The Line Edit is Done

Those of you who have been following my blog will remember that I had hired Erin Stropes from kallista.ca to do a line edit of my novel Evermore: Call of the Nocturne.  I am happy to announce that she has finished and returned my annotated manuscript to me.  Or, I was happy until I found all the (valid) criticisms levelled at my baby.  But not to worry, I did what any self-respecting writer would do.  I went into the corner and cried.After a couple of hours and a couple of hundred tissues, I pulled myself from my misery and began to focus on what I needed to change.  After some thought, I identified three major issues with the plot:

1. The ending was too difficult to understand.
2. The timelock used during the story fizzles out as it approaches the deadline.
3. One of the major characters disappears without reason for half the novel.

The first problem I was able to solve last night with some clever tinkering but the other two will take weeks of work as I read through the manuscript yet again.  This will be followed by a second swing through the novel as I address the thousands of small (and yet valid) points that Erin raised.  Following these two drafts, I will have to submit it again to Erin for a final line-edit review.So while Erin's editing has levelled a blow to my self-esteem and delayed the novel's release for months, I still find that it was worth the time and the money (about $1200) to have the line edit done.  Despite all the aggravation and extra work, the end result will be a manuscript that will be far more fun to read.  Thus for those of you that are considering publishing your novel digitally on your own, I would fully recommend hiring an editor.  They truly do pick up so many things that you missed.  In fact, I would recommend three rules:

1. Hire an editor.
2. Your editor is always right.
3. Your editor is ALWAYS right (it needs to be said twice)

Follow these rules (don't forget to pay her) and you will be able to produce a manuscript that you won't be ashamed of.

Apple Offers iPad Self-Publishing

On Wednesday, Apple announced that they would be offering support for individuals seeking to self-publish to the iBook Store.  MacLife has the details at http://www.maclife.com/article/news/apple_reveals_new_service_authors_sell_their_books_directly_ibookstoreIn short, Apple will allow you to publish directly to the iBook Store if you meet the following criteria:

• The eBook must have a valid and unique ISBN number;
• The eBook must use the ePub format;
• You must have a US Tax ID;
• You must have a valid iTunes Store account with a credit card on file; and
• You must have an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.5 or later.

All in all, this sounds pretty simple.  None of these requirements are at all difficult to get.  You can buy an ISBN through a number of services, you can Storyist (like I will) to convert your manuscript into .ePub, almost everyone has an iTunes account with their credit card ready to go, and Macs are pretty much a necessity for the serious writer anyway.Obviously, there are numerous advantages in publishing directly through Apple.  They take a smaller cut than Amazon or Smashwords, you don't have to go through an aggregator to upload your content, and the interface (like Amazon's Digital Text Platform) will be simple and elegant.  Does that mean that i'm going to change my business plan once again, avoid Smashwords and Lulu, and go straight through Apple?No.There are two reasons for this.  The first is that I don't have a US Tax ID.  This isn't really a problem as I'm certain that within the next year, Apple will expand to service to multiple countries including Canada.  That's what happened with Amazon's Digital Text Platform.  But I would prefer to publish my novel this year.  I would rather not wait if I don't have to.No, the second and bigger reason is a financial requirement that is being underreported in the press.  Under financial requirement from the iTunes Connect page (https://itunesconnect.apple.com/WebObjects/iTunesConnect.woa/wo/0.0.0.5.7.7.1), reads the following:

Apple does not pay partners until they meet payment requirements and earning thresholds in each territory. You should consider this before applying to work directly with Apple as you may receive payments faster by working with an Apple-approved aggregator.

So in other words, you have to sell a significant number of books in order to get paid.  Now in my case, I don't expect to sell more than a couple of hundred copies if I'm lucky.  Of course, this makes sense for Apple.  It would be extremely difficult if their account department had to handle hundreds of thousands of business partners, most of whom would be doing business in the single digits.  However, considering that Amazon offers a similar service without any problems, it is a little disappointing.Apple helpfully provides a link to a list of Apple-approved aggregators which you can find here.  These include the following:

• BiblioCore
• Book Baby
• Constellation
• INgrooves
• Ingram
• LibreDigital
• Lulu
• Smashwords

Now I admit, I have only heard of Lulu and Smashwords, the rest are completely new to me.  I will have to do some research into these options in order to see which service would serve me best when I launch my novel this fall.  If any of you have any thoughts or reviews about these sites, please don't hesitate to comment.So while Apple's announcement is a step in the right direction, it will only serve established authors at this point.  For us little folks, we will have to go through a third party.  Here's hoping that Apple follows Amazon's path and makes it available to everyone.

