From author Tobias Buckell:

I love this quote from the recent marketing guide that Smashwords published:

“we cannot promise you your book will sell well, even if you follow all the tips in this guide. In fact, most books, both traditionally published and self-published, don’t sell well. Whether your book is intended to inspire, inform or entertain, millions of other books and media forms are competing against you for your prospective reader’s ever-shrinking pie of attention.”

. . . .

This just does not get emphasized nearly enough. And it’s something I’ve been thinking about a great deal since I published The Apocalypse Ocean. One, because so many rah rah eBook advocates have been indicating to me that if I’d only just publish digitally first I’d keep 70% of the profits and *obviously* make more than I would with ‘traditional publishing.’

. . . .

Like in most cultish behavior, if you follow the rules and don’t get the results, you’re either ostracized, ignored, or it’s pretended you don’t exist. Many who don’t get the same results just shut up and go away. Thus creating an environment where people are creating massive amounts of confirmation bias by continually listening to the top sellers.

In an interview recently, David Kirtley pointed out that in business school there’s this point made that if you interview rich people who have won the lottery, you might come to believe that playing the lottery is the only way to become rich. I thought that was interesting. One of the things I’m constantly trying to point out is that we’re not doing nearly enough to highlight both median and failure modes, because that’s where the real lessons lie. As for myself, I find message boards where new writers struggle to sell more than a few copies interesting, and where I harvest data about the low end.

That survivorship bias is useful to understand, and I just read a very large article that I think should be required reading for authors.

If failures becomes invisible, then naturally you will pay more attention to successes. Not only do you fail to recognize that what is missing might have held important information, you fail to recognize that there is missing information at all.

You must remind yourself that when you start to pick apart winners and losers, successes and failures, the living and dead, that by paying attention to one side of that equation you are always neglecting the other.

and

Survivorship bias pulls you toward bestselling diet gurus, celebrity CEOs, and superstar athletes. It’s an unavoidable tick, the desire to deconstruct success like a thieving magpie and pull away the shimmering bits. You look to the successful for clues about the hidden, about how to better live your life, about how you too can survive similar forces against which you too struggle. Colleges and conferences prefer speakers who shine as examples of making it through adversity, of struggling against the odds and winning.

Link to the rest at Tobias Buckell and thanks to Kathlena for the tip.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Writers always panic. They finish a book and expect the world to fall at their feet. At the same time, they worry that no one will notice. And, because all writers who are writing today were raised in the traditional publishing model, they believe that if no one discovers their booknow, this minute, if no one hears of them the day of the book’s release, then that book is a failure forever and ever, amen.

So panicked writers behave badly. They promote stupidly. They alienate the very people whom they want to read their books. Tweeting Buy My Book! Buy My Book! twenty-five times per day. Demanding that friends and family “like” said book on Facebook.

The advent of social media hasn’t made this problem worse, although it has made the problem obvious.

. . . .

Many writers, who want their books to get noticed, go with traditional publishers. Traditional publishers do very little work with their midlist titles to get those books noticed. Until earlier this year, traditionally published titles went into a different system at Ingrams and Baker & Taylor than self-published books.  Baker & Taylor brought those walls down hard earlier this  year (see my blog) and now Ingrams is ramping up the competition with its announcement of Ingram Spark.

That distribution wall between traditional publishers and self-publishers is in the process of collapsing entirely.

So bookstores can order any book they want; the key is to make them want that book—without pissing them off.

. . . .

The best way to promote your work is to develop a fan base.

How can you do that with just one book?

You can’t. It’s a rare writer who hits on the first novel, and usually that’s a fluke tied into something going on the culture. You can’t control the culture. You can’t control book buyers. But you can control what you do.

Write good stories. Write great stories. Practice, practice, practice. Publish what you write. Readers will find good books, and they will tell their friends.

. . . .

[A survey of book-buying behavior] said that people buy books because:

1. Personal recommendations (49.2%)

2. Bookstore staff recommendations (30.8%)

3. Advertising (24.4%)

4. Search Engine (21.6%)

5. Book Reviews (18.9%)

6. Online Algorithm (16.0%)

7.  Library visit (15. 5%)

8. Blogs (12.1%)

9. Social Networks (11.8%)

I’m not sure if “author reputation” is missing here because of the way the question was phrased. I suspect that it wasn’t a choice.

