Weird Things About Being A Digital Author

The cover of  The Elias Anomaly. You could read it
on Wattpad if you wanted. But you'd be the first.

It has often been my contention that I was an artisanal author before I knew what that was. Not for me the hassle of sending stuff off and waiting for the rubber stamp of mid-list approval. Not for me the irritation of people actually reading what I write or caring about it. No. I write for me. I know I am a good writer. I live in the hope that one day someone else will agree with me. If it doesn't happen, well, the world's loss frankly.

Nevertheless it's no good writing things in this day and age and letting them fester on a hard drive. To show intent of actually publishing something one should "get out there" and "build a fanbase". One should, at least, make the attempt, I feel, anyway.

With this in mind I have put a few things up on Wattpad like my spiffing Kafka meets cyberpunk meets Douglas Adams affair The Elias Anomaly. Now complete and available through this perfectly wonderful online e-book delivery system.

At some point soon I shall make paper and electronic (e.g. Kindle) editions available also. This brings us to the point of the weird things mentioned in the post title.

Writing with this method, in these channels, changes the business of writing after a certain point. If you are writing something fresh, i.e. drafting out, then nothing has changed there. Likely it never will. You bang out the words, you get through the material. You write. No problem.

After that it gets tricky.

For a short while (Just over a century?) it has been accepted that authors may not edit their own work. Many reasons are given for this but chief among them appears to be that editors like to eat. Now, in an ideal world where every book was to be given the respect it deserves this would be a no-brainer. If I could be assured that everything I wrote would make enough money to pay for my time and the time of an editor and a cover designer then I would happily pay for these things.

This, however, is not the case. This leaves an author with few choices. One is to admit that writing is a hobby that they like to spend money on. Pay the cover designer, pay the editor, eat the losses. That's cool if you want to do it. No problem with that as an approach.

The other is to find workarounds. This is my approach. I realise I am not a great artist and I am a mediocre cover designer. But hell, mediocre professional cover designers get paid. If I'm doing what they're doing for free I'm a winner, right? Additionally tools like Hemingway help me do a serviceable job of editing. I've read some very poorly edited small press stuff recently, not that I am one of those editing pedants.

The age of meticulous editing on everything we read is over. As the means of production come down in cost and the available stories expand to every conceivable taste it is inevitable that some things you read will have less than perfect editing. My stuff has typos in it, for sure. I have to admit this. I have done the best that I could and I can't do more.

However, I've read stuff recently where there are malapropisms, blatantly wrong uses of words, words added that don't exist AND typos. These things were edited by third parties. It turns out all those copy editors with high and mighty arrogance about how undervalued they were had a point all along. Being a super-editor takes some chops.

I am a good editor, not a great one. Compared to this other stuff I've read that purports to exist in a semi-legitimate state my stuff is golden. Sad but true.

So I am a one man band. This I have become used to.

The really odd thing is that I have evolved working practices to optimise the flow of work going out and they introduce bizarre tasks at weird times.

For example, the best way to edit alone is to go a chapter at a time. The best way to ensure that you are concentrating to your very hardest on that one chapter is to bang it out via Wattpad as part of a serialization. So you take the chapter, Hemingway it and then "publish" it for the delectation and delight of young adults writing mopey, awkwardly eroticised post-apocalyptic steampunk fantasy. No, really, I've just described 95% of what's on Wattpad. Check it out if you don't believe me.

The only problem with this process is that in order to make it look nice on Wattpad you must design a "cover". You don't have to but if you don't take it seriously who else will? No one. So you must have that cover ready before you're even ready to re-edit for public consumption. That's weird.

What's even weirder is that if you have, oh, I don't know, some kind of Patreon thing going on then you might want to promote what you're doing in that medium. Before you can though you really ought to have some sort of video.

I know, mental. You've written a first draft, then you have to design a cover and bang out a video before you're even ready to drip feed your work onto the web. In addition the commercial version of the work won't even be ready until after the thing's already been serialised onto your digital platforms.

In addition you've just graduated from cover designer to short film-maker in your efforts to go it alone.

Never mind weird, being a serious independent author is just a hell of a lot of work. Oh well, off to my editing software I go. Time for me to produce some actual content. 

Editing, Outlining and the thin line between.

It's not often, like, once or twice before to my memory, that I feature other people's writing tips but sometimes you come across something that you just have to share because it nails some kind of process or whatever.

This post on io9 about editing is one such tip. Enjoy.

