Tag Archives: writing

Writing Tips: Writing Accurate Descriptions

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A response to a blog comment, and more.

I need to say that I really can’t thank blog commenters enough for taking the time to write. Not only do they often add useful information beyond what I know — thus adding incredible value to this blog — but they sometimes post questions or comments that get my mind going and give me fodder for new blog posts.

I received such a comment this morning and it prompted me to write a new article for my Writing Tips series.

The Importance of Accurate Descriptions

I touched upon the topic of accurate descriptions in fiction in a post I wrote last month: “Facts in Fiction.” In it, I explained why I thought it was important to get the facts about the “real” parts in fiction correct. I talked about the depth of a fictional world and how it would determine what facts and descriptions needed to be accurate.

My goal in that piece was to urge fiction writers to get the facts straight. Errors, when noticed by readers, can seriously detract from the work. For example, I believe I cited the example of a bestselling author who claimed that when a helicopter was low on fuel, it would be safer to fly lower than higher. This is downright wrong, no matter how you look at it. The author’s reasoning proved he knew nothing about the thought he was putting in a character’s head — a character that should have known better. This absolutely ruined the book for me, making me wonder what else he’d gotten wrong.

You can argue that fiction is fiction and that the writer can make up facts as he goes along. I disagree. My “Facts in Fiction” post explains why, so I won’t repeat it here.

Today’s Question

Today’s question comes from a comment on my recent blog post, “Dan Brown Doesn’t Know Much about Helicopters,” in which I painstakingly (and perhaps nitpickingly) point out a bunch of errors in Brown’s latest literary masterpiece (and yes, that is sarcasm), The Lost Symbol. The errors revolve around the inclusion of a helicopter as a repeating plot component throughout the book. Brown used his descriptive skills to make several claims about helicopters that simply were too far fetched to be believable. (But then again, isn’t that what Dan Brown’s work is all about?) I detailed them for blog readers.

One reader found the post useful. She wrote:

I just wanted to let you know I found this blog immensely helpful as I am writing a chapter in my book that involves a helicopter ride. I must say that I am striving to find new ways to describe the sound a helicopter makes. It’s rather unmistakable when you actually hear it, but to describe it to a reader is much more difficult. I recently wrote… “the deafening drill of the helicopter’s rotors made conversation impossible…” and one of my proof readers balked at the use of the word “drill.” I’d love to hear your comment on that one!

I started to respond in a comment, but the length of the comment soon bloomed into blog post length. So here’s the response.

First, I definitely agree about the word “drill.” Now here are some points to consider:

  • Have you actually heard a helicopter close up? Or at the distances you’re trying to write about? First piece of advice is to go someplace where you’re likely to hear helicopters and listen to them. Then describe what you hear.
  • Does the word “deafening” really apply? I think Dan Brown used that one, too. Deafening is a strong word. Unless the listeners were standing/sitting right outside the helicopter or inside with a door open/off, I don’t think deafening would be accurate. Helicopters are not as loud as people think — unless you’re right up next to them.
  • Lots of folks think it’s the rotors making all that noise. Close up, it’s the engine you mostly hear. Piston engine helicopters sound like airplanes; turbine engine helicopters sound like jet planes. Are you trying to describe the sound of the helicopter’s engine or spinning blades?
  • The tail rotor on many helicopters actually makes more noise than the main rotors. Why? The tail rotor blade tips are sometimes traveling near the speed of sound. Maybe it’s the sound of the tail rotor you want to describe.
  • How fast are the blades spinning? Is the helicopter just winding up? Is it at idle RPM (usually around 70%)? Is it fully spun up to 100% but still sitting on the ground? Preparing to lift off? In flight? There are differences — significant or subtle — in the sound depending on the blade speed and what the helicopter is actually doing.
  • How many blades does the helicopter have? You’re more likely to hear a rhythmic “wop-wop” sound coming out of a large helicopter with a two-bladed system — like an old Huey — than a smaller helicopter with four or five blades — like a Hughes 500C or D.

As you can see, it’s not as easy as asking someone if you can use the phrase “deafening drill” to describe a helicopter’s sound. There are too many variables. And at least three components are making that noise: engine, main rotor, and tail rotor. You need to hear the sound to describe it.

Do Your Homework

As I writer, I’m more bothered by the introduction of stereotypical descriptions — even if they’re not actually cliches — than inaccurate descriptions. Yes, it’s easy to ask a pilot whether a description you’ve written about flying rings true. But it’s lazy (for lack of a better word) to use a stereotype or cliche to describe a sound when you have the ability to hear it for yourself. And its irresponsible, as a writer, to expect a pilot or proofreader to come up with a better descriptive word for you. That’s your job.

