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TBR Pile

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.” – Ernest Hemingway

My daughter likes to read. I mean, she REALLY likes to read. She gets it from her mother, and both sets of her grandparents. Me? I like to read; I just haven’t done as much of it in my lifetime as I should have. It’s a terrible thing I know, but it is the truth.

I grew up with two educators for parents, my father being a sports nut and my mother a gym teacher and yoga fanatic as well. I read lots of books growing up. There were some Choose Your Own Adventure, of course. I read every single one of the Gordon Korman books. I also read: A Boy at the Leafs Camp (mandated reading for any kid growing up playing hockey in Toronto); Vladislav Tretiak’s book Tretiak: The Legend; and Ken Dryden’s The Game. My favourites though were The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald.

In high school I focused on math and science, and if I’m being honest, reading all that mumbo jumbo turned me off reading in a big way. Plus, I was more interested in sports, girls, my friends, and general teenage shenanigans. Curling up with a good book wasn’t high enough on my list of priorities. That said, reading a bunch of books is unavoidable in high school. I did manage to avoid reading a lot of the usual books. Careful selection of English classes saw to that (my high school was quite large and we had ample choices of English classes).

So, my high school years weren’t filled with tons of reading for pleasure. If I did it was almost always a Stephen King book. Fast forward to university and it was all advanced calculus, computers, and applied physics. If you throw in a little bit of drinking and a fair amount of debauchery what you don’t get is too many novels piling up on the night stand.

Then I grew up, got married, bought a house, had kids, moved a few times, changed jobs a few times… and started writing. Over the last five years or so I’ve read more books than all my previous reading years combined. None of them will ever be “classics” but many were quite enjoyable to read and I’m a better writer for having read (most of) them.

I am a writer with another job that’s not writing and I also have a family and a social calendar. I will always be fighting the battle between writing, reading, and just sitting on my ass doing nothing. I yearn for a time when my entire existence isn’t one giant exercise in prioritization. In that vain, I’m left to wonder what’s the point of a TBR (To Be Read) pile? The damn thing never gets any smaller!

For every one I do read there’s ten more I want to read and ten more on top of those that I should read. I think the pile exists mainly because there’s comfort in its existence. It’s good to know that there will always be something there; always something to do; always an adventure waiting for me. All I have to do is open the cover and turn a page. Also, if there were no TBR piles then I would have less incentive to have my book sitting on top of one.

TBR:

Save the Cat
– Blake Snyder (in progress)
Signal to Noise
– Gordon Bonnet
The Key to Everything
– Alex Kimmell
Bigger Than Jesus
– Robert Chazz Chute
Savage Fire
– Ben Langhinrichs
Eleven
– Carolyn Arnold
Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird
– Jesse James Freeman

~ Andrew

Size Matters

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When I started writing my novel I had a grand idea that it would be at least 100,000 words. Before I had even determined the full arc I knew I wanted to write 100,000 words. It was a nice round number and as far as I could tell it would make a pretty decent length book. The problem was that as much as I wanted the 100k the more I wrote the more I discovered that it was either going to be a stretch to get it there or it would wind up being a 150,000 word marathon.

So what’s the right number? If quantifiable numbers are your thing you can look to the Smashwords article from May 2013 for a very telling answer. A book’s success can be directly tied to its sales and the average length of the top 100 books on Smashwords is a hair over 115,000 words. Of course even Smashwords says flat out that most authors would be thrilled to be in the top 500. So, if you look at their top 500 the average length is just a bit over 77,000. Double the ranking and it only drops a couple thousand words. So, if the top 100 is any measure (which it should be) you’re writing a good length novel. If you’re happy sitting in the top 1000 (which you should be) then you can probably do with 40,000 words less – almost an entire novel – and still be doing just fine. Of course, when you look at the same Smashwords data you’ll see that the top book (#1) outsells #50 by a margin of 7 to 1 and #50 outsells #500 by another 5 to 1. I’m sensing a trend here…

That same Smashwords article also had a price point comparison and it looks like FREE and 99¢ are the big winners, but $3.99 seems to be the magic number, which if you’re an indie author could mean a serious advantage over someone who’s traditionally published and has all that additional overhead – and cost – associated with their book (that, or the author is taking a serious cut when it comes to royalties).

