The Author-izer

Here’s what I’ve tagged for August 31st through September 1st:

• Blogging For Web Designers: Editorial Calendars and Style Guides – Smashing Magazine –
• The first printed books came with a question: What do you do with these things? –
• E-books and Digital Content Boost China’s $150bn Publishing Media Market (Update) –
• Why Most Authors Should Not Emulate Seth Godin –

A few days ago on LinkedIn, I came across someone who was trying his hand at ghostwriting for the first time. He had jumped in at the deep end and was writing from recorded interviews rather than a draft, and the client objected that what the writer produced wasn’t in his voice. According to the aggrieved novice ghost, his client’s voice “is pretty much gibberish.”

Some clients do, alas, suffer from a certain lack of coherence, particularly during interviews, where they may be hunting for the best way to express something, or even formulating their ideas on the fly. A straight transcription of such a conversation reads like a fox backtracking through a stream to throw the hounds off its trail. But correcting grammar, eliminating redundancy, and getting to the point fast enough to keep the reader from falling asleep don’t have to neuter your prose. Even if you have no actual writing samples from which to deduce a style (or the writing is as hopeless as the conversation), your client still has a voice.

Everyone uses characteristic expressions when speaking and writing. Some of these are regional; some are generational; some passed down in a family; and some may be unique creations of the user. Chances are you can easily list several such expressions used by your close friends and family members. My mother always used to say “destructions” for “instructions.” (Sometimes I do, too, as a result.) I had a high school friend who would say “Damn skippy!” where others said “Damn straight.” My housemate says “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” when she wants to contrast two situations. Neville Hobson’s predilection for the word “kerfuffle” has become an inside joke on the For Immediate Release podcast, as has his co-host Shel Holtz’ classic consultant’s answer, “It depends.”

Famous ghostwriter Claudia Suzanne includes such expressions among what she calls an author’s “tells,” along with characteristic sentence structure and perspective or intent. Everyone, no matter how poor a writer, has these “tells,” and part of what distinguishes you as a ghostwriter from other writers is your ability to discover and preserve your client’s “tells”—and to be aware of and eliminate your own.

If your client is not a native English speaker, and you are not fluent in your client’s first language, it’s much harder to identify these “tells,” but not impossible. Vocabulary is the biggest challenge, unless your client is very fluent, because you don’t know whether word choice is dictated by a limited phrase book or is actually meaningful. In most cases, you’re going to want to correct any misused words, however charming the error.

But even when you can’t get a direct experience of your client’s natural writing and speaking style, you can certainly get an impression of his or her personality. Sometimes it’s more illuminating to ask the client’s friends or colleagues than to rely on your own impression, because s/he may be more reserved or formal with strangers or people from another culture. Is this a person of few words or many? One whose natural style is academic, learned, even a little dry, or passionate and energetic? A big-picture person or a detail person? Does s/he care about being approachable, or respected? All of these things can help you choose an appropriate writing style.

In the case of the client who has long, rambling telephone conversations, it may be necessary to preserve a rolling style, with multiple clauses per sentence, rather than writing the short sentences you think are better suited to the reader’s short attention span. A client who wants to be approachable wouldn’t write with intimidating vocabulary words or lots of jargon, but one who wants to impress people might.

Unless you know your client very well, you’re unlikely to get the voice perfect in the first draft. Ghostwriting is a collaborative process. It’s your client’s job to go over what you’ve written and make corrections for voice as well as for facts, then give the draft back to you for revisions. As you make the corrections and discuss the manuscript with your client, you’ll develop a better feel for the best way to convey someone else’s identity in writing.

