When I found out that Jessie Kwak released a new book on writing books, I decided to order it straight from the source at Microcosm Publishing. From Chaos to Creativity serves as such an effective manual, I figured the ability to pick up one of her books and thumb through it for the tips I needed was worth the paper. Then last week, as I recuperated from a medical procedure, I thought I’d break into it to see what pearls it had to offer.

Listen to Episode 15 with Joe Biel, Founder and Manager of Microcosm Publishing.

As soon as I opened From Big Idea to Book: Create a Writing Process that Brings You Joy, I had to reach for my laptop and boot up Evernote. After reading From Chaos to Creativity, I should have known Jessie Kwak’s newest would be similarly packed to the gills with amazing quotes, vividly illustrated concepts, and a Matryoshka doll’s worth of book recommendations. It requires quite a bit more attention than an afternoon on the couch with no notetaking equipment in hand can afford.

This book is a great balance of practical exercises and psychological insights about different facets of the writing craft and process. It’s an excellent starting point for people who want guidance on their process of getting a book ready for publication, or even a midpoint for people who have done it before and want to sharpen their systems. In fact, it might be sufficient for many as a manual for the whole process (although, it is also redolent of recommendations to books on craft, creativity, and productivity).

In similar fashion as in From Chaos to Creativity, this book gives the reader ample space to be themselves and focus on what works best for them. “As I’ll be saying over and over and over in this book,” she says, “you do you.”

What You’ll Find in From Big Idea to Book

From Big Idea to Book is organized into the three major stages of work on a book and addresses issues faced by both fiction and nonfiction authors.

Planning

This book manages to walk an idiosyncratic line. Imagination and inspiration are not treated as elusive beasts to be tamed or to be dismissed as imaginary. The first chunk of the book includes ways to pin down ideas, then allow them to grow, change, or make room for different ones altogether.

Drafting

There is no sugar-coating how difficult it is to make it through the process of drafting an actual book; writers have to negotiate the unexpected behavior of characters, mental blocks waiting around unexpected bends in the plot, and corners where authors accidentally trap themselves. Fortunately, there are plenty of exercises and suggestions made for how to climb over, push through, or chart a new path.

Revising

The latter portion is for folks who want help during the last stretch, where the work is polished into something shiny and enticing. The revising section also includes a breakdown of different types of editors and where they fit into different stages of writing a book. She also discusses alpha readers and beta readers and how they can let writers see their book through the eyes of the people that will hopefully love it!

Key Takeaways and Tools

The following are three themes of From Big Idea to Book that really meant something to me.

The Value of Inverting One’s Thinking

A lot of the suggestions in this book invite the reader to think about different steps of the writing process from new perspectives. An early example is challenging the idea that idea generation, outlining, and plotting a book are different from “writing” a book. Under the header Planning is Writing, Jessie points out how many writers rush through the planning process because they have been taught word count is everything. She reminds us that activities like going for walks, talking through our ideas with friends, and even just staring into space, are all important parts of the writing process.

Another mental trick she mentions was suggested in one of her writer’s groups to someone who was struggling with being blocked: “What if you just tell yourself you aren’t a writer anymore?” The question was meant to inspire the person to express their creativity for a while in alternate ways, and to free them from the mental frameworks writers build around themselves that ultimately hold them back.

That particular idea hit me in a really personal way, because it was something I tried myself. All my life I’d had these ideas of what it was to be a writer inside my head—all the ways my life should work, the times of day I should write, the way I see the world. Then one day, I said, “What if I just am not a writer?” 

Instead of depressing me, the thought freed me as if from handcuffs I’d lost the keys to years earlier. I went on to learn a ton about publishing business, marketing, and design—the things that go into creating books, websites, and other print and digital publications that don’t involve “being a writer.” Now that I’ve turned back to writing both fiction and nonfiction myself, I feel comfortable inhabiting a writer’s identity again. The lessons I’ve learned in the meantime have shown me there are many different ways to be a writer and to do the actual work. The possible amazing outcomes of flipping the way we think about ourselves and our work can’t be overstated

Practice Self-Examination—but in Moderation

Jessie suggests activities suggested at each point in the writing process from free writing to fully walking away from one’s desk. These activities are meant to get writers unstuck when they have a mental block or an element of their plot that makes sense. They can also help them empower the ideas that have the greatest go-power. However, there are limits to how much one can and should reflect before falling into the trap of overthinking. Kwak encourages readers to go through reflective exercises, but when the time comes to write—turn off all distractions and write.