. . . .

You can’t control word of mouth. You can start it only by telling your fans, Facebook friends, and the readers of your blog that a new book is out. Repeatedly hammer that point and you turn into Wolowitz. Instead, write the next book and let the first one take care of itself.

That’s true whether you’re an indie writer or a traditionally published writer. I don’t care how much  your traditional publisher nags you to promote, promote, promote. Ignore them. Write the next book and if they don’t buy it (or you choose not to sell it to them) publish it yourself.

. . . .

Back in the early days of self-publishing, a great story hidden in a book with a low price and crap cover could sell. Honestly, that’s how Amanda Hocking’s books sold. That woman can tell a story, but her covers were bad and interiors worse. And she was one of the few people writing good urban fantasy in the early days of Kindle. Readers who spent 99 cents got a good story, so they let other readers know.

. . . .

Nowadays? Unless you’re a reader trolling the 99 cent book ghetto, the bargain bin as it’s called in brick-and-mortar parlance, you’re not going to discover anyone who wrote a book with a great story and a crap cover.

A good cover isn’t just a good piece of art. It’s the right art with the right branding. It’s making sure you have the correct fonts, knowing where to put information, and keeping an eye on genre.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch and thanks to Ant for the tip.

From Writer’s Digest:

Writers tend to be creative in many areas of life, so it’s no surprise that we can get creative with the truth. Or, as my mother said, “You lie a lot.” This is especially tempting when we are debating why we aren’t published. Before I was a published author, I embraced a few cherished lies because they blunted the pain of rejection. But the road to publication required discarding these lies and facing reality. Here are five lies I believed before I was published:

1. THE RULES DON’T APPLY TO ME.

I write amazing first drafts. If there were a contest for first drafts, mine would win every time. So I told myself, “Writing is not rewriting.” Other people might have to do multiple drafts, but my first drafts are so solid I could publish them as-is. For years I believed this.

One day I did three drafts of an article, and it became my first published article. A solid first draft is not good enough to be published. All those “rules of writing” that you read in Writer’s Digest, on blogs, and in creative writings classes are rules because they are true most of the time. So if there are some rules that you think don’t apply to you, think again. It might be the rule preventing you from getting published.

. . . .

5. I’M A BETTER WRITER THAN MOST PUBLISHED AUTHORS.

If you’re like me, you love picking up a book from the “Top 10″ rack, flipping it open and cringing at the terrible prose. But this author (who is, keep in mind, a worse writer than you) somehow got a contract, got published and is selling well. I said this most often before I had finished writing the first draft of my first novel. Perhaps it’s just that the “hack writers” out there actually finish their books.

Here’s an exercise: Find a writer online who is published but far inferior to you as a writer.

Link to the rest at Writer’s Digest and thanks to J.M. for the tip.

From author Leigh Ann Kopans:

One of the first questions I ask people who are considering self publishing is whether they have the money to do it well. I see other self-publishers giving the advice to “only spend what you can afford,” and I think that’s wrong.

Yes. It’s wrong. What I think they should say is “If you don’t have the resources to do it right, either wait and save up or don’t do it at all.”

Yes, it’s sort of a harsh message. Yes, I stand by it.

. . . .

Before I made the final decision to publish ONE and TWO, I spent some time quietly gathering estimates from the various professionals I’d need to hire to make these books a success.

. . . .

Then I made an Excel spreadsheet of all the costs, and added up the total.

Then I sat down with my family’s (very tight, four-kids-in-full-time-daycare) budget and hemmed and hawed and sweated and groaned and SQUEEZED until I figured out a way to make it work. (Basically, there will be no date nights or new clothes or electronics or, like, any luxuries for….awhile.)

. . . .

