Two things jump out at me here.  First, the author’s royalty is proportionally much larger with e-books than hardcovers (20-25% compared to 15%, and even lower for paperbacks).  Second, since distributing an e-book is cheaper, the cost to consumers should drop considerably.

Picture taken from the New York Times.  Full article here.  This statistic caught my eye: “The industry is based on the understanding that as much as 70 percent of the books published will make little or no money at all for the publisher once costs are paid.”

1.  There’s less payoff now.  You’re telling us about the hero twelve years ago to set us up for something interesting later, not because what happened twelve years ago is the most interesting part of this story.  If it were the most interesting part of this story, why not just write that story instead? (Relatedly, if the backstory is more interesting than the present, you’re writing the wrong story).

2.  Backstory–particularly a flashback– is  generally much less urgent and more boring.  When you use a flashback, we already know how the flashback ends: the character survives to become the person he is currently.  When the reader already knows the ending, reading is much less enjoyable.

3.  It’s generally harder to follow, particularly if the backstory is layered with events.  (X happened 12 years ago, Y happened 7 years ago, then we learn that Z happened 10 years ago, etc.)  For example, Heroes’ backstory is convoluted even before you factor in the time-travel.

Now I’d like to show an example of backstory that is very well-executed.  This is how Silent Dragon #1 introduces us to Renjiro’s history.  He is confronted by a ghost as he walks through a forest.

Here’s why I really like this.

1.  It is focused on the present, not the past. We learn a lot of interesting details about Renjiro now. For example, he shows that he is competent and skeptical by trying to disprove that he’s actually seeing a ghost.  He suggests that he isn’t comfortable about his work in the fourth panel.  He minimizes his role but doesn’t claim that his work is honorable.

2.  We aren’t bogged down in details.  This is paced very quickly and it’s easy to follow.

3.  It has conflict.

(A parting thought… I used a comic book example above, but these observations apply just as much to novels).

For example, the story builds up to a “climactic” battle that doesn’t actually vanquish the villain. The main sidegoal is to get the girl, but the hero doesn’t manage to accomplish that, either. After reading hundreds of pages, your audience will want some resolution.  If your novel can best be summarized as “to be continued,” then what’s the point?

Here are some better ways to set up sequels.

1. The hero achieves his initial goal, but the problem is more complicated than he had believed.   For example, we are set up to believe that John is the main villain.  Over the course of 300 pages, the hero struggles against him and narrowly defeats him.  At the very end, though, we learn that he was only a lieutenant to the true mastermind.  This gives us some resolution because the hero has accomplished what he set out to do.
2. The hero achieves his goal in a standalone novel, but unanticipated complications arise in a later work.  In the first novel, the hero defeats the villain and woos the heroine.  The end of the first novel will feel satisfying because it appears to have resolved the underlying problems.   The characters live happily ever after… well, not quite.  Your next novel skips forward a few months and reveals that the hero is quite unhappily married and that the villain from last time left a nasty surprise. This sort of sequel is easiest to write if you give yourself some minor loose ends to pick up later.

Note:  if you’d like to read the article Pat mentioned, click here.

One of the best ways to tell if what you’re writing is actually working is to show chapters to trusted friends and reviewers. These are your beta reviewers. They will help you head off problems in your writing before you’ve written 100,000 words of hopeless dreck.

Obviously, to maximize the effectiveness of beta reviews, you have to have beta reviewers. If you’re totally stumped on who could serve as a beta reviewer, you could go to an online writers group like Critters, which is free and notably professional. If you have friends and/or writing buddies that are really enthusiastic about your writing, that’s a great place to start. Be careful about close personal friends, though. You need honest feedback. If someone gives you only glowing reviews, that may distract you from serious problems. Here are some characteristics of the ideal beta reviewer:

1. Someone that knows and appreciates (but does not not adore) your style.
2. Someone that is published in your genre, or is at least a strong writer in your genre.
3. Ideally they are demographically similar to your target audience in age, gender, etc. If you’re writing a book for high school students, a college student will probably prove more helpful than a college professor.
4. Reliable.
5. Meticulous and sharp (“wait, this character’s eyes were green six chapters ago”).
6. Ideally your reviewers are diplomatic and courteous but not yes-men. It’s useful to have at least one perpetually critical curmudgeon (like me), but you’d be emotionally overwhelmed if all of your reviewers were really negative.

