And now, a quick word from one of our editors

I was checking the The Economist's iconic style guide and read the intro for fun (as nerds do). They quote this reader's letter:

SIR—At times just one sentence in The Economist can give us hours of enjoyment, such as “Yet German diplomats in Belgrade failed to persuade their government that it was wrong to think that the threat of international recognition of Croatia and Slovenia would itself deter Serbia.”
During my many years as a reader of your newspaper, I have distilled two lessons about the use of our language. Firstly, it is usually easier to write a double negative than it is to interpret it. Secondly, unless the description of an event which is considered to be not without consequence includes a double or higher-order negative, then it cannot be disproven that the writer has neglected to eliminate other interpretations of the event which are not satisfactory in light of other possibly not unrelated events which might not have occurred at all.
For these reasons, I have not neglected your timely reminder that I ought not to let my subscription lapse. It certainly cannot be said that I am an unhappy reader.
—WILLARD DUNNING

And then there's Mark Twain's take on writing and style:

 

Mark Twain described how a good writer treats sentences: “At times he may indulge himself with a long one, but he will make sure there are no folds in it, no vaguenesses, no parenthetical interruptions of its view as a whole; when he has done with it, it won't be a sea-serpent with half of its arches under the water; it will be a torch-light procession.”

 

Enjoy and keep writing (and revising)!

 

 

Wordsmack in demand - find the radio and TV interviews here

The Wordsmack team has been featured on radio and TV in the last month, and we can't get enough of chatting about our incredible authors, and how our controversial city, Johannesburg, is fast becoming the new base camp for science fiction writing.

We have more exciting events coming up - so stay tuned on Twitter and Facebook.

Firstly, our authors Abi Godsell, Mico Pisanti and our director Louise Cosgrave, were on Radio Today. You can listen to the podcast here. We talked about Johannesburg as a location for sci-fi writing and about how young writers have a very fatalistic, yet practical outlook on the future.

Louise was also on Kyknet. Talking about ebooks and speculative fiction in her best Afrikaans. She chatted about Wordsmack Publishers and why we focus on African speculative fiction. She also touched on the future of reading: is the physical book dead or will we always have a soft spot for the ancient technology of paper?

You can watch the broadcast here.

   

Babies, Lusaka and eBooks.

We've been very quiet of late. So quiet, in fact, that you'd think we've been off giving birth and moving countries.

But that's exactly what we've been doing! Louise gave birth to a lovely baby boy, Nicholas, and Leani moved to Lusaka, Zambia. However, this doesn't mean we haven't been working hard on the next installments of Idea War, The Folds and ... is that a Ripmender sequel I see emerging? 

We've also been approached by some amazing writers with big plans for their books and careers seeking tips and advice, sometimes hugs. Leani met with a true inspiration: Makhiba Mollo - a business woman with a helluva story to tell. In fact, watch this space. This lady is going places. We've also seen our share of the good, the bad and the ugly in terms of manuscript submissions.

Remember: if you're sending your manuscript to publishers, make sure you've had it read by people who owe you nothing and can offer constructive criticism. Join a writer's circle, submit short stories to magazines (there are some great local publications) and foster those connections. This way you can get valuable advice on your writing. You may only have one shot for your work to be seen by a publisher, make sure it's perfect.

Our Young Adult books: Idea War: Volume 1, The Ripmender and children's book The Guardian's Wyrd are now also available on Obami, the award-winning, social learning management system. Tell your teacher-friends. And it's for free!

Future bookworm in the making.

Leani's inner grammar-Nazi is going to have to be purged.

Stay tuned fellow readers and writers, there's some exciting news around the corner!


Leani & Louise

Books for the price of a cup of coffee

Publishers have been vocal recently about the fact that you can now buy a book for the same price as a cup of coffee. Isn't that sad, they lament? How will it last? Well, of course we'd also like to make big profits and pay rent and eat something other than 2 Minute Noodles. But for now, we need to get more people with those eyeballs of theirs onto our books so that their minds can also be blown by how incredible (and sometimes a little scary) our authors' minds are.

To do list:
#1: blow people's minds
#2: make money when Hollywood comes a-knocking
#3: eat something other than 2 Minute Noodles

So therefore, the point, dearies, of this rant: Look at what you get for a measly R20 these days. It's not much. OR you can spend R20 on a book which will blow your mind, broaden your horizons and leave you looking down at your old school friends who clearly are not as impressive as you are.

Below shows: you can buy a Woolies smoothie, a cup of coffee (not even a double shot anymore), a song on iTunes, a cheapass app or ten diapers. OR you can do better.

This price is only available on the awesome Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/the-folds 

We were generous and thought we'd even look at what R40 can give you. It includes a Woolies meal, better apps, or a movie on box office movie and some homemade popcorn (no easy popping for you). OR the brain explosion thing.

This price is only available on the awesome Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/idea-war

Be good, but if you can't, you may as well enjoy.

Leani

How I rate and review books on Goodreads

Recently there has been a big furore about reviews: fake, real, paid for honest reviews, paid for fake reviews and the whole attacking/commenting on authors saga. But what if you just really love to read and to tell your friends and followers about worthwhile books? 

On Goodreads, I'm one of the top reviewers in South Africa  (16th over all at the moment). Because I hate reading the whole plot in reviews, I keep mine very short. However, I often go back to my old reviews and ratings and wonder whether I should change them. I also often wonder how my ratings will hold up in a few years. 

The way I rate books is very subjective - and I don't think a lot of people can say their's are not. When I review and rate a book I really do try to focus just on the book itself - language, readablility and plot. But it is also influenced by an author's other works, what else I read recently, other books in the genre and obviously my mood.  