Here’s what I’ve tagged for August 26th through August 27th:

• Email Subject Lines that Won’t be Ignored | Copyblogger –
• So What Do You Do, Seth Godin, Author and Marketing Guru? – mediabistro.com Content –
• How Authors Really Make Money: The Rebirth of Seth Godin and Death of Traditional Publishing –

Here’s what I’ve tagged for August 20th through August 24th:

• You Are Not Seth Godin | Six Pixels of Separation – Marketing and Communications Blog – By Mitch Joel at Twist Image –
• Seth’s Blog: Moving on –
• <i>New York Times</i> Bestseller Seth Godin to No Longer Publish Books Traditionally – mediabistro.com: GalleyCat –

Here’s what I’ve tagged for August 13th through August 17th:

• Anthologize –
• Looking beyond print | theBookseller.com –
• Direct to POD by Selfpublishing.com –

If you ever listened to the WBJB Radio series of podcasts conducted by Ron Pramschufer, founder of SelfPublishing.com, you know how he feels about Print on Demand. If you haven’t heard his interviews with representatives from Xlibris, iUniverse, AuthorHouse et al., I’ll sum it up for you: he thinks most POD houses are little more than vanity presses out to beggar unsuspecting authors, and even at best the POD printing process produces an inferior product.

So you can imagine my surprise—and that, I suspect, of most other readers of the Publishing Basics newsletter—when I got an e-mail message from Ron with the subject header “New!!! Direct to POD from SelfPublishing.com.”

What accounts for this change of heart?

To quote Ron,

I’m a bit of a hard headed German so I have resisted altering my approach to self-publishing because I know it works. But I’m finally starting to realize that “me” knowing it works, and “you” going to a pay-to-be-published publisher defeats the whole purpose.

(Anyone who can give me a semantically valid reason for putting “me” and “you” in quotation marks in that sentence gets extra pedant points.)

Ron goes on to describe the Direct to POD program this way:

Direct to POD is a program developed by SelfPublishing.com for individual authors who prefer to choose a guided Publishing “Package” to the traditional a-la-carte method of SelfPublishing.com. Unlike the “Pay-to-be-Published” publishers, like Author House and iUniverse, we do not have inflated a-la-carte prices just so we can make it look like we’re giving you a big discount if you buy one of our packages. If you don’t mind the extra work, our a-la-carte self-guided services will always be the most economical way to self-publish your book. Whether you chose the guided or self-directed approach, YOU will:

• Always be the publisher
• Always own the ISBN to your title
• Always own your printing files after your initial printing
• Always earn ALL the publisher profit

The Direct to POD approach concentrates on helping the author get to the point that printed copies can be ordered. The old saying printers use: “The first book costs a lot but they get pretty cheap after that.” The packages offered are all based on the cost of the first book. Once the author/publisher has received that first copy, they will be free to order 100, 1000 or 1,000,000. Remember…as with all SelfPublishing.com programs… you’re the boss.

The $995 package includes:

• Dedicated book coach to see you through the process
• ISBN
• Layout of text and cover (5X8 or 6X9 fiction)
• 1 Paperback copy
• EBook EPub and Mobi Kindle file
• Inclusion in the Thor POD distribution program
• 5% discount on first primary print run as well as any additional upgrades or services.

The $1495 package includes

• Dedicated book coach to see you through the process
• ISBN
• Layout of text and cover for paperback and hardcover book
• 1 Paperback copy
• 1 Hardcover copy
• EBook EPub and Mobi Kindle file
• Inclusion in Thor POD distribution program
• 5% discount on first primary print run as well as any additional upgrades or services.

By “book coach” I presume he means “publishing coach,” someone familiar with the various steps involved in publishing a book, rather than a writing coach.

But the thing is, if Selfpublishing.com is providing all these services, where exactly is the motivation—for them—in tying it to POD? Because they could just as easily create a similar package for offset printing, with a primary print run of as few as 100 copies for one-color books and 25 copies of full-color books. (And, uh, isn’t “first primary print run” redundant?) With the lower per-book price of offset, the customer would get a comparable deal, even if storage and fulfillment services might add a bit to the package cost.

After all, if the main reason people are paying for POD services (some of which are a rip-off) is because they’re easier than managing the different aspects of publishing oneself, then making offset book printing easy would seem to be the obvious counter tactic. If you can provide an attractive package, you should be able to compete with the AuthorHouses of the world.

