or two ago, but I’ve never opted to try purchasing an eBook from the site. From looking at the site and reading through the requirements, I was turned off by how complicated it appeared to be.

Here’s an example:

You can purchased the October/November 2005 issue of Asimov’s on Fictionwise.com for $5.99. Since the eBook is a multi-format one, you have the following choices:

“Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [1.9 MB], Adobe Acrobat - Large Print
(PDF) [2.0 MB], Palm Doc (PDB) [394 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [349 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [358 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [386 KB], hiebook (KML) [925 KB], iSilo (PDB) [328 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [409 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [516 KB]
Words: 117592
Reading time: 335-470 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format: Printing ENABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED”

That’s a lot of information to take in! I like to think of myself as an early adopter of new technology, but I’ve found the whole eBook market to be extremely confusing and troublesome. Why? I don’t even know what an OEBFF format is! I understand what Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Reader is, etc., but I found it a bit disconcerting to purchase something without seeing an example of what it’ll look like on my screen or if I print the book out. Since portable readers aren’t readily available (as a popular and well produced device—like the iPod), I would probably be printing the book out. Or at least parts of it. I like to see what I’m buying before I spend the money so I’m not that geared up to spend $5.99 on an electronic item that I might not be able to print out. I think it’s useful to see how many words, but without knowing how many pages are in the book, I’m a bit lost in the dark.

Fictionwise.com is a step in the right direction, but I’ve not found a way to purchase one story from an issue. Basically, you have the choice of buying the whole book/magazine and that’s it. And for $5.99 for an electronic issue, why wouldn’t you just pay the $33 a year to have it shipped to your house? It’s cheaper and the physical copy is easier to carry around.

Can someone help point me to another site that might offer more diverse content? A site that would allow me to pick one story from a magazine instead of having to buy the whole magazine. I think there are major gaps in the online model: Distribution, consumer usage, and ease of use.

If you can only buy a whole magazine from content that is already available in print format, what’s the big deal? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to search a database, find an author you like, and then purchase all of her stories at one time? Maybe you could create your own book, have it made into a pdf format, and then you download it, or opt to use the “print on demand” so you can have your own hard copy (of a real book or magazine) sent to you in the mail.

Obviously I do see financial problems with my business model. I cannot see how costs could remain low for the consumer and profit to still be obtain by the copyright owners. I’ve been listening to episode 27 of ThisWeekinTech and I’m intrigued by Creative Commons copyright. But I’m also trying to figure out how an author, an unknown author, can make some money by selling his/her work online.

If there are only 12 or so stories published each month on a big magazine like Asimov’s, then maybe there needs to be a way for authors to create their own clearing house for online content. Yet the problem remains in that I haven’t seen or heard of an ideal product for a consumer. Carrying around a digest size copy of Asimov’s in your bag isn’t a big deal. But what if you bought the eBook and wanted to print it out? That wouldn’t be convenient and it’d waste paper and toner. I haven’t seen an efficient electronic reader—or at least none have taken off yet. So what is an author to do?

Plan and collaborate with other authors. Just as musicians are working on their own to cut out the music industry, maybe authors can cut out the publisher and work together to great a Website that acts as a clearing house for content. Is this vanity press? No, that’s not what I’m talking about. Just as some musicians are extremely good but can’t obtain a record deal so there are writers out there that cannot find a market to be published in.

Podcasts are exploding through the roof. Now we video podcasts starting to take off, several amateurs will break through and become popular. In the world we currently live in, I don’t see a business model that will provide funds for podcasts, musicians who create their own CDs/mp3s, and writers who try to sell their own work. But that could be changing in the future. What type of funds am I talking about? Let’s be honest here: A fiction writer (unless you a top list author) isn’t making a ton of cash on selling a short story to a magazine like Asimov’s. At $.02 a word and an average story being 4,000 – 6,000 words, you do the math. You can’t live off of that.

We don’t live in an era in which the selling of short fiction can sustain a writer. And obtaining a book deal, isn’t the answer either. A typical first time contract is approximately $5,000 for a new, unpublished author. If I’m wrong on this, please e-mail me. I’d like to be better educated in this matter. Many, many writers work at their day job and then write fiction on the side. Writing is what they love to do. But being a writer isn’t simply about writing, it’s also about understanding the business of writing: Earnings, taxes, agents, editors, submission guidelines, postal fees, copying fees, etc.

