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Thursday, January 28, 2010

About Mori Ōgai on translation

Friday, January 15, 2010

Help Haiti

All royalties from sales of my ebook edition of Beneath Gray Skies for sale ($3) on Smashwords from now until 21 January 18:00 (Japan time) will be sent to a relief organization (TBD) to help Haiti.

For more on Smashwords, please see the article on my blog–-it’s a very interesting approach to the whole ebook concept, including Kindle and B&N distribution. Kindle, iPhone, PDF, Sony, Palm, etc. formats all available, covering almost all the bases.
Please download the ebook and help Haiti.

Friday, October 23, 2009

ebooks and the author

I’m considering all the new options by which we can now read books (i.e. the ebook reader market, which appears to be coming of age - sort of), and it seems to me that there are both technical and business issues here.

The software to convert existing material to ebooks does not seem to work at all well. For example, although Adobe claims that InDesign CS4 produces ebooks, it doesn’t - these are simply strings of text, rather than organized and formatted books).

Though there is obviously some technological skill required to produce an ebook, many producers of ebooks will be the authors, with sub-optimal technical skills, and the situation, with its different standards (Kindle, Stanza, nook, PDF, etc. etc.) seems to be much worse than, say, the start of the Web, where we were all learning what these strange “tags” and weird angle brackets meant.

Although there is an easy-to-use conversion service provided by Feedbooks, it comes with a very large string attached - the demand that the material enter the public domain, which to me seems an unfair restriction to put on an author who has something original and worthwhile to say, and who has taken the time and trouble to say it.

So… Any ideas on how ebook publishing should proceed? I have a little more to say about this and ebooks at my own site.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Channelling Jonathan Swift, or, Never Throw Anything Away

Some years ago (actually, quite a few years ago) I went back to college to “retool.” One of the courses I took was “Child Growth and Development,” a worthy class in which I learned a lot. But by the time midterm exams came, I’d had enough. One of the short essay questions asked, “In your opinion, what will be different in breast-feeding practices fifty years from now?”

My resistance was low. Possessed by some demon or other, I wrote:

“I believe that in fifty years breast feeding will be much more common than it is today due to two factors. The first is that advances in medical technology will make it possible for men to nurse as well as women. The double-breasted suit from C & R Clothiers will be a much different affair from today’s version. Power lunches will include a shot of brewer’s yeast and other substances believed to increase milk production.

“The other reason that breast feeding will be more important in the future is that this country will have had almost seventy-five years of uninterrupted Republican rule, a leadership which has nearly completed the elimination of the single-breadwinner family and the dismantling of what few family support services created since the New Deal still survive. This and the support of the monopolization of food production now in progress will mean that the American child will be breast fed until he or she is old enough and earning enough to be able to buy his or her own meals at the local MacDisneySears.” (11/13/90, revised slightly)

Midway down the page the instructor scrawled in the margin, “You’re serious?” There was a second question to the exam which I answered more sanely and she gave me an A.

But that’s not why I saved the thing. I save all sorts of writing. I came across it recently when going through papers from that time and laughed out loud when I read it. I saved it because I thought it was funny. And I still think it is funny. And despite my mis-prediction of presidential elections, I think it remains true in spirit.

With my writing I’ve had to be patient. I’m just now placing poems written ten and fifteen years ago. Some of them are real world travellers, having crossed the ocean dozens of times. I may no longer feel much emotion when I look at them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t exactly what some editor might need for a particular issue. Or that they won’t affect readers seeing them for the first time.

And even the goofy answer to a long-ago exam can find a path to a few more readers.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Biking the Yamanote Line

Monday, September 14, 2009

Seven Pounds (with Will Smith)

I would definitely recommend seeing this movie (twice): Seven Pounds (with Will Smith). In Japanese it’s 7つの贈り物. Nanatsu No Okurimono. The DVD and Blu-ray disc went on sale in Japan on September 2, 2009.

