Price Point

The pricing of fiction is an arcane art. There is not much science to it yet. What works? Often you won’t know until you try it and test it, keeping good records of sales so you can see how book page copy and varying prices work in combination to improve sales.  Non-fiction publishers know this, and many indie authors and small publishers are experimenting in exactly this manner to find the sweet spot in ebook pricing in their non-fiction niche.

But fiction writers? Not so much.

As a case in point, let’s consider short stories. Famously (or infamously), there are now scads of short stories being sold for .99 at Amazon, a virtual glut on the market that has both sparked hope in the rebirth of the short form story, and despair that so much cheap schlock is finding its way into print that the really good stuff is impossible to winnow out of the haystack.

This rush to the 99 cent price point has produced a ‘default’  low-ball price tag for short stories.  Is this a fair price for a short? Maybe so, especially if it is, erm, short (rather than a longer piece of short fiction)  or of only average quality.  Then again, for authors who write better quality fiction, to sell at this price point may be a real undervaluation of the work.

There is a constant tension between pricing low and selling in volume, versus pricing high, selling fewer but netting much more return on those units sold.  Will .99 guarantee your books will sell well? Or will a higher price attract a different kind of buyer, and help put more money in the writer’s pocket?

The fact is that in outlets like Amazon, the writer can set whatever price she wants to charge for a work, within certain limits. For the sake of illustration here, let’s consider an “expensive” short story priced at $2.99, as used in my friend’s number-crunching examples.

While you the author may not be willing to pay more than 99 cents for a short story, the fact is that many people are.  The reasons for this are important.

First, a higher price signals quality. People don’t always want a bargain; they are often very willing to pay a premium where they perceive value is to be had.  Second, in a market where there is a race to the bottom to undercut a competitor’s price (and I’d argue that’s been going on in ebook pricing), it is very easy to loose sight of the value factor.  But remember: people don’t buy books on price alone. They buy them for the escape and entertainment they offer. If you tell a better tale, you have made your book worth more than alternatives out there, and you can ask a higher price because you are delivering more bang for the buck.

It’s easier to do this if you have a track record or a following, of course. Even so, many buyers are surprisingly willing to simply take you at your word. For instance, in a sea of 99 cent stories, don’t you look twice at the one that charges $2.99? What’s so special about that one? Why’s it worth more?  At the very least these questions cause a buyer to look more closely at the work in question. You’d have to sell six short stories at the lower price to make the same royalty you’d clear from selling one of the more expensive stories.  Financially this should be a no-brainer.  Are you ripping off the buyer? Not at all. If they value your work, then it has higher value. It’s that simple.

In the immortal words of Don (“American Pie”) McLean, “The more you pay, the more it’s worth.”

So take the plunge and eliminate the guesswork in all this. Offer a story at a higher price point, and see how it goes. Of course, if your storytelling is poor or mediocre in quality, you are taking a big risk that scathing reviews will warn people off from your work, so I wouldn’t recommend this for people starting out or who lack professional-quality editing in their work.  But as for testing a price point? It’s that simple.  Try a higher price tag in the market. You might be surprised at the results.

Units (Quantity) Sold

So far people have been selling ebooks essentially the same way they sell paper books. Publish, offer review copies, try to get some attention for it through book reviews and blog posts, do things like virtual book tours or podcast readings,  hope word of mouth helps it catch on. Occasionally some investment in advertising to help showcase the book. Even so, things like short stories are likely to trickle, not fly, from the virtual bookshelves.

It is my belief that internet marketing tactics can be used to effectively pump up sales volume for fiction (of any sort) in the internet marketplace. I don’t mean banner ads and such; I mean targeted sales campaigns that recruit and sell to an audience that likes your work. This is a potentially complex subject, and rather beyond the scope of this particular post, but my point is simply that there may be ways to amplify sales that are not being practiced by the majority of the bookselling market right now, and which would help your work find its proper (appreciative, money-paying) audience.  I hope to be able to post more about this kind of alternative approach in the near future.

Creating a Body of Work

They may offer a low return on the dollar, but here’s one good reason to continue writing short stories: when you have more content on line, you are creating a pool of “related reading” for people who come across your work. They like one story, they browse and buy two others.  If you have a pool of work available you are creating a self-amplifying sales tool.  It’s also true that the return would be higher if these were books, not short stories, that you had a growing collection of, but short stories are quicker to write and so lend themselves to this “library building” function more readily.  One way to work shorts to your advantage is to create short stories that elaborate on aspects of your novels: telling prequel tales, side stories, back stories, tales about locations or characters or legends that you didn’t have room to properly incorporate into your novel. This way fans of the book can get another dose of your fictional world and satisfy their craving for more while you are off working on that next book.

So, there you have it.  I know this just scratches the surface, but those are my observations du jour about selling fiction in today’s ebook marketplace. Hopefully these ideas will help writers who are serious about making money off of their work. Do you have other tactics for improving sales and income in short story or novel e-publishing?  Please leave a comment below.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Improving Sales and Income in Ebook Publishing
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Yes, this curve shows averages. The point is in the comment: the more business entities screw with creative decisions, the more the distribution of the curve shifts left, toward an abundance of suck and a dearth of quality.

I love quality entertainment. Why is there so little of it on TV or in the movies? Why is it that most really good shows seem doomed to short runs and early cancellation (especially if they’re in niche genres like science fiction), and shows that hold high promise in the conception have the spark leeched from them before they ever hit prime time?  That people want superior storytelling is evident in the runaway success of shows that have flourished in the cable oases, with less (or different) corporate pressure to please advertisers and willingness to take risks. I could list a good number of those shows (The Wire and Sopranos on HBO; Mad Men on AMC; many others), but my point here is about the movie and tv productions that suck.

There are reams and reams of them. Some of this is due to the law of averages: the average production, statistically speaking, is going to be exactly that, and about half of what’s out there will be worse than average. That’s the good old bell curve at work for you. But that’s not the only reason sucky shows and movies get made.

Old Habits Die Hard

The other reason is the legacy system of Hollywood production, which sets up a dynamic that permits, even encourages, bean counters and executives to fiddle with creative decisions until they are “certain” they have a hit on their hands (pardon me while I ROFL for a while), or at least have a show that won’t scare off advertisers and create negative feedback from viewers.

Here’s a snippet I read recently that brought this home to me. This is the tiniest isolated instance touched on in this reportage, but it happens day in, day out, and in much more egregious measure than this, throughout the traditional entertainment media establishment. This anecdote is about the award-winning performance of Bryan Cranston in the phenomenally successful Breaking Bad:

[I]n typically nearsighted network fashion, AMC initially hesitated when his name came up. As the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, tells it, “There was concern originally: ‘This is the father from Malcolm in the Middle, which is night and day from Breaking Bad. Why do you think this is the guy?’?” A longtime X-Files producer and writer, Gilligan had cast Cranston as a menacing racist in a 1998 X-Files episode. “We needed a guy who could be scary and kind of loathsome but at the same time had a deep, resounding humanity. When Malcolm went on the air, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t realize he could be so funny!’?” To convince AMC, Gilligan distributed copies of Cranston’s X-Files appearance: “That was all it took.” (source: http://nymag.com/arts/tv/features/55303/. Registration may be required to view, but is free.)