One of my favorite topics discussed is how to write through drafts without stopping and revising as one goes, a struggle for many of us. A major theme is silencing the critical voice. Informed by the words of authors like Anne Lamott, who suggests (to paraphrase) letting the voice shout itself out and then silencing it to move on. Kwak also Twitter-sourced thoughts from other writers regarding how they move through this troublesome stage.

Author Jordan L. Hawk mentioned that every time a turn of phrase in a sentence bothers him, instead of fixing it, he’ll just write “[ugh]” and continue writing. This is almost exactly what I try to do when I write my own drafts (and anyone who has shared a Google doc with me—including my clients—can attest to this quirk). The difference is, Hawk claims that when he goes back to read those sentences, they’re usually left as is (though I can’t say that’s the case for me).

Look for Joy at Every Stage

“Joy” is right there in the book title, and it shows up again and again throughout the text. One thing Jessie reminds readers to do is to celebrate every milestone of book creation. That means every finished outline, draft, or revision. She also has a wealth of ideas for bringing pleasure to those supposedly duller points in the writing process. She talks about how self-editing, which is the most plodding and unpleasant part for many authors, is actually one of her favorites because it helps her bring the book closer to everything she’d imagined it could be. Jessie says, “This is also where I can waste a lot of time going over and over a scene, tweaking words and digging for gold.”

There are quite a few references to digging and excavating and caving and mining, and I believe these images are truly effective to describe the work of completing a book. Ultimately, writers are digging down inside themselves and getting under the surface of the world around them to find the stories they and their readers will treasure.

I’m happy that I added this book to my writing and publishing bookshelf. I’ll be referencing it the next time I get started on a book of my own and probably at all the hurdles I hit along the way. 

Buy From Big Idea to Book here, and get Jessie’s first book From Chaos to Creativity here.

The post From Big Idea to Book by Jessie Kwak — Planning, Drafting, and Revising with Joy first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post From Big Idea to Book by Jessie Kwak — Planning, Drafting, and Revising with Joy appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.

Publishing methods, opportunities, and battle fronts have multiplied more over the last twenty years than ever before. Author and researcher John B. Thompson walks us through the archipelago of these issues in Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing (2021, Polity Press). It examines the anxieties, realities, and shifting sands of publishing in the 2000s and 2010s, focusing heavily on the results of technological leaps and the tech companies who have developed along with them.

“The publishing ecosystem is now more complex than ever and no single model of communication flows could adequately capture the multiplicity of systems that are now in play…”

Boy is it! In Book Wars, we get a starting point to find out just how complex it can be.

The Author and His Research Methods

Author, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge, and emeritus fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, John B. Thompson, went at this project with all the gusto of your favorite TV detective mapping and solving a massive conspiracy. Over the course of researching and writing this book, Thompson conducted 180 interviews with various publishing and tech professionals between 2013 and 2018. That’s in addition to the over 200 he conducted previously for his 2013 book Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. He also pored over and analyzed massive amounts of data to chart and demonstrate his points.

In this book, Thompson sought to address an idea that is at once straightforward and endlessly complex: what was the impact of the digital revolution on Anglo-American trade publishing? To put a finer point on it, what happens when the oldest of our media industries collides with the greatest technological revolution of our time?

Spoiler alert! Despite how technology has generated multiple sources of entertainment including more visual programming we could possibly watch in a single lifetime, the book is not sleeping with the fishes. It’s alive and well, and has increased in form and number at a rate comparable to cellular mitosis. Below are a few of the major topics and transformations that Book Wars covers.

Tech Companies’ and Traditional Publishers’ Struggle for Dominance

Major tech players, the most notable being Amazon, have changed the way people peruse and purchase books. Before the digital revolution, publishers never could have predicted how influential a single online retailer would be, or how Google would make it their mission to scan and post whole sections of books in order to increase their search engine traffic. The ascent of these two companies and their impact on traditional publishing alone each make up one chapter.