If you want to write about the sound of a helicopter, for example, get your butt down to an airport or police helicopter base or medevac base. If you’re writing about a helicopter ride, as this commenter is, go for a helicopter ride.

Talk to the folks at the helicopter base about flying. Be straight with them — tell them you’re a writer and are doing research. (That is what you’re doing, isn’t it?) Let them read a passage or two from your manuscript if you think they can check it for authenticity. Then wait around until a helicopter operates in the area and listen. Get the permission (and possibly an escort) to stand or sit where you need to be to hear the sound as you need to hear it. Record it if you think it’ll help. Make sure you get the right sound for the right phase of flight. After experiencing this, you should be able to accurately describe it.

Do not rely on what you see/hear on television or in the movies. Many sounds are usually added after the fact. I’ve seen clips where the sound of an aircraft didn’t match the type of aircraft being shown. Movies also show helicopters departing almost straight up or landing almost straight down — a pilot will only do this if he must. (Read “The Deadman’s Curve” to learn why.)

Authenticity is Worth the Effort

There’s an added benefit to doing your homework: authenticity now and in the future.

For example, a visit to a helicopter base or ride in a helicopter will give you all kinds of additional details about the helicopter or flight operation. Do people really need to duck when getting out of/into a running helicopter? How is downwash different between an idling helicopter and a helicopter that’s just lifting off or arriving? How strong is the downwash from a hovering helicopter? What does it feel like? How does it smell? What does a turbine helicopter’s engine sound like when first starting up? (Think of your gas barbeque grill and you won’t be far off.) What are the pavement markings like on the helipad or helispot? What’s the pilot wearing? What’s he holding?

These little details will not only add authenticity to what you’re writing now, but they’ll give you plenty of useful material for the next time you need to write about helicopters.

It’s Not Just Helicopters

I’ve used the example of helicopters throughout this post because that’s one of the things I know from experience — and that’s what the question that prompted this post was all about.

But the advice in this post applies to anything that’s outside your realm of knowledge.

You know the age-old advice about writing: Write what you know. Well, you know what you experience. The more research you do — the more things you experience firsthand — the more you know. And the more you can write about accurately and authentically when you need to.

Spelling Checkers Don’t Work if You Ignore Them

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Reminding my brain not to block out the red underlines that indicate potential spelling problems.

Check Spelling as You Type has been a built-in feature of many word processors for years. It’s now in most applications I use — including my Web browsers, for Pete’s sake! — and the red squiggly or dotted underlines are an integral part of my writing life.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about — do you live in a cave? — I’m referring to the feature that indicates when a word you’ve typed may have been spelled wrong. This is supposed to flag the word so you can check and, if necessary, correct it.

A Blessing…

I vaguely remember when this feature first appeared in Microsoft Word years ago. It was a blessing — and a curse.

I initially loved the feature because it often identified my typos. I’m a touch typist and can get up to 80 words per minute when I’m tuned in. But those aren’t always error-free words. Check Spelling as You Type was a great feature for finding typos as I worked, eliminating the need to run a spell check periodically or at the end of document creation.

As you might expect, it also found spelling errors. My spelling was always pretty good, so it usually found more typos than actual spelling mistakes. But that’s okay. An error is an error and I want to remove all of them from my work, whenever I can.

…and a Curse

But over the years, I’ve found some problems with the Check Spelling as You Type feature — and spelling checkers in general.

The feature does not identify all typos or spelling errors as errors. For example, suppose you type bit but you really meant but. A spelling checker doesn’t see any problem with that, so it won’t flag it. That means you can’t depend on a spelling checker to proofread your work. (And yes, in case you’re wondering, a grammar checker would likely identify this as a problem. As well as the sentence you’re reading right now, because it isn’t really a proper sentence. And this one, too.)

So you’ve got a feature that makes you lazy by doing about 90% of the proofreading work for you, as you type. If you neglect to do the other 10% of the proofreading work, you could be very embarrassed — especially if you write professionally and editors expect your work to be error-free.

The unflagged error that zaps me most often? Typing it’s instead of its. At least I know what it’s supposed to be.

It’s worse, however, for people who don’t know the correct word. How many times have you seen people use then instead of than? There instead of they’re or their?

The feature has degraded my spelling skills. In the old days, before spelling checkers, I simply knew how to spell. If I wasn’t sure of the spelling of a word I needed, I looked it up in — can you imagine? — a dictionary. It made it worthwhile for me to actually learn how to spell words. Knowing the proper spelling saved me time in the long run.