I have myself an Editor

Publication of Evermore: Call of the Nocturne is moving along quite nicely.  After some searching, I have found an editor.  Henry Baum, writer of The American Book for the Dead, recommended Erin Stropes (www.kallisti.ca) from Montreal, QC.  After reviewing Erin's work, I have hired her to do a line edit of my manuscript.  Needless to say, I have been quite pleased about the quality of work that I have received.  I have received her comments on the first few chapters and it is clear that there is still a lot of work that I still need to do.  One of the things that digital publishers must do is ensure that the quality of the manuscript is top-notch.  One error or poorly-worded phrase and the reader will assume that you are an amateur and close the book.  For an independent author to succeed, he or she must provide a superior product than what you would find in stories.  Their stories must be more original, their characters must be more interesting, and their prose has to be top-notch.  It is for this reason that I made securing an editor a top priority for this manuscript.A full line edit will set me back about $1200 and will take a couple of months to complete.  This will be followed by another couple of months of revisions on my end and then perhaps another edit if it is warranted.  It is a lot of money but at the end of the day you are selling quality.  If you are not willing to put the investment into your own work, then you are in the wrong line of work.With the editing process, a 2010 release is still possible but it's going to be tighter.  In the meantime, I will prepare one of my short-stories for release.  This will allow to learn the ins-and-outs of digital publishing on a much smaller scale.  Stay tuned for more details.

iBooks Announced for iPhone

And the good news keeps getting better.As reported by Macworld.com, the iPhone OS 4.0 presentation today announced that the iBooks app, available on the iPad since its launch, will now be available along with the iBooks Store on the iPhone.  As quoted by Macworld, this means that

In another borrowed feature from the iPad, Apple will make its iBooks e-reader available to the iPhone in iPhone OS 4.0. The iPhone offering will be a smaller version of the iPad app, but it allows for the same features, including purchasing from Apple’s iBookstore. And you’ll also be able to sync your place and bookmarks between multiple devices—leave off reading a book on your iPad, and you can start reading it in the same place on your iPhone.

It seems that self-publishers in Canada have had nothing but good news over the past three months.  First the Amazon Digital Text Platform and Kindle app for iPhone came to Canada in January - allowing any writer to publish to the world's most popular media device at no upfront cost.  Then, we found out that Apple was launching iBooks and that Smashwords and Lulu would be supporting it - allowing any reader to buy your work with the same account that they buy music, movies, and games with.  But now we find out that iBooks will be available on the iPhone.  It doesn't get any better than this.  Now only if we could figure out how to get people to buy the millions of self-published novels that will appear on the platform.

Amazon's Digital Text Platform Comes to Canada and Changes Everything ... again

Wow, I can't believe that I missed this one.  Back in January, Amazon announced that it was extending its groundbreaking Digital Text Platform to non-US authors.  The complete story is here.

This is big news indeed for the cut-the-publisher-out-of-the-picture movement. Today, Amazon announced that it has opened its Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP)--which is the Web-platform that allows writers to upload and sell their own Kindle books, meaning to self publish via the Kindle Store--to writers all over the world writing in English, German and French. Previously, only US-based writers could take advantage of the DTP.Here's more from Amazon, which also promises to add more languages to the DTP in the next few months: "'We are excited to make the self-service Kindle Digital Text Platform available to authors and publishers around the world,' said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content. 'Now any content owner can offer English, German or French-language books to the fast-growing audience of Kindle owners around the globe.'"Whatever one's grievances with Amazon may be, it has done a pretty good job of creating an international bookstore. And now that authors living all over can upload books, we have the potential to get heretofore unimagined texts, though most of them will likely be very bad, and all of them will be hard to find.

