Authors back up your manuscript every day, it’s not difficult

Showing all posts tagged: writing

Authors back up your manuscript every day, it’s not difficult

19 December 2022

Image courtesy of malcevsasha.

The story about British writer Ann Cleeves losing her laptop, and, in the process, potentially the manuscript of the novel she was currently writing, is enough to give anyone who’s ever written a book nightmares for weeks. Some people devote years to developing their manuscript. Imagine if it were lost — irretrievably — in the blink of an eye?

While Cleeves was reunited with her laptop, it had been run over by a car, and buried under snow for a day or two, in Lerwick, a town in Scotland’s Shetland archipelago.

Cleeves was unsure whether any data could be retrieved from the device, but was thankful she’d emailed herself a copy of the document shortly before misplacing the laptop. “Not too much will be lost,” said Cleeves. Let’s hope so. Let’s also hope Cleeves has a clear memory of what work had not been copied. Losing even a couple of paragraphs could be devastating, especially if an author’s power of recall is not the best. The best part of the story may be lost forever.

But this sort of thing should not happen anymore. Authors no longer handwrite, or use typewriters, to write book drafts. They no longer depend on keeping a handwritten backup of their work. Nor do they need to use carbon-copying, or photocopying to create duplicates. At least they shouldn’t.

Who can forget the scene from Richard Curtis’ 2003 film Love Actually, when pages of the manuscript Jamie Bennett, portrayed by Colin Firth, is working on, blow into a nearby pond?

Why the hell wasn’t Bennett keeping any copies — whatsoever — of his work? More the point, why the hell was Bennett even using a typewriter? Because he sought to be charmingly technophobic? That’s not endearing, that’s foolhardy. Laptops were hardly uncommon in 2003, and were surely a more sensible option for a writer who seemed to be moving about, as Bennett was.

He’d have easily been able to keep a copy of the work-in-progress on a laptop’s hard drive (HD). And for extra peace of mind, he could have transferred copies to a thumb drive or two. Thumb drives had been around for a couple of years by that stage. But you don’t need me to tell you that.

Of course it could be argued Bennett had other things on his mind at the time we saw him. A recent relationship breakdown. Emerging feelings for the woman, Aurélia, who was looking after his villa in France. Not to mention the part the manuscript blowing into the pond played in the fledgling romance between Jamie and Aurélia. But rom-com movies aside, word processors, and other writing apps, make backing up documents as valuable as a manuscript easy.

No writer should find themselves in the situation either Cleeves or Bennett did. Because there are plenty of simple, secure backup options. Dropbox and OneDrive, for example, are among numerous cloud storage services. If you prefer to keep your work within the four walls of your home, setting up a separate backup folder on your HD isn’t difficult. Regularly copying that backup folder, and its contents, to a couple of thumb drives, which you keep somewhere safe, is an additional safeguard.

And although not the most secure, there’s the aforementioned method of emailing yourself copy of the manuscript file. It’s better than nothing. Preferably that’s a password protected document, and your email account is with a reputable web/cloud based provider.

Leaving a single copy of your manuscript on your computer HD is leaving all your eggs in one basket. Sadly though, I suspect there are plenty of writers who still do not understand this. But failing to back up work isn’t down to a lack of backup options, it’s more down to a lack of routine. For many authors, making copies of their work files may not be a part their work routine. If that’s you, change that conduct today. Make it the last thing you do at the end of each writing day.

Add “backup work files” to your daily to-do list now.

RELATED CONTENT

technology, writing

Can an algorithm assess the quality of a novel manuscript?

18 December 2022

It pays to follow Australian scientist and writer Dr Karl Kruszelnicki (aka Dr Karl) on Twitter (as long as Twitter continues to permit such behaviour), especially if you are writing a novel.

The other day he posted a link to an article published in 2014, about a literary algorithm that is apparently capable of quickly assessing the quality of an unpublished novel manuscript. The article expounds upon research conducted (PDF) by Stony Brook University into the matter:

Regarding lexical choices, less successful books rely on verbs that are explicitly descriptive of actions and emotions (e.g., “wanted”, “took”, “promised”, “cried”, “cheered”, etc.), while more successful books favor verbs that describe thought-processing (e.g., “recognized”, “remembered”), and verbs that serve the purpose of quotes and reports (e.g,. “say”). Also, more successful books use discourse connectives and prepositions more frequently, while less successful books rely more on topical words that could be almost cliche, e.g., “love”, typical locations, and involve more extreme (e.g., “breathless”) and negative words (e.g., “risk”).

Fascinating, no? Remember though, don’t let the algorithm write the book, let it guide you in writing the book. But if you wish to avoid algorithms all together, look at the way Irish author Sally Rooney — for one — does things.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for awful novel opening lines

18 December 2022

Not a literary award at all, more of an anti-literary award really, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (BLFC), which has been running since its inception at San Jose State University in 1982. But unlike the literary awards we are more familiar with, the Bulwer-Lytton recognises terrible writing, and envisages the worst possible opening sentences to what will be awful novels.