It’s not as fast-paced as the trailer would have you believe, and Will Smith has a pained expression on his face for most of the movie, but if you can get past those things, the film has its rewards. Not the least of which is Rosario Dawson. Or the more cerebral reward of figuring out the English title. I won’t say more.
But my concern about this movie, and the reason I’m posting about it on the SWET blog, is a key subtitling error. (I don’t think revealing the dialogue will spoil the movie for first-time viewers.) I’m wondering if it’s a legitimate error, in the sense that the translator hired by Sony Pictures Entertainment (or production) made a mistake, leaving out a “~” to indicate a span between two numbers.
The reason I have to wonder, is that I received the DVD from a friend in July, so it was likely downloaded from a torrent. In the past I’ve watched “fansubbed” videos, and the MO of the fansubber is usually a prominent display of his “name” at the beginning. (I don’t have an example at hand, though.) This DVD didn’t have that and seemed like a legitimate rip (I know, an oxymoron), perhaps from a rental DVD.
Anyway, here’s the dialogue for the scene with subtitles. “W” stands for “Will” and “D” for “Doctor.”

W: Do you have any more..any optimism about Emily
あなたの経験から言って
than you did the other day?
エミりーにはどれくらい見込みが？

D: When..when you’re looking for a donor with a rare blood type
ドナーが見つかっても雌らしい血液型では
the odds go way down.
可能性が低いよ

W: To what? They go down to..What’s..give me a percentage.
可能性が・・低いとは？
確率は？

Give me a number!
数字を現して！

D: Three? (Shakes head) Five percent?
３５パーセント

I…I’m sorry…
もう少したかければ
I wish the numbers were higher.
いいんだけど

W: Thank you.
ありがとう。

(Here’s the video of the scene.)
——-
That subtitle sure looks like “35” to me.
Three to five, not thirty-five!!!
I wonder if Japanese audiences who only read the subtitles will be misled by this mistake. What do you think?

Friday, September 04, 2009

Marketing fiction on the Internet

Well, Beneath Gray Skies is starting to sell a few copies, and when I say “a few”, I mean a few. It’s more than the number of thumbs on one hand, for sure, and I wasn’t expecting enormous sales in the thousands. But there’s not even any record of even one being sold through Amazon Japan - I would have thought at least one SWET member might have bought a copy (sniff!). Maybe they have, and the Amazon sales returns just take a long time to come in. Hope so, anyway.

Of course, without a commercial publisher, all the marketing has to be done by the author - this is one of the drawbacks of independent publishing. But so many of the little tricks mentioned in the “get your book out there” advice on the Web are useless if you live outside your main target market. “Get on your local radio talk show”, for example. Useless here in Japan. Kathleen Morikawa’s book is excellent, but many of the promotional tips seem a little more directed to non-fiction than fiction.Yes, there are local English-language newspapers and periodicals - and I have yet to send review copies to them, since the price of buying copies and getting them shipped over has been prohibitive up to now, and it would hardly have been worth it, compared with the potential local sales (if the current figure is anything to go by!). However, Lulu has reviewed its shipping prices somewhat, and I can now actually get the US trade edition for significantly less than the Amazon Japan price, so I may well end up ordering a batch for review, etc. and even have a few left over for book events or whatever[1].
Many of the textbooks and gurus on Internet marketing talk about improving your Google rank. Now for non-fiction books, this makes perfect sense - after all, if you are looking at (say) repairing and customizing your 1972 Chevy and you need the book to help you, then you look for the relevant terms, and hopefully, Chester Bludgett’s Make that ‘72 Chevy really SHINE! pops out of the search engine. Even if it’s a self-improvement or health-related or inspirational (Linda Whelkclencher’s How the Spinach Diet and Meditation Cured My Agoraphobia) - and these are some of the most popular genres in self-publishing right now - a high Google ranking will be a great boost to awareness, and maybe even to sales.

