Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
M. J. Rose is one of the best known success stories in e-book publishing.
 
It all started several years ago with her book "Lip Service," which she
published online. After lots of hard work promoting and selling the book,
"Lip Service" was published by PocketBooks.
 
Using her experience in ePublishing, M. J. co-authored (with Angela Adair-
Hoy) another book, "How to Publish and Promote Online."

What's really interesting about that is that when "Lip Service" was
published, M.J. Rose was interviewed right here in inkwell.vue, and now
that her epublishing experience led to the writing of a second book, we
are delighted to have her with us again!
 
Her latest book "In Fidelity" is in print and winning raves. Kirkus called
it "a well crafted study of infidelity... fast paced... and altogether
satisfying."  

See www.mjrose.com for more these books and what else she is up to!
 
We'll be holding a slightly schizophrenic interview with Melisse, with Mark
Binder asking her questions about electronic publishing and Joe Flower
asking questions about "In Fidelity." (mostly - at least that's the plan.)
 
Mark Binder is an author and storyteller. His novel "The Brothers
Schlemiel" is being serialized in print and via email
subscription.(http://www.chelmtales.com) He is proud of the fact that The
Brothers beat Stephen King's serialized e-novel. Mark is also co-host of
the WELL's Macintosh conference.

Joe Flower is an author, speaker and consultant on the subject of creating
change.  He is also a futurist, primarily in the area of healthcare.  He
writes, speaks, and consults about the future and how to build a better
one.  In addition to authoring or co-authoring several books including
_China's Futures_ and _Age Wave_, he is also a longtime WELL member and
co-host of the WELL's Writers Conference.  You can read more about Joe and
his accomplishments on his Web page, ImagineWhatIf.com.

Now, please join me in welcoming Melisse, Mark and Joe to inkwell.vue!
 
  

    

Hi y'all.

Let me get the ball rolling by asking a fairly difficult question...

Melisse, what's the difference for you as an author between the
electronically published work and the printed versions?
  

    
It is a very complicated question - and perhaps not for the reasons
one would imagine.

Right now the print versions of my books are identical to the
electronic versions - except in my non fiction book where the links are
live in the electronic version.

In the future I don't imagine the two versions will be as similar. As
we progress into electronic books, we will begin to play with more and
more multi media to enhance our messages - or at least I plan to. 

For anyone interested in what we can do even now - and what will
become more commonplace  once the average reader has the right device
and enough bandwith to enjoy the experience -  go visit
www.nightkitchen.com and play with a TK3 book. Or go to
www.livereads.com and download one of their free ebooks and see what
they are doing to make ebooks speical and value enhanced.

But specifically to answer your question in the present. 

The biggest difference is the perception. 

There is a literary snobism still in place that e authors are not real
authors. 

Elecrtronic books still don't get much respect. And I'm saying that as
an author who is both in print and in e.

 I still meet people who hear that I am published electronically - and
don't wait to find out that I am also published tradtionally in print
- and literally walk away shaking their heads. 

One is not a real author even in 2001 - many people feel - unless one
is published in print by a traditonal press. And that's a shame. 

But we've come along way in just two years and I am sure that in two
more this attidude will be even less prevelant.

I believe that just as there are hardcover books, trade paperback
books, mass market paperback books and audio books there are ebooks.
And that some books will even bee more interesting in the e format.
  

    
Good to talk to you here, Melisse. This e-book thing is fascinating. There
are technological advances now that within a few years are likely to give
us e-books that have the look and feel of traditional books - that is,
made of pages that look and feel more or less like traditional paper, yet
are actually electronic displays, capable of displaying anything, and of
changing in an instant.

What do you think this will do to the advance of e-books?
  

    
Hi Joe. Nice to chat with you too.

I've seen some of the prototypes for all those "new fangled"
inventions. They are amazing and it will be fascinating to see which
makes it to market first and who the adopters are.  

But the bottom line on all of this ebook business is this:

Once the devices are as good quality a reading experience,
as cheap a reading experience,as simple a reading experience as a book
- then we will have various versions of devices to read books on and
people wll really read them.

As exciting as all this is - the basic book is still really a pretty
marvelous invention that doesn't cost all that much and is very
portable.  RIght now very few people are loving the reading experiences
of ebooks.  