So what about the short story? Is it doomed? The numbers seem to suggest that short stories don’t sell very well at all. To me, this seems counter-intuitive, especially in the digital age. They make perfect sense, and all for one very simple reason: time! With every device under the sun capable of displaying a book, and in today’s go-go-go world I would think that it would simply be easier to pick up an anthology or collection and read a couple short stories and then move on as opposed to having to invest hours and hours of reading chapter after chapter (and if you’re reading Dan Brown, chapter after chapter after chapter after chapter after chapter…)

My theory seems to hold especially true for short story erotica. You may be asking, how is it that people can sell erotica for $2.99 or even $3.99 for a 10,000 word short story and get away with it? That’s the same price as an average length (and commonly priced) full length 115,000 word novel! Well, in addition to the time factor the the answer also lies in re-usability. You’re not likely to re-read that 400 page novel over and over, but any time you’re in the mood for a quick… um… “break”, you’ll bust out that erotic short story quicker than a prisoner on conjugal visitation day.

Now, as the writer of a blog (a new post every Sunday here at Potato Chip Math) I’ve been long curious about the optimal length for a blog entry. Now, it seems that if you go looking for this information you’ll find almost as many answers as you find experts. One recent article I found was particularly interesting. It basically says that people value longer copy over their shorter counterparts. While I think there is definitely some truth to that statement I think that the author goes out of his way to over-simplify. At one point he simply compares length of post (greater than or less than 1500 words) to number of tweets and Facebook “likes”. The posts greater than 1500 words got more of both. The scientist in me is going absolutely crazy over this. How many other variables are in play? Too many to be able to say with any degree of certainty that this is a result you can hang your hat on.

That being said, there was one interesting statistic that it mentioned which did make me go “hmm”: Google search results. Here’s a quote directly from the article and the graph they had to support it:

“The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2000 words.“

So maybe there’s something to a post or article with a bit more meat to it. As for all my posts, as I eluded to above, views to word count isn’t a direct comparison because so many other factors go into each one. Did I tweet about it more often? Did I post in a comment thread on another blog or article? Did I try to engage my audience or just pump out noise? Ding! Ding! Ding! Here’s a pro tip for you: engagement works but it takes work! Frankly, I’m okay with the traffic I am getting for the amount of work I’m putting in. I know when I try to do more with it I get more impressive results, and sometimes that’s just what I do, but I have to be realistic with my time. Blogging isn’t my full time job. Heck, it’s not even a job at all. It’s a tool and like most tools, it’s all in how you use them.

So, size does matter but the experts agree, content is king. I don’t think this should come as a surprise to content providers and creators of the world. I know I like to ask, “Aren’t people impatient; with the attention spans of small children?” The answer is generally yes, but I have found that this doesn’t hold true for people who actually like to read. Sure, we all like snazzy infographics and quick information, but people who are looking for reputable information and who want to learn and explore new things and are generally curious will usually go beyond the fold to get what the’re looking for.

At the end of it all, and as far as my novel is concerned, agents and editors will have a better sense of what changes are needed to achieve results. That’s why they do what they do and why I’ll gladly pay them to do it. What this means means for me is that I should take as many words as I need to tell the story. No more, no less.

As for this post, well, by the time it’s done there will be 1,171 words on the virtual page. I’m already curious to see how many views it gets.

~ Andrew

Anyone Can Write a Book

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So this quote came across my Facebook wall a week or so ago:

“After I had written this book I told several friends. Their response was polite and mild. Later I was able to tell them the book was going to be published. Almost to a man they used the words ‘I am proud of you.’ They were proud of the result but not of the action.” – Hugh Prather

Attached to that post was some additional commentary from the person who posted the quote. He was proud of all his friends for their actions, not the end results. In that moment, I felt very fortunate to know this person and I felt even more fortunate that he was just one of many people in my life who echoed that sentiment.

You see I have written a short story that was published in an anthology. When I got the email saying that I had made it into the book my wife came up to me and said, “Congratulations, you’re a published author!” On the surface would appear that this was praise attached to the result. That would be true as becoming published is a big deal, however, if we go back not a month earlier I participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

NaNo, as it is affectionately known, is a challenge to write a novel in 30 days (a novel being defined as at least 50,000 words). I tried in 2011 and failed miserably, barely squeaking out 21,000 words. In 2012 I also squeaked out a number – 50,000 in 29 days (I took the last day off to celebrate AND grew a moustache for Movember the whole time). As soon as I crossed the 50,000 word plateau I paused and took a moment to soak it all in. My wife wrapped her arms around my neck, kissed me on the cheek and said, “Congratulations, you’re a novelist!”