Well, yay that they saw the light eventually in this one instance, but why are they even involved in such decisions in the first place?  That’s outrageous. Why did Gilligan even have to make a case to have the actor of his choice approved for casting? Yes, I understand this is “business as usual” in Hollywood, but I don’t care: that legacy system has long outlived its usefulness.  It is designed to put entirely too much creative control in the hands of pedestrian business people who have never been enlightened by an artistic vision in their life. I don’t care if it’s their money. Sure, let them argue about what show concept they are willing to finance. Casting is a creative decision that should be strictly up to the director, series creator, or other primary creative running the show, and not be mucked with by anyone else.

Collaboration, or Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen

In the “collaborative” (cough) model of movie making and tv production, anyone with a financial stake in the show or  a producer title figures they have creative input that’s just as valid as the originators of the concept. Sometimes that input is valid, but it is more often the case that constraints are dictated on the basis of an executive having been in the business for so long and fancying they know “what the market wants.” Or because he or she has a stack of (unproduced) screenplays they authored in their file drawers, and is eager to jump into someone else’s project with “input”. (Can we say “blocked artist”?) Or because unnecessary financial constraints are imposed that reduce an exceptional production to something pedestrian.

Do we have to show so many zombies? Can't we just hear them instead?

This is why so many creative shows are strangled in infancy by the production machine that dominates our entertainment industry. This is true even in the cable outlets which have ventured to tell daring tales, but which are still structured in the Hollywood studio manner.

AMC, for instance, produces some wildly talented shows (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead) but it seems they manage to do this in spite of themselves. They forced a parting of the ways with Frank Darabont, the creator and showrunner of The Walking Dead,  over budget disputes that would have limited his creative vision in ways he didn’t want to compromise.  Wanting to cut costs by 20%, AMC felt qualified to judge artistic elements like the need to shoot in outdoor locations, or whether it was necessary to show the zombies in this zombie-apocalypse series.  Not doing so was cheaper, so that was the kind of limitation they sought to impose, and the sort of issue that contributed to Darabont’s departure from the show.

This is not just the normal tension between budget constraints and a director’s artistic vision and ability to implement within cost.  At the time this dispute occurred, Walking Dead was “the most successful show in the history of basic cable.” They had a runaway profitable hit on their hands precisely because of Darabont’s vision, but still felt free to jump in in ways that impacted creative decisions.  “It’s not broken, but we’ll fix it anyway.”   This is par for the course in the “many cooks in the kitchen” atmosphere of Hollywood-style production.

I’m boggled that anything worthwhile ever manages to make it through the labyrinth of systems like that, which I think account for the endless hours of drek passing as mass-media entertainment in this country. (Others share my disgruntlement on this point; here’s a good rant from The Angry Black Woman on this topic).

The Tech Cure For TV Mediocrity

Rosa

But there is one silver lining here. The technology revolution we’re experiencing right now has put hugely powerful production tools into the hands of independent filmmakers. Such artists can now create shows and movies previously impossible to make without the support of a studio system and industrial-sized budgets – and do it on a single desktop computer, if one has to low-end the process. And because the lion’s share of the actual film-making takes place in a computer, and likely in a home office/studio, this allows individual artists and independent filmmakers to be answerable only to themselves and their own creative vision.

Even more importantly, this growing wealth of creative output is readily available online, and in particular at YouTube, where 48 hours of viewing material is uploaded every minute¹. Online outlets provide the distrbution, and on the production end we’ve finally reached a tipping point in the density and availability of media tools. The fruits of this magical combination are now emerging online. I’m seeing things of amazing sophistication and superior storytelling surfacing ever more frequently on the web.

This trend may be intensifying now, but it has been going on since the middle of the last decade. Some established producers have had the ability to put complete webisodes online, either to enhance existing series (Ron Moore with Battlestar Galactica webisodes), or to introduce a story concept in hopes of it getting picked up for production (Amanda Tapping’s initial Sanctuary webisodes); or an unknown artist creating originals like the very clever Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager webisodes that predated these and became a regular web-based entertainment series.

The trend I think is heating up now, though – especially via YouTube – is of many short films intended to portray an artist’s story world, their capabilities, and perhaps to lure funding for a lengthier full-blown project, as well as more and more story series like webisodes.

I predict this refreshing type of media production will only become more commonplace, and that our next big wave of good entertainment series will start to emerge from the web, not from television, cable, or movie studios.

Some samples of superior creativity of the sort I see happening:

Archetype, by Aaron Sims
Dark Resurrection, the Italian Star Wars fan movie
Dragon Age: Redemption
Portal: No Escape, by Dan Trachtenberg
Rosa, by Jesús Orellana. Embedded at end of this post.
The Gift, by Carl E. Rinsch.

Not all of these are by solo artists like Orellana, laboring alone in their garrets over a hot laptop in post-production (Dragon Age is done under license from Bioware and presumably some production funding from them as well). But the fact that the web is the premier venue of choice for such content says much about the direction this new media is flowing in. And many other samples online are simply inspired productions by people passionate about their storytelling. These little gemstones may not stay on the web – hopefully many will get picked up and turned into tv productions and major-release films, as has happened with Orellana’s Rosa, and find large audiences – but the web is becoming the incubator for this wealth of creativity.

May we see much more of this in the future.

Portal: No Escape

_____

1 There’s an astounding quantity of material being uploaded to YouTube: 3 months worth of non-stop viewing every 24 hours. YouTube now contains more hours of media than were produced by all of network television in the last 60 years. If you want to hit a large audience and get maximum exposure for your video, YouTube is the place to be.

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Mr. Gorell Barnes, Regency House Party

What was it really like to live “back then”? I think that is one of the central questions that motivates the enjoyment of historical fiction, whether one is reading, writing it, or watching in a film.  For a long time, a good historical novel was the only way a “modern” reader (of whatever era) could experience the past in great detail.  Great books of this sort bring an era alive with an immediacy that lets us forget our modern sensibilities and exist for a time in the skin of someone from the past.  It is the closest most of us ever get to visiting and living in the past.

Living in the Past

For many people, though, experiencing the past through the imagination alone is not enough. This has given rise to reenactment societies, working opportunities in living history (like the docents at Colonial Williamsburg), Renaissance Faires, the SCA and more. All of these offer folks a chance to sample a bygone way of life, but it is always in small doses, within close time constraints and within the framework of modern life. Just beyond the borders of Faire lie the interstate; the Civil War battle must be refought in time for everyone to return to work on Monday. These experiences cannot create a truly immersive sense of living in the past within these constraints.

But there is another way to go live in the past, one that is much more comprehensive than these leisure-time amusements. It is not available to everyone, but for those chosen to participate, it is arguably more immersive and for that reason potentially more enjoyable (and stressful) than the alternatives. This is the series of “historical living” experiments that PBS has aired over the last decade and a half: a series of historical “reality” documentaries where the focus is the experience of living in another time.

