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When Self-Publishing Works: The Complete Writer

When Self-Publishing Works: The Complete Writer
*Free Reads*

The Complete Writer
Section VII: Publishing and Self-Publishing

 This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays.  You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

33

When Self-Publishing Makes Sense

The mines of the Amazon are liberally salted with fool’s gold. Your chance of striking it rich with the next best-seller as you make an end run around traditional publishers is right up there with winning a Powerball jackpot.

But there are a few good reasons to self-publish. Some will help you turn a dollar or two; others let you create a product with special significance for specific, targeted audiences. Let’s consider the possibilities.

First: The costs

Publishing on Amazon is free. You can create a Kindle book by posting a Word document formatted cleanly with Word’s “Styles” function. You can make any content available to anyone with a Kindle reader—and since you can download a Kindle app on almost any device, this means your market is anyone who owns a computer. You can set your price or even give it away, gratis, if you’re willing to fork over exclusive sales rights to Amazon.

Print-on-demand technology is not free, but it’s very cheap. It allows you to produce a professional-looking book in extremely small print runs—even one copy. Most PoD printers will ship books to addresses that you provide. With this approach, you can create a print book for a specific audience, order only as many copies as you need, and never worry about warehousing or shipping. Unless you’re an experienced publishing professional, you’ll need the help of a copyeditor and a graphic designer, but prices here are within reason, too.

So, what can this swell self-publishing technology do for you? What kinds of projects are we looking at?

Educate your business or professional practice’s clients

This is useful for doctors, lawyers, and any business whose customers benefit from understanding facts and processes.

During the Great Recession of 2008, a lawyer I met displayed a self-published guide to walking away from an underwater mortgage. He had it sitting on the receptionist’s counter where everyone who came into the office could peruse it. Part of his practice entailed helping people to get out from under dead-weight loans.

The Mayo Clinic, among other medical groups, publishes a book-length guide for patients with breast cancer.

A chiropractor who has developed a specialty in treating fibromyalgia distributes his book to patients, complete with charts and diet logs to help them keep track of their treatment and its results. He also takes the book to conferences to share with other health workers.

Build credibility for your business

Most people still hold “authors” in awe, believing that anyone who writes a book must be an expert.

A friend and former university colleague started a corporate consulting business that thrived. Early on, she published a book that outlined the major principles of her specialty. Last I saw of her, she met me for lunch at an expensive restaurant,  wearing an outfit worth more than my net worth.

Market your business

Because of that “gee-whiz” factor, a book not only can build credibility but helps spread the word about what you do. My chiropractor client, for example, takes his books to regional and national conferences, where he sells or gives them away to potential clients and colleagues.

Another friend, writing before the Amazon era, created a book that complemented her consultancy, which did in-house employee training programs. Her book, which (admittedly) appeared through a mainline publishing house, added luster to her image and gave her something to distribute to prospective clients and their workers. She did exceptionally well in that line of work.

Raise funds for clubs and nonprofits

Who among us has not seen (or bought!) a Junior League or church cookbook? For groups with active memberships or effective communications, a book relevant to the group’s mission can bring in some nice charitable contributions. These may be inspirational books, how-to books, or books about the group’s history and accomplishments.

Record your family’s history and genealogy

A professionally produced and printed paperback is a much better way to collect and share a family’s history than a big pile of papers in someone’s closet. You can create such a book and print as many or as few as are needed to give them to every member of the family. If you don’t have a lot of graphs and images, you can (in theory) produce it in e-book format for family members around the world to download economically, or even for free.

For family genealogists, a big advantage to self-publishing technology is that you can easily change or add to the existing content. All you have to do is edit the formatted copy, add or delete what you like, and re-upload.

Write and share your memoirs.

One of my clients has led an interesting life as an international banker. Among several books he’s writing is a memoir that he wishes to hand down to his children and grandchildren. This is a brilliant use of self-publishing technology. The result was a professionally produced, bound book that can be shared with his adult children and friends and also saved for the coming generations. He printed about fifty copies for friends and family.

Commemorate large family reunions

Write up the events and experiences when a large family comes together for a reunion. One strategy might be to ask family members to write anecdotes or short memoirs. Another could be to have one person do the reporting and collect photographs.

On a vacation in Bermuda, I stayed in a hotel that had mostly been taken over by a very large African-American family who were gathering there for a family reunion. It was quite a posh and fun affair. Any event like that would lend itself to a book commemorating the reunion and celebrating the family’s history.

Write a community or town history

My city has several historic neighborhoods populated by active community advocates who love their districts’ history and charm. These areas are often besieged by developers and political interests who would sacrifice them for a profit. A book describing a neighborhood’s historical importance and unique aspects can help preserve it, interest others in living there or protecting it, and enhance property values.

Most small towns have town archives or a museum housing historical materials. These lend themselves to the writing of book-length histories. If you’re a history buff, gathering and interpreting these materials is a fun and rewarding project. Produced as a well-edited and professionally designed book, it’s a great contribution to the community.

Compile a business history

Some years ago, a friend of mine was commissioned by a large corporation to write the company’s history. It was a big job, for the company had been in business for many decades. The result was useful for the company’s upper management, a nice morale-builder for employees, and all-around good public relations in the community.

Monetize your blog

If you have a blog with a specific theme, collecting posts or—preferably—rewriting posts to create a book-length work and then adding extra content to enhance value can help drive readers to your site. Sales of the book can also increase the site’s profitability. Budgeting in the Fun Stuff blogger Crystal Stemberger, for example, sells books on budgeting and on monetizing websites.

Enhance your online or face-to-face course

Many people offer informal online courses to any and all comers. Journalist and personal-finance blogger Donna Freedman, for example, has an online course on writing successful copy for the Web. Providing a free-standing text or workbook—electronic or print—adds value to your course and gives participants a permanent reminder of their experience.

Community colleges often allow people with expertise or experience to present special community-service courses, usually for little or no college credit. This is also a good venue in which to sell books you’ve written and self-published, assuming they’re relevant to the subject. You may not be permitted to require students to buy them as textbooks, but nothing can prevent you from drawing them to students’ attention.

You get the idea. No doubt there are many other possibilities. The point is, an ambition to publish a best-seller is not the only reason to create a book. Nor is profit the only motive: contribution to community or family is as good as the almighty dollar when it comes to writing and publishing.

Self-Publishing: REALLY? The Complete Writer *Free Reads*

The Complete Writer

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays.  You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

Section VII: Publishing and Self-Publishing

32

Self-Publishing: Really?

Know how to get a small fortune?

Start with a large fortune and publish a book.

(Cue laugh track)

 That old chestnut wouldn’t be so funny if it weren’t so true. As a practical matter, most people make nothing on self-published books. They soon find their magnum opus interests no one but themselves, and the whole project turns into an expensive hobby.

At this writing, I have a pricey Facebook Ads campaign plus several other efforts under way, by way of peddling one of the forty-eight books and bookoids my two imprints have put online at Amazon. It’s been going on for several months. So far we’ve sold a few copies of the cookbook in Kindle—and far more of them in hard-copy through face-to-face marketing—three copies of Slave Labor, an occasional copy here or there of the erotic shorties. And we have sold a few copies of the beloved novel. Not for lack of trying: serial versions of the thing have earned five-star reviews.

The books that do sell with a little regularity—the “racy books” published through Camptown Races Press—do not even come within shouting distance of breaking even on ad investment.

The cookbook sold smartly to a group of friends but in the wide world is barely noticeable on Amazon.

Yesterday as I took a break from hour after hour after crushing, unpaid hour of recovering a 325-page book our software had corrupted for reasons unknown, I reflected on the causes for this.

Books have never been easy to sell.