[H]ere’s a basic [cost] breakdown:

Editing, formatting, packaging, and distribution services: $825
Promotional materials and services: $700
Print ARCs (including shipping): $450
Audio book studio time*: $150

Grand Total – $2125

Included in some of those categories are some deeply discounted services, that could have easily added $1500 to the project if I had kept them at full price. All writers have different connections and different personal skill sets, so this is not meant to be a guide for any individual author or project - just one example of  one person’s budget for one particular project.

. . . .

I just want to stop right here and say that I fully recognize that putting money into publishing a book up front is the biggest drawback to self-publishing. So, here are the reasons that I decided it was worth it:

I was speaking (read: complaining) to a prominent literary agent about the stress of putting money into the project at the outset. She responded with something like, “Yes, but just think – if you got a book deal today, your book wouldn’t be out until 2015. All the money you make between now and then, consider your advance.”

Link to the rest at Leigh Ann Kopans and thanks to Ant for the tip.

Link to the rest at The Three Jaguars, thanks to M.C.A. for the tip and don’t forget to Feed the Jaguars.

From The Guardian:

The bestselling author Hanif Kureishi has lost his life savings of £120,000 after becoming the latest high-profile personality to fall foul of suspected fraud.

The London-based writer, best known for writing My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia, said he had lost his money after being persuaded to invest in a property deal.

. . . .

“I’d asked my agent if they could recommend someone to do my accounts,” said Kureishi. “Fisher Phillips sent over a partner and he was very helpful and charming. When he proposed this investment to me, he said many other clients and other writers are making this investment … I said, great. He worked for a very respectable firm that had been in business for 60 years, one that came highly recommended by my agent.”

The letter recommending the investment, sent to Kureishi by Woricker using the company email address and seen by the Guardian, promised a return of 15% on the money, which had to be invested for 120 days.

. . . .

“I’ve been told there’s little prospect of me getting my money back. Fisher Phillips has denied all knowledge, refused to apologise to me, refused to make recompense and until this week have refused to meet with me in any way. They said [it was] nothing to do with us.”

Robert Ward, partner at Fisher Phillips, told the Guardian that Woricker had offered the investment “in a personal capacity and the firm had nothing to do with it”.

Link to the rest at The Guardian and thanks to Elizabeth for the tip.

From author and publisher Jeff Posey:

For better or worse, I have an MBA in corporate financial analysis. That means when I think of royalties earned by an author’s novel, I think Net Present Value (NPV) of future cash flows: your “novel worth” in financial terms.

It’s easiest to imagine NPV in reverse. Let’s say you go to a bank and ask their financial wizard how much you’d have to give them to get, say, a $50 check every month for forty years. The number they give you is essentially the NPV of the future cash flow of $50 per month.

. . . .

We’ll make these calculations over forty years. Too long, you say? No. It’s not. Copyright is the life of the author plus seventy years. That’s way longer than forty. But forty is the outside horizon for useful NPV calculations in the business world, and it’s about how long I expect to live. But I have made one grand concession to reality: after twenty years, I assume you’ll stop writing and publishing. A twenty-year run is a good one.

To calculate your novel’s NPV, you have to come up with a few numbers:

• What is your average monthly royalty per title across all venues? If you guess, go low.
• How often do you publish new titles? Number of new books published per year.
• How big a boost does publishing a new title give your existing titles? If you guess, go very low.
• What is your cost of production? Do you hire or buy anything to publish your book?

. . . .

Example 1

Let’s say it’s your first novel, you intend to write another one every five years come hell and no water, you’re going to do everything yourself and hire nothing done, you feel certain you can earn $15 per month royalty, and you think there will be so much demand for your literary skill each new book will boost your sales 20 percent.

            NPV: $7,249

That’s the financial value of your novel. If it takes you five years to write, say 250 hours a year, then you are a very slow writer earning $5.79 an hour in NPV dollars. Pretty classy.

. . . .

Example 3

You’re a seasoned writer with a dozen books earning an average $150 per title per month and you have perfected the craft of publishing three books per year by spending $5,000 each on high-end production. Also, your accountant claims each new title released boosts overall royalty income by 5 percent—you think that’s way too high and use 3 percent instead.

            Answer: $145,015

Yep. More than $500 an hour if it takes you 250 hours to write each novel.

And those twelve novels already in the hole give you a boost in cash flow.