The 1900 House Family

The premise is simple: a carefully selected cross-section of people leave their modern lives, don the garments of the era, and move into a painstakingly recreated, historically correct setting. Intentionally isolated from all interaction with the modern world (as much as possible, considering that their experiences are being filmed), persons are assigned roles, their duties and obligations lined out for them, and they live as that person for the next several weeks or months. In conjunction with experts from historical preservation societies, academia, and other specialities, Wall to Wall/Channel 4 in the UK launched their foray into this arena with The 1900 House project in 1999.  As of this writing those producers and WNET in the US have covered groups of people living in 1940s Britain and Wales, Edwardian and Regency England,  Colonial America, the post-Civil War Texas frontier, and the Montana frontier in the late 1880s.

Transitioning Back in Time

The results of these long-term living history experiments are fascinating.  There is some indoctrination before the living experience begins, and some persons walk right into the era as if born to it. Others have a very difficult time adapting to the change and the loss of modern conveniences and social customs they are used to.  Everyone has their social niche and expected role lined out for them in detail. Some overarching goals are often assigned, and the person or group’s success will be rated accordingly. For instance, eligible young men and women in Regency House Party know they are angling for a marriage proposal by end of their summer with houseguests of varying status and incomes.  The rancher in Texas Ranch House knows he has to round up and sell enough cattle by the end of the summer to make his next mortgage payment, or he will lose his ranch. Even those without lofty goals can still have quite demanding challenges ahead of them: the maid of all work who cooks and cleans for a  household in 100-degree heat with nothing but wood stoves and elbow grease really has her work cut out for her.

In many of these shows, individuals are evaluated at the end of the residency, when their success personally and as a household are rated. If they had truly lived in that era, how would they have fared by the standards of the day? Did they establish a prosperous ranch, or go broke trying? Have sufficient food stores to survive a harsh winter? Found a husband or lost their honor in the community?  Evaluations are are conducted by area experts applying the standards of the period as much as recreation skills allow.  They are based on objective criteria, but to some extent are also necessarily subjective. What a modern person deems was a “success” may be a resounding failure in the past era, for reasons the evaluators explain in detail.

Regency House Corsetry

Almost without exception, no matter how much indoctrination they receive beforehand, modern people face peculiar challenges in stepping back into the past like this. For women a consistent stumbling block seems to be the sexism and social strictures they encounter. It is built into the mores of earlier eras and is harshly apparent to contemporary sensibilities when a modern woman has to live with it every day.  Also, for women used to comfortable clothes and freedom of movement, the often severe constraints of period fashions and the behaviors expected (be fully dressed even in a heat wave, etc) grow into a not-insignificant stress point. Many women said the heck with authenticity and took expedients like omitting their corsets, or spending the day in the equivalent of period underwear even when outside the house.

It’s a Man’s World

One thing that is striking when watching several of these shows is that men seem to have an easier time because the demands of the transition don’t hit them as hard.  Male privilege becomes if anything more explicit, and more pronounced than in our modern era. While there may be forms of etiquette they are expected to adhere to, there is no major social penalty for them if they do not (though evaluators will note if their behavior is not in keeping with the mores of the era).  For men, one is left with the impression that stepping back in time through a House project is a satisfying exercise in dressing up and playing an extended if grown-up form of let’s-pretend. Men are not asked to abandon who they are; instead they get to concentrate on one aspect of themselves and let that side “come out to play” and live the role (the Regency gentleman; the Texas ranch hand; the WWII householder on the home front).

Cooke Family, Texas Ranch House

Women, however, are suddenly surrounded with do’s and do-nots.  An Edwardian maid carrying on with a footman could be fired; Regency women are not allowed to amuse themselves outdoors in the carefree and physical manner men are. On the Texas Ranch project, all five women in the project felt discounted by the men and left out of any important decisions and opportunities.

On the ranch, this led to a contretemps that could have spelled the end of the venture had this really happened in 1867.  In this setting, the cowhands expected Mr. Cooke, the owner, to deal with them  “man to man”, on the strength of his word.  The input of Mrs. Cooke in the rancher’s dealings was universally resented as interfering at best, and emasculating at worst.  While the men’s attitudes were era-appropriate (a headspace modern men fell into quite readily), their expectations of the ranch owner challenged his 21st century practice of his wife having  equal input into decision-making. In frontier Texas, the hands come to disrespect her husband because it was thought his wife pulled his strings and he did not keep his word.  This assertive modern woman needed to put a lid on it, or she risked creating resentment and power struggles.

Unfortunately, she was not able to remain hands-off. Mrs Cooke felt she and the other women on the ranch were cut out of all business of importance and made to be inconsequential. Her antidote for this feeling of powerlessness was to assert more control in her husband’s ranch business.  Yet the more she exercised authority with her husband, the more the ranch hands resented both Mr. Cooke and her interference. Things came to a head when finally – two days before the project officially came to an end – every cowhand quit their employment and left the ranch en mass. While the rancher’s daughters were saying “I don’t understand. Dad’s so nice!”, what they were blind to is the fact that he made some harsh decisions and went back on his word to his men on several points under the influence of his wife’s input.

Cowboys, Texas Ranch House

If this had been real 1867 Texas, the rancher would have been hard pressed to find a new qualified crew of cow hands in a frontier where every such person was eagerly snapped up by competing ranchers. The desertion of his crew might have spelled out the failure of his ranch. It is an unhappy ending for the Texas Ranch project, and one brought about in no small part because of the clash of expectations between a modern woman and her more limited 19th century role.  Mr. and Mrs Cooke were startled at their failing evaluation; based on the pleasant time enjoyed by their family, the Mrs had deemed the ranch stay a success.  But according to evaluators, the more systemic elements in their scenario (poor use of food resources, muddled accounting practices, and the complete alienation of work crews) would have doomed this fledgling ranch or at least made its long-term survival very problematic.

Living Under a Microscope

Obviously, a PBS “House” project is in many ways like life in a fishbowl. Constantly under observation, cast into a strange setting with clothes that make daily functioning a challenge, often short on food or facing physical challenges in the environment, thrown in with strangers, and with many constraints built in on what one can and can’t do in the era: this set-up has many of the elements which make reality shows so popular. Unlike Survivor, however, the drama is not manufactured. People come into these projects generally expecting a good time and a pleasant adventure. There is no built-in dynamic that pits one against another, but what we do see happen is a stratification and alignment of factions based on the historical elements that were in play.

In Regency House Party, for instance, there is surprising tension between the marriageble young women and some of the older women chaperoning them.  Class tensions spring into life with the economic and labor divisions inherent between masters and servants in the Edwardian Manor House.  Likewise with the Texas Ranch, where at one juncture Mrs. Cooke thinks the hands should be appreciative of the work the family puts into feeding them, while the cowboys resent what to them feels like calculated charity at the rancher’s table.  Friction arises organically, just as do alliances, cooperation, and strong bonds forged by shared challenges. Quite often participants remark afterwards how real the period felt to them.  With the modern world absent from view and lived experience, it fades even more from mind as daily life and coping with problems demands that they “be here, now.”  In doing so these modern time travelers fall into an historical “present time” that becomes their very real life for that time.

