Category Archives: -Phil Rosette

Imagining Fiction in the Electronic Age

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I received a good response to last month’s apocalyptic post on pulp, mostly notes of reminiscences. I had no idea people time-stamped their best reads like they were best dates. Two folks thought enough to put fingers to keyboard and tell me just how wrong I was, and one good friend about chewed my ear off with the same message. But one woman wrote about following a person off a subway, up a flight of stairs and all the way to the crosswalk without that person ever looking up from their Kindle. She didn’t say if they were male or female, old or young, but earlier she had seen the same thing play out from subway to crosswalk, only this person was reading a paperback. What she noticed was how engrossed both readers were in their stories, not the format they were reading them on. To her, and to me, it proves that Content will always be King.

Thanks to all who commented.

 

Tomorrow’s bestselling fiction authors need to wade through new and exciting waters if they want readers to enjoy their digital content. The future fiction story has to be engaging on every page. Good news! Authors can now use more than just words to engage their readers!

Meaningful graphics strategically placed in the body of the works is soon to be the new norm. Children’s fiction has always been picture book format, so it will just be business as usual for that age group. Adult fiction authors, however, strive to paint just enough of a character or a scene, yet still leave something for the reader’s own imagination. We want to draw characters that remind readers of someone they’ve known: the bitchy boss, the nearsighted neighbor, the real estate lady who knows no quit.

Authors run great risks in the future if they use the wrong graphics. This becomes a fault, graphically speaking, when authors use a well-known person as a metaphor. For example, one of my references to Elizabeth, a main character in my upcoming novel, Knock Softly (working title), says she looks like Little Orphan Annie in one childhood photograph. The reader already knows that Elizabeth is a redhead so that is all I say. I leave all her other attributes to the reader’s imagination; young Elizabeth’s height, voice, dimples or not. Adult fiction readers can color in all the “known” minutiae much faster, and clearer, than the author can. In this case, any companion image of a young Elizabeth would spoil the reader’s own imagination.

Other trip-ups include using well known locations, like Disneyland or the Grand Canyon for example. You don’t want to alter whatever image your reader already has; you want them to recall it. Authors can only do that with words that metaphorically develop their characters against such landmarks. The great e-novel of the future will illuminate the text with images that only the author can bring to life.

Color, not black and white, will adorn future e-pages. Without ink, there is no cost consideration for digitally printing in color, so descriptive hues, shades and shadows will matter as never before. For that reason, future authors need to be just as considerate for what they choose to leave out as what they choose to spell out. Even the very colors that illustrators use have to complement the scene’s mood and drama, otherwise the visuals will wind up competing with the words. It’s a subliminal thing, but ad agencies have been refining the use of color for decades to convey stature, sensuality and attitude. This is nothing new, it’s just found a new home. Black and white will only be used to depict dark and dreary scenes, or to shadow horror too repulsive for vivid interpretation.

Here’s the rub: e-novel readers cannot see how “heavy” a tome is before they buy it. There is no page count. Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken weighs as much as James Joyce’s Ulysses in e-book format. Instead, there is an indicator at the bottom of each page showing what percentage you’ve completed. It feels like a journey, not a read. Authors need to be aware of this from their first draft onwards. That indicator is like the kids in the backseat of your mind asking, Are we there yet? There is less time for a story to “breathe” in the future e-novel, where pictures purpose the pauses. Each page has to be reason enough for the reader to carry on. Authors are going to have to make the journey just as entertaining as the destination if they want to shut up the brats in the backseat of their reader’s mind. The percentage indicator is neither good nor bad; it’s just a new way of telling time in a novel. We’ll all get used to it. By next Thursday.

E-novels will probably be 75,000 to 100,000 words with a dozen-odd illustrations to richen up the read. Last chapters will be written like soap opera; effectively, lead-ins for tomorrow’s adventure in a continuing series. Authors who create quirky characters that readers want to follow from adventure to adventure will do well.

Paper’s First Mass Extinction

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The digital age is upon us, it’s everywhere we look today. Literally, no industry is safe when doctors can now print 3-D parts for a heart valve repair minutes later. What possible chance do printed books have by the year 2025? Slim to none, sorry to say.