. . . .

In each of these examples, the NPV tells you the present monetary value of your intellectual asset if it generates the expected cash flow over the next forty years. It emphasizes the value of long-term steady flows of small amounts of cash, and also helps quantify the value of your time investment (you only have to write a novel once for it to earn income for forty years or more).

What is NPV not? It’s not cash flow.

. . . .

You want to write a few novels and the money start coming fast and hard. It might. Probably won’t. But if you work at it, find enough people who read more than one of your books and recommend them from time to time (also called a fan base), you can build a nice income. If you’re persistent. Talented. And patient.

. . . .

Most importantly, this whole exercise drives home a message: The most productive thing a publishing writer can do is write and publish. Even in Example 1, you earn nearly $6 per hour in NPV dollars. How much do you earn per hour by “marketing” on Facebook and Twitter (if you’re very perceptive and keep good records, you can figure this out)? And in Example 2, what kind of other (legal) job could you possibly find making more than $100 per hour?

Lesson: Write more, do other stuff less.

Finally, you can discover how much intellectual property asset value you create each year. In Example 3, the author is creating nearly a half-million dollars in NPV asset value annually.

Link to the rest at Jeff Posey, including a spreadsheet that lets you see what happens with your own numbers.

One of the visitors to The Passive Voice took an simpler look at part of what Jeff is talking about several months ago.

She looked at her average monthly royalty income, then checked to see how large a fixed income investment (like a certificate of deposit) she would have to own to generate the same income.

PG will perform a much, much less sophisticated calculation than Jeff does to show how this works.

A $500,000 investment earning 3% annually generates $15,000 per year in interest. (Forget daily or monthly compounding to spare PG’s limited math skills) Divide that by 12 for $1,250 per month.

So, if you’re averaging $1250 per month in royalties, your books are generating the same income as a $500,000 certificate of deposit that earns 3%.

From Dave Farland:

In my posts, I prefer to concentrate on storytelling, rather than talking about the art of creating powerful prose or talk much about the business side of writing, but today I’m going to make an exception.

Yesterday, I noticed that a fellow writer (she’s young, she’s hot!) put up a note on Facebook that said, “Will marry for health insurance.” It’s both funny and sad.

Here in the United States, health insurance can be hard to get, and if you can get it at all. In fact, my friend Kris Rusch has said that the single most frequent cause for a writer’s career to become derailed is that the author has inadequate health insurance.

. . . .

So what is “adequate” insurance? That’s hard to answer. In 2003-2004, my wife and I were living in California. We purchased the best insurance that we could possibly get.

However, that insurance didn’t cover everything. When our daughter needed help, we chose to spend an extra $40,000 for services that weren’t covered. We knew that it would put our financial health in jeopardy, but made a tough choice. After all, what’s more important, a few thousand dollars, or the life of your child?

In fact, it turned out that the insurance didn’t cover what we thought it did. A few months later, our insurer refused to pay for services that their policy did appear to cover. They left us in the lurch. I contacted a good lawyer, looking to sue, and he spent a couple of days researching the case. As he put it, “The things that they offered on page 4, they took away on page 33. They’ve had an army of lawyers working on this document for years, and it’s pretty ironclad. A lot of people have sued, and if you do, you’ll just waste your money on legal fees. I’m sorry.”

These excessive health costs caused a domino effect, and eventually we lost our house, our car, and our life savings, narrowly avoiding bankruptcy.

. . . .

Now we’re facing another health crisis. We moved to Utah in 2004, and we were able to keep our insurance until early 2006. But when we went shopping for insurance in Utah, we found that we weren’t able to buy it at all. We tried. We couldn’t get personal insurance for my family because I have type II diabetes. My condition is not bad—I don’t take insulin. In fact, as my doctor put it, I’m one of the “lucky few who seemed to have beat diabetes” through a combination of exercise and diet. But private policies won’t cover me, and when I tried to get a group policy, that didn’t work either. No one wanted to have a diabetic in their group, raising their rates. We tried a number of approaches, until my insurance agent just said, “Give it up, Dave, you just can’t get it here.”

. . . .