But who goes window-shopping for fiction? Especially when it’s a slightly off-the-wall subject like mine (alternate history, a 1920s Confederacy, airships, Nazis, etc. etc.). Unless you knew such a book existed, how would you ever go about looking for it? Well, the answer seems to be linking, but getting your way onto other people’s sites seems to be tricky. I have a few mentions out there, and the site describing the book gets several hits from these each day, but if the links only live on other low-ranked fiction sites, this doesn’t help.

So you can take your book to special interest groups, like (in my case) alternate history groups, airship enthusiast sites and so on. But people don’t like comments on their sites that are too obviously there to sell a product or service. So it takes time to be tactful and ease your way into sites (SWET, for example, has pretty much zero tolerance for such comments, even when they’re on target).

Even when they get to your site, they have to be persuaded to buy your book. I could start selling from the site, I suppose - it’s not something I really intended doing when I started out, and it’s probably better for me to do what I have done - put up links to the book’s pages on the various international booksellers. Is there a better way?

I knew that marketing my book was going to be the hard part of self-publishing - and I knew it wasn’t going to be just a matter of building a pretty Web site and watching the orders flood in. But it does seem to me that fiction is somewhat of a rara avis when it comes to sales on the Internet - the books are just a little too expensive to be an impulse buy, you can’t kick the tires (i.e. read the product specs) and though you can provide excerpts, you can’t really provide a demo like the software makers do.

So - I am genuinely looking for ideas and support to get the book out there into people’s hands. I still have enough faith in the book and the writing to want it to go there (apparently, my 13-year-old nephew thinks it’s a great story, and it’s started him writing his own book!). Comments on how to market (including “you’re doing all this completely wrong”) are welcome.

[1] If you think you’d like to order a copy through me, I think I can deliver within Japan for ¥2000 - Amazon price is about ¥2600. I guess it will take 2-3 weeks to deliver. I can take payment by Paypal and you can contact me through the Web site. Hey, if you order this way, I might even sign the copies I sell to you!

Technorati Tags: writing

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Learning to submit

Well, here it is, the end of August and I haven’t yet kept my promise of at least one posting this month. I have my reasons, sloth among them, but the main one is my wife and I were in the US on a family visit. But we’re back and I want to keep my promise. And the mail waiting for me gave me something to write about.

When we got home there was a little note from Marilyn Johnson. She is one of the editors of Pearl, a literary magazine published in Long Beach, California. They wanted to use one of the poems I had sent them a few months ago in an upcoming issue. She needed to know if it was still available or had it been accepted or published by someone else since I had sent it to them. I sent an email letting her know the poem was theirs and I was happy it had found a home. So I’ve got my first pending publication for 2010. A nice little welcome home gift.

But Pearl and I have history and I want to talk about that in a roundabout way. About twenty-five years ago, I began writing poems again after many years of writing almost nothing. Most of them were pretty terrible and I knew it, but once in a while, one would click. This was enough to keep me at it. But aside from entering a writing contest run by a local community college, I didn’t try to get anything published. Then, about twenty years ago, I moved to Long Beach to study music and Music Therapy at the Cal-State campus there. At the urging of a friend, I began attending a poetry-writing workshop led by Richard Garcia at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

This was a wonderful experience, although it didn’t always feel that way. The group met once a week, mostly on Saturday afternoons. Garcia, now in South Carolina, is a talented, widely published poet and a gifted, hard-working teacher. The group was a cantankerous mob of egomaniacs who squabbled and snarled and carried on, and occasionally produced some remarkably good work.

After I had been working with this group for awhile, writing and revising poems and taking them back to the group for further kicking-around, I began to think I should do something with the poems which seemed to be pretty good. They weren’t doing much sitting a folder at home. At about the same time I read somewhere that the mark of a professional writer was a hundred rejections. I loved the irony of the statement and it gave me a perversely achievable goal. I could do that, I thought to myself, I could be a professional writer. I could get a hundred rejections.

