News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #120…
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #120…
[Double feature today—anyone remember them? Sometimes two B sci-fi movies in one day? You have it here—this newsletter and two movie reviews.]
Series. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is a pretty good example of how to write one—no egregious cliffhangers, and just a study progression developing a lot of the same characters from book to book and interesting new ones along with a new plot. What she didn’t change from book to book was the theme of special magician boy fights bad magician. By the end, I was tired of Harry and liked Hermione, who wasn’t the “chosen one,” a lot more.
The division of that last long Potter book into two movies, though, was an example of a Hollywood gaffe. Rowling’s prose became overly detailed and more verbose as the series went on, so that last book could have received a Reader’s Digest condensation and be just fine. Hollywood messed that up. And now, by releasing Magical Beasts and Where to Find Them, a movie loosely based on Rowling’s 2001 book, they’ve created another gaffe. Clearly they want more money from this franchise—or, is it Rowling? Is she going to become the James Patterson of fantasy?
Reading forensics. Stats about popular genres, readership demographics, ebooks v. paper, and so forth are hard to come by. Amazon might have a lot of them, but they’re not sharing. Traditional publishers might too, but same comment. Here’s one “stat” from the past: the Harry Potter series motivated many kids to return to reading. I can’t prove that wrong—I’d need the stats—but I can say that I think it’s malarkey. My observations have led me to conclude that the number of people reading books is going down, down, down. In other words, Harry Potter was a temporary thing, and kids are flocking to their smart phones and streaming videos instead of reading a good book, more than ever before.
Speed reading. The last relates to speed reading. Two jerks in the NY Times said no one can do it (I won’t even give the title of the article). More malarkey. What happens is that most people under thirty can’t. It comes natural to many avid readers. People with huge active and passive vocabularies can easily train themselves to do it. I did. I’ve noticed that my passive vocabulary is diminishing with age, but I’m still a speed reader. That and touch typing were the two most useful things I learned in high school. They’re both skills.
You also increase your reading speed with practice. That’s one reason why most people under thirty can’t do it—they don’t have much practice so they don’t need the skill. They’re into more graphical entertainment too and lose focus when reading text. They’ve lost the ability to turn words into scenes in their head and to imagine how characters appear and act—they don’t want to tax their minds too much. Reading exercises your mind and creates all sorts of good endorphins. Not a reader? Why the hell are you reading this blog then?
It takes money to make money. OK. I’m not whining about the stock market. I’m complaining about BookBub. Their prices for a thriller just went up. I checked out sci-fi too—even higher (are there that many more readers of sci-fi than thrillers?). Moreover, they have no special category for anthologies or short story collections, and I know there aren’t that many readers of them. Of course, I don’t know what their algorithm is for price gouging—I mean fixing prices.
Like the NY Times’s algorithm for “best seller” and most of Amazon’s for ranking and what not, it’s a big mystery. I just know that I can’t afford BookBub’s prices. Yeah, I know, they claim you’ll sell far beyond what you pay (how does that happen for books offered for free?). That’s why I titled the note this way: with BookBub, it takes money to make money. Like all PR and marketing, you have to pay up front, and I can’t. But, like all PR and marketing, they don’t really guarantee results. Pox on their house!
Sales. I’ll have a few of them this spring and summer as I prepare to end exclusivity on Amazon and add more books to Smashwords. Beyond giving me the option to give my ebooks away (I don’t do that) or reducing their prices periodically, Amazon hasn’t done much for me except sit on my books. Smashwords sells and distributes to other retailers, including Apple, B&N, and Kobo. So watch for the sales! One begins today: the whole “Mary Jo Melendez mystery series” (two ebooks) is on sale for $0.99 each, reduced from $2.99. Celebramos Cinco de Mayo con María José.
My motto. To provide you with entertaining books at reasonable prices. All of my ebooks are low-priced. My two Create Space paper versions are low-priced. Here’s my Amazon page.
Free books? Sure. You can read any ebook in my catalog for free in return for an honest review. To sweeten the deal, I’ll even through in another ebook of your choice for free—no review obligation, just a thank you for being a reviewer. Query me at: steve@stevenmmoore.com.
In libris libertas….
