On Writing - Michelle Richmond

Where to Find Pre-designed Ebook Covers

These sites offer quality pre-designed ebook covers:

Literra Designs: covers starting at just $35. Literra keeps costs low by using free stock images. You can customize the cover text for free. Back-of-the book and spine designs cost extra.

Beetiful.com is much pricier, at $165 per cover, but the covers tend to look a bit more professional. If you’re serious about marketing your work, I recommend Beetiful.

Fostering-success.com has pre-designed covers starting at $99, plus an additional $85 for full wrap. Don’t let the weird website name turn you off. They have some decent covers at a mid-range price.

CCRbookcoverdesign skews more toward sci-fi and horror. If genre is your thing, these could work. Very affordably priced at $45-$75. (The primary image for this post is from CCR)

Damonza.com offers very good-looking, unique, artistically inclined covers, but at a heftier price than the others–$195. If you don’t mind spending more, this site is worth checking out. Unfortunately, some of the covers, while arresting, have titles that aren’t as readable as you might like them to be.

Goonwrite.com has covers starting at $30. The brightness of the images definitely gives the covers a pre-packaged look, but that doesn’t mean they’re not eye-catching. If you scroll down you’ll find searchable genre categories on the left hand side of the page.

Author Marketing Club features covers by a number of designers. You choose the design, and AMC hooks you up with the designer. Covers are affordably priced, although some look a bit too formulaic. AMC offers is a membership of $105 per year, which gives you free access to all of their ebook cover designs.

A Tale of Two Writing Spaces (or my dream writing room)

A South Korean furniture maker has designed this desk for kids to help them focus while they study. It could also serve as a writing room for smallish adults. Emok sells the nifty little space in South Korea for about $2,200 U.S. How much would you pay for a little bit of zen?

I love the built-in shelves and lighting, and the window that (perhaps cruelly) allows kids to gaze out on all the fun other members of the household are having while the student is locked in his homework prison.

That footrest below the desk is a massage bar for tired feet. It may be the only thing in the room to keep you from totally losing your mind.

In this photo you can see the white board, great for writing, “Get me out of here!” or “Why did I ever think I could write this novel?” Or maybe you could play hangman solitaire.

I both love this space and hate it. Theoretically, it looks like a great place to write The Next Great American Short Story (I can’t imagine staying there long enough to write a novel). On the other hand, it might make you go a little Yellow Wallpaper.

Photos via Design Taxi.

This micr0-cottage by Tengbom Architects in Sweden (via Contemporist by way of DesignTaxi) is more to my liking. At ten square meters, te eco-friendly space, conceived as a complete student flat in collaboration with students at the University of Lund, is truly museum worthy. Though it’s not for sale yet, I’m pretty sure that if it ever is produced, it will be out of my price range.

3 Myths That Are Killing Literary Culture

1. Writers just want to be read.

I recently heard a young woman at a party say that writers don’t mind when their books are downloaded for free on the internet, because “writers just want to be read.”

As a working writer who pays my mortgage and buys groceries and sends my kid to summer camp with the proceeds from my books, I can tell you that this isn’t true. While I do want to be read, that isn’t my primary concern. My primary concern is making a living.

2. Writers don’t need to be paid for their work.

Let’s say you design and produce a T-shirt. Let’s say you sell the T-shirts for $20 each, and with the proceeds from these T-shirts, you pay your rent, buy coffee, pay off your student loans, pay the electric bill,go to the movies, buy a beer at the corner bar, etc.

Now, you may give your shirt to a few friends in order to drum up business. That’s called marketing, and it’s not much different from when publishers send out review copies of books to newspapers, magazines, and influential bloggers. You’re willing to give away a few shirts in the hopes that it will lead to sales.