Granted, a writer like Stephen King can easily pull in a six-figure deal for a book. Yet how many writers out there (published ones) can pull in such numbers?

I can only hope that there will be further technological advances that will help writers bind together to create online content that is easy for the consumer to purchase and read. Maybe magazines will realize that if they bind together and sell their work in individual formats that they can draw in larger number of sales. I’m not a businessman, but I do think that there needs to be a breakthrough of utilizing digital technology to propel the publishing world into the next phase.

Rejected!

A story of mine received the kiss of death from Asimov’s: Rejected!  Got to love those rejection form letters.  Who knows if they thought the story didn’t work for them, the writing wasn’t good enough, and maybe it was something else.  Who knows.  I know I’ve written about this before, but I have to express my frustration: Asimov’s receives approximately 850 manuscripts per month.  They publish maybe a dozen in every issue.  There’s over 6 billion people on the planet and Asimov’s has around 22,000 subscribers.  What’s wrong with this picture?

I was walking at lunch today and I had some time to do some thinking.  I just walked—without anyone else and without an iPod on—and my brain started thinking.  I don’t know what made me start thinking of this, but I wondered: “When will micropayments be affordable on the Web?”  I started thinking about payments of $.01 or of $.10.  Right now you can purchase a song on iTunes for $.99, but what if you could visit an author’s website and buy a story from him/her for $.01?  Yet you still have the problem of quality.  People need to know that stories are screened and are somewhat good. People wouldn’t want to read crap.  They want entertaining stories.  But then I started thinking about video and audio content.  Maybe some of the stories out there could be sold as podcast or videocasts. 

I have thought for a good many years now that I’m stuck between living in the print world and the digital one.  I’m not saying that I don’t value Asimov’s, but I will complain about the stories.  Many times I’ve read two or three stories in the magazine and think that they’re great, but the rest of the stories are lackluster, boring—to me.  There needs to be a way for you to take what Netflix and Amazon does with referrals and ratings, tying this to selling literature (or stories made into podcasts).  But I don’t believe there is an effective means of handling micropayments of sales as little as $.01 or below.  Verisign and the companies that handle similar online transactions charge a good hefty percentage on processing the online transactions.  But I do believe there is a way to make content for online/offline usage to be more attractive to readers/listeners out there.

I’ve had my work published on smaller places and when I read a rejection from Asimov’s (without knowing why it was rejected), I wonder how I can sell this piece to another magazine.  I keep thinking and wondering as to why the major publishers don’t work together to great a “supersite.”  Wouldn’t it be interesting to have an account to a website in which you could read online (or copy the file to an offline reader) content from Asimov’s, Science Fiction & Fantasy, and whatever other magazines joined in the venture?

There are many writers out there, but so few are being published.  I’ve had people (I don’t mean family or friends) read my stories and be amazed at them.  Yet I still can’t break into publication at a big magazine.  I have thought that magazines like Asimov’s were the Holy Grail for writers, but maybe I’m just thinking within a cage.  Maybe I need to broaden my reach and imagine what else is available or what could be available.

I know I’m just writing off the cuff and I’m disappointed in receiving a rejection for my story, but when there are so few markets out there (that pay) and the payment is so little, I can’t but be discouraged.

I’m not blaming Asimov’s for my rejection.  I am just expressing the angst of a rejected writer: You have no idea what worked or didn’t work with your story.  So you shop it around other places and keep working.  And that’s what I’ll do.  But I’m also still going to think and do some research.  Maybe other avenues are available and I’m just not aware of them.

Burned Out

I’m exhausted.  Wasn’t a great weekend.  I’ve been grouchy, testy, and at my wit’s end.  I’m torn between this world and the next (the new home).  We’re still in limbo on a few issues and it’s frustrating.  I’m a broken record these days: I’m exhausted from work, from house related issues, and I’m not too pleasant to be around.  Yesterday my wife, son, and I went to my mother-in-law’s house and my wife and I worked really hard in pulling down the wall paper from the living room (with about 5’ ceilings), dining room, and the hallway.  After we took a break for dinner and then I put out son to bed, we continued to work on spraying some cleaning material to dissolve the wallpaper glue and then used a scrapper to get the glue off the walls.  We put in about 5 hours of work yesterday and were able to get all the wallpaper down and a good portion of the glue off the walls.

