Category Archives: Writing Life

Struggling with an Alternative for PayPal Users
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I’ve had a number of folks from countries outside the US who have contacted me to ask me how I’m going to make either my novels or my courses available to readers or students who don’t have access to Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com or the Apple Store or CreateSpace.

What these folks have all had in common is their ability to buy via PayPal (and thus to use Smashwords).

I promised to re-investigate Smashwords, and it remains as bad a deal for writers as it was before. I think I’ve come up with a workable alternative, but it will be a lot of work for me, so before I leap into it, I’d like to get just a rough idea of interest.

If you only have access to US products via a PayPal account, please let me know here, as well as a little info about where you are, or why you prefer PDFs, or why you prefer PayPal.

Format will be PDF. I simply don’t have the time or the ability to create a bunch of different versions of my work for all the platforms out there.

Prices will match the prices I offer elsewhere, and the content will, aside from format, be otherwise identical. I’m considering doing this as a matter of accessibility for folks who might not be able to get my work otherwise.

ADDED LATER: My take on the whole true self-publishing vs. packaged publishing issue.

This is the price for a Short Courses Community membership.
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Thinking of Joining?

Thinking of Joining?

I’ll offer two ways to pay:

PAYMENT PLAN PRICE: The price for a SHORT COURSES Membership is going to be $5 a month for six months. After the final payment, the student becomes a lifetime member at the SHORT COURSES level.

At any point during the six months in which payments are being made, the student can quit and receive a refund for the current month, and will no longer be a member.

SINGLE PAYMENT PRICE: One payment, $30. Student becomes a provisional lifetime member at the SHORT COURSES level. At any time during the first 60 days, the student can request, and receive, a full refund, and no longer be a member. After the first 60 days, the student becomes a lifetime member.

100% of either membership will be applicable to upgraded memberships. Meaning that at ANY TIME you choose to upgrade, you can apply the $30 you paid for SHORT COURSES membership to your Think Sideways or Revise Your Novel memberships; in other words, you can give yourself a $30 discount on either of those memberships. (Likewise, you’ll be able to apply the cost of upper-level memberships to OTHER upper-level memberships.)

This was the price I’d originally intended to charge for SHORT COURSES, and no one gave me a good reason to raise it.

But SHOULD you join?

The price discussion brought up some interesting questions about the community and its value to writers, along with the question, “Why should I join?”

The short answer to this question is, in most cases, you shouldn’t. Most writers are looking for a social venue, and won’t benefit from the community.

The point, the purpose, and the value of the Writers’ Boot Camps Community

I’m going to quote myself from one of my replies in in the price discussion:

I’m already publishing HTTS and HTRYN as individual lessons on the big platforms (the HTTS lessons will go out to Hitch for compiling in about another week, once I have all the links updated in the lessons to reflect the new workgroups and the worksheet landing pages. This is old news. But I don’t intend to charge Kindle’s top 70% royalty price (9.99) for each lesson. I’m coming in significantly under that. (That MAY be new news. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before.)

But my personal statistic (90% of people who get the community for free don’t use it) is WHY I don’t want to charge the maximum amount possible for the lessons, and to use that money to offset the price of community membership: I don’t want people to pay for something they don’t use. In other words, I don’t want ten people to buy the course on Kindle, and have nine of them subsidize the one member who joins the community and gets as much out of it as my active current students do.

So the question becomes…what does my community offer to students that makes it worth paying for, and why will some writers want to join?

And the answer to that is:

The community supports the courses. Period. It isn’t a “social” community. (It has social elements–there are open discussion boards and the writers who use them have a LOT of fun discussing various topics.) This is a hard concept for most people to get, because almost all forums are essentially social gatherings, where people talk about work, but don’t work.

The Writers’ Boot Camps are built around work.

I’ve written something like a dozen courses now (HTTS, HTRYN, HTWAS, Plot, Plot Outline, Character, Language, Culture, Scenes, Dialogue and Subtext, Beat Writer’s Block, Motivate Yourself, Writing Discipline, 21 Ways to Get Yourself Writing, the upcoming Mugging the Muse Second Edition Course…, and the upcoming Create A World Clinic) okay, so FOURTEEN now available with two more on the way—MTM: 2nd Edition is due for release next week and Create A World Clinic is due for release when I wrap up this overhaul and get WARPAINT finished…

…And the community is the place where the people who bought the “textbooks” have a live class where they can work through their lessons with other folks who are taking the same courses.

The workgroups are now open, not assigned, and set up lesson by lesson. I’m currently building out the Short Courses boards with the individual lesson posts. (These have been empty until now, because until I had the software with which I could invite Short Courses students to join, there was no point in doing the work of building out the boards.) If you’re already a community member and you log in and go to the new Mugging the Muse: 2nd Ed Workgroup, you’ll see how the Short Course Workgroups will work.

The community is my duplication of the process I used to get published.

This is why I’ve gone to such trouble and expense to build the community and to build a way for new people to join it by choice.

I learned much of how to make my work publishable by belonging to a writers’ group when I was just getting started. I didn’t learn much from what the other members told me about what I was doing wrong. Or right. I learned from figuring out what THEY were doing wrong. And right.

So I’ve set up the community based around workgroups, where writers can present snippets of work that are giving them problems, and receive comments from other students on these. Where, lesson by lesson, they can work through my processes and techniques, and get and GIVE feedback from other students doing the same lessons. And where they can read through solutions discovered by students ahead of them.

This is why the boards are private, why moderators monitor them, why I don’t make the thing public and invite everyone to join. It’s a place for my students who want to accelerate what they’re learning in the lessons by taking what they’ve learned and applying the concepts and principles to work other than their own.

My objectives with the community are:

  • High signal to noise ratio—conversation stays focused on writing
  • High content to filler ratio—the majority of the posts should give students something valuable for the time they’ve invested in reading them
  • High work to play ratio-–the boards are primarily dedicated to classwork, publishing, marketing, and self-promotion, not to general conversation

I’ve managed to maintain that so far…and while eventually I’d like to have enough active students in there to have regular posts on all boards all the time, I want to continue to do that by focusing on quality, not quantity.

And because my purpose with the community is to create a resource that will help writers publish their work, if they spend all their time hanging out on the boards rather than writing, I’M DOING SOMETHING WRONG.

I hope that answers your questions.

New Course Releases coming, and my schedule for the rest of the year.
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Mugging the Muse: Second Edition

Mugging the Muse: Second Edition

Here’s my schedule. No dates, because I don’t know how long any of this will take until it’s done.

  1. Move all students’ accounts into the new software and test the accounts — (about 60% done now).
  2. Complete MUGGING THE MUSE: Second Edition, publish it on Kindle, Nook, iTunes, and in print, and get the free worksheet downloads set up, and the invitation to existing and new MTM students to join the Boot Camp writing community. (About 90% done — should need beta testers next week)
  3. Complete PROFESSIONAL PLOT OUTLINE: 2.0, publish it on Kindle, Nook, iTunes, and in print, and get the free worksheet downloads set up, and the invitation to existing and new PPO students to join the Boot Camp writing community. (About 75% done)
  4. Get all HTTS Lessons converted into Kindle, Nook, iTunes format, publish the course on Kindle, Nook, iTunes, and in print, and get the free worksheet downloads set up, and the invitation to the new A La Carte HTTS students to join the Boot Camp writing community. (About 50% done).
  5. Get all HTRYN Lessons converted into Kindle, Nook, iTunes format, publish the course on Kindle, Nook, iTunes, and in print, and get the free worksheet downloads set up, and the invitation to the new A La Carte HTRYN students to join the Boot Camp writing community.(About 25% done)
  6. Finish the final 15 or so lessons of the HTTS WALKTHROUGH while writing WARPAINT. (0% done.)
  7. Finish the How to Write A Series Expansion while writing WARPAINT. (About 20% done)
  8. Write CREATE A WORLD CLINIC (about 25% done)
  9. Write fiction and hang out in my writing community, and have fun.

HTTS Grads and 1-month+ Students: Your Login Is Ready
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I now have all HTTS students who’ve been in class for AT LEAST ONE MONTH in the new database.

Test Your Login

Test Your Login

No matter which other courses you have taken or are taking, if you have been in HTTS since AT LEAST February 7th, 2012 Please test your new account to make sure you can log in. Here’s how.

Go to this page:
Current Student First-Time Log-in Page

Logging in with your current username and password will take you to a dummy page—but landing on that dummy page will let you (and Margaret, and me) know that as soon as I get all the courses inside the classrooms, you’ll be able to reach yours. And it will keep me from having to do 1000 password resets on Opening Day.

If you CAN’T login (and you’re sure you typed your existing name and password correctly) create a support ticket here and let me know what your username and your email address for HTTS are. Don’t tell me your password. I NEVER want to know your password, and neither will ANYONE who works with me.

There is nothing to do inside the new classroom yet. This is so you and I both know your account is working correctly.

If you joined HTTS AFTER February 7th, please be patient. We’re doing another sweep of the databases immediately after I close the doors, and your account will be included in that sweep.

If you are a member of HTRYN or HTWAS, but are NOT a member of HTTS, Margaret and I will be ready to help you test your account shortly after we finish the HTTS database (which is the largest).

I am not taking new signups into the new classroom yet. I’ll start opening smaller classes and community memberships AFTER I have checked logins for all current members.

Self-Publishing Round-Up #1
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Indie Talk

Indie Talk

I’m trying to keep up with what’s going on in indie publishing, and I realized there are a lot of folks, both readers and writers, who would be interested in taking a look at the same issues I’ve come across.

The first thing I’ve come across is an issue of terminology. You may laugh at this, but I didn’t. When I was searching for “self-publishing,” I got a boatload of services dedicated to separating me from my money—websites offering to help me promote my work, with no evidence that they had anything real to offer, or anything better than what I could do on my own. It was depressing as hell.

When I switched to searching for “indie publishing,” however, the world got a bit brighter.  I actually found some useful information.

So let’s get on to that.

Because I know number of my students write erotica, and because this is going to affect indie publishers who have their own sites where they sell their work via PayPal, or sell their work through distributors who use PayPal, this is big news.

PayPal Strong-Arms Indie Ebook Publishers Over Erotic Content

PayPal’s new aggressive campaign wants to stop independent e-book publishers that use its service from including certain kinds of erotic content in their catalogs. On Saturday February 18, PayPal began threatening indie book publishers and distributors with immediate deactivation of the businesses’ accounts if they did not remove books containing certain sexual themes – namely, specific sexual fantasies that PayPal does not approve of. www.zdnet.com Read more

This is a big deal. While businesses have the absolute right to decide on the material they choose to support, there aren’t any other payment processors as popular as PayPal. What PayPal is doing is creating an opportunity for a rival company (or companies) to come in with favorable terms for the folk PayPal is deciding it doesn’t want. PayPal is creating the hole into which an aggressive competitor can slide. I’ll be interested to see who jumps first.

Day 8 of Amazon boycott of indie presses: Still no comment from New York, but …by Dennis Johnson

As we enter the second week of Amazon.com’s boycott of ebooks from over 400 American, Canadian, and British independent presses distributed by the Independent Publishers Group (IPG) (see our earlier MobyLives report), …  mhpbooks.com

This is also a HUGE deal. I’ve said writers need to keep their options open, and need to deal with as many bookstores as they can. This is why. Amazon, like PayPal, is creating reasons for people not to use its service.  It is giving other sites and other companies the key to making it less relevant.  Watching both Amazon and PayPal making these mistakes is like watching Letterman bring out TWO “Stupid Pet Tricks” acts at the same time. You look from one to the other and you wonder what the hell they’re thinking.

Finally, something that isn’t a Stupid Pet Trick.

IndieReader Helps Connect Authors with Their Readers

I can understand the gatekeeper perception of the traditional publishing process, but the world of publishing is changing. There are self-published authors and traditionally published authors, as well as those indies whose works are being published …goodereader.com Read more

I’m cheering for IndieReader. I like their slogan. Independent Books for People with Independent Minds.  I think that’s a damn good place to start.  I hope they’ll do well by their customers.

Published the WARPAINT Soundtrack
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WARPAINT SoundtrackIt took a while to find the right music for WARPAINT.

First, this is the music I have playing in the background while I write, so it has to fit the universe, the characters, and the “feel” of a lived-in place full of real humans, real needs, and the themes of the story. And it has to not grate on my nerves or distract me from my words.

It has to become subliminal, has to leak into my subconscious mind and feed the story I want to write.

So the soundtrack places HEAVY emphasis on Jim Tozier’s guitar work, which fits Cady like her skin.

The rest of the music in the soundtrack hits plot points, characters, or some element of theme or characterization I want to have in my head.

But Tozier is the backbone of the whole track.

So here’s the WARPAINT soundtrack.

(Link is to iTunes. It’s quick and convenient, and every other listing option I’ve tried has proven a giant pain in the ass.)

Consider it a sneak preview.

