You Can't Break Grammar Rules You Don't Know

 The last two indie published books I read (by two different authors mind you) were the same. Not in plotting or characters but in the fact that they existed on single sentence and single sentence fragment paragraphs. As in, almost the entire book was written this way with the authors hitting "enter" instead of the space bar after each sentence. 

Most people don't know anything about grammar except "rules were made to be broken." If you fall in that group, it isn't something to brag about any more than you should brag you are among those who know how to swim just enough to get yourself (or someone else) drowned. Personally, if you haven't taken at least one writing course at a college ranked in the top 100 in the U.S. or top 500 internationally by U.S. News and World Report, you need cough up the money hire an editor (and an editor is always good even if you have met the above requirement). I know, I am being harsh, but an unedited book doesn't just harm its author, it harms all indie authors. It keeps them from being accepted into contests for the traditionally published and encourages editors at traditional publishing companies to toss submissions from unsolicited authors without reading them. 

However, I am fair, I will explain what a sentence is (in case you were flirting with the kid next to you instead of listening in your high school class), what a paragraph is, and when sentence fragments may be appropriate. 

A sentence must have a subject and a verb. She ran. When I homeschool my children, I don't accept sentences under eight words. As you can tell reading this post, I practice what I teach (for the most part--I don't generally go back and edit my blogging posts). Short sentences have their place: They increase tension; they are great for young, new readers; they can stylistically be used to flush out a specific character's nuances through dialogue, and if someone knows how to use them correctly, they can contribute to an experimental or poetic work. If you didn't get a full on B.A. in English from one of the abovementioned colleges, don't even think you can craft something in that last category, please. I hate to say "no," but the fact of the matter is that one in a million people can do something like that without any training and 500,000 in a million will think they are that one. 

An incomplete sentence or sentence fragment, can be short or long and can have both a subject and a verb, but it is dependent on more information to form a complete thought. Into the night, the butterfly flitting left and right, fully abandoning myself to the freedom. That was a fragment. I know you are probably thinking that is just a jumble of nonsense and could never be a sentence. Try adding "I followed" at the beginning: I followed, into the night, the butterfly flitting left and right, fully abandoning myself to the freedom.

Fragments can be tricky. Most indie authors I read get overexcited about putting them in everyone's dialogue because they believe that is how people really talk. For one character, that could work. In response to a question in a tense moment, that could work. However, speaking in fragments denotes a character of lower intelligence (or one who wants you to think s/he is dumb). If you actually listened to people, you would soon discover that most use complete sentences in their dialogue most of the time. 

Another rule I have for my children are that their paragraphs must always be at least five sentences, but I am much more flexible on this. First, variety in paragraph size is a good thing. It adds interest to what you are reading. Second, whenever a new character talks, it needs to be a new paragraph:

"Will you go home with me?"

"No!"

"Why not?

"The game isn't over!"

The above is a perfectly natural stream of one-sentence paragraphs. However, when that is the way you wrote your entire book without rhyme or reason, it is like going to a movie and finding out the only background music through the adventurous parts, through the romantic parts, and through the comedic parts, is the same pounding four bars of music over and over and over and over and over again. You also would not want to write an entire book of back and forth one-liner dialogue. 

In high school, we were given paragraphs and told to find the main idea and then list the supporting details. Read your paragraph, and see if any of the supporting details ended up in the next paragraph (or next five paragraphs if you have resorted to mistaking the space bar for the "enter" key). Or pay a good editor to fix it (i.e., not an editor who is like, "Oh, you are such a creative genius for not using standard paragraph and sentence structure.")

Tricksy Amazon: The Real Amazon Royalty

 Amazon advertises a high royalty rate--up to 60%--on its print books. But have you ever looked at the price you put in and then looked at the calculated price you will be getting and scratched your head? 

Even a person who has basic math skills can figure out they are not getting the promised percentage. The trick is that Amazon deducts printing costs AFTER figuring out your royalties. So, if you sell a book for $8.99 and they give you a 50% royalty rate but the book costs $3.28 to print, the deduction comes out of your "royalties."

$8.99 x 50% = $4.495  - $3.28  = $1.215 

Now, Amazon is kind in that they will actually give you $1.22 because of rounding. That, as you might realize is nowhere near the $4.495 on the list price. 

Normally, the printing cost would be taken out first since the rest is the profit:

$8.99  -  $3.28  = $5.71 x 50%  = $2.855

However, Amazon can do whatever it wants because it is offering authors a way to get their books printed and distributed without the approval of a publishing house. It also isn't technically charging you anything to do it like vanity presses would. 