By the time we arrived home (it was rainy really bad and took about one and a half hours to get home), it was midnight.  Our son woke up at 6 a.m. this morning but my wife was kind enough to get him and stay up with him.  So I know she was hurting from lack of sleep.  Sunday morning my wife took my son to the zoo and this gave me time to work on cleaning the garage out and storing some of our packed boxes into the garage.  I also was able to get some more packing done in my office.

Why am I packing so early?  (We’re probably not moving until early December.)  I don’t like to be last minute on things.  If there’s things that I don’t need or haven’t used in a while, packing them up will make my life easier—rather than scrambling at the last minute packing.  With our planning on moving near the holiday season, I’d rather have extra time to handle all the issues that I can’t foresee right now.  My packing comic books and Star Wars figures early isn’t going to impact my life.  If I can’t find it, I won’t loose sleep over it.  (Though my wife wasn’t too happy that I had packed most of our DVDs.  I was able to dig up the movie we wanted to see though pretty easily.)

I guess, if I’m honest with myself, I would love to have some quiet time to just relax.  I told my wife yesterday that I had three or four nightmares Friday night into Saturday.  The one dream really stayed with me.  I dreamed that a military helicopter had dropped down low on the block behind us and a marine (holding a big gun) repelled down a rope, shooting at something,  In my dream, I remember hearing the gunshots echoing in the air and my fear spreading through me.  I saw the marines as they went by and the one guy said to me: “Leave everyone now and get out of town.  Now.”  I don’t know what it was that they were chasing (in my dream I sensed it was some enemy—could have been a monster or an alien—who knows.  I’ve an active imagination).  I had two other dreams that stayed with me and in my sleep I remember saying to myself: “I have lots of story ideas in my head.”

And I must admit that I’m just cranky, tired, frustrated, burned out, and not at peace.  Not at peace.  I’m jumbled up inside.  I can’t make more time and I’m looking at the world around me and am trying to spend time with my  son, to work, to play, to hang out with my wife, to pack, to fill out paperwork on the house.  And I see all the hard work that my wife is doing.  She’s put a ton more work into helping us get a new house than I have.  She has sacrificed a lot of her time.  And I know that this won’t last forever, but I sure don’t feel relaxed and at peace.  I’m angry at not writing (beside my blogs), tired and don’t want to work.  I just want to relax and have some fun.  I want to actually have some time to just think.  You know, to take a walk and to allow my thoughts to wander.  That’s when I typically get the inspiration for my stories.  Now when I walk, I’m thinking about bills, the logistics of moving, should we get movers, how much we have to pack, the work that has yet to get done on our house before it sells, the work that has to get done on our future house before we can buy it, and a zillion other details.  And when you think about how much money you’ll actually be spending over the 30 years—well, it’s enough to get anyone upset.

And then there’s that cynical voice inside me: “Well, why are you spending so much money on a house?”  That’s a good question and I have a good answer.  When we bought this house, we sold ourselves short by not getting a big house.  We thought it would be great for us and for one child.  All of this is true, but there’s just not enough space for office space or to watch a movie when your kid is sleeping or to exercise, etc.  When I think of how hard we work, I realized that we should have put more money into our house so that we had more space to do what we wanted.  It’s true in that your “home is your castle.”  When I’m not at work, I’m at home.  And home time consists of upkeep on the house, improvements, and living in the place.  I have some big plans for the new house and I’m looking forward to a new place.  Yes, we could have stayed where we are or we could have just been thankful with what we have.  None of that is incorrect, but I wanted something more for my family.  And my wife agreed.

In America, it’s expensive to do anything: To go to school, buy a car, a house—even to die costs around $7000.  Nothing is cheap.  I made a decision a long time ago that I did not want my children to grow up in the environment that I did: Not the top schools, to have to share a room with my brother until I was in my late 20s (when I moved out with my wife).  It’s not that I want a flashy expensive house or fancy car.  That’s not what I’m saying.  What I am saying is this: I decided a long time ago that writing wasn’t going to be my only source of income.  I didn’t want to be poor, trying to sink and swim from paycheck to paycheck.  That’s not what I wanted to do.  I give full credit to those writers who stay true to their art and who work really hard, but can’t make enough to get by.  I did not want to live that way.  I grew up in a household that if it were not for the help of my grandparents, I don’t know where I would be today.

