Software for Writers

If you're writing a long (book-length) document in Microsoft Word, you really need to get the Author Tools Template from the Editorium. It's a beautiful add-in set of MS Word macros. Make sure to enable macros in Word for it to run.

If you want an alternative to Word, here are some possibilities:

Commercial Software

• Scrivener (Mac only): everybody who uses it loves it.
  
• PageFour (Windows): I use it and think it's great.
  

Freeware

• Notepad++: plain-text freeware, a huge improvement over regular Notepad.
  
• JDarkRoom: plain-text freeware makes your screen black -- a retro computer look with no distractions.

There are other options out there, but these are the ones I'm most familiar with. Here is an article comparing Scrivener with several other Mac-based alternatives to Word.

Death of Publishing--Isn't there anything we can do?

Could the recent posts and articles about the publishing world be more depressing ? Publishing companies are laying people off right and left. Book sales are down. Is book publishing going to die as an industry? Isn't there anything we can do? (besides hope, and giving people books as presents)

If it's a problem of books' popularity, there are things that could be done. Though movies are a form of entertainment that distracts people from the printed word, they also get readers interested in storylines. Viewers of Fight Club, Benjamin Button, and Memoirs of a Geisha saw the movies on the big screen and then flocked to the bookstore, spurring sales of the books these films were based on. Can movies be used to save publishing? What about book clubs? Sure Oprah's club has turned novels into bestsellers overnight, but what about small non-publicized book clubs. Maybe if book clubs were a more mainstream type of social gathering, it would help the industry. Also, didn't publishers used to have big parties celebrating the launch of a new book with fanfare? I think the industry could harness celebrities' influence to recapture a fickle public's attention.

Gimmicky fixes aside, the real problem is not that people aren't interested in reading. People just don't want to buy anything they can get for free, which is understandable. Personally I'm probably contributing to the downfall of the publishing industry by relying on libraries for reading material. I'm too cheap to shell out the full cost of a brand new hardback book just for the novelty of being one of the first to see it. When I do buy books, it's at secondhand bookstores. I don't mind if books are worn, the story inside is still the same and that's what counts. With the economic downturn, people aren't buying things they don't need. I guess a lot of people see books as a luxury. That's sad. Mostly because it means losing the escapism a well-written story provides. But it's also depressing because anyone who wants a job in publishing right now is out of luck.

Make that three steps

From the New York Times, an article called "Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab." The lede:

The point may soon come when there are more people who want to write books than there are people who want to read them.

A bit later:

Meanwhile, there is one segment of the industry that is actually flourishing: capitalizing on the dream of would-be authors to see their work between covers, companies that charge writers and photographers to publish are growing rapidly at a time when many mainstream publishers are losing ground. (Emphasis added)

The whole article is worth reading.

Two more steps toward the end

Teaching Publication Arts at this moment is a strange experience: every piece of news about the industry seems a sign of decline. Two more such signs:

• The Washington Post is discontinuing its Book World as a special section in the Sunday papers. (This hits me especially hard, as I grew up in the DC suburbs and read "Book World" every week.) Possible positive sign: "Book World" will continue as an online entity, apparently.
  
• Sara Nelson, Editor in Chief at Publishers Weekly, has been laid off. Is anybody safe?
  

A Different Take on The First Five Pages

So I may be playing Devil's Advocate in voicing this opinion, but I am going to go against what the majority of the class has been saying about Lukeman's "First Five Pages" and point to the value that Lukeman presents in his guide.

First of all, I will be honest and say that I am barely entertained by his writing.  Without a doubt, Lukeman is not my favorite author, and I say with confidence that I will most likely not be another patron of his work.  I agree with Ian's comparison of the First Five Pages and a grammar school text book.  To be entirely blunt, Noah Lukeman is a boring author.