Still, it is important for you to know just how much you are making when you set prices. In the above case, it would be 13.6% of the set price or 21.4% of the net price after printing costs. This can make it difficult for two reasons. First, when you are deciding on book prices, you need to be competitive while making a profit. In some cases, the way of calculating the profit for you is difficult to calculate. The percent you earn is not stable and changes based on the price of your book. 

It is also devious. You are not getting a true 50% royalty. A "royalty" is a percent of the sale or a per sale flat rate given to an author for the use of their material. Here, Amazon sells your material, but it does not pay you a 50% rate based on the list price or on the net income from the sale. In actuality, Amazon charges you 50% of your book's list price as a sort of undisclosed "listing fee." It then charges you printing costs out of what is left. You are technically paying them to be your vanity press on a per book basis. 

The second problem with this is that you are not going to find many traditional book publishers who will negotiate a 50% royalty rate. If you are approached by a traditional publisher who is offering 25% royalties, you might balk because Amazon is "giving you 40-60%." In actuality, you would be making more money with the traditional publisher. (Don't get scammed--the only reason a traditional publisher would contact you about your already self-published book is if your book goes viral. If you aren't already making a good chunk of change and someone approaches you, read the fine print--they probably just want you to pay them money for something.) There are some people, however, who might be trying to go the traditional route and who get an offer for their book. If they have considered self-publishing on Amazon, they could think it makes them more money when it does not. 

Obviously, I use Amazon to publish my books, and I have recently started using IngramSpark. In my opinion, Amazon has the better deal, but I haven't used IngramSpark enough to make a final decision. A lot more goes into what a print-on-demand company has to offer than just printed books. For example, do your books get more sales because their marketing plans work better? Amazon is meh about free advertising in my opinion. You have to get a boatload of reviews before you will even start ranking in their lists. However, despite the huge chunk of change Amazon charges and the little you get in return for it, I like the freedom of printing my own stuff. 

Why AI Sucks and People Who Argue Are Trying to Sell Something

 About fifteen years ago, there were videos all over YouTube, websites, and advertisements promoting that you could get rich quick by hiring a freelancer to write your book(s) and then publishing them on Amazon or other platforms. Like any get-rich-quick scheme, these were bologna. Good freelancers cost money that most people couldn't afford to invest. If they did, they would soon discover that they then needed to come up with the money and time to market the book. This can cost four to five times as much as getting the book published. 

Now, all those get-rich-quick schemes have rebooted with AI in the place of freelancers--after all, you can use AI for free all over the web. In addition to the plagiarism problems that also happen with freelancers, you now have serious issues with the quality of AI writing. It's garbage. 

I came across an ad today talking about how it is the person's problem and not the AI's fault if the AI gives you garbage. This is another big fat lie. Obviously, the ad said, you aren't giving the AI enough information to do a good job. I could die laughing at this one as I am struggling to get my favorite free AI to generate the book cover I have envisioned for The Inconvenient Sister. 

First, you may ask why I am struggling with AI that isn't putting out what I want when there are plenty of other platforms. My biggest reason is because I have worked with other AI, and I also know its limitations. I think we are about as good as we are going to ever get with it. I also don't want to spend time looking for something that may or may not exist. Deep AI does a variety of things for free without requiring me to sign in. I need the image generator and right now, I haven't found too many free image generators. Feel free to leave a comment if you have one you like. 

So, let's address the problem that the ad mentioned--not specific instructions. 

Here is what I put in the prompt: "1750s dressed 28-year-old man with long, black, braid and green eyes and white cravat next to a 20-year old corseted woman with brown hair in bun and blue eyes standing in street." To me, this is pretty specific. I have gone into even more detail with the imagery and found that at a certain point the AI breaks down and doesn't give me anything better. I think with this prompt, which has been expanded as I see issues in the picture, it has too much information for the AI to process. I will probably have to ditch the ages. 

Now, AI could get this wrong in a variety of ways that I have not specified. For example, it could (and does) give me tons of non-period clothing even though I specified 1750s because I did not detail each piece of clothing they are wearing. However, it also totally screws up the things I have been clear about. I get men with 10 braids and women with braids. I get men with no braid and a man bun. I even get two cross-dressing women. Most irritating is that I get men with dark brown eyes and women with auburn hair instead of brown hair. Those two things I have been very specific about, so I cannot understand how anyone could support AI that screws that up. I have gone through about 100 images right now, so I will cut out some of the details and see if I can get it to go better for me. Since these things should be easy enough to find, especially 1750s clothing and hazel eyes, it is extremely irritating that the AI can't figure it out.