REB #16: “With the advent of ebook self-publishing and the democratization of distribution … the power of publishing is shifting away from publishers and into the hands of authors and readers where it belongs.”

– Mark Coker interview

Mark Coker, Founder and CEO of Smashwords

Yesterday, I found this interview with Mark Coker, Founder and CEO of the electronic publishing company Smashwords. In it, he describes the changing nature of the publishing industry, highlighting his role and understandably praising his own brand of electronic self-publishing. Thisis marketing 101 after all: you do an interview to raise awareness for your product/service, so why not “talk it up”?

Anyway, I love technology. Outside of books and real-life people, my computer and TV are my best friends. However, I’m apprehensive about this shift toward electronic reading. I already do a lot of my news reading online because of all the blogs and Twitter accounts that I follow. So will I want to sit on my futon this winter, next to a roaring fireplace, and cuddle up with a good…LCD-type screen? An iPad, for instance?

Hell no!

But while I love the tactile sensation of having a book in my hands, turning its pages, flipping quickly to a favorite passage, etc., I cannot deny the convenience that electronic publishing affords the reader (we’ll leave the writer out of the equation for now). The simple fact of the matter is that I’m running out of space for books. When I moved to Baltimore in August 2009, I brought with me a small, 3-shelf bookcase and well over 300 books; I quickly bought two 5-shelf bookcases to accomodate the books, as well as my collection of DVDs. Then in late August 2010, I moved from Bolton Hill to Downtown, where my room is actually a little smaller anyway, so it wasn’t too distressing that one of my large shelves collapsed before I even tried to move it. I’m down to a 3-shelfer and a 5-shelfer. As such, many of my books are now stored and, yes, inventoried in boxes in the downstairs closet. I hate that; my books want to be out of the closet, with me, but alas, they aren’t.

With an e-reader, I still wouldn’t be able to display my books – they’d still be in the invisible “closet” of my e-reader’s storage mechanism – but at least I would have room for them. I guess that’s the tradeoff. I can have more books with an e-reader, I can have them almost instantly, and I can have them cheaper in most instances. But they aren’t books. They’re texts, yes, but they aren’t books, per se.

So why, as a writer, would/should I consider using a service like Smashwords? For one thing, Smashwords itself is free. They only take a 15% bite out of the writer’s royalties, when he/she makes money, which is a far cry from the 50-75% that most traditional publishers take. From an economical standpoint, the advantage is clear: if you (self-)publish electronically with Smashwords, you stand to make a lot more money for your work. There’s also the fact that you don’t have to wade through a sea of rejection letters from publishers, because you, my friend, are self-publishing. For “free.” That’s unheard of, isn’t it? We’re talking about guaranteed publication, here, with 85% royalties and coverage on most of the e-book stores out there (even Apple’s iBookstore and Barnes & Noble’s e-book store are included; I don’t think Amazon is one of them, though – not yet, anyway).

That sounds like a sweet deal, and I’ll probably seriously consider it for book-length works because at least I can get my name and my writing out there. But at the end of this M.F.A. program, when I publish my book of short stories, I still want to see my awesome book cover design on a tangible, traditional book in a brick-and-mortar store. And I want the prestige that comes with having my book hand-picked for publication.

Is that so much to ask?

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

We Like Boys

Wow. My writing exercise for this week was to do a structural repetition, in which something a character or narrator says or does is repeated or echoed, perhaps in a different context, by different people, or on a different scale. Mine started out boring, but it transformed as I was writing it, from a story about two sexually-charged daughters and their mother into a story about a mother who was raped when she was younger and a son (hers) who is coming out of the closet. Still not very original, but I like it so much better than what I started with. I call it

In 1984, Suzy Salinger had been a rambunctious 16-year-old, but not really one to get herself into trouble. Nevertheless, she had gotten into trouble on that particular November afternoon when she had finally stood up to her mom about dating.

“What can I say, mother?” she had said. “Boys just like me!” And then she had smirked and received a slap across the face and instructions to go to her room. Furious, she had sneaked out her bedroom window that night, for the first time ever, to meet up with an older boy who had said he liked her. And that night, he had raped her.

Twice.

Thinking back on this night, Suzy now began a dialogue with her 15-year-old son, Chad, about respecting women and dating. If things went well, she might even bring up sex. And things did go well because Chad swore he had the utmost respect for women and didn’t think he was ready to date anyone yet, male or female.

“Excuse me?” Suzy said, and picked at her ear. “What did you say?”

“Mom…I like boys. Maybe even…just boys.” Chad looked at his feet, and Suzy saw his face turn crimson.

Shocked as she was, she knew this was 2009, when being gay was almost okay. She worried that rejecting his sexuality now would make her lose him forever, and besides, she was a pretty cool mom, wasn’t she? She could handle this. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help but cry a little; she had to grieve the loss of that heterosexual life she had subconsciously envisioned for him all these years. A beautiful wife. Two-point-five naturally conceived children. Low chances of contracting HIV. An aversion to that shitty pop music—Beyoncé, she remembered—and to the color pink, which even she, a woman, a straight woman, hated with a passion.

But wait. Now she was being unfair and buying into stereotypes. Chad was still Chad, and this wasn’t going to change his personality and tastes. At least, she didn’t think so. She stepped closer to him and put both hands on his head, one on each side. She tilted his face up toward hers and kissed his forehead.

“I was going to talk about sex after all that, but you caught me off-guard,” she said, and smiled. She looked into his eyes, and he smiled back. “I liked boys too when I was your age, of course, and I need to tell you where that got me one night because you need to know what boys can do. And why you don’t have a dad.” She swallowed hard, and then continued: “First of all, you need to remember that you have the right to say no, and it always, absolutely means no. Okay?”

Then Suzy and her gay son sat down to have a serious talk about sex. And boys. And to her great surprise, it was the best conversation they’d ever had.

Red

My assigned writing exercise for this week came from What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers (Second Edition). I had to pick an exercise from part four, and I chose the one on psychic distance. The objective is essentially to create a story that begins far away from the character, using general/unspecific language, and then gradually focuses in until the narration feels specific and very close to the character—without slipping into first-person. I’m not sure if I succeeded, but I kind of like what I got out of the assignment, a simple piece of flash fiction that’s a lot horrific and a little magical/fantastical. 😉 As of now, I call it “Red.” Oh, it’s supposed to be “within 200 words,” but I just couldn’t get it under 200. I think it’s 205. Oh well.

The girl was removing her rouge and singing jazz classics when the wolves finally came. She’d heard them crying, and was frightened, of course, but she’d never let fear run her life. She didn’t care for that kind of thing.

“Sarah Harper,” she told herself, “don’t you be a ‘fraidy cat!” Sarah continued rubbing cleanser on her face—firmly, but not so hard that she’d go raw and be mistaken for a burn victim the next morning and rushed to the hospital or something.

When they scratched the door and pretended they had knocked and said, “Let us in, let us in,” she looked at the doorknob suspiciously. She thought she’d heard a scratch, but maybe it was a knock. She put down her cleansing pad and went to the door to let in chaos.

The wolves leaped, scratched, clawed, dug. In a rage, they tore her pretty face open like a hunter gutted deer. They fooled and embarrassed her, shamed and disfigured her. They made her bruised and swollen and ugly. And red. So much red. She abhorred the red—the blood and the raw, puffy, mangled mess that now masqueraded as a feminine face.

Sarah woke up the next morning in the hospital.