Consider this, however.  Lukeman is writing about perhaps one of the most boring topics available.  The title of his book is "The First Five Pages:  A Writer's Guide to Staying out of the Rejection Pile".  Unlike King's "Memoir to the Craft", Lukeman doesn't propose readers with any suggestion of entertainment. What he does promise is valuable inside information, a guide for aspiring writers,  and advice that will lead to his opinion of success in the writing industry.  The majority of students in class have voiced their negative reception of the book, and I agree with the following common statements:  "I would have tossed this book if it weren't required" or "Lukeman lost my interest after the first five pages" and so on.  My question to you is this:  would you ever consider reading this book if it weren't required?  I don't think many of us would be compelled to purchase this book had it not been required - I find it hard to imagine that anyone looking for a leisurely read would choose a "Writer's Guide to Staying out of the Rejection Pile".  

So, instead of bashing on Lukeman for being dry and boring, I suggest we try a different approach to the book.  His intent is not to entertain, it is to inform, and I have found a well of useful information in his guide that I would have not been able to find elsewhere.  While Lukeman is a horrible entertainer, he is gifted in being informative and I appreciate the opportunity to learn the details of what it takes to become successful in the writing industry.  Like King mentioned somewhere in his memoir, it pays to read - even horrible, boring books. When it's all said and done, Noah Lukeman is a published author, and I am not.  

My take on First 5 and Book Business

The First Five Pages has been as painful and tedious to read as a grade school grammar book. While I begrudgingly admit that I have already started to incorporate some of Lukeman’s tenets into my writing, despite the academic rather than creative nature of my writing, I have struggled to finish this reading. Lukeman gives advice similar to King when he instructs the writer to approach the craft with an, “unshakable confidence to leap forcefully into the realm of creation” (15). This echoes King’s admonition to not approach the blank page lightly, but King manages to weave his principles of writing into the narrative of his life while Lukeman provides a bone-dry index of proscriptive measures for the aspiring author. To use their own vocabulary, King shows the reader/writer how he became the literary entity that he his, and Lukeman is telling us what to do or not do. As readers, we learn that one must never staple manuscripts from both texts but unlike the story of King’s first hand-written response to a submission, we simply receive a directive from Lukeman. In addition, the examples Lukeman provides are such extreme examples of his talking points that it becomes more difficult to recognize and correct more subtle occurrences of “bad writing” in my own writing.
So far, The First Five Pages is the lest favorite of the books we have read. On Writing was a quick read because I enjoy King’s fiction, so getting a glimpse into his creative process was a treat. I have not gotten very far into Book Business yet but I have been intrigued by this aspect of the publishing business for some time. I agree that the publishing business, like many other industries, is going to undergo a drastic change in the near future because of advances in technology. I found an interesting parallel between the music and publishing industries during the last class discussion. Similar to the transition from vinyl records to digital files, books have evolved from stone tablets to e-books. I find some of Epstein’s ideologies a little naïve though. His idea of book-printing kiosks springing up across the globe seems far-fetched. His view that people will download a text and then print and bind it in their homes appears ludicrous. Again, I see a parallel between the music industry. Before mp3 players were on the market, I burned downloaded music onto CD. iPods have made this unnecessary, as technology like the Kindle may make books printed on paper. I would not be surprised if, in twenty years, books are published exclusively in a digital format. To accommodate for people like Epstein, who simply must have an actual book in their hands to enjoy the reading process, people will be able to get printed copies of the book, most likely at smaller ‘boutique’ retailers. Another solution for these people would be, in essence, a book-tailor. One could send a digital copy of the book you want printed to this book-binder and receive a custom printed copy of the book. Such a store will probably never come into existence, I’m guessing for reasons relating to profit, but its an interesting notion. Aside from Epstein’s depictions of things like the ideal book store, I anticipate this being a quick and interesting read.

How should you format text?

So here's a question: suppose you work for a publisher or are a publisher yourself. What format should you start with? I hear you saying "Hermagoras, what a silly question: whatever form the author gives me." And it's true that authors will likely give you files in a word processing format like Microsoft Word. Some technical writers, mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists will submit files in formats like LaTeX or perhaps even HTML (the code for most web pages). But almost all other authors will give you a Word file or, perhaps, a Rich Text Format (RTF) file that can be translated among various word processors.