Yet, despite the still-visible differences between digital and offset printing (a narrowing gap, less perceptible in text than in, say, business cards), it wasn’t the technology of Print on Demand that really had Pramschufer up in arms. It was the predatory pricing practices of certain companies that used that technology and produce poor-quality, unsalable books for unjustifiable sums of money. Those are certainly practices worth condemning.

The Direct to POD program seems like decent value, but I’m not sure it’s unique  enough to distinguish itself from its increasingly numerous competitors. Since the days of that podcast series, we’ve seen the advent of Lulu.com, Amazon’s CreateSpace, and, in the e-book space, SmashWords, Scrib’d, and Amazon’s Digital Text Platform. And even though I believe (knowing what the cost of a book designer is, and of an ISBN, and so forth) that there are no outrageous markups in these packages, the creation of Direct to POD still looks more like a belated attempt to cash in on a trend than an attempt to protect authors from vanity presses in disguise.

It’s a busy day in the writing world:

• The Role of Retailers, Distributors and Wholesalers in the Book Trade –
• Bowker Reports Traditional U.S. Book Production Flat in 2009 –
• Adventures in Smashwords – Getting Premium Distribution –
• Adventures with Smashwords – Publishing an E-Book –
• Adventures with Smashwords – Signing Up as a Small Publisher –
• Wholesale eBook Sales Statistics –
• Google Book Editions and a ‘New World Order’ in Book Publishing –

Here’s what I’ve tagged for July 30th through July 31st:

• Gobbledygook Grader –
• Group Story :: Collaborative Photo Books –
• Published.com – A Free Book Directory. Discover The Best Books Today. –

Now here’s a headline to catch the eye: “Is Your Writing Driving Away Clients?”

Ernest Nicastro’s RainToday article about the dangers of “corporatese” isn’t really news to anyone who’s ever played Buzzword Bingo, but it’s a good reminder that the last thing you want to sound is more corporate.

There are, in fact, people who say things like “leverages a proprietary framework” every day, people who can’t just use things but have to “utilize” them. If you spend too much time with those people, you might forget that to most people, those words are completely meaningless.

Nicastro recommends using some of the tools built into Microsoft Word to help you eschew obfuscation.

Long ago, there used to be a tool called Bullfighter, a plugin for Word that specifically targeted business jargon. The most recent version is designed to work for Windows XP, so might not work with more recent operating systems and versions of Word, but there’s a hilarious “Mystery Matador” online option. I tried pasting in part of the sample text from Nicastro’s article:

“In other words, sir, Leader Coaching’s services meet the expectations of business leaders who recognize the value of purposeful investments in human capital—often beginning with themselves—as a means of preparing and aligning people and systems in pursuit of growth.”

Bullfighter’s analysis was as follows:

Flesch Diagnosis: You like to hear yourself write. Despairing of the thought of bringing a sentence to a close with something as demeaningly ordinary as a simple period, you shower readers with gratuitous, interminable and often weighty if not impossibly labyrinthine prose. Meaning lingers, albeit awash in a thick tide of metaphor and exposition that threatens to drown the writer’s message. Seek help.

In a comment on Nicastro’s article, Gail Ludewig pointed to HubSpot’s Gobbledygook Grader, built with help from David Meerman Scott. This is a less snarky version of the Bullfighter. While it pegged the reading level necessary to comprehend this 38-word sentence as “graduate,” it didn’t dismiss any of the words as gobbledygook.

Taken separately, each of the words in that description of Leader Coaching’s services is fairly simple, but the cumulative effect is to make the reader wonder “And what’s that when it’s at home?”

Anyone you actually want to work with is smart enough to recognize corporatese as “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Or, as the authors of Why Business People Speak Like Idiots (Amazon Associates link) would put it, bull. They suspect that if you have to use words like that, you don’t have products or services worth talking about.

And they’re probably right, too.

Here’s what I’ve tagged for July 21st through July 28th:

• White Paper Marketing – 10 Tips for Promoting B2B White Papers –
• Ghostwrite Pro — Ghostwriting tips, quips, and laments for ghosts…by ghosts. –
• eBook vs. Hardcover: Beyond the Headlines | Digital Book World –