The 1940s House

For a microcosm of human behavior, one could choose far worse to study than these people who abandon their ordinary lives to exist as fully as possible in another era. If you’ve ever wondered how you would get by if you were suddenly transported to another place and time, these historical House programs on PBS and Channel 4 (UK) are well worth checking out.  At least these documentaries permit us to see how our contemporaries fare in such settings, and if you’re like me, you can do some vicarious living through their experiences at the same time.   It is not time travel, exactly, but of all the modes of experiencing history, this seems to be the closest thing to being there.

These period living experiences  are produced by various organizations, and have been aired by PBS in the U.S.  It does not appear that they are working on any new ones at this writing, but previous shows are available now on DVD or online at  YouTube.  The episode embedded below is from the Texas Ranch House series, which illustrates some of the tensions between women, rancher and ranch hands discussed earlier in this post.  See especially Mrs Cooke’s complaints about not being part of management decisions around the 17 minute mark, and her reaction to veiled threats from a visiting Comanche around 34 minutes.

If you’ve watched these shows, which ones were your favorite and why? What period would you most like to participate in if you could be part of an immersive experience of this sort? Please leave your comments below.

Maura, Texas Ranch House

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Back in Time With Living History: the PBS “House” Projects
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Noomi Rapace

Not long ago I watched all three of the Stieg Larsson movies, the trilogy which begins with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I saw them in the subtitled original. Besides the powerful tale that is told, I was completely blown away by Noomi Rapace‘s performance as Lisbeth Salander. Because of this, I have no interest in watching the English-language remake of this movie or the related stories. Once you have a stellar performance engraved on your mind, others can seem only shallow imitations.  I also don’t trust American cinema to stay true to the original stories (and books) as the Swedish version did; it seems part of Hollywood’s DNA to do writing-by-committee, to toss producers’ opinions into the mix, or otherwise to allow various factors to dilute pure and powerful storytelling. Only adamant artists with creative control, like Spike Lee, or producer/directors who are completely invested in the scripting process, like James Cameron or Ridley Scott, are people I would trust with an adaptation of a foreign work in that manner.  The new version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo does not seem to be of that genesis, so I’ll take a pass.

The original, though, is another story entirely.  The story is quirky and unexpected, the twists unforeseen, the whole is unpredictable, like one is exploring new territory as every plot development unfolds. And Noomi Rapace! What a discovery! Her Lisbeth is street-tough but vulnerable, a near-broken child grown into a wary woman with an edge of wired-tight intensity. Her defenses are obvious; her genius as well, if she allows one to glimpse it. She is complex, prickly, and mesmerizing. She is like those women you meet sometime who are mysteries you want to solve, but who may not stand still long enough – or let you close enough – to do so.

Rapace as Lisbeth Salander

All of this brings me around to my science fiction novel Mainline. Mainline’s protagonist is Reva, a wary, streetwise woman who works as an assassin because of her rare ability to move between variant moments of Now.  She is flashy when she wants to be or can blend into the background; she is by turns abrasive or subtle, whatever she needs to do to achieve her ends. She, too, is intense, complex, prickly, and mesmerizing. When I saw Rapace’s performance in Dragon Tattoo, I knew I had found my Reva. Forget the vague cover art on that novel, an artist’s random concept based on a few book notes. Except for a difference in height (Reva is 5’8; Noomi is petite in comparison), the attitude, body language and look is virtually identical to what I have long seen as Reva. Reva is a tad less punk, more chic, but the basic vibe is the same.

Some quotes from Rapace that caught my eye:

I’m interested in people’s darker side, the ones that aren’t easy and well balanced. The cracks.

We need more extreme movies in Sweden, personal projects that aren’t necessarily made for a bigger audience. I think it creates a creative block to always have the audience as a goal.

Noomi, Lisbeth, or Reva?

When Mainline is made into a movie, Noomi Rapace gets my vote for playing the lead.  Until that happy day, you can get a hint of Reva by checking out the remarkable Dragon Tattoo movie in the original subtitled version. Rapace’s performance alone will make it worth your while, and if you like this kind of suspense/thriller tale, you’ll enjoy the ride overall. If you miss that, you might want to catch Prometheus, coming out in 2012, a dose of high-octane science fiction by Ridley Scott, who cast Rapace as lead character Elizabeth Shaw. She is also presently appearing in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

This is not a formal movie review for the original movie, but since I do go on a bit about aspects of the film and cast, I’ll give it a rating as well.

Rating

5 Stomps of Approval: This rocks!

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and My Novel MAINLINE
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"Pish-posh!"

I’m writing an alternate history/paranormal novel that takes place in a version of Victorian England (Queen Victoria’s Transmogrifier, which I’ve written about here).  I routinely give things a once-over to make sure my language is consistent with the era I’m depicting: no anachronisms, no modern slang, and appropriate use of mid-19th century phrasing when it adds flavor and makes sense to the reader.

Recently I was working on a short story that will be appearing in the forthcoming anthology, Demon Lovers: Succubi.¹ The story is related to characters and events in Transmogrifier , and in the course of this writing I found myself using some turns of phrase I had to double-check. When did they come in vogue? Would it be right to have people saying them in their time/place?

One case in point is the term “pish posh”, a dismissive utterance somewhere between “don’t be silly” and “oh, come on!”.  To my surprise, etymology for the term “pish” shows the word as an exclamation of contempt has been in use since the 1590s. Who knew? And yes, it was in vogue in the 19th century, as reflected in novels and some letters and journals of the period.

Anyway, this got me thinking about use of old expressions in writing, and so, here’re some thoughts on the when/how/where/why of it.

When to Use Outdated Speech

Obviously, speaking in an “old fashioned” way can have (at least) one of two impacts. First, it can make someone sound old-fashioned – i.e., identified with an earlier era -  if you have them do it when no one else talks that way. This is a tactic to use if you want to make your character sound dated. You don’t have to think 19th century or earlier literature here for that to happen, either. The older man who answers the challenge, “Yo, why you up in my grill?” with “No sweat. It’s groovy, man,” sounds like an old hippy, or at least someone who came of age during the 1960s.

The other time and place to use period slang is when it is era-appropriate and everyone talks that way. In that situation, though, a writer has to deal with a different challenge:  we generally want to convey the flavor and feel of the period, without having the language feel stilted. We want the story to flow in a way that is comfortable and understandable for a modern reader, but remind them in subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) ways, that they are a fly on the wall in a place and time that is not “here, now”.

Certainly there is artistry to accomplishing this, and in the end you have to rely on your feeling for language (or develop a feeling for language) that lets you strike the right nuanced tone to carry these things off. But even if you’re tone-deaf about vernacular and what slang comes from what period, there are still solutions to hand. Here are some resources I’ve found that can help you transport readers back in time without jarring the believability of your characters and setting.

