Guest Post: "Honey, I Deleted Your Novel!": An Author's Guide to Avoiding Disaster

Several years ago, in trying to transfer some files, I accidentally deleted my wife’s novel. The fact that I’m still alive says more about the lack of loaded weapons in our house than about my wife’s forgiving nature. (She did forgive me, eventually. I think. Maybe.)

Once I got past that horrible, “Oh god, I am so totally cut off from the marital bed!” feeling, the first order of business was to make sure nothing like this ever happened again.

Having come up with a handful of habits and strategies that have so far protected me (and, more importantly, my wife) from any more data disasters, I thought I’d put them into a simple guide for any other authors out there who might have careless partners, overeager toddlers, or keyboard-strolling pets wandering around the house.

Lifesaving Tip #1: Copy, Copy, Copy

The simplest way to make sure you never lose your manuscript, or any version of it, is to make copies. Every time you go to edit your work—whether it’s an entire novel, a chapter, short-story or poem—save a copy first.

To distinguish one copy from another, put the date in the filename (e.g. GreatAmericanNovel_02_01_10), or number it (e.g. MyLifeStory_backup1, MyLifeStory_backup2, etc.) or add your own special code (e.g. MyBestseller_DanBrown, MyBestSeller_ToniMorrisson, etc.) This prevents you from overwriting one copy with another, and makes it easier to find a previous version when you need it.

Lifesaving Tip #2: Auto-Backup — It’s On!

Most word-processing programs have an Auto-Backup feature that you can turn on or off in the Options or Preferences panel. One option makes a backup of your file every time you open it. If later that day you discover your creative instincts were complete crap, you can get your original un-mangled version back instantly.

Another option, Auto-Save, saves your open files at regular intervals. If your computer crashes while you’re riding a creative tsunami, you’ll only lose as much work as you did between the last auto-save and the crash.

Turn both of these on. Now!

Lifesaver Tip #3: Drive, Baby, Drive

Backup drives are cheap, easy to use, and come in a variety of formats and sizes—from huge, networkable disk arrays to tiny thumb drives that fit on your keychain. My suggestion? Get one thumb drive, and one external hard-drive.

Thumb Drives

Also known as “flash drives,” they come in everything from black rectangles to colorful animal shapes. There’s even a SpongeBob Squarepants version, if that’s what you’re into. The smaller sizes (e.g. 2 gigabytes) are fairly cheap, but big enough to hold everything you’ve ever written. The larger sizes (e.g. 16 gigabytes or more) will hold everything you’ve ever written, plus your book trailers, author photos, and favorite time-wasting games.

Since thumb drives are small and easy to lose, they’re best suited for temporary storage. When you finish that climactic scene in your murder mystery, stick a thumb drive in your computer’s USB port, copy the files and voila! Your laptop can crash, a coffee-shop bandit can make off with it, you can spill RedBull into your keyboard—it doesn’t matter. You’re backed up.

External Hard Drives

Storage sizes range from about 250 gigabytes (big) to a terabyte (ginormous!), and physical footprints can range from little bricks to cubes the size of your bread machine. Most of them connect via USB or FireWire, but some are networkable.

Choose an external drive that is reliable, easy to set up, and has enough room to hold whatever you’re going to backup. A 100 gigabyte drive can easily hold all your scrivenings. If you want to backup your entire computer, you’ll need an external drive about the same size, if not bigger, than your internal hard-drive.

Once you’ve got the new drive connected, look for software to perform regularly scheduled backups for you. The Mac (OsX 10.5 and above) comes with Time Machine already installed. Not only does this program work beautifully, it’s incredibly easy to setup. For PCs, there are a world of options, from Microsoft’s own backup program, to software included with external hard-drives and third-party software.

Lifesaver Tip #4: Here, Hold This For Me

So what happens if your house catches fire or sinks into a swamp one night and all your disk drives go with it? The best backup is always an off-site backup (meaning someplace other than where your computer is), and the two easiest and cheapest (i.e. free) ways to achieve this are web-based email and on-line document storage.