Unless you have a platform from which to market them—a business with a broad reputation or one that does something relevant to the book’s subject matter—you will have to hustle madly to bring your book to anyone’s attention. That has ever been so, yea verily since long before the Amazon disruption.

Digital publishing amplifies that difficulty

Amazon has made the marketing challenge infinitely more difficult. Without literary agents and publishing houses as gatekeepers, the market is now flooded with dreck and chaff. Not just flooded: we’re talkin’ tsunami here.

Readers know that about 80 to 90 percent of books offered on Amazon and waypoints are junk or self-serving marketing tools. They also know, if they’re at all savvy, that they can acquire most of the stuff—and even some readable books—for free. So of course they’re not about to pay you enough to cover your time and skills. Not when they think they shouldn’t have to pay you anything at all.

So, the nature of the market has changed: not for the better, where people who write for a living are concerned.

A fly-by-night enterprise from the git-go

Then we have the issues inherent to self-publishing that have always worked against independent writers: publishing a book or periodical and getting people to buy it requires a full staff of workers. It’s not something one little person working alone is likely to succeed with.

Every time I’ve published a book through a mainline publishing house—and I’ve published three of them, not counting the ones I’ve worked on for my employers or the ones my business has packaged for other publishers—I’ve worked with an acquisitions editor, a copyeditor, a layout artist, a proofreader, a marketer, and various secretaries and admins.

The first magazine I worked for, which published the occasional easy-to-market book, had five editors, three graphic designers, four or five ad space sales staff, and a publisher whose job was to market the publication. The next magazine had three high-powered editors, a fact-checker, a photo editor, four graphic artists, a production director, and a marketing department. It also had a book division with its own editor and designers.

To make a self-published book fly, you need to do the work of all those specialists.

And you’re not a specialist. If you are, it’s as a writer, not as an artist, a marketer, a sales rep, an acquisitions editor, a production manager, a copyeditor, or a proofreader.

The likely upshot

Because you’re an amateur at seven in eight of the jobs that need to be done to write, produce, and sell a book, your chances of success are almost nil. But even if you were expert in all those lines of work, you’re only one person: there’s no way you can do the work of eight people and do it well.

That’s why you’re better off trying to sell your book idea or manuscript to a mainstream publisher. And it’s why, if you have a lot of money to start with and are willing to subsidize your book by hiring the talent needed to put it together and sell it, self-publishing means you’re likely to end up with a lot less money.

All is not irredeemable gloom and doom, though. In fact, there are some good reasons to self-publish. In some circumstances, self-publishing can be the most reasonable, most economical, and most successful way to reach a targeted, interested audience. Stay tuned for chapter 33 to learn when and why to publish your own book.

Law, Conscience, and the Writer: The Complete Writer *FREE READS*

The Complete Writer
Part VI. Ethics and Legality: Rights, Obligations, and Risks

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. To see all the chapters published so far, visit the *FREE READ* page for The Complete Writer. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

31

Libel & Defamation

Insured or no, writers and publishers rightly try to avoid accusations of libel.

The Associated Press Libel Manual defines libel as “injury to reputation.” It says, “Words, pictures, or cartoons that expose a person to public hatred, shame, disgrace, or ridicule, or induce an ill opinion of a person are libelous.” As the same guide points out, this extends beyond the obvious: the New York Times, for example, was threatened with a lawsuit over its matrimonial column after practical jokers announced the engagement of two people who hated each other.

Omitting the name of a person you are defaming may not protect you. If a story’s details identify, say, a rumored drug dealer who has not been arrested and charged, that person may have a case against the writer. Quoting someone else’s defamatory remarks accurately is also not protected.

There are two main defenses against libel:

  1. Provable truth. To succeed with this defense, you must show that the defamatory statement is substantially correct.
  2. Privilege. This legal concept holds that some people, under some circumstances, may make false, malicious, or damaging statements without fear of prosecution.

There are two kinds of privilege:

  1. Absolute privilege. It applies to legislative, legal, and official proceedings, and to the contents of most public records. A legislator, for example, may make a statement on the Congressional floor that outside those halls would be libelous. A criminal prosecutor may accuse a defendant of acts and motives in court and may phrase the accusation in terms that would be actionable if they were uttered outside the courtroom. The theory behind absolute privilege holds that airing certain statements and accusations serves the public interest.
  2. Qualified privilege. This covers the press. It means you can report a speaker’s statements made under absolute privilege—if your report is fair and accurate, and if the statements really are privileged.

Remember, however, that public officials enjoy absolute privilege only when they are speaking in official proceedings. Statements made before a public gathering of a private group, such as the Rotary Club or Soroptimists, are not privileged. Also, legal briefs, complaints, or other papers are unprotected until they are filed in court.

You can lose qualified privilege by inaccurate reporting or by publishing statements with malice or reckless disregard of their truth or falsehood. Errors in reporting privileged statements may be taken as evidence of malice.

Fair Comment

Commentary and criticism on matters of public interest, such as art exhibits, literary works, performances, architecture, athletic events, and the like, are protected by the defense of fair comment. Even severe criticism, as long as it is not written maliciously, is acceptable. Any facts stated must be accurate, and commentary must be pertinent. You may blast an actor’s inept stage depiction of a philandering husband, for example, but you may not observe that his performance is disappointing compared to his fabled off- stage exploits.

Ethical Behavior

Ethics has to do with how we treat the people we write about and the people we work with. Ethical behavior extends beyond mere good will or malice; it also takes in vaguer issues of propriety and intent. Sometimes it concerns the way things seem as much as the way they really are.

To behave in an ethical manner means to conduct oneself in a way that never compromises one’s own or one’s employer’s honesty or credibility. If you have taken many journalism courses, you have undoubtedly heard several lectures on ethics. But it is such an urgent subject—one too often underplayed—that we should take some time here to review the industry’s standards.

Codes of ethics

The Society of Professional Journalists

Let’s begin with the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. SPJ is the premier trade group for journalists, whether they work for newspapers or magazines. This version, which appears to be the most recent, is posted at the SPJ website.

Under the First Amendment, the document is not legally enforceable; it’s intended as a set of guidelines. Where I have anything to add, I will enter my comments in italic type.

Preamble

Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough. An ethical journalist acts with integrity.

The Society declares these four principles as the foundation of ethical journalism and encourages their use in its practice by all people in all media.

Seek Truth and Report It

Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.

Journalists should:

Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it. Use original sources whenever possible.

This should go without saying. In Chapter 17, we touched on the importance of checking and double-checking facts. If any statement or claim appears incendiary, outrageous, or in any way questionable, you should check it with another, independent source.

Remember that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy.

Provide context. Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story.

Gather, update and correct information throughout the life of a news story.

Be cautious when making promises, but keep the promises they make.

Identify sources clearly. The public is entitled to as much information as possible to judge the reliability and motivations of sources.

Attributions to “informed sources” and the like are highly suspect, and many editors will not accept them.

Consider sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Reserve anonymity for sources who may face danger, retribution or other harm, and have information that cannot be obtained elsewhere. Explain why anonymity was granted.

Assume that a person who will speak only off the record is giving you questionable and probably unreliable information. Some states do not provide immunity for reporters; in any event, an arrest or lawsuit based on something you printed that was said by an anonymous source puts you at risk of huge legal fees and even imprisonment. Newspaper reporters work for organizations that retain lawyers specializing in media issues, but their services do not extent to freelancers, who are not regarded as employees. As a freelance writer, reporter, or blogger, NEVER promise a source anonymity! If you can’t get the story without using material from a source who refuses to identify him- or herself, drop it. To do otherwise is the height of folly.

Diligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing.

When repeating any allegation about an individual, you are expected to interview that person and ask for a response to the claim. If you can’t reach the person, you should state, in your story, what you tried to do to reach him or her and the results of your effort. For example, “Repeated telephone calls to Oliver Boxankle were not returned.”

Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public.

Again, as a freelancer you have no legal protection if you engage in tactics like this. Do not—repeat, DO NOT—gather information “undercover” as a freelance writer or blogger.

Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable. Give voice to the voiceless.

Support the open and civil exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.

Recognize a special obligation to serve as watchdogs over public affairs and government. Seek to ensure that the public’s business is conducted in the open, and that public records are open to all.

Provide access to source material when it is relevant and appropriate.

Boldly tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience. Seek sources whose voices we seldom hear.

Avoid stereotyping. Journalists should examine the ways their values and experiences may shape their reporting.

Label advocacy and commentary.

Never deliberately distort facts or context, including visual information. Clearly label illustrations and re-enactments.

Never plagiarize. Always attribute.

This should go without saying, but it doesn’t always seem to register with reporters (or, apparently, with the wives of presidential candidates).

Never copy any passage from any print, video, audio, or online source without placing it in quotation marks and attributing it to its source. To do so violates the owner’s copyright (and so is illegal) and compromises your employer’s ethics as well as your own.

A form of plagiarism common among journalists consists of lifting quotes. The theory goes that a spoken word cannot be copyrighted. Therefore the parts of a story within quotation marks—i.e., the things a subject said aloud—are fair game.

Even if this rationalization were correct—which it is not—the practice smells. It’s lazy journalism. It’s stealing someone else’s work. By placing the speaker’s words in a new context, it may misrepresent what was said. And it often repeats misquotations.

Minimize Harm

Ethical journalism treats sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect.

Journalists should:

Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.

Another precept too often honored in the breach. A friend of mine once jumped a wall into the backyard of a private home to photograph a dead child who had drowned in a swimming pool. This behavior is a large contributing factor to the low regard that journalists enjoy in American culture. Do unto others . . .

Show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage. Use heightened sensitivity when dealing with juveniles, victims of sex crimes, and sources or subjects who are inexperienced or unable to give consent. Consider cultural differences in approach and treatment.

Reporters have a power way out of proportion to their numbers and wealth. A writer who has the public’s ear can ruin a person’s reputation, business, or private life with a single remark—whether or not that remark is true. To compound the danger, it is easy for writers particularly those who cover politics or crime, to grow self-righteous and arrogant.

Keep in mind that the subjects of your stories are not one-dimensional caricatures, not good guys and bad guys, not the great unwashed, but human beings. They have mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, children and grandparents. They must keep their jobs in order to live. When you prick them, they bleed.

Recognize that legal access to information differs from an ethical justification to publish or broadcast.

Realize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than public figures and others who seek power, influence or attention. Weigh the consequences of publishing or broadcasting personal information.

“Privacy” varies according to circumstances. The Associated Press Libel Manual has noted that the right of privacy is “based on the idea that a person has the right to be let alone, to live a private life free from publicity.” Then it adds, “When a person becomes involved in a news event, voluntarily or involuntarily, he forfeits the right to privacy. Similarly, a person somehow involved in a matter of legitimate public interest, even if not a bona fide spot news event, normally can be written about with safety.”

A woman in Steele County, Minnesota, witnessed an assault near her isolated rural home. Later the victim was found dead of stab wounds. Before a suspect was arrested, the Owatonna People’s Press reported the witness’s name, despite her request for anonymity. She protested to the Minnesota News Council that her life could have been endangered when the newspaper identified her while the killer was at large.

The majority of the council agreed that the woman’s fears were well founded and that, given the circumstances, the newspaper should have respected her privacy.

However, they added, reporters and editors are by no means bound to honor all witnesses’ requests for anonymity.

In a more obvious breach of compassion and taste, the Sacramento Bee interviewed eighteen-year-old Peter Vanos after his brother, pro basketball player Nick Vanos, died in an airplane crash. The young man’s college basketball coaches had asked that he be left alone while he was still in a state of grief and shock. But when Vanos was asked directly if he objected to an interview, he said no, so a reporter went ahead. During the exchange, the youth broke into tears. Family members and coaches complained that the newspaper had caused further anguish that affected the freshman student’s ability to cope with his loss. An ombudsman agreed that the interview invaded Vanos’s privacy.

Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity, even if others do.

Restrain yourself from reporting a detective’s detailed comments on a murdered woman’s life as a prostitute, for example. To illustrate a story on drug addicts who ignore the risk of acquiring AIDS through dirty needles, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a page one photo of a man shooting up. Readers called the lurid picture unduly graphic.

Morbid curiosity extends beyond crime and immorality. Any unnecessarily detailed look at misfortune that does not add to the reader’s understanding may be taken as bad taste. The Ann Arbor News once reported that firefighters found a dead man sitting on the toilet. Rescue workers at a building collapse in Bridgeport, Connecticut, had to hold up a blanket to shield a dead body from newspaper photographers; survivors complained that coverage of the story was ghoulish.

Balance a suspect’s right to a fair trial with the public’s right to know. Consider the implications of identifying criminal suspects before they face legal charges.

Consider the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Provide updated and more complete information as appropriate.

Act Independently

The highest and primary obligation of ethical journalism is to serve the public.

Journalists should:

Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts.

Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.

Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; do not pay for access to news. Identify content provided by outside sources, whether paid or not.

Deny favored treatment to advertisers, donors or any other special interests, and resist internal and external pressure to influence coverage.

Distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two. Prominently label sponsored content.

Be Accountable and Transparent

Ethical journalism means taking responsibility for one’s work and explaining one’s decisions to the public.

Journalists should:

Explain ethical choices and processes to audiences. Encourage a civil dialogue with the public about journalistic practices, coverage and news content.

Respond quickly to questions about accuracy, clarity and fairness.

Acknowledge mistakes and correct them promptly and prominently. Explain corrections and clarifications carefully and clearly.

Expose unethical conduct in journalism, including within their organizations.

Abide by the same high standards they expect of others.

Bloggers’ codes of conduct

Several have been promulgated. None of them seems very good. In 2007 Tim O’Reilly proposed seven principles of blogging ethics.[1]

Though he elaborates on his points, it’s pretty minimalist. Wikipedia summarizes them succinctly:

  1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
  2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
  3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
  4. Don’t feed the trolls.
  5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
  6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
  7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

I strongly recommend that, as a blog writer, you follow the SPJ code of conduct. A blogger engages in a kind of journalism, and so faces the same liabilities and should follow the same guidelines for common decency and ethical behavior.

And please: always keep in mind that as a freelance writer or an independent blogger, you do not enjoy the benefits provided for an employee of a corporation that has insurance, a corps of lawyers, and deep pockets.

This leaves you highly vulnerable to lawsuits and prosecution. Never forget that.

[1] Tim O’Reilly, “Call for a Blogger’s Code of Conduct,” March 31, 2007, O’Reilly Radar. http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/03/call-for-a-bloggers-code-of-co.html

Writers’ and Publishers’ Rights and Contracts: The Complete Writer *FREE READS*

The Complete Writer
Part VI. Ethics and Legality: Rights, Obligations, and Risks

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. To see all the chapters published so far, visit the *FREE READ* page for The Complete Writer. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

30
Rights and Contracts

The question beginning writers most often ask is “how do I copyright my work?”

Just put it on paper. Under the Copyright Act of 1976, your rights in a work take effect the minute you write it. You do not have to publish it or register it with the Copyright Office to receive protection. A work written after 1978 is protected for its author’s lifetime plus 50 years. A work written anonymously or under a pen name is protected for 100 years after the work’s creation or 75 years after publication, whichever is shorter. Works done for hire (about which we will say more below) receive the same 100-year protection, except the publisher, not the writer, owns the copyright.

What is “copyright”?

