Question The Literature Club

So, most of the writing I have been doing isn't for Whateley' Fan Fiction, but for an almost pure fantasy series of my own creation, and I've been struggling to work out where I should publish it. It has a tiny bit of to TG in it, so I suppose I could publish it to sites such as BCTS or Fictionmania, but I'm not active in those communities, this is the one I feel comfortable in.

I was wondering if there is any interest in a 'Litrature Club' type section for non-Whateley stories on the site? Possibly something something run like the Fan Fiction section that could lead to stories being published in the 'Library' section of the site?

Just a thought, if it's not something we want here, does anyone have any ideas of a similar writing community to our Whateley one that might be interested in a Fantasy series?

Publish it on Amazon Kindle.
Send me a pm or email and I can walk you through it, along with explaining why it's a good choice.

I work for Apple, that's not a solution for me, and I was more looking for a community of writer critiquing the work before final publishing type situation like we have here for the Fan Fiction

Who cares where you work? It's your free time, you can sell it wherever you want and if you're worried use a penname.
For critiquing, find some beta readers or join Big Closet or Fictionmania and go from there. Crystal Hall is more for Whateley stuff, or I'd be posting even more stories.

There is a rather famous photo of a Pepsi employee in a Pepsi van drinking a Coke. No matter what the circumstances, it doesn't look good. Apple has that level of exposure and it's highly embarising for the company when its employees use competitor products, again, no matter what the circumstances. Since Apple has its own electronic book store, it's written into our contracts that we won't 'assist' competitions, even in our own time. Releasing a book on the Amazon store would be the same as releasing an App on the Android store, helping a direct competitor to the company you work for.

So, no, Amazon is not something I personal would publish to (not saying anything against them, but I've worked for Apple for eighteen years, I like my job and I understand the reasons for the rule).

Not wanting to make a big thing of it, just explain I'm not rejecting it out of hand for no reason.

Ouch OK, that's different.
Still if you want to get feedback, get a group of beta readers or join Big Closet, Fiction Mania, or set up your own website and post the stories on a set schedule, and join up in a few sites that connect net stories together.

Domoviye wrote: Ouch OK, that's different.
Still if you want to get feedback, get a group of beta readers or join Big Closet, Fiction Mania, or set up your own website and post the stories on a set schedule, and join up in a few sites that connect net stories together.

I would second Big Closet, especially for feedback. FictionMania is likely to get feedback, like "not enough sex." Post some of your Whateley stories, and then your fantasy stuff.

BTW: That clause in your contract is likely illegal, but only Disney and Google has the money and lawyers to fight it.

You could do Big Closet and for Apple in my opinion to limit your writing creativity should have nothing to do with their products. They use MS word as well as others for producing works but they don't own whats produce off the site.

But I would be interested in learning more on creative critique and so forth.

About Apple, the limit is because we have our own ebook store, not because of anything else. The clause covers all 'direct competitors' it just so happens Amazon and Apple are the one and two ebook stores, so it's about as direct as you can get.

As I said I agree with it, support the company you work for, not one of their direct competitors. Why sabotage the people paying your wage? Thats like helping a competitor take away your own job, that's just stupid.

If I was going to release a book for payment it would be on the iBooks store not the Amazon store is all I meant, nothing else.

But this isn't about Apple. Other then the BCTS, is there any other writing communities people could recommend? Any 'fantasy' story communities with a similar vib to Whatelely?

I note Morpheus has created his own community, was that because he's so popular he could, or because there isn't a good 'non-tg' writing community he could use for his stories?

So publish under a pen name. Simple on Amazon.

Astrodragon wrote: So publish under a pen name. Simple on Amazon.

Sigh, I shouldn't have started this, but just to stop it:

a) I agree with this policy, "support the company you work for" seems a no-brainer for me, it's not a secret part of the contract, it's pointed out when you apply for a job, if it's a problem, don't sign the contract. I don't see why people think this is a problem, I would just consider it common curtesy to your employer "I am going to work for you, and at the same time I won't undermine you by also working for a competitor at the same time."

b) I think Amazon has too much power to dictate in the book market as it is, even without the Apple contract I wouldn't publish with them.

c) I'm just hoping to get a story good enough for people to want to read it, arguments over selling it seem very much 'putting cart before the horse', after all, it's highly probable nobody would even like to read it

I understand and agree with supporting the company paying the bills.

