A sense of impending doom . . . .

Today -- Friday, 10 January 2020 -- has not been one of my better days.  Maybe that's why I'm back here, after a long and not entirely voluntary hiatus.

I wrote a long time ago that I wouldn't be doing book reviews here.  I thought about setting up a separate blog for reviews, and in fact so much time has passed that maybe I actually did that and have just forgotten about it.

The truth is, I don't write a lot of reviews of current fiction.  Most of the reviews I do write and post on BookLikes are of books I didn't like, didn't finish, didn't get past the first few pages.  There's a reason for that, and it's not a good reason.

My budget is severely limited.  More or less retired, I live on Social Security and some supplemental self-employment income from my writing and from the sale of various arts & crafts products I make.  My Social Security benefits are reduced because I elected to start them earlier than full retirement age.  The supplemental income is not reliable, and it has been made even less reliable by my inability to shake off various stressors.  Anxiety is not profitable, but it is pervasive.  I do not write as much as I should.  I do not make as much jewelry as I should.

I do not make as much money as I need.

Therefore, my reading material tends to fall into certain distinct classifications:

1. Physical books I already own, which number about 5,000.
2. Kindle books, mostly freebies and therefore many self-published
3. Non-fiction library books, whether physical copies or digital borrows.

It's that second category that ends up being "reviewed" on my BookLikes blog.  Sadly, many of those author-published books just aren't very well written.  But I did try them.  I really did.

My longer, more analytical reviews were saved for those favorite personal classics, books like Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar and Leslie Turner White's Lord Johnnie.  I loved these books when I first read them more than 50 years ago; rereading them for the purpose of close analysis was just as much fun.

The past few weeks have been filled with the drama surrounding Romance Writers of America, a scandal of sorts with its roots in racism, lack of diversity, and lack of transparency in dealing with those issues.  I'm not going to rehash any of that, or bring up my very tangential involvement, except to say that my fifteen or so years of active membership in RWA meant I made a lot of connections with other writers.  Friends? Um, not all of them, and only a tiny few of those connections have survived.  But it still means that reading a book by someone I knew back then brings in an automatic bias.  So I haven't posted reviews of many books by people I know or knew.

Let me be clear:  I would never, under any circumstances, direct an author to a review I had written of their work*.  Reviews are for readers.  But I don't have any way of knowing, unless they post it in front of me on Twitter or something, which authors routinely search for reviews of their books.  It's not likely that I'd post a really bad review of a book by someone I've had a positive personal relationship with -- whether in person or just through social media -- but even minor criticisms might be taken the wrong way.  I really do appreciate my online contacts, and I would rather not review a book written by a cyber-friend than risk that friendship.

(*I did recently inform an author with whom I've interacted on social media  that I reviewed one of their books 30+ years ago. I no longer have a copy of the review.)

But BookLikes has become more problematic today than it has been for a while.  I think I started to take it for granted again, but it's been down for 24 hours now with only a brief Facebook notification that they're working on it.

So, what to do?

Well, I have a website that I haven't even looked at for a year or more.  It's due to renew in February, and I actually thought this morning that I might let it all lapse.  Could I convert it to something more attuned to books and book blogging?  I don't know.  That's not my area of expertise; I wouldn't even know how to start.

But it's been six and a half years since the Great Purge at Goodreads, and so many of us have found a home at BookLikes.  We like the freedom, even if we don't like the spammers.  We like the platform, even if we don't like the silence from the operators.  Most of all, however, we like each other.

If the platform returns, I'll be backing up as much of my material as I can.  Some of it may end up here.  Comments may be lost, but at least the core will be saved.  Again, that's if the platform can be resuscitated.  And I'll add links to it for this post, too.  If it comes back.

I'm committed to doing what I can -- within the constraints of time and budget -- to keep the community alive, regardless.



 

Part 1: The price of buying -- and selling -- words

This is going to be a very long work in progress.  Rather than wait until I have the whole thing written, I'm going to post each part as it's completed and then post updates and/or corrections as needed.

