The Words We Choose

   I like words. Tiny words and sesquipedalian words. Hoary words and nascent words. Repurposed words like ratchet (maybe a corruption of ‘wretched’...used pejoratively in the sentence ‘that girl is ratchet’); words that once were in but now aren’t so phat. Portmanteau words (á la Lewis Carol) like ginormous (which surprisingly dates back to 1948).
   But when writing stories I think it is best to keep it simple. The idea is to communicate and every time your reader needs to search Dictionary.com he or she is taken out of the story. William Faulkner once said of Ernest Hemingway: “(Hemingway) has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” And Hemingway replied: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
   As Hemingway suggests, knowing the ‘ten-dollar words’ is something you would expect of a writer...after all, a writer reads a lot more than he or she writes, and a product of reading is a good vocabulary. But when it comes to word choice in your writing it’s not the time to be showing off your vocabulary prowess.
   I personally don’t think that less common words should be avoided altogether. There will be times when a particular word is the perfect fit and worth making a reader go to the dictionary. Even Hemingway made me pick up the dictionary at least a time or two.
   My biggest problem with those uncommon words is pronunciation. I’m a reader and when I look up words I am more interested in the definition than the phonetics. Unfortunately, I often make a fool of myself by mispronouncing a word.
   I think it might help to make poems in which a rhyme of the word I need to learn to pronounce is used. For example:

   He looked around as he pulled apart the brioche,
   and wondered if to spread jelly would be gauche.

   I had to cheat and use rhymezone.com for that one (there isn’t a whole lot that rhymes with 'gauche' it turns out).
   Here is another:

   Abandoned with these manacles on me--
      My emotions flowed from
   Anger to fear to desperation and finally ennui.

   Feel free to share rhymes of your favorite uncommon words.
   If you are interested a fun look at English words and the language in general, I recommend Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue (English and how it got that way). After you read that you might want to follow it up with Bryson’s Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States.

A Twitter Newbie’s first approximation for a code of conduct

   I have been on Twitter many months now. I’ve read a lot of great articles, saw some great photos and art, and had a laugh or two. Along the way I’ve been working on my personal code of conduct.

Rule Number 1: I won’t try to sell you.

   I won’t be asking you to buy any of my novels or short stories on Twitter. Ever. Promise.
   For writers, musicians, and movie stars that have a large following, I’m sure they find Twitter is a great tool to keep in touch with their fans. But for the rest of us, I don’t think that Twitter works for direct marketing and I am almost positive that incessantly spamming your followers with BUY MY BOOK or whatever is going to produce much in the way of sales. It has the opposite effect on me.
   Only rarely do I check the general feed because when I do I am overwhelmed with a torrent of tweets. To get the most out of Twitter I have made a select list of my favorites. Instead of wading through a flood of tweets I just go check out my favorites to see if they have anything interesting for me. No one on my favorites list spams their followers with BUY MY STUFF tweets. I bet there are a lot of folks like me.
   I will tweet links to my blog. And maybe I will tweet links to Smashwords where you can get my novels and short stories for free.
   I want you to read my blog, my novels and my short stories. I hope you enjoy them. I hope you’ll post comments. I hope you will leave positive reviews.
   What I’m hoping to do is connect with people, not to sell them.

Rule Number 2: I won’t post just because I can.

   I’m not going to tweet the mundane. I won’t give the weather forecast; I won’t tell you I’m getting out of bed; I won’t tell you I’m having Shredded Wheat for breakfast.
   Most of my tweets will be retweets. There are a lot of interesting and creative people out there and I want to share their insightful, funny or beautiful thoughts.

Rule Number 3: If you’re not a troll, I’ll follow you back

   No, I’m not going to pay $5 for 20,000 followers. Who would do that anyway?
   And what about those people that follow you and immediately unfollow you after you’ve followed them? I guess they think people will think they are a superstar with their 100 to 1 ratio? What I think is that they’re trolls. Tools like ManageFlitter will help you throw those trolls back under the bridge.
   But if you are a real person then I’ll follow you back. I’ll look at your latest tweets. I’ll check out your blog if you have one. If you have content that I connect with, then I’ll add you to my favorites list.

Observation: On Facebook I have friends; on Twitter I have followers.

   On Facebook I connect with people I know; on Twitter I connect with people that have common interests. On Facebook I share photos of me and my family; on Twitter I talk about books and writing mostly.
   I hope this doesn’t rub you the wrong way if you have a Facebook fan page. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with that. It’s
just not for me.

   Please find me @StepClary on Twitter and tell me your Twitter Code of Conduct.

My Appeal to Writers for Lower Audio Book Pricing

   So...Amazon and Hachette Publishing have been having a big battle. The cynical side of me thinks that this is essentially two big companies fighting over a bigger piece of the publishing pie. Amazon want's a bigger piece of the pie so they want e-books to be priced low so more people will buy them and read them on the Kindle. Hachette wants the price high so they can sell their paper books where they get a bigger slice.
   Below I've included a link to the letter for you to read if you like. It's Amazon's appeal to writers to side with them in their desire for lower ebook prices. Maybe you'll feel inspired and join the email campaign against Hachette's e-book pricing policy. I found it interesting reading. My favorite paragraph was: "...e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger."
   Yeah, I mostly side with Amazon in this argument. But I think Hachette inevitably is just hurting itself, so in the end I see this as a problem that will eventually resolve itself. If I were an author under contract with Hachette I'd be writing a letter telling them that I think they are being greedy and narrow-minded. But I'm not, so I don't really care too much. I might be hurt as a reader if I want to read one of Hatchette's books, but then I'll just go find something less expensive to read. I have lots of good books to choose from.
   But here is something I don't hear discussed: lower audio book pricing. I'm an Audible subscriber and so I get books at a reduced price; but if it weren't for Audible the only audio books I'd listen to would be what I could check out from the library. And why are the audio books so expensive? Sure, an actor must be paid to read the book. There is usually a producer, a sound studio, technicians, and editors. Expensive, right? Maybe, but it is a non-recurring expense, and is it really much more expensive than what is paid to editors and artists and printers for a paper book? Anyway, arguing that the extra expense of producing the audio book makes it more expensive falls apart when you compare audio book prices to movie prices.
   Take Divergent by Veronica Roth, for example. On Amazon the Divergent audio book price (CD) is $12.33 and the movie price (DVD) is $15.96. The movie budget was $85 million. I have no idea what the audio book budget was, but I think it's safe to guess that it is a statistically insignificant fraction of $85 million. And for the newest book in the series, Allegiant, the audio book price is $20.59--well above what will be charged for the movie version when it is new.
   So that's my thoughts on audio book pricing. Let me know what you think.
   Here is that link to Amazon's letter I promised. A Message from the Amazon Books Team. Enjoy.