Sounds to me like the whole "not using Amazon while working for Apple" thing is more an issue of principles than it is a legal issue. Phoenix would rather take his creative work and support his own workplace with it rather than someone else, if it ever does come to the point of him wanting to publish it. It's not a matter of him feeling obligated to do one thing over another, it's him choosing for himself the more appropriate course of action given his own situation and convictions, which is some thing I can and do greatly respect.

Now that I've said that, I should probably get around to responding to the actual question here. I'm afraid I'm not familiar with any other writing groups that you could go to with something like this, though I CAN second the opinion of most everyone here that BCTS would be the better option over FM. I've scoured both sites before and have largely been turned off of FM, mostly because of how the feedback there tends to go. All that said, I wouldn't be opposed to having another section of this community added in some way to accommodate a creative writing group if there's enough interest for it. Exactly how that could be done though is a matter well beyond my expertise.

Points:
1. Phoenix has reasons to not publish on Amazon. That's fine. So maybe he should instead lobby for Apple to offer a competing self-publishing path on iBooks.
Although, to be truthful, I dislike the idea of ebooks (or music, or movies for that matter) being exclusive to any single platform. Maybe there is some other independent publisher who sells through all the major ebookstores? If there isn't one, maybe there should be.

2. I don't think it's anywhere on Kristin's roadmap to turn this site on a general fiction home. Yes, there are a few non-Whateley stories on the Library... but that's because they are written by canon authors, who are in a way the owners of this site, and therefore it affords them a place to publish a "canonic" form of the stories where they have full control (as opposed of the various limitations of every site known to man...)

3. I think the largest active TF fiction repositories right now are FM, BigCloset and TGStorytime. Each one has good and bad points.
I think BC has more of a community feel, but I think it is worse at discoverability (to find a specific story), and they don't promise to publish every submission.
FM is big and open, but it has some old-fashioned limitations such as a preference for plaintext. (It does accept HTML submissions, but it entails hand-tweaking by an admin)
TGStorytime is popular with new authors right now, but it's a pain to download the stories and it has a feel of "everything here is just a draft." Not true for every author, of course, but it seems lots of them treat the site as a word processor, constantly editing and revising. (Workaround on the downloading thing: instead of using the built-in "epub" feature which is pretty crappy, use the FanFicFare plugin for Calibre)

There are also numerous non-TG-focused story repositories around. I really cannot rate those because I know them only superficially.

I can understand the feeling of commitment to the job. As there are some sites, if one is to dig around, other than those mentioned I think it would be hard pressed to find one that will allow us to have some form of animosity given if one was to publish others would guess the who. I don't mean as in their real I.D. other than if they toured to promote and such.

The ones that I have found I find myself becoming leery in that I find myself reluctant to want to divulge many ideas for the fear of being ripped off. I can throw stuff out here knowing that I did so with that intent. And as easy as it is now by others to take works that have been published on other sites only to find them later on being sold on Amazon and so forth this only serves to reinforce the idea.

This of course brings us into a catch 22 situation in that I want to have something looked at for the hopes of learning, better understanding and to one day possibly to take that plunge to publish online for my own personal gain.

Many sites require you to register and from what I had seen on a few to acknowledge what you review is not yours to publish.

This brings up another problem. If we were to find such a group I'm sure it would require certain permissions to be placed so that none but those who are granted access are allowed to do so. I don't know if perhaps setting up such a site on Yahoo would be desired. Morpheus knows this better than most and yes I have received e-mails of accounts hacked but not sure if the site itself has. He would have more knowledge if it has been done so.

I don't know Phonix if that is a possible solution in that if able those who are invited would be sworn to certain standards if allowed.

I know I have the ability with my provider to create a site but I'm not sure on how deep or complex it would be to have.

Perhaps another solution might be to look into asking how much it would cost to use BC's services in 'renting' out a portion and setting it up as done here. Just some ideas to run through. Here as in the 'provider' and not through Whateley itself. The other factor would be cost as there would be no ad revenue made as it would be an invitation only site.