Resources

If you’re writing a period piece or want to talk old-fashioned on purpose, know your old-fashioned language. I think one of the best ways to do this is to read books from the era in question. I am lucky in that I grew up reading a lot of novels written in the 19th century and things even earlier, so the cadences and usage of that era are almost second nature to me. Often I will write something down and then go, “Wait, where’d that come from? I better look that up in case I’m making it up.” Turns out I’m probably regurgitating something from Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) or Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island), and so on. Good! The language my people are using, at least in the incidental expressions and phrasing, is hitting the right tone.  You don’t need this to be second nature in order to use the right phrasing, though.  There are great resources online that I frequently turn to, and you might find them useful too. Here’s a sampling:

The Online Etymology Dictionary

One of my favorite resources for the etymology of uncommon phrases is the most excellent Online Etymology Dictionary, which you can browse for endless hours (if you’re of that bent) right here.  While good dictionaries have interesting etymology (word origin) notes, this online resource is more chatty and has some interesting backstories tucked in here and there about the phrases in question, going beyond the simple ‘word root/first use’ info in regular dictionaries. Great resource, highly recommended. In fact, let me give that a Lizard Lair stomp of approval!

Online Etymology Dictionary

The Word Detective

For an even more back-story filled and often humorous romp through the underbrush of language evolution, check out The Word Detective. This bloggish reference site is the online version of a newspaper column produced for ages (well, online since 1995, anyway) by Evan Morris. Great stuff here, less dictionary-esque than the previous listing, and an eclectic grab-bag of vocabulary byways.

Evan Morris’ work gets stomps of approval as well, but it’s the same as the one above (5 Stomps=This Rocks!). In fact, all my recommendations here are 5-stomps worth of word fun.  If it’s just 4 stomps of “good stuff,” it’s not on this short list.

Speaking of vocabulary byways, I also recommend…

The Oxford English Dictionary Online

The O.E.D. is the sine qua non of dictionaries, and many obsessive wordsmiths would give their next smartphone for an unabridged version of this venerable reference work. Other dictionaries pale in comparison. Actual access to the grist of the OED online costs moolah, but you don’t need to be a paying subscriber to get one of the next-best things: their Access to English page. This content gives you various subsets of historical and word-evolution info. I find their “Word Stories” section to be one of the most consistently useful. I think they have a newsletter link somewhere there; I seem to get periodic (quarterly?) mailings from them, but right now cannot spot where I signed up for such a thing. Their Word of the Day is also entertaining, and you can sign up to get that emailed to you as well (right hand column on the home page).   5 Stomps for this one as well.

So there you go, hopefully a little helpful grist either for your writing mill, or for your language enjoyment neurons.  Happy dated slang to us all. May we use it well!

Do you have suggestions for etymology and slang resources that help with language from other eras? Please share in the comments below!

_____

1. Demon Lovers: Succubi is an anthology appearing December 2011 from my imprint, Storybones Publishing. More will be announced about that book shortly. You can find the book website at http://www.demonlovers.info.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: When to Use Old Language and Slang in Your Stories
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This is the newest site of this sort I’ve seen – there seem to be several of these cropping up suddenly, for I’ve random-surfed across at least two others in the last month. The reason I’m commenting about this here is because I’m thinking maybe the time is right for this, and the technology AND social networking is now in place in sufficient density to enable this kind of interaction.

To my thinking this is not simply one more channel through which people can express their opinions (though it is, also, that). What is different about Debate.fm and its kindred sites, is that, first and foremost, they are based on the premise that it is possible to debate topics of the day in a civilized manner. (Yeah, I know, huh? What a concept.) This is a conscious move away from the vitriolic free-for-all that all too many chat forums and comments columns rapidly devolve into.

It has long been lamented that since people are anonymous on the net, they can (and do) snark and attack in unfettered ways that they would never do in real life or face to face conversations.  But besides rabidly demonstrating that left to their own with minimal social control many people act out like 7-year-olds, the current state of “debate” on the net is laughably spotty in quality. The people who are screaming to be heard or who are busy shooting down others drown out people who are focused on intelligent, constructive dialog with others.

What has been hugely missing in the increasing noise to signal ratio is a movement towards actually coming up with consensus and solutions on issues of concern. If we can crowdsource to solve urban planning problems¹, why can we not crowdsource to solve problems of greater and more immediate social and global import? The fact is we could, but people are not in the habit of interacting this way. Let’s leave aside the political question of how to enact solutions rooted in social consensus (that answer will differ from place to place around the globe, anyway). The starting point of achieving understanding and real answers in today’s world must be predicated on open communication. “Open” in the sense of open to different opinions; open to the free flow of ideas and information, and respectful of the debater who stands in opposition.

Not every debater will be willing to change their mind on an opinion or issue they are arguing one side of. But the greatest value in debate has always been the impact it has on those who are listening, not necessarily those who are participating. For the fact remains that most people will stand by while a handful exchange words on a topic. They keep their own council and are forming their own opinions – and their opinions are shaped and influenced by the argumentation presented in the debate forum.

And here is precisely the value of Debate.fm and this new wave of social debating spaces on the interwebs. These are places where topical issues are put forth and discussed in a relatively structured manner in a space that at least attempts to maintain a civil conversational environment. Perhaps the debaters’ minds will not be changed – but in this forum, it is possible to more easily present counter-claims, and to support conclusions with facts.

This process – the dialog and the new conclusions dialog can lead to – is a big step in the opposite direction from people absorbing faux news and being reactive to hot topics because of it. The Debate.fm approach requires you to think, and to break your argument down into supporting claims (and it is at that granular level that we can easily see where some arguments are weak, and some are strong).  Oh, I’m sure a number of people with a surfeit of fact-free opinion bias will still rush to join in online debate forums (even the structured ones), but they are less likely to carry the day when the very style of the debate encourages point/counterpoint and thoughtful (rather than emotional or pile-on) commentary.

Will debate sites change the world? Probably not. But they are a demonstration of diverse access to a forum of issues and ideas.  They are perhaps our first faltering baby steps on the path to truly productive democratic debate about real issues among “the masses”, not merely among the enclaves of activists or the politically astute.

___

1. Daren C. Brabham. (2009). “Crowdsourcing the Public Participation Process for Planning Projects”, Planning Theory, 8(3), pp. 242-262

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Public Debate, Dialog, and Debate.fm
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Working With Established Publishers

For my books released by a major publisher like Tor Books, I have very little input into the process. They have their own art department and editors dealing with that end of production issues. I suppose if my heart were really set on getting a certain person to do the cover illo, I could ask if they could get him/her to work with, but whether that request has any weight is a complete crapshoot (plus, they usually have their go-to artists already lined up).

The one thing that I might get asked to provide is one or a few descriptions of scenes I think would be worth illustrating, or a detailed description of a character (usually pulled straight from the book text). However, even though I have provided this info in the past, it has in fact never made it into the cover art. I understand that this is a pretty common experience when dealing with established publishers. An author has little impact on the cover, and depending on the publisher and genre, may even be lucky if the cover bears any resemblance at all to storyline or characters in the book.

