All the Billion Other Moments

June is here, so it’s time to post my monthly writing update1. My concerted effort to try and hit at least 550 words a day in May paid off, and I often found myself blowing past 1000 words some days when things really got going. I was able to build good momentum that carried me from day to day2.

I managed at least 13,697 words this month. I’m not sure what the exact number is because I’ve become accustomed to pulling my totals from my twitter archive and I found that a few tweets I thought had gone out either didn’t or were lost3. Even without my full number of words I did better this month than last, and that’s what matters. Of course, since I finished the big project, the question now is “What’s next?”

I’m going to be leaving my latest novel draft to sit for a while, but a good number of people cheered me along so I thought I’d toss out a small snippet in case anyone is interested in reading it.

Be warned: It’s rough, this is not my greatest work, and possibly not even a good example1. Also it shows at least one quirk of my early drafts that may be a deal breaker for some folks.. When I’m writing along and I come across a character2 that I’ve yet to name, I just pick a word3 and place it in brackets ([ ]). I do this because I’ve found stopping to decide on a name can kill my momentum deader than dead. Also, as I have developed rather strict language rules for this world I can’t just pull something out of thin air. So even though the second guard is a major character throughout the novel, so far I know him only as [Driver], because when he showed up, that’s what he was doing.

So, if after all that you still want to read it, I hope you enjoy it.

Just a quick post to note that yesterday I finally typed “THE END” on the first draft of this latest novel. I’ll post about it in more detail soon, but I wanted to thank all the folks who offered encouragement and support throughout the process. You know who you are. I’d list you all, but I’m sure I’d leave someone out 1(but if you can always list yourselves by leaving comments).

May already? I feel like I just posted one of these. Sorry for the lack of other content around here, but I’ve been pretty much spending any and all time I carved out to write on the novel. How did I do on the “write every day” front? Well, I missed two days in April: my eldest daughter’s birthday, and my wife’s birthday. I’m happy to excuse myself in those cases1.

I cranked out 12,926 words, making April an improvement on last month. While I did miss two days I was more consistent in my output I’m pretty sure this comes down to having a daily goal of 550 words, which I didn’t always make, but it seemed to work better than “some words”. Read on for the breakdown

March was not a great month for me. I got pretty sick, and on March 24th I was too out of it to write. But I did manage to go eighty three days straight without missing a day. I’ve also been working long hours, which caused me to somehow miss another day as well. I’m still not feeling 100%, but I’m getting there. I wrote 11,781 words this month, making it my worst so far this year.

Not a hoax! Not a dream! PodCastle, the fantasy audio magazine from the folks who bring you Escape Pod and Pseudopod, launched today. The first story is Come Lady Death by Peter S. Beagle, read by Paul S. Jenkins (of The Rev Up Review). Check it out.

Apparently Amazon is making moves to drop any POD books not printed by their own BookSurge service. I’m not sure how long this was brewing, but stories are popping up all over.

I can see how this makes sense, from a certain point of view. Asking Amazon, who is now in the POD business, to sell POD books from LuLu (for example) could be seen as similar to asking Wendy’s to sell you a Whopper.

Unintended Consequences

To me this sends a message to all other book sellers that it’s ok to not consider POD books as real products, and refuse to carry them. I can envision all the major chains having their own in-house POD setups at some point, and they’ll follow suit by refusing to carry anything “not printed here”. This will include those books printed by Amazon’s BookSurge service.

Maybe I’m missing something more obvious, but it really seems that Amazon has set back the legitimacy of a certain class of books based solely on how they were printed and bound. I’m fully aware that there’s a lot of junk out there, because with POD anyone can “publish” their own book, but at the same time there are some wonderful works that perhaps would not be available in print any other way.

As a consumer, books in this situation might as well be mythical creatures. If I like to shop at a big chain, and they tell me “We don’t have a listing for that. We can’t order it,” then that’s it. Anything more requires jumping through hoops, meanwhile there are thousands of other books I can walk home with right now. Online it’s even worse. If a book isn’t up for order at your preferred online book seller it might as well not exist at all. And to many consumers, it won’t.

A Business Opportunity?

I foresee a lot of gloom and doom while this shakes out. There’s a change it will come to nothing in the end. It’s also possible Amazon is hoping to use this to get more favorable agreements out of POD houses before letting them back in. As such I’m just speculating here.

What if things play out like I suggested earlier, with each book seller having their own POD house, and not taking books from other POD houses. Assuming that the different POD services don’t have exclusivity agreements, the best option would be to offer you book through all of them. It’s obvious. Then wherever folks are they can get your book.

Simple, right?

No, not really. Having put together one book for LuLu I know it can take a great deal of time to prep the book to look good when they print and bind it. I’m sure other services have their own pitfalls. The idea of learning them all fills me with dread. Who has time for that?

But what if a someone started up some sort of aggregated POD service, where you get them your manuscript and they go through the process of getting it up on all the POD services for you? Could such a thing work? If you’re a POD author, would you use such a thing?

I’d be interested to hear other folks thoughts, so please comment.