Ibi

If you opt for Kristin's suggestion of submitting a relatively proofread version (or even if you submit to another site, most likely), I would hesitantly volunteer myself as a proofreader. It really only depends on how well (or rather, poorly) I would gel with your writing style and/or the particulars of the story. I'd certainly give it a shot if that would be beneficial to you.

Certainly, if the nature of your writing approximates that of your posts I'd have little or no problem doing so.

Sir Lee wrote: Points:
1. Phoenix has reasons to not publish on Amazon. That's fine. So maybe he should instead lobby for Apple to offer a competing self-publishing path on iBooks.

Just FYI, self-publish is available on the iBooks store, see question one of the FAQ's
www.apple.com/itunes/working-itunes/sell.../books/book-faq.html

And Ametros, thank you for the offer. I'm working on a way people can read at least the first part of my story to see if it is the kind story and writing people would be interested in reading.

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: Just FYI, self-publish is available on the iBooks store, see question one of the FAQ's
www.apple.com/itunes/working-itunes/sell.../books/book-faq.html

Good to know. Although, to be sure, I wonder if it's in really competitive with the Amazon path... really, I have seen dozens and dozens of amateur writers saying "hey, you can buy my book on Amazon", but so far a big *zero* of offerings on iBooks.

Part of it is undoubtedly the size of the audience: Amazon is available on Windows, Macs, iOS, Android and, probably (I didn't check) Windows Phone, not to mention their proprietary hardware. iBooks, AFAIK, are available only on Apple platforms. (The same applies to the Google Play offerings, btw -- good on Android, weak on other platforms) That may change in the future as Apple changes gears from a mostly hardware company to an Internet media company... they now offer Apple Music on Android, for instance. But right now I guess it is simpler for most authors to publish on Amazon.

So true. I've found with Kindle books, putting the links to the different chapters and the table of contents, takes longer than prepping it for uploading. I didn't even know that Ibooks lets independent authors sell books, and it's what I do as an important side job. Tells you how important writers consider it.

Apple's self-publishing pushes are, I'll admit, rather concentrated on the education market, and schooling in particular. Markets where the OS X only nature of our tools are not really a disadvantage.

Also, iOS has Apps for all the differnt eBook providers, even Amazon, and iBooks will handle any DRM free ePub or PDF from whatever the source, so even myself, the vast majority of eBooks I have in iBooks are from the DRM free Baen.com store.

ePubs are much nicer to read on small screen devices then PDFs. PDFs retain exactly the formatting of the original, no matter what the limitations of the current display. ePubs on the other hand are easy to reformat for the display and preferences of the reader, making them easier to read, so much so that for the stories of Morhpeus' that I like to re-read I took the effort to reformat personal copies of them into ePub. (OK, admittedly not much of an effort as the free word processor that comes with Apple products saves as ePubs, but you get the idea).

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: PDFs retain exactly the formatting of the original, no matter what the limitations of the current display

This is because Adumbe's PDF is a postscript file, it is all images, not designed for true scale-ability.

Amazon kindle format and Apple's ibook format are both useless, I only have Linux or openBSD, neither of which they support.
( the hardware to read them, such as the kindle, doesn't work when touch screens do not respond so spending money I don't have on ebook reader or a'smart phone' (sic) is not going to happen. )



smart phones, NOT smart since they are a major distraction to drivers and are the cause of a significant percentage of fatal motor vehicle accidents.

Dawnfyre wrote:

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: PDFs retain exactly the formatting of the original, no matter what the limitations of the current display

This is because Adumbe's PDF is a postscript file, it is all images, not designed for true scale-ability.

Um, no actually, this is almost completely wrong. PDF is actually a very flexible display language, very scalable and able to handle not just images but sophisticated text formatting. The confusion is because all this sophistication and scalability was specifically designed so that on any device the document looks exactly the same. All it's flexibility and power is specificly utilised to make sure the document looks and behaves exactly the same on any devise or OS.

If you want to understand the true power of PDF, OS X has used it as the display language for drawing to all the various displays Apple supports for as long as OS X has been around, so it's flexibility and scalability is pretty robust.

postscript is the language, adobe's pdf is a specific implementation of it, designed to have 100% consistent display.
the .ps files are scale able, the .pdf contains explicit image size parameters, default to US Letter paper size.
both are designed for display as graphics, since print jobs are most commonly treated as an image.