We might also consider it a stroke of luck if the artist actually gets to see and read any of the manuscript that they are illustrating, beyond (maybe) a scene or description an editor has passed on to them. This is partly because a lot of artists just don’t want to read the entirety of the associated content (would you want to read a whole book just to illustrate one scene from it?). On the other hand, a lot about the world, setting, characters and dramatic tension can be packed into that one scene visually if the artists HAS bothered to read the whole associated work. I think it boils down to a question of time and interest. In fact, it seems to happen only rarely.

Books I Publish Myself

Unlike most authors I am also a publisher. I used to publish a tech journal where I also made cover art production decisions, have published a little in the rpg market (though that is not an example of a quality cover), and have been involved with small press book production issues including cover art. Soon my Storybones imprint is publishing an anthology (more about that near month-end), and we have some other titles lined up for publication through 2013, including books I am authoring.

So, wearing this hat as author-who-CAN-select-her-own-book-covers, my experience is completely different than when working with a major publishing house. Here are the steps I go through when commissioning cover art.

1. Be clear on theme of book

It’s surprising how many book covers don’t reflect the content in tone, composition, color selection, or any other significant way. It’s hard to tell where that failure comes from, but one factor that can prevent such massive Fail is for the publisher or art director (or whoever) to be crystal clear on the theme of the book – and, of course, to convey this to the artist.

2. Be clear on scene or composition

Know what scene is going to be illustrated from the book, or alternatively, what kind of composition will serve to convey the sense of the contents.

If using a scene, as a rule of thumb I’d say pick one that contains dramatic action, or suggests something interesting. Avoid like the plague ones that are static-figure-centric or “portraity” in nature (unless it’s a biography or character study).

Essentially, the cover tells (or, I believe, should tell) a story at a glance, or gives a feel for the story contained in the book. Portraits don’t do this. For an example of what not to do, see this book cover for my fantasy novel Kar Kalim. It is a lovely and mysteriously evocative portrait. But – so what? Can you look at that and have any faintest inkling of what the book’s about, or why it might interest you? No.  Does this make you want to pick up the book and flip through it? Probably not compellingly so.  This hinders sales.

The fact is that people DO judge books by their covers, and covers have a huge impact on people’s buying decisions, especially when they are “just browsing”, as opposed to seeking a title on purpose (because they read a review, like the author, or whatever). You want to create a cover that intrigues, titillates (if appropriate), entices, conveys some interesting dramatic tension or mystery – anything that tempts the reader to crack that book open, or click the ‘preview’ button, or buy it on the strength of the cover alone. (I think that accounts for more impulse sales than is generally recognized.)

2b. What does “be clear” mean?

More specifically, here is an example of art directions I recently gave someone for cover art I commissioned:

“This needs to be a two-figure study, two people in intimate embrace but more sensual than sexual. Potentially risque body parts must be concealed: we want suggestive physical tension, not anything explicit. One figure is dominant, the other resistant but succumbing to the dominant one.”

There was much more but that gives you a feel for the type of art direction that provided useful guidelines for that particular artist. I also gave some example jpgs of other covers in the genre, some in the vein of what I was looking for, and some marked as “definitely NOT this kind of thing”, so the artist could see what I had in mind without me spending 1000 words on describing the proverbial picture.

The bottom line here is that when commissioning art, the more conceptual detail the art director can convey, the easier it will be for the artist to formulate something that will work. If an artist is working with someone who waves their hands and gives you really vague direction (“we need a fighter killing a monster on the cover”), I can only urge you to work up very rough sketches first (don’t spend more than an hour doing so – just rough figure composition is a fine starting point) and run those past your buyer so that you can narrow down what they’re looking for before spending waaaay too many hours producing what you thought they wanted. (!)

You’d be surprised what becomes a sticking point once the publisher/art director sees where you went with something they described only vaguely. If they remain inarticulate with you, it is also a good idea to ask for reference art or examples of what they like/what’s in the ballpark thematically from existing artwork or book covers.

Most people don’t think or talk like artists. I’m an artist and graphic designer also, so it’s easier for me personally to bridge that gap, but I find most people in the publishing biz don’t speak Art very well at all. The clever artist has to find ways to elicit input from his/her customer nonetheless.

3. Production considerations and the deliverable

Don’t assume (ASS-U-ME) what format for your finished art will work for the publisher’s purposes. If they don’t give you a detailed deliverable spec, ask about those details instead of just sending them a “final” jpg at 300 dpi and think that’s a done deal.

For instance, in the recent cover art I commissioned, I required that the original art be of a specific (trade paperback 6″x9″ print) dimension, in CMYK color format, delivered as a .psd (Photoshop) file with layers kept separate. I needed the cover art without typography, the art with typography, and the art in a full book-jacket sized display (i.e background extended across what would be back cover dimensions). In addition, the artist had to deliver a 300 dpi jpg that I could use for web-centric purposes in RGB color.

In my case, these deliverables were necessary because I am covering the eventuality of releasing a print edition in the future. If the artist had assumed I needed only a low-res jpg for pdf and web display purposes, then I would not have the deliverable I need for future print production.

In my case I knew to spec this out for the artist in advance. But as an artist, if your customer does not think to tell you these things (or does not know to consider them), this is a dialog worth initiating, so that they have the artwork they need not just next week but into the future.

OK I hope that last wasn’t too far afield, but I think the production-quality deliverable aspect is also part and parcel of book cover creation these days, and so there you have it.

Those are my quickie thoughts about what it takes to get the right visual representation for a book.  If you’ve been involved in this process yourself, I’d like to hear your take on these things as well. Please leave your remarks in the comments below.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Book Covers, Artists, Authors, and Publishing
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This lack of professional publishing engagement with your work meant something.  It often meant your work had only niche appeal, thus not justifying a publisher’s expense of bringing something to market. But more often, it meant your work actually sucked. You had not yet mastered your craft;  you wrote something no agent would touch and no publisher would buy. Sure, spend your money on vanity publishing: when you see how difficult it can be to market a work, and are unable to sell the many copies you thought would fly off the shelf – well, that’s when reality sets in, and you will look longingly at established publishing houses, and wish your work would be taken up by one of them.

Enter the Ebook

Now – quite suddenly, relatively speaking – all those barriers to getting one’s work out there are gone. Vanished, as if they’d never existed. There’s been a lot of discussion about how the publishing model has flipped around – not just from a business viewpoint but from the actual get-it-in-print viewpoint. It used to be that a lot was written, and specialists picked what they thought was marketable. This is what would see print. The new model is, everything plus the kitchen sink gets into print and is readily accessible everywhere (electronically): and out of this morass, the good stuff will (presumably) float to the top. This is also known as the “publish then curate” model, as opposed to its predecessor, “curate then publish.”

Tons of Garbage

The first and most immediate effect of this new model is the fact that it pushes tons of garbage onto the market. When the price of entry is a word processor, minimal (and I do mean minimal) ability to string words together on a page, a free ebook conversion program and free distribution services: well, if you envision it, and take time to write it, then you can have it in print, for any value of “it”.

Where does this leave the good stuff? If the good work can’t find enough of a readership to elevate it from the muck at least by word of mouth, then it leaves that good stuff buried in the muck, lost in the noise of the absolute glut of cheap or free poorly written material that is flooding the market.