Most people who are reading ebooks are reading them on Palm Pilots or
Laptops. The dedicated reading devices are just not catching on. 
  

    

I agree. Paying $300 for the ability to read something at a lower resolution
is one of the major drawbacks currently.

As an author interested in self-publishing, though, I find that the biggest
drawback is in terms of form -- what form do you put your manuscript in in
order to publish it?

Do you use PDF? (Adobe's Portable Data Format) do you use something else for
the Palm OS? And you can't even get at the Gemstar Ebook format anymore....

What kind of suggestions do you have for aspiring e-writers?
  

    
Just use Adobe PDF, and don't worry about encryption. Use ebooks as
marketing toos for now - use them to advertsise your work as a
writer.Give them away free.

Even the bestsellers are selling less than a 1000 ebooks a month - or
sometimes a quater - often a year. Its not about money now - its about
using ebooks as browsing tools to seel the print book or the Print on
demad books.
  

    
I'm not sure I follow you.

One of the problems I had with "The Brothers Schlemiel" was that the
people who didn't pay for their subscriptions stopped reading. The
people who did pay really enjoyed it. I know it sounds self-serving,
but it seems to me that when you, as the reader, buy something, you own
it in a different way than getting it for free. 

The problem with e-books is the expectation that it's free.

So, how does it generate the other sales?
  

    
Well in your case - you aren't selling a print version - which I don't
agree with as a strategy.  And I think paying for an email serial also
is a complicated venture.

Why don't you tell me all the specifics of what you tried and what
happened - and what your goal was?

But  in general -  I don't think that giving away a free ebook lessens
the value of the story or of the print book any more than I think free
sites have less percieved value than paying sites

. I don't value Salon less than the Well because Salon is free and I
pay ten dollars a month for the Well.

I think that people still prefer paper books to ebooks and that given
an ebook as a browsing tool they will stop reading it at a certain
point and buy the print book if they are given this option.

Serveral people and companies have been experimenting with this and
having great results.

Livereads.com found this happened with Orpheus Emerged. They onlly
sold a few hundred ebooks but sold thousands and thousands of print
books.

Seth Godin gave away his ebook free for six weeks and then make the
hardcover available for $40 for onlly a 180 page book and sold over
35,,000 hardcovers in less than three weeks. 

The ebook was the only marketing he did for the print book.

Likewise with Doug Clegg - a horror writer - a Bram Stoker winner. He
gave away his ebook for free in an email serial. And then watched his
print sales soar. In a year and a half - he gave away two different
ebooks online - and his print sales moved from 10,000 copies per print
book to over 100,000 print copies per book. 

No other marketing or advertising.

I can go on. But why don't you tell me what you wanted from your
serial and what happened. 
  

    
So the e-book, for these two authors, at least, becomes a teaser for the
print version. I can see that, especially for the kind of book you would
refer to again - say, a non-fiction book in a field that you care
about. At this stage, the print book is still a lot more convenient to
have on the shelf. If it was a useful book, I would want both versions.
  

    
Wow. I'm blown away by those stories....

What I had hoped for was a huge number of subscriptions to the serial,
which would help support me while I wrote it. I got a bunch -- but not
a whole lot. As you said, it's difficult to convince people to pay for
an email serial.

One of my biggest questions/concerns about ebook sales is how much
time you actually spend marketing versus how much time you spend
working on the book.

How much time did you spend networking and doing those things?
  

    
Well Mark - about your serial -  its better to do a paying email
serial after you are a bestselling  author. The form itself is so
unusal that a newish author with a new form is double the sales work.  

Doug Clegg - see above - gave his email serial out for free and he'd
had 10 novels already published. I bet if you'd been selling a pod
version of the book at the same time a number of people reading the
serial would have bought the book.

As to marketing/writing.

When I first started all this in '98 I spent much more time marketing
than writing. In fact I didn't write for a year. But now I spend much
more time writing. 

I have the marketing down to a science - lists of people to contact
via email when something new is coming out - lists of websites to have
review copies sent to - lists of special folk who get automatic free
copies of my new novels. 

I think that it should take an author a few months to really do their
research and build up a web presence and then if you are organized the
maitenance is not terribly time consuming.

I'd say these days I spend about five hours a week - or one afternoon
- devoted to marketing and the rest of my time split between being a
journalist and a novelist.