Copyright is a legal concept that gives you the right to reproduce your work; to prepare derivative works based on it; to sell, rent, lease, or lend the work; and to perform or display it publicly. Copyright permits you to recover damages from other people who do any of these without your permission.

A writer owns many kinds of rights to a work and may choose to sell part of the ownership, to lease the right to use the work, or to sell all the rights to it. The law’s purpose is to let you say how your work will be used and to guarantee that you will be paid for your efforts.

To be eligible for copyright, the work must be fixed in a tangible form: copiable with a machine or other device. Literary works; musical, dramatic, pantomime, and choreographic works that have been notated or recorded; pictures, photographs, and sculptures; motion pictures, videotapes, or other audiovisual works; and sound recordings are protected.

Intangible works, such as improvised speeches, dances, or performances not written or recorded, are not covered by copyright. Nor are ideas, titles, names, short phrases, slogans, lists, and the like.

Note that copyright covers the creation, not its physical form. In other words, someone could buy a famous writer’s manuscript for its value to collectors, but owning the paper and ink would not confer the right to reproduce the story.

Although you don’t have to register your work to receive protection, registration with the U.S. Copyright Office does give you some advantages. Your work must be officially registered before you can sue someone for infringement, and if you registered the work after the offense took place, you can sue only for actual damages—that is, for the income or other benefits you lost as a result of the theft. If you had already registered your copyright, you would be permitted to sue for statutory damages (a punitive award) or recover the costs of attorneys’ fees. There is, however, a ninety-day grace period following the date of publication. If you register within this period, you can sue for statutory damages, actual damages, and attorneys’ fees, even if the infringement took place before the registration.

As a practical matter, it’s not worth registering every magazine article you send out. Normally, you have a contract or letter of agreement that spells out the rights you are selling before you present a work to a publisher. But if you have some good reason to believe someone might steal your work, register it. Fill out a form (available at reduced cost online) from the Register of Copyrights, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20559 or at the copyright office’s website:

https://www.copyright.gov/registration/

If you wish to retain copyright to an article that is to be published in an uncopyrighted collective work (such as, for example, a club’s cookbook), insist that your copyright notice be printed on the article’s opening page. A copyright notice consists of the symbol ©, the word “copyright, or the abbreviation “copr.,” followed by the year the work was written and the owner’s name. This notice must appear on works that you send to the copyright office for registration, and anything that is printed or distributed in an unrestricted way should have a copyright notice on it.

Magazines and newspapers normally take the responsibility for registering all the work that appears in each issue. The copyright notice appears with each number, usually near the front of the publication.

The United States is a signatory to the Berne Copyright Convention, a multinational treaty that covers copyright questions. According to this international law, you don’t have to put a notice on your published work for it to be protected in the countries that have signed the treaty. However, because under U.S. law you may not collect statutory damages and attorneys’ fees unless the notice was on the work, you should be sure a copyright notice appears with all your published works.

As the owner of a copyright, you can sell certain parts of your rights to a work. Let’s consider a few.

First serial rights. The word “serial” here refers to periodicals—works that come out “serially” or in a continuing manner. That is, the term means “magazines or newspapers,” not “installments.”

When you sell “first serial rights,” you offer a magazine the right to be the first periodical to publish your article, poem, or story. The remaining rights belong to you. You retain the right to sell the same, unaltered work to another periodical after the story appears in the first publication, and to be paid should the original buyer reprint it.

Logically enough, then, you may also sell second serial or reprint rights. This allows a publisher to reprint a piece that has already appeared somewhere else.

Sale of one-time rights promises nothing about whether the buyer is the first to publish your work. It simply grants permission to publish the piece once.

First North American rights guarantee that the buyer is the first in North America to publish the work. First U.S. rights are restricted to the United States.

Foreign serial rights cover periodicals published in countries outside the United States. If you have sold only first U.S. rights, you are free to resell your story abroad.

Simultaneous rights allow two or more periodicals to publish something at once. The term is used by writers who self-syndicate articles by sending the same work to many different newspapers across the country at once. Make sure your editor understands this by typing “simultaneous submission” in an upper corner of your first manuscript page.

Syndication rights permit syndicators to sell works to several publications at once, taking a commission on sales and passing the rest to the author.

Subsidiary rights are additional rights, usually listed in book contracts. They include dramatic, motion picture, translation, foreign, and various serial rights.

Are Internet sites copyrighted?

You bet. Just because the reproducible medium in which the work is published happens to be digital does not negate the author’s rights in the work.

What is the reference to “Creative Commons” seen on Wikipedia? Doesn’t that give anyone the right to use the work as they please?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization dedicated to enlarging the range of creative works that people can build upon and share. Through Creative Commons, writers and artists can obtain any of several licenses that specify what rights they waive and what rights they retain. A notice of a Creative Commons license does not mean others can grab the work and do anything they please with it; you must examine the license and discover what rights are available before reusing the author’s or artist’s work.

What is public domain?

“Public domain” means the work is not covered by copyright. This may occur because the copyright has expired (see above), because its author has explicitly placed it in the public domain, or because it was produced by a government entity. Works in the public domain may be reproduced without permission.

Contracts

An experienced editor, freelancing between jobs, took a job as a consulting editor to start up a regional magazine. Once the magazine was running, he hired a permanent editor and managing editor and then stepped into the background.

Shortly afterward, the new editor called and explained that a story had fallen through and he needed 2,000 words to fill the hole—fast.

Promised a healthy fee, the consultant raced around the city tracking down and interviewing people, spent a weekend cranking out the desired 2,000 words, and dropped the piece on the editor’s desk Monday morning.

A week later, he had heard not so much as “thanks, we’ll be in touch.” So he called and asked after the story.

It was all right, said the young editor. But it was more copy than they needed, and so they had to cut it to fit their space. And by the way, since they couldn’t use the 2,000 words they had asked for, they would pay him only for what they could use, at an arbitrary per-word rate.

“I should have had a contract,” mourned the freelance, “but my god! I’m the consulting editor!”

There is no such thing as a gentleman’s agreement in this business.

You should always have a contract before you write a story, because it protects you as well as the publisher. It spells out what is expected of you and what you can expect from the publisher, says how much you will be paid and when, and establishes your rights in the work. If a magazine folds before it pays you, a contract establishes you as one of its creditors.

A contract for a periodical assignment should cover these items:

  • The title and length of the story
  • A brief description of its content and approach
  • The deadline
  • The rights you are selling
  • The fee you will receive
  • The kill fee you will receive if the magazine cannot publish the article through no fault of yours (usually about one-third of the total fee)
  • Whether you will be paid on acceptance or on publication
  • Whether you will be reimbursed for routine expenses
  • A guarantee that your work is original and, to the best of your ability, accurate and free of libel

In addition to the work-for-hire clauses discussed above, you should watch for these pitfalls:

Indemnification

Some contracts include a sentence saying the author indemnifies the publisher against any claims for libel, invasion of privacy, defamation, or anything else for which someone might choose to sue or demand redress. Never sign a contract that contains such a clause.

Unless you are a lawyer, you have no way of second-guessing the reasons litigious individuals threaten to file suit. Nor is it your job to purge the story of all actionable material. It is the editor’s responsibility to recognize passages that may be defamatory, libelous, or invasive. If any such statement makes its way into print, the magazine is as guilty as the writer. Nevertheless, publishers have been known to buy off people who claimed they were wronged and then bill the writer for the cost.

If the clause is modified with words that say the article does not libel or defame to the best of the writer’s knowledge, it is acceptable.

Payment on publication vs. payment on acceptance

Too often, agreements to pay a writer when an article is published mean “pay never.” Magazine copy usually sees print months after it is accepted. Should the editors decide, for whatever reason, not to run your article, you get no pay for your contracted work. If the magazine folds before the story runs, a bankruptcy court will not number writers with payment-on-publication contracts among the magazine’s creditors.