For authors like myself, this is huge.  My earlier game plan was to get my stories onto iPhones by going through Smashwords.  Smashwords would have allowed me to sell my stories directly through the excellent Stanza app.  However, there were a number of problems that bothered me.  As I said at the time:

To format it properly for all of the different digital formats that are in use these days, Smashwords feeds the manuscript through a software program called the “Meat Grinder”.  This gives the author almost no control over the final end product.  In a perfect world, I would prefer to use Amazon’s Digital Text Platform.  Amazon’s DTP would give more control over the final product and make my manuscript available to buy on both the Amazon Kindle and the Kindle app for iPhone.  Rather than buying it through an obscure websitem, Amazon’s DTP would allow me to sell my novel on the popular Amazon store.  Unfortunately, neither the DTP or the Kindle are available yet in Canada so I will have to stick to Smashwords for the time being.

Well Hallelujah.  Christmas has come early.  Not only do I avoid the atrocious formatting of the "Meat Grinder", not only do I get access to the world's biggest online e-book store, but my stories will now be available to everyone with a Kindle or the Kindle App for iPhone.  Yes, I can now publish to the iPhone.  All without paying a dime.  Incredible.  God Bless Amazon.For those of you who are not familiar with Amazon's Digital Text Platform, it is a service that allows you to log in with your Amazon account and upload your manuscript directly to the Amazon Store.  There is no middlemen.  There is no publisher.  Just you, your audience, and Amazon taking 70% of every sale.  The most significant barrier to publication has now been removed.  The only problem is that now everyone can publish, so getting your manuscript noticed becomes a Herculean task.But that's a challenge I live for.  I'm just happy that my wish has come true.  I can now publish to Amazon, the iPhone, and to the Kindle.  Now I have to just figure out how to publish to the iPad.

Pegasus Book Group Joins iPad Lineup

Macrumours.com (hey, I'm waiting for the mac mini and MacBook Pro upgrades alright!) is reporting that Pegasus Books Group has agreed to bring their entire line of indepndent books to the iPad. The news story can be found online at http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/22/apple-signs-up-independent-publisher-and-distributor-perseus-books-for-ibookstore.To comment, this is definitely the direction that I expected the iPad to go. Its digital distribution network opens up incredible opportunites for small and independent publishers. The only advantage that a large publisher would have in this environment is promotion.But it remains to be seen if Pegasus Group is the right choice for a digital noveliss like myself. While they have three hundred small publishers as clients, I still worry that I would be too small to be accepted into their clientale. I have after not yet published a single novel.There is also a question over what cut Pegasus will take with their deal with Apple. While we know that Apple will take 30% of every sale, we don't know how much of a cut that Pegasus Group will take on behalf of its small publishers. If it's small enough, it may still be worth it if Pegasus improves the visibility of the novel by getting a dedicated section of the iBook Store.While it still may be too large for ultra-small publishers like myself, it definitely deserves investigation. Most likely though I will have to wait for the CDBaby equivalent for digital publishing. Here's hoping that I don't have to wait long.