But now, I simply type the word as I think it might be spelled and wait to see if it’s flagged. If it is, I use a context menu — Control-click or right click the word — to choose the word I meant to type. Yes, it’s convenient. But I seem to be doing it an awful lot more than I used to use a dictionary.

(Perhaps it’s also expanding my vocabulary by making it easier to use words I’m not as familiar with? There’s something there.)

The feature identifies any word it does not know as a potential spelling error. That means that if your document is filled with jargon, technical terms, place names, or other words that do not appear in a dictionary, those words will be flagged as possible errors. The word unflagged, which appeared earlier in this post, was also flagged. Is it an error? Or does my spelling checker simply not recognize it? Seems like a word to me, so I let it go.

And herein lies my biggest problem: I’m so accustomed to seeing words flagged in my documents that I’ve managed to tune out the red underlines. (It’s kind of like the way we all tune out advertisements on Web pages these days.) This happened to me just the other day. I typed the word emmerse in a blog post. My offline editing tool flagged it with a red dotted underline — as it just did here. But for some reason, I didn’t see it. I published the post with the error in it. A friend of mine, who referred to himself as a “spelling Nazi,” e-mailed me to point out my error. I meant immerse, of course. He knew that. Readers likely knew that. But I got it wrong and I shouldn’t have. How embarrassing!

Spelling Checker

Here’s a look at the spelling check feature in ecto, my offline blog composition tool of choice. It works just like any other spelling checker. (And yes, I do compose in HTML mode.)

The correct way to go about this is to look for every single possible spelling error and resolve it so those red lines go away. That means learning or adding the unknown word so it’s never flagged again or ignoring it so it doesn’t bother you in this document. All of this should be done with the appropriate menu command. Simply telling your brain to ignore a problem just sets you up to be blind to it when it occurs. That’s not how the software was designed to work.

The Point

This post has a point — most of mine do — and here it is: spelling checkers, including any Check Spelling As You Type feature, are only as good as allow them to be. Use them, but don’t depend on them. Follow up on any flagged words and resolve them using the software so the red underlines go away.

Spelling checkers are just a tool. Like any other tool, it won’t help you if you don’t use it correctly.

MagCloud

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On-demand magazine publishing.

I need to start this blog post by thanking RickHap for his comment on my blog post, “Marketing Madness.” My post whined a bit about the chore of putting together a 12-page package of information about Flying M Air‘s helicopter tours and day trips for Phoenix area concierges. Rick told me about MagCloud, an HP service that can turn a PDF into a slick, bound, full-color magazine.

The deal seemed too good to be true: only 20¢ per page for full color printouts with no minimum purchase. Just create the PDF, upload it to the site, and get a free proof. If it looks good, click the Publish button. Or, if you’re confident about your PDF production skills, simply publish it without waiting for the proof.

So I tried it. I threw together a quick PDF of the files I’d been printing at my local print shop for 80¢ per page and painstakingly slipping into special binders. I went away on a trip — have you noticed how much I’m traveling lately? — and when I got home, the proof was there.

And it was pretty damn good.

The print quality was better than I’d been getting from the local print shop’s fancy printer. It was smartly bound with staples, so it wouldn’t fall apart. And on the back page was an address area to make it easy to mail the materials out.

Not only was I hooked, but I began to see the possibilities in using this service to meet my own publishing needs.

Exploring Arizona by HelicopterFirst up (after the concierge package was properly done) was a newsletter for Flying M Air that I’m calling Exploring Arizona by Helicopter. I had to come up with a new design that utilized my company colors. The resulting PDF looks pretty good for a first effort, if I do say so myself. I can’t wait to see the printed version.

Although this first issue is a bit heavy on the marketing content, some comments from Miraz will help me focus on content with more universal appeal in the next issue. This issue does feature a few of my better photos, though, many of which can be found in my photo gallery. (Hey, a girl has to pay for this photo equipment, doesn’t she?)

I’ve ordered 20 copies to send out to former clients and hopefully entice some of them to submit photos and first-person accounts of their experiences flying with me. I’ll also be dropping off copies with some of the concierges I’ve been visiting to get them interested in what’s new.

If you have a newsletter or magazine you’d like to get printed on demand, I highly recommend MagCloud. And again, I’d like to thank Rick for sharing this info with me. I think it’ll really help me get the word out about all kinds of things in the future.

Pro Writing Fundamentals: Contract Negotiation

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Negotiating a book contract without an agent.