By then, publishers will only print Limited Edition books that authors and illustrators will sign and that collectors and fans will treat like trophies. Books will only be purchased – and thus printed – for their beauty or their collector appeal by 2025. Attractive, leather bindings with inlaid gold designs touting popular titles will command hundreds of dollars, but the “trade editions” will all be ninety-nine cent digital versions.

Text books – all learning material for that matter – will fall like dinosaurs during the first mass extinction of pulp. These books will die out because of their sheer weight alone, but so, too, will all sci-fi, suspense, mystery and romance stories. Novels will lose out because they hold no advantage on paper. They are more expensive and take longer for everyone involved, from author to publisher to seller to readers. In the end, economics rule. Without some other inherent value, there will be no reason to keep a novel once you’re done reading it. If that’s the case and e-books remain cheaper, then print is dead. Long live E!

Some genres should survive until 2025. Children’s books will still be in print because they are illustrated, but their days are numbered, too. Biographies with their childhood photographs, documents, maps, and other such supporting evidence have a home on the future bookshelf for those very reasons, at least for a while longer. Religious material will continue in print because you take this Book with you to Church to read along with the faithful. Even so, at some point, churches, too, will be distributing prayers, sermons and missals on e-readers left in the pews.

Cookbooks and other reference material – the kinds of books that people dog-ear and write in the margins of – will continue to be printed because we treat them like tools while working on related projects. It’s hard to see other formats surviving, though. How are you going to convince today’s youth to put down their iPhones and pick up something printed on paper?

The year 2025 is only a decade away. For the first mass extinction of paper to come true by then, all these dire predictions will need to travel at the speed of light.

Exactly!

A decade from now, authors, Amazon, and the publishers who are sure to follow, will be too busy translating their e-novels into other languages without making embarrassing mistakes. That will be everyone’s main concern. The war over “cover price” will be long over. Free market enterprise will set the price. It always does in the end.

I think third world countries will be the new marketing frontier ten years from now, not just for books but for e-everything. Authors and publishers could thrive with the Polaroid Theory of Marketing in those countries by providing them with cheap e-readers and free internet.

Dr. Edwin Land’s marketing strategy in the 1960s was to effectively “give away the camera to sell the film.” This was akin to financial suicide in an industry where cameras cost hundreds of dollars and the photographic film costs pennies to turn into pictures. But Land had a theory, which was this: people will pay dearly for instant gratification.

Land priced one version, the Polaroid Swinger,  under $20.00. Cameras were not household items in the 1960s until Land’s affordable entry pricing made them popular. But, where 35mm film was cheap – $4.00 to develop a roll of 36 photos – it had to be mailed to a company to be turned into pictures. It took about a week to process, and sometimes you got someone else’s pictures back instead of your own. That could get embarrassing. Polaroid sold ten pictures for $7.00, but you held your Polaroid picture in your hand one minute later, while the moment was still fresh. It was our first taste of instant gratification, and we showed great marketers like Edwin Land, Bill Gates and Steven Jobs just how much more we were willing to pay for it.

Create a $20.00 e-reader today and the Polaroid Theory guarantees that everyone of age in Africa, Asia and the poorer parts of the Americas will have access to all kinds of books. With today’s technology, all it requires is a few drones parked in the sky to gain access to millions – billions – of potential e-book buyers. This means instant global gratification for e-books and global extinction for print. A $20.00 e-reader could conquer the world with ten books for seven bucks instead of ten pictures. Everyone from author to publisher makes more money with the Polaroid Theory because millions of more copies are sold. The costs to create more copies spiral down with the economy-of-scale, and if the novel never catches on, the cost of failure is survivable.

Think bigger than that. It is possible bilingual e-books could give rise to English as Earth’s common language by 2025. It almost is now. Think of what that means to all fiction authors, regardless their native tongue.