Heavy Rain and the Development of Interactive Story-Telling

You'll have to forgive me for the relative quiet over the past two weeks, but I made a last second decision to fly west for the last three days of the Vancouver Olympics and it's taken me a week to recover. However, the recovery time did give me chance to play Heavy Rain and reflect on the surprising power of interactive storytelling.Now, I've been playing video games since I was six years old but I had never considered the story to be significant part of the experience. Mario? Save the princess. Contra? Shoot aliens. Bionic Commando? Swing around the first level for hours. We played these games for the gameplay, for dodging death and never-ending bottomless pits. Who cared about the story?And then in 1998, I played Metal Gear Solid and I was blown away by its ground-breaking cut-scenes, the hero's gruff persona, and the action-packed storyline that kept me on the edge of my seat. It was a revolutionary game and it set the storytelling standard for video games over the next ten years: cut-scenes, cut-scenes, cut-scenes.Personally, I thought that this would be the peak of interactive storytelling but there was another little game that came out in 1998 that signaled the changes to come. It was called Half-Life. Now I didn't play Half-Life until 2002 so I never understood why it was considered such a great game. But where it did innovate was in how it told its story. Rather than use CG or in-game cut-scenes, it told its story through the eyes of Gordan Freeman. No matter what happened, you never left the point of view of the protagonist. This choice always made you feel that you were experiencing the story yourself rather than watching another character play out the story. In short, it led to a far more immersive experience. But it was also a cold experience. As a cipher, Gordon Freeman had no discernible personality. As a character, he had no character. Thus while the experience was immersive, I found that unlike Metal Gear Solid, I couldn't care less about what happened to the characters.As the 2000s progressed, Half-Life's perspective on storytelling gained more and more influence in the industry, but I was so busy playing Metal Gear sequels that I didn't notice. Bioware allowed you to create characters and make choices that affect the storyline but the effect was somewhat cold and distant. I still preferred my cut-scenes.It was not until I played Fallout 3 in 2009 that I saw the power of the interactive storytelling that Half-Life had wrought. Unlike in previous games, choices had real consequences. A dress I found in the Statesman Hotel turned out to be a Father's dying gift to his daughter. A choice to sell a child into slavery horrified me. As I succumbed to Fallout's world, I came to the conclusion that the Nameless Wanderer wasn't just some character. He was my character. In other words, I was no longer the player, I was the writer of an epic tale and I could choose how it ended up.As immersive as that was however, it contained some limitations. The choices were simply binary. You had good, bad, and neutral choices. It was fairly easy to tailor your character to these three categories, dramatically limiting your character-creating scope. Its artificial simplicity was one of the full elements that pulled me out of the Capital Wasteland. If your dog died, no big deal, just reload your save. Not happy with the choices you made, no problem, just reload your save. Thus while a groundbreaking game, its storytelling still left me with very little emotional connection to my character.Based on strong reviews and hype from gaming websites like 1up.com, I decided to give an obscure game like Heavy Rain a try. For those unfamiliar with the game, Heavy Rain is an interactive novel that is played completely through Quick-Time Events. When you're asked to shave your beard, you slowly move the right analog stick to the right. When you put your son on your shoulders and run through the yard, you use the motion control to steer. When you throw or block a punch you use one of the face buttons. On the face of it, a game completely centred around Quick-Time Events is a dumb idea. However this design choice allows the game to focus completely on immersing you into the game and its characters rather than iterating on various gameplay mechanics. The result is the most immersive and emotional experience that I've ever encountered in a video game. Not only do I feel a part of the action when I chase down a criminal like I've never felt before, the emotional investment in the characters is unparalleled. When I lose my son, I feel like I've lost my son. When I do a series of increasingly horrific tasks to get my son back, I am mortified and repulsed by my actions but determined to do whatever it takes to find my son. In one scene, a mentally disturbed man pulls a gun on my violent partner. I pull my gun on the perpetrator and am faced with a terrible choice. Shoot an innocent man or let him kill my partner. The option to shoot is clear and easy to ready. The other choices such as "order" or "reason" are shake around the "Shoot" option. I try to order the mentally-challenged man to drop the gun. My partner screams at me to shoot, my options become more agitated. I am running out of time to make a choice. My surprise is not that my character is panicking. The surprise is that I am panicking too. In the end, I panicked and pulled the trigger, killing an innocent human being. My character's revulsion and horror over what he has just done is matched by my own.This is a revolutionary step that Heavy Rain has accomplished with seemingly ease. Not only do I play the characters in the game, I become the characters in the game. I feel what they feel, I think what they think. I have experienced the first true implementation of interactive storytelling and it is stunning.But what does it mean? Will this be the future of storytelling? I don't think so. Interactive storytelling is so expensive and so time-consuming to get right. Heavy Rain took years and tens of millions of dollars to produce.  Prose fiction, on the other hand, is relatively cheap and quick to produce. I imagine that prose fiction will remain the standard but that interactive stories such as Heavy Rain will continue to present a unique experience. The multimedia capabilities of the iPad could present some interesting possibilities such as the return of the Choose Your Own Adventures books that I loved as a kid but this time with far more complexity and innovation. Or how the use of digital graphic novels could explode with full access to a powerful sound and graphics processor? Perhaps the digital novels of the future could combine voice, illustration, text, and sound to create something new and wonderful. The possibilities are endless.