For fulltime freelance writers, payment on publication makes it impossible to budget living expenses, because they never know how much they will be paid in a given period. One month $5,000 may come in; the next month, the take is $89. For this reason, established professionals hold out for payment on acceptance of the piece. If the editor will not agree to this, the writer declines the assignment.

A beginner may have to take payment on publication to establish some credits. Always ask to be paid on acceptance. As you gain experience, seek out publishers who will treat you fairly, and avoid pay-on-publication markets.

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The Complete Writer
Part V. Writing Fiction

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. To see all the chapters published so far, visit the *FREE READ* page for The Complete Writer. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

Please note: This chapter contains a scene that may not be appropriate for all readers. If you are uncomfortable with depiction of sexuality, please pass over this chapter.

29

Writing Sex Scenes

One of my clients was wrestling with the question of how to present a sex scene between his two favorite characters. He would swing between flummoxed (oh, no! writer’s block!) and exuberant (yipes!). Though I recognized that there’s an in-between, I also found myself wrestling: trying to explain how to handle it.

When an author addresses the sexual frolics of a story’s characters, he or she confronts a slew of challenges:

  • One’s own hang-ups.
  • One’s own fantasies (Even in fiction, there’s such a thing as over-sharing . . .)
  • The characters’ hang-ups and fantasies
  • The influence of other authors’ sex scenes (“and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”)
  • The sense that it is impossible to improve on some other author’s sex scene (see above.)
  • Political correctness
  • Resentment of political correctness
  • Absence of political correctness
  • Expectations of the perceived audience
  • Imagined or real hang-ups of the perceived audience

One could go on at length. As it were.

We could add to the list of challenges: “The essential ludicrousness of the sex act between human beings and the difficulty of making a love scene appear less than (or more than) ludicrous.”

I try to advise, but am limited by all of the above. I certainly have written a number of very randy sex scenes, one of which, with some trepidation, I copy and send over to him as a sort of example.

This gets him past his Victorian mores and jump-starts a pretty lively exchange between the characters. But now I think the result is a bit much. Baroque, even.

When it comes to writing sex, there’s a fine line between not enough and too much; between wimpy and creepy. And as for what the readers want to read? It’s anyone’s guess.

Personally, I think the writer is better served by restraint than by extravagance, where sexuality is concerned. Tone it up. Tone it down. But make it part of the story.

As a real-life human being’s sexuality cannot be divorced from his or her experience and milieu, so a fictional character’s sex life must fit into the plot and the action. Whatever that character gets up to must relate in some way, preferably in a significant way, to the ongoing narrative.

From one of our pseudonymous authors writing as Roberta Stuart comes a passage from Cabin Fever. In that novelette, a crusty sea-salt of a lady yacht cabin hires a young man to help crew her boat across the Caribbean so that she can meet some tourists who await her arrival. At the outset, she takes him for a rich-boy frat rat looking for a little adventure, but as the story proceeds we see he’s deeper than that. The two fight the attraction slowly growing between them…until that fateful night…

When my alarm woke me at midnight, the chop had subsided somewhat. I climbed the ladder and stepped into a world transformed.

The moon was high and full, and all around me, the sea glowed as if lit from within. Millions of plankton, too small to be seen with the naked eye, hung suspended in the water. And everywhere, as the water moved and the moon struck them, they lit with a bioluminescent glow.

Pete needs to see this.

I bolted back down the ladder. “Pete!”

He sat bolt upright, and if we’d had stacked bunks, he’d have put himself out like a light. “What’s wrong?” He lunged for his shorts.

I hadn’t meant to worry him. “Nothing’s wrong. Something I want you to see, is all.”

He let out his breath. “Oh. Okay.” He rummaged for his shorts.

“Never mind that! Who’s going to see you? Come on! I bolted back topside without waiting to see whether he followed.

He did, of course. He stopped short halfway out of the hatch.

“Wow,” he breathed. He came up the rest of the way and turned in a slow circle, taking it in. “It—it’s beautiful.”

I swallowed hard. No matter how many times I’d seen it, it always got me that way, too. “Go up front and look at the bow.”

By the time I’d checked the readings and updated the log, Pete was standing braced at the front of the boat, watching the phosphorescent wave rolling away from the bow. “It’s like magic,” he said when he heard me behind him.

“Yeah.”

I sat down on the decking, and after a moment, Pete flopped down beside me, his leg warm against mine.

“Bioluminescent plankton,” I told him, a little short of breath. “The moonlight hits them and they—”

“I know.” A slow grin spread across his face. “I’ve heard of it, but I never thought I’d get to see it. Thank you.” His eyes watered up a little. “Thank you.” And before I knew he was going to do it, he leaned down and kissed me, very gently, right on the lips.

Bad idea. Terrible idea. I drew back to tell him so, and then I was kissing him, full on, my arm coming up around his neck to steady us both.

We fell back on the deck together, side by side. Our arms came around each other, and our legs tangled as we pressed close together.

Pete’s hands came up to cup my breasts through my shirt, thumbs squeezing my nipples gently. I groaned and ran my fingernails up his spine, goading him.

His tongue darted between my lips and slid away, and mine chased it eagerly. It felt wonderful, lying here on Fever’s deck with his hands and mouth on me, but it wasn’t nearly enough.

I cupped his balls through his shorts, then squeezed his hard-on. He groaned into my mouth. “I want you,” I growled.

“God, yes!” Pete reached down and freed his cock from his shorts, and I slithered out of my panties, kicking them away.

His eyes widened when I rolled him onto his back and straddled him. “Is this okay?”

“Yeah. I mean, it— Yeah. It’s great.” His cock twitched beneath me. “It’s wonderful.”

I lined us up and he slid into me, filling me. Damn, it felt good!

Pete’s hands came up to squeeze my breasts again. I yanked my shirt over my head, swung it like a rodeo cowboy, and let it fly. I thought it landed somewhere on the boathouse.

Fever pitched a little, and I grabbed Pete’s arm to steady myself. I leaned back and slapped his thigh. “Lift up a little.” He brought his knees up a bit and I tucked my heels under his thighs, locking us together. There was no way I was coming off him now, not even if we both slid right off the deck. Pete propped his hands up and I braced myself on them and began to ride.

I rode with the motion of the boat, letting it move me. Up and up as we crested a wave, then down into the trough, Pete plunging deep into me. As we bottomed out, I ground hard against his pubic bone. Then the next wave was lifting me, and I was soaring higher and higher into the night air.

Up. Down. Around. Up. Down. Around.

I could have gone on like that forever, surging and falling with the sea. But all too soon, my orgasm came crashing over me like a wave.

Like any scene in a piece of fiction, the effective sex scene does more than add spice. Otherwise you get a hot tamale with no interest other than its jalapeños. Not that we don’t enjoy the occasional hot tamale . . . but Man cannot live on jalapeños alone.

This passage echoes not only the sights and feel of the open ocean but resonates with the characters’ faltering resistance to their mutual attraction. It continues to characterize the two while it moves the plot’s action forward.

A sex scene needs to add spice. But it also needs to serve another purpose. Jalapeños, after all, are full of vitamin C.

What NOT to do . . .

My goodness, there’s some bad writing out there! Most “erotic romances” are awful: graced with dangling modifiers (some of them truly funny), typos, unidiomatic language (“grinded”; “withering” for “writhing”; and on and on), lapses in point of view, characters dissolving pointlessly in laughter, eye-glazing clichés . . .

Oh, well. Clearly literature is not what people are buying the things for.

Some erotica does display workmanlike writing, and some stories are even done with style and humor. But even those self-consciously deploy tried-and-true tropes. There’s a sameness to the things, especially where the female characters are concerned.

The female character almost invariably is said to be lonely: either she describes herself as lonely, explicitly, or some other character observes or speculates that she’s lonely.