Posts in the Pro Writing Fundamentals Series:
• Editors
• Contract Negotiation

Years ago, after reading Robert’s Rules of Writing, I spent some time seriously thinking about writing for a living. I took a few moments, while trapped on a jet speeding toward the east coast, to jot down some topics I wanted to write about for this blog. Contract negotiation is one of them. I wrote and published this post in November 2005, but on reviewing it today, I realized that it would make a good addition to the Pro Writing Fundamentals series I started here a while back. So I’ve refreshed it a bit and republished it.

I should mention here that I’ve been writing for a living since 1990. As of today, I’ve had more than 70 books and literally hundreds of articles published — not including what I write here in this blog. I’ve never had an agent. I’ve done just about all book contract negotiations myself. And, on the whole, I’ve been quite pleased with the results.

Although I’m not a lawyer and can’t advise you on legal matters, I think the information here can help you understand the important aspects of negotiating a book contact for a non-fiction book. Combine this information with some negotiating skills and you should be able to negotiate your own contract.

My First Experiences

I got my first up close and personal look at a book contract back in 1990 or 1991. The contract was for what would become my first book, co-authored with Bernard J. David, The Mac Shareware Emporium.

Neither Bernard nor I were represented by an agent for the book. We’d approached publishers on our own and had gotten a nibble from the first publisher we went to. That deal fell through because of a disagreement over the amount of the advance and we went to one or two other publishers before getting our first contract for review.

Bernard was a relatively seasoned author. He’d worked with John Dvorak on at least one book (Dvorak’s Inside Track to the Mac, which I worked on as a ghostwriter) and I think he had other titles under his belt. All this was new to me, so let Bernard handle the negotiations. But don’t think I wasn’t involved — I certainly was. Bernard proved to be a good teacher, helping me understand the various standard contract clauses and what we could do to get them changed.

This came in handy the following year when it was time for me to negotiate my first book contract on my own. The book was about FileMaker Pro and it was for Sybex. And I saw that many of the contract clauses were the same as they were for our contract with Brady. In fact, over the past 19 or so years, I’ve negotiated very similar contracts with Brady, Sybex, Macmillan, Random House, Peachpit, and McGraw-Hill.

This post will share some of what I learned with you.

Understanding Deal Breakers

First of all, you have to understand that in any contract negotiation — whether it’s for a book publishing deal, the purchase of a house, or a new car loan — there’s something called a deal breaker. A deal breaker is any contract term that the two parties absolutely cannot agree on. For example, you want a $20,000 advance but the publisher will only give a $10,000 advance. (That was the gist to the deal breaker Bernard and I faced in our first negotiation.) Since you can’t agree, the deal will fall apart.

Now here’s a secret: a standard book contract is full of clauses that the publisher is willing to give on. But it also has clauses the publisher will absolutely not give on. Part of your job is to figure out which is which before negotiations begin. The other part is to figure out which clauses you’re willing to live with, so you have something to give up when the negotiations begin.

Right of First Refusal

I can think of only one deal breaker that I can’t live with. It’s called the right of first refusal. You’ll find it in every book contract and, if you’ve got any sense, you’ll have it removed. I’ve never had any trouble getting it removed, either. Which is a good thing, because I won’t sign a contract if that clause is in it.

The right of first refusal clause basically states that the publisher has the right to review and either accept or refuse your next book. Not the one you’re signing a contract for. The one after that.

Well, you might say, that sounds like a good idea. The publisher is already interested in all my future work. How can that clause hurt me?

Here’s how. Say your book does okay and you’re ready to find a publisher for your next book. You submit the proposal or the outline or the sample chapters to your publisher. Your publisher isn’t terribly interested in the book right now, so it goes in some editor’s in box, which may resemble a slush pile. Time goes by. Your idea gets stale. (Or, if you’re writing computer books, the software has already come out and there are already 10 other books about it.) You have a lead on another publisher, but you can’t follow up because…well, you signed a contract with a right of first refusal clause in it.

Or here’s another way that clause can bite you. Suppose your first book is a bestseller (lucky you) and other publishers are courting you, trying to get you interested in signing with them for your next work. They’re offering you a bigger advance and maybe even a higher royalty rate. One of them is a big name publisher and has connections all over the world that will guarantee your work is translated into at least 20 languages. Another one has an incredible marketing machine that’ll get your book in every single bookstore in the country. Meanwhile, the publisher you originally signed with has a limited budget and even more limited marketing capabilities. But you can’t sign with anyone else until that first publisher says no. Do you think it will? When your first work for them was a bestseller?

Copyright

Then there’s the copyright issue. This is usually a publisher deal breaker. They do things one way and aren’t interested in changing them for a relatively unknown writer.

I’ve signed contracts that handled copyright in two different ways. One kind of contract grants me copyright of the work and gives the publisher the exclusive right to publish, market, and distribute the book. The other kind of contract gives the publisher copyright and the exclusive right to publish, market, and distribute the book but copyright reverts to me when the book goes out of print. In either case, other rights (movie rights, electronic publishing rights, etc.) are specified the same as the primary rights.

Now, on the surface, the first kind of contract sounds like a much better deal. After all, you want copyright of your work, right? Well, copyright isn’t worth much if the publisher still has exclusive rights to publish and distribute the work. Those exclusive rights pretty much prevent you from doing anything else with the work until it goes out of print.

I don’t want to give you the idea that this is a bad thing. It just isn’t much better than the other option.

You might be thinking that in the second option, the publisher isn’t likely to give copyright back to the author after the author has signed it away. But the publisher does. All you have to do is keep track of the book and know when it goes out of print. Not sure? Contract the publisher and ask. Once it’s out of print, ask the publisher for copyright. It’ll come to you in the form of a one-page letter that grants you all rights to your own work. I’ve done this with at least a dozen of my old titles and have had no problems.

So although you can gently push this contract clause in an effort to get it the way you really want it, it probably doesn’t matter too much if the publisher won’t budge. You can, after all, use it as an example of where you’re willing to give in, perhaps to get more money.

One more thing…read the rights clause carefully. Make sure you don’t give away any rights that might be worth something in the future, like electronic rights (for computer books, especially), audio rights (for just about any book), or movie rights (for fiction).

Advances

Speaking of money, a book contract also includes the amount of the advance and the royalty rates. The amount of the advance is an indicator of three things: 1) the publisher’s budget, 2) the book’s sales potential, and 3) your value to the project. In that order.

Here’s how advances work. They’re called advances because they’re royalty moneys given to you in advance of actually earning the royalties. They’re supposed to cover your expenses for writing the work and maybe even keep you fed and clothed and under a roof until the project is done. When the book is finished and published, it starts to sell (hopefully). You earn a royalty percentage on the book’s sales. When the royalties exceed the amount of the advance, the book is said to have earned out and you start getting royalty checks.

One good thing about advances is that publishers rarely ask for them back. So if you got a $10,000 advance and the book earned only $8,000 for you, that $2,000 excess is written off (eventually) as a bad business decision by the publisher.

Or, if the book is revised, that $2,000 usually has to be earned out with the next book’s royalties before that book starts to pay.

While I’m thinking of it, this brings up the topic of cross-deductions. Some publishers will lump all your books in a kind of pool and require that royalties cover advances for all books before any more royalties are paid. This is a bad thing and a deal breaker for me. I won’t sign a contract that allows cross deductions with other titles. Sometimes I can even get them to take away cross-deductions for revisions.

Going back to the topic of advances, it’s always a good idea to ask more than they’re offering. But don’t get too demanding about it. Don’t let it be a deal breaker unless you have another publisher waiting in line with a better contract.

Three true advance stories, in brief:

  • Bernard and I lost the first contract for our book because Bernard wanted more than twice as much as the publisher was willing to pay. It took us three months to find another publisher, and we wound up with just a tiny bit more than the original publisher was willing to pay. That first publisher hired someone else to write our book, beat us to market, and with superior marketing, far outsold us. If we’d settled for less, we would have had that bestseller and my writing career would have been off to a better start.
  • Back in 2005, I had to revise a book I really don’t like working on. I’d already decided that I didn’t want to do it. My editor was very eager for me to do it. I decided to see if the publisher would “put their money where their mouth was” and asked for a significantly larger advance than the last revision. The editor said she’d ask for even more. She asked and I got what I asked for. So I did the book.
  • I recently broke off all talks with a small publisher who offered me a contract with a low royalty rate and no advance. The small numbers convinced me of what I suspected: that the publisher didn’t have the ability to turn a decent profit on book sales. If he didn’t have confidence in the book’s sales potential, why should I? I got the impression that writing the book would have been a waste of my time.

I now have a bottom line advance amount for all new books and revisions. If the publisher won’t meet it, I’ll let the deal go. After all, I do this for a living.

But if you’re just starting out, don’t let this be your deal breaker. My first advance (on a solo book) was only $3,000. The good thing about that is that the book earned out quickly and I got royalty checks on a regular basis for the next year and a half.