Over the last twenty years, editors and layout people have mainly worked with desktop publishing programs such as Adobe PageMaker and FrameMaker, QuarkXPress, and even Microsoft Publisher (for small companies publishing newsletters and the like) Such programs took care of layout issues and, combined with graphic design programs for illustration, formed the backbone of publishing technology (at least in terms of editing and page design). When a publisher needed a freelance editor, the adverisement would almost invariably request expertise in FrameMaker or QuarkXPress.

But technology is evolving, and the need to produce electronic and print products (a kind dual-format imperative) changes the technological landscape. Here's what I mean. In a dual-format environment, an editor needs to make decisions with a single text that can be translated quickly and easily into a variety of formats. A format decision should make global changes in the text, and those changes should take effect in all the chosen formats -- and in new ones that are not yet designed.

I want to take a cue from the technical publisher O'Reilly (they produce some of the best computer books around) and suggest that would-be editors and publishers Start with XML. I think this might be a good idea even though I'm not an XML expert myself. My one real experience with XML was a freelance project in which I used the XML language DocBook. The project was a manual for a computer application. The manual ended up existing in three formats: as a physical book, as a set of web pages, and as a Help file (the kind that pops up as a window in a computer program). With DocBook, I coded the text semantically -- that is, I marked the text elements for their purpose -- rather than textually. So, for example, I wouldn't mark a word as "bold" or "italic," the way you'd do it in Word or in Blogger. Instead I'd mark it as a certain kind of word: a keyword, for example, or a cross-reference. This is signficant because if you make a text italic, it's italic in every format: book, web page, help file, Kindle, etc. But if I mark it as a keyword, then the style sheet recognizes the keyword and changes all the keywords in the format according to a specified style sheet. For various reasons, you might do this differently in different formats (perhaps keywords are in italics in a print book but bolded or even linked to a glossary in a help file). With XML, you can do this.

The point is this: by coding for content, XML allows editors to mark a text so that it can be changed in different formats more cleanly and easily. In a sense, it separates the practices of editing and layout. As multiple-format publication becomes the norm, this will be more and more important, and XML skills will be something to seek out and develop.

Kindle 2!

A new version of the Kindle will debut February 9. According to Brad Stone of the BITS blog at the New York Times,

the biggest changes may be inside the device. The new Kindle likely uses the new Broadsheet microchip from Epson and E-Ink, which makes the display technology for the Kindle. E-Ink’s chief executive, Russell J. Wilcox, described the technology to me a few weeks ago, saying that it breaks the screen into 16 pixel sets and can update them in parallel, allowing for faster screen refreshes and a generally more responsive screen. He added that the technology was somewhat analogous to putting a better graphics card in a computer and would help e-readers become better full-featured devices.

So what does this mean for publishing? For the future of the book? Feel free to speculate in the comments or in new posts.

Book news: John Updike dies, NBCC awards announced

John Updike, prolific and gifted writer, has died at the age of 76. I'll be the first to say he wasn't my kind of novelist or poet (though I liked his art criticism). But I may have encountered him too early: I read my mother's copy of Rabbit Redux when I was about 14, surely before I was prepared for it. (That summer I also read John Irving's The World According to Garp, another novel for grownups.) In any event, his death has meaning for this class because Updike managed to combine best-seller status with serious literary attention. Not many writers can do that.

******************

The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced. The NBCC is one of the three big prizes for literature in America (the other two are the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize). I'm not surprised at the fiction nominations (Roberto Bolaño's 2666 was probably the best-reviewed novel this year), but the poetry nominations are surprising. They included Pierre Martory's The Landscapist, translated from the French by John Ashbery. I didn't know translated works were open to nomination. Would the award go to Martory or to Ashbery, the most important American poet alive?

Another poetry nomination for Devin Johnston's Sources. When I first met Devin, he was, I think, barely a teenager. He's matured into a remarkable poet.

Check the list of nominees, and note the presses. Which have you read? Which would you like read? Why? What do you notice about the differences in publishers for the different categories?

Links: Chicago Manual of Style

The Chicago Manual of Style is a great resource for anybody interested in book publishing. Most of the online version of the CMS is subscription-only, but the appendix on design and production is freely available. Everybody should read it and familiarize themselves with the helpful glossary of publishing-related terms.