The quick background is this:  Effective 1 January 2015, the European Union ("EU") will require all sellers of digital media to include Value Added Tax ("VAT") in the listed prices of the item being sold, to collect the VAT from the buyer, and to remit the VAT collected to the appropriate authority.  This requirement has been public knowledge for at least six months as of this date (18 December 2014) and some sellers of digital media have taken steps to comply.  Others have not.  Others are trying to but cannot.  There appears to be a huge amount of misinformation, misunderstanding, ignorance, and, well, a lot of other stuff.

I don't have all the answers, and don't claim to.  I'm just trying to ask the questions and put whatever information I find into some coherent order.


The concept of VAT has been around for quite a while.  It functions as a national sales tax for some 28 European countries, and ranges from a low of 3% to a high of 27%.  Much like state, county, and local sales taxes in the U.S., VAT is imposed on the buyer of physical merchandise at the time of purchase.  The merchant collects the tax at the rate imposed on the location where the purchase is made and then remits the monies to the appropriate authorities.  The purchaser may be from another country (or state, county, or city) where the rate is different -- higher or lower -- but the rate is charged based on where the actual transaction (where the buyer actually takes possession) takes place.

Unlike U.S. sales taxes, however, the VAT is included ("VAT inclusive") in the advertised price.  Assuming a 20% VAT rate for the United Kingdom, an item with a price of £5.00 would be displayed/advertised/listed at £6.00.  The customer thus knows up front what the total price is.

With physical goods, this isn't difficult to understand.  VAT being a national tax, even such things as printed books could (but in actuality may not) carry the correct VAT-inclusive price printed right on them.  Merchants collect the taxes at the time of the sale and then later report and pay them.

The U.S. having so many different taxing authorities -- state, county, city -- as well as various exemptions within those authorities, sales taxes are calculated after all the retail prices are added up.  Again, the merchants collect the taxes and remit them to the appropriate authorities.  Large retail merchants who sell a variety of goods at various tax rates have much of the complicated calculations programmed into their scanners and cash registers.  Smaller merchants who only sell one category of merchandise are permitted to calculate manually; in some jurisdictions they may even be allowed to calculate tax as a percentage of the list price paid rather than adding it to the list price.

You may think I'm writing this on the wrong blog and that this applies more to selling my arts and crafts than to writing books.  In fact, this has everything to do with books, and almost nothing to do with selling jewelry or wooden bowls at an art show.  Well, almost nothing.  We'll get to that later.


What worked for physical commodities sold in physical stores/locations was one thing.  Online selling of physical merchandise posed a different scenario.  In the U.S. as well as the EU, application of taxes to physical goods that were ordered online and delivered from one taxing location to another required some new requirements and strategies as well as implementation procedures.  In some cases it works, and in some it doesn't.

Digital distribution of digital products across jurisdictional boundaries was a bit trickier, for a variety of reasons.  The most obvious issue was that since there was no physical object being transferred, there was no physical point at which the taxing authority could intercept a package and demand payment (or evidence of prior payment) of taxes before turning the merchandise over to the purchaser.

Digital downloading via the Internet also meant that buyers and sellers could be in different states, even different countries.  Which taxing authorities then applied?  What rates?  How could the funds be collected and remitted?  What currencies would be involved?

The rapidity with which digital selling of digital products has increased apparently caught the EU taxing authorities sort of flat footed.  Especially when digital behemoth -- and infamous tax avoider -- Amazon got involved.

For one thing, the EU were upset that Amazon was taking over retail markets of physical goods and not paying any VAT at all, nor was Amazon paying any corporate taxes.  While various negotiations were taking place to rectify those situations, the EU took steps to begin collecting VAT on one market where Amazon had a very visible market dominance: ebooks.

The EU, in order to capture revenue from huge digital sellers and Amazon in particular, declared that VAT on digital media would be assessed based on the location of the seller.  Amazon then chose to set their EU location as Luxembourg (so did Nook and Kobo) whose VAT rate on ebooks is 3%, even though such a low VAT rate apparently contravened EU directives.  (France's rate of 5.5% on ebooks has also been deemed in violation.)