As the story unwinds, the woman is “rescued” in some way from an unhappy relationship with a former husband or boyfriend. The male lover(s)’ sex is better, kinder, hotter, more positive all the way around.

The female character yearns for change or sometimes simply for an outrageous spree.

She often is described as feeling self-conscious or insecure about herself.

Attraction is immediate, as you’d expect in such short pieces—the characters lust after each other at first glance.

Men are described as “gods.”

Men are often described as cooking or doing some other domestic activity; this seems to be part of their appeal or at least a repeating trope.

We’ll redact some of the other observations, lest the young, the impressionable, or the tender be reading. Suffice it to say that all the way across the board, a kind of monotony reigns.

It explains why some very, very silly things rise to the top in the erotic romance genre. Like the series about the woman who gets it on with Bigfoot.

Yes. That one is said to be authored by a stay-at-home mom who home-schools the kiddies.

Erotica vs. porn

In front of me I had the work of an author who would like to publish with Camptown Races Press and whom we would like to have writing for us. After plowing through his current effort, I thought, Where’s my coffee? Toss in an extra shot of espresso, please. . .

Once again I tried, as I have tried with various scribblers in the past, to explain about writing sex scenes. This boils down, really, to explaining the difference between erotica and pornography.

Pornography is a variety of erotica, but erotica is not a variety of pornography. As author Kate Douglas wrote in her essay “Writing the Fine Line between Erotica and Porn” (published in Shoshanna Evers’s collection, How to Write Hot Sex), the term erotic means “having to do with sexual love; amatory.” Pornography is “intended primarily to arouse sexual desire.” Amatory has to do with love, whereas unalloyed sexual desire amounts to lust.

There’s a difference.

Theme & Symbol in Fiction: The Complete Writer *FREE READS*

The Complete Writer
Part V. Writing Fiction

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. To see all the chapters published so far, visit the *FREE READ* page for The Complete Writer. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

28

Theme and Symbol

When you’re writing fiction, theme is crucial, as we all know. Theme is what your story is about. Not the action, not the plotline, but what the story signifies—its overall meaning or message.

Not all stories can be said to have a “meaning” in some deep, artsy way. Genre fiction often exists to amuse, and so its authors can get away with recycling canned plot lines and characters developed in previous novels. But in my never-too-humble opinion, a genre novel that is just a reiteration of some canned theme is not very good reading. The best genre fiction, like the fiction we regard as “literature,” is trying to tell us something.

Think of your favorite genre fiction. These days I spend a great deal of time watching Poirot and Murdoch, themselves latter-day spinoffs of my hero Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. On the surface, they’re just detective stories. Their characterization makes them interesting. But below the surface, they all have thematic currents that carry over from story to story and that keep us coming back.

In any detective story, as we know, there’s the underlying theme of good vs. evil. In Sherlock Holmes we can discern a number of themes, one of them the power of science and intellect to combat evil. We see the same theme arise in the Murdoch mysteries, but there it’s combined with a pattern of frustrated love. Murdoch also represents the efforts of gifted women to escape societal oppression, a theme that recurs frequently throughout the series. In Poirot, the strangeness of the protagonist is just a thread in the thematic strangeness of the culture in which he moves—our culture, heaven help us!

So, what is your story about?

The first installment of my post-apocalyptic series, Fire-Rider, developed around the protagonist’s weariness with his people’s endless wars and his growing sense that much of what he has devoted his life to—revenge, disruption, and an allegedly infallible religion—is simply wrong. This theme couples with his famed wiliness—the character echoes Odysseus in a number of aspects—which can verge into duplicity when he uses it among his own people to get his way.

The second theme—duplicity and deceit—resurfaces in Book II, where it elides with issues of sin, error, and forgiveness. The second book’s theme suggests that if you really want to be macho, you must learn to forgive.

It’s tricky to weave these threads into a book-length work without shoving them in the reader’s face and without making them look forced. By and large, some hint of the theme, shown in action or setting, needs to appear early on, maybe even in the first few paragraphs. But it’s something that needs to be shown, not lectured about: for that reason one should avoid presenting any direct exposition of the theme in dialogue or narrative. At least, so I think.

Rules, as we know, are made to be broken . . . though probably that should not even be thought of as a “rule.” It’s just one scribbler’s opinion.

Fire-Rider opens with a group of characters expressing sentiments exactly the opposite of the theme represented by the protagonist’s experience. The first two and a half pages show comrades in arms celebrating their triumph over an enemy city that they have breached, sacked, and burned. Not until this scene is firmly set and action has begun does a suggestion of the protagonist’s troubled heart appear:

[Kaybrel, his fierce young sidekick Fallon, and his cousin Mitch] stood taking in the view, the torched city a roaring, gaudy backdrop to the activity on the plain before it.

“Must do your heart good,” Fal said to Kay.

“You bet,” Kay said.

But his eyes said something else, Fal saw, the expression gray and pensive, far from the unrestrained joy Fallon would have felt had he stood in Kay’s boots. Tired, maybe: the fight was hard-won, and Kay and Fal had put themselves at the front line.

As for Kay, the man of the moment: What was he feeling? The smoky breeze combed his grizzled beard and hair like the hand of a woman who had been working by the kitchen hearth. He thought of Maire and the child. When he looked at the devastation below him, he did not, could not think of bygone sorrow or of the years spread out between past loss and present victory. Instead, he thought of going home.

The narrative touches on this and then moves on. Over the course of the entire novel, Kaybrel’s weariness and nausée develop thematically. But a little at a time.

Theme is something the readers need to discern and interpret on their own. It should never be fed to them.

One tool you can use to help the reader do those things is symbolism: a concrete image that represents something abstract—an idea, a theme, a psychological concern, a cultural current, or the like. Ernest Hemingway infuses his stories with symbolism; I can’t recall a place in any of his stories where he explicitly reveals the theme in so many words. Interestingly, he denied any guilt in this line. But if you and I could deploy imagery the way Hemingway did, we’d all be living on our yachts and punctuating our writing stints with drinking and deep-sea fishing.

One of my authors, who has just begun to explore the finer points of writing fiction, wants to develop two symbols to present a long novel’s main theme. One—the sound of an ethnic musical instrument—was an afterthought. It leaps to the fore as the novel rises toward its climax, but because we’ve never heard of it before, it jars.

I suggested that, on rewrite, he should introduce the musical tradition’s sounds and sights early on, with at least a mention in the first chapter and then recurring appearances as the story grows. A few months later he came forth with a chapter, imbued with magical realism, in which the protagonist encounters the tradition as a young boy. From there the author builds the image into the narrative until it becomes thematically symbolic.

Theme is crucial to good fiction. Symbol is a tool you can use to point to theme. And to use either of them, show, don’t tell!

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The Complete Writer
Part V. Writing Fiction

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. To see all the chapters published so far, visit the *FREE READ* page for The Complete Writer. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

Chapter 25. Where Do Your
Characters Come From?

Athena springs full-fledged from the head of Zeus

Who are the people in your fiction? Where did they come from? Come to think of it, do you even know how you dreamed them up?

I have to admit that sometimes I have no idea. Fire-Rider, the first of several tales of an invented world in the far, far future, teems with characters who bear no resemblance to anyone I’ve ever met or even read about. Homicidal warlords and foot soldiers, powerful ruling women and their sister wives, a boy prostitute and a prosperous madam, a tribe of young refugees unhomed by ceaseless wars, a woman hunter and trapper, the foreman of a vast ranch-like estate, a healer who’s also a warlord, a wandering teacher and bard . . . whence did these people arise?

Well, out of the writer’s mind, obviously. Often I think that each character is a fragment of the writer’s consciousness, some part of her or his own personality in some way hidden until it pops out, full blown from the head of Zeus, and materializes in the form of a new (albeit imagined) human being.

