The Economics of Indie Publishing- Chris Nuttall | According To Hoyt

The Economics of Indie Publishing- Chris Nuttall | According To Hoyt

There’s a general rule in traditional publishing that the money should always flow downhill to the writer. If you’re being asked to pay for anything, once you get picked up by a publisher or agent, you’re being conned. Editing? Cover design? Formatting? Promotional material? The publisher should pay for all of those – and if he doesn’t, something is very badly wrong.

However, this isn’t actually true of independent publishing. Certainly, as before, the writing is the author’s work, but there’s no publisher to pay for all the other items (or, for that matter, to find them.) The author has to meet those costs himself, unless he can do the tasks for himself. (I know authors who can do cover designs, but I haven’t met a single author who could edit himself successfully.)

In these cases, the author needs to budget – and pay for these items as a lump sum.

Escape from Book Boredom -- RobertRinger.com

Link: http://robertringer.com/escape-from-book-boredom/ (via shareaholic.com)

And if you're a writer (or aspire to be one), I believe you'll find my words to be of value to you when it comes to honing your craft.  I say this because the very reasons that make me give up on a book early include some of the most important factors that every author should focus on when he writes — at least if he wants to sell his book to me.

Words mean things...

....but not always what you think they do.

You can't tell whether a text is "clear" or "unambiguous" by simply consulting the text — you also need to see whether there is external evidence that the meaning of some term is something other than what you assume it to "clearly" or "unambiguously" be (whether we refer to the meaning intended by the author or the meaning likely understood by most of the author's intended readers). This shouldn't be politically or ideologically controversial. It's just a description of how language and communication works.

consider this text:

1 + x = 10

This may seem "clear" or "unambiguous," until you see that people sometimes say — and quite correctly,

1 + 1 = 10

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Or say you have a contract that reads,

I will turn over to you my car if you pay me twenty thousand dollars.

Usually that's pretty clear; but if it turns out the contract is made by two Canadians in Canada, contemplating a transaction in Canada, we'd realize that "dollars" means something other than what it usually means in America.Even if the contract ends up in American court (say the parties move to California and litigate the matter in California), any American court will correctly look beyond the supposedly "clear" meaning of the text to recognize that the contract meant something quite different. Even the strongest version of the parol evidence rule would not, to my knowledge, require a court to assume that the term "dollar" is "clearly" U.S. dollar, even if that's the first reaction that the judge had to the contract before he learned of its entirely Canadian context.

Again, it's not that meaning is "up for grabs" in the sense that any interpretation is always as good as any other. It's just that language can't be understood without figuring out what it means in a particular context, and recognizing that seemingly "clear" words can become less clear — or clearly something else — when one recognizes the context. Usually the context is as you expected, and the meaning is thus what it clearly seemed at first. But we can't just categorically foreclose the possibility that a word in a 200-year-old document (or even in a relatively new document) means something different than what it clearly seems to be if we look only at the text.

Editors take note

(Hat tip: Eugene Volokh)

A rave review of a book on chess tactics, including:

The other thing I'll say about this book is that "My God, this is a fantastic way to present a book." If you dig in, you'll find that the book is done in small chunks, with a frame on the left for the board illustration. This is such a fantastic way to present the materials in a book, because when you need to scroll down, you can keep the relevant illustration in sight. I often read math books or economics papers, and find myself having to stick most of the fingers on one hand between different pages to keep an easy reference to the equations or diagrams referenced throughout the text. Imagine if people adopted this sort of organization for math books, easily presenting everything that each chunk of the text refers to while you read. Brilliant.

Anyone who prepares complicated information for presentations might want to take a look.

Learn something new every day.

(From "This is true" newsletter.)

I have read This is True for many years now and enjoy it. You have readers in 200 countries. I suppose that many of these readers are US citizens who are abroad for some reason such as soldiers, diplomats, engineers etc. But you have also foreigners receiving your mail. I am one of them: French citizen, 72 years old. I have studied English since the age of 11 and have never stopped using it, professionally (I was a physicist). I have written about 100 papers in English, discussed in English with colleagues of all countries, spent one full year in the USA and made about 20 trips to the US. So I thought that I am fluent in English and therefore able to understand all your jokes. Alas, I find every week that it is not true. I understand almost completely your stories, but I miss your final joke or pun once out of three. So please, Randy, when you make a joke, try to think that there are maybe 20,000 readers who might not understand it. Either make it simpler or (this is a suggestion), put a footnote somewhere for us, poor ignorant idiots." You're not fooling me, Georges: I know you're neither ignorant nor an idiot. Please be assured that only a tiny minority understands it ALL. Some of it depends on intimate knowledge of American culture, or fine twists on English linguistics, so even if you lived here now, it's unlikely you'd "get" all of it. And since some of it depends on higher educational standards, not all Americans will "get" all of it! Many readers consider that one of the fun things about TRUE: those who DO understand the esoteric references revel in them. I'm sure there are many instances of you understanding something many others didn't, and that appeal to your intellect is likely a large part of your enjoyment. Making TRUE simpler would mean reducing its quality, and I'm simply not going to be doing that. Over the years I've had many notes from people who have said they didn't understand something, and had fun researching it, from looking up a word in the dictionary to learning about new concepts. Yes, you can get plenty of enjoyment from reading the stories, even if you scratch your head from time to time. But you can get MORE enjoyment if you spend the time looking up the stuff you don't understand or know about, and you get to exercise your brain at the same time. This week, try learning about the Freedom of Information Act. Does France have one? Can "mere" citizens file FoIA requests? Don't do it because "it's educational", do it because it's *fun*.