If you have a web-based email account such as Yahoo or Gmail, you can email your files to yourself every day. They’ll sit on those nice, big, conveniently remote servers for as long as your account is active, and if you ever need to retrieve them, it’s as simple as flipping through your in-box from any computer, anywhere.

For an even simpler solution, take advantage of the free on-line file storage offered by Google Docs, Windows Live SkyDrive, and other services. Just create an account, upload any documents you want to store online (up to whatever their maximum is), and presto! Free off-site backup.

Lifesaver Tip #5: Fortress of Certitude

There are a lot of things you won’t get with free on-line storage: unlimited space, security, encryption, version control, automatic backups, etc. So for the ultimate in safety and convenience, consider using one of the paid backup services. These companies will let you backup whatever you want, whenever you want to their servers. If your computer crashes, you’re covered. If your house burns down, you’re covered. If there’s a nuclear attack—well, some of these places might even survive that.

Look for a service that works with your operating system (Windows services, Mac services), and has an easy to use interface. Incremental backups (i.e. where the software tracks changes between one backup and another) should also be a priority. That way, if you decide to ditch your third-person narrative and go back to the first-person version you had three months ago, you can get the exact versions of your files from that day, or any day.

So there you go: the secret to creative (and possibly marital) survival.

Chris Abouzeid is the author of the Young Adult novel, Anatopsis. His short stories, poetry and book reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, Agni Magazine, The Literary Review, Epoch, Southern Review, New England Review, Other Voices, and Literal Latté.

Blog: beyondthemargins.com

Guest Post: What Makes a Good First Sentence

I’m standing in front of my bookshelves, pulling out some of the volumes and reading through the first sentences. “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” That’s Jane Eyre. “London.” That’s Bleak House. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. Further along, there’s a sentence I know only in translation: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” That’s Gregory Rabassa, the translator of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude.

If Brontë, Dickens, Hartley, and Marquez were publishing today, they would have made their agents and editors happy. Their opening words grab us right away and hit the jackpot: they make us want to read more.

For writers trying to catch the attention of an agent, an editor, or a reader, the first sentence is crucial. Some agents say that they are actually more patient readers than the writing world gives them credit for. Still, we writers agonize. We want to create something that intrigues, that stands out, that suggests something of our unique writing style. But how do we achieve that? I thought a small sampling of great opening sentences might give some lessons on how to hook a reader.

The best openings seem to fall into a few categories.

The universal truth

Tolstoy starts Anna Karenina with his famous statement about the difference between happy and unhappy families. I don’t know how the original Russian goes, but there’s nothing distinctive about the language of the translation. Nor is there anything special about Hartley’s opener about the strangeness of the past. But the idea is interesting and takes a moment to grasp. That first sentence tells us that the book we’re reading is about memory and isolation.

The quick mystery

It takes Brontë only ten words to unsettle us. She shoots down possibility as soon as she raises it. Why is there no possibility? Where are we? What day are we talking about? Why is “that day” so memorable that she’s referring to it that way? And who, after all, is talking?—because we know right away that this is no omniscient narrator. Ann Patchett does it almost as simply as Brontë: “When the lights went out, the accompanist kissed her.” We immediately want to know about that relationship, the setting, the ensuing plot. Marquez takes a little longer, but the effect is an intense dislocation. Later than what? Later than when? Why are they shooting the colonel, and why? How do you discover something that’s been around forever? Marquez’s first sentence signals the way his novel goes on to fold time over and blur the personal and the historical.

The style icon

There are lots of great ones here, one of them from a book I never finished and didn’t particularly like. But I’ve never forgotten the start of Gravity’s Rainbow: “A screaming comes across the sky.” That generates almost enough curiosity to carry a reader through hundreds of Pynchon’s pages. Take Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, considered by many to be one of The Perfect Novels. “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” You have to pay attention to a voice and an attitude like that. Then “The Dead”: “Lily the caretaker’s daughter was literally swept off her feet.” A classic case of first-person limited, signaled by Lily’s error of usage. And my sentimental favorite from Tom Drury’s The End of Vandalism: “One fall they held the blood drive in the fire barn at Grafton.” It’s a novel about straightforward people, and its first sentence has only one word with more than one syllable, and that’s the name of the town.

