Category: Just for Writers

This is the second of three posts on how to improve the use of languages in constructed worlds. Part 1, an introduction of the topic for authors, is here. This part is addressed to folks who invent CONstructed LANGuages: conlangers. The third part of the series, which provides guidance for authors working with conlangers, is here.

So, you're a linguist and you like to build languages or even entire language families developing over time. Maybe you'll get lucky, and your language will make it into a hit movie or game or TV series — wouldn't it be nice to turn pro and make a little money at it?

Well, I can't help you with winning the lottery for high-visibility media. On the other hand, just about every movie, game, or TV series that uses a constructed language started life in one or more books. And that's what we're going to talk about here, primarily for the fantasy and science fiction genres.

I'm a writer of fantasy and science fiction, and I happen to have an amateur linguistics background, primarily in the form of dead languages: Egyptian hieroglyph, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Old Norse, Old Irish, Old English, Middle High German, Middle Welsh — you get the idea. I know a little bit about the subject from the linguistics perspective, and quite a lot from the author perspective.

I'm going to take a stab at describing a potential market for conlangers (inventors of CONstructed LANGuages) and propose some ways of finding work there. The third part of this series takes the authors' perspective on working with conlangers.

I will be defining some basic concepts for conlangers and painting with a broad brush in the interests of keeping the length of this post within some sort of reasonable limit.

October 6, 2015

Karen Myers

3 Comments

Languages for Sale – Part 1

Posted in Just for Writers, and Language

This is the first of three posts on how to improve the use of languages in constructed worlds. Part 2, directed to the constructed language community, is here, and part 3, guidance for authors in working with conlangers, is here.

Writers of fantasy and science fiction have many world-building responsibilities. We have to create and populate worlds, landscapes, ecologies, technologies, cultures, history, and all the myriad of things that go with that. Whether our story is set in the near future, in a galaxy far, far away, or in a place that could never exist, our stories are immersed in a background that must seem rich, plausible, and historically deep — like the real world we live in.

World-building at the tectonic plate level

Many of us play at amateur world-building with maps we hope are not geologically ridiculous, with alien ecologies we hope make some sort of evolutionary sense, and with interactions between cultures that we trust convey some of the flavor of a fictional reality. We look up a few bits of knowledge, here and there, and get a boost from a friend who can critique starship engines re: physics. All of this is done to make us seem like plausible experts for the purposes of our stories, so that we don't create inanities that pull the readers out of the story (at the very least) and so that we can convey a sense of depth and inevitability and interconnectedness for our story world (at the best).

One of those important threads is language. Most of us are not, unfortunately, historical linguists. In fantasy and science fiction, creating the verisimilitude of cultural depth is a large and fundamental requirement, and most of us are not qualified to fake the linguistic part of that.

We've all read fantasies where the personal names are ridiculous, mixtures of syllables from RPG name generators and ordinary everyday names, with implausible apostrophes and incoherent spellings. These are the equivalent, for some readers, of the lousy book covers we all wince at. Even readers who don't quite understand what the problem is can sense something wrong. And when we start to supply place names, artifacts, and other bits of other languages, the opportunities for maladroit handling just increase. We're not (alas) Tolkien who created entire language families before ever writing the world that used them.

The good news: there are people who do this for fun and profit. The art is called “conlang” (CONstructed LANGuage), and the practitioners are conlangers.

July 16, 2015

Karen Myers

16 Comments

What’s the point of an author website?

Posted in Just for Writers

There are plenty of gorgeous websites out there for books and authors, but I think that a surprising number of them miss the point and frustrate their readers and potential buyers.

Over time, I have evolved some firm opinions about what should be on Author and Publisher websites. It seems only fair to put them up here so that others can shoot at them.

In brief, the point of an Author website is to own and control all the information about your products so that you can tell readers what they want to know and turn them into fans who will buy your next book. It's really that simple. Almost no one builds their first Author website with that in mind, however, and it can take quite a while for them to clarify what they're doing with it.

Let's explore what that mission statement means, in a 4-page post…

April 13, 2015

Karen Myers

13 Comments

Using CreateSpace vs Ingram for Print-on-Demand (POD) Distribution

Posted in Just for Writers

An earlier version of this article was published here.

Note: The following observations reflect my personal understanding of the differences between the two services, based on my own and others’ observations. They do not include private information received from any of the vendors involved.

Ingram

Ingram is the largest worldwide distributor of print books. When a bookstore orders a book, it probably comes from Ingram (perhaps through an intermediary).

Ingram offers two services for publishers: Lightning Source International (LSI) and IngramSpark. The former is for “real” publishers and was all they offered until a couple of years ago. Its contracts are daunting, its interface is a bit clumsy, and its communications are a bit slow and sometimes cryptic (especially to indie publishers who aren’t familiar with publishing industry terms). Indie publishers and others lamented, and Ingram offered a new service, Spark, with a friendlier front end and slightly more restricted discounting terms. They stopped letting most indies into LSI once Spark was launched (I got into LSI just in time). Both systems, I understand, use the same back ends and services — the only difference seems to be that there are fewer discount terms on Spark, and the front end/customer service is easier for the newbie.