Recreating Civilizations: The Future of Publishing

“The critical faculty that selects meaning from chaos is part of our instinctual equipment, and so is the gift for creating and recreating civilizations and their rules without external guidance.”
In Book Business, Jason Epstein details the rise and, at least as we know it, the fall of the book publishing industry. He concludes by saying that the future of publishing on the horizon will harness the power of the Internet as never before. Amid this cogent thesis lies the idea that human beings instinctually attempt to draw order from chaos and that this ‘new age’ in publishing does not change this basic fact. Epstein writes, “Without a vivid link to the past, the present is chaos and the future unreadable.” Book publishing in the days to come will come transpire as a result of the human propensity to recreate civilizations once they are destroyed.
Chapter Seven introduces to the reader Norman Wiener, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT, whom Epstein had published and had come to know. Epstein says, “Powerful metaphors linking his theoretical work to the visible world flowed easily from his mind”. He then goes on to discuss the second law of thermodynamics, which “posits the inexorable deterioration of closed systems in nature as their temperatures become increasingly uniform with that of their surroundings over time”. In simple terms, when people can no longer assimilate energy, they become dust. Unless new energy is fed into a closed system, it will deteriorate.
As a way of clarifying the second law, Wiener used the metaphor of a salmon swimming upriver to spawn new life. “The salmon’s struggle stands for the temporary victory of life, art, and morality over the vast force arrayed against it”, Epstein writes. Wiener foreshadowed the technological future, the Internet, in his use of such metaphors. He describes an “all-encompassing feedback loop”, in effect, a global feedback system. Publishing itself will never become obsolete; only certain methods of publishing will decline.
Last class we discussed the ‘scene’ and the ‘network’ as audiences that are changing with the advent of social networking via the Internet. The forces of life will prove victorious and our links to the past will remain because of the ways that the publishing industry is evolving. The counterentropic value of interactivity as a source of cultural renewal is a powerful image and carries great weight in the present moment.

Authonomy as a Model for Tomorrow's Publishing Contracts?

I read in Jane Friedman's blog There are no Rules (at Writer's Digest) that HarperCollins has signed three authors to contracts who submitted their work on the HarperCollins site Authonomy. One of these authors had already self-published, and one used Authonomy to get an agent, but one was simply highly rated by the Authonomy community.

This is a fascinating development suggesting that social networking on the web has the power to transform traditional publishing. Recall that Epstein's Book Business was written before Amazon had started to make money, and in the book Epstein can't figure out how Amazon would ever turn a profit. It retrospect, his pessimism seems wildly off the mark. But who could have predicted how the social networking tools of Amazon (such as user ratings) and the use of Google-like algorithms to recommend books for individuals based on their browsing and purchasing history, would have such an impact? Authonomy seems to be relying on the same sort of thing: submitted works get bumped up in the ratings, and a kind of sorting takes place by the small crowd of users. Now, will this be successful as a model? Who can tell? If it makes more people partcipate in Authonomy, that is likely to be good, because a larger, more diverse group will resemble more closely the total reading public.

Blogs to Print

Every paper has a business section, but never one for labor.
-- Ron Silliman

Well, here's an interesting development. A January 21 article in the New York Times notes the development of a new way to read blogs: in print.

Amid the din of naysayers who insist that newspapers are on the verge of death, a new company wants to start dozens of new ones — with a twist.

The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper, surrounded by local ads, and distribute the publications free in big cities.

The first issues of this Internet-era penny-saver will appear in Chicago and San Francisco on Tuesday. They will start as weeklies, but Joshua Karp, the founder and publisher, hopes eventually to publish free neighborhood editions of The Printed Blog twice a day in many cities around the country.

This is a new one for me, although I can think of two other recent ventures starting out as freebies in print: Bit o'Lit, in Washington DC, which publishes excerpts of new fiction and nonfiction for subway commuters; and Boston's own Color magazine, available at some T stops and as a monthly supplement in local papers: "the premier all-inclusive monthly magazine that highlights topics of interest revolving around New England's professionals of color." (Color is a very interesting new publication, and its editor, Josefina Bonilla-Ruiz, should be a great contact for someone in the class to work with.)