Other times I think, “That is just not possible!” These people do things I have no experience with; they know things and say things that I could never know or say. I have to do hours of research to envision some kind of understanding of their world, their lives, and their loves.

Is there ever a real-life model for such characters?

Occasionally. Just now I’m writing a chapter in the first-person voice of a character who’s a kind of public intellectual, to the extent possible in a time when almost no one can read or write. He’s a wandering teacher and bard. After Hapa Cottrite coalesced in my imagination, I realized that he resembles one of my editorial clients, an international banking CEO and long-time ex-pat with a sharp mind, broad curiosity, and zest for living among foreign peoples. Once that dawned on me, I began to model Cottrite explicitly after this man, to the extent that their moods, outlook, and even physical appearance are similar.

But most times, there’s no visible connection between a character in one of my tales and a real-world human being. They don’t resemble anyone I know, because no one I know lives in a reimagined analog of the European Middle Ages amalgamated with life in medieval Asia.

William the Conqueror and pals

Probably they spring from what I know of life in the medieval period and of the world-view of the people who inhabited that time.

That’s a fair amount: before I first engaged the doctorate in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean English literature and history, I wanted to specialize in the medieval period. So, I took quite a few upper-division and graduate courses in medieval literature (both British and continental works, because my undergraduate major was French). And I still edit scholarly works of medieval history.

Some pretty heady stuff went on during those times. And it was weird. If you or I could magically step through a time warp and come out in 1250, we would feel like we’d landed on another planet. That’s how different the people were from us.

So I suppose you could say the Fire-Rider characters are sort of “modeled” on what I happen to know of a typical medieval warlord, informed to some extent by what I’ve learned about Mongol warriors of Genghis Khan’s time. That’s pretty broad. And since no two of these characters are the same, it’s hard to say where their individual personalities came from.

The women’s roles, however, are completely re-imagined and warped. Never in human history have women, aristocratic or otherwise, done what Fire-Rider’s women do. In their cases, I’ve had to invent, invent, and re-invent. Even to imagine what they look like, to say nothing of what they get up to, requires a great deal of focused, concentrated work.

Maybe we could say, then, that our characters come out of our experience, learned and observed, and out of our invention, purely imagined.

Or maybe they spring full-formed from the head of Zeus?

Kaybrel FireRider

Kaybrel FireRider, Kubna of Moor Lek

The Complete Writer: A Few Notes on Plot

The Complete Writer
Part V. Writing Fiction

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. To see all the chapters published so far, visit the *FREE READ* page for The Complete Writer. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

Chapter 24. Notes on Plot

Plot is the structure of a piece of fiction. When you write nonfiction, you’re building something similar to the fiction story’s plot: an organized narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, whose fact-based rising action leads to a high point and falls off in a resolution. It is, in a word, your work’s organization. A fictional work has—or should have—much the same kind of structure.

In fiction, plot is driven by conflict. Any conflict: could be between two or more people, between a person (or persons) and an external force (Man vs. Nature!), between conflicting emotions within an individual . . . any number of things. But conflict there must be.

Conflict moves the rising action from the beginning of the story up through one, two, or even more difficulties or calamities (often called turning points or complications), until the story reaches its climax. At that point the action is resolved into a dénouement, sometimes called falling action, that leads to the story’s end.

So here’s a question: do you write down a plot outline and dutifully follow it, or do you juggle your story’s direction in your head?

And, as long as we’re posing questions, if you have a written outline, what format does it take?

Some people—many of them prominent writers—claim they have no set outline, and that a piece of fiction seems to take form on its own, as it’s imagined. Others—also prominent writers—insist they must have a formal, carefully written outline, which they follow from beginning to end. Until recently, I tended to hang with the latter group.

For the current fiction enterprise, though, I got in the habit of sketching out ideas for coming action in notes at the end of a chapter in progress or in a separate Word document. It helps for remembering little insights and bright ideas.

But it’s not very efficient.

Recently it struck me that one of those Word docs full of ideas and notes was beginning to resemble a plot outline. So…now I’m about ten chapters in to what probably will be a 25- to 30-chapter novel. The ten chapters in hand aren’t in order—there are gaps, and they represent several subplots.

Those gaps and uncertainties, I suspected, could be wrangled with notecards. This makes it possible to shuffle chapters around, to move them from one section of the line of action to another, and to add or delete items easily.

I ended up with something that I called a “timeline.” It’s not exactly a plot outline, at least not yet: at this point it’s just a rough chronological arrangement of imagined events. The events in the timeline are narrated in the chapters.

One stack of notecards represents parts of the timeline. Each card shows what chapters are related to that timeline—presumably indicating approximately where they should appear in the finished manuscript, if not in what order. A timeline notcard also lists the subplots that would play out in those chapters:

In another stack, each notecard is dedicated to a specific chapter.

Exactly how well this will work for any given writer remains to be seen — by the writer. If it interests you, try it and see if it helps you to organize your scenes, chapter, and plotline. At the least, it should make it possible to keep track of a plot whose complexity seems to be running amok. At the worst, I doubt if it can do much harm!

 

The Complete Writer: Learning to Write Fiction


The Complete Writer
Part V. Writing Fiction

This book is a work in progress. A new chapter appears here each week, usually on Fridays. To see all the chapters published so far, visit the *FREE READ* page for The Complete Writer. You can buy a copy of the entire book, right now, in PDF format, or, if you like, as a paperback. For details, visit our Books page or send a request through our Contact form.

Chapter 23. Getting Started

John Gardner

This book is not the place to go into a lot of detail about how one writes a piece of fiction—a short story or a novel. Many resources can help get you started. One of the best is John Gardner’s classic, The Art of Fiction. It’s for people who want to write literary fiction, but the principles he describes apply across the board. You can get a boxed set of all three of Gardner’s influential works on creative writing, in Kindle format. These include The Art of Fiction, On Writers and Writing, and On Moral Fiction.

Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey is extremely useful for genre writers. In many instances, it also applies to more literary efforts. Spinning off the ideas of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, Vogler traces the links between myth and modern fiction and shows how you can engage that understanding in your writing.

For genre fiction, see any how-to published by Writer’s Digest Books, but more important: immerse yourself in your genre. Read a lot of your coveted genre: if you want to be a great science fiction writer, you’ve got to be a great science fiction reader. That’s true of fantasy, romance, erotica, crime and detective fiction, and all the other genres.

It’s amazing how many people who say they wanna be writers don’t read the kind of thing they think they want to write. People who show up at magazine writing workshops and sign up for college courses in magazine writing don’t read magazines. Those who say they want to get rich writing romance novels or detective stories don’t read romances or detective novels. To write this stuff, you need to read the stuff.

It’s much more useful to read and analyze the kind of things you want to read and write than to study how-to books about writing fiction. Joyce Carol Oates’s Telling Stories is a fine way to see how to do this. She provides advice and comment on writing and revising fiction interspersed with a large and entertaining collection of the real stuff. Another excellent tool: Joseph Trimmer and C. Wade Jennings’s anthology, Fictions, contains 1260 pages of high-quality short stories and novellas, along with instructions on how to read and analyze them critically. It also contains an appendix that lists entries by theme, so that if you’re interested in, say, coming of age as a theme for your own writing, you can find examples under the heading “Initiation and Maturation.”

Read a lot of your favorite literature: live your life in it.

The Complete Writer: Ethics for Bloggers

Writing Nonfiction: Magazines, Newspapers, Books, Blogs
Chapter 22. Ethics for Bloggers

The Complete Writer
Part IV: Blogging

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The Sanity Discount: Integrity, Small Businesses, and Bloggers

Bloggers who run ads are small businesses, of course. A couple of ripples in the daily flow of things led me, over the course of several days, to ruminate about integrity and ethics, and about how they should direct the course of the seemingly ubiquitous American side businesses, including our blogs.