 
  

    
So you still market yourself now that your novels come out from a major
publisher?
  

    
Yeah... I still do. 

As much as I wish this weren't true - but publishers don't quite have
enough time and manpower to do as much as is needed in terms of
publicity.

I was really lucky - Pocket bought table space for In FIdelity - the
new novel - in both Borders and BN for two months. That is a really big
deal and I was very appreciative that I got that. But I've been doing
all kinds of online publicity. And imagine I always will for my books.

 
  

    
Maybe you could talk a little about the fiction books--was the process of
writing any different for you the second time around than the first? How did
the different themes (both books are about relationships of various kinds, I
realize) come to crystallize in each case in your mind? All at once, or over
the process of writing as exploration? (And how's In Fidelity doing?--but
that's marketing again, and I'm hoping you'll be talking some in here as a
writer, not only a writer/expert on various publishing issues.)
  

    
Oh bless you Jane. I do so want to talk about writing not marketing. 

The themes of my first novel - Lip Service - came to me all at once -
in a flurry of an idea over one full day. But the nuances of the book
and the full characterizations evolved slowly with each rewrite of the
book that I did. And I did many. 

 I think the book took me about sixteen months to write. And looking
back at it now - I wish I could still rewrite parts of it.

In Fidelity  - as an idea came to me more slowly - over weeks not
days. In one way it was easier to write becuase I was more at ease as a
writer - already having been pubished and knowning that 'PocketBooks
very much wanted to publish me again.

But I was also sometimes frozen as a writer becuase becuase LIp
Service had just come out and I was getting very polarizing reviews.
People either loved it or hated it and I was trying to ignore both the
good and the bad and not be unduly influenced by any of the comments as
I devolped the themes and characters in In Fidelity.

In Fidelity was more of an exploration for me as a writer. And I was
more willing to let the book and the characters lead me than I was with
Lip Service. I had the ideas of what I wanted to explore - of the
questions I was asking myself - and asking of my characters. But I
wasn't always sure what we were all going to discover or where we were
going to wind up.

And also there was this awful stuff going on in my life while I was
writing In Fidelity - and becuase of what was going on - how much of In
Fidelity  I wrote in a daze - to escape my reality.

My mom had died just the year before - and within days of starting to
figure out In Fidelity the man I live withalmost died  and then was
very ill for the next fourteen months.

And I just kept writing. 

Last summer, when I had  to read the finished proofread manuscript - 
I got phyically ill and could barely get through the first paragraph no
less the whole book. I was thrown back in time with each sentance to
all the hospital rooms and tenuous moments of that awful year when Doug
was first in critical condition, then on dialyisis and finally,
blessedly got a kidney transplant.

As to how In Fidelity is doing - it's doing well - and just went back
for a second printing.  The few places that did review it - The
Charlotte Austin Review, PW and Kirkus - and a some online places like
the Bookreporter and Bookbrowse - have really given it great reviews.
But the book is not doing as well as those few reviews would indicate
and that's becuase In Fidelity has had limited exposure becuase it was
a trade paperback original and unfortunately 99% of all review sources
only review hardcovers. So all the sales we have gotten have all been
word of mouth. Which is great. But not enough. (Is it ever enough?) 
  

    

Can you give us a little taste of "In Fidelity?" What's your favorite
passage?
  

    
Boy that's a tough one Mark. One passage out of over 300 pages. And
one that will make some sense... okay... it's from the third chapter of
the book - a memory sequence.

It was Friday, July 22nd.  My mother was in the front of the store and
my father and I were in the workshop. He was bent over his bench
setting a three-carat sapphire ring and I was cleaning an antique
amethyst and diamond necklace. The room smelled of coffee, wax and the
apple I had just finished. On the radio, a Frank Sinatra song ended and
the news came on.  Reaching out, my father turned down the sound.

Over the intercom we heard my mother said goodbye to a customer. A few
moments passed and then the front door chimes pealed again. I wasn’t
paying attention to the noises coming over the intercom until I noticed
my father pick up his head and listen more carefully.  I started to
ask him what was going on but he put his finger to his lips, took his
small pistol out of the top drawer of the workbench and stepped on the
silent alarm that was connected to the police station.  