Let’s say a bunch of people—a thousand, two thousand, ten thousand, half a million—come to you and say, “Hey, you should give us that shirt, because we’ll wear it, and when we wear your shirt, it’s going to be good for you.” What would you say? You’d probably turn them down. You’d probably point out that creating the shirt took time, effort, and resources. Maybe you studied graphic design to learn the skills that went into making that shirt. Maybe you worked at the mall for a few dollars an hour while you were figuring out how to arrange your life in a way that would allow you to do more fulfilling work. You’d probably point out that you didn’t make that shirt just to give it away. You need to sell the shirt, because that’s how you make a living, and the fact of someone wearing your shirt does absolutely nothing for you. It’s good for the person who gets the free shirt, but it is most definitely not good for you.

Don’t like the T-shirt example? Make it an app. Let’s say you spend time, money, and intellectual capital developing an app that you sell for $1.99. If thousands of people were to say to you, “Give me that app. I want to use it, but I don’t want to pay for it. If you give it to me, it will be good for you,” would you agree?

Authors make a living by selling our books. We write books that we hope will be good, books that we hope will be meaningful, but we also write books that we hope people will buy. We do not go to the store and walk out with a new pair of shoes or a new baseball bat or an ice cream cone without paying for them. We don’t expect the taxi driver to drive us to the airport for free, and we don’t expect the tech guy to fix our computer for free, and we don’t expect the piano teacher to give our kids piano lessons for free. We understand that when a service is provided, it is good practice to pay for it. We hope that others will show us the same courtesy.

When increasing numbers of readers decide they’re going to get our books for free by illegally downloading them, and when increasing numbers of libraries lobby for the “right” to lend digital copies of our books to anyone, anywhere, forever, without compensating the creators, authors don’t make a living.

In “The Slow Death of the American Author,” an opinion piece for The New York Times, Scott Turow points to the offshore pirate sites that offer illegal downloads of copyrighted books. Google and Bing serve ads to these pirate sites, and subscribers pay a fee to download content, so both the pirates and the mega-corporations are making big money off of the books they had no role in creating. Kim dot com gets another Rolls Royce, Google tops off its multi-billion dollar coffers, and PayPal gets a huge chunk of the pie. The only ones who aren’t being compensated for those books are the people who wrote them. The people who are downloading books and music illegally don’t mind paying the pirate, and they don’t mind sending a percentage to paypal; these entities are often praised as innovators. It is strange that the same people who happily to give money to the pirates believe that the writers and musicians who created the content are wrongheaded or selfish to ask for compensation. (The Trichordist has been writing on this subject for the music industry for some time now.)

If I stood on a corner telling people who asked where they could buy stolen goods and collected a small fee for it, I’d be on my way to jail. And yet even while search engines sail under mottos like “Don’t be evil,” they do the same thing. ~Scott Turow

The only people who can legitimately say, “Authors shouldn’t be paid for their books,” are people who happily go to their jobs for free. There’s a rallying cry among certain academics, librarians, and journalists that copyright is anti-culture, that all books should be free to all people, but I don’t know a single professor or librarian who doesn’t get paid to show up to the university or to the library. The same journalists who lambast authors are often salaried employees of newspapers and magazines that a)charge a subscription fee and b) pay the journalists for their content.

Traditionally, libraries purchase a hard copy of a book, which they then lend out to their patrons. I happen to be a longtime fan of libraries and the services they provide to the community. As an author, I have accepted the fact that I receive a royalty only on the copy the library purchases, not on the lending (although in Europe, authors do receive royalties each time their books are lent). It’s a model that American authors have by and large come to terms with, and, traditionally, there has been a friendly relationship between libraries and authors. Unlimited e-book lending, however, is an entirely different ballgame. For one thing, a physical book has a shelf life and must eventually be replaced, while an e-book may be lent forever from any location. By effectively ensuring that no reader will have any incentive to purchase an e-book, ever, it erases a huge chunk of the author’s royalties.