And so I started to send out poems. I set a goal of at least one submission a month. I sent them to the “big” little magazines like Prairie Schooner and The American Poetry Review. I also sent them out to the “little” little magazines and the “tiny” little magazines. Often these brave little efforts were (and are) no more than a few photocopied pages folded double and stapled. But they are where people can start publishing careers. I learned about the various magazines from publications like Poetry Flash, a San Francisco Bay area journal, and Poet’s Market, published by Writer’s Digest Books.

The “big” little magazines were unimpressed with my work and I began to rack up my rejections. (An aside: For the most part, they remain unimpressed.)  But to my surprise and excitement, some of the smaller venues began to accept and publish my poems. In a sense, these little successes were a setback—after all, my goal was a hundred rejections. But I could live with it. And I started to keep track of my acceptances and publications.

Some months into this project I had a problem. The end of the month was coming up and I still hadn’t sent anything out. And I didn’t know where to send. I had poems out to most the places I thought I had a chance. Or at least a chance of a fair read before the “Thank you for showing us this work. Unfortunately…” note went into the return envelope and mail.

For some reason, Pearl came to mind. I knew the magazine, had read it, and had an outsider’s surly attitude about it. It was the local version of The Establishment.

Pearl started in Long Beach in the 1970s, went dark, and was revived in 1987. It had become the local powerhouse, publishing Charles Bukowski, who also contributed drawings, Billy Collins, Dorianne Laux, Frank X. Gaspar, Denise Duhamel, Gerald Locklin (one of the funniest writers alive), and any number of “real” writers and poets. It was Big League. I wasn’t. And they seemed to publish a lot of their buddies. I wasn’t one of those, either. So it appeared that this was a perfect place to to go for my next rejection. But I didn’t want to. I was afraid.

Now, I hadn’t been afraid to be rejected by the majors far away. I mean, so what if they don’t like me in Philadelphia? I don’t know anybody in Philadelphia. But this was different. This was local. I probably wasn’t going to meet anyone from the Swanee Review in the supermarket. But I had a fear of being known as a loser in my own neighborhood. I didn’t want to put myself at risk.

But my twisted ambition, the desire for one hundred rejections, got the better of me. I made up a packet of poems. Knowing Pearl wasn’t going to like anything I sent, and since it was a free-verse magazine, I included a formal poem. I knew they wouldn’t like this quiet little love meditation since their content tended towards social commentary and they favored an in-your-face style. Rejection was guaranteed.

So I was stunned a few weeks later when I got a little note saying how much the editors liked “From A Doorway at Angel’s Gate,” my little formal love poem, and could they use it in an upcoming issue of Pearl, please? Recovering quickly, I wrote back, Yes they could and that I’d be very happy to see my poem in Pearl.

And I was. And I continue to be. Over the years they’ve published seven of my poems. I send them a packet of poems every two years or so and they usually accept one. Although I have since met the editors, I’m not one of their buddies or part of the “in-crowd.” I am simply someone who writes poems they tend to like.

One of the odd things about submitting, even to a magazine which has used my work before, is I never know what editors are going to like. I hate to admit this, but I’ve even been so presumptuous in cover letters to suggest which poems might be especially good in their magazine. Never has an editor agreed with me. I’ve grown up and quit doing this. These days I simply offer my goods. The editors choose or choose to pass. 

I reached my goal of a hundred rejections long ago. Now the goal is a hundred publications and I’m almost there. But Monday is the end of the month and I haven’t made a submission yet. It’s time to get busy and get a packet together.

 

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

A Year as a Publisher’s Reader

About a year ago I signed up to be a publisher’s reader for a children’s book publisher here in Japan; each month I read ten YA and middle-grade books, mostly from U.S. and U.K. publishers. Then for each book I submit a written summary, a brief critique, and a rating on a scale of 1 to 10, with ten being the best. The publisher uses these summaries, critiques, and ratings, as well as comments from editor-reader meetings, to help determine which books are translated into Japanese.