This is frustrating to anyone trying to get their stuff read. It is not only frustrating but I think a real tragedy when this is the fate of truly good writing that can’t get the hearing it needs. But most fiction ebooks do not even fall into that “good writing” category: they sink even further to the bottom of the heap, the really bad writing buried under reams of merely mediocre writing, because there is simply so much STUFF coming out now in ebook form, and the sad fact is, most “authors” in this market are not producing any work that warrants that job description. They are writing at a 7th grade level with stilted craft abilities, and their work is being avidly consumed by an audience with 7th grade reading skills.

This is all well and good if you aspire to write dross for ill-educated masses who aren’t especially particular about the execution of what they read. If, though, you want to write intelligent, insightful, entertaining things that intelligent, insightful readers can really appreciate and be entertained by, you have to up your game and write at a whole different level. This will not only elevate you out of the junk heap of ebook mediocrity, it will connect you with an audience that is the right audience for what you are trying to convey.

This brings me to my tip list of the three things to avoid like the plague if you want to successfully publish an ebook (in a way that distinguishes you from the dross, that is, and makes your work stand out for its merits).

1. Don’t Write Crap

Even the suckiest book will find some poor benighted soul who thinks it rocks. That one ignorant fool does not a market make. If you are writing, you have to be able to, well, WRITE. This means technical skills like good grammar and spelling. It means proofreading skills like getting rid of redundancies and using the right turn of phrase instead of some bastardized thing that misses the mark. And most importantly, it means (if you’re writing fiction) that you need to learn how to tell stories effectively. This means learning your craft. For every significantly flawed work you rush to market, you will lose readership: all those intelligent well-read readers who are potentially repeat book-buyers will trickle away and be almost impossible to win back, because they will have read your work and decided, “Hey. This is crap.”

2. Don’t Publish the First Book You Finish (or the Second, or the Third)

At the risk of being redundant, I’ll say it again: Learn your craft. Practice. Write. Join critique groups and get critiqued. Don’t think because you start here and end there you have told an effective story. Learn what an effective story is. Read voraciously, and listen to intelligent input about your writing. This does not mean asking for fen feedback from your favorite yaoi writing forum. It means finding constructive, detailed technical criticism and constructive input, ideally from other published authors. If not, then find a writing group populated by English Majors (Masters are even better). The kind of detailed critique skills they learn about writing in school is one of the only real-world uses that degree background will ever see. Work it for all it’s worth. And write a million words. Seriously. If you haven’t done that yet, you’re still learning the ropes. What you write at the end of that journey will be vastly different than what you started out with. There are relevant discussion comments in this thread here and more easily found if you google around on “a million words.”

If it takes potentially years to master any major skill, why do we think writing would be any different? People who say, “Well I decided to start writing last year, and now I have three books out at Smashwords” – well, ok, good for you for completing multiple projects. But what’s the quality like? If you’re not a natural genius with the written word, I’m betting you have some craft honing yet to do. Probably years worth of it. And you know what? That’s ok, because it’s par for the course – but be aware of that need, if you want to have quality work on the market.

NOTE:  I know the above two points are similar, however: the first is about quality on the page, the second is about the author’s learning process. I think these are two areas primarily responsible for all the drek posing as readable fiction right now, and so deserve being highlighted in this manner.

3. Don’t Sit Back and Let Your Book (Try to) Sell Itself

This last point is not about craft, but about the issue I mentioned earlier: that in this (still accelerating!) ebook revolution we are in, there is a growing glut of books on the market. Just releasing it at Lulu, Smashwords, Booklocker or Amazon is not by itself sufficient to guarantee sales. You need to take additional steps to draw attention to your work. This is a really necessary thing to do, just as much (or more so!) as in the days of hard-copy vanity publishing, when someone with a 1000-print run had boxes in their living room, relatives saying “No more, thanks!”, and yearning to sell the rest of their inventory so they could get their living room back.

The actual sales tactics have changed, in this day of the interwebz and social media connections, but the problem essentially remains the same: how can you draw people’s eyeballs to your work, so they even realize it is there, much less want to pick it up and read it?

A discussion on marketing is waaay beyond the scope of this post, but this point is in this list because if your book is like 99.99% of those out there, you cannot simply leave it to chance that your book will “catch on” somewhere, or magically stand out in a publisher’s listing compared to all the other hundreds of books in their catalog. Give some thought to this challenge, and understand that when you choose to publish an ebook, you are also making a commitment to market your work – if, that is, you want to stand out from the trash heap and create a market for your work.

That’s it for now – some quick thoughts on big problems I see in today’s fiction ebook marketplace. Good luck to everyone aspiring to write, and LEARN YOUR CRAFT. You don’t just owe it to your readers: you owe it to yourself, to tell the best story you can.

_____
Here’s a little disclaimer: this is a not-so-disguised rant as well as cautionary “points to watch out for” commentary. I’ve been a professional editor and publisher since I was 24, so I’ve been at this for a while. My experience spans old-style print media from journalism to journals, including newspaper and magazine layout with galley proofs and a handy exacto knife for trimming layout edges, to web content, book editing, and *.mobi conversions for Kindle ebooks today. Still mastering that last, but my point is simply: I’ve seen a lot of styles of media production and distribution, and the content they purvey. Edited a lot of it, and written a lot of it as well. It is from that viewpoint that I share these observations, as well as from my deep dismay at the shear mass of unreadable garbage on the ebook market today. Don’t ask me to review your ebook unless you have zero doubts about the quality of your writing, because if it is not up to professional standards that is the first and (if you’re lucky) the last thing I will note about it in my review.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Three Problems to Avoid If You Publish a Fiction Ebook
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Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker in 'Bonnie and Clyde' (1967)

A friend was concerned that someone might steal her creative writing if she posted it online. Someone else told her she had to register it to secure copyright protection. Actually, that’s not quite true. Here’s the skinny on claiming copyright (in a kind of anecdotal and only two-pronged manner. Time limits.)

How Do I Make Sure No One Steals My Writing?

There are actually two separate issues here: 1) creating copyright and 2) establishing when you did so.

1. Creating copyright

No registration or any arcane bureaucratic act is required. The copyright law stipulates that all you need to do is to record your creation “in a tangible format.” If it is a song, make an audio recording. It doesn’t have to be the final finished piece: singing the melody acapella will suffice to establish it as yours. If it’s a piece of sculpture – make the sculpture or a small prototype of a big piece. If a written work: record the words. Even making an audio recording of your words and skipping the “writing down” part provides copyright for that specific work as recorded, because that puts it in a tangible format.

As to the more normal work a writer does: once you have written it down, presto, you have copyright. That includes whatever you post online at a blog and longhand notes in a notebook. (To the issue of posting ideas you have for projects, see 4a, below).

There is a whole ‘nother layer of weirdness about short missives in discussions, a la email lists, forums and G+, but I won’t get into that here in detail. In those circumstances the short version is that Fair Use doctrine usually allows people to take and reuse your words to a large extent, and you have given tacit permission for others to (re)publish your words by participating in those fora. At any rate, that is irrelevant to protecting a piece of proper Writing, which is the main concern we’re addressing here.