In any case, we then looked at finding a job that would allow us to get insurance through an established group policy. My wife found such a job and worked at it for nearly two years, but the company laid her off at the height of the recession. Since she is hearing impaired, getting a job is difficult for her. After searching for 18 months, she took a new job for the State of Utah, helping to teach handicapped children, but people in her position don’t have any benefits at all. So health insurance isn’t an option through work, either.

. . . .

With our son Ben’s longboarding accident, which happened three and a half weeks ago, we are approaching $700,000 in medical bills for the month, and our overall bill, once we get him through rehab and his future brain surgery, should run well over a million dollars. Obviously, we are checking into programs to help cover costs, and we’ll look at negotiating the prices down as low as we possibly can, but this is grueling.

. . . .

[G]etting insurance is a must. At some time in your life, you will probably need it. Buy a smaller home if you have to, or get a used car instead of new. But make insurance a priority.

Link to the rest at David Farland and thanks to Eric for the tip.

When PG was still doing litigation, he banged heads with a big health insurance company twice. Won both times. Two of the best days of his life.

Following are details about another way of helping Dave with his son’s medical bills. May 4th is the magic day:

Star Wars Twitter Bomb: Tweet, RT, and share throughout the Twitterverse and other social websites! The goal is to get #helpwolverton and #davidfarland trending on Twitter and Google+ on May the 4th (Star Wars Day) and encourage the kind people online to donate and help.

Please encourage people to participate on other social media websites, primarily Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, blogs, and anything else. Several independent studies show that spreading the word will significantly increase your midichlorian count.

The twitter bomb fundraiser is for David Farland’s son.Dave has written many Star Wars novels and contributed to anthologies such as Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia, Star Wars: Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina, Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters, and Star Wars: Tales from Jaba’s Palace.

We’d like to celebrate Star Wars Day by letting their family know that “the force will be with them” in their time of need. Donate and spread the word! Share with everyone you know and on all social networks.

Suggested Tweet (Feel free to improvise):

Help Star Wars author’s son on Star Wars Day! Visit http://www.helpwolverton.com to learn more. #davidfarland #starwarsday #helpwolverton

From agent Rachelle Gardner:

I received a panicked email from a client—and this was seriouspanic. His computer had crashed and died; his external backup was corrupted. His manuscript—the one he’d been writing for months—was due to the publisher in a couple of weeks. And it was GONE.

Just…pffft. Gone.

All of his hard work. All his moments of epiphany, his late nights and early mornings, his flashes of brilliance and the hours spent rewriting the not-so-brilliant. Each little God-given nugget of wisdom, each carefully-placed word and sentence and comma. All of it just gone.

He sent his computer off to an expensive service, who made no promises but committed to extracting as many X’s and O’s from his hard drive as possible, to see if there was any semblance of a book left there. Weeks went by. Meanwhile, the writer was heartsick and grieving. He cycled through the stages of grief (repeatedly): denial, anger, bargaining, depression… although I’m not sure he ever really got to #5, acceptance.

. . . .

Finally, a miraculous happy ending. The document was largely recovered—albeit a messy, unformatted and incomplete version. And very expensive. But it was there. Phew! We worked out a new delivery date with the publisher. And the author could finally get on with life.

. . . .

The technology available at our fingertips is so easy to use, so inexpensive, so foolproof that there is NO EXCUSE to lose work to a computer problem, a virus, or an unfortunate airplane crash landing. (I had a client whose laptop ended up in the bottom of the Hudson when his pilot—Sully Sullenberger—landed the flight on that river in 2009).

Link to the rest at Rachelle Gardner

Passive Guy has owned personal computers for over thirty years, long enough to have lost important computer files in all sorts of unexpected ways. The result is a deep paranoia that he has translated into a backup system bordering on the obsessive-compulsive.

Local Backup

PG has two large capacity external hard drives (something like this one) attached to his computer. Mrs. PG has a similar setup for her computer.

Just having the storage capacity doesn’t mean you will use it, so PG and Mrs. PG each have an automatic backup program running on their computers. We use SyncBack, but there are others.