In Other News

The Bridgetown Tales blog has surpassed 1000 hits this week! Which could provide some explanation of why I have not been posting so much. I have some video reviews to put up but while BT is going so well I want to ride the wave of enthusiasm. Besides which it will be November soon enough.

I have sufficient BT in the bank at this stage to ride out eight weeks of non-productiveness. It sounds a lot but in a couple of other busy weeks I managed to chomp through two of my buffer occasioning this mad scramble to get back on top of things. Running a serial is somewhat exhausting.

I am managing to cram in other activities such as reading books for review, reviewing Starfall for gotchas in preparation for beta and even little bits of other new work here and there. Bridgetown Tales has taken precedence in writing time, however, because it's fun to be writing a serial and also fun to be writing something which is proving to be somewhat popular.

Will try to post a bit more often. Have promised this before. Mean it this time. Honest.

Back Matter

Just a quick note of my final and utter completion (bar beta based show stoppers) of the first three books in the Chicago Shadows series. A typographical swoop over vols 2 and 3, the assembly of some front and back matter and the posting of the e-books to Amazon and we're all set for the launch.

I remember reading the words of a literary agent back in 2005/2006 whose one piece of solid advice was: polish, polish, polish. I believed the words back then but with the reservation that going over and over the same Office Suite Document/Text File/Hard copy over and over again would be a route to navel-gazing OCD insanity.

The true answer to this problem, aside from spending money on assistance, is to ensure that you continually change your perspective on the material prior to publication. This is the reason for me to compose in a text editor, edit in Manuscript and read the thing aloud from an e-book before giving it the rubber stamp. Final typographical flourishes take place in the final ODT file. Every fresh pass is a different look at the same material, every polish reveals mistakes that had hidden behind the previous format.

It is not enough to just comb through and through. It won't help, it will just make you blind. You have to find your own way to change your relationship to the finished article.

Also, as my beta readers have testified, my editing in Manuscript became better the more I edited. Editing has become a new skill set, a different type of writing, and I am pleased to have discovered it because it is its own type of creative process.

Not long now, exciting times.

Nano and Covers

Well, time sometimes just gets away from you, doesn't it?

I'm a little annoyed at myself for not being able to completely finish Chicago Shadows 2 to get it out to beta readers. On the up side for them I will probably manage to finish both 2 and 3 together so those that are going to plough on will get a double helping.

Now that I can consider the beta of CS1 dead and buried I can reveal something to my beta readers that they did not know. They were all part of a small experiment upon the effectiveness of my "Manuscript" software. It is not super-scientific but, of my seven readers, four were given a version of the file that had been through the extra editing layer of Manuscript. Three were given a file made from the manuscript before it had undergone the process.

I have received feedback from three out of the seven beta readers. All three had been given the manuscript that had been reworked using my software (the other person with the "genuine" beta manuscript thought I had written a game manual and apologised that he didn't know much about English so would probably not read it... I did try to explain that if it needed proofing I would have gone a different route but hey ho). None of the people who were given the "alpha" manuscript actually finished it at all. A couple said they were having some problems sitting down to it, time being what it is.

I can't say for certain but I do think that the difference in manuscript appears to have had an effect. I would definitely identify several things about the alpha manuscript that needed fixing, not least a profusion of things having "been" something else, "seeming" as if something being "just" something or being "like" something. In 55,000 words these four words occurred somewhere in the region of 200/250 times each in the alpha. None of them occurred more than 100 by the time I'd finished.

I do believe that sometimes a reader can't put their finger on why they're not getting into a book, they believe it's something they would like to read but they just can't seem to get their head round it. It is entirely possible that having repetitive use of tenses and concepts could well contribute to that feeling. I know that the text that came out post-Manuscript was more dynamic and purposeful. The feedback numbers would appear to bear that out.

Thankfully not all the feedback I received has been glowing praise (although it scored above average on all the scored questions), the chief bugbear is that even given the "Manuscript" spit and polish the manuscripts still need an extra pass purely for proofing. The other thing is that, over my time with my new editing program I have become a better editor. Now I can see all manner of grammar snafus that I couldn't see before. So vol 1 is back on the block for one final tread through, which is slow and painful going but all part of the process.

Nobody said self-publishing would be easy. In fact everyone says it is hard. Harder still if you have become determined to do everything yourself.