So. You’ve written X down, posted it at your blog. You automatically have copyright (for your lifespan plus 70 years). So, why do people talk about registration and so on? Well, that gets into the issue of establishing when you created that copyright claim.

2. Establishing the DATE of your copyright

For this to make a little more sense, let’s start by rolling back the clock and pretending it’s 1968. Not only because that was an interesting year, but because it was a full decade before the international copyright convention rewrote the copyright agreements holding between nations and led us to our present “record it in a tangible format” rule.

In 1968, if you wrote a book or screenplay or something, ok: you’d have it sitting around on typewritten paper, with a carbon copy in your files. And you’d have a date on it, somewhere, but of course, any date could be made up and slapped on the paper. Let’s say you were jealous of the success of Bonnie and Clyde (nominee for Best Picture that year, written by David Newman and Robert Benton.) If you wanted to try to run a little scam and cash in on the action, you might have tried copying that screenplay, putting your own date on it (“Look! I wrote this in 1951! Newman and Benton stole my script! I’m suing!”), and taken it to court.

But your law suit would have failed, because Newman and Benton, being clever boys, would have registered their script with the Writers’ Guild of America, or perhaps even directly with the US Copyright Office. In either case, by doing so they established a “public claim of authorship” that is tied to a particular date (the date of registration). This certifies that their opus was complete and hatched by or on that particular date. However…

If you did in fact write Bonnie and Clyde in 1951, and if you had mailed a copy of the script to yourself, and still had it in a sealed envelope with a postmark proving the date it was mailed on it (or maybe even had it notarized) – then you would have good grounds to challenge nefarious Newman and Benton in court for swiping your script, which was demonstrably written before their own. (Same process applies potentially to books; I’m just having a Bonnie and Clyde week here

Bonnie meets Clyde for the first time. "Hey, boy. What are ya doin' with my mama's car? Going to the Post Office to register your book? Oh, get along then!"

My point to these hypotheticals is, this is what gave rise to the ‘register it/mail it” etc approaches to “establishing copyright.” At the time, you had to go through a proactive registration process with the US copyright in order to establish a claim in the first place. (That is the main thing that changed in 1978). In addition, registering with the copyright office (not the writers’ guild) allowed (and still allows) you to claim more in damages should your work be infringed upon.

Today, of course, there are a million other ways to establish a date of first creation of a work (i.e., to establish a “public claim of authorship”) short of officially registering a document and paying a fee to do so. However, if/when things go to court over a work, it is sometimes more difficult to defend dates written in electrons on the internet or your hard drive, than it is a government-stamped certificate on file in a government office. But then again, don’t assume one will automatically win out over the other. All kinds of methods of establishing creation date and provenance of a work are acceptable now that were not previously, thanks in part to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other changes in law, plus the increased familiarity with and use of digital media since 1978. That said, an “official” government document will often have a little more clout (depending on circumstances) if something ever goes to court.

The main reasons to register a creative work for copyright purposes today is so you can collect more in damages if it is infringed upon and goes to court. A secondary reason is if you are working in certain industries like the screenwriting business, where it is virtually required that you have your work registered with WGA or studios and agents won’t look at it. This is partly to cut down on wannabes cluttering the doorsteps, but also mainly an entrenched habit from the era when this was actually logistically necessary in order to demonstrate who wrote what when. (Old habits die hard).

If you are intent on spending money on a registration, do so with the US Copyright Office. It’s more bang for your buck (decades of protection, not five or 10 years per fee payment as WGA does; plus statutory entitlement to more damages if it comes to that).

3. The Practical Side of This

Practically speaking, from a legal viewpoint you have a viable and defensible claim to anything you write or post online. No registration is necessary. It is also not cost effective to turn around and register every scene, draft, installment or work in progress one might produce along the way. If you finally have a finished work that you feel warrants tougher statutory damages in case of infringement protection, then by all means, go register it. Personally, I would do this only for books that are actually getting published, or for a finished script I’m shopping around to real screen agents. Nothing short of that.

Note: I wouldn’t even worry about the registration process if I’m shopping for a literary agent. You already have copyright when you send it to them, and if you have a time/date stamp on any electronic docs, or have ever posted outtakes anywhere on the interwebz, you’ve established date frame of authorship. From a practical viewpoint, you are already as legally protected as you’re going to be against infringement. People who worry about literary agents stealing their work are spending misplaced worry energies.

4. Miscellanea

In case it needs to be said:

a) You can’t copyright ideas. If you blab about your blockbuster best-seller idea at a restaurant, and some dude the next table over hears you, goes home, bangs out his own version of your concept and releases it as an ebook next week, there’s not a darn thing you can do about that. It is your finite execution of the creative work that is copyrightable, not the notion that informs the work. That is why I’m comfortable, for instance, posting a book synopsis at my site: it’s just a concept, anyway, and concepts are a dime a dozen, and they can’t be copyrighted. The actual work of writing a book is a whole ‘nother thing entirely.

b) I’m sure you know the reality of the interwebz: ANYthing you post online, you can think of as something you have just released into the wild, whether that was your intention or not. Even if you delete it, you are unlikely to really get rid of it (persistence of electronic data being what it is). Simple rule, then: if you truly can’t bear the risk (or the thought) of someone stealing a snippet from you and doing something unauthorized with it, don’t put it online.

Realistically? If they need to swipe content to puff up their pitiful blog, let ‘em. These days anyone with a little google fu will be able to determine who the original author was, anyway. And if they can create an entire book based on stolen tidbits from you and their own creative writing – well, the odds of that happening are like you getting struck twice by lightning two days running on your door step. (Plus, the DMCA allows you to file a ‘take down’ notice with an infringer’s ISP, and get them tonked for a TOS violation.)

Basically: you have to decide if the benefit of creating an audience for your work and getting feedback on a WIP is worth the “struck by lightning” risk.

PS:  Good practice is to put a copyright notice somewhere so a bonehead can’t claim they didn’t know it was protected by copyright (even though it automatically is). “(c) 2011 by Deborah Teramis Christian. All rights reserved.” is sufficient.

OK. Coffee break’s over.  That’s my $1 worth.

And notes, references? No time right now to plug them into this post, might do so later if I can. Meanwhile, google is your friend. Also be sure to visit the very informative website of the US Copyright Office.

"All your word are belong to us."

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Why You Don’t Need to Register Something to Copyright It
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I filed that away and moved on. Later, in 2006, a movie called The Black Dahlia was made. I noted that as well, but was not in a place where I could catch the flick in the theaters. Again, something to note for later.

Well, later finally came. Needing a break from book writing, I took a little time out to look over my Netflix queue – where lo and behold, I had saved the streaming version of that 2006 movie. So I watched it the other night. Here are some thoughts about the movie, and the unsolved murder at the heart of it.

Read the full review here.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: The Black Dahlia: a Sideways Murder Mystery
DRAGONSWORD: Teramis' new Asian-inspired fantasy adventure novel is online now for free.
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