Joe Tussey, from Daniels, in the U.S. state of West Virginia, was named winner in the 2022 adventure category, for this opener:

“Hoist the mainsail ye accursed swine” shouted the Captain over the roar of the waves as the ship was tossed like a cork dropped from a wine bottle into a jacuzzi when the faucet is wide open and the jets are running full blast and one has just settled into the water with a glass of red wine to ease the aches and pains after a day of hard labor raking leaves from the front yard.

The BLFC accepts nominations, the usual categories, including fiction, crime, and young adult, in the form of the worst paragraph you can devise, all through the year.

British authors worse off than lowly paid Australian authors

11 December 2022

Australian authors are not alone when it comes to struggling to make a living from their writing. English-French author Joanne Harris, also chair of the management committee of the British Society of Authors, writing for The Guardian, says British authors have seen their earnings go backwards in the period from 2006 to 2022:

When the ALCS first ran its survey of author incomes in 2006 it found that the median self-employed income of a full-time author was £12,330. In 2022 — a year in which multiple publishers have posted record profits while freelancers in all professions are still reeling from the impact of Covid-19, Brexit and rising living costs — the median full-time income has fallen to £7,000. That’s a drop of more than 60% when accounting for inflation.

Unsurprisingly, there are British authors who are considering giving-up writing, and finding other ways to make a living.

But a quick look at those numbers. In 2006, £12,330 equated to about A$30,750. I used an exchange rate from December 2006, where one British pound equated to about two dollars and fifty cents in Australian currency. Today’s rate is closer to one dollar and eighty cents, according to xe.com.

At around the same time, December 2006, the minimum wage in Australia was not quite A$27,000 per annum. So an annual salary of A$30,750 wouldn’t have been too bad (well…), at least in Australian terms. But today £7,000 equates to a paltry A$12,633. That figure again: A$12,633. Then go and contrast that number with the present minimum Australian wage of about A$42,000.

Considering the lowest earning writers in Australia, being literary authors, make A$14,500 a year, describing the position the majority of British authors find themselves in, as dire, seems like an understatement to say the least.

RELATED CONTENT

Joanne Harris, literature, writing

Never revisit your past that includes NaNoWriMo manuscripts

7 December 2022

British journalist and writer Tim Jonze on participating in NaNoWriMo 2021, meeting the fifty-thousand word target in the requisite thirty days of November, and then… reading the work — for the first time — a year later:

Well, it’s been a year since NaNoWriMo. Could this book really be as bad as I imagined? Amazingly, the answer is no.

It is much, much worse.

Aside from the fact I could not meet the average 1,667 daily word requirement, to successfully complete NaNoWriMo, reading what I’d written, would be the other reason why I’d not take part.

RELATED CONTENT

books, events, literature, writing

Literary authors are among the lowest paid Australian writers

6 December 2022

The recently released results of a survey of Australian authors and writers make for sobering reading. If you’re considering a writing career, you ought to sit down before reading on. With rare exceptions, most Australian authors need at least one other job to make their writing ambitions feasible.

Income per annum varies according the nature of their writing, anywhere from about A$27,000 for educational writers, down to A$14,500 for literary authors. Bear in mind the minimum annual salary in Australia is a little over $42,000, based on a rate of A$21.38 per hour.

Education authors earned the highest average income from their practice as an author ($27,300), followed by children’s ($26,800) and genre fiction ($23,300) authors. Even though these figures are above the overall average for authors, they are not enough to live on, to support a family, or to pay rent or a mortgage. At the other end of the spectrum are poets, who earned an average of $5,700 from their creative practice. Literary authors earned $14,500, which is a decrease in real terms since 2015.

In case you’re wondering, literary authors are likely the sort of author anyone who wants to write wants to be. They also tend to be winners of literary awards including the Stella Prize, Miles Franklin, SPN Book of the Year, and Patrick White Award. And yet they only earn about a third of the Australian minimum wage for their craft.

Storywizard an AI for creating instant kids bedtime stories

6 December 2022

Somewhat related to my last post… Storywizard is a generative AI story creation app, that composes bedtime stories for children, complete with images, in real time.

We all have vivid imaginations and great ideas, but it’s not easy to express them and put them into writing. We built Storywizard to help parents and kids bring their ideas to life.

Could AI technologies be the end of writers and bloggers?

5 December 2022

For a long time it was believed the inevitable rise of automation technologies would bring about the end of repetitive and labour intensive jobs. Warehouse workers, drivers, and filing clerks would need to re-skill if they weren’t to be left unemployed.

But as digital and AI technologies evolved, the threat of being usurped by a computer moved up the ranks. An article published in The Economist in January 2014 (I couldn’t find an author credit, surely a machine didn’t write it?), warned that white collar professions such as accountants and doctors were also at risk:

Computers can already detect intruders in a closed-circuit camera picture more reliably than a human can. By comparing reams of financial or biometric data, they can often diagnose fraud or illness more accurately than any number of accountants or doctors.

