Business of Writing

News is starting to spread across the indie writing world about Amazon’s upcoming plans for quality control on the ebooks sold through their platform.

A number of writers have reported receiving an email stating this:

Starting February 3, 2016 we will begin showing customers a warning message on the Amazon.com Kindle store detail pages of books that contain several validated quality issues. We will remove this message for a book as soon as we receive the fixed file from you and verify the corrections – typically within 2 business days.

We understand that even with the best quality controls, defects sometimes make it through. That’s why we’ve limited this messaging to books with several issues. Books with more serious quality issues will continue to be suppressed from sale.

Before the warning message appears, we would like to work with you to ensure these issues are fixed. After you’ve made the corrections, please upload your revised content through the ‘Book Content’ section in your KDP Bookshelf and republish it by clicking “Save and Publish” so that we can verify the corrections and prevent the warning message from being displayed on your book’s detail page.

But it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. All those unknowns, all those grey areas, are what’s spreading a mild panic through the indie publishing world.

• How will the quality checks be done? Via a robot, via reader feedback, or both?
• Will the errors be double-checked and validated as genuine errors before the warning message is posted onto the sale page?
• How will regional spelling differences be handled? (eg: the differences between British, American, Australian, and Canadian English?)
• How will Amazon handle things like made up character and place names, made up words or languages in fantasy or sci-fi books, characters speaking in dialects and local slang, characters typing in text speak, technical jargon, or online slang?

But I think the most important question is one of just how automated this system is going to be: in other words, will the onus be on Amazon to prove that the errors are genuine errors before the warning message appears, or will the onus be on the writer to prove that they aren’t in a fight to get the message removed?

A warning message on your sales page, and Amazon keeping your books “suppressed from sale” is going to affect sales, there’s no question about that. Will authors be suffering days, or weeks, of hits to their income while they argue with Amazon over the spelling of a character name?

Meanwhile, I wonder how book formatters will react to this. Clever ones will be jumping on this to cash in with new clients, but will they find authors demanding contracts that include free revisions should their book’s formatting be flagged with a warning? Could there even be claims for compensation on lost sales?

Once again, and as is the way when you’re dealing with a third party distributor, Amazon is implementing a system with little forewarning, a system that us writers will simply have to wait and see how it’s going to work.

Here’s an interesting blog post from Elizabeth Spann Craig, a writer with first hand experience of this system: elizabethspanncraig.com/3877/amazon-pushing-quality-control

What are your thoughts? Will this be good or bad for the industry, or is it simply too early to know for sure?

Here’s some more resources for you:
goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/kindle-e-books-will-have-a-warning-message-if-they-have-spelling-mistakes-or-bad-formatting
kdp.amazon.com/community/message.jspa?messageID=979849
kboards.com/index.php?topic=229823.0
eroticromancepublishers.com/2016/01/will-amazon-start-publically-flagging.html

I suspect we’ve all said it; describing ourselves as being ‘just’ something. Shrugging off our achievements with a ‘just’.

For a long time I was a published writer, but ‘just’ poetry. ‘Just’ on webzines. Then I got short stories into anthologies, but I was ‘just’ a short story writer, with nothing of my own.

In May this year, I released my debut novella, and I also made another big decision. I changed all of my website branding from saying ‘writer’ to ‘author’. There are some people out there who see this as a tiny, flippant thing, but most of the writers I speak to see this as a huge self-affirming step in their career. Some still don’t dare take it.

The thing is though, I still felt like a fraud. Why? Because it’s ‘just’ a novella, and it’s ‘just’ an ebook. I still didn’t feel, in my heart, like a real author.

Something changed all that. And it’s this:

Everyone has their own self-imposed targets, their own milestones that they have to hit in order to feel like they can move on to the next level. And this was mine. When I finally held my own paperback in my hand, I no longer felt like a fraud. I can finally hold my head high, and say “Yes, I am an author.”

Before publication, there are two kinds of readers a writer needs.

There are the famous Beta Readers; those that read the full book, picking up on the final edits and polishes needed to create the final published version. Beta Readers are absolutely worth their weight in gold.

Alpha Readers, meanwhile, fulfil an altogether different role. These guys are truly special. They work with the story at the planning stage, often before a single word of it has been written, before it has been fully outlined.

My Alpha Reader is my husband. He helps me plot out stories on long car journeys, quiet Sunday afternoons, while I wash and he dries. Sometimes, on special occasions, we’ll plot stories in coffee shops, over coffee and cake.

He helps me rank up the conflict, and comes up with practical solutions to my plot holes, and when I plot my characters into corners.

My husband’s a gamer. I often refer to myself as an X-Box widow, and joke that I come second in his affections (at least, I hope it’s just a joke!)

But his gaming obsession has taught him skills that I can really make use of: how to think himself out of a tight spot, how to utilise the tools around him, how to use the setting. It’s taught him about rising tension, conflict, story structure, and climaxes. It’s taught him about quests, character growth, and story arcs.

He may not be a huge reader, but he’s the best Alpha Reader I could hope for.

November brings with it the start of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which sees writers all over the world attempt the crazed feat of writing a 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of November.

I’ve participated several years, but haven’t managed to complete the challenge since 2011. But, I’m feeling positive this year. My life is very different, and I have more time to write than I have for a long time.

Everyone comes to NaNoWriMo for different reasons. In fact, every year I do it, I approach it with a different goal in mind, a different attitude.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that NaNoWriMo is a game for ‘pretend writers’, or ‘people who wish they were writers’. That it floods the self-publishing market with drivel, that it promotes bad writing. That’s fine, and they’re entitled to their opinion. What they’re not entitled to, is to tell someone else they’re wrong for doing it.

Everyone writes in different ways, uses different methods, strategies, routines, and rituals. The important thing is finding out what works for you, and running with it. Not telling other writers they’re doing it wrong simply because they do it differently.

For me, NaNoWriMo promotes some good writing habits:

1. Writing every day. Real life always gets in the way of writing. There are emergencies, unexpected events, and the basic need to spend time with the people around you. The real people that is. And writing daily is a habit that can easily fall by the wayside. But it is a good habit, and it’s easy to get rusty and out of practice.
2. Turning off the inner editor. So many writers simply have trouble allowing themselves to simply write. And to write badly. All first drafts need work, that’s why they’re first drafts, rather than final drafts. And the sheer speed required by NaNo, means that there is no time to listen to that inner editor, to keep going over and over the same parts to get them perfect.
3. Getting something finished. I’m not good at finishing things I start. I’m a giver-upper, and I always have been. When things get tough, I’m always tempted to throw in the towel. But the sense of competition (against both my fellow NaNoers and that little word count graph) keeps me going. I can finish things by myself, I’ve proved that, but I find using NaNo helps. So, why not?

I know that a lot of what I produce during NaNo will end up as a sacrifice to the big red editing pen, but then, a lot of any first draft does.

And, why should I worry about what anyone else is doing? Whether they’re writing terrible fiction, whether they’re planning on sending that terrible fiction to agents, or publishers, or planning on publishing it themselves. There was bad fiction before NaNo, and there’ll be bad fiction after it too. We’ve all written it at some point.

So, that’s why I participate in NaNo. Be a naysayer if you will, but live and let live. If it works for someone, don’t criticize them for it.