CS2 and 3 have had the benefit of a trip through Manuscript, then I read the finished article aloud to Sue and bookmarked in my e-reader any part where I spotted some heinous error. Then I did a final review until I have produced the beta. I know they're a lot cleaner than the supposed beta of Silent Majority that I put out there. Hopefully the proofing score on my next spreadsheet will be a bit higher.

I had better go and get on with Nano now but, to leave on a positive I have managed to design covers for the CS books which I shall now reveal in anticipation of their release, er, sometime before Christmas... Here they are, hope they do the job for which they were designed i.e. I hope you all now want to read them:

Two Down

Pleased this morning to have finished stage 2 editing on Pleasant Rest AKA Chicago Shadows Vol 2. That should be ready for Beta by about the 15th October now, all being well.

Only Street Cleaning to go and we'll be just about ready to rock and roll. Although, November is coming up and that, of course, means all hands on deck for Nano...

Busy, as they say, busy, busy.

Morning Off

Well, day off but this afternoon I must do chores. As you can see from the left bar the first volume of Chicago Shadows is in beta. Three of my seven lovely beta readers have received their copies. I am expecting to get the other four out by tea time tomorrow. Right now, however, I'm going to play computer games and possibly eat some toast. (Not necessarily in that order, now, where's the Marmite?)

Getting Things Done

The last couple of days have been particularly productive. CS1: The Silent Majority has come out of editing and is awaiting my typographical and artistic skills to put together a beta package for my ever-so-kind beta readers.

I was expecting to take a break from editing to iron out a few bugs and add a couple of features in Manuscript. In the end this work took me a total of about an hour and ten minutes, so CS2: Pleasant Rest has been loaded up and is now under the microscope. This also means that Manuscript is ready for alpha testing with my faithful alpha tester AKA my mum.

I wrote the first draft of CS1 in 2010 during the annual nano bunfight. The first draft of CS2 came this year. I've completed a lot of writing in the meanwhile. Some of it is invisible in a fiction sense because it was RP manuals but all of it counts. I'm exactly as bad with my over use of the qualifier "just" when in full flow but otherwise the shape of the language in CS2 is way ahead of CS1.

That's not at all to say that I'm ploughing through at high speed, there are still many gotchas to be identified and corrected. However, I am not finding the same repetitive rhythm that I was shocked to discover in CS1. It could also be the difference between punting out something for Nano and being allowed to get through at my own rate. Even so, I've managed circa 130,000 words of fiction this year so far. Not a bad amount with a day job vying for my attention.

I'm off to indulge my new C&C Alliances habit, cook a spaghetti bolognese, eat it with the Mrs and hopefully unwind. Hopefully I'll be able to link through to my latest BTS article soon, watch this space.

What I Did In The Summer Holidays

Almost unconsciously I have taken a short break from writing, which has proven to be tougher than I thought it would be. However the job that took over the writing time was no less in need of completion. It was actually becoming more urgent the more manuscripts I had to edit.

It has long been the accepted wisdom that authors should, wherever possible, refrain from editing their own work. In fact there is much truth in this. An author should refrain from doing anything with their work other than produce it wherever they can. This, however, is the age of the self-publisher. If you really have to - i.e. you are poor - you can learn the principles of e-publishing, milling out epubs, mobis etc., producing your own cover art and the principles of same disciplines. You have to market yourself as a self-publisher or pay for the privilege of a professional marketing campaign.

In most of the areas where writers are forced to be there is encouragement and the odd helping hand. No one wants to have to master marketing, typeset in pitstop or make their own cover, but people understand when needs must. In all areas except editing.

Editing is completely beyond the capability of the author, apparently.

Maybe this is true. It's certainly fiendishly difficult for someone familiar with the text to gain some removal from it. Is it impossible to do even a fairly decent job even in a pinch?

Nobody knows, and I certainly hope that it isn't because if it is I have pretty much wasted the last month of my time building something that is ultimately useless.

And here it is:

This is Manuscript. It's not a word-processor.

What it is is an editing application for finished novels. I have built it to my own specification to do the things that I need it to do, currently. I finished it about half an hour ago. So I haven't had much time to try it out. Nor will I for a couple more weeks because I have circa 20k words to polish off on Shadow Cities Chicago III.

Once that is complete I will attempt to edit the manuscripts using Manuscript and see how things go. I would describe the status of the project as being in pre-Alpha testing. Once I am comfortable that the wee beastie doesn't go boom too often I will roll it out to some alpha-testers if such are to be found and we shall see what happens from there.

Watch this space for updates. Now off to swim. Have a nice Sunday!