What does a beta review look like?

This is pretty simple. You give your chapter to the reviewer (paper or electronically). The reviewer will give you some notes on what worked and what didn’t. If you’re lucky, he’ll mark up his copy with suggested revisions of certain lines.

The problem is that if you ask someone to do a review without guidance, their advice will probably be general and may skimp on the areas you care about most. If you guide and probe your reviewers, you will probably be much more satisfied with the level of critique they provide. To guide your reviewers, I’d recommend including 5-10 questions at the end of the chapter for your reviewer to consider. Ask him to answer whichever ones he finds interesting. Asking a question really encourages your readers to tackle the specific problems that concern you the most. “How did the tensing work?”

When you write questions, try to keep these points in mind.

1. Avoid yes-or-no questions. Readers will almost always give you the response that is favorable to your work. Either way, a yes or no answer is probably not very enlightening. You can get around this problem by making questions open-ended. Instead of “were there problems with tenses?”, try “what do you think about the chapter’s tenses?” Open-ended questions stimulate critical thinking.
2. Keep track of which problems keep getting mentioned. In Superhero Nation, readers frequently hard to follow the perspective, action, chronology, world’s politics, and the over-expository style. When virtually every reader mentioned a few of these issues, I started actually listing recurring problems at the end of the chapter. “On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being awful and 10 being perfect, please rate this chapter’s style.” A scale is useful because readers will give you an absolute ranking of how problematic the chronology was but they will prioritize your problems. It also lets you track your chapters over time. (For example, if you rewrote a chapter and the style went from 5.5 to 8, it’s clear that your reviewers liked the changes).

Here are 10 sample questions you may find useful.

1. Use five adjectives and a verb to describe one of the characters in this chapter {or you can name one specific character, but I recommend leaving it open}.” This will tell you whether you and your readers are on the same page with characterization. You wrote Jack as an obnoxious punk but your audience adores his “spunkiness.” Or you wrote Pat as a conflicted, deep hero but your readers think he’s whiny or a wuss. You may also be surprised which characters resonate the most with your audience. When I was originally writing Superhero Nation, Lash was ostensibly my main character but virtually every reader chose to describe Agent Orange or Agent Black instead. That suggested that he wasn’t resonating as much as he should have been.
2. How would you describe this story to a friend? This suggests which themes of your story are most salient to your readers. This may also help you market your work.
3. What city does the chapter take place in?” OR “How are Jim and Mary related?” Do your readers grasp the story’s basic details? If readers fail to pick up on recurring details like the city the story takes place in, that’s probably a sign that they have pretty much dropped out of the story. This is much more effective than asking something like “did the plot of this story confuse you?” Readers hate to volunteer that they’re confused. They might not even understand how confused they are. Questions like this help measure how clear your chapter is.
4. Pick your favorite scene. What are some of the details you found memorable? This is pretty self-explanatory. Which scene drove the reading experience the most and why? This will help you perfect your other scenes.
5. Pick your least favorite scene. Describe some areas you would suggest improving. This is really straight-forward.
6. If you had to Google-search for this chapter, which search terms would you use? This lets you peek into the mind of your readers. What sort of associations are they making with your work?
7. Do you think that any characters or scenes could be shortened or removed from this chapter? Why? This is a coded way of asking “were there any points at which the story got tedious?”
8. How do you think this chapter compares to previous chapters?
9. If you could make one change to this chapter, what would it be? What you’re really asking is “what is the biggest problem with this chapter?” But that question will cause your readers to clam up. This question will also encourage readers to volunteer possible ways to address the problem.
10. What are some of the issues you’ve had with previous chapters? How does this chapter compare on those issues? Notice that this question avoids the word “problems.” Don’t confront your readers!

