A hearty thanks to James Wells for hosting the last SP 101!
Before getting started, if you're in the Bellingham, WA area, I'll mention his book launch for The Great Symmetry at 7 pm this Saturday.
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Does anyone remember the PlayPump?
PlayPumps were merry-go-rounds designed with the idea that the energy of kids playing could be put to good use pumping water from a well.
PlayPumps were advertised as huge improvements over the hand pumps Africans struggled with for years. Laura Bush announced $16.4 million in U.S. funds to install PlayPumps across southern Africa. Steve Case, the founder of America Online, pledged $5 million. Jay-Z filmed a short piece that aired on MTV to try to raise even more funds. PlayPumps became a huge cause.
Pictures online abound of happy kids playing on PlayPumps. On the surface, it seems like a great idea. The problem is that no one ever really asked anyone who used one daily about how well they worked.
Owen Scott is a Canadian engineer who blogged about his experiences in Malawi.
Blogging online about the PlayPumps in 2009, he asked:
How often do you get to hear about the results of a development project from the people who are actually using it? Not that often. Most of what you hear gets filtered through layers of PR. Well, with post, I’m trying to change that. It might end up being a bit anticlimactic, but read on for an on-the-ground consumer review of a new piece of “development” technology.
Owen drove out to see one of the PlayPumps in action and arrived to find two women struggling to turn the PlayPump. They stopped and observed that water was being pulled up into a tank (because it wasn’t full) before it came down into her bucket.
When the PlayPump was installed, the hand pump that used to exist was removed and replaced in the name of progress.
Owen asked the woman which she preferred, the hand pump or the PlayPump. The woman responded that she far preferred the old hand pumps because they were easier to use and filled buckets quicker.
Scott compared how long it took each to fill a 20-liter bucket:
- Traditional hand pump – 28 seconds
- PlayPump – 3 minutes 7 seconds
The purpose of this discussion is not to denigrate the inventors of the PlayPump. On the contrary, we need people to take chances with new ideas. The purpose, rather, is to highlight the importance of receiving good feedback at the appropriate time. If PlayPump or the development organizations sponsoring PlayPump had run a realistic pilot, they would have realized some of the key failings of the design.
Here's some ways you can get feedback to prevent your book from becoming a PlayPump.
1. Blog
It's hard for me to believe I've been blogging since 2004. Some friends of mine put together a website called The Cincinnati Dealer. It was a local version of The Onion.
We made fun of local politics and Cincinnati.
Later, in 2007 after reading George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, I started a blog called The Reckoner about how to frame issues in a progressive manner. All my old content is still on my author site.
In one of my first articles, In Search of an Objective Media, I wrote about how we should reframe the media:
You know you’ve heard it. The dreaded “liberal media” label that has sent scores of journalists scurrying to defend themselves against accusations of bias. Conservatives love the liberal media frame because it has been tremendously effective for them. Rather than deal directly with an argument, just dismiss it as liberal. You’ve always got a scapegoat and convenient distractive tactic when things are going badly – blame the press!
It's a little painful for me to read my old articles these days because I've learned many things since then and they seem a little dated. My early pieces were often summaries of things I'd read (
The Most Important Economic Theorem You've Never Heard Of). Or sometimes, I'd try to flesh out a new way to present an idea I'd read about. Or sometimes, I'd put something together in a way I thought was original (
I'm a liberal. I eat at Applebee's).
Though somewhat painful to read now, blogging helped me think through ideas and improve.
I learned that I could advocate for almost any liberal issue using 5 themes or values: democracy, freedom, mutual responsibility, equality, and a working economy/economy for everyone. I learned that framing was much more than what I initially thought it was (messaging). I learned that I could win far more people over if I started from these values, rather than beliefs.
These themes became the basis of my book and some of the better pieces made the book in one form or another. The best part, because I'd blogged them in some form or another, was that I had a good idea of what worked and what didn't from the feedback.
One note, this strategy is probably best for non-fiction or "how to" type material. It works great for politics. There might be some benefit though to blogging about fiction books you're writing if you could find the right venue. I've seen people do it here in different ways in R&B Lovers.
2. Publish segments
This strategy is similar to blogging with a slight difference, you publish entire segments. This strategy is similar to workshopping parts of a novel or short stories in a fiction workshop. The only difference is that you're doing it online.
I didn't use this strategy because it didn't fit the way I write. I found blogging, where I would later reshape the content into something more appropriate for a book, to fit my style better.
Sites like Critique Circle are built to allow writers to workshop materials. Groups like R&B Lovers here at Daily Kos also seem like they would be open to reading segments and offering feedback. I'm sure there's others.
People who can write in this fashion, I think of them as serial writers (I've heard others refer to them as Pantsers), like Dickens, amaze me. I have to write through the entire thing and then re-write it several times.
What the serial format allowed Dickens to do, however, was adjust books according to feedback. When his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to negatively stereotype dwarfs, Dickens made her a more rounded character.
A present day analogy is the TV serial.