Royalties

Royalties are stated as a percentage of wholesale sales. Here’s how it works. Suppose you get a 10% royalty on a book that retails for $25. Booksellers normally pay publishers only 40% to 60% of the book’s retail price. For simplicity sake, I usually work with an average of 50%. So take 50% of the book’s $25 price tag to get $12.50. Then apply the 10% royalty to that. The result: $1.25 per book. That might not seem like a lot, but it’s not bad at all if you can sell 20,000 copies.

Now apply that to a $7.99 paperback and you’ll get something like 40¢ per book. Gotta sell a lot of books to make that mortgage payment.

Of course, this is just to get a ballpark figure of what you can expect to earn on each book sold. And remember, returns come in with big, fat minus signs in front of them.

I’ve seen royalty rates range from a terrible 6% to a very generous 20%. The lowest I’ve ever signed for was 8% and that was a tough line to sign. This, remember, is for computer how-to books,which is what I write. Fiction, mass market paperbacks, and other types of books might have different rates. I don’t think you’ll find 20% in too many places. I’m very lucky to have it on a handful of my contracts. You’ll also see different rates for international sales (lower), deep discount sales (lower), and direct sales (higher).

Some publishers work on a sliding scale. The more books that sell, the higher the rate. I’ve never had a contract like this, but I’ve heard of them. I’ve also heard authors complain about them. So if I’m ever faced with a sliding scale, I’ll do what I can to get it removed from the contract.

The way I see it, if it has to do with money, it’s something you should try to negotiate up. Just don’t be surprised if royalty rate is one of the publisher’s deal breakers. I usually have much better luck with advances than royalty rates.

Payment Dates

Payment dates are also in the contract. First, there are the milestone payments for the advance. You see, you don’t usually get the whole advance up front. I think it’s because your publisher doesn’t want you taking the money and running to Las Vegas before you start work. Instead, you get a bit of it on signing and bits of it when you reach various completion milestones: half and finished is popular; so is one-third, two-thirds, done.

In my case, I think milestones are pretty funny. When I’m working on a book, I’m working so darn fast that the milestones are usually due one right after the other. I remember writing one book and having the whole darn thing done before the signing advance arrived. That’s why I usually lobby for as few milestones as possible. Less paperwork. But if your book will take a long time to write and you truly need that advance money for groceries and rent, you may want to have more milestones to ensure more regular payments. It’s up to you. Publishers are usually pretty flexible. Just don’t expect them to give you all the money up front.

Royalties are also paid on schedule. Normally it’s either quarterly or twice a year. The publisher is unlikely to change its accounting system for you, so you’re pretty much stuck with what’s offered. If they try to offer annual royalties, push back a little. That can’t be all they have to offer.

Most of my royalties are paid quarterly, with either two or three months to compile sales figures. This means that if a quarter ends on June 30, you won’t see any money until August 30 (two months later) or September 30 (three months later). This must be a throwback to the old days, before there were computers. What computer book publisher these days really needs three months to count the books sold during the previous quarter? Again, there’s not much you can do about this, so be prepared to live with it.

Indexing

Indexing is something that most publishers expect you, the author, to pay for. And I can tell you from experience that indexing a long book can cost well over $1,000. Normally, the publisher assigns the indexer and pays him or her, then deducts the amount of the payment from your royalties. Of course, if you’ve written a book that doesn’t need an index, there’s no need to worry about this.

Here’s anther little secret: you can often get the publisher to pay for the index. This is like making an extra $1,000 to $2,000 on the book! Remember, a penny saved is a penny earned. But don’t think you’ll get the publisher to give in on this one. I’ve never had any luck getting a publisher to pay for an index on my first book for them; it’s the revisions or other titles I can usually get them to give in on.

The “Who Cares?” Stuff

Some clauses are so unimportant that they’re not even worth worrying yourself about.

For example, one clause, which usually appears near the end of the contract, indicates which state the contract will be governed by. Since the state selected is normally the state in which the publisher has its business (or its legal department), it isn’t likely that the publisher will change it to your state just to make you happy. But then again, do you really care what state governs the contract? It’ll only be an issue if there’s a problem down the road with the contract. Publishers contract with writers all the time. How many contract problems do you think they have? I don’t worry about it.

You Don’t Need an Agent to Negotiate a Book Contract

The important thing to remember is that if you got to the contract stage without an agent, you probably don’t need an agent to get you through the contract stage. Even if an agent can get you a few extra grand on the advance or two percentage points on the royalty rate, is that worth the 15% off the top he’ll get as his fee?