No idea what apple uses for the graphics language, I have never been able to work with the macos ui,( first seen by me in 1982 ) and macos ten with all the jumping around of content is the worst to date.

Postscript was designed as a language to allow laser printers to correctly print WYSIWYG documents.

PDF was an extension of the postscript language to documents to allow designers to unambiguously define the entirety of a document so that when it is rendered on any system, the document will display exactly the same.

Before PDF people used to,send things like word files around, and you had the problems of differnt users having different margins, different paper sizes, different fonts, etc. so when the documents where printed they where different. When people sat down to discuss the documents there was all sorts of confusion as people swapped pages, and frantically searched back and forth until they all found the right paragraph that was being discussed. With PDF this was a thing of the past. PDF described the document is such detail that when printed out 'Page 213, line 3' was the same, no matter what OS or printer printed it.

Being explicit about the image size, page size and point size was actually the whole point of a PDF document, it needs to be that explicit to do the job it was designed to do. If you problem is the inflexibility of a PDF file, you are miss-using the format. Prehapes you need to rethink your document handling, because it's possible you are trying to use PDF files for a purpose they are inherently unsuitable to, and a different format designed better for your use case is what you need.

And FYI, OS X APIs render everything 'Display PDF', and then composites together the different program PDF outputs to form the image displayed on the screen. It just allows abstraction of the display output from the hardware and gives scalability and flexibility, allowing hardware changes without needing software programs to be recompiled. All modern use similar abstraction, the only interesting thing about OS X is that it uses PDF to do it.

If people are interested, I split out the first section of the story I'm writing as it reached a stage I consider good enough for me to ask for comments.

I've put it up on iCloud.com (Apple version of Google Docs) for anyone who's interested to read it:
www.icloud.com/pages/0001lFhjbtESduzCXpY...Book_One%2C_part_one

IMO I might go with FM ?

as its pretty quick and easy to list a story there

as for sex being an issue? my first three chapters had near none and I got no calls for 'needs more sex!' ever!

but the the grammar Nazi's hit me hard a few times til i found a proof reader

but if you want to see what I have got and done with others in WA look up Shadowsblade and nnuan or braneck

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: If people are interested, I split out the first section of the story I'm writing as it reached a stage I consider good enough for me to ask for comments.

I've put it up on iCloud.com (Apple version of Google Docs) for anyone who's interested to read it:
www.icloud.com/pages/0001lFhjbtESduzCXpY...Book_One%2C_part_one

wow

That is an incredible start. I started reading and couldn't stop until I finished what was available.

"Longing" was a really nice story, but there were a few word choices that occasionally confused me and brought me out of the story. In particular, there was the use of both Trail and Trial. There were situations were one or the other seemed more appropriate, but frequently it seemed mixed up, more often with Trail used where I felt Trial would have been more appropriate.

That being said, this was a well developed world, and some very nice characters to introduce us to it.

I thought I got all those, your right, it's always meant to be Trial

I enjoyed it. You might want to work on your subject-verb agreement though, because you seemed to get that wrong rather a lot:

There was jugs of cool water.
There were jugs of cool water.

I'm not sure if the reader was supposed to be amused by the molestation during the bath scene, but I wasn't.

I like Artel and I hope she shows up more in the next part. I also really liked the non-motto Laurette quoted when thinking about how Cylsteth is organized. "Fighters fight. Leaders lead. There will be magic."

Thanks Kettlecorn, tenses are a particular bugbear of mine. I tend to write all in the one way, and it's been pointed out to me that makes things hard to read, so I then go back and clean up and diversify things, but sometimes in fixing one sentence, I miss other sentences later that now look weird cause I swapped the tenses around.

I'll also relook at the bath scene and try and tone it down, it just supposed to be girls mucking around in a pool, nothing more.

a tickle fight in the bath.

I think it needs to be run through a spell check and proofread before you go to actual publication. I noticed a lot of typos and small errors in structure.

Yeah, I don't have anyone to proofread or bounce stories off yet, it was one of the reasons I was trying to find a community like this one for this story, I've only just started writing and I need to find some people to read my stuff and point out errors for me.