Oh gosh. Hold on a sec and let me catch my breath.
Okay, author J.A. Konrath wrote a post on (among other things) maintaining the joy of creating without fussing over commercialism or perfectionism, and he ended with a challenge to create an entire book in just 8 hours.
That’s the entire book project. Writing, revising, formatting, creating a cover, and publishing. Complete.
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.
I found this quote while flipping through an older book, in a section on electronic publishing:
“…Will [electronic publishing] ever be more than an intriguing fringe for a literary avant garde and those who just can’t make it in traditional publishing?”
A while back I wrote a humorous post about goals which would let me know I’d “made it” (whatever that means) in my writing career. Since then I’ve passed some pretty impressive personal milestones, and while I wrote that post primarily for my fiction writing, it would be wholly ungrateful of me not to acknowledge the great things which have come my way thus far in my non-fiction work as well.
Sometimes we achieve goals we didn’t even mean to set, and it’s good to find the joys of these surprise achievements. So here are some awesome things which have really happened, some of which I hadn’t even thought of as goals until I was delighted by them.
I remember laughing when Patrick Rothfuss confessed to book-signing performance anxiety. (I suspect he’s rather over that by now, by simple necessity.) I hadn’t ever practiced my autograph, either. But I did read Pat’s final word on the subject:
Christmas is one of my favorite holidays — but it wasn’t exactly popular during Heian and Kamakura eras in Japan, for obvious reasons. So here on the blog we’re going to celebrate Twelve Days of Kitsune, and each post we’ll discover a new folk tale, period foods, or…
I read that December’s shopping will determine whether 2012 is in fact the year ebooks edge out physical books, or if that will happen in 2013. Regardless, it’s coming soon.
So I just got an email notifying me of my first Kitsune-Tsuki royalties. So of course I had to tweet about it.
First KITSUNE-TSUKI royalties arrived. There's more than one digit before decimal point. Look, I have totally justified my writerly stuffs.
— Laura VanArendonk Baugh (@Laura_VAB) October 24, 2012
Of course, I knew that I wasn’t putting out Kitsune-Tsuki for money. That’s good, because all single-digit humor aside, percentages on a 99¢ ebook ($4.99 in paperback) are not exactly going to pay for a trip to a warmer climate.
Okay, I am pretty equal-opportunity when it comes to paper books and ebooks. I have minor preferences — I like paper books for plane trips (no obligatory power-down!) and ebooks for reference material (I have no guilt highlighting and annotating a ebook, while defacing a paper book even in the name of education feels wrong) — but I feel fairly egalitarian about the whole thing.
I can flip through a paper book in a store and get my own free sample; I can’t with an ebook. Both types, however, offer (or suffer from) electronic sampling. Amazon automatically provides peeks of a book’s first 10%, while other sites allow the publisher to set a sample (my Smashwords account is set to show at least 20%, for example). Publishers (and self-publishing authors) need to consider this when laying out their books.
