Interview with Lorina Stephens at Irreverent Muse

Michell Plested recently interviewed Lorina Stephens for his podcast that appears at Irreverent Muse. They discussed publishing and publishing trends, Five Rivers and its place in the publishing world. You can listen to the hour-long interview at: http://www.michellplested.com/getpublished/get-published-episode-24-interview-with-publisher-lorina-stephens/

Seven Book Agreement with Paul Lima

This morning Five Rivers reached an agreement to publish seven books by well-known Toronto-based freelance writer, Paul Lima.

 

In January 2009, Five Rivers released Lima’s How to Write a Non-fiction Book in 60 Days. To date it has gone on to sell almost 700 copies in Canada, the US and UK, and has constitently held the top 100 spot in its category on both UK and Canadian Amazon sites. It is available through online booksellers in both print and eBook format globally, direct from Five Rivers, and in select Indigo chain stores.

 

Lima is no stranger to the POD and self-publishing phenomenon. He has published several reports and books through Lulu. In 2009, encouraged by Lorina Stephens at Five Rivers, Lima released under his own imprint Harness the Business Writing Process and (re)Discover the Joy of Creative Writing, with global distribution through Ingram. The former is a textbook used in a course at the University of Toronto. It had been Lima’s intention to eventually revise and reissue his Lulu titles using Lightning Source Inc., and have all his work available through Ingram Distribution. His success as a freelance writer and corporate trainer, however, capitalized all his time.

 

Given the long-standing relationship between Lima and Stephens, the agreement today to have Five Rivers publish his revised titles should come as no surprise. The entrepreneurial duo have been associates for over 20 years, and up until May 2009 had never met face to face.

 

The publishing agreement will see updated and revised releases of the following titles: 

1. Harness the Business Writing Process
2. (re)Discover the Joy of Creative Writing
3. Everything You Wanted to Know about Freelance Writing
4. Copywriting that Works: Bright Ideas to Help You Inform, Persuade, Motivate and Sell
5. How to Write Media Releases and Promote Your Business, Organization or Event
6. Do You Know Where Your Website Ranks? How to Optimize Your Website for the Best Possible Search Engine Results
7. Build a Better Business Foundation: Create a Business Vision, Write a Business Plan, Produce a Marketing Plan

The Everything and Copywriting books are both texts in UofT courses.

Revised titles from Five Rivers will start releasing later this year.

 

For more information about Paul Lima, visit him at his website: http://www.paullima.com/

Five Rivers' Submission Guidelines

Some of you have asked about submission guidelines at Five Rivers. The guidelines can easily be found on our website at http://www.5rivers.org/contents/en-ca/d89.html, but in the interest of clarity I'm posting them here for you.

Five Rivers Chapmanry is a micro-publisher of fiction and non-fiction, catering to new Canadian authors. We employ print on demand technologies as part of responsible management of environmental and financial resources by printing only the books required, rather than warehousing thousands, thereby saving trees, land, air, water, hydro, fuel and capital expenditures. We also produce eBooks as part of that mandate.

 

Five Rivers is committed to bringing publishing back to uncompromising personal editors where it belongs, not focus group marketing. We publish real books by real authors for real readers.

We do not offer an advance to authors. We do provide quarterly statements and payments of royalties, based on a standard 10% of retail price, paid within 30 days of the close of the calendar quarter.

 

Five Rivers is committed to producing quality books that have had the scrutiny of a good editor, with attention to layout and cover design. We work closely with our authors throughout the process. And we are very aggressive in our marketing, ensuring both our authors and our titles receive the best possible exposure in the global marketplace.

 

We will consider submissions in the following categories:

• Non-fiction books on history, experimental archeology, and those that are Canadian in nature. 
• Fiction books that are solidly plotted and character driven: science fiction, fantasy, speculative, historical and above all good literature. We will not consider anything to do with vampires or horror, crime, women's fiction or erotica. We are particularly interested in books by Canadians about Canadians and Canada.

No hard copy submissions, please. All hard copy submissions will be returned unopened.

 

Query first by email, accompanied by a DOC, PDF or RTF attachment of synopsis and first 30 pages of the manuscript. We will read in a timely fashion (usually within two to three weeks) and respond.

 

Please be sure to include full contact information with your query: i.e. name, mailing address, email address, phone number.

 

Please, no phone calls.

The Amazon/Macmillan fracas: the flaw in both arguments

As many of you know by now publishing world giants Amazon and Macmillan fired salvos at each other over the weekend, resulting in authors, pundits, corporate captains, and the public tossing about comments, criticisms and invectives.

To synopsise, as I view it, Amazon had its corporate knickers in a knot over Macmillan’s pricing policy (eBook prices over $9.99.), and yanked Macmillan’s titles from their online catalogue. Macmillan responded, as did its authors and the world, that Amazon exercised unreasonable and predatory practices.

Last I looked we lived in a free market economy. That means Amazon can do whatever it pleases within the law. Amazon does not have to capitulate to corporate demands. Having said that, Amazon very much has to please its patrons, or face an economic decline of their own. Most often pleasing customers means having good selection, good service, and good prices. For the most part, you have to admit Amazon delivers on all those counts. Their cutting of retail prices has only benefitted book-buyers.