When my father had installed that alarm a member of the police force
had taken us through a drill.  If the store was robbed, none of us was
supposed to put up a fight or argue, but rather, as slowly as we could,
gather up the jewelry and hand it over to the robber. 

"Concentrate on the fact that the police are on their way," my father
had told me when we’d practiced.  "Let them take whatever they want. We
are insured.  Nothing is worth risking your life for."

  "You know what I want and it’s not this gold shit," the robber’s
voice was tinny and mechanical coming through the intercom’s cheap
speaker but I heard every word.  I recognized the voice – it was Dan
Mallory.

"Here-- take these--" My mother was whimpering.

Where were the police? We’d entered another dimension where no time
passed.  The air did not circulate. The earth had stopped rotating. Was
it ten minutes, ten hours or ten days since my father had stepped on
the alarm?

"Stop--" my mother’s voice was twisted up as if she were in pain.  My
father and I rushed to the doorway. With his free hand, my father
shoved me back into the workshop where I fell against a table.  

"For God’s sake, stay here Jordan," he hissed and then stepped out
into the store.

My leg throbbing, I crawled to the doorway and stared out. 
A frozen tableau. Mary and Joseph and the three wise men around the
crèche at Christmas.  Tinker bell flying across the stage with Wendy,
Peter and Michael close behind.  JFK JR saluting his father’s flag
draped coffin. Movement locked in immovable permanence because of its
importance. To the world. To a nation.  To children. 

 This one was mine. Forever. My iconography.  The horror against which
all other horrors would be measured and come up short. Or so I
thought.

My mother was trying not to cry, not to breathe, not to exist, while
Mallory holding her, hiding behind her, pointed a gun to her temple.
Black metal against her cream skin. 

My father, his back to me, pointed his gun. "Dan, let her go. Take the
jewelry and let her go. Now."

"I don’t want the jewelry, I want my job back. I want Jordan back."
Mallory shouted.

The only thing louder than his voice was the sound of my heart
slamming against my rib cage. 

My mother, growing brave with my father in the room, pushed Mallory
away. His arm hit a tray of diamond, sapphire, emerald, and ruby rings
glittering on the counter. The bowl of deep red roses my mother had
delivered to the store every week, crashed to the floor. Glass
shattered, water spilled, one of the roses fell across Mallory’s shoe. 

Gun shots from different directions.

One bullet hit the wall behind my father and burst a glass display
case.  Another bullet – or was it that bullet ricocheting – hit the
mirror behind Mallory and a rain of my father’s reflections fell to the
floor.  Almost instantly it was followed by another gunshot but this
time it was my father himself who fell.  With my eyes, I followed his
body as it dropped, the longest drop to the deepest center of the
earth. When I looked up again Mallory was gone and my mother was on the
floor beside my father.  I ran to his side and  put my head on his
chest.

My mother was screaming but there was no way to judge the volume. It
was either the loudest or the softest scream I have ever heard.  My
father was gasping for breath as beneath him the rug slowly changed
color from pale gray to the deep dark red of the roses. 
 
I could hear his heart beating.  His blood was hot on my cheek, like
my own tears.  Using my hands I tried to stop the blood. I pressed
down. Hard, harder, I heard a bone break. A bone in my hand?  I found
out later I broke one of my father’s ribs trying to staunch his
bleeding.

But I could not do it. My hands were not big enough. The hole was too
deep. The bullet had gone right through his heart.  My father bled out
in front of me, under me, while I watched. I smelled fire and roses. 
Saw the stain growing, reaching towards my mother’s feet. She was
wearing bone pumps with black toes. Everywhere I looked the carpet was
red. (The next time I went into the store, the carpet had been removed.
 A whole section of parquet stained forever.)

 My mother was looking at me. She knew that her husband’s life had
leeched out of him. I had become her focus. 

Taking my face covered with my father’s blood in her hands and
repeating herself like a scratched record, she screamed: "You’ve been
shot, you’ve been shot, you’ve been shot..." There was so much of my
father’s blood on my body it had blinded her and she ran frantic
fingers down my face and my arms and my chest checking to see where I
had been injured.  

I knew I had not been shot but could not reach that part of my brain
where the words were.  

In the ambulance, my father on one stretcher, I on the other, the
paramedic told my mother it didn’t appear that I had been shot.  At the
hospital they confirmed what she already knew: her husband was dead,
her daughter was in shock but she had not been wounded. 