Creatives meanwhile, writers and artists among them, always felt immune from these technologies. After all, how could a computer possibly produce an artwork, or write a book? Well, thanks to the likes of DALL·E and Jasper, we now know it’s possible. But creative output is not the limit of these technologies. They’re also capable of creative and problem solving… thought.

For instance, an application called Consensus, promises to seek answers, or consensus, to deceptively simple questions such as “is drinking coffee good or bad for my health?”, and potentially save hundreds, maybe more, of research hours. The app, once fully developed will be able to accurately scan multitudes of research papers on a particular topic, and deliver a pithy yet informative, summary in response to the query, says Derek Thompson, writing for The Atlantic:

Consensus is part of a constellation of generative AI start-ups that promise to automate an array of tasks we’ve historically considered for humans only: reading, writing, summarizing, drawing, painting, image editing, audio editing, music writing, video-game designing, blueprinting, and more. Following my conversation with the Consensus founders, I felt thrilled by the technology’s potential, fascinated by the possibility that we could train computers to be extensions of our own mind, and a bit overcome by the scale of the implications.

I expect in time AI technologies will be able to research and write the papers apps like Consensus will scan. But while AI apps can create artworks and perhaps write novels, will they really be any better at being creative? Let’s take blog writing as an example. A lot of people blog, but how popular are all these bloggers? We know some are more widely read than others. Their writing might be seen by hundreds of thousands of people, while other bloggers struggle to attract a handful of readers.

Just because, then, a machine writes something, does that mean the work will automatically have a larger audience? Will they cause every last writer on Earth to throw in the towel, and give up? I’m not so sure. Certainly the AI writers will improve, learn as they go, hone their craft, but will that result in more readers than an article written by a person? Maybe. Maybe not. Human and AI bloggers could be evenly matched. Of course, AI blogging apps will be able to research and write articles a lot faster, and that will be an advantage.

They’ll be able to publish an article on a given topic far more quickly than I can, and that work may rank on the search engines and elsewhere before mine. And that will suit some readers, but not all. And then we come to the human side of the process. Will readers be able to interact with the AI blogging app, as they can with human bloggers, through say email or social media? More crucially though, depending on the topic at hand, will an AI blogging or writing app, have the same authority to write as a person?

Could, for instance, an AI app write about raising a family? This is something most people learn about the hard way, by living through it. How could an AI blogging app possibly claim to be better qualified than a person, through “personal experience”, in this regard? How could the app ever gain the crucial trust to write on some subjects? This I suspect remains to be seen. At their core, AI apps are capable of thinking like people. For better or worse. I dare say, unfortunately, they will find a way.

Penguin Random House calls off Simon & Schuster merger

23 November 2022

Penguin Random House, one of the world’s largest book publishers, has called off a proposed merger with Simon & Schuster. Last month, a United States court blocked the proposal, on the grounds competition, and remuneration to authors, stood to be adversely effected. Initially Penguin had indicated they would appeal the ruling, in the hope the deal could still go ahead. The merger, had it proceeded, would have reduced the world’s major publishers from five to four.

The U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit aimed at stopping the deal in November 2021. In hearings held in August, the government argued that the largest five publishers control 90% of the market, and a combined Penguin and Simon & Schuster would control nearly half of the market for publishing rights to blockbuster books, while its nearest competitors would be less than half its size.

Hopefully this is a good outcome for authors and book readers. However, Paramount Global, who own Simon & Schuster, have expressed a desire to divest itself of the book publisher, as the film production company sees ownership of a publisher as a non-core asset. This probably means we’ll see Simon & Schuster being brought to the market again, at some point in the future.

RELATED CONTENT

books, publishing, writing

The Fanzine Scan Hosting Project preserving fanzines fanfiction

18 November 2022

For every well-known work of fiction, there’s an extended universe behind it, called fanfiction. Look at the likes of Star Trek, The Twilight Saga, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and a whole lot more, it’s all there. Stories written by adoring fans of the original books, films, and TV shows, expanding on the creator’s canon, and exploring other weird and wonderful story arcs.

At times not all of these works are sanctioned by the series creator, but that won’t always stop the most die-hard of adherents. If they think there’s a story to tell, they’ll write it. But while works residing online, in electronic format, are likely to be preserved — at least for now — publications such as zines, or fanzines, which usually exist solely in paper format, are another matter.

The Fanzine Scan Hosting Project, an initiative of An Archive of Our Own, or A03, one of the most extensive online repositories of fanfiction, along with a number of collaborators, aims to preserve physical fanzines, and eventually make as many as possible available in electronic format online. Needless to say it’s a big job, but progress is being made:

Over the last year or so, however, Open Doors’ Fan Culture Preservation Project has expanded, finally giving them room to launch the Fanzine Scan Hosting Project. So far, they’re making their way through the backlog of scans that Zinedom has already accumulated, which Dawn estimates is “a couple thousand.”

RELATED CONTENT

books, history, technology, writing

« older posts

newer posts »