I've also recently started using Booklikes, but it's still quite new and a bit harder to use at the moment.

How do you rate books? 

Please remember to review A Grain of Sand. 

A Grain of Sand - where can you get it?

Where can you buy our new short story and for how much?

Wordsmack's first short story, A Grain of Sand is out. You can read my review on Goodreads here.

For some reason this is still cheaper on Amazon.co.uk than on Amazon.com - something to do with us being in South Africa. The cheapest option, however, is to buy it on Kobo, because Amazon makes the book more expensive because we are in South Africa.

Self-publishing vs traditional publishing

Self-publishing versus traditional publishing

The blogosphere is full of articles about self-publishing versus traditional publishing. And I love how self-publishing has shaken up the (very) cobwebby industry, so here are my two cents worth:

Firstly, let me quickly explain what I mean by traditional publishing. Traditional publishing is done by either a large publishing house (think Penguin, Pearson, Pan Macmillan, etc.) or a smaller independent publisher (like Wordsmack). These publishers pay authors a royalty. The royalty percentage differs from publisher to publisher, but most pay 10%-15% although this is changing with the advent of epublishing. There are also vanity publishers who publish your books for a fee – this is a completely different form of publishing that is not being discussed here.

So, what exactly does a publisher do for you? 

Firstly, you get a brutally honest answer about whether your story is worth publishing or saving. Fear of rejection, I guess, is why a lot of people self-publish … I had a long conversation with an author who said that all authors should self-publish because publishers take too big a cut.  A few weeks later, I see she has found a publisher …

Secondly, if your book is accepted, you have a company who backs you, who believes in you and who wants to make you the best writer you can be.  A lot of very big publishers might not cultivate young talent, but there are small publishers, like us, whose goal in life is to develop new authors and a writing community in Africa. That, and winning the lottery, the European lottery.

Thirdly, and this is the most important, there are all the costs that the publisher carries: editing, proofreading, cover design, typesetting, illustrations/photos, marketing, etc. You don’t pay for anything and if you do, you are with a vanity publisher. Therefore, publishers have a vested interest, they want your book to sell and sell well. If your book doesn’t sell, the publisher makes a loss.

This article on one of my favourite websites explains it quite well: http://io9.com/the-7-most-common-misconceptions-about-science-fiction-1189361443

So, marketing, how hard can it be? There seems to be a lot of self-published authors who do really well. Every day there is at least one author who comes out and says how well they’ve done, how easy it was, what worked for them and tells everyone that they should do it too. However, I am sure that for every successful author, there are at least ten who aren’t successful. This could also be because their writing sucks, but often that has nothing to do with it. Some people are born self-marketers. They write blogs, are extremely active on social media, have time in the evenings to punt their books and they have connections. Most authors aren’t like this though – they love to write in their little corners at night after a long day of work, but they don’t have time or the energy for all the rest.

Slushpile or Something Else?

What happens when you send your book to a publisher? 

You've put your heart and soul into a book. You've followed the submission guidelines. What happens now? 

In South Africa, it gets added to a slush pile. This is because we don't have an agent model - in other countries you send it to an agent and it gets added to their slush pile - a completely different process ensues, but eventually the same applies from step 1 onwards.

In South Africa, if you're lucky, you send it to a small enough publishing house that still reads all its manuscripts. Your manuscript then goes through the following process: 

It gets rejected. 

OR You get some notes from the publisher, which include some suggestions, ideas and questions that you can follow, or not, and resubmit. If you resubmit and the publisher likes it enough, you can go to the next step, if not, do not pass GO. 

OR The publisher wants to publish it right away. This then follows the following process: 

1. You sign a letter of intent giving the publisher the sole option to publish the book. 

2. The book gets sent to a professional editor who does two things: 

•  A developmental edit: this includes suggestions for anything from major changes to minor tweaks. This process can take weeks or months depending on the level of changes that have to be made. It includes an ongoing dialogue between you and the editor to make your story as good as possible. 
• A copy edit: when the editor is happy with the manuscript, they do, basically, a very thorough proofread where they change whatever they think will make the reading of the story even better. 

3. The publisher converts the manuscript into the correct format - for print: they get  typesetters to typeset it in inDesign, for ebooks, they put it in whichever formats they want to publish it in (Kindle, Kobo, Nook, iBooks Author etc). 

4. Proofreading: the book gets proofread by a professional proofreader and checked by the author. 

5. The publisher collates these changes. 

6. The changes get applied to the electronic manuscript by a typesetter. 

The last three steps can be repeated until the publisher is happy with the final manuscript. How many times this is done depends on the length, the complexity and state of the book at this stage. 

7. The publisher signs off the book. 

8. It gets published. 

This process excludes: cover design, any other design elements inside the book and the marketing drive.

Good luck with the writing!

Louise

Not another blog?

You can't walk down the street in Cape Town without tripping over a writer's group. However, for the rest of us peasants who don't get to live in the artistic hub of Africa, it can be a bit trickier to find a group of people who can offer sage advice when it comes to our writing.

What about all those self-published authors who had their work edited by a 'friend' who also happened to be a highly successful publisher? Who has access to those people?

The answer is: you do, as of now.

Wordsmack Publishers have noticed that most of our writers are real, everyday people with jobs, kids and mortgages. Getting together in Montecasino to discuss how Frances's use of her cats as main characters in her novels is going, is just not appealing.

So we've started a blog - we'll discuss the process of being published, how you go about world-building, we'll organise events (not at Montecasino, promise) and create an online community of writers and editors that will rival anyone of those you can trip over, physically, in Cape Town.

Get ready for some good stuff!

Leani and Louise