Smashwords Interview

Smashwords have a feature where the site will interview you, in a broad, author-y kind of way. I went through the process.

You can view the interview here.

Don't Believe Everything You Read

"So, what, this is a Discordianism blog now?" the voice asked.

My response is thus:

Two sequential posts on a topic do not a theme make. However, I think that what's surfacing in my consciousness is a recognition and appreciation of what Discordianism has done for me, what it could do for others, why it's so relevant in 2017 and why it would seem someone needs to attempt to make sense out of the whole thing.

The hilarious thing is that Discordianism exists in a soup of zen paradoxes. Discordianist dogma teaches that seeking to increase order merely increases chaos and that the good Discordian does not believe anything they read.

I can't disagree with any of that. So I provide, for your reading pleasure, a short piece that attempts to make sense of this paradox problem that appears to defeat Discordianism even as it begins.

Let's begin with the problem that, if you consider yourself Discordian, or "possibly" Discordian then, by default, you shouldn't believe this post, because you are reading it. That's actually pretty sound advice. If you believe something because you have read it you need some kind of psychological intervention, or to read the next sentence. You really should send me a couple of hundred quid, it's the right thing to do.

The point is that it is essential not to read something and incorporate it automatically into the body of your world view as if it automatically has a right to be there. If the thing you have read makes you angry, it is because you believe it. If the thing you have read makes you scared, it is because you believe it. If the thing you have read makes you happy, it is because you believe it.

It is outside of your immediate emotional response that you will find the worth of the written word. If you have that emotional response it means that there is a part of you that believes it, but it also means that there is a part of you that thinks it has understood what it has read.

Discordians know two things here. One, is that understanding does not equal belief. The other is that one pretty good indicator that you haven't understood the message put out by another is that you believe you have understood it.

Once you have run the material you have read through the process of:

a) understanding that you don't understand it and that therefore
b) you cannot possibly believe it

you have left only one thing. That thing is the degree to which the thing which is written is harmonic with your own set of beliefs. The safer a written thing makes you feel the more sympathetic you are to it. All this means is that you should attempt to disbelieve it even harder than the things that you find easy to be disbelieved.

Whatever you actually cannot get rid of, no matter how hard you try, is part of your personal truth. If you feel that this discovery is worth sharing go ahead and write it down safe in the knowledge that no one will really understand it.

Note that after reading my thorough decomposition of the notion of not believing everything you read you may feel too confused to now read anything at all. This is the second paradox at work. My article seeks to increase order, but in doing so it has just deepened your own inner chaos. This is to be expected.

If one can call to mind that chaos and order are both illusory perceptions of a single continuum you will understand that the more confused you feel the less confused you actually are. The fear you feel is exactly identical to the momentary sinking sensation you get when you wake up in the morning and remember who you are.

If time mattered then in the next article I will take a look at why time doesn't matter. I hope you enjoyed it and will enjoy the upcoming article about disbelieving everything you read, which you just read.

Selecting A Self-Published Book

I am pretty impressed with Guy Kawasaki's new book APE: How To Publish A Book,  I reviewed it at the beginning of December. I'm also impressed with Mr Kawasaki's unending energy in taking the APE message out into the world. Now it's time for me to be similarly impressed with his short presentation published in the Huffington Post advising readers on how to discriminate when picking an indie pleasure for their e-reader of choice.

I would, however, take issue with a couple of points that he raised. I'm talking from the point of view of a genre author, Mr Kawasaki from that of a non-fiction writer but there's a good deal of crossover. Many of my quibbles are to do with the different ways that fiction and non-fiction are sold.

On a technical note (so more the Huffington Post's fault than Guy's) I'm also not too pleased with the slide show having no option to read it as a short article. To mitigate the technical issue and add my thoughts here's a quick summary of the key points of the presentation:

1. Cover

Guy says: "While it is inaccurate to say that every book with a crappy cover is not worth reading and every book with a nice cover is worth reading, the cover is [your] first data point." 

The Monkey says: I have to say, I'd pretty much agree with this. I'd add that a cover needs to be appropriate more than anything.

Whacking a great piece of richly detailed art on a fantasy or historical may well be the way to go but thrillers and horror books are often more impressionistic. If someone hasn't even looked at covers of books within the genre they're writing then how seriously are they taking themselves as a commercial writer?

In my opinion, in the world of the indies there is a bar, and currently there are points for effort. If it's clear that the cover has been lovingly handcrafted in an attempt to engage, or generically designed enough to fit with all other similar titles, then I'd tend to give it a thumbs up.