My mother struggled to work and get by.  We didn’t have enough money for me to go to a good high school and I didn’t have the knowledge (that I have today) of how, where to apply for scholarships.  I did okay in getting through school and the like but by the time I was out of college I had nearly $30,000 in debt from school.  I will never forget my still living at home in my mid twenties and how my first job out of graduate school paid a whopping $18,000.  (At the time, I was earning $10,500 working part-time at a local department store.)  I remember seeing my student loan payment each month, comparing that with how much I was earning, and I said to myself: “This is nuts.  I can’t afford to move out.  What am I going to do?” 

And it took me a long time, but I worked hard and applied my skills in the area of technology.  It’s a sad, sad day when you wake up and realize that what you went to school for doesn’t pay a lot of money.

My story is no different than millions of other kids out there: I had a dream that I would become a college professor.  I would teach and then write.  Then I ran into the world of academia and the “publish or perish” mentality.  I realized that it wasn’t so much what you knew in teaching, but who you knew.  I had a teacher (in graduate school) who “taught” us by reading off of note cards.  And if you asked him a question that strayed off of what he was prepared to answer, he just wouldn’t answer you question.  I remember shaking my head and thinking: “I’m paying $1,000 a course here!  And he’s READING off of notecards?!”  And a teacher we all loved was not granted tenure at the University because she didn’t have enough papers published.  (Some of the papers I read in my study of English Literature at the graduate level would make you laugh.  Inter-textual language is a bit crazy.)

Through it all, my brother would say to me: Well, that’s what you get for picking to study English as your major.  I read in the recent issue of “The Writer” that an author needs to balance paying the bills and his art.  Tell me about it.  Writing has not paid me enough for me to be able to survive.  In my lifetime, I’m lucky if I’m made about $500 on my writing.

And it comes down to: Do you want to have a house, raise a child, own a car, or live off of fantasy land that comes out of your head?  I opted for the responsible path.  Does this make me a coward in that I don’t believe my writing can sell enough for me to survive?  I guess I look at it this way: Realistically.  I want to be able to eat and have a place to live.  I enjoy writing and am frustrated right now because I haven’t been making time to write (because I’m working on packing, moving issues, etc.).  It’s just frustrating.  I don’t know how else to put it.

I might sound like I’m bitching but I need to get this off my chest.  This period of my life right now sucks!  I’m torn four different ways and I want this: I would like to make/find some time to just take a walk and relax (it’s dark by the time I come home from work at night).  I want to walk around and think of nothing.  Not of my work, not about writing or moving, etc.  No, I want some time to be able to dream and think and just to settle my thoughts.  That’s what I want. 

Negative Energy

Well, well, well.  I was hanging out last night playing some cards online with a friend of mine when I decided to visit my blog site.  I had noticed that in the last few days a good amount of traffic had been coming to the site and I was a bit perplexed as to why the sudden jump. I kept wondering who the visitors were and how they stumbled across my site.  With being busy with work and not having much free time, I really hadn’t thought much about it.  But I did what any interested person would do: I googled myself.  And, boy, did I find something.  It appears that Paul Jenkins of the Rev Up Review slammed me in his October 8th podcast.  But I’m jumping ahead of myself.  In the Google list of links, I saw my name mentioned in 7 mins 27 secs into the Oct. 8th, 2005 Rev Up Review podcast.  I scratched my head and wondered.  First off, I had no clue that this podcast had been out and I had been discussed in it.  I downloaded the podcast, listened to a bit of it, and then listened to the section in which Paul discusses my Podcast article entitled “Creating a Podcast to Market Your Work” that was published in the Summer issue of the SWFA’s The Bulletin. Let’s just say that Paul slammed my article.  He was not kind in his critique and I must admit that I was a bit hurt.  I kept thinking: Here’s this guy in England, trashing my article.  How do I feel about that?  I wasn’t too pleased.