Do this: take the contract’s clauses and split them up into three categories: fine as is, could use changing, must be changed. Then disregard everything in the first category and make notes about the changes you’d like to see — or must see — in the other two categories. Work from there.

And if you find any of this information helpful, please let me know.

Dan Brown Doesn’t Know Much about Helicopters

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I guess a best-selling author doesn’t need to check his facts.

A few weeks ago, I forced myself to slog through Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. I’m trying really hard to understand why people like this guy’s work. He’s a gawdawful writer. Have we become a nation of illiterates?

As a helicopter pilot, I’m really sensitive to errors about helicopters that appear in fiction. The Lost Symbol was chock full of them. Apparently, it’s too much to ask Dan Brown to take a peek at Wikipedia or talk to a helicopter pilot when writing passages that concern helicopters. It makes me wonder what other “facts” he got wrong.

This bugged me so much at the time that I wrote a post title “Facts in Fiction,” where I discuss the failure of novelists to check the real-life components of their fictional worlds. I wanted to include a discussion of Brown’s failures in that post, but didn’t have time to complete it. Instead, I’ll cover them here.

These are the passages that bugged me most:

Without warning, Omar felt a deafening vibration all around him, as if a tractor trailer were about to collide with his cab. He looked up, but the street was deserted. The noise increased, and suddenly a sleek black helicopter dropped down out of the night and landed hard in the middle of the plaza map.

Deafening vibration? We get it: helicopters are loud. But do they deafen with their vibrations?

Black Hawk Helicopter

Public domain image of UH-60L by SSGT Suzanne M. Jenkins, USAF from Wikipedia.

The “sleek black helicopter” he’s describing is a “Modified Sikorsky UH-60,” which is basically a Black Hawk. I’m not sure what kind of modifications Brown is talking about — there are many versions of this helicopter. I’m also not sure I’d use the adjective “sleek.”

But what bothers me more is how it “dropped down out of the night and landed hard” — if it “dropped out of the night,” it would indeed “land hard.” This poor helicopter “landed hard” three times in the book. I think the CIA should consider getting a new pilot.

CIA field agent Turner Simkins was perched on the strut of the Sikorsky helicopter as it touched down on the frosty grass. He leaped off, joined by his men, and immediately waved the chopper back up into the air to keep an eye on all the exits.

“Perched on the strut,” huh? Not perched on a skid? Oh, yeah, that’s right: A Black Hawk doesn’t have skids. It has wheels. If someone can tell me where a Black Hawk’s perchable strut is, please do.

High above the National Cathedral, the CIA pilot locked the helicopter in auto-hover mode and surveyed the perimeter of the building and the grounds. No movement. His thermal imaging couldn’t penetrate the cathedral stone, and so he couldn’t tell what the team was doing inside, but if anyone tried to slip out, the thermal would pick it up.

I honestly don’t know if there’s an auto pilot in a Black Hawk or whether it has an “auto-hover mode.” I suppose I could research this and find out. But I do know that there’s no way in hell that a CIA Black Hawk pilot (if there is such a thing) would be responsible for flying a helicopter and doing overhead surveillance using thermal imaging at the same time. Pilots fly, on-board observers observe.

As they rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, Katherine stopped short and pointed into a sitting room across the hall. Through the bay window, Langdon could see a sleek black helicopter sitting silent on the lawn. A lone pilot stood beside it, facing away from them and talking on his radio. There was also a black Escalade with tinted windows parked nearby.

Hello? Mr. Brown? A Black Hawk has a crew of two pilots. The original Black Hawk had a crew of four pilots. Yet the book consistently uses the word pilot — a singular noun — when referring to the person flying the helicopter. I guess it’s easier to write one character than two.

The modified UH-60 skimmed in low over the expansive rooftops of Kalorama Heights, thundering toward the coordinates given to them by the support team. Agent Simkins was the first to spot the black Escalade parked haphazardly on a lawn in front of one of the mansions. The driveway gate was closed, and the house was dark and quiet.

Sato gave the signal to touch down.

The aircraft landed hard on the front lawn amid several other vehicles . . . one of them a security sedan with a bubble light on top.

Google Maps shows Kalorama Heights to be a densely populated area of Washington, D.C. filled primarily with embassies. This is an especially poor location for the bad guy’s lair:

Black Hawk Dimensions

Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk dimensions public domain line drawing from Wikipedia.