Effective 1 January 2015, that will no longer be the case.  Because of the amount of VAT funds being lost, the European Commission has stated that sales of digital products -- electronic books, crochet and knitting patterns, music recordings, digital training materials, etc. -- will have to be taxed by the seller but the rate will be based on the purchaser's home location, or at least the IP registered location of the computer or ereader device to which the file is downloaded.   This is similar to how U.S. sales taxes have generally been assessed on physical goods:  It's not the point of sale that matters; it's the point of purchase.  As online purchases of physical goods have increased, many taxing authorities (usually the individual states) have implemented measures by which sales taxes can be collected based on the buyer's location, especially if the seller has any physical presence in that particular state.  But again, it all depends on the taxing authority.  They're the collectors; they set the rules.  (Enforcing them may be a different matter.  We'll save that for another post, I think,)

There are several stipulations involved in all this beyond just the assessing, collecting, and remitting of the tax itself.

1. The listed price posted by the digital seller must include the specific VAT amount for the prospective purchaser and that VAT-inclusive price must be posted prior to any sale.  The VAT amount can't be tacked on afterward the way sales taxes in the U.S. are.
2. The seller must be registered with the EU and each member state (there are 28) in order to collect and remit the funds.  (There are some procedures in place for "one stop shopping" programs to allow digital merchants to remit VAT monies to just one location, which will then distribute according to the merchant's tax return.)
3. Returns must be filed quarterly to those 28 member states.
4. Records identifying each and every purchaser's location via IP as well as corroborating indentification evidence must be kept a minimum of 10 years and it must be stored on a server in the EU for auditing purposes. 
5. Sellers' records must be auditable.
6. And so on.

Amazon is complying with the order, albeit imperfectly.  Some other distributors of digital publications are not.

Amazon's fix is not, as I said, perfect, and that lack of perfection will have a direct and potentially serious impact on the digital self-publishing author.

Digital publication has allowed author-publishers to put their digital products online via a single distributor and then sell virtually anywhere in the world.  Amazon's Kindle dominates the ebook market.  One report suggested that 9 out of every 10 ebooks purchased in the UK came from Amazon.  But Amazon isn't alone.  There are other ebook distributors such as Smashwords, Nook, and Kobo, but there are also craft-oriented sites such as Etsy.com that allow "shop" owners to upload and sell digital files such as knitting patterns and downloadable graphics files.  The files are held on the website's servers -- not the seller's -- and downloaded automatically upon payment, usually through PayPal or another automated payment platform.  The EU and the UK's taxing authority HMRC have stated that such platforms constitute "3rd party" sellers who are liable, as is Amazon, for the collection and remittance of the taxes as well as the recordkeeping.  I'll get to the details of that distinction in a subsequent post, but I wanted you readers to know that Amazon isn't alone.

But getting back to ebooks in the EU.  The VAT rates on ebooks in the European Union range from 3% (Luxembourg) to 27% (Hungary).  There are 28 taxing bodies.  (Because most of those member states have more than one rate, there are actually the possibilities for 75 or so different rates on various products, but this post is only concerned with ebooks.)

Let me reiterate part of this:  The law that is slated to go into effect on 1 January 2015 (two weeks from today) includes the stipulation that each digital product be priced to include the appropriate VAT amount.  Thus, to use one example, a digital book priced by the publisher/author at £5.00 in the U.K. would have to be listed at £6.00 to cover the 20% VAT rate.  Amazon has its amazon.co.uk website, so the Kindle edition of the book would appear there at £6.00.  Amazon would collect that amount, remit the £1.00 VAT to the taxing authority (HMRC), and pay the author's royalties based on the selling price of £5.00, which the publisher/author set.

In the event, however, that a copy of the book is purchased from the amazon.co.uk site by a customer in Ireland, the numbers change.  The Republic of Ireland has a VAT rate of 23%, which on that book would be £1.15.  Since there is no separate Kindle pricing available for Ireland, the Irish VAT would be assessed and paid out of the posted price of £6.00, but now the publisher/author's selling price is docked to cover the shortfall, and subsequently her royalty from Amazon is based on £4.85.  In effect, the author in the U.S. has subsidized the higher Irish VAT rate.  The author can set a higher price, of course, to cover the Irish VAT, but that means the UK buyers will also be paying the higher price, too, and higher than they really need to.  Amazon will essentially split the difference with the publisher/author.