These aren’t the only kinds of successful first sentences. Others sow a seed of doubt in the writer or the setting; still others introduce the elements of the plot right away; every now and then, a first line is spoken to us, in dialogue. It’s not even requisite for an excellent novel to have a catchy start. Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, for instance, starts with a rather mundane sentence about a series of emails.

If these many sentences have anything in common, it’s that they alert us that something special is going on: that the writer is in control. A good first sentence places the reader squarely in the writer’s grasp, either because the voice is enticing or because the story seems–it’s too soon to know for sure–compelling. One way or another, through tone or voice or language or plot, a good opener makes the reader unable to resist the novel’s pull. No pressure, but that’s all we writers have to do.

What are some of your favorite first sentences? And, unless they’re the same, which novel openers have you found most effective?

Henriette Lazaridis Power's work has appeared in Salamander, the New England Review, The New York Times online, The Millions, Rowing News, and Writer 2.0. She is the founding editor of The Drum, a literary magazine publishing short fiction, novel excerpts, and essays exclusively in audio form.

Guest Post: Talking Books: Promoting Your Work on Radio

With all of the focus on online marketing and social media, it’s easy for an author with a new book out to overlook the traditional media—especially radio.

I’m not talking about the kind of radio station that plays music all day long. I’m talking about talk shows and current affairs programs. Because the kind of person who listens to intelligent radio programming is also the kind of person who reads. Radio listeners are the types of people who might just buy your book.

So how do you get on a radio program?

First, you need to research what programs there are that are relevant to your book. Is your book a novel, and more suitable to an arts show? Or is it non-fiction, and so might fill well within a show oriented towards science or health or current affairs? In addition to the major radio shows that get national airplay, many regional shows are likely to feature local authors—both regional shows that are affiliated with a major national network, and smaller, independently owned local radio stations.

There are actually numerous radio programs that focus specifically on the arts or on books—here is a list of some of the big national ones:

CBC (Canada)
Writers and Company (weekly)
The Next Chapter (weekly)
Q (daily arts and culture show)

NPR (USA)
“Fresh Air from WHYY” (daily arts show)

(also CBC’s daily arts show “Q” on PRI as of June 2010)

ABC (Australia)
The Book Show (daily)

BBC (UK)
Open Book (daily)

Obviously, the bigger the show is, the harder it is to get on. So, if you and your work are not so well known yet, you might want to focus on the smaller regional shows for now. But you also might want to aim high and try for the big ones, too. As long as your pitch is professional, it can’t hurt to get your name out there, can it?

So how do you do that?

1. Research the show that you want to get on. Make sure your book is relevant to what that show is about—otherwise you are wasting your time.

2. Find the name of that show’s producer. Send your book and a professional press release addressed to him or her several weeks before the date that you hope to be interviewed. Make sure your phone number(s) are on the press release (you’ll see why below).

3. Find a “time hook.” The media always want stories that appear to be “timely.” The lead-time to producing a book is so long that you’d have to be pretty darn lucky to have some news event happen to coincide with your book release. So make your “time hook” yourself, by organizing an event. The producer is much more likely to say yes to your pitch if they can wrap up the interview saying “And Jacqueline will be appearing tonight, reading from her new book at the Joe Blow Café…” Suddenly, the “story” is “timely” and they are more likely to want it. (This works for newspaper interviews too).

4. Think of the medium. Radio is about sound. It’s only partly about the words you wrote in your book (if they ask you to do a reading at all—oftentimes they won’t). And it’s not about how you look. It’s about the sound of your voice, how you put words together. Do you sound confident and interesting and fun? That’s good for radio. Do you sound bored, or do you mumble or stumble over your words? Hmm… that’s not so good for radio. So how do they know this about you? Well, if the pitch you’ve sent them interests them, they are very likely to get back to you by phone—the reason for that is because they are checking you out. They want to see how you sound. And how that phone call goes may be the clincher for them—do you sound good, or not?

5. Feel free to follow up with the producer, a week or so after they have received your package. A gentle “I just want to make sure you received..” email or phone call is fine. But don’t hound them.

OK, so let’s say you’ve got the interview. It’s easy to freak yourself out and get nervous. And that’ll make you stumble and sound bad. So don’t do that.

