Deal heard round the world…

A few weeks ago I discussed the e-revolution, especially the advent of e-reader devices such as the Kindle, Nook, and iPad.  The original post, if you missed it, is here.

What I didn’t discuss in that previous post is the relative success many authors were having in publishing directly for the e-reader market.  I am not talking about the success of the e-book version of the latest Stephen King novel.  I am referring to previously unknown and unpublished writers who are publishing original fiction for the first time in e-book format and are selling via Amazon.com and BN.com.

What does this mean?  Why should you care?

Well in my recent poll on e-readers, 57% of respondents indicated they either had an e-reader or planned to get one soon.  I imagine across the English-speaking world, when prices continue to drop, more people will buy them.  Those that do will find that they read more and buy more e-books than they normally would buy print books.  This increases the market for new material.

Buy more e-books?

Yes, when you can log into the Amazon store right from you Kindle and can immediately search and download a new book at midnight, from the beach, or in an airport you’ll probably agree.

And you’ll agree that the price of e-books, which currently ranges from free to an average of around $12 for the latest bestseller release, is attractive and you may find you don’t miss those $25 hardcover price tags.

It also means that times are changing.  Technology is bringing writers and readers closer together and the time it takes for a writer to publish a book and put it in the hands of readers can be drastically reduced with direct e-publishing.

A writer can finish an edited, packaged, formatted, e-book on Monday and have it posted for sale that same day.  That may not seem like a big deal, but consider that the average time a print publisher takes to publish a new work is close to a year and often much longer.  That means the brand new bestseller you bought last week for $25 was written by the author a year ago.  Yes, a one year delay.

But who is doing this?  Who is publishing e-books only and is having any success?  See this announcement in the NY Times: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/self-publisher-signs-four-book-deal-with-macmillan/

Who is this Amanda Hocking?

A bout a year ago, Amanda Hocking was a frustrated writer of young adult paranormal romance/fantasy, like “Twilight” and others.  She couldn’t attract the interest of a print publisher, so she published several of her novels as e-books through the Kindle store and within ten months or so she had sold over 1 million copies.  She made over $2 million dollars and now has a big deal worth another $2 million plus for four new books with St. Martin’s Press, one of the big six publishing houses.

She came from nowhere, couldn’t get published, published herself via e-books, and now she has effectively taken the publishing world by storm.   Read what she has to say about this big deal here:  http://amandahocking.blogspot.com/2011/03/blog.html

This news and Amanda Hocking’s success is what you call a game changer.  The landscape for writers has been redesigned and is far more open than when the only path forward was through the gatekeepers in New York.

Let’s be honest.  Many, many people will publish their e-books and 90% of them will be unedited, unpolished, unformatted, or just plain terrible.  When it is that easy to create something to sell, people will indeed try.

But, the marketplace is the great equalizer and only the cream will rise to the top.  Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other e-books vendors display sales rankings and customer reviews so a discerning reader can sift through all the dirt to get to the gold.  There will plenty to choose from, but unlike the slow browse through the stacks at a library or bookstore to find something good to read, you can simply do a keyword, author, title, or genre search and then sort and shop the results to find what you want.

It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s not the future.

It’s the now.

It’s a brave new world for publishing and I, for one, think it is a great time to be a reader AND a writer.

What do you think?

Why we need more conflict…

…or what we really need from a story.

I read the other day that many aspiring and novice writers tend to avoid the very thing that makes a story interesting.  When these moments, the moments where characters at cross purposes cross paths, are what we read for.

The conflict.  The tension.  The argument.  The fight.  The physical war.  The silent war.

We read for the exchange of glares and stares with set jaw, thin lips, narrowed eyes, boiling blood, red face, quickened pulse, and perspiring palms.  What will happen next?  We must know because the characters we like are struggling with what  they need versus what they have.

We read for the break up and reconciliation.  We read for the beginning and end of a battle.  We read for a naive character gaining wisdom.  We read for the prideful character finding humility.  We read for the pursuit, loss, and rediscovery of love.  We read for the saving of the world or the saving of a family.  We read for the hero to triumph and the villain to fall.  We read for small victories and great victories.  We read for things to change.

We don’t want to read about happy characters making a great living where their boss and co-workers idolize them.  We don’t want to read about characters with loving and supportive spouses and high-achieving and obedient children living the dream in the suburbs with the annual vacation to the timeshare in Lake Tahoe.  We don’t want to read about the well-adjusted character who was raised by kind, wise, and affectionate parents, who provided everything and the character lacked for nothing and faced no adversity in their childhood.

As much as we want and aspire to some of these things in our lives, why wouldn’t we want to read about characters that have it all and can just cruise through life without any ill winds blowing their way?

Because it’s boring.

Stories are not meant to lull us into a false sense of the ideal life around us.  A story is a window into a setting where characters struggle for what they want and fight for what they need.  Story is drama.

Dictionary.com defines drama as “…a story involving conflict or contrast of character…”

Think back to your favorites books or even movies.  What happened?  Did someone just cruise through a perfect life with no problems?  Or did things go wrong from the beginning and the entire story was about trying to set it right or at least to achieve some form of equilibrium?

So, when a writer tries to tell a story by emulating what we want in real life, he misses the whole point of telling a story.  There must be a difficult and challenging path for the characters and it is the writer’s job to provide those obstacles and really push the characters to overcome.  Because it through that process of overcoming that we as readers truly identify with the characters we like most.  We share their journey through the ups and downs and can experience the highs and lows we may not normally find in real life.

Very few of us will sneak through an orc encampment in the heart of an evil nation to toss a ring into a molten lake inside a mountain like Frodo did in Lord of the Rings.  But, we were right there with his every faltering step, his every burden, his struggle against Gollum, and the weight of the ring itself on his soul.  We won’t do that in life, but we did it through a story.

So, next time you read a story, relish the conflict, the drama, the tension.  The author worked hard to make life difficult for the characters so that they could learn and grow from their experiences.

And if the writer does his job well, and you as reader identify with a particular character and a particular struggle, then you may just learn a little bit about yourself.

And isn’t that really why we read stories?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/drama?fromRef=true&rh=thesaurus.com&__utma=1.139692768.1278211005.1286652354.1286691941.51&__utmb=1.2.10.1300570492&__utmc=1&__utmx=-&__utmz=1.1285287960.24.11.utmcsr=dictionary.reference.com|utmccn=%28referral%29|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/browse/air&__utmv=-&__utmk=108625154