these crimes of illusion

by phill

inDisaster:

So right now I’m wrestling with Adobe inDesign trying to figure out how to create margins and borders, how to get gutters to spread evenly, and how the fuck I’m going to do the bleed effects that I’d like to include. I may seem like a traitor to myself using an Adobe product, given how much I despise their .pdf reader software, and I do feel somewhat dirty when that big ol’ splash screen comes up. But it has to be said that they really don’t have a peer when it comes to their creative suite. So far it’s been less of the struggle I thought it would be, and more like a frigid handshake; a firm grip before we sit down to see how many units time and frustration I must donate to reap inDesign’s rich rewards of layout clarity.

The Bookseller’s Guide to Books:

This has been building up in my head for around about a year or so, i.e. the amount of time I’ve worked in the bookstore that I’m currently employed in. So without further ado, here are my observations (and pet-gripes) from working in a bookstore:

  1. Whoever said that you can’t judge a book by it’s cover obviously never tried to publish a novel. Your average book buyer can and will judge a book by its cover, and if it’s not up to scratch, they damn well won’t buy it. Maybe when printing was new and all the publisher had to play around with was a monochrome palette and a choice between Courier and Times New Roman, maybe, maybe there would have been equivalency between books.Ah who am I kidding, Courier is one nasty little mynx.
  2. It doesn’t matter how much value your book has in the literary world. It doesn’t matter how many glowing reviews you’ve gotten from other luminaries of the same genre. It doesn’t matter how many incredible devices you’ve used, and how polished your prose is. It still won’t sell half as many copies as a book written by some middle-aged woman frothing off about her theory that angels are watching us and can be used to heal our personal grief and/or bring us good fortune and/or cure a potentially fatal disease. It’s a sad fact of life that our ‘Motivational’ section has the highest turnaround of any in our store. And from the sounds of things, it’s the same way across the entire country, and at a guess, the entire world. Seems we can’t get enough of quick fixes, fanciful theories, and straight out crackpots. Don’t believe me? I’ve got two words for you: ‘The Secret’. I haven’t got exact sales numbers to give you, but my estimate would be that we’ve sold around a shitload of them. How these people never get taken to court for being total hacks is beyond me.
  3. If you ever publish a children’s book with some wacky attachment on the front, preventing it from being stacked properly, do not ever under any circumstances boast about this to a bookstore sales clerk. Trust me on this if nothing else.
  4. Speaking of children’s books, if you want to earn some money but don’t want to sell your soul to Satan for a self-help idea, then kids books are the way to go. The reason behind this is that parents stuff books down their kids’ throats in order for them to learn better and develop more. Your average early childhood kids book has in total about 50 words. Now, even a kid with the english skills of a retard is going to get bored of that pretty soon, so the parent will buy another one. And another one. And another one. They may not cost as much as a ‘real’ book, but damn they pile up something fierce over the course of the ten years or so it takes the kid to realise that reading is for dorks.
  5. Make friends with your bookstore owner. You never know who they might know in the business.
  6. The train of thought of the average beginner author when they walk into a store to buy a guide to writing is “I like writing, I want to write. I like reading. If there’s a book that I can read about how to write, it must be good, write right?” No. Buying How-To-Write books won’t make you a better author. Write. Read. Get better. Not necessarily in that order.
  7. I don’t care if there’s demons. I don’t care if there’s vampires. I don’t care if there’s demon-vampire-werewolf-succubi-naga hybrids in your story. If it contains the words ‘throbbing, spikey member’ it isn’t horror.
  8. If all else fails, there’s room on the shelf in romance.

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