Another vote against "dumbing down" to make sure every possible reader understands every word on the first read-through.

Wall Street Journal has a review of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft's shadow looms over modern horror fiction the way the shadows of decrepit churches and mutant trees – and the occasional eidolon loomed over the characters in his novels.

As with so much genre fiction, Lovecraft's oeuvre isn't for everyone. Some people just can't see past the wooden characters, overwrought prose, and fantastic speculations about the nature of the universe. The dialogue occasionally descends into Howard Dean-like howls of "Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah!" Edmund Wilson once quipped that the only horror in Lovecraft's corpus was the author's "bad taste and bad art." Yet it is difficult to deny his enormous importance in a field of literature whose roots stretch back to the Gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe, the prescient nightmares of Mary Shelley, and the macabre mind of Edgar Allan Poe. Even the most respectable authors have taken advantage of the conventions these writers created and refined. "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James, after all, is a pretty good ghost story.

And indeed, Lovecraft's work has spawned (if I may use the word) any number of books, movies, TV shows, and even the odd (!) role-playing game.

There's something about being scared, and when Lovecraft was good, he was pretty darn good.

Yet Lovecraft's circle seems ready for ever more widening. On the Internet, it's possible to take a virtual tour of Lovecraft sites in his hometown of Providence, R.I., or to shop for a Cthulhu plush toy. You can also buy a bumper sticker: "Cthulhu for President--Don't settle for the lesser evil." Lovecraft almost never wrote a happy ending and he certainly isn't known for his sense of humor, but perhaps by now even he would appreciate that it's nice to have the last laugh.

And it seems when he's bad, he's even better.

No, dammit, we're not speaking Latin!

A fair amount of grammatical mythology has found its way into English. For example, "split infinitives".

For example, a sentence of mine might read: “It is better to awkwardly insert a word inside an infinitive than to mindlessly follow ancient rules of grammar.” In a sentence like that, this partner (a very good writer) would move the adverbs before the word “to,” so that the sentence read: “It is better awkwardly to insert a word inside an infinitive than mindlessly to follow ancient rules of grammar.”

I have read, in a fairly reputable source, that this ancient rule of grammar is rather more ancient than many think. It was adopted in English in an attempt to make it function more like Latin, presumably because Latin was considered a higher-class language. (In Latin, of course, it's impossible to split an infinitive without hyphenating it at the end of a line. Even then, no one would dream of putting extra words in the gap.)

English derives from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language tree, and one of the features it retains from German is the notion of a separable verb. For example, "anziehen" means "to put on" (well, "pull on") as in clothing. "Ich ziehe meine Schuhe an" means "I'm putting my shoes on."

Entomologies

Eugene Volokh discusses mythical etymologies that get e-mailed around, despite being debunked by Snopes. These include:

Where did the word "picnic" comes from? It was typical to have a picnic on a Friday evening in Oklahoma. The word was short for "pick a nigger" to lynch.

And:

...the claims that "nitty-gritty" originally referred to debris (including dead bodies) in the holds of slave ships, or that "handicapped" stems from handicapped people supposedly begging with their caps in their hands.

Eugene has some suggestions about such folk etymologies.

So do I. I suggest the more interesting word origin stories be called "entomologies" until they've been thoroughly debugged.

I before E, unless you mean E.G.

Eugene Volokh notes the existence of people who are unclear on the difference between i.e. and e.g. The first is the abbreviation of the Latin "id est", or "that is". The second is the abbreviation for "exempli gratia", meaning "for example". There is a little bit of overlap in their meaning, but nowhere enough to make the two interchangeable, in Latin or in English.