Amazon does not provide sufficient information to the publisher/author distinguishing the number of sales to Ireland and the number of sales to the UK.  The publisher/author just has to make a guess.

The VAT was never intended to be paid by the producers of the goods but by the consumers.

Amazon does have a variety of websites for Kindle publishing and publisher/authors are able to set the prices for each of those venues to cover the VAT rates.  But those venues do not cover all the taxing situations.  Amazon.de would presumably cover the 19% rate for Germany as well as the 20% rate for Austria, since Amazon doesn't have a unique Austrian platform.   The publisher/author will have to cover the 1% shortfall.

No big deal, right?

But what about situations involving France?  Amazon.fr will presumably require ebooks to be priced to include the 5.5% French VAT on ebooks.  Can a Kindle buyer from Sweden buy Kindle books from Amazon.fr?  If so -- I've searched and haven't been able to find anything definite yet -- who pays the difference between the French 5.5% VAT on ebooks and the Swedish 25%?

So far, I have not been able to find out if buyers from Sweden even can purchase from Amazon.fr, or are they restricted to Amazon.co.uk, or can they buy Kindle books at all?

If there is a shortfall, even if it's 19.5% between the VAT-inclusive French price and the 25% Swedish VAT rate, how much you wanta bet it's gonna be charged to the publisher/author as a deduction from the selling price of the book, with a resultant diminution of the publisher/author's royalties?

So far, only France, Luxembourg, and Malta have applied a substantially reduced VAT rate on ebooks.  Austria, however, only applies a 10% VAT to physical books and periodicals.  Other EU member states also have lower rates on books, magazines, newspapers.  Ireland and the UK impose no VAT at all to physical books and periodicals.  That reduced rate does not apply to digital books and periodicals, per the EU declaration that it's not really clear that digital and print media are equal, the same, equivalent.  (They are discussing the issue, however.)  After all, digital books have linkable indexes and so on.  (Never mind that digital books require some kind of digital reading device; physical books don't.  Or that digital books cannot be legally resold because they aren't legally "owned."  Did you know that?  You really don't own any of those Kindle books.  All you have is a license to read them. . . .)

If the Kindle books are sold(sic) and taxed at the rate posted on the Amazon marketplace website but purchased by someone in another country with a different VAT rate, the tax is going to be applied unfairly.  Either the publisher/author will have to subsidize the buyer if the posted rate is too low, or other buyers will be paying more than they should.

There is another effect of this variability in taxation:  The publisher/author may take an even greater hit when it comes to royalties because of KDP's two-tiered royalty schedule.  That issue is just full of math (or maths) so let's save it for Part 2, shall we?

What have they done to my words? The Amazon formatting fraud continues

What follows is the text of my email to Amazon customer service regarding the Kindle content I downloaded last night.  I will post the relevant screen shots later today.


The Kindle content is "Stone of the Goddess" by Grizel Standilands.  I looked at the Look Inside sample, and it appeared fine.  The sample download, however, is formatted differently than the Look Inside feature.  It is in a different font and has no paragraph indents.  It is not easily readable.
I would like to buy this book, but I'm tired of getting Kindle content that looks good on the Look Inside feature and then turns out to be junk when I try to read it on my Kindle for PC.

I have deregistered, uninstalled, and reinstalled the Kindle for PC application literally dozens of times since these problems first appeared in July 2012.  Not a single one of the problems has been solved. 

Angels at Midnight by Norma Beishir
Danger at Mellin Cove by Rena George
Embrace the Wild Dawn by S.K. McClafferty
among others.