Every night between 1:00 AM and 4:00 AM, while we’re tucked into bed, SyncBack does a lot of work. First, it creates a mirror copy of all documents, photos, Quicken files, etc. A mirror copy is one that looks exactly like what’s on the computer at 1:00 AM. SyncBack makes a copy of Mrs. PG’s latest manuscript with the day’s additions and edits and replaces the one it made the day before. It does this twice, once for each of the two external hard drives. Another copy of SyncBack is doing the same thing on Mrs. PG’s computer, so that’s backups on four different external hard drives.

Next, SyncBack creates a cumulative daily backup of those same files. The cumulative backup adds today’s version of Mrs. PG’s manuscript to yesterday’s to the one that existed the day before yesterday, etc. That way, if Mrs. PG inadvertently deleted a couple of chapters when she was writing today, we can go back and pull up yesterday’s manuscript with those two chapters intact.

PG does two different types of backups – Mirror and Cumulative – for different purposes. The benefits of cumulative backups are fairly obvious. A file may be inadvertently deleted or corrupted without the damage being noticed for awhile. A backup copy of yesterday’s corrupted file doesn’t solve any problems.

However if the computer’s internal hard drive checks out, a cumulative backup with 200 different versions of several hundred or several thousand files is a nightmare to restore to a replacement hard drive or a new computer. For restoring a lot of files, you want a mirror copy of yesterday’s hard drive before it died.

In addition to daily local backups of key files, PG has SyncBack automatically make weekly and monthly backups. If a virus infects a computer and does dirty work for awhile, he wants the option to look back a week or a month instead of just a day. If something has gone hinky with the backup process and daily backups are corrupted, those weekly or monthly backups are valuable.

PG saves these backups on each of his two separate hard drives because no hard drive lasts forever. If one of the hard drives has problems and PG doesn’t notice it for awhile, he has the same backups on the other one.

This sounds complex, but all you have to do is set up your backup schedule on SyncBack one time and it runs the whole complicated structure automatically after that. The program will show you when it ran each of the backups the last time and flag any that don’t run correctly.

The local backups are PG’s front-line insurance. Because the external hard drives are connected directly to the computer, a lot of files or even the entire MyDocuments folder can be restored to the computer’s internal hard drive very quickly.

Readers will observe a lot of belt and suspenders stuff going on here. PG has had belts fail and suspenders fail at critical times in the past.

Remote Backups

If an earthquake happens and Casa PG slides down the mountain, those external hard drives will go along for the ride. Similar consequences will occur with a brush fire or a burglar. That’s why some of PG’s backup belts and suspenders are not located in Casa PG.

PG has a pair of small, portable external hard drives that look something like this. They’ll fit in a pocket or purse. You plug one of these into your computer with a USB cable and it’s up and running.

PG sees a couple of PG offspring once or twice a week. Before one of the offspring arrives, PG uses SyncBack to make a mirror copy of all the files he backs up each day on one of the small portable hard drives. It takes less than a minute. He hands the small hard drive to the offspring and the offspring takes it to his home.

The following week, PG makes another backup on the second portable hard drive and reminds the offspring to bring back the first hard drive when he comes to Casa PG. They swap hard drives and the offspring takes the latest backup.

Because PG has a million things to remember, he has a weekly calendar reminder tell him to make this backup.

Mozy – Mozy is a remote backup service. You go to the Mozy website, sign up for the service, install a small piece of software on your computer, spend ten minutes telling it what files you want to back up and it just runs.

So long as your computer is turned on and you’re not typing or surfing the web, day and night, every few hours, Mozy automatically makes a backup of your files and sends those files in encrypted form over the Internet to Mozy’s servers. It pops up a screen after every backup so you know it’s working.

If you lose a file, you log onto Mozy which looks like another hard drive that’s attached to your computer, navigate to locate the backup file and download it over the Internet back to your computer. It’s quick and slick and, in PG’s experience, bulletproof. (PG was going to say it’s foolproof, but fools can be so ingenious.)

Mozy currently costs $5.99 per month for an account large enough to back up almost any author’s files. Carbonite is a service that’s similar to Mozy, but PG hasn’t tried it.