Printed matter’s second life is destined to become firewood at some point during in the next decade. Even something as sought after today as a first edition of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I’m sorry to say. As an antiquarian dealer, I worry about this a lot. I’ve stopped investing in modern classics produced after 1980.

Tomorrow’s bookshelf is today’s trophy cabinet. By 2025, we’ll keep our treasured tomes locked behind glass and out of direct sunlight. When someone asks if they can take one out, we’ll smile and say, “I’ve got that book on my iPad, too, if you’d like to read it.”

Next Month: Back to the topic of writing. If the future of fiction novels is strictly digital, how will that affect the way authors pace their stories? Are we headed for the 140-character novel? Will an author need to work with an illustrator to have any chance of success? Is writing a novel morphing from solitude to team project? And, if so, then whose e-voice is this, anyway? Stop by next month and explore these thoughts with me.

Slogging Through the Jungle with a Hatchet

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You may have heard something about the ongoing fight between Amazon and Hachette Book Group. It started in the boardrooms of both companies over the new contracts that, effectively, allow Amazon to set the prices for Hachette’s and eventually all publishers products.

But that’s not all. It also says the publisher, by a certain future date, must submit “electronic versions” of their books – and covers – with shipments, and to allow Amazon to print-on-demand (POD) any orders the publishers cannot fulfill within a specified amount of time. I haven’t seen the contract, but enough people have to warrant over 1000 authors signing a letter and buying a two-page ad in the New York Times Sunday Edition to protest the contract’s language. It’s getting nasty, just the kind of stuff that good, suspense novels are made of!

Diana Hirsch got this topic started back in August with her Amazon, Hachette and the wretched $9.99 price point, but I saw a sidebar there that warrants a bit more discussion. I wear both hats in this fight. My first novel, The Freya Project, was published by Countinghouse Press. I self-published my second book, Seoul Legacy, the Orphan’s Flu, with aid of the University of Michigan Library’s Espresso Book Machine. Anyone can use their million-dollar “book” printer. My per-unit cost in each case (tradition vs. POD) was about the same. The difference was that I could have printed just one POD book if I wanted instead of hundreds or thousands, so the overall publishing cost difference was huge and that’s what drove my decision to POD for my second book.

You can bet Amazon has a few Espresso Book Machines at the ready, and what’s really at stake here are jobs. Thousands of workers bees throughout the book distribution channel are about to be handed pink slips. Traditional printing houses will fall if they don’t get onboard the e-train, and the biggest ones will fall the hardest. Publishing is going to bleed all the way back to the pulp forests. This contract, this new business model, if it comes to fruition, will literally rewrite the definition of the word “print” in all dictionaries by the year 2050. I alluded to this in my blog back in March, And now, the 2050 POE prize winner for…. Amazon has already captured the prize – the consumer.

Don’t blame Jeff Bezos and his Amazon.com; he just expanded the vision. Blame Johannes Gutenberg; he started it when he put all the first scribes out of business! By 1460 – a mere 21 years after he invented it – Gutenberg’s moveable type presses were operating all over Europe. What happened next changed the course of history. Over the next 500 years, print would evolve into the worldwide format for all sciences, medicines, religions, and all other forms of education. It allowed us to record history and for the masses to learn. Jeff is merely taking over where Johannes left off.

I don’t care how they define “print” in 2050, so long I’m still able to read it. That’s the consumer’s hat I wear in this fight, and it’s the hat I care about the most. I don’t care what price point publishers put on e-books, either, so long as Mr. Bezos & Co. keep their long-standing consumer protection clause; Amazon’s seven-day, no questions asked, money back guarantee. If you don’t like an e-book, return it for a full refund within a week. I have both bought and sold eBooks this way on Amazon.com for years, and have yet to experience a refund from under either hat.

Amazon’s consumer protection clause is the rising tide that lifts all boats. If the author or publishing house insists on staying anchored to their price-point, then let them, just as long as the consumer can get a refund if they don’t like the book for whatever reason. Frankly, Amazon’s seven-day policy should be thirty-days, to encourage bulk purchases.