Amazon has taken hours and hours of my time in online chat and promise resolution, but nothing has been done.  I have been promised responses in three days, five days, a week, but I never get anything.  The people I chat with pay little attention to what I'm telling them.  For instance, the last time I got into an online chat, it lasted three hours, even though the question I asked at 20 minutes into the conversation could have been answered then, if the person had only been paying attention.

I have sent screen shots of sample pages showing what happens.  I have been told over and over and over that there is a team of specialists working on the problem and that it is an Amazon software problem.  I began reporting this in July 2012 and I have logs of all the chats to show that.
I know that it is perfectly possible for Kindle content to be formatted just fine to show correctly on the Kindle for PC app, because I read that content all the time.  If indeed the problem is in the software, as I have repeatedly been told by Amazon representatives that it is, then Amazon needs to fix it.  If, on the other hand, the problem is with the authors' formatting of the document that's uploaded to the Kindle platform, then that needs to be determined so the authors can fix their product.

I have the Kindle for PC app on two computers, an HP laptop operating Windows Vista and a Lenovo desktop using Windows 7.  I get exactly the same results on both of them when I look at the affected content.

The Amazon representatives have granted me some Kindle credit in compensation for my frustration and the time I've spent online with them.  I'm tired of giving up my time to this.  There is absolutely no reason why these books don't display properly on my devices.  And I am not going to go out and spend money for a Kindle device that I don't want and don't need and don't have the time to use, because I no longer have faith that these products would display correctly even on the Amazon hardware.

I am also a Kindle Direct Publishing author.  I have no way of knowing if Amazon has delivered my product in readable or unreadable condition to readers.  I have no way of knowing -- other than trusting the "preview" feature -- what my product looks like on any other device.  All I do know is that Amazon has been cheating authors out of sales by not addressing this issue for six months.

This email will be posted on my blog. 

The words out of their mouths, Part 2: Effective speech tags

One of the more common criticisms of unpolished writing is that there is too much telling and not enough showing.  Often, writers are urged to use dialogue between characters to break up long passages of narrative and get out of the authorial point of view.  While dialogue can be a very effective means of employing the "show, don't tell" technique, it must  be done, well, effectively.


A few days ago I was perusing my rather substantial inventory of Kindle books and selected one that I'd been particularly interested in based on the plot description and setting.  Unfortunately, the very first scene turned me off.   After a paragraph or two that set the stage, so to speak, as being in the library of a great house somewhere in Regency England, the ensuing conversation went something like this:

"You've taken everything I have, Craddock," said Jeremy Vinson.
     "There's always your sister," said the earl of Craddock.
     "What do you mean?"
     "I mean your sister Oriana.  She owns the Morvenny estate, doesn't she?"
     "Yes, but I still don't understand," said Jeremy.
     "Morvenny adjoins one of my smaller properties.  Together they would make an attractive parcel," said the earl.
     "But I can't give you Oriana's property.  She's only my half-sister, you know.  She inherited Morvenny from her mother's father, and I have no control over it," said Jeremy.
     "Oh, I'm quite well aware of that.  But surely you have some control over Oriana?"
     "Very little," said Jeremy.
     "Yes, I got the impression she's a bit of a handful.  Quite the hoyden when left to her own devices I would imagine," said Craddock.
     "You don't know the half of it."

Yes, it was that bad.  All dialogue, no action, and those booooring "said So-and-So" speech tags, and it went on for several pages just like that before the author added anything approaching action or description or. . . . anything.

So, how to improve this?  Well, one way would be to change all those "saids" to something else.  Replied, responded, queried, wondered, snapped, barked, snarled, trilled, sang, chortled, etc., etc., etc.  Those are called said-bookisms, as if the writer had a book of alternatives to the plain old said and was determined to use each and every one of them at least once but never employ "said" itself at all.  I won't even provide you with a sample; I think you know what I mean.

Much better results are achieved not by adding lots of interesting verbs (or worse, a bunch of adverbs!), but by. . .