Fair play for a client

First, a very nice new client had recently wandered in through the door [his character is irrelevant to the issue, but nevertheless: a very sweet human being he was]. He said he wanted someone to edit website copy for a successful small business in the trades. I sent my rate sheet, which frames my rates on a per-page basis. He wanted to know what I would charge by the hour. I said sixty bucks, not an unreasonable amount in the large scheme of things (twenty years ago a friend here was getting $120 an hour for similar work). He, doing business in a large city far, far away where employees’ and independent contractors’ pay is not throttled by right-to-work laws, didn’t even blink.

So I dove into the project, which was kind of fun. “Kind of fun” because it didn’t entail a lot of technical language or esoteric theory, unlike most of the stuff I do. Mathematical biosciences this was not, nor was it abstruse postmodernist blather. But there was a fair amount of it, and it needed substantial reorganization, rewriting, and new research and writing. I enjoyed this little endeavor over the course of about twenty-two hours. Eventually I wrapped the job and added up my bill, and . . .

Holy mackerel! At $60 an hour, the tab came to enough for me to buy a condo in the guy’s expensive city. It really did seem out of line, given the relative ease and mild entertainment value of the work.

Okay, it’s true that if I based my fees on how much fun the job is, I’d have to edit novels for my favorite genre publisher for free. But still . . . there’s a limit.

Seeking a fairer arrangement, I calculated what it would cost the client if I charged my highest page rate—justifiable, I figured, because of the amount of actual writing I did—and came up with an amount that was enough for The Copyeditor’s Desk to buy itself a couple of laser printer cartridges. Fairly respectable, but not enough to break the bank.

So that was what I ended up billing: about four or five hundred bucks less than the hourly rate would have commanded. But at $60 an hour, the bottom line added up to a figure utterly beyond reason. It didn’t seem right to charge that much for that kind of work.

Call it the Sanity Discount.

Hard on the heels of that exchange, an ongoing conundrum resurfaced.

Black-hat “advertising” in the blogosphere

Funny about Money is large enough to attract the attention of various individuals and groups who bill themselves as advertisers. Almost all of them want me to run paid text links. And they’re willing to pay pretty well for the privilege. I could easily double or triple Funny’s revenues by selling paid text links.

These people and their brokers approach the blogger by saying either that they want to buy ad space on the site or that they are generously offering a guest post, “absolutely free to you.”

Trouble is, doing so puts one afoul of Google’s arcane rules, designed to protect its search engine algorithm. To simplify a complicated story, if Google catches you publishing paid text links (as sooner or later it will), your page rank (a metric that dictated where your site appeared in a Google search but that has, in recent months, been abandoned in favor of “blog authority”) would magically drop to zero.

So, after you’ve worked for months or years to build a respectable page rank, these folks come along and take advantage of it; then when their practices kill your page rank, they of course abandon you.

That particular aspect is not at issue here, though. What we have at issue is the so-called advertiser’s strategy to evade discovery, which is to produce copy for a post that fits the blogger’s site theme. The paid link is then embedded in the post, in such a way that the link appears to point to something relevant to the post’s subject.

It’s important to understand that paid links are not advertising. They’re a device to suck link juice from a site with a relatively decent page rank into the buyer’s own site, as a strategy to cause the other site appear at or near the top of a Google search.

In other words, what looks like a real post is a deceptive device to mount self-serving links whose purpose has nothing to do with the host site’s content. Often it contains a link pointing to some outfit selling a service or product that runs counter to the host site’s reason for being. Why, for example, would a personal finance blogger who urges readers to get out of debt, manage money wisely, and avoid loan sharks recommend taking out a payday loan?

Why? To collect a hundred bucks for publishing two words attached to a live do-follow link, that’s why.

Such a post is, in short, advertorial. Actually, it doesn’t even rise to that level, because the articles are not really intended to be read; they exist to carry the links, which exist to use the host’s page rank to jack up the search engine page rank on the link seller’s site. While they’re billed as advertising, they’re actually a form of black-hat SEO.

Editorial vs. advertorial

Over the years since I started in journalism, I’ve worked for some of the most prominent regional periodicals in my part of the country. Believe it or not, there is such a thing as journalistic ethics, and after some thirty-two years of practicing and teaching, they tend to inhabit your thinking. When I came up, there was a sharp divide between advertising and editorial—in fact, the ad and circulation departments were housed on the other side of the building from where the editors and artists worked.

Magazines did publish crass little “articles” written by highly paid ad copywriters—earning far more than any of us did!—whose purpose was to plug paying customers. This was not surprising: magazines survive on ad revenue. Subscription income doesn’t suffice to support a print publication. However, ethical publishers mark advertorials as such: with a running header or footer saying something like “Advertisement.” Often advertorials are set off typographically and even printed on slightly different paper from the rest of the rag.

To publish advertising or SEO masquerading as a normal blog post without cluing the reader to the fact that the stuff is paid advertising: that’s dishonest, in the same way passing off an advertorial as real journalism is dishonest.

That is why many publications don’t print advertorial at all, and why those who do, if they have any decency at all, label it prominently as advertising.

Times have changed, of course, with the advent of the brave new world that is the Internet. And blogging is and is not journalism, though it has readers who presumably expect some standard of honesty from their writers. Here’s what journalistic webmaster Robert Niles says about the issue, writing at the Online Journalism Review[1]:

The old rule: There must be a wall between advertising and editorial.

The new rule: Sell ads into ad space and report news in editorial space. And make sure to show the reader the difference.

Drawing the line in the shifting sands of ethics

Accordingly, I marked the paid-link peddler’s copy as a Sp0nsor3d P0st! The numerals were intended to throw off Google’s nosy bots, which go around searching for clues to paid links.

This elicited a squawk of dismay. When I refused to remove the notice saying the post was a paid article containing links to the author’s clients’ sites, the deal fell through. Cheerfully, I removed the post from my site, and good riddance to it.

To cope with the practice of secreting paid links in fake stories, Google began to demand that all links to commercial sites be coded as no-follow links, robbing them of the coveted “link juice.” Would-be advertisers hated this, of course—because the link juice is what they were paying for—and usually they would then decline to place a paid link unless it was do-follow. Many bloggers simply take a chance[2] that Google will never catch them, and they justified the potential swat-down by arguing that PR didn’t matter anyway.[3]

Maybe it didn’t, maybe it did. The technicalities of page rank were way above my pretty little head, and so I didn’t trouble myself with them.

But one could argue, with some justice, that Google’s policy on paid do-follow links[4] was hugely unfair, since Google AdSense places plenty of paid links on your site. And because Google pays nothing like what these sometimes sleazy “advertisers” will pay, Google itself takes on a whiff of the exploitive.

About that, I say it is what it is.

Ironically, while Google’s policy is self-serving (its motive has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with the way the company’s business model works), it in fact fed into that fundamental journalistic ethic: the effect of the rule was to discourage deceptive content and to encourage separation of advertising and editorial.

Old-fashioned . . . but then so is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

[1] http://www.ojr.org/p1623/

[2] Check out Martin Langfield’s discussion at NiemanLab: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/the-flip-side-of-black-hat-seo-if-your-news-site-publishes-paid-links-you-risk-googles-wrath/

[3] Eventually Google tried to suppress PageRank as a device for assessing a site’s influence. Today an advertiser will ask what a site’s “authority” is. Danny Sullivan discusses this in “RIP Google PageRank Score: A Retrospective on How It Ruined the Web,” March 9, 2016, Search Engine Land, http://searchengineland.com/rip-google-pagerank-retrospective-244286

[4] “Link Schemes,” n.d., Google. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en&hl=en&rd=1