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Marking: the Contract

18/5/2016

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It's the end of the semester and I have started marking papers (that's grading for you USians). I think I an honestly say that it is the hardest part of my job: harder than writing new lectures, harder than encouraging very frustrated students to try again, harder than reading the end-of-term module evaluations where the students get to say what they want about me and about how the class went. Marking is both exciting and, well, not. I get to see where my students have ended up after 12 weeks of hard work; and I get to see where my students have ended up after 12 weeks. 

We teachers do a lot to make sure we are fair and consistent in our marking. We have meetings about it, we second mark or moderate (this is where we mark behind someone else, and then see whether the mark we would give a paper meets up with the original mark), and we talk about it. A lot. The students trust us to be fair, and we do everything in our power to be. But it is still difficult. Sometimes a paper is *almost* there, but not quite. We see the hard work that goes into these papers; we know how stressed-out our students get. But, in the end, it's what's on the paper that counts. 

In that way, it's like anything that I write--fiction or non-fiction. I can't sit on my reader's shoulder and explain what I meant here, or what I thought they'd understand there. All there is, is what's on the paper in front of them. There's a contract between reader and writer, and there's a contract between teacher and student. 

You hold up your end, I'll hold up mine.

Here, have a photo of Queen Elizabeth I, from the inside of Hatfield House.​


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Continuing Self-Pub Saga: Doing PR Without a Buffer

15/5/2016

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If you've been playing along at home, you'll remember the last post where I described what I went through to self-publish a pair of short stories on Amazon in order to learn the steps of actually doing the thing. What I didn't think about was what came after:

Selling the stories. To the public. Those people out there: the ones with money.

Following a set of physical steps to go from A to B is easy. It's the mental work that's difficult. Every other time I've sold fiction, I've done so in an anthology or magazine market. That means that someone in a position of authority decided my work was good enough to pay me money. The fiction had been deemed good enough to send out into the world with their brand on it. Plugging that work was easy. I mean, it was still weird--asking people to buy what you're selling always is, and likely always will be--but those stories had a patina of respectability. 

Asking people to pay for something you've decided on your own is some level of "good enough" is embarrassing, to put it bluntly. I'm not only asking people to trust my writing, I'm asking them to trust me. This is difficult in the writing world, especially in the SFF world, and especially if you're a woman in this world.

Last night the Nebulas were handed out, and the awards were almost all given to women, some of them women of color (the one man who won, George Miller, did so for Mad Max: Fury Road, not exactly a total dude movie, eh?). The fact that women writers swept the awards has been on my news feed all morning. I'm sure it is driving many of the RPs and SPs a bit daffy (which is a GOOD thing). But it's the fact that it's news that women swept the awards that is important; too often SFF is still seen as a white guy's game, regardless of evidence to the contrary. People are often surprised when I mention what I write, especially in some academic circles. Add in the attitude toward self-publishing, and you can see how doing my own PR for my own work that no one else gave me permission to sell can be difficult. Is difficult. 

At this point, I'm not 100% sure what to do about it, other than possibly re-read Amanda Palmer's The Art of Asking, and remind myself of the question I used to ask myself five or six years ago when I doubted and wondered why me: why NOT me? 

If I wait around for someone else to give me permission to try to be awesome, I will wait forever. 

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Self-Publishing: A Tiny Saga

3/5/2016

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Because I am a lecturer in publishing and I teach creative writing, self-publishing often comes up in conversation in class. My only knowledge of it was from friends--their successes and failures--and from what I see on Twitter (that is, the constant spam from some writers). So I decided to try it out for myself, to get an idea of the steps required to go from manuscript to "book". I didn't do it with the idea of making any money; some things are done for the experience, not the results.

First up, I needed something to publish:
I've had some short stories floating around, pieces I've gotten good feedback on, but pieces without secure homes because they're just odd and hard to place. I chose two: "Hill Witch" and "Litter." They don't share a genre (one is dark fantasy the other post-apocalyptic science fiction), but they share a theme: the consequences of accepting help from others. I also believe in the idea that things you like go together because they're yours, like odd soft furnishings. So these are my throw-pillow stories!

Then, I needed to decide which platform to use:
There are dozens out there, but I decided to go with the big guns (you know, the one that starts with A and ends with mazon). Their KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) platform walks you through the whole process. 

Next, I had to set up my account and deal with the tax thing:
Easy enough.

Of utmost importance, I had to get a cover made:
There are people out there who make covers for self-publishing writers; they are easy enough to find on the internet. But I wanted to give work (and money) to a creative person I know, or someone I could get to know. Luckily, a friend of a friend is an artist and designs covers, so I sent him the stories and my ideas, along with a list of themes and images in the stories. He sent back this awesome cover. The contrast is especially striking and looks great even when the cover is a thumbnail--something to keep in mind when self-pubbing!

Then I just had to follow the steps:
The site talked me through the businessy stuff (titles, subtitles, categories, descriptions, keywords, and--very important--royalties). It also allows the user to see what the book will look like on a Kindle. This is a vital step because it's where you see all the boo-boos. I fixed and re-loaded the file half a dozen times before I thought it was right. (And even then I was wrong! Please, don't be like me and do this late at night and in a hurry because you promised to discuss it with your students the next day!)

Finally, you click "publish":
And then the next night, as you are listening to a publishing-industry professional explain the ebook business to your students, it dawns on you that you're a total idiot and used the word "Bibliography" instead of "Biography" on the last page of your manuscript. (Because you're an academic and used to the last page of nearly everything containing a list of works cited!) So then you go home, click "unpublish," fix the damn thing, "click "publish" again, and then turn your attention to PR. And that's where things get...uncomfortable.

​[to be continued in the next post]

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    Tiffani Angus

    Mostly thoughts on writing and the creative life.

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