Jeremy Vinson took a deep breath and released it slowly.
      "You've taken everything I have, Craddock," he said.
      Swirling the brandy in his glass lazily, the earl of Craddock studied the amber fluid and did not look at his host.  "There's always your sister."
       "What do you mean?"
       Craddock leaned back against the closed door and almost smiled at the desperation in Vinson's query.
      "I mean your sister Oriana.  She owns the Morvenny estate, doesn't she?"
      Vinson tried but failed to stifle a gasp.
      "Yes, b-but I still d-don't understand."
      Desperate, yes, but not terribly bright.  Craddock finally looked up from his contemplation of what was a surprisingly fine brandy, given the state of the Vinsons' fortunes.  From the other side of an ornate desk, Jeremy was staring at him, his eyes blinking with total lack of comprehension.  The earl had hoped not to have to spell out the details but there was nothing for it but to put it in simple terms this eldest of the three Vinson brothers might grasp. 
     "Morvenny adjoins one of my smaller properties in the duchy.  Together they would make an attractive parcel."
     Jeremy blinked several more times before he blurted, "But I can't give you Oriana's property.  She's only my half-sister, you know.  She inherited Morvenny from her mother's father, and I have no control over it."
     Good God, the man was duller than he'd thought.  To avoid shouting at him, Craddock took a sip of the brandy, then replied, "Oh, I'm quite well aware of that.  But surely you have some control over Oriana herself?"
     With a snort of disgust, Vinson said, "Very little."
     "Yes, I got the impression she's a bit of a handful.  Quite the hoyden when left to her own devices I would imagine."
     "You don't know the half of it."  Vinson tossed back the last of the brandy in his own glass, then threw the lovely vessel at the library's exquisite fireplace some three or four feet behind him.  Shards of crystal flew everywhere.  "She's a God damned bitch is what she is."

Speech tags themselves aren't enough.  Dialogue has to be mixed with action, with narrative, with description.  Sometimes "said" is the best verb to use because it doesn't overpower the rest of the sentence, either the dialogue or the narrative that goes with it.  Even without speech tags, the reader has no difficult discerning who said what.

More important, however, the blending of spoken words with action and description keeps the action moving.  Without the author's voice ever intruding, the reader learns Jeremy Vinson is apparently in debt to the earl of Craddock and is desperate as a result.  The author could easily have started the exchange between the two men by simply writing "Jeremy Vinson had lost everything he owned to the earl of Craddock and now had nothing left."  Instead, through dialogue and narrative and careful use of point of view, Vinson's desperation and Craddock's condescension are made evident.

The truth is not a bad word

You know who you are.  I don't need to cite your names or post your book titles or link to your blogs.  Most of the rest of us know who you are, too.  Or at least we know who some of you are.

You're the authors of badly written books.  And you need to face that reality.  Oh, I'm sure you won't, but you need to.  For your own sakes if no one else's.

Some of you are new to this game, but others have been around for a long, long time.  I know this because I've seen your manuscripts before when they were entered in RWA contests.  My last RWA membership lapsed in 1998; some of the books that are being digitally self-published now, in 2012, were contest entries in the late 1980s.  They've been around.

These are the books that never won a major contest, never found a traditional print publisher.  Maybe they collected a lot of rejection slips, with or without suggestions for improvement.  Maybe you revised them based on critiques; maybe you didn't.

Then there are the books that have never been evaluated, never entered in a contest, never subjected to a critique group or any other analysis.  Never been sent to an agent or editor, and thus never rejected.

And there are probably some that fall in between:  They've been critiqued by friends or rejected by a couple of agents or. . . .something.

But old or new, experienced author or novice, you know the routine:  You've written a book or two, maybe more, and now that it's so easy to put your books into digital print, you do so.  You get some stock photo art and create a cover, then upload your MSWord file.  Presto!  You're published!  Woohoo!

You launch with greater or lesser private fanfare on Amazon or Smashwords or Nook or Kobo.  Friends and family, who think it's terrific that you've done this but who know nothing about writing or publishing, post five-star reviews.  Maybe you post a few yourself, under other account names or even under your own name on Goodreads.  (I saw one author the other day who had posted three separate five-star ratings for one of her own books on Goodreads.  Not reviews, just ratings.)  If you're ambitious enough, wealthy enough, and/or greedy enough, you buy a few more five-star reviews.  Or you swap reviews with other writers who are just as eager as you to get those ratings, because after all, ratings equal exposure and exposure equals sales and. . . .

Wow!  Look at all the people who think you've written a great book!  The royalties will come pouring in now, won't they!

Excuse me, honey, but none of those people count.  Not one of them.  If they're a friend or family member, they are automatically biased.  If they're you under another name, you're out and out lying.  If they're paid shills, they just plain don't count.

Even if you send your book to an "independent" review site, unless that site is recognized in the reading community as unbiased and fair, it doesn't count.  The awards and recommendations of a site that only gives five-star ratings don't count.

The only thing that counts is the truth.

And the truth is, your books suck.  They're bad.  They're really bad.

Oh, did that hurt your feelings?  I'm sorry your feelings are hurt, but as a reader, I'm not in charge of making sure you feel good.  My job is to read the book; your job was (past tense) to write one that I would enjoy.  You didn't do your job.

Now, let's back up here.  You can't defend yourself here, since it's my blog, and you're probably about to have a stroke at this point, but that's not my concern either.

There are books that a lot of people don't like which are not badly written books.  I for one can't stand anything written by Hemingway.  Nor do I like books that have depressing endings.  I will go out of my way to avoid horror stories, or those with graphic descriptions of violence.  And I'm invariably traumatized by a book in which an animal dies.  (This is one of the many reasons I absolutely can't stand and will never defend Judith McNaught's A Kingdom of Dreams: The heroine is such a spoiled twit she disregards common sense and is directly responsible for the death of the hero's beloved horse.  She never expresses remorse, never apologizes for it.  I hate that book with a passion.)

That's an entirely different kettle of fish -- a book can be very well written and still not be to the reader's personal taste.

I'm talking  about the badly written ones.  The badly published ones.

I'm talking about the books whose authors defend them on the basis of those five-star reviews, insisting that the reviews -- even though they are not legitimate reviews -- are necessary for sales and no critic has a right to deprive the author of potential sales. 

Say what?  Honey, your book has to earn its sales, and no one owes you anything.  No one owes you kindness in their reviews.  Hell, no one even owes you a review at all.  No one owes you a critique that will help you improve the book.  No one deserves your excuses or your protestations of hardship, your whines, your rants, your angry responses and sock puppet comments. 

And no reviewer ever, ever, ever deserves a personal threat from you.  Not ever, not under any circumstances whatsoever.

Bad books are just bad, and that's a simple truth.  Do some of them eventually sell a few copies?  Yeah, sure they do.  Some may even sell a lot of copies.  But that doesn't make them any less bad.

So, what qualifies a book to receive a "bad" rating?  The writing.  If the writing is bad, the book will have a very difficult time succeeding.  And if an author defends a bad book, or denies that it is bad, the author cannot improve.

1.  Bad technical skills -- spelling, grammar, syntax, word usage, punctuation.  These are as basically basic as you can get.  If you can't punctuate dialogue, how can you give your reader an accurate sense of what your characters are saying?  If you don't know how to use the right words, how will your reader know whether you mean demise or surmise?  proceed or precede?  Fray as a noun has a similar meaning to struggle, but fray as a verb means something very very different from the verb struggle.  They cannot be used interchangeably.

2.  Bad story skills -- plots have to be consistent with an internal logic.  Do you know how to construct a cause and effect chain of events from opening to resolution?  Are your characters consistent?  Do they have sufficient internal and external motivation and conflict? 

3.  Bad research -- check your history. Check your geography.  Even if you are writing a paranormal or fantasy, you can't ignore facts unless you provide some logical explanation, either explicit or implicit.  Review your own personal anatomy and make sure human beings can do what you have them doing in your book, especially the love scenes, for the goddess's sake!

4.  Bad formatting -- how many times do we have to go over this?  Readers do not want to read badly formatted books.  You simply cannot expect readers to do your work for you.  You just can't.  And you have no right to complain when readers bitch because you didn't format your book properly.  That's your job.