Has Macmillan passed those basic consumer tests? Sure, Macmillan has an enormous range of books on their list. Customer service – well, that’s a bit difficult to determine, given they deal on the corporate level, not the consumer, for the most part. Good pricing – ah, now here is the core of this entire dust-up.

Macmillan insists eBooks should be priced similarly to mass-market paperbacks. Strange, I don’t see printing costs, shipping, warehousing, or most of the usual publishing expenses factoring into the determination of a retail price of an eBook. Once an e-Book is formatted correctly, that data is uploaded to your distributor or retail partner. That’s it. Product delivered. Once and forever.

Given the economics of eBooks, one would have to say its Macmillan who practices predatory practices. And in this matter I feel I have some credibility to speak to the issue, given I am a publisher, albeit microscopic by comparison to the giant that is Macmillan.

Now, unless Amazon’s taking a huge piece of that $9.99 retail price, as in beyond the customary 45-55% wholesale discount, there’s enormous room for profit there, more so than print. It would seem, however, that extra margin of profit isn’t enough for Macmillan. Like every other corporate hog they’re bellying up to the consumer trough, whining about piracy, and eating themselves out of credibility and a place at the publishing table.

And while the noise in the sty reaches critical levels, the ones this whole issue truly affects, the consumer, the avid reader of all things, will find other ways to obtain the material they desire. Piracy will increase. Predatory pricing will increase. The indie, micro and small presses will be given a second glance simply because in order for us to gain entry to the banquet we price our product reasonably, so that consumer, retailer, author and publisher all benefit. And in the end we all enjoy the bounty of the board.

My great-grandmother had a saying: pigs should be seen and not heard.

Barbeque anyone?

On Writing by Stephen King

On Writing: A memoir of the Craft
By Stephen King 297pp.

Review by Robert Runté

I've been an academic and editor for 30 years, but am now working on my first novel. Two-thirds of the way through, I felt the need for a little moral support, so ordered a shelf of books on writing from Amazon.ca. This one happened to be on top of the stack when I went on holidays and needed something for the plane.

The book quite surprised me: the first 94 and last 19 pages are in fact autobiography, which is certainly not what I expected from a book on writing. It's largely a pleasant surprise because this is Stephen King after all, so as autobiographies go, it's pretty slick. And it does rather support his contention that one must write what you are. A central theme of the book, once King gets around to the actual "how to write" section, is that one must "write the truth", by which he means, in part, "write what you know." Thus, the "CV" portion of the book serves as back-story to demonstrate where Stephen King the writer came from; and, perhaps, even to go some distance towards answering that perennial question, "where do you get your ideas?"

There are some quite compelling insights here, including the revelation that "The Shinning" was likely a call for help during his own losing struggles with alcohol and drugs (p. 89). (King subsequently (p.92) directly addresses the Hemingway stereotype of the creative genius as necessarily a drunkard, and makes a compelling case that this is a literary creation without basis in reality: the two conditions are unrelated.)

The actual section on writing is also quite engaging, its only failing King's abhorrence of adverbs, against which he strongly warns the reader. This is of course nonsense, but a fallacy shared by the majority of Americans, so one for which a prolific writer of American fiction may be forgiven. King sets up the strawman of the evil adverb by providing numerous examples of appalling misuse, with which he then attempts to tar an entire part of speech. British authors (and by extension, Canadian writers) being native speakers of English are better equipped to use the adverb correctly. Far worse, in my view, is the inexcusable American habit of dropping the 'ly' from an adverb and pretending it is an adjective.

But that one aberration aside, just about everything else King has to say resonated strongly with me, not only as a writer, but also as an instructor. For example, he devotes quite a few pages to the need to finish a first draft before showing it to anyone else. I have experienced, and frequently observed in colleagues and students, the death of stories or articles critiqued too soon.

Rough drafts are often that, and not everyone can look at one's initial attempts and see the potential it could have once properly revised and polished. It's all too easy for a casual observer to dismiss a rough draft as "not very strong" or complain that the "ideas just doesn't make sense". And often the author will look at what they have so far, see the holes that have just been pointed out to them, and give up. But this misses the point that first drafts are always weak.

This is particularly a problem with my grad students, who constantly compare their own tentative first efforts against the finished product of others' published articles/stories. They don't realize that that published story/article they are using as the standard went through eleven drafts, four colleagues, and an editor to end up like that. The initial draft of those now successfully published pieces might well have been much, much worse than what they currently have on their own screen. But never having seen anyone else writing (writing being largely a solitary act), they often assume that writing comes easily to everyone but them, and that if their first draft is this weak, then they might as well just give up on this story/article.