The support and the support of those around me as I muddle my way through this whole book writing thing is absolutely outstanding. To them, and certainly to me, the journey toward becoming a novelist is an accomplishment to be proud of.

Fast forward to one of the first comments on that Facebook post I started this article with. It read:

“Anyone can write a book. The trick is writing something good enough to convince a publisher that enough people will find it interesting enough to buy.”

Sitting on my couch reading that comment over and over I went right properly ballistic.

After settling down a bit I re-read it and I guess there’s a certain amount of truth to the statement. In one month, technically, I wrote a book, but his over simplification of the task and his assertion that for your book to be “good” you need to “convince a publisher that enough people will find it interesting enough to buy”, are well… *cough cough* bullshit *cough cough*

First of all, I suspect that there’s only so much convincing that you (or your agent) can do. At the end of the day content is king. It does need to be interesting, but the idea that if you can’t convince a publisher it will sell that you have nothing to be proud of, or that your book isn’t good, is completely absurd. Quite frankly, those sound like the words of someone who is never going to write a book.

The first thought that went through my head was actually, Sure anyone can write a book. In the same way that anyone can become an astronaut. This was echoed by my writer friend Gareth Young when I mentioned this Facebook post to him and he replied:

“It’s a little like saying you just have to study and train hard, be a genius level polymath and Olympic level athlete to be an astronaut. Sounds pretty straightforward when you put it like that. Although now anyone can be an astronaut too. All you need is plenty of money and the Russians will strap you into one of their rockets and shoot you into space.”

If we take it a step further, these days anyone can get a book published too. Self publishing is a rapidly growing business and many writers are having a pretty good go with it. So, Mr. Facebook Guy, does this mean that if you self-publish you have nothing to be proud of? Is your book not “good enough”?

Now, because (surprisingly) not everyone has read everything I have ever written on this blog you may not know that back on February 9th I wrote this:

“Good ideas are even harder to come by. Those are like the crystal clear double rainbow you see after a short summer rain where you can imagine giant pots of gold at each end and a bevy of leprechauns dancing a jig around them. Oh, and let’s not forget that all this has to be interesting enough for people to read. That’s like trying to describe your rainbow scene in such a way that someone would rather read about it from you than see the photograph of it taken by someone else.“

My excerpt was in the context of being a writer – as in, anyone can write but not everyone can write something readable. On the surface you’d think my comment and the Facebook Guy’s were just variations of each other, but there’s a solid distinction to be made. Gareth (this guy is good with words – I mean really good) also had this to say:

“Anyone can write a book but not everyone can be a writer. Writers are a whole different animal from people who just write books.”

Indeed. Anyone can blather 50,000 words onto a page and say “I wrote a book”. I did it, and I’m a giant lazy turd with a day job and a family and more procrastination techniques than anyone I’ve ever met. But that’s not all there is to writing a book – at least not if you want to be a writer. Blathering gibberish onto a page is making a book, not writing a book.

Properly writing a book means a whole lot of research, hard work, patience, and dedication. When you’re done and you’ve got your fifty, sixty, seventy, or a hundred thousand words down on the page; with all your characters developed, your plot points covered, your beginning, middle, and end all tucked away between the title page at the front and the final punctuation mark at the end you take a break, and then you edit it. You edit the living hell out of it. Then you edit it again, and possibly again. Then, you let someone else read it. Maybe it’s some beta readers, maybe it’s a professional editor, maybe it’s your husband, your wife, your best friend, or your mom. You take this thing that you’ve just invested countless hours on, put your heart and soul into, devoted those precious few free waking moments to, and you hand it to someone – and you wait. You wait and you wait and you wait. You wait for them to tell you… that it’s not good enough.

Then, you suppress your anger, you hide your tears and bite your lip, and you take the comments, one by one, and you learn from them. You make changes and you re-write and you re-work and you polish. You push through the pain and the heartache, and you keep writing. You just keep writing.

Just keep writing.

After you have spent more time editing and re-writing (and crying) than you did writing it in the first place, you finish. Done. You write your acknowledgements and you celebrate, for you have accomplished something great.

It is said that a first novel can take someone years to write. If you still think anyone can do it I dare you to try – just once – give it a try. I’ll check back with you in 2015 and see how you’re making out.

~ Andrew