I sent Paul an e-mail back to explain that my article had been written back in the Springtime and that I agreed with him that most of the material was out of date by the time that the issue was printed, but my goal in writing the article had been pretty straightforward: I wanted to educate writers as to what a podcast was and get them to think about creating one of their own.  At the time the article was written, iTunes 4.9 had not been released yet.  I had contacted the editor, asking him to make some last minute changes and I cannot remember if the changes were able to make it into the print version or not (I can’t look it up because all my reprint copies are packed, getting ready for the move).  CastBlaster had not been released yet and the scifi podcast network was still not on my radar (I hadn’t even heard of that at the time).  It was also before I had heard of Michael A. Stackpole's podcast and Mur Lafferty's podcast.  Ah, hindsight.  It’s just not possible to sometimes have all the knowledge you might want about a topic you wish to write about.

I had to make a decision and here was my dilemma: I had been in contact with the editor of “The Bulletin” because he had published my article on blogging.  I shopped my podcast article idea to him and he liked it.  When an editor asks to see your article, well, I wrote quickly and sent the piece to him.  If I would have had weeks of time to write the piece, sure I would have done more research, but the main point of my article remains the same: To educate writers as to what a podcast is and give them the basics on how to create a podcast.  Being slammed about not talking about Macs is missing the point to my article.  Podcasting had not yet been written about in “The Bulletin.”  I saw an opportunity to be the first writer to be able to write about the topic and so I did.  The links that I gave to users in the article will help them get on their way.  All a person needs to do is to do some research on Podcast Alley and he/she will find plenty of good discussion in the forums as to what software to use and how to do it.

I’m rather proud of my podcasting article being published because for once I wasn’t beat out by another writer who had a similar idea.  That might sound vain, but it’s actually nice to be able to write a piece, see it published, and then be paid for it.  I opted to work fast and get the article out in the mail.  My gamble worked.  However, it seems that you can’t make everyone happy.  C’est la vie.  Yep, those are the brakes my friend.

Paul’s biggest critique of my article is that I have not done my own podcast.  That is a fact that I cannot deny.  I have played around with CastBlaster and sent audio feedback to Adam Curry and put the file up on this site for him to use (he never did play the clip I sent him), but I have not done my own podcast.  I made a decision a while ago that I would only do a podcast if I made a commitment to stick to it.  I didn’t want to do a half-assed one and then forget about it.  If I were to create my own podcast today, I’d probably use CastBlaster or Audacity.  And I’d be sure to use music from the Podsafe Music Network.  But the question that I’ve had is: What the heck would I talk about?  I have some ideas and if I had the time I would do the podcast.  But I want to be honest: Right now, I cannot make the time to do a podcast.  I’m preparing to move, I’m raising a 2 year old, I’m working a lot, and someday soon I’d love to sit back down and get back to writing short stories.

No one is living my life, but me.  And I like it that way.  Some might choose to not do this blog or to create a podcast or just shut the heck up and do some fiction writing.  I’ve opted to keep up the blogs.  I’m 34 years old and I’ve been writing since I was 15 years old.  (Well, I’ve been writing since I was around 8 or 9, but I meant sending stories out in the mail to be published.)  There’s no need for me to justify what I do with my time, but I do agree that I would have liked to have given more information to readers in my podcast article.  But it’s a tough call.  With limited space and knowledge, I did the best I could.  I couldn’t put a ton of links (as I’ve done in this article) to help people out.

Yet I can do that here.  There’s a lot of tricky stuff involved in podcasting: Getting the sound quality right, problems with recording Skype calls, knowing how to create a RSS feed, adding ID3 tags to one’s podcast, and much more.  I have some of that knowledge, but I did not wish to overwhelm a user.  It’s funny but I’ve talked to a few people at work about podcasting and they’ve asked: “What’s a pod-cast?”  They use the word “pod” as though it’s an alien container, waiting to eat up people as in the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”  And that got me to thinking: Just because I know what a podcast is, doesn’t mean that everyone else does too.  Give people the basics and those who want to know more can do so through the links I provided.  Hopefully, I’ve helped to educate a few readers.

At the end of the day, my goal in writing is to share knowledge and to pass experiences on.  We’re all entitled to our opinion.  What a mixture between surprise and hurt in hearing your name mispronounced and then an article you had published being slammed.  But I’ve thick skin: It’s all cool.  Have a good day: And hopefully, I’ve interested you in at least finding out what the heck podcasts are and where to go to create one.  Have fun!

Resources:

Podcast recording software for Windows users

Podcast recording software for Mac users

How to record Skype phone calls