If you happen to be a professor or librarian who believes that information, including copyrighted books, should flow freely with no compensation for the creators of that information, or that publishers should offer books to libraries for free or next to free, or that soft copyright laws are essential to democracy, I urge you to put your money where your mouth is: the next time you receive a paycheck, return it. You are just happy to be able to go to work, right? You don’t do it for the money. (It also bears saying that libraries need content, and the content comes from somewhere, so when libraries lobby against fair compensation for authors, and when they remove the incentive to actually show up at the physical library to get a book, they are lobbying against their own existence.)

3. Writers make so much money, they shouldn’t mind if their books are illegally downloaded.

Advances for mid-list authors—that is, the vast majority of authors—are far from a living wage. The advance for my first book was $2,000. As I wrote the stories in the collection over a period of eight years, I wasn’t exactly raking it in. My second book, which took a much more reasonable three years to write, received an even smaller advance of $1,000—or about $333 per year. My third book, which took me more than four years to write, received an advance of $25,000, as did my fourth book, which, fortunately, only took one year to write. Obviously, during those years of writing I was making a living in other ways—from wiping down the beds at a tanning salon to selling credit processing machines all over New York City to teaching creative writing. For my next two books, I received a much bigger advance, but this only happened after one of my books, through some alchemy of good fortune and good timing, sold half a million copies. (Obviously, I did not do this alone; my book sold well because I had the support of booksellers and my agent and my editor and publisher, the very entities that piracy threatens to put out of business.)

My point here is that very few authors are making the big bucks. There are the mega bestsellers, of course, but the vast majority of authors make far less per hour than the barista at Starbucks or the person flipping those admittedly amazing burgers at In n’ Out. So when you say, “If I download this book for free, it doesn’t really hurt anybody,” you’re wrong. It hurts the person who made it.

I assume that most of the people who read this post do not illegally download books, music, or movies. But if you are a person who does that, I ask you to do one thing before you download the next book or song from a file sharing site: take a moment to visualize yourself reaching into that author’s purse, or that musician’s wallet, and stealing money. Are you comfortable with that image of yourself? If so, go ahead; download away.

Why this should matter to you.

If you’ve read a good book in the past few years, if you’ve read a book that moved you,a book that enlarged your world-view, a book that changed you, if you have ever read a book that made you want to be a writer or inspired you to be a reader, then remember where that book came from: an author who lives in the same world in which you live, an author who cannot download lunch, blue jeans, or an apartment for free.

Why It’s Sometimes Okay to Quit

As a child, I hated horseback riding. I took lessons, though, because my mother wanted me to, and because I was under the impression that girls were supposed to like horses. The day after my twelfth birthday, during my riding lesson, our horse reared back, and I fell off. I landed on my back on the ground, but that was just the beginning of it. I can still remember watching the horse struggle in the air above me before she fell backward, her body slamming down on top of me, grinding the bulky Western saddle into my eighty-pound frame. She rolled around on top of me, trying to get up. Looking back, I’m amazed that I suffered only a broken pelvis and fractured hips.

Months later, after my body had (for the most part) healed, I confessed to my mother that I was not and never had been enamored of horses. I did not like the way they smelled, I didn’t like mucking the stalls, I hated the clouds of dust rising from the horse’s flanks when I brushed her. Most of all, I did not like lying beneath a horse while it rolled around on top of me. “I don’t want to ride anymore,” I said, lying flat on my back in a hospital bed, my legs in traction. “I quit.” Fortunately, she did not tell me to “get back in the saddle.” I have lived a relatively horseless life, and that has not bothered me one bit.

My high school career began at Mobile Christian School (Mobile being a city, not a state of being). A few weeks into the first semester of my freshman year, I got sent to the office for wearing orange socks.For this offense, I was shut in a room with the varsity football coach who, acting on the orders of the principal, told me to bend over. The coach, clearly mortified, gave me a couple of weak smacks with the wooden paddle that was reserved for juvenile offenders like me. The school called my mother only after the corporal punishment had been administered. “I quit,” I said. “I’m not going back.” The next day, I enrolled in the public school, Murphy High. A couple of months later, Murphy made national news because the district was so underfunded, students had to bring our own toilet paper. Despite the financial difficulties, it was a terrific school. My teachers were amazing. Did I ever regret quitting the private school that meted out spankings to girls in short plaid skirts? I did not.