Probing reviewers: you may find that you have relatively little to work with. People may have written generalities like “the dialogue was good” or “I don’t know about the chainsaw scene.” Try to tease out what they liked about the dialogue—the voice? word choice? the body language? the irony that the monkey was in the closet the entire time? Was it the violence they found objectionable about the chainsaw scene, or was it the language? Perhaps they didn’t like that the chainsaw scene was narrated by the killer, instead of the protagonist. Etc.

As a rule, I would discount any response to a question that is fewer than 10 words long. The work I’ve done with my reviewers suggests that shorter responses are less likely to be heart-felt or meaningful. As a test, I gave ten reviewers a copy of one of my chapters in January and then gave them a virtually identical copy in April. The people that gave one-line answers the first time around frequently changed their opinions, even though I hardly changed the story at all. By comparison, the people that had written longer passages about, say, a given category were more likely to notice that the category hadn’t changed much since they read it last.

Other considerations

1. Thank your reviewers profusely.
2. Don’t get defensive. If someone wrote a review for a chapter he didn’t like, that’s a sign he is really committed to helping you improve.
3. Some people are not as courteous as you might like. “This part needs work” is blunt but remember that he’s not trying to offend you or make you feel bad about your work.
4. Don’t be dismayed by conflicting reviews! Your critics will disagree about a lot of things, sometimes in surprising ways. Let’s see. Readers have told me that Lash is “too black”, “not black enough”, probably shouldn’t be black in the first place, and should be removed from the book entirely. (“This story, whether you see it or not, is clearly about Agent Orange”).
   

It has come to our attention that you have continued to violate our intellectual property rights. Continuing to infringe on copyrighted terms and concepts, including but not limited to the following, will force us to pursue alternate methods of defending our legal rights.

1. “superhero”
2. “superpowers”
3. The concept of superpowered individuals concealing their identities with masks and capes.
4. Accusations of lurid conspiracies by government personnel against the public interest

We eagerly anticipate your cooperation in this matter.

–Wonder Comics

ATTN: WONDER COMICS

It has come to our attention that you are attempting to restrict our linguistic rights for your selfish profit. Please refer your legal staff to the following concepts in US-American jurisprudence.

1. “Common usage”
2. Lawyers/media vs. police/military. Who do you think we have on staff?
3. Billionaire playboys: you’ve either got them or you don’t.

We eagerly anticipate your lawsuit.

–The Social Justice League

This makes it a bit easier to describe problems/successes in characterization and plotting that might otherwise be abstract.

So far I have:

• Soon I Will Be Invincible
• Empire of Ivory

I’d really appreciate if you’d like to suggest any novels, particularly ones with superheroes or high fantasy generally.  I focus on those kinds of novels because they often have the same challenges and audience expectations as Superhero Nation.

• Creating a world more or less by scratch
• Making a fantastic world serious enough that people won’t hear your premise and groan
• Combining action and non-action components into a workable whole.

There’s really no way to know how many of my plots have been spoiled by Carlson and Alan Colmes, but I’d feel pretty confident saying that they’re the main barrier between me and global domination.

I’d give you two guesses whether it’s Hannity or Colmes that’s the bane of supercriminals everywhere. Remember, people that look bumbling are dangerous. And anyone that looks as bumbling as Colmes can strangle your best assassins with his mind.  Interestingly, Sean Hannity is also a superhero, but any supervillain that fears a conservative diversity hero should reconsider his line of work.

Unsurprisingly, the talk radio guy doesn’t know how important it is to keep his appearance secret.

My mini-scene

The elf hit the orc with his shield, giving him enough time to cast Fireball. It shot out of his land like a bullet.

This scene completely fails to immerse readers.

1. “like a bullet” feels distinctly inappropriate for a conventional fantasy story (let’s assume that’s what it is).