I was hesitant to take on this side job on top of all my other commitments, but I knew this opportunity would force me to read over 100 books a year in two of the age groups for which I am currently writing. Editors often urge writers to read at least 100 recently published books in the genre in which they write, and I had done this deliberately with picture books and adult books, and I had even spent an entire year in which I read nothing but short stories. But I had not yet managed this with young adult books. Being a publisher’s reader would be a perfect yearlong assignment for me as a writer.  Now, having passed the one-year mark, I have read over well 100 books—almost all novels, plus a few nonfiction works and graphic novels.

Beyond providing me the opportunity to read recently published or soon to be published books from some of the top publishing houses for young adult and middle-grade fiction, the task has benefitted me in other ways. Writing summaries forces me to discover and articulate the central plot and conflicts in a story. This paring down of a tale to its bare essence is an important skill for all fiction writers to develop, particularly essential for creating one’s own novel synopses. Writing critiques forces me to look closely at a book’s merits and weaknesses in order to attempt to fairly evaluate it. I learned to zero in on aspects of a book that might render it less likely to succeed in Japan, be they matters of language, relevance to readers, cultural bias or cultural specificity. The ratings challenged me to be selective and gave me a far better sense of an editor’s vantage point when faced with stacks of manuscripts.

Of the 100 books I read over the last year, the following are some of the selections that I rated highly: Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson, Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan, Defect by Will Weaver, Skin Hunger (part one of a trilogy) by Kathleen Duey, The Name of this Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch, The Entertainer and the Dybbuk by Sid Fleischman, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin, Wilderness by Roddy Doyle, and What I Was by Meg Rosoff.

I wasn’t sure if I would be able to continue with this work beyond a year, but now I find I don’t want to stop. I’m thinking, if I benefited this much in one year, surely I’ll benefit more in two. 

Friday, July 17, 2009

Suzanne Kamata interviewed in The Telegraph

Some of our readers will no doubt be interested to learn that SWET’s own Suzanne Kamata—author of Losing Kei and editor of Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering, The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan, and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child With Special Needs—was interviewed recently in The Telegraph:

Raising a mixed-race family in Japan can be hard

What’s it like bringing up mixed-race children in a country that likes homogeneity? Author Suzanne Kamata explains that it can be the mother of all experiences.

Learn more about Suzanne at her Web site or her blog.

(Thanks to Steven Horowitz for the tip)

Friday, July 10, 2009

First Time Out

So at Holly Thompson’s suggestion I’ve been asked to contribute to this blog and I’ve been casting around looking for things to write about which might be of interest to the SWET folks. I mean, I’m a poet. In the US, that announcement will clear most rooms in a real hurry. It is like announcing you have herpes and want to talk about it. Loudly. A few years back I was introduced as a writer to someone at the JALT conference and he asked me what sort of things I wrote. I told him and the expression on his face was really interesting. He looked as if I had just tried to feed him a spoonful of the most disgusting food of his childhood. He then got fist-on-the-hips belligerent and announced he hated Emily Dickinson. Glaring, he waited for my response. Jujitsu. He was completely deflated and defeated when I told him that I didn’t think much of her either.  But even with this common ground, our acquaintanceship was doomed and ended before the minute was up. 

But even coming from the fringes of respectability in the writing world, I may have something to say about issues common to most writers. So over the next few months I think I’ll talk a little about my experiences with submitting, rejection, acceptance, getting published, revision, community, money, serendipity, and anything else which holds at least my interest for a while.

By way of introduction, I’m a Southern Californian and Tokyo resident since 1993. While my primary writing activity is poetry, I do other things, too. For many years I’ve been involved with the Tokyo Writers Group, an ongoing cross-genre workshop which meets one Sunday a month in Takadanobaba. This year I’m one of the organizers of the Third Annual Japan Writers Conference, to be held Oct. 17-18 in Kyoto. I teach all sorts of English at two universities and for a Japanese government agency. In a prior lifetime I made my living in the music world as a teacher, player, peddler, and music therapist.