I have been wounded: I wanted to explain. But the file in my head
where the words were stored was still locked, missing, lost. I had been
wounded for the whole of my life.  But I did not say anything. In my
lap, I clutched my hands, still sticky with traces of my father’s
blood.

We were in a hallway of the emergency room. I was on a stretcher. An
IV needle was stuck in my arm, a bag of something clear dripping into
me. I noticed my hands are stained red. 
Slowly I lifted my right hand to my face and put my forefinger inside
my mouth where it was wet and warm and I sucked the stickiness off.  I
tasted something sweet and then salty – the salt from my own skin – the
sweet from my father’s blood.  One finger and then the next and then
the next, all licked cleaned but still not clean enough and my mother
said "Dear God, stop her." 
And then a male voice said, "You’re going to get a little sleepy now,
Jordan. Don’t fight it. Close your eyes."

I tried to tell him that I needed to finish cleaning my hands but I
still could not find the words. 
  

    
That's a kind of hard act to follow with a question, you know... But I will
comment on how it manages to be dramatic and cinematic but also deeply
kinesthetic--how it moves from sense to sense in the telling.
  

    
Oh Jane... thank you. Especially coming from you that mean a lot
beucase your poetry is rooted in the sense so often.

I have been told "the senses" are part of my voice - that one can very
vividly hear and see and smell and touch the world I present in my
books. 

Having a voice is something that matters to me  - even though I can
neither recognize it or understand much about it.

 It is like not being able to smell the perfume when you are the one
wearing it.

 But it greatly pleases me when readers respond to.

Jane - I have a question for you. I used one of your poems as the
epigram to In Fidelity. If you've read the book yet - I was curious to
your reaction.
  

    

And I was curious about your statement earlier, that 

> unfortunately 99% of all review sources
>  only review hardcovers

Really?  I had no idea.  I wonder why that is?
  

    
I've been told its basically because:

The average newspaper reviews only about 100- 152 books a year - and
the average magazine about the same amount - but there are over 70,000
books are published a year. 

That average review source - say the Washington Post - gets over
20,000 books sent to them every year. So they have to draw the line
somewhere. The first line that gets drawn is the hardcover and the
paperback line. Even trade paperbacks get thrown out. 

According to the publicist I know - the reviewers assisants don't ever
read the press releases that come with the trade paperbacks or mass
market paperback..

Then amoung the hardcovers- there's a whole heirarcy - who knows who -
what publicist is well liked- which one isn't etc. What publishers are
well respected - ie a Knopf book  has a 100 percent  chance of being 
reviewed whereas a PocketBook book only has a twenty five percent
chance. 

Now with Publishers Weekly and Kirkus its different - but these aren't
consumer publications - they are for the trade. So PW reviews about
6000 books a year - as does Kirkus and they can let in a few more
paperbacks - esp in the trade size. 
  

    
Email from S. Gulland:

MJ, thanks for the clarification. I've wondered how it worked. I read
elsewhere that you had to give some thought to the pros and cons of
publishing a trade paperback original (as opposed to a hardcover, followed
a year later by a paperback). One "con" is this difficulty getting
reviews. Will you go the trade paperback route next time?

I ask because I went the trade paperback route in the U.S., and it bugs me
that there aren't reviews! The numbers are good, I can't argue with that,
but I'm not sure what's more important, in the long run. Next time, I
think I'd prefer to go hardcover.
  

    

Thank you M.J.

I'd like to open this up to more questions from the outside world.

If you have a question for M.J., please feel free to email it to me
mailto:realfun@well.com
  

    
Sandra, 
If I have anything to say about it - Hardcover, hardcover, hardcover.
The reviews - even bad ones - get people to notice the book in the
store, to pick it up and browse it and to get interested.

Without the reviews we have - only the word of mouth we can generate -
and while its wonderful - its just not enough.
  

    
Email from Masha:

Melisse,

Can you talk a little about your web site, about how that developed,
how many 
hits you get and how much of an impact you think it has had on sales?

I'm encouraged to hear that, after a year at least, you managed to
whittle 
down the amount of time you had to spend on marketing.  Do you think
five 
hours per week, once you have your contacts in place, is about as low
as we 
can hope to go and still be marketing our books?

Thanks,

Masha