  • An area filled with embassies is likely to have very, very tight security. It’s unlikely that the events Brown reports could happen at a “mansion” there without anyone noticing and calling the police.
  • Properties are not large — not in relation to the buildings on them. The fronts of buildings are generally right up on the street. It would be a stretch to park multiple vehicles on a lawn.
  • The area is heavily vegetated with lots of tall trees. This makes me wonder how a helicopter that’s almost 65 feet long and has a rotor diameter of nearly 54 feet can land on a lawn full of parked cars in this area.

So we’ve got a big helicopter and some loud activity happening in a densely populated, heavily treed embassy area of Washington, D.C.

Sato moved the group toward the dining room. Outside, the helicopter was warming up, its blades thundering louder and louder.

Warming up is a function of the engine. The blade sound would not be different. Spinning up is a function of the blades. In either case, the sound of the blades would not get louder. If the helicopter were spinning up, the sound of the blades — the rhythm of the blades — would get faster.

Sato could hear the whine of the helicopter blades at full pitch.

Pitch is a poor choice of words here. “Helicopter blades at full pitch” literally means the collective is full up. The helicopter should be flying, not on the ground (as it is in this passage). Full speed — meaning that they’re spinning at 100% RPM — is probably what Brown meant here.

Langdon felt his stomach drop as the CIA helicopter leaped off the lawn, banked hard, and accelerated faster than he ever imagined a helicopter could move.

This is a classic ignorant writer passage. If the helicopter could leap off the lawn — which it might, depending on load — Langdon’s stomach wouldn’t drop. He might feel pushed back in his seat. The only time you’re likely to feel a helicopter motion in your stomach is if the helicopter entered autorotation, which feels — especially the first time — as if you’ve crested the top hill of a kiddie roller coaster and are suddenly zipping downward.

As for accelerating fast, I don’t know much about Robert Langdon’s imagination, but helicopters generally don’t accelerate quickly. It’s not like slamming down the gas pedal in a Ferrari in first gear. (In fact, one of the challenges I face when photographing car and boat races is catching up to a high-speed car or boat that has passed us while we’re hovering.) Can’t say I’ve flown a Black Hawk lately, though.

Langdon held his breath as the helicopter dropped from the sky toward Dupont Circle. A handful of pedestrians scattered as the aircraft descended through an opening in the trees and landed hard on the lawn just south of the famous two-tiered fountain designed by the same two men who created the Lincoln Memorial.

There’s that hard-landing helicopter again. Maybe the problem is that Brown — and most of the rest of the population — doesn’t understand that helicopters don’t just “drop out of the sky” to land. There’s a thing called “settling with power” that will basically ensure a very hard landing if you descend too quickly straight down.

And don’t even get me started on the encyclopedic fact that has nothing to do with the plot, fouling up the end of that sentence.

Once everyone had jumped out, the pilot immediately lifted off, banking to the east, where he would climb to “silent altitude” and provide invisible support from above.

Silent altitude? What’s that? About 50,000 feet? I don’t know of any altitude above a point where a helicopter would be silent — especially if it still had to provide “invisible support” — whatever that is. I look forward to the day when the words silent and helicopter can be used in the same sentence as adjective describing noun.

The UH-60 pilot threw his rotors into overdrive, trying to keep his skids from touching any part of the large glass skylight. He knew the six thousand pounds of lift force that surged downward from his rotors was already straining the glass to its breaking point. Unfortunately, the incline of the pyramid beneath the helicopter was efficiently shedding the thrust sideways, robbing him of lift.

He threw his rotors into what? What the hell is that supposed to mean? And what’s with the “six thousand pounds of lift force” surging down from this rotors? Is he trying to say that rotor wash is exerting 6,000 pounds of force?

Hello? Helicopters do not work just like big fans blowing air down to fly. They have wings, just like airplanes do. Airfoils create the lift that makes a helicopter fly. Downwash just helps a bit when the helicopter is near the ground. That’s called ground effect.

And let’s look at this in real life — the helicopter had only 2 or 3 people on board. It had already discharged its passengers. Is Brown trying to say that the pilot was depending on ground effect to fly? On a winter night (cold; it landed on “frosty grass” once) in Washington DC (sea level)? How did it get off the ground with passengers on board — let alone leap into the sky — if it couldn’t even hover out of ground effect when it was nearly empty?

And what’s all this about skids? Didn’t we already establish that the Black Hawk has wheels? If you can’t read the words, Mr. Brown, at least look at the pictures.

Errors like this just prove that the writer has no understanding of how helicopters fly. Yet this and many of the other helicopter-related errors in this book could have been prevented if the passages were handed off to an experienced helicopter pilot as part of the editing process.

But I guess a bestselling author is beyond all that.