The radio people will be there in studio to make you feel at ease. They will explain to you how to sit, how far to be from the mic. I find it helps to drink a big glass of water right before I go on, so my throat is nice and clear. Find a comfortable position, so you can maintain a constant distance from the mic (usually leaning forward on the table is best) and so you are not rustling papers or clothing that will make distracting background sounds.

And most of all, don’t think of it as a public speech. Treat it like a private conversation with the host. This will keep you from feeling nervous, and it will also ensure that you come across sounding fluent and natural.

Jacqueline Windh is author or major contributor to four books, including the Canadian best-seller The Wild Edge. She is also a photographer and a freelance radio broadcaster whose documentaries have played on CBC and ABC. You can find her at www.jacquelinewindh.com.

Guest Post: On Publishing Choices: An Opinionated Primer

Thus begins Guest Post Week Round 2, mes auteurs! Sit back, relax, and take in the next few days' worth of guest posts, and be sure to check out this interview I did with the witty and brilliant Ms. Tahereh Mafi. Enjoy! — E

While I was searching (again) in 2009 for a home for my memoir, Map, I decided to take the time to articulate some publishing fundamentals and my own philosophy on the matter. Map had caught the interest of an agent and a publisher early in the decade, but at that time eight years later when the book was truly ready for publication, they were long gone. Yet I knew there were readers out there who needed to read stories like mine, a coming-of-age memoir about a time when it was easier to admit that you were in love with another girl than that you had met someone on the Internet. I wound up self-publishing Map this past October and in March it was named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award (the Oscars of queer books). Now eight months post-publication, I stand by everything I say below, and add only that self-publishing is an experience that redefines the meaning of success and reminds you (often wonderfully) that book selling happens one copy and one reader at a time.

At its heart, publication is about reaching an audience. A love letter, a fortune cookie, a blog, a bestselling novel—all are forms of publication.

Traditional book publishers—the conglomerates, independents, and university presses whose books fill the shelves of your local bookstore—aim to contribute to this process for a selection of books they choose. They aim to do this while staying in the black, compensating their authors in some way, and (usually) providing paid employment to the folks doing the work of publishing.

When you submit a book to a traditional publisher, and they turn it down, it's essentially for one (or more) of three reasons:

1. Manuscript not good enough,
2. Book not expected to be financially viable (the math will vary from press to press), or
3. Lack of chemistry.

If you're lucky, the rejection letter will give you a clue to the reason. This is valuable information, particularly when multiple publishers seem to be in agreement. Use it. (If the reason is manuscript quality, revise until you can revise no more.)

Self-publishing has historically gotten a bad rap, despite the occasional success stories, but recent changes in technology are beginning to alter the landscape. It's anyone's guess how this will ultimately play out; meanwhile, there's attention, debate, and opportunity that didn't exist even five years ago.

There are legitimate reasons to choose to self-publish as well as to work with a traditional publisher. Each option has pros and cons, and the right choice will vary from author to author and from book to book. There are five basic arenas to take into consideration in making an intelligent decision: the shape of the words themselves, the physical product, the credential of affiliation, reaching an audience, and economics. The weight of the economic part of the equation will be heavily influenced by whether or not writing books is—or is intended to be—your primary means of making a living.

With self-publishing, you can hire people such as designers and publicists and editors to assist you—self-publishing does not have to be an all-or-nothing decision, though ultimately you are the one in control of what is offered to the public and how. With traditional publishing, a team is already in place, led by someone who is not laden with the emotional baggage an author inevitably brings to the publishing process.

Even if you go with a traditional publisher, it's possible that the book will see print when it is still in need of more editing, but this is an even greater hazard with the self-publishing route, especially in this day and age when you can make the decision to self-publish and have a paperback for sale and in hand in under a week.

Quality matters.

Patience is important.

Your own internal editor and feedback from others each play a valuable role.

It is worthwhile to strive for—and hard to truly recognize—your absolute best.

"Best" is a moving target.

The wonderful thing about self-publishing is that it provides an outlet to authors whose voices aren't being heard otherwise, and a home to books whose audience is simply too small or too hard to reach for most traditional publishers' business models.