“Say Everything”: The First Bloggers

Scott Rosenberg’s new book on the origin and development of blogs is Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. His 5-minute video on the origins of blogs (back to 1993!) is at the Say Everything Web site. Long-time readers of the SWET Weblog remember my own post on the topic, “Weblogs,” in October 2004. It’s always interesting to find out the foundations, and Scott traces them back through the 18th century to cave paintings in his video.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Beware of the Piranhas

These seem to be particularly Japanese piranhas - my book is now for sale on Amazon.com, and Amazon.co.uk - go there and search for Beneath Gray Skies - you can even order a copy, if you want (please do order a copy - or two - or three).

But if you go to Amazon.co.jp, you will discover four “Out of print” books with the same title as this, categorized as “Japanese Books” (well, if things go well, you won’t see them any more but you would have done). These were preliminary editions, which got mucked up by the submission process and were withdrawn as active projects. Lulu somehow managed to get them up onto all the Amazons.

Also, you will find the real thing (the approved final version) there - which was available for pre-order (whatever that means - “pre-order” surely means “before you order”, not “before the thing is available”) at ¥2,130. Now it, too, is “out of print” and “limited availability”. So I wrote to Amazon, pointing out that this was a print-on-demand publisher:

My book, Beneath Gray Skies, published by Lulu in 9 x 6 US trade paperback format, with ISBN 978-0-557-06053-5 is available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk It used to be available on Amazon.co.jp for pre-order with a price being set, but is no longer available and is listed as “out of print”. Since this is a print-on-demand book, this is obviously incorrect.

Can you please ensure that this book is listed as being available, and let me know when it has been re-entered into the database.

Also, there are four versions of the book which should never have been listed, which are in the database as “out of print” and as “Japanese books”! Can you please remove these titles from the database.

The same day, I received a very polite reply in good English, promising to remove the four spurious titles, but:

Also, on our website, availability of items are updated based on the data from availability of our suppliers. Therefore, regardless new release books or published books, availability is updated as “Out of Stock” on our website when we don’t receive latest data from our suppliers.

Please note it is possible availability won’t be displayed as “In Stock” if we don’t receive the data from suppliers even if publishers do have the items on stock. We are sorry for this inconvenience.

Regarding availability, please offer availability information to publishers or VAN (please ask the suppliers you do business with), or please contact Osaka-ya EC department.

Osaka-ya Tokyo head office EC department
Phone number

Also, about the books in your inquiry, we have to ask you would contact each suppliers in order to keep the items on stock at warehouse of suppliers.

Osaka-ya Tokyo head office EC department
Nippan Net department
Nikkyo-han EC department
(phone numbers were provided for these as well)

Obviously, the idea of “print-on-demand” doesn’t really work for the Japanese Amazon. I have tried to educate them, but we will see if this bears any fruit at all (I started by thanking them for pulling the four non-editions from the list):

...the edition of my book that is for sale (Beneath Gray Skies, published by Lulu in 9 x 6 US trade paperback format, ISBN 978-0-557-06053-5) is listed as out of print. Since this is a print-on-demand book, it can never be in stock in the same way as a traditionally published book, and therefore may never be listed as “in stock” by Amazon Japan. However, it is not “out of print”.

Could you please reinstate the book in the catalog, and mark it as being “in print” with a note that it may take a week or two to deliver (which I believe is the standard practice with all print-on-demand publications).

I really do not understand why it was listed as “available for pre-order” on your site and then suddenly dropped to an “out of print” status. There is actually a market (maybe small, but still a market) for this book from my friends and colleagues here in Japan, and it would be good to have this, and all other titles published through this rapidly growing method, available in Amazon Japan, as they are in the other Amazon subsidiaries round the world.

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

Let’s see what happens next. The piranhas haven’t won yet!

PS In the meantime, you can always order from B&N, Amazon US or UK, or Lulu itself.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Google’s CAT tool is out of the bag

A little bit less than a year ago, I started seeing hints that Google was planning to develop a computer-assisted translation (CAT) tool of its own for use by human translators. I posted a link to one such article then, but have been waiting ever since to see what Google would come up with. As of this week, that wait is over. Google Translator Toolkit is now available to the public.