It's great when new free papers work out. I recall being at a conference in Milwaukee* in 1996 and picking up a crazy-looking free paper out of a newsbox. It had a story about then Presidential candidate Bob Dole, who, if I recall, was reported to have had an accident that revealed his metallic robot face (as in The Terminator). The interior of the paper had ads for local restaurants and bookstores along with lots of ads for sexual services. I recall thinking this was a really strange paper but that it had some of the funniest writing I'd ever chanced across. I wondered if I'd ever see it again. That local free paper was The Onion (which started in Wisconsin).

Sometimes they don't succeed, at least as paper publications. Exhibit A, a Boston-area legal publication ("the law in plain English"), was available in boxes at T stops for a while but now operates as an internet-only venture. What the successful ones seem to tap is a specific demand and readership. The genius of Bit o'Lit, a venture that I wish I'd started, is that cities like Washington DC are full of educated, highly literate people who may read less than a novel but could be enticed to read. So the magazine publishes chapters from new publications, and publishers jump at the chance to publish a chapter as a teaser to a longer work. Bit o'Lit tends to focus on things DC readers are interested in: politics especially. Perhaps a different set of works would be appropriate for other mass-transit cities. Color seems also to tap a specific group: urban and suburban professionals of color. Like Bit o'Lit, it connects readership to mass transit (a free weekly on farming would be unlikely to get a readership on the T). The targeted readership of each publication helps with the business model as well: publishers and bookstores underwrite Bit o'Lit, and Color gets advertisements from businesses interested in employee diversity as well as the often overlooked market of non-white professionals. Exhibit A may have overestimated the convergence of Boston's deep legal community with the reading interests of the commuting public. And so it goes online.

*On Milwaukee, from Wayne's World:

Wayne Campbell: So, do you come to Milwaukee often?
Alice Cooper: Well, I'm a regular visitor here, but Milwaukee has certainly had its share of visitors. The French missionaries and explorers began visiting here in the late 16th century.
Pete: Hey, isn't "Milwaukee" an Indian name?
Alice Cooper: Yes, Pete, it is. In fact , it's pronounced "mill-e-wah-que" which is Algonquin for "the good land."
Wayne Campbell: I was not aware of that.

Conclusions on Book Business

First, I must thank David for calling me out on my incorrect identification of a comma splice. Oops. I stand humbled. I guess I should have been more careful, knowing his involvement in the AWD program here at Northeastern.

Returning to Book Business:As I mentioned in my last post, I had not finished the book before I voiced my concerns with its style and content. Well, I have finished it now, and my opinion of it has changed slightly. The second half of the book provides more of what I was expecting before I began reading: a unique and informative look into the publishing industry from one of its most important figures. The namedropping is still there, but it is in much lower proportion to Epstein's insight into how the industry changed in the '70s and '80s, and how it is changing again. Whether or not this information could have been sifted from the autobiographical aspects of the book is debatable, and moot in any case. I certainly understand this book's importance to our class now, and I feel as if I have gleaned important information about the publishing industry and its history. While Epstein could get tedious with his anecdotes, his history of the trade gave me a new perspective on the world of which I hope to become a part.

We've covered how much Epstein misses the mark with the book ATM idea, but in other places I found he has at least an inkling of what was to come in the better part of a decade separating 2009 from the publication of Book Business. He mentions a few times how reference books are outdated the moment they are put in print, due to their constantly changing subject material; he then postulates that such materials are perfect for digitization because their information can be updated instantaneously. I thought of dictionary.com, the OED, and, of course, Wikipedia. Similarly, Epstein writes of the fantasy of a "vast, multilingual virtual library" (177) - well, Mr. Epstein, your prayers have been half-answered in Project Gutenberg and Wikisource.

Conclusion on Book Business: I have determined that my problems with it lie in the misleading presentation. The title and subtitle give no indication of the autobiographical passages that constitute a large portion of the book, and neither does the description on the back cover. I think if I had anticipated this aspect, I would have had a gentler opinion of the work.