2. What’s the fireball like? This wasted a huge opportunity.

3. The passage used weak and generic verbs (hit, cast and shot).

4. We can’t really visualize the fight. What happens to the orc that lets the elf cast Fireball?

5. What’s the elf like? Or the orc? We can’t really visualize either beyond the barest mental cliches.

A somewhat better version of my mini-scene

The orc swung wildly with its masher. The elf instinctively ducked. A cool breeze fanned the elf’s face as the hammer rushed by. The elf sprang up with his shield, smashing the orc’s face. It fell backwards, chains rattling as it crashed into the ground. The orc’s bloodyshot eyes fluttered, unfocused as though gazing at something miles away.

But it was alive.

“Spirits of fire…”

Mystical energy welled in the elf’s chest and smoke pooled in his lungs. The smoke. He lived for the smoke.

“I implore you…” he aimed his hand at the prone orc. Power surged from his heart, as though magma were rushing through him. Clumps of his skin charred and flaked away in the wind.

“Incendio!”

A geyser of fire hot enough to melt stone gushed out of his fingers. The orc’s top half disintegrated completely. And the bottom half… only he and the gods would know it had ever belonged to something alive.

The elf inspected the black gashes that ran up his heavily charred, heat-withered arm. Regrowing skin and bone was simple enough that any apprentice healer could have his arm functional within an hour. But the scars, the scars were permanent. In any case, they made for great bar stories.

Then he noticed that his fingernails had burnt away.

“Dammit!”

It took weeks for fingernails to grow back.

This story is better, but it still has many problems… “incendio”? Come on. More substantively, we have no impression of the physical setting, where the story is taking place. (Is this fight happening in… an open field? An Orcish coliseum? An astral plane? What’s the weather like? How does the terrain affect the duel? Who, if anyone, is watching? Is anyone else fighting? What time is it? How humid is it?)

In contrast, this scene does develop the cultural setting. We learn a lot about the elf here and his society. He spends as much time thinking about his burnt fingernails as he does about killing the orc.

The sensory imagery is occasionally solid– particularly the fire/smoke/imagery– but aside from that it was pretty bland…

Making Your Scenes More Immersive

1. Sensory imagery is critical. “He cast a fireball” is too bland to captivate readers.

   1. Show us what the spell does to the victim, the caster, the terrain, etc. Give us the smoke!

   2. Try to engage as many senses as possible. Smell and touch are particularly immersive and visceral. Sight and hearing are obviously important but are usually more generic.

   3. Focus on the elements that separate your story from every other story we’ve read. A fight between elves and orcs on the beach should not focus on the seagulls. Likewise, a story with a dragon character (ie a dragon that actually has lines) had damn well better describe and use the dragon. Give us the dragon!

2. You have to show readers where the scene is happening.

   1. The best way to develop the setting is to show your characters interacting with the scenery. For example, if the fight is in a tavern, bystanders might jeer or root for one combatant. The elf might use a chair or mug as a weapon. More generically, the elf might choke on the smoke that comes from the fireball or his eyes might water.

   2. Don’t overwhelm your audience with trivial details. For example, if they fight on a beach, describing the sounds of the waves hitting the beach probably won’t add much. But mentioning that the sand offers bad footing will help your readers visualize the scene.

3. Explain the cultural setting. What are the people in your world like? How are their thought processes and cultures different from ours?

   1. Above, the elf is pretty messed up. He talks about his scars at taverns and cares more about his fingernails than burning an orc to death. If I had only described him as an elf, the audience would have assumed he was elegant, high-minded, nature-attuned, etc. What is this, Dungeons and Dragons?*

   2. Readers prefer unique settings.

4. What is the focus (or purpose) of your scene?

   1. Originally, my fireball scene was an action scene, describing only the elf-orc fight. The rewrite was far more character-driven. I used the fight as a vehicle to portray the elf.

   2. Mixing up scenes is usually more effective. You can drown your readers in action (or dramatic dialogue). I tried to mix action and character development here and I think it was pretty effective.