Book Wars goes into some literal court battles between publishers and tech companies. In particular, it wades into the conflict mentioned above between the Google Library Project and the American Association of Publishers (AAP). It also explains the lawsuit involving Amazon, alleging that Apple Books and five major publishers engaged in price fixing. An interesting angle I learned was how Amazon is a monopsony rather than a monopoly when it comes to the book industry. The word means a single buyer has singular sway over a market, and Amazon’s role as a buyer rather than a seller often protects it from antitrust lawsuits.

Data Collection: A Major Game Changer

To quote mathematician Clive Humby, “Data is the new oil,” and data collection has been pivotal for not just retailer success, but for publishers and book industry startups as well. Thompson calls data collection “information capital” and points out how easily it can be converted into “economic capital” (aka profits). This fact makes it so the major retailers, who have access to all kinds of data on buyer behavior, are able to exploit major advantages.

While Amazon is wealthy with “new oil”, smaller, nontraditional publishing startups have also benefited from data collection and used it internally to grow business. Wattpad, who features heavily in “Chapter 11: Storytelling in Social Media,” built their business using data from fanfiction writers and the people who followed and interacted with their serialized fiction. The company was able to measure what types of content were most engaging to users, then use that information to nurture writers into creating original content for the platform.

Thompson also makes a very interesting point about an unintended consequence on user data and Amazon’s algorithm. Specifically, he discusses the diversity of recommendations that other bookshops are able to offer, rather than the predictability and sameness of what an algorithm delivers to readers.

The Growing Influence of the Reader

In the digital age, readers are stronger and more vocal than ever. While, yes, that means lots of data and information is harvested and used to influence them, it also means they themselves have a huge influence on which books see the light of day. This book shows you the many ways in which that’s true, including when it comes to visibility and book sales as well as being able to publish in the first place.

“Chapter 8: Crowdfunding Books,” goes into the advantages and limitations of crowdfunding and highlights companies who focus specifically on using these fundraising methods for book publishing. Thompson emphasizes a point we’ve explored on the show, which is the fact that both self-publishers and traditional publishers can use crowdfunding not just to get their own books out, but to gauge interest and predict whether a book will sell. Thompson uses the story of former Hybrid Pub Scout guest Margot Atwell to demonstrate just what the process of crowdfunding a book looks like (a pretty great illustration, if we do say so ourselves).

Listen to our interview with Margot Atwell of Kickstarter.

Disrupted Publishing Workflows and Pricing Experiments

What would an examination of the digital revolution in book publishing be without an exploration of self-publishing options? The history of Kindle Direct Publishing is, of course, widely covered, but it is also balanced with input from Smashwords founder Mark Coker. He offers some comments on the trajectory of self-published authors on Amazon, which we’ve had guests corroborate on the show from time to time as well.

“If Amazon owns the soil, the land, the access to the customers and if they own you, if 100 percent of your income is dependent on Amazon’s good graces, you have lost your independence and control: you’re a tenant farmer.”

With all the new ways of conveying content to readers, companies have been experimenting with pricing models and workflows to adapt to a changing landscape. Thompson gets into success stories and stories of companies that tried and failed to make their businesses profitable. Content itself, whether it’s purchased backlists, self-published authors’ works, or serialized fiction, is expensive and can be challenging for people trying to profit from (not to mention justify second rounds of venture capital).

Listen to our discussion with self-published author Brianne Marie Robinson.

Conclusion

For people like us who are exploring the publishing frontier, Thompson has created a massive atlas to help us navigate this complicated terrain. I would venture to say that the book isn’t closed yet, especially since we had not yet been struck by the COVID-19 pandemic when the book went to press. Book Wars is an important tool and framework for understanding the forces that have shaped publishing as we know it since the first emergence of the e-book, and will help us contextualize what is waiting around the corner.

Buy a copy of Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing.

The post Book Wars—A Full-Scale Investigation of the Effects of Tech on Publishing first appeared on Hybrid Pub Scout.

The post Book Wars—A Full-Scale Investigation of the Effects of Tech on Publishing appeared first on Hybrid Pub Scout.