For anyone who is familiar with traditional CAT tools, Google Translator Toolkit will seem very familiar in terms of what it does, but how it does it is somewhat different from what you may be accustomed to in a CAT tool. The most significant difference is that Google automatically applies its own good-enough-for-gisting-purposes machine translation system to the source document, and then offers the results to the user for additional finessing.

This being a Google app, naturally the team that produced Google Translator Toolkit has prepared a short video describing what it does:

For the time being, Google Translator Toolkit is only available for translating English-language content into a number of other languages (namely these), but presumably the number of source languages it can handle will increase sometime soon. As a matter of professionalism, I generally avoid translating into languages I do not speak natively, so I will not attempt to write a review of Google Translator Toolkit at this point, but merely out of curiosity, I did try it out, using the About page of the SWET site as an example (click image to enlarge):

As you can see, Google’s machine translation contains a lot of obvious errors, but not all of it is entirely unusable. Better still, machine translations are only used if there are no matching translations provided by a human being, so assuming Google can get enough input from human translators, the quality of the matches should improve as well. Will Google actually be able to do that, though? That’s what everyone wants to know. Even at this early stage, it is clear that Google Translator Toolkit offers many of the features that a good CAT tool requires, but it also requires its users to trust Google with the content of whatever they are translating, which rules out using Google Translator Toolkit for anything confidential (which means most paid translation work).

What happens next is anyone’s guess, but the CAT’s out of the bag now. Look for updates in this space as Google Translator Toolkit matures.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Drifting down the Amazon

I make no apologies for writing about the progress of my novel, Beneath Gray Skies. Judging by the fact that I’ve had comments on the site and off about my previous blog posts on the subject, it seems to be something that is of interest to quite a few people. Maybe there are a lot of you out there wanting to take the plunge into self-publishing. If so, I am happy to share my experiences with you and provide assistance if required.

Well, I have to say that I (in company with the hundreds of thousands of other authors out there) am thrilled to see my work on Amazon and Barnes and Noble at last. I am pretty sure that it’s not the same as seeing piles of your books in a bookstore, and watching people rushing to the register with copies, though. Just having one physical book in your hand, with your very own words of fiction neatly printed in it s a real rush, I have to admit.

On the other hand, although you don’t have the joy of seeing your book on the store shelves, you don’t suffer the disappointment of witnessing someone actually pick up your book (hooray!), flip to the end (huh?), read the last page (spoilsport!), put it down (agh!), and then take the latest John Grisham to the cash desk (boo! hiss!) (actually, I think that when John Grisham writes well, he writes very well indeed, but I would be upset if I saw someone discard my book in favor of a Jeffery Archer offering!).

In Amazon’s favor, it’s almost certain that many more people are likely to stumble across your magnum opus on Amazon than in a bookstore, if you write a decent blurb, and tag the book properly, so the chances of an actual sale are probably greater. Reader reviews, whatever their general tenor, also show that there is some interest in the book. Even if someone writes:
This is the worst novel I have tried to read in years. The dialog sucks dead rotting whales through a straw, the characters are wooden, and the plot would stretch the credulity of a simple-minded 2-year-old.
it’s a review, after all, and you might even get some sales from people wanting to see just how bad it really is. As it happens, of course, I don’t believe that in my book either the dialog or characterization is poor, and the plot, though imaginative, is possible, if not plausible. Naturally, you may have other opinions if you read it for yourself (none-too-subtle hint), and if you do, I’d be delighted to see them on the Amazon or B&N site.

Of course, success breeds success, and one way to do this, apparently, is to have all your customers try to buy on the same day, thereby pushing up the numbers. So if anyone feels like buying the book, please do it on a Friday - and that way it may look like a mini-stampede as both customers race for the checkout clutching a copy, driving Beneath Gray Skies to the dizzy sales ranking of 189,343.

But for now, it’s just a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

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