In tenth grade, I quit youth choir because the songs they made us sing were terrible. “Contemporary Christian,” it was called. All pep, no feeling. Lots of poorly thought-out rhymes. Bad robes in unappealing shades of burgundy and pink. I told the choir director I’d stay if he’d let us sing Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” He was tolerant but unconvinced. Have I ever regretted my decision to quit the youth choir? Not once. Eventually, I quit the Baptist church altogether. I discovered that life is better with more wine and less guilt.

In college, I had a string of odd jobs. One involved pulling auto parts at a warehouse for $3.75 per hour. It was sweltering hot, the ladders were rickety, and at five foot two, even with the ladders, many of the parts were beyond my reach. I hung in there for a week; then I quit. Remorse? None.

Another college job involved opening a convenience store in Northport, Alabama, at five in the morning. For this I was paid the more amendable sum of $4.25 per hour. One morning, alone in the convenience store, I heard shots ringing out from the crack house across the street. That day, I quit. I never looked back.

I briefly worked at a small airport in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. My responsibilities included calculating fuel for small aircrafts. Math has never quite been my thing. Fuel, as it turns out, is important. It only took a few days for me to realize the folly of this situation. I quit; the pilots did not complain.

Right after college, I quit a waitressing job in Knoxville, Tennessee, after the owner slipped something in my drink and the chef took humiliating photos while I was unconscious in the storage room. Soon thereafter, I found a job as a copywriter at an advertising firm. Quitting a bad thing led to a good thing. Once again, no regrets.

Over the years, I quit a variety of things for a variety of reasons: I quit the pill because it made me fat. I quit Bikram yoga because it made me stink and did not bring me anything akin to peace. I quit Moby Dick, three times. In the early nineties, I quit an engagement. Thank goodness. I quit the MFA program at the University of Arkansas and transferred to the University of Miami, because I wanted to live on the beach. I loved living on the beach; I did not love living in Arkansas. I knew then, as I know now, that life is too short to live somewhere unappealing.

While I was living in New York City, I quit wearing shoes that hurt. My husband and I quit New York City to live in San Francisco, because San Francisco has good air and good food and good views, and it made us very happy. A couple of years ago, I finally quit trying to do fancy things to asparagus, because, as it turns out, most vegetables, including asparagus, taste better steamed, with a little butter and salt, without the bells and whistles.

A few years ago, I’d been struggling for two years with a novel I was writing on contract, unable to find my way, when I finally confessed to my editor that the book just wasn’t working. “Do you think you could write something else?” she asked. Strangely, that simple solution had never occurred to me. After all, I had invested 300 pages and hundreds of hours in the book, and the thought of abandoning it seemed obscene. But I took my editor up on her offer. I quit the failed book, the bad book, the book that simply was not working. Days later, officially released from the unwieldy mass of my failed manuscript, I started from scratch. Blank page, new premise; new characters, voice, and setting. The freedom proved exhilarating, and the result was a much better novel than the one I’d been tied down to, the one I had been so reluctant to quit.

Our impulse as human beings is to finish what we started, to overemphasize our investment and continue along the path to which we’ve committed, no matter what. Our impulse as writers is to attempt to salvage the words, to make good on the promise we made to ourselves when we penned the very first line. While there is beauty in perseverance, and while there are, of course, some things you shouldn’t quit, some things that are more than worth the long and arduous journey, sometimes the best thing you can do, in stories as in life, is let something go, and give yourself the freedom to begin again.

Think of one thing in your life that isn’t working. Not something that is simply difficult, not something that is challenging but worthwhile. No, I mean something that adds no meaning to your life, something that adds unnecessary pain or unhappiness or outright despair with no hope of self-improvement or valuable public service or future positive return. Now, repeat after me, “I quit.” Commit to the end of this thing you are quitting. Watch the space open up in front of you. Begin again.