The challenge is that, without gatekeepers or curators, there's an awful lot of noise. (I argue that this is a good thing—I don't believe people should be silenced just because their best isn't as good as someone else's best. Others certainly disagree.) As glad as I am—as a writer, reader, teacher, and fellow human being—that the noise is there, absent of word-of-mouth recommendations and such, I'm not likely to be reading many self-published books myself. I'm in good company here; when browsing for new reading material, most readers prefer the implication of quality that comes with a traditionally-published book to the gamble that comes with a self-published one.

With self-publishing, you lose the credential of affiliation with a traditional publisher; you lose the branding. You also lose the ambiance of the branding that often softens judgment while someone is actually reading your words.

It's the difference between saying, "I got into Harvard," and "I'm wicked smart." The first, we're expecting intelligence (at least until someone we respect tells us, "Harvard made a mistake that day"). The second, we're thinking, "Oh, really? Prove it."

If you're self-published, you need, somehow, to get other people saying the equivalent of "She's wicked smart." People whose opinion is already taken seriously by those who might read your book if they believed that you were wicked smart.

Of course, even if you're traditionally-published, it's helpful (and flattering) to have people raving about you, but in the world of self-publishing, if you want a larger audience than your close friends and loved ones, it's absolutely fundamental.

There are lots of ways to encourage this raving to happen, and to get people reading and talking about your book. Most of these will take a lot of time and energy, no matter which publishing route you take. So first, and most importantly, take the time and energy to get the words right.

Audrey Beth Stein is the author of the memoir Map, a 2010 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Bisexual Nonfiction. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and is a two-time national prizewinner in the David Dornstein Memorial Short Story Contest. She teaches memoir and novel development at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Direct links to order Map can be found at http://map.audreybethstein.com.

(Round Up) Days of Summer

It's that time again, for the weekly round-up with Laura from Combreviations (and don't forget—guest posts next week!):

Hello, friends and foes. This week I'm going to ease you into the funniest and most nauseating thing I've seen in a while. So hang in there and hold on to your lunch.

You know what's charming and not nauseating? A new book on Roald Dahl contains a missing chapter from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Sweet! (Ha.) And hey, here are 11 fictional characters in real life—I'm glad someone found Waldo. Now if only I knew the right book to be reading in public so Waldo would ask me out. Maybe I could read the new Jonathan Franzen—he's on the cover of Time, you know. And Mark Twain is always a good fallback, because there really is something to reading him today. Maybe I'll check out some of these overrated contemporary authors, or pretend these book suggestions for Obama are for me, the other President of the United States.

What are some more feel good things from the week? Well, this slightly misguided book trailer is great, and I want about six of these text posters. There's a new Chicago Manual for the Internet age, which made me sqee a little inside. And I love these better book titles, but then, I love anything that makes me feel smug and erudite. Here are some famous literary last words (hey, at least go out with a bang, amirite?), and the descendants of Dickens and Tolkien are writing together, which should be super interesting and potentially terrible.

And don't forget to check out this repackage of the Twilight books, changing the covers from black to white, so everyone who already has all four will go out and buy them again. Suckers. Is everyone feeling good and smug? Proud of ourselves? Then maybe you won't want to click through to the piece de resistance, the best and worst link in the world: erotic GOP fanfiction, starring Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Hilarious! But also, I would like to scrub my eyes clean. Ech.

Happy emotionally scarring day, reader types, and see you next week here or all week at Combreviations.

Borders: Redux

I've been following the trials and tribulations of Borders Group for awhile now, and once again it seems there's a shake-up of sorts going on at their corporate headquarters.

Borders announced another round of job cuts at their Ann Arbor office yesterday, only seven months after their last corporate cut (which eliminated 88 positions). It's unknown whether their new ceo (their fourth in two years), Bennet LeBow, ordered the cuts, but it doesn't bode well for the company regardless.