Elizabeth Lozano and Arvind Singhal write about television soap operas:
Audiences often welcome the traits of a serial's heroes and heroines, suggest solutions, cheer or boo the shows, praise their realism or, in its absence, criticize them for falling short of audience expectations.
Mad Men changed in Season 4 as a result of viewer fatigue with Don Draper's home life. People wanted to get back to the office and so Matthew Wiener and the shows writers moved the show back to the office with the firm Sterling Cooper
starting over as Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.
Finished pieces or chapters published online can help you determine what's working and the future direction of your book.
3. Workshop
Workshopping allows you to present a segment of your book or a short story to a small group of other writers. You can often do this through any university that has a writing program. If you want something a little less formal, look for writing programs in your community.
I've done this through the University of Cincinnati.
Workshops at UC were open to people outside of the literature department. You simply needed to write something for the class or have something that you wanted to workshop.
The benefits of this were several:
- Feedback from writers with experience including professors who typically had published.
- Deadlines that forced you to get something together.
- Practice giving feedback to others
- An opportunity to revise and see how revisions worked.
I did find that the quality of the workshops varied depending on who taught them and the make-up of the classes. Overwhelmingly, my experience was positive. However, one workshop was dominated by the professor's opinion.
I don't know as I have enough experience with workshops to generalize this as a rule, but in my limited experience, it seemed that the less famous the author, the better the workshop. Take this with a grain of salt as this is based on a very small sample.
The other downside to university workshops is the cost. Community workshops might be an option if cost is an issue.
4. Reviews of advance copies
One of the things I liked best about print-on-demand (POD) technology is that you can print copies of your book for a reasonable price before you publish it.
Here's what I mean by reasonable. Through Kinko's, at $.07 a page, a single copy of a draft costs $17.50. To print 20 copies for review would cost $350. This is not cheap.
Through IngramSpark, I could purchase 20 copies for roughly $80-100. This is less than a third of the cost for reviews.
Now I could have used an electronic format for review. This would have eliminated that cost. However, since my book was going to be a paperback, I wanted my final reviewers to have something that looked like a final product. I think it makes a difference.
Some quick notes about reviewers:
- Ask at least twice as many people as you want feedback from.
- Look for people who are either writers or know your subject matter (if non-fiction).
- Give them a reasonable deadline. Say you need any feedback in 2-3 weeks. Even if they haven't finished.
- Allow time afterwards to make changes.
- Thank them profusely and include this thanks in your book.
- Don't argue with them about comments. Simply thank them and if you decide not to use their feedback in certain areas, that is your prerogative.
- If you are on a schedule to release the book at a certain date, make sure there is enough time in your schedule for review.
The added benefit of having people review in this fashion is that you have a small core group of people who are familiar with your work who might also be able to help you with posting early reviews when your book is published to the larger world.
5. Publish papers or present
This tends to work best for non-fiction.
I'm working right now on an upcoming book about Agile development. I was asked to help write this book, believe it or not, based on my first book about democracy. It might be a little tough to see a connection between the two, but they're both about culture.
I didn't know much about Agile before I started. As a former software engineer, however, I was quite familiar with traditional development approaches. Also, having worked for startups, Agile quickly made sense. Especially because the ideas are relatively simple and I'm working with someone who has been an Agile coach for years.
In the development cycle, I've built in time for a review (because the content is new to me and writing a book is new to my co-author).
Meanwhile, as I'm writing, I'm looking for opportunities to test my ideas. I found a local Agile group that meets monthly and made friends with a couple people there. I asked one person to lunch to talk about the subject as he had some expertise talking about emotional intelligence in Agile environments.
We also submitted an article and had it accepted for publication as a precursor to the book.
In addition, I found an opportunity here in town to present on the subject to a non-profit organization. I put together a presentation called Agile in 8 Minutes to explain some of the concepts and lead a discussion about Agile in non-profits. My presentation is this Monday (wish me luck as I still feel like I'm fumbling around with all of this!).
Summary
I'd like to close with a short poem I wrote in a poetry workshop. Having workshopped the poem and received feedback at a poetry reading, I'm reasonably confident that you'll enjoy it.
Sunday School
When you weren't old enough to go to church
You went to Sunday school
Where the lady who resembled Moses
Gave out gum to the good.
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The beauty of feedback and rewriting is that it gives you confidence people will like the end result. You may or may not have enjoyed my verse, but I at least know people laughed when I read it (it was a delayed laugh, like a Stephen Wright joke laugh, but people laughed).
As I've grown and gotten more and more used to the idea of feedback, I've also found that it's become an approach to life for me.
Once upon a time, I dreaded feedback. Now, I don't see myself as writing in a vacuum and I enjoy the hell out of learning new things from people.
How have you gotten feedback on your work? What do you prefer and why? And/or how has it helped you?
Guest Hosting: If anyone is interested in guest hosting SP 101 and talking about an aspect of self-publishing, please shoot me a kosmail. The series is moving bi-monthly and I hope to have 1 guest author a month. That way you'll hear from people other than me and my poetry! ;)
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule:
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David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy.