News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #92….
Item. Countdown to countdown. Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder, #3 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” is a Kindle Countdown Deal from July 1 through July 7. The $2.99 price will be reduced to $0.99 for this short time. Here’s the elevator pitch: Does Chen commit murder? The long answer is surprising. Look for it. Note: This is more mystery than thriller. (It’s not my first mystery, by the way. The first was The Secret Lab, a YA sci-fi mystery taking place on the ISS in the same fictional universe as Survivors of the Chaos.) If you missed the Countdown Deal for Angels Need Not Apply, put this one on your calendar.
Item. Language concerns. ABC weatherperson: “Today is more perfect than yesterday.” ABC reporter: “Traffic is basically at a standstill.” Another ABC reporter: “It’s literally chaos here.” (Those all occurred in one day!) Maybe in the heat of the moment, such slips are acceptable. I’m not saying that we should start our own Académie Française, but these are examples of bad English usage. Avoid them in your writing, even in dialog.
Worse: People writing those news banners running across the bottom of my TV screen should watch their grammar and spelling. Other people (like me) multitask and read them. No serious crimes are committed, but it is unprofessional, although some of the errors are hilarious and provide some comic relief from bad news reports.
“More worse” AKA “worster” (a town in Massachusetts?): People texting me from their cell phone with their comments and replies to my “old-fashioned” emails using something like “OMG u R correct” or “ROTM dude.” This type of texting shorthand might be appropriate for Twitter, and I even understand some of it (I use a texting thesaurus for the rest), but please have pity on a writer who writes in English, knows some foreign languages but not this one, and doesn’t tweet because he can’t say anything worthwhile in 140 characters or less (not even using this shorthand).
Item. The generic “you.” Many readers of this newsletter know I’m no fan of the Indies Unlimited website, but I do occasionally read their posts. One struck me as just wrong, so I decided to comment. I finished, went to post my comment, and they said, “Sorry, time’s up!” So, here’s what I would have said in response to Melissa Bosersock’s article “Addressing the Reader: Breaking the Fourth Wall.” She objected to the use of “you” in an omniscient third person POV piece of prose, calling it a “newbie” mistake. Here’s her sample phrase (used to protect the innocent author—who protects Melissa from me?): “You could have heard a pin drop.”
Melissa’s the one making a newbie mistake. Why? Unlike other languages, English uses the single word “you” in many ways—second person singular, second person plural, and generically. In her example, this is the “generic you.” It’s OK because we can replace that “you” with “one” or even “a person.” “You” is used here like “on” in French, which is always third person in French prose (they also use “tu” and “vous”). Spanish has “tu,” “vosotros” (“vos” in Antioquia state in Colombia), and the ubiquitous “Usted.” If the English writer used “one” or “a person” in the example, though, it would appear snooty and too formal.
I had an English teacher once who was a stickler for everything from wearing the same color of socks to split infinitives and the like, yet she couldn’t tell a good story if you paid her a million bucks. If Melissa or anyone else wants to criticize that use of the “generic you,” we can conclude s/he’s never written op-ed like this. ‘Nough said.
Item. Book reviews. I’ve been trying to schedule some book reviews for More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, getting a head start before the book is released by the end of the month. As usual, I first scan reviews of similar books, try to find some reviewers on that famous top reviewers list, and peruse Simon Royale’s list on The Indie View (not to be confused with Indies Unlimited). I was going to make some comments about reviews and that process here, but they became long enough for a separate post–see yesterday’s article.
Item. Crowd funding. Continuing the discussion about ethics in this writing business, let’s consider crowd funding AKA crowd sourcing. I see authors doing it, and I can understand why. The usual indie business model is to finance the first ebook somehow and then the next one with the royalties received from the previous one.
My “publishing enterprise” is barebones. Cost centers include professional ebook formatting, cover art, and PR and marketing when the book is released (I’m not considering free review copies as part of the latter because a large percentage of that cost I can declare as a loss—I often don’t receive the review!). That means I need to sell a good number of copies to recover costs and pay for the next ebook. It might seem natural to use crowd funding to facilitate this process. In other words, ask a few nice people to jump in and finance that next ebook and not wait for those royalties.
But what’s in it for them? A free ebook for a $5 donation? They’ll be able to buy it for $2.99 or $3.99 anyway, at least in my case. Their name mentioned in credits at the back of the ebook? How do I word that? “The following people were nice enough to give me money just for mentioning their name…”? Seems like a lot of hassle for the crowd doing the funding and for me keeping track of it all. Is crowd funding even ethical? Amazon thinks so, and they’ve introduced Kindle Scout, which is more like American Idol (i.e. a popularity contest) than true crowd funding (all crowd funding campaigns are popularity contests, of course—but so is the book business in general).
I just don’t see that the crowd funding model works at all for books. If only a small number of people bought each ebook, I’d be crowd-funded, like forever! No one would have to jump through all those hoops. At best, crowd funding (this includes Kindle Scout) is equivalent to pre-release sales. And, if I’m going to swallow my pride and beg, why not just beg readers to read my books without making it a public spectacle? (Readers and writers, I’m willing to listen to your opinions on this.)
***
[Coming soon, Kindle Countdown Deal #2: Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder, #3 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco,” will be on sale from July 1 through July 7, at $0.99, reduced from $2.99. Does Chen commit murder? The long answer is surprising. If you missed the first deal, don’t miss this one.]
In elibris libertas….