Now, caveat: I am not a financial authority or analyst of any stripe, so what I'm offering below should be construed as neither (a) super fancy or detailed information, nor (b) financial advice of any kind. That said:

Borders (NYSE: BGP) is currently trading at a dismal $1.25 per share, which doesn't tell you a whole lot until you realize that means their market capitalization (share price x number of shares outstanding, which is a guide to the size of the company) is only $80 million. Compare this to Barnes & Noble's (NYSE: BKS) $850 million market cap and last trade of $14.48, and you get an idea of how much Borders has shrunk over the past few years (especially given that Barnes & Noble actually has fewer shares outstanding than Borders Group).

Here's where things get a little (but not super!) technical, so feel free to skip to the end if you like.

BGP's P/E (price-to-earnings) ratio is currently -0.83; given that the P/E ratio is defined as price per share divided by the annual earnings per share (there are a few different ways of calculating these earnings), this indicates that Borders is suffering losses. I find the negative number a little strange, though, since it's my understanding that the P/E unit is in years (that is, an investor buying a share of Borders' stock would expect to wait -0.83 years of earnings to pay back the purchase price of $1.25). If anyone can clarify this point, please do so in the comments.

For context, Barnes & Noble's P/E ratio is 23.98, which seems to indicate a high forecast earnings growth for the company; then again, it also means that anyone buying BKS now is paying $23.98 for every $1 of earnings, so if we imagine another company identical to Barnes & Noble but with a lower P/E, that would be a more attractive investment. (Have I lost you yet?)

Finally, BGP's beta coefficient (a measure of the correlation between the stock's earnings and the behavior of the market as a whole) is 3.77. A positive beta coefficient means the stock's behavior is generally correlated with the market, but 3.77 is very high, which indicates that Borders' stock is pretty volatile (which you might have already guessed, given the multiple ceo changes and staff reductions they've undergone over the past few years).

Again, for context, BKS' beta is currently 1.35, meaning Barnes & Noble's stock price correlates directly with the market and is pretty stable (the overall market, by definition, has a beta of 1).

In summary (this is the end, in case you've been skipping down): while I'm no financial expert, Borders looks like it's been in trouble, is still in trouble, and will continue to be in trouble until and unless (a) they stage some kind of incredible comeback, or (b) the market as a whole returns to its former glory, pulling BGP up with it. I won't go so far as to say that I think Borders will go out of business this year or next, but things aren't looking good.

Financial experts, armchair economists, and auteurs du monde: what do you think?

The Ten Commandments of Blogging (Rerun)

Work abounds, mes auteurs, so another blast from the past (this one from last September). Enjoy! — E

Episode: "The Ten Commandments of Blogging"
Originally aired: Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

1. I am thy blog. If you're an author, you should already have a blog. If you're not yet published, now is the time to start.

2. Thou shalt have no other blogs before me. We all love reading blogs—we wouldn't be here if we didn't—but yours comes first. Write your own posts before you spend all afternoon reading someone else's.

3. Thou shalt not make of thyself an idol. Keep your ego in check; you always want to portray yourself positively in your blog. Your reputation is all you've got in this business, and if you earn yourself one as a likable person as well as a great writer, you're a golden calf.

4. Remember thy Schedule and keep it, wholly. You don't have to write a post every day, but keeping a regular schedule is a courtesy and a sort of unwritten contract between you and your readers; they'll know when to expect new content and will come to appreciate and respect you for that.

5. Thou shalt honor thy agent and thy publisher. You couldn't have done this without them. Give props where props are due.

6. Thou shalt not commit character assassination. Everyone has authors or critics they don't like, sometimes personally. Don't pull an Alice Hoffman. And, I guess, don't try to kill anyone in real life, either.

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery, but thou shalt pimp thyself. No one sells you like you do. Facebook, Twitter, &c. The more pervasive your presence, the more likely it is that people will buy your book.

8. Thou shalt not plagiarize. Always quote. Always cite your sources. Always link back to them if they're on-line.

9. Thou shalt not deceive thy audience. Never post anything you don't believe is true, and be sure to provide links to any research you've done. Always be sure to clarify whether a point you're making is an opinion or a fact.

10. Thou shalt monetize. I don't do it because I don't consider blogging a part of my livelihood, but you, as authors, should consider self-promotion as part of the job. Let Google or whomever run a few relevant ads on your blog and make a little cash on the side. (Unless you've got a large readership, though, it probably won't be much.)