On a personal note, I still have the damn headaches and migraines. I’m getting some work done—putting the soundtrack together was a little bit of relaxation when my head hurt too badly to do anything else.

TALYN PARTY!
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Welcome to my party!

TALYN Party

TALYN Party

Help yourself to the cookies, the many varieties of cheese, fresh fruit, home-baked breads and pies, and of course, chocolate and champagne. I’m celebrating the rights reversion of my novel TALYN, and thanking both Robin Rue and Beth Miller (and my agency, WRITERS HOUSE) for making this happen.

But while we’re here (and simultaneously live on Twitter) meet my other guests, hold conversations with each other, and ask me whatever you’d like.

I’ll happily answer questions about my books, both in-print and upcoming, my move to self-publishing, do writing neep, whatever.

I won’t give spoilers, but I will give hints. :D

There may be a lag in seeing your FIRST post appear; if you haven’t posted here before, I have to MANUALLY approve your post (which does pretty well keeping spam off my site). But once your first post is approved, the rest will show up right away.

I’ll be splitting time between answering posts here and Twitter, and will be around from 10 AM to 3 PM Eastern Time.

We may get crowded. If by chance we crash my site, I’ll still be on Twitter. Join me there.

Follow @hollylisle

Thank you for coming. I’m delighted to have this reason to celebrate, and delighted you’re here.

The OFFICIAL party is now over. But I’ll still be answering posts and questions here over the weekend If you have anything you’d like to know about books or courses or writing or whatever, I’ll be here tomorrow and Sunday after I get my words on WARPAINT.

TALYN Rights Reversion Party 10 AM–3 PM Friday (Eastern Time)
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Party on Friday

Party on Friday

I’m throwing a party in honor of my agent, Robin Rue, her assistant, Beth Miller, and the very fine folks at WRITERS HOUSE, my agency. The party will be this Friday between 10 AM and 3 PM (my Friday work hours), and will be here, so everyone can attend, and also simultaneously on Twitter.

You don’t have to do anything special to participate on the weblog, but if you want the live feed, you’ll need to create a Twitter account, and then follow me.

Twitter is here:

http://twitter.com

My Twitter name is:

@hollylisle

I’m taking the day to just hang out online and talk to people, eat virtual chocolate, drink virtual champagne, and litter the place with virtual confetti.

Why?

Because for more than six months, I’ve been requesting rights reversion on TALYN, which has been out of print for quite a while.

And AFTER more than six months had passed, I received notice that Tor would not be reverting the rights; that they had decided to print ebook versions of both TALYN
and HAWKSPAR.

At which point, Robin and Beth got all the necessary paperwork together, and informed Tor that it had passe its six month grace period, and that their position was
the rights belonged to me.

There was a long, painful silence between last week and this week.

And then today, I received the rights reversion from Robin and Beth.

TALYN, which I consider the single best book I’ve written to date, once again belongs solely to me.

I’ll send you a reminder either late Thursday or early Friday. And a link to the party page.

I hope you’ll join me. We’ll have fun.

Cheerfully,
Holly

Global Warming? You’ll wish…
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I’ve been saying all along that the global warming scare is just that: an attempt to divert massive amounts of money and power into the hands of a bunch of fearmongers who prey on the gullibility of people who don’t want to learn science.

Here’s the latest.

Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about

Note that the article, while pointing to no increase in temperature since 1998, also notes that the folks who brought out the data say that even though temperatures are dropping, they think “man-made carbon dioxide” will be sufficient to keep everyone warm.

If that’s true, China will have the best temperatures around: it has much of the world’s heavy industry and air you can cut with a knife. The US, with relatively clean air, won’t have that spiffy man-made carbon to keep it warm.

Note also, however, that there’s debate over the release from the Met office—that scientists aren’t all falling in line with the thought police’s “carbon is more important than the sun” mantra.

Here’s the thing. The sun has regulated temperature on this planet since there was a sun. And a planet. Temperature increases in the late last century fit with the planet’s relationship to the sun. And those increases were nowhere near as great as pre-industrial increases.

The planet’s temperature cycles. It does this without out us. It did before there were humans, with much more variable swings than we’ve experienced in the last 200,000 years. It will continue to cycle without us, and not just in the next ten years or hundred years. We’re not experiencing carbon warming. Or carbon cooling. Or whatever the power-hungry decide to claim as the next great crisis.

We’re experiencing weather. Weather changes. Invest in coats and greenhouses.

(Thanks to Jim Woosley for the link.)