Reviewers are going to leave negative reviews if you publish a badly written book.  The readers and reviewers don't know you and they don't care about your excuses -- or your precious feelings.  You published a badly written book, so now suck it up and either fix it or write a better one.  But don't you dare accuse the reviewer of anything other than telling you the truth.

I can fix your words!

Oh, hell, why not?

As much as I whine and bitch and complain and rant about poorly written books, maybe I ought to make some money off it.

Proofreading -- all genres*, fiction, non-fiction; English only
Will correct spelling, usage, punctuation, grammatical errors.
Rate:  $2.00 (US) per 1,000 words as counted by MicroSoft Word, minimum charge $25.00

Line editing (including proofreading) -- romance (contemporary, historical, fantasy/paranormal), fantasy, mystery
Will correct sentence structure, recommend areas for revision, flag potential factural inaccuracies.
Rate:  $5.00 (US) per 1,000 words as counted by MicroSoft Word, minimum charge $100.00

Manuscript formatting for digital publication (without proofreading or line editing) -- all genres*, fiction, non-fiction; English only
Formatting of MSWord document without graphics for Amazon Kindle and/or Smashwords publication including TOC, appropriate front matter (copyright notice, licensing agreement, etc.)
Rate:  $100.00 up to 100,000 words; over 100,000 words, $100.00 plus $1.00 per 1,000 over 100,000.

Services do not include insertion of artwork or other graphics, design of cover art, or structural editing.

* No pornography; material deemed inappropriate/offensive may be returned uncorrected with full refund of any monies paid.

If interested, contact me through this blog.

I can't fix your story, but I can fix your manuscript.

The dollars and sense of the words and numbers, Part 1

One thing always leads to another.  Always.

And everything is connected.  Everything.

Some months ago, I blogged about an analysis I had done almost 20 years ago regarding how much it costs to produce a mass market paperback romance novel.  That analysis was a response to the numbers the publishers -- and most notably Steve Zacharius of Kensington/Zebra -- had been giving to RWA in justification of their low royalty rates and outrageous contract terms.

I have always contended that publishers were shafting the writers, but writers didn't have any valid options, and in the absence of any real advocacy from RWA on behalf of the writers, nothing would change.  Individual authors might achieve sufficient status that they'd have clout to get their own contract terms made more favorable, but the majority of romance writers were getting shafted left and right especially on discounted bulk sales and subscription sales for print books.  And it's worse today on digital sales.

The figures Courtney Milan is reporting from her royalty statements bear that out.

Now, allow me to qualify that, as indeed I believe Courtney does herself:  There are significant differences between the costs to manufacture a paper-and-ink book and the costs to upload a digital edition.  Those overhead costs -- editing, artwork, etc. -- are incurred simply to produce the product, regardless how many are produced or how many are sold and are going to be more or less the same for print as for digital.

Additional expenses involved in promotion, marketing, etc., are optional and separate.

So let's keep in mind that there are basically three types of expenditures to take into consideration when determining the total "cost" of a book:

1.  Pre-production overhead for editing, artwork, etc., and this includes all the stuff associated with office space and receptionist's salary and conference attendance.
2.  Manufacturing cost: the paper and ink and foil and embossing dies plus transportation and warehousing.
3.  Post-production advertising and promotion.

Remember -- keep those in mind at all times when examining any claims by anyone regarding the profitability of any given romance novel.

Now, read this statement from Simon & Schuster's Pocket Books imprint from last week, courtesy of Romantic Times online, in which the most important line is this:

Pocket’s executive vice president and publisher Louise Burke had this to say about the variety of authors that will be included in the line when these digital books land on e-shelves:

“Similar to how mass market has served as a platform to develop future hardcover authors, it is our mission to use Pocket Star’s new digital-only format to establish new voices in the marketplace. An eBook imprint is flexible, cost-effective, cutting-edge and makes sense in today’s marketplace.

Yes, dear readers of my little blog, a publisher's representative, in this case an executive vice president, is acknowledging that ebooks are cost-effective.  That's executive speak for "We make more money off these things than on our other products."