Dropbox – In addition to Mozy (more belts and suspenders), PG uses Dropbox. Dropbox works a lot like Mozy, but it watches for whenever a file changes and automatically updates that file on the Dropbox servers. Think of Dropbox like another file folder. However, instead of those files residing only on your hard drive, they also live on Dropbox’s servers in the cloud. It’s a lot like Google Drive with a few more bells and whistles.

When you install Dropbox, it puts a little Dropbox icon on your desktop that you can use just like a file folder.

Dropbox is installed on all the desktop and laptop computers at Casa PG. PG and Mrs. PG keep all their document files on Dropbox. This means everybody’s documents are available on all computers. When Mrs. PG finishes work on her current manuscript and saves it on her desktop, she’ll find that same manuscript on her laptop. If she wants to talk to PG about something in the manuscript and enters his cave, he can pull up her current manuscript on his computer as well.

Essentially, Dropbox acts like a server that holds all the documents in PG World. The documents reside both on our local hard drives and in the cloud on Dropbox’s servers.

When PG gets a new computer, he installs Dropbox on that computer and Dropbox brings all of his files and Mrs. PG’s files into the new computer.

Like Mozy, Dropbox only stores encrypted files and has passed muster with lots of paranoid security types.

There is more overlap between features offered by Mozy and Dropbox now than there was when PG started using each of the services. He continues to use both for the same reason he does local backups on two different hard drives. If one gets dodgy, he has the other as a backup.

So there it is, a whole pile of belts and suspenders. At the beginning of this post, PG described it as bordering on obsessive-compulsive. Now he’s decided that he’s crossed the border but he still feels fine. It’s a more useful form of obsession than washing your hands all the time.

Describing the entire system makes it seem like an overgrown monster and it does cost some money (not a lot) to put together and maintain. However, it’s the repository of Mrs. PG’s current and past manuscripts together with all the publication files for her books and PG’s files for his clients and all the tax and financial information that government entities want you to keep, so the value of the data the backup system is protecting exceeds its cost by a vast margin.

PG hopes the information may prevent some author somewhere from losing a manuscript.

From The Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing:

Last month, an author I’d not spoken to in a while came to mind. She was someone I’d spoken with professionally, we’d read each other’s blogs, and I truly enjoyed her books. I began to wonder if I’d somehow lost another colleague’s posts in the sea of social networking I do every month. (Sadly, it happens.) So, I decided to look her up and find out if she had any new books out.

I couldn’t find her Facebook page or profile.

Her website had been deleted.

Her books were no longer on Amazon.

I started to doubt my recollection. I hadn’t spoken to her in a few months. Did I have her name confused with someone else’s? Had I written her blog address down wrong?

I emailed her, not at all confident I would hear back. I worried that she’d died or suffered some personal catastrophe. How could someone vanish?

She wrote back the same day. She’d quit writing completely, unpublished her books, let her website expire, and gotten the hell out of Dodge. I was stunned. She was a talented author. She paid for wonderful cover art, gotten professional editing, and went about social networking like a pro. She’d even successfully signed with an agent.

Her reasons for quitting were varied: home issues, time constraints, poor sales, a few unsupportive indie colleagues, a couple of stinging reviews, and feeling like her books didn’t fit into any recognisable niche. She said to me: “It was an experiment, and it failed.”

. . . .

Anyone I’ve mentioned the situation to has said something like, “Oh, she probably just needs a break. She’ll go back to it someday.” To them I can only say: I recognised the despair in her letter. This wasn’t a temporary setback. She did, indeed, quit. Forever. For good. She said thinking about her writing made her literally sick. Ouch.

I felt incredibly sad at her story, but in truth, I understand. Being a writer is hard. Self-publishing is even harder. We indies have to know a bit of everything, be a bit of everything. We rarely take enough time off. We often spend too much time watching the rankings, checking our stats, feeling elated when our books sell, but no matter the number, we secretly feel disappointed we don’t sell more.

My friend was crushed under the weight of expectations, disappointment, pressure, and criticism. Who among us can’t sympathise with that? Who here hasn’t felt crippling self-doubt?

Link to the rest at The Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing and thanks to James for the tip.