And for the much, much more I’ve written about this over the years, use the search button on the right side of the navigation bar, and just type in “global warming.”

Ignore Google’s ads at the top. You’ll fine a long list of my stuff.

How to say “I was wrong.”
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I was wrong. Now I'm sheepish.

I was wrong. Now I'm sheepish.

You start by saying, “I was wrong.” So I’ll start there.

Last week, I looked at the EULA for a piece of software called iBook Author, and based on reading the EULA and on reading the interpretations of the EULA by folks better at this than I am, and based on the understanding that iBook Author was designed to be the creation point of original work, and not as a formatter of work created on other platforms, and with that understanding seeing in Apple’s EULA a serious and unethical rights grab, I pulled my own work from Apple’s website on principle, and informed my students that I could no longer recommend iBookstore as an ethical market for their work.

While the comments I received were primarily emotional posts about hating Apple or opinion pieces based on nothing, I also got several quiet, reasoned comments about how the software was NOT a word processor, but was in fact a software packager, a creator of interactive software designed specifically for use on the iPad.

So I downloaded the software.

And the folks who said, “It’s not a word processor” were right. It’s not software for novelists. It’s pretty nice software for taking courses you’ve created and adding interactive media to them. It creates software, and that software is only usable on the iPad.

I would not present a novel in this software, or software like this for other platforms. But iBook Author would be one way to create a version of my How To Write A Series course, for example, which depends heavily on video, with transcripts and worksheets. And paying Apple to sell the course on its site truly would be no different than paying Apple its commission for selling my books through its bookstore.

Apple has done nothing wrong with either the software or its EULA. Folks who misunderstood the nature of the software, including me, got it wrong.

My  actions and final recommendation, then?

ACTIONS

  • I’ve put my books for sale on iBookstore again.
  • I have sent an email to my students and readers explaining the error I made, and where my error lay.

RECOMMENDATIONS

  • If you use iBook Author, make sure that you have created your work in a word processor that will allow you to preserve formatting, pagination, headers and footers, footnotes, bibliographies, etc. in a form you can easily copy and paste INTO iBook Author and other
  • I recommend iBookstore as an acceptable market for writers, along with Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, and CreateSpace, all of which follow open accounting practices with your work, pay regularly, and currently offer favorable terms to self-publishers.
  • I strongly support presenting your work equally and simultaneously in multiple markets and formats, in order to keep competition strong among bookstores, and in order to keep the terms of each bookstore most favorable to the individual independent writer. Don’t give any market special treatment or exclusivity: Doing so will permit that market to kill competition, and eliminate your ability to work for favorable terms.

Thanks to those of you who took the time to point out what the software actually is, and to show me by example where I made my mistake. I am pleased to be able to correct my error.

1-25-2012
ADDED LATER:

I added the following in reply to a post by Scrivener, and have added it here in case later replies move that post off the page:

Okay, let me run through this for you in specific detail, so you understand why I reversed my previous position.

From Apple’s EULA including a definition of “THE WORK”

IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

Understand—I’m not a lawyer. I am a writer who has pored word by word over every contract I’ve signed with every publisher I’ve ever had, and over the changes my agent made before that contract hit my hot little hands. So I have experience reading contracts that apply to me. A lawyer might take my interpretation here and tell me I’m full of shit. But I’ll take that chance.

THEM: If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”),

ME: If you are charging people for the product you create with our product

THEM: you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore)

ME: you may only sell or distribute THE WORK YOU CREATED ON THIS SOFTWARE through Apple.

This is where understanding definitions comes in handy, and why I require people writing on this weblog to post their definitions when using words in ways that don’t fit the real definition of the word.

It’s also why it matters that this is a single-platform, limited-use ebook formatter, and NOT A WORD PROCESSOR. A word processor creates something that is intended to be used for original creation of original content. Such a clause on a word processor would be a rights grab.

In the first part of the sentence, “THE WORK” is defined as “that which has been created on this software.” That is its sole and limiting definition. It does not apply to any version of the work created on other software. You have to hold both parts of that clause together. You cannot separate them. If you separate them, you misunderstand the clause. As written, it is a single, self-limiting clause that makes clear the version to which Apple claims an interest in is the version created on their software—and their software creates a version that can only be used on one specific platform (the iPad) which they have created and own.

THEM: and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

ME: If they’re going to pay you, you have to sign their contract. Which you have to do to sell ANYTHING on ANYONE’s platform.