For King, the secret is putting the completed manuscript away for six months and to work on something else entirely, so that one can return to it with fresh eyes, completing the rewrite from a more detached perspective. I completely agree. But that's not always possible for grad students working against the deadline for thesis completion. Nevertheless, I encourage students to keep moving forward to finish the full first draft all the way through before revising anything, because (a) by the time they get to the end, they will have gained at least a little distance on the earlier chapters, which aids in spotting needed revisions; (b) there is no point revising something to a high polish early on, only to discover that that section has to be fundamentally changed, deleted or replaced when one gets to the end and realizes that's not where they needed to get to; (c) after one has a complete draft and sees how it all kind of hangs together, our egos are better positioned to hear constructive feedback – the project is less fragile than in the early stages when one's ideas are still quite tentative and one's ego vulnerable; and finally, (d) pragmatically, one has a better chance of passing with a weak but completed thesis than with the first three brilliantly refined chapters of an incomplete thesis.

Another point on which I largely agree with King is his reservations about writers' workshops. I think these can be invaluable if handled correctly, but too many are as he describes them: too vague feedback on too early drafts:

How valuable are [these daily critiques]? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. I love the feeling of Peter's story someone might say. It had something...a sense of I don’t know...there's a loving kind of you know...I can't exactly describe it. Other writing-seminar gemmies include I felt like the tone thing was just kind of you know; The character of Polly seemed pretty much stereotypical; I loved the imagery because I could see what he was talking about more or less perfectly. And instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemnly thoughtful. In too many cases the teachers and writers in residence are nodding, smiling, and looking solemnly thoughtful right along with them. It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

Ouch! But all too often, uncomfortably close to the mark. I've been in some excellent writer's workshops where the attendees are more articulate and helpful than those depicted by King, or where the facilitator has intervened with probing questions to draw out more specific and therefore more constructive feedback from attendees. But I have grown increasingly skeptical about weekend or week-long retreats that consist of a random selection of aspiring writers, most of whom may not 'get' one's particular genre or style or intention; and where the timeframe between first draft and first reading is too close to be useful.


I think one requires a longer timeframe: Where one has a chance to draft, rewrite a couple of times, put the story away for a month or two, then revise again, and only take the story to the 'focus group' once it's ready to be published, just as a final check. For that, one requires an ongoing writer's circle, a small group of reliable reviewers (writers, editors, trusted readers) who can provide clear, concise, specific advice. A few writers who live in large urban centers may be able to develop a circle of such colleagues that physically meets in someone's home on a regular schedule; but more likely it’s a group of correspondents in other locales to whom one can send the manuscript when it is ready. (And it's a lot easier to dump a correspondent who doesn't work out – you just stop sending them your stuff as often – than it is to fire someone from a circle that meets physically.)

But back to King. I found On Writing an invigorating read because the personal anecdotes provide a context that successfully changes the tone of the book from the didactic of the typical "How to" manual, to a much more involving 'discussion' of the writing life. Although the book cannot directly critique my manuscript, I often find the most useful aspect of writers' workshops is just the validation of the writing life that comes from hanging with others who take writing seriously. Of course, reading On Writing is not really the same as hanging with Stephen King, but then, getting King to accompany me on the plane would have been a lot more expensive, and a lot less convenient, than just ordering the book from Amazon. So a recommended read.

Amazon vs Macmillan

A very cogent analysis of the current fight between Macmillan (one of the major American publishers) and Amazon that has Amazon removing ALL of Macmillian's titles from its "shelves" is presented by author Charles Stross. Stross is mostly focused on the fate of the large commercial legacy publishers here, but in an aside points out that if monster corporations like Macmillan can't take on Amazon, micropresses like ours and self-publishers will have to accept any terms Amazon cares to dictate, Not sure I entirely agree with the prognosis here, but a very provocative read!

Stephens demonstrates mastery of distopian/strange fiction

A reader review of And the Angels Sang appeared last week on LibraryThing, which was cross-posted to Amazon.com. We thought we'd share.

Lorina Stephens demonstrates mastery of distopian/strange fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy in this recent seventeen story anthology. Although many pieces are previously published, shorter unpublished works such as 'Protector', 'The Gift', and 'Zero Mile' are captivating looks at phenomena just on the edge of our current reality - while longer pieces such as the futuristic Jaguar (my favorite) really allow Stephens to shine by allowing room to more fully explore her characters.

Though the collection is split among three genres, all of the stories touch upon the common theme of the individual's struggle for self-determination against external oppressive influence. The theme plays out in the guise of yearning for motherhood in a eugenic society ('Have a Nice Day and Pass the Arsenic'), the abused ('Darkies'), an empath trapped in the service of society ('Protector'), mortality ('The Gift'), and thirteen other ways.

Despite being variations on a theme, all of the pieces are original, and the storytelling is far from repetitive. The author deftly shifts from the eerie to the mundane creating a satisfying reading experience, each story allowing the reader unique immersion in the psyche of a different character.

'And the Angels Sang' is highly recommended for anyone interested in speculative fiction, sci-fi, or fantasy, as Stephens' writing will carry the adherent of any one genre seamlessly into the others. Though the anthology was 25 years in the making, I certainly hope to see more from Stephens - and soon.

Stephens' novel, From Mountains of Ice, is eligible for the Prix Aurora Award, Best Long-form Work in English. Voting closes February 15.