In a business writing course, we spent some time with a quiz on words and phrases that were often confused with each other, e.g., "infer" and "imply", "perimeter" and "parameter", s**t and Shinola. (I don't recall which word it was, but there was one where I turned out to be right, and the instructor was wrong – over the lunch break, I printed out the definition from onelook.com and brought it back with me.)

The advice we were given as a class was two-fold: 1) be aware that these words and phrases don't mean quite what you may think they do, and 2) if you do know what they mean, be aware that your reader may not, and you might want to consider not using them.

My first reaction: FEH!

My second reaction:

...continued in full post...

Still "Feh!"

It's a declaration of surrender to the mediocrity of your reader.

While it's possible to emit prose so turgid it obviates any semblance of penetrability, I don't see the point of abandoning perfectly good words – words that mean precisely what you want to say (not just approximately), merely because someone in your audience might have to get his lazy rear end to a dictionary.

Many years ago, I read an article on how to build your vocabulary. It discussed the notion of "threshold words". These were words that you encountered on occasion in your day-to-day reading, but whose meaning you didn't fully know. You were encouraged to look those words up in the dictionary, and possibly explore any synonyms that might be listed.

You would emerge with a clear understanding of the word, and it would be a word you actually had a use for on a regular basis.

It seems to me this can work in reverse, as well.

If you make a point of abandoning words because they are "threshold words" for too many people, you will wind up shrinking your vocabulary until you are speaking and writing something more reminiscent of Newspeak than English.

Once again, FEH!

No rhyme for orange?

Mark Steyn notes the following thought for the day, taken from a post on the Democratic Underground: "Reality sucks. That's the problem. We want a new reality."

Jesse Jackson and his groupies marched in protest outside Congress while the electoral votes were being tallied. They, too, wanted a different reality.

Steyn does miss a point, though, when discussing the "Rhymin' Reverend".

Now on the one hand it's very brave for the Rhymin' Reverend to lead an orange protest. There is no rhyme for the word "orange." Irving Berlin tried and the best he could manage was "door-hinge,"...

At the risk of waxing pedantic, it turns out that the botanical term for a capsule that holds spores until they're ripe is called a "sporange".

I will not attempt to write a compelling jingle rhyming "orange" with "sporange".

Declining English grammar – nailed by Chomsky

I'm sure you've noticed the decline in English usage in society. Even people who communicate for a living don't seem to know, for example, that it's one criterion, and more than one two or more criteria. Making sure the subject and the verb agreed with each other in number used to be automatic. Nowadays, it's depressingly common to read or hear of one person doing something with "their" possessions. [Oops. Edited 12/19.]

In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky developed a theory of transformative-generative grammar (TG) to deal with the "deep meaning" of English sentences.

English is perfectly capable of generating ambiguous sentences, such as "Visiting relatives can be boring." TG can elucidate the deep meaning of such sentences, teasing out the difference between "Relatives who visit can be boring" and "Going to visit relatives can induce boredom". (Another example, two sentences with identical structure but very different deep structure: "Alice is easy to please" / "Alice is eager to please" / Proper-noun, copula, adjective, verb infinitive. The two sentences are exactly opposite in terms of who is the recipient of the action in the infinitive phrase.)

TG is a very powerful and useful theory, and became the standard way of diagramming sentences in linguistics. Unfortunately, it was adopted into grade school curricula, and attempts were made to have students learn it instead of traditional grammar.

Unfortunately, TG was developed as a tool for understanding grammar, not for teaching it. The effect of trying to teach TG was like trying to have students learn to read whole words at once before they had mastered phonics, or learn number theory before they had learned basic arithmatic. Students come away with a knowledge base that doesn't relate to anything they know, and not knowing the basic material they need to relate to what they were actually taught.

In the 60s and 70s, students still had teachers who had mastered grammar. Now, the next generation of teachers never learned the stuff, and have long forgotten the TG they did learn. The blind lead the blind, and the teaching of English has fallen into the ditch.

Proper punctuation

Question: When you have a list of items separated by commas, should you put a comma between the last two items, even though they're already separated by the word "and"?

In other words, should you write "Item one, item two, and item three" or "Item one, item two and item three"?

One sentence I just read which illustrates the need for that last comma is,

I want to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

The Gregg Reference Manual agrees that the comma before the word "and" is necessary. It seems there was a court case where the division of an estate hinged upon that comma. The will stated the estate was to be divided equally among child one, child two and child three."

The judge ruled that the commas divided the object of the sentence into boxes, and each box would receive half the inheritance. Child one got half, and child two and child three got to split the remaining half between them.

Someone like Judge Ooka might have checked whether that was what the deceased had intended by stationing people at his grave to listen for the sound of someone rolling over at the moment the judgment was read.