2. Blurbs

Guy says: "An excessive amount of blurbs is a sign of poor quality."

The Monkey says: I have never really paid much attention to blurbs in fiction whatsoever. I think this is more of a non-fiction point. Non-fiction requires a definite authority to say; "This guy knows what he's talking about".

Fiction is far more a matter of taste. I have read loads of Neil Gaiman, I don't believe I have ever bought anything endorsed by Neil Gaiman, or, if I have, never because it was endorsed by Neil Gaiman.

3. Name of publisher

Guy says: "If an author cannot come up with a more clever name for his company than his last name, how imaginative and intriguing could his novel be?"

The Monkey says: There's another point here. The fact is that in order to get your book out into the world you have to take yourself seriously as a writer. To learn to be a thing one must first imitate the thing we want to be.

There are good authors who don't "pretend" to have a publishing house and that's not an indicator that they're a bad writer. It is however, an indication that they don't take the business of marketing at all seriously and, by association, they may not view delivering the product to the customer seriously either.

A book that has a lacklustre cover and loads into your e-reader at page one, chapter one, no title, no TOC may be fine, but it does say that the author had more fun writing than they particularly care about whether you will have reading.

4. Front matter

Guy says: "It’s not crucial that [the front matter conforms to the Chicago Manual of Style] but at least you can determine if the author cared enough to find out what the front matter of a book should contain."

The Monkey says: This just refines the point about how seriously you can tell the author takes themselves as an author. In order to have published a "real book" I want my work to resemble a "real book" to the extent that the casual observer cannot tell why my book is "not real".

Also showing an awareness of copyright notices shows you take the business side of what you're doing seriously, dedications are a nice touch, thinking about the structure of your book is about taking care of your reader. I don't go the whole hog but I do put in a copyright notice, disclaimer and ensure that anything I feel I should say before the main action begins is said in good part. In other words, I do believe a self-publisher should make this effort.

5. Copyediting

Guy says: "Read the first few pages of the book and if you see more than three spelling mistakes or instances of poor grammar, take the book out of your online shopping cart and save yourself a few bucks."

The Monkey says: To this day I still question what "good grammar" really is. In journalistic and non-fiction pieces sticking to the absolute letter of the orthodox grammatical law is essential. In fiction the question is, rather, "does it flow?" Do you understand the story? Do you care? The odd fragment sentence is sometimes allowed for style reasons. Your mileage will vary.

Spelling errors come in two flavours, bad spelling e.g. "I am loosing my mind" and typos e.g. "I am losing my mnid". Either should be rare but typos and even the odd complex homophonic (bear/bare, hear/here) substitution do creep into the best of books.

Mr Kawasaki's three alarm limit seems fair to me. The Amazon default preview is 10% of the book, if the book is hard to understand and poorly proofed to the degree that you check yourself three times in 10% of the volume you will potentially encounter 30 head scratchers in the course of the whole book, which is pretty excessive.

6. Fonts

Guy says: "As in cover design, the use of Times, Arial, and Helvetica is a bad sign."

The Monkey says: This is a reference to fonts used throughout the interior of the book. I would tend to disagree with this when it comes to genre fiction. In fiction books the use of Times New Roman is to encourage readers to find the actual text as invisible as possible.

I did read something once that stated serif fonts, such as Times were easier to read printed, where as sans serif fonts, such as Arial were easier to read on a screen. We've entered a time when what counts as "a screen" is somewhat harder to define, so this is no longer a hard and fast rule. What I would tend to say is that those artifacts that are used as books tend to benefit from serif text, those intended to be read off a vertical, non-portable screen, such as a monitor, from sans serif.

If a fiction book's text looks pretty boring that's probably a good thing, if it looks weird, crazy or if you're noticing the fonts while you're supposed to be wrapped up in the story that's probably a bad sign. In addition the peppering of a random crew of unusual fonts in a non-fiction book shows a cluelessness in typographic skills that should be a red flag.

So not what I would describe as a hard and fast rule.

7: Website

Guy says: "If you’re browsing online, take a quick look at the author’s website because a website is a window into her soul."

The Monkey says: This is a strange one, because it's just as true of a published author or any other person asking you to become digitally involved with them.

If someone's Facebook profile looks like a Facebook profile, their Twitter bio looks like a Twitter bio and their website looks like the kind of place you'd like to hang out then you know that the person is communicating effectively no matter how they're trying to engage with you. If you get the creeps looking at a public artifact someone left behind with the full intention of having random people look at it then that person probably isn't your type of person... so, a no brainer really.