The main reason new authors have such a hard time breaking into the industry has been the same for hundreds of years; they are just not-quite-good-enough to warrant the all expenses required to “launch” a new author. Amazon’s proposed business model finally buries that hatchet. It allows a publisher to take a chance with someone or something new without the fear of going broke. It allows the author to take a chance without the fear of losing audience. It also allows the reader to take a chance without wasting a lot of time, or money.

Too many good voices are going unheard. For every one David Baldacci there are fifty Bonnie Virag’s. I dare you to put down her The Stovepipe, a true story about growing up in the Canadian Children’s Aid Society. Hers is the most gripping novel I’ve read since Frank McCort’s Angela’s Ashes. Virag only has 29 five-star reviews on Amazon.com, compared to McCort’s 2,400, but download The Stovepipe and I guarantee you will want to be number 30.

As I see it, new authors are the only authors who will need an agent – a megaphone, if you will – in the Amazon business model. Word-of-mouth has always been the best form of advertising. If readers like what you write they will tell two friends who will tell two friends, etc. They always have and they always will, especially where reading material is concerned. The internet only amplifies today’s voice, but it does so on the same scale that moveable type amplified reading almost 500 years ago.

Right now, Hachette & Co. should be driving fast and taking chances instead of slogging along in the fast lane and holding up traffic. Think of the internet as the carpool lane in rush hour, Mr. Hachette – give someone else a lift and you’ll both get there faster.  Smaller advances, say, a tenth of the size of Baldacci’s, could be paid to new promising authors. All publishers should be trying to find –and fund – new voices like Ms. Virag’s. If only one turned out to be as successful as David Baldacci or Frank McCort have they’d be in the money. Two or more and they’d be fat cats with cigars. Again.

 

Next Month. A look at what the future holds for pulp.

I have no doubt someone will print a 600th Anniversary edition of the Gutenberg Bible. I suspect all religious material will still be in “print” by 2055, but what chance do newspapers have? Or magazines? Or books? And, what does history hold for all the printed matter in existence now? Is a first edition of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire treasure or trash? Those questions answered, and more, in November. Thanks for dropping by!

Inking Out First Impressions

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No doubt, you already know how to add adjectives and adverbs to Mr. & Mrs. Fashion Forward’s outward appearance, so I will hold off on the physical aspects of first impressions – height, weight, color of eyes, etc. – until the end of this blog. And I am not going to discuss what it takes for your book to make a good first impression on the shelf – cover artwork, font size, colors and the blurb on the back. That is a separate topic unto itself. This blog is about how to utilize three of storytelling’s four fundamental pillars to build the strongest, most vivid first impressions for characters and scenes, on the page:

  • Where is this story taking place? (geographical and social settings)
  • When is this story taking place? (historically, seasonally)
  • Who is it about? (age and wisdom, but not physical appearance)

It is these three spiraling timelines – where, when and who – that I use to create memorable first impressions.

The other pillar – What is happening? – is plot line, which I discussed in July.

Where. Your story’s setting should have a “connection to place” if you want to make a good first impression. Get to know your scenery up close and personal. Visit. If you can’t go, then find that location in Google Maps, click “street view” and see what it looks like. Search “local events” to get a flavor for the eats, beats and treats around the area, and then pick out a feature or landmark that can help cement your story. Scenery is usually set during your book’s slower moments, away from the action, but don’t go crazy here; it’s only minutiae. One or two quick, accurate, local details will do.

Where also indicates social position. Who are your characters’ circle of friends? What are their family and workplace situations like? How do your characters behave in their community? Not that authors needs to tell all of this stuff to make a good story, but they do need to know all of it in order to develop their characters – in character. It is the action of your characters within their social, home and work settings that shows where their motivation lies.

Case in point. In my upcoming novel, Knock Softly (working title), the protagonist, Edvard Bergman, at the age of seven, loses both of his parents in a house fire. That event dictates how he manages his business and his family in the story. There is no prelude. Readers do not know the backstory when Knock Softly opens, 38 years after the fire. First, the reader sees that Edvard has built a fire station on his research campus because the nearest fire department is 12 miles away. At home, Edvard has installed sprinklers in the kitchen and garage ceilings, as well as above the fireplace, a fireplace that’s never been lit. Readers learn that Ed will not allow his children to sleep with locked doors, and that all second story bedrooms have rope ladders. Ed’s demeanor is played out in actions and reactions long before readers learn why he is pyrophobic.

When. In order to write realistic fiction, the author must be in touch with the era in which the story takes place. That is why contemporary suspense is so popular. It’s the easiest for the author to imitate, and it’s the easiest for the reader to follow. Before you write the scene, think about what was really going on at that point in time. Read the local newspaper for around the time of your story and see what everyone was talking about. You just might discover something newsworthy that will help place your story to that time in that town, city or park. Incorporating history and a few seasonal aspects into your background will lend authenticity to your story and make it seem more real.

Watch out for seasonal changes in longer stories, they can cause slipups that are hard to spot by the author. I needed to cut the line “…acorns crunched under his step…” from one scene in Knock Softly because that scene takes place in July. I first wrote it in the fall of last year. At the time, I was attempting to incorporate a soft sound into a quiet walk in the park. It was just minutiae, but I never caught the error until last July, when I was walking my dogs in the park and could not find a single acorn to crunch under foot… Oops!

Who. Very young kids, up to about the age of seven, will believe anything their parents, teachers, guardians and older siblings tell them. That’s why they make lousy protagonists in suspense. On the page, just have very young characters do what their elders tell them and you’ll be fine. But after about age seven, appropriate behavior for kids is the toughest feature of all to nail down. Especially through puberty – when shoe sizes and career goals change overnight.

Be careful what your characters say with older kids on the page – they absorb everything. Gossip, and how children interpret what they overhear, will grab a kid’s attention in a way that telling them directly cannot. It’s, I learned verses you told me, to their young minds. The older we get, the less we trust hearsay and gossip, but to kids it’s golden nectar.

You can use these three factoids to make great suspense between young and old:

  • Kids and young adults are constantly looking outward to see what else is available. Adults are ego-focused by their mid-thirties.
  • You can’t teach a know-it-all and teenagers already know everything, so they say and do the first thing they think of. A rational adult will take whatever time necessary to make the right decision.
  • When confronted with unknown situations, kids become flustered and everything speeds up for them. Adults become keenly aware in unfamiliar situations, and everything slows down.

These transitions do not begin until we gain more confidence in our decisions–twenty-something for most people.

As you start to draw your older characters, imagine you are meeting them for the first time, just like your readers really are. Your character’s life doesn’t begin at this point. You and your readers are effectively dropping in on them. Yet, even though the reader knows very little about the character’s past, there is much they will assume until you tell them otherwise. I have found these assumptions are true with most adults:

  • Day by day, our ambitions spiral us onward and upward to bigger and better.
  • But in reality, our life becomes focused through a narrower and narrower lens as we gray.
  • The older we get, the more we want, but the less we are willing to accept.

Some glues harden quicker than others, but most people set their course in life by thirty-something. That’s not to say life can’t come unglued. Read: midlife crisis. There are tons of suspense and mystery novels built around this time in a character’s life and it is fun, fun stuff to write. Just keep in mind that by midlife most mortal characters know what sorts of things they’re good at, what kinds of people they like to be around and what entertains them. And they go for more, not less, in life’s next chapter.

Exceptions, of course, always make for better stories. Exceptions to the norm that give depth to the storyline can build lasting first impressions, but if the “exception” does not move your story forward, the words are just bulk. That’s true for scenes and character traits.

As for the physical aspects of character, let me ask you: what color were Dracula’s eyes? On which cheek was Capone’s scar? In the Sherlock Holmes series, on which leg did Doctor Watson received his old war wound? Once your characters are fleshed out, you can color their eyes, skin and hair and dress them as you like; it won’t matter. Fangs, scars, limps and the like all make for great imagery, but it is the personality to which these images are attached that readers will remember first and foremost.

 

Next Month: Not sure yet. Any suggestions? Contact me via the comments section below.

Minutiae

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According to Merriam-Webster.com, “Mystery” means anything that is not understood. Its origin pre-dates the bible. “Suspense” is defined as nervousness or excitement caused by wondering what will happen. It was first used in the 1500’s. “Minutiae” means trifles, details and smallness, and it dates to 1782, making it the new kid on the vocabulary block. The elements of minutiae can enhance both mystery and suspense, but they are used differently in each genre.

In a mystery, you don’t know who done it; that’s for the protagonist and the readers to figure out. The author plants clues throughout the story, and those clues are often in the minutiae, the small details in the beginning that have large consequences in the end. For example, break a fingernail in Chapter 1 and have that fingernail show up at the scene-of-the-crime in Chapter 7. Mystery readers need to be on their toes, constantly asking themselves, “Why did the author choose this minutiae to express that scene?” Readers won’t fault the author if they figure it out before the end. Instead, they will think of themselves as very clever for having done so.

In a suspense novel, the reader knows who did the dastardly deed, often from the opening chapter. There is no mystery to the story itself. Instead, there is plenty of mystique in the characters, and the readers are left asking, “Why does she always do that?” Readers don’t fault the author if the character’s mystique is double-handed or morally corrupt, so long as the author explains the minutiae in a rational way for that character’s development.

In a mystery, minutiae mystifies the storyline, in suspense it mystifies the characters and their actions.

What you choose say is just as important as when you say it. Character traits are popular with authors because these small details pull double duty with character development, and they don’t have a “sell by” date, meaning you can bring them back in your next chapter or next novel.

One place where minutiae can play a part in your novel is when you want to slow down the pace. Never use minutiae to speed up the action, like: His fist floated into Fred’s flabby gut. He heard him go oomph and gleefully watched Fred double over in pain. Instead say: He hit Fred once and watched him double over. Only use minutiae to slow down the action: The wine’s robust aroma floated in the air and competed with her perfume. He inhaled deeply, slowly; this was a night he had to savor.

Entirely new scenes and romantic moments can also benefit with a sprinkle of minutiae, to let the scene breathe. But this minutiae is only used once to full effect, then condensed for any revisits. Case in point: here’s a “first” scene from my upcoming novel Knock Softly (working title). The characters make several visits to the park and dog run with our protagonist, Edvard, and his two dogs, Rufus and Pudge, throughout the story. The dogs weigh 75 and 25 pounds respectively. (The novel goes into more detail on the dogs, too, but here such detail would only be minutiae.) This scene involves only a small portion of the 1.2-mile walk. Knock Softly is told in present tense.

Long before they arrive at the dog run, Ed has to walk the dogs past a family of oaks that proves to be home to an entire community of squirrels. The trees are a magnificent cluster whose matriarch stands dead center and at least 80 feet tall. The grounds under the oaks are well shaded and almost barren of other trees or tall vegetation. Their broad branches and long, fingered leaves steal all the sun’s rays leaving this part of the walk always cooler, darker. Rufus lifts his ears in eager anticipation and starts pulling on the leash. Ed wraps the leash around his wrist and braces for impact.

Readers revisit this part of the path again in another scene several pages later, but in the second scene, the pace is much faster and it is dialog that sets the pace. The scenery is just the canvas:

They’re getting closer to the oaks and both Ed and Rufus know it. He wraps the leash around his wrist before they get to the shadows and gives it quick jerk to let the dog know who is boss. Ed tells Jane… And the dialog follows.

All the minutiae from the first scene are present in the second, just not on the page. Left in the readers’ thought bubbles are the cluster of trees, the squirrels, and all the other previously established minutiae. To put all of that on the page again would only bog the story down when it wants to run.

And never use the same minutiae twice – that’s worse than marrying your brother-in-law in the same wedding dress.

Next Month: First Impressions
They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression, but much of fiction is character development. Development means change, and suspense means changing those first impressions. To write a great first impression in a novel, you have to first think about what your characters are going to develop into. Then figure out what kinds of darling details, social settings and backstories you need to get them there. Next month we’ll look at how to make a good first impression on the page.