Ingram will charge you for returns, an area that terrorizes new indie publishers because they don't know what to expect. (These days, it seems to be pretty harmless, now that bookstores have adopted just-in-time ordering practices instead of ordering in bulk and returning leftovers. UPDATE (2017): I no longer allow returns, since I don't expect to be stocked on bookstore shelves without some form of significant marketing, and that removes one financial risk area. I may revisit this once I step up to that form of marketing.)

CreateSpace

CreateSpace (CS) is owned by Amazon and intended for indie publishers. It’s very user friendly, with good customer service. It had a fee per book, just like Ingram, but then dropped that altogether. It lets you use a CS ISBN if you don't have one of your own. (Ingram requires you to have your own ISBNs, like a “real” publisher). In fact, it requires a CS ISBN for the Library portion of its expanded distribution service, presumably due to its relationship with Baker & Taylor.

There are two basic levels of CS distribution: Amazon-related, and expanded. The Amazon-related is closely tied to the KDP program, so linking your ebook and your CS POD book is very easy. CS also offers a webstore, for what that's worth (I've never sold a book there).

April 2, 2015

Karen Myers

One Comment

How to use Pretty Links

Posted in Just for Writers

A version of this article was originally published here. It is co-authored by authors AD Starrling (part 1) and Karen Myers (part 2).

Pretty Link Lite (free) and Pretty Link Pro ($37 for one website, $97 for unlimited websites) are WordPress plugins that enable you to create and control all kinds of links by funneling them through your website. Be they social links, redirect links, or affiliate links, you can shrink, cloak, track, and share your links through your WordPress dashboard.

A D Starrling’s Experience of Pretty Links

As part of my business strategy for 2015, I was looking for a simple way to introduce platform specific review and buy links in my ebooks, links that I could easy control and adjust. My formatter, Streetlight Graphics (also my cover and website designer), installed the Pretty Link Lite plugin on my WordPress dashboard and Pretty Links in my ebooks.

All the review links in my ebooks now redirect to the retailer page where the books are on sale (Amazon US for my Kindle file, iTunes for my Apple epub, Nook for my Nook epub, and Kobo for my Kobo epub) and to the Goodreads book page. The only exception is my Smashwords epub file, where I only have a link for the Goodreads book page. As a distributor, Smashwords won’t accept other retailer links inside ebook files. Neither will Draft2Digital from my conversation with them. Below is an example of the link inside my Apple epub file for The Meeting (A Seventeen Series Short Story).

March 24, 2015

Karen Myers

One Comment

Learning from the Mistakes of Others – 4

Posted in Irritated Reviews, and Just for Writers

Another Irritated Review™, but this time it's not mine. I was just reminded of one of the masterpieces of this genre, by the immortal Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), on James Fenimore Cooper‘s The Deerslayer (1841).

For those of you who snoozed through your grade school English classes, The Deerslayer is the last of the five books referred to as The Leatherstocking Tales, another of which is the more famous The Last of the Mohicans (1826), one of the most widely read American novels of the 19th century. Sadly, everything that Twain says about Cooper's writing is absolutely true, despite the best efforts of N C Wyeth to make it seem otherwise.

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses (1895)

“The Pathfinder” and “The Deerslayer” stand at the head of Cooper's novels as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these, and scenes even more thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished whole. The defects in both of these tales are comparatively slight. They were pure works of art.

–Professor Lounsbury
The five tales reveal an extraordinary fullness of invention. … One of the very greatest characters in fiction, Natty Bumppo… The craft of the woodsman, the tricks of the trapper, all the delicate art of the forest were familiar to Cooper from his youth up.

–Professor Matthews
Cooper is the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction in America.

–Wilkie Collins

It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature at Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper's literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper.

Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in “Deerslayer,” and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

March 15, 2015

Karen Myers

The most important thing for all new writers to remember

Posted in Just for Writers

I can personally vouch that it works this way for music, photography, and all the other arts, too.

Ira Glass. Source

March 9, 2015

Karen Myers

Surprise your readers

Posted in Just for Writers, and Readers

When I was in college (in the 70s) I visited the London Zoo in Regent's Park during a summer vacation. They had a wonderful indoor nocturnal exhibit, all sorts of critters in dark terrariums who were awake during visitor hours because their normal schedule was reversed.

It was, not surprisingly, dark in there. It was hard to read the labels. As I recall, there were reptiles, and bugs, and all sorts of things, but they hid in their foliage very well and half the time you couldn't tell what was lurking in the greenery.

At the same time that I entered, a young father came in, carrying his toddler son up against his shoulder so he could see into the enclosures. The two of them followed directly behind me as we circulated along the edge of the exhibit.

I learned three things that day.

First, small children have a hard time trying to see something in a darkened terrarium. As far as the kid was concerned, he and his daddy were taking a walk in a funny dark place with lots of